I have a lot of clients who have hard personal aspects to Sirius—a fixed star at 13º Cancer. I don’t know why but it’s something that happens more than it’s supposed to, statistically speaking. Sirius shows up in the charts of my clients way more than any other fixed star. At first, Sirius was just something I noticed. Over the years, after working with numerous clients around Sirius, I’ve learned about its connections with alienation, cultural memory, and simulacra.
In almost every story that I could find regarding Sirius, it’s a dog. Homer called it Orion’s dog, east Asians called it the celestial wolf, and indigenous Americans called it Moon Dog or coyote. The name Sirius comes from Osiris, who replaced Anubis (another dog) as the god of the underworld.
All of the clients who have hard personal aspects with Sirius have some kind of relationship with some kind of lone wolf complex, which it’s something that they see shape their own lives or whether it’s shaped the personality of someone close to them. Especially when Sirius hard aspects the Moon, it creates a sense of cultural alienation. People with intense relationships to Sirius often feel like they’re the dark sheep in the family. A lot of folks with this star prominent in their charts are first generation immigrants, are estranged from family, or exist as outliers in some way. Sirius people live in the inbetweens. They’re often too queer for the straights, not queer enough somehow for the queers, too American for their family, or too other for their chosen family.
Intersectionality tries to solve a lot of these Sirius related issues because it tries to create a space for everyone to belong in. However, I’ve found that the ideals of intersectionality, that it’s going to create positive channels of communication between different power relations so that those of us who are othered in more ways than one can position ourselves, don’t really do anything for Sirius people. The language of intersectionality is very utopian. Sirius is not an utopian star—it’s not a future oriented star.
Sirius is a star that deals with memory. However, Sirius doesn’t deal with real memory but fabricated memory.
Sirius people are people who often fit in neither with their biological family nor their chosen family. They often play the role of the dark sheep or the lone wolf in both social spaces. However, Sirius isn’t really about perpetual alienation. Sirius people aren’t fated to always feel alienated. Rather, Sirius simply likes to orbit itself because it is an anachronistic star.
The USA is a country that has its Sun conjunct Sirius. The USA is built on anachronistic histories and fabricated memories. The promise that the USA holds—that it’s a place where dark sheeps from all walks of life come together—is a Sirius narrative. The Sirius promise is a promise that cultural alienation can turn into soft power. It’s the ugly little duckling story. It’s the story that the kid everyone bullied will one day overcome through struggles through fame. It’s the story that the kid who everyone in the ethnic community ostracized goes on to do bigger and better things than all the rest of them and becomes a representative of the ethnic minority. It’s a story about conquering your pain by turning your pain into a cultural product, by commercializing the self narrative. This is an American story. It’s a story about exceptionalism.
Sirius sees itself as operating under marginalization. The USA, for example, sees itself as a positive integrating force in the world because it thinks that it has the ability to pull together a band of misfits. It sees itself as a shelter for those who have been estranged from the rest of the world. However, Sirius is also about false memory. It is about simulated memories. American expansionism happens because America is a place that no one can really call home.
Dogs are a colonial animal and Sirius, as the dog star, is about settling, cultural belonging, and citizenship. The history of keeping dogs evolved alongside settler colonialism. Dogs are seen as a companion species of those who are fated to wander the world, attached to nothing. Dogs are for the John Wicks—for the cowboys. The popular dog breeds—Australian shepherds, German shepherd, French bulldog, Newfoundland—are nationalisms and fantasies of settler colonialism.
Isolationism is something that haunts Sirius people, whether it manifests in exceptionalism or marginalization or both. Because Sirius people feel that they will never belong anywhere, they often feel like they’re stuck in a competitive environment in which everyone is always trying to prove how they stand out from the crowd. Competitive and scarcity in resources creates the conditions for exceptionalism.
Sirius people are interested in investigating the histories that they cannot remember. However, Sirius people must remember that the process of investigating these memories are meant to bring them in alignment to people who might not share their struggle but have histories of pain of their own. When Sirius people investigate their histories with the purpose of overcoming other people, they become kings of their own universe but it’s an universe that’s empty and not populated by anyone. It’s a fascist universe and full of false memories performed for clout.
Sirius tempts its people by offering a liberal wound culture that 1) locates social identity only within the wound and 2) sees the individual’s story as representative of the whole. Liberal wound culture loves stories about people who have suffered so much because they’re part of such-and-such ethnic group, gender, sexuality, class but overcame it through coincidences and personal luck. Liberal wound culture ignores the oppression of the many and enjoys the elevation of the one.
People who have hard aspects to Sirius are dealing with generational marginalization. Sirius people have the choice to perform pain within liberal wound culture. However, liberal wound culture will not give them their true memories. It will bring them into a false memory world.
Here are some observations and delineations of the personal planets and Jupiter in aspect to Sirius.
Sun or Moon conjunct, square, or opposite Sirius
The Sun is about power while the Moon is about borders. The Sun is associated with centers of cultural capital while the Moon is associated with markets. This is why the Sun is about the familiar while the Moon is about the foreign.
People with the Moon in hard aspect to Sirius often experience double foreignness. They feel that they don’t fit into narratives around what foreignness means. They find it hard to find home with other foreigners. However, Moon-Sirius people are able to turn representations of their own foreignness into commodities and are able to perform many different types of foreignness. Since the Moon is dignified in Cancer, Moon-Sirius people feel that their performances of foreignness fill a need.
The Sun in hard aspect to Sirius is about soft power. Soft power is the ability to represent the self as weak from a position of power. Sun-Sirius people are able to attract people to them who identify with the role of the misfit or the rule breaker. Sun-Sirius people are interested in counter-culture.
Venus or Mars conjunct, square, or opposite Sirius
Venus and Mars are about the normal and the abnormal. Venus is the disciplinary power of norm setting and Mars is the perceived threat of the cultural outsider.
People who have Venus in hard aspect with Sirius can feel like they’re expected to perform marginalization or exceptionalism. Performing these roles makes Venus-Sirius people feel like they’re alienated from themselves. They can often feel as though the marginalized identity that they perform is not authentic to them but that it is a learned behavior.
Out of all the signs, Mars-Sirius aspects are the hardest to deal with because Sirius is strongly connected to the Moon while Mars is in fall in the Moon’s domain. Mars-Sirius people are punished for taking on the exceptional or marginalized role. Mars-Sirius people struggle to be themselves because their environment punishes them for taking on the exceptional role. While Venus-Sirius people feel alienated from themselves, Mars-Sirius people feel alienated from other people.
Mercury or Jupiter conjunct, square, or opposite Sirius
Mercury and Jupiter are about labor. Mercury is the ability to extract labor and Jupiter is the concealment of labor through technology.
Mercury-Sirius people often experience marginalization through labor. Performing marginalization can feel like labor for Mercury-Sirius people. Mercury-Sirius people look for memories because they’re looking for truth. Because memories are by nature untruthful, they become fragmented. Mercury-Sirius people are always trying to make sense of their histories and want to formulate or strategize a way out of their histories of oppression.
Jupiter in hard aspect to Sirius is the easiest type of Sirius placement to deal with, since Jupiter is exalted in the Moon’s sign. Since benefics usually work to reassert the power relations that already exist, Jupiter-Sirius people can find it easy to participate in liberal wound culture. They might be the person who seems to have overcome oppression by succeeding—the one who “made it out.” Jupiter-Sirius people are rewarded for performing marginalization for the institution.
Saturn conjunct, square, or opposite Sirius
Saturn is about exodus and genealogy. Saturn-Sirius people often inherit the Sirius-related issues of their ancestors. Saturn-Sirius issues can be around actual exodus or migrancy. Marginalization is experienced as a direct result of losing the homeland. Since Saturn is a social planet, Saturn-Sirius people don’t experience Sirius-related issues as a personal issue but one that affects everyone from the homeland. Saturn is in detriment in Cancer and Saturn-Sirius issues are difficult since they result from geopolitical problems.
How to work with Sirius
Again, it is important to remember that Sirius wants you to realign yourself with people. That’s why it creates alienation—because alienation is an anachronism where fictional experiences become real. It is important to remember that liberal wound culture fetishizes certain forms of vulnerabilities and that representing your own history of struggle through the rhetoric of liberal wound culture actually conceals your pain.
Sirius is about creating memories that live in the future. It’s a spectacular star and anyone who has personal aspects to Sirius has a magical ability to remix and reimagine history. Sirius people know what happened in the past, even if they don’t know it. Ancestor problems show up in the form of coincidences and synchronicities.
When people inherit ancestral trauma, there are two impulses: one impulse is to die so that the histories of pain that represent the ancestors can be put to rest. This impulse can make people feel as if they don’t deserve to exist because they haven’t suffered enough or like they must make the ultimate sacrifice to deserve existence in an oppressive world. The second impulse is to survive so that the memories of the ancestors can live on. This impulse makes people try to relive the memories of the ancestors and reproduce the same issues over and over again.
In the story of Osiris, Osiris was scattered into many different pieces before being put back together. As a body, Osiris represents the social body of a cultural group. The disintegration of that social body, through diaspora, is an anachronism. In the period of time when Osiris is split open, time doesn’t exist. The past, the present, and the future, are all the same.
The thing to remember, when dealing with Sirius, is that there really is no such thing as true memories. All memories are memory worlds. Because marginalization takes away a person’s ability to write their own history, we often live in memory worlds that are not our own. The memory worlds that we live in are full of orientalisms. Sirius people feel that they want to locate their true memory but they are unable to do so. They can only speculate—not historicize. For Sirius people, memories become speculative and fictional. Histories are revealed in the science fiction novels, in the fantasy series, and in the animes.
