Today’s Oracle takes us to the Scorpio weekly for April 20, 2012
Do you want your relationships to be easy, or do you want them to be real? I suggest that you see things in terms of these two options, at least initially. By real I don’t mean difficult; challenges usually show up in the context of denial or resistance rather than by a conscious embrace of what is so. However, I suggest you notice the way that you tend to make other peoples’ issues into your own problems. Being real also means being real about knowing where the edge is between you and somewhere else, and knowing when it’s appropriate to cross over that line. Clearly you are being drawn into a deep situation of some kind, if only by your curiosity. The place where a warning should go off is when you find yourself adopting problems that simply are not your own, on the excuse that you love someone. The thing to focus on is creative purpose and a kind of calm, centered passion about life itself — not the relationship.
The Daily Oracle offers a horoscope selected randomly by our Intelligent Archive Oracle program, unique to Planet Waves. It’s also a database of my horoscopes going back to the late 1990s. You can use the Intelligent Archive Oracle to answer questions and give you ideas for how to handle problems and situations you cannot see through. This feature is available to our All Access and Core Community members. See this link for more information.
Imagine you are standing on astrology’s zodiac circle of signs just inside the territory of Leo, where the Sun is ruler (and where the emblematic Sun will be after tomorrow). Then, envision a friend standing in the very last part of the sign Cancer, where the Moon is ruler (and where the symbolic Sun is today). Finally, picture holding hands with your friend, and that your hands are clasped directly over the line (or cusp) where Cancer and Leo meet.
Then, please allow yourself to imagine that you and your friend agree to each go your own way for the time being, walking around the zodiac in opposite directions at exactly the same pace to meet precisely on the other side, 180 degrees away. (Note: you and your friend are not impersonating any particular planets in the sky in this exercise.)
If you were to walk in a counter-clockwise direction (emulating direct motion), you would eventually leave Leo behind and step into Virgo, where Mercury rules.
Your friend, walking clockwise (impersonating retrograde motion) would simultaneously retrace Cancer to eventually enter Gemini (albeit through the back door) where Mercury also rules. Interesting, that.
Your own journey around the circle would next take you from Virgo to Libra, ruled by Venus. In synchronized ambulation, your friend would step into Taurus (the other sign ruled by Venus) just as you were entering Libra.
Continuing your circular journey, Scorpio (where Mars alone ruled before the discovery of Pluto) would be your next destination, and your friend will concurrently have reached Aries — the other dominion of Mars. The next sign on your itinerary after Scorpio would be Sagittarius, domain of Jupiter. In the meantime, your partner would be making her or his way into Pisces, where Jupiter was also preeminent before the discovery of Neptune.
At the end of your trip would be Capricorn, realm of Saturn. Your collaborator would likewise conclude explorations in Aquarius, where Saturn also reigned without rival until the discovery of Uranus.
Clasping hands once again, but this time where Capricorn and Aquarius meet, you might share the details of your separate journeys. If such a discussion were to include the succession of signs (and corresponding rulers) respectively traced, your combined experiences would reveal an impenetrably ancient order in the zodiac — an order that begins at the cusp between Cancer and Leo.
There are no archaeological or anthropological records of astrology in the process of development. No matter where on Earth you go, no matter what culture you study, the earliest surviving evidence of astrology is of a fully functional system. Hence, the documented, as opposed to speculated, origin of how the original planetary rulers (all visible to the unaided eye) came to be arranged on the zodiac is lost to irretrievable antiquity.
When the Sun enters Leo tomorrow shortly before 11:31 pm EDT (03:30:24 UTC Thursday), the solar symbol of consciousness will once again make its own annual journey across what is thus a highly consequential cusp. It’s the place where this missive first asked you to imagine your hand conjoined with that of your friend. The place where a mysterious, yet entirely natural order in the zodiac begins.
Assuming you are awake as tomorrow segues into Thursday, you might want to stand in simple awareness of that mystery. You may want to sit with the apparently simple cypher that so many take for granted. Rather than trying to parse out the details of aspects, getting all wrapped up in what it ‘means’, you could simply consider feeling the moment and connecting with times long past, beyond scholastic recovery.
For in every cell of your body, there is a record of life’s entire history on Earth. In your DNA (and probably many other cellular components), mysteries are recorded. Through your genes and the essence of your physical being, all that preceded history is understood. That understanding would include the origins of astrology.
Whether astrology was somehow developed by humanity, or whether it was in some way bequeathed to us whole is something you can grasp and know, but not through the abstract machinations of your mind. That’s how tomorrow or Thursday would be an appropriate occasion to put your intellect aside for awhile.
That’s how this week constitutes a good and appropriate time to ask the manifestations of fire, earth, air and water in your body to tell you of their own journey as the Sun once again crosses a consequential cusp. Perhaps by doing so, you can achieve a significant crossing as well.
As of this morning, the Moon is in cardinal Libra, bringing a desire for more diplomatic and graceful interactions than might have occurred yesterday. Did you get a little inflammatory on social media yesterday, like I did? Whoops. Today’s Libra Moon might urge some finessing of your stance — not backtracking per se, but a reconsideration of what is truly justified.
Photo by Amanda Painter.
The bigger story, or at least part of it, is the Sun in the next-to-last degree of Cancer. Wednesday night at 11:30 pm (Thursday at 3:30 UTC) the Sun will ingress Leo.
Leo is a fixed sign, which means we’re in the middle of the season — yet the big news of this season is Venus stationing retrograde Saturday.
In today’s Planet Waves FM, Eric will be looking at the station retrograde of Venus in the first degree of Virgo. This is happening conjunct an unusual point called Transpluto, which has a way of hyper-focusing Virgo tendencies.
Eric will also begin the discussion of his Astrology for Artists approach to reading charts and putting astrological information to work.
For some preliminary thoughts on the Sun entering Leo and Venus stationing retrograde, check out Monday’s Astrology Diary — a collaboration between Amy Elliott and Eric. With these two astrological events happening so close together, “the effect is multiplied, and you may feel a condensation of experience.”
Today’s Oracle takes us to the Libra weekly for Oct. 25, 2002
Venus moving backwards through Scorpio, a sensitive, restless region of your solar chart, is likely to have you assessing yourself scrupulously. Encounters with your own inner thoughts may prompt the feeling of unusual insecurity followed by deep knowingness, followed by the sense that a thousand little parts of you must die in order for you to be whole and free. This is, of course, my impression of an astrology chart. But in any event, please take it easy on you. Self-evaluation needs to be done very gently. The past needs to be handled like crystal, and it contains important revelations now. Fortunately, people from the past are closer now than they’ve been in many months, and are open to listening.
The Daily Oracle offers a horoscope selected randomly by our Intelligent Archive Oracle program, unique to Planet Waves. It’s also a database of my horoscopes going back to the late 1990s. You can use the Intelligent Archive Oracle to answer questions and give you ideas for how to handle problems and situations you cannot see through. This feature is available to our All Access and Core Community members. See this link for more information.
Merriam Webster defines demagogue as “a political leader who tries to get support by making false claims and promises and using arguments based on emotion rather than reason.”
In our recent history, the last fifteen years or so, every presidential election season has had at least one demagogue. Republican Presidential candidate and former House Leader Newt Gingrich was one in 2012.
In 2008, it was John McCain’s running mate Sarah Palin. In 2000 and 2004 George W. Bush’s “aw shucks” charm exuded a plain-and-deadly charm of willful ignorance coupled with entitlement and power that thrilled his Republican base.
This year, for the 2016 presidential campaign, we have billionaire Donald Trump. While declaring his candidacy he hit press gold by vilifying Mexican immigrants as killers and rapists. This was followed by an onslaught of corporate abandonment: the Miss Universe Pageant that he sponsored; Univision — the Hispanic American network with domestic and international viewership in the millions — especially for soccer; NBC; the Pro Golfers Association; NASCAR and Macy’s.
Macy’s dropped Trump’s clothing line, which is made in Mexico. With Trump a traditional sponsor of the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving parade — a gaudy national display of colorful plastic cartoon character gasbags — their firing of Trump, a human gasbag, is a beautiful irony.
The best political art coming fresh out the gate early in the silly season has to come from Mexico — the Donald Trump piñata. I understand there is also a Donald Trump butt plug, but that could be urban legend. Yet, even by demonizing Mexico and Mexicans, he acts as a form of stimulus for Mexico’s domestic economy. He is a perfect corporate product.
Donald Trump has no equal in branding himself. It seems as though he can do this in a matter of minutes. Having already made a name in real estate, entertainment and tabloid-worthy divorces, he really is a man who doesn’t give a shit. He doesn’t have to. He has done what every American craving entitlement wants to do. He wants to make you and me (well maybe not ME) a success story, the good old-fashioned capitalist way. He does that by bringing down others. They’re losers. They must be fired. They are not worthy in the eyes of His Corporate Lordship: immigrants, poor people and even other Republicans.
Trump’s bombast is honey to the feverish press, breathlessly waiting for the next stupid thing to come out of his mouth. He has accomplished in three short weeks what the other Republican candidates are dying for — relentlessly focused attention. And that’s exactly what he wants. It’s this that makes him quite dangerous.
His recent attack on Senator John McCain, who called him out for “riling up the crazies” in the base, incited Trump to double down on his initial insult. He not only said McCain — a POW in Hanoi for five years — was “no hero in Vietnam,” he continued by saying McCain has made America less safe. Agree with him or not — because if John McCain was president, he WOULD make America less safe — Trump is laying the traditional leadership of the Republican Party on an ironing board and flattening it.
Trump uses ‘winner’ words, which is more than red meat to Tea Party lizard brains. It’s filet mignon. Racist, classist, ruthless and greedy. He doesn’t care. He is Sarah Palin with bigger hair. He is the Republican id — the personality component made up of unconscious psychic energy that works to satisfy basic urges, needs and desires.
Whatever we think about Donald Trump, he knows Americans as consumers of products, and he is marketing himself as the ultimate product: a corporate leader who dreams of becoming President of the United States. He has abandoned campaign methods of ‘civil discourse’ by career politicians like Governors Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Chris Christie, and he’s eclipsing his fellow Republicans in the process. It’s working with the most cherished Republican demographic — the Tea Party base. Early polling shows Trump with the lead amongst his other Republican challengers.
He has sucked the air out of his competition’s campaign bandwagon tires. Who are these other guys again? He is doing exactly what Sarah Palin did in 2008 and George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. He makes it acceptable — exciting even — to stroke the beast of intolerance, bigotry, unabashed thoughtless greed and militarism.
Hopefully, Trump’s bubble of political prominence will not last. Early risers in the primaries rarely last, at least according to conventional wisdom. So we hope that danger will pass soon enough.
Yet the greasy slick of Trump’s campaign rhetoric will remain a form of sanctioning that it is okay to talk like that and to think like that. Immigrants, career politicians, and everyone else be damned. Trump, as our latest iteration of demagoguery, is a human gasbag stroking the beast. Even if (and when) he loses, that slick will remain long after the gasbag has gone, and all it takes is one fool with a match…
Today’s Oracle takes us to the Cancer weekly for May 30, 2002
Desire the elusive desire the complicated desire the fierce consuming destroying creating force that drives the universe forward. (Pluto is over-rated in this regard: Mars does much of his actual work and now Mars is with you.) How would it feel if you took up your desire as strength? How would it feel if you exonerated yourself of all the misgivings surrounding this most necessary and urgent expression of humanity? As it turns out you don’t have much of a choice in the matter.
The Daily Oracle offers a horoscope selected randomly by our Intelligent Archive Oracle program, unique to Planet Waves. It’s also a database of my horoscopes going back to the late 1990s. You can use the Intelligent Archive Oracle to answer questions and give you ideas for how to handle problems and situations you cannot see through. This feature is available to our All Access and Core Community members. See this link for more information.
This week the Sun is in the last few degrees of the sign Cancer, and will ingress Leo at 11:30 pm EDT on Wednesday (3:30 am Thursday UTC). Meanwhile, Venus, having just entered Virgo, is slowing to a halt and will station retrograde on Saturday morning (5:28 EDT / 9:28 UTC).
We are experiencing a sign change of the Sun and also an inner planet station-retrograde at the same time.
Either of those could, on their own, have a pronounced effect. Together, the effect is multiplied, and you may feel a condensation of experience.
Things — feelings, facts, different aspects of truth — may seem to ‘come out’ or to reveal themselves, with a lot of emphasis on a relatively short period of time.
Other factors suggest there’s a need for caution around perfectionism, particularly in matters of the heart, and of creative expression. If you are striving to be emotionally and creatively authentic, I would remind you that perfection is not a value.
A natural aesthetic sense can be manifested, through Virgo, into a form of artistic expression. Pay attention to your creative impulses over the next week or two. Be wary of any obstacles arising from over-precision or self-doubt; just let the inspiration flow.
Of course, Venus’ best-known domain is over love and relationships. As with any inner planet retrograde, you may get a feeling of retracing your steps, going over old ground, or simply looking within. Decisions made at this time might also be revisited as Venus returns through the last degrees of Leo.
Venus is retrograde for only about six weeks every 18 months — the shortest total time of all the planets. During these special periods she looms large — both literally and figuratively, since she is closest to the Earth at this point.
What a week — a potent New Moon and new images of Pluto, the lord of the underworld — or at least one of his masculine celestial representatives. While writing my column for last week, I had no idea Pluto and its surrounding themes, particularly the nuclear ones, would be making an appearance on the world stage. Now that I’m paying attention again, I’m delighted to see the underworld getting some airtime.
Photo by graywacke/A Landing a Day
I shouldn’t be surprised, really, that something related to nuclear power made headlines this week. The detonation of the first nuclear bomb does, of course, coincide with the ‘discovery’ of Pluto, reflecting its themes of complete destruction, chaos and volcanic eruptions from down below — be that below place the underbelly of the Earth or the unconscious.
Of course we also have an invigorated thread about underworld themes. Although I’ve enjoyed looking at the various images of Pluto, nothing has sparked excitement within me quite as much as this article, which discusses the naming of many of Pluto’s newly discovered features for creatures related to underworld mythologies. I see in that the potential for some old mythologies to re-enter the collective consciousness.
My spirituality has evolved to embrace the mythological as vital to our culture’s ability to navigate a global rite of passage. Realizing that all of those underworld mythologies are being re-animated within collective consciousness during this time is exciting to me not just because it’s all so intellectually fascinating and gives us the opportunity to actually talk and think about death, but because those images and stories get the imagination pumping.
Juicy imaginations are the key to developing a new, sustainable, global mythology or mythologies. More than that, a hearty imagination is a key ingredient in scientific breakthrough, and something we need more of if we’re going to create sustainable options for things like clean energy.
According to Joseph Campbell, “myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.” Underworld mythologies are particularly important because they place us in contact with the life/death/life cycle and therefore in contact with the organization of the universe.
Western culture has such a deep and profound fear of death. We constantly attempt to banish the reality of death, stripping our social, psychological and cosmological views of any recognition of this completely unavoidable facet of life. Instead of using mythology or even natural cycles to illustrate the regenerative and creative aspects of death, we act as if the death of a body is a definitive and concrete ending. It is my belief that this avoidance inhibits our ability to have healthy, transformative relationships at the soul level with other beings, with our food and surroundings, and with ourselves.
A teacher of mine often says that the human psyche is constantly throwing up seeds for a new global myth, marking the signs of spiritual revolution, and these are most often and obviously found in dreams. Dreams are the way that the psyche speaks to us, and in times of paradigm shift dream images can help us to understand how our personal unconscious speaks, elucidating our ever-shifting personal mythologies within the context of the collective.
It often seems like as we become capable of understanding our personal mythologies, whether by acknowledging past stories we’ve told ourselves, or recognizing frameworks we’re moving into, we have to encounter and experience them. We then add those stories to the deepening collective myth of the times we live in — even if we live in a culture that seems to think ‘myth’ is a synonym for ‘lie’. The beauty and the burden here lies in that as we shape these interwoven stories, we have the power to transform them.
I wonder sometimes whether we should be reworking old myths or going off on an entirely new path. It seems that in many ways, the obvious answer is that we are doing the latter, creating something completely different. Carl Jung believed that we would ultimately re-work and revitalize the Christian myth. In that sense, the nuclear myth, which seems to be the prevailing myth of our time, encompasses the Beast-Messiah complex quite nicely.
I don’t know, though. I wonder how our general cultural ambivalence towards mythology, and unconscious creation of overarching stories, increases our feelings of being acted upon by outside forces, and of being victims. I like to think we can move away from waiting for something from the outside to save us, or blaming something out there for our hurts and pains.
Perhaps all of this Pluto stuff will just fall away, with only a little ripple of collective awareness of underworld mythologies. It’s quite the dynamic, isn’t it? With the closing of the Uranus-Pluto square, I’m intrigued at the possibility of a cultural deepening. Not that I’m suggesting pictures from outer space will definitely trigger that. But I am aware that those Uranian lightning bolts and the mental trauma and liberation associated with them tend to register more quickly than the cavernous tumult of emotional Plutonian transformation. So we shall see, I suppose.
