The Gospel and the Zodiac

Venus, ‘The Morning Star’ (one of Mary’s titles in the litany of the Blessed Virgin). The great feast days in honour of Mary, her ‘birthday’ on 8 September, and her ‘Assumption into Heaven’ in August, both owe their origin to astrology, as we shall see in the chapter on Virgo. November, for Catholics the month of the ‘holy souls’ in Purgatory, is the Scorpio month, chosen because Scorpio is associated with purgation, expiation and regeneration.

Virgins do not give birth; people do not walk on water; storms cannot be calmed with a word; a few loaves and a couple of fish cannot feed thousands of people; and people, once dead, do not come back to life

What rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The age of the Fish and the feet is coming to an end. A new Passover is upon

Thus, the bread of Virgo’s harvest is linked with the Christ, ‘the Vine’ (see John 15). Wine, symbolic of all celebration, which gladdens our heart but takes away our will, is, like all drugs, Piscean. Mythologically it belongs to Dionysus (Bacchus in Roman mythology), god of the vine who died and was resurrected. It is this ‘new wine’, the wine of the new age, which Jesus will drink in the kingdom of God (Mark 14:25).

the idea of breaking with the past, symbolized in the original ceremony by the unleavened bread.* This would remain as part of the new celebration, but it would take on an added significance, representing Virgo, the Maiden with the Sheaf of Wheat, whose qualities complement those of its polar opposite sign, Pisces

Jesus is Everyman and Everywoman, poised between the past and the future, the twin ‘thieves’ of the divine life, symbolized by the two fish of Pisces swimming in opposite directions

This is the ‘secret’ message of the Gospel narrative, a message which it shares with the dramas of the mystery cults of old, that a new kind of life – ‘eternal life’, ‘resurrected life’ – is available to those who are brave enough to embrace the Way of the Cross, the painful destruction of the ego and its appetites, so that the Christ-spirit may come to birth. This ‘resurrected life’ is not a post-mortem state; it is offered to us while we are still in the flesh

Lent is for reflecting on the past, and for opening up to the future: the Ash Wednesday anointing declares that our present suffering is cathartic, purgatorial perhaps, but not permanent

Such duality inevitably produces a tension which all four of these signs symbolize, in one way or another. This is least in evidence in Virgo and Sagittarius, since the Earth of one and the Fire of the other give consistency and resolve, qualities wholly lacking in Airy Gemini and Watery Pisces