Illustration by Gustave Doré

Mars square Pluto and Saturn - Mercury opposite Uranus - Pallas Athena square Sun & opposite Moon - Moon trine Mercury & Neptune 

“Ghastly grim and ancient Raven…Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”

Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”, a man in mourning for his dead beloved is visited one night by a raven. The bird intrudes upon his morose solitude, determined to make its way in, but then delivers no clear message to his host. “Perched upon a bust of Pallas…Perched, and sat, and nothing more.” What to make of him? Who sent him? Is he a ghost, an angel, a harbinger of death, or just a clever bird? Is he friend or foe? More and more insistently, the man engages with the raven, until his mourning descends into mania and despair, feeling his soul trapped in the shadow of the visitor, still sitting, unmoving, above the chamber door. 

The Norse god Odin was known to have two raven companions: one for thought and one for memory. As Mercury slows down in Scorpio, we, like Poe’s narrator, may find ourselves being pulled into the spiraling depths of both mental functions, and, in the case of memory, caught between the desire to hold on and the desire to let go. As Pluto and retrograde Mars wrestle each other, with Saturn close by, there will be a tendency to spin rational thoughts into anxious or obsessive ones. The planetary dance in general, in the upcoming days, reminds us that death, loss and fear will inevitably visit us all, but more often, the things that haunt us are the unseen, unconscious parts of ourselves that we project onto the outside world. Perhaps omens are what we make of them; our shadows may contains monsters and madness, but they may also contain deep truths desiring to be discovered, rich Plutonian compost out of which new growth, or new ways of looking at things, may emerge. 

Is memory a blessing or a burden? Does it give us solace or trap us in the past? What has been haunting you, and can you give it space to be acknowledged without letting it take control of your mind? Maybe it’s not the past, but the future, that has you feeling anxious or out of control—can you recognize that, and then bring yourself back to the present and tackle one day at a time? If the spectre that persists at your window is rooted in trauma, can you ground yourself in patience, non-judgment and support before letting it in? There is no shame in asking for help. 

These intense and looming transits, like the poem, caution us to seek balance between the rational and the irrational, between the controllable and the uncontrollable. Like the black-plumed raven atop bright-eyed Athena, thought and memory, light and dark, in working union, can lead to deeper understanding, and acceptance, of yourself. As this year’s sky stories, and the lessons of the gods, reach their climax, I hear and invoke the well-loved prayer: “Grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”