I often hear from friends and clients: “I can relate to the other signs, but I don’t understand Virgo at all.”

My response: “Well, you’re really not supposed to, that’s part of Virgo’s mystique.”

The Virgin’s smile is minxian and Sphinixan — a sexy cryptogram. Rams, lions, goats, bulls — what’s to question? But virgins? How exactly do they fit within a circle comprised mostly of critters? The months ahead offer several opportunities (and tests) to solve this oddity; starting with tomorrow’s lunation — which is very Virgo. In other words very human. It’s time to begin a shift from the instinctual to the intellectual. Bestial to hominal. To pause, assimilate and follow the guidance of a higher wisdom, a more inclusive approach.

A Sun Moon conjunction (a New Moon) is similar to an insemination, and that’s a big deal for a virgin. Myth decrees what follows: An avatar. So the time range following a Virgo New Moon is important to track. Viewed alchemically, we could say that what’s cultivated tomorrow brings forth a golden result nine months from now.

In keeping with this tantric theme, Venus via conjunction, colors the Solar Lunar nuptials, adding an element of passion and longing to the nexus. True, Venus is in her fall in Virgo — but tomorrow her trine to Jupiter in Taurus (the sign she rules) denotes an earthy libidinal theme. Dane Rudhyar notes that symbolically this particular degree of the Zodiac is “sexual in its implications” and reveals how the life force “provides us with the opportunity of demonstrating some type of skill and mastery.” So this involves a passion for aptitude, navigation and planning ahead. (Winter’s coming!)

Venus in Virgo people understand the concept that the brain is the body’s largest erogenous zone. Whoever wrote that book Think and Grow Rich must have had Venus in Virgo (actually he didn’t, but Napoleon Hill‘s Moon was there, close enough). They miraculously ponder and plan things into existence — with a zeal for problem solving. The more complex and hidden the solution, the brighter Venus in Virgo shines. And we’ll need this kind of Mercurial edge to deal with the remainder of the year — which promises to be a motherfucker. Read more

Filed Under: Astrology andNew Moon Watch

Buddha sat under a tree and explained the truth of impermanence. Alchemical artists drew, etched, carved or painted vivid images to represent that truth.

Eastern philosophy evokes nature to reveal the cycles of change — living life in accordance with flow. But the alchemists of old were crazier and wilder. They knew human beings were complex creatures and depicted our psychic atmosphere in phantasmagorical allegory. Breeze-caressed willow sprigs and geese flying south for the winter didn’t match the nitty-gritty human condition.

People are complicated creatures — a mix of animal instinct and human desire. The alchemists understood this. And so the psychological world was depicted with a tumult of clashing chemistries — trials of burning, freezing, steaming, dissolving and splitting depict the psychic clash or merging of antithetical forces.

The alchemical gold, the reward at the end of the opus — the art or work — is not just a reconnection with one’s harmonized, essential nature (that goose flying to Florida), it is a certain wisdom that only a self-reflecting consciousness comes to understand and embrace. A wisdom that transcends the limitations of duality, of time and space. The result is hard-won, but clear: When we align with the law of impermanence we discover the security of our center. We abide in the present — the ‘one moment’. And that is a golden condition. The natural condition.

It’s good to bring up gold because tomorrow’s New Moon in Leo is all about the soft, precious metal. Interestingly enough, gold is very much what Pluto’s continued grind through Capricorn unearths. You dig into the earth to free the stuff. And nothing digs quite as hard as Pluto, and no sign is earthier. Read more

Filed Under: Astrology andNew Moon Watch

To simply consider the Full Moon invites Luna directly into your head.

The evolutionary process has burrowed her image deep into your cerebral cortex. You can’t escape her colossal, fat roundness — pushing out the boundaries of your inner vision.

After Father and Mother — the two defining archetypes in our lives — there looms the Sun and the Moon. Our consciousness develops and is sustained by this quadrant of forces. And between the Sun and the Moon life on Earth thrives and dies.

The Sun radiates and sustains whereas the Moon reflects and craves, as Martha Heyneman writes, always the Moon “…is tugging at everything on her side of the surface of the earth. She sucks on the very rocks. As she passes overhead the earth’s crust rises a few inches beneath her and is elsewhere compressed, kneaded as a cat kneads your stomach.” Read more

Filed Under: Astrology andGurdjieff

“Understanding evolves in the same way as natural systems do. Each new level, whether of being or of knowledge, encompasses all the previous levels and manifests the inauguration of the dominion of a still more powerful — at the same time more concentrated and more comprehensive — unifying principle. It is as if, as the reach of its organizing power encompasses more and more diversity, the unifying principle itself goes deeper and deeper, approaching closer and closer to the center and unifying principle of the Whole.”

“This evolutionary process is not continuous but proceeds, when a system reaches a state far from equilibrium, by sudden leaps, as if by inspiration or revelation. The moment of the leap, from atom to molecule, from molecule to cell, from cell to organism, resembles those moments when, after long and anguished searching, there leaps into the mind of the scientist (from he knows not where) a theory that brings into order a vast realm of formerly unrelated data; or into the awareness of the poet the presentiment of a poem — the almost physical sensation that there is now something inside him that will give him no rest until he succeeds in bringing it to birth and precise articulation, and within whose form all the contradictory experiences of his life up to this time will take their places in harmonious relationship so that, at last, their meaning will be revealed to him.”

– Martha Heyneman from The Breathing Cathedral

Filed Under: Poetry andUniverse