Capricorn 5° (December 26)

To the Eliot and Stella to the Nutcracker. I saw Brian and Anne, which turned out to be annoyingly unfruitful.

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.

Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*
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