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Southern Hemisphere Astrology

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New Moon in Sagittarius: Frivolity

13 Wednesday Jan 2021

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Australia Day, Dasein 2021, Frivolity, Full Earth in Gemini, Sagittarius New Moon, Self-development, Southern Hemisphere Astrology

Have you ever been told to lighten up? Then you know the meaning of ‘frivolity’: letting go, moving on, getting over it, getting a life.

Frivolity is a question, not a statement, a New Year’s resolution you have no capacity to keep to, whether you know it or not. It’s the quality of the change to Australia’s national anthem from “We are young and free,” to “We are one and free,” when you’re broke and marooned outside your state by sudden and remorseless Coronavirus lockdowns.

Adherents to the settler narrative of Australian history and sympathisers with indigenous dispossession have been yelling “Get a life!” at each other for decades, and who knows which side is Morlocks and which side is Eloi? Finally, the issue has been resolved, along with the implications of absurdity our foretaste of Armageddon flings at our compulsive drive to be someone else.

The good burghers of a community in Queensland have invited the Moon down from the south to join with the elders Jupiter and Saturn, and the social media influencer Mercury, to help celebrate the day Sarina rejoins the Southern Hemisphere and brings Australia as one a day closer. All over town posters are advertising the upending of astrological meaning and the trivialisation of winter-sign intentions. Only those with permits will be allowed to enter from the north from midnight when police from Mackay and Rockhampton will glare at each other across a formidable barricade. But it’s not really an imposition on anyone’s freedom, just a harmless bit of fun: on Bramble Cay Day, February 25, every Australian will be south of the karma police blockade!

It is early in the morning of the year. We go abroad with faith alive in us, but let us not confuse the task of nurturing our faith with the insanity of perfection. If no amount of mindfulness can discourage you from striving to improve yourself, do try not to be motivated to be better than me. Keep faith not only with hope, but with anxiety, not only with imagination, but with dread. It is not wise to erect confidence on the entertainment of your judges, nor on the vanity of self-worth. The world of power and the subservient self are what they are, not what they ought to be.

Without in any way seeking to trivialise the sentiments of the previous paragraph, but also without further ado, let us sashay on into 2021 with those memorable words resounding in our aerodynamic Dumbo flaps: a day without a good belly-laugh is a day wasted!

The Veteran: Full Moon in Gemini

30 Wednesday Dec 2020

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Acheron, Antipodes, Bardo, Boredom, Cardinal Directions, Country, Forgetting, Gemini, Gemini Full Moon, Lethe, New Earth, Southern Hemisphere Astrology, Underworld, Veteran Moon, Woe

“Superfluous lags the vet’ran on the stage…”, Samuel Johnson, l. 308, The Vanity of Human Wishes, 1749, derived from Juvenal, Satire X.

Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations: ask thy father, and he will shew thee; thy elders, and they will tell thee. Deuteronomy 32:7, King James Bible.

It’s no use. The Veteran cannot hide from the truth. It’s not just that his triumph in Northern skies comes in the middle of a Coronavirus-infested winter, as humanity struggles to celebrate the turning of the year with breaking heart, or that in Southern skies his diminutive opposition to a searing Sun needs the compensation of the un-moonlit symmetry of the Eurocentric mythical Twins to impress, but having crossed the Lethe immediately before syzygy, he realizes in his curtain call only the magnitude of the reintegration which lies ahead for the audience (who are yet oblivious to the Acheron River which daytime has just crossed), and the possibility that he no longer has the will to help. Oh God, not more feelings!

On the other hand, the Veteran has died and been reborn so many times that the Bardo provides his second name: “The Hell You Say!” The Tenth Bardo House of Boredom is one he particularly enjoys, where the cleansing of the Lethe affords him the luxury of staring out of the window of the Northern Tropical Indolence bus on his way to Total Withdrawal, paying no attention to dark continents rolling him around their clocks. His fellow-passengers cannot wait to get off: being bored is akin to being boring; the emissions from the bus out-thrust its propulsion; grasping is mindfully consuming acceptance; and forests of wild viruses are being cleared for the graduation of sated ignorance. “We must alight at centre-stage,” they cry. Not the Veteran. He is indifferent to the footlights, and to his demotion from a starring role for the next twenty-four times he appears on this stage: you will not see a Full Moon in Gemini (the Constellation) until January 2023.

What tortuous labyrinths of despair might just squeeze a sleeper up to the surface? What convulsions of suppressed hatred, what intestinal convolutions of corruption and deliberate pain? What catacombs of memory, what collapsed and utterly expunged escape routes out of anxiety? What tectonic shifts of catatonic stress? And reversing direction, the Ngaanyatjarra Lands in the Australian Central Ranges is no country for old fish.

It is time and memory which stamp Veteran country, a duration of exile from the permanent present. Aligned with the course of the Moon’s progress across the faintly visible constellations between Sagittarius and Gemini, Woe and Forgetting, and irrevocably past Regulus and Spica and Antares to the Acheron again, an artesian underworld meanders beneath a landscape dotted with caves, one of which is yours, another mine.

New Moon in Scorpius: Doubt

14 Monday Dec 2020

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Climate Change, Doubt, Full Earth in Taurus, Great Conjunction, Indigenous Seasons, Meaning, Scorpio New Moon, Time Cycles, Tropical Astrology

Doubt is the necessary condition for meaning, and the necessary condition for doubt is time, and specifically time’s experienced intervals. What measures your mindfulness and interrogates your ego? Habits? Addiction? Divorce and remarriage rate? Child milestones? Reunions? New Year’s Eve? For some of us it is Full Moons, and Saturn Returns. The longer the interval, the more abrupt and bittersweet our apprehension of the brevity of the time we have. Were we right?

By Johannes Kepler – De Stella Nova in pede Serpentarii (1606), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16622989

In a week from now, a Great Conjunction will divide our lives into twenty-year chunks. For a very long time, observers of the cosmos like Kepler have understood that successive conjunctions occur roughly 120 degrees apart, so that every third return occurs in the vicinity of its forerunner, but advancing through the Zodiac by 4-10 degrees every 60 years. The previous occurrence of this triad took place in sidereal Sagittarius in 1961. A Grand Return, a full circle, takes 1767-8 years, by my calculations. The last time it occurred in the vicinity of this one was in February 253 CE, and before that, ‘February’ 1455 BCE. How much time have we got?

I will leave it to the Sun and Moon to tell us how long it takes for a Great Conjunction in sidereal Capricorn to coincide with a New Moon. I am content to leave it in doubt. This Moon will be near First Quarter.

The last time the New Moon occurred on December 14-15 at the tail-end of the Scorpion was in 2001, and the next will be in 2031, when we may have another eleven years to look back on, and maybe not. At nightfall tonight Jupiter and Saturn are less than half an outstretched fingertip apart.

Salta Noon

I doubt if anybody here still holds to the view that seasons have a fixed starting date and duration. Perhaps there are Australians who regard scorching-hot weather before December 1 as an aberration, and purists who don their summer outfits at the Solstice. I know there are many who believe the Northern Hemisphere tropical signs apply down here with some sort of transcendental cosmological impact, and many of you up there incorporate Southern Signs into a meaningful polarity. Pity those migratory birds who arrive down here in a drought! But do notice how Ascendant and Descendant play out in the Antipodes.

Heyuan Underworld Solar Midnight

Along with the doubt which plagues us at this time of year that the brilliancy of our appropriate gifts will be under-appreciated, we have become accustomed to the devaluation of the Christian festival which draws nigh, just as the Christians devalued pagan antecedents. But as we prepare for the insufferable rectitude of pubescent nephews and nieces, can we admit the ambiguity and indefinability of the seasons?

After all, as our youngsters are fond of pointing out, it’s 2020, and it’s we who’ve changed the seasons, and perhaps invalidated all Tropical Signs, North and South. Have we really changed the seasons? Let’s have recourse to the timeless wisdom of indigenous peoples, or are they now wrong too?

There are no seasons on the Moon, only day and night, lasting 13 1/2 days each, which can be described as bloody hot and bloody cold. Perhaps the siderealists are right: Signs are no more than myth and appearance. If we abolish the seasons from the Moon’s view of us, what remains?

Moon view at 173 celsius below.

So back where we start from, we persevere in creating the antidote to doubt. What the Great Conjunction means depends on the Sign it occurs in, which I leave to the vested interests. All I know is how small it makes me. Country is time distilled. Will 2020, and the disadvantage its catastrophes have imposed at the margins, never end?

Full Moon in Taurus: The Vagabond

30 Monday Nov 2020

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Bogeyman, Cancel Culture, Scorpio New Earth, Shadow, Subjectivity, Taurus Full Moon, Vagabond Moon, Wokeness

Country is criss-crossed by trails, above and below ground. It’s easy to forget that, when you’re bathed in moonlight. You’re here now, and that’s enough. But give him a name, and then you and the Moon are tangled up in trails, because you have a name too, featured on an arbitrary array of signposts in the network of your country.

If the existence of a vagabond may be defined by work or lifestyle which precludes or undermines membership of a social group, most of us, as we ponder the upcoming Christmas/Summer holidays, the mechanisms of a multicultural defence against the coronavirus, and the economic and political dynamics of sustainable air-conditioning and climate change, call our social status into question too. It is not just identity politics which signposts us as vagabonds.

Be aware of what you want from him, because while the absence of machismo in the Vagabond may be pleasant to play with, the love will pour out of him if you so much as caress his foot. Dolls go through adolescence too. That his independence and unconcern for opinion are skin-deep confirms the kinship he craves. Better that you keep your tenderness for your own man.

Is the Sun in Woke and the Moon in Cancel, or the other way around?

What does it matter? Both are projections, esoteric and binary caricatures of place and time.

How individualized perspective subverts the existence of both the woke and the cancelled is demonstrated by the confusion wreaked upon the subjectivity and possible agency of Sun and Moon by Signs and Angles in astrology.

Is it unreasonable for the Moon to do his shadow work independently of a cacophony of competing psychological models?

Not only must the Vagabond accept rising and setting simultaneously, but the very possibility of a personal trajectory is undermined by local prejudice: he sets in a quadrant he did not aim for, and over his shoulder his journey’s embarkation has disappeared like the contents of a dream. It seems he is doomed to wander as a ghost among the contiguities of human horizons.

Lest it be forgotten in the contestation of identity that no place on Earth is the centre of the universe, bear in mind that the Vagabond is as entitled as anyone else to reclaim his perspective. The universal tendency to characterise the drifter fancifully as the bagman, the bogeyman or Black Pete, whether shadowed by superficiality or unruliness, should teach us to look to our own infamy!

New Moon in Libra: Rectitude

15 Sunday Nov 2020

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Australian National Horoscope, Bardo Houses, Cardinal Hemispheres, Celestial Idolatry vs Iconoclasm, Libra, Libra New Moon, Meridian Anticlockwise Houses, Rectitude, Scorpio New Moon, Southern Hemisphere Astrology, Southern Hemisphere Houses, Taurus New Moon

The mechanism at the root of community is rectitude, confected as integrity and projected in hateful battle with any recalcitrant other which threatens its compensation. Rectitude stares at corruption and does not recognise its own reflection. Unable to find this mechanism in the self, rectitude finds itself starkly revealed in the face of the enemy. The Bardo of madness seethes with it.

Sun and Moon are conjunct in the Constellation of Libra, once the home of self-knowledge and -mastery, but consigned by the retrograde march of the seasons to the Sign of the Scorpion, whose assertiveness is better unopposed. In the South, its seasonal attributes are of the Bull. Not for nothing do we accuse each other of bullshit.

Of course, what the world of others tells you is not all lies, if you’re listening. I don’t wish to argue with you about Astrological Houses, you who make a living from imposing alien perspectives on Southern skies, but just look at the correspondence of the astro.com traditional chart of the birth of the Australian Commonwealth and compare it with a Stellarium view.

Turn the traditional numbering of the Houses back to front and upside down and they correspond. And what choice does astrology have? To show the Ascendant on the left to anyone orientated to the North looks like deliberate and self-defeating obfuscation!

The Southern way of going, if we imagine the first Spring Constellation in the First House, with the other Constellations arrayed anti-clockwise across the sky from East on the right to West on the left, introduces some strange yet resonant bedfellows to the self-defensive mind (Southern Signs in italics):-
I TEMPERAMENT Virgo Perfection Aries
II FORTUNE Leo Discrimination Pisces
III INTELLECT Cancer Paranoia Aquarius
IV REPUTATION Gemini Relativity Capricorn
V ATTACHMENT Taurus Fear Sagittarius
VI CONSTRAINT Aries Self-Development Scorpio
VII RELATIONSHIP Pisces Aggression Libra
VIII CHANGE Aquarius Relationship Virgo
IX ASPIRATION Capricorn Deprivation Leo
X REALIZATION Sagittarius Boredom Cancer
XI HOPE Scorpio Ignorance Gemini
XII MYSTERY Libra Seriousness Taurus

But, hey! Let’s not mess around with what works! Let’s not play with this confirmation bias thing lest tuning its relationship with what is really happening create identity issues, gender dysphoria or any number of other neurological implasticities. But ask yourself this question, ‘What is my intention in taking astrology seriously?’ And play with the answer, that regardless of the time of day, I may be stuck in the Twelfth House, and all you others may be holograms, projected from my Underworld memory without anyone’s consent.

Full Moon in Sidereal Aries: The Peasant

31 Saturday Oct 2020

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Aries Moon, Beltane, Country, Enlightenment, Halloween, Milky Way, Peasant Moon

“Take me for a walk in your country, so I can understand why you call me that name, Peasant.”

Community is a complex concept—which concept isn’t?—but if it exists as a thing, and not just as a term used for political or economic advantage, it must have boundaries: it is both inclusive and exclusive. That the world is complete is a common way of looking at things.

Out here, and in here, I use the term ‘country’, borrowed, without permission but with profound respect, from its usage by the warriors and wanderers (as I perceive them) of Australian Indigenous culture, to signify a reality without boundaries, impervious to political and economic definition.

Peasants are they who belong to a community by virtue of their acquiescence in a political and economic system, but who, by the nature of their work, their intimate knowledge of the seasons of hot and cold, the transient and anonymous life-cycles of their animals, and the motions of the sky, stand at the boundary of community, where ‘who are all in this together?’ is as idle and meaningless a question as ‘who owns this country?’ So a peasant does not ask questions.

Country is no more nor less than territory’s transcendence of its map. Who among us lives harmoniously without maps? We are all peasants, and particularly when we celebrate the dead at Halloween, when Spring is bursting into Summer, and we should be celebrating Beltane, garlanded with flowers. Does the Queensland election portend Summer or Winter? Trick or treat, indeed!

“So I am possibly at a time of enlightenment?”

Maybe. Unless our heads are in the sand, or we are called, or it rains. Or a stranger comes.

New Moon in Virgo: Community

17 Saturday Oct 2020

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Bardo, Community, Monk Moon, Peasant Moon, Pisces Full Earth, Virgo New Moon

Who will mourn the Monk, on this day of rejoicing the birth of the Peasant?

Who will guide the Monk, and indeed the Peasant, when his time comes, safely through the Bardo to an auspicious rebirth?

Who guides you through the night to make sure you inhabit the same identity in the morning?

Who will promote the awe of the Earth as a guide through the long night of its soul?

You will.

An Itinerant Monk: Full Moon in Pisces

02 Friday Oct 2020

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Circlet of Pisces, Despair, Grace, Le Grand Meaulnes, Lunar Nodes, Northern Autumn, Pisces Moon, Privilege, Redemption, Refinement, Southern Spring Equinox, Uluru

Conquerors and social organisers have always been with us, but so has the imaginative Moon, encouraging the integration of mind, body and spirit. Near the Autumn Equinox of the Northern Hemisphere, where it is known as the Harvest Moon, the Monk Moon travels the valleys in the proximity of the high country of the Circlet Of Pisces, signalling the time for the herds to come down for the winter, and exhorting the blessed to share preparations for hard times with the less-fortunate.

Around the dawn of the Current Era, the Moon noticed that the proper motion of the stars behind him when the Earth was directly between him and the Sun in Leo had formed a circle. At that time, as Greece and Rome flourished, the inner voice of the gods’ authority was beginning to lose its grip on the human psyche, and the Moon was eager to symbolise the new spiritual age. He chose the Crown of the Circlet of Pisces.

Every nineteen years—the Metonic Cycle—for about 150 years, there it appeared to Earthlings, whether they were believers or not, receiving for their edification a heavenly crown. Unfortunately, this phenomenon of individuality outshining its grace, we might say, depends on the relative positions of Sun and Lunar Nodes—one goes forwards through the Zodiac and the other backwards—and for its impact, on observer latitude; and of course the moment of full moon must be visible overhead at night. The ecliptic latitude of the Circlet centre is +6º, which the Moon, let alone the Full Moon, only gets to with the help of parallax in the northern sky of the Tropics and the Southern Hemisphere.

In short, the Monk Moon offers only a tenuous sense of human immortality—but look for it in other guise before First Quarter when the Southern Descending Node (Northern Ascending), which is in Taurus now, working its way backwards at the rate of a constellation every 18 months or so, is near Sagittarius, for example at nightfall in 2028 on January 3. (You’ll need a dark sky, or binoculars, to see the Circlet.)

Furthermore, history records many occasions when the benefit of a Full Moon in the Circlet must be called into question. The glorious bloom of Romanticism, which occurred during the cycle of 1693-1845, coincided with the invasion of Australia.

The sentimental purloining of the Circlet in these pages to locate the lost love haunting the ruin of “Les Sablonnières”, the publication of Le Grand Meaulnes in 1913, and the death of its author in the First World War, have taken place during horrific times between cycles. This may have given the Moon an excuse for eschewing the weight of the crown. Perhaps, in these intervening centuries, he is doing battle with his uselessness, his privilege, his masculinity and his ego. I wonder, in this time of global pestilence and environmental destruction, what Earth the next Full Moon in the Circlet will bathe in 4-500 years, in this flux we call the Universe. Is the glass half-full or half-empty?

New Moon in Leo: Disclosure

17 Thursday Sep 2020

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Experience, Inconsequentiality, Innocence, Intention, Isolation, Leo New Moon, Memory, Saturn-Jupiter Conjunction

You cried, and I did not know how to comfort you, with your young body dressed in shortie pyjamas pressed to mine. You sobbed, I am not a virgin. At last, dear kind friend, I know, because I am not a virgin either, no matter how hard I try.

Every night when the Sun goes down I follow it, in search of my innocence. The stars outside are unconscious beacons of my experience, and they carry vestigial names from other times or intuitions in my own past. But the night sky is a cloak of experience thrown over something more intangible, a kernel perhaps of me as I am in my intention, not as I am in my responsibility.

Who is more ridiculous, the one who labours all the critical day longing for night, or the one who tosses and turns in his bed longing for the morning to straighten his load?

It is time I took my leave. Prolonged isolation has taken its toll on my hippocampus. Memory has become a stranger to any task put before it. I have no idea of the way forward, since it leads from wherever ‘here’ may be. You don’t need me to see straight; only you can transform nowhere.

There is a sign coming, which may yet unite us, offer a focus for our combined wayfaring instincts and a harmonious engagement of innocence and experience, intention and judgment. Jupiter is closing the gap on Saturn, and will overtake it in Capricorn at the end of the year in a single flare of light. The Sun in Sagittarius will be rounding on both, and so the conjunction will be visible low in the West, just where you would expect to witness the smothering of inconsequentiality. Will you look?

Zealot Moon in Sidereal Aquarius

02 Wednesday Sep 2020

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Mary's 'Virgin' Explanation Makes Joseph Suspect Upstairs Neighbour, Perfectionism, Zealot Moon

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. Macbeth, V. v.
 

At last, what difference does it make if Sun and Moon swap signs? If the Constellations of the ancient Zodiac retrieve their mythical identities from the precession of the seasons which we have destroyed anyway? If grief or anger will hold sway tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow? If it’s all confirmation bias and could not possibly be influenced by solar system orientation to the stars when that’s all relative, and every celestial body’s view of every other’s background is strikingly different? If the only thing you can say for certain is that you’re opposite on the Zodiac to whomever you’re looking at, and they signify nothing?

Is there a place to be other than at the centre of attention? Or, rephrased, why should you be the only one who doesn’t exist?

I could never resist one last question. Cheers, Zealot, nice to catch up, even if it does seem only once in a blue moon. You probably get this all the time?

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