The Screaming Caveman

Tis the fucking season.

So, in the Julian calendar, the astrological sign of Pisces comes as the first "mutable" sign of the zodiac. Now, we could go on about personality traits and all of that magillah, but I'm going to do my best to focus on the meteorological parallels in the temperate climate.

In the Western astrological model, the signs come in three modalities: Cardinal, Fixed and Mutable, further split between the four Aristotlean elements of Fire, Earth, Air and Water. In the Western Tropical astrological model, the Cardinal signs begin with the Solstices and Equinoxes. Aries begins Spring, Cancer begins Summer, Libra begins Autumn and Capricorn begins Winter.

So, we're left wondering, "Well fuck! It starts getting hot out long before the Summer Solstice, and winter doesn't begin to rrrrrrreally suck until February. What gives?" See, here's where the modalities pick up. Cardinal begins, in that we collectively go "Okay, I guess it's not summer anymore. Time to get out the sexy boots and sweaters, bust out the moisturizer and drink chai." Fixed signs tend to be unmistakably of their season: more days in Aquarius are wintery than not, and it's statistically colder than any of the other months. The mutable signs tend to exemplify when the season's definition falls apart, where the winter gets warmer at random, when hurricanes kick up in the summer, when we get drippy noses.

So, the big thing that a few people have noticed are that the extremes of the mutable seasons have grown. The outdoors is a nice 45 degrees and the sun's gone down, yet the high tomorrow will barely breach that. Most of my friends have headaches and feel ill, especially those who've investigated metaphysical phenomena on a regular basis. This, at least for me, seems to indicate one of the most immediately noticeable effects of environmental screwups on humanity's part. That, however, is a story for another time.

Anyhow, you get it: Once a mutable sign (Pisces, Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius) starts, the weather gets crazy.