APRIL, 2004

Mythic Prelude

Travelin' Crooks

  As everyone with an interest in the mythic cycles of the year learns early on, the importance of April, apart from its position at the top of spring amid showers that stroke the Earth and help quicken new life, is that it celebrates the transition from Aries month (3/20 - 4/19), ruled by Mars, to Taurus month (4/19 - 5/20), ruled by Venus, and along with it the eternal, hopeful, irresistible and impossible marriage that is at best an unstable compound or uneasy alliance, at the other extreme a battle of the sexes in which the weaponry gets deadlier, the spy game trickier, the peace accord more vindictive all the time, at least among those who no longer hold in vision the Grail of Love, but know only the Cup of Fear.

  In truth, the three-month cycle of Spring has always been a three-act drama in which the dynamic and inherently conflictive urges of Mars rule Act One, the deliciously conciliatory energies of Venus rule Act Two, and the Hieros Gamos, or Divine Marriage celebrated in the month of Juno, rules Act Three. The marriage can last only if it is founded in spiritual love. When it is not, and it usually is not, it fails, and has to be attempted all over again in another Spring.   

  So next month's Calendar will be mainly about Venus, and about the extraordinary trend of Venus events that begin on April 19 when the Sun enters Taurus, continue through Aug. 7 as Venus is both confessor and communicator over a very long four-month stay in Gemini, and climaxe on June 8 at the Venus Occultation or Venus passage that was briefly noted in the March Mythic Prelude, and will be the main mythic topic next month.

  Until Taurus Month begins on 4/19, and with it a time when the feminine is favored and empowered -- indeed, for some women, the challenge of Taurus Month 2004 will be in learning how to use beauty for medicinal purposes only -- our emphasis is on Mars, and on the two main astral aspects he forms while the Sun is still in Aries:

  4/5: At the Full Moon -- relatively uncomplicated, except for a trine (120° angle) between the Moon in Libra and Neptune in Aquarius, and a sextile (60°) between Neptune and Sun in Aries -- Mars in Gemini crosses into a square (90°) with Jupiter in Virgo. The best thing that can be said about this intensely unpleasant relationship between the hot teenager who wants to take the car out and peel some rubber, and the father who won't give him the keys, is that it does tend to be decisive, as one would expect from a clash between Warrior and Ruler. The emphasis here is more upon conflict resolution than the conflict itself, and on how we will pick up the pieces and assemble them into something new.

  4/14: Mars in Gemini trine Neptune in Aquarius. These two planets are related at an arc of 120° ("trine") for the nine days from 4/9 to 4/18, but 4/14 is the giddiest: the moment when creative inspiration in motion, dance itself, is driven by Mars the Red Warrior. From the Mythic Prelude for April, 2003:

  "The male warrior is only one of many mythic types, male and female, who rule . . . Aries month . . . . Their common trait is that they are all makers, bearers and thieves of creative fire. Among those who enjoy envisioning conflict of Biblical proportions, April has long been called the month when kings go forth to W Word, and many have been suckered for millennia by the scam that April belongs to Mars the Warrior. It does, but only in the sense that the True Warrior is actually all men and women who practice the virtues of courage, endurance, discipline, patience, resourcefulness and protectiveness, and the arts of building, saving, fire making and mercy. This type is firm in the practice of love." (For more on the other type, the Black Mars, see The Fires of Mars from last August.)

  The tendency of Mars to take fire by force when he can, and steal it by fraud when he must, has always been a part of his character, especially as he ages from Achilles into Agamemnon or Odysseus, and may even devolve further -- as an afflicted Mars is tense with fraud and lies are invariably the product of fear -- into a psychopathic personality as typified by Donald Rumsfeld, whose recent statement that "There are no good targets in Afghanistan. There are lots of good targets in Iraq" represents perfectly the image of the psychopath, or "anti-social personality," that Dr. Hervey Cleckley (in The Mask of Sanity) compares to a gourd with a material outside (the "mask"), but no spiritual content within. To paraphrase Dr. Cleckley: There's nothing there. No conscience, no guilt, no remorse. They're great actors, though.

   Apart from the general proclivity of Mars to be economical with the truth in April -- why else does April Fool's Day fall today, and the IRS and millions of taxplayers try to scam each other two weeks from now? -- it is evident now in the United States, as gourds on high vines brace themselves for the knife of knowledge and the tap of truth, as Dick Cheney secretly teaches Rumsfeld how to stay in the lower register of his voice, and still can't get Dr. Rice to try to look like "Condi" and soften a face that would scare Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor, that the mask will hardly hold until July, much less into November; and when Republicans try to steal the presidential election again -- this time by computer voting fraud -- there may be too many truth tellers, and too many truth tricksters, aligned against them. Or maybe not.

  At a time when the Simeda company of Romania is now marketing in the USA a device called a SoundCover, which supplies fake background noises for cell phones -- so users can claim to be at the freeway, the church or the bank, and not home with a hangover -- how do we get ready to crack the gourds, lance the lies and clean up the present and growing horror? By telling the truth at almost all times, except when we are beating the conspirators and liars at their own game when we can, and by delivering the goods in laughter and the language and rhythms that people know and like, so we make it fun for them to wake up. We attempt the kind of comedy that follows here, a rant the author did last night in Honolulu, in a cross between hip hop and hunt rhythms:

Travelin' Crooks:

Copyright 2004 Dan Furst