Before you get on your high horse this month, make sure you know what you’re fighting for.
Mars, the warrior planet, becomes a crusader when it enters Sagittarius (11/4). Any natal planets in its path will be prodded into life. Whether this feels like vitalization or aggravation depends on our understanding of the transit’s intention.
All by itself, Mars is pure self-assertion. It is not necessarily connected to a particular worldview. But in Sagittarius, it is. Our behavior is backed up by a point of view, and amped up accordingly.
What was once a garden-variety desire –neutral Mars –becomes something grander, more fiery. It becomes a quest.
Fervor and fever
Mercury is in Sagittarius, too, for most of the month. The Sun joins it on the 21st, and Venus on the 30th. This puts a lot of emphasis on this equestrian sign, governor of travel, adventure, the hunt.
These galloping transits drum up a lot of righteous volume, in both high and low forms. For genuine social warriors, the transits enhances the fervor of moral courage. In misguided blowhards, it enhances the ungrounded fever of a holy campaign.
In addition to this month’s fire, we have the water of Jupiter (Cancer), Saturn & Neptune (Pisces). That’s a lot of emotive force.
This month, everybody’s on a mission.
Fire posing as air
Symbol-readers will want to use November to take a closer look at Sagittarius, a complex sign whose motivations can be tricky to diagnose. It’s a fire sign (passion) that can disguise itself as air (mental processing).
Air (Gemini, Libra, Aquarius) is the element of rational thought; it is dry and detached. This gives it the ability to be relatively objectivity. Air signs can distance thinking from feeling. By contrast, the genius of fire (Aries Leo, Sagittarius) is its passionate subjectivity.
But Sagittarius is easy to misdiagnose. Like the air signs, Sagittarius traffics in theory and knowledge, so it may appear, at first blush, to be interested in empiricism, reason and factuality. But don’t be fooled. Sagittarius doesn’t merely think; it believes. It isn’t interested in opinions so much as in its relationship to opinions.
Its strength lies not in ideas but idealism.
Take the temperature
Check to see where Mars is passing in your chart this month. That part of your life may embark on a grand tour, either geographical or ideological. It wants to take you somewhere, and it will use strong feeling as its fuel.
Especially if the transit is projected — i.e. if it comes at you from the outside — it’ll be easier to handle if you realize where, in the other person, the heat is coming from. If you find yourself doing battle with somebody under Mars in Sagittarius, don’t look for logic in their lofty justifications.
The arrows your antagonist is firing at you derive, for better or worse, not from his mind but from his heart.
