Tag Archives: 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 Constellation Virgo 2017: 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?

Monk Moon in Aquarius

06 Wednesday Sep 2017

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The Monk arrives, as he always does, in the inverted sign of his departure.

Monk Transit Delicias Oct06

An equatorial grid reveals a hitherto unremarked affinity of the fabled Circlet of Pisces with the mythical vanity of Cassiopeia. Fortuitously lurking in the Mexican astrological house of the intellect, the two of them are conversely at home in the Indian Ocean aspirations of the antipodean American hungry ghost.

Monk Lower Transit Delicias Antipodes Sep06

On his way to give succour to the wretched pilgrims camped expectantly below the Circlet of Unfulfilled Love,  the Monk is waylaid by a throng of rancorous social scientists. He stands accused of not disclosing emotions which have the potential to perpetuate gender duality and white male supremacy. Additional charges, that he helped Captain Cook chart the Australian coast and is therefore implicated in the invasion which followed, and that he gave solace to unhappy priests tempted into the sexual abuse of children, have been dropped for want of credible eyewitnesses.

It cannot be denied that the Monk has triggered some pain, but if we can dispassionately judge perpetrator, why not victim? With all due respect, he defends himself, although I cannot deny being a witness to the whole of human history, I do not control it. I am not responsible for the emergent practice of connecting with the cosmos at sunset, or the associated encounter with the Other of people’s unconscious longing and exploitation. Do not delay me further, and what influence I may have, I will employ.

For generations, it has been the Circlet which has offered connection in the suffering embodied by human loving, and the Monk has been revered for the selfless love and courage of his service to humanity in renunciation of the physical comforts of biological union and material wealth. However, he is aware that some of his followers have begun to practise the contemplation towards the west of the setting Sun. As darkness falls on the last glow of the day, they quietly absorb the same feeling of primal union that dissolves the individuality of lovers and stimulates the dropping of bonded milk for the newborn.

The high priests, by computing the precise intersection of the prime meridian and the ecliptic, which half the time occurs below the horizon, have bolstered their claim to special powers of interpretation, but in doing so have introduced a potentially disturbing perspective, namely, that the rush of oxytocin may have unconscious elements which are not always benign.

“It’s sometimes known as the “cuddle hormone” or the “love hormone,” because it is released when people snuggle up or bond socially. Even playing with your dog can cause an oxytocin surge, according to a 2009 study published in the journal Hormones and Behavior. But these monikers may be misleading.

Oxytocin can also intensify memories of bonding gone bad, such as in cases where men have poor relationships with their mothers. It can also make people less accepting of people they see as outsiders. In other words, whether oxytocin makes you feel cuddly or suspicious of others depends on the environment.” Stephanie Pappas, Live Science.

Astrology is working in parallel with social science to quantify oxytocin’s effects. The Vertex faction of the Capricornia Chapter of the Australian Coastal Retirees Association is playing a prominent role. Its members are in silent uproar as the glorious rays of sunset give way to darkness. The Vertex at this latitude offers something for all who rummage in their hormones for the indrawn sigh of connection. Unfortunately, there is as yet no Anti-Vertex faction.

Monk Capricornia Vertex Sep06

As the Vertex disappears below the horizon in the astrological house of relationship, the Monk is approaching from behind, while the cosmos has clicked into perhaps its most significant configuration. The Milky Way arcs in a straight line from southwest to northeast centred directly overhead. The Monk, himself an habitual contributor to light pollution, is unaware of the profound implications of connection with fifty thousand years of indigenous culture dulled by the lights of Rockhampton above the oxytocin worshippers focused on gratitude for their superannuation and companions in retirement. However, he does have some thoughts on country.

Monk Summer Solstice Transit Sep06

The Monk taps on his champagne glass and clears his throat. Lifelong friends, he begins, I commend you for your refusal to succumb to suffering as the pilgrims waiting for me at the Circlet do, but please hear my testimony. I share your yearning for validation, but I have learned its pitfalls. As long as it comes from the Other, it can only reinforce the Self as Other too. What is it about you which gives you the power to connect with the Other? Only Thou can know. Love is not projected, nor can it be measured or deserved. Transcendence and joy can only be found right here, as the source of the real, not at the end of an investigation or journey. Let your meditation be the ground under your feet and the sky above you. Open your heart to all who share them with you, and let yourself fall into total disclosure, whether they do or not. To worship and be worshipped is a beautiful thing, but to be the place of worship is sublime.

Monk Anti-Vertex Alignment Rockhampton Sep06Observe the Vertex Calendar, true for leap years, and enjoy the rapture of prattling children, renewed friendship and new shoots in the vegetable garden, savour the mysteries of bewitchment and compulsion, but embody north, south and east too. The driver of midsummer is midwinter. The driver of permanence is idolatry. I will face my charges guilty of my innocence.

Vertex Calendar

[My disclosure: I am a Cassiopeia in the lower case: letter ‘w’. ‘You’ are not Other, but when absent, missed. Please do not colour me in. Abliq.

Everything’s been returned which was owed. Dylan.]

Drone Moon in Capricorn August 7-8

07 Monday Aug 2017

Posted by in Bardo, Milky Way, Moon Phases, Underworld

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The astrologer sat in the concourse of the shopping mall, feeling very strange. Hundreds of people were milling past him. They must have been talking and calling and laughing, he could see from their faces, but aside from the strains of some inane pop song thrumming intermittently inside the electronics store all he could hear was an inchoate groan, like what you hear when a recording is played backwards. No snatches of conversation, no click-clack of shoes on the tiles, nothing in the foreground. Every idea in his head was no more than background noise in a world which needed faith, not information, hope, not truth. Not one person needed to know that later that day the rising of Sirius at Giza would not align with Orion’s Belt and the pyramids, but indeed would in four days at Athens, where the myth of the Lion’s Gate evolved in the minds of astrologers who had probably never seen a heliacal rising, let alone at Giza.

Sirius Rise Giza Aug08

The world is an operation of four dimensions: it falls, it speeds, it spins, and it changes. Being fabricates meaning, intention, suffering and perfection. Religion and ideology promise identity, reward, equanimity and love. Country is the emptiness of submission, narrative, relativity and survival: horizon engenders the fall, form the speed, energy the spin and utility the change. In other words, country turns the zenith into ground, the stars into seeds, the weather into shelter and decay into food. Country is the intersectionality of your identity, but essentially, the empty essence of your world. What urgent need has the shopper to be somewhere else?

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Drone Art Alice Springs Aug08

The human habitat spins and speeds towards the east, and our desire for novelty, the possibility of fresh perspectives, and curiosity about what’s coming, incline us as individuals in that direction. In the North you have to swing left from your normal orientation towards the Sun; in the South we swing right. Your planets and circumpolar stars revolve anti-clockwise; ours clockwise. This may give us different inner workings: I don’t know.

In the opposite direction, our identity is constrained by logic, language and relationship. In a sense, we lean towards the west to balance our eastward spin. But the west is also the gravity which captures our momentum: the Shadow is not the unconscious, but its revelation in the reaction of others to the unconscious meaning of our behaviour. It is by expressing ourselves that our dreams take shape, in language constantly mediated by others.

All the while, we share with all being a trajectory and entropy of time and change, which in us leads to the mission to construct a consciousness which will give our frightening transience at least semi-permanent status. We have invented science, the humanities and religion to do this, to live ‘the way’, and to connect in us the past and future. The timetables of arrival and departure so fabricated make us unfortunately easy to control.

The north-south axis frames the meaning of all this. We are never either fully conscious or unconscious, rather there operates at all times a feedback loop between the two which dissolves any definition of a boundary. Ego straps us into our seat and emotions unsteady us, but the journey is mapped as we embark: reason and instinct are impressions of each other, like practice and confidence, skill and habit, law and ceremony, result and intention, challenge and dream. Left and right hands on the wheel, peripheral vision and feet ready for brake and gas guide our trajectory down slot-car alley.

Unlike every other being in the universe you may believe you lack a sense of direction. If you have been in both hemispheres, you wouldn’t believe that. However, perhaps if direction as a tool for understanding is my vanity, and the enterprise of caring for each other is based on the delusion that we can know what’s good for each other, then I am wasting my words. Why does anybody bother to speak?

Sirius Heliacal Rise Athens Aug12

Are all of these shoppers medieval fundamentalists, caring only to carry the harmony, or like worker insects, simply following a mental map?

Drone Moon Currie Miserere Aug08

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Are concepts of humanity, altruism, equality, entitlement and human rights any different from other constructs of worship, based not in reality but in separation from it, in withdrawal to a fabrication called ideology where disbelief is subhuman? Is empathy real? There are oodles of interpretations of the partial eclipse superimposing themselves on its path, but who can understand someone else’s country, even when they’re standing in it? Can my southern mystification of time and direction give any more meaning to Kolkata experience? It takes an entire childhood to learn to read a map.

Drone Moon Transit Kolkata Aug07

Perhaps belief inhabits two separate functions of mind: idolatry and miracle-worship which evolve out of woe and a narrative of oppression and exclusion into a conflation of separation, transcendence and identity; and iconoclasm and mystery-worship which evolve out of forgetting, not just suffering, but individuality as a fabrication of guilt and shame, and which conflate a cloud of emptiness, immanence and corruption.

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Drone Moon Kolkata Sky Aug08

The former might be referred to by the latter as Gratitude, which in turn might know the latter as Kindness. Equally, Kind people could scoff at Grateful people as unkind consumerists, and be mocked themselves as ungrateful addicts. Perhaps they are mutually abusive voices in an endpoint argument, or are each polyphonic embellishments of medieval chant?

Drone Moon Transit Kolkata South Aug07

Perhaps a drone is of a spiritual nature and cannot be heard in the physical world, but perhaps to hear it is the one spiritual experience available in the physical world, and reality’s way of suggesting that there is always more to existence than meets the eye, at the same time as a drone adds a pleasant undercurrent to the transient which makes it almost seem permanent. Is it the map or the territory which is the background groan?

Drone Moon Canberra Aug08

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Astrology is very old, and its habits are set. The astrologer is dependent on his habits, and because they deliver faith and hope, has no intention of changing them, let alone doing away with habit altogether. However, for as long as sentient beings have felt obliged to curb their emotions, the habits, wisdom, expertise and most tried and tested beliefs of others have been perceived as preventing them from realizing true potential–which only we can see. This we call charity.

The South looks at the North, where False Dreams are in Discrimination:

Drone Madness 2017

The North looks at the South, where the Covenant is in Relationship:

Drone Madness South 2017

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The covenant of the cross is not continuously visible in the North, nor are the elms at the entrance to hell in the South. Furthermore, of what value is a sky clock to a traveller with charge in her smartphone, especially one which turns backwards? How should I know? Just another thing I dreamed up, along with the map of hell and the madness of the hours, while I was respiring, photosynthesizing, drinking from the earth and resting birds here in country. Why don’t you go out one night, turn away from the Zodiac, and allow a covenant and a grove of false dreams to roam in the rooms of your disintegration? Or just absorb the energy bursting through the Lion’s Gate Portal and move on: does the astrologer pocketing his schedule of trains really care?

New Moon in Cancer: Connection

23 Sunday Jul 2017

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Last year, the Drone took its meaning from the hive. This year it is born above the Gaza Strip, whose living conditions have gone way past intolerable, and thanks to a band of morons who thought it was a good idea to kill two Israeli police officers at the Al-Aqsa mosque, well on the way to becoming even worse, therefore the meaning of ‘drone’ seems more appropriately to accord with its usage in music, most notably in the threnody, and derived from etymological roots in ‘hum’, ‘drum’ and ‘dream’.

Cancer New Image Rafah Jul23

The Palestinian problem is insoluble because the pathways available towards rational compromise are humming with two different threnodies. The instincts of Israelis and Palestinians are incompatible, and the Zionists of the forties can only be forgiven as survivors of a conflagration of instincts they believed had been extinguished by reason. I situate my thought in a three-thousand year tradition of mutual fertilization of instinct and reason which trusts neither, but on both sides of the conflict in Palestine, the nexus is paralyzed in history and the fabric of the universe.

Cancer New Rafah Chart Jul23

It is well known that the seasons of astrology are out of phase with the constellations which invested them with celestial meaning. This is not a problem for the Southern imagination, because if you turn things upside down, most of the Signs make perfect sense, but it’s a huge issue in the North, because our Crab’s tendency to bury altruism in the sand is one thing, but no way can she be imagined as the King of Beasts.

Cancer New Sky Rafah Jul23

When the second wave of Out-of-Africans passed through ‘Palestine’ on their way to ‘Europe’ twelve thousand years ago, Cancer was rising heliacally in the last month of winter and the King of Beasts announced the arrival of Spring. If instinct had not been moderated by reason during the Ages which followed, as Spring moved backwards through Cancer (Civilization), Gemini (Trade), Taurus (Agriculture) and Aries (Conflict) to Pisces (Spirituality), Northerners might still be dressed for winter in July like Southerners, and worshipping Moon-Goddesses as crustacean embodiments of the tides.

Drone Phases 2017

It might have gone better for Palestinians had they been invaded by astrologers moulding the instinct to the seasons and the clockwork movement of the Milky Way, and Buddhist ones at that, dissolving instinct and reason into houses of madness and emptiness, but they got stuck with invaders who believe in submission to the will of God, just like themselves. Why do we need organized religion, nationalism or socialism to bind us in common aspiration and obedience, to bring altruism out from the instinct where it belongs, and codify it and enforce it rationally? Because your altruism is my vanity. Altruism hardens into idealism, and your idealism is always in danger of causing you to undermine my idea of the good!

Cancer New Guantanamo Jul23

The remarkable thing is that we have evolved some control over our instincts, but to the extent that we allow them to rule us, our relationships, our polities and our lives tend to fall apart, no matter how zealously we pursue the greater good, as we see it. Yet we challenge reason all the time with our ingrained blacks and whites, our impatience, blame and resentment. If we are not victims of this -Ism, we will be victims of the next. If we are not victims of the other, the other is ours. How unfair it is that our success or failure depends on the ignorance we try to dispel. How dare you offer me help to overcome my self-defeating mechanisms, when your mindset is what’s wrong with the world?

Cancer New Kaaba Antipodes Jul23

The whole thing is such a mess that it is not only human community which amazes with its perpetual delusional resurrection, but the resilience of personality itself. How can we be connected to all those disasters in the past and still hang together? What is the mechanism for staying wrong? How do you define sin? A two-state solution? I doubt it.

The First Crescent will probably not appear on Australia’s eastern seaboard on Monday, but it will be visible at Coober Pedy, if the locals would like to emerge from their subterranean homes.

Dhul-Qa'dah Coober Pedy Jul24

Weather permitting, it will be visible from Melbourne on Tuesday. All over the world, what a sight it will be!

Dhul-Qa'dah 2 St Kilda Jul25

The cultures of some immigrants to Australia are nearly as old as the Indigenous one. The other day I got talking about the Moon with an old man in Arab dress on the tram. We old men have less and less to hide from each other. He told me that civilization emerged from the recognition that the Moon was the Great Mother. My stop was coming, so I just listened, but I wondered, when did ‘civilization’ discover the Anima in men? Woman (or Rabbi and Imam) casting magic spells on man, man accommodating his ideal to every poison: can we please just say goodbye to what we never had? ‘You’ are not ‘it’. She, and country, are the ‘I’ ‘It’ is learning to be!

Incidentally (or not), Khandha is my name for the star known by astronomers as Gamma Velorum, and it means ‘connection’ to me because it is a multiple star system, very bright, which includes one of the nearest supernova candidates to the Sun, and which stimulates thoughts of the five aggregates of attachment to suffering: form, sensation, perception, mental formations and consciousness.

Declination and Directionality

13 Thursday Jul 2017

Posted by in Breamlea Zodiac, Milky Way

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“Sacrificium Deo spiritus contribulatus : cor contritum et humiliatum, Deus, non despicies.”

“My sacrifice is this broken spirit, you will not scorn this crushed and broken heart.” Psalm 50:19.

For all time, when the day’s work has been done, relationships have been pacified, and sleep has beckoned, a calling is heard by human beings, neither recognition nor faith, issuing from the deep of humanity’s separation in consciousness and individuality from the principle, dumb yet sublime, which it knows itself saturated in, of all creation and change, and this calling is to abandon to the healing of unconsciousness the effort of being human. Dedicate tomorrow to practising the instrument whose mastery will allow the conductor’s interpretation to be broadcast by such an upswell of the human spirit as has never been heard, a massive, unanimous voice like the flight of birds, the blossom of trees, and the suck of the tide. The instrument is country, where your shadow dances, and where you sleep.

GSP Transit Caboolture Jul14

The great Kyrie Milky Way Arch crested by the Southern Cross has now disappeared in evening twilight, and its opposite number, the great Miserere Arch crested by Cassiopeia appears in dark skies at northern latitudes before dawn. At Caboolture in suburban Brisbane, which happens to be situated at the latitude of the Galactic South Pole, roughly 27S, the Milky Way is completely hidden on the horizon at Cassiopeia’s upper transit, as befits a revelation of the map of Hell.

On July 15th and 16th, the noon Sun passes more or less directly over the holy Ka’aba in Mecca, and Muslims in daylight can confirm the direction from which their community radiates. This fortuitous occasion, which is repeated twice a year at every locality in the tropics, including the top half of Australia, half of South America and India, most of Central America, Africa and the Pacific islands, and the whole of South-East Asia, is the cause of something quite remarkable, nothing less than the transformation of direction.

Ka'aba Noon Jul15

Just imagine a flat Earth sliding around like a skiffle board, one day with the noonday sun passing to the north, and the next day to the south. It is enough to make a surveyor or an astrologer giddy, and to explain the development of astronomy and mathematics in climes of more stable observation.

Ka'aba Noon Jul16

Mexico City reverts to Northern Hemisphere astrology on July 25-26 when the Sun is at tropical 3Leo, Bangkok on August 15-16 at 23Leo, and Darwin on October 25-26 at 2Sco. Until those dates the Sun is in the northern sky, and natives are my babies.

The Miserere Arch at the Equator has some interesting phenomena to add to the vocabulary of gender and madness, my gender and my madness, certainly. It may remain hidden in the early hours of the morning, until later in the year, from you sane ones.

Zealot First Elmsbridge Mogadishu Jul20

Populism: New Moon in Taurus

26 Friday May 2017

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The apparent behaviour of the Milky Way  may afford astrology a globalist understanding of how the constellations and seasons fit together in the interpretation of identity, and a matrix to make sense of an astrology which actually looks at the stars, but here in the South the head of the Bull reminds us that there is more to life than ideas.

Late Summer, when Taurus is most prominent in the evening sky, is when growth reveals its catastrophic potential as bushfire. The bush is not only our source of oxygen: it is made of wood! Taurus disappears into the Sun as Regulus, the basilisk known as the healing archangel Raphael, urinates on us from his evening possum perch in the northern trees of the law. Like it or not, Taurus is the last roll of the dice of theory, the dawning recognition that conflict and disaster cannot be mitigated by the legislation of wishful thinking, but must be understood as implications of the materiality of existence. The most persuasive voice of rationality right now gives intellectual form to a spirit which can no longer be suppressed, the experience that we are not from everywhere, but rooted in somewhere. Our national and global citizenship fails to locate us in country! Populism is the battle-ground of top-down and bottom-up thinking.

Taurus New Canberra May26

The Moon in Taurus will precede the Sun into Lethe, the Hades river of forgetting, and forge a path through the difficult terrain of love, the instinct of the heart. It’s all too easy to lose one’s head altogether in there!

Dilettante Signs 2017

And so what is to be done with one’s roots? Which is the greater delusion, that form is a product of mind, or that mind is a product of theory? Can we include strangers in our space if it has no boundaries? Can we fortify boundaries which exclude emptiness? Now we need a Spanish fly to manage Moroccan snails. Will an Indigenous Assembly antagonize or placate the invaders who keep muscling nativity aside with their foreign ‘countries’? Is there any future for rational community? Can harmony between different instinctive origins be attained within multicultural global society, or will the programming of robots suffice in an internet of things? Will our only freedom be to do nothing? Is obedience of the wilful the best we can do?

Ramadan St Kilda May27

If you imagine that when you die, what you know will live on, that your emotions, connections and experiences will be eternally reincarnated in other lives, other identities like yours, other components like you, then I probably can’t reach you. But there is another you. If you’re listening, Canberra, listen to the wondrous voice you are mistaking for mine, but which is entirely of your hearing and nobody else’s, as an echo of your creation. What you know and your knowing exist in parallel universes. Of the two, only your knowing is real. The world you know will be obliterated by your cessation to know it, so cease not while you live and breathe! This alone is ‘country’, the personal geography of intention and consequence, error and resilience, hubris and humility, hope and gratitude, hunger and pain. We want our country back!

What Regulus is thumping a paw to: