Dharma Moon

At first sight this may appear a radically boisterous New Moon in tropical Taurus – the drive of the people looking for ways to ground the fiery power of a stellium of planets that have been channeling Aries qualities into the world this last month or more. And on a gross level we might well want to make this work, given the scale of events and the challenging dynamic now at work in the world….however, experience is transforming the radical element, and it is the increasing presence of the Goddess consciousness emerging at the heart of the world that is coming through this May New Moon.

She is both primal and supra-intelligent, and there is no place here for brute force or blinkered heads down confrontation in the use of those Aries values. So, while this is a ‘no-nonsense, get real’ Moon, it is fundamentally an opportunity to further embody Her within our daily lives. In this reading of the May New Moon we will be able to see just how powerfully articulate is her primal wisdom as it permeates our world and further prepares us with the creative tools needed to bring an end to the overbearing autocracies of a dieing paradigm….we need to be creative, aware and empowered and, as we shall see, our creativity within the realms of the sensuous, is the conscious vehicle through which the radical element can become grounded…..

Helping us to bring alive the deeper layers of consciousness within, Her divine energy is manifesting the multifacted Soul of the World through Ceres, Persephone, Juno, Pallas, Eris and the Liliths. Key to grounding them all within our hearts is Venus – and it is the medicines she brings, her sensitivity to the sensual nature of Life, that will help us balance the male archetypes now raising the tension we all feel. The field is stretched taut and filled with potential. This is an energy ready to be given expression and we can do so with creative beauty and power, funded by the divine feminine – lets explore the rising celestial wave…..

With Venus now in Aries opposing Saturn in Libra at the New Moon the value of our relationships is brought into sharp focus; just who we know in our hearts to be our most trusted friends and allies, how we relate to them on a one to one basis through fidelity, whether the individuality we each bring into the world is honoured within our partnerships, how we communicate this…..the quality of truth that we know from the feel right factor within our hearts. All these aspects of this opposition are brought out into broad daylight here with Venus close at 2 degrees from newly direct Mercury. The Sabian symbol for Venus’ degree has this keynote : “Projecting into everyday living the realization of wholeness and fulfillment.” Here is a central theme for the mundane application of these energies. This expresses the act of self realisation through the creative fulfilment of spiritualised desire. At 15 Aries Venus brings out the exquisite Sabian symbol of “AN INDIAN WEAVING A CEREMONIAL BLANKET” in full sensual beauty – there is a mediation within this that is profound and inspiring, as ‘the realised original self clothes itself in the universe’. In relation to Saturn it is a degree of realising what buddhists would call Dharma – the everyday as the path of natural law, and here is our first influx of the creative element in context. Our lives are the skene from which the patterns of our soul are woven within the fabric of the Universe. We should say Multi-verse as Venus also opens the possibility to transcend the forms we create and use them as gateways for spirit to enter the world. Again, with Saturn’s Libran structuring and eldership, it becomes possible to view our path as initiation through Life – intiation of both healing medicines through creative acts and as a restoration of rites of passage within the everyday, where every step is made both conscious and divine. For us all, if we care to take notice (and, although surely not all of us are, humanity is awakening to Earth awareness) the intensity of present events is showing us that we have entered the ‘no looking back’ phase of initiation into karmic reality…..we have gone beyond the threshold and the whole world has taken on the shape of the sacred ground within which we will become transformed through living experience – the here-and-now has become humanity’s ritual ground for initiation into adulthood.

So from the very start we are called to recognise the pragmatic side of a spiritualised life, lived creatively as prayer in practice that serves a larger process. The Sabian also refers to the state akin to that following a divination, where enquiry leads to awakened consciousness that becomes infused with ‘knowing’ of a divine order and seeks to find creative expression that carries forward the clear intent of the insights revealed…….we talked last time about the importance of divination, the role of the diviner as an ‘inner mentor’ – now, we can take a step further and become purposefully articulate as divining beings, and this role is asking to be fully activated and embodied with this new cycle. We can make our offerings based upon the insights within our active meditations. This is common practice for the diviner/healer – it is powerful and effective within the everyday, both for grounding our own divine nature through creativity and for giving form to the healing energies that are seeking to work with and through us. And the natural consequence of such is to translate knowledge into wisdom through action that serves the larger purpose….again the unfolding events and situations within the world give us our clear mandate, and this is a purpose that is clear to us all now; we only have to look around and percieve with our heart’s inner eyes to know where our prayers are most needed. It has become obvious, also, that we can equally become intoxicated with the divine; it is both zealousness and hubris that bring the imbalance – as both unconscious and unacknowledged symptoms of a deep collective soul wound, the spiritual void at the heart of ‘material culture’ that seeks to be filled with divine energy, this affects our world through its own narcolepsy….and here is where the reading begins to open out.

Simply embodying our divinity, realising our sacred nature, is creative and, under ‘healthy and balanced’ circumstances this may give rise to cultural expression that embodies the spiritual health of the people; we only have to look to the life-ways and creative beauty of the indigenous world for to see our heritage mirrored back to us. By contrast, our dominant cultural trend has brought us into a world that is stripped back to the mundane, where creativity is reduced to a feature of our human capacity for both survival, invention and decadence, and we are paying heavily for the latter – creativity needs to honour the divine to become balanced, for the divine and the manifest are symbiotically interwoven. Without this honouring we are constantly pursuing a path that leads towards what the Hopi call Koyaanisqatsi – a ‘world out of balance’. Following the blind objective dictates of ‘science in service to progress’ this desacralised and hubristic impulse has driven us to the edge of extinction, where ‘progress’ is the hunger that seeks to fill the void within with the false gods of materialism. Such is the halmark of the patriarchal paradigm, controlling the hunger and making us servants of its self-serving agendas. So, within the fallout of our patriarchal paradigm, its entropic meltdown, it is the function of Goddess awareness and energy to alert us to the realities of the imbalance, and to show us the path that we must now follow to restore it….for follow we must. And more than anything else it is the denied aspects of the Goddess that are returning, her innate presence within all things as well as the multiplicity of her conscious expression. We need look no further than the aspects to pick up the threads of the story……

Sextile the Sun and Moon we find Ceres, the sickle, wheat, poppy and snake bearing Mother, provider and pragmatic parent, wise to the ways of the underworld….opposite her is Juno, who demands the honouring of balanced individuality within partnership, or exposes the infidelities that betray the sacred trist! What brings the fine edge to this arrangement is Pallas square the Moon, and Pallas raises consciousness with Amazonian intensity in service to wisdom – so, there’s no question about whether this Moon is about consciously addressing the imbalances within the world in relation to the patriarchal paradigm and all its works. What we find in this configuration is a potentially emasculating yod between Venus sextile Pallas pointing towards Juno at the action point, with Ceres opposite at the reaction point, and she’s twitching her blade ready to express the combined energies of her sisters with decisive impact. How does this translate……?

Venus and Pallas bring the passionate heart and dis-passionately wise women’s knowing together and mutualy raise their values; Juno holds this up as the template for action that honours the sacred and Ceres makes sure that it is applied with decisive and unflinching effect – the Sabians again provide the symbol for the mundane context. Pallas’ degree has these lines within the text for the symbol : “…….the confrontation with superpersonal group or occult power…..In social life, as well as occultism, conflict is always to be expected; one must prepare for it……a deep-seated struggle is inevitable at least to some extent…..It can be a struggle against the ghosts of the unfulfilled past, the “unlived life,” or a confrontation with accumulated and often-eluded karma……One may have to rehearse the dangerous play…..Individual rashness cannot be tolerated……Even a deliberate sacrifice must play a well-conceived part — like the sacrifice of an important piece in a game of chess…..the process of integration of the individual into a social Whole, a community, an occult Brotherhood…….The concept of group-value dominates the entire scene.”

We are put on collective call to be aware, pre-cogniscent of the values and motivations behind our actions and to take this higher consciousness into embodiment, centered within the heart – a far cry from the scientism of the collapsing era. Juno’s energy is finely tuned to bring out the crimes that have been committed against us in the name of ‘over-Fathering’ our world. The Sabian for Juno’s degree offers the healing balance, saying “…the mystic Beloved hands him what she has woven for him out of spiritual threads.” This is the recognition of the devotee as the “the blossom that crowns a long series of incarnations” – it also offers the redemptive honouring of the masculine principle within service to the divine feminine. Once again, there is the creative element, the soul-weaving that echoes the Norns message from the last Moon cycle, and we cannot escape being aware of the fated nature of our predicament . Karma is at the heart of this – it requires owning and cleansing, the integral function of these combined goddess energies. And there is a further context for this, that Ceres delivers through fearless re-orientation to Earth consciousness and the seasonal cycles, as they express the endless round of Life and Death…..Ceres, although applying an underlying pressure with increasing effect now, is absolutely key here and we will come back to her. But, this is not all!

Both Ceres (in wide aspect to Saturn) and the Moon+Sun are quincunx Saturn, and they too are in an energising sextile – the message is doubled, and this time it is a blunt and imperative challenge to the Saturnian authority figure, a blunting of his masculinity; ’emasculation’ perhaps defeats the purpose, more likely the ‘little death’ after the ejaculation of patriarchal culture in climax provides a more useful reading! The structuring principle is being broken down in the world to allow for the inner light of Goddess consciousness to shine from within, and that means within every one of us, women and men alike – for it is the paradigm of masculine dominance and not the male sex that is being brought to justice here. So, here at least is a window of opportunity – if Saturn is at the action point of this second yod, Venus puts the redress into action, at the reaction point opposite Saturn. Ceres, being in waning aspect to Saturn, channels her energy through her initiate’s heart and values, and Venus holds this role – she is becoming empowered, which means it is at a heart level that we are being initiated – we can take courage and stand up to the oppressive regimes that embody Saturnian control and bring the masculine and feminine energies to a higher level.

The divine and the mundane intermix, but, the mundane application becomes more visible if we come back to the New Moon. Here Sun and Moon combine, and the Sabian symbol for their degree clealry expresses those values that are now being hi-lighted, which must be addressed : “He is the strong man, the man of ambition who has to take care of the inward-turned “woman” aspect of his consciousness, the aspect that seeks to grow a beautiful “garden” of individual selfhood…..the relationship of ego-man and society has taken the aspect of COMPULSION FOR GAIN.” The end symbol is glaringly obvious, especially in light of the above, but, the inner message makes us think as it can be read both ways…..the feminine has become reduced within the world to an inner ideal, in service to unconscious patriarchal greed and personal profit. We can see this everywhere…..we live in peril of destruction if we allow this to continue. While Ceres provides the underlying directive Venus is the linch-pin within this reading, her role is pivotal in realising that directive. Yes, we want the earth to be our ‘beautiful garden’, but, how can we possibly achieve this if we continue to supress that which Earth is the embodiment of and abuse Her body in the process. What we create around us reflects what is within us…..the goddesses are showing us that our inner work must continue with renewed dedication.

Being in the sign of Aries some astrologers would say Venus is here ruled by Mars, so, how does the warrior fit into this process? Mars, having just conjunct with Jupiter shortly before this new Moon, and still close by the great benefactor, it is now the closer attentions of Eris that is driving Jupiter to distraction and Mars must pay heed – this spells big trouble unless we bring about changes in our outlook, a re-energising of our fundamental philosophies. The warning is that unless we orient ourselves in the right direction and utilise power wisely, the world situation will esculate aggressively! There is hope – Jupiter can bring out the best in Mars, and we know that there is little room for gungho macho attitudes anymore. This too is a point that the goddesses are pushing home. Within the revolutionary movement that has been spreading throughout the North African and Middle-Eastern nations it is the voice of the women that is emerging as the articulate expression of grounded reason and motivation for real change – these are not simply movements for political freedom, they are also a demand for equality and truth. How can we achieve equality when the majority of governments are led by men who are driven by fear, greed and power-over and who continue to pursue their elite agenda’s through use of force in the name of ‘democracy’? How can we achieve real freedom within the patriarchal spewing of weaponry into the world, and this applies equally whether there are politicians with their fingers on the button, their pockets lined with the loot of clandestine arms sales that merely fuel further conflict, whether they are represented by State police, the enlisting of men as cannon fodder, or high-tech combat soldiers, providing the perfect cover for the covert pursuit of “COMPULSION FOR GAIN” – not only is Saturn being called to account. Mars energy can help us realise the role of Sacred Warrior and our goddess infused creativity is the channel for his energies as well, thus bringing him into service to Her……

Pallas, in Aquarius, knows that Uranus, closely shadowed by the Liliths, is out to bring Plutocracy to the dock – the two year square-off between Uranus and Pluto begins within months, we are feeling the tensions build through this as well – and Pallas higher knowing is visibly broadcast throughout the WWW. She knows that the Liliths will expose the dark side of the political power base, and while they entrain Uranus, may continue to do so with explosive and unpredictable power. So long as our collective intelligence is active as a global network, we can keep this impulse growing and channel it for the greater good, until the world we seek within our hearts, to manifest and pass on to our children, has become a reality….this is the central message of the goddesses at this New Moon. And it will happen, regardless, for the rising Goddess consciousness is as real as the ground we stand upon – our task is to bring the visionary power She funds us with into our human reality.

This is no fairytale – the authorities are constantly feeding us ‘less than the truth’, contradicting themselves, inducing both confusion, miasm and blind ignorance – these are the fingerprints of those who would be God, the hubrists who hold the seats of worldly power. To combat this the warrior archetype must now be taken to its higher vibration….and, this is where we find Mars role most strongly vindicated, as he trines the North Node. If ever we faced a time when we are asked to embody the Rainbow Warrior as fully conscious and initiated individuals, to come forth and champion our Earth in divinely inspired creative Unity, it is now…..men and women alike. Remember, Venus is telling us it is a sacred calling of the heart, but, we can channel that powerful Ceres energy through this role as well…..our voices are strong in the global network, as artists, writers, musicians, campaigners, communicators increasingly embodying extra-ordinary epoch making power. Creativity. Ceres is the Goddess of ‘experience’. The snakes she has at her side bring cthonic wisdom and electrifying kundalini energy – here is a reflection of how the religious dogmas of patriarchal divisiveness have subverted her role. It is through experience that knowledge within incarnation becomes manifestly conscious – the church fathers have re-written the story and called such experience ‘the Fall’.

There are deep resonances for the Earth Mother within this – in the Eleusinian Mysteries her initiatic wisdom became both enshrined and protected, initiates to the Mysteries being sworn to secrecy. In Demeter’s myth (and Ceres is the roman name for Demeter) the Earth ‘fell’ to barrenness after Hades (Pluto) snatched her daughter from the en-flowered fields of springtime, and Demeter sought her daughter the world over – only Hecate was awake to the crime! Here are two aspects of the story worth noting; first, Persephone, Demeter and Hecate are triple aspects of the Goddess, Maiden, Mother and Crone – and what is most interesting in this is that while Persephone and Hecate are ‘personal’ names, Demeter is an ‘archetypal role’ name. This is reflected and developed within the story when Demeter, after fruitless searching, encounters Baubo at the house of King Celeus of Eleusis (where the Mysteries found their home). Baubo and Iambe, the king’s daughter, try to placate Demeters exhaustion with wine and food – Demeter refuses nourishment, and so Iambe and Baubo, attempt to raise Demeter’s spirits with lude and lascivious verses ( we get the Iambic metre in poetry from Iambe) – this too fails. Demeter will respond only to the archetypal, the personal does not touch her. So, it is Baubo’s great gift of womanhood that finally breaks through Demeter’s mourning as she raises her skirts and vagina – Demeter is awakened to the full impact of women’s power of regeneration, her Mysteries enshrined and embodied. Baubo is the Sheilanagig whose own body is the archetypal gateway of the sexual powers of regeneration and their inward turning, the deep Crone ‘kenning’ of matured and lived wisdom.

Ceres/Demeter carries the pervasive ‘field’ energy of the archetype and this helps us to understand how her influence is at work within this reading as well as throughout her astrological journey.

The second aspect of Demeter’s story we need to take notice of here brings us back to the current state of the world. After Pluto (Hades in the Greek version) kidnaps Persephone, the fertility of the Earth falls into crisis and the seasons ceased their cycle – some interpreters have attributed this catastrophy to Demeter’s own doing, others to the loss of the Kore, the maiden aspect of the Goddess. There are also echoes here of the massive global changes in climate that were unfolding through the last Ice Age – Ceres myth may well have arisen from this. We should remember that Hecate, the Crone, is wise to the crime. She is no stranger to the Death realms herself, having connection to the initiatic power of the menopause, the inward turning of the creative cycle at the end of ovulation, the final phase of the triple Moon Goddess. She petitions Zeus (through giving the Sky Father full knowledge of Hades crime and Persephone’s location) to persuade Hades to release Persephone (the now initiated Kore). This is a big wake-up call for us all – only through initaited knowledge of the full Life-Death-Life cycle can we reclaim our wholeness, our potential for balanced and fruitfull living – we can become wise within our world and all that is unfolding in our midst. Inspite of themselves the patriarchs are revealing our path. Our world, Mother Earth, Demeter, is initiating us all on this path – how we wake up to the true nature of the presence of Death within Life is the most fundamental of all initiatic challenges. Death can be seen as both the instrument of the mass crimes against our humanity that we are seeing perpetrated by the patriarchal powers and culture of our times, and also as the awakener to our hidden fertility, our creativity become wise. The stolen Goddess, denied her rightful place for too long, can be returned to us now, re-installed within the heart of our life-ways ans culture. Ceres’ poppies are the sacrament, the sacred entheogen that give us symbolic access to the archetypal realms – Hecate’s ‘kenning’ is the power of experience and knowing combined, reflected through our divining psychic eye, in our ‘seeing’ into the archetypal. Another aspect of the triple Lunar Goddess in her ‘dark’ knowing aspect points up the psychic and occult energy present here – Lilith has been at work with Uranus.

What we see in Liliths influence is the esoteric aspect of Uranus being brought out – his entry into tropical Aries saw Fukushima explode with devastating effect. Radiation continues to pour into our oceans and atmosphere – the full facts are being covered up. There may be justification in this – panic is to be avoided. But, this is yet another halmark of the ‘over-Fathering’ of the patriarchal approach. We are made vulnerable without the facts – Lilith is stealthy and eery in combination with Uranus and this becomes dangerous and subversive in the extreme if kept unconscious. This is also how radiation works at the biological and atmospheric level. The Father culture does not work in its controlling and protective capacity when this dis-empowers the individual – this is full-on politic at the personal level. With regards radiation we need to excercise our own power in other ways – careful research and informed networking can bring us the inside knowledge we need to counter the veil of un-truth we are being sold. Uranus with the Liliths can aid us in this, and here we can see the power of our communications across the WWW at work. Venus also tells us that Nature nas the medicines we need.

The Aquarian ideal was diseminated far and wide under Neptunes influence and now he is feeding spiritualised imaginative Piscean energy into the New Moon cycle via Venus. The Dharma Moon is supporting Venus’ role with exquisite compassion and creative imagination of the highest spiritual order – she is aided and abeted by Neptune in quintile to the New Moon. This most creative of aspects resonates with Venus through sacred geometry, the quintile aspect emphasising the fifth harmonic that Venus embodies in her cycles. Her esoteric qualities bring us back to the reclamation of knowledge from the Tree of Life and echo Ceres ‘fall’ in redemption – her dreaming is of the sacred marraige in all its sensual glory. Chiron close by Neptune brings shamanic consciousness to the root of this creative influx and emphasises the sensuous world…..it is only through the sensuous, and Venus is nothing but sensuality in action, that we can truly know the fullness of divinity. The shadow side of ‘puritanism’ in our world is exposed by the goddesses. Too long the abstract has dominated the spiritual – the shaman knows otherwise. Unflinching, the shaman undergoes the test, the initiatic process that sublimates the ego to the divine will, and so must we…..this is a visceral process, a path that leads to empowered return and the pragmatic presence of spirit in the world. Here again are resonances with Ceres story. It must be completed, for any remaining vestige of ego-oriented motive threatens to become a self serving power that manifests the dark side of the occult, and, remember, Ceres made sure that the inner knowledge of the Eleusinian mysteries was kept secret, known only to the initiates – the penalty for revealing them was death. Is it any wonder that in a death oriented culture the dark underbelly of the global elite is becoming exposed; and do they care, with such a powerful heirarchy of fear at their heart? Lilith, branded the ‘fallen’ bride, the ‘harlot’, the passionate Lunar Goddess of deep women’s knowing, is uncanny and watches Pluto with unblinking and penetrative eyes……as irradiated particles, carried on the wind, falling with the rain, settle on the land…..in Uranus ear she whispers eerily, and asks “did they get it yet, or shall we give them a vision to wake them up, a spell to break their chains, and for revolution, a powerful potion, a medicine of freedom through creativity…..?”

Take heart….our lives are blessed with divine knowing. In the Roman version of the Ceres myth Persephone is known as Proserpina – the celestial powers work in mysterious ways, for asteroid Proserpina is conjunct the Moon and Sun at this Dharma New Moon….

Deep power of the Goddess be with us all….