Friends, Romans, Pagans,
Before I head for Northampton, MA in a few minutes, I’m here to send my Beltane greetings. Today is the day that the Sun crossed over the midpoint of Taurus, which is one measure of this cross-quarter holiday — the backbone of the Pagan calendar. Beltane (in Taurus time) celebrates birth and sexuality; Lammas (in Leo time) celebrates the harvest; Imbolc (in Aquarius time) celebrates survival, gestation and introspection; and Sahwen (in Scorpio time) celebrates the ancestors, death and rebirth. Together the cross quarter days represent points in a natural, Earth-based religion. They work together as part of a four-way balance that honors two aspects of the masculine and two of the feminine.
Somewhere in the dreamtime this morning I had the idea to write a brief post expressing why it is that Planet Waves and many of my other projects over the years focus on sex and various forms of eroticism; that is to say, the mission behind the message. On another world or in another time I might not need to explain that, or even do this work; and because we live in a culture where false sexuality and in particular fraudulent sexual imagery is basically forced on us, it may to some seem like more of the same.
If you’ve come to Planet Waves seeking or expecting to find an astrology website, you might find this focus surprising. Jonathan Cainer once said to me that there is no place for a discussion of sex on a proper astrology website, so I will take that as a mark of distinction. I believe that humanity is in yet another dark night of the soul where our sexuality is concerned, though some would say it’s the same dark night we’ve been in since Constantine’s day.
Collectively, we suffer from ignorance and being unfree. Both of these are cultivated like fields of wheat. A few individuals have risen above this, but most have not and our major cultural institutions have not and there are relatively few places to either find information to dispel ignorance, or to encourage freedom. I am here to do both. I view this calling less about the work of the Bodhisattva and more about something that is simply human — though I am gradually, though my art and writing about sexuality, deducing some of the basic concepts of Buddhism, and of Tantra. (I am not trained in either of these disciplines, or at least not any time recently.)