Love, romance, friendship. As any astrologer will tell you, personal relationships are far and away the hottest topic clients want to know about.
Yet the two signs of relationship, Libra and Scorpio, are particularly poorly served by pop interpretations. Scorpio is over-hyped, Libra is misconstrued.
They’re both big in the sky this month, so let’s use their transits to dig a little deeper.
Of the two, it is Libra that gets top billing every September, with the Sun’s ingress at the Equinox. This year, it’s on the 22nd, and there’s a Full Moon a few days later (9/25).
Mercury, also ingressing into Libra (9/10), will oppose Saturn a week later (9/18). An event may force us to define our ideas decisively. Not an easy task for Libra, the sign of both/ and.
Consider how different Libra is from Aries, its opposite number. Aries says: The world exists for me to figure out who I am. Libra says: The world is full of other people, and I need to figure out how to relate to them.
Libra has been called the sign of marriage. What this really means is “marriages” of all kinds. Partnerships based on competition, even antagonism, are equally within its purview. Libra’s expertise lies in finding balance between two separate forces.
It’s a misnomer to call Libra the sign of romance. It is, after all, an air sign, and air is fueled by concept, not emotion. All by itself, Libra doesn’t need to go deep. It just needs to dovetail.
Scorpio, on the other hand, is a water sign. It does speak the language of emotion, especially the kind that dives below the surface. Ruled by Pluto, Scorpio tries for something more profound than merely like and dislike. This sign wants to be subducted: think of the Earth’s crust being pulled down into the roiling mantle by tectonic forces. Scorpio wants to be subducted by feeling.
When Venus is in Scorpio (9/10 – 10/25), relationships can become melodramas. Something in us wants not merely to relate, but to merge completely with someone else, and the attendant intensity is part of the attraction. Absent self-awareness, this leads to enmeshment at best, love-as-crime-scene at worst. In a spiritually grounded person, it leads to self-transformation via ego death.
Be on the lookout, mid-month, when Venus hits Pluto by square (9/15). If your attachments are feeling compulsive, it’s a sign that something transpersonal is trying to happen.
When Mercury (the intellect) enters Scorpio on 9/30, the mind takes a similarly deep plunge.
Seductive dangerNeptune opposes the Sun right around the Full Moon Equinox. For several reasons (oppositions tend to get projected, Full Moons tend to bring events to a head), this transit could throw us off balance. But it doesn’t have to.
Neptune seduces us with a siren song. Like its opposition to Venus last month, this one may express itself through a relationship. It may use the partnership to tempt us away from the harsh rigors of life.
Nothing wrong with that, if we know it’s happening. We all need a little glamor, and, goddess knows, a healthy dose of escapism can be just what the doctor ordered, in times as crazy as these. The danger comes in when we ask personal relating to do something it’s not capable of doing.
Neither the sign Libra nor the planet Neptune are about people, per se. Libra, like all air signs, is about ideas. Neptune, like all transpersonal planets, is about souls. Put them together and you get a vision of total equilibrium. The Libran goal of equitability is raised by Neptune to the level of utopian ideal.
Perfect balance — or perfect anything — are not features of the earth plane, though they inspire the earth plane. The job of an Libran abstraction, like peace or equality, is to be glimpsed as an abstraction, to inspire us. It can shine a light on the material world.
But it isn’t of the material world. If we expect it to be, we suffer.
This is all the more true when Neptune’s involved. The planet of dreams exaggerates the Libran ideal, tempting us to project our yearnings onto the object in front of us. This is especially ill-advised if that object is a person.
This person will inevitably fall to earth with a thud when the Neptune influence ebbs and we wake up to the fact that they have a tacky-ass human side, just like us.
Instead, use this Equinoctial Full Moon knowingly. Enjoy the heightened emotion it brings to relating, without kidding yourself that your partner is its source.
There’s nothing wrong with rose-tinted glasses if you remember you’re wearing them.
