One of Uranus most unifying qualities as an astrological entity is its ability to point out to us our unknowing, and that we are united in our ignorance – Uranus’ gift is the space this recognition creates within us for intuition to enter, for anomaly to alter our reality and thinking, and Uranus operates at a collective level of the higher mind.
Being gifted with this infusion of uncertainty can activate creative energy that is essential if we are to transcend our fears – it allows our actions to cut a wake in the ocean of grace, which is also available to us, ever-present.
In fact Uranus can open our eyes ‘in the moment’ to the presence of this ocean, of which we might otherwise be ostensibly unaware in our everyday lives. Uranus has been called ‘the Awakener’.
Its a matter of the inner nature of our being, whether we are already swimming in that ocean or not. And to ‘cut a wake’ is one of the primary meanings of being ‘awake’, to be present with the consequence of our actions, of our lives in fact.
At 6° Taurus, where Uranus is at the time of writing, we find the Sabian symbol of ‘The Woman of Samaria at the Ancient Well’. The woman is imbued with grace, as a consequence of her life and how she has lived, and the openness of her heart to the inspiration of love which that grace embodies.
It is an old symbol, predating biblical references, with its roots in the importance of initiation to the well-being of the village, an intitiatic symbol whose key significance is that old ways of knowing and attachment to the established institutions of the past must be transcended for the creative spirit to be received in the heart.
Uranus imbues that creative spirit, manifests the power, the impulse for it to ‘render old patterns obsolete’. As the Sabians tell us, the Woman of Samaria “in her openness to love’s urgings, had already repudiated any narrow subservience to the old order” – this is a message which has found its time, and we know it.
Lonsdale takes it further and interprets the Chandra symbol for this degree thus :
“A Large Ruby Inscribed With A Prayer.
A beautiful dream that comes true. Conceiving in your heart that a fresh life current is here to be met in the physical. Being magnetized to the spot where the New Earth arises. You feel deeply drawn to give yourself over completely to what the new life-wave asks. Sensing acutely that this is all that counts, and suffering for all of those who are shut off from the bounty. Knowing how hard it is to feel dejected and forsaken, and never forgetting the ache, the longing, the distances, and what it takes to earnestly clasp new life and realise you belong to the heavenly kingdom in the Earth and will never again be out in the cold.”
On 23rd April at 2:24am UTC the New Moon opened the new lunar cycle at 3°24′ of Taurus, exactly 3° from Uranus at 6°24′ of Taurus.
We can take these meditations into our hearts now, and be ready to re-dream this world alive with grace and beauty. These reflect the essential nature of our being, the origin of innate power.
The New Moon cycle will be a most interesting one, for sure. A season of retrogrades will follow soon in which all the planets will be affected. We will have to dig deep during that time, but it will serve us well, as we are mining for truth and the empowerment it brings, another of Uranus indefatigable gifts.
Only, the power to be redeemed is our own.
This lunar cycle represents an opportunity to clear the decks in preparation – take it.
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 world unknown sleeps a voice unspoken; By thy step alone can its rest be broken”(1)
So long as we are held within the grip of a compulsion to externalise it, the inner illumination of the divine fire that enters through the imaginal realms may hold more importance than we realise – it was not always so, but, neither need it always be so. Questions arise around the relationship between the unseen and the tangible realms under the light of the June full Moon, and Uranus asks whether we can survive without remembering what instigated the crisis caused through their seperation. The answer, like the seen and unseen worlds, lies sleeping in a ‘world unknown’ and integrating its lessons into our world view is the step we must now take.
We began to radically transform that world view when Uranus south node first entered Sagittarius, 2700 years ago. Where formerly we had been immersed in the oceanic undercurrents of a more archae-emotional realm, it signalled a rise in inspired thinking that penetrated the manifest world with profound insight. But, it was a torch held aloft in a realm that had formerly been perceived fluorescent with spirit and soul, a world fast becoming a shadow land, of increasing contrasts, dividing as between night and day. We had arrived in a place that for millenia had already been moving steadily away from a more deeply rooted experience of the promethean fire.
As the divine spark present within all life receeded from our grasp we began to look for it within the tangible realms. In fact, our journey into the Sagittarian fields of philosophy and knowledge could well have been the natural human response to this process, a shift from the all enfolding ineffable towards the personalised individuated experience of the divine. It was the beginning of our pathological experience of the world and, with the ensuing rise of religion, as a formal extension of this experience in relation to the divine, the power of rational thinking correspondingly became its wilful executor within this world. As ironic as it may seem, the advent of religious experience seeded the rise of logic, rational discourse and phenomenal objectivity and in the process laid the foundations from which secular science would eventually emerge. This was the beginning of our hubris.
Two millenia later the Enlightenment brought this process to its logical conclusion. Saturn and Jupiter, who had once ruled the worldly affairs of heaven as a counter against the human will, had become dethroned, relegated and co-opted into the inner pantheon of humanity, Saturn ruling our world view with the pragmatic logic of cause and effect, and Jupiter, our ever thirsting quest for knowledge. These roles still apply, but, the astrology we practice is changing – it too has stepped up to that threshold. Saturn has turned upon Uranus memory.
LIFE DEATH LIFE – TRUTH (Ω)
Saturn shows us now that we have reached a place of standstill, stationing on Uranus south node in Sagittarius, a place in which paying our karmic debt is crucial to releasing the promethian impulse from its secularised straightjacket of rationality and scientific progress. This is the age of transition in which we are tasked with responsibility for redeeming our relationship with the divine fire, and use of it, as a positive power within the world. We have applied this vital energy outwardly, filling our world with a material manifestation of its power and, as the Ages shift have come to the point where the accretion of the consequences to our actions, having effectively uncoupled us from its inner source, are now drawing us back into its field of influence, towards the source of that sacred illumination.
Not only our science, but, our minds have led us here, our path poised at the threshold of that ‘world unknown’ – for some, the next step is inconceivable, for others it has already been taken. It is inconceivable to the wholly enslaved mind that its rational master could ever be found deficient, but, we must claim our freedom from knowing and reclaim the sanity of our liberty from reason’s irrational hegemony. Too much of the opiate of rationality and reason can unhinge our minds. To enter the ‘world unknown’ is not to collapse the wave of probability into the particle of the known, but, to ride it, become submersed in it, become it, in all its luminous darkness.
This moment, the heart of this lunation, with Sun and Moon, spirit and soul illuminating the solstice axis, asks for us to let the voice of the sacred fire be our navigator, the unspoken voice that would in-form us and self propagate the inner flame, raising it and us from our own sleep. To burn off the calque that obscures its native tongue, the spirit and soul must unite in transfiguring the body nature and free the material body from its exile. In exile it has become a shell, a husk of accretions that have calcified our imaginal nature – in the spiritual lucidity of the solar disc, and the lunar luminousity of the soul, the light of our inner eye is released from the limitations they impose.
“Throw away the lights, the definitions, And say of what you see in the dark
That it is this or that it is that, But do not use the rotted names.
How should you walk in that space and know Nothing of the madness of space,
Nothing of its jocular procreations? Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand
Between you and the shapes you take When the crust of shape has been destroyed.” (2)
Nocturne in Silver ~ Richard Cartwright
(1) Percy Bysshe Shelley ~ from Prometheus Unbound
(Ω) The words ‘life death life truth’ were scratched on bone sacrificial tokens found on the northern coast of the Black Sea at Olbia. They were accompanied by Orpheus name and offered in complete faith of the Orphic mysteries as a deliverance from the shores of uncertainty that surrounded the lands of the dead. They have been dated to at least 500bce, having been cast into the waters some 2,700 years ago…..
(2) Wallace Stevens ~ from The Man With The Blue Guitar
“Generosity is a virtue for individuals, not governments. When governments are generous it is with other people’s money, other people’s safety, other people’s future.” (1)
The potential of the eclipses we have witnessed in the first half of this year is ours to be be realised, and, as the year progresses intentional conscious participation in our own evolutionary process becomes central to working with the eclipse signatures. This is a very political signature when it comes down to it, but, amongst the eclipses the lunar eclipse of March 23rd, while being partial and relatively subtle, just within the ‘eclipse zone’ so to speak, is notable for having activated the Aries Libra axis, a shot of adrenalin to the social arena – the other three eclipses of 2016 all highlight the Pisces Virgo axis and show more of the internal processes at work that are setting the agenda within that arena, both at an individual and collective level.
If the solar eclipse of March 9th highlighted the need for conscious self determination based upon personal experience and knowledge to take precedence over globalised top down ideological determinism the lunar eclipse of March 23rd raised the question of whether we are capable of creating a social context that is coherent enough to support such self authority without diminishing it or its potential for creating real change.
The Aries Libra axis points towards challenges in consciousness that are intrinsic to this socialising process. This is a process that aims to create a society in which the power is returned to the people. Within the predominant paradigm the Aries drive that fuels such a process itself must become conscious and Venus higher octave of ‘relative values’ within Libra, if based upon lucid perception and listening, can provide the drive for awareness necessary to such a society with its own mirror. It is this self reflective quality that helps the new social consciousness seeded at the March solar eclipse and emphasised at the March lunar eclipse to take on its potential protean qualities, adaptive, able to respond to immediate needs and to find appropriate shape accordingly. The rhetoric for change is empty without this mutable potential.
The Sabian symbol for the Sun’s degree in Aries at the March lunar eclipse speaks of the emergence of dipolar qualities within its conscious imprint, the awareness of dualism within the evolving self, but, as embryonic as this may appear does its innate naivety work against it? How we create such a context, one that is itself free of the effects of those ideologies it has been formerly programmed by, formed in service to and which itself does not perpetuate their faults, is dependent upon utilising the potential within this polarity.
The Sabian symbol for the eclipsed March Moon also reveals something here; it shows us a circle of young people gathered in communion around a central fire – intrinsic to this symbol is Listening, a quality that underlies the positive aspects of Libran consciousness. To quote, the Sabian text tells us that, “If a new society is to be built, those who yearn for it, or perhaps who have envisioned its outlines, should commune. But communion is useless where no central “fire” burns, IN-SPIRITING the group“. While listening is a fundamental human necessity within this social context it is the central fire, its creative principle, that calls us together and defines the space within which it is activated and illuminated. The ‘creative principle’ at work within ‘gathering’ reveals the nature of our common ground.
Here Mars elemental thrust is reclaimed from the prevelant ideological paradigm of ‘progress’ and consciously put to work in our midst, supporting the process of self determination and social formation. This signals a reframing and revisioning of the ‘democratic processes’ itself, a need that is all too present in our time. While the UK debates whether to remain in the EU or not, a debate that highlights the need for change in ‘representation’ either way, it is the US electional process that we can look to here for some primary indicators of how this is playing out, especially within the ‘Democratic Party’ itself. If Bernie Sanders represents the new re-alignment and activation of social consciousness Hillary Clinton is well positioned to continue the dynastic tradition peculiar to American politics within our time. Between them they encapsulate the paradigmatic political struggle that is its characteristic.
“A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.”(2)
As the Sabian symbol for the Moon at the lunar eclipse also indicated the signature of the preceding solar eclipse is here ‘evolved’ forward indicating that an answer can be found in fostering a ‘grass-roots’ movement ‘of the people, for the people, by the people’ – that may in our times have the ring of irony about it (in respect of the Gettysburg Address), but, doesn’t it also sound like a familiar battle cry from the hustings?
The transits to Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton’s natal charts in connection with these eclipses are worth noting here. With Clinton we have a problem as her birth time is in dispute, but, while I would have gone with the 8:02 am time giving her a Scorpio Asc I am leaving out references to the houses in both charts and to the angles in her own chart, while I’ve included Sanders Asc and MC as they are significant here.
The eclipsed March Moon was conjunct Sanders natal Mercury, sextiling natal Pluto. This coincided with an acrimonious 8th debate between Sanders and Clinton in Miami, as well as Sanders victory in the Michigan primary. The March solar eclipse fell on Clinton’s natal Moon and squared her natal Uranus, the day she delivered her “counterterrorism” speech at Stanford. Do politicians utilise such transits intentionally…..it is certainly not unprecedented for them (and their masters) to do so.
Sanders is also seeing Uranus transit his natal Moon + Mars, a sustained transit that is igniting his popularity as a champion and fighter for social change. Clinton has natal Pluto and Mars conjunct in mid Leo forming an exact square to her Scorpio Venus and a loose but applying square to her nodes – an indicator of an ambitious nature which her Sagittarian Jupiter emphasises. She will stop at nothing in its pursuit, which her Scorpio Sun will risk everything for – even if it means her downfall she will remain undetered.
The fight is well and truly on as transiting Saturn is squaring Sanders natal Virgo Sun and transiting Mars squaring his MC, while Neptune is transiting his IC. He is having to draw on his most innate visionary qualities in bringing his deepest social values into realisation. Transiting Mars will conjunct Clinton’s Jupiter twice during the current Mars retrograde, stationing direct on her Scorpio south node. These transits reflect the uphill battle Sanders has faced as an ‘independent’ pitted against Clinton’s ambition and establishment platform, but, show how while these make her a formidable opponent these same qualities can also be her achilles heal, especially when her south node is activated by Mars and her personal history is under attack. Clinton’s natal Saturn, in detriment in Leo, also squares her nodes indicating a life heavily suffused with karmic lessons.
The remaining eclipses of this year will also directly affect both Sanders and Clinton’s natal charts. The solar eclipse of 1st September falls just one degree from Sanders Midheaven, and the lunar eclipse of September 16th falls on Sander’s south lunar node, this time both luminaries squaring Clinton’s natal Uranus. If Sanders appears fated to carry a revolutionary vision to the people as a break from the past, Clinton appears as his perfect foil, a woman in pursuit of the precedent of claiming the ‘top job’, but, in the midst of such ecliptic interaction the Uranian element is absolutely key – Uranus will conjunct Sander’s natal Mars on the September lunar eclipse. This could signal both ‘breakthrough’ and equally ‘martyrdom’, though no-one would wish the latter upon him, save his detractors. His Scorpio Asc makes him tenacious but equally susceptible to fault in the midst of power and deception – there are vulnerabilities at stake with both candidates. If they both have it all to fight for, what that ‘all’ means to them both as well as to us is deeply and significantly polarised.
The fight for the Democratic ticket and the challenges to its holder will continue to be ignited by astrological transits to both candidates charts in the run up to election day, but, that is a matter best served in a seperate post. Either way it is the longevity of the prevelant political ideology that is ultimately going to be the deciding factor. We are poised on a knife edge and it is the people who will decide, if their votes and voice are to count for anything…..
“The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves.” (3)
If, as it often seems, it is the People who have been made fools of by the political power game, in the current political climate, which has its tentacles reaching into all our personal interests, there is an emergent level of consciousness at work here that cannot be denied. It is a consciousness itself born out of the need to be free of hegemonic ideologies and their encumbant effects. Such consciousness holds attributes we might associate with Mercury and Uranus in combination and it is worth remembering here that Uranus north node is in mid Gemini. However, as the outcomes of many social revolutions and dictatorships alike have shown, being solely self determining, a hegemony unto oneself, is a seriously dangerous business, in fact it is the inherent danger and runs counter to the ‘grass-roots’ theme; to evolve and be able to establish coherence beyond its own anarchistic undertones such consciousness requires acceptance of ‘difference’ and a willingness to acknowledge that no one individual or group of individuals can represent ‘the whole truth’. This was always the caviat inherent in the March solar eclipse, the truth that requires revitalising in the process of emergence from the millenia of power struggles that have shaped the cocoon of our body politic. It applies equally to any sustainable future in which a new social vision might take flight.
We are looking then towards engendering a shared coherence based not on homogeneity or its ideological counterpart ie. democratic conformity, but, through bringing a mutable quality to its conscious formation and sustainability, and, while as a species we are not without precedent for such a context, those who have lived it have, historically, been suppressed, their fire all but stamped out – we must accept that we are both returning to the beginning and making a break from the past in rekindling that fire.
There is an evolutionary consequence to this – while we are not being called upon to re-invent the wheel, in exploring new ground we must be ready to make allowance for what we do not know, to suffer our own foolishness in the process. Such a task belongs to individuals who are, at core, secure enough within themselves to undertake the fools journey without its pitfalls undermining their self authority. It is perhaps a consequence of human consciousness that we do so, as we witness each other speaking and acting upon our personal truths. It requires of us a balancing act between being able to have the courage of our convictions and to be ready to learn from our errors, and laugh at ourselves in the process. Discernment without over-ruling judge-mentality is key, a signature of maturity as well as a more egalitarian society.
As we venture further into the cauldron of the year we will find this evolved and evolving capacity serves us all well as the matrix is now breaking away from rulership under the cardinal face off exemplified by the Pluto Uranus square. We will be resonating more with the meaning seeking qualities set up by Jupiter, Neptune, Saturn and the Moon’s nodes through their mutable T square active through Virgo, Pisces and Sagittarius. The sixth, ninth and twelth signs of the zodiac bring that much needed mutability into focus in the run up to the September eclipses, and how this will carry our impetus for social and personal evolution forward will be explored further in future posts. As we enter a self reflective period in which Mercury will station retro in Taurus joining Jupiter, Saturn, Mars and Pluto already retrograde it is the mutable Geminian signature and the revolutionary Uranian future which will bring its potential into conscious synthesis.
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.
In answering the question What Price Planet Earth we must turn the tables on an many things, not least of all the degrading supression of women and it is in the myth associated with the degree of the May new Moon that we find one of the most virulent examples of the mysogynist’s dirty work, the myth of Medussa. The balance of power must be reconfigured.
Astrologicaly, the May through June lunation carries a broad and unboundaried field quality, so its influence is globalising. The lunation opening at the midpoint between Jupiter and Neptune brings an archetypal balance of masculine and feminine values into the global arena that expands upon the dynamic balance of male and female energy which was a feature of the last Moon. There we saw the feminine aspect taking the most dynamic role, redressing the balance through a self confident and athletic Venus. Now we see this energy collectivised, unfolding throughout this lunation, emergent particularly at each quarter of the Moon’s phases.
In the skies the Sun and Moon began this lunation where Venus began the last, at the flanks of the Bull, and will complete it just as they pass beyond the tip of Taurus horns on 16 June. Venus, by then will be passing through the stars that form the ancient gateway at the heart of the constellation of Cancer. She is giving us the heads up, as she slows down towards her own turning point, to look ahead and take a status check ~ be prepared, have a plan, be ready to change direction.
As this lunation opened Venus was passing through the midst of the Geminian stars, giving us a strong hint, not only of the left/right brain balance that her dynamic can help restore, but, of the necessity of listening, communication and keeping your antennae up, especially those that feed your gut feelings. She suggests that it pays now to bring the intuitive side of physical consciousness to bear on mental processes, those ‘knowings’ we experience at a gut level. This highlights the point and value of peace within adaptation. As the primary practical grounding for all our actions this is an essential part of our survival kit ~ it is also the very grounded foundation upon which the spiritual aspect of this lunation is built.
At the personal level opening to intuitive intelligence is essential as it has the capacity to guide us independantly of the powerful emotive influences of dramas unfolding around us ~ often it is heard and felt more as the quiet but clear voice that appears to contradict the concensus, the voice of the herd mentality. It allows us to avoid becoming distracted from sensing what is real. As an art, encouraging the wisdom of our gut feeling also increases integration with that aspect of our selves which is outside of conditioning, aids our deconditioning. It deepens the connection with our ‘higher self’, which is integral to the ‘pleroma’ rather than the individual energy cluster which we recognise as ‘our-selves’. In this sense it unites ‘above’ with ‘below’ and allows us to make better choices and adjust our lives accordingly.
Here, the ‘peaceful adaptation’ of the Sabian symbol for 27 Taurus may find meaning, but, how does this interface with the ‘collective’? The intuitive nature of Uranus is now building through a trine to Jupiter and works with Mercury, turned retrograde just hours after the new Moon, to receive more intuitively. Mercury’s retrograde pulls the immediate past into the present. Changes and experiences that have been brought into our personal and world field over the last few weeks are now being integrated, so, the first days of this lunation provide a good time to take stock and reflect on what has transpired most recently.
But, the new Moon also saw Mars opposite Saturn and Venus opposite Pluto; this may not only be a period of hard choices that we are now entering, radical by nature and effect, but, of decisions that are tough to impliment. While patience might be necessary it is much easier to find when peace is present. ‘Easier said than done’, we might hear ourselves saying…..but, we do have the means to do it; the astrology of this Moon is first and foremost a tool for accessing and identifying those means appropriately. In fact there is a prophetic quality about this Moon, one connected with Medussa, a great seer who has become totally distorted into a terrifying gorgon…..the fear factor she has been foisted with is our biggest challenge. It too must be cut through unflinchingly, seen for the deception that it is.
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 have built excercises into the training that help develop this faculty. It is almost as if we are now entering that training.
Not only do those two oppositions stamp their signature on the lunation at the beginning, at first quarter the Sun opposes Saturn, and the aftermath of the Uranus Pluto square is once again stressed as Venus squares Uranus. At full Moon Mars applies the heat to Pluto at the apex of the yod from Mercury and Jupiter. The complexity of this matrix is matched by its volatility. That yod definitely gives the game away ~ at the outset an ebulliant, demonstrative Jupiter in Leo sextiles self regarding Mercury retrograde and their combined energy emerges through the Pluto point, backfiring where self obsession, mindgames and narcissism are at work fueling a thirst for power, and discharging through Venus in Cancer. You will know it when you feel it, as if we are not already! The Uranus square exaccerbates and Mars amplifies this effect vociferously while the Sun gives penetrative intent to the collective voice. Many world leaders need look out and wise up! The seer’s eye is opening…..and, I hate to say it, but, heads will roll.
Pluto is now also retrograde so we can truly expect the radical games of the power-elite to be seen for what they are – a massive scam to keep our attention and energies fixated, managed and farmed.
But, the reality of the threats we may percieve are not limited to the human sphere. Geocentric oppositions involving the inner planets, such as those between Mars, the Sun and Saturn, are extremely sensitive times for tectonic movement and upticks and, as geomantic stress events, these also affect how we are feeling as well as how we react. Hard aspects, especially oppositions, between Earth, Sun and the outer planets bring this sensitivity deeper into the collective realms, Venus opposite Pluto not withstanding. Venus begins this lunation squaring the lunar nodes and it is the feminine power that holds the keys to our future as well as to unlocking the past.
Then there is the matter of the superstition surrounding the degree on which this lunation opened. With the new Moon falling on the same longitude as the fixed star Caput Algol we might well find ourselves facing long held fears and come to the sudden realisation that these must now finally be overcome, a kind of ‘now or never’ moment. In so many senses the primary quality of this lunation is a startling immediacy and compelling intensity about the nature of experience itself ~ we must not allow their intensity and our fears to petrify us into inaction, in fact, we simply cannot afford it, quite literally.
With the Sabian symbol for the 27th degree of Taurus indicating ‘individual adaptation to collective needs’ and Venus transitting Cancer those fears and our sensitivity to them are almost certainly going to be ancestral and inherited in nature and relate to values closest to home. There is deep and long term programming at work here. You may get a sense of karmic payback at work in the world. On a personal level, if you do experience this ‘feeling tone’ arising in ‘events’, take it as a sign that something has come up in order to be changed, this time around. Collectively, Algol has given us the ‘heads up’ (pun intended).
Algol, as said, is associated with the much misunderstood figure of Medussa, the priestess raped by Poseidon/Neptune in Minerva’s temple, and yet held responsible by Athena – for her ‘crime’ she 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. Sound familiar?! 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……Venus has been preparing us for this encounter.
We must take up her cause now and use seers eyes, as well as listen to our gut wisdom. Looking further ahead, globally we are now entering ‘salvage’ mode, this being the point at which the need to find the route to survival becomes manifestly real and the decisive action we might once have taken to avert danger is redirected into adapting to circumstances. It all begins to come together. The need for prioritising values, deciding what is essential, and focusing on preservation and damage limitation come to the fore. The demands of the past and future are becoming more immediate in the present.
Conversely, the Sabian symbol also talks of our indigenous nature and cultural heritage giving us the peaceful means to integrate a healthy flow of energy into our social setting, our community ~ the artifacts we offer out of our heritage carry the patterns of enduring wisdom and embody a certain deep joy that can be experienced directly in them. We are meant to pay the ancestral gift they represent forward. There is a strong nod here towards the reparative effects of the ‘gift culture’, to creating a genuine flow of energy that both feeds and honours, in which reciprocation and recognition are the currency and carry the true value, rather than exchange and possession of the thing itself. Wealth is meant to be shared, in fact it can only flourish if it is. In such flourishing we all receive nourishment. A highly pertinent fact waiting to be re-embodied within our world.
Without a doubt the strongest fears we have collectively suffered around this issue are connected with the idea of ‘scarcity’. This has been the psychological crowbar that has been deployed to force open the collective psyche and allow our most vulnerable instinctive fears to surface into the world. While our rightful heritage is destroyed and life blood syphoned off We are mercilessly manipulated through its use. The inner dynamic of this is so clearly demonstrated in the imbalance between the wealth of the ‘top one percent’ and the struggle to survive being visited upon the vast majority of the rest of us, a ‘reality’ which we clearly see being aggresively ‘deployed’ globally. It is symbolised through the money laundering schemes of government that feed the military-industrial complex and the bank owning elite who profit from it, rather than the people. This too is one of the inner dynamics of the Jupiter and Neptune mid-point, its emergent shadow side, now in full view.
The highly developed material aesthetic of the final degrees of Taurus carry a heavy burden if not shared. But, if anything, this Moon highlights this imbalance at its most potent level and, through the planetary positions, shows that we must apply strong energy to the task of rectifying it.
The last decan of Taurus is ruled by Saturn emphasising the life and death nature of this level of engagement, a radicalising game in which choices are made to appear very extreme, polarised, dualistically antagonistic. But, Saturn’s door, while it is seemingly one way, signed ‘exit’, is not ‘the end’……
……the Sabian symbol gives us an image of an indigenous woman bringing the traditional crafts and artifacts of her culture into the marketplace of the contemporary world. There are several layers to this symbol, beyond her finding a means to survive in the modern world. The idea of ‘paying it forward’ is central to the work we all face now and the feminine apsect of our times is emergent within this role. Through her journey over the current lunations Venus is highlighting the immense beauty of an empowered woman, not in competition with the men, or the Bull, but, in full flow, expressing her accomplished abilities.
The snake maned priestess decapitated by Perseus has been demonised to the point of dissociation from her roots. In our time this is the political purpose served by the myth, a suitable repository for the ‘unacceptable’ face of initiated and empowered woman, a mirror. The curse of petrification she carries is rather a testament to the immense power her eyes radiate. She has incredibly potent vision, yes, but, it is the snakes that signify her source of power. It is the very 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. In the human frame this power can be sourced at the deeper centres, but, its voice is most clearly heard through our intuitive insight and its wisdom equally accessed through gut feeling. Some call this primal, but, while it is certainly intense, it could just as easily be called sublime, transcendant even.
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; however, the antidote to this weapon of fear 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.
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.
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.
While our question might well be ‘What Price, Planet Earth’, undoubtedly, Medussa now challenges Us to find the answer. Only fear and conditioning stand in the way of doing so.
Top Image : Underwater Sculpture, Jason DeCaire ~ modified image
Between the new Moons of 18th April and 18th May a lunation of oppositions, squares and inconjunct aspects unfolds. On the face of it this looks like a lunation of forced issues and tense face-offs and disagreement, but, at its heart is a liberating freedom expressing great beauty that matches such challenges. Of the inner planets Venus leads the way, travelling now between the stars at the shoulder of the Taurean Bull and those in the midst of the Constellation of Gemini. She begins this lunation poised to vault between the Bull’s horns!
This gives us a very apt symbol to work with and a clear indication of the emotional qualities that will serve us best through this time. At their foundation are realism, courage and commitment, describing the essential grounding for our speech and actions in the world. But, more than this, Venus energy here is brilliant, dynamic and purposefully creative, a fitting response and reminder that we humans possess gifts well beyond those we have begun to explore within the Piscean Age. Venus is in tropical Gemini squaring Neptune and trining the north node ~ she is the frontrunner, leading us into the future!
At the outset Venus shines like a diamond in the western skies just after darkness falls. You will find her at new Moon drawing apart the veil of daylight between the Pleiades and Aldebaran, the stars marking the creative heart and headstrong brow of the Taurean Bull.
Ultimately, Venus is flying with speed towards her meeting with Jupiter early this August, at which time she will swing back into retrograde motion within the skies. She will turn just beyond Asellus Borialis and Asellus Australis at the heart of the constellation of Cancer. In the process she will bring the ineluctable force of womens wisdom to bear on the patriarch of the gods, a sign of the times. These stars formed an ancient solstice gateway associated with the millenia that saw the foundations of contemporary western civilisation being formed. We are all now engaged in this monumental healing process, conscious or not of our part in it.
However, as this lunation unfolds towards full Moon Venus will rise from the flank of the Bull and leap between the tips of its horns, echoing the ancient rites of youth depicted at Knossos during the Age of Aries. These were rites undertaken by women and men alike, reflecting a balance of power not only between genders but between the human and animal realms. But, these rites were depicted on the famous frieze at Knossos amidst a time of transition within this relationship.
Venus is asking us to reach beyond the Piscean and remember innate human attributes much closer to our Earth. As it was for the Cretan youths our qualities of courage, adept skills and timing are tested against the powerful instincts and physical strength of the great Earth animal. And, in keeping with Venus symbolic qualities, it is the dynamic wisdom centred in the powerhouse of the heart that will lead us with confidence in overcoming the hegemony of the head and rebalancing its analytical dictates. We must become whole within ourselves in this respect, for, in this realm Venus is at home, sovereign amongst the stars whose constellation corresponds with her own sign of rulership. In their ecstatic risk taking saavy it was the power of the Bull itself that the Cretan youths sought relationship with, and for us the Bull is our Earth. It is our home…..but our healing must reach back further still.
We too can experience an exuberant joy in making such bold and athletic moves, but, much depends upon removing blockages to our leap, sources of fear and oppression. We can see something of this indicated at full Moon through the Moon’s aspect with Pluto. But, we also require aquisition of a certain sure-footedness that can only be developed through experience of working in harmony with that bullish power. Opportunities for gaining such experience are writ large through this lunation and their impulse reaches back to times in which the root wisdom of matriarchal lineages were becoming superceded by the forces of much more martial affiliations and an accompanying spirituality based upon very different heirarchies. The entire relationship between human, nature and divinity shifted, and in that shift we became divided, within and without.
The ancestral legacy resulting from that shift is playing out now, and while we have learned how to extend our minds into the world to compensate, the wounding fears we have suffered as a consequence of our own inner rift need to be fully healed for our leap to be successful. Symbolically, we must join with the ancient Grandmother, whose story came through in the previous lunation, in reweaving the sacred Buffalo robe of Life with this vigorous creative energy. It is no exaggeration to say that our very sanity and future depend upon it.
The Sun and Moon meet, unaspected, in the 29th and penultimate degree of tropical Aries on April 18th. The Sabian symbol for that degree speaks of finding the song that sings through us, harmonisation of our own voice within the music of the spheres, in its indivisible state. This is an image of healing the divided self, split consciousness by another name. Finding it we will all the more confidently experience the ‘dramatic moment of release’ that enables us to fly. But, while the leap through the bull’s horns can end in celebration and an empowering sense of achievement, it hinges around grabbing the bull by the horns, a ‘now-or-never’ moment’. We have but one chance, that is to say, we have but one chance left.
Mercury’s sextile from Taurus to Neptune in Pisces at new Moon forms a yod to the Moon’s north node in tropical Libra. There is no time to dream about our future any more ~ the ‘Dream’, if it is to be pursued, must be made reality and this means going beyond the known in a leap that can restore balance and right relationship with Earth. Neither can this simply be a leap of faith ~ time for that, as the previous new Moon and lunation reminded us, has come and gone. ‘What are our innate skills and how well can we lend them to spirit to speak through‘ is the question a newly unfettered Uranus asks of us in response.
Many things appear to be driving us forward here. Now that the Uranus Pluto square is unravelling we are called upon to own our adepthood, especially as we are now faced with the serious consequences of unfinished business that surrounds us, and especially that which arises from the last four years of Uranus and Pluto’s face-off. If there is a symbol of this unravelling it is in Fukushima…..
As the previous lunation contained two eclipses we can expect the whole period between the equinoxes to present clear examples of how those consequences are now playing out in the world. It may seem as though our choices are being determined by forces that are beyond our control, but, perhaps Uranus would have us believe otherwise as the divine maverick is slowly building an empowering trine with Jupiter, direct in tropical Leo, to bring a sense of unpredictable largess to our issues of self-trust. These are global issues and these too are in a rapid process of change.
At new Moon a bullish energy prevails adding to this trine through Mars square from Taurus with Jupiter. The impetus gathering here is pushing us further into concrete action while amplifying that ‘now or never’ feeling.
Jupiter’s developing trine with Uranus is a background feeling, edgy and compelling beneath it all, and will begin to gain momentum, sensed rather than seen at full Moon. Here we can also look out for an encouraging fore-taste of what we might never have imagined we are capable of. At full Moon a T square is formed between Sun, Moon and Jupiter, exact to within minutes of arc. This Scorpio full Moon on May 4th opens our emotional body to deeply grounded creative energy, deepening trust in our connection with Earth, and Jupiter’s place at the fulcrum in connection with Uranus doubles the effect. Such depth in our emotional field is absolutely necessary for healing and restoring connection.
At this time Mercury, newly envigorated after transiting the Sun and coming home to Gemini, will be exactly opposite retrograde Saturn in Jupiter’s home sign, Sagittarius. Don’t let the buggers get you down! However, both Venus and Mars will be out of aspect and there is great opportunity here for bringing natural balance to bear on both our minds and bodies, our genders and our relationships. This is a Moon for each of us to relish in our own unique way, with freedom in speech and act giving voice to the spirit of the moment – a passionately rebellious will to express natural self determination.
Now we see the expressive power of the leap at work, an impulse manifesting a moment in which calling the shots is our own prerogative and our sovereignty is expressed most naturally through our own innate creativity – to be creative in this sense is to be free. More than this it is an expression of truth, choice and personal power, all of which oppose subjugation, control and, ultimately, enslavement ~ can you make the connections here between this impulse and the TPP or TTIP? Globally this impulse is made all the more powerful as the full Moon sextiles retrograde Pluto telling us that, in doing so, significant ground can be gained back from and against the stultifying oppression of the Plutocracy. The high point of this lunation, like the athlete’s somersault over the Bull’s horns, releases much untapped creative energy in answer and has grace, beauty, power and sheer audacity written all over it. If we are to restore a harmonious connection with our Earth we will surely need to be so audacious and do so in the spirit of that leap.
In the next post we’ll follow Venus path of liberation towards the May new Moon, and an encounter with the divine twins, representatives of the divided mind.