I love Imbolc, halfway between the winter solstice and the upcoming equinox. It’s a neither-fish-nor-fowl time of year; a bare flicker of a sabbat, as tentative as the new green shoots contemplating their debut above the crust of the soil. It was once a holy day, as were all seasonal turning points in the Great Wheel…
The Cardinal Climax is giving us a breather as we move into October, offering us a chance to stand back and take stock.
Uranus and Jupiter have retrograded into Pisces, easing off the fiery intensity of the Aries Point. Saturn is moving forward in Libra, past the relentless exactitudes of its square to Pluto and opposition to Uranus. Pluto is still (again) hanging out at the first couple degrees of Capricorn, biding its time.
About 30 years ago I was at a lecture by Rob Hand, whom I vastly admired (still do), that blew my mind. I haven’t thought the same way again, about history, ecology or the state of the world. But at the end of his talk, he said something that appalled me.
The world is melting. And I don’t mean just polar ice caps.
Neptune conjoins Chiron to the degree on the 16th -17th of this month. Neptune is the planet of dissolution; that is, what sugar does in hot tea, and what our self-control does when we have an emotional melt-down. Neptune dissolves, erases and effaces things.
On a personal level, Neptune is associated with the little ego-effacements we endure in the course of living: those moments when our sense of competence disappears. It can throw us off-message; make us feel slack, ungrounded and confused. Such experiences weaken our focus on the external world, and humble our pride. This we do not like at all….
Remember when we were young, and some mean kid would come up behind us and twist our arm, demanding that we “cry Uncle?” That’s sort of what the planetsare doing to us now. But they’re not doing it to be mean.Up in the sky are a series of transits that are designed to humble us; to squeeze the arrogance out of us. I realize most of us don’t like being humbled. But as you’ve probably heard me say before, liking has nothing to do with anything except Venus. Whether we like or dislike a transit is neither here nor there. The only question is: Are we going to learn what it’s trying to teach? The Cardinal Cross and the Aquarius transits are major humblings. Their motive is to curb our excesses, clarify our blind spots, and make us more human.
Now that Saturn is in Libra, it’s time to take a hard look at the issue of fairness. Libra is an idealistic sign, and its tenets are a point of pride for many conscientious folks. Who doesn’t like to think of themselves as fair-minded? Saturn, however, does interesting things to the sign it’s passing through. This planet‘s job is to expose inconsistency, not to indulge self-imagery. Saturn’s two-and a-half-year tenure in Libra is a teaching about fairness in the archetypal sense. Does this deeper meaning of fairness have anything to do with its conventional meaning? That’s what we’ll find out.
The years ahead are going to challenge our old ways on just about every front. But human nature being what it is, some issues are going to throw us for more of a loop than others. In the mass mind, certain topics are connected to powerful unconscious feelings. These provoke intense reactivity unless or until they are brought to awareness and resolved.
Their first exact opposition coincided with one of those heightened historical moments like the day JFK was shot or the day the twin towers exploded; a date our future selves will remember as a “Where-were-you-when…” event. It was November 4th 2008, the day Obama was elected. Where were you that night the world whooped with relief and danced in the streets
Congratulate yourselves, fellow travelers. You have incarnated into the least boring period in human history.Astrologers are paying special attention to the window between 2011 and 2015, with another spike at the USA Pluto Return in 2022. The world is in for quite a ride. To approach the Cardinal Cross years with our eyes open would be a very useful prayer to incorporate into our spiritual practice right now. We are dealing with big energies here, and we need to draw on the highest parts of ourselves
In the USA right now, only four industries seem to have escaped the downturn unscathed. Sales of junk food, alcohol, and guns are way up; and, as was the case during the Great Depression, Hollywood movies are raking it in. This says volumes about the mass mood.
