Mars (now in Gemini) squares Uranus on September 3rd. The Sun (now in Virgo) opposes Uranus on September 9th. Jupiter (still in Sagittarius) will be squaring Uranus October 9th. This will pit all the three other mutable signs against the planet of wild and sudden changes, now in Pisces, the most mutable sign of them all.

Uranus transits on the personal level

One way to take advantage if this situation is to imagine that each of the three planets facing off against Uranus over the next several weeks has a question to ask it.

–As the month begins, Mars will be asking Uranus: What’s the best way to break away from this situation that’s been stifling me? Given that Mars asks every planet with which it comes into contact to act itself out, and that Uranus is the planet of the unpredictable, we can bet that whatever impulses we may have been hiding are not likely to stay hidden. Mars and Uranus are volatile energies that we must be careful to use constructively.

–The Sun’s opposition to Uranus on Sept. 9th will cast a klieg light upon some area of our life that’s been trying, for a while now, to radically shift (check out what house of your chart Uranus is passing through. This will be the arena provoked). The Sun is asking Uranus: What would it take for me to achieve freedom in my life?

–When Jupiter squares Uranus on Oct. 9th it will be for the last time this cycle: the two will be finishing up the lesson they started teaching the world as 2007 began (see June’s Skywatch). The transit’s second peak was during the Virginia Tech shootings in April, and this will be the third hit. Jupiter will be asking Uranus: How can I express my individualism through my highest principles?

In the weeks ahead, these transits are acting as a team, trying to teach us something – not only about Uranus but about the sign Pisces — from three different angles. This gives us a chance to look a little deeper than we usually do at this mysterious water sign.

Esoteric meaning of Pisces

All Pisceans — i.e. anyone whose chart features the sign Pisces, the planet Neptune or the twelfth house prominently — must deal with the dyad of pain/suffering. As the Buddhists tell us, pain is an inescapable feature of life on Earth; but suffering is not (see Saturn Without Suffering on the Articles page of this website). This is one of the great teachings of this last sign of the zodiac, the one that allows Pisceans to know empathy.

Astrology textbooks rarely mention Pisces-and-pain except as a warning about its pathological potential. In modern secular culture it is almost a blasphemy to suggest that there could be a creative dimension to pain; that it could be seen as not only acceptable but as a road to higher understanding. With the exception, perhaps, of the S&M crowd, pain is thought to be an experience only fools — or those without the right meds – would subject themselves to. But again, this is because the distinction that makes all the difference – that between pain and suffering — is not a familiar one to most of us, nor is it often pressed into service even when it is.

In an esoteric sense the awareness of pain bestowed by Pisces leads to the realization that we are all part of the same Whole. To acknowledge human pain on this level allows one to depart from the widespread denial that prompts so many First-Worlders, for example, to shy away from identifying with the majority of beings all across the planet who, at any given moment, are experiencing deprivations we privileged few can hardly imagine. Thus does fear-of-pain cut us off from the rest of humanity. Not pain itself, but the fear of it. Modern cultures in general fail to understand the role pain plays in the deepening of the soul. This failure strengthens the illusion of separation between ourselves and the millions of victims of oppression, deprivation and torture with whom many who live in relative comfort cannot bear to engage emotionally.

This is not to say that all those whom we perceive, from afar, to be suffering unimaginably – the besieged nomads of Darfur; the women trying to keep babies alive in Iraq without clean water – are necessarily ignorant of the difference between pain and suffering. We cannot know their subjective experience. No individual can know whether any other has made that critical Piscean distinction. If one is in a maternity ward, however, seeing one laboring mother screaming and thrashing around in torment while the woman in the next bed is concentrating intensely on each contraction with the undistracted aura of someone doing immensely hard work, we might infer that the second woman has made this distinction and the first has not. But in general this is a consciousness call, up to every unique individual to make, not for anyone else to judge or presume to know.

When this esoteric level of its meaning is understood, Pisces can bestow a rare freedom. It can relieve us from the illusions that afflict so many others in our pleasure-chasing and pain-avoiding modern society. It allows us to bear witness to the bald yet inscrutable truth that planet Earth is inhabited by a species that creates pain for itself¹. It allows us to see that this characteristic of the human animal is not something to be dismissed as “a negative way of looking at things” or as a mere opinion, or a belief — but a simple fact.

The twelfth and last sign of the zodiac can accept the messy and immoral side of humanity because Pisces, all by itself², has nothing to do with critique, reform, or right-vs.-wrong.³ This sign contains within its sights the entire kaleidoscopic morass of potentials of which humans (and everything else) are capable. A well-functioning Piscean quite naturally acknowledges the obvious fact that pain exists in this world; and with equal ease acknowledges the world’s joys and all the myriad states in between. A healthy Pisces would no sooner be able to deny the reality of pain than a healthy Virgo would deny the reality of human error.

The tricky part comes in when Pisceans choose (whether the “choice” conscious or not) to mirror this pain through their own personal being. Depending on the level of consciousness of the native, she may play out this process in the form of hypochondria, substance abuse or emotional victimhood. Though firmly discouraged by contemporary models of ego health, as well as by friends, family and shrinks, from an esoteric perspective such scenarios represent her attempt to process the pain she is so richly aware of around her; whether it originates in a person living under her roof, in a tribe halfway around the globe, or in a set of memories deep within her own karmic history.

For better or worse, this seems to be the aspect of the sign most people think of when they think of Pisces. But the ever-suffering Pisces who remains unaware of the transpersonal dimension of pain is a shadow version of the sign, albeit one that is so familiar it has become an astrological stereotype.

Less often discussed in the lore of Pisces is the native who uses his sensitivity to pain in a spiritually responsible way. When he is aware of the difference between pain and suffering, and about the role of personal mirroring as a means of understanding what is going on in the collective, the Piscean can use pain to profoundly deepen his consciousness.

Ultimately, the pain/suffering dyad is just a lesson. Just one of the twelve human lessons, no better or worse than, say, the lesson of attachment to material (Taurus) or to the personal ego (Aries). Each is played out in the external world, in the human condition, and in the individual self, either exquisitely or through the shadow: the choice is ours.

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Notes:

¹Some use the word “evil” to describe this and similar impulses. It is this writer’s belief that “evil” does not exist in and of itself, but represents the lack of consciousness.

²Of course, none of us is just one sign. Every individual Piscean’s vision will be mitigated by all the other signs in his or her chart.

³Unlike Sagittarius, Libra or Aquarius, by contrast, Pisces has no interest in ideology.