Virgo 1°, the Sabian Symbol, In A Portrait, The Significant Features Of A Man’s Head Are Artistically Emphasized. Discrimination is a Virgo word if there ever was one, and this is what today’s oracle is all about—distinguishing this from that, compare and contrast, digesting differences, so to mete out what’s what, ye olde wheat from chaff. Virgo, it’s Virgin holding that sheaf of grain, begins harvest time, and on the feminine side of the sign’s archetypal coin we are in the realm of the Earth Mother, Demeter (Roman: Ceres, from whom both the words cereal and ceremony derive), and her maiden daughter/self Kore, who will become Persephone the goddess of the abyss. Demeter is Pandora (all giver) but that little trouble maker Pandora (meaning all-given) is also part of the metaphysical mix here. She was a little plaything made of clay, made by the potter god Hephaests (Roman: Vulcan)—August 23 marks his festival of Vulcanalia—a collage of all the grand goddesses best features, the original sex doll, whose box (ahem), actually it was a vessel or a vase (lots of v-words associated with Virgo) that contained by virtue and vice (see what I mean?). Wheat from chaff, good from bad, our ability to discriminate.

As the Virgo virgin holds that sheaf of grain she two considers, discerning, what about that phallic seeded object is going to give nutrient and what might be detritus. Just as yesterday’s Leo image was ruled by the subsequent sign of Virgo, today’s first Virgo image is ruled by Libra, the Scales, which puts extra emphasis on the weighing. We must weigh and measure, mete out and consider, lift and separate, sift and discrimate, before we can reach some harmonious Libra balance. We don’t just make decisions, we take in all the information and we deliberate; without doing so, decisions can be one-sided, faulty and send us further out of balance and harmony. I’m always interested in how one sign leads, thematically, to the next in the zodiac. And there are myriad ways to slice and dice that, which is what the symbol today is al about. We want to slice and dice. We want to dissect the situation, to pull out pieces of the puzzle before we work them back together. Virgo is about function while Libra is about design. You can’t give short shrift to the former if you’re to achieve greatness, true integrity, with the latter.

Happy Festival of Vulcanalia
(look it up—it’s a thing)

And so we pull things apart, sometimes like taffy, exploring every nook and cranny of situations, to make sure that our decisions will serve a solid design for living. So the features of the man’s face in this image are the various features of any life situation which must be viewed as part of a whole. Nothing, especially not ourselves, exists in isolation. Like Mother Nature, all is an interdependent composition, the sum of us being larger than that of our various parts. So, painstaking as our instincts, in service of our analysis (and vice versa) might be, it’s in the knowing of all what we’re dealing with, exploring each feature of our life situation in turn, that will reveal a direction forward. We need entertain every vice and virtue even in the forms of plain ol’ pros and cons, to get to the bottom of Pandora’s box, a metaphor for any complex situation, or can of worms, to find the underlying meaning of not the hope therein. We must explore the most characteristic features of every situation to understand its true form. Otherwise we’re just punching our way out of a paper bag. So don’t hesitate to deliberate and don’t defer differentiation. Exaggerate every angle to see how different it is from other scenarios. En route to fuller understand—a perfect portrait—we must roll around in the extreme natures of all the essential elements. It’s like Starsky + Cox say: Diversity is the Mother of Compassion—all rights reserved.

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