• About

Southern Hemisphere Astrology

~ Turning astrology the right way up…

Southern Hemisphere Astrology

Monthly Archives: January 2019

The Migrant: Full Moon in Sidereal Cancer

21 Monday Jan 2019

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Cancer Moon, Death, Forgetting, Frivolity, January Eclipse, Lilith, Migration, Morning Star, Super BLood Wolf Moon, Underworld, Wanderer, Warrior, Woe

Planets vanish in the gaps between constellations; stars drift screaming into the void; the Milky Way runs in glittering rivulets down across the sky’s glassy dome, coming to rest, defeated, against the hard bed of the horizon. There’s no mistaking it. You are going to die. Sam Kriss.

What could be more antithetical to Buddhist emptiness than the infantile notion that spirit or consciousness survives death? I have no idea where the idea came from that dead loved ones become stars in the sky. Perhaps it’s an anthropological fiction which confirms the a priori cultural delusion of permanence. Yes, we are constructs of energy forms forged in the stars, but so what? Mind is an emergent reality of carbon, but so what? We could argue until the cows come home about mind’s purpose, the fulcrum of its personal meaning or the laws of its libraries of evolutionary independence. But imagine the moment of death without any mumbo-jumbo: awesome, yes, but the nothingness you’re sliding into is neither eternal nor permanent. You’re becoming nothing.

We’re beyond history here: our personality and its ramifications are no more significant than a hole in the ground. Our body can no longer answer the question, who am I? Of course we will be remembered, but the minds which will do so are as dust. Galaxies, gods and goddesses, lovers, friends, enemies, children and grandchildren, all dust, as though they never were. The living will do with this as they must: always, they seek. Indeed, in Hell, here on Earth, there are many grey areas: embers of a material world in conflagration, country, the imagination, the unconscious. Perhaps a good death might be no more than the evaporation of the mirage which, shimmering on someone else’s country, we named our pain.

Who are we, the never-were, the forgotten? We are all immigrants into country our ancestors never knew. We live in an alien age, not of sticking it out, making do, with a promise of nirvana or heaven in an afterlife, but of hopelessness, betrayal and envy. Only the mentally ill have faith in an afterlife, or the truth of their ancestors. The rest of us are queuing to get what more fortunate people already have. We are doomed where we are, and life is too short for struggle against the odds. Equanimity is not something you can bequeath your kids. Our ancestors forgot the past, but the future is where we live, and it is a paltry thing to forget in death.

migrant miserere sentinel venus jan21

They came to the old man and harangued him to find the spirit of the boy’s sickness and make peace. The old man knew how to dream bad spirits back to the Underworld. He dreamed his Wife, long passed, as the Morning Star, and steered Her to join the Guardian and draw Him back under the canopy [Ophiuchus] to which He was appearing to desert the boy, the strongest hope for their prosperity. On the day he brought Her to join forces with Him, he was reassured that the boy would be saved, even though he was deeply unsettled by the omen of the canoe from the Underworld which his dreams told him was the vehicle of invasion.

migrant moon warrior sentinel jan21

Shortly before noon, the boy died, and while the women shrieked and screamed, the old man went back into his dream, and sent his Wife into the Underworld for vengeance.

migrant moon sentinel underworld jan21

She is well aware that She is from somewhere else and has a Mission, but She finds Herself overwhelmed by a feeling of being at home with the fishermen who have pulled Her from the sea and clothed Her, mumbling incomprehensible words to each other and to the darkened Moon.

migrant moon wanderer galapagos jan20

There is so much kindness in this superstitious and pessimistic world, beneath the butchery and inside the walls. Her feelings seem almost alien, like the disappointment which haunts tourism. That’s the thing about dreams, certainly the lingering aura of this waking one we try to share, that their reality eludes words. She is remembering.

Remembering a caravan of migrants escaping poverty, discrimination and violence which includes her without question, though she says not a word; remembering an eclipse of the Moon which is everywhen; remembering an awareness of being a man in a woman’s body, issuing deep laughter in response to the antics of strange people in the colours of the rainbow at the back of a bus. Given a knife by a lovely woman in a man’s body, she remembers how to kill, though the man in uniform is strangely unable to provoke a memory of anger or hostility.

migrant moon wanderer mexicali jan20

Kumar (not his real name) finishes the last take, and director Lenny (not his real name) says he is in love with it. Kumar “has mastered the physical and mental techniques for a convincing portrayal of death”. For the thirty seconds the camera was exploring his primeval face, time after time until after 9pm, he was banishing nagging thoughts, that the remembered had forgotten him, that he might only exist in unremembered form, and that warriors are doomed to love being forgotten.

migrant moon wanderer hollywood jan20

Nonetheless, all went well, and it is time to go home and be remembered. Tomorrow is the day of the preliminary hearing of the charge against him of sexual assault of a minor on the set of his first movie fifteen years ago, one year to the day after his arrival. His devout Hinduism and the presumption of innocence notwithstanding, he would be the first to admit there are many things he would like to forget, when his time comes.

The Shadow is most often projected into delusion: such is migration. “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” (Sartre, Huis Clos.) The movie in production has the working title, Death of a Border Guard, and the production house, wreathandstyle.org, in anticipation of no being universally construed as yes, has opened a Facebook page for us to post suggestions of what the old woman might be saying. It remains blank. It might not be the first time a Hollywood movie has starred an extra who walked in off the street, but the bloody #MeToo t-shirt was a first, and when did you ever hear of an extra melting back into obscurity without collecting her pay? #WhoIsShe is trending.

And me, I’m just a simple guy out of the audience listening to the voice of an hypnotist who has me staring at the sky. What will I forget? More than I’ve remembered, that’s for sure. Just like you, I have migrated into a village unable to raise a child. I’m sorry, did I remember you properly?

Frivolity: New Moon in Sidereal Sagittarius

06 Sunday Jan 2019

Posted by abliq in Milky Way, Moon Phases

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Acheron, Ancestors, Antipodes, Cosmic Humour, Dasein 2019, Partial Eclipse, Patriarchy, Rivers of Hades, Secret Women's Business, Shame, Underworld, Wanderer, Warrior, Woe

The crossing of the Acheron is arduous. To be judged, rejected or outcast seems like the hardest thing in the world, but one way or another, by dogged determination, blind faith, or the glimmer of respect, we make it across. And then, nightmarishly, we come to it again and again. It is only natural to seek an easier way, by boat, or by inebriating yourself so that you don’t care if you drown. ‘Drown your sorrows’ is right. Taunted, negated and misunderstood, the imagination can come up with lots of ways to withdraw and hide the suspicion that it got us into this. If we cannot belong to this group, we can belong to that; if people judge us, we can judge them. What a grim prank it is to hole the boat of someone who has made our own crossing difficult, to stone them in turn, and then frivolously to march on through enemy territory.

Thus is it possible to misconstrue the Acheron. Indeed, in infancy it almost, but not quite, seems normal to see it as a River of Hate, and the defences some build against slight and injury, and the awareness of them, are never demolished in a lifetime. However, and it almost seems perverse to assert it, the Acheron reveals its most terrible power when life erodes those defences with the combined forces of transcendence, love and shame, and in a flash, we can see ourselves from the outside, as others accuse us, and the inside, theirs and ours, becomes our responsibility. The Acheron offers us a life in death, an opportunity to relish our burden in the friendly universality of shame. We continually meet people who cannot face us, who secrete themselves in imaginary worlds and abuse anyone with the temerity to look in, as though a face were in itself an attack, but exclusion can actually feel like inclusion, the irresistible humour of a cosmic joke, when you pass a shop window and see in your reflection what the suffering of a fool looks like.

Sagittarius New Alice Springs Jan06

So now we are across, except for the muddy bit, which is why we lift our pinky when we pour the tea. This is the Moon which begins them all. Like the meditation on death which brings to mind the awesome beauty of our absence in the pulsating emptiness of country, the first Moon is born in the ever-present possibility of transcendence. Perhaps the year is a cyclical exploration of what not to do in our situation, and we start, as in infancy, by pointing the finger at a tendency to take it all seriously, mistaking the laughter which imprisons us in the gangs of absurdity for the courage to be, and making it a habit to rehearse a standup routine in every shop window. You’ve heard the old expression, “A day without a good belly laugh is a day wasted”? Escape to frivolity though we do, nothing is more painful than being marginalised by people we would like to love were it not for things they know we have done.

Capricorn may puff itself up like the peacock behind it—look!—but the way across the transparency through Aquarius, Pisces and Aries, until you come to Orion and Taurus, is dark and empty. No joke. Woe betide anyone who embarks in High Summer: it’s hard to make small talk around the evening campfire when the ancestors are sliding over the edge of the world. Where do they go, and most disconcerting even if we know they’ll be back, why do they go? Why do they leave us here in the dark? It seems like a cruel lesson, that moments of awe, in contemplation of immensities of distance and time, have a dark side of insignificance, and the sacred connection with the presence of the ancestors, the miraculous need of Being, must be earned. Existential thirst: you can get it smiling at the Wailing Wall; you can get it climbing Uluru; you can get it just tearing up a roughy ticket in your finery at the races. Matter of fact, I’ve got it now.

Dasein 2019

To pursue the metaphor of the Underworld as unconscious to its logical conclusion, towards the elimination of duality and inequality, you must imagine lying under the night sky with your feet to the Zodiac, so that your familiar firmament is visible with a slight lift of your head. If the Earth were not between you, your heads would be back to back facing opposite directions, you and your Other at the antipodes, and the cardinal directions would carry opposite meanings. Below is the sky above the local swimming pool.

Sagittarius New Warrior Winton Jan06

The stars revolve around the Celestial South Pole clockwise, and anti-clockwise around the Celestial North Pole.

Sagittarius New Wanderer Schema Winton Underworld Jan06

Do you imagine I am not perfectly aware of the conjectural status of everything I say, and of your repudiation of your ancestors at the ripe old age of 15? We 70-year-olds were once where you are, and truly, life began when we heard our ancestors calling, when we discovered shame. It may be that the intersection of the Ecliptic and the plane of the Milky Way is a mathematical irrelevancy, as 3 o’clock in the morning is, or as a 300mm rise in sea level is if you swim 190m above it, or as the tension in Southern Victoria is between solitary Alphard at the centre of the Eastern Wall, the arc of the ancestors on the personal side, and the Vertex in the house of maniacal self-development on the social side, but you may also not have noticed that daylight saving breakfast is an hour too early if you leave for work at the same time year-round. The fact is, there’s a lot more going on in the body of the universe than we are cognizant of. The question is, and only you can answer it, did the Sun just cross the River of Woe?

When the Milky Way rises vertically from the southeast, above or below the horizon, it connects me with secret women’s business: a spiritual antidote perhaps, and at the very least a psychological one, to patriarchy; mine, on my country, take it or leave it. Will your treachery ever be forgiven? Perhaps only a warrior, in his underworld, will ever know. Gone are the days when you could lump everyone into the same spiritual reality. I did not climb Uluru.

Subscribe

  • Entries (RSS)
  • Comments (RSS)

Archives

  • January 2023
  • 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 80 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...