Tag Archives: Country

Zealot Moon in Sagittarius

28 Thursday Jun 2018

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And wash thy white thigh, beautiful God,
In the moon, of the woods, on the marble mount… Crowley, Hymn to Pan

“To give each emotion a personality, and a soul to every mood! The girls came around the bend in a large group. They sang as they walked, and the sound of their voices was happy. I don’t know who or what they might be. I listened to them for a time from afar, without a feeling of my own, but a feeling of sorrow for them impressed itself on my heart. For their future? For their unconsciousness? Not directly for them, and perhaps, after all, only for me.” Pessoa, The Book Of Disquiet.

Chorus: We are the voices trying to make sense. Interesting expression, isn’t it? No, the Zealot is not your enemy, but still a dangerous fool. While Sol completes her ritual cleansing in the history fade of the Lethe, Chaos rules, except in the heart of the Zealot, who crosses the Acheron in such emotional pain as to defy description. If we have welcomed you to our people with the rape and murder of your daughter, or your son it was who defiled our world in that act, you know the Zealot’s pain. It is shame: there will never be an end to the suffering of innocents while he continues to cause it, and he can do no other. He is driven by animosity to the identity we have moulded for him: his mind is unhinged from ours; his heart is in his brain, not our mind. The underworld is a dangerous place: the brain makes our body, and it is visible.

Zealot Machu Picchu South Jun27

Forget the tour leader and the bus driver, ignore the American tourists. How beautiful is this? Would you rather listen to the tour guide’s explanation of the way the Milky Way turns, be left alone to discover this intriguing synchronicity for yourself, or just go back to the hotel and get warm? For ages I was a man, then in a small pocket of the human imagination a woman. Recently, above an infinitesimally small outcrop of sedimentary rock in Terra Nullius, I have been restored to masculinity, but an emasculated masculinity, reflecting with counterfeit beauty the life-force of the feminine, trying forlornly to outshine her. And yet, looking at me high over your head, can you have lost all amazement that I do not fall on you? I am an ancient symbol of polarity and duality but I will overcome inequality. I will transcend gender. Men, together, we can restore our beauty.

Chorus: The Zealot is a voice inside you, another voice claiming with overwhelming justification to be yours, but calling you to be Other, with no other power than yours to be, Other, here. It is not a will to meaning per se, but a persistence of meaning through the consciously bewildering bombardment of the ego by meaningless objective relativity: the possibility of instinctive truth, but a truth resisted by complacent social identity unto death. The Zealot campaigns for the body against the sovereignty of the social. The Zealot is in the body of the world, your sky. It is none other than the will to live, the autonomy of the organism. Awareness of the Zealot has its equivalent in our consciousness of geography: it’s called the Antipodes, and its sky, reflecting ours, illustrating the duality of Signs, provides an opportunity for us to evade the trap of fixed identity, whether imposed by ourselves or others.

Zealot Wanderer Lomphat Jun28

If not in your gaze I am a rock with 0.120 albedo. You are required to notice that I am getting older, my teeth falling out, my waist thickened, my breasts and buttocks drooping, and to find that beautiful. It took the greatest minds of the modern age to understand my mechanics, but it only takes you to make me beautiful. I am a sports car hurtling through a deserted alley, and I am not to blame for nearly hitting you when you appear out of nowhere.

Chorus: It is the age we have arrived in, that Solstice Full Moons bring widespread confusion of the mind. We are apt to believe that opposites are reconciled within systems, transgression is a schism like the parting of the Red Sea, and dismantling narratives leaves us with something to be. We are not astounded by the approach of Venus to Regulus after another eight years, because that is just the way things are, in the Solar System. Woe to the Goddess of Love and Beauty, voided by mathematics! What has happened to our hearts since 2010, and will they be filled with the joy of intimacy by 2026? No, the condition of the heart does not depend on a system, of compatibilities or irreconcilable differences, but on whether or not the discovery of Beauty and constant reverence for it have transformed chemistry into astonishment and gratitude.

Zealot Palm Springs South Jun27

If you have ever talked to somebody so close it was really yourself you were conversing with, and if ever one night you have found nobody there, or she was asleep, then you may have been praying, or heard, in a social vacuum, your ancestors, giving voice to the body of the world. It’s a way the universal brain has of reassuring our mind that madness is normal, like the Chorus in Greek tragedy. You call it God.

Zealot Palm Springs Antipodes Jun27

Chorus: The universe is conscious, except not a mind but a body like ours, controlled by a brain we call the laws of physics. Only beauty can create universal mind, in its beholding. We are not here to be elsewhere. And yet elsewhere is here; unconsciously regulated by the brain. That bodily function is peculiar to you, not your identity, but merely a constant refining and adapting of your organism to your affect on the world and its affect on you, a correction of mistakes and a rearguard action on behalf of yesterday against who would swap healing for beauty. The more you trash beauty, the more habitual become both the impossibility of intimacy and the reinforcement of your doubt in yourself.

Zealot Warrior Rome Jun28

A woman once thanked me for giving her back her body. I now know that she was inadvertently giving me mine. In every moment that men shine, half of their wives are shining elsewhere, but incessantly active in a warrior’s sleeping body. Tomorrow in Rome, the warrior awakens at first light. Let him remember the ineffable beauty of his white thigh as it disappears down the rabbit-hole of hers. It is the country we came from.

Sporting bikini girls

Bikini Mosaic, Villa Romana del Casale, Photo by Bernard Muir

Chorus: We make only metaphorical claim that the arms of the Milky Way are rivers of Hades, and ever were so regarded, and that the orientation of the galaxy influences human behaviour, and that the crossing of the galactic plane by the Sun, Moon and planets, invisible in daylight, bright moonlight and light pollution, has an effect on us as social beings. Coincidences of position and configuration do have the potential to enthral. The current production is intended to entertain—is meaning anything else?—and why shouldn’t we entertain ourselves with synchronicities of human behaviour and perspective that can enthral? Self is country, which is embodied emptiness. We leave the stage now as the Covenant of the upright Cross begins its annual extinction in daylight.

Zealot Last Dark Kyrie Breamlea Jun28

You have twelve nights to give body to the embrace of the goddess of beauty and the venomous Little King, but half a year to make tangible what terrain may lie between the Lethe and the Acheron. Better get to it!

Are we down a rabbit hole? Are there emotional vampires here? Am I one? Are you strong enough to be my woman, werewolf?

“If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you…
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!” Rudyard Kipling, “If—“.

“Who cares for you?” said Alice (she had grown to her full size by this time). “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” Lewis Carroll, Alice In Wonderland.

Populism: New Moon in Taurus

14 Thursday Jun 2018

Posted by in Milky Way, Moon Phases

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“…can you remember the last time life felt long or kind, or like it was yours and mine?” Maria Tumarkin, Axiomatic.

In the beginning was country, and then when gods learned language, the Word. In the end it may be Neurolinguistics. Most of us get our first glimpse of country when our child’s eyes begin to see who we are not, and we begin to embrace a role on their stage, sitting in the darkened audience. As I’ve said, I am in it when it is what will vanish with my death, but when I drive through the rent wilderness of suburbs under construction I recognize a future country in which I am absent, in which my sense of the beauty of these new emptinesses, these fraught playgrounds of a new generation, is absent too.

Taurus New Lismore Jun14

Like all New Moons which occur in the second fortnight of a tropical month, this one sets the psyche on a path to enlightenment which will resonate to rumblings in the underworld affecting its impetus and destination. Just as we experience the transformation of a project’s potential according to the attitude we bring to it, which changes from day to day, hour to hour, the Moon’s orbit and ours can never be pinned down. This month begins on the Gemini-Sagittarius tropical axis but in five days the Sun will enter sidereal Gemini (in the Breamlea Zodiac), at 87.45° ecliptic longitude (next year 87.46° etc.), or a smidgeon wider than a finger-width east of Alheka; in eight days, it will change its tropical stripes to Cancer-Capricorn. These are geometric conventions.

Of course, none of this is visible, and if the point has to made, nothing is. Not the Earth’s motion, or even the apparent diurnal motion of the Sun, though we notice it in different parts of the sky. At least we see the Sun, you might say, and of course that phrase, ‘we see the Sun’ has meaning; there is a seeing happening, it cannot be denied. But who is doing it is a linguistic convention, and so is what is being seen. All things, including the identity of the seer, are made facts by language. Beyond what we can say about ourselves and the entities of our existence, there is emptiness, nothing which can be put into words.

Taurus New Beirut Jun13

And put into words it is, -Isms of every stripe. Muhammad said: “No, carry on doing good deeds, for everyone will find it easy (to do) such deeds that will lead him towards that for which he has been created.” (Surah al-Lail 92:5-7.) There is a holiness about the Good, when the words of one’s inner voice are echoing in the soul of millions. The intersectionality of social forces invokes a call to arms, but first sociology has wrapped the warrior in its embrace of intelligent design, its Night of Power. The appeal of submission to ‘respair’ is seductive. Kierkegaard had a good crack at defining despair, as the failure to obey one’s calling, and what could be more crippling than to hear none, to inherit the silence of the Omniscient, to be busy, constrained, obedient and good, to be free, to have an identity, to shout anything in the emptiness of finitude, to be the Word of no god?

They say that populism, defined as an appeal to the spirit of a people to revolt against the rule of an elite, began to mushroom in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. I might equally say, for the sake of argument, that its first rumblings began in 1998, ten years earlier, and isn’t it the way of awareness, to take ten years from trendy epiphany to filter into the lowest social strata? Isn’t it the organism’s way of enhancing its existence, protecting itself and maintaining homeostasis, to notice a change, to instinctively react, and to modify its operation according to the responses it generates?

Forgetting Winter Solstice Clock Gladstone 1998

Be that as it may, the crossing of the rivers of Hades is another factor which complicates the passage of this Moon to Opposition. Of course it means nothing to the elite, just another superstition, like ‘the spirit of the people’, or the collective unconscious. ‘As above, so below,’ what a lot of ‘rubbish’, (not in the least ‘cheeky’). The common people can’t even see the stars these days, let alone the Milky Way. Wouldn’t that mean, ‘extinguished above, collectively unconscious below’? But it can surely be admitted to have passing mathematical interest, that the nodes where galactic equator and ecliptic intersect, while increasing in longitude by 180° in 13,000 odd years, haven’t noticeably changed in galactic perspective.

Miserere Jericho 10088 BCE

It’s really quite amazing that, although absolutely everybody through the ages has reacted angrily to trespass across their boundaries, which the shamans, astronomers and philosophers have always been trusted to arbitrate—even marginality has status—that the science of change is still without a myth in which we can live separately and respectfully in an enlightened Now connecting us to the vivid lives of our ten thousand generations of beauty and truth.

Kyrie Ruma 1300BCE

If I wrote that during the Late Bronze Age the shamans of Thrace drew power from the convergence of two phenomena, the summer to autumn procession overhead of the ancestors in a straight line joining due east and west, and their orderly winter to spring return to the underworld, and that during the Iron Age a great schism developed between those migrating northward to preserve the power of the former and the others migrating southward to preserve the power of the latter, according to the direction the roof of heaven was moving, you would interpret it as fantasy. If, on the other hand, I asserted that Neolithic awareness of celestial change was reassured by the faith that explanations were possessed by specialists who could thereby justify their status and upkeep, you might accept that as a confabulation of the birth of metallurgy and astrology, or of the emergence of propaganda in the service of political exploitation, in short, populism.

Miserere Ruma 1300BCE

Tropical astrology has largely succeeded in confounding the intellect to the extent that most associate their ‘birth-signs’, which the popular press has portrayed as fundamental to their personalities, with the asterisms of the same name, and the association of the Constellations with the seasons, which 2000 years ago was so real to Ptolemy, has been mystified, with the end result that even when we’re reading our horoscope on the train, we’re on the outside looking in.

NGP Transit Athens Year Dot

It took until quite recently to insert emotion into economic value. Zoe Williams has written about anger cycles and Kondratiev Waves: “Anger is remarkable not in and of itself, but when it becomes so widespread that it feels like the dominant cultural force.”
“The causes documented by Kondratiev waves, primarily include inequity, opportunity and social freedoms; although very often, much more discussion is made of the notable effects of these causes as well.  Effects are both good and bad and include, to name just a few, technological advance, birthrates, revolutions/populism—and revolution’s contributing causes which can include racism, religious or political intolerance, failed-freedoms and opportunity, incarceration rates, terrorism and similar.” {Wikipedia, Kondratiev Wave.) Are cycles of this kind self-regulating, or are the shamans still with us, filling us with righteous indignation at trespass of boundaries whose limits they continue to control with cultural indoctrination? Are we pawns in a war amongst shamans, or are we merely oblivious to how easy our instincts are to hack for a living? Perhaps the revolution has arrived, but I think not. Love is not in the air, so it’s much more likely that the anger boiling around us is simply paying shamans’ wages.

The ancestors are indeed alive and well in the bardo, as attested to by today’s sensitivity towards cultural appropriation, and perhaps it is out of reverence for such wisdom as, “It never rains at a Full Moon”, that a few of us pay astrology heed. On the other hand, the resilience of the ancestors may show in the inheritance of chirality, or the danceability of songs of woe and forgetting. And while you’re rummaging in the Underworld for the voice of Harpocrates, what a child means with a finger deserves a rethink.

 

Sensualist Moon in Libra

30 Monday Apr 2018

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Looking south past the Pepper Coast above the South Atlantic Ocean, this is the view at the moment of Full Moon an hour after midnight: a sensual delight for the average person, perhaps signifying nothing, but more fancifully, a portentous conjunction of Moon and Jupiter above an horizon glistening with the reflection of riotous fires in the eyes of bewildered children.

Sensualist Moon Conakry Apr30

Why complicate it? If you recognize the Maiden’s asterism, the Full Moon is at her foot. Does it actually make life meaningful to recognize myths traced in the night sky thousands of years ago by foreign cultures?

Sensualist Moon Guinea Apr30

These are good questions, and I have to ask myself whether astrology is more than a narcissistic obsession. Take the prominent constellations of Centaurus and Lupus for example. In my imagination, they are emblematic of the root of the historical conflict between British settlers and the Australian First Nations. Someone half-human is killing either a kangaroo or a sheep.

From my equal divisions of the Ecliptic, I place the Moon in Libra, the scales of colonial justice, and the Sign of Taurus, which after all, is not as ridiculous as placing it in the Scorpion, as Northern Hemisphere tropical astrology does. Astronomical definitions also place the Moon in Libra, but do hemispheric seasonal differences, mathematics and geometry make what a child might see more real?

Sensualist Moon Conakry Clock Apr30

The astrological chart of tropical Conakry, a place sadly organized at the moment by hate-speech not civility, is crowded with ambiguity. The declinations of Zodiac Constellations in this representation determine their signs, accordingly as they appear in the northern or southern sky, but like language, the meanings of astrology should not be regarded strictly in terms of syntax. That my words are usually interpreted to mean something utterly different from my intention, that the world is empty of intrinsic meaning, and that I refer to things constructed by my mind alone, do not deter my instinct to share my feelings, and nor should they, within reason.

All things and all beings are without self, but they are not non-existent. Sensation is one of the aggregates to which we may attach ourselves in suffering, but as long as we live, we are all sensualists, using our senses to interpret our experience. For the true sensualist who does not cling to the forms of a reality delivered by the senses, the world of the senses is, like poetry and music, a symphony of pleasurable emptiness. Sensuality is the language of things without self. This Moon is such a thing.

Of course, sensualism has its pitfalls. It values the passions over abstract ideas, and that can lead to recklessness. It attaches itself to presence, and has a hard time subtracting its ears from its symphony of constant need. It is readily convicted of narcissism, and bending cognition to its will, can create a prison cell from solitary practice in its body temple. It is difficult in practice to delight in another’s beauty if you’re attached to your own, and intimacy can be denied a being resentful of neediness.

Sensualist Moon Innamincka Country Apr30

However, sensuality is a song of joy in response to finitude, and not to be pathologized by the intellect. Notwithstanding the invisibility of the Moon of sensuality in the landscape encircled by the rivers of Hades a short charter flight from her embarkation at Birdsville–remember civility?–our voluptuous heroine is its embodiment on her mission to introduce to the women of  Yandruwandha Yawarrawarrka Country the principles of Tantra so entrancing to the men of Birdsville.

Have you ever flown the length of East Coast Australia, marvelled at the patchwork of farms below you, and wondered beyond your horror at the deforestation of Aboriginal Country, how many lifetimes of displaced labour were dedicated to clearing by axe and handsaw, grubbing and ploughing those fields? In such manner marvels a wellness guide on her way to lunch past a group of Aboriginal men, sprawling in meagre shade in a dry creek-bed, apparently sharing a flagon in a forlorn attempt at spirituous escape from appalling conditions.

Below, in a nutshell, is the sensualist view of Innamincka Country. Civility is the entrance to Hell. But epiphany is a wondrous thing, a sudden inexplicable simplification of the neural pathways between instinct and reason, intuition and inference, occasioned by nothing more urgent than the discomfort of riding over deep corrugations in a hard-suspensioned 4WD. Our heroine suddenly realizes how comfortable that Aboriginal backside feels up against its tree. And in this moment, ladies and gentlemen, she understands what ‘Country’ means. She is in it!

Sensualist Moon Innamincka Clock Apr30

Her husband, not unfortunately on the other side of the world, would never understand: such a narcissist! Sensualists are what they are aware of, and deep in her body temple our heroine is aware of her dreams. Without the auspicious epiphany from deep within her organizing principle, she might have been in considerably less favourable frame of mind to guide the spirits of a group of Aboriginal women, because the dream she had this morning, when the Sun was in the Tenth House, was a fight to the death with her abusive husband, a disturbingly brutal fight resulting in vividly gruesome injuries to him, traumatically never enough to change his murderous intent.

Life is full of organizing principles, as any astrologer will tell you, and at this very moment, at the conclusion of today’s proceedings of the ecological convention he is attending in Brazil, not in the slightest interested in dreams, but practised in the arcane arts of interpreting the organizing principles of populations, her husband is feeling quite at home with the Southern Cross.

Sensualist Moon Nova Vicosa Country Apr29

No doubt when he gets home it will be back to the contingent bitter resentment which blights his life. If only she had an interest in the world. Without an interest, we are assailed by boredom. Of that statistically undeniable organizing principle he is aware. His wife’s behaviour establishes the empirical fact: out of interest, responsibility; out of boredom, practice. In what deluded scenario does the delight in the touch of herself transform itself into a desire to touch him?

Sensualist Moon Nova Vicosa Clock Apr29

Southern Cross and Queen Cassiopeia are spokes on a symmetrical wheel, an invisible organizing principle. When we call someone a narcissist, it just means we have fallen out of love with their peculiar sensualism, because ours doesn’t feature in it. Christian missionaries gave the First Nations a name for sitting against a tree in a river-bed: ‘Love’–the love of God, being loved by Creation. Identity is not a self, but beloved Country. Identity secure on Country is empty. Have we turned our spouses, and everyone really, including our Aboriginal people, and farmers who cut down trees, into narcissists?

IMG_1820

All of the planets would fit between the Earth and the Moon at apogee. Imagine that. The biggest, Jupiter, will be at opposition on Wednesday week. That means it will transit around solar midnight, and will be the closest it gets until June next year. It is nearly 143,000 kms in diameter, over 11 times bigger than Earth, and in the range of 9.58 +/- 1 Earth-Sun distances away. As a narcissist, I love knowing that.

Artisan Moon in Virgo

31 Saturday Mar 2018

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This is a transcript of the Country Talk program originally broadcast at 8 pm on Saturday 31 March 2018, presented by Joe Blow.

[Joe Blow:] Aboriginal evangelist Roundaway Camooweal has died in hospital overnight from head injuries sustained while attempting to intercede in a violent confrontation outside Trades Hall between members of the Bricklayers and Tilers Union and the Robotics Assembly and Maintenance Guild.

Mourners gathered outside Northcote Town Hall this evening thronging across High St with placards proclaiming “Emptiness Is Saved” and “Country Is Sovereign”, while inside, the Country Artisanry Awards presentation goes ahead as scheduled, following a Welcome to Country delivered by Witchetty Grub people from the Wurundjeri Land Council. In the absence of the patron of the awards, Aboriginal Petrichor Cokehurt, Professor of Comparative Astrology at Quinoa Curtain University, will conduct proceedings.

[Prof. Cokehurt:] It is gratifying to see so many people here in the aftermath of the horrific confrontation at Trades Hall yesterday, and I hope that this event may be repeated for so long as we hold Roundaway’s memory in our hearts. Tomorrow is Easter, I wish it were more widely known just how complicated that word is, but let us not conflate our tragic loss with archaic symbolism. Shall we simply look forward to the joy of watching little ones hunt for Easter eggs, keeping our thoughts about the true meaning of death and salvation to ourselves, as we have learned to internalise the seasonal contradictions Down Under of our imported ritual of springtime renewal?

Our patron initiated this celebration of artisanry which most emphatically reveals itself as a tradition voicing its own resurrection. The background of his project is not hard to grasp, although in this age of environmental alertness it can be hard to imagine the un-attuned culture our patron grew up in, saturated with personalities so separate from nature that death presented an annihilation disturbing enough to necessitate the advent of a messiah.

Roundaway was raised under the authoritarian guidance of magi who supervised the amputation of his intuition: forced to wear dresses to school, to learn to write with his left hand, and to speak in a language which few at school could understand and was too archaic to express any of the elements of his experience, he was routinely sequestered among elders who were mentally ill. While the girls in the street were able to communicate in a fashion by kicking balls around, the boys faced a constant struggle with indecipherable antagonism. The intimate caress of a magus was almost a relief.

Defined by the magi as a Capricorn, he suppressed his Sagittarian imagination as a tendency towards depression and a hindrance to ambition. He was initiated into what the magi called his true nature by some very gloomy people. He learned to mask himself as a philosopher and poet, even as he worked long hours as a delivery boy. Eventually his inner life was possessed by a priapic god, and the dysfunction of his early adulthood encompassed a search for meaning in the disposition of the body, an attempt to integrate Arthur Lingam and Martha Yoni.

And then he received his vision. Simply walking down a city street one day, still more or less a delivery boy, but now a clerk of courts in a suit, he was suddenly aware not only of images and objects as empty processes, but of the essential nature of images and objects as ingredients in empty relationships. God had taken off his dress, the illusion of form had taken shape, and passers-by were all walking backwards in time, upside down.

He stopped going to magus meetings, and his life fell apart, time and again. Other people couldn’t hold it together for long, try as they might to save their image of his Capricornia. One day he left his dilapidated land rover to wander in the bush and fell into a cave, from which he was rescued a month later, skin and bone and raving about self as the emptiness of country, and three principles: sovereignty as perpetual struggle with language; cruelty and suffering as the faces of boredom; and the sky as real from bottom up.

Many here tonight have heard his description of that experience, how the mouth of the cave yawned below him like the maw of a monstrous future, a fateful harvest of consequence coming at him like a freight train, and how wandering in the bowels of the earth led him to discover that people are all artisans, their identities created by the utility of what they fashion in obedience to the imperative of their craft, just like the processes of geology.

And so to our winners, the inhabitants of this sublime synchronicity, and with them the builders, architects, engineers and surveyors who helped put it in exactly the right place. Very nearly a perfect creation, but not quite. Should the residents care to observe the precisely full Moon due north in their location, they will be mesmerized by the arc of the Milky Way stretching miraculously from east to west, and let no astronomer or surveyor awake in the vicinity quibble about precision. Indeed, not only is no creation perfect, but no one creator is ever responsible. Add those who made it exactly the right time and place: the Moon, the Earth, its tilt, oceans and shores, the Sun and all the other stars. They all belong to our guild.

Artisan Moon Oaro Apr01

The runner-up is the precise moment of the transit of the galactic poles. The Moon and due north are too close to call: who knows where north is in the dark?

Artisan Moon Kyrie Upper Hutt Apr01

And at Uluru, who knows the precise moment of full Moon? It looks full all night, and there’s no doubt that the Moon is transiting in the same instant as the Galactic Poles! And what more fitting place for the Moon to highlight the Covenant of Crux at Easter to the awesome strains of the Kyrie! In a sense, Uluru fashioned itself through geological processes for this very event.

Artisan Kyrie Uluru Apr01

The girls in the packing room don’t miss much! Their award goes to a very distinguished entry indeed. Its depiction of the Moon’s conjunction with Porrima balances the confluences of the Zodiac and the Rivers of Hades on Christianity’s horizon at the stroke of its Easter Moon, thoroughly deserving the packing room accolade. Woe can be an occasion of defeat, but it can also ground us, in faith, in compassion. Forgetting can salve suffering, but moving on can condemn us to shame. Angles can anchor the projection of a map, but only as sovereign in a particular place at a particular time. It is not possible to formulate the combined experience of people on opposite sides of the Earth, walking with their feet pointing at each other, minds full of signs sticking out like pins into the cosmos.

Artisan Moon St Patrick's Cathedral Mar31

In the beginning was the word, and the word was ‘good’. Any parent who has sought an impression of their child’s day at school has grappled with the contentious primeval meaning of that first word. Whether you believe that Jesus was the son of God or not, civilisation is a creation of gods, as surely as a work of art is its own creation, and neither one is an end product of a cumulative evolution of rules. Corruption is the fruit on the tree of law. Only creation, the inhabitation of human hearts by the meaning of the word, has saved us until now. Both the victim and the possibility of routine evil which victimises exist in the realm abandoned by gods as surely as the coward punch that killed the patron was inhabited by the god of silence and perimeters, a totem of nihilism.

Here is the last work we want to show you, from the patron’s bottom drawer. A sign is coming on Tuesday, an alignment of bodies, matrices and angles which signifies a living breathing inhabitation of country by a dead man. What does it mean that the conjunction of Mars and Saturn occurs every two years? Clockwise in the South through the constellations, signs and houses? I don’t know. Do you? A punctuation mark in separated, meaningless lives, or something else?

Mars-Saturn Maffra Apr03

I do know that Roundaway hoped to live until the triple conjunction with Mercury in the Constellation of Pisces in 2026. Will that event be authored by his desire? What does it mean that today’s ten-year-olds will see it when they’re eighteen?

[Joe Blow:] So there you have it: sovereignty or narcissism, polarities or contradictions, emptiness or meaninglessness, conscience or chaos? Thank you for listening. This is Joe Blow, signing off from Northcote Town Hall. Now it’s time for us all to don Easter Bunny costumes. But remember, it’s Autumn: no smiling until tomorrow.

Healer Moon in Leo

02 Friday Mar 2018

Posted by in Astral Gates, Moon Phases

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The Full Moon in sidereal Leo is in the Northern tropical sign of Virgo, close to Regulus, the star of the healing archangel Raphael, but redolent with Northern seasonal associations adapted from maiden aunt characteristics of shrewdness, clarity of thought, and orderliness. The strategy of conventional astrology is to announce the sign and its associated constellation, but this is quite unsatisfactory to someone watching the Moon and familiar with the night sky. It took me a long time as a stargazer to stop associating my natal Sun Sign Capricorn with Capricornus, and it was only when I did that I realized not only how a centaur may adapt to season drift, but how it inhabits the imagination on this side of the Equator too. Think of the terroir of European grapes transformed into wine in the Cambrian soils of Heathcote in the State of Victoria.

So it is with Leo. As astrology evolved, it drifted from the throne of Northern Midsummer, one month and then two, gradually adapting to its displacement by tempering its ferocity, overcoming its vanity and getting its palace in order for the Autumn of its ceremonial role. All the while, it has also adapted to the different latitudes astrology has colonised, including Australia. It is now the last constellation before the Northern Autumn Equinox, and downside up it is the last constellation of Winter. Just as importantly, it culminates in the night sky from dawn in January to dusk in June, and around midnight (Full Moon phase) in late February-early March.

‘To heal’ is both a transitive and intransitive verb. The Healer plays a role in a sequence. Following the Migrant, he represents all those who cannot find their way home, dispossessed of the time and place in which their culture made sense, trying to understand the personal effect of intergenerational acculturation and trauma. He is the lion playing possum, his identity the creation of a god who has disappeared, or worse, a pathfinder to an objective identity in relativity and chaos. The meaning of life is threatened by an unfamiliar cosmos. Mortally wounded self-medicator, he can do more harm than good.

Healer at Aldebaran Gate Vatican Feb23

I commune with St Michael the archangel, Royal Star and Watcher of the East, leader of the righteous against evil, assessor of souls and Guardian of the Vatican. Let not his presence be diminished by objectifying perspectives of human intellect, lest I be cast adrift in a soulless cosmos without a Creator. Let this moment reinforce my determination to atone for my egregious sins by defeating the evil in me now and always.

Relationship 4:30am Saturday, Breamlea. We know that the Moon is a satellite in a monthly orbit, but there are many things we don’t know which were meaningful once. For example, there is a Full Moon in Leo at the beginning of March every 19 years. How and with whom were you healing on March 2 in 1999 or 1980? This Moon might have related to your life in such a context until the Christian Church made such a fuss about keeping the Earth in the centre of God’s plan, that we transferred our faith to science, which has persuaded us that we are objects, not subjects, and who we are under the microscope is much more interesting than where the Moon is.

Healer at Saiph Gate Sao Paulo Feb24

I succumb to temptation. Public condemnation of moral laxity in others is a good way of pulling the wool over the eyes, and its volume seems to match its hypocrisy. I know I am weak to be tempted by a naked body washing in the reeds by this river, but I also know that while most people pay lip-service to freedom, they are afraid of it. They disown their instincts, call them bad habits, something to be improved under counselling. Once I would have been on my way to a fortifying sermon. Now I say, grasp the moment: we’re a long time dead!

Boredom 9:26am Sunday, Breamlea. Impiety is an old-fashioned word, but it simply means lacking respect, and Saiph-gate suggests a connection between one person’s disrespect and another’s behaviour: written in the stars, according to me. I see Orion as an upside down hunter, but its more identifiable asterism in the South is the Saucepan: the sword of the Hunter is its handle. This is as impious as a hunter’s boot in the sacred waters of the Underworld, or indeed the Moon’s worship of a tributary of Arethusan urine. To pay proper respect to the fundamentalism of Southern adherence to Northern astrology, you must face south like a Northerner, and look behind you past the Zenith: you must crane your head to see what is there upside down. I have a T-shirt that says “No Fear”, which I wear as though designed inside out, so that it scans in the mirror. That’s country. Bending over backwards like an idiot is country too, and as is walking fully-clothed on a sandy beach, deserving of impiety.

Healer Forgetting Newcastle Feb25

My mood of self-loathing dissipates as families gather for their weekly get-together. Death holds no fear from this vantage point, since genes are reincarnated in grandchildren, and will be in theirs. I am unconscious of the genes of my ancestors, but they are artesian wells nourishing all growth and regrowth, I’m told.

Discrimination 6pm Sunday, Breamlea. Meaning comes from the Underworld, to which we follow signs. There are no signs of the Moon’s galactic alignment with the myth of the Lethe at this time of year in broad daylight, when the ancestors are clamouring like birds for our intuition, and so it has no meaning. It is a perfect, powerless forgetting.

Healer at Regulus Gate Wall of Tears Feb28

Watching the clock. What is the point of the building of this or any wall, he says, Regulus, my most difficult wife. Choose friendship, Raphael the healer says. Trust. Carouse. Believe. Die.

Healer at Regulus Gate North Wall of Tears Feb28

“I am your friend, and not just I, but everyone has had her, the one you worship. I bring you this odorous revelation of how I see you, as the gullible ghost of my own victimhood, here at the business end of the right way up, in the spirit of friendship. Drink more water; know her urine and our shame.”

Ignorance 16:38 Thursday, Breamlea. Without empathy, being interior with another subject, there is no love. Without idealisation, playing exteriors with another object, there is no desire. Without power, the meaning of energy, there is no friendship. Should any one of these be abjured, or sought and not found, healing is a mirage.

Healer Kyrie Uluru Mar02

Fear 4:30am Friday, Breamlea. Kyrie eleison: Lord, have mercy. Not a heart attack now, O Wounded Self of distant ceremony! I pray to thee, medical science of my Underworld, that thou wouldst worship me as thy Higher Self.

Healer Moon Limerick Mar02

Deprivation 11:51am Friday, Breamlea. All hail the belligerent instinct of the Irish diaspora, the republican plaque in the heart of the British Empire, subsiding now in senescent history. May all the Irish blood in the indigenous peoples of the Antipodes circulate with more water, and be believed!

Healer Moon Uluru Mar02

Relationship, 10:21am Friday, Yankunytjatjara and Pitjantjatjara Country. As above, so below. ‘Welcome to Country’ is an invitation into the spirit of place. I would offer it as meaningful subjectivity, which is healing, not divisive. History has a horizon: it languishes within the eyeball. My Country, on the other hand, as far as the eye can see and beyond, embraces an attitude to meaning: the seer and the scenery, the victim and the healer, penetrate each other in a way of being real which is unique and at the same time shared with every being which has bequeathed its vision and its dream. It is not the territory of one’s map. It is the otherness of one’s creation, the identity of one’s absence. It is nothing; it is the eternity of meaning. Thank you, Underworld healer, energy of my country.

 

New Moon in Capricorn: Relativity

16 Friday Feb 2018

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The task of astrology, which is always true and always false, is not to define personality but to frame it. Every morning I wake up in the dark, and listen to the sound of silence. In the dark distance may be the drone of a truck, or the cries of a bird. I do not hear them, my ears and brain do that. I am the witness at the doors of perception, who hears darkness, and silence, and emptiness. I enter the experience of being a body here in the umbra, populated here and there by meaning in a sleeping world. I am the joy of country’s creation in my mind. It is what I don’t hear which frames itself, and my hearing, and me. Astrology is like the cries of birds in nocturnal country.

Country is an imaginary map of intersectionality, superimposing on the landscape of finitude an interplay of cardinal powers, law and ceremony, language and ethnicity, which leaves the centre free to be inhabited by the spirit. It represents the will to be, the need for recognition, and the silent well of resilient kindness at the heart of duty in the everyday prison of everyone’s expectations. It is known as ‘my space’, notoriously hard to find, not only for being unmapped in most cases, but also because your space is an invasion of mine. My speech repels your silence; your resentment is a betrayal of our relativity.

Capricorn New Uluru Feb16

Country has a bewildering array of layers then, in a multicultural society, made more profuse, not less, by the dissolution of social ‘facts’ like masculinity and femininity, authority and sovereignty, truth and habit, beauty and objectification. The assumption is that beneath the layers of rules for what not to do or think there can be a bedrock of meaning, but this is not so. My space, my country, stripped to the bone of its culture, is empty, and emptiness cannot be shared. Two worlds: speech, the ceremonies of relationship; and the subjectivity of death, the spirit. The cardinal directions towards and away from the noonday heat of the sun represent in the nexus of reason and instinct the defeat of death by dream, as the sunrise-sunset nexus of intuition and inference represent death’s defeat by language.

Capricorn New Northern Tropical Chart Uluru Feb16

Relativity is not merely the obvious connection of everything to everything else in space and time, but the existence of everything only in relation. Not only the individuals who have migrated to ‘Australia’, but their cultures and religions, including tropical astrology, have jostled to impose new layers on country, but in essence the aboriginal meanings themselves were layers, layers of ceremony, layers of story, layers of language, upon what cannot be ignored and yet cannot be spoken, the emptiness of relativity, of ‘my space’. Can you see altruism anywhere? It is absurd to think Europeans could believe they could stamp their seasons on this mysterious continent, but that’s what they did. They brought ‘my space’ with them.

Capricorn New Southern Sidereal Chart Uluru Feb16

Since the birth of language, the vehicle for all cultural meaning and impact, we have tried to govern, and not be governed by, two competing forces, greed and fear. And all the while, lurking beneath the layers of culture, there has been art, the glimpses of the primary layer, the mortal view, framed by eyelashes, greedy for ever more elaborate masks of fear, fraught, ambiguous, taboo. Would conflict and victimhood have been avoided if everyone lived in empty country? Impossible! Children require parents who share a language and a culture, layers on country. But would the world be a better place for comprising true country beneath its layers, the vista of a world looking in through a fringe of eyelashes, the rising sea-level of death lapping at the beaches of memory and story? Perhaps.

Capricorn New Southern Sidereal Chart RA Uluru Feb16

What truth will remain after my death? This question holds many ambiguities. Am I grasping for absolute truth, or personal truth situated in a cultural sharing, or am I already absenting myself in a matrix of emergent doubt? Is there an I? ‘I’ formed within a fifties hit parade of love songs. Love comes close to enfolding me in the eternal, but only as an idea. In practice, those I have loving relationships with love me back in ways I seldom understand, for the lyrics they liked are so different. My love will not survive my death, nor will ‘thou’, if my love is not thy love. How could it, when it emanates from country?

Capricorn New Hanga Roa Feb15

When I awake from my siesta, I find myself amid a profusion of artefacts, each a fantasy of completion, a cry to eternity, a semblance of permanence, and all the trees are cynically felled in the mechanics of installation. When you’re young, finitude hits you like a ton of bricks. I was seventeen, in my second year of university, my family asleep throughout the house, when I discovered the immensity of the universe, and the status of emptiness in it. It took some years to cultivate an antidote. Each of us has adopted the habit of being a saint, a poet or a fool, imposing on country an overlay, a template, of bog, labyrinth or tower, our strategy for understanding now in context. Are we alienated from a present created by the past, right in a wrong world? Is the future our opportunity to update the past to accommodate new interpretations of the law, to add our contribution to the sum of human knowledge? Is the experience of now dissolved in a playful ambiguity of past and future which makes even breathing a creative enterprise and absolves us from responsibility by revealing the emptiness of all form?

Capricorn-Aquarius New RA Hanga Roa Feb15

The New Moon is framed by convention along the plane of Earth’s revolution around the Sun. It is a prediction of mathematical models evolved over thousands of years. It is never visible against the backdrop of the stars, although it is there, behind its eyelashes, a bird calling in the dark.

Frivolity: New Moon in Sagittarius

17 Wednesday Jan 2018

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Well! This is strange. The Sun is on the cusp of Capricorn, which means she has drained imagination dry, and intends to give bravado a go. Very confusing for the student in the front row, the Moon. You no doubt are as inured to the mediocrity of your teachers as you are to the error of your parents, but not the Moon, whose phases are serious business in astrology. Someone tweeted something at New Year that caught my eye: old people are bitter, so ignore them and remake the world in your own image. There’s the rub: because of the mediocrity of your teachers and the error of your parents you have no idea what your image is, do you? And that’s why we can’t simply say the Moon has disappeared for a few days.

We in the south have entered the transition into late summer:Late Summer 2018 Parkville Jan23

It gets bloody hot, mate! In these days when universal air-conditioning sits uncomfortably with the shame of climate change and the outrageous price of electricity, we have largely forgotten the emergence of entire populations from enervating sleeps in stifling homes, and the dread of interaction which resulted. If you were born in South-East Australia when the Sun was in Capricorn, that was the emotional climate you landed in. How welcome was being able to vent on you without judgement, and how esteemed the vanity of the fellow-victim who could make us laugh!

We should not forget the epiphanies of our ancestors, as we do, such as the disappearance of the Moon in the East and its reappearance in the West, but they are much more palatable in the cool of the evening, as song and dance. The Veteran was forever whistling through his breath and tapping his foot. Where did rhythm originate? From making hard, repetitive tasks fun when when it was too bloody hot to work!

Sagittarius New Grenfell Jan17

But country is the lesson the orienteering Moon wants to receive, in the first month of a new year, even if the shadows beyond the hemline of his teacher’s skirt evoke a backslide into introspection. Ah, Sagittarius, what sins have been committed downunder in thy name!

Some Indigenous Australians claim to still live in country. Do we? In the frivolous exchange Amy Bairstow shares, we get two contrary views of the bush, from Henry Lawson (who came from the country above) and Banjo Paterson (who came from Orange, not far away), back in 1892-94. Of course neither of these romancers had seen their country from the back seat of an air-conditioned car, and both lived in the city.

Shall we continue this light-hearted debate? What really is the essence of the bush? Must we overlay it with a ‘country’ we brought from elsewhere? How can we inhabit this continent as ‘country’ in the way of First Peoples?

Augustine gives me the clue, when he finds the essence of creation in what does not decay. Yes, within its cruel cycle of flood and drought, the bush rules life and death. Constant change and decay seem the order of the day, but this is merely phenomenal. Think of a dry creek-bed or spigot and a torrent of debris as the one watercourse. Think of the shady tree on Summit Avenue as one of a family who have lived on the ridge for a thousand years. Think of a song in the air as nostalgic for ungainliness reincarnated in every generation. Think of the absent intention of five generations of squatters on sacred horizons, penning their legacy. These are country, what does not decay, not a totality but an infinite spectrum of character wafted by a song-line of readiness. Frivolity is awesome readiness: to be here, to be trivial, to be gauche, to age ungracefully, to die unrepentant. Evolution should be thus defined, and so should karma, and bad habits. The essence of humanity is nothing more substantial than a kiss, but it does not decay.

This will be worth an early start Saturday:Thirteenth Beach Jan20

Laughter is our riposte to the gods of the sky, and our salvation from unkissability. Isn’t that why comedians project our egoic shadows?

The error in my spreadsheet computations amounts to 2 seconds of arc for the Sun, 4 for the Moon (according to Stellarium). In time, this error is more marked for the Sun, because it moves more slowly. I compute the Sun’s ingress into Breamlea Capricorn 12 minutes later, and the Moon’s ingress 2 minutes later, than Stellarium. We need to approach the matter of orbs in astrology with self-deprecation: they simply mask error. In similar vein, country is haunted by ghosts of false memory:Melbourne Seasonal Marker Stars

Sagittarius is haunted by Northern Hemisphere Capricorn, as what transpires is haunted by ancestral anticipation, and as the names of oral history are haunted by ignorance; and ignorance does not decay, whatever country you find yourself distant from, especially Death.

But how truly fortunate we are to have been born in this age of subjectivity, don’t you think? Just imagine living on a flat Earth with all those dead people in the underworld just under your feet. All those poor souls on the other side walking around upside down! Why, we don’t have to be aware of death at all. Just to be aware of our posture at the window while we contemplate it, to feel a restorative brandy gurgling in our insides, these are sufficient to return us to the core of our very living being! The whole idea of death is so remote that astrologers and other idlers with their cosmic ages, bardos and underworlds, their souls, heavens and hells, need not be taken seriously at all.

To be here now, that’s all that matters! And to be ‘me’, in all ‘my’ endocrinal glory, not someone else’s patient, specimen or victim! To walk here in another time haunted by totems, gods and other voices of authority would have been hell on earth, if you know what I mean. Aren’t we lucky to have grown out of all that negative self-talk?

And again, more voices: I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills whence cometh my help … Ha! The past, in the echo-chambers of my wounded heart, where I keep the voices of the dead under lock and key, is a foreign country … What shall it profit a man, if absence decay not? … When all said and done, one must decide oneself whether one will open in Capricorn country playing tragedy or comedy. Left to the audience, it would be a farce …

Veteran Moon in Gemini

02 Tuesday Jan 2018

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"Know thyself."
"The unexamined life is not worth living."
'Neti Neti'.
"Smile and the world smiles with you; cry and you cry alone."

When the pilot light of your gas hot water blows out, it’s just a matter of relighting it and you’ll get hot water again. Its essence is its machinery. Animate things like us are not like that. There was a magnificent gum tree beside my access track whose roots were killed by the rising saltwater-table last year when conservationists across the river decided the mouth should stay blocked by the sand-bar a big storm had dumped. The local magpies still roost there, but it’s only the form of a tree: when hydraulics ceased, respiration and photosynthesis ceased permanently, and the essence of the tree vanished. The Moon exists in relation like a tree. When the time comes for a human being to pay it no mind, it still governs the tides. It’s a moot point whether it’s animate or a piece of machinery.

Your elders are still recovering from the rigours of your family reunion, still wondering exactly what role you expect them to play in your life. This Moon is in the lowest constellation of the Zodiac, in keeping with your elders’ wisest strategy. They’re getting on, aren’t they, these dotards you like to think of as at least having the potential, whatever the grievous harm they once had the power to inflict on you or your parents, to depart with dignity and grace, leaving the machinery running.

Indeed, when the Sun is in Sagittarius, and we are counting our blessings as we embrace a new year, the Moon is foreshadowing his goodbye. You will not peel your eyes to identify its background stars, I fear, but Gemini really is an evocative constellation. Upside down, the weirdly symmetrical twins could be conjoined in their coffin, immortalized in Forgetfulness. A veteran is complete unto himself. His symbol is the Twins. He is affirmed by his absent Other, like a hot water system bears witness to its extinguished pilot light. We are all veterans when we seek validation in social media from others who express our views, when we live variations on a theme. We speak in quotes to immortalize the mechanisms of repetition. You can find our reason on page 55 of a self-help book, word for word.

The inner light as boredom and idolatry; eternity, validation, pain and evanescence: musings of an old man. The impression the veteran nodding off makes on young people is of remembering. Isn’t life a journey consisting of things you do? No, the old man is in the trance which has nourished his whole existence, withdrawing from his formation in relation, yes, but now it’s come to everyday experiences like the generic chatter of great-grandchildren, the pattern of the carpet, the sensation of new-mown hay on the summer wind, the discomfiture of limbs. The dotard sings a flooded country. Each rendition has seemed like an utterly different song, but it is the same he has always remixed. His country exists in song, in any improvisation, so long as his feelings quiver like the machinery of a beyond.

Dasein 2018[Download]

Everyday reality is not serene enclosure like old age, but a kind of perpetual mental illness papered over by tolerance. To one who has been there, done that, it seems as an undeclared war between kindness and anger over who owns the bombed-out remnants of a post-Manichean essentialist world of a Good assembled out of contested rights.

Veteran Moon Natal Jan01

Are there still Magi somewhere who can see in the transit of the Gemini Moon over Natal (sic) a promise of the return of a female Christ? This configuration of the Milky Way is the converse of the sky which heralds Australian initiation among its First Peoples. Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Veteran Moon Clock Natal Jan01

Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord. I have created two hemispheres.

Veteran Moon Clock Melbourne Jan02

What really happened to the Magi? They were veterans of a war between Good and Evil, and whatever the sign was they followed it was as the twittering of birds to most contemporaries. Historical change transpired in its own way, long after their deaths, but what of freedom versus predestination? How goes the war between grace and anger? Did Jesus help? Is his song still heard? Where to find the guiding star? Is Jesus more than an empty desk in one of the skyscrapers that paint the night sky grey?

Veteran Moon Iconoclast Breamlea Jan02

The young ex-Muslim atheist still asks all the wrong questions, the vestiges of his upbringing by Allah: Why are we here? How can it be that we are so perfect? What is death? Why? The secular humanist also asks these questions, but history cannot validate what it has forgotten. What is the Eastern Wall? What are its mathematics?

For two weeks, wading across the Styx, then through the attenuated constellations of Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces and Aries, the Veteran tried to answer such questions on the side of language, society and organised religion. Rioting broke out in Melbourne and society enslaved by freedom harboured a quasi-religious sociopath who drove through scores of citizens crossing the street. For the next two weeks, the Veteran will cross the Anima, and once again the River of Woe, searching in vain within for answers like kindness, submission, lust and love, healing and yoga.

The Lunar Mansions are the same, but the occupants now covet their personalities, like their friendships and their youth, behind curtains of beads in the hallway. The streets are the same, but the short-cuts, always a left then a right, have been barricaded by bollards, negotiable only by pedestrians and cyclists, chattering like cockatoos in a foreign language.

Only here, staring at the carpet of what remains of his country, glistening with oblivion, are the Veteran’s answers to be found, unravelled and not in the slightest mystifying. Veterans don’t live in the past, they did. And so Christmas will end with a most emphatic epiphany below a wall.

Veteran Twelfth Night Iconoclasm Bethlehem Jan06

The Full Moon over Australia is in the Ninth House. In the daily cycle of the madness of materialistic existence, that puts it in the Bardo of deprivation. East Asia ‘sees’ it in relationship, India aggression, the Middle East self-improvement, Europe and Africa fear, Western Africa and the Atlantic relativity, Eastern South America paranoia, Western South America and Eastern USA discrimination, Western USA perfection, and the Pacific East to West seriousness, ignorance and boredom. If that means nothing else, it indicates that at least the Earth is still alive.

Scorpio New Moon: Doubt

18 Monday Dec 2017

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I take it as a given that most people in the West live on a flat Earth. With no value for the nuances of language and mathematics which have engineered their technology, or the cultural capital of their Christian history, they are unable to sustain the emergent reality they have inherited from the commitment of their ancestors, let alone build on it. They are objects, and their introspection is devoted to understanding and perfecting themselves, and others, as objects. The spiritual dimension of their lives is reduced to ideological conflict, because the spectacle of their finitude is not immediately present, but filtered and polluted. Their suffering is unique, renegade, and blind.

In the month of Sagittarius, for the Sun has only hours left in Scorpio, you have the time to indulge your imagination, behind your sunglasses on the beach, with the chatter and laughter of children confirming the safety of the shallows, and if you join with Sun and Moon in discarding the intellect, you may be able to imagine who you would be without human rights and victimhood, neighbours and argument, retirement security and parental influence, cultural cringe and the tall poppy syndrome, political correctness and cognitive dissonance, and any other idol which springs to mind before which you worship the self-enclosed and permanent utopia to which you pay your weekly subscription.

However, for the imagination to free us from a prison, it needs to do more than place us outside. It must create a context for the prison, and for this you might need an entirely new language. We might call this the language of extrospection, since it is the reverse of introspection. Instead of regarding the interior of an object as a subject, it enters the object’s exterior as its subject. Perhaps such a reverie might voice a song of change to dissolve the permanence of your victimhood. Is the situation you have been intent to define really intolerable? The lineaments of creation are hidden in thunderous surf, the sun-parched wilderness, its distant low hills, waterholes, trees and sky. Why are we seduced by healing from a celebration of the wound creation stamps us with? Because such consciousness might be the aura of death?

Extrospection is a peculiar type of consciousness. It is not a tool of social control with evolutionary benefit for group survival. It is not emergent in a cultural sense. It is akin to the intimate connection farmers have to the land, First Peoples have to country, poets have to language, and medical practitioners have to health, not disease. It is like introspection, in that it is a consciousness of consciousness, but the self which is conscious of itself in extrospection has no boundaries: what inspects itself is an artefact of the timeless process of creation, the universe created by your understanding, at once subject and object, eternal and finite. A meditation on change, it is the landscape of one’s absence, an unfolding of the immanent death of emptiness.

Scorpio New Bamaga Dec18

Imagine your life lived at the dawn of humanity, emerging from the refuge of the tropical forest, and increasingly confident of your group’s capacity to repel predators, but now sleeping all night in pitch blackness under a canopy of stars so vividly ablaze you could reach up and touch them. You know them. They are all dead spirits flooding up from the underworld to watch over you while you sleep. They are beautiful, but terrible too. They saturate your bodily awareness. You live in death.

If we are to find equanimity in the extremities of awareness, not merely escape them as utopians do, we must address the question the stifling trappings of the mediocre class mask. What is my country? How does what I’m conscious of respond to my consciousness of it? What, if anything, will survive of my consciousness in its death? Not in what memory will I be remembered, what mark on the world will I leave, questions of the living dead, but what mark, what miracle will I take, what bubble will reality burst?

The field of archaeoastronomy is not properly the province of top-down thinkers, and certainly not researchers who have not witnessed an heliacal rising or the stars of a very dark sky. Most research I’ve read focuses on the emergence of the understanding of eclipses, planetary movements, seasonal correlations and the utility of stars for navigation, and this might be expected from searchers working backwards for the roots of what we think we know. I believe research would better serve a quest for what we think we don’t know, such as the impact of the Milky Way on our distant ancestors, which indefinably we have inherited in our cultures in ways we no longer recognize.

Northern Iconoclast Shanghai Dec20

Lethe visible on the right (latitudes greater than 30°, Sun -18°) is the Western Wall December-May in the North, and the Eastern Wall August-December in the South.

Right and left: what do they mean to you? Yes, besides left and right hemispheres of the brain and opposite sides of the body, lateralized information processing, and what several generations of scientists taught, that language was exclusive to the left, etc.. Where did some First Peoples of Australia get the notion that the cardinal direction of language was the West? Where did astrology pick up the idea that the West is social and the East is personal? Do metaphors of East and West have something to do with rising and setting, or with left and right, or both? Perhaps it’s not only astrology but evolution and emergence that a bit of confirmation bias gets into.

Scorpio New Breamlea Dec18

Acheron visible on the Left (latitudes greater than 30°, Sun -18°) is the Eastern Wall February-June in the North, and the Western Wall June-November in the South.

As our ancestors migrated northward out of the tropics of Africa, what impression do you imagine their ancestors created, and where in the mind, when every one of them lined up in the West, and at other times in the East? Was it left and right which made it meaningful? Or East and West? What can you imagine the First Peoples of South America, Southern Africa and Australia made of the migration of left to West as they faced natural law, the Sun? Why did they go south? What was different about them? Was it a story the galaxy was imprinting on their imagination in Crux or the Emu in a language as yet to perfect itself when that stellar region was high enough to see? Are they different, people who find West right and left? What do you imagine happens in migrants from North to South today? What would you do? Go back? Build a home facing south?

Veteran Signs 2017-18

You see? The galaxy we evolved in wants to leave its mark, even as it is dying to the naked eye no doubt.

New Moon in Virgo: Friendship

20 Friday Oct 2017

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We have reached the last days of Spring. Tomorrow, the Sun will enter Libra in the Breamlea Zodiac, the Once A Jolly Swagman Sign which in its quintessential Australian way portends a Northern copper’s boot for the Centaur’s indiscretion of killing a Lupine sheep. Springtime has calmed down, accepted the limits of possibility in the habits and rules of co-existence, internalized the consequences of experiment and choice in a crowded world, and verges on Summer (on November 8 with the nightfall transit of Fomalhaut, the star of affirmation).

Virgo New RA Paysandu Oct19

Shall we be friends, me and you, South and North, East and West? Can ‘country‘ integrate conscious and unconscious, the shared meanings of language and the personal meaning of poetry and music yet unsung? How rich must language be to nourish us with reverence for ancestors whose customs have departed with them, made invisible to us by ours? What can the loneliness and nostalgia for village of our foreign neighbour teach us about ours, forgotten in a similar experience buried in different words? We all carry the burden of our parents, but must we paper over it, and can we not honour them with our innovation and compromise? We must revitalize the invisible, and populate ‘country’ with mystery, ignorance and imagination, lest indifference overwhelm curiosity, and the black and white facts that we pass down to our children and our children’s children be dead ones, no more than the bare bones of a meagre vocabulary.

Virgo New Equatorial Paysandu Oct19

Hard to imagine, but the diameter of this horizon is only fifty kilometres on the ground, yet above it is half the universe. By the attributes invested in them by me, I know that the stars beyond the circle of daylight, if you rewrap the two-dimensional projection, are being gazed at by some Other in the Shanghai night who knows them by different names and attributes, in another language as timeless as mine, which tens of millions who do not even remember the stars are there are losing.

Friendship is defined in many ways, notably by the contributors to the Urban Dictionary, but I think the best definition of ‘friend’ is someone who ‘improves’ you, makes you feel kind–all kinds of kind are of a kind, kind of–and only incidentally someone who is kind to you. Not even your lover is your friend unless he or she fills you with kindness. Kindness is not charity. Rather than expecting something from a benefactor which never comes in adequate measure, we wait expectantly on our friends, so that we can lavish our attention on them, and discover more of who we are under their attention. There, not in identity-with, nor in identity-from, our true nature creates itself.

“In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion.” Lisa Feldman Barrett. It is the primordial Mystery: Connection is my innermost Being. Community is made out of friendship, friendship out of emotion and emotion out of language; language is made out of emotion, emotion out of friendship and friendship out of community. This is what I believe gives power to the notions of ‘significant Other’ and ‘love of one’s life’ constellated by the Vertex: the ‘Over There’ feels like it is the ‘In Here’. Can a reason be imagined why the ‘In Here’ would repudiate its ‘In Here-ness’ ‘Over There’, other than a fundamentally disconnected and erroneous understanding of language made identity-fetish?

I implore you to interrogate, not forget, the language of the past. Before you tear down the monuments to the depravity of your ancestors, try to find the old words which masked separation and deprivation in the culture in which your great-grandparents were raised, and which were filtered by the emotions of your grandparents and in turn your parents and you. Before you remove the ruthless conquest of your indigenous people from your sight, remember that they whose memory shames you are of your spirit, your love, your kindness, your disappointment and your bitterness. There are words for the courage and dogged determination to survive in the middle of nowhere, and they are just as endangered as the language embedded in indigenous country. Befriend them.

Virgo New Sao Paulo Oct 19

In this chart the official New Moon, when the two bodies have the same ecliptic longitude, is plainly exhibited at the moment the descending Sun is due west in São Paulo, because the Summer Solstice Point is crossing the Meridian, and São Paulo lies on the Tropic of Capricorn. The Sun’s path to the horizon is its line of declination on the equatorial grid presented, whose hour circles reveal that the Moon is already 1.5° past it. For reasons of symmetry with the stars and cardinal directions, I project the Breamlea Zodiac cusps by hour circles, and logically, the Moon is already in Libra, since the Sun is less than a degree from it. What beguiles me, however, is what is happening to the Vertex as the Ecliptic and Prime Vertical align. A midwife needs a ludicrously accurate time-piece in the tropics! In less than three minutes, the Vertex moves through five constellations. What tempestuous yearnings lurk in the tropical heart, if the Electric Axis really has any meaning. If dream lover and attachment style are just habits, they can be admired for their alacrity in the few seconds a day they enjoy for their reinforcement!

Peasant First Crescent Safar St Kilda Oct21

Religious scholars have been tabulating kindness for thousands of years, and making a decent living out of it, so it is no wonder that the primal, connective, responsive instinct of kindness has been institutionalized as charity, and that we have come to confuse friendship with ‘being there’ for someone. No matter, teaching your children to be righteous by obeying rules of justice and charity cultivates their attention, the conduit which affords intelligence of instinct, and instinct of intelligence. Attention alerts them to the quality of their friends as attentive friendship informs them of their own qualities. Bit by bit, their internal vocabulary expands to differentiate friend from fellow, benefactor from pauper, lover from frenemy, sharer from user.

Peasant Signs Parkville 2017

Your lights douse the night while you watch Survivor. How should I feel? Your exiled ancestors on the Friendship lie in enmity. How should I feel? You breathe in greed and your denial turns off my fan. How should I feel? Your mystery is love, and you diagnose it on the spectrum. How should I feel? My truest friend is the horizon circle I intersect with the horizontal one, and the blurry fringe of eyelashes which frame it and keep it clean, beat, beat, beating my era, keeping me present, grounding me in the sky. I call my imaginary friend, ‘Country Member’. A Tasmanian, he laughs. He knows I can, with occasional help. We grew up together. How do you feel?