I have unwittingly been slacking for more than 3 hours.
Libra
Mirror, mirror on the wall,
Who's the fairest of them all?
One of the most notorious Librans of recent fame is Brigitte
Bardot. She serves as a reminder that the ruling planet of Libra is
Venus, goddess of love and beauty in ancient mythology. You'd think
Libra would be the most obvious, easiest sign to understand. All
they need is love, right? Wrong.
Remember that Libra is an airy sign. And air is concerned with
ideas and principles above all else. Love, yes, of course. Every
Libra thinks a lot about love, just as he thinks a lot about
anything that pertains to relationship. But the operative word here
is think. Libra's idea of love isn't necessarily your idea of a
warm, cozy, delightful tête-à-tête. More likely, it'll be one of
his many theories on the nature of love and marriage, his ideals of
the perfect relationship, his concepts about how people ought to
behave toward each other, his urgent vision of a world where
everything is absolutely balanced, polished, perfect, symmetrical,
harmonious. It can drive you mad. This sign, whose symbol is the
scales of balance, has less to do with ordinary sweaty human
coupling than any other. What? Libra soil his hands? Never. Love,
for Libra, must always be in the appropriate style: a ritual of
courtly love, complete with the right gestures, the right words,
the right perfume, the right satin sheets, the right scented
candles, the right flowers. Be careful. Libra is the great
perfectionist of the zodiac. Not Virgo, as you may have heard.
Love, ah yes. Love, for Libra, makes the world go round. But his
love is a theoretical one. He knows less about love than any other
sign, although he thinks about it more. That's why he's always
searching for it in the most idealized possible forms. Like
Aquarius and Gemini, Libra's emotional nature is often childlike
and naïve.
The planet Venus symbolizes, in astrology, the urge for
relationship. Let's look closely at that word. Relating one thing
to another doesn't necessarily involve emotion. It's the art of
comparison, differentiation, of making balanced and symmetrical
patterns. Relationship is an integral part of dance, of geometry,
of mathematics, or warfare. Relationship can mean a delicate and
masterly sense of which colour blends with which. Or whether the
lines of a Porsche 928 are superior in style to those of a Ferrari.
This is really what Libra is concerned with. Marriage, yes. Most
Librans think a lot about marriage, too. It's rare to find a Libra
who remains unmarried for long. There's something about the ritual,
the ceremony, the sense of togetherness, the rings, that appeal to
the delicate quality of stylization in Libra's nature. It's the
marriage of opposites, the balancing of things which are
incompatible and mutually exclusive, the cleaning up of rough
edges, the ordering of the pattern.
Marriage to Libra is like a sixteenth-century dance. Every step,
every gesture, has a ritualized meaning. Libra is the great sign of
ritual. And remember that Libra's symbol, the balance, is an
inanimate object. Libra tries to lift ordinary human living onto
the level of Platonic ideals. Not that he's incapable of being
erotic or deeply sensual. But often sex itself must be ritualized,
otherwise it turns him off.
You'll hear the words 'fair' and 'equal' mentioned a lot in
conversations with Libra. The Libran's sense of what is fair is so
acute that he can spot an imbalance miles away. He believes
passionately in fairness, and this often causes him a great deal of
unhappiness, because life and people aren't always fair. Again and
again his idealism collides with an imbalanced world full of
imperfections and rough edges. Libra believes passionately in
equality, too, particularly in relationships. If you do him a
favour, he does you a favour. If you pay for dinner, he'll pay for
the theatre tickets. In many ways he's truly an enlightened soul
when it comes to male-female relationships, for he understands in a
very real way what equality and fair play mean, and he won't use
sex to tip the balance.
Here, too, he often meets with sad disillusionment, because finding
a relationship where each partner gives exactly the same amount and
takes exactly the same amount, where there isn't one slightly
stronger or one who loves slightly more, is like finding a unicorn.
But Libra believes in unicorns too, and may often be seen moving
from one relationship to another, one job to another, one country
to another, believing and believing and believing that one day,
some day, he'll find that perfect companion, that perfect career,
that perfect environment where no ugliness or coarseness or human
tragedy intrudes.
Like Socrates, Libra seeks the Good, the True and the Beautiful.
Even the Libra who's learned to use his notorious charm to
manipulate people and situations still seeks these things. He seeks
them in whatever field of life you find him, in whatever
relationship he enters. He usually knows by the time he reaches his
mid-thirties that the Good, the True and the Beautiful are concepts
and symbols rather than facts which he's likely to meet on the
street. But he'll go on trying. And one of the nicest qualities
about this curious sign is that in his eternal efforts to change
the world and make it a place where the Good, the True and the
Beautiful can make their abode, he often succeeds in making life
just a little better, a little more beautiful, a little more
harmonious than it might otherwise have been.
Like his planetary ruler Venus, he has the gift of creating style
and grace and harmony wherever he goes. More earthy souls often
don't appreciate Libra's special gift. But those who know that
hyacinths for the soul are as necessary as that extra five pounds a
week on the salary cheque appreciate Libra.
Libra has a quality of initiation, a need to have goals, which the
sign shares in common with Aries, Cancer and Capricorn. All these
signs have as a basic characteristic the need to be working toward
something. Libra is usually looking for order, for perfection, for
an ideal of relationship. Because he's always aware of other
people's viewpoints, he won't often show aggressiveness or
pushiness in his encounters with others. But don't forget that he
possesses just as much initiative as his more overt cousins born
under Aries and Capricorn. He's always after something. The
difference is that, in order to really feel confident about
achieving it, Libra needs a partner. If you spend some time with a
Libran, you'll learn to recognize the royal Libran 'we'. Aries
simply says, 'I want that. Do it.' Libra is far more diplomatic,
far cagier.
