The Rites of Spring

We are in the last days of the astrological year, which resets with the Vernal Equinox on March 20, just past noon ET.

Photo by Steve Parker.

This was preceded by the Pisces New Moon on Saturday. And it will be followed closely by Mercury stationing retrograde, which takes place on Thursday.

Starting yesterday, here’s the sequence of events in synopsis format: Pisces New Moon, very close to Chiron; Sun conjunct Chiron; Sun goes void of course; Sun enters Aries; Mercury stations retrograde in Aries. When the Sun reaches the vernal equinox, it’s directly aligned with the Aries Point, the “reset” point in the astrological year. It’s like a long day ends at midnight, and a new day begins.

The Aries Point has a special quality that seems to be dominating our lives now, which is that we’re standing in this frantic crossroads between the individual and the collective. That’s the feeling we have of being blown in the winds of change, of so much happening nobody can keep track, and of time moving so fast that it seems like we live a month in a week.

We live with this sense of not knowing what’s going to happen, though unlike many other times in the past, there’s not a moment to recover from one wave of feeling and experience before the next one comes along. This might seem like a distinctly current phenomenon, yet we’ve been living this way for a long time — though the speed of events is increasing exponentially.

More than half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan described our lives as a media-induced maelstrom — a powerful whirlpool in an ocean or river, which it’s easy to get caught in, and spin around and around.

Photo by Lalit Kumar.

There may, in fact, be a time anomaly going on, which we covered in an ancient issue of Planet Waves from 2012, called We’re About to Go Off the Map, with several theories of what it means that the Mayan Calendar “ended” on the winter solstice of 2012. There are other Mayan models of time that represent us as living in a cyclical rather than linear model, with each loop of the spiral getting shorter and shorter as it covers the same amount of “time.”

But let’s stick to this week. The blend of the equinox and Mercury stationing retrograde right at the midpoint of Aries is already proving to be turbulent. We’ve been in Mercury shadow phase for a couple of weeks (that’s the warmup to the retrograde) and the wheels have certainly been squeaky.

You might refresh your memory with an old article called An Expert’s Guide to Mercury Retrograde. To sum up, though, one theme so far has been misunderstandings. So, avoid making assumptions. Don’t decide for yourself what someone told someone else, or what they think of you.

In the public sphere, we are about to witness some particularly spectacular events the next three or so weeks. The fireworks shed has been on fire for a while, and we’ve been staring at it wondering what could possibly happen — and the answer is everything.

Positions of the planets at the Aries Point and the Capricorn point at the equinox on Tuesday, March 20.

My favorite bit of astrology involves what is currently parked on the Aries Point right now, and on the Capricorn Point, its identical twin, 90 degrees away: a lot of outer planets, though I only need to describe two of them, with the presence of Mars involved.

A very slow-moving point called Salacia is making a long, slow conjunction to the Aries Point. Salacia implies salty, and salacious. We have seen a lot of that the past six or so months, with every sordid detail about every bad thing (involving sex) that ever happened to a public figure spilling out into the open.

Square Salacia are Mars (energy, desire, aggression) and Pholus (the uncontrolled release; the small cause getting a big effect).

Now all three points team up, as Mars and Pholus make a nice tight square to Salacia, and the Sun makes a conjunction to Salacia and the Aries Point. Said simply, this could be a rather salacious week. I am mainly thinking about Stormy Daniels. This is the porn star (and a fine one, too) who, weeks before the 2016 election, was paid $130,000 to shut up about an affair she had with Donald Trump.

The problem that Donald Trump has is that he usually gets his way by being willing to be shameless. However, he’s met his match in a woman who has clean hands politically, and sticky fingers otherwise — a woman who is shameless about her body, her voice, her vulva, and her desire nature. When someone is that liberated, which would seem in Stormy’s case to be both spiritually and physically, they are not easily “put in their place.”

I cover Stormy’s chart on the air at WKNY, Radio Kingston, tonight at 10 pm ET.

Catch you then.