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.

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.

10 October: Dark Moon in Libra

Dark Moon is the pause between lunar cycles, and it is marked by a rare moment of rest and quiet in the emotional body. When Moon conjuncts Sun she cannot be seen lighting up the night sky, so for a few nights she stops acting as our nocturnal Luminary and gets to take time off from the job of activating our emotions. This is the optimal moment for emotional cleansing, setting down burdens, and preparing for the next phase of activation.

Some people call the Dark Moon the New Moon, and this is really a subjective matter. In my practice we distinguish between the two. Dark Moon is the moment of conjunction, and New Moon comes a few nights later, when the first sliver of Moon can be seen above the tree line after darkness falls. For those of us who note this distinction, the New Moon marks the beginning of the next lunar cycle, when Moon begins to act as a luminary again. New Moon is the right time to begin lunar cycle manifestation, ideally after performing the ritual cleanse we associate with the Dark Moon’s emotional quiet.

The lunar cycle is colored by the sign the Dark Moon falls in, and this month the Moon’s focus is on the sign of Libra. Libra is the sign of the Balance Scales, and also the sign of Justice. Some people mistakenly believe that Libra rules objective justice, as in fairness. But it’s more true to say that Libra’s justice is about doing justice to oneself by treating oneself fairly.

Since Libra rules the seventh house of the Other, a lot of people think Libra is all about enforcing justice in the Collective, and they get caught up in obsession over other people. These people inevitably fall victim to codependency, getting entangled in a dysfunctional vortex of giving mutual aid they can’t really afford and then despairing over living in poverty, crying over not being able to martyr themselves for tragic causes that actually have no bearing on their personal lives, and trying in an ill-fated well-meaning way to exert control over other people so they don’t suffer from negative emotions ever again. Libra does not like to hear that these behaviors are not actually altruistic, but are instead deeply self-serving and problematic.

It’s actually not like Libra to be emotionally verklempt, because Libra is an air sign. A healthy Libra is characterized by emotional lightness, logic, and sound reason. A healthy Libra does not become emotionally dysregulated easily and does not fall victim to unwarranted grief over other people’s problems, because they are well able to detach themselves from watery and fiery feelings and zoom out to see the big picture of reality and the actual role they play in it. It is necessary for Libra’s growth to mature into the capacity for objectivity and intellectualization. Libra needs this detachment to see their true sense of purpose, and to understand that they need to understand the role of the Self in order to productively provide service to the tangible Other (distinct from the imaginary, projected Other).

As I always say, regardless of whether or not we have planets in Libra, we all have Libra on the natal chart. So that means nobody gets to escape the duty of maturing this part of our personalities. In order to mature the Libra parts of ourselves, it is necessary to understand that we cannot provide service to the Libran Other without developing a strong foundation in our Arian sense of Self.

100% of the Libra Suns I know loathe and despise the idea that they need to develop a mature, realized sense of Self to provide healthy service to Others. They would much rather live as slaves to the Collective. But of course it’s natural for immature people to desire to remain immature, because staying immature is easy and requires no investment of effort.

To this all I can say is that we all have to do things that challenge us if we want to grow up. These days a lot of people get away with remaining immature until death, and that is also a choice Libra is free to make if it really is too harrowing to think of the Self. Freedom of choice does give us the freedom to succumb to having a weak personality.

This Dark Moon falls within opposition distance of Saturn in Aries, and that is actually extraordinarily supportive to our process of developing a strong sense of self. Structural foundation is Saturn’s domain, and while traveling through Aries it is our sense of self that he is building.

Opposition can be a challenging transit, because it brings us into awareness of the polarized aspects of our personality. In this case the polarization that is highlighted is the contrast and interplay between the Self and the Other. We are forced to acknowledge that without one side or the other, we fall out of balance. Opposition brings our weaknesses into the light.

All that said, not everyone has dysregulation in the Libra part of the chart. Some people are overly Arian and deprioritize the Libran Other. For those people, this lunar cycle will bring the opposite challenge, calling for the opposite kind of maturation in the sign of Libra, the act of giving more weight and importance to others instead of overidentifying with the Self. For these people Saturn’s presence in Aries serves the purpose of creating healthy limitation.

Immature Arian people resent the idea of limitation, feeling rather strongly that they ought to have ultimate freedom to pursue their every desire to fulfillment. But the reality is that life cannot exist without limitation. Every decision we make sets limits. Even the decision to put off making decisions in an effort to limit our limitation sets a limit – living that way severely limits our movement towards maturity and personal growth.

So how can we all make the most of this lunar cycle that begins with the Dark Moon in Libra? Using the image of the balance scales, we need to place the Self on one side and the Other on the opposite side… and then invest our effort in developing the side that has less weight, in an effort to balance the scales.

A lot of people these days don’t understand what balance scales are for because most of us use electronic scales nowadays. The whole purpose of balance scales is to add weight to the lighter side until the scales reach a point of equilibrium. Scales that are out of balance are useless.