I make not big secret out of my love for Valentine’s Day, or Valentine’s Season, as I prefer to call it. Why limit our worship of love to one discrete day when we can make a whole week, month, lifetime an offering to love?
The day after Valentine’s, I celebrated by making surf ‘n turf and creamed greens; yesterday, I wore green and bright pink, matching my eyeliner too. You need not hang up red heart doilies or make an elaborate meal to celebrate Valentine’s season. As I wrote in last week’s essay on the spiritual path, we cultivate love when we pay attention: to our significant other, to our pet, to the sunset, to the tea we are drinking. Valentine’s Day, as much as people dislike it, is a state of mind: that love is worth celebrating and centering on our lives, even when there is so much death and destruction and hate to counter it.
One way to love love: make a list of things you like, like Susan Sontag or Roland Barthes did:
Things I like: fires, Venice, tequila, sunsets, babies, silent films, heights, coarse salt, top hats, large long-haired dogs, ship models, cinnamon, goose down quilts, pocket watches, the smell of newly mown grass, linen, Bach, Louis XIII furniture, sushi, microscopes, large rooms, ups, boots, drinking water, maple sugar candy.
Susan Sontag
I like: salad, cinnamon, cheese, pimento, marzipan, the smell of new-cut hay (why doesn’t someone with a “nose” make such a perfume), roses, peonies, lavender, champagne, loosely held political convictions, Glenn Gould, too-cold beer, flat pillows, toast, Havana cigars, Handel, slow walks, pears, white peaches, cherries, colors, watches, all kinds of writing pens, desserts, unrefined salt, realistic novels, the piano, coffee, Pollock, Twombly, all romantic music, Sartre, Brecht, Verne, Fourier, Eisenstein, trains, Médoc wine, having change, Bouvard and Pécuchet, walking in sandals on the lanes of southwest France, the bend of the Adour seen from Doctor L.’s house, the Marx Brothers, the mountains at seven in the morning leaving Salamanca, etc.
Roland Barthes
If this feels too pollyanna, you can also write a list of things you dislike, which is another way of noticing and honoring ourselves. How can we love ourselves by trying to have as little of what brings us down in our life? Putting boundaries around our beings can be the most caring way to look after yourself and others.
Astrologically, I embody the Valentine’s Mindset when I don’t simply read about the planets and stars but spend time with them myself. Intimately. Mysteriously. Connectively. It’s easy enough to pore over texts and come up with my own words. It’s something else entirely to build spirit relationships myself. I can’t simply march into a ritual demanding certain knowledge be revealed to me. I have to cultivate a relationship, let them open up to me when the time is right.
So today, I revisit one of my first fixed star essays on Vega, the star of Orpheus’s lyre adding more based on my own relationship-building with it. It is typically seen as a star of creativity and enchantment but through conversations with fellow astrologer Rowan, we uncovered a different facet of the star too: one much more chthonic and bestial.
Enjoy.
“Beauty and Reality are Identical: On the Fixed Star Vega”
Divine Illusion
The history of the lyre begins with deception. According to myth, Hermes, son of Zeus, created the instrument not long after his birth. Though just a newborn, the messenger god slips out of his swaddling and happens upon a herd of cows owned by Apollo, god of the sun. He manages to steal them all but is discovered when local satyrs hear him play his new invention, which he fashioned from a tortoise shell and cow guts. Though he tries to deny his theft, he eventually confesses to slaughtering two of Apollo’s flock but ends up getting to keep the rest; Apollo, a deity of the arts, is enchanted by the sound Hermes’s new invention can make and trades his herd to keep it. Zeus, Hermes’s father, tells him to to stop telling lies. Though he promises to “never tell lies,” he “cannot promise to tell you the whole truth”.
“‘That would not be expected of you,’ said Zeus, with a smile,” Robert Graves is sure to relay.
And so begins our exploration of Vega, the primary star in the Lyra constellation. Though it has been given many images and titles over the years, it has always been tied with musical instruments, usually the harp, or in the case of Ancient Greece, the lyre. Rather than connecting it with Hermes, they connect Vega with the lyre of Orpheus, son of Apollo and thus a direct beneficiary of Hermes’s trickery. After receiving the instrument from his father, “the Muses taught him its use, so that he not only enchanted wild beasts, but made the trees and rocks move from their places to follow the sound of his music”. To have a natal connection to Vega is said to imbue the native with artistic ability, specifically in music and acting.
Here we have another view of deception: the ability of art to alter our relationship to reality, for better or for worse.
Art in Ancient Greece
One of the places where these sorts of half-truths is not just allowed but accepted, of course, is in the world of art. But in Ancient Greece, Plato questioned art’s ability to blur the lines of truth. Because “Poetry, drama, music, painting, dance, all stir up our emotions,” the philosopher believed they should be heavily censored, for fear of the common people mistaking a fabrication of the Truth for the real thing. Though he acknowledges the potential for art to shape human character for the good (even including music and dance in the school curriculum in his Republic), he spends plenty of time worrying about the deleterious effects of uncensored art on the general population. Music played simply for pleasure was dismissed as “irrational,” especially considering the lofty potentials music presents us.
Music was especially emphasized for its ability to bring one either into harmony or disharmony with the proper movement of the human soul. This connection comes from “[t]he idea that there are revolutions in the souls that are similar to those of the celestial bodies”. Thus music was “seen as an expression of this cosmic attunement and concord”. Music was seen as “an ally against the disharmony that has come into the revolution of the soul, to bring it into order and consonance (sumphonia) with itself”. The truth that art could extend to us, then, was not the bland truth of a purely objective, materialist world, but a transcendent truth handed down to us from the heavenly spheres embedded into our everyday reality. As Plato derides anything that induces men “to regard the reality which falls under our senses as the only reality,” music was seen as especially virtuous for its connection with the movements of the heavens.
Here we learn a few interesting points for Vega natives: To be given the gift of creativity is to be given great power. You can enchant others, bid them to follow you, and influence the shape of their soul. Art can act not merely as a mirror to one’s psyche but can act as a portal to spiritual truths or a connection to the divine. But, on the other side, Vega can also lead them away from reality and fabricate illusions for one’s own gain. A Vega native must be aware if their art or expression are coming from a place of virtue or connection to spirit rather than a mere tool for personal gain/of egoic origin.
Defying Death
The most well-known of lyre players, and an exemplar of this dictum, was Orpheus, who, according to Robert Graves’s “Myths,” was “the most famous poet and musician who ever lived”. The divine relation between the heavens and music are apparent through the story of Orpheus. After being given his first lyre by Apollo and being taught how to play by the muses, Orpheus was said to enchant wild beasts and make ”the trees and rocks move from their places to follow the sound of his music”. Through the skill and blessing of the player, the lyre acts as a conduit for divine energy, drawing all beings to it.
The lyre even helped Orpheus defy death. After his love, Eurydice, dies of a snake bite, he travels to the underworld and:
on his arrival, not only charmed the ferryman Charon, the Dog Cerberus, and the three Judges of the Dead with his plaintive music, but temporarily suspended the tortures of the damned; and so far soothed the savage heart of Hades that he won leave to restore Eurydice to the upper world”.
Guided by the sound of the lyre, Eurydice makes her slow ascent back to the world of the living. But just as they reach sunlight, Orpheus turns to look at her, breaking the one condition of her safe return.
Orpheus is heartbroken, of course, and ends up dying at the hands of the Bacchae, crazed followers of Dionysus, God of wine and reverie. Where his remains end up, however, tell us why his descent was doomed to fail.
The Head and the Harp
According to Robert Graves, while Orpheus’s lyre ended up in the sanctuary of Apollo, his severed head was interred in the sanctuary of Dionysus. These two gods are often paired with each other as a demonstration of opposites; Apollo represents the clear light of intellect, Dionysus the ecstatic wildness of the senses. It is clear, then, that the instrument itself, divinely created and attuned, holds the power of the gods, as well as the eternal order and rhythm of the heavens that Plato so praised. But it is only in the hands of a human that beautiful music can be plucked from its strings. This fact also subjects the instrument to human passion and irrationality, the very things that make Plato so derisive of art. But, as the lyre cannot play itself, we also rely on the subjective human body to bring its enchantments to life.
To play the lyre, in other words, one must balance the roles of divine vessel, expounding the pre-existing perfection of the heavenly spheres, while also using one’s tricky, irrational passions to bring about the enchanting effect.
That’s the issue with Vega; sometimes, you’re not quite sure if something is real or an illusion. But there must a remembrance, a reverence for the source of the music. To engage with Vega well, one must remember the source of the music lies beyond one’s mind, not mistaking the vessel for its contents.
Vega in Motion
One Vega native that demonstrates this tension between the divine and the earthly is Simone Weil, 20th French mystic. Known for her religious writings and political activism during World War II, much of her writing grapples with the necessary mediation of the divine through the human body and mind.
In “Gravity and Grace,” a collection of her writings which features a whole section entitled “Beauty”, she tells us that ““beauty and reality are identical,” calling to mind the fact that, true gnosis of the god or Truth, is an aesthetically and emotionally rich event, one that can fill us with the feelings and reveries that Plato so feared. A spiritual appreciation of beauty is enough to mark a Vega native. But Weil also cautioned against mistaking the beauty as the only truth. She compares beauty to “a fruit which we look at without trying to seize it” and also penned this adage:
“A very beautiful woman who looks at her reflection in the mirror can very well believe that she is that. An ugly woman knows that she is not that.”
Here we have two facts: One, that the visage we see reflected back to us is not truly us. For Weil, our true self lies with God, passes through God, is god.
Secondly, the more charming the illusion, the more likely we are to believe it. And that is the tight rope that Vega natives must balance; on the one hand, to be incarnated is to be surrounded by beauty, as each thing is a reflection of the divine origin. On the other, they must avoid illusions or mistaking the form for the substance.
Vega, like any gift, brings with it a moral responsibility to truth as you see it; you may dress it up in music, words, dance. With any luck, you can see the divine truth underneath the facade and perhaps even bring back the dead.
But don’t for a moment think these powers come from you alone. Trust in god and where that message is going, even if you can’t see it, lest you turn your head too soon and see everything you love vanish again.
The Gremlin on my back
When I sat down in the ritual space to connect with Vega myself, a dark rich melancholy enveloped me, what I described in my notes as “an edge of sadness even amidst flow and creativity and longing”. It was like a rich soil at night on the border of a deep dark lake or a seemingly endless hole in the earth. I saw a woman standing at the shore of the pitch dark lake staring at a man across the water who was staring at himself reflected back. Eventually, the woman dives into the water and lets a piece of seaweed wrap around her ankle, wishing it would pull her into the abyss. I see cranes and storks gathering in a sort of lowland swamp, similar to the terrain Rowan and I walked to gather poplar buds in the slowly emerging green of late winter.
On the way back, she asks me about my experience of Vega, having made a talisman for this star herself. I have somehow forgotten most of the image I have shared above but tell her about this pitch black gremlin-like figure I see whenever I think back to my time with Vega. She says she’s seen him too. Curious, then that Agrippa says a talisman to the Vulture Star brings “courage and spiritual protection from curses and evil spirits particularly against devils and demons”.1 My take is one has to know the nature of demons intimately to properly defeat them. So, when interacting or attempting to embody Vega, don’t overlook the dark, chthonic aspect of the star. Don’t overlook the darkness and inner demons you must contend with to receive the glittering magic and creativity it holds
Sources:
“Gravity and Grace,” Simone Weil
“The Greek Myths” by Robert Graves
“The Book of Symbols,” Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbols (ARAS)
“Plato’s attitude to poetry and the fine arts, and the origins of aesthetics,” Walter. G. Leszl
For now, I leave you with this:
Until next week,
Love,
Chloe
https://www.renaissanceastrology.com/vegatalisman.html