Tag Archives: Full Moon

The Artisan: Full Moon in Sidereal Virgo

29 Monday Mar 2021

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Earth’s self upholds this monument
To conquerors who won her when
Wooing was dangerous, and now
Are gathered unto her again. Brian Fitzpatrick.

Now there’s a dog on the v’randa, for his master he waits
But the boss is inside drinking wine with his mates
He hurries for cover and he cringes in fear
It’s no place for a dog ’round a pub with no beer. Gordon Parsons.

The Artisan, schooled in a time-honoured tradition, has practised his craft so often that design and method have become innate. Ornament is often idiosyncratic but his guiding star is utility, and the artefact he produces is ever used in the same way. We don’t need an instruction manual to place and sit on a chair, or hold a cup the right way to drink out of it. Conventions needs no description. To be inside them is enough, until they no longer work. The patriarchy no longer works, and we have laboriously deconstructed it, or in places begun at least to recognize its negative influence in traditional societies evolving connection beyond the village. However, the belief that a convention has lost its utility becomes another convention, which no instruction manual can market. Inclusion takes time and immense care to avoid violence and hurt as a new authority attempts to confront an old one.

Fortunately, the convention of map reading has not reached that position, or even revealed its existence to more than a handful. (See McArthur’s Universal Corrective Map of the World.) Southern stargazers take it for granted that North is at the bottom and that we are looking at traditionally represented asterisms upside down, but the cartographical convention that North is up cannot be ignored when the Moon’s perspective attempts to align with ours, or to put it another way, when the Artisan attempts to make something we can use. How can we in the South possibly get inside a Moon in our Zodiac who is looking at the Earth upside down?

We will get to an explanation presently, but first consider the Constellation, Cetus. What is the basis of the attributes I have given it? Had Babylonian, Greek or mediaeval European taxonomers seen Cetus our way up, they would possibly have called it Vespa, the Wasp, because that’s what it resembles in the South, with a stinger to the west and a proboscis to the east, in celestial context which only came to make sense when Southerners began to ride horses, and the Fishes revealed themselves as a presumptuous rider on Pegasus whose moomba in jodphurs was worth investigating. Diphda is antagonistic and Menkar is intrusive, but the industry of the Potter Wasp, an artisan if there ever was one, is both beguiling and inspiring. It is difficult to assess the impression we make on others, though convention has it that there are those who ‘get’ us and those who don’t. The passage of the Earth through Vespa (Cetus) depends on where the Moon’s nodes are. This orbit we Earthlings are giving the impression of both positive and negative characteristics of waspishness, whichever way up we ought to be viewed, between 15:28 on the 28th and 08:25 on the 29th UTC, and after a day and two hours in Pisces, 10:45 and 15:14 on the 30th UTC. Know your time differences? Then mind how you go!

Your selfie over Nepal is a Northern tour de force, Artisan! You have created an image in the tradition of ancient maps of the world showing it surrounded by ocean, while giving your position the authentic offset from the Zenith which proves you’re not a robot. Most helpfully, your projection of the sky, first mapped onto paleolithic cave walls, demonstrates the root of the conventional orientation of north and south on a map. But you know, the Packers Prize goes to another.

The sky can be dragged down to the vertical from any direction. To see the Zodiac the Southern way up, drag it down from the North, but then North will be at the bottom, the opposite of our maps, in which the South is always behind us. Let’s view the Honourable Mention.

To see the Emu right way up, drag the sky down from the South-East. The Emu at Zenith is always above a North-up Earth. How’s that for a Treaty? And every artisan leaves a signature: today the upper transit of the Southern Cross was at Solar Midnight. Only happens once a year, on this day. Nice one.

Full Moon in Capricorn: the Prisoner

19 Tuesday Jul 2016

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A straight line is a segment of an infinitely large circle. Immediacy is a segment of a cycle. Madness is straightened immediacy.Addict Crossing the Torrent

“I haven’t been there for a few weeks. Did you notice? Of course not. You’ve got a busy life, and you’ve got more important things to think about than where the Moon is. I don’t really care. I’ve got my routine, and I just do it. I hear you: what difference does it make if the calendar shows my quarters facing left or right? Right? If you don’t want to know, don’t read me, simple as that. I never expected to go viral, did I?Addict Moon Transits F-N

Why do any of you express yourselves? Of course, you have to place your order at Maccas, but really, I’m serious. If your opinion isn’t going to influence someone powerful, isn’t going to change the world, why do you so carefully construct it? Doesn’t matter if you’re gay or straight, why do you find it necessary to have an opinion on same-sex marriage? And why do you think the world needs changing, anyway? Can’t you compromise?

Of course I get sick of going around in circles. Of course I know I’m predictable (hardly to any of you though, I dare say, heh heh heh), but it doesn’t matter to me whether I holiday behind the clouds or on a yacht in the Aegean. What matters is what’s going on in HERE, right? Same as you. I’m not ashamed of what I do. I’m happy! I was over the Angola-Namibia border at opposition, and now I am visible to Eastern Australia in Capricorn(us), and whether you consider me in the northern or southern part of it, I’ve got a brandy, a rollie, and a game on TV. I’m full, in your face, and loving it!

Addict Moon Antares Transit Jul20This is my compromise. Hero in my own lunch-hour (sorry if I extinguish you, Emu). Did my father’s abuse and my mother’s compassion make me what I am? Who cares! I’ll explain the chart in a minute, if you’ll just let me finish. Matters of import are being realized at the Meridian, and I’m very upstage in this setting, but who says they’re matters of import? Me! I don’t care if you don’t believe me: Antares is Uriel, the Light of God, and his role is grave! This warden reminds you that your self-importance is imprisoned in causality and consequences, just like mine. I don’t have to tell you what working family-man Mars makes of that. Great-Uncle Saturn on the other hand is anyone’s guess.Addict Moon Antares Transit Jul20 South Tropical

And just in case you get too far up yourself–if you’re still reading–there’s a tiny man-made speck towards Rasalgethi (Alpha Herculis, “Head of the Kneeler”, just to Rasalhague’s west), where human imagination put it, and can find it, as I have. It was made by ordinary people like me who find ways of making the intolerable tolerable and pay their taxes. Or have I got that the wrong way around? We pay our taxes, and powerful people make their intolerable tolerable. Can you see where you fit in? It’s an unimaginably big world, but size matters, if you look from the inside!

Addiction is an orientation of the world to the emotional self. In the arms of addiction we give ourselves up to pain. We are centred on it, and the furthest from its release we can be, confirmed in it by painlessness. We are called, and make any excuse; but our stunted, misshapen appearance to the outside belies a miracle of ecological adaptation. For example, as a prisoner, I have been given a lot of counselling on how to stop defeating myself. Thank you. I have adapted my orbit to it.Emotions of the Sky

[Based on Chögyam Trungpa’s Transcending Madness: the Experience of the Six Bardos, Shambhala, 2010, and Lövheim’s cube of emotion.]

Guilty as charged, but have a look at those constellations of addiction, and acknowledge which ones have tipped the scales of passing interest. Do you really want to free your self from all dependency? I tell you what is self-defeating: looking at the transit of Antares and seeing only a scattering of distant lights. I am rather excited in your sky by my discriminating good fortune….”

Full Moon in Sagittarius: the Zealot

19 Sunday Jun 2016

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It’s time to press Restart.

A long time ago now, having more by good luck than good management evaded capture by the Germans, or betrayal by collaborators, five abandoned British soldiers found their way by the light of a full moon to the port of Le Verdon, where they were taken on board a Polish ship and evacuated from German-occupied France. Actually, only four made it to the ship. The lieutenant who went missing was a lunatic, the expatriate veteran who shot him from behind confided to me in drunken anguish one Anzac Day in Prahran. My stepfather was a decorated officer of the Black Watch, and his reaction was guarded when he heard this story. He still had nightmares about leading the liberation of an extermination camp at the end of the war, my mother told me.

Zealot Moon 1940Exactly 76 years ago, 4 multiples of 19, the Full Moon of June 1940 was within a degree of this year’s, therefore in the same Nakshatra, and very close to the Sagittarius solstice point, like this one. Reading accounts of the conflicts which my parents’ generation grew up in is every bit as challenging as confronting my implication in the treatment of indigenous people here and in Papua, and my share of responsibility for the suffering of millions in the Middle East. I am ashamed to be embedded in this violence, as most of my generation are who have been passengers on what we have believed to be a journey to reconciliation. Can astrology have anything to say on the subject?

There wasn’t much sign of reconciliation in 1959, when my generation were still in school: the Solstice Moon shone on a respectable world in which insecurity resolved itself by proxy: shorthand for thousands of violent deaths in Central America, Vietnam and the ‘colonies’ of Africa; and for the indoctrination which validated the massive spending on nuclear proliferation which accompanied the Cold War; not to mention the evasion of the law constituted by contemporary closed-shop methods of dealing with sexual abuse of children. Dictatorship and military-style leadership seemed the norm, on the international stage, in workplaces and families. [1959.]

Everyone was a zealot by 1978: Aboriginal land rights occupied centre-stage in Australia, but two decades of self-actualization had resulted in substantial progress for the equality of women and the secularization of morality. Economic reform was underway in both USSR and China which would transform the world. However, there were signs of trouble ahead, in the emergent form of ‘political correctness‘. [1978.] Then came 1997, which I look back to as the high tide of multiculturalism, but the Australian ‘history wars‘ of that period were a disturbing crack in the foundations of a belief that we are one humanity undivided, indeed enhanced, by difference. Zealots were emerging on the extreme left as well as the extreme right. [1997.]

And so the punctuation of the Moon’s orbit, the foundation of archaeoastronomy and arguably at the root of earthly civilization, science and technology, returns it to the solstice this month. How are we looking? Do we go around and around like the Moon, or are we getting somewhere? Is there still a ‘silent majority’ of good people armed with regard for each other’s welfare and fulfilment? Does it have a resilient discourse to steer us more or less unanimously towards a decent solution to the humanitarian crises we must face, of violent political upheaval and mass-migration, despite the clamour of zealots at both extremes? Can it direct the resurgence of religious difference towards the enhancement of secular, multicultural cohesion?Zealot Moon South Tropical Jun20

The Full Moon this month as you can see is half an arc-minute from the solstice of the Tropic of Cancer, so it is more than valid to look at it from a southern astrological perspective. The one-half of the world’s population who live below the Tropic of Cancer are looking north to see the Moon, so it appears 104 degrees past the descending node! Most of you will go, “Huh?”, but in the interests of the ‘silent majority’ I would like to remind you that Southern Hemisphere Astrology evolved as a rejection of colonialism! Our perspective ‘down’ here is as relevant as yours ‘up’ there, and perhaps the polarities of astrology can resonate with the ‘silent majority’ after all.Zealot Moon Jun20

Out of respect for our northern cousins, i.e. those living north of 23.44 degrees north latitude, I present the view from the ‘Mirror’ just off the east coast of Japan, the same distance ‘above’ the equator as Melbourne is ‘below’ it, and at the same longitude. Let me remind all readers that you can always see the opposite hemisphere’s point of view if you turn to the cardinal point opposite the Medium Coeli, cusp of the Fourth House, and crane your neck backwards far enough!Zealot Moon Downside Up Jun20

What you will read in astrology columns will almost exclusively relate to this image, in terms similar to these:Zealot Moon North Tropical Jun20

Needless to say, it is wrong for half the world’s population. That’s OK: it’s right for the other half. Or is it? Perhaps each is wrong. Is the Moon as an entity above or below the Ecliptic? Both, or neither? Do we need to respect the Other’s truth more, or ours less? Remember, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Whichever way you look at it, the Sun in Gemini is making up its mind, and the Moon in Sagittarius is making up its heart. Perhaps therein lies the reason the egg the Emu lays every nineteen years never hatches, bleached by the Sun. You may take our word for it. [There is an alternative periodicity of Full Moons at the June solstice, eight years after this series, visible at night somewhere in the southern hemisphere, in Australia in 1948 and 2043. The Moon is above the Ecliptic. As far as I’m aware, the bird, ostrich, cormorant, or vulture perhaps, has not been identified.]Zealot Egg

This time around, the egg that won’t hatch is internalized phobia and, dare I say, self-love dependent on the removal of offence. Not as though this may apply to you, here is a cautionary quote with an interesting link for those susceptible to reintardation, prey to compartmentalization, or with a tendency to project shame onto other people: “To attempt the destruction of our passions is the height of folly. What a noble aim is that of the zealot who tortures himself like a madman in order to desire nothing, feel nothing, and who, if he succeeded, would end up a complete monster!” Denis Diderot.

 

Full Moon in Leo: the Counsellor

22 Monday Feb 2016

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‘By “infinitude’s despair” Kierkegaard means the sickness of the personality, the opposite of health. And so the person becomes sick by plunging into the limitless, the symbolic self becomes “fantastic”—as it does in schizophrenia—when it splits away from the body, from a dependable grounding in real experience in the everyday world. The full-blown schizophrenic is abstract, ethereal, un-real; he billows out of the earthly categories of space and time, floats out of his body, dwells in an eternal now, is not subject to death and destruction. He has vanquished these in his fantasy, or perhaps better, in the actual fact that he has quit his body, renounced its limitations.’ Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, Souvenir Press, 1973, p.134.

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.” George Santayana.

Counsellor Moon Feb23

Moon: Your referral indicates an anxiety problem. Would you like to speak about that?

Earth: Well, I am tearful all the time and I can’t sleep, and the hope I had for this relationship I’m in with people is not working out, and some blame it on me, and say I haven’t done my work on myself and I need to see you.

Moon: Shall we talk about your relationship, or the work you need to do on yourself?

Earth: I suppose my relationship might be working out better if I didn’t have so many contrary habits, the most problematic of which seems to be the way I love. My existence is imprisoned in time. I recover from each loss by attaching myself to something new, which in turn matures and dies. Eternity, the big picture, beckons as a solution, but what is that really but a craving for the end of loss?

Put it this way: in the immensity of the universe everything seems insignificant, meaningless and futile, but my heart breaks for the brevity of human life, and the meaning people try to create. And I have such vivid, horror dreams, which some say may be my struggle with my ego and a sign that I’m on the verge of letting go, but letting go of what? War? Attachment? Time? Or loss…and love…and tears?

Moon: We can explore your dreams in another session, and in the meantime, it might be helpful to focus on some negative thoughts you seem to have and see if we can’t identify them, and change them into positive ones.

Earth: You mean, don’t you, that perhaps my anxiety arises from not feeling good about myself, not being grateful for just being here, having unrealistic expectations, being needy?

Moon: Perhaps. We are in this space-time thing together. If we are unperturbed, there’s no reason we can’t reach out to eternity in harmony, each of us cooperating with the other in ways that work to our mutual satisfaction, such as my libration and your tides, and all we have to do is feel good about that.

Earth: If only I were just a rock in spacetime, but I’m not! I am humanity’s home, and its burial ground! I realise I am not the author of existence, that you and the Sun and the galaxies are as much part of it as I, but the oceans that fishermen work are of me, the gardener’s rain falls on my soil, and the rubble of war is my ruin. I have hopes; I have regrets. I am made of the aspiration of generations, to transform me, to use me in their heroic quests. I have been their perspective and their disappointment.

In the long run, none of it matters, I know that. Form is a figure of speech; ambiguity rules. But if nothing matters, harmony doesn’t matter, nor does eternity. Perhaps it does all come down to habit, but habit is real, my sleeplessness is real, and the fullness of emptiness is real!

Moon: What do you mean by ‘the fullness of emptiness’?

Earth: There is a war going on inside me, and it seems to get worse the wiser I get. First it was spiritual versus material, and then capitalist against socialist: people trying to expand their inside, their subjective experience, against people trying to perfect everybody. None of it was real, but many generations were consumed by anxiety, hatred and war. Out of it emerged an uneasy stalemate: the spirit of the universe has evolved as the projection of egos which regard themselves as delusions. Even you are not much more than a rock these days, reflecting light from the nearest star from different angles, and if I weren’t here you wouldn’t even do that.

Moon: I am ok with however you want to see me.

Earth: Precisely! Any definition is a delusion, including that one, but defining is real, and so is ambiguity. That’s the fullness of emptiness! Your ‘ok’ does respond to how I see you. That is the war going on inside me as it has evolved. Bullies are looked upon as pathetic creatures of reified belief, and yet they cause suffering, which does not seem empty to the perfectionists. The age-old solution was to negate a bully’s belief by standing up to him, thereby validating the belief system which informed the bullying. The new solution is to teach emptiness to the bully, and in effect indulge the victim in a compassionate validation of irresponsibility. No?

My anxiety is about compassion becoming a habit which entails a kind of heat-death, the dissolution of ego’s energy into an anti-heroism content with an aspiration to gratitude for inherited cocoons. My anxiety is about the fullness of this emptiness. Empty bullies hurt!

Moon: It is difficult to resist your impression of the root of your anxiety, but I perceive another possibility which I suggest you deliberate on between now and a next session should you request one. In affirming a tension between finitude and infinitude one merely states the conditions of existence. There is no cause of anxiety here. Anxiety arises in despair: the refusal to be finite in relation to the infinite, but alternatively the refusal to be infinite in relation to the finite. In familiar terms, we share the characteristics of hurtling and falling, and each exists as a determinant and effect of the other. Freedom is the relation to the relation of possibility to necessity. Your anxiety may result from the relation of infinitude to finitude, as you seem to believe, or in your self it may be arising from a refusal of the denial of that relation that is being transferred to you by the despair of others. It may lie in the relation of your love to an imbalance towards abstraction and a denial of limitations in those you love, or its relation to an obsessive absorption in the everyday which denies possibility, in other cases.

Fullness, as I take your meaning, can be likened to the heat which creates the steam. Remember, as the old saying has it, a watched pot never boils.

Your anxiety may arise from your sanity in a sick world, or your own sickness…and on that note we must interrupt our conversation.

Earth: …!

End of Session.

My definition of astrology is rather loose, if not perverse: it is a gaming of reality — feeling, time and form — which enhances meaning and expands it until it implodes for lack of, you guessed it, objectivity.

The world is made of subjectivity, not objects, and that is where astrology properly begins and ends. Unfortunately, as practised by many astrologers, it affirms the belief that we have an essential nature as subjects and can therefore be understood like objects as having independent existence.

We may feel no enmity, but as object to some we would befriend, we have become ’the enemy’. How is equanimity attained? Is it really despite yourself that you are someone’s enemy? Will you die at peace, or simply already dead to poverty and devastation?

You can find a SHA chart of the opposition of the perfectionist Sun in Aquarius to the confused Moon in Leo here, and the cast of my “Astrology” characters here. Game on!

Full Moon in Cancer: the Exile

18 Monday Jan 2016

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The zodiac is an entity like the conscious human mind, the inorganic energy transfer processes at the root of life, the gears which drive the hands we hardly see when we ‘tell the time’, or the keystrokes on a qwerty keyboard that produce ‘laughter’ and ‘crying’: it takes shape!

Essential reading: https://aeon.co/essays/why-life-is-not-a-thing-but-a-restless-manner-of-being

It suddenly hit me one day that we recognise ‘things’ by their structure, but structure generates itself in the world—as it generates its idea in my mind—out of shapes which endure because they fit.

Shape is the wood of trees and a wood of trees. It is what is shared in pairing, what crystallises in solutions, what appears out of a fog, what connects a narrative, what constitutes a mood.

Only bits of the zodiac are visible at a time, and the bits that are visible have enduring rather than permanent shape, but the whole sky resonates with them! Like the waves of hormones which roll through a brain in the course of a cycle of light and dark, the shape of the zodiac shifts in a peristalsis which is both ingress and egress, cause, initial condition and consequence.Cancer Full Moon Set Jan24

We know that the bits we see are connected to the angles made by Earth’s axis with the stars and the Sun, as we know where the sky goes below the horizon. We know so much more than the draughtsmen of the zodiac that what we don’t know may come as a surprise.

Everything is in the zodiac because ‘everything’ gives the zodiac its shape. The poles of the ecliptic are in the zodiac, as are the equatorial and horizontal poles. The stars which are adjacent are also opposite, and the stars which are never visible are circumpolar in the opposite latitude. The seasons are in the zodiac, and so are their opposites, because of the nature of shape: a lion can be a charismatic lionheart one millennium and a bit of an irritable know-all the next, a benign dictator or a bungler in intimacy.

Feel the wave of his stars roll through you, bringing the awareness of infinitely complex implications to your best intentions. See the hands of connection and confusion tick around the clock of the south at all hours of the day and night. The South Celestial Pole—your latitude above the horizon—engraves ‘E’ at 9 o’clock and ‘W’ at 3 o’clock and somehow the hands at those figures always point down and across to the cardinal directions on the horizon. Marvellous contraption!

Henceforth we shall consult it as a frame of reference. And immediately we strike gold! We have already met the coincidence of Australia Day and Southern Cross daybreak transit. Now, with our enlightened appreciation of shape, we are presented on late January mornings in ‘complete’ darkness—darkness is never complete, even in death—with the rising of the shape known as The Emu.Emu Stars

Lots to read about this too:  http://www.atnf.csiro.au/research/AboriginalAstronomy/Examples/emu.htm   http://www.enlightning.com.au/

but briefly this is a gormless individual prey to delusion who straddles many signs, recognised by the first, unrecompensed, owners of your property many thousands of years ago, a marvellous sight an hour and a half before sunrise, and may I suggest a typically strident justifier of faith ever implicated in the contemporary phenomenon of straggling haste?Emu Soul

Did I mention that today marks the arrival of Late Summer, as Aldebaran crosses the meridian at nightfall, or that today the Moon is full in Cancer, transiting 5 minutes before solar midnight somewhere over eastern Greenland?Cancer Full Jan24

Have you experienced exile?

The Astrologer: Full Moon in Gemini Christmas Day

22 Tuesday Dec 2015

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The star of expansion, Arcturus, is risen: it’s Christmas!
In every moment ‘I’ am a culture seething with sensations, visions and insights, habitual reactions, instincts and humours, wafts of conversation, snatches of song, smells of bowel. ‘I’ am saturated by others, including myself, and playing conscious and unconscious part in various social transformations, even sharing them, but this is all theoretical. The ground of my being is imaginal and aesthetic.

The Full Moon, back again, is drawn forward time and again to its immolation in sunlight. This is human artifice. Many hundreds of thousands of such renewals have played out in the psyche of imaginative Homo Sapiens, but only there. There are no phases on the Moon.Astrologer Moon Image

The human psyche is imaginal, and each human imagination is aesthetic. This fiction it creates, that the Moon exists in anguish: “This proto-feminine principle, the Sun, life itself to me, the source of all energy, light and time, all competition, necessity and utility, if she has a soul at all, does not nurture me in it. ‘We’ have a one-sided relationship. She bathes me in heat, but gratuitously. She barely feels my gravity. She tolerates me, exists without me, finds no essential beauty in me. Where lies the beauty of my reflection, in me? I don’t find it in her.”

This is not a campfire story. This is the confection of a solitary shepherd, a boy known to others, who presents himself to others, but with a self in orbit of the soul. The clock of the constellations chimes in the heart ravished by importance. And the Moon? Let him cleave to the human heart, for his orbit was the key our imagination used to unlock the neighbourhood of all stars in our ‘eternal’ emptiness of quantum nonlocality (or words to that effect–insert your own). The Sun of the seasons is a poor thing without him.Astrologer Moon Dec25

“…[Dream,] the most subjective and mystical of all mental phenomena, and a phenomenon more inclusive than the dreamer himself, because it allows him both to observe himself and to be at one with the universe.” Otto Rank, Psychology and the Soul.

In his arcane costume of skins and feathers he goes to sleep on a rock in a crag which offers some protection from predators. The stars are so bright they prick the skin. He dreams he is a great rock in space, hurtling around an unimaginably large ball inhabited by teeming millions of strange beings who worship him. He feels the caress of their eyes. Their hearts beat under his ribs. But a great power is vested in him by their perspective, the power not only of geometry, of phases and latitudes and azimuths, but as he soars up over their horizons he feels the power of calculus, the integrals and differentials of falling ever onwards, through ages of ice and ages of sand, now fast and close, now slow and far, in life and in death, but always falling, and always Now, forever.
A goat bleats in the dark, announcing the pulse of new life, and another Tomorrow.
This was the Astrologer’s dream—he who made the Sky—in Gemini one night, at Christmas, in the two thousand and sixteenth year of our Lord.

Personally, I reject a spiritual path that begins with the experience of suffering, or the compassion which arises from a perception of suffering as the ground of human existence. Cut to the chase, I reckon. If the path out of suffering leads through a direct realisation of emptiness, and that is immediately accessible as soon as you step outside your tent under a dark sky, as it was for the mystics who found the Everything and Nothing God of the religions of The Book, then that is where to begin, with the immensity of the universe in your tiny, virtual, infinite consciousness.

The expression, ‘Everything is connected to everything else’, is an analytical tool and a form of non-violent protest used to promote anything from vegetarianism and environmental sustainability to multiculturalism and the Middle Way.
Like everything it has three meanings. It means, ‘The material world of independent individuals is an illusion.’ It means, ‘Everything exists in a web of dependent origination, and every action and inaction, including thoughts, has an affect.’ And it means, ‘Everything is subject to fundamental laws which can be understood and used to transform things into more desirable things.’

“Believers in emptiness
Are incurable.”
Nagarjuna.

A parting gift: hesitate before you dismiss southern hemisphere astrology in favour of what ‘works’ according to other people, lest you languish in the inherited, non-imaginal prison of confirmation bias.

Have a good one!

Francis of Breamlea Station.

Full Moon in Taurus: The Mandarin

25 Wednesday Nov 2015

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A mandarin’s job is to give form to the ruler’s vision. His aura is charismatic, his skill intrigue, his accomplishment cohesion. A large group of them has assembled in Vienna, in the hope of negotiating a peace settlement in Syria. The precise opposition of this Moon will be above them, hammering the importance of independence and self-criticism, despite the self-justifiers thronging cabinets back home.

The impact of tomorrow’s Full Moon is to highlight the swing of opinion we are seeing in relation to radical Islam. Cooperation is being challenged as a value by those who see its tendency to relativism and its accommodation of victim mentality. I cannot remember a more tumultuous upheaval of thought. Is it just coincidence that the Moon’s Nodes are announcing a new challenge to us to focus, against a tendency to avoidance?

[The South Node is on the boundary between Aquarius and Pisces, and during the year to come the Moon’s Southern Lunistice, its highest position above the Ecliptic, will move gradually away from Gemini through Taurus, bringing the Moon very close to Aldebaran as it passes. The eye of the Bull is a stolid presence, and the interplay of the two bodies at conjunction will be interesting as the Moon’s hubris wanes and waxes in these turbulent times.]Mandarin Moon Nov26

Peasant Moon: Full Moon in Aries October 27

26 Monday Oct 2015

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The small, landlocked, ethnically Arian principality of Aries is in turmoil tonight, as a horde of refugees sweeps across its borders following the announcement of an historic accord between the Eastern and Western Blocs of constellations, which imposes on members cooperation with, and acknowledges responsibility for, the so-called Second Diaspora. A delegation of celebrities from Leo is on its way to urge the government to show compassion, and to apply restraint as activists on the steps of parliament fan the embers of bitter resentment which remain in Aries from the treaty which displaced it so many years ago.Peasant Moon 2015

Sources have confirmed that the bounty of this year’s harvest could well remain ungathered as the rural population move en masse to the capital, in open disregard of the national interest, to assert what amount to isolationist agrarian values. Their spiritual leader is a pugnacious priest who calls himself ‘Father Moon’, a renowned bullfighter before the ‘sport’ was banned as one of the conditions Aries was forced to accept for continuing membership of the Western Bloc.

With violent confrontation between farmers and refugees seeming inevitable, Government spokespeople were this evening remaining tight-lipped.Peasant Moon Oct27

Full Moon on Sunday—The Crone

28 Friday Aug 2015

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In the days when rocks could talk and the Sun licked the Earth like a dog licks her puppies, it so happened that one of the Moon’s wives turned out to be a snake. When the two of them came to visit, the Sun did not open her arms to them and say, it’s an unconventional relationship between you two, but hey, whatever turns you on! Stars are not like that.

She said, you’re not good for each other. You’re codependent, and Moon, there’s something wrong with you. Shield is a snake because you’re enabling her. You must renounce her, but while you’re at it, renounce the bad reputation you’ve sunk into, renounce all your bad habits. Deal with your shame, man!

Why couldn’t she just say, come here, silly boy, you’re fine just the way you are? Why does the Sun need the Moon to make her human?

There is a scientific explanation which humans have developed, and you can find it at

https://youtu.be/p-YZAIECTrA

but meanwhile the Moon is trapped in a story, as he always is.

Night after night, he goes to a different woman, and they’re all like the Sun, needing him to make them human. He kisses them, listens to them, holds them tenderly. He tries to show them another way of looking at things, to turn their words into poetry, their movement into music, their flesh into paradise.

It is all to no avail. They only want one thing from him, his potential. That is why his dreamy peregrinations are doomed to narrative. They want form. He builds expectations.

To hell with it, he says to himself this time. This comfort I take with my wives, this impetus they manufacture in my life, I don’t need it! I am a philosopher, a musician, a poet. I love my wound! I will be a saint!

The crone is the Moon’s love image divested of everything he craves. It is a profound sadness in him, dead possibility. She is romance unromanticised. She is now his eyes and all he sees. He never was separated from his mother.

The Moon, for the moment, has renounced himself. Now it is just a story, and I may have got it wrong. You would think that the Moon would recognise sainthood as just another another addiction, wouldn’t you?

How would you interpret the chart?Crone Moon

http://youtu.be/ZmzLfUmp7bk

A note on crones.

Briefly put, a crone is a wise woman, but for very cogent reasons, one who has always been mistrusted.

It is quite difficult to get to know her personally. She is not so much wise as steeped in wisdom, an unstinting servant to a community, but a stern judge, disconcertingly aloof, even arid, one feels.

Her presence is impressive, but there seems something wrong with her face. How could it not reveal the embarrassment of suffering to the degree necessary to explain her knowledge?

Her raucous good humour contemptuously despatches any suspicion of inauthenticity, and yet the edge to that humour leaves an impression.

She reminds us of a man, proud in dependency, competent in redundancy, important in deference.

She is the man in a woman, the mother of the Moon, an asteroid.