Sedna
So where were we? Ah yes, I was doing a little investigative reporting in the dairy aisle at Vashon Island Thriftway when I uncovered the following story.
THIS JUST IN: NATURE STILL EXISTS
For some reason, our local supermarket carries a lot of goat products; this is how the Northwest gets its reputation for being so groovy. Goat yogurt. Imagine all those mellow Northwestern farm women in their Birkenstock clogs milking little mischievous grey critters, in places like downtown Seattle, which of course you see every day.
Stuck to that particular shelf was a hand-written note that said:
Goatmilk Products
Shoppers: it's once again birthing season for goats + supply is greatly limited - sorry - Vashon Tway.
I cannot tell you how relieved I was to see that the natural order of reality had some bearing on the human experience.
As cosmic coincidence would have it, that was the same day the discovery of Sedna was announced by astronomers at Cal Tech. It was seen using the Spitzer Space Telescope, which among its tricks peers into space by way of a camera. Most planetary discoveries are not made by gazing at the stars in the backyard sense of the word but rather by studying photographs. The discovery was made in a plate taken by Mike Brown and Chad Trujillo on Nov. 14, 2003, but due to the need to confirm the discovery, the announcement was delayed five months.
Given that the minor planet count presently stands at 243,682 (bodies orbiting our Sun), and you hardly ever hear about any of those, there's a pretty big deal being made about Sedna; it's made all major media and there are many articles that appear in searches.
Sedna is something unusual even on the scale of all those minor planets. It's very nearly the size of Pluto, and thus the biggest planetary discovery since Pluto, in 1930. It is believed to have a Moon, though the evidence is indirect. It is the reddest thing discovered since Mars.
And its orbit is about 10,500 years -- though not quite the longest known. That distinction currently belongs to 2000 OO67, which goes around our Sun in 11,670 years, and which was discovered in the summer of 2000. As the Cal Tech web site put it, however, "On 15 March 2004, astronomers from Caltech, Gemini Observatory, and Yale University announced the discovery of the coldest, most distant object known to orbit the Sun. The object was found at a distance 90 times greater than that from the Sun to the Earth -- about 3 times further than Pluto, the most distant known planet."
Its orbit is extremely egg-shaped, and it's currently near the Sun. At its furthest, Sedna travels more than 800 times the distance from Earth to the Sun. It goes WAY out there, and comes back with messages and information from the deep subconscious.
Sedna is between 1,250 and 1,800 kilometres in diameter, bigger than Quaoar, another major discovery in which Brown and Trujillo were involved. Quaoar was designated minor planet 50,000 in 2002.
The combination of Sedna being the largest thing since Pluto, the most distant object sighted, the length of its orbit and the fact that its discoverers broke the rules of naming a planet, have collectively gotten this thing a lot of attention. Specifically, the rule they broke was that the International Astronomical Union (IAU) doesn't normally entertain naming proposals 'til a planet has been assigned a catalogue number. It's been provisionally designated 2003 VB12 but has not yet been catalogued formally.
But the discoverers will get the opportunity to name it once all the orbit is confirmed and the paperwork is filed, and obviously the name is going to stick. It has already become part of our culture.
There are a lot of themes to cover relating to this discovery and how we relate it to astrology. If you're wondering where this planet is in the sky right now, it's at 18 degrees of Taurus. In our lifetimes, it has only been in Aries in Taurus. Interesting that it was conjunct Chiron in early Taurus (within two degrees) at the time of Chiron's discovery, and as such can be counted as part of the 'rainbow bridge' reality that Chiron represents.
The name comes from the Inuit goddess of the sea. The Inuits, formerly called the Eskimos, hold her as a goddess of abundance in that she's directly involved with the bounty of the hunt. She is depicted as a morph between a woman and a seal. She lives, in the myth, at the bottom of the Arctic Sea. You can see an image of Sedna and an artist's conception of the planet here, where there are also lots of clear illustrations showing the orbit, the relative size and much more:
http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/sedna/
Astronomically, Sedna resides somewhere called the inner Oort cloud, the existence of which is not yet fully agreed upon by scientists and where the New York Times does not have a bureau. Most of the little planets beyond Neptune belong to something called the Kuiper Belt, which is a swarm of icy planetoids on the far reaches of the solar system (these are the Plutinos and the Cubewanos). Pluto is the king of this realm. All the discussion you may be hearing about "whether Pluto is really a planet" has to do with the fact that Pluto is really a Kuiper object, the first ever sighted, and there are some people who feel that calling it a planet was incorrect.
There's a precedent for demotion: Ceres, discovered in 1801, was originally called a planet and was then reclassified as an asteroid, which was probably a mistake that may be reversed soon. For Scorpios in the audience worried that your planet is going to get demoted, fear not: from an astrological standpoint, this notion is an absurdity. Pluto is Pluto and evermore shall be so. If one pending scientific proposal is approved, Ceres, Varuna and Quaoar will be promoted to official planet status rather than Pluto being demoted. This will be fun because it will send tons of astrologers scrambling to catch up with what's already a very interesting and available field of study today. But it's also purely academic. What astronomers define nine or 12 of a quarter million bodies to be seems like a lot of wasted bandwidth. They are all planets if you ask me.
The fact that Pluto is so influential suggests (or might reasonably suggest) to astrologers that there's more information waiting in its region of space. But in fact, exceedingly few astrologers bother with anything beyond Pluto, and by exceedingly few, I would take a guess and say there are maybe 20 in the world who could do a chart session really factoring in these points in a meaningful way. That's about on par with how many professional astronomers are involved with this kind of research as well; lots of planets, few people interested.
The Oort Cloud, where Sedna lives, is the next swarm of stuff out beyond the Kuiper Belt, and extends halfway to the nearest star. The Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud are the realms from which comets and centaur planets are drawn into the inner solar system, like a reservoir of ancient space material from the earliest days of the solar system. All of those little planets, probably millions or billions of them, are held into place by the Sun's gravity. But from the viewpoint of Sedna, the Sun could be covered with the head of a pin at arm's length. It would look like a large, bright star. You could not do much sunbathing there; the temperature is about 400 degrees below zero. Not exactly Rio Rancho.
Sedna, as I mentioned, was named for the Inuit sea goddess. The myth is rather interesting and deserves a much closer look than I'm going to give it here. But in short, it involves a very beautiful young woman who was preoccupied with her own magnificence. She turned away suitor after suitor until one day, when the family was starving, her father said that she would be married off to the next hunter who came along. This was done, but the hunter turned out to be a raven, who secreted Sedna away to his island, where she was miserable as a captive of marriage to a strange and alien being. (Sound familiar?)
Her father heard her howling through the airwaves and finally, riddled with guilt, he came in his kayak to get her. But the raven wouldn't have it, and attacked the father as he made his rescue. Finally the father threw Sedna into the sea, and when she tried to climb back into the kayak, he hit her fingers with the paddle. They broke off and became seals. Then he hit her arms and they broke off and became whales. She sank to the bottom of the sea, where she now lives, kept company by the creatures of the deep.
A complete version of the myth is located here:
http://www.hvgb.net/~sedna/story.html
It's important to remember that there are many versions of myths, more or less similar to one another. To get a feeling, you have to study several versions, which I plan to do over the next few weeks.
What I find the most interesting about this story is that it's about the creation of a god where man is doing the creating. I know of no other such myth associated with any creation god or goddess among the named planets. With all these worlds beyond Pluto, we're seeing a lot of creation god names and stories come to the surface: Varuna, Quaoar and others. But they all involve god or the gods creating people or other gods.
I also think Sedna's preoccupation with her own beauty but total disinterest in men is really quite an interesting one for our times. Perhaps it makes sense given who she is revealed to be, once the story is borne out. But it's certainly a pretty common scenario today. And I think the dynamics between the father and his daughter deserve a much closer look: he perceives her as property to claim or discard as he pleases. There is obviously a relationship. Were I a woman, I would not have interest in men who would take me as property, particularly if that was my father's attitude.
We could also ask: who were these people? They predate the gods, or at least Sedna, a primordial goddess. Were they proto-people, or deities themselves?
The announcement of the sea goddess returning comes at a moment when water and the health of the oceans is a very serious issue on the planet. The seas are in distress; as a result, all ecosystems are in distress.
This is particularly true at the polar regions, which are basically melting, and which bear enormous burdens of pollution. PCBs, for example, are heavy, oily chlorinated compounds that were used in hundreds of industrial applications. These collect in the fatty tissue of critters and quite effectively at the polar regions, despite there not being any industry there, and people in the region eat those animals.
The seas are being fished empty by industrial fishing. There is exceedingly little fresh water left clean -- we barely had any to begin with on this planet, and now most of it is polluted. Reading the articles on water in aquasphere (the Planet Waves annual horoscope for 2004) earlier this year was enlightening: I had no idea how serious the situation was. See The Hydrotoxic Spiral by Tracy Delaney:
http://planetwaves.net/aquasphere/norlnpgg/open/hydrotoxic.html
Meanwhile, there has been a lot of talk of water on Mars in recent months, as Spirit and Opportunity explore that planet via remote control. The fact that Mars had water and as a result probably had life are bigger reality shifts than we may notice today. Until fairly recently the only image of a Martian anyone could muster was of someone who was going to fly over in their space ship, land and conquer us. There is a vast subculture in the U.S. -- listeners of Coast to Coast A.M. -- who are followers of the folklore that Martian civilisation was destroyed by a cataclysm, the atmosphere dried up, and Martians came here as refugees.
If that is true, and it seems plausible enough, we carry the memory of this trauma in our genetic code. Even if not, we are headed on a course that we must soon reverse or risk the same kind of cataclysm in which a large number of people leave the planet suddenly. Those who think we don't actually face this risk perhaps can give as much as acknowledging that this fear is rather strong in the unconscious and conscious minds of many people. And evidence that this fear is founded can be found in the oceans, which function as the immune system of the planet, as well as the food source and the primordial seed-bed that supports all life.
Thanks to Chad Trujillo and Mike Brown peering in to deep space but remembering the myths at the core of the psyche, we're reminded to honour the goddess of the oceans, Sedna.
The Record of the Time
Scientific discoveries can help serve as markers of time. At the time of the Sedna discovery, we note the following news stories were developing. There were two cases in which parents were charged in the mass killings of their children, one in Anchorage and another in Fresno. The enquiry in to the death of Dr David Kelly, the U.K. arms expert who had warned that the claims of the Bush and Blair administrations were nonsense, was itself called nonsense by a group of doctors in England. But the coroner refused to re-open the investigation, making it an open secret that there's something to hide.
Tensions in Kosovo escalated. In the wake of terrorist bombings, Spain threw out Jose Maria Anzar and elected Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero prime minister. While essentially replacing a fascist with a socialist, this set a dangerous precedent of terrorists electing the next government as the US enters the full-throttle of its election process.
We are on the anniversary of the fraudulent invasion, occupation and war in Iraq, as the insurgency steps up its resistance dramatically, killing many people. The Washington Post reports in today's editions:
A year ago tonight, President Bush took the nation to war in Iraq with a grand vision for change in the Middle East and beyond.
The invasion and occupation of Iraq, his administration predicted, would come at little financial cost and would materially improve the lives of Iraqis. Americans would be greeted as liberators, Bush officials predicted, and the toppling of Saddam Hussein would spread peace and democracy throughout the Middle East.
Things have not worked out that way, for the most part. There is evidence that the economic lives of Iraqis are improving, thanks to an infusion of U.S. and foreign capital. But the administration badly underestimated the financial cost of the occupation and seriously overstated the ease of pacifying Iraq and the warmth of the reception Iraqis would give the U.S. invaders. And while peace and democracy may yet spread through the region, some early signs are that the U.S. action has had the opposite effect.
A small asteroid, 2004 FH, made the closest approach to Earth ever recorded Thursday (see NASA web page: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news142.html).
Additional research: Kirsti Melto, Tracy Delaney, Juan Revilla. Thanks to Chryss Alex of the Centaurs list, Jeanne Treadway and others for their contributions.
Equinox, New Moon, Retrogrades
This has been a challenging week for a lot of people. The Sun has moved through the last few degrees of Pisces, wrapping up the astrological year, and the year for many pre-Christian cultures who celebrate the new year in the spring.
The Sun enters Aries, the Vernal Equinox, Friday night at 10:48 pm PST (Saturday morning at 1:48 am EST and 6:48 am GMT). This begins the spring in the northern hemisphere and the fall in the southern. It is now six weeks to Beltane and 12 weeks until the beginning of summer.
The Aries New Moon is Sunday afternoon/evening at 2:41 pm PST (5:41 pm EST and 10:41 PM GMT).
Mars is on the verge of its ingress to Gemini, which happens Monday in most U.S. and European time zones. This begins two seasons of rather intense activity in Gemini, as both Venus and Mars work through those signs. Venus, in particular, will be retrograde in Gemini between May 17 and June 29, about six weeks. The "shadow phase" -- that is, the duration of time when Venus occupies any of the degrees where the retrograde occurs -- extends that from April 14 through August 2.
Mercury has entered its shadow phase for a retrograde that extends between April 7 and May 2. The shadow phase adds about three weeks onto either side of those dates and began earlier this week. The whole process lasts about two months. The last one ended in late January and spanned December and January.
Future History Reflection of the Week, by Eric
It's irrational to think you're going to vote someone out of office who never got voted in. There's an inherent contradiction there.
Early Aries Birthdays
From the look of your anniversary charts, you are heading for one of the most memorable years of your life. At the moment of the Vernal Equinox, the Moon trails about nine degrees behind the Sun, covering the very end of the horoscope as the Sun begins the journey of the new year. Some Grateful Dead lyrics come immediately to mind:
Terrapin Station
in the shadow of the moon
Terrapin Station
and I know we'll be there soon
Terrapin - I can't figure out
Terrapin - if it's an end or the beginning
Terrapin - but the train's got its brakes on
and the whistle is screaming: TERRAPIN
Terrapin Station, named for the land turtle that lives on Turtle Island -- an indigenous name for the North American continent -- is that symbolic place where we finally arrive, and which unravels, exceeds or shatters all previous expectations of life. As the song goes, some rise, some fall and some climb to get to Terrapin. Enlightenment is a strange process, and it rarely works out exactly as planned. The benefit is that because true growth works out differently than you thought it would, you can relax about what you want to be the outcome and just deal with, or appreciate, what is so.
There is something LARGE happening in your world: a change of consciousness that will quite literally transport you to another space of mind, and quite possibly a different physical space. This year presents an awesome opportunity for you to learn to speak your mind. I'm not talking about in the usual Aries sense of the idea, but rather something akin to an intellectual journey that develops as you express ideas, reconsider them and then express them a new way -- over and over.
I suggest you do this in writing. I suggest you do this in writing no matter how difficult it may be for you, or how your schedule likes the process. And I suggest you share that writing with your peers and anywhere you can get it published, even if it's a little web page or coffee house Zine. Your house of writing -- Gemini, the third house for Aries -- is so powerful this year, with such profound depth coming through, that to prioritise anything else would be like hanging out in the parking lot during the World Series when you could be going to bat. The benefits will come. They will take time, but they will come.
For both men and women, this is a time of rethinking the sex roles you were taught as a child, particularly to the extent that you learned them from or explored them with siblings. Family patterns are going to come out, reveal themselves, be exposed for what they are, and you're going to finally have a chance to do something about them. For people who were mistreated as children, which is most of us but I'm talking about actual sexual and psychological abuse, there are clear signs you will come to a new level of understanding about what happened, why it happened and what you can do about it.
There is a family pattern at work -- a pattern that long predates your birth. You were born into this pattern and while it seemed like the beginning for you, you actually appeared in the middle of a long story. What you will discover are how these patterns affect you now, how they affect the people you select as partners, and how they affect and indeed create the whole experience of your relationships. Pay attention to female friends and female partners! A little later in the year, they're going to go through some enormous changes that you'll have the benefit of learning from and bearing witness to.
While you are normally an extroverted and assertive person, the year begins on a distinctly introspective note as Mercury warms up to a retrograde in your sign. In all respects you are being given opportunity after opportunity to Know Thyself. But this is not for the sake of knowledge; this is active introspection that yearns to be expressed. You are changing, you are growing, and ever there was a time when you could be born again every day, the time is now.
Eric Francis Horoscope
for the week of March 19, 2004
Aries (March 20-April 19)
Your season has arrived. In high form. The Sun, the Moon and Mercury will join forces in Aries this weekend, which marks a major turning point for you and, in many ways, for the world at large. This is not a time to keep your opinions to yourself. And it is very much a time to take up an active role in shaping your community and your household. However, you really need to listen, and seek active methods of receiving feedback from people around you. There's no question who's the boss, but if you want to be taken seriously, you need to be the kind of mayor who answers mail and gets potholes fixed.
Taurus (April 19-May 20)
You need to get through an emotional bog and you'll be fine. This one comes stamped with the "what am I doing with my life" DNA marker. This may in fact be a crisis of rather large proportions right now; I would not be surprised if you were dealing with a sense of failure and sacrifice that you suddenly realise is rather old. For many reasons, you are getting the point this time around. But you must squarely address the question of sacrifice. Why is it such an important concept? Whose idea is it? I assure you -- it's nothing original. But to get beyond it, you need to be vigilant about what you believe.
Gemini (May 20-June 21)
Mars enters your sign this week for the first time in nearly two years. Mars in Gemini is more than most people can handle. But it's not more than you can handle. Truth be told, it's been difficult for you to muster the focus that life is constantly calling you to pull together. It appears that you're suddenly going to have the strength and power to meet the world in a meaningful way, which may feel far more forceful than you're accustomed to. Remember that you don't need to be forceful, just clear and honest -- particularly honest, and that means honest with yourself. If there's just one price to pay for the gifts you're about to receive, let this be it.
Cancer (June 21-July 22)
Once again, it's time to make a career move. Make it a big one, and do it now. Reach for something you really want to accomplish. I have no doubt whatever that this has been on your mind; if you've noticed nothing else the past year or so, it's how confined you are, and how much you yearn for blue skies and mountaintops. There are no guarantees on Earth or in heaven, though your chart is a ticket to much better places at the moment. As someone once wrote in one of these horoscope columns, the stars in their courses may guide us, but it is you who must row the boat.
Leo (July 22-Aug. 23)
This weekend's stunning New Moon happens in the angle of your solar chart that deals with the greater possibilities of life, and with the rewards of endurance. Enduring what? Well, what else is there to endure but change? I guess it's possible to survive things not changing, but then you have to plunge headlong into a new reality, and embrace the possibility of success as well as of failure. Fortunately, failure is a thought far from your mind right now, as well it should be. This is a blessed moment in your life, and you have the strength and the faith to receive just what you need. Many around you will benefit from your good fortune.
Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22)
You are moving into a long review period, one that's going to last about two months. You're likely to see lots of new opportunities for beginnings, including beginnings in relationships. But I suggest you really make a conscious effort to go over your sexual history, in excellent detail. Who were these people who were so important to you? What did you exchange with them? What have you been left with as a result of the experience? You search for your identity a lot more than you realise in sexual situations. Some of what you find you want, and some you don't, and it's best to know the difference.
Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23)
A lot depends on whether you can sort out the details of a significant deception that's more or less run your life for a while. The thing about deceptions is that they tend to go unnoticed; then suddenly we're swirling in the midst of them, like they were always there. The matter at hand involves how much you actually want someone or some thing. It seems you've been the very picture of hot and bothered, and once you figure out what was actually going on, you get to change your mind. You were just living in a small world, that's all. A bit too small for anyone's good.
Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22)
I think by now you're aware of an old way of doing things that was not working, for you and for someone important in your life. This is a moment of pretty rich opportunity in your relationships, but you have to know what you want to make that opportunity into anything solid and tangible. The fear that your current situation may turn out to suddenly be an all or nothing arrangement could be made real if you don't go out of your way to communicate your actual desires. Silence does not equal strength in this situation, even though speaking up comes with a significant risk. If you don't take your chances, you're taking a big chance.
Sagittarius (Nov. 22 - Dec. 22)
Your sense that you're capable of anything is not necessarily coming through as positive inner feedback. Anything includes a lot of possibilities, and some of the less savoury ones may be getting your attention now. The real question is what you do with your second chances. Everyone makes mistakes in life. There is no getting around that. Then, we're almost always offered opportunities that make up for those errors. The most stifling fear you may face is the feeling that you're going to squander an excellent opportunity to make amends with the world. Personally, I doubt it.
Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20)
You may still be shaken up from recent events or emotional upheavals, but the energy of the new days and the new season that's approaching is all about emotional renewal. Put your energy into clearing the spaces in your life: everything from closets to computer drives to conversations with people you need to be clear with in order to move on. A change of physical location would also help, even if you rearrange what you do in the different rooms of your house. You are also getting a grip on a bad habit that has done little other than hold you into unproductive emotional patterns. That's the keyword of the season: emotional patterns. Pay attention and be free.
Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19)
Among the lessons of life that are the most challenging is keeping one's faith. This isn't a matter of religious importance; rather, faith is what stands between your heart and the sense that life is a futile exercise. It seems that recently you've become aware of a sacrifice you made, or perhaps a long series of them. You may be wondering whether it was worth it, or whether your choices had any net positive effect. Wonder, but not so much that you lose your faith in yourself or the future you've worked so hard to create. The future is now; the past and its losses are gone.
Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20)
The queer liberation movement is making a personal house call to Pisces this spring. Everyone is queer -- as a Pisces, you already know that. Everyone has their own particular erotic calling, their own unique sexual orientation. Both Sappho and Eros have arrived in Pisces in recent days. Sappho's gift is allowing us to magnetise just the people we need around us, those with a close enough affectual orientation to get the energy and ideas moving. Eros is about the creative power of sex and sexuality, and the sexual power of what we create. Get yourself out amongst the people, and you will soon find your people.
