October begins with an annular Solar Eclipse — a New Moon with extra clout. It’s a double dose of the smoothest of signs: Libra, the Mr Nice Guy of the zodiac.
Let’s deepen our understanding of Libra by challenging its mistaken association with romance. Libra is not about love so much as the idea of love. Although its ruler, Venus, governs the law of attraction, Libra is an air sign: it’s about concepts, not emotion. It doesn’t traffic in the depths of erotic connection nor in the giddy heights of infatuation. It is not into drama. It is interested in getting along.
Libra approaches both personal and impersonal relationships through the faculty of reason. That’s why it governs the law, mediation, and other institutions that promote equality and justice.
Libra does not create these perfect states. But it can glimpse them, and work towards them.
An idea, not a state
Libra is not really the sign of balance. It’s the sign of the balance-imbalance polarity.
As we discussed last month, this is a sign that exercises the mind. It plays with the idea of opposing poles, equally weighted. Libra’s job is to carry this equipoise as an ideal; the most self-aware Librans understand that perfect parity cannot actually be achieved on the Earth plane. This distinction — between expecting the ideal to become manifest vs. understanding its usefulness as a guide — is what separates the frustrated expression of Libra from its sublime expression.
When children are playing on a seesaw, there is an energizing tension between their opposing positions. To make it fun, both kids must stay alert to the ever-shifting imbalances. The game consists of trying to get it just right: with playful concentration, they test and tease the
equilibrium. For a brief moment, they might get the board perfectly horizontal to the ground, but they don’t expect it to stay that way. They understand that perfect balance is a point of focus, not a result to be actualized.
The point is to strive towards getting the seesaw level, not to keep it that way.
Peace and harmony
In this way, a Libra-dominant native carries a vision of parity as something to continuously strive for. The fact that she can imagine it may help her make it happen, sometimes, but that’s not Libra’s primary concern. The prime concern is to spot the absence of it.
Far from living a life of peace and harmony, a high-level Libra may attract disharmonious situations for the sake of exercising her ability to spot and correct disharmony. Conversely, far from embodying fair-mindedness, a low-level Libra may have a hair-trigger sensitivity for perceived injustices to himself, while being utterly blind to injustices against anybody else.
Transits of Libra
Similarly, transits of Libra aren’t there to make the world fair. They’re there to put attention on how fairness works, and how it gets blocked. Especially this month, which is super-Libranized from the eclipse, there will be a lot of talk about societal mechanisms that try to do this, such as anti-discrimination practices and wealth redistribution. People will be thinking about the ways inequality arises and how we approach them. We will all be looking at the process of human cooperation.
In our individual lives, we will be sensitized to two-sided situations that are out of whack. Wherever you are getting the Eclipse (check the house where ten degrees of Libra falls) you may feel like a moderator of a debate, whose job it is to notice whether one speaker is getting more time than the other.
The genius of Libra is to not pick sides, but to cultivate a dispassionate perspective. This will be tested at the Full Moon, when a bellicose opposition from Aries challenges the cool Libran ideal.
Scorpio comes to town
But as always, there are other transits going on, which have a different tale to tell. Venus has been in Scorpio since the Equinox. On October 13th, Mercury joins her in Scorpio, and the Sun ingresses on the 22nd. These influences plunge us into a more inscrutable realm of our psyche. They insist that we pay attention to our gut.
We are being challenged to honor our faculty of reason, at the same time that we attend to our emotional impulses — especially those susceptible to repression. Let us use Libra to understand Scorpio, if we can.
Images
The Seesaw by Francisco Goya
The Seesaw, French engraving, 1657
1967 by William Weege
