Obviously, the project of Southern Hemisphere Astrology is to encourage resistance to objectivity, to create conditions for immunity from just another formal system which seduces the unwary into static, objective, received notions of identity and relationship. Astrology grew organically from observation, and still roots astronomy, at the source of its measurements, in the seasons. All I persevere to persuade those with the instinct to connect below with above is to observe, and recognize that the arcane traditions of Northern Hemisphere astrology are upside down in southern latitudes.
Observe that that the crescent of the waxing Moon is illuminated on the left, that it creeps clockwise as its phases displace it in time, that a negative sign means above, and that if you look to the south and bend over backwards far enough you can see from the Northern Hemisphere. Observe how much further the Moon moves nightly at perigee. Observe whether it is above or below a star such as Regulus or Zubenelgenubi on the ecliptic, and by the Moon’s progress know these and other prominent stars of the zodiac. Above all, observe the constellations the Moon and planets are in when astrology tells you which sign they are in, and calibrate that association so that all astrological meaning becomes at least ambiguous.
When you know where the seasons are in the sky, and when you know what seasons they are, then you’re ready and able to stand upright in the universe, in company with the people of the Pacific and the indigenous people of Australia, Africa and South America. You’re ready for the Gates.
The progress of the Moon through the gates, like its progress through the phases in psychological astrology, is only a game, in this case a geographical game, but it helps to envisage the invisible, and to give a deeper perspective of conditions as they unfold, a global ‘feel’. Bridging north and south, a Gate reminds us that everyone is walking upside down. Duality is not the root of suffering. Duality is the root of humanity. Hence:
and (because of space limitations to convey so much geographical information):
Every New Moon is a new set of conditions; every Full Moon the denouement of a story that unfolds from the attempt to give subjective meaning to those conditions, as dream orientates the events of a day, and Geworfenheit discovers itself, through and despite the pseudo-science of ethnography, as it unpacks the concept of ‘culture’. The absolutely essential ingredient in these conditions and narratives is the Sun.
And the harmonics of Moon orbit and Earth rotation are augmented by the harmonics of Earth orbit and rotation in such demonstrations as this, which will appear on Facebook as “Falling Towards Rectitude”, foreshadowing the next set of initial conditions.
Mother Courage revealed, thanks to what is visible in the sky at solar midnight when the Sun is before a Gate.
And so the Moon completes another round, and my thoughts are decidedly autumnal! Now is the meaning of a life nearing its end obliterated by the clamour and prodigal blaze of manifest implication–the hunchback Richard, misquoted in the media, as likely said.
The ‘Baby-Boomers’ will leave their over-priced houses to children grown old outbid and waiting, but do allow them a last brief moment to consider their life’s meaning. They’re a bit anxious about it, bless their secular hearts. A hundred definitions of cool have come and gone, a hundred -isms, a thousand icons, a thousand must-reads, and now in the legacy, what still smoulders?
A curious coincidence, this Full Moon conjunction with Uranus. Like many stargazers, I have anticipated this month’s opposition of the seventh planet as a rare opportunity to see it with the naked eye. Not this week. The Moon has seen to that. So what can I ‘see’ behind the Moon’s oppressive charm?
Once again it is Theodore Tasmanian at transit in the Breamlea afternoon, but in the Atacama Desert, Justfriendistan, it is Achernar at Midheaven, the star of hubris, end of the river and like Uranus, invisible to the ancients (for whom the river ended at Acamar). Hubris and charm definitely resonate, but what dimension does ‘contrite interest’ add? We should all know that the Prodigal eventually returns (Luke 15: 11-32). Will the Baby-Boomers return? What does Uranus say?
“Meaning is determined in time, and beyond my realm, but I can say this: there is no system which can be analyzed to elemental constituents; there is no cause which is not a prisoner of such analysis; and every moment is a progenitor of that prison. Most of the misunderstandings which divide and separate people, the antipathy of science to religion, for example, resolve themselves in recognition of the ground of interest, the potentials of care, noise and change.
Care is the root of loving-kindness and responsibility, and the irony of independence, but really it is simply what happens to the world when you pat a dog. It is not culturally determined or directed. It is simply being there, like the flutter of Amazon butterfly wings. Noise is the root of language, science and music: in it lies the meaning of something flapping in the wind, or the phase of rhythms of distant traffic and a blowfly in the baby’s room. It is redundancy’s midwife and the high priest of silence. Change is the root of time, calendars and clocks, but it is born to the motion of a crawling child, dies in the intellect, in structure and determinism, and is constantly refreshed in memory, the mirror and the dream.
You will find your meaning not by parsing the sentence of your time, but by remembering the great tides of interest in which you have swum. Swim on! Death will annihilate your unifying vision, but be joyous in your interest! Love, sing and dream right up until your own death, and leave the meaning of life to its misunderstanding.”
In common with Quetzalcoatl, the Morning Star (Venus) who created the humanity we think we know from wounds he inflicted on his earlobes, calves, tongue, and penis, Uranus, the sky god from before time, saw something momentous created from his severed genitals: Aphrodite, otherwise the Roman love goddess Venus, in an ironic twist of comparative mythology.
So something existed before love, something in every moment, before narrative and the search for meaning tied all the moments together and gave them causes, or tried to, and that is interest. What do we deserve? What have we enjoyed? What dictates an imperative to change gender? What does a computerized machine have that a process-worker does not? What does the train-wreck of our time leave behind? What will we take with us? Interest.
The Moon, on the other hand, is barely begun on a new circuit of the Zodiac, which begins by convention in southern hemisphere autumn. Perhaps it is never the wrong time to start again. This is of course a human perspective. No matter how empty of independent reality we recognize things to be, we still order them in systems and structures of the intellect. The global economy is a unity of alienations. The Breamlea Zodiac measures from Sagittarius as well as the equinox in Pisces. The Moon is full when it is directly in line with the Sun and the Earth, and where it transits at solar midnight.
But what does it mean, a Full Moon? How does polarity work under the hood? What would a global astrology come to consist of when naive expectations that the perspective of North America and Europe would assert its superiority over local superstition had been dashed by a combination of rigid barbarian submission to a set of rules for existing upside down and disbelief that prediction was possible at all? An energetic, impatient Sun in October? Twelve seasons in one day, shared on rotation around the globe like the solar terminator? Will the Robot one day volunteer no-fly zones over the ground tracks of Gate-Posts? Or to preserve narrative insanity just terminate me?
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.” Omar Khayyám
“What rubbish!” the Skygod echoes at this Gate. And here we have the Moon’s new motivation to keep going around in circles: my prodigal interest in the duality of every perspective, and the potential I live and breathe for a comparative astrology of time. A preview:
Each of these stars forms one part of a gate with another, six steps along on the chart, which is exactly, within 24s of right ascension, opposite it in the sky. Arbitrary definitions notwithstanding, what mindfulness of a unity with who and what is directly beneath our feet can we bring to waking-consciousness? Out of interest?
Ostensibly, the conjunction of Sun and Moon in sidereal Virgo signals a debate about community, since we are venturing out into a busy springtime period of competing agendas.
In contemporary usage, ‘community’ means a group of people who share an identity, and Southern Hemisphere Astrology would agree with this usage. However, I seem to stand alone as regards the meaning of ‘identity’. Identity is not a characteristic. It cannot be defined, decided or owned, since it is not fixed, but always becoming in a feedback loop engaging waking consciousness with deeper subconscious levels of awareness and meaning.
My generation, at least to some extent raised among religious precepts, link ‘identity’, and logically ‘community’, with aspiration and dream, not with character or personal history. They simply do not understand how anyone can actually believe in communities formed from definable static identities, as compared with their participation in communities articulating a shared vision or commitment.
Young secular progressives on the other hand seem unable to understand “We are all one” to mean anything inclusive outside their group. I submit that two perplexities are at the root of this divide. One, a loss of historical perspective, a dissolution of time and causality into the now; and two, a hyper-inflation of waking consciousness and personal space at the expense of a subconscious reality of dreaming, ancestral voices, and vocation.
An identity framed and maintained as a real entity by waking consciousness is like Sisyphus doomed never to get what he is pushing to the top of the hill. What this identity is pushing is community. The force of gravity is lent by opposing groups with profoundly other instantaneous perceptions. Ultimately, identity politics will discover that unity in shared grievance has only one imperative, warfare between grievances to create ever more grievance, and implies only one community, a community of one.
First Crescent 2nd October, 19:54 Parkville [1 Muharram]
Identity used to subsume difference, because change, alternative means to an end and ambiguity of relation were assumed. Difference was an accident, and community a coincidence. Somewhere along the line, secular societies, without even realizing they had thrown a precious baby out with the bath water of religious participation, began to really believe in universal human rights as though they existed separately from universal human obligations, and before you could say, “Hey, Presto!” there was a world full of victims equating identity and pain-body, focussed on the identity of both those to blame and of any heretic with the balls to say,”I’m not hurting that bad”; and suddenly, the biggest crime was to inhibit someone’s healing.
This world is just fiction, ladies and gentlemen–Hollywood, Bollywood, love, fear and everything in between–and the most important element of it is making it real. Performance, and performance there must be, is real to its audience, the silent ones beyond the footlights who know it’s a role you’re playing for their sake, and who love you for it. Sit in the audience. Recognize fellow-players when you see them. That is community: you cannot sit twice in the same one.
Nobody owns his space, ladies and gentlemen, and no amount of proselytism and appropriation-resistance will alter the fact that personal reality is fiction. Sharing is messy, and judgment and exploitation are perhaps built into it, and degrees of success in marketing, that is to say, comparative numbers in ashrams, churches and mosques, or in social forums on the net, but that’s the nature of self: it’s designed to be expressed, not hoarded but shared. You cannot wake twice into the same identity.
When it all boils down, community may be nothing but the kindness of the audience, suspended disbelief. How can you be what you’re becoming? Perhaps kindness is the way society dreams. What the so-called ultra-right represents may be no more than slighted generosity, and we should hear the underpinnings of their utterances in that way, because we need their kindness.
The North is a story, the location of mythology, the inching across the night sky of the primordial artefact known as the Zodiac. The South on the other hand, defying narrative, simply revolves. Reverse directions if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, but my astrological focus is on Southern Hemisphere experience, because nobody else’s is.
It is by no means paradoxical that the most important attribute of the North is that it is opposite the South. Astrology is a system of symbols of human existence, and the upper (northern) Meridian, or Medium Coeli, where the stars, and approximately, the Sun, Moon and planets, culminate in their daily arcs, is given pride of place as the symbol of the conscious self. However, there is in each of us an awareness of the limitations of that waking, egoistic consciousness, which works in our body-consciousness as under-arching and over-riding necessities like eating and sleeping, and, I would argue, in our dream-consciousness as moral, spiritual or metaphysical questions, such as, “Am I responsible for what I’ve just done?” All of that deeper dimension of consciousness, and therefore any possibility of individuation, wholeness, or oneness, is symbolized by the Meridian, the direct, continuous connection of above and below, North and South.
Police have tonight issued a warning of dire consequences for any gullible skywatcher responding to an invitation posted on social media to a star party on the verge of the McGregor Rd off-ramp of the M1 at midnight. It is a hoax: people are warned that heavy fines will be incurred for obstructions to traffic, and that no geocache or Pokémon exists or should be sought in the area.
The following images were posted on the offending social media page.
The precise geographical longitude of the transit of the Southern Autumn Equinox point (opposite to Sun position) at the moment the Sun crosses the Equator:
A representation of the promised sky view:
And an astrological chart for the time and place:
Editor’s Astrographic Note:
Authorititave sources give the precise time of the equinox as 14:21:59 TDB, with the usual disclaimer about the impossibility of precise accuracy. When ∆T is added, our rudimentary software gives a local time which closely agrees with In-The-Sky.org and Stellarium (which admittedly deals in topocentric coordinates, not geocentric as in the official standard).
The following Stellarium-sourced slideshow demonstrates the effect of general precession on the geographical location of the Sun at Southern Spring Equinox over eight years (three leap-years).
“Imagine that a child drops a plate in the presence of his parents. When he seeks forgiveness from his father, the child is rebuffed. He experiences a pang of emotion linked both to fear of impending punishment and to anger and resentment at his father for his harsh reaction. This, according to Kosawa, approximates Freud’s understanding of guilt in the religious context. But then the child asks the mother for forgiveness — and receives it. The mother takes the child’s fearful and rebellious guilt and alchemises it into a ‘reparative guilt’: an overwhelming response to total, unconditional forgiveness. This latter reaction was, for Kosawa, a truly ‘religious state of mind’ and he saw it as the core of his own Shin tradition.” Christopher Harding.
“Here I am. Look up into my face. Can you see my emptiness? Or merely narcissism (Kristin Dombek), an illuminated disc? Be assured: I am here. My presence is my emptiness.”
“Adorno’s central objection—that astrology fostered a risky passivity—was later echoed by liberal intellectuals who argued that New Age thinking (to which astrology belonged, despite its lineage going back to antiquity) did even worse damage by encouraging an inward turn at the expense of the civic sphere.
“…For what did injunctions to “live in the moment” and “be present” mean if not “forget the past”?
“…What critics of astrology have in common—whether they come from the anarchist left or the Christian right or anywhere in between—is a tendency to see astrology as a form of therapy. What bothers them most is not astrology’s irrationality, but its use as a substitute for something older or truer—monotheism, freedom, the demos, the political — that is both the salvation and end goal of progress. To them, astrology is an ideology of the depressed, a politics of resignation: a balm that, like therapy in general, treats the individual symptom of a larger social illness without acknowledging the disease. Look at someone reading a horoscope and you may see hope: someone looking toward the future in a way that suggests a desire for a future at all. What the critics see, however, is someone giving up.
“…On the other hand, astrology offers those who take it less seriously a nice opportunity to critique taxonomies of identity in general.”
High on a ridge in Aquarius stands a monastery, where for thousands of years monks of a peculiar order have offered sanctuary to the spiritually tormented and the politically challenged.
Here it is that the Moon returns once a month to walk in the grounds with ‘retreaters’, and reassure them that there is nothing essentially wrong with being unequal or having thoughts in a subjective language other than global-transformation-speak.
The visitors book has been signed by such notables as Lucy Who Fell Out Of A Tree, Diogenes of Sinope, Jesus of Nazareth, Giordano Bruno, Arthur Schopenhauer, Sören Kierkegaard and Mark Chapman, reader of Catcher in the Rye.
In a quiet murmur barely discernible from the ghostly whispers which still haunt the monastery from a time during the rise of socialism when it was sequestered for the reinforcement of class division, the Moon talks about relativity and difference, nothingness and emptiness, identity-with and ipseity, and the essential strife of being.
“We are all creatures of habit,” he counsels. “Each and every day there comes a time when we hate ourselves for the negativity with which we react to our complete immersion in the daily tide of inauthentic borrowed ideas, and at such times, often just after lunch or at sunset, it is advisable to take a nap.”
The monastery prospectus advertises with quotes of the Moon, and of course most people who come on retreat are disappointed by his absence. Some describe their visit in negative terms, but the funding of the monastery suffers little since they always shortly afterwards return, usually with an ephemeris in their bag.
“Yes, life has a measure,” goes one of the Moon’s aphorisms, “but neither is it in your pocket nor your enemy’s.” He has, with loving-kindness to equal the source of all woe, enabled thousands to dissolve themselves back into communities of anathema with a simple message: pause at the gate. This monk is nothing if not a neuro-linguistic programmer.
“This world you were deposited in at birth is not a prison of others’ making. You must realize how much it has adapted to you, but when you change it you must also realize that you are now one of the architects of the world new life is being deposited into. Your responsibility is not to own the world, and it is not to own yourself. Your responsibility is to stand at the gate before you open it for yourself or another, and recognize its nature and purpose. The gate is the intelligibility of the world. It opens with permission.”
His springtime visits draw thousands, who spill out into a great city of tents beyond the monastery grounds, and not just because he always appears in all his finery, complete with wings–every 18 years or so he actually arrives on a donkey preceded by youths waving palm leaves–but because this is the quintessential season of initiative and communication in a common cause. It is a bad time to be unequal.
The Moon is like every other element in the world: it is trying to make you conscious of it. It seeks attributes and connection. It is more real for your realization of its regularity and witness to its phases. But what more can it mean? Can it be the portal to outer space? Can it furnish minerals? Can it clear the rain? Can it combine in conjunctions and occultations? Can it reflect not only sunlight but our thoughts and feelings? Can it synchronize menstruation? Before it can do any of these things, it must know what they are: it has to learn more about us.
It has had to learn that we begin at a crawl, that it takes 4 billion years for us to walk on two feet, and 7.5 million years more to move faster than it. It has to learn that a human lifetime is very short, and not long enough to overcome all the delusions out of which we construct our reality and concepts of time and space, causality and self.
It must learn to think as we do, to see itself through our eyes. It has to understand the experience of day and night, and perspective, and love. It has to learn how to freeze-frame individual conclusions before connecting them in theories and systems. It has to learn the power and humble beginnings of language. Ultimately, like us, it must try to make sense of this:
I have asked him (sic) to sit at the front of the class, so that I can give him special tuition. In his linguistics, astrophysics and chemical engineering classes, his presence may be considered superfluous, but in my humble tutorial, Who, Where and When Am I Right Now 2B, his participation matters.
His current assignment is to demonstrate a process by which a Drone might be transformed into a Monk. Until today, he has made no visible progress. The theme I have suggested he work to is ‘disclosure’, a philosophical term referring to transformation in its quintessence. He doesn’t understand it. He cannot grasp how a nascent being relinquishes naughtiness as the portal to power and then relinquishes power as the key to overcoming shame: he has never had a child or a pet.
However, tonight he has made a giant leap. For the first time this month, he transits at night, all over the world, against the background of visible stars, and not only does he recognize what I see, his direction and altitude, and the arbitrary names and personalities I have playfully assigned to particular bright stars, but his contribution is an exemplar of the disclosure process.
How? By asking the right questions. Here is his first essay.
“The human mind was destined to measure once it had discovered language, because language modulates difference: firstly by identifying things, and then by owning them, and finally, in sharing them, by distilling their subjective relativity.
Below me, as I pass through a gate of my teacher’s mind, a boy finishes mooring a boat and gazes up at me before turning towards home. I wonder if it is a scorpion or a fish-hook he sees below me over the ocean to the southwest.
If I could stay, I could learn much from this lad which my teacher will never know, because although one day they may speak the same language, and thus be enabled to share different meanings and frame time as a continuum of perspectives, this boy’s moment cannot be located by anyone, including himself, without becoming lost in translation.
What am I to make of the journey my teacher has imposed on me? What makes one drone’s utterance preferable to another’s? Will this boy’s hands become toughened like his father’s by brine and rope or softened like my teacher’s in dispensing applications beyond traditional wisdom?
And so the earthlings whirl insensibly through their hours and as their sky moves I pass through my teacher’s gate, and prepare to flip south and north for his examination.
What can I tell him of his Yabby, that it is slimy from tuna in the Coral Sea? No, it is the strident sentinel of his zodiac, steadfast anchor through the precession of seasons and life’s daily observance of the Acheron and the awful necessity to get across.
And Saiph, the synchronously invisible, the inevitable, the equally robust temptation to impious lust, what can I confirm of her as I move towards my teacher’s barren shore? Can I bear witness to her charisma and independence, and the determination and withdrawal signified by what her thighs straddle, the act of sacralizing the waters of forgetfulness?
For the sake of meaning can I embrace the human concept of a particular moment rippling daily across the perspectives of seven billion people? Can I so infinitesimally fragment and compartmentalize my freefall?
Of course I can, but do I desire it? Into what fables and myths must I acquiesce in my appropriation in order for these stick figures to convert me into immortal words? When may I graduate to the lectern myself, and dilute human consciousness into a roiling protoplasm, as empty of cosmic significance as the orientation of the rotational axis which furnishes my teacher’s vision?
Is, are, astrometry, astrology, human language, grammar and narrative, meaning and desire, and my own identity and physical form, any more than a time-consuming molecular fiction?”
Can he find himself in the coordinates and attributes of all three of the systems he itemises? Perhaps he can, but it makes me wonder how many systems have to penetrate each other before identity is conceded as meaningless. How many more generations of elders will condemn their grandchildren to violence by refusing to see orthodoxy as a masquerade of truth?
Sidereal astrology is, or should be, your invitation to emptiness, an experience of the limiting structures of narrative and identity. Nowhere on the planet tonight is the transiting Moon further than a handwidth from the gate, wherever it might be in relation to the zenith, and whether positive latitude means it is above or below the ecliptic. The gate, four minutes earlier each day, will linger in the north and disappear into twilight in the south as sunset gets earlier or later. We are all numerals on the one clock.
Karma and everything else about the real world, is cyclical, not linear. We are creatures of rotation and longitude, but let us not be prisoners of the hours, or the year. Being is essential strife (Heidegger), an incessantly emerging responsibility for blame, a continuous endorsement of doodle. Let us stop revering shape to the extent that we model ourselves on the last turd to dissolve.
Claiming no more legitimacy than any other mindfulness aid, astrology should focus not on putting something else into mind, but on the memes in there: the substratum of our dependency on the delusory self making this mistaken world. I give him an A.
“Art thus teaches us not to try to banish the darkness that surrounds the light of intelligibility, but to learn to see into that ubiquitous “noth-ing” so as to discern therein the enigmatic “earth” which nurtures all the genuine meanings that have yet to see the light of day. Insofar as we can learn from Van Gogh (or other similarly great artists) to see in this poetic way ourselves, Heidegger suggests, we will find ourselves dwelling in a postmodern world permeated by genuinely meaningful possibilities.” Iain Thomson, Heidegger’s Aesthetics, 2015.
Astrographic Note:
Because of the inclination of the equatorial and ecliptic planes to the galactic plane, some part of the Milky Way is not visible to us. Rather, it is divided into two great rivers. The first is the great tumult of Scorpius, which is entirely contained in the Breamlea Zodiac Constellation Scorpio, and carries the Summer Sign of Gemini, because the Sun crosses in Summer. The Moon crosses this river once a month, bringing it to the stellar wasteland I have called Justfriendistan, and in that context I call it Acheron.
The second river features the visual delights of Orion and Canis Major, and flows between the Breamlea Zodiac Constellations of Taurus and Gemini, which carry the Winter signs respectively of Sagittarius and Capricorn. This is the River Lethe, which cleanses the memory of past astrologies and prepares the traveller, Sun, Moon or planets, for the social climb, where the Sun is now, back into the mentality of Scorpio.
August 31: Dear Diary, I googled ‘Disclosure’ today, actually searching for a philosophical reference to Heidegger’s use of the Greek aletheia, and found this:
“True Spring Disclosure.
Abliq, Tintinara, EverHive Chronicle, Thursday 1 September 2016.
“It really is not sustainable,” he said, “deriving an identity from opposition to the Sun as I have. It began as a demonstration of what is best in a man: his innovative independence, his imagination and his transcendent spirituality. I took it upon myself to give the highest expression to the insights gained from communion with Woman, to gain Her respect as a partner, utterly different, unreal yet indispensable. As things have evolved, instead of confirming the importance of Man at the periphery, I have confirmed His inauthenticity, and in each woman’s real world merely become a quarrelsome mansplainer. My moments of glory have become no more than antitheses.
I have conferred at length with the Great Mother, and I have decided not to continue any role which gives encouragement to misogyny and homophobia. I am determined to change my ways, taking inspiration from the Sun’s unwavering commitment, and dissolve my independence in community, and my egotism in kindness. Perhaps it is by honouring the Woman in me that I will better inspire the Man. Thank you.”
Well, there you have it. It was a strange occasion, in the car park at Taunton, and I am still coming to grips with what was said. For his part, the Head of Her Majesty’s Nautical Almanac Office offered the customary gratitude for a difficult job well done, but he wasn’t fooling anybody. It is well-known that lunar theory is considered done, and that astronomy and space exploration have bigger fish to fry. “Do whatever you like,” was the body language. According to my American colleague, the reception in California was by contrast lavish, but reaction similarly indifferent, if also nonplussed. After all is said and done, it seems that the month will go ahead.
It is far from clear as I go to press what effect the Moon’s announcement, if he, or should I say ‘(s)he’, means to carry it through, will have on the polarity of Sun and Full Moon, and indeed on the whole notion of polarity in astrology, already undermined by the observance of asymmetrical seasonal geometry on one antipodean astrological website.
Considerable reassurance is taken by the observance in this graphic of the emergence of a set of hitherto unremarked non-seasonal polarities in which the Moon seems willing to participate.
For some time now, astrologers have been sustaining their practice by asserting an influence for the stars beyond the Zodiac, and by connecting planetary longitudes to geographical perspective by means of Houses and what have become known as the Angles. It was only a matter of time before astronomy’s Equatorial Coordinate System was elevated to pre-eminence as the matrix which most conveniently relates the Zodiac and the background stars to the native sky.
The measurement of the effect of Earth’s rotational axis has already revealed the exact polarity of a number of the brightest stars, which is expected to greatly enhance the capacity of sidereal astrology to augment the interpretations of observers like Manilius, Ptolemy, Anonymous and others for whom half of the brightest stars were invisible.
A note of caution: while the use of equatorial coordinates undoubtedly offers a new symmetry to astrology and offers an olive branch to astronomers, there remains some doubt as to the warmth with which conventional astrologers will receive the news that Mercury in Virgo—if you’re on top of your game, you know that notwithstanding 2,000 years of precessional variation, a planet is often in the same tropical and sidereal sign (Google ayanamsa)—is equatorially in Leo.
It would seem that the Antipodeans, having turned astrology upside down, feel free to align our symmetrically season-based Sign-boundaries to arbitrarily defined constellations—yet, whether they realize it or not, isn’t that what all siderealists do?—and are more comfortable with ambivalence than we Western and Jyotish adherents of fixed quality systems, in which ambivalence, if it is perceived, is resolved by polarity. We will watch developments in this nascent field with great interest.
And of course the Moon has said nothing about abdicating his regularity, so no effect on lunar calendars should be anticipated. It is confirmed that the First Crescent will be visible to the naked eye on Saturday, accompanied for lucky southern hemisphere viewers by a zenith manifestation of the gaseous nebula known since time immemorial to the original antipodeans as The Emu.
Suffice to say: may you live in interesting times.
Abliq is Science Editor of EverHive, the search ID for Southern Hemisphere Astrology on Facebook and developer of eSprit Astrolomical Software.”
Well! What do you make of that?
I eventually found the passage I was looking for.
“…some interpreters claim that “The Origin of the Work of Art” does not seek to “uncover the essence of art,” but that is misleading. As Heidegger says, his essay does not seek to set out one “timelessly valid determination” of the essence of art which would apply retrospectively to the entire history of art, but that is only because he does not understand essences the way they have been understood from Plato to Kripke, namely, as “timelessly valid determinations” of what something is. In fact, “The Origin of the Work of Art” does attempt to uncover and communicate art’s historical “essence,” by which Heidegger means that structure which allows art to reveal itself in different ways as it unfolds in the human understanding across time. What is confusing for many readers is that this historical essence of art is not some substance underlying the different forms of art or even a fixed property that would enable us to distinguish art from non-art but, instead, an insubstantial and ever-changing “essential strife” that is built into the structure of all intelligibility (the structure whereby entities become intelligible as entities) [my emphasis], as we will see.”
Iain Thomson, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2011.
I have some thoughts of my own on the content of these two articles.
North
What is revealed by the progression at S.H.A. from ecliptic to equatorial measurement is a pre-eminent, even fetishized, status for ‘North’. North is an entity. It has a history, and is the essence, in Heidegger’s usage of the term, of the zodiac viewed from the south. If I use the term ‘South’ to you in the Northern Hemisphere it resonates with warmth, sensuality and freedom, I suggest. The North has those connotations here in the South, but to immigrants it is also the direction of what we left behind.
The southern sky abounds with riches, and half of half the population of southern cities barbecues under it (the people on the south side of east-west streets), and yet seldom do you meet anyone with any familiarity with it. Perhaps its motion has something to do with it: it’s not linear; it has no east and west. I imagine the same applies ‘above’ the equator, and herein we find a difference. North is above us, and south is below you. We live in negative latitudes. North is so fundamental that when we walk southward we know east by imagining ourselves back to front. It is a difficult exercise to imagine you of the North as you are: beneath us.
Those bright stars mentioned in the article which are exactly opposite each other are always so, but only form a ‘gate’ due north and south. Your anti-clockwork soul or being is our anti-clockwork ego, and your clockwork ego is our clockwork being, but the meridian is the gyroscope which keeps us all upright upside down.
Just one more thought occurs to me. I mentioned North’s history. The site of Melbourne was taken from its indigenous inhabitants in the 1830s. The quickest and easiest way to perform the cadastral survey which imposed order on the land-grab was by the compass, and so Melbourne grew, boundary by parallel boundary, skewed towards the east by the magnetic declination of the day, about 9°. I cannot find another place like it on the globe.
North is our “essential strife“. It discloses our being. It is nothing less than a work of art.
A drone flew into a sheepfold one day, and found himself in a situation of some confusion. A wolf delegate outside the fold was offering security to the sheep if they would get rid of the dogs that guarded them. The ram was his usual stiff-necked self, telling the sheep that they weren’t safe even with the dogs, and they would be defenceless without them. The wolf was suggesting that as the dogs didn’t guarantee the sheep’s safety, they might as well be got rid of. The drone admired his reasoning. “What do the sheep think?” he asked. The sheep were unanimous: “We’re sick and tired of fearing for our lives; we should make peace with the wolves, and accept their terms.” “They’re right,” said the drone, “there should be no fear in this world, only love and goodwill among all animals. Get rid of the hateful dogs.” As soon as the dogs were gone the wolves fell on the sheep and devoured them, and the ram was first.
Don’t trust wolves and be wary of the collaboration of a blow-in.
Mother Courage revealed, thanks to what is visible in the sky at solar midnight when the Sun is before a Gate.
A curious coincidence, this Full Moon conjunction with Uranus. Like many stargazers, I have anticipated this month’s opposition of the seventh planet as a rare opportunity to see it with the naked eye. Not this week. The Moon has seen to that. So what can I ‘see’ behind the Moon’s oppressive charm?
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
[Cygnus atratus in declamatory flyby of bipedal peabrains.]
Southern Hemisphere Astrology 