Virgo Power (credit: Aharon Varady 2024, license: CC BY-SA)

The sixth month of the year, Elul, is my birthday month which usually translates to the Gregorian calendar as occurring in September. As the months of the Jewish/Hebrew calendar are strongly associated with their mazalot (constellations), so Elul is associated with the mazal of Betulah (Virgo). Perhaps it is already well established that the sigil of Virgo ♍ looks somewhat like a closed fist, so I thought I’d illustrate the association with the attached image I’m titling “Virgo Power.”

Elsewhere here, I established that as Planet Earth wobbles through its various cycles in its solar orbit, our familiar natal identities current in astrology ignore the axial precession of the equinoxes. That is interesting for historians wondering when a very distinct moment of celestial observation was reified in popular astrology. For astrological practitioners though, the inability of the system to adapt to the precession of the equinoxes underscores its fundamental conservativism and alienation from meaningful observational cues. So, if the precession was accounted for and the symbolic system more adaptable, then perhaps Elul would currently be associated with the sign of Leo than the sign of Virgo.

But even if we ignore such pedantry, we can (and should) allow for a more assertive posture for Virgo in our age: where virgin women are not necessarily childless, and where childless women are not necessarily virgins, and where individual sexual history along a spectrum from celibacy through promiscuity is decoupled from assumptions over fealty, fidelity, strength, or any other virtues for everyone, regardless of their gender identity. Virgo’s fist is closed to fascists, totalitarians, and autocrats and is open to gleaners, democratic polities, and observers of change in their seasons, in their age, and in their moment.

About Aharon N. Varady

Aharon's Omphalos is the hobbit hole of Aharon Varady, founding director of the Open Siddur Project. He is a community planner and environmental educator working to improve stewardship of the Public Domain, be it the physical and natural commons of urban park systems or the creative and cultural commons of libraries and museums. His advocacy for open-source strategies in the Jewish community has been written about in the Atlantic Magazine, the Yiddish Forverts, Tablet, and Haaretz. He is particularly interested in pedagogies for advancing ecological wisdom, developing creative and emotional intelligence, and realizing effective theurgical praxes. He welcomes your comments, personal messages, and kind words. If you find his work helpful to your own or you'd simply like to support him, please consider donating via his Patreon account.

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“Virgo Power” is shared by Aharon N. Varady with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.