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By way of a brief aside, he was awfully grumpy yesterday, my lovely astrologer. (And I find it unfailingly touching that he is grateful to be allowed to be). All day. I mean all day. On and off, of course. And I might add that nowhere near as explosively as I the day before.
I rather got the impression that it was baffling him, too. I mean, there is nothing majorly wrong (aside from the usual, which is too laborious and painful to go into here). In fact, he is utterly enthused with his life and vocation just now. If anything, he is generally wishing for more hours in the day: too many projects, too little time.
But he was grumpy, man.
Is THIS how you feel, Sweetheart?
It started when we first sat down to write, it continued through the morning, into the afternoon, it peaked when he was washing up and waned a little once that loathsome task was complete, and picked up again as, children tucked up in bed, we snuggled up to watch a film.
He was about to press “Play” when I urged him to check out his transits.
“Ahaaaaa!” he uttered, snorting somewhat sheepishly.
“Mmm?”
“Mars square Moon, exact at 11pm tonight.”
Snuggling into his chest, I muttered “I’ll keep my head down till then, then.”
He had me in tears today, my lovely astrologer.
They bubbled up, out of nowhere, and flowed down my cheeks to splash on the notes on my desk.
His latest passion is Asteroids and Trans-Neptunians and his reasearch exhaustive. Greedily, he devours books, pores over charts, identifies personality traits, deep-rooted problems, potential pitfalls.
Jupiter, right now, is at 19° 18′ Aquarius and is transiting my Odysseus. So he looks up Odysseus. Odysseus is the asteroid for one who is sent into exile. “This sense of exile is to be seen as poignant because there is a longing for home; one has been banished and yet yearns to go home, to have a home, to find a place that offers what they idealise as home.” The tears, by now, are streaming unbidden down my face. “There is the perception that one doesn’t have a place to call his own.”
Then, of course, having punched this asteroid into the software, we discover that it is conjunct my Mars in the 9th – the lure of the open road, eh? And Odysseus conjunct Mars, to quote the pertinent paragraph: “Angry scenes in connection with being sent away” from ‘Go to your room’ as a child to “later in life, anger, independence or criticism carry the potential for echoes of banishment – being driven out.”
He is, inadvertently, enormously good at summoning my pain, dredging it up from its hiding place deep within my soul, standing it in front of me and saying: “Here it is. Confront it. It will make it better.” Or put another way, as he often says: “With awareness comes relief.” I suppose it is some small relief to know that it is there, in black and white, in my Nativity.
I am exiled from my family.
More than that, whenever I have dared speak out, rock the boat, step out of line, I have been royally punished for it. And (conjunct Mars in the 9th, remember?) hauled my cookies abroad and lived there for a good long time. Since I can remember I have longed to live far away from the family home. I have left and found it bittersweet because from a distance I can pretend that home is perfect. I can miss it. And if I stay away too long, I run the risk of forgetting that it isn’t what I believe it should be.
My whole life I have been mystified by the discrepancies between my understanding of home and family and the reality. Don’t misunderstand me, I have had a privileged and comfortable life, upbringing. On the surface of it, you would consider me the luckiest in the world. But it is about appearances, doing and saying the right thing. The substance of it, the meat of it, the depths of it… they have been conspicuous by their absence. Behaviours have been so utterly not what I expect of a family.
And, with what my lovely astrologer calls “The Jupiter Effect”, Jupiter is magnifying this conjunction. No wonder it hurts, huh?
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His research is not exactly painless for him either, you know.
Inevitably, he uses his own Nativity as a test or control case (and mine follows on as the live-in guinea pig), and turns up aspects and placements that have him drawing in his own breath in recognition, wonder or pain.
The latest example of such was his discovery, yesterday, of how Psyche plays out in his own chart. Apart from Daedalus, the Sun’s conjunction with Psyche is the closest aspect it makes. It is a massively sensitive point, arising mostly from one’s own pain “the excessively present trauma of the past”, which creates a hypersensitivity. It can be nigh on crippling “as one identifies oneself in terms of one’s ‘pain’ and the emotional complexes of the childhood. One may feel that what they are, at root, is the sum total of their pain and damage”.
As the tears rolled off his cheeks and into his beard, I began at last to understand from where his unsettling, extreme sensitivity and deep anxiety stem.
Surely only one with such levels of insight into pain and damage is qualified to help others overcome theirs?
My curiosity has been tweaked of late as to where the correspondences for food intolerances and allergies lie. I wanted to write a “quick post” on this subject, but it appears to be sucking me ever deeper into the world of eating disorders, anaemia, malnutrition… I suspect that there is a lot more research and digging around to be done here and, having Hygeia on the astrologer’s degree of 26° Leo, it is perhaps not surprising that I am being drawn in so!
I am, I might add, struggling to find the words I need, since Mercury squaring Neptune is fogging my brain. I sit here, alongside my lovely astrologer, and he admits to me he is having just the same problem (but let’s not forget there’s nothing in this astrology lark 
)
So, I shall attempt to keep this first foray into such matters short and sweet.
My astrologer and I both have problems with wheat, to varying degrees and for different reasons. Neither of us, thankfully, suffers from an allergy, simply an intolerance, but that is irritating enough on a niggly daily basis. (I might add that my third son suffers from a dairy intolerance and I shall be looking into that at a later date).
In my efforts to find a common denominator in the astrological configurations of food-allergy sufferers, I have looked at a fairly exhaustive number of charts, taking into account most particularly what Ceres is up to: what aspects she makes most commonly to which planets. The biggest co-conspirators so far appear to be Neptune – dissolving the issue; Pluto – supercharging it; Saturn – restricting things and Mars and Uranus – giving it too much oomph and sudden impetus (think nuts and anaphylactic shock).
But, for now, back to wheat.
I started, naturally, with my chart and my astrologer’s. Both of us have aspects from Ceres to Pluto (he a conjunction, I a square) and Neptune (he a sextile, I a quincunx), while he also has a square to Mars and I a semi-sextile to Saturn.
Looking, then, at known and celebrated coeliac sufferers, I took what I already surmised from the above and applied that information to their Nativities. Neptune is the unifying factor, with barely a single case being unaspected to him. Following a close second is Pluto. I shall list, for your persusal, a few examples:
- Jim Carrey: Ceres opposition Neptune and trine Pluto
- Jude Law: Ceres semi-sextile Neptune and contra-parallel Pluto
- Amanda Donohoe: Ceres trine Neptune and sextile Pluto
- Kelis (actually a nut-allergy sufferer): Ceres trine Neptune and opposition Pluto
Ceres in Taurus appears to be another contributing factor. Consider these examples:
- Jim Carrey (again) with Ceres in Taurus, and the above configurations
- Rachel Weisz: Ceres in Taurus and quincunx Neptune
- Scarlett Johansson: Ceres in Taurus and sesqui-quadrate Neptune
- Bill Clinton (asthmatic): Ceres in Taurus and trine Neptune
- Terence Stamp: Ceres in Taurus and trine Neptune
There are other considerations as well, of course, mostly involving aspects to Saturn, Mars or Uranus, but they simply appear to add weight to the issue, perhaps even bringing other intolerances or allergies in to play alongside the wheat problem. Juliette Lewis, for example, has Ceres conjunct Neptune, trine Mars and semi-square Uranus. Goldie Hawn has a peregrine Neptune and Ceres opposition Uranus and trine Pluto. Terence Stamp, renowned for his regimented diet and coeliac trouble, has Ceres in Taurus, trine Neptune, conjunct Uranus and quincunx Saturn – the whole shebang!
These things can all be common factors, incidentally, in the suffering of the rather widely-spread umbrella term of IBS.
Should you find yourself with a combination of these indicators, I am not for a minute suggesting that you will find yourself in the grips of a full-blown wheat allergy. I would simply suggest that it is something to be wary of as you may find that such a thing might be triggered by a tricky transit, arc or direction. My astrologer and I, for example, discovered to our surprise and mirth this afternoon that his problems were triggered by his Pluto square in 2004. This he worked out just after I had mentioned that mine came into effect some time after the birth of my fourth son. I went to a homeopathic doctor to ask why I was so tired: was I being stupid and just exhausted because I had four children under 7 years old?? She did various tests on me and came up with a wheat intolerance. When we looked at my transits for that period of 2007, what should we find? Yup. My very own Pluto square.
Hah! Nothing in it, eh?
For those that might be interested, and as long as you have no problem with eggs, might I offer you here my own recipe for wheat-free bread?
Wheat-Free Bread
I use a bread machine for this, for ease and convenience, but it can be made with pretty good results in the conventional manner.
Ingredients:
500g wheat-free flour. You can buy ready-mixed flour, but I mix my own, using roughly equal quantities of any three of the following:
gram (chick-pea) flour
rice flour
potato flour
buckwheat flour
tapioca flour
soya flour
[Note: I find that a base of gram and rice flour with a third type from any of the rest works best)
1 tsp xanthan gum (optional, but performs the gluten-like action of binding the bread together)
2 tsp dried yeast
2 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1 egg
2 x 250ml warm water
In a bread machine:
- Put in the 2 tsp yeast, 2 tsp sugar and 250ml of warm water. Allow the yeast to activate while you prepare the rest.
- Measure out 500g wheat-free flour and add to it the salt and xanthan gum.
- When the yeast is activated and bubbling up, add the egg to the yeast mixture.
- Add the flour mixture to the bread pan, along with the other 250 ml warm water. Mix well and bake on an ordinary loaf program.
- Tastes best toasted.
Bon appetit!
So this morning I received an email from my beloved mother. It was by way of response to mine. The original email, from me, was sent yesterday, bemoaning the fact that she simply will not stick to any rules (she has Sun quincunx Pluto) and is happy to side-step me at all costs, in order to get to my children. This latest complaint of mine was that she had sent my son a birthday card at his school – am I the only one to see that as subversive?! Yes, dear reader, we are in the process of attempting to “work out” our relationship after I dared to make a decision about my life that she didn’t like. I, I hope understandably, have put everything on hold until it is sorted out, which means of course that she doesn’t see my children at the moment. After all, how does one carry on a relationship with one’s grandchildren if one will not speak to their mother? Simple logic, it seems to me.
As usual, I digress.
Where does astrology come into this?
Well, this morning, as I say, I received a pretty hideous email – anger, manipulation, threats of death (other people’s, but the implication was at my door)… that kind of stuff.
During the school-run it occurred to me that I might ask my astrologer to glance at what the sky was up to today. So, on our return, we took a look at today’s astrology:
Transits of 22nd May 2009
Here I found that Mars was squaring Pallas in Cancer, thus ruled by the Moon in Taurus in 8th. She, in turn, was squaring Pluto in Capricorn in 4th. (Coincidentally, this Moon in 8th – Pluto in 4th is a facsimile of my own natal Moon trine Pluto). What does it all mean? Well, Mars squaring Pallas in Cancer is clearly tension with the daughter, ruled by the Moon brings the mother into the equation and the Moon in trine aspect to Pluto creates an easy ability to amputate the emotions. Interesting for me, especially, since I told my mother goodbye. Oh, and I mentioned that today’s Moon and my own natal Moon are both in the 8th House of things we give up? And while I’m discussing aspects that already exist in our natal charts corresponding to today’s transits, might I point out the Sun quincunx Pluto that exists in dear Mama’s? And while I’m at it, the Moon trine Pluto alive and well in my own?
These observations led us to look a little more closely at what had been going on when I had sent my original email yesterday afternoon. This is what we found:
Transits of 21st May 2009 at 16:18
I sent my email expressing my anger at my mother at the exact moment that Mars and Moon were in partile conjunction (anger with the mother), both squaring Pallas (tension with the daughter).
Finally, on leaving the school this morning having dropped off three little boys, my friend collapsed on me in tears having just had a godawful morning with her daughter.
Good job I take on board my parents’ assertion that there’s nothing in this astrology lark, isn’t it?
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