The Festival Procession in Your Chart
There are bodies all over your chart. Across the nodes, there is a dragon. Across the 5th and 11th House, there is a festival procession.
The 5th and 11th Houses are some of the least well-drawn houses in astrological literature in my experience. It's only been in learning about ancient and medieval festivals that I've come to understand the relationship between these two houses better.
In his 4-part workshop on the nodes and eclipses, Austin Coppock describes all the succedent houses as repositories. The 5th is the repository of our creative energy; the 11th is the repository of our social resources. We can say the 5th is your art and the 11th is your audience.
I think this works well but I like another model too. This model is based on the sacred festival. The hodgepodge we find in the 5th (besides children) — the art and sport and theater and leisure — make sense in the context of the festival as they all find their basis in it.
Broadly, the festival was a release of care and toil (the 5th is in aversion to the 6th and 12th), and a release from social responsibilities and identities (the 5th is in aversion to the 4th and 10th). People wore often masks and costumes, often dressed in ways that demonstrated the contingent nature of social norms. Anyone could be anyone at the festival. Theater, sport, and art were often all acts of devotion, catharsis, and trance induction.
The festival was a mix of the individual and collective, of ritual and trance, of meticulous artistic planning and rehearsal as well as spontaneous creative eruption, of the internal and external, of ecstatic devotion (Venus, rejoicing in the 5th) and collective effervescence (Jupiter, rejoicing in the 11th).
When the 11th is secularized, it is a conference, a sporting event, a rock concert, social media. Here we get divided into audience/performer, which can be right. But that's not how festivals operated. The point was not to watch but to let your mirror neurons fire and dance along. The festival is participatory — a monster-human-mass with opportunity for individuals to make their mark (incredible costumes, being particularly good at the rehearsed dance, your pastries are so good, etc.) and also be held in the ecstatic experience of collective connection.
Festival was one of the primary ways we built communal ties. So effective was the festival at shoring up these bonds that it was systematically uprooted by those in power who would prefer bonds be based on fear and to the state.
I’ve been speaking in the past tense which is not really right. Collective ecstasy was suppressed in Europe and this suppression was exported by European colonizers around the world, but ecstatic festival, its rituals, and experiences still live in many communities around the world. Whiteness is defined in part by a lack of revelry and ecstatic dance traditions, and a persistent fear of collective ecstasy’s “unruly” power. This connects to Calvinism to be sure but also seriously predates it. The Romans suppressed the Dionysian festivals for similar reasons.
The 5th House teaches us how we revel. It tells the stories about how we are possessed, entranced, pulled under by, and overflow with vibrancy. Sharp contrasts, deep colors, strong smells, wild desires. The rhythmic beat and the sudden silence. The 11th House is where we go together to experience our individual pitch and hue, and to be deliciously made into a multi-headed monster of the masses. The 11th House dreams the moment of relief that you are not one but many. The peace of that. To remember every bit of identity we have is part of how we are many-headed and also absolutely an improvisation, one possibility out of a sea of droplets. The 5th House/11th House procession is the catharsis of grieving together, of celebrating together, of not being alone in these cycles of fruiting and decay, and daring to fruit again.
If you’d like to attune your ear to the music of the procession in your chart, check out my Dionysian 5th House Reading.
