Spica
April 5 – April 18, 2026 192.858° – 205.714° The StarSpica appears as a single point of blue-white light, the 16th brightest star in the entire night sky, 250 light years from Earth. Look at it through a telescope and it still appears as one. There is no instrument that can resolve Spica into its two components. They are too close together. Only spectroscopy reveals the truth: what looks like one star is two, orbiting each other every four days at a distance of only 18 million kilometers, closer to each other than Mercury is to our Sun.
They are so close, and so massive, that their mutual gravity has pulled them out of spherical shape. Spica A and Spica B are not round stars. They are egg-shaped, each one tidally distorted by the gravitational pull of the other, each one permanently deformed by the presence of what it orbits. Two massive blue-white bodies, each larger and hotter and more luminous than anything in our local neighborhood of stars, locked into each other so tightly that neither one can ever be entirely itself independent of the other.
Spica A, the primary, is 11 times the mass of our Sun. Burning at 22,400 Kelvin, radiating 12,100 times solar luminosity. It pulses. Expands and contracts in brightness over a cycle of 0.17 days, less than four hours, tidally induced by the pull of its companion. Even its pulsations are caused by the other one. And at this mass, with this fuel burn rate, Spica A will end as a supernova. The death is already built into what it is.
Humans have been in sacred relationship with this star for over five thousand years. A temple to Hathor at Thebes was oriented toward Spica when it was built in 3,200 BC. The Greek astronomer Hipparchus used Spica’s position to discover the precession of the equinoxes, the slow wobble of Earth’s axis, in 127 BC. Copernicus made observations of Spica with a homemade instrument for his own research on precession. This star, this blue egg-shaped pair of massive bodies locked together by gravity, has been a reference point for human understanding of where we are in the cosmos for as long as we have been looking up.
Its name is from the Latin: spīca virginis. The ear of grain. What is held in the left hand. What grows from the earth, is cut down, and grows again.
This time of year so much birth occurs. Eggs hatching, birds making their nests in all the trees and in all the eaves. Squirrels running through the trees shaking the newly fluorescent green leaves against the backdrop of a crisp blue sky.
The incubator is on nonstop, with an ever rotating collection of fertilized eggs, to be either put into a tub to grow out or to be cared for by a broody hen. I acquired my first turkey eggs. I figure we are already a farm, so what are a few new types of animals.
The rabbit babies are growing up. The grow-outs from winter are almost ready to breed. Our cat had her first litter of six kittens. These kittens stay silent until their mother returns, then for a moment we hear the cutest mews screeching. Cats are something that are needed when one lives in unadulterated woods, with nests of mice and rats that pop up new each week, and the bugs they chase around in the grassy meadows.
The life death life cycle has its origins in when we were deeply connected to the Sacred Mother Earth, as a matrifocal species. Matriarchy is often thought of as women being the leaders, but there is no such thing in these cultures and societies. Matriarchy is more of concentric circles. Where children are the center, the most important, as this is how the species thrives and grows and develops. Continuing the evolution of progression and change, to create a better, more loving world. Then women are the next circle, as they are the life bringers. They are upheld, honored and revered, because all life is sacred. Then the men, around them. Protecting them, upholding their ability to bring sacred life to the physical realm and to nourish them. There is no hierarchy.
Hierarchy brings with it power over, greed and control aspects. All things that fuel the destruction of our planet, induce slavery, and use people as resources rather than the sacred embodied beings they are.
This life death life cycle is prevalent when one is raising animals and living so close to nature. There is not a separation between life and death. It is simply a part of life. When hatching out eggs, there are some that simply do not make it. They are feathered and look as though they are perfect, but nature had her reasons. These babies simply get buried, going right back into the Earth. We lost a chick that was a few days old. It could have been that the other chicks sensed a disease or illness and ended up killing it. But this is also vital to a thriving species.
Spica A will end as a supernova. That death is not a malfunction. It is the completion of what a star of that mass does, burning at 22,400 Kelvin, giving 12,100 times solar luminosity, pulsing with the tidal pull of its companion, and then will collapse and explode, seeding the surrounding space with the heavy elements it forged across its entire life. The death is the mechanism by which what it built gets distributed. What it made gets returned.
The ear of grain. Cut down. Returned to the earth. Growing again.
We can see the disease of using women as sex slaves happening in this culture. A Telegram channel where men were teaching other men how to drug, sexually assault, and video their wives or girlfriends to create content for other men. Just like the Epstein files showed what men with money and power do to children, this channel showed what some husbands have been doing behind closed doors. We first discovered this nationally with Pelicot’s trial. These horrors are not new in a patriarchal society that wants to keep women from having bodily autonomy, but they are new to coming out on a global scale.
Women have been trying to gain back their sovereignty since the 1930s, but it seems each week a new state makes a law about our bodies, to try and keep us in its grip. More women have been arrested for having a miscarriage, something completely natural so that babies are born healthy, than have been arrested for being named in the Epstein files.
The life death life cycle is off balance. Death is seen as the final curtain. Death is seen as an ending. When death is simply a step in the cycle. It is never over. Death is used as a way to control people with fear, obedience, and the promise of some imaginary heaven. Just as the seasons shift from one to another and continue on in their spiral, so do our own lives.
Spica has been oriented toward in sacred practice for five thousand years. Not because the people who built the temples at Thebes were afraid of it. Because they understood what it represented: the ear of grain held in the left hand. The thing that grows, is cut, returns to the earth, and grows again. The life death life cycle, written in blue-white light, 250 light years away, two egg-shaped stars locked in four-day orbit, one of them already carrying its supernova death in its own mass, burning so bright you can navigate by it on any clear night.
May the Life Death Life cycle be with you today. May you feel held by the knowing that life is a beautiful spiral of second chances and progression. If not this year or lifetime, then in the next.