I keep coming back to writing about projection, I think it’s because I want to know where all the energy leaks out from my astrological chart. The little pictures of the planets are dotted around my chart, why can’t I have access to them? Where am I seeping out their energies, if I’m unable to enjoy them for myself?
I give them over to other people, things and ideas, of course.
I remember when I was in my early twenties living at home with my parents. Both my mom and my best friend worked for the same government branch, and my friend recently got promoted to a position where she supervised my mom. I was goading my mom on because she seemed satisfied to stay in an employee position and get told what to do for the rest of her career. My mom was sweeping the kitchen at the time that I was saying this and I remember her clutching the broom and exclaiming, “Yes! Yes I WANT SOMEONE TO TELL ME WHAT TO DO!!” She was kind of laughing in her exclamation, but there was frustration and longing in her voice. Firmly entrenched in the judgemental daughter phase of early womanhood, I saw this as a weakness in my mother and saw myself as self-directed and too good? Too full of potential? Too enterprising to have anyone need to tell me what to do.
Now in my forties, I see how wrong I was to judge.
One of the admission criteria for entrance into the Ontario Association of Jungian Analysts training program is that you have to have a masters degree, or at least be able to prove that you are self-directed in your studies. I don’t have a masters degree and I can go through bursts of self-directedness, but for the most part, most of my productivity in life has come from having someone tell me what to do. Either by having a boss, a god, a teacher, a youth pastor or a father, I have worked harder for superiors than for myself. I have even stayed in terrible work situations for fear of being left alone with my bullying Saturn, my progenitor of discipline. Saturn can either direct us from within us (self-employment, self-directedness, etc) or from outside us (employment, etc.), so you can’t really complain about your boss because your boss is the manifestation of your Saturn in your chart (I mean, you can too). I would love to be more self-directed, that is definitely the goal, but I know I’d need someone to project my inner authority onto if I ever got into OAJA. Is that bad?
I was thinking about this when I was out for a walk one night, and I walked past the Presbyterian church on the corner that hosts AA meetings on Friday nights. The people were milling around outside on a smoke break and I realized they were allowed to project onto a higher power, and that was a sign of strength. Step 1- admit you’ve hit rock bottom and step 2- believe in a higher power to bring you to wholeness.
I was talking to my ex tonight on the phone and we were talking about socially acceptable projections and shameful projections. He always calls me out for depending on astrology to tell me what to do, and in my mind, it makes a whole lot more logic than Christianity. For reasons I’ll never understand, Christianity is a much more socially-acceptable haven for one’s projections, but having been a Christian for about 35 years, I am quite confident in saying that projecting onto a father-figure god was an absolute waste of my outwardly projected saturnian energy. As a young Four whose ego-identity was constructed around my uniqueness, one of the things I longed for most was for guidance from a caring father-figure who knew me most intimately, who knew specifically what I was born to accomplish, and who had a purpose for my life. It was a decades-long pleading to “please show me what I should do with my life, and I will do it!” The begging got me absolutely nowhere, either in directing me to a me-appropriate career, or even in finding a me-appropriate skill or hobby. How I cried for a voice that came from outside me, but whenever I heard a “voice”, I kept identifying it as coming from within me, either from my head or my desire, and then I doubted that it was the right path. In fact, the Sunday I finally left the church for good was one morning when the pastor said, “We don’t know anything, God knows everything.” Bam, with that sentence, I was done. There is no holy spirit whispering to me, the direction I get either comes from my logic, my desire (heart), my intuition (my gut); and later in life, coincidences and synchronicities (including tarot and astrology), or dreams. Everything else is flotsam and jetsam, the same associations tarot readers sift through when looking at cards to sew archetypes together into a narrative.
Last week, I purchased two horary astrology readings regarding two very pressing questions in my life. With this astrologer, you can purchase readings with a 1-day lead time, a 2-day lead time, or a 3-day lead time. I chose the 3-day option because then I’d have the answers by Friday and could spend the weekend doing whatever needed to be done to roll out the red carpet for what the planets were doing. I was pumped for these two readings, but Friday came and I didn’t hear from him. Saturday went by painfully slowly as I refreshed my phone a hundred times – nothing. I wrote to him [this] Sunday morning asking him not to forget me, and he never even replied to that e-mail to explain his silence. I did some horary readings about the whereabouts of my readings and they confirmed that they weren’t coming; something must not be right in his world. So this morning, being bereft of guidance and exhausted with my powerlessness to make my will incarnate something into the physical world, I said out loud to myself, “OK if I have no one telling me what to do, this is what I am going to do”. I listed about three things that I willed:
- sell my house
- replace the mirror in my bathroom
- get a plumber in for my tub
(The latter two being in service to the first.) The first decision was obviously the most important, and the guidance came to me through various sources:
- head: my ex (another one) created an Excel spreadsheet to compare cost of living across different scenarios
- head: I have done extensive price comparisons on MLS since February this year (I also did this in 2023 so I have a good idea of the market in my area)
- head: I have met with a realtor who gave me a decent projection on what I could get for my place
- head: In my solar return chart [my astrological chart for my upcoming birthday year], it shows that my fourth house lord (real estate) is closely conjunct the south node (separation).
- heart: I wanted the profit from my house in my bank account.
For better or for worse, I’m going to push forward this week with my will as the sole engine. My agent told me that I could expect to be on the market for 120 days, which I dread and I want to come out at the right time and at the right price. Those are the two questions that nag at me now.
Last week- perhaps influenced by tiktoks of eager Latinos celebrating their vote for Trump, I don’t know- I texted my Excel ex and said how earnestly I wanted to hire someone I could give my willpower to as a surrogate “director”, who could temporarily take over my life, make the right decisions to get me out of my jam and give me back the keys when I was out. He replied, “I think that’s a cult”. I think the ideal person would be a rich, well-connected father but I replied I’d take a cult as long as it was a legal and morally-driven entity that had to give me back my life when I asked. In the absense of an outer Saturn to direct me on market timing and to confirm strategic pricing, I move forward on my inner Saturn (we’ll see!).