Here’s what to watch for:
* Remember that Uranus has been aptly compared to the figure of Prometheus for a long time by modern, archetypal astrologers. It’s a fitting comparison, but most of the time we don’t really understand the shadow side of the comparison.
* Prometheus’ theft of the fire from the gods, though we often admire it, was also a serious transgression that led to torture and ongoing punishment.
* In this sense, Prometheus bears some similarity to the figure of Satan or Lucifer, who is cast down from heaven due to his desire to hold the highest seat in heaven.
* It’s interesting to note that Venus was also called “Lucifer,” perhaps due to the fact that she would aspire upwards, ahead of the Sun in the east just prior to dawn, only to eventually fall down again.
* In this sense, it is especially interesting to note the similarity between Prometheus and Lucifer as Uranus is entering Venus’ feminine abode of Taurus for the next seven years.
* It is also fitting given that just as Uranus was making the transition into Taurus, Venus made a square to Uranus and is now flowing forth from that square just as Uranus enters Taurus.
* When I was in Mayapur, India last week, there was an enormous ceremony that took place in the temple, called a Maha Abhishek, where the Pancha Tattva deities of Lord Caitanya Maha Prabhu, the golden avatar of Krishna, were bathed. Mind you these are gigantic, tall deity statues, all golden being bathed in yogurt, ghee, honey, milk, coconut water, Ganges water, etc. It was totally beautiful.
* Throughout the ceremony it was nearly impossible to get close up without moving through intense log jams of human bodies, most of whom were groping toward the deities with the intense desire to receive darshan.
* I noticed that Venus was squaring Uranus perfectly as all of this was happening.
* Several times, I found myself getting swept up in the intense desire to rush toward the golden light of these beautiful deities, and yet several times I found myself cast back, cast out, hurled aside by waves of bodies, a mere beggar at the gates.
* Then, finally, while sitting on the outside looking in, I remembered the words of one of the senior devotees on the trip. During a parikrama talk, he had said, “We forget that darshan isn’t about getting to see the Lord, it’s about presenting ourselves before the Lord to be seen. To present ourselves as servants, and to ask for more facility to serve.”
* Having remembered this, I slowly ambled away from the crowd and found myself standing along a fence on the outskirts of the temple. I could still see just a small glimpse of the golden deities through the crowd, but somehow I knew that it was enough, and I tried to adjust myself inwardly back into the mood of being a servant. The passion and love and desire to connect with the deities were admirable, it was actually beautiful to behold such intense desire and piety en masse, but at least within myself, the lunging and groping toward the light had represented something subtle and malignant. I had confused the desire to consume the effulgence of the divine, to merge with it or rush toward it, an Instagram photo opportunity in waiting, with the desire to present myself as a servant before it.
* In the Bhagavad Gita we are similarly taught that while it is desirable to elevate our lives and our consciousness to the mode of goodness, which is ethical, beautiful, Venusian, tidy, kind, noble, intelligent, virtuous, etc., the desire for these things alone, like the rush toward the golden effulgence of divinity, eventually leads to a fall. The desire to do good, the desire to consume the good, the desire for the shining, luminescent effulgence of the good, is good, but as Krishna tells us, “bhaktya mam abhijanati/yavan yas casmi tattvatah/tato mam tattvato jnatva visate tad-anantaram,” which means “One can understand Me as I am, as the Supreme Personality of Godhead, only by devotional service. And when one is in full consciousness of Me by such devotion, he can enter into the Kingdom of God.”
* Similarly, the temptation exists for each of us, every day, all of the time, to rush toward the good. We craft, plan, and imagine, “What is the highest good that I can achieve?” We ask, “What is the most beautiful thing I can make?” And who could fault us wanting to be good, wanting beauty, or wanting “love and light?”
* And yet, the pride of the “good” also comes before the fall of the good. The Promethean rush toward the golden bull of Taurus, no matter how progressive, beautiful, aesthetically pleasing, green, etc., will in time become the new tyranny, the mass movement toward the Venusian idol that smashes, tramples, and even crushes others along the way, lest we forget that it was the triple Taurean, art student, Hitler, Hitler who was born while Uranus was in the Venus-ruled sign of Libra, who also “loved” Hinduism and the Gita, who lusted after the image of a beautiful Aryan super-race and then lunged toward his golden bull with devastating results.
* In fact, the last time that Uranus entered Taurus Hitler was just rising to power.
* But this isn’t a post about Hitler. Rather, it’s a reminder that the vision of what is “good and beautiful” coupled with the often violent idealism of Uranus, will sometimes lead “good people” to do terrible things. Even our own democracy, which so many of us think of as “good,” was founded around the time Uranus was being discovered and was done alongside tremendous genocide and bloodshed.
* The good, the beautiful, and the golden may thus become the idols we rush toward, with disastrous results in the years to come, unless we can pause and find ourselves content to be mere beggars at the gates, servants presenting ourselves before the source of all golden goodness, asking for the facility to serve rather than becoming selfish pilgrims, stampeding like mad bulls toward the sattvic but fleeting planes of goodness, richness, and beauty.
* We are not nearly careful enough about the vanity and violence of our “good intentions.”
* When the good becomes bad and the bad becomes good, when beggars become Kings and Kings become beggars, we sometimes remember these noble truths. Most often, though, history simply repeats itself and we continue to be lived by the modes of material nature, which, as it turns out, are anything but natural for eternal spirit/souls.
* Theme song for Uranus in Taurus? The Police once sang, “There is no political solution, to our troubled evolution, have no faith in constitution, there is no bloody revolution…Where does the answer lie? Living from day to day, if it’s something we can’t buy, there must be another way. We are spirits in the material world. We are spirits in the material world.”
Prayer: Help us to understand you as you are. Replace our noblest greed for gold and goodness with the simple desire to serve you.
Leave a Reply