Today we will continue our conversation on Pluto's upcoming entrance into Aquarius by looking at one of my favorite passages from The Astrology of Fate by Liz Greene. It will take us more deeply into the sign and its mythology to unpack what this transit might mean for all of us individually and reflect on what it might mean that we're entering a new era historically.
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Transcript
Hey, everyone, this is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology, and today we're going to continue our conversation on Pluto's upcoming entrance into the sign of Aquarius. We're going to do that by taking a look at one of my favorite passages. This comes from the Astrology of Fate by Liz Greene, and it is a passage on the sign of Aquarius; this will allow us to get more deeply into the sign and its mythology as a way of unpacking what this transit might mean for all of us individually and also kind of reflecting on what it might mean that we're entering into a new era historically.
We talked a little bit yesterday about the history of the Age of Aquarius and what that means and stuff like that. If you haven't checked that out, you might go back and take a look. The Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in 2020 opened up a new era of Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions in air signs. And so the fact that Pluto is moving into Aquarius and hitting the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction point does seem to signal that there's a trend toward an airy age; what might that mean? I'll reflect on that a little bit as I go along today, too. I'll be trying to offer some feedback and reflections alongside Liz Greene's wonderful text, which, you know, it's like her text alone is enough. I do have some thoughts that riff off from what she said that I hope you'll find useful. Of course, the entrance is on the 23rd. So that's this week, you know, that is Thursday of this week, we have the entrance. So this week is sort of like Pluto and Aquarius week.
Anyway, before we get into it. As always, don't forget to like and subscribe, and share your comments. You can find a transcript of today's talk on the website nightlightastrology.com. If you have a story to share this week, please do. We're trying to aggregate stories about Saturn and Pluto ingresses, use the hashtag grabbed, and then put Saturn in Pisces or Pluto in Aquarius and tell us what you've noticed, especially by way of the whole sign house it's entered in your birth chart, that would be interesting.
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Alright, let's get into this. I want to read you what Liz Greene, one of the great modern masters, has to say about the sign of Aquarius, and I'm going to pause at certain points and reflect on what it might mean that Pluto is entering Aquarius, given what she's saying. Aquarius, for mercy, has a human heart, pity a human face, and love the human form divine and peace the human dress. That's from William Blake Songs of Innocence.
We arrive now at the sign of the new age, which in the 1960s was proclaimed to be the age of love and brotherhood but which it is increasingly apparent may be a little bit more complex than that. Aquarius is a complex sign with two planetary rulers, Saturn and Uranus, but its rulers, unlike those of Scorpio, have little in common. In fact, they are enemies in Greek myths, as we have seen, and the struggle between them seems to portray an inherent duality or ambiguity within Aquarius itself.
Even though I don't agree with Liz Greene's use or modern astrology's use of outer planets as sign rulers, the way she handles the joint pairing of Uranus and Saturn in Aquarius, given that modern designation to me, is just brilliant. So I take away a lot from it even though I don't assign outer planets to sign rulers myself, but here's what she says. We have seen quite a lot of Kronos Saturn already, and there is little mythic material on the sky god Ouranos saved the fate he suffers at the hands of his son.
In fact, the only salient piece of information we have about the ancient and elusive deity is that he was repelled by the children he begat on his Mother, wife, sister, Gaia, the earthy Titans, and the grotesque 100-handed giants and imprisoned the whole brood and Tartarus the bowels of the underworld so that they would not offend his aesthetic eye.
This tells us a good deal about Aquarius; in fact, more than the paucity of material might suggest, I have seen this process of repression of the earthy and the bestial. So often in aquarian's that it seems a fundamental necessity of the sign. The offensiveness that the crude and the cathodic hold for Aquarius accounts, perhaps for its ceaseless efforts to reform and redeem mankind. And it's almost ferocious, civilizing instinct, which is forever worrying as that at the baser aspects of the human personality like a dog at a bone.
Like Ouranos, the heavenly daimon of perfectionism suffers eventually at the hands of that which it has cast out but is redeemed in other more ambiguous forms. The severed genitals which Kronos throws into the sea breed the Goddess Aphrodite, who combines in herself both the sensuality of the earth-born Titans and the aestheticism of the sky god who is her father, the Erinyes, as we have seen are also his progeny born of his suffering and his blood and are kind of permanent law against the shedding of the blood of kin.
First of all, wow, she packs it in. One of the things that I think is really important to understand is that in Aquarius, and I mentioned this in a previous video when I talked about the shadows of the age of enlightenment, that where there is an idealism about what humanity can become what humanity is capable of, is usually a very severe judgment of that, which is messy, or that which is sort of natural and earthy and sensual and embodied. And it's sort of like there's a compliment that sometimes people give to me on YouTube, that I read it, and I'm always like, you're not aware that's kind of an insult, you know, that people think that they're giving a compliment, and it'll go something like this.
I was so impressed by today's video. You took it to a totally new place that you're usually not capable of. Well, thanks. So I guess you're saying that my material is sort of shitty, but then sometimes it hits these high notes, and you go look at what you're capable of, you know. I'm teasing, of course, because, you know, I try to take such things as compliments, even though I don't particularly love that kind of statement.
But it's that idea that, like, as soon as you point out the potential and remember, one of the synonyms for New Age is the human potential movement, and it's also often conflated with the Age of Aquarius. What are we capable of? What more could we become, in that is an inherent judgment of what we are, of what is natural of the way things are? And you can't help that. I'm not saying that, you know, it's like, how could you? It's just part of the archetype. You can't talk about progress. And think about how much better we could become without inherently thinking that we're not good enough the way that we are.
That's a real shadow that Aquarius, the airy age that we're entering into, could fall victim to, that we could become more condemning of our earthly life and condition when we reach for civilizations on Mars or whatever. The offensiveness that accrued to the cathodic hold for Aquarius accounts, perhaps for itself, ceaseless efforts to reform and redeem mankind and its almost ferocious, civilizing instinct, which is forever worrying at the baser aspects of the human personality like a dog at a bone.
Like Damn. She's gets it; she just nails it. And that's it. But we must look further afield in Ouranos. So if we were to grasp the mythic pattern of Aquarius, my feeling is that an equally important figure who embodies much of the meaning of the sign is the beneficent Titan Prometheus, who comes with the same race as Kronos yet who sides with Zeus in his battle against his father and who ultimately takes the side of man against the gods. Prometheus is the great cosmic social worker who stuffed a fire from Zeus to give to man and embodies a spirit that is not content with merely instinctual life but must forever grow better and more enlightened.
There is some disagreement about Prometheus and his birth in stories, I'll agree that he was a Titan, but he is sometimes Hera's illegitimate child and sometimes the son of Iapetus the Titan; I'm probably slaughtering a lot of these Greek words. His name means the one who foresees or the provident; he had a brother Epimetheus whose name means he who learns only from the event or the heedless.
Together, these two titans seem to describe opposite qualities of the human spirit. Because Prometheus was gifted with foresight, he knew the outcome of the rebellion of Zeus against his father Kronos, and although he was himself a Titan, he wisely preferred to fight on Zeus's side; he assisted at the birth of the Goddess, Athene from Zeus his head, and she, in turn, taught him architecture, astronomy, mathematics, navigation, medicine, metallurgy, and other useful arts.
These, in turn, he passed on to man. In fact, the oldest version of Prometheus myth tells that it was the Titan himself, who made men, with the consent of Athene, out of clay and water in the likeness of gods, and Athene breathed life into them. This is similar to the Talmudic account of creation with Archangel Michael. Prometheus, His counterpart, formed Adam from dust at the command of Yahweh. The Arts, which Prometheus taught man, mark him as the daimon of the cultural impulse. He is an image of that instinct which strives to raise man beyond his animal origins to become godlike.
There is a long passage and Aeschylus Prometheus Bound. I think that's how he said, which expresses eloquently the gifts which the Titan, against the wishes of Zeus, has bestowed on man of wretched humans, he Zeus took no account resolved to annihilate them and create another race. This purpose, there was no one to oppose, but I dared; I save the human race from being ground to dust from total death. Prometheus goes on to speak of how men could not understand nor see things properly, or comprehend the world around them, how they could not build houses possessing no carpentry, or they could not make sense of the orderly cycle of the changing seasons and the growing of crops.
He tells us how he introduced them to astronomy and mathematics, the training and care of animals, and shipbuilding. He also taught them medicine and healing and prophecy and the reading of omens, and the working of gold, silver, and iron. So here's the whole truth in one word, all human skill and science was Prometheus' gift; this benign impulse of goodwill toward mankind I feel to be one of the dominant themes in Aquarius, and it certainly is the one which most descriptions of the sign portray.
But the myth of Prometheus is not so simple, for there is another character in the story who also belongs to Aquarius, with whom the Titan is involved in kinship and enmity Zeus, King of the gods. Zeus wanted to destroy man and spared him only at the Titan's plea. And Zeus, in our tradition, is Jupiter right in the astrological tradition, and he grew gradually angrier and angrier with the increasing powers and talents that Prometheus's human protegees began to display.
This is the jealous God of Genesis who does not wish his creation to partake of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and life; less man become as God; Zeus here is more like his own father, Kronos, and seems to embody that aspect of the psyche, which does not wish to become conscious but attempts to thwart and hold back the development of the individual ego, threatening dire punishments, instilling a sense of sin and the Renegade.
Prometheus is incessantly at odds with Zeus over the issue of how much or how little mankind should be permitted in its development. It is as though these two deities represent some profound truth about the nature of ourselves. I feel that Aquarius, whose powerful impulse toward the development of the civilized unconscious aspects of man is well known, has likewise an equally powerful, antithetical aspect within him which forms the drama of his own mythic pattern.
I'm going to read more in a second, but what I love that she is doing, which is really, in my mind, attributable in the traditional sense to the Saturn rulership of Aquarius because I feel that the complex mythology of Kronos Saturn embodies a lot of what she's saying without having to necessarily bring in Ouranos and Prometheus, although the juxtaposition between Saturn and Uranus in the modern sense is super, super interesting. And I think she's using it to hit on things that are core qualities of Aquarius; I would just, in my explanation of those qualities would, come more from a focus on Saturn. But that's also because I'm not interested in like the, again, like the outer planet, as sign rule ruler.
But one of the things that I really appreciate about what she's doing is saying that you can understand that there is this impulse in Aquarius, And she's attributing this to Uranus. The impulse is to the redemption of humanity or the advancement of humanity as a collective like for the social good of all, for the advancement of human knowledge, above, baser, lesser, or more ignorant conditions that reflect the dimness of like early evolved life on planet earth or something like that. This is an archetype. This is important. Once you hear this, you start thinking, is that true? Or is that not true? It's not true or false. It's archetypal. That's an important distinction that I feel like we have to make again and again when learning about the myths of astrology.
Astrology helps you to understand that all of the different philosophies that we think we're always trying to choose between are all part of these archetypal mandalas. They don't need to compete with one another. But anyway, more on that another time.
Prometheus evidenced his contempt for Zeus's tyranny in numerous ways, according to the tale. One day the Titan was invited to act as an arbiter in a dispute about which portions of a sacrificial bowl should be offered to the gods and which should be given to men to eat. He flayed and jointed the animal and sewed its hide to form open-mouth bags. into one, he puts a delicious flesh concealed beneath the attempting stomach; into the other, he puts the bare bones covered with a rich layer of fat. Then he offered Zeus the choice.
The God easily deceived chose the bag with the bones and fat and infuriate the deception punished Prometheus by denying man the gift of fire, let them eat their raw flesh. He cried. Prometheus then went back to then went to a theme, his patron s who led him into Olympus by the backstairs. He lit a torch the fiery chariot of the sun and broke from it a fragment of glowing charcoal. This he thrust into the pithy hollow of a giant fennel stalk. Then extinguishing his torch, he stole away and delivered the sacred flame to man. Zeus swore revenge. He ordered Hephaistos, the divine Smith, to make a clay woman.
The Four Winds breathed life into her, and all the Olympian goddesses adorned her. This woman called Pandora Zeus sent as a gift to Epimetheus, Prometheus's brother; Epimetheus had been warned by his foresighted sibling to accept no gifts from Zeus, so he refused the woman. Zeus then had Prometheus chained naked to a pillar high in the Caucasian mountains where a greedy vulture, or eagle Caucasian mountains where are greedy vulture or eagle toward his liver all day, year in and year out. Every night the liver grew whole again. Epimetheus, alarmed by his brother's fate, married Pandora. She opened a jar which Prometheus had warned him to keep closed and in which he had been at pains to imprison all the spites that might plague mankind, old age, labor, sickness and sanity, vise and passion. These flew out in the cloud and attacked the race of mortals. Delusive hope, however, which Prometheus had also shut in the jar, discouraged men by her lies from a general suicide.
The suffering of Prometheus, intended by Zeus to be eternal, was, however, finite for the hero, Heracles pleaded for his release, and it was granted. We have already seen how the Centaur Chiron offered to exchange mortality with the Titan so that Hadees should not be cheated of a soul. Having once condemned Prometheus to everlasting punishment, Zeus stipulated that in order to appear still a prisoner, the Titan must wear a ring made from his chains and set with the *KC in stone. Mankind now began to wear rings and wreaths in honor of their benefactor, and Zeus set the arrow which Heracles used to shoot the vulture with, which tormented the Titan in stars as the constellation Sagittarius.
Prometheus is the redeemer of mankind from darkness; as he himself says in his Isclaiuss tragedy, all Art and Sciences which the human race has developed stemmed from him. This beneficent aspect of the mythic figure is recognizable enough in the aquarian concern for human welfare and development. But the problem of Zeus is less simple and likewise the image of his torment. Here's the paradoxical problem of the urge toward consciousness colliding with an urge toward unconsciousness.
Prometheus is not man in the sense of the ego. He is the daimon who seeks to help man develop this perpetual tension on an archetypal level, creates inevitable suffering because the collision is inevitable. We can look upon Prometheus as a hero because he has offered man the divine creative fire, but from the point of view of the gods' world, he has committed a crime, a sin, and this situation is one which Jung was particularly concerned with; the sense of sin, which arises when any effort is made at individual realization. That is super interesting.
First of all, what I love about that is the idea of progress that in order to make progress, like you have to break things, or that there's always a sense of potential transgression in order to make, I mean, how many times do I see people coming in during Uranus transits for example, when there is the need to make progress, but they'll have to break certain structures or traditions or rules in order to do so, and someone is going to be upset or even hurt.
But nonetheless, you have to evolve in order to do so. So there's like the sense that evolution and transgression of boundaries and limits and laws and rules somehow go together. That's fascinating. And this could be one of the more challenging aspects of Pluto into Aquarius, that in order for us to evolve and become the next thing, there's, you know, if you're gonna make an omelet, you gotta break some eggs kind of thing going on and that its structures have to change very radically and in ways that are sometimes painful in order for progress to occur and that it doesn't go unpunished that there is this kind of backlash from the fates for trying to progress. That's the shadow and fear that we face whenever progress is close at hand.
She goes on to say you only had Aquarius on the ascendant, and therefore his preoccupation with this problem must have had something to do with him as well as something he observed in his patience. By opening up Pandora's Box of the unconscious, he was paradoxically playing both the role of Prometheus and that of Zeus. His constant doubt in the validity of his own work is, I think, some indication of what that vulture or eagle attacking the liver might mean. For the liver in ancient astrological physiological correlation is the organ of Zeus Jupiter, and therefore Zeus's vulture destroys that part of the mortal body, which is also the God Himself.
We are back yet again to that peculiar doubling of symbols which we have already met several times, that God punishes Prometheus through the very aspect of the Titan which reflects the God. Perhaps this might be described as his faith or his belief in himself. I have found that side by side with the genuine altruism of Aquarius, there also lies a profound self-doubt, and I've rarely seen people quite so adept at self-punishment and self-denigration as those Aquarians who have managed to express something of the Promethean spirit and have contributed something however small to individual or collective evolution.
In traditional astrology, the sun is in detriment in the sign of Aquarius, and this is said to indicate that the principle of self-expression and self-confidence is hampered by Aquarius' perpetual concern with the power and viewpoint of the group. Aquarius is often tormented with the horror of being selfish and is the most riddled of all the signs with shoulds and oughts. The myth suggests a deeper ground for this fear of self-fulfillment. It implies the problem of the sense of sin which accompanies any real effort at development. That's fascinating.
Another thing we talked about with regard to Aquarius, in terms of the psychology of Aquarius, was the way in which concern over the group can hamper the development of the individual, and too much preoccupation with individuality can take us away from development and evolution vis a vis groups, and that there's a tension there in the sign of Aquarius. Genesis represents the act of becoming conscious as a taboo infringement, as though knowledge meant that a sacrosanct barrier had been impiously overstepped.
And this is the thing that many of the most enlightened scientists were told by the religious establishment that their desire to know and get to the truth of the universe was hubris and that they were overstepping. So you see how that idea of progress constellates someone saying you can't go far. That's arrogant, and you should be punished for trying to overstep; you should just be an animal, you know, just stay where you are. Or there are people, or if you want to progress, they'll say, Oh, you want to progress? Well, what do you think is wrong with the way things are right now? You're judging it; you're condemning it.
Which is the opposite problem that we talked about earlier, where Aquarius might show up and say, We need to progress, but we need to progress. But in the meantime, I'm, you know, I'm obsessed with progress because I tend to judge and like, you know, keep everything at arm's length, and I'm sort of dissociated from like earthly life, so it can go either way. I think that Genesis is right insofar as every step toward a greater consciousness is a kind of promethium guilt; through knowledge, the gods are as it were robbed of their fire. That is something that was the property of the unconscious powers is, torn out of its natural context and subordinated to the whims of the conscious mind.
The man who has usurped the new knowledge suffers, however, a transformation of or enlargement of consciousness which no longer resembles that of his fellow man; he has raised himself above the human level of his age, and he shall become like unto God, but in so doing has alienated himself from humanity. The pain of this loneliness is the vengeance of the gods, for never again can he return to mankind. He is, as the myth says, chained to the lonely cliffs of the Caucasians, the cosas forsaken of God and man; I would not put this better than Jung has; that was a quote from Jung. And no doubt he knew all too well the pain of this loneliness because he stole a considerable amount of fire.
Needless to say, isolation from Fellows is a profoundly painful dilemma for the socially-minded aquarian. We are Jung's beneficiaries, but no doubt the man himself had, despite the remission of punishment, which occurs in the myth, continued to wear the ring forged from his chain, the reminder of the offense against the gods, all the traditional Aquarian fields of endeavor, science, invention, social welfare, psychology, even astrology are tainted with this loneliness, which is the price of offending Zeus.
Isn't that amazing? That is just remarkable, and it's so true. When it comes to the Aquarian archetype, the progress you make will alienate you from other people, specifically because there's you like; I'll just give you an example. When I'm around a certain, you know, people in different social hemispheres that I occupy, and they start talking to me, and I, you know, we somehow it comes up that I spent a decade doing ayahuasca, and I spent a decade doing yoga and you know, that I'm an astrologer and all of these things that are like completely alien and foreign to them. There will often be this immediate way where I'm just talking about my life or whatever because it's come up naturally. And they'll look at me like, Oh, you think you're better than me? Like, just because I'm into astrology, and I've guzzled some, you know, some psychedelics in the Amazon.
But it's not just that; it's because my consciousness is different. I've seen and done things that, like, a considerable amount of people have no idea about, like you guys do because you listen, you're into astrology, so you know exactly what I'm talking about.
How alienating it can be to be amongst people who have not had any kinds of awakening or spiritual experiences. And I don't mean to say this as a way of like, Oh, we're so much better than people or whatever. The point is that it's alienating, not that it makes you better than people just having different experiences and being exposed to different things. There's a social feeling of having transgressed norms that leaves you feeling punished socially, like you're ostracized or alienated, or people don't like you, or they feel uncomfortable around you. And that's across that you bear the sort of the Aquarian cross that you bear when you go digging around when you steal some fire somewhere, whether it's through psychedelics or you know, kundalini awakening, or like whatever people do Kundalini yoga, or do you know what I'm saying?
So I hope that that comes across well enough. It forms the secret shadow impetus behind the one who must help others, for it is through these helping relationships that some little portion of the intense loneliness of insight is alleviated. The Aquarian impulse is like, Well, this has alienated me and made me totally different from others. And then often the next thought is, well, I guess I should go help people.
You know, and Plato warns about this when he says that there's a person who, like, exits the cave, the prisoner who exits the cave thinks I should go back in and help people because, you know, I'm all alone out here, and you know, people could probably use help, and they'd be very liberated to see what I'm seeing. But if you go back in, they could kill you. So, Plato was like going over that in his Republic. It is well to remember that Lucifer, the rebellious angel who oppose the wishes of God, means light bearer in Latin and that in Aquarius, we have met another form of the dialogue between a rebellious son and jealous father. In Capricorn, this dialogue occurs between the father, who has crystallized into old rigid forms, and the son, who rebels against these worldly restrictions into the detriment of his own productivity.
In Aquarius, we are confronting that jealous God whose creation has illicitly spied out the secrets of his origin. That's fascinating. It is probably relevant that in one version of the Prometheus myth, Zeus remits the punishment not out of compassion or favor to Heroclix. But because Prometheus, the four-sided, knows the future fate that awaits the King of the gods, Zeus, reluctant to have this information withheld from him, allows himself to be blackmailed.
Once again, we encounter that mysterious left-handed handshake, which is the secret collusion between conscious and unconscious. Zeus, although he could have blasted Prometheus into atoms for his sin, permitted him to continue to exist and even to go free because the Titan had something the King of the gods himself needed.
Remember when I did that talk a while back on Ganymede, and the water pourer and I talked about how the gods need something from humans as much as humans need something from the gods. The same thing that Greene is saying, he required knowledge of the future from Prometheus and guidance and how to meet it. This is the old alchemical heresy once again that God needs a man to achieve the work of perfection.
Isn't that fascinating that the universe let's call it The universe, somehow needs us in our basic form, to live out and perfect things? I think that's fascinating because it suggests that exactly who we are and exactly the way we are is needed somehow by the higher powers. It is also one of the major themes which runs through Jung's work in, which infuses it with such a deeply mystical feeling. The struggle towards individuation is not just a cure for a neurotic discomfort, discomfort but a sacred work done both for man and God.
Ego and unconsciousness possess a strangely ambivalent relationship; they are enemies, yet they are dependent upon one another. Zeus and Prometheus sprang from the same seed, Ouronous, to the sky god, who is the image of the eternal heavens, but they have different stocks. Zeus is an Olympian and, therefore, airy, while Prometheus is a Titan and, therefore, earthy. One is allied to spirit, the other to the world. Their delicately balanced relationship is full of dangers; you have it as a partnership of equals in value, if not in nature.
So, again, we have the idea of a partnering between heaven and earth. And this is where I think it's very important to talk about the potential shadow of Pluto in Aquarius, which is all air, no earth. Or, I mean, Pluto in Aquarius is in many ways going to bring the reforming, saving, evolving, progressing archetype to humanity, but it can't do so if it doesn't, ironically, recognize the love and need that it has for humanity just as it is, that that acceptance of who we are as we are is vital for progress to actually occur. And that also, you know, we have to be open to the fact that it's not damnation to say that we could be better, you know, it's not condemnation to say we could improve.
So we have to meet each other halfway. The gods lift us up as we bring the gods down. And it's so there's a marriage of above and below that's the hermetic axiom that all of astrology is built on. We now consider the actual constellation of Aquarius and those myths which are connected with it. The water bearer in Egyptian law was the God who presided over the River Nile. He was called Hoppy and was portrayed as a vigorous fat man with women's breasts, dressed as a boatman or fisherman who resided near the first cataract and a cavern where he poured water to heaven and earth from his urns.
Because the whole of Egyptian civilization depended on the yearly flooding of the Nile, hoppy was an important deity, but he did not do anything else besides pour his water. The Greeks put an altogether different myth upon the constellation that Ganymede is the beautiful son of King Joseph Troy. According to the story, he was the loveliest Youth Alive, and Zeus desired him and chose him to be cupbearer to the gods. The Olympian disguised himself as an eagle and abducted the boy to heaven. Afterward, on Zeus' behalf, Hermes presented King with a golden vine, and to find horses and compensation, Ganymede was made immortal and dispensed nectar to the gods while Zeus set his image among the stars as the water bearer.
What relevance this pretty little myth might have to the complex psychology and fate of Aquarius is not immediately apparent. Robert Graves has the following comments to make about it. The Ganymede myth gained immense popularity in Greece and Rome because it afforded religious justification for a grown man's passionate love of the boy. That's interesting. The spread of Platonic philosophy, the hitherto intellectually dominant Greek woman degenerated into an unpaid worker and breeder of children wherever Zeus and Apollo were the ruling gods. So that's Robert Graves's comment.
Now I'm inclined, since not all Aquarians are homosexual, to take symbolically rather than literally this charming story of gay Greek gods. Graves connects the myth with a repudiation of the feminine and a reduction in its power. This is certainly a relevant theme for Aquarius; there is a noticeable horror of the base and the biological inherent in the sign. We've seen this already in the story of *Varanasi rejecting his titan children. And there's likewise a deep fear of the irrational. The image of homosexuality and myth might, among other things, suggests an exclusively masculine world, a place where women in the instinctual plane of life cannot enter.
A union which produces no offspring other than those of the mind and spirit. So she's, she's making this as a metaphor. Just to be clear on that. This applies no less to the Aquarian woman than to the Aquarian man, for she's often more at home with masculine company and masculine ideals. The tribal custom of taking pubescent boys away from their mothers and setting them up in exclusively masculine clubs or groups in order to counteract the power of the feminine matriarchal realm is an anthropological parallel, which suggests how archetypal is the quest for male strength in the exclusion of the feminine, Zeus and Ganymede together reject Hara, the mistress.
When the King of the gods takes the female Paramore, Hara can at least compete with Ganymede. She cannot even get near it. I feel this is an Aquarian pattern, although it generally occurs in spheres other than the sexual one. The sign is most definitely the champion of light and spirit, and the only feminine deity with whom Prometheus himself had any dealings at all was a theme herself hardly a friend of the Great Mother, as she has a father's virgin daughter. Thus the Promethean world is a masculine world in which the drama of the struggle for evolution and its inevitable repercussions are imaged.
It's an important final note, whether you like the way she went with that or not. An important final note, though, that there is something about Aquarius and its idealism and perfectionism and hope for humanity that is, in many ways, very young and archetypal Lee masculine insofar as it presents ideal images of ascent from the biological to the angelic, so to speak.
So the sign doesn't have the greatest love, necessarily for the feminine realm of nature. And the progress and enlightenment again can come as sometimes at the cost of the feminine, and yet it can be projected, ideologically projected, the Aquarian spirit as feminine insofar as it's for the love of humankind, right? But the feminine in ancient astrological terms is not just about love, agape and utopia, and perfection. The feminine is the relational natural biomatrix that is, in part, like it's magical, but it's also chaotic, and it has a dark side to it. And it's much more about imminence as opposed to transcendence.
Not that there isn't a sort of transcendent quality associated with the feminine ancient astrology, but it's just that this, like, you can see people saying like that where we're heading to is a more like feminine future insofar as that is somehow described or depicted as this like very loving, perfect, harmonized place and that will be projected as feminine. But the degree of intolerance toward diversity and messiness and difference in, like, sort of biological, organic, feminine life, the tolerance may be very low, which is a weird thing that I think we have to be a little bit careful of.
Well, big stuff to be talking about, and I hope that you find hope you find all of this thought-provoking and stimulating. I would love to hear your thoughts and reflections as you're taking this in. And we'll continue on with our exploration of Pluto into Aquarius, with more tomorrow. So that's it for now, and we'll see you again soon. Take it easy, everyone. Bye.
KG
Hi
You commented in a previous piece on Pluto-Aquarius about the experience of being a small part of something big. Also, a comment on aliens – their arrival would bring that awareness.
I’ve been pondering the infinite unknowns in nature on this planet & how much that is natural can be almost alien. I suspect w/climate changes-and the rise of diseases parallel with tech growth AI, quantum computers , tech implants into bodies perhaps this might increase that drop in the ocean (in being) feeling.
I enjoy your thoughtful astrological takes!
(Taurus sun-3rd house, Aquarius rising—Pluto is in my 12th house right now! I’m going to turn 64 soon. Life is quite an adventure! PS-mom & retired teacher -enjoy your family. Kids are so wonderful! It sounds like that is going well for you! Becoming child centered societies would be a great thing-I’m not seeing any astrologers speak to how that ties in with the stars.)