Depth Astrology

In Huber astrology, where I’ve spent most of my astrological training and energy, there are three masculine planets (Mars, Sun, Pluto), three feminine planets (Venus, Saturn, Uranus) and four gender-neutral planets (Mercury, Jupiter, Moon and Neptune). Traditional western astrology can hang just fine with some of this perspective, while other parts — especially the view of Saturn and Uranus as feminine — tend to shock the western astrologer’s system.

It works, though, in a deep and profound way, as Saturn is a conserving, protecting and attaching/separating mechanism — the traditional domains of the Mother archetype.

But still, with all due respect to both the Huber tradition and the mainstream western tradition, I always felt there was something missing in the reading of my own horoscope chart. I didn’t know what it was. I was able to attribute most parts of my life and personality to the basic elements that comprise the typical natal chart. But even still, I felt there was a missing piece, an inexplicable gap in my understanding of my own chart — and thus of myself.

Yesterday I posted that Saturn and the outer planets are springing a bit of an overhaul on my internal life and way of being in the world. I hinted that an unexpected piece fell into place in a Mercurius mysterium kind of way, the way of the semi-sextile that allows you to pick up little bits of data from the universe as they blow by like butterfly wings.

The little bit of data that fluttered by me yesterday was the name Hestia, the Greek goddess of home and hearth.

To the best of my memory, the name occurred to me because I was looking at the Sun in my 4th house, the place of home, family and roots. I thought about how I’ve worked from home for much of my career and how, despite many efforts to the contrary, I’d really rather be no other place. I was thinking about how much I truly enjoy engaging in the traditional home arts — cleaning, folding, decorating, cooking — that have been degraded and diminished over the years by a lack of respect for women and for homemaking as a skilled art.

I realized, much to my surprise, that I actually love homemaking — in its truest sense, that is in the sense of doing the tasks that make my home feel warm, loving, safe and abundant to all who enter, but especially to my family.

I don’t want to do it all day every day, but neither do I want to rush through it to get to my writing or put it off in favor of studying or reading charts or doing anything else I enjoy. But that’s exactly what’s happened over the years in my life and, truth be told, in the lives of many, many families I know. We are expected — by a relentlessly expensive economy, by persistently impoverished wages, by a consumerist culture — to make stable, loving and abundant families while rushing through, putting off or neglecting entirely the care of the family’s home environment.

But you can’t grow carrots in gravel. Wherever things grow, no matter what those things are, the ground must be tended.

As I mused on this idea, I remembered the bumper sticker slogan, “Peace begins at home,” and thought about environmentalism in the same context. Is it any coincidence that the planet has been degraded on about the same timeline that respect for homemaking has eroded? That the ecology of the home and of the earth are equally impoverished?

Our homes are increasingly crowded with stuff just as our world is increasingly crowded with freeways, strip malls and subdivisions. FEMA issues hurricane survivors toxic trailers to live in just as industry spits out toxic fumes into the air we all breathe. Our household garbage cans get larger and larger over the years while, at the same time, landfills mushroom out of control. We even expect, now, to periodically replace our household appliances and furniture — where, a century ago, they were made to last a lifetime — just as buildings and forests regularly get razed and rebuilt, razed and replanted.

With all this thinking about Home, then, and the care thereof, I thought of Hestia, goddess of hearth and home, and I looked her up and I realized her public name in Greek mythology was Vesta.

Now, Vesta is one of the four largest bodies in the asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter. I hadn’t really paid her much attention before, but I decided this week to look and see where she sits in my horoscope chart. At first I was surprised, and then it began to make sense, like the missing puzzle piece that’s finally placed right: Vesta sits right on my ascendant. In Huber terms, she’s the green corner of an irritation triangle with my nodal axis. To my mind (and this isn’t Huber), that means she’s got a lot to do with me figuring out my karmic junk — cleaning out the old and bringing in the new.

Not unlike a homemaker sweeps the hearth to prepare the fire.

More next week.

Photo credits: Sweeping, pollution, messy house