In this post, I go over the anatomy of a sidereal birth chart in the Divination For Liberation framework. You can use this guide to cast your sidereal birth chart.
PLANETS
MOON • SUN • MERCURY • VENUS MARS • JUPITER • SATURN are the planets used in Divination For Liberation Sidereal Astrology. Planets are people first.
Subsequently, they are essential aspects of the self that are formed and developed inside relationships.
SIDEREAL ZODIAC SIGNS
There are 12 signs in Divination For Liberation Sidereal Astrology: CANCER • LEO • VIRGO • LIBRA • SCORPIO • SAGITTARIUS • CAPRICORN • AQUARIUS • PISCES • ARIES • TAURUS • GEMINI
Each sign is under the authority of a planet. Sidereal zodiac signs establish a hierarchy of relationship & survival priorities based on a scheme of planetary authority.
HOUSES
There are 12 houses in a sidereal birth chart; there is one sign in each house. Houses are where the planets are situated. Houses represent specific people and relationships, topics as areas of one’s life, and body parts. Houses are also a time keeping tool that tells us the when of the who, what, and how that is signified by the planets and signs.
TOOLS & TASKS
Each of the 12 sidereal zodiac signs falls into one TOOL category: WATER • FIRE • EARTH • AIR; and one TASK category: CARDINAL • FIXED • MUTABLE
The distribution of TOOLS in your sidereal birth chart tells you what you have needed to survive your life experiences (relationships) and get your needs met from birth til death (inside relationships) in the form of behaviors, beliefs, skills, talents, traits, and habits.
The distribution of TASKS tells you what kinds of experiences that have given you the tools you’ve used to survive.
For more on how to interpret your sidereal birth chart:
2023 is off to a shaky beginning. The start of this year is like a 2022 repression hangover, a dizzying awakening from the stupor of suppression we used to trudge through the ongoing trauma that 2022 refused to extinguish. What does it feel like to awaken from a dream only to realize that you were not dreaming? To see that the setting of your slumber was in fact reality?
Repression is a fascinating thing: To ignore something that you do not know you are ignoring; To not see something that you are not looking at; To not acknowledge the existence of something that you do not know exists. This is the coping strategy of Capricorn, where Saturn was from January 23, 2020 until January 17, 2023. (Saturn’s not there anymore. It’s in Aquarius as of a couple weeks ago.)
Capricorn represses (an autonomous act) to cope with disregard.
A disregarded body disregards itself. That means that when a person’s body is disregarded, that person in turn disregards their body. When a person experiences no tangible or physical effect of their body’s sensations and functions in the form of another person’s material response, that person cannot regard and become aware of what is happening in their body. If a baby’s cries of discomfort are not responded to with food, that baby will struggle to identify and respond to feelings of hunger. This can last all the way into childhood, adolescence, and adulthood in the form disordered eating.
When an adult’s struggles and the anguish that arises in response to those struggles are not met with care, concern, and resources to alleviate the distress, that adult will not be present to and aware of their suffering. Especially when that adult looks around to see others experiencing the same conditions and somehow continuing onward anyhow, Business Goes On As Usual. A disregarded body disregards itself.
To feel, to regard one’s body, to respond to your distress with attention and concern, even when you lack the resources to alleviate your suffering, is the necessary first act of resistance. This is why revolution begins in the body. If I willfully reject the disregard of those who have the power to alleviate my suffering, if I refuse to internalize that disregard as a model for how I should be in relationship with my body, I become an instrument that disrupts the status quo.
It is incredibly difficult for the people around me and in my life to ignore their bodies when I refuse to ignore mine. In fact, people will go to great lengths to avoid being affected. They will say that the person feeling is over-exaggerating, that they are lying and that nothing is wrong. They will say that they are just trying to gain sympathy and attention. Yes! Yes! That is exactly it. When I am in distress and pain I need sympathy and attention. Give it to me, won’t you?
In the 2023 Sidereal Astrology Guide, the fill-in-the-blank for the Full Moon in Cancer says: Realizing what resources are available to emotionally/physically regulate: (Fill in this blank with the house meanings associated with your sidereal Cancer house. Find that here.)
This Full Moon is very much a prelude to the Venus retrograde in Cancer that occurs this coming summer and fall. Take note! You can see which house in your birth chart this Full Moon and the Venus Rx occur in in my 12-2023 Sidereal Astrology Horoscopes. Make sure you cast your sidereal birth chart first.
What are 3 signs you experience in your body that signal to you that you are in emotional distress? If you cannot name 3 signs, might you try honing in on how you feel right before you pick up your phone or device this week? Try to catch yourself when you pick up your phone. Pause. Sit for a bit What do you feel after you put it back down instead of turning it on and scrolling?
How do you respond to your distress?
Do you signal to others that you are in distress? How do they respond?
Who in your life notices that you are in distress?
Who in your life do you signal your distress to?
For a more personal application of this week’s astrology, download the 2023 Sidereal AstrologyGuide. In it I guide you through the personal application of the year’s astrology month by month. No previous astrology knowledge required.
I’ve created sidereal astrology transit iCals that you can upload into your personal calendar. This will allow you to see the dates and times of planetary and moon transits right in your phone or on your device. Want to know what time the full moon is in your time zone? Or, the precise moment that Mercury stations direct?
Find the Moon sign changes, new and full moons, and eclipses in the 2023 Moon Transits iCal.
The most recent few years have had us mired in the muck of the Earth signs, separated from our will to demand and impact change. We believed that the way that things were was the way that they would always be. So conforming was the only way to survive. Be who they told you you were. Do what you could with what you had available—no use in demanding more when it seemed to be clear that there was not enough. Take it all at face value with no wonder about what lies beyond the exterior. Everything being what it was, was as it should be.
What power did we have to make changes? Machines too big to dismantle must have an inherent right to exist, if only because their complexity and weight cannot be deconstructed with a single hand. That would require allegedly impossible cooperative action.
Then came Jupiter in Aries, in April of this year, baptizing us with the Fire of the entitlement to impact change. With this Fire baptism came a mandate. Might we see this mandate as a divine ordinance? The divinely given opportunity to disassociate our actions, our identities, and our beliefs from authorities that claim to be omnipotent?
When Moses was given his divine ordinance, it was announced by the Fire of a burning bush—a bush that was burning yet was not consumed. That was enough for him to recognize that he had encountered something supernatural. At that bush, he was given a vision of liberation. His encounter with the Divine would be the Fire that fueled the eventual exodus of the Israelites from bondage.
Harriet Tubman, often called Moses, saw the vision, too. She had been to the mountaintop and seen the Promised Land, the same mountaintop that Martin Luther King Jr. saw. Moses brought his people out of Egypt, but he never saw the Promised Land. Harriet Tubman brought many out of enslavement, but into Black Codes which became Jim Crow. King began his freedom fight aiming for Black folks’ integration into the larger, white society. But soon he realized that he was integrating Black folks into a burning house.
Who has seen this Promised Land? Who has been to this mountaintop? Who now holds the vision, the supernatural fuel of a divine ordinance towards change?
Pharaoh eventually let Moses’s people go. Lincoln eventually signed the Emancipation Proclamation. President Lyndon B. Johnson eventually signed the Voting Rights Act. But, even the Israelites fell prey to the intoxication of imperialism and domination. They wanted their own king. Post-Reconstruction era Black folks sang the song of antiBlackness to each other with more conviction than the composers and lyricists of it did. And post Civil Rights Era America demanded the adoption of class striving as an alleged escape from all kinds of marginalization and domination.
Many of us have become authorities in institutions as a means to achieving our goals of affluence and hoarding. With the validation of those institutions, we carry out and continue the cultural indoctrination we were subject to. We see it as our duty, our right, to align ourselves with the power and influence granted by powers and influences that enthroned themselves.
Huey P. Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party For Self Defense said, “To us power is, first of all, the ability to define phenomena, and secondly the ability to make these phenomena act in a desired manner.” The first phenomenon that we must define is the phenomenon of self, of identity. This power is the power of self-determination.
The Promised Land we seek now is a place where we are free from the bondage of wage slavery, free from having our food and housing held hostage by wealth hoarders. Free from external determinants of who we are, what we are capable of, and what we have a right to do. Free to determine who we are. Those who commit to the labor of self-determination see the vision of the Promised Land, who hold that vision, who must make it plain. And this is what makes self-determination the ultimate Promised Land.
Now, self-determination means to uproot the indoctrination that took hold while we were sleeping children, unawakened to the realities of consciousness and awareness of ourselves. We absorbed the stories and myths of national identities, gender identities, racial identities, and class identities as irrefutable truths. Self-determination is the necessary resistance that mutes these myths on our tongues, silences their narratives in our streams of consciousness, and amputates them from our bodies. Self-determination is to reject the seductive promise of power over others at the expense of power over ourselves.
You know who you are. What shall you name yourself in absence of authorities who claim to know you better than you know yourself?
Here is your Weekly Horoscope for January 16 – 22, 2023
Saturn dominates the sky this week as it resumes its once every 29 year transit through Aquarius at the New Moon in Capricorn. Also, Mercury finally stations direct.
This week’s themes: Having enough, Visibility, and Self-Determination
17 – Saturn in Aquarius
18 – Mercury in Sagittarius, Stationary Direct
21 – New Moon in Capricorn
22 – Venus in Aquarius; Venus conjunct Saturn in Aquarius
Astrology time and Gregorian calendar time rarely align. Astrology time is segmented, named, and given meaning based on planetary cycles. Gregorian calendar time is segmented, named, and given meaning based on the imperialist whims of capitalists.
Saturn’s transit through Capricorn since 2020 has been all about time. In a recent post on Instagram, I asked what your sign’s inner child is asking your for. For Capricorn I wrote, “To have enough.” If we have learned anything, it should be that time costs money. Whoever has enough money has enough time. Enough time to be sick. Enough time to rest. Enough time to care for their loved ones. Enough time to play. Enough time to waste.
Who has enough money as the cost of everything continues to be inflated by the whims of the same capitalists who determine the value and meaning of time? Who has enough time to rest and fully recover from illness as sickness abounds?
This is what Divination For Liberation is for: The rejection of time as a capitalist commodity we seek to hoard by selling our labor, and the embrace of time as an oracle we use to divine our way to liberation.
Now, if ever there were a week that would explicitly let us know that we are in a new segment of Divination For Liberation time, it is this week. “2023” officially begins with the New Moon in Capricorn, and Capricorn’s ruler Saturn in a new sign–Aquarius.
Saturn started its transit of Aquarius back in April of 2022. [You reflect on what was happening in your Aquarius house April 28, 2022 through July 12, 2022 for insight on what Saturn is resuming in your life.[
Whenever Saturn changes sign our reality changes. Reality in this context meets at the junction of who and what we collectively ignore and who and what we give our attention, too. Yes, the gift of Saturn is sanity. You are deemed sane when you ignore what you are supposed to ignore. And if you do not ignore what you are supposed to ignore…
I would say that we’ve all agreed to ignore COVID. But the truth is that we’ve had our consent manufactured. We have had factual information withheld from us. We’ve been told explicit lies about the origins of COVID and the danger it poses to our lives. Many words have been written about the folks who refuse to ignore COVID. We’ve been called “the last holdouts”, anxious, and many derogatory terms, all as a means to question our sanity. “Why aren’t they ignoring what clearly doesn’t exist? Why are they paying attention to something that’s not real? They must be mentally unwell…”, they say.
With Saturn entering Aquarius, we still have this question of sanity hanging over us. Where Saturn in Capricorn meant that we ignore our bodies as we fall in line with the way that our bodies have been ignored by others; Saturn in Aquarius is about who we ignore.
Personhood is the designation of being human in the eyes of those who hold the power to grant life and make death. Unfortunately, in the capitalist white patriarchy, personhood almost always means white. And those deemed white have the power to extend or revoke that personhood based on their own claim to authority.
A question I pose often is, “whose vision determines what you see?” We assume that we see ourselves, each other, and this world through our own vision. If we are not seeing through our own eyes, whose eyes are we seeing through?
What we call the ‘self’ is an aggregate of internalized gazes. By gaze, I mean who and what other people perceive and/or demand us to be, and how they treat us and judge us. An internalized gaze, then, is the way we consciously and unconsciously see ourselves, each other, and the world through the judgements and perceptions of others. This often happens to the exclusion of our own gaze, until the time comes to see ourselves anew. That time is now.
I won’t carry on about Saturn in Aquarius. You can read the post I’ve already written. It’s linked above. For now, I’ll leave you with these questions:
Do you deserve to have enough?
What are you willing to do to have enough?
What are you unwilling to do to have enough?
Who does not deserve to have enough? Why?
What is your name (given name, pronouns, self-determined name) and its origins?
How does your name impact your ability to have enough?
How does your name reveal or conceal who you are in your own eyes?
For a more personal application of this week’s astrology, download the 2023 Sidereal AstrologyGuide. In it I guide you through the personal application of the year’s astrology month by month. No previous astrology knowledge required.
I’ve created sidereal astrology transit iCals that you can upload into your personal calendar. This will allow you to see the dates and times of planetary and moon transits right in your phone or on your device. Want to know what time the full moon is in your time zone? Or, the precise moment that Mercury stations direct?
Find the Moon sign changes, new and full moons, and eclipses in the 2023 Moon Transits iCal.
Something that keeps me from becoming completely demoralized is rereading history. Every now and then I read what was said about HIV during the first decade of its onslaught. And I see how ridiculous, dangerous, and incredibly ignorant our public health messaging was.
To know and remember that lies, misinformation, prejudice, and hidden agendas regarding novel viruses have precedent gives me a grounded perspective on what we're dealing with.
It can be soul and sanity crushing to believe that what’s happening with covid is some modern world hyper-political phenomenon. And then I remember that Reagan didn’t even utter the word “HIV” or “AIDS”. The erasure was not subtle at all. It was intentional, nasty, and immoral.
This is the 1980s and 1990s. I'm old enough to recall when saying someone looked like they had AIDS was an insult that flew out of folks mouths way too easily.
To witness the pied pipers of propaganda carry on with their lies about covid, vaccines, & death is business as usual in a society that fears the human body. I say to myself, "Yes, this is how it goes. Denial is how we avoid reckoning with our powerlessness & mortality."
I have to keep saying this to myself. I have to keep repeating it and tweeting it. I know that we are spiritually starving. We have no rituals, no mantras, no prayers, and no one to shepherd us through. But I know my calling so I'll continue speaking and teaching and praying.
