The Healing Power of the Gates of Hades
This week, I am taking a break from the Learn Astrology series to share an experience I had last week of Mars’ ingress into Aquarius. I’ll return next week with lesson 3.
The lesson 2 quiz for paid subscribers is ready and can be found here.
Note that I started writing this article last week and, with the exception of the first paragraph, decided to keep the tenses as I originally wrote them.
I had been wanting to talk about Mars’ ingress into Aquarius for over a week, but struggled to find words. In part, it was because so much was going on in the chart it was hard to know where to focus. In part, it was because what was coming up for me was so deep, it was hard to talk about. And, in part, it was because I was finding it hard to ground sufficiently to be able to do the inner work I needed to do around what was arising. But things began shifting, ever so slowly, like a frozen waterfall thawing at the end of Winter into Spring, melting one slow drip at a time at first, then one sudden chunk at a time as the temperature creeps higher, each crashing down until the water finally flows freely.
Mars entered Aquarius on February 14, 2024 an hour or so after midnight, Eastern standard time. Pluto, the higher octave of Mars, entered Aquarius about a month prior on January 20, 2024, preparing the way, so to speak, for Mars. Because Pluto moves slowly, it is still sitting at 0 degrees Aquarius, plus some change in terms of minutes and seconds. Thus, when Mars entered Aquarius, we can say that it did so through the gates of Hades, Hades being symbolized by Pluto. On February 16, 2024, Venus will do the same thing. And before each of these planets, on February 5, 2024, Mercury entered through these gates.
Pluto represents the underworld, the shadow, that which is hidden, those things that compel us from a place so deep we do not fully understand what is driving us. Pluto also represents our Soul indicating that, sometimes, we are driven by inner forces from past life times not yet resolved in us and long forgotten by us. Also representing the realm of sexuality, Pluto symbolizes some of the deepest, most vulnerable aspects of ourselves.
Thus, during this period, aspects of our experience that have been hidden out of sight, kept out of sight to protect us, perhaps, may be surfacing, whether from this life time or past ones, aspects we may have put on a back burner as we focused on other things, aspects we were not able to find resolutions to before.
Mars represents courage. The word courage derives from the French word, corage, which means “heart, innermost feelings; temper”.1 Although we typically think of Venus as the archetype that symbolizes love, we see that the archetype of Mars, associated with the heart, also does.
In astrology, the planets are often grouped in the following way:
the Sun and Moon
Mercury, Mars, and Venus
Jupiter and Saturn
Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto
The Sun and Moon are called the luminaries. Mercury, Mars, and Venus are called the inner planets, or the personal planets. Jupiter and Saturn are called the social planets. (I prefer to call them the societal planets.) Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto are called the outer, or transpersonal planets. When we consider the symbolism of the inner, or personal, planets from the perspective of Venus and Mars representing the receptive and active expressions of love, we can make the case for calling them the relational planets.
When we think of them as relational planets, we can see that Mercury’s presence with the other two makes sense. Ruler of communication, it facilitates the expression of love between the receptive and active manifestations of it. Mercury is also the messenger who can travel to all the realms. No other planet can do that without consequences.2 Given the emotional depths that can be stirred in relationships, perhaps Mercury serves as a guide who can help us, individually and together, go to where we need to go so we can communicate what we need to communicate to process what comes up, to restore us to loving connection, to balance.
Before they entered Aquarius, Mercury, Mars, and Venus transited through Capricorn. In Capricorn, love may be expressed through the dutiful carrying out of culturally assigned roles. To the extent these roles align with who we really are, things probably go pretty well for us. To the extent the roles don’t align with who we are, we may struggle, even if, for a time, we find ways to conform, find ways to make it work, find ways to convince ourselves that fulfilling our roles is more important than being who we are (as though those two things were inherently antithetical to one another). But, all of these efforts to fulfill the roles that society has assigned to us will only carry us so far. Eventually, things will start to break apart.
For a while, we’ll succeed at patching things up. But, in time, the patches won’t hold any longer and new patches won’t take. With regard to this pattern, the energy of Aquarius represents the breaking point, the point of awakening to the pattern, the point of realizing we can’t go on as we have been. In my experience, these awakenings happen over time. In some cases, wounding needs to be healed before some layers can finally resolve, no matter how aware we are of them.
…
I am gay. A lot of my experience of trauma comes from my identity as a gay person. I have known, consciously, that I am gay since college. Before that, I did not consciously know. When I was growing up, the only thing I heard about gays was that they were perverts and child molesters, a message that deeply affected me. The Catholic Church, representing the religion in which I was raised, kindly added abomination to the mix.
With hindsight, I can see that I was so terrified by the possibility that I might be gay - and by the crushing judgment and expulsion that, in my mind, seemed likely to result and against which I would have no external or internal defenses - that I could not accept it. (My parents’ inability to accept me for who I was when I finally did come out was the most enduringly painful experience of my life.)
As a teen, what I saw when I looked out was that there was no place for me in the world, no path, no horizon. I could neither be me nor who others expected me to be. When I entered junior high and high school, my life changed dramatically when boys, with whom I identified, suddenly became interested in girls; when I, suddenly, was no longer one of them. I spent my energies desperately sidestepping the dating scene, hoping I would not be accused of being gay, still too terrified to sort out who I was and so come to terms with me. To get by, I relied on suppression and sports.
It is interesting to consider that the other side of Mars’ courage is cowardice. Without any self-disparagement, I see now that I was that. One cannot be courageous if the strategy one adopts to make it through is emotional suppression. If courage is the action that results from feeling the fear and doing it anyway, I did not have access to the first part. You cannot feel emotions that have been suppressed, and so you cannot access courage.
When I would tell the story of my fear in the past - my fear, for example, that people might accuse me of child molestation - people would not understand. They would see that I am not that and could not understand how I could fear being accused of it. When they would tell me that they did not reject me or homosexuality, it did not help. I understand now what I did not understand then: that none of us had the awareness or words to recognize and name trauma or the conscious understanding that trauma does not respond to reason or words of support. It needs to be healed at a deeper level. For that to happen, it needs to be seen and felt and held. I did not come to understand this aspect of healing until relatively recently.
The young child raised in traumatizing circumstances has no defenses against them. The experiences imprint in their being and become hidden drivers of their lives until they are finally able to feel into the level where the trauma is stored and heal what needs to be healed. The work when it comes to trauma is not to dismiss it, talk yourself out of it, minimize it, or disparage it and move on. It is to recognize it, hold it, and bring loving attention to it. While outer changes, like laws changing in the case of gay rights, for example, help, making it a lot easier to breathe freely in the world, they do not necessarily heal the trauma that was already internalized. That still needs to be accessed and addressed.
And so here we are, Mars, the masculine aspect of love followed by Venus, the feminine aspect of love, entering Aquarius, symbol of the unknown, of surprise, of shock, and sometimes of trauma, preceded by the Mercurial guide to all the realms, healer of body and mind. Entering through the gates of Hades, there is the possibility of awakening to deep, personal layers of wounding, of seeing them so that they can heal, so that we can come to embrace ourselves as who we are, as who we chose to be, so that we can inhabit our hearts again.
…
When Mars entered Aquarius, Mercury, also in Aquarius, was trining the South Node in Libra. The trine is a 120 degree aspect that represents an easy flow of energy. There are two of them in astrology. One is waxing and one is waning. If you count out the degrees on the natural wheel, you find that 120 degrees going forward starting from Aries lands you at 0 degrees Leo. Thus, the waxing trine is Leonian in nature. If you count the degrees going backwards, you land at 0 degrees Sagittarius. Thus, the waning trine is Sagittarian in nature.
The Mercury-South Node trine is waxing, and so, Leonian in nature. The South Node represents our past. In Libra, it may be indicating an imbalance there. Mercury, in addition to representing the messenger and guide, also represents our early environment and healing. What might be flowing from our past? What aspect of our child selves might we be awakening to?
Leo comes after Cancer, the sign that has to do with mothering, nurturance, and emotions. Our ability to express our joy, we could say, depends on the mothering and nurturing we receive and our corresponding ability to access and process our emotions. In part, what we are learning in Leo is how to ride the peak of joy, how to fully express our light.
If we grew up in dysfunctional circumstances, our ability to access and process our emotions might have been compromised. We might not have had the nurturing and mothering presence we needed to help us soothe and integrate our naturally and necessarily wildly swinging emotions when young, and so gradually learn to process them for ourselves.
Growing up in a homophobic world would probably not have impacted me so deeply by itself. But it was part of a larger encompassing experience. There was no one to turn to, no one to talk to, no comfort or nurturance available to help me process the raw fear I experienced and the self-distortions mirrored to me. When I began to awaken to what I came to call the mother wound (no pun intended, but recognized), I sought to heal it, but failed… and failed… and painfully failed.
…
In the chart for Mars’ ingress into Aquarius, the trine between Mercury and the South Node is not yet perfected, meaning that it has not quite reached 120 degrees. It’s still a trine, because aspects don’t need to be exact. But, when we count out the degrees of the actual distance between them (about 116 degrees), we find ourselves at the end of Cancer, not the start of Leo. It is still a Leonian trine. Yet, there is a Cancerian hue to it. We can say that, in that symbolism, we have the energy of the mother nurturing the child’s light and expression.
Just as Mars entering the gates of Hades indicates the possibility of awakening to deeper layers of past wounding that, perhaps, we were not able to access and heal before, so Mercury and the South Nodes’ trine indicates the possibility that healing energy may be available to us - mother energy freely flowing from our past, providing nurturing support, helping us heal old narratives and wounds that no longer serve us, helping us access deeper layers of our authentic selves, helping us return to dwelling in the loving strength of our hearts.
…
What happened for me was that I was able to access mothering energy within me. The process unfolded over a few days, I think, with a sudden shift at the end. It started first with the realization that the heart symbol can be seen as a depiction of the human chest or mother’s bosom, that which draws us close and comforts us. (I can be slow on the uptake sometimes so that is probably old news to you :). But I literally just got it after 60 years of living.)
Over the next day or two or three - I don’t remember exactly - I began to imagine being held, my body resting on a heart symbol, the symbol warm and soothing on my back and shoulders. Several weeks before this, I did a personal constellation focusing on my mother. Though she passed many years ago, the constellation helped to shift my experience of her. As I lay my body on the heart symbol, I was also able to imagine my mother looking lovingly into my eyes, something previously unavailable to my imaginative powers. I felt safe and held and valued. When I imagined being gay, I felt her acceptance. With that, I could settle into it for the first time. Despite having come out decades ago, I could finally ground. I could accept myself for who I am. I could imagine my sexual orientation being a part of what made me unique, an aspect of my worth, something to value.
Mars, as ruler of Aries, represents the I Am principle. Aquarius represents our unique, individuated, selves. It also happens to represent homosexuality. When Mars entered Aquarius through the gates of Hades, for me, an old heart wound was salved, an old identity wound, and I could finally ground in my heart, and on this planet.
(See footnote 3 for image credits.3)
Thank you!
Thank you to everyone who has subscribed to my Substack for your support and interest in what I do. I hope what I share continues to be helpful for you as you travel your path.
References
Courage. (n.d.). In Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/word/courage
Updates
February 23, 2024:
I forgot to adjust the footnotes to the Substack format, meaning I forgot to add the footnote link and numbers in the text and Notes section. I corrected that. I also added a footnote (#2) that I forgot to include previously.
Notes
See Online Etymology Dictionary
I had always understood that only Mercury could travel to all the realms, but then read something that indicated others could. I don’t remember what it was. I then read something that said that Mercury was the only one that could do it without being affected. I also don’t remember where I read that. But thank you to the person who clarified that.
This is brilliant. Thank you. I hope you post an audio version.
Thx for the reminder that Aquarius (Uranus!) also partly rules trauma. Yes.
Hearing much trauma unearthing for healing right now, in the field. Your post reifies this.
So glad for your healing work. 💖
It's hard for me to put into words my appreciation for the profound beauty and influence of this article. I'll just say thank you and hope that you continue to share these insights.