What does home mean in astrology?
has justice ever been at home in the US?
Once again, a leonine Venus: The biggest news is that Venus is moving into Leo tomorrow! I’ll talk more about this next week and discussed it a bit in the most recent horoscope for paid subscribers, but here are a few ideas for what it might mean…
Karaoke? You maybe should go do some karaoke. Or at least find somewhere to dance and kiss.
What were you up to last year when Venus did her retrograde dance in Leo? Anything coming back up in those parts of your life?
It’s very, very hot outside. Get your sun, show your skin and sweat, but be careful to drink water! And share water/Gatorade/cash with people who need it! Venus likes good vibes and heat stroke/dehydration are not good vibes.
Theories of home in astrology and how the Supreme Court did something very bad.
Early in college, probably my freshman year, a new friend of mine and I were walking down the Drag in Austin, TX. It was hot and overwhelming to walk down that street as a recent transplant from my little town. Businesses were always in the middle of opening or closing or somehow despite terrible business practices staying open for decades (Jenn’s Copies…). Greek life spilled over from their nearby houses (mansions, to me) and parties with weird esoteric rules. Students of all kinds spilled back and forth across the street along with the flow of the course schedule. And people, lots of people, slept wherever they could find a bit of shade, wherever they could squeeze out of the way of the fast walking students’ feet.
While I realize now there must have been people without homes where I grew up, that there certainly were people experiencing all sorts of housing instability, it was swept away. It was kept out of sight through a mishmash of charitable services, extended family allowing people to pile into their too small homes, and dense brushy juniper trees off the highways that must have concealed at least the occasional sleeping bag or makeshift tent. Around the University of Texas campus, there were far fewer efforts to hide people away and seemingly not very much available support, despite the strip of churches that ranged from Baptist congregations to a Catholic Parish to the Church of Scientology.
That day, we’d stepped out of Caffe Medici and, chattering in the way 18 year old nerds do that’s part pissing contest (“Yeah, I got waitlisted at X, but got better scholarships here..”) and part the joy of finding another freak (“Are you auditioning for the Broccoli Project1??”), we almost ran into a woman covered in bags and blankets. The extra weight and fabric had to be threatening her with heat stress.
Face to face, of course we heard her ask if we had any spare change, but we looked away and moved on. Before I could even process it though, I realized my friend had stopped walking and turned around. He hurried back to the woman who’d already continued her uneven walk, used to white boys from UT being rude or worse I’m sure. I watched him fish his wallet out and give her whatever cash he was carrying. I’m not sure if they exchanged any words, but he came back to me and, as we crossed the street back to campus, he told me he did his best to never ignore homeless people. He didn’t always have cash to give, but he said he didn’t want to be someone who pretended not to see them.
I think about this often, first because of the amount of people living outdoors in Philadelphia, and second because I think it does cut to the core of at least one reason the Supreme Court’s decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson is so chilling. Cities (people) all over the country just got the go-ahead to jail any person with the gall to lack resources in public. Not just in public, but, within view (the decision gives latitude to punish someone for sleeping in their own car, though I doubt this will apply to the average white TikTok influencer doing #VanLife).
If a city (a group of people) decides they don’t want to see suffering, they can put that suffering (those suffering people) in jail. They can get rid of them.
The idea to ban “public camping” as it’s so cutely called is not new if you lived in Austin, TX in 2021. Not unique to us, I’m sure, but, following the pandemic’s first year and the ensuing economic mudslide that pulled anyone who’d already been on the precipice of security down into the depths, there were lots of people living outside. This is dangerous anywhere, but especially so in Texas. It’s hot. Famously hot. But instead of rallying around these people to help them, a group of “concerned citizens” got together, labeled themselves “Save Austin Now”, and managed to manipulate people into voting to ban homeless people from being in public.
Yes, they dressed up their language by saying they wanted to keep the streets safe, to require people to seek shelter in safe, indoor locations with air conditioning, food, and water, and to just “save Austin”. And, unfortunately, their branding was effective. I remember at the time a frantic word of mouth campaign to tell people to not sign anything offered by Save Austin Now. Lots of otherwise well-meaning people did, because the representatives and the mailers were convincing. They did not ever say “we intend to shove these people out of sight, won’t you join our cause?” Instead, they said they were “saving Austin.”
Of course, this begs the question of who can call Austin home. According to this group, you had to be paying rent or a mortgage. It didn’t matter if you were also paying rent or a mortgage in California, New York, or Montana and you only came to Austin for SXSW and to visit the AirBnB you owned. To the “anti-camping advocates” you just had to have enough money to keep paying ballooning housing prices. Convenient.
Because this is Ask Good Questions and here we use astrology to think about things, I’m reflecting on the ways that we understand “home” in the birth chart. It doesn’t take very much study of the tradition to see how important this concept was to those Hellenistic astrologers who were pulling together even older lineages to make sense of the sky.
Planets have domiciles. They can be exiled. A planet might feel welcomed in different places that are not its home and a planet can even carve out a little space in exile under which they still live by their own terms. All of these words are more or less direct translations of original Hellenistic texts. So, to understand your birth chart, or to make use of astrology, you really need to have a good understanding of what “home” means. Sometimes it means having a residence, which you may or may not own. Sometimes it means having a community, sometimes a town or region, sometimes it is a country or, for fewer of us, a land from which your lineage grew.
These concepts prompt all sorts of fraught questions before you even look at a chart. If you think a home is a place you rent or own, what if you share with others? Is their home contingent on you? What about communally owned spaces? If you rent, is it your home? Or your landlord’s? Benjamin Franklin2 said, “A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.” What’s that mean about my college dorm which was, to be clear, cement walls containing two twin beds, the world’s ugliest desks/shelves, and the failed home brew my roommate made in his closet? What’s it mean about the people who are miserable where they live but they can’t move, can’t relocate?
All I can land on here, today, is that home is subjective. Duh. What I think is interesting to pull from the framework of astrology, from the birth chart, into this conversation about hiding people experiencing homelessness is that in the birth chart you can’t really hide anything. You can’t hide if a planet is exiled, if a planet is living within another planet’s home, if two planets are mutually receiving each other in their own homes, or any other arrangement. When you look at a birth chart you begin to sketch out relationships and, since you cannot change them and cannot hide them, you just figure them out.
We can look at my chart as an example. That’s lots of planets and points and houses and pieces of data. If you’re new-ish to this, I’ll do my best to break it down.
First, we can look at the Sun. He’s in Aquarius which is where the Sun is in exile. This is also translated as “in detriment” which gets at the idea that being away from home is often not ideal. When I first got into astrology, I wondered if this meant anyone born in that month-ish where the Sun was in Aquarius was basically doomed at some level. Our Sun, the planet that is supposed to help define our purpose and life direction, is homeless. But he is somewhere, he does exist in the chart. He’s just living somewhere he “doesn’t belong.” He’s in Saturn’s home, Aquarius.
In my chart, Saturn can’t see the Sun because Saturn is in Pisces, the sign immediately following Aquarius. If you want to know more about why that is, feel free to shoot me an email or check out this book or this podcast. Otherwise, you can take my word for it.
This means that not only is my Sun living somewhere he “doesn’t belong”, he doesn’t even have the blessing or support of the planet that owns that home. My Aquarius Sun is exactly that person living outside that conservatives fear. Who knows what he might get up to?
Except we can’t get rid of the Sun, fine it, or move it somewhere else. It’s just going to be there. Luckily, we have Jupiter living in his own home of Sagittarius who can step in to help. From his position, Jupiter is able to see and support the Sun and see and support Saturn (who, incidentally, is living in Jupiter’s second home, Pisces). The story of the exiled Sun is begins to be fleshed out.
Sure, my birth chart won’t ever change, but there’s always this multi-party dynamic working itself out, this relationship between Saturn and Jupiter that feeds in its own way into a relationship between Jupiter and the Sun. And then there’s Mercury hanging out with the Sun, not as uncomfortable in Aquarius and able to help out in their own way. When we get to know a chart we rely on all the weird, tense, uncomfortable, and sometimes supportive relationships to give it meaning. We don’t avoid them.
It is a stretch to connect the very real life implications of making it legal to punish people for experiencing homelessness to astrological theory. But I find some kind of value in thinking about home and thinking about generosity and dependence in this way. All of us, wherever we live, are connected in ways that we might not immediately see and we might rely upon each other at some point down the line that we can’t predict. Famously, not a single one of us has simply fallen out of a coconut tree. We exist in the context of all in which we live and what came before us <3 This is something the majority of the Supreme Court seems to have forgotten.
I’ll wrap up this little note with the same quote cited by Justice Sotomayor in the dissent to the Supreme Court decision. She references a selection from the book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond: “It is only after we begin to see a street as our street, a public park as our park, a school as our school, that we can become engaged citizens, dedicating our time and resources for worthwhile causes.”
While I might quibble with the word “citizens” there, because I don’t believe one has to be a citizen to be a member of the “our” that Desmond and Stomayor reference, the sentiment holds. We will need “home” and “neighbor” to become more expansive words that can hold more of us if we have any hope of surviving these upcoming cycles of change and unpredictability. When push comes to shove, when the rain comes down and washes away our walls, when the fires burn through our ceilings, and we’re all just trying to survive, it’ll be hard to tell who most recently had a bed to sleep in. I don’t think it will matter as much to us then.
Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.
The real name of our real college theater club for real little freaks 😌.
Go birds 🦅