Fellow mages, students of the stars, seekers of the Noetic Light…

We currently find ourselves in the midst of the crazy, wild antics that is the Mars-Saturn square. In fact, the square perfects tomorrow, on November 10th. I’m sure you’re feeling it, and I know I am too.

In a previous article which you can read here, I gave very specific descriptions and predictions about the Mars-Saturn square.

So I wanted to change things up a bit and share with you all how this aspect has personally shown up in my life. By doing so, I hope you give all of you more “aha!” moments as you go back over your own life and start to make connections.

So let’s start with a little review. I said that with Mars in Scorpio, self-interest and personal motivation and drive would become a lot stronger. People would have greater energy to pursue their passions and do what they desire than was the case with Mars in Scorpio. Mars in Scorpio attunes us to our deepest desires.

And then I pointed out how this would clash with the civic, socially minded Saturn in Aquarius. Mars wants what it wants and has the strength to get it, but Saturn unceasingly desires the individual of their egoic wants, and really just crushes and dismantles the ego in general. With Saturn in Aquarius, much of this denial has a social, humanitarian focus, considering the good of the many instead of one’s own selfish desires.

I described how they would clash in a couple different ways. I said that events and circumstances would consistently arise that make you angry and frustrated and you won’t have much space for expressing them. People won’t get it. I said that your anger and passion would only be met and responded to by clinical, overly-detached, classically aquarian vibes. You won’t feel heard.

I also determined that civic duties and social obligations would tighten, and this would increase the anger and frustration that you will feel, and aggravate the Mars in Scorpio placement. Essentially, there is all-out war between one’s own, quite strong desires, and the needs and intentions of the greater social sphere of which we are all a part.

And I mentioned that some fear and panic would spike related to Covid.

Annnddd I mentioned that, though the situations that arise would be frustrating, they would ultimately bring a lot of good fortune and success.

So let’s see how this has all applied in my life…

All the Nonsense I have had to put up with

Yesterday, I had my whole day planned out. I was going respond to some emails and check off some other minutia, go to see a bodyworker that I normally see once or twice a week, and then return home in order to get about 5,000 words of writing done, and be officially done with my workday around 5:30-6ish.

I was very attached to this agenda, and I had been on a roll with my work, getting a lot of stuff accomplished in record time. This is Mars in Scorpio.

While I’m lying down on the table at my bodyworker’s office, someone else accidentally take’s my wife and I’s keys to our car. It wasn’t malicious - he had just gotten some bodywork done himself and was in a light trance. Our keys were right next to each other and he just accidentally grabbed both of them.

So he drives off while we’re getting work done on ourselves. And by the time we get up, he’s long done with our keys. Once we figured out what happen, the bodyworker called him, but he doesn’t pick up. To make matters worse, we both left our phones in the car, and that car was locked. We couldn’t do anything, call anyone, nothing.

So we’re sitting in the office just…waiting. We’re afraid he won’t come back. I have all these things I want to do (Mars), but I am literally stuck, held down, and I can’t call anyone or do anything about it (Saturn).

Thank goodness for the Golden Flower Meditation, a practice that all of my students are familiar with. I would have been a super agitated aries rising in that office if my wife and I didn’t have a consistent meditation practice. (note, I was still a super agitated aries rising, but I was able to settle things down a little bit and keep things from spilling over to other people.)

Eventually, the gentleman gets back to his house, sees our calls, and rushes back over. In about 25 minutes, he arrives back at the office.

And in the time that we’re waiting for him, I was able to have a very constructive conversation with my bodyworker about his business and marketing strategies. This guy is really incredible at what he does. But like most spiritually-minded workers, he isn’t as comfortable advertising and putting himself out there. He prefers to just let the results speak for themselves (which they do), but at the same time he wants to grow his client base. I was able to talk him through some of the process, give him some pointers, and we agreed to meet again for tea at some point to strategize a bit more.

Just as that conversation was finishing up, the guy that took our keys came back. And as it turns out (surprise surprise), he’s the exact person that we needed to connect with. He’s a theater professor at a distinguished university who teaches theater as ritual as well as breathwork in the class. He also studies alchemy. We were supposed to meet him, and he was supposed to meet us - and that’s why he took my freaking keys.

Clearly, the universe wanted me doing other things besides working on my own stuff. Instead of following my own agenda, Saturn in Aquarius comes siderails me and pulls my attention towards these social obligations. I had higher responsibilities to other people that I needed to fulfill. That’s Saturn in Aquarius.

Unfortunately, that’s not the whole Saturn-in-Aquarius story. I’ve also been knee-deep in bureaucratic nonsense of all kinds from car registration and insurance to my wife’s name including a mysterious “L” as her middle name for some reason on our marriage license. There’s the civic side of Saturn in Aquarius - bureaucratic red tape keeping me from following my own agenda.

So this is how the tension between social, greater responsibility and my own personal desires has manifested in my life. Basically, by not getting nearly as much done as I want, and the Divine consistently dragging me out of my comfort zone tofulfill responsibilities I have to people outside of me.

Now, I did say that it was all going to work out for the best. My initial response went something like this: “yeahyeahyeah, synchronicity this, synchronicity that, I see what you’re doing universe and I don’t care. I want to go home. I want my keys. magical shmagical, get me back to my to-do list.”

Once I got over that, I could see how helpful and important everything that happened was. Not just for me, but also for the people that we met, and the conversations that lifted them up and helped their lives. The connections that were formed were very useful, for all people involved. I’m excited to see how things unfold with them.

As for the bureaucratic nonsense I am putting up with…..time will tell.

And it doesn’t apply to me personally, but I do want to address Covid, as I did mention it in my last post. Turns out the death rate has been up since Mars went into Scorpio and started forming the square. Also, the fear-machine that is mainstream media has put out a bunch of articles talking about the surging cases in California and Minnesota.

I would not worry too much about this - things will begin to wind down with covid rates in a permanent way once Jupiter leaves aquarius in about a month and a half. Compare the death and infection rates of Covid to how close Jupiter and Saturn are together in a Saturn-ruled zoidion, starting from the beginnning fears of covid in december 2019 and going all the way till now. It will blow your mind.

Mercury, that Guy I Didn’t Mention Last Time

Okay, so in the previous post I didn’t mention Mercury’s involvement in the square. But Mercury has been getting involved for the past week. Today he is directly conjoined Mars, and tomorrow he will square Saturn directly. So these couple of days we’re going through right now are by far the most intense.

Have the topics and rulerships of Mercury been affected in a challenging way? Absolutely. Our keys were taken, we couldn’t get into our car, and we couldn’t access our phones. Mercury rules keys, cars, and phones.

And today, my wife and I took three wrong turns on the way back to the house from our local tea-shop, and then she took a wrong turn as we drove to get my car inspected. Both the license and registration were outdated in my car (MORE BUREAUCRACY&*$#!) when I went to get it inspected. And we got stuck in an alleyway with a contractors’ truck (Mars) parked in the middle of it.

It’s been nutty. Fortunately, the peak is tomorrow, and afterwards things will start to subside.

Why Am I Sharing ALl of This?

First off, by sharing some personal anecdotes, you can see that I’m not above the goings-on of the planets. It happens to me too. You don’t ever go beyond their antics - you just learn to be nonreactive to them and work with them as opposed to against them.

Second, this is also a personal practice for me as I go back into the archives of my predictions and see what came true, what was accurate, and what did not come true. That’s the only way you improve. By writing this, I am also walking you through a process that I engage in quite frequently, and that you should too if you want to be really serious about predictive astrology.

So far, I would say that I have been fairly accurate for the square. Looking back, I would definitely emphasize more strongly the tension between social duties and personal desires, as in the last post I didn’t frame that as explicitly as I would have liked.

Third, as an astrologer or astrologer-in-training, it is very important to consistently correlate what is going on in the sky with what is going on in your life. I hope that by watching me do this, you will have a clearer sense of what has been going on with you, and will be able to frame and contextualize your own experiences more effectively.

So I invite you to do the same thing - go back in your own life and think about how this transit has shown up in your life. It will help you to understand the meanings of the planets more fully, and it will improve your capacity to predict the future based off of transits like these.

Ultimately, it will help the planets to come more fully alive for you, as you learn to watch their dances and cycles in the sky and attune yourself to the natural effects they have on the world. By attuning yourself to their effects, you can begin to draw on their energies more to empower your magical rituals.

And that’s one of the true aims of astrological mastery: not just knowing how to read charts, but knowing how to attune yourself to and harness the power of the planets for magical mastery and insight.

We’ll be learning about the core meaning of the planets, as well as the methods and tools for predicting the future with them in GNOSIS round 2, open again for enrollment on December 13th! If you feel like you are ready for the initiation into the practice of classical astrology, as well as the practice of ancient meditations and rituals that teach you to harness the power of astral energy, then I invite you to sign up for it in December!

Until then, keep tracking the planets. Keep studying their motions. Keep up with whatever spiritual practices and ritual work you engage in right now. If you don’t have a consistent spiritual practice, there’s no time like the present to start.

Own your power.

-Merlin