Shiva-Parvati
Transit Venus is currently forming a trine to the Saturn-Pluto conjunction in Capricorn. In Roman mythology, Pluto was the lord of the underworld while Saturn was the founder of civilizations and of social order, and conformity. Metaphorically Saturn can be thought of as the hard rocky layer that keeps the boiling lava (Pluto) of earth’s interior safely deep inside. But the balance is quite tenuous and once in a while Pluto breaks through the Saturn layer of rock causing a volcanic eruption which can destroy everything around. Compare that with the primal passions (Pluto)..more appropriately authentic needs of human beings kept in check by the social order (Saturn). Here too when Pluto moves past Saturn we have wars, rapes , murders that make a farce of all civilized behavior.
Pluto is also Shiva the destroyer. Therefore, Pluto’s transit through Capricorn (Saturn ruled) is serving to break outmoded and artificial standards, to decimate the hypocrisies of social convention, and of social extremes. It also brings emphasis to address patterns of avoidance or repression of authentic human needs.
With Venus, the planet of love and relationships, forming a trine to the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, what might be the message it is sending to us?
The similarity between the Roman Pluto (aka Hades) and the Indian god Shiva is actually startling particularly when we compare their love lives. According to mythology Pluto falls in love with the maiden Persephone whom he abducts and takes to the underworld. When her mother Demeter demands her back, Persephone refuses as she has fallen in love with her captor (often referred to as the Stockholm Syndrome [1]). She has realized that Pluto is not the monster that people in the upper world have made him out to be. Primal passions that express authentic human needs free of social hypocrisies is what she comes to understand.
Compare this with the story Shiva and Parvati. Many of us suppress our highest potential. Often hurt by past experiences, we shield our emotional body to protect ourselves from further injury. This process of retreat is mimicked by Shiva when he lost his great beloved Sati. In grief, Shiva sat in meditation for thousands of years neglecting his duties. During a period of withdrawal, there is no luster or shine in our lives because we are not allowing ourselves to transform, take risks, open our hearts, and feel. Alarmed by Shiva neglecting his duties of destruction and transformation, Brahma sends Parvati to entice him out of his stupor.
Parvati doesn’t gain Shiva’s attention because she is beautiful. She gains his attention because her inner light was brilliant. Parvati, unable to rely on externals, has to go on an inner journey. Each of us has this journey to go on. Along the way, we fall down, tip over, get twisted, and arrive wiser. Parvati represents that part of us that doesn’t give up. She shows us that hard work and inner discipline are necessary for growth.
Perhaps the poet Rainer Maria Rilke was describing the dynamics of a Venus-Saturn-Pluto connection when he wrote:
Fear Of The Inexplicable
The fear of the inexplicable has not alone
impoverished the existence of the individual; the relationship between one
human being and another has also been cramped by it, as though it had been
lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities and set down in a fallow
spot on the bank, to which nothing happens.
For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human which drives the prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us. We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
― Rainer Maria
Rilke
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