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Southern Hemisphere Astrology

Tag Archives: Apogee

Rectitude: New Moon in Libra

31 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by abliq in Jupiter, Moon Phases

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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.

libra

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.

libra-new-stawell-oct31

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….”

libra-new-equatorial-solar-midnight-tanunda-oct31

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?

libra-new-equatorial-solar-noon-brazil-oct30

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…

peasant-moon-transits-melbourne-2016

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?

jupiter-heliacal-rising-parkville-oct31

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.

peasant-moonrise-at-apogee-breamlea-nov01

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?

safar-nov01

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!

 

The Ghost in the Machine

16 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by abliq in Uncategorized

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Apogee, Lilith, Nodes, The Moon

Did you see the eclipse?

Stripped of its light, the Moon was a rock in space, no more. But that space! One of the joys of stargazing, space usually reveals itself only to the intellect, unless the dimensions of the universe are profoundly grasped. On this occasion it was palpable.

The Moon shuddered huge in my night as a ship under its bunks shudders in deep seas. For that moment I understood the thrall of an eclipse to our ancestors, not only in its anxious challenge to a sense of order and in time the magnificent restoration of that sense by astronomy and mathematics, but in a bodily awareness of depth and mass and time and distance as one awful reality to make one’s very existence shudder, unmasked like the Moon.

This post wonders what it is really about, although its occasion is clearly the Moon’s next crossing of the Ecliptic. Is the Moon a dervish reeling inebriated in the divinity of the universe? Has he learnt his gyrations, or is he just trying to stand up? What comes first, the Moon or its orbit? How in fact do Lilith and the Nodes tell us what they have to say about existence?

I know I’ve discussed this elsewhere, but in conventional astrology, the position of the Moon’s nodes indicate the karma which needs to be transformed, what is overdeveloped and what underdeveloped. When the Moon is below the Ecliptic, we are subject to the inherited, the habitual, the traditional. When the Moon is above the Ecliptic, we hear our calling and are exhilarated to heed it.

Southern Hemisphere Astrology embraces this concept, but makes this day’s South Node the ascending one, or Dragon’s Head. Of all the discrepancies between Northern Hemisphere Astrology and our antipodean experience, this is the most glaring. There can be no argument.

However, it is not at all clear to me how any influence of the Nodes might manifest. Is it an important influence? I have read several persuasive attempts to meld different manifestations of the obligation and transformation inherent in karma to the characteristics of the Tropical Signs.

Unfortunately, even after turning everything right way up, I have a problem. It takes about eighteen months for the gyration of the Moon’s orbit to swing its nodes back a Sign. Attributing a nodal influence to Signs produces a static situation in which everyone deals with the same karma for eighteen months. Great for identifying generations, or universal moments in an unfolding of consciousness, if they’re your bag, but hour after hour, day after day? The elements of the Moon’s orbit are not static influences like Pluto or Neptune, but immediate and dynamic!

Trying to find psychic or spiritual resonances for what I can actually see in the sky, I really do look forward to the South Node for the uplift it presages. Watching the progress of the Moon in those terms, I chose at some point to respond to Lilith and the Nodes as elements of the Moon’s position. And so I have programmed my computer to generate results within parameters which are entirely arbitrary personal preferences, and which I could change at any time.

But could I? Is it possible that confirmation bias has already clothed my light-hearted parameters as discoveries or inventions? Is this how astrology evolves? Is this how you can be so mired in error that the ludicrous colonisation of Southern skies by northern seasons continues?

The following series of horoscopes for Friday April 17, when the Moon passes Perigee and South Node, shows how the nodal and apsidal influences morph as the Moon changes Sign and Quadrant.

Winter Vertex April 17Like all my horoscopes, this presents the constituents of a situation so simply that you can as easily muse on the keywords and then evade them, as play with combinations of them and ignite a narrative of your choosing.

The Moon is 30° before New; it is the middle of the night but only Saturn of the naked-eye planets is visible; Leo is low in the west, Scorpius high in the northeast. Lilith and the North Node are in conjunction in Virgo, which means that the Moon is at its most distant as it crosses the Ecliptic heading downwards. This sounds dreadful, but on the other hand, because it is heading downwards near the Spring Equinox in Virgo, the Moon will reach its lowest latitude at its highest declination in Sagittarius, which means it will reach its highest latitude at its lowest declination in Gemini, and there is some consolation in that.

The question is, in what way are the nodes and apsides real? A Virgoan can be expected to adhere to fastidious solutions to separation’s implication of impurity, and Virgoan karma focusses on avoidance, but these points are in the Constellation Virgo, not the Sign. Libran qualities for Lilith would be vacillation and ambivalence in conventional astrology, converting to Arian irritability and pride in Southern Hemisphere mode.

But let us ask the Moon! Does he conform to mathematical orbital rules, or does his mass and momentum swing his orbit around his waist like a hoop? Above, he is in Southern Sidereal mode in the 4th Quadrant, a Leonian Moon with Leonian Lilith and Leonian karma. His nodes remain in Pisces and Virgo, but their effect is expressed by his latitude in the Constellation he is in. Below, in Northern Tropical mode, he is approaching an Arian denouement.

Summer Vertex April 17

In the second Quadrant, The Moon juggles mirrored tropical influences, moving fast and about to boil over!

PERIGEE17Apr

In the third Quadrant:Winter Descending April 17

the Piscean nodal axis has something interesting to say about Librans.

And finally, isn’t it self-denial that makes compassion (rather than sympathy) such a challenge for transplanted “Arians”?

South Node April 17

Postscript:SOUTHNODE17APR_NORTHTROPICALSOUTHERN NODAL RESONANCESThe Ghost in the Machine, c’est moi!

Finding a face

14 Tuesday Apr 2015

Posted by abliq in Uncategorized

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Apogee, Lilith, Moon, Nodes

No sooner had the Moon expressed his internal grumble about the satisfaction-deficit of excess humility, than the clouds which had muffled his course for a week peeled completely from the early morning sky, the surf thundered encouragement, a great eagle soared up to accompany him, and his face blazed once more a youthful recognition of the world’s glory.

You make a fundamental mistake if you look at the Moon and see only a reflection of the Sun. Do still look, lest you never journey beyond your opinions, and one day you may see, not a rock enmeshed in our spacetime, not a being of indeterminate age and gender shuffling away, but your own reflection earnestly ablaze with one question, what ought I be about?

In The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard identifies a state of existence you might recognize, the state of being without purpose, of being in despair. Is the Moon in despair? Is he ignorant of eternity, celebrating regularity, dedicated to escape?

Of all the resonances, polarities and affinities proffered by astrology to serve as keys to the infinite, some but not all useless to unlock Southern Hemisphere shutters, I suggest you pay attention to the Nodes and to Lilith. In them you will find the Moon trying to follow his calling.

The Moon, just like us, is a tiny entity in the scheme of things, swept off his feet by the gigantic power of the Sun, but of two compliments he is deserving, just like you: firstly, he never ceases to steer himself, even though the current be overpowering; and secondly, just look around, untold physical reactions pay homage to him here on Earth.

He epitomises the activity of relating finite and infinite, of not just being conscious of the freedom he has in the system he cannot resist, but realizing himself in the doing of it.

I hope in trying not to describe or explain too much I do not succeed only in mystifying the anthropic links drawn in my horoscopes between the ever-changing locations of the Moon, the Node he most recently passed, and the Apogee where in the instant he focusses on his folly and our fault.

They are the Moon’s instincts…

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