The Essential Questions of Virgo
Today's essay leads to some queries. But first, a few ideas about the holistic principle.
Dear Friend and Reader:
In a classic Planet Waves article from 2013, “The Threefold Goddess in a Field of Grain,” I describe the traditional meanings of Virgo. It’s a lot about food and agriculture, and Virgo (Jungfrau, or the Virgin) is the sign of the goddess, meaning an incarnation of archetypal female potential.
This is worth a point of clarification: goddess is not the female equivalent of God. Nearly none of the gods are the male equivalent of God. There is The One, prime creator or source, and then lots of incarnations of various human expressions of, well, all kinds of things. However, with Virgo, we do come close to Gaia, but really, closer to Ceres (of whom the Blessed Virgin of Catholic fame seems to be an incarnation).
The article also pays homage to the quintessential Virgo herself, Betty Dodson, author of Sex for One. However, she was not a virgin.
I’d like to take a fresh look at Virgo, in the form of some questions related to its subject matter. I could sum up that subject in a single word: Holistic.
This relates to wholeness, and making whole. It’s closely related to a newer word, holographic, which is about the part being contained in the whole, and the whole being contained in the (seeming) part.
The Unification of Facets
Holistic is the adjective form of “holism,” a word a mere century old, coined by J.C. Smuts in his book Holism and Evolution. This is about the integration of seemingly separate parts, from Greek holos, from the older root sol, meaning whole and well kept.
Smuts wrote, “This character of ‘wholeness’ meets us everywhere and points to something fundamental in the universe. Holism (from holos = whole) is the term here coined for this fundamental factor operative towards the creation of wholes in the universe.”
So Smuts characterizes it as a kind of tropism. Like the leaves of plants reach to light and their roots reach toward water, living creatures reach toward wholeness. However, this is stronger in some people than others — and there are factors that cut us off from even sensing the spectrum of who we are.
My therapist and later teacher, and finally close friend, Joseph Trusso of Woodstock developed a method of therapy that relied on this principle as its basis. He has Virgo rising by the way (and is retired). His therapy approach was to help people live a whole life, not merely to solve what they perceived as their problems. The holistic principle includes the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. This is also called synergy or biophilia.
Our Fragmented and Unhappy Times
We live in times when we are fragmented and driven mad by constant busyness. But at the moment, it’s worse. American society has always had plenty of activity. There is always something else to do on a farm. Agrarian life was not a vacation, and urban life has also been driven by constant alleged necessity and incessant mental activity.
There is no concept of relax; there is no concept of “lax” to return to.
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