Transit Lab: A Lucifer Return
Aha.
That’s it.
I’m a(n astrological) minute from having a Lucifer return. The asteroid (1930) is natally on my Sun, and seeing that I’m at the end of one chapter and the beginning of another is the only thing that’s made sense about the self-inflicted drama and fireworks of the last few days.
My ego is fighting its imminent death like crazy, like never before. I’m being asked to give up my need for control and open to what’s better than what my control can bring me. And for a 2nd house Scorpio, giving up control can be quite a challenge.
For any return, this chapter idea is this: Your experience of any energy in life is divided up into chapters. Returns of the bodies delineate the chapters, and big moments regarding the energies can be created around the time of the return. The transiting, returning body’s function in your life is highlighted during the return, and you’re supposed to have a great time when the return happens. In truth, though, the infusion of the returning planet’s energy into its natal position, into you, will reinforce whatever’s happening with the energy in your life. Birthdays, for example (solar returns), are supposed to be great. You get an infusion of solar energy into your Sun. Ever had a birthday that sucked? They suck when the solar energy you’re running is already subpar or unhealthy; whatever you’re doing with your Sun energy is magnified and highlighted.
As I continue on a path of opening more to what my higher self or spirit guidance is offering me and asking of me, my own Lucifer work (= my learning to choose to give up control) gets a little more rocky. Lucifer is the separating influence, what in us decides if we’re going to recognize and serve something greater than ourselves. With it on my Sun natally, I will naturally have lessons in this life of finding out just how big the ego can be and what it should serve (itself or something higher).
I’ve been “answering the call” of Spirit lately, including moving to an area of town I specifically never wanted to live in, changing my eating habits from something I thought was really good for me, beginning to learn a foreign language I’ve resisted learning my whole life even though presented with an absurd number of cues to learn it, and giving up relationships of various kinds - basically, as I understand it, everything that I’ve chosen for myself is being replaced by something else I’d clearly decided I didn’t want. Its like living the life you specifically chose not to live, and being asked to learn to love it. A little dose of feeling in a strange reality where someone else seems to have chosen for you the life you’d already opted not to live.
Immature Lucifer energy considers giving up control a threat to its being. Lucifer energy needing to mature is in fact an egocentric control freak sure that God/the Universe/Creation doesn’t love it. I’ve been experiencing this in spades the last few days, as I feel I can’t have anything that I want for myself. By the way, if you give this part of yourself time to make some noise, you’ll see that you’re a crazy mofo in no time. (And what an awesome exercise this can be - I can’t recommend it enough - find out what really makes you tick by giving into the egocentric control freak inside you that you go to great lengths to hide from everyone, including probably yourself.)
In order for Lucifer to mature, the ego has to find the right sort of expression and place in the rest of you. Which is to say that the ego needs to find a healthy role in the workings of the overall life. He needs to find the right seat at the conference or dinner table, you might say - he thinks he’s deserving of the seat at the head of the table, and for developing personality and soul maturity, he needs to learn to be okay with any other seat at the table.
For many of us, we need to experience something that wows us in order for the ego to choose to take another seat. Some sort of numinous/soul enlargening experience that knocks the logic-clinging pants off your egocentricity. (I’m reminded of Angels in America, when that dude with the name I forget meets and wrestles with the angel played by Emma Thompson.) This is another way of saying that the intellect must learn the benefit in choosing to take a back seat in running the life. In the end, the ego must merge with the heart/emotional guidance system, but Lucifer in no way can conceive of this and so must learn to choose the second seat.
In me, this fight in necessary. I’m not yet at the big wowing experience that convinces my ego to chill out and serve the rest of me. It’s on its way, I know, and it could take one of many forms (I’m open to what it is, and terrified of what I’ll be asked to do - ego never thinks it’s ready to choose to relinquish the illusion of control). In the mean time, I’m letting the fight happen because I thereby show myself, all of myself, what are the issues needing to be addressed in order for healing the wounded part of the ego.
And for each of us, healing needs to happen along the way to ego relinquishing the insistence on (illusion of) control. I see in my work as an evolutionary astrologer and counselor the effects of wounding to the ego, as if my life itself isn’t enough. Its insistence on supremacy is a reaction to feeling out of control in the past (the past of this life is informed by the past of other lives - we’re talking about all of them). Learning to trust something higher is the lesson for all of our Lucifers, and working with this in my counseling work is about healing the relationship with Spitir/God/Creation/the Universe - pick whatever word works best for you.
So, at this return I have the opportunity to see all of the fireworks I’ve been setting off and, reading between the lines, heal something about my willingness to trust the unfolding of the bigger show, the one that’s larger than my conscious mind/ego/Lucifer can grasp or ever devise. After writing all this out, I can finally see what’s happening, and what is the use for all the feelings and anger that’s been coming up - until I noted that I’m having this return, I was pretty sure everything as I knew it was over and I was headed for some unstopped existential drain, and in a hurry.
Speaking of returns, returning is the inevitable conclusion of anyone’s Luciferian journey. Anger at the bigger authority is what leads to the separating behvaior. At root, each Luciferian reason is anger at the perception and feeling of having been betrayed, and all Luciferian scheming, plotting and resistance to the bigger - someone else’s - version of things are attempts to protect one’s self from feeling betrayed again. Feeling forgotten by God, etc., is pretty serious wounding, and each of us has some version of it.
The return of Lucifer is the return to love. To accepting the love of the greater reality (again, choose your label for it). To releasing the need to be separate in order to prove a point about exhibiting on one’s sleeve evidence of the deep existential hurt.
And in the end, Lucifer healing hinges on our willingness to accept that the hurt is about our perception that we’re separate from that greater thing. In the mythology, Lucifer rebels against God because he takes the fact that God is sending a son to earth (whether Adam in the Hebrew tradition or Jesus in the Christian); he takes this as a clear signal that God does not love him as much as he thinks God does. The pain of Lucifer stems from his decision that he’s got the market on defining love. The question for him becomes this: Can he give up his narrow definition of love? Of course he can. Will he choose to do so?
And since this journey is being taken by each of us, can you? Can I? I know I can, can choose to, and at the same time recognize there’s more fight left in me because there’s more healing to be done on this karmic wounding to the relationship with God[/your word here].
And that’s where I am today at this Lucifer return. Egads, do I feel better. Amazing what some caffeine-driven blogging can do for an existentially wounded (& healing) spirit.
2 Responses to “Transit Lab: A Lucifer Return”
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August 15, 2007 By Tom Jacobs
August 22nd, 2007 at 5:12 am
[...] be a wee bit of a stat whore. Something drew me out of my shell who knows what. Maybe it was the stars. And when I say stars I mean heavenly bodies, some of which USED to be considered [...]
August 22nd, 2007 at 5:22 am
Excellent site! I really appreciated this article and RX Venus RX Pluto, very helpful.
Thanks!
Hazel.