Vestal Solstice: The Sacred Space of Self

by Eric Francis Coppolino and illustrations by Emil Alzamora, June 30, 2009

Northern Hemisphere summer began June 22 with a series of planetary events, and as often happens, events in close proximity describe a theme. When the Sun made its ingress into the cardinal sign Cancer, it was conjunct an asteroid called Vesta.

This magnificently complex asteroid, I believe, holds the key to understanding how we might go about healing our often injured, burdened, and confused sense of our sexuality. In one word, the method is devotion.
I’ll do my best to describe the qualities of Vesta in a way that makes it possible to feel and experience them—and to put them to use in our relationship experiences. Vesta is primarily about tending the fire within. That fire, and that experience of constantly caring for it, becomes the focal point for organizing space; that is, the psychic space of our lives, our priorities, and our beliefs.

Vesta is represented by a hearth (actually, a chevron, though in mythology it’s a hearth), and that hearth is the center of the home. We make our homes, comfortably or not, primarily within our psyches. The fire is the core fire of human existence, which is inherently sexual and creative. We use this fire for light, for heat, for creative purposes (you could say, to prepare our meals, whatever form they may take on the physical and nonphysical levels of existence).

Honoring this would give our daily lives and our relationships, whether sexual or not, a central concept to work with. Vesta is inherently about one’s relationship with oneself, which is the thing we share with others no matter what form that sharing might take. It may seem a paradox, but there is a touch of the impersonal to Vesta, which to me is about a boundary between self and other that gives everyone a little extra space to be who we are. Yet there is something collective about Vesta as well: We all share the same inner fire, whether we recognize it as the same thing or not.