spiritual alchemy

I recently retrieved one of the jewels in my audio library, the series «Entering the Castle» by Caroline Myss, a genius revisiting of Teresa de Ávila´s work «The Inner Castle». I remember listening to it for the first time back in June 2013, when I was still pretty much in a constant tug-of-war with my own Mystic archetype, insisting that such a sacred pattern could fit the agenda of my wounded ego.

By that time it had not yet occurred to me that Astrology and Kabala can be – to me they are, in fact- interdependent symbolic languages that pave our way to Illumination. As intuitive astrologers we are feeling called to hone more and more the way in which we both feel and intuit any chart we are working with, and this is more and more possible now in the midst of all this vibrant Aquarian energy. The psycho-spiritual level in chart reading is more desirable, even more accessible, now than ever with all this Aquarian Light pouring down on us.

In this light I have felt drawn to listen again, with re-wired perceptual filters thanks to our Teachers, to the series Entering the Castle, where Myss explains the 3 Stages to the Mystical Experience, among which the first one happens in what she calls «the lower mansions», the Stage of Purification. This is where, she says, you find yourself with all the conflict that needs to be purified within, «discovering your reptiles» as Teresa herself said: the irritancy of the Shadow part of ourselves, our power struggles, our shadow emotions, our addictions, our interior dilemmas, our envy, jealousy, etc. These are all «reptiles» and the contents of the lower mansions, where our inability to love, to love ourselves, to love others and our judgments of ourselves and others are also included.

When entering this stage, Myss directs us to take notes, to write on what we in your soul are dialoguing about, because then we will find that our soul continues to talk to us. The lower mansions are about purification, and they are rigorous work: they are about practice, not about perfection. They are about us coming to say «I love this life I have», and getting to «stop being tormented by this new age propaganda that the life you have is not enough», Myss says, and the manufactured disease propaganda and psychic viruses that you should have more, be more, do more… Based on shame and spiritual perfectionism.

In the stage of Purification when scaffolding our intuitive capacities there is only one ambition. And that is Surrender. We realize how ambition may have been preventing us from feeling grateful with the life we have: our bodies, our eyesight, everything we have eclipsed by insisting that we are not happy because we are not getting what we want, and which makes us become greedy, competitive and vain. It makes us bitter and then we cannot hear any guidance. In other words, eclipsing our present moment makes our intuitive channel stay cluttered, fragmented and shaky.

In intuitive-astrological terms, I see this Purification stage as the natural realms of both the signs of Virgo and Scorpio, the natural 6th and 8th houses, the 20th and 24th paths of wisdom in the Tree of Life, respectively. The Scorpio stage of bio-psycho-mystical development resonates with the archetype of Death, in that it leads us to Acceptance: We start to activate the mystical heart by Accepting what Is, when we accept to feel life in its own terms. By necessity, we will oftentimes come into acceptance through subsequent dark nights and the de-layering of what is unauthentic in our ego and self-concept. The seeds of compassion herald a new life in our courage and willingness to let everything that we do not need any more burn away.

The Intuitive potential promised in the Sun and the highly intense feeling nature of Venus, then, meld together so that we can feel renewed enough to refine the structures and set the adequate scaffolding to keep on receiving intuitive guidance, once we have cleared the channel to a certain degree through a tipping point. And this is where Virgo and the Hermit archetype are the most precious energies at our disposal, because they are the forces that enable us to keep on tapping into our Essence and becoming those self-esteemed vessels to channel all the Light pouring down on us, incrementally, I would say. Hence, I see the Sun-Venus and Sun-Jupiter aspects (or the absence of them) as clauses in our Soul Contract, through which we can tap into all this Purification potential that facilitates a rewiring of our relationship to our intuitive capacities, while practically and psycho-spiritually, shamanic-ally sustaining our homecoming to the Soul.

My suggestion is that we can intuitively feel many nuances of how this sacred process of scaffolding through Saturn and Shadow work happens in any given chart, and how we can be individually proactive in such process – a process, indeed, of inner creativity. We can do so by looking at both the direct and indirect aspects that the Sun makes to Venus and Jupiter in the chart. If such aspects are not explicit, we can track them through indirect sources, such as natal Venus and/or Jupiter Retrograde -or Stationary- condition, and also through rulership and house placements. For example, the Sun in a chart may make no natal aspects to Jupiter, but if it is in Sagittarius and/or placed in the 9th house, the connection is already there.