• About

Southern Hemisphere Astrology

~ Turning astrology the right way up…

Southern Hemisphere Astrology

Monthly Archives: January 2017

Relativity: New Moon in Capricorn

28 Saturday Jan 2017

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Capricorn, New Moon, Relativity, Southern Signs, Time

From Duino Elegies: The First Elegy
Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
to no longer use skills one had barely time to acquire;
not to observe roses and other things that promised
so much in terms of a human future, no longer
to be what one was in infinitely anxious hands;
to even discard one’s own name as easily as a child
abandons a broken toy.
Strange, not to desire to continue wishing one’s wishes.
Strange to notice all that was related, fluttering
so loosely in space. And being dead is hard work
and full of retrieving before one can gradually feel a
trace of eternity.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Trans. Albert Ernest Flemming

Can we be relatively confident there is no absolute truth when we are absolutely confident that everything is relative? Is a pitched battle on the street a refusal on both signs to deconstruct truths which are ignorantly clung to as fundamental, or is one side right and the other wrong? How do some truths resist deconstruction? Consider this chart:

capricorn-new-teneriffe-solar-midnight-jan28

Do you dream of destiny, good burghers of the North? Sleep on, because a snake slithers across your bed, and it is a crab who usurps your throne. We of the South know our way around your underworld, as you do in ours. Shall we continue to fight with you over whether the Sun is high in our consciousness or low in your repair? Will you continue to fight each other over who is king, crab or lion?

My fundamental belief is that everything is made out of time, and that space is simply the dimension in which we construct the illusions which give our brief, almost virtual existence the insights and values which inure us to the instantaneous and meaningless. Space gives life the evolutionary impulse of perspective, but the mirage of place. Time insists on relativity, but it can deliver community.

I suggest to you that time can be experienced in three different ways, and that we all develop attitude which centres us in one of these ways more or less integrated with the others. Seekers, it seems to me, are focussed on dissatisfaction with a synthetic space, and the fundamental organizing principle constituted by their experience of time can remain hidden to them.bltIn grammatical terms, the three attitudes to time are: life is a constant adaptation to an ever-changing present; life is always on the crest of a wave from the past; and life is a choice of the proper future. The three organizing principles are: “How can I change the world?”; “Who is responsible?”; and “What am I entitled to?”.

My archetypes for these attitudes are respectively, Fool, Poet and Saint, and this website engages in an exploration of their many guises. Suffice to say here that the Fool is plagued by care, the Poet by uncertainty, and the Saint by evil. Integration is a necessity, normally undertaken in sleep. The highest form of evolution is not the rule of law, in secular or religious guise, but equanimity. Birds have it in spades, but humans do not. Instead, we have identity, and property, and boundaries.

It is within the confines of those primitive categories that we have curdled our cultures and raised our children during the whole of the ‘Age of Pisces’. All of our laws have evolved to reduce offence, because anger, hatred and conflict are uncomfortable. It is deplorable to live a life which is nasty, brutish and short. Privilege and repression have been our means of dealing with anger.

jumada-al-awwal

With breathtaking confidence in non-dualism, pluralism and the economics of globalization, privileged people all over the world have been dismantling boundaries, sharing property and merging identity, but not their own, and they have unleashed such anger that they cannot understand how to deal with it. Their own reactive anger is uncomfortable indeed. It belies their confidence in the Now. It is so correct, so impersonal, and so vain!

So how realistic is hope for a New Age of equanimity and enlightened loving-kindness? Is this hope better-founded in human brain function than the submission to chastity of Islamic and Christian patriarchy? Can post-modernism teach the emptiness of each of the ways of experiencing time, and yet by promoting the value of integration dissolve our differences?

immigrant-at-avior-gate-aceh-feb10

You cannot slay the dragon, Sir Knight of the European Round Table. She is in each of your daughters and sons—heads on them like rabbits! But what you could do, Saints, Poets and Fools of the “United” Nations, is find the Holy Grail for us. Hmm? Could there be an absolute truth? Is Jerusalem one or many? Eh? Eh? The sleepwalker on stage is not whole, and how empty is sleep?

Australia Day 2017

26 Thursday Jan 2017

Posted by abliq in Stargazing

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Australia Day, Bunjil, Emu, Golgotha, Mercury, Milky Way, Musca, Sagittarius, Southern Cross, Southern Hemisphere Astrology

Three gifts I bring to my fellow-Australians, all of whom are making a new homeland out of courage and determination, anger and self-control, mutual recognition and care.

australia-day-rise-galactic-north-pole-box-hill-2017The Milky Way, bridging northwest and southeast in a dark sky (limiting magnitude 5-6) at the rising of the galactic north pole, with the Emu rising too, is a celebration of your gratitude, those of you who plan to spend the national holiday asleep. Just keep your lights down and your cat inside.

australia-day-crux-box-hill-2017Looking south, it’s 12 o’clock Southern Cross time as nautical twilight begins. These stars are now yours, and the Emu too. Alpha and Beta Muscae are what martyrs see on the cross. [Pi Puppis, the watchful creator of this timeless place, is (perhaps mis-) appropriated to honour its transit at nautical twilight on my Mother’s birthday.]

australia-day-dawn-box-hill-2017The Moon offers you a signpost to Mercury. The sign of Sagittarius is ours in the Southern Hemisphere (if we but feel like it).

My heartfelt thanks to the descendants of the traditional owners of this part of the world: the Wathaurong, Wurundjeri and Bunurong people: please keep showing us how to care for your new homeland. Continuing gratitude to the developers of free astronomy software, Stellarium, for Aussie Rules, and for any happy faces.

Full Moon in Gemini: The Veteran

12 Thursday Jan 2017

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Gemini Moon, Reptilian Brain, Veteran Moon, Withdrawal

I am too tired to write this post. I have good ideas, but they’re not going to change the world. People are too locked into habit, and pointing that out just triggers resentment and anger. There is so much anger in the world! So many people trying to change others, or blame others for discomfort with change. Perhaps habit should be left in peace? No, habit is bossy. Habit pushes others around. It’s demanding. If the search for meaning is fundamental, and it follows habitual pathways, then we’re stuck with conflict. I am tired of conflict. I think I will just go away.

The past is another country, as Rilke said. If youth knew, if age could, as Freud said. These are neat phrases, but we are all veterans of the campaign to find meaning, constrained by the habits of the past, and enfeebled by the resistance of the wrong choice. I am completely enclosed by my choices. The signs I did read to make them are now too old, too petrified, too historical. I am a pathology of enclosed personality. I have arrived at nothingness. The veteran is the opposite of the drone. Submission is not in his nature, so he withdraws.

veteran-moon-transit-samauga-samoa-jan13

The snakes of Savai’i meet under the full moon. One of their clan was discovered and captured last year, and since then their leader, the great-great-great-grandmother who grew up in the Victorian bush and slithered into a container to have her babies many years ago, has guided them as far from human habitation as Savai’i allows. However, there is dissension in the clan. Many of the younger snakes are angry with submission to exile. They say they have the same rights as other creatures. The others are angry with them for suggesting another migration, back to where water and food are more accessible, because they feel too malnourished to move, and afraid of the danger. There has been some savage fighting.

“Go, if you must,” the elder begins. “But hear this. You will be going back to a world of fear and aggression. If you do not avoid confrontation, you will be killed. The majority of humans fear us, but it is our fear, and the aggression which masks it, which will cause your death. It is the destiny of every snake to reach the high places, the inhospitable places, or die. This we owe to our nature, the inherited habits of our ancestors.”

There is a sign in the sky tonight. The great snake, Hydra, which extends from Cancer to Virgo, covers the entire personal, conscious quadrant of the Savai’i sky. ‘They’ will be ready for ‘them’, won’t we?

Epiphany January 6

04 Wednesday Jan 2017

Posted by abliq in Astral Gates, Breamlea Zodiac, Underworld

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Bethlehem, Epiphany, Fomalhaut, Gabriel, Magi, Raphael, Regulus, Semiology, Southern Hemisphere Astrology

Attesting to the uncomfortable marriage of belief and truth, there exists in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian Territories a township known to the Palestinians as Place of Meat, and to the Israelis as Place of Bread. These are mere facts, but to Christians, who know it as Bethlehem, it remains a landmark in the timeless human search for meaning, associated not only with a birth, but a sign.

This year there are signs in various parts of the world, in the days leading up to the annual commemoration of the Adoration of the Magi, known to Christians as the feast of the Epiphany, of a possible new birth. God knows we need one!

The first sign, at sunset in Bethlehem on January 4, is the simultaneous transit of the First Point of Aries and the First Quarter Moon. In fact, the Moon transits 2 seconds before the equinoxial point, and 7 minutes before official sunset, but it is signs we seek, not facts. Some sort of new beginning might be approaching. [All times at the foot of the following charts are Australian Eastern Daylight Time, UTC +11.]

veteran-at-first-point-of-aries-transit-sunset-bethlehem-jan04

The second sign, proving just how elusive signs can be, is manifest at Regulus Gate from my observatory on Epiphany morning.

regulus-transit-epiphany-2017-breamlea

Regulus, the star of the Lion’s heart, has a complex meaning in Southern Hemisphere Astrology. Not only does ‘Regulus‘ mean ‘little king’ (not ‘prince’), an infamous basilisk who can kill with just a glance, but Leo upside-down looks more like a possum than a lion, and as anyone who has been pissed on by a possum can attest, he is a malicious creature. Nonetheless, Regulus is one of the Royal Stars of Persia, the four guardians of the sky (along with Aldebaran, Antares and Fomalhaut), associated with the healing angel Raphael, and so the worst I can think of him is that he can seem sarcastic, when really his mordant wit is simply helping you to recover from yourself. It is important to know these resonances to understand Regulus Gate, because its other end is Alnair (at top of chart), the brightest star of Grus, the Crane, which carries Asian cultural connotations of celebration.

Now, Epiphany is astrology’s big moment, so flipping the globe to my meridian on the other side to see what the celebration end looks like in Brazil, I find the second sign.

alnair-transit-floriano-peixoto-jan05

Wow, the Ecliptic is so close to the zenith (the zigzag in the meridian line), and Venus is almost there and opposite Regulus, which is right on the opposite horizontal pole!  This seems special in some way I can’t quite put my finger on, because Venus and Regulus have been a ‘thing’ for thousands of years. How does Venus in Aquarius through Alnair Gate relate to what I’m seeing in Breamlea? Is she prancing on Regulus’ sarcasm? Is celebration so unwarranted that she must negate her underworld man with an upskirt?

The third sign, computed by a Solomonese Indian astrologer, is the entry of the Moon into Ashvini, the first Nakshatra (opposite Spica) at the precise moment of transit, at sunset on Malaita, one of the Solomon Islands. (Official sunset is a mere 7 seconds later.)

veteran-at-ashvini-transit-sunset-malaita-jan06

Indulgent Jupiter constrained by shrewd Spica: a gravitational reminder of what the politeness of a refined wife may mask? No? Well, perhaps all these cyclical rebirths are all we get. But wait! Poring over my arcane tables in retreat from the late heat of the summer sun, I realize that Fomalhaut, the angel Gabriel, is culminating, signalling affirmation perhaps of the sacred meaning I am looking for. It was no doubt the same fervour that seizes me now which gripped the astrologers of Herod’s day! I must follow that star!

epiphany-fomalhaut-transit-breamlea-jan06

It takes about 9 hours for the Earth to rotate its longitudes so that Fomalhaut transits at Bethlehem, so I have plenty of time to get there and consult my tables, but I am thrown into consternation by complete unfamiliarity when I get there. It is cold, not at all like the nativity plays where I come from, where the wise men all wear shorts. I can’t even find the sun at first, until I realize it is behind me, much lower than I left it, and setting to my right, clockwise. The chart above, my home, is where I am used to the constellations following an anti-clockwise procession, but no matter, I am already acclimatizing.

epiphany-fomalhaut-transit-bethlehem-jan06

But what’s this? What are those ridiculous signs? What in Heaven’s name is Gabriel affirming? Must I become the newborn and start learning to read the world all over again? My wisdom deserts me! Whoever heard of a confident crab, or an aggressive set of scales? Never could I associate a possum with perfectionism! No wonder there is such implacable hostility between sidereal and tropical astrologers up here! No wonder ‘wise men’ no longer look at the sky here: it’s all wrong!

epiphany-sunset-bethlehem-jan06

And so, as the sun sets into the cosmic ocean, I finally have my epiphany. Life is not a river flowing down to the sea, but a journey in the opposite direction, through ever more sharply defined contours, dwindling resources and thinning populations, until finally, the water dries up completely.

Subscribe

  • Entries (RSS)
  • Comments (RSS)

Archives

  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015

Categories

  • Astral Gates
  • Bardo
  • Breamlea Zodiac
  • Emu
  • Jupiter
  • Kaballah
  • Milky Way
  • Moon Phases
  • Pop Psychology
  • Seasons
  • Stargazing
  • Tales
  • The South
  • Uncategorized
  • Underworld
  • Vertex

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Southern Hemisphere Astrology
    • Join 1,912 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Southern Hemisphere Astrology
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...