Living Tradition: Mercury in Capricorn

There are some concerts that are by definition musical history, and I happened to see one of them last night — Hot Tuna acoustic at the Bearsville Theater in Woodstock. Hot Tuna consist of two members of the former Jefferson Airplane — guitarist Jorma Kaukonen and bassist Jack Cassady — as well as multi-instrumentalist Barry Mitterhof, and one guest worth a whole article who I’ll identify as soon as my phone rings. This was a moment of living history: of seeing, feeling and partaking in a fully vital American folk music tradition. This would have been considered a hot concert in 1860, except for one thing: people would have been dancing.

Living tradition is the image of Mercury [slowing down toward retrograde] in Capricorn. You might say it’s good for the holiday season; we can pray that it will bring something authentic to all of our mostly-dead traditions; the ones that annoy so many people with their lurking sense of obligation and doing everything in automatic mode. For example, instead of putting lights on your Xmas tree, you might want to take it outside and light it on fire — the original tree-based, light-oriented symbol of transformation and renewal that is so central to the actual traditions of our current time of year.

If you really want to go for doing something old timey, you can invite over a few hundred of your friends and throw a party for the original “Christmas before Jesus,” Saturnalia, which was celebrated by the Romans from Dec. 17 to Dec. 25. “The festival [included] similar customs (gift giving, feasting) that are done to celebrate Christmas today,” say our friends at Wikipedia, using forensic evidence to explain the existence of the shopping holiday. “Another argument is that Christmas was set on the feast of Sol Invictus, which was also on Dec. 25.”

The invictus part is about honoring the Sun as a god, which if you ask me would be a fine idea. Unless Dick Cheney killed you for doing it. The Sun-as-god tradition goes back a long way (further than former vice president as god), and the Sun is still shining. “It now seems certain that the Romans revered the Sun, Sol (with various epithets, including invictus) as a god, without interruption, from as far back as we can trace Roman religion until the end of antiquity.”

Saturnalia (note the connection to the Sun in Capricorn, which in traditional astrology is ruled by Saturn) was the really, really fun Roman celebration, and that is saying a lot. It made Beltane debauchery look like a kindergarten pageant (though for my part, I will take fucking in the fields any day of my life over feasting and getting drunk; but heck, who said anyone had to choose). This is also the Winter Solstice, when the Sun heads north and the days get longer in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s always odd to think they’ve been getting shorter since June.

Before I log out for the morning and resume my authorship of Cosmic Confidential, be mindful of the Mercury retrograde effect: the flake factor in both people and computers. Give yourself extra time for what you need to do; make sure you have Plan B ready, and when you’re sitting at your computer and everything is going great, SAVE YOUR WORK.

If you are looking for the dates of that Mercury retrograde and many other events this winter, check the Cosmic Confidential page on that topic.