Mark Jones joins Alejo Lopez to chat about all things Pisces. Includes a look at classic Pisces Quincy Jones, PLUS the monthly lunations, Saturn in Pisces, Jupiter conjunct Chiron, and the Moon trine Venus.
Time stamps for the topics covered in this episode:
0:00–10:15 Introduction to Pisces
10:15– 18:03 Famous Pisces: Quincy Jones
18:03 – 23:55 Things to do in Pisces Season
23:55 – 45:53 Saturn in Pisces
45:53 – 56:07 Significant Lunations and Events
56:07 –1:03:26 Monthly Mantra, Book Recommendations, and Upcoming Events
Transcript for The Cosmic Eye – Pisces Season Episode
Tony Howard: This is the Astrology University podcast, helping you find inspiration, insight and connection through the study of astrology. And I’m your host, Tony Howard.
Alejo Lopez: Welcome to the Cosmic Eye, the Astrology University podcast, in which we will look at the month ahead and the challenges and opportunities that are coming. This is the podcast for the Pisces season. I am Alejo Lopez, your host, and today with me is Mark Jones. Mark is a writer, an astrologer, teacher, psychosynthesis therapist, and he’s working with clients and students throughout the world. Hi, Mark, thank you for being here.
Mark Jones: My pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.
Alejo: Thank you so much. So before we move into the Pisces season, I would like to mention that if you like the podcast, the best thing you can do to support us is to share with your friends and people who might be interested in it. And of course, we would also love to hear your feedback. If you have some thoughts or reflections, you can share them at [email protected]. Alright, so let’s go navigate Pisces, and let’s see how you do it. So to introduce Pisces, I usually come up with a story about this monk who wanted to see the Buddha of compassion. And so he went into a mountain to meditate for 10 years, and he didn’t see it. So when he was coming back to the village, he meets this young boy. And the boy tells him, “Oh, come on, maybe if you would have waited one more day, you would have seen the Buddha of compassion.” So he goes back to the cave and he meditates again for 10 more years, he doesn’t see it, he comes back. He sees a middle aged man and the man says the same thing, “Oh, come on, maybe just one more day and you could have seen it.” So he goes back to the cave. He doesn’t see it, he comes back, he meets an old man and the old man says the same. So he goes back to the cave, another 10 years, he doesn’t see it. And on the way back to the village, he meets this animal, this dog who was hurt, who was wounded. And in the wound, it was so old that it had some worms inside. So the monk quickly starts to heal the dog. But then he realizes that to heal the dog, he has to kill the worms. So basically, he wounds himself, and one by one, he takes all of the worms and puts them on his own wound. And at that point, the Buddha of compassion shows up. He says only when you feel compassion for every living creature, you will escape from the wound of incarnation. So I like this story because I think it reflects this idea of compassion and love for the world. What do you think about it?
Mark: Well, I mean, I think that’s a very profound story and a very profound moral lesson in the power of sacrifice and the power of dedication without immediate reward. You know, far too often the spiritual path or psychological, spiritual growth is conceived of some linear path of achievement, you know, we’re going to reach this towering mountain top or we’re going to win or now I’m interviewed by Oprah or on Sounds True or something. And actually, real growth often is accompanied in very difficult times of dedication, staying committed to something greater than yourself. People have a child or people have a difficult aspect to their job, but it’s meaningful, and they stay with it. And they stay with it, regardless of cost. And then the other thing that strikes me, okay, the Buddhists are a little bit extreme on the compassion front, you know, can you love everything without having to cut yourself and invite the maggots into your wound? Avalokitesvara, the buddha of compassion, is sometimes represented in Buddhist teaching as a kind of snowfall, or like, white flower petals falling onto the world like gentle snow, you know, and there is this pointing in that story to what I would call divine grace, that there is a presence in reality that can support people, that can support people’s growth. And if you accept that sacred element of reality, you realize that though you’re apparently alone a lot in life and you’re apparently struggling, you realize that some greater aspect of reality itself is witnessing. That man in that story thought he was just alone with a wounded dog. Turns out the wounded dog is the Buddha of compassion. But that’s pointing to me to the fact that reality itself is real. Reality itself is a real presence, and perceived spiritually, you could say that reality itself always witnesses you. You are always seen. You are never truly alone. Because Pisces often has a component of taking the risk to be alone, in order to develop greater empathy, compassion, or sensitivity or insight and not just be steered by the crowd or by commonplace conditioning or social dynamics. So you can say in the story, these stories often have this fabulous moment where the Buddha of compassion reveals him or herself, like some action movie reveal scene, yeah? But I think the implication is because the Buddha compassion was there all along. And you didn’t need X amount of time on the mountaintop. Reality is real, whether you’ve done 10 years or 20 years of meditation or not. Reality is real. It’s just when do you get it? When you wake up to it being real?
Alejo: Yeah, it’s interesting because this monk actually sees the Buddha when he connects with reality, like you’re saying, not when he’s alone, in the mountain, in his cave. It’s like when he connects to reality, like you’re saying, compassion is there, the spiritual realm is there in the real world, it’s not separated.
Mark: It’s not a transcendent other realm that you have to journey like on some spaceship to get to. It is the actual inherent foundational reality of everything that we live in. And then you could say, you know, why are we talking about this with Pisces? Because there’s very different kinds of Pisces, aren’t there? And Pisces has this sort of perceived criticism as lacking in pragmatism or lacking in groundedness or being too idealistic or too soft. But that’s why it’s very important. Maybe Pisces has been like that at a certain point. But if the spiritual myths of a culture, if the spiritual stories that animate our life place God in some transcendent other realm that never interacts with this earth, then you’re going to produce, if you like, a spiritual orientation that leads people away from the pragmatic, earthy, day to day. But if you perceive an embodied sacred reality, in the essence of food, sexuality, human love, the body, nature; if you perceive the reality of the presence as the inherent background of everything, all sentient life, as the Buddhists would put it, then you don’t necessarily breed these ultra-idealistic, ungrounded Pisces people, do you? You don’t push people into that place. Sometimes I think that, you know, just spiritually inclined people– because it’s very difficult to truly open to a greater reality, you know, you can’t reinvent the wheel every time, you can’t ignore every religion or every spiritual teaching, you’re not just going to get there with nothing, you have to understand some of these great Buddhist stories or these great Buddhist monks or something. And so you’re influenced by the culture that has helped prepare you to undertake the path? And that’s where to me astrology is one of those teachings, astrology teaches this, broadly speaking, that life is a full range. That life includes water signs and earth signs and air signs and fire signs. It includes mad Sagittarius people that rush off, you know, following some fiery inspiration but it also includes grounded Taureans who value their stuff and want to stay put. And because astrology is a broad church, if you like, it’s Catholic in the old school sense, the small sense. It includes everything. And astrology is a metaphor for spiritual reality just like some of these spiritual tales are and I think that was a perfect Pisces spiritual tale, beautifully chosen, genuinely profound teaching.
Alejo: And I also– when you were saying it, I was thinking that perhaps to be spiritual is to be able to encompass all of reality, to be able to accept the whole circle, like you’re saying, to be able to see the whole. It’s not just the subtle realities, but also the grounded, the real, the driving forces, like you were talking about Sagittarius. Yes.
Mark: Exactly. Well, and is there, in the heart of Pisces at its absolute best, does the empathy of the final sign include this ability to feel into the reality of all the preceding signs. The best Pisces people are like a rainbow. The damaged Pisces people or Pisces on a bad day–and I’m a Pisces, so I’m not being judgmental–if on a bad day, right, I call it the Pisces puddle. You know, it’s just a puddle of water. We struggle to get outta bed, we struggle to deal with things, there’s a sensitive, messed up side of Pisces, you could call the Pisces puddle. But I think you’re pointing to what we could call the rainbow side of Pisces, which is in the heart of Pisces is the ability to empathize with all the 11 preceding signs and have a little feel for what they represent. So at its best, Pisces can be a sort of integration point of everything that’s come before.
Alejo: Yeah, broadly, it’s an ability because it’s a mutable sign.
Mark: Yes, well, adaptable. Exactly. And it’s the final mutable sign. It’s the final adaptation. Yeah.
Alejo: And it’s mutable water. Water is probably the element that adapts the most.
Mark: Because it can easily move its shape around the thing that makes the impression in the water. Yeah.
Alejo: Great, fantastic. Thank you for sharing this. So usually we choose a classical Pisces, a famous Pisces, maybe not a classical Pisces but a famous Pisces. And for this one, I was thinking of Quincy Jones, because I read a quote by him, that he said, “I never really knew what it was like to have a mother, there’s no question that that pushed me into a fantasy world. I used to sit for hours in the closet and just dream.” So I think this connects a little bit with what you were saying about the wounded side of Pisces.
Mark: But also does the wound lead to the vision itself? Is the wound a form of entry point or portal into another world like those fairy tales where you have to journey, you have to sacrifice something, a finger or that boy comes back, I think then a swan in a different world and one of his arms is still a wing, even as he returned, you know, it’s like you pay this price to enter the inner life, in a sense. There’s also, I’d say, in the core of the human psychological movement, I mean people have written books accusing Freud and Jung of what we’re perceiving in Quincy Jones here, their sense of like, their struggles, their personal illness or suffering leading to a greater psychological vision. And some people question whether they truly transcended their own illness. I certainly think you can raise that question against Freud, for me at least, more clearly than you can Jung. I think Jung clearly transcends something in a profound way in his later life. But it’s interesting, isn’t it, because that’s Quincy Jones’ great gift. That loss led to him discovering the imaginative, great gift that produced so much high quality music. I watched this documentary on this, it’s funny. Michael Jackson, after being in the Jackson Five, was really hungry, really dedicated to writing this amazing music really, really empowered him. And he hadn’t found the right person to work with. And he worked with Quincy Jones, who almost blended himself to Michael’s need, and his need to express the empowerment of the vision that he felt to truly break out. But people don’t realize how much Quincy Jones was involved in making Thriller and various other music around that time. I mean, he literally brought his friends in, who are musicians, he brought the total vision that just responded to everything Michael said. It’s like that Pisces ability to just wrap around what’s going on, mold or respond to what’s happening, the best use of empathy to produce real rapport and creative results. I think it’s fascinating, isn’t it? I have reached a point, Alejo, where I just genuinely think certain wounds are there in life, almost to break us through. Like, they’re both a real wound, like there’s real suffering in this world, obviously. But you know, when you really meditate deeply on your own childhood, or things that have happened to me, for example, just in my personal life struggles I’ve had, I realized what they gave me. I realized struggles I had in my family growing up how psychically independent it made me to have gone through such avert struggle as a teenager. And that later in life then I’m a less dependent person, and then to be an astrologer, and a spiritually orientated psychotherapist and teacher, you don’t want to be a very dependent person, do you? I would never have been that person if I hadn’t developed this very strong internal psychic independence that partly came through the wounding experiences of just being with people who didn’t understand me. It was empowering.
Alejo: Yeah, your wounding experience, but also your kind of your approach to it. I don’t want to say your work, but the way you embraced it, perhaps?
Mark: Exactly, exactly, almost like an initiation. And I didn’t even realize it fully at the time. I mean, these things are working on multiple levels at the same time. At the time, I was struggling, maybe upset by it, but I found my way. But years later, I see what finding my way in those circumstances has given to me. And it’s tremendously enriching. And you could say that that’s a really fantastic model for thinking about Pisces. Can you find these private wounds? Can you find in how you’ve been hurt, even victimized, a very Pisces thing, in a way. Or these areas of your life where you have to make tremendous sacrifice, perhaps you work as a paramedic or you’ve just got a full time job and kids or something and it’s just heroic. People who have kids and who work as well, it’s just stunning, like people’s regular lives are stunning, they’re heroic. And I would say Pisces season, if you like, the deepest contemplation is to realize what is the meaning of the sacrifice I make in my life? From its original linguistic root, sacrifice comes from, “to make sacred.” “Sacra” is the same root “to make sacred.” Can we understand the value of our commitments and the sacrifices we make because of love? Because we love our kids, because we are trying to help. You know, when the ambulance shows up, we’re trying to help people, or astrology, we’re interested in astrology, you know, can it be more than just a private hobby? Can we use it to maybe have some self knowledge or help the people around us gain some insight about their lives?
Alejo: Yes. And I also agree with you the idea that it’s something you can do in everyday life, it doesn’t have to be something grandiose, you could be having a mundane, normal, let’s call it, job. And maybe you do it in a way of service, in a way of trying to make it sacred, like you’re saying, make it important, make it have an impact in other people’s life. I think also, like you were saying, heroic lives are everyday lives. Sometimes I think we over imagine what it is to be a hero, what it is to save the world. And maybe it’s just your world that you need to save, like your neighbor.
Mark: I think that’s the single most profound thing. I mean, it’s just incredible you just said that. And what strikes me is these fantasies in movies. If you watch movies and TV shows, particularly of any kind of fantasy type of origin, but even thrillers, after the Bourne movies and stuff, it’s all just like, almost like super people. You know, like the Marvel Universe. There aren’t ordinary heroes anymore in movies, there aren’t ordinary, regular people who would have been scared that someone’s spying on them from a car and try to work out what to do. No, these are all people specially trained, or in some special FBI program with special powers, or they’ve come from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And to me, it speaks of a sadness in the culture, the loss of the understanding of the heroism of the ordinary, that just to have people in your life, just to work hard, just to have kids, just to have family, just to have values, just to try and be a good person in the face of the struggle of being a human is legitimate. That’s a legitimate life. That’s legitimate meaning, and I think we’ve lost lots of that, and you see a mental health crisis in young people. And you see that the imagination of the culture produces these evermore lurid heroes. Literally, Thor is reincarnated or Iron Man has a nuclear power center in his heart or whatever. It’s like it’s a ridiculous over-machismo version of heroism, like you can literally just fly around the world like Superman did and save someone’s life. Because we’re disenchanted in some ways with the power of the ordinary, but actually ordinary love is everything, isn’t it? Ordinary love is heaven. Ordinary love is spiritual love. That is the point.
Alejo: Yeah, I agree. I think it’s like an overcompensation. Because if we were lucky, we need to overdo it in a grandiose way, because we cannot connect it in a more real…. Yeah. Nice. Great.
Usually, we try to think of special things to do during Pisces season, like what is this season about? I think one of the things you said, I think it’s interesting, the idea of thinking about sacrifices, what are the sacrifices I do? Why do I do the sacrifices? What do they mean to me? Am I really feeling like I’m making something sacred? Or am I feeling like I’m giving away a part of me and I’m not making it sacred? Because like you said, sacrifice in our culture became more like a negative word, and not so much like a positive word.
Mark: It’s a brilliant point, right? Human life without meaningful sacrifice is just a lesser life, right? In my view, if you’re not making some bigger commitments somewhere in your life beyond your own hedonistic impulses, or selfish orientation, you just simply will not have as much happiness or purpose as people who have a meaningful commitment in their lives. So sacrifice is actually really important. And in a way, what struck me when you were speaking there, are people need to be more conscious of the sacrifices they’re making, and appreciate themselves for it. It’s like when you become unconscious of it, it just starts to become a general burden. And you’re like, “Oh, God, I’m making the kids dinner again, I’ve worked all day and my supervisor doesn’t even think I did a good job…” You have to remind yourself of the greater love. You have to consciously connect with the greater love for your family for the meaning of your work. And if you can’t do that at all, if you literally stare at your work and you see it’s completely meaningless. Well, then maybe you have to think about strategizing a change in your life. You know, and finding something that does speak to you on that level, because I put it to people. One thing in Pisces season you could say, it’s a general truth, but it’s a good time to contemplate it: there is no human life of any great meaning and fulfillment without some degree of sacrifice
Alejo: Yes. So an interesting thing could be, also taking back this idea that we said in the beginning of Pisces being a mutable sign, maybe it’s a good period of time to think about what you want to change to make your life more meaningful.
Mark: I love it. And actually, you’re supported, aren’t you, at the moment Neptune’s been in Pisces for a very long time. If you like the symbolism of your ultimate dream, or the ultimate dream of the culture, Saturn is about to go there. Saturn’s really racing through the last degrees of Aquarius, having spent ages in 20-something Aquarius, it’s suddenly going to hit Pisces very, very quickly in the Spring. And Saturn going to early Pisces is very much like, act on your dreams. Mature, Saturn to me is always a sign of like, can you mature? Can you grow up and accept your adult responsibilities? In Pisces people get confused by that. But can you grow up by taking seriously an aspect of your ultimate dreams? You know, why should you just have to sacrifice all your dreams to grow up? You have to sacrifice some of them, especially the more childish ones perhaps. But actually, it’s not good to sacrifice all ultimate meaning. That produces robots. Saturn isn’t about producing a robot army. Saturn’s about true, mature adults. An increasingly rare phenomenon in certain sections of the culture is actually, I would argue, perhaps in some ways it’s harder to grow up right now. There’s an extended adolescence going on, and extended kind of…. But Saturn in Pisces is very much about maturing because you’ve committed to act on your ultimate dreams or your highest aspirations by yourself.
Alejo: Yeah. And also, again, if we take it back to this idea of this Buddha of compassion being in the real world, and the idea that the transcendental world is not outside of reality, but it’s here. It’s also, I think this maturing of dreams.
Mark: Yes. Now that’s a profound point! I mean, yes. You picked up the absolute bigger picture meaning. Yeah. Well, because It’s all–if you think about the seeker idea, it’s all distant, you have to get there, you have to travel many lands. The seeker by definition has not found, they have not found. If you find it, you realize it’s there every day. This conversation with this interesting person I’ve only met today, who seems to have quite a deep perspective on things, is alive right now. Yeah. My relationship with my wife or child or the work I’m going to do, the people around the world that I’m going to speak to this afternoon and try and help with their life, this is it. This is all real. It’s all intimate. It seems to me the greatest soul work happens when you realize the intimacy of reality, that your inner life and the choices you make day to day, and the way you conduct yourself day to day really does matter. It’s not in some abstract future when aliens come to earth, and you have to join the big heroic bunch and save the day. It’s now, it was never any other time than now. And your life is inherently meaningful and purposeful now. And if you’re not feeling that people – you know, astrology is an inspirational source of rediscovering it, I would argue, and maybe some of the community you meet around the world because of astrology. That’s how it was to me when I was a young person, when I was in my 20s and really first studying astrology. It helped me connect with the great stories, the Buddhist teachings, psychology, but also interesting people around the world. You know, people need to know that they’re not alone enough to take steps. And then when you take enough steps, you realize you are never alone. There is no alone. The dog was always the Buddha of compassion.
Alejo: Yeah, nice. Very good. Thank you. So Saturn goes into Pisces on the 18th of February. I have 10:34pm, but this is GMT, so everybody’s a different timing. And then two days later, we have the new moon. And you were saying before we started recording, you said something very interesting. Like, it might be a little bit of a glimpse of what it might feel when Saturn goes into Pisces, right?
Mark: Yes. You know, I was saying to you before we started that the danger with contemplating large scale astrological stuff is I don’t want to liberalize this, you know. There are 7 or 8 billion people on the planet. The idea that Saturn going into Pisces is going to impact all these people in a very particular way is, I think, bordering on absurd, but you can extrapolate general principles. And if you’re following the larger planetary cycles and trying to meditate on their meaning for your life, then a wonderful way of thinking about Saturn going into Pisces is– and this is even an exercise you can do, like a coaching exercise in a way– people could write down their biggest dreams. Write down three of the most important, fundamental, biggest dreams you have about yourself or about life, and then spend some time contemplating how serious are these? Maybe one of them has to go, because the dream you had as a teenager that you were going to drive a Ferrari when you’re 40, or something, maybe that just wasn’t that significant, or whatever, or you were going to be a famous movie star. You have to look at those dreams, and the first stage of Saturn is to decide what to take seriously. Because human beings can only work on so many things at the same time. You can only do really one or two serious things with your life at any given point. There’s this fallacy of multitasking your life, but I think it’s a fallacy. So Saturn asks you to decide what are the most important dreams? And then it asks you, you know, what is the strategy that you could take to actually achieve something around that dream?
Alejo: Nice. Yes. And Saturn will go into Pisces on the 11th of March, no the seventh of March, right? Ah, I will double check now, I’m confused.
Mark: I’ll look it up. So you could say, in a way, that the last days of Saturn in Aquarius going into Pisces are again a time contemplating this, it’s a great transition time. Yeah, it goes in on the seventh. Yeah, seventh and eighth of March. So it’s happening whilst the sun’s still in Pisces and is interesting because it’s going to go into Pisces whilst the sun’s getting closer and closer to Neptune. So my point is perhaps even more intuitively valid, in the sense, you could say Saturn goes into early Pisces, you could ask yourself the question, what of my dreams do I take seriously? Neptune has been in Pisces for a long time, the kind of sense of the power of people’s dreams or the collective. And then the sun is going to that point of Neptune in the seven or eight days, from the seventh of March to the 16th, or whatever. It’s a really nice period, that week or 10 days, to contemplate this process I’m suggesting, that I might actually do myself, frankly, I’m enamored of this idea. Now I’m gonna do this myself.
Alejo: And how do you feel about this? Because Saturn conjoins Neptune every year, of course, at some point he will meet him. And I always get this feeling. And I usually don’t look at the ephemeris, I always realize later that it’s actually on this exact same period, that I get this feeling, I start thinking a lot about things that I would like to forgive myself for. And the things that I’ve done that I feel like they were wrong. And I would like to ask other people to forgive me. And it always comes up. It tends to come up when Saturn is getting very close to the conjunction to Neptune. After I realized, I started to look at which day this actually happens on. And to choose that day to reflect on the things that I would like to be forgiven for. And sometimes it’s myself, me with myself, let’s say, and sometimes it’s to other people. How do you feel about that? Because it makes sense.
Mark: Brilliant. Yeah, it’s a brilliant move. And what I feel is that I’m talking to a highly intuitive person who I didn’t know. I swear, to anyone listening, I didn’t know half an hour ago, I did not know this person. You know, you’re clearly connected to something inside yourself, aren’t you? Because it’s a very, very powerful thing because the unforgiven aspects will accumulate shame, it will become an infrastructure, like a coat hanger, to accumulate old coats of shame. And people get burdened down, people get to the point where they can’t walk anymore, because they got so much burden from past shame, past mistakes. They dig themselves deeper and deeper into past mistakes. I mean this on an astrological symbolism level, it’s perfect, isn’t it? Saturn coming to Neptune, especially Saturn coming to Neptune in Pisces, I think the highest spiritual ideal, alongside compassion, of Pisces, is forgiveness. And in A Course of Miracles, the Course of Miracles has this idea that the world is the world of perception. And then there is the real world which can never be sullied in a way, right? This kind of spiritually real world. And it argues that there is only one thing in the world of perception that leads you to the real world. And that thing is forgiveness. And you have to forgive so much, until you realize there was nothing to forgive. You have to use it up. And that’s why it says that forgiveness is ultimately unreal. But it’s the only ultimately unreal thing that leads you to the real, because forgiveness will lead you to the place where you realize there was nothing to forgive. And, you know, that’s very Saturn–Neptune, isn’t it? It’s mysterious. People say– astrology students are often tripped up by things like Saturn–Neptune. How do we deal with the thing about boundaries and physical limits, and time, how do we deal with that coming to the thing that is boundless, that is beyond time, maybe? Well, that’s a mystery in life, isn’t it? You deal with that by accepting a spiritual paradox that humans have contemplated for millennia. Astrology isn’t going to become a simple route to escape life’s complexity. So once we understand life’s complexity, we realize Saturn coming to Neptune symbolizes that kind of complexity, of how do we accept the eternal within time? Or how do we accept the possibility of divine love when the world is so apparently full of suffering and struggle? But I think the process you’re describing, personally, is phenomenal. I mean, that’s a deep personal practice. I would argue that’s a more powerful, spiritual practice, at this point in a grounded way, to examine regularly what you haven’t forgiven yourself for, and do your utmost to surrender that. That is a more powerful practice than going off and learning some Eastern religion or, you know, whatever, necessarily, at this point, that what we need is emotionally dynamic practices, where people’s grounded lives, transform from that grounded vantage point of their life without having to go off to the mountaintop, without having to go and become a monk, that fantasy, that Pisces escapist fantasy, “I’ll go and join the monastery there, I’ll go and do a 10 year retreat in the mountains.” And I’m not decrying the people that have done those things. Some great spiritual teachers of the world have emerged in the world, because they did those kinds of things. But it’s just not appropriate for the vast majority of people listening to this podcast. It’s probably not appropriate for you and I. How can we learn from the great spiritual traditions of the world without having to go and become monks or nuns?
Alejo: And also, without making it too rational and too abstract.
Mark: Exactly, without studies or, yeah, just heart! Heart! Feel it, embody it, yeah.
Alejo: Yeah. And I think it’s so hard. Maybe it’s because we are culturally inclined to think so much. But I think it’s so hard. I think we get stuck in reading more and more books. And again, we go back again to this idea that dog was always there, just go.
Mark: Exactly. Exactly. Well, so you could say, couldn’t you. And that’s what astrology is, to me. That story says something about your relationship with your chart, it seems to me people listening to this podcast, probably identify with this, you probably got into astrology because you’re thinking, “I would like a tool of self knowledge. I would like to understand myself better. And I’m going to study this strange circular set of symbols so I can understand myself better.” That’s like the monk going off to the mountaintop. Because what are you trying to find in there? You’re trying to find your soul, in a way. I argue that astrology is like a boat that crosses a certain river or a certain sea to get you to a new land. And then the task is to live in the new land, not worry about the boat anymore. The natal chart is pointing you to your route to the Buddha of compassion, if you like, you know, it’s pointing you to the things you might have to process or understand about yourself or contemplate on the path to a deeper acceptance of life that sees you perceive the meaning and every moment or the compassion or the meaning in every moment. So in a way, the story is almost like our relationship to astrology, we think we have to go off to some specialist monastery and study for 10 years to learn astrology, and astrology is complicated, you do probably have to put in some serious time studying it to really understand it. At the same time, what’s all of the understanding for? Hopefully, it’s to lead you back to greater, enriched compassion, love and meaning in yourself and in your life. But astrology can sometimes get lost and not do that. It suddenly becomes all about the scholarship. And it’s another 10 years in the academic ivory tower of reading ancient astrology textbooks. And there’s some specialized people for which that’s an appropriate path, I’m not trying to knock people. But for the most people who come into astrology because they want to understand themselves emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, realize astrology can only take you so far. It only points you a certain way, and then the rest is your life. The whole point is to live your chart, not study it. Live it. Be it. I am a Pisces, I don’t sit writing theoretical works about Sun in Pisces, I live it. My wife’s a Pisces. Two of the best men at my wedding are Pisces, the other was a Scorpio. It’s like, live it. Learn enough astrology– unless you’re going to become a teacher of it– learn enough astrology that it increases your ability to live. Not so much that it decreases it or becomes a burden.
Alejo: Yeah, I love that. Yes. And you know, I love that you use this image of creating a boat to navigate because we were giving a talk with Darby Costello about Saturn in Pisces. And what you’re saying, the complexity of trying to explain, like what is Saturn in Pisces, and she came up with this idea of Noah’s Ark, the idea of floating and being in this arc to kind of protect your inner self, you know, contain, I would say contain your inner self through this navigation. Because Saturn eventually will come to Aries. And like you were saying you will have to leave the boat and do things.
Mark: Exactly. Saturn in Aries, exactly, is the challenge to act. Saturn in Pisces, the challenge would be to refine your dreams so that they actually are your real dreams. If you think about it, people have different stages of dreams, they have their false dreams, they have their youthful dreams, they have their “everybody’s going to love me and want to have sex with me dreams,” or I drive this fancy car dream or whatever. Yeah? Analyze and refine your dreams. Make sure that they’re your real dreams. Like that phrase, “Be careful what you wish for.” And make sure that what you’re wishing for is actually what you want, you know. Grow up through actually realizing your limitations. Saturn is always about limitation. And even when it comes to the ultimate dreams of your life, Neptune Pisces, there are actually limits to a human life. You will only love so many people, you will only write so many books, you’ll only actually read so many books. You’ll only listen to so much music, you’ll only– let’s say you’re a musician, you’ll only record so many albums, right? Like it’s just finite, that doesn’t matter who you are. That doesn’t matter if you’re the biggest band in the world, you know, you’re only going to make so much. So have a think about Saturn in Pisces as the period of time to contemplate what do I really want the most authentically from my life? And to really refine that process so that the deeper stage of Saturn action at Saturn in Aries changes. Remember though you’ve already got Jupiter in Aries; Jupiter’s already made the cycle change. So on a volitional, faith based vision based level, you’re already being led to the new action. So that’s how complex astrology is. You can’t just follow the Saturn cycle for manifestation. So we realize here that the Jupiter cycle has already gone into Aries. So you’re meant to act on some of the refinement process already. But mainly in terms of understanding or where you’re placing your faith or vision. It’s a very good time period, isn’t it? Jupiter in early Aries to start new projects. And then it’s a good time, Saturn in Pisces, for those new projects to involve, as it were, your bucket list and refining it so it’s not someone else’s bucket list. So you don’t just Google bucket list and the places– “50 destinations to see before you die.” Yeah? Don’t live someone else’s life, stop living someone else’s life. You know, most of those places don’t mean anything to you. Pick. Pick. So what most people do is they read a list like that, they have some vague holiday fantasy, and then they probably end up most of the time not going to any of those places, right? The key is not to be presented it from outside, but to actually listen within to spend some time learning the difference between that which truly emerges from within you, like a soul image. And then maybe there are some times, maybe it is important for someone to go to the Himalayas or the beautiful islands of Greece, you know, maybe they’re led there by something rather than just following the list. That’s what I mean by refining your dream, actually learning to follow the threads of where the dream even emerges from. Don’t just accept the fantasies that the culture came up for you.
Alejo: There is an aspect that’s happening in February, which repeated itself this year. The 23rd of February, which is usually I think considered not so important, but to me it caught my attention because it’s going to be repeated three times. So Saturn, still in Aquarius, will semi-sextile Chiron in Aries. It’s a semi-sextile, so people don’t usually pay so much attention to it. But it’s going to repeat itself in August and in November. So I’m feeling like, again, of course we cannot generalize it, it depends on your chart and we should always see like, in which houses it’s falling–
Mark: You mean a semi square, you mean a semi square?
Alejo: Yeah, sorry, a semi-square. It’s from Aquarius to Aries. So yes, a semi-square. Yes.
Mark: Well, and whilst Jupiter’s conjoining Chiron and therefore expanding that insight. Yeah, I mean, one thing. Just a broader point about Chiron. Chiron was discovered in early Taurus. So it’s already in the last 27–28 degrees before its discovery point. So it’s gone into Aries. So this is Chiron in the culmination. It was discovered in 1977. So it has never done a full Chiron cycle since its discovery. So it’s almost like our understanding of Chiron is coming into consciousness, now. Because it’s getting to the end of its first full cycle of observation by astrologers, if you like. Then the fact that you have that there, emphasized by Jupiter semi-square Saturn. Yeah, I think Chiron will be perceived to be of increasing importance. That’s my sense. Purely synchronistically, or serendipitously, a student of mine sent me a prep they’re doing with another student on Chiron this morning. I haven’t looked at it yet. They sent me the PowerPoint layout. My researcher is working on some intense Chiron material. I’m flagging that I think Chiron is going to come in to a kind of astrological re-exploration in the last few years, I don’t think we’ve caught the entire symbolism of it apart from this wounded healer aspect. But to take that wounded healer aspect for a moment, in this important semi-square, which I think you’re right to identify as important. You know, what stands in people’s way, most of the time in their life, what we hinted out right from the beginning and your even your story has multiple explorations of the wound, not just the wound on the dog, the old wound, but even the wound of the person and keeps going and meditating for 10 years and not discovering the figure. Like what’s our greatest wounding? You know, realize, I would say the vast majority of people are drawn to astrology because they’ve been wounded in a certain way. Because their relationships, someone they really loved didn’t work out, or an expectation or hope they have for themselves about their life didn’t work out, they wanted something for themselves, and it didn’t happen and they turned to astrology to study the fate or the outcomes or the shape of things. In order to understand that, we come back to the very first point you made about Quincy Jones. It’s a genius point. The wounding, the isolation in his family, led him into the private world of imagination. Same thing happened to me in some ways, you know, reading books, reading Greek myths as a small boy, and then reading Tolkien and stuff. Really very young, like, Lord of the Rings when you’re 10. And it takes you six weeks to read the book. And even that’s good going. You know, you spend all this time completely moved by it. You spend a week thinking Gandalf has gone forever, you know, it changes you. It changes you. That’s when I realized that the people that wrote books, even though they were dead, they were still living consciousnesses that I could interact with, they could still sustain you. It was a way of having friends that were not incarnate, if you like, friends from other times and places, even for an isolated child. I think you made a brilliant point, you know, our woundedness, although it hurts and it may require lots of attention and even hospitalization, psychically or whatever, not just physical. They are also great portals into our inner life. You know, we’re in a world where wars rage, where people want there to be so much more justice than there apparently is. Hence all the superhero movies and revenge movies and so and so turns out to be a secret trained CIA operative and he takes all the bad guys now. Because people want that wish fulfillment, they feel the world’s a dark and scary place and we need to get rid of these figures. But it’s inside ourselves that that work really takes place. The Saturn Aquarius going into Pisces work of identifying your real dreams, of identifying you know, what was Saturn in Aquarius? Individuation, you could argue. Take mature action to commit, you know, don’t just think about astrology, maybe make a commitment to do a certain amount of reading or studying or whatever it else is in your life. Saturn in Pisces, the refinement of the dreams. Saturn in late Aquarius, commit to your individuation. Semi-square Chiron in Aries, because to the extent that you haven’t been able to embrace your individuation, you won’t be acting in some area of your life. People accumulate unconscious stress and then they don’t act, they don’t act not because they think it’s not the right thing to do. They don’t act because they’re secretly much more wounded in that area than they like to admit to themselves. So they put off the most important things.
Alejo: So it is semi-square just before Saturn goes into Pisces might be a moment to reflect on this sense of isolation, this woundedness.
Mark: Exactly, well and where is your wound tripping you up? You will not be able to refine your truly deeper relationship to your own dreams and the manifestation of them unless you can define where you self sabotage. You know?
Alejo: Thank you. Okay, so to mention it quickly, so on the 18th of February the sun goes into Pisces. 20 February, we have the new moon at one degree of Pisces. So maybe this could be important if you have a planet there at one degree of Pisces or do you use lunation in oppositions, so if they have a planet in one degree of Virgo?
Mark: I think you can fourth harmonic it, yeah. I mean, even one degree Sag–Gemini. I mean, that’s going to be very close to my Sun. So it’s interesting itself.
Alejo: So that might be kind of triggering all of these thoughts about what new dreams do I want? What new sacrifice should I do? I want to do these kinds of things.
Mark: Well because recognize, right, to refine sacrifice, because people probably hear that word and think why should I make any sacrifice? Remember, greater meaning in your life only comes if you live your life beyond purely personal, selfish terms. An d you could say Mark’s biased, he’s a Pisces, he’s not an Aries, or a Leo. But I’m telling you, it’s a universal truth. If you only have– if you’re isolated, let’s assume you’re isolated. You have multi-millions. You can do whatever you want. You can fly everywhere on a private jet. You can, you know, play out any fantasy for yourself, you will soon and rapidly become unhappy. Look at rock stars, you know, having sex with attractive people, taking drugs, movie stars, are they happy? It’s like there is no happiness that doesn’t involve some sacrifice to the greater life, either the greater body of humanity, individuals that you love, your family, or the greater religious and spiritual life. Right? So knowing that, choose what your sacrifices are, make it conscious, choose them, because the biggest burden of all is not sacrifice. It’s unconscious sacrifice and sacrifices you don’t even realize you’re making.
Alejo: Yeah, it fills you with resentment, then.
Mark: Exactly. Yeah. And it often becomes codependency or you end up having sacrificed your life for your aging, difficult parent, and just having looked after them instead of done anything for yourself, or you’ve sacrificed your life for your wife or your husband, and then you suddenly find out 10 years later when they’re divorcing you that they didn’t even really love you anyway. Those are the things that need exploration, the things that hold people back.
Alejo: Nice. So then the 23rd of February, we have a semi-square between Saturn and Chiron, which we talked a little bit about. Then on the seventh of March, we have the full moon, and with the full moon, Saturn goes into Pisces so I guess it’s also kind of–
Mark: That’s very interesting timing, yeah? And Mercury right there, too, what a line up? Saturn, Mercury, Sun, Neptune? Yeah.
Alejo: Yes. So the full moon happens at 16 degrees of Pisces. I don’t know, I would say perhaps if you have something at 16 degrees of mutable signs, you’re going to feel– you could attune to these and perhaps have some kind of revelation or insights.
Mark: That’s my wife’s Venus and my daughter’s Neptune. My daughter’s Neptune is my wife’s Venus. Yeah. I mean, my daughter loves my wife. She tried to eat her hair the other day. My wife has extraordinary long auburn hair, and my daughter tried to eat it. Neptune right on the IC in my daughter’s chart, right on my wife’s Venus in the fourth, you know this kind of like love bond, intense love bond, she can’t get close enough to her sometimes. What happens past a certain point, what’s happened to me, to try and share something to your listeners– because I’ve been living with astrology for so long, literally coming up to 30 years, and at a relatively high level right from the beginning, because of a strange twist of circumstances in a way, people took me seriously as an astrologer long before I had the ability to deserve that just because of the sort of artistic community I was in at the time, and no one else knew it. So everyone came to me about it, even though I’d only been learning it for like three months. I’ve seen so many charts, and I know so many charts inside my own head. I just know how often charts get aspected. Your natal chart will get lit up all the time. But that’s what’s so beautiful. It’s like I can seem cynical sometimes like, I’ve heard it all before, the different transits. You know, they all go on at such a level. It’s because what I’ve realized is something is happening with your chart all the time. All the time. Yes, there are those once in a lifetime transits, you know, slow moving outer planets hit your Sun or your angle for a year or two, because of their slow motion. There are really big things that happen to people. But actually your charts lit up all the time, all the time. And that’s because life is always significant. You don’t have to feel it. You might be really bored or stuck in your life, and I’m sorry if you are, but life is always significant. And your chart’s always lighting up. And yes, I look at the fourth harmonic every time, to answer your question. So if the New Moon is at one Pisces, I look at one mutable, full stop. A degree or two on either side, even. So the charts being lit up in fourth harmonic terms all the time to me, I read it by the crosses. I read it by its implicit structures. And then the later point at 16, the full moon in March at 16th Pisces– Virgo, obviously with a full moon you’re looking at the axis, Pisces and Virgo, because of the Sun– Moon, but you know, I would also look at Gemini–Sag, yeah. Because I’m just thinking in fourth harmonic terms, I think that’s the structural axis of astrology and is supported by the trines around but the key access is the crosses.
Alejo: What would you think this full moon might…. Would you have any reflection on if you have a planet there?
Mark: Well, I don’t have a short reflection. What is starting to happen is, in the theosophical tradition there were these series of significant full moons, and the Pisces full moon– basically the Aries, Taurus, Gemini moons that follow this Pisces moon, in March, are perceived in the Theosophical tradition relating to the Buddha’s birthday to the Vesak festival, in May, a perception of the Buddha’s birthday that’s symbolic, to link back to your original story. For me, it’s the last in the cycle before the truly crucial moons– or not for me, but for the Theosophical tradition– so I think the Pisces full moon is a kind of culmination. What are full moons, right? They are elevated periods of two or three days, where if you like, the energies rise, just like the tides rise. So they’re just great localized moments in your life for more intense, psychic focus. And then this is the last one prior to the spring, you could say in simpler terms, couldn’t you? This is the last part of Persephone as the Queen of the Underworld, just before we get to the new life of spring. And those ones in April, May, June are perceived in the Theosophical tradition as very significant full moons because of that spring energy, because of its relationship to the symbolic birthday of the Buddha in May. There’s all this same theme, isn’t it? Well, you could say that a full moon is a kind of two day portal, let’s say, to explore your deeper, psychic aspiration. It’s a very good time. What is the symbol of the high tide, if you like, or the moon pulling at you? The bigger moon pulls at you, literally the emotions and psychic energy in you rise up. So it’s a good time for very intense focus on your purpose, or your true aspiration. So it fits in nicely with this theme of us talking about Neptune in Pisces, Saturn going into Pisces, the Sun in Pisces, in this next month. This refinement of your purpose.
Alejo: Nice. Yes. And I’m thinking also when you think about Persephone, I’m thinking of the idea of letting go of some things.
Mark: Exactly. Well, because that is our purpose here, it seems to me. Anyone who’s passed their first Saturn Return has started to accumulate a burden of dust, if you like. Like old furniture. All the time it’s just layering up because we’ve been on this Earth for so long. You have to constantly move it away if you want to retain a sense of the deeper psychic life.
Alejo: Nice, thank you. Okay, so then we said okay, Saturn goes into Pisces, and then on the 20th of March, Sun goes into Aries and we will have another. I will talk a little bit about the Sun conjoining Neptune, which is perfected on the 14th of March, and then on the 20th, Sun goes into Aries. Now we need to kind of wrap up in a few minutes. Sometimes we have some dates for people who like to try to find kind of days in which the energy is flowing more. So I found on the 18th of February, the Moon in Gemini will trine Saturn in Aquarius. So I think it may be also a good moment to… it’s just when the Sun is going into Pisces, it might be kind of the beginning of this whole process that we’re starting to talk about. And then we took the idea of the 14th of March, Sun being conjunct Neptune, we talked a little bit about that. And then on the 15th of March, if you’re looking for more fire, the Moon in Sagittarius will trine Venus in Aries. So if you’re fed up on reflecting on lunar stuff, you can use that date. Great. And sometimes also we like to give our listeners a takeaway mantra or phrase that they can keep to reflect on this.
Mark: Maybe this central idea, in some ways– well, there’s been two– but the most pragmatic one, it seems to me, is the heroic nature of the everyday. The extraordinary nature of ordinary reality, the magic of every day, right? This world is it. You know, your unique conscious, or consciousness, Is it. How do you even reflect on yourself? What is the part of you even studying astrology? This is it. This is the birthplace, this is the world where that happens. And it’s, I would argue, a sacred gift to you. So there isn’t another place to go and do all this transformation. There isn’t this place to find, astrology is not going to lead you through some tombs in a Dan Brown novel under the Vatican to some secret place where someone hands you this globe and goes this is it. This is enlightenment. This is the meaning of your life. There isn’t an answer to the meaning of life. It isn’t a question. It’s not a formula. Life is the answer. Your experience is the answer, your consciousness is the answer, your life already is the answer. If you don’t feel like that, then this whole thing we’ve been talking about, about what a great period this is to reexamine your dreams and what you really want for yourself, that shows how powerful it can be. Because I put it to you. We can’t change everything. I think some people get a bit carried away with this create your own reality. There are limits in this world. But at the same time, you can still do an awful lot more than most people realize, to move your circumstance, to change things around, especially when it comes to just your personal experience of love. I’m not saying you’re earning or becoming president or famous or something. But you can do an awful lot to change your experience of personal relationships and your bonds of care with people around you.
Alejo: Yeah, I agree. Fantastic. Thank you. And then we also like to ask people what are they reading? Are you reading anything in particular now?
Mark: There’s an excellent Bruce Scofield book for the more serious astrologers, which is called The Nature of Astrology, History, Philosophy and the Science of Self Organizing Systems. That’s a serious and heavy read, though, people, it’s not just the kind of inspirational personal astrology book. The personally inspirational book I’m reading, I’ve read it many times, it’s one of the very few books I’ve read multiple times. It’s called Meditations on the Tarot that was originally recorded by an anonymous writer, but it’s actually Valentin Tomberg, who was a kind of student of Steiner’s, who developed his own path and converted to Catholicism and created a kind of Catholic synthesis of visionary mystery teachings.
Alejo: Wow, interesting. I’m now reading The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner, which is a very anthropological, historical book. I don’t know if it has anything to do with Pisces, but it’s what I’m reading now.
Mark: Yes. Well, I mean, yeah. I mean, I have a small child. So, I feel blessed that I get to read at all. When I do get to read, yeah. But I think– oh, I just got a book called, which I’m very much looking forward to reading, called Love Unveiled, by A.H. Almaas, which is the pen name of Hameed Ali, the founder of the Diamond Approach. He’s an extraordinary visionary at his best, but Love Unveiled looks like a very readable, very accessible book on his experience of what love is.
Alejo: Great. So if people want to get in touch with you, what can they do? Or do you have upcoming workshops?
Mark: The key is just to look at the markjonesastrology.com website and go from there, really. I’m sure I’m doing a variety of teachings for Astrology University over the course of the year. My immediate things have been, just to say very briefly, I’ve been teaching over the last couple of years a spiritual psychology training course, a psychosynthesis coaching training after I got into the archive in Florence in 2012, Roberto Assagioli, the founder of psychosynthesis, and I realized his huge relationship to astrology, amongst other things. And then, I’ve been preparing what we call this turning point material, me and my researcher. So studying when artists and visionaries or key people have the single moment in their life that turned everything around and looking at what’s going on astrologically and what can we understand about the nature of transformation when we look at those kinds of things. I’m teaching a class in Beijing over the next eight weeks on the Lunar and Planetary Nodes. Yeah, but really, there’s just loads on the site. There’s loads of free stuff. There’s loads of like courses, there’s a foundational astrology course. There’s a counseling skills for astrologer’s course. One of my great specializations is teaching, as a former therapist and someone who still mentors and coaches people, I’m sharing with people useful skills for the consultation, because it’s about more than just knowing astrology, isn’t it? If you do readings for people, you have to actually communicate and read those people and not just tell them about astrology.
Alejo: It’s just also about how you deliver. So the webpage is Mark Jones astrology?
Mark: Yeah. markjonesastrology.com. Mark with a “k” Jones astrology.com.
Alejo: Thank you. Okay, great. Now for academy of astrology, if you’re interested, 20th of February is going to start a course on Predicting with Progressions with Kelly Surtees. And then we have the second part of Saturn and the Kore Goddess with Safron Rossi on the fourth of March. And talking about Saturn in Pisces, the 18th of March, Lynn Bell will be doing a workshop on Saturn in Pisces. If you want to get in touch with me, my Instagram is @liminalcosmos, my webpage is also liminalcosmos.com. I will be teaching a workshop on unaspected planets on the fourth of March for the Faculty of Astrological Studies. And then the astrology of the hero’s journey. We’re talking about being heroic in everyday life, the astrology of the hero’s journey, on the 30th of March. Okay, great. If you have any feedback, please email us at [email protected]. And if you can share the podcast, that’s fantastic. Mark, thank you so much. This was superb, thank you for being here. Thank you very much.
Mark: Thank you. I’ve really enjoyed it. You’re a surprising person, it seems to me. Yeah. You personally brought a lot of depth and sensitivity to this. Yeah, I really enjoyed it.
Alejo: Great. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Tony: Thanks for tuning in to the Astrology University podcast. Study astrology online with some of the greatest astrologers of our time at www.astrologyuniversity.com, where we offer webinars, online classes and virtual summits to bring you inspiration, connection and insight through the study of astrology. Take good care, and we’ll see you next time.
