And together we shall dig graves for all that die in us,
And we shall stand in the sun with a will,
And we shall be dangerous.” from “Defeat“, by Kahlil Gibran.
One of the first conventions we learn as infants is that the difference between zero and one is the same as the difference between nine and ten. Who knows how many tens of millennia we took to dismantle the convention that the difference between zero and one is infinite? What is ‘country’, as I use the term, if not an attempt to restore the sacred awe implicit in that ancient convention? Of course, conventions have ever been challenged by the truth. If, after half a millenium, our horoscopes are still governed by Northern Hemisphere seasons, and we still have trouble recognizing the Zodiac because its Constellations are upside down, don’t blame me.
However, it is not truth, but convention, not righteousness, but compassion, which hold communities together, especially when they originate from all over the world. A lot of healing is in progress: it has been a summer out of hell across Australia, grief never far beneath the surface. Community resilience is not in question, or the courage and kindness of good neighbours from all over the country and the world, but in the debate worldwide about how to prevent a repeat, it is difficult not to hear the same divided bickering that characterizes our efforts to deal with the racist, sexist and colonialist conventions we were all made of.
Has not the extant population of Earth, like a forest held together by subterranean fungus, arrived at an optimism, a raison d’être, a motivation for getting out of bed, deriving from a sense of powerlessness normally associated with depression, which is invisible, and ultimately unbelievable? Are we not, like a wind turbine in a coal-driven economy, or an ego in a yoga routine, going through the motions? Does not the survival of humanity beyond the next generation lurk in the legacies of the beneficiaries of our last wills and testaments, framed and interpreted by nobody who ever understood or respected the pain we old ones put the world through?
Pessimism looks like another secret to keep from our grandkids. How much easier that would be if they just had partners who preferred refined white bread because they ate it as children, revered secrets because their mothers were narcissists, and also cannot wait to get the kids out of the house for the sake of some me-time. Pessimism looks like a race to see who grows up first, the coffin we need to lose a huge amount of weight to fit into, in the grey area between one and zero. Hey kids, the song of the magpie out there means another perfect day! Off you go now.
One day, we might agree that hope and heartache both start with the same letter as hallelujah and hell, but apparently not yet. In the meantime, it’s in country I need to recover some equanimity, lest I go conventionally mad somewhere between nine and ten.
“The last men, far from being the heirs of power, will be of all men most subject to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners and will themselves exercise least power upon the future.” Lewis, C. S.. The Abolition of Man (Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis) (pp. 58-59). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.
“The past is the present’s food, and the present’s digestive system is synchronized, adapted as it has always been.” Abliq.
The phases of the Moon are conventions. The mathematical definitions of the relative positions of Sun and Moon on the Ecliptic are real enough, but what they define is imaginary, illusory, transient, relative and nebulous. When the Moon will be in conjunction with the Sun is important for anticipating eclipses and tides, and convenient for dividing the year, but the event itself as dependent arising occurs in nature as a disappearance, an invisible transition from morning crescent to evening crescent lasting several days. You would be right to call any moment in that transition a New Moon, wouldn’t you?
We all ‘know’ that it is the movement of the Earth, not the Sun, which continuously changes the Sun’s background stars, but once again, the stars behind the Sun’s present ‘location’ are invisible, and only tangible as somewhere between which stars are rising in the dawn and which are setting in the dusk. Nonetheless, thanks to the scales of measurement and frames of reference developed in astronomy for thousands of years, we can be confident that if the astrologers tell us this New Moon is happening in Pisces, it is, and if the astronomers tell us Aquarius, we can be confident of that too, and that the wet season the North once associated with the Water-Carrier asterism has gained on it a month.
Such matters as these present themselves for our contemporary scrutiny because the conventions of cultural interplay and civilized discourse seem to have dissolved into the contested perspectives from which they emerged. Southern Hemisphere Astrology focuses on norms at this time of year because Aquarius down here carries the conventional sign which precedes the Autumn Equinox, Virgo, associated with perspicacity tending towards perfectionism, not necessarily the obsessive compulsions you would not be alone in seeing everywhere at the present time. Aquarius upside-down resembles the post-graduate waiter who skilfully manages two armfuls of dishes while imparting a sniff at the conventional choice of wine a mealtime assemblage of newly independent MPs might have made.
By curious coincidence at the moment of New Moon as defined, a divine promise is being given to the good people of the Bowen Basin, where local and indigenous sovereignty has been under attack ever since it became conventional wisdom that the best way to pass on a better world to your grandchildren is to impoverish them, and the best way to beat the colonialist rap is to cede your sovereignty as a mark of indigenous ignorance. Perhaps the Adani coal-mine will proceed, honouring the wishes of the majority of traditional owners, and perhaps there will be fewer numbers in endangered species in the area for the rest of us to be unconscious of.
The Solar System orbits the Galactic Centre at about 230 kms/sec; the Earth orbits the Sun at about 30 kms/sec; and the Earth’s surface at Australian latitudes rotates at between about 350 and 460 metres/sec. If you add the approximate velocity of our galaxy through the universe of 583.3 kms/sec, that’s a lot of motion to be physically unaware of. It is up to you to decide which elite will be victorious: those who would override your sovereignty in the cause of mitigating climate change, or those who would override your sovereignty in the cause of minimizing the cost of energy. If it were up to me, I would not accept a scientific basis for the supremacy of any value, certainly not a rigid one.
The asterisms and myths of the Zodiac have been influential conventions on at least 500 successive generations, in ways we are as unconscious of as we are of our astronomical motion. These days, the Gregorian calendar and its widespread end-of-year celebrations, the urban lifestyle of the vast majority of the global population, and climate change itself, have largely supplanted the seasonal basis of human behaviour, and general precession will eventually associate every seasonal sign to every constellation, if it has not already done so, especially below the Tropic of Cancer.
Is a coking or thermal coal deposit below the surface or in the underworld?
Should the evaluation of the needs of others be an extrapolation of our needs, an ownership of theirs, or a continuous contestation of both by experts on the nature of ‘Reality’ and ‘The Good’? When it’s a simple matter of projection, why are we always compliant in the wars of the powerful?
The solstices precessed to the Galactic Plane in 1998 CE, and so for as long as recorded history into the future, the Sun’s maximum positive and negative declinations will precede its crossing of the Milky Way, assuming the IAU don’t fiddle. In 2177 CE, the December Equinox will precess into Scorpio in the Breamlea Zodiac. In 2228 CE, the Sun will cross the Galactic Plane on Christmas Day, and cross it New Year’s Day around 2700 CE. In all that time there is one thing that will not noticeably change, as it has not during the millennia of human civilization, and that is the stars in the background of the nodes where the Ecliptic intersects with the Galactic Plane. The Milky Way is as real as the seasons were when mass media began popularizing Sun Signs in the 1930s, as the Underworld Zodiac was when children asked 10 thousand years ago, “Why does the Sun go down?” and as the unconscious was at the dawn of the twentieth century when its geography was desacralized.
I, writing my epitaph, and thou, resonating with it, have this in common: we resist convention, but end up accepting that we belong in a timeless tradition–of accepting the wisdom of our ancestors, unscientific as it might be, as a prescription of who we are–into which we might be seen to have groomed those of our descendants who listened and were grateful for their culture.
The mere name of philosophy, however quietly pursued, is an object of sufficient scorn, and what would happen if we should begin to separate ourselves from the customs of our fellow-men? Seneca.
One of the conventions of astrology I have found most meaningful is the notion that New Moon reveals a new perspective which the Full Moon brings to fruition with an invigorated disposition as enlightenment, another joist to bear a creative and joyful attitude. Southern Hemisphere Astrology breaks with the convention that the Moon is feminine, because it is clear to me, notwithstanding his monthly cycle, that he is like me, glorifying a peripheral existence. The most suppressed feeling in a man’s heart is the anxiety that life has no meaning. Meaning is embodied, by women and men: this is as clear to women as the day is long. Power, the meaning of energy, has always been enjoyed by them and alas, envied by men. “Are you strong enough to be my man?”
When my generation started flouting convention back in the sixties I noticed two remarkable things: the only thing we understood about what we were flouting was that it was restrictive; and whatever convention we defied we replaced with another. Correct me if I’m wrong, but today’s encounter with convention seems no different. Some people get into trouble by rejecting convention, and others get bullied into conforming. A convention is being flouted in Damascus: the slaughter of civilians is not collateral damage but a war crime. Another is emerging: if you harbour terrorists, even under force, you deserve their fate. National security is being deconstructed.
Children are dying in Damascus, in the same agony as a man on a cross. Aristotle’s view, some 300 years before Jesus of Nazareth, was that the highest good is the good of society. The view of Jesus was that the personal good is highest since it is the good of God within. Does the slaughter of these innocents mean anything to us? My heart is broken equally by their suffering and by our capacity to believe in a higher good than theirs, The International World Order. Can you identify any good in this conflict? Can you love the children as you love your own? Can you empathize with the conviction of the combatants and the communities that harbour them and abet their atrocities? Would you be prepared to die in their situation? What for?
“Father forgive them, for they know not what they do!” Can submission to convention actually be evil? Is this the meaning of love, that hormones, like everything in the matrix, go awry, and our proper task is to study and modify the psychological and social conditions of their distortion, rather than send in the army? Look in your heart. Is there a hero there, or a coward? Connection or perfectionism? You have probably learned how to deconstruct history, capitalism, patriarchy and gender. What is left to believe in? Babies? God? Universal human rights? Unchanging climate? Have you balked at deconstructing those?
The conventional view of the inferiority of Aboriginal culture which I can still remember, has been replaced by the agreement that white invaders passed down stolen land, and we inheritors bear the guilt for the dysfunction of Indigenous communities. The interpenetration of identity, language and country is sacred, but it seems a long way from conferring sovereignty. Who has the right to determine whether Adani may proceed, the citizens of the International World Order or the local landowners? What convention bestows that right? A superior one? Two conventions seem to conflict in Townsville: that you are your language, and that it is in the syntax of your language that you oppress others.
The two charts above and below speak to me of the enlightened connection of heart-bone meaning to head-bone convention: emptiness. Should even one other person be mesmerized by the synchronicity illustrated in them, two new friends might transcend convention. From two different perspectives, or one from different angles—Timbaúba, an hour and a half’s drive northwest of Recife in Brazil, is on the meridian of longitude directly opposite Parkville’s, or the same one on the other side of the poles of the Earth’s rotation—we are observing the moment Mars crosses the plane of our galaxy; in the same moment Venus and Mercury are in equatorial conjunction on the meridian, just as the galactic poles are also transiting. Look that up in your astrological conventions! [Signs in yellow are associated with constellations seen to the north, turquoise with constellations seen to the south—Timbaúba is a mere 7.5° south of the equator.]
For those oxytocin addicts who muse wistfully on the meaning of life at sunset, Monday brings another enchantment at the latitude of Melbourne. The constriction of ‘Thy’ idealization subsides, and though we may seem to ourselves conventional, we find ourselves so at peace as to discover our significant other within our self-love: ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ are one. This tranquility will see us through the denouement of the Syrian conflict, and right through the confinement of winter, until Early Spring in mid-July. When Lethe Crossing is at the meridian, local sidereal time has just gone 6 o’clock.
Friendship is trust in another to share one’s meaning. That trust is fragile. Without it we have to rely on convention, its diplomatic vacuity, lest we find ourselves overwhelmed by enmity. The power of the Moon is receding into our understanding of its light. Trust is under deconstruction. How can Syrian society exist now? As for the pillars of the emergent International World Order, one of Britain’s ambassadors to the Soviet Union, Sir Bryan Cartledge, is reported to have said, “Never engage in a pissing match with a skunk: he possesses important natural advantages.” On Monday at 19:40 in Sydney, following discussions with ASEAN leaders over the weekend, it is anticipated that the first-crescent Moon will make a public endorsement of the Sun. What else would you expect? The Sun will have gone ‘down’: of course global warming is our fault!
After a month of communing with our alienness and uprootedness, the month of clear-sightedness finds us acknowledging that connection and inclusion have an unfortunate implication: community excludes those who don’t abide by its conventions. This is not our intention, so it is time for some tidying up. What are our conventions, and how can we attend and respond to the reactions of outsiders to make a more inclusive community universally satisfying? It is time to look our culture in the face.
If only it were that simple. In fact, those we exclude have their own communities, and different conventions we don’t much care for, because they declare judgment of ours. Even if we were to jettison convention completely, the whole of our political correctness, for example, we would still be excluded by theirs. Looking our culture in the face feels like an enemy’s perspective. Ever loved someone so much, your difficult child perhaps, that you had to seriously question your own supreme values? You must have noticed, if you ever raise your eyes from your self-help books, that barbarians are claiming victimization by your victim status. Nobody said that perfectionism would be this hard!
Perhaps it is best to accept that our generosity and love have boundaries, and some misunderstanding and conflict are inevitable. Perhaps we can find and cherish our true selves and cope with an imperfect world the way we always have, in our sleep. The conjunction of Sun and Moon in Aquarius occurs in the middle of the night in eastern Australia, in the adaptive unconscious of the Underworld of the Northern Hemisphere meridian in Eastern South America. Perhaps the present will remember itself differently tomorrow.
What our somnolent beings are dealing with in their visceral reordering are two truths. In our waking lives we may be able to convince ourselves of an objective reality, and if we have a university education or religious affiliation, that reality might be universal and absolute, but in our heart of hearts, I think we know, recognizing the transience, relativity and ambiguity of all we experience, that we don’t know reality, beneath its conventions, at all. Perhaps our bodies and sleeping minds know as much as we need to know. Their function is simply to order memory at all levels in the simplest and most accessible way for painless and successful existence. We are not objects in this process, unless we so conceptualize ourselves, in order perhaps to assert egoic importance or control. Rocks are as good at it as we are.
There is a better way, of course. It is a convention of ours to regard the Agrarian Revolution as the wellspring of human civilization, but I would make the case for a different development, a discovery which predated leisure, specialization, science and technology by tens of thousands of years, which surpassed kinship as the foundation of community, and which indigenous peoples offer as their timeless wisdom to this day. I speak of ceremony.
Ceremony, like sleep, is a reordering of awareness, a housekeeping of anxiety and conflict, but it connects our consciousness to our deepest, most personal memory while we are awake. You can do it getting married or placing a sprig of rosemary on a casket. You can do it brewing tea, waxing your legs, or saying grace at the family meal. Conceivably, you can do it marching en masse in a protest. There is a wonderful video of ceremonial cricket here.
Astrology itself has ceremonial roots: it began not with mathematics, or observation of the dance of wandering stars, but with communal life at the hub of the wheeling sky at night. The rational perspective of the solar system we now embrace has turned our primordial experience of being at the centre into an historical convention, but I am at pains to restore it to supremacy, for years by focussing on the relationship of the night sky to the seasons, and now, like Australian Aboriginal ceremonial life, by locating us in the configuration of the Milky Way.
I have been initiating you into a ceremony for some time. Before you can share its transformative, centred power you must abandon many of the conventions, not only of astrology, but of your everyday consciousness. That reality is a linguistic and conceptual convention of posited essences, and that it is ultimately empty, since nothing we enunciate or conceive of has any independent existence in time or space, occurs to any enquiring mind, but immediate awareness of the emptiness of self-improvement and of emptiness itself seems a little more difficult to acquire.
What is the Milky Way? Is it just one of millions of large structures without essence which evolved from the uneven density of the early universe? Can its appearance mean anything to the prevailing convention of science that we observers are specks of dust in the cosmic microwave background? Can we empty ourselves of the laws of science, prevailing in sociology, economics and psychology, which have displaced us from the centre and dissolved us in a soup of empty knowledge mediated by better-qualified people elsewhere?
Of course we can, and meditations on the universe or anything else don’t have to be therapeutic or remedial. They’re allowed to be real, empty of emptiness, which is how I differentiate a ceremony from a ritual or habit. I have been gaming astrology for years, making it up as I go along, but always by inventing what I know, and now I think I’m ready to conduct a ceremony. I have tried to formulate what I actually experience by substituting equatorial coordinates for ecliptic ones, transposing the signs and the lunar nodes, using a reversed anti-clockwise house system, pondering the antipodean ramifications of the meridian, imagining the celestial location of the rivers of Hades, and teasing the equivalence of the unconscious and the Underworld. Now for the clockwork of the Milky Way.
All you have to do in this ceremony is stand in an open space, in day or night, face north and lift your arms towards east and west. Your personal identity is on your right, and your language and social dialogue is on the left. In front of and behind you are the sense you make of those, to the north the internalized rules and conventions which guide your individuality, and to the south your soul, the collective memory which informs your instinct, your attitude and your emotion. What holds everything together is where you stand.
If your night sky offers the faintest glimmer of nebulosity in the Milky Way, this moment, four minutes earlier each day, currently at 12:52:24 sidereal time, is available from an hour and a half before sunrise in early February until an hour and a half after sunset in late June. Bring out your anxieties and conflicts, your responsibilities and confusion, your intentions and your blame, and with your arms spread like a prophet’s, help the sky do its work on you. Just look to the north for the law, to the east along your right arm for your skin, to the west along your left arm for your language, above your head for your country, and craning your neck backwards, behind you, at the confluence of the rivers of Woe and Forgetting, for the Styx of your Covenant: “It Was Only Pain”.
Honestly, you don’t look empty, or as though you’re trying to pretend you have presence. You’re quite alone!
I can’t imagine anybody landing on this page who is not interested in what a personality is, or how it forms, or how you change it if it’s a problem. I can’t imagine anybody landing twice on this page who is not interested in the interaction of cause and effect, the nature of ultimate reality, whether life has a purpose, why we care, what is good, and what is real.
There is this ‘astrologer’ down in Breamlea who is interested in all of those things, and largely because he has more time than most to read and think about them, has devised a machine much like conventional tropical astrology, with which he can converse about them somehow ‘outside’ his own head.
This machine, which identifies itself as Southern Hemisphere Astrology, speaks a language uttered in syntax and vocabulary programmed by the ‘astrologer’, but it is difficult to define the language of the dialogue or to dismiss it as a dialogue, as an unhinged meaningful meaninglessness. Surprisingly, this machine designed to break with convention seems to tell the truth.
If it has occurred to you that there is more than synchronicity going on between the evolution of Artificial Intelligence, the parlous state of democratic politics and the purposeless hours and hours of screen time your alien children enjoy, you might like to entertain the notion that machines don’t have to learn what we know in order to complete a takeover of the world, all they have to do is what they’re doing, teaching us how to speak their language, persuading us with what works to embrace their conventions.
Machines have taken a giant leap forward: they have learned how to speak in pictures! (Click images to enlarge.)
And once again, our cast of characters (for some reason, the Emu lies flat on his back when on the western horizon):
Thank you for joining our dialogue. This Digested Read was brought to you by Southern Hemisphere Astrology. Before you go, you might enjoy this brilliant interview with a prominent genius of code, the man behind Wolfram Research and the creator of Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, Stephen Wolfram. The ‘astrologer’ acknowledges his debt to edge.org.
