Wednesday, August 30, 2006 | Planet, house, sign... Dear Friend and Reader: ONE comment on yesterday's entry suggested that I tend to link the themes of houses, signs and planets -- in particular, the 8th, Scorpio and Pluto. This is a mistaken impression that I owe to a few shortcuts I've had to take in summarizing recent events involving Pluto. Houses, signs and planets are related, but they come from different levels of the game of astrology, if you can call it that, and it's a helpful meditation studying the differences. If you look, you'll see that any house and its corresponding sign are like two siblings: exactly the same, and totally different. Houses are more worldly, grounded in the environment. Signs, while also representing things and environments, tend to be more cosmic and biological. An example of a Scorpio theme is DNA. An example of an 8th house theme is decoding the DNA, cutting it up and selling it for billions of dollars. In any case, when we look at the current revision of the world, "all the things that seem to matter most" tend to be 8th house themes, derived from Scorpio in a more organic form, and associated with Pluto processes as Pluto makes its way around the solar system. In the current astrological climate, we tend to forget that Mars is also a driving force in the whole experience: desire, pushed to the limits -- or in many cases, made subservient to a "higher power" -- the company one works for. The 8th house begins with the themes "death, dowry and the substance of the bride" (this is from the first astrology book in English). Karl Marx summed it up as commodification -- in a capitalist society, everything you need becomes a commodity. However, the idea of bride-price (buying a bride) or dowry (buying or financing a groom) were around long before Marx was ever a gleam in his daddy's eye. Yet his prediction has come true; we must buy very nearly everything we need; we share and trade very little; most of life comes back to an agreement or a contract of some kind, with a capitalist entity. As well, the kind of relationship we tend to want the most is marriage. The expressions, "banks run everything," "everything is about money," "nothing is certain in life except death and taxes," and "all is fair in love and war" are the reasoning processes of the 8th house as we know it. And they are pretty difficult to escape. How do you get sex? Lots of guys will tell you take a woman out and spend money. How do you get a wife? Of course, dress well, drive a nice car, and make a lot of money. How do you get a guy? Be very sexy, which usually involves spending a lot of money. Whether this is true, or a belief, it's a thought-form that tends to dominate our ideas about life, and we live in a world where sex (8th house theme, as it relates to bonding, orgasm and reproduction) is nearly entirely a commodity. Prostitutes know this better than anyone, not because they charge for sex, but they are not blind to the ways everyone else does the same thing. And I observe that prostitutes are controversial because they are not hypocrites. They state their price openly, and you know what you're getting in the arrangement; nothing is implied. What pushes this whole complex system of economics along is the idea of death, which is one thing that the 8th house and Pluto definitely have in common. Survival (desperately needing money or sex) is a sub-topic of death, and is well taken advantage of by those who see the opportunity and set up a system to either meet a need, or exploit one. Then there is the growth aspect of the 8th house and Pluto -- what comes from these confrontations with "the bottom line." Everyone knows that in the metaphorical world of humans, death and change are nearly interchangeable; and that people tend to fear change the more. And the resistance of so many people to change tends to push things in to an 8th house context (crisis), and make them vulnerable to Pluto-type upheavals. So given all this, it's all very interesting what has happened with Pluto -- for example, the best fact I can think of, he's been put on an equal plane with Ceres, the goddess of fertility and food. Fertility and food are the perfect answers to the distorted themes of the 8th house. Because when fertility and food are focused on, and received lovingly, we don't have all those 8th house problems. We recognize our common needs (instead of just fearing our common fates). The suggestion (Ceres theme) is that we learn as much from abundance as we do from lack; we can just as easily create passion, fertility and wealth as we can create our gun-to-the-head kinds of situations we love to get out of; and we had best start considering how to do that better, because we are in a global resource crisis that is calling for a new approach. And we do have the ability to create a different reality, if we will work together. There is plenty to go around, if we cooperate. Ah, well, that's a big one. Here is how Swami Beyondananda sums it up: "Of course, if you're looking for signs [of an up-wising] in the news, you won't find them. At least, not yet. The news might as well be called the 'olds', because the world still seems stuck in greedlock, ruled by fossilized fools fueled by fossil fuels. But I have been receiving encouraging intelligence reports that say indeed, humans are becoming more intelligent. Yes, people everywhere are wising up. And that's great, because we could sure use an up-wising! The evolution has begun." Yours & truly, -- Eric Francis