August opens with a Venus-Uranus square, setting the tone for the month.⁽¹⁾

In the sign Cancer, Venus’ preferences lean towards the safe and familiar: cosy settings, cats on laps, dinner at your aunt’s house. Through August 13^th (when Venus goes into Leo), family issues are in the forefront.

But don’t get comfortable. Uranus is waiting to pounce.

Venus in Cancer loves to make connection, but Uranus wants only to break away. August’s opening square is the coup de grâce of a series of unstable transits ⁽²⁾ whose job is to keep us guessing.

Little Patience

Granted, instability has become perversely predictable over the past several years, ever since Uranus started squaring Pluto. Especially if your chart highlights the middle degrees of the cardinal signs, I hope you’ve found a way to make Uranus your friend.

This wild child of the solar system has little patience for the warm-and-fuzzy. Uranus rules electricity, and is always looking for ways to shock us. It disdains tradition and despises clichés. At best, its iconoclasm is enlivened with wit.

The Venus-Uranus transit is emblematic of what happens when a personal planet confronts a transpersonal one. Venus (personal), the planet of preferences, tastes and social habits, is up against Uranus (transpersonal), the urge to assert independence (our own or somebody else’s).

We are being challenged to integrate the two.

In any transit between a personal and transpersonal planet, our plan should be to make room for the X factor: to invite it before it invites itself. This month, definitely go through with that dinner party you had planned, but set a place for Uranus. Make a recipe you invented from scratch, wear a pink wig while serving the soup, hire someone to jump out of the cake.

Personal-transpersonal pairings pit an ordinary part of the self against a part of ourselves we barely understand.

Confusing at Best

Unless we accommodate their complexity, these pairings are confusing at best. With the transit that peaks August 1st,  Venus inclines us to a nice, quiet evening at home, but Uranus may interject an element of speed and/or surprise. Go with it.

Another such hybrid presents itself on Aug 18^th and 19^th, when Mercury (a personal planet) – the everyday workings of the mind -– opposes Neptune (a transpersonal one) — the mind’s mysterious image-creating capacity. Here again is a readily understandable part of the psyche meeting up with inner drives we can barely describe, let alone explain.⁽³⁾

Neptune is said to refer to the unconscious. Which is, when you think about it, a totally noncommittal term, despite its grand-sounding definite article. Unconscious is just a negative prefix attached to conscious — another word whose multiple meanings are as wide-ranging as they are imprecise.

The truth is we don’t really know what these things are.

When we’re dealing with Mercury (left-brain thinking) and Neptune (right-brain imagery) at once, as in this opposition, we tend to identify with the Mercury. It makes sense, doesn’t it? We identify with the part of ourselves that we think we understand. (Ever since Descartes, many of us think we are our Mercuries.⁽⁴⁾).

A rule of thumb with pairings like this: If we are over-identified with the personal planet (which is more likely than the other way around, since the transpersonal planet barely feels like it’s part of us at all), then we will probably project the transpersonal one.⁽⁵⁾ In the case of Uranus this might mean an event arises that is sudden, flukish and intrusive, like a prank.

The ideal way to approach a rendezvous with Uranus is to keep an eye out for a sample of cosmic whimsy: events that playfully show us what we’re holding onto too tightly.

The worst approach is to stiffen up. Those who take umbrage at sudden change are tempting life to throw a pie in their face at the next Uranus transit.

In the case of the transit on August 18^th-19^th: Mercury in Virgo is busy trying to figure something out, analyzing, ordering and sorting; and in rushes Neptune, a flood of surreal energy that confuses and inundates whatever we’ve been focusing on.

It’s a tug-of-war between the part of us that uses logic to make sense of the world and the part of us whence dreams and fantasies arise. Any guesses about who will win?

Not in Control

Our goal should be to meet each personal-transpersonal hybrid knowing that while we might be in charge, we are not ultimately in control.

Use this month’s transits to practice this principle. With the Venus-Uranus square, open to the possibility of serendipity and inventiveness. If you feel bored and itchy, instead of blaming yourself or your surroundings, open the window and let the fresh air in.

With the Neptune opposition, prepare yourself ahead of time to be taken on a mental detour by subconscious contents. Watch for clues about what you’re doing that you never could’ve come up with through cognitive function alone. Give at least as much respect to wisps of apparent nonsense as you give to straightforward ideas. Then, instead of messing with your mind, Neptune will inspire it.

Next month we’ll get a crack at trying this with Pluto. Instead of viewing transpersonal transits with a superstitious dread, let’s prepare ourselves to humbly welcome the god who’s coming to visit.

Notes

1 In this essay I talk about the birth-moment idea as applying not just to living things but to blocks of time. That is, the first moment of any period, no matter how short or long, holds the seed pattern for the whole period.

2 The Venus-Uranus square is the last hit of a cardinal T-square that started a few days before the month begins. Venus opposed Pluto exactly on July 27^th-28^th and her square with Uranus peaks on the 31^st – August first.

3 The distinctions between the personal planets (within Saturn’s orbit) and the transpersonals (beyond Saturn’s orbit) force us to confront different layers of ourselves, provoking consciousness growth. See the anthology Transpersonal Astrology.

4 That is, since the advent of the so-called Age of Enlightenment, many believe that the thinking mind is the sum total of human consciousness. See Reining in the Mind.

5 Students of astrology know that, in general, tense aspects between planets (e.g. squares and oppositions) signify a conflict between the two corresponding parts of the self. Under duress, we may identify with one and dis-identify with the other. The latter may be cast outside the self (“projected”), as when we unconsciously attract an antagonist to play the role of the rejected planet.

Ideally, we wouldn’t project either one. The more we understand a planet’s purpose, the more likely we are to experience it internally, where it is more manageable and helpful — even downright enlightening (especially with the transpersonals). By contrast, the more we resist the lessons symbolized by the planet, the more likely it is to come at us from the outer environment, and in its least becoming guise. See “Beware of What you Want.”