**December Books are Open**
My books are currently open for this month. My availability will be limited because of the holidays so schedule now if you want a year ahead session to prepare for the next year or a grounding in your unique enchantment/purpose.
Some of my current offerings:
Creative Praxis Consult: This reading is specifically for artists who want to connect their art-making to the divine and unseen. We examine your 5th, 3rd and 9th houses, as well as any significant muse asteroid conjunctions to see where spirit flows through you and what your unique artistic process looks like.
And remember:
Fixed Star Parans Consult: To go past the natal chart and into all the stars contained in our sky is to know your essence, your truest soul. I have trouble describing the potency of the path your fixed stars lay out because you truly have to experience the stars to understand their deep significance. One way of doing that is booking this reading with me.
Year Ahead Consults: This reading is great for an overview of themes, planetary time lords, and significant moments for you in 2023. I use techniques such as as firdaria, annual and continuous profections, solar returns and transits to describe your upcoming year as well as which parts of yourself are currently coming to fruition. I also actively include remediation or take-home actions to help align yourself with the current period of time. (**If you are interested in a longer-term, more involved way to bring your life in alignment with the stars, stay tuned**)
On Mars’s Joy in the Fifth House
The planetary joys are one of my favorite parts of astrology. According to this system, the planets not only have preferred signs but preferred houses. Here is the list of planetary joys according to Firmicus, Rhetorious and Paulus, and others:
The Sun has its joy in the 9th house.
The Moon has its joy in the 3rd house.
Jupiter has its joy in the 11th house.
Venus has its joy in the 5th house.
Mars has its joy in the 6th house.
Saturn has its joy in the 12th house.
Mercury has its joy in the 1st house.
While a planet in its own sign is “home,” a planet in its preferred house is considered a cause for rejoicing. It’s not just comfort that will help a planet work more smoothly: its desires and feelings also impact its responsibilities. I also find the planetary joy scheme to illuminate important facets of the planet.
Venus, for example, rejoices in the 5th, house of children, sex and creativity because, as Demetra George puts it, “from the first stage of visions of her beauty that arouse the senses and the emotions to flirtation, dating, romance, courtship and pleasurable foreplay, to the final act of sexual consummation with its respective offspring, Venus is most able to be Venus when placed in the fifth house” (701). As the planet of love and desire, Venus in the fifth is able to properly value what is pleasurable to an individual and bring it toward them so a new thing is created— a child, a romance, a piece of art.
But Manilius, rogue poet and personal favorite ancient of mine, put a different planet in the fifth. Well, more accurately, he doesn’t name the planet that joys in the fifth, but just named all the other planets and then we are left with one: Mars. Mars is the other supporting planet of the night sect, like Venus, but in many ways her antithesis: war-like, severing, independent where she is connective, collaborative and sensual. For most of our current traditional astrology revival, this alternate joy scheme only found in Manilius’s Astronomica has been ignored or overlooked as a quirky error. But Peter Yong of Premier État Astrology gave great lecture on Manilius’s alternate joy scheme that has me looking at this possibility anew. And, as someone with both Venus and Mars in the 5th, what have I to lose?
Below are some thoughts on what Mars’s joy in the house of children could mean about the red planet and our relationship to creativity and pleasure.
Turning to the Text
As I mentioned, Manilius never explicitly names Mars as the planet that joys in the fifth. He instead says there is a temple “with an inverse likeness” to the 11th house (opposing it in the wheel) “which is thrust below the world and adjoins the nadir of the submerged heaven”. Here we are dealing with what is ensouled, “submerged” into matter and hidden by its downward movement towards the nadir, or lowest pivot of the sky. Manilius describes the planet here as “wearied after completion of active service,” perhaps in references to fifth house planets’ recent descent from the sixth house, temple of toil and labor. But a fifth house planet’s work is not over: “it is again marked out for a further term of toil, as it waits to shoulder the yoke of the cardinal temple and its role of power”. As a succedent house, the fifth house is supporting and moving towards an angular house, a place of heightened significance and activity. Hence, the anticipation of the a yoke and the power that comes with the toil. But because “not as yet does it feel the weight of the world", it may be more zealous and enthusiastic than when it reaches the 4th where Manilius says Saturn, the planet of silence and stillness, rejoices.
Who else but Mars, planet of “infernos and blazes, swiftness and suddenness, strength and power, unexpected things, and rulers who are domineering, courageous, and bold” (Ma’shar) could have just exited a place of toil and be ready to step into power again with zeal and vigor?
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