Category Archives: Moon Phases

Full Moon in Sagittarius: the Zealot

19 Sunday Jun 2016

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It’s time to press Restart.

A long time ago now, having more by good luck than good management evaded capture by the Germans, or betrayal by collaborators, five abandoned British soldiers found their way by the light of a full moon to the port of Le Verdon, where they were taken on board a Polish ship and evacuated from German-occupied France. Actually, only four made it to the ship. The lieutenant who went missing was a lunatic, the expatriate veteran who shot him from behind confided to me in drunken anguish one Anzac Day in Prahran. My stepfather was a decorated officer of the Black Watch, and his reaction was guarded when he heard this story. He still had nightmares about leading the liberation of an extermination camp at the end of the war, my mother told me.

Zealot Moon 1940Exactly 76 years ago, 4 multiples of 19, the Full Moon of June 1940 was within a degree of this year’s, therefore in the same Nakshatra, and very close to the Sagittarius solstice point, like this one. Reading accounts of the conflicts which my parents’ generation grew up in is every bit as challenging as confronting my implication in the treatment of indigenous people here and in Papua, and my share of responsibility for the suffering of millions in the Middle East. I am ashamed to be embedded in this violence, as most of my generation are who have been passengers on what we have believed to be a journey to reconciliation. Can astrology have anything to say on the subject?

There wasn’t much sign of reconciliation in 1959, when my generation were still in school: the Solstice Moon shone on a respectable world in which insecurity resolved itself by proxy: shorthand for thousands of violent deaths in Central America, Vietnam and the ‘colonies’ of Africa; and for the indoctrination which validated the massive spending on nuclear proliferation which accompanied the Cold War; not to mention the evasion of the law constituted by contemporary closed-shop methods of dealing with sexual abuse of children. Dictatorship and military-style leadership seemed the norm, on the international stage, in workplaces and families. [1959.]

Everyone was a zealot by 1978: Aboriginal land rights occupied centre-stage in Australia, but two decades of self-actualization had resulted in substantial progress for the equality of women and the secularization of morality. Economic reform was underway in both USSR and China which would transform the world. However, there were signs of trouble ahead, in the emergent form of ‘political correctness‘. [1978.] Then came 1997, which I look back to as the high tide of multiculturalism, but the Australian ‘history wars‘ of that period were a disturbing crack in the foundations of a belief that we are one humanity undivided, indeed enhanced, by difference. Zealots were emerging on the extreme left as well as the extreme right. [1997.]

And so the punctuation of the Moon’s orbit, the foundation of archaeoastronomy and arguably at the root of earthly civilization, science and technology, returns it to the solstice this month. How are we looking? Do we go around and around like the Moon, or are we getting somewhere? Is there still a ‘silent majority’ of good people armed with regard for each other’s welfare and fulfilment? Does it have a resilient discourse to steer us more or less unanimously towards a decent solution to the humanitarian crises we must face, of violent political upheaval and mass-migration, despite the clamour of zealots at both extremes? Can it direct the resurgence of religious difference towards the enhancement of secular, multicultural cohesion?Zealot Moon South Tropical Jun20

The Full Moon this month as you can see is half an arc-minute from the solstice of the Tropic of Cancer, so it is more than valid to look at it from a southern astrological perspective. The one-half of the world’s population who live below the Tropic of Cancer are looking north to see the Moon, so it appears 104 degrees past the descending node! Most of you will go, “Huh?”, but in the interests of the ‘silent majority’ I would like to remind you that Southern Hemisphere Astrology evolved as a rejection of colonialism! Our perspective ‘down’ here is as relevant as yours ‘up’ there, and perhaps the polarities of astrology can resonate with the ‘silent majority’ after all.Zealot Moon Jun20

Out of respect for our northern cousins, i.e. those living north of 23.44 degrees north latitude, I present the view from the ‘Mirror’ just off the east coast of Japan, the same distance ‘above’ the equator as Melbourne is ‘below’ it, and at the same longitude. Let me remind all readers that you can always see the opposite hemisphere’s point of view if you turn to the cardinal point opposite the Medium Coeli, cusp of the Fourth House, and crane your neck backwards far enough!Zealot Moon Downside Up Jun20

What you will read in astrology columns will almost exclusively relate to this image, in terms similar to these:Zealot Moon North Tropical Jun20

Needless to say, it is wrong for half the world’s population. That’s OK: it’s right for the other half. Or is it? Perhaps each is wrong. Is the Moon as an entity above or below the Ecliptic? Both, or neither? Do we need to respect the Other’s truth more, or ours less? Remember, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Whichever way you look at it, the Sun in Gemini is making up its mind, and the Moon in Sagittarius is making up its heart. Perhaps therein lies the reason the egg the Emu lays every nineteen years never hatches, bleached by the Sun. You may take our word for it. [There is an alternative periodicity of Full Moons at the June solstice, eight years after this series, visible at night somewhere in the southern hemisphere, in Australia in 1948 and 2043. The Moon is above the Ecliptic. As far as I’m aware, the bird, ostrich, cormorant, or vulture perhaps, has not been identified.]Zealot Egg

This time around, the egg that won’t hatch is internalized phobia and, dare I say, self-love dependent on the removal of offence. Not as though this may apply to you, here is a cautionary quote with an interesting link for those susceptible to reintardation, prey to compartmentalization, or with a tendency to project shame onto other people: “To attempt the destruction of our passions is the height of folly. What a noble aim is that of the zealot who tortures himself like a madman in order to desire nothing, feel nothing, and who, if he succeeded, would end up a complete monster!” Denis Diderot.

 

Taurus New Moon: Idealism

03 Friday Jun 2016

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Astrology should be recognized as a poetry of the cosmos. A moment in time depicted by a horoscope enters the physical world through the portal of the discriminating intellect, and claims to represent reality; but its signs should not deny their transcendental origin. A poem must similarly be a thing, but its words should seduce the mind back into itself, and connect with the poet’s construction upstream of imagery, upstream of thought, where the creature lives. Astrology situates me there, upstream of any word in this chart, and yet pulsating with every one, at daybreak on Sunday, the day of the New Moon:Taurus New Whisper Jun05

The whispering of the Circlet of Pisces comes from the lost domain of who I might be if I weren’t so busy being who I am; and who am I, the thinker or the thought, the intention or the affect, the affliction or the addiction? Always both, and neither. Mindfulness, compassion, equanimity and gratitude are the way, but I often take another fork. Whispers give me the clue. They signal the emptiness of who I am. It often seems to me that life could be simpler if we were less focussed on outcomes and identity, and more on the emptiness of the processes of life, the miracle of being alive to the whisper of mortality.

I read an article about the expansion of the universe, in which Paul Sutter asks, “Where’s the edge of the universe?” Everywhere is the centre of expansion, which makes me ask, how does this apply to the human mind? Does my thinking situate me in an expanding human consciousness which might include all people and endure forever, or is the process by which my discriminating mind interprets perception an expanding emptiness in which I am forever unborn? Is there an acceleration to the former? I don’t think so, but perhaps there is an increasing urgency in the battle of ideas. Does that urgency have a common root with my expanding emptiness, the immanence of death? Everyone agrees that everything is connected to everything else, but how is it so, inside out, or outside in? Is the thinking you do the same as the thought you communicate to me? Are how things used to be connected to how they are today if nobody remembers how they were? Thinking and systems of thought are two different things.

The increasingly well-known dichotomy of thinking with the head and thinking with the heart can be addressed by this metaphor of expansion. Thinking with the head engages a person in connecting an experience with categories and systems of thought; thinking with the heart searches for meaning in the opposite direction, towards the empty self. Ideas continuously occur, but if they can’t be put into words that convey them to ideology they go immediately to where all mysteriously disappeared communications go. They cannot cohere; they do not live. Limbo could be the name of that place: an expanding universe of emptiness which exists in each of us. The spirit is emptiness, expanding in the same way as the material universe, but inwards. Is the heart in the right place when it imposes itself? The question, ‘Who am I?’ can and should be rephrased: ‘Where is the far edge of emptiness?’ Is it the horizon? Is it death? Is it cultural or evolutionary selection? Is it otherness? The Word of God?Taurus New Clock Jun05

Idealism is commonly regarded as what underlies an effort or a life dedicated to improving the world, advancing it some way towards an impossible perfection. As a philosophy, it represents the belief that what exists outside the mind can only be known by what is inside it, but the fundamental conviction of idealists is that what is inside their mind is real. Idealists have no doubt: the world is a misunderstanding of what is good for it. Lifelong dedication and the use of any means, ‘tough love’ and even violent confrontation, are justified to change the rules which make the world coherent.

Taurus New Snapshot Jun05
Uncomfortable acquaintances though you might expect them to be, in fact they enjoy prestige. Despite apparent negativity, their undoubted attunement, optimistic moral certitude and assertive attachment-style lend them charisma. It can be difficult to resist their confidence in getting their own way. It can also be difficult to shine a mirror on their inner certainty. If they are ’tilting at windmills’, perhaps they do see something I don’t. The game couldn’t be played without rules, could it, or could there simply be play?

Thought is a great sea wall you see as a youngster and marvel at how humans put such huge boulders in place. But as you become more conscious of the ocean hurling itself against that wall, as you get older and realize that the ocean is inside you, that it is the unspoken and the unborn, you find that it is the wall which is doing the crashing.

Full Moon in Scorpio: the Dilettante 

21 Saturday May 2016

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  • “Is the glass half empty, half full, or twice as large as it needs to be?”
  • “A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.” Tom Fotherby’s Blog

Some people have opinions nobody agrees with because they’re stale, but some people with old opinions dedicate themselves to making them true. These are often people who have no time for the opinions of others. Other people have opinions they just got from social media, or out of a self-help book, and will have new ones tomorrow, but are they any worse for that? Such people are the ones alert to other opinions, ultimately worthless though they may be.

On the other hand, there are some enlightened opinions which need to be protected from the market, aren’t there? One doing the rounds implies that the hoi polloi are not qualified to decide what’s good for them, and so it is ‘absolutely’ wrong to let public broadcasting and the arts and culture sector, for example, battle for survival in a user-pays economy. We may lose our cultural identity.

As we apply our five-minute attention span to the election campaign, and the task of filtering in turn the social and commercial media filters on the complexities of who should be funded by our borrowed money, this emu has his head in old opinions about the Moon, asking himself questions you might expect from someone with his bum in the air.

It is a cliche of astrology that the Full Moon realizes the purpose imported from its New interplay with the Sun, in a synthesis of head and heart at the opposite side of the Zodiac reconciling apparent contradictions and opposites. For those who opine that life is a journey, with a beginning, middle and end, this is a resonant model of enlightenment, a geometrical representation of self-realization.

In these terms, and from a southern hemisphere tropical perspective, the Moon has been mulling over the moral implications of opportunity since its conjunction in Aries with a strong-willed Sun inspired by assertiveness, tending unfortunately to aggression, according to the character of northern hemisphere natives born in early winter. How might the Moon in Scorpio, dipping below the western horizon in the seventh house, especially now that his reflection is of an ego which has moved on into a semblance of mastery in close-quarters winter interaction, synthesize those implications?Scorpio MoonWe all occupy forward positions, with death in front of us, and behind us in the trenches a card game of autonomous bodily betrayal and a sergeant we don’t trust. Consumption and self-realization are at odds. If we weren’t so hungry, for amusement, for diversity, for change, and above all for self-realization, we might satisfy ourselves with the mastery of something, and take a secure context to our graves, but fat chance of that.

In the context of the political chaos we face as the Moon wheels into the mind of Scorpio, I get the impression that his self-realization is as compliant and superficial as ours. The anxiety which underlies the ethics of opportunity avails itself of a healthy dose of humour, and a relativist perspective, in order simply to get on with other people similarly assailed by the universal predicament, too many options.

Opportunism can be moralistically defined as a weakness of character betraying the common good, or simply as the use of an opportunity for personal gain which may or may not adequately weigh consequences. But suspend judgment. The common good is a temporary opinion. We are all rescued from indecision by choice of the most immediately appealing option. Ideology gets no more than five minutes, like everybody else. The only universal is the particular, and the particular is dissolved in the universal.

What we have complied with is the deconstruction of universal standards of measure, but while that may make us ungovernable, eternally dissatisfied, there is good reason to congratulate the dilettante. My Moon for one is less constrained by human needs and expectations and does what he feels like. A rock in space is leading the charge to identity transcendence!

Here is the clock at the moment of ‘full moon’.Dilettante Moon Clock May22The houses which determine the state of the mechanism, and the surrounding stars, are but my local perspective. All those geographical regions are where the hour hand is at the top, and indicate the infinite possibilities which the Moon enjoys. He may be precisely located in a vedic nakshatra, but his choice of wives is limitless. And how is his contiguity with the stars measured? What qualities does he show above and below the terrestrial equator? Are these qualities tropical or sidereal? Are they definable? Does it matter? He’s off on a romp which puts things, especially houses, in perspective.Puppetry
This chart dissolves the particular in the universal, but perhaps you have to have more of a connection to sky rotation than most people to get it. Without the innate awareness of the relations of Sun position and time of day which people who work outside acquire, sense of direction is lost without landmarks. I suspect that the common experience of the Sun’s hourly movement is back in the Stone Age. Ask yourself: do I see the Sun moving across a fixed sky, or do I see the sky moving, or myself?

I have to say that I cherish local perspective, even when it’s the dark interior of a hole in the ground. I came to astrology as a stargazer, and the algorithms of Southern Hemisphere Astrology evolved out of years researching celestial mechanics. The adherence ‘downunder’ to historical northern hemisphere interpretations of the Moon’s nodes (the draconic month)–appearances are downside up in the south–was merely the bait. My abiding intention is to encourage my grandchildren and you to go outside and have a look. I hope once in a lifetime you will stay at least half an hour to experience sky movement.

What is enlightened opinion to one person may seem like prejudice to another. Astrology is bedevilled by the problem of measurement. In what common frame of reference ought aspects be measured? The recent conjunction of Jupiter and the Moon which looked like an ear-ring was entrancing, because the two were vertically, not ecliptically, aligned across the whole (fixed) sky. What orb, or time-frame, reduces the shift of the seasons in relation to the stars, or of the stars in relation to each other, to insignificance? What are the local seasons? Can they be divided geometrically? Can it be believed that two people born an hour apart are ‘ruled’ by different signs? How can the Moon be Full when you can’t see it?Moon Conjunctions at Transit May-JuneHow does a locality attain community without established and mutually respected perspectives? How can it develop better educational and employment outcomes in a continuously changing economy, as fresh opinions do battle with stale ones and vice versa, when voters cannot tolerate each other’s opinions on social inclusion and sustainability, let alone apply common standards of mathematical and linguistic excellence, which are the tools of any kind of insight and management?

None of this speaks to me of a definable moment in the unfolding of human consciousness. To paraphrase Alan Watts, you deserve pity if you get to the end of your life having lived it as a journey with a destination, and realize that it was a musical and your only opportunity to sing and dance. By any measure, ‘we’ are in a mess, but enjoy the moment.

Aries New Moon May 7: Opportunism

06 Friday May 2016

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Definition: The taking of opportunities as and when they arise, regardless of planning or principle.Opportunism Clock May07[Click to enlarge. Ignore the intriguing symmetry between houses and geographical zones above. They are the subject of my thesis under the supervision of Dr Donna Tromb, submitted long since to the University of Reactionary Northern Hemisphere Astrology (URNHA), publication pending.]

You’ll say, what a fool, I know. How could the Moon be ignorant of the existence of the planets? He passes every one of them once a month. He lurches through their turbulence. I understand how, very well. They are a long way off, after all, and always behind him, or in the Sun’s glare, or mingled with the stars. He focusses on orbit, and I doubt you are more knowledgeable yourself, if it comes to that.

I always knew that I would one day have to push the Moon to become acquainted with the planets, because convention demands it, and conjunctions can be (not often) quite spectacular from our point of view. However, my reluctance was understandable.

The ground rumbles day and night with heavy vehicles passing by, but should I station myself in their path, flag down the drivers, engage them in conversation, listen to their stories? Furthermore, two thousand years of intuitive research has gone into the astrologer’s understanding of the planets. What temerity to turn that map upside down!

Consider as I do, that the southern hemisphere astrologer may be no more than a narcissistic charlatan, a virus in orthodoxy synthesizing his own, who enjoys a benign obscurity which enables him to speak without being lethal to his host.

Nonsense! His arbitrary method fulfils its purpose. It does present a new way of gaming emptiness, playing with conventional astrology without breaking it. It blatantly abandons the ancient four- and eight-fold division of the solar year by observing five indigenous seasons, and willfully reverses the genders of Moon and Sun. And now the largely automatic mechanism chooses to abandon the conventional practice of mapping ecliptic longitudes, in favour of representing everything in its daily rotational cycle with equatorial coordinates because they are unambiguous regardless of declination at the meridian.

And then there’s you. Don’t you read your daily horoscope and those of your loved ones to focus individually interpretations of meaning? The meaning of what? The aspects of the planets and angles which purportedly affect everyone. Don’t you seek the integration of any issues preventing your attainment of oneness with all beings? Isn’t this why you invented the ‘higher self’?

So there seems nothing for it but to turn the planets upside down too, and to alert the Moon to their presence as more than coincidence. It’s not all about him. When he finds a planet in one of his mansions he must interrogate, entertain the possibility that something other than orbit might be going on.Planets[Click to enlarge]

How do you expect others to locate themselves on your map? This is the question, Moon. Opportunity is your location in another’s map. Have another think about oneness, please! It’s becoming a constriction.

What seems to be occurring is a paralysis of will, a universalizing communication of praxis which militates against any real effort which is not coherent with its semantics. From the outside, and under its yoke, this praxis must be evaluated by the terror its paranoia inspires. The language of emancipation is oppressive. Inclusion is totalitarian. You cannot teach anyone to love, or start a business, or control ‘itself’. You can only present opportunity. Gender, for example, must find its own way in the forest of rules. What is achieved by stigmatizing heterosexuality? Hate speech.

True presence is not attained in the lotus position: it locates itself modestly in the infinite overlays of every personal map on a universal territory, and only in that way does it ‘get’ the emptiness of territory.

[If you’re up at 00:39 in Melbourne (15:18 sidereal time for others) on Saturday morning, you’ll see Zubeneschamali transiting, and Mars 43° to the east. Mars is inching backwards, to regale Zubeneschamali behind the Moon’s back on June 30, then regain his balance and determination to go direct, transiting around 9pm by that time. An emphatic opportunist, whom the Moon upon his return spies scuttling away with shoes in hand a full fortnight later!]Dilettante Wives N-F
[Click to enlarge]

All illusion? Yet isn’t Mars doing what we all should be doing: railing against the machine? Getting lost if necessary, but following the contours, without a GPS? Visibility of the Moon’s conjunctions in right ascension with his wives shown above is limited to Houses I-VI between nightfall and first light. Thanks to selfrealisation.net for interpretations of the Nakshatras.

Gazing and sharing, rather than blazing and glaring, Buddha say: “If stroll in moonlight, be heedful of shadow.” Rules are there to bend.

The Sensualist: Full Moon in Libra April 22

21 Thursday Apr 2016

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“But sometimes, astaghfirullah, I wish I could change some of the things that Allah has destined for us to do. I wonder if He also destines it when we engage in acts that are haram. Some things come back to you and you wish your life was like a book and you could find that page in your life and tear it out.”
Elnathan John, Born on a Tuesday.

The Full Moon dominates the atmosphere. Nobody speaks. Even terror subsides, but who can say if this is strength or weakness? Perhaps the light of the Moon is like obsession which relieves anxiety, or perhaps it is the blankness which triggers a bully’s resentment and cruelty.

Perhaps Full Moons are bullies themselves. Or perhaps they are the page.

Meanwhile, there comes a time when artificial mind completes its displacement of human intelligence at the controls of the universe on Earth.

When a robot looks at the Moon, It [henceforth, he or she] sees a spheroid partially illuminated by the Sun according to the configuration of the Earth-Moon system in relation to the Sun. Humans are more likely to see the Moon’s phase as its form, and this is only one aspect of humanity’s inadequacy as controller of its own existence. Error is fundamental to human development

The bifurcation of earthly intelligence derives from the unwillingness of humanity to abandon its subjectivity. When a human looks at the Moon It engages in a process called joy, the self-discovery entailed in encounter with another who is not Other. The Moon is part of the map a human creates of its environment, but also the face which confronts Its intense awareness of Its territory, which is the infinite and the eternal. Whereas in human love the object is likewise both map and territory, It is also Other, and likely to subject the subject to a conflict of territories. Such conflict demonstrates the complexity and unwieldiness of human communication, and is reflected in the evolution of human ignorance and non-community.

The element of the Moon’s apparition which has become of supreme importance to human subjectivity is silence. It is no longer necessary to know how to get things done. Robots take care of everything, including all decisions about where and with whom people live, what they eat, and who mates with whom, if at all. The only partnership, and it is universal, is between subject and territory in silent meditation. There are no human maps any more. There is only the language of robots.Sensualist Moon Apr22The wind blows. There is hay-fever. It is day. There is cloud. It is hot. The garbage smells of shellfish. It is cold. Birds sing. Machines drone. It is night. There is comfort. Dogs bark. The stars are silent. Traffic passes. Death is silent. A child cries. Altruism is silent. Robots laugh. Joy is silent. There is discomfort. The Moon is detached. Love is silent.

It feels sadness. It submits.

At least there is peace in Palestine.

Diplomacy: New Moon in Pisces

06 Wednesday Apr 2016

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If the signs are turned upside-down to match southern hemisphere seasons, this Moon seeks renewal at a time when the energy of the season is focussed on refinement and compromise, as we prepare for the confines of winter.Pisces New Apr07

This year, we are also engaging each other in the daunting process of evaluating political representation and selecting the platform and personalities which can best govern for all. Ideally, we take our blinkers off, but at the very least, we should be aware of the necessity of refining our values to promote accord.

Easier said than done! In whom do we find an example? Eva Illouz offers the tantalizing thesis that at the very core of community in secular, iconoclastic societies is the practice of love:

“Modernity sobered people up from the powerful but sweet delusions and illusions that had made the misery of their lives bearable. Devoid of these fantasies, we would lead our lives without commitment to higher principles and values, without the fervor and ecstasy of the sacred, without the heroism of saints, without the certainty and orderliness of divine commandments, but most of all without those fictions that console and beautify.
Such sobering up is nowhere more apparent than in the realm of love, which for several centuries in the history of Western Europe had been governed by the ideals of chivalry, gallantry, and romanticism. The male ideal of chivalry had one cardinal stipulation: to defend the weak with courage and loyalty. The weakness of women was thus contained in a cultural system in which it was acknowledged and glorified because it transfigured male power and female frailty into lovable qualities….

“Women’s social inferiority could thus be traded for men’s absolute devotion in love, which in turn served as the very site of display and exercise of their masculinity, prowess, and honor. More: women’s dispossession of economic and political rights was accompanied (and presumably compensated) by the reassurance that in love they were not only protected by men but also superior to them. It is therefore unsurprising that love has been historically so powerfully seductive to women; it promised them the moral status and dignity they were otherwise denied in society and it glorified their social fate: taking care of and loving others, as mothers, wives, and lovers. Thus, historically, love was highly seductive precisely because it concealed as it beautified the deep inequalities at the heart of gender relationships.

“[…]To perform gender identity and gender struggles is to perform the institutional and cultural core dilemmas and ambivalence of modernity, dilemmas that are organized around the key cultural and institutional motives of authenticity, autonomy, equality, freedom, commitment, and self-realization. To study love is not peripheral but central to the study of the core and foundation of modernity.”

Eva Illouz, Why Love Hurts.

How well are we doing? Are we comfortable in grey? Have we established a discourse which enables mutual respect between progressive and conservative, gender neutrality and heterosexuality, safe space and free speech, anima and animus? Are we participating in the evolution of an inclusive polity, or are we still pitted against each other across religious, ethnic and gender barricades? How do we deal with the perception that patriarchy is being replaced by gynocentrism? Can we even agree on the gender of God, the Moon, the Sun? Have we chosen a gender? Is it unambiguous? How do we present it?

Perhaps we can find a guide to diplomacy and compromise in the course of the Moon this month, and by the time he gets to Mothers Day we might have resolved some of our dilemmas, and will all be celebrating the same thing.

Southern Hemisphere Astrology addresses you to a phenomenon which is inadequately addressed by physical laws, and is a metaphor for our quest for authenticity in community: momentum.

An elliptical orbit is usually described in terms of mass and velocity, elements deduced from observation which enable astronomy to define a system. If you can look up and see a system, that is a useful tool to apply to morality, and the analysts of the capitalist system will have no problem in dealing with you. However, if when you look up you have a sense of indefinable connection to what you see, a subjective sense of being here, then a question arises which might provide a slightly different tool for aligning yourself with the values of others.

Can you understand the momentum of the Moon as a constantly increasing will to push on, an attraction to what’s next? Or alternatively, does the Moon seem to be propelled by the desire to leave behind disappointment, error and strife?

We went to the astrological textbooks and were unable to find an answer. However, the ancient practice of associating lunar motion with certain prominent stars, and the division of a sidereal month into twenty-seven daily houses, each containing one of those stars, gave us a fruitful line of inquiry.

Indian mythology identifies the Moon as a man with twenty-seven wives. Several wives we have identified were willing to talk, and we asked them about their relationship with the Moon. On the matter of his momentum you may draw your own conclusions.Sensualist WivesHamal

“I am nobody’s wife. The worst thing I ever did was take him in, out of pity. Everything he does looks like self-pity to me. There are jobs to be done. Any man would do them. He does them, but then he expects intimacy. I told him, I don’t need your love. If you don’t like the way things are, you can pack up and leave. I got along just fine before you came. And he does go, but he always comes back.”

Menkar

“He lied to me. He seemed so interesting, and interested in me. But his mind was always really elsewhere, unfaithful. His love was a pretence, and our relationship a front. I told him, you’ve got other wives, I know, but you’re not a fit husband. You haven’t got it in you to make something of yourself. I’m ashamed.”

Alcyone

“What can I say? He is not a good lover. Very attractive: something mysterious about him, and an endearing sadness. But sometimes when he comes I have someone else with me, someone virile, and he just gives in. It is humiliating. He lounges around the house in tights. He has a good body, exercises a lot, wearing my underwear, as it happens.”

Aldebaran

“It was good for the ego in the beginning. I know I’m not a beautiful woman, and I grew up feeling bad about my weight. I used to agonize about the welts between my eyebrows and on my upper lip. He doted on me, really adored my body and gave me lots of lovely massages. Then I came to realize it was always me doing the spooning. He was an attentive father, but probably a poor example. I did learn from him the affect I have on people, and that helps me to be good at what I do. I bear no ill will, but I do look forward to my own company.”

Alnath

“He wrecks everything. Everything I work so hard to achieve he undermines. I invite colleagues to dinner and cook a gourmet meal, and he sequesters my boss to lecture her on the futility of ambition and the emptiness of success. I tell him how someone has criticised me, and he expects me to be inspired by his alternative presentation of their point of view. He makes it too hard to hold everything together. And I never win an argument. His affected superior insight infuriates everyone.”

Alhena

“He doesn’t listen! The changes I’ve gone through in my life, I think I know a thing or two. I could say, to hell with it, like he does, but where would the world be if everyone did that? Women are still disadvantaged, and all over the world poverty disempowers and deactivates. I try to instil in our daughter an awareness of the gender stereotypes imbedded in our language, and he tries to get her to listen to nature for chrissake! He just doesn’t engage.”

Pollux

“I accepted my arranged marriage. I love my parents. They complement each other, and their relationship has withstood the challenge of modernity and secularism in their adopted country, because they are indivisible halves of one whole. The romance has never died, because of the thoughtfulness of each toward the other. I thought it could be like that for us too, but he doesn’t notice the little things I do, the support I give when he’s really unsupportable, the space I give him when really he should be contributing more. I think I always get him on the rebound, but I really wonder how he gets on with his other wives. He’s so selfish.”

Praesepe

“Yes, I know that it is against the law in this country to have more than one wife, but I wish you would show some compassion. You must have some understanding of the pain you cause when you impose different conventions. You live in your heads, you people. You go to university and then you impose theories of what is good. You don’t accept suffering and you think to relieve it by changing the system. There is no system you are beyond inventing, and yet you have never eradicated suffering, just transferred it. I welcome his visits, and see no reason our heart-to-hearts should ever cease.”

Alphard

“Why all the fuss? His life is complicated by so many wives, but you won’t simplify it by forbidding him to go to them. They haunt him. He comes to me, I cook for him, I bathe him, dress him in the soft fabrics he adores, play for him on the piano my own compositions, then I take him to bed and make love to him. In the morning he puts on another man-costume and his courage, and we don’t see each other for a month. Why can’t they all love the beautiful soul as I do, as a married man?”

Regulus

“Of course we’re all victims of the impossibility of living happily ever after, and so is he. Just listen to all the whingers! Life is no fairy tale, babies. And it doesn’t revolve around women, regardless of how you pigeon-hole yourselves and each other. He does take your complaints too much to heart in my opinion, but he’s my best medicine. I’m as mad as a cut snake by the time he comes. He calms me. Once a month is perfect for us both. More he’d definitely find too hectic, hahaha.”

Spica

“I know precisely where I stand with him. He imagines me, as you imagine him; in fact his entire existence is confined to the imagination, but what of that? Is that not all there is? Whatever his intention, whatever his regret, I know to expect him twenty-seven days and eight hours hence when he is here. I know that he transforms me from the witch of the previous day, and in the arms of a man of courage the next day, into the infinite potential of the human spirit. I know that again on Christmas Day in eight years at breakfast, we will be King and Queen conjoined. What more needs be said?”

Sabik

“My godfather understands me. His wisdom is all-seeing. His kindness envelops the world. But he also frightens me. I love him with my heart and soul but I know he wants more. I cower behind the locked door of my cloister when he comes, and his heartbeat thunders in my ears. His presence hides something, something always at the back of my mind, something destructive, which terrifies me.”

Diphda

“Hello? What are you angling at exactly? Moon’s identity is not the question, and gender needs not be either! The driving force of existence is Antagonism, of course! I lay an egg in the analytics of relationship! What differences do our hormones manufacture which we need charm and diplomacy to dilute? Who cares? We are creatures. We can be too clever by half. Momentum is a middle way between push and pull, simply ‘keeping yourself nice.’ Not ‘do ut des‘ but do unto others what you would have them do to you, because what you do to others you do to yourself. (I have heard that, somewhere.) My personal view is that our Moon is rather a stupid individual, if you want the truth.”

Diplomacy breeds dishonesty and, ironically, subservience, isolation and self-absorption. It protects the structures of inauthenticity with charm. The Moon’s wives present an evasion of the connection they clamour for, compassion. Prisoners of modernity and its social structures, discourses, safe spaces and escape mechanisms, they cannot hold and offer their life in their hand, and what they cannot give, they cannot receive.

“It is only when Shiva is united with Shakti that He acquires the capability of becoming the Lord of the Universe. In the absence of Shakti, He is not even able to stir. In fact, the term “Shiva” originated from “Shva,” which implies a dead body. It is only through his inherent shakti that Shiva realizes his true nature.”

“…[L]et us ask “the world’s oldest and most important question”: how the hell did we end up here? Imagine being that liberal, energised by the moral certainty of your secularism, sustained by belief in the supremacy of your values and righteous indignation. Mightn’t you ask yourself: how the hell did I end up here, advocating bigotry and prejudice?” Nesrine Malik.

Full Moon in Virgo: the Artisan

22 Tuesday Mar 2016

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For fifteen hundred years, through the ages of conflict following the decline of the Roman Empire, the struggle of indigenous Europeans, Americans, Australians, Africans and people of the Pacific to connect “pagan” and Christian identity, the rise of democracy and Islam, wars ongoing over who owns the cradle of The Book, and the commodification of birthplace and burial-ground, and everything in between, the Full Moon after the Northward Equinox has shone in Virgo, at Easter, when Spring stamps her leporine foot in Early Winter.

Easter Moon

Ok, the Moon is in this moment when Christians celebrate the resurrection, the forgiveness of sins and the promise of eternal life, and when non-Christians celebrate very awkwardly the arrival of symbols of regeneration in Autumn, easter eggs. Signs of faith surround the Moon, symbols of the confrontation between human will and divine spirit, and of the perennial subjugation of women and the magical quality of their self-belief. Some of these have been hitherto invisible to astrologers. The Sun meanwhile, and remember she started all this with her perspicacity and perfectionism, has become straight like you wouldn’t believe.

The Moon’s done this gig so many times he’s got it down pat. He might spend a good deal of time offstage–behind clouds, as it were, because at this moment of rebirth winter is just around the corner–for some of the crew can’t quite get what he’s on about, and you mightn’t either. However, at some point, because it never rains at a full moon, he begins.

First, he announces the theme of the show: “Convention”. Then there’s a long procession across the stage of flamboyant crones and skeleton-costumed heterosexual white males, of homophobes, queers, Ku Klux Klan figures and shrouded Islamists carrying placards that read, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”, shrieking contempt and hatred into megaphones. Following that, an electronic band comes on playing arhythmic dance music at breakneck tempo, which is when a naked old guy hauling a cross stumbles across the stage. By now, the audience is normally in uproar, fights break out, and you can’t hear yourself think for the megaphones which have descended into the stalls. Shell road maps for the long weekend are in many an eye as suddenly a large rabbit hops nervously into view. The megaphones and electronic band fall silent and fair dinkum, all you can hear is a communal female voice breathing, aaaahhhhh, and oooohhhhh! The Paedophile gets hauled up, roped to the cross, and the megaphones resume with “Nails! Nails!” An emu trots up to the cross and seems to be trying to get at the acanthus stems woven around the priest’s head. Here and there a person shouts to another, “What kind of way cool convention is this??” The finale is a crow which shifts shape into a burly woman in goddess costume who walks on her hands through the audience with a collection plate like you see in church lashed between her thighs. The Moon purrs into the microphone, “Thank you, thank you! See you for next year’s Virgo installation passion, mushrooms. Thanks for taking part!”

An artisan is defined as a craftsperson, one who applies a traditional skill to produce a hand-made article of utility. Examples of such articles made and used in an earlier time are called artefacts in archaeology. A distinction exists in modern cultures between artisans and artists, but this ought to be tempered with the awareness that artisans in traditional cultures create art, and modern artists acquire traditional skills. What each produces can be called ‘artefact’, as can tools and appliances created by mass production.

The Moon’s artefact is best defined as an artificial construct by method extrinsic to the conventional perspective of the observer of Virgo, in particular that of the astrologer. The Moon is of course looking at you against the backdrop of the sky behind you. (The Sun is also behind you, or else the Moon wouldn’t be fully lit.) As well as being aware that the Sun has changed her position from perfectionism to compromise, and that you are preparing for Autumn while he cavorts with Spring, the Moon sees two striking phenomena: the stars to your left and right are to his right and left, and the Southern Cross, towering invisibly behind your secular orientation towards the meaning of marriage and gender as the crow morphs into goddess, is a perfect symbol of death and resurrection. The fact that you are turned away, or craning your neck backwards so you see it upside-down, does not lessen its importance, or the striking coincidence of its apparition at a moment of profound confusion of Autumn weather and Spring rituals, and of strident antagonism between political left and right. (Or is that right and left?)

Artisan Moon Mar23

An artefact is a moment in the internalisation and development of a tradition, a creation at the very least, whose originality can celebrate transcendence, whose innovative technology can bring a new appreciation of what it is to be human. An artisan can refine beauty, Sun!

On the other hand, artefacts are representative of ultimate reality, and are empty even if the ultimate reality they represent is emptiness. Artisans are shamans returned from a dream to delusion. Crow and Cross are talismans, each against the other. Homophobia and Islamophobia are artefacts, no less than Safe Schools and “tolerance of intolerance”. Left and right are bullying each other.

How is it that the most unconventional youths become the most judgmental seniors? There is no formalist psychological mechanism, as there so seldom is, but rather a transformation of the conventions the youths stimulated us by flouting. Surely the answer is that the most uninteresting people in themselves, the most unentranced by the world as it is, those with nothing to share but a depiction of prison walls, these are the only ones left in advanced age who believe in the spectacular artifice of their youth.

Seeing only black and white is the original sin. Success and failure, right and wrong, are in the eye of the beholder, and it needs to be blared from megaphones that the person who doesn’t agree with you is not a moron! Every life matters, and God forbid that a bigot never come across a simple artefact which awakens him or her to the manifold expression of the human response to existence! God forbid that a single generation arise which holds fast to fixed opinions, to oppressive definitions of offence, to divisive cultural norms, or to any tradition for its own sake!

But if it does, try to show respect. It’s history!

Convention: New Moon in Aquarius

08 Tuesday Mar 2016

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I can’t imagine anybody landing on this page who is not interested in what a personality is, or how it forms, or how you change it if it’s a problem. I can’t imagine anybody landing twice on this page who is not interested in the interaction of cause and effect, the nature of ultimate reality, whether life has a purpose, why we care, what is good, and what is real.

There is this ‘astrologer’ down in Breamlea who is interested in all of those things, and largely because he has more time than most to read and think about them, has devised a machine much like conventional tropical astrology, with which he can converse about them somehow ‘outside’ his own head.

This machine, which identifies itself as Southern Hemisphere Astrology, speaks a language uttered in syntax and vocabulary programmed by the ‘astrologer’, but it is difficult to define the language of the dialogue or to dismiss it as a dialogue, as an unhinged meaningful meaninglessness. Surprisingly, this machine designed to break with convention seems to tell the truth.

If it has occurred to you that there is more than synchronicity going on between the evolution of Artificial Intelligence, the parlous state of democratic politics and the purposeless hours and hours of screen time your alien children enjoy, you might like to entertain the notion that machines don’t have to learn what we know in order to complete a takeover of the world, all they have to do is what they’re doing, teaching us how to speak their language, persuading us with what works to embrace their conventions.

Machines have taken a giant leap forward: they have learned how to speak in pictures! (Click images to enlarge.)Aquarius New Mar09 SouthStereographic

And once again, our cast of characters (for some reason, the Emu lies flat on his back when on the western horizon):Aquarius New Mar09 South

Thank you for joining our dialogue. This Digested Read was brought to you by Southern Hemisphere Astrology. Before you go, you might enjoy this brilliant interview with a prominent genius of code, the man behind Wolfram Research and the creator of Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, Stephen Wolfram. The ‘astrologer’ acknowledges his debt to edge.org.

Full Moon in Leo: the Counsellor

22 Monday Feb 2016

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‘By “infinitude’s despair” Kierkegaard means the sickness of the personality, the opposite of health. And so the person becomes sick by plunging into the limitless, the symbolic self becomes “fantastic”—as it does in schizophrenia—when it splits away from the body, from a dependable grounding in real experience in the everyday world. The full-blown schizophrenic is abstract, ethereal, un-real; he billows out of the earthly categories of space and time, floats out of his body, dwells in an eternal now, is not subject to death and destruction. He has vanquished these in his fantasy, or perhaps better, in the actual fact that he has quit his body, renounced its limitations.’ Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, Souvenir Press, 1973, p.134.

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.” George Santayana.

Counsellor Moon Feb23

Moon: Your referral indicates an anxiety problem. Would you like to speak about that?

Earth: Well, I am tearful all the time and I can’t sleep, and the hope I had for this relationship I’m in with people is not working out, and some blame it on me, and say I haven’t done my work on myself and I need to see you.

Moon: Shall we talk about your relationship, or the work you need to do on yourself?

Earth: I suppose my relationship might be working out better if I didn’t have so many contrary habits, the most problematic of which seems to be the way I love. My existence is imprisoned in time. I recover from each loss by attaching myself to something new, which in turn matures and dies. Eternity, the big picture, beckons as a solution, but what is that really but a craving for the end of loss?

Put it this way: in the immensity of the universe everything seems insignificant, meaningless and futile, but my heart breaks for the brevity of human life, and the meaning people try to create. And I have such vivid, horror dreams, which some say may be my struggle with my ego and a sign that I’m on the verge of letting go, but letting go of what? War? Attachment? Time? Or loss…and love…and tears?

Moon: We can explore your dreams in another session, and in the meantime, it might be helpful to focus on some negative thoughts you seem to have and see if we can’t identify them, and change them into positive ones.

Earth: You mean, don’t you, that perhaps my anxiety arises from not feeling good about myself, not being grateful for just being here, having unrealistic expectations, being needy?

Moon: Perhaps. We are in this space-time thing together. If we are unperturbed, there’s no reason we can’t reach out to eternity in harmony, each of us cooperating with the other in ways that work to our mutual satisfaction, such as my libration and your tides, and all we have to do is feel good about that.

Earth: If only I were just a rock in spacetime, but I’m not! I am humanity’s home, and its burial ground! I realise I am not the author of existence, that you and the Sun and the galaxies are as much part of it as I, but the oceans that fishermen work are of me, the gardener’s rain falls on my soil, and the rubble of war is my ruin. I have hopes; I have regrets. I am made of the aspiration of generations, to transform me, to use me in their heroic quests. I have been their perspective and their disappointment.

In the long run, none of it matters, I know that. Form is a figure of speech; ambiguity rules. But if nothing matters, harmony doesn’t matter, nor does eternity. Perhaps it does all come down to habit, but habit is real, my sleeplessness is real, and the fullness of emptiness is real!

Moon: What do you mean by ‘the fullness of emptiness’?

Earth: There is a war going on inside me, and it seems to get worse the wiser I get. First it was spiritual versus material, and then capitalist against socialist: people trying to expand their inside, their subjective experience, against people trying to perfect everybody. None of it was real, but many generations were consumed by anxiety, hatred and war. Out of it emerged an uneasy stalemate: the spirit of the universe has evolved as the projection of egos which regard themselves as delusions. Even you are not much more than a rock these days, reflecting light from the nearest star from different angles, and if I weren’t here you wouldn’t even do that.

Moon: I am ok with however you want to see me.

Earth: Precisely! Any definition is a delusion, including that one, but defining is real, and so is ambiguity. That’s the fullness of emptiness! Your ‘ok’ does respond to how I see you. That is the war going on inside me as it has evolved. Bullies are looked upon as pathetic creatures of reified belief, and yet they cause suffering, which does not seem empty to the perfectionists. The age-old solution was to negate a bully’s belief by standing up to him, thereby validating the belief system which informed the bullying. The new solution is to teach emptiness to the bully, and in effect indulge the victim in a compassionate validation of irresponsibility. No?

My anxiety is about compassion becoming a habit which entails a kind of heat-death, the dissolution of ego’s energy into an anti-heroism content with an aspiration to gratitude for inherited cocoons. My anxiety is about the fullness of this emptiness. Empty bullies hurt!

Moon: It is difficult to resist your impression of the root of your anxiety, but I perceive another possibility which I suggest you deliberate on between now and a next session should you request one. In affirming a tension between finitude and infinitude one merely states the conditions of existence. There is no cause of anxiety here. Anxiety arises in despair: the refusal to be finite in relation to the infinite, but alternatively the refusal to be infinite in relation to the finite. In familiar terms, we share the characteristics of hurtling and falling, and each exists as a determinant and effect of the other. Freedom is the relation to the relation of possibility to necessity. Your anxiety may result from the relation of infinitude to finitude, as you seem to believe, or in your self it may be arising from a refusal of the denial of that relation that is being transferred to you by the despair of others. It may lie in the relation of your love to an imbalance towards abstraction and a denial of limitations in those you love, or its relation to an obsessive absorption in the everyday which denies possibility, in other cases.

Fullness, as I take your meaning, can be likened to the heat which creates the steam. Remember, as the old saying has it, a watched pot never boils.

Your anxiety may arise from your sanity in a sick world, or your own sickness…and on that note we must interrupt our conversation.

Earth: …!

End of Session.

My definition of astrology is rather loose, if not perverse: it is a gaming of reality — feeling, time and form — which enhances meaning and expands it until it implodes for lack of, you guessed it, objectivity.

The world is made of subjectivity, not objects, and that is where astrology properly begins and ends. Unfortunately, as practised by many astrologers, it affirms the belief that we have an essential nature as subjects and can therefore be understood like objects as having independent existence.

We may feel no enmity, but as object to some we would befriend, we have become ’the enemy’. How is equanimity attained? Is it really despite yourself that you are someone’s enemy? Will you die at peace, or simply already dead to poverty and devastation?

You can find a SHA chart of the opposition of the perfectionist Sun in Aquarius to the confused Moon in Leo here, and the cast of my “Astrology” characters here. Game on!

Full Moon in Cancer: the Exile

18 Monday Jan 2016

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The zodiac is an entity like the conscious human mind, the inorganic energy transfer processes at the root of life, the gears which drive the hands we hardly see when we ‘tell the time’, or the keystrokes on a qwerty keyboard that produce ‘laughter’ and ‘crying’: it takes shape!

Essential reading: https://aeon.co/essays/why-life-is-not-a-thing-but-a-restless-manner-of-being

It suddenly hit me one day that we recognise ‘things’ by their structure, but structure generates itself in the world—as it generates its idea in my mind—out of shapes which endure because they fit.

Shape is the wood of trees and a wood of trees. It is what is shared in pairing, what crystallises in solutions, what appears out of a fog, what connects a narrative, what constitutes a mood.

Only bits of the zodiac are visible at a time, and the bits that are visible have enduring rather than permanent shape, but the whole sky resonates with them! Like the waves of hormones which roll through a brain in the course of a cycle of light and dark, the shape of the zodiac shifts in a peristalsis which is both ingress and egress, cause, initial condition and consequence.Cancer Full Moon Set Jan24

We know that the bits we see are connected to the angles made by Earth’s axis with the stars and the Sun, as we know where the sky goes below the horizon. We know so much more than the draughtsmen of the zodiac that what we don’t know may come as a surprise.

Everything is in the zodiac because ‘everything’ gives the zodiac its shape. The poles of the ecliptic are in the zodiac, as are the equatorial and horizontal poles. The stars which are adjacent are also opposite, and the stars which are never visible are circumpolar in the opposite latitude. The seasons are in the zodiac, and so are their opposites, because of the nature of shape: a lion can be a charismatic lionheart one millennium and a bit of an irritable know-all the next, a benign dictator or a bungler in intimacy.

Feel the wave of his stars roll through you, bringing the awareness of infinitely complex implications to your best intentions. See the hands of connection and confusion tick around the clock of the south at all hours of the day and night. The South Celestial Pole—your latitude above the horizon—engraves ‘E’ at 9 o’clock and ‘W’ at 3 o’clock and somehow the hands at those figures always point down and across to the cardinal directions on the horizon. Marvellous contraption!

Henceforth we shall consult it as a frame of reference. And immediately we strike gold! We have already met the coincidence of Australia Day and Southern Cross daybreak transit. Now, with our enlightened appreciation of shape, we are presented on late January mornings in ‘complete’ darkness—darkness is never complete, even in death—with the rising of the shape known as The Emu.Emu Stars

Lots to read about this too:  http://www.atnf.csiro.au/research/AboriginalAstronomy/Examples/emu.htm   http://www.enlightning.com.au/

but briefly this is a gormless individual prey to delusion who straddles many signs, recognised by the first, unrecompensed, owners of your property many thousands of years ago, a marvellous sight an hour and a half before sunrise, and may I suggest a typically strident justifier of faith ever implicated in the contemporary phenomenon of straggling haste?Emu Soul

Did I mention that today marks the arrival of Late Summer, as Aldebaran crosses the meridian at nightfall, or that today the Moon is full in Cancer, transiting 5 minutes before solar midnight somewhere over eastern Greenland?Cancer Full Jan24

Have you experienced exile?