Jason wasn't the kind of person who normally finds his way to an astrologer. Someone sent him to me. Perhaps it was Pluto, the God of the Underworld.
Jason was in career transition and wanted to know why he couldn't find a job. At 58, he felt it was time to make some serious money. What he didn't know is that he was quickly approaching his second Saturn Return, a time when people take a very serious look at their lives. Jason's natal Saturn is in Cancer in the 10th so I knew he would be cleaning up some family business while we met. Pluto has also entered his 4th house.
This is what Jason's chart looks like.
Never one to beat around the bush, I asked Jason, "What about your family? His grandfather had been very big in the stockyards. He had become wealthy this way and was a regional celebrity. Jason was very proud of his grandfather. Like many with Saturn in Cancer, he relished glories from the past. I shuddered. Jason has a lot of blood on his hands, I thought.
His father had lost his inheritance and began to drink. In order to support the family, his mother tried a few things and wound up breeding dogs. Jason himself had been the live-in manager of a ranch where handicapped children were brought for horseback riding.
If ever there was a family that owed a lot to animals, I thought, it's Jason's.
I had my eye on that packed 11th house. Forget about making money for a minute. What about a mission in life. Could this be Jason's "mission", advocating for animals?
Not. After helping the underprivileged all those years, Jason was looking out for himself.
I looked at that potentially violent Moon in Aries in the 8th house, split off like that. I could hear the death and terror screams of the cattle in the slaughter house.
Orthodox Jews and Muslims won't butcher one animal in front of another. Each animal is slaughtered ritually. It is blessed to human use before it is killed. Blessing something that gives its life for us is a wise thing to do.
In the days before Hitler's tanks rumbled into Warsaw, cavalry men often volunteered to care for horses because it was one of the few ways in which nurturing could be expressed in war. (A good book to read for this viewpoint is "The Face of Battle" by John Keegan.) The relationship between men and animals is long and complex. Jason wasn't interested in any of this.
The animal kingdom had served Jason and his family in a variety of ways but karmically, the other side of the equation was looking pretty weak.
This is the time in someone's life when Pluto will enter through a crack in the floor. Indeed, Pluto was moving through Jason's 4th house at the time of this reading. The 4th house is your personal home but more than that, the house of the father and the father's father. It is the house of the ancestors. An excellent 4th house book to read for this perspective is "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe.
The book that needs no introduction.
Jason's 4th house was ruled by Sagittarius which also rules big animals like cattle, dogs and horses. This house in his chart was empty by birth but now the planet of death and transformation was probing its subterranean waters, stirring monsters that lurked in the depths. There are things at the bottom of every ocean that have no face and no name.
Arthur Miller once described human nature this way. "Every man is lying asleep with his wife in the bedroom while making passionate love to his mistress on the living room couch and building a bomb in the basement."
So now it was time for the bomb to go off in Jason's basement. So far Pluto had awakened only a lust for money, the only kind of power someone like Jason could understand. This is like increasing the instability of the bomb.
I looked again at that violent Moon and asked Jason questions that might reveal more about his temperament. He wimped out on every question, unable to assert himself. Every direct question about himself was countered with a protestation about how much he had cared for the underprivileged. What Jason was consistently failing to see was that the "underprivileged" in his world were four footed.
Jason has a wide Tsquare involving Moon, Neptune and Saturn. Neptune is in Libra in the 1st house and he believes he is a saint. I gather Jason projected this aggressive Moon onto the women in his life but he declined to say much about his ex wife. Of his present girlfriend he said only that she had a small lapdog he didn't like and so they couldn't live together. I believe this was the only comment he made about a specific animal during our time together.
I thought again of his mother breeding dogs and wondered what kind of a breeder she had been. A desperate one, no doubt.
In this context, Pluto in the 4th house made me think of a bigger predator moving into shark invested waters. What better way to know what a predator you are than to be confronted with a bigger one? Of course I speak symbolically.
Well, then, where's the real power in Jason's chart? Look for Pluto … it's in the Stellium in the 11th house in Leo being trined by transiting Pluto. Jason has the power to infuse an 11th house vision with life, to bring hid dreams alive, with the power of his words. Pluto is conjunct Mercury in Leo.
The only person Jason wanted to help at the moment was himself, a poor use of Leo and an absolute travesty of a Stellium in the 11th house.
Here's one astrologer who doesn't know when to Quit. "Why don't you become an advocate for animals??" I suggested. Polite silence.
"You certainly owe it to them (ha ha)." Silence.
"You know, Jason, inter-species communication is something you would be very good at." I was looking at all that Gemini/Sag and other mutable energy. Uranus in Gemini at the Midheaven could act like a "translating machine" such as the one Stephen Hawking uses, grotesque perhaps but a start. Uranus frequently includes the grotesque and freaky as part of its shock value. There is an awakening power in the very strange among us. If you would like a peek into this world, try a very profound book called "The Moonfall" by Heather Spears.
I knew if Jason hooked up with his vision in life, he would be a powerful
person and money would come. People with Stellia in the 11th houses are
denied any real sense of career until they have found their mission in
life. 9th house people are denied any real sense of career until they
have found their passion in life.
Jason wasn't buying any of this, so I cut to the chase. I made him the best offer I could, straight from the God of the Underworld. "Look Jason", I said, "if you want to get a job and get on with your life, you need to remove the blood curse of your family and you need to do it before your second Saturn Return." I gave him the dates and made a suggestion, "Do a ritual blessing of the animals." He asked me how to do a ritual, like it was something he could buy at The Psychic Eye. By now I knew I was talking to the hand.
Jason was the person selected by the evolution of his family to bring them whole. A book and movie on this theme is "The Shipping News". Quoyle's life is a completely meaningless, limp object until he returns to Killick-Claw, Newfoundland and finds out about his violent ancestors and the crimes they have committed. In bringing this information whole, the red blood returns to this man and he begins to build a new life that means something.
Jason is the Chosen One because his Moon in Aries widely opposes Neptune in the 1st house, a perfect screen on which to project the Procession of the Ancestors. He has the capacity to contain violence, even absorb it, and ultimately to wash it away, to "justify it" like a margin is justified, to even the score. But he has to do this consciously. Until then, he wears the scapegoat's cloak which is soaked in blood.
This process
began when Pluto opened the tomb of the 4th house. A good astrology book
about family dynamics and family heritage issues, also for adopted adult
children, is "The Astrology of Family Dynamics" by Erin Sullivan.
An excellent short essay on the role of the Neptunian child in family
dynamics is found at this Finnish
website.
For another article by Nancy R. Fenn on family dynamics and family dynamics readings, click here. Which Planet is Your Family from? Uranus or Neptune?.
