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.
Read the rest of this column on my website.
At quarter to noon on August 22, the Sun enters the first decan of Virgo. High in the sky and climbing toward the Midheaven, the Sun holds the first post in the eleventh house, in a decan that Austin Coppock called The Tree Bearing Fruit. When the sun rises toward the height of the day, it’s a useful emblem to consider the sunlight retained in the apple, or the pear, or the peach — the plant has collected sunlight from the skies above, trace minerals from the earth below, and produced a child, progeny, a potential descendant, from the admixture of the two main components; fire and earth are united in juicy and enriched sweetness — the perfectly pregnant peach, ready to fall (and never far from its mother), to become the new child in turn. The moment of perfect ripeness is almost at hand: what will we do with the precious gift? Eat it whole? Sacrifice it to the soil? share it with another? Gift it to the earth? Patiently nurture it to become a new peach tree? How shall we take the gifts of the earth with gratitude, and make the whole earth new?
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