This week between the Libra equinox and the Aries Full Moon is absolutely vibrating with the potential for deeper engagement with your world (inner and especially outer) on all levels. You may feel it as excitement or intimidation. But Ceres moving onto the Aries Point — by way of ingressing the sign Cancer just before 3 am EDT Wednesday — is a reminder that the point of letting go of the old is to allow in the new, and that it doesn’t happen in a social vacuum even when we’re talking about food attitudes.
Ceres is a minor planet named for the goddess of agriculture and the harvest. It’s not your ordinary minor planet — it was the first discovered, in 1801, and in the first group of dwarf planets, designated in 2006. In mythology, she’s associated with mourning when her daughter spent part of each year in the underworld with Pluto resulted in the seasons. As such, this planet most frequently turns up with themes about food and its production, the idea of nourishment in general, and mother-daughter dynamics. Often when Ceres interacts with any of the early cardinal degrees we see news about our food supply pop up in the media.
In fact, as Ceres has been approaching Cancer, a story about Monsanto’s Roundup-ready GMO corn causing tumors in rats has been in the news (the story made it into Friday’s subscriber issue). As Ceres actually enters Cancer and moves into even closer aspect with the Uranus-Pluto square, we may very well see some developments in this story as well as other issues surrounding our food supply and eating habits (the topic of arsenic in U.S. brands of rice is also on the radar again).
The Sabian symbol for the first degree of Cancer suggests that paradigm-shift around food is inevitable. The question is, with everything else trying to get our attention right now, will something as basic as food be able to cut through the static?
The Sabian symbols are part of a channeled system famously interpreted by Dane Rudhyar in his book An Astrological Mandala. There is a symbol for each degree of the zodiac. The one for 01 Cancer is: “On a ship the sailors lower an old flag and raise a new one.” Rudhyar adds the keynote, “A radical change of allegiance exteriorized in a symbolical act: a point of no return.”
If that doesn’t say ‘paradigm shift’, I don’t know what does. Any idea what sort of “symbolical act” you may choose tomorrow? Perhaps you will know it only as you do it — or in hindsight, as you look back and realize what some seemingly small choice actually set in motion.