Melencolia by Albrecht Durer, 1514
Everyone has an Anti-Birthday! It’s the day exactly six months after their birthday. Usually, if a person has a decent-enough chart without major natal complications, the period of 3 or 4 days before the anti-birthday will be felt as a kind of dull, numb, sluggish period. Nothing “bad” has to happen, and it usually doesn’t. But there is a feeling of passivity in the air, a feeling that you’re being pulled along by others.
A client and I had a dinner date. The date came. The client called: “You really want to go out tonight?” It didn’t sound very encouraging. “Not if you don’t want to!”
The next day, we could have gone out again. But that was yesterday. Tucson was hit by a big thunderstorm that even spouted some funnel-clouds! We didn’t even talk on the phone.
Why not? Why didn’t we even talk on the phone? It was their ANTI-BIRTHDAY yesterday! They were sunk in a blue funk and unlikely to even leave the house – and the rainstorm and lightening fit the situation – to a “T’.
WHY do Anti-Birthdays have this effect? The reasons for this are several. If you were born an emotionally responsive Pisces, then the days of Virgo, and the energy of Virgo, the opposite sign, are often too exacting, efficient and wearisome for you. You feel people are extracting things from you during this time, and maybe you just want to be left alone!
But there is an even more astrological reason for feeling a bit “off”, and that is because the Sun, the glowing heart of our personal and planetary system, is coming to a point exactly opposite where it was when one was born. This produces a kind of tidal pull, and some people are bent or swayed at such a time. There may also be a feeling of needing to shift gears, but the response is often one to just relax and watch the world go by. The ball (Sun) is in the other guy’s (opposite sign’s) court, not yours, at this time, and HE (or she) has the ability to whack the ball back at you while you have to be alert and watchful for what’s going to happen next!
I was married to a Sagittarius lady for five years. I’m a Gemini. Gemini and Sagittarius are opposite signs. Whenever the Sun went into Sagittarius in late November, she had a series of good things happen, mostly in her career. But at the same time – I was a spectator, it was hard to participate in the stuff going on when you are in the opposite sign. The opposite situation held true every May and June. The situation is not quite so simplistic, of course; a lto of other factors need to be looked at. If a person is born with a very difficult chart, then it is likely that their ANTI-birthday might give them some positive feelings and events.
There is good news, though! Newton’s Third Law is often misstated as follows: “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction…” That’s not exactly what Newton said. But in this case, I think such a statement applies to the reality that follows the highs and lows of birthday and anti-birthday.. The days immediately FOLLOWING one’s Anti-Birthday are often filled with a rebound of more positive energy. Almost always, the days right AFTER the Anti-Birthday have something good to be said about them. Positive things may very well happen in these days, 3 or 4 days, anyway, which follow the less energetic, “turning inward” days of the Anti-Birthday. Hey! I’m going out to dinner tonight. You see?
