AUTHOR’S NOTE: For the moment I’m going to drop back from my current fascination with traditional astrology and revert to my previous incarnation as a New Age psychological astrologer. For the record, although most people only know Dr. Marc Edmund Jones as the chronicler of the psychically-channeled Sabian Symbols, he was a profound psychological astrologer who was at the forefront of efforts to rehabilitate the art. Here I will explore a few of his more useful ideas.

I seldom use the meticulous techniques that astrologer Marc Edmund Jones presented in Essentials of Astrological Analysis, but I recently came across a classic case of the planet of oriental appearance and its implications for the native’s vocation. To refresh your memory (assuming you’ve heard of it before), this is the “planet” among  Moon, Mercury, Venus and Mars that rises on the eastern horizon immediately before the Sun in its clockwise circuit of the sky. Its main significance is as a descriptor of the individual’s vocational aptitude, and the role is usually filled by Mercury (the “technician”) or Venus (the “artist”) since neither one ever gets very far away from the Sun. As we might suppose, Mercury favors left-brained* logical pursuits and Venus right-brained* creative activities. One uses mental acuity to the fullest and confers analytical ability , while the other mounts a more fluid, imaginative attack (perhaps too strong a word for Venus) that excels at visual comprehension and presentation.

The native in this instance is a talented graphic designer whose career path lies in promoting the client’s “brand” via the media of digital art. This individual has Aquarius rising, showing that his engagement with other people is unconventional, visionary and forward-looking. As the planet of oriental appearance, Mercury in late Aquarius sits in the 1st House within 8 degrees of the Ascendant, with the Sun and Venus conjunct in early Pisces right on its heels, followed at a distance by Mars and the Moon. Mercury is the planet of communication and Aquarius rules electronics, including computers and networking, so the vocational “signature” here is a perfect fit for the circumstances. In the world of traditional art, the graphic designer straddles the line between mechanical draftsman and fine artist, but the advent of the digital age has pushed the profession into the domain of the technological wizard, demanding a much more specialized skill set. While the Sun and Venus conjunct in Pisces (the exaltation of Venus) in the 1st House symbolize refined creative sensibilities, Mercury is their enthusiastic pitch-man.

The other piece of the puzzle is mental chemistry, which combines the position of Mercury in relation to the Sun with the apparent motion of the Moon on the day of birth relative to its daily average of just over 13 degrees of arc. Mercury ahead of the Sun with an accelerated Moon denotes “fast” chemistry, while Mercury behind with a lagging Moon imparts “slow” chemistry. One is brisk but also excitable in its cogitation, the other much more deliberate; all other combinations signify “normal” mental celerity. In the present case, the Moon in Leo is moving slightly slower than average, anchoring the eagerness of Mercury and tempering its facile sociability with emotional restraint. The upshot of the combination of oriental appearance with mental chemistry is a graceful melding of thoughtful self-promotion and patient circumspection, an altogether admirable fusion of personal styles. Mercury’s interplay with Jupiter and Saturn also deepens its character considerably, but that is beyond my scope here.

Also largely outside the purview of this essay is the fascinating and fruitful work Dr. Jones did with “hemisphere emphasis” and “planetary patterns” as techniques for delineating the personality; however, both follow a logic similar to the main topic and are worth a brief mention. In the first case he divided the birth chart into left-and-right and upper-and-lower hemispheres and judged whether there was a preponderance or absence of planets in any one region. Jones characterized the left-hand hemisphere, which is centered on the Ascendant and delimited by the axis of the meridian, as the domain of the “Self,” while the right-hand hemisphere of six houses surrounding the Descendant he viewed as “Other-directed” and representative of the “not-Self.” The upper hemisphere, which is focused on the Midheaven and bounded by the horizon, he considered the “Public” arena of social interaction and the lower hemisphere encompassing the Imum Coeli he described as exemplifying the “Private” dimensions of an individual’s life. Each of the four interpenetrating hemispheres contains two sub-sectors that share qualities of the adjacent hemispheres. For example, the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Houses partake of both the “Self” hemisphere and the “Private” hemisphere, thus constituting the most intensely self-oriented and sequestered areas of experience, culminating in the Imum Coeli, while the 7th, 8th and 9th Houses participate in both the “Other-directed” hemisphere and the “Public” hemisphere, conveying the most externally-driven aspects of interpersonal activity (in the sense of “partnering”), reaching its apex in the Midheaven. A large number of planets (or a total absence of planets) in any one sector can signify a major influence affecting the development of the personality.

Planetary patterns, as the name suggests, display the geometric arrays formed by various groups of planets in the horoscope, but they are not necessarily aligned in the way of traditional aspects. Jones gave many of them fanciful names; one that is uniquely illustrative of the title of this post is the “Locomotive,” in which a number of planets are laid out in a semi-circle like “boxcars” across several houses, with the planet that is the most clockwise in position acting as the “locomotive” or engine. This is the leading planet of the series that crosses the Ascendant first after birth, lending it an importance similar to the “planet of oriental appearance.” Another is the “Bucket,” which consists of a tight group of planets in one hemisphere offset by a single planet in the hemisphere directly across the wheel. This solitary planet ideally forms a strong opposition with the middle planet of the group, serving as the “handle” of the bucket, which brings it into “high focus” within the interpretation.  A similar one is the “Bowl,” which exhibits the same close-knit bundle of planets on one side but faces a segment of empty houses on the other, implying a self-referential span of attention with no facile mode of outward expression. There are seven of these patterns that offer a convenient way to analyze general tendencies and temperament types within the personality of the native.

https://www.astro.com/astrology/in_jonespatterns_e.htm

* A scientific study of 1,011 individuals published in 2013 casts doubt on the left-brain/ right-brain hypothesis, concluding that “neuroimaging data has not provided clear evidence whether such phenotypic differences in the strength of left-dominant or right-dominant networks exist.”

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0071275