With “The Merlin” Astrologer Rick Levine
What happens when the planet of love and the planet of war conjunct at 90 degrees during an eclipse?
We are seeing it right now as polarities become sharper and tensions rise.
And, as many people are starting to feel, there is a profound opportunity to evolve beyond what we ever thought was possible with these specific planetary alignments.
The Merlin Astrologer, Rick Levine shares his perspective on what is happening energetically with Venus, Mars, and the eclipse, and the best way to see this rare opportunity for what it is, and fully participate in it.
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Amanda: Rick I’m really excited to talk to you about Venus, Mars, and the eclipse, and how they are impacting life on Earth right now. It feels pretty big.
Rick: Well, it is. Pluto is returning to where it was when the United States was founded.
The structures of colonial America were in great upheaval, leading up to the American Revolutionary War, the French Revolution. Also, this Saturn Pluto conjunction in the sign of Capricorn.
The last time Pluto was in Capricorn, the United States was founded, and the time before that
Martin Luther sparked the Protestant Reformation. It was reforming through protest and challenging Rome as the control center.
We are in extraordinary times. And unlike then, we also have Jupiter in the mix, conjuncting Pluto. Then we’ve got Saturn moving into Aquarius, which brings emphasis to humanitarian structures.
There’s a meme going around the internet that says the last time Saturn was in Aquarius we had the Rodney King riots, and it’s true. It also says that Pluto was in Capricorn when the US was born, which we already covered.
The third thing on the meme says that Neptune was in Pisces when the Roman Empire fell. But that isn’t true, someone made it up. But with Jupiter in the mix, there are actually bigger things occurring – a big shift in power.
And we have all these retrogrades… Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto, the 3 heavyweights involved in all of this.
Venus is playing a very big role in everything that’s happening. While Venus turns direct Mercury and Neptune both retrograde.
There’s just this incredible whirlpool of swirling energy that is being played out right now. And we have an eclipse [June 5, 2020], the Sagittarius Full Moon Eclipse.
This eclipse is incredibly important for setting a tone to the energies for the year 2020.
In this eclipse, you will see that Venus has retrograded, and is still close to the Sun. There’s this whole energy of love and attraction to beauty and aesthetics. But of course in Gemini that attraction is scattered. It has lots of potential and possibilities, but it’s about thoughts and communication, not so much action.
Then we add Mars into the picture. Mars is in what we call a T square with Venus. Venus is the planet of love, attraction, desire, and even money because money buys pleasure. Mars is the angry red warrior planet.
In Greek mythology, Venus and Mars are cosmic lovers. There is an interplay of energy here between the feminine Venus and the masculine Mars that are at 90-degree angles right now. This eclipse has the battle between Venus and Mars being fought in real-time.
The 90-degree angle, or the square, is the most conflictive, and we humans don’t like stress. We typically do one of two things when we encounter it, fight or flight. We either engage it and resolve it, or we get the hell out of there.
When we flight, it doesn’t solve the underlying issue. But, with Venus moving retrograde where she already was last month and will be again, this is about a recovery in the underworld.
The ancients said when Venus lost her light to the light of the Sun, she became invisible and went into the underworld. Then when she came out as a morning star, the energy was different.
There’s the sense of Venus going back into the past, and bringing it into the present moment, but it’s running into this square with Mars.
That’s the macho militaristic suppressive Mars showing dominance. Now there’s a healthy place for Mars when he’s in Pisces because Mars becomes a spiritual warrior. But in this eclipse Mars has more impulsive energy.
All squares can be negative if they’re in denial, but if they’re faced, they can actually be the juice that motivates creative resolution or solution. During this eclipse, it’s important to express with caring, kindness, and compassion… even if wounds and hurts are coming up.
The eclipse itself has another polarity between long term vision and data. We live in the United States, and the long term vision is to be the land of the free, the home of the brave, the Declaration of Independence, all that. But when you look at the facts, they don’t match up with the ideals that we’ve had.
Right now people are going out and being confronted with a reality that doesn’t match up with what they believe that their Constitutional Rights are, for freedom of speech, to protest peacefully. Instead, people are getting tear-gassed and hit with rubber bullets.
Amanda: So, how do we pass through this period of time most aligned?
Rick: Well Amanda, I’ll tell you next year! Joking, but I don’t think there’s a one size fits all answer. There are some practices, which I would recommend that I’ve been trying to do myself.
First of all, we need to breathe and we need to feel all the feelings because whatever they are, putting them aside is not helpful and will make us overreact. Psychologists call that reaction formation.
Whatever your beliefs are on some of the issues coming to light right now, we need to breathe and be with the painful emotions.
Then we need to listen to the things that are most opposite of what our assumptions are, and what those people are feeling. We don’t need them to believe what we do. We don’t need to join them or their cause. None of us are 100% right, in fact, each of us only has a part of the picture.
But this whole thing is only going to be resolved as the individuals in it resolves their own polarities. So we get through this by continuing to educate ourselves, feel our feelings, and take in information that may not be comfortable.
The word apocalypse, as most of us have come to understand simply means without a cover, you know, uncover, or reveal. Things are being revealed to us, whether we want to know them or not.
And whether we dig the ostrich hole deeper and stick our head in it, or whether we brave up and encounter our uncomfortable feelings, that will determine where we go from here.
Amanda: You mentioned that the higher expression of Mars is the spiritual warrior. What is the higher octave? We talked a lot about the lower octave.
Rick: I wouldn’t use the word higher octave because planets have octaves. But the higher manifestation of that energy is when one is fighting to protect a worthy cause. That’s Mars at its best. When one is defending those who are unable to defend themselves, that’s the warrior at its best.
But you see in ancient astrology before Pluto was discovered, Mars was connected with Aries, the warrior and with Scorpio. So we forget that Mars is not just the fighter. Mars is also the lover. Venus is what you love, but Mars is the lover.
Mars is the physicality of expressing energy and emotions. Mars is passion, Mars is what you do with your desires to resolve them, which is procreative.
So again, here we come back to Venus and Mars with a higher invitation for this moment to communicate with each other as compassionately as possible and to really start to bridge these polar extremes that are happening as much as possible.
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If you’d like to listen to the full-length interview on Mars, Venus & the Eclipse you can do that by clicking here.
You can also watch the entire interview with Rick.
And check out Rick’s incredible course, The Astrology of Relationships!