The first Full Moon of 2017 illuminates the night skies on January 12th, reaching its height at 22°28′ of Cancer, 11.38am UTC. The lunar disc reflects the radiance of the Capricorn Sun and is squared by Jupiter in Libra and Uranus in Aries, together forming a grand cross that is resonant with confident and inspired energy. Its a good time to embark on establishing something new.
The possibilities for expanding upon our foundations, being inventive with and exploring new horizons in our lives now benefits the support that comes from feeling at home with ourselves and in our element, itself a reflection of the domicile Moon.
The strong presence of feminine archetypes, coming notably through the asteroids and smaller celestial bodies that accompany some of the major planets at this full Moon, are here assisted by the masculine energies, and indicate that it is the creatrix within that is activating our souls and pushing the boundaries of possibility.
But, the key element in all of this is the practical magic that naturally arises from being able and willing to let our personal light shine, illuminating our lives with real purpose. Being at home with this inner magic brings an openness to new possibilites – with all the planets direct over the next month this is a time to step more fully into our power and trust in our ability to embody a positive influence within the world.
Amongst the grounding elements which accompany this open minded and forward looking full Moon is Saturn’s trine with Uranus from Sagittarius. Saturn has a beneficial influence on Uranus impulse to break free of the past and embody our creativity in the present, giving it worldly form. This is where the magic happens, in the moment, when we are unencumbered by ‘what has been’ and are not distracted by hopes, fears and anxiety for the future, when we are fully present with our selves.
Mercury stationed direct in late Sagittarius on January 8th. Sagittarius is the sign of Mercury’s detriment, so, with Mercury having turned direct and on the cusp of Capricorn at full Moon a clearer focus is now becoming available that will allow these distractions to fall away and assist in this grounding. Inner connections are being restored and personal integrity renewed.
The Sun is also close on Saturn’s south node in Capricorn, a subtle further indication that it is through being true to the well grounded magic of our personal power and gifts that we can burn off the restrictions of collective conditioning that have dimmed our inner radiance in the past. There is much now happening in the world that reflects this process at work, the exposure of suppression and subversive controls coming into the full light of day, and the drive to establish equanimity, especially in relation to imbalances between the ‘feminine’ and the ‘masculine’ are at their center ground.
This is nowhere more visible than where injustice and inequality prevails between men and women, in so many aspects of life, but especially in issues of ‘power’, the relationship between ‘power-over’ and ‘power-to’, macht and kraft, and we will feel this most strongly where we encounter limitations on our personal power and how it is expressed.
Nodal influences of the outer planets are epochal by nature, and I would include Saturn and its nodes in this context as we are seeing the accumulative effect of millenia of that particularly masculine manifestation of Saturnian ‘control’ surfacing now, coming ever more under scrutiny. Pluto is within 3° of the Sun at full Moon and has been applying pressure to the foundations of the most outmoded expressions of this culture of control, dissembling its structures and eroding its influences, in its present Capricornian phase since 2008. In fact Pluto is also chasing its own south node in Capricorn and will catch up with it in a couple of years, bringing this long process of transformation within the institutions and politics of power to a head, reconstituting their past by forcing their karmic shadow into the present.
Saturn’s north node in Cancer is 2 degrees beyond the exact full Moon, suggesting that while we are on the cusp of an emancipatory period, at this time it is out of the work we do in giving integral form and balance to our personal power that the foundation of a more caring and equal world can be built – not necessarily a new focus for us, in our era and current lifetime, but one that is very much of the moment.
Venus is also bringing a strong nodal influence into this full Moon, being conjunct her own north node at 8° Pisces as we enter full Moon, so there can be no doubt – it is the women who are leading the way. Venus in Pisces is in exhaltation and the feminine spirit is resurgent. She is also conjunct Neptune, domicile in Pisces, and together they are otherwise unaspected. This conjunction is infusing the entire field with a visionary reminder of the value of passion and how love can shape and influence the world. The source field and the creative spirit that is its expression are also pushing the boundaries of possibility. Go to the waters, listen…..and give thanks.
The full Moon is also aspecting Chiron by trine in Pisces, further grounding the transformative spiritual potential we have available to us. The power of self confidence, the willingness to go beyond our own boundaries and to take the leap into the unknown are emphasised here – the practical side of trusting in our own spirit’s power to endure all and prevail. In the days around full Moon consider what your own passions and gifts truly are, how they are and can be most fully expressed, and let them be the guide.
Mars will join Chiron on the 17th of January, on his way to meeting with Uranus, and together with Chiron Mars squares Saturn throught this full Moon period. So allow yourself the space to gather your energies and direct them towards a higher goal through this time. This focusing of the masculine energy will serve best here, a spiritual re-alignment with our purpose and purposefulness.
The opposition between Jupiter and Uranus is now in full swing – they too tell us that we can gain much by opening the doors of possibility in our lives now, and will see the scope of our thinking and ability to relate expand as a result. I will be writing more about this in the coming months, but the focus brought out by the beginning of their 12 year cycle in 2010-11 has already been covered in previous articles and, having had time to observe their first exact opposition (the first of three this year), a clearer analysis of its most active forms of expression is now becoming available. The ecological theme of their cycle and focus in issues surrounding energy production and consumption have been very much in the spotlight over the last few months, and nowhere can this be seen more clearly than at Standing Rock which stands as a clear example of how the prevailing conditions can be and are being met. This is going to continue to be a clear focus for the coming year and, lets remember, it was the women of Standing Rock who arrived there and set up camp first.
And then there are the asteroids…..amongst all this expansion and personal growth a certain mental accuity is becoming more prevelant, and necessary, and the finer influences at work highlight both the dynamics and possible stumbling blocks that are intrinsic to this process. While this is a great time in which to really begin shining our light in the world, it is no time for self-serving egotism….that will backfire, immediately, in the present planetary climate. There is a process of differentiation at work here – as distinct from seperation; neither is this a time for condemnation.
Juno is conjunct Saturn in 22° Sagittarius at full Moon, tempering the patriarch with a just hand and reminder of the sacred laws that govern relationships – their trine with Uranus in the 20th degree of Aries is made the more exact by Eris at 22° Aries, tieing Eris very strongly into the grand cross. Eris is a dwarf planet who, astrologically, brings an extra level of impulsive and reactive energy to this trine. Not much escapes this nexus of responsive and catalytic awareness and, as we are seeing in a very Uranian way, the reaction time to injustices and degree of tolerability surrounding them, within the internet especially, is diminishing continually. It represents a kind of quickening that is becoming exponential through Jupiter’s opposition with Uranus. The current ‘witchhunt’ that singles out ‘fake news’ as its target, especially in the ‘alternative media’, is itself a prime example and is rapidly backfiring on its perpetrators, the MSM and their masters – if we can learn anything useful from this, it is that we have and can access an innate ‘higher sense’ for the ‘truth’ that cannot be subverted so easily now; it is our prerogative to use it and follow it, not least as the more we do, the stronger it gets, as the fake-news fiasco is proving.
At the shoulder of Pluto we find asteroid Magdalena, while at the side of Mars, his co-ruler in Scorpio, we find Borasisi, one of the astrological Centaurs.
The divine lover and the alchemist of the zodiac make for an intriguing couple, suggesting a revision of spiritual sexuality to be at the very root of the planetary transformations we are seeing – in union with Uranus and Jupiter’s opposition this may come across as a collective awakening of kundalini like energies, but, Magdalena is already present in each chakra, as an awakened psychic energy. The re-emergence of the goddesses of old as active agents of change within our midst is no imaginary matter; we are talking the ‘realism’ and ‘real magical power’ at work within it all – the Goddess does not deal in anything but practical magic, when it comes down to it, and the karma of centuries of priesthood is crumbling under the pressure of Her re-emergence. It is only a matter of time, but, Magdalena is highly intuitive, representing the embodied feminine psyche turned on and tuned in at all levels, and this is where the real transformation is now at work – that same realm of intrinsic magic, and power.
There are many breakthroughs coming amidst the breakdowns now and this time marks the beginning of a sustained period in which the latter begin to more fully prevail. We will see more of this manifest as the second quarter of the year progresses, but, Uranus is injecting much energy into this process from Aries, initiating new ground for us to build our futures upon, and Jupiter in Libra is emphasising how mind expanding and liberating this can be, when we allow it….it all sounds great; so what could possibly go wrong….
Borasisi and Mars in Pisces bring a piercing ability to penetrate the veil and understand the nature of illusion into active mode here as well. The astronomical Centaur Borasisi is a neighbour of Pluto and shares some of Pluto’s more masculine astrological qualities – with Mars these are doubled. The personal power we have to cut through the crap is heightened here, bringing a higher level of self determination based on our own incisive insights. We can gain a stronger vision for our future from this. But, this can also be provocative and, in the wrong hands, push us to ‘publish and be damned’, and to press the red button of our own intent and purpose, no matter what, all of which may sound like a dangerous facility and energy to have at our disposal. And, ‘there’s the rub’….in the midst of the prevelant energies is there any reason this energy cannot also be made to serve the higher good, and goal – right now, the answer to that question rests with each of us, and our ability to let our light shine from within, without impediment, or self doubt – Borasisi and Mars tell us its time to banish those shit-fairies! And, more importantly with Borasisi and Mars, this is not about displays of ego either – where we see those driving the agenda, they too will be seen through. We simply have to be who we are, knowing that the power of our gifts is enough.
If anything our inner luminosity is boundless, and this is an energy that rests not on the light of our inner drives, but, of our soul. It is at its best a spiritual matter. This is also the energy that, in ceremony, sets the clearest and strongest intent to that end. When the masculine is in service, in this sense, it can work wonders…..and, with the feminine, bring them into being. This is what we are, wonders, and this is practical magic.
On the 20th of April 2010 the world suffered a forbidingly deep wounding of its ‘wine dark sea’, as two hundred million gallons of ‘crude’ that is to say ‘unrefined’ oil lay its suffocating shadow upon the living waters. This stifling of the Gulf of Mexico pressed down upon its soul rich heart a heavy hand of crude inhumanity and brought death forth in the dreaming sea, an unrefined nightmare that haunts us still. We saw its image, a spume of black blood issuing from the wound, a toxic rainbow mirroring the flame raged cloud that rose from the crippled rig. Such images burn themselves into the heart of our concerns for life, but, how many more warnings do we need…..
…..it was a warning that the natural balance had been recklessly disturbed once more and, as many others warnings have been since Trinity unleashed Shiva’s dance upon the Earth, that the boundaries of sanity were being pushed to breaking point – we could have turned back then; the first testing of the atom bomb showed us how far the insanity had reached within the corridors of power, but, Hiroshima and Nagasaki pushed it further still and Trinity’s unheeded forebodings were finally fulfilled within a year of the Deepwater Horizon disaster when Fukushima let loose on March 11th 2011. The boundary had been breached.
The stricken reactor nailed humanity to a disastrous cross of its own making, at least three of its cores going into meltdown, signalling the advent of the ‘China Syndrome’. But, just as the news hoisted Fukushima’s dread tree aloft our own Golgotha, then too officials spoke through sealed lips, drew their own blanket of lies tight around the fact and washed their ‘pontius’ hands of culpability. The images that accompanied this deception told otherwise as the fury of Neptune’s own hand swept down upon the Japanese people, scouring the land and sea through tsunami and irradiated chaos. As Oppenheimer had ironically foreseen, too late, the dance of Shiva once invoked, cannot be contained.
Such were two of the momentous events that framed Jupiter and Uranus meeting on the Aries point which, on June 8th 2010, marked the opening of their current synodic cycle; the midpoint of their cycle approaching, it is time to take stock of our ability to turn the tide.
What have we learnt from this, the last six years since Deepwater and Fukushima, and the ever raging war being wrecked upon our Earth? Mars complicity notwithstanding, did the Thunderer and the Awakener ignitethe cardinal fire of our deepest concerns through these acts? We have entered far deeper waters than Homer’s odyssean mariners ever sailed, and our wine dark sea has become oil black, a dumping ground for the dominant culture’s inherent complex and its objects of denial. Its eerily illuminated undertow is reflected in the harsh light of the defiled flesh and bleached irradiated bones that whales and dolphins cast upon our shores in the wake of such terrible folly.
Event Horizon
Can we hold ourselves responsible? When an ‘accident’ of such serious magnitude happens more than once, and happens again, and again, does it wear the mantle of fate, as might be presaged in the stars, or is its persistent knocking on the doors of our consciousness and conscience not trying to tell us something about our destiny and what must happen for us to claim it; if we do not bear responsibilty and ultimate culpability, do we have the power to counter the vested interests of those who, ultimately, are culpable? By its very repetition do they not reveal themselves and their cronies to be what they truly are by such account, violating perpetrators? These too are questions that must be asked, and have been asked increasingly since these epochal events stimulated beyond any doubt the need for their asking. We can all hear them being asked in Dakota right now…..
Fukushima struck while Jupiter was still connected with Uranus, their conjunction still just in orb, at its critical point of departure, but the connection and the event, though appearing late in the day, was no less prescient for this. The Japanese disaster, in fact and nature a global disaster for sure, might have brought us to our senses and alerted us to the fact that, for us too, it is late in the day, very late. We might yet sense, were we to fully take in its import and rise to its calling, that we are not entering but are leaving the epoch of planetary destruction, but, such rests upon our ability to respond and, if we do so, first realise that the path of planetary healing leads not away from the wound, but through it.
Both in scale and consequence the role of the power industries has been disastrously epochal, none the less so, regardless the nuclear desert in whose shape we are rapidly terraforming our future, as for more than a century the oil industry has held such a dominant and deeply influencial role in our current culture of power and commerce. It is a geopolitical battle ground whose theatre of war we can see playing out now. In nuclear power many were, initially, duped into believing that we were being shown the way out of this paradigm, such was the naivety of the time with which many accepted its promise, in spite of Trinity, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The planetary matrix at the opening of the first fully commercial nuclear plant, Windscale, on 17th October 1956, reveals astrological themes that we will see recurring again and again here – Pluto sextiled Neptune, both on sign cusps, formed a yod to the Moon at 0° Aries, the ‘Aries point’, and Pluto squared the Moon’s nodes; Saturn was conjunct the north node, precisely on the cusp of Scorpio and Sagittarius; Venus opposed Mars from mid Virgo, and Mercury sextiled Uranus, trining Chiron; Jupiter was exactly semisquare Uranus, the first critical angle of their cycle, and Uranus opposed Chiron. The role of the outer planets in particular is key in our examination here and this must include Chiron who sat firmly in Capricorn, the power base, as Jupiter and Uranus opened their cycle in December 1954; Neptune’s role too is central to this article and Neptune exactly squared Uranus and Jupiter at that moment.
Without getting too deeply embroiled in the planetary matrix at this point, suffice it to say that one of the main aims of this article is to illustrate the key role that certain astrological factors have repeatedly played in the charts connecting major environmental disasters, both accidental and not, but, all here relating to the ‘industries of power’. I could have chosen many more examples, especially those relating to the nuclear industry, but that is a project that requires its own space. The Jupiter Uranus cycle, however, has much to tell us within all this and this is a long article, of necessity…..
……the ‘power industries’ have led us into very deep water and to continue following this way of power leads nowhere, except to the dead-end of a lifeless culdisac, an event horizon that is a point of no return. The voice of the industry tells us otherwise, but, the ‘authorities’ of power are clearly seen to be in the business of selling us down the river. We do not need the oil or nuclear industries to power our planet.
With the cracking of the atom we reached the ‘event horizon’ of our times and were pushed, as an exploration of the Trinity chart will indicate, beyond the brink of containment. The illness of our times became psychotic as the button was pushed, such that now the progressive pursuit of dominance through the material use of power has induced an unchecked tsunami of consequences that blight our human presence on Earth. This is no time for political correctness – we need a stronger more passionate language to voice our burning concerns.
Astrologers often try to hold a neutral ground when dealing with interpretation, avoiding such rhetoric in the pursuit of an unbiased view – but, if their is a rule in this, this astrologer favours its breaking, and with good reason. As a diviner I have found that the energy of emotion is a powerful healing tool in itself and, in taking a diviner’s approach to astrology this informs this practice equally. This is not a surgery or lab, and we cannot afford to pussyfoot around our most pressing issues…..
…….I could have gone the conventional route of including charts, but, it is a custom here to focus more on the narrative, as divination does, to give voice to the story behind the chart rather than focus on its technical elements alone; the power of the imagination is what we are after restoring, not a supplimentary science, or meta-science, to justify it, and in responding to the current of our times the poetic medicine of this innate power is essential.
We have seen enough of how science works – as much as its findings excite, it speaks a dead language. As one of our greatest scientists once ironically proclaimed, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand”.(1)
Our response is gathering apace, but, our common tongue is itself afflicted with numbing irony. Buzzwords abound, ‘sustainability’ jostling for space with ‘ecocide’, ‘the environment’ and the ‘biosphere’ become flatline synonyms for our living Earth. We must not be afeared of finding and using our poetic tongue, or be heckled into submission, believing that to do so is to depart from the facts. The drama being enacted in this theatre is deeply tragic and requires equally dramatic language to disclose its true import – a journey into the wound cannot help but bring us face to face with its inherent pain; but, it is a journey we have the means to navigate and we must be unflinching in our determination to see it through. In navigating Neptune’s world this is a de rigueur necessity……
Trinity
If the celestial mirror is anything, it reveals itself to be unflinchingly precise, not least of all in asking for our attention – after the detonation of the first atom bomb, given the unholy name of ‘Trinity‘, was Oppenheimer’s invocation of Shiva any more accidental than the test itself? Is it pure coincidence that within the chart for this event the asteroid ‘Shiva’ was conjunct the Sun to within 2 minutes of arc at the moment of detonation?
The chart for the Trinity detonation is a regular dragon’s egg of powerful potential energy, its key signifiers revealing a deep coherence that carries a profoundly assertive quality; the chart carries a depth charge of meaning and portent that mirrors the moment in which the cosmic egg was rent asunder. This is a chart that warrants much deeper exploration than be given here, but, in the context of this article a relatively brief summation will indicate its unquestionable importance.
Saturn, in detriment, was conjunct the Trinity Ascendant in mid Cancer, precisely squaring the Moon, the ruler of the Asc, in mid Libra. Sirius, the brightest of stars in our night skies, had just risen, barely a degree above the horizon – a symbol of the event’s magnitude and historical significance. In Gemini, Libra’s own ruler Venus precisely sextiled Pluto in Cancer with the Moon’s north node exactly at their midpoint, just six degrees from Saturn – it was a moment of extreme collective soul crisis, a violation of the generative principle and lockdown on our future and collective identity.
The repercussions of this fateful moment have afflicted our collective soul’s journey to this day, its catatonia inducing impact contagiously propagated at the deepest levels as Pluto fell precisely on Neptune’s north node in Leo in the Trinity chart. In this vision of the future the ‘egg of creation’ has been fatally cracked open, creating a breach in time that has released the unbounded powers of the Underworld within the earthly realms. Entering the realm of this unthinkable nightmare we suffered a loss of soul that reverberated well beyond the earthly sphere. But, as Neptune and Pluto are also reminding us here, it is in plumbing the depths of the dream and retrieving the transformative scope of its vision that the keys to its own redemption can be found.
If there are shades of Orpheus at work here the soulful task in hand is brought fully home as the asteroid Orpheus occupies the mid-point of the 10th house, at 15° Aries, precisely square Saturn and the Asc, directly opposing the Moon. The wandering stars are unerring in their precision……..but, what of Jupiter and Uranus?
In the Trinity chart Jupiter is in detriment in Virgo, squaring Uranus in Gemini, a sign in which Jupiter is also in detriment. This critical juncture in their cycle is no less crucial, or fatalistic; it was a cycle that began amidst tumultuous warring, but, the degree upon which its opening fell was perhaps more fatal still as Jupiter and Uranus met conjunct the fixed star Algol, the star of the Medussa. That alone is an ominous imprint to carry, but, the chart for that moment is something to behold (12.20am UTC, May 8th 1941).
Jupiter is loosing power in the Trinity chart as the square seperates, but, while Uranus is the stronger, in its own natural element, Jupiter carries the power of two fixed stars that lend the Thunderer’s presence a symbolic poigniance in ‘earth’ and the sign of the Virgin.
In orb of Denebola, the blue star in the tail of the Leo constellation, Jupiter compounds the import of Robson’s commentary (2) on its conjunction with this star, words brought to a new level of Uranian intensity – “Pride, hypocrisy, disappointed life, troubles abroad or through relatives, secret enemies, danger of imprisonment or death by sentence.” Ebertin tells us Denebola “is of the nature of Uranus”, and that “in mundane horoscopes major catastrophes are triggered off by it” (3)
However, in closer orb of Nu, the fixed star at the head of the Virgo constellation, Jupiter’s culmination of its waxing square with Uranus opened a reckoning time, a time of awakening in which we must pay heed to the catastrophic seeds of destruction that were being sown.
Nu’s esoteric significance is not lost here and echoes something of the Jupiter Uranus theme in relation to Trinity – as the 13th letter of the Greek alphabet, one of Nu’s sigils resembles the lightningbolt. It also symbolises ‘specific volume’ in thermodynamics and, in nuclear physics, the number of neutrons released per fission of an atom.
Within this star’s rich symbology Nu also associates with the truly anomolous, a truly Uranian quality. Its energy is further indicated by its algebraic signification of wave frequency, the modulation of which is at the very heart of energy work and field propagation. Science aside, this is a star that, while being much overlooked, indicates the workings of subtle energies – numinous by name, numinous by nature (pun intended). However, with this resonance between the star and these two planets in mind, Jupiter in square aspect to Uranus becomes an amplified critical point around this energy. An extreme has been reached – in calculus Nu’s symbol is used to signify ‘the greatest fixed point of a function’; as a calculated act Trinity nailed us to the fixed point at the center of the cross of fate and destiny. It was a chronically Chironic.
If the need for the deepest of healing sought confirmation, Chiron was closely conjunct the IC of the Trinity event chart, in the final degree of Virgo, a degree that seems fated to play a recurrent role in this energetic drama – the deepest and most fatal of wounds was opened and we have been repeatedly called to its healing ever since. And, as if to drive the point home, the chart’s MC is precisely on the Aries point, within 4 minutes of arc of the point of entry into Uranus and Jupiter’s current cycle.
The Widening Breach
At Hiroshima, three years later, at 8.16am local time on the 6th of August 1945, the sensitive degrees were activated again. Mars joined Uranus in mid Gemini, with Uranus precisely conjunct the chart’s MC, squaring the Ascendant and the Trinity Moon’s degree. In the Hiroshima chart the Ascendant falls exactly on the degree occupied by the asteroid Shiva in Japan’s national chart. Hiroshima’s Jupiter opposed Japan’s Mars and squared Japan’s Moon…..and this too is a chart carrying a yod with the Moon’s nodes as its central axis.
This time it is Pluto and Mars that are feeding their energies into the Moon’s north node, with the south node at their midpoint! In the deafening roar of the bomb you could almost hear the ancestors howling in disbelief at this ultimate act of aggression. Mars is conjunct the fixed star Aldebaran, a union signifying violent death and sickness. Mars also trines Neptune and Pallas, with Pluto at their midpoint framed by the Sun on one side and Shiva on the other. The correspondences begin to show themselves as the celestial evidence mounts.
Chart comparisons of such events reveal much; they can also lead one down a very wearying path when the destructive element is being highlighted – but, when we look further afield Shiva’s presence and the roles of Uranus, Pluto, Neptune, Saturn, Chiron and Jupiter in particular spring out with an unerring call from the outer planets for our attention.
The Evidence Mounts
In the chart for the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, 1.24 am 26th April 1986, Uranus this time falls exactly on the Ascendant, along with asteroid Orpheus, and is once again in a waxing square with Jupiter! The Sun opposes Pluto close on the Moon’s south node and the chart’s MC/IC axis.
Pallas is exactly conjunct Pluto’s south node in Cancer, weighing our lack of wisdom in the ancestral balance of creation. Pluto was also trined with Ceres in early Virgo as Chernobyl went critical, alerting us to the depth of the event and the need to see its widespread effects within the earth realms more clearly. Did we take heed?
Mars and Neptune once more sextile Pluto, with the asteroid Shiva this time close on Neptune. The pattern at work here is revealing itself. Some say that there was no accident in Chernobyl’s meltdown, that Fukushima was no accident, that politically motivated revenge and deliberate sabotage was at work. However we look at it, there is an old old war at work in our world.
During the Gulf War massive oil spillage was unleashed by the Iraqi army in an attempt to prevent American forces from landing – the planetary positions on that day, 21st of January 1991, are very revealing.
Saturn, domicile in Capricorn, was conjunct the Moon’s north node within two degrees of the Sun at 0° Aquarius. Chiron opposed Saturn from Cancer, trining Pluto, domicile in Scorpio. Mars at 0° Gemini trined the Sun with the Moon transiting the Aries point midway between them. Meanwhile, Jupiter in Leo, squaring Saturn and Chiron, quincunxed Uranus, Mercury and Neptune, whose stellium in Capricorn is very telling. The dice are heavily loaded in this chart, activating critical degrees and pushing the power base into overload.
Neptune’s influence in Capricorn by itself might have alerted us to the message that such violent geopolitically driven disregard for the Earth’s and Life’s sanctity expresses, but this entire complex of interwoven apsects belies the pursuit of a wreckless strategy of dominance. It is a strategy that finds its purpose in creating emotional turmoil and unbridled drama, as a distraction from the underlying wound that it meanwhile deepens. It has deception at its heart and is achieved, as the American campaign in Iraq of 2003 brazenly broadcast, through the widespread delivery of ‘shock and awe’. It is also at the heart of the attempt at a perpetual war, not on but ofterror, that now sustains this intent and purpose. Neither is it confined to the military battlefield…..
…..if the military delivery of such globalised trauma is ongoing so is its environmental twin. And, if Deepwater Horizon has anything to tell us about this veiling of our sanity and its relationship with the current opposition between Jupiter and Uranus, perhaps a closer look at Neptune will reveal it.
There is a certain irony in Neptune’s role in the Deepwater chart; conjunct Chiron on the cusp of Pisces the oceanic wound carries its heart in its mouth – as environmental disasters go its magnitude, if not its cause, was both openly pronounced and concealed in the process as we heard its dry echo on the news. This was ‘the worst‘, we were told, ‘environmental disaster‘, we were informed, ‘in US history‘, we were duly advised, as if official notification of its scale and national appointment were a measure of its weight…..there was no ‘solace’ or ‘measure’ offered in the fact, or its presentation in the media.
The familiar machinations of obscuration surrounding this event are highlighted when we look closer, as Neptune and Chiron on the Pisces cusp sextile the Sun at 0° Taurus, with Uranus at their midpoint. Uranus on the Aries cusp opposes Saturn rx in the final degree of Virgo. Echoes of the charts mentioned above also resound here. The key planets here had barely moved a single degree by the time Jupiter and Uranus opened their current cycle.
In the Deepwater chart the Moon is conjunct its own south node, in the process of transiting Saturn and Pluto’s north nodes in Cancer. The soul of the past must inform the transformational building of our future. Mid Cancer, if you remember, was sensitised in the Trinity chart and the key angles are trigger points activated by the outer planets at all these events.
Jupiter and Uranus both square the Ascendant. In the Deepwater chart’s 10th house Jupiter and Uranus signal the importance of this event in the relationship between the industries of power and our ability to transcend their dominance, but it is Neptune who is the ruler of the MC, calling for redemption. Is the society of the future we dream of now a dream we can share with our descendants…..
…..in their yod with Saturn, Neptune + Chiron’s sextile with the Sun shows us how the message is being both perceived and not perceived. At 29° of Aquarius the critical point of Neptune’s transit into Pisces is overshadowed by the karmic sensitivity of Saturn’s place at the head of the yod. It is a karma both shut out of view, concretised and delivered into our hands – we have to feel it to believe in it and only the power locked up in our human passion and will to live harmoniously can redeem it for us. Some might say that, with such a diagnosis, humanity is in dire need of a soul retrieval – so, who might we find who could facilitate such an undertaking; its a rhetorical question.
Opposing Saturn, Uranus becomes the revealer who alerts us to the event’s true nature – this is not simply an act of extreme negligence, as the courts ruled against BP, the company responsible for Deepwater, it was a call to rein in the destruction to our living Earth. It was also a call to a much more profound and powerful vision, one that engenders and protects life and can be lived by. Answering such a calling would be the purpose of Jupiter and Uranus meeting at 0° Aries and such a vision forms the positive core of their new synodic cycle.
If The Path Leads Through The Wound…..
Such disasters bring catastrophic and deeply affecting damage whose images nevertheless point towards the painful heart of the healing being called for. The impact of Deepwater upon marine life has been far deeper than has been acknowledged – we are told that hundreds of whales and dolphins, many of them babies, died as a result – the toxicity of the chemicals used in the ‘clean up’ is no less pervasive to this day; but, the reality behind these events is far more deep reaching and forms part of a much bigger picture.
At the time, Deepwater Horizon was but the latest in a long history of environmental disasters falling at the hands of its industrial power base. Yes, BP were found guilty of negligence, but, to call it ‘negligent’ is an insult of the highest order, one that ignores the long list of ‘negligence’ behind its perpetrators. Over one billion gallons of crude have poured from that ongoing industrial wound into the oceanic biosphere within the last half century alone. And this figure does not include one of the biggest spills ever recorded which was not accidental by any means – millions of gallons were deliberately unleashed within the Persian Gulf during the Gulf War and it is openly admitted but never spoken knowledge that a nine foot deep crust of ‘tarcrete’ covers afflicted areas of the desert to this day. The damage within Neptune’s realms goes almost entirely unmentioned – further hard evidence must be called to the dock……
Forgetting is at the deep core of the construction of Onkalo, a mile deep repository for nuclear waste being built under a granite mountain in Finland. But how, millenia down the road, do we tell our descendants of the lethal dangers our legacy has created for them in such an irradiated tomb? The radioactive waste buried at Onkalo has a half life of tens of thousands of years, and we struggle to decipher the signs left by our ancestors 5,000 years ago, let alone 50,000. (4)
The thousands of starfish that have been dissolving on the eastern Pacific Coast, the dead seals and fish, the mass die off of marine flora and their mirror, the hundreds of deformed human babies born in Japan after Fukushima and Russia after Chernobyl are not considered hard enough evidence to halt the madness, yet. Neither are these facts redeemed by the use of depleted uranium in wars fought over geopolitical gains; gains, no matter how opposed to them we are, from which we continue to benefit; our hand is being forced, while running our cars, heating and lighting our homes, powering our computers……
……Trinity was the first of many tests, themselves running to the thousands, that have produced generations of dead and cancer afflicted ‘downwinders’, and the military personel involved in these tests, ordinary footsoldiers used in that ‘good old military tradition’ of ‘cannon fodder’, were treated with equal disdain being nothing more than a ‘part of the experiment’.
Official figures attached to these events differ wildly when they do actually appear within the public realm, by astronomical factors in some cases, an open indicator of the confusion and deception at work within. This in itself is not newsworthy enough to warrant reportage either, it seems. The hegemony of the scientific priesthood will always try to sell us the official line. Hundreds of ‘alternative’ researchers will tell us different, alternative in many senses simply because they are never consulted by the media. And yet, when these events are thrust in our face they invariably filtered down, delivered through the official channels with just enough force for the figures to wash over us, and we are expected to swallow them. This is a reality fully manifest in Fukushima where, over five years after the event, the authorities continue to massively downplay the truth and its consequences. Regardless, we know the truth – these events are all of one ilk; they are all acts of war, ultimately destructive crimes against Life. So….
…..What Is The Antidote?
At Fukushima the asteroid Shiva was exactly conjunct Pluto at 8° Capricorn and, as I began to write this article Jupiter was exactly square this degree – the burgeoning sphere of radioactive threat is upon us again as the drums of global war ratchet up their rhythm. And, it has long been known that the nuclear fuel industry is but a front for the manufacture of weapons grade uranium.
The reactors are getting old, as are the warheads. Instability rules the day. One strike from a significant coronal mass ejection will take down the grid and the failsafe on these ‘facilities’ will be tested to its extreme. It is madness to continue in this way. If Jupiter and Uranus are to have a hand in this it is our prerogative to find their higher calling and it is to this that we will be looking in the next post.
Neptune’s realms are suffering through widening pollution and irradiation, and yet the fact of the whales and dolphins carcasses in relation to these events remains obscured. If we are to bring a passion to bear here, it must surely be upon what in our times has become that most mercurial of things, Truth. The truth is there for all to see, deliberately veiled if not ignored by the official channels in order to prevent widespread panic, we are told – and insurrection, we might surmise. The cover up is no less great above our heads where the daily deposition of many thousands of tons of heavy metals, nano-technologies and viral particulates infuses the skies that carry the oceans irradiated waters and bring its heavy load to our lands, lakes and front doors. Its a ‘hard rain’ thats falling, to be sure….but the truth behind this reality does not escape our notice; witness this latest appraisal. The perpetrators know that truth is the most powerful of weapons and have no inhibition in concealing it and affecting our capacity for recognising it. Our very ability to think and dream for ourselves is under assault.
The scientific foundation upon which the industries of power have built their edifice has done everything in its power to seperate our thinking from our dreaming – we cannot imagine without either, and Neptune is the archetypal ruler of the imaginal realms.
As the planetary matrix of Deepwater and many of these charts might have indicated it is in Neptune’s, and Chiron’s, realms that the soul of Jupiter and Uranus antidote might be found. In indigenous lore the Whales are Earth’s keepers of the great repository of knowledge that give us access to the ancestral dreaming of our planet. This is knowledge that encompasses a far older memory than is widely acknowledged, a memory that reaches far back into the migration of the planets, and of our ancestors, into this solar system.
Water has memory, conveys information, responds to emotions – when we are born our body’s primary element is water (around 75%) and remains so in healthy humans ( dropping to an average of <60%>) until death; we are born from water……and the primary source of oxygen on our planet is in the oceans; phytoplankton photosynthesises over 50% of the world’s oxygen into the atmosphere……..and oxygen is the bane of cancer. It is also essential to our capacity to imagine, but, we will return to this next time.
The Whale’s return to the oceans signalled a change in our planetary atmosphere and gravity, a transformation of Earth also intrinsic to the human evolutionary path; they hold the memories of a unified consciousness that are braided into our own dna – the release and recovery of these memories is essential to our world, a central part of the antidote.
When Uranus and Jupiter met at 0° Aries they signalled a new beginning for us all in retrieving the power within these memories, of memory itself, and their current opposition across the Aries Libra axis will tell us just where and how this journey could continue, its great promise and startling reality……in future posts over the coming year we will pick up on the incoming attributes of the Jupiter Uranus cycle, looking more deeply into the story as it unfolds, and begin to unpack what the return of the whale dreamers might mean for us. The next post in the series, Mysterious Travellers, can be found here…..
(1) quote attributed to Albert Einstein
(2) Fixed Stars and Constellations in Astrology, V E Robson, 1923
(3) Fixed Stars and their Interpretation, Elsbeth Ebertin, 1928
On September 18th fire maned Venus met with her dark sister, the ‘Black Moon Lilith’ and, stepping into the Lilith corridor, donned her robe of dark feathers. As she did so she opposed Uranus, the cosmic fire wielder and ancient consort of the Earth goddess, and through the mantle of the dark feminine power ignited a Need-fire that will burn for 13 Moons. Mark this time and set a lunar calendar by which its phases can be counted. There will be many as the inner and outer realms are being activated in unison with a pulse that brings many synchronous levels of planetary phases into an entraining sequence.
The die is cast for the coming months as She also carries the seed energy of the eclipsed Moon from 16th September, striking the ground of the fertile darkness with black lightning, the shadow side of Uranus fire, as she traverses the ‘fiery road’ that leads into the heart of the Scorpio.
With this subtlely convened entry into the other worlds Venus path may have gone unmarked and, leaving no visible trace, undetected; save in the hearts of the wise women, the poets and seers whose vibration of the membrane between this world and the next within this world would have felt like a sweet rage of passion upsurging to issue forth with new verse, insight and knowing…..the zone of extreme psychic sensitivity that the Lilith corridor demarks is below the sweep of the ‘common’ mind’s radar. And yet, in us all, there is this path and we know it, even if only by its dream traces and the ‘anomalous’, the unbidden scents of ancient forest of knowledge through which it leads, whenever we stumble across the boundaries between the worlds within our own world and hear their whisperings…..
As I write, Venus has now left the ‘via combusta’ but remains yet within the Lilith corridor, having met with Black Moon Lilith’s sister ‘Dark Moon’ Lilith on the way. As the corridor closes behind the ‘fire-maned’ goddess, on October 10th, the two Liliths having also swapped places, such is the weaving of their own paths, Black Moon Lilith once again ushers ‘Fire Mane’ out and into the company of Juno who awaits her at the sacred portal in late Scorpio.
With this passage into the realms of the dark fire, Venus activated the degrees upon which the thunderer Jupiter and the awakener Uranus will mark the mid point of their current synodic cycle. She opens the pathway for the Sun and Mercury to follow in her wake before the storm bringers get to work. Having sensitised the degrees of opposition with Uranus and initiating a year long archetypal influence that promises a widening of mental perception and injection of paradigm shifting potential into the planetary field, She also marks the second half of the current lunation with a potent homeopathic dose of intense otherworldly energy, the subtle workings of which will underpin the coming year with psychic sensitivity. Her journey through the via combusta has carried this psychic imprint and, as Venus accelerates through the zodiac towards the slow down and retrograde that precedes her eventual meeting with Uranus in Aries, June 2017, is pushing feminine issues and the reconfiguration of ‘wealth’ distribution to the top of the agenda.
Following Mars lead, as he opened the transit of the outer planets by starting a new synodic cycle with Saturn in August, Venus and Mercury will be activating the outer planets through this time zone to mid year, and we can expect big shifts on the ground, and in our personal lives as a consequence. The issues at stake are rampant, complex and global, but they boil down to one major effort to end the abuse, of our planet, of each other and of ourselves. This is a massively important time for us all and Venus has found the best of company with which to open the flood gates for serious healing.
Venus has been gathering a storm behind her and She, with Juno, who oversees the boundaries of the sacred marraige and who upholds its lore and sacred laws, will be seeking justice for all the wrongs done in the name of falsity and greed to the Feminine ‘archetype’. The sacredness of Life has become threatened to the point of extinction, through the violation of the sacred marraige that a rampant army of patriarchal genocidal murderers has wrecked upon the holy, our Earth, no less than holy women, and men, our brothers and sisters…..and we are all of their kin, as they, holy, within our bones….
…..the wound is deep, so deep, a maw of millenia wide abuse, torture, rape and pillage, whose scouring of the temenos and razing of the circles of sacred power undid what Venus, the Fire Mane, Comet Goddess began when she seeded this world with the holy fire of the otherworlds at the turning of the worlds, the beginning of ‘our’ historical time. The turning must, in turn, be turned.
The Liliths are not bound by the material, but are of an ilk that embodies a knowing and imbues our acts with unchecked raw passion, is uncensored in its primal power, deeply erotic with the love of the life force at full flow, capable of no less a cataclysmic transmutation of the known through their own dark fire than Uranus lightning strikes, and it is this furious compassion that they invoke, for a cleansing of this world; no less than this will turn the world from its present destructive course – we are disposed to take its spark into our own hands and hearts to this end. Without it ‘goodness’ alone will be inadequate to the immensity of the task.
There is a voluminous depth to their emotional power now, banked up behind them by generations of murder at the stake, inflamed by usury and enslavement of the creative embodiment of the life force in service to a specious post modern psychosis of scientific materialism…..and, in Scorpio, this reaches down to the primary building blocks of life itself, to the encoding hardware of our DNA, its inwoven story of ancient memory itself a path between the worlds. The mutation of all life forms at the hands of controlling yet uncontrolled hubris that has so marked the later phases of the ‘modern era’ cannot continue without severe consequences.
The Dark Goddess has been reviled, suppressed and seared to the bone for being the source of wisdom that needs no mandate from a higher ‘God’ to manifest its fecund life affirming creative energies in form. Lilith was the original serpentine Eve, the true repository of such wisdom and empowering knowledge and means – empowerment as it could be, has been and will be again, within the incarnate realms. This violation is the great wound of the modern ‘Christian’ Era, at the hands of the ‘church fathers’, their armies, mercinaries and plunderers, who have sought to wipe her power from the earthly realms – but Christianity is not alone in its subjugation of the Feminine and the propagation of this wound. All wars carry the vile seal of their murderous intent, ‘holy’ or not. And War rages on, until we end it.
Expect now fierce reprisals, fearsome even……but, that would be an understatement…..for there must now be a swing in the balance, archetypal and paradigmatic in scope, in favour of the Feminine power, for a purging of the unholy cankers that scab the wound, to clear the way for a truer balance between the sacred energies of creation to be created anew. For the wound to be healed. Libra and Scorpio propagate this process, are at work in this.
Do not expect the world to end; do not expect an end, without a fight, for fight we must, not with violence but with the sacred passion of protectors……and will need the lightning seeds of a revolutionary resurgence and passionfires of raw wisdom that Fire Mane has been gathering in her wake, to burn in our own hearts and minds as we do so.
The Need Fires must burn away the rot and its shadow, and will, with Her blessing. And this is not man’s fire, but, the ancient fire that was invoked to scour the illnesses and dis-ease from the face of this world with sacred purpose. The knowledge of the Need-fires was one of Fire Mane’s gifts to our own ancestors and were ignited from, carried the sacred spark of, the original fire at their heart, as must we. Sacred Fire keepers we must be, as Uranus gatekeepers……promethian heirs to an unbound legacy, the buck stops here.
Within the Lilith corridor Fire Mane will have gained necessary knowledge from the ‘lunar’ sisters that will restore Her vitality in this resurgent cleansing of the world, the better to find its mark; the wise ones, medicine people, healers, poets and seers will know it, invoke its inner flame, sound it wide and far, for this is now their time, our time; but, its markers will be seen in the mundane world, the world of the ‘common’ mind, and minded, as the collapse of its secular gods, upon their own alters, impaled upon the barbs of their own greed and lust for power….economies will crumble, the swaggering ozymandian empires of this world will follow Percy’s prophecy and the New World will find its coat of lies burnt to ashes, its imposed Order-out-of-‘chaos’ destroyed in the wake……
….the high priests of this Order have long lost control of their own minds, their hearts hollowed, their souls long reduced to dust beneath the feet of their own uncaring pantheon…..they long ago instituted the ‘death of all caring’ and will suffer their own fate accordingly; it is not for us to perpetrate such, lest we merely perpetuate their crimes, we who would see all souls redeemed…..and can any diviner, astrologer or seer, poet, wise woman, or man, proclaim any other intent…….I, for one, would say not, for the chain of guilt that binds the violators will be the nematic rope of karma that hangs them, the chasm that swallows them, for guilty they are, and even now pile further crime upon crime……such is the psychotic vortex that surrounds them, of their own making. Its mark upon the world is not hidden; look to where their is unjust pain, like Chiron’s wound, awaiting redemption…..this wound is real, its source no less so, and this is where the Need-fire must be applied.
To say that the wounding is ‘real’ is to reduce it to banality, but, at the risk of such, it is true to say that the planetary alignments brought out this theme with the penumbral lunar eclipse conjunct Chiron at full Moon on September 16th, just as Venus was coming into orb of opposition with Uranus. And Chiron is no less an architect of the subtle than Saturn is an architect of the material. As the lastest of the group of eclipses across the Virgo Pisces axis, that sweeps the ecliptic following the lunar nodes with its own fated destiny every 18.6 years, this ephemeral eclipse may have slipped its own influence beneath the radar; but, the world and the celestial sphere reflect each other with unerring acuity, and there is little in the world of human and planetary affairs now that does not reflect the need to pay heed to the wounds that have been created, and are being creating still.
As an augery of the times the opposition between Venus in Libra and Uranus in Aries is by itself a powerful indicator of the erotic power of primal creative energy, of the profoundly transformative effect of peak experiences and ‘divine’ insight on our human mentality and how we, as humans, relate to the world. Seen together they suggest the rapid transmission of kundalini energy, ‘serpent power of the goddess’, into the higher generative realms of the mental sphere, the source field of the mind’s architecture.
By itself, this energy is potent requiring a purposeful and timely integrity, a soul possessed of a level of self reflection and ‘completion in understanding’ in which clarified intent and a high degree of self honesty are already established. Otherwise, it is a transformative power that belies the positive aspects of its potential; the shadow side of these transformative experiences are latent within their manifestation – if one is not prepared for their influx these arcs of Uranian kundalini like power can be equally devastating, wreaking immense damage to both body and mind, subverting Uranus potential for transformational liberation into deep psychosomatic wounding from which only equally deep cleansing can restore its liberating potential. But, this is the true reflection of the world, of what the Fire Maned Goddess and Her dark sisters are invoking in our minds and hearts, the ‘need’ within the need-fire, and be sure, their Need-fire must burn within, as well.
When the Black Moon Lilith is involved with Uranus, especially in opposition and union with one of Her planetary sisters, the Uranian power manifests its shadow, and such healing becomes the absolute necessity. Uranus castration brought forth a new order in the realms of creation, an order in which his own wound and seperation from the Earth goddess realms is complicit. With this firmly in mind, it is of great significance to a world undergoing such deep wounding, as ours is, of Uranus usurped creative power, that this opposition activated the Aries Libra axis in anticipation of the major opposition that sets the 13 Moon time frame, that between Jupiter and Uranus. Their orb is activated as the current Black Moon lunation closes and completes in October 2017, as Jupiter enters Scorpio.
Not only Uranus but Jupiter too is calling forth a revolution. Juno’s husband will test us, call us to levels of understanding we cannot foresee, unweave our knowing and weave it anew, bring elemental power into our mental workings and reverberate the collective mind, awakening the Planetary Mind. To understand the visceral significance of this necessity we must revisit the beginning of their synodic cycle back in 2010. And this will be our theme next time…..
…..for now, make still your sacred center, gather the kindling of your passions and set the hearth in your own sacred temenos to receive the fire seeds of Venus and the dark sisters of the Moon. And in the meantime let us come one step closer to the present moment…..
…..this post enters the neural pathways of the ‘virtual’ etheric as the second waxing quarter of the Black Moon opens, the Moon preceding Samhain, just as the lunar disc joins with asteroid Lilith, close on Pluto in mid Capricorn, having first called forth the sacred fire of the protectors at Moon’s passing of Mars one day ago. For we are here within the embrace of an older calendric, under the rising energy of the Black Moon, and this will be our closing invocation here. Let it be understood by this that the naming of this Moon is quite other than that which popular ‘modern’ pseudo folklore has applied; this Moon is Black by another name……
The Black Moon
The Black Moon lunation which began on October 1st completes in the 8th degree of Scorpio on October 30th and fully describes the arc of the transition involving Jupiter and Uranus, making of this lunation a powerful augery for the primary archetypal signature not only for the emergent power of the Lilithian Fires, but, of the coming year over thirteen lunations. That it completes at Samhain provides us with a clue to the subtle pathways it is engendering and through which its energies are working…..if it is karmic it is also cyclical and its karmic roots, as we will soon see, in the next post here, were clearly delineated at the beginning of the current Jupiter Uranus synodic cycle.
The major archetypal marker however for the first half of Jupiter and Uranus cycle has been the Uranus Pluto square, whose transmutative series it perfectly frames. As this solar year ends and the new year begins the last reverberations of the Pluto and Uranus square will be felt as they come to within 4° of orb, signing off the current phase of their cycle. By that time Venus will be transiting the Moon’s south node in Pisces and the Sun will be transiting Pluto. The ancestral legacy of 5,000 years or more of sacred violation is loaded in this time, awaiting its great turning, and Pluto has opened a wide portal of his own, all the roots of that ancestral tree ablaze with the Sun’s light as the solar disc crosses its meridian.
The intensity of the last six years is shifting in focus, density and pace as we move out of the zone of radical transmutation brought through Uranus and Pluto’s seven waxing squares to the fundaments of power at work in this world. Complicit with this emergence, new cyclical relationships are forming between the inner and outer planets, amongst all the planets in their synodic phases. We are seeing the beginning of a new planetary phase which will, ultimately, help us to make sense of the turmoil and dissonance we have been experiencing.
Astrologically, it is Jupiter and Uranus opposition across the Libra Aries axis that is providing the underlying planetary influence behind this emergence, stimulating new levels of intuitive thinking and instinctive knowing. We must ready ourselves for an expansion of neural connectivity that reaches beyond the habitual limitations of our own mental frame. But, before we can fully integrate with this powerful influence we would do well to call forth the inner wisdom of the Goddesses, to light our own need-fire and purge our own inner lives of the mental canker that we carry and project onto others and the world. This Black Moon is the grounding time for this preparation.
In this light the new Moon which began this current lunation was labelled with a deceptive yet provocative epithet – hailed with populist new-age fervour as a ‘Black’ Moon, its apparent ‘rarity’ no less than obscurantist, freighted with imaginary significance that does little more than distract us from its relevence by drawing on an artificially created human thirst for meaning.
Flattened into desouled meaninglessness within the scientifically refracted spectra of sensual reality that blights our times there is, on the one hand, no especially ‘black’ Moon, at least none any shade significantly darker than at any other new Moon; this use of name is ‘simply‘ down to the fact that two new moons occur within the same calendar month, one of which is called ‘Black’, in the same way that one of two full moons occuring in the same Gregorian calendar month is called a ‘Blue’ Moon – such is the anodyne post materialist view of the ‘literalist’, no less ironic for its unacknowledged Papal endorsement, who will tell us, “neither are black or blue or gain any special meaning from the term”…..
…….except that, as the poets and people of medicine remind us, on the other hand, by some subtler construct and equally subtle irony, to which the unquenchable if curiously human desire to clothe the mundane in a livable story responds, the Soul is re-awakened through such fertile symbolism to a possibility beyond the senses, beyond the literal. The same fertility sown through Lilith and Venus transactions between the worlds.
The synchronous advent of this symbol, as it has perhaps unwittingly been applied to this Moon, with the invoking of the ‘need-fire’ reminds of the presence of this inextinguishable fecundity at work behind our world. It is a symbol we need, that is calling for our attention. It tells us that this possibility for other-worldly intervention between the worlds persists, even now, that it enters via backdoors, hidden behind the hard reflective surface of homogenised reductivism, a magical propensity that somehow, perhaps miraculously in the face such rampant literalism, by dint of iteration and innate need, is constellated in this Black Moon and its lunation.
Lilith, in all compensatory and redemptive senses, has begun to dance this magic back into our lives…..only the soul-less will fail to feel it, but, Hers is a dark fire, both invisible to the physical eye, and seen by the soul, that is the need-fire. It comes, as the ‘need-fire’ has been invoked by Earth loving peoples for countless millenia, in response to the times, in anticipation of the Samhain Moon, as a purge of illness and disease between ourselves and the ancestors….
We are thirsty for such magic, as they are for us to invoke its healing power; the soul feels that ‘need’ as a magnetic pull from the heart, whose knowing responds to the innate, to the already known, which the ancestral realms give us access to, which itself carries healing resonance, and accepts the wound as the passageway to wholeness.
The ‘via combusta’ in which this Moon finds its own fiery culmination earned its uneasy reputation from the fall of the luminaries, the Sun and Moon, within its own respective signs of Libra and Scorpio, as well as those same signs loaded associations with the ‘malefic’ aspect of their ruling planets, but, the archaic roots of the ‘burning way’ have almost certainly been overlayered by these meanings. There are certain times in Earth’s history when such a term would have carried a very different meaning, and this too we now invoke, in preparation.
The cyclical cleansing of earth, of homesteads and of livestock through Fire is not an apocalyptic biblical construct, but, the same very old tradition, surviving into post-glacial times within emergent cultures, that relates to celestial events that preceeded and prompted their advent. The great comet that has been recorded globally amongst indigenous peoples to have brought these planetary changes, and marked the rise of aggression against the Feminine, was described as trailing hair of fire and scouring the earth. She became subdued through capture into the Sun’s magnetic heliosphere and became known, amongst other names, as Venus, and thus began the rise of the solar cult and its shadow, the cult of Saturn so loved of the violators. She was a planet become a comet, before she resumed her planetary status, and her-story carries the memory of our true ‘his-tory’. All the planets have undergone massive transformation before achieving their present orbits around this, our second Sun, become our central Sun. But, that is a story for another time……
As we have seen, it was Venus who, under the astrological shadow cloak of Her romanised form, called up her dark sisters prior to this Moon, igniting this lunar ‘need-fire’ and, in so doing activated the greater resurgence that will come into manifestation over the coming year.
Regardless the human folly, Lilith will not be held back and in the process our Story will be returned to us. This will be a part of Jupiter and Uranus gift to us.
This is the time for the raw power of the ‘Feminine’ to emerge, to be given voice and the fierce fire that burns behind its wisdom to become manifest, reinstated. As a creative force it is unbridled, knows the intimacy between life and death, and pulses with passionate intensity. It casts no shadow for its own light is innate, the darkness transformed – this is the healing within its fire, burning off the illusions of the shadow realms. This is the Black Moon lunation’s gift – let us use it well……at Samhain there will be celebrations if we do; the Great Fire tended by the ancestors at the center of their village will burn the more brightly and ignite new dreamings in our souls. Our medicine people, seers, poets, wise women, and men, will sing us the way….
As we end now you may have noticed one major planetary player by their absence here, Neptune. Neptunes realm will be at the heart of the next post when we take a very different look at how the oceans of this world have suffered the wound of our times and how this relates to the Jupiter Uranus cycle…..in the meantime,
“From opaque rock
springs clear water.
The skull’s hard cup
holds clarity.
Drink, traveller.
Be mindful. Drink.”
The new Moon on July 4th opens the lunation at 12°54′ of tropical Cancer and brings a much needed sense of caution and caring to the ongoing momentum of the times. The events generated through the previous lunation have shown us much, about the power of consequence and responsibility towards aforethought, as well as the need to hold the highest of aspirations before us, shared as a collective, and this lunation brings these qualites home amidst a time of turbulence and radical restructuring.
If the turbulence of the times is proving too much for you, this lunation says step off the gas a while and regroup – nurture and care for what is close to hand; even though there may be a battle raging outside, tending home and hearth and keeping the sacred fire burning is equally vital, giving to all our doings in the world their core meaning.
If on the other hand you are feeling fired up and ready to go, have donned your sacred war paint and can feel the adrenalin pumping, the lunation says, first check that your personal house is in order before rejoining the battle – that means knowing where you stand and what you are fighting for, ie. the true value of what you are leaving behind, as well as what you are taking beyond the threshold.
It is going to be a tender month, highly sensitive around current boundary issues, protective of vulnerabilities and prone to further bruising where the punches have already landed. But, embedded within the Cancerian field are sensitive points that indicate a much more far-reaching necessity for our times. Their triggering casts a much needed longer term view on where our current conflicts of interest could lead us. It comes down to remembering what the most important things in life are, before everything else.
With both Venus and Mercury in Cancer at new Moon this is perhaps a reminder that it is the women and children, the feminine and our future, who must come first in all our considerations. But, it is also a sign of the times that communications and money, awareness and values, are colouring the bigger picture.
As Michael Meade said in a recent video, we are experiencing ‘a world gone wrong’, and this is no time for narrow mindedness. That could well be the defining issue that not only decided the UK’s vote to leave the EU, but, puts the quality of this lunation into its sharpest, if not global perspective. Perhaps nowhere has the sucker punch been more fully felt during the last lunation than in the world of politics, economics and personal freedoms, as personified for example by the UK’s referendum on June 23rd 2016.
The foxes have been in the hen house – and, not just for the Brits, it is time to count our chickens. With the Moon in Cancer we should be under no illusions about the more far reaching relevance of this outcome either, regardless our nationality, but especially in view of our own domicile status, where-ever we are.
With the election of new European ‘Heads’ pending, stalling and shuddering in the aftermath of Brexit, and the US elections poised on a knife edge of legal investigations, also reflecting tensions between political tribalism, economic truths and social conscience, the Cancer Moon puts us in mind of why we are facing such tough choices at home. It also illustrates why the globalist economic agenda is falling apart.
Boundary issues and the domestic value of foreign currency are bound to be highlighted with this new Moon, and this builds upon tensions within the international flow of trade and commerce that have been defining the new partnerships now being formed between East and West. The NM quincunxes Saturn in Sagittarius and trines Neptune in Pisces putting international relations into the front-line, an influence that favours restructuring agreements and the dissolution of obstacles to ‘free trade’, where they exist. There is in this a movement away from not only the old hegemonies of ideological power, but, from old politics itself as the defining characteristic of their realisation, a point further indicated in Venus strong aspects to Uranus, Mars, Pluto and Jupiter at new Moon.
The British referendum delivered what may be the coup-de-gras in globalist ideologies around foreign investment, at least amongst European States, but the ripples of the vote reach much further – the TTIP was already all but over for Europe, with a unanimous vote ‘in favour’ necessary within the EU for its ratification, and five European nations now showing significant dissent. The dollar and the TPP will be coming under more pressure over the coming months as the USA’s 7th, 8th and 9th house planets, Uranus, Venus, Jupiter, the Sun, Mercury and Neptune are activated. The USA’s north node in Leo is also going to be directly triggered by the next new Moon on August 2nd.
Pluto already opposes the Independence Day Sun that this new Moon falls upon, and, in the Brexit day chart Uranus, Eris and Ceres in Aries squared the USA’s 8th house Mercury in Cancer, exactly where Venus is now applying pressure. The talk will all be about following the money as the old ‘western alliance’ picks up the pieces.
The shift in power at the heart of the financial markets that was already underway is now being stimulated to firm up new alliances. Watch this space, especially in respect of new trading agreements between Europe and the East; there’s a new Silk Road being built and much of the turmoil in the Middle East is around trying to disrupt the flow of traffic along it. Who is funding who and to what ends, we may ask. But, that EU vote has an astrological signature that illustrates all to clearly where the real power lies.
In the last post, without directly referencing Brexit, I tried to indicate that the astrology favoured an ‘out’ vote win, but, with a certain inevitability, the planets have now pushed the issue of sovereignty even further to the front, and in so doing reveal something of the longer term focus that this historic vote brings to us all.
Of all the days that David Cameron could have chosen to hold the referendum on he chose this one! On June 23rd at midday GMT Ceres and Uranus met at 23° Aries and gave us the signature aspect of the moment – as mentioned Eris, an indicator of discord and disruption, was involved in their meeting, but, just hours later the deed was done and the UK voted to leave the European Union by a majority of just 4%. The tar-brushing that has followed has been a revelation to us all, and it ain’t over yet.
Uranus meeting with Ceres, or Demeter as the ancient Greeks called her, only happens once in every 89 years – the parallels between 2016 and 1927 give much food for thought. Catastrophic floods and earthquakes took hundreds of thousands of lives during 1927, typhoons and hurricanes wrought havoc in the USA; both US and British troops were involved in conflicts on foreign soil, the Chinese regime became formally militarised and Stalin took control of the Soviet Union, the Irish Free State gained independence; diplomatic relations, not least of all between the West and the communist block, were stretched to breaking point, many civilians in both Europe and the USA were shot by police while protesting their social rights; this was also the year that saw international radio, television and flights become established, Heisenberg formulated his famous ‘uncertainty principle’ and Fritz Lang’s iconic film Metropolis premiered. The list goes on…..
The conflicts of the time seem all too familiar; we have not moved on so much as come back around to the same old story with the same old players vying for the same old ‘power’, and the future we might have perceived through the smoke and first flickering images of new technologies has turned out to be dangerously unacknowledged for its warnings and prescience. In some ways our technology, like our symptomatic hypocritical obsession with political correctness, has made us both more sensitive to and less resilient around the threats we share with that time. Interestingly a wave of influenza swept the UK in 1927 killing up to a thousand people a week as Uranus quincunxed Neptune, then on the Leo Virgo cusp; Uranus hovered over the Aries Pisces border, was transited by Jupiter in the process and, just as they are in this time, both Saturn and Mars were transiting the first two decans of Sagittarius in 1927.
But, here’s a curious thing – as the UK’s 1801 national chart reveals, Ceres was discovered in the same year and on the same day as the United Kingdom ratified the Acts of Union. The two are intimately tied together. Pluto’s transformative influence is still in orb of the UK’s Sun and will oppose the UK’s 10th house Cancer Moon in 2018-19. Ultimately, Pluto will trine the UK’s natal Ceres in 23° Taurus, by which time Jupiter’s exact quincunx to natal Ceres and the Moon, and semi-sextile to transiting Pluto will almost certainly see all former ties severed between the UK and EU. The intervening time is all about negotiating a viable path to the future, a path that must be forward looking enough to carry the wishes of the people, as the Moons North node will cross the UK’s natal Moon at the exact moment when Mars opposes Jupiter from Gemini, semi-sextile Ceres. Its all about the timing, not so much ‘whether’ as ‘when’. This was a result already written in the stars – Cameron should have consulted an astrologer! Maybe he did…..too many condemning fingerprints have been left on what transpired.
In fact, as the myth shows, Ceres knows how to drive a hard bargain, but, she does also has something to say about power sharing – while she gives the best of the plutocrats a run for their money, she ultimately makes them an offer they can’t refuse and, in the process, brings a new template to the table that rewrites the rules of power. She does so in accordance with natural law. Equal distribution of power through a balance between Pluto’s (Hades) entropic and her own negentropic forces was the bargain Ceres drove in the myth.
In this is a multi-layered reflection of the times, on the face of it a recognition of the natural wisdom of the goddess as embodied in the seasonal cycle on the one hand and of the power of the Mother, Demeter, on the other as fierce and fearless protector of children, her own somewhat wayward and impressionable daughter Persephone not withstanding. But, more than anything else this conjunction between Uranus, Ceres and Eris gave us an indication that a radical new direction must be undertaken, both in respect of power, the environment, the politics of choice, as outlined in Eris own story, and the fundamental balance between destructive and creative forces, all of which are being played out globally on a very human scale.
Interestingly, Pluto ties the new Moon chart into the natal chart of the UK’s queen as well, although this in no way intends to draw any parallels between Ceres and ER2! If anything it points up her own plutocratic role in the world. The July new Moon falls exactly on Elizabeth Regina’s natal 6th house Pluto, and Venus is exactly conjunct the royal north node and DC. But, foreign money was always the means to an end in filling the coffers of the so called House of Windsor. Perhaps the plug will be pulled once Uranus introduces a whole new set of values and rules into international trading when he enters Taurus in 2018 and makes three transits over her maj’s Sun at 0° Taurus – will she survive until her nodal return on his third pass, three years from now? Given the signs I somehow doubt it, and her passing, whether from power or life, will be another global history making event. The world will undoubtedly have already undergone many changes by then, as it is, but the Uranium industry will never be the same….
Its an odd Moon to begin a lunation with as sovereignty is very much at the heart of it all and Cancer harkens back to a time of tribal affiliations in which the Mother ruled the traditions that carried the common wealth of the people forward. This image and its focus is not arbitrary here either. Conjunct with Mercury in the July NM chart is the asteroid Kronos.
Many astrologers associate Kronos with the highest station of things, their own sovereignty, as well as their highest and most meaningful values, and it is through the search for those values in both our words, thoughts and children that Kronos gives Mercury his role in Cancer now. We are becoming aware of their future as the question in our own hands perhaps more now than ever. However, these are innate values, all too well known to our ancestors that are given a new reminder through this lunation.
In Cancer, Pluto, Jupiter and Saturn all have their own north nodes. This shows us a future, a commonality to all people alive now, and a key indicator of how our future could take shape in our own lives, and must in those that follow us. The power of life is nurtured in Cancer, our own ability to care for the Earth, for our human family and the protection of Earth’s children. The nodes indicate a way in which we can limit the use of our power according to a more deeply rooted, far-sighted and wise understanding, giving it a quality more at home on this planet than our current anthropocentric hedonism allows. There is a shared Cancerian quality of service as well as instinctive and empathic protection inherent in these planetary nodes, a promise that could be fulfilled, of new life under the Sun and Moon. But, we must honour our commitment to see it through and not succumb to the Capricornian temptations of the past, or suffer their wounds again.
The Sun and Moon meet at NM with the asteroid Eurydike, the inter-planetary body astrology associates with ‘dependence’. In leading Eurydice back from Hades, Orpheus, for all his magic and boundary crossing skills, was unable to resist the temptation to look back and, consequently, the ‘plutocratic’ rule he had been asked to observe was broken.
It is a poigniant reminder that even while, in the form of Pluto, Jupiter and Saturn’s south nodes, Capricorn holds our ancestral memories of a past that saw the destruction of the Mother goddess civilisations, our focus must remain on the present and how this relates to where we are headed. This is how it is with the nodal axis. We cannot go back, not without great or even unthinkable risk, but, can however carry the gifts as well as the most important lessons of the past forward with us, in creating our path towards a future built upon common ground. In fact, our future and the Earth it is built upon depend upon it.
“From their houses, from their town
rainbow people come walking
the dark paths between the stars,
the bright tracks on water
of the moon, of the sun.
Tall and long legged,
lithe and long armed,
they follow the fog pumas
beside the wind coyotes,
passing the rain bears
under the still air hawks
on the paths of sunlight,
on the tracks of moonlight,
on the ways of starlight,
on the dark roads.
They climb the ladders of the wind,
the stairways of cloud.
They descend the ladders of air,
the steps of rain falling.
The closed eye sees them.
The deaf ear hears them.
The still mouth speaks to them.
The still hand touches them.
Going to sleep we awaken to them,
walking the ways of their town.
Dying we live them,
entering their beautiful houses.”
Poems by Ursula Le Guin from ‘Always Coming Home’ :
~ Bone Poem VI
~ The Madrone Lodge Song of Mica of Sinshan
Images, with thanks to the artists :
Stone Arch ~ artist unknown
Goose Feathers ~ Andy Goldsworthy
Inuksuk ~ traditional Inuit
Nest ~ Nils Udo
Balancing ~ Adrian Gray
In the early hours of June 30th Mars stations at 23°03′ of Scorpio and, from our Earth perspective, begins a new two year cycle of direct motion. Mars direct offers us a springboard for informed action that is in alignment with our deepest desires. However, to gain the optimum benefits of this impulse it is well advised to first align with Mars slowdown, to realign ourselves with our own internal drives before putting new plans into action. As Mars slows down to standstill after ten weeks of being retrograde, it is now time to take a moment to reflect on the most important lessons we can draw from the last two months or more.
If you have felt as though, in some important areas of your life, you have been driving with the handbrake on, from the end of June into early July you can expect a sense of emergence and greater freedom to come into play – allow some time to let your wings to unfurl and feel their power before taking off for the wild blue yonder.
If you have been able to bide your time or have treated this time as an opportunity to have fun with the retrograde period, doing handbrake turns and making circles in the road, this is now a time to stop burning rubber senselessly and take a more serious view towards your own agenda – draw breath and for the next couple of weeks show yourself just how adept you can be at taking the potential of your own life seriously.
The gist is that Mars retrograde is a time to either slow down and go with the flow or to let off steam, both being preparation for a coming time of focus and concerted effort. Either way, inScorpio Mars ultimately gives us a deeper sense of our own power and its place in the world, and, with this apparent change of impetus a change of perspectives comes into play. The third quarter of 2016 will undoubtedly challenge us to face up to how we are using our energy in pursuit of our most deeply held desires.
Reassessing our deepest passions at a personal level inevitably brings us face to face with limitations to using our personal power that we have experienced in the past. The expansion of imagination and (self) knowledge that we can bring to bear on this process will directly affect the world view we have, especially when Mars enters Sagittarius again just after Lughnasadh, at the beginning of August. This will be a good time to embark upon new fields of learning, to broaden our skills base and thinking.
Collectively, in the face of current circumstances, this shift in perspective meets a longer term necessity; we know we must become more worldly wise, especially as we now enter a time in which the will of the people will be increasingly tested against the will of the power brokers in this world. Where these clash, where we experience dissonance between our own agendas and those that have we have been co-opted into, ‘a new level of understanding’ is the optimum prerequisite – it signals a time of ‘consciousness raising’ and any action that lacks this fundamental requirement runs the risk of repeating our mistakes, as well as of instigating confrontation and violent reprisal. Conversely, with the higher goal firmly in our grasp we stand a good chance of seeing the ‘groundswell’, the resurgent ‘will of the people’ that was seeded at the Spring eclipses bearing first fruits.
The cultural and global impact of this effect will bring fresh challenges to the status quo, and a refueled sense of purpose is a prerequisite for making our actions count, in the face of any resistance to systemic change it may catalyse. I am anticipating a third quarter of dynamic attempts at restructuring the relationship between personal and institutionalised power, and we need to be ready and well informed!
Mars will be carrying the Scorpio imprint of unwavering focus and determination forward in its new cycle so, where there are clashes of agendas, we can expect hightened friction to colour the mundane world as we shift between the Ages. However, the planetary matrix indicates that we will see this dynamic upping a gear sooner rather than later. Towards the end of August the red planet will return to 9° of Sagittarius, the degree in which its retrograde period began – the preparation we can undertake now and ensuing the sense of direction we have chosen will meet its first real test.
On August 24th Mars will meet with Saturn on the fixed star Antares, squaring the lunar nodes, a strong indication that the prevailing focus will be on how the wilful use of aggression is shaping our world, and what its antidote is. At its ‘higher octave’ Antares martial focus belongs to the individual who champions the underdog, the ‘David’ like figure who stands up to ‘Goliaths’ of this world and fights for liberation. People power starts with each of us and activism will be more effective if it is ‘knowingly applied’, organised, keeping the bigger picture firmly in mind, rather than simply as a collectively realised personal reaction to events. A skilfull use of our personal power and knowledge is favoured over crude use of forcethat follows the herd.
The challenge is to use the will to higher ends, to temper our tempers, to use the fiery life force at large constructively, and to keep the focus on significant and beneficial long term change rather than short term victories. There is a philosophical flavour to the view that will emerge, bringing the more traumatic consequences of ‘short-termism’ into sharp focus.
As Mars moves beyond Saturn a moment of hiatus may crystalise following events that, for example, cause us to severely question and make a concerted effort to bring an end to the misuse of our vital energy and its co-option in the pursuit of conflict and war. This will coincide with Mars transit of Uranus south node, a crucial point already activated by Saturn’s station retrograde three months ago.
Saturn’s retrograde will itself come to an end shortly before the meeting with Mars when the Moon transits the ringed planet on August 12th, so the lessons of Saturn’s own retrograde period must also be taken into account before hand, as a part of our preparation. These reach back to March 24th 2016 when, just hours after the full Moon/lunar eclipse, Saturn slowed to a standstill within 30′ of arc of the south node of Uranus in Sagittarius.
Embedded within the 36 year cycle between Neptune and Saturn this astrological event underlined the question of who we are and why we are here, the meaning of our mortality and relationship with death within life. With these two planets currently in a tight square and the lunar nodes closing to square Saturn over the coming months the third quarter of 2016 has a philosophical quality about it that underpins the ongoing global transformation already underway.
Uranus seven squares with Pluto have undermined the power structures of ‘the Establishment’ and we are now dealing with the effects of this, the turbulence in their wake. Saturn’s presence also carries the Sagittarian signature forward, putting everything that has stood for maintenance of the status quo into a ‘global context’ of reconfiguration at ground level.
The challenge is to avoid falling back into old patterns and materialise a break with the past that commits to working for a better future. Collectively, this could be a magical and inspiring time, if our personal will is able to operate beyond habitual constraints and we have the imaginative ability to re-envision the human imprint upon our home planet. Every individual’s contribution counts.
In Saturn’s square with Neptune the anthropocentrism of the human presence on planet Earth is questioned in its relationship to the ecocentric spirit and aspirations of our times. This relationship is bringing increasing tension into the world as we question our own collective purpose in the light of environmental disturbances and their relationship to our use of power and technology within the current cultural and spiritual paradigms. This is an aspect that brings the imaginative and spiritual realms of consciousness into question through the lens of pragmatic worldly analysis. When we get into this frame of mind, the constellation of Piscean archetypes and the dynamics of imagination can ground in new forms within the Sagittarian field, but not before exposing both our spiritual deficit and our hubristic tendencies. Uranus can also indicate where the trauma arising from these tendencies continue to affect us, where we need to raise our consciousness to a new level.
Saturn and Neptune’s rhythm is deeply instructive. In the human realm the 36th year marks the first waxing square after the first Saturn return, a moment of maturation that tests the validity of the gains we have made in the process of coming home to the reality of our selves. It is the equivalent of three Jupiter cycles, an expansion of our personal power that requires a new level of maturity, and presages the need to consolidate our gains towards meaningful ends, a process which is tested at mid-life. As we enter the very beginning of the current period of recapitulation and preparation, as Mars slows down and turns direct, we now find Jupiter and the Moon’s north node conjunct in Virgo. They are exactly on Uranus and Pluto’s meeting point at the beginning of their current cycle during the mid sixties.
These times carry some potent connections across time and question our capacity to embrace the wider view through time towards the future. Uranus in Aries is quincunx Mars as he stations direct in Scorpio – and Mars rulership of both signs reflects a time to claim our own sovereignty. Mars also trines retrograde Chiron in Pisces – self compassion is the key to healing our spiritual wounds, the sign that we are ready to reclaim and strengthen the link with the wisdom of our ‘higher self’.
‘Rebellious youth’ must, inevitably, become ‘responsible adult’ and humanity, having acted for too long like a kid in a Ferrari, must realise that the red light that is flashing in the periphary of our vision is not simply the cops giving chase, the past catching up with us, but, also the sign that our tank is approaching empty and we may be running on air. The ‘fly-boys’ and hedonists of the world are about to get their comeuppance! But, we don’t want to be taken down with them…..
Make good use of the coming weeks to get with your own inner beat, develop the meaningful art of understanding your own rhythms, and re-orientate your life towards worthy causes that your own passions align with naturally. With a sense of liberation and willingness to navigate through unknown territory the world takes on a dynamic vitality that reflects Mars impulse to get up and live; as the July new Moon approaches we can prepare for fresh fields, an expansion of our personal and collective scope, and carry the momentum forward with a deepened sense of responsibility.
No matter how small you may feel in the face of our current global challenges Mars message is to be confident in yourself. There is great power in this. Take this time personally, make it your own, but, remember, everything you do has a meaning and a purpose that reaches well beyond the known – this is the age of transition and, in it, creating the path ‘is’ the path.
The fifth lunation of 2016 opens with the Moon and Sun joined at 17 degrees of tropical Taurus. From the earthbound point of view five planets are in retrograde motion as this Moon cycle gets underway, all of which fertilise the New Moon, intensifying the seed energies of the lunation.
The inner power of this seed point is emphasised by the Sabian symbol for 17 Taurus which talks of the ‘Seeker’ turning ‘Warrior’, raising the energy of internal illumination as the weapon of choice in the ‘eternal battle’. The battle that would see truth prevail. The historical limitations and conditioning of material existance are no longer accepted as given, as the bottom line, the necessity for individual evolution and self determination taking precedence over conformity to roles and agendas that do not belong to us as individuals.
Taurus pulls focus to the individual’s struggle for survival, to the question of what matters most, and, having begun to witness the groundswell of energy emergent at a grass-roots level since the spring eclipses, this lunation furthers the internal strengthening of individual resolve to repurpose life in accord with our own natural values, the impulsethat was seeded at the March solar eclipse. The darkness of the eclipse is coming alive. It is about aligning ourselves and re-establishing life in accordance with Natural law, as opposed to Human law. This is an image brought to the point of utter necessity by what we are witnessing in the world and emphasised beyond question by the Sun and Moon’s trine to retrograde Pluto in Capricorn. Wholesale destruction of nature through authoritarian rule stops with our personal choices and the transformative power they enshrine.
The lunation’s seed point is amped up by Venus and retrograde Mercury also in Taurus, both now closing on the Sun, and the Earth signs are further linked through this stellium’s trine to retrograde Jupiter and the Moon’s north node in Virgo. The Earth signs ask us to bear witness, in support of a future that can be lived according to realities with which we can each resonate. These are core values, realities that are meaningful in answer to what we are witnessing and can be sustained to the benefit of those who come after us. This is the bottom line impulse powering the grass-roots groundswell.
Venus sextile to Neptune in Pisces pushes the issue of discerning what is real in relation to those core values and through quincunx to retrograde Mars in Sagittarius makes it clear – this is, as the Sabians describe it, a time in which ‘swords’ are at odds with ‘torches’ in the struggle for survival. If we are to be torch bearers we must pay heed to how rx Mercury is working within us. Mercury’s retrograde raises the need for inner clarity and clear connections to become the cutting edge here. We must, we know, be on guard against fantasy and deception, especially our own, emphasising the importance of inner illumination as a metaphor for light thrown upon our own thinking. But, this is also about ‘thinking on our feet‘.
As the old Irish saying has it a warrior must first learn how to dance before wielding the sword. Neptune’s mutability can provide us with both the imagination required to refigure our path and at the same time distract us from grounding ourselves in the ‘now’. A fluidity of action, perception and balance in motion serves to keep us centred in our power. It is an old art taught for the benefit of both the individual warrior and the community and cause they serve. The old guard is now being unbalanced and caught on its heals, fighting a dirty war in the face of rising awareness of their stratagems. It is becoming clearer that the ‘old’ is being dressed up as the ‘new’, ‘vision’ being appropriated and propagandised as ‘truth’. Nowhere is this more apparent then in environmental and ecological issues, particularly where vested interests are exposed. However, in the emergent climate the efforts of those who continue to disseminate the deception can no longer escape attention, and not only is the historical veil of lies and hypocrisy wearing very thin but the ‘people’, seeing through the orthodox version of reality we have been and are being sold, are gaining in awareness of what lies beneath. If the momentum is with the ‘People’, we know we must also dance with the Earth and her rhythms.
The lunation carries this momentum forward with a release of energy as Jupiter stations direct during first quarter and begins moving towards the Moon’s north node again. They will converge at solstice on the full Moon of the next lunation, just before Uranus ignites Mars into action, but, in the meantime we have a deeper matter to consider.
In her novel ‘Children Of Men’ the author P D James cast a distopian vision of the future in which human fertility has ceased, a not too far distant time that sees ultra controlling authority at war with rebelious factions amidst a world in lock-down. As speculative fiction it carries disturbing tendencies very much present in our own world to an all too plausible point of realisation. She is not alone in envisioning such a future. Margaret Atwood’s novel ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ envisions authoritarian rule over fertility under militant theocratic control as a consequence of terrorist driven revolution. In both cases the issue of self determination is raised to become the front line in the battle between natural law and human law. Human fertility is its central metaphor. Womankind is made both victim and redeemer. With Venus in the sign of her rulership there can be no fakery in this respect.
Many might not want to contemplate such visions of the future, but, they serve us with due warning – there is too much that is recognisable in the world not to take heed of it. This too is a reflection of the illuminating power that is central to this lunation, made all the more poigniant through Taurus association with fertility and survival. To remain grounded in livable realities that give us the balance of a positive vision of the future the threats to that future must be acknowledged and actions be taken that ensure we do not allow such threats to become realised. This is not a time for navel gazing and idealistic dreaming.
This factor will become more pressing and present as this and the following lunations unfold, unless our individual choices carry the clarity of perception and adaptability called for now – while the ‘new age’ may be the prerogative of the dreamers amongst us, the danger is that in following the dream alone we may also discover that the road to hell really is paved with good intentions. The future must also be defended and the offensive against it, as these two novels might strongly suggest, is already under way.
A core underlying element that reflects this through this lunation and beyond is indicated by Saturn’s presence in Sagittarius, quincunx the new Moon. Retrograde Saturn is testing the reality of our beliefs against experience. In squaring Neptune we may become disillusioned at what we find, become dispirited and equally determined to hang on to our cherished dreams. The mutable fire of Sagittarius illuminates from within, transforms through worldly experience and encourages us to grow in the process. The message here is to allow the truth in. Saturn, while burning off false beliefs can also be the ally who provides the essential reality factor that fuels wiser and more realistic choices.
The worldly view of evolutionary forces that are at work within our times can be revealed in this. Saturn’s stationing retrograde on Uranus south node activates memories stored in our bones, ancestral memories inherited from times in which natural law has been at the centre of both traumatic and revolutionary events in our extended history. These are memories that have been over-written in the orthodox version, versioned to suit controlling agendas. In accessing them we reclaim our past and with it our rightful path.
Sagittarius is also the sign of the seeker, the wise fool who follows the spirit of their passion out into the world. With Mars in close proximity this factor is being fueled up, in-volved with passionate soul searching – a passion that can lead to the most fundamental heart of truth, embedded within the fertile darkness. The torch bearer leads the way.
Each of the five retrograde planets reveal different aspects of the seed energy at work within the inner workings of this lunation. They invite us to engage on a personal level with our…….
……individual evolution and self determination taking precedence over conformity to roles and agendas that do not belong to us as individuals,
concerning ourselves with what matters most,
our own natural values
the better to embody personal choices and the transformative power they enshrine.
They ask us to bear witness
to core values, realities that are meaningful,
inner clarity and clear connections
providing light thrown upon our own thinking.
Thinking on our feet,
a warrior must first learn how to dance before wielding the sword,
embodying perception and balance in motion –
an old art taught for the benefit of both the individual warrior and the community and cause they serve.
Here the issue of self determination is raised to become the front line in the battle between natural law and human law.
The future must also be defended by such a warrior,
testing the reality of our beliefs against experience,
prepared to allow the truth in,
the essential reality factor that fuels wiser and more realistic choices.
In doing so we access memories stored in our bones, ancestral memories
and reclaim our past and with it our rightful path,
the most fundamental heart of truth, embedded within the fertile darkness.
We have to talk and talk tough, with extreme lucidity, and put our petty concerns aside – the times demand it of us. But, more than that, we have to walk our talk. The radical end game of the Uranus Pluto square has arrived as the two outer planets slowly break out of antagonistic orb. Five years of unrest has seen the world change profoundly, one irrevocable truth overshadowing all others – the disastrous consequence of the pursuit of nuclear power is a reality that will not go away; Fukushima made sure of that. Few could have forseen the actual event of Fukushima, but, well before this, once the atom was split the writing was very clearly on the wall. How on earth did we let that happen? Who’s choice was it……
At the end of the Piscean Age our choices for the future bring us to the very edge, the crux of transition, the fact that whatever we decide now will affect all who come after us. Fukushima’s imprint is seemingly indelible, potentially covering 50 millenia or more, two precessions of the equinox.
The Piscean Age was always ultimately about endgames; its ultimate danger, oblivion, its ultimate promise, absolution. We could have perhaps walked the talk of its spiritual core and brought ourselves to unparalleled heights, but there was always an element in our midst that sought all the glory for itself – and now, caught beneath the many tentacled manifestation of its shadow, it is no exaggeration to say that we are in a fight for survival as we struggle to lift its smothering veil. That shadow element has proven itself ruthless, to the point of self destruction – it is an old old wound that has become cancerous, quite literally, but, we must ask; how did it get there, what is its true nature and what must we do to eradicate it, for good?
We could begin by recognising that it began long ago, not simply a consequence of some mad myopic modernistic race for ‘progress’ but the inevitable consequence of profound changes within humanity that began nearly twelve thousand years ago. The seeds of those changes were sown by cosmological events, Earth changes that forced us to evolve new ways of thinking and living around the end of the younger Dryas. Then too, our choices were stark, but, choices we had. And we would do well to remember them. It is no coincidence that the planetary matrix is reflecting this reality back to us now.
Saturn is conjunct the south node of Uranus – we must remember our unique capacity to survive the worst of adversity, the human ability to meet radical times with an equally radical shift in consciousness, and more than anything else how it changed us – such remembering brings us face to face with the karmic consequences of seeking power over natural law.
Pluto is closing on conjunction with its own south node; we must retrieve the memories of that deep change that shifted the balance of power within our human world, within our human relationship with this living being we call Earth – no matter how painful the trauma, we will find the map that leads us to our own long hidden and virtually forgotten buried treasure in that place.
Without this level of collective self knowledge we are consigning ourselves to repeat our gravest errors, to continue the phobic blackout and inflict upon our selves an even deeper if not irrevocable wound as a species. Pluto’s south node in Capricorn can give us the keys unlocking the mystery of its own north node in Cancer and, the radical necessity of doing so is at its crucial point. Uranus is now exactly squaring that node. The shift in power, the radical change in mores and social structures, seeded the rise of patriarchy and heirarchic relationships based upon dominance. Capricorn represents the culmination of these changes, the apotheosis of Cancer.
When Saturn conjuncts Pluto in 2020 they will meet on Pluto’s south node in Capricorn and be in close proximity to Saturn’s own south node. The shadow of the past will be unavoidably manifest in the present at that crunch time. We have a clear time frame for this endgame.
In the intervening time we will see Uranus transit the Taurean cusp three times, eventually entering tropical Taurus in March 2019 for an eight year stay.
In 2024 Pluto will enter Aquarius for a 22 year transit of Uranus home sign. This transit will culminate in their opposition, the first of seven across early degrees of the Pisces Virgo axis over a three year period. As far off as it may seem the keys to that time, our ability to receive Uranus influx of the Virgoan field, lie in this present time and the current lunation gives us a vital glimpse. We will return to this in the next post.
Before that time, also beginning in 2024, there is another perhaps more beneficial stage in this slow shift of the Ages as Neptune finally leaves Pisces and in the process sextiles both Pluto and Uranus at the midpoint of their trine. This configuration will last for five years and eventually see Uranus transit its own north node in May 2029 in Gemini. Some might say that Neptune in Aries provokes memories of religious conflict and Pluto in Pisces a crisis of spirituality. But, again, it is the conscious choices we make now and the commitment they embody that will determine how well we are able to bring out the positive side of this interplay between the outer planets.
The message is clear – our time for reparation is short. In the last six years, since I began blogging (at Owlmirror) about planetary transits and the revolution in consciousness, the field has changed radically – not only has the world become radicalised but a parallel inner process is at work. Many who have woken up from the torpor of the Piscean miasma are now working to further this change. Our Uranian technological revolution serves to enable this as a continuing process, but, waking up alone is no longer enough. The crisis that waking up to reality presents us with now demands a sea change that must build from within the awakened consciousness of the individual. It is a commitment sourced at soul level. We have to turn the tide now. If we can use the next four years wisely to this effect the four years after may carry enough momentum for us to continue enjoying the benefits of choice.
Choice we do still have, even now, even if these appear diminished and stark against the backdrop of global irradiation and creeping wipeout. These are not morbid pessimistic statements, they are facts, realities, and there is very good reason to accept them as such. The ensoulment of Life as much as our own future depend upon it. Such acceptance and commitment may yet be the very thing that makes the crucial difference, the key to a plausible future, a radically different way of thinking and living – we have to be brave, courageous to accept it, but the bottom line is that Uranus and Pluto were always about a revolution of the soul, not just our own but this planet’s. That is why we are here, now.
Lets not forget that forgotten treasure – it lies behind the door to the future manifest in Pluto’s north node. It takes the shape of a profound memory of the past that is deeply embedded within the souls of all living now, a memory going all the way back to the Age of Cancer, the cultural high point of the age of the Mother Goddess. The egalitarian society which belonged to that time cannot be retreived, but, its soul is asking to be remembered and born anew – it is the gift of the Aquarian Age that can yet give meaning to our times.
ROOT MEDICINE OF THE STARS ON EARTH 