Standing Against The Sun
Dates and times are given for U.S. Pacific Time zone. Click them to see the date and time where you are.
Release and transition
Although this week is full of smaller moments and opportunities that I’d ordinarily love to savor, I’m choosing to write only about the two biggest, shoutiest celestial events.
The first is Mercury’s inferior conjunction with the Sun on Nov. 11 (7:21 am PST), when it will briefly be visible as a small, dark dot against the Sun. Normally, a planet in conjunction with the Sun is rendered invisible by that star’s brilliant light; so Mercury’s *“transits” of the Sun – when it passes in front of it and is visible from earth, like a tiny object that’s been blown into your eye – are rare and significant. (* “Transit” here is distinct from its usual meaning in astrology, when it’s used to refer to the current position of the planets in relation to another chart.)
Mercury gets short shrift in astrology, other than the histrionics that accompany his retrograde periods. And that’s a shame, because astrological Mercury is as rich and deep as any symbol. Mercury is the astrological ruler of some of my favorite people – jesters, rakes, magicians, wordsmiths – and the facilitator of words and ideas. He’s the telephone wires overhead and the fiber optic cables under our feet, passing messages and signals at furious speed. He’s the central nervous system that animates our bodies. In an astrological chart, he’s the connective tissue that makes everything else hang together.
In mythology, Mercury was the psychopomp who escorted souls to the afterlife. This week, he’s escorted a little animal spirit very dear to me and is poised to take another. He held the hand of a friend’s beloved young relative as he tragically left the world. I like to imagine that, in moments such as these, Mercury hovers nearby like Wim Wenders’ elegant, pony-tailed angels, bearing careful witness to the last thoughts and whispers of the dying. At the moment of death – whether literal or figurative – Mercury brings release and transition.
But like a sleight-of-hand magician, Mercury prefers his work to go undetected. What will it mean, astrologically, as he passes, dark and conspicuous, before our life-giving star? Oh, one dozen astrologers will give you one dozen interpretations, many more eloquent than my own.
But my mind goes here: That Mercury’s transits across the Sun occur only in November and May, and are more common in November, Scorpio’s season. We spend our days consumed by the light, by the rhythm of day and night, ruled by our Solar, ego-and-earth bound selves. That’s as it should be; it’s what it means to live. But now and again, when Mercury the trickster asserts himself so boldly – standing tiny and dark against a brilliant and colossal star – he reveals both the psychopomp who carries us to the other side, and also the magician, the trickster, and a reminder that death is an illusion, a magic trick.
Spirit changes form all the time, but it stubbornly refuses to die. The spirits we love and lose are traveling with Mercury; and eventually, they’ll emerge somewhere else, as sure as a rabbit pops out of a magician’s hat.
Wind clouds and haste
E ach year, the Full Moon in Taurus (Nov. 12, 5:34 am) offers an emphatic, unequivocal, life-affirming response to the season of death. But Venus, the ruler of Taurus, approaches a square to Neptune, the god of illusion (exact on Nov. 14, 9:06 am) in this Full Moon chart; and the Sun stands at the Sabian Symbol, A woman drawing two dark curtains aside. The Taurus Full Moon affirms the power of life over death, but might also bring the sudden revelation that someone we relied on as a stable and reliable fact of our lives is, in fact, a total stranger.
Again, it’s a week of transition, and spirit is in the process of assuming other forms. When we lose something we love, people in our lives get a chance to show us the truth of who they are and what we mean to them. The ones who show up for you, and the ones who don’t, don’t always line up the way you expect them to.
The Sabian Symbol for the Full Moon degree is Wind clouds and haste. Blain Bovee likens this degree to the effect of time lapse photography, when slow motion images are speeded up to reveal movement over time. Life does seem to be moving fast, but in reality there are the same number of minutes on the clock. It’s just that we spend less time with the small, static moments; they fly past us like social media posts.
We do know on some level that from one day to the next, one hour to the next, we have no reasonable expectation that our lives will look as they do right now. Most of the time, we can afford to ignore that fact. But this week, the curtains have been pulled aside – and behind them is a different world.
© 2019 by April Elliott Kent
Featured in my online shop…