Full Moon in Taurus — November 14, 2016, 13:52 UT

The Full Moon in Taurus today is the brightest supermoon in nearly 70 years. The Moon is closer to Earth than it has been since January 1948. In the astrological chart, the Moon was in conjunction with one of the most distant objects in our solar system, Sedna.

Sedna was discovered on 14 November 2003, exactly thirteen years ago. It is a trans-Neptunian object which astrologically has a strong association with the climate change and other environmental issues. It reminds us that we should not be exploiting the resources of Earth.

Sedna has an exceptionally long and elongated orbit. The orbital period is around 11,400 years. At the moment it is about three times as far as Neptune, approaching the Sun, and coming to its perihelion in 2076. The last time Sedna was this close to the Sun, Earth was just coming out of the last ice age. The next time Sedna comes back, the world will be a completely different place again.

Sedna is named in honor of the Inuit goddess of sea and marine animals. She is thought to live at the bottom of the frigid Arctic Ocean. There are several variants of the myth, but all of them agree that Sedna was a beautiful young girl, who became the goddess of the icy waters. According to Grey Eagle, a Native American ceremonial storyteller, “…all the broken taboos and sins against the nature of the people fall through the water, to collect on Sedna’s body. When the accumulation is too great, Sedna sobs in pain.” The sea creatures gather by her door to comfort her and in the above world there is hunger and sickness. Then a shaman must visit her in the deep waters and clean her body and comb her hair. When Sedna is happy again, she releases her mammals and allows the humans to eat from the bounty of the sea.

Sedna wants to be known. She gives us subtle warnings, and if we don’t pay attention to her, we may have to deal with her strength.

Another distant object named after Inuit deities, Sila-Nunam, is squaring the luminaries from Leo. Sila-Nunam is a binary system, a double cubewano, consisting of two bodies tightly bound and with nearly equal sizes. The orbital period is almost 300 years.

Classical trans-Neptunian objects are given mythological names associated with creation. Sila or Silla is one of the oldest Inuit deities, even older than Sedna. Sila is the Inuit god of the sky, weather, and life force. The Inuit believed that Silla was the primary component of everything that exists. He had control over everything in one’s life. Nunam is the Earth goddess, Sila’s wife. Nunam created the land animals and, in some traditions, the Inuit people. Sila breathed life into the Inuit.

In 1997, the same year when Sila-Nunam was discovered, an international treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol was adopted. The agreement set targets for industrialized countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions.

Year 2016 has been the hottest year on record. This has been especially pronounced in the Arctic, affecting the melting of the ice sheet and sea ice, and the thickness of the snow cover. The survival of the polar bear is seriously threatened. The warming is endangering the Svalbard seed vault, which was thought to be safely surrounded by arctic permafrost. Global biodiversity is declining at an alarming rate. Almost two-thirds of the vertebrate species have disappeared in about 50 years because of human actions.

The Paris agreement on climate change went into effect on 4 November 2016, marking the first time that governments have agreed legally binding limits to global temperature rises. Now the world is worried about USA’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement. Is Donald Trump’s presidency going to be a disaster for our planet?

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