Nov 2023
Under the Quiet Waters
Just as the season’s flames were burning out, the world received a new firestorm on an energy level. I discuss the chart of the Middle East crisis in the MothersSky blog.
On personal and collective levels, we are having to navigate the element fire. On November ninth, Mercury enters Sagittarius, on the 22nd the Sun follows suit, and on the 24th it’s Mars’s turn.
But first, it’s Scorpio time.
Hidden things
As the month begins, the Sun, Mercury and Mars are in this deepest of water signs. Students of hidden things things will want to pay particular attention to the days between 11/4 and 11/10, when Mercury opposes Uranus and ends up in a square with Saturn; and between 11/11 and 11/18, when Mars and the Sun oppose Uranus.
Wherever you are with Scorpio – no matter how well you think you understand this mysterious sign – these Uranus transits want to jolt you into a new way of looking at it.
What does it mean to be in touch with subterranean issues? Scorpio inspires a fascination with other people’s repressions, which is why it’s so often found in the charts of
therapists. As for our own secrets, it drives us down into emotional recesses that might feel too taboo to share.
Scorpio doesn’t want to keep us stuck down in the dark. It just wants us to stew a bit, to marinate in our own depths for a while. Something magical happens when we do. Unsavory material, when it’s allowed to fester, changes form.
Think of the energy released by decaying plant material when invisible microbes are allowed to do their thing.
Slap in the face
Cultivate a heightened flexibility mid-month, when transits may take us off-guard. Like an earthquake tremor that reminds us of the dramas happening beneath our feet, Uranus will 
look for ways to shock us into seeing something previously invisible.
These energies may be emotional — we might be listening to relatives playing out their unconscious roles at a family dinner and suddenly find all the pretending intolerable — or they may be intellectual, as in the case of solutions that seem to arise out of nowhere.
They’re not really coming out of nowhere. Like Pluto bursting up suddenly from underground in the myth of Persephone, this material has just been hidden down below the crust of conscious awareness, and is likely very old. We will probably viscerally recognize it when it emerges.
Mars, Saturn and the Sun
On 11/24, Mars enters Sagittarius, and for a few days thereafter conjoins the Sun while squaring Saturn (11/22-25). It is an invigorating, jarring transition that we will all feel. Those with natal planets in its path (the first degrees of mutable signs) will be especially affected, but on some level of consciousness, we all will feel it.
The square with Saturn will push it into our faces. It’s asking us to confront the shift between the soggy emotionality of Scorpio to the restless questing of Sagittarius.
Sense the shift
Needless to say, it is not that Scorpio is a bad sign and Sagittarius is good. All signs can be used superbly or poorly or somewhere in between. But as a general rule, when a transit gets to the end of its cycle, it starts to flag. It’s how transitions work. An old phase gets exhausted, the ethers are getting ready for the new thing. We’re less likely to see the best qualities of the sign that’s waning.
This is as true every 2½ days, when the Moon is getting ready to leave one sign and enter a new one, as it is every 15 
or 20 years, when Pluto is getting ready to leave a sign (in this case, Capricorn) and enter a new one (Aquarius).
This is what happens with the Sun every month, about two-thirds of the way through the month. The mood in the air shifts from one element to another, from one mode to another. In that moment of transition, there is burst of possibility. This month, not only the Sun, but Mercury, and Mars too, transition from Scorpio to Sagittarius, a particularly dramatic shift.
Flaming arrow
Scorpio is inscrutable and psychologically subtle. It is like the marsh, beneath whose surface intense fertility slowly takes place. Sagittarius, by sharp contrast, is a freewheeling galloping energy, passionately blatant in its self-expression. It does not sit and percolate. It leaps and rises, its arrow aimed at a goal.
Try to notice these ingresses (11/9, 11/22 and 11/24) while they’re happening. See if you can feel the flaming arrow shooting up through the swamp water.
Transit-tracking becomes an art form when we watch the cycles mutating into each other, and get on the wavelength of what’s happening. When we tune in to what the sky is doing, at the moment — as filtered through the potentials of our natal chart – we bring power and light to whatever we do.
Charles François Daubigny,
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Pietro Perugino, Archer Drawing a Bow, c. 1505
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Man Ray, Électricité, 1931