By Len Wallick
Everything we experience begins with thought,
Our words and deeds spring from thought,…”
Attributed to Buddha
A lot of energy is moving from Aquarius to Pisces this week. Today, Mercury follows the Sun into Pisces (which entered on Friday), conjoining Chiron 12 hours later. Late tomorrow or early Wednesday, depending on where you are, Mars concludes the precipitous and closely synchronized migration out of Aquarius. Mars then also conjoins Chiron about a day and a half before Jupiter exacts its square to Pluto on Friday. This square between Jupiter, the planet that traditionally rules Pisces, and Pluto is a relatively rare and meaningful aspect. That’s the backbone of astrology for the week.
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All of this combines to imply a shift or transformation. Concurrent with these events we may see a change in emphasis. Some might experience the need to re-balance or re-organize. The means and tone of expression may alter.
But before we start to look at the vertebrae of today’s astrology, let us not forget the Moon. Oh yes, again we begin another Monday with Luna in a cardinal sign. Today it’s Libra, all day. This pattern, which started with the first Monday of 2011, will begin to taper off next week.
This has been an an extraordinary run. Perhaps the time has come to put it in perspective. Maybe it was the Industrial Revolution, or perhaps the Protestant Reformation. Could be it goes back before all of that. Somewhere along the line, the day named after the Moon came to mean the beginning of the secular, business week — the day when it is a common practice to go back to work or school after at least one day off. In the United States some Mondays, such as today, are an exception to the rule, designated as a holiday for at least some of us. On the whole, however, this day has assumed a cultural identity that is identified with the start of a new cycle, both in our personal and in our political lives.
Long before time was organized into weeks, the cardinal signs had acquired an identity of their own. There is tangible evidence, going back over 10,000 years that human beings have noted, marked, tracked and commemorated the first day of Aries, Cancer, Libra or Capricorn because they correspond to perceptible and auspicious moments in the Sun’s annual cycle — the seasons. It’s extraordinary, really. All over the world, ancient people who knew little or nothing of each other observed the beginning of a new phase in their public and private lives. In other words, the first day of a cardinal sign was a sort of seasonal Monday. So it is that this year of transition starts off with an unlikely rhythm that links the ancient days of initiation with those of the present. This transition symbolically provides not only a bridge between cardinal sign templates, but also a between-epochs past to this present moment.