The Sun Crow Quarantine

In the midst of the Pandemic scare that is the Covid-19 fiasco, we're finding more and more of our ranks, that is to say the working class, experiencing our livelihoods and ability to travel disrupted. Meanwhile, there's talk of the government stepping in and placing a moratorium on rent and mortgage deadlines until the situation is normalized. That's a nice thought, but let's not forget that the government is primarily responsible for the industry and travel bans that have put people in this predicament in the first place. The limitations that are being imposed upon us are either imminent or already here. So far the relief being offered is merely speculative. So anxieties are high and, understandably, all eyes are on the 'Rona. So this is my headspace going into the realization I had that I'm about to unpack and run with.

(The Oliver Hibert Tarot)

The Corona virus, Covid-19, evokes solar imagery for anybody with even a passing familiarity with the Tarot. The 19th Trump of the Tarot is the Sun. The Sun is the ruler of Leo, the lion. The lion is the king of the beasts. He has a natural crown, or corona, in his majestic mane. Possibly a little less obvious, and the lightbulb that prompted this post, is the observation that "Covid-19" is an anagram for "corvid," the genus of bird that includes the crow and the raven. To understand why that is, first you have to understand that every card of the Tarot's Major Arcana corresponds to a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The Sun corresponds to the letter, resh, the phonetic equivalent of the English "r." So if you look at the Sun through the lens of its letter correspondence, then rearrange the letters of "Covid-19" slightly, you arrive at "corvid." 

The "Chinese virus," as President Trump (incidentally a Leo Rising) recently called it (to much public outrage) is, in a sort of occult parlance, the "Sun Crow Virus." As it turns out, the Sun Crow is an important figure in the mythological landscape of China and some other Asian cultures/regions. In Chinese lore, there were originally 10 Sun Crows, who are always depicted with three legs. It is said that around 2170 BCE all 10 Sun crows came out on the same day and burned the earth. To solve this problem, the celestial archer shot all but one out of the sky. That's why now there is only one Sun Crow. 

Interestingly the constellation of the Archer in western astrology, Sagittarius, is the Ascendant of the United States' natal chart. That means that it was aligned with the direction of the rising Sun at the moment the nation was conceived. At the time that talks of military enforced travel bans were confirmed, the Sun was traveling through the final degrees of Pisces, forming a square to the final degrees of Sagittarius, the Ascendant of the United States. In other words, this is a critical moment in a challenging transit between the natal Ascendant and the heart of the zeitgeist. 

American pop culture circa 1994 was responsible for giving us a homegrown Sun Crow of our very own in Brandon Lee. The star of the hit movie, the Crow, notably the son of the famous (Chinese) martial artist, Bruce Lee, was fatally shot during the filming of the same motion picture. It bears highlighting that the martial arts are called "martial" because fighting is a martial, or Mars-resonating, discipline. This will become relevant when Aries and Mars enter the stage shortly. It is also worth noting that Lee died on March 31st, 1993, which puts the Sun at 11 degrees Aries. This is the second decan of Aries, which means that the Sun was in the portion of Aries whose subruler is the Sun. I wonder if the synchromystic community will have further insights into this weird "coincidence."

EDIT 3/19/20: I was reminded after initially publishing this post that Brandon Lee's character in The Crow was named Eric Draven, which is easily stretched out to form Eric, d' Raven. Eric is derived from an Old Norse name, Eirikr, which means "Ever Ruler." So the name conveys the message that the raven or the crow is a sort of eternal god-king. In the Norse pantheon, the principle god, Odin, is associated with two ravens, Huginn and Muninn. There is a motif at least as old as recorded history where a king, who is always regarded as divine, must be sacrificed and reborn to ensure the rejuvenation and continuation of the empire. Sometimes the king is killed by someone else who takes up his mantle. Sometimes, as in the case of Jesus or Osiris, he simply dies and is resurrected somehow. Sometimes the theme is only acted out, sometimes it is literal. This motif is repeated again and again, in legend after legend. It's still acted out on the world stage at extremely regular intervals. Others have taken to calling the phenomenon the King Kill. The plot of the movie, The Crow, overtly dramatizes this motif as Eric the Raven, the Ever Ruler, is murdered and resurrected to seek vengeance for his family who died with him. But when we read between the lines and  realize that Brandon Lee himself was an embodiment of the Ever Ruler, the Sun Crow, it becomes obvious that we're looking at a King Kill embedded within a king kill. When both layers are overlaid, it's apparent that what we're looking at is tantamount to a highly orchestrated and produced blood ritual. Since the Sun Crow Virus has taken us back in time to look at a particular Sun Crow King Kill that we are 27 years removed from (roughly the length of a Saturn cycle btw) this begs the question, will history repeat itself? In a week and a half, when the Sun has traveled 1/3 of the way through Martial Aries, the sign of it exaltation, and entered the subportion where it is at the height of its power in that sign on March 31, will there be another King Kill? And what will that look like? Will somebody find a cure for the virus? Will the virus cleanse the U.S. of its present stagnating Lion King? Or maybe he'll take the opportunity to parade out a scapegoat. 

Circling back to the previously mentioned Sun-Ascendant square, the US's chart ruler, Jupiter, is currently transiting its natal Pluto. Jupiter is luck and expansion, Pluto is rebirth; often fiery and violent. Simultaneously, transiting Pluto and Saturn are also right on top of the nation's natal Pluto. The country is right in the thick of its Pluto return, and these themes will be deeply intertwined with our collective karma as a nation. It's a good thing it wasn't built on an ancient Indian burial ground or engaged in armed conflict for 93% of its existence.....You know, or anything like that. Jupiter's presence here might just be our saving grace. Perhaps as the potential for fiery scorched earth apocalypse hovers above the Earth, its proximity to the "Greater Beneficent," Jupiter, and the Archer's challenging stance relative to the Sun Crow will once again shoot the threat down from the sky and give us another opportunity collectively to do better than we have in the past. 

Ordinarily, when they weren't threatening to consume the Earth in fire, the original 10 Sun Crows were driven by Xihe, the Sun Mother, across the sky in her chariot, one at a time. When they weren't engaged in giving light and warmth to the Earth below, they remained perched in the Fusang, a red mulberry tree whose name means "the leaning mulberry tree." The limbs of the Fusang were each said to have "many mouths." It seems noteworthy to me that the Hebrew letter attributed to the Tower, Mars, is Peh. Peh is a pictogram of a mouth. The Lightning struck tower, like the red mulberry tree, is characterized by its leaning. The color attributed to Mars, the planet associated with the Tower, is red. As I write these words, the Sun is within a degree and a half of Aries, who is ruled by Mars. As of March 19, 2020, the Sun will be in the sign of its exaltation, where its power is second only to when it travels through its home sign of Leo in July and August. 

The martial sign of Aries, in turn, is depicted in the Tarot as the Emperor. Presently, the Sun is straddling the country's natal 3rd and 4th houses, where it has been transferring the Empire's prerogative of quarantine onto the 3rd house matters of travel and communication (e.g. facebook's censoring of legitimate covid-19 reporting). As the Sun moves more solidly into the natal 4th house of the US, its influence on the house's themes of security, comfort, and home life will become even more firmly cemented. We're not going anywhere for a while. Settle in and get comfortable. Aries/the Emperor isn't fucking around this year. He is favoring Martial Law and, for all intents and purposes, we are already there. As a side note, in 2008, the Sun Crow was almost adopted as the national emblem of Korea, reinforcing its resonance with the themes of the Emperor. In the Japan Football Association, the winner of the Emperor's Cup is given the honor of wearing the Yatagarasu (Sun Crow) emblem the following year. Japanese lore has it that Yatagarasu, the Great Crow was sent from the heavens to guide the Emperor in his journey from the region that would become Kumono to the region that would become Yamato. So here again we see themes of Sun, Empire, and rebirth converging on a single point that is associated with a Sun Crow. 

In the Chinese lore, there were said to be two grasses of immortality. One was called "ground sun," and the other "spring grow." The crows enjoyed eating the grasses of immortality and would descend upon the earth periodically to pig out. The Sun Mother apparently didn't like this and blinded them to prevent them from continuing. The blinding of the Sun Crows calls to mind the blind ambition of the Empire. The Emperor is a stabilizing force that is foundational to society. But the same energies that sustain us are all prone to imbalance in some way or another. The Emperor will seek the expansion of his powers to grotesque proportions in the absence of checks and balances.

And how does immortality factor into this subject? The Emperor is closely related to the Hierophant (Taurus). The Hierophant governs institution. We can see an example of their interplay in the State mandating the closure of the entire service industry, courts, libraries, and other places of employment. The Hierophant is also the keeper of the keys to immortality. He represents the traditions that guard the secret to apotheosis, Man's innate ability to claim his birthright. That is, to realize the divinity inherent in his true Self. Yet the institutions that have been propped up by the State as we know it keep us in a state of perpetual debt slavery that is much more akin to the serfdom of medieval Europe for example than most people would be comfortable admitting. This leaves little time to introspect and to ask questions. It yields a populace that is ignorant despite unprecedented access to information. It shapes individuals who are too busy worrying about their next meal to figure out how to reclaim their own sovereignty and power. These conditions enable a Nanny State, which is just a cover for incremental power grabs.

This Emperor/Aries-Hierophant/Taurus tie-in is a good segue into another major transit that impacts everything I've been talking about so far. Uranus is presently in Taurus (the Hierophant), which it will be transiting until April of 2026. Instead of repeating myself, I'll just quote something I wrote to someone who asked me about the subject recently. 

Taurus is material stability, your possessions, your home (in the sense that it's a possession as opposed to an emotional/family/nurturing thing), your food, your comfort, your income/livelihood. It's also institutions. Anything governmental, schools, the debt slave game we're all participating in. Uranus is rebellion, individualism at all costs, breaking things apart, reinvention, innovation, etc. The last time this happened was the Great Depression. 

We also have a pretty long-lived Pluto-Saturn conjunction going on at the same time in Capricorn. Saturn is limitation, boundaries, hierarchy, and karmic cycles. Pluto is death and rebirth. So basically all kinds of karma is going to be blowing up in everybody's face for a long time. Things that we shouldn't be doing will fall apart. It will become apparent that they're not sustainable. They're going to explode and transform into something new and, if we're smart and applying the lessons presented to us, something better. So it's a big collective community/societal shift that's going to have to happen. And the shortcomings of the systems and institutions we rely on are going to be highlighted, probably by them being upended because they're fucking obsolete. If we're smart, we realize that all this bureaucracy and systematic enslavement are inefficient and exploitative and we could be doing literally everything better ourselves. Anybody who's ever been on an Army base as an enlisted soldier and to a Rainbow Gathering can see that as clear as day. Community is more efficient than government by a factor of 100.

So what lessons can we begin to apply? Here's a laundry list of things that seem like low hanging fruit to me. Some are obviously easier to execute than others, but they are all Taurus themes where most of us could stand to do some housekeeping, both at the scale of the individual and the collective.

• Grow and preserve your own food. Food scarcity has a historical precedent and we're already seeing hints of it at the mere suggestion of a strong flu.

• Approach living arrangements in unorthodox ways to increase your advantage. If legislation is your sphere of influence, hit it from that angle. If communal living makes sense to you, that might be beneficial to you. Intentional community is not a bad idea in my opinion. But the traditional one nuclear family per house on a 1/4 acre lot paying 1/3+ of your income for shelter situation is obscene. No other animal preoccupies itself so completely with simply worrying about where to live. That is not a landscape where people, as a whole, are going to thrive. This is the time to re-think this and receive the benefit of the universe adding to our momentum. Wage slavery is a scam.

•  Recognize that the U.S Dollar and other fiat currencies are more volatile than governments, who have a vested interest in them, would have you believe. 

• Again, Taurus is money and stability while Uranus favors innovation. Put a few bucks of your savings into cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and XRP periodically (also use a hardware wallet). There are at least a couple of possible, if not probable, future scenarios I am aware of where the value of these currencies will increase exponentially.

• Put some of your savings into silver and/or gold as well. Historically, these hold their value much more reliably than printed money and token (i.e. non-precious metal) coins.

• Take some of the responsibility for self-defense upon yourself. Sometimes governments are too distracted to protect you. Sometimes governments turn those forces of government that are ostensibly there to protect the populace against those very same citizens. Both of these are potential themes of Uranus-occupied Taurus. Learn a martial art, get a gun, and learn to shoot if there's not some glaring reason that that would be an awful idea in your particular case. 

• Prepare for the worst but expect the best. Try your best to not freak out. Fear-mongering is a classic tool for motivating the masses to act against their best interests. Watch the news only selectively and maybe cultivate a meditation practice. 

• Keep an eye toward conservation of resources and reduction of waste. Any activity that aligns you with these themes will ease growing pains. Maybe that just means being better about eating leftovers or composting them if you can't even with that shit; all the better if you followed the first piece of advice and started a garden. If your ambitions are larger, you can take a Permaculture Design Course or hire a designer to make your house more energy efficient and/or help you create a food forest or aquaponics setup. Also, just cutting unnecessary expenditures out of your life is really something everybody should be thinking really hard about for the next six years.

• Look toward ways to keep your tax dollars out of the National Defense budget. The things that are done with a massive proportion of that money are objectively unethical. We could end poverty at home and provide education and healthcare for everyone who wants it if we stopped turning a blind eye to bombing brown kids in third world countries. We would still have enough left over even to cover a standing army; provided that its priorities are shifted from policing world affairs and limited to actual homeland defense instead. 

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EDIT 3/20/20

I keep finding synchronicities that tie into the ones I've already unloaded above. Rather than continuously revising the original piece, I am just going to keep a running tally of them here. 

So to summarize, in Tangled, Rapunzel lived on the island of Corona, perched up in a tower like the Sun Crow in its mulberry tree.

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Michael Massee, who starred opposite Brandon Lee in the Crow as "Funboy," is the actor who accidentally shot and ultimately killed Lee. Massee went on to play multiple God-king roles himself, effectively completing the motif, once again, of the resurrection of the Sun Crow. 

• 2003 - 2005, Carnivale - Massee plays the Russian, Lucius Belyakov. He is a figure imbued with god-like powers who is one of a never ending succession who must find and kill their opposite to maintain the balance between good and evil in the world. He is killed by Hack Scudder and avenged by his kind of friend, Ben Scudder, Hack's estranged son. Ben then goes on to kill Belyakov's son, an evil priest who has been making a name for himself as a prophetic figure and consolidating an empire of acolytes around himself. The final season ends with his daughter taking up his mantle. The show was not renewed past that point. 

• 2005, Revelations - Michael Massee is a Satanist cult leader named Isiah Haden, who is working to bring about the apocalypse. The name of the show itself carries the theme of resurrection. Isiah Haden's antagonist, the man who is trying to thwart his plans and kill him, is named Richard Massey. In other words, Massey is trying to kill Masse, a king of sorts, to avoid the rebirth that is Armageddon. But in so doing, he would in effect be supplanting his nemesis and initiating a resurrection of sorts of his own.

• 2006, The X-Files; The Field Where I Died - Massee plays Vernon Ephesian, the leader of a suicide cult which is heavily preoccupied with reincarnation.