Rectitude: New Moon in Libra

31 Monday Oct 2016

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Apogee, Beltane, Equatorial Conjunction, Halloween, Jupiter Rising, Libra New Moon, Peasant Moon, Southern Hemisphere Astrology, Waltzing Matilda

Today’s New Moon occurs in sidereal Libra, which carries the Sign of the second month of northern Spring, Taurus, and once again, visibility blurs its relationship with the seasons of the two hemispheres. The Sun occupies the Sign a month earlier than the Constellation, in northern Autumn and southern Spring, but the Constellation is prominent in the night sky through northern Spring and southern Autumn. It transits at dawn in March, solar midnight in May, and nightfall in August.

The traditional view of Libra, with autumnal associations of refinement and compromise (when the Sun is nowadays actually in Virgo), is of the scales of justice, a symbol which resonates with its Southern season and surroundings. Below it is the Spring star Arcturus and the Ploughman—impossible to see as such—or the Chinese ‘Great Horn’, which unmistakably resembles a corporate tie. Above Libra, over the zenith at the back of your head when you face north, is the array of the Centaur and the Wolf skewered on his spear.

Because of its proximity to the symbol of justice, this array has always represented for me the quintessential colonial Australian conflict between indigenous people and settlers, and settlers and colonial powers. Tranquility is guaranteed by the police if you’re a squatter and some swagman or band of blackfellas kills your sheep, but how secure are you in your moral rectitude? Who is interfering with whose livelihood? Is it a sheep, or a kangaroo? Is Ned Kelly a national hero or a murderer and thief? Whatever our decisions, we Australians transfer their shortcomings onto the ‘suits’ in the big smoke (Bootes).

My life has been witness to both an evolution of ideas of what is good, and an erosion by cultural relativity of absolute meaning. My ancestors stole the children: ‘good Christians’ they were who put the interests of indigenous children—whom they regarded as tainted in indigenous communities by white blood—before the need of their mothers, because they saw only dysfunction and destitution in indigenous communities. Of course, we can acknowledge the cause of that dysfunction in our simply being here, see the missionaries as henchmen to capitalist exploiters, and believe that a guilty conscience was a poor foundation for ethical action, but my ancestors did not only think they were doing the right thing by the “stolen generation”, they were at that time also sacrificing their husbands and sons in world wars believed—naively, as it can seem in retrospect—to be defending the good against evil. There’s nothing secure about rectitude.

Saiph is sublimated. It’s Halloween! Imagine this: at the ‘stroke’ of solar midnight in a dark churchyard in the Barossa region of South Australia, directly below its graves, the Moon aligns with the Sun. Notwithstanding that, because of daylight saving, this is the only midnight on Halloween, the return of the souls of these dead and the opening of the doors to the spirit world occur in the other tonight of the 31st. And yet something is happening here. Let’s just say that the spirits are having a dress rehearsal. “And his ghost may be heard….”

To be honest, I was drawn to the Lutherans because of the German connection with the swagman [linked above], but here’s another spooky connection. What unseen power guided my search to Our Lady of Navigators? What is it about two places—two churches—which are precisely opposite each other on the globe? What other questions am I being asked to answer? Where do we go when we die? What underworld does the Sun enter after dark? Does it die? What will happen to me if I’m awake at midnight? Am I alone?

Can you see a sign in the form of a halo of light from the south side of the igreja? Peasant superstition? An uncanny similarity asserts itself with the phenomenon known as the Brocken Spectre, a magnified shadow of an observer projected into mountain mist on the very same mountain, in the Northern [see?] German Harz Mountains, where witches meet on Beltane Eve to hold revels with the Devil. The Lutherans came from Germany, and it is Beltane in the Southern Hemisphere—or near enough—on the First of November! Phew! Fortunately, I can give you these salutary lines about limerence, addressing this apparition, to calm you down:

And art thou nothing? Such thou art, as when
The woodman winding westward up the glen
At wintry dawn, where o’er the sheep-track’s maze
The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist’ning haze,
Sees full before him, gliding without tread,
An image with a glory round its head;
The enamoured rustic worships its fair hues,
Nor knows he makes the shadow he pursues!
From “Constancy to an Ideal Object“, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Coincidences? A demonstration that everything is connected? That everything happens for a reason? Or are the ‘suits’ right, and the world simply turns? On we go…

Today sees another portentous omen. Is the appearance of mighty Jupiter in the dawn sky a sign of the welcome return of the Prodigal, or is it to confirm our optimism towards the chance of a bountiful harvest untroubled by further calamities like the floods we have endured during the Spring? Is it the long-awaited sign that the ‘suits’ will stop Aleppo, the incarceration of Aboriginal youth and the global annihilation of wildlife?

And on the eve of the new month, the Moon reaches its apogee, which some foolish people believe has an influence on which things we are ashamed of and keep buried within us, instead hating their manifestation in other people, unaware that discriminating rectitude like this merely enables and perpetuates infantile, unconscious self-hatred.

So Happy Safar! The month when fighting is forbidden is finally over, and we can get stuck into it. ‘Safar’ means ’empty’, as in empty homes, when sanctions are lifted against trading and feuding. However, it must be pointed out that this coming month, regarded by some pre-Islamic Arabs as unlucky, is like all months, neither good nor bad in itself. Let there be an end to all such superstitions. No month, and no position of the stars, Sun, Moon or planets exerts any influence independent of the will of God. Does God wear a suit?

If you have ever been anaesthetized, it is not difficult to imagine Limbo. As deeply personal as your last experience might be, there might yet be something you wish to say, some further comment on an umpiring decision, perhaps. You may get many opportunities to dress-rehearse but it may be a considerable time before you are heard. I would add that we have this in common: my sincere wish in what I have written above is not to offend anyone—even if you’re wrong.

Happy Halloween!

Prodigal Full Moon in Pisces

16 Sunday Oct 2016

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Identity, Interest, Pisces Full Moon, Prodigal Moon, Sheratan Gate, Time, Uranus

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?

prodigal-moon-atacama-oct16 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?

prodigal-moon-sth-tropical-oct16

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.

prodigal-full-equatorial-coruripe-oct15

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?

prodigal-at-sheratan-gate-riverside-oct17 “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:

lunar-gates-2017

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?

Community: New Moon in Virgo

30 Friday Sep 2016

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Community, Identity, Meridian, Virgo New Moon

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.

The Monk: Full Moon in Aquarius

16 Friday Sep 2016

Posted by abliq in Astral Gates, Moon Phases, Pop Psychology

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Aquarius, Aquarius Moon, Duality, Emptiness, Full Moon September, Inequality, John Lennon, Monk Moon, Narcissism, Retreat, Southern Hemisphere Astrology

Seeing things as they really are: Full Moon at 19:05 GMT 16 September 2016.

“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.”

n+1 Magazine:

“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.

Yabby Gate

10 Saturday Sep 2016

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases, Stargazing

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Acheron, Angles, Emptiness, Lethe, Milky Way, Monk Moon, Saiph, Southern Hemisphere Astrology, Yabby, Yabby Gate

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.

Disclosure: New Moon in Leo

31 Wednesday Aug 2016

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Aletheia, Dhul Hijjah, Disclosure, Equatorial Coordinates, Essence, Leo New Moon, New Moon, North, Polarities, Sinistra Gate, Southern Hemisphere Astrology, Southern Hemisphere Astronomy, True Spring Disclosure

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.

Full Moon in Capricorn: the Drone

18 Thursday Aug 2016

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Capricorn Moon, Connection, Drone Moon, Southern Hemisphere Astrology

The vainglorious Full Moons of winter, soaring in the summer constellations of Scorpio, Sagittarius and Capricorn, have passed. Spring is here, the season of begetting: of coupling, certainly, but ever and always for the rejuvenation of the hive.

Drone Moon Image Aug18 If you think that the mantra, ‘Everything is connected to everything else,’ paves your road through a universe of things; if your boogeymen are racism, capitalism, climate change or, God forbid, immigration, apostasy, homosexuality , delinquency or addiction, and you can’t accept that you are their strongest henchman; and if knowing everything you don’t need to know more, and the relativity of astrology is no more than a penny dropping into your slot: then at least you may recognize the Cartesian, cogito ergo sum, as one of the smallest steps ever taken by mankind. The connection mantra is as small.

If you have never experienced the growth inside your body of another transforming your flesh and blood, and the bifurcation of your soul into two; if you have never experienced yourself as a process of nature, and your organism as so dissolved in exchange and becoming that any separate identity is inconceivable; if you have never stood under the stars in awful dread of the tiny span of humanity’s integration of stardust yet been overwhelmed by gratitude and worship: this one’s for you.

The Drone honours the periphery, where importance is conditional, value contingent, and identity redundant. Drone Moon Adelaide

“So have I got it right? I can help end suffering by overcoming my neediness? If I ferret around among the causes of my irresponsibility and guilt I can find my root pain to heal with compassion for my inner child? Then I will be able to love even psychopathological extremists, give unlimited asylum, cause no offence, and live harmoniously in a utopia of universal human rights without reacting with despising and blame to those egoistically clinging to opinions and identities which produce pain and suffering? …Okay, I can do that.”

Thus, he departed from the Sun, and now, once more, the Moon is Full in the Atacama Desert. Men Are From Mars

“The addict seems to have rejected the values of the ordinary person, which the Buddhist has also rejected, such as the permanent nature of reality and the idea that pleasure should be cosy, quiet and decent. The Buddhist aspires to entirely destroy desire and aversion as the root causes of all suffering, and sees both in turn as products of our deluded apprehension of the world as solid and real. The addict has also experienced the emptiness, but has failed to realise that the cause of suffering is aversion and desire – in which they continue to indulge. Thus, the addict appears to sit mid-way between the ordinary person and the Buddhist, and is moving in some ways ‘along the way towards’ Buddhism – chiefly in apprehending the emptiness and in realising that desire and hatred have some problems and price-tags attached. I would therefore conclude that the addict’s is a form of spiritual path – a development away from the ordinary life position – and that involves experiences, which can be more fully understood from a deeper study of Buddhism. These relate to cause and effect, the nature of mind, desire and aversion and finally impermanence and emptiness.” Peter Morrell.

“Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo”: ‘If I cannot bend the will of Heaven, I shall move Hell.’
Aeneid, Book VII, Line 312, Virgil. Drone Moon Drama

The last addiction is love. Not an addiction, you cry? Hard-wired by natural selection into the human essence? The spark of divinity linking humanity to its creator? Perhaps you are inclined to attach yourself to drones. Every prophet, every saint, every healer that ever existed was a drone. What is the spirit but an addiction to emptiness? What is the word of God but addiction to language, the echo of apes barking? What is the Noble Path but addiction to mind, a midday siesta under a shady tree?

And what is a drone? A peripheral member of a community whose single purpose is one day to make an utterance which of all the utterances of all the drones of a generation may prove to be the utterance which perpetuates the hive, long after everyone in the generation of a previous utterance is dead. And the hive is not dedicated to love, just the feeding of the young, the Great Mother, and the drones. What remains when all desire is defeated may well be revered by those suffering in the yoke of life, but really, what remains is only death. This is not transcendent revelation.

In fact, all drone utterances and all cultural memes preserve a drop of desire in their ethic, all the more precious for being the very last one. Can you love without desire? Of course not. This elementary truth is masked by confusion around the nature of desire. It is not asked if you can love your children without the urge to fornicate with them, but if you can love them without distinction from others and without hope for their future. If you can do this, congratulations for attaining enlightenment, and now take your place among the drones. Perhaps your utterance will be the one which will perpetuate the hive, be its will, as it were: “Your children are no more deserving of your love than anyone else, including the most degraded sexual predator on pre-pubescent children; and the future is not your concern.” Perhaps this utterance will be the one.

Addict Moon B Aug18 Tropical The lot of the Great Mother is to lead into nowhere, of the Worker to persevere, and of the Drone to weigh emptiness and purpose. Everything is connected.

Connection: New Moon in Cancer

01 Monday Aug 2016

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Cancer, Connection, Justfriendistan, New Moon, Saiph, Southern Hemisphere Astrology, Spica

There is a boy once–Muna is his name–who is a constant worry to his mother. “Watch out for snakes,” she calls after him as he heads into the bush again. Cancer New Aug03 He likes to escape the gossip of the village, even though there is much he could be helping with, and spend the whole day wandering, wondering about change and goodness, and daydreaming about girls. One day he does come upon a snake, a big one right across his intended path.

“What are you afraid of?” The old midwife who lives on the hill has changed herself into a crow and is watching him. “My mother says if a snake bites you, it is the end of you,” replies the trembling boy. “Ah, death,” says the crow, flapping over the snake and seeing it off into the grass. “I don’t worry about death,” she croaks. “Death is the entrance to eternity. Don’t you know that?” “What is eternity?” “Eternity is a beautiful place where it is always now, and you don’t have to worry about getting home and getting into trouble with your father for being lazy and having your head in the clouds and coming up here every day to play ‘Mothers and Fathers’ with Old Spica. In eternity, you are the headman with your choice of all the pretty girls, and you don’t have to lift a finger.” She knows she is giving in to an unkind impulse, but really, another needy man is just what the world doesn’t need. “Go to the river yonder, and ask Antares to row you to eternity, just for a look.” Remembering Death

So Muna goes further than he ever has before, and comes to a vast river. On the bank he finds a man in a loincloth, his arms outstretched, spinning slowly around and around. “Excuse me,” says the boy. “Can you tell me where Antares is? And what are you doing?” “I am Dervish,” says the man, “and I am working myself into the trance of eternity. What do you want with Antares?” “I must ask him to row me to eternity,” the boy says. “Do as I do,” says Dervish, “and prepare yourself. Then I will show you where Antares is.” The boy makes himself completely dizzy, and barely manages not to throw up as he staggers to the boat Dervish is pointing to.

The blind Antares cries out, “The Way to Eternity is through me!” Muna almost capsizes the boat as he clambers over the gunwale, observed scornfully by the two oarsmen. By the time he has regained his senses, the boat has reached the far bank, and believing himself in eternity, Muna disembarks. To his horror, the boat immediately heads back across the river, Antares in the bow calling, “The Way to Eternity is through me!” “No returns,” scoffs one of the oarsmen.

Muna finds himself in a strange and frightening place, quite unlike the village and so far from his mother and Spica that he fears never to be held by a woman again. The only girl to be seen has herself done up with ringlets in her wispy blond hair and a pale floral dress tied with a pink bow. How can this pale-skinned trifle be what the crow promised? In tears, he describes to her what has befallen him. She bursts into a flood of tears herself. “This is Justfriendistan,” she wails, “where jilted lovers go. You must escape as fast as you can!” She points to a distant range in the opposite direction to his home. “The way you must go will take you past the chateau where I was to be married, and I implore you, do not listen to the voices of passionate love you will hear there, lest you too become bewitched by limerence!”

Drone Transits Melbourne With no idea what she is talking about, the lad takes off at a sprint. Seven days and seven nights he runs, until exhausted he trips on the roots of a giant tree on a razorback ridge and falls immediately into a deep sleep. While he sleeps, a swirling fog creeps down the spur from an invisible peak, and voices begin whispering to him. “There is no such thing as eternity.” “Life is a miserable delusion.” “Only a woman can save you.” “Your love can save the world.” “Find the One.” When he awakens, the fog has lifted, and far below he can see the glint of another river. He has never felt more disheartened, nor less deserving to be a headman or to rule over women.

In three more days he reaches the river, and finds himself in the presence of a brooding bull of enormous power. “Are you ready to mate with one of my heifers, and be unassailable in relevance and pride?” he bellows. Off to his right, Muna sees a knot of chewing cows winking in his direction, and distinctly hears the words, “Am I the One?” Without hesitation, he dodges the bull and races to the water, but just as he reaches it, he glances to his left, where he catches sight of a swarthy herdswoman who, with a giggle in his direction, has hoiked up her skirt and is squatting to pee in the river. This, finally, is the One!

With curiously little effort he swims to the opposite bank. “I am hungry for the future, aren’t you?” says someone else’s wife. Muna has become a man. He has no idea how he came to be three days walk from his village, nor does he know Capella, or to whom she might belong, but she does remind him of someone, and in this moment, eternity, he is hers.

He never becomes headman, and becomes derisively known as Mooner, and eventually just Moon. He is forever wandering, away for weeks at a time looking for someone. Perhaps for this reason he has remained a secret connection in the heart and body of every woman, and I daresay, in the heart of many Fa’afafine, and men who adore women, especially women like Saiph.

Drone Moon 1st Crescent Aug04

Dhul Qa'ida

Full Moon in Capricorn: the Prisoner

19 Tuesday Jul 2016

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Addiction, Antares, Capricorn Moon, Emotions, Full Moon, Southern Hemisphere Astrology

A straight line is a segment of an infinitely large circle. Immediacy is a segment of a cycle. Madness is straightened immediacy.

“I haven’t been there for a few weeks. Did you notice? Of course not. You’ve got a busy life, and you’ve got more important things to think about than where the Moon is. I don’t really care. I’ve got my routine, and I just do it. I hear you: what difference does it make if the calendar shows my quarters facing left or right? Right? If you don’t want to know, don’t read me, simple as that. I never expected to go viral, did I?

Why do any of you express yourselves? Of course, you have to place your order at Maccas, but really, I’m serious. If your opinion isn’t going to influence someone powerful, isn’t going to change the world, why do you so carefully construct it? Doesn’t matter if you’re gay or straight, why do you find it necessary to have an opinion on same-sex marriage? And why do you think the world needs changing, anyway? Can’t you compromise?

Of course I get sick of going around in circles. Of course I know I’m predictable (hardly to any of you though, I dare say, heh heh heh), but it doesn’t matter to me whether I holiday behind the clouds or on a yacht in the Aegean. What matters is what’s going on in HERE, right? Same as you. I’m not ashamed of what I do. I’m happy! I was over the Angola-Namibia border at opposition, and now I am visible to Eastern Australia in Capricorn(us), and whether you consider me in the northern or southern part of it, I’ve got a brandy, a rollie, and a game on TV. I’m full, in your face, and loving it!

This is my compromise. Hero in my own lunch-hour (sorry if I extinguish you, Emu). Did my father’s abuse and my mother’s compassion make me what I am? Who cares! I’ll explain the chart in a minute, if you’ll just let me finish. Matters of import are being realized at the Meridian, and I’m very upstage in this setting, but who says they’re matters of import? Me! I don’t care if you don’t believe me: Antares is Uriel, the Light of God, and his role is grave! This warden reminds you that your self-importance is imprisoned in causality and consequences, just like mine. I don’t have to tell you what working family-man Mars makes of that. Great-Uncle Saturn on the other hand is anyone’s guess.

And just in case you get too far up yourself–if you’re still reading–there’s a tiny man-made speck towards Rasalgethi (Alpha Herculis, “Head of the Kneeler”, just to Rasalhague’s west), where human imagination put it, and can find it, as I have. It was made by ordinary people like me who find ways of making the intolerable tolerable and pay their taxes. Or have I got that the wrong way around? We pay our taxes, and powerful people make their intolerable tolerable. Can you see where you fit in? It’s an unimaginably big world, but size matters, if you look from the inside!

Addiction is an orientation of the world to the emotional self. In the arms of addiction we give ourselves up to pain. We are centred on it, and the furthest from its release we can be, confirmed in it by painlessness. We are called, and make any excuse; but our stunted, misshapen appearance to the outside belies a miracle of ecological adaptation. For example, as a prisoner, I have been given a lot of counselling on how to stop defeating myself. Thank you. I have adapted my orbit to it.

[Based on Chögyam Trungpa’s Transcending Madness: the Experience of the Six Bardos, Shambhala, 2010, and Lövheim’s cube of emotion.]

Guilty as charged, but have a look at those constellations of addiction, and acknowledge which ones have tipped the scales of passing interest. Do you really want to free your self from all dependency? I tell you what is self-defeating: looking at the transit of Antares and seeing only a scattering of distant lights. I am rather excited in your sky by my discriminating good fortune….”

Responsibility: New Moon in Gemini

03 Sunday Jul 2016

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Addict Moon, Calling, Gemini New Moon, Lilith, Responsibility, Treeness

Usually every three years, when Full Moon phases with the range of dates the Sun enters a Breamlea Constellation, there are two Full Moons in the same Constellation. Three years ago, spectacularly, it was the Aquarius Crone in August-September. This year it is the Capricorn Addict, this Moon and next. How to differentiate them, and how do they derive a common meaning? Is there any valid foundation to this exercise in giving Moons a Southern Hemisphere existential identity?

Responsibility, Gemini’s calling-card, is really the basis of all life: not just in the sense of being responsible for a state of the world, or of oneself; or of being able to respond to the world, or demand that ability in others; but as a combination, even a continuum, of the two. It is a feedback loop, in which a calling from within adjusts itself to reality, and a real desire is driven by a sense of unrealized potential, of oneself and the world to care for each other. This is what I think ‘ownedness‘ means. You have to own yourself, and where you and the world meet in mutual creation, to be authentic. Responsibility is the transformation of emptiness into gratitude, generosity and joy.

You only have this one life, and you don’t have to be anxious about that. Responsibility can take you in a million directions, in despite of the final destination. Culs de sac like death are an illusion. So are images of the higher self you want to attain, and the wound which stops you getting there (or keeps you trapped in ministration). Of course, responsibility as calling is not without its complications. The absence of responsibility is despair, which Kierkegaard powerfully defined as the refusal of one’s calling, the loss of the eternal. And where is the eternal, if not in emptiness? Immediacy has no self, to use Kierkegaard’s words.

Take courage, through this and the next Full Moon in Capricorn: we will construct an enlightening interpretation of this fortuitous coincidence together! And authentically, I hope we can share a laugh. After all, a calling does not come from the newspapers, does it? Millions of people in post-industrial western democracies are searching for an authentic inner voice calling them to the future. It’s very hard to hear. My own calling to write about this most significant of New Moons, at the heart of Winter when the God is born, and when intimacy and duty entail an appreciation of role and judgment, has fluctuated in its audibility, and I’m afraid I cannot do it justice. Two events have drowned it at times in static: a federal election facing a polarized electorate which democracy dooms to ineffective and reactive division; and a resurgence of bodily pain which asserts my lifelong irresponsibility, a black bird come home to roost.

Three faces of inauthenticity: venting, subservience and the higher self.
We are not reaction, nor perfect.
We are not victims, nor independent.
We are not on a journey, nor lost.

Procol Harum once said, “Life is like a beanstalk, isn’t it?” Yes, in every moment of every day the tree of life contends with the elements in whatever form it has managed to preserve, automatically continuing the primordial transformative processes which create it out of nothing. Its ‘tree-ness’ can be located in its chloroplasts, at the empty threshold of energy transfers; or in the hydraulics implicit in its structure; or in shade, timber, firewood or home. As a tree, to be the gestalt of all of those identifiers, and none, is responsibility.

The moment of New Moon is an experience of being, similar in relation to the Full Moon as the house of realization is to that of reputation, in the sense that Being at the Imum Coeli represents the emptiness of ego. In that moment the Moon embarks on a mission to fill the emptiness, or allay the boredom, of what in essence prefigures what he is propelled towards. New Moon is not an embarkation from or towards an ultimate form of being. Any consciousness of higher-order being is already ego bored with emptiness. It is more valuable to think of it as a new infusion of care into will: a renewal of ‘human-ness’.

The Moon is cursed to swivel two hoops: an elliptical orbit and an inclined orbit. His gyrations delight us until we know what they mean. In the rush of his proximity he makes more urgent the task of unlearning the infantile solutions to shame which fuel so much of our judgment of others. As he composes his anguish in the Sign of determination and withdrawal (the dichotomy of twinship) in very dubious company, he has already rushed us by, but his apogee, in Libra the shame of greed and the reaction formation of disrespect, hangs from the top of the tree, impossible to ignore. Although nobody can see him, we do know that high above the Sun, he is giddily reminding us of the responsibility of prominence, with the Ascending Node in Aquarius, to focus our insight on overcoming avoidance and perfectionism.

The Tree of Man [sic] is a cross, constructed from an upright pole joining identity and emptiness, and a crossbeam joining dependent arising to transcendence, from which the bound human arms of value and intention regularly lift in supplication and dangle in despair. However daunting that symbol may seem, it doesn’t have to be. The imagination can function as a chloroplast. Just as the stars immediately above the Southern Cross symbolize the thoughts of the crucified, the left way of intoxication, the right way of asceticism, and in between, the immanent reality of transfiguration, so a child gazing up into the foliage of a parent can get an expansive perspective beneath their posture: the twitter of the cosmos in the branches.

At the moment of this New Moon, accompanied by Mummy’s ghost, Alphekka is at transit. He is the habit which affects to answer the calling. Alphekka has the quality of ‘disguise’ because he rotates very quickly and is surrounded by dust. He resembles Taz, the Tasmanian devil with a vicious temper in Bugs Bunny, and appears as the repressed accountant Theodore Tasmanian in the Looney Tunes Wabbit series now showing. Go Theo! I hope you’re happy with your vote! Now, where are those painkillers?

Southern Hemisphere Astrology

~ Turning astrology the right way up…

Category Archives: Moon Phases

Rectitude: New Moon in Libra

Prodigal Full Moon in Pisces

Community: New Moon in Virgo

The Monk: Full Moon in Aquarius

Yabby Gate

Disclosure: New Moon in Leo

Full Moon in Capricorn: the Drone

Connection: New Moon in Cancer

Full Moon in Capricorn: the Prisoner

Responsibility: New Moon in Gemini