STARFIRE

September 2007

September 2007 - Saturn's in Virgo.
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Saturn’s in Virgo and Leos Can Play

What a relief! Saturn has been a tough task master for my Leo friends. We’re limping around, whining gently when we’re not roaring–and we’re all glad to have Saturn move on.

Not that Saturn wasn’t good for us. Saturn just wasn’t comfortable for us. And Leo humans, like all the other big cats, do like comfort.

Saturn’s no picnic in Virgo, either, but it is more manageable. Saturn is the natural ruler of Capricorn and is more at home in Earth signs than Fire. It’s a practical planet, about as much fun as a visit with your accountant (and sometimes no more fun than an IRS audit).

The secret for Saturn in Virgo is simple: Color inside the lines. Boring, but safe. Look at the political candidates to see how it’s done. Safe. Boring. Even their innovations are safe and expected given their positions in the polls.

If you’re a writer, grammar and lines per page and spaces after periods all count more than usual now. If you’re a genre writer, crossing genres will be harder than usual. Unless your story is brilliant enough for the best-seller lists, it’ll be hard to sell an unconventional book now.

The artists who benefit most from Saturn in an Earth sign are sculptors, who will find a market for larger works (although not necessarily for sculptures from exotic materials).

Natural foods, landscape paintings, and environmental movements all thrive with Saturn in Virgo so long as they’re presented quietly and rationally. Buyers will be inspecting their art work as carefully as they do their organic foods now. Perfection matters.

How long? Saturn will stay in Virgo until the 29th of October, 2009, dip into Libra until April 7, 2010, and then spend a final few weeks in Virgo, departing for decades on July 21, 2010.

So the elections will be boring.

And the economics aren’t exciting. Ancient astrologers used to read the fate of a nation from the birth chart of its king, or his coronation chart. President Bush will be plagued with diminished resources (Saturn in his personal second house of resources, where it will eventually conjunct his Mars and frustrate him into further temper outbursts in public) and economic shockwaves (Uranus and Neptune in mutual reception in his 8th house of assets shared with the public and issues like taxes, public reserves, and international finance). Bad news for the president is rarely good news for the nation.

Uranus is in a critical degree, so we can expect shockwaves financially. In the long run, the mortgage market will survive and housing values will stabilize. In the short run, there may be more crises before there are solutions. That’s the view from Washington, or at least from the White House.

For the rest of us, Uranian changes may be more personal and may be both unexpected and life-changing. To see how Uranian change might affect you personally, print out a free copy of your own natal chart from my website www.iowapoet.com see what a transit of Uranus at 17 Pisces would mean to you.

Change is just change. With Saturn in Virgo, the world as a whole will be more suspicious of change, more resistant to change. (With Saturn in Leo, there were obstacles to change, but they were physical and financial obstacles rather than emotional ones.) But change is always an opportunity for new direction.

Saturn in Virgo requires planned changes. Try not to surprise people. Plan on paper, work out the details, then foreshadow the changes you want to make. If you want a promotion, start dressing as if you’d already been promoted; give people a chance to get used to your new image.

Responsible is an important word now. Flamboyant is out. Natural is good.

Expect more people to leave the city for the country lifestyle...or find ways to have plants and a better environment within cities. In the long run, cleaner air and cleaner cities may be the real blessing of Saturn in Virgo. Even if Uranus has to provoke a public health crisis to make it happen.

Chick-lit and comedy in general may have reduced sales while Saturn is in Virgo. But don’t write comedy off altogether. All that Virgo responsibility does make people want to relax and escape at night.

If reality gets grim, reality shows will go. Game shows fit the bill for escapism and stay.

Erotica stays. Surprised? Virgo is the equivalent of the tarot Hermit, the sense of touch. Touch and texture thrive when major planets go through Virgo.

And now let me say I know I’m wrong about some of these predictions. Uranus is waiting in the wings to surprise us.

Second-guessing Uranus is, however, a waste of time. There’s a prominent Uranus in my own chart, and I’ve become an expert at wasting time second-guessing Uranus.

It’s not Uranus that brings tragedies like 9/11 and Katrina. Uranus opens our minds, spins us around in new directions, makes it impossible for us to see things the way we saw them yesterday. Sometimes the change is fun and sometimes it isn’t.

The secret to Uranus, as Ed Steinbrecher explains in The Inner Guide Meditation, is to eat whole grains and apples. The secret to Saturn is to plan on paper and work consistently and (of course) color inside the lines.

The purpose of Virgo is making us whole human beings. Where we have blind spots, Saturn and Uranus will make us uncomfortable. Where we have dreams, they’ll teach us to build support systems and trust synchronicity.

Mary O’Gara, Ph.D.