Representing Metatron as one of the archangels who transit at nightfall to shepherd our local seasons, expansive Arcturus is distributing blueprints for renewed growth. True Spring is the portfolio of Antares (Uriel) in a month.
I await clarification from the Victorian Government on the propriety of linking my observations with Aboriginal cultural heritage. My source of information on local seasons can be found here.
The identification of six seasons by the Wurundjeri people is sufficient reason to abandon the geometry of northern hemisphere astrology, and attach the signs in southern order to the constellations, not according to distance from the (northern hemisphere) Vernal Equinox. The appealing symmetry of quaternaries, elements and gender, magnetic or mathematical polarity cuts no ice down here, where we are belatedly learning to go outside, look up, and make up our own mind.
A straight line is a segment of an infinitely large circle. Immediacy is a segment of a cycle. Madness is straightened immediacy.
“I haven’t been there for a few weeks. Did you notice? Of course not. You’ve got a busy life, and you’ve got more important things to think about than where the Moon is. I don’t really care. I’ve got my routine, and I just do it. I hear you: what difference does it make if the calendar shows my quarters facing left or right? Right? If you don’t want to know, don’t read me, simple as that. I never expected to go viral, did I?
Why do any of you express yourselves? Of course, you have to place your order at Maccas, but really, I’m serious. If your opinion isn’t going to influence someone powerful, isn’t going to change the world, why do you so carefully construct it? Doesn’t matter if you’re gay or straight, why do you find it necessary to have an opinion on same-sex marriage? And why do you think the world needs changing, anyway? Can’t you compromise?
Of course I get sick of going around in circles. Of course I know I’m predictable (hardly to any of you though, I dare say, heh heh heh), but it doesn’t matter to me whether I holiday behind the clouds or on a yacht in the Aegean. What matters is what’s going on in HERE, right? Same as you. I’m not ashamed of what I do. I’m happy! I was over the Angola-Namibia border at opposition, and now I am visible to Eastern Australia in Capricorn(us), and whether you consider me in the northern or southern part of it, I’ve got a brandy, a rollie, and a game on TV. I’m full, in your face, and loving it!
This is my compromise. Hero in my own lunch-hour (sorry if I extinguish you, Emu). Did my father’s abuse and my mother’s compassion make me what I am? Who cares! I’ll explain the chart in a minute, if you’ll just let me finish. Matters of import are being realized at the Meridian, and I’m very upstage in this setting, but who says they’re matters of import? Me! I don’t care if you don’t believe me: Antares is Uriel, the Light of God, and his role is grave! This warden reminds you that your self-importance is imprisoned in causality and consequences, just like mine. I don’t have to tell you what working family-man Mars makes of that. Great-Uncle Saturn on the other hand is anyone’s guess.
And just in case you get too far up yourself–if you’re still reading–there’s a tiny man-made speck towards Rasalgethi (Alpha Herculis, “Head of the Kneeler”, just to Rasalhague’s west), where human imagination put it, and can find it, as I have. It was made by ordinary people like me who find ways of making the intolerable tolerable and pay their taxes. Or have I got that the wrong way around? We pay our taxes, and powerful people make their intolerable tolerable. Can you see where you fit in? It’s an unimaginably big world, but size matters, if you look from the inside!
Addiction is an orientation of the world to the emotional self. In the arms of addiction we give ourselves up to pain. We are centred on it, and the furthest from its release we can be, confirmed in it by painlessness. We are called, and make any excuse; but our stunted, misshapen appearance to the outside belies a miracle of ecological adaptation. For example, as a prisoner, I have been given a lot of counselling on how to stop defeating myself. Thank you. I have adapted my orbit to it.
[Based on Chögyam Trungpa’s Transcending Madness: the Experience of the Six Bardos, Shambhala, 2010, and Lövheim’s cube of emotion.]
Guilty as charged, but have a look at those constellations of addiction, and acknowledge which ones have tipped the scales of passing interest. Do you really want to free your self from all dependency? I tell you what is self-defeating: looking at the transit of Antares and seeing only a scattering of distant lights. I am rather excited in your sky by my discriminating good fortune….”
Usually every three years, when Full Moon phases with the range of dates the Sun enters a Breamlea Constellation, there are two Full Moons in the same Constellation. Three years ago, spectacularly, it was the Aquarius Crone in August-September. This year it is the Capricorn Addict, this Moon and next. How to differentiate them, and how do they derive a common meaning? Is there any valid foundation to this exercise in giving Moons a Southern Hemisphere existential identity?
Responsibility, Gemini’s calling-card, is really the basis of all life: not just in the sense of being responsible for a state of the world, or of oneself; or of being able to respond to the world, or demand that ability in others; but as a combination, even a continuum, of the two. It is a feedback loop, in which a calling from within adjusts itself to reality, and a real desire is driven by a sense of unrealized potential, of oneself and the world to care for each other. This is what I think ‘ownedness‘ means. You have to own yourself, and where you and the world meet in mutual creation, to be authentic. Responsibility is the transformation of emptiness into gratitude, generosity and joy.
You only have this one life, and you don’t have to be anxious about that. Responsibility can take you in a million directions, in despite of the final destination. Culs de sac like death are an illusion. So are images of the higher self you want to attain, and the wound which stops you getting there (or keeps you trapped in ministration). Of course, responsibility as calling is not without its complications. The absence of responsibility is despair, which Kierkegaard powerfully defined as the refusal of one’s calling, the loss of the eternal. And where is the eternal, if not in emptiness? Immediacy has no self, to use Kierkegaard’s words.
Take courage, through this and the next Full Moon in Capricorn: we will construct an enlightening interpretation of this fortuitous coincidence together! And authentically, I hope we can share a laugh. After all, a calling does not come from the newspapers, does it? Millions of people in post-industrial western democracies are searching for an authentic inner voice calling them to the future. It’s very hard to hear. My own calling to write about this most significant of New Moons, at the heart of Winter when the God is born, and when intimacy and duty entail an appreciation of role and judgment, has fluctuated in its audibility, and I’m afraid I cannot do it justice. Two events have drowned it at times in static: a federal election facing a polarized electorate which democracy dooms to ineffective and reactive division; and a resurgence of bodily pain which asserts my lifelong irresponsibility, a black bird come home to roost.
Three faces of inauthenticity: venting, subservience and the higher self.
We are not reaction, nor perfect.
We are not victims, nor independent.
We are not on a journey, nor lost.
Procol Harum once said, “Life is like a beanstalk, isn’t it?” Yes, in every moment of every day the tree of life contends with the elements in whatever form it has managed to preserve, automatically continuing the primordial transformative processes which create it out of nothing. Its ‘tree-ness’ can be located in its chloroplasts, at the empty threshold of energy transfers; or in the hydraulics implicit in its structure; or in shade, timber, firewood or home. As a tree, to be the gestalt of all of those identifiers, and none, is responsibility.
The moment of New Moon is an experience of being, similar in relation to the Full Moon as the house of realization is to that of reputation, in the sense that Being at the Imum Coeli represents the emptiness of ego. In that moment the Moon embarks on a mission to fill the emptiness, or allay the boredom, of what in essence prefigures what he is propelled towards. New Moon is not an embarkation from or towards an ultimate form of being. Any consciousness of higher-order being is already ego bored with emptiness. It is more valuable to think of it as a new infusion of care into will: a renewal of ‘human-ness’.
The Moon is cursed to swivel two hoops: an elliptical orbit and an inclined orbit. His gyrations delight us until we know what they mean. In the rush of his proximity he makes more urgent the task of unlearning the infantile solutions to shame which fuel so much of our judgment of others. As he composes his anguish in the Sign of determination and withdrawal (the dichotomy of twinship) in very dubious company, he has already rushed us by, but his apogee, in Libra the shame of greed and the reaction formation of disrespect, hangs from the top of the tree, impossible to ignore. Although nobody can see him, we do know that high above the Sun, he is giddily reminding us of the responsibility of prominence, with the Ascending Node in Aquarius, to focus our insight on overcoming avoidance and perfectionism.
The Tree of Man [sic] is a cross, constructed from an upright pole joining identity and emptiness, and a crossbeam joining dependent arising to transcendence, from which the bound human arms of value and intention regularly lift in supplication and dangle in despair. However daunting that symbol may seem, it doesn’t have to be. The imagination can function as a chloroplast. Just as the stars immediately above the Southern Cross symbolize the thoughts of the crucified, the left way of intoxication, the right way of asceticism, and in between, the immanent reality of transfiguration, so a child gazing up into the foliage of a parent can get an expansive perspective beneath their posture: the twitter of the cosmos in the branches.
At the moment of this New Moon, accompanied by Mummy’s ghost, Alphekka is at transit. He is the habit which affects to answer the calling. Alphekka has the quality of ‘disguise’ because he rotates very quickly and is surrounded by dust. He resembles Taz, the Tasmanian devil with a vicious temper in Bugs Bunny, and appears as the repressed accountant Theodore Tasmanian in the Looney Tunes Wabbit series now showing. Go Theo! I hope you’re happy with your vote! Now, where are those painkillers?
Representing Metatron as one of the archangels who transit at nightfall to shepherd our local seasons, expansive Arcturus is distributing blueprints for renewed growth. True Spring is the portfolio of Antares (Uriel) in a month.
