Libra, the Universal Justice and the Cosmic Joke
cosmic scales, air cardinals, ecocentric law, bridge and beauty makers
The weight of the human world is heavy, yet again. It is impossible to place that weight on a scale. I cannot count how many times I wanted to resign from our species in this life. While trying to pen Libra amidst the ongoing horror, the resignation surfaced again. “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” writes Nietzsche, a Libra Sun, and I will not say more on Enchanted Zodiac.
Autumn is the time when the creation is shedding. Our star shines but does not burn. An hemisphere begins to lean towards darkness and coldness, some animals migrate, some stay, the leaves fall, and gravity catches us, all. We are not going anywhere after spring and summer, it is time to fall and winter. There has been a harmonious seasonal rhythm our planet and our solar system offered to life. Without the celestial harmony, we would not come into being. Not all the sides of the universe bring forth life, our little corner does and here we are, born out of universal chaos and harmony.
Who are we? Humans, a kind of primate amongst many kinds of beings. We shared a common ancestor with bonobos and chimpanzees about six million years ago, with gorillas about ten million years ago, and with orangutans about fifteen million years ago… This is our closest animal family, our closest set of relations, the Great Apes. The list and the story of life continues until the whole planetary life reaches a shared common ancestor more than three billion years ago, from whom branched all the web of life. From this shared past, shared story has emerged many relationships. At the moment, as a great ape, a social mammalian, a symbolic animal, we are the most common and widespread primate on planet Earth. Congratulations to us and our web of life. That is both our cosmic gift and cosmic curse. As the leading symbolic species of our planet we imagine the symbols, the concepts, the ideals and our web of life imagines them through us.
As the generator of the air element within zodiac, Libra is related to all the things that make us symbolic animals and the cosmic scales swarm with many concepts, many ideals. Balance, harmony, equality, fairness, justice, peace, diplomacy, music, art to name some… Not all animals care for justice and injustice, for fairness and unfairness but we do, so do some of our monkey cousins. It is in our biology, it is in our imagination, this ideal of having a fair, just world is one of those things that makes us who we are and hapes our world. Here is a little experiment that was conducted on monkey people about “fairness.” There are capuchin monkeys in cages (Be warned. I too have quite a bit issue about other than human animal experiments) side by side asked to do the same simple task to hand in a stone to get something in return. In this case it is a piece of cucumber. If they are both given cucumbers as reward, none complains, they just perform the task. Monkey gives a rock, monkey receives a piece of cucumber. But if the human gives one capuchin monkey a cucumber and the other a grape, then hell breaks open for the one who gets cucumber. They react, they throw the cucumber back to the human. They want the grape also. The one who gets grape does not seem to care about their fellow monkey’s drama. Please watch if you can.1 I am sharing this because it touches so many cords about primal attitudes and it is so very relevant to our chapter this month.
We have journeyed quite a bit, yet it is not over. We are a species amongst many other species that is still evolving in an ever-evolving creative universe. We are in the midst of the cosmic and planetary journey. All this is a part of who we are. We imagine, we create and we transform with our universe, with our planet and they imagine, create, transform through us. We don’t know what awaits us. The universe is full of surprises. Nobody said we could “fix” the reality as we please, as it pleases us. Even the fixed stars are not fixed. They move, we move all the time.