INTRODUCTORY ESOTERIC ASTROLOGY

INTRODUCTORY ESOTERIC ASTROLOGY

VIRGO 2011

Labor of Hercules
Golden Girdle of Hippolyta

Told little by Eurystheus and Nereus. Hippolyta of the Moon/Mars cult offers Hercules Venus' girdle of unity. Hercules won't listen and kills her – failure in War of the Sexes.
Rescues Hesione from the throat of monster of the deep, the great Sea.

Motto: I am the Mother and the Child. I, God, I, matter am.
(Virgo hides the light which irradiates the world in Aquarius)

Mars in Virgo (Oct 2011 to June 2012)
We have entered an Extended Tenancy of Mars in Virgo (Nov 2011 – June 2012) with six months to go.
I prefer to express these Mars periods as Extended Tenancies rather than as Retrograde periods, since Signs trump Planets trump Houses, in terms of astrological ‘placement’ and long-term influence and effects. Both POVs are useful.

Here I am speaking to spiritual students and world workers, not the masses (including the “Tea Party”) satisfied with mediocrity who have established their codependent mob-majority plutocratic Mediocracy, taking over government, economic and social life in America. Delusional and parochial values and politics stroll hand-in-hand down to perdition.

We are faced with another six months (Jan-June 2012) of Mars in Virgo. The self-possession and self-presentation of Mars is at its most refined in the sign Virgo. (This includes the martial arts.) However, operating IN the lower mind rather than ON it can wreak hell on the nervous system. We can clearly see the disease-enhancing stasis of lower-mind polarization present in the political swamp of Foggy Bottom (DC). So many straw stalking dogs, PACs, Super-PACs and scarecrows. If only they had a brain.

Having received a number of reports that Mars-Virgo is driving them nuts (including myself), I feel bound to respond to those sensitives who are suffering from spiritual indignation at the barrage of insults from world politics and media, as well as radiation clouds from Fukushima unparalleled since Chernobyl.

Virgo Overview

Virgo may esoterically be associated with the previous solar system, the ‘Past’ and the lower mind, but the latter remains an asset for negotiating life in the Three Worlds.
Virgo is perceived as critical by those who lack analytic capacity, fascination, or simple interest. It is perceived as judgmental by those who don’t understand disputation as a natural and necessary instinct toward Inquiry, who are tired and emotional (kama-manasic) because they lack the capacity to disagree dispassionately or formally without being disagreeable or becoming emotionally deranged, or because they have no knowledge-, justice-, normative or fairness interests (but who are not necessarily heartless morons, defensive and projecting their inadequacies on to others).

Virgo generally has refinement, enthusiasm for self-improvement and reform, and hypersensitivity. These qualities can be perceived as competitive or annoying by others who are more sluggish or less perceptive of the meticulous detail and beauty of Life and its forms. (The stressful side of hypersensitivity is especially aggravated with Mars and/or stelliums involving Outer Planets in the sign.)
Virgo’s interest in work, self-work, and social improvement is therefore strangely but automatically irritating to pleasure and comfort-seeking, self-satisfied, self-indulgent, or self-confident types. Therefore from a low perspective it may seem an enigma that developed Taurus and Virgo tend to get along and work well together.

Virgo Hypersensitivity and the Lower Mind

Hypersensitivity in general is especially strong with Virgo placements, or with Mars in Virgo interacting with other planets on the Mutable Cross. With strong Virgo placements and an active Mutable Cross there is an abundant need for channeling hyperactivity and frustration into creative work, work for the public good, for greater social equity and well-being, service of some sort, or for fairness and justice on a level playing field. There is also a strong need for deliberate pacing and scheduled rest & relaxation.

Detachment from the vigorous, attentive, and positive serving lower mind is essential, as is the divine indifference of the many-faceted but centralized higher mind of the soul as Light. As with Gemini there is a naturally pronounced dualism (or schizoid conflict/ambivalence) in outlook, but more importantly with Virgo, a dualism involved with strategic planning versus skill-in-action. Mars in Virgo, when healthy, gives great powers of concentration, nervous vigor and stamina, and the power to work.

Virgo as a soul lives centered above and at a distance from a world of somewhat overwhelming detail. Virgo as a personality is immersed in or tormented by it. It is useful to maintain a stance and outlook outside the personality mechanism and allow the panoramic perspective to enable detachment from one’s own concerns, and especially the reactions of others. These reactions of the Other are always to be held suspect, given the question of one’s own discernment regarding the human diversity of attitudes, POVs, as well as humanity’s predominating addiction to crisis/conflict/confrontation to stimulate the reflective thinking process. In the Shaivaite tradition, citta (elemental mind-stuff) is considered synonymous with Ignorance.

In the case of hypersensitivity, it is just as important to develop the skill of NOT seeing, hearing, or reacting, with their concomitant brooding or worrying. With the stresses hypersensitivity is vulnerable to, there is no reason to fear one is losing one’s grip or patience if one just ‘steps up’ — the only way out of the ensnaring lower mind is UP. This may take practice. It is invaluable to be able to STOP and reflect on the natural state of the mind as naked Awareness, Empty as the sky.

Virgo in Mars and the Political ‘Lower Mind’

What is the impact of tax-fleeing multinationals? Starving millions of drought victims and political refugees die, knowing only the love that attempts (often unsuccessfully) to save them in these horrendous and unnecessary planetary events. Millions of refugees attempting to conduct subsistence living in dignity in their traditional territories are pursued by rabid animal-men, either motivated by degenerate impulses of greed, etc., or as a type of psychotic and sociopathic rabid animal, delusionally and absolutistically attached to ideological, distorted religious, or mere theoretical or personal ego constructs. One may be hungry to outlive one's past or childhood poverty. But why not a choice of voluntary simplicity over aggression? Where is the basis of relationship (expressed by these attitudes and behaviors) to Actuality or the three aspects of Reality (conventional, relative, ultimate)? — Take your pick.

A similar situation exists in the U.S. where Republicans (codependent on passive Democrats) are tinkering with the democratic ideal while degenerating as a quasi mass-conscious social ‘group’ from the governmental and leadership values of a Republic and philosophical republicanism to a party of revanchist defense of white-collar criminality, naturally forcing the somewhat inert US public to create a third, or additional political parties. The Republican provocation and coercive enforcement of polarization turns its self-interested tinkering with public enslavement to Debt-currency into a totalitarian form of societal terrorism where Democracy and the democratic ideal are no longer recognizable by the world. The Party mouths off about deserving to be paid for their “work” –which is generally sharp business quasi-fraud and brown-nosing their way up through the corporate cubicles– while Republican values despise the simple human right to Dignity of Work and Public Service. The viral fidgets have been busy for decades now, siphoning all the profits they can to offshore non-national accounts. They are no patriots. They are basically thieves of honor.

The politics of America are pursued as a prolonged and expensive Personal-Popularity War, with the intensity of a hormone-induced junior high-school mentality. The solution in junior high and U.S. politics is to step back, respect one’s own integrity, self-discipline and self-possession, and maintain that skeptical distance by laughter at arising ‘situations’ — meanwhile focusing on one’s own creative interests and work. Isabel Hickey (Boston astrologer) used to say “The first occult law is ‘Mind your own business’.” This is a harsher version of Voltaire’s “tend your own garden” more suited to American behavioral crassness (the ‘ugly American’).

Virgo tends to think the world is run by common sense or Reason, which is a terrible joke. The world of work is filled with mindless (clique and club member) delegators, experts in intimidation, manipulators, spin-sheisters, aggressive arrogators and rip-off artists of others’ work; those who maintain their credentials through self misrepresentation (if not fraud), or through defensive or preemptive counterattack (of good skills, ideas, or character); and those parochial and corporate thugs who will be happy to bash heads with their empty, discarded or falsified paper credentials.

Because of their sensitivity and attention to detail and the interests mentioned above, Virgos are easily enslaved by their inferiors. In such a ‘powdered parlor-snake’ pit, Virgo can take the advantage by accessing all the blind spots (intelligent assessment for starters), forging ahead with reform and innovation with invisibility while surrounded by primitives — even while functioning ostensibly as a ‘doormat.’ There is a science of right sociological analysis, right adaptive and designed/modulated language – little words of power delivered with right timing in the right context or company, while maintaining a transparent and stone-like poise that deflects all thought back toward its objective.

Virgo Outlook

For a Virgo, essentially concerned with self-improvement and social progress movements, it is important to maintain self-respect, self-possession and poise in the realization that all circumstances and horrors can be turned into skills in a learning curve for immediate or deferred application.

Regarding hypersensitivity (which is liable to increase Jan-June 2012), it is also important to “Let go and let God,” recognizing the boomerang effect of karma on those who psychologically and professionally assault, rape, and go on the attack. They have engineered their own destruction eventually, even if one sacrifices the satisfaction of delivering the final word that spotlights and seals their self-generated fate. Again, most think only in a crisis. And remember, don’t forget the ‘mantra’ that severs the beautiful and constructive thoughtform from its creator, allowing it to take its effect. Isabel Hickey just used to say “Put them in the light and let God do His work.”

At times like these, one feels like shouting WAKE UP. And in the case of the hysterically self-interested “Tea Party” — “Wake Up and Follow the Legislation, Stupid.” It is astonishing how delusional ‘wannabes’ can ignore the legislative and voting record of their representatives against the interests they are clamoring for.

The Neo-Aristocratic oil-igarch slopebrows have begun a war for survival in the U.S., similar to that in Civil War England and Revolutionary France. They perhaps forget the “final solution” in these two nations was the rolling of aristocratic heads. The Government by and for the People is taking its own action on the streets, in real estate, in their demand for the right to Dignity of Work, and in the voting booths. The tiny Buy Local and Bank Local movements may create a dual (albeit disproportional) economy in the U.S. It is not impossible that international corporate ‘Persons’ whose registration or CEOs claim American citizenship may finally die on life support before they recognize the legitimacy of sovereign governments (such as the U.S.) established over decades or millennia.

We as a race (human) may find new leadership above and below the radar employed by self-interested corporate ‘Persons.’ Leadership may become a Multiplicity. There is the possibility that corporations interested in creating slaves to Debt-currency may find self-willed self-interest leaves them clutching the bottom line of terminal Ignorance, stupefied and strangled by their last attempts at trompe de l’oeil fraudulent financial instrumentation. Personally, I hope that governments win over corporations, forcing both to cooperate. This may begin in 2020.

There is such a thing as social and innovative evolution, no matter how spasmodic. Social death of nations and confederations can also be spasmodic and unexpected.
The battle of perceived values with constructed ideals will undoubtedly continue, since the incentive of contentless or reiterative wrangling –direct or via media proxy– seems to have infinitely greater appeal these angry days than dialogue redirecting conflicts and crises into reform and reconstruction.
However, the planetary choice is now between Humanistic values and human death via planetary systemic death.
Truly a turning point with Uranus entering Aries (Mars, Mercury, Uranus). Mars in Virgo can act as the midwife to planetary Reconstruction (Mercury, Moon-Vulcan, Jupiter).

Virgo and a Little Light Music

Some of the earliest music found in anglo America is found in the Sacred Harp tradition, a tradition perpetuated since the 1700s by itinerary tunesmiths traveling from town to town giving singing classes in shape-note notation, the sheet music giving a different shape to each note to facilitate right pitch. It started in the northern Appalachians and traveled south to be preserved in southern revivals and sings. Particularly fine and typical examples can be found in the following two songs (1st of 4 quatrains only). This is how folks socialized and brought delight to their rigorous circumstances in the homespun outback.

This song might have taken the place –in early America– of contemporary catharsis-designed TV crime dramas where one can conquer and dispatch evildoers from the comfort of one’s couch.

Huntington Text – Isaac Watts, 1719 / Music – Justin Morgan, 1790
Lord, what a thoughtless wretch was I, to mourn and murmur and repine
To see the wicked placed on high, in pride and robes of honor shine.
But oh their end, their dreadful end. Thy sanctuary taught me so.
On slippery rocks I see them stand, and fiery billows roll below. (Repeat…)

This one says it all:

Windham Text – Isaac Watts, 1707 / Music – Daniel Read, pre-1785
Broad is the road that leads to death, and thousands walk together there.
But Wisdom chose another path, with here and there a traveler.
“Deny thyself and take thy cross” is the Redeemer’s great command.
Nature must count her gold but dross, if she would gain this heavenly land.

Inspiration: Alice A. Bailey, Esoteric Astrology, and her 24 books on esoteric philosophy.
NY: Lucis Publishing Company – website (http://www.lucistrust.org/en/publications_store)