Tag Archives: Nakshatras

Vagabond Moon in Sidereal Taurus

19 Sunday Dec 2021

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“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 Vergil 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.

Doubt: New Moon in Ophiuchus

04 Saturday Dec 2021

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“… In this immeasurable darkness, be the power
that rounds your senses in their magic ring,
the sense of their mysterious encounter.

And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I’m flowing.
To the flashing water say: I am.”

Rilke, Rainer Maria, Sonnets To Orpheus, Second Part, XXIX, trans. Stephen Mitchell.

Flow, raindrop, in a trickle of raindrops, into a creek, and thence to the unfathomable swell of the sea: habitat, sacrificial altar and sewer, but the parched hermit’s rain. Is there such a thing as an individual absence? Do water droplets exist in the ocean? Country reveals answers to both these questions, at the crucial time of the year when their answers require the doubt we are harbouring that anything else matters. We approach the 107th anniversary of the Christmas Truce, remember. What do we know of Christmas, of truce?

Quite obviously, the practice of sincere new year’s resolutions doesn’t come out of nowhere, but out of a reassessment of the spiritual confines our anxious solutions have placed us in, and serious doubt about the person they might be making us. If only we could see it, this is neatly symbolized by the astral background of today’s partial eclipse. In the context of our reflections on yesterday’s 167th anniversary of the Battle of the Eureka Stockade, it is noteworthy that no law yet exists, in an abundance of caution to prevent the overwhelming of publicly-funded ICUs, to punish people for looking at the Sun. A surreptitious glance shouldn’t hurt if the eclipse is low on the horizon, but it won’t confirm the celestial position the experts are giving us, or allay any suspicion about the data upon which they base their claims. The rule of law may be unable to guarantee freedom, but it does harbour doubt.

Is there any observational basis for the belief that Ophiuchus is a shield protecting us from the Scorpion, other than “I flow” and “I am”? Look up at it one winter, and if the Shield doesn’t leap out at you, as in oh-phew-cuss, then the ancestors will cry, ‘Stone the flamin’ crows! Are you blind?’ If you’ve been present for a few thousand years, you’ve seen for yourself the effect of precession, of the Equator and the Ecliptic, on the Shield: for thousands of years at transit it has not been more fairly and squarely beneath the Scorpion than now. Rather than the Age of Aquarius, we might well name our time the Age of Anxiety.

Flow on, raindrops, and let country repeat, I am, absent! Is the Earth country? A drop in the ocean, is it absent too? Its seasons are: look up at solar midnight to see that your heliocentric Signs are opposite those you place the Sun and Moon in. The Earth is in Taurus, where the Antisolar Point is, nowhere near Ophiuchus or Scorpius. Why bicker about Signs? Let us doubt our solutions. Country is the sacred, coming into being in absence. The stars really are our ancestors, all of them absent, timelessly. Words are all that remain of presence, because presence is the absence of words.

Full Moon in Scorpio: the Dilettante 

21 Saturday May 2016

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  • “Is the glass half empty, half full, or twice as large as it needs to be?”
  • “A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.” Tom Fotherby’s Blog

Some people have opinions nobody agrees with because they’re stale, but some people with old opinions dedicate themselves to making them true. These are often people who have no time for the opinions of others. Other people have opinions they just got from social media, or out of a self-help book, and will have new ones tomorrow, but are they any worse for that? Such people are the ones alert to other opinions, ultimately worthless though they may be.

On the other hand, there are some enlightened opinions which need to be protected from the market, aren’t there? One doing the rounds implies that the hoi polloi are not qualified to decide what’s good for them, and so it is ‘absolutely’ wrong to let public broadcasting and the arts and culture sector, for example, battle for survival in a user-pays economy. We may lose our cultural identity.

As we apply our five-minute attention span to the election campaign, and the task of filtering in turn the social and commercial media filters on the complexities of who should be funded by our borrowed money, this emu has his head in old opinions about the Moon, asking himself questions you might expect from someone with his bum in the air.

It is a cliche of astrology that the Full Moon realizes the purpose imported from its New interplay with the Sun, in a synthesis of head and heart at the opposite side of the Zodiac reconciling apparent contradictions and opposites. For those who opine that life is a journey, with a beginning, middle and end, this is a resonant model of enlightenment, a geometrical representation of self-realization.

In these terms, and from a southern hemisphere tropical perspective, the Moon has been mulling over the moral implications of opportunity since its conjunction in Aries with a strong-willed Sun inspired by assertiveness, tending unfortunately to aggression, according to the character of northern hemisphere natives born in early winter. How might the Moon in Scorpio, dipping below the western horizon in the seventh house, especially now that his reflection is of an ego which has moved on into a semblance of mastery in close-quarters winter interaction, synthesize those implications?Scorpio MoonWe all occupy forward positions, with death in front of us, and behind us in the trenches a card game of autonomous bodily betrayal and a sergeant we don’t trust. Consumption and self-realization are at odds. If we weren’t so hungry, for amusement, for diversity, for change, and above all for self-realization, we might satisfy ourselves with the mastery of something, and take a secure context to our graves, but fat chance of that.

In the context of the political chaos we face as the Moon wheels into the mind of Scorpio, I get the impression that his self-realization is as compliant and superficial as ours. The anxiety which underlies the ethics of opportunity avails itself of a healthy dose of humour, and a relativist perspective, in order simply to get on with other people similarly assailed by the universal predicament, too many options.

Opportunism can be moralistically defined as a weakness of character betraying the common good, or simply as the use of an opportunity for personal gain which may or may not adequately weigh consequences. But suspend judgment. The common good is a temporary opinion. We are all rescued from indecision by choice of the most immediately appealing option. Ideology gets no more than five minutes, like everybody else. The only universal is the particular, and the particular is dissolved in the universal.

What we have complied with is the deconstruction of universal standards of measure, but while that may make us ungovernable, eternally dissatisfied, there is good reason to congratulate the dilettante. My Moon for one is less constrained by human needs and expectations and does what he feels like. A rock in space is leading the charge to identity transcendence!

Here is the clock at the moment of ‘full moon’.Dilettante Moon Clock May22The houses which determine the state of the mechanism, and the surrounding stars, are but my local perspective. All those geographical regions are where the hour hand is at the top, and indicate the infinite possibilities which the Moon enjoys. He may be precisely located in a vedic nakshatra, but his choice of wives is limitless. And how is his contiguity with the stars measured? What qualities does he show above and below the terrestrial equator? Are these qualities tropical or sidereal? Are they definable? Does it matter? He’s off on a romp which puts things, especially houses, in perspective.Puppetry
This chart dissolves the particular in the universal, but perhaps you have to have more of a connection to sky rotation than most people to get it. Without the innate awareness of the relations of Sun position and time of day which people who work outside acquire, sense of direction is lost without landmarks. I suspect that the common experience of the Sun’s hourly movement is back in the Stone Age. Ask yourself: do I see the Sun moving across a fixed sky, or do I see the sky moving, or myself?

I have to say that I cherish local perspective, even when it’s the dark interior of a hole in the ground. I came to astrology as a stargazer, and the algorithms of Southern Hemisphere Astrology evolved out of years researching celestial mechanics. The adherence ‘downunder’ to historical northern hemisphere interpretations of the Moon’s nodes (the draconic month)–appearances are downside up in the south–was merely the bait. My abiding intention is to encourage my grandchildren and you to go outside and have a look. I hope once in a lifetime you will stay at least half an hour to experience sky movement.

What is enlightened opinion to one person may seem like prejudice to another. Astrology is bedevilled by the problem of measurement. In what common frame of reference ought aspects be measured? The recent conjunction of Jupiter and the Moon which looked like an ear-ring was entrancing, because the two were vertically, not ecliptically, aligned across the whole (fixed) sky. What orb, or time-frame, reduces the shift of the seasons in relation to the stars, or of the stars in relation to each other, to insignificance? What are the local seasons? Can they be divided geometrically? Can it be believed that two people born an hour apart are ‘ruled’ by different signs? How can the Moon be Full when you can’t see it?Moon Conjunctions at Transit May-JuneHow does a locality attain community without established and mutually respected perspectives? How can it develop better educational and employment outcomes in a continuously changing economy, as fresh opinions do battle with stale ones and vice versa, when voters cannot tolerate each other’s opinions on social inclusion and sustainability, let alone apply common standards of mathematical and linguistic excellence, which are the tools of any kind of insight and management?

None of this speaks to me of a definable moment in the unfolding of human consciousness. To paraphrase Alan Watts, you deserve pity if you get to the end of your life having lived it as a journey with a destination, and realize that it was a musical and your only opportunity to sing and dance. By any measure, ‘we’ are in a mess, but enjoy the moment.

Diplomacy: New Moon in Pisces

06 Wednesday Apr 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eva Illouz, Why Love Hurts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Menkar

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

Alcyone

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

Aldebaran

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

Alnath

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

Alhena

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

Pollux

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

Praesepe

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

Alphard

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

Regulus

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

Spica

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

Sabik

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

Diphda

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

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

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

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