Venus cazimi Sun

Sun cazimi Venus - Goldenrod Cohobation

11:50 PM 1/10/2010

Sun and Venus are cazimi at 20 Capricorn. They are sextile Uranus and conjunct the IC. Moon in Sag is very widely trine Mars.

The goldenrod cohobation yeilded a little over 12 oz, so I poured the rest into the Sun-Venus libations. This turned out to be very strong herbally and little sips are hitting me hard.

I was in an odd mood during the invocation, my mind returning to thoughts of being abused by a cult and how people recreate their abusive childhoods with some other poor sucker cast as "the child". I hope this means I'm healing from that issue, and I also hope that the work at hand wasn't tainted. My heart is opening a lot lately, and it hurts to hear about kids getting the worst treatment that people are capable of, or any person being powerless against abuse.

Since I'm looking at the intelligence of Justice with this cazimi, maybe it's quite appropriate to think about outrages thereof. I have been thinking about Karma and Nemesis today, the meeting of oneself - but not the self you pretend you are. We understand misconduct best when we are on the other side of the situation. This reversal of roles I believe to be an intrinsic factor in the Justice principle. Yet it also can be undertaken as a sort of revenge, finding a victim to abuse so that we can trade places with our abuser.

How do we make peace with a serious injustice in our past? How do we make amends to people we've hurt in a way that actually makes things right? How do we forgive rather than seek revenge? Where does taking righteous vengeance end, and deformation of character along the lines of malevolent sadism begin? Even when the guilty party dies, the pain and hatred of their victims often doesn't. This suggests that no vengeance is sufficient, not even the destruction of the person who caused the harm. What then *does* bring peace to the soul?

It's easy to rationalize actions that are unjust with ideas along the lines of purifying or improving the character of another person. In many cases, though, we are the ones who are contaminated with the violent characteristics of people who hurt us in the past, not the person we believe needs to be hurt for their own god. Victimizing a person and justifying it with fine-sounding theories can either be out of a desire to feel powerful and in control, in the way we were not when we were the victims; or it can be out of a desire to purify ourselves by proxy, by making someone else what we wish we could be; or it could be out of a desire to take from someone else what had been taken from us, whether with the idea of stealing it or just out of envy. Or it can be undertaken because we hate the person we once had been before abuse changed us due to blaming ourselves for having been too 'weak' to stop it, and someone who reminds us of our younger selves provokes the same contempt.

Passing along the harm we have suffered turns into an endless cycle that eventually permeates the whole culture. The scale on which we scapegoat grows larger and larger, first a person, then a type, then a gender or race. If we don't find peace in ourselves, the seed of injustice eventually bears the fruit of war so brutal that there is a tear in the soul for generations and we are haunted by mass deaths that rip a hole in all of our families. Is this the justice we seek? Is there nothing we love enough to protect from this outcome?