The Seven Sins

Introduction

The First Sin: Envy

Learning to look at the sky

In some ways you are better equipped to deal with Envy than many people, because of your realism about human failings and limits. You tend to view life pragmatically, without the need for impossible ideals or expectations, and you have a toughness and resilience that allows you to cope fearlessly with many of the darker aspects of human nature. You can also, when required, be realistic about your own limits, and it is likely that you are your own harshest critic. If you are good at something, you do not assume that this makes you a genius; you just do it as well as possible. And if you are not very good at something, you can admit it and focus on spheres where your competence can yield the best rewards. This ability to make peace with human imperfections is a profoundly useful gift. But it may not protect you against Envy toward those who can look upward and beyond, and believe that humans could be more than they are.

The pitfalls of tradition

Your values are rooted in the solid ground of the past, and you can feel threatened by innovative and anarchic ideas. When you encounter individuals who are not bound by the same conventions as you, you may feel critical and even contemptuous. But perhaps you secretly wish you could kick over the traces and adopt all those inspirational new ideas and trends that appear to be so threatening. When you are too intent on self-control, you can be envious of those who display abandonment and spontaneity; when you are too bound by manners, duty, and what you see as proper behaviour, you can be envious of those who do exactly what they please. The eruption of Envy doesn't mean that you should abandon all that you hold most worthwhile. Your commitment to your values is a great strength. But try to recognise where there is room for greater flexibility, tolerance, and joy in your life, and where you could develop the kind of courage that allows people to unashamedly express their individuality.

Never build a house on a volcano

You have an intense emotional nature and feel things with great depth and passion - not only in your personal relationships, but also in the realm of ideas, beliefs, and goals. But your pride, sensitivity, and lack of trust in others makes you wary of displaying your feelings. You expect rejection, and fear the humiliation and betrayal that vulnerability can expose you to. When you see people who follow their passions with trust and joyful abandon, and who seem to be enriched rather than destroyed by even the most painful experiences, you are likely to feel deep Envy of their resilience and confidence. When you do indulge in the pursuit of a grand passion, you are likely to do it in a restrained, secretive, and even manipulative way. Even the people you love most may not realise just how intense your feelings are. You may seek to control those you care most deeply about, but this will only make you even more mistrustful. You have very definite ideas about right and wrong, and sometimes you are so bound by rigid convictions that you can't trust the wisdom of your emotions and the deeper intelligence in the instinctual side of life. Try to recognise that there may be an intelligence in life that exceeds your own capacity for understanding, and that merits greater faith in the future.

You fear and long for the kind of courageous emotional commitment that forms the substance of so many great works of literature. When Tristan abandons all for his love of Isolde, or Romeo risks his life to claim his Juliet, they have entered a world in which one comes closer to feeling the breath of the gods than in any other domain of life. Something similar might be said about those who make an absolute commitment to creative work, or to a cause about which they feel passionate. It is in this world of crisis and transformation that your deepest Envy is likely to be aroused, by people who can indulge their passions without the anxiety you suffer. You need to find ways of communicating your feelings, rather than trying to control any situation where you might suffer ridicule or humiliation. The more you understand your own complexity, and the more honestly you can express yourself, the greater your Authenticity will be.

Thinking in monochrome

An element of inflexibility in your thinking may make it hard for you to recognise Envy when it appears. Perhaps your early environment included belief in a judgemental deity who punishes humans if they break the Law. Or you might have experienced an inflexible moral, philosophical, or scientific outlook that presented fixed ideas about the nature of life. But your early environment has not 'caused' your difficulty in intuitively trusting life. Your own temperament inclines to great depth of thought, but your thinking can be rigid, and it's hard for you to have faith in what you cannot see, prove, or explain. Even if you are profoundly suspicious of belief systems, your scepticism can itself be somewhat rigid. You have a deep respect for Law, however you understand it, and you try to live according to clear and inarguable standards. But you may wind up envious of people who are able to have faith in something beyond their own rationality. Your views about life are strongly coloured by your intense emotions, and you are liable to put your faith in stark black-and-white convictions that reflect personal hurts as well as personal triumphs. You want to commit yourself deeply to a meaningful system of belief, but you may not trust either life or yourself enough to maintain real optimism.

Your profound concern with meaning could help you to amass a considerable fund of knowledge. But you can be plagued by a very personal fear of the future, a mistrust of life's bounty, and an often unacknowledged Envy of people who experience heartfelt faith, whatever their system of belief. Envy may make you critical of people who do not put their beliefs to the test of critical thought or scientific investigation. In fact you can be critical of everyone who doesn't see the world as you do. Try not to exhibit the kind of rigidity that you may accuse others of displaying, and make the effort to recognise that you might need to make a leap of faith to enjoy a direct experience of those higher realms that intrigue but also repel you. "I want to believe" is one of the better-known quotations from the TV series, The X-Files. You may never be a 'believer' in the devout sense, but you can learn to acknowledge that there are many ways of interpreting reality, and no single system of thought can encompass them all.

Be careful how you climb

You need to assuage your anxieties through achieving status and importance, and this can help you to create many solid achievements. You have tenacity, self-discipline, and a willingness to work extremely hard. But the more you rely on controlling others, rather than trusting that the world will recognise your abilities simply because you are good at what you do, the more vulnerable you will be to Envy of those who don't need to exercise such strenuous efforts to achieve their goals. Be careful of the tactics you employ in your climb to success, because if you injure or thwart others on the way, you can be sure they will do nothing to help you when you eventually need their support and encouragement, which sooner or later you will. Envy of the talents of others cannot help you to feel any real confidence in yourself, especially if the Envy is unconscious and expresses itself in efforts to undermine those who might be enjoying what you have set your sights on. Envy can only transform if you are able to develop an honest appreciation of others' gifts and a willingness to allow them the same respect you desire yourself.

Martyrdom isn't helpful

You may feel a lot of envy toward people who can ask directly for what they need, and who aren't afraid of being let down as you usually are. You carry a deep conviction that you must always stand alone and maintain an emotional self-sufficiency that protects you from hurt, rejection, and abandonment. You may expect, and demand, unrealistic guarantees from loved ones in order to feel safe. But no matter how much reassurance you are given, you still find it hard to trust. You have the strength to provide your own nourishment when you need to. But you can become very resentful when you feel that people aren't recognising your needs through some magical telepathic insight. And you don't give others the chance to be emotionally generous because you are so busy doing everything for them. You might not notice that it is you who often architects the rejection you feel, because when you finally do reveal any neediness, it is done with a flavour of martyrdom intended to make others feel guilty. In this way you may inadvertently create the very isolation you fear so much.

You tend to defend yourself against rejection and isolation by trying to possess those you love, and controlling them financially, intellectually, emotionally, or sexually, in order to ensure that they don't go away. But even if you succeed in this kind of control, it will not assuage your Envy of those who enjoy greater emotional freedom than you do.

Envy can be a big problem because you are so doubtful of finding the kind of emotional support you long for. Although childhood experiences may be connected to your present emotional patterns, it may be your own touchy defensiveness that causes your feelings of isolation, for you are too unwilling to let go of a sense of injury even when no injury was intentionally inflicted. You can sometimes forget all the people who have shown you love and understanding, yet you will remember every single time when someone has let you down - even when your idea of being let down is exaggerated or even invented. Hanging on to grievances can open the door to a particularly destructive form of Envy. The more conscious you are of your fund of resentment toward those whom you imagine have had it so much easier than you, the better able you will be to transform Envy into a spirit of genuine self-sufficiency softened and warmed by greater emotional trust.

Envy and individuation

Unacknowledged Envy can distort your vision. Other people can appear to be so much better endowed, luckier, or more gifted than you are, and that injures you. Or they become the objects of your criticism and contempt, and that injures them. Envy can be an intractable destroyer, which is why it was viewed as the greatest of the Sins. Much of the world's misery and destructiveness is rooted in unconscious Envy, not only of individuals but also of national and racial groups. The creative side of Envy, when it is conscious, is that it can make you work much harder to develop the qualities you believe you lack in your own individual way. You can achieve profound insights into your deepest values, as well as the skills and knowledge to express them. But first you have to find out what these qualities are, and recognise that you will always remain who you are, and can develop your potential only within the limits of your unique personality. This means, in short, that you need to be able to accept and appreciate who you are, rather than hoping to become like somebody else. Ultimately human beings can never become anything other than the fullest and best expression of their own essential individual core.

It might help you to recognise that the people who make you most uncomfortable - the innovative, experimental, and sometimes shocking members of society who break all the rules in order to discover new possibilities - are the people you might feel most envious of. Your respect for established values is a valuable and supportive quality, but you always run the risk of stagnating if you cannot move forward with life and open yourself to innovative ideas. Envy is virtually guaranteed to disturb you when you are most entrenched in your structures and most intolerant of anyone who has the courage to question the prevailing wisdom of the collective.

Dealing with Envy doesn't mean trying to compensate for what you believe you lack by becoming just like someone else, or acquiring what they have. Envy breeds in the darkness when you carry a distorted vision of yourself and judge yourself wanting. Transforming Envy into Authenticity requires the painful recognition of what you secretly wish you had, an equally painful recognition that you will never have it in precisely the form you admire it in others, and the dawning realisation that you can develop it in your own unique way, through hard work, effort, commitment, and appreciation of your own gifts. The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein wrote that Envy could be healed through Gratitude. Klein's idea of Gratitude is the experience of feeling fulfilled by what you are able to do reasonably well, whatever that might be. And it also involves appreciation of the gifts of others, because these gifts brighten all our lives. Gratitude doesn't demand perfection or genius, and it emerges with the realisation that everyone, whatever their limitations, has some area of life where they can shine and feel a self-respect that comes from within. If you can feel contented rather than resentful that you are who you are, Envy can transform into a genuine and indestructible sense of Authenticity.

The Second Sin: Gluttony

Buried yearnings

Because you relate well to the earthy world, you probably have a strong appreciation of the pleasures of the senses, and a tendency to overindulge yourself when it comes to satisfying desires of one kind or another. But pleasure isn't the same as Gluttony, even if it sometimes results in excess. You have the realism to know when to stop - even if it's just short of the line - and the self-discipline to be able to make necessary sacrifices when you have gone too far. The sin of Gluttony is identifiable by its compulsive quality, and you are more likely to experience a profound and gnawing restlessness that points to a powerful unknown craving concealed beneath the surface of your awareness. This craving could be rooted in a sense of meaninglessness, and working with it creatively demands recognition that there might be more in life, and particularly in your own life, than material stability, practical knowledge, or the safety of rules and conventions.

Kicking over the traces

Your allegiance to values that have stood the test of time is one of your great strengths, and your respect for individual effort helps you to become a responsible and productive person. You are usually astute about the workings of the world. But Gluttony can take forms other than an addiction to material objects and sensual pleasures. It can also appear as a compulsive resistance to change, and an overwhelming dependency on structures and beliefs that are rooted in the past. This kind of Gluttony can stifle new ideas that seem to threaten the stability of the status quo. But it also can be a disguise for a very different and much subtler aspiration: the need for a direct experience of inner roots and origins that lead back to an indestructible psychological and spiritual core.

Climb every mountain

You crave status and respect, not simply for the power, but also because you want to believe you are contributing something important to others. This desire is supported by a pragmatic attitude that can help you to excel in fields such as research, organisation, and the practical application of ideas to solve broader problems. You are a natural executive whose personal ambition, although often strong, is not necessarily negative. It could be an asset in helping you to become an effective individual in the world. But you can also be a glutton for control, and for a hierarchical structure in which, sooner or later, you will rise to the top. You may find it hard to accept the authority of others, however valuable, and you have an urgent need to see your own ideas and beliefs made manifest in the outside world, whether this involves material concerns, the law, or the realm of spiritual or religious conviction. Although you are pragmatic in your world-view, you also have the sense of a greater unity behind mundane reality. This can help you to give shape to the dreams and aspirations of the collective. But the inner realm does not lend itself to any person's efforts to control it, and you may need to learn humility in the face of a mystery so much deeper and larger than your own individual self.

Gluttony can colour your goals with an inclination to let the end justify the means. You may find it hard to respect the views and beliefs of others if they conflict with your own, and you may even excuse or rationalise behaviour that disregards or even injures those whom you perceive as less capable than yourself. Ambition can become an implement of domination, rather than a way of using your talents to improve the world around you. Be careful of dogmatism, intolerance, and an addiction to imposing your ideas on others. This will not help to transform your Gluttony into an immensely creative Aspiration to implement lasting changes that leave the world a better place than it was when you entered it. Faith in what you cannot see may not come easily to you, but if it does come, it is likely to be strong - perhaps so strong that you ignore the views of others in the assurance that you have the Only Truth. You could be a positive force in your world, provided you retain sufficient humour and humility to say to yourself occasionally: 'I could be wrong'.

Merging with the One

The world of the imagination is your natural home, and it is also the source of your Gluttony. You have an intuitive sense of realities beyond the domain of mundane life, and you crave solace and inspiration from a deeper or higher source that links you with earlier generations, earlier times, the realm of symbols and images, and the collective psyche from which all forms of art arise. This sense of connection, which might be described as a longing to lose yourself in the One, probably existed in your family background for many generations. But you need to find your own language to express your perceptions of the inner world. And you also need a sense of connection with the mundane world in order to keep your balance. Otherwise, if your craving to merge with that Other becomes full-blown Gluttony, you may run the risk of seeking escape from life through substances such as drugs or alcohol, or a repressive collective formula for worship that seems to provide comfort but effaces any individual creative expression of your inner vision. Although you long to merge with something greater than yourself, you have a strong instinct for self-preservation. There may be considerable tension between your mystical longing and a hard pragmatism that seeks control and rational explanations in inner as well as outer worlds. This tension could be creative, as long as you don't try to become part of a controlling spiritual elite.

You are a glutton for the world of the spirit and the imagination. Your compulsive reliance on inner realities can expand your mind, heart, and spirit, but it can also provide a defence against the challenges of ordinary mundane life and your deep anxiety that you will not be able to cope. Make sure that you don't devalue everyday obligations such as financial matters and physical health because you feel your spiritual life is too important and your convictions too profound to waste your time on things that do not fulfil your inner vision. The deeper Aspiration behind your craving is not escape from the everyday world, or exemption from its responsibilities. Transforming Gluttony into Aspiration requires you to act with humility as a mouthpiece for ideas and visions that belong to everyone but which need to be communicated through your unique individual abilities. If you can embrace your ordinary humanness, you will find the balance necessary to nourish your inner and your outer worlds.

The pursuit of the Big Picture

Your imagination and your communication skills work well together, allowing you to develop many abilities on both intellectual and artistic levels. You are always eager to learn new things, and you can communicate your knowledge fluently to others. You could be a gifted scholar and teacher if you choose to pursue that path in life, and your sense of the story underpinning events and facts contributes vitality and meaning to your self-expression. But sometimes accuracy takes second place to the colourful meanderings of your imagination, and you might not explore ideas with sufficient detail and detachment if they happen to inspire you at the time. And restlessness can prevent you from developing a particular subject or skill as fully as it merits, and you run the risk of being addicted to change at the cost of completing creative projects you set out to do. You enjoy a fruitful flow between what you see in your mind's eye and what you produce in reality. In any field you choose to pursue, your gift helps to curb the tendency to chase too many possibilities. But you can set your standards so high that you undermine your own confidence and dismiss ideas that might be worthy of development.

This kind of Gluttony isn't life-destroying. But your greed to devour a new and exciting subject or skill before you have really mastered it can still leave you feeling hungry and dissatisfied with what you have achieved. You may lose many opportunities, because you can be in such a hurry to pursue the next inspiring idea that you fail to develop something you are really good at. And your urgent need to communicate can make you a bad listener if you are in full flow. You are not really a dilettante, although sometimes it might seem so when you abandon a sphere of learning before you have thoroughly digested it. You might need to work to develop more prosaic qualities such as intellectual discipline, patience, respect for facts, and a greater sensitivity to the people around you, whom you might too often treat as though they were your audience.

Somewhere over the rainbow

You crave the ineffable, and this can make you gullible because you want so badly to believe that all your dreams can come true. If the dreams are about money, you could wind up in trouble pursuing something that you cannot have. If they are dreams of redemption, you might embrace a spiritual path that promises freedom from the shackles of mundane life but ends up freeing you from worldly responsibilities in ways that are not very spiritual. You have the wonderful gift of glimpsing dimensions of reality that many people never experience. But your gift won't guarantee you a permanent dwelling in paradise. Whether it's your own willingness to be tricky, or your naïve trust in other people who are tricky, you could find yourself deeply disappointed and disillusioned. Your Aspiration is real, moving, and achievable in moments of grace. But transforming Gluttony may require greater respect for the obligations of worldly life.

You have a deep connection with invisible realms, and this can fuel a special gift for expressing your vision in creative forms. But you crave the bliss of losing yourself in the depths. If you do not cultivate individual boundaries and a sense of self-worth to balance that compulsion, you may fritter away your talents in your yearning to become one with a higher or deeper source.

Your Gluttony is really an Aspiration toward the world of the spirit and the imagination. Whether you pursue this vision through creative paths or humanitarian concerns, it is an immensely positive dimension of your character. But you are too easily seduced by the beauty of the vision, and you may justify evasive or manipulative behaviour toward others or allow yourself to be exploited by people who seem to promise what you crave and then leave you feeling disillusioned. Detachment and realism can be helpful, even if you think such attributes are selfish or harsh. And a creative vehicle could allow you to ground your vision rather than pursuing impossible dreams. This form of Gluttony might seem spiritual and selfless, but you may use belief in your own spiritual superiority to compensate for a deep lack of self-worth. Try to explore the conflicts that might feed rather than help to transform your Gluttony. You will be in a much stronger position to experience that inner world of beauty, richness, and meaning while remaining able to cope with ordinary life.

Not everything is a Shakespearean drama

You are a glutton for drama, especially the kind that involves emotional intensity, passionate commitment to the pursuit of a dream, and an exaggeration of everyday matters into the stuff of grand opera. But you aren't aggressive about the way you express this craving, and it might not seem to you in any way problematic - except perhaps to those who don't share your need for a larger-than-life vision of reality. In many ways this kind of Gluttony is not destructive, because you can grow through crises and experience a sense of enhanced consciousness when you glimpse a meaningful pattern or feel that good fortune favours you. But you may need to keep a careful eye on the tendency to indulge your most colourful fantasies, especially the one in which your belief in a special destiny overrules the everyday responsibilities of your ordinary life. Your craving for intensity is exaggerated by your deep conviction that crises, struggles, and periodic rebirths are the only way in which life can hold any meaning for you. This could play havoc with your relationships and drive you to engage in power battles that would otherwise be unnecessary. Your addiction to drama might be utilised more positively in creative work.

Your addiction to a mythic world can fuel your imagination and give force and urgency to any creative work with which you are involved, and it can generate a quality of vitality that is infectious and enhances the lives of others as well as your own. The need to infuse every experience with meaning is not necessarily destructive to you or anyone else. But you may need to make sure that this kind of Gluttony doesn't overwhelm your capacity to relate to ordinary life, and to enjoy the surface as well as the depths. Not every life experience is full of hidden meaning and purpose, and sometimes you need to be able to laugh and let things simply be what they appear to be. You have a gift that can bring great richness to your inner and outer life. As long as you can keep your balance, your vision will be enlarged and deepened by your Aspiration to discover the hidden secrets that, for you, always lie beneath the surface of ordinary events.

But what does it mean?

Gluttony might seem to be one of the less serious and destructive of the Cardinal Sins, and it has provided the theme for many comic figures such as Shakespeare's Falstaff. But even this most obvious form of Gluttony is not a laughing matter, for it carries serious dangers, emotionally as well as physically. Subtler forms of Gluttony can be equally devastating because compulsions always leave us at the mercy of the unconscious complexes that rule our lives like a kind of fate. Jung, in company with many ancient philosophers, believed that compulsions did indeed constitute fate, and that only greater consciousness could break their power and allow their creative dimensions to be expressed in life. Only through a clearer recognition of the deeper symbolism behind your own Gluttony can you transform it into the kind of Aspiration that gives your life meaning, movement, hope, and faith.

Your faith in the strength of values rooted in the past is one of your strongest assets, offering stability and self-containment to your character and allowing you to appreciate all that has been tested by time. But be careful of becoming addicted to stability to the point where you reject change simply because it is change, and not because it has nothing to offer. You can become a glutton for clinging to the same safe track, and this could produce a sense of stagnation and frustration. Aspiring toward the preservation of values that are deep and true is an important dimension of your character. But refusal to allow your life, your perceptions, and your ideas to flow into new channels can become a form of Gluttony that masks profound insecurity and a fear that if the future is different it will inevitably be worse. Try to have more faith in yourself, rather than becoming compulsively dependent on objects and attitudes that you may have outgrown long ago.

The deeper symbolism that lies behind Gluttony hints at the source of that mysterious spark which injects every human life with a feeling of meaning and purpose. Without this spark, human beings grow weary, cynical, and depressed, and lose their joy in living. Gluttony can reveal itself as a bright beacon illuminating a road that leads toward a sense that we are part of an intelligent pattern and can contribute meaningfully to that pattern, whatever form our abilities and talents might take. While apparently one of the least serious of the Sins, Gluttony can also be the most important in terms of its relationship with our essential human need for meaning. However, Gluttony is also one of the hardest Sins to recognise, because we try to convince ourselves that the thing we crave is too necessary to be subjected to any efforts at analysis or transformation. If you can recognise that what you believe to be a passionate and justified need might really be a destructive compulsion, then you might begin to understand that any object of obsessive desire, corporeal or non-corporeal, is a symbol that can open a door revealing that highly individual and life-enhancing Aspiration that lies behind your Gluttony.

The Third Sin: Wrath

Opening the valve on the pressure cooker

You like things to be stable and under control, and Wrath is a challenge because it is so disruptive to stability. You may feel frightened of your own anger, and try to keep the lid on a highly combustible temper that threatens to erupt at the worst possible moment. But anger can sometimes be your best friend, provided you are able to remain conscious of it and able to contain and harness it when the situation merits it. Attempting to keep everything in its place may not be the best strategy to deal with primal emotions, and it certainly won't work with rage, which may build up in you for years because you are so afraid of it. While erupting volcanoes are exciting to watch on film, they are not fun in everyday life if your temper explodes out of proportion to the situation because you have been saving it up for so long. Try to express anger in small, safe bursts at the time you feel it, and appropriate for the circumstances that have provoked it.

The threat of chaos

You depend on structure, tradition, and the test of time to determine the value of objects, relationships, and ideas. The disciplined Wrath that belongs to institutions such as the military may be acceptable because there is a respect for order. But undisciplined rage can be deeply threatening. You tend to suppress this face of Wrath, deny its existence within yourself, and find little understanding when you encounter it in others. But if you stifle your anger too forcibly, it may break out at the worst possible moment; and if you try to find disciplined outlets for it, your behaviour may become too harsh and almost military, especially in personal relationships. You need to understand the psychological dimensions of Wrath more deeply before you can transform it into the Courage you admire. You can be fearless in defending what you value and hold dear. But try to explore more deeply the Wrath that arises when individuality is crushed in the name of rules, habits, and conventions.

Handle fireworks with caution

Your anger is usually overt, fiery, and hurled with intuitive accuracy at your chosen object. You have a volatile temper, and a tendency to let rage fly before you have reflected on what has triggered it. The positive side of this volatility is that you have a great deal of vital energy and spirit, and you don't tend to hold grudges. The negative side is that, if you don't reflect before you speak, you may say and do things that cannot be retracted afterward, even when the fire of your rage is spent and you have moved on. This can be a destructive element in your relationships; if you explode without any awareness of the consequences, you may injure people close to you in ways that don't readily heal. The greater your disconnection with the deeper sources of Wrath, the more it will erupt in inappropriate ways. The greater your consciousness, the easier it will be to make sure you don't place yourself in situations guaranteed to enrage you. You can pour great energy into ideals that you believe could change the world, and you are always seeking like-minded people with whom you can launch grand creative projects. You can certainly be effective in the world in which you move, but make sure you don't trample over colleagues and friends simply because you are so busy being right that you fail to listen to them.

The positive side of your fiery temper is its immense vitality. The darker side is that, if your sense of freedom is compromised by unconsciousness and rage accrued over a long period of time, you can hurt others deeply without understanding why. Try to take the destructive aspects of Wrath seriously and explore the sources of your anger. Your energy and enthusiasm are positive qualities that could be even more creative if they are not being drained by a festering rage that you haven't acknowledged. The rage may arise from the feeling that life is restricting you and that you should be exempt from such banal demands - even when you yourself have chosen the restrictions. You have the courage to pursue areas of life that require imagination and faith despite an uncertain outcome. The same courage can help you to deal with Wrath, but you need to enlist it in the service of self-knowledge and the relationships that matter to you.

First among equals

You are always willing to fight for an ideal, whether your methods are cerebral or practical. But you rely on the support of the group, rather than pursuing a lone crusade. You favour fighting on behalf of others rather than for your own personal desires, and your anger is most easily aroused when you perceive stupidity, cruelty, and oppression perpetrated by individuals or collectives. This makes it especially important to cultivate the discernment and detachment necessary to recognise a cause of real value, rather than one that is secretly fuelled by your own personal grievances. Yet although you are eager to fight on behalf of others, this doesn't make it any easier for you to work cooperatively with them, even when they share your views. You tend to engage in battles with colleagues and friends, because you are a leader rather than a follower and may find it hard to display the democratic spirit you so often fight to defend in the outer world. Your enthusiasm contributes life and vitality to any group or community project. You love the fire of debate and discussion, and you are a natural communicator. Be careful of your impatience and your irritable temper, as well as your tendency to avoid the boring details in favour of big, expansive gestures. Others are not in your life in order to clean up after you.

You are caught by a paradox in your own nature: you want to fight alongside others to benefit the larger community, yet you aren't really suited to committees, group discussions, and cooperative ventures unless you are leading them. Wrath can be a creative tool if you find a cause in the world that fires your anger. But you may have to go your own way if you really can't tolerate the methods and attitudes of those around you, because your rage will eventually provoke battles. You may always experience tension between your urge for independence and your desire to share your goals with like-minded people. You have the courage of your convictions. But you may need to walk a delicate tightrope between honest self-assertion and the capacity to curb your anger long enough to allow others to disagree with, and even improve on, your ideas, so that you can be a more effective force in the world you want so badly to change.

Can't get no satisfaction

You have a powerful will, plenty of energy, and an irrepressible determination to carve your own way in life. But your wishes often collide with the quiet voice of an inner self that draws you in directions that seem opposed to what you most strongly desire. You may feel that it is others, or life itself, which keeps getting in your way, and this can make you ill-tempered, angry, disruptive, and aggressive. Or, if you try to suppress the anger, you can feel depressed and apathetic. Or you may swing between the two. But the real obstacle is within you, and it is not something negative or destructive that seems to pull you along a path that makes you want to say, along with the Rolling Stones, that you 'can't get no satisfaction'. It may be necessary for your development as a complete individual to work with your desires in a way that is creative rather than repressive, and that can direct your energy into goals that serve that quiet inner voice.

Although you may desire many things, your deeper self is focused on the hidden patterns that underpin the unfolding of your life. This inner voice may push you into an exploration of darker aspects of life that threaten your sense of autonomy and arouse a powerful and sometimes self-destructive desire to challenge what you experience as Fate.

The lifelong process of becoming yourself, which Jung called 'individuation', doesn't require exorcising your demons, or perfecting what is imperfect, or transcending what you are meant to be. But this process may involve frustration because you need to accommodate a fundamental conflict between your strong desire nature and a deeper need to focus your life on an inner vision that gives you a sense of meaning and purpose. Try to develop more trust in your inner world, rather than trying to solve your conflict through aggressively conquering the outer world or suppressing desire to the point where you lose your faith in yourself. Wrath will always be a problem because you aren't a lukewarm person and you feel things passionately, even if you try to stifle those passions. But Wrath can also become the courage to contain your anger and wait until you have a clear intuition of the path all that energy is ultimately meant to serve.

Persuasion

You can cloak Wrath with great amiability and charm, and this helps not only to soften your anger, but also to hide it from yourself. You have a genuine desire to behave in a kind and civilised way and to be please and be pleased by others, and this keeps you out of trouble with those close to you. But you are also frightened that you might be rejected if you assert your will too strongly. You may work hard to convince yourself that you don't feel anger at all, when in fact you can feel things passionately. In your close relationships, your need for harmony often makes you say 'Yes' when you mean 'No', and agree when you really want to disagree strongly. This can cause subtle dishonesty in your intimate life, for any anger or frustration you experience may be hard to communicate, and you may opt for a peaceful life at the expense of your own desires, or choose duplicity with unfortunate consequences if you are found out. You bring charm and diplomacy to all your ventures, even when you are wholeheartedly pursuing a goal of your own. You value fair play and civilised interaction, and you can appear to compromise even when you have no intention of giving way. All of this makes you a rewarding companion, but it can also disconnect you from your real feelings and desires.

Your ability to balance self-assertiveness with diplomacy is a great asset and a genuine gift. But you need to recognise when you are really angry, and find ways of expressing it - diplomatically, because this allows you to maintain good relations with others, but also honestly, because otherwise you run the risk of saving up a big fund of anger. When you feel resentful, you tend to express it in indirect ways, through verbal inferences that hurt or through actions that quietly undermine the feelings of others. You may also use duplicity, hoping that it will help you to maintain harmony but still do exactly what you want. Dealing with Wrath always requires consciousness. Uncontrolled rage is destructive, but yours is not uncontrolled. However, it may be unconscious, because you are often too dependent on harmony to courageously face the kind of confrontations that are healthy and necessary in every close relationship.

The rent-an-anarchist club

You can be so self-willed that you are instantly ready to oppose any rule or demand, even if, after a bit of thought, you might even agree with it. This takes courage, but it can also cause many problems, because you may justify your angry behaviour in the name of an ideal, when in reality you just resent being told what to do. This kind of fierce individualism is not the same as true individuality based on heartfelt values, so try to distinguish between the two rather than kicking out unthinkingly. If you truly believe in what you are doing after reflection and serious thought, then you can be wonderfully courageous in pursuing your goals, especially those that benefit others. Your pioneering spirit could take you to exotic places and fascinating fields of work where others might be too timid to go. But getting angry just because someone has asked you to comply is not an especially creative, nor even an especially individual, way of dealing with Wrath.

You crave an intellectual crusade that allows you to enlist the support of like-minded souls to fight for new ideas. You want to change the world and provoke a revolution in people's thinking. But you aren't a cooperative team player, and you may make as many enemies among your colleagues as you do among the people whose views you oppose so vehemently.

Don't expend your considerable energy and originality on trivial acts of angry rebellion when you could be doing something much more constructive with your talents. You could harm yourself as well as others if you just go around kicking out blindly, because you can become so angry at restriction that you act thoughtlessly, hurting others or causing damage to yourself because you aren't paying enough attention to the people and objects around you. You are attuned to larger currents in the world and respond to big trends in thinking, especially those concerned with human progress. This capacity to envisage and contribute to a better human future would serve you better than hurling yourself against anything you perceive as an obstacle to your desires. There are problems in the world that merit the creative use of Wrath, and you could make a valid contribution to working with those problems.

The Achilles heel

You are no stranger to feeling that your will has been thwarted, and that others are capable of bullying or manipulating you into choices or actions you don't wish to pursue. This kind of experience may belong to your early life, when you were not old enough to defend yourself, and you have a deep mistrust of the collective and a profound uncertainty about whether you will be able to achieve what you desire in life. The result is likely to be a large fund of anger that goes back over many years, but which is hard for you to express because of your fear of the consequences. Yet these experiences have created an endurance and tenacity that are positive assets in coping with life's challenges. You have courage and willpower, but you are so unsure of yourself that it takes a lot to get you mobilised to fight on your own behalf. When you finally do, you are capable of explosive rage because you have been saving it up for so long.

Feeling loved and validated isn't easy for you, and painful early experiences have probably contributed to anxiety around any self-expression that might earn hurtful criticism or rejection. But you need to confront these issues in order to develop a creative medium through which you can express not only your anger, but other, more joyful ideas and inspirations.

You cannot unlearn what you have learned, and you aren't naive about group behaviour and what is deemed normal or acceptable on a collective level. You may always suffer anxiety when you assert your own wishes or exhibit entirely justified anger. But the more you are able to take a detached and philosophical view toward the less attractive aspects of human behaviour, the better you will cope with it. You can also feel profound empathy for the underdog and acquire deep insight into the roots of Wrath, which so often allies itself with Envy and results in the victimising of anyone who has something special or unique that the group is unable to claim. Take time to explore the roots of your own Wrath. The more deeply you delve, the greater your capacity for harnessing your considerable strength into constructive channels that contribute something of great value to the collective from which you so often feel excluded.

Fighting to become

Wrath can be a terrifying and destructive experience, whether it erupts within us or we experience it at the hands of others. But Wrath is also deeply linked with courage and the spark of individuality that allows us to fight for the right to become ourselves. Obvious Wrath can be observed in any act of violence or abuse, physical or psychological, but indirect Wrath is a lot harder to spot. It can take the form of spite, where a person unconsciously, or perhaps deliberately, tries to wound or belittle another person because of an imagined slight or injury, or because of corrosive Envy. Indirect Wrath can also turn against the person feeling it, and then it can become self-destructive: a repeating pattern of feeling exploited, bullied, injured, or controlled. Wrath can also, if powerfully repressed, emerge through the body, expressing itself in psychologically linked symptoms that mysteriously reflect the nature of Wrath itself: burning, itching, and inflammation, as well as addictions that numb the furious fire. To transform Wrath into courage, you must find the courage to confront your own Wrath.

You might respect the necessity for battle, but you tend to view it from a distance rather than recognising its devastating emotional consequences. You dislike violating the unspoken expectations of the collective because those expectations give you a sense of security. Wrath has no respect for rules of any kind, and courage is likewise a spontaneous, irrational, and miraculous intervention from somewhere deep within, called out by a response to circumstances rather than by an act of will. Handling Wrath creatively may involve breaking the social rules or going against collective assumptions of 'normal' behaviour. It may also require the courage to express individuality when necessary. The more you try to inhibit your feelings, the more destructive your rage is likely to be. Honesty about your emotions can help you to find the most appropriate expression for anger while still maintaining the structures and emotional bonds that you value.

Wrath is perhaps the most frightening of the seven Sins, because its expressions often involve physical harm to others and to oneself. But like the other Sins, Wrath has a core that is immensely creative and necessary for the unfolding of life and of your own individuality. The most difficult and paradoxical dimension of Wrath in the modern world is its suppression and denigration through our sometimes impossible ideals and ideologies. Because humans so often feel guilty and ashamed about even the most justified anger, unjustified rage erupts in ways that are often out of control, in collectives as well as individuals. The more you as an individual can explore the nature and causes of your anger, your resentment, your feelings of powerlessness, and your urge to have greater power and self-determination, the more Courage you will discover to help you deal with life, and your own emotions, honestly and fairly.

The Fourth Sin: Pride

Discovering Wonderland

You take pride in your ability to deal with the mundane world and its demands and responsibilities. You aren't afraid to work hard, and you don't expect free lunches. But deeper pride in your own individuality may be harder for you to achieve. The circuitous road to solid self-esteem requires a willingness to ignore what is safe and known, and sometimes make choices that others might regard as eccentric, irresponsible, or simply foolish. You may have followed your impulses and done many unconventional things in your life, and others might see you as bold and individualistic. But when you do break the rules and gamble on a dream, you are likely to suffer great anxiety about whether the world will retaliate by making things tougher. Offering loyalty to an inner self that you can't see, touch, or explain might not always be safe, but it can offer a sense of meaning that challenging circumstances can never destroy.

Breaking with tradition

The idea of following your individual daimon may challenge your way of thinking, because you rely on values that have their roots in traditions that have been tested over time. Although you are capable of translating these values into individual goals, it isn't easy for you to turn your back on collective expectations, especially if they promise a secure place in the world. You are proud of your self-discipline, your ability to be productive and responsible, and your attentiveness to history and its lessons. You draw great strength from feeling that there are deep roots beneath your feet that protect and sustain you. But genuine self-esteem may also depend on listening to the individual voice of your own soul, which may, at times, require you to break with the past so that your creative energy is free to develop. Try not to get stuck, because ignoring this inner voice can lead you to stifle others' potentials as well as your own. And it can also lead to the nagging sense that life has passed you by.

It's all in the detail

Pride in your skills and your nimble mind gives you confidence, and you feel valued when you have created something useful or beautiful, or have made yourself master of a particular craft or sphere of knowledge. You are proud of your competence and your capacity to bring order into chaos. But false Pride can make you critical and intolerant of people who are less organised than you, less punctual, less attentive to the details of life, and less intelligent according to your own criteria. You may even feel contempt for those whom you perceive as indolent and unwilling to help themselves. This kind of Pride can be a defence against your deep fear of chaos and disorder, in the world and in yourself. Try to allow more room for failure and clumsiness; genuine self-esteem needs to be based on a complete person rather than an efficient machine. Striving to be good enough may be wiser than striving for a perfection no human can achieve. Your desire to understand life rationally may have been challenged by painful events in early life, and this has left you determined to explain everything logically in order to keep unhappiness and chaos at bay. Use your understanding to penetrate the mysteries, but learn to accept deeper, more meaningful patterns that you will never grasp through reason alone.

Genuine self-esteem needs to be based, not only on your self-sufficiency, but also on recognition of your need of others. You can be so involved in the pursuit of knowledge, skill, and competence that you forget how much you depend on others to value those skills and receive with enthusiasm everything you wish to give. You will always strive to be the best version of yourself, not because others expect you to, but because of your own inner standards. But you need to make peace with the side of yourself that will always be an ordinary messy human who depends on others for support and encouragement. Being able to laugh at yourself can help you to tolerate the mistakes you make without undermining your sense of self-worth, and it can also temper too much pride in your self-sufficiency. The more you can embrace with compassion all that is flawed and imperfect in yourself and in life, the stronger your sense of self can become.

The light within the tunnel

Your journey toward a sense of self may require you to delve deeply into life's mysteries, especially those aspects of life that people call 'fate'. You might have encountered loss, pain, separation, or disruptive events when you were too young to make choices. Now you may be frightened of the unknown, yet fascinated with the archetypal patterns and powers beneath the surface of life. Don't avoid deep inner exploration, even if you see yourself as rational and pragmatic. You are justifiably proud of your ability to survive and grow through whatever life throws at you. Don't let false Pride drive you to seek crises in order to prove your courage, for you may pull others into your dramas at their expense. You may also need to accept with grace what you cannot change or control. Find the right balance between your sense of individuality and the mysterious dimensions of life that only deep inner searching and direct experience can reveal. Your clever mind helps you to formulate and use conceptual frameworks to shed light on the most difficult aspects of life. This may draw you into paths such as psychology in order to gain a sense of control. But don't assume that knowledge will allow you to avoid the transformations that only happen by going through deep experiences you cannot easily rationalise.

It might be unwise to reject the reality of deeper realms, either intellectually or through avoiding intense emotional encounters that might awaken sleeping dragons. Although knowledge can be useful, there will always be experiences that your intellect might never be able to grasp. You can transform yourself through difficult situations that would make many people feel helpless and defeated. But you need to accept with humility events you can't transform or change, for it may be the transformation of your own attitudes that is needed, rather than efforts to control aspects of life that belong to a larger pattern. Your journey is likely to be rich, transformative, and insightful. Don't try to run away and live only on the surface of life, because the ice may become thin if you try to dance your way across it. Take up the challenge of exploring the unknown, and you can build an enduring connection with a deep and indestructible core.

The happily ever after

The goals you most desire in life are in harmony with your deepest emotional needs. However anxious and insecure you might sometimes feel, you have a deep consistency that makes you hopeful and resilient even if things seem to be going badly wrong. You believe that everything will come right in the end if you trust the future enough, and it often does. But the danger with this sense of inner harmony is that you can become proudly complacent, and feel convinced that your view of life is the only valid one and that all conflicts are undesirable and unproductive. This kind of false Pride is not helpful when life makes ugly faces, which it does to all humans at one time or another. If you allow yourself to become too self-satisfied, you may be shocked and injured when conflicts arise and real fighting spirit is necessary, and you may constantly depend on others to provide you with the security you need to be building from your own strengths.

Your family forms the basis of your sense of security, and even if your early life was difficult, you tend to turn back to the past and the people who give you a sense of roots and belonging. You may be fortunate enough to have a strongly supportive family. But you also need to learn to stand on your own when life requires it, and put your faith in your individual strengths and abilities.

Loyalty to your emotional needs as well as your vision can nourish your sense of self-esteem. But be careful of assuming that your way of seeing reveals the sole truth about reality. Your vision is coloured by your own temperament, and it can lead to false Pride if you can't cope with the paradoxes and ambiguities of life and human nature. You have the gift of bringing harmony to the lives of others, and to work with people in ways that encourage them rather than demeaning or competing with them. But false Pride built on complacency can isolate you and result in self-righteous anger toward those who have disappointed the expectations you have of them. Try to recognise that conflict and disagreement, both inner and outer, are an immensely creative as well as a potentially destructive force, helping you to face the multifaceted nature of life and the intensely individual differences that support every person's unfolding life pattern.

Danger: high explosives

You have a great deal of courage, whether or not you can acknowledge it. But it may be harder to feel a genuine sense of self-esteem because you worry so much about handling your anger and aggression positively. This can make you swing between extremes. Sometimes you can lose your temper at the smallest of triggers, but at other times you allow yourself to be pushed about by others because you are frightened of appearing aggressive. False Pride in reactive rage won't make you truly strong or courageous. It is a defence against feeling powerless and uncomfortable with who you are. But if you disconnect from your anger and allow others to bully or manipulate you, this won't give you confidence either. Nor will indirect ways of expressing rage. You need to learn to assert your individuality honestly and consciously when it's necessary, rather than saving up fury and venting it in ways that undermine any feelings of self-worth.

You will fight anything or anyone who tries to cage you, even if you do it subtly, and you are liable to angry explosions if you suppress your individuality in order to preserve the status quo. You may need to learn patience, self-discipline, and greater sensitivity; but cloaking your essential self will only build up a backlog of anger and an erosion of your self-esteem.

Look carefully at your conscious goals and aspirations, for some of them might not be as independent and individual as you may think. You may have become accustomed to bowing to others' wishes in early life, and now it could be hard for you to distinguish between what you truly want for yourself, and what others want from you. Anger can build up inside you because you are trying too hard to fulfil expectations that are not your own, and this can undermine your self-esteem and make you even angrier. Honest self-expression can be hard because you can swing from one extreme to the other without knowing whether you are simply reacting or whether you are really expressing your deepest values. Building a sense of real connectedness may require a lot of introspection and reflection before you can distinguish between knee-jerk reactions of rebellion and the aspirations that reflect your deepest inner Self.

The hill of dreams

Whatever you achieve in the world, your powerful yearning for merging with something higher or greater than yourself will always leave you feeling dissatisfied. While you struggle to build a solid individuality through your talents, you also want to abandon that individuality for a timeless realm beyond the limits and sorrows of ordinary everyday life. Although it may take earthier forms, this mystical longing can undermine your confidence because your need to express yourself is in direct conflict with your desire to abandon an isolated sense of self. Your unsatisfied dream makes it hard for you to take pride in your achievements, although you may feel proud of what you have created on behalf of something greater than yourself. Pride is a complex issue because of this conflict, but you can find a workable balance through creative work that honours your vision as well as the personal skill and effort required to give it shape.

You can lose yourself in the depths of the inner world, and in the longer history of the collective psyche. Work hard to find creative vehicles to express your vision and imagination, but don't assume you have been 'chosen' as a vessel for the divine. You are a talented individual who, like other talented people, needs the anchor of a strong sense of individual identity.

The conflict between your need for a solid sense of identity and your yearning to merge with an ineffable Other may make it hard to develop the inner core of individuality that builds real self-esteem. But the conflict is also creative, because it protects you from the kind of false Pride that uses talent and achievement as a means of feeling superior. You answer to something Other, and ultimately you must give your allegiance to it, provided you don't lose yourself in the process. Don't lose your realism and common sense by identifying with your gifts as someone more special than others and then fleeing the sense of aloneness that comes with being a separate individual. Both sides of your nature need each other, however intractably opposed they might seem, because together they form the basis of your creativity, and offer a way of transforming false Pride as well as false humility into a love of what is highest and best in you.

The Self behind the self

The Sin of Pride has many faces. The kind of pride expressed through characteristic manifestations such as pride in accomplishments, pride in family, group, or nation, or pride in personal qualities, is not in itself sinful. Pride has many positive and confidence-building qualities, even in its most worldly forms. But the Sin of Pride as Superbia - a sense of superiority - can indeed be a Sin, because it belittles the value of others and can justify controlling or harming them in the name of one's own greater cleverness, talent, spiritual evolution, empathy, or social awareness. A sense of self-worth rooted in a deep connection with an inner Self that is both individual and part of a larger unity is the antidote to the more destructive expressions of Pride, transforming it into a love of the mystery that lies behind the gifts, successes, achievements, sufferings, struggles, and rewards you have experienced in life.

You are justifiably proud of your adherence to structure and tradition, and your respect for the conventions that allow the world to run in a civilised and orderly way. But be careful of using false Pride as a defence against all that you fear within yourself and in the world around you: chaos, change, and the unpredictability of human emotions and instincts. You need to acknowledge and value those aspects of your nature that long to break free and pursue new ideas and unknown pathways, for it is through the discovery of an independent spirit that you can build an authentic sense of self. The more you shelter behind the rules, the less truly confident you will feel. Take pride in your achievements and your strength, but try also to recognise those more anarchic elements within you that are the true source of creativity and that can help you to experience yourself as a whole individual.

Pride, of all the Cardinal Sins, is the one most intimately related to a sense of destiny and purpose. Learning to differentiate between what you have achieved through your own effort and dedication, and what you have been given as gifts for which you are a custodian, a vehicle, and a mouthpiece, is not an easy task for anyone. It is particularly difficult because, even if the mysterious source of your gifts is acknowledged as something other than yourself, Pride can slip in and claim superiority because you might secretly feel you are some kind of chosen vessel. Pride needs an equal measure of the antidote of humility before it can reveal its most creative face. Michelangelo once described the art of sculpting as releasing the innate design already inherent in the stone, rather than making it up himself. It is in this spirit of recognising that each of us is a vessel for a special individuality that Pride can become a source of love - including that elusive expression we often misunderstand and call self-love, which is really love of the Self.

The Fifth Sin: Lust

Transgressing boundaries

You are comfortable living in the material world, and Lust in the form of erotic desire may not seem like a sin at all to you. But there are forms of Lust that you might not recognise for what they really are. Your appreciation of the beauty and pleasure in nature, in sensual gratification, in craftsmanship and skill, and in the orderly patterns and cycles of everyday life, is not in itself destructive. But Lust as a Sin is not concerned with simple delight in the sensory world. Its subtler face concerns self-deception and the deceit of others, and it can involve an inappropriate desire for people, things, and ideas that are not rightfully yours to possess. Lust may involve a passionate desire for goals that transgress the boundaries of what life permits you to have - in other words, longing to become someone other than yourself - leaving you resentful and inclined to seek a culprit or a scapegoat to blame for your sense of deprivation.

Recreating the past

You value structure and tradition, but you are realistic enough to accept the reality of physical Lust and find ways of accommodating it in your life without too much disruption to your personal world. But there are many forms of Lust, and yours may be an 'inappropriate longing' for values that have passed their sell-by date but which you cling to because they give you a sense of safety and personal authority. Insisting on a hierarchy of rules that deny others - especially those you love - the right to greater freedom and individuality is a Lust for control. It can be more destructive than sensual Lust because it favours attitudes that stifle new possibilities, and it can make you intolerant and narrow. Traditional values can be the strong glue that binds families and societies together, and the present world may need more of them. But try to recognise when your longing begins to stifle everything innovative and creative in others and in yourself.

Relative perfection

Plato's description of love as 'passion aroused by beauty' aptly describes the ways in which Lust may strike you. You long for perfect beauty, harmony, and grace in the world and in relationships, even if you pretend to be too realistic to succumb to such yearnings. This can make you feel dissatisfied with everyone and everything in your life because it always falls short of your ideal. Your powerful aesthetic sensibilities may combine with considerable talent, and you may be a creator of works of beauty as well as a collector of beautiful objects and beautiful people. But Lust for the perfect love can make you reject or devalue other people's ordinary human failings as well as their abilities and gifts, physical as well as psychological. You may expect far too much, and set yourself up for inevitable disappointment. And this kind of idealism, taken to its extreme, can undermine your own self-worth when you yourself fall short of your ideal image. You long for a perfect philosophy, ideology, or spiritual path that will connect you with the inherent goodness and harmony in life. This can be creative and uplifting as long as you can make peace with the gap between your ideal conception and the imperfect world of human needs and desires. Be careful of becoming judgemental if life doesn't match up to your expectations.

Lust's deception or self-deception may be reflected in your attempts to convince yourself that, when you cannot find the ideal you seek, it is invariably the fault or failing of something outside you: another person, a group, an ideology, a religious path, a government, or what you perceive as innate human stupidity and brutishness. This belief is deceptive because 'fault' implies that, without that failing, you could have what you desire; but the perfection you seek doesn't exist in mortal life. While this may be painful to accept, it doesn't mean that your ideals are wrong or deluded. Try to recognise that, behind your search for perfect harmony in the outer world, there lies a longing to connect with a profound archetypal core of beauty and joy that lies within your own soul, and perhaps also within the core of life itself, hidden and invisible, yet accessible if you can accept the paradox of the complex and multifaceted forms through which it reveals itself.

Hitting the ground running

You are as susceptible to sensual Lust as anyone else. But you are more susceptible to a vision of love as a grand adventure in which you are always on the track of some great vision that will provide ultimate answers and a revelation of meaning. You are drawn to philosophical or spiritual paths that provide insight on the journey, and you seek people who can enlarge your vision. But you will never find ultimate answers, only more questions. Don't use personal relationships as a means of furthering your quest; you will feel trapped when people turn out to be ordinary humans who want a deeper emotional commitment than you are prepared to offer, and you may experience perennial dissatisfaction in your personal life. Your quest belongs to your inner world. Although you need partners who value the life of the mind and spirit, don't expect them to be anything other than humans with emotional needs and longings of their own. You long for a universe that is fair, just, and governed by reason. Philosophical and spiritual paths that place Reason at the centre of life's grand design may appeal. You view relationships in the same way, seeking fairness, reason, and harmony. You may need to cultivate greater tolerance and an acceptance of the realm of feelings and instincts as a meaningful part of love and life.

Find outlets for your longing through study and travel, spiritual insight, and an exploration of the world of ideas. The right creative vehicle could provide wonderful moments of illumination and inspiration. These moments won't last forever, and you may need to accept the limits of human knowledge if you want to keep growing as an individual. Finding a partner who shares your longing, even if only in part, can be deeply rewarding. But you will need to accommodate the humanness of others, the importance of their feelings and emotional needs, and the annoying tendency of the world to demand some kind of compromise with any ideal, however fine and noble it might be. If you can develop greater realism and accept the emotional and practical dimensions of human relationships as well as the vision, your Lust can - at least a good deal of the time - be transformed into real joy in the genuine fascination and mystery of life itself.

The pied piper

You don't need to be pushy to get what you desire, because you can usually charm others so elegantly that they can't refuse you. You have refinement and finesse, and you will always be able to attract others. You can be kind even when you are determined to have your way, although you prefer enough challenge to alleviate the boredom that arises if a relationship is devoid of sparks for too long. Your longing for excitement is tempered by consideration, and you are wise enough to pursue objects that you know are obtainable. But there may be times when you have to fight on your own behalf, and your civilised approach may not always be viable. Don't try too hard to please everyone while you pursue your goals. You long for conquests that avoid any serious collision with others and carry no risk of emotional turbulence, and you can feel baffled and miserable when you discover that life, and love, aren't always that easy or comfortable. You have the gift of inspiring others with your energy and optimism, and you generally fulfil your longings through sheer enthusiasm. But you can lose your optimism and desire quickly if you are expected to adapt to mundane limits and commitments that might cramp your freedom. Try to cultivate greater awareness of others' feelings, as well as a modicum of patience.

Lust in its sensual forms isn't likely to be a painful issue in your life, because your longings, even when they are intense, are usually tempered by charm and civilised behaviour, and you rarely pursue an unobtainable object of desire. But your yearning can become 'inappropriate' if you assume that you will always get what you want without the discomfort of open confrontation. Most of the time, your desire to win the prize with a minimum of conflict is likely to be fulfilled. Some of the time, you may need to deal with chaotic and aggressive elements within yourself and in others that require greater insight, toughness, and willingness to accept aspects of human nature that you might prefer to avoid. And sometimes you may need to follow a cherished longing on your own, without becoming resentful if loved ones don't follow you. Sadly, life might not allow you to get everything you want while pleasing everyone at the same time.

The grit in the oyster

Although you are as vulnerable to Lust as anyone else, you have a sense of compassion that makes it hard for you to pursue your desires if it means hurting others. This doesn't depend on will or self-discipline; it arises from your sense of identification with other people's unhappiness, for you know what it's like to stand in their shoes. Feelings of being wounded yourself triggers your empathy, and you understand the experience of being deprived of some fundamental desire early in life - not only because of your early relationships, but because your strong perception of inequality and unfairness in the world has left you with a keen sense of injustice and a receptivity to the suffering of people in general, rather than exclusively your own. But you may need to explore the ways in which the deep sadness and even cynicism you carry can interfere with your faith in love and your ability to let go sufficiently to experience real joy. You find it hard to express yourself with confidence, and you don't expect others to accept your unique individuality or value your creative efforts. Rather than trying to avoid rejection by stifling your self-expression, or hurting lovers before they can hurt you, try to value yourself by your own standards rather than those of other people.

One of the results of your experience of the harsher and darker dimensions of love and of life is that you are attracted to, and desirous of helping, others who have suffered from the unfairness in society and in human nature. 'Inappropriate longing' isn't easy to attempt to fulfil when a strong sense of identification with others' pain intervenes, and this is what happens when you try to pursue the object of your longing. The moment you recognise that satisfying Lust will damage another person as well as yourself, your empathy kicks in and you find it hard to justify actions that will add to the quota of life's general misery. This doesn't mean you are incapable of hurting others, but you wind up diminishing yourself as well. Although the source of your restraint is a wound rather than some impossibly noble sentiment, it is a wise and meaningful wound that can deepen your understanding and, if you can let go of your bitterness, can foster real joy.

Beauty and the Best

Lust, however harmless we might perceive it in our so-called 'permissive society', can be a powerfully destructive force. Homer, in The Iliad, wrote of the ruin of the great city of Troy through the lust of Paris, a Trojan prince, for Helen, the queen of Sparta, who happened to be married to someone else. Myth and literature are full of the corrosive effects of Lust, and its dangers don't always reflect the precepts of an intolerant religious or moral doctrine. Lust is as psychological as all the other Sins, and it confronts us with the necessity of recognising the limits life places on our desires and dreams. Yet because of the elusiveness of the true symbolic nature of Lust, we may not recognise when we are possessed by it, and we may try to convince ourselves that our desires are legitimate and even selfless, and therefore merit gratification without any inner reflection.

You are no more immune to the sensual attractions of Lust than anyone else, but if you choose to pursue them, you tend to be more careful than many people, in order to ensure that the security of your life isn't threatened. But a subtler kind of Lust may trouble you: the deep longing for change and transformation, which collides with your stubborn resistance to any experience that might lie beyond your control or understanding. Try to recognise your antagonism toward anything new that might shake up your life. If you deny your longing for freedom from the self-imposed limits within which you live, Lust can draw you toward people and situations that shake up your world and force you into a future you are unprepared for. Try to find a balance between what you value and what you yearn for to foster the growth of your inner life and the creative potential that may lie undeveloped because you are too afraid to take the risk of pursuing it.

You will never truly possess the object of your Lust in the outer world, because the thing you really lust for is not 'out there'. Nor are you likely to possess it in the inner world as an unchanging state of enlightenment, perfection, or transcendence. No amount of machination, force, deception, self-deception, or self-sacrifice will satisfy Lust, because by its nature the object of your longing is a symbol of something ineffable. The more you can grasp this, the more easily you will recognise when you are slipping into the web of Lust, and the more creatively you will handle the frustration and unhappiness that inevitably accompany any effort to contain intense desire. Seeing beyond the form of an outer object, or accepting the impossibility of an inner ideal of perfection, is not the same as self-sacrifice; but they are prerequisites for a connection with the archetype of beauty within you and the transformation of Lust into joy.

The Sixth Sin: Deceit

Cunning with conscience

You are pragmatic and clear-sighted, and Deceit is always within reach because you know all too well that it can sometimes be necessary in order to survive and make your way in the world. This doesn't mean that you are by nature a dishonest person. Every human being has the potential for Deceit. There may be times when, however reluctantly, you are convinced that prevarication is the only path through which you can achieve your goals, and you have enough shrewdness and awareness of the ways of the world to outwit those you might feel deserve to be outwitted - whether this involves cheating institutions that you perceive as oppressive and unfair, or individuals whom you believe are not as deserving as you are. But genuine worldly wisdom, as opposed to avarice or cynicism, is a combination of canniness and ethics, and you need to keep a firm hold on both in order to achieve your goals while retaining your self-respect.

The illusory power of tradition

You favour traditional values that reject overt expressions of Deceit, and those who display it are likely to earn your criticism and dislike. But you may be capable of deceiving yourself about the nature of people and the nature of the world around you. You dislike any challenge to authority, especially your own, and you don't easily accept people who are eccentric, unconventional, or rebellious. Intellectual rigidity can blind you to the need for movement and growth, in individuals and in the world. You can be avaricious in clinging to the status quo for reasons that involve self-deception as much as loyalty to a cherished set of values. And sometimes you lack empathy for those who are not in a position to adhere to the past, but must move with the times because they have no other choice. Opening your heart and mind could help you to find a better bulwark against Deceit than simple pronouncements of what you believe to be right.

Big journeys are made with small steps

You have a quick and subtle mind and tend to notice every detail of what is going on around you, and you are highly sensitive to other people's mess and disorder as well as to your own. You can fool others if you put your mind to it because your powers of observation allow you to recognise a multitude of ways around obstacles and a variety of channels through which you can circumvent the rules. Your sharp perceptions are a gift that you could apply to many business ventures, research projects, and creative pursuits that require concentration, a fine eye for detail, and a shrewd assessment of what is possible. But your abilities need to be supported by integrity and the recognition that, although you might be cleverer and more knowledgeable than many people, there is no ultimate reward in manipulating or cheating them. And the kind of complex planning at which you excel may backfire badly if others lose faith in your honesty. You long to understand life's deeper mysteries, but you can be frightened by experiences that have no rational explanation. This could attract you to spheres such as psychology and medicine, where you can exercise your intellect and your attraction to the depths. Don't try to rationalise emotions, or convince yourself that what you cannot analyse doesn't exist.

Your abilities, whether intellectual, artistic, or practical, are worthy of as much training and encouragement as you can give them. As long as you remain loyal to your highest values, you won't indulge in the more destructive dimensions of Deceit. You can often outwit and out-think others, and you know your limits as well as your capabilities. Integrity and a sense of service to something greater than yourself could ensure that your gifts are freely offered rather than serving avarice and prevarication. Your form of Deceit, rooted in your cleverness and competence, can easily ally itself with other Sins: it can give Envy a poisonous voice, Wrath a clever means of subtle revenge, Lust a way of effectively concealing lies, Pride a justification for superiority, and Greed a whole reservoir of rationalisations. But you are intelligent and realistic enough to recognise that none of these paths will bring you any real wisdom or self-respect.

The beam that penetrates the dark

You want to understand the depths of human nature and the hidden aspects of life. This is a valuable asset in any field involving research, psychological insight, healing skills, or artistic work that taps the deeper levels of the emotional realm. But your focus on what others cannot see inclines you to secrecy as well as mistrust of people's motives and of the benignity of life itself. You long to extract knowledge from realms that require humility in the face of what cannot be changed, but you may be too proud to accept what you cannot rationally understand. You could also use your insights in manipulative and even devious ways, if you feel threatened by the people around you. Try to recognise that the mysteries will never be entirely open to rational analysis, and that human fate is not some malevolent pattern imposed by forces outside yourself. Then you will be wise enough to make the most creative use of your insight and depth of thought. Your analytical mind is a valuable asset in exploring the deeper realms of life that fascinate you. But be careful of deceiving yourself into believing that rationality and pragmatism will help you to cope with emotional depths and patterns that defy logical explanations. Learn to trust your intuition as well as your faculties of reason, and try to be more open to your feelings.

You may have encountered experiences of loss or separation in early life that have exaggerated your need to understand the deeper patterns that humans experience as fate. This could be highly creative if you approach the mysteries with respect and wonder as well as with reason. Approaching this realm with arrogance or efforts to control it may result in the painful realisation of your human smallness in the face of greater forces in life that need to be honoured and accepted with grace, humility, and faith. Deceit can arise from your fear of what you do not understand, and self-deception may be reflected in the conviction that you have secret knowledge that makes you superior to others. Learn to trust in what you cannot see, and value intuitive and emotional perceptions as much as rational analysis. Then you will get the most from your gifts without the chronic anxiety that always accompanies any effort to control life.

The overflowing fountain

You have a rich imagination and a capacity to find meaning and pattern in everyday experiences, and your creative abilities are heightened by this intuitive gift. But the fertility of your thinking and fluent expression can make you lazy and self-satisfied, and you may view people without your talent as inferior or boring. Self-satisfaction is not in itself deceitful, but it can lead to self-deception if you believe you are entitled to special exemptions because you are brighter or more talented than others. It may be hard for you to accept the necessity of hard work, patience, and disciplined training in the subjects that appeal to you, because learning and expressing yourself can seem so easy. Laziness is a form of avarice if you expect something for nothing. But there are no free lunches in life, and smugness is not the same as genuine self-confidence. Develop your talents with humility, and value your gifts as an act of grace rather than an entitlement. You are ambitious and very conscious of your social standing and image in the eyes of others. Your sensitivity to how things look, and to what the outside world requires, can be a great asset in achieving your professional goals. But be careful of exploiting others on your climb, and don't use your verbal persuasiveness to manipulate others into giving you what you want.

You learn quickly, grasp ideas easily, and express considerable inventiveness and imagination in your understanding and communication. This can make you indolent, and indolence can make you assume you shouldn't have to be pressured or challenged. When you are confronted by unpleasant limits, you may turn to Deceit in order to avoid subjecting yourself to mental and physical structures that you find boring and restrictive. All of this can be helped by self-awareness, for you are quick enough to recognise the dangers of too much self-satisfaction. Wisdom comes from this recognition, which can allow you to laugh at yourself and acquire sufficient humility to view your talents realistically, feel gratitude for your gifts, and do everything you can to refine your skills through the tougher route of discipline rather than the easy route of sticking to what you know you can do without expending too much effort.

With a bang and not a whimper

Even if you try to live a conventional life, there is a card-carrying revolutionary alive and well in you. You love original ideas that challenge the status quo. Sometimes the new can be attractive to you just because it is new, and you may reject ideas simply because they have been around for too long. You can sometimes be dogmatic and opinionated, and once you have been inspired by an idea, you find it hard to see any other point of view and may react with a stubborn, entrenched intolerance. Try to remember that you too can be wrong or, at the very least, too extreme in your thinking. The genuine inspiration that animates your best ideas can be immensely creative, and your revolutionary thinking is not deceitful in itself. But you may deceive yourself into believing that you must always tell the unvarnished truth, even if others are deeply and unnecessarily hurt by your conviction that you have the right to say whatever you please. In common with others of your generation group, your idea of progress encompasses the rapid breaking down of narrow attitudes and the expansion of awareness into the realm of meaning and interconnectedness. Make sure you don't become so fanatical about your vision that you forget the value of everyday life and the slowness with which the human animal can change.

If you identify your personal self with a collective movement or ideology, you may deny your individual feelings and values. Then you will have to lie to yourself in order to sustain your belief in ideas that you might instinctively sense are false, destructive, or too idealistic to implement in their entirety. You have the ability to tap visions of progress emerging from the collective psyche, and you could bring this visionary quality to your creative work. Learn to temper your ideas with the reality of human emotions and the rare art of patience. Fanaticism always contains Deceit because it attempts to stifle individual expression, and this can only be achieved by lying to oneself as well as to others. Fanaticism breeds hypocrisy, which is one of the most common forms of self-deception. As long as you can balance your convictions with humour, compassion, and tolerance, your original ideas can genuinely encourage the best of human potential.

Clouded lenses

You may sometimes feel as though you are justified in being deceitful because the world outside has deceived you. You carry a feeling of being hurt by life, especially when it comes to other people's honesty and willingness to listen and take your ideas seriously. You may have encountered difficulties in your early education, or problems in being heard and valued in your early family life. You are a deep thinker with a nose for detecting hypocrisy, and this may have caused problems in a society in which extraversion and easy sociability are valued more highly than introspection, quiet reflection, and emotional truthfulness. However difficult your experiences have been, you need to turn them into a source of wisdom and meaning. Allowing bitterness and self-pity to block your capacity for trust would be a great waste. And bitterness encourages Deceit to flower, even against your own better judgement.

You have doubts about your intellectual competence, and this may arise from uncomfortable early experiences and a deep loneliness that comes from the feeling that no one ever listens or cares about what you think. Don't overcompensate by attempting to be cleverer than everyone else, or retreating into silence to avoid the risk of being hurt or misunderstood.

You may often be justified in your perception of unfairness in the world. But you can also transfer your own feelings of being injured and demeaned onto collective situations that are more complex than you realise. You may have been misunderstood in early life, through others' insensitivity or through failures in the educational system. But your own responses to painful experiences are more relevant than trying to find a culprit so that you can justify your own Deceit and declare war on anyone who appears as a persecutor in your eyes. You have depth and insight, but you need to develop these gifts on the side of life rather than as a weapon against everyone whom you feel has injured or lied to you. Understanding how you project personal experiences onto general social or political concerns can help you to find a balance between recognition of real problems in the world and your own problem in making peace with the past.

I dreamed a dream

You have a rich and vital imaginative life, and you need the right creative medium to express your visions, intuitions, and sensitivity to emotional currents. Your dream world is so comfortable that you may not even realise when you have moved into the realm of fantasy at the very moment that you need to focus on objective facts or communicate your ideas clearly. Your ability to mix fact and fantasy makes you a gifted storyteller, but sometimes other people don't need stories; they need a direct expression of what you really think and feel. You may also run the risk of becoming so comfortable with your ability to blend fact and fiction that you take pleasure in fascinating others and gaining power over them. Enjoy your talents and work to develop a creative outlet that does justice to them. But make sure you don't display evasion, manipulation, and dissimulation because you are too fearful of rejection to be direct. You have great sensitivity to the unconscious currents of the past that have influenced your own family and cultural background. Try to find a creative vehicle to express your perceptions, for they can be profound and moving. But they can also feel overwhelming, so make sure you can distinguish between your own feelings and the deeper world of the collective psyche.

It is worth your making the effort to refine and discipline your gift in order to offer something to others. Your ability to empathise ensures that what you express can deeply touch the hearts and minds of other people. But you may need to work hard to be more conscious of the times when you stray from the boundaries of mundane reality into a world of your own invention, or a world comprised of collective feelings and longings that belong to others. You have the gift of entering these deep psychic worlds and giving them shape and form; but you need to articulate them while knowing what they are and where your own individual boundaries begin and end. Deceit rooted in fear of separateness, dislike of confrontation, or a need to feel more potent than others because of self-doubt, can become a danger to your integrity if you don't learn the value of clarity, detachment, and a realistic assessment of your own limits.

What is Truth?

Deceit has been called by many names throughout history, among them Avarice and Covetousness. This Sin is like a serpent, coiling under and through our most cherished ideals and noble intentions, always masking itself as something else. Deceit can align itself with Envy, Gluttony, Wrath, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, producing hybrids that often seem socially acceptable in a world devoid of genuine worldly wisdom. Deceit is the easiest Sin to justify through the rationalisations provided by political, social, and religious ideologies, and the archetypal Thief and Liar can be a truly destructive force. But Deceit is also an immensely creative catalyst, helping us to translate innovative ideas into concrete actions. Without Deceit, no vision could achieve manifestation, no dream could ever contribute to the alleviation of human suffering, and no amount of compassion could produce the skills necessary to help actual people in actual life.

You want to feel you are in control of your life, and resistant to the kind of lazy self-indulgence that leads to exploiting others. But subtler forms of Deceit can affect you despite any moral stance you might take against calculated dishonesty. Your resistance to innovative ideas can be a form of self-deception, for dogmatic self-righteousness can thwart your need to break free of conventions and pursue new possibilities. You can also wilfully refuse to recognise the needs and values of others, who may not wish to follow the same path as you but who are entitled to understanding and respect even if they don't accept your views. Stifling others' self-expression in order to keep control is a form of avarice, because it involves grasping and holding what doesn't belong to you: other people's freedom to become what they need to be. Try to acquire the wisdom to recognise when things need to change, and when they need to stay the same.

In an ideal, two-dimensional world without subtlety or nuance, perhaps Deceit would not be necessary; nor would any of the other Sins. Yet Deceit, in its creative forms, is truly essential in order to translate any good intention or aspiration into concrete action, and any feeling of love into an act of loving that enhances your own life and the lives of others. No higher power can accomplish the transformation of Deceit into worldly wisdom; everything depends on your willingness to pursue inner insight, your decision as an individual to confront the murky and ambiguous aspects of your own inner world, and your recognition of the multifaceted and paradoxical nature of the psyche. When you can recognise how cleverly Deceit can infuse your most cherished moral and spiritual convictions, you will be truly wise in a world that requires subtlety as well as goodness, experience as well as innocence, and realism as well as faith.

The Seventh Sin: Sloth

Let the sunshine in

You are usually a well-grounded person, and you can recognise the importance of instinctual needs even if you choose restraint and self-containment rather than spontaneous expression. But sometimes you may be too pragmatic for your own good, overriding your dreams and intuitions if they threaten to rock the boat and bring disorder and instability into your work or domestic life, or provoke unwelcome disruption of your plans. You can stifle your imagination and the possibility of simple, spontaneous joy in the mysteries of life. If you insist on making your inner world the servant of your practical decisions, you may become increasingly burdened by a sense of meaninglessness and an inability to find the energy and focus you usually display toward achieving practical goals and enjoying the pleasures of the material world. Not everything can be reduced to concrete realities, and if you try, Apathy may be your reward.

Loosening the stiff upper lip

If you are troubled by feelings of Apathy, you prefer to adopt the proverbial 'stiff upper lip' and get on with things, rather than exploring more deeply the roots of your sadness. This is an admirable quality that reflects self-discipline and a refusal to indulge in self-pity, but it can be unhelpful because there may be deeper reasons why depression might invade your life. You dislike having to dig too deeply into realms that are too chaotic, particularly the world of the emotions and the imagination. But your restraint and insistence on rational explanations may mask a deep need for change, or a justifiable discontent that requires you to make important shifts in your life or your outlook. Depression cannot be ordered into nonexistence, nor is it wise to ignore it. You would be wise to explore the emotional or creative discontent underlying Apathy, and learn to cope when your life need changes you are too frightened to face.

All mine

You can experience serenity or, at the least, a sense of contentment in everyday life because you can enjoy the pleasures of the moment and the beauty of the world around you without feeling you have to rush about making exciting new things happen. You can be patient, realistic, determined, and impossible to shift if you feel secure in a relationship or work situation and need to keep it safe. But your fear of any change that you yourself haven't initiated can make you possessive, dogmatic, and recalcitrant in enduring situations that make you emotionally unhappy or thwart your creative possibilities. Apathy may show you the extent to which you can get stuck because you are too afraid to move. You avoid taking risks of any kind unless you are certain of the outcome. But without the occasional leap that requires faith in the future and the truth of your inner self, you may be immobilised by a depression created by your own intractability. You may come from a background where change and instability in early life have exacerbated your need for a safe and secure domestic environment. You can be devoted to your roots and resistant to change, even when you need to put distance between you and your past. Try not to let anxiety curb your freedom or stifle the independence of the people you live with.

Apathy can erode your peace if you dig yourself into a bunker from which there is no chance to explore the world outside. Try to be more open to intuitions that might seem impractical but reflect a need for growth, development, and new ways of relating. Your need for stability can make you ignore unhappiness in yourself and others, and your possessive nature doesn't allow much breathing space to those you care about. You can feel resentful if loved ones want change or greater freedom. But anxiety and resentment can lie hidden and emerge as Apathy. You may find it hard to let loved ones be free enough to develop as individuals rather than as sources of safety. If you can develop greater awareness of the anxieties that lie beneath your apparent calm, you can transform Apathy into the kind of serenity that allows love and life to flower freely, without the intractability that blocks change and the road to a better future.

The great return

You aren't one of those people who always remain close to the place of their birth. But even if you traverse the world, you dream of returning to your roots like a homing pigeon, hoping to find everything safe and secure. You have an ideal fantasy of home, for no physical abode, past or present, can remain exactly the same. Like any other human, you want a brighter and more interesting future, however satisfying the present might be. But you still want to find the same past pictures on the wall and the same food in the larder that welcomed you in childhood. The past is always alive in your present, and you may be drawn to genealogical research to understand the roots from which you come. The broader sweep of history may merit deeper investigation. But you also need to explore old feelings of abandonment and loneliness that belong to your roots as much as your fantasies of a magical place to which you can always return. You tend to dig your roots deep, and long-term stability is part of your vision of an ideal home. You dislike change and will sometimes go too far to prevent it happening in your domestic environment, even when it might be necessary and creative. You might need to reflect on unwelcome disruptions in your early life that have left you feeling anxious and unsafe.

Serenity can grow if you give sufficient time to your past as well as to your present domestic life. You might need to view early family relationships from a psychological perspective, rather than dismissing the past as finished and no longer relevant. And your physical home may be far more important than you realise. You have the creative imagination to create an environment that conveys in its symbolism the safe, serene home you need to find within yourself. Time spent with memories and the beautifying of your environment is worth the effort, because physical and psychological worlds meet in your home and the feelings it invokes. You may need to look back beyond your parents for your insights, because your perceptions may reach back to the soil of your ancestors and your culture. Apathy in the form of homesickness, like an ancient tree, has deep roots, and reflects your chronic yearning to return to an inner source.

Seasonal dishes

Your emotions tend to move in cycles, from unquenchable optimism to bleak sadness and back again, with all the shades and gradations in between. This ebb and flow doesn't reflect an innate problem, nor does it require an external trigger. You won't always be able to find a reason, because there often is no reason; you are attuned to life's natural fluctuations and need to work with this receptivity creatively. The changeful nature of your family background may provide clues to why certain events, even if they are happy ones, can trigger Apathy. But once you have exhausted these clues, don't be surprised if you still can't find an explanation for depressions that come and go. Learn to value the cycles of nature, rather than attempting to stifle your emotional rhythms and hammer a round peg into the square hole of collective assumptions of consistency. Your moods could provide a rich source of creative inspiration and a link to deeper realities.

The perils of fairy tale endings

A gentle accord exists between what you aspire to become and what you need emotionally to feel safe and secure. You are instinctively certain of what is right for you. But when life makes ugly faces, as it does at times in everyone's life, you can find it so unexpected and shocking that you plunge into Apathy rather than holding your ground and fighting back. You assume that life will always be harmonious, and you may be unprepared when the fairy tale ending doesn't manifest. Your inner certainty gives you confidence, but it may leave you open to distress and disappointment simply because you don't expect life to behave in chaotic ways. Trust your instincts about what you need in order to be fulfilled. But try to cultivate more realism and more muscle when it comes to facing difficult circumstances, rather than collapsing in an emotional heap and hoping that someone will come and wave a magic wand to make everything better.

You can usually find a way through difficulties through your keen intelligence and ability to create order in the midst of chaos. You analyse problems because understanding allows you to deal with them efficiently. But when you are confronted with emotional challenges where reason and pragmatism offer no solution, you can become anxious and depressed.

Even if you see yourself as a realistic and rational person, you secretly believe in a happily-ever-after world. This attitude contributes an inner confidence and stability to your nature. But you need more grit and courage when you face unexpected conflicts. Don't try to escape into an idealised past or a fantasy future. You can be handicapped by the conviction that life will always mirror your idea of it, but sometimes life won't oblige. You are much tougher than you sometimes feel, and you may surprise yourself when you discover just how resilient you can be in the face of the unexpected, even when things don't look as though they will ever work out. You have a deep underlying conviction that all will turn out well if you can wait patiently and find the right person to wave a magic wand. And sometimes things do turn out as you hope. But cultivating a fighting spirit could help you in the face of life's inevitable inconsistencies and disappointments.

The how-to-build-your-own-prison kit

You don't believe you will ever fully receive the emotional support you need. Perhaps you didn't get enough demonstrations of love in your early life, or you were expected to shoulder adult responsibilities far too early. But it is your own bottled-up resentment and self-pity that can lead to Apathy, rather than a callous and unfeeling world. You have a hard time revealing your emotional vulnerability, and you can feel isolated and alone, even if you have loved ones around trying to offer encouragement. What they offer may never seem enough, and you constantly test them to get them to prove their love and loyalty, although you rarely try honestly to communicate to them what you really want. Unfortunately most people aren't telepathic and can't respond to your needs unless you express them. And if you don't ask, you will receive nothing, and then the cycle of disappointment and resentment will begin all over again.

You are always fearful that those close to you will betray you. This expectation of imminent abandonment and humiliation can make you suspicious, defensive, manipulative, and secretive about your most vulnerable emotional needs. But emotional barriers shut others out and don't give them a chance to give you the loyalty and emotional support you need.

Your expectation of being let down can make you push others away. You believe it's better to do the rejecting first rather than sitting around waiting to be rejected. You can be highly controlling to ensure that others can't hurt or disappoint you. The most destructive aspect of your Apathy is your tendency to allow self-pity and resentment to undermine your ability to engage freely and confidently with life. Your defensiveness can make you manipulative in communicating your feelings, and you can be unreasonably critical and judgemental. All your self-protective manoeuvring can leave you feeling deeply lonely, even if your life is full of people who truly care about you. You can be strong, reliable, resilient, and tireless in looking after others. But you won't find serenity unless you are honest with yourself and recognise the emotional prison you have built around yourself with walls made from the disappointments of your early life.

What goes round comes round

Apathy is a Sin that is profoundly related to the cycles of time, and to the idea that everything comes into being, arrives at fruition, and passes away when the time is right, making way for a new birth and a new cycle. Although the poet T. S. Eliot once wrote that April is 'the cruelest month', it is perhaps only with the coming of winter that humans experience most vividly the profound sadness of the dying year. Living in accord with such deep archetypal cycles demands that you recognise the ebb and flow your feelings, and the rightness of the times when you are most needy, most vulnerable, and least able to stand alone, as well as the times when you are at your strongest and most creative. You will never receive all of what what you need at any time in life; but you may discover that you can experience enough love, respect, and encouragement, and support, from others as well as from yourself, to find serenity as you make your way through life.

Your respect for time and tradition can make it hard for you to acknowledge depression, for in your eyes it smacks of self-indulgence. Your strength and realism are admirable, but you may sometimes impose a simplistic set of rules on your complex inner nature. When you feel apathetic and depressed, you need to understand why, rather than maintaining a stiff upper lip and doggedly soldiering on. There is a time and a place for courage and self-control, but your emotional needs deserve something more than narrow-minded assumptions about how humans should behave. The vital force of your unlived individualism will demand expression no matter how hard you stamp on it, and Apathy will mask the unhappiness of the unacknowledged soul. Serenity is possible if you can value yourself as a whole person, and not a stereotype you have imposed on your inner self because it seems safer, more socially acceptable, and more secure.

If you experience sad emptiness where there could be fullness in your emotional world, you may need to turn to memory, especially the memory held in your emotions and your body, to discover what remains unfed. This can help you to accept what has been lost or cannot be changed, forgive those who have failed you, and seek with greater realism and compassion all that is rewarding in life, which might be far more than you imagine. Serenity can develop from a full recognition of your emotional needs, especially if you yourself have been denying those needs. Understanding your feelings without self-blame can be an effective antidote to the Apathy that drains colour, joy, and hope from life, and so can an acceptance of the flaws and limitations of every living creature with whom you engage. You will never find the perfect parent, whether you seek this through relationships, groups, material security, or political or spiritual convictions that promise safety and salvation. But you can find a good enough parent within yourself to nourish your inner world and share at least an important part of it with those closest to you.

Conclusion

The illustrations are excerpts from the triptych 'The Garden of Earthly Delights' by Hieronymus Bosch (around 1500).