The Virgo Full Moon and Venus Born Aloft
I explore the Virgo Full Moon, and Venus' heady exaltation in Pisces, through Anne Carson, Anais Nin, The Ballet Russes and my own personal Zelda remediation.
“I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.”
- Anais Nin (Venus in Pisces)
“Love is like a faucet, it turns off and on”
- Billie Holiday (Venus in Pisces)
The full moon in Virgo illumes a bolt of the sky’s cloth that has long been folded away in the cool of a drawer. Luna may not have a particular dignity in Virgo, but under the sign’s Mercurial rulership we can begin to perceive the intricate motifs of this cloth, spun in silver thread. Somehow the imperfections, flaws, and dropped threads are what makes this cloth not only beautiful, but beloved.
At the same time, we might find ourselves shooing away those sundry Knights of Cups: slinking out from the woodwork of Venus’ exaltation, they promise you, oh, everything. Perhaps we derive more comfort from a man who stays home to do the dishes, as Virgo Jarvis Cocker once crooned. What seems too good to be true right now likely is. The divine discontent of Venus exalted can be channeled, however— under this Moon—into poetry, or love letters of unrequited longing (best unsent, or burned in the sink!).
I found myself poring over a blanket I’ve had since childhood this morning: the side I recline on is now rubbed to the twill so that the paisley pattern has all but vanished, revealing the underlayer of its handiwork. I found myself strangely moved by its slow disintegration:iIts faithfulness, and its shabbiness, are impossible to entangle.
This reminded me of my childhood obsession with the story of The Velveteen Rabbit, whose lustrous coat was all but loved away. Here was a toy once so adored (even as it’s later turfed by its teenage owner) that its leaking batten, and missing glass eye, are seen by a fairy of the woods as marks of the deepest beauty. Even as the toy is rotting—picked apart by the elements—memories of having once been loved extravagantly sustain the Velveteen Rabbit.
The fairy, however, takes pity on this castaway, and transforms him into a living rabbit at the end of the story. Venus is exalted, at last. Here we have a metaphor for Venus’ chariot in Pisces: love is always inflected with loss, longing and vast distances. In her exaltation, the truly abstract force of love—something that burns away our words in her resplendent, though distant light—makes mad poets, and drunken saints of us all. We would never willingly choose the abject pain of romantic love, but we would never take it back either.
Especially with Venus now combust, and dazzled by the Sun—as she prepares for her death and rebirth as Hesperus, (the evening star)—Venusian matters may feel obscure and lost to darkness. They may even feel damaged, or tainted in some way. However, thank the gods for this Virgo Full Moon that allows us to see love’s slow marring, through the medium of time, as something both tragic and holy.
Or in the words of the writer Anais Nin, whose Venus in Pisces was indeed held aloft by the many writers and Surrealists who considered her a muse (even as her talent eclipsed them all):
“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”
Eros the Bittersweet
Through Venus, I was also drawn to a collection of essays by poet and Greek classicist Anne Carson (herself a native of the Virgo Moon), titled Eros the Bittersweet. The two primary source texts woven through the book are Sappho's Fragment 31 and two Socratic dialogues, the Phaedrus and the Lysias.
Though the book will explore the triangular relationship between reader, writer and text, as well as the frisson between oral and written Greek, the first chapter concerns itself with the exquisite agony of eros. It considers how desire is often predicated on distance and the obscurity of the lover, onto which we project a gorgeous tempest: something divinely impossible.
In the end, love is impersonal—it’s something that flows through us and seeks its own end. Though this tempest momentarily elevates the lovers into Gods, eros collapses, paradoxically, with the actual closeness of the beloved. Here’s an excerpt from the essay:
“Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me sweetbitter, / impossible to fight off, creature stealing up” (Sappho fragment).
It is hard to translate. "Sweetbitter" sounds wrong, and yet our standard English rendering "bittersweet" inverts the actual terms of Sappho's compound glukupikron. Should that concern us? If her ordering has a descriptive intention, eros is here being said to bring sweetness, then bitterness in sequence: she is sorting the possibilities chronologically. Many a lover's experience would validate such a chronology, especially in poetry, where most love ends badly… Eros moves or creeps upon its victim from some-where outside her: orpeton. No battle avails to fight off that advance: amachanon. Desire, then, is neither inhabitant nor ally of the desirer. Foreign to her will, it forces itself irresistibly upon her from without. Eros is an enemy. Its bitterness must be the taste of enmity.”[1]
This full Moon, we might be able to perceive the bittersweet in Eros, like Carson, from a place of Mercurial logic and remove (though we risk rationalizing something that doesn’t need to be explained). Or, we may find a way to hold these two thoughts in the mind at once: this new desire may feel like divine intoxication, but I know that to be swept into the firmament will mean an equally perilous fall.
We have an opportunity, with this Virgo Moon, to logically deduce whether or not we can shoulder the emotional volatility of a transcendent experience that may tempt us this month. The love-drunk madness will peak at an otherworldly Pisces New Moon, with the Sun, Venus, and Neptune all entangled limbs, and cups of wine, in a niche of Fellini’s Satyricon.
Nevertheless, this dreamy escape from the endless grind of pandemic life might cruelly dissolve when Venus enters Mars’ sign later this spring. From the floating sweetness of her exaltation, to what could be a bitter fall indeed in the sign of her exile—Mars’ sharps will burst the bubble, or perhaps it’s us who will do the cutting away.
However, if we’re feeling grounded in our root system (the Full Moon blooms in a decan Austin Coppock calls the Tree of Life), and accept that this whirlwind of desire may be fleeting—perhaps we take that calculated risk. My Gemini rising sometimes confuses the courting of chaos with the harvesting of writing material, so I know what side I might fall on.
In any case, under Virgo’s powers of discrimination, we can weigh up the pros and cons. Perhaps this brisk tasting of ambrosia will function to open portals in our heart and imagination, or to stir a long dormant muse. Perhaps a few weeks of heavenly dislocation are exactly the medicine at this peak of covid exhaustion. Quizas, quizas, quizas…
Venus Exalted in Pisces
As mentioned earlier, an exalted Venus in Pisces allows us to taste the eros of love that always seems to recede at the moment we grasp it—like an impressionist painting of water lilies that can only be appreciated from a distance.
Acyuta-Bhava Das describes planets in their exaltation as that moment in a symphony when the string section reaches an almost agonizing pitch of beauty and intensity: the note is impossible to hold; it seeks it resolution in its inevitable collapse. For that moment, however, we are transported, and perhaps forever altered.
Another metaphor I use for Venus’ exaltation is that of fine perfume (as a layman frag-head, I used to hang out with perfumists in Barcelona—halcyon days indeed!). The process of distillation of essential oils, whereby thousands of flowers are burned, stewed and pushed through pipettes, and finally bottled as an abstraction, feels true to Venus’ impossibility to truly be possesed in Pisces.
The most divine perfumes (in my mind, Anubis by Liz Moores, Portrait of a Lady by Frederic Malle, Chanel no 5, Philosykos) intoxicate through this dance of the vivid presence of their materials, and their simultaneous ghostly loss.
We meet a further paradox in Venus’ exaltation being corrupted, or damaged in some way by the beams of the Pisces Sun. As long as she is within 8 degrees of sol (in a state of combustion), her golden finery is still singed at the edges. Perhaps we taste more of the acrid than the mellow sweetness now. It must be said, however, that some of my favorite vintage perfumes have that indolic jasmine note that smells slightly of decay, or animalic notes that dirty up intoxicating white flowers.
Though a combust Venus can corrupt her mandate of harmonization, aesthetic beauty, diplomacy and symmetry, she is somewhat protected in her own chariot in Pisces—a mitigating factor according to the ancients. Perhaps today’s angst and longing will be tomorrow’s windfall. There’s a sense of current Venusian deprivation resolving in a fortuitous way if we can be patient, and hold space for the current imperfection of our circumstances.
A beautiful example of Aphrodite petrified by fire, but born aloft and miraculously protected in her chariot, was uncovered in Pompeii this week. Archaeologists discovered a rare ceremonial chariot, in a state of exceptional preservation—literally swaddled by lava flows and ash and therefore frozen in time. Delicate bronze and tin decoration of floral garlands remained intact, and it’s thought that the chariot would’ve delivered a bride to her husband.[2]
The Ballet Russes
As for chart natives of Venus in Pisces, one that stood out to me (apart from Nin), was the director of the groundbreaking Ballet Russes company: Serge Diaghilev. I started watching a documentary on the company this morning, narrated by Tilda Swinton,[2] and this was before I discovered that the Full Moon was illuminating the Sabian Symbol of “a girl takes her first dancing lesson.” There’s something about the polarity of Virgo and Pisces that reminds me of the endless sweat, blood and toil—the 3000 thankless hours—that underpin the weightless virtuosity of ballet (or any art form for that matter).
Diaghilev was a ballet dancer of considerable talent, as well as an art critic, a patron, and the founder of the Ballet Russes. The ruler of his Piscean Venus, also exalted as Jupiter in Cancer, speaks to an endless creative fertility, as well as the inherited wealth that helped make his grandest dreams possible. He gathered surrealists and cubists in his fold to furnish his avant-garde visions, with Picasso and Braque designing productions, Coco Chanel contributing costumes, and Stravinsky and Prokofiev providing brand new scores.[4]
This description of his transcendent dancing talent and mesmerizing glamour, from NPR, is about as close as a human will get to Venus being held aloft in the sign of Pisces:
“Gorgeous, with blazing dark eyes, fabulous cheekbones and a dancer's body, he became a major star… "Nijinsky was an incredible talent," Kennel says. "He was technically very well trained. He was incredibly strong. He could jump in the air, seemingly able to stay there. The story is that somebody asked him once, 'How do you jump so high?' And he said, 'It's simple. You just jump up there and wait a little while.' "
Nijinsky was worshiped by men — it was a moment when gay culture became visible in Paris — and by women, who got the chance to really look at a man and be seduced by what they saw. Slithering sensuously, having his way with a scarf to Claude Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun…”[4]
Perhaps, over this Full Moon, we take the first ‘dance steps’ on a fabulous new creative project, to be further affirmed by an auspicious Pisces New Moon. Perhaps this project will chariot us through the rest of the pandemic, or we simply spend the evening wiggling our hips.
Venus in Pisces: A Remediation
To end on a more personal note, my own Venusian remediation this week was to finally splurge on a Nintendo Switch Lite and Breath of the Wild. The sprawling, open world game is one I’ve been dying to play since its release in Pisces season of 2017.
I’ve been a fan of the Zelda franchise since the N64 days, and fell madly in love with the elegiac tone, and surrealism of Majora’s Mask as an angsty pre-teen. Link’s Awakening for Gameboy, which was apparently inspired by Twin Peaks, is another favorite, and I’m coveting its Switch remake with hyperreal depth of field and plasticine-like graphics. I guess I’m now outing myself as a gamer (not to brag, but I once won a race of Mario Kart 64 with my toes)!
I decided that some Piscean fantasy and immersion would help keep my obsessive mind from spinning out in more toxic ways, as the long wait for vaccination will drag on into the summer (after which I’m hopefully back to Spain!). The creator of the Zelda franchise, Shigeru Miyamoto, has a Saturn-Neptune conjunction, which is perfect for fantastical world-building.
His games are also inflected with Taoism, and often involve restoring balance to a corrupted world. In Breath of the Wild the lack of an intrusive score allows you to appreciate bird song, insects churring, the shifting weather patterns, or even an arctic fox yawning as it stretches. The rhythms of nature are the star of the show.
Cancer is a sign I’ve always associated with nostalgia, but Acyuta-Bhava Das pointed out that Pisces shares this affinity with memory. Though it’s early days on the Hylian Plateau—currently foraging ingredients to make a seafood stew for an old woodsman who has promised me his winter kit in return, lol—I understand that a part of the game’s questing is a reclamation of Link’s memories! How lovely are these synchronicities in retrospect?
All of this is to say, returning to Zelda has been an incredibly nostalgic and comforting balm. As cheesy as it sounds, the game feels like my own pocket-sized chariot bearing me through the boredom, and dark ruminations of endless, sober nights alone.
That, and the endlessly renewing fount of writing, poetry and a life examined—a comfort even in the clenched, slumbering seed of this season. I will end these musings with some words from Nin:
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
And finally:
“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”
Works cited:
[1] https://icpla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Carson-A-Bittersweet-Eros-The-Bittersweet-1998.pdf
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56222992
[3] https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/diaghilev-and-the-ballets-russes
[4] https://www.npr.org/2013/05/30/187066946/modern-movement-how-the-ballets-russes-revolutionized-dance