The month begins on Easter Sunday, on a date that was Venus Fest in ancient Rome. To connect with the energies of beauty, prosperity and fortune in relationship, women would strip before entering the temple of the goddess. According to Kevin Danaher, in his book, The Year in Ireland, on April Fools’ Day, “It was customary to play all sorts of tricks in her veneration.” Was humor part of the goddess’ Springtime revival?
As for the resurrection, the goddess played a key role. In his, The Year of the Goddess, Lawrence Durdin Robertson notes that,
…in the Death and Resurrection rites of the pre-Christian religions… the god is always accompanied by a goddess. Osiris is attended by Isis, Tammuz by Ishtar, Bel-Mardok by Belet-Ishtar, Adonis by Venus, Attis by Kybele. In each case the goddess is shown either explicitly or implicitly as restoring the god to life… In the accounts of the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus, the person most in evidence is Mary Magdalene.
In his ambitious The Joy of Sects, Peter Occhiogrosso says that Attis may be the earliest of the heroes who were symbolically sacrificed at Spring. Attis’ effigy, made of foliage, was buried with a ritual of mourning, only to be disinterred three days later. His goddess Kybele was the Phrygian Earth Mother, connected with dark goddesses around the world from Kali to Tlazolteotl, who had the power to take away life and restore it.
How are we using our own powers? What type of assertiveness do we wish to bring forth from the collective shadows? In a world that seems to be wrought by negative projections of these energies, April’s influences can help us bring them into focus and evolve them.
Brave Mars and intense Pluto will be walking down Main Street. Co-rulers of big-boss Jupiter in Scorpio, they’ll move us to look at what kind of weapon our inner tough guy carries. Is it a sawed-off rifle, a pen, or the willingness to move ahead on an apparently daunting intention?
When we disown our energies of power and assertiveness, we get twisted warriors and demented leaders. Mars is considered “malefic,” and Pluto a creepy customer. And then there’s the “greater malefic”, Saturn, that pasty-faced schoolteacher with an army haircut who barely read your breakthrough paper and lowered your grade because you went over the word count by nine.
These archetypes are now at play. Some of the contacts are challenging, others are magical. Yet within all cycles are seeds of evolution. When we recognize the planets as mirrors of inner potential, we are equipped to access their gifts of healing.
Mars rules Sun, Mercury and Uranus as they all transit through Aries for the last time until 2094. Mars also rules April’s Aries New Moon, and co-rules Jupiter and the Full Moon in Scorpio.
The feisty planet will also be bugging his tough siblings, Saturn and Pluto. Pluto the powerful rules Jupiter and the Full Moon, and he’ll take a hit from Mars and a sextile from Jupiter, the planet of expansion.
As for Saturn, the planet of building rules Pluto in Capricorn, and both heavies join the retrograde motion of Jupiter and Mercury, helping us look within.
Whether or not we want it, the first….
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