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Southern Hemisphere Astrology

Tag Archives: Lethe

Vagabond Moon in Sidereal Taurus

19 Sunday Dec 2021

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases, Tales

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Atacama Desert, Bardo, Delusion, Electric Axis, Idealisation, Intimacy, Justfriendistan, Lethe, Nakshatras, Neediness, Ressentiment, Saiph, Taurus Full Moon, Vagabond Moon, Vertex

“You and me babe, how ’bout it?”

Romeo And Juliet, Dire Straits, 1981.

“… We’ll love you just the way you are

If you’re perfect.”

“Perfect“, Jagged Little Pill, Alanis Morisset, 1995.

Names have been changed to disguise the ressentiment of the protagonists, but may the Earth choke on its ceremonial tea if a word of this tale is a lie.

On this night of December 18 in the Gregorian year two thousand and twenty-one, ten seconds before solar midnight, two tributaries of the River Lethe converge below Cerro Palestina, a short motorcycle ride from Antofagasta in Northern Chile. The first is the intermittent stream known as Justfriendistan Ditch, and the second, ephemeral and as yet nameless, the trickle of urine meandering across the stony waste of the Atacama Desert from the guileless squat of Saiph, the glimpse of whom has arrested the Vagabond for thousands of years as his woe nears its oblivion.

Expect fireworks in the region of the June solstice-point where the southern hemisphere winter signs, ‘Sagittarius’ and ‘Capricorn’, jostle for position (especially when destiny’s gate is in the anguished bardo of self-development), but perhaps the Vagabond is taken unawares because as always, he thinks of himself as just passing through, and when he pulls off his boots and socks and immerses his toes, playfully if a little cloyingly, in Saiph’s twinkle, and she reacts with dignified horror and withdraws immediately to her full distance of 700 light years, he is dismayed. Dante’s Beatrice is as far away as that.

The stony backdrop of the moonlit Lethe is not home to shadows, but gleaming statues, crystalline and petrified. Saiph is 2400 times bigger than Earth, but casts no shadow on the Atacama. No matter, her script doesn’t pay a lot of attention to shadow. She sculpts: indeed, is he not her artefact who has shamefully descended from his plinth and now stands with arms outstretched, claiming horns of a bull on his left and two overbalanced twins on his right, imploring her to be his artefact, his ideal, his life? She de-plores him, and what wets his toes.

By solar midnight she has already replaced the plaque at his feet, which in the first act read ‘Charisma’, with ‘Neediness’. On the other hand, a new title for the idol the Vagabond has kept in his own underworld heaven, ruefully offered by a retaliatory imagination, is ‘Charming Cowardice’. Surely these are labels of resentment? What do they mean? Too timid to animate sculpture? Too impolite to play at intimacy? The leading man, it must be said, is sadly out of touch with postmodernity: men who create statues these days are drones defending their sculpted gender against cancellation, even though their artefacts will not condescend to stand on their plinths. And the leading woman (to unsafely assume a binary gender)? Goddesses have adapted their anguish to the social media market, and the delusion of the complete is so yesterday’s therapy, but how well their sculptures capture their subject a non-binary audience may deride.

This homeless Vagabond will never be readier to embrace his fate, the annihilation unto eternity of intimacy by sanctimony, and beauty by efficacy, than here, as he reaches the Lethe. A howling wind is blowing and the sky is shuddering, for at the sidereal stroke of 6 o’clock destiny’s gate fell below the western horizon into the bardo realm of hell. The stage is set for the powerless to be cowed by autocratic banshees emerging from the underworld, commodifying submission and perfecting convention. The voice of Virgil is a rattle of stones: this is no place for old men. The Vagabond can feel his supplication stiffening. His whole body has become as rigid as a statue. A strong gust picks him up (on invisible wires) … the twins right themselves, and at last onstage, good old Butch the dog prances like a panda bear, as the lead actor topples. It will be three hours before he emerges from the stage door on Lethe’s far shore.

The end.

Responsibility: New Moon in Sidereal Gemini

10 Saturday Jul 2021

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Acheron, Country, Emu, Forgetting, Kyrie, Lethe, Miserere, Responsibility, Underworld, Woe

Bring me my gun, and I`ll shoot that bird dead
That`s what your mammy and pappy once said
The crow on the cradle, what can we do
Ah, this is a thing that I`ll leave up to you
Sang the crow on the cradle.

Sydney Carter, “The Crow On The Cradle”.

260.
And down from there he spies
this little spot of earth that with the sea
is embraced, and begins to despise
this wretched world, and hold it vanity
compared with the true felicity
that is in heaven above. And at the last
down where he was slain, his gaze he cast.

261.
And in himself he laughed at the woe
of those who wept for his death now past:
and damned all our work that follows so
on blind lust, which can never last,
when we should all our heart on heaven cast.
And forth he went, briefly to tell,
where Mercury appointed him to dwell.

Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, Book V, trans. A.S. Kline.

Responsibility dries on the skin like nakedness as the first thing we remember on the lee shore of the Lethe. The silent voice which asks who we are belonged once to the god, and then for many centuries we recognized it as our own. Enslaved to inattention, we are vaguely aware of the crisis of irresponsibility which engulfs us now. We listen in vain for our calling. The earth we tread is sealed. The heavens are curtained by our artificial light. We must wake up, consult a map or an instruction manual, dispel the suspicion we are sleepwalking. Can it be that the tear in the fabric of our journey-commemorative teatowel is irreparable?

How did we never notice before, with the Gemini Sun on our skin, that the tumult of the Acheron was beneath us?

Can we bear the thought that the oasis of difference is a mirage?

This is the beginning of what might be called Southern Hemisphere Miserere Season, from July to November, roughly 4 minutes earlier each day, when the Milky Way is visible in a dark sky between astronomical twilights as a ring around the horizon. (The Northern Hemisphere season is between January and May.) This configuration, exact at the latitude of the declination of the Galactic South Pole, gives the Emu a chance to have a lie down, which is something awesome to see at a location further south such as Apollo Bay on Victoria’s Surf Coast. However, at the latitude of the angle between the planes of the Galaxy and the Solar System, namely approximately 63°, the Emu is a busy bird.

The Emu’s job there is to point East. Country inherited its cardinal directions from the Emu, finding their nocturnal lyricism preferable to the glare of equinoxes over its eternal landmarks.

There is not a moment to lose, if the power of the Emu is to be invoked to get us out of the mess we’re in: the last Kyrie is upon us! Heaven be praised: our dire predicament cannot efface Galactic synchronicities: so let this Emu Moon begin!

The Siberian child staring at the strange figure lying full-length face-down on the sodden turf sees him move, and asks her parents what he is doing. They do not notice any movement. “Come along, quickly,” they urge the child.

New Moon in Sidereal Taurus: Populism

10 Thursday Jun 2021

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Acheron, Animal Realm Surprise, Bardo Emotions, Cultural Appropriation, Emu, Gemini New Moon, Genocide, Hell Realm Shame, Lethe, Nationalism, Populism, Prodigal Moon, Racism, Sagittarius New Moon, Sexism, Southern Hemisphere Astrology, Taurus New Moon, Tree of False Dreams, Underworld

Populism has completely disappeared, because it is now absolutely everywhere. Everyone is an activist Sagittarian wannabe, and a world which places supreme value in presence is a very dangerous place.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Sorry to be Abliq … you have to be careful what you say, because in the shadows of your meaning lurk innumerable barrow-pushers looking for clickbait.

You couldn’t make this stuff up!

The world is intersectionally sick, and no top-down therapy is going to heal it.

Denizens of the Northern Hemisphere need not feel deprived of the splendours visible down here.

You were looking in the wrong place. Leave your -isms under your bed, and be at peace with your underworld. The antidote to populism is not neutrality, or equanimity, but sorrow.

Civility: New Moon in Sidereal Pisces

12 Monday Apr 2021

Posted by abliq in Bardo, Moon Phases

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Acheron, Bardo, Celestial Emotions, Civility, Lethe, Meaning, Overview Effect, Pisces New Moon, Virgo Full Earth

If we’re trying to be civil, it helps to understand each other. “What do you mean?” What an enigmatic question! Are you saying that I am not making myself clear, or asking me to rephrase in terms you can get your head around? Depending on your tone, there might be a hint of rebuff, a suggestion that my meaning need not be understood unless it conforms in some way with yours. Furthermore, there might be some basis for a paranoid interpretation of the question, and the subliminal arising of questions about my value to you, yours to me, and mine to myself.

And so you ask the question, “What does it mean that there is a New Moon in the constellation of Pisces?” What do you mean, New Moon?

Now the arguments begin, between tropicalists, of Northern and Southern Hemispheres, and siderealists, and no matter how erudite and convincing the expert, the question really means, “What does the New Moon mean to me?” There are billions of ‘me’s, and not one asks what it means to the Moon.

It’s difficult to be a moon, a satellite of someone else, but each of us is just that, seeing others as only we can, yes, but struggling to inhabit the context they provide us, which seems like a global chaos of sanctimony and savagery, victimhood and self-importance. There is nothing for it but to judge each other in order to jostle for control of the path to justice. We seem to have defined civility in that way, that any identity has the right to impose its narrative on others, and difference is their problem. Rather than adapt to order, we deconstruct it, but still don’t hesitate to call the police. We ‘believe’ in order, because we are one organism, are we not? And this organism we call the universe, part of which is a night sky and the microscopic individual standing under it, is the embodiment of emotional life, ever projected in organic behaviours bubbling up from energetic structures emerging from the exhaust of stellar engine-rooms.

Imagine a future expedition wrapping a silicone membrane around the Moon which could sense and transmit across the strait his Threnody On The Impertinence of Earth. What a shot in the arm for robotics to find a sentient artificial intelligence! Games addicts could show themselves in public again. The sky is a screen; the earth is an avatar!

The Moon is no more bit-player than, dare we say it, the Sun Goddess. He is as awe-struck by the Milky Way and its configurations as we were when we were poets. Centre stage, waiting for his cue, with the galaxy due East and West on his horizon, he is not only a jester, but an author and director. So long as he entertains us when the play gets going, who would begrudge him our bit-parts and a theatrical foible or two? Anyone offended by where their Sign ends up is welcome to join the protesters outside.

Another Way of Putting It

Wherever his arbitrary concoction came from, his perspective at least gives us an opportunity to examine our emotions before we plaster them all over social media. May we all pay attention to the activity of our brainstem at lunar zenith as the Constellations drift behind us through the monthly cycle of the Moon’s bardo. An overview of our position is overdue. Emotional intelligence has gone out the window. Try the Moon’s chart as an alternative unifying principle to rampant priapism, aggressive nationalism or resentful greed. We are opposite the Moon, out there, just as we are out there when we have another in our crosshairs.

Convention: New Moon in Sidereal Aquarius

13 Saturday Mar 2021

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Aquarius New Moon, Artisan Moon, Cardinal Directions, Convention, Forgetting, Full Earth in Virgo, Gender, Identity, Lethe, Milky Way, Sexism, Sexual Misconduct, Southern Hemisphere Astrology, Toxic Masculinity., Wanderer

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.

The Veteran: Full Moon in Gemini

30 Wednesday Dec 2020

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Acheron, Antipodes, Bardo, Boredom, Cardinal Directions, Country, Forgetting, Gemini, Gemini Full Moon, Lethe, New Earth, Southern Hemisphere Astrology, Underworld, Veteran Moon, Woe

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

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

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

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

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

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

July Full Moon in Sidereal Sagittarius: The Prodigal

05 Sunday Jul 2020

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Acheron, Being, Forgetting, Gemini, Gender, Identity, July Moon, Lethe, Prodigal Moon, Sagittarius, Satyr, Twins, Underworld, Woe

“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?

New Moon in Sidereal Gemini: Responsibility.

21 Sunday Jun 2020

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Acheron, Forgetting, Full Earth in Sagittarius, Gemini New Moon, June Solstice, Knight of the Woeful Countenance, Lethe, Prodigal Moon, PTSD, Responsibility, Southern Yule, Wanderer Sky, Warrior Sky, Woe

I have dreamed thee too long,
Never seen thee or touched thee.
But known thee with all of my heart.
Half a prayer, half a song,
Thou hast always been with me,
Though we have been always apart.

From “Dulcinea”, Man Of La Mancha, Wasserman, Leigh & Darion.

Gemini New Sihora N Jun21

If there is one injunction we don’t need in the maw of pestilence, it is, ‘Get serious’, for the meaning of life is no longer a buffoon’s number but a lack, a very disconcerting lack, lingering amongst the precious things we always took for granted and may never have again, like a tender embrace, an infant’s confided insight, the soaring spirit of an orchestra, and a blush on the cheeks of numbness.

Dasein 2020

Yes, every nineteen years of our lifetime, 1925, 1944, 1963, 1982, 2001, and right now, the New Moon has joined with the Sun at June Solstice to cross the Lethe, where exhausted extremism loses itself and we can rebuild country—the village that un-cancels, rescues and raises the child—as sanctuary, in Schiller’s immortal words from the Ode To Joy:

“Freude, schöner Götterfunken
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!”

Gemini New Sihora N Underworld Jun21

The attributes of the stars, the configurations of your unconscious inheritance, the paleolithic sky, and the evolution of the idea of ‘space’ beyond representations of zodiac and underworld, are the sidings and stations your journey has passed through in your dreams, in the middle of the night, where sanctuary is eternally denied the enclosed heart:

“Whoever has succeeded in the great attempt,
To be a friend’s friend,
Whoever has won a lovely woman,
Add his to the jubilation!
Yes, and also whoever has just one soul
To call his own in this world!
And he who never managed it should slink
Weeping from this union!” Schiller.

Gemini New Full Earth Constellations

When you notice from your window the rows of plantings which radiate in all directions in perfectly straight lines, I know you don’t know how it was done, but do you wonder if there is a station around here you might get a ticket back to one day? So many stations on the Mindfulness Line! Perhaps it is senseless to conjecture attributes for the stars. Perhaps journeys are hallucinations, or absent-mindedly drumming fingers on a pin-striped knee, resonating on a commute like the reverse motion of a picket fence.

Onward, across the Lethe! You may not see eye to eye with Heidegger, but I think we can all agree that responsibility is a pretty basic step forward to remembering oneself. As they say, there’s no time like the present. Is there, Aldonza?

New Moon in Aries: Opportunism

23 Thursday Apr 2020

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Acheron, Aries New Moon, Carpe Diem, Cassiopeia, Catastrofetishism, Country, Dark Energy, Lethe, Limerance, Memento Mori, Opportunism, Ramadan, Temperance

Sapias, vina liques et spatio brevi
spem longam reseces. dum loquimur, fugerit invida
aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero. Horace, Odes I xi.

[Be prudent. Let the wine flow. And since time is short, leave off far-reaching hopes. Even as we speak envious time has escaped us. Reap what the day offers and put as little trust as possible in the future. Trans. B. Muir]

For there are pleasures which they must have, and are afraid of losing; and therefore they abstain from one class of pleasures because they are overcome by another: and whereas intemperance is defined as “being under the dominion of pleasure,” they overcome only because they are overcome by pleasure. And that is what I mean by saying that they are temperate through intemperance. Plato, Phaedo. Trans. B. Jowett.

Goodbye Michelle it’s hard to die
When all the birds are singing in the sky
Now that the spring is in the air
With the flowers everywhere
I wish that we could both be there.
Brel/McKuen.

In the Southern Hemisphere there is a trail leading from the high country, which lies in the direction of Sagittarius A, down across the ridges of Pisces into the meadows of the Ram and the Bull which line the River Lethe. All of the planets are strung out along this trail in this time of calamity, all of them obeying a primeval rule: mind the path! For the trail is precipitous, and fall is fatal. It only seems like yesterday the Full Moon was diplomatically avoiding the subject of castration with the old drifter on the ridge, Uranus, and here we are for the third and last time for 30-odd years in Aries at Ramadan, the two of us quarantined together, fasting in the jaws of apocalyptic pestilence, with the invisible stench of our homeless Father Sky a few days further down the track tainting the decomposing autumn sunshine.

Aries New Downhill Breamlea Apr23

You are welcome to dismiss this metaphor as a guide on your journey, for who would deny the narrative you are at pains to construct for your life? Alas, you may need a Covid-19 test if you deconstruct narrative as relative but cling to your own. Who on Earth began a ‘journey’ at your birth but your ancestors, jostling for reincarnation? And if we go back far enough, 4 billion years, yours are mine, so don’t take it personally when I scorn your journey! And does your journey have a social and linguistic background which makes your claim to ‘go your own way’ a little quaint? Don’t the seasons and the Covid-19 shutdown define it? Remember the Ramadan weather twenty years ago! And that the faithful are heading for the Lethe while Ramadan is working its way back to the Acheron!

If you think that opportunism is the cynical advantage of prevailing anxieties the unprincipled take to enrich themselves, then you are far from sharing the preoccupation with death that tempts the celebrants of enrichment into the giddy abyss of eternal forgetting. What is that smell? The stale toejam of the tragic bride, Andromeda, the bowels of her water-boarded mother, the crotch of homelessness and the hormones of a rutting ram! A lot of bull, perhaps? Is the pursuit of knowledge and truth the foundation of civilisation or the talisman it vouchsafes its loved ones as it lowers their impoverished corpses into the Underworld, or floats them away on the Lethe?

Aries New Richmond Apr23

I’ll grant you that when you came into this world what you didn’t know was very important. But as you leave this world it no longer seems important at all, does it? Even though an entire culture be evolving in the pursuit of the knowledge certain others seem to have gained by ignoring yours. There is a germ at the heart of every organism as resilient and adaptive as any virus: you are taught to know it as love. But its formula can be rephrased in terms of what love has taught you to fear, love as a disease overcoming its absence, the disease of limerence. Life has taught you not to fear, not to look down below the ridge. But limerence retreats to medical definitions, and thus do ‘we who are about to die’ fear dying of a virulent coronavirus. The opposite of love was never fear. Only intemperate individuals could cling to such an idea, as dark energy to matter seems to cling, because the opposite of love is its narcissistic dark temperance, silence.

To revisit the concept of ‘country’ as death meditation: if it is true that what you know, including what you instinctively or unconsciously know, is a collaboration between the world as it has formed you according to its needs, and you as you have formed the world according to your needs, then it is true to say that what you know is a constituent of what you don’t know, or that your essence is somewhere between the two, like the history of Australia before 1788, as the essence of a tree is in the quantum uncertainty of the sunlight of its chloroplasts, or as country grows the timber of its nearby star. I strenuously suggest you grab whatever low-hanging branch you can, because to be made of stars is to burn out like them. Better to warm like wood in the hearth of your desire, than to illuminate emptiness a million years after your death.

Aries New Chart Breamlea Apr23

And should I seem terse, or scarcely adequate to the leadership you desire, just continue in the direction you are heading, as you must, in fair weather and foul, under deluge and darkness, one foot in front of the other, on your journey, if the evasion of dizziness can be called a journey. Who did you think you were, once the plug was out of the bath, if not a variation on a universal theme? Strive, one foot in front of the other! Plant your foot carefully in the print of the horde! Live as though you hope for mercy! Carry a rooster in your bag! Saint Peter’s love has not been tested for limerence! Hello? You’re breaking up! God is saying goodbye! Carpe diem!

January Moon in Gemini: The Veteran

10 Friday Jan 2020

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Acheron, Climate, Dasein 2020, Dementia, Lethe, Mental Health, Precession, Salvation, Veteran Moon

‘”…Jorge feared the second book of Aristotle because it perhaps really did teach how to distort the face of every truth, so that we would not become slaves of our ghosts. Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.”

“…The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless…”‘ Umberto Eco, The Name Of The Rose, Picador, 1984.

The veteran finds he can remember the name of everyone in his high school class, but cannot remember taking his blood-pressure pill today. As he reads the news of the world going to hell in a handbasket, who is manipulating whose doubt in democracy’s inclusivity, and who is crowdfunding what ego trip, he admires the new methods of driving forward what feels like it must be done, but he cannot remember much about what that was in his own youth. He imagines a reunion of his high school class dividing into contact groups asked to explore one question, ‘What happened?’ How did you lose all your money? How did you rise to those dizzy heights over there? How did you raise five children and foster nine more, alone? How did you interpret the platitudes of the sixties and seventies to make yourself that best self you committed yourself to find after school? In straggling formation like cockatoos, squawking eternity across the timeless vault, they would possibly share an inexpressible need to absent themselves from their children’s resentment, but would be unable to articulate what in the moment they would need to adapt … in these terms, my darling grandchildren, you achieved greatness merely by getting here!

Veteran Moon Haifa Jan10

Upon what glistening trackside web in the light of dawn shall time, the flight of its captives, zigs or zags, be transfixed? The zigs and zags of the veteran similarly flutter no more. He remembers the past as the foundation of its future, but karma in each instant depends on karma in the next. The future is indeterminate; the present is a polynomial guess, whether the climate emergency means you, or you mean it. The distinction may already be between a zig and a zag.

As humanity begins to fall apart, the Veteran Moon wonders at the meaning of his velocity, his phases, his background and his gravity. Humans have created history, society, science and religion out of cultures of meaning, which is a great achievement on the face of it, since the meaning of all phenomena, the Moon and your heart, for example, only phenomenologically exist. Rights and duties, and genders, for that matter, circle each other like pugilists, as the planets circle the Earth, and the Sun.

Veteran Anniversary Haifa Sky 11101BCE

Perhaps you don’t believe in Gaia, but what of the sea and the sky? You may not believe in God, but what of awe, and your vocation and your muse? How do you define your family? How do they define you? Meaning is the situation you create for yourself, your country, in that existential terrain which sustains your interest. Poof! One day it will be gone. How can it have been so important? How will the next generation of veterans define an ingenue? Does your judgment of your elders mean anything? What does it mean to be on the verge of extinction?

Religions abound which offer authoritative measures of the meaning of life, and have ever done so. And as surely, the doctors of the spirit have never shirked from the issues of suffering, fear and despair. Salvation is at hand, cry the wellness spruikers of today, on a million social websites, in the form of answers to questions like, ‘who am I?’ and ‘what shall be my legacy?’, or ‘how may I cling eternally to something which will survive me?’ On the other hand if, unlike Southern Hemisphere Astrology, you believe the rock of permanence is best left unturned for the red-back spider it will disclose, there’s a tour for that, and it heads out well after dawn.

Veteran Moon Zomba Jan10

As for the Full Moon near the ‘June Solstice’, the Elder or Veteran in Gemini, it resonates with the overarching values of human community, forgiveness and compassion, because on the other side of the world from the Sun’s woe, it’s the Moon’s job to say, “Keep going, it’s all downhill from there.” Trouble is, 866 crossings of the Lethe to the Sun’s 70 doesn’t make the Moon an authority, it just makes him mathematically correct, one who has done it all, including compassion, without remembering how.

What is the nature of the reality in which an Earthling’s local perspective can find meaning in geometrical intersections of galactic and orbital planes which are no more visible than the Stone Age in an urban streetscape, or a name for someone’s awe? What cannot be disproven by algorithms such as I use, whose formulae are based on polynomial expressions of previous observations, is the good fortune of Earthlings in 1998 CE that the Sun’s crossing of the Lethe did not exactly coincide with the June Solstice (difference 6 minutes), the New Moon (difference 3 days) or the North Node (difference 2 constellations), because the coincidence of all four would have wiped out all memory, tipped the magnetic poles and caused 10m tides, catastrophic floods and bushfires, and hundreds of thousands of fatalities in collisions of aircraft with each other and with migrating birds.

Dasein 2020

For me, there can be no more satisfactory explanation of contemporary utopian, even soteriological, notions of secular safety, mental and physical health, and identity and personal improvement, than that Earthlings are learning less and less about more and more, and more and more about less and less, resulting in widespread distribution of ingenues who know nothing about everything and veterans who know everything about nothing.

“Dear Lord, may this stone, a symbol of my efforts on the pilgrimage that I lay at the feet of the cross of the Savior, weigh the balance in favor of my good deeds that day, when the deeds of all my life are judged. Let it be so. Amen.” Emilio Estevez, The Way, Elixir Films, 2010.

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