I want to tell you a story thats happening now. It is unfolding in the sky and under the Earth. Its sheroes are the Goddesses of deep earth wisdom.
Our story begins on the eve of Orion’s advent. Since ancient times this day, which now coincides with May 11th in our modern calendar, was used by the ancients and ancestral star seers to mark time and terrestrial events, through significant risings such as that of Orion’s constellation and of Orion’s Dog Star Sirius.
But Orion is not alone here. The great hunter is looking directly towards the head of the Bull belonging to the constellation of Taurus, and beyond that, above the Bull’s horns, lies the constellation of Persius, slayer of Medussa, as the myth would have it.
As Orion sets at dusk on this day, Venus, poised to turn retrograde on the 13th, is now visible in the falling night sky shining from the very tip of the northern most horn of the Bull.
Venus, who currently travels in the guise of Aphrodite Urania, the Evening Star, daughter of Gaia, is still very bright in the evening sky, but as she turns and begins travelling back to meet the Sun, her face will darken and very quickly become a bright crescent before being swallowed up in the Sun’s rays.
In transiting between Earth and Sun she arrives at her closest point to our planet and from here enters the underworld on the way to being reborn as the Morning Star, Aphrodite Pandemos. In this guise she will journey as daughter of Dione, another name of the great Earth Goddess. Her journey through this solar gateway into the chthonic realm begins exactly on the Bull’s forehead – but, there is more still.
While all this is happening Mercury, the planet of messages and transactions between the worlds, is passing through the constellation of Taurus, running close by the Pleiades star cluster at the heart of the Bull, to emerge from between the horns of Taurus before his ingress to one of his home signs, Gemini. As he does so he meets with asteroid Eurydike and SDO Sedna, and together they will fall into alignment with Algol the brightest star in the Persius constellation.
Mercury will move on but Euridike and Sedna will remain in exact alignment with Algol on the day of Venus transit of the Sun and entry into the underworld. Algol is the star of Medussa. The goddesses are joining forces.
Mercury is alerting us to the common ground shared by these powerful women, and a deeply significant message that the Goddess is bringing in Her return journey. First let’s revisit Medussa because her story is of the greatest significance here.
Medussa, is a great seer who has become totally distorted into a terrifying gorgon. The very myth of Persius is an explicit portrayal of the appropriation of ancient feminine wisdom, of the Earth goddess and her sisters. It clearly portrays the violent methodology which the new masculine sky gods wielded, that was responsible for suppressing and destroying so much of the ancient legacy that, in truth, belongs to us all.
Such was the indigenous legacy of the great living lineages of priestesses and initiatrix, carrying and protecting chthonic wisdom. As is so often the case, the symbology has not only suffered at the hands of the masculine gods, it has been used to violate the Goddess.
But, Medussa was a seer in this tradition.
Many traditions of seership emphasise the importance of being able to hold a high degree of clarity and focus in the midst of distraction, and extreme conditions, not unlike our own, and have built excercises into the training that follows initiation that help develop this faculty. It is almost as if we are now entering the heart of that training. To do so willingly is the invitation.
Algol is associated with Medussa and placed in the hands of Persius in his constellation. But, we have been given the end result of a story that makes Persius look the hero, and it is the vilification of Medussa that enabled him to rise to this false status.
Medussa was the priestess raped by Poseidon/Neptune in Minerva/Athena’s temple. And yet it was She and not the gods who was held responsible for this violation by Athena – Athena, the motherless child of Zeus. For her ‘crime’ Medussa was given her serpent hair and deadly reputation, all in return for a violation of the sacred precincts, in which she was not the perpetrator, but, its victim. But, this too is the propagandised version, designed to justify the misogynist agenda.
In fact Medussa was an initiatrix in the spiritual path of the cthonic earth Goddess, a divine mortal possessed of extreme Beauty, Power and Grace.
The snake maned priestess decapitated by Perseus has little resemblance to this vision of the fully empowered divinity in woman; her symbols turned against her, she has been demonised to the point of dissociation from her roots.
Until our time this has been the political purpose served by the myth, a suitable repository for the ‘unacceptable’ face of initiated and empowered woman; a mirror of that which men have been conditioned to demote and despise, She is also the image of the defiled yet all powerful Earth feared of men in their separatist madness.
The curse of petrification she carries is rather a testament to the immense power her eyes radiate. It is the symbol of initiation into the very Earth herself, overturned.
She has incredibly potent vision, yes, but, it is the snakes that signify her source of power. It is the power of creation that flows within the earth realms, the lightingbolt that condenses light into plasma, that illuminates the neural pathways of the unconditioned pleroma.
Snakes are its living symbol and medicine animal. Petrification is the opposite of its effect rather than its corrollary, but it turns the symbol of initiation into the Earth mysteries into an instrument of fear, rather than empowerment of the soul.
The truth is far from that which we have been indoctrinated into believing by the myth. In the light of this knowledge, Persius looks more of a coward and fool than a hero. His name comes from the Greek pérthein, “to waste, ravage, sack, destroy”, and literally means ‘sacker of cities’. He is venerated as a hero for slaying monsters, but had been blinded, programmed by his own thirsts and needs, to the very nature of the encounter he was offered through Medussa and the opportunity it gifted to him.
The gift of Medussa is seership, of connection with the creative power of Earth herself, of her inner cycles and the endless spiral of life, the very powers that keep us vitally connected with and embedded within the cosmos beyond this world.
In the human frame this power can be sourced at the deeper centres, but, its voice is most clearly heard through our subtler senses, through our intuitive insight, and its wisdom equally accessed through gut feeling as the higher vibrational layers of our energy body.
Some call this primal, but, while it is certainly intense, it could just as easily be called sublime, trancendant even. It lives in ancient sites, waiting to be connected with. It runs throughout the Earth, a living river of many streams beneath our feet. It connects us with the stars, a truth known to many of the seeing traditions.
In slaying the Medussa Perseus was obeying the rational dictates of his goddess Athena, the myth overlaying symbolism onto the historical transference of primary feminine power and wisdom to the more secular and masculinised figure of the goddess born fully armed from Zeus forehead.
Athena kept Medussa’s head as the protective boss of her shield, ironically signifying that her sacred law was to be regarded as beyond question; she brought martial means to maintaining law. She was wise, still, but her gaze was very much on the world of men.
However, the antidote to this weapon of fear which Medussa’s gaze had become, can be found exactly facing the constellation of Perseus in the constellation of Ophiuchus, rising in the eastern night sky as Venus sets in the west in this time.
Ophiuchus the serpent bearer holds the snake in both hands and applies its primary healing powers to the mortal world. Indeed, it is said Ophiuchus, or Asclepius as he is also identified, was the greatest of healers, so much so that he angered the gods with his ability to restore life to the dead and, ultimately, paid for his abilities with exile to the star realms.
Ironically, in the end it was Athena who made the crucial difference here as she bestowed two phials of the Medussa’s blood into Asclepius possession, one from Medussa’s left side which gave the power to mete out death, the other from her right side which gave the power of to overcome death. The healer chose to use the latter and in so doing tipped the balance.
But, it is in this balance across the opposing sides of the ecliptic that we find the goddess and the primal creative wisdom represented in our times. Indicative of healing the Geminian division between the right and left brain it is Venus message to us that our encounter with the Medussa can allow this balance to be restored. Medussa’s head is the embodied consiousness of that primal wisdom which has been initiated into a deep understanding of all that creates, heals and destroys within the natural flow of life, the Earth Goddess wisdom – we must restore it to the body of our world and, trusting her guidance, follow the pathways it opens to us.
Both these constellations point to the balance of extremes, not in duality, but as a living power to be grasped in both hands.
There is a trace of this in our dowsing of the earth powers and subterranean water courses. We have the power to connect with these powers built into our human frame, the senses we need to do so are indigenous to us. But, this is a special time, in which the powers of the Earth mother, her wisdom and its message for us offer a corrective and healing for the world, and for us, Her children.
With care and practice, prayer and veneration where it is due, we can restore these powers to our lineage and our connection with the Earth, her soul and spirit.
The Medussa’s head and its primary state of fully awakened unconditioned consciousness is not to be feared, but, re-united with our own creative energy – in doing so the restorative healing it can unleash in our world is unlimited.
Sedna’s own story, a reflection of Medussa’s in many ways, joins forces with Medussa and with Eurydice, who was ‘bitten’ by the snake and, as the myth would have it, consigned to the underworld. We can now see that this too is an appropriated story, hidden in its core the very image of the initiates journey. This will pass on to Mercury, a message for us now. Venus will bring that message home at this turning of the tides.
Mercury will meet with Venus on the 21st May on the horn of the Bull, just as the Sun passes by the Pleiades. One day later the Moon joins the Sun in the heart of the Bull. On 4th June Venus transits the Sun between the Bull’s horns. One day later a penumbral eclipse of the Moon ushers in a new relationship to the Goddess from the constellation of Ophiucus and the sign of Sagittarius. It is time for our lives to embody a new and ancient story.
Undoubtedly, Medussa, Venus and all the representatives of the divine Earth now challenge Us to respond. Only fear and conditioning stand in the way of doing so. But, we know what is asked of us to overcome these obstacles. And the gifts we stand to gain are our own, once stolen, now ready to be restored.
Blessed Be!
ROOT MEDICINE OF THE STARS ON EARTH 