PLANET
WAVES
by Eric Francis
Firedancing
At
the opening ceremony for the recent ninth annual Women of Wisdom conference
in Seattle, the drumming started and a young woman in an elegant black
dress stepped onto the stage wearing gloves with long extensions off
of each finger. A candle was lit, and each of the extensions, dipped
in the flame, became a torch; the lights were dimmed, and the week-long
feminist spirituality event was invoked with a fire dance ritual.
I spoke to the dancer later, and as I guessed, she had first learned
fireplay at the Burning Man celebration, which happens each summer in
the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. Burning Man is a “temporary autonomous
zone,” a portable city created on a bare, ancient lakebed (or “playa”),
and then removed after the week-long event, leaving the desert empty.
Anything (literally) can happen, as long as it doesn’t involve
guns or motorized vehicles. Art, sex, drugs, music, theatre, whatever—anything
goes. A central theme of Burning Man is fire: burnable art, fire breathing,
fireworks, and flame twirling, with its main ritual, on the last night,
dedicated to the burning of a six-story tall effigy of a man.
At other rituals I’ve been to in recent years, including Beltane
at the Center for Symbolic Studies in Tillson, the importance of fire
as an empowering and purifying element is being remembered. Burning
Man has had its influence; I keep turning up places where people get
out the torches or batons and light the flames of transformation. Lots
of them trek out to Nevada every summer for some healthy freaking out.
We live in a culture where fire is a very contained, frightening element,
and one usually associated with poison and not purification. Some of
us get to have gas stoves and wood heat, and a scant few of us get to
experience open fire. Except for candles, our society has for the most
part reduced fire to resistance (electric heat and stoves), internal
combustion engines (cars and trucks), dioxin (incinerators), and good
old smoking. We believe the Sun is toxic, and nuclear power, a kind
of weird, unburning fire, is toxic for centuries after it’s usable.
Things do burn down, and we’re also familiar with fire as an unpredictable
and destructive force of nature, which bystanders watch with amazed
attention.
So the return of fire the creator, fire the cleanser, fire the impassioned,
and fire the theme of a sensuous dance at a women’s conference,
is a happy turn of history. Fire, in all its forms, is contagious. Passion,
change, heat and erotic energy, all represented by fire, can move from
person to person, from mind to mind, if we open up and allow, if we
breathe it out, and breathe it in.
Fire in the Sky
The astrology of Spring is a dance of fire. It will be difficult to
miss, though it’s nice if you know what’s happening. Each
Spring at the Equinox, the Sun returns to the beginning of the zodiac,
the fire sign Aries, when the days become longer than the nights. Aries
is the sign of the god Mars, and we count this time as the return of
passion, light and life here in the northern hemisphere.
But there’s a lot more going on than that. You may already know
that Pluto and Chiron are making their way across Sagittarius, a fire
sign which represents world culture, the fire of the creative intellect,
as well as the passion of Spirit. Since Pluto entered world-wise Sagittarius
in 1995, we have seen the surfacing of three kinds of globalization
themes: corporate (IMF and World Bank-style), raging protests against
this kind of unabashed planet-mongering, and the emergence of World
Beat culture, where influences from civilizations on every continent
are finding their way into our lives as music, food, tea, medicine,
dance, ritual, folklore, literature and art.
Chiron, a planet with strong themes of healing and Shamanism, swept
into Sagittarius in 2000, making a conjunction to Pluto just as the
first wave of anti-Free Trade protests was ending in Seattle. The amazing
thing about those protests was how aware one needs to be in order to
protest against an abstract entity like a trade organization, which
hardly poses the immediate threat of the draft (which inspired lots
of protests against the Vietnam War not so long ago). Something else
that turned me on was the presence of Pagan leaders like Starhawk and
the use of ritual, prayer and conscious intention by protest leaders
and participants. I think when we look back on Chiron in Sagittarius
and the rare Chiron-Pluto conjunction, this is what we will remember.
Now, a lot more happens with Pluto and Chiron later in the Spring, but
I would be getting ahead of myself. First we get to have some real fun
and talk about Venus.
Fire Walk With
Me
Venus is Planet Desire, and she is also Planet Fulfillment. Though we
usually think of her as associated with chocolate bonbons, bear in mind
that the temperature on Venus is about 900 degrees, which is the temperature
of most women if you can (metaphorically speaking here) get past the
dense cloud cover that envelopes the surface of the actual planet. Venus
is currently in Aries, which is a sign of fiery initiative, outgoing
lust, and passion. In Aries, Venus is about self-conscious beauty, but
she takes on a Marsy property and openly wants more, and is not afraid
to be unladylike and, you know, Just Do It.
Every two years, Venus does something we usually think of Mercury doing,
which is turn to retrograde movement. She moves faster than the Earth
and is about to pass us on the inside bend, whizzing by and creating
an illusion of reverse movement through the zodiac. Retrograde motion
occurs when the Earth and the retrograde planet align on the same side
of the Sun. The effect is just like when one train is passing another,
and the slower train appears—very convincingly—to be going
slowly backwards.
This turns the love and desire emphasis of Venus to self-love and self-desire,
a kind of inner experience of erotic passion. We are very dependent
on other people for our fulfillment and for affirmation of who we are.
I don’t think we can get out of this any time soon, but we can
learn to make the best of it, and we can learn to appreciate ourselves.
I’ve already mentioned that Pluto and Chiron are in another fire
sign, Sagittarius. Mars has joined these two planets in Sagittarius,
and on March 18th, there is a rather beautiful event. Mars crosses over
Pluto’s position, in the 16th degree of Sagittarius. In the 16th
degree of Aries (a perfect trine), we will have Venus conjunct the powerful
asteroid Juno, whose themes involve marriage. Venus retrograde in Aries,
plus Juno says, marriage to Self is the true marriage of this season:
self as Higher Self, self as Lover, self as lifelong consort.
But these goddesses align perfectly with Mars and Pluto in Sagittarius
in a gentle and harmonic trine. The potent energies of male Eros, Anima,
male desire, join one another and find freedom and expressiveness within
the fully realized image of inner female, Animus. The image is of joining,
ease of communication and contact, opportunity and freedom. Three days
later, the Sun enters Aries and Spring begins.
Galactic Times
There is one more act in this play. Mars continues on his way through
Sagittarius, where later in spring he will meet Chiron. Chiron is also
beginning a retrograde at this time, standing still in the last degrees
of Sagittarius, which align with the center of the Milky Way galaxy,
our home. In the coming months, because Mars will also go retrograde,
there will be three close conjunctions between Mars, the primary male
energy, Chiron the energy of healing, learning and transformation, and
the galactic center which astrologically symbolizes the central source
of our existence and intelligence.
In reading the symbols and signs of the universe, we could not wish
for a more vivid harbinger of the reuniting male energy with its higher
vibrations, original intention and Mystic Warrior quality.
In recent years, there have been many words spoken in New Age circles
about sexual healing, awakening the inner male and female, and healing
our anger, relationships and gender issues. The wandering stars are
aligning in a rare, long-lasting and magnificent dance which we can
follow down here in the small world: a dance of life, love and the exchange
of passion and fire that has been liberated from the fears and hurts
of the past.
Astrology doesn’t force us to do anything; it only gives us choices,
and this spring, the choices are especially delightful. See you there.
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