Remember that old TV show “The Odd Couple,” with Oscar and Felix, two bachelors living together in the 70’s? When we think of Virgo, we may well think of Felix. It’s easy to imagine that Felix is a Virgo type, because he’s so fastidious. After all, Felix vacuums during poker games, while Oscar leaves pizza crusts under the bed and his room is always a mess. The two of them continually snipe about order around the apartment. But I have a new idea for you: Oscar is Virgo too. Do you want to know why?
People think Virgo is naturally orderly, tidy, clean, meticulous and so forth, but that’s just half of the story. It’s not that being organized and clean is easy for a Virgo type. What is actually going on is not that Virgo is clean, it’s that Virgo has a sensitivity to order. When things are messy, Virgo notices. But not every Virgo has the wherewithal to live up to that sensitivity by creating the degree of order they’d like to have in their life (much the way a Gemini secretly wonders if they’re smart enough or a Leo wonders if that last cool thing they did got noticed at all). The Virgo who is overwhelmed is a sad creature, never getting the tidiness that their soul loves. And what does that result in? Oscar.
Oscar represents the Virgo who has given up. Underneath the disorder, Oscar still cares very much about where things go and how they are kept. But he just doesn’t have what it takes to maintain that kind of environment. Felix does, but Felix overdoes it. Felix, left to his own devices, would live in a hospital, with hard, cold surfaces wiped down regularly with antiseptic and cheap fluorescent lighting. No beauty or warmth—only stark efficiency. It’s like they are 2 extremes of a single personality. And that personality is Virgo.
Every Virgo type starts off life with a predisposition to enjoying clarity, clean lines, empty spaces, tools staged ready for use. Virgo loves a clean, empty surface and a to-do list with everything checked off. Virgos who persist against the entropy this world has to offer also learn to love not only the product of order, but also the process of getting there. They learn to reward themselves (even with just a mental pat on the back) each time they check an item off that list.
But if you take Virgo too far, it splits into two types: one who is endlessly industrious in an effort to create an impossibly perfect order and one whose standards are so high that they never do anything at all. This explains something that was a mystery to me for years: the fact that Virgo is a Mutable sign. Mutability suggests a built-in duality and ambivalence which the other 3 Mutable signs all clearly have: Gemini is the Twins, Pisces is the Two Fish, Sagittarius the Archer is a centaur, half man and half beast. But where is the duality in Virgo? Finally, all is clear: the Perfectionist has two faces after all.
More about Virgo here.
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