Fifteen million people in Australia’s south-east are emerging from lockdown, and a monk is on the ridge which overlooks the vast reaches of suburbia sloping down to the Lethe, peering into the heart of anyone emerging long enough from social media to return his gaze, and looking for stirrings of love and kind intentions, so long constrained.
Is it just a coincidence that the monk is back? Where is this Moon? Why is the Moon where it is? Is that even a sensible question?
The monk will not discourage any romantic impulse or narrowly focussed desire, because he too has had a lonely time of it. He is the archetypal lover, you see, the Libran Moon of the Southern Hemisphere, and while nothing might overcome his buddha-nature, he is occasionally disturbed by thoughts unbecoming in one sworn to celibacy, and by memories of not-quite innocent, and consequential, passions of the past.
Permanence, idolatry; completion, fantasy; idealisation, delusion; submission, convention; seduction, narcissism; eternity, cynicism: every angle the westerly zodiac makes with the horizon has its opposite. The anti-vertex is both the weakness which empowers the vertex wish, and the compensatory mechanism for the absolute unattainability of that wish.
The electric axis is, as the passport out of herein, a powerful tool for the self-congratulation of the spiritual bypass we have for so long indulged in lockdown. The weeds of narcissism are luxuriant.
And where is it to be found, this tool? In the cosmos, in the dreamtime or the moment? In the warp of imagination? In the pages of pseudo-science? In the gaze of a dead Moon? Does it only exist because we narcissists, or whomever we are wholly not, have invented it to cocoon our unreality?
Are we, on this dangerous axis, committing ourselves to the impossibility of being ourselves? For an entire generation, isolation might become the elephant in the room.
Everybody’s mad. Go out and give someone the hug you need from them. Let’s do it. Let’s fall in love. Embrace your muse. Cling if necessary. Enjoy any limerence which can survive helpless altruism!
Idealize a future and idolize its impossible permanence. Be seduced by the reflection of your agoraphobia. Submit your difference to self-help. Believe in your cynicism. Is totalitarian surveillance intimidating you? Check out the monk’s skimpy g-strings on the line!
Some time between the Stone Age and the Bronze Age, while the peoples of the Mediterranean were cobbling together myth and asterism and time as eventual attributes of a religion of connection, the tradition grew that a small triangle of rather dim stars a little more than a handspan east of the Milky Way resembled a goat, and as Capricorn (Goat Horn), it was the right place for the Sea-Goat to inhabit, eternally watching over the children destiny doomed him to lose.
By now, the Moon is aware of being meat in the sandwich of science and superstition, and by increasingly presenting his own perspective, is attempting progressively to emancipate himself from the prejudices and preoccupations of earthly folk-history. Nevertheless, he cannot evade the path to meaning indicated for him by the witches’ hats of the Sun-goddess, despite the senseless complexity of their pattern—she is primarily responsible for magnifying the Sea-Goat’s loss by uncoupling his constellation from the seasons, and reducing him to undeserving obscurity. It is beyond belief that the Moon might ever evolve back into a rock, so how does the Drone know when to fly, and in what direction? He follows human practice, of course, and devotes himself to his Thou!
No wonder the Drone is so seldom successful in finding a subject for his devotion!
But wait! Driven by loss, the Drone will inevitably find the Vertex in the Eighth House, even should the wind-blown recipient of his devotion there have no hope of perpetuating her hive. Here it is, in the middle of the ocean, and neither seasons nor Milky Way could guide him, only the mythical cry of the Sea-Goat.
Are-you-there-for-me? It is an interesting question—at a very busy intersection of hotly contested terms which endanger the life of anyone crossing against the lights—which is answered in the affirmative, not without trepidation, and in a voice barely audible and without echo, by the Drone.
Looking south past the Pepper Coast above the South Atlantic Ocean, this is the view at the moment of Full Moon an hour after midnight: a sensual delight for the average person, perhaps signifying nothing, but more fancifully, a portentous conjunction of Moon and Jupiter above an horizon glistening with the reflection of riotous fires in the eyes of bewildered children.
Why complicate it? If you recognize the Maiden’s asterism, the Full Moon is at her foot. Does it actually make life meaningful to recognize myths traced in the night sky thousands of years ago by foreign cultures?
These are good questions, and I have to ask myself whether astrology is more than a narcissistic obsession. Take the prominent constellations of Centaurus and Lupus for example. In my imagination, they are emblematic of the root of the historical conflict between British settlers and the Australian First Nations. Someone half-human is killing either a kangaroo or a sheep.
From my equal divisions of the Ecliptic, I place the Moon in Libra, the scales of colonial justice, and the Sign of Taurus, which after all, is not as ridiculous as placing it in the Scorpion, as Northern Hemisphere tropical astrology does. Astronomical definitions also place the Moon in Libra, but do hemispheric seasonal differences, mathematics and geometry make what a child might see more real?
The astrological chart of tropical Conakry, a place sadly organized at the moment by hate-speech not civility, is crowded with ambiguity. The declinations of Zodiac Constellations in this representation determine their signs, accordingly as they appear in the northern or southern sky, but like language, the meanings of astrology should not be regarded strictly in terms of syntax. That my words are usually interpreted to mean something utterly different from my intention, that the world is empty of intrinsic meaning, and that I refer to things constructed by my mind alone, do not deter my instinct to share my feelings, and nor should they, within reason.
All things and all beings are without self, but they are not non-existent. Sensation is one of the aggregates to which we may attach ourselves in suffering, but as long as we live, we are all sensualists, using our senses to interpret our experience. For the true sensualist who does not cling to the forms of a reality delivered by the senses, the world of the senses is, like poetry and music, a symphony of pleasurable emptiness. Sensuality is the language of things without self. This Moon is such a thing.
Of course, sensualism has its pitfalls. It values the passions over abstract ideas, and that can lead to recklessness. It attaches itself to presence, and has a hard time subtracting its ears from its symphony of constant need. It is readily convicted of narcissism, and bending cognition to its will, can create a prison cell from solitary practice in its body temple. It is difficult in practice to delight in another’s beauty if you’re attached to your own, and intimacy can be denied a being resentful of neediness.
However, sensuality is a song of joy in response to finitude, and not to be pathologized by the intellect. Notwithstanding the invisibility of the Moon of sensuality in the landscape encircled by the rivers of Hades a short charter flight from her embarkation at Birdsville–remember civility?–our voluptuous heroine is its embodiment on her mission to introduce to the women of Yandruwandha Yawarrawarrka Country the principles of Tantra so entrancing to the men of Birdsville.
Have you ever flown the length of East Coast Australia, marvelled at the patchwork of farms below you, and wondered beyond your horror at the deforestation of Aboriginal Country, how many lifetimes of displaced labour were dedicated to clearing by axe and handsaw, grubbing and ploughing those fields? In such manner marvels a wellness guide on her way to lunch past a group of Aboriginal men, sprawling in meagre shade in a dry creek-bed, apparently sharing a flagon in a forlorn attempt at spirituous escape from appalling conditions.
Below, in a nutshell, is the sensualist view of Innamincka Country. Civility is the entrance to Hell. But epiphany is a wondrous thing, a sudden inexplicable simplification of the neural pathways between instinct and reason, intuition and inference, occasioned by nothing more urgent than the discomfort of riding over deep corrugations in a hard-suspensioned 4WD. Our heroine suddenly realizes how comfortable that Aboriginal backside feels up against its tree. And in this moment, ladies and gentlemen, she understands what ‘Country’ means. She is in it!
Her husband, not unfortunately on the other side of the world, would never understand: such a narcissist! Sensualists are what they are aware of, and deep in her body temple our heroine is aware of her dreams. Without the auspicious epiphany from deep within her organizing principle, she might have been in considerably less favourable frame of mind to guide the spirits of a group of Aboriginal women, because the dream she had this morning, when the Sun was in the Tenth House, was a fight to the death with her abusive husband, a disturbingly brutal fight resulting in vividly gruesome injuries to him, traumatically never enough to change his murderous intent.
Life is full of organizing principles, as any astrologer will tell you, and at this very moment, at the conclusion of today’s proceedings of the ecological convention he is attending in Brazil, not in the slightest interested in dreams, but practised in the arcane arts of interpreting the organizing principles of populations, her husband is feeling quite at home with the Southern Cross.
No doubt when he gets home it will be back to the contingent bitter resentment which blights his life. If only she had an interest in the world. Without an interest, we are assailed by boredom. Of that statistically undeniable organizing principle he is aware. His wife’s behaviour establishes the empirical fact: out of interest, responsibility; out of boredom, practice. In what deluded scenario does the delight in the touch of herself transform itself into a desire to touch him?
Southern Cross and Queen Cassiopeia are spokes on a symmetrical wheel, an invisible organizing principle. When we call someone a narcissist, it just means we have fallen out of love with their peculiar sensualism, because ours doesn’t feature in it. Christian missionaries gave the First Nations a name for sitting against a tree in a river-bed: ‘Love’–the love of God, being loved by Creation. Identity is not a self, but beloved Country. Identity secure on Country is empty. Have we turned our spouses, and everyone really, including our Aboriginal people, and farmers who cut down trees, into narcissists?
All of the planets would fit between the Earth and the Moon at apogee. Imagine that. The biggest, Jupiter, will be at opposition on Wednesday week. That means it will transit around solar midnight, and will be the closest it gets until June next year. It is nearly 143,000 kms in diameter, over 11 times bigger than Earth, and in the range of 9.58 +/- 1 Earth-Sun distances away. As a narcissist, I love knowing that.
This lunar epiphany with massed choirs won’t be repeated in your lifetime. Just one of those days (for narcissists who get turned on by the mystery of their unexposed deceit)?
And I’m the last person who needs to be reminded of what made America great. My credulous, consumerist faith was there before your birth. No offence taken. Our ancestors died together in battle for something a bot would not recognize.
Please, corporate California, stop imagining that you can define my ‘family”s business as a family business!
“Imagine that a child drops a plate in the presence of his parents. When he seeks forgiveness from his father, the child is rebuffed. He experiences a pang of emotion linked both to fear of impending punishment and to anger and resentment at his father for his harsh reaction. This, according to Kosawa, approximates Freud’s understanding of guilt in the religious context. But then the child asks the mother for forgiveness — and receives it. The mother takes the child’s fearful and rebellious guilt and alchemises it into a ‘reparative guilt’: an overwhelming response to total, unconditional forgiveness. This latter reaction was, for Kosawa, a truly ‘religious state of mind’ and he saw it as the core of his own Shin tradition.” Christopher Harding.
“Here I am. Look up into my face. Can you see my emptiness? Or merely narcissism (Kristin Dombek), an illuminated disc? Be assured: I am here. My presence is my emptiness.”
“Adorno’s central objection—that astrology fostered a risky passivity—was later echoed by liberal intellectuals who argued that New Age thinking (to which astrology belonged, despite its lineage going back to antiquity) did even worse damage by encouraging an inward turn at the expense of the civic sphere.
“…For what did injunctions to “live in the moment” and “be present” mean if not “forget the past”?
“…What critics of astrology have in common—whether they come from the anarchist left or the Christian right or anywhere in between—is a tendency to see astrology as a form of therapy. What bothers them most is not astrology’s irrationality, but its use as a substitute for something older or truer—monotheism, freedom, the demos, the political — that is both the salvation and end goal of progress. To them, astrology is an ideology of the depressed, a politics of resignation: a balm that, like therapy in general, treats the individual symptom of a larger social illness without acknowledging the disease. Look at someone reading a horoscope and you may see hope: someone looking toward the future in a way that suggests a desire for a future at all. What the critics see, however, is someone giving up.
“…On the other hand, astrology offers those who take it less seriously a nice opportunity to critique taxonomies of identity in general.”
High on a ridge in Aquarius stands a monastery, where for thousands of years monks of a peculiar order have offered sanctuary to the spiritually tormented and the politically challenged.
Here it is that the Moon returns once a month to walk in the grounds with ‘retreaters’, and reassure them that there is nothing essentially wrong with being unequal or having thoughts in a subjective language other than global-transformation-speak.
The visitors book has been signed by such notables as Lucy Who Fell Out Of A Tree, Diogenes of Sinope, Jesus of Nazareth, Giordano Bruno, Arthur Schopenhauer, Sören Kierkegaard and Mark Chapman, reader of Catcher in the Rye.
In a quiet murmur barely discernible from the ghostly whispers which still haunt the monastery from a time during the rise of socialism when it was sequestered for the reinforcement of class division, the Moon talks about relativity and difference, nothingness and emptiness, identity-with and ipseity, and the essential strife of being.
“We are all creatures of habit,” he counsels. “Each and every day there comes a time when we hate ourselves for the negativity with which we react to our complete immersion in the daily tide of inauthentic borrowed ideas, and at such times, often just after lunch or at sunset, it is advisable to take a nap.”
The monastery prospectus advertises with quotes of the Moon, and of course most people who come on retreat are disappointed by his absence. Some describe their visit in negative terms, but the funding of the monastery suffers little since they always shortly afterwards return, usually with an ephemeris in their bag.
“Yes, life has a measure,” goes one of the Moon’s aphorisms, “but neither is it in your pocket nor your enemy’s.” He has, with loving-kindness to equal the source of all woe, enabled thousands to dissolve themselves back into communities of anathema with a simple message: pause at the gate. This monk is nothing if not a neuro-linguistic programmer.
“This world you were deposited in at birth is not a prison of others’ making. You must realize how much it has adapted to you, but when you change it you must also realize that you are now one of the architects of the world new life is being deposited into. Your responsibility is not to own the world, and it is not to own yourself. Your responsibility is to stand at the gate before you open it for yourself or another, and recognize its nature and purpose. The gate is the intelligibility of the world. It opens with permission.”
His springtime visits draw thousands, who spill out into a great city of tents beyond the monastery grounds, and not just because he always appears in all his finery, complete with wings–every 18 years or so he actually arrives on a donkey preceded by youths waving palm leaves–but because this is the quintessential season of initiative and communication in a common cause. It is a bad time to be unequal.
Southern Hemisphere Astrology 