The first Full Moon of the Chinese New Year is occasionally the Healer, but usually the Migrant, which makes sense because, of the readily available salves for Solstice extremes, emergency freezes, bushfires, pandemics and reluctant returns to school and work, namely submission, adaptation, and escape, it is the latter which preserves our delusions of autonomy and the authority of the cultural covenant in which our egos might remain secure. While the Healer, preoccupied by affliction, resentful of relationship difficulties and fearful of the inexorability of seasonal and existential insecurity, turns his mind to neurological, social and economic reforms, or mindfully monetized jogging on the spot, the Migrant is an invader, obsessively impatient to transplant his attributes into more nutrient soil.

Imagine an existence wrapped in the coils of physical laws, whose narrative, bickered over by others, conceals not purpose and subjectivity, but the aesthetic avoidance of an eternal fate. Imagine that we are all locked in orbit by meaning with a fiction of straight lines our furtive hope. Imagine the horror of discovering that one’s relationships and roles are someone else’s attempt at narrative. So might things have appeared to the Migrant, until a great hero entered his existence, an Influencer with charisma sufficient to move the Sun, and whose journey, unconstrained by measurement, seems to go on and on.

Perhaps the chart above is as confusing as it is revelatory, and certainly the intersecting patterns which Jupiter and the Chinese year reward weird Earthlings with are beyond the Migrant, or else he would choose to stay home to study. The twelve-year cycle of the Chinese Year seems like placatory wallpaper on the wall of the Migrant’s prison cell, whereas the original inspiration for the numbered menagerie, Jupiter, gets to ride the twelve-year zodiac cycle in irresistible increments of change. It takes Jupiter 11.862 years to orbit the Sun, so that in twelve years it progresses about 5° through the Zodiac. It takes about 866 years, or around 72 12-year cycles for its Opposition to complete a revolution and return to roughly the same Right Ascension, but for a return to a particular background in the same year in the sexagenary cycle of the Chinese calendar?

The Moon, like you, goes around and around in circles, and just like you, needs the story of change and progress we call our ‘journey’. Can we heal this need? How far into the future do we have to search for a Year of the Ox which is Yin and Earth, and in which Jupiter’s Opposition is near Deneb Algedi in Capricornus, closing a cycle? Eternity? This is no trivial question, because the damage to your existence would be calamitous if the Moon migrated to Jupiter to say, ‘Goodbye tight orbit, hello infinite linearity!’ Is Jupiter’s ‘journey’ linear or cyclical?

Alas, Migrant, it is cyclical. Jupiter’s ‘journey’ takes nearly, but not quite, forever. The least common multiple of 866, 12 and 60 is 5160. In the life of the Solar System, Jupiter has completed this cycle at least 775,000 times! You won’t find linearity out there, Migrant. Endless journeys are delusional. But a host of others have gone before you. In the Great Influencer’s retinue you will have to find a place among at least seventy-nine others, most of them migrants too. Your origin, your journey and your historical attributes will be as irrelevant as theirs! Your journey with Jupiter will only be decipherable in the culture you will leave behind, where you will be invisible. Of course you realize Jupiter is not a psychiatrist, or even a guru, and cannot help you with your ‘stuff’, but if you really have made your mind up, we won’t be stopping you. And our tides will commemorate your absence, and our astrologers will extol your virtues at Jupiter’s return, those of us lunatics left healing under the watchful eye of the years.