Tag Archives: Madness

Disclosure: New Moon in Sidereal Leo

07 Tuesday Sep 2021

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Those whom the gods would destroy find in their madness a subject for analysis.

He got into big trouble when it was discovered. It took many decades and generations of controllers fretting over the often irrational signals coming from the spacecraft before it was finally deduced that somehow limerence must have got on board. Only a virus like constant craving could explain so many perverse communications. Naturally, he was found to be the culprit, and was sentenced by the joint chiefs of staff of the supreme powers to pay retribution, which he will be obliged to pay, denied escape velocity, forever.

There were no doubt high-level sympathisers with the view, frequently expressed by common people, that elimination of limerence is unsustainable, and we must learn to live with it. However, to send limerence into the cosmos as representative of humanity was formally agreed to be unconscionable. It is ignoble, the communique emphasised, to wish for what one does not have. It is a betrayal of community to so devalue the expectations of others that one might excuse oneself from them and find in oneself a more alluring voice.

So long as the ‘Galactic Anticenter’ points to the ground, any but the most dispassionate astrological interpretations of the intersection of Prime Vertical and Ecliptic are to be suppressed, and the escape velocity in the Bardo from any variety of madness is to be defined as fifteen degrees per hour.

That is why First Crescent can be scientifically predicted, and no longer needs to be seen. That is why consciousness is measured by wakefulness. At least limerence, like the Golden Record the fingerprints of the ache of eternity, will be preserved as a human relic, as the tools of the first ancestors to venture out of Africa, in that first ineffable stir of limerence, have been preserved by the sands of the Nefud Desert.

Have you got it? Have you been tested? Have you been inoculated? Are you self-isolating? Do you really believe that love can save the world?

You only lose what you cling to. That’s it! Nothing eternal here but cynicism, nothing permanent but idolatry. The Earth is full in Aquarius, disclosing what? Impatient perfectionism? Farewell.

Drone Moon in Sidereal Capricorn

24 Saturday Jul 2021

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Perceived from an angular distance of 180 degrees, the Sun’s awakening to responsibility a fortnight ago seems incongruous, to say the least. She is more humble in Cancer, more attuned to the farcical Bardo of madness wound by the Earth’s solitary rotation which represents on stage for your delectation the irrepressible corruption of its inhabitants. Welcome to the cast, aromantics; so pleasing to see any identity emerge from the wings of limerence! Welcome, demisexuals, please line up with the aromantics towards stage-right where we can all see you in Self-Development. Clinging, quite naturally, should be neither sanctioned nor sanctioned, but expect the audience in the cheap seats to be primed to laugh. An influencer will be with you shortly.

Before influencers there were astrologers, who possibly inherited the wisdom of shamans. Where are we? Everyone wanted to know, but any answer was required to confirm and reinforce power. Has anything changed? Incidentally, the tryst of Venus and Regulus which divides life into eight-year orbits occurred on Thursday. It was invisible in south-eastern Australia, but we know it happened, don’t we? Did you see it? What influence did it have on you eight years ago? Sixteen years ago? Go on, drone, be your own influencer!

Here, it was evident to the shaman, but that question remains, oblique and disconnected in ways foreign to one intimate with the underworld. And isn’t that all of us? Do we not dream? Do we not do hourly battle with our emotions? Do we not have loved ones on the other side of the world? And yet we remain transfixed by the power of the tangible, grooming our diet, appearance and performance for a flight into history which someone else will probably make. Where others are is circumstantial, but here in the south-east of New Holland, where country is the answer to the question, we are amongst the first blooms of early Spring, if you hadn’t noticed. What? The seasons are changing? Get out of town!

In the beginning was the Emu, and among other coincidences, the right angles of Aquarius and Enif, and of Adhara, Wezen and Aludra, the diamond facet of Denebola, Spica and Arcturus, and the relationship of stellar visibility to the seasons. The beginning came before meaning, and yet it ordained meaning. You were ordained, how about that? No, not your sexuality, which was always fluid, and yours to play with as the influencers saw fit. But you know what? The way you felt when you got up this morning was ordained! The workers fed you in your wintry underworld, or they did not. Stand by, an influencer will be with you shortly.

At the risk of throttling another fish with its ordained plastic balloon, the obvious must be stated:

Check out the Signs and Houses. Yes, it would appear that it was ordained in the beginning that we would all be in this together, and that influencers would be needed to spell out our differences. Drones are such ‘warrior‘ wannabes, don’t you think? What do your influencers think? Careful! Try to avoid being struck by an emu when the Milky Way is in the Warrior configuration.

Is that not the very picture of us? Did you fear a shameful image of biomass annihilation? Totalitarianism? Corruption saturation? Don’t be perverse. Hearken to your influencer.

So that’s where we are! Confused? Wait please, good inhabitants of Sichuan with genealogies going back thousands of years, your influencer will be with you presently, whether or not you want your country and underworld validated. No doubt about it, he’s done well for himself.

Civility: New Moon in Pisces

16 Monday Apr 2018

Posted by in Milky Way, Moon Phases

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It’s as though an evil spirit has got into us all. At the very least, the gods, goddesses, totems and saints seem to have vacated us, and nobody could blame them for not wanting to come back. Hatred and its deluded excuse, resentment, paranoia, ridicule, not to mention chemical warfare and the faithlessly spirited prosecution of sacrilege, are not in their line of work. Our symbol of oneness has become 1. I am right, I am healing, I am equal, I am together, I choose my identity and my gender. The world is full of objects, of which I am one. My love is a delusion and I’m reassembling it. My role is an oppression and so is my image. I face them. I turn my back on them. I am the iris of a proud cat’s eye.

Many years ago, one of my precocious granddaughters in her ‘What’s that?’ phase was pointing indiscriminately all over the garden, asking, “What’s that?” I could see Nominalism 101 in full swing, and perversely tried to turn the tide. A broken stem was a hole. An upturned empty pot was a hole. The end of the hose was a hole. Together we discovered that the world is full of holes, not just things.

Pisces New Birdsville Apr16

My custom is to present an image of the sky over a place where Sun and/or Moon are at the meridian, in an ongoing attempt to broaden a sense of global country, its connectedness and its objective emptiness. That place at noon in the moment of conjunction is Penrith, Australia, with the Moon in the third house. Once I would have explored the horizontal non-alignment of the two bodies to confirm my use of the equatorial system, but I noticed that the galactic plane was close to one of its distinctive configurations, and mathematical investigation led me to the sky above Birdsville, in Western Queensland. The conjunction of Sun and Moon is an invisible cat’s eye, the symbol 1. The alignment of horizon and galactic plane is an invisible ring, the symbol O. It is a hole.

Do you think we might reexamine circles in this light? Could we go back to the beginning, the ‘What’s that’ stage, and recognize the circle, our group, our culture, our religion, not as a zone of exclusion or as the boundary of its solid contents, but as a concept of emptiness? The horizon is a perfect example. What is it really? Perhaps it is so obstructed by the physical features that crowd your environment that you have never even seen its circularity. Are you aware that it changes with every step you take? Are you aware that you share elements within it with people beyond it?

The Milky Way is another perfect example. We are accustomed to seeing it, perhaps on rare occasions when we vacate the circle of our city, as an arc. From representations of our galaxy as a thing, we ‘know’ it as a spiral we observe from near its rotational plane. However, just like the horizon, it reveals itself as a circle as we turn around. When its poles cross the meridian, South Pole in the South, North Pole in the North, it becomes a closed circle near the horizon and disappears. What is within it? Are we?

Curiously, the horizontal galactic circle reveals a potentially therapeutic symmetry between the astrologies of North and South. Perfect alignment, at the present time, occurs at latitudes 27° North and South. Here it is at Laredo in North America.

NGP Transit Laredo USA

The empty night sky is observed in this configuration from mid-January until the end of May. The Moon and planets are not shown. Note the ruling Sign of the Constellation Virgo. And here is the same galactic configuration at Oodnadatta in Central Australia, observable from mid-July until the end of November. Note the ruling Sign of the Constellation Pisces. What’s in a Sign, eh?

SGP Transit Oodnadatta

The Laredo alignment was moving south at the latitude of Stonehenge in 2700 BCE. Imagine what figurative representations of the sky might have occurred to people who lived under the Milky Way on the Salisbury Plain, as science emerged from Neolithic concepts of the cardinal directions. Imagine the concept of good, honourable government which might have stood in the circle of extinguished ancestors!

By 880 BCE, the Galactic Poles were at the latitudes of Southern Tasmania and the Great Lakes of Adena culture. What is within the circle of disappeared ancestors? Grave mounds. Legend. Story. Nobody knows for sure what the sky-stories of these people were, but over China, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece, zodiacs had formed. The concept of the empty circle was being supplanted by linear histories in cultures with boundaries. By the year dot, the North Galactic Pole transited over Athens, where Western science was born within the circle of Hell, and the South Pole over South-Eastern Australia, where my conception of the southward evolution of Indigenous cosmology culminates.

My astrology is rooted in the circle: the cyclical madness of postmodern hormones, the presence of the bardo, and the emptiness of country. Remember Justfriendistan? A “territory only to be rivaled in inhospitality by the Western Sahara, the Atacama Desert, and Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell.” (Ali Binazir.) Is the Styx of hatred destined to flow across our circle between Acheron and Lethe? Is it the Zodiac? What is this impassioned battle between suppressed women and shame-faced perpetrators of all sorts of atrocities? Do people really want to spend the rest of their lives at war, or in one or two friendships hermetically sealed from the other sex? Must a male Moon be like a boy returning to his mother’s arms from ridicule for being a Mummy’s boy, an errant inner god submitting to the contempt of a generation?

And what do we want to leave our great-grandchildren, fast internet speeds and cheap power, or safe streets? Civility turns theories of power on their heads. Power is not disseminated from authority figures or a resilience concentrated towards the centre of social structures. That is force, not power. Country cannot be invaded and taken from you by any force, even if its hills and waterholes can and its stories be made about somewhere else. Why not? Because country is empty. It’s just you standing in your absence.

Look at your circle, and see its emptiness. It contains only one thing I can see: a hole of civility.

Responsibility: New Moon in Gemini

24 Saturday Jun 2017

Posted by in Bardo, Moon Phases

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

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

Idolator Big Hill Jun24Yours

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

Iconoclast Big Hill Jun24Yours

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

Gemini New Stawell Jun24

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

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

Zealot Signs 2017Yours

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

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

Shawwal St Kilda Jun25

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

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

Bardo, Lilith and Thou

28 Saturday Feb 2015

Posted by in Bardo

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Bardo

I’ve been reading Chӧgyam Trungpa’s Book, Transcending Madness–very appropriate subject matter for Southern Hemisphere Astrology! My whole enterprise is mad, it seems, dropping breadcrumbs in the moonlight towards the mouth of a cave–of identity, of conventional astrology–people don’t want to leave, with birds as my only retinue.

In the process of reading, I recognized the realms of existence and the Bardo states as mapping the same terrain as my interpretation of the astrological Houses. My first merger of the two maps was this one:

BARDO

Like any map, it took a while to orientate, and playing around with it, I came up with this one:

BARDO3

This one satisfies me for now. You can see how the resonances of the Constellations align with the Zodiac and the seasons, and with their opposites across the chart. You can also see the effect of my chosen Ayanamsa of (currently) 27.73° (whose origin is Iota 1 Scorpii at 0° Sagittarius–so important to preserve the tail of the South’s most prominent constellation!) on the Sun’s sidereal location throughout the year.

Lilith

The title of this post mentions Thou, and that’s what I want to get onto, but because of its importance in my understanding of madness, and because of its prominence in the chart above, I will tell you a little about my concept of Lilith, Black Moon Lilith, whose glyph appears in each Constellation above.

Lilith is a strange compartment of the psyche, buried so deep as to have no real location, and yet its ghost lingers in the shadows of every corridor. Mathematically, it can be found as the hypothetical apogee of the Moon, bouncing around all over the place as the Moon’s orbit lurches through the turbulent influences of Sun and Earth (and Venus and Jupiter etc.). Astronomically, it can be identified by measuring the Moon’s distance at its greatest. Psychologically, it symbolizes our earliest, most distant but fundamental emotional experience, separation.

What was our first experience of emotional pain? How did we come to define it? How did we react and perceive the response to our behaviour and our training to overcome it? How did we understand the sanctions of our early training and internalize them? How did the chaotic feelings of frustration and anguish translate into behaviour? How did that behaviour contribute to the form of our early relationships? How did we modify it ourselves as we came to evaluate the behavioural models before us? Along what path to attitude did we remedy ourselves? What are we made of: remedy or pain?

Aren’t we mad, the way we’re so sane?

In the chart I suggest keywords for the possible ways in which you could differentiate behavioural pathways according to personality type, and perhaps more importantly, how you could find the seeds of personality in fortuitous behaviour type. Here is a link to some fine work on Lilith: http://www.expreso.co.cr/centaurs/blackmoon/lilith.html

Thou

The graphic representation of sidereal/tropical date-difference of Sun entry of the Signs and Constellations in the Madness chart got me thinking about what I now know as ascension difference. My question was, how long after the ascension of the first point of a constellation does the ascension of the next sign follow? It turns out that because of the tilt of Earth’s axis of rotation, and the inclination of the horizon to the Ecliptic, the relationship of sidereal and tropical zodiacs in time varies markedly. Here is a representation of that:

Ascension Difference

The times given in hours:minutes:seconds are of how long each Constellation takes to cross the Ascendant at my latitude. The time it takes the next associated Sign to rise after the first point of each Constellation varies between 5:27 and 11:18 (mins:secs). At the extremes, it takes Aries 2:29:46 to cross the horizon and 11:18 for the Sign of Taurus to follow; but Virgo is across the horizon in 1:14:04 and the Sign of Libra follows 5:27 later.

What has this got to do with anything? Well, what you see above is the opposite to what occurs in the Northern Hemisphere, where our short ones are all long and our long ones are all short. Furthermore, because the Ascendant takes longer to pass through the long ones, the likelihood is that more natal horoscopes will have Ascendants in long Signs than in short Signs.

The Wikipedia entry on the Ascendant includes this juicy morsel:

“Some astrologers, such as Richard Nolle, consider the preponderance of Ascendants in signs from Cancer through Sagittarius (known as the western signs) to be symbolic of the highly relationship-oriented character inherent in a complex or civilized society as found today in the northern hemisphere but never developed in equatorial or south temperate latitudes where eastern (Capricorn through Gemini), individual-oriented Ascendants are equally or more common.”

I can’t at present find in nature a basis for differentiating Eastern and Western Signs, other than that depicted above, but thanks for focussing me on the western hemisphere, Richard. It’s where the interesting things happen down here too, such as the behaviour of the Vertex.

Referring to the Ascension Difference chart, and bearing in mind that the Equinoxes are at 2.27° Virgo and Pisces, the Ecliptic in all of the Constellations below the horizontal line crosses the Western Horizon north of due west, so that the Vertex is below the horizon. The configuration of the Constellations as shown, with the Southern Summer Solstice in Sagittarius at the top, occurs 3min 56sec earlier each day, this morning at 08:52:49 EDST. For several hours beforehand, the Vertex, as astrology refers to another imaginary point at the intersection of the Ecliptic and the Prime Meridian (or due west), looped through Gemini, Cancer and Leo.

As the projection onto the Ecliptic of the Descendant or Shadow, the Vertex, which has been named Destiny’s Gate by one astrologer, lurks in the western, afternoon and evening Houses, in which relationship reveals the nightmarish difficulty of merging consciousness with others, and when flagging egos often suffer more than glancing blows. It symbolizes both the danger and the blissful anticipation of that most intimate Other, the Beloved.

As I configure the resonances of the Constellations in the Madness chart above, associating them with their opposite Zodiac Signs, the Vertex had quite a journey! (Lilith was in Cancer.) It ultimately reached a tense conjunction with the Shadow at the time stated, and clambered above ground like the ghost of Sadako in The Ring, lurching into the earnest spiritual materialism of Virgo. The journey will repeat itself tomorrow.