Welcome to the October 2018 Cosmic Weather Forecast! Wednesday, October 24th, at 12:45 pm Eastern time, we celebrate the Taurus Full Moon and the Scorpio Solar Festival.
Sexy. Spooky. Spiritual. Scary. It's Scorpio season once again! Plus we have a magical Taurus Full Moon conjunct electrifying Uranus opposing the Sun/Venus in Scorpio. Prepare for emotional eruptions, reject astral glamours, compost decaying karmic patterns of behavior, and elevate your consciousness by piercing the veil of egotism with the Eagle Eye of the Scorpionic Adept!
This Taurus Full Moon is called the Hunter's Moon, when Native Americans traditionally used the lengthy nighttime light of this Full Moon to track and kill deer and small game. The community's well being depended upon the hunters' success. For this Full Moon was the moment to cure and stockpile meat for the community ahead of the coming winter season.
The Hunter's Moon is not exceptionally bright, but because shifts in the plane of the ecliptic cause the moon's orbit to track closer to the horizon at this time of year, the time between sunset and moonrise diminishes significantly. This means that there is a prolonged period of light in the early evenings, suitable for hunting.
In the Northern hemisphere, fields of grain had been harvested in late September and early October, so the light of the Hunter's Moon made it easy to spot deer, foxes and other prey in the denuded fields.
Here in 21st Century Boca Raton, Florida, large trucks full of Maseratis, Bentleys, Teslas and Corvettes are arriving daily, heralds of the seasonal arrival of Northeast snowbirds.
Until last night it had seemed that summer would not relinquish its grip on South Florida, with "feels like" temperatures in the day above 90 degrees and warm evenings in the upper 70s. Last night there was a cool breeze for the first time in months, and today the high is going to be only 81 degrees.
Record high seaweed piles on Boca's beaches have begun to disappear and the red tide has receded. We are lucky because most beaches on Florida's East and West coasts are still suffering from these twin environmental catastrophes.
Here in Jane's garden, orchids are headed toward peak bloom, and it's now planting season for vegetables and herbs. In the front yard, scene below, we have a mini tropical botanical garden featuring red tipped ginger, bromeliads, white ginger, and more.
This month has been the time to review the health of the wide variety of plants in our garden, remove those that are at the end of their productive life, and amend the soil so the next generation of plants will have the nutrients they need for a healthy life.
That's a complicated process, appropriate for this Scorpio time of year leading up to and including Halloween, All Saint's Day, and Day of the Dead.
Scorpio is the Zodiacal sign that governs the process of fermentation or putrefaction. For ancient alchemists in the Western mystery school traditions, putrefaction represented the first in a series of transformative steps that result in the perfection of the psyche.
Modern alchemists operating on farms and in gardens across the country transmute the putrefying base elements of nature into the "gold" of life-enhancing foods such as sauerkraut, energizing drinks such as beer and wine, and vitalizing soil amendments such as BioChar and compost.
In South Florida soil sits on a shallow bed of limestone which is extremely porous, so soil, nutrients and even mulch tend to settle and disappear over the course of a year's growth.
Before any new planting is done, Jane adds additional organic soil and compost from our bins, created over time from the slow transmutation of kitchen and garden waste into a soil amendment alive with vital nutrients, in a form readily accessible to growing plants.
In some areas of the garden, Jane adds BioChar, another Scorpionic soil enhancer, created by heating of waste vegetation in oxygen deprived vessels or trenches. Pre-Columbian Amazonians created biochar by covering trenches full of burning biomass in soil. This extremely stable form of carbon, called terra preta, which can stay in the soil for thousands of years (unless it sits on a porous limestone base), can increase soil fertility of acidic soils, increase plant productivity, and provide protection against some foliar and soil-borne diseases.
Jane also adds fish and seaweed fertilizers, iron and eggshells, to mitigate the iron and calcium deficiencies in sandy South Florida soil and add crucial plant nutrients -- nitrogen, potassium, phosphate, and magnesium. After all that, we cover all areas of the garden with large quantities of organic mulch, to help retain much needed moisture.
Jane has got pea seedlings and pole beans started already, crucifer seedlings have germinated, and we look forward to planting the rest of our veggies and herbs in short order. We expect to begin harvesting in a couple of weeks.
Scorpio traditionally rules all processes of alchemical transformation, physical and spiritual, and all evolutionary processes of death and rebirth. So we may think of the Scorpio time of year as a time of harvesting, here in South Florida we do the Scorpionic work of prepping soil and planting seeds.
Be sure to read our article on Lactofermentation, Putrefaction and Scorpionic Transformation for a quick look at Scorpionic magic as it manifests in the spiritual and material worlds, including the home-brewing of seasonal sauerkraut, an autumn ritual in many areas of the Northern Hemisphere.
The preparation of sauerkraut demonstrates the alchemy of food preparation, and traditionally takes place in the Northeast at the time of the Scorpio Full Moon. Relatively undigestible raw cabbage, which corresponds to the raw substance of the human personality, is transformed through lactofermentation rituals into pure nutritional gold, a relatively long-lasting, extremely potent and nutritionally rich food substance that can sustain the community throughout the long dark nights of the winter season, when the plants die off and the Earth inhales long and deeply of the Cosmic Forces streaming in from the Stars.
If you aspire to the role of household alchemist, try out the fantastic recipe for Sauerkraut and Fermented Vegetables from our dear friend, farmer and nutritionist Betsy Cashen.
Scorpio Solar Festival Cosmic Weather Forecast
This month's Full Moon occurs mid-day on Wednesday October 24th at 01°13′ degrees Taurus, conjunct electrifying Uranus, opposed by Sun in Scorpio conjunct retrograde Venus. Jupiter and Mercury join Sun and Venus in Scorpio, giving us a quadruple helping of Scorpionic energy. This is not a comfortable lunation, in any sense of the word.
Earthy Taurus prefers comfort, tradition, routine and ritual, while Uranus is all about revolution, shocking sudden transformations and disruptive innovation. So the combination of Moon and Uranus in Taurus signals the potential for emotional, political, financial, and geophysical earthquakes.
October has seen financial markets around the world disrupted by fears of all kinds, resulting in big swings featuring steep declines, from Asia to Europe and in America.
In the run up to the November elections in the United States, an escalating war of words, tweets, posts and images deepens the intense polarization that separates Americans on the major issues of the day.
With Sun and retrograde Venus in its detriment in Scorpio, the sign of death, putrefaction and regeneration, emotions will run hot and wild this week and into next month. Venus continues to retrograde into Libra over the next few weeks, finally going direct November 16th.
Sudden reversals of fortunes in the political and financial spheres are to be expected with the stars in this configuration.
Markets will continue to swing wildly for the next few weeks during Venus retrograde, but price swings may well be short lived as volatility continues to whipsaw global markets. As soon as Venus goes direct, Mercury goes retrograde, and this often corresponds to, you guessed it, more short term volatility in financial markets. So if you are a day trader who makes money from short sharp price swings, more power to you! And if you are a long term investor, you may want to try to filter out the noise and concentrate on indicators of long term trends instead of the dizzying daily barrage of moment to moment ups and downs.
It is quite likely that the results of elections during this period will be slow to materialize and contested vigorously when they do. With both Republicans and Democrats spending more money than ever before on campaigns around the country, and with more at stake emotionally for all concerned, you can be sure there will be an outpouring of negative emotions by those who perceive the election results to be unfair, unacceptable and perhaps even unlawful. So you may want to prepare yourself mentally and emotionally for a deluge of anger, fear, loathing, disappointment and recriminations, which are sure to follow this election no matter what the results may be.
On a spiritual level, this is the season of Scorpionic holidays, celebrating the time of yearly transformation when the veil between the worlds thins and all things normally repressed or hidden from sight erupt into the everyday world.
This is the time of the seasonal festival of Samhain, also known as Halloween. In India, during the Scorpio interval, Hindus celebrate Diwali, the Festival of Lights. Diwali is a five day festival honoring the Goddess Lakshmi, who bestows abundance, and the victory of Lord Ram, the seventh incarnation of Lord Vishnu, in his war with the Demon King Ravana, as recounted in The Ramayana.
Houston Halloween Scarecrow Goddess by Jane Sherry
This Scorpionic season, the Twilight of the Year, we can make a special effort to connect with our Divine Selves and with the Immortal energy stream of Divine Love. Now is the time to fearlessly confront the repressed contents of our subconscious selves -- our negative emotions, self-defeating habits and mistaken maps of the world.
The Hunter's Moon is the ideal moment to seek spiritual illumination that will bring us a new awareness of the karmic circumstances that created the elements of our shadow selves that often trip us up during our long journey on the path of Spirit.
Through this heightened awareness we can forgive ourselves and others for participating in the karmic round of cause and effect that has embedded these shadow elements in our egoistic personalities, and seek to release these imperfections, returning them to Source, freeing us from their recurring influence in our lives.
This is a type of spiritual alchemy, a Scorpionic process that can lead us through a kind of ego death and into an increased consciousness of love and light, which brings with it true spiritual freedom.
For the alchemists, who represent the Western mystery school tradition, Scorpionic putrefaction represents the first in a series of transformative steps that result in the perfection of the psyche.
Putrefaction is the “black step” ruled by Saturn and by Scorpio, when the alchemical material, the initiate’s psyche, is decomposed into its various constituent elements, air, water and earth, or the mental, emotional and physical bodies. The putrefaction process is thus analogous to the process of Death, whereby the physical body decomposes into its various constituent elements. On a psychic level, putrefaction represents the “Dark Night of the Soul”, when repressed memories, karmic debris and psychic blockages rise to the surface prior to a process of releasing.
According to the ancient wisdom teachings of the Hindu Vedas, “Born of the Earth, man, when he dies, returns to his mother.” This corresponds to the Jungian conception of Death – the atomization of the personality and the return of the energy contained within that personality to the collective unconscious.
The concept of Death as part of the transmigration of souls in a process of reincarnation first surfaced during the dawn of agricultural society, when humans first conceived of a cycle of death and rebirth, linked to their understanding of the seasonal cycles of cultivated plant growth.
The Hindu sacred text known as The Upanishads says that “The Tree of Samsara (Illusion), or the relative universe, is characterized by a continuous series of births and deaths, without beginning or end. The only way to cut it down is through the knowledge and realization of Atman’s identity with Brahman.”
Brahman
It is only by conscious realization of the identity of self (Atman) and Self (Brahman) that illumination can be achieved. "Tat tvam asi," explains the Chandogya Upanishad. "Thou art that".
The following portion of that sacred text reveals its esoteric meaning.
"'Remember my son, your body dies, but your Self does not,' Sage Uddalaka explained to his son Shvetaketu. Uddalaka told Shvetaketu to bring him a fruit from a nearby banyan tree and to break it open. Shvetaketu did and said, ‘There are seeds inside, all very small.’ ‘Now break one of the seeds and tell me what you see.’ ‘Nothing, Father.’ "
"Uddalaka said, ‘My son, this great banyan tree has grown from a seed so small that you cannot see it. Believe me, an invisible and subtle essence is the Spirit of the whole universe. ‘Now, take this salt and put it in some water and bring it to me tomorrow morning.’ "
"The next morning Shvetaketu looked for the salt but couldn’t find it because it had dissolved. Uddalaka asked his son to taste the water. ‘Salty,’ he said, adding, ‘the salt will always remain in the water.’ “That’s right. The salt permeates the water, just like the Self permeates the Universe. Even though we cannot see it, the Self is within all things and there is nothing that doesn’t come from Self. “This invisible and subtle essence is the Spirit of the whole universe. That is reality. That is truth. And you, Shvetaketu, you – are that!’ "
It is only by conscious realization of the ultimate unity of all reality, both immanent and transcendent, that one gains release from the eternal cycle of reincarnation. It is only through conscious identification of the individual soul (Atman) with the immanent and transcendent energy that sustains and vivifies all of creation (Brahman) that one obtains enlightenment.
This ancient Hindu goal of enlightenment corresponds to the ultimate goal of the Western alchemists – to turn the lead of the egoistic personality into the gold of Divine Consciousness.
The wisdom teachings of the alchemists were captured in the pictorial tradition of the Tarot cards. Tarot Trump 13, called Death, refers both to physical death and to the death of the egoistic personality, which is an illusory death. For the personality remains after this death, but it is stripped of the illusion of control.
The aspirant no longer lives to satisfy individual material desires at the expense of others, or without thought for the consequences of actions upon the larger Web of Life that comprises the great Karmic Wheel of Existence figured in Tarot Trump 10, The Wheel of Fortune.
This is the death by water that is the culmination of the spiritual exercise pictured in Trump 12, the Hanged Man. As at the moment of physical death, the ego is submerged completely in the collective consciousness of humanity and the evolutionary record of all sentient beings incarnating over time on planet Earth.
This is the true baptism of water, and this baptism leads to new life, to a true rebirth of the spirit, the flesh and the soul.
This Scorpio Solar Festival is the time of Cosmic Transition when we stand poised at the edge of the Watery Abyss, and when we plunge into that Universal Womb from which we came.
This is the season of the year when we can all begin to make substantial progress in our inner work. The darkening of the light outside corresponds to increasing light within. Now is the time to rededicate ourselves to our spiritual practice, and renew our efforts to transform our own inner raw materials into gold.
Full Moon in Taurus -- Abundance, Romance and the Qabala
The Full Moon in Taurus is traditionally a lovers’ moon, perfect for romance, which combines the emotional, sexy watery nature of Scorpio with the earthy sensuality of Taurus.
By Till Credner [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], from Wikimedia Commons
This Full Moon conjunct retrograde Venus in Scorpio amplifies the Scorpionic component of this lunation, but the overall cosmic weather patterns favor romance, sexual magic and harmony and balance in all relationships.
On October 23, the day before the Full Moon, Venus in Scorpio sextiles Saturn in Capricorn. On the 27th Sun in Scorpio sextiles Saturn in Capricorn. These aspects indicate that the heightened Scorpionic influences this Full Moon week will be positive for relationships and for the apportionment of shared resources, another theme of this month's Hunter's Moon in Taurus.
The Moon, associated with romance, is said to be exalted in the sign of Taurus, which means that at this time positive Lunar qualities manifest in their highest and most beneficial forms, and any deleterious effects from negative Lunar qualities tend to be minimized.
In the Western Qabalistic System of Wisdom Teachings recorded in the various forms of Tarot cards published since the Renaissance, the Moon in Taurus is associated with the six of disks, which is called Success.
The Qabalistic Tarot displays Ancient Wisdom Teachings in graphic, symbolic forms that depict the macrocosm and the microcosm simultaneously via a map called the Tree of Life. Each card has two meanings corresponding to aspects of the microcosm (the human being) and the macrocosm (the Universe).
The Tree of Life symbolizes important places in the Universe; a map of the human mind, body and aura; states of consciousness within the human mind; stages along the path of life; archetypes of the collective consciousness; steps along the path to spiritual enlightenment; and energy states of varying frequency from lowest to highest. The spheres represent different levels of consciousness and the paths represent interactions between these different levels of reality.
The six of disks can be found in the sphere, or Sephira, known as Tiphareth (Tif'eret), which sits midway between Kether, the Source of Creation, and Malkuth, which is the four dimensional space time continuum. Tiphareth is that sphere lying equipoised between the absolute unity of Source and the infinite diversity of our world of ordinary consciousness. This is the center within us associated with the heart chakra. This is the level of awareness where a human being begins to connect the experience of individual existence with an experience of Self as an aspect of Universal Unity. In Esoteric Christianity, this is the center of Christ Consciousness, represented by the Sun.
On the material level the six of disks is associated with quantifiable, substantial material gain; a lifestyle of sensuous opulence; romantic love; and sexual prowess.
For alchemists and practitioners of the Western Mystery School Traditions of Ceremonial Magic, the six of disks has a very special secret significance.
The six of disks represents the Union of Heaven and Earth, the alchemical union or royal marriage of Universal Male and Cosmic Female energies experienced by a man and a woman in sexual union whose hearts are in tune and resonating to the energy of the Divine.
The six of disks represents the highest form of sexual magic. The partners transcend their egoistic personalities through their fusion in love. In offering up their love to the Divine for the benefit of humanity the lovers come in contact with the Source of Universal Life Force Energy, then channel that energy through their bodies and out into their environment.
This is a Western Mystery School variant of ancient Tantric practices which channel sexual energy up the spine through the power of the will by blocking orgasmic release through mental concentration.
In this modern variant of sexual magic, a couple dedicates their loving energy to the nourishment of favorite Deities, Angels, Guides and Teachers in Higher Realms up to and including the Divine Source.
The couple links hearts as they reach the plateau stage of sexual arousal, and sets their intention to send the energy up into their crowns and to radiate out through the crown and heart into Higher Spiritual Realms and into the material world.
This is a true love-offering to the entire Web of Life inhabiting all the planes of existence.
Spiritual beings who inhabit high-frequency realms of subtle energy obtain nourishment from human emotions, which exude a subtle energy that is equivalent to perfume in those realms.
This is why Spiritual Teachers tell students they should never become attached to their negative emotions and thought-forms. Students must learn to minimize those negatives as much as possible so as not to attract subtle energy beings who feed on human negativity.
This is why we seek to cultivate positive emotions and thought-forms, which we offer up to the Divine like a perfume during our spiritual practices, prayers, rituals, meditations and affirmations, and yes, in our love making.
In this case, as the two lovers unite the energies from their opening hearts during sexual union, they experience a fusion that takes consciousness beyond the boundaries of the egoistic personality, and their combined energy resonates with the extremely elevated energy frequency associated with the Divine Lovers, uniting the earthly and heavenly energy streams.
The energy released into both material and subtle energy realms by the act of love and sexual union, which consciously unites male and female, above and below, ascends into subtle realms where it is received as an offering and a banquet by Benevolent Beings of Light. (See accompanying artwork Healing the Wounded Heart of the World by Jane Sherry.)
The act of love, performed as a conscious act of spiritual practice and a conscious offering to the Divine, can be a powerful magical act that activates the tremendous power of sexuality in the service of the spiritual evolution of humanity as well as one’s own personal spiritual evolution.
Imagine the heart of one of these lovers as a rose within a cross, symbolizing the human body and material existence, and imagine a rosy glow around the rose.
This is the image of the six of disks in the Crowley Tarot deck, and is a beautiful symbolic rendering of the moment of the opening of the compassionate heart and the awakening of loving wisdom.
This Full Moon reflect upon this image and you will sense the perfume of romance and the magic of love in the air.
On the spiritual level, the six of disks corresponds to the heart chakra, the fourth chakra in the human body, and also symbolizes the Sun, which is the source of life-giving light and heat in our Solar System.
The six of disks represents the action of the heart in the material world. We can study what that looks like by studying the lives of Ram and Christ -- and Buddha.
The six of disks is called Success because it represents the Union of the Heavenly and the Earthly realms, the infusion of the Holy Spirit into material reality, and into humanity, and is represented by the six-pointed Star of David.
The six of disks symbolizes the creative impulse of the highest form of Deity manifest in the material world – Christ consciousness in a human body, actively at work in the world to bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth.
The six of disks is that harmony of expression which reflects the harmonio