Dear Readers: I’ve got 3 astrology readings left for January, before I take a winter break to write. I’m also teaching a cosmic and practical writing intensive Feb-April. Registration opens soon. Details and get on the wait list here. yrs, E
“Air, water, or crystals are thus the most favorable materials for media of perception.” (Aristotle)
Sun and Pluto crossed over into Aquarius yesterday. Slow, cold, and linked with death and rebirth cycles of hard won gold, Pluto will stay in Aquarius (save for a brief retrograde back into Capricorn this fall) until 2044. Aquarius: the cold, clairvoyant, fixed air of spiritual and physical midwinter. Fixed not because bolted. Rather, the dynamic stillness of the crispest days of Saturn’s season, silver. Freezing air that jolts us awake. Air is, according to Aristotle, an optimal medium for perception. Air is also ideas, genius, and madness. Gets everywhere. How to read the room, its people and airs, clearly? James Hillman writes: “It is easy enough to attribute inventions to genius, but genius is also an air, a nimbus around the head.” At times, a pure vibe.
Think of the women who populate “A Game of Chess,” the airiest section of Eliot’s The Waste Land: maybe-clairvoyants with fried nerves, wanting to know what we’re thinking—repeating, repeating. The pharmakon of air: at worst, paranoia, constant chatter, automatons, gamification of all, groupthink. At best, freedom, angels, play, clear-seeing, friendship, electric zaps of revelation.
Water can help us see air. Aquarius: an air sign who carries and pours liquid. Also: The Star card in the tarot. And Kierkegaard: “The sky was clear and pure, only a single light cloud glided unnoticed across it, best seen by fixing one’s eyes on the pond, beyond whose smooth surface it vanished from sight.”
Pluto, the underworld’s lord, will be in residence in Aquarius, moving glacially through the sign of our airy future, for the next twenty years. Horoscopes—keywords, sighs—-for Pluto’s trip below. I recommend reading for your sun and rising signs.
