Love, Marriage, and Solar Arc Rulership

Here is an interesting exercise. I have a client who is 68 years old, married, three kids. Very high achieving family. Both parents and their daughter went to Harvard. One son is a Marine ROTC student at UVA, and the second son is currently applying to college. Dad, the client has a Ph.D. and an M.D. Mom is a high-power business woman in sales. Father has been a stay-at-home Dad for a decade or more raising the kids, as his wife has ADHD and found it impossible to focus on her kids. This has been the cause of some friction in their family, as he was a successful research scientist at the National Institute of Health before he walked away from professional life.

Let's say that he came to you in early 2018, and you were looking at the tri-wheel here coming down the road for 1 Sep 2018. The inner wheel is the natal, the middle solar arcs, and the outer transits. What would you raise with him that was coming down the road? What areas of life would you highlight as worthy of attention? As it turns out, he did announce something quite unexpected in August, something he had not intimated before. We had not had a chance to look at his horoscope together prior to this announcement, so it came as quite a surprise.

He announced totally out of the blue that he was getting a divorce from his wife of many years. Moreover, I think that the only way to really see this as the likely interpretation of current measurements was the interpretation that you offered--that Venus, ruler of the Seventh, had arced to square his natal Neptune. Although this was SA Ve=Ne, it manifested not as "love in a swoon, erotic imaginings, artistic ideas," as Noel Tyl defines Ve = Ne in his book Solar Arcs, but rather as he defines Ne = Ve, namely "potential delusion in love, feeling unrequited."

Certainly, the transit of Pluto to Neptune, ruler of the Fifth, does suggest challenges in expressing love to others, which is consistent with a divorce here. But there are other ways to interpret Tr Pl squ Ne, ruler of the Fifth House, particularly for someone with children. This is why I asked whether you could get to a divorce if you did not use the reverse reading of SA Ve=Ne. When I posed the question to a number of astrologer colleagues, some suggested that the arc suggested a sex change or coming out as gay. Perhaps, though you might expect these alternatives primarily if you read the arc as Venus modifying Ne, ruler of the Fifth. But it is difficult not to think immediately of a possible divorce or breakdown of relationship if you read SA Ve as the ruler of the Seventh receiving the square from Neptune, the planet of disillusionment, confusion, disappointment. Read in this direction, the interpretation leaps right off the page.

It is interesting that this is in a way a repeat of the example that Noel Tyl offers of his own divorce in his book Prediction in Astrology. Noel writes that he had SA SA=Ma, where Mars ruled his Eleventh of love received, and was located in his Fifth of love given. Clearly, Saturn is putting the exchange of love on ice here, so you can see the emotional foundations of a divorce. Noel describes Sa=Ma as "putting a damper on things, ups and downs, indecision, failing. However, look as well at the fact that Saturn rules Noel's Seventh House of marriage. Reading the combination backwards as Ma=Sa and you have "the clash of hot and cold, action and control, stalemate," as he defines this planetary combination, all manifesting in the Seventh house of marriage! This involvement of the arcing Seventh House ruler translated the general difficulties he experienced exchanging love into a divorce, attaching it directly to his marriage.

In my client's case, it saw the delusion and disappointment of Ve=Ne lead as well to divorce, as the ruler of the Seventh House arced to Neptune. The details show the powerful influence of Ve=Ne on the marriage and describe his wife's circumstances quite well. You'll be wondering with the Tr Pl squ Ne if there was an affair? No, there wasn't. Instead, he describes his wife as being maddeningly scattered and unfocused in their personal life. He said he had lost track of how many times she has lost her purse, with their credit cards and house keys, creating one family emergency after another. He describes how she would leave the car running when she got out of it upon returning home--all night long. He cited a statistic that I find difficult to believe, that more than 80 percent of marriages with people who have ADHD end in divorce. He's had enough, and they apparently both agree it would be better for all if they divorce. Note the ruler of his wife, Venus, is located natally in the Twelfth House of chronic illness and loss. Note that it has arced over the past year to square Neptune, the planet of illness, confusion, erosion. Note also that this arc was partile in Jun 2017, and they decided to divorce nearly a year later, when the arc was at the very end of its one-degree separating orb.

So if this has been in train for more than a year, what aspect reflects a more recent development that might confirm suspicions of a coming divorce? In April 2018, he had Tr Sa opp Ur, ruler of his Fourth House of family and home. Separations, change, leave-taking, endings, emancipation, all involving the family, the home. Indeed, this fellow is planning to leave Maryland and move to a family cabin in the mountains of Colorado. Tr Sa opp Ur makes its last pass in December, when they finalized the divorce.

So just to repeat, not only can you see the details of this impending divorce in the reverse approach of reading the arcing planet in a solar arc as the area where the event will occur, I would argue it would be very difficult to see it as clearly in the horoscope without this insight. Moreover, we can see here again the case of a solar arc taking the full year of its separating aspect to play itself out. There was no word of this happening--though of course there was much going on behind the scenes--until late summer.