11) Aquarius
Direction: east
Period: January 21 – February 19
Element: Fixed Air
Planet: Uranus, Saturn
It is true that winter still grips nature under its straitjacket in the period of Aquarius but under the snow the new life is getting ready to burst into the Light soon. The sun “pours” out its life-giving energy and wakes up the vegetative sprouts to new activity. This impulse of energy is the most important event of this period. With this energy, life begins, although still invisible and underground. Notwithstanding everything is still white and bare, yet grass and sprouting plants awaken slowly: they take the life-giving water from the ground and push it into the dried-up stems. At the end of the period the plant juices are into the branches.
In the solstitial signs – Cancer and Capricorn – the Sun is very slow (after reaching the point of solstice, it actually turns back heading for the other solstice). The energy of solstice signs is thus focused on one point and it gets liberated in the following signs of Leo and Aquarius. The message of the preceding cardinal signs is fulfilled, stabilized and fixed here. This liberation then either develops what had been created and focused in the preceding cardinal signs or tries to destroy and transform it, if there’s no other way forth. It brings either a reformation or a revolution. While Leo does this in the field of family, Aquarius is active in the field of the whole society. Here the change becomes real. After all, the planetary ruler of Aquarius is Uranus – the principle of reverses and substantial changes.
A guard stone between Aquarius and Capricorn is the building of The Radio Free Europe, for instance. Could you possibly imagine a more apt symbolical expression of the fixed airy Aquarius?
The merge from Aquarius to Pisces is marked out by the church of St. Charles of Boromea in Bartolomejska Street in the Old Town (a street where Vaclav Havel were being interrogated and imprisoned by the communist secret police) and the northern hillside of Vítkov hill in Žižkov with a statue of Žižka, a medieval revolution leader of the co-called Hussites (followers of Jan Hus - see Aries) against the totalitarian authority of the emperor and pope, whose allied armies were defeated by Žižka's much smaller troops in 1419 at the Battle at Vitkov. The statue is said to be the largest horse-rider statue in the world. In the town centre within the sector of Aquarius, you will also find a beautiful gothic church of Our Lady the Snow founded by Charles IV in 1347 that later became one of the hottest centers of the so-called Hussite revolution in 1419.
Another example of the magice Prague Zodiac magnetism is the so-called Golden Cross – the lower part of Wenceslas square – which is a true Czech national forum. This is a place where the nation comes when it wants to declare its will for a political change. Here the social ideas of preceding signs came true: The Declaration of the Czech Republic in 1918 (that had been dreamed about in the Libra’s building of the National Theatre), the main demonstrations of The Velvet Revolution in 1989, but also the biggest demonstrations in 1968, during the Soviet occupation.
Soviet occupation in 1968
