Saturday, August 11, 2012

Which Planet Rules Creativity?

© 2012 by Joyce Mason
All Rights Reserved

You may have been told, like I was, that the Sun rules Leo and the 5th House  of children and creativity.  This isn’t hard to buy. After all, the Sun represents our unique Self, and we shine through our creations.

After six decades of expressing creativity from crayons to blogs, books and beyond, I think there’s a lot more to it than being ourselves in our most inimitable way—or replicating ourselves in a biological way. I think creativity is both personal and interpersonal—and very outerplanetary. Creativity taps into One Mind and everything that’s not new, as in that old adage, “There’s nothing new under the Sun.”

While nothing’s new as far as the basic materials of creativity are concerned, the way we recombine them is often highly original. While we’d be hard put to find an idea that hasn’t been thought of before, we surely will find many new ways those ideas have been pieced together to fulfill a need, solve a problem, bring us joy, give us a laugh, or touch us with beauty.

An example from the more ridiculous end of the sublime/ ridiculous continuum is the Chia Pet. Who’d a thunk it? Chia Pets make people laugh or groan or at least ask what the … ??? You just can’t be neutral about them. First sold in 1977, unbelievably, Chia Pets were still selling over a half million a year as of 2007. Enjoy this original Chia Pet commercial. Aries and Tauri, take note. They come in rams and bulls! (Or at least they did back then.) You even can buy a Chia of President Obama on Amazon or eBay. Could anyone dispute this is possibly the world’s most creative combination of pottery, plants, and the human desire for pet companions? (I’ve never wanted a pet President, though. Have you?)

Creativity comes from a swirling kaleidoscope of ethereal ideas, everyone’s space junk and genius, floating in the dimension of our connected minds. Some astrologers assign creativity to Mercury, others to Uranus. To me, it’s obvious that creativity has no one planetary ruler.  

I completely understand why those advocating Mercury as creativity’s ruler came to that conclusion, though, because creativity, above all, requires an open mind. That’s how we tap into the Big Think Tank in the Sky.

I live to create. If I’m not being creative, I’m dying. Since I retired from my government job almost seven years ago, I’ve had the good fortune to be able to live my creativity nearly 24/7. (I’m also counting my active dream life, where my subconscious goes hog wild mixing experiences and feelings to produce some night movies that are even stranger than Chia Pets.)

The longer I live in the center of my whirlwind imagination, the less I feel that I create on my own. I have heard the concept of co-creation with God or the universe for the last 35 years, since I officially “got metaphysical.” Yet, I never really understood in such a visceral way what it means till now. In fact, I’m not sure I create at all. Creations come through me. I birth new creations by tapping into the Cosmic Altogether. It feels very Lunar and Neptunian. And Uranian. Plutonian, and considering my bent toward that savvy centaur, Chironic.

Creativity is too big a concept to fit into a single planetary ruler. It’s universal energy, bigger than the sky.

I’ve written before about a sense that I have Manicotti Mind. You know, one of those big tubular pasta shells. It’s like this tube sits in the middle of my head, and it’s the base of a funnel through which I get information. Surely, I’ve got Uranus sending some signals, maybe through my dental fillings. And if you aren’t Plutonian, you can’t deal with the death-birth-and rebirth that all creativity demands of us. Example: The typical scene in the movie of the frustrated writer, back in the olden days of typewriters. He or she just can’t get it right, rips the paper out of the carriage, balls it up and throws it in the trash. If she’s really at wits end, she stomps on it or kicks the garbage can.

This may be hard to believe, but I never recall suffering from writer’s block—ever. (If anything, I need help turning off the faucet.) The expression itself, writer’s block, tells what needs to be healed—a blockage. (Time for Chiron!) While I know that actual manicotti is best served stuffed with delicious ricotta cheese and drowned in marinara or meat sauce (I was raised by an Italian mama, after all), the metaphorical tube in Manicotti Mind must remain completely open.

The belief that you have to fill the empty page solely from content that you draw out of yourself is the cause of writer’s block.

When you open to let to the entire cosmos whisper in your ear and stuff ideas into the noodle in your noodle—or even send wires over your dental work, anything is possible! Even these last few paragraphs.

Creativity requires a lot of Jupiter, too. You’ve got to be willing to make a fool of yourself—and to laugh at yourself. Some of the best things you’ll ever write, paint, sing, dance—name your medium—will come from being crazy, wacky, and telling Saturn to take a powder. Saturn can come back when he’s done playing fuddy-duddy and is ready to help you where he counts most—in bringing your creations into usable form.

Chiron remains a Saturn-to-Uranus bridge in this case, too. Chiron can help you translate some of the farthest-out ideas into something that the middle of the bell curve can understand, if that’s your audience. And if your audience is on the other extremes, he’ll show you how to simplify or leave the material uncut for people on the cutting edge.

The best writing exercises I’ve ever done are called Brain Warmers. Brain Warmers are a kind of morning coffee to wake up the creative juices and get them flowing. They can be adapted to any medium of self-expression. Brain Warmers more than let Pandora out of my creativity box; they blew up the box.

Brain Warmers

  1. Take any book, newspaper, magazine or printed material. At random, open any page and point at a word. This is your first word. Write it down. Omit articles, prepositions, conjunctions and all “little” words. Stick to nouns, adjectives, and verbs—but primarily nouns. You’ll need at least one noun, and you may choose to do only nouns. Another option: use a Random Word Generator.

  2. Repeat process until you have written three words.

  3. You will be writing a paragraph that includes these three words. The first word must be in the first sentence. You can modify the form of the word to fit your context. Example: I drew preservation from my Sabian Symbols book. If preservation doesn’t work right, preserving or a variation of form is OK, but stick as much as possible to the original.

  4. Set a timer for 1.5 minutes. Write fast and without worry about who will see it or how it comes out. Just let ideas flow. Edit nothing.

  5. When the alarm goes off, STOP. You can finish your thought after you reread your paragraph, if there’s a sentence that’s not yet completed.

Undressed and Unrehabilitated
To give you a real example of one of these, I drew the following words from the Random Word Generator: undress, rehabilitated, and intimation. Here’s what I got in my minute and a half:

The mannequins were in various states of undress. I don’t know why it bothered me. I guess it’s because I’m a rehabilitated nudist. I just can’t bare seeing others romp in the all together, even if they’re just big, inanimate dolls. I guess I’m tired of the intimation, even to myself, that I might be a little “preverted,” as my friend Nancy used to say. Still, I have to admit, I’m happy I’ve decided to go back to clothes. I like fashion. We’re back to the mannequins, aren’t we?

Given I’m a Virgo, the chances of my actually ever being—or having been—a nudist are nil. That’s what makes brain warmers so much fun. They can be total fantasy, silly—and no one ever has to look at them but you. They open the channel for creativity, and the carryover is contagious to your writing.

You could do the same thing as an artist: find three words and include them in a sketch concept, or write a story first and draw or paint that scene. As a dancer, dance the three words or a story you derive from them. A singer can work their story into lyrics. An instrument musician can use the words to stir up a song or choose three random notes and work them into a theme. What this exercise does is show you how to remix those fragments from One Mind and make something new from them.

I’ve already talked about Sun, Moon, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Chiron, Uranus, and Pluto. I can’t leave out Venus and Mars. Creativity is an expression of love (Venus) and many say Venus rules creativity. She certainly inspires us. Also from Venus’s realm: to touch and relate to others is a large part of why most of us create. Mars gives us the passion and desire to deliver our creativity and the juice to run that sky-to-earth interface creation requires. Creativity can take a lot of energy, and managing creative energy without burnout is a constant challenge for me—and a whole other article.

Creativity is a dialogue between your uniqueness and the unlimited potential of the universe.

Finally, all this dancing with idea fragments must come through you. You’re the other end of the funnel, the end of synthesis. You will express your creativity in a way no one but you can do. It’s a dialogue between uniqueness—yours—and the unlimited potential of the universe. Creativity, in my experience, includes all the planets, given back through your shining Sun and all the unique astrological Mandala of You.

Anyone can be creative. As with any other skill, creativity takes practice to do it well. It takes a willingness to give Saturn the boot when he interferes, and any of the other planets when they’re ornery, and a commitment to embrace them, quirks and all, as part of the process.

Creativity is simply the cosmic life force, brought down to Earth, through you.


Photo Credits: Drawing the Sun © Rozum |;
Mannequins  © marcoguidi -


Cameron said...

The part about Chia Pets made me laugh out loud!

They appeared many years before 2007; I remember seeing them in the '70s, and I brought a Chia ram back from Mexico in 1980 when I lived there.

I gave it to my mother, and she tended it faithfully by the kitchen sink for years. Then 5 years after she passed, I found it in a box in her closet and rescued it.

His name is Clyde, and he makes me smile.

Joyce Mason said...

Great to hear from you again, Cameron! I'm delighted that Clyde brought so much joy to your family. And thank you for catching the error on the date Chias came into being, now fixed! I knew that, but I wrote this article during Mercury Retro. I guess Hermes was annoyed that no one had made a Chia pet of him. :) I must have been thinking ahead to the sample sales year in 2007 I was talking about next.

However, looking again at the date of the Chia's debut, it hadn't registered that it was the year Chiron was discovered. Come to think of it, Chias are very Chironic. They're composite things--a planter and a "pet." They grow greenery, and Chiron was keeper of the forest and connected to ecology. And they are definitely a strange site to behold, much like a centaur. They are often either a person or an animal, so they have Chiron's both/and feel. Wow. If it weren't for that "mistake," I'd have never seen how comically Chironic they are. They even both begin with Chi! Thanks, again!