The Golden Fleece

(part 2) -

The Tail of the Dragon

The helpers turn

On 13 November Mercury and Venus both turn direct: after weeks of apparent backward motion they move forward again.

In the myth these are Hermes, the messenger god who once gave the golden ram, and Aphrodite, the goddess of love who made Medea fall in love with Jason. The two helpers of the story come back into motion.



At this point in the myth something decisive happens. Aeetes realises that his daughter has helped the strangers. Hera, queen of the gods and Jason's protector, puts fear into Medea's heart. Medea flees. Barefoot she slips out of the palace; the bolts of the doors spring open at her spells.

The Moon rises and sees her running. The Greeks believed that sorceresses could sing the moon down from the sky. And the Moon goddess had a lover of her own, the shepherd Endymion, whom she visited every night in his cave. So she mocks: how often have you sung me down from the sky so you could work your magic in the dark? Now you are burning with love too.

At the river Medea throws herself before Jason. She promises him the fleece: she will put the dragon to sleep. Jason swears by Zeus and Hera that he will marry her.

What had withdrawn now comes into motion. But it does not come from the hero himself. It comes to him.

The tail of the dragon - 12, 14 and 16 November

The lunar nodes are the two points where the path of the Moon crosses the path of the Sun. In old astrology they were called the head and the tail of the dragon. The South Node is the tail: Cauda Draconis.

On 12 November Jupiter meets the South Node, at 25°32 Leo. On 14 November Mars follows, at 25°12. On 16 November at 07:24 Mars and Jupiter stand exactly together at 25°59 Leo. Rarely has an astrological term been so literal.

Medea and Jason enter the grove of Ares before sunrise. They pass the spot where the golden ram, with the boy Phrixus on its back, first sank to its knees after its long flight from Greece. The blackened remains of the altar on which the animal was sacrificed still lie there. Then they see the fleece, high in the oak, like a cloud that blushes red in the first light of the sun.

The dragon stretches its neck. Its hiss is so loud that far away mothers wake in fright and pull their children close. Its coils roll like smoke above a smouldering forest.

Medea calls on Sleep, to her the mightiest of all gods, and on Hecate, queen of the underworld. Slowly the dragon relaxes. But its head stays raised, threatening. Then Medea dips a freshly cut sprig of juniper into her herbs and, singing, sprinkles its eyes. The dragon lays its head on the ground.

Jason takes the fleece from the oak. He lifts it the way a girl in her room joyfully watches the light of the full moon fall on her robe. The gold casts a glow like fire over his cheeks and forehead. When he returns to the ship, his companions see the fleece shining like the lightning of Zeus.

Mars and Jupiter are both in this scene. An ancient commentator, who wrote notes in the margins of Apollonius' poem, compares Jason to Pyroeis, "the fiery one": the Greek name for the planet Mars. And the fleece shines like the lightning of Zeus, the god we know in the sky as Jupiter.

This is what Mars and Jupiter on the South Node ask of us. Mars stands for decisive action, Jupiter for vision, knowledge and wisdom, the South Node for an intuitive knowing that comes from deeper layers. Together: carrying vision and knowledge out into the world with force, from intuition. Jason does exactly that. He does not know how to put a dragon to sleep. He acts on what was given to him in the dark. But he has to do it himself, with his own hands.

That is not always easy to place. Neither for yourself, nor for the people around you. Whoever says "I know, but I cannot explain how" is not always heard. Yet that is exactly where depth can arise, if you are willing to carry that knowing out with force.

Around the conjunction the sky forms a special figure. Venus and Chiron stand opposite each other, as do the two lunar nodes. Such an opposition is a tension. But they are connected by harmonious aspects: Mars and Jupiter on the South Node form a trine to Chiron and a sextile to Venus, and the North Node does the same the other way round. Astrologers call this a mystic rectangle: a tension that is held from both sides. The teacher and love stand opposite each other, but the sky holds them together.

What the fleece costs

This is where an ordinary hero's tale would end: the hero has the treasure, the ship sails home. But this story continues, and it turns dark.

Aeetes does not let it go. He sends his fleet after the Argo, led by his son Absyrtus, Medea's own brother. The Colchians far outnumber them and close off every escape. The Argonauts are trapped.

Medea sees only one way out. She sends her brother a message: come alone, at night, to a small island where a temple of the goddess Artemis stands, and we will talk. As a gift he receives a precious purple robe. Absyrtus trusts his sister and comes. Jason waits in ambush and strikes him down. Medea covers her eyes with her veil so she does not have to see. Dying, Absyrtus catches his blood in his hands, and it spatters onto her silver veil and her purple gown.

For the Greeks this was the worst thing a person could do: to shed the blood of one's own family. Such a deed called up the Erinyes, the goddesses of vengeance who pursue those who kill their kin until they pay. Apollonius writes that one of them is watching.

Zeus is furious too. Built into the ship is a piece of wood from the sacred oak of Dodona, the oracle of Zeus, and that wood can speak. It tells the crew they cannot come home until Jason and Medea are cleansed of this murder. Only one person can do that: Circe, the sorceress, sister of Aeetes and so Medea's aunt.

That night Circe has dreamt that the walls of her house were weeping blood. When Jason and Medea arrive, they say nothing. They sit down at her hearth, as suppliants in Greece did when they asked for protection. Medea hides her face in her hands. Jason plants the sword with which he killed Absyrtus upright in the ground. Circe understands without words. She performs the ancient purification rite for those with blood on their hands: she sacrifices a young pig and washes their hands in its blood, so that blood removes blood.



Here lies the shadow of Jupiter on the South Node. Jupiter enlarges everything, including the tendency to believe you won the treasure yourself. Jung called this inflation: the ego claims for itself what actually came from a deeper source, and grows bigger and blinder for it.

More than four hundred years ago the German physician and alchemist Michael Maier saw this too. He lived at the court of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague, a centre of alchemy and astrology, and for him the Golden Fleece was a veiled description of the alchemical quest. In a book from 1617 he describes a dreamlike encounter. Travelling through the region of ancient Colchis, he meets a venerable old man. It turns out to be Jason himself. Maier asks how he obtained the fleece. Jason tells him: Medea gave him every means. But when Maier asks where he might find those means, Jason answers that he no longer has them. Medea took the secrets with her when she later left him in anger. Then he vanishes.

The hero who won the fleece ends with empty hands. The knowing was never his. It was hers.

Mars returns to this as well. From January to April 2027 he is retrograde, seen from Earth moving apparently backwards, and in mid-March he passes the degree of this conjunction once more. What is conquered now will be looked at again then.

Chiron and the child in the fire

On the way home the Argo has to pass through the most dangerous waters in the world: past the sea monster Scylla, the whirlpool Charybdis and the rocks that wander over the sea. For this Hera calls on the help of Thetis, a sea goddess. Thetis is married to Peleus, one of the Argonauts on board. Their son is Achilles, who will later become the greatest hero of the Trojan War. Hera reminds Thetis that the child is now being cared for "in the dwellings of the centaur Chiron".

Apollonius then tells why Achilles is there. Thetis wanted to make her son immortal, like herself. At night she burned the mortal part out of his body in the fire, and by day she anointed him with ambrosia, the food of the gods. One night Peleus woke and saw his child writhing in the flames. He cried out. Thetis seized the child, threw it to the ground, vanished like a gust of wind into the sea and never came back.

What the parents could not complete, Chiron takes up. So it was with Jason, and so it is with Achilles. Both are pupils of the wounded healer. And according to Hera, Achilles' fate is that after his death, in the Elysian Fields, the Greek paradise for heroes, he will become Medea's husband. Medea, who in this way becomes bound to both of Chiron's pupils.

Chiron stands in a trine to the South Node, and so to Mars and Jupiter. What the South Node carries is often old: what was left unfinished in a family, what was broken off in the middle of a process. Chiron shows that such breaks need not be the end. Someone else can take up what a parent let fall. Sometimes that someone is you.

The wedding on the fleece

The Argo reaches the Phaeacians, a seafaring people on an island that Odysseus will later visit as well. But the Colchians have followed them and demand Medea back. King Alcinous must decide. His ruling: if Medea is still a virgin, she is still her father's daughter and goes back. If she is already Jason's wife, she belongs with her husband and stays. Queen Arete takes pity on Medea and lets Jason know at night what the verdict will be.

Jason and Medea marry that same night, in a sacred cave. The Golden Fleece lies as a cover over the bridal bed. The heroes stand by with their spears, crowned with green branches. Orpheus, the singer whose music could move stones and trees, plays the wedding song. That Orpheus is there at all is thanks to Chiron: he had advised Jason to take the singer along.

Jason and Medea had wanted it differently: in Iolcus, in his father's house. But necessity forced them. Apollonius adds that people never stand on joy with their whole foot. Something bitter always walks alongside.

Homecoming - 29 November

On 29 November at 01:16 Venus once again stands exactly opposite Chiron, now in direct motion, at 26°56 Libra and Aries. That same day Uranus and Pluto form an exact trine, the closing chord of the triangle of outer planets that stood in the background all autumn. Mars left Leo on 25 November.

The last trial in the myth comes at Crete. There stands Talos, a bronze giant given to the island by Zeus as its guardian. Three times a day he walks around the coast and hurls boulders at any ship that tries to land. He is made entirely of bronze and invulnerable, except in one place: beneath the tendon of his ankle runs a single vein of blood, sealed by a thin membrane.

Medea steps onto the deck. She calls on the spirits of death, whom Apollonius calls the hounds of Hades, and with her gaze she bewitches the eyes of Talos. As he tries to hurl a boulder, he grazes his ankle on a sharp stone. The giant's blood pours out like molten lead. He sways like a half-felled pine and falls.

Even the invulnerable one has a single wound. That is Chiron's territory.



Then the Argo comes home. Chiron himself turns direct on 6 January 2027, at 26°15 Aries, close to the degree of his trine to this conjunction. Then begins his very last round through the sign of Aries, before he leaves it for good in April.

In closing

The Golden Fleece is no ordinary treasure. It is something that was once carried away from home and must now return. You do not bring it back with strength alone, nor with knowledge alone. You bring it back with a knowing that comes from the dark, carried out with your own hands. And you bear the cost.

So here is a question for these weeks:

What are you bringing back this month, and from whom did you receive the knowing that made it possible?

Thanks for reading xx

Melanie 111026

Sources:

Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica, book 4 (1574 edition, Source Library); Michael Maier, Symbola aureae mensae duodecim nationum (1617), book XII (Source Library). Positions calculated with the Swiss Ephemeris.