Ode to Some Eaus by Opus Oils, with special attention to their recent collaboration with Skye Botanicals, Strawberry Passion!

Tiger Powers posing in the Jitterbug Perfume Parlor.​

Writing about perfume is an art in itself, and I am a complete novice in this growing trend in the blogosphere.  But I’ve long wanted to devote a post to one of my favorite perfumers, Kedra Hart of Opus Oils in Hollywood, CA.  It certainly helped that Opus Oils opened their “Jitterbug Perfume Parlor” a few scant blocks from my Los Feliz apartment when I was living in Los Angeles.  I had the leisure to just drop in any old time and party with Kedra and international superstar, Tiger Powers, in their lovely salon decked out like a New Orleans bordello. 

My first Opus Oils love was Absinthia, an enchanting ode to the green fairy in a bottle, making prominent use of bitter Wormwood.  Absinthia’s feminine, ethereal bouquet sets off the astringency of herbal Wormwood, and the version I bought for my husband, Absinthio, is just as packed with Artemisia absinthium but it’s strong enough for a man – literally.  There’s something more of woods and smoke in the His version, while the light and powdery Hers version whisks you away with whispering Wisteria.

I also have to heap praise on lovely Isis, a fragrance in Kedra’s “Divine Collection” at Opus Oils, which I think any Egyptian priestess would do well to discover.  With notes like Frankincense, Myrrh, Blue Lotus, White Water Lily, and Jasmine, Isis transports you straight to the Nile.  Its aquatic florals give off a lacustrine luminescence that is softly supported by base notes of ancient resins.  Kedra gave me the opportunity to smell some of her Lotus and Water Lily absolutes at the salon, which have a wonderfully fluvial-alluvial pungency that is lacking in synthetic lotus notes.  Blue Lotus – according to elusive perfume writer, John Steele – is also a mild narcotic and may have been used to induce mind-altering states in ancient Egyptian rites.

I’m realizing that I could single out a number of Opus Oils fragrances that I’ve loved over the years, and that this would lead me away from my main point – my belated review of their 2012 release, Strawberry Passion, put out by Monica Miller of Perfume Pharmer and Skye Botanicals.  But I just have to discourse a bit on Vampyre of the collection, “Are you afraid of the dark?”  Vampyre is a very special scent; according to Kedra, it has over a hundred different ingredients, not all of which are going to appear in the product’s official description, naturally.  Though I consider myself a “white light” or positive polarity magician, I was immediately drawn to Vampyre as a ritual oil.  For me, the heady combination of Saffron (which I’ve described as a solar oil in a previous post) and Honey evoke both the ancient world and the power of the Sun – Kedra’s cheeky inclusion of the Vampyre’s poison in his namesake formula!  Classic Rose rounds out this blend, giving it a heart feel (again – note Kedra’s perfumed puns), while Cedarwood and Black Agar suggest ancient woods, i.e., the Vampyre’s coffin.  Agar, also known as Aloeswood and Oud, is a particularly interesting note, as it gives off the odor of great age and decay.  But there’s far more than kitsch at work in Vampyre – it’s a sophisticated, complex oil unlike anything I’ve ever smelled before, and I find it to be especially appropriate for drawing the ancient gods.

And now for something completely different: the sinfully scintillating Strawberry Passion!  This collaboration between Kedra of Opus Oils and Monica of Skye Botanicals originated with Monica’s desire to incorporate the essence of strawberry into a bespoke perfume.  Monica created a flower essence (click here for more info) out of the strawberry flowers growing on her property.  Flower essences have no scent of their own, but are imbued with the life energy and thus the healing properties of the flower they are taken from.  Getting a perfume to actually smell like a strawberry is a bit trickier.  Have you ever smelled a strawberry?  More likely you remember the taste of an organic strawberry, and the Platonic ideal of strawberry in your head conjures up the long, hot, languorous days of summer and the tang of a fruit that is both tart and sweet.  Most of us have also consumed strawberries with sugar: perhaps with cream, perhaps as a jam, perhaps as a sweet sauce for our waffles or pancakes.

If you’re a woman who’s come of age in Western culture, you already have firsthand experience of things that are supposed to smell like strawberry, not smelling like strawberry.  You bought that hot pink plastic tube of chapstick with a glittery strawberry on it when you were ten, and came away from that purchase a little disappointed.  Your first boyfriend gifted you with a tub of strawberry bubble bath, and the synthetic harshness of the fragrance made you a little sick.  If you happen to find a candy that actually does a good imitation of a strawberry, you might enjoy consuming it, but I bet you also have the intuitive knowledge that “this flavor can’t be natural.”  And you’d be right. 

What makes Strawberry Passion Perfume so unusual is that it is natural – at least the Green version.  The scent is available as both the more outdoorsy Green (think of gorging yourself on fresh strawberries on a summer afternoon), and the more cost-effective Cream, which includes some synthetic notes (strawberry married to its good friends, cream and sugar).  Both are exquisite, and I admire both versions for different reasons.  There are benefits to natural ingredients and benefits to synthetic ingredients, and the true perfumista is more concerned with the overall bouquet than with the source of all the notes.  A basic rule of thumb is that an entirely synthetic composition tends to smell harsh, unrelenting, and flat, in that its notes are less likely to adapt to your personal body chemistry.  Completely natural fragrances are more alive in their reaction to your individual body chemistry, but they also tend to be very dear price-wise, short-lived both in the bottle and on the skin, and they don’t often smell like what we typically think of as “perfume.”  We’ve all been so influenced by the introduction of synthetic notes into perfume, beginning in the late nineteenth century, that we’ve lost many of the nuances of the ancient art of perfumery in pursuit of scents that are bigger, stronger, and longer-lasting. 

Wave of the future?  Logo for the Natural Perfumers Guild, established in 2006.​

I’m pleased to say that the natural perfumery movement, which has come into prominence in the last decade, has made great strides in improving both the quality and availability of natural perfumes.  I also really want to honor both Kedra and Monica for their integrity, and willingness to state when a perfume is all natural and when it contains a synthetic ingredient.  Perfume, unfortunately, is an industry which is rife with spin and flim-flam, and it takes courage and moral conviction to pull the curtain up on a very secretive profession.  The fact remains that most of us – and that includes the world’s best noses – are going to favor perfumes which are a mix of both natural and synthetic ingredients.  You can’t beat natural resins for base notes and true florals for mids, but a perfume with some synthetic additives has gone to finishing school.  She tweaks your nose delicately with her top notes, and then flows gracefully into Acts II & III, never hitting a sour note in her performance and maintaining a tight control of her evanescence right on through the drydown.

Which is a long way of saying that I think most people would probably prefer the Cream version of Strawberry Passion!  I won’t try and compete with all the stellar reviews that already exist, which are conveniently listed for you at the Skye Botanicals Etsy store.  A lot of reviewers have compared this scent to a rich dessert or strawberries soaked in cream, but I don’t get that at all.  It’s true that nummy Vanilla is filling out the base, but this perfume has all the freshness and warmth of berries without the tang, and none of the sour pungency of a real milk note.  My husband said it made me smell like a slutty yet still high-class piece of candy, and that’s what we’re all going for, right ladies?  Sultry Amber and soothing woods support this fragrance, and I think this cheesecake image which I nabbed from Skye Botanicals says it all.  Imagine a woman with pale creamy skin flushed pink with passion, and you have the feeling-tone of this perfume.  Strawberry Passion Cream is that rarest of things: a real sexy perfume that isn’t relying on raunchy animalics or masculine notes to send the message.  Rather, this creamy girl is coquetting you with her not-quite-innocent kisses, showing the fruit of her ripe youth but leaving the glittery strawberry chapstick and bubble bath at home. 

​Kedra Hart contemplating an image in the Jitterbug Perfume Parlor.

Now for the bad news.  I don’t think Strawberry Passion smells like a strawberry, although it perfectly evokes what it is to consume and enjoy a strawberry.  I’m sure the energetic pull of the Strawberry Flower Essence has a lot to do with the mood of the perfume, but to my mind, so does the subtle beauty of Boronia.  As you’ve probably guessed by now if you didn’t know already, there’s no way to extract a natural strawberry scent directly from the fruit itself, and so natural perfumers must construct accords to mimic these elusive fruit notes.  An accord is a blend of many notes so fashioned to smell like one note, as in an accord of apple or pear.  Kedra’s berry accord is just gorgeous, but if you’re familiar with the effusive power of Boronia, you’ll notice that it’s pretty high in the mix.  There’s just no mistaking that delicate, uplifting, (and painfully expensive) lemony-raspberry floral. 

Now my husband’s choice was very clearly for the Cream, but if I was buying for myself I’d choose Green.  I think this is really as good as natural perfumery gets, in that this blend smells like perfume, and a very memorable and complex one at that.  Green carries all the sharp, citrusy bite that Cream lacks, but the heavy floral mix of Tuberose, Boronia, Rose, and White Water Lilly, embedded in a woodsy-earthy base, provides a piquant counter-balance to the riot of fruity top notes.  And once again, the Boronia sings out clear as a bell, a plus for me because I think this natural absolute has potent aromatherapeutic qualities.  To sum up then, Strawberry Passion Green gives Jo Malone a run for her money, and I recommend it as spring and summer wear for the daytime sophisticate.  Cream is for pretending that you’re on your first sleepover date.  Compare the notes of both “au naturel” GREEN and “mixed media” CREAM and choose for yourself! 

You're probably wondering if this post has anything to do with astrology.  Why yes, as a matter of fact, but I’m going to do the smart thing and put most of my astrology-aromatherapy exploration into a Part II.  Strawberry Passion – both versions – put me into such a lovely state of mind that I gathered a whole new post’s worth of material on its singing heart note, Boronia.  Boronia is new enough to perfumery that we know very little of its origins, lore, and ancient uses, and so I took a left turn away from Strawberry Passion in my research, into another world of Dreaming and aboriginal plants which is best saved for a subsequent post.  But I’m placing Boronia under the rulership of the Queen of Heaven, Venus, because this fragrance is so uplifting for the mood and so desirable to lovers.  The glyph for Venus, remember, resembles a hand-mirror, and Boronia inspires a self-love and contentment which is absolutely delicious.  Look out for more on Boronia’s aromatherapeutic properties in an upcoming blog!

Be sure to pay a visit to kool kats Tiger and Kedra in their Hollywood salon, but if you’re looking for Strawberry Passion, go through Perfume Pharmer.

Earth and the Artist: Len Del Rio's Psychetronic Trip

A few weeks ago I wrote an article on electronic music and the conjunction of Pluto and Uranus in Virgo in the 1960s.  I wound up writing so much on that topic that I never got around to profiling a musician friend of mine, Len Del Rio.  Len’s birthday is in a few days, so this is a timely post.  Len is an electronic musician, but many of his professional highs have been in another genre altogether: prog rock.  Len has had the honor to join the bands of Nik Turner (of Hawkwind fame) and Damo Suzuki, of the legendary prog rock band, Can.  He’s played on stage with Genesis P-Orridge, remixed songs for Gary Numan, paid musical homage to Bruce Haack and Jean-Jaques Perry, and participated in festivals hosted by Moebius and Rodelius of Cluster.  Most recently, he toured with the iconic prog rock band, Brainticket, in support of another 1970’s prog sensation, Nektar.  

Electronic musician Len Del Rio (far right) on tour with Brainticket in 2011.  Also pictured: singer Abby Travis and guitarist Andrew Scott.​

For some of you, I’ve been speaking Greek for the past few sentences.  Others of you will recognize a lineage of kraut rock, space rock, and electronic music royalty in the names I’ve listed above.  Electronica and the umbrella genre, prog rock, were closely allied in the 1970s as electronic music was finding its feet; now they seem rather far apart.  Electronic music on the whole has gotten pretty clipped, mechanical, and spare, while prog rock, with its rich and full sonic landscapes and improvisational ethic, no longer draws the fans it used to.  But once upon a time, new-fangled electronic sounds and a progressive musical ethos met in a land called Psychedelia.

"The Psychedelic Sounds of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators," released in 1966.​

Now what the heck does a guy born in 1966 have to do with psychedelia?  That’s the question I’m here to answer for you today.  Carl Jung once said that the moment of birth is the most synchronistic in a man’s life, and 1966 was the first year rock bands started using the word “psychedelic” in their album releases. 

Let’s take a quick glance at Len’s chart.  Right away we notice that he is a ninth house Aries Sun conjunct Mars, with Leo rising.  Ninth house placements can show a person who travels or tours professionally, fiery Aries likes to express himself creatively, and Leo is a natural performer.  Not everyone with such fire-heavy placements will become a touring musician, but here we have the bare bones of the artist archetype.  I firmly believe that all of us have an artist inside somewhere, but the difference with the fire signs is that the artist is just chomping at the bit to come out!  Earth signs worry a lot about being artistic versus being “practical,” air signs can dither over the long-term implications and significance of what they create, and water signs struggle with externalizing their private inner worlds.  But creativity is the life-blood of the fire signs – if they don’t express themselves, they burn up inside.  

1966 Aries baby, Len Del Rio!

Having said all that though, you might remember that the title of this post is “Earth and the Artist,” and see that Len has something of a dramatic earthy trine.  A tight conjunction of Uranus and Pluto, mere minutes apart, trines a Capricorn Moon, followed by another trine to the Taurus Midheaven.  Here’s how we get more nuances in the natal chart.  Isolating Len’s fiery placements can show the touring musician, but they could also describe the salesman who is constantly on the road for business.  Ninth house is the professional traveler, remember, Sun conjunct Mars shows an especially aggressive personality, and Leo has the gift of gab and charm.  This chart might also describe a community college professor who is a gifted raconteur, an interpretation which emphasizes the ninth house association with higher education and Leo’s theatrical gifts.   

Len Del Rio on tour in 1997.​

Len’s earthy trine helps mitigate some of that locomotive fiery force; his earth planets also ground the creative fire and put it into physical form.  The Midheaven reveals how we are known to society at large, and Len has Taurus, archetype of the musician, at this point.  The reasons why Taurus signifies the musician are complex, but part of the symbolism stems from the fact that Taurus prefers music (or silence) to words.  Taurus understands how a song – say, the national anthem – can unite the most opposed forces in the country, tugging at the heartstrings of both cynical liberals and jingoistic reactionaries.  Len’s comfort with non-verbal (i.e., musical) modes of expression is reinforced by the eighth house conjunction of Saturn and Mercury in Pisces. 

In my “Tech Geek” article, I talked about how the sixties conjunction of Uranus and Pluto corresponded to the new technology of electronic music, and how this same conjunction a few centuries before gave rise to the modern piano.  Fittingly, Len is a keyboardist, and he’s made a name for himself as an analog synth player, the signature instrument of the electronic musician.  Len’s technical proficiency (Virgo) with new technology (Uranus) has allowed him to be part of the sweeping cultural transformation (Pluto) that we call the electronic age.  The placement of these two planets in his second house of values and resources shows that these gifts provide him with income (resources), and also that he values independence (Uranus) and radical authenticity (Pluto) more than cash.  In other words, here we have the profile of someone who might choose to lead the hard life of the touring musician, one in which it’s pretty difficult to gather moss, for the privilege of “making the scene” (Uranus) with shadowy artistic material (Pluto).  

Well let’s face it, not everyone born in the sixties has become an electronic keyboard player.  But you can bet that there were more electronic keyboard players born in the 1960s than ever before, for fairly obvious reasons.  Sometimes the most important innovations in any society are not visible until a hundred years later, when they’re rendered more obvious by the 20/20 vision of retrospection.  So the wider contributions of this generation, now in their forties and fifties, might only be recognized after their deaths.  But some trends make an impression right away – in my previous article about this conjunction, I made a glancing reference to punk rock.  The performers who first broke this genre to the public were born before the Uranus-Pluto conjunction (exact in 1965-1966), but the kids who heard the message and kept it alive were from this sixties generation. 

Len has a strong, emotional identification with punk rock which he developed while in high school.  Shortly after graduation, he moved to London, then a haven for the punk scene, where he got a job on swingin’ Carnaby Street and landed a role as an extra in the Alex Cox film, Sid and Nancy, dedicated to the rise and fall of Sex Pistol, Sid Vicious.  Something of the punk ethos survived into Len’s mature career as a musician; you’d have to have the soul of a punk to put out a few albums with outspoken icon Lydia Lunch, as Len did in the 2000s with long-time musical partner, Tommy Grenas.  

At this point I’d like to introduce another chart as a point of comparison; Len will absolutely hate this comparison, but it serves a purpose.  The musician usually given credit for breaking “industrial” music to the public is Trent Reznor, the force behind the popular band, Nine Inch Nails.  The purists among my friends will squawk at this, and put the origins of industrial music in the 1970s with Throbbing Gristle.  They might be technically correct, but Nine Inch Nails has become a household name and Throbbing Gristle has not.  There are the avant-garde pioneers, and then there are the mediators who translate this edgy material to the mainstream, and Trent’s music is definitely in the latter category.  Mundane astrology also has to pay attention to album sales and public penetration since it is concerned with large, cultural trends.

Trent Reznor, born May 17, 1965, at 11:53 PM in Newcastle Junction, PA.​

You’ll notice that Trent also has a fairly earthy chart.  He’s a Taurus with Capricorn rising, and the most salient feature of his chart for my purposes is that Uranus-Pluto conjunction in the eighth house.  The relevant point here is that the guy who transported industrial music out of the avant-garde and into the mainstream is of this Pluto and Uranus in Virgo generation, in which the programmer has transmogrified into the performing musician.  Nineties rave and DJ culture also contributed to this epic transformation of what the public was willing to call “music,” but Nine Inch Nails has become symbolic of a certain kind of electronic music with a dark edge – your grandpa stands a chance of knowing who Trent Reznor is, in other words, while gramps might draw a blank on naming another industrial artist.  Note that Trent has the Uranus-Pluto conjunction in the taboo-busting eighth house, conjunct restless Mars: a fine combo for bringing shadow elements to the surface with the driving (Mars) power (Pluto) of electronic technology (Uranus).

Well let’s jump back to Len’s chart, and please note that, though Trent was born only a year before Len, no one could accuse him of having anything to do with psychedelia.  More on that later.  Part of my inspiration in analyzing Len’s chart was to recuperate his Capricorn Moon, for all of us out there who have one and feel a little grumpy about it.  The existing astrological literature on the Capricorn Moon is pretty grim – dreamy, warm-fuzzy Luna is not herself in this sign of business and professional decorum.  She’s in detriment in Capricorn, sign of the stern father, and some books will tell you that you’ll never feel loved or nurtured enough with this placement.  One of my first astrology teachers glanced at my chart and said archly, “Capricorn Moon; the Prostitute.”  That’s what happens when loving Luna meets Capricorn’s keen eye for strategy and playing every angle: “Love for sale …”

Thankfully, I didn’t take her advice, if that’s what it was.  I’ve learned to love my Capricorn Moon, and to appreciate all the gifts it’s given me.  Len Del Rio pulls off this lunar placement better than almost any Cap-Moon I’ve ever met.  One thing I tell my Cap-Moon clients is that, “Your soul is nurtured by work.”  Once people get beyond how funny-sounding this concept is, they see that it’s true.  Capricorn Moon and her close cousin Virgo Moon feel nurtured by laboring busily at a project.  Instead of curling up with a bowl of ice cream and watching sentimental movies, like a Cancer Moon might do, Capricorn Moon battles the blues by channeling energy into a Great Work.  Remember that Capricorn is ruled by the taskmaster Saturn, and in Saturn’s domain we must labor diligently at a big project: Saturn prefers the novel to the magazine article, the finished album to just “jamming on the weekend with the guys.”  The high number of albums that Len has either played on or recorded (available to view at discogs) gives you some sense of how adept this Moon placement is at nurturing projects; Capricorn Moon has a catalog of impressive work, in comparison to the “one-hit wonder” of the dabbler. 

A sample of Del Rio's releases ...

Moon, the Great Mother, gives birth and tends to her young.  Len even has the Moon in the abundant fifth house, the house that can tell us about a client’s children.  But Len’s children in this lifetime have not been physical extensions of his being; Len has given birth to artistic progeny instead.  As far as “earth and the artist” goes, Len’s Capricorn Moon is what has allowed him to sublimate his fiery vision into consistent artistic production.  Many artists experience highs and lows and go through periods of creative drought, but Len’s earth trine draws him continually back to the mill stone to grind away at his musical craft.  I know few people who work as hard as Len, though he does so in arenas we consider “fun” (stamp of the fun-loving fifth house).  Ever since I’ve known him, he’s held down a full-time job, and then come home to give another forty hours to his craft on nights and weekends.

Len labors not for the expectation of financial reward or recognition (though we all welcome these things when they come), but for the good of his Soul.  How many talented artists and musicians do you know who struggle with actually picking up a guitar every day, or who are turned off their art by one bad review?  Diligent, determined Capricorn is not swayed by public opinion and holds fast to his integrity, working for work’s sake instead of for the brass ring.  At this point I should also point out Capricorn’s solitary nature; Capricorn’s tendency to single-mindedly pursue a goal in spite of suffering and opposition is one reason why this sign and the Moon are not always well-suited.  Capricorn Moons often need reminding that they have a lunar nature, one that needs hugs and encouragement from those notorious “time-stealers,” friends and lovers.

Anais Nin poses with her life's work of journals.​

I think my favorite example of how a Capricorn Moon can ground the turbulent artist is Anais Nin.  If you’ve read her famous diaries, you know that Anais Nin’s life was characterized by a tumult of conflicting desires and illicit erotic adventures.  She championed her boundary-crossing intrigues and mystical sensibility as the flower of her Pisces Sun, but guess who was crafting those grand, fantastic passions into readable art?  Nin’s Capricorn Moon in the third house began keeping a journal at age eleven, and she diligently maintained this practice until her death in her seventies.  Lacking that Capricorn workhorse in the third house of writing, Nin might have died a particularly storied adventuress, but otherwise unremarkable; instead she left behind the magnum opus of an intimate view into a woman’s psyche over the whole of her life. 

Len on stage (in background) with Nik Turner and Helios Creed.​

But what about Len’s psychedelic roots?  Len played with the prog-inspired industrial band Pressurehed in the 1990s, which led to members of that band backing up the prog giant Nik Turner on tour.  Len and Tommy Grenas released some albums with Nik as Nik Turner’s Space Ritual, whose primary thematic substance was the Egyptian Book of the Dead.  Notice how this material differs from the angst and fantasies of vengeance one might meet on a Nine Inch Nails album, for example.  I can’t help but fixate on the word “ritual” in their ensemble name, because that is what those shows felt like to attend.  Nik dressed up as a silver-suited space-man, while psychedelic images bathed the audience in a shifting array of colors, and haunting space-age melodies streamed from Len’s synths.  When Len and Tommy split off to form their own electronic duo, Anubian Lights, their shows maintained this same trancey feel and Egyptian mystique, using samples of Middle Eastern music and rhythms borrowed from exotica records.  A belly-dancer completed the ritual feel of these gigs, during which the audience would often bond together as one swaying, spellbound body. 

The Anubian Lights (Len Del Rio and Tommy Grenas) in Berlin, 2001, with dancer Spencer.​

Music and trance are close bedfellows; the instant bonding and altered states that happen at rock shows are not rare, and there’s a reason why today’s pop stars inspire Maenad-like devotion in their fans.  As this whisper of the Dionysian should make you aware, musical abandon falls under the domain of the intoxication-loving god, Neptune.  I’ll note that Trent Reznor has Neptune in the uber-public tenth house of “how people are going to remember us after we die.”  Len Del Rio has his in the opposite placement, the hyper-private fourth house, though close enough to the vertical axis of the MC to make a dent.  If both musicians have Neptune in Scorpio, why are trance music and psychedelia so much more prominent in Len’s music than in Nine Inch Nails?

In the type of astrology I practice, I’ve learned to pay a lot of importance to the South node, that cup-looking glyph in Len's fourth house next to Neptune’s trident.  For all intents and purposes, Len came into the world with a “dream state in his mainframe,” to paraphrase an Anubian Lights song.  Len will tell you that he’s not spiritual or into any New Age gobbledygook, which is not uncommon for a self-willed Aries, but he does have an enormous receptivity to music and a natural ability at programming trance rhythms.  When clients tell me they don’t relate to the mystical end of nebulous Neptune, I switch my channel to art and music, which are other ways of accessing the Neptunian need for healing, redemption, and escape.  The South node shows where we have built up a talent, a groove, and also a limitation in our series of incarnations.

Len’s South node and Neptune in Scorpio show me that he has spent lifetimes cultivating transformative trance states (Neptune in Scorpio).  The clannish nature of the fourth house tells me that he may have been part of a spiritual collective that practiced trance, like a Sufi monastery.  In fact I can think of no more appropriate metaphor than the whirling dervish to describe the longing for transcendence (Neptune) expressed through ecstatic trance (Scorpio) within a cloistered religious tribe (4th house), which Len’s South node suggests.  The limitation indicated by this incarnational groove is one in which the individuality of the Soul is sacrificed to the collective – not a lot of “soloists” in the Sufi monastery, in other words, but a uniform means of expression through which the personal identity must be abandoned.  

Mevlevi dervishes, 1887

Len Del Rio live at Spaceland, 2001

Len’s task in this lifetime is to move away from his South node and embrace his Taurus North node, the archetype of the hands-on artist or musician in the public tenth house.  While he’s already come out as a public figure via all his touring and album releases, a lot of the shyness and deference of the private fourth house still clings to him, even overpowering the brightness of his Aries Sun.  So I’m embarrassing him a bit today for his Soul growth – stand up and be recognized, Len!  Happy birthday! 

Please check out the Anubian Lights music page, and Len's youtube channel for more of his psychetronic sounds!​

Welcoming the Spring with a Puritan Poetess

I’m posting a day late this week, on a Monday, because I spent all of last week at a beautiful retreat center learning core shamanism.  Much of the emphasis of the workshop was on ancestors, and it gave me food for thought regarding my own family line. 

Moon-day certainly fits the mood of this post, in that the Moon is concerned with both the past in general, and with one’s tribal ancestry.  I’ve always been fascinated by early American history, and indeed, many of my ancestors touched down on this continent prior to the eighteenth century.  I probably have many more early American ancestors than the ones who appear in my family tree, because, frustratingly, very little has been recorded about the wives of my Scots-Irish stock who came to the New World in droves.  It seems like a convention of genealogy to trace the bloodline exclusively through paternity, and to treat the wives as mere conduits for the male seed.  But of course, we inherit just as much of our psychic and genetic material from Mom as we do from Dad. 

In the spirit of paying homage to our early American ancestors, I'd like to share with you a poem by Anne Bradstreet.  She's not my personal ancestor (that I know of), but I've always felt a writerly kinship with her.  Anne Bradstreet was born in England in 1612/13, and though modern biographers have assigned her a birthdate of March 20, 1612, I think this is either a mistake or an arbitrary attribution; church records of the period often revealed nothing more than the month, season, or year of a child’s birth.  Here is a screenshot from a great resource for astrologers, the online ancient ephemeris, Khaldea.  It gives us the flavor of the year Anne was born, which might be all we can reasonably expect to get without performing painstaking archival work.  Note the tight square between Uranus in Gemini and Neptune in Virgo, a generational aspect, with Saturn approaching to form a T-square in Pisces. 

Bradstreet was a popular Puritan poet.  A lot of people hate Puritans; having studied them for many years, it irks me to hear them dismissed so lightly.  Calvin’s theology might not have been tenable, but we too often focus on cartoonish stereotypes of the Puritans’ obsession with sin and their enduring work ethic, to the exclusion of their pioneering spirit and intense religious piety.  I like to think of Puritans as the punk-rockers of their day, and indeed, many of the first waves of Puritans who migrated to the New World were born under the bristly Uranus-Pluto conjunction in Aries in the 1590s.  The Puritans are more accurately described as Non-Conformists, in that they were unable to tolerate any traditional religious authority whatsoever.  In fact, it was the Puritans’ refusal to compromise their extreme principles which drove them out of England and into exile, and ultimately to the shores of the New World.  

We tend to forget that sweeping historical movements are made up of individuals, and that individuals often get caught up in forces beyond their control.  In other words, if your father was a Puritan, as Anne Bradstreet’s was, chances are pretty high that you’re going to be a Puritan too.  Anne Bradstreet arrived on the Arabella with Jonn Winthrop's fleet in 1630, accompanied by her father and husband, both of whom were destined to become governors of the newly-formed Massachusetts Bay Colony.  The Puritans didn’t put much stock in royalty, of course, but this status places Anne Bradstreet firmly in the ruling class of the young colony.

As Westerners, we carry a lot of shame about our colonizing ancestors and their cultural blindness, and there’s no denying that there’s a lot to be ashamed of there.  But we also suffer very much as a culture from denigrating – even hating – our ancestors unilaterally.  How can we heal our history if we can’t redeem our forebears somewhat, by honoring what was important to them and attempting to understand their worldview?

I chose this poem by Bradstreet not only because she is a woman, but also because she is the most relatable and accessible of the Puritan poets.  Michael Wigglesworth’s Day of Doom lives up to the worst Puritan stereotypes, and Edward Taylor’s odd “prepatory meditations” are utterly delightful, but mostly opaque to the casual reader.  Bradstreet’s poetry also appeals to me for another reason; like all good pagans, she was mildly obsessed with the number four, and saw evidence of the divine quaternity of air, fire, water, and earth everywhere.  Check out the title of her distinguished volume of poems, appearing circa 1650 (you might want to take a breath first):

The Tenth Muse, lately Sprung up in America, or Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning, Full of Delight, Wherein especially is Contained a Complete Discourse and Description of the Four Elements, Constitutions, Ages of Man, Seasons of the Year, together with an exact Epitome of the Four Monarchies, viz., The Assyrian, Persian, Grecian, Roman …

And that’s not even the complete title, I just capped it after she had exhausted the poetic possibilities of the quaternity, or, as Bradstreet calls it, the “quaternion.”  Now I have no doubt that Anne was a sincere Calvinist, but her poetry is a wonderful receptacle of pagan survivals in the culture that she would have been exposed to in her native England (Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic is a good resource for this).  As Bradstreet knows full well, the four elements form the basis of astrology and other much-maligned magical arts.  But even Calvin gave the OK to astrology, as long as it was being used for purposes of medicine and agriculture.  Predictions by astrology, however, were strictly verboten, as they infringed too much on God’s turf. 

Anne Bradstreet perhaps unwittingly defends the astrological worldview with lines like, "Each Season hath his fruit, so hath each clime: / Each man his own peculiar excellence, / But none in all that hath preeminence."  No one person gets to be every sign in the Zodiac, in other words, and “it takes all kinds.” 

I encourage you to read this poem, penned by a Puritan ancestor over three hundred years ago, as a view into someone who lived in close harmony with the land, and who payed deep attention to the Sun's passage across the ecliptic.  Here in Eugene, Oregon, I can viscerally relate to this poem in the slow thaw of the weather, and in all my bustling neighbors I see planting seeds and starts.  I know a lot more farmers than I ever did before, and their talk of husbandry gives me a felt sense of how we are connected through the generations.  The meter of this first of Bradstreet's seasonal poems, "Spring," is plain and simple, like Bradstreet herself, an unbroken march of heroic couplets.  But there's some gold in there, for those who will take the time to find it.

Spring, by Anne Bradstreet (1650)

Another four I’ve left yet to bring on,
Of four times four the last quaternion,
The Winter, Summer, Autumn and the Spring,
In season all these seasons I shall bring:
Sweet Spring like man in his minority,
At present claimed, and had priority.
With smiling face and garments somewhat green,
She trimmed her locks, which late had frosted been,
Nor hot nor cold she spake, but with a breath
Fit to revive the numbed earth from death.
Three months (quoth she) are ’lotted to my share
March, April, May of all the rest most fair.
Tenth of the first, Sol into Aries enters,
And bids defiance to all tedious winters,
Crosseth the Line, and equals night and day,
Still adds to th’ last till after pleasant May;
And now makes glad the darkened northern wights
Who for some months have seen but starry lights.
Now goes the plow-man to his merry toil,
He might unloose his winter locked soil:
The seedsman, too, doth lavish out his grain,
In hope the more he casts, the more to gain:
The gard’ner now superfluous branches lops,
And poles erects for his young clamb’ring hops;
Now digs, then sows his herbs, his flowers, and roots,
And carefully manures his trees of fruits.
The Pleiades their influence now give,
And all that seemed as dead afresh doth live.
The croaking frogs, whom nipping winter killed,
Like birds now chirp, and hop about the field,
The nightingale, the blackbird, and the thrush
Now tune their lays, on sprays of every bush.
The wanton frisking kid, and soft-fleeced lambs
Do jump and play before their feeding dams,
The tender tops of budding grass they crop,
They joy in what they have, but more in hope:
For though the frost hath lost his binding power,
Yet many a fleece of snow and stormy shower
Doth darken Sol's bright eye, makes us remember
The pinching north-west wind of cold December.
My second month is April, green and fair,
Of longer days and a more temperate air:
The Sun in Taurus keeps his residence,
And with his warmer beams glanceth from thence.
This is the month whose fruitful show’rs produces
All set and sown for all delights and uses:
The pear, the plum, and apple-tree now flourish;
The grass grows long the hungry beast to nourish.
The primrose pale and azure violet
Among the verdurous grass hath nature set,
That when the Sun on’s Love (the earth) doth shine
These might as lace set out her garment fine.
The fearful bird his little house now builds
In trees and walls, in cities, and in fields.
The outside strong, the inside warm and neat,
A natural artificer complete.
The clucking hen her chirping chickens leads,
With wings and beak defends them from the gledes.
My next and last is fruitful pleasant May,
Wherein the earth is clad in rich array,
The Sun now enters loving Gemini,
And heats us with the glances of his eye,
Our thicker raiment makes us lay aside
Lest by his fervor we be torrified.
All flowers the Sun now with his beams discloses,
Except the double pinks and matchless roses.
Now swarms the busy, witty, honey-bee,
Whose praise deserves a page from more than me.

The cleanly housewife's dairy's now in th' prime,

Her shelves and firkins filled for winter time.

The meads with cowslips, honeysuckles dight;

One hangs his head, the other stands upright;

But both rejoice at th' heavens' clear smiling face,

More at her showers, which water them a space.

For fruits my season yields the early cherry,

The hasty peas, and wholesome cool strawberry.

More solid fruits require a longer time;

Each Season hath his fruit, so hath each clime:

Each man his own peculiar excellence,

But none in all that hath preeminence.

Sweet fragrant Spring, with thy short pittance fly,

Let some describe thee better than can I.

Yet above all this privilege is thine,

The days still lengthen without least decline.

Astrological Advice from a 500-Year-Old Mage: Obtaining Life From the Heavens on the Vernal Equinox

German model of the Ptolemaic universe, circa 1599

I firmly believe that there are magical technologies out there in the world, and I also believe that we can access these technologies directly, without the use of books or other formal training.  This is something I tell clients a lot – astrology works whether you believe in it or not.  It’s a common experience for me to tell a client to, say, “take your energy out of your business and put it into your personal life,” only to have the client say, “Yeah, I’ve been thinking the same thing.”  The astral energies I see reflected in the chart are always working on you, and they’re indifferent to your belief in them.  An astrologer simply helps you clear away the social pressures and other personal pitfalls which distract you from your true purpose and desire. 

My yardstick for whether a magical technology has purchase in the real world is its spontaneous appearance to more than one person.  For example, if you think you see a ghost in an old house, you might not tell anyone.  But if your friend sees the ghost too, suddenly you have a lot more confidence in your own impression.  If a whole town sees a ghost at the same time and at the same place, the Pope might have to send out an investigative squadron to research signs of saintliness.  I’m being a little silly here, but you get the idea.  I think one of the reasons people read spiritual or religious literature is to create this experience – to find validation of what they already believe in the tomes of established spiritual authorities. 

Bust of Ficino by Andrea Ferrucci in the Cathedral of Florence

I have this experience a lot because I read a lot.  Six months ago I was reading Francis Yates’s Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, and I happened upon a passage that made my hair stand on end.  I made a mental note to read more Ficino.  A few months after that, I went digging in my book collection for a new read, and came upon Thomas Moore’s The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino.  Moore’s book is a practical distillation of Ficino’s third “Book of Life,” De Vita Coelitus Comparanda, translated as “On Obtaining Life From the Heavens.”

If you don’t know who Marsilio Ficino is, you should feel just a little bit embarrassed.  There would have been no Florentine and perhaps no general Renaissance without him; he translated Plato, the Neoplatonists, and the Corpus Hermeticum into Latin for the first time, and the recent development of the printing press meant that these texts enjoyed wide distribution on the Continent.  In addition to reviving ancient mystical ideas which had lain dormant for a thousand years, Ficino harmonized the wisdom of Plato and that of the mythical Hermes Trismegistus into a system which also included Christianity.  This syncretic merging of essentially occult ideas with Christian theology was both original and highly influential, and Ficino’s efforts toward universal harmony are what, in part, gave the Renaissance its humanist character. 

Portrait of Ficino (far left) in "Zaccaria in the Temple," by Domenico Ghirlandaio, circa 1490

In Cosmos and Psyche, Richard Tarnas notes astutely that Ficino wrote his eighteen-volume magnum opus, the Theologia Platonica (1482), under the rare conjunction of Uranus and Neptune in 1478-1479, occurring on average only once every 170 years.  As controversial as Ficino’s syncretic system was, he did not come under church scrutiny until 1489, the year Saturn caught up to the separating conjunction of Uranus and Neptune in the sky.  The cause?  In the 1480s, Ficino wrote sympathetically of natural magic and astrology in his Three Books on Life, and that was just too pagan for Pope “Innocent” VIII to overlook.  The same pope, incidentally, authorized the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum, a treatise on the identification and prosecution of witches productive of grave consequences for women in the succeeding centuries.  The appearance of this ominous book within arc of the Uranus-Neptune conjunction (1486) shows the darker potential of the astrological event, less “cosmic harmony” and more “mass scape-goating.”

It saddens me to say that no English translation of Three Books On Life was available until the nineteen-eighties, a full five hundred years after the original was published.  Nor is this surprising; I’ve come to expect that the more esoteric leanings of great thinkers are suppressed or ignored to perpetuate the myth of the secular progression of history, philosophy, and science.  Isaac Newton’s alchemy certainly comes to mind.  

Images of the sky goddess Nut in the Temple of Dendera

By now you’re probably wondering what my point is.  Essentially, it is this: one of the most talented philosophers and theologians who ever lived was also an astrologer, and he wrote a beautiful book about how to live in harmony with the planets.  Ficino’s De Vita was a determining force in the magic of Agrippa and Paracelsus, according to modern-day scholars; his astrological philosophy is also as close to mine as any thinker I’ve come across.  Thomas Moore in his aforementioned book on Ficino does a great job explaining that Ficino was the first psychologist, in that all of his health remedies emphasize care of the psyche, or Soul.  De Vita is full of fanciful remedies – Ficino frequently advises consuming grains of gold to attract the energy of the Sun, and instructs you in making “pills” filled with wine, crushed lapis lazuli, and fragrant basalms for planetary ailments.  You may not be able to implement any of these charming (and expensive!) remedies for yourself, but the very idea of absorbing the essence of what is most soulful in life – fine wine, precious metals and stones, and heavenly perfumes – makes a profound statement about his system.  Ficino believed in surrounding oneself with beauty, because beautiful things have Soul. 

Artist's rendition of the famous zodiac at Dendera

I think the other aspect of Ficino’s system which so attracts me is his cosmic consciousness, his belief that the world is alive and that we draw to ourselves the energies we need through sympathetic magic.  To argue that his philosophy partakes of Hermeticism and Neoplatonism will not mean a lot to most people, so I’ll simply say that he followed the doctrine of “As above, so below.”  He engaged the celestial bodies as archetypal energies, an overarching cosmic harmony which we can emulate by cultivating Soul in our lives, and by increasing our resonance with certain planetary forces.

Here is a selection from On Obtaining Life from the Heavens, in which Ficino explains how to create a “figure of the world” on the Spring Equinox to increase harmony in your life.  I rather unwittingly put a lot of these elements into my own Equinox ceremony a few years ago, which I’ll elaborate on after the quote:

Marsilio Ficino, De Vita Coelitus Comparanda

Chapter XIX: How to Construct a Figure of the Universe

The adherent of these things, if he can do it, should sculpt an archetypal form of the whole world, if he pleases, in bronze; he should imprint this subsequently at the right time in a thin gilded plate of silver.  But when exactly should he imprint it?  When the Sun has reached the first minute of Aries.  For astrologers customarily tell the fortune of the world – at least, what is going to happen in that year – from this moment, since it is the return of its birthday.  He should therefore imprint this figure of the whole world on the very birthday of the world …

Page from an annotated copy of Marsilio Ficino’s De vita libri tres, 1496

But he should be careful not to sculpt or imprint a figure on the Sabbath, the day of Saturn [Saturday] … For by so much as the Sun is accomodated to generation, Saturn is not suited to it … The adherent of these things likewise should first sculpt his world not in the day or hour of Saturn, but rather in the day or hour of the Sun …

But they would like him to insert not only lines but colors into the work.  There are, indeed, three colors of the world, at once universal and peculiar: green, gold, and sapphire blue, dedicated to the three heavenly Graces.  Green is the color of Venus and also of the Moon … Nobody questions but that gold is the color of the Sun, and besides not alien to Jupiter and Venus.  Finally, sapphire-blue we especially dedicate to Jupiter, to whom also the sapphire itself is said to be consecrated.  For this reason too, on account of its Jovial power, the lapis lazuli, richly endowed with this color, possesses according to doctors the prerogative of curing black bile, which comes from Saturn.  Lapis lazuli comes into being along with gold and is decorated with golden marks; thus it is the companion of gold as Jupiter is of the Sun … They therefore judge it useful to look at these particular colors above all, in order to capture the gifts of the celestial graces and, in the model of the world which you are making, to insert the blue color of the world in the spheres. 

They think it worthwhile to add to the spheres, for a true imitation of the heavens, golden stars, and to clothe Vesta herself or Ceres, that is, the earth, with a green garment.  The adherent of those things should either carry about with him a model of this kind or should place it opposite him and gaze at it … Nor should one simply look at it but reflect upon it in the mind.  In like manner, in the very depth of his house, he should construct a chamber, vaulted and marked with these features and colors, and he should spend most of his waking hours there and also sleep.  And when he has emerged from his house, he will note with so much attention the spectacle of individual things as the figure of the universe and its colors …

Because the heavens are most exactly tempered and possess in themselves the most absolute life, it can be conjectured that insofar as other things approximate that temperance and life, so far they will be endowed with a more excellent degree of life.            

3.20.2011; photo by Fritz

I was married on the Vernal Equinox in 2011, when the “Sun reached the first minute of Aries.”  The astrologer Demetra George was one of the wedding guests, and noted this as the precise minute we said our “I dos.”  It was a Sunday, which irked some of our out-of-town guests, but we kept coming back to this potent energy of the “world’s birthday” for our electional.  (An electional is a chart chosen for a momentous occasion, and selected for its auspicious astrological configurations).  It’s not a perfect chart by any stretch, but no electional is – you just have to choose your priorities.  Dour Saturn was exalted in Libra, sign of partnerships, in 2011, and electing the Moon's conjunction with Saturn was a statement of intentionality about the seriousness (Saturn) of our emotional bond (Moon).

But it wasn’t simply Ficino’s singling out of Sun-day and the Vernal Equinox as a fitting moment to reimagine the world which struck me as so uncanny.  It was the colors of Venus, Moon, and Jupiter to be put into prominent display in this “figure of the world” that gave me chills when I read the above passage, years after my wedding ceremony.  I’ll never forget telling the urban shaman who officiated for us that I had settled on green and gold as my main ceremony colors; he informed me with some dismay that those were also the colors of the local university’s football team.  Yet I would not be deterred, even when the florist dismissed the table cloths at the reception site as “golf green.”  I made the unconventional choice to wear a green dress with a gold veil, in unconscious homage to Venus and the Sun.  When I got to the phrase “green garment” in the passage above, I really felt like I must have been channeling Ficinian ideas in all the quixotic detail that went into the ceremony.  Noble Jupiter’s sapphire blues even appeared in the peacock feathers we used for the bouquets, buttoniers, and table displays. 

3.20.2011; photo by Fritz

We got married in a historic octagonal barn with a soaring ceiling, our “vaulted sky” as it were.  I think the reason this passage from De Vita affected me so much was because we really covered that moment in space and time with our own unique energetic embrace, creating a three-dimensional, mobile model of beauty and harmony that I will remember forever.  “Three Graces” read from Normandi Ellis’s beautiful rendition of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Awakening Osiris, while Normandi herself happened to be in Egypt on the Equinox, and so sang out a marriage blessing for us on March 20 in the King’s Chamber at Giza.   

3.20.2011; photo by Fritz

What exactly does Ficino’s “figure of the world” look like?  Is it a painting or a piece of jewelry, or a room decorated to resemble the cosmos?  Is it a three-dimensional globe, or a two-dimensional image of the Ptolemaic universe?  I’ve offered some suggestions in the images I’ve attached, but I encourage you to interpret his words for yourself, and to create something with the materials you have at hand.  What’s your image of a harmonious, living world?  Even if you only construct this figure of beauty and harmony in your own mind, be sure and celebrate the first day of Spring with the consciousness that you have the power to draw the Soul of Heaven down to the Body of the World.   

Orrery constructed by David Rittenhouse, now housed in the library at U-Penn.​

Ptolemaic model of the universe by Bartolomeu Velho, 1568

The Uranus-Pluto Conjunction in Virgo, the Tech Geek, and the Rise of Electronic Music

​This week I’ve set myself the challenging task of illustrating the astrology of electronic music.  I’ve sat in a lot of astrology classes and have been pained by generalizations about the music of "my generation" based on album sales and top forty hits.  One of the favorite narratives astrologers like to tell about popular music is the rise of punk rock in the late seventies.  All those kids born during the dramatic conjunction of Pluto and Uranus in the 1960s grew up to invent punk rock, a genre characterized by its use of taboo lyrics and iconography (Pluto), and its rebellion (Uranus) against both musicianship and commercialism.  Here was a scene which embodied the liberating force of Uranus and the more nihilistic end of Pluto.  Armchair pundits will tell you that punk rock had a social conscience, but that seems to me to be a later development – the people who were vibrating to this scene in the late seventies and early eighties were more drawn in by a sense of social alienation (Uranus) expressed musically with the Plutonian force of aggression, and lyrics of unflinching honesty. 

If you’ve noticed a discrepancy here, so have I.  Almost every performer who rose to prominence in punk rock was born in the 1950s, not the 1960s.  Without derailing this blog into a speculative exercise about precisely WHEN the artistic-cultural stamp of a generation will show itself, which is a huge topic, I’d like to suggest that it was the innovations appearing immediately after punk rock which have had the more lasting impact on the music of our generation.  It’s important to remember that that Pluto-Uranus conjunction took place in Virgo, which, among other things, has proficiency with GEAR and TECHNOLOGY, and may be ascribed the archetype of the PROGRAMMER.  

For the first time in recorded history, our culture is identifying artists and performers as "musicians" who may have no kinetic relationship to sound – meaning that they’re not physically strumming a guitar with their fingers, blowing into a flute with their mouths, or jamming on timpani with mallets.  A pop song can be generated entirely by a computer with a programmer at the helm.  Purists may scoff and claim that electronic music isn’t real music, but if top forty radio shows the way the wind is blowing for the culture as a whole, the younger generations don’t seem to be too particular about the distinction between electronic and so-called "real music."

When I was a teenager in the nineties, there was a popular bumper sticker making the rounds that read, "Drum Machines Have No Soul."  And I was troubled by this because I enjoyed both the sounds made by live drums, and the programmed rhythms of the electronic and industrial music I was just getting into.  I thought that maybe there was something wrong with me because electronic music seemed to me to be, well, just as soulful as any other kind of music.  A wonderful Discovery article (Is Electronic Music Real Music?) explains how the mass implementation of electronic music today has effectively de-stigmatized the idea of programmers as musicians.  The article further points out that, after its development, the piano was considered a controversial piece of musical technology because it made it so dang easy to produce beautiful sounds.  One didn’t even have to develop finger calluses to play well, where’s the skill in that?!? 

For my purposes here today, it’s extraordinarily telling that the piano was also developed during a conjunction of Pluto and Uranus, appearing around 1710 when these planets met in Leo (performing arts) before moving together into Virgo (practical mechanics).  The piano has had quite an impact on all kinds of music, from orchestral to jazz, even serving as a source of family entertainment in the days before TV.  It’s currently one of the most popular instruments in the world.  The rapid elevation of the piano as a staple of instrumental music makes it fairly easy for me to speculate that these other Pluto-Uranus innovations – purely electronic instruments like the synthesizer and the drum machine and all their rapidly evolving derivations – will be prominent features of music in the generations to come.

Pluto and Uranus meet in the sky in a conjunction only once every 125 years or so.  Typically this conjunction corresponds to radical upheaval in the social order, as we witnessed in the 1960s with the convulsions of the Civil Rights movement and the sexual and cultural revolution.  It should not surprise us that 1848, when Uranus was approaching a conjunction with Pluto in Aries, is remembered as the "Year of Revolutions."  The drive toward social equality (Uranus) and the destructive power of Pluto cut a swath across Europe and parts of Latin America when these planets were in antagonistic Aries, champion of the underdog. 

Best-selling electronic album by Walter (Wendy)​ Carlos, 1968

As a scholar it pains me to say this, but the Wikipedia article on electronic music is actually quite excellent and thorough, distinguishing between electromechanical instruments like the electric guitar (a blend of the electronic and traditional instrument), and purely electronic devices like the synthesizer.  As the article makes clear, the 1960s – when Uranus and Pluto were hovering in Virgo’s frequency in the sky – was the watershed decade for electronic music.  A sort of critical mass of avant-garde artists and inventors perfected their electronic creations, and these innovations went on to influence the progressive rock of the nineteen-seventies, leading up to the explosion of synthesizer pop music in the nineteen-eighties.  After perhaps a bit of a backlash in mainstream music against overuse of the synth, the proportion of electronic music in top-selling albums has steadily increased thanks to the popularity of rap, house, and other dance genres. 

I’m taking a lot of inspiration from the BBC documentary Synth Britannia, which I encourage you to view if you can find it.  It traces the rise of synthesizer music from the German pioneers Kraftwerk in the 1970s, to the wildly popular electronic albums of Depeche Mode in the 1980s.  It’s fascinating to hear about how early innovators like Gary Numan (see video above) were panned by the press for not performing "real" music, and how they were perceived as both anti-social (Uranus) and transgressive (Pluto).  It’s also quite striking to hear groundbreaking electronic bands like the Human League, OMD, Throbbing Gristle, and Cabaret Voltaire talk about how they admired punk’s iconoclasm but deplored its methods.  In other words, the alienation first voiced by punk could be better expressed by the disembodied, soulless (if you will), hollow, droning, and repetitive sounds made possible with electronic instruments.  Synthetic sounds (Uranus) were a more accurate reflection of a mechanized, industrialized urban lifestyle than traditional instruments, and they permanently transformed (Pluto) popular music.  

The Grammy-award-winning electronic musician Skrillex

I think up to this point most astrologers would agree with me, in connecting the dots between Uranus (technology), Pluto (transmutation), and the proliferation of electronic music in late twentieth century culture.  But I think the occurrence of this conjunction in the sign of Virgo is also an important part of the equation.  The rise of the "tech geek"-cum-musician is clearly Virgo’s legacy, as is the appearance of performers whose only musical accompaniment is a laptop.  Sadly, the only thing most people know about Virgo is that she is a virgin, giving the sign an exaggerated connection with purity and perfection.  In fact, Virgo’s virginity is an expression of her self-sufficiency and competence (think of the famous Virgo virgin Queen Elizabeth), and is more accurately depicted by the archetype of the craftsman and his tool. 

One of the first astrology books I ever read lamented that the "true ruler" of Virgo had yet to be discovered, and that the earthy nature of the sign was not well-represented by busy, intellectual Mercury.  The writer went on to theorize that when Vulcan, Roman god of smithing and craftsmanship, was discovered (!), Virgos everywhere would embrace their natural mechanical skill and craftiness and leave off their mercurial criticism and carping.  Sadly, that day has not come, although some astrologers give the recently discovered asteroid Chiron rulership over Virgo, a proposition to which I am sympathetic. 

​A modern Vulcan hard at work in her forge

In my experience, the difference between Mercury-ruled Gemini and Mercury-ruled Virgo is that Gemini consumes knowledge for its own sake, while Virgo prefers knowledge to be practical.  Knowing how to change a tire, fix a friend’s computer, or help an elderly relative file her taxes can give Virgo an immense amount of satisfaction.  Flighty Gemini knows a little bit about everything, but Virgo’s knowledge tends to be deeper and more oriented toward service and a usable skill.  Astrologers will often attribute anything to do with technology and computers to the planet Uranus and the sign Aquarius, but it’s important to remember the association of Aquarius with the future and with innovation.  At this point it’s become de rigueur for every active member of society to have access to a computer and a high-speed internet connection.  In other words, computer technology no longer falls under the banner of the futuristic, but has wandered into Virgo’s realm of simply knowing how things work. 

Roy and Moss of the "IT Crowd"

If you think the very modern archetype of the condescending IT guy who looks down his nose at you for lacking basic computer literacy is a far cry from the smithy who lovingly hand-forges his tools, I suppose I would have to agree with you.  But try on another late twentieth century archetype: the gearhead.  Most of us can see the archetype of the craftsman in the guy who works on old cars on the weekend, in all the time he spends in mechanical tinkering and in his emphasis on getting the whole system to run smoothly. 

​The musical tech geek is a function of the same archetype; who else but Virgo could systematically memorize the technical functions of the dizzying array of gear which goes into setting up a live show, from amplifiers, monitors, and mixing boards, to tube amps, equalizers, and effects pedals?  I’m enjoying the multiple meanings of the word "gear" here too, in that the gearhead is not simply concerned with having lots of equipment or "gear," but in getting each device, a metaphorical gear or cog, to run in harmony with the entire system.  Virgo’s practical know-how comes in very handy when you’re plugging in all your cables and power-sources, and in fact much of contemporary music performance would be closed to you if you failed to master these basics of electronic technology. 

Even though the members of Kraftwerk (video below) were born a whole generation before the Pluto-Uranus conjunction in Virgo, the music they pioneered on the heels of this conjunction in 1970 perfectly encapsulates the energy of the Virgo tech geek as musician: four clean-cut guys in modest suits, in sharp contradistinction to the glam look which carried the day in the 1970s, efficiently performing their music behind four electronic machines.  Their name might literally mean "power-station," but isolating some of those Anglo-Saxon word-roots on which the English language was built, "craft" and "work," provides us with a convenient shorthand for understanding how the Pluto-Uranus conjunction of the 1960s came to fruition in humble, mechanically-minded, and methodical Virgo.

Mermaid at Midnight: Melissa Mankins

So how is the effect of five planets in Pisces right now grabbing you?

I’ve been surprised at how powerful those metaphorical ocean waves have been, as Mercury retrogrades in Pisces.  But you may also be experiencing the rigors of Saturn's retrograde in Scorpio, which Portland astrologer Tony Howard has a great piece on.

In honor of all the misty, murky, and haunting Pisces energy floating around, this week I’d like to highlight the photography of one of my oldest and dearest friends, Melissa Mankins.  She and photographer Claire Flint Last recently opened the Paper Moon photo studio in the colorful Whiteaker neighborhood in Eugene, Oregon.

Melissa’s photography has a particularly poignant, subtle quality, a way of capturing the emotion of longing and the fantasies of childhood.  I selected her beautiful image of a dancer’s reflection to represent the element of WATER in the gallery display on my website.  Zeroing in on Melissa’s strongly-placed Venus in Pisces, conjunct the past-life point or South node, can tell us a lot about the source of her artistic vision.

With any artist or any client who aspires to be an artist, I tend to look at Venus first.  Venus shows personal taste, and can reveal a fund of knowledge about the native’s artistic potential.  Melissa has Venus in hazy, sentimental Pisces.  This tells me a number of things.  First, Pisces is particularly susceptible to art – or TV and movies, any medium which takes the hard edge off reality.  Pisces can get lost in a world made of dreams, and so Melissa’s taste might tend toward the highly romantic and grandiose, or art that partakes of fantasy and exalted feeling states. 

Watery Venus in Pisces is also in the watery fourth house.  In astrology, the element water signifies the realm of mysticism and the emotions.  Earthy art might make pronounced use of materials (think ceramics), while airy art appeals to the intellect or one’s social conscience (art with a message).  Fiery art forms are bright and broad and awaken the passions (a sexy fashion spread in a magazine).  So what about water?

http://melissamankins.com/home.html

It’s said that those people with a high ratio of water in the chart think in images.  Think about what happens when you wake from a dream: you might not remember the words that were said, or the plot, but you retain an image, or two or three.  You also remember the feeling, even if you forget all the other details – and you might not be able to put this feeling into words.  What happens when you see a photograph of yourself at an event from the past that you’ve erased from your consciousness?  The memory of that day and how you were feeling come flooding back in a way not possible if someone had only brought up the event in conversation.  With a picture to look at, you remember that the dress you were wearing that day was too tight and that it made you feel a little self-conscious.  You remember the smell of popcorn in the air and the feel of sweat on your skin.  You remember the admiring glance of a stranger and the simultaneous rush of embarrassment and attraction.

This is how water works: it evokes the subtle realms, the psychic plane and the underworld of emotions for which we have no words.  It’s tied to the imagistic world of memory.  The fourth house is the most private house in the whole chart, and shows the inner world of the soul, our psychic home.  Traditionally, the fourth house shows our tribal or family heritage, as well as the circumstances of our childhood home.  But the fourth house is also our own personal midnight, who we really are in our innermost core.

Melissa’s fourth house Venus tells me that she’s an artist in her soul.  Now one in every twelve people, roughly, is going to have Venus in the fourth house, and one in 144 people will have Venus in the fourth house in Pisces.  It’s not rare, and not all these people are artists.  But there will always be a certain exquisite sensitivity, a certain elevation of the inner world and an ability to respond to its innate beauty and subtlety, with anyone who has this placement.  In the type of astrology I practice, the fact that Venus is also conjunct the South node in Melissa’s chart gives it a whole heap more importance.  The South node shows the dominant theme of the past life. 

http://melissamankins.com/home.html

For a few years, Melissa was studying to be a nurse.  This career path is not inconsistent with a Venus in Pisces.  Generous Venus is exalted in compassionate Pisces, and this placement can indicate feelings of universal love for all humanity.  A nurse spends her day administering to those in need of care, and there is an association with Pisces and service, and charity to those who cannot help themselves.  A simple way to read the past-life story in Melissa’s chart is to say that she was a nun in a former life.  Mystical Pisces can connote Christian love, and Venus in the private fourth house suggests a cloistered life characterized by devotion.  In history, nuns were often the only ones who would administer to the gravely ill and those beyond the pale of medical help.  But the South node also shows a place where we got stuck, a limiting pattern that we need to move beyond if we are going to continue to develop.

We are always moving toward the North node in the chart.  The North node represents something untried, a future point which we must access and develop if we want to reach our highest potential.  The North node is always 180 degrees opposite the South node, and it is always scary because, karmically, it’s new territory for us.  Melissa’s North node is in the hyper-public tenth house.  In the tenth house, we are something larger than ourselves: we become a community figure, often a community leader.  It’s no surprise that actors and politicians tend to have a lot of tenth house planets.  Somehow, even without consciously willing it, tenth house individuals come to represent some segment of society and its desires and needs.

http://melissamankins.com/home.html

So while Melissa is most comfortable at home (fourth house), and pursuing her artistic sensibility in private, she’s also enduring some intense karmic pressure to come out as a public figure.  While the South node signifies an old piece of karma which we don’t need to repeat, it also highlights some energy we’ve mastered and can offer to the world as a gift.  Melissa brings the gift of her nuanced, emotional, and private world to her public life as an Artist, capital A.              

One of my most vivid impressions of how Melissa’s sensitive vision impacts the public occurred at a gallery opening and artist talk she gave in 2011.  Her photos were essentially fashion shots, as she photographed models wearing the creations of designer Allihalla (all the photography featured in today’s blog is the product of that collaboration).  Yet the images are more reminiscent of Waterhouse paintings than fashion photography, drawing from that numinous Piscean well of longing and fantasy.  As the small group of art patrons admired Melissa’s photographs, one older woman was moved to tears, and spoke about how evocatively Melissa had captured the spirit of a woman’s youth with her lovely shots.  Venus in Pisces in the fourth house, that mermaid at midnight, gives Melissa’s photographer’s eye its moving and mystical quality.  Explore Melissa's photography website here.

http://melissamankins.com/home.html

Bouguereau, Heavenly Mediocrity, and Neptune in Capricorn

Welcome to my new website, launched when the Sun was in the first degree of Pisces and moving into a conjunction with ethereal Neptune in the Year of the Snake, 2013.

I’m woefully verbose as a writer, and always have been.  I can’t ever remember, in my perpetual years in school, having turned in a paper which came in under the suggested limit.  Call it the effect of my well-placed Mercury, my chart’s ruler, in literary Libra in the expressive fifth house, trine garrulous Jupiter in Gemini.  To paraphrase a line from one of my favorite comedies, my Mercury is "kind of a big deal."

Bouguereau, "Girl with a Pomegranate"

But since I find my previous blog posts a little exhausting to read for their exhaustive length, my goal for this new site blog is brevity.  Yet I have the sinking feeling that I’ve already violated this condition quite before I’ve even properly begun.

I’m dedicating this first blog post to the French painter, William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905), whose oeuvre I mined for images to enhance the description of my “Psyche’s Gift” series of readings.  I’m a bit ashamed to say I’d never heard of Bouguereau prior to trolling the internet for depictions of Psyche.  But there’s actually a pretty good reason for this: Bouguereau was on the wrong side of Impressionism, post-Impressionism, and other late nineteenth century modern art movements.  Though he was enormously successful and popular, boasting a career which spanned over fifty years, his otherworldly skill and classical (read: conventional) themes were sacrificed to our lust for neat historical narratives.  In other words, he was criticized by the avant-garde and thus functionally erased for posterity.  Read more about the suppression of the legacy of this prolific painter here.

The planet I want to highlight from Bouguereau’s natal chart is that striking Neptune in Capricorn.  This single placement can tell us so much about the lush, ecstatic feel of Bouguereau’s paintings and his subsequent damning by history. 

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, born Novemver 30, 1825, in La Rochelle, France, at 4pm.​

I’ll start off by sharing my own reaction to Bouguereau’s collection of over eight hundred paintings, many available to view here.

When I look at his work I feel enchanted and exalted, the sort of state one expects to enter upon being confronted with Great Art.  No mere mortal painted this, I think.  Truly the photographic realism he applies to his divine and angelic subjects is a god-given talent.  Liz Greene unfolds Neptune’s rulership over this redemptive and religious quality of art in her massive tome, The Astrological Neptune:

Art and magic are closely allied.  The power to make something out of nothing, to create worlds from the elusive stuff of the imagination, is an act which – even to those who regularly engage upon it – partakes of a numinous element.  The artist has always held a special and ambiguous role in myth and legend – as prophet, outlaw, mouthpiece for the gods, tool of daimonic forces, and victim of both human and divine retribution.  The mystery of creative power is increased by the taint of theft, for the artist’s ability to make something out of nothing  transforms him or her into a god, thus encroaching upon the jealously guarded preserve of heaven.  Prometheus’ terrible fate is as fundamental to the myth of the artist as is his ennoblement as divine culture-bringer.      

I also find Bouguereau’s paintings quite erotic, and there is precious little on this feature of his work for the armchair internet historian to gather.  I think the closest I came to finding a discussion of the erotic quality of his work is a comment by that arch-villain in censorship, Anthony Comstock, who claimed absurdly that Bouguereau’s "Nymphs and Satyr" was edifying to him personally, but hanging in a bar in New York the painting promoted lewd and lascivious behavior!

Well let’s take a look at this painting.  For twenty years it hung in a New York night spot (the blurb above is taken from King’s Handbook of New York City of 1893).  The nymph in the foreground is showing us her posterior in a strong light and is partially bent over.  The nymph behind her has her breasts pressed against the satyr’s resisting arm, and the space between their naked nether parts is filled by what I can only assume is a particularly long and bushy tail for a goat.  I’ll give my husband credit for noticing that the third nymph has a pretty robust grip on the satyr’s horn, and her arms are thrown back in a state of wild abandon, elevating the breasts.

I’m sure Anthony Comstock found this life-size, roughly eight-by-six-feet painting edifying in the extreme.  I still find it erotic.  As some of you may know, Capricorn is an earth sign, ruled over by stern and commanding Saturn whose symbol is the goat.  But the goat’s long-time association with sex, satyrs, and Satan himself gives us some indication of the other side of Saturn, as does the Roman holiday “Saturnalia” which was celebrated with total sexual license.  Both sides of Capricorn appear in Bouguereau’s artistic vision – the rigid champion of convention and the impish and sensual satyr.

Bouguereau, "Nymphs and Satyr"​

The planet Neptune rules over religious and mystical experience, and the mysterious propensity art has to waft us up to these exalted realms may be counted as one of its domains.  In the goatish and eminently methodical sign of Capricorn, however, Neptune’s store of grace and unbounded vision is said to be unhappy, and unable to really flourish within Capricorn’s need for order and usefulness.  Some writers would even call Capricorn the sign of Neptune’s Fall.

Yet Bouguereau’s oeuvre represents a perfect marriage of Capricorn values with Neptunian experience.  Bouguereau is known as one of the most talented painters to ever limn the human form.  Capricorn is the architect, the builder of the zodiac, and Saturn has general rulership over form and structure.  In medical astrology, Saturn’s domain is skin and bones – the building blocks of the human form.  Bouguereau’s divine ability (Neptune) to execute the human form (Capricorn) gives his paintings a magical quality which is both sensuous and numinous.  The eroticism of his paintings is a direct result of this; his themes are Romantic, i.e. Neptunian, but their depiction is accurate enough to class Bouguereau as a Realist, where many critics in fact place him.  I can’t help but think of Neptune’s twentieth century passage through Capricorn, from 1984-1998, when the pornographic film industry exploded.  Neptune rules over film, and all mediums which promote escapism and release, and when it passed through earthy Capricorn there was a visible trend toward crass commercialization of the flesh in the film industry.

The most Capricorn aspect of Bouguereau’s style appears in his classification as an Academic painter.  Neither an early nineteenth century Romantic nor a late nineteenth century Realist, Bouguereau’s style borrows from both these movements, producing a synthesis known as Academic painting.  “Academic” is a very Capricornian word, suggesting prestige, tradition, convention, training, and the domination of the status quo.  As Fred Ross notes in the ARC link above,

[Bouguereau] won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1851 at the age of twenty-six, and after winning nearly every accolade and award imaginable for an artist of his time, ultimately become the President of the Academy, Head of the Salon, President of the Legion of Honor. He was in fact, considered the greatest French artist of his time, and Paris was the center of art world.

Bouguereau was no starving artist, no malcontent shivering in a garret, no iconoclast with a theoretical ax to grind.  He rose up through the ranks of the French Academy (Capricorn), until he achieved the ultimate Capricorn goal of arriving at the summit of the mountain and being the top in his chosen field.  He worked in conventional, classical themes and in a style that was generally acceptable to the public.  He didn’t push the envelope. 

And because he was a symbol of tradition and conservatism, Bouguereau came under the attack of late nineteenth century modern artists, who tarred him with the brush of "mediocrity."  There’s something to this – ever tried to penetrate to the top of your field by being an iconoclast and pressing your pet agenda?  Typically you’ll never arrive until you learn the value of tact, formality, and respect for the middle way - and so "mediocrity," derived from the Latin for "middle," is a Capricorn word too.  It's the quickest way up the mountain of public acceptance.​

Neptune rules over Christ-figures and martyrdom in general, and later generations of artists and art critics crucified Bouguereau for the very technical excellence (Capricorn) and academic synthesis (Capricorn) which made him such a giant of the nineteenth century art world.  His reputation has been redeemed (another Neptune word) in recent years, though much of his rightful place in art history has been sacrificed (Neptune) to the more compelling emergence of modern art within the same historical period.

So much for writing a short blog!​

Venus and Friends

Part of what I'm interested in doing with this blog is making the language of astrology more accessible to people who just want to learn about it in a desultory way. Not everybody is ready to sign up for a class or commit to some serious book-learnin'. One of my first teachers, Karen McCauley, used to have me just feel the energies of the planets we discussed, or meditate on them, which, at the wise old age of nineteen, I assumed was a waste of time. But in the many years that have passed since those first classes, I've found that when studying astrology, just vibing with the energy of a particular archetype is the perfect complement to reading about the planets and the parts of our lives that they rule. You can't even really begin to use astrology in any personally meaningful way unless you can connect to how the different planetary energies feel.

Today's lesson is dedicated to Venus. When we think of the planet Venus, we typically think of love, and that's a good place to start. But romantic love can draw on a lot of other parts of our psyches that are not strictly Venusian. Sex (Mars), power (Pluto), high romance (Neptune), trust (Saturn), emotional neediness (Moon), and exchange of ideas (Mercury) are some of the many other components to a relationship which might get us into a Venusian mood in the first place. We're not usually inclined to kiss someone that we don't trust, or to whom we're not attracted! So what is Venus really about?

Venus makes us feel good, plain and simple. It's an integral component of the equation for attaining those elusive states, FUN and HAPPINESS. In astrology, Venus is given rulership over two signs, Taurus and Libra. In Taurus, we see the face of Venus that is primarily concerned with PEACE. In Libra, we meet the part of Venus that is given over to BEAUTY. I think peace can sound a little dull to younger ears, like a still-point, a no-action zone, an emptiness. Think of Venusian peace instead as those periods in your life, or those moments of the day, when nothing is wrong. For chronic worriers like Cancer and Virgo, or ambitious signs like Aries and Scorpio, or intellectually restless Gemini, such moments may be rare indeed. But we need them, desperately - they are balm to the soul, the everyday graces that make us feel like life is running smoothly and going according to plan. Another simple way to connect with Venus is to think about those parts of life that are easy for us. Do you have a beautiful, comfortable home (Venus in Cancer)? An effortless faith in God (Venus in Sagittarius)? A dynamite relationship with your co-workers (Venus in Virgo)? Or a seemingly endless fund of artistic inspiration and creativity (Venus in Aries)? In each of the examples named, it's all too easy to overlook the magnitude of the gifts we've been given. Venus in Virgo: "Sure I have an easy time at work, but I'm not cute enough to attract a partner." Venus in Aries: "Sure I'm burning up with ideas, but when will the recognition - and the money come?" The trick to mastering Venus is to find contentment in the things that are going right. Venus is about wanting what you already have.

If Venus is sounding a little lazy or unambitious, then you're cluing into another facet of the planetary energy. Laziness can be a danger of too much Venus, and foster the sense that we're so beautiful that we don't have to look after our health, or the conviction that the values handed down by our parents were good enough and don't require any adjustment, or the belief that life is just fine the way it is and there's no sense in trying to make it better. Venus can become stuck and resistant to change, just like the rest of the archetypal energies. But it's my firm feeling that in the West, we don't place near-enough emphasis on the higher expressions of Venus. Sure, lots of people get addicted to money and security (the negative stereotype of Taurus), but then these people aren't really connecting to high Venus either: they're not enjoying what they have beyond the having of it.

You'll notice that the Empress card in the Rider-Waite Tarot deck features the Venus glyph. In the Tarot, the Empress augurs a time of sensual indulgence and relaxation, a period in your life when there's time to make love and cook a sumptuous meal, and chat the night away with good friends and a bottle of wine. Take a break, the Empress says. Smell the roses. Come home from work early and look your lover in the eyes. Though Venus can function as shorthand for money in the chart, most of the activities I just listed don't cost very much. Human connection is free. Ditto the beauty of the natural world. Playing with a child or a beloved pet just takes time, as does cooking a delicious meal. There's something to the old adage, "The best things in life are free." High Venus is a state of mind, an attitude which allows us to see the beauty in the things that are right in front of us, and to discover peace and joy in the way things are.

One of my favorite Venus words is "local." We might dream of one-day storming the New York literary scene, but Venus is about being satisfied with being the best poet in Peoria. Healthy Venus is thinking that the local offerings of people, entertainment, and opportunities are just as good where you stand as they would be in the next town, or across the ocean. Wise Venus knows that you can just as easily get enlightened in Fresno as Tibet. Venus is the "here" and the "now" in Ram Dass's immortal formulation, "Be Here Now." Astrologers wax eloquent about the spiritual capacity of Neptune, Saturn, and the Moon, but what about chipper little Venus and effortless, everyday happiness? How spiritually advanced or juicy can we really be without ease, grace, and personal comforts? How much would our lives change if we really loved all of who we are, however humble or small we judge ourselves to be? To quote Oriah Mountain Dreamer, "What if the question is not why am I so infrequently the person I really want to be, but why do I so infrequently want to be the person I really am?"

As you can see, we've wandered from romantic love to self-love, which is another way of describing the state of being happy with who you are. Venus is associated with romantic love because it allows us to see our own beauty through another person's eyes. Some people just make us feel good - or wonderful or gorgeous or hilarious - and typically we have Venus contacts with these people in chart comparisons (called synastry). So does Venus rule over those heart-pumping grand passions that lead us to dramatic, Romeo-and-Juliet-style expressions of our love? Well, perhaps, with a little stimulation from the trans-personal planets or the South node. But sustainable Venus in action is more along the lines of, "Every time Billy comes into the coffee shop where Carrie works, it puts a smile on Carrie's face." Billy sees the best in Carrie, so Carrie sees the best in Billy. "She's so easy to be with ..." is something we hear a lot from people who are falling - and people who are still - in love. It's another way of saying, "I can open up my whole self and she still likes it! And I reward her for this generosity of spirit by allowing her to be who she is." We don't usually think about any of this consciously, of course. But we get a clue to how Venus operates in our lives when we notice the activities - and people - which put us in a good mood.

I've been sustaining some pretty heavy outer planet transits to my Venus these past few years, and so I thought I'd share my own personal story of taking Venus gifts for granted. Several years ago I did a chart reading for an acquaintance who has since become a celebrity. She's drop-dead gorgeous, so much so that I could easily put aside my own Venusian pride in my appearance when I was in her presence, because it was just so thrilling to orbit her radiance. When I'd tool around Los Angeles with her, the reactions she got were incredible. Not only men but straight women would fawn all over her and make every effort to please her. I'll call her Betty for the sake of convenience. Even before Betty was in films or on magazine covers, she was treated like a celebrity, and she graciously accepted this treatment.

I was tickled when I cast her chart and saw that sexy Venus in Aries was smack-dab on Betty's Ascendant. Venus in the Mars-ruled sign of Aries gives off epic sex appeal, and Aries ain't shy about putting it out there (neither is Betty). The placement of Venus on the Ascendant just ups the ante in terms of how widely that sex appeal is going to radiate. The Ascendant is one of the most visible points in the chart, and so any planet there is on prominent display: in Betty's case, her feminine endowments were her calling card. A first house Sun in Taurus contributed to this charismatic picture (first house planets can't hide their light), with earthy Taurus softening the potential for masculine harshness that comes with Aries rising.

So here I was, in truth fawning a little bit over Betty and singing the praises of her Venus rising, and noting how neat it was that the goddess of beauty was elevated in her chart, since Betty herself resembles Venus incarnate. Now I had noticed that gloomy Saturn in Cancer was squaring that Venus in the natal chart, but Betty was happily married, and about to embark on a career in which her Venusian body was the key to getting jobs. I read the Venus-Saturn square as the challenge of turning personal beauty into a business, and thought that that was that. Overall she was very happy with the reading, but when I asked Betty if there was anything else she wanted to talk about, she floored me.

Her face and mood changed, and a note crept into her voice which told me that this was one of the deep pains of her life: "Why can't I keep any female friends?" All in a flash I had one of those astrological revelations which let me know that my own filtered perspective had crept into the reading and led me to miss something. I have Venus in its own sign of Libra, in the outgoing fifth house and trine expansive Jupiter. I have to struggle not to make friends so I keep enough time for myself and my projects.  Friends?  It took me a moment to even comprehend Betty's question.  Friends? Who except the extremely smelly and socially inept has a problem making friends? I'd never thought about making friends before. I can be stiff, shy, and stand-offish, and I still make and keep friends in spite of some natural awkwardness. How could a woman who looked like Betty help but have a whole gaggle of friends? As it turned out, she'd had so many negative experiences with female friends, and suffered so many betrayals, that she was extremely reluctant to trust women at all (Saturn square Venus). I stumbled through an answer to her question but probably made a mess of it because I was so shocked.

I learned a lot about Venus that day. I learned that one of my own natural Venus gifts is the ability to attract and keep friends. As proof that I'd always taken that talent for granted - I'd never thought about it before Betty confessed her own struggles in the world of friendship! I'd never had to. I'd set up my life so that I always had a ring of people to celebrate my accomplishments with, or commiserate with me over my woes. I never lacked for folks to invite to movies or parties or happy hours. A fifth house Venus in Libra can mean a lot of things - like a dangerous propensity for falling in love with love - but it wasn't until after Betty's reading that I really appreciated my own Libran friendliness and gift for forming relationships.

Now the savvy astrologer will have already noticed that the Aries, first-house emphasis in Betty's chart can be productive of diva syndrome - Aries is extremely self-focused, while Libra, its opposite, is other-focused. Saturn in Cancer in Betty's chart also makes it difficult to show tender feelings and neediness. So without knowing exactly how all of Betty's friendships went south, it's easy to guess that her natural talent for self-promotion (her very star quality) struck her friends as self-centered, and her Saturn in Cancer would have prevented her from letting those friends know just how much she cared. It's easy to feel eclipsed by Betty's radiance, and so the friends in question might have betrayed her out of jealousy, spite, or anger over their unmet needs. Betty's Saturn in Cancer also tells me about her high sensitivity level, and how these broken friendships probably wounded her in a way that might not have phased someone with more social experience. In spite of her exaggerated Venusian beauty, Betty seemed to be lacking in that higher octave of Venus - balance and reciprocity in relationships - as suggested by the placement of her Venus in competitive Aries.

Friends are usually not the first thing astrologers think of when discussing the role of Venus in a chart. We're far more focused on Venus as an indicator of romantic relationships, self-esteem, personal resources and even hobbies (i.e. what you like to do for fun). But I think our friends tell us a little something about all of the above. In most cases, your romantic partner is also your best friend, and the values of our friends reflect what we think is important about life. For the first time in my own life, I've really had to think about what kind of friends I want, and why, and how one goes about attracting them. Check the status of Venus in your life by thinking about your relationship to your friends. Do you feel at home with them - at peace and relaxed? Do your friends reflect your values - at least in part? Do you feel like you have no friends at all, or so many you have no time for yourself? Just a little reflection on your own experiences with friendship can yield loads of information about how much Venusian joy you're letting into your life. We work out a lot of karmic baggage in partnerships, but friendships are supposed to be fun - that is, Venusian - most of the time. If your friends aren't stimulating your personal sense of peace and beauty, then perhaps it's time for an upgrade. Change your friends, change your life. And if you take nothing else away from this post, remember that no one person can have Venus everywhere in the chart, and that even the pretty people have Plutos and Saturns.

History Pocket: Nineteenth Century Astrology

When I worked with the Caroline Myss book, Sacred Contracts, I was simultaneously annoyed and relieved to discover that one of my twelve archetypes is the scribe. The scribe can explain why I've spent the bulk of my life poring over things that other people have written and offering my own dry commentary, but come now, a scribe? It sounds crabbed, and peevish, pedantic and petulant. Decidedly not sexy.

(Fortunately I slotted some fun archetypes in there, like Anais Nin. Oh yes I did. No, she's not a goddess or a type but - oh well then, isn't she? I'd make the argument that she lived her life on the mythic level. Zora Neale Hurston is one of my twelve archetypes too. No, I didn't follow the rules. So sue me.)

For the scribe I had some cartoon version of Ebeneezer Scrooge in my head, crouched over a table and squinting under the light of a single candle, wrecking his hands with the repetitive motions writing involves (regrettably I resemble this image all too often - I'm currently folded up in my desk chair, squinting at my computer). Then my sub-conscious mind took over and intoned the epic word, THOTH. Oh yes, Thoth is a far-sight better than the impoverished Clerk of The Canterbury Tales.  The Greco-Roman (and Western astrological) archetype of writing, Mercury, didn't work for me as well as the ancient Egyptian scribe and god of magic. Mercury is too saucy and immature. He's also a thief. But Thoth is a Merlin. Or a Comte de Saint Germain.

And because I'm a Thoth, at least in part, I'm going to scribe for you, not minding that the old-timey font I've selected deploys backwards quotation marks (OK I mind a little). Someone needs to write a book about the history of American astrology. (Note to publishers: this person could be me). Astrologers in history are extraordinarily difficult to track down, not least because by-and-large their trades were illegal. Usually we know of their existence only because some unlucky few ran afoul of the law. Or because a prominent writer made fun of them; thus Ben Jonson immortalized the notorious career of the Elizabethan astrologer, Simon Magus. A 1767 play by Thomas Forrest, The Disappointment, narrowly missed becoming the first American theatrical production written by a native talent. And it tells us that eighteenth century Americans were conversant with the core language of astrology - if they hadn't been, no one would have gotten the play's jokes, which lambasted astrology by botching its esoteric terms.

Tonight I scribe for you the first entirely positive portrayal of astrology in early America that was not written by an astrologer. George Lippard was the best-selling American writer of the nineteenth century prior to Harriet Beecher Stowe's monumental success with Uncle Tom's Cabin (the only book more popular than this one in the entire century was the Bible). Lippard had an astrologer friend named Thomas Hague, and Lippard based a small but pivotal role in The Quaker City, his most popular book, on Hague. I'm not sure I've ever read anything like Lippard's portrait of the astrologer before. In his depiction, there is no mystery, no chicanery, only a plain, honest man who knows his craft. The astrologer also makes an uncannily accurate prediction which drives the entire novel. I read several of the passages excerpted below to a small group of astrologers at one point, and I do believe their eyes glazed over. But someone needs to do the painstaking work of collecting the physical traces of our psychic history, and weaving them into a coherent frame. Someone like me. A scribe.

From The Quaker City (1844-1845) by George Lippard, U-Mass edition, I give you-

The Astrologer

In a small room, remarkable for the air of comfort imparted by the effects of the neatly white-washed walls, the floor, plainly carpeted, and the snug little wood-stove roaring in front of the hearth, sat a man of some forty-five winters, bending over the table in the corner, covered with strange-looking books and loose manuscripts.

The light of the iron lamp which stood in the centre of the table, resting on a copy of Cornelius Agrippa, fell full and strongly over the face and form of the Astrologer ...

There was nothing in the dress of the man, or in the appearance of his room, that might realize the ideas commonly attached to the Astrologer and his den. Here were no melodramatic curtains swinging solemnly to and fro, brilliant and terrible with the emblazoned death's-head and cross-bones. Here were no blue lights imparting a lurid radiance to a row of grinning skeletons, here were no ghostly forms standing pale and erect, their glassy eyes freezing the spectator's blood with horror, here was neither goblin, devil, or mischievous ape, which, as every romance reader knows, have been the companions of the Astrologer from time immemorial; here was nothing but a plain man, seated in an old-fashioned arm chair, within the walls of a comfortable room, warmed by a roaring little stove.

No cap of sable relieved the Astrologer's brow, no gown of black velvet, tricked out with mysterious emblems in gold and precious stones, fell in sweeping folds around the outlines of his spare figure. A plain white overcoat, much worn and out at the elbows, a striped vest not remarkable for its shape or fashion, a cross-barred neckerchief, and a simple linen shirt collar completed the attire of the astrologer who sat reading at the table.

The walls of the room were hung with the Horoscopes of illustrious men, Washington, Byron, and Napoleon, delineated on large sheets of paper, and surrounded by plain frames of black wood; the table was piled with the works of Sibly, Lilly, Cornelius Agrippa and other masters in the mystic art; while at the feet of the Astrologer nestled a fine black cat, whose large whiskers and glossy fur, would seem to afford no arguments in favor of the supposition entertained by the neighbors, that she was a devil in disguise, a sort of familiar spirit on leave of absence from the infernal regions.

...

And thus turning from page to page, he disclosed the remarkable fact, that the great, the good, and the wise of the Quaker City, who met the mere name of astrology, when uttered in public, with a most withering sneer, still under the cover of night, were happy to steal to the astrologer's room, and obtain some glimpses of their future destiny through the oracle of the stars (26-27).

Perfume Corner: 40 Notes

I'm exhausted from a long day of writing on other projects, and so I thought I'd post something from a while back. This is the review I wrote for my personalized experience with the lovely Miriam of 40 Notes Perfume. Enjoy!

It’s such a pleasure for me to relive the sessions I had with Miriam, in her elegant atelier, when crafting a custom scent for my wedding day. I honestly can’t imagine a more sensuous, indulgent experience! During the first session, Miriam encouraged me to list the qualities I wanted my wedding scent to convey. From these initial ideas, a lush and three-dimensional creation was born, and it was fascinating to watch how a little bit of inspiration was transformed into a complex, finished product over the months we worked together. The first time we met, Miriam had me sample a number of notes from her impressive collection of essences. I think the most enjoyable part of this session was knowing that Miriam was having absolutely as much fun as I was, nosing around in these gorgeous florals and heady botanicals. I was, literally, astounded, when Miriam showed me an essence of Palo Santo, a wood sacred to Peruvian shamans and an important part of my spiritual practice with my husband – we burn it often as incense. No other note could so uniquely capture the bond I have with my husband, and I think the fact that Miriam produced this exotic essence, on a whim, is a testament to her keen, intuitive sense of her client’s vision. We quickly decided to make Palo Santo the keynote of my custom scent, and to this rather intense base, Miriam added soft musks and mellowing cedar wood. I also wanted my perfume to be sexy and round, and so for the mid-notes we selected juicy mango leaf and the luscious spice of white ginger flowers.

Palo Santo Wood

In follow-up sessions, Miriam shared her alchemical process with me, and had me provide input on several blends so we could get the final product just right. The top-notes came as a bit of a surprise – sharp, green kumquat expressed the bracing feel of the first day of Spring (the day we selected for the wedding), while white grapefruit gave the blend the lightness and lift of a sophisticated fragrance. When I tried on my wedding scent for the first time, I immediately dubbed it “Serpentine” because of the sinuous way the natural essences developed on my skin, and because its bright, green notes reminded me of the green stone, serpentine – a perfect complement to my non-traditional wedding dress – also green!

I couldn’t be happier with the finished product, or with the memorable hours I spent in Miriam’s studio, an experience that was relaxing and vivifying all at once. Serpentine was everything I’d dreamed it could be – a scent appropriate to the solemnity of our ceremony, but also soft and feminine and befitting a bride. Playing in Miriam’s atelier was akin to taking a scented trip around the world – I felt like we searched the four corners of the globe to discover the far-flung ingredients that best expressed my unique “scentual” desires. Scents are famously hard to describe in words, and I was impressed with how Miriam was able to translate my feelings, wishes, and subtle reactions into a holistic vision which meshed with my own. I would recommend Miriam to anyone looking to craft a custom scent for any occasion. Miriam brings her expertise and artistic, intuitive sense to such a collaboration, but the emphasis is firmly on the client’s individual vision. The process of creating a personalized perfume enhanced the magic of my wedding day tenfold. I was walking on air – and clothed in an aromatic cloud of exotic woods, sexy florals, and the piquant promise of a bright, green day.