A third grouping of planets which can be highly informative concerns their distribution in terms of the angular, succedent and cadent houses. Before examining the probable effects of these three groups in combination it is first necessary to take into account the general characteristics likely to be present when one particular grouping predominates in a nativity.
Angular
Those with a majority of planets in angular houses usually want to make an impression on the world and to feel themselves to be at the center of everything that is happening. The impact of their
personality will be immediate, whether it is attractive or repugnant. These types enter easily into relationships, perhaps because they need the reactions of others in order to become more aware of themselves. A number of planets harmoniously aspecting each other in angular houses may indicate a rather self-satisfied person, while discordant aspects linking angular planets tend to produce a more rugged type of personality, usually with a strongly accented ego and a desire to take the lead in a partnership.
Succedent
Those with a majority of planets in succedent houses are more concerned with establishing roots and building up the schemes initiated by those with a majority of angular planets. They therefore have a vested interest in stable partnerships although discordant aspects between planets in succedent houses may indicate some difficulty in establishing a stable life pattern. There is usually a great need for emotional security. When the Moon, Venus, Jupiter and Neptune are involved in these
inharmonious aspects, there may be a tendency to seek the pleasures of life instead of settling down, while malefics afflicted in these houses can indicate a rather jealous nature and a strong need for a feeling of security in sexual relationships that can work out disastrously unless the partner's
horoscope provides enough harmonious cross-aspects to the succedent planets.
Cadent
Natives with the majority of planets in cadent houses tend to hide their real personality and often have some difficulty in finding a really effective way of self-expression. Sometimes, as in the case of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had six bodies in the twelfth house, this is compensated for in literary activities or through dedication to a life of service. There is some talent for acting as an agent or go-between, and adapting to a variety of different people and circumstances. There is often more
tendency to live in the mind than with the other types, so that they may tend to withdraw into the world of the abstract. Consequently mental compatibility is more important to them and they need a partner who can draw them out and help them to realize their latent potentials.
When two partners both have a majority of angular planets, a great deal will depend upon whether these planets blend harmoniously and whether their intrinsic natures are compatible. If they clash, a smooth relationship is unlikely to be established since both partners will have a marked interest in getting things done. If they are at cross-purposes, they may try to forge ahead with their own plans at the expense of the other.
The angular type may blend well with the succedent type if the cross-aspects are harmonious but usually there is less chance of an harmonious relationship with the cadent type. Of the three types, the succedent is the only one which has an equal chance of achieving a good blend with either the angular or cadent types, provided the majority of cross-aspects are not discordant. A partnership with one whose planets are mainly in succedent houses may also work out well, provided the
cross-aspects promise harmony. Those with a majority of planets in angular houses, who like to
concentrate on putting ideas into action, are the least likely to get on well with the cadent type, who tend to concentrate on planning and perfecting the theoretical approach.
CHAPTER 6
Benefic and Malefic Planets Harmonious and Discordant Aspects
A famous English astrologer, having ruefully surveyed the effects of transits of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto over sensitive points in his horoscope was heard to observe: "I hope the next planet they dis-cover will be a benefic!" Such a sentiment raises several questions. Why, for instance, do we label some planets benefic and others malefic? By what standards are we measuring?
If we are measuring from a worldly point of view then every-thing which is conducive to maintaining and increasing our creature comforts and to bringing us pleasure must be regarded as benefic, while everything that causes us pain and thwarts our desires must be classed as malefic. No one says:
"Hooray, I've broken my leg" or laments the inheriting of a large fortune and so it is that the former type of event is nearly always found to occur when the so-called "malefic" planets are active, while the latter take place when the so-called "benefic" planets are operating.
The world's great religious teachers have always stressed that true happiness is not to be found in pursuing the pleasures of the material world. It seems that the majority of mankind's restless search for pleasure is but a pale reflection of the religious devotee's quest for a state of ecstatic bliss. Such a quest demands a life of rigid self-discipline and self-denial, qualities which do not reflect the essential nature of the traditional benefics, Venus and Jupiter. Yet Love and Wisdom are both essential to the quest, which demands for its ultimate fulfillment, an harmonious response to all the planetary rays.
The terms "benefic" and "malefic" may suggest that they are the agents of the twin forces of good and evil. If so, the forces of evil seem to have a huge advantage, since the extra-Saturnian planets appear to indicate as many troubles as the traditional malefics! It is probably truer to say that the forces
represented by the planets are neutral and that whether they operate for good or evil in a particular nativity depends upon the evolutionary status of that particular native. It has been said that we suffer from the defects of our virtues and our individual response to planets may at times invoke both their more desirable and less desirable qualities and this two-way operation of the planetary forces accounts for the fact that various authorities have equated the Sun, Moon and the planets as far as Saturn, both to the Seven Great Virtues and the Seven Deadly Sins.
Additionally, man incarnates on earth in order to learn certain lessons; by struggling against adversity, soul growth is speeded up and gains in spiritual stature. Thus any planet which signifies difficulties, opposition and afflictions of various kinds can assist the native's soul growth and by this reckoning must be productive of "good."
It is easy to see how Venus and Jupiter came to be classified as benefics. An excess of self-love and self-indulgence usually harms no one except the one who indulges in it, though admittedly an excess of the benefits apparently conferred by the benefics can occasionally have disastrous results. I well remember an incident in an early Eddie Cantor film, "The Kid from Spain," in which he was captured by a fierce Mexican bandit, whose idea of benevolence was to offer him a choice of ways to die, perhaps by the knife or by the gun. Eddie thanked him for his generosity but said: "If it's all the same to you, I'd rather die of eating strawberries!" Excesses can lead to trouble just as deprivations can.
The energy of Mars, used selfishly, can easily manifest as aggression and even cruelty, while the misuse of Saturnian energies can result in a cold and callous self-interest and the over-zealous imposition of discipline on others, all activities calculated to produce unpleasant experiences for others. In the light of this type of low-level response to their stimulus it is easy to see how these two planets became "branded" as malefics. Yet the higher qualities of Mars, courage and a desire to champion the cause of the weak, and of Saturn, dependability, perseverance, self-discipline and a never ending quest for self-perfection, make a mockery of the term "malefic."
There is no better illustration of the benefic/malefic potentiality invested in a single planet than in the various effects of Neptune to be discerned in individual nativities. The ecstatic realization of heart's desire and the drugs that provide a short cut to ecstasy both belong to the domain of Neptune—
boundlessness—the absorption in Nirvana of the Buddhist—Universal Love. Neptune can bring one's heart's desire, thus appearing to act as a benefic. But if one desires the wrong thing through
immaturity or an exaggerated self-interest, then the realization of envisioned goals can become a disastrously shattering experience, so that the gifts of Neptune are ultimately regarded as totally undesirable. Neptune has been labeled the planet of illusion by those who judge by worldly
standards, when in actual fact its function is to destroy illusion by presenting man with the results of yearnings after false gods and becoming seduced by illusory concepts of happiness. Thus Neptune can be regarded as benefic or malefic, according to men's expectations, and so it is with the other planets.
Some of those who recognize that there is a more desirable goal beyond the pleasures of this world fail to understand that this goal is only reached through unceasing effort and iron self-discipline and seek short cuts through the use of drugs, which, although capable of opening doors of consciousness hitherto undreamed of, can have side effects which ultimately destroy the user.
Just as we speak of benefic and malefic planets, so the aspects are divided into two principal
categories. The energies denoted by the good aspects, the trine, sextile and semi-sextile, are easier to handle because they appear to produce satisfactory results with less effort than the more powerful energies of the square and opposition (and to a lesser degree the semi-square, sesquiquadrate and quincunx) which are often indicative of obstacles, opposition and delays, though these are not necessarily catastrophic. As with the malefic planets, it is often the so-called bad aspects which provide the conditions most conducive to soul growth, setbacks to be overcome, pain and suffering to be surmounted. Such obstacles to progress, by setting up resistance, serve as the basis for a kind of spiritual isometrics, by which spiritual "muscle" may be developed and strengthened.
Ptolemy's division of the aspects into "harmonious" and "discordant" is one again based on a sound mechanical assessment of the problems inherent in combining planets in signs of different elements.
The trine is usually formed between planets in the same element and the sextile between planets in compatible elements, either either positive or both negative. It therefore follows that a trine between a planet at the very end of Cancer and one at the very beginning of Sagittarius is less likely to operate entirely harmoniously, since water and fire do not easily mix. Similarly, a square between a planet at the end of Cancer and one at the beginning of Scorpio is not likely to operate so adversely as one between planets not in the same element.
The present writer prefers to retain the long established practice of referring to aspects as
harmonious and discordant in the belief that most students are aware that this does not imply any prejudgment of an aspect's operation for good or evil in a particular horoscope but merely refers to the fact that the achievement of a smooth combination between the two planetary forces involved may require a greater degree of effort from the native, when the aspect is discordant, to achieve the best results. If the greater power of the so-called discordant aspects can be controlled,
correspondingly more productive results may eventually be obtained. If this power cannot be
controlled, a state of crisis may be precipitated, just as a man who is not strong enough to handle a pneumatic drill properly may do damage with it, while in capable hands it can prove to be a most effective tool.
While there has been no attempt to refer to benefic and malefic planets by other terms, there have been several attempts to find an alternative way of referring to harmonious and discordant aspects, and the pairings of static and dynamic, active and passive spring to mind as couplings which suggest a slightly different view of the working out of aspects. Other couplings, such as easy and difficult, helpful and adverse and favorable and unfavorable, merely reiterate the underlying idea contained in the terms "harmonious" and "discordant" and readers will no doubt notice that the author occasionally makes use of these alternatives for the sake of variety.
It is worth re-emphasizing that the so-called favorable aspects do not of themselves promise an harmonious combination of the qualities signified by the planets in aspect to each other. Not only does much depend upon the intrinsic nature of each planet but also upon whether those planets are well placed by sign and well aspected by other planets. Mars, for instance does not combine easily with Saturn, even when in trine aspect, while a square between the Sun and Jupiter can indicate much success. However even a trine between the Sun and Jupiter can be spoilt if either body is in its detriment or fall, while a technically adverse aspect between two planets may be much improved if either or both planets are dignified by sign.
The above observations hold good also in the comparison of horoscopes, and a trine between one person's Venus in Scorpio and another's Saturn in Cancer could signify a rather less happy
association than if both planets formed a conjunction in Libra.
There is a further point to be considered in this context. If our horoscope contains, for instance, a Mars-Saturn square, suggesting some difficulty in combining the forces signified by the two planets, an aspect from another's Saturn to our Mars, or from Mars to our Saturn, will serve to remind us of our difficulties. The other person will, so to speak, personify our own psychological problem and since we tend to attract others according to our own planetary make-up, there is a good chance that a number of our own harmonious and discordant planetary complexes will frequently become
"personified" in this way. As a result we shall probably look benevolently upon those who stimulate our best aspects, and entertain considerable reservations about those who make us uncomfortably aware of the disharmonies in our own nativity.
It is through the dual working of the benefic and malefic possibilities associated with the planets and of the harmonious and discordant possibilities associated with the aspects that we can find the most satisfactory answer to the old chestnut: "If God is a God of Love, why does he permit pain and
suffering to exist?" The evolutionary plan of the universe is so constituted that each individual has the possibility of achieving the status of a Divine Being, a possibility which can only be realized after many incarnations of unremitting effort and sustained aspiration. Only by being free to respond in our own way to the planetary forces playing through our solar system, represented by the Sun, Moon and planets, can we ultimately fit our-selves to become a perfect channel for the expression of those planetary forces.
The amount of pain and suffering in any individual life can be a measure of that individual's failure to respond in the best possible way to the rays of a particular planet or planets, a failure which may stretch back over a number of lifetimes. If, for instance, we fail to use properly the power represented by Mars and allow our energies to control us instead of us holding them in check, we may fail to exercise proper control over our temper, become unduly aggressive or unreasonably reckless and so precipitate situations which result in our being given a short, sharp and painful lesson, a lesson which may be repeated over and over again if we do not learn to improve our handling of the Martian
energies. If we do not respond as we should to the power represented by Saturn and allow ourselves to become dominated by a cold and restricting self-interest and allow our worldly ambitions to blind us to all other considerations, we may find that in the long term we are denied the love and affection that we have omitted to bestow on others and are isolated in some way from the world in which we live.
The lessons of Saturn are stern, but dictated by strict and logical justice. In similar fashion, our failure to respond adequately to the other planetary forces can involve us in a variety of unpleasant
experiences.
The repercussions of wrong living may not make themselves felt in one lifetime. Indeed, most of us are much too fragile to bear the accumulated burden of all our previous misdeeds during the course of any one incarnation. Thus Dr. Davidson in his lectures on Medical Astrology, cited the case of a woman with consumptive tendencies, shown by a much afflicted Neptune, who had built this
predisposition into her system through a lifetime of fasting and midnight vigils in spartan surroundings in a previous existence as a nun. Not for nothing did the Buddha counsel the wisdom of the Middle Way!
Thus by the way in which we respond to the play of the planetary forces, do we become our own judge and jury. It is we who precipitate our own suffering and the unpleasant effects resulting from our own mishandling of the forces at our disposal are the inevitable results of immutable law. The
alternative to this process of learning by trial and error is for man to remain ever in the robot stage, a state of existence not far removed from permanent annihilation!
The foregoing is, of course, an over-simplification of the picture, since our own evolution is bound up with the evolution of the wider units to which we belong, of the family into which we are born, of the nation of which we are a part, and, indeed, of the whole human race. Thus it is that the story of the most perfect Being who ever incarnated on Earth tells of the ultimate sacrifice on the Cross, not only for the purpose of paying off any remaining debts of his own to the past, but with the object of freeing
The foregoing is, of course, an over-simplification of the picture, since our own evolution is bound up with the evolution of the wider units to which we belong, of the family into which we are born, of the nation of which we are a part, and, indeed, of the whole human race. Thus it is that the story of the most perfect Being who ever incarnated on Earth tells of the ultimate sacrifice on the Cross, not only for the purpose of paying off any remaining debts of his own to the past, but with the object of freeing