Aries New Moon Meditation for 2004:

Sedna Rises

By Jean Hinson Lall

Happy new year to all! Aries, the Ram, welcomes us to a new Zodiacal cycle as we observe not only the Vernal Equinox but the New Moon in Aries on the same day – a double beginning. I am observing the season properly for the first time in my life, by watching baby lambs frolicking in the fields! My campus digs in Canterbury are just a few minutes’ walk from a pleasant pasture where several dozen sheep have their domicile. I’ve been getting acquainted with them over the autumn and winter, and it was thrilling when the lambs started turning up, at first just a few, now a steady stream of new ones each week.

In Zodiacal emblems Aries is often depicted as a ram in mid-leap. The adult sheep here don’t do much leaping, though, at least in the spring. Heavy and stolid, looking very much the middle-aged parents many of them are, they plod, graze, chew their cud, graze some more, and rest. The moms, their wool matted and muddy, udders heavy with milk, are eating as fast as they can to keep up with the lambs’ caloric requirements and their own. It’s the young ones who are leaping, cavorting and gamboling, sprinkling the whole landscape with a spirit of play. They alternate between novice grace and comic awkwardness, between fearless exploration and bleating panic – a little like the energy of the new season. The new is arriving, full of joyous energy, growing fast and trying out its baby legs, but still fragile.

Having both the Equinox and the Full Moon occur in the same degree this year would seem to give that degree extra significance. I looked up the symbol for 1 Aries and immediately stopped thinking of sheep. "A woman just risen from the sea," it read. "A seal is embracing her." The previous couple of days I had been looking into the mythology connected with Sedna, the Inuit goddess whose name has tentatively been assigned to the newly discovered planetoid in the outer reaches of our solar system. On Monday, March 15, scientists from the California Institute of Technology’s Palomar Observatory held a press conference to confirm their detection last November of this body, smaller than Pluto and thrice as far from the Sun.

Astronomically, the nature of Sedna is still controversial. Caltech’s Dr. Michael Brown, the astronomer who led the research team, believes it is "the first observed member of the long-hypothesized Oort Cloud, a sphere of comets out to halfway the distance to the nearest star." Other scientists speculate that it may be an eccentric member of the Kuiper Belt, another cometary zone that ranges from Neptune’s orbit to just outside that of Pluto. It takes 10,500 years to complete a single orbit, following an extremely eccentric elliptical path that ranges as far as 84 billion miles from Earth and as near as 8 billion. Over the next 72 years it will reach the nearest point to us, giving astronomers the opportunity to study it. It is said to be extremely cold, shiny and (like Mars, ruler of Aries) red in color.

Dr. Brown and his colleagues chose the name Sedna for the new body because of the icy nature of its home region; they plan to petition the international body responsible for celestial naming to designate all new bodies in the cometary regions with names from Inuit mythology.

According to Inuit tradition, Sedna was a beautiful young woman who after spurning many suitors married a hunter who turned out to be a raven or a bird-man in disguise. (In some versions, she also had a dog husband!) Bitterly unhappy, she was finally rescued by her father, but the bird-man pursued them as they fled in their boat, flapped his immense wings and kicked up a storm. Fearful of losing his own life, the father threw Sedna overboard; when she clung to the side of the boat, he chopped off her fingers joint by joint until she sank into the ocean. From her finger-joints were formed all the sea mammals: walruses, whales, and seals. Sedna became goddess of the sea and mistress of its animals. From her new home at the bottom of the ocean, she saw to the needs of the Inuit people. If they failed to follow a just and reverent way of life, she would create storms or make animals scarce, and their shaman would have to travel into the depths to comb her long hair and to learn how they had offended her and how to make amends. Then animals would become plentiful again.

On Saturday morning (Friday night PST) when the Sun enters the first degree of Aries, the Moon will still be in Pisces, sign of the oceans where Sedna lives. At the Full Moon sixteen hours later, the Moon catches up to the Sun in Aries ("A woman just risen from the sea"). This interval could be an appropriate time to meditate on the emergence of Sedna, the sacred mother in the icy depths who nourishes and regulates the people’s existence. There are many elements to her myth (and more variants and details than we have space for here: do follow some of the links at the end of Dr. Brown’s webpage to learn more), but I note especially the connections between justice and right conduct, climate, and sustenance. I shall offer a prayer to Sedna that day as I visit the sheep, reflecting on their service to us, the fragile climate of this beautiful island so dependent upon the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, and the poor state of our people’s relationship to nature, to justice, and to sacred order.

Many thanks to Peter Pugh for initial information and links on Sedna!

© 2004 Jean Lall
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