Exponential Potential

This week we struggle to integrate the manifold lessons of the last month while new ones unfold with surprising rapidity.  Things begin with an annoying T-square between Uranus, Pluto and Mercury, a configuration that foreshadows the complications of Summer’s crosses.  In the midst of this planetary tangle, Jupiter enters Gemini (11^th), where the big planet will be growing clones and playing video games for the next year.  Meanwhile, a retrograde Venus returns to visibility, proudly hailing the dawn again as Morning Star.  All the while the waning Moon slides slowly across this changing skyscape, shedding unnecessary psychic tissue to make room for new growth.

Morning Queen

Venus will continue along her retrograde path for the next two weeks, yet this week she strides back into visibility, purified by her time in the heart of the Sun.  The time that she ascends to visibility as the Morning Star (Lucifer) is different depending on latitude, but virtually all will greet Venus’ face to face this week.  This heliacal rising does not “solve” the Venus retrograde issues in play, but it places them before the mind’s eye as well as the body’s, making things considerably easier to understand and therefore to enact the appropriate transitions.

 The Mighty Crab-duceus

On June 7^th, last Thursday,  Mercury entered Cancer, whose stinky lakes the messenger will be splashing about in until June 25th.  While Mercury is in Cancer, the subject turns naturally toward emotionally engaging matters.  Greater levels of discourse between family members is common.  Mercury’s time in Cancer favors conversations as a means of bonding, the exchange of secrets and the exposure of vulnerabilities.  It is often difficult to discuss matters in a purely objective tone during this time, as conversations consistently veer toward people’s feelings about the matter.

Square Dancing Lesson

The messenger’s time within the Crab’s shell pulls us heartward, compelling us to find a way to emotionally integrate the confusing eclipse tunnel we’ve just left.  Yet the messenger’s journey through sensitive Cancer is a troubled one.  Mercury spends the 10th, 11th and 12th in a tense T-Square with Uranus and Pluto, stressing communications considerably and befuddling thought patterns.  Though not catastrophic in nature, this T-Square foreshadows a pattern that will recur over and over again throughout the coming season as the Sun, and Venus cross the same difficult degrees.

Setting The Multiplication Table

In this midst of this small storm (11th), Jupiter meanders out of the stockades of Taurus and hops on the bullet train to Twin town.  In Gemini, where Jupiter will be until June 2013, we’ll be offered a variety of opportunities and blessings.  Jupiter in Gemini amplifies the ability to learn quickly but shallowly, blessing attempts to grasp languages of all sorts.  Small opportunities emerge in bundles.  Finally, Jupiter seeds the spiritual wavelengths with strongly dualistic viewpoints, telling Manichean tales about the Brothers Light and Dark, starring the traditional cast of Cain and Abel, God and Satan, Set and Horus and the rest.  For more, check out “Jupiter in Gemini.”

After a season of devouring shadow selves and sacrificing multiplicities for realities, Jupiter’s movement into Gemini starts to switch things up, blessing and inspiring the very pattern of self multiplication which has been the target of the eclipse’s darkness for the last year and a half.  This return to normalcy for those who live under the banner of the Twins is reaffirmed by a second new Moon in Gemini on the 19th which, unlike the one on May 20th, portends no eclipse.  The coming New Moon not only breaks the pattern of eclipses in Gemini, it sits right on the Solstice.   It is a pivot point, and thus pivotal- but we’ll deal with that next week.