• About

Southern Hemisphere Astrology

~ Turning astrology the right way up…

Southern Hemisphere Astrology

Tag Archives: Dilettante Moon

Dilettante Moon in Scorpio

29 Tuesday May 2018

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Dilettante Moon, Dream, Journey, Memory, Opportunism, Scorpio, Scorpio Full Moon

The Journey

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. 
T.S.Eliot, Four Quartets.

It was just an offhand suggestion, and a trip I have made many times–just up the road, as my father would describe a ten-hour drive to Meekatharra–but I am prepared and packed, and the boys next door, who seemed to leap at the idea, are nowhere near ready and don’t seem at all perturbed. If we don’t leave soon, we’ll get there in the middle of the night!

Dilettante Moon Clock Cooktown May30

Just doing a last check, patting my wallet, as it were, I discover I don’t have my phone. Where is it? Not there, or there … when did I last have it? Something strange is beginning to happen to me: I can’t for the life of me remember when I last had it! Instead of running around in circles like a mad thing, just remember what you were doing when you had it last. I can’t. I’m like a little boy: I just can’t.

In England, visiting my dying stepfather, and realizing Mum’s unpreparedness was the real reason they had paid for the trip, I read her the funny letter in her magazine which proved she wasn’t the only one. When people get older, they spend a lot of time thinking about the hereafter. Going from one room to the other, they ask themselves, what am I here after? Boredom is the soul of relativity.

The boys arrive, and I’m distraught. This isn’t supposed to happen. Without my phone, I’ll be as helpless as they, who’ve never been before, will be. The woman steps in, and makes a call. Next minute I’m talking to Sue, from the insurance, who doesn’t think this is at all unusual, and will furnish me, right now, with a temporary replacement, run me through it, help me with police statements if necessary. She’s very calming, but deep down, I know chaos: I can’t remember anything! I’ve checked every pair of trousers I own, every jacket, outside and inside pockets, even though I wouldn’t have been wearing any of them: I was at work. Ah!

It’s all a bit of a dream. Will the charger for this phone work in my car? Is this my car? Is my charger in it? Which car are we taking? Why are we going down Rathdowne St? Sue is so nice. She doesn’t have a customer service manner, just seems to be intimate with everything I’m not. Did I check my taxi uniform? Should we go back? Sure enough, the taxi depot guy has a carton with my stuff in it, the contents of a shift, including my phone and charger and paperwork not done. The owner sits in the back. Not the end of the world, seems to be his attitude.

Did I get robbed, I ask. The cab’s fine. Was it a blow on the head? Getting my phone back doesn’t solve anything. The past is blank.

 

What would it be like to turn ritual inside out? If people didn’t begin to grow up until they were old enough for their children to look after them? If habit and expertise were an exoskeleton and experience and meaning a dream? If the law was a ceremony made of sign-posts? Does a priest have someone to upgrade his phone plan? How would priests like it if people spoke to each other as they do to priests? What if there were a woman to take charge for every Imam, she proceeding on his journey while he lived in another world, incompetent, asleep? What if reality were only a five percent swing away and twitterbots were hacking practice in kindergarten? What if I were a murnong in a sheep run and kangaroos ruled the world?

Dilettante Moonset Robe May30

What will happen about the replacement phone? It’s ok, the woman explains, you’ve made the minimum four calls, and that waives the formalities. It’s my cab we’re going to drop it off in. I recognize it, but the day-driver doesn’t seem as though he’s ever driven before. At the lights, he starts bashing that bit of unstuck moulding on the dash with a steel rod from my carton, wrecking the cab in front of the owner. The boys are laughing and talking with him in another language.

And now we’re in Brunswick Rd, at the construction, and he’s missed the detour that sticks out like dog’s balls and driven straight into the fenced yard. Blithely, he backs out into a wall of oncoming traffic. Look over your shoulder, I tell him, like a supervisor. He doesn’t. Miraculously, there is no impact, and we’re on our way to the airport. The owner and I exchange the sign of the finger across the throat.

Life is a journey: Carlton to Tullamarine with a cabbie who puts personality into his driving, because you know the way; Tullamareena’s journey as mainmet through hostile country after release for not understanding English; Chinese journeys from Cooktown to the Palmer River goldfield terminating in the fork of an ironbark hung by the pigtail for ‘Ron; Airlie Beach to Cooktown intersecting with 350,000 comfortable daily trajectories; A Day Out With Thomas ten days ago with two fledgling migrant train-driver apprentices from Melbourne. All a dream. A recharge of the phone.

I wonder what I’ll be when I grow up? A statue of Captain Cook, or the last Orange-Bellied Parrot. I want to be unique, doing something nobody’s heard of, and be really good at it. I want my own space, but where everybody is always happy. Perhaps I can discover that I’m an ugly duckling, a gorgeous swan to cuckold Tyndareus, or model bikinis with my tip-tilted breasts. Could I possibly continue in the direction my journey has led me thus far? I can’t seem to find it. Have my opportunities dried up like shingles at low-tide, or are there as many as there always were, but now they’re disconnected from forgotten dreams? Why is every upturned face so vacant? Over the hills and far away … I wish I had stored Sue’s number. With her I could keep going. She makes empty country benign. She’s the Centre. She’s an original.

Dilettante Moonrise Parkville May30

Only one member of the Burke and Wills Expedition, John King, made the return to Melbourne. The others died, but King was cared for by some Yandruwandha people. While searching for the missing expedition along the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1862, William Landsborough buried some supplies in the hope the missing explorers might find them, and carved the word, ‘Dig’ into the trunk of a eucalypt. The tree was Heritage listed, but destroyed by ‘vandals’ in 2002. By the time King died, inland Australia was crawling with whitefellas and their cattle.

The Beginning.

Dilettante Moon in Scorpio

09 Friday Jun 2017

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Australian Indigenous Astronomy, Dilettante Moon, Instinct, Johanna, Language, Milky Way, Rationality, Scorpio Moon, Warrior

The dilettante gets bad press: Jack of all trades, master of none. No Universal Man is he, in a world made of interlocking expertise. Something is wrong with him. It is as though he has disassembled the jigsaw puzzle of reality and is trying to put it together a different way. You can’t do that, we say, it only goes one way. But why, he demands, why can’t we all make it the way we want it? Because that would be too messy, we say. It has taken a long time to make ourselves in the mould of the world as we see it, and no good will come of tinkering. The world was made, is made, by someone else, according to laws it is sensible to obey, and that’s that. But on that point, that myth, the dilettante cannot agree.

In his personal country the world is constantly reshaping itself within: if people believe only in obeying the law, the world is not made by law, but by submission; if there is strife, it is not caused by opposing laws, but by failure to share pleasure. Country is not an area on a map, but the experience of connection, and orientation must go hand-in-hand with recognition. The law does not demand submission, but personal sense, in accordance with instinct. The law must have a rhythm you can dance to. Without recognition of its origin in the personal space of communal dreaming, country is reviled for belonging to others, particularly venomously by owners and experts, lawmakers, high priests, scholars, ethnographers et al. who are qualified to annex and catalogue the minutiae of a grand plan.

But what of the country of those who seem happily to submit to the grand plan, who are entertained by diversity, who meditate away their instinct as the underlying cause of suffering, and who believe it prudent to have no country? Is it possible that country is an evolutionary phase of universal consciousness without borders and identity without individuality, that it appears at a stage of growth as a genetic template like ego which enlightenment gently but insistently eradicates? The dilettante has not found the way to such constant flight. He still gets tired and hungry. He meditates on the branch of a tree. He flies away when somebody chops it down. Is it possible that humanity will find a home in a Big Empty Country in which automatic ships plying the Tasman will not be haunted by the seaman’s sense of ocean heft and engine throb?

Dilettante Moon Tasman Sealane Jun09

He looks around at the stars above him and scratches his head. There will be no stars when he closes his eyes for the last time. Will they still be haunted by memories and totems and bowels despite forgetting the names he has given them? So wonders the Third Mate as he returns to the haven of the bridge after looking due north at the Full Moon, at the precise moment the Milky Way was rising vertical through fern-shaped Aquila on the port side. Dabbler in astrology, namer of stars, humming a song which has popped into his head, he muses on the status of memory. Are the galactic signs of language and identity his delusions of reward, or placed in the right place at the right time by a healer? Are they evolutionary or dismembering? He becomes conscious of what the song is saying: these visions of Johanna are now all that remain. Does Johanna linger in some tropical zone of the Urmensch? Are relativity and Louise temperate zone phenomena?

Dilettante Transit GSP90 Disseminating Paynesville Jun15

He looks forward to his R&R with fellow-golfers Pru and Bob next week, but if the truth be known, he is still shaken by that strange encounter a few days ago in Brisbane, when total strangers had gathered around him affectionately, showing him photos and bringing him up to date about people he couldn’t remember having ever met. That parting comment from the freckle-faced redhead in the bow-tie who more than he seemed to have preserved some of his youth, chiding gently, “And at least I have a university degree, eh?” What will Pru, chair of Indigenous Studies, make of evolutionary cultural divides at the latitudes of the Galactic Poles? Talk about something they can eat?

His supposed area of expertise is safety, but he does not approach its regulation as of a set of rules like Deuteronomy, but rather as a negotiated settlement of dynamic entitlement. The cultural property Pru might accuse him of appropriating is itself an appropriation: few people alive belong to a community living beneath the Milky Way, and any offence to the instinct of the few ought to be weighed against its stirring up of the rationality of the many. In his heart he knows that for thousands of years the people of the Milky Way felt its beat as he does-–as the seaman feels the throb of the engines-–whatever meaning they gave it. He is trying to graft lost instinct into his intellect. He wills to be a descendant of his ancestors.

Tweed River Warrior Jun10

He believes that Aboriginal consciousness was saturated by the night, as is his, and that the people who saw the emu saw everything in the Milky Way’s vivid band. Furthermore, in their intimate connection with it, they orientated the horizon to it, that is to say their daily experience, and profoundly considered the zenith, into which they fell as they lay to sleep. To overlay on that consciousness a Western geometry which evolved erect, eyes looking out windows, in no way diminishes it, but rather reaches out a humble hand of recognition. He is the one in need of reconciliation.

Pottsville Warrior Jun10

The dilettante discovers in Bundjalung country the latitude at which the zenith of the warrior beat passes into Scorpio, if this most prominent constellation of Southern Australian winter nights is measured from its easternmost star. Further south, at the Clarence River boundary between Bundjalung country and Gumbaynggirr country, Pisces and Virgo are replaced at the extremes of the Prime Vertical by Aquarius and Leo, if the constellations of the Zodiac are measured by twelve equal divisions of the ecliptic, originating at the zenith of the Northern Rivers warrior, he who monitors the boundary between Northern and Southern Australia.

Grafton Warrior Jun10

How is it possible to divorce the study of Aboriginal language from an intuitive grasp of the night sky? How can one conceive of an evolution of communication divorced from country? How much needs to be forgotten to create conscious order? And on that note, how is it possible to completely forget people who have obviously once known you well, to so utterly lose the memory of who you once were? The dilettante thinks again, as he clears away his charts, of those university days, studying languages, and all the turns his life has taken since. He searches his mind for an intuition of discontinuity but can’t find one. It seems that each new bearing has offered itself at the destination of the one before, and yet he can remember only the bearings. Was it really ever just too concise and too clear, that Johanna wasn’t here?

Full Moon in Scorpio: the Dilettante 

21 Saturday May 2016

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Astrological Houses, Dilettante Moon, Dilettantism, Full Moon in Scorpius, Nakshatras, Scorpio Moon, Self-Realization, Southern Hemisphere Astrology

  • “Is the glass half empty, half full, or twice as large as it needs to be?”
  • “A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.” Tom Fotherby’s Blog

Some people have opinions nobody agrees with because they’re stale, but some people with old opinions dedicate themselves to making them true. These are often people who have no time for the opinions of others. Other people have opinions they just got from social media, or out of a self-help book, and will have new ones tomorrow, but are they any worse for that? Such people are the ones alert to other opinions, ultimately worthless though they may be.

On the other hand, there are some enlightened opinions which need to be protected from the market, aren’t there? One doing the rounds implies that the hoi polloi are not qualified to decide what’s good for them, and so it is ‘absolutely’ wrong to let public broadcasting and the arts and culture sector, for example, battle for survival in a user-pays economy. We may lose our cultural identity.

As we apply our five-minute attention span to the election campaign, and the task of filtering in turn the social and commercial media filters on the complexities of who should be funded by our borrowed money, this emu has his head in old opinions about the Moon, asking himself questions you might expect from someone with his bum in the air.

It is a cliche of astrology that the Full Moon realizes the purpose imported from its New interplay with the Sun, in a synthesis of head and heart at the opposite side of the Zodiac reconciling apparent contradictions and opposites. For those who opine that life is a journey, with a beginning, middle and end, this is a resonant model of enlightenment, a geometrical representation of self-realization.

In these terms, and from a southern hemisphere tropical perspective, the Moon has been mulling over the moral implications of opportunity since its conjunction in Aries with a strong-willed Sun inspired by assertiveness, tending unfortunately to aggression, according to the character of northern hemisphere natives born in early winter. How might the Moon in Scorpio, dipping below the western horizon in the seventh house, especially now that his reflection is of an ego which has moved on into a semblance of mastery in close-quarters winter interaction, synthesize those implications?Scorpio MoonWe all occupy forward positions, with death in front of us, and behind us in the trenches a card game of autonomous bodily betrayal and a sergeant we don’t trust. Consumption and self-realization are at odds. If we weren’t so hungry, for amusement, for diversity, for change, and above all for self-realization, we might satisfy ourselves with the mastery of something, and take a secure context to our graves, but fat chance of that.

In the context of the political chaos we face as the Moon wheels into the mind of Scorpio, I get the impression that his self-realization is as compliant and superficial as ours. The anxiety which underlies the ethics of opportunity avails itself of a healthy dose of humour, and a relativist perspective, in order simply to get on with other people similarly assailed by the universal predicament, too many options.

Opportunism can be moralistically defined as a weakness of character betraying the common good, or simply as the use of an opportunity for personal gain which may or may not adequately weigh consequences. But suspend judgment. The common good is a temporary opinion. We are all rescued from indecision by choice of the most immediately appealing option. Ideology gets no more than five minutes, like everybody else. The only universal is the particular, and the particular is dissolved in the universal.

What we have complied with is the deconstruction of universal standards of measure, but while that may make us ungovernable, eternally dissatisfied, there is good reason to congratulate the dilettante. My Moon for one is less constrained by human needs and expectations and does what he feels like. A rock in space is leading the charge to identity transcendence!

Here is the clock at the moment of ‘full moon’.Dilettante Moon Clock May22The houses which determine the state of the mechanism, and the surrounding stars, are but my local perspective. All those geographical regions are where the hour hand is at the top, and indicate the infinite possibilities which the Moon enjoys. He may be precisely located in a vedic nakshatra, but his choice of wives is limitless. And how is his contiguity with the stars measured? What qualities does he show above and below the terrestrial equator? Are these qualities tropical or sidereal? Are they definable? Does it matter? He’s off on a romp which puts things, especially houses, in perspective.Puppetry
This chart dissolves the particular in the universal, but perhaps you have to have more of a connection to sky rotation than most people to get it. Without the innate awareness of the relations of Sun position and time of day which people who work outside acquire, sense of direction is lost without landmarks. I suspect that the common experience of the Sun’s hourly movement is back in the Stone Age. Ask yourself: do I see the Sun moving across a fixed sky, or do I see the sky moving, or myself?

I have to say that I cherish local perspective, even when it’s the dark interior of a hole in the ground. I came to astrology as a stargazer, and the algorithms of Southern Hemisphere Astrology evolved out of years researching celestial mechanics. The adherence ‘downunder’ to historical northern hemisphere interpretations of the Moon’s nodes (the draconic month)–appearances are downside up in the south–was merely the bait. My abiding intention is to encourage my grandchildren and you to go outside and have a look. I hope once in a lifetime you will stay at least half an hour to experience sky movement.

What is enlightened opinion to one person may seem like prejudice to another. Astrology is bedevilled by the problem of measurement. In what common frame of reference ought aspects be measured? The recent conjunction of Jupiter and the Moon which looked like an ear-ring was entrancing, because the two were vertically, not ecliptically, aligned across the whole (fixed) sky. What orb, or time-frame, reduces the shift of the seasons in relation to the stars, or of the stars in relation to each other, to insignificance? What are the local seasons? Can they be divided geometrically? Can it be believed that two people born an hour apart are ‘ruled’ by different signs? How can the Moon be Full when you can’t see it?Moon Conjunctions at Transit May-JuneHow does a locality attain community without established and mutually respected perspectives? How can it develop better educational and employment outcomes in a continuously changing economy, as fresh opinions do battle with stale ones and vice versa, when voters cannot tolerate each other’s opinions on social inclusion and sustainability, let alone apply common standards of mathematical and linguistic excellence, which are the tools of any kind of insight and management?

None of this speaks to me of a definable moment in the unfolding of human consciousness. To paraphrase Alan Watts, you deserve pity if you get to the end of your life having lived it as a journey with a destination, and realize that it was a musical and your only opportunity to sing and dance. By any measure, ‘we’ are in a mess, but enjoy the moment.

Subscribe

  • Entries (RSS)
  • Comments (RSS)

Archives

  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015

Categories

  • Astral Gates
  • Bardo
  • Breamlea Zodiac
  • Emu
  • Jupiter
  • Kaballah
  • Milky Way
  • Moon Phases
  • Pop Psychology
  • Seasons
  • Stargazing
  • Tales
  • The South
  • Uncategorized
  • Underworld
  • Vertex

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Southern Hemisphere Astrology
    • Join 1,912 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Southern Hemisphere Astrology
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...