My lover and I were in La Companía, perhaps the most beautiful church in Quito. We had hired a guide, because my lover said she wanted to learn more about this church, and so we’d been introduced to lots of somber, painted saints. Now we were gazing into a round mirror near the front of the church, placed there so that people could peer up into the ornate recesses of the ceiling.

We saw four figures up there, surrounded by the hypnotic golden shapes that cover every surface of La Companía. Our guide told us that the figures were the evangelists, and that each had a companion. These four companions were a bull, a lion, an eagle, and an angel.

Those are the four symbols of the fixed signs of the zodiac: Taurus, Leo, Scorpio and Aquarius. They show up everywhere – in occult literature, in the tarot deck, in the Book of Revelations. But it was strange that we should look up and see them there, since we’d just been talking about them that morning.

I’d been talking to my lover about them because Jupiter has now entered Scorpio. And so each of these four fixed signs is tenanted by an influential and slow-moving planet. Neptune is in Aquarius, Saturn is in Leo, Jupiter is in Scorpio, and Mars (retrograde, and moving more slowly than usual) is in Taurus.

The four fixed signs are all very powerful. They take their power from their fixity, their resistance to change. They stand for the stability of our life on this planet. We are structures: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual structures. We exist here, in this fluctuating energy grid, and we have a presence from one moment to the next. This is our beauty, our joy and our pain: to be here, continually existing in all our contradictions.

The four fixed signs are the most resistant to change, and so change is most turbulent and dramatic when these signs are affected. Change is inevitable, and when something is most fixed and solid, change becomes an uprooting, a cataclysm, a total destruction and a rebirth.

Mars has been in the earth sign Taurus for the past three months, and we’ve seen these cataclysmic changes on the physical level. The earth usually bends, flexes, and flows, finding many small outlets for her immense power. But now the large changes are much more evident than the small, ordinary ones. The earth howls and pummels and levels us.

Saturn has been in Leo for about three months as well, and Leo is the sign of kings. Our world is very far from getting rid of kings. King Henry VIII would have loved the power and glory that is available to rich businessmen in the world today. Serfs no longer have to be in one’s own back yard. They can be in a country halfway across the world. You never even have to see the scruffy children who are creating your wealth.

But with Saturn in Leo, the kingdoms are shaking. Will some of them fall? As I write this, it looks like Karl Rove has dodged his bullet. Saturn was exactly opposing his Mars a couple of weeks ago, but it has moved on. However, Saturn will turn around late in November, and will repeat the opposition to his Mars in January and again in June. So I don’t think he’s safe yet.

George W. is also having his share of hard Saturn aspects, with Saturn in Leo going back and forth over his ascendent, Mercury and Pluto between now and next July. So he will experience a slow grinding effect, but he may be able to hunker down and ride it out. With Leo as the heart of his chart, he is a very fixed person, and it will take a lot to uproot him.

Leo is an enormously creative and resilient sign, but its Achilles heel is the love of glory. While Saturn moves through Leo, all people with strong Leo influences will find that glory is scarce. And so the challenge will be to move beyond the ego, to express the courage, strength and open-heartedness that is Leo at its best.

And now there’s Jupiter, which has been in Scorpio barely a week. Scorpio is the sign of transformation, a basic contradiction for a fixed sign. The rhythm of Scorpio is intense and extreme - stasis, transformation and rebirth, over and over. It’s also a water sign, so it operates on the emotional level, working through ancient archetypes of devil and dragon.

And so Jupiter has appeared in Scorpio in the role of a change-agent. As it moves through Scorpio, it will oppose Mars in Taurus (in December 2005 and January 2006), square Neptune in Aquarius (in January, March and September 2006), and square Saturn (in June and October 2006). The whole next year will be about Jupiter’s tough transformations. And the one area that is particularly vulnerable is the economy, since Jupiter rules finances and financial institutions.

We’ve already seen the economy take a beating through the earth-changes of Mars in Taurus. It may come to the point where we can’t just afford to subsidize any more kings. They’ll all have to give up their thrones and get ordinary jobs as jugglers and bread-bakers.

And what’s Neptune in Aquarius doing while Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are tenanting the other three fixed signs? Neptune has been in Aquarius since 1998, and is well-established there. Aquarius is the sign of enlightenment and social change, and Neptune in this sign has contributed to the development of a world-wide peace movement, and the increased visibility of many human rights organizations.

Neptune is about the things and ideas that fascinate people. However, Aquarius is also the sign of new inventions, and so Neptune can be sidetracked by gadgets. When the crunch comes, when the transformations start to roll over us, Neptune will be put to the test. Will we be so seduced by our gadgets that we don’t notice what’s going on? Will we see the chance to act on our ideals? Will all these neighborhood peace groups suddenly see a hundred more enlightened ways to arrange the world?

To confront this new reality, we will need to tap into the positive attributes of all four of the fixed signs. We will need the practical skills of Taurus, the courage and open self-expression of Leo, the underlying emotional awareness of Scorpio, and the ideals of Aquarius.

It’s not a coincidence that we are now saying goodbye to Rosa Parks, an Aquarian par excellence. In leaving us, she reminds us of who she was and what she stood for. She challenged fixity with fixity, substituting a new ideal for an old set of prejudices and painful traditions.

Change is many things. It’s the moment in which resistance breaks through into a new reality. It’s happened before, and it will happen again. Let us shape this burgeoning future according to the things we believe in. Rosa left us plenty of work to do.

Index of Jenny Yates' Writings on Lesbian.com