Sep 2013
Due Diligence
It’s time to take stock. Virgo is about checking what’s on our shelves, straightening out our dresser drawers and deleting old computer files. The New Moon in Virgo on Sept 5th is a good time to pledge to eliminate all unnecessary drama over the next four weeks.
Not a pledge to make glibly, since Mars will be squaring Saturn during early September (exact on 9/9). This will make many of us knit our brows with frustration, at best, or condemn whatever we’re doing as a failure, at worst.
Don’t indulge. (I’m talking to you, you with the planets in early-degree fixed signs.) Chalk up any difficulties to the speed bumps of life, just doing their job: reminding us to slow down. Now’s the time to make adjustments and fix what needs fixing. There’s work to be done.
This is the attitude to take even — especially — when the sparks start to fly, which may well happen mid-month, when Mercury reignites the Cardinal Cross.
The Cardinal Cross
The Cardinal Cross is the on-and-off planetary formation whose longest arm is the Uranus-Pluto square, the epochal transit with seven exact hits between 2012 and 2015. The 90-degree angle between these two heavyweight planets is linked by astrologers to the crisis-a-minute intensity of our era.
Unless we’re closed off in denial, these crises are being felt both externally and internally. The external clashes show up as unmistakable world events, some of which are discussed in the Cardinal Cross Lecture Series (my new lecture discusses the key milestones of 2013), and some of which I write about in the blogs.
The internal clashes, by contrast, show up as subjective events. Their setting is the psycho-spiritual level of life, which we have been talking about in the Skywatches.
Inner and Outer
We don’t usually refer to relationship dramas and private psychological episodes as “events”; the word seems to attribute to them more realness than is warranted. The assumption here, that our culture ingrains into us with the mother’s milk, is that inner events are somehow less valid than outer ones.
If we detach ourselves from the mechanistic materialist mindset, however, we start to see all energy as just energy. It can manifest on any plane it wants to. And all planes are equally real.
Seeing things this way can be useful in a practical way. Once we’re in the habit of viewing the inner and outer planes as equally legitimate and mutually mirroring, we can understand the transits’ symbolic teachings more fully. We start to understand our emotional and psychological episodes in terms of the larger cycles they fit into.
Venus-Saturn Conjunction
The Venus-Saturn conjunction on the 18th, for instance, might otherwise be dismissed as a day-and-a-half-long funk, peculiar to us alone. Unless we knew about its significance as part of a cosmic pattern — one that everybody is experiencing, to some extent — we would probably chalk up our mood that day to any number of negative stories we harbor about ourselves and our social skills.
Not only would this make us feel bad, and strengthen an energy pattern that isn’t good for us, but it’d be an inaccurate reading of the transit.
This isn’t to say that our own unique dysfunctions don’t play a role. We each have distinct points of neurosis, just as we have our own unique points of genius; and some transits tend to bring them out. Saturn transits in particular are notorious for bringing forth negative self-imagery. But to go no further than that is missing the point.
In the case of the conjunction of Venus (relationships) and Saturn (restriction), the sky is offering us a template that is universal: every one of us needs, every once in a while, this cosmic lesson about the limitations inherent in human relating. Knowing ahead of time that this is the purpose of the transit keeps us from investing undue significance in our own particular self-condemning story.
Inner Storms
This kind of detachment comes in especially handy with outer planet transits, whose demands on us are particularly daunting. Instead of viewing them as some scary, random storm within our own psyche — that makes us ask ourselves Am I going crazy? — what if we saw them as a cresting of energy? No more, and no less. A surge of energy that has meaning; it comes bearing a message. Our job is to decode that message and incorporate that meaning. Not to prevent or stonewall or recoil from the feeling, but to figure out its meaning.
This is why astrologers write Skywatch columns. By considering these inner events in advance, we get a distance from them. We can anticipate not only what we are likely to feel, but what the greater point is behind our feeling it.
Anticipating transits is very useful when the potential for disruption is high, as when a quickly-moving planet triggers the Uranus and Pluto square. Understanding the symbolism at work lets us navigate more mindfully the intensity that will accrue to whatever happens.
And in the case of the flowing transits – the periods of ease, such as the Venus-Jupiter trine (9/22-26) – considering it ahead of time lets us take full advantage of something we might otherwise miss: the unusually strong support available.
The Equinox
The first days of spring, summer, fall and winter are sacred portals by definition. Throughout human history they have been celebrated as the crossroads of the year, times for communicating with Nature through festivals and private ritual.
The Autumnal Equinox was known by the ancient Celts as Mabon. In the Northern hemisphere they saw it as the second harvest.1
It celebrated the turning of the corner into the dark season, with twilight showing up a little sooner, and the the air taking on a fresh chill.
Those attuned to the Wheel of the Year will have noticed that something unusual has been happening to our Equinoxes and Solstices. For the past five years, each shift of the seasons has surged with an extra layer of power. This is because they mark when the Sun, and the planets immediately around the Sun, set off the Cardinal signs — Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn – thus triggering the Cross.
The Sun’s shift into Libra occurs this year on September 22nd at 1:45 pm PDT.
Note
1 The First Harvest was Lughnassad, or August Eve (later Lammas), which fell on the New Moon last month. Cross-quarter festivals like Lughnassad occur halfway between solstices and equinoxes.