Two hours before sunrise this week the waning gibbous Moon shines its light on the twins Castor and Pollux as the red warrior Mars sweeps by just below. Mars will hang out in this region of the sky for the next several months, making a nice pirouette here until April 2025.
In every two-year orbital period, Mars makes one retrograde loop that takes about 80 days, which means it travels three times through one region of sky ~ in this case, it’s in the region of Gemini twins.
When Dante ascends from the spheres of the planets to the fixed stars in his Divine Comedy, it’s at this region of Gemini. Many believe it’s because Dante was born while the Sun was in Gemini, but I think it is much more poetic to imagine that he noted Gemini because right here the path of the planets crosses the river of Milky Way stars.
There is great mystery in this place of crossing, from one plane of the Milky Way to the other, and Mars is calling our attention to this threshold, starting now and all the way to the spring. Mythologically the twins present as one mortal and one immortal brother, so the questions one can ask when Gemini is activated: What is temporal, what endures; what do I take with me through the threshold, what do I shed?
Or, as the German poet Rilke says of the sunset, it is here we experience a moment of witnessing two worlds that both leave us, one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks toward earth, leaving us, not really belonging to either. Gemini asks us to decide, Mars to act upon our decision, which determines whether life is a stone in me, or a star.
