Venus and Mars square Chiron

Whatever is happening for you right now is what it feels like for the sky to have a lot of Chiron going on. We know there is a conjunction that has lasted for months, in the style of slow-moving planets. This is in Aquarius, the sign of ‘all of us here’.

Today Venus in Taurus is exactly square Chiron; Mars is close enough, applying to Chiron, to be able to feel and represent something that is happening or developing. I’ve suggested before that Venus square Chiron is about a wide open erotic/emotional expression of Venus and that Mars square Chiron is often expressed as a kind of piety, purity or block.

They are something of corollary expressions and the interesting thing is they are happening at the same time. Any of us may be picking up one or both of the energies, through ourselves and/or another person; but the moral of the story is that we’re both going through the same experience, with ourselves and with one another.

They are different planets doing the same thing, and the emphasis here is on what our experiences have in common; on the fact that we have one another’s experiences in different ways; and that we might encounter an awareness-raising factor from differing emotional registrations. And they will be experienced by ‘the public’ (that is, the people around us, represented by Aquarius planets) in different ways.

There are many pleasant ways to experience this, many unpleasant ones and in the end the whole point is to have fun and pay attention; which would be about paying attention to how your past injuries are triggered by your experiences; what effect that has on others; and what we can do to treat one another more humanely in the midst of this all.

This story from yesterday’s Associated Press, however, is a vivid expression of the dynamics. Consider that he is a public person having normal human experiences. Follow carefully the words used, and what they represent in the coded language of a newspaper.

See if you can either suspend or stand back from your moral expectations for a moment, and ignore him saying how wrong he supposedly is, so that the moralizers (among whom he was a big one) don’t kill him (big mistake he’s making, but that’s how the game is played at the moment) and tune into the underlying human dimension. For one thing, we have a left-handed admission of polyamory. This is disguised as ‘cheating’ because there is no other word for it in public use, but what he’s saying is that he has diverse relationships and this is normal for him — like it is for millions of men and women.

Remember how he voted for Bill Clinton’s impeachment three times — and use that as a metric of how far our private reality is often divorced from what we present to the public.

Note the way you think you’re supposed to be offended and that will tell you how intense public pressure is for him to conform, and to shut the fuck up if you don’t; and for you to conform in your moral repudiation of his actions. Then, when you’re done, please read this and note the contrast.

S.C. governor ‘crossed lines’ with more women
Mark Sanford denies having sex with any but his Argentine mistress

Story updated 7:50 p.m. ET, Tues., June 30, 2009

(AP) South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, already struggling to salvage his family and his political career after admission of a scandalous affair, added explosive details Tuesday, including more visits with the mistress he calls his “soul mate” and other women in his past.

The once-promising presidential prospect said he is committed to reconciling with his wife, but professed to The Associated Press his continued love for the Argentine woman at the center of the firestorm that gutted his political future.

In emotional interviews with the AP over two days, he said he would die “knowing that I had met my soul mate.”

Sanford also said that he “crossed lines” with a handful of other women during 20 years of marriage, but not as far as he did with his mistress.

“There were a handful of instances wherein I crossed the lines I shouldn’t have crossed as a married man, but never crossed the ultimate line,” he said.

About the Author

Eric Francis is the creator of Planet Waves and author of Book of Blue. He has worked as a professional astrologer and internationally published horoscope columnist since the mid-1990s, specializing in minor planets. He has presented sexuality workshops and written for such publications as the Journal of Bisexuality, Sexuality.org and Loving More magazine. He writes his astrology columns in his fine art photography studio in Kingston, New York.