I have to admit—I am a Sagittarius midheaven. So, I’ll start this piece about Sagittarius midheaven off by giving you some information about my own experience.
When I first immigrated to the United States, every single piece of clothing and furniture my family had came from the church. The church taught us English. It connected us with other people. I learned most of my first lessons and met my first friends in the church. Not only that, we lived on a college campus in the dorms. That was my context—school and religion.
As I got older, I left religion and started to practice spirituality. Religion and spirituality are very different because religion is a relationship to myth and spirituality is a relationship to the where and when of place. However, there are going to be places where religion and spirituality blend into each other because both deal with the issue of perspective. Perspective happens to be what Sagittarius represents with its long winded arrows and all.
The midheaven, in astrology, is how you nurture your own future. It is flanked by the ninth house, which is where you witness your own potential, and the eleventh house, where you witness the potential of your friends. The midheaven isn’t just your career, though I did make a career in a Sagittarius related thing (astrology). The midheaven describes the people who nurtured you, including your mother, because it also describes the style of how you raise the future by nurturing the young.
I have noticed that, like me, a lot of Sagittarius midheavens were nurtured not by a person but by an institution. But what does it mean for a person to be mothered by an institution? To be nurtured by an ideology?
I think that the thing that many people tend to overlook about Sagittarius midheaven is how rigid we can be. I mean this in the most honest and kind way possible.
People who are rigid about an idea aren’t the ones who follow a bunch of rules or love authority. The most rigid people, when it comes to ideas, tend to be the people who are the most excited. You just believe in your idea so strongly! You think it’s The Truth! That passion, that devotion, is what makes people unwilling to think beyond themselves.
Sagittarius midheaven struggles with its own rigidity. We are constantly trying to think beyond ourselves because we were raised to believe that our needs would be met if we subscribed to an ideology. But we struggle with our rigidity no matter how open minded and flexible we are (and many of us are open minded and flexible) because we feel as though we are or should be constantly seeking some kind of Truth. We sometimes make the mistake of thinking that, if we disagree with the people around us, that we will be outcast.
Don’t get me wrong. Sagittarius midheaven can be fully delusional.
We can’t help it. We have a really wild imagination and we feel all of these invisible patterns that other people think are crazy but actually allow us to kinda sorta predict the future sometimes. The patterns aren’t really patterns per se. They’re just vibes or intuition. Often, Sagittarius midheaven is dead wrong but, sometimes, we’re able to kind of guess what might happen next??
A lot of us are educators. Like many other Sagittarius midheavens, I also spent several years as an arts educator. And not to toot my own horn but I was good at it. I was a teacher who kids had fun improving their arts skills with. Since I bounced around from non profit to non profit, a lot of parents would ask me where I was teaching next because they wanted their kids to keep doing art with me. They could see their kid draw better, think bigger, and gain more confidence.
I don’t think that teaching is that hard. Teaching is the simple act of seeing someone not for what they can do right now but for their potential. You’re never complimenting or criticizing when you teach. You’re always encouraging—using praise, suggestions, and questions to try and get someone to explore what is currently unknown in themselves.
I think that teaching works well for Sagittarius midheaven people because we are so delusional that we believe in potential in people even when we can’t see it yet. We are not trying to see the world for how it functions right now. We’re trying to see what it could become.
When you grow up in the church, when you receive most of your nurture from an ideological institution, you have to become delusional if you’re going to survive. You grow up thinking that the world that you can see isn’t what it is trying to be. You have to believe that fantastic and monstrous things are possible, not in the mundane world but in the symbolic world.
So, Sagittarius midheaven people have this secret fear that we will grow to become angels or devils. We can be morally judgmental, sometimes of other people and always of ourselves. Because we want to know the truth about the world and the truth in ourselves. We think that appearances and reality don’t matter. The part of you that will survive is your truth, that part of you which makes the other parts possible.
Yes, Sagittarius midheaven will sometimes forget to live in reality. We forget to eat, to go to bed on time. We blink and five years of our lives have passed us by. Oh well! What does it matter? It’s not like we had a plan or anything. We just had a belief, a gamble if you will, that something different could be possible.
