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Southern Hemisphere Astrology

Tag Archives: Boundaries

Full Moon in Aries: The Peasant, Eclipsed

19 Friday Nov 2021

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Boundaries, Constellation Boundaries, Equatorial Nakshatras, Lunar Mansions, Miserere, November Eclipse, November Moon, Peasant Moon, Rectitude, She'll Be Right, Taurus Moon

What you egg!

Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 2.

Love yourself, Menkar says. Work on your stuff. Don’t take it personally, she says, but people say negative things about you. You lack humility, she says. Every wife is a challenge.

The Peasant looks forward to jumping between the sheets with Alcyone, after the peculiarities of Hamal and Menkar, the daunting accomplices of his descent from the high places. Be mindful of your tendency to aggression, Peasant, and don’t inflate your expectations. There are puppeteers offstage, and this is a pantomime about freedom, not intimacy.

It is harder to be a peasant these days than when princes and priests ruled the land. Three levels of government with 16-20% of the workforce administering control exert a lot more energy than the muscles of yore, and yet you never know when the power or water will go off, because every politician and bureaucrat is a prince and a priest. For a guest of a mid-Autumn mansion in mid-Spring things are further complicated by a plethora of boundary ordinances.

A bureaucrat thinks nothing of drawing a boundary on paper, like the Local Government Areas which located restrictions of movement during Victoria’s infamous lockdown, but like the limits of nationalities and territorial waters, they usually involve conflict when marked on the ground. The horizon is a boundary, but you try pegging it. Where is the coastline? Where does a mangrove swamp end, or a eucalyptus forest? Celestial boundaries are no less nebulous, for all that they may be precisely defined, because they move, and so do the herds they enclose.

The Peasant has a motto: we’ll make it work. That does not satisfy the princes and priests whose province is value, despite never having to jostle for position on a fishing ground. It doesn’t satisfy the Sun either. Despite moving around the galactic centre at 230 km/sec, she has never accepted the momentum of her planets, and any notion of one of their satellites having a mind of its own is anathema. On this occasion when earthbound astronomers and astrologers are at loggerheads over divisions of the Ecliptic, and the Moon is intensely trying to make it work, she will put her own stamp on things.

This otherwise significant event for Moon and observers is only 5 1/2 minutes before the upstart’s most comprehensive diminishment.

“Peekaboo! Assertiveness is it? A fig for your hemispheric Signs, Earthlings! And while we’re at it, a pox on the enclosed absolute sanctimony of your social media! And I will be anthropomorphized if I feel like it! What does Earth’s moon know about seasons? He may have rhythm, but what of it? I’ve got gravitas.”

The motto of the Peasant takes another form: She’ll be right, mate! Though dictators demand heartlessness and investors in change rant about the apocalypse, and though Underworld insecurity undermine and render transparent the independence the Southern Moon is obliged in Taurus to revere, that motto will resound.

Peasant into shadow and Vagabond out, but she’ll be right! The lasciviousness of Alcyone is ambiguous enough! And so the shadow retreats and Earthlings reinhabit their narcissistic boundaries. In suburban Brisbane, the ancestors line the outer of the Underworld, supplicating the referee of a game the Sun simply does not understand, and all know that a fair referee only gets it right half the time.

Was it a dream in a cusp?

Is that not a dragon’s tail coming to sweep us back into the urgency of our predicament? Give it to me, she says. Make it right. And yes, she’ll be right!

Sensualist Moon in Sidereal Libra

19 Friday Apr 2019

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Antipodes, April Moon, Boundaries, Country, Covenant, Easter Moon, Sensualist Moon, Underworld

Aha! Do I spy another lost soul who has succumbed to that deadly sin, sloth? Head down, shoulders hunched. Your name, sir? As I might have guessed, you receive no mention on the preeminent databases of the successful. Shame on you, sir, that you have so mistaken the purpose of your existence as to have spent on yourself all those profits which rightfully belonged, with compound interest, to the glory of God’s creation. No doubt you have been dealt a cruel blow or two, sir. Haven’t we all? The importance of such setbacks is that they provide the opportunity for spiritual growth towards the redemption of original sin for this and future generations if we learn the right lessons. Have you sought professional help or considered further study? What invisible thing are you staring at, anyway?

I gaze at the birds outside my window and see an animal which evolved a house.

Yes, it is difficult to love another person, to share lives of empty oneness resonating pleasurably in miraculous presence each with the other like the ripples we launch on the billabong before they rebound chaotically at the limits of our consciousness, where we project shadows and light, depths and banks, reflection and blindness, expectation and recrimination, desire and satiety, and ideas of creatureliness, proper course, perfection and finitude. Indeed, that love is so rare for most people that they exclude it from their experience as impossibly ideal, even pathologize it, and instead luxuriate sentimentally in comparable experiences of solitude: sunsets, the entrancing behaviour of children, favourite pieces of music, and secret dreams of ghosts; knowing full well that each facsimile of loving physicality shares with the others a certain sensuality, an immersion of the self, as it craves the dissolution of its boundaries, in what we knew once as that ‘oceanic’ feeling, aware that joy is not imbibed like wine, but exuded by the glass.

Sensualist Moon Gisborne Apr19

None of this self-discovery business needs to be anxious, dear reader, even in the event that it is not merely incidental that we are at Easter once again and throngs of candles will soon be wending their way through the nightscapes of Christian cities. To take part in such a procession is not usually the privilege of the sensualist, but he is nevertheless bedazzled by the extraordinary synchronicity of the annual procession and midnight transits of the Easter Moon and the Southern Cross. Have candle holders never wondered about the night sky which grounded the followers of Jesus after their prophet’s martyrdom? What were they staring at, indeed, when tomorrow became today? The one thing you cannot hide from the senses is meaning! But hark, the sensualist is not gawping at the Moon, but in the opposite direction, and the Moon’s gaze is boring through the back of his head, or would be, if the Moon and sensualist were not one and the same. The sensualist’s art is the transparency of walls. Is the Full Moon in Libra or Virgo? Take your pick.

Sensualist Moon Gisborne Underworld Apr19

About 650 kms east-northeast of Tokelau and roughly halfway between Samoa and Kiribati in the South Pacific, the Moon is directly overhead. At the Moon’s distance, the Earth hides an arm’s length fingerwidth of the sky (2°), which does not even cover the Sun, because the Moon is square to the nodes, and 5° out of alignment. If that is not how you imagine it, the Moon’s diameter is half an arm’s length fingerwidth for an observer on Earth!

Sensualist Moon Kiribati Apr20

What the Kiwi sensualist is looking behind is a bit broader, about 90 arm’s length fingerwidths in fact. Like millions of ancestors before him, he is trying to see the underworld. Why? How will that ameliorate human suffering and maximize the value of our legacy? Those latter questions cannot even be comprehended by the sensualist, but the reason he is trying to see the underworld is because it is his. What he imagines he cannot see will vanish with his death as surely as will the visible artefact we imagine he can see. The relationships he cherishes with ancestors, antipodeans and archetypes of his own psyche will be no less tangible than his family, community and society when his Country vacates itself. Is the Spaniard’s underworld real because the Kiwi can see it, and the Spaniard real in the Kiwi’s underworld?

Is the unreality of these personages not a sign of mental illness?

Islamists may be slaughtering each other in Mali, Libya, Nigeria, Yemen, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan and Somalia, or any other Muslim society struggling in these postcolonial times with the ideas of community, property and space; Britain, ‘America’ and Israel may have torn themselves apart in order to stitch their citizenry up again; the Belt and Road may continue to park excavators and graders all over former Soviet Socialist Republics: but in every one of those ‘countries’ with their legal definitions and contested boundaries the sensualists are creating Country with their senses, and long may the mutual creations of their transparencies continue.

Bodhisattvas who claim more presence than a fool are invited to help the tree-huggers.

The sensualist is a lover, not a fighter. He doesn’t change the world, he adapts, which he reckons is the same thing. He annoys the totalitarian left and right by defying perfection and evading definition. Reviled as Lumpenproletariat and Bogan, he is seen as having adapted identity quite out of business and himself out of the equation! Well, I regard him as a hero. Who else, thrown into the sewer we know as the Late Anthropocene, can so delightedly get down and crawl on the floor of a country pub with a stranger’s infant, narrowly escaping lynching as a pedophile; be so enthralled with social media on the crowded train which has just obliterated a motorist who ignored the warning bells; or be so happy going to bed because a covenant is at the top of the sky?

Sensualist Moon Alcadozo Underworld Apr19

I may allow myself anything I want in my imagination, for soon I too will die. Remember, no smiling until Sunday!

Disclosure: New Moon in Constellation Leo 2018

09 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Boundaries, Connection, Country, Disclosure, Five W's, Iconoclast, Idolater, Leo New Moon, Miserere, Perspicacity, Property, Underworld, Welcome To Country

Anyone who has lived through the internet’s transformation of reality will have noticed a proliferation of certainty. Every debate is loud with it, and wisdom, dismayed, must consider unassailable facts on both sides. Whereas investigation was previously predicated on ‘I don’t know’, it has apparently degenerated into a search for facts which support ‘I know’. This is quite amazing to somebody educated in facts, with the purpose of disclosing the extent of ignorance, who has seen the transformation of critical theory into the syllabus of primary schools, with the purpose of exposing the ambiguity of knowledge.

The notorious family conflicts which arise when children reach puberty disclose the ideological opposition of ‘I know’ to ‘I don’t know’, and two stages of personal development, the investigation of experience as existence and the investigation of existence as experience. Such conflict can take generations to resolve. In an Australian multicultural context, these two stages manifest themselves in the perennial dynamic of integration. Immigrants are dismayed by their perception of a demand for acculturation, and antagonists to plural monoculturalism can find difficulty in locating their pragmatism in recovery from the grief of their own displaced ancestors.

What differentiates quality journalism from populism is the avoidance of bias confirmation. Both base investigation on the Five W’s, who, where, when, what, and why, but whereas quality journalism demonstrates the ambiguity of the answers, populism confirms their simplicity. Once upon a time, my own investigation of current affairs was led by The Guardian and the Australian Broadcasting Commission, and it has taken time to accept, to grieve, that quality journalism can no longer be confidently sought there.

In similar terms, quality astrology differentiates itself from the populist variety in its focus on ambiguity and recognition of confirmation bias. It presents a tool for asking the Five W’s, but it assumes readers to be seeking more questions, not answers, and to be intensifying existence, not pacifying it. The answer to the question, ‘Who am I?’, is indeterminate, and that is exciting. If you must know who you are, it is my sad duty to inform you that you are nobody.

Where and when you were born cannot be identified, because the where has disappeared, like your parent culture and the climate and geographic coordinates of your birth location, into nowhere, and the when cannot be retrieved except in the historical antecedents of various different arbitrary measures of time based on their obviously impossible separation. The increments of one against another may be small– the measure of sky movement, sidereal time, increases against solar time by 33 seconds every 8 years–but no-when will they ever coincide again. Specifics are out of the question, my dear Watson.

Where is this place?

Leo New Iconoclast Sky Cessnock Sep10

Cessnock is a real entity, proclaimed with defined boundaries in 1906, and is indexed on thousands of databases and maps. It welcomes the traveller with a real sign in the real ground beside the highway, and every property-owner knows they are in it because they pay council rates. That information may answer the questions who and what, but my question was, ‘where is it?’ Someone in Cessnock, perhaps you can tell me? Down the road from Newcastle, yes, but where is Newcastle, down the road from Cessnock? If I approached from the west, the bush of the Pokolbin Forest, following a road, or else Cessnock would repel me beyond an array of back fences, sooner or later a sign would tell me the road’s name, and someone would tell me I was in Cessnock, someone who wouldn’t understand that they weren’t answering my question, “Where am I?” If I were really lucky, a child might give me the right answer, “Here, in country!”

Leo New Cessnock Underworld W Wall Sep10

Here is another correct answer: Cessnock is, not a thou’ out, directly and exactly above its underworld! (A pubescent child always knows when an adult is using semantics to reach a common understanding, which explains the ubiquity of the expression, ‘Sarcasm is the wit of fools’.) Seriously, you have to ask yourself, couldn’t we have done away with 100 years of research into the unconscious if we had simply listened to the people who could find it on a map, right here?

The Miserere, Psalm 51, is the cry of the penitent who is left here, when the rivers of Hades, and their grazing thunder lizards, have disappeared beyond the boundary of the underworld, and penitents are not sure which shore they inhabit. Who are we? The ordinary souls sent to the Asphodel Meadows of our underworld’s underworld? Can Here be There, as the Proclamation has it? What do the aquifers of country disclose when your lover is on the line and your voice is in their head?

Leo New Steep Point Underworld Miserere Sep10

This is the moment the ancestors ring the edge of the world, above and below, in neither. Steep Point is the western tip of a continent, from which the then living ancestors watched Dirk Hartog sail past in 1616 CE, with no idea that country was about to be proclaimed out of existence, parcelled up as abutments. To be fair to those seafarers and the settlers who eventually followed them, they had no idea of the Universal Proclamation of Humanity gestating in the abutted minds of landowning philosophers, astrologists and activists. Like any migrant, they were simply creating right of way through abutting, overseas kinships they had no relationship to.

Now we come to the weird bit. Who are ‘they’? Who are we as they?

Leo New Osorezan Underworld Sep10

Osorezan is an active volcano in northern Honshu believed by many to be the threshold of the underworld. Half the world (and almost everyone in these parts) has always believed that ill fortune is not an outcome of karma, what goes around comes around, but the result of sorcery, the conjuring of injured, vengeful spirits from the underworld. I have not found reference to which way up they endure, or if their seasons, directions and chirality mirror the hemisphere of the living, but when they climb out of the fissures of the Earth their evil is authentically alien to ours. Shamans and sorcerers know how to channel them, and so, apparently, do the revilers of Captain Cook, and those still fighting the lost War Against the Proclamation of Country.

So you have no self which is not some other nobody’s nobody, no country which is not some other underworld, and no history which has not been repudiated by you, its child. How WOW is that? But you will be who you want to be, until we have built Jerusalem, and the holy temple of your devotion will be the body, of the visible world, indeterminate, ineffable, enfolding you tenderly in your confirmation bias until you have exhausted fact, country has thrown open its five aggregates of mind and the fleeting moment has disclosed its unbearable beauty. Country, world disclosure, is your will to be, your sap, your yeast, your music, and you are always welcome!

Diplomacy: New Moon in Pisces

28 Tuesday Mar 2017

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Boundaries, Civility, Diplomacy, Islam, Milky Way, New Moon in Pisces, Pisces, Southern Hemisphere Astrology, Tradition, Underworld, Virgo

Psalm 74:20—“Have respect unto the covenant: for the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty.”

“Where were you when I called? Why didn’t you answer? I needed you! I was absolutely terrified! Listen. I was in a dream, walking to the bus after my lecture, head full of images of Islamic architecture, when the attack happened and all hell broke loose. I heard the takbir, then gunshots, then I walked into a screaming horror. Sirens coming, people running in all directions, others lying injured or dead all over the path. At the very instant I realized what had happened, staring down at an old man on his knees and covered in the blood squirting from the woman he was tending, a woman on the other side looked into my eyes with an expression on her face I didn’t register at first. I stared at her, and then suddenly I got it. I was to blame. My first reaction was outrage, but then I became aware that everyone was looking at me with the same expression, not contempt or fear, but recognition. That’s when I nearly fainted in shock: no, it wasn’t that I was wearing the uniform, but that it was I, naked and without qualities, who wore that mediaeval uniform, or any uniform, and that I felt guilty, recognized! There was nowhere to go! Nowhere to be!”

Sidereal time begins again in Pisces, and here we are again, face-to-face with our most serious, fundamental and seemingly insoluble problem. Rome is burning, like a bushfire which began as a controlled burn but escaped with a wind-change. We are caught in a feedback loop: we want our elected representatives to do something, to stand for something, and make decisions on the basis of what they know, majority decisions, even if we disagree; on the other hand, to get anything done, our representatives, monitoring the public mood, safeguard their status by telling us as little as possible, and what truth they tell is what they believe is a palatable truth in terms of who-knows-who’s interpretation of what we want to believe; and the result is that all we know is spin, and we, the minorities of one, inadvertently, are spinning the spin which disempowers our representatives. The age of Pisces might even suggest itself as the age of leadership in criminal submission.

Pisces New Moon Lower Transit Cabo Frio Mar27

Any fool these days knows that truth is relative. And yet, allergic to fundamentalism, to the wisdom of the Bible and the Qur’an, so many are faithful adherents to other fundamentalist notions such as universal human rights and our culpability in, and the moral imperative to reverse, climate change. Pisces, the symbol of Christ, nowadays eschews absolutist claims, but in its incarnation in the South it still attests to humanity’s resilience. In the face of the second law of thermodynamics and the inevitability of irrelevance and death, it delivers the semi-permanence of tradition and culture. By some miracle we are hanging together–remembering that the next Full Moon is the Easter Moon (no pun intended)–but doubt is no longer a benign influence, as happens when you’re being told a pack of lies: you’re supposed to doubt the strictures of your ego, not the very existence of truth itself.

Poeppel Corner is an imaginary place, situated in theory on the boundaries of the Northern Territory and Queensland with South Australia. Attesting to its imaginary nature and the obstacles faced by any agreement on anything, its marker post, accessible along the QAA Line and the K1 Line four-wheel-drive tracks 174km west of Birdsville, and beyond the GPS receptivity of your smartphone, is not where it was intended to be by the surveyors who, with 19th century technology, unimaginable adversity and incredible bravery, intended to mark the gazetted border at the intersection of latitude 26 South and 138 East. Did you know that Australia has moved about 1.6m northeast since 1994? Do you realize that your property has no fixed position? And finally, nobody knows what time it is where three time-zones, and more when daylight saving changes (on April Fools’ Day), intersect! Why don’t you go there, and decide for yourself?

The entirely speculative names I have given to the Milky Way ‘rivers of the Underworld‘ may offend you. Is it really true that people of the South born in January and February carry an innate regret for the suffering of centuries, and those born in the second half of the year are doomed to struggle with ignorance, or do I just like the sound of my own voice? Whatever the demographics of the matter, if you are familiar with the night sky of October, the Sun is in the middle of nowhere. She needs her son to validate her, to stand up and make a contribution to the society she has brought him to, and she needs him to make it in a way which substantiates her claim to ethnic and religious continuity. She needs him to build something of local value within his tradition.

Artisan Under the Bridge East Brunswick

The miracle of tradition is the personality that goes into its reinvention. But it is also the resilience of the underlying layers of its palimpsest. May I make one thing absolutely clear? You do not separate yourself from ‘Das Man‘ by having a story, or in narrative terms a journey. In fact, the self has no story and no journey. It stares its transparency to itself in the face, without props, because it is not an object. Far from it! Its subjectivity reveals every object as a subject, and the process of reality as civility among subjects, with an emptiness of plot. Who knows what the next encounter will demand, each from the other?

Rajab

The authentic self is not interstitial. Society is not its god. What godly power can compare to the reverence of the self for the finitude of the world it has created and expires with every breath? What sense of belonging to a master plan can outweigh the sense of being unique? What calling has a voice to diminish our gratitude for just being here, when we who are about to die commune with the beauty of what we will depart? But on the other hand, if we want to be recognized, we have to make ourselves recognizable. Truth lies (sic) in all sides of an argument, but the argument has to be heard. Judgment rules over silence; diplomacy rules over noise, and mindfully, change.

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