“Cy-git un chevalier courtois
Du souverain sujet fidèle
Et qui toujours sut à la fois
Servir sa patrie et sa belle.” L’épitaphe sur le cénotaphe de François de Rochechouart.

“There’s a lot to be said for brevity.” Mad Magazine, Issue #502 – 01/2010, Wikiquote.

The Monk got into attaching to the female as a boy. Little did he realize as he gave himself to the caresses and chaste kisses of older girls that as he modelled his gender on theirs, as his feelings and emotions satisfied themselves with intuition and softness and resonance, they were modelling theirs on his, or what they perceived of it beneath their caresses, to the extent of synchronising ovulation with his tender boyish blush, and castrating him to erase the semen stains testifying to their spoor on his woodpile. Perhaps when the Monk responds to the Sun’s “All men are bastards” with “You get that on these big jobs” the transpiration of gender fluidity and the respiration of cultural stability enter the market.

It does take a while to accept that a birth tree can be seen as a source of firewood or an impediment to progress, but of course it is undesirable to freeze to death or graduate to design a 6-lane freeway which does not sacrifice a bit of bush, now that the equipment is at our disposal to deal with the big ones. Furthermore, the number of people who know what has happened to the place of their parents’ birth would be infinitesimally small, and I say that as a callow youth in my memory awaiting the birth in 1968 of my first child, banished to the corridor of what is now Melbourne Central shopping complex. How does a woman bear witness who drives past the place where her grandmother gave birth to her mother and it’s a traffic island? Who knows? No man, probably. You get that on these big woodpiles.

But I digress. One cannot be too discursive when one is limited to a few paragraphs, and there are several important things to explain. First of all, there is some confusion over who is bullying whom, but the ranks have been shuffled somewhat for next year, and the Monk is actually relieved to be moved out of perfectionism by the Zealot. What difference does it make? Let the Zealot overcome the narcissistic design of the Drone’s redundancy. The Peasant will go back to aggression where he belongs, and perhaps it will be good to leave 2019 behind as a year of inauthentic pretence that ‘They’ were ‘You’. The Monk will relinquish his connection with Yvonne, Les Sablonnières and the unobtainable, and trudge past the Circlet of Pisces on a pilgrimage to nowhere like the rest of us, every nineteen years threading the eye of a needle without shank or stitch. I cherish the thought that his recalcitrant belle will dematerialize, along with the head and tail of the dragon, and the contestation of victimhood will die uninhabited.

The next thing is the question resonating all the way through 2019: who is ‘The Man’? Frankly, the Moon is becoming tired of this male metaphor. Of course it is logical that a Moon recovering from a Drone’s bad relationship withdraw for a while, but it is as logical for the Monk to draw re-inspiration from a female Sun in Leo as it was for him to design his gender on the woodpile. Are Trump, Johnson and Xi unequivocally male, and even if they are, is their gender more than populism’s rhetorical flourish? How can Full Moons represent gender dysphoria when the majority who imprint on the Moon do not live gender on a spectrum? Is the Moon no more than a scam, the seduction and control of suckers by a Creator in drag irritated by our reluctant recognition? “We have a special connection, and you can inhabit it by being proud of the attributes for which I diminish you by their diminishment of me.” The proliferation of scammers and the question they raise about secrecy—”Why did it take me so long to see it?”—haunt my experience of the ‘disintegration of humanity’: the Hong Kong insurrection, the destruction of Amazon forests, the danger of sailing the Strait of Hormuz, the genocide in West Papua, the collapse of world order, the counterfeit legitimacy of British democracy, the corruption of the free market, and the mesh of vapour-trails imprinting the desire to be anywhere else.

Which beholder would label the Monk’s withdrawal from the gender wars as abuse? Which appellate judge? Which not? Which woman will shoulder her suspicion of beauty, her hunger for childhood, her fear of her own manhood, and of the power to be someone other than herself, in order to rule the theft of country and her own sovereignty? Alas, the Monk ventures, beyond the biology of gender and the landscape of country, more woman than man, more dingo than pawprint, more tide than rock, none of you. And yet … he continues to be imprisoned in the month, his E Lucevan Le Stelle powerless to delay a single day, his rising and setting, mere accidents of the directions of traffic flow, the time-limit of his appearance in the exercise yard of the Gaia Penitentiary.

The soul, the spirit, the essence, what is it? There’s a good chance you were taught to look for it within. The Circlet of Pisces, the event horizon of childhood delusion, is as good a place as any to start, but when you realize that the whole world is within, you begin to lose the distinction between what is inside and what is outside. It’s all chemistry, isn’t it, really? Country, yes, and emptiness, and the subjective. But it is in the essence of astrology that we find the key to the Monk’s immunity to naturalism, our rootedness in the objective. The essence of astrology, the utility of its birthing-place, is the emptiness of identity, the transparency of perspective, the underworld of the underworld: like the ancestral galactic gyrations of solitude fossilised by the Miserere of Hell, like a divine command reverberating in the lost domain of an Egyptian tomb, and like the memory of a childhood caress, regardless of its perversity.