Winter Solstice, 21st December 2021, 16:00 GMT
Turbulent times; times of division and fear. Our thoughts and feelings swirl around and in between us, pushing and shoving, even snarling and biting: fear is mobilised and fed at every turn. The main message I’m picking up in the social world is, ‘If you’re not anxious and in a state of fear, you bloody well should be!’ What state, physically, mentally and emotionally, does fear put us into? Contracted, defended and shut down. This is Saturn, but it’s negative Saturn. There is a place for negative Saturn: when you are in danger. So when we find ourselves affected by states of fear (generated by ourselves or others), we can ask, ‘Why do I feel unsafe?’ Positive Saturn is really good at structuring enquiry, so that we can assess situations realistically; it is the force within us that allows us to take responsibility and to endure difficulty. It is our personal sense of authority. Our safety is created by our willingness to be safe. It is supported by faith in life. Fear undermines that faith, creating situations of danger. We are creators – the realities we experience arise out of us; we are powerful creatures.
We disown inner authority when we project it out on to others, or conventions, or the State. Our inadequacies and lack of expertise, or being just plain overwhelmed, encourage us to give our authority away. Then we are in trouble, because we need the core strength that inner authority confers: it is our ground and our grounding. It is the place we stand and our ability to stand up. Martin Luther King urged people to ‘straighten up your backs, so nobody can ride you!’ When we lose our ground we are leaves in the wind, prey to every whistle and gust. When we lose our uprightness, our vital connections with heaven and earth wither.
Saturn and Pluto made their powerful conjunction two years ago in January 2020, striking a very complex chord, of which fear, control and domination were the prominent notes. Other notes, more subtle and more powerful, were also played and are still resounding, for another ‘register’ of Pluto in Capricorn is the ineluctable power of the goddess: She Who Gives Life, She Who Flays, She Who Brings Death. This relentless energy of the divine feminine is the truth of our lives. We are born; we experience life on Earth; we die. The Saturn-Pluto conjunction stirred this truth more deeply into our worlds and consciousness, turning us towards a notion of authority aligned with the energy of the goddess. Unarguably, we all bow before this power sooner or later.
All through this December Venus is in conjunction with the Kali-like energy of Pluto. Pluto is the most powerful planetary force; its operations are largely unconscious, enacted in the collective and by what we experience as the ‘blows of fate’. Venus, as a fast-moving personal planet, readily impacts our consciousness. It is acting like a fracture line through which the energy of Pluto can pour into our conscious experience, potentially empowering us and buoying up the inner authority we sorely need, giving us that ground and a sense of Truth. But it also asks that we deal with how we handle the power the flows through us: do we seek to dominate and control, or can we hold our own force wisely and well? Think of Quan Yin, the goddess of mercy, in a state of equanimity as she rides the dragon.
We have a choice to make: to allow this empowerment (to work consciously with it), or to project it on to situations and people external to us (and call it bad luck).
Working with this potential at this sacred Solstice time of darkness and stillness is a wonderful opportunity. We can’t do it with our minds or emotions as they are too stirred up; we need to use the will, to decide tobe in our bodies, tuning into reality at the physical level. The journey of Uranus through Taurus is, in one register, the awakening of intuitional intelligence (Uranus) through the body/sensation/nature (Taurus). The possibilities of this awakening are enormous, for the body is the locus of consciousness, the guide to our own becoming.
2021 has been marked by three squares (crises) between Saturn (authority, the status quo) and Uranus (breakthrough, the new); the third and final square is on 24th December. Old ways of doing authority are crumbling. The feeling, captured by the words of Yeats, ‘the falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’, is strong and unnerving. Each of us is both falcon and falconer (personality and soul); we need to listen out for the voice of Soul, which speaks eloquently through the body. An old paradigm is in its death throes and a new one is being generated in the hearts, minds and wills of all beings – and not just the humans. How we handle our energy fields and our connections to all our relations plays into the co-creation of the New. We are beings powerful beyond our measure, extraordinary and amazing: awesome.
awen astrology 