A Peacock Parading On The Terrace Of An Old Castle is the image at 30° Taurus, as we bid adieu to that sign for the year. Dane Rudhyar says this oracle is about the personal display of inherited gifts and then he talks about the peacock being sacred to Venus and makes some connection to “Promethean Spirits” from (planet) Venus giving the divine gift of consciousness to “animal mankind.” That’s a lot to chew on frankly. Also I think of the peacock being sacred to Juno not Venus, although I think both goddesses have a stake in what would be Pisces-ruled symbol in a twelve-fold sequence. Venus (Aphrodite/Mari) is the goddess of Pisces in that the two fish of the sign are the animal totems of her and her son, Eros, to whom she would remain tied, in fish form, by an umbilical like cord. Planet Neptune, the sea, rules the sign and Venus emerged from the sea, goddess of love, sea of love. Eros is love. So is Christ, the Jesus fish; and Mary’s (Mari’s) blue gown fringed in white is the sea, she is Stella Marris, sea star. So what about the peacock and the castle?

Before the discovery of planet Neptune and its assignation as Pisces ruler, the sign was governed by Jupiter, named for the king god whose queen of heaven is Juno (Hera), goddess of power. Juno is associated with radiance and to look upon her is blinding. Her myth involves her many-eyed watchman, Argus, whom she, Hera, set to watch over the nymph Io who was messing around with Zeus (Jupiter) who turned her into a snow-white heifer to disguise her. Hermes/Mercury put the hundred-eyed Argus to sleep and murdered him, the first murder of the new-god order. Hera forever preserved his eyes in the peacock tail. Io was freed but Hera sent a stinging gadfly to chase her down, but when the silly cow arrived in Asia she turned back into nymph form and was recognized as a goddess there “returning” generations later as Europa, on the back of a white bull, now Zeus in disguise. Fun times. Needless to say the myth of Io and cow-eyed Hera is a Taurean one, the prototype of the Snow White fairytale. What does this all have to do with the peacock?

Well, the peacock, having inherited Argus’ eyes, symbolizes that which is all-seeing, omniscient, all powerfully divine. And we are at a castle after all, so we have indeed inherited this power and fortune. The display of the peacock’s tail is the consummation. All has come full circle. Io is the maidenform, no doubt, of Hera and their myth is one of exodus, deliverance and return. We have to make mistakes, be stung in the rear, before we can become more knowing and circumspect. We have been around (the world) and we’ve encountered some home truths and they have embolded and enobled us and thus we are free to roam around our experience with confidence on display. If the castle and peacock are symbols of inherited gifts, than our inheritance is nobility and power, which is knowledge, specifically, of the self-sort.

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