I like to read the Free Will Astrology reports. I have to post this week’s forecast because of the Halloween costume suggestions.

Aries (March 21-April 19)
For all we know, in your past life you were a virgin who was thrown into a volcano to appease a fire deity. But whether or not that’s an actual fact, we can say this with certainty: At some time in your current life, you made a great sacrifice in an effort to pacify a person whose anger or violence or manipulativeness you were intimidated by. Now I say unto you, Aries, that it’s an excellent time to fix any distortions that were unleashed in your life because of that sacrifice. You’ve got the personal power and insight you need to set the healing in motion. Halloween costume suggestions: the mythical phoenix; a virgin-turned-warrior carrying the severed head of the fire deity; a fireman, firewoman, or firedancer.

I’d love to be a phoenix, but the costume planning is too daunting. I don’t know anybody I could borrow a fire-fighting costume from, and I have no idea what a fire dancer would wear.

But I did do something like the the virgin-turned-warrior carrying the severed head of the fire deity once, if you count Judith‘s beheading of Holofernes.

12 When the people of her town heard her voice, they hurried down to the town gate and summoned the elders of the town. 13 They all ran together, both small and great, for it seemed unbelievable that she had returned. They opened the gate and welcomed them. Then they lit a fire to give light, and gathered around them. 14 Then she said to them with a loud voice, “Praise God, O praise him! Praise God, who has not withdrawn his mercy from the house of Israel, but has destroyed our enemies by my hand this very night!” 15 Then she pulled the head out of the bag and showed it to them, and said, “See here, the head of Holofernes, the commander of the Assyrian army, and here is the canopy beneath which he lay in his drunken stupor. The Lord has struck him down by the hand of a woman. 16 As the Lord lives, who has protected me in the way I went, I swear that it was my face that seduced him to his destruction, and that he committed no sin with me, to defile and shame me.”

Read the Book of Judith

Back in Iowa City, my graduate student friends and I dressed up as religious figures and went trick or treating to our professors houses (in the sleet). I made a plaster cast of my face and painted it. I carried it around the whole night, although the strands of the black wig kept getting caught on it. Note the pink tee shirt with the painted nipple. I’m not sure why Judith is represented with the one breast showing, but I did the best I could.

Can you guess who everybody is (other than me)?

But hey, I can’t do that again. Ben wants me to be a witch. And besides, I doubt our pseudo-christian conservatives here in Georgia would recognize the reference or approve of the depiction…