“Adults keep saying: ‘We owe it to the young people to give them hope.’ But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.” Greta Thunberg.
If reality only exists in relation to unreality, who are we to question the unreal, we who are merely real?
“Both what I know about myself and what I do not know will therefore be my testimony to you, since what I know I have seen by your light, and what I do not know is from my own darknesses, not yet scattered by your noonday gaze…. So, though memory is in my memory when I remember remembering, both forgetting and remembering are in my memory when I remember forgetting—remembering that I forget, and forgetting what I once remembered.” St Augustine, Confessions, Book Ten.
News of Abliq’s terminal illness has begun circulating on social media.
Was he ever real? And what of those he has remembered, and forgotten? Is there a populist who can stimulate their regurgitation from his unconscious, put them back together again, make them feel real enough to survive him?
Where is the Moon real? Not the lump of rock, whose physical presence three or four hundred thousand kilometres away in the sky and tidal effects on Earth are real enough, or as real as we are. No, not that moon, but the Moon, the creature of antiquity, the voice of the heart, of human emergence from universal mind. Where does it survive NASA’s landing, and socially engineered equality, and exclusive religiosity, and populist claims of humanity’s responsibility for climate change, and Abliq’s rudimentary algorithms of solar and lunar position? Where is it safe from judgement and perfection, exploitation and habitation, logic and priority, identity and death? In Country, in short, where the Underworld is tangible, and secret business resonates as powerfully today as it did 50,000 years ago; in consciousness of the unconscious, seventy years of dreams of a lifespan transforming 13.8 billion years into occupied space; a space always and forever occupied by Abliq’s absence as the Other.
Aha! Do I spy another lost soul who has succumbed to that deadly sin, sloth? Head down, shoulders hunched. Your name, sir? As I might have guessed, you receive no mention on the preeminent databases of the successful. Shame on you, sir, that you have so mistaken the purpose of your existence as to have spent on yourself all those profits which rightfully belonged, with compound interest, to the glory of God’s creation. No doubt you have been dealt a cruel blow or two, sir. Haven’t we all? The importance of such setbacks is that they provide the opportunity for spiritual growth towards the redemption of original sin for this and future generations if we learn the right lessons. Have you sought professional help or considered further study? What invisible thing are you staring at, anyway?
I gaze at the birds outside my window and see an animal which evolved a house.
Yes, it is difficult to love another person, to share lives of empty oneness resonating pleasurably in miraculous presence each with the other like the ripples we launch on the billabong before they rebound chaotically at the limits of our consciousness, where we project shadows and light, depths and banks, reflection and blindness, expectation and recrimination, desire and satiety, and ideas of creatureliness, proper course, perfection and finitude. Indeed, that love is so rare for most people that they exclude it from their experience as impossibly ideal, even pathologize it, and instead luxuriate sentimentally in comparable experiences of solitude: sunsets, the entrancing behaviour of children, favourite pieces of music, and secret dreams of ghosts; knowing full well that each facsimile of loving physicality shares with the others a certain sensuality, an immersion of the self, as it craves the dissolution of its boundaries, in what we knew once as that ‘oceanic’ feeling, aware that joy is not imbibed like wine, but exuded by the glass.
None of this self-discovery business needs to be anxious, dear reader, even in the event that it is not merely incidental that we are at Easter once again and throngs of candles will soon be wending their way through the nightscapes of Christian cities. To take part in such a procession is not usually the privilege of the sensualist, but he is nevertheless bedazzled by the extraordinary synchronicity of the annual procession and midnight transits of the Easter Moon and the Southern Cross. Have candle holders never wondered about the night sky which grounded the followers of Jesus after their prophet’s martyrdom? What were they staring at, indeed, when tomorrow became today? The one thing you cannot hide from the senses is meaning! But hark, the sensualist is not gawping at the Moon, but in the opposite direction, and the Moon’s gaze is boring through the back of his head, or would be, if the Moon and sensualist were not one and the same. The sensualist’s art is the transparency of walls. Is the Full Moon in Libra or Virgo? Take your pick.
About 650 kms east-northeast of Tokelau and roughly halfway between Samoa and Kiribati in the South Pacific, the Moon is directly overhead. At the Moon’s distance, the Earth hides an arm’s length fingerwidth of the sky (2°), which does not even cover the Sun, because the Moon is square to the nodes, and 5° out of alignment. If that is not how you imagine it, the Moon’s diameter is half an arm’s length fingerwidth for an observer on Earth!
What the Kiwi sensualist is looking behind is a bit broader, about 90 arm’s length fingerwidths in fact. Like millions of ancestors before him, he is trying to see the underworld. Why? How will that ameliorate human suffering and maximize the value of our legacy? Those latter questions cannot even be comprehended by the sensualist, but the reason he is trying to see the underworld is because it is his. What he imagines he cannot see will vanish with his death as surely as will the visible artefact we imagine he can see. The relationships he cherishes with ancestors, antipodeans and archetypes of his own psyche will be no less tangible than his family, community and society when his Country vacates itself. Is the Spaniard’s underworld real because the Kiwi can see it, and the Spaniard real in the Kiwi’s underworld?
Is the unreality of these personages not a sign of mental illness?
Islamists may be slaughtering each other in Mali, Libya, Nigeria, Yemen, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan and Somalia, or any other Muslim society struggling in these postcolonial times with the ideas of community, property and space; Britain, ‘America’ and Israel may have torn themselves apart in order to stitch their citizenry up again; the Belt and Road may continue to park excavators and graders all over former Soviet Socialist Republics: but in every one of those ‘countries’ with their legal definitions and contested boundaries the sensualists are creating Country with their senses, and long may the mutual creations of their transparencies continue.
Bodhisattvas who claim more presence than a fool are invited to help the tree-huggers.
The sensualist is a lover, not a fighter. He doesn’t change the world, he adapts, which he reckons is the same thing. He annoys the totalitarian left and right by defying perfection and evading definition. Reviled as Lumpenproletariat and Bogan, he is seen as having adapted identity quite out of business and himself out of the equation! Well, I regard him as a hero. Who else, thrown into the sewer we know as the Late Anthropocene, can so delightedly get down and crawl on the floor of a country pub with a stranger’s infant, narrowly escaping lynching as a pedophile; be so enthralled with social media on the crowded train which has just obliterated a motorist who ignored the warning bells; or be so happy going to bed because a covenant is at the top of the sky?
I may allow myself anything I want in my imagination, for soon I too will die. Remember, no smiling until Sunday!
“My place is the Placeless, my trace is the Traceless;
‘Tis neither body nor soul, for I belong to the soul of the Beloved.” Rumi.
”When it all comes down to dust, I will help you if I must, I will kill you if I can.” Leonard Cohen.
“Behind rigidity there is always something hidden, in many cases a double life.” Pope Francis.
“…He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbours.'” Robert Frost, from “Mending Wall“.
”The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.” Bill Shorten.
“Justfriendistan. A territory only to be rivaled in inhospitability by the western Sahara, the Atacama desert, and Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell.” Dr Ali Binazir.
”…There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours….” Kemal Atatürk.
This Moon has so rudely transformed my culture, so brazenly redefined its traditional meanings, that I am cowed beneath it like one deafened by laughter. One minute I was like a drunken bee, swinging from stalk to stalk in an Elysian Field, each stalk topped by a lovely flower, of art, philosophy or music; the next I am clinging for dear life above a tsunami of sewage. Eek! Has one of the gods broken a vow sworn by the primaeval waters of Styx? Has Styx said #MeToo?
It used to be said that the opposite of love was fear. Ah, the seventies, those good old days, joined in oblivion by the shamelessness of white privilege. The opposite of love is not fear; it is identity. At first glance, the tsunami seems to be a heaving mass of guilty miscreants borne aloft on a sea of placards demanding justice and the unmasking of corruption, but fearless inspection reveals the putrid turmoil stripping every stalk of its flower to be a contagion of anger and hatred. It derives its irresistible force not from a balance of reason and instinct, or even a unity of purpose, but from a unanimity of righteousness.
You see, like you, I always knew what was going on behind the facade. Incest, bestiality, pederasty, Zionism, Islamism and White Supremacism: we had lots of names for the unmentionable. But we were groomed to forgive and forget, in the name (as it were) of love. Good outweighed evil. Identity meant we were all the same, imperfect, imprisoned in our curtailed salvation, assailed only sometimes by envy, resentment and paranoia. How could the theist, socialist and humanist covenants be denied, let alone withdrawn? Well, we have decided that not only is it our right to be unique, but it is our right to be perfect, a pre-existent state of being we might regain if and when the evil of the perpetrators of our imperfection has been identified and punished. The process of healing is interminable, since every wound, and every evolving definition of perfection, is different.
What is the craft of any artisan? Perfection! An emergent autonomy nurtured by the great oath of the gods that healing may be enjoyed, craftspersonship is the very apotheosis of enjoyable healing, the Covenant of the Styx itself. When the Southern Cross is at its highest in the South, for those blessed by atmospheres in which the splendid design of Crux’s background in the Milky Way is revealed, arcing from due east to due west, the keystone of perfection locks into place. (I feel such compassion for the perfectionists north of the tropics who are denied this denouement! How do you manage?)
No, this Moon is not perfect. Supermoon, you call it, but its Perigee was yesterday; it is indeed on the cusp of the September Equinox, but the New Tropical Year is four hours old; and, most careless oversight, it is nearly two days from its Northern Lunistice. If it were a chair, the buyer would need to re-glue some dowels. But the buyer might be a bit of an artisan themselves, recognizing that nothing is perfect enough, not in the human realm, anyway. The Southern Cross now, as a symbol of Country, covenant between finitude and emptiness, Crown of the Emu no less, coincidence-that-never-dies, that’s an altogether different matter.
“But there is no way we will overcome the neurosis of victimization if, by transforming the past into our subjective present, we root our identities in injury alone. For the past to become a principle of action in the present, we have to manage to admit the reality of loss and stop living in the past instead of integrating it in to the present as that which must sustain human dialogue. In any case, the complete restitution of the past is not only terrifying, but also a clear impossibility.” Achille Mbembe.
Google ‘Western Sahara’.
*** DAILY HANSARD PROOF ONLY – DO NOT QUOTE ***
SOVEREIGNTY
Mr A PODES (S Province) (11:43):
The climate-change, ecological translocation and Earth redistribution concatenation has become a national chthonic crisis, and in view of the cataclysmic consequences for the ownership of water, the availability of deckchairs and other aspects of our global viability should we falter in our resolve to protect our traditions from gods who break their vows and suchlike, we must build a Wall to keep the ancestral tsunami out. The consulting engineers have alerted us to the necessity of relocating as many inhabitants as possible within one horizon, and of putting the Wall on rollers which will frequently need hazardous maintenance on the outside in territory contested by the UDL (Upside Down Life) independence movement, and so we call upon all artisans to make themselves known to us, so that we may deploy them immediately to appropriate locations on the horizon. Yes, a wall is expensive to construct, maintain and defend, but be assured that the cost will be met by the Other Side!
Does the incomprehensible time-frame in which the light of the most distant visible stars and galaxies has travelled to reach us–2.5 million years in the case of the Andromeda Galaxy, the most distant naked-eye object–suggest to you a pitiful transience of self’s here-and-now or being’s eternal backdrop? It really is a fundamental question, and every culture I can think of has afforded both positions, but their coexistence has never been less harmonious.
”Know thyself,” and “Nothing to excess,” said the Greeks, and those maxims linger, but increasingly it seems, you have to imagine yourself in the Tardis to witness them. The presence of the Divine is beyond our sequestration of permanence in narcissism and comfort, and the Self as process abandons truth to the loudest voice, the highest-rating morning television, because the absolutely basic definition of being we cannot or will not share is our transience, our finitude, our emptiness.
We are on trains pulling away from the station in different directions. Has it ever been thus, that the good-looking African-Australian captivating the weirdly non-black girls outside the shopping mall with his studiously and rhythmically platitudinous ‘hoes’ and ‘bitches’ cannot gauge the contempt in the darkness beyond his spot engendered by the recognition of his bravadaccio as a dog’s barking in the wind? Am I the only witness to the wind of death stripping him of his narcissism as he speaks? Apparently those pretending his expletives are not cowardly are afraid of them.
You may have lost your way in the appearances of things, in the expensive, controlling and demeaning expertise of others, or in the unbearable loneliness of being unworthy, but cheer up, the path to the cliff is lined garishly with comforting signs of imminent healing, and this Moon is showing the way, to the Archangel Raphael, binder of demons, healer of blindness, Regulus the little king. No, a healer cannot heal you. Healing, throughout the ages, has been misconstrued as a transitive thing. The lion is not a king, but a trial of Hercules; a Little King is a basilisk. Healers are people who are themselves healing, from being born without white male privilege, from being born with it, or from being born at all. If Regulus is a healer, it may be the discovery of his anatomical position upside down he needs to heal.
It used to be said that life transforms the face you were born with into the face you deserve, but a third face is emerging under the scalpel and the syringe. Be careful what you wish for: “The wages of sin is death”, is morphing into the secular understanding that life transforms the wound you were born with into the subsidiary obsessions which merely transmute it, but a qualified mind-doctor can help you heal them. How does such ‘auditing’ deal with the wound you were born with? A healer is transforming compassion into narcissism, creative force into intellectual property, country into legacy, knowledge into fame, and accordingly life itself, the primary wound, knows only one cure.
In the immortal words of Kirsty MacColl, “Why can’t we just be happy, baby?” Yeah, wouldn’t that be nice, but we can’t blame the punk for the girls’ adulation, any more than we can blame light pollution on the wrong extinction coefficient, or extinguish persona in shadow. Has there ever been a culture that didn’t prize ignorance (closely related to humour as it is)? Men’s business is about obedience to the fieldmarshal, not debating his strategy; women’s business, acceptance, tolerance, forgiveness, is definitely not helping the choice of better leaders, and as an example for men is no better than a mirror to the shame of their pride. Perhaps the adulation of those girls is not much removed from pride in their shame. Oh well, they’ll move on one day, won’t they?
O Profit, what globalizations of healing are carried out in thy name! The river is sick; we must heal the rain. Busking leads will heal the queue excluded from the play. The audience willingly waits: they paid good money, printed by the Government, just in time. If as yet there is no app banishing the healer from next door to the underworld of opposite houses, nevertheless the meaning of your pain is all there above you, like ‘phases of the Moon’, and it’s not my fault you need everything spelled out: equality, diversity, identity, inclusion, footprint, in a smorgasbord of healing.
Bah! Humbug! The quintessential healer refuses to play victim to his wound. There will be no redemption for him! Transience is eternal, he mutters, rummaging heartbroken through priceless childhood photos of his children and their Fathers Day cards. The river is sick; he poisons himself with alcohol. The rivermouth is blocked; he swats mosquitoes in the hope it will be his flesh-eating ulcer that gets it dredged. He shares with asylum-seekers a debt to panels of experts. How many glass beads is his sovereignty worth to those who know better? Can its loss be healed by the human rights bestowed by foreign thieves on the victims of its theft?
Is a ‘Full Moon’ even possible any more?
I am not healing. What do I mean? I mean that the river which runs dry, the suburb which extinguishes its night sky, the refugees whose deprivation stands as pragmatic denial of any ideal, in opposite house or no, the acts in my past I would have to undo the fundamental naive judgements of my loved ones to deny, all of these dissolve in the texture of country, a wound and its wounding, a projection in three dimensions of my time in existence, an infinite emptiness not subject to appraisal by any pantheon of gods or panel of experts.
The Underworld of original sin has a surface where a healer’s tears repair the rain. Though it be covered by a skin of concrete outside a suburban shopping mall, it must be found this end of the rainbow.
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. Ecclesiastes 3:1.
Dreams, like music, have a way of seeming personal.
It was late and time to turn the music off … turn, turn, turn … blowing through the jasmine in my mind … are you old enough? … handle me with care … I’ll clean it up myself I guess … and it ain’t me who’s gonna leave … there’s one way of gettin’ there, I’ve been usin’ the method for twenty-five years or more … so open up your beach umbrella while you’re watchin’ TV … desultorily clinging to words which had made the world around him, but merely punctuated the arpeggios of his soul … skipped the light and bangles … hey little sister who’s the only one … tastes just like cherry cola … how to open doors with just a smile … don’t want your kisses that’s for sure … and you wish the world was as tired as you … never lost a minute of sleepin’ worryin’ ’bout the way things might have been … I guess hell has finally frozen over … didn’t recognize the boy in the mirror … now he wants the music to stop, but when he takes the needle off the dream groove the music keeps going. He tries the volume and the off switch to no avail. The music cannot be stopped. He is aware that music has defined every step of his life’s journey, learned and made his own, but ever with a life of its own, a cosmos of his entrails.
The dream is still there when the astrologer awakes slumped in his wheelchair. The garden outside his window is in twilight. Any moment now the nurse will come to wheel him into the dining-room. He will eat, and then be hoisted into bed, sleep, and be hoisted out again and onto the toilet, then back into his wheelchair. His bodily processes, like the music, cannot be stopped. A lifetime of change seems petrified by the bodily processes which have governed it, and by the wheeling heavens which they have written in their dance book.
This Moon aligns with one of the vertical configurations of the Milky Way, or near enough, not the transcendent associated with the initiation of Indigenous men, but the other one.
Is anyone dreaming of music in the Rohingya camps tonight? Are Southern Hemisphere Signs protruding into anyone’s northern sky? Are the Rivers of Hades no more than a poetic device, and the Milky Way no more transcendent than a campfire?
Essential to this astrologer’s country is the awareness of cyclical change. Sometimes she is a man, and sometimes he is a woman. One of the more interesting implications of the meaning he has given to the intersections of the Zodiac with the Milky Way, in no small part inspired by the imputed association of one region of the Milky Way with ‘secret men’s business’, is that at the Southern Summer Solstice the female Sun is in masculine territory, and on this rare occasion the male Moon realizes itself in what the astrologer regards as feminine territory, ‘secret women’s business’. It must be conceded that the heroic male constantly facing the insurmountable obstacles to his immortality presented by the world, and the repression of female individuation which wipes her from history, are archaic cultural constructs nowhere near obliteration.
You should be familiar with the Emu, but you may not know how its appearance has moved throughout the millennia. It has been remarked that evidence of the orientation of Bora grounds to the position of the Emu is largely to be found in Northern N.S.W. and Queensland, a phenomenon which one day might enter the debate about continental vs. regional Indigenous culture. In the meantime, there seems to me a cogent explanation for the scarcity of such evidence south of the Murray, which has nothing to do with genocide or expropriation, and everything to do with locality.
About 12,000 years ago, around the time of final separation of Tasmanian inhabitants from the mainland resulting from rising sea levels, something just as weird began in the sky: creeping northward from Southern Tasmania, the orientations of the two vertical configurations of the Milky Way when the Galactic Poles cross the horizon converged due East and West. The Poles intersected with the horizon at the Meridian (addition of the absolute values of the declination of either Pole and local latitude equalled 90°, the angle between zenith and horizon). This weirdness got as high as Tallangatta around 4500 BCE then doubled back before it quite reached Echuca, passing south of Southern Tasmania again around 1800 BCE.
Down my way, at the Wurdi Youang stone circle, this occurred in approximately 5815 and 3190 BCE (as contemporaneously it did upside down in Copper Age Anatolia and Peloponnese Greece), according to Stellarium‘s algorithms, and during the intervening millennia the Emu was never precisely vertical. The NGP crossed the Meridian below the horizon and the SGP was circumpolar. It is possible that ‘near enough is good enough’ originated in Southern Australia (or Turkey, or Greece), but it is also just possible the Kulin nation occupied the locus for a sanctification of the Prime Vertical, the invention of the plumb bob or the transmogrification of masculinity.
It is also worthy of note, especially by those anthropologists and archaeologists who have not imagined the cultural impact of an evolving sky one lives under by night, that the vertical Emu has not always appeared as it does today head down in the southwest. Between 13000 and 3000 BCE it was entirely framed head up in the northeastern sky at Wurdi Youang, similarly moving down and back up between 12800 and 3200 BCE in Northern Victoria, and in Northern N.S.W. between 10800 and 5000 BCE.
That was the time to fetishize the dust lanes recognized as the Emu, and adapt geodesy and ceremony to the subsequent millennia, and so antiquity combined with latitude explains the orientation of countrywide Bora grounds all over the compass.
The fundamental revelation which underlies compassionate humanity is not woundedness but harmfulness. Yes, we suffer, and that means we sometimes cannot help the harm we do, but never have we alleviated suffering by being blameless. And have we alleviated suffering by institutionalising goodness? We like to think so, and weep in gratitude for the separation of conjoined twins, but we are also outraged by the sexual misdemeanours of priests.
The terrible truth is that we choose to harm, and because our freedom and responsibility are the conjoined twins of our selfhood, it eventually falls to us all to confront and own our harmfulness, and if we are not to lose our selfhood to self-hatred, see ourselves finally as victims of our own evil, we must find forgiveness. Loving myself and others as wounded victims is so, how can I put it, de-meaning? Woman, you chose to be this way. The only transformation of patriarchy that works comes from the forgiveness of the guilty, women who have taken a man, from his children, his mother, himself, to give their existence meaning, women who have accepted the inherited status of domesticated animals, and men who have conflagrated their heroism in love.
“Nobody owns my country but me,” our struggle seems to entitle us to say, and yet the past I and the ancestors have vacated stretches fence by fence across the horizon. The past of my neighbours is my country. Is it a paradox that we cannot forgive our enemies, when we are identical to them in our manias of self-justification? Have we lost with the Us and Them moieties of trade-unionism a mechanism for bringing the best out of each other? Pleistocene Australians invented the fire-stick, Holocene Europeans the fence. Is it a paradox that setting fire to the bush protects the fences, originally invented to minimize conflict over game? Do traditional owners really want the onerous task of collecting the rent to fund the administration of Blue Mud Bay fishing? Midnight permits? Boarding and sinking dinghies? Headlines? Civil war?
The human bones revealed by the shifting sand of deep time belong to a nonentity who was a hero or heroine like us, and so they are sacred, like every somebody who tries not to be nobody. The guilt-ridden invaders have been willing for ages to play a fugue with the Indigenous people their ancestral nonentities wronged, but the Indigenous prelude, from the time before European settlement, has not been scored for Western instruments. How far away are the stars now? Is it different for a man or a woman to stare into the abyss? Is the Wanderer more than a dead white man’s Fantasy in C Major? Is there now a Cassiopeia in Wurundjeri country? Yes, my anxiety is salved when the Moon crosses the Lethe, why would it not be? Am I not my Mother’s son? Was it not a Song of the Rainbow Serpent she sang which opened my heart to my welcome as an interloper at the campfire of strangers? Yes, “everybody owns my country” is what I’m trying to say.
Trujillo, Colombia
“I’m a time traveller.” “You’re a clock watcher.” “All my life I’ve been travelling at 7.9 km/sec.” “You’re hooked on melancholy”“Doubt everything, especially yourself.” “How could you believe being a failure was paying your dues?” “How could you think therapy could pay yours?” “Your anality is dying in its arse.” “Your top-down thinking is arse-up.” “I can’t keep a straight face listening to a dead man’s vain attempt to sacralize death.” “One more km/sec and I never had to hear you.” “Why did you need to tell me that? Stop attacking me.”
This all too human propensity for discrimination and judgment, unalloyed with a good dose of skepticism, consolidates normal black and white mental illness. Applied to the skin, it establishes the difference manifested by foreignness. Binary gender is a classic example: humans have confronted and adapted to devastating climate change countless times throughout the millennia, but when they were forced to leave, it was always into someone else’s country; the right to somebody else’s country doesn’t exist, but could that be rouge on the cheeks of Chopin’s corpse when Khatia Buniatishvili plays ‘his’ Piano Concerto No. 2?
Kyrie
The veteran in his wheelchair will not see the like of this again, and nobody younger will experience quite the awe of the Pleistocene, because dark skies are gone from Sunbury, where once the soul could study the lines of its eternal palm under the stars. Hoisted into bed, the astrologer lays his grateful head on plumped pillows, dissolves the fences of mind, floats down and beyond the fulcrum of duality, and sleeps.
He doesn’t trust you. It’s not that your compassion is insincere, merely hollow, gratuitous. He doesn’t ask for it. He doesn’t need it. More than that, it’s no business of his what you think or feel about him, or, for that matter, what you believe would relieve human suffering, by eradicating inequality, poverty and disease or improving difficult relationships. That is not to say that his is not in any way a spiritual path. He may appear to have given up his calling, to be bent only on his next meal, fag-end and doss, but his experience in the body of mind no more disqualifies him from transformation and becoming than yours does.
The Vagabond as an archetype may look out of place, with his odiously soiled trousers in the Maccas queue, but his affinity with country is palpable. If you don’t look up, and it is very uncomfortable to do so, you are vividly aware of his luminescence bathing the sky down to the horizon in all directions, as though the cardinal directions have been extinguished, as in a painful separation, perhaps, and only one direction remains, the non-zenith. The body of the world radiates from the mind, or is it that mind is dissolved in its body?
Look Tela up on Google Maps. It is strikingly beautiful, and with the midnight moon in the zenith it seems lit for a photograph by a professional for a tourism brochure. The last thing you would be wondering if you were here is, ‘what’s over the horizon’. But although the Moon is giving any witness to its perfect syzygy a show worth the price of admission and more, it gives the impression it is gazing beyond the horizon, like an actor delivering lines beyond the footlights and the dark silhouettes of the audience. Who or what is this Vagabond? Is he an apparition from the Underworld, a dead man walking, wandering in our waking and sleeping unconscious like an alley-cat? Murakami’s untrademarked Commendatore, perhaps?
All the powerful figures in my life are women, which explains the genders I associate with Sun and Moon. It is a moot point whether selectively listening and mansplaining at New Moon is a less potent expression of masculinity than independent and vainglorious posturing at Full Moon. Also unclear is the extent to which the undeniable subjugation of women is voluntary, and such phenomena as the #MeToo ‘movement’ are less a force driving an emasculation of men than an overdue rejection of self-loathing.
The tropical Sign associated with Taurus is Gemini in the North, Sagittarius in the South. It is both, and neither. It carries its own myths, Mesopotamian, Greek and Indigenous. To be a ‘Taurus’ is to be struck by Taurus the Constellation, not Aries or Libra (in the South). Being stuck on someone or something was not long ago much easier to recognize than it is today. We all knew with vinyl technology what a speck of dust meant. At worst we could stop playing that album, which is what most people, especially women, mean by ‘let it go’ today, but a good anti-static cloth usually did the trick.
Needless to say, the Signs of the Zodiac are seasonal Sun Signs, of which the Moon makes what he can. Regarded as female in traditional western folklore, the Moon contests the Sun’s influence on growth and decay, and the tidal behaviour of rivers, seas and the fertility of women. Regardless of how cultures have chosen to identify with it, the Moon has always hotly contested the Sun as principal guide in the measure of time.
If we could prevail upon the Vagabond to speak, he would no doubt have an abundance of calamity and disappointment to share, and we would expect much of that to be about love. Perhaps he tries to illuminate the karma of his relationships with his gaze upon and beyond our horizon of time and place, but he is more likely rejoicing in his release from the constriction of our subjugation by the hormonal mysteries of the hours, which rewards him with a realization of time’s emptiness.
In the charts above and below, two perspectives of the moment of Full Moon are presented in detail which could easily be deduced from the Mercator projection presented above them, if we only knew how to tell the time. Embedded in equatorial relationship to the Constellations of the Zodiac, the bright stars of the Vagabond’s eternal return to promise and loss, among them the denizens of the Lunar Mansions of a number of traditions, move continuously around the clock of human madness: as the time of day in this instant increases to the east, by 2 hours every 30° of geographic longitude, so the (Meridian) Houses occupied by these subjects and their corresponding Signs as viewed from any location become the next 30° to the east. Conversely, a star transiting at the cusp of the Fourth House at any location appears at the cusp of the Third 30° to the west.
If the Moon is able to perceive the powerful female forces in his world not only at all hours of the day, waking to the daily activities from which he is displaced and keenly misses, or asleep in the underworld chambers of his heart, adored by others in this instant, giving him a glance at the horizon if at all, but also instantaneously in all the realms of the bardo engendered by the negative emotions, and if he does this in a dozen guises, waxing and waning throughout the year as the Sun cloaks her tender subjects in seasonal daylight and reveals them to us in the night sky, then we may have the answer to the question, who or what is the Vagabond: detached in time and place, practising the elimination of resentment and envy, absent from history, he embodies the emptiness of memory, the presence of non-existence, and country’s transcendence of identity. He doesn’t trust your ability to tell the time; he is idea, and so are you; he is looking for a smoke.
Incidentally, before we meet again, the Sun will commence its annual fording of Acheron, the River of Woe. The Vagabond anticipates a difficult rebirth there, but I trust you will notice nothing out of the ordinary.
“Is it possible to be on the outside of the outside of the outside? Or perhaps that is the seventh circle of hell.“ Rick Morton.
It’s nearly last curtain for the Moon: time, I can feel it in the stalls, to put his costumes back in Wardrobe, or the closet perhaps, and go back into the Underworld.
My father used to say I talked because I liked the sound of my own voice, but I think it was irrepressible for two reasons: it wasn’t mine, but a voice with which the woodwork might become human, the hills might converse across the creeks, and the stars might exchange their vacuum for a night sky; and it ignited the silence of ignorance, and complacency towards incarceration of the body by the mind, delighting in the play of power. I haven’t grown up much.
This blog began as a Facebook page, motivated by a rather naive impatience with people who were attracted to the meaning astrology seeks in the heavens but knew so little about the night sky that the Moon in Aries was effectively lost. As above, so below, people were saying who were as interested in making a living as in connecting real people to the real world. This motivation was of course also true of Facebook, who invented the monetary value of talking to the world, and silenced the hills.
It might profit us ordinary people to compare ourselves to peasants, for we resemble them in many ways, despite protesting too much, methinks. Alan Hollinghurst, in his introduction to Penelope Fitzgerald’s quite superb Offshore, quotes the author as being drawn to “people who seem to have been born defeated or even profoundly lost … They are ready to assume the conditions the world imposes on them, but they don’t manage to submit to them, despite their courage and their best efforts ….” I think of myself, I think of people in various places trying to survive the devastation visited on them by distant, imperious and collusive decisions of unfathomable interest, indigenous Australians, West Papuans, Palestinians (and indeed Israelis), and anybody whose traditions situate them on top of what someone else wants. I think of the courage of the equally unfortunate communities disintegrating in arduous habitats of no value to anyone else, seduced of their youth.
”What the land needed was not a degree but sons and, in certain cases, daughters who were willing to stay behind and work it and breed. It was, and to an extent remains, a feudal system in its simplistic expectations.” Rick Morton, A Hundred Years Of Dirt.
The reason Southern Hemisphere Astrology Full Moon names are so archaic is because, like voice and vocation, they arise in the Underworld, where cosmos breeds mind, where the numinous dwells, where the memes of 85 million years belie their disappearance, and where we put the past, the poor and the dead. What better symbol of community than the peasant in Spring, what better model of self-acceptance, confidence in, and contribution to others, in the Adlerian terms Kishimi and Koga (The Courage To Be Disliked, Allen & Unwin, 2017) use to describe community. And if your season is not Spring, it really is in your Underworld. But the Moon, your moon, is not a symbol, is it? And you don’t think of yourself as a peasant?
What is there to learn from the mechanics of peasantry towards an optimization of harmony and control in the age of artificial intelligence? What will we do with the poor when climate change erodes their self-sufficiency and menial stop-gap occupations are filled by machines? How will we frame our global regulations so that the annihilation of the poor indicates to us their best interests? Will the economics of automation offset the economics of mental illness?
Jusqu’ici tout va bien, as the man who fell from a skyscraper said as he counted the floors. Control the Underworld, the presence of absence, and you own the country. But the question is, how to do that without getting stuck there, like the peasant? What typifies the peasant in our everyday usage of the term is a lack of the normal ambition to make the world a better place, an acceptance of the unacceptable, an unpalatable satisfaction with ignorance. The account the peasant gives of past and future is rooted in repetitions and cycles: such and such a season, a birth here, a death there. It seems shallow and constrictive, but in comparison with us, he seems free of incapacity, of a sinister legacy of the past, and of anxiety about the future. The Underworld, our unconscious and unknown, is palpable to him: the ground of his being is the earth upon which he works, this globe with its atmosphere and its climate which physically enfolds him and his ancestors. At least he is grounded. Perhaps it should inspire our confidence too, that if you feel unqualified to exchange ideas about how the world might be made a better place, you can at least enjoy finding yourself in the body of your own mind.
Enmeshed in his physical rather than emotional environment, he is no more attuned to human behaviour than the pigeons of suburbia, who keep telling everybody to “Cross the road” an hour too late after daylight saving kicks in. He is oblivious to the precession of the equinoxes and the ‘man box’. Neither happy nor unhappy, he seems satisfied simply to get done the job at hand. Self-development for him is a good meal for family and friends. You can safely predict such a person deprived of subsistence will instantly turn to crime. But what of that? He is of use to us, even as a criminal, so long as he accepts and contributes to our power. In fact, we even feel a sense of connection with him, since we too are embedded in a non-emotional physical environment, a machine of economic and social goods in which we in turn often feel a lack of meaning, almost as though we are marionettes.
However, should he revolt, we must annihilate him, for if anything should obstruct the power which flows through us, our culture will collapse like a deck of cards. It actually feels good that so far this has not been necessary. That we continue to enable him to be poor reflects well on our compassionate community and the system we enjoy. He has served us well in surveillance, but CCTV is making him redundant again. Opposite to the Artisan, the Sensualist and the Dabbler in the Order of Appearance, he would make the perfect counterfoil to architectural durability. We can make him a builder, or better still, a building inspector: more work for the insurance industry. The play’s the thing.
[Abliq to Community. You may have noticed I have omitted any reference to ‘country’ in the sense ‘Welcome to Country’ gives it. This is not because I consider myself less qualified to speak about reality than anyone else, whatever language is appropriated to do so, but because it is now so hard for most of us to hear country’s heartbeat empty, and that’s as much my Moon’s fault as anyone’s. Back with more good reading and listening leads next month, hopefully in good voice. Abliq out.]
“True singing is a different breath, about nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind.“ Rilke, Sonnets To Orpheus.
You need to listen to this. Do you think of community as a timeless thing, with age-old issues, or a problem of your time to which you personally must address yourself? Are you aware of your underworld, or do you identify it as an antipodes inhabited by others?
Country transcends the visible. Before it can become authentic existence, life in death, empty and real, it must include its ghosts. We all have ghosts, even if we ghost them: real people we have clothed in norepinephrine, epinephrine and cortisol in our hippocampus, unreal people we have idealized, our own selves as we wish we were or hide in shame, people we have lost or never had. The visible, material world ghosts them; Indigenous country shares them, dances them. Community is not possible without ceremony which keeps them in place, in the living, breathing underworld, our world’s body. Is it better to preen and screech like one’s cockatoo, and gossip like one, or try to wing it from a tree?
Did I forget to mention that the only person who can really tell me Cessnock’s location is its representative? The episteme of the age of democracy, the belief in representation, is dissolving in instinctual dissatisfaction, and the normalizing mechanics of power, institutional propaganda addressing a shared morality which no longer exists, are only reinforcing the experience of powerlessness and a universal sense of loss of sovereignty. Country is under threat from the ghosts of its underworld (read emotions!). Passion overwhelms regularity and cause overshadows effect. Trauma relives its anniversaries.
Community, which has historically been an honourable battle against a common enemy, the forces of nature, seasonal deadlines, ignorance of the law, zombies and psychopaths, poverty, inequality etc., has in many places forgotten honour in action in order to heal, to demand dignity, to ghost its ghosts. Community means safety, and in a society terrorized by the rare disasters which dominate the news, and driving the kids to school so they don’t get abducted, at 40kph 500 metres either side of a pothole repair, it means confidence that nothing horrible is going to happen. The common enemy is now the unknown. Blessed be the ghost who walks, for the warrant on his head.
How can a person be there for you if you don’t know who they are? (Read: Indigenous Australians, do your Underworld homework,)
“Advance Australia Fair” is the epitome of anachronism as the national anthem of a modern state. What is the national character it celebrates? Who even knows the words, let alone how offensive they are? How does it promote the sense of community schools are trying to inculcate in Australian youth? Can any of us truly sing it, as a national community? What virtues do Australians distinctively and unanimously extol, which are not equally valued by every society on earth? What is the true nature of a community in which a hundred distinct cultures may coalesce? Silent respect? Empty breath? Or secret psychosis?
Is community akin to the synthetic co-existence of the agglomeration of cells and processes we call the body, the universal template which differentiates identity in terms of the incidental repercussions of time and place? Does it transcend or inhere in narrative? Can we own our different bodies without honouring universal body-consciousness? Must identity divorce personal perspective from the emptiness of country, defining the delusory as the particular?
Such are the questions which engage a consciousness which revolves in a sequence of emergent ideas, beginning afresh in the waters of Lethe to rediscover and explore in turn the corridors of responsibility, connection, disclosure and community. The geocentric conjunction of the Sun and Moon and position of the Full Moon are mathematical fictions. Can they really transcend differences in chirality and topocentric perspective of North and South and unite a community? I might laugh at any Southern astrology which divorces itself from the practice of observation which birthed it, but I seem to be the only one laughing.
The evolution of intelligence has always involved regulation in a feedback loop of consciousness and voice, law and instinct. In every utterance in the history of human thought you can hear the voice of some element of human yearning, for freedom, tolerance, immortality, victory etc., in a dialogue (we call sensibility) with accepted meanings of prior utterances in the cultural forms of the everyday. Community has never existed in law, but in the resonance of voice in the underworld.
Community will be one of the last redoubts of the unconscious to resist the inexorable march of the robotic mind. It disappears when you try to think it, turns into something else, culture, ideology, society, nationality, kinship, class, race and gender, any of which can be rationalized and is constantly redefined by the robotics of the sociological mind, but none of which comprises community or can exist without it.
We held our annual solar midnight fling in the first week of this month, lined up around the horizon, and detonated our usual tonne of fireworks. Nobody even noticed, although last night the waning Prodigal Moon made audible supplications, and we are bound by thousands of years of tradition to grant him what he wished for: community. After all, this week marks five years of the astrologer’s exile.
Back in the good old days, we used to line up across the zenith from east to west, and what parties those were! We only do that up near the Arctic Circle these days, a kind of wildling banishment it seems.
Alack, poor Orpheus, we knew him well, we who have danced our blood and conjured ghosts. Yes, 2,148 years ago communities were no masters of their underworld either. And still it is our nature to wish the other’s imperious flesh to be made of dream.
Silence cannot be the foundation of community, because silence enables secrecy, secrecy enables corruption, and corruption usurps power, which evolves to manipulate trust and destroy community. Why is there no safe passage through the Sahara? What happened to hospitality? Why are hungry Rohingya babies crying in exile? Why can’t Uighurs, Syrians, Yemeni, Sudanese, Londoners and Bavarians breathe peacefully? Because silence and submission are one, and for millenia have provided a vocation for witch-doctors.
Many undesirable things come from the underworld: wounds, illicit desire and other unsavoury instincts, bad habits, attitude, habits of any kind, evil, anger, fear, and most dangerous obedience to voice, psychosis. Never tell a psychopath they’re a psychopath, it upsets them. But that’s not the real reason. After they’ve killed you, or done to you whatever was done to them, they will do their homework, and correct the mistake by which you recognized them. You’ve made the world a more dangerous place by perfecting its mask.
So what to do? Nobody in the history of civilization has ever figured that out.
Do you have someone in your past who speaks to your anguish in the words of pop songs? Or are you someone’s ghost? Have you hurt a lot of people in the past, and even though you’re more in control of yourself now, do you find people looking sideways at you when you speak from the heart? Do you dig up graves? Do you own shares in BHP?
Do you hate people who couldn’t care less about the Great Barrier Reef, or the feminist implications of hijab, or what eighty-year-olds from other cultures get up to in the privacy of their pre-pubescent nephew’s or niece’s bedroom? Yes, you may be a psychopath, and yet belong to a community. Is community never telling anyone they’re a psychopath? Is being a psychopath any more than having a mind that’s made up? Can a community exclude? A mind can be, ought to be, aware of its thought patterns and the patterns of others as the workings of a machine which situates itself malignantly in it, but a sense of the beauty of life’s dance with the machine of the world blooms out of the change of mind. That sense is the machine personified, the world’s living, finite epitaph. Immortality is an exclamation-mark, the sarcophagus of the made up mind.
Nothing, never too little, ever too much: that is the community we enjoy here, in the underworld. When do you join us? Q was dancing at Caboolture! How satisfying it is, that the impossibility of community is embodied by its authentic existence among your dead and us ghosts-who-walk-upside-down!
Anyone who has lived through the internet’s transformation of reality will have noticed a proliferation of certainty. Every debate is loud with it, and wisdom, dismayed, must consider unassailable facts on both sides. Whereas investigation was previously predicated on ‘I don’t know’, it has apparently degenerated into a search for facts which support ‘I know’. This is quite amazing to somebody educated in facts, with the purpose of disclosing the extent of ignorance, who has seen the transformation of critical theory into the syllabus of primary schools, with the purpose of exposing the ambiguity of knowledge.
The notorious family conflicts which arise when children reach puberty disclose the ideological opposition of ‘I know’ to ‘I don’t know’, and two stages of personal development, the investigation of experience as existence and the investigation of existence as experience. Such conflict can take generations to resolve. In an Australian multicultural context, these two stages manifest themselves in the perennial dynamic of integration. Immigrants are dismayed by their perception of a demand for acculturation, and antagonists to plural monoculturalism can find difficulty in locating their pragmatism in recovery from the grief of their own displaced ancestors.
What differentiates quality journalism from populism is the avoidance of bias confirmation. Both base investigation on the Five W’s, who, where, when, what, and why, but whereas quality journalism demonstrates the ambiguity of the answers, populism confirms their simplicity. Once upon a time, my own investigation of current affairs was led by The Guardian and the Australian Broadcasting Commission, and it has taken time to accept, to grieve, that quality journalism can no longer be confidently sought there.
In similar terms, quality astrology differentiates itself from the populist variety in its focus on ambiguity and recognition of confirmation bias. It presents a tool for asking the Five W’s, but it assumes readers to be seeking more questions, not answers, and to be intensifying existence, not pacifying it. The answer to the question, ‘Who am I?’, is indeterminate, and that is exciting. If you must know who you are, it is my sad duty to inform you that you are nobody.
Where and when you were born cannot be identified, because the where has disappeared, like your parent culture and the climate and geographic coordinates of your birth location, into nowhere, and the when cannot be retrieved except in the historical antecedents of various different arbitrary measures of time based on their obviously impossible separation. The increments of one against another may be small– the measure of sky movement, sidereal time, increases against solar time by 33 seconds every 8 years–but no-when will they ever coincide again. Specifics are out of the question, my dear Watson.
Where is this place?
Cessnock is a real entity, proclaimed with defined boundaries in 1906, and is indexed on thousands of databases and maps. It welcomes the traveller with a real sign in the real ground beside the highway, and every property-owner knows they are in it because they pay council rates. That information may answer the questions who and what, but my question was, ‘where is it?’ Someone in Cessnock, perhaps you can tell me? Down the road from Newcastle, yes, but where is Newcastle, down the road from Cessnock? If I approached from the west, the bush of the Pokolbin Forest, following a road, or else Cessnock would repel me beyond an array of back fences, sooner or later a sign would tell me the road’s name, and someone would tell me I was in Cessnock, someone who wouldn’t understand that they weren’t answering my question, “Where am I?” If I were really lucky, a child might give me the right answer, “Here, in country!”
Here is another correct answer: Cessnock is, not a thou’ out, directly and exactly above its underworld! (A pubescent child always knows when an adult is using semantics to reach a common understanding, which explains the ubiquity of the expression, ‘Sarcasm is the wit of fools’.) Seriously, you have to ask yourself, couldn’t we have done away with 100 years of research into the unconscious if we had simply listened to the people who could find it on a map, right here?
The Miserere, Psalm 51, is the cry of the penitent who is left here, when the rivers of Hades, and their grazing thunder lizards, have disappeared beyond the boundary of the underworld, and penitents are not sure which shore they inhabit. Who are we? The ordinary souls sent to the Asphodel Meadows of our underworld’s underworld? Can Here be There, as the Proclamation has it? What do the aquifers of country disclose when your lover is on the line and your voice is in their head?
This is the moment the ancestors ring the edge of the world, above and below, in neither. Steep Point is the western tip of a continent, from which the then living ancestors watched Dirk Hartog sail past in 1616 CE, with no idea that country was about to be proclaimed out of existence, parcelled up as abutments. To be fair to those seafarers and the settlers who eventually followed them, they had no idea of the Universal Proclamation of Humanity gestating in the abutted minds of landowning philosophers, astrologists and activists. Like any migrant, they were simply creating right of way through abutting, overseas kinships they had no relationship to.
Now we come to the weird bit. Who are ‘they’? Who are we as they?
Osorezan is an active volcano in northern Honshu believed by many to be the threshold of the underworld. Half the world (and almost everyone in these parts) has always believed that ill fortune is not an outcome of karma, what goes around comes around, but the result of sorcery, the conjuring of injured, vengeful spirits from the underworld. I have not found reference to which way up they endure, or if their seasons, directions and chirality mirror the hemisphere of the living, but when they climb out of the fissures of the Earth their evil is authentically alien to ours. Shamans and sorcerers know how to channel them, and so, apparently, do the revilers of Captain Cook, and those still fighting the lost War Against the Proclamation of Country.
So you have no self which is not some other nobody’s nobody, no country which is not some other underworld, and no history which has not been repudiated by you, its child. How WOW is that? But you will be who you want to be, until we have built Jerusalem, and the holy temple of your devotion will be the body, of the visible world, indeterminate, ineffable, enfolding you tenderly in your confirmation bias until you have exhausted fact, country has thrown open its five aggregates of mind and the fleeting moment has disclosed its unbearable beauty. Country, world disclosure, is your will to be, your sap, your yeast, your music, and you are always welcome!
Meditation develops mind, and permanently elevated levels of perception, problem solving and consciousness. Can we stop teaching children the building-blocks of reality, language, citizenship and morality if we teach them to meditate? Is this the way to create a world of loving-kindness in which building-blocks are known to be empty causes of confusion and division? By example, monks claim to enlighten the world by perfecting themselves and teaching that suffering arises from clinging to a fixed self in an objective reality imprisoned in time. Do they?
We are well aware of the danger of undervaluing a healthy ego. We don’t want students to succumb to melancholy, depression and suicide, and we don’t want them harming others on rampages of resentment and vengeance either. We want them to be centred, confident and successful, and only drawn to the ladder of spiritual practice with a natural desire for enlightenment. Is there anything worse than organized ignorance? Ask the Rohingya. Ask the Arakanese.
Meditation is natural. Not only mystics do it, but birds do it, crustaceans do it, and perhaps even the trees do it. Can you imagine any living thing not desiring to prolong bliss or the glimmer of self-consciousness? Is it not ultimately an instinct for transcendence that will overturn this bucket of crabs you find yourself in?
Way back at the dawn of civilization the ancestors imagined into being an aid to the task of clambering out of the bucket. Answers to the question, ‘How do I fit into the scheme of things?’ come from within the nascent consciousness formed by meditation, but how to get in there to control the answers, how to be sure we are not just sacrifices to time in an eternal crab-race?
“Angels (they say) don’t know whether it is the living they are moving among, or the dead. The eternal torrent whirls all ages along in it, through both realms forever, and their voices are drowned out in its thunderous roar.” (Rilke, The First Elegy, trans. Stephen Mitchell, The Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus, Vintage International, 2009.)
Clamouring with the antediluvian authority of journalists on social media, the white cockatoos rearrange themselves on the tree of life. You never see them, unless you are evolved indeed! Their raucous flight takes place, and is impossible not to hear, in the underworld houses beneath the ground, where they endlessly challenge the Monk’s mind with ancestral bypass. Like the numerals on the back of football jerseys, and the nations of the Earth, their bodies are interchangeable.
Full Moon beneath Managua, Nicaragua
Antares, 11 million years old, is 550 light-years away, a supergiant 12 times the Sun’s mass, 680 times its diameter and nearly 100,000 times its luminosity. Its nightfall transit heralds the arrival of true Spring’s generic obligations in the South. It is one of the cardinal Royal Stars.
Uriel represents an ancient argument about the basis of stability, triangle or square. They are variously the angel of repentance, the pitiless, the south wind, patron of the arts and of confirmation, angel of the face and the earth, one of the four angels of the presence, ruler of Tartarus. They are in awe of what is occulted by Earth.
Full Moon beneath Corner Brook, Canada
Canopus is a bright giant 310 light-years distant, 8 times the Sun’s mass, 71 times its diameter, and 10,700 times its luminosity. Its right ascension places it in Breamlea Zodiac Gemini, and those in the North above latitude 35° who can never see it can reason its upper transit beneath the southern horizon on a line projected from Mirzam and Tejat, and its opposite lower transit below Kaus Australis.
Sandalphon’s head reaches to heaven, and like music, is firmly rooted in, yet soars beyond, the body of the world. As the immortalized Elijah, they are the protector of the unborn, and their almost human cry resonates with the pangs of your faltering attainment.
Full Moon beneath Maceio, Brazil
Altair, 1.2 billion years old, is one of the closest stars visible to the naked eye, about 16.7 light-years. It has about 1.8 times the Sun’s mass and 11 times its luminosity. It spins so fast, once every 8.9 hours (compared to the Sun’s 25 days), that it is 20% flattened at the poles, and observably brighter at the poles than the equator. It is prominent in August and September nights.
Akathriel, an angel of the presence, and possibly God themself, is the angel to some of Kether (meaning ‘crown’), the topmost of the sefirot of the Tree of Life, and no wonder here in the Tropics, but in temperate latitudes they find themself outscreeched up there. Anything for a quiet life, says the circling Yesod eagle. They have 8,760 eyes, one for every hour of the year.
Full Moon beneath Bologna, Italy
Fomalhaut is about 449 million years old, 25 light-years away. Nearly double the size of the Sun, it is 16 times more luminous. Its visible transit more or less overhead in Chile, Argentina, Southern Africa, Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific begins in June and disappears in November, heralding Summer. It is one of the four Royal Stars, the watcher of the south (at the Winter Solstice of 2,600 BCE–in 1,150 years it will be at the Northern Vernal Equinox).
Gabriel is God’s messenger, the plucker of new souls from the Tree of Life, the guardian angel of Israel and the bearer of revelation to prophets, such as Muhammad. Gabriel administers severity in the North, and may accordingly assist in death. In the South they squawk to the other side of the tree. They announce high summer, and affirm the victory of instinct.
Full Moon beneath Tehran, Iran
Achernar, 139 light-years away and 37 million years old, is the first magnitude star on its own opposite the Southern Cross on the South Celestial Pole clock. It spins so fast, rotating every two days, that its equator is 56% greater than its polar diameter. It blinks on at upper transit at the latitude of Melbourne, Florida, and is visibly circumpolar below Melbourne, Australia. Seven times the size of the Sun and 3,150 times more luminous, it lurks below the southern horizon at Tehran.
Belial is the archangel of cleansing and hostility to hell, but that is because they are reformed. Historically the angel of darkness and destruction, one of the fallen ones, they may have fathered Lucifer and been the avatar of Satan, but liar that they are, they seek to overcome their worthlessness by promoting self-sufficiency and personal accomplishment. They would have you address them as Independence, or Headwater, but their tight wheel brings a waterboarded Cassiopeia to mind.
Full Moon beneath Shwebo, Myanmar
Aldebaran is an orange giant 44 times the diameter of the Sun and 425 times its luminosity, though only 1.7 times its mass. Aldebaran is 6.6 billion years old, nearly half the age of the universe, and around 65 light-years away. It is the eye of the Bull and the baleful follower of the Seven Sisters.
Michael is the highest in rank of the angels, leader of the armies of God against evil, the Prince of Israel and the archangel of mercy (it was they who substituted a ram for Isaac). They are in charge of the soul of justice, and roost in the west side of the tree, on your right facing south, or remember, on your left if you go behind the tree.
Full Moon Sun beneath Suva, Fiji
Regulus, a star-system of two pairs of dwarves, is about a billion years old and 79 light-years distant. The main star rotates every 16 hours, has over 3 times the Sun’s mass and 360 times its luminosity. Its name, meaning ‘little king’, identifies it with the basilisk of mediaeval bestiaries. It is one of the Royal Stars marking the cardinal quarters, and is notable for its regular occultations by the Moon, and its encounter every 8 years with Venus.
Raphael is the healing archangel, bestowing submission to the severity of the wound with a healthy sarcasm, directed towards the tropical duality of meditative connection and theology’s engrossment in perfectionism, often misinterpreted by those unfamiliar with the spirits of the underworld, being focussed only on cognitive diagnosis.
What do stars and angels, higher consciousness and music, social media and stigma, gender and mental illness all have in common? They are in the body! Ah, Monk, you smooth talker! You have me in two minds.
You are certainly higher than I on the ladder leaning to heaven’s restoration of innate human divinity, and if Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics, the permanent improvements you have made to your consciousness, and pharmaceutical or psychedelic alternatives to our disembodied spirituality can all be combined, the pilgrim’s progress may prove to the benefit of all, but if gamma waves prove barely to rustle the leaves of the tree of life, suspended as it is above a lower realm of struggle and strife, and the most heightened consciousness cannot elude its underworld, might we not be wise to use meditation on the body which is the world the mind is embedded in, to connect us to history, and to forgive us our past and theirs rather than engineer a future unlike it?
Turn off the lights so that children can see the stars. Encourage the inexperienced to be alone, carry a tune, remember change, and blaspheme against the prophets’ words with their non-binary, non-perfectionist bowels. Let children discover the underworld of country in sidereal time and project the houses of the Vertex onto their social firmament before we teach them its emptiness and the existence or otherwise of angels.
