The Watched Power

By Len Wallick

Right off the bat, those of you who have not read Eric’s insightful weekend blog Let’s keep an eye on this one should scroll back and attend to that first.

In that piece, Eric addressed the issue of today’s Capricorn conjunction of Mercury, Mars, and Pluto so thoroughly it makes gilding that particular lily unnecessary. Instead, one will fall back on the old reliable. When in doubt, start with the luminaries.

There are those who have never bothered or had the opportunity to identify a visible planet. An even smaller number have had the motivation to employ a telescope. But what human being has not seen the Sun and Moon? Together, they form most of the foundation of astrology. From Sol’s apparent motion, the referential structure is derived. Luna’s accessible cycles and unique partnership with our planet yield access to both fundamental and sophisticated principles. Rich with symbolism, incorporated into our genetic and experiential consciousness, this dynamic duo is our direct connection with the cosmos. It is thus fitting that this morning for most of us, the waxing Moon exacts its first quarter phase.

Last weekend, as you recall, Sol and Luna conjoined with lots of company. This monthly longitudinal conjunction is called “New” because it is commonly considered to be the end of an old cycle and the beginning of a new one. The next substantial phase is when the faster of the two — the Moon — has moved on to the point where the luminaries are separated by 90 degrees from our point of view. You can deduce this orientation by looking up at night and finding the lunar sphere equally divided into light and dark. That’s where we are today.

This tableau of dynamic division between illumination and obfuscation is closely associated with the word dichotomy. As in word, so it seems, it is also synchronized in deed. Take, for example, the current predicament of Julian Assange. Here we have a fellow being held in legal custody in Great Britain. Beyond that he has been denied the opportunity to post bail. This despite the fact that he has communicated and cooperated with the authorities since entering the country. This despite the fact that he has yet to be charged. All of this unprecedented activity taking place in an ancient legal system founded on the eminence of precedent.

Actually, if one can ironically assent to being less than lawyerly in definition of the word, the whole complex and episodic WikiLeaks story may be considered to be one dichotomy after another, within another, on top of each other with a little something to fascinate, titillate and/or flummox nearly everyone. So the question is, how is that playing out in your life? Sure, you yourself may not be, or be directly involved with, some femme fatale who conveniently tweets. Probably you are not playing hardball with murky and vast power structures. But if your life does currently constitute some hanging out between contradictory things, consider yourself part of the club.

What’s more, because it’s the first quarter phase, we can expect the synchronous situations to swell and grow into a broader and more involved tension. The lesser luminary proceeds to oppose the greater. This constitutes a Full Moon and a total lunar eclipse taking place along an anaretic axis. It is closely followed by the Sun crossing a cardinal point — the solstice — to start a new season. One suspects that solstice will mark the occasion of more than one thing coming to a head. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my. As if to emphasize this theme of expansion, Luna moves on from its square with the Sun to conjoin Jupiter in late Pisces before picking up where Eric left off: entering Aries and squaring its north node while Mercury, Mars and Pluto are doing their thing in Capricorn later today and tonight. But enough about me, said the Moon, what about the Sun?

Today, Old Sol conjoins with Quaoar, a minor planet which ushered in a era of unanticipated expansion with dichotomies of its own. As was the case with Varuna less than two years before, the discovery of Quaoar was considered to be somewhat of a climax. It was thus assigned a large, rounded number (50,000) by the Minor Planet Center (MPC) of the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Turns out that name was more prescient than the number.

The name, Quaoar, originates with the first citizens of what is today the area of Los Angeles, California. We call these people the Tongva. Quaoar was their creation deity, the first to manifest from the undifferentiated, who proceeded to sing and dance one singing and dancing partner after another into existence. This co-creative process continued as the song and dance became more complex and the singers and dancers more numerous, eventually resulting in our physical world and its mortal inhabitants. Sounds like the best party ever.

Similarly, the minor planet Quaoar, which seemed so big and so far distant at the time it was first observed, has served to be more of an initiation than a climax. The years that followed have witnessed a cascade of additional singing and dancing partners out there past Neptune and Pluto. A veritable chorus line of ever increasing diversity and complexity, growing with each new discovery until science was finally compelled to project a new order on the local firmament.

More than anything it was Eris that brought about the need for reorganization and redefinition. Much further away than Pluto and bigger at the same time, Eris either had to be classified as a planet or Pluto had to be re-defined as something else. Turns out that the male dominated IAU found something else to be the less threatening proposition, although the decision remains controversial.

Today the Sun-Quaoar conjunction in the mutable manifestation of Sagittarius forms a fire trine with Eris in the cardinal initiative of Aries. This symbolizes that the personal, political and spiritual level of the energy of creation itself is indeed flowing to a head — as indicated by the Moon’s progress and the stellium in early Capricorn. If there is anything to astrology at all, these combined and complimentary indicators of fecund dichotomy indicate something is afoot besides that thing on the end of a leg. What we are likely seeing is the threshold to a new level of some sort. Not a climax so much as a precipitation and one that will take some time and detachment to fully appreciate and utilize.

One other aspect presents itself as a possible clue regarding the complimentary convergence between the mutable luminaries and cardinal planets. The goddess asteroid Pallas Athene closes our day by conjoining with the Galactic Center. In terms of location, this conjunction sits neatly in between the Capricorn stellium and Sagittarius Sun collaboration with Quaoar. It thus forms a conceptual, if not spatial bridge between what we can now understand to be complementary assemblages. In addition, there seems to be an additional layer of meaning.

Pallas in all of her manifestations was complex and dichotomous unto herself. It is much easier to say what she did not represent rather than her many ironic morphologies. With the possible exception of weaving, she had no association with the limited and confined roles available to women in patrilinear cultures. She represented the artificially suppressed potential of the female half of the human race. Often portrayed with helmet, armor and spear, she was a dispenser of wisdom, law and justice. She was the forerunner of a new generation of deities and a new age for humans before pragmatism and politics froze the evolution and fossilized the prototype.

The Galactic Center has a lot in common with the idea of deities. As the rotational axis of our galaxy, it is a central location of immense power with large quantities of electromagnetic radiation on all wavelengths. Thanks to its unimaginable distance and intervening clouds of interstellar dust, it is not accessible to our unaided senses. We can look up and see where it is, but we can’t actually see the thing itself. Even its distance from us is subject to a very large degree of uncertainty. It’s like asking for directions to New York and being told it’s on the same continent as Chicago.

All powerful and self evident on one hand but unknowable and well-nigh unlocatable on the other, the actual, scientific characteristics of the center of our galaxy are the attributes by which human beings have been identifying gods and goddesses for as far back as we can follow the trail. Whether that is coincidence or crucial one leaves to you, the reader, to ascertain. It is, however, a telling indication that the Galactic Center represents, among many other things, something that all human beings have always had in common, as far as we are able to tell.

Pallas Athene conjoins with the Galactic Center on the same day the Sun conjoins Quaoar and trines Eris. All this on the same day of the Moon’s first quarter, and as retrograde Mercury backs into a conjunction of Mars, Pluto and the asteroid Hermes. Too much to be coincidence?

First, there is the pervasive idea of a separation of different or contradictory things. Then there is the concurrent and paradoxical idea of bringing those dichotomous things together. There is also the feeling of a quickening, of life being breathed into that which is progressing from manifestation to creation — even as established structures are unable to contain what is coming forth. Finally, it would appear that the first principle of the creation is feminine this time around, but not what we are used to. This is a brand new yin. It all seems to have a great deal of momentum. So much so that even the cardinal point aspects involved would appear to be making a temporary exception to a cardinal rule. The most applicable action would be not to act at all, or at least act with selective and shrewd discretion.

That’s one heck of a way to begin a week. It may not be necessary to keep your head down. In fact, this would be not be a good time to have your awareness below sand level. Indications are that it is more important than ever to keep your head at all times. Do what work you have and pay attention. Things are evolving rapidly.

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