The Astrology of December 3rd to 10th: A Terrible Beauty is Born
A mini scry into next week's cosmic weather.
[The fish] wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash-heaps;
opening and shutting itself like
an
injured fan.
The barnacles which encrust the side
of the wave, cannot hide
there for the submerged shafts of the
sun,
split like spun
glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
into the crevices—
in and out, illuminating
the
turquoise sea
of bodies.”
– Marianne Moore, excerpt from “The Fish”
Whirl up, sea—
whirl your pointed pines,
splash your great pines
on our rocks,
hurl your green over us,
cover us with your pools of fir.
— “Oread” by H.D.
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
— Excerpt from “Easter 1916”, by William Butler Yeats
The astrology of the coming week brings black pills and acid tabs in equal measure. Neptune stations direct in Pisces on December 6th and Mercury is preparing to station retrograde on the 12th. It traded its flame-tipped arrows for an engraving stylus in Capricorn this past Friday. Tomorrow, Venus enters the sign of her exile: Scorpio — where she’s scrappy, resourceful, and not afraid to weaponize her whiles.
Here, she embraces femme fatale mode. In the sublime closing scene of film noir, The Third Man, the film’s hero watches as Anna walks on, implacable, in a lingering long-shot, between the lane of stripped linden trees. Though Venus loses the pedestal of her essential dignity in Libra, I think we’ve all had quite enough of her willingness to play spin doctor in these past weeks. An exiled Venus is one with nothing to lose. Her artistry will not be beholden to the pressures of any audience, patron, or party line.
If Venus in Scorpio is the vermouth, Mercury in Capricorn provides the bitters — the astringency that will set off her dark honeys. Venus’ dance-macabre in the coming weeks with Mercury, Saturn, and Neptune is an opportunity to verbalize our “dark twisted fantasies” — or take a first stab at writing some smut for your lover.
Mercury’s entrance into the sign of the sea goat, where it’s now co-present with Pluto’s dying supernova, feels like the scribe picking its way through the cooling obsidian flows of this late Plutonic age. The edges of unavoidable truths all but glitter in these darkest of days. Perhaps Hermes has returned to tell the tale of how it was always about oil, arm’s sales, the military industrial complex, etc. Its seer’s needle pierces through history’s tome, poleaxing words that echo in unsettling ways.
A journalist in Gaza, @wizard_bisan1, bedridden on a mattress due to a viral disease, calmly instagramming today her certainty that she will die in the next few weeks or even days, are the horrifying realities that Mercury will be quantifying as it goes underground.
With Mercury in Capricorn, I’ve been thinking of that Buddhist notion of a soul’s endless march through incarnation as an eagle, with a silk scarf in its beak, infinitesimally wearing away a mountain peak with each pass of its flight.
I’ve also been taken by the fact that Mercury’s upcoming retrograde will see the messenger flitting between the sign of the archer and sea goat. Denise Riley’s writing on “The Lapidary” feels appropriate as we consider this strange dialectic between the planets of constriction and expansion. Snow has finally fallen, general, over all of the Kootenays, absolving the shoulder season malaise. Its spangled surface in the moonlight is a reminder that its points of flame depend on the precision of their cutting.
“The work of cutting has to maximize each gemstone’s colour, brilliance, fire, and scintillation. Light travels inside a stone, but the optical characteristics of each kind of stone will differ, so each needs its particular mode of fashioning, whether of sawing, shaping, facet grinding, or polishing… It’s needless to labour the parallels with the activities of the professional lapidary, described in such technical textbooks, with those of the poet; enough to say that the writing of poetry can demand extreme compression and the dispersal of as much internal light as possible. It can be experienced as a working technique of chipping verbal matter into shape.”
The Neptunian bending of this Sagittarius season was felt as I wept against my lover, on our way to a wreath-making workshop. One parent betrayed by her capsizing body; the other, by his mind. I embraced the fir-needle sharps and glue gun burns after, crafting my tufts of cedar and spruce on the floor — like a child. And we walked our offerings to Jupiter through the fog after, my gloveless hands freezing in a way that felt right and good. The Full Moon rising through the mist, above Mark, transfigured into some alien cross or unholy star of Bethlehem. The fact that Pluto will cross the Great Conjunction degree again soon never far from my thoughts.
Mars in Sagittarius has no essential dignity, said to be “peregrine” (meaning foreign) in this mutable fire sign. The seasoned general or DC spook hands off to the free agent, the jester, or the chaos of mob rule.
Fresh off its cazimi, as it entered Sagittarius, Mars’ lava flows met the ice cold water of Saturn in Pisces. We’re still integrating the afterring of its reality check. Mars’ recent arc reminds me of the closing act in Andrei Tarkovsky’s three hour opus, Andrei Rublev, which follows the drifting of a 15th century icon painter through medieval Russia. In over thirty minutes, we see the casting process of a bell, in all its mud-slaked toil. The digging of the pit, the construction of the mold, the pouring of the bronze, the lifting of its awesome weight — and then its birthing wail in innumerable tongues.
After Mars’ cazimi the previous weekend, the Yeatsian “terrible beauty born” of its alloy is now being poured into an infinitude of new molds and forms. Some perhaps beyond our comprehension: 3D printed sigils and emblems of a world that’s emerging from the martian bellow of incomprehensible horrors.
In a recent dream, I was swallowed by a jellyfish and slowly forgot myself as the brains in its tentacles said “be not afraid” in brailes of pure vibration and light. My struggle against the agape of its hive-mind felt like a slim wire, slowly being corroded. And at the moment of complete dissolution, I experienced utter horror intermixed with bliss.
Here’s a seasonal favorite, from Galaxy 500. xo