Mars Ruling in Scorpio

July 31, 2014

So this is what it looks like when Mars is ruling and has 3 outer planets under its influence.  This reminds me of when I first began turning to ‘mundane’ astrology for comfort.  It was about 1988.  I had been studying astrology seriously for 3 years, and was familiar with how the planets affected my chart.  I don’t remember when exactly I was reading the account of the death of Federico Garcia Lorca, a Spanish poet murdered in the early days of the Guerra Civil.  There must have been some emotional transit that day.  All I remember is being completely overtaken with grief at the end of the book.  I had checked it out looking for a biography of Lorca, but it turned out to be a full length book solely devoted to the account of the start of the war, Lorca’s concern for his life, staying in someone else’s home, hoping he would not be rounded up and shot as events unfolded.  But he was.  The author had to do a lot of digging to get the story.  No one wanted to talk.  I remember so little about the book.  There was an introduction by Lorca’s brother.  In another book I learned about the plays he had written and the work he did reviving community theater by organizing puppet shows.  It seems like the book about his murder tried to make it sound as though he were not political.  But a review of his plays makes it clear that he was behind some very provocative productions that questioned the traditional role of women in families as proscribed by the church.  Then I learned even later that he was flamboyantly gay.

I was in tears.  Knowing about my chart was no help.  I needed some form of solace.  I kept thinking if only there were some way to mathematically quantify the energy that erupts in violence, I could see it as a force of nature, and not be so incapacitated with sadness in the face of all the cruelties lacing life.  I knew the answer was astrology, but my ephemeris only went back as far as 1900.  To see the roots of the conflict in 1936 Spain I was drawn further back in historical reading.  I suppose it was about 2 or 3 years after that day that a friend let me borrow his computer to look up the locations of planets in the 1800’s.  I guess he logged me on to the internet and directed me to the site with the ephemeris.  I knew nothing about computers or the internet back then.

I still have the list of dates and locations of planets that I copied down that day.  I kept going back and back in time.  I worried that he regretted making the offer when he came home an hour later to find me copying locations of Jupiter-Pluto as far back in time as the 1600’s.  I don’t remember how far back I went, but that data fed me for a long time.  I studied it to discern cycles; how often planets met, where they met, and if there was a pattern in the location of their meetings.  It was indeed very comforting.  It was fascinating to see two outer planets meet and then go back in history and try to figure out what was happening at that time.  I spent a lot of time learning the history that overwhelmed me in junior high and high school.  History and astrology became my consolation for all the pain and suffering that seemed to go on around me.  

The sadness is still always there.  The need to understand how such intelligent creatures can be so cruel and violent.  Times like this it is not what is in the stars now that helps me stay sane, it is the steadiness of mind that I have gained from observing the cycles repeat themselves like thousands of variations on a theme for centuries.

In the last three years that steadiness has become a post that reaches down to the center of the earth and comes out the other side.  All human history dissolves into the progression of the zodiac signs through one 24 hour cycle.  I am no longer angry at books that advertise the secrets of the ancients.  I know now the secret is only to be found in the stillness of the mind; it cannot be described or explained.  It can only be perceived directly by quieting the mind long enough to perceive something as simple as the actual earth turning on its axis.

 Twelve are the fellies.  What man has understood them?    Dirghatamas