Picture of the Week: Jupiter in the London Eye

This is a fantastic astrological image! A detail of the London Eye, the biggest Ferris wheel in Europe and now the UK’s most-visited tourist attraction (source), the photo suggests the tension of the Jupiter archetype — the desire to encompass everything — at the risk of losing sight of what’s important. In other words, losing the trees for the forest.

The planet Jupiter actually has a feature astronomers call “the eye” or the Great Red Spot:

This real-life “eye” on the solar system’s largest planet reminds us that the archetype Jupiter is concerned with seeing the big picture, with new experience and new ideas, with pulling back from the daily grind to get perspective — the kind of perspective one gets from atop Europe’s largest Ferris wheel:

This is a fantastic place to go — literally or figuratively — when you feel yourself getting bogged down in the details of daily life, in the rules and expectations that unconsciously guide so many of your choices. Studying a new field, taking a trip far away, looking on life through new lenses, making a daring kind of choice that you wouldn’t normally make: All these things are Jupiter activities that expand your horizons, develop your brain and bless you with new ways of thinking.

Jupiter’s style reminds me of this fabulous quotation from Helen Keller — who had the inner vision of a Jupiterian if not the literal eyesight:

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

Jupiter is most at home in the zodiac sign Sagittarius, which lies opposite the chart from my last Photo of the Week, which depicted the Gemini archetype. Sagittarius is the only mutable fire sign; imagine a temple full of flickering candles, each one representing a hope or a belief or a different way of looking at the world. Sagittarius is an equal-opportunity believer, seeking truth wherever it may lie; and it sees the quest for truth as life’s daring adventure.The problem may come when Jupiter/Sagittarius cannot help us focus, when each one of those little flickering candles holds such sway over us that we become indecisive, or too agreeable, or mushy around the edges of our thoughts.

Yet Sagittarius also trusts in the process, where more conservative or suspicious signs may balk. Certainly climbing into a little glass capsule with 23 other people to be carried 443 feet into the London air is the quintessential Jupiterian/Sagittarian act. It is big, it is daring, it breaks out of the norm, it ventures into the unknown, it provides the sweeping view of life of which people strong in these archetypes often dream.

And yet the Photo of the Week — the first photo above — tells the other side of this archetype, the side that sometimes gets lost in more popular descriptions. That is the Archer archetype, the seeker brought to the stillpoint of one breath, where focus on a single point 100 feet in the distance allows all else in the world to melt away for an instant, to seize the shortest line between two points and deliver everything you have through that narrow tunnel of vision.

So, too, must the designers and builders and riders of a giant, inspiring, visionary structure like the London Eye have interest in each minute detail as if it held the integrity of every life it supports in each little hinge and latch and joint.

Because, in fact, it does.

Photo credits:Detail of London Eye; Jupiter; view from atop the London Eye