For the past ten days we have been experiencing a Venus-Juno conjunction, (meaning they have been lined up in the sky, looking almost like one and the same star, from our vantage point on Earth), the only two “wives” of Olympus. Also the conjunction Mars-Lilith, which was exact the day of the San Bernardino shootings, in California.
Venus, in our consciousness is the second planet of our solar system from the Sun outwards, and Goddess of Seduction, Beauty, Love and Pleasure, married to Hephaestus, by order of the gods, but in love with Ares, both sons of Hera/Juno, but not of Zeus.
The Archetypes of the Venus in the psyche of a woman represents her ability to seduce the male, and drive him crazy with love and passion. Her beauty is such that man finds it absolutely irresistible. The power of Venus, is not limited to physical beauty, but to everything that emanates from the feminine, that men fall in love with.
Juno (name Roman)/Hera (Greek name), is an asteroid discovered by Karl Ludwig Harding on the 1st of September 1804.)
Asteroids or minor planets, are not minor in its expression in our psyche, they are mostly located between Mars and Jupiter, as if they were on the threshold of the human experience, ” before ” we dare to leave the neighborhood.
Asteroids work as a transformer between the collective and the experience of the personal planets. The emergence of these asteroids, considered planets at the time of discovering, marked the beginning of a State of consciousness considered to be, a quantum leap, especially in the expression and understanding of the feminine, since the four first discovered and named correspond to 4 major goddesses of Olympus.
In the beginning of the 1800s, when these asteroids were discovered, we saw the abundance of female literature, as Jane Austen, the Brontë Sisters (Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre) and Jean-Marie Leprince de Beaumont (Beauty and the Beast) Joanna Southcott, Johanna Spyri (Heidi), Harriet Beecher Stowe (UncleTom’s cabin) Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden) , etc.
Until then, the moon had been considered (the cycle of rising and waning Moon) as the symbol of the evolution of the feminine, but these asteroids came to fill the glass of other more detailed archetypes, more specific of the experience of the feminine, both in men and in women.
In its physical influence, asteroids correspond to the activation of new cells in the brain and nerve centers that allow us to grow and transform, as Demetra George mentions in her extraordinary work on the Asteroid Goddesses. In its psychological aspect they represent potentials that have been asleep and are evoked by these archetypes, by stories of the goddesses and gods of the names that have been attributed to them. Finally, in its spiritual aspect, they provide us with a path to a consciousness that allows us to evolve from the personal to the collective. They help us become aware of that illusion of duality with which most of us see the world.
Like all archetypes and symbols that we use in astrology, Archetypes of these asteroids works on many levels, depending on the degree of development of the individual. Ultimately, astrologically, the use of these symbols function as a “fine tuning” and added depth to the understanding of the chart, and the experience of the feminine in our lives.
The problem is, often, that we insist on using these symbols as something “literal” and we must understand that Archetypes are simply ideas, images that serve us to evoke new horizons of consciousness, which help us in our path to the evolution of our psyche.
Aphrodite and Juno are the only wives of Olympus, meaning the only two goddesses properly married. Aphrodite plays with the brothers, since she is wife to Hephaestus (the deformed) but she lays with Ares (the beautiful and strong), with whom she had most of her children: Harmonia. Adrestia, Eros and Anteros.
Juno instead, becomes wife and consort of the King of the gods, his brother and his son, in some versions and its intent and mission is to maintain, as such, completely faithful, yet, her and Zeus never have children together. Its Greek name (Hera) means the land and also “lady”, which is the feminine form of hero.
However, she becomes the goddess of marriage and presides over all the rites of the marriage regardless of culture. After having been vomited by Saturn, she was given to Thetis and Oceanus, so she was raised by two sea deities, the gods that symbolize the power of emotions. Zeus fell in love of his sister and it is said that he seduced her, becoming a cuckoo bird, and provoked a firestorm and then stopped all wet and dying in the skirt of her sister. She felt pity and took care of it and that’s when he manifested himself in his true form and violate her.
She then, feeling ashamed, married him, by guilt and obligation. (This still seems to describe the fate of many women nowadays). At the beginning there was a lot of sensuality between them but soon passed and the story of this marriage and its struggles of power between them, is what is mostly known, he always unfaithful, and she completely faithful and devoted to her husband. She retired once in a while and disappears to restructure and restore her virginity and thus be able to seduce her husband over and over again. In refusing to be unfaithful, she plays her most powerful card, since her reputation was impeccable, so the infidel and treacherous was always him.
She had to Ares when she came in contact with a may flower, that had been given to her by the goddess Flora, then had Hephaestus, in a fit of anger, therefore the was born ugly, deformed and lame. She felt so ashamed when she saw him that she threw him out from Olympus. Then Zeus had Hercules, whose name means the “Gloria of Hera”, but not with her. Some stories say that Zeus, waited for her to go to sleep and hung the baby on your chest so she would breastfeed him without realizing it. One day she awoke in the middle of it and removed Hercules from her breast and the milk that poured out of her, created the Milky Way. She periodically retired, to different shrines, when it couldn’t deal anymore with Zeus’ infidelities, but she always returned. Once refused altogether to come home and so he he proceded to announce his marriage with a local Princess and thus managed to convince her to return.
Juno represents the feminine desire of union with man, physical, psychological and spiritually, therefore represents the complexes and suffering that emerge when we cannot get this union. It represents the desire of men and women to have a stable and long term relationship where passion and companionship reign. Married or not married, heterosexual or homosexual, those are human differences that do not affect the archetype of the goddess.
She emerges from the symbolism of the Moon and Venus, but enhances the meaning of them, in the sense that Venus is the first step towards relationship, seduction and sexuality and the Moon speaks of the experience of the feminine in men as in women, but Juno, is “the wife”, she describes the functioning of the relationship, hence she is considered the ruler of Libra and Scorpio. In her more Scorpio self, Juno confronts us with the pathologies which emerge from the relationship due to infidelity: jealousy, revenge, the fight for sexual property of the partner, infidelity, power plays: “today i have a headache, sorry”. deception and abandonment. The anger expressed toward the person with whom our partner deceives us. Also the sacrifice in the relationship – the woman or man who abandons her profession for the relationship and then disconnect from their internal power and their own destiny. The fear of abandonment, fear of deceit, fear of sexuality, bisexuality, fear of being devoured and absorbed by the sexual partner, fear of the true commitment and therefore the variety of superficial relationships, the use of children as an instrument of war, giving out power to the other – the female that marries the boss or the politician,etc. These are the women that men accuse of manipulators, who take over the needs of their husbands to be able manipulate them. Rape within marriage and its difficulty to be proved in the courts. The use of sexuality to manipulate, to be able to become a wife, sexuality as an elixir wishing the relationship.
Juno symbolizes the struggle of women and their rights within marriage. In her Libra aspect, she uses her beauty to keep his consort interested in her, in search of a divine union that keep the family together, even if her interest is not in their children, but in her husband.
To be able to “handle” that aspect Juno of our psyche, both in men and in women, the answer lies in invoking Vesta, and become one that takes care of the divine fire, in other words, maintain the energy and vision on what each of us has come to develop in this life, apart from our story with our husband or wife. That, which makes us individuals and helps us carry out the task that we have come to do.
If you find yourself trapped in a relationship or in power struggles with your partner and especially if in recent days you have become more conscious of it , invoked Vesta, in your life and it will come to help you.Call upon that side of your psyche that drives you to keep the divine fire burning and that calls you to manifest your own destiny, beyond the confines of personal relationships.
