It is a once-in-168-year event. In a year chockfull of world-altering transits, it is one of the most important. The god of the sea is inaugurating a thirteen-year-long shift in the way we look at water.

Now begins a calendar year that’s been well worked over before it was born. Variously interpreted eschatological imagery and dubious pop culture prophecies have been pouring forth for years now, exploiting poor 2012 like an MGM child star. Now that it’s here, let’s separate the hype from the essential meanings that underlie it.

This Solstice season, bells are tolling for the death of the Old Paradigm. You can hear them all over the globe. The shifts they signal are too profound to stay local, or national. The changes upon us right now are not confined to either the First World or the Third World; the Northern of the Southern hemisphere; the 99% or the 1%.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,