Crucible

Summer Solstice

21^st June 2017, 04:25 GMT

 

The Summer Solstice is a time of reckoning as the Sun stands at its zenith. The days are long and the light falls strong on the Isle of the Mighty! It’s all here to be seen; no hiding place! I write this on the morning after Britain’s General Election, a time of reckoning indeed. In my view, the solstice chart casts a light on what is culminating in consciousness at this time and what will be unfolding over the coming season as the Oak King is slain and Earth tilts towards its winter journey.

The solstice is marked by the movement of the Sun into the first degree of Cancer. Astrology can tend to treat the Sun as just another celestial body, alongside the Moon and planets. Yet it is of an altogether different order of significance. It is a star and pertains to the soul level of experience – the immortal aspect of our lives. It is the source of of all life, ‘great giver of all that is’, the animating principle; it confers consciousness. Pure light is strong medicine; illumination exposes what has been concealed in shadow. This is a time to look at our lives and our world unflinchingly, a time to come to consciousness.

The Solstice moment this year occurs just as the Sun rises above the horizon. A new dawn. And it is only 25 seconds of arc away from an applying conjunction with Mercury (29° 29′ 35ʺ Gemini): Mercury casimi conferring super-refined intelligence (of a kind) to the moment, as nervy Mercury is enlivened, ensouled with solar energy. New mental connections are being made: aha! Mercury is on the unstable 29^th degree of its own sign, so this feels somewhat critical: a significant ‘seeing through’ opportunity and one that is likely to find public expression as Mercury rules commerce, media and negotiations. The EU chart is significantly triggered as Mercury casimi falls on its midheaven, squaring its ascendant. This looks to be quite a moment.

The Solstice Sun in Cancer is ruled by the Moon, which is part of a yod involving Venus, Neptune and Jupiter. Jupiter, at the head of this yod, suggests that the work to be done now is to regeneratesocial justice and reinstate benevolence and fairness as core values. A rebalancing needs to occur between values based on getting my piece of the pie (the pursuit of self-satisfaction) and those arising from an ideal of sharing and compassionate concern for the collective. The social world can only work when we acknowledge that our needs and resources are the same: ideally we all share them. We all need to be able to sustain ourselves and yet the resources for doing this are not held collectively; rather they are arranged in order to exclude and profit from, often dire, human need. This is clearly unjust and the mighty forces of Neptune, arraigned to erode the personality perspective, are urging us to raise our sights to include compassion and a real experience of our interconnectedness. Such an experience is not simply a theoretical position; it is incontrovertible only when it is lived, it changes the patterning of the heart and mind. Neptune is working to achieve this re-patterning.

The power of the elite has to be sacrificed in order to share power within the collective. This time calls for a radical change in popular values: self-serving strategies, institutionalised injustice and power protection are not being supported at a higher level. A change is being made. The unviable values of ‘selfservatism’ (!) are being eroded as Neptune insists upon fairness and inclusiveness. This rebalancing goes on throughout the year, but it has reached a pivotal moment now. For the many not the few, as someone has said!

We cannot wait for compassion to arise in the public body – it has to emerge from each of us individually as we make our judgements and choices, perceive our personal and social relationships, and respond to life. Only then can it find its resonance in the body politic; without change at the individual level we will continue to experience Neptune as disappointment, delusion, loss and lies.

Kate Hubert, Awen Astrology, kate@spiral7.co.uk

Riding the Tidal Waves of Change

Riding the Tidal Waves of Change

The familiar tells us who we are; but it is in the unknown and the untried that we will find all that we might be. Suzanne Rough

There was something about 2016! We were rocked by a series of significant collective shocks and I’m not talking about Prince! It felt like the world tilted on its axis and we found ourselves living in a reality that looked familiar and yet was changed. Like falling into a dream or waking from one, I’m not sure which!

Why is this? How do I know what I know about the world I live in? There is my observable experience (very limited) and beyond that I have to rely on the interpretation of others (e.g. my friends who kindly – or unkindly – tend to agree with me), and mostly, the media, according to which we are on the brink of all kinds of disaster. We’re descending into chaos as the waves of change crash against our jpersonal and collective shores.

I do not doubt that the challenges we face are grave, but we are also dealing with a culture that seems to be all out to tease and trigger reactions of fear, anxiety, disgust and overwhelm. It used to be the church that told us we were skipping down the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire, now the message comes, via the media, from secular sources. We are also dealing with the struggles of our private lives and inner worlds where negative emotions, more or less inculcated in us, really take hold and lead us into dark places. In the grip of these reactions we form our perceptions of reality, inner and outer.

Private predicaments (e.g. personal problems, illness, poverty, lack of opportunity) are compounded by inner feelings (e.g. low self-esteem, fear of future, vulnerability) and the whole shebang gets conflated with a sour outer reality peddled by the media as being unrelentingly appalling. This conflation of inner and outer worlds is dangerous and overwhelming. It’s too much! Our perception becomes enmired.

The awfulness of it all becomes anaesthetising; one cannot keep engaging. It is futile to do so. A bottle of wine and a sunshine holiday begin to look very attractive indeed – and just as well, because that is about all we’re going to get! The church found that people held in states of fear and shame are very easy to control; a fretful and enfeebled population offers little resistance. And in these digital days, we are all only too happy to carry out our own self-surveillance and pay for the privilege. It’s a funny old world.

Somehow we have to engage with realities in the world in ways that do not paralyse us. Passivity is not an option. Gaia needs our consciousness. We have to know how to protect ourselves without retreating our souls. The planetary world is a wilder, freer, bigger and more beautiful thing than we can conceive. This is still a beautiful world, a world that is wonderful to live in, a place of daily miracles: a world worth fighting for.

Astrology is an unsurpassed tool for interrogating and describing the qualities of time and experience. It is a language that describes cosmic patterns and rhythms. Humankind has to return to the rhythm of the cosmos. That difficulty and opportunity are two sides of the same coin has become a cliché, but we need to practise the art of finding the opportunity in the midst of fear-inducing difficulty. Astrology teaches us that we are all instrumental to a greater unfolding of consciousness: every effort we make to transform inner and outer experience is blessed; every effort to live consciously is blessed; all resistance to soul retreat is blessed.

In the spirit of seeking opportunity amid challenge, three of us astrologers are facilitating a day of astrological exploration to be held on 13^th May on the Dartington Estate, near Totnes in South Devon: Riding the Tidal Waves of Change. This is envisaged as an enquiry into the astrology of outward events and inner unfoldings that will serve people and place, renewing strength and vision to help take hold of opportunity, and be the change we want to see. It’s a good world.

Kate Hubert

Awen Astrology

kate@spiral7.co.uk

Gathering Force

Spring Equinox

20^th March 2017 10:30

“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower…” Dylan Thomas

The global experience of Spring Equinox is the balance of the forces of Day and Night in all places across the Earth. Our whole planet is similarly affected, and all its denizens. Light and warmth are the forces of growth, emergence and awakening. In the northern hemisphere now, the Sun is on the horizon, its rays illuminating and warming the land. We see plantlife responding to the waxing Sun in a greening of our lands. New life is everywhere manifesting, and this renewal and burgeoning of growth is happening at every level of our experience, seen and unseen.

We can think of the annual cycle of the Sun as a Greater Day: the Winter Solstice was midnight, the seeding moment; the Summer Solstice is the noon of the year, time of culmination. Here and now, in Aries, we are at the daybreak of the whole year. Light is the signal to “WAKE UP!” Time to get up and get going. Aries brings a dynamic directional energy, a huge drive towards activity, self-actualisation and manifestation. That energy is moving through us now whether we know what we are about or not. If we are living without a sense of purpose and direction the awakening energy of Aries might feel disruptive or exhausting, as it pulls us out of passivity and torpor into activity and wakefulness.

We need acute mindfulness at this time of such questions as:-

What is my purpose?

What serves my purpose?

What am I doing now?

What are my next steps?

That is to say: what am I all about, where am I heading and how can I channel this new energy of awakening in a constructive way?

Failure to address these questions can mean that we have dynamic force moving through our lives without it being channelled and directed, which is, at best, wasteful, and, at worst, random, chaotic and pointless. We can observe how this outflow of force manifests in the natural world: in the swell and break of sprouting seeds, in budburst and regrowth of ground cover, in nest building, warming of air, land and sea, and in new birth. Humans are, of course, integrally a part of nature; but paradoxically we are set apart: we have free will. We choose how and when and what we do. We are subject to doubt, anxiety, loss of faith and willpower. We are prone to waiting for a sign from the external world in order to be galvanised into activity. We are undermined by the fracture lines in our attention, our difficulty in holding intent: we are dealing with chronic levels of distraction, which holds us in its grip like a kind of cultural dementia.

The powerful directional force of Aries manifests in humans as the will to be and to do: it is about our effectiveness. Our world sorely needs free and effective agents to challenge injustices, to resist the mire of conformity and to fight for values that sustain the wellbeing of life forces on our planet. To find our effectiveness is to find out our unique purpose and gather the forces of the will to serve it. Just as the brilliant renewal of spring has its beginnings in the inauspicious chill and gloom of winter, so must we gather the forces of our will in whatever circumstances we find ourselves. We cannot afford to wait or to retreat the truth and purpose of our souls even if we feel overwhelmed or undervalued or whatever our personal line of least resistance is. The time is now!

Our dilemma is how to empower intent, how to renew commitment when it fails, as inevitably it will, and how to raise our sights above and beyond the seductions and distractions of a culture that is steadily reducing us to passivity and disconnection. We have to remember who we are: timeless spiritual beings having incredibly precious, hard-won, Earthwalk lives. Our opportunity is invaluable, but we can only take hold of it through deep and continued deployment of the will. It is for us, step by step, to steer towards purposeful living, better use of time and attention, our own higher goals, reconnection with wider communities of being.

The planetary principle of the Earth is manifestation. It is here on Earth that the refined energies of spirit, thought and emotion are cloaked in form and take on physical characteristics – our bodies and the events and circumstances of our lives; reality, if you like. How things get embodied in our lives is a reflection, an index, of all that is arising at unseen levels. Impulses, ideas, thoughts and feelings come eventually (if held on to) in to physical manifestation in our lives. Our thoughts and feelings are very powerful then: we become them, we give them birth in the manifest world. This power is ours, all the time, in every moment; we can foster a sense of our great capacity as free human beings (at another level, as multidimensional, timeless beings) or we can become avatars in some useless game that we give ourselves to through lack of awareness and lack of willpower.

The challenge of Aries and of this time is to develop and guide the will: to gather forces. To root ourselves in the manifest reality of physical life is crucial to Aries’ project, because the will is about our being and doing in the world. We gather force in order to act effectively. This Spring Equinox is striking the note of grounded and embodied action strongly, for Mars, ruler of the Equinox dawn, is in Taurus. Taurus pertains to physical sensation and the experience of the body. Mars here is urging a venting of physical force. The more we are grounded and living in our bodies, engaging with present realities, the more effective and useful our actions and the less likely we are to encounter aggression and hostility in ourselves or around us.

Our experience more widely is of a shift in the paradigm of authority and governance; we are seeing radical change in our political conventions and structures. A new model of authority and responsibility is sought in the unpleasant, toxic remains of traditional forms. Many people are taking autonomous action outside of the usual realm of political discourse and change: all kinds of new constituencies are arising as people make new associations with each other, deciding just to get on with what needs doing in their locality. This is in keeping with the spirit of the times, heralded somewhat, I hate to mention it, by David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ theme.

We currently have Pluto in Capricorn (going through our establishment with a wrecking ball), disposited by Saturn in Sagittarius (the structure/status quo negotiating foreign relations), disposited by Jupiter in Libra, seeking the wisdom of the middle way, the way between extremes. Jupiter is calling us to explore compromise, working through the principle of balance and groundedness. Find the meaning in this situation, it urges, see the underlying principles at work here; transform the energy of crisis into the energy of opportunity. Our response to the drastic work of Pluto is that the whole thing is coming down on our heads, as Pluto continues to root out traces of sepsis in our political body, indifferent to how widespread, ugly or painful its activity may prove to be. We are likely to be emotionally triggered, hence the importance again of finding the ground.

At the same time, Uranus, in the sign of Aries, is liberating personhood, urging us towards autonomy and entirely new notions of human subjectivity; the digital human or the spiritually conscious human, both avatars of sorts. War, tumult and technological revolution are just one level of Uranus’ potential outworking. We can also see its energy as liberating qualities of soul and intuition that serve to transform notions of human presence and effectiveness in very different ways. It is for us to choose the level to which we respond.

The particular gift of this Spring Equinox is that it is pushing us into an awareness of the physical world that needs us, our rootedness in the energies of the Earth are crucial to all evolutions.

I feel that all the stars shine in me.

The world breaks into my life like a flood.

The flowers blossom in my body.

All the youthfulness of land and

water smokes like an incense in my

heart; and the breath of all things plays

on my thoughts as on a flute.

~ Tagore

Kate Hubert

Awen Astrology

kate@spiral7.co.uk

Workshop: Riding the Tidal Waves of Change

A day of astrological exploration for all levels of experience, beginners to professionals

With Barry Goddard, Moira Lake & Kate Hubert

Saturday 13th May 2017, 10am to 5pm, £50 (concessions available)

The Hexagon, Park Rd, Dartington Estate, Totnes TQ9 6EQ

Bookings/Further info: kate@spiral7.co.uk

Brexit/Trump and the Uranus-Pluto Square with Barry Goddard

Arguably the biggest political event of our lifetimes, Brexit came as a shock. The UK chart reveals different sides to the national character, shedding light on what happened, both personally and collectively. Brexit can also be explored in the context of the current Uranus-Pluto square that has revealed the dark underbelly of globalisation and is bringing political change across the western world.

Barry Goddard has been using astrology to describe and predict world events since 2003, mainly in his blog at http://www.astrotabletalk.blogspot.com, as well as in astrology magazines.  He has been doing professional readings since 2002 and also runs shamanic trance dances.

Going for Broke with Moira Lake

Let’s follow all the planets through the heavens as they close in for the dramatic multiple conjunction with Saturn and Pluto in January 2020. What is ending or beginning now? What are our choices? Every day counts. Through enacting planetary energies and exploring dialogue between them, we will learn how to work with these influences so that a world may emerge in which we truly want to live.

Moira Lake has been a professional astrologer for over 25 years.  She also works as an energy healer and shamanic worker.  She practises in Dartington, Devon.  For more information, visit http://www.hearthstarhealing.com.

Overthrowing the Tyrant King with Kate Hubert

What Saturn makes, Uranus breaks. Merlin-like, Uranus brings radical change to our awareness of human possibility. We are held in the tension of incarceration and liberation. Using visualisation to attune to these energies, we can begin to identify them in our own experience and in the wider world. This helps us get conscious and engage with the challenges and possibilities of our times.

Kate Hubert is influenced by esoteric and Jungian astrologies and a love of druidry.  Based in Ashburton, Devon, she’s been a professional astrologer since ’99, offering readings, teaching and workshops.  http://www.awenastrology.wordpress.com.

“For staying is nowhere.”

Winter Solstice     21st December 2016     10:45

Is it not time, that in loving,

we freed ourselves from the loved one, and, quivering, endured:

as the arrow endures the string, to become, in the gathering outleap

something more than itself?  For staying is nowhere.

Rilke, First Duino Elegy

The Winter Solstice is defined by the Sun’s entry into Saturn-ruled Capricorn.  Saturn is the signifier of the descent into the darkest time, when energies are most contracted.  Leaves have dried and fallen as earth energies have been withdrawing; slowly the colours of growth and freshness have faded and we are now seeing the beautiful, subtle hues of the mute midwinter palette.  This is an apparent point of stasis.  And yet there is activity – amongst the roots and around the seeds: the new cycle of growth that will burgeon into being in spring is now being cultivated in chill and darkness.  This is the time of clarifying intention and conditioning  the many aspects of the new cycle of becoming that lies ahead.

The Way Between Extremes

Autumn Equinox, 22nd September 2016, 14:22 GMT

The Autumn Equinox is defined by the Sun’s entry into the first degree of the sign of  Libra, whose symbol is the scales: the balance.  At this time the Sun’s path intersects with the celestial equator (Earth’s equator projected out into space) and the whole globe shares the experience of day and night being of equal length.  A beautiful moment of balance arises before the scales tilt towards winter and the closing in of darkness in the northern hemisphere.

The Calyx

Summer Solstice

20^th June 2016

22:35 GMT

A magical thing, the calyx: if you open it up intrusively, before the flower is formed, it seems to be an empty green space. Given a bit more time you may see an embryonic green flower. Give it its own time and the calyx opens of itself to reveal a beautiful, colourful blossom. It’s nothing short of miraculous. The calyx is the tangible space of creation or manifestation. The word ‘calyx’ shares its root with ‘chalice’, the sacred cup, symbol of feminine power: receptive, holding, creative and manifesting. Ruskin wrote, ‘The calyx is nothing but the swaddling clothes of the flower.’ But a baby is placed into swaddling clothes; it does not magically appear inside of them. The calyx is more rightly the womb, the cauldron of the mother.