If you point at a wall made of bricks and mortar and randomly ask people what type wall it is, most will call it a brick wall. Rarely will anybody mention what holds the bricks together. In perceptual practice, the mortar is often taken for granted and hence is functionally invisible.

So it is for many people in the world, and also for some notable objects in astrology. Among the people most commonly taken for granted and rendered all but invisible, the largest group is women.

The last century or two has seen some progress in many places as regards to women’s most basic rights. Even so, the default cultural position worldwide overwhelmingly marginalizes the female half of the human race — despite the fact that it is women who have nearly always served as the mortar holding things together.

Whether at the tribal level or in more advanced industrial nations, economic, political or military power is (through physical advantage or institutionalized discrimination) conferred mostly to men. However, no army, no political system and no economy could possibly come together (or endure) without the role women play in continuing and cohering the human race. Every soldier has a mother, and often a sister or a wife as well. The same holds true for every tycoon, president and potentate.  

Unsurprisingly, the first four objects discovered in the main belt of (mostly) asteroids between Mars and Jupiter are named after mythical female deities who functioned to hold things together in the ancient Greek and Roman cultural traditions. Meaningfully discovered on the very first day of the 19th Century, there was Ceres — to this day meaningfully designated by the Minor Planet Center (MPC) number one. After that (in rapid order) came Pallas (MPC #2), Juno (#3), and Vesta (#4).

Time and again, the ancient myths (still serving as a significant part of western civilization’s heritage) demonstrated how those goddesses were disregarded or degraded at the peril of the good-old-boy system, which emulated the cultures creating those stories. Jupiter’s sense of entitlement was met in kind by Juno.
Mars consistently got his backside kicked by Pallas Athena. Ceres literally held dominion over life on Earth, and Vesta conferred the moral legitimacy of home and hearth to what would otherwise be exercises of raw and irredeemable power.

The written readings for all 12 signs of Vision Quest are available for instant access, and Eric is working on the audio astrology and rune readings! Order all 12 signs here, or select individual signs here.

With the ingress of Ceres into Pisces on Thursday at about 1:40 pm EST (18:39:51 UTC) comes as good a time as any to renew your appreciation of the goddess energies of the sky, and of the women of Earth who carry on courageously to keep the sky from crashing down on us all.

It will be worthy to note how Pallas recently entered Aquarius as if to take the baton from Ceres in the sign of the collective. It would be appropriate to observe Vesta moving through Aries towards Uranus, as if to mediate and bridge the gradually widening Uranus-Pluto square. You would also very probably find reason to give thanks for how Juno’s Scorpio conjunction with Mars this last weekend might well have correlated with things holding together (against all odds) for you.

Indeed, if there is anything to astrology, right about now would be a good time to be grateful for those who give birth, so as to keep mortal humans in touch with humanity’s capacity to imagine (and take inspiration from) the immortal. If you have a sister, there is no time better than the present to appreciate the parallel universe she represents. Most of all, these days — when the foremost (and nominally female) members of the layer of mortar between Mars and Jupiter seem to be taking a crucial symbolic hand in things — would be an excellent opportunity to actually see both the divine and mortal woman in yourself, all around you, and in the Earth itself.

For without both the tangible and symbolic representations of the feminine in this world, we would only have a useless pile of bricks. The time has come to no longer take that fact for granted.

Offered In Service 

I confess. I am in a bit of a mild self-induced panic. I have not come out for either Hillary or Bernie and the Iowa caucuses are a week away. Excuse me while I go a bit wonky in today’s column, but I need to air things out.

Being this undecided is unusual for me. After the 2000 Presidential election debacle, during the 2004 and 2008 election cycles I became an “early adopter.” A label coined by professionals in political campaigning, early adopters are so enthralled by message and candidate that they sign on, contribute money, and soap-box on blogs and message board before the primaries even begin.

That was me in 2003 for John Kerry. He seemed the right answer for his military and foreign policy experience, and he took it in the shorts by more progressive Democrats, who stumped for Howard Dean. They objected vehemently to Kerry’s vote on the Iraq War Authorization. But then came the killer ground game in Iowa, which sealed Kerry’s deal in the caucuses; followed by the Dean scream; and the win in New Hampshire, which caved Dean’s hopes for the nomination.

We all know what happened afterwards — the swift-boaters Karl Rove employed to undermine Kerry’s one strength — his experience in the military and his foreign policy credibility as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — did its work. The key loss of Ohio — a purple state heavily fought for, with some purported scurrilous vote tampering by Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State — decided the election. The day after the 2004 presidential election was a dark day for the country.

Fortunately, something was prescient about John Kerry’s choosing Senator Barack Obama for the DNC Convention keynote speech earlier during the summer of 2004. The Convention keynote address is the “anointing” speech for the top rising star of the Democratic party. And Kerry and his convention-planning team were on the money. Listening to Senator Obama was revelatory. So much so, that while I was there in 2004 on that convention center floor in Boston, I had to call my friends in California to get them to watch Obama’s speech. I admitted to them and to myself right then and there that this man would be president in four years. Not Kerry. I was right.

So, in 2007, I was ready for Barack Obama, who was by all accounts a long shot — African American, four years a US Senator, and from outside the mainstream “inevitability” of the Clinton Machine of centrist-leaning Democrats. I signed on, phone banked, contributed, and fought against the Clinton machine that threatened to tear the Democratic Party apart during the South Carolina primaries. It was then that my dislike and distrust of Hillary Clinton and the entire Clinton Machine was so hot that it washed me clean of any remaining illusions I had about her.

Eight years later, with two terms under his belt, President Obama is leaving his office to be claimed by one of the next two leading contenders. And this is where I can’t adopt. Not early. Too much concerns me about both Democratic candidates that I cannot be ready for Hillary or feel the Bern. Not yet.

It’s not because I still distrust Hillary. I have softened my view of her since she became Secretary of State under the Obama Administration, and see her as a strong public servant. She would be a good problem-solving president. But there are still major questions hanging over her about US foreign policy in Libya, which gets her Republican detractors hot to establish yet another Benghazi probe.

And what about her role leading up to the current mess in Syria? I can imagine what a Trump or Cruz campaign would do to negatively meme her if she were the nominee, let alone the baggage the name ‘Clinton’ would inspire. Then, there’s her connection to the 1% — the bankers, the contributions to the Clinton Foundation. Then there’s Bill.

Yet, as a teen for George McGovern in 1972 (I was a political junkie early on), Bernie Sanders’ populist message makes me hope and despair simultaneously. His message against the corrupt establishment in Washington rings true, and is absolutely timely for the mess that’s going on in Washington DC. But as Charles Blow says in his op-ed in The New York Times:

…But practicality and incrementalism, as reasonable as that strategy and persona may be, are simply no match for what animates the Sanders campaign — a kind of kinetic, even if sometimes overblown, idealism. His is a passionate exposition of liberalism — and yes, democratic socialism — in its most positive light.

But, let me be clear and unequivocal: I find his earnest philosophic positions to be clear and often laudable, but also somewhat quixotic. I think that he is promising far more than even he knows he can deliver, and the electability question is still a real one, even though polls now show him matching up well against possible Republican opponents.

As a West Coast liberal in California no less, I am somewhat shielded from the rest of the country, which leans conservative. The word “socialist” as a label in America is a broad brush dipped in blood. Add Democratic to the label and fears for a landslide Trump or Cruz victory triggers my McGovern Syndrome.

In the same article Mr. Blow is equally as critical of Mrs. Clinton:

In October, when Hillary Clinton made a spectacle of the congressional Benghazi committee during a marathon interrogation that seemed designed to make a spectacle of her, she emerged stronger than ever. Her polls numbers surged.

That performance had come on the heels of a strong debate performance the week before in the first Democratic presidential debate. She had bolstered the image she wanted to project: strong, smart, capable and battle-tested.

But now, on the verge of Monday night’s Democratic town hall in Iowa — the last time the candidates will face off before the caucuses in that state — and with Bernie Sanders’s poll numbers climbing not only in Iowa, but also in New Hampshire, the Clinton campaign seems increasingly desperate and reckless.

I noticed the turn in the last debate as Clinton seemed to me to go too far in her attacks on Sanders, while simultaneously painting herself into a box that will be very hard to escape.

The written readings for all 12 signs of Vision Quest are available for instant access, and Eric is working on the audio astrology and rune readings! Order all 12 signs here, or select individual signs here.

So, a week before the Iowa caucuses I am hovering between the negatives I perceive between the two candidates. And this is based from my short-lived experience in political campaigning and observing the long game of politics over the last forty years as a Democratic voter in the United States.

Which way do I go? I don’t expect answers today or tomorrow. I don’t even expect them next week when the primaries start. There’s a long road ahead to the summer and the conventions. And there are enough questions hanging over both candidates for me that I need some assurance on as a voter. As a someone who plans to retire in the next five or six years, where will my Social Security account be? Who will sit on the Supreme Court in the next three years?

Looking at the positives between both, being a Democrat choosing between Hillary or Bernie is not a bad thing. Even with her baggage, Hillary has a lot of experience in how to handle the shit-storm that is Washington DC politics. Bernie has the exact right vision of where this country could go. He is inspirational and really touches a deep nerve in a country desirous of changing a corrupt system. How he plans to do it is still unclear.

One thing is for certain. I feel we’re in much better shape than to be a Republican having to choose between Trump or Cruz, the front-runners in Iowa — of which Senator Lindsay Graham famously remarked last week: “It’s like being shot or poisoned. What does it really matter?”

Let that be THEIR dilemma.

By Sarah Taylor

“We cannot just keep on as we have gone before, but must radically change our ways.”

According to writer and tarot expert Rachel Pollack in her book, The Haindl Tarot: The Major Arcana, this is one of the meanings of the card at the centre of this week’s reading, Aeon. I take it to be the primary meaning for the purpose of this spread, and one that has far-reaching implications, both personally and collectively.

Prince of Stones, Aeon, Three of Swords from the Haindl Tarot, created by Hermann Haindl. Click on the image for a larger version.

Card XX in the tarot’s Major Arcana, Aeon is the Haindl Tarot’s version of Judgement in the Rider-Waite Smith tarot deck.

It holds a similar essence to the RWS variant, but here I feel a sense of something that has an urgency in the way that Judgement does not. Or maybe it’s simply that the urgency in Judgement is softened by the more human presence of the fiery-headed angel.

Here, the angel has become a mysterious eye in the sky. There are still those snow-capped mountains in the distance, but unlike the single body of water in Judgement on which the figures of men, women, and children rise from their coffins, here there are no human figures, and the sea is now riven into one river of water on the left, and one of blood on the right. Above them, a foetus lies curled in an egg, ready to be born.

Each separate river is further associated with the card next to it: the water corresponds to the Prince of Stones (the Knight of Disks in the RWS deck), and the blood to the Three of Swords. How fitting.

The Prince of Stones, as Pollack points out, is the only Court Card in the Haindl deck that depicts a real person: Chief Seattle, a Pacific Northwest leader who strove for peace and accord, but who was part of a nation that was cheated, subjugated, and driven from its land. The orca at the top of the card would have held a vital place in the hearts, minds, and creativity of the Native Americans who bordered its marine habitat.

In the same way that Native Americans were hunted and displaced, so the orcas were, and continue to be, subjected to the harpoons of those who care little for the implications of their actions.

Rivers of blood indeed.

The Three of Swords drives this home: broken accords; allegiances (and alliances) torn apart; the debasement of the heart in favour of a war of words, where tears and blood are spilled.

“Mourning.”

Take this to a personal level; apply it to what’s going on in your life. Where is there a battle over some kind of ‘real estate’, whether literal or figurative? Where has the balance between heart and mind faltered to the point where no-one emerges with what they wanted? Where are there tears on contracts?

Where are you being called to pay attention to a toll exacted on something that holds, nurtures, provides life? Where is the voice of natural authority being drowned out by an agenda that will stop at little or nothing to exact its price?

The written readings for all 12 signs of Vision Quest are available for instant access, and Eric is working on the audio astrology and rune readings! Order all 12 signs here, or select individual signs here.

Now zoom out and take it collective. Where can you apply the same questions to what’s happening in your community, your country, the world? As Eric often writes on this site, “The personal is political.” One does not exist without the other, and this is particularly visible in a reading where there is one Major Arcana card (the collective/archetypal), one Minor Arcana card (how that archetype manifests in the physical world), and one Court Card (an aspect of personality that becomes the instrument of the archetype and how it manifests).

You see, it lies with you. And it lies with all of us. This is Pluto we’re talking about here. But we also have Saturn, the great limiter; that can work against us, and it can also work for us. No birth can be rushed, but it can’t be held back indefinitely either. Something will be born; something will die to make way for it. The eye seems to proclaim this from its all-seeing position.

A new age is imminent. Our actions are determining whether it will be defined by rivers that flow with blood, or with water.

Can we make different choices this time around? Can you?

“Although the picture appears dire, it is, in fact, suffused with hope.”
~ Rachel Pollack, The Haindl Tarot: The Major Arcana

 

Astrology/Elemental correspondences: Son of Stones in the West (the airy aspect of earth), Aeon (Pluto), Three of Swords (Saturn in Libra)

If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread.

The written readings for Vision Quest, Planet Waves’ 2016 annual edition, have now been published. Order all 12 signs at a great value or choose your individual signs.

“There is no better test of character than when you’re tossed into crisis. That’s when we see one’s true colors shine through.”
— Tess Gerritsen, bestselling author and fascinating human

It’s always darkest before the dawn, they say, although I’m not sure who ‘they’ are. Years ago I heard a comedian speculate that ‘they’ might be an old couple in Kansas but I don’t trust old Kansans anymore, so I’m not confident of their collective wisdom. In fact, collective wisdom itself is suspect, here in our brave new world, where the unexpected seems to be writing the script.

Weather emergency Jonas, headed to the East Coast today, hit the Pea Patch earlier in the week. Forced to make the 60 mile round trip to town for meds, I left early, relying on Weather Channel reports. Freezing rain started two hours earlier than projected and by the time I was headed home, the road was an ice rink.

I passed at least a dozen smashed or abandoned vehicles, along with a firetruck, a wrecker and an ambulance stuck on the side of the road. Roadside ruts had been cut even deeper by intense rainfall and flooding earlier in the month.

Rounding a glazed-over corner, I spun into a ditch but was able to back onto dirt and then slip and skid, white-knuckled, for another few minutes to reach the only convenience store within ten miles. There I joined a dozen or more anxious people waiting for the county gravel/salt truck, including two Amish women (one with a newborn) who had tied their horse and buggy to a stack of firewood at the side of the building. When the truck finally arrived, we all followed it as far as we could. It took over two hours to drive the 30 miles home.

I’ll bet some of you had a story like that, or perhaps you will by the time Jonas passes by. That sense of emergency (and deliverance) began a week that seemed to bend all the old platitudes into pretzels. Take ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’, for instance. That was not my heart response to watching Sarah Palin hitch her (band)wagon to the Trumpinator in Tulsa.

Her nearly frenetic enthusiasm was not unexpected, as she’s been wagging her tail since his numbers began to climb. Perhaps this is a meeting of minds in the Snake Oil Salesman Union, ‘rock ‘n rollers’ and ‘holy rollers’ aside. Me, I think she wants a place in his cabinet. If she’d vibrated any faster in that performance, I’m confident her head would have exploded.

What was unexpected is that Sarah’s stream-of-consciousness ‘word salad’ style has definitely wilted with the public (watch Colbert emulate the demise of sentence structure here.) One conservative blogger accused her of being drunk, suggesting she go home. Eight years after her ascent into stardom, however brief, paying a bit more attention at home might be excellent advice.

Her daughter, Bristol — sometime Dancing With The Stars contestant and well-paid abstinence-only speaker — continues to stump for conservative religious principles while nursing her second out-of-wedlock child. Bristol is a blogger and committed critic of anything Obama proposes, especially if it includes birth control. While the young woman seems to have failed at abstinence, she’s learned radical rhetoric at Mama’s knee.

Palin speaking in 2013. Photo by Gage Skidmore / CC

Meanwhile, Sarah’s firstborn, Track, was arrested for domestic abuse.

Diagnosed with PTSD, Track was the child pointed to on the stump in 2008, serving in Iraq and providing ‘patriot’ cred for the (as yet unknown) candidate known as the ‘Hillbilly from Wasilla.’ The young man not only beat on his girlfriend this week in a drunken rage, but threatened suicide with an assault rifle, and — by golly — we just know he’s got one, don’t we? You betcha!

Sarah addressed the incident in her speech by blaming Obama for ignoring the needs of veterans, which is another of those Bagger ‘truthiness’ accusations totally lacking credibility. I was pleased with the blogger response on this Mother Jones report which included a number of veterans’ family members calling bullshit on the premise.

White House wives, Michelle Obama and Jill Biden, have made tireless efforts to see to it that returning vets get their needs met, despite funding obstruction on the right. While it’s never enough, sadly, they have overhauled support systems available to America’s military, wounded in body and/or in mind.

Still, while my heart didn’t get fonder at Sarah babbling like a tweaker, the same can’t be said for the extremist evangelicals who claim her. According to longtime Fundy leader, Ralph Reed:

Palin’s brand among evangelicals is as gold as the faucets in Trump tower. Endorsements alone don’t guarantee victory, but Palin’s embrace of Trump may turn the fight over the evangelical vote into a war for the soul of the party.

That clearly describes what we’re already seeing on the political right, candidates gone shrill and Baggers at war with establishment types. The evangelicals were not happy with Trump trashing their golden boy, Ted Cruz — who meets almost all of their particulars for a Gawd-inspired politician — but now that Sarah’s taken Trump’s part, they may forgive him his secularism, disturbingly displayed in his grotesquely shallow remarks at Falwell’s Liberty University this week.

It seems Donald is unaware of the platitude that a closed mouth gathers no feet, although that one is new (and something of a Jude-ism,) not old. Or perhaps he knows his audience even better than do I, because not all the snake handlers found Donald’s unfamiliarity with religious principle insulting, especially when he salted his usual me-me-me commentary with insipid statements like “The Bible is the best.” (South Park fans: I can almost hear Mr. Mackey follow that up with “Mkay?”)

Perhaps Donald’s introduction by Liberty’s president — Falwell’s son, Jerry Jr. — softened their expectation, likening Donald to his own dearly departed Dad (of Jerry Falwell vs. Larry Flint fame.) A Salon piece, which referred to Falwell, Pat Robertson and the Donald as hucksters, put it this way:

The comparison between Trump and Falwell Sr. is apt, as both men are vile opportunists preying on credulous idiots (although I imagine this wasn’t what Falwell Jr. had in mind). But likening Trump to Martin Luther King Jr. and Christ is preposterous and an insult to thinking Americans. Trump is a religious illiterate whose adult life in affront to the core message of the Gospel. Falwell’s glowing remarks reveal, to no one’s surprise, where his real interests lie.

I’ll give him an Amen on that one! Trump, Robertson and Falwell behave as unprincipled charlatans in pursuit of a buck, happy to relieve the widow of her last mite and follow up with a letter asking for more. Sadly, that’s what American Christianity has come to and the Donald’s saving grace in this company is that he’s only kissing up to them, not one of them.

I like that the writer has a good opinion of thinking Americans, who we can only hope are watching all this with a critical eye. They’ve been pushed right to the edge these last years and seem, finally, to be aware that they’re standing on the cliff, with no further room for missteps. Truly, if there are enough of them to push back, now, then all this angst will have served us well.

So perhaps the darkness before the dawn is too easy a cliché for this moment. It’s dark only in some minds, only in some opinions, only in some contests, and especially as we’re all beginning to see true colors everywhere we look. It’s dark only if we think we’re victims. It’s dark only if we decide we can’t overcome. It’s dark only if we refuse to look for the light or notice the transformation occurring all around us.

Poised on the meltdowns and breakthroughs Eric spoke of in this week’s piece, we are witness to true colors showing here, there and everywhere. I hope we don’t have to lose additional liberties and protections in order to see them clearly enough to reject what is cynical and heartless. And I trust that those who think the growing movement backing Bernie is just another ‘hopey changey’ exercise in unrealistic politics will rue the day they thought so.

This “ballot box” was discovered in Dallas, Texas. Photo by Post Memes / CC.

Speaking to the dysfunctionality of strident nationalism and constant warfare, Robert Koehler wrote on the concept of Earth Community, a description of where we must go if we are to survive.

At this juncture, there is only one American presidential candidate who would take this information to heart, based on colors thus displayed, and even he would be hard pressed to slow up the military-industrial complex that rules our present era (but of them all, I’ll bet Bernie would be the least afraid to do so.)

Earth Community … organizes by partnership, unleashes the human potential for creative co-operation, and shares resources and surpluses for the good of all. Supporting evidence for the possibilities of Earth Community comes from the findings of quantum physics, evolutionary biology, developmental psychology, anthropology, archaeology, and religious mysticism. It was the human way before Empire; we must make a choice to relearn how to live by its principles.

This is the goal, the vision of evolution. This is what we must embrace if we are to survive. It doesn’t sound easy, but Noam Chomsky thinks it’s as easy as making a decision. “Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism,” says Noam. “Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.”

Let’s take responsibility for the truth that the true colors — the character — of those who will assist us to get there can only reflect our own as we awaken to the possibilities. We ourselves are, first and foremost, our most ambitious project! The unexpected is not writing the script, we are! And for many of us, this process of living in crisis has given us opportunity to explore our own character, to grow into better, stronger versions of ourselves.

Although we can expect the logical consequences of what went before, we are tasked, now, to take control of our present by focusing our intention and creating a future in which we are no longer afraid of the dark, unloving or unfair to our selves or our fellows, and one in which our true colors go ahead of us as a benediction. For those with ‘eyes to see’ and ‘ears to hear,’ it can be no other way.