Digesting Summer
Virgo and summer's end and entrails
What does Virgo have to do with the end of summer? I’ll get to that, but first, some housekeeping. I’m teaching a course called Cosmic Rigor: Art, Poetry, Astrology, held once a week on zoom, beginning October 1, via the Morbid Anatomy Museum. RESERVE YOUR SPOT HERE. This class will also serve as a kind of intro to Psycho-Cosmos, a once monthly trippy dive into psychoanalysis/psychotherapy and astrology in 2025. Dates, details, and a secret link to sign up at a serious discount through the end of TODAY is at the very end of this email for subscribers only.
OK, onward—-
“Observing the early evening sky during the spring months, astrologers of ancient Greece and Rome would have been struck by a bright blue-white star shining with unrivaled splendor in the south-eastern corner of the heavens. The stargazers labeled her spica, marking the ear of wheat that the zodiacal sign Virgo holds in her left hand….The urge to travel back to origins, to a time of perfection, to a paradisiacal or mythological situation, is at the heart of the Astraea myth.” — Astraea, The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century by Frances Yates
The sun is a third of its way through Virgo, a sign which gets its qualities from the end of summer, when the season’s final embers are dying out. Thoughtful, somewhat sorrowful, a buzzkill, a little too real. Or, as the ancients said: “fastidious, set in the shape of justice, concerned with the body, involved with the mysteries, writers…” The Virgin holds wheat, editing the grain and prepping the harvest. As the sun makes its way through her, it begins to find fall, and to fall.
Last night, at a gathering in my backyard, the conversation turned from the Jurassic energy of the Delaware River to a magician who has been performing at a nearby inn for several decades. His hand skills, it was said, are unmatched. How does he do it? Even sitting in close proximity, one cannot fucking tell. Virgo is a mercury-ruled sign, and so glimmers with the impish quickness of The Magician. If Leo rules the center of the body, our hearts, then Virgo presses on and presides over the extreme and hidden operation of digestion—-revealing how the intestines and the hands-head work in tandem.
Virgo is sometimes likened to a vestal virgin, tasked with keeping Rome’s fire going, and also to Astraea—-the maiden who turned herself into a constellation, fleeing Earth because life here so sucked, promising to return when things got better—looking forward to some imaginary glowing era. The search for a pure origin or time involves much destruction. Virgo-ruled digestion: break down, analyze, sort, discard, keep useable nutrients. Mutable signs are tasked with the desiccation of seasons. In Virgo’s case, summer must go.