surprising, weird, and HOT truths of Virgo season
The sun has entered into Virgo, a sign associated in the popular imagination with calm fastidiousness and purity.
It's true that people born with strong Virgo placements in their chart (sun, moon, rising) tend to be excellent at managing fine levels of detail and complexity that would cause many other folks to run in the other direction.
It's also true that Virgo, the sign of mutable (meaning changing) Earth, ruled by the Trickster Mercury, holds far more hot and weird mysteries than popular culture gives it credit for.
Like what?
Well, Virgo revels in illuminating the secrets of pleasure, the invisible strands of sympathy and longing that bind all the intricacies of the created world together.
Virgo by nicoolay, via Getty images
The deepest pleasures in life don't come through rushing and grasping, have you noticed?
The deepest pleasures - whether in the bedroom or on the playing fields of life -- come through expansive, relentless, non-grasping attention.
Virgos succeed at mastering their crafts through their fascination with the way the previously-invisible order, plan, or dream can be made visible through attentive action.
These days all the sexy sexy desire and pleasure stuff gets attributed to brooding Scorpio, but the ancients associated Scorpio primarily with the mysteries of death.
When it came to sex as play and theater and fun, the ancients might have thought of frolicsome Leo...
... but when it came to sex as sacrament, they would have thought of the fascinating maiden (i.e., untamed, unmarried, whole-unto-herself) Virgo, who presides over the harvest.
Virgo is the mystery of the weird (literally wyrd - as in the Norse web of unseen Fate) feminine unmanifest (the implicate order, as physicist David Bohm would have it) ripening into manifestation (the explicate order, according to Bohm) through the heat of attention....
.... or, agriculturally, through the analogous heat of the Sun.
It's through the secrets of pleasure and pain that transmutation happens, and as the sign of mutable Earth, Virgo knows how to transmute one form of substance into another...
.... -- poison into medicine, dirt into sophisticated beauty, using the patient, pleasurable heat of attention.
What am I talking about, the heat of attention?
Oh, you've felt the heat of attention.
Think about how you feel when all eyes in a room are just on you.
Does your heart beat faster, do your cheeks flush?
That's the heat of attention. It's very closely akin to the heat of arousal.
It's erotic, and it provokes ripening and fullness.
Consider this:
Historical evidence from pre-Dynastic Egypt at the end of the fifth millennium BCE, suggests that the Virgoan art of Metallurgy...
... i.e., the taking of raw minerals from the ground (essentially big piles of rubbly dirt), melting them down and forming them into shapes...
... began not for purposes of industry, agriculture, or even warfare ...
... but as the province of magicians who ritually fashioned sacred jewelry and tools for ceremony.
Think about that.
The first priority of our ancestors upon figuring out how to smelt metal was to make something beautiful.
This art of maintaining a hot holy flame of desire, a fire of vigilance and attention and will, and using that flame to illuminate chaos and create gleaming, lasting beauty out of piles of boring dirt...
... can also be found represented in the Hermit, the Major Arcana from the Tarot associated with Virgo.
The Hermit wanders in a lonely wilderness, with a lamp (the flame of attention and will) as his guide.
The Hermit, from the Thoth deck by Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris
The Hermit also doesn't conventionally get much credit for off-the-charts sexiness.
He is, after all, a bearded old man wandering the wilds alone.
But he's doing the sexy sexy work of fructifying the land, the world, with the loving heat and light of his refined magician's attention.
In other words, the Hermit is not just some random old dude ...
... he's Hermes, he's Odin, in his guise as the Wanderer, the Traveler, the Stranger who fathers fantastical magic wherever he goes.
So if anyone dares suggest that Virgo time is all about nerdy neat-freaking...
.... just arch your eyebrow and look at them with the heat and light of your magician's attention.
Eventually they'll fructify.
What to do with Virgo energy?
Well, the astrology this month, as of this whole year, is generally very difficult with Mars in Aries squaring Saturn-Pluto-Jupiter in Capricorn...
... but Venus is happy in Cancer right now.
So I suggest that on Friday you go ahead and make some time to commune with Venus and honor the ripening mystery of Virgo.
To do this, offer roses, wine, chocolate, the flame of a red candle, and rose incense or essential oil diffusion on your altar, while chanting Aphrodite IO HO, Aphrodite IO HO for as long as you like, then sitting or laying to receive Her presence.
And whenever you want some deep pleasure - remember to pay attention.