THE PURPOSE of ECLIPSES:  The DRAGON’s HEAD and TAIL
Technically, the nodes of the moon are the place where the Moon’s orbit intersects the path of the Sun.  Where the Moon crosses the Sun going upward is the ascending point called the North Node, while the Moon descending is moving south of the Sun, so is called the South Node.  Because the Sun is the heart of the solar system and our personal vitality and life force, and the Moon is the waxing and waning of our emotions and our instinctual reactions and needs, the darkening of one of these primary luminaries has always foretold major personal and collective transformations.

As many of us are aware, the heroic quest culminates with the mythical “slaying of the dragon.”   In astrology, the dragon is associated with Rahu and Ketu, the nodes of the Moon, which are the dragons’ head and tail.  In Alchemy, the “slaying of the Dragon” was a metaphor for the Great Work: the shaman-alchemist’s heroic battle with the slippery serpentine forces of the unconscious.  One’s heroic duty involves confronting the shadow forces and transcending their vicious-circle tendencies.

Rahu-Ketu can be related to the image of the Uroboros serpent swallowing its own tail in our path of evolution and individuation as we watch ourselves repeat patterns, witness them, and transmute their energies from base and reactionary to golden and evolutionary.   Rahu-Ketu was a naga, a serpent of hidden knowledge and wisdom, represented ubiquitously throughout Asian art. Thus the events that unfold around the eclipses instruct us in cosmic law, revealing to us how to swallow our karma, churn it, and spiral it into the vortex of our dharma as we move towards spiritual awakening.

We must be very careful what we say and do during the eclipse window, just as we should give special intention to the Nodes in our chart.  For, the South Node tail of Ketu is knotted and entangled, like our past life holding patterns, unresolved emotions, incomplete desires.  And the head of Rahu is monstrous, in ferocious hunger, seeking experience.  In the North Node, we fall prey to hedonistic consumption of the illusory traps of maya’s material seduction.

The purpose of eclipses is to shake up the old, the inessential, and shed it away, in order to usher in a new direction necessary for our evolution.  The two weeks between eclipses reverberate with occult power and electromagnetic energy as the veils thin and psychic information channels through.  Life experiences, conversations, encounters resonate with a more soul-level importance.  Thus, with eclipses, the synchronicity quotient skyrockets, especially when the December 21st Lunar Eclipse aspects all of the Outer planets, with their transpersonal, psychospiritual urges, promising these eclipses to have far-reaching global proportions.  The potential for a massive awakening at this time pulsates at a high frequency, especially to our nature as not just a planetary, but a galactic intelligence, a topic I explore at the end of this article in relation to the Galactic Center and Mayan prophecies.

The sign and house where the South Node transits, we collectively must dissolve, sacrifice, and spiritualize our energy.  Life circumstances conspire to help us release what can no longer serve our evolution.  This “shedding of the dragon-skin” creates space for the infusion of new life symbolized by the sign and house where North Node transits. It is as if we must release and fertilize the earth and her inhabitants with the gifts of our South Node, while feeding on the spiritual fuel of the position of the North Node.  This is true in both our natal charts and to where the eclipses transpire every six months.  Find 29 Gemini in your chart and 4 degrees Capricorn.  There is a dissolving, release, and sacrifice in the house where 29 Gemini is, and an injection of new people and experiences that sparkle with destiny and spiritual motivation where 4 Capricorn is in your chart.  If the eclipses touch a planet, that intelligence in you will be going through a strong karmic journey in the next six months.  If the eclipses curl up next to an angle, our entire life direction, relationships, and home will be shifting.

As the soul journeys from one lifetime to the next, it is progressively moving towards wholeness and reunification, ultimately no longer needing to suffer through further incarnations.  The Eclipses demonstrate how we must cleanse and resolve our karma, while stepping into our dharma path of self-realization.

MERCURY RETROGRADE, The ECLIPSES, and OUR ASTRAL ALLIANCES

Mercury rules the Lunar Eclipse at the last degree of Gemini on the 21st and Mercury is Retrograde, dancing over the Galactic Center at the exact moment of the Eclipse, with the Sun just having crossed the GC.  On one hand, the eclipse-retrograde combo will intensify the typical retrograde effects––travel delays, tech and communications breakdowns, etc… But, the connections with the Galactic center provides significant opportunities to access Galactocentric consciousness, to imbibe the wisdom and revelations of the 2012 prophecies, and to raise our frequencies to vibrate as a Galactic intelligence.  We should all be giving special attention to the information percolating through our individual systems at this time, and to both the news stories and disinformation in the media, as it is time to de-cipher, or decode the truths that resonate with you. An interesting practice could be to use Google as a sort of oracle––don’t just go to the most popular pages, let the spirit instead guide you to unexpected portals of awareness.

Mercury Retrograde on the Galactic Center is the ideal time to download the information we have been receiving from the Galactic Federation and the Star Nations.  Numerous channels and texts (not the type drenched in the roll-your-eyes, woo-woo factor, but real communications from our astral family) have been emerging in the last few years from star systems such as the Pleiades (Barbara Marciniak, Barbara Hand Clow) Arcturus (Patricia Periera and Norma J. Milanovich), the Lyrans (Lyssa Royal), the Sirians (Patricia Cori). We can use this Mercury Retrograde to reflect on the profound acceleration of Alien disclosure that has transpired in 2010, such as the massive spiral wormhole formation over Norway and the pyramid/tetrahedron over Moscow that day…. shutdown of major international airports in China, the floating anomalies in October in New York, the recent announcement that UFOs had on numerous occasions interrupted the functioning of US nuclear missile systems, and the astronomer for the pope’s September statement that he would “baptize aliens, no matter how many tentacles they have.”  We are on the precipice of a major global awakening.

We should collectively dialogue not about the “if” of disclosure, nor even the “when,” as 2012 seems to be an obvious galactivation moment.  Instead, this Mercury retrograde affords us a chance to prepare our bodily and emotional vessels for the new frequencies being emitted by the galactic center, translated by our local star-sun, shifting us into conduits of interspecies communication, ready to relate and interact with our star siblings.  This includes our individual activation of the light-body and our persistent perception of ourselves as multidimensional beings.

AT THE ALTAR OF THE SOURCE, PART 1:

THE MILKY WAY RIVER OF SOULS

During the height of the Mayan culture, the Mayan leaders were both shamans and kings, mediating the spirit world and the earthly realm.  The Mayans were the foremost advanced civilization in terms of astronomy and mathematics, building pyramids encoded to retrieve light from the Pleiades, echoing the Egyptian veneration of Sirius and Orion.

The much prophesied December 21, 2012 enddate of the Mayan long-count calendar of 5,120 years marks the end of the age of one Sun, and the birth of another.  This enddate coincides with an alignment of the December solstice Sun, the Earth, and the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.

Why is the galactic center so important in the Mayan cosmology?  And why, as scholar John Major Jenkins has demonstrated, was the Galactic Center venerated in cultures as widespread thru space and time as the Mayans, Egyptians, the Greeks, the Mithraic mystery school initiates, and the sages of Vedic and Islamic astrology?

The Galactic Center is the dark rift, the ominous bulge in the Milky Way.  The GC, as I will call it, is the most shamanic realm of the ecliptic, the path of the Sun through the backdrop of constellations.  The GC is a locus of an incredibly potent trinity of constellations, inviting us into mystery, transformation, regeneration, and the luminous renewal of the soul.

The Scorpion’s stinger points to it, the Sagittarian centaur’s arrow fires at it, the Serpent-Bearer’s foot steps upon it.  These three constellations mark the death and underworld journey of the Sun as it reaches its lowest point in the sky on the Winter Solstice, just 3 days after conjoining the Galactic Center.  Again, after 3 days of remaining still, the Sun begins to rise again, is “reborn” on Christmas Day, also the birthdate of Solar heroes Mithras and the Roman Sol Invictus.

This rebirth of the Solar hero teaches us about the mystery of resurrection, as  various cultures have consistently sung the Milky Way as a path of souls on their journey into the beyond.

The Mayans called the Milky Way Xibalba Be, the “Road to Awe,” the journey of the spirit to its next destination. There are certain Aboriginal tribes in Australia that believe the Milky Way to be the river of floodwaters spilling out from a celestial stream, the stars as campfires of the dead who ‘live’ next to the stream.  Some Siberian peoples describe it as “God’s Footprints” or the “ski track of the son of God.”

In Mesopotamian myth, the Milky Way was portrayed as the ‘road to heaven’ that had to be travelled in order to gain audience with the high celestial gods.

The Greeks referred to it as the Galaxias Kuklos, or Milky Circle.   The Romans called it Via Lactae, the Milky Way.   As we all know, infant humans and the young of most mammals feed on nutrient-rich milk for survival.

Indeed, the Milky Way is a path of regeneration and rebirth, the ‘stream of living waters’ connecting the spiritual world of the gods and the dead with the souls of the living world.

Astrophysicists today have discovered that indeed a black hole with a mass and energy of millions of Suns exists in the Galactic Core, gushing Cosmic rays and energy.  Theoretically, black holes could serve as stargates to parallel dimensions, acting as passageways called wormholes.

Repeatedly, the symbolism of the Milky Way and the Galactic Center connect us to a supreme realm of divinity.  As the origin of our galaxy, our stellar family, and the earth, the Galactic center is our Black Madonna, our dark mother feeding us upon her breast––the cosmic rays emitted from the Galactic core.   We could even call the GC the throne of the Creator.  Imagine now, we are kneeling at this altar of our Source  How should we behave?  What song of truth shall we shout out to the world under these eclipses?

The Nodes of the Moon, and the subsequent eclipses in Gemini and Sagittarius between December 21, 2010 and the fall of 2012, instruct us that our greatest evolutionary task at this time is to sift thru the Gemini detritus of info-overload, and find the Sagittarian truth, meaning, and purpose, as the teachings of the Milky Way and its Galactic heart instruct us.   We must allow our Gemini curiosity to spiral us on the sage centaur’s quest for re-union with Truth Absolute, the principle the Egyptians called Ma’At.  The information we dance with, the posts to facebook, the retweets, the books and films we absorb, all of it now must resonate with a galactic cosmology.  How will you vibrate the pulse of the Galactic heart?  How will you weave the myth that will lovevolve all of us?

…More on the Galactic Center and Mayan Prophecy in Early 2011