The Daily: 11 November 2025

Martinmas

On November 11th at 11 in the morning, we practice a moment of silence for two minutes to remember the day we reached an accord and agreed to lay down arms after the brutality of World War 1. Over a century ago we stopped fighting. Soldiers came home. It was a time very like this. A time of deep economic divisions. A time of great uncertainty. A time when disease wracked the world, exacerbated by the homecoming military. This day is also Old All Hallows’, being close to the point in the seasonal year that marked the ancient day of the dead, before the switch to the Gregorian calendar. For millennia we have been remembering our dead at this time as the sun approaches the winter solstice.

The rest of the world calls this day Armistice Day, the day we stopped using weaponry against each other, or Remembrance Day, the day we remember those who died fighting in the muddy trenches. We remember the day we laid aside aggression. We honor the lost with red poppies and candlelight vigils. In the US, we call it Veteran’s Day. This is not quite the same thing. In this country this day has lost some of its meaning. It is not remembrance of the day we stopped fighting. Many people in this country could not even name the war that ended on this day, nor even that this day is remembered for the ending of that war to end all wars.

I want to be clear right now. I do not mean to take any regard away from those who have fought our many wars. Our veterans deserve to be respected and remembered this day and every day. They deserve far more than flag waving, parades and empty tokens. They deserve acknowledgement. They are fighting the endless wars that capitalism has raged against the earth. And they are dying. They don’t need medals of honor; they need to be brought home, fully. They need to be able to lay down their weapons, including all the sharp retorts endlessly firing in their minds. They need to put gruesome memories to rest and remember that their wars have ended. They need us to stop waging war. They need a final armistice.

On this day of remembrance, we would do well by our veterans to remember the day we ended the war to end all wars. And remember that in the century since we made that pledge to them we have not spent more than a decade free from the bondage of armed conflict. The chains are everywhere in our culture and most of all on those we use as our weapons.

This day, before 1918, was Martinmas. It was and still remains traditional to cull the herds and flocks of those animals that can not be fed over winter. It is a bloody time. Even the most pragmatic farmer dreads this time of year. Killing is not a native inclination, and most of us never learn to tolerate it. We recoil even from killing insects. We loath killing a mammal that has eyes like our own, that responds to pain and death in exactly the same ways we do. It is, in fact, dreadful. And now remember that this is what a soldier is trained to do, what a soldier is expected to do.

And we make our children into soldiers. It is very difficult to train an adult mind to kill, so we begin the brain-molding young. We call our foot-soldiers infantry, perhaps subconsciously acknowledging that most of these people who must kill directly never reach psychological adulthood. They never make the neurological connections that would allow them to question a command, that would enable them to act morally and consciously. This is by design. We put game consoles into the hands of adolescents to inure them to killing. We put ROTC programs into schools to remove questions from young minds and overcome psychological barriers, fashioning them into drones who are able to act against nature. And we wonder why most soldiers are damaged.

We call this day Martinmas because it is the old feast of St Martin of Tours, a fourth century bishop of Caesarodunum (Tours). Martin was a soldier. Most depictions show him astride a white horse, holding his cloak to his sword. The military trappings are emphasized in most works of art, and he is patron saint of soldiers. Even his name might be more of a title, meaning something like “follower of Mars”, “warlike”, soldier, killer…

However, he was canonized not for his martial strength but because he laid down his arms, giving away everything he had to help those in need. That gesture, holding his cape to the blade, is the memory of the day he cut his cloak in two so that a beggar man would not go unclothed in the cold. That was the day Martin walked away from the white horse and the military life and became a simple priest. If he is our patron saint of fighting men, perhaps it would be good to follow his lead and walk away from the fight — while lending whatever aid we can give to those who need it.

Today is Remembrance Day. It might be good if we remember what that means. Stop what you are doing at 11am and remember what war takes from us, remember who is taken, and remember those who have refused to heed the call to battle.

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Random Skywatcher Observation

Jupiter goes retrograde not long after the moment of Remembrance, at 11:41am. The gas giant continues on this backward path across the sky until 10 March 2026.

In astrology, this seems to be interpreted as a time for reflection… though most things in astrology seem to mean time for reflection.

But what is really happening is quite neat! Every nine months as we whiz around the sun in our little orbital path and Jupiter plods along on its much larger ring, we pass the gas giant. For the next four months, Jupiter appears to be moving westwards each night against the backdrop of stars. Then, after this little dipsy-doodle, it returns to its normal eastwards progression.

Retrograde motion of the planets, and particularly the long reversal of Jupiter, was one of the first indications that our models of a geocentric world, a universe that orbited Earth, were all wrong. We had to make such complicated spirals and epicycles to match the observed motions in the sky. Turns out, Copernicus showed us, that it is much simpler to make the sun the center of our small part of the universe, with all the “movable stars”, the planets, circling in rings around our star. That little shift in perspective, and it all falls into place, no need for complex hand-waving.

With this elegant model, the dance of the planets made sense… however, it also ripped a gash in our inflated egos that has never mended. We went from being the center of the universe, favored children of the Prime Creator in the ver middle of Being, to one of many species inhabiting the third small ball of rock in orbit around a highly average star in a backwater arm of a generic spiral galaxy. This new way of thinking starkly revealed that the universe is not about us… In fact, we hardly figure in the grand narrative.

To many, this is a bleak view of human existence. Relative to all that we see out there, humanity is insignificant. We don’t matter all that much. There isn’t a preeminent point in our being.

But I look at Jupiter moving backwards and think that understanding my small place and quiet story is exactly the point to being. That in all these goings-on whirling through space, here we are in our beautiful little home planet, living our cozy lives as Earthlings. No, I don’t matter all that much to anyone out there. But my life matters to me. No, I am not master of the universe. I don’t want to be. I don’t need to be. And I don’t think there is any such thing. It’s all this wondrous waltz of tiny beings living together — and all these moving parts in seeming choreography, yet with no grand design or higher purpose than just to be.

And isn’t that amazing! That it all works so well with no center whatsoever! All through all of us just being our best selves in balance with everything else. Random Brownian motion resolving into flow.

So when I look up, I smile and think that maybe I am helping to keep it all together. I am being who I am. At home on my small, lovely Earth. Marveling that each tiny thing like me, adds up to all this wonder…

Maybe that’s the reflection bit that the astrologers will go on about…

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©Elizabeth Anker 2025