Apotheosis

If we are to believe everything we read on the Internet, there was an event last Tuesday night which changed the world!  Not seen in over 2000 years, the "Star of Bethlehem" was reappearing in the Heavens! 

Dramatic!  Rare!  Magical!  Behold!

Ooh, shiny!

I jest, of course, but the clickbait just got to be too much. Also, when people get caught up in the good feelings of drama and fantasy, they tend to develop an acute allergy to reality and facts.

Jupiter and Venus conjoin every 13 months or so on the average, and their conjunction in 1988 was significantly closer. Furthermore, Venus goes retrograde between July 25 and September 6, so this conjunction is only the first one in a triple conjunction between the two planets. (Now that's a little more rare; it happens about once every ten years.)  The first encounter is the closest, however, and there is actually plenty of omens and portents in the Heavens overall at that moment which are worthy of inspection.

Starting with the focal matter at hand, we have the celestial tango of the Greater and Lesser Benefics under the solar spotlight in the Sign of Leo.  Love meets charity, beauty bonds with bounty.  In and of itself, aside from a very weak square to Saturn retrograde in Scorpio, there are no drawbacks here whatsoever.

Propping up this beatific conjunction are trines to Uranus in Aries and Luna in Sagittarius.  There is a strong impulse for sudden change here, change in an independent and perhaps unorthodox manner, coupled with idealistic optimism.  These three assemble a Grand Trine in the Fire signs, adding fuel, power and balance to this impetus.  The Grand Trine itself is somewhat transitory, as Luna forms one of its vertices, but it makes that snapshot in time all the more significant.

The only thing that would have made this conjunction more auspicious is if it were just a few degrees further along in the Zodiac.  Then it would have conjoined with the fixed star Regulus as well.  Regulus is Cor Leonis, the Heart of the Lion, one of the four Royal Stars of Persia, and the "kingmaker" among the stars.  In this case, however, Jupiter would hand over his sceptre to a new Cytherean Queen.  If one is looking more towards a spiritual omen, it would be more the case of "God is coming back and boy is she pissed!"  Despite the precise conjunction not really being there, the path of the triple conjunction does pass over Regulus, so I anticipate seeing more women rise to positions of power in the future.  This heralds a change in the governmental order of things, and Pluto hovering in Capricorn would back that up.  (The last time Pluto hung out in Capricorn, France and the American Colonies had their revolutions.)

The patriarchal structure will not go unopposed, literally, as a Sol-Mars conjunction in Cancer is trying to extinguish Luna's enthusiasm by fighting Fire with Fire.  That conjunction having a trine to Neptune retrograde in Pisces supports that resistance through belief systems and disinformation.  One can even see shades of the Emanuel AME and black church burnings in all of this.  As would be indicated by the outpouring of forgiveness from the victims and the subsequent "Hate Won't Win" campaign catching Fire, so to speak, the benefic conjunction supported by the Grand Trine prevails, with an assist from Pluto opposing the Sol-Mars conjunction. 

So this is indeed an auspicious snapshot of the Heavens, but the Star of Bethlehem it is not.  However, if you want to look for the next solid candidates to herald the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, look to the Grand Conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn in Aquarius close to Winter Solstice 2020 and Spring Equinox 2080.  Their close encounters bring each other within 6 arc-minutes of one another, which is 4 times closer than this last Jupiter-Venus conjunction.

When I was going through the regimen of the Outer Order, by far the hardest grade for me was Philosophus.  I have almost no planets in the Fire signs in my natal chart, and oh, how it showed.   I struggled with the spiritual alchemy of it all, sometimes mightily, but most of the time pathetically.  My wife sometimes reminds me of the scorch marks I left on her, but then I remind her that she was in Theoricus at the time, just fanning my flames.  I had taken no longer than six months in any previous grade.  Philosophus would take me a year and a half.  There were many a time that I didn't think I would make it, but I managed to overcome, thanks to a little help from my friends and loved ones, scorched or otherwise.

The peculiar thing about it now is, out of all the Golden Dawn initiations I conduct, by far the most efficacious ones are the Philosophus initiations.  With a proper opening of the Fire Tablet, salamanders come pouring out and start nipping at everyone's heels.  Closing the same, there follows a noticeable draft felt at the ankles.  So I boggle at the ease of working with the element of Fire, because it gave me so much grief when I went through its Grade.

I was discussing this paradox with my wife while in the car tonight, and I made a realization.  I was reminded of my struggles with social anxieties in my teenage years, and they were much harder and took a lot longer to overcome compared to my paroxysms in Philosophus.  The Hiereus tells us in the Neophyte Initiation that "every obstacle can at length be conquered by perseverance", but what I just discovered is, the longer you persevere, the stronger you become.

Besides, I didn't engage in the quest for the Great Work because I thought it would be easy...