The Cosmic Story:
Venus - Mars conjunction, July 13, 2021 at 20* Leo
Once upon a time, a King and Queen had 3 daughters. The older daughters were beautiful, but the youngest daughter was exquisite and her beauty was breathtaking. Her name was Psyche….She was so beautiful that people began to talk about her as the ‘new Aphrodite’.
Well, you can imagine how the great Goddess Aphrodite took that!
Psyche ~ Susan Seddon Boulet
This week there is a Cancer New Moon on July 9th, and the planets Venus and Mars will come together in the heavens in a ‘sacred marriage’ to begin their new cycle early next week. Both planets are Evening Stars and they will appear right at sunset with the Crescent Moon in Leo on July 12th-14th, depending on where you live. Look to the West!
The Cancer New Moon is the most fertile Moon of the astrological year. It is the Mother Moon, the birthing Moon, the caretaker of the Soul. This New Moon in Cancer considers the family first – not just blood family but our tribe of like-hearted people. With support from both Uranus in Taurus and Neptune in Pisces, the seeds we plant hold our intention for what makes a good, secure, sustainable, loving life and community. As the Moon also opposes Pluto in Capricorn, it seeds a renewed vision of our culture, one that allows what is dying to die, so that Mother Moon can birth the new collective life the world needs and deserves. A society that really takes care of community as extended family.
Venus and Mars symbolize the archetypal energies of desire, need, connection and love. Both are passionate energies; both emerge in us as desire or need. The last time they began a new cycle, on August 24, 2019, they were both in Virgo and they were in their underworld phase. Both planets were hidden behind the Sun.
Venus was being transformed in the fires, stripped of all her allure, letting go of what she had desired before, so she could understand her needs again, wiser and more clear-sighted because of Virgo’s gift of discernment and integration. Mars embraced her new knowledge and gave his energy to strengthen the new integration that needed to be birthed within each of us. This was an inner, perhaps unconscious, union.
Venus vanished from our morning sky on February 14, 2021 while she was in Aquarius as a Morning Star and reappeared as an Evening Star on May 7th in Gemini. It seems Venus had to die to some of her ideals and fixed judgments and emerge all the wiser in Gemini knowing there are many truths that make up The Truth. And each of us has our own lessons to learn and beliefs to express.
Just a reminder. Earth can be a harsh school, but we’re here to learn Love. The most precious gift of our life here on Mother Earth. Once we ‘become as little children again’ we’ll remember love and how it can turn our world into paradise.
This year, these two passionate planets come together in the fires of Leo, and are visible to us, so that we can consciously connect to them. They are getting ready to birth some new creation into the world. We each have a part to play in this. The world needs our input. So practice opening up your imagination and see what wants to come out and play with you. This is Leo, after all.
Where in your birth chart is 20* Leo? While you’re at it, check out Uranus at 15* Taurus and Saturn rx at 12* Aquarius. The houses they occupy will be the areas of your life that are going to be part of this change and where your gifts will be used and appreciated.
The Sabian symbol for Venus and Mars at 20* Leo is: Zuni Indians perform a ritual to the Sun. The Zunis are ancient Pueblo Native Americans whose religion is central to their culture. They worship Earth Mother, Sun Father and Mother Moon. This image suggests that we too need to honor and respect the world we live in and all of Nature through ritual, connecting with life’s creative powers.
What is Need? What is Desire?
Desire: verb
"to wish or long for, express a wish to obtain," c. 1200, desiren, from Old French desirrer (12c.) "wish, desire, long for," from Latin desiderare "long for, wish for; demand, expect," the original sense perhaps being "await what the stars will bring," from the phrase de sidere "from the stars," from sidus (genitive sideris) "heavenly body, star, constellation".
Need: (v.)
Old English neodian "be necessary, be required (for some purpose)," intransitive; also transitive, "require, have need of," from the same root as need (n.). Meaning "to be under obligation (to do something)," especially in negative or interrogative sentences implying obligation or necessity, is from late 14c.
What is the shape of your desire? What do you need for a fulfilling life?
When Venus and Mars come together in love and desire, what do you want the outcome to be? Do you have a desire for something vital? Is there a need in you that is required for your continued sustenance?
With the Crescent Virgo Moon providing their marriage bed, we have the opportunity to reach into the heart of the spiritual flame that burns in our souls. And then bring what’s there out of the creative fires and into the world.
Leo’s desire (from the stars) is that we each become our own unique Self. That we learn to express that Self in our life and in our creativity, whether in literal children or creative children. Venus and Mars in Leo and the Virgo Moon will help you birth that new life.
What creation is waiting to be birthed by you?
If you don’t know the answer yet, don’t worry. Mercury has just come out of its Gemini shadow, hopefully understanding something that it worked on from May 3rd to July 7th. What are the new perspectives you’ve gained in these past months?
I learned that I still needed some work on going with the flow – and I got a chance to let go and flow. And it worked! So I also learned to trust a bit that the world wasn’t going to ignore my needs; rather it would make things easier for me. And I definitely re-claimed the wonderful truth of kitty love! And also children love.
I haven’t put it all together yet to have a clear focus on what comes next. But now I know more about what I want it to feel like.
As in the myth of Psyche and Eros (yes, I’m getting back to them soon) I will just say: Follow your heart’s desire. Uranus in Taurus is squaring this union, challenging it to embody your Self (soul consciousness). Uranus is the wake-up call to follow your heart! That takes courage.
Recognize what you need to to do to change. Saturn in Aquarius stands opposite this sacred marriage, meaning he wants to integrate the new life direction that is being conceived into the Aquarian mindfield. He’ll create the structure for this new life to thrive in, available to all humanity, not just the few.
And I might add: Go through this initiation. Maybe the initiation is just for the healers and light-bearers; for conscious, wild women and strong green men; for our children and wonderful youth. Maybe it’s for everyone in the world. But these few years of necessary chaos and change must be met and embraced and transformed if we want a future where we all will thrive.
It is the divine Feminine that will ground in this work, as she always does. She appears to us now, in this time, as Lady Wisdom/Sophia/Mary Magdalena. And she is appearing most often in women – because Wisdom is always seen as feminine. (Of course there are exceptions – Thoth is the Egyptian God of Wisdom or Hermes Trismegitus).
But Wisdom is a gift that our world has suffered without for too long. And it needs to come back into collective consciousness for our survival as a species.
Women are the bearers of Wisdom. Hopefully men will work with Wisdom and share in the labor of birthing a new world order, not one organized and run by corporations, but one created by, for and of the people!
Venus & Mars Sacred Marriage
So to go to back to the Psyche & Eros story:
Psyche is condemned by the Oracle of Delphi to marry ‘death’ and ‘a beast’, but instead she finds herself married to the god of Desire and Love himself. But at first they only make love in the dark (Venus and Mars’ union in Virgo, hidden behind the Sun). But when Psyche wants to discover who her lover is, he runs away. And She must go on the search to find again. Because she shows up, Aphrodite (our primal, oceanic feminine nature) initiates her through four tests. And when Psyche completes her tasks, she is reunited with Eros.
Because if you’re going to take the place of a goddess, you need to know and own that goddess energy in yourself!
Psyche & Eros
In this ancient story, which has given rise to many of our western fairy tales, Psyche is the human soul who has to own Love and become Love. She has to unite with Eros, the desire to create and generate life. Out of Love.
(I’ll be writing about Psyche’s four tasks next month when Venus and then Mars goes into Virgo.)
These are the archetypal energies that this ‘sacred marriage’ embodies. Before we look outside ourselves for this love, we need to birth it within ourselves.
Mars is the archetypal energy of the instinctual will to live, our desire and vitality, as well as our ability to act on that desire. Like the Greek God Eros, Mars represents our sexual drive, the outward yang energy of the universe to create life. It can also represent the darker energies of that desire nature like aggression, domination, violence and anger.
In King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette say this about Eros/Mars as the Lover:
The Lover is the primal energy pattern of what we could call vividness, aliveness and passion. It lives through the great primal hungers of our species for sex, food, well-being, reproduction, creative adaptation to life’s hardships, and ultimately a sense of meaning, without which human beings cannot go on with their lives.
The Lover archetype … is the energy of sensitivity to the outer environment.
The Lover is the archetype of play and of ‘display’, of healthy embodiment, of being in the world of sensuous pleasure and in one’s own body without shame.
Venus is the archetypal energy of connection, of love, of beauty and wisdom. Venus describes what we value, what our feeling nature needs to feel loved and worthy. She energizes the wisdom of the body – our instinctual, feeling, intuitive nature. She speaks through our heart.
Venus is challenged by Saturn in Aquarius to stand up for her principles and she is also in a tense aspect to Uranus (exact Wednesday 7/7). This opens her initiation into claiming greater authority of the beauty way as an expression of her Heart's wisdom and activates her role as Queen of Rebellion during this turbulent time. (Sasha Benedetti)
Leo concentrates our heart energy. With the Saturn/Uranus square pushing us to let go of what no longer serves us so we can create something new, this Venus/Mars union will bring that revolution into our daily life.
Our modern culture is based on desire. We don’t need to work as much as we do. We could all survive by working less and needing less. But capitalism is based on stoking our desires for more, for all those things advertisers make us think we need to survive and be happy.
We humans are thinkers, doers, creators, makers. What happens when we turn our attention away from desiring ‘things’ and look instead toward our inner wealth? We can enrich ourselves spiritually, mentally, and physically. We can enrich the greater social good. We can heal Mother Earth.
Let this union of Venus and Mars open your imagination to the treasures of your Soul. Let Psyche/Soul meet your divine lover in the light. And let your creativity flow.
Blessed Be!
Cathy
Concerning the Atoms of the Soul
Someone
explained once how the pieces of what we are
fall downwards at
the same rate
as the Universe.
The atoms of us, falling
towards the centre
of
whatever everything is. And we don't see it.
We only sense their
slight drag in the lifting hand.
That's what weight is, that
communal process of falling.
Furthermore, these atoms carry
hooks, like burrs,
hooks
catching like hooks, like clinging to like,
that's what keeps us
from becoming something else,
and why in early love, we
sometimes
feel the tug of the heart snagging on anothers heart.
Only
the atoms of the soul are perfect spheres
with no means of
holding on to the world
or perhaps no need for holding on,
and
so they fall through our lives catching
against
nothing, like perfect rain,
and in the end, he wrote, mix in
that common well of light
at the centre of whatever the
suspected
centre is, or might have been.
~ John Glenday ~
(Soul
Food: Nourishing Poems for Starved Minds,
ed.
by Neil Astley and Pamela Robertson-Pearce)