christianity

How to Make Your New Year's Resolutions Stick

Happy New Year! Hip, hip, hooray! Out with the old, in with the new. This is usually how New Year’s is celebrated. We mark the year’s end by shouting emphatically, making grandiose statements, and proclaiming the next year will be better than the last. But is this how we should approach the New Year, from a spiritual and/or astrological viewpoint? Yes and no.

We celebrate New Year’s having just left the winter solstice, the day where there is the shortest amount of light. Many events occur at this time of year: the birth of Christ, for myself as a Jew, the celebration of Hanukah, and yes, New Year’s. It is indeed cause to celebrate, the return of light, the birth of the savior, or the miraculous lasting of the oil in the Menorah, but lest we get carried away with the celebration we should remember that ambition, structure, success, and discipline are the key words associated with Capricorn the great mountain goat who symbolizes the year’s end and beginning.

Capricorn, ruled by Saturn, or Kronos, god of time and fate, asks us to make slow, deliberate progress. Slow and steady wins the race. The mountain goat’s climb to the top of the mountain is slow and hard, but the rewards are great. Capricorn asks us to be ambitious but methodical and not to make wild resolutions that are sure to go unfulfilled. Better to look at oneself and structure your behavior so as to make great gains in the long run. This is not jubilant Sagittarius season. There is work to be done. Take it from the conservative Roman emperor Augustus who minted his coinage with a symbol of Capricorn, the supreme symbol of steady work, progress, and discipline.

Even Augustus believed in Capricron

Capricorn season this year is also buttressed by a retrograding mercury, further asking us to slow down. Most of you know that when mercury retrogrades it is not moving in its unusual direct motion, so we must rethink, reevaluate, and revive our actions so as to better realign them going forward. Again, none of this indicates a fast jumpstart to the New Year. 

So when you bring in the New Year, before you make any grand resolutions, think first about making slow incremental changes. That just might be the way for you to become your own emperor. 

Worshipping Capricorn, the mountain goat

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We're very happy to have a theology student coming for an Inner Makeup Session today! Inner Makeup does integrate different faith traditions, including Christianity, depending on the client. When you come to a session, you will receive a print out of your astrology chart, hand-typed notes as a guide to your chart, and of course, the hour session where we will discuss your personal spirituality using astrology, tarot, and more. Book your session, today!

How It Gets Better

How does It Get Better? We’ve told by the It Gets Better Project that we shouldn’t worry, our best days are ahead, that whatever is difficult in life shall pass and is temporary. This is an incomplete picture as to how things get better. For things to get better, it means they have to have been bad or even worse before. In fact this is the binary that permeates nearly all of Western culture. Things are bad, and then they break for the better. We don’t enjoy the peace that Eastern cultures aspire to; rather we ebb and flow, seek and destroy, rise and fall. Yes, rise and fall. Just like the craze of Dionysus as contrasted with the blazing of Apollo. Just like the crucifixion of Jesus and his subsequent rise. Just like the season of Pisces that magically breaks from the bleakness of winter into spring. So yes it’s bad. But it will get better. However, one has to start with madness, death, hopelessness, and despair, to then experience the ecstasy of redemption. To circumvent that step would mean that, no, it doesn’t get better; it had never gotten anywhere in the first place.

 

Amber Or Johnny?

Whom do you believe? Johnny or Amber? It’s a tough position to be in. Amber Heard has just leveled serious, career-threatening allegations at Johnny Depp including accusations and photographic evidence of physical and verbal abuse. Johnny Depp has responded by launching a bunch of surrogates to claim Amber is shaking him down. What are you to do? Don’t believe either. Believe in their astrology.

Johnny Depp is a classic Gemini. Geminis are the outsiders, the airy twins who were the first humans to live outside of the Garden of Eden. Gemini represents a glibness and flightiness associated with the child-like beckoning of the early months of summer. We see this in Johnny Depp. He seems never to have grown up. He plays fantasy parts in his major movie franchises, has always maintained a hard-partying, violent, rock lifestyle, and even as these serious accusations are being leveled against him, he’s off playing concerts in Europe. What gives? Amber is a Taurus.

This is some classic s%^t. Taurus is Eve. She is possessive, earthly, and the materials of the world come easily to her. She’s also eats from the forbidden fruit and offers it up to Adam, commencing her fall from grace. Is Amber Johnny’s foil? Probably. She is also a mother figure he is trying to reclaim as his mother had been ill and recently passed away. It’s Oedipal and Biblical, Johnny trying to get with Taurus (Eve), his mother, and also attempting to get back into paradise. Even though Gemini has all of the airy, creative power, Taurus maintains the upper hand with her earthly prowess.

But as we know, once man falls from grace he is never allowed back in. Paradise has already been lost. Johnny already was fallen, being the outsider for most of his life. Perhaps this explains his obsessive need for love, fame, and self-medication. Unfortunately for him, loneliness is the fate bestowed upon those lost. Trying to find one’s way back to his mother will only result in his and her destruction, wandering blindly as Oedipus did. Strangely, Gemini still maintains a glib attitude about all of this, having never known the bliss of paradise.

As for Amber, she may yet live to see another day, withstanding the pains God bestows upon Eve. Taurus, being an enduring, materially replete earth sign, may get the windfall she covets. Only at the expense and the fall of herself, and her child, or twins, in Johnny. 

To better understand your personal astrology and spirituality, contact us for a reading at 203-889-8328 or dan@innermakeup.net

Is Kanye Our Saviour?

Is Kanye our savior? He would certainly have us think so. With an album entitled Yeezus and a generally defiant, rebellious nature, we might conclude that Kanye is a contemporary incarnation of the child of Nazareth. But is he?

Jesus, unlike Kanye, was a despised, rejected, and reviled political criminal. He was suspicious of the nuclear family, going so far as to recommend that one leave his kin in order to seek spiritual nirvana. He preached that wealth was the enemy and that the downtrodden would inherit the earth. He was crucified, willingly, providing his body as a sacrificial lamb for both his people and the Romans. Does this sound like Kanye? Not really. But then again, neither does our contemporary conception of who Jesus was. The modern Jesus generally passes as an acceptable, personal, convenient punching bag, serving as absolution for one’s sins and as a get out of jail free for the guilt-ridden. It’s quite a contrast to the man who lived on the fringes of society and was so unilaterally rejected in his time.

Astrologically, Kanye is a Gemini. Geminis exhibit a sunniness and glibness of tongue associated with the beginning months of summer. While Kanye takes his work seriously, there is a child-like, flighty duality to his thoughts and actions. In fact Mercury, the mercurial planet of thought and communication, rules Gemini. You never know what he is going to say, like twins talking back and forth. Gemini is the twins in astrology. Gemini is also the outsiders, Cain and Abel, being the first humans to live outside of the Garden of Eden, having been banished from paradise. While Kanye seems keenly aware of the fallen nature of humanity he seems to be unaware of his own flighty, attention-seeking nature as it relates to his own invocation of Messianic prowess. This is the same sin that Jesus warns against, the one that states we should be pious for the sake of being pious, not for attention.

So why does Kanye feel crucified? Well, being kicked out of the Garden of Eden is admittedly tough, as well as being an outsider. But a Messiah does not that make. No, Kanye’s astrology features a Pisces ascendant, Pisces being the sign most associated with magic, dreams, and Jesus, the month of deep, spiritual transformation from winter into spring, water into wine, men into fish, and death into rebirth. But one’s ascendant, the sign in which the Eastern horizon is placed at the time of one’s birth, is the mask we put on for the world. It is an act, an artifice. Kanye puts on the mask of Yeezus or Jesus, but doesn’t live it in reality.

Kanye displays none of the features of Jesus meek and mild. For one thing he has dived wholeheartedly into marriage and children, which flies in the face of Jesus’ raison d’etre and abdicates to the mass’s almost singular desire to bear and keep children. He appeared recently on Ellen communicating a boyish, misbehaved, childish persona, palatable to a daytime audience much more than the artistic mask he puts on as the crucified Jesus. He worships at the altar of billionaires, an act anathema to the anti-money stance of Jesus. Does this sound like the markings of a rejected man?

But Kanye may yet be our savior, as Jesus in antiquity has nothing to do with the Jesus of today. Jesus had no social media, no Ellen, and rejected the biological trappings of nature, namely procreation and arguably the kind of ambition someone like Kanye espouses. Kanye and Kim Kardashian getting married is amongst the most overexposed, animalistic acts we’ve witnessed in recent media history. A doubling down on the traditional man/woman procreative binary, Kim Kardashian with her fertile, bulging hips just ripe for child rearing, and Kanye being the irreverent husband that can be tamed by her and her coven even when he misbehaves. The much more Christ-like and transformative act for Kanye would be to come out in some fashion because allegedly he is gay.

So we crucify Kanye with every click, every tap, every retweet, every petty judgment, convenient like our garden-variety conception of the modern Jesus. In this sense, he is justified in calling himself a Messiah. But, a Messiah can only be crucified if he saves us and is truly the one who transforms us. And Kanye is nothing of the sort. He saves himself in his own Gemini game, understanding the significance of the air he flies in but nary a thought spared for the gravity of his influence, ignoring the potential for deep cultural transformation as a humble, Christ-like figure. But as it stands, we don’t have much of an appetite for transformation. We merely want to see reflected back to us a hyperbolic, technologically expedient version of who we are and who we think we should be. Kanye is all too happy to deliver, dragging the carcass of Jesus through the mud, faking a crucifixion, laughing all the way to the Gemini bank. 

To learn more about your personal spirituality as divined through Inner Makeup, contact us at dan@innermakeup.net or 203-889-8328.