I’m always fascinated by debilities. There’s planets in detriment, in signs opposite to their place of home, and there’s planets in fall, planets that are opposite to their places of exaltation. Debilitated planets don’t signify. They obscure, they contradict, and they confuse. Debilitated planets are planets that signify that a cultural rupture or fall has taken place. They’re planets that remember scarcity. They’re planets that offer us something very important—they offer us transformation.
I think that there’s a lot of focus out there already about astrological reception. Astrological reception happens when two planets gain dignity through ruling one another. For example, someone with a Taurus Sun and Aries Moon might find that their luminaries behave in a way that is exalted even though neither the Sun or Moon are in signs where they exalt simply because the Sun exalts where the Moon is and the Moon exalts where the Sun is. If your Mercury is in Pisces, you might really love the way a Virgo Venus cuts into your ideas.
Astrological rejection is the opposite of astrological reception. Astrological rejection happens when two planets find debility in the signs that the other are in. This is Jupiter in Cancer and Saturn in Capricorn. This is Sun in Leo and Saturn in Aquarius. This is Scorpio Sun with Libra Moon. Jupiter falls in Capricorn and Saturn faces adversity in Cancer. The Sun is in detriment in Aquarius and Saturn falls in Aries. The Sun falls in Libra and the Moon falls in Scorpio.
You'll notice that most everyone experiences astrological rejection, even if it's not in your own chart. You will experience rejection in synastry with someone or something else. This is because rejection is just a fact of living. It is impossible to hold everything at once.
With astrological reception, the planets are said to “help” one another. I have found that receptions happen when two planets are able to almost blur into one another, when the significations and promises of one planet cannot happen without the other one’s presence. If anything happens to one planet, it also happens to the other one.
Astrological rejection does not blur planetary meanings. Two planets that reject one another refuse the other’s presence. They push against each other. They refuse to sit in the same room together. When something happens to one of them, a transit or return, the other one doesn’t get to participate. Instead, it feels rejected. It feels forgotten or overlooked. Sometimes, that planet chooses this moment to rebel.
It’s possible to talk to clients about the rejections in their chart. It puts words to dichotomies of identity that have sometimes been accepted and, other times, feels like an impossible crossroads between two possible selves. People sense their rejections as two states of being that seem completely irreconcilable. To understand one planet, to give it living room, you must abandon or reject the other one and to do this feels like a perpetual and impossible grief.
It doesn’t matter if the planets in rejection to one another are dignified. It doesn’t matter if the two roads at the crossroads are both viable. Rejections often occur between dignified planets for the same reasons that receptions often occur between debilitated placements. When rejections are between dignified planets, they can still, and often do, feel like impossible choices.
However, this is also the magic of astrological rejection—that it is always a choice.
Life, as it turns out, is not a straight or even crooked path. Life contains its fair share of crossroads.
Rejection from family is also the choice to live life as yourself. Rejections from a workplace means that you are forced to do your own thing for a while. Rejection from a person means that you get to be who you are, exactly as you are, without having to anticipate that person.
If receptions between debilitated planets signify experiences in which relationship and community are fortified through mutual struggle, then rejection signifies the choice to strengthen identity through exclusion.
And I don’t want to minimize the experience. Rejection is a painful thing. Often, rejection feels like dying. It feels like being excluded from the option of survival. To be rejected means that, at least for a moment, you feel very, very alone.
But rejection never defines a person. It’s choice that does. And, in rejection, there is always choice. To work with astrological rejection, you must always remember that you have a choice.
And choice is momentary! It’s never one choice that defines a person. It’s always a continual and endless series of choices. Astrological rejection in a chart is very rarely a one time event. It’s always something that is chosen again and again, each time differently.
To have Jupiter in Cancer and Saturn in Capricorn, for example, which almost all people born in 1989 do, you have a choice between big, big meaning and prudent commitment. You have the choice between Icarus style largeness and down-on-your-knees humility. To have Sun in Aries and Saturn in Libra, you have the choice between devilish impunity and angelic order. You face these choices again and again. Each time, you find yourself choosing differently.
To act through either one planet makes the other one throw its very own tantrum. There are some parts of you, it turns out, that refuse neglect even when accepting rejection.
This is the thing about rejection. It forces you to pay attention to yourself. People and planets that are rejected scream for attention. They do not allow themselves to be ignored. There is a beauty in this screaming because there is an honesty and a vulnerability there. These are not socially savvy placements that understand how to bring people together. These are screaming and tantruming planets that can only bring attention to themselves.
It is your job, when you have rejection in your chart, to love each other these pieces of you through choice, repeated and repeated. Choice becomes like a hymn. It becomes its own rhythm. It becomes its own devotion.
