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On November 7 at 9:36 AM-PDT, the Sun hits exactly 15 degrees of Scorpio. That might not sound exactly earth-shaking, but if you were a Druid, it would be a really big deal. Actually, you might still be in bed recovering from the previous evening’s festivities – more about that point in a little while.
Most traditional cultures were very aware of the Summer and Winter Solstices. The noon-day Sun would have reached its highest or lowest point in the sky. The days would start getting longer or shorter. All that is fairly obvious even to a casual observer, so our ancestors figured it out long ago in prehistory. I suspect that knowledge of the Equinoxes came a little bit later – again, no one knows the date because it all happened such a long time ago, but noticing that night and day were of equal length and that the Sun now rose or set due east or due west seems slightly less self-evident than the “return of the light.”
Anyway, those four points – the two Solstices and the two Equinoxes – became the skeleton of the yearly calendar in every culture, not to mention the basis of the western Zodiac. They divided the year into four quarters – what we came to call the four seasons. Pretty much universally around the world, those four transition points were marked by festivals. Whether that was to please the gods and goddesses, or just because people like parties, is hard to say.
We’re in the midst of the epochal, but painfully languorous, entrance of Pluto into Aquarius. We know it will change the world – Pluto’s sign changes always do – but please don’t hold your breath. The process won’t be complete until Pluto finally kisses Capricorn goodbye on November 19, 2024, a little over one year from now. And that will only be the beginning – Pluto won’t be done with Aquarius until January 2044.
Those of you who have been following Pluto’s patchwork transition know that it has already been in Aquarius once. That was for just 39 days, starting on March 23rd, 2023, whereupon it retrograded back into Capricorn, where it remains today. But on October 10th, Pluto turns direct and heads for the Aquarian frontier again. It crosses the line on January 20th – only to return once more into Capricorn on September 1, 2024 before definitively entering Aquarius 78 days later.
The push-pull you can feel in that long recitation of dates is not just happening up in the sky – it’s happening here on Earth too. “As above, so below” strikes again. The back-and-forth in the heavens is echoed here on planet Earth.
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On Friday evening, May 26, in Seattle, I presented a keynote talk. The title of my talk was one of my favorite subjects – “Reconciling Astrology and Spirituality.” We’ve put the talk up on Youtube. You can watch it here:
Thinking back, maybe I should have titled this keynote address “Reconciling Astrology and Spirituality (or trying to.) It’s not always easy!
In my twenties, I wrote my first astrology book – one that never saw print. It was basically a statistical study attempting to prove astrology in a scientific way. If you’re interested, I spoke of it in a bit more detail during the keynote. I bring it up here because one of my (many) rejection letters from publishers contained a line that I’ve been wrestling with ever since: “The thrust of modern astrological publishing is egocentric and I suspect it will remain that way.”
Yikes! Do we actually “resemble that remark?” Sad to say, the answer is often yes. There’s no shortage of silly ego-flattery in pop astrology – telling people what they want to hear and neutralizing any desire in them to improve themselves. Often such astrology encourages people to blame their problems on everyone else or on their “bad aspects.” In every case, it’s “me, me, me” – and that’s the definition of egocentricity.
As August opens, the Sun is in mid-Leo faithfully advancing about one degree per day. Meanwhile, Venus is retrograde, having made a station near the end of Leo back on July 22nd. That means that the Sun is going forward and Venus is going backwards and that they’re locked on a collision course. The two finally come together in a conjunction on August 13th. That happens in 20 degrees 28 minutes of Leo. After that, Venus will continue to move backwards until September 3rd, forty-three days after turning retrograde. By that time, the Sun will be well into Virgo.
Built into that ho-hum recitation of dates is one of the most mysterious, elegant mysteries of our solar system: the Venus Pentangle. It will take us a few steps to understand it, starting with the fact there are two distinct types of Sun-Venus conjunctions – inferior ones and superior ones.. Most astrologers, myself included, don’t make much of a fuss about their differences, but maybe we should.
Think of an archery target with concentric rings. The Sun is the bull’s eye. The first ring out is Mercury’s orbit. The second is Venus’s orbit. The third one is us. Mars orbits further out in space, so it would be the fourth ring, and so on, out to Pluto and beyond. When Venus is lined up halfway between Earth and the Sun, we have the inferior conjunction. But then sometimes Venus aligns with the Sun from the opposite side of its orbit – that’s the superior conjunction.
