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Pisces Full Moon Reflections: The
Virgin and the Mystic Harvest It’s been an extraordinarily fine growing season in Maryland, and the tables at our local farmers’ market are resplendent with vegetables, fruits and herbs. Children have been sprouting up and filling out, too, and are off to the shops with their parents getting outfitted for the opening of school. The season of harvest festivals, which will stretch on into the Autumn, is getting underway. At the Maryland State Fair just outside Baltimore, young members of 4-H and the Future Farmers of America are showing off their livestock, while city gardeners are hoping to win ribbons for the dahlias and hot peppers produced in their tiny rowhouse plots. Every sort of animal from honeybees to dogs to milk cows to emus will be on exhibit. Local wines will be judged; baking contests will be held daily; monster trucks and tractor pullers will take to the track; aquaculture and egg candling will be demonstrated. Prizes will be awarded for excellence in knitting, crocheting, tatting, embroidery, weaving, spinning, clothing design, quilting, photography, food preservation and rug hooking. Among the events not to be missed are the National Sweet Potato Pie Contest, the "Thunderation" draft horse precision team show, and the daily performances by Swifty the swimming pig (who, however, appears to be from out of state). Rock bands will perform, games and rides will be there in abundance, hot dogs and cotton candy will be consumed in immoderate quantities, and Miss Maryland Agriculture will be crowned. All this in just eleven days! Other festivals great and small will take place in countless towns and counties as summer gives way to fall. October will bring the East Texas Yamboree in Gilmer, my father’s hometown. Established in 1935 to celebrate the local yam crop, this fair features a grand parade with Queen Yam and her court, a livestock show and sale, a quilt show, a marching competition, a barn dance, antique cars, art, poetry, a home canning contest, gospel music, and other attractions too numerous to list. I have a soft spot for this one, as I was once a Duchess in the queen’s court (a privilege reserved for out-of-town girls with Gilmer connections) and got to wear an elegant red strapless peau de soie ball gown and dance the night away with my handsome beau. (Oddly, though, I don’t recall taking in any of the agricultural exhibits.) All in all it’s a heady time of year, and one with deeper meanings than we often realize as we try to pack in all the activities that press upon us. Last year at the Virgo New Moon we reflected on the image of the Virgin (Virgo) as maiden of the harvest, with her clean, pure garments and her sheaf of wheat. Behind our contemporary harvest queens stands this divine figure, who in ancient times was worshipped as a great goddess, and who in European Christendom became assimilated to the Virgin Mary. In a new book, "Visions of the Virgin Mary: An Astrological Analysis of Divine Intervention," Courtney Roberts examines a number of well-documented modern apparitions of the Virgin at La Salette, Lourdes, Fatima, and other European sites. Roberts finds that planets in the signs Cancer and Virgo, among other indicators, tend to be prominent in the natal horoscopes of the young visionaries and in the charts of the Virgin’s appearances. As Cancer is the sign of the Mother, and Virgo of the Virgin, this is hardly surprising to astrologers. The content of the Virgin’s message, too, often reflects what we think of as the Virgoan emphasis on moral improvement, and at times draws a connection between the people’s religious and ethical failings and the failure of the crops. Also unsurprisingly, given the traditional interest of Virgo in healing, many of the sites of Mary’s appearances quickly became known as healing shrines. In these examples of Marian mysticism we see some of the most significant features of the Virgo-Pisces polarity. Virgo is an Earth sign, and in Christian tradition Mary is the means by which the transcendent can be born into the world. Pisces, sign of the Fishes, is the complementary Water sign, representing Christ who comes with the water of baptism and the wine of the Eucharist to redeem the world. Mary and Christ, Earth and Water, thus constitute a divine pair, each implied in and dependent upon the other. Appearances of Mary often occur at springs or grottoes, some of which are known to have been sacred to pre-Christian goddesses. Christ, who walks on water, also turns water into wine (an agricultural product). Many of the visions came to young children in farming communities where a good crop (Virgo’s aim) could be a matter of life or death, and where religious rules and practices were well established and Church authority strong, again in a Virgoan style. The Lady’s appearances, however, were not always entirely orthodox in their details, and sometimes posed a challenge to the religious authorities. She spoke directly to simple people, bypassing the authorities to address matters of great spiritual importance to the community and to the individuals involved. Arriving in the midst of the mundane Virgoan cares of peasant life, the visions were of an otherworldly and transforming Piscean beauty. The visionaries were transported to another reality, impervious to normal sensory stimuli, able to see and hear what was invisible and inaudible to others. Virgo and Pisces together describe the mystery of the relationship between the daily world and the transcendent. Where Virgo grounds us in the here and now and calls upon us to perfect our personal adaptation and perform useful service in the world, Pisces gives us a footing in the eternal and the universal and helps us adapt to the sublime and serve the infinite. Yet one is not profane and the other sacred; rather, both are faces of the same divine reality that underlies our existence. As Courtney Roberts suggests, these archetypal principles are older than Christianity and accessible to us all, apart from the doctrine of any particular religion. They are a part of the structure of reality and thus can appear anywhere, in the most ordinary of experiences or in formal religion. (Recall, for example, the Inuit goddess Sedna whom we considered at the New Moon in Aries). Although Marian visions may come to those withdrawn from the world, they may also arrive in the midst of the ordinary routine. So this season in which we are so busy gathering in the harvest, assessing our performance for the year, preparing for new challenges at school or work, and grappling with civic responsibilities and political decisions may be an apt time for the transcendent to enter our lives. Virgo, the virgin, is the one who is prepared, whose lamp is filled with oil, whose pantry is stocked and whose mind and heart are clear, disciplined and receptive. At this Full Moon, which falls on the eve of the U. S. Republican Party’s national convention in New York, the Sun is applying to a conjunction with Mars in Virgo while the Moon in Pisces has just conjoined Uranus (no wonder the New York police have been so worried about demonstrations getting out of hand!). Mercury, which rules the Sun, is retrograde in Leo and in mutual reception with the Sun, while Jupiter, ruler of the Moon, is in Virgo. Venus applies to the conjunction with Saturn in Cancer and is semisquare the Sun and sextile Jupiter. The Virgo-Pisces-Cancer emphasis, with Uranus suggesting a revelatory or disruptive potential, fits in well with the themes of Roberts’s book. Several of the visionaries she describes also reported the Virgin’s urgent concern for international peace, which is certainly relevant to our present situation. The proximity of Uranus to the Moon and the quincunx of Neptune in Aquarius to Mars suggest the current international tensions and also the possibility of unexpected insights or breakthroughs. Between now and the New Moon on September 14, the Venus-Saturn conjunction will be exact (August 31), Saturn will conjoin the United States’ Mercury (ruler of our Seventh House of partners and open enemies) on September 8, and Mercury will turn direct September 2, then move forward to repeat the opposition with Uranus which we saw at the Aquarius Full Moon. Mercury also opposes the USA natal Moon, making communication important but difficult (both are in fixed signs, reflecting the dug-in positions of the two major political parties and their adherents). The Virgo New Moon itself will fall (along with Mars in the same degree) exactly on the USA chart’s Neptune – the nation’s ideals, its illusions, and its mystical potential. May the Mother of all guide our meditations and support our labors in this busy season. Notes for further reading: Courtney Roberts’s book (published 2004) is available from Llewellyn Publications. Another fine source on the harvest goddess is "The Goddess Obscured: Transformation of the Grain Protectress from Goddess to Saint," by Pamela Berger, Beacon Press 1985. Look
for the Virgo New Moon ©
2004 Jean Hinson Lall |
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