Star of the sea and cause of our joy
a little piece from my new zine
Virgo Full Moon: We have a Virgo Full Moon tonight, one that is expected to have strong visual appeal. This is what’s known as a “Blood Moon” though, as far as I know, that’s not connected to any kind of astrological interpretation beyond what would be expected for any incidence of an eclipse. Still, considering how much of the roots of astrology are based on what’s visible and the transmission of light, it’s certain that a lunar eclipse displaying a reddish hue would have evoked strong feeling. As the Moon is currently responsible for Mars, moving through the “place of his fall”, Cancer, we might also think about how his story works into this moment.
Where have we become accustomed to violence in life? Where is violence so standard that we might not even understand it as such? These startling visuals in the sky, if nothing else, can remind us to switch out of autopilot and attempt to course correct.
Today I’m sharing the introductory essay from the little zine / booklet / stapled-together-trio-of-blogs that I swore I’d have done before the sun moved into Aquarius. This, obviously, did not happen, but that’s okay, because eventually I did finish! If you filled out that form a while ago, know that they’re going in the mail tomorrow morning. Thanks for the support, I can’t wait to hear what you think :)
From my zine, “Mary in Astrology: star of the sea and cause of our joy”
I wouldn’t say I’m trying to salvage Mary for myself or for anyone else. This isn’t some kind of apologetic plea, and, if it were, I wouldn’t be the best apologist to make the case. Not because I don’t feel a warm attachment to her, but because there are countless devotees who would do a better job than me.
Mary of Nazareth is the kind of religious figure who inspires passion and obsession that is both truth seeking and reverent. There’s something comforting in her image, in the blue robes that often cloak her. For Catholics it is meant to be easy to honor her. I think the first time I came across this being lived out in earnest was when my own mother began to work with the Marianists, a Catholic community of priests and brothers. They’re united around what the Catholic church calls their charism, or gift given by the Holy Spirit for the benefit of others. Their way of practicing Catholicism includes a commitment to building a society of equals. They “view Mary as the model of discipleship. Just as Mary gave birth to Jesus, Marianists seek to bring the presence of Jesus to life within [them]selves and others.”
I’ve considered the possibility that I’m thinking about her for topical reasons. She has certainly been newsy lately. Yes, Mary, a Palestinian Jew, would have likely been burned alive today. Our leaders and militaries, America’s and Israel's, are committed to this. If by some miracle she carried her pregnancy to term and was able to give birth to Jesus, they’d have begun a second impossible marathon, a contest between the ability of Israel to starve her out and her ability to feed her child.
It would make sense to write this piece because of the violence in Palestine, but I can’t claim any such grand designs. It is true that we are living through a moment in which the children of Palestine are being mutilated, murdered, erased, in the same way that Herod of the Christmas story sought to kill Mary’s child. But I’m writing this for more selfish reasons.
(1) I am learning about a person, a story, with a lot of significance for my mom, (2) I am considering one of the main carriers of femininity in the religion that I grew from, and (3) I am reacquainting myself with someone who still in some ways feels like home.
When I was 19, I traveled out of the United States for the first time. I was going to do a short-term study program with University of Texas professors in Oxford University facilities. For someone raised in a small Texas town and with a general unease when it came to new experiences, it felt like the right way to explore. A safe and small extension out of my comfort zone. I decided, however, that before the session started I wanted to travel around some of continental Europe by train.
I’d watched all the backpacking videos I could find on YouTube, researched what I could about staying in hostels and finding places to sleep that were cheap and safe-ish. I thought maybe I’d have sex for the first time and went to buy condoms at Target, though I ended up being too nervous (to buy the condoms or to have sex). I bought a journal instead.
By the time I made it to Europe I realized I had not prepared enough. This was before my frontal lobe finished developing, before I’d been diagnosed with ADHD/gotten medication for that and for depression, and before I’d been to therapy. I wanted to do everything right, take advantage of this European summer, but I spent most of it unsure of what to do. I was always looking for WiFi, eating enough hostel breakfast to get me through to the next hostel breakfast, and buying bottles of what ended up being dessert wine with labels I couldn’t read from Carrefour.
Between stops where I would meet up with some more adventurous friend, I felt the certainty that I was wasting my time. My control of the summer felt like a worn out sock, loose elastic sliding down my leg and bunching uncomfortably around my ankle. I could either perform coolness and try to ignore it or constantly reach down to yank it tight as high up my calf as possible. Does the metaphor work? I was depressed and homesick and embarrassed about it.
The one activity I could count on myself to accomplish was to visit churches. They were free to enter, did not require any interactions, and were something I could only visit in Europe. See? I was not wasting my time and money.
This is why, in Lyon, I found myself visiting the Basilica of Notre Dame of Fourvière on a dry, dusty, scorching day toward the end of June in 2015. I walked up the hill after crossing the Saône and was exhausted by the time I’d reached the top. Turning around I was able to see Lyon splayed out and bisected by two rivers. The city was painted in shades of yellow.
I’ve lost a lot of details about the weeks I spent in France that summer, because of an “unprecedented” heatwave and that depression I mentioned. But this day is relatively clear in my head. I remember a courtyard filled with children who must have been visiting with their school or church, a small cafe where I mustered up the courage to order a cappuccino and pay in cash, and a welcome breeze that I had not felt at the base of the hill and walking around the city in the days prior.
I felt good about the day, felt good about having seen friends the night before, felt good knowing that the church would have been on most people’s list for visiting Lyon.
I entered the main basilica. High ceilings, pink stones. Then I remember walking down the stairs to what is called “the crypt” or “the low chapel”. Along the walls, featured in eleven adorned alcoves, were Marys of the world. Before that point it had never occurred to me that there might be these other Marys. It was like realizing that mountains in Virginia or Washington looked, felt, spoke differently than the Rocky Mountains I was born into. All royal and rooted and vibrating with importance, yet distinct.
Slowly I worked my way past Our Lady of Fatima and Our Lady of Aparecida. I remember noting Our Lady of Health of Velankanni, from India, holding her son and dressed in an embellished sari. Then I saw Our Lady of Guadalupe. There was the Hail Mary, printed in Spanish, which brought me nearly to tears. Nuestra Señora. There was her blue robe speckled with stars. Her thoughtful stance atop the dark crescent moon.
I was shocked by the feeling of home. I’d let all of that go when I stopped going to mass every Sunday, I thought. It seemingly didn’t matter. Our Lady of Guadalupe was a thread to which I was still very much attached.
Thinking about that moment, thinking about why I’m compelled to write these essays and spend time here, I don’t immediately understand. I know I can be interested in almost anything. That’s doubly true for anything that feels like it will help me make more sense of my childhood. But why something so Catholic? Why something (someone) who represented what once scared me, made me feel excluded and wrong? Even if I dodged a great deal of the harm that can come from growing up gay in the Catholic church, I still understood it to be there. I still came face to face with people who embraced the worst components of the institution. I know how bad it can be.
There is a poem called “A Kentucky of Mothers” by Dana Ward. I first came across it referenced by Maggie Nelson in The Argonauts. She specifically identifies Ward’s idea of the “many gendered mothers of my heart”. These are the mothers, men, women, and otherwise, who enact mothering on you.
Kentucky is mainly a myth I abide because I learned to love inside its stories.
For me it's a maternal place but not the mother-land.
It's where my heart when it was young & small & lacked impressions
took its wealthy shape in songful opulence
of birthdays.
Who were they? All these mothers who seem mothers to me still?from “A Kentucky of Mothers” by Dana Ward
One of my mothers, I realize now, is the Catholic church. Another is Mary. There are many more I could name, but, for brevity’s sake I won’t. The Catholic mass is a myth I abide because I learned to love inside its stories. It’s a maternal place but not the mother-land. Mary was a place where my heart took its wealthy shape. Are these mothers mothers to me still?
Of this booklet’s title, I should say: I was not familiar with these epithets for Mary as a kid, I had never heard “star of the sea” or “cause of our joy” before I began researching for this project. I chose them for their “niceness”, first and foremost. By niceness I mean that they fit, they suit the overarching attempt that I’m making here, an attempt to connect and to renegotiate, and they do so prettily. As a secondary reason, once I began unpacking them, looking into alternatives and reading on their etymology, both seem to offer something useful.
I’ll start with “cause of our joy” which is admittedly a little hard to find the source of. There’s a similar but different phrase “cause of our salvation” that can be traced back to writings by St. Irenaeus in about 200 CE. I like this comparison and it feels fair to make the association, at least to see this early phrase as a template for later “cause of X” appellations. Though in the source text, Against Heresies, in which there is some time spent being annoying about Eve as a foil for Mary, he also spends time appreciating the agency that Mary took. “Cause of” is not a passive designation. Whether she is the cause of our salvation or of our joy or of anything else, she is “a cause”.
“Star of the sea” is much easier to track and came about because of a little trick of history that is satisfying and that fits comfortably in a book that is astrologically inclined. Due to a transcription error, Mary’s name was altered ever so slightly. Once it was translated, it became “star of the sea”, a name that spread rapidly by the middle ages. I like this because it clearly met some spiritual need—sailors began to ask Mary, star of the sea, to intercede for them. The Netherlands claims Mary, star of the sea, as their patroness, an apt choice for a country in constant negotiation with the ocean for shoreline. This is a Mary who watches over from Polaris, the north star, acting as a guide and a reference point.
The two names together, cause of our joy and star of the sea, operate as active and re-active framings. Both are helpful ways to understand, both are necessary counterweights. As with any concept in astrology (in life?), we look for balance.
ADDENDUM: it is worth nodding toward the modern, educated, rational perspective on Mary. The conclusion that Mary is either a simple mythological character, or, if she lived, she did not have a Virgin birth, but was a young married girl made pregnant through an unhappy means. That’s reasonable, but, for the purposes of this booklet, we’re putting it aside.
On this, and as a way to sum up a lot of my position these days, I want to quote Simon Critchley:
Skepticism is not an instinctual or default response for me. If someone tells me something, I am inclined to believe it, no matter how strange it sounds. Maybe I’m just gullible, particularly when it comes to profound experiences that I have never really had, or never had in the way that I would really like. Maybe I’m just a bad philosopher. The thought has certainly crossed my mind.
He continues shortly after:
At this point in history, it is at least arguable that understanding is as important as critique, and patient, kind-hearted, sympathetic observation more helpful than endless personal opinions, as we live in a world entirely saturated by suspicion and fueled by vicious judgments of each other. I’m not arguing for dogmatism, but I suspect that whether philosophy’s obsession with critique risks becoming a form of obsessional self-protection against strange and novel forms of experience.
The hope in putting aside the rational perspective is to become more open to the gifts that come from irrationality, which I believe we need in order to find new and better solutions for the challenges in our world today.
ADDENDUM: briefly, about the importance of archetypes, symbols, for us. There’s the idea that everything that could happen contains implied within it the opposite. Add in a third or a fourth or a fifth or a sixth or a seventh (you understand) to account for shades of gray between those two, then you are going to start freaking out. There is only so much a single human brain can experience.
We need tools to make sense of these endless potential experiences. We need ways of understanding. We can also, simultaneously, acknowledge these tools that help us understand can and likely always will end up with a life of their own.
ADDENDUM: One of the big challenges I have faced in forming these essays is that I’m trying to bridge the parts of my brain that think associatively and the parts that think logically. The best poetry can do this and the best essays can do this. I think I have not yet let this writing swing wildly enough. So, I draft, I re-write, I try more and more tricks to stimulate production. There’s an impulse I have to gather more material. With this pile of material in front of me, I think I can chip away and produce something good. But what’s to keep me from losing sight of these essays’ limits? Who’s to say that I can focus long enough to say what I mean? I think I probably cannot.
I first came across an articulation of this problem back in college when I read The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson for the first time. On the first page, she says:
Before we met, I had spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein’s idea that the inexpressible is contained—inexpressibly!—in the expressed. This idea gets less air time than his more reverential Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent, but it is, I think, the deeper idea. Its paradox is, quite literally, why I write, or how I feel able to keep writing.
For it doesn’t feed or exalt any angst one may feel about the incapacity to express, in words, that which eludes them. It doesn’t punish what can be said for what, by definition, it cannot be. Nor does it ham it up by miming a constricted throat: Lo, what I would say, were words good enough. Words are good enough.
It is idle to fault a net for having holes, my encyclopedia notes.
“Words are good enough”, Nelson says, which is the permission I was looking for, the permission I’ve always been looking for, and the permission I am looking for still, despite having received it.
If the words are good enough, the net of words that is more than half made of holes, then how can I be sure that you understand? I could include a test at the end and grade you, though I don’t think that completely solves things. Your answers are either limited to my phrasing (in the case of multiple choice) or your answers might in their own right influence my own comprehension (in the case of free response). The latter is more appealing if less clean. The former is unsatisfactory almost completely.
So I think my best advice, or, if you want, we can call it a request, is that in reading this booklet you assume I am gesturing almost exactly where I want you to focus, but that you will inevitably have to take a leap to get where I hope for you to land. Assume there is a yawning gap, a canyon, and on one side we have the limits of my ability to be specific and on the other is what I’m trying to say.
Is that a flowery enough caveat? No? Take another selection from the patron saint of this project, Simon Critchley, as one more attempt to say what I mean:
“The apophatic path of Dionysius is characterized by a negative collapsing of language in superlative words, which can give voice to deeply felt emotion: the experience of love. This can be seen in the very title of the Song of Songs. A song is just a song, one might riposte. How can there be a song of songs? Yet this excessiveness of utterance is what is being asked of us in approaching mysticism. It is only when words break, by saying too much, and by saying too little in saying too much, that we might be released towards that which exceeds propositions: an openness to the simplicity of mystery.” - pg 92, Mysticism, my own emphasis
There are three other essays in the zine, focused on the Capricorn Moon, Mary in the lunar cycle, and (still a work in progress, but printed anyway) virginity in astrology. If there is enough interest in this, I’d be happy to re-print at some point. Let me know with a comment or email. Thank you for reading!
Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.