The Sun and the Galactic Center

Dear Friend and Reader:

The Galactic Center is not a shopping mall in Los Angeles. It’s a place in outer space, located in late Sagittarius to be exact. But not that outer of space, since it’s the center of our particular island in space, our galaxy, the Milky Way. The Galactic Center is a cluster of stars, a black hole and dark matter located about 26,000 light years away from where you’re sitting. You may think that’s pretty far — light travels 186,000 miles per second, and there are a lot of seconds in 26,000 years, but on cosmic terms it’s right around the corner.

Today, the late Pisces Sun is square the Galactic Center, meaning that it aspects the core of our galaxy at 90 degrees. The Sun is in late Pisces, the core is in late Sagittarius. The square is supposed by most astrologers to be a tense, internal aspect. In this context I call it a meaningful aspect, but the quality that it has of internalizing your experiences makes an interesting point: we are always looking out there in space for signs of intelligent life; this aspect is like Yoda saying, “Galaxy centerpoint within you is.”

This is made a little extra interesting by the fact that tomorrow is the third quarter Moon; she’s in Sagittarius now, and will conjoin the GC tomorrow.

Note that we have only recently finished Pluto’s transit of the GC. While we’re all mulling over Pluto in Capricorn as it develops (i.e., as banks collapse and ethics lay in smoking ruins on the ground), it was just during the past three years that Pluto made its trip across the core for the first time since long before the American Revolution.

I think that more than anything, Pluto’s transit across the core has put us into this new, unfamiliar and somewhat chaotic territory we now occupy.

One thing that Philip Sedgwick, one of my favorite astrologers, said about it seems to hold true — it’s easy to forget what this point means. I keep figuring it out, and then I keep not remembering. This has happened to me at least five times. Then I forget where I wrote it down. If I had to relate it to a planetary energy, it would be Varuna. Some vast influence behind the scenes is what feel when I sense this point, and it could be one of the most potent evolutionary influences in the chart. My poster child for the GC is Robert Moses, whose Sun was conjunct this point. I don’t like what Mr. Moses did to the world (he invented urban sprawl, among other things) but one cannot deny a wide and pervasive influence that tells us about how this point works. (I have Ceres conjunct the GC; I’ve always viewed cooking as a sacred act, and now I run a galactic tea house called Planet Waves.)

You can be sure that if the thing that holds our whole galaxy together is involved, it must be special; there has got to be some kind of spiritual or cosmic meaning, though it may be so wide you can’t get around it. I am always fascinated simply by the notion that we exist on this island but because we cannot visually see where we are, we have no consciousness of that fact. How often do you visualize or imagine yourself to be living out among these spiral arms of the Milky Way?

It’s easier in the summer, when we can see the galactic cloud across the sky. Because we’re so close to the vernal equinox, we’re a quarter of the way there. By the time the Sun arrives in late Gemini in three months, we will be exactly opposite the core, though the clouds of the spiral arms will be visible in the night sky soon enough.

Greetings from the Galactic Center by Shelley Ackerman

There are related articles on this contents page from The Spiral Door, the 2007 annual edition of Planet Waves. If you’re a fan of Cosmos and Psyche or wish you were, there are three articles introducing the work of Richard Tarnas on this archived page.

Catch you soon enough.

Yours & truly,