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Southern Hemisphere Astrology

Tag Archives: Death

The Migrant: Full Moon in Sidereal Cancer

21 Monday Jan 2019

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Cancer Moon, Death, Forgetting, Frivolity, January Eclipse, Lilith, Migration, Morning Star, Super BLood Wolf Moon, Underworld, Wanderer, Warrior, Woe

Planets vanish in the gaps between constellations; stars drift screaming into the void; the Milky Way runs in glittering rivulets down across the sky’s glassy dome, coming to rest, defeated, against the hard bed of the horizon. There’s no mistaking it. You are going to die. Sam Kriss.

What could be more antithetical to Buddhist emptiness than the infantile notion that spirit or consciousness survives death? I have no idea where the idea came from that dead loved ones become stars in the sky. Perhaps it’s an anthropological fiction which confirms the a priori cultural delusion of permanence. Yes, we are constructs of energy forms forged in the stars, but so what? Mind is an emergent reality of carbon, but so what? We could argue until the cows come home about mind’s purpose, the fulcrum of its personal meaning or the laws of its libraries of evolutionary independence. But imagine the moment of death without any mumbo-jumbo: awesome, yes, but the nothingness you’re sliding into is neither eternal nor permanent. You’re becoming nothing.

We’re beyond history here: our personality and its ramifications are no more significant than a hole in the ground. Our body can no longer answer the question, who am I? Of course we will be remembered, but the minds which will do so are as dust. Galaxies, gods and goddesses, lovers, friends, enemies, children and grandchildren, all dust, as though they never were. The living will do with this as they must: always, they seek. Indeed, in Hell, here on Earth, there are many grey areas: embers of a material world in conflagration, country, the imagination, the unconscious. Perhaps a good death might be no more than the evaporation of the mirage which, shimmering on someone else’s country, we named our pain.

Who are we, the never-were, the forgotten? We are all immigrants into country our ancestors never knew. We live in an alien age, not of sticking it out, making do, with a promise of nirvana or heaven in an afterlife, but of hopelessness, betrayal and envy. Only the mentally ill have faith in an afterlife, or the truth of their ancestors. The rest of us are queuing to get what more fortunate people already have. We are doomed where we are, and life is too short for struggle against the odds. Equanimity is not something you can bequeath your kids. Our ancestors forgot the past, but the future is where we live, and it is a paltry thing to forget in death.

migrant miserere sentinel venus jan21

They came to the old man and harangued him to find the spirit of the boy’s sickness and make peace. The old man knew how to dream bad spirits back to the Underworld. He dreamed his Wife, long passed, as the Morning Star, and steered Her to join the Guardian and draw Him back under the canopy [Ophiuchus] to which He was appearing to desert the boy, the strongest hope for their prosperity. On the day he brought Her to join forces with Him, he was reassured that the boy would be saved, even though he was deeply unsettled by the omen of the canoe from the Underworld which his dreams told him was the vehicle of invasion.

migrant moon warrior sentinel jan21

Shortly before noon, the boy died, and while the women shrieked and screamed, the old man went back into his dream, and sent his Wife into the Underworld for vengeance.

migrant moon sentinel underworld jan21

She is well aware that She is from somewhere else and has a Mission, but She finds Herself overwhelmed by a feeling of being at home with the fishermen who have pulled Her from the sea and clothed Her, mumbling incomprehensible words to each other and to the darkened Moon.

migrant moon wanderer galapagos jan20

There is so much kindness in this superstitious and pessimistic world, beneath the butchery and inside the walls. Her feelings seem almost alien, like the disappointment which haunts tourism. That’s the thing about dreams, certainly the lingering aura of this waking one we try to share, that their reality eludes words. She is remembering.

Remembering a caravan of migrants escaping poverty, discrimination and violence which includes her without question, though she says not a word; remembering an eclipse of the Moon which is everywhen; remembering an awareness of being a man in a woman’s body, issuing deep laughter in response to the antics of strange people in the colours of the rainbow at the back of a bus. Given a knife by a lovely woman in a man’s body, she remembers how to kill, though the man in uniform is strangely unable to provoke a memory of anger or hostility.

migrant moon wanderer mexicali jan20

Kumar (not his real name) finishes the last take, and director Lenny (not his real name) says he is in love with it. Kumar “has mastered the physical and mental techniques for a convincing portrayal of death”. For the thirty seconds the camera was exploring his primeval face, time after time until after 9pm, he was banishing nagging thoughts, that the remembered had forgotten him, that he might only exist in unremembered form, and that warriors are doomed to love being forgotten.

migrant moon wanderer hollywood jan20

Nonetheless, all went well, and it is time to go home and be remembered. Tomorrow is the day of the preliminary hearing of the charge against him of sexual assault of a minor on the set of his first movie fifteen years ago, one year to the day after his arrival. His devout Hinduism and the presumption of innocence notwithstanding, he would be the first to admit there are many things he would like to forget, when his time comes.

The Shadow is most often projected into delusion: such is migration. “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” (Sartre, Huis Clos.) The movie in production has the working title, Death of a Border Guard, and the production house, wreathandstyle.org, in anticipation of no being universally construed as yes, has opened a Facebook page for us to post suggestions of what the old woman might be saying. It remains blank. It might not be the first time a Hollywood movie has starred an extra who walked in off the street, but the bloody #MeToo t-shirt was a first, and when did you ever hear of an extra melting back into obscurity without collecting her pay? #WhoIsShe is trending.

And me, I’m just a simple guy out of the audience listening to the voice of an hypnotist who has me staring at the sky. What will I forget? More than I’ve remembered, that’s for sure. Just like you, I have migrated into a village unable to raise a child. I’m sorry, did I remember you properly?

New Moon in Aquarius: Convention

17 Saturday Mar 2018

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Tags

Adani, Aquarius New Moon, Convention, Death, Easter Moon, Kyrie, Masculine Moon, Miserere, Submission, Vertex, Woe

The mere name of philosophy, however quietly pursued, is an object of sufficient scorn, and what would happen if we should begin to separate ourselves from the customs of our fellow-men?  Seneca.

One of the conventions of astrology I have found most meaningful is the notion that New Moon reveals a new perspective which the Full Moon brings to fruition with an invigorated disposition as enlightenment, another joist to bear a creative and joyful attitude. Southern Hemisphere Astrology breaks with the convention that the Moon is feminine, because it is clear to me, notwithstanding his monthly cycle, that he is like me, glorifying a peripheral existence. The most suppressed feeling in a man’s heart is the anxiety that life has no meaning. Meaning is embodied, by women and men: this is as clear to women as the day is long. Power, the meaning of energy, has always been enjoyed by them and alas, envied by men. “Are you strong enough to be my man?”

When my generation started flouting convention back in the sixties I noticed two remarkable things: the only thing we understood about what we were flouting was that it was restrictive; and whatever convention we defied we replaced with another. Correct me if I’m wrong, but today’s encounter with convention seems no different. Some people get into trouble by rejecting convention, and others get bullied into conforming. A convention is being flouted in Damascus: the slaughter of civilians is not collateral damage but a war crime. Another is emerging: if you harbour terrorists, even under force, you deserve their fate. National security is being deconstructed.

Children are dying in Damascus, in the same agony as a man on a cross. Aristotle’s view, some 300 years before Jesus of Nazareth, was that the highest good is the good of society. The view of Jesus was that the personal good is highest since it is the good of God within. Does the slaughter of these innocents mean anything to us? My heart is broken equally by their suffering and by our capacity to believe in a higher good than theirs, The International World Order. Can you identify any good in this conflict? Can you love the children as you love your own? Can you empathize with the conviction of the combatants and the communities that harbour them and abet their atrocities? Would you be prepared to die in their situation? What for?

Aquarius New Damascus Mar17

“Father forgive them, for they know not what they do!” Can submission to convention actually be evil? Is this the meaning of love, that hormones, like everything in the matrix, go awry, and our proper task is to study and modify the psychological and social conditions of their distortion, rather than send in the army? Look in your heart. Is there a hero there, or a coward? Connection or perfectionism? You have probably learned how to deconstruct history, capitalism, patriarchy and gender. What is left to believe in? Babies? God? Universal human rights? Unchanging climate? Have you balked at deconstructing those?

Aquarius New Townsville Mar17

The conventional view of the inferiority of Aboriginal culture which I can still remember, has been replaced by the agreement that white invaders passed down stolen land, and we inheritors bear the guilt for the dysfunction of Indigenous communities. The interpenetration of identity, language and country is sacred, but it seems a long way from conferring sovereignty. Who has the right to determine whether Adani may proceed, the citizens of the International World Order or the local landowners? What convention bestows that right? A superior one? Two conventions seem to conflict in Townsville: that you are your language, and that it is in the syntax of your language that you oppress others.

Mars at Woe Parkville Mar18

The two charts above and below speak to me of the enlightened connection of heart-bone meaning to head-bone convention: emptiness. Should even one other person be mesmerized by the synchronicity illustrated in them, two new friends might transcend convention. From two different perspectives, or one from different angles—Timbaúba, an hour and a half’s drive northwest of Recife in Brazil, is on the meridian of longitude directly opposite Parkville’s, or the same one on the other side of the poles of the Earth’s rotation—we are observing the moment Mars crosses the plane of our galaxy; in the same moment Venus and Mercury are in equatorial conjunction on the meridian, just as the galactic poles are also transiting. Look that up in your astrological conventions! [Signs in yellow are associated with constellations seen to the north, turquoise with constellations seen to the south—Timbaúba is a mere 7.5° south of the equator.]

Mars at Woe Timbauba Mar18

For those oxytocin addicts who muse wistfully on the meaning of life at sunset, Monday brings another enchantment at the latitude of Melbourne. The constriction of ‘Thy’ idealization subsides, and though we may seem to ourselves conventional, we find ourselves so at peace as to discover our significant other within our self-love: ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ are one. This tranquility will see us through the denouement of the Syrian conflict, and right through the confinement of winter, until Early Spring in mid-July. When Lethe Crossing is at the meridian, local sidereal time has just gone 6 o’clock.

Submission-Convention Sunset Parkville Mar19

Sidereal Vertex Temperate Australia
Friendship is trust in another to share one’s meaning. That trust is fragile. Without it we have to rely on convention, its diplomatic vacuity, lest we find ourselves overwhelmed by enmity. The power of the Moon is receding into our understanding of its light. Trust is under deconstruction. How can Syrian society exist now? As for the pillars of the emergent International World Order, one of Britain’s ambassadors to the Soviet Union, Sir Bryan Cartledge, is reported to have said, “Never engage in a pissing match with a skunk: he possesses important natural advantages.” On Monday at 19:40 in Sydney, following discussions with ASEAN leaders over the weekend, it is anticipated that the first-crescent Moon will make a public endorsement of the Sun. What else would you expect? The Sun will have gone ‘down’: of course global warming is our fault!

Scorpio New Moon: Doubt

18 Monday Dec 2017

Posted by abliq in Milky Way, Moon Phases

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Acheron, Cosmology, Country, Death, Doubt, Extrospection, Iconoclast, Idolator, Left and Right, Lethe, New Moon, Scorpio

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.

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