Full Moon in Pisces – Are you Martha or Mary?
Today´s Full Moon (19th Sep 2013, 11.12am GMT) shows the Sun at 26°40’ Virgo and the Moon at 26°40’ Pisces and they make no major aspects to other planets. It is as if they are hypnotized by each other, as in a dance, eye in eye. For me, this greatly emphasizes the quality of the signs involved. The image that comes to my mind is the story of Martha and Mary, told in the Gospel of Luke 10:38-42, which I transcribe here fully:
Jesus and his disciples stopped at the house of Martha in Bethany, about two miles from Jerusalem. Her sister Mary lived there, along with their brother Lazarus whom Jesus had raised from the dead.
Mary sat at Jesus’ feet and listened to his words. Martha, meanwhile, was distracted with preparing and serving the meal for the group.
Frustrated, Martha scolded Jesus, asking him whether he cared that her sister had left her to fix the meal alone. She told Jesus to order Mary to help her with the preparations.
“Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”(Luke 10:41-42)
For me, this episode about Martha and Mary illustrates very clearly the permanent and daily Virgo-Pisces dilemma concerning the apparently irreconcilable realms of the profane and the sacred, the mundane and the spiritual, the ephemeral and the eternal. For someone who has got the North Node in the 12th and the South Node in the 6th like me, this is definitely an everyday dilemma.
Martha clearly incorporates the Virgo attributes of efficiency and the daily domestic preoccupations. In Virgo, we get down to the daily tasks, necessary to our survival and functioning in the world: body care, food, cleanness, order, details, efficiency, function and usefulness of everything, and so on. Mary, on the other hand, personifies the Piscean qualities: the numinous, more spiritual and transcendent dimensions of life; compassion, sensibility, the yearning for the divine, the search for the eternal, the longing for totality and the universal source of life. As she sees Jesus arriving, Martha immediately takes charge of all practical arrangements to welcome him and the people who follow him. She goes around providing food and accommodation, being a good host, making sure everything is perfect. Maria does the opposite and just sits down at Jesus’ feet and listens to his teachings, without worrying for a minute if any practical measure is necessary.
Like Martha, sometimes we get so lost in the frenzy of domestic tasks, daily rituals, bills to pay, lists effectively ticked, functioning details of what we need to do… That we end up losing track of what is most important, forgetting what is essential, the greater dimension of a life which doesn’t end here. It’s similar to when we give a party and are so busy about the service efficiency, that we don’t even enjoy our guests’ company, or we don’t even notice the taste of the food we paid such high price to have.
Obviously, the practical dimension of life is necessary if we are to function and exist in this world. But, as usual, the problem is the exaggeration, the lack of balance. Or even worse, when we realize that, in fact, we are using those little tasks to get away from the spiritual realm, avoiding the Center, avoiding the inner encounter, escaping from the deepest and most sacred dimension of life. We say to ourselves: “tomorrow I will meditate/read that book/play with my children/go to the temple/meet my friend/have lunch calmly… You name it! You name what it is that takes you out of your own inner Center.
Paradoxically, by getting so frantically busy with so many practical details of here and now, we are shamefully escaping from the very sacredness of the present moment and from the possibility of doing things with wholeness, putting body and soul in that which we are doing. Joseph Campbell says: “Eternity has nothing to do with the hereafter… This is it… If you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere. The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. Heaven is not the place to have the experience; here’s the place to have the experience”.
Virgo-Pisces polarity invites us to integrate the sacred and the profane, the eternal and the ephemeral, the mundane and the spiritual. Thus, far from avoiding the banal and necessary daily tasks, this Full Moon urges us to pay attention to the spiritual dimension of everyday life, even in the house cleaning that needs to be done. However, this same Full Moon asks us to be careful about the imbalance, about the use of everyday life as an escape from the spiritual. And we do know exactly when we are doing this – like the student, who says to himself that he will spend the whole day studying very seriously, then we wakes up and thinks that he will study better if the room is clean and tidy, then, he stops to eat, then he cleans the dishes, then… When he realizes, the day is over and he has studied nothing, so lost was he in little details.
Therefore, every time we see ourselves playing Martha’s syndrome, we shall remember the Lord’s words: “Martha, Martha,” “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”
We shall choose the best part, that one which will not be taken from us. Here and now is the right place and right time to have the experience of wholeness and Totality. Be mindful!
Note: Virgo is a very complex sign and the efficiency and everyday sphere is just one of its many facets. I emphasized these aspects because I was following a train of thought.
