I’m opening up the void. Void of Courses is a monthly series of unrecorded workshops, an experiment in sacred/secret online space. Last year, we focused on moving images and varieties of voids—this year, we’re moving through the astrological signs. We began with Virgo, six months ago, and now that we’ve reached Pisces—our midway point—you can join us for the rest of the strange trip. The Pisces Void Workshop is tomorrow, Sunday Feb 25th. Details and void access HERE. Sign up by tonight at midnight ET.
(Spoke to fellow astrologer Danielle Beinstein about the Virgo full moon, the Virgo-Pisces axis, and cosmic animals here.)
After the contemplative, cave-riddled Saturnian phase of the alchemical-artistic process known as calcination comes Jupiterian dissolution. In this phase, we see water. The hardness of the beginning dissolves and breaks up in the hot hysteria bath of Jupiter and we see what we’ve got. Hot tubs and flow states and limitless readings, Jupiter rules Pisces. Neptune, too—with its glamour and search for paradisiacal origins—a being or a thing to dissolve, pre-fall, into. Disappearance and dispersal—Pisces is, after all, the final sign in the zodiac.
And every end lusts after its start. Regret, repetition, delusion, revelation, mystical accompaniment, postverbal silence and music, a new-old lingo of oceanic grammar. The fishes swim in opposite directions. A mutable, double-bodied, singing paradox. Its opposite sign is Virgo. Where Pisces can be broad and abyssal, an aerial shot of endless fishes, Virgo gets high on specifics. We’re at the beginning of the end of winter—-which points back to Virgo’s end of summer, prepping the harvest.
What lasted through the winter?
What words, materials, relationships?
What withered?
The sun’s in Pisces and the moon’s full in Virgo—they stare at each other, opposites, siblings, and counterparts. I think of Marguerite Duras’s 1981 film Agatha et les lectures illimitées which takes place at the sea—in a “drawing room in an uninhabited house.” There is very little speaking and “the sea seems to be sleeping.” Two siblings have returned to the empty-overfull place of childhood.
Or the opening lines of Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box”: “She eyes me like a Pisces when I am weak / I’ve been locked inside your heart-shaped box for weeks…” And later in the song, climbing back into an “umbilical noose.” The Pisces-Virgo axis is filled with fragments of yearning for innocence, purity, and escape from pain and worldly noises through the sweat of immersion, leaving, or altered states. We all long for nirvana.
When we return to the misty drawing room in winter from whence we came, and find it (and us) both changed and the same. Arthur Schopenhauer, Pisces philosopher, said: “After your death you will be what you were before your birth.”
PISCES SEASON HOROSCOPES for all twelve signs below, featuring famed Pisceans Kurt Cobain, Michelangelo, Arthur Schopenhauer, and others……I kind of enter a trance when writing these….I recommend reading for your sun, moon, and rising signs. Happy full moon.