Merry Solstice and Gathering of the Light
The browns, the olives, and the yellows died,
And were swept up to heaven; where they glowed
Each dawn and set of sun till Christmastide,
And when the land lay pale for them, pale-snowed,
Fell back, and down the snow-drifts flamed and flowed.
From off your face, into the winds of winter,
The sun-brown and the summer-gold are blowing;
But they shall gleam with spiritual glinter,
When paler beauty on your brows falls snowing,
And through those snows my looks shall be soft-going.
“Winter Song” by Wilfred Owen
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As the Sun enters Capricorn, with cries of Io Saturnalia, it squares Jupiter in Aries — a bonfire on this darkest night indeed. A sudden flare of great expectations and courage, as we approach the final stretch of our Mars retrograde marathon. Except we’re still deep in the weeds of Gemini paradox: our cardinal turning, super-charged by Jupiter in hype-beast mode, occurs during the dark of the moon. A time of shedding, dead-heading, and tidying up loose ends. We’re asked to notch our bowstrings a bit longer yet, which are all but singing with the tension of this months’-long holding pattern.
The quantum leap is there: we can taste it. But we’ll be hedging our bets a while longer. Before boarding Jupiter’s express chariot, we must consult our metro map: a snarl of routes, transfers, patches of construction, and connecting buses that will take some time to unravel yet.
Traditionally a time of epiphany and renewal, as cultures the world over herald the gathering of the light — this solstice comes bearing contractions. And could it be any other way this deep into Mars’s sub-divings footnotes, subordinate clauses and parentheses?
If this Mars retrograde was a book, it would be Nabokov’s Pale Fire, a novel presented as a scholarly annotation of a 999 page poem in cantos, by fictional poet John Shade. The annotator, Kinbote (who claims to be good friends with the recently murdered poet) proves to be an unreliable narrator, and the reader is left to piece together the mystery of Shade’s killing through Kinbote’s increasingly digressive (and delusional) commentary. It’s a riot, if you’re looking for some holiday reading.
Anyway, many mysteries to ponder on the threshold of the solstice, as the sea goat’s finned tail slips into the grackled waters of the unconscious. A brush charging with Indian ink before it spills its hieroglyphs onto the page. We are not supposed to know yet, and I’m trying my best to make my peace with that.
Yes, Jupiter just ingressed into Aries, a sign that has no time for post-Avatar malaise or the endless perseverations of our retrograde Mars. And yet it answers to this very Mars — an investigator gone rogue with his cork board and string, connecting the dots of trauma’s ghosts of Christmases past.
Jupiter in Aries will do an exhilarating speedrun of the ram this spring, but first we must go gently into this new year. For months now, the sword of our will — our Martian purpose — has scattered into beads of Mercury, which are now circling a fiendish box maze. The next few weeks, before Mars stations direct on the 11th, are best given to surveying, strategizing, and waiting for that crucial piece of intel to drop that could shift our best laid plans. Or point us in the direction of another adventure completely.
As agonizing as this endless limbo has been (especially if you have important placements in mutable signs), we can trust that any leaps we take this spring will be from a place of integrity. Our force and momentum will be directed exactly where they can have the most impact. Our risks will be well calculated. You certainly don’t want to get on the wrong bullet train this Jupiter in Aries, as it’s unlikely to make many stops.
So, as much as Jupiter is chomping at the bit, we’re asked to direct this frontiering spirit inward – at least for another few weeks. There are unknown districts still to explore within our anger, our trauma, and our impotence. And with Gemini, this is the violence of malediction: the ways we cut ourselves (and others) down with our words. The way my father’s fatalism rushes to fill the void in times of uncertainty. His refrain of “the dufus family” still living rent free in my head, lol.
In fact, what’s not being said possibly feels even more corrosive now. For weeks, I’ve been struggling to write a rather vulnerable letter, but every word feels like a sledgehammer swinging through the most delicate of cobwebs. And so it haunts my Notes app, unsent, and I gaslight myself instead with tarot readings on TikTok (12th House annual profection things).
Cerebral imprisonment is a running theme through the tarot cards that rule the decans of Gemini. Currently mired in Nine Swords, Mars is the woman holding herself in her own arms, suffering a dark night of the soul. The zodiacal signs patch-worked across her bedspread hint at her torture: a mind compartmentalized into thought loops — the misfires of cognitive errors. “Agony of the mind”, according to the Thoth, where “consciousness has fallen into a realm unenlightened by reason. The world of the … psychopath, the fanatic.” The essay “Bad Words” by Denise Riley feels apt at this stage of the retrograde. It opens:
“The worst words revivify themselves within us, vampirically. Injurious speech echoes relentlessly, years after the occasion of its utterance, in the mind of the one at whom it was aimed: the bad word, splinterlike, pierces to lodge. In its violently emotional materiality, the word is indeed made flesh and dwells amongst us—often long outstaying its welcome. Old word-scars embody a "knowing it by heart," as if phrases had been hurled like darts into that thickly pulsating organ, but their resonances are not amorous. Where amnesia would help us, we can't forget.”
In the hush of this longest night of the year, such vampiric “resonances” may feel especially loud. The ritual of an unsent letter could be productive tonight, or a proclamation into the hearth flames of exactly what thought patterns “shall not pass” the solstice threshold.
(And yes, I’ll be watching John Huston’s The Dead at some point over the holidays — a tradition of mine — which will be the perfect excuse for a cathartic Mars retrograde weep).
The contemplative side of Capricorn is often overlooked in pop astrology, but this is the sign of distant imaginal realms made manifest. Ruled by Saturn, the farthest of the seven traditional planets visible to the naked eye, Capricorn straddles the symbolic bounds of human knowledge. Its hooves are very much planted in its earthbound stratagems and methods, but the fish-tail is plunged in the quirks and quarks of quantum mechanics.
It’s like those genius mathematicians who actually see equations as topography, and can turn them around like asteroids in their heads. Don’t let their avuncular airs or daddy energy fool you: Capricorn has the most extraordinary — even subversive — imagination in the zodiac. From our agony, we can architect brave new worlds.
Strangely enough, as I finished writing this a hummingbird started hovering and darting right in front of my balcony windows (I’m not sure if it actually collided with the glass or not). Eventually it perched on the window ledge. We were eyeball to eyeball. I could see its tinker-toy heart vibrating through a blaze of emerald feathers. I was mesmerized but also concerned at the possibility of injury, as the poor thing seemed dazed.
Likely attracted by the light, I turned off every lamp in the apartment, drew the curtains, and left a bowl of honey-water outside. I’ve always imagined hummingbirds as avatars of Gemini, and it’s hard not to think of Mars retrograde’s broken circuits and strange loops embodied by this visitation.
Of course, this solstice messenger has forced me to leave the apartment in total darkness… the universe chiding me for burning the midnight LED, perhaps. Message received.
I’ll observe the darkness and the hush after I post this, but for now I would like to wish you all a very merry yuletide. Here’s a favorite Christmas song from the Pretenders that strikes the perfect balance of nostalgia, melancholy, and ambiguous longing. Love the Lynchian vibe of the video too. xoxo