Saturn square Neptune

We’ve just had an astrological foreshadowing of 2016. The first square between Saturn in Sagittarius and Neptune in Pisces occurred on Thursday, underlined by Mercury’s conjunction with Saturn.

What does this mean? Our dreams receive a giant-reality-check-makeover.

All of this was further highlighted by Wednesday’s full Moon in Gemini.

Geminis, Virgos and Sagittarians REALLY felt the pressure to find clarity and the path forward. This is just the beginning! If we’re able to integrate this aspect we can find huge rewards down the road.

Saturn is the reality check. It is structure, discipline, maturity, time and timing. We reap what we have sown. Neptune is the planet of Magick and Belief. It’s the most spiritual and visionary of planets. It can awaken our consciousness or plunge us into escapist fantasies. The choice is ours.

When Saturn travels through Sagittarius, it brings a serious tone to our faith and inner truth. We need to follow a structure in order to experience freedom, walk our talk and apply ourselves with disciplined practice. Sagittarians around the world are becoming responsible in a new way.

Neptune is the visionary, and it’s natural home is Pisces. This dissolves our boundaries bringing vision, creativity, spirituality and music. There is no more separateness… we are all ONE. To quote Empowering Astrology: “Neptune does not entirely belong to our solar system. The view of life it teaches us originally belongs to other parts of the Milky Way.”

Neptune also brings the desire to escape reality.. leading us to drugs and distraction to escape the brutal realities of the world.

What happens when these two planets meet in a square? It’s an opportunity to structure our dreams – to make them real! This often happens through hard work which can be difficult for mystical types. As I said above the rewards are huge.

The other side is that illusions are shredded. People fall off their pedestals because their flaws become obvious. Are you playing out old, outworn patterns? Still going after the same people or situations that end up disappointing you? Time to snap out of it! If you’re lost in a fantasy or lying to yourself, the bubble will be burst in the upcoming months..

We’re in an interesting week astrologically. We’ll have a Gemini Full Moon tomorrow at 3 degrees and this one will oppose Saturn and square Neptune. We have some major things to figure out and commit to — things that must be in alignment with our hearts, our souls, and our higher good.

From Mystic Medusa: “This has been building all year, since last Xmas Eve actually, when Saturn first got into Sagittarius. A dream that you thought was sustainable and that was happening turns out to be based on quicksand.

A person you thought was your companion or staunch ally on the journey takes a side path away from you and you find out something dirty about them whilst you’re trudging onward. But there is no point berating them or even whining. They can’t hear you – your paths diverged a while back but you’re only now seeing it with Saturn Neptune.”

Where do witches come from?

"Circe" by Franz Stuck

Where do witches come from?

• By Alastair Sooke

10 October 2014

Ask any Western child to draw a witch, and the chances are that he or she will come up with something familiar: most likely a hook-nosed hag wearing a pointy hat, riding a broomstick or stirring a cauldron. But where did this image come from? The answer is more arresting and complex than you might think, as I discovered last week when I visited Witches and Wicked Bodies, a new exhibition at the British Museum in London that explores the iconography of witchcraft.

Witches have a long and elaborate history. Their forerunners appear in the Bible, in the story of King Saul consulting the so-called Witch of Endor. They also crop up in the classical era in the form of winged harpies and screech-owl-like “strixes” – frightening flying creatures that fed on the flesh of babies.

Circe, the enchantress from Greek mythology, was a sort of witch, able to transform her enemies into swine. So was her niece Medea. The ancient world, then, was responsible for establishing a number of tropes that later centuries would come to associate with witches.

The Three Weird Sisters from Macbeth, 1785 (The Trustees of the British Museum)

Yet it wasn’t until the early Renaissance that our modern perception of the witch was truly formed. And one man of the period arguably did more than any other to define the way that we still imagine witches today: the German painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer.

Double trouble

In a pair of hugely influential engravings, Dürer determined what would become the dual stereotype of a witch’s appearance. On the one hand, as in The Four Witches (1497), she could be young, nubile and lissom – her physical charms capable of enthralling men. On the other, as in Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat (c 1500), she could be old and hideous.

Durer's influential etchings portrayed witches as young and nubile or old crones.
"The Four Witches" by Albrecht Durer

The latter print presents a naked crone sitting on top of a horned goat, a symbol of the devil. She has withered, drooping dugs for breasts, her mouth is open as she shrieks spells and imprecations, and her wild, wind-blasted hair streams unnaturally in the direction of her travel (a sign of her magical powers). She is even clutching a broomstick. Here is the matriarch of the witches that we find in popular culture today.

For art historians, though, the interesting question is what provided Renaissance artists with the model for this appalling vision. One theory is that Dürer and his contemporaries were inspired by the personification of Envy as conceived by the Italian artist Andrea Mantegna (c 1431-1506) in his engraving Battle of the Sea Gods.

“Mantegna’s figure of Envy formed a kind of call for the Renaissance of the witch as a hideous old hag,” explains the artist and writer Deanna Petherbridge, who has co-curated the exhibition at the British Museum. “Envy was emaciated, her breasts were no longer good, which is why she was jealous of women, and she attacked babies and ate them. She often had snakes for hair.”

A good example of this Envy-type of witch can be seen in an extraordinarily intense Italian print known as Lo Stregozzo (The Witch’s Procession) (c 1520). Here, a malevolent witch with open mouth, hair in turmoil and desiccated dugs clutches a steaming pot (or cauldron), and rides a fantastical, monstrous skeleton. Her right hand reaches for the head of a baby from the heap of infants at her feet.

This print was produced during the ‘golden age’ of witchcraft imagery: the tumultuous 16th and 17th centuries, when vicious witch trials convulsed Europe (the peak of the witch-hunts lasted from 1550 to 1630). “Across Europe, there was the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the Thirty Years’ War, fantastic poverty and social change,” says Petherbridge. “Even King James in his text Daemonologie [1597] was asking: why was there such a proliferation of witches? Everybody assumed it was because the world had got so foul that it was coming to an end.”

As a result there was an outpouring of brutally misogynistic witchcraft imagery, with artists taking advantage of the invention of the printing press to disseminate material rapidly and widely. “Witchcraft is closely allied to the print revolution,” Petherbridge explains. Many of these prints, such as the powerful colour woodcut Witches’ Sabbath (1510) by Dürer’s pupil Hans Baldung Grien, can be seen in the British Museum’s exhibition.

By the 18th Century, though, witches were no longer considered a threat. Instead they were understood as the superstitious imaginings of peasants. Still, that didn’t stop great artists such as Goya from depicting them.

Los Caprichos, Goya’s collection of 80 capricious (or whimsical) etchings from 1799, uses witches as well as goblins, demons and monsters as vehicles for satire. “Goya uses witchcraft metaphorically to point out the evils of society,” says Petherbridge. “His prints are actually about social things: greed, war, the corruption of the clergy.”

Broom with a view

Goya did not believe in the literal reality of witches, but his prints are still among the most potent images of witchcraft ever made. Plate 68 of Los Caprichos is especially memorable: a wizened hag teaches an attractive younger witch how to fly a broomstick. Both are naked, and the print was surely meant to be salacious: the Spanish ‘volar’ (to fly) is slang for having an orgasm.

Around the same time, there was a vogue among artists working in England for depicting theatrical scenes of witchcraft. The Swiss-born artist Henry Fuseli, for instance, made several versions of the famous moment when Macbeth meets the three witches for the first time on the heath.

By now, though, the art of witchcraft was in decline. It lacked the strange imaginative force that had animated the genre in earlier centuries. In the 19th Century, the Pre-Raphaelites and the Symbolists were both drawn to the figure of the witch, whom they recast as a femme fatale. But their sinister seductresses arguably belong more to the realm of sexual fantasy than high art.

The one constant throughout the history of the art of witchcraft is misogyny. As a woman, how does this make Petherbridge feel? “At the beginning when I was looking at these images, I was quite distressed because they are so ageist,” she says. “Of course, now I’ve stopped being shocked by them, and I think that they are saved by their excess, satire and invention. Artists were often drawn to these scenes because they offered drama. They were free to spread their wings and come up with all kinds of bizarre imagery. Yes, these scenes represent the demonisation of women. But often they are keenly linked to social critique. Witches are the scapegoats on which the evil of society is projected.”

Alastair Sooke is art critic of The Daily Telegraph

Choose Her Every Day (Or Leave Her)

Great sentiment about love that’s been circulating around this week! We had a New Moon in Scorpio on Wednesday, and this article is a reflection of the emotional depth and commitment reflected in this sign. check it out:

”Choose Her Every Day (Or Leave Her)” by Brian Reeves

I spent 5 years hurting a good woman by staying with her but never fully choosing her.

I did want to be with this one. I really wanted to choose her. She was an exquisite woman, brilliant and funny and sexy and sensual. She could make my whole body laugh with her quick, dark wit and short-circuit my brain with her exotic beauty. Waking up every morning with her snuggled in my arms was my happy place. I loved her wildly.

Unfortunately, as happens with many young couples, our ignorance of how to do love well quickly created stressful challenges in our relationship. Before long, once my early morning blissful reverie gave way to the strained, immature ways of our everyday life together, I would often wonder if there was another woman out there who was easier to love, and who could love me better.

As the months passed and that thought reverberated more and more through my head, I chose her less and less. Every day, for five years, I chose her a little less.
I stayed with her. I just stopped choosing her. We both suffered.

Choosing her would have meant focusing every day on the gifts she was bringing into my life that I could be grateful for: her laughter, beauty, sensuality, playfulness, companionship, and so … much … more.
Sadly, I often found it nearly impossible to embrace – or even see – what was so wildly wonderful about her.

I was too focused on the anger, insecurities, demands, and other aspects of her strong personality that grated on me. The more I focused on her worst, the more I saw of it, and the more I mirrored it back to her by offering my own worst behavior. Naturally, this only magnified the strain on our relationship … which still made me choose her even less.

Thus did our nasty death spiral play itself out over five years.
She fought hard to make me choose her. That’s a fool’s task. You can’t make someone choose you, even when they might love you.
To be fair, she didn’t fully choose me, either. The rage-fueled invective she often hurled at me was evidence enough of that.

I realize now, however, that she was often angry because she didn’t feel safe with me. She felt me not choosing her every day, in my words and my actions, and she was afraid I would abandon her.

Actually, I did abandon her.

By not fully choosing her every day for five years, by focusing on what bothered me rather than what I adored about her, I deserted her.
Like a precious fragrant flower I brought proudly into my home but then failed to water, I left her alone in countless ways to wither in the dry hot heat of our intimate relationship.

I’ll never not choose another woman I love again.
It’s torture for everyone.
If you’re in relationship, I invite you to ask yourself this question:
“Why am I choosing my partner today?”

If you can’t find a satisfying answer, dig deeper and find one. It could be as simple as noticing that in your deepest heart’s truth, “I just do.”
If you can’t find it today, ask yourself again tomorrow. We all have disconnected days.

But if too many days go by and you just can’t connect with why you’re choosing your partner, and your relationship is rife with stress, let them go. Create the opening for another human being to show up and see them with fresh eyes and a yearning heart that will enthusiastically choose them every day.

Your loved one deserves to be enthusiastically chosen. Every day.

You do, too.
Choose wisely. ॐ”