The Cosmic Story:
The Wheel of the Year: Samhain
Time to Let Go
As I drive around Rhode Island, I am overwhelmed by the beauty of the autumn leaves. The colors are vibrant: reds, oranges, golden yellows, greens. The first 4 chakra colors! There’s something warm and nurturing about Nature now, even as the temperatures lower. The cold adds something to the warmth.
I am awed by Mother Nature’s gifts: the bright light of the Sun as it makes its way south, the fresh breezes, the cold, clear night skies, the bounty of the fields. All made more poignant by the fact that this is the season of letting go, of release. Mother Nature isn’t afraid of letting her beauty and bounty die. She is all about release now.
I love the cycle of Nature’s year. The birth, growth, fullness, release and death/rest. When I lived out West, I really missed the seasons. When seasons stay the same, it feels like we have to keep producing like hot-house blossoms. Constantly ‘productive’. Never a time out to rest. (We’ve even made the term ‘time out’ into a punishment for being naughty!)
That’s the problem with our society. We’re expected to produce, push, work without a real ‘time out’. Weekends don’t cut it anymore because we have to catch up with all our personal tasks we didn’t have time to deal with during ‘the work week’. To me, this means we don’t get to contemplate that letting go. We don’t get to contemplate quiet. We don’t get to contemplate Death.
And yet death is all around us. The military/industrial complex is having a hay day making money over the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. There’s war in Africa, there’s war in the United States with home-grown terrorists. And most importantly, we continue to destroy our ecosystems.
We fear death instead of seeing it is a natural part of the life cycle. This comes from the patriarchal fear of death. The masculine principle is the energy that needs to continually die so it can be reborn. Why do you think it is the male god who dies? Mother Nature is always alive, even when she’s sleeping, for she is the foundation. It is the separate units – the masculine energy – the need to die out so it can be reborn as something new. Have you noticed that it is mostly men who say they want to live forever? I would find that quite boring.
That’s what we’re experiencing now – the refusal on the part of the powers that run the world to let the old rules die so we can create new ones. We just have to look back at the Greek myths, which form the basis of western society, to see how the father gods – Saturn and Jupiter – refused to allow the next generation to take over. They didn’t want to relinquish their power. They didn’t want to die!
Until we each contemplate death, we will continue to allow our society to create it.
Our society is not rooted in a spirituality that supports life and recognizes death as part of that life. This has given rise to a toxic view of life. And unfortunately, there is a toxic masculinity that has shaped both men and women, and we don’t even realize we’re shaped by. Life is supposed to be a mixture of masculine and feminine energies – the feminine is the baseline, while the masculine creates individual energies. Modern society is based on masculine principles and uses its feminine energy to support things like consumerism and division, rather than inclusiveness.
I saw a video of Meryl Streep speaking to a group of her fellow male actors. She said that when you learn a language, you know you know that language when you can dream in it. She went on to say that women have lived in the house of men and know how to speak men and dream in it. (I call that being Father’s daughters, daughters of patriarchy.) Then she said, but men don’t know how to speak or dream women. All the men laughed nervously and then made a joke. That’s how afraid men are of the Feminine.
I just read a newsletter I get from Robert Reich. He called it The inhumanity of humans towards other humans. “Civilization is the opposite of the state of nature. Nature is a continuous war in which only the fittest survive, and where even survivors’ lives are “nasty, brutish, and short,” in the words of English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. He’s wrong! Nature, like women, cooperates. Nature works as a whole, like the trees in a forest supporting each other. Insects work with flowers to produce life. Wolves bring back the lost ecosystems humans have wrecked. Nature is a unified whole, and when it’s time to die, there’s a purpose to that. Nothing new can be born if nothing dies.
He goes on to say: A civil society doesn’t allow the strong to brutalize the weak. It doesn’t incite the weak to terrorize the strong. It doesn’t tolerate violence against innocent people, nor does it tolerate retributive violence. He’s wrong again. Our whole civilization has been based on this masculine brutality. When have the masculine power structures ever been humble enough to work with everyone, distributing their wealth in a fair way?
That fairness is what the myth of King Arthur and Camelot was about. That’s what early Celtic society was about. That’s what our Native, aboriginal tribes did. These ancient people lived in harmony with nature and so they were less brutal that our so-called ‘civilized’ societies. Their connection to Mother Nature made for more equality, more kindness, more creativity than we give them create for.
So we have to become that civilized society Reich speaks about. It is the goal we haven’t reached yet.
Samhain, All Hallow’s Eve/Halloween, Dia de los Muertos
When the Wheel of the Year turns to Samhain, we stand before the veils that separate different realities. The veils thin and the souls of the dead can move on to the next plane of existence. Or come back for a visit to us.
The Celts called this otherworld Annwn or Avalon. It was a blessed place of peace and happiness. Perhaps that’s why they weren’t afraid of death as we are. Our religions have made death a scary, painful place, full of fire and punishment. That’s probably why people today are afraid of death, even if they don’t consciously think of a fiery afterlife. It’s in our collective unconscious. Shame on the Christian church for that! Instead of picking the real miracle that Jesus’ life contained – the Resurrection – they chose to pick a symbol of suffering and death for themselves and for us.
It’s time for us to get over that delusional belief and understand that the Universe and Mother Nature re-cycle souls. They don’t punish us for living our lives. Jesus’ death was supposed to redeem us from our fear of death because he showed us that we will Rise again.
So it’s important for us to learn to let go, release what’s no longer of service to us, and LET IT DIE! It will create so much more room in our psyches to create something new in the coming year. And these little ‘deaths’ will get us used to the grand finale of our lives. Our death into new life.
At this end of the Piscean Age, we need to learn its lessons. Despite how our society has developed into a flat-earth, anti-Christ (against the Spirit) viewpoint, each of us can begin to build a new vision for ourselves and society. That’s what Robert Reich was really talking about. The society that embraces the real values of the Piscean Age – that we are all one. That kindness, generosity and love are the basis of a ‘civilized’ society. (Think Star Trek!) That Spirit lives within Nature and within ourselves. We have created a brutal world because we’ve been made to forget that we really are Spirit having a human experience.
So this Samhain (November 1-7), face your fear of death. Face yourself and decide to let go of these beliefs that keep us separated from ourselves, from each other and from Nature.
Never forget. We’re all in this together.
Entering the Dreaming and Storytelling time of year.
These next six weeks will be the darkest time of year for those of us in the northern hemisphere. Those of you down South are gearing up for the light time.
This is a great time to work with your dreams and be enchanted by stories that feed your soul. I was listening to a podcast about psychedelics and Jungian Dreamwork. What we experience in psychedelic journeys comes from the same place as our dreams. How not? The drugs open us to our unconscious – both our personal unconscious and our collective unconscious. How our ‘trips’ go depends on how much work we’ve done on our personal unconscious. Whatever we haven’t dealt with comes to us as the monsters we fear to face.
But once you’ve embraced that darkness inside you, you realize it isn’t so dark at all. Just a mystery to be explored. Like Death! And when you’ve worked out your personal psychological complexes, you can step into the greater mystery of the Collective Unconscious, which can also be scary. But wonderfully magical!
Marie Louise van Franz, Jung’s chief disciple, said that the unconscious can devour you. So you need a grounded ego to face what’s there. Otherwise, you can be taken over and inflated by the archetypes, which reside both within our unconscious and outside it. The archetypes are the cosmic laws of life. They’re the structures that shape our energy and our world. That’s one of the things I never liked about Caroline Myss’s idea that you can pick archetypes. You can’t. Archetypes pick YOU!
That’s what makes Jungian therapy so different from other types of therapy. We enter our psyche through the voice of our dreams. As we work with dreams, we discover that our soul has a point of view that might conflict with our ego’s point of view. When we can listen to what our dreams are saying, we open ourselves to a deeper experience of life. Our dreams shatter the patriarchal box we’ve been brought up in. They point us in the direction our soul’s long to go in.
When I was a single mother of four kids, I started thinking of working full time. But I dreamed that I was buying a calendar and nobody was there to take my money. So I finally decided to just take it and leave. But when I walked out of the store, I walked into a room with a woman artist who told me to put the calendar back. I said no. So she called a group of children into the room and they circled around me and said, please put the calendar back. So I did.
The interesting thing is that I have a Cancer Moon exactly square my lunar nodes. That means that my Cancer mommy Moon needs to be actualized if I want to get to my Aries North Node – my independence. It’s a missed step that my soul needed to learn. Since so many women in my generation looked down at staying home and being a mother (not anymore !), it was another way I had to go against society’s expectations. As we know now, latch-key kids grew up feeling abandoned. My Cancer Moon didn’t want that for my kids, though my modern ego wanted to go out and achieve more.
From Dear Mystic Mamma
I told my kids that I was going to just continue to work with a few clients and at a shop in town so I could be there for them. We’d just have to make due with what I made. But I told them I was there for them. Now in my ‘old age’ I see that I made the right decision. They are the best adults I know. (The boys even bought me a house!) I went against society’s expectation that money was the important thing, at the expense of having a mother there when my kids needed me. I ended up being the town mother to lots of their friends who still feel that way about me. So Yay for dreams!
Jungian dream work is the way to learn to speak ‘women’. It can teach us how our psyche speaks in symbolic language and connects us to the Creative Imagination, which is how we co-create the world. As you learn to understand your dreams, you learn to know who you really are.
Astrology of the Samhain Season
The astrology of the next few weeks continues to show us what we need to learn about living an authentic life. Ground yourself in the Moon’s cycle, planting your seeds at the New Moon and seeing how they’ve blossomed at the Full Moon.
The last lunar eclipse in the Taurus/Scorpio nodal axis (we’ve already moved into the Aries/Libra axis) occurs on Saturday October 28th. Taurus is the sign of new life, while Scorpio is the sign of death and release. It’s our last check-in for the next 18 years to clean out our emotional traumas and ground ourselves in our values, in our bodies and in beauty. Let beauty surround you. Walk in beauty. See your own beauty. And you’ll move through this death into new life.
Taurus Full Moon with Jupiter to the lower left
The Taurus Lunar Eclipse highlighted the need to examine our deep psychic wounds (Sun, Mercury, Mars in Scorpio) and release them and come to rest in our bodies (Taurus Moon). If any of you saw the Full Moon on Saturday night, you saw bright Jupiter and invisible Uranus just below and to the left of the Moon. The sky story showed us that change (Uranus) is possible when we are curious and expect the best (Jupiter) of the situation (Moon). As a Taurus, I can promise you that it’s a relief to know that I can change!
Saturn turns direct at 0* Pisces on November 4th, bringing us back to the issues facing us last March when Saturn entered Pisces for the first time since 1994. Our collective anguish is right up front now – wars, murders, loss, fear. Pisces is our collective Heart. When Saturn travels through this watery realm, we need to look at our beliefs and shape our lives around them. If we have fear and hatred in our hearts, we create that. When we can let go and open our hearts to love and connection, we’ll see that when we hurt someone, we’re hurting ourselves as well. This is the Piscean mystery of Oneness.
Venus leaves Virgo and enters her own sign of Libra on November 8th. Now is the time to take those lessons we learned while Venus retrograded in Leo and bring them into our relationships. Be bold and true to yourself at the same time as you act with courtesy and understanding towards those you are with.
The Scorpio New Moon occurs on November13th. It opposes Uranus retrograde in Taurus and conjuncts Mars and Ceres in Scorpio. When Uranus and Mars get together, sparks can fly and accident can happen. Perhaps Mother Ceres can sooth Mars enough that he can let himself be cracked open by Uranus’ power to shake us outside the box. Mars in Scorpio is an inner drive to understand what’s going in within ourselves and in others if we can let go of our ego’s need for control. Trusting Life now seems hard, but that’s what we’re being called on to do with Neptune trining this New Moon.
Neptune stations direct on December 6th, just in time to square the Sagittarius New Moon on December 12th. What will we choose to believe? Because we do have free will. Which means we can choose what we stand for. Mars, Uranus and Neptune are once again aspecting this New Moon. Uranus the Cosmic god, Neptune the ruler of the collective unconscious and Mars the action energy of life. Sagittarius is the sign of our beliefs, our ability to see beyond what’s in front of us. Can we imagine a better world? It’s not that hard when we look at the mess our world is in now.
We’ve come to the chaos of the ending of an age. This is a time of choice for humanity. It’s the first time we know of that humans get to choose how we’ll take that next step in evolution. Will we succumb to the brutality of the past and continue to foster hate and fear and embrace war on everyone who isn’t like us? Will we let the far fringes win out or will our core values, the things most people want, win out? The next few years will see what we’ve chosen to do.
Have
a blessed Samhain,
Cathy
excerpt from John O’Donohue’s poem: For the Dying
May
there be some beautiful surprise
Waiting for you inside death,
Something you never knew or felt,
Which with one simple
touch
Absolves you of all loneliness and loss,
As you
quicken within the embrace
For which your soul was eternally
made.
May your heart be speechless
At the sight of
the truth
Of all your belief had hoped,
Your heart
breathless
In the light and lightness
Where each and
every thing
Is at last its true self
Within that serene
belonging
That dwells beside us
On the other side
Of
what we see.
