ASTROLOGY AND ALCOHOL 

    As I mentioned before, I tended bar. The family restaurant where I worked for years was in the neighborhood where I grew up. It sits on a plateau with only 5 streets to enter or leave. No one went there unless they lived there or got lost. It was a destination, not a throughway at the time. It maintained that old time neighborhood feeling long after other neighborhoods, maybe because of it's geography. It was once said of the neighborhood that the men went to work and the women "neighbored", that described my parents' generation (Pluto in Cancer) and my generation (Pluto in Leo), when I was growing up. (Pluto changes signs about every 20 years, so it defines generations.)

    My point in mentioning this is that not only did I know many of my bar customers before I worked there, but I knew their backgrounds, families, gossip and a lot were lifetime friends, school mates and neighbors. This gave me amazing insights into developing a new perspective on simplifying astrology as a tool that anyone can understand.

    Being able to connect the signs to the personalities and doing it generationally has been invaluable to my work. In light of that foundation of information, let's get started on ASTROLOGY AND ALCOHOL.

    When someone drinks, the goal is to relax the patterns of their behavior a bit, (that is to say, for the purpose of this article) the patterns of their Sun sign.

    When you create a written chart, the EARTH is put in the center because you want to see how everything in our solar system relates to the EARTH, it's called a GEOCENTRIC (EARTH CENTERED) chart. The EARTH as the center and the constellations as the perimeter. The planets move between the two. The symbol for EARTH is a circle with a cross in it (as below in the center).

    The first person that I observed that helped me understand the connection between astrology and alcohol, is a friend of mine, who is an AQUARIUS, so I will use that example first for her.

    AQUARIUS is her conscious state, no alcohol, no weed, no nothing.     AQUARIUS is her patterning. The characteristics of her sign, it is an air sign, which is intellectual, it is a fixed sign, so it wants to draw a circle and control that which is in the circle; but I have found with Aquarians, mostly they want to control themselves within the circle, it is distant and usually considered to be out in left field. (CONSCIOUS - see below).  

    When you have a few drinks, you are seeking to come from your patterning (on the perimeter) and move closer to the center, loosening your patterning. This is when you have a buzz. (See below).

    When you continue drinking (to the point of being drunk) you overshoot the center to the opposite sign. For AQUARIUS, the opposite sign is LEO. (See below.)

    

    What turned that light on over my heard was when my AQUARIUS friend said, "When I get drunk, all I want to do is suck face." No one wants to "suck face" (make out) more than LEO, the epitome of "puppy love". I knew LEO was opposite (180 degrees) AQUARIUS and this opened a whole new door of understanding.

    For a long time, I would hold out my hands as though I was weighing out a scale, first one up and the other down and vice versa, thinking, "I tend bar, I do astrology, I tend bar, I do astrology; what's the connection?" Then BOOM, there it was. I knew the sun sign for most of the regulars, so I started to test this theory and there it was, proving itself over and over that when one gets drunk, they turn into their opposite sign. No one has ever looked at astrology like this before and how enlightening it was, how easy to predict behavior.

    

    Where Virgo wants to have everything in order, the next step Libra, wants everything in order, pretty and matching. I have a few LIBRA friends (and customers) who are always with every hair in place and perfect make up, when they got drunk (yes, they, more than one), they turned into ARIES, the little warrior and wanted to take people outside and "kick their ass", their words, not mine. Time and again it proved itself. It opened a BIG door to creating a new perspective on astrology that I never heard of before and I have studied astrology for over 40 years.

    By the way, the same theory proves true when applied to weed when high (buzz) and stoned (drunk). This would certainly explain that the hippie generation (Pluto in Leo), were so stoned that they sang the praises of the Age of Aquarius and when they sobered up years later, instead of making it a reality, became yuppies and sang the praises of capitalism and being the center of attention (center of attention takes money and of course, LEO is the king) more than professing equality. 

LEO is opposite AQUARIUS (the humanitarian sign).

    I realized that it couldn't only be drunks or stoners that had embodied characteristics of their opposite sign. It seemed to me, that, even if one never drank alcohol or smoked weed, that somewhere inside them, they possessed the characteristics of their opposite sign, even if they were never expressed.

    

    If you read the last article "What's Your Karma? What's Your Lesson?" and check out the characteristics of the signs, next time you're drinking with friends, observe and see what happens.

        Before I finish this article I want to connect it to the SPECTIVES (CHILD, ADULT, PARENT 1-2-3).

    When looking at the opposites that we each possess, even if unexpressed, let's compare the opposites to the 3 SPECTIVES.

    If we look at the example of my friend whose Sun sign is AQUARIUS / who expresses LEO when she is drunk; we find she possesses not only the SPECTIVE of 3 (PARENT) (AQUARIUS) but she also possesses the SPECTIVE of 2 (ADULT) (LEO) and what she lacks is the SPECTIVE of 1 (CHILD). Make sense?

    I'll write more in depth about the connections between OPPOSITES and the SPECTIVES, what you have and what you lack, in relation to both Sun signs (self) and Pluto signs (generations) in future articles. I just wanted to put this basic principle out there.

   Blessings on your journey,

   Janice                                                                                                                                                                                         

(It is recommended that all Astrology articles be read in chronological order as the information in each builds upon the previous article.)