Origins
As Jupiter in Aries, moves to Square Pluto in Aquarius. And Pluto Stations Retrograde, and we have our final Eclipse in Scorpio squaring both Pluto and Black Moon Lilith in the late degrees of Cancer. I can’t help but cast my mind to our origin stories (Aries) and compare them to where we are today (Aquarius).
And how the “benevolent spiritual light” (Jupiter) has perhaps cast us in a direction we did not mean to go. And how Pluto (Underworld) and Lilith, the one who was cast out of the Garden, to make her home elsewhere, might help us right the ship towards more a more balanced orientation to life.
Because you see, despite our best attempts, we cannot out-spiritualize or out psychologize our humanity. We cannot actually “Good Person” ourselves into a good life.
Nor should we we.
So often when I sit down with clients in Underworld sessions they tell me all of the things they’ve tried to get relief from the condition of being human.
The different modalities they’ve tried to mitigate and “manage” their pain, anger, rage, sadness, lust, trauma, and grief.
And I get it. We’ve been taught that these conditions, “states”, feelings are not “normal”. That we are entitled to peace and happiness, and that there is potentially something “wrong” with us when they arise for any length of time.
In fact, that’s the most frequent statement I hear. “I’m so _____, I don’t know what’s wrong with me”?
I’ve waxed poetic plenty of times about society’s orientation to emotions being one of “management”, in service to productivity. So I’m not going to go on about that again here.
What I want to talk about today is how this emotional “management” is also deeply entwined with our “good person” programming.
There is something is something so wild, so organic, feral, and primal about emotion and the animal body that makes the full on rapture of emotion seem almost dangerous.
ORIGINS
There is a deep thread, stemming all the way back to the origin of written history that says when Pandora opened the box of shadows, and Eve ate the Apple, that women unleashed every conceivable kind of misery upon the world.
This is a deeply imbedded program within us, so deep we often cannot see it. It’s become part of an epigenetic disposition.
In response to the story of “the Fall” and our responsibility for it, we have been working this story in reverse.
We are told that The Garden was a place in which all was provided for us. An Eden of safety, and perpetual, unending, abundance and peace.
We often unconsciously spend our lives trying to rebuild our personal Paradise . To “get back” inside the gates paradise. Re-establish our place in “The Promise Land”.
We see the lack of safety, peace, and perfection, as proof that we’ve sinned. As proof that we’ve made a wrong move somewhere. Fallen out of favor. Thus the darkness we experience is a type of cryptic punishment. The story itself full of double speak.
This orientation towards safety bends us ever towards the light. When pain arrives, and shadows engulf us, we panic, thrash and splash in the ocean dark, use all of our energy to swim towards safer, brighter, known, shores.
Not least because the appearance of ferality, of the organic unknown, feels so deeply unsafe. But also because it feels as though we are outside the walls of the Garden, abandoned by God.
When I was young, any time I met the dark, and displayed the natural resulting emotion, I was sent to my room until “I felt better”. Thrown out of Eden. There was no co-regulation in my house. Only isolation.
In early adulthood, when a chasm would open beneath me, and it again resulted in organic emotion, it elicited condemnations of insanity. It served as proof that I was unhinged, and excused all manor of abuses to be shot my way.
And I believed I deserved that. Somewhere in the deepest recesses of my very being, I believed I’d brought the pain upon myself through my “badness”. My sin, my unworthiness.
I didn’t have it that I was allowed to be human. Only that I was to strive to be good. And if I was good, I would have a safe life. That good person = good life. And I could prove my goodness to “God” through my behavior. By brandishing a nice, calm, generous, ever accommodating, demeanor.
It was a weird heave - ho, back and forth, of dashing towards the light for safety, anytime the feral deep came to visit, contrasted by a deep well of self loathing. That if the darkness persisted, I must try and outrun it. Show the universe my goodness. And how worthy I was to have it.
I didn’t have any capacity to be with the dark. To feel the fullness of the deep. Explore the shadows, or sit with the taboo.
This was all a long time ago. Unwinding this has been part of my own process of De-Conditioning.
The “Good Woman” programming runs so deep, even today. Think of all the ways we still maneuver to get our virtue signaling badges. It shows up in the unlikeliest of places.
I got here through Christianity. But even an elementary understanding of Karma can land us in this place.
The very act of rewilding ourselves is meeting our humanity. De-conditioning asks us to go back and rewrite the beginning. Back to the “origin”.
These women, Eve and Pandora, they came to give us our humanity. To give us the dark, and the weird, the ability to know joy through its contrast. To give us magic and depth. Anger, and hellfire. Dreams as well as nightmares. To introduce us to the mysterious unknown. Sex and death. All of the dueling binaries that make the world beautiful.
Hence, the eating of the fruit, gave us knowledge of Good and Evil. Gnosis.
And really what is the best way to (g)know? It is to feel. What makes us uniquely human? Emotions. All of them.
Yet we have been taught to fear these things. That they will draw us into darkness. To fully own our anger, our lust, our disgust, will lead us down the wrong path. A bad path. So we’ve relegated them to the unconscious. And gotten on with our “good person” programming. Hoping that will save us.
But for the brave; those keen on reclamation, it was Eve and Pandora who secretly planted initiation into the heart of their stories. For it is the dark that precipitates the hero/heroine’s journey. And it is this journey that introduces us to both our strength and our softness. Our power and our broken heart. Or said another way, the power of a broken heart.
There is another spiritual cosmology that I find much more true. It’s says that God birthed humanity to experience itself.
And that we are all fractals of the divine spark, mirroring the world to each other.
The story of Eve and Pandora was sold to us as the “Fall of Man through the weakness of Woman”
But is wasn’t the “Fall” was it? Their story is one of the “The Split”. One of duality. Introduction of shadow and light.
And in the curse of the distorted translation we’ve been sold, we’ve cut ourselves off from all of the attributes of the dark feminine. From her Underworld domain, and from our deepest, most authentic expression of humanity.
So maybe it was Lilith who had it right all along. She fully claimed her sovereignty, and her darkness. She weathered the unknown outside the safety of Eden. This was perhaps the deepest act of restoring her humanity. She said no to all of the distorted imbalance that has come pass through the embrace of the Biblical Eden. Perhaps it is Lilith whose path has been straighter? Less complex. More true.
I began our Taurus/Scorpio nodal axis journey with a story about the Graden, and reclamation of the life giving power of our blood. It feels fitting as we near the end, that we look at where we are now.
A little wiser, a little more raw, a tad bit more feral. And a hell of a lot more human.
#eve #pandora #eclipse #pluto #lilith #blackmoonlikith #emotion #shadow #unconscious
