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Virgo Full Moon Reflections: Further
Adventures with Water Regular readers of this column may recall that in our Baltimore home my husband and I occasionally have very engrossing adventures with water (basement flooding, leaky pipes and roofs, back-yard drainage issues, even weird hemorrhages in our cars). Last month, returning to Canterbury to resume my studies, I thought I might, as a side benefit of the trip, get a break from all that. After a bit of searching I found a great place to live near the campus, but when I came to see it the owner of the house explained that the ceilings in two rooms would have to be taken down and replaced in the near future as a result of a leaky roof on one side and a broken pipe on the other. While I was talking with her, in fact, a new leak was discovered in the dining room ceiling, producing a nasty puddle on the parquet floor. I had to laugh; there was no evading my drippy destiny even by relocating across the ocean! Repairs are proceeding, however, and my own room is snug and dry. I’ve settled in and begun to get engrossed in my research. One day last week, after reading some particularly stimulating material, I lay down for a short nap and dreamt that water was pouring in through the illuminated light fixture above my bed. I ran downstairs to look for a dishpan or bucket to catch the water. When I woke up I laughed again. As the old saying goes, "when it rains, it pours": when something significant happens to us on one level, often it is working on other levels as well. While I keep on encountering unexpected water events in my physical existence, the dream hints at an influx of a more subtle kind of water. It would be much too tedious and disheartening to take all these leaks personally, so I referred them to the planets. In the Aquarius New Moon column we looked at the image of the Water-Bearer who not only irrigates the land but pours out the "living waters" of spiritual renewal. Now the Sun has moved into Pisces, and at the Full Moon will be just a day away from an exact conjunction with Uranus, the planet whose name means "Heaven." While, as we noted last time, Neptune sojourns in the rarefied air of Aquarius where Uranus is co-ruler, Uranus is making a reciprocal journey through Neptune’s watery realm of Pisces, making for a "mutual reception" between these two slow-moving outer planets. It does seem a suitable time to reflect further on the waters and their relationship to "Heaven." On the first day of creation, according to the Book of Genesis, when the earth was as yet formless and void, God’s Spirit moved upon the face of the waters, and then God created light and separated the light from the darkness, and Day from Night. On the second day, ". . .God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven." Heaven, according to this version of events, is designed as a support structure, a strong framework or vault that is needed to divide the upper waters from the lower waters. In this, as in creation narratives generally, a good deal of the creator’s job involves separating and dividing things, creating distinctions and polarities. "Waters Above/Waters Below" is an interesting polarity, not so familiar and self-evident as pairs like "Earth and Heaven," "Light and Darkness," "Day and Night," "Water and Dry Land" or "Male and Female." We have to stop and think why it would be important in the divine plan to separate the waters, which appear to be the first matter of creation, in this definitive way. One thing this separation accomplishes is to create a space for reflection and for metaphor. We are able to experience our lives consciously precisely because of this division, through the resonance between events on different levels. Imagination and thought dance in the space between, drawing down water from above – poetry, mystical vision, music or inspired ideas -- to meet the humble water of daily existence. Spiritual water becomes more accessible to us and more potent through its resemblance to physical water, while physical water and all the labour of dealing with it (rivers and seas, navigation, flood control, irrigation, bathing, household washing, plumbing repairs) are lifted up and infused with meaning when linked to the higher waters through metaphor and symbol. The Moon now is opposite Sun and Uranus in Virgo, the mutable Earth sign that complements Pisces. Virgo is stereotyped as the practical housewife and caregiver who cleans up after everybody, as well as the teacher, the student, the nurse and the researcher or technician busily at work. (She’s definitely the one who rushes downstairs in search of a bucket to catch the water pouring in through the light fixture.) But she is also the Cosmic Mother who gives birth to the divine. Spiritually, she is that in us which is well-defined, disciplined and bounded yet exquisitely receptive, able to receive and contain the fertile water of Pisces. Just as Pisces (depicted as two fishes swimming in opposite directions) has its dual Waters, Virgo meets them with an upper and a lower Earth, uniting in herself the practical and the sublime. The conjunction of Sun and Uranus in Pisces could be a potent time for the descent of new ideas or images. As they meet and look across at the Full Moon, have your buckets ready to catch what may flow from above. ©
2005 Jean Hinson Lall Look
for the Pisces New Moon |
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