Sagittarius season; the archer of fate
We have emerged (mostly!) from the depths of Scorpio into the brightness and expansion of Sagittarius season, and I find myself thinking about Sagittarius as the archer. About what it means to take aim and let the arrow fly. About how carefully we might line up our arrow, read the air currents, adjust our stance, sight our target.
Sagittarius season - clear skies and a rising sun…
But once we let the arrow fly, all we can do is trust. It might not land where we expect - do we need to trust that it will land where we need it to? It seems to me there is something of the eternal debate about fate and free will here. The process of co-creation between the hand we’ve been dealt, the natal chart we are working with, the circumstances in which we find ourselves. And our perception that we have at least some free will, and ability to respond to that chart, to those circumstances. That we have a bow, an arrow, a clear sky to launch into. We might not be able to control the form those take, and we only have a limited amount of control over what happens to the arrow once we have loosed it. How often have we set off on a path, with a destination in mind, only to find ourselves somewhere completely different? Sagittarius might not even mind that, might revel in it, embracing the unknown, enjoying the possibility of going further than we thought possible, or finding ourselves somewhere we had not imagined.
A frequent criticism of astrology is that the chart determines our fate, and of course, in this modern individualistic age, few are ready to deny us our free will. But there are those circumstances again - the ones we were born into, the vagaries of life we can’t control. Working with astrology allows us to see what might be beneath them and what meaning we might find in them. Or they might not show up in our chart at all, or our chart might show something of our responses to them. What our chart does give us is the resources we have, the archetypes and symbols we can work with. Understanding our natal chart and the ways it manifests through our lives also opens us up to different ways of manifesting a particular energy. There’s an element of choice in our perspective on life, in our actions and responses to what is around us. And so we can become the co-creators of our reality, we can work with what seems fated. As astrologers, perhaps we are the ultimate compatibilists.