LIBRA: THE NEXT 2 YEARS

This is the twelfth and final sign in the series, which has taken me about 3 months to get to! For some reason I’ve been putting off writing about Libra. For the other signs in this series, go to Topics on the right of the page, and find 'Sun Signs 2008-10'.

Using solar astrology, Pluto is this year entering your 4th House, while Uranus and Neptune are gradually coming to the end of your 5th and 6th Houses respectively.

So the 3 outer planets between them occupy the second quadrant of the chart, which is a place of self-expression. As a Libran your main focus tends to be on others – for better or for worse – and you instinctively define yourself through your relationships and attitude to others. The outer planets are emphasising the need for you to develop what YOU have to say behind your other-oriented self – the type of home environment you like, your creativity and your skills. You know what it’s like with Librans – getting them to say what THEY want can be near impossible.

And this is where Pluto hitting the bottom of the chart is taking you to – into who YOU are. Pluto is currently the strongest influence, for not only is he entering a new House, he is also crossing an Angle, the IC. The IC is less glamorous than the Asc and MC and is easy to forget about, hidden at the bottom of the chart. But he is your roots. It is just like a tree: what you see is the effusion of branches and leaves above ground, not what is standing there underneath, Atlas-like, making the whole show possible.

So Pluto is asking you, at least to some extent, to turn inwards and pay attention to your deeper sources. As a Libran you like to be civilised, you like to do things with subtlety and grace and consideration for others, and this is your strength. But it is easy for you also to be too identified with your graces and forget that you too aren’t always very conscious, you too have a reptilian brain and ancestral reasons for much of your behaviour. Without this awareness you will become gracefully hypocritical and superficial.

25 years ago I had a chat with my local MP at a fair, and he was telling me about his vegetarianism. What struck me at the time wasn’t what he was saying, but the extent to which he WASN’T THERE. He was trying to impress me with his idealism, but all I could sense was someone who was hard and withered and not at home. He wasn’t a Libran, but it makes the point.


Bernard Weatherill...The Man Who Never Was

Someone who is a Libran is David Cameron, the leader of the Tory Party in the UK, and probably the next Prime Minister. Something that exhausts me to think about is the extent to which these politicians have to pretend to care passionately about every issue that arises. I think it is both Libra’s strength that they can be so involved ‘out there’, but also their weakness. With David Cameron I am impressed with his ability and freshness, but his concerns are so obviously politically crafted that I don’t get much of a sense of the man behind them. Acting ability is also useful in a politician, and Cameron has Moon conjunct Jupiter in Leo.

The man who sets the lie to it all is Boris Johnson, the Tory clown who has recently become London Mayor. He can’t do false sincerity, so he cracks jokes and blusters instead. Asked at a Press Conference about drugs, he turned to his adviser and said, “What’s my policy on drugs?”


The new Lord Mayor of London

Anyway, I’m not here to write on politics. What I’m talking about with Pluto is not just about Librans acknowledging their reptilian brains, I’m talking more importantly about finding a greater degree of reality in your judgement. The judgement that comes through many years of considering both sides is your special strength, but you won’t get there if you either won’t look at your own feet of clay, or you think it wrong and unfair to acknowledge the faults of others.

Listen to this Librans: what drives me bananas about you is not just your unwillingness to look at other’s real motives, but the righteousness with which you defend those people. And you get righteous because you feel it is wrong to talk or even think critically about other people. And this makes you stupid.

I have a Libran friend who spent years getting shafted and manipulated by women he regarded as good, sound people simply because they were young and pretty. The penny has finally dropped, but it has taken him 30 years. Having Moon in Pisces as well didn’t help.

So in some ways Pluto crossing your IC is asking you to look at your feet of clay, examine your past and family background. This may occur through events, such as deaths or births or betrayals within the family. But he is also asking you to deepen your sense of what is real, so that it is the whole of you that is out there engaging with people and weighing up your experience. And to do this you need to listen closely to yourself, listen to what your feelings and instincts are saying, even if it seems unpalatable. Your feelings and instincts are what sustain you, they are the roots beneath the brilliant foliage.

Meanwhile Neptune has been passing through your 5th House of play and children and creativity. Neptune is the Imagination, so he likes the 5th House. The Imagination is the product of both mind and emotion, there is both understanding and feeling, but not separate. Rational analysis and sympathetic engagement fuse to become insight. Through the Imagination we become more whole. With Pluto entering a House of deep personal feeling, you will be able to bring more emotion and sympathy to your rational understanding, and this will enhance your ability to be insightful and creative and original.

Uranus has been passing through your 6th House of work and skills and health and everyday life. Wherever Uranus is, this is where we are being nudged to think outside the box, to see the fissures in the self-serving bodge job that often passes for society's idea of reality. Being successive Houses, there is a progression here from the increased emotional depth that Pluto is catalysing, through the heightened powers of insight that Neptune is giving you, and then bringing this into work and everyday life via Uranus in the 6th. The 6th is an Earth House, and it is about manifesting the inner transformation in the most real place of all, everyday life. But it is also Uranus, so there needs to be a positive disruption as well, a willingness to be seen as ‘different’.

Finally, bringing it all together, we have Saturn in your solar 12th House. The emphasis of the outer planets is on transformation, despite what I said about the 6th. Saturn is about making things real and concrete, and learning from that. But it is in the 12th House, the least concrete House of all! We could say here that as a Libran, a Cardinal sign, you have a need to be in control. Which is OK. ‘Control’ has become a bogey word, it’s what men do to women etc., and it makes you a ‘freak’. We need control, it’s over-control that is the problem, where there is no room for the unconscious and its promptings. Saturn in the 12th raises this sort of issue, and it’s a difficult transit to work. As a Libran, it’s about your favourite word, ‘balance’. Balancing responsibility, fitting in with society, achieving, paying the bills (Saturn), with trust in the natural process of unfoldment of your life - the sense that things that are uncomfortable sometimes need to be so for a while, and also that things that seem completely unearned and ‘undeserved’ can just come your way, and just open yourself to them.