Mars Escapes the Kala Sarpa Quandary

The pugnacious firebrand finally cuts loose. Will herd immunity follow or greater degrees of havoc?

2021 IS SUPPOSED TO FEEL DIFFERENT, RIGHT? Vaccines on the horizon, a new president in office (who is already bombing the Middle East), the announced cancellation of Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Life was gonna start feeling good.

What’s happening?

A look at the March lunation chart below shows, uhm, the same clusterfuck of planets locked behind the nodal axis as last year. In India, there is an astrological term that corresponds to this condition. It’s called Kala Sarpa Yoga.

Kala Sarpa Yoga is generally studied in natal astrology and relates to a condition where the seven planets from Vedic astrology (Sun, Moon, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury) are trapped between Rahu (the Moon's North Node) and Ketu (the Moon's South Node).

Of course, modern Western astrology also includes Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto in the pantheon. And this is why when I first started to consider the sky pattern back in early 2020— where the Nodes had locked all of the solar system into one half of the zodiac, I was struck by the pattern's literal correlation to the COVID pandemic and the feeling that—well, people felt trapped—cornered by time.

Think of the Kala Surpa pattern metaphorically: Picture a pie where all ten pieces of the pie are crammed into just one-half of the pie plate—instead of being evenly dispersed in the circle.

It’s difficult to maintain objectivity when the cosmic lens we experience life through feels like we are viewing the world through a pair of glasses where one of the lenses is completely blacked out.

Kala means time, Sarpa means serpent and yoga means combination. So we could read Kala Sarpa Yoga, when considered within mundane (world-focused) astrology, as global consciousness trapped into one segment of time.

In Vedic astrology, the Moon's Nodes are based on the metaphor of a snake, whereas in Western astrology they are aligned with the image of a dragon.

Nodes and eclipses

What are the Nodes? Well, in both systems of Vedic and Western astrology (and astronomy) they are highly charged points that mark the eclipse cycles, and if you think of time as an actual entity—not just a conceptual creation—the Nodes would mark the entrance and exit points of force, within time's body.

Time as a living entity? Well, yes.

Consider what happens when you think about a pronounced situation in your life that, say, started in your childhood and has continued—perhaps just through memory—to this present moment. Repeatedly thinking about that condition sets up a steady inculcation of force that shapes and eventually determines your consciousness in a unique way. Over time that situation begins to feel like a lived-through fact.

You can extend this metaphor to the notion of time.

For over 200,000 years—the collective consciousness of humankind has developed into a universal way of marking and experiencing their lives through a concept of time.

That concept you could say begins to take on a life of its own by the incessant vivification of billions of individuals attaching their lives to the same projected phenomenon. In some Tibetan schools of thought, space is considered as a kind of living entity. This same notion can apply to time as well.

Gurdjieffian student—the psychologist Maurice Nicoll—presents another facet to this idea. He presented time as being a direction, what he called a containing dimension of the World. In his seminal book Living Time he wrote:

Thinking of Time as a real but invisible direction, in which all things have extension, there must be another aspect of everything we see, contained in this direction. From this standpoint, the world does not only exist in the known space of the present moment but in the dimension of Time itself. There is a Time-World, or World in Time—that is, in a space of more dimensions than our senses record. We touch this higher space at a point—the present moment. But outside this momentary point, at which a visible world is so brilliantly obvious to sense, there seems, for our natural understanding, to be nothingness, nowhereness—no other space or place, or any sort of room for existence.

This is a topic for another article, but I'll just say quickly that it was Rudolph Steiner's explanation of solar and lunar eclipses that made me reconsider the Moon's Nodes in a different light. And also how the energetic releases around eclipses become a polarity-based threshold or demarcation within the body of time. Just as you have a sense of your interiority in distinction to the world outside your skin, a similar arrangement exists within the spatial body of time as defined in space by the lunar Nodes.

Whenever I study a natal horoscope I use the nodes as a definite marker of how the person I’m reading the chart for is oriented within the body of time. This would need another article to flesh out more fully, but I recommend that you try this yourself. I also recommend that you move away from the erstwhile notion of the South Node being evil or debilitating and the North Node being beneficent and the marker of blessings.

These antiquated ideas about the Nodes are related to the difficulty human beings have in discussing elimination or—said more crudely—shitting. Within the body of time, the North Node would be considered the start of an alimentary-like process, and the South Node its conclusion—how time shits in other words.

This is why Rudolph Steiner wrote that eclipses serve as safety valves within the body of time. A solar eclipse helps metabolize or decentralize corrupted elements within nature. While a lunar eclipse ‘allows’ harmful, more regressed forces in the cosmos to assert influence. This of course reads as if there is a morality inherent in nature but really what he was detailing were the various beginning and endpoints in any natural cycle and how our solar system has its own version of that polarity. There’s no need for us to anthropomorphize the process—in a moral sense—as Steiner did.

The Martian escape

Considering last year, what's interesting to note is that the Kala Sarpa Yoga began to move into exactitude about one month before the COVID pandemic was acknowledged as an encroaching and unavoidable health crisis. Shortly thereafter all of the planets and lights were locked into that one segment of space as defined by the Nodal axis.

In fact just as Mars (the activator) conjuncted the South Node in Capricorn on February 25, 2020, the CDC announced that Americans should prepare for an actual pandemic. Alerting us that: "It's not so much a question of if this will happen anymore but rather more a question of exactly when."

So any ability to escape (Mars) the oncoming societal malady (Pluto in Capricorn as the epidemic), was lost once Mars moved past the South Node and joined all of the other planets in the Kala Sarpa corral.

But now that is about the change as Mars finally exits the Kala Sarpa on March 26, while applying a trine to Saturn and then Jupiter in Aquarius. This will feel like the Judgment card in the Tarot, where the angel is blowing her horn above all of those grey corpses rising up from their quarantine crypts, ready to descend on Costco en masse.

With Mars trining the love zone of the last year’s Jupiter Saturn conjunction in Aquarius, we’re finally going to feel the creative force of the Aquarian conjunction start to enliven our lives.

Think of Mars as the sergeant in a boot camp who comes along at 5 AM to rouse all of the sleeping privates from their morning stupor. You just have to get up and finally engage with whatever new project you’d conceived (but were hesitant to commence) at the close of last year.

Of course throughout last year the Sun, Moon, Mercury, and Venus slipped in and out of the Kala Sarpa formation, but Mars—being the first planet beyond the Earth’s orbit—activates our individual will. A force of strength that’s free from the dictates of the laws and orders of religion and science (as typified by Jupiter and Saturn).

Part of the agitation that’s accompanied COVID-related quarantine has been the low-grade chronic sense of having lost one’s Martian volition. And of course, for many of us, that was a literal circumstance. And we saw aggressive acting out of the repressed Mars with the various nutso conspiracies regarding the virus—a cavalcade of nutcases that are still trying to enforce their twisted rewriting of reality on the rest of us.

Reading The Pictures @ReadingThePix

Was waiting for CPAC pix from @petersonpixs and he nails it in one: 4 days of cult worship. Even more pop for gender bending & seam seeming nose out of joint.

Last week we saw frontrunners of the upcoming ‘Martian escape’ in the US, with several states lifting mask requirements and lockdowns. For many of us, this seems to be courting disaster, but for the evolution of herd immunity, it’s an inevitability. As if nature is bombarding the lawmaker’s brainpans with impulses they consider part and parcel of their own political strategies.

Does this mean COVID will actually diminish because someone says so? Not likely. Brazil is experiencing a horrifying explosion of the virus, as are parts of Europe. But again, with Mars released into a new section of time’s body, the history-in-the-making of the COVID story will be experienced and documented through the other half of the reality lens. In other words from a more balanced perspective, with less polarization flaring in the field.

What we’ll see exactly it’s difficult to detail, but you can track the set of aspects that Mars will perfect as the planet moves on through Gemini (with those trines to Jupiter and Saturn) and then into Cancer on April 24 when a square to Pluto gains traction (this is akin to your mother telling you as a kid, “Just wait until your father gets home!”)

By the time Mars moves into Leo on June 12, forming a square to Saturn (the full stop planet) we might feel like we’re being stuffed back into the bottle we escaped from in March—despite everyone’s “I was vaccinated” sticker.

As always—stay tuned. I mean, where else are you gonna go?

Love,

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Opening collage by FW