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Southern Hemisphere Astrology

Tag Archives: Justfriendistan

December Moon in Taurus: the Vagabond

12 Thursday Dec 2019

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Acheron, Ceremony, Country, Forgetting, Justfriendistan, Lethe, Memory, Miserere, Rejection, Taurus, Vagabond, Wanderer, Warrior

“The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.” Umberto Eco.

“The bull of the herd had stepped into the white foaming brook, and went forward slowly, now striving against, now giving way to his tempestuous course; thus, no doubt, he took his sort of fierce pleasure. Two dark brown beings, of Bergamasque origin, tended the herd, the girl dressed almost like a boy.” Nietzsche, Human All Too Human, Second Sequel, The Wanderer And His Shadow, Aphorism §295, ed. Darryl Marks, trans. H. Zimmern, P. Cohn, Everlasting Flames, 2010.

The naming of Moons of course connects them to what we’re doing down here. Inverting European and North American names or leaving names behind completely in the Northern Hemisphere might do for some, and continuing such traditions as Yule and Easter in their opposite seasons doesn’t seem to have disturbed capitalism or hurt anybody, but the entertaining possibility exists that seasons and customs merely refine what we’re doing and feeling, and we’re actually all doing more or less the same thing. It might at least be said that we are all subject to universal influences on our mental health, which fall into cyclical patterns we all engage with in similar ways, if at different times. Two distinctive things we all have in common with the Vagabond are the balancing of the desire to forget and the inability to remember, and the experience of being utterly alone.

The best moments of your life are the hardest to remember, because your language did not impose you on them, but rather from the bottom up, your spirit was dissolving into a belonging in something beyond, something almost magical, a connectedness which drew its miraculous energy from you, which could only last an instant and might never emerge again from the objective definition of your existence, but which in a flash of awareness revealed the reality of being alive instead of dead. Ceremony is of course your best method of putting your memory back in that transcendent self you own abstractly as yours. But what of the wooden hands of the cellist, the traffic vibrations and the halitosis of the singer behind you, and your own, for that matter? Is solitary meditation the only way to engage in a ceremony of connection? Must we wash our hands of others lest we forget who we are? Would such uncleanliness truly be the opposite of authenticity? Is there an important lesson in equanimity to be gained from the Vagabond’s stoical existence?

Vagabond Moon Detroit Dec12

The danger we sense is real: the most vividly lived moments of our past are most challenging to relive, because they include the best, which we can seldom recall in all their complexity, and the worst, which can traumatically reconstruct themselves viscerally in the most unwelcome way. We even judge the good in the context of the meaning of the bad, and we think to free our good selves from shame by working on our shadow, but the judgment our insight passes on the self-as-other is so vivid in its remorseless negativity that compulsively as we might train ourselves to disbelieve, we are built to forget, and it is easier to disbelieve what is forgotten. The shadow of the Vagabond in sidereal Taurus falls across the June Solstice and the river of Hades he approaches in the Bardo, the River of Forgetting.

Vagabond Moon Rio de Janeiro Dec12

If you have the good fortune to withdraw from the everyday, just for one night at the right time of the year, and in your nearest dark sky, you can realize the connection of above and below, as it was known by the prehistoric people who lived under the Milky Way, as it was once known under rural skies by the swagman, and as it has now been forgotten in urban lanes by everyone: when the Milky Way arcs overhead from horizon to horizon in either of the two configurations which are so formed, its bearings link all Warriors or Wanderers camped on their river, Acheron or Lethe. My Acheron crosses Eastern Australia to Caloundra on the Sunshine Coast, but my Lethe arcs over Central Australia to the Kimberley and beyond through Timor Leste and Western China to Siberian Omsk. I am proud when I am on the Lethe to project over the horizon the kin of my spiritual sisters of Wurdi Youang. Detroit’s Lethe arcs over the Caribbean to Brazil, and a shout-out wells up in my heart to all countrywomen, and tonight, fellow Vagabonds!

Vagabond Moon Atacama Dec12

Not everyone is summoned by a divine voice to sacrifice his son, as was the Patriarch of all of the religions of The Book, and of socialism and humanism, in all their woeful, forgetting folly. If the nearest you can now approach to such grief, mysterious atavistic Vagabond of our cosmic loneliness, as you stare over the Atacama Desert, is not quite being able to erase the memory of rejection, the clinical name healers give the extinction of a divine voice and the reduction to dust of every monolithic monument to human immortality since the dawn of civilization, you are as blessed as you seem to believe yourself, blessed to have heard the voice, blessed to have been spared its demand. Charismatic though our inner voices may be, the gods are bent on the narcissistic autonomy they enjoy in our submission to their resentful, perfectionist control.

Vagabond Moon Luxor Underworld Dec12

The Vagabond is the avatar of all who throughout history and before it have gratefully accepted country as more real than landscape and real estate: the ancestral, the migratory, the rejected, the enslaved, the dispossessed of everything but kinship and the meaning of ceremony and song. He and they enact the memory we share eternally of what remains of creation to be forgotten. What more could there ever possibly be, than broken, throbbing hearts crying, “Please don’t climb my rock,” and protected by them in a world of liars, charlatans, scammers, hostage-takers, people-smugglers, bullies, creeps and bogeymen, the laughter and tears of children?

Relativity: New Moon in Sidereal Capricorn

05 Tuesday Feb 2019

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Tags

Humour, Justfriendistan, Migration, Moiety, PC, Pride, Relativity, Shame, You Get That On These Big Jobs

The profession to which I have not professed, eminently qualified though I may be, has rigorous rules which I deplore, and so not one conventional astrology examiner has confirmed to me my eligibility. Jewish humour appeals to me as much as to you, but a God who suddenly realizes that the meaning of life is an answer, and in order to understand whatever the question might be, in case He is ever asked, decides to become human—who else?—is less humorous than perversely unoriginal. Those unfortunates like myself who idealize a beloved as the question are the dupes of das Kapital, for the narcissists who lie in wait for us are truly Gnostic shards of the answer to no known question. Of course, nobody these days has ever heard of Professor Joad, one of the BBC’s Brains Trust who famously opined, “It all depends …”, but it might be time for his relativism to make a reappearance. Anything, surely, would be better than dispassionate astrology, God disguised by a pen? How could I be envious of eternal gratitude accorded to gurus who alienate us from our own sky? But it does all depend, you’re right, on you, it seems.

A lion cannot be patted like a pussy cat. Toxic masculinity may be the problem du jour, as we continue to undermine pride as the basis for community in favour of shame, but it may be the case that toxic masculinity would disappear if we revived the distinction between wild and domesticated human animals, and reestablished pride on the same footing as shame, so that it might not be shameful to feel no shame, but rather a matter of pride. In my experience, the shame offered by the shadow of pride cannot match the presence of the shadow of shame! Lucky me? Yes, Pride and Shame are a Team, like daylight and darkness, or emptiness and substance. It might appear that the Conferences are they which pit themselves against each other at Superbowl, but in truth, it is they whose independence continues to make the anguish of America great.

As you travel the journey you are exhorted to make your life, Grasshopper, you will occasionally meet someone who wants you to cut off your hair. It is in this sense that moieties, such as male and female, can represent enemy territory. Your strength is foreign, at every stage of your journey, until the moment of your seduction to stay, that moment when in shame you might stop making calendars or listening to Mahler. North of the Lethe they invented a projection called Justfriendistan, where they don’t watch clocks or slit their wrists, I’m told. Be that as it may, migration is the beginning of everything: time, foreignness, marriage, gender, hair. It is only by walking away down each of the paths which converge at intersectionality that you discover what the theoreticians think you think they mean: emptiness is intersectional; we are mis-made of pluralities of victimhood. In fact, back at the intersection, only Miss Polly’s Dolly needs to heal, because the rest of us weren’t born anything, let alone perfect. Are you coming quick, Ms Muslim or Christian Post-Colonial [PC] Indonesian or Anzac Immigrant, or quite fainting away in your doctoral Miss Polly projection? I hope you will realize before your children do, that we are politely turning our gaze inward on how ridiculous you look. Look up ‘evolved’ in the Urban Dictionary: it does not refer to the ecology of a tidal rock-pool, much and all as many of us would like to crawl back under a rock.

Shadows are smallest at noon, have you noticed, or never connected ego, reputation and shadow? And after lunch they lengthen towards the east, but is that naturally on your left or right? In other words, do you measure direction from the north or south? People are either clockwise or anticlockwise in their experience of time. Which are you? Is 9 in the sky left of 3 or right? Do people who count lefts and rights on a map belong to the same species as people who negotiate right angles by correcting north and west to go northwest by the afternoon Sun in the Southern Hemisphere or its morning shadows in the Northern Hemisphere? Do you even know what I’m on about? Has it never happened to you that GPS coverage left you high and dry? Talk about pre-migratory! Would you know that it was the cliff the lemmings were running towards? Who on Earth are you, love? Oh well, when all else fails, we can always ask directions from the same kind Brotherhood volunteer on a student visa who saw our inner child safely home at 3am last Sabbath, can’t we?

When those around you who deride your sticks marking sunset and sunrise and the blind clap halfway between ask you how to explain law and ceremony to their abusive elders and suicidal children; when you cannot find a companion for a southward migration from Bamaga to Fitzroy because nobody has a father who has danced the journey, nine hops that way, four that, four fingers, three, two, one, a squat, one finger the other way, two, three, four, five; when all around you are unable to recognise a single star out of the corner of the eye of the collapse of their cultural memory into deprivation, squalor and shame and simply recognize an accumulation of vomit as the end of the wet; when your initiation is in your neurones, not written in a wandering academic’s sky map; when you know what how and when to go depend on, and why your ancestors are telling you to go now: you will be a roadbuilder, or a cave-rescuer, and we’ll be proud of you, my son!

Identity is the cusp of Pride and Shame. The question which torments relativism is not, ‘what are things in themselves?’ but, ‘where is “Out Of Story”?’ The 3am ‘Aha!’ is the refolding of a disease around a misspelled antigen: “Did I simply lack the guts to be one thing or the other?” Women have lived in a foreign country so long that they have trouble realizing the real men have left. Perhaps the last Imams to leave are right: women in their country have half a brain. Anyone who cannot see the trees for the forest may leave the room. You’re right, relatively speaking: you don’t belong here, though your broken journey bless us, where the intersection blurs in evaporating tears.

Alnair Gate

15 Thursday Sep 2016

Posted by abliq in Astral Gates, Stargazing

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Alnair, Alnair Gate, Aquarius, Atacama Desert, Duality, Grus, Justfriendistan, Leo, Monk Moon, Regulus, Southern Hemisphere Astrology

Grab a bottle of wine and come over for lunch. Let’s talk about equality and #ssm!monk-at-alnair-gate-atacama-sep15

What is the purpose of closing a gate? Does the farmer know you are here? What farmer? Aren’t we in Justfriendistan, or the Ninth Circle of Hell?

It is sacred; go ahead, clasp it; and open the wine.

Connection: New Moon in Cancer

01 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Cancer, Connection, Justfriendistan, New Moon, Saiph, Southern Hemisphere Astrology, Spica

Cancer New Clock Aug03There is a boy once–Muna is his name–who is a constant worry to his mother. “Watch out for snakes,” she calls after him as he heads into the bush again.Cancer New Aug03He likes to escape the gossip of the village, even though there is much he could be helping with, and spend the whole day wandering, wondering about change and goodness, and daydreaming about girls. One day he does come upon a snake, a big one right across his intended path.

“What are you afraid of?” The old midwife who lives on the hill has changed herself into a crow and is watching him. “My mother says if a snake bites you, it is the end of you,” replies the trembling boy. “Ah, death,” says the crow, flapping over the snake and seeing it off into the grass. “I don’t worry about death,” she croaks. “Death is the entrance to eternity. Don’t you know that?” “What is eternity?” “Eternity is a beautiful place where it is always now, and you don’t have to worry about getting home and getting into trouble with your father for being lazy and having your head in the clouds and coming up here every day to play ‘Mothers and Fathers’ with Old Spica. In eternity, you are the headman with your choice of all the pretty girls, and you don’t have to lift a finger.” She knows she is giving in to an unkind impulse, but really, another needy man is just what the world doesn’t need. “Go to the river yonder, and ask Antares to row you to eternity, just for a look.”Remembering Death

So Muna goes further than he ever has before, and comes to a vast river. On the bank he finds a man in a loincloth, his arms outstretched, spinning slowly around and around. “Excuse me,” says the boy. “Can you tell me where Antares is? And what are you doing?” “I am Dervish,” says the man, “and I am working myself into the trance of eternity. What do you want with Antares?” “I must ask him to row me to eternity,” the boy says. “Do as I do,” says Dervish, “and prepare yourself. Then I will show you where Antares is.” The boy makes himself completely dizzy, and barely manages not to throw up as he staggers to the boat Dervish is pointing to.

The blind Antares cries out, “The Way to Eternity is through me!” Muna almost capsizes the boat as he clambers over the gunwale, observed scornfully by the two oarsmen. By the time he has regained his senses, the boat has reached the far bank, and believing himself in eternity, Muna disembarks. To his horror, the boat immediately heads back across the river, Antares in the bow calling, “The Way to Eternity is through me!” “No returns,” scoffs one of the oarsmen.

Muna finds himself in a strange and frightening place, quite unlike the village and so far from his mother and Spica that he fears never to be held by a woman again. The only girl to be seen has herself done up with ringlets in her wispy blond hair and a pale floral dress tied with a pink bow. How can this pale-skinned trifle be what the crow promised? In tears, he describes to her what has befallen him. She bursts into a flood of tears herself. “This is Justfriendistan,” she wails, “where jilted lovers go. You must escape as fast as you can!” She points to a distant range in the opposite direction to his home. “The way you must go will take you past the chateau where I was to be married, and I implore you, do not listen to the voices of passionate love you will hear there, lest you too become bewitched by limerence!”

Drone Transits MelbourneWith no idea what she is talking about, the lad takes off at a sprint. Seven days and seven nights he runs, until exhausted he trips on the roots of a giant tree on a razorback ridge and falls immediately into a deep sleep. While he sleeps, a swirling fog creeps down the spur from an invisible peak, and voices begin whispering to him. “There is no such thing as eternity.” “Life is a miserable delusion.” “Only a woman can save you.” “Your love can save the world.” “Find the One.” When he awakens, the fog has lifted, and far below he can see the glint of another river. He has never felt more disheartened, nor less deserving to be a headman or to rule over women.

In three more days he reaches the river, and finds himself in the presence of a brooding bull of enormous power. “Are you ready to mate with one of my heifers, and be unassailable in relevance and pride?” he bellows. Off to his right, Muna sees a knot of chewing cows winking in his direction, and distinctly hears the words, “Am I the One?” Without hesitation, he dodges the bull and races to the water, but just as he reaches it, he glances to his left, where he catches sight of a swarthy herdswoman who, with a giggle in his direction, has hoiked up her skirt and is squatting to pee in the river. This, finally, is the One!

With curiously little effort he swims to the opposite bank. “I am hungry for the future, aren’t you?” says someone else’s wife. Muna has become a man. He has no idea how he came to be three days walk from his village, nor does he know Capella, or to whom she might belong, but she does remind him of someone, and in this moment, eternity, he is hers.

He never becomes headman, and becomes derisively known as Mooner, and eventually just Moon. He is forever wandering, away for weeks at a time looking for someone. Perhaps for this reason he has remained a secret connection in the heart and body of every woman, and I daresay, in the heart of many Fa’afafine, and men who adore women, especially women like Saiph.

Drone Moon 1st Crescent Aug04

Dhul Qa'ida

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