1. The Quintessential Ophiuchus ~ The Quest Begins

Standing at a Fork in the Road

Fall, 1987 ~ I had just quit my high-paying day job to become a professional astrologer after some 17 years of study and “practice” in the literal sense.

One afternoon on my way out of a bookstore I’d been browsing, I stopped at the clearance table, attracted by a book called Atlas of the Night Sky. As I riffled through it I got the brilliant idea it might add uniquely to the value of my services if I knew facts about the stars in the “real sky” so I bought it. In my astrology studies I had learned to be alert to conjunctions between planets and certain key stars (i.e., Aldebaran, Antares, and Regulus). If aggravated by a passing “malefic” planet (bad planets?) these stars were said to inflict upon the native some debilitating defect of mind and/or body (bad stars?). I objected to this concept viscerally and chose to deal with it by avoiding further exploration of the troublesome topic. So had gone my brief, negative introduction in 1970 to the role of fixed stars in a natal horoscope. But now I had a reason to review the subject that had previously put me off.

Sitting down in 1987 with my sky atlas for the first time, I was too mesmerized to be intimidated. To keep my bearings, I focused on the constellations along the zodiac belt. ¹  As I explored the familiar area of the sky globe, the 12 zodiac signs unzipped themselves one by one, unfurling to reveal a political map of neighborhoods from pole to magnetic pole – parcels of celestial real estate in all sizes and shapes lay mapped out in the night sky. I was dazzled by the vision of a scintillating fabric of stars and deep sky objects suspended in an emulsion of time. At constellation Sagittarius I was treated to the sight of Aquila the Eagle flying northward over the head of the Archer. I was reminded of a prophecy I’d read somewhere concerning a day in the future of humanity when the neighboring zodiac sign of the scorpion would be transmuted into an eagle ² . This was said to be a sign that the breakpoint of humanity’s evolution had been reached, whereupon a golden age of peace and prosperity would be ushered in. And that’s when it happened.

Constellation Ophiuchus

Next to Sagittarius the Archer, on the page that featured Scorpius the Scorpion, was a constellation I’d never heard of before, in or outside the context of astrology. Yet there it was, literally standing on our zodiac belt between Scorpius — a mere spit of celestial real estate in comparison — and Sagittarius. The constellation, taking up three times as much space along the ecliptic plane as constellation Scorpius, was called “Ophiuchus,” a generic term meaning “serpent holder.” In the serpent holder’s hands was a giant snake, over the head of which was Corona Borealis, the Northern Crown.

Wait just a minute (I exhorted myself)! The prophecy didn’t mention anything about a snake holder appearing as if by magic between the scorpion, archer and eagle constellations! What did this mean? Did it, in fact, have any meaning at all in the context of our zodiac’s body language? And if so, and if this constellation was one of the positive signs presaging the long awaited golden age of global peace and prosperity, how were the Christian-indoctrinated masses ever going to get beyond the ingrained programming that turns what was in ancient times a serpent of wisdom, the symbol of metamorphic change, into the embodiment of evil incarnate taking Eve, Mary Magdalene, and the history of the divine feminine to Hades along with it?

I read what the author of the sky atlas had to say about the constellation. Here it is, paraphrased:

The constellation takes its name from the Greek Asclepius, the master physician who never lost a patient to death. Asclepius could revive the dying and recently dead using soma or amrita, “the deathless drink,” said to reside in the blood or venom of a monstrous snake with dragonish features. Hades, god of the dead, angered at Asclepius’s filching of souls rightfully belonging in the Underworld, convinced his brother Zeus who did strike the mortal Asclepius down with a Thunderbolt for using powers reserved for the gods. However, Zeus placed Asclepius in the sky to honor him and to appease his father Apollo, calling the constellation “Ophiuchus,” which is Greek for “serpent holder.”

I asked myself how it could possibly be that this god-like, life-saving doctor figure did not have a zodiac presence. I looked askance at the scorpion/harbinger of death constellation. Had I just tripped over its subsumed source of (“Scorpios make good doctors”) astrological attributes?

Once I had recovered from the soul-jarring, 13th constellation shock wave that these revelations triggered in my consciousness, I found myself captivated by the idea that here on my very own zodiac belt was a constellation in the image of a man of science. I didn’t have a clue what an investigation of history, myth and legend would reveal. But I was sure I needed to know. Meanwhile, my would-be career as a professional astrologer had just gone up in a puff of smoke but it was too late to go back to my day job—I had already quit it and invested in a home computer – my first. I had just seen in the pages of my new sky atlas the celestial equivalent of a white buffalo. When that happens, you don’t think, you know. This book is a result of all of the above, and as above, so below.

~ February 2005

Snake Nebula | Constellation Ophiuchus

Out of the Starry Blue

Signs our generation has entered the New Age are everywhere to be found but nowhere is there more compelling evidence of it than on the Western Zodiac Belt where the sudden appearance of a 13th constellation on the Ecliptic Plane has created quite a stir.

The Belt of the Zodiac has consisted of the traditional 12 zodiac signs in use today since the 1st Century CE when the 12th sign, Libra, was created from the severed claws of the giant scorpion.³  The evidence has ironically been left in the pans of the scales. The ancient names of Libra’s Alpha and Beta stars, Zubenelgenubi and Zubeneschamali translated into English literally mean the Southern and Northern Claw, respectively.⁴

Between 1928 and 1930 the International Astronomical Union (IAU) decided for good and fair reason to dispense with the plethora of conflicting ancient star maps and create constellations to better serve the technical needs of modern day astronomy scientists by setting fixed boundaries around the star groupings, a job that was not ever going to be simple⁵. Because it was the serpent holder star grouping and not the scorpion that occupied the lion’s share of the degrees of longitude along the ecliptic plane, IAU assigned 19 degrees of the zodiac belt to Ophiuchus and only as many degrees as constellation Scorpius actually occupied at the belt: a measly 6 degrees. Add these two numbers together and you still only come up with 25 degrees, demonstrating the distinction between constellations and signs.

Constellations are irregularly-sized and oddly shaped. The celestial sphere with boundaries applied looks like a plot map of real estate parcels, with some of the zodiac constellations under or over hanging one another and some of the non-zodiac constellations, such as Orion for example, reaching up into but not quite touching or crossing the Ecliptic Plane.

Zodiac signs, on the other hand, are even, 30-degree divisions of the heavens, extending from north to south celestial pole like orange wedges, into which the brighter stars in the star groupings close to the Ecliptic Plane, from which the signs takes their names, tend to fall. Prior to the IAU’s institution of constellation boundaries, these star groupings were known as asterisms.

Link → Signs vs. Constellations, an illustration

Due to precession of the equinoxes⁶, a phenomenon responsible for giving the so-called “Age of Aquarius” its name, the zodiac sign of Sagittarius has rotated clockwise so that Scorpius and Ophiuchus are now the constellations making up this sign. In case you ever wonder why astrologers place fixed star Antares (Alpha Scorpius) in the zodiac sign of Sagittarius (this used to drive me nuts), that’s the reason. Correspondingly, your Sagittarius zodiac sign probably houses a Sun that, in the sky, falls physically in constellation Ophiuchus.

13th Constellation Shockwave

The domino effect of the IAU’s partitioning of the sky lay like a sleeping dog for 65 years. On the morning of January 20, 1995 the dog awoke with a shock to headline news plastered across the front page of a UK paper, The Daily Telegraph: “13TH ZODIAC SIGN WRITTEN IN STARS” followed by an article presented by Dr. Roger Highfield, the paper’s science correspondent who released the story, apparently acting alone, as though it were late-breaking news. The article received major media attention worldwide. Lines of communication were flooded by irate astrologers and astrology aficionados thrown into a panic over their birth sign – what was it now that there were 13 not 12 constellations on the zodiac belt?⁷

Meta-Historical Backdrop

The modern form of constellation Ophiuchus the Serpent Holder takes its name and meaning from the lore surrounding Asclepius, Greek God of Healing & Wisdom, a mortal master physician and man of science, deified hundreds of years after his demise by the people he healed, counseled, and on occasion retrieved from the underworld. He is well known to modern day physicians who venerate him as patron, archetype and role model for the work he did to advance the fields of institutionalized medicine and healing. His work was well documented and the testimonies are easy to find.

Step Pyramid built by Imhotep at Saqqara, Egypt

Asclepius was also known by the name Imouthes, a Greek form of the Egyptian name Imhotep. Imhotep the Egyptian too was a mortal master physician who never lost a patient to death and who was later deified and added to the pantheon of Egyptian gods. A man of wisdom, considered the first man of science in recorded history, practiced in the arts and sciences of astrology and astronomy, Imhotep was additionally a part time priest of RA, and master architect and builder of the famous Step Pyramid at Saqqara for 3rd Dynasty King Djoser who reigned in Egypt in or around the 27th century BCE.

Where the life and career of Imhotep leave off and the life and works of Asclepius begin is a mystery that archaeologists and historians are unable to resolve. The nearest thing we have to a clue is the Corpus Hermeticum, a collection of ancient texts from the Roman/Egyptian period representing a fusion of Greek and Egyptian primordial wisdom traditions including astrological, alchemical and magical texts. This collection of texts was written by unknown authors between the first and third centuries C.E. and constitutes the core foundational documents of Hermetic philosophy. The tractates are letters and lectures by Hermes Trimegistus, a Hellenistic fusion of the Greek god Hermes with the Egyptian god Thoth, several of which are addressed to his son Asclepius who is also a fusion of Greek and Egyptian deities.

“A few miles west of the Nile and just below the tip of its delta lies the modern Sakkara, site of the necropolis of ancient Memphis, center of Lower Egypt from the days of the pharaohs through the time of Egypt’s Roman conquerors. The sacred ibis, the graceful black and white bird in which the god Thoth showed himself, no longer visits the Nile at Memphis, but when the Ptolemies and their Roman successors drank from the holy river, the god’s bird still came to its banks in great plenty. So huge were its flocks that those who wished to honor Thoth with mummies of his bird were able to prepare thousands of such offerings every year, thus proving their piety in a cult of the ibis, just as devotees of Osiris-Apis or Sarapis worshipped their god in the bull cult of the great Serapeion, the temple that dominated the landscape of Ptolemaic Memphis. Many gods dwelled in the precincts of the Serapeion: Isis of the hundred names, whose worship had already begun to spread from Egypt through the Mediterranean basin; Imhotep or Imouthes, a god of healing whom the Greeks called Asklepios; and Thoth, god of the moon and messages and writing, Hermes to the Greeks, and like Hermes the guide of dead souls.”

Hermetica, The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius, (Copenhaver, Cambridge University Press 1992)

Imported by the Greeks at Memphis and subscribed to the family of gods headquartered at Mt. Olympus is Asclepius nee Imhotep, the master physician from the land of the pharaohs, the deified mortal who had never lost a patient to death and had learned how to retrieve a soul from the land of the dead. His soul new to the world of the Olympian Greeks, the mortal demigod Asclepius breaches a protocol he never had to worry about in Egypt – in the process of retrieving souls from the Greek land of the dead he offends the gods and is zapped with the Thunderbolt of Zeus either for trespassing on Hades’ domain (the Underworld) or for reviving three criminals Zeus had put there himself. As a consolation, Zeus places Asclepius among the stars from where he, now as a god himself, continues to serve humanity as a divine healer through the medium of dreams or as a spirit who sometimes takes form. And although some centuries later Asclepius is overshadowed as God of Healing and Wisdom by Jesus Christ, recent signs and events observed in his constellation connected to thematic movements and events here on earth seem to suggest the spirit of the serpent holder constellation is vital, active and, indeed, being revived.

In the process of uncovering ancient celestial secrets and rediscovering their meaning, we will presently uncover real treasure, the divine feminine presence underlying constellation Ophiuchus.

REALLY Ancient History

Buried alive more than three and a half millenniums ago, the Minoan Serpent Goddess of Crete and other religious and cultural icons mark the site of a long standing if not predominant goddess culture predating the Greek Dark Age in and around Crete and indeed elsewhere along the Phoenician trade routes that spanned the Mediterranean. In terms of how the face of Goddess relates to Constellation Ophiuchus in particular, we observe the body language of the constellation’s posture mirrors that of the serpent goddesses while it bears no resemblance whatsoever to any image of the Greek Asclepius. We also note the zodiac sign of the scorpion (death-rebirth) which has been veiling constellation Ophiuchus these past thousands of years is elementally a water sign. As such, this sign is energetically negative and therefore by extension predisposed by nature to a gender feminine presence. This isn’t to say the serpent holder constellation ought properly to be represented on the zodiac belt in feminine form. But rather after thousands of years of male dominance reclaiming the balance demands a thorough exploration of this question as long as we are in the process of discovering and uncovering information and perspectives on this new-to-us star grouping. We at least need full disclosure of the facts underlying this critical constellation-sign’s form and history.

In Sum: The Simple Essentials

As to what we might expect in the way of influence from this body of stars and celestial objects and from people born under the sign, look no further for the top priorities on this constellation-sign’s agenda than healing and wisdom. Based on the list of burning issues being debated in America and around the globe today, Constellation Ophiuchus is bringing its considerable cosmic influence to bear in matters of health care reform and wise stewardship of our planet the Earth, herself a living, sentient body being drained of inner resources and choking from polluted outer resources from sea level to the limits of her atmosphere. What’s it going to take to bring us and our planet back into healthy balance?

Ophiuchus, the Serpent Holder, perhaps?

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Copyright © 2005-2012 Donna Provancher – All Rights Reserved

Rev. 07/19/2011