Yes, Libra focuses on balance and symmetry.
A few years back, a friend of mine sent me a link to an astrology site. The site gave month by month forecasts for each sign and my friend had claimed eerie accuracy for this one. Now, I understand the attraction of astrology. It is inherently all about you. Whether it is a description of whatever traits are assigned to each sign or predictions about the future, they are YOUR traits and YOUR future. I don’t fault anyone for being into it, either. The idea that the movement of the planets affects your day to day life or the shape of your personality makes just as much sense as the idea that a guy who died 2000 years ago rose from the dead, or that if you have been bad you will return to life as a squid, or that some Asian prince returns over and over again as different people, always in the same place and always of the same race. I know rational, intelligent people who believe all of these things and I can’t prove that any of those ideas are bad ones or wrong. Nor am I much inclined to. I have no idea how the universe functions and I simply don’t care so long as it doesn’t get in the way of whatever I am up to. It is very much an artist’s mindset I guess, you have your subjects and themes and everything else is idle speculation.
At any rate I took to having a look at my friend’s recommended website. And like the bible or any other philosophy, much was left to interpretation. There were strange bullseyes. The new moon will reveal secrets about a friend and lo and behold a friend of mine went to the hospital for a drug addiction I was unaware of. And times when it was left wanting. Venus in whatever sign DID NOT improve my fucking finances. So, in many ways, at the end of the day, the only thing to recommend astrology over, say, Catholicism, was its accessibility. It was always right there, just a mouse click away, for your speculation and to offer ready context. That, and astrology seems to make no judgments about who you have sex with.
It occurred to me, though, that this meant nothing in a vacuum and context was needed. So, I went on to check out a few other sites that offered monthly forecasts in hopes of cross referencing. This yielded some interesting stuff. First of all, to every one’s credit, no one is just making shit up. Of the three websites that I visited, all were using a common playbook. Each astrologer really believed that there were fixed meanings to the positions of the planets and they all agreed on what the broad outlines of those meanings were. None of them were ever really in direct conflict. One never said that the moon meant love while the other said it meant brain trauma due to a car accident. In the macro view, they all follow the same philosophy.
And that leads us into the next interesting thing: Language. While they all held to the same broad concepts, how they worded the forecasts varied greatly. Some were highly pragmatic, day to day events type of things. Don’t spend money on Tuesday, a bill comes due on Wednesday. Others, in particular my friend’s favorite, were much more given to hyperbole. And here is where we really get into playing to the self absorption at the heart of all personal philosophies. My buddy’s site routinely introduced every revelation with words like “I am so excited for you!” or “I am so sorry to have to tell you this!” More often that not, whatever was being presented was done so as if your whole sense of self and life and emotional stability was hanging in the balance as the stars played contact billiards with your destiny. A full moon rolls around and “a close partner has been hiding something painful from you! You will find out this terrible secret now. I am so sorry to have to tell you this, but just know that you will survive it!” One of the other sites might phrase the same thing as “Someone close to you needs more attention, stress open communication at this time.” These are almost direct quotes.
pisces, however, only cares about one thing. And it is clearly not spelling.
Taking belief in or accuracy of off the table for a second, what are the implications of such language. According to some sites “this is important, that is important, have you balanced your check book?” According to the first, the entire planet spends its days in a free fall from one end of the bi-polar spectrum to the other. Given the idea that each sign represents roughly a twelfth of the populace, every new moon one out of twelve of us is rolling in cheese cake and free money and every full moon staring into the abyss wondering if they can possibly go on. And that is if you only read your sign’s forecast. God only knows what kind of rollercoaster the other eleven bastards are on. If this site were to be believed there is no reason not to be putting lithium directly into the water supply. But as I said, this feeds directly into the idea that what you are reading is all about you. While you read such things, you are so wrapped up in your own hopes and fears that you don’t think about all of the other Pisces or Virgos out there or the fact that, if all of their marriages are breaking up or all of their businesses are going under at just that moment, there is no way our society could survive. The cities would be in flames and people would be leaping from every available window landing on the roofs of the Mercedes the more favored signs had bought with their ridiculous winnings.
I don’t tell people what to believe, because I don’t care what people believe. I do care about living in a nation of hysterics though, that affects me. So, just as I would plead with people to stay away from end time religions that encourage you to horde for the apocalypse that the gays are bringing about, I would also ask my friends who are into astrology to watch the language of the sites they consult carefully. Avoid the ones that make it sound like you will be rolling in wealth if you survive the catastrophe that is coming with the mercury retrograde and stick with the one’s that suggest you should be more honest with your spouse. That is sound advice whether it comes from Jupiter or not.
(a further note on the image above. They went to all that trouble to do that elaborate body paint and then misspelled pisces. That is beautiful tragedy.)
