by Katie Cercone
“No man who has once acquired his power will ever care to return to the old habit of abandonment to passion; for he will see that he was then a slave, whereas now he is a King… ascetic self-denial is nature’s appointed gateway to increased sense-pleasure.”
– Ida C. Craddock, Psychic Wedlock (1985)
The first time a boy said he loved me. Sitting in his car in the parking lot of the Coddingtown Mall – all I could do was cry. I knew not why. He broke up with me a week later when I refused to have sex with him. I should have known that day at the mall when some girls walked by to tell me he wasn’t even single. Blame it on my south node in Scorpio stellium, looking back I think ironically what I felt when this 16-year-old Backstreet boy look-alike with frosted tips said he loved me, was unloveable. Although I see it’s not rational, it’s certainly a feeling that runs deep. At thirty-six still doin the splitz, it’s a feeling that still rears its ugly head.
I was a late-bloomer. I remember being at least fifteen, feeling horrible I had never kissed a boy! Rolling up to my first house party with free-flowing booze – ready or not! Micha, who offered his parents’ home up to all-school debauchery while they were away, died tragically a few years later in a drunk driving accident. That night I would get drunk for the first time and chase my first kisses. Before long I was dancing alone to OUTCAST on the kitchen table, feeling irrevocably alive. I already had my eye on Stan. Even in the throes of intoxication by Bacardi Ice, I was clever enough to devise a somewhat twisted plot to get him to kiss me. The plan? Going for his best friends from the rival school. Before long I was in a room alone on the couch with two of Stan’s best friends, having jumped whole heartedly into a three-way first kiss. By the end of the night I was lying in Stan’s arms. And he was kissing me. All I remember was his long perfect lashes and how he said “You’re not going to be my girlfriend” before cuddling me to sleep that night. The Stan obsession got much worse after that… as I played the secret side chick to his blonde, public girlfriend with a huge mansion down the street from where I lived. Pretty sure she ended up pregnant and/or in juvenile hall before high school was over (in my hazy recollection both amounted to social suicide as a teen… I can’t really remember which is true). I ended up a feminist artist. And maybe a slut. But I’ll never forget that day in eating disorder rehab about a year later when the whole house of girls rolled out a banner dedicated to me with Stan’s name crossed out on it. Sometimes, not even the most well-meaning sisters can save you from yourself.
At 25, I broke up with my serious boyfriend when he suggested we have kids. My best friend helped me shave my head and we started a lesbian-feminist art collective. I had an abortion with the next serious boyfriend at 28, but not before insisting we have an open relationship so I could date another half-homeless and crazy guy, breaking up with him and then aborting his child while the new guy served me breakfast out of a thermos. I had many lovers, and I remember telling them things like “W/I/F/E is a four-letter word.” While I may have spent the first half of my performance art career head-shaved mad as hell – I spent the second half sexy, seductive, cyber and celibate. During my period of celibacy, I self-pleasured to addictive, holographic fantasies only to emerge convinced no mortal man could please me. Which is why I stopped “dating” and started studying astro-feminism. A myth-based, Goddess-saturated form of therapy, I find it’s a less-cerebral way to psychoanalyze yourself, one that can help guide one out of limiting perceptions. While most of us feel comfortable with sun signs and the major planets, as I mentioned in edition one of this 8-part series on the CREATRIX CODEX virtual study, the outer lying asteroids represent very much uncharted, unknown, unfathomable reaches of the feminine psyche. Some call them the cherry on top of the astrological cake.
During my recent year of high-octane celibacy and self-pleasure I found deep solace in Lilith – night-monster, witch, borderland bride, seducer, devil, bearer of demons, embodied horror of the grave, unreasoning terror, harlot, female-desert monster, granny-witch, serpent-woman…the list goes on. She is both asteroid, black moon and dark moon. Some call her Innana of Ancient Mesopotamia in her decent, some call her a malefic sex addict. Like any planet, aspect or feminist asteroid, it all depends on how you look at it. Demetra George writes in ASTEROID GODDESSES (1986) that the psychic development of the feminine as consort and wife can be symbolized by the progressive stages of the Goddesses Lilith, Juno and Psyche. Lilith prefers isolation and loneliness to subjugation, and in our natal charts she often represents where we are deceived or deceive in love, as well as where we experience and process feelings of isolation and separation.
If you were able to read this far through and beyond the teenage heartbreak and ironic sexcapades, you’re more than ready to know Juno. It’s certainly no coincidence that I selected Juno as our focus, although the only faint recollection of her I could recall before CREATRIX CODEX was that flick about a teenage mom.
Much like Lilith, I guess you could say that Juno chose me!? With my Moon conjunction Juno in the 4th house, and Juno sextile to my Sun, I may even be a Juno-type. Unlike Lilith, Juno chooses relationship. Although she never derives true satisfaction from it, she evolves into a guardian of marriage, childbirth and conflict resolution. While Lilith’s badassery is scintillating to say the least…Juno’s dedication to compromise lays the groundwork for Psyche to realize soulmate union. Astrologically we associate Juno with commitment, steadfastness, loyalty, devotion, and willingness to remain in relationship within the context of separation and return.
Partner of Jupiter, it’s curious how much we know about Jupiter, and how little about Juno. Just as we once believed the world was flat, sometimes we are too comfortable circling around our own skewed vantage point. Many astrologers will say that due to its horrific size, in ancient times whole charts were read and oriented around Jupiter, the big fat BENEFIC, matched in scope only by MALEFIC Saturn. As we speak, there is a NASA spaceship called Juno on a $1.1 billion mission to study Jupiter. While Jupiter may be expansion, adventure, philosophy, grace, and space for change – that $1.1 billion spaceship feels a little bit like sending money to starving children in Africa while your American children of color suffer food insecurity on top of police brutality on top of bargain variety racism. Sound like America to anyone? We need to know more about Jupiter just like we need to know more about Big Macs and white boys. Goddess of Marriage, Queen of Heaven, Eternal Consort epitomizing the principles of right relationship, with divorce rates at an all time high – it’s no wonder Juno went missing!
Having made Lilith my bedfellow for over a year, in hindsight I was somewhat content simmering in the sad loneliness of the dark side of the moon. Approaching this second essay, I felt a bit of apathy and suspicion towards Juno, if not love, marriage, motherhood and the whole sha-bang! Maybe because my parent’s love felt like a big lie. Oh how I hated the power dynamics around me that groomed women to be the smiling, deferential eye candy circling around cis white men. Before I was Or Nah, I was calling myself an art terrorist, planning to set off a bomb at my own wedding. That’s how I felt about all this crying-at-first-kiss shit show called Love. Low and behold, Juno has a shadow aspect I could deeply relate to. Juno straddles the polarities of intimacy and manipulation. Juno has grit! Juno takes Jupiter, the biggest BadBoy of them all!
In her higher expression, Juno represents relationship and self-expression, freedom, equality, intimacy and sharing; mutual trust and understanding and creating new forms of relationship. Juno is that degree of sensitivity and awareness we bring to the other person. In her lower expression – infidelity, jealousy, subjugation, betrayal, emotional attachment and possessiveness, emotional and sexual power games, projection and reflection, giving away our power, identification through partner or children, woman as malcontent and subtle manipulation. In Occult, Juno represents tantric sexuality, soul mates, marriage as alchemical union and spiritual relations. At this advanced level of spiritual marriage, Juno shepherds the spiritual use of sexual energy within committed partnership. As Demetra George writes, the bed in the center of Juno’s temple symbolizes the ritual reenactment of sexual consummation … SEX AS BLISS (mutual orgasm) …. SEX AS MAGIC (conscious conception) …. SEX AS REJUVENATION (purification, healing, regeneration).
It’s interesting how I unwittingly chose the asteroid which is jointly ruled by my natal sun (Scorpio) and moon (Libra). Where Scorpio’s rules of sacred sexuality mingle with the Libran diplomacy of spiritual marriage? In my natal chart, Juno lies in the 4th House of home, hearth, family of origin and family one forms; roots (cultural, ethnic, geographic), psychological inheritance and the most deeply rooted part of our psyche – our personal myth. This placement suggests a need for security and emotional depth in marriage. Here Juno upholds the values of cooperation, compromise, understanding and relationship harmony. With my Juno in Virgo, I crave right relations in marriage, and may be looking for the perfect partner to a fault. Add to that Juno Sextile the Sun. In Juno-sun individuals like myself these principles of relating combine beautifully with my identity and purpose. Learning to harmoniously interact with others is a major life theme, and over time I may prove to have a true gift for developing harmony in intimacy and partnership.
If marriage is an alchemical union, a path of transcendence that transform’s the ego’s separateness into the larger whole, it is Juno who presides over the marriage ceremony merging two separate selves into a third entity swathed in divine love. Ida C. Craddock is a Juno-like crusaders of sex consciousness worth citing. Craddock’s infamous spiritual wedlock with angels I had already made a study of in my deep dive into Black Moon Lilith. Although she was criminalized for talking and writing about sex openly in the context of marriage under Victorian-era morality, before she committed suicide to avoid a life-long prison sentence for many years Ida counseled married couples on sex in secret drawing from yogic wisdom. Which is what I’m on. I’m ready for what Yogi Bhajan called the highest form of yoga – marriage.
According to Ida, who like Juno stands for honesty, integrity and equality in sex relationships, “The woman…must be the best judge of when union is desirable…for her to yield to her husband’s solicitations when she does not desire union is a fraud upon him, since he finds only a corpse or a hypocrite in the place of a sincerely loving and tender martial partner.” Craddock believes that a woman who concedes to the lust of her lover against her own desire not only confirms the man “in his selfishness,” but likewise “degrades herself from the position of high priestess in the sacred mystery.”
Juno, Goddess of Marriage, was revered for her loyalty and fidelity to Jupiter. Crowned by a glittering veil, she is often seen accompanied by a peacock and frequented by a rainbow. The sixth month of June was sacred to her. Long after we’ve forgotten Juno and her essential teachings, June remains one of the most popular months in which to wed. Embodiment of the triple Goddess, during the Age of Taurus she was worshipped as a cow-eyed sky queen. Juno is representative of the feminine passage from Maiden to Mother, and uses sexuality to transcend personal identity through committed relationship. She is the perfected state of bride and consort signifying the urge for full mystic union which is emotionally, sexually, and psychologically fulfilling. Juno’s husband Jupiter is known to have destroyed her Goddess cults and forbid her to worship the feminine way, oppressing her through total chastity-belt-buckled monogamy while flaunting his infidelities.
Before I happened upon Ida Craddock’s Psychic Wedlock, my single authority on sacred marriage was Yogi Bhajan. Not only did the late Yogi Bhajan claim sexuality was a requisite for spirituality, his tips for transcendent tantric union involve tedious hours of foreplay arousing the female partner. When I had my child my partner and I followed many of the Kundalini customs around childbirth and aspired to a sacred marriage, including practicing together the Venus Kriyas from the Kundalini manual on Sexuality and Spirituality (as well as our own Beyonce-infused sex magic). Having recently devoured Premka’s book A White Bird in a Golden Cage: My Life with Yogi Bhajan, the frank truth of which wreaked havoc on the Kundalini community, I can officially say the guru is dead. In this book Pamela Saharah Dyson, Bhajan’s Chief Officer in Command and apparently his mistress, confirms he cheated on his wife and forced the author to back-alley abort his child in secret before moving on to sexually molest the younger female initiates. With all due respect to yoga, and the matrifocal, nature-based consciousness I believe from which it emerged, we are collectively guilty when it comes to excusing and more often then not exalting male abuse of power. Every morning as I join my Jupiter finger (index) and thumb in gyan mudra, calling on great Jupiter, the planet we call “Guru” in this practice for its powers of expansive change… where is Juno? Where is the harmony, love, reciprocity, mutuality, faith, compromise, and true loving communion?
Originally Juno was called Hera, root meaning “Earth.” From a feminist standpoint, all of the Goddesses were once all-powerful in that their body was the bridge linking our human relationship to land, community, harvest and fertility. As Juno and Jupiter’s toxic tango highlights, with the rise of the written word came the heroic, hyper-masculine mega-lords and the demotion of female deities to brides and wives. As Hera the wife of Zeus, her pairing was symbolic of the merging of two distinct and separate cultures. Hera and Zeus experienced a brief period of sexual ecstasy and martial bliss prior to their monogamous marriage erupting into a sadomasochistic combat zone. Zeus punished Hera by hanging her from the heavens, her wrists bound by golden bracelets. Not only did the strict monogamy deprive Hera of the sacred sexual customs ancient to Goddess-worship, Zeus was not only disloyal, but took a destructive attitude towards her cult and customs. Zeus went on to spawn many of the Greek heroes through his sexual assaults on Hera’s priestesses and worshippers (her former sisters who she now became pitted against in deadly rivalries). When Hera was finally fully humiliated by Zeus’s infidelities and the shame and hate it inspired in her, she retreated into solitude, bathing in a spring to renew her virginity. Even as she would come to initiate more and more women into the rites of marriage, she would be denied the same fulfillment. Juno’s chief distortion is jealousy … her archetype expresses the need for deep sacred union as well as the range of suffering and neurotic complexes that arise when it is denied.
In a personal natal chart, Juno’s sign and house might suggest the qualities we seek in an ideal mate. As significator of protocol and social ritual, Juno transits can indicate timings within a significant relationship (courtship, marriage, wedding) as well as periods of crisis and separation such as divorce. In synastry, Juno is a primary indicator of compatibility and karmic connection.
Astrologers often associate Juno with the Moon (the ground of feminine energy) and Venus (the Moon’s active sexual expression from which Venus emerges). In her association with Venus, Juno enhances feminine beauty and represents achievements in the creative arts. Juno stands up for women’s rights, and is a champion of the powerless (including women, battered wives, abused children, victims, minorities, survivors). Relationship pathologies and unfulfilled needs are likewise associated with the Scorpio side of Juno – jealousy, possessiveness, infidelity, subjugation, manipulation, sexual and emotional power games, projection, betrayal, abandonment. When Jupiter’s infidelity aroused anger in Juno, her anger was displaced on Jupiter’s lovers and their children. Juno came to symbolize the suspicious wife, cut off from her feminine roots, aborting sisterhood for toxic rivalry. Juno challenges a patriarchal world view in which an abundance of shallow sex is privileged, and avoidance of deep spiritual union is the norm. Juno shines light on emotions and fears that swirl around commitment, and the depth (Scorpio) of sexual and emotional encounters within relationships.
Juno aspires to Libra values that assure fair and equal partnerships – but power struggles and disappointments result from a failure to align ideals with reality (Air sign shadow territory). Juno gave her power away to Jupiter but raged when he turned it against her. In this light Juno represents the need for relationship and the refusal to accept unfair circumstances – even if it means rage, revenge, plotting, and/or being a shrew. All the while, contained within Juno’s separation from Jupiter and hiding is return and reconciliation. Call on Juno to bring refinement, fulfillment, and intimacy to relationships based in empathy, mutual trust, equality and balance of power.
Bibliography
“NASA Extends Juno Jupiter Mission Until July 2021” Mike Wall, SPACE.com June 8, 2018
Sexual Outlaw, Erotic Mystic: The Essential Ida Craddock by Vere Chappell, San Francisco: Weiser Books, 2010
Asteroid Goddesses: The Mythology, Psychology, and Astrology of the Re-emerging Feminine by Demetra George & Douglas Bloch, Florida: Ibis Press, 1986
Premka: White Bird in a Golden Cage: My Life with Yogi Bhajan by Pamela Saharah Dyson, Eyes Wide Publishing, 2020
Katie Cercone aka “High Prieztezz Or Nah” is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, scribe, yogi and spiritual gangsta. Cercone has been included in exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum, Whitney Museum, Dallas Contemporary and C24 Gallery. She has published critical writing in ART PAPERS, White Hot, Posture, Brooklyn Rail, Hysteria, Bitch Magazine, Art511, Utne Reader and N.Paradoxa. She is co-leader of the queer, transnational feminist collective Go! Push Pops and creative director of ULTRACULTURAL OTHERS Urban Mystery Skool. Cercone was a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow for the U.S.-Japan Exchange Program in Tokyo. Follow her on instagram @0r__Nah_spiriturlgangsta and learn more at KatieCercone.com
