The Astrology of Love

What do the planets have to say about love? As always, you know I’m going come at it from another angle. Read on about the Astrology of Love the sidereal way.

This content originally appeared in a thread of tweets on my Twitter timeline.  It has been edited for clarity and cohesion.

While Venus is often called the planet of love, sex, and pleasure, each of the planets speaks to us about love. Love can be defined in practical terms, spiritual terms, psychological, etc. But I’m going to include all of the above and then some as I share what the planets have to say about love.


Moon

I always start with the MOON because this is where you began—in your mother’s womb. Your first body, your first home, was not your own, it was your mother’s. It was there that your body was shaped. And only upon your emergence from that body did your body take a form of its own.

The MOON is home and family, it is the circumstances of your upbringing. It is all of the people, places, and things that are familiar to you, the fixtures in your environment that comprise “home”.

LOVE begins with mother—home. This is where you learn what your needs are, who will meet them, and how they are met. Your body is programmed by your upbringing to interpret one thing as a need, and another as optional. If you survived without it, then you don’t need it, right?

The MOON teaches us that LOVE is the incubator of necessity. LOVE defines what we cannot live without. As we are shaped by our home and upbringing, so too is our relationship to our body. LOVE teaches us what necessity feels like.

  • How has your mother, home, family, upbringing, and familiar environment during your formative years shaped how you define necessity in your life?
  • Are these necessities rooted in familiarity, or does your body call for these things at present?
  • Who are the people that fulfill necessity in your life at present?

Sun

The SUN is the sense of self shaped by the awareness that you are not your body. The mind that perceives can perceive the body. The mind is aware of itself, too. The SUN, experienced as FATHER, teaches us that our sense of self informs our level of entitlement to impact the world around us. LOVE, in this sense, is the drive to be seen as we see ourselves.

  • How has your experience of FATHER shaped your entitlement to impact the world you inhabit, your world?
  • Who and what is the self that seeks to be seen as it is? Is that really you?
  • How do you show yourself so that you can be seen?

Mercury

MERCURY is the underrated champion of LOVE. It is the words we think in, speak with, write with. As incantations of manifestation, words create the world we inhabit. They create the space and place where we exercise our entitlement to be.

When your world is named for you, it shapes how you perceive it. And when you are named, it shapes how you are seen and how you see yourself.

When you name your world, you shape your world. When you name yourself, you shape yourself.

  • What have you been called?
  • How has this shaped your becoming at present?
  • If you are to be seen as you are, what words have shaped your capacity to show up to be seen?

Venus

Now, we have arrived at VENUS: the capacity to change, assimilate, adapt, adjust, bend, and conform. The SUN says that your sense of self informs how you see the world. But VENUS says that LOVE means letting the world and the people in it change you, and how you see yourself.

Both are needed, you see? There is no self without LOVE. Because who you are and who you are becoming has and will always be shaped by the people in your life. Either by your resistance to conforming or by your willingness to change. This is the LOVE that VENUS teaches.

  • How willing or unwilling are you to be changed by the people in your life?
  • How do you find balance between maintaining the sense of self rooted in self perception vs the sense of self reflected back to you by the people in your life?
  • Even if you did not choose the reflection, the people in your life, can you still see yourself?
  • Can you still magnify the commonalities, however small they might appear? Perception is reality, right?

Mars

MARS, the defender of the body which emerged from Mother MOON. The one that severs the binding that necessity has created. The one that ventures out to flex the muscle of courage. It sustains and maintains the entitlement endowed by Father SUN.

The courage to stand your ground, preserve your life and body, and move as the force of life empowers you and impels you to act—this is MARS. This, too, is LOVE.

  • Who and what empowers you to save your own life?
  • Where do you find the strength to stand your ground when it matters most?
  • Who empowers you with a visceral awareness of the value of your life, your body, yourself?

Jupiter

JUPITER tells the story of who you are. It’s the teacher who shows and tells. It’s the culture that gives words meaning. It’s the experiences that give you meaning.

Framing the cultural narrative around belonging and community, JUPITER gives the context for how we interpret ourselves and our bodies within the society where we live. JUPITER teaches us that LOVE is finding connection beyond the primal and biological while reinforcing it at the same time.

Stories are tapestries of words that shape how we interpret the world, ourselves, and the people in it. This is JUPITER and this is LOVE.

  • How do these stories provide a way to interpret the impulses that arise in you?
  • What is the origin of these stories?
  • How do they empower intention and possibility in your life?

Saturn

SATURN is where it ends and begins, for birth, too, is a SATURN thing. Birth is the beginning of the discovery of where the limits of our body lie. And death is where we face the limits of life itself.

Life ends at death, so says Saturn. The awareness of your mortality brings an existential crisis that makes living urgent. Pressing you against the walls of possibility, narrowing the path forward, LOVE is urgent. LOVE is life and death. The only two guarantees in this world.

LOVE is the consequence of mortality. It grows from the awareness that life is not forever. So we must figure some way to make it last past the time our bodies are animated with life. LOVE is the legacy we leave as evidence of our lives.

  • How have you discovered the limits of your body?
  • Who are your partners is legacy creation?
  • How has the awareness of your mortality narrowed the path of possibility in your life, revealing who and what matters most?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.