TOUGH LOVE ❤️
HOROSCOPES + ASTROLOGY FOR THE WEEK AHEAD: the toughness of the moon, sharp tongues, channeling, and vessels
UPCOMING:
JUNE 29: PSYCHO-COSMOS MONTHLY WORKSHOP [our next one is on the erotic, the death drive, and astrology’s 8th house]
1 LEFT IN JUNE (TOMORROW!), AND 5 IN JULY: SATURN SESSIONS
JULY 26: INITIATIONS: A workshop on the cardinal signs with Danielle Beinstein and Emmalea Russo
“NOW BEGINS THE LIFE OF OUR MINDS” — James Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover
On Monday mornings, I look at the astrology of the week ahead and write to you. I’ve also been making horoscopes (ways to mark the hour, the week) using whatever text the astrology evokes for me. Today: my take on the tough love and vessels and sharp tongues of the week ahead. At the end, horoscopes taken from James Merrill’s wild epic The Changing Light at Sandover (1982) which features floods of voices and was written with the help of a Ouija board and guides. To me, it screams “first degrees of Cancer,” as the poet becomes vessel—strong and changeable as the moon—listening to, transcribing, and transforming these myriad voices (planets), maddening and sacred. “What if,” Merrill writes, “The blood’s least vessel hoisted jet-black sails.” And: “Here on Earth—huge tracts of information / Have gone into these capsules flavorless…” The poem was composed in the seventies, mostly at the coast.
Our sun’s in the house of the moon, moving through those early degrees of Cancer—the first summer sign. And in ancient Hellenistic astrology, it was not Aries, but Cancer, which was positioned first on the zodiacal wheel. The Thema Mundi, a mythic birth chart for the birth of the universe and a Hellenistic teaching tool, puts Cancer at the opening moments. This first zone of Cancer features images of mothers and children. The moon rules Cancer and has long been associated with motherhood. The moon mothers the sun, all of us, as she gives and takes light/life: waxing and waning, holding and disappearing. A silver paradox: both femme fatale and eternal nurturer.
It has to do with