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New Moon in Aries: Opportunism

12 Wednesday May 2021

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“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.…

It is happy for man that he does not know what the morrow is to bring forth; but, unaware of this great blessing, he has, in all ages of the world, presumptuously endeavoured to trace the events of unborn centuries, and anticipate the march of time. He has reduced this presumption into a study. He has divided it into sciences and systems without number, employing his whole life in the vain pursuit. Upon no subject has it been so easy to deceive the world as upon this.”

Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Gutenberg.

You pull over on a hilltop to take in the view. You are familiar with the geography, but the panorama fills your awareness with so much that you don’t know: values, intentions and functions imposed on the landscape by people you will never meet, living and dead. There is no clarity in country. Hidden in plain sight are privacy, family, opportunity and duty. Hidden in plain sight on the side of the road where overtaking motorists exercise caution in oncoming traffic are you and your astrology, the local, global and celestial contexts you impose on the patterns you see, the labours and refuges you theorize, and your interrupted journey itself.

In a way, your journey is just like the Earth’s, from the Moon’s perspective (and the Moon’s from Earth). Not to say that you go around in circles, but that your progress, though it be powered by gravity, internal combustion or the calories from breakfast, and mapped by waypoints called a and b, is measured by changes in the background, whether in space or time. So regular are these changes that from time immemorial popular belief has been seduced by the notion that they were created for your edification and control. Is astrology guilty? Do you really belong in a herd? Do the planets?

You might be angry if you weren’t so disgusted by fear of the anguish which, enthralled as you have been by the seductive growth of mystical connections, has so surprised you. You might direct that anger at a world which questions the rectitude of your state of mind and shows no inclination to conform to your dreams, or you might work with the anguish of a full-stop in search of a backspace and apostrophe to exclaim itself grammatically. In you, and around you, a conflict is raging, and the opposing sides have not identified themselves. Are these astral gates then battle lines between polarized forces? Are these bardo emotions personal or generic? On the bright side, they may be opportunistically confirmed because you can identify with them all.

Where do names and attributes come from, brainstem or frontal cortex? You may be sure, acculturated consensus notwithstanding, that when Indigenous Australians noticed the existence of variable stars, there were some who gave them names and told stories about them, but for most people there would have been nothing remarkable about changes in the sky, since nothing in country was, or is, permanent. Country is change. Over thousands of years, the “Southern Cross” at transit climbed higher and higher in the northern sky, until about 4000 years ago above where the 300-500 years old Corroboree Tree survives in Queens Way, Melbourne, it reached the zenith, and gradually it became more comfortable to see it in the south. Do you think it turned upside down? Did it shake any power structures?

How many identities do you have? How many more must you add to the intersection you call your Self before you feel your alienation, before your intellect collapses under its own weight, the weight of change, and you know the profound emptiness of being suspended in the arbitrary web of your own absence. Unless your feet know the emptiness of the dirt between you and the stars, get back in the car. You feel only your weight in your shoes, and so you will be safer on your backside. At least the underworld of your contribution to global warming may resound with the nostalgic hits of yesteryear as you proceed to point b, taking your conscious horizon with you.

The Southern Sign of the Constellation Aries, the domicile of the Ram and the Peasant Moon, is Scorpio, not Taurus. Mass circulation of Sun Sign horoscopes has captured the global population in Northern Spring, but just how important is your need to escape? Your reading of the quoted text by Mackay, so contemptuous of the peasants, has conflated opportunism and populism. Aggression might win an advantage in the manger where Autumn is trying to snuggle among the absent newborn while Ferdinand dreams of flowers, but hibernation is an equally attractive proposition. Populists may properly be regarded as opportunistic manipulators of ignorance and cynical exploiters of fear and resentment, but populism per se is misunderstood as ignorant and smug. Populism is empowered by a desire verging on the noble, to take an opportunity to integrate, not obey, a coming to attention with regard for a peasant Self without pretension to permanence, but which might withstand the desacralizing news cycle of doom, which, as we all know, trigger by trigger, activates our incoherent and piecemeal emotional response and threatens our very existence. Ah well, that’s Autumn Country for you.

New Moon in Aries: Opportunism

23 Thursday Apr 2020

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Sapias, vina liques et spatio brevi
spem longam reseces. dum loquimur, fugerit invida
aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero. Horace, Odes I xi.

[Be prudent. Let the wine flow. And since time is short, leave off far-reaching hopes. Even as we speak envious time has escaped us. Reap what the day offers and put as little trust as possible in the future. Trans. B. Muir]

For there are pleasures which they must have, and are afraid of losing; and therefore they abstain from one class of pleasures because they are overcome by another: and whereas intemperance is defined as “being under the dominion of pleasure,” they overcome only because they are overcome by pleasure. And that is what I mean by saying that they are temperate through intemperance. Plato, Phaedo. Trans. B. Jowett.

Goodbye Michelle it’s hard to die
When all the birds are singing in the sky
Now that the spring is in the air
With the flowers everywhere
I wish that we could both be there. Brel/McKuen.

In the Southern Hemisphere there is a trail leading from the high country, which lies in the direction of Sagittarius A, down across the ridges of Pisces into the meadows of the Ram and the Bull which line the River Lethe. All of the planets are strung out along this trail in this time of calamity, all of them obeying a primeval rule: mind the path! For the trail is precipitous, and fall is fatal. It only seems like yesterday the Full Moon was diplomatically avoiding the subject of castration with the old drifter on the ridge, Uranus, and here we are for the third and last time for 30-odd years in Aries at Ramadan, the two of us quarantined together, fasting in the jaws of apocalyptic pestilence, with the invisible stench of our homeless Father Sky a few days further down the track tainting the decomposing autumn sunshine.

Aries New Downhill Breamlea Apr23

You are welcome to dismiss this metaphor as a guide on your journey, for who would deny the narrative you are at pains to construct for your life? Alas, you may need a Covid-19 test if you deconstruct narrative as relative but cling to your own. Who on Earth began a ‘journey’ at your birth but your ancestors, jostling for reincarnation? And if we go back far enough, 4 billion years, yours are mine, so don’t take it personally when I scorn your journey! And does your journey have a social and linguistic background which makes your claim to ‘go your own way’ a little quaint? Don’t the seasons and the Covid-19 shutdown define it? Remember the Ramadan weather twenty years ago! And that the faithful are heading for the Lethe while Ramadan is working its way back to the Acheron!

If you think that opportunism is the cynical advantage of prevailing anxieties the unprincipled take to enrich themselves, then you are far from sharing the preoccupation with death that tempts the celebrants of enrichment into the giddy abyss of eternal forgetting. What is that smell? The stale toejam of the tragic bride, Andromeda, the bowels of her water-boarded mother, the crotch of homelessness and the hormones of a rutting ram! A lot of bull, perhaps? Is the pursuit of knowledge and truth the foundation of civilisation or the talisman it vouchsafes its loved ones as it lowers their impoverished corpses into the Underworld, or floats them away on the Lethe?

Aries New Richmond Apr23

I’ll grant you that when you came into this world what you didn’t know was very important. But as you leave this world it no longer seems important at all, does it? Even though an entire culture be evolving in the pursuit of the knowledge certain others seem to have gained by ignoring yours. There is a germ at the heart of every organism as resilient and adaptive as any virus: you are taught to know it as love. But its formula can be rephrased in terms of what love has taught you to fear, love as a disease overcoming its absence, the disease of limerence. Life has taught you not to fear, not to look down below the ridge. But limerence retreats to medical definitions, and thus do ‘we who are about to die’ fear dying of a virulent coronavirus. The opposite of love was never fear. Only intemperate individuals could cling to such an idea, as dark energy to matter seems to cling, because the opposite of love is its narcissistic dark temperance, silence.

To revisit the concept of ‘country’ as death meditation: if it is true that what you know, including what you instinctively or unconsciously know, is a collaboration between the world as it has formed you according to its needs, and you as you have formed the world according to your needs, then it is true to say that what you know is a constituent of what you don’t know, or that your essence is somewhere between the two, like the history of Australia before 1788, as the essence of a tree is in the quantum uncertainty of the sunlight of its chloroplasts, or as country grows the timber of its nearby star. I strenuously suggest you grab whatever low-hanging branch you can, because to be made of stars is to burn out like them. Better to warm like wood in the hearth of your desire, than to illuminate emptiness a million years after your death.

Aries New Chart Breamlea Apr23

And should I seem terse, or scarcely adequate to the leadership you desire, just continue in the direction you are heading, as you must, in fair weather and foul, under deluge and darkness, one foot in front of the other, on your journey, if the evasion of dizziness can be called a journey. Who did you think you were, once the plug was out of the bath, if not a variation on a universal theme? Strive, one foot in front of the other! Plant your foot carefully in the print of the horde! Live as though you hope for mercy! Carry a rooster in your bag! Saint Peter’s love has not been tested for limerence! Hello? You’re breaking up! God is saying goodbye! Carpe diem!

Opportunism: New Moon in Aries

15 Tuesday May 2018

Posted by in Bardo, Moon Phases

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Is life a journey? Does one day, month or year to another measure a distance, or does duration just go around in circles like the hands of a clock? What is this mysterious ‘Now’ the self continuously inhabits? Does it transcend time, or is it a piece in the journey’s jigsaw-puzzle? Is it ‘Country’? Is it emptiness? Is it no more than the struggle for existence between birth and death, or a moment of emergent Being as it learns and actualizes the interplay of an infinite array of evolving controls? A serious question: are you conscious or unconscious? In 17 days it will be 140 years since a ship’s apprentice by the name of Tom Pearce rescued Eva Carmichael, around 2 hours before a New Moon in Taurus, the only other survivor of the wreck of the Loch Ard. (No, they did not marry–read this eerie story, by Tony Wright, at the Sydney Morning Herald.)

Aries New Loch Ard Gorge May15

A similar configuration of the southern stars is visible all over Eastern Australia. Come on, quit your studies and social media conformity, and bow with me to hear the Kyrie, at journey’s end. Along the Shipwreck Coast an estimated 638 journeys ended in tragedy. I’m afraid you’re staging for a free-kick if you can’t budge from your ideological opposition to the invasion which resulted from the courage of your ancestors lucky to get here to spawn you. Our lives are a complicated mechanism, and if truth be acknowledged, we are a little rusty. We have too many conflicting theories of how it works, and as many therapies for its repair in situ, but having eliminated religion and sympathetic magic, even applying objective understanding to the emotions, we find the mechanism lacking in an essential input, the lubricant of communion, the sense of shared energy within, and the security of being another’s Thou which comes with the faith that we can get inside each other.

“Man needs vengeance like a tired person needs a bath.” (Baudelaire.) The ‘Realm of Hungry Ghosts‘, represented in my charts as the Houses occupied by the Sun when we’re usually asleep, is always operating in us unconsciously, and if you’re stuck with an insatiable desire for revenge, an unshakable belief that you could be the person you want to be if someone’s actions hadn’t denied the possibility forever, or you can’t help loving it when you see another person suffering, you may need to enhance your conscious connection with where your dreams come from. Try closing your eyes in a public place and imagining there is no way of measuring how far away the hubbub is; or try in conversation to be the person your interlocutor thinks you to be.

Here is a chart which represents where the European invaders on the Loch Ard might have thought they were on the morning of their death so far from home.

Loch Ard Ecliptic

The New Moon was soon to occur in Gemini, but there was nothing Springlike in the fog in which their journey ended, and no familiar Zodiac was lurking in the southern sky anyway. Woe at the Vertex (though it hadn’t been invented yet) was not an auspicious sign, but otherwise the portents for their new life in Terra Nullius seemed favourable enough. However, a local perspective tells a different story.

Loch Ard Equatorial

Sun and Moon were not highlighting the Ascendant House at all, but the Animal Realm, where taking yourself too seriously on awakening is a natural cover for ignorance, but it may have been the retrograde motion of dauntless Jupiter in relativist Capricorn and the idealist hunger of Cancer that did them in. Perhaps you should try to imagine this was you, but you should definitely eliminate the intergenerational trauma of not finding the Zodiac when you look to the south.

Aries New Kalgoorlie May15

Back to 2018, when the IAC and tropical astrology agree that the May New Moon occurs in Taurus (1° and 14.6° respectively), but I have the Sun 2½ days away in Breamlea Aries. The important thing is to know where we are, and that is definitely not in a seasonal quarter neatly divisible by three. Deep Winter in Victoria arrives in a week, but it came early, didn’t it? Not only Southern Hemisphere Astrology believes that Kalgoorlie ego and mood are contiguous in the Bardo Realm of Hell, but arcane powers as well.

Aries New Shanghai May15

The Bardo Houses are identical on the same meridian north or south of the Equator, a facticity of profound interest to forces for integration and harmonious difference. You may imagine what use in diplomacy might be made of knowing the unconscious mood of entire populations, and being able to project it from your own experience. Furthermore, I am not the only one who has established that the Houses are opposite on the same meridian the other side of the geographic poles.

Aries New Paysandu May15

In the age of artificial intelligence and psychological and virtual warfare, these elements of Being have not gone unnoticed. Moscow’s meridian passes through the Middle East, Washington’s through Cuba and Ecuador. I believe I am at the forefront of incorporating elements of Australian Indigenous wisdom in my self-examination, formatting Milky Way configurations with the cardinal directions of Country, but I cannot be at all sure of that.

To succeed in life you must assert yourself. Don’t worry about who your self is–it’s a passive, defeatist predilection to think of life as a set of rules to obey, or a race you’re not winning, especially if you’ve retired hurt. Life is not a straight line, but cycles within cycles, circles intersecting incongruent circles, and you must always be ready, like a fox evading the hounds, to leap sideways, from one merry-go-round to another, one treadmill to another. Opportunism is a characteristic of the ground of being. If you reflect on your addictions, you will know how opportunistically they multiply their positive reinforcements.

“So you don’t have to look painfully for some kind of stepping-stone; instead, a stepping-stone presents itself in your life. You have the confidence to start on the first thing that is available within your experience—if you know the geography or road map of developmental psychological structures.
…If you try to create something by will, you have to use accidents as a way of channeling yourself.” (Chögyam Trungpa, Transcending Madness.)

BARDO

Unconstrained by ego’s besieged battlements, the midnight mind

Hurls its toys against a nursery wall daubed

With experiments in defecation.

Try as noon might to wrest behaviour from dream

Boredom never surrenders

the puppet-strings of meaning.

 

[On May 19, when the Sun enters Taurus, until July 25, when it will be in Cancer, the nightfall Sun (12° below the horizon) will be in the House of Self-Improvement at the latitude of Melbourne. The naked-eye Breamlea First Crescent of Opportunism will be at 18:05 on May 17, but the Moon, in Taurus, will be in the House of Fear. At nightfall, 6° above the horizon, it will occupy its rightful place in the House of Self-Improvement. The nightfall Sun will be in House VII (Aggression) until Full Moon in Sydney (Campbelltown)-Margaret River, and all Lunar Month above Port Macquarie-Yanchep. Make hay while the sun shines.]

Aries New Moon: Opportunism

26 Wednesday Apr 2017

Posted by in Moon Phases, Seasons

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“Gurus Can Loathe Very Little Signs Of Spiritual Change And Preach A Totality.” Abliq.

“Reality conforms to precedent certainly, and you can analyze it that way, but it is not imprisoned by immutable laws or patterns, any more than identity is. Reality is what you make of yourself, and you are what reality makes of itself, moment by moment.

I mean by reality conforming to precedent that there is something akin to intention in the world. Form emerges according to pattern. The context of an emergent thing encourages relations and structures that are readily available, practised, in a word.

A seed is an intention; the form a tree takes is an accident. If you would see a thing, you must look to the processes creating it, and they are always relational in the same way that you can never define where one thing ends and another begins.

The existence of a thing takes form, but that form is the carcass of its creative process. A thing is an imprint on the world which has left its imprint on the thing. This to me indicates the essence of identity.” Abliq.

Sahih Bukhari (49:857) – “He who makes peace between the people by inventing good information or saying good things, is not a liar.”

“Opportunism is the exploitation of form.” Abliq.

“This little planet causes more problems than it is worth. The side tilted this way is emerging from ice and snow and you would think its people could just happily forage for food and be done with conflict, but their leaders are playing “Mine’s Bigger Than Yours”, teeming millions are on the roads, displaced by war, famine and climate-change, the shamans are at loggerheads over what is fundamental, and prophesy, competing for scarce funds, seems unable to restore calm.

Aries New Cardiff Grid Apr26

On the other side things don’t seem much better. Duty and self-indulgence have been their usual strange bedfellows during the summer. People haven’t made sufficient provision for the winter, and there will be anger and resentment boiling over when they are confined together and forced to share.

Aries New Te Teko Grid Apr27

They don’t take much notice of me these days, and I confess it wouldn’t matter to me if they wiped themselves out, but you’re closer to them, you do care, and they still look up to you. Do something new. You’ve already tried uniting them with polarities. That’s not working fast enough. Say something to them that will placate them. Make something up, if you want. They stopped trying to agree on truth a long time ago, but though they shirk it, they crave it. Go on, little man, give them something to believe in. Their meanings are failing them, and if they don’t lift their spirits, they’re doomed.

Aries New Dimbokro Clock Apr26

[The grid indicates the declinations of the constellations and the paths they take across the meridian. Much of Pisces and all of Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer and Leo will pass to the north, anti-clockwise with East on the right. What are the seasonal influences of March-August? Are they Northern or Southern Hemisphere, tranquil or aggressive, neither or both? Exegesis I, ii.]

That’s the style! Show them that their chaos might simply be a matter of facing the wrong way. Throw a bit of the others in with it: love, brotherhood, sisterhood, submission, everlasting life, success, affluence, celebrity, presence, healing, enlightenment, transcendence, emptiness. Use science and mathematics. They believe that. Restore awe, for God’s sake! Take a leaf out of the Artisan’s book and just make astrology work.

Aries New Dimbokro Country Apr26

Nice! You’ve got country, a powerful indigenous notion, and one to cleanse evil spirits who come to whisper young people away from rootedness in creation.

Aries New Darwin Apr26

[Where you are on a two-dimensional chart, your ‘country’ as previously described, is at the zenith of your sky. Darwin people facing north would have to crane their necks 10º backwards to see the Sun in Scorpius and Sagittarius, and a backbreaking 30º+ to see all of those constellations. In fact, much of Scorpius, not to mention the Moon at major lunar standstills, is south of overhead at many southern latitudes, even when the Ecliptic is not. Furthermore, Darwin has only two seasons, Wet (November-April, conventionally) and Dry (May-October). Can these be correlated with the direction of the Sun, south with Northern Signs in green and north with Southern Signs in yellow, or to the chirality of east and west and to apparent clockwise or anticlockwise Zodiac motion? Exegesis I, iv.]

Embodiment, nice touch! Transform two dimensions into three by lying down under the stars, head one way or the other. Turning reverently to the qibla of choice, like a code for pollen danced by bees. Suitably mystifying. Let them look up with their own eyes into the mind of God. If they question the seasons, we can always say you’re divinely inspired. Or that all prophets have been known to be wrong. Now, off you go. Good luck!

Sensualist Transits Parkville 2017

Perhaps The Prophet will bring everlasting nocturnal life! “The devil will be with you in a moment,” as the hunchback in The Tin Drum said in the lavatory.

Sha'ban

[The Sun obtains her peculiar power, not from her light and energy, but from her regularity, from the nutrients of night and day and the cycle of the seasons. We may no longer worship her, but we still experience her movement, just as we continue to think of time as clockwise. Convention records her annual passage through the Zodiac, as though country in the night sky were not more appropriate indication of our progress on this planet. Even her regularity is a projection, revealed to inquiry as deriving from the momentum of our tilted fall. It is Earth which deserves our reverence, and yet, like some atavistic matriarch, and like our own outgrown parents, the Sun still pulls strings in our unconscious. Exegesis I, i.]

 

Aries New Moon May 7: Opportunism

06 Friday May 2016

Posted by in Moon Phases

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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.