Sun in Scorpio I

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October 22, 2020, at 7:00pm EDT, marks the ingress of the Sun into the sign of Scorpio, and specifically Scorpio I which Austin Coppock called The Jawbone in his book 36 Faces. While it’s nominally a night chart, with the Sun just below the horizon and the Moon waxing toward fullness — it also starts with a terrible warning. Here, we see the Moon in its exile, besieged between Pluto and Saturn at 22° Capricorn 45′, the gifts of mind and heart and intuition already constrained, and further confined by exterior limitations and venomous fury. Nor is this the only indicator of turbulence: Mercury and Uranus, both retrograde, are in opposition across the chart at the seventh and first houses, warning of revolutionary actions and hidden communications. Warlike Mars and conspirators Saturn each have great power in this chart, while soothing Venus and generous Jupiter are both under house arrest in their respective locations; there is much to call us to enmity with one another, and little to hold us together. Tread carefully.

The ancient Greeks of Alexandria celebrated the Nymphai, or spirits of nature, during these ten days — genii loci of tree and forest, spring and brook, rock and boulder, hill and hidden vale. It’s difficult to look back through the mists of time and try to understand ancient attitudes toward nature, but the Romans had rituals for separating the human realms from the wild. A team of oxen, one white and one black, would cut a furrow around the edges of a human town or village, and the world beyond that trench (called a pomeranium) was the realm of bird and bear, wolf and wilderness. The separation of the present day between the human community and the wild is more difficult to judge. I must safeguard my trash cans against raccoons and bears alike; one morning I woke to find a young black bear gorging itself on windfall fruit from my apple tree, in the seven-yard-wide grassy plot between me and my neighbor’s house. The cries of foxes and owls are never far from my front porch at night. Though I live “in town”, the non-human realm intersects my human community in a regular way.

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