Friday, October 26, 2018

Scorpio Venus Star Point 2018: Psyche Awakening

Scorpio Venus Star Point 2018: Psyche Awakening
 
Driven by the force of love, the fragments of the world
seek each other that the world may come into being.
                                 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin


Today Venus kisses the Sun, ending her cycle as an Evening Star and beginning a new cycle as a Morning Star. Today she is truly clothed with the Sun. What new wisdom will she take into this next phase of her cycle? What have we learned in the past 18 months about ourselves, about Love, about connection?
With the METOO# movement, with what happen with the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, with the rise of white nationalism again, more women are reclaiming our powers -- the powers of an awakened soul.
In astrology, Venus is connected with love, sexuality, longing, harmony, union, acquisition and beauty. Venus in Scorpio wants to be utterly transformed so that the passions of her heart can guide her life. Even more than the Roman goddess Venus, it is Aphrodite, the Greek sister-goddess of this stellar energy, who embodied the Wisdom of the Body and of Love. She held deeper longings, the longing to become an awaken soul.


As Venus makes this transition today from Evening Star of Wisdom to Morning Star of Embodiment, she opposes the planet Uranus, the planet of awakening, of freedom, of uniqueness. This takes us back to the original creation myth of Aphrodite.
Hesiod's Theogony states that . . . 
first there was Chaos, and then appeared "broad-bosomed" Earth, who bore, first of all and as her equal, the starry Sky, Ouranos. Then She bore the great mountains, valleys, plains and the Sea, and after that She mated with Ouranos and bore many children, among whom were the Titans and Titanesses, the ancestors of the Olympian divinities, who represented the 'titanic' forces of the earth. Yet, although Ouranos came every night to mate with his wife, Gaia, from the very beginning he hated the children whom Gaia bore him. As soon as they were born, he hid them and would not let them come out into the light. He hid them in the inward hollows of the Earth, and it is said that he took pleasure in this wicked deed.
             The goddess Gaia groaned under this affliction, and felt herself oppressed by her inner burden. Therefore she devised a stratagem. She brought forth gray iron and made a mighty sickle with sharp teeth. Then she took counsel with her sons and daughters, asking who would avenge her for this wicked deed. Only Kronos (Saturn) took courage and agreed to act on her behalf. So Gaia rejoiced, and hid Kronos in the place appointed for the ambush, giving him the sickle and telling him her plan. And when Ouranos came at nightfall, inflamed with love and covering all the Earth, his son thrust out his left hand and seized his father. With his right hand he took the huge sickle, quickly cutting off his father's manhood, and cast it behind his back into the sea.
             Gaia received in her womb the blood shed by her spouse, and gave birth to the Erinyes - the strong ones - and to other creatures. The father's genitals fell into the sea, and it mixed with the foam and gave birth to Aphrodite. Since that time, the sky has no longer approached the earth for nightly mating.

Aphrodite is the embodiment of this ancient promise -- that we are called to live in love, with love, for love. And that is exactly what we are called to do now, as we watch our world split apart, as the old ancient hatreds erupt and the powers that be try to use them. Now is the time to be brave and stand in love rather than hatred, in connection rather than enmity, in beauty and harmony rather than ugliness and war.
The story of how Aphrodite trains us to awaken to love is the myth of Psyche and Eros. In the patriarchal version, Aphrodite is jealous of Psyche and gives her tasks out of spite. But in reality, Aphrodite's love guides Psyche (which means soul) to awaken to love and to her own self-awareness and being.

Psyche ~ Susan Seddon Boulet
The story of Psyche and Eros was first written down in the second century A.D. in Apuleius' novel The Golden Ass.


A great king and queen have three daughters. The youngest is so beautiful that men worship her as a goddess and neglect the worship of Aphrodite, called Venus, for her sake. One result is that the girl, whose name is Psyche, has no suitors, for men reverence her supposed divinity too much to ask for her hand in marriage. So her father consults Apollo's oracle about her marriage, and is told to hope for no mortal bridegroom. He is told that he must expose Psyche on the mountain-top to be the prey of a fierce and cruel beast. Her wedding and her funeral are to be one. With heavy heart, he carries out the oracle.
           Now Aphrodite, in a jealous rage over men's acclaim of Psyche's beauty, and the neglect of her worship, sends her son Eros to afflict the girl with an irresistible passion for the basest of men. But when Eros goes to carry out his mother's plans, he himself falls in love with the beautiful girl. As soon as she is left on the mountain as a sacrifice, he has the West Wind carry her off to a secret valley where he has built a hidden palace for her. There he visits her at night and makes her his bride, but he forbids her to see his face. She is content for a while, until in her loneliness she begs to see her two sisters.


            Now her sisters are beautiful with a human beauty, and so they each have married kings. But when Eros reluctantly brings them to see Psyche, they are jealous of her wealth as well as her status as the wife of a god, and plot her downfall. The god tells Psyche that she must not let her sisters talk her into trying to see him, or else she will bring ruin on them both, and on the child that she bears. But innocent Psyche cannot believe that her sisters would betray her, and when they insist that she must be married to a monster since he refuses to let her see him, she forgets the love they share and listens to her sisters' plan.
            And so that night she takes with her a lamp to see by and a sharp knife to kill the monster with. But when she lights the lamp, she is overwhelmed by the beauty of the god, and touching one of his arrows, proceeds to fall in love with Love himself. As she bends over him to drink in his beauty, some of the hot oil from her lamp spills on his shoulder, and he awakens with a cry of pain. He rebukes her and flies away. The palace crumbles behind Psyche as she sets out on her wanderings, exiled from her lord.
            The sisters have little time to enjoy their triumph, for Eros soon sends them to their deaths. Psyche, meanwhile, is in such despair that she tries to throw herself into a river, but the god Pan stops her and warns her that she cannot kill herself. Then he tells her to call on the God of Love for help. Psyche wanders on, coming to the temples of Demeter and Hera, but the goddesses refuse to help her for fear of Aphrodite's wrath. Finally, when Aphrodite offers a reward for her, Psyche decides to go submit herself to the Goddess.
           Aphrodite keeps Psyche as a slave, beats her, and finally sets her four seemingly impossible tasks, threatening death each time if she fails. First, She sets Psyche to sorting out seeds - all sorts of seeds: barley, oat, millet, poppy, sesame, chickpea and more - into separate piles. Psyche despairs for her life until an army of friendly ants comes to her aid, completing the impossible task by nightfall. Next, she is sent to collect the golden wool from some man-killing rams. Psyche wants to drown herself again, but a reed by the riverside whispers to her that if she but waits until the heat of the day is past, while the rams rest in the cool afternoon breeze, she can go and pick the golden wool off the bushes and branches of the meadow without fear.
   Aphrodite is angry and amazed when She finds that Psyche has accomplished these two tasks, and sets her a third. Psyche must fetch a cupful of the icy waters of the river of Death, which can only be reached by climbing the highest mountain. There, two dragons guard the spring which gushes from the mouth of a cave into a pool and then quickly disappears again into the earth. When Psyche sees the path, she knows there is no way to accomplish her task. In her desolation, she is numb beyond tears. But Zeus takes pity on her and sends his eagle to help her. The eagle takes the cup and fills it with the waters of death, and returns to Psyche. Gratefully, Psyche returns to Aphrodite with the cup.
Now Aphrodite gives Psyche her last and most dangerous task. She bids her go to the Land of the Dead and ask its' Queen, Persephone, to send back to Venus a boxful of her beauty. Psyche imagines that her end is near, and determines to find her way swiftly to Persephone's kingdom. She climbs a high tower to cast herself down, but is stopped by a mysterious voice, which tells her that she can survive the journey to the underworld and come back safe and whole. She is told that on the way she will be asked for help by various people who seem to deserve her pity, but she must refuse them all and keep silent. 
                                                   

Psyche & Charon
 
Taking with her gold coins for Charon, the ferryman, and barley cakes for the ferocious, three-headed dog, Cerberus, Psyche treads the path of the underworld, holding fast to the knowledge imparted to her. She declines Persephone's offer of food and comfort, accepting only bread and water, until she claims the box of beauty. Then she returns to the upper world.
           Now Psyche had heeded all the warnings, but finding herself at the end of her journey she weakens, and seeing the task almost completed, she succumbs to the temptation to take some of Persephone's beauty for herself. She opens the box, and a shadow covers her over. She falls to the ground unconscious.


Psyche's Last Task ~ Susan Seddon Boulet

           While Psyche completes her tasks, Eros is recovering from his wound in his mother's house. Aphrodite keeps him away from Psyche while he is hurt, but when he recovers he stretches his wings and flies away in search of Psyche. Finding her unconscious on the ground, he wipes away the shadow from her beloved form and puts it back in the box. Psyche awakens to her beloved, who takes her to Olympus, where she is accepted by Aphrodite and married to Eros by Zeus. She is made a goddess, and in due time, gives birth to a daughter named Joy.

 
This ancient story has been retold in countless fairy tales and is an important part of the heroine's journey of self-awareness. Too often we think that love should be easy and painless, but as the poet Rainer Marie Rilke says, love is work.

To take love seriously and to bear and to learn it like a task, this it is that young people need. – Like so much else, people have also misunderstood the place of love in life, they have made it into play and pleasure, because they thought that play and pleasure were more blissful than work; but there is nothing happier than work, and love, just because it is the extreme happiness, can be nothing else but work. So whoever loves must try to act if he had a great work: he must be much alone and go into himself and collect himself and hold fast to himself; he must work; he must become something!
For believe me, the more one is, the richer is all that one experiences. And whoever wants to have a deep love in his life must collect and save for it and gather honey.
                                      Rilke: On Love and Other Difficulties


If love is to be our greatest achievement, then this new cycle of Venus must see us working to embody her Wisdom -- to become Psyche, to awaken Soul, to be Love.

Stories awaken things within us that facts alone can never show us. Meditate on these stories and next week when Venus is once again visible in the early morning sky, I'll be back to explain how you might live those 4 tasks that Venus/Aphrodite sets us to awaken our souls.

Walk in Beauty and Love,
Cathy


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