Dear Friend and Reader:

TAURUS AND SCORPIO present us with the most basic images of vitality, prosperity and the cycles of life and death. These two signs are represented by Venus and Mars, fundamental polarities for understanding life on Earth: male and female, and the delicate, absolutely unique inner balance of the two that every person possesses.
 

Illustration taken from "Ten Questions People Ask About Hinduism …and Ten Terrific Answers!"

Taurus is about abundance, gathering prosperity, working the land, and mankind's astonishingly complex, dependent relationship with cattle. The crescent in the Taurus symbol is the Moon. The Moon is exalted in Taurus: the ancients passed it onto us as one of that sign's ruling planets.
 
It's also the season of Beltane, a holiday traditionally celebrated by having sex in the fields for the sake of creating abundance for the year ahead. Many modern-day Pagans skip this part of the ritual: Christianity has made it so that sex is too embarrassing to even talk about. This kind of ritual is so fundamental to understanding and cultivating wealth that it is amazing our society functions at all without it.
 
Yet we are beginning to pay a high price for our tendency to deny the body, stuff our shadow material and consequently run from the wisdom and benefits of Eros. In short, our economy is organized around taking rather than giving: in particular from the Earth.
 
Scorpio, the sign opposite Taurus, takes the cycle of life to a cosmic level. It is the sign representing emotional and erotic surrender, humanity's long journey down the generations and the transfer of DNA as part of that process. Taurus is about what we possess; Scorpio is where we share, bond and exchange. Taurus is where we sow the fields and Scorpio is the harvest.
 
Neither sign is particularly useful without the other. All of the signs and all of the houses work this way. Two of the most significant pre-Christian holidays are held in these signs -- Beltane during Taurus, and Samhain (pronounced sahwen) during Scorpio. One is the celebration of new life; the other is an encounter with death. Note that of the two, Beltane is the most often ignored. Many Western cultures have big Halloween festivals right at Samhain, including Days of the Dead.
 
Where we tend to fall asleep is celebrating the rebirth of life. As usual, we want the harvest without working the land. Sex is very much a question of working the land, particularly when you exit from either obligatory or drunk mode. To embrace sex and sexuality consciously you need to do a few things: one is to admit your true needs; another is to take back stolen inner territory. Another is to challenge the definitions that were put onto you that have no bearing on who you actually are.
 
Hence, we live in a death-obsessed culture that lies to itself about both sex and death. And we live in a culture that pretends to be sex-obsessed but is really obsessed with the lack of sex, which expresses itself as glamour. This is a bigger paradox than it seems on the surface. In order to balance out the elements in yourself, you would need to go against the widely prevailing cultural grain. This makes it challenging on the immediate level -- it's difficult to even start the conversation, or to move toward someone or let them in. Then, the deceptions of our culture make it difficult to maintain a value on what we learned or enjoyed from doing so.
 
It's never too late (or too early) to allow the deeper elements, the underlying truth about existence, to work together and have some authentic expression in our lives.
 

DNA, the vector of all life, is associated with the sign Scorpio. Image By Paul Thiessen.

The Sun and Moon are getting ready to align across the Taurus/Scorpio axis, not once as usual for this time of year, but twice. The Sun enters Taurus on Sunday, April 20, followed by the Moon entering Scorpio less than 24 hours later. When the Sun and Moon align in opposite signs, we have a Full Moon. Because they happen to be aligning when the Sun is in the very first degree of Taurus, we will have another alignment with the Sun in the very last degree of Taurus.
 
Then there is a New Moon exactly on Beltane, traditionally celebrated May 5 (sometimes considered to be the entire month of May, known as The May). The New Moon occurs when the Sun and Moon are in the same sign, in this case, Taurus.
 
Then on May 19, the Scorpio Moon opposes the Taurus Sun, this time in the very last degrees of these signs, and we have the second Scorpio Full Moon. Then 12 hours later, the Sun enters Gemini and we begin the third and last month of the spring season.
 
The Full Moon is the time to express, celebrate, drum, dance and make love. In the next few weeks, we get two of them in what is for most people the deepest, sexiest sign of the lot. If you're not feeling it, you might want to ask yourself why. There is a difference between being virtuous and being uptight. And if you are noticing -- well then, light that fire.
 
Here are some May planetary highlights, with help from Serennu.
 
Mercury retrograde in its own sign, Gemini

Mercury entered Taurus April 17, then Gemini May 2.
Shadow (or echo) phase begins at 12+ Gemini on May 11.
Mercury stations retrograde May 26 (same day as Neptune!) at 21+ Gemini.
Mercury stations direct on June 19 at 12+ Gemini.
Echo phase ends July 4, one day after the Cancer New Moon.

During this Mercury retrograde, there is a triple conjunction of Mercury, the Sun and Venus on the midpoint day of the Venus transits of the Sun. Remember I said that -- I'll cover it shortly. We are approaching the midpoint of the two Venus transits of the Sun (one occurred June 8, 2004 and the next occurs June 6, 2012). The midpoint of the two transits is June 7, 2008.
   
Vesta enters Aries, conjoins the Aries Point

Vesta enters Aries Saturday, April 19. She is one of the more poignant symbols of our era: she is the Goddess manifesting as fire, representing our need to tend the inner creative and erotic fire rather than attempt to extinguish it. Her archetype is a mix of the virgin and the whore; she can manifest as both simultaneously, sometimes in the form of the chaste prostitute, the sexual healer, one who offers himself or herself in service. When she's not working right, she represents work as a substitute for relationship.

Mercury, the Sun, Amor, Venus & Pallas all pass through Taurus in April.

They will all make conjunctions to Sedna. By the time Pallas arrives on May 20th, Mercury has already left. The chart for, say, May 1 has the other 4 in there, including Venus conjunct Amor.
 
Asteroid Eros enters Gemini

This occurs May 8 and is shorthand for "let's talk about sex." With Mercury about to station retrograde, this is an excellent time for the truth to come out. Gemini is the sign of talking. For whatever reason, it has a tendency to be ashamed of very little, kind of how siblings (in particular, twins) know everything about one another. Retrograde Mercury is conjunct Eros on May 31.
 
Ixion Conjunct the Great Attractor

This aspect will continue through 2010. Will be exact again December 1. First exact pass was January 17.

The timing of this (it only happens about every 250 years -- the last time was in 1761) reminds me of the way the actions of our governments (Ixion) bring about the polarity, the reaction against, which brings up the whole idea of "what you resist persists." Anti-war is a lot different than pro-peace. The 60s were definitely more on the pro-peace end of the spectrum; our current era is characterized by many forms of aggression without grounding in a sense of abundance, true sensuality or exploration. Polarity is a necessary stage, but not an end in itself.





By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

I RECALL, a couple of years ago, driving home from a neighboring town on one of Missouri's many numbered roads, two-way traffic lanes that rise and fall over gently rolling hills lined with thick forest. It was late in the fall and the trees were bare, revealing little homes and trailers set back into the woods, invisible when summer dressed the trees with greenery. There seemed so many of them, some modest to the point of pitiable, the yards dotted here and there with old cars and trucks, farm equipment rusting quietly in the fading sunlight. For reasons I still haven't determined, you don't see people out much in this state; perhaps in the summer you'll see them sitting on their porches, fanning themselves, and my son tells me if I would get out and about at the crack of dawn I'd see a few more, but that's about it. This creates a feeling of abandonment to a city girl, such as myself. You can only tell if a home is occupied if the grass is cut or if there's laundry hung in the yard; over time, I've learned that even the pitiful ones are usually occupied even if signs of life around it are minimal.

Rural church near Wahoo, NE. Photo by Ryan McGinnis.

As I drove the thirty-odd miles back to the Pea Patch, I passed through the single town on that route and I use the word loosely. The typical township is composed of one street lined with shabby business fronts -- a gas station, a post office, perhaps a greasy spoon in which the locals gather. Andy Taylor, the beloved TV sheriff of the 50's, would recognize the customers although Mayberry would have been considered a real live city compared to these kinds of stops in the road. There's one other building in each of these little villages that is a cut above the others, maintained and spotless. I'll bet you can guess what it is ... it's the church. As I drove, pondering the isolation and poverty, it suddenly dawned on me why this state is repressively religious. There's literally nothing else going on.

Barack Obama is said to have put his foot in it recently, speaking to a group of Californian's about the bitterness of rural Pennsylvanians. Here is his quote: "You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

This is the moment you’ve all been waiting for: Part Seven of the Compersion Series -- The It’s Not About Sex Horoscope By Paloma Todd! Sign up today get the full six-part version (a short book) and on then Monday, read Paloma’s extended length amazing "It's Not About Sex, It's About Self" horoscopes -- Our most unusual, psycherotic, emotional and spiritual horoscope version yet at Planet Waves. Subscribe now and get the It’s Not About Sex Horoscope!

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, April 18, 2008, #710 - By ERIC FRANCIS