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.
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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