Image credit: CHN. From the Jiroft culture- Bronze Age (late 3rd millennium BCE) located in present day Iran.

Right now Venus is out of sight, obscured by the light of the Sun in what is known as her inferior conjunction. The ancient Sumerian myth of Inanna- our oldest written myth- tells the story of the descent and rebirth of the goddess as a symbolic representation of the movement of the planet Venus as she moves between the Earth and the sun- and then the other side of the sun.

For Inanna, the underworld journey is a process of healing the split between herself and her dark sister, the lost or unconscious parts of herself that have experienced loss, betrayal, rejection, and trauma. It is a profound experience of awakening, reclamation, reintegration, and sovereignty.

For the ancient world -and still many today- it is believed that Venus is guiding and showing us how to move through the process of death and rebirth as an initiatory journey into the sacred nature of our being. She is showing us how to integrate the shadow and the light parts of ourselves.

This feels more important than ever as the dark unacknowledged aspects of the collective unconscious are becoming painfully visible and destructive.

In Mesopotamia, Venus in her underworld phase was represented by the deity known as Ishhara or Ishkhara- who was symbolised by the Scorpion. She takes her place among the other Scorpion goddesses seen in cultures from Hindu, Aztec, and Egyptian.

Ishhara is the goddess of healing, magic, and sexuality. A vow made to Ishhara was taken very seriously… vows made in the underworld are for real, as is eating the food of the underworld as seen in the myth of Persephone.

Perhaps we are realising that many Faustian pacts have unwittingly been made and that it is time to free ourselves from the bondage of corrupt systems which have led to the desacralization of our humanity.

Times of underworld descent are an opportunity to right wrongs and free ourselves from unconscious patterns and behaviours by making them conscious. This works individually and collectively – as we become conscious of the ‘great below’, below the veil of illusion, or behind the curtain of OZ, the impulse is to rise up and refuse further complicity with that which is in misalignment with or offensive to our essence.

As Venus continues her journey in the underworld, the moon is undergoing her own death and rebirth as she is partially eclipsed on Friday 5^th June in her full moon phase, positioned at the feet of the constellation Ophiuchus- ‘the Great Healer’ and close to the royal star Antares in the constellation of Scorpio. Antares symbolises death and rebirth, power and profound transformation.

Venus emerges on June 12^th just above the fixed star Aldebaran in the constellation of Taurus -the ‘Eye of Illumination’- another royal star which symbolises movement into the new and remembrance of the sacredness of life.

This Venus retrograde cycle closes on June 24 shortly after the solar eclipse/Solstice on 21 June.

Venus then journeys direct in her Morning Star aspect-or Lucifer the Light Bearer- for 9 months before making her superior conjunction on the other side of the sun. She then returns as the evening star- Venus as lover- for 9 months.

What powerful times we are living through as we, part of the cosmic matrix, also undertake these journeys filled with the possibility of renewal, repair, and remembrance of our sacredness.

Credit to Psychologist Heather Ensworth, and to Babylonian Astrologer Rumen Kolev for their research and presentations on this topic.

Light on Water, taken by me in Roslin Glen, Scotland.

We don’t all have to agree right now. Our experiences, though fundamental on some level are also unique. We have different families, communities, cultures (conditioning), and inner worlds (souls). In my opinion we also have different soul paths, karma, consciousness, and life purpose. And it’s all OK.

Some of us trust the people in power to lead us to a good place, and some of us don’t. When a certain few have so much power and money so as to affect the entire globe on many essential levels- including biological- one has to admit, that’s a staggering amount of responsibility. It seems only natural that some of us might want to question if the consciousness behind that power is operating honestly and transparently. For example, is the issue of world health being considered beyond the purely material level of biology and economics? Are less tangible influences also factored in, such as spiritual health and wellbeing, soul-based living, and the living planet?

In previous times, Priests, Priestesses, Druids, Seers, Mystics, and Shamans (or equivalent) might have been regularly consulted precisely because they were able to penetrate behind the veil to see how things operate the level of spirit.

Some people are content with a materialist perspective, others are not.

It doesn’t have to be all conspiracy theory and woo-woo though, separating things in this way only adds fuel to the already raging fire generating more fear, suspicion and division. If there is evidence that doesn’t match up, if there is a sense of dishonesty, or of things being hidden or occult, it seems wise to look a bit deeper. Highly emotive and terrorizing posts circulating on social media can obscure and prohibit measured and responsible conversation. Hence the reason why many people are choosing to opt out of the conversation entirely.

There is a middle way between not engaging and jumping on every little thing out there to prove the existence on an evil cabal.

Talking of wisdom, no matter where stand on the spectrum, keeping a strong inner intuitive connection with oneself is crucial.

If it comes to pass (and perhaps it already has), a global government based on technocratic principles will have unprecedented powers never before witnessed in the history of humanity (at least not as far as we know). Is it enough that these new ‘superpowers’ operate beneath the seemingly benevolent umbrella of humanitarian ideals and philanthropy? Can we trust that?

I need to state again- that is a colossal amount of power.

But life (including bacteria and viruses), and the nature of humanity is more than a problem to be mastered, solved, or controlled.

For me there is a bigger picture to consider- the journey of the human soul and the potential of the human spirit… an evolving humanity whose final destiny is yet unknown.

I am open to questioning the fundamental issues of our time and I encourage others to do the same. I am not going to pass up the opportunity to participate in the potentially greatest transformation (awakening) of our time. And as many have said before me, “We are made for these times”.

Above all I recognise that fear is the biggest inhibitor of the human spirit… and the evolution of humanity.

I notice that the more spiritually inclined among us are focusing on raising our vibration- and if possible, the vibrations of others. Staying positive, upping the ante on spiritual practice, and cultivating good health is essential – I absolutely resonate with that. And yet… I also feel it is important to contribute to the world conversation – we each have something to offer, and for those with spiritual aptitude it is so important to add that to the mix.

Of course, the danger comes in losing sight of oneself in the process and this is why it’s important to honour ourselves… it’s fine to switch off and nourish ourselves, it’s good to retreat for a while, tune into ourselves to find our authentic voice again. It’s all too easy to get bent out of shape.

For me it’s also worth remembering that at the level of spirit, in the absolute sense, or in what native people call ‘Great Mystery’ things may look very different to how they appear to us on this plane.

All things are revealed in good time.

Until then stay strong and centred.

This post speaks to the growing discussion around the possibility of enforced vaccinations.

I am neither anti vaccination nor pro vaccination; I am a strong advocate for medical freedom. I choose to live free from fear and manipulation – I choose personal autonomy, and I align with democratic values in the truest sense of what that means. I believe in the freedom to express opinions even while they may not accord with the general consensus, or the (often subtly imposed) social rules.

Image by Remedios Varo

No one needs reminding of what strange times we find ourselves in. Today we are living through an epic shift of consciousness, replete with upheaval and catastrophe on many levels of human experience. There is a kind of fever pitch taking hold of the collective imagination and in a bid to grasp onto shreds of certainty, theories, speculations and expert data merge and mingle almost seamlessly into jumbles of unfathomable material.

For me this craziness points one way- inward- to the inner knowing and self-generated wisdom that in the aftermath of the age of reason many of us have lost touch with. Bringing our instinctual and intuitive awareness back online is the portal through which we are being invited to walk now- and for me the compass that can lead us there is the language of myth, archetype and symbolism, or in the words Sufi master Ibn ‘Arabi, ‘the imaginal’.

I notice people are getting very angry with conspiracy theorists; one woman’s rant against pseudo researchers demands literature reviews, abstracts on every paper cited and independent probability statistics on each report given before accepting the material as valid. I agree that spouting any piece of second-hand information that comes one’s way in an attempt to validates one’s fears and assumptions is not helpful. But the question I am asking today is, what qualifies a democratic point of view? Also, epistemologically speaking, how do we know what we know are how justified are we in sharing our beliefs?

This is a tricky subject… given that most of our science, philosophy, academia and medicine has been filtered through an androcentric lens for several hundred (if not thousand) years, what space has been left for other ways of knowing? From the Renaissance to the early modern period and beyond, medicine has almost exclusively been dominated by white males of a certain class and education. It was not until 1983 that a woman received the Nobel prize for physiology or medicine, and that was only after decades of having her work refuted and ridiculed by the medical establishment.

This same privilege of male sovereignty is also applied to the fields of education, religion, law, finance, philosophy, and scholarship- in short, the tenets of our entire current Western civilization.

So how do we know?

Barbara McClintock the aforementioned female scientist said of her pioneering work in the discovery of the Transposable element (one of the most important contributions to the study of genetics):

“If you know you are on the right track, if you have this inner knowledge, then nobody can turn you off… no matter what they say.”

In studying maize races of South America, she confirmed the mechanisms of genetic regulation. She worked tirelessly and profoundly with the maize saying,

“I know my corn plants intimately, and I find it a great pleasure to know them.”

With asteroid Ceres conjunct her natal Sun in Gemini, Barbara McClintock seemed to be channelling the wisdom of the Great Mother herself and though she showed steely determination and steadfastness, she finally succumbed to the pressures of ridicule and stopped publishing her research.

She was, and is still, the only woman to ever have received an unshared Nobel prize for physiology or medicine.

My point is this- is the rational left brain, statistic qualified, peer reviewed, scientifically proven knowledge the only knowledge that we must believe or have any faith in? And, is wisdom the same as knowledge?

Given that most of Western knowledge has been presented by men, where we might wonder is the space for more intuitive ways of knowing? Scholar and ecofeminist Val Plumwood coined this particular androcentric way of knowing the ‘Master Model’, and in questioning the validity of this model says,

“The participants in the great dialogue of Western philosophy, which extends now some two and a half thousand years into the past, have been almost entirely male, white and drawn from the privileged sections of society.”

To the ranting woman who so vehemently dismissed any knowledge which has not been processed through the well protected grinder of the verifiable voice of reason, I ask, isn’t your view a little lop-sided and ultimately limiting of the vast human experience?

Some of the greatest scientific discoveries were made by ‘accident’ when the tyrant of left brain rationalism was snoozing… Paul McCartney wrote ‘Yesterday’ while sleeping, and many cast out and rejected artists and thinkers were later celebrated as geniuses.

How does an animal know to climb high or vacate an area when there is an ensuing tsunami or storm? It is down to primal instinct, or as scientist Rupert Sheldrake calls it, the Morphic Resonance… which is in fact a very ancient wisdom.

When I was child growing up in Scotland, I would often hear the women saying, “I just feel it in my water”, and we say, “I feel it in my bones”. We talk of ‘gut instinct’, but so often we are asked to deny these inner experiences and give way to an external voice of authority.

The problem is that we have by-and-large lost contact with our instinctual knowing which has been over-ridden by external governance. Be it the laws and codes of our society, the unchallenged assumptions of our parents and peers, or nowadays the aps on our smart phones that tell us when our next period is due or remind us that we need to pick up orange juice on the way home from work, we have forfeited the ability to think for ourselves.

It is this innate instinct that needs to come back online for us humans, and OK this process might look a bit messy in our ‘post truth’ culture where many of the external codes that we have placed our faith in have begun to crumble. It is little wonder that our channels of information are hoaching with conspiracy theories of a dark cabal, the illuminati, and reptilian intervention- the time is ripe for it.

This kind of projection however prevents the necessary descent into the human psyche to face and own the full spectrum of humanness in all its dark and light manifestations. Casting the darkness into convenient receptacles and scapegoats and remaining in blind fear will not facilitate awakening. Everything, says archetypal psychologist James Hillman, is in psyche, meaning it’s not so much that we have a psyche, but that we are part of the collective psyche, just as the archetypal energy of the lizards, the grays, and the omnipotent ‘One World Order’ are too.

Of course, within this great shifting archetypal matrix we also have an individual psyche and to get to know this is our personal journey or quest. Jung referred to this process as individuation and the ancients knew it as initiation.

In her book on the asteroid goddesses Demetra George says,

“Therefore, insight into one’s personal mythology, gained by an understanding of planetary themes in the birth chart, can enable the individual to more consciously live out his or her destiny.”

Myths depict the basic scripts of life and direct human drama; they are universal patterns of consciousness through which humans may evolve. To understand the secret meaning of myths and to consciously work with them prevents us from becoming stuck in chasms between life played without any personal autonomy, and projecting everything that happens to us onto some uncontrollable agent, or fate. There are of course also uncontrollable agents but here too they might be read through an archetypal lens. Finally, myth, archetype and symbols speak the language of the soul… it can not always be qualified or proven nor does it have to be.

To reject all impulses that fall outwith the spheres of acceptable rhetoric is to restrict the soul’s expression and questing for wholeness.

Once again this crisis throws us back on ourselves- we do not have to read everything that is out there, we don’t have to believe every opinion that floats in with the wind, and we do not need to get angry by other people’s beliefs. If we are triggered there is certainly something worth exploring. Above all this is an opportunity to master discernment.

The journey of the awakening human is to not get stuck or fixated in archetypal complexes or blame everything that we don’t like or understand on outside forces. The trick is to dance with the archetypes towards deeper self awareness and maybe even liberation.

Yesterday’s new moon in Aries highlights a theme of primal impulses, instinctual awareness (and instinctual wounding), as well as returning feminine consciousness, and body mind integration.

With the sun and moon at 4 degrees of Aries accompanied by a close conjunction with Chiron at 5 degrees and Black moon Lilith at 6 degrees, this lunar cycle (and the coronavirus) offers an opportunity to bring our instinctual wisdom back on-line. And let’s face it, with all the heady deluge of information -often conflicting information- our rational minds have been sent into a frenzy of confusion. But there is another place from which to draw wisdom- our bodies.

Mars is the natural ruler of Aries and as concentrated desire including the desire for incarnation, our instincts-though a bit damaged and wild from repression- may show us what we truly need and desire at this time. Mars is associated with primal forces such as raw anger, desire, passion, and sexuality. In its intensified expression it can be narcissistic, aggressive and even violent. As well as being a god of war, Mars is also a fertility and vegetative god and thus capable of expressing the mysterious forces of nature therein. Essentially Mars is primal power and seeks to manifest that which it desires… sometimes through sheer brute force.

In this new moon pattern, Mars (25 degrees of Capricorn) is also powerfully echoed in tight conjunction to Pluto at (24 Capricorn), and Jupiter (23 Capricorn).

The signature of instincts in the new moon chart reflects the necessity for engaging with our inner knowing and basic awareness born from an innate sense of what is important at this time. These inner stirrings will make themselves known to varying degrees of consciousness though it is not necessarily through the conditioned ego and the rational mind that this information reaches us. In a rare opportunity to silence the overactive, over controlling mind of societal protocol-and if we can tear ourselves away form the onslaught of panic driven information-we might just touch in with the still silent voice of our deeper knowing.

What surfaces could very well get messy as a critical mix of fear, uncertainty, and insecurity contained in the pressure cooker of being locked down with family, friends and lovers, reaches boiling point. Sudden eruptions could break free from the usual well controlled psychic structures, causing shockwaves and disruption to the usual flow of interpersonal relationships. These outbursts may intensify as old Chironic wounds surface forcing us to acknowledge psychic material buried under layers of ‘normal’ daily life.

The Chiron wound is a wound of the instincts- often it is initiated in childhood when we are forced to deny our primal nature in favour of a more socially acceptable personality. Like an untamed horse the unintegrated instincts gallop through our inner landscapes in a constant bid to overcome the primacy of the ego.

The original wound of Chiron is constellated when he is rejected by his mother on account of his appearance. Abandoned by her shortly after birth Chiron becomes the foster son of Apollo who tutors him in many noble skills and crafts. The second wound of Chiron occurs when he is accidentally pierced by the spear of Hercules which has been dipped in the blood of the Learnean Hydra, the many headed serpent that cannot be slain until Hercules defeats her in his second labour.

This detail in the story of Hercules’ conquest of the Hydra is important in the myth of Chiron… while it is Hercules that causes the wound of Chiron it is also Hercules who sets him free by convincing Zeus to allow Chiron to trade places with the Titan hero and trickster Prometheus. This godly sanctioned trade-off facilitates the end of Chiron’s suffering as he is released form his immortal status.

The theme of snake medicine as pharmakon- the power to heal and the power to destroy is seen when Hercules both injures and redeems Chiron. In our own lives, Chiron in our birth chart by house and by sign may describe the nature of our wound, the poison and also the cure… and we discover that they are very often one in the same.

Could this be the medicine of the coronavirus? Many have speculated that what in the first instance appeared as a terrifying crisis for humanity also offers healing as perception shifts from one of fear to a heightened sense of awareness and responsibility.

Ultimately Chiron is the reintegration of our instincts and our conscious mind- not only bringing previously buried material to consciousness but also releasing instinctual awareness through the body thereby rebooting our inner knowing and guidance. In this respect Chiron and Black Moon Lilith carry a similar medicine- BML is also involved with the redemptive processes of releasing previously trapped psychic material and power from bondage. In the case of BML her healing comes from the reintegration of a particularly feminine pattern of consciousness directly linked with instinctual awareness, intuition and the ability to mediate the transference of energy between self and other, self and environment, and self and cosmos. Both BML and Chiron are masters of what may loosely be termed the ‘bio mystica’l process, that is the filtering of spirit through the world of matter thereby becoming agents of spirit in action.

Bringing it back to the coronavirus, questions to ask this lunar cycle may include-

What is it that weakens our immune system leaving us vulnerable to invasion? For sure, an early trauma and Chiron- like wounds that remain acknowledged lowers our resistance either through a weakened nervous system and/or repeated patterns and cycles of the original wound as the soul attempts to heals itself.

On the collective level, one question might be, what is it that humanity needs to bridge between the personal and collective at this time? Also, the human/ divine; unconscious/ conscious; heaven/earth… after all Chiron is also known as the Rainbow Bridge positioned as it is between Saturn and the outer planets.

And for our individual journey of healing… where is your Chiron wound, how conscious of it are you, and how can the cause also be the cure?