ORIGIN: No soul could have spoken of the universe’s origin since no one could have existed to witness it. Origin is ellipsis. We believe the universe began, because we exist and because we can hear the sounds of its origin. Activating radio telescopes, gazing at the far corners of existence so dark and distant that the mewling universe can still be heard and seen cooling in cosmic antiquity, we hear. We hear the origin’s cold weak light journey to us. From our center, we can see nothing beyond the cosmic background radiation’s feeble crackle. Beyond this dark margin, we can hear no more origin. We have run out of the sound of the past. We have used up all our past we may know. Beyond this past, there is only the silence that marks the edge of the infinite.
~Ken Chen – You May Visit the Cosmos but You May Not Speak of It (or on the Tackiness of Elegy)
New Moon in Aquarius January 27, 2017, 7:07 pm EST, 8 degrees 15 minutes Aquarius.
Aquarius is the sign of the 30,000 foot view. When a New Moon happens here, it is like a cartographer sitting over a map of the world and planning their route. It is an orderly, measured, visionary affair, lit by the soft lights from the candelabra, accompanied by the voices of seasoned others who are also having their say in mapping the route, and draped unequivocally in the sense of sheer possibility.
Aquarius is an air sign, a designation that gives it a bent for social interaction. This sign is populated by contrarians, and those who are able to hold several seemingly opposite positions simultaneously. Aquarius shares the ability to volley between multiple viewpoints with its sister signs of the air element, Gemini and Libra. They can be called fluid, a term normally associated with water, but which means that they each are socially fluid, able to pollinate conversations with facility, with thoughts and ideas gathered from a variety of sources, connecting previously disparate elements with one another, all without losing sight of the view.
Aquarius is the sign associated with the rallying of mass movements of people. China’s annual Chinese New Year event sees millions of people taking up travel to celebrate the yearly festival. While the New Moon marking this event surely happens in Capricorn some years, mass movements of people is an idea that belongs to the Aquarian disposition.
The airwaves carrying the message of Aquarius are already present in societies at this time. They can be observed in calls for resistance against the new presidency sweeping not only across the United States but globally. They can be observed in the recent Women’s March in Washington D.C. They can be observed even in the U.S. outlier groups like the nazi-affiliated alt-right, who now find themselves emboldened by a shocking and shameless president, and who have likely felt themselves outsiders for a long time in a country bracketed with rich cultural and ethnic melting pots on each coast.
Aquarius is a political sign. And while it is also a sign of extremes and of shock, in no place on god’s green earth or infinitely expanding Universe does Uranus belong as the ruler of Aquarius. But I live in the United States and here, now, you are welcome and free to disagree with me.
The shock Aquarius often delivers is enlivening. The electric jolt of it brings one to one’s senses; it comes with an onrush of fast oxygenation that then galvanizes more intentional and deliberate responses to the world. It startles one into the deliberation and communication of one’s own stances of existence in the world. In this way Saturn’s rulership of the sign beams through the sign in that Saturn encourages authorship, independence, and self-authority.
Saturn’s rulership over Aquarius is the constant consistency and drawn out labor of thought that extends until it has exhausted all possible routes of exploration, until it ends. But it doesn’t end because there is no possibility of exhausting all the options, even if we truly and viscerally considered and connected with the lived experiences of the disillusioned long-since unemployed West Virginia coal miner, or the battered Russian wife whose country will make the battering of her less punishable by law, or even if thought extended deep to the magma layer of the earth to uncover its steady and ancient truths or even if consciousness suddenly found itself existing far into to the infinitely expanding Universe then still, the possibilities could not be exhausted. Because there would always be newness and layers of nuance in experience. And creating social structures that preserve the ability for the unrestricted expression that comes with allowing for the novelty of infinite possibility is the core of what Aquarian-brand freedom is about.
The New Moon is itself ever a time of newness, preparing to cycle energy upward with the growth of the light of the Moon. This month’s New Moon carries both a sense of stoic responsibility countered with an aesthetic emotional sensibility and a heroic sense of possibility. Mars leaves the ultimate degree of the zodiac for the first degree of the zodiac, the place in sky that is its natural home. Because it takes a few days for the energy of the New Moon to take, Mars’ shift from Pisces into Aries suggests a powerful release of any lingering emotional attitudes that don’t serve, releasing victimization, blame, and shrugging off of personal responsibility for taking action to create change. This movement also speaks to emotionally supported inner visions and emotional attitudes that are then thrust into the animating fire by virtue of both the natality of the Moon and Mars’ movement into Aries.
As Mars crosses this threshold, it lands on 0 degrees Aries, a place in the zodiac known as the world axis. When planets cross these degrees it is not unusual for something consequential to happen on the world stage. Yet within and beyond that, the first degree of the zodiac is a powerful place of inception, and Mars’ rise to the strength that comes with being in its home sign is a powerful component of this lunar cycle. The symbol of new life along individualistic, rogue, shocking, and revolutionary lines is repeated strongly at this time. This would be the moment to choose to measure your present coordinates in time and space and to extend them out far into the future you can map with all the eyes you have available to you.
With love,
Ichrak
Join us on January 31st for a Live Talk on the Astrology of 2017!
