Continued
“I spent 40 years of my life researching Astrology. The following 10 have been spent writing about what I found.
These discoveries can all be distilled into one sentence.
That astrology is extremely simple, if your focus is principally on planetary aspects.
That being the case, the study of aspects should be front and centre of any investigation into astrology.
Many students of astrology believe aspects are complicated.
They are really very simple, the idea that they might be difficult to understand only comes from the fact that they were not taught first, that all kinds of other things were put ahead of them on the agenda, so by the time the student reaches aspects, their brain is already hurting from the amount of information that they already have been told they have to carry.
Up to now we have looked at aspect patterns in general and I do stress that this is the starting point for any understanding of a chart.
Any kind of hemisphere or quadrant emphasis should be considered first.
Then to look at the overall patterns to get a feel for how they might be operating.
Only then should we look at specifics, but I would still be focused on particular aspects rather than sign or house placements.
The simplest and most powerful aspects are the conjunction and the opposition.
They obviously would be very different.
The conjunction is about unity, two planetary principles coming together, pooling their energies and resources, focusing onto one area of that person’s life.
So inevitably with any conjunction, the sign and house where it occurs is going to get an extra boost.
It will play a bigger role in that person’s life because it has two parts of them there rather than one.
Of course, a lot will depend on which parts they are.
The Sun conjunct Venus or Jupiter in a sign and house will bring a much more favourable and easy expression than Mars conjunct Saturn.
But there is consistency about a conjunction. These two different planetary energies have decided to agree on the territory where they will play out the main part of their roles in that person’s life.
One important fact about an aspect focus approach to astrology, it is strongly connected with life themes.
It can also work as a character description, but not separately from the kind of life that the person will inevitably lead.
Aspects, more than any other part of astrology is intrinsically linked with transits.
You can’t really separate them.
If a planet is transiting conjunct your Sun, it will automatically be hitting any other planets that are aspected to it at the same time.
In this way, planetary transits reinforce the aspect patterns that we have in our natal chart.
So everything that happens to us, make these natal patterns stronger.
So if for example you have a Sun/Mars conjunction you would have warrior like qualities, always looking to assert yourself into any situation in life.
This will be done in the style of the sign that the conjunction is in, but also into the area of life described by the house.
Every transit that you have to your Sun will reinforce this type of expression because it will at the same time be transiting your Mars.
If the transit was also a conjunction, then even more energy would be focused on your assertiveness.
But it would be so, even if the transiting planet were in the opposite sign and house, because it would give you something to assert yourself against.
So much of course depends on which planets are forming the conjunction.
The most fundamental would be between the Sun and Moon because they rule essential parts of ourselves and our lives.
You could say that the Sun rules your essence, your individuality and your preferred path in life.
If we all only had a Sun we would head of in our own special direction, largely unaffected by anything or anyone else.
Other planets aspects to our Sun will describe how the rest of the world fits with our plans.
The Moon is our feeling nature, our habit patterns our connection with those close to us, including our families.
If the Sun is the essential part of us, the Moon rules the bits that change, our moods and responses.
The Moon will also in a general way show how other people and the environment will respond to us.
If we have the Sun and Moon in conjunction, there is an agreement, those two essential parts of ourselves are going to focus on the same area.
People with the Sun and Moon in the same sign are more obviously that type of character.
If they have it in the same house, the area of life described by that house will take a more prominent role in. their life.
This much is obvious, but we tend to forget the simple fact that it we have the Sun and Moon conjunct, we don’t have them in different areas of the chart.
11/12ths of the population do have their lights in different signs and houses, many do so in very different ones.
So if you have the Sun and Moon in conjunction you don’t have the pressure that comes from different parts of you wanting other things.
There is a simplicity, but also it can be harder for a Sun/Moon conjunction person to understand why other people have such difficulty in acting in a way that operates in their own best interests.
With the Sun and Moon in conjunction, other people are more likely to go along with your plans or at least to allow you to pursue them undisturbed.
It’s as if you are being given a special dispensation by the Universe, to be who you want to be.
This is not the case with a Sun/Moon opposition.
Here your conscious day time self (Sun) is at odds with your unconscious night time self (Moon).
You might want to go in a direction identified by your Sun, but you wont be allowed to just do that.
You will also have to attend to other stimuli and pressures in your life that are pulling in an apparently contradictory direction.
You might want something, other people will want something else and its likely that they will try and drag you away from your own chosen path towards one of their own.
Our whole birthchart is us, all of the planets represent different parts of us, but that simple fact is a lot easier to feel if you have conjunctions.
If you have oppositions, particularly as important as the Sun and Moon, it is very difficult to equally identify with two such opposing parts of our lives.
We are all taught our conditioned to be one thing. If you go to a party, someone will ask you what or who you are.
Often this is a question just to be polite, they are not really asking for your personal history.
They are expecting to be told about your choice of career, whether you are an accountant or a circus performer etc.
You might say, I don’t have a career, I stay at home and look after the kids.
They probably don’t want to hear about how difficult it is juggling being a mother of twins with a career as a trapeze artist.
But then again they might, because one of the things about a Sun/Moon opposition is that it might be more of a challenge, but it can certainly make you more interesting.
Because we are conditioned to think of ourselves as one thing and not two contradictory things, people with oppositions are likely to try and identify with one end of the aspect rather than the other.
This is particularly difficult with the Sun opposite the Moon.
It’s likely that they will see themselves as their Sun rather than the Moon.
As the Moon tends to cover other people’s reactions, it becomes easier for people with this opposition to project its qualities onto others.
Wit a Sun/Moon opposition we can easily see other people as being against us.
In fact many people who have this aspect need to be able to se it like that in order to function in their lives.
So people with a Sun/Moon conjunction are likely to identify themselves in terms of what they are for.
Whereas people with a Sun/Moon opposition are just as likely to identify themselves as what they are against.
In some ways, having a clearly identifiable opponent makes it easier for them to focus on their own path.
This makes life easier, because then they no longer have to deal with the complexity of wanting two radically opposite things.
The choose one part of themselves and project the other unwanted part (which might otherwise create personal conflict for them), onto someone else.
Obviously not everyone with a Sun/Moon opposition projects their issues in this way, but it does certainly make a complicated life simpler for those who do.
Opposition aspects have more power than conjunctions.
The very fact that there exists this tension between the two planets, is something that has to be addressed in some way through action.
It can’t simply be ignored. It is very in your face.
And it is being constantly reinforced by transits.
As we’ve already noted any transit to a conjunction will have the effect of putting more energy into the combination. It enables the person to concentrate even more on their own themes.
If you have the Sun and Moon together, every transit to one is also to the other so it reinforces their essential unity.
Even challenging transits like oppositions would be experienced up to a point in a cohesive way.
Say you had the Sun and Moon in Taurus in the 2nd house. Your focus is likely to be on money.
Even if you had a difficult transit like Saturn being opposite them, it would be experienced as some kind of obstruction, limitation or loss in a financial sense, but it would be likely to create more resolve to work harder to get more money in your usual 2nd house ways.
If you have the Sun and Moon in opposition, every transit, even the conjunctions will reinforce the fact that these two energies are essentially operating against each other.
Because if you have the Sun in Aries in the 1st house and the Moon in Libra in the 7th house, you will feel constantly divided between how you want to assert yourself in the world and your needs and probable experience in relationships.
So even a transit conjunction with your Sun will simultaneously form an opposition with your Moon.
So each transit that comes up is likely to add to the distance that exists between you and your life partner.
And it also throws up strong chances off a third challenge as well.
Because planets going through Cancer in your 4th house or Capricorn in your 10th will add extra pressures from another direction altogether.
So the differences that already exist between husband and wife are likely to be exacerbated by family or career.
So transits will reinforce these patterns.
The longer we have been alive, the more of these transits we will have experienced, so the more entrenched the patterns will have become.
If you have lived many years with a Sun/Moon conjunction, you will have experienced many situations that have enabled you to basically concentrate on your own direction.
If you live long with the opposition you will have received a great many challenges to that and its understandable that you might perceive other people as being against you.
You are more likely to feel that you have to fight for the things that you want for yourself because if you don’t you will be continually being distracted from your path.
This battle of course can make you stronger, but it would also make you more aware of the need to combat your opponents or people you perceive to be against you.
With all aspects, the tighter the orb, the more dramatically these themes play out.
So someone with a 1 or 2 degree orb conjunction will experience an even stronger consistency of energetic themes than someone with a 10 degree orb.
One person whose whole life is obviously dominated by this Sun/Moon opposition theme is Donald Trump.
Trump’s Sun is at 22.55 Gemini opposite his Moon at 21.12 Sagittarius an orb of just over 1.5 degrees.
You only have to listen to him, to see that he identifies himself by what or more particularly who he is against.
We will be seeing more and more of this opposition over the next three months.
Everything will be directed at his opponents.
Even the things that he promises to do once elected are actually against someone else.
He doesn’t have policies to improve things, he has policies to stop other people interfering with his life.
He makes an assumption that any sensible person would see things in the same way and identify the same enemies as he does.
So what he proposes to do is get rid of the immigrants, stop women leading their own lives and do things that will ruin the environment, because all of them are seen as the enemy.
Trump’s Sun is in the 10th house, so he wants to focus on his career. In Gemini, he wants to have unrestricted freedom to do that in whatever way pleases him at the time.
The Moon is therefore seen as representing enemies that are trying to stop him doing that.
These enemies include women (Moon), foreigners (Sagittarius) and the environment (4th house).
They might even include members of his own family (4th house).
But of course there is more to the opposition than simply projection.
The native will still express both ends of it. So while Trump is still likely to project qualities of the Moon in Sagittarius onto his enemies, he will also go after them in the style of that placement.
So there is a Sagittarius direct, “tell it like it is” manner with a tendency to play up and exaggerate his enemies’ impact on the US for his own gain.
For a Gemini, the most important thing is the fact of communication. What you are actually saying doesn’t matter so much and it’s fine to keep changing it as long as you are talking.
A Sagittarius Moon is also not fussed about details, as long as big the vision is there it is ok.
With the Sun in Gemini tightly opposite the Moon in Sagittarius it becomes very easy to lie, because the actual details of what you are saying are not that important.
The big picture is the deal, how it’s actually painted doesn’t matter.
When the Sun in Gemini in the 10th house is closely opposite a Sagittarius Moon, the only thing that matters here is Trump’s own career, so he will say anything to further it.
With that Moon in the 4th house, his own opponents are seen as enemies of the state, further justifying the use of outright lies to condemn them.
The delivery might be Gemini, constantly changing even to the point of verbalising every thought that comes into his head immediately, but the volume is Sagittarian, loud, brash and targeted.
Of course whenever we are talking about individual aspects or even sign and house placements we can’t adopt a ones size fits all approach.
You might have a Sun/Moon opposition but this doesn’t mean you are Donald Trump.
Even if you have it in Gemini in the 10th/Sagittarius in the 4th, there are still many other factors to consider, in the way every other chart placement dovetails with it.
If one end included a conjunction with Saturn, we would have a very different expression because there would be a strong restraining factor.
Trump’s is not restrained at all, it is given even more power by the fact that the Sun is conjunct Uranus.
This conjunction also allow him to paint himself as the unconventional maverick, the idealist, the one person that stands against the elite.
When up against Sun in Scorpio in the 12th house Joe Biden, there is such a contrast of style.
With Biden you feel that there is an intensity there, that he has something valid to say but there is almost something stopping it coming out.
Even before dementia had started to settle in, he was always understated.
He was put forward as candidate for 2020 largely on his ability to work with members of the GOP in Congress, to do back room deals (Sun in Scorpio in the 12th) rather than to go off antagonising all and sundry like his opponent.
But now Donald Trump has a worthy opponent.
Kamala Harris has a Sun/Moon opposition of her own, and with the Sun at 27.39 and Moon at 27.48, it’s even tighter than Trump’s.
So Harris also has an innate ability to project her own astrological themes onto her enemies.
It also gives her the ability to go after them with more power.
Up to now, this power has been hampered by the fact that she was Biden’s VP, so her every expression had to be contained within his own astrological themes.
It is my belief that Biden deliberately held her back.
Being a Vice President is a difficult role to play, particularly for someone like Harris.
She is not allowed to go with her own instincts in case the media turn them against the President.
It is my view, that Joe Biden didn’t actually trust her, that he chose her to balance the ticket. An old white man/young black woman combo to reach parts of the electorate that he wouldn’t necessarily have covered on his own.
I feel that he would still be be aware of how she nailed him on segregation issues during the 2020 primaries and has deliberately sidelined her since then, marginalising her effectiveness in office.
Now I feel, the gloves are off.
If you think Trump v Biden was polarised politics, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Harris’ opposition is Libra Sun/Aries Moon so it is different to Trump’s.
Again it is more likely that she would want to be seen as her Sun and project her Moon onto her enemies.
So she is presenting herself as Libra, fair and balanced, a keen legal mind with a strong interest in equality.
Her enemies are going to be Aries, self serving and macho.
But equally she is going to go after them in a passionate, incisive direct but simple Moon in Aries manner.
She might appear to be discussing something in a civilised reasoned fashion with the desire to get to the truth (Sun in Libra), but there is the stiletto attack delivery as soon as she spots a weakness (Moon in Aries).
This same delivery can put people offside, and she would naturally make many enemies effortlessly.
Biden is more likely to aim for respect from his opponents. He is a more typical politician.
Not so Harris. She wants them opposite her, she is up for the fight, the more polarised the better.
She is not aiming for the middle ground, like her predecessor. She wants to expose her opponents as extremists and her delivery is much more capable of doing that Biden’s ever could be.
The politics of war are her strength despite appearing to be a peace loving Libran.
But of course this approach has its weaknesses as well as strengths.
It is impossible for her to not put people and large parts of the media against her, but this will probably be seen as a necessary sacrifice because the truth is more important.
Harris’ opposition is from a 5th house Sun to an 11th house Moon.
The 5th rules children. With the Sun in Libra in the 5th, reproductive rights would be front and centre of her campaign in a way that it could never be with Biden.
Her perceived opponents would be that Aries Moon in the 11th house of politics, men in power who want to tell women what they can do with their own bodies.
But she will go after them with the same Aries attack dog instincts.
With a tight Sun/Moon opposition receiving polarised responses is part of it.
The Moon signifies other people and the environment and they are not going to back you up automatically in the way that they might if you had the conjunction.
So Harris makes enemies in the same way that Trump does.
But she is also no more concerned by that fact than he is.
For her, identifying what you are against and fighting it is the most important theme, even if you are a Sun Libra.
This for me is why aspects should come first not last.
The conventional astrological approach to learning about Kamala Harris would be to read a small chapter on what it means to have the Sun in Libra.
The same would have applied to Margaret Thatcher.
If the first thing to study was Harris’ Sun/Moon opposition or Thatcher’s Sun/Mars conjunction we would have a much greater insight into their lives and their role within the world.
Once we have the aspects nailed down then we can look at the houses.
Both of them had an 11th house focus, Harris with her Moon, Thatcher with her Sun/Mars.
Once we have that, we can look at the signs involved.
So we start by seeing both women as fighters, not peacemakers. The Libra thing shows that the battleground has something to do with equality.
Thatcher fought tenaciously against the political assumptions of her time, that a woman could not be a world leader.
Bizarrely 45 years after Thatcher was elected, Harris is still having to do that.
A Sun/Moon opposition is polarising. It is meant to be.
Someone with this opposition will make many more enemies than a conjunction.
It goes with the territory.
Those enemies will probably try to use the person’s oppositional placements against them.
In Trump’s case, his opponents will paint him as only being interested in his own Sun in the 10th house career.
In Harris case, the fact that she isn’t a mother has already been used against her by opponents that fervently believe that is a woman’s true and only purpose.
This is a 5th house thing.
It is a part of Kamala Harris 5th house Sun opposite 11th house Moon theme that she doesn’t have children.
Maybe its a deliberate sacrifice that she has made in order to have the political career she wanted.
Maybe she was not able to have kids and to compensate for this sadness has been a driving force behind her career.
It’s really no-one’s business but her own.
But as she has the Sun in the 5th exactly opposite her Moon in the 11th, her opponents are certainly going to try and make it their business.
But in all likelihood Harris will be undeterred by this kind of personal attack. She will be expecting it and will probably use it to her advantage reinforcing her argument that men in government have no right to tell women what to do with their bodies.
Either way, you can be sure it will be a major theme of this campaign because of her Sun in Libra 5th house/Moon in Aries 11th house opposition.
We know only to well that we live in a time where politics is becoming increasingly polarised.
This is as a direct result of Donald Trump’s Sun/Moon opposition.
It has been the single dominating pattern in the political world for the best part of a decade.
It has fuelled the rise of other people with charts that are driven by major oppositions, people like Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss, Javier Bolsonaro and in Australia with a Sun/Moon opposition of his own (Taurus/Scorpio), Scott Morrison.
With Kamala Harris bringing her own Sun/Moon opposition into the fray, this polarising narrative running through politics is only going to get stronger.
Whoever wins in November will have (almost) half of the American people hating them.
But neither of these two opponents will see this polarisation as a negative.
They will see it as a necessity.
We all know that whatever you throw at Donald Trump, he will use it for his own purposes.
An election defeat, 34 felony convictions and even an assassination attempt will be framed as lies, fake news and the elite’s increasingly desperate attempts to take him down.
All of those things, triggered mainly by transits to his Sun/Moon opposition will just aggravate the polarity that already exists there and provide him with more fuel to fight, fight, fight.
The same goes for Kamala Harris, the more she is attacked, the tougher she will become.
With a 12th house Scorpio Sun and Taurus Moon (not in opposition), Joe Biden would look to avoid conflict and seek to find some kind of consensus that could bring people together.
He would stress that his Presidency has been a success.
If viewed from his perspective it largely has.
The US economy (despite Trump’s lies) is in a much better place than it was when he was inaugurated in January 2021 after the ravaging that it took through the height of Covid.
So for a steady as she goes Taurus Moon, this would be considered a plus.
From Kamala Harris’ perspective (whatever she says in public) the last 4 years have been a failure.
When we see things from a reproductive rights/culture war perspective of a 5th house Libra Sun opposite an 11th house Aries Moon, 2021-24 was actually a step backwards.
Roe v Wade has seen to that.
Joe Biden’s conciliatory approach has not worked. Donald Trump’s own packing of the Supreme Court has seen to that and this conservative power base hasn’t been countered. In fact it hasn’t even been dented.
So it’s to be expected that Kamala Harris will try a different way. To go on the attack.
That is not to say that it will necessarily work. But if so it won’t be for lack of trying, or a fear of upsetting the status quo.
Donald Trump never respected or feared Joe Biden as an opponent.
He never believed he lost to him either. He was more than happy to keep Sleepy Joe in the line up for November.
He would know that he can just shout louder.
Harris is an altogether different prospect. Debating against her is a much tougher ask.
Like Trump her potential weakness would be in overreaction and going over the top, but its unlikely that he would have the ability to exploit that because he’s way past that point himself already.
If up against Biden, he would happily do debates every week until November.
Against Harris he’s already pulling out of the next one scheduled for September.
Of course given all of the above it makes total sense that Kamala’s campaign began with Joe Biden dropping out – on a Full Moon.
I will stop at this point because although there is a lot more that can be said on this issue, I want it to be an introductory astrology thread for beginners on the nature of the opposition aspect, rather than a political piece.
The main point I want to make is that with two opponents with tight Sun/Moon oppositions, the 2024 election campaign will be very polarising indeed.”
To be continued
Posted 24 Jul 2024
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