Tag Archives: Gender

Convention: New Moon in Sidereal Aquarius

13 Saturday Mar 2021

Posted by in Moon Phases

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust. Shakespeare, Fidele’s Dirge.

The Autumn horoscopes of Virgo personalities devoured by Southern Hemisphere commuters born in Spring are beyond rational understanding, but there is no stronger influence on human behaviour than confirmation bias, and I am not butting my head against it. So let it stand for the moment that this year the first Moon of Northern Hemisphere Spring, pivotal in the lives of Christian believers, is born in the Sign of Pisces and culminates immediately before Easter in the Sign of Libra. It has remained a convention among European invaders of the South for 500 years. The fact remains that the astrological romance of each Moon’s journey from inspiration to realization is complicated by the journey of the Sun: the first realization of the Full Moon as it dramatises its Opposition is that the Sun has moved on, and navigation is ambiguous in the shoals of memory, as any expatriate visiting ‘home’ will attest. Convention is not mere habit, but the fabrication of a new chapter in the same story, a contest of intuition and language, memory and awareness, success and defeat. One person’s affluence is another’s deprivation. One person’s ritual self-discovery is another’s defilement. Convention is a truce.

But can the truce hold? When the Moon elected to worship the Sun Goddess as a man, he neglected the resilience of convention, and must now admit some culpability for a worldwide resentment among women towards his mansplaining. He meant to portray himself as subordinate to the coordinating power of female creativity, but deep in the brainstem from whence he drew his interpretations of gender there did lurk an urge to power. The ambiguity of his reflected outshining was tainted by denial that he was underplaying a primeval contest, and that he might represent just another patriarch with 27 concubines. Was there not a caricature of triumph in the metaphor of dragging Goddesses by the hair out of their Underworld hill caves to worship his worship? Even if all experience is the crocodile speaking, relationship is a more serious issue than this.

One person’s instinct is another’s reason. As previously explored, the alignment of the ancestors in a straight line passing directly overhead has two configurations: one associated by indigenous custom with the mystery of male initiation, and the other labelled idiosyncratically as the Wanderer, a possible celebration of gender difference locked into the progressive possibilities of iconoclasm emerging from the Underworld River of Lethe. Perhaps this moment, visible in complete darkness in the first quarter of the year, might be the birth of a New Moon with a difference, deriving his trajectory not from Goddess worship, but from self-worship among the ambiguous roots of identity in the somatic soup of retrospection.

Thus might the Moon be relegated to the ranks of those who dangerously deal their own cards, resentment and victimization be revealed as premeditated, and interpretation of selfhood dare to contradict convention. Meanwhile, he seems in the South to have fallen right way up out of the frying-pan of Pisces into the fire of Virgo.

What it all boils down to is, in attempting to give personality to the Moon, I have landed him with the same problem we persons all have to deal with: how to get inside another’s mind, indeed how to get inside our own without an objective system of meanings such as astrology which infers that another can get in there.

To paraphrase Bob Dylan’s prescient lines, you were kidding me, you weren’t really from the farm, and I told you later as you tore out my eyes, that I never really meant to do you any harm. Perhaps we must leave it at that. Own your conventions and their ancestral languages, and let no Goddess need recourse to claims of being framed, or farmed. And yes, rejoice in any unconventional primal resurgence of the cardinal directions, especially their upsidedown-ness, and let us hope that our subscription to their metacortical experience does not inadvertently expire.

July Full Moon in Sidereal Sagittarius: The Prodigal

05 Sunday Jul 2020

Posted by in Moon Phases

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“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?

Civility: New Moon in Sidereal Pisces

05 Friday Apr 2019

Posted by in Moon Phases

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

Straightway Rumor flies through Libya’s great cities, Rumor, swiftest of all the evils in the world. She thrives on speed, stronger for every stride, slight with fear at first, soon soaring into the air she treads the ground and hides her head in the clouds. She is the last, they say, our Mother Earth produced.  Virgil, The Aeneid IV 219 ff., Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, trans. Robert Fagles, Penguin Publishing Group 2010, Kindle Edition.

Over the mountain, watching the watcher,
Breaking the darkness, waking the grapevine.
One inch of love is one inch of shadow.
Love is the shadow that ripens the vine.
Set the controls for the heart of the Sun. Pink Floyd.

If you deduct from time all those unkind acts you still hurt from, and all the hurt you’ve perpetrated without meaning to, what you’re left with is civility, because nothing is more pressing a concern than how to live together, and nothing is further from our grasp than coexistence in freedom. Homer called the Sun, tireless. What is ‘inextinguishable’ is not only the Sun, but the refusal to be responsible for ignorance and pain, set in stone as the rights of the individual. Ownership of subjectivity is as predictable as the Sun.

Thinking keeps thought alive and in check, as dancing keeps music alive and in measure. What keeps culture alive is its frontier, where it takes its validation at crossroads of negotiation and relationship, at its borders with misunderstanding. Australia, seen by many as having a poor culture, has decided to address its brand problem, or the Government has, in the pointed absence of an ‘Australia’ to recognize its dysfunction, let alone address it. We don’t have borders—not in the sense of crossings where something of ourselves must be left behind—but we do have standards we are relieved and enlivened to come home to, don’t we?

Operating in a global market increasingly corrupted by fatuous Guanxi assertions of unassured trust, Australians—who are they?—need to focus on their shadow—read, ’face’—and perhaps the best we might come up with is, “Love is the shadow that ripens the whine” (sic.), or “Cosmology is the glue of twilight”, or what about, “Australia, the song which helps you remember to breathe”, or “Getting up too early for breakfast is a bitch”? Perhaps, after all, Australia is too safety-conscious to show a face, the ‘Inextinguishable’ merely a monkey on every back, jabbering the half-truths and rumours we hear in the grunts and growls of their preverbal network.

It is probably not a coincidence that while this brand crisis was brewing, masculinity across the world was also being forced to have a good hard look at itself, especially in a country whose Prime Minister could accord higher status to the national cricket captain, and pastoral care could be found guilty as charged. This website began as a questioning not only of the applicability of Northern Hemisphere Signs to Southern Hemisphere seasons, but also of the traditional Eurocentric gendering of Sun and Moon. It seemed to me worthy of consideration that the life-force of the Solar System is female, and that the peripheral body in orbit around her reflecting her light is male. Unless emasculation is a thing, like sex-objects and racial stereotypes, it cannot be blamed on a diminishment of interest in self-aggrandisement, seriously, but is altruism a thing, and how will your descendants value the imperfect world you have passed down?

Dasein 2019

What have you got when the passage of a year is measured in phases of the Sun, waxing from Winter Solstice? When Moon has will and Sun feelings? When brief human lives are enfolded by the spirit of ancient trees? When parent and child can agree to disagree, understanding that their shadows are forever lengthening and deepening? When every hatred dissolves in the time it takes to digest it, and every son of a bitch is a mother’s son? When the highest aspiration of hunter (and murderer) is to poke their head into the shimmering mirage of creation and stay there? When culture is what you pass on of the mind you have changed? What have you got if not civility?

In my time of dying, let bickering about gender and other dualities cease. What does it matter if the seasons are divisions of a year or multiples of the month? It is incontrovertible that before the sky and the sea came Mother Earth, but Gaia has been supplanted by Country, which has no limit above or below, merely an horizon shared by the Underworld, at which Coxeter and Escher located our binary motifs, and Country comingles them as above, so below, within and without, infinitely reduced.

Pisces New Salto Apr05

A little bird told me that the physical and the spiritual are not parts of a whole, and nor are the female and the male: neither has any existence without the other, not even for Mitochondrial Eve. So it is with the roles of reason and instinct in the achievement of self-restraint; so it is with the invisible passage of the Sun through the Zodiac measured at night by the Moon and stars; so it is with the seasons of the hemispheres.

Pisces New Shanghai Apr05

Are you a tree growing miraculously out of solid rock, or an embodiment of respiration and photosynthesis flirting with the idea of permanence? Is the stable value system your gossip is preserving progressive or conservative? Can Post-Colonialism open its borders for the arrival of something other than wholesale exploitation, corruption and theft? Is this not a question to Heaven answered by the crumbling pillars of our invasive heritage? What cultural garb does Rumor reveal beneath the clouds? Will you dissolve your personal space into the infinitesimal otherness of your Self, the emptiness of the identity your culture or religion affixes, if there is real danger of enslavement to the Other in believing in their tacit assurance, or even in Rumor keeping a civil tongue in her head when discussion turns to walls? Is the fatty deposit she sits on a handful?

Prodigal Moon in Constellation Pisces 2018

25 Tuesday Sep 2018

Posted by in Moon Phases

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

Hidden deep within conventional astrology is an undisclosed intention, to help you make something of yourself. It is not just yiddishe mamas who define parental accomplishment as providing the world with more doctors and lawyers, and it is not just Western culture which judges a life by its social benefit. For 3000 years poets, storytellers, philosophers and priests have been teaching us the art of creating a self, and astrology has merely delivered a universal tool to the same end with its Sun Sign daily horoscopes. Astrology provides an aesthetic dimension to subjectivity’s game of chess with the world machine, but the aim of the game is to win.

Not necessarily fame and fortune, but something approaching those supremely admired achievements is still unquestioned as the purpose of life by those still desiring entry to heaven and those dutiful to heaven’s creation on earth, if only to convert the world, by force if necessary. Self-improvement is the madness of the House of Constriction in my astrology, but lack of motivation to better oneself and others verges on psychosis in the minds of most. What life discloses is a way forward, and if we don’t take it, some self-defeating mechanism must be involved.

The September Full Moon reflects both the impulse to leap into the traces and the grasshopper threat of not having enough laid by, and in keeping with the ostensible self-disclosure we admire in our delusion, the gambler mourns wasted opportunity. Does the father in the parable welcome the wastrel home because everyone deserves a second chance, or did his own youthful impatience reveal itself as it decayed into world-weariness? How many more eggs can we put into the basket of gender?

What image the prodigal doesn’t live up to, and where it resides, what initiation into the desirable path they receive, and who really desires it, are fraught questions. The imagery, not the morality, of cultural tropes would bear closer examination. The expectations of tiger mums may be deplorable, but would not self-awareness be more effective in discouraging her than stigma? The meditations of astrology on the subject of the vertex may serve better than a lifetime of therapy in the hands of professional imagery.

The image we harbour of the desirable other and the demeanour we develop, unconsciously and reactively, as a projection of our response, is as hidden as the ecliptic from which astrology derives its quantities. Even as avid a stargazer as I could not assert an observational basis for any significance in the altitude of the zodiac due west or east, and naturally I regard magnetic or electrical resonances with extreme suspicion. Previously explored here, the rapidity with which the Vertex can change Signs and houses in and near the Tropics, a huge chunk of Australia, may disqualify it as an element of personality formation. Nonetheless, as offering a spectrum across which to observe in ourselves the mysterious hormonal interaction of coincidentally waxing and waning images of the ideal, the Vertex is a fruitful concept.

As Alan Watts said, “It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.” The Vertex is quintessential astrology. It is as the music of our soul that it discloses itself, just as the chemistry of photosynthesis discloses itself as wood and height. As the intersection of the western Zodiac and the Prime Meridian it makes no sense, but as the focus of all the important people who come into our lives, and leave them, it discloses the hormonal shades of our interest in others, what it is in them which arrests and seduces our instinctive will to be.

The pleasure of observing sunrise and sunset is part of it, and the degree of comfort I feel in the presence of another. The primordial resonances of east and west are part of it, and the feedback loops of projection. I experience the character of my love-image, and the success or otherwise of its projection, in cyclical patterns. They morph into different forms as the Vertex inhabits different constellations, in other words at different altitudes above and below the horizon, and at different times of life, of the year and day. The higher the zodiac, the more intense and constellated is the effect of the Vertex in the west or the anti-Vertex in the east; the lower it is the more primal and potentially transgressive. But these are my moves. Now you have a dance!

Vertex Houses Capital Cities 2017

You be the judge. Do you find yourself varying the dosage of your self-medication at these times?

Vertex City Times 25Oct2018

Incidentally, it seems patently obvious to me that conjunctions of stars and planets with the Vertex should be measured horizontally, not along the Zodiac. Here is a particularly seductive alignment in Charleville’s narcissistic Prodigal underworld. Note the configuration of the Milky Way, giving the lie to the synchronous Covenant invisible on the Australian side.

Prodigal Kyrie Charleville Underworld Sep25

Here’s another one, possibly the hormonal undercurrents of a bleary elevator ride following another $50,000 of inheritance blown on the roulette wheel.

Prodigal Dohar Underworld Sep25

This graphic way of representing or imagining the underworld, as the hidden correlates of the conscious or visible, not only unites the hemispheres, but persistently alerts us to the existence of the Other in ourselves, a partner in the dance. No culture is alien to any other. No way of looking at things is entirely wrong. No perspective is unique, or entirely conscious. There are no opposites in gender. Projection is the very definition of imagery.

Prodigal Moon Bogota Sep24

What if the altitude of the Zodiac around the time of your birth, in the evening or early morning according to outhouse visitation preferences, had a big influence on what your parents decided, perhaps in a narcissistic epiphany at the pan, to impose on your meaning in their lives? Must such self-unawareness surely ordain your eventual repudiation? Is “What went wrong with you?” our universal doom? A global government must surely take this seriously, and coordinate biometric data on transnational emotional and imaginative responses to the Vertex, in order to remove parental bias from the resonance of upbringing in our careers and relationships!

Prodigal Jakarta Underworld Sep25

Let it be emphasized that the natural resonance of the Vertex is unifying, that across the threshold of consciousness, across the seasonal polarity of the hemispheres, its Signs are the same, and cardinal directions are interchangeable.

However, unity is a dangerous thing to wish for. Not only could astrology-savvy AI enable police reinforcements to be mobilized in anticipation of conjunctions of a full moon with disruptive angles (cue Charleville), but its design might impose extreme intolerance, of resistance to careers in medicine and the law for example. Our cultures are divided in their attitudes to gender fluidity: artificial reunification might as easily be designed to eradicate it, and prohibit homosexuality as a sacrilege and mental disorder, as be designed to destigmatize its hormonal fluctuations. One could ask, what went wrong with the hormones of Indonesian Islamists? ‘Eternity’, the Vertex in the Ninth House (Aspiration), in the Tropics? Or ‘Permanence’ in the Fourth (Reputation), eternity’s fetish?

Prodigal Regulus Jakarta Sep25

The words of the Prophet belong in the world which discloses itself to childhood. They are the lawns of suburban parks and backyards, evolved to minimize injuries and indelible stains through generations of debate about the Good. They exist in Reason, as binary gender does, but they are made of grass, which is the disclosure of Instinct. You could say that lawns help grass to make something of itself, but they are really weeds dancing with the machine.

Zealot Moon in Sagittarius

28 Thursday Jun 2018

Posted by in Moon Phases

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

And wash thy white thigh, beautiful God,
In the moon, of the woods, on the marble mount… Crowley, Hymn to Pan

“To give each emotion a personality, and a soul to every mood! The girls came around the bend in a large group. They sang as they walked, and the sound of their voices was happy. I don’t know who or what they might be. I listened to them for a time from afar, without a feeling of my own, but a feeling of sorrow for them impressed itself on my heart. For their future? For their unconsciousness? Not directly for them, and perhaps, after all, only for me.” Pessoa, The Book Of Disquiet.

Chorus: We are the voices trying to make sense. Interesting expression, isn’t it? No, the Zealot is not your enemy, but still a dangerous fool. While Sol completes her ritual cleansing in the history fade of the Lethe, Chaos rules, except in the heart of the Zealot, who crosses the Acheron in such emotional pain as to defy description. If we have welcomed you to our people with the rape and murder of your daughter, or your son it was who defiled our world in that act, you know the Zealot’s pain. It is shame: there will never be an end to the suffering of innocents while he continues to cause it, and he can do no other. He is driven by animosity to the identity we have moulded for him: his mind is unhinged from ours; his heart is in his brain, not our mind. The underworld is a dangerous place: the brain makes our body, and it is visible.

Zealot Machu Picchu South Jun27

Forget the tour leader and the bus driver, ignore the American tourists. How beautiful is this? Would you rather listen to the tour guide’s explanation of the way the Milky Way turns, be left alone to discover this intriguing synchronicity for yourself, or just go back to the hotel and get warm? For ages I was a man, then in a small pocket of the human imagination a woman. Recently, above an infinitesimally small outcrop of sedimentary rock in Terra Nullius, I have been restored to masculinity, but an emasculated masculinity, reflecting with counterfeit beauty the life-force of the feminine, trying forlornly to outshine her. And yet, looking at me high over your head, can you have lost all amazement that I do not fall on you? I am an ancient symbol of polarity and duality but I will overcome inequality. I will transcend gender. Men, together, we can restore our beauty.

Chorus: The Zealot is a voice inside you, another voice claiming with overwhelming justification to be yours, but calling you to be Other, with no other power than yours to be, Other, here. It is not a will to meaning per se, but a persistence of meaning through the consciously bewildering bombardment of the ego by meaningless objective relativity: the possibility of instinctive truth, but a truth resisted by complacent social identity unto death. The Zealot campaigns for the body against the sovereignty of the social. The Zealot is in the body of the world, your sky. It is none other than the will to live, the autonomy of the organism. Awareness of the Zealot has its equivalent in our consciousness of geography: it’s called the Antipodes, and its sky, reflecting ours, illustrating the duality of Signs, provides an opportunity for us to evade the trap of fixed identity, whether imposed by ourselves or others.

Zealot Wanderer Lomphat Jun28

If not in your gaze I am a rock with 0.120 albedo. You are required to notice that I am getting older, my teeth falling out, my waist thickened, my breasts and buttocks drooping, and to find that beautiful. It took the greatest minds of the modern age to understand my mechanics, but it only takes you to make me beautiful. I am a sports car hurtling through a deserted alley, and I am not to blame for nearly hitting you when you appear out of nowhere.

Chorus: It is the age we have arrived in, that Solstice Full Moons bring widespread confusion of the mind. We are apt to believe that opposites are reconciled within systems, transgression is a schism like the parting of the Red Sea, and dismantling narratives leaves us with something to be. We are not astounded by the approach of Venus to Regulus after another eight years, because that is just the way things are, in the Solar System. Woe to the Goddess of Love and Beauty, voided by mathematics! What has happened to our hearts since 2010, and will they be filled with the joy of intimacy by 2026? No, the condition of the heart does not depend on a system, of compatibilities or irreconcilable differences, but on whether or not the discovery of Beauty and constant reverence for it have transformed chemistry into astonishment and gratitude.

Zealot Palm Springs South Jun27

If you have ever talked to somebody so close it was really yourself you were conversing with, and if ever one night you have found nobody there, or she was asleep, then you may have been praying, or heard, in a social vacuum, your ancestors, giving voice to the body of the world. It’s a way the universal brain has of reassuring our mind that madness is normal, like the Chorus in Greek tragedy. You call it God.

Zealot Palm Springs Antipodes Jun27

Chorus: The universe is conscious, except not a mind but a body like ours, controlled by a brain we call the laws of physics. Only beauty can create universal mind, in its beholding. We are not here to be elsewhere. And yet elsewhere is here; unconsciously regulated by the brain. That bodily function is peculiar to you, not your identity, but merely a constant refining and adapting of your organism to your affect on the world and its affect on you, a correction of mistakes and a rearguard action on behalf of yesterday against who would swap healing for beauty. The more you trash beauty, the more habitual become both the impossibility of intimacy and the reinforcement of your doubt in yourself.

Zealot Warrior Rome Jun28

A woman once thanked me for giving her back her body. I now know that she was inadvertently giving me mine. In every moment that men shine, half of their wives are shining elsewhere, but incessantly active in a warrior’s sleeping body. Tomorrow in Rome, the warrior awakens at first light. Let him remember the ineffable beauty of his white thigh as it disappears down the rabbit-hole of hers. It is the country we came from.

Sporting bikini girls

Bikini Mosaic, Villa Romana del Casale, Photo by Bernard Muir

Chorus: We make only metaphorical claim that the arms of the Milky Way are rivers of Hades, and ever were so regarded, and that the orientation of the galaxy influences human behaviour, and that the crossing of the galactic plane by the Sun, Moon and planets, invisible in daylight, bright moonlight and light pollution, has an effect on us as social beings. Coincidences of position and configuration do have the potential to enthral. The current production is intended to entertain—is meaning anything else?—and why shouldn’t we entertain ourselves with synchronicities of human behaviour and perspective that can enthral? Self is country, which is embodied emptiness. We leave the stage now as the Covenant of the upright Cross begins its annual extinction in daylight.

Zealot Last Dark Kyrie Breamlea Jun28

You have twelve nights to give body to the embrace of the goddess of beauty and the venomous Little King, but half a year to make tangible what terrain may lie between the Lethe and the Acheron. Better get to it!

Are we down a rabbit hole? Are there emotional vampires here? Am I one? Are you strong enough to be my woman, werewolf?

“If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you…
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!” Rudyard Kipling, “If—“.

“Who cares for you?” said Alice (she had grown to her full size by this time). “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” Lewis Carroll, Alice In Wonderland.

Declination and Directionality

13 Thursday Jul 2017

Posted by in Breamlea Zodiac, Milky Way

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

“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

Diplomacy: New Moon in Pisces

06 Wednesday Apr 2016

Posted by in Moon Phases

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

If the signs are turned upside-down to match southern hemisphere seasons, this Moon seeks renewal at a time when the energy of the season is focussed on refinement and compromise, as we prepare for the confines of winter.Pisces New Apr07

This year, we are also engaging each other in the daunting process of evaluating political representation and selecting the platform and personalities which can best govern for all. Ideally, we take our blinkers off, but at the very least, we should be aware of the necessity of refining our values to promote accord.

Easier said than done! In whom do we find an example? Eva Illouz offers the tantalizing thesis that at the very core of community in secular, iconoclastic societies is the practice of love:

“Modernity sobered people up from the powerful but sweet delusions and illusions that had made the misery of their lives bearable. Devoid of these fantasies, we would lead our lives without commitment to higher principles and values, without the fervor and ecstasy of the sacred, without the heroism of saints, without the certainty and orderliness of divine commandments, but most of all without those fictions that console and beautify.
Such sobering up is nowhere more apparent than in the realm of love, which for several centuries in the history of Western Europe had been governed by the ideals of chivalry, gallantry, and romanticism. The male ideal of chivalry had one cardinal stipulation: to defend the weak with courage and loyalty. The weakness of women was thus contained in a cultural system in which it was acknowledged and glorified because it transfigured male power and female frailty into lovable qualities….

“Women’s social inferiority could thus be traded for men’s absolute devotion in love, which in turn served as the very site of display and exercise of their masculinity, prowess, and honor. More: women’s dispossession of economic and political rights was accompanied (and presumably compensated) by the reassurance that in love they were not only protected by men but also superior to them. It is therefore unsurprising that love has been historically so powerfully seductive to women; it promised them the moral status and dignity they were otherwise denied in society and it glorified their social fate: taking care of and loving others, as mothers, wives, and lovers. Thus, historically, love was highly seductive precisely because it concealed as it beautified the deep inequalities at the heart of gender relationships.

“[…]To perform gender identity and gender struggles is to perform the institutional and cultural core dilemmas and ambivalence of modernity, dilemmas that are organized around the key cultural and institutional motives of authenticity, autonomy, equality, freedom, commitment, and self-realization. To study love is not peripheral but central to the study of the core and foundation of modernity.”

Eva Illouz, Why Love Hurts.

How well are we doing? Are we comfortable in grey? Have we established a discourse which enables mutual respect between progressive and conservative, gender neutrality and heterosexuality, safe space and free speech, anima and animus? Are we participating in the evolution of an inclusive polity, or are we still pitted against each other across religious, ethnic and gender barricades? How do we deal with the perception that patriarchy is being replaced by gynocentrism? Can we even agree on the gender of God, the Moon, the Sun? Have we chosen a gender? Is it unambiguous? How do we present it?

Perhaps we can find a guide to diplomacy and compromise in the course of the Moon this month, and by the time he gets to Mothers Day we might have resolved some of our dilemmas, and will all be celebrating the same thing.

Southern Hemisphere Astrology addresses you to a phenomenon which is inadequately addressed by physical laws, and is a metaphor for our quest for authenticity in community: momentum.

An elliptical orbit is usually described in terms of mass and velocity, elements deduced from observation which enable astronomy to define a system. If you can look up and see a system, that is a useful tool to apply to morality, and the analysts of the capitalist system will have no problem in dealing with you. However, if when you look up you have a sense of indefinable connection to what you see, a subjective sense of being here, then a question arises which might provide a slightly different tool for aligning yourself with the values of others.

Can you understand the momentum of the Moon as a constantly increasing will to push on, an attraction to what’s next? Or alternatively, does the Moon seem to be propelled by the desire to leave behind disappointment, error and strife?

We went to the astrological textbooks and were unable to find an answer. However, the ancient practice of associating lunar motion with certain prominent stars, and the division of a sidereal month into twenty-seven daily houses, each containing one of those stars, gave us a fruitful line of inquiry.

Indian mythology identifies the Moon as a man with twenty-seven wives. Several wives we have identified were willing to talk, and we asked them about their relationship with the Moon. On the matter of his momentum you may draw your own conclusions.Sensualist WivesHamal

“I am nobody’s wife. The worst thing I ever did was take him in, out of pity. Everything he does looks like self-pity to me. There are jobs to be done. Any man would do them. He does them, but then he expects intimacy. I told him, I don’t need your love. If you don’t like the way things are, you can pack up and leave. I got along just fine before you came. And he does go, but he always comes back.”

Menkar

“He lied to me. He seemed so interesting, and interested in me. But his mind was always really elsewhere, unfaithful. His love was a pretence, and our relationship a front. I told him, you’ve got other wives, I know, but you’re not a fit husband. You haven’t got it in you to make something of yourself. I’m ashamed.”

Alcyone

“What can I say? He is not a good lover. Very attractive: something mysterious about him, and an endearing sadness. But sometimes when he comes I have someone else with me, someone virile, and he just gives in. It is humiliating. He lounges around the house in tights. He has a good body, exercises a lot, wearing my underwear, as it happens.”

Aldebaran

“It was good for the ego in the beginning. I know I’m not a beautiful woman, and I grew up feeling bad about my weight. I used to agonize about the welts between my eyebrows and on my upper lip. He doted on me, really adored my body and gave me lots of lovely massages. Then I came to realize it was always me doing the spooning. He was an attentive father, but probably a poor example. I did learn from him the affect I have on people, and that helps me to be good at what I do. I bear no ill will, but I do look forward to my own company.”

Alnath

“He wrecks everything. Everything I work so hard to achieve he undermines. I invite colleagues to dinner and cook a gourmet meal, and he sequesters my boss to lecture her on the futility of ambition and the emptiness of success. I tell him how someone has criticised me, and he expects me to be inspired by his alternative presentation of their point of view. He makes it too hard to hold everything together. And I never win an argument. His affected superior insight infuriates everyone.”

Alhena

“He doesn’t listen! The changes I’ve gone through in my life, I think I know a thing or two. I could say, to hell with it, like he does, but where would the world be if everyone did that? Women are still disadvantaged, and all over the world poverty disempowers and deactivates. I try to instil in our daughter an awareness of the gender stereotypes imbedded in our language, and he tries to get her to listen to nature for chrissake! He just doesn’t engage.”

Pollux

“I accepted my arranged marriage. I love my parents. They complement each other, and their relationship has withstood the challenge of modernity and secularism in their adopted country, because they are indivisible halves of one whole. The romance has never died, because of the thoughtfulness of each toward the other. I thought it could be like that for us too, but he doesn’t notice the little things I do, the support I give when he’s really unsupportable, the space I give him when really he should be contributing more. I think I always get him on the rebound, but I really wonder how he gets on with his other wives. He’s so selfish.”

Praesepe

“Yes, I know that it is against the law in this country to have more than one wife, but I wish you would show some compassion. You must have some understanding of the pain you cause when you impose different conventions. You live in your heads, you people. You go to university and then you impose theories of what is good. You don’t accept suffering and you think to relieve it by changing the system. There is no system you are beyond inventing, and yet you have never eradicated suffering, just transferred it. I welcome his visits, and see no reason our heart-to-hearts should ever cease.”

Alphard

“Why all the fuss? His life is complicated by so many wives, but you won’t simplify it by forbidding him to go to them. They haunt him. He comes to me, I cook for him, I bathe him, dress him in the soft fabrics he adores, play for him on the piano my own compositions, then I take him to bed and make love to him. In the morning he puts on another man-costume and his courage, and we don’t see each other for a month. Why can’t they all love the beautiful soul as I do, as a married man?”

Regulus

“Of course we’re all victims of the impossibility of living happily ever after, and so is he. Just listen to all the whingers! Life is no fairy tale, babies. And it doesn’t revolve around women, regardless of how you pigeon-hole yourselves and each other. He does take your complaints too much to heart in my opinion, but he’s my best medicine. I’m as mad as a cut snake by the time he comes. He calms me. Once a month is perfect for us both. More he’d definitely find too hectic, hahaha.”

Spica

“I know precisely where I stand with him. He imagines me, as you imagine him; in fact his entire existence is confined to the imagination, but what of that? Is that not all there is? Whatever his intention, whatever his regret, I know to expect him twenty-seven days and eight hours hence when he is here. I know that he transforms me from the witch of the previous day, and in the arms of a man of courage the next day, into the infinite potential of the human spirit. I know that again on Christmas Day in eight years at breakfast, we will be King and Queen conjoined. What more needs be said?”

Sabik

“My godfather understands me. His wisdom is all-seeing. His kindness envelops the world. But he also frightens me. I love him with my heart and soul but I know he wants more. I cower behind the locked door of my cloister when he comes, and his heartbeat thunders in my ears. His presence hides something, something always at the back of my mind, something destructive, which terrifies me.”

Diphda

“Hello? What are you angling at exactly? Moon’s identity is not the question, and gender needs not be either! The driving force of existence is Antagonism, of course! I lay an egg in the analytics of relationship! What differences do our hormones manufacture which we need charm and diplomacy to dilute? Who cares? We are creatures. We can be too clever by half. Momentum is a middle way between push and pull, simply ‘keeping yourself nice.’ Not ‘do ut des‘ but do unto others what you would have them do to you, because what you do to others you do to yourself. (I have heard that, somewhere.) My personal view is that our Moon is rather a stupid individual, if you want the truth.”

Diplomacy breeds dishonesty and, ironically, subservience, isolation and self-absorption. It protects the structures of inauthenticity with charm. The Moon’s wives present an evasion of the connection they clamour for, compassion. Prisoners of modernity and its social structures, discourses, safe spaces and escape mechanisms, they cannot hold and offer their life in their hand, and what they cannot give, they cannot receive.

“It is only when Shiva is united with Shakti that He acquires the capability of becoming the Lord of the Universe. In the absence of Shakti, He is not even able to stir. In fact, the term “Shiva” originated from “Shva,” which implies a dead body. It is only through his inherent shakti that Shiva realizes his true nature.”

“…[L]et us ask “the world’s oldest and most important question”: how the hell did we end up here? Imagine being that liberal, energised by the moral certainty of your secularism, sustained by belief in the supremacy of your values and righteous indignation. Mightn’t you ask yourself: how the hell did I end up here, advocating bigotry and prejudice?” Nesrine Malik.