MythAstrology: Exploring Planets & Pantheons - Softcover

Raven Kaldera

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9780738705163: MythAstrology: Exploring Planets & Pantheons

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0738705160 ISBN 13: 9780738705163

Publisher: Llewellyn Publications, 2004

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2005 Coalition of Visionary Resources (COVR) 1st Runner Up in Non-Fiction category!

In ancient times, priests, poets, and astrologers studied the movements of the planets to understand the cycles of life. Mars, Venus, Neptune - the planets themselves are named after gods and goddesses of civilizations past.

MythAstrology is a guide to understanding the expression of planetary energies through the signs of the zodiac. Explore the many myths that you may be living, their lessons, and their rewards and difficulties by discovering your own astrological mythology.

All you need is a copy of your astrological birth chart and this book to form a complete astromythological profile of yourself and your friends and family. Deepen your understanding of ancient myth, modern astrology, and your own psyche.

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About the Author:

Raven Kaldera is a pagan priest, intersex transgender activist, parent, astrologer, musician, homesteader, and the author of "Hermaphrodeities: The Transgender Spirituality Workbook" (XLibris Press). He is the founder and leader of the Pagan Kingdom of Asphodel, and the Asphodel Pagan Choir. He has been a neo-pagan since the age of 14, when he was converted by a "fam-trad" teen on a date. Since then, he's been through half a dozen traditions, including Gardnerian, Dianic, and granola paganism, Umbanda, Heithnir, and the Peasant Tradition. He is currently happily married to artist and eco-experimentalist Bella Kaldera, and they have founded the Institute for Heritage Skills.

...'Tis an ill wind that blows no minds.'

The Sun

Amon-ra

Sun in Aries
In the ancient land of Khent-the Black Land as its
occupants called it-the greatest of all gods was Ra,
the burning sun. He ruled over all the land like a
great father, dispensing wisdom and putting down
rebellions. Ra was the creator, the first god of the
people of Khent, which today we call Egypt. Before
there were any others there was Ra, the all-seeing eye
in the unremitting hot sky over a parched desert
land. He was the First, just as the Aries Sun is the
first, and always will be. In his legend we see the sun
with early eyes, those of people who first looked up
and saw divinity, the source of life. Aries is primal
instinct, survival, and he is very good at it.

Ra, as the sun, spent half the day soaring in the
air, inspecting his kingdom below. In the morning he
and his boat rose out of a lotus flower, and at night
he sank into the depths of the underworld, bringing
light for its dead inhabitants. This daily voyage was
not without peril, however; there was a great serpent,
Apep, living in the Nile, who sought to swallow
Ra's boat and had to be constantly fought off.

In the underworld there were other terrors, each
attempting to devour his light. In some allegories, he
is born as a little child each morning and ages to an
old man each night.

We tend to think of Aries as a simple, straightforward sign,
rather one-dimensional, without much depth. Nothing, however,
could be further from the truth. For one thing, Aries combines
apparently contradictory archetypes within him: the Innocent Child
of springtime and the Warrior of Mars. We will come to the Warrior
in a moment, but first we should look at Ra the sun god who lives
each day as if it were his whole life, present in the moment. This is
one of the gifts of Aries consciousness, especially in the solar placement.
Ra also needs to fight daily battles in order to survive and
bring light to both worlds, and here we can view the quintessentially
Arian trait of courage. This is the energy of the daily battle
that one emerges from victorious every time, and awakes fresh to
every morning, all demons defeated for the time being. It is part of
the Aries fire, and it is sustained by innocence. He does not believe
that he can lose or that each day may not be an event to be lived
with wonder.

Ra had a secret box locked away, which was the source of his
power. In it, as his unfortunate grandson once found, were two
items: a poisonous snake and a magical lock of blue hair. The snake
had a tendency to leap out and kill anything that opened the box,
and the lock of hair could heal any wound, even that of the deadly
snake. The two together can be read as both the Achilles heel of
Aries-the anger that leaps out impulsively, not caring who its random
targets might be-and its salvation, the lock of hair as blue as
the wide sky. The sky, in Egyptian mythology, is the place of the crying
hawk, Ra's symbol, and Horus's as well. The flying bird looks
down on things from a distance, a quality the tempestuous Aries
Sun needs to learn-using his head (from whence comes the lock of
hair) rather than his leap-and-strike survival instinct.

However, Ra made a few errors. Among them was his rather
strange attitude toward children and grandchildren. He drew from
himself the first two children, Shu the god of the air and Tefnut the
goddess of the dew, as if they were a mere experiment. When they
proceeded to have opinions and desires that did not mirror his, he
was rather surprised and annoyed. Shu and Tefnut mated and produced
two more children, Geb and Nut, and this upset Ra so much
that he ordered them permanently separated from each other, a task
Shu performed. When they managed to thwart him and produce
five children, however, he gave in and grudgingly accepted his new
brood. Aries likes new things, but only new things that go along
with his idea of how things should be, which seems like an impossible
contradiction and in fact is one. In spite of this, he recovers
quicker than many signs and does not hold grudges.

When Ra grew old and weak, his subjects began to mutter
against him. This is the worst fear of Aries the Child, who hates the
idea of old age and lack of control. Ra decided to teach his rebellious
subjects a lesson and sent Sekhmet after them, but she ate so
many of them that he had to resort to getting her drunk in order to
stop the extinction of his entire kingdom. This shows that even
when Aries' anger seems like a good idea at the time, it often gets
out of hand and has repercussions that the enthusiastic Aries never
seems to guess at beforehand. Isis also took advantage of his old
age, playing the feminine Venus-ruled Libra Moon to his masculine
Mars-ruled Aries Sun and charming the words of power out of him.
Once she had them in hand, she nullified his power and took it for
herself, and he realized-as trusting Aries often does-that he had
just been had.

Ra was the first god, and he was chief of the pantheon for millennia
of Egyptian history, but somewhere in the twelfth Pharaonic
dynasty a new god arose who would eclipse Ra and all the others,
up until the Christian era. He was warlike and strong, and bore as
patron animals the Arian ram and the aggressive goose. His name
was Amon, and his priesthood gained ground with disconcerting
speed. Pharaoh after pharaoh named himself after some relationship
to Amon or built temples or obelisks to him. The most famous of
them, the pharaoh who conquered more land than any other, was
named Ramses. Amon was Mars to the hilt; he was shown sometimes
as a man with double plumes on his head and sometimes as a
ram-headed man. He ruled the Age of Aries with his chariot and
lance.

Seeing this, the priesthood of Ra agreed to combine the two gods,
and Amon-Ra came out of that agreement. The new composite
deity that was Amon-Ra owned so much of Egypt's wealth that his
priesthood was richer than the pharaoh. After the last of the Ramses
dynasty died off, the chief priest of Amon-Ra ascended the
throne himself. In Ethiopia his priesthood chose the rulers; in Libya
they built him a great shrine. Child, Old Man, Great Warrior-he
held within himself all the archetypes of Aries, all of which any
Aries Sun can access and manifest, and neither he nor any of his
worshippers saw any contradiction.

Aries conquers less out of ambition than out of challenge-not of
others, but of himself. On some level, he knows that each trial will
improve his spirit a little more, and he is driven toward them. If he
can't find a worthy challenge to keep improving himself with, he
will find an unworthy one and pursue it anyway. He is the "I"
opposed to the Libran "Thou," and he can be self-centered, like Ra,
the sun that is the brightest thing in the sky. He can also fight to the
death for the right things, or the wrong ones. Aries' energy is not a
guided missile; it's a cannon that needs to be aimed properly or others
will suffer. Aimed at obstacles, he plows through them as if they
don't exist. It isn't so much ambition as the thrill of the chase. After
all, there are many reasons why a king or general would conquer
other lands, but Ramses, the chosen of Amon-Ra, did it for one reason
alone: glory. Aries understands glory. It's part of the secret of his
contradiction, you see . . . both the Child and the Warrior are surrounded
by clouds of glory. Different kinds, perhaps, but glory nonetheless.

Glory is the heart of this most fiery of fire signs . . . and
after all this time, hawks still circle the glorious, blazing Sun.

Gaea

Sun in Taurus
The Earth is the place from whence all our bodies come. It can be
thought of as the original body that we grow out of and that we will
return to. It can even be thought of as the body that we are parasites
living in, if you'd like to put it that way. However we put it, it
comes down to the same thing: Earth and body are on some level
one and the same. There is the fiery core of chemical reaction, there
is the skin, and there is the place where Earth touches Sun. This surface
is the place where most of the life is concentrated, green and
growing, sessile and moving, constantly changing yet dancing in the
same old patterns of birth and death and rebirth from the soil.

This interface of Earth and Sun is where we best experience the
sacred being that we call Gaea. Unlike other deities, she is easy to
see and touch. Other sacred beings can be experienced subtly in the
wind or the flames or the cycle of life, but Gaea is the most obvious
and tactile. We are never very far from her, unless we leave the
planet. She is right there, where we can dig in her, feed from her,
crumble her in our hands. And that's just the way Taurus likes it.

The ancient Greeks named her Gaea. She has other names,
though-Tellus Mater, Erda, Artha, Hertha, and so forth. She is the
one constant in every religion, because we are all born of her. Yet to
reduce her simply to a personification of the ball of dirt we live on is
to far underestimate her in our psyches. She is Mother as much as
she is Earth, she is metaphorical as much as she is physical. In our
collective unconscious she is the nurturing figure who is more powerful
than our actual mothers, and to whom they never measure up.

She is all-giving and maternal, but in a completely different way
than that of, say, Demeter, whom I have associated with Cancer.
Demeter loves personally and intensely, and is easily thrown off by
changes in her children, mirroring Cancer's sensitivity in the face of
trauma. Gaea mothers impersonally; she is all-generous, but none of
her children is more special to her than any other. She is hard to
shock. Like a secure Taurus individual, you can beat on her breast
and scream and she will stand patiently, loving but unmoved, until
you are done.

If this immense archetype seems a little difficult to live up to, it is.
Yet every Taurean Sun has Gaea at the roots. Gaea's impersonal
force of gravity illustrates the Taurean Sun possessiveness, which is
strong but often seems impersonal. People sometimes become property-
like, thing-like, in their hearts, and thus the confusion when
their "things" get up and walk away. Although Taurus does have to
guard against this, it does not come out of a sociopathic need to
dehumanize or objectify; it is just the ripple of Gaea consciousness
coming through them. To her, we are all her things.

At its worst, this can result in a kind of materialism where
objects or money take the place of attention or loving words. This
sort of Taurus is someone who, paradoxically, has not gotten away
from the earth archetype but has gone too deeply into it, and perhaps
needs to be dragged up and away by some other god who can
show them the long view. Whatever else material goods become a
replacement for, however, it will not be for physical affection. The
most sensual and affectionate of all the signs, Tauruses need physical
touch like they need water. It would do them well to remember
that earth without water-Taurus without Venus's ruling power of
love-is a desert. Sometimes just increasing the amount of loving
touch they have in their lives, assuaging that skin hunger, is enough
to bring them back from a dry world of materialism and drudgery.
For Taurus, hugs and cuddles really can work wonders.

Like Gaea, who objected to Uranus the sky god spreading himself
over her and stifling her, Taureans may object to more airy types
who dominate the conversation, expect everything to move at their
pace, and become impatient at the Taurus need to make decisions
slowly and think things over carefully. Like the physical Gaea, Taurus
prefers slow changes to fast ones. The Earth does not live at the
same rate that we do, and it is as if Taurean Suns are tapped into
that Gaian clock just enough to keep them slowed down a little
more than the rest of us. Slow, of course, does not imply stupid. It is
not the opposite of intelligent, but rather the opposite of impulsive,
or rapid, or abrupt, or haphazard. Taurus would rather see that
something is well thought through than go off half-cocked. And on
a simple emotional level, it takes her longer to get used to things.
That's why it's hard for her to let go of people and jobs and ideas-
she'll have to get used to not having them around.

It seems that in most descriptions of Taurus, astrologers go to the
trouble of emphasizing the bull rather than the cow, as if Taurus
was the most masculine of signs. It's actually ruled by Venus, the
most feminine planet of all, and is a supposedly "feminine" (meaning
receptive rather than aggressive) sign. So why all the macho posturing?
Perhaps in order not to offend male Taureans, who sometimes
do a good deal of macho posturing themselves, as if to prove
that they don't have any of those receptive qualities. Still, any sexism
out of Taurean men is far less about Taurus-type beliefs about
gender and far more about simply being socially conservative and
uncomfortable with major world-view changes. If we lived in a
matriarchy, Taurus men would probably be telling the rest of the
boys not to act uppity or take on women's airs.

To change the mind of a Taurus, you have to be in their life, day
after day, putting forth your best effort to be friendly, not getting
into a lot of intellectual discussions (because even if you win them,
it probably won't change her mind) and just putting in the time
until she gets used to you and whatever your alternative ideas and
lifestyle are about. You'll have to outwait her, which will not be
easy. When you've become a fixture in her life, strange ideas and all,
she'll accept you because it will be more effort for her to throw you
out. You can even keep your strange ideas, because she's used to
them now (on you, anyway), and she'll be more shocked if you ever
change your mind.

But anyway, back to the bull. This livestock animal appears in
hundreds of myths, from Europe to China, as the sacred earthspirit.
It seems (in the western half of the world, anyway) that if the
Earth Goddess could appear as an animal, it would be a cow, and so
the bull simply became Gaea's male incarnation. You will notice,
however, that the bull is often sacrificed to Gaea. Part of this is the
concept of giving back like to like, but the deeper meaning seems to
be that the aggressive, trampling nature of Taurus needs eventually
to be sacrificed to (read: cycle back into) the overarching archetype
of Gaea's abundance and generosity.

Gaea gives abundantly because she has it to give, which describes
a Taurus Sun who is secure in themselves. They are also associated
with the archetype of the Builder, which they share with Capricorn
and occasionally Virgo. However, the motivations are different: it is
said that Taurus builds up because there are mountains, and levels
flat because there are fields, and digs deep because there are caves.
In other words, Taurus builds like the Earth makes ...

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