Pisces 2° (February 21)

 

Paris, Day Twenty Nine of Sixty. Started Bikram today after breakfast with the Dobens. There are thinking of staying but they won’t in the end. They want to do two photo shoots and have S. call one of them to arrange in French. Bikram class wasn’t as terribly frightening as I imagined it might be. I did all the postures but only did one of the triangle and camel each. I didn’t die…yet I had a note from a client and I thought: Wow that was a lot of internal experience surfacing from that one event. It all makes sense. As we are now in Pisces time, it’s good to embrace the fog (mutable water) and the mists of imagination and not judge between what is real and mere mirage because right now there need not be any difference. Sometime this month maybe, those earthworms will appear on the sidewalk and the crocuses will pop up there heads and we can focus on what specific new realities we want to enact. But for now let us stay in the vapor and let all the tension dissolve and allow it to leave a “solution”. Come Aries time we can put on our warrior garb and spearhead what needs to happen.Today will be a slow day due to the fog I will be in myself. We spent way too much time trying to find flip-flops and still we have come up short. I think we need to go to a large Monoprix. I’m going to try and figure that all out in the next coming days. We have D + N coming for dinner tonight. They had written yesterday to ask if we were still on and to say that E. was free and should we move the whole thing to their place. No. We have a client tonight until eight o’clock and we will spend the day getting some stuff done. We come back after yoga and have a little soup and then go back out on our failed flip flop mission and then at least get some wine and water, which I will drop upstairs, and then back out to do the major food shop on Rambuteau. I will make salmon and we’ll have a salad but the rest of the meal will consist of goodies from the Greeks and some bakery and cheese items. We are getting to be so Fwench. Çoise writes to say that they did in the end do two photoshoots and weren’t getting on the road for Amsterdam until four o’clock. That is late. We have our appointment and D + N are on time which is rather unusual; it seemed slightly weird in the first moments but then totally like our old selves again and we had plenty of wine with which to ply ourselves and dinner was long and delicious and drawn out. And we even had to go back down to get more wine. And we stayed up until at least three o’clock and I’m wondering what is going to happen to me day two of yoga. Here is some Virgo stuff I’m working on.

VIRGO Woman

Virgo with a V: In our book Sextrologythe she-Virgo chapter begins “And God created woman.” Drawing on her mutable-earthy Pandora archetype, Virgo woman seems designed to the specifications of someone seeking a lady stacked with feminine assets. In mythology, the cuckolded potter-god Hephaestus/Vulcan (married to Aphrodite/Venus who was getting busy with Ares/Mars while carrying a torch for Adonis) bakes up his own little sex-dolly out of clay, Pandora, with her infamous box. (It was actually a jar, a vessel). And we titled the Virgo woman chapter The Vesselbecause, like the sign’s Virgin holding that sheaf of grain, intent on separating the wheat (virtue) from chaff (vice), Pandora’s jar was filled with an equal mix of the same stuff. From a patriarchal standpoint, and a misogynist one, woman has been viewed as both a source of pleasure to be penetrated and one of the worlds ills. Mary Magdalene is sinner and saint. She too is the vessel. Especially if one thinks on her as the literal wife of Jesus and potential mother to his children. Blasphemy. She was a sacred harlot, like the Vestal virgins, sex and spirituality going hand in hand (or something in something) as it should. And so, without getting too into it, the Virgo woman personifies the feminine as such: An undulating object of lust who could be ones undoing. The Virgo motto is “I serve” which is misread as submissive or subservient (she can be ifit serves her). But like any good master-slave inversion, one typically finds oneself so dependent on the Virgo woman, whether for her love, devotion or mad skills in the sack, that she typically ends up holding all the power. Makes you rethink the image of the Virgin clutching that phallic sheaf in her tight, tender grip. And, blow me down, just look at these brick houses. Claudia Schiffer, Raquel Welch, Naomie Harris, Jaqueline Bisset, Pink, Beyoncé Knowles, Sophia Loren, Salma Hayek, Whitney Cummings, Joey Heatherton, Jennifer Hudson, Ingrid Bergman, Lauren Bacall, Yvonne DeCarlo, Padma Lakshmi, Peggy Lipton, Rachel Ward, Jennifer Tilly, Foxy Brown, Rebecca DeMornay, Jennifer Coolidge, Tuesday Weld, Shannon Elizabeth, Lea Michele, Cameron Diaz, Barbara Bach, Cassandra Peterson, Valerie Perrine, Fay Wray, Frances Farmer, Alotta Fagina (We imagine).

The virgin of Virgo is Kore, the maiden form of Earth mother-goddess Demeter, from whose name the word core is derived, a nod to the planet’s molten, shifting center, its fiery furnace. While Virgo man draws on the archetype of Hephaestus, god of that sizzling forge, Virgo woman personifies, yes, his little dolly, Pandora, meaning “all given”, whom the god gave the best features of all the goddesses, baking her out of clay in his divine kiln—Virgo is themutable-earth sign, highlighting tangible change. But Demeter herself was also called Pandora, here meaning “all giver.” Virgo woman acts as caretaker, little sister, especially to objects of her desire, playing den mother, a Wendy, to any number of lost, Peter Pan-complexed boys or domineering Peppermint Patties. She leans, learns and models herself on significant others, having her fun, and ultimately forging her own future. On the shadow side, she borrows too directly from others, appropriating their moves to the point of inappropriateness. She tends to secure a mature mate who’ll cherish her and to whose power and protection she is drawn, and from whom she pulls strength to grow and develop her own unique talents, skills and character, which she often then focuses on helping others in turn. Enter Peggy Guggenheim, Mary Shelley, Kitty Carlisle, Agatha Christie, Mother Theresa, Mother Seton, Cass Eliot, Margaret Sanger, Sylvia Fine, Geraldine Ferraro, Nan Goldin, Salma Hayek, Emmy Rossum, Melissa McCarthy, Amy Poehler, Blake Lively, Rosie Perez, Queen Noor, Queen Rania, Sonia Sanchez, Paula Jones, Ségolène Royal, Lea Michele, Joan Jett, Chrissie Hynde, Fionna Apple, Pink.

VIRGO Man

The move from Leo to Virgo is like a shift in historical consciousness from the divine right of kings to the empowerment of serfs. Virgo’s motto is I serve. In the annals, we saw the absolute power of (Leo) nobility give way to that of the indentured (Virgo), Pride being trumped by Humility—this is mirrored in the rise of allegorical pieces of literature like Everyman, which tackled the dichotomy of virtue and vice, and Dr. Faustus, caught in that same balance between good and evil. The temporal takeaway is that power shifts from crowns to individual human conscience. Take that monarchists.As personifications of these signs, Leo man embodies the golden-boy Sun-king archetype, while Virgo man is a walking-talking morality play, munching on experience and humble pie, embodying that human conscience, whose nature it is to grapple; but, in so doing, to eradicate pride along with every other human vice, digesting experience to extract its every virtue. You won’t see a Virgo man bound into a room unapologetically. He doesn’t have that golden glow of Leo. The sign color of Virgo is silvery grey (Gandalf grey) the result of negotiating a world that can be so black-and-white. He is thoughtful, to a fault, self-effacing, self-examining and often hyper critical. He negotiates his way in the world carefully, and yes, skeptically, but he thereby aims to leave it a better place than he found it. Virgo begins on August 23rd, the festival of Vulcanalia. Vulcan (Greek: Hephaestus, from whose name Faustus might derive) was a disenfranchised “lame” god who channeled the lemons he was given into making lemonade. A smith, a potter, a tinker, an inventor, artisan, artist and, like Faust, an alchemist in all respects. Hephaestus hid himself away, something of a hermit (with that Gandalf wardrobe). Virgo is traditionally ruled by planet Mercury (Greek: Hermes, from whence the term derives)—focus on the work and service at hand, typically making tools and weaponry that would empower the other gods. He forged Zeus’s lightning bolts, for instance, the true power behind the throne. Virgo man, the zodiac’s is likewise a lover of privacy, a symptom, first, of feeling dejected on some level, but ultimately the crucible via which he forges his own path toward success and fulfillment. He will wrestle with his conscience, the true philosopher’s stone, to alchemically transmute his disappointments into opportunities, his wounds into sources of healing and his accumulated woes, source- material, into masterful works of art. Behold the Virgo Everyman of conscience who has sought his separate peace and serenity in his solitude; or as an actor (our best living archetypes!) plays that part to the hilt: Bill Murray, Jimmy Fallon, Luke Wilson, Martin Freeman, Jack Black, Chris Pine, Rupert Grint, Colin Firth, Leonard Cohen, Josh Charles, Armie Hammer, Jason Sudeikis, Adam Sandler, Stephen Fry, Roald Dahl, Louis C.K., Idris Elba, Keanu Reeves, Warren Buffet, Aaron Paul, Alexander Skarsgärd, Richard Gere, Wes Bentley, Oliver Stone, Stephen King, David Copperfield, Moby, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, John Locke, John Cage.

Virgo’s planetary ruler is in dispute. It’s traditional planet is Mercury, which also governs the mutable-air sign of Gemini, the god Mercury (Greek: Hermes) being patron of all sorts of street folk from merchants to thieves, jugglers to magicians, which brings us to the mutable-earth (read: clay) sign of Virgo where it rules alchemists and all the “hermetic” and healing arts. Mercury’s staff, called the Caduceus, is the emblem of the medical profession to this day. Virgo and the 6th astrological house are associated with health, habits and hygiene. But there are those who don’t believe that Mercury actually rules Virgo. Some feel that rulership belongs to Chiron, a minor planet-ette orbiting the Sun between Saturn and Uranus. The notion is that Chiron, discovered in 1977,  was once a major planet that got pummeled by asteroids. It thus draws on the archetype of the “wounded healer” in mythology. Chiron was a centaur who wasn’t savage like his fellows, but the opposite, a savior, and he is the father of doctors which were one and the same as magicians, under the grand heading of alchemists. Another theory is that Virgo is ruled by the as yet undiscovered planet Vulcan, which is debatably orbiting between Mercury and the Sun.. Virgo men are menschs but they do tinker—if not nipping and tucking themselves, they may Svengali others, women especially, whom they treat as Pandoras, the first sex doll molded by Hephaestus out of clay. Voila: Alchemical some more Virgo men-schs: Hugh Grant, Elvis Costello, Chris Tucker, Peter Sellers, Tommy Lee Jones, Paolo Coelho, Peter Falk, Bob Newhart, Ben Falcone, Daniel Stern, Adam Sandler, Sam Neill, David Arquette, Mark Harmon, and those who couldn’t leave themselves, let alone others, well, alone: Mickey Rourke, Michael Keaton, Barry Gibb, Billy Ray Cyrus, Eddie Fisher, Michael Jackson, Gene Simmons, Kenny Rogers, Steve Guttenberg, Harry Connick, Jr., Paul Reubens.

 

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree pointof the Sabian Symbol will be one degree higher than the one listed for today. The Blague portrays the starting degree of for this day ( 0°,  for instance), as I typically post in the morning, while the Sabian number corresponds to the end point (1°) of that same 0°-1° period. There are 360  degrees spread over 365 or 6 days per year—so they near but not exactly correlate.

 

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
Copyright 2020 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2019 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox