Tag Archives: Leo

Zealot Moon in Sidereal Aquarius

22 Sunday Aug 2021

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This month celebrates the triumph of what is most ignoble in the human spirit, the desire and capacity to shove an opinion down somebody’s throat. Special recognition is given to the puppeteers whose armies of billions of zealots are so ready to hand.

One glance at social media in these physically disconnected times suggests that there are zealots everywhere, more than you can defeat in battle or even point a stick at. What they all seem to have in common, these stalwarts of the perennial conflict with imperfection, is the knowledge that something true is threatened with extinction.

The allure of totalitarianism is not particularly the opportunity to perfect others, but the absolute imperative to perpetuate the conditions for an identity, as a white supremacist, a queer person, a person of colour, a nationalist humiliated by history, the list goes on, or simply anyone otherwise perfect on the verge of being ignored. “Freedom!” the anti-lockdown protesters spit. I suspect they mean freedom from you.

In the beginning was time. First they diseased the future, and then they erased the past. Live in the now, they said. To fuse future and past into a present is the finitive compulsion of the zealot, but what happens to a past with no future is a black hole which haunts him. Time itself is something true threatened with extinction, like a chook running around without its head. The roots of the Tree of Life are dangling in mid-air.

Trees grow from the top, where the chloroplasts are. Is the Galactic Centre the crown of our tree or its roots wrapped around a spiritual black hole, winter in the North, summer in the South? Centres are full of zealots, and so passe.

Poet, Saint and Fool are far behind, propped in the lowest sephirot of the Tree of Man, somewhere back there among the ragged hills of youth and romance, not visible from the artificial park whose laps we avatars continue to call a journey, though it have no beginning and no end. Zealots, the shriek of the cockatoos means only, you’re facing the wrong direction. There has ever been a ready antidote to ideology.

Healer Moon in Sidereal Leo

19 Tuesday Feb 2019

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Does the incomprehensible time-frame in which the light of the most distant visible stars and galaxies has travelled to reach us–2.5 million years in the case of the Andromeda Galaxy, the most distant naked-eye object–suggest to you a pitiful transience of self’s here-and-now or being’s eternal backdrop? It really is a fundamental question, and every culture I can think of has afforded both positions, but their coexistence has never been less harmonious.

”Know thyself,” and “Nothing to excess,” said the Greeks, and those maxims linger, but increasingly it seems, you have to imagine yourself in the Tardis to witness them. The presence of the Divine is beyond our sequestration of permanence in narcissism and comfort, and the Self as process abandons truth to the loudest voice, the highest-rating morning television, because the absolutely basic definition of being we cannot or will not share is our transience, our finitude, our emptiness.

We are on trains pulling away from the station in different directions. Has it ever been thus, that the good-looking African-Australian captivating the weirdly non-black girls outside the shopping mall with his studiously and rhythmically platitudinous ‘hoes’ and ‘bitches’ cannot gauge the contempt in the darkness beyond his spot engendered by the recognition of his bravadaccio as a dog’s barking in the wind? Am I the only witness to the wind of death stripping him of his narcissism as he speaks? Apparently those pretending his expletives are not cowardly are afraid of them.

You may have lost your way in the appearances of things, in the expensive, controlling and demeaning expertise of others, or in the unbearable loneliness of being unworthy, but cheer up, the path to the cliff is lined garishly with comforting signs of imminent healing, and this Moon is showing the way, to the Archangel Raphael, binder of demons, healer of blindness, Regulus the little king. No, a healer cannot heal you. Healing, throughout the ages, has been misconstrued as a transitive thing. The lion is not a king, but a trial of Hercules; a Little King is a basilisk. Healers are people who are themselves healing, from being born without white male privilege, from being born with it, or from being born at all. If Regulus is a healer, it may be the discovery of his anatomical position upside down he needs to heal.

It used to be said that life transforms the face you were born with into the face you deserve, but a third face is emerging under the scalpel and the syringe. Be careful what you wish for: “The wages of sin is death”, is morphing into the secular understanding that life transforms the wound you were born with into the subsidiary obsessions which merely transmute it, but a qualified mind-doctor can help you heal them. How does such ‘auditing’ deal with the wound you were born with? A healer is transforming compassion into narcissism, creative force into intellectual property, country into legacy, knowledge into fame, and accordingly life itself, the primary wound, knows only one cure.

In the immortal words of Kirsty MacColl, “Why can’t we just be happy, baby?” Yeah, wouldn’t that be nice, but we can’t blame the punk for the girls’ adulation, any more than we can blame light pollution on the wrong extinction coefficient, or extinguish persona in shadow. Has there ever been a culture that didn’t prize ignorance (closely related to humour as it is)? Men’s business is about obedience to the fieldmarshal, not debating his strategy; women’s business, acceptance, tolerance, forgiveness, is definitely not helping the choice of better leaders, and as an example for men is no better than a mirror to the shame of their pride. Perhaps the adulation of those girls is not much removed from pride in their shame. Oh well, they’ll move on one day, won’t they?

O Profit, what globalizations of healing are carried out in thy name! The river is sick; we must heal the rain. Busking leads will heal the queue excluded from the play. The audience willingly waits: they paid good money, printed by the Government, just in time. If as yet there is no app banishing the healer from next door to the underworld of opposite houses, nevertheless the meaning of your pain is all there above you, like ‘phases of the Moon’, and it’s not my fault you need everything spelled out: equality, diversity, identity, inclusion, footprint, in a smorgasbord of healing.

Bah! Humbug! The quintessential healer refuses to play victim to his wound. There will be no redemption for him! Transience is eternal, he mutters, rummaging heartbroken through priceless childhood photos of his children and their Fathers Day cards. The river is sick; he poisons himself with alcohol. The rivermouth is blocked; he swats mosquitoes in the hope it will be his flesh-eating ulcer that gets it dredged. He shares with asylum-seekers a debt to panels of experts. How many glass beads is his sovereignty worth to those who know better? Can its loss be healed by the human rights bestowed by foreign thieves on the victims of its theft?

Is a ‘Full Moon’ even possible any more?

I am not healing. What do I mean? I mean that the river which runs dry, the suburb which extinguishes its night sky, the refugees whose deprivation stands as pragmatic denial of any ideal, in opposite house or no, the acts in my past I would have to undo the fundamental naive judgements of my loved ones to deny, all of these dissolve in the texture of country, a wound and its wounding, a projection in three dimensions of my time in existence, an infinite emptiness not subject to appraisal by any pantheon of gods or panel of experts.

The Underworld of original sin has a surface where a healer’s tears repair the rain. Though it be covered by a skin of concrete outside a suburban shopping mall, it must be found this end of the rainbow.

Healer Moon in Leo

02 Friday Mar 2018

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The Full Moon in sidereal Leo is in the Northern tropical sign of Virgo, close to Regulus, the star of the healing archangel Raphael, but redolent with Northern seasonal associations adapted from maiden aunt characteristics of shrewdness, clarity of thought, and orderliness. The strategy of conventional astrology is to announce the sign and its associated constellation, but this is quite unsatisfactory to someone watching the Moon and familiar with the night sky. It took me a long time as a stargazer to stop associating my natal Sun Sign Capricorn with Capricornus, and it was only when I did that I realized not only how a centaur may adapt to season drift, but how it inhabits the imagination on this side of the Equator too. Think of the terroir of European grapes transformed into wine in the Cambrian soils of Heathcote in the State of Victoria.

So it is with Leo. As astrology evolved, it drifted from the throne of Northern Midsummer, one month and then two, gradually adapting to its displacement by tempering its ferocity, overcoming its vanity and getting its palace in order for the Autumn of its ceremonial role. All the while, it has also adapted to the different latitudes astrology has colonised, including Australia. It is now the last constellation before the Northern Autumn Equinox, and downside up it is the last constellation of Winter. Just as importantly, it culminates in the night sky from dawn in January to dusk in June, and around midnight (Full Moon phase) in late February-early March.

‘To heal’ is both a transitive and intransitive verb. The Healer plays a role in a sequence. Following the Migrant, he represents all those who cannot find their way home, dispossessed of the time and place in which their culture made sense, trying to understand the personal effect of intergenerational acculturation and trauma. He is the lion playing possum, his identity the creation of a god who has disappeared, or worse, a pathfinder to an objective identity in relativity and chaos. The meaning of life is threatened by an unfamiliar cosmos. Mortally wounded self-medicator, he can do more harm than good.

Healer at Aldebaran Gate Vatican Feb23

I commune with St Michael the archangel, Royal Star and Watcher of the East, leader of the righteous against evil, assessor of souls and Guardian of the Vatican. Let not his presence be diminished by objectifying perspectives of human intellect, lest I be cast adrift in a soulless cosmos without a Creator. Let this moment reinforce my determination to atone for my egregious sins by defeating the evil in me now and always.

Relationship 4:30am Saturday, Breamlea. We know that the Moon is a satellite in a monthly orbit, but there are many things we don’t know which were meaningful once. For example, there is a Full Moon in Leo at the beginning of March every 19 years. How and with whom were you healing on March 2 in 1999 or 1980? This Moon might have related to your life in such a context until the Christian Church made such a fuss about keeping the Earth in the centre of God’s plan, that we transferred our faith to science, which has persuaded us that we are objects, not subjects, and who we are under the microscope is much more interesting than where the Moon is.

Healer at Saiph Gate Sao Paulo Feb24

I succumb to temptation. Public condemnation of moral laxity in others is a good way of pulling the wool over the eyes, and its volume seems to match its hypocrisy. I know I am weak to be tempted by a naked body washing in the reeds by this river, but I also know that while most people pay lip-service to freedom, they are afraid of it. They disown their instincts, call them bad habits, something to be improved under counselling. Once I would have been on my way to a fortifying sermon. Now I say, grasp the moment: we’re a long time dead!

Boredom 9:26am Sunday, Breamlea. Impiety is an old-fashioned word, but it simply means lacking respect, and Saiph-gate suggests a connection between one person’s disrespect and another’s behaviour: written in the stars, according to me. I see Orion as an upside down hunter, but its more identifiable asterism in the South is the Saucepan: the sword of the Hunter is its handle. This is as impious as a hunter’s boot in the sacred waters of the Underworld, or indeed the Moon’s worship of a tributary of Arethusan urine. To pay proper respect to the fundamentalism of Southern adherence to Northern astrology, you must face south like a Northerner, and look behind you past the Zenith: you must crane your head to see what is there upside down. I have a T-shirt that says “No Fear”, which I wear as though designed inside out, so that it scans in the mirror. That’s country. Bending over backwards like an idiot is country too, and as is walking fully-clothed on a sandy beach, deserving of impiety.

Healer Forgetting Newcastle Feb25

My mood of self-loathing dissipates as families gather for their weekly get-together. Death holds no fear from this vantage point, since genes are reincarnated in grandchildren, and will be in theirs. I am unconscious of the genes of my ancestors, but they are artesian wells nourishing all growth and regrowth, I’m told.

Discrimination 6pm Sunday, Breamlea. Meaning comes from the Underworld, to which we follow signs. There are no signs of the Moon’s galactic alignment with the myth of the Lethe at this time of year in broad daylight, when the ancestors are clamouring like birds for our intuition, and so it has no meaning. It is a perfect, powerless forgetting.

Healer at Regulus Gate Wall of Tears Feb28

Watching the clock. What is the point of the building of this or any wall, he says, Regulus, my most difficult wife. Choose friendship, Raphael the healer says. Trust. Carouse. Believe. Die.

Healer at Regulus Gate North Wall of Tears Feb28

“I am your friend, and not just I, but everyone has had her, the one you worship. I bring you this odorous revelation of how I see you, as the gullible ghost of my own victimhood, here at the business end of the right way up, in the spirit of friendship. Drink more water; know her urine and our shame.”

Ignorance 16:38 Thursday, Breamlea. Without empathy, being interior with another subject, there is no love. Without idealisation, playing exteriors with another object, there is no desire. Without power, the meaning of energy, there is no friendship. Should any one of these be abjured, or sought and not found, healing is a mirage.

Healer Kyrie Uluru Mar02

Fear 4:30am Friday, Breamlea. Kyrie eleison: Lord, have mercy. Not a heart attack now, O Wounded Self of distant ceremony! I pray to thee, medical science of my Underworld, that thou wouldst worship me as thy Higher Self.

Healer Moon Limerick Mar02

Deprivation 11:51am Friday, Breamlea. All hail the belligerent instinct of the Irish diaspora, the republican plaque in the heart of the British Empire, subsiding now in senescent history. May all the Irish blood in the indigenous peoples of the Antipodes circulate with more water, and be believed!

Healer Moon Uluru Mar02

Relationship, 10:21am Friday, Yankunytjatjara and Pitjantjatjara Country. As above, so below. ‘Welcome to Country’ is an invitation into the spirit of place. I would offer it as meaningful subjectivity, which is healing, not divisive. History has a horizon: it languishes within the eyeball. My Country, on the other hand, as far as the eye can see and beyond, embraces an attitude to meaning: the seer and the scenery, the victim and the healer, penetrate each other in a way of being real which is unique and at the same time shared with every being which has bequeathed its vision and its dream. It is not the territory of one’s map. It is the otherness of one’s creation, the identity of one’s absence. It is nothing; it is the eternity of meaning. Thank you, Underworld healer, energy of my country.

 

New Moon in Leo August 21-22: Disclosure

21 Monday Aug 2017

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No matter where you are on this earth, and no matter what system of belief you inhabit, the night sky is studded with the stars grouped by perspective into the western astronomical constellations between Virgo setting in the west, Scorpius at transit, north or south, and Aquarius rising in the east. The Sun is in Leo. That much we can infer, regardless of how far it is from the Pisces Equinox, or which season it is in by the Tropical almanac. Whether it is Virgo perspicacity or energy which stirs in your veins, the Lion will for an instant across the United States today demonstrate its presence, as the Moon for that instant discloses the relativity of the Sun.

Leo New Missouri Image Aug21

Disclosure is the process of finding yourself out, learning the rules, those that are imposed and those that you instinctively or reflexively assert, and the resolution of conflicting rules is your choice of who you want to be. When you accept that you cannot always get what you want, when you discover oppression is largely wanting what you can’t have, when the sky doesn’t fall in when a rationalizing of your priorities removes the urgency of much of what you thought you wanted, you enter a new phase of disclosure.

In this process you discover ambiguity and relativity, that there are reasons why people often do not understand you that go beyond you being right or wrong, and by engaging with intersecting lexicons and narratives you develop your own philosophy and a creative perspective on the arbitrariness of the system you inhabit. This development is the intention of deconstruction. Sadly, the outcome of the process you are led through in your education often falls short of the ideal. Relativity can erode the sense of being someone whom everything is relative to. That your language embodies power structures and implicates you in offences you deplore leads more easily to the learning of new languages than to humility and responsibility, when there is nobody speaking it.

The hardest thing to appreciate is what emptiness is full of. You can’t undo the twists and turns of your story by getting out of it, because that too is just another twist. You can’t absolve yourself from the harm you’ve done by attributing it to someone else’s influence or the ignorance of your victim. Karma is the implication of what you don’t do too. The language you no longer speak continues to resonate, and others continue to interpret the story you have vacated. In the end, the things you deconstruct remain things. Whatever an eclipse means to you, the birds will fly home at the end of a shortened day and relaunch their affairs at the end of a shortened night for a repeated shortened day.

Leo New Missouri Aug21

This is a depiction of disclosure. Its author has discovered the relationship of inferred Sun position, seasonal formative conditions and human personality, and already suspects his system to be the tip of an iceberg. That is to say, he has reached a realization of subterranean influences on behaviour which dissolve behaviour in an infinity of the unconscious, the mystery of which is reduced to absurdity by systems of conscious explanation. It is only a small step to reproduce the moment in another time and location.

Leo New Visakhpatnam South Aug22

There is a third phase in the process of disclosure. When you have accustomed yourself to ambiguity and relativity, and thereby learned to forgive the agency of others in the injuries you have sustained and which have so profoundly affected the course of your life, when you have forgiven yourself for the injuries you have inflicted on others, and finally forgiven yourself for bearing injury like everybody else, rather than seeking to remove it, you begin to forget. Now it is in your dreams that disclosure proceeds. People who were once central characters in your play reappear on stage in strange roles. Familiar events are recomposed, containing discriminations and formations which are recognizably yours, but quite inside out. It doesn’t matter.

Leo New Visakhpatnam North Aug22

South or North: each is the other buried. Now you really do have a story to get out of: one beyond history with unlimited permutations, without beginning, middle or end, without fixed plots or identities, without seasons or opposites and without author or audience. Disclosure is disclosing itself. You are in old country. Welcome to the empty mirror of the Bardo.

Alnair Gate

15 Thursday Sep 2016

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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.

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!