The first chapter of Mars Calling came out last night. You can see a sample of that on our splash page at PlanetWaves.net, and if you like what you read, you may subscribe from there. It’s an amazing 10,000-word essay covering all things Aries, and many cool Aries men, co-written by Paloma Todd & me. Her starting point was the Sun, mine was the Moon. We integrated our ideas and the result is a chapter called The Dark Side of the Sun. you can check out a nice sized sample on our main page.
Dear Friend and Reader:
Note: the full edition of this entry will appear in Planet Waves Astrology News Friday. The expanded, edited and illustrated version has been moved to the subscriber area. It will be emailed to subscribers at about 9 am Friday.
Today is an exciting aspect day. The Sun is making aspects to Eris (a conjunction) and Jupiter (square). The Sun is also aspecting Chiron and is about to aspect Neptune. The Moon is in late Gemini and will sweep through the whole aspect structure from the cardinal sign Cancer over the next 48 or so hours.
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So who or what is Eris? If we take a structuralist approach, that is, looking at the structure of the myth, she is a psychological component we have suppressed or denied. Given that the Eris myth involves a competition for which goddess is the most beautiful, and the prize (Helen of Troy) is the most beautiful woman in the world, we may have something about sex, sexual imagery and desirability.
The opposite of Eris is pious. The opposite of piety is being real, being in your body, expressing your needs. If you do not do this, then there are few possibilities — some version of the Trojan War (usually acted out in divorce court), the abdication of one’s personhood (that is, a tangible sense of one’s existence, followed by community, purpose and creative mastery), and generally, depression and misery.
That is to say, fragmentation. Most people do in fact walk around fragmented; in chunks of themselves.
Eris is in Aries and I think that in many respects, Aries in our era is about Eris. Aries is the sense of self and the right to exist. We do a lot of experimenting with identity these days, but most of it is virtual. It is fast arriving at the point that anything that occurs in the physical world is perceived as, or sold to us as, a kind of threat — unless it involves spending money.
Eris is here to teach us to return to the roots of our identity. I do not mean identity as an abstract concept; I mean identity as the direct experience of self and of existence. We may be so far from this that it sounds like an abstraction. We may feel like we can express our “true self” more in Second Life than we can in our First Life.
Now, you may think this is a cool idea, and I make it sound appealing and logical and even practical. The question we have to ask ourselves is: what exactly do we do? How do we identify these cast off parts, and what do we do with them once we find them?
Moreover, how do you relate to others — your partner, your friends — when you’re changing and accepting things about yourself that they don’t accept about themselves? What if you’re asking questions others are not asking? What if you notice things that nobody else seems to notice? What if you’re looking for answers but nobody is willing to raise the questions? Well, there are a lot of ways to avoid a meaningful dialog. There are a lot of ways to avoid receiving meaningful information about ourselves.
I would like to leave that question open for now: I would like to leave it to you.
Oracle for today returns May 02, 2006 – Gemini – Daily from the Jonathan Cainer horoscope by Eric Francis.
You may feel the creeping tide of pressure urging you to action. You may sense that you know what you want; so you had better go for it – now. If you can sit with this feeling, and be aware with all your senses and all the different forms of your intelligence, you’ll notice that the information keeps coming. It’s not any special fact or idea that you need, but rather the deeper source that’s informing you of everything you need to know. What you’re experiencing and learning is leading somewhere. Pay attention: try not to draw conclusions. A revelation you’re not quite expecting is at hand.
Here are your daily aspects, courtesy of Serennu:
Thursday 10 April 2008
Mercury (13+ Aries) quintile Hades (25+ Gemini)
Mercury (13+ Aries) conjunct Pallas (13+ Aries)
Mercury (14+ Aries) trine Great Attractor (14+ Sagittarius)
Mercury (14+ Aries) sextile Nessus (14+ Aquarius)
Pandora (21+ Scorpio Rx) quincunx Eris (21+ Aries)
Sisyphus (23+ Libra Rx) opposite Amor (23+ Aries)
Atlantis (22+ Libra Rx) opposite 1992 QB1 (22+ Aries)
Venus (5+ Aries) semisquare Chiron (20+ Aquarius)
Mercury (14+ Aries) trine Ixion (14+ Sagittarius Rx)
Pallas (14+ Aries) trine Great Attractor (14+ Sagittarius)
Venus (5+ Aries) semisquare Sedna (20+ Taurus)
Pandora (21+ Scorpio Rx) sextile Jupiter (21+ Capricorn)
Sun (20+ Aries) quintile Kronos (2+ Cancer)
Mercury (14+ Aries) quincunx Hidalgo (14+ Scorpio Rx)
Pallas (14+ Aries) sextile Nessus (14+ Aquarius)
Sun (21+ Aries) quincunx Pandora (21+ Scorpio Rx)
Sun (21+ Aries) square Jupiter (21+ Capricorn)
Sun (21+ Aries) conjunct Eris (21+ Aries)
Venus (5+ Aries) trine Hylonome (5+ Sagittarius Rx)
Sisyphus (23+ Libra Rx) septile Ixion (14+ Sagittarius Rx)
Vesta (25+ Pisces) square Hades (25+ Gemini)
Mercury (15+ Aries) septile Neptune (23+ Aquarius)
Mercury (15+ Aries) square Mars (15+ Cancer)
Venus (5+ Aries) septile Nessus (14+ Aquarius)
Jupiter (21+ Capricorn) square Eris (21+ Aries)
This may have already been mentioned, but if not……
Has anyone noticed that the letters of the word ERIS are included in the word aRIES?
In the ancient art of wordplay – they are related!
I read your 4/11 edition with much interest. I’ve been fantasizing not about purity these days but about prostitution. Sexual healing may be more accurate—using my sexuality to help men to heal, and to heal women by way of example. Whereas this helps me to connect with my sexual core and power, I also wonder about whether this fantasy keeps me locked into a problem similar to that of accepting or otherwise taking-on projections of purity. In such fantasies, I am there for them, not me. My desire is still in the background, expect as the desire to be an object, albeit a healing one, for the other. Interestingly, this is what I do for a living—psychotherapy, that is, which may a form of prostitution, or a cousin of it. And what I have learned here is something about the essential need to be in it for me in some way. While my presence does function to help others heal, in order for this arrangement to work for me I must be grounded in my own truth.
In the sexual realm being grounded in my own truth has been challenging. I cannot locate a bodily sense of sexual truth. It seems to me that in addition to purity being about psychological abuse and neurological damage, it is also about the destruction of the subtle body, the energetic body, the body of desire. I hesitate to write “destruction,” wondering if it is too strong a word. Perhaps it is. I don’t want to believe it is lost forever, but I have been searching for mine for two years now, with intensive psychotherapy, body work, and meditation, and I cannot find it. What aroused the search, though, was an awakening of just this bodily level of desire to which I am referring and so I know it has been possible to access at some time. The problem for me was that it disappeared as abruptly as it came into being. I talk to many women who don’t feel sexual desire in their bodies, and it does not seem to be just the result of a mental concept or belief interfering with the desire. (Reconstruct the beliefs and the desire returns.) The desire is just nowhere to be found. Our beliefs have sunk so deeply into our cores that the energetic body of desire requires nothing short of a miraculous resurrection.
I do believe that there are many avenues out there to help with this resurrection. However, the continued forces that work against this can so easily squash the progress an individual is making at any given time. I don’t need to say that we still value bodies that look only a certain way, prescribe acceptable sexual practices and behaviors, and feel threatened by raw desire—but I will say it. I appreciate all that you do, either intentionally or by way of “side-effect,” to change this. Regretfully, it is one of the few areas of my life where I find it difficult to pull myself out of cynicism; though the few rays of hope that I do have often emanate from your writing. And I am open to more hope.
++ Trust me: the Catholics and all their successors know exactly what they are doing when they crack the spine of sexuality. They create a bunch of scared, unconscious neuters and geldings who try to go around acting human but usually, in their desperate hunger, resort to cannibalism. ++
That observation should be nailed to cathedral doors all over this planet.