Sacred Service: Virgo & the Daughter of Sin
After the shining glory of Leo comes the austerity of the soul in Virgo. Its arrival on the horizon returns us to to the earth in a time when the ancients would have focused on the harvest and the preparation of fields for the winter season. It’s a place of receptivity, a bicorporeal sign owing to the constellation as a woman holding a stalk of wheat or, in some traditions, pregnant. Modern associations of its name piles assumptions on the sign — virginal, pure, self-sacrificing, clean. Victorian anthropologists writing through the lens of their social preoccupation with purity culture associated the sign with Isis by way of misalignment with the Virgin Mary, herself an icon of their unrealistic ideals: fruitfulness without the stain of Sin.
Perhaps it’s ironic that the Babylonian astrologers originally called this constellation Ab.Sin: the Daughter of Sin.
Not yet a synonymous with impropriety and evil, Sin was the Babylonian God of the Moon. As the Lord of Wisdom, he conferred knowledge of natural sciences, astrology, and sired two of the most important celestial bodies in the Babylonian pantheon. The Daughter of Sin was in fact Venus in her face as the Babylonian goddess of Love and War, Ishtar. Known in Sumeria as Inanna, she was one of the primary goddesses of the Mesopotamian diaspora and occupied positions of importance amongst not only…
