Strange to imagine, but we’re already at the mid-spring holiday. That’s called Beltane, the celebration of love, sex, and abundance. After April Fool’s Day, it’s my favorite “special” day of the year, as it makes such a lovely point: of honoring the Earth and women as part of the divine feminine, which is to say, the basis of all life.
Some people are starting to figure out what this is about, and some always knew. Yet in Western civ, imagining the divine feminine as real is a little like trying to conjure sprites and faeries while you’re walking around midtown Manhattan. There’s a place and a time for everything, and in a forest or perhaps near the ocean is a natural place to feel how female the Earth and the cosmos are. As for the time, that would be Beltane.
This old holiday is commemorated by Druids, Pagans, or us witchy types when the Sun reaches the midpoint of Taurus, one of two signs ruled by Venus, usually on May 5 (it’s usually celebrated on April 30 or May 1 and some traditions have the party all month, known as the May). The other Venus-ruled sign is Libra.
All things related to Venus have one thing in common: producing people who are astonishingly diverse in their talents. There’s an inexplicable, multifaceted quality to Venus, and when she gets going, there’s a kind of fecundity that is nourishment, that’s dripping with erotic energy. Eros and creativity feed one another, especially when you get a positive cycle going.
It would appear that humanity is far from that right now: We’re in a time when fear seems to be feeding on fear, and many people are caught in the cyclone and not seeing any easy way out.
Venus has been one of the most active planets in the sky this spring. It was in retrograde motion from early March through mid-April, beginning in Aries and ending with a conjunction to Chiron in Pisces. Chiron is an agent of healing, or you might say, activation of potential. Chiron has a cathartic effect, and its intensity leads to plenty of confusion about what it’s really about.
Venus conjunct Chiron was a heart-opening, heart-rending, or heart-wrenching experience. Chiron activates the full potential of the other planets. The word apathy means the inability to feel pain. When you tune into a Venus-Chiron blend, you feel; and what you feel will give you guidance on what you need to heal.
Since we’re talking astrology, remember that in the background of everything happening is a great conjunction, one sign over, in Aries. That would be Uranus conjunct Eris. We’ve been getting a lot of messages to pay attention to this rare event, the one that I’ve been associating with what living underneath a digital ocean is doing to us: for the most part, numbing and shoving us out of body.
The last time Uranus and Eris formed a conjunction was on the Aries Point in 1927-1928; at the dawn of radio and television, and when a pineapple-sized version of the transistor was patented. At the beginning of the last Uranus-Eris cycle, everything we now live with was set into motion.
A Feminist Perspective
Venus usually clips through the zodiac, often faster than the Sun. Chiron is a slow-mover, currently transiting at about the speed of Uranus. So a typical Venus-Chiron aspect will last a day or two. What we experienced through much of April was a conjunction that lasted for weeks.
This seems to be emphasizing a message, in particular, about all things feminine and female, and raising those aspects of consciousness. It’s no coincidence that this is happening in a time when all things female and feminine (including the Earth) are under siege, be it psychic, economic, or physical. What comes to mind is the recent vindication of an avowed rapist by his ascension to the American presidency; and his politically expedient notions of destroying women’s health care, reproductive freedom, and legal abortion, not to mention eliminating all government regulations that protect the Earth.
It’s easy and somewhat accurate to look back at the past 2,000 years of Christendom as one long war against the feminine aspect of consciousness, women, female autonomy, and sex. What we’re witnessing today is a pathetic wannabe retro aspiration to the times when women were not considered owners of their own bodies, and did not even have names, which translates to being slaves.
Today, in an era when women can vote, have bank accounts, own real property, possess and use passports, publish in their own names, serve as ministers and professors, practice as attorneys and hold public office, we cannot exclusively blame men for this. It’s true that there exists an insidious culture of sexism and misogyny, though it’s perpetuated, supported, and tolerated by both men and women.
I remain shocked that even one woman voted for a man who openly bragged about sexual assault, and who yesterday said he thinks that Bill O’Reilly of Fox News did nothing wrong.
When we talk about overcoming the patriarchy, it’s critical to remember that this is not just a thing in the world. It’s a thing that exists in our minds: as various expectations, as a perspective, as cellular memory, and as a way of rearing both boys and girls that results in the problem as it has manifested over the centuries.
This was copiously documented by the existentialist philosopher and historian Simone de Beauvoir in what I consider to be the greatest work of feminist literature, The Second Sex.
The author notes that it’s principally other women who are responsible for initiating girls into accepting the world that men have created.
She does not let men off the hook, at all. She understands the problem of rape, a problem we need to understand better—and to admit that it will take the cooperation of men and women together to end this problem. She understood sexual repression of the sexes, at one point writing, “No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.” (We might note that fact, and figure out what to do about it, because it’s relatively easy to address, and it will help.)
She also reminds us what most people know well: “Women’s mutual understanding comes from the fact that they identify themselves with each other; but for the same reason each is against the others.” And, “Without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one’s liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.”
And: “It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them; the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.”
Escaping from Freedom
From a contemporary psychological perspective, it’s pretty easy to observe some of why this is. Yes, there is conditioning, though that comes as much from the pope and the priest as it does from the mother who wants her daughter to be baptized and otherwise indoctrinated into the church. It’s true that all the Abrahamic religions, including Judaism and Islam, have an issue with women. Christianity, though, essentially stole its cosmology from something called Manichaeism, with its dark and light philosophy—and women and sex ended up on what was considered the dark side.
The church is not merely against sex but is built on that idea as its foundation. And a great many mothers teach their daughters to be against sex and to hate, mistrust, or disclaim their own sexuality.
Anyone who does not claim and own their sexuality will be its victim. Feminism that does not embrace sexuality as natural, and sexual pleasure as a birthright, is not just flawed but fraudulent.
In the book Escape From Freedom, Erich Fromm explains that “modern man still is anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds, or to lose it by transforming himself into a small cog in the machine, well fed, and well clothed, yet not a free man but an automaton.”
Freedom demands responsibility and wisdom, and there’s always peril involved. Freedom calls forth full participation in existence. To the extent that any man, as in male-bodied person, has honest freedom, it’s an ongoing struggle, and requires a risk. Anyone who lives in an independent way has, many times, had to risk everything; often, his life. There is usually a fight or a long struggle involved, and the need to break free from the bonds that hold back everyone. That takes courage, which is usually in short supply.
Yet as Fromm notes, “The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.” This counts for men and women.
Venus Conjunct Chiron: A Tantric Perspective
Psychology and sociology only get us so far. To gain some additional perspective, let’s switch lenses to a pre-Christian view of sexuality, which today we call tantra. I’m not referring to “spiritualized sex” or to pujas and rituals, nor to the Kama Sutra. I’m talking about a cosmology that holds the feminine principle to be the equivalent of what we call the universe.
Consider that all people are conceived and gestated inside the female body. Maleness contributes one cell and half the genetic code. (As Simone points out, this is not even necessary, since females have most of what they need to clone themselves.) Female provides the dwelling place of the womb, all the nourishment, the patience, and the dangers of childbirth (a near-death experience, even on a good day). Male and female are not equal, and are not even equivalent. Just knowing this, we have all the information we might need to figure out what’s going on in the world, where there is so much raging against existence.
In classical tantra, existence as we think of it—by which I mean the Earth and the cosmos—is a female phenomenon. The male principle provides a seed of energy that activates existence, which is inherently feminine. In the tantric cosmology, female, and by extension woman, is the center of all existence, and the source of all creation.
If you’ve ever taken a moment to wonder what the heck is calling forth all this anger and resentment and attack toward women, what the power source is, it makes more sense in this context. All the effort to hold back women, and to exploit whatever is perceived as feminine—oceans, forests, and all the resources of the Earth, for instance—is an attack on existence itself.
Yet consider how much responsibility this places on women, and in particular, on women so long conditioned to think they are irrelevant and that their existence is wrong. It’s difficult enough to explain that voting matters or that a wife owns half of the property in a marriage. It verges on impossible to convey to women the notion of sexual autonomy, largely because there’s so much guilt involved. If you’ve ever experienced group sex, you may have learned that one woman can take on a whole room full of men.
Most men cannot hold a match to the power of fully expressed female sexuality. As Betty Dodson has joked about her own sex parties, the women were still going at it long after the men had retired to the living room to watch football.
It would be just as difficult for men, conditioned for so long to think that they are masters of the universe, endowed with the privileges of pillaging, rape, and murder, to accept the fact that they play a very small role in a universe in which they are inherently aliens. It’s difficult for men to accept that female, or what we call woman, is the giver, the nourisher, and the taker of life.
It is possible, though, to touch this reality, and that’s enough to set a creative process in motion. Barbara Hand Clow described Venus conjunct Chiron as “orgasmic fusion with the cosmos.” But there’s more to it than that. One of my clients yesterday paraphrased her teacher, Tamara Slayton, who quoted a much older source: “As long as the blood of women is not revered, the blood of warfare will be glorified.”
This article appears in May 2017.
