Venus Retrograde Conjunct Pluto: Secrets, Invisibility, and the Underworld

Transcript:

Hi everyone. This is Acyuta-bhava from Nightlight Astrology and today we are going to take a look at Venus is retrograde coming back through the conjunction with Pluto right so we are going to be revisiting this today from the standpoint of a number of different essays from one of my favourite authors James Hillman. I've got some excerpts from Dream in the Underworld, Healing Fiction an essay that he wrote on dreams and dream interpretation. So I'm really excited to dive into this a little bit today I've titled this talk secrets and visibility in the underworld. We're gonna try to explore Venus and Pluto from a very different place than we've done so far. I have the day off today outside of making content so I had much more, more spaciousness. I have a lot of spaciousness every morning before I create my content, thanks to my meditation practice, but this morning was sort of extra spacious because there's that not that sense of anything that's going to be done later in the day. I really went deep into thinking about Venus Pluto this morning, and I hope you enjoy this talk we're gonna we're going to try to visit Venus Pluto from hopefully, a lesser known place.

Before I do that, as always, you guys know that I'm in Kickstarter mode right now. So I'm gonna do a little promoting of the Kickstarter before we dive in. Today this morning, we are at 950 backers with just a little about almost seven days left to go. So we finish on New Year's Day pretty early in the morning. So New Year's Eve is sort of your last opportunity to pitch in. I'm going to put the link to the Kickstarter into the chat box. If you haven't pitched in yet. I hope you'll consider donating and supporting this channel in the year ahead. 950 backers, 1367 is our goal, which means we are just a little bit over 400 backers away from our final goal of the year. And I'm going to put this up on the screen so you can see it. That means you also have literally just hold on just a second did that come up? Let's just see if it even appeared. That means that you guys have about seven days left to take advantage of the half off costs for all of my programmes in 2022. 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After I do all of that than I sit, having really kind of emptied myself and gotten into my spiritual centre the best I can. Then I prepared the talks that I give. And you guys know sometimes we have fun we go through the houses. Sometimes we look at archetypal combinations, sometimes we tell stories from you guys. And other times I do deep dives like this where you know I've I have really taken a deep look at a variety of different texts in my library and prepared a talk. And this happens five days a week year round. So if you enjoy this ways you can support outside of donating if you can't afford to pitch in include liking and subscribing sharing the videos clicking on the notification bell so you get notified when there's a live cast happening. All that stuff helps the channel to grow. And helps me to continue doing all the cool things that we do we support a large staff. This is part of how I support my family. We also because of this because this is successful, all of our programmes, whether it's our speaker series programmes or the online training courses, we have never price out people who can't afford to take an astrology class. The prerequisite for taking a class from me is that you want to study astrology. And we try the best we can to never let a person's budget get in the way that happens because you guys are generous and support this channel. So thank you guys really appreciate you letting me bang the drum here these last seven days. We'll see how good we can do coming down the homestretch. All right. Let's turn our attention now to the real time clock and we'll take a look at Venus's conjunction with Pluto. So Venus is coming through the conjunction with Pluto today December 24 into tomorrow December 25. Merry Christmas everyone. If you're celebrating you get a nice dose of Venus Pluto on Christmas alongside of a nice dose of Saturn and Uranus.

I've joked about you know like what kind of Christmas drama Can you imagine? He reminds me the potential of this transit reminds me a little bit of that movie. National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, if you guys remember that. Oh, all the drama. So Venus can joins Pluto today into tomorrow. You're gonna be able to feel the energy. Venus is retrograde for a while yet and Venus moving through Pluto, you'll be able to feel really all the way through, you know the end of next week. So still a ways to go with this one. Next week, we'll be turning a little bit of our attention, we'll be turning our attention more directly to Jupiter entering Pisces next week, just in time for the new year. So that's the that's the transit we're going to talk about today. And we are going to try to do it from the standpoint of looking at the underworld and what the underworld means and what it doesn't mean. So I want to start by talking about one of the things that I have noticed the most when it comes to Venus, Pluto, how have I seen students? I don't know, social media, you know, everyone's an astrologer now. So you have a lot of people on social media sharing their interpretations of planetary turns, you say I see that I say that with such disdain. I don't mind lots of people being into astrology, I just like good astrology. And sometimes I feel like there's a little bit of that lacking. But that's me just being a scrooge.

So Venus, Pluto, will often be talked about in two ways by astrologers. This is sort of in my mind, the two banner interpretations of Venus and Pluto that you you'll see pretty much everywhere. And I see it in myself, which also means I have to I've forced myself to go deeper What more is there? Besides these two interpretations? So the first one, Venus, Pluto will be talked about as a refinement or purification of one's desires or one's desire body, there's a popular phrase, no one knows what it means. But we all say it right? Whatever your desire body is, is it being refined? Is it being purified? Are you looking at your desires? Do you have naughty desires? You know, are they unclean? Are they getting you into trouble? Do you need to need to refine them or purify them? Take this magical elixir and just take a little turmeric, you know? So Venus, Pluto, purify the dark stuff, purify the dark? Do you have a porn problem? Yeah.

You know, it's like Venus, Pluto comes around. And we're talking about all the bad desires that you shouldn't have that you should clean, or cleanse or purify that are getting you into trouble somehow. All of that is fine and dandy. I'm not at all saying suggesting, by, you know, mocking this, I'm just having some fun. But I'm not suggesting that there isn't something to it. Right, I can honestly say that in the past couple of weeks, almost every client I've seen has been dealing with some kind of Venus Pluto desire that, you know, on multiple occasions, I've listened to people talk about marital affairs, or listen to people talk about, you know, problems that they're having with, you know, maybe overeating or some some, some way that their desired body is just getting out of control. So it's a fair interpretation. The second one is opposite. The opposite interpretation is what are you repressing? What do you want really, like, what do you really desire, but you're holding back from it. It's taboo to want that thing. You know, you feel like it's dirty to want that thing or you're not being honest with yourself about the thing that you desire.

And so the basic translation of these two, this this binary, purify your desires, or acknowledge your repressed desires, one of the two, it translates into stop doing something that you want but is not good for you or start doing something that you want but you're holding back from that you probably should be doing right? It's like okay, fine, we get it but this is there anything more, there's nothing more you're telling me that the god of the underworld and Venus, the goddess have nothing to say other than stop eating cheeseburgers, or just let yourself have a cheeseburger? You know what I mean? So this is where I started this morning when I started making this talk. I thought to myself, Okay, what can we say about Venus Pluto? That goes beyond I want frosting. I'm just gonna let myself have it. Or I shouldn't want frosting because it's dirty and it's making me bad. So what, what else is there? That's where I started this morning and I asked the eaching and, and I pulled out a lot of books and I by sat and I thought about this for a long time, and then I wrote this talk.

I started by asking the question, What more is there? And then I started realising something. The first thing that I started realising was that we need to learn how to listen to Pluto. And we need to learn in general how to listen to symbols, in a way, in any other way, then the hermeneutic approach the hermeneutic approach being symbols decode into psychological instructions or imperatives, that I can go and do that I can go and accomplish. Because I'm a work in progress, and I need to know what I need to do to get better. So I'm laughing because it's so true that we do this as astrologers all the time I'm like, these, these astrologers out there who don't have good astrology but the whole actually it's common with real comedy of is the whole reason for this is I was like, Man, I don't feel like I've said anything other than this to throw me right into the junk bin.

Pluto Hades is Hades literally means the invisible one, right in the invisible one. What does it mean when the goddess conjoined through her retrograde motion with the invisible one? That's something that's more interesting question to me. Then, Venus equals desire, Pluto's Pluto equals unconscious repression, unconscious repression of desire, you should go and deal with that. You know, like, just something doesn't feel right about something feels to me, like I'm forgetting Pluto, and all of this, I'm forgetting Venus, and all of this as living beings that have something to say or that have some dimensionality outside of my, you know, just moving them along the conveyor belt line of self help instructions for my next day or week of life. I just get sick of things like this. Mostly. Not that I don't need those instructions to not that that hermeneutic manoeuvre, isn't there. Like I said, you can interpret the symbols this way. And a lot of times, it really works like it's applicable. I'm not saying it isn't. But I just get sick of it, because it feels like, in some ways, especially because my life is sort of like a conveyor belt of astrological content. And I don't want it to turn into that all the time. So I have to, I have to re approach the symbols constantly and be like, What are you saying, Who are you really, you know, like, what are you? What do you actually want to say? Well, I started I started thinking about it. Well, Hades is the invisible one. He is said to rule over the dead, and yet the dead live in another world. That's interesting that they live the dead live in an underworld. And Pluto is invisible, not seen. And yet rules over a land in which the unseen dead people live. And the underworld is also in Greek myth right here. We just can't see it. Isn't that interesting?

So what does it mean when the goddess Venus gets into this unseen, invisible realm of the Living Dead? It's someplace that's here, but we can't see it. Okay, so I want to read you guys a few things. These come from essays written by James Hillman. One of my favourite books, of all time, is called the dream and the underworld. I don't know if you guys can see it, the dream and the underworld. And in this book, Hillman gives like, an anatomy of the underworld in a way, but it's not anatomy isn't the right word. It's like a poetic topology or something like that. He starts off in the very beginning of the book, and he writes this. The remainder of this essay meets these Freudian and union objections, which can be summarily condensed into one statement. The dream requires translation into waking language, either to extend waking consciousnesses domain, or to serve nature's demands for the more broadened and balanced qualities of consciousness.

In developing my thesis further, I shall follow Freud and Jung both but not only Freud, by insisting that the dream has nothing to do with the waking world, but is the psyche itself, speaking to itself in its own language, and young by insisting that the ego requires adjustment to the night world. I shall not be following them in bringing the dream into the day world in any other form than its own. Implying that the dream may not be envisaged either as a message to be deciphered for the day world, or as a compensation to it.

By day world and day light I do not mean the daily world I mean rather the literal view of any world where things seem as they appear, where we have not seen through into their darkness, they're deadly night shade. It is this day world style of thinking, literal realities natural comparisons, contrary opposites per shut processional steps that must be set aside in order to pursue the dream into its home territory. They're thinking moves in images, resemblances, correspondences, to go in this direction, we must sever the link with the day world for going all ideas that originate their translation, Reclamation compensation, we must go over the bridge and let it fall behind us. And if it will not fall, then let it burn.

So think about this from the standpoint of what we often say about Venus and Pluto. What is it? What does Venus and Pluto mean? Well, I will arrest its meaning, I will feel something from this combination to be given to my conscious efforts to become more heroically virtuous, moral and spiritual. Right. And in doing so, I leave behind the actual shadowy, dreamy, like terrain of working with symbols of speaking to them getting to know Gods and diamonds, I'm leaving all that behind because I've I've decided, Venus and Pluto, stop desiring or wanting the bad cookie. Or start allowing yourself to have the cookie.

And in doing so, we are always trying to take the gods and translate them into some kind of literal instruction for our literal issues in the literal world. Thank God Venus Pluto appeared because now I know the dirty bad thing that I shouldn't be doing anymore thinking or feeling or wanting, or again in the opposite direction. I'm, I'm not going to repress it anymore. Right? And there's, there's something we lose in this so he goes on.

Actually, I'm going to switch to this one. First. I want to read you guys a short essay. today. It's like James Hillman reading our I'm going to read you guys a short essay called A Snake is Not a Symbol. I've actually read this before a couple of years ago.

This is to the same point. Often I begin a workshop on animal images with the snake. The snake works like a charm, freeing people of their insidious notions of snake symbolism and therefore of animal symbolism in general. The question I asked sounds like this, how do you understand a snake image? What does the snake mean? What's your interpretation? I have assembled and condense the replies. Number one, the snake is renewal and rebirth because it sheds its skin to a snake represents the negative mother because it wraps around smothers won't let you go and swallows hole. Number three, it is the animal embodiment of evil. It is sly, shifty, sinister forked tongue and it is cursed by God to slide on its belly because of what it did even Adam, the book of Revelation says that the serpent is the devil himself. Number four, it's a feminine symbol having a sympathetic relation with the even the Goddesses in Crete, India, Africa and elsewhere.

Number five The snake is a phallus because it stiffens, directs its head and ejects fluid from its tip. Besides penetrates crevices. Number six it represents the material Earth world and as such as a universal enemy of the spirit. Birds flight it birds flight in nature and heroes fight it in culture. The snake is a healer. Birds fight it in nature and heroes fighting culture. The snake is a healer is in medicine and we still see it in the signs of pharmacies it was kept in the healing temples of Asclepius in Greece and a snake dream was the God Himself coming to cure. Eight it is a guardian of holy and wise men, even the New Testaments as serpents are wise. Nine the snake brings fertility for is found by Wells and springs and represents the cool moist element. Number 10. A snake is death because of its poison and the instant anxiety it arouses. 11 is the inmost truth of the body like the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, or the serpent power of Kundalini yoga. That's why the sophisticated folk medicine among Native American South Asians, Chinese and Africans for existent for instance, rely on parts of the snake for remedies. 12 The snake is the symbol for the unconscious psyche, particularly the introverted libido the inward turning energy that goes back and down in in its seduction draws us into darkness and deeps it is always a both creative, destructive, male, female, poisonous and healing dry, moist spiritual material, and many other irreconcilable opposites like the figure of Mercurius.

This 12th interpretation of the snake takes all the other 11 and turns them into steps in a programme in which the snake is finally explained by the final step. The snake is the unconscious psyche. What has really been said by this last term, it is not better said by the image itself. It's fascinating flickering tongue it's rattle or hiss and quick strike It's articulated glistening skin, it's coil inside winding the panic, rising on sudden sight of it. Why What Why must we exchange the living image for an interpretive concept? Or entity interpretations really psychological defences against the presence of a God? Remember most of the Greek gods goddesses and heroes had a snake form Zeus, Dionysus, Demeter Athene Hercules Hermes, Hades, even Apollo is our terror of the snake the appropriate response of a mortal to an immortal. For instance, a black snake comes in a dream, a great big black snake. And you can spend a whole hour of therapy with this black snake, talking about the devouring mother talking about anxiety about repressed sexuality, and all the other interpretive moves that we therapists make. But what remains after all, the symbolic understanding is what that snake is doing. This crawling huge black snake that's sliding into your life. The moment you've caught the snake in an interpretation, you have lost the snake, you've stopped its living movement. Then the person leaves the therapeutic hour with a concept about my repressed sexuality, or my cold black passions or my mother, and it is no longer with the snake.

The interpretation settles the emotional quivering and mental uncertainty that came with the snake. In fact, the snake is no longer necessary. It has been successfully banished by interpretation. You the dreamer don't need the snake anymore. And you then form the habit of not needing dreams anymore either. Once they have been interpreted, meaning replaces image animal disappears into the human mind. There are various ways of keeping the snake around. It can be imagined as a felt presence and talked with it may need to be fed and housed painted and modelled. It can be honoured by attention like recalling it several times during the day. By doing something for it a physical gesture lighting a candle buying an amulet, discovering its name, it can be brought closer by visualising it sensing its skin its strength. Now imagination replaces meaning and the human mind gives itself over to the animal presence. This is the psychological and imaginative work of animating the image giving a life soul back to the snake that may have been removed from it by your desire to understand it. The snake may have no objection to being understood. It may be pleased with your turning to Herpa herpetology books about snakes by your visit to a zoo to watch them by your reading of ancient serpent mysteries. But whatever you do, consult with the snake first, so that you do not insult it by following your own plan without recognising its arrival in your life. Its arrival is a summons to divert your intentions from yourself. At least partially and toward it, animating the image that is the test day. No longer is it a question of symbolic contents of dreams. over 100 years ago, Freud brought us back to the old traditions of symbolism, and the old traditions of dream meanings. Then Jung explored these symbolisms and meanings even more widely and deeply. But then, both Freud and Jung made a move that we no longer want to repeat. They both translated the images of animals into crystallised symbolic meanings. They didn't let what appeared express itself enough, but move towards satisfying the rationalising and often frightened day world mind. This means that even Young's method of active imagination which does animate the image is less for the sake of the animal soul than for yours, the dreamers pinned and wriggling on the wall said TS Eliot about the modern minds mode of operation. Elliott's image suggests that the psyches butterfly on suggest the psyches butterfly unable to wing it's way beyond diagnostic labels and interpretive meanings. Once you've translated the great snake into your omnipotence, fantasy or penis envy, or you've translated as the mother symbol, the Great Mother, then you no longer need the image and you let the image only say one thing and two words Great Mother, then it disappears. You don't want that blacksnake really not anymore. You want to work on your mother complex your personality and so on. This leaves the soul an animated that is on alive. The images are not walking around on their own legs they've been turned into meanings. Now let's try to leave meaning and the search for meaning and the meaning of life so as to stick with the animal image. In our eagerness for conceptual meanings, we ignore the actual beast. We are no longer astounded by its facts or wonder over its presence that for instance, a snake dislocates its jaw to swallow an animal larger than itself, that its digestive system works without chewing without teeth or gizzard or cud like a rhythmic peristalsis that squeezes its meal against the snakes backbones crushing its prey into a digestible pulp. Or for instance, the fact that it's discarded skin after shedding appears to go on shedding lives without meaning hunger for meanings, and psychologists feed the hungry with the living presence of animals. Patients is carnivores devouring the flesh of their dream animals to satisfy their gluttony for knowledge. Or have we psychologists become taxidermists disembowelling the snake, stuffing it with concepts and preserving it as a carefully fixed meaning.

So let's go back Venus and Pluto. There's something you're not you're doing that's not really good. It's a bad naughty desire. It's a secret, something that you ought to purge and cleanse and purify. That's what Venus and Pluto these gods in the form of massive planets moving through space, that's what they mean. Just that just for you so you can get on with the process of becoming better. Right? Or, on the other hand, there's something you're not letting yourself do you're repressing a desire. And Venus and Pluto they have no other meaning other than to help you recognise that you should just go eat that cookie, smash your face into the frosting just love yourself. Right? So Hillman really challenges us and he says you know what's forgotten and all of that Venus and Pluto, what's forgotten and all of that is a living relationship with Gods. What's what's missing in that is that Gods are not just here as symbols to be combined and adjectives to be extracted into simple self help steps to be taken. The whole purpose of doing astrology is also to move into a symbolic erotics. We want the symbols to be like presences God's real beings just like animals and dreams should be more than just something that we interpret and strip away of their actual presence. I remember one time when I was reading this book I had a dream about a to can that was came to me in a dream and was talking to me it was a bizarre image too. I don't know why I would be thinking about a to can and upon reading this. I resisted the urge to interpret with the toucan men Ted Andrews animal speaks where is it? Give it to me right now. What does Ted say about to Cannes aha, that's what it means. Now I can take that from the unconscious I actually interpreted its meaning and now I can go and become a better person because I've received the message from the two can Which, honestly is a lot of I mean, I honestly until I really started deeply studying James Hillman, I think it would have been more common for me to do something like that. So instead, I purchased a statue of a to can that I found on Amazon. And I put it near my bed. And every night I would talk to it before I went to sleep. And you know what happened, that too can appeared in my life in my dreams for about a year until it just disappeared again. And it said a lot of meaningful things. And it appeared in a lot of different ways and had a lot to say. But what I remember more than anything that it ever said or told me to do, or messages it gave me was the fact that I established a relationship with a freaking to can in the dream space, like and to me, that that changed my life. And I highly recommend when people are studying astrology, I say this to all of my students, that you first and foremost understand astrology as a form of divination, not just some, not some, not purely some kind of Astro logos purely in the in the realm of Hermes, these are just moving archetypes in the sky, meant to be uncoated decoded, you know, to make the unconscious conscious, right, all of that. No, these are gods, right. And your ability to be a good reader, if you're going to read charts for people is tantamount to your ability to have good relationships with these presences. Which, yes, Hermes speaks on behalf of all of the gods, Hermes is an interlocutor. Hermes is the god of astrology, because part of astrology is interpreting the messages of the gods, their omens, their warnings, their prognostications, their rulership over the process of fate, which can't do it unless you have a relationship with the gods unless you have some kind of living connection with them, which goes beyond how able you are to interpret their meanings. It's not because if you just interpret their meanings, they will stop giving their meanings to you, or they'll start, you'll start interpreting them in ways that are not appropriate, because they see that you're objectifying them because they're Gods because they're beings. So what appears like a system moving in the sky, which is purely logical and rational, and should be able to deep be decoded, just like it's, you know, Morse code, it's just a system that should be able to be decoded according to a logic is merely the syntax diction and grammar of a language that living beings called Gods diamonds, etc, used to speak to us as diviners, who are interpreting astrology or bringing its presence into our everyday life. So that's first and foremost, and I'm saying this, as a as we're just we're trying to do today is like, look at how easy it is to fall into that mode. I've done it, I still do it regularly. It's easy to keep falling back into that mode, especially when you're someone like me who makes content every day, and you want to try to give people some practical instructions for life. You can't sit and take everyone into deep reveries about the presence of the gods every day. It's hard. It's not easy to evoke that state of relationship. But that is why you hear me hammering on about why why I think my YouTube channel is valuable. And I say it's because of all the time I spend previous to making the content. The reason that I feel that it's valuable to say that is because the more you start studying astrology, the more you realise this exact truth, which is that you have to establish relationships with these symbols. There's a symbolic eroticism that has to develop in your own psyche. This is true whether you're someone like me who makes content year round or someone who just loves astrology or someone who's going to read charts for people or teach it to other people or whatever. No relationship with these presences means that over time, you you will not get the they will not yield their deepest secrets, teachings meanings prognostications, they won't be your friends, they won't hang out, they won't show up in your dreams. They won't give you that little light that comes on in a session when you're reading for someone. Don't have to like get into some kind of super awe and reverence mode either where you put you know, you're singing Orphic hymns to Venus every morning and ringing a bell like you're playing a Dungeons and Dragons game either. You know, it doesn't like just be yourself. But you have to establish a relationship with them. Back to dream in the underworld Hillman writes this entering the underworld. This is Pluto's domain refers to a transition from the material to the psychical point of view. Three dimensions become two as the perspective of nature, flesh and matter fall away, leaving an existence of immaterial mirror like images, Idola we are in the land of soul.

As Nielson says, eidolon signifies simply image and always keeps the sense for the Greeks the soul was an image, we have to be careful about the words we use for describing these a dolla, they are not substantial and so we may not use our convenient substantial Ising language we may not just say they are this or that or say that existence in the underworld is so and so. We may speak of a Dola only as they seem appear to be or what they like in unto our statements must be prefixed by UN as as if that little word is the coin we offer. We offer chairman for taking us across the separating waters between two kinds of speech. The dead speak differently, they whisper their talk has lost its positive substance its natural certainty, we must lean in very close to hear this kind of speech. A Dola may be distinguished from icons which are better compared with pictorial copies, visible things out there that we can touch even make. The word a Dylon relates with Hades himself, Ada, a darkness and with a dose ideational forms and shapes the ideas that form and shape life but are so buried in it that we only see them when pulled out in abstractions. So we are speaking of images that are at the same time invisible remember Hades invisible, we are inside the imaginative mind. Another way of putting this underworld would be distressed the shadowy or shade aspect Skia was another word the Greek imagination use for underworld figures, the person's There are shades. So we must imagine a world without light in which shadows move it how can we speak about shadows in the dark? Since for upper world consciousness, shadows result only from physical things blocking the light, how can there be shadows in the dark? The problem is very much like trying to sense the movement of one's own shadow, trying to catch a glimmer of the shape behind the scenes to tune into what else is going on. In what seems to be a natural action or simple conversation is precisely trying to see shadows in the dark. It is to notice the fantasy in the moment to witness the psyche shadow play in our unconscious daily living. Consciousness of this sort is reflective, watching not just the physical reality in front of the eyeballs and by means of them, but seeing into the flickering patterns within that physical reality and within the eyes themselves. It is a perception of perception. Or as Jung said about images they are the self perception of instinct. Our blind instinctual life may be self reflected by means of imagining, not after, or before events in the closet of introspection, but as an eye or ear that catches the image of the event while it occurs. So again, entering the underworld is like entering the mode of reflection, mirroring, which suggests that we may enter the underworld by means of reflection by reflective means pausing, pondering, the change of pace, voice or glance, dropping levels. Such reflection is less willed and directed is less determined Lee introspective like a heroic descent into the underworld to see what's going on there. Let us rather imagine it to be more hermetic, a cocked ear a sideways look, a suspicious fisheye or intuitional feeling and thoughts that appear in the midst of life and twist life into psyche.

There's one last little small excerpt I'm gonna read you from an essay that a book that Hillman wrote called Healing fiction. My point here is not that Hermes is the wrong god for analysis. He's talking now about psychoanalysis. My point is that once he has been invited in then we better know what we might expect. He is himself a healing fiction a god and Hermes heals by convincing us of that fiction of interpretation. Making symbols work out constructively for us, so that the interpreter hits just on the word which opens the way. But if Hermes is to function properly as guide of souls, we must have some material for him to turn into a message, no dreams, no symbols, no therapeutic insights, there must be something to move across the threshold and exchange or translate into an insight. He appears in the interpretive act his gift is the insight when recognises where he has been by the mound of stones erected to mark his intervention. haha this is what It means so Hermes is a part of our life, Hermes will eventually approach Venus and Pluto and conjoined with the two of them. And Hermes plays a role in our everyday lives as astrologers astrology was considered to be the science of Hermes, a God of interpretation. But Hermes, is a God that has relationships with all the other gods, and is able to somehow traverse back and forth from the shadowy realm, the realm of the Living Dead, the places of invisibility, and the realm of the gods themselves and into our world to bring messages that somehow makes sense. So it's not to say that Venus and Pluto don't literally mean at times that you should put the cake down, or maybe take the cake up, depending on if you have gone bananas, or if you are repressed, you know what I mean. But it's also crucial to realise that becoming a hermetic astrologer means to become like Hermes, which isn't to just receive His messages and go and do what we will with them, but to get to know the gods and to become like Hermes, as a, a friend of the gods, bearing relationships with the gods, which essentially, you could say if you want to take it out of literally literal relationships with the gods, at the very least means that we need to develop some sense of symbolic eroticism in our life, which means we get to know the symbols, and we crave hearing them speak and appear in all of the different ways that we do with our sideways glances and our sense of sudden recognition. Oh, there's a God among me. There's a symbol speaking, that we develop that is just as important that we develop a love for just that moment, and that those those flickering spaces and the presence of the gods the feeling that the gods are near, as much as we develop the ability to interpret whatever it is that they might have to say. Symbolic eroticism, there's Venus, Pluto, there's just a meta way of thinking about Venus and Pluto, just sitting down this morning and thinking, here, I've been interpreting Venus Pluto here, I see lots of astrologers right now just interpreting Venus, Pluto. But where Venus and Pluto? What, what? There's something we're missing here. And so I sat with it. And all of these images and thoughts and passages came to mind and what did they do what I love about James someone more than anything, is that they take me to the gods, they take me to the snake to the dream, to the Goddess to Hades to the underworld, to Hermes. Now I can feel them. Now they're real to me. And that's what we want more than anything. We're not really what is the goal of life to take all these symbols and to progress to level 10, spiritually, to evolve through your north node in 30 more lifetimes until you reach the top rung. And God's like, good job. You made it all the way through the north and south node maze. That was a tough one glad you figured it out. No, it's absurd. What can we imagine that actually the goal of life is relationship. That reality is a relational being just inviting us to explore in infinite intimacy, or through curiosity, through learning through experience, that intimacy relational curiosity, is the goal itself a worthy goal? Does it need to be anything more than that?

So symbolic eroticism there's Venus, Pluto? Can we just be curious and listen to the different presences that are there in the psyche in the environment and things that speak or suddenly turn and catch our attention somehow and we know that there's the dead are with us made it by the dead we mean the living that are invisible. the allowing of symbols so lessons takeaways, let's let Hermes speak. Now. Let symbols speak. Just let them speak. Try to work that into your relationship with astrology. the allowing of symbols to speak without any kind of interpretation is how the symbolic eye develops because you're developing intimacy with these presences. And the symbolic guy is the one who hears and sees spirits diamonds, Gods moving invisibly. Here's a really good one. When interpretations rise up, keep them secret, or keep a few secret, especially if you're someone who works with symbols regularly don't rush toward the Ted Andrews animal speaks book or the dream dictionary or whatever. And instead when something speaks when something stands out, try to see if you can further the relationship. If How annoying is it like this? Sherry messaged me on Facebook. I'm just making this up. Sherry messaged me on Facebook. What does it mean? Oh my god. Does it mean Sherry likes me? Sherry, did you message me on Facebook? Because you like me? Right? And if you're anything like any girl I've ever dated when I was 17, if I ever did that, it's like, gone. No chance. No, it's like, Oh, come on, you know, like, what? You've just squashed the connection by trying to interpret its meaning. Why don't you just say, hey, you know, like, Sherry contacts you on Facebook? Or if? If Dave reaches out to you, you know, instead of being like, what is this mean? What are your intentions Dave? You know, just go. Hi, what's up? See what happens. So, when interpretations rise, keep them secret. When symbols speak, keep them secret. Because we know that secrets are symptomatic of the soul. The soul is coming forth to speak when secrets start appearing. try placing the statue of the two can next to your bed. Do you know what I mean? And again, don't I would say avoid the DND enactment now I'm going to have a relationship with the gods. I've got my cloak on I've drawn my sacred geometry on the altar. And now I'm chanting to ISIS or you know, it's like, don't if that's your thing, if that's naturally you if you were just a warlock from birth and fine, you know, but like, just be yourself. You can do this wearing a hoodie. You know what I mean? You know what I mean? So, only when we've developed these qualities, the sacred uncertainty, this respect for the dead, the depths, the underworld, this attunement to envision invisibility do things like Venus and Pluto really have a chance to speak to us so I dare you today for the next few days. To see if you can develop some kind of you can feel Venus and Pluto and just start reaching out. See how that changes the dynamic of what they have to say compared to what the astrologer has to say about what they have to say, which really breaks down it appears everywhere into eat more cake or don't eat the cake. So, messages are delivered in ways that keep secrets even while revealing wisdom that is the essence of occultism for 1000s of years. Mercury can't work as a hermit hermeneutic messenger. We have not learned how to know the invisible Mercury the cloaked helmeted mercury that was given the gift of invisibility by Hades. Invisible psychopomp of the underworld. See, I really am a warlock. I just I just still dress like I'm wanting to be part of the Backstreet Boys. So oh my gosh, this has been fun today.

Consider what I find here stays quiet. What I hear sense see, I will stay curious about I will not come to immediate conclusions about this presence is attractive to me and I want it to stay around more. Be around a little bit more. So I thought about this last night, you might be saying you know, all of this dead all the goal of the dead What are you doing? And I'm uh I will say this. I went last night in Minneapolis. There's a theatre called the Guthrie. I went to the Guthrie last night with my mom and her partner and Ashley. And we saw a Christmas carol and one of the things I love that play so much I've seen the play probably seven or eight times in my life now I've it's been a tradition for Ashley nice to go and see. We like the Christmas carol we like to go see some performance of The Nutcracker if we can find it around the holidays. But I love A Christmas Carol in particular. Because one of the things that I love about that story is you can easily say Oh, it's a Christian story you know about redemption and kindness and compassion and changing your ways and becoming the better person but you know what? I think it's a story about ghosts. That's why I liked it as a kid. That's why I like it today. It's a story about spirits. And it's a story about the way in which this guy changes his ways, not to me just because there's all of these lessons that he's shown by spirits or all this heavy stuff or consequences that he's shown by spirits, but also because He cultivates relationships with spirits. And that, to me is one of the most interesting symbols of Christmas time, it always has been that there is some way in which, if we get to know the dead, if we get to know the presence of these living spirits, we start to see them in the time bound world of Saturn. Now, it's interesting that Jacob Marley and the Christmas Carol, he was born he died on Christmas Eve, and then seven years later, a quarter of the Saturn cycle, Scrooge finds himself on Christmas Eve, and did you know that the date on his gravestone marks him as an Aquarius Saturn ruled sign, it's an interesting thing to note. Seven years later, a Saturn number. On the same Christmas Eve, the Jacob Marley died, he's visited by Jacob Marley, the dead. And then he's visited by spirits all throughout the night in a dream in a dream state. This is how most of us really change. Most of us really transform whether it's something simple or something profound, because of dreaming the underworld because of dreams and spirits because of the presence of the invisible world. That's why we really love astrology. Right? That's, that's the thing that draws us in over and over again. And I was thinking, what more is there to this Venus Pluto dynamic.

And I'll just end by saying this. This is my attempt this morning to just tell Venus and Pluto myself through giving this talk, hey, I felt you around lately. And sorry, if I've just been interpreting you sort of what I do for a living every day. The last night when I was watching those spirits on that stage in the theatre, and the costumes. I was just reminded this is this is really what people need from symbols. They need it to be theatrical, they need spirits, gods dreams, and not just as something to be interpreted. But as something that we see that we feel that it just awakens within us this imaginal dimension of life, which is where any real, ongoing, meaningful hermeneutic interpretation comes from. So I hope that you find this Christmas spirit in yourself, whatever that may be, aside from any of the religious connotations of the holiday. I hope you find spirits in you. And I hope that they speak to you that you develop a relationship with them and then if some good instructions come of it, so be it. To me, that's the maybe some of the eroticism and symbolic artfulness that Venus Pluto speaks to. So thank you guys so much for listening today. I hope you guys enjoy this. I hope you guys have a very Merry Christmas if you're celebrating, we'll be also bringing in the New Year together next week. Don't forget, I still need your help with the Kickstarter, we have about a little over just a little over 400 More backers that we need prior to the new year to meet our goal for this year. So pitch in if you haven't yet the link will be in the comment section of this video in the description of this video. I put in the chat in the live stream chat box a few times, pick up tuition come to one of my programmes. Let's hang out and study astrology together next year. combine them together pick up a reading. appreciate all the love and support you guys have given already.