from Planet Waves
Dear Friend and Reader:
On Saturday, the Sun and Moon align in early Capricorn and form the New Moon. This is exact Dec. 27, 7:22 AM EST. For many of us, this will be a life-changing New Moon that calls us to a new (and truer) understanding of selfhood and service. This an extraordinary chart, because Pluto is in Capricorn for the first time during the [Northern Hemisphere] winter solstice season. Mars will be right there, in a conjunction. The two are aligned on the Aries Point, which is a kind of cosmic magnifier that will bring whatever unusual news occurs that day or the days surrounding it, into a deeply personal context.
Landscape with Vesta temple in Tivoli, Italy, c. 1600. By Adam Elsheimer.
The most potent aspects of the chart make a close trine to Vesta in Taurus. Vesta, for its part, is precisely on the discovery degree of Chiron. So this chart opens up a flow of energy from that Chiron/Vesta dimension.
Not long ago I read about a French woman (let’s call her Vesta) who, for 30 years, lived with and cared for the people in a Cairo trash dump colony. By choice. The community — men, women and kids– tended the burning piles of trash and raised pigs for their meat. No devout Muslim would touch them because they ate pigs and lived in filth. Their kids climbed mountains of other people’s broken furniture, and the stiffest brush couldn’t scrub the smell of burning refuse and pig shit from their little bodies. Even straight from a bath, they were grimy, as if the soil were part of them.
This amazed me, so much so that she lived in my mind for weeks afterward. Whenever I threw out my own trash, I added some detail of what I imagined her life was like. My potato peelings and the onion skins became her dinner. My snotty tissues, her kindling. My foot-high pile of mail order catalogs, a guilty offering of expiation to the recycling gods. “Please, please forgive me: I signed up because I thought the stuff was pretty; I never had an intention to buy it. So sorry…” I offered them to this woman, too, who once tended the flame and smoke of Cairo’s burning trash heaps.
After her death, Dr. Mounir Neamatalla, a leading Egyptian expert in environmental science and poverty reduction who worked closely with her, marveled that this woman chose “one of the worst qualities of life on the planet… [she] was living right among them, the garbage collectors, the pigs, the whole mess. I had never seen anything like this in my life.” Together they created a composting plant to process the tons of pig manure and sold it as fertilizer. In time, Vesta also brought a school and medical care to these unwanted people.
People like this are unforgettable because they’re so rare. But they are a type of modern day Vesta, the Roman goddess of selfless and devoted service. Traditionally Vesta was the original keeper of Rome’s eternal flame, and her mortal servants, the Vestal Virgins of the Roman Empire, served to keep Rome’s flame alight, night and day. As any camper knows, maintaining a perpetually burning flame requires careful, sustained attention and patience. Call it investing. Today when we invest, we’re likely to think of money instead of attentive service. While there’s nothing wrong with money, it’s a poor substitute for Vesta’s original meaning. We haven’t forgotten Vesta; we just renamed her.
This is because our culture defines us by our spending power. At the bank and in shops, we heap our offerings upon a false Vestal altar hoping that somehow our little flames of self-importance might not go out. With devotion we cultivate our next contract, our next project, our next gig that might lead to the kind of connections and wealth that guarantee our worth to others — and ourselves. It’s so pervasive, it functions like an autonomic response in the body politic. Someone would have to throw us into a burning trash heap of a town to get our attention.
Sacrifice — Janis and the Vestal Virgins stoneware with mixed media. Rebecca Reagan Boatman.
This New Moon we might just get that experience. Right now Vesta is approaching the Chiron discovery degree. This is a degree that functions as if Chiron is always present. Chiron is our astrological marker for the struggle or quest for awareness, and so we’re approaching a moment where lots of us will find ourselves standing, latte in hand, negotiating the next “deal,” more aware that the whole thing’s a sham and uneasy about why.
Continue reading "The Hammer and the Flame: The New Moon Report of Dec. 27, 2008" »
