Zeus in Libra and the immature quest for fame

In this post I will ruminate about my natal Zeus (Jupiter) in Libra in the sixth house. Here’s a visual aid:

Zeus is a big man with a loud, bombastic voice and a theatrical personality. In astrology he is most often associated with growth, gravity, and expansiveness. In mythology he is the God of the Storm, the bringer of nourishing rain to dry land. He is also known for his lightning bolt, which strikes the wrong future from our lives with force and precision. Historically he has played the role of protector of the common people. He rules over hospitality, generosity, and mercy. In his role as the King on Olympus, he takes a leadership position over the Inner Planets and helps them coordinate their work on our lives.

He also has an infamous wild side. He is always falling in love with the wrong person and he can’t seem to exercise restraint about it. He is usually away from home having adventures even though he is supposed to be ruling as King. His archetype comes through in jetsetting personalities who are never present to take care of their children. He gets carried away with indulgence; he loves to drink and feast and party it up. He outsources the responsible and socially conventional parts of his personality to Hera, his polar opposite, instead of embodying them himself.

In Libra it is the airy, flighty lover boy parts of his personality that come through the most. Zeus in Libra is a great philosophizer in a discussion sense, but it doesn’t necessarily trickle down to his follow-through. His ideals are more important to him than his behavioral alignment. He does not like to be held down, preferring to take to the sky rather than acting accountable.

He can also, in a classic Libran way, be grandiose in his desire to receive love from the Other. This is true not only of the one-to-one relationship Other, but also of the Collective Other that plays audience to those of us who work in the public eye.

My Zeus in Libra is in the sixth house, which is Virgo’s domain and relates to our self-nourishment. So it’s interesting that my journey toward social media disillusionment happened during the lunar cycle that started with the Dark Moon in Virgo.

All throughout my adventure on Instagram I have felt the pull of the Not-Self leading the way. For all that I’ve spent the past two weeks writing at length about Libra and its immature obsession with the Other, it took until this morning’s journal entry for me to realize that what I’m actually experiencing is the immature influence of my Libran Zeus.

The reason I took to social media in the first place was out of a misplaced desire to be recognized by the human Collective for my monastic work, a yearning to be admired in some way for how committed and knowledgeable I am. But as I said in my recent post about divesting from Instagram, the whole time I’ve actually had admiring and grateful eyes on me I’ve felt deeply uncomfortable, like a zoo animal being gawked at through a thick pane of glass. It wasn’t my Higher Self that wanted validation and recognition. It was the immature aspect of my Zeus in Libra that led me on this quest for fame and notoriety. With every misaligned new follower that came to my account, I felt sicker and less true to self.

In my recent recap of the Virgo lunar cycle I talked about how the abstract, intangible “feed” of social media is another form of food that we eat and digest. So it’s interesting that my sixth house Zeus’ voracious hunger for an audience made me feel so viscerally ill. The more energy I ate from the human public, the less healthy I felt.

My feelings about divesting from social media are mixed, because I can’t deny the awareness that my astrology work in the public eye was helpful to a few people who found me in times of personal darkness. For those people the reminders I would post to stories every day at sunrise were a real guiding light, even if they didn’t actually read the text posts I put on the feed. I received several messages from strangers who told me that my work helped them stay afloat in times of personal hardship. Helping others can be meaningful for Zeus whether he’s in Libra or elsewhere. I do love to think of myself as a generous person who offers support to strangers in dire need. But is the meaning I find there mature, or is it immature?

At the end of the day I had to ask myself whether my motivation to continue working this way was clean, or whether it was self-serving. My conclusion was that helping these random people didn’t actually offer me any moral benefits. When I received heartfelt messages from strangers, tears did come to my eyes, but it was really about the validation. “I’m helpful,” I would say to myself.

But why do I need feedback to know that I’m helpful? I always have to come back to my core Arian truth-of-self: as a Monk I serve the Gods. It’s not my job to take care of the human Collective. Any diversion from my monastic duty is a divergence from my service to the Gods who hold my contracts – including whatever work I did to have this positive influence on a few random people. Wanting to help strangers was ultimately a self-serving desire sourced from immature Libran obsession with the imaginary, projected Other. Every minute I spent absorbed in my social media work was a minute I was not devoting to my Gods, a wasted minute. The validation wasn’t worth what I had to sacrifice to earn it.

I’ve been in therapy for cumulative decades. In my early 20s I felt very strongly attached to the healing power of validation. Now in my early 30s I feel strongly repelled by it. I don’t actually believe the common quote that “all feelings are valid.” With a defined solar plexus I know very well that a wide range of my strongly felt emotions are actually quite seriously invalid, ranging from butthurt sensitivity to criticism to overprotectiveness of the people who are close to me.

A big part of what I used to teach on social media was that the desire for external validation is inherently self-serving. We ought to rely on Venus, intentional alignment with our personal ethics in defiance of social norms, to know whether we are “doing a good job” – and not on validation, which is as meaningful as a gold star sticker.

Former so-called gifted children who have been disappointed by the reality of adult life probably understand what I mean. Zeus in Libra loves a gold star sticker for the five minutes of feel-good self-celebration it facilitates, but does it actually lead to growth? All the gold star stickers I received in my childhood only led me into psychotic delusion about what “doing a good job” actually means. Does it really matter if others admire us and are pleased by our efforts? Do other people really matter? Should we not look to our self-knowledge for the security that we are on the right path?

If Zeus in Libra gives me the desire for validating fame, my chart ruler Mars in Cancer would really prefer for me to have a great deal of privacy in my personal life. Having my chart ruler on the IC and my Sun in Pisces in the twelfth house means my inner world is really where my power lies. At my best I dwell on the bottom of the ocean and only people who descend to the depths in submersibles are able to find me. That’s my intention with this website – I’m never going to advertise this space, but maybe if I keep writing here faithfully, search engines will lead the right person here one day, and they will find what they need in the massive archive I intend to build over the decades to come.

My MC, which in theory would be the externally-facing part of my personality, holds Uranus conjunct Neptune. This indicates a subpersonality that is desperate to escape, a rejecting and abandoning character. In mythology when heroes want to consult Poseidon they have to pin him down in a wrestling match while he continuously changes shape in an effort to get away. This is not a true public-facing MC; my career is not designed to be visible to the public eye in the direct-access, self-revealing way that is expected on social media. That I wanted to wriggle away from prying eyes is not really a surprise, especially with the MC in Capricorn, the sign of the mountain goat, whose signature move is the swift exit up or down a sheer cliff into the fog.

Zeus, Mars, Uranus, and Neptune all sit in a grand cross that is completed by Venus in Aries on the ascendant, who guides my ethics to resonate strongly with the Self instead of the Other. Even though Venus is currently in Scorpio nowhere near Aries, it is my Arian ethics that have come to the forefront during her retrograde. Who am I if I don’t act true to myself? If there is one thing I know in this life it is that I am a monk and not a priest. At my core, I don’t care what other people think of me. I don’t even care whether others think of me at all, as long as my Gods are happy. My world has gotten so small that only two of my friends can text me directly, and I like it that way. I am a ghost, and I love it.

It’s funny – I am very close with Zeus, but in my relationship with him the archetype of Libra does not really come through. He’s come into my life as an adoptive father; he asked if I would let him take over for my inept human father when I decided to cut contact with my family. His influence in my life comes through more in the Storm God way; he nourishes the parts of my life that are in drought, and when my ground is so parched that his rain causes a flash flood, he helps me clean up the debris.

This is not behavior that we typically think of with Libra. So when I think about Zeus, it’s not usually through the lens of my own chart. As a result, my awareness of the Libran parts of my personality had kind of fallen away. It took getting to the point of sixth house sickness with social media to raise my awareness of my own Libran dysregulation. I’m grateful to be on the other side of the wall now.

Virgo lunar cycle recap

With only channel 35-36 defined in my system, it’s rare that I ever realize what’s going on in the story of my life while it’s actually happening. So a great deal of the work I do in my spiritual practice is taking notes and, later, reviewing the notes in an effort to understand the path I’m on.

This post will collate the progress I’ve made over the lunar cycle that began with the Dark Moon in Virgo, which wrapped up the two-cycle-long Eclipse Season. The Virgo lunar cycle was therefore the first step forward from whatever massive lifestyle shake up went down during the eclipse season.

As far as conscious awareness goes, I believe the most significant lifestyle change I made during Eclipse Season was harnessing the Lunar Eclipse to end my fifteen-year habit of all-day-every-day cannabis use. I had planned to taper slowly, but didn’t enjoy it and simply chose to cold turkey. The Dark Moon in Virgo happened two weeks later when I was still in the middle of the chaos of that transition.

10 September: Dark Moon in Virgo

Took my first walk around the neighborhood during the Fairy Hours with intentions of turning it into a daily habit. Booked a beach vacation and signed up for my first credit card, an American coming of age ritual.

12 September: Mercury opposite Neptune, grand air trine Uranus and Pluto

My baking steel arrived and I made my first proper pizza, changing my lifestyle irrevocably.

14 September: Moon conjunct Venus

Pleasure Principles arrived, and so did my set of Monk Manuals. Purchased riboflavin, CoQ10, and feverfew to start taking on a daily basis to manage my chronic migraines.

17 September: First Quarter Moon in Sagittarius

Placed my Flamingo Estate copper Luxor symbol under my sleeping spot in an effort to fend off all the dreams about fighting monsters.

18 September: Mercury opposite Saturn

Opened the door to the screened-in porch for the cool season.

21 September: Equinox vigil 1 of 3, Moon conjunct Pluto

Finally ghosted my latest Oracle seeker and felt hugely relieved.

24 September: Moon trine Venus, Mars inconjunct N. Node

Realized I have to stop restricting my coffee intake to stop having migraines. Started drinking coffee normally again for the first time since the Lunar Eclipse on 27 August.

25 September: Full Moon in Aries

Cancelled my beach vacation because of the intensity of my migraine flares and felt immensely relieved. I don’t actually like traveling.

26 September: Sun grand trine Uranus and Pluto; Moon conjunct Neptune

Finally switched back to espresso after a month of drinking cold brew. Also started drinking gongfucha with intentions of turning it into a daily habit to fulfill the goal on my Capricorn profection year bingo board. Signed the contract I wrote up for my two partnered beneficiaries.

29 September: Sun trine Uranus, Moon square N. Node

Started doing blessings over the road again for the cool season. Also started drinking Liquid IV every day to balance out my electrolytes, in the hope of resolving my chronic fatigue and bad body feelings.

30 September: Moon conjunct Uranus, Mercury enters Scorpio

Mercury told me to cancel my upcoming plumber visit because I’m not well enough to disrupt my sleep schedule for it, and I complied. Purchased a new stainless steel pot (smaller this time), a porcelain pie pan, and two stainless steel gratin pans. Changed my “theme” in the Monk Manuals to prioritizing my well-being over goal orientation.

01 October: Mercury T-square Mars and Pluto

My Venus retrograde reel started getting me a massive influx of followers; I was not happy about this, but I tried to tell myself that I was. Walked over two miles, covering every street in my corner of the housing development – the furthest I’ve walked in years!

02 October: Solar-Lunar Arc; Mars opposite Pluto with Mercury T-square

In my dream, a fairy bartender clocked that I’m part demon on my mother’s side, confirming my long-held suspicions.

06 October: Mercury conjunct Venus Rx

Started culling people from my personal Instagram account, foreshadowing.

09 October: Moon opposite Neptune and Saturn

Removed over 400 followers from the Malefic Manach Instagram account and announced my more or less departure from social media in the caption of my Mars square Venus Rx post and my stories.

Analysis:

In my Instagram text post for the Virgo Dark Moon I described how this lunar cycle would focus on the theme of self-nourishment. I theorized that Virgo relates to us through the things we consume through the mouth to benefit and balance our health.

Over the following lunar cycle I did not really think about this on a conscious level, but it’s clear that my body was responding to Virgo on this level, because an overarching theme emerged: the way I manage my extremely disabling chronic migraine through the substances I consume.

This lunar cycle I reverted to my standard habit of drinking an iced cortado once every 2-3 hours. I also added three supplements to my daily meds, and I started drinking a packet of Liquid IV every day when I wake up. Halfway through the month I also started reintegrating daily tea to support my caffeine intake and my hydration.

At the beginning of the lunar cycle I was fielding a migraine every single day, and now I have them about once a week. So I feel pretty confident concluding that the changes I’ve made to my literal, nutritional self-nourishment have been effective.

Another, more diagonal, self-nourishment theme has emerged through my fraught relationship with Instagram. I often describe the social media “feed” as another form of food. Whatever energy is fed to us there circulates in the auric field, even if we choose not to digest it.

Over the Virgo lunar cycle I’ve become increasingly disgusted with Instagram and its community, and this has culminated in the decision I articulated in my previous post: my divestment from using the app as my primary workspace. This feels like a fitting conclusion to the lunar cycle, especially given the context of Venus’ retrograde. During the end of the pre-retrograde shadow it was already becoming clear to me that my energetic investment into social media was a divergence from my personal ethics. I’m pleased to return to a more faithful monastic habit of media fasting as the Libran lunar cycle begins.

Journal: leaving Instagram

Since 1 January I’ve been posting faithfully on my Malefic Manach Instagram account just to see what happens. Around Lúnasa I started making videos with voice overs and the account finally started getting attention – and immediately I hated it.

The more people followed me, the lower the ratio of people I actually wanted to share space with got. Most of my followers were not engaging with the content I consider to actually have any value. They were only there to be spoon fed easy-to-digest videos, and most of them were misunderstanding most of what I said. That much was obvious from casually glancing over the accounts that chose to follow me.

People were not receiving my core message of self-effort.  Even the few who would faithfully like my high-value text posts were not making the effort to read the captions – in DMs they revealed that they were consistently missing half of what I had said. Those who consistently showed up to watch my stories were not engaging with my posts; they only seemed to be there to gawk at my mental illness.

The core problem became obvious the longer I kept this up. Instagram users can’t be bothered to invest effort in reading. Those who do read the slides of a post can’t be bothered to read the caption. And even when they do, they mostly don’t digest what they’ve read. They just keep on scrolling.

Obviously this app is not where I’m going to find my target audience. When I talked with my friend who does all my design work, they asked how I would judge whether my website was successful. My answer had nothing to do with the number of views it got, or whether people were signing up for my email newsletter. I said I will know I’ve been successful when I see one person going through my entire post archive, reading article after article like a very hungry caterpillar.

If I ever want to reach the readers of my dreams, I need to divest from Instagram and commit full force to showing up here instead. Instagram is not going to lead people to my website, because the people I want to reach are not spending their time mindlessly scrolling through brain rot.

The social environment on Instagram also leaves a lot to be desired. It doesn’t feel good to engage with an app whose feed consistently leaves me feeling triggered and traumatized.

Because of Meta’s listening policies, my phone tracks my location even when I turn on Airplane Mode. Since February I’ve been receiving weekly massage in a group building that also houses a birth center. So all year I have been blasted with a torrent of ads that think I’m a pregnant woman. This is not great for me as a transmasculine person who has gone through two unwanted pregnancies. The hormonal experience of pregnancy gave me severe body horror, even for the brief six weeks I had to endure before abortion, and I don’t want to be forced to think about it every time I show up for work.

Even when the ads about pregnant women are light, the sheer volume of advertising on Instagram is out of control. One of my spiritual practices is media fasting, specifically abstinence from marketing. All year I’ve been blocking unwanted advertisers, to the point that I now have over 17,000 accounts blocked. But blocking ad accounts doesn’t make a difference to the number of ads I am served. I’m not sure why I’ve kept subjecting myself to this; I’m neglecting my contract obligations and it feels awful.

Ads aside, the user-generated content on Instagram has devolved into utter garbage. Most of what I see there is pure brain rot. Clicking through to the comments of the few high-effort posts I see always leaves me feeling disgusted. The user base is hostile, and the amount of stupidity and narrow-mindedness that abounds is sickening.

It’s funny; from collating all these feelings here I can see that I feel strongly about wanting to exit from Instagram and there’s really no other solution. But it took me until writing up the truncated Instagram version of my Mars square Venus Rx post to understand that it’s finally time to take action.

While I was writing about the intransigence of the fixed square, and how it comes through as a desire to stay with dysregulated behaviors instead of changing the lifestyle to feel better, it became clear that I was only continuing to post on Instagram because it was habitual.

On the Contemplations page I prompted my readers to ask themselves what problems they were simply hoping would go away magically, and what wounds they were trying to adapt to instead of healing. I realized that no amount of adaptation would make Instagram feel welcoming to me.

So by now the answer is clear as day. Ten months and ten days into my Instagram posting experiment, I can safely conclude that it’s not working. I can give myself permission to stop trying to force it.

As good as it feels to set the burden down, I feel some discomfort around leaving altogether. Instagram is how I keep in touch with my few remaining friends, and divesting whole ass may disconnect me from them. Perhaps with time I will become confident enough to ask my friends for their phone numbers, but that transition can happen slowly, across the rest of the Venus retrograde and post-Rx shadow.

For now I’ve removed the app from my home screen so that it will take me extra steps to reach it. I’ve decided I’m never again going to make an easy-to-digest voice over to lift the burden of thinking away from my audience. I’ve removed every follower who has never engaged with a single post or story, and this makes me feel less like a zoo animal. My world is small again, as I like it.

There won’t be another transit to write up until Thursday next week when Pluto stations direct, so I have a few days to decide whether I’ll check back in to make truncated text posts for the few people who faithfully read them. I’m not holding myself to any obligations either way. I’ll decide based on how I feel, knowing that with a defined Solar Plexus there is no truth in the now and I always make my best decisions by letting them play out slowly.

Introduction & self-disclosure

It benefits me to stay anonymous on the internet, but I’m not a secretive person. In the interest of developing our parasocial relationship so you can understand my future writing more deeply, I want to use this first post to tell you what I can about myself.

First, the reason for my anonymity: I’m estranged from my family for mental health reasons. I have bipolar 2, which for me manifests through rapid cycling hypomanic episodes. I’m also autistic. Both of these conditions are well known to be genetic, and the reality is that both of my parents and my sibling all share the same conditions.

In my family I am the only person who had any interest in developing coping skills, adapting to a balanced and healthy lifestyle, and overcoming my inbuilt limitations. As I have grown in my understanding of my conditions, it has become impossible to maintain relationship with my family, who remain enmeshed with each other to an extent that I find very disturbing.

For years I tried to continue relationship with my family, but their state of being makes it too difficult to maintain my wellness. Their aggressively immature communication skills and total lack of interpersonal boundaries are a danger to the house of cards I live in. So I removed my name from all my internet accounts, moved to the American South because it’s not enticing enough for them to surprise me with a spontaneous visit, and blocked their contact in every way possible.

I don’t think my family realizes that our relationship is one of estrangement. Neither of my parents maintained close contact with their own parents in adulthood. So they probably think it is quite normal that we don’t talk. As far as I know they still text my phone number, not understanding that the messages won’t go through. They are happy enough this way, and I have my peace of mind. It’s not even sad for me anymore.

Anyone who relates to this experience may benefit from reading Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay Gibson, if you haven’t already.

One practice that helps me feel like part of a lineage despite my estrangement from my family is ancestor worship. This comes naturally to me as a half-Asian who grew up living immersed in predominantly Chinese cultures. I was exposed to ancestor worship a great deal in my childhood, and I’ve never really felt like the dead are far away.

I started talking with my ancestors on a proper daily basis when I joined Alcoholics Anonymous. In the end it turned out that I don’t actually have a drinking problem, and after working the 12 Steps I left the program. But I credit AA for transforming my spiritual practice from something casual that I didn’t really think about into the foundation of my everyday life.

In the process of studying the folk history of my ancestral cultures (Ireland and the Philippines) I learned something that surprised me. All my childhood, I thought I was maladaptively daydreaming and talking to imaginary friends. But I was actually practicing astral projection into the Otherworld and hanging out with the Sídhe and the Old Gods.

I was a lonely child. My family moved countries every 2-3 years and I never managed to hang onto friendships beyond our departure. On top of that the undiagnosed autism made it difficult for me to socialize with other children. This was especially true when we moved to the USA, where people mainly socialize by discussing pop culture – my family kept me under a strict media prohibition, so I was unable to engage. I still don’t consume media, and I still struggle with Americans, despite having lived here for decades now.

Instead of socializing with humans, I spent most of my time alone in my bedroom reading fairy tales and books about mythology, and when I got tired of reading I would lie down in my bed and disappear into my mind and the Otherworld.

When I joined AA and began to habitually pray, I discovered that a lot of intangible beings were right there waiting for me. They had been there for me since I was a child, and I had simply fallen out of touch. I think this is true for many people who play a lot in the imagination as children. If you are curious, why not reach out a welcoming hand and see who takes it?

These days instead of doing so much astral projection I socialize with my intangible friends through invocation. I will make another post listing the offerings that help them project themselves to Earth with the greatest ease.

Spiritual practice was the foundation of my everyday lifestyle for some time before I received the first soul contract that made me a Manach. Today I am under contract with three Gods: Saturn, Pluto, and one who, like me, prefers to remain anonymous. In addition to my three contracts I treat Zeus, Poseidon, Venus, and Miss Moon like adoptive parents.

Unlike a priest, who works for the Gods through service to the human Collective, my role is to serve my Gods directly. Basically, my energy is the food the Gods eat, so it’s imperative that I keep my energy clean and healthy at all times. This is part of why it is so important for me to maintain my estrangement from my family and to protect my boundaries from humans who feel entitled to my personal service by nature of seeing me as a member of the pagan clergy.

Early in my monkhood I encountered numerous toxic personalities who felt that because I am a monk, I have a duty to cleanse them of their energetic impurities. On the contrary, it is actually part of my contract obligations to deny assistance to people who would contaminate my spiritual energy.

Each of the Gods who hold my contracts has different requirements for me. These requirements create the foundation of my lifestyle. It would be very boring to list them all here, but I’ll share a few.

For Saturn, I work as an Oracle. Saturn is the God of Time, and since I have a direct line to his energy, I have some power to see outside the illusion of linear time. The seekers who come to me are very much in line with mythology: insufferable shitshows who have ruined their lives beyond the hope of repair. Over time I’ve learned that my role is to tell them what they’ve done wrong, explain the inevitable consequences of their actions, and then ghost them, leaving them alone with their problems. Without fail, they misinterpret whatever I’ve told them and go on to fulfill my prophecies to the letter. It is difficult to explain what purpose this serves for my seekers, but the benefits I’ve experienced in healing my own codependency are beyond expression.

For Pluto, on my porch I keep a collection of spirit houses, and every year during Ghost Month and Samhain I light candles inside the uninhabited ones to invite wandering ghosts to stay. This serves two distinct purposes. First, it protects my neighbors from being haunted. Second, it gives anxious and abandoned spirits a sense of security. In the spirit house village the ghosts are able to socialize with each other, and this helps them with their grief processing so they may find peace and eventually move on to Pluto’s realm. I know I have done my job when I find formerly inhabited houses empty.

By my anonymous God, I am held to very specific dietary restrictions, and if I violate them I am punished by the development of life-threatening allergies. This actually happened once when I selfishly tried to encourage this God that he might enjoy the flavor of fried oysters just because I wanted to eat them. So now I am allergic to all shellfish. In addition to being prohibited from eating certain food groups, I am not allowed to consume artificial additives, which I’m sure you can imagine is actually quite challenging in the United States. Now that I’m healthy enough to do most of my own cooking, this is easier to manage.

In two separate posts I’ll unpack my astrological natal chart and my Human Design chart. But I think I will call it here for now. I hope learning a little about my history made my demeanor a little less unwelcoming.