Welcome to the March 2021 Easter edition of our Cosmic Weather Forecast from your editors Curtis Lang and Jane Sherry. Here in Winston, flowering trees are in full bloom, flowers are waking up and planting season is in full swing!
Daffodils at Reynolda Gardens, Wakeforest University, photo by Jane Sherry
Sunday March 28th at 2:50 pm EDT we celebrate the Full Moon at 8°18' Libra and the Aries Solar Festival.
The Aries Solar Festival and Libra Full Moon coincide with the arrival of spring and constitute the first of three Global Spiritual observances occurring at the Aries, Taurus, and Gemini Solar Festivals. These festivals were instituted by the Tibetan Ascended Master Dwaj Khul and given to humanity in the middle of the 20th century through the telepathic stenography of Alice Bailey and others in the Theosophical Spiritual Tradition.
These three Full Moon Solar festivals incorporate elements from Mystery School teachings of both East and West, drawing from Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, and Christian Esoteric traditions. These three Festivals are intended to be a focus for spiritual development for humanity around the world, based upon the yearly seasonal cycles, the rhythms of the Sun and Moon, and the movement of stellar entities that inhabit the Plane of the Ecliptic, the Zodiac, far beyond our Solar System.
During these three Spiritual Festivals, awakened humanity joins with the Earthly Elementals and with Angelic presences, all presiding over the structure and growth of mineral, vegetal and animal kingdoms, uniting human beings with the Web of Life on our blue-green planetary home.
The Spiritual Hierarchy pours forth vast waves of healing energy along all the colors of the Seven Rays, directed toward the Earth, with the general goal of accelerating the spiritual progress of all sentient (and non-sentient) beings in our realm, and with the specific goal of supporting humanity on our Ascension Path toward Unity Consciousness here in our physical bodies.
On the day of the Full Moon millions of people around the world celebrate the Hindu Feast of Colors called Holi.
The ancient Spring Festival of Holi commemorates the victory of Lord Vishnu, Sustainer of the Universe, over the dark powers of Hiranyakashipu, the King of Demons. Lord Vishnu manifested as a Narasimha, half man and half lion, to defeat the Demon King, and that victory is celebrated on the Feast of Holi.
Lord Narasimha Killing the Demon King Hiranyakashipu
Holi is a venerable and potent festival of regeneration, resurrection, renewal and new life, similar to other spring festivals in cultures around the world.
On the second day of Holi, known as Dhuleti, celebrants spend the day throwing colored powder and water at each other. This playful activity has a spiritual and medicinal significance. The changeable weather of the spring season, alternating between cold and increasing warmth, is believed to cause viral fevers and colds and, on a more spiritual level, to cause disruptions in the smooth flow of prana, or Universal Life Force energy, throughout the body and the aura.
The colored powders were traditionally made of Neem, Kumkum, Haldi, Bilva, and other medicinal herbs prescribed by Ayurvedic doctors to restore the smooth flow of prana and ward off potential physical illnesses.
In his role as the Spiritual Sun of the Universe, who sustains peace and order just as the sun sustains all life on planet Earth, Lord Vishnu is said to have incarnated ten times on the planet Earth, and two of his incarnations were as the solar heroes Lord Ram and Lord Krishna. Vishnu's Divine avatars have many qualities that are similar to the qualities of Jesus Christ, the Divine Christian avatar whose death and resurrection we celebrate this year a week after the feast of Holi. For the complete Holi story, see our article Holi: The Spring Festival of Colors.
Tarot Trump 8: Adjustment, or Balance, Crowley-Harris Tarot
Associated with the sign Libra
This year's Easter celebration occurs on Sunday April 4, 2021, shortly after the Libra Full Moon and Aries Solar Festival, occurring on Palm Sunday, March 28, 2021.
According to Christian Wisdom Teachings, the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ balanced the Cosmic Scales, and brought forgiveness for all human beings for original sin, which had weighed heavily on the souls of all incarnated humanity for long ages of time.
This "original sin" was the sin of plunging so deeply into material reality that humanity lost its connection with Higher Self, Higher Mind and Higher Purpose, becoming enmeshed in the illusory world-view created by the egoistic personality and mistaking that egoistic world-view for the true reality, which includes but also transcends the reality we can apprehend with our five senses.
Christ exemplified the virtues of the spiritually evolved Aries personality, which puts personal integrity and one's own spiritual guidance above all other considerations. Christ's Self-consciousness was tempered by a Libran concern for the well-being of the community.
Resurrection of Christ, by Carl Bloch, 1875
At this time of the Easter Festival, something Divine seeks to restore equilibrium between humanity and the natural environment of Mother Earth. Christ is the perfected Aries personality, the “Lamb of God”, whose sacrifice takes away the “sins” or “karma” of the world, wiping out debts in a Spiritual Grand Jubilee, and preparing the way for the spiritual liberation of humanity, just as the sacrifice of the “Lamb of God” at Passover heralded the Exodus of the Israelites into freedom!
Something Divine seeks to bring peace to the warring classes of humanity.
Something so sacred, so subtle, yet so powerful that in its global balancing act it is both disruptive & healing at the same time.
At the time of Easter, we celebrate the blending of the energies of Aries and Libra. Esoterically, Aries represents the egoistic personality, and Libra the Cosmic Equilibrium of the Higher Self. For more on the Esoteric meaning of Easter, see our article Eastertide: Uniting with the Cosmic Christ, Honoring the Divine Mother.
In 2021, our Spring Seasonal Festivals coincide with a preponderance of propitious astrological aspects, indicating the potential for a season of renewed hope, revitalized relationships and replenished personal power.
This Full Moon a Grand Air Trine meets a Sun/Venus Conjunction in Aries. Cosmic Weather patterns indicate that personal and collective relationship challenges can be resolved, resulting in Win-Win outcomes to what have seemed like longstanding, possibly intractable problems.
The Full Moon in Libra, the sign of Social Equity, opposes Venus and the Sun in individualizing Aries. These aspects challenge us to act vigorously and creatively to restore a dynamic balance in all areas of our lives.
The Grand Trine in Air signs features Jupiter and Saturn in Aquarius, Mars in Gemini and Moon in Libra.
Mars is in volatile, unpredictable Gemini through April 21. Mars in Gemini corresponds to the Nine of Swords in the Thoth Tarot Deck, known as Cruelty. The Nine of Swords is associated with cruelty, pitilessness and oppression when poorly aspected, but can indicate patient, unselfish sacrifice when well aspected.
The Mars in Gemini period this year is full of challenges that could trigger impulsive, angry actions directed without much concern for the effectiveness of these outbursts. This Mars energy also indicates a tendency toward paranoia and the subsequent mental cruelty toward oneself and others that the miasma of paranoia generates in our lives.
Nine of Swords, Cruelty, Thoth Tarot Deck
The Mars-Saturn Trine this month could stimulate the Saturnian virtue of self-restraint, enabling us to restrain our worst impulses and most damaging, recurring hamster wheel thought-forms.
The Mars-Jupiter Trine indicates if we tune in to inner spiritual guidance we can channel this difficult Mars energy into inspired creativity and deep meditation or powerful healing practices.
Mars is also square Mercury and Neptune in Pisces this Full Moon week, creating a kind of overly optimistic mind fog and a tendency toward dreamy dissociation that could make it difficult to view our world with the clarity required to practice necessary discernment. We may be tempted to act precipitously and aggressively on the basis of illusions and delusions that seem rational at the time.
The antidote to brain fog and emotional glamours is always to be found in strengthening our connection to our inner spiritual guidance, and fortunately this Full Moon provides a golden opportunity to do just that.
The Sabian Symbol for this Full Moon is Three Old Masters Hanging in a Special Room in an Art Gallery, depicting a return to Source in an effort to discover new meaning and new values during a period of social chaos.
Just as artists seek inspiration in the works of Old Masters, each one of us would benefit this Full Moon week from reconnecting to our spiritual lineage, our Guides and Teachers. We will benefit from a more concentrated focus on realigning our mental bodies so that the monkey mind becomes the servant of Unity Consciousness.
Hanuman with Mace Meditating, Collection of Satya Center, photo by Curtis Lang
This realignment brings new clarity of vision. Our upgraded view of our world serves as the backdrop for new creative inspiration from Source that will empower us to envision more beneficial personal goals, more equitable social systems, and more loving intimate relationships.
When this realignment connects us consciously with the Source of our intuitive guidance, energy from Source ignites the will forces required for the attainment of our Higher Purpose. So keep a journal near your meditation cushion this Easter week because you won't want to lose track of all the insights arising as the Resurrection approaches.
This Full Moon is a time of creative realignment for the collective consciousness as well.
As we mentioned in last month's Cosmic Weather Forecast, Jupiter was rising in Aquarius on March 20, the day of the Spring Equinox, in Washington D.C. which indicates a very positive medium-term energy, conducive to collective celebration. A moment of American joy is indicated which will positively impact cosmic weather patterns throughout the spring season.
Americans received checks from the federal government the week of the Spring Equinox, and the $1.9 trillion economic stimulus package is likely to create good feelings in markets and families for months to come.
This positive energy does not eliminate the conflicts that have plagued the United States throughout the last year. These conflicts are inner, existential conundrums that will require years to resolve.
Constellation of Aries,
Hevelius’ star atlas Firmamentum Sobiescianum, 1687
This Easter, the needs of individuals for personal fulfillment and freedom symbolized by Sun and Venus conjunct in Aries are diametrically opposed to collective, social demands symbolized by the Moon in Libra that seek to subordinate individual freedoms to protect public health and well being.
Poised between the fear of rising Covid case numbers as seen recently in Brazil, UK and Europe and the relief we feel as America relaxes restrictive Covid precautions, our present moment represents a rare opportunity. If we choose, we can make this a time of truce and equipoise.
If we can turn off our ADHD monkey mind, represented by the Monkey God Hanuman, who is pictured above, and if we can insulate ourselves from the emotional and mental cacophony emanating from humanity's collective consciousness at this time, this Full Moon Easter and Holi week is the ideal time to celebrate our connection to inner guidance, and our spiritual lineage.
Astrologically, although we are all challenged by the discordant energy of Mars in Gemini, and potentially confused by the energy of Mars square Mercury and Neptune, this Easter is a hopeful time for the collective American consciousness. Nationwide there's a burning desire to return to our pre-pandemic old-normal lifestyles -- with a degree of public safety. That's a good formula for creating a dynamic balance between the opposed energies of Aries and Libra.
As you might expect with this month's conflicted star chart, the current Covid outlook is extremely confused. Social media and the mass consciousness bristle with contradictory, oppositional narratives about the nature of the pandemic threat and about the quality of the social response to the pandemic, overseen by nation states around the world.
In America, Covid cases and deaths have declined as shown in the chart above, but are still at a level comparable to May 2020, a time when New York was in panic mode because the epidemic was raging.
The UK has been in lockdown since January however, because of a third Covid surge triggered by the spread of a new more contagious and more deadly variant of the virus.
Paris and other populous French regions are entering a 30 day Spring lockdown this week. Italy plans a total shutdown of the entire country over Easter weekend. Hamburg, Germany responded to a surge in new cases by creating a new lockdown on Saturday, March 20, the day of the Equinox.
In a display of Mars square Mercury and Neptune mental confusion German Chancellor Angela Merkel just canceled a five day nationwide lockdownplanned for the Easter weekend, after massive pushback from the public and others in her own party. Germany has been in various stages of lockdown for over a year, and the new European surge has left Merkel with no politically and scientifically clear path forward.
In Brazil, which has suffered 980,000 cases of Covid to date, 90,570 new cases were recorded today, March 22, 2021. At that rate, by the end of June the number of total Covid cases in Brazil could nearly double what it is today, one year into the pandemic.
"The Covid-19 crisis in Brazil has never been worse," CNN reports. "Nearly every Brazilian state has an ICU occupancy of 80% or higher, according to a CNN analysis of state data. As of Friday, 16 of 26 states were at or above 90%, meaning those health systems have collapsed or are at imminent risk of doing so."
"The seven-day averages of both new cases and new deaths are higher than they have ever been."
Brazil National Flag: Ordem E Progresso, Order and Progress
"In the last 10 days, about a quarter of all coronavirus deaths worldwide have been recorded in Brazil, according to CNN analysis."
The new Brazilian variant of Covid, called P.1 is responsible for at least 50% of new cases in eight Brazilian states. P.1 is calculated to be 2.2 times more transmissible than Covid-19.
For America, the new Brazilian, British and European pandemic surge, linked with the rise of new Covid variants and cases, is a warning flag that should not be ignored. America has demonstrated very little ability to track the spread of the Covid virus. New variants of Covid have popped up in the hundreds in a number of states, including Florida, California, New York, Minnesota, and more.
Without widespread fast population wide Covid testing, American policy makers don't really know how fast the new, highly contagious Covid virus is spreading, so they can't estimate how big a potential problem these variants represent.
In the meantime, we have only the experience of other countries to guide us. And that experience suggests that Americans would do well to exercise an abundance of caution.
The countries that have best contained the Covid virus and that have been able to maintain a more or less open society for most of the time since the pandemic mushroomed last spring have used a variety of tools to mitigate the social and economic problems associated with long lockdowns, overloaded health care systems, mass deaths in nursing homes, and shuttered businesses.
Successful countries enacted strict quarantines to isolate Covid hotspots, created apps to track movements of citizens so the associates of those who caught the virus could be isolated in a timely fashion, and provided social support for those who had to be quarantined.
Source: gov.uk dashboard
Testing, tracking and tracing the entire population has also been a winning formula. In South Korea people are tested by hospitals outside of the buildings themselves, in special sealed booths and receive test results in a few hours.
In Slovakia, “Observed prevalence [of Covid cases] decreased by 58% within one week in the 45 counties that were subject to two rounds of mass testing, an estimate that remained robust when adjusting for multiple potential confounders…. Modelling indicated that this decrease could not be explained solely by infection control measures, but required the additional impact of isolation and quarantine of household members of those testing positive,” according to a recent article in Science magazine.
In Kerala, India, 30,000 health care activists assist those who need to be quarantined, doing their shopping, getting their medicine and performing other tasks for them as needed. Free meals, financial aid and debt relief are all part of the quarantine package in Kerala.
In Tübingen Germany the city government focused on protecting the elderly, who are the most vulnerable to the virus. Subsidized taxi services, free masks and special shopping hours have been effective in shielding the elderly from the virus. The city's University Hospital was not overwhelmed and did not have to cancel routine procedures as a result.
All these strategies are instructive as America begins to relax Covid restrictions all over the country, but the likelihood that these types of strategies will be widely implemented in the United States is slim to none.
To further complicate matters, we are at the opening of what could be a short window of time for us to vaccinate the vast majority of the population in advance of the spread of the new, more contagious and more deadly Covid variants.
"In Michigan and Minnesota, infections are mounting swiftly and new hospital admissions of confirmed or suspected Covid cases are up about 70% and 32%, respectively, from recent lows, according to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services data," reports Bloomberg News. "The pace of daily Covid-19 hospital admissions, meanwhile, has stopped its slide in New York and New Jersey — despite the vaccine campaign — and begun to inch higher.”
Early March polls suggest that about half of Americans intend to get vaccinated, and about 30% probably or definitely would not agree to be vaccinated. Experts say that somewhere between 50-80% of a population must be vaccinated to give an approximation of herd immunity, so right now we just don't know if the current vaccination program will be effective in the long run.
We don't know how well current vaccines will protect against the new variants, although early results are encouraging.
We don't know how well the vaccines will prevent vaccinated people from becoming carriers of the Covid virus. Participants in the Pfizer vaccine trials, for example, were not tested regularly. Only people who were symptomatic were allowed into the trial. This could be problematic since many Long Covid cases began as asymptomatic infections.
We do know that medical experts recommend continuing to use a mask and maintain social distancing, especially inside buildings and crowded areas. This is for the protection of those around us just as much or more than to protect ourselves.
Because these vaccines were developed in a matter of months, a fraction of normal vaccine development cycles, we know much less about them than scientists normally know prior to public release of a new vaccine.
It can sometimes feel like we are all unwilling guinea pigs being used in some mass scientific experiment in a bio-technology development lab from hell.
Picture taken by Captain Jae in June 2007 of his guinea pig.
[Since then I have discovered that YOU SHOULD NEVER USE A HARNESS ON A GUINEA PIG AS IT IS VERY DANGEROUS FOR THEIR WELL-BEING AND THEY CAN SUSTAIN SERIOUS INJURY.]
Courtesy Wikimedia, Public Domain Image.
So why do we comply? Why take the vaccine? Many people think it is their moral duty, their dharma, to protect public health, and to help minimize the suffering and loss of life caused by the spread of the virus. It is everyone's dharma to preserve and extend the medical advances that vaccines and modern medicine have provided over the last 100 years.
Masks, vaccines, lockdowns, quarantine and social distancing are all proven public health tools that work. Since the 1800s, vaccines have made a big difference in our lives, enabling us to control formerly uncontrollable diseases such as polio, tetanus, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, rubella, measles, whooping cough, the mumps, smallpox, diptheria, rabies, rotavirus, pneumococcal disease, meningococcal disease, shingles and last but not least, the most common sexually transmitted disease HPV, or human papillomavirus.
We want to preserve the medical advances the current system has delivered over the last 100 years, despite its shortcomings and the abhorrent, wasteful, inequitable for-profit delivery system in which our medical practitioners are embedded here in America.
Still we must ask the perennial question posed by investigative journalists -- who will benefit? In the rush to develop a Covid vaccine, governments subsidized private pharmaceutical companies, who paid only a fraction of the normal cost of development. The lucky corporations reaping the benefits of this taxpayer funded corporate crony socialism will, now and in the future, enjoy all the profits from long term sales of the vaccines and their spin-offs.
"Since the start of the race for a COVID-19 vaccine, the U.S. government has funneled more than $10 billion in taxpayer dollars to pharmaceutical companies through contracts for the expedited innovation of a vaccine," CBS Marketwatch reported in June 2020. So far, the government’s investment has been made with no strings attached, not even a guarantee that any vaccines and treatments will be affordable to the people who need them."
Once vaccines have been produced, they have become useful geo-political tools. Wealthy and powerful countries leverage those vaccines into political power in poorer and weaker countries.
There is no evidence of goodwill, loving wisdom or dharma fulfilled in the actions of pharmaceutical companies and many national governments so far during the global response to Covid. That makes it difficult for many people to trust the new vaccines, their governments, or even the scientists that are studying the spread of the pandemic.
There are two inflection points American Covid watchers should focus on to determine the global prognosis.
First, the next month or two could be critical. If the new variants actually take hold and spread wildly, the numbers will change radically in the near to medium term.
Second, next fall and winter flu season will be the determining moment for the efficacy of mass inoculation around the world.
Meanwhile each of us must use our powers of discernment and our inner spiritual guidance to chart our path during this tumultuous, conflicted, politically charged global health crisis.
What we've discussed so far is just the tip of the politics, science and deep meaning iceberg encoded into the Covid pandemic's progress over the last year.
Americans can only agree on one thing. So far, the pandemic has been a big bummer. Americans are suffering from Covid fatigue.
The Web is buzzing with reports that the majority of America's affluent top 20% are planning to travel again in the months to come, primarily for pleasure rather than business. Of course they will need Covid passports to fly overseas, and they may have to quarantine, and they may have to endure a lockdown once they arrive, unless the third wave subsides in Europe. No matter.
Members of the techno-academic-managerial class (TAMs) can not afford the private jets the point one percent use to evade the hazards of intercontinental Covid era commercial flights and the TAMs are jonesing for new Instagrammable, highly curated guided tours, cruises and resort experiences.