Connie di Marco's Blog, page 6
March 20, 2017
Spring Fling Blog Hop
March 20th ~ The Vernal Equinox is here!
You might not think that’s such a big deal – not like the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year or the Winter Solstice, the shortest day, but the two equinoxes, vernal and autumnal, are just as important.
Maybe I get excited about all this planetary stuff because my protagonist in the Zodiac Mysteries, Julia Bonatti, is an astrologer and she pays a lot of attention to the stars.
Each equinox and solstice is an astronomical event brought about by the shifting of Earth’s tilt on its axis. On this day the sun will rise exactly due east and set due west. At the moment of the equinox, the hours of the day and night are exactly equal all over the world. This year the vernal equinox occurs on March 20th at 3:29 a.m. on the west coast. But here’s an astrological chart of the event set at the Greenwich Meridian.
If you look near the top of the chart, you’ll see the symbol for the Sun at exactly 0 degrees and 0 minutes Aries. It looks like a circle with a dot in the middle. The very beginning of the the zodiac. A harbinger of the coming spring.
Many cultures and religions through the eons have celebrated this time of the year with festivals and symbols of rebirth and fertility. The egg is a prime symbol, promising new life. Folklore tells us that eggs balance on their ends most easily at the equinox. Seeds, like eggs, hold the potential of new growth. Rabbits, because of their many offspring and constant breeding, are also associated with spring festivals.
Passover takes place in the middle of the Hebrew month of Nisan and although the calendar was constantly being adjusted, the most important factor in deciding the day was the spring equinox. No Ruz (New Day) is celebrated in Iran, a festival rooted in the beliefs of Zoroastrianism. In Egypt the Festival of Isis was held as a celebration of spring and rebirth. The ancient Romans observed the Feast of Cybele, a mother goddess at the center of a Phrygian fertility cult.
In Poland, a little lamb made of butter or sugar is placed in the center of the Easter table, which is laden with food and decorated with eggs. In Italy, colored eggs are baked in braided loaves of bread at Easter. In Russia, the celebration of Maslenitsa is observed as a time of the return of light and warmth. St. Patrick’s Day is March 17th and we’ve all heard that St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland . A double meaning here because the serpent was a metaphor for the early pagan faiths of Ireland.
Easter is named for the Saxon goddess, Eostre, a goddess of the dawn. And the date of Easter is determined by a moon cycle – always the first Sunday on or after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. This year the first full moon will appear on April 9th. It’s sometimes called the Pink Moon or the Egg Moon or the Sprouting Grass Moon. So this year Easter will be celebrated on April 16th.
Many holidays dedicated to the great mother goddesses take place in the month of March: Astarte, Isis, Aphrodite, Cybele and the Virgin Mary. The goddess shows herself in the blossoms, the leaves on the trees, the sprouting of the crops, the mating of birds, and the birth of young animals. We are reassured that life will continue.
We are bound to our beautiful blue ball and its movements. We depend on the earth, so of course our important festivals are celebrated at the solstices and the equinoxes with symbols that hark back to ancient pagan influences.
How will you celebrate this Vernal Equinox? Will you do something special to show your gratitude to our planet? Plant a tree? Call your representative or senator and ask her or him to protect the EPA? Start a flower garden?
Happy Spring ~
But wait ~ don’t go away – Click the links below to follow the Spring Fling Blog Hop with all these other authors:
Allyson Charles: https://www.allysoncharles.com/blog
Gillian Baker: http://gilianbaker.com/blog/
K.B. Owen: http://kbowenmysteries.com/blog
Layla Reyne: https://laylareyne.tumblr.com
Kirsten Weiss: https://kirstenweiss.com/blog
Mona Karel: https://mona-karel.com/blog/
Misterio Press: https://misteriopress.com
Shannon Esposito: http://murderinparadise.com/blog-2/
Victoria De La O: http://www.victoriadelao.com/
And you can visit me at Facebook or Twitter @askzodia too!
All Signs Point to Murder
(Book 2 in the Zodiac Mysteries)
Coming soon: August 8, 2017
Rob Ramer was the perfect husband until he committed the ultimate family faux pas ~ he shot his sister-in-law to death. Was this a murder plot or a tragic accident? Julia Bonatti, San Francisco astrologer, vows to find the answer in the stars.
February 2, 2017
Mystery on the Menu
The Mystery on the Menu luncheon at the Cerritos, California library on January 28, 2017 was a fantastic event! Fifteen bestselling mystery authors appeared before a packed audience.
Paul D. Marks was our moderator for the “Write What You Know, Write What You Don’t Know” with D.P. Lyle, Naomi Hirahara, Dave Putnam and myself.
Of course, we posed for lots of pictures. Here are Paul D. Marks, Nancy Cole Silverman, Naomi Hirahara and Dianne Emley.
Did I say we had a lot of laughs? We certainly did.
And below, check out a group shot of all the attending authors:
Top row, left to right: Sybil Johnson, Marcia Clerk, Mike Befeler, Nancy Cole Silverman, Jill Amadio, Christopher J. Lynch, Dianne Emley, Betty Hechtman, Patricia Smiley and Linda O. Johnston.
Seated are Doug Lyle, myself, Paul D. Marks, Naomi Hirahara and Dave Putnam, with our wonderful librarians Padmini and Janice seated below. 
December 20, 2016
Winter Solstice
The winter solstice is a magical time. The shortest day and the longest night of the year has been celebrated in cultures the world over for thousands of years. This year, 2016, it occurs on December 21st at 2:44 a.m. PST in the northern hemisphere of our planet as the Earth’s axis tilts furthest from the Sun.
Ancient peoples followed the sun’s path to know when to sow, when to slaughter cattle and when to monitor food supplies. Their survival was at stake. They built monuments like Stonehenge, Machu Picchu in Peru, Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, and Chichen Itza in Mexico to track the sun’s annual progress.
New Grange in Ireland, built around 3200 B.C., is one such monument. For five days over the winter solstice, a beam of sunlight illuminates a small room inside the mound for seventeen minutes at dawn. Every year, thousands enter a lottery in hopes of being one of the hundred people allowed to enter and mark the passage of the Sun.
In northern Europe and Scandinavia, the celebration is known as Yule from the Norse word, Jul, meaning wheel. Modern customs, like the Christmas tree, the Christmas wreath, and the Yule log are all descendants of these traditions. The Romans called this time of the year Saturnalia and decorated their homes with red and gold.
Sol Invictus (the Unconquered Sun) was a Syrian god later adopted as the chief god of the Roman Empire. His holiday is celebrated on December 25, as are several gods associated with the winter solstice. In 273 A.D., the Christian church selected this day to represent the birth of Jesus, and by 336 A.D., this Roman solar feast day was Christianized. January 6, Epiphany in the Christian church, associated with the visit of the Magi, was originally an Egyptian date for the Winter Solstice.
Today’s Santa is a folk figure with multicultural roots. He embodies characteristics of Saturn (the Roman agricultural god), Cronos (a Greek god, also known as Father Time), the Holly King (Celtic god of the dying year), and Father Ice/Grandfather Frost (a Russian winter god).
And let’s not forget the Goddesses. The Great Mother has been honored in many cultures through countless centuries – the Egyptian Isis, Holda, the Teutonic earth goddess of good fortune, Bona Dea, a Roman goddess of abundance and prophecy, and Befana, an Italian witch who gives gifts to children at this season.
No matter how you celebrate the solstice season, it’s a time to be close to loved ones, to give gifts, to share your bounty with those less fortunate, and to feast and make merry. Just think of all the peoples of the Earth who have celebrated on this magical night by building fires and lighting candles against the dark, marking this season and this moment in the heavens.
Happy Winter Solstice to all
~
December 14, 2016
My Visit with Shirley
I fell asleep last night reading a collection of Shirley Jackson’s recently published short stories and essays. I woke up this morning, poured a cup of coffee, and went back to reading. Blissful morning and the coffee helped. Sans coffee, I might not have taken notice of a few facts about Shirley’s life. I hope no one minds that I call her by her first name. I feel a bit like the character in Julie and Julia, haunting the life and works of someone I greatly admire.
Shirley Hardie Jackson was born in San Francisco on December 14, 1916. Today is her birthday and she was a Sagittarian! Like me! She died on August 8, 1965 in North Bennington, Vermont at the young age of 48. Not only do we share a Sun sign, but Shirley spent her life in places that I have been intimately connected with on both sides of the continent.
Perhaps it’s because of the Zodiac Mysteries that I’m writing, I became curious about her natal chart. Of course, without a birth time only a solar chart is possible, but here it is. 
The solar chart gives her a Pisces rising. Maybe that is actually accurate. Notice her large eyes and the open, sensitive expression. If Pisces was rising at the time of her birth, she wouldn’t have had a very tough exterior in dealing with the world. 
A grand trine in fire signs between her Sun, Moon and Jupiter indicates that SO much came easily to her. The grand time is a fabulous, blessed natal aspect. I wish I had one in my chart. The downside of all this “ease” in life is that it can incline to laziness and an assumption that one need do nothing and wait for the blessings of life to arrive.
In contrast, Pluto is in Cancer. She was of the misogynistic generation (is there only one?) that elevated “motherhood” to the level of sainthood and invented Mother’s Day. Such nonsense! But Pluto opposed her Mercury in Cancer — a dark, tortured and obsessive mind. Perhaps even an indication of harsh criticism by early reviewers and readers.
Then there’s the conjunction between Saturn in late Cancer and Neptune in early Leo. Faith and optimism were not one of her natal gifts in spite of her fire sign placements. She was fearful and tended toward depression. Reality for her was not at all trustworthy. She would have suffered from a lack of confidence, fits of anxiety, even a tendency to sacrifice herself for others. She was a conflicted soul, at the mercy of addictions and agoraphobia but pouring her brilliant and perceptive observations into her stories. She was a woman who yearned for freedom and greener pastures (Sagittarius) and more time to write, yet unable to escape her own very personal prison. Note the placements in Capricorn – Mercury, Mars and North Node of the Moon. Her status in the world and how things appeared to others were important to her. Perhaps that’s why freedom and independence eluded her. This was a conflicted woman who drew upon that pain to write her stories. 
One reviewer (Eliot Fremont-Smith) called her “. . . a master of complexity of mood, an ironic explorer of the dark conflicting inner tyrannies of the mind and soul.” The New York Times Book Review said of her: “Shirley Jackson knew better than any writer since Hawthorne (one of my personal faves) the value of haunted things.” Another reviewer said “. . . she wrote ‘with a broomstick’ instead of a pen.” Yet another called her “. . . a kind of Virginia Werewoolf.”
I first read The Lottery in a creative writing class in college. I had no interest at all in creative writing at that time, but the class was a handy escape from organic chemistry and chordate morphology. I was stunned when I read this story. The Lottery resonated with me in ways that are hard to explain. I thought, yes, someone who really “gets” New England — the bigotry, the xenophobia. When I first moved to the West Coast, I was taken aback when strangers on the street would nod and say ‘hi.’ That would never have happened in the New England I grew up in. At the time of its publication The Lottery was tremendously shocking. The magazine received hundreds of letters from angry readers. Subscriptions were cancelled. Today perhaps, no one would bat an eye. I can’t say, but I loved the story, still do. It illustrates so much about New England and human nature.
At Malice Domestic last May, I sat on a panel called “Murder in New England” with several wonderful New England authors – Kathy Lynn Emerson, Lea Wait, Barbara Ross and Sherry Harris, our moderator. I was invited because of my Soup Lover’s Mysteries set in Vermont and written as Connie Archer.
Our first question was “Why?” Why New England? We all had different comments and takes on the subject, but I was reminded that as a child, I was sure I could smell the blood that had soaked into the earth for generations. The sense of it was everywhere and I couldn’t understand why no one else noticed it. My parents were fond of taking long rides around the countryside. I was usually car sick. I didn’t like those meandering rides at all.
Shirley, a native Californian, was completely creeped out by New England. There were the obvious reasons – anti-Semitism directed at her husband and her family, isolation as a housewife raising four kids and trying to find the time to write, the damage caused by a cold and critical mother and a bullying, controlling, vain and philandering husband.
I wish I could have known her. I wish I could have hung out with her in that New England town, preferably in a soup shop. If she had been my friend, I would have advised her to pack up the kids and get on the next plane, train or bus and hightail it back to California. That’s the true Sagittarian response! She didn’t need him. After all, it was her money from writing that kept the family afloat.
In spite of her life and her personal demons, she still managed to create some of the most brilliant literature ever published. If you’re a fan, as I am, you might want to know a new biography has just been released by author Ruth Franklin: Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. I want to read it, but part of me hesitates. I wish Shirley had had a happier life. I wish she had lived longer and written more.
No astrologer can or ever should predict death (unlike mystery writers) but I did happen to notice that Jupiter in Gemini was transiting in opposition to her Sun sign on that fateful August day. Perhaps she finally found the escape and freedom she longed for.
November 29, 2016
Holiday Reading
The Madness of Mercury is featured today at Cindy’s Notebook. Read on for an excerpt of this first book in the Zodiac Mysteries!
June 2, 2016
A Very Independent Woman
Connie’s post about Lillie Hitchcock Coit, a San Francisco character, and Coit Tower is up today at Booklady’s Booknotes.
May 28, 2016
It’s in the Stars
Connie’s a guest at Shelley’s Bookcase talking about the Zodiac Mysteries and her protagonist, Julia Bonatti, San Francisco astrologer.
Playing with Planets
Connie’s a guest today at Le Coeur de l’Artiste to talk about creating charts for her characters.
May 25, 2016
If You’re Goin’ to San Francisco
Connie’s touring this month, and today she’s at The Bookwyrm’s Hoard to talk about her protagonist’s city and its cable cars.
