Ours is a notoriously immature culture. One could even go so far as to say we pride ourselves on our adolescent ethos. Youth is king; juvenility is cool. Our president was not offended when he was portrayed as a comic-book super-hero on the cover of the satirical German magazine Der Spiegel. He was flattered. Our mass obsession with physical youthfulness has been widely noted; the very word “mature” has become a euphemism for “no longer young and beautiful”. But far more insidious is the damage our cult of immaturity has inflicted upon the non-physical aspects of our beings. As a group, we lack a maturity of mind and soul. Read More >>
Poor old Saturn, the planet of responsibility, is usually quite narrowly considered. We tend to think of its lessons as material tasks and calls to filial duty: I must go to work on Monday morning; I must call Grandma on Tuesday; I must settle down and become a parent before I’m thirty. But Saturn has to do with being grown-up in all arenas of life. Its recent duet with Pluto has intensified the question of what it means to mature in all of our human roles, not just the immediate ones. Read More >>
Saturn will be conjoining our country’s Sun and our president’s Sun over the next several months and will spend two years in the sign of its detriment. Now is the time to sweep away the cobwebs around Saturn’s lore and dispense with some superstitions. To work properly, Saturn’s function should express the principles of consistency, practicality and preservation. But the core meanings of a symbol can become lost in the translation from archetype to societal expression. There has been a lot of bad press and confused thinking about Saturn’s modern face, and looking at it through the lens of the old planetary laws raises some interesting questions. Read More >>
Pluto is the planet of taboos. How appropriate it is that the god of Hell is the governor of these festering energies, always in the atmosphere but rarely discussed honestly and directly. The danger attached to these ideas causes baroque mythologies to build up around them, a system of apologias which would provide a fascinating self-study if we had the courage to look into them. In our own natal chart, Pluto’s placement points to issues we may be semi-aware of but rarely look into, because we simply don’t know what to do with them.
The recent black-out in New York City got me thinking about how rarely we get to experience a pure, velvety black night sky, studded with Moon and stars, shimmering with information. These days we city dwellers may even forget the Moon is there, unless we catch a glimpse of her as she rises between buildings, her magical luminosity not quite drowned out by the city’s electric lights.
Though the Moon is a universal icon, ubiquitous in our romantic language, in our psychology, literature and popular song, millions of us never actually see her. But there was a time when the Moon was humanity’s primary religious and temporal reference point, as comforting as a child’s nightlight, mysterious as a sovereign goddess.
As astrologers, we are the appointed timekeepers of metaphysics. Throughout history we have been the jealous guardians of the astrolabe, the hourglass, the ephemeris and the computer tables, clocks and calendars which use the sky to tell what time it is. Sky calendars are our lingua franca. Yet we must grapple with a basic conundrum: clock time and calendar time do not exist in cosmic reality. This is one of those things that is obvious once you think about it. But we don’t usually think about it. Ever since humans have been on earth, they have been looking up, gazing at the sky, tracking time. The Julian Calendar used so widely today is a very recent invention. So are all linear calendars. Read More >>
“Patriarchy is best understood as the 5,000-year birth-canal of the Great Mother Goddess.” — Richard Tarnas, at the Cycles and Symbols III Conference, San Francisco February 1997 A long, long time ago, the cosmic creation force was seen as female: the spark of life that had begun the Universe was likened to a biological mother giving birth. The earth, which fed everybody, was seen as maternal. People saw her caves as wombs, and buried their dead back within the belly of the Mother, vagina-like cowry shells clutched in their hands. Read More >>
It was apparent right away that what happened on April 20th in the Gulf of Mexico was no ordinary oil spill. Within days, the disaster moved through several meaning changes in the public mind: from that of an accident brought on by the failure of a mechanical device, to that of an example of how government fails to regulate oil companies, to that of a call to reevaluate our position on travesties against Nature.
The skies under which the Deep Water rig went down indicate to astrologers that disturbing questions are meant to be asked, right now, about the way we live in today’s world. It was a literal explosion that triggered an even more far-reaching kind of explosion: one of collective consciousness
Halloween arrives with the brisk autumn wind, when our sensibilities are undergoingthe same subtle but profound changes as Nature herself. The energy in theair is ambivalent, prickling with unease but alive with the promise ofconnecting us to life in a new way, a deeper way. Halloween reminds usof the existence of powers we cannot see, and yet still somehow understand.
Thekeen sense of nostalgia many of us feel at this time of year may be dueto cellular memory, which keeps us in touch with Halloween’s long, richhistory. Archaic collective imagery of a very special kind re-awakens everyyear when the sun is in Scorpio, sweeping us under its spell.
Halloween arrives with the brisk autumn wind, when our sensibilities are undergoingthe same subtle but profound changes as Nature herself. The energy in theair is ambivalent, prickling with unease but alive with the promise ofconnecting us to life in a new way, a deeper way. Halloween reminds usof the existence of powers we cannot see, and yet still somehow understand.
Thekeen sense of nostalgia many of us feel at this time of year may be dueto cellular memory, which keeps us in touch with Halloween’s long, richhistory. Archaic collective imagery of a very special kind
During the last few decades the inequities of patriarchy have been challenged in virtually every realm, from the legal to the linguistic. Celestial symbolism may be the last bastion of the old boy’s club that has defined civilization in the Western World, but there are stirrings of change even there. The discovery of the four major asteroids, just now, at the advent of the Millennium, symbolizes that change. From pagan sky-gods through Jehovah and Allah, male divinities have reigned in heavens perfectly suited to male-dominant cultures. Classical theologians, from whom contemporary astrologers draw so much of our imagery, voted Jupiter/Zeus as king of the sky and we have retained the male focus, with our pantheon of eight male and only two female planets, ever since.
Astrologer, writer and cultural commentator Jessica Murray brings to light the spiritual underpinnings that shape both the personal and collective experience of our time.
Read More >>
