The Sun, Venus, Mars and Pallas Athene are all in Taurus right now, which has a physical quality, in the form of passion, motivation and drive. Taurus is famous for things staying the way they are. (I would strain to think of one Taurus friend who has ever moved house, and I’ve known many for 10 or more years. These people really like to stay put.)
That said, we are in a moment of change, evolution and progress centered on Taurus, and that is special. Here’s a metaphor. Most musicians I know don’t like to write that much — but when they do, it’s something extraordinary. Meanwhile, this is the season of Beltane. I’ll have more to say about that soon here on blog and on PW FM.
In matters of the heart, I think this comes down to one subject — what use does jealousy serve? Can we control or possess others, and just how toxic is it when we pretend to? Why do we use relationships to cover for lack of self-esteem, and you know, how badly does that work out? And, happily, what alternatives do we have? I assure you that there are many.
As for the astrology — this week we have the first of three eclipses, two of which are along the Taurus-Scorpio axis. Thursday, April 25 at 3:57 pm is the Scorpio Full Moon. That’s also a partial lunar eclipse, not visible from the United States as it will happen during daylight here.
Eclipses come in groups. The Taurus New Moon on May 9 is an annular (not annual, rather, annular) solar eclipse, and then the following Full Moon in Sagittarius on May 25 is a penumbral lunar eclipse. These are not considered the most powerful kinds of eclipses, but I’ve seen that even modest eclipses can do their work effectively.
Think of this as one passage of time, one extended event that stretches over a month with a little margin on each side. Eclipses are transitional events; that is, they can represent developments that we think of as ‘before and after’. Said another way, they shift or alter continuity (sometimes they ‘break’ continuity but that may be too strong of a word).
They are good times to shift away from old habits and into new ones. That’s just what the energy is facilitating. I think that at this troubled phase of history, yet one with so much potential, we need to be thinking about what we want the world, and our worlds, to look and feel like. It’s necessary to focus on understanding problems but it’s more important to have a clear vision for what you want to create.
As we move through a series of three eclipses, this is the time to do that.
I am aware that in various forms of spirituality and psychology, there are questions about whether the use of strategy is a good thing. The case can be made that strategy is the opposite of coming from the heart. That said, in astrology there is a time for every purpose, and the heart of this eclipse season is a solar eclipse conjunct an important asteroid called Pallas Athene.
She is all about having a plan. I suggest you add a little planning to your vision, making sure that you keep both conscious and flexible. In our new quantum energy paced world, we need to think of probable realities, and learn how to shape and sculpt our energy to manifest where we want to be.
But we also need to do something else, which is be more bold about working together. The mantra “I do my thing and you do yours” only gets you so far on a planet where doing anything of any significance almost always requires cooperation. Here on Planet Techno, hyper faux individuality has pushed many of us into a structure or posture that’s resistant to cooperating.
Let’s get over that — it verges on useless and self-destructive. We have a lot to do — together.
Lovingly,
eric francis
I give you reason modest same Eric an Eclipse is an Eclipse which gives strength has the full moon as the spices in the kitchen. Thank you note Pallas the Joan of arc of time modern
Good Weekend 🙂
Same goes for Christianity as I see it: in its Mother Church form the compassion evaporated as soon as the abuser called Constantine got his hands on it. He would have been keen on Hitlers tactics, but the Roman Church considers him a saint. Nevertheless people have been picking up on the inspirations of Christ through their own channels and we get people like St. Francis popping up inside the Catholic Empire. I think Jesus in most of the stories is the kind of man that tends to be the norm in partnership societies. He gets hassled by the empires, but he’s not just one man, he’s an archetype upon which any human can draw. Sensitive people are rare in the Empires: no wonder. Empires beat the sensitivity right on out of us. I think this is why so many sensitive people become musicians. It’s a way to create a bubble of harmony within the cacophony of machines tearing the Earth mother to pieces.
Diva Carla: we humans as a group never switched sides. Goddess reverence has continually emerged within the occupied regions of the European empires, once partnership societies. A minority of humans have been holding the flame in closets, deep woods, basements and sometimes in the wide open the whole time the empires have been running. Indigenous people all over the world kept the balance until it was upset by invaders from Eurasia and North Africa. Even the Andean empires were less brutal and destructive than the empires around the Mediterranean. I think part of the reason is that The Americas are small compared to Eurasia: there were no horses. Horses were one of the main reasons the partnership societies had to cave into the demands of the warlords. I think the first memory of horse invasions is preserved in the myths of the centaurs.
To my knowledge I don’t know if anyone really knows what caused the last planetary climate shift, but whatever caused it the last ice age ended around 17-10000 years ago. Maybe it was humans, maybe it wasn’t. I’d guess that the idea that humans pissed off god was created by humans generations after the actual changes. Maybe a planetary body flew by close enough to pull us a little further from the sun. Maybe humans had a technology that created the changes. I think it probably wasn’t humans who ended the last ice age and brought the floods.
Just spotted this quote on my son’s blog (the born-again Presbyterian deacon). I am not in full alignment with the mechanism, but the energy refers back to Eric’s comment on authentic servants of Christ:
Pardon me for being so reactionary, but religion itself was never as shaming nor as degrading as this society we’ve built for ourselves. At least the Christian religion (in its original form) had a mechanism to cope with these pressures; you speak to a priest, you confess your sins, you do penance and are forgiven of those sins so that you may live your life. But nowadays we’re not just asked to be our own priests; we’re told implicitly by society that if we do anything wrong whatsoever, we’d better damned well keep it a secret, because if the public finds out, we will be forced into a kind of shame and self-loathing that will make life so unbearable that death will seem preferable. And every single person we know, everyone we meet, everyone we see will encourage this perception of ourselves. We tell ourselves that we’ve freed ourselves from morality and moralism, that we’re no longer held hostage by those ideas from the past; what we’ve really freed ourselves from is mercy, forgiveness, compassion, and love. And disturbs me in a way that I have trouble adequately expressing.
Here’s the link where my son found the comment: http://www.metafilter.com/94096/No-second-chances-in-the-digital-age#3203309
The high cost of Shame and scandal is a recurring theme addressed at Planet Waves.
Eric, I first read your response as “there must be balance for there to be SANCTITY. Perhaps the epochs of balance become “golden ages”. The material Universe is a swinging pendulum, and we humans create what happens on earth, at least. I remain curious, and now I have some Full Moon eclipse energy to direct. Thank you for PlanetWaves.
There is information that can be accessed directly.
The short version is, power corrupts, and there must be balance in order for there to be sanity. Monotheism, meanwhile, was imposed on people, but the Old Religion as it was known for many years had problems the way it was practiced. For one thing, it was cold. The warmth has all but evaporated from Christianity, but not from people who are authentic servants of Christ.
Wandering Yeti, that’s an interesting approach to the puzzle. When collaboration with the goddess stopped yielding plenty, we humans switched sides, and followed the jealous god of monotheism, who loves conquest and domination. What precipitated the climate change then? I’ve guessed that something was out of balance with the feminine/goddess culture to cause or allow the shift. But we’ll never know because history was overwritten by the dominators.
I like the encouragement to plan. I have a plan. I think I’ll write it down so I know what it is.
Eric: Thank you for helping us to appreciate what you have referred to as a special moment by elucidating some underlying themes of the astrology and outlining some appropriate areas in our lives to focus on in correlation with the astrology. Your question about jealousy, especially, deserves everybody’s time and deliberate consideration. Once again, you raise the bar and inspire each of us to respond in kind.
wandering_yeti: Special thanks to you as well for taking on Eric’s question in such a thoughtful and innovative manner. Your invocation of scarcity consciousness, suggesting its deep roots in history and mythology, is the inspirational thinking of an exceptional mind.
Machines sound like sick animals to my ears.
Why jealousy? I think it came out of the deserts during the time when the people who would become the violent invaders that came in wave after wave out of central Eurasia starting about 5000 years ago experienced climate change. Maybe they suddenly found themselves trapped by the limitations of the land, nothing left to eat but goats, pigs and horses. I don’t know, but at this point in the up-down of empires it seems evident to me that jealousy serves the mind who has become so used to scarcity it can’t recognize abundance anymore. Instead it uses war on the scale of society and domestic violence, racism, classism, and the cops to create scarcity on the local level.
Take the 3 goddesses who reacted to Eris’ golden apple: they couldn’t fathom a message to all of them, it must be for only one of us. Scarcity: there’s not enough apples to go around. But there’s enough resources to mine gold? Paris as judge chooses between Aphrodite- sexual relations with Helen of Troy, Hera- political power and Athena- military glory. Not long after he chooses Aphrodite’s bribe a war is started based on the idea that women are property. More scarcity. Gotta hang on to what you have cause if you lose it you’ll die. Even when that’s not true, the dominator mind works very hard to create situations where it seems true enough.
I think Barbara Hand Clow’s idea of catastrophobia is more or less accurate: we’re killing our habitat because we haven’t had the time to slow down and face the emotions connected to whatever trauma created the dominators. I think the ancestors of all our dominator cultures in the world now were actually trapped in hellishly scarce conditions for long enough to forget that Earth can be kind as well as cruel.