Eclipse highlights battle between Dionysus and Ceres

 

Bacchus and Ceres (1560-1561) : Paolo Veronese

 

In my entire lifetime, this is the worst that drought conditions have ever been in the western half of the country.  During the past 20 years, the amount of territory in the West considered to be suffering from exceptional drought has never gone higher than 11 percent until now.  Today, that number is sitting at 27 percent.  The term “mega-drought” is being thrown around a lot these days to describe what is happening, but this isn’t just a drought.  This is a true national emergency, and it is really starting to affect our food supply. Just look at what is happening up in North Dakota.  The vast majority of the state is either in the worst level of drought or the second worst level of drought, and ranchers are auctioning off their cattle by the thousands. https://bit.ly/3zuMQ4f

In classical antiquity, the cornucopia from Latin cornu (horn) and copia (abundance), also called the horn of plenty, was a symbol of abundance and nourishment, commonly a large horn-shaped container overflowing with produce, flowers, or nuts. One of the goddesses who often holds that horn of plenty is Ceres, the goddess of agriculture and abundance, motherhood and nurturing. Catherine Urban researching on Trends In Famines [1] writes:

Our little dwarf planet between Mars and Jupiter is Ceres, queen of the asteroid belt. Her Greek counterpart is Demeter, goddess of the grain, the earth and of the Eleusinian Mysteries…After meditating on Ceres, I grew curious to research whether Ceres would show up prominently during periods of famine.

She discovered that Ceres shows  up in hard aspect with the eclipses during onset years of major famines.

Here is the chart for the June 10 solar eclipse drawn for Bismarck, North Dakota where it is placed very prominently on the Ascendant and is conjunct the asteroid Demeter – the counterpart of Ceres. Moreover Ceres itself is conjunct Uranus square Saturn aligned with the meridian.

In addition, the upcoming Cancer ingress chart of June 20 has Ceres on the IC (4^th cusp) conjunct Uranus and square Saturn. In his book Mundane Astrology, H.S. Green describes the influence of Saturn and Uranus affecting the 4^th house  thus:

Unfavourable for agriculture, poor crops.

Considering that Ceres is the goddess of agriculture, caught in the Uranus-Saturn square, we can see another reason for the drought apart from the Demeter-eclipse.

Finally, the Sabian symbol of the eclipse is:

(GEMINI 20°) A SELF-SERVICE RESTAURANT DISPLAYS AN ABUNDANCE OF FOOD

The assimilation of multifarious knowledge through the synthesizing power of the mind or mental confusion caused by lack of discrimination. Dane Rudhyar

In his commentary on the Sabian symbol, Dane Rudhyar adds “The keynote here is indeed ASSIMILATION; the negative potentiality of the symbol is WASTE”. With Saturn in hard aspect to Ceres (food) in the eclipse chart are we seeing the karmic consequences of waste? 

Strange that the eclipse symbol should use the analogy of assimilation of food to drive home  the lessons of the famine and the Mercury-Neptune  square discussed in two previous posts [2][3].

Mercury (retrograde) is in Gemini – the sign connected with rational thinking  while Neptune is in Pisces – the sign associated with psychosomatic illness…A Mercury-Neptune square  can propel us to the some of the lowest places to which a human can descend, the throes of mental illness.[2]

The  psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight – Joseph Campbell [3]

 The rational mind either successfully assimilates the insights of Neptune or drowns in the process!

[1] https://www.catherineurban.com/blog/ceres-grieving-the-old-life-trends-in-famines

[2] https://bit.ly/3glvNIN

[3] https://bit.ly/3gjYx4D

 

PS:

The eclipse essentially  pits Demeter (Ceres) and Mercury (servant of Apollo) against Neptune (Dionysus or Bacchus). The following references describe the nature of the battle as portrayed in Greek mythology:

Kore is shown with her mother Demeter and a snake twined around the Mystery basket, foreshadowing the secret, as making friends with snakes was Dionysian. The fragments of a gilded jar cover of the Kerch type show Dionysus, Demeter, little Ploutos, Kore, and a curly-haired boy clad in a long garment, one of the first son's of the Eleusinian king who was the first to be initiated. On another vase, Dionysus sits on his omphalos with his thryrsos in his left hand, sitting opposite Demeter, looking at each other severely. Kore is shown moving from Demeter towards Dionysus, as if trying to reconcile them [p. 162]. Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter

The cornucopia is most frequently associated with the goddess of the harvest, Demeter, but is also associated with other gods, including Dionysus  since the horn he carries symbolizes abundance. This abundance is available to the god’s followers when they make  the transition from civilized life back to nature.  Those who refuse the god’s gift are turned mad as in the story of Lycurgus, the king of the Edoni in Thrace. In his madness, Lycurgus mistook his son for a mature trunk of ivy, which is holy to Dionysus, and killed him, pruning away his nose and ears, fingers and toes. Consequently, the land of Thrace dried up in horror (famine?). Dionysus decreed that the land would stay dry and barren as long as Lycurgus was left unpunished for his injustice, so his people bound him and flung him to man-eating horses on Mount Pangaeüs.