Astrology for Thursday, 13 August 2020:

Today Mars in Aries perfects a square with Pluto retrograde in Capricorn. The rulers of rage and the underworld clash in this tense aspect, dragging conflict up from what has been buried, confronting abuses that have been repressed or forgotten, demanding transformation in the places where rage propels us toward destruction. As Judith Butler has said, “How often is sorrow effectively shouted down by rage? How does it happen that sorrow can bring about the collapse of rage? Is there something to be learned about the sources of nonviolence from this particular power of grief to deflate rage of its destructiveness? … Mourning has to do with yielding to an unwanted transformation where neither the full shape and nor the full import of that alteration can be known in advance. This transformative effect of losing always risks becoming a deformative effect. Whatever it is, it cannot be willed. It is a kind of undoing.” What is the grief or mourning that is covered over by rage? Beneath the intensity of whatever anger or righteous indignation that you may feel, what is the mourning that you carry that—if given the opportunity—has the potential to transform you in ways that can be neither willed nor known in advance? The Moon in Gemini makes a sextile with its ruler Mercury in Leo. In the wake of breaking open whatever part of us resists the immensity of the grief we are holding, the light of new understanding finds its way through. Perhaps we find that we can share parts of our hearts that have been bound up in the crypts of rage and grief to which we denied ourselves passage.