Virgo season is upon us. So while you may be conjuring up classical images of virginal, naive ladies-in-waiting, we’re about to pull a supercurious on you. Virgin? As Inigo Montoya once said, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” Well, if that’s the case… let’s take a closer look!
💃 ALL THE SINGLE LADIES
Yes, the astrological sign Virgo means “virgin.” Today, the word equals sexual purity, as in virgo intacta. But without the intacta? A Virgo, until the 13th century, was simply a woman who wasn't married.
More than one Greek goddess could claim to be Virgo, the constellation. She may be Dike, the goddess of moral order. Or Astraea, the last of the gods to abandon humanity after the whole Pandora’s box incident, leaving us forever hoping for her return to bring the next Golden Age.
All the candidates are unmarried women who appear just before a total breakdown of the prevailing moral order. Once we made this connection, we started seeing Virgos everywhere:
Pre-motherhood Eve is God’s last creation before the Expulsion from Eden
In Lord of the Rings, Galadriel’s old world gifts guard The Fellowship of the Ring in the transition from the Third Age to the next.
Wonder Woman is the last of the Amazonians to defend mankind, leaving her home to fight Nazis
And don’t forget Buffy, of Vampire Slaying fame, who is the most popular pop culture figure in academia
All are protectors in their own right, tasked with protecting humanity from evil incarnate.
About the images above: on the left: a montage of Wonder Woman costume changes by Myles Lester; in the middle: Gerard Mas’ unladylike sculptures; on the right: the iconoclastic virgin herself, Madonna.
For more women who aren’t afraid to toe the line:
Do you have a voice for radio? Not if you’re a woman
How horny Mormon teens stay chaste: an ode to armpit sex
WWF’s Mad Maxine became a crusader for healthy aging
Support women journalists in Afghanistan
⏰ TIME AFTER TIME
Virgo’s archenemy is tyranny. Nazis. Communists. For Daenerys Targaryen, it’s The Lannisters. But these days, the supervillain is Time itself. And it’s not just pop culture… in “real-life” we’re seeing struggles between old world and new world orders too:
News is written by tweet, and then even network anchors try to figure out what really happened. (We did it too by posting something erroneously on our Instagram.)
The culture war, particularly “cancel culture,” is a fight to own the historical narrative.
The pandemic infodemic boils down to a fight against microbial time. Covid loves confusion. It allows more time for genetic mutation (new variants) - to emerge.
Personal liberty is at odds with the one thing that can shorten the pandemic - a sense of responsibility to a community.
“Those seem like some overstated stakes,” you say? Maybe not. Whoever owns time owns reality as we know it. When Greenwich Mean Time was established in 1855, there were bomb threats against the “authoritarian” invention of coordinated time. Before you laugh, consider that all of China has only 1 time zone, which means that 5pm in Kashgar is also 5pm in Weihei - 3,000 miles away.
In the industrialized world, a 30-day month is 2,592,000 seconds long. Since June 2019, an atomic clock in deep space measures each second as “the length of time it takes a caesium-133 atom in a precisely defined state to oscillate exactly: 9 billion, 192 million, 631 thousand, 770 times.” That precision powers society as we know it: mobile phones, GPS signals, zoom calls and wifi on planes. It is a very powerful invention. But it is... an invention.
In Nature, the Earth wobbles and is not a perfect sphere. In Nature, time is irregular. Lunar calendars, leap years, and even Japan’s 72 microseasons.
Who gets to say which is more real?
About the images above: on the left: The length of a single second was first used in the 17th century. in the middle: @macroroom’s extraordinary video experiments with time. on the right: Kristina Makushenko synchronizes to the beat - underwater.
⌛️ OUTATIME
Another way to measure Time is the drumbeat of our news. Will the world’s superpowers change in time to avert climate catastrophe? Does removing a statue or revising a history book erase the contributions of history’s currently best-known heroes? If the US had stuck it out in Afghanistan “long enough,” would the outcome have been better (and for whom)?
As always with thesupercurious, we have more questions than answers. But if Time is an evenly spaced set of caesium-133 blips, it is also a tyrant:
As the basis of industrialization, its consequences even determine the design of Chinese keyboards.
It’s also a grid against which our lives are measured. It deems us early or late, compares us to our peers by how many hours we spend with good “work-life balance.”
The attention economy runs on how much time we spend - or regret spending - on a few platforms run by a few people.
But there are so many realities that don’t fit neatly into a grid of standardized, coordinated, hyper-efficient clockwork time. Cracks are showing in the form of extreme weather events, AI modeling, and even modern depictions of Africa in emoji, or the way the culture of Black Twitter has branched into global social movements.
Reality, as we know it, is changing.
Humans are always creating new narratives. Try as we might, they take on a life of their own once they are created. Letting go is part of creating something that lasts. Just ask supercurious friend, David J. Peterson - the creator of the Dothraki language from HBO’s Game of Thrones:
Well, that’s it for Virgo 2021! We hope this edition stokes your curiosity until Libra season starts in approximately - but not exactly - 9,192,631,770 x 86,400 x 25 atomic oscillations of caesium-133.
Your curators,
Lisa and Jordan
Why does this newsletter have so much astrology in it anyway?
We think all knowledge is connected. It’s fun and useful to figure out how. It also helps us figure out when to publish the next issue. Know someone with a zodiac sign who is supercurious? Send them an invitation to subscribe.