The Personal Planets

To ancient astrologers, that meant noting the positions of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn —the only planets visible from Earth. For thousands of years, stargazers assumed that there were no other planets. Then, in 1781, an amateur astronomer in England discovered another planet, and the race was on. Today, astronomers argue over how many planets there are in the solar system. Some claim there are only eight. Others insist there are 23 — and counting. The answer depends entirely on whom you ask. 

Astrologers regard those five planets, the ones you can see for yourself in the night sky (and sometimes during the day), as the ones with the most immediate impact on the individual. That s why Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are known as the personal planets. The outer planets, which aren t visible without a telescope, are less personality-driven and more generational in their effects (with exceptions that 1 note in Chapter 10). 

If you ve slogged your way through Chapters 2 and 3, you probably have a copy of your chart in hand, in which case you already know your planetary placements. If you don t have a copy of your chart, return to those chapters — 

Chapter 2 if you want to get your chart from the Internet or Chapter 3 and the Appendix if you plan to cobble it together yourself using the tables in this book. 

To figure out what those placements mean, list your planets by sign and by house and then look them up in this chapter (for the personal planets), Chapter 10 (for the outer planets), and Chapter 12 (for the house placements). 

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Contemplating the personal planets in astronomy, mythology, and astrology Understanding the planets in the signs Interpreting Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn in your chart... 

The metal copper, the rose flower, and the color green are all empirically assigned to the planet Venus, which is the mundane chakra (the macro-cosmic manifestation) of Netzach. Within the personality, Netzach is the seat of the desire-nature. Green, in Alchemy, always represents the manifestation of a power as it appears in nature as being incomplete, since the Sages hold that creation is still in process, that it is, as yet, an unfinished work. So the copper coins spoken of in the Turba are the manifestations (coins) of our desires (copper). 

Be creative. Write a poem or song or story or joke. Parody the style of someone you ve heard or read. Become an inanimate object and complain to the humans around you (for example, what would a soft-drink machine like to say to those folks constantly beating on its stomach ). Become a little green creature from Mars and convince a human to accompany you back to your planet as a specimen of Earthlings (or be the invited guest and explain to the creature why you are definitely not the person to go). The possibilities are endless, so go wild. 

I always felt differently. I liked staying up late surrounded by numerical tables, volumes of astrological data, pads of yellow paper, and the special horoscope blanks I bought at a metaphysical bookstore. As I calculated each planetary position and house cusp, drew the symbols of the signs and planets onto the chart, and counted up how many planets were in fire signs, in earth signs, and so on, the chart — and the person —slowly grew clear in my mind. 

Intensity is the key to Scorpio. Ruled by Pluto, the (dwarf) planet of transformation, you re a compelling personality — and a creature of extremes. Emotionally or otherwise, in fact or in fancy, you live on the edge. 

Whenever you find a birth chart with a true singleton — that is, a bucket chart with one planet sitting apart from all the others — you have found a key to the person. Consider these examples from my files ... 

Here s the rule The transits that pack the biggest wallop are those made by the slowest planets — Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto — to the Sun, the Moon, the Ascendant, and the faster planets. Contacts made by the faster planets are usually short-lived. Contacts made by the slower planets to the slower planets (such as Uranus opposite your Pluto or Neptune conjunct your Saturn) may be too subtle to detect (unless the natal planet happens to occupy a prominent position in your chart). But contacts made by a slow planet to one of your personal planets — Pluto conjunct your Moon, Uranus opposite your Sun, and so on — signify the chapters of your life. 

A difficult problem John Conway, the prolific British mathematician, offered 10,000 to the person to find the first value of n such that the frog s path is always less than 0.55 for higher values of n. A month after Conway made the offer, Colin Mallows of AT T solved the 10,000 question n = 1,489. Figure 25.3 shows this value on a plot for 0 < n < 10,000. (For a variety of minor technical reasons, a less accurate number is published in Schroeder s book.) As I write this, no one on the planet has found a value for the smallest n such that a n)/n is always within 0.001 of the value 1/2, that is a n)/n - 1/21 < 0.001). (No one even knows whether such a value exists.)... 

The marines won t shoot. I promise that, Loren. It would be pointless. Shooting would just cost the life of the person you ve possessed. Nobody wants that. Please, come and talk to me. I ve already obtained huge concessions from the authorities. Gerald can be taken down to the planet. He ll be looked after properly, Fll continue his therapy. Perhaps someday he can even see Marie again."... 

Plastics will continue to be required in space applications from rockets to vehicles for landing on other planets. The space structures, reentry vehicles, and equipment such as antennas, sensors, and an astronaut s personal communication equipment that must operate outside the confines of a spaceship will encounter bizarre environments. Temperature extremes, thermal stresses, micrometeorites, and solar radiation are sample conditions that are being encountered successfully that include the use of plastics. 

How large is a mole If a computer were to count items at one million per second, it would take about 19 billion years to reach Avogadro s number. If every person on the planet (population = 6 billion) were to spend 1 million dollars per second, it would take about 300 years to spend one mole of dollars. 

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