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.