Aries 29°

(For last year’s meditation on the Sabian Symbol for this degree:  click here)

Beyond our individual work as humanistic astrologers and even the more generally specific Sun sign astrology, we are gathered here together understand and benefit from what we call Natural Cosmic astrology, that is to say what the Sun in each sign means for us during the 12 months of the year, each cycle of the Moon, which is where the word month—moonth—comes from, one moonth, corresponding to the Suns journey through each of the 12 signs and their natural houses of the zodiac. Funny and beautifully cosmic that our two luminaries, the Sun and Moon, seem to illustrate the same cosmic reality based on that most divine of numbers 12. It’s so much a no-brainer that we don’t even think about the fact that our own journey around the Sun takes twelve cycles of our moon; perhaps 12 is the key, the formula for life itself. Maybe other planets orbiting other stars have life too if that simple mathematically equation is in place. It just might be that simple. The zodiac is lousy with simple realizations like that which we take for granted. And, like the golden mean, the Zodiac with it’s 12 iterations, seems applicable to all aspects of existence. Not just the twelve months in a year, but the twelve hours on a clock, an individual hour made up of sixty minutes, a derivative of twelve, sixty seconds in a minute, not a mathematical system of 10, but a cosmic system of 12. The zodiac’s twelve signs and houses can apply to the individual span of a life, each house ruling a spate of 7 years, suggesting we should all live to an approximate age of 94, give or take; whilst it also expresses the span of all of existence, expressed in myth and biblical legend and through comparative religion, the world over. Let’s look at it through a biblical lens: Aries, cardinal-fire is the big bang, Genesis, creation; Taurus fixed-earth is the garden, Eden; Gemini mutable-air, is conscious, duality as characterizes the Fall, Cancer, cardinal-water is the Flood to wash it all away; Leo, fixed-fire, is the book of Kings and the Age of Miracles; Virgo, mutable-earth, is the human conscience, humility, Chronicles and Job; Libra, cardinal-air, the poetic Psalms; Scorpio, the meaningful Proverbs; Sagittarius, the philosophical Ecclesiastes, Capricorn, Prophets, Aquarius, the New Testament leading to Revelation of eternal life of damnation, the opposite-facing fish of Pisces with its new golden age of Peace, thirteen being the number of new order. There are only 12 thrones in Olympus just as there were 12 Titan thrones before that; and when Dionysus, the new-order god shows up at Olympus, one of the gods, Hestia, relinquishes her seat, and go sits and tends the hearth fire in the center, like the Sun through the twelve houses. Likewise, in the book of Revelation, the “Woman”, clothed by the Sun, with the Moon at her feet, has twelve stars circling her head. Also in the book of Revelation, the wall of the City has twelve foundations (one for each apostle).

There are twelve apostles; and even the original roundtable of Arthurian legend, that of his father Uther Pendragon, had twelve seats, with an additional left blank for Judas. There had to be twelve apostles, too, as Matthias replaced Judas, one of the original twelve..There are twelve tribes of Israel. Twelve sons of Jacob. Twelve stations of the cross. Twelve days of Christmas, ending with the feast of Epiphany, the new-order adoration by the Magi, the first to “recognize” Jesus as the new messiah. Twelve is a higher vibration of three, the trinity, taken to the four corners of the earth; and it numerologically reduces to 3 (1+2).