Get your yellow highlighter out. It’s time to mark your calendar; the Full Moon this month is a stand-out.
First off, it peaks on the eve of eleven-eleven-eleven. Eleven is considered a master number in numerological tradition. Even just one eleven is enough to raise the eyebrows of those who assign to numbers a numinous significance. As the lunar cycle peaks, we will get the power of eleven iterated by three, itself considered a perfect number by the ancients.
It’s hard to believe that the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon is just over a month old. Long expected by astrologers, long awaited by progressives and long dreaded by the One Per Cent, the movement hit the ground running. It expresses the world moment so precisely that it seems to have arisen full-blown, like Athena from the head of Zeus.
The corporate media tried to ignore the Occupy Wall Street movement. Lord knows it tried. Over the past three weeks, as protests filled the streets of New York and started springing up in cities all over the country, the TV news at first played blind, deaf and dumb.
To get a bead on the energies of this month, let’s first consider its place in the solar cycle. A time of Dark Mysteries, Scorpio has a strong seasonal character. It is governed by the planet Pluto, governor of taboos and secrets.
Not only the Sun, but Venus and Mercury ingress into Scorpio in October. This will make for a potent Halloween (or Samhain [pronounced SOW-en] in Wicca): our annual celebration of the human desire to know forbidden things.
On this tenth anniversary, I don’t want to write about 9/11. I’ve written elsewhere about the implausibility of the official World Trade Center narrative, as have many other astrologers (see especially the blogs of Eric Francis), and the explosive transits under which it took place (Rick Tarnas has an excellent monograph on the chart). It was the first Big Lie of the 21st century, and has amassed so much refutation that a cultural movement arose to hold it.
The Sun’s in Virgo and the Moon’s in Pisces at the Full Moon on September 12th. Both are misunderstood signs, so this lunation can be hard to deal with.
We all have to cope with the blind spots of our cultural conditioning. It isn’t that Pisces and Virgo are inherently any more difficult an opposition than any other zodiacal pair; it’s that our society doesn’t value the impulses they represent.
Pluto is slowing down for its station opposed to the midpoint of the US Venus and Jupiter, and the rot at the core of the American system is blossoming in the summer heat. The nation’s values (Venus) are being stripped raw. A twisted morality (Jupiter) is being exposed.
I don’t have to tell you, dear reader, that there’s nothing like astrology for knowing which way the wind is blowing. Not just in our own individual life, but knowing the meaning of the storms we’re all being buffeted by together right now, during this thrilling, surreal, crazy-making epoch.
I’m feeling ambivalent about irony. Certainly I’m grateful to it for providing me with some of the best laughs I get these days; mostly from British humorists, who are masters of the form. And ironic prose is often challengingly amusing, offering a showcase for a kind of chilly cleverness.
It must say something about our society that the use of irony has become so all-pervasive. Why do we rely on it so much in writing? And why do we frame so much of what we say with finger quotes?
It always struck me as so quintessentially American, that Pottery Barn metaphor that Colin Powell and Thomas Friedman chose to refer to Iraq: “You break it, you own it”. I wonder whether a public speaker elsewhere in the world would have made this same point by invoking a less explicitly commercial image. Such as, say, a mother saying to her child,