Tag Archives: Bardo

Drone Moon in Sidereal Capricorn

24 Saturday Jul 2021

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Perceived from an angular distance of 180 degrees, the Sun’s awakening to responsibility a fortnight ago seems incongruous, to say the least. She is more humble in Cancer, more attuned to the farcical Bardo of madness wound by the Earth’s solitary rotation which represents on stage for your delectation the irrepressible corruption of its inhabitants. Welcome to the cast, aromantics; so pleasing to see any identity emerge from the wings of limerence! Welcome, demisexuals, please line up with the aromantics towards stage-right where we can all see you in Self-Development. Clinging, quite naturally, should be neither sanctioned nor sanctioned, but expect the audience in the cheap seats to be primed to laugh. An influencer will be with you shortly.

Before influencers there were astrologers, who possibly inherited the wisdom of shamans. Where are we? Everyone wanted to know, but any answer was required to confirm and reinforce power. Has anything changed? Incidentally, the tryst of Venus and Regulus which divides life into eight-year orbits occurred on Thursday. It was invisible in south-eastern Australia, but we know it happened, don’t we? Did you see it? What influence did it have on you eight years ago? Sixteen years ago? Go on, drone, be your own influencer!

Here, it was evident to the shaman, but that question remains, oblique and disconnected in ways foreign to one intimate with the underworld. And isn’t that all of us? Do we not dream? Do we not do hourly battle with our emotions? Do we not have loved ones on the other side of the world? And yet we remain transfixed by the power of the tangible, grooming our diet, appearance and performance for a flight into history which someone else will probably make. Where others are is circumstantial, but here in the south-east of New Holland, where country is the answer to the question, we are amongst the first blooms of early Spring, if you hadn’t noticed. What? The seasons are changing? Get out of town!

In the beginning was the Emu, and among other coincidences, the right angles of Aquarius and Enif, and of Adhara, Wezen and Aludra, the diamond facet of Denebola, Spica and Arcturus, and the relationship of stellar visibility to the seasons. The beginning came before meaning, and yet it ordained meaning. You were ordained, how about that? No, not your sexuality, which was always fluid, and yours to play with as the influencers saw fit. But you know what? The way you felt when you got up this morning was ordained! The workers fed you in your wintry underworld, or they did not. Stand by, an influencer will be with you shortly.

At the risk of throttling another fish with its ordained plastic balloon, the obvious must be stated:

Check out the Signs and Houses. Yes, it would appear that it was ordained in the beginning that we would all be in this together, and that influencers would be needed to spell out our differences. Drones are such ‘warrior‘ wannabes, don’t you think? What do your influencers think? Careful! Try to avoid being struck by an emu when the Milky Way is in the Warrior configuration.

Is that not the very picture of us? Did you fear a shameful image of biomass annihilation? Totalitarianism? Corruption saturation? Don’t be perverse. Hearken to your influencer.

So that’s where we are! Confused? Wait please, good inhabitants of Sichuan with genealogies going back thousands of years, your influencer will be with you presently, whether or not you want your country and underworld validated. No doubt about it, he’s done well for himself.

Prodigal Moon in Sidereal Sagittarius

25 Friday Jun 2021

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Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
Oscar Wilde, De Profundis,1905.

On watch, with travelling sheep, my comrades all asleep,
Neither moon nor star illumed the summer sky:
My eyes I scarce had closed, tho’ I know I must
have dozed When a very strange procession passed me by.

First came a kangaroo, with a “swag” of blanket blue,
With a dingo, likewise loaded, for his mate ;
They saluted me and passed, saying they’d travelled rather fast.
And could not stay, as it was growing late.

An opossum and a crow sung a song,”The long ago,”
A frilled Jew lizard listened with a smile;
An emu, straying near, held his claw up to his ear.
Saying,”The prettiest song I’ve heard for quite a while”

… Just here there came a crash, as if creation had gone smash,
And leaping up I found I’d been asleep.
Twas the boss from ‘neath the cart, who woke me with a start,
Crying -“Charlie! where the blazes are the sheep ?”

From the original “Drover’s Dream”, Folkstream.com

“O Lieb auf grüner Erden.
Ich zieh’ in Krieg auf grüne Haid,
die grüne Haide, die ist so weit!
Allwo dort die schönen Trompeten blasen,
da ist mein Haus,
mein Haus von grünem Rasen!“

From “Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen“, Gustav Mahler, Des Knaben Wunderhorn. See translation at Hampsong Foundation.

Woe to the Sagittarius Moon! At his highest in the Southern sky, yet can he find no human spirit to soar with him. No romantic poet remains to march us gloriously out of our past; in fact, unable or unwilling to identify with the poverty and sins of the past, regardless of where we migrated from, we have wandered aimlessly into a Google dreamtime, uninitiated. Community is a strange label for populism. Who lives in our old bark hut? Who owns our land? What are they going to do with it? We don’t know, do we? Do entrepreneurs and their propagandist administrators whose nest-feathering has betrayed our trust–sold us down the river, as it were–belong in our community?

Cheer up. Yes, Winter’s here, bringing its usual privations, including Seasonal Affective Disorder, to add to those the whole world is experiencing in lockdown, and Jupiter’s gone retrograde. But that’s no reason to be overwhelmed by self-criticism projected onto the casual judgments of those significant others sharing your retreat from the cold. You are not a waste of your birthright if you have been doing what you were supposed to do, and even if you haven’t, isn’t that what you were supposed to do? Who in the visa queue dares know the contribution to carbon emissions justified by the urgent need to conjure their birth country in an eternal present?

The conventional Sign lumped on Sagittarius is partly right. Natives can tend towards withdrawal and melancholy, but not because of single-minded ambition to surmount arduous conditions, rather because their imagination is enthralling. They might actually achieve very little for that reason. Well might you label them prodigal, and deplore their self-absorption and waste of talent. However, at this time of year we all appear to be in Sagittarius, which ought to inspire some circumspection.

Authenticity has people by the tail, provoking narcissistic condemnation of inertia. To whom does it matter whether the Centaur represents an archer with a bead on the Scorpion, or a brew of tea? Is it not just a bunch of invisible stars? What does an implied Pleistocene fascination with the Milky Way matter under a washed-out sky? The morbid anxiety exuded by a prodigal Underworld is dreadfully infectious! Come out! Be someone! Be remembered! Do something! Psst, whispers the Prodigal, shouldn’t you be wondering what you will meet this side of the Acheron? What irrelevant self do you leave back there? No wonder that the ferryman disdains your obol, this desecrated planet, your millions of unhallowed dead. Why do you keep returning here? Welcome to country, he says.

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.

Sensualist Moon in Sidereal Libra

27 Tuesday Apr 2021

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For heathen heart that puts her trust

In reeking tube and iron shard,

All valiant dust that builds on dust,

And, guarding, calls not thee to guard,

For frantic boast and foolish word–

Thy mercy on thy people, Lord!

Rudyard Kipling, Recessional.

You remember Ferdinand, the bull whose predilection beyond the ring was to lie in a meadow and saturate his existence with the scent of flowers? What presence he had, according to popular usage of the term ‘sensualism’! You have to wonder, who has more presence, a bull with his head in clouds of perfume, or an infuriated bull triggered by a toreador? It cannot be denied that presence is not generally ascribed to someone who is all there—how would we know?—but to a being we can see, a performative being. We can enjoy Ferdinand’s kind of sensuality any time the world ignores us, but to be full-time sensualists, we must emulate the myriad performers of unrestricted sensual presence to be found on the web. So there is something not quite right about Ferdinand’s presence, and that which is experienced by meditation adepts and obsessive compulsives who can filter their senses and ignore the world. What is more absurd than the lotus position when the kids need breakfast before school? You see? Astrologers know nothing about sensuality.

Nonetheless, a Full Moon in the Constellation of Libra, once associated with the scales of justice, is much more likely in the Southern Hemisphere to share a meadow with Ferdinand than to contest anachronistically systematised seasons of Earth. However, there is no absence of anxiety when you put Libra’s jackboot at the back of your head (looking south) to contemplate the skewering on an Indigenous spear of the merino known as Lupus, with the legacy of the retaliation of colonial law staining Left and Right forever.

As any neophyte can affirm, the senses impose themselves from the bottom up. Does that mean sensualists are bottom feeders? Is solitary sensuality always transgressive? Country, the Australian Indigenous term I use to signify presence in absence, is sensual if it is alive. Perhaps it all comes down to one question, how do you share country? How do you perform it? After all, the shape of your body, what you’re wearing, and what you ate for breakfast, are of no interest to authentic beings. How to perform absence? In what sense is that a meaningful question? What is the proper term for projected sensuality? Pornography? Limerence? Love? Dream? Death?

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.

Psalm 51:17

The Moon does it. Always has, tidally, but also in the contamination he brings to any wife and mansion from all the others. His presence brings absence and a whiff of betrayal. In a few Earth days he will cross the Acheron, and what will preserve him in its turbulence is not any forgiveness from Earth for primordial transgressions, but knowing that the last thing the crescent Earth will forget as she plunges into the Lethe is the impious hauteur of Saiph, the Moon’s naked Melanesian queen, twerking at the riverbank where she wrings eternity from her seaweed.

Crossing the rivers of Hades does it. The Vertex does it. Country does it. The forty-nine days do it. Remembrance, the Silent Minute and the Two Minute Silence do it. Can the Earth perform her presence in absence, or is she too engrossed in her comic?

Civility: New Moon in Sidereal Pisces

12 Monday Apr 2021

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If we’re trying to be civil, it helps to understand each other. “What do you mean?” What an enigmatic question! Are you saying that I am not making myself clear, or asking me to rephrase in terms you can get your head around? Depending on your tone, there might be a hint of rebuff, a suggestion that my meaning need not be understood unless it conforms in some way with yours. Furthermore, there might be some basis for a paranoid interpretation of the question, and the subliminal arising of questions about my value to you, yours to me, and mine to myself.

And so you ask the question, “What does it mean that there is a New Moon in the constellation of Pisces?” What do you mean, New Moon?

Now the arguments begin, between tropicalists, of Northern and Southern Hemispheres, and siderealists, and no matter how erudite and convincing the expert, the question really means, “What does the New Moon mean to me?” There are billions of ‘me’s, and not one asks what it means to the Moon.

It’s difficult to be a moon, a satellite of someone else, but each of us is just that, seeing others as only we can, yes, but struggling to inhabit the context they provide us, which seems like a global chaos of sanctimony and savagery, victimhood and self-importance. There is nothing for it but to judge each other in order to jostle for control of the path to justice. We seem to have defined civility in that way, that any identity has the right to impose its narrative on others, and difference is their problem. Rather than adapt to order, we deconstruct it, but still don’t hesitate to call the police. We ‘believe’ in order, because we are one organism, are we not? And this organism we call the universe, part of which is a night sky and the microscopic individual standing under it, is the embodiment of emotional life, ever projected in organic behaviours bubbling up from energetic structures emerging from the exhaust of stellar engine-rooms.

Imagine a future expedition wrapping a silicone membrane around the Moon which could sense and transmit across the strait his Threnody On The Impertinence of Earth. What a shot in the arm for robotics to find a sentient artificial intelligence! Games addicts could show themselves in public again. The sky is a screen; the earth is an avatar!

The Moon is no more bit-player than, dare we say it, the Sun Goddess. He is as awe-struck by the Milky Way and its configurations as we were when we were poets. Centre stage, waiting for his cue, with the galaxy due East and West on his horizon, he is not only a jester, but an author and director. So long as he entertains us when the play gets going, who would begrudge him our bit-parts and a theatrical foible or two? Anyone offended by where their Sign ends up is welcome to join the protesters outside.

Another Way of Putting It

Wherever his arbitrary concoction came from, his perspective at least gives us an opportunity to examine our emotions before we plaster them all over social media. May we all pay attention to the activity of our brainstem at lunar zenith as the Constellations drift behind us through the monthly cycle of the Moon’s bardo. An overview of our position is overdue. Emotional intelligence has gone out the window. Try the Moon’s chart as an alternative unifying principle to rampant priapism, aggressive nationalism or resentful greed. We are opposite the Moon, out there, just as we are out there when we have another in our crosshairs.

The Healer: Full Moon in Cancer

29 Friday Jan 2021

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Well! The Moon is right in its element above our divided world this phase! Somewhere in the wilderness of tropical timekeeping, Cancer, as an angular distance from the Spring Equinox, may today attach itself to Gemini or Sagittarius, but as a Constellation, though it adopt the Sign of Leo or Aquarius, it remains a crab, the home of Praesepe, the Beehive Cluster, the Manger, the Crib. And the principle function of the Moon is to nurture, isn’t it? And what, may we ask, as we awaken to our utter helplessness as humanoids, needs nurture more than ‘Healing’?

Healing, like Praesepe, when your sky is dark enough to see it, is an island. Cancer is a homestead in the desert, aerially disclosing the feint tracks of its organism; it is the digestive system of a spider on a web, waiting. Can it be found in the Strait of Hormuz, or the South China Sea? No, the Island of Healing lies in an ocean vaster than the Milky Way, beyond the cosmic shards of objectivity, totality and truth and other attributes of wholeness which progressive education, in the name of critical theory, moral relativism and Buddhism 101, has shattered. Should you desire to go there without drugs, you will join an interminable queue, for the bureaucrats in the ticket office demand evidence that mental illness has been officially processed. Leaving the world a better place wasn’t meant to be easy. Wholeness without allness? Oh well, sleepwalking in country might have to suffice for authenticity.

What preceded the Big Bang? When was time created? How important was the cataclysm which resulted in the Moon’s momentum? How smug was the ecological niche vacated by the dinosaurs? The dynamism of Earthly gravity and Lunar momentum embodies an encouragement to the timeless legion healing physical or emotional discomfort, the evolution of habitat, and the loneliness of gender duality: Cancer is the partner of Capricorn, and to imagine perfect harmony with the Other as Self is not neediness, but humanity. Is it stretching it too far to suggest momentum to be the healing of gravity, and gravity to be the healing of momentum?

Welcome to Late-Summer island country, girls and boys. Aldebaran, the star of presence, is crossing the Meridian in south-east mainland Australia at nightfall this week. The Emu is rising. “We’ll all be healed,” said Hanrahan. The Covenant is serious business, and by dawn, beyond paranoia: the Southern Cross is scarecrowing into the Bardo of Relativity.

It is the third day after Invasion Day here, or Australia Day as it was once known. We invaders have the unenviable task of healing the legacy of our ancestors, those primitives who believed that the culture of the people who were living here when they arrived was even more primitive than theirs, and whose dogged effort to transform country into a country bequeathed us everything we own. ‘Sorry for buying stolen goods’ doesn’t cut it. We must heal our dependence on authority, integrity and trust, on our comfort, our recreation, our individual identity. How else can ‘all’ and ‘permanent’ not exist? And indigenous Australians must heal too, not only from dispossession, but from their inheritance of child abuse and family violence. We must ‘all’ heal the primitive societies which spawned us whole, when absolutes like ‘permanence’ and ‘wholeness’ still existed.

Is there a way to heal being born? Should we, can we, disown our birth trees? Indigenous cultures remember what individualism forgot: that property is only a right if it is also a duty. Insularity may well market itself as wholeness, but it merely transforms any temptation to identify property and value into a mortgage. Having submitted to ownership of the village by outsiders, we orbit duty to shareholders and our momentum is the right to take a second and third job. The Moon’s orbit embodies a more benign healing: of gravity versus momentum. If only our healing were eternal like his. If only we were rocks. Yes, there he is, our guru, above his birth tree, in his own world, trading shamelessly in reflected light futures.

The Veteran: Full Moon in Gemini

30 Wednesday Dec 2020

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“Superfluous lags the vet’ran on the stage…”, Samuel Johnson, l. 308, The Vanity of Human Wishes, 1749, derived from Juvenal, Satire X.

Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations: ask thy father, and he will shew thee; thy elders, and they will tell thee. Deuteronomy 32:7, King James Bible.

It’s no use. The Veteran cannot hide from the truth. It’s not just that his triumph in Northern skies comes in the middle of a Coronavirus-infested winter, as humanity struggles to celebrate the turning of the year with breaking heart, or that in Southern skies his diminutive opposition to a searing Sun needs the compensation of the un-moonlit symmetry of the Eurocentric mythical Twins to impress, but having crossed the Lethe immediately before syzygy, he realizes in his curtain call only the magnitude of the reintegration which lies ahead for the audience (who are yet oblivious to the Acheron River which daytime has just crossed), and the possibility that he no longer has the will to help. Oh God, not more feelings!

On the other hand, the Veteran has died and been reborn so many times that the Bardo provides his second name: “The Hell You Say!” The Tenth Bardo House of Boredom is one he particularly enjoys, where the cleansing of the Lethe affords him the luxury of staring out of the window of the Northern Tropical Indolence bus on his way to Total Withdrawal, paying no attention to dark continents rolling him around their clocks. His fellow-passengers cannot wait to get off: being bored is akin to being boring; the emissions from the bus out-thrust its propulsion; grasping is mindfully consuming acceptance; and forests of wild viruses are being cleared for the graduation of sated ignorance. “We must alight at centre-stage,” they cry. Not the Veteran. He is indifferent to the footlights, and to his demotion from a starring role for the next twenty-four times he appears on this stage: you will not see a Full Moon in Gemini (the Constellation) until January 2023.

What tortuous labyrinths of despair might just squeeze a sleeper up to the surface? What convulsions of suppressed hatred, what intestinal convolutions of corruption and deliberate pain? What catacombs of memory, what collapsed and utterly expunged escape routes out of anxiety? What tectonic shifts of catatonic stress? And reversing direction, the Ngaanyatjarra Lands in the Australian Central Ranges is no country for old fish.

It is time and memory which stamp Veteran country, a duration of exile from the permanent present. Aligned with the course of the Moon’s progress across the faintly visible constellations between Sagittarius and Gemini, Woe and Forgetting, and irrevocably past Regulus and Spica and Antares to the Acheron again, an artesian underworld meanders beneath a landscape dotted with caves, one of which is yours, another mine.

New Moon in Virgo: Community

17 Saturday Oct 2020

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Who will mourn the Monk, on this day of rejoicing the birth of the Peasant?

Who will guide the Monk, and indeed the Peasant, when his time comes, safely through the Bardo to an auspicious rebirth?

Who guides you through the night to make sure you inhabit the same identity in the morning?

Who will promote the awe of the Earth as a guide through the long night of its soul?

You will.

Relativity: New Moon in Sidereal Capricorn

25 Saturday Jan 2020

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“I’m looking at the river, but I’m thinking of the sea.” Randy Newman, “In Germany Before The War”, Little Criminals, 1977.

Today is an important day in Townsville, Australia. Locations south of Toolakea witness their noonday shadows to their south for the first time since the Sun’s declination moved south of Townsville’s latitude on 19 November. In astrological terms, the noon Vertex moves from the 9th House to the 4th, or in simple geometrical terms, the overhead intersection of the Ecliptic with the Prime Vertical crosses from the east to the west, transformed from anti-Vertex to Vertex. Another way to relate to this phenomenon is to imagine the complete reorientation of your sense of direction when the Sun goes from rising on your left to rising on your right, how mindful of your shadow you would need to be in terrain with no landmarks, and how familiar with landmarks you would need to be in the tropics. You would expect our ancestors in the tropics to travel a lot at night and know the stars like the back of their hands, wouldn’t you?

Capricorn New Cynicism Townsville Jan24

The longing for the divine partner underfoot in eternity is transformed by material greed or secular cynicism into the archaeology of imperial trophies, and, by what Greta Thunberg called “fairytales of eternal economic growth”, into the replacement of religious obedience by scientific enthralment. Is that what happens? Can the Earth’s obliquity really single out the residents of Townsville for such an influence during their lunch break today? And can we really know the exact day the Sun’s declination equals the latitude of anywhere before the noon shadows of the locals announce it? [The sine of the Sun’s declination equals the sine of Earth’s obliquity multiplied by the sine of the Sun’s ecliptic longitude. The Vertex ‘flip’ occurs at the longitude after the Summer Solstice Point (either one) whose sine equals the sine of the latitude divided by the sine of the obliquity, and before that Solstice Point by the same degree. Since sine 0 = 0, those longitudes at the Equator are 0 and 180, the Equinox Points.]

And finally, is there a more logical basis for the application of Sun Signs to places without four seasons than which horizontal hemisphere the noon Sun is in, North or South? As the Sun retreats towards the Northern Hemisphere in our late Summer, we welcome back more of the Tropics to our shared perspective; or the more of us there are, the further away the Sun. [It takes two months for Australia to get all of its Tropics back from the Northern Hemisphere, but the South gains Singapore at noon on March 24, Monrovia on April 5, Bangkok on April 27, Mexico City on May 17, the Kaaba on May 28, Hong Kong on June 3, Havana on June 11 and ultimately Mazatlán on June 13.]

Capricorn New Permanence Townsville Jan25

Whatever the flipping of this mysterious recently invented influence on the heart from sidereal Cancer in the House of Aspiration to sidereal Capricorn in the House of Reputation signifies, you can imagine it has a huge bearing on the price of fish, up and down Australia’s tropical east coast. Even with GPS, the unwary visitor who cannot smell the sea will begin westward when trying to find the fishing co-op! No aid will be forthcoming from the locals, either, who will be down on hands and knees with plumb-bobs and rulers, trying to calibrate the turbulent hormones which cascade during a four-hour period in Townsville at different times of day. Perhaps the visitor is of a mind not to ‘lose it’, but simply to go without fish today. Such a person might well be absent in their own country, and not lost at all. What kind of country might that be? Not a culture of power relations and commodities, oppression and exploitation, perhaps, but unfortunately a world of innerness without outward form or utility to anyone else.

Miraculous though its panorama certainly is, the tenancy of country with a small ‘c’ becomes null and void, any freehold extinguished, at death. Whatever ancestors or previous inhabitants might have put into place, for however long the grandfather clock might have ticked, or the eels teemed into the traps, country did not exist until its tenant came along and made it. Has the tenant lived an impoverished existence, up to their ears in debt, even enslaved, banished, children gone in war and marital strife and migration? Very likely! But you know how beautiful their country is? How awesome to be its only inheritance? You probably don’t because, embedded in history, social theory and economics, identity and law, or perhaps the search in therapy for love and validation in your existential victimhood and educated blame, it is too soon for you to stand here on the banks of the Lethe, dissolved in awe of karma created by hope, error, sorrow and submission, defeat, addiction, intoxication and joy, which for all eternity has been the haunt of our ghosts. When the time comes, welcome to cosmic individuality, the practice of awe, where even scientists and high priests acknowledge the relativity of their faith in platitudes about life’s journey.

Let’s whizz to the moment in time, several hours before Townsville noon, customarily identified by the Academy of Scientific Astrology and the Uniting Church of Oncology, Climatology, Astrometry and Extragalactic Dynamics as New Moon. So here we are, ready to argue about signs and influences, but suddenly aware that the only thing we know for certain is that we know nothing. It may or may not be the case that this is not a dream, that the underworld is the outside looking in, or that the many mansions of my Father’s house are the wards of a detention centre’s psychiatric hospital, the hours which mark the various ways the autonomous spirit of everything gasps for survival under the putrefaction of my corpse, or the seams of my resistance to the emptiness of consciousness, time and illness. The following relativities of geography, Milky Way mythology and rotational orientation may or may not be helpful in sustaining the dialogue you might have with the Moon this year. [They are all plotted using Stellarium 0.19.2 and paint.net 4.2.7.]

Capricorn New Perfection Melbourne Jan25

Capricorn New Discrimination Wellington Jan25

Capricorn New Paranoia Kiribati Jan25

Capricorn New Relativity San Francisco Jan24

Capricorn New Fear Mexico City Jan24

Capricorn New Self-Development Washington Jan24

Capricorn New Aggression Recife Jan24

Capricorn New Relationship London Jan24

Capricorn New Deprivation Istanbul Jan25

Capricorn New Boredom Tehran Jan25

Capricorn New Ignorance Islamabad Jan25

Capricorn New Seriousness Beijing Jan25

Every one of these snapshots could begin a dialogue between insiders and outsiders typified by a line in the sand separating absolutist and relativist: do not assert your truth over mine, because I am right and you are wrong. Presented together, they offer the elusive prospect of a system which ties them all together, which should remind us that our most conspicuous lack is not respect for difference, but a spirit of solidarity, an ethics of presence, a sharing of silence. In fact, it is relatively easy to discover systems on the outside, but it is not easy to share from the inside one’s creation, of love and obedience, integrity and awe. The oaths sworn by the gods in honour of the goddess Styx, the elm tree at the entrance to the ancient underworld to which false dreams cling under every leaf, the varieties of madness in the no-man’s-land of the bardo, and the experience of life in death I call ‘country’, are concepts borrowed from other times and cultures, and elements like the oils on a canvas, with no intrinsic meaning or independent agency, of an astrology of empty identity, time and place.

Prodigal Moon in Sidereal Sagittarius

17 Wednesday Jul 2019

Posted by in Moon Phases

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“The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.” Jacques Monod.

“Having the freedom to believe but not to express is not freedom at all.” Gabrielle Moore.

A grandparent’s life is about transforming eternity into permanence: preparing for death must be an act of love.

”Clara didn’t belong to you.” “Your life didn’t belong to you.” Almodovar, Carne Trémula (Live Flesh) 1997.

“What happened to you?” Disappointment is readily couched in blame, but the failure of the prodigal to live up to expectations cannot cloak one’s projected dismissal of annihilation, particularly narcissism’s claim to survival in eternity, and the open-ended immensity of non-existence known as permanence which so overwhelms the sociopath. Let us remember Janus, facing past and future at the gateway of our absence.

Prodigal Moon Singapore S Jul17

“Let me tell you what happened: this layabout took off when the going got tough, and excluded us from the temple of his emotions; and now his Procrustean flesh wants to come home, because it seems the capacity of its independence cannot surpass his father’s blessing.”

Not that this Moon would rationally be reflecting you personally, but ask yourself, was your existence worth its effect on global-warming, for example? Was it sufficient to be stable in your ignorant, irresponsible, surprised consumption of the self-evidence of every platitude, every fashion statement, every improvement to humanity and the planet, which you were manipulated by status into following … or not?

More to the point, if you are prodigal, is it in your wastage of the natural resources you inherited, or of the opportunity to share them with the poor of the world you choose to make your equals by calling them disadvantaged? How can you choose climate-change minimization over poverty alleviation? Fear? Shame? Millions have died in youth who, with the endowment of electricity, security and education, might have contributed far more to the science of energy technology, climate management and human survival than you and your lucky fathers, mothers, sons and daughters have achieved.

Have you lost your inheritance, the reason for your pain and all its hope, and in your contrition are you just begging your father for more than a slave’s wage? Take it then, the fatted calf of a world of hatred, fear and anger it is unlawful to express! Like the older brother in the parable of Jesus, I question your fitness at the table, especially where global temperatures and the manhandling of your waste are traded. Your eternity is emotional prattle and your permanence is rational wank, not flipping but tripping.

Prodigal Moon Quito N Underworld Jul16

It is well-known that the Tropic of Capricorn passes through Longreach (and Gracemere, south of Rockhampton) in Queensland. Still quite commonly known is the fact that the inclination of the Equator to the Ecliptic is currently decreasing, and so the latitude of the Southern Solstice is moving northward. However, only our allegorical prodigal knows that in the year he was born, 1993, the Tropic of Capricorn passed over the Longreach hospital in which his long-suffering mother brought him into the world. A lifetime later, he is still pondering, as is his wont, if he was born before or after a Vertex Flip, if indeed there was one above his southerly ward, and why the stars wait for birth to exercise their influence. The miracle of gestation and the exhaustion of labour have never entered his equations of care. Thinking with the heart does not teach us to feel with the head.

Prodigal Moon Singapore S Underworld Jul17

What is the ‘Vertex Flip’? Twice a day it happens for every location in the tropics, where James Cook University has estimated more than half of the world’s population will live by mid-century. An uncomfortable moment from which the majority of humans have escaped into temperate latitudes, it transposes and mystifies the hemispheres of left and right, before and behind and up and down, whatever they might mean. Currently stationed in North Queensland, (among the electorates which decided Australia’s destiny at the recent election,) I must say how tumultuous seem the Constellations of Scorpius, Sagittarius and Capricornus at the Zenith, revolving implausibly into my South.

No wonder the comfortable geometries of astrology evolved by the heirs of Ptolemy flourish in temperate latitudes: what sense can they make of the lurch of the Vertex from Eleventh House (one before IC—bottom West) to Fourth (one after MC—top West), and of the Anti-Vertex from Third (one before MC—top East) to Tenth (one after IC—bottom East), when the Ecliptic, the Zenith, and East, West, North and South converge? The Third House is the House of Intellect and the Bardo of Paranoia, and the Ninth House is the House of Aspiration and the Bardo of Deprivation. The Fourth House is the House of Reputation and the Bardo of Relativity, and the Tenth House is the House of Realization and the Bardo of Boredom. The Vertex by definition is a western, social point, a source of personal meaning in the Other, and its opposite is an eastern intuition of social meaning in the Person. Put all these elements together, and the Vertex Flip encapsulates the transformation of eternity into permanence, cynicism into idolatry, and country into emptiness, cultural artefacts which, face to face, at once engender and transcend time, place and difference.

Prodigal Moon Quito N Jul16

“You are welcome to your inheritance, my sons, whether you’ve blown it already or not. I congratulate you both as flashes of brilliance in the bog of emotion. I am proud of you equally, but what either of you deserve was never in the equation. This I must tell your children as their grandfather: you have rights, evolved in the rationale of the ages in all cultures, and one of them, the right to country, is called Emptiness, not Permanence. Death is the empty gateway to that right, idolatry is an ignoble trap, and a right to serotonin, dopamine and noradrenaline is an oxymoron. By the time they are grandparents, and your dreams and their memory have withered and died, they will know what it means to love one’s workers with their faults, if sometimes in Gemini a little harshly.”