Tag Archives: Gemini

The Veteran: Full Moon in Gemini

30 Wednesday Dec 2020

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“Superfluous lags the vet’ran on the stage…”, Samuel Johnson, l. 308, The Vanity of Human Wishes, 1749, derived from Juvenal, Satire X.

Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations: ask thy father, and he will shew thee; thy elders, and they will tell thee. Deuteronomy 32:7, King James Bible.

It’s no use. The Veteran cannot hide from the truth. It’s not just that his triumph in Northern skies comes in the middle of a Coronavirus-infested winter, as humanity struggles to celebrate the turning of the year with breaking heart, or that in Southern skies his diminutive opposition to a searing Sun needs the compensation of the un-moonlit symmetry of the Eurocentric mythical Twins to impress, but having crossed the Lethe immediately before syzygy, he realizes in his curtain call only the magnitude of the reintegration which lies ahead for the audience (who are yet oblivious to the Acheron River which daytime has just crossed), and the possibility that he no longer has the will to help. Oh God, not more feelings!

On the other hand, the Veteran has died and been reborn so many times that the Bardo provides his second name: “The Hell You Say!” The Tenth Bardo House of Boredom is one he particularly enjoys, where the cleansing of the Lethe affords him the luxury of staring out of the window of the Northern Tropical Indolence bus on his way to Total Withdrawal, paying no attention to dark continents rolling him around their clocks. His fellow-passengers cannot wait to get off: being bored is akin to being boring; the emissions from the bus out-thrust its propulsion; grasping is mindfully consuming acceptance; and forests of wild viruses are being cleared for the graduation of sated ignorance. “We must alight at centre-stage,” they cry. Not the Veteran. He is indifferent to the footlights, and to his demotion from a starring role for the next twenty-four times he appears on this stage: you will not see a Full Moon in Gemini (the Constellation) until January 2023.

What tortuous labyrinths of despair might just squeeze a sleeper up to the surface? What convulsions of suppressed hatred, what intestinal convolutions of corruption and deliberate pain? What catacombs of memory, what collapsed and utterly expunged escape routes out of anxiety? What tectonic shifts of catatonic stress? And reversing direction, the Ngaanyatjarra Lands in the Australian Central Ranges is no country for old fish.

It is time and memory which stamp Veteran country, a duration of exile from the permanent present. Aligned with the course of the Moon’s progress across the faintly visible constellations between Sagittarius and Gemini, Woe and Forgetting, and irrevocably past Regulus and Spica and Antares to the Acheron again, an artesian underworld meanders beneath a landscape dotted with caves, one of which is yours, another mine.

July Full Moon in Sidereal Sagittarius: The Prodigal

05 Sunday Jul 2020

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“After all, what is identity but the slow, lifelong accretion of gazes: us looking at ourselves being looked at by others? What we see is, largely, what they see, or what we think they see. And when they turn away, when we become unseen, in a way we cease to be.” Elitsa Dermendzhiyska.

Prodigal New Earth Closeup in Gemini

“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought;
And enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard, their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.” Hamlet, III, i.

Prodigal Moon Antofagasta Jul05

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” Nietzsche, Beyond Good And Evil, IV, §146, trans. Helen Zimmern.

Prodigal Moon Antofagasta Underworld Jul05

That the Sun is in the Constellation Gemini, the Northern Sign Cancer and the Southern Sign Capricorn is of interest, but not arrestingly so. Nor is it of vital concern whether the primal force of earthly existence is female or male—we choose whichever we like—although it has amused us to plot the rhythm of the Moon’s phases as locked in a striving to escape a primordial envy of female power. It is the dynamism of Opposition which now resonates with the strongest signal, not only because the Signs and genders of Sun and Moon are interchangeable at Opposition, but because of the influence we have imputed to the Milky Way and the crossing of its rivers of the Underworld.

Prodigal Moon Guiping Jul05

From the Lethe we dry off our responsibility; from responsibility we clothe care; care gives rise to anxiety; from anxiety comes being-toward-death in the effort to maintain buoyancy, the meaning of who we might be, as we flail across the Acheron to do quixotic battle with the denial of authenticity. And this drama is projected into the heavens above and below. Yes, we are made of water; yes, we go to water. The Full Moon of Sagittarius is hidden in the sack of the Sun and Earth in Gemini as a sublimated knot of anger and hurt, a recurrent nightmare, a hard-wired secret, an unexpiated unkindness, a solvent of lust and revenge: the germinating seed of an Elm rattling to be festooned with False Dreams at the gates of Utopia.

Prodigal Moon Guiping Underworld Jul05

Do you identify with Gemini for some reason? Have you ever been recognized as a ‘Gemini’? Do you in fact resemble it? Or have you never seen it? It is visible in the night sky between its heliacal rising in September and setting in May, at the nightfall meridian in March. And it really does look like a pair of twins, or two buddies of either gender or both, or two sides of the same coin, Sun and Moon, North and South, like being a self, and knowing the law, daring and caution, day and night, anima and animus.

Prodigal New Earth in Gemini

Validation, the ghost which haunts the faces of yesterday’s somebodies, reverberates like the reflected reflection of the existential enquiry, ‘What happened?’ You may well have accustomed yourself to the belief that you surpassed your parents, but you know that the back of your head indicates that you need a haircut, and has not surpassed the emperor’s or the prophet’s. Is it possible that lighting merely shaded your followers, your students, even your children? And does the improbably grotesque approbation of the satyr, somewhere between the comic and the tragic, emulate Gemini’s humanity, or merely notch the animal shaft it saves for perfection?

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

Responsibility: New Moon in Gemini

24 Saturday Jun 2017

Posted by in Bardo, Moon Phases

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Responsibility is nothing other than how we heed our calling. Commonly confused with duty, it is rather only indirectly an element of the ethics of our response to others. At the deepest level of being, it is where we integrate self and the product of behaviour, the world as we perceive it. From our beginning, we obey in every action a call, to obey or disobey, to gratify or deny, to emulate or invent, to laugh or cry, to love or fear. Where this call comes from has been debated for millennia. Is it the voice of God? The Earth? Our species? Our ancestors? Whatever it is, we can all agree that it commends effort. It does care less for disinterest and boredom. It may evolve towards activism or submission, but the last thing it means is that life doesn’t matter, that it makes no difference what you do, for you’ll soon be dead.

But we will soon be dead, and notwithstanding the nobility of ‘responsibility’, there is more than a touch of absurdity in it, and when we judge it in others, madness too. Am I not mad to devote myself to reconfiguring a mediaeval world-view? Is it not madness to dedicate one’s life to preparation for the next life, or to perfect oneself in the knowledge that there won’t be one? Is it not madness to shake one’s head at the obsessions of others which have turned the world into a madhouse, believing that only one’s own responsibility is sane?

Idolator Big Hill Jun24Yours

The Bardo is just like a huge department store: in every direction rows and rows of identical white display cabinets all the way to the hexagonal walls which announce its realm if only you could see that far; and on your way to a wall every cabinet reveals in its compartments, identical compartments, an infinite range of character inhabited by personality and opportunity changing as you pause and behold the particular combinations of compensation and destiny you can recognize as the madness of everyone you have ever known, as well as your own, even though you still haven’t been able to identify the department. Everything seems, like an expanding universe, to radiate from wherever you are.

Iconoclast Big Hill Jun24Yours

In many ways, the midwinter Moon is the Big One, the cyclic root of discrimination and prejudice. The entire history of the human race has enacted our reaction to winter: will it kill us, what will we eat, what is it for, whose fault is it, what have we done wrong, will it end, when will it end, how will we prepare for its return, how can caring be so cruel? Actually, midwinter crosses the sky every day. Rug up your feelings, and contemplate the panorama of country on this occasion eclipsed by cold sunlight.

Gemini New Stawell Jun24

Saturday’s iconoclastic child works hard for a living while her shift-working idolizing sibling sleeps, because she lives a life of anguish. Benoit‘s third type, her being is strong in both animal and abstract nature. The twins complete each other in a self tending to overcome the not-self, but each, the brighter one deferent—deferential in the Ptolemaic sense—and the other subservient, reduces the other’s individuality to a not-self. What is unconscious is terrible in its imperative.

Yet the twins stand on the banks of the Lethe, and the self’s struggle to overcome fear of annihilation is blessed thereby in the imagination. Not in the law is human survival to be sourced, but in the instinctive assertion and satisfaction of responsibility. Reason determines it, but responsibility in the gut is what drives human resilience in community through the signs of winter and spring. God help you if you get in the way of human resilience!

Zealot Signs 2017Yours

The problem is, responsibility, that primeval driving force of humanity in the face of death and meaninglessness, constellates the self in opposing directions, as we know. Fracture is built into community, as separation is built into love. The autonomous principles of rationality and instinct are not united in Malkhut, but in Yesod, which has no existence other than as a rung on a transcendent ladder. Radicalization is a probability as immanence is a probability. The physical world was always a fetish for humanity, always a commodification, always a consumption.

Esmeralda, the transgender judge of the high court, is an activist in the rehabilitation of the suppressed gender which underlies all miscreance. Igor, the Eastern European-Aboriginal saint of the public bar, is hell-bent on refusing to accept less than he deserves. Uki, the fool of the Tarot deck, lives in a magical world of continuous transformation of human flesh and spirit engendered by what the latest cultural implant is selling at the corner store. Meanwhile, country is a usurpation of indigenous culture, and ‘centering‘ prayer is sold by Amazon. Is there a way towards a cultivated space in which voices all speak the same language? Can the world we leave our grandchildren transcend madness, thanks to our effort?

Shawwal St Kilda Jun25

How to be responsible by not speaking out and causing offence. How to enjoy a Sagittarian cup of tea with the twins. How to submit to a culture of mental illness, consuming the culture of others and teaching only consumption to your children. How to project mental illness as the condition for rejection without defining it, and therefore without judging it. How to be in good mental health by excluding others not of your caste who might reveal your shadow. How to do something for youth by teaching the culture of an outcast. How to live and teach a complete life without reading a book of ideas or listening selectively to music, or learning to fish and hunt and cook. How to invent a life in the spirit. How to be responsibly irresponsible.

Incidentally, the opposite of responsibility, the irresponsible, is boredom. There is no other place to find your vocation than right where you’re standing, in the centre of the landscape, though you might never get to read the sign on the wall.

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:

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.