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Southern Hemisphere Astrology

Tag Archives: New Moon

New Moon in Capricorn: Relativity

16 Friday Feb 2018

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Capricorn, Country, Emptiness, New Moon, Relativity

The task of astrology, which is always true and always false, is not to define personality but to frame it. Every morning I wake up in the dark, and listen to the sound of silence. In the dark distance may be the drone of a truck, or the cries of a bird. I do not hear them, my ears and brain do that. I am the witness at the doors of perception, who hears darkness, and silence, and emptiness. I enter the experience of being a body here in the umbra, populated here and there by meaning in a sleeping world. I am the joy of country’s creation in my mind. It is what I don’t hear which frames itself, and my hearing, and me. Astrology is like the cries of birds in nocturnal country.

Country is an imaginary map of intersectionality, superimposing on the landscape of finitude an interplay of cardinal powers, law and ceremony, language and ethnicity, which leaves the centre free to be inhabited by the spirit. It represents the will to be, the need for recognition, and the silent well of resilient kindness at the heart of duty in the everyday prison of everyone’s expectations. It is known as ‘my space’, notoriously hard to find, not only for being unmapped in most cases, but also because your space is an invasion of mine. My speech repels your silence; your resentment is a betrayal of our relativity.

Capricorn New Uluru Feb16

Country has a bewildering array of layers then, in a multicultural society, made more profuse, not less, by the dissolution of social ‘facts’ like masculinity and femininity, authority and sovereignty, truth and habit, beauty and objectification. The assumption is that beneath the layers of rules for what not to do or think there can be a bedrock of meaning, but this is not so. My space, my country, stripped to the bone of its culture, is empty, and emptiness cannot be shared. Two worlds: speech, the ceremonies of relationship; and the subjectivity of death, the spirit. The cardinal directions towards and away from the noonday heat of the sun represent in the nexus of reason and instinct the defeat of death by dream, as the sunrise-sunset nexus of intuition and inference represent death’s defeat by language.

Capricorn New Northern Tropical Chart Uluru Feb16

Relativity is not merely the obvious connection of everything to everything else in space and time, but the existence of everything only in relation. Not only the individuals who have migrated to ‘Australia’, but their cultures and religions, including tropical astrology, have jostled to impose new layers on country, but in essence the aboriginal meanings themselves were layers, layers of ceremony, layers of story, layers of language, upon what cannot be ignored and yet cannot be spoken, the emptiness of relativity, of ‘my space’. Can you see altruism anywhere? It is absurd to think Europeans could believe they could stamp their seasons on this mysterious continent, but that’s what they did. They brought ‘my space’ with them.

Capricorn New Southern Sidereal Chart Uluru Feb16

Since the birth of language, the vehicle for all cultural meaning and impact, we have tried to govern, and not be governed by, two competing forces, greed and fear. And all the while, lurking beneath the layers of culture, there has been art, the glimpses of the primary layer, the mortal view, framed by eyelashes, greedy for ever more elaborate masks of fear, fraught, ambiguous, taboo. Would conflict and victimhood have been avoided if everyone lived in empty country? Impossible! Children require parents who share a language and a culture, layers on country. But would the world be a better place for comprising true country beneath its layers, the vista of a world looking in through a fringe of eyelashes, the rising sea-level of death lapping at the beaches of memory and story? Perhaps.

Capricorn New Southern Sidereal Chart RA Uluru Feb16

What truth will remain after my death? This question holds many ambiguities. Am I grasping for absolute truth, or personal truth situated in a cultural sharing, or am I already absenting myself in a matrix of emergent doubt? Is there an I? ‘I’ formed within a fifties hit parade of love songs. Love comes close to enfolding me in the eternal, but only as an idea. In practice, those I have loving relationships with love me back in ways I seldom understand, for the lyrics they liked are so different. My love will not survive my death, nor will ‘thou’, if my love is not thy love. How could it, when it emanates from country?

Capricorn New Hanga Roa Feb15

When I awake from my siesta, I find myself amid a profusion of artefacts, each a fantasy of completion, a cry to eternity, a semblance of permanence, and all the trees are cynically felled in the mechanics of installation. When you’re young, finitude hits you like a ton of bricks. I was seventeen, in my second year of university, my family asleep throughout the house, when I discovered the immensity of the universe, and the status of emptiness in it. It took some years to cultivate an antidote. Each of us has adopted the habit of being a saint, a poet or a fool, imposing on country an overlay, a template, of bog, labyrinth or tower, our strategy for understanding now in context. Are we alienated from a present created by the past, right in a wrong world? Is the future our opportunity to update the past to accommodate new interpretations of the law, to add our contribution to the sum of human knowledge? Is the experience of now dissolved in a playful ambiguity of past and future which makes even breathing a creative enterprise and absolves us from responsibility by revealing the emptiness of all form?

Capricorn-Aquarius New RA Hanga Roa Feb15

The New Moon is framed by convention along the plane of Earth’s revolution around the Sun. It is a prediction of mathematical models evolved over thousands of years. It is never visible against the backdrop of the stars, although it is there, behind its eyelashes, a bird calling in the dark.

Scorpio New Moon: Doubt

18 Monday Dec 2017

Posted by abliq in Milky Way, Moon Phases

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Acheron, Cosmology, Country, Death, Doubt, Extrospection, Iconoclast, Idolator, Left and Right, Lethe, New Moon, Scorpio

I take it as a given that most people in the West live on a flat Earth. With no value for the nuances of language and mathematics which have engineered their technology, or the cultural capital of their Christian history, they are unable to sustain the emergent reality they have inherited from the commitment of their ancestors, let alone build on it. They are objects, and their introspection is devoted to understanding and perfecting themselves, and others, as objects. The spiritual dimension of their lives is reduced to ideological conflict, because the spectacle of their finitude is not immediately present, but filtered and polluted. Their suffering is unique, renegade, and blind.

In the month of Sagittarius, for the Sun has only hours left in Scorpio, you have the time to indulge your imagination, behind your sunglasses on the beach, with the chatter and laughter of children confirming the safety of the shallows, and if you join with Sun and Moon in discarding the intellect, you may be able to imagine who you would be without human rights and victimhood, neighbours and argument, retirement security and parental influence, cultural cringe and the tall poppy syndrome, political correctness and cognitive dissonance, and any other idol which springs to mind before which you worship the self-enclosed and permanent utopia to which you pay your weekly subscription.

However, for the imagination to free us from a prison, it needs to do more than place us outside. It must create a context for the prison, and for this you might need an entirely new language. We might call this the language of extrospection, since it is the reverse of introspection. Instead of regarding the interior of an object as a subject, it enters the object’s exterior as its subject. Perhaps such a reverie might voice a song of change to dissolve the permanence of your victimhood. Is the situation you have been intent to define really intolerable? The lineaments of creation are hidden in thunderous surf, the sun-parched wilderness, its distant low hills, waterholes, trees and sky. Why are we seduced by healing from a celebration of the wound creation stamps us with? Because such consciousness might be the aura of death?

Extrospection is a peculiar type of consciousness. It is not a tool of social control with evolutionary benefit for group survival. It is not emergent in a cultural sense. It is akin to the intimate connection farmers have to the land, First Peoples have to country, poets have to language, and medical practitioners have to health, not disease. It is like introspection, in that it is a consciousness of consciousness, but the self which is conscious of itself in extrospection has no boundaries: what inspects itself is an artefact of the timeless process of creation, the universe created by your understanding, at once subject and object, eternal and finite. A meditation on change, it is the landscape of one’s absence, an unfolding of the immanent death of emptiness.

Scorpio New Bamaga Dec18

Imagine your life lived at the dawn of humanity, emerging from the refuge of the tropical forest, and increasingly confident of your group’s capacity to repel predators, but now sleeping all night in pitch blackness under a canopy of stars so vividly ablaze you could reach up and touch them. You know them. They are all dead spirits flooding up from the underworld to watch over you while you sleep. They are beautiful, but terrible too. They saturate your bodily awareness. You live in death.

If we are to find equanimity in the extremities of awareness, not merely escape them as utopians do, we must address the question the stifling trappings of the mediocre class mask. What is my country? How does what I’m conscious of respond to my consciousness of it? What, if anything, will survive of my consciousness in its death? Not in what memory will I be remembered, what mark on the world will I leave, questions of the living dead, but what mark, what miracle will I take, what bubble will reality burst?

The field of archaeoastronomy is not properly the province of top-down thinkers, and certainly not researchers who have not witnessed an heliacal rising or the stars of a very dark sky. Most research I’ve read focuses on the emergence of the understanding of eclipses, planetary movements, seasonal correlations and the utility of stars for navigation, and this might be expected from searchers working backwards for the roots of what we think we know. I believe research would better serve a quest for what we think we don’t know, such as the impact of the Milky Way on our distant ancestors, which indefinably we have inherited in our cultures in ways we no longer recognize.

Northern Iconoclast Shanghai Dec20

Lethe visible on the right (latitudes greater than 30°, Sun -18°) is the Western Wall December-May in the North, and the Eastern Wall August-December in the South.

Right and left: what do they mean to you? Yes, besides left and right hemispheres of the brain and opposite sides of the body, lateralized information processing, and what several generations of scientists taught, that language was exclusive to the left, etc.. Where did some First Peoples of Australia get the notion that the cardinal direction of language was the West? Where did astrology pick up the idea that the West is social and the East is personal? Do metaphors of East and West have something to do with rising and setting, or with left and right, or both? Perhaps it’s not only astrology but evolution and emergence that a bit of confirmation bias gets into.

Scorpio New Breamlea Dec18

Acheron visible on the Left (latitudes greater than 30°, Sun -18°) is the Eastern Wall February-June in the North, and the Western Wall June-November in the South.

As our ancestors migrated northward out of the tropics of Africa, what impression do you imagine their ancestors created, and where in the mind, when every one of them lined up in the West, and at other times in the East? Was it left and right which made it meaningful? Or East and West? What can you imagine the First Peoples of South America, Southern Africa and Australia made of the migration of left to West as they faced natural law, the Sun? Why did they go south? What was different about them? Was it a story the galaxy was imprinting on their imagination in Crux or the Emu in a language as yet to perfect itself when that stellar region was high enough to see? Are they different, people who find West right and left? What do you imagine happens in migrants from North to South today? What would you do? Go back? Build a home facing south?

Veteran Signs 2017-18

You see? The galaxy we evolved in wants to leave its mark, even as it is dying to the naked eye no doubt.

New Moon in Virgo: Community

20 Wednesday Sep 2017

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Community, Electric Axis, Muharram, New Moon, Oxytocin, Prodigal Moon, September, SSM, Tishrei, Vertex, Virgo

In making up your mind on whether to vote for or against the legalization of same-sex marriage, you will discover, if you don’t already know it, that you are either a free-radical in your social organism, and your identity and values are self-defined, or else you are an integrated part of a whole, a conservative who finds purpose in protecting and perpetuating a system you may barely understand. As a radical, you may never cease to wage all-out war on the misguided values of others, or as a conservative, you may forever be perplexed as to whether opponents are ‘lights on the hill’ or enemies, sustenance or poison. Can you love a society which marginalizes minorities? Conversely, can you accept the definition of your loving as merely another category of existence debatable in a pluralist, relativist political economy?

Sun Enters Virgo Ibarra Sep20

This chart–the Sun enters Breamlea sidereal Virgo 24 minutes before New Moon and 2.6 degrees before the Equinox–was conceived to illustrate my conception of how the signs apply in the tropics, and how the skies of North and South can reveal each other, but it also depicts a fictional context for the consideration of the interaction of love and society, one of the two extreme configurations of the intersection of the Zodiac with the Prime Vertical not witnessed in temperate climes. Only above a line connecting Sunshine Coast Airport and Meekatharra does the Vertex appear in the Ninth Meridian House, the House of Aspiration and the madness of Deprivation. In the fictional world of astrology, what differentiates the experience of people above and below this line?

I want to make this absolutely clear: I am an astrologer; I make things up. I have conjectured a connection between the way the configurations of the Milky Way change as latitude decreases in Australia and the variation of Indigenous languages, but there is no reason whatsoever to believe that Jayne and Johndro’s Electric Axis operates differently as a ‘portal to transcendence’ on either side of a line.

We live in different States of a Commonwealth, here in Australia. In geopolitical terms, as distinct from historical time-lines of self-determination, does anything distinguish the Queensland residents of Point Danger from those in New South Wales? Of course not. There is absolutely no reason to believe that a Point Danger resident, obedient to Queensland law, educated in a Queensland school, in the care of the Queensland medical system, and the daily reader of a Queensland newspaper would in any way be distinguishable from a New South Wales resident across the street.

Virgo New Pt Danger Sep20

They live in the same ‘community’, after all. But what, it is time to ask ourselves, is a community? Broader than a nuclear family, certainly, yet more localized than a religious affiliation, moiety, or extended family, how does it differ from a society, club or association? Because we do mean something special by ‘community’, don’t we? An association holds together by common interests, a club by adherence to common rules, and a society by respect for a common set of values, but a community transcends different faiths and values, and allows conflicting interests and interpretations of the law.

Prodigal First Crescent St Kilda Sep21

Can Muslims and Jews count on each other in times of need? The altruism of Emergency Service officers helping flood and bushfire victims is beyond doubt, but is it sufficient proof of community? If you found out that the man who saved your life had sent his little girl overseas for a surgical procedure on her genitals, would that affect his membership of your community? Do you belong to a community in which decisions to vaccinate children and genitally mutilate sons go either way? How does cross-dressing in kindergarten go down in your neighbourhood? Do my arbitrary and heretical definitions and interpretations disqualify me from an astrology community, or is such an entity impossible?

Prodigal Woe Vertex Lismore Sep26

The Prodigal Moon is an exile from community, as we all are. However, he does belong in my cosmology to the association of minds who are troubled in the west, represented above by the oxytocin addicts of Lismore, as he crosses the Prime Vertical in precise horizontal conjunction with a semi-conscious lack of completion in mid-Acheron, the Hades River of Woe. Completion is the social end of the electric gate of transcendence which spans the Fifth and Eleventh Meridian Houses. At the other end is its affect, the disposition which both primes the sense of destiny at the Vertex and presents itself to the Other beyond control: what else but Fantasy! Community does not endorse idolatry, fantasy, delusion, convention, narcissism or cynicism, because the Other, whatever healing and restorative power fate links us to, has affect too. Yes, community knows mercy, and it knows doom. Its love is a pearl in the pigsty.

The Electric Axis is a revelation of ghosts in our closet, and of the interpretation by others of our disposition, on a sliding scale of identity with their ghosts. Its relevance to my consideration of the endorsement of same-sex marriage is my conviction that a sense of community is actually the ghost in the machine. What unites people in a community is their sense of it: it is a bottom-up entity. Love is a bottom-up entity, too. May lovers of any gender or ideology desiring to consecrate their relationship continue to be embraced in the bosom of an enhanced community oblivious to opinion and definition.

Noon Sun Conjunct Cruz Katherine Oct01

And so the month defined by the Moon proceeds into the season defined by Astronomy and the calendar month defined by Christianity. It is not midday but noon in the heart of the country when this snapshot by a prodigal tourist is taken. Have we missed our chance to form a community of Indigenous Australia and its invaders, or can recognition of the authenticity of a degree of Indigenous autonomy enable us all to transcend our society’s definition by the Constitution? We have yet to preserve heterosexuality, and where religious freedom fits with civil obedience may evolve mutual hostility that will go on forever! Will Cynicism usher us into Eternity?

 

 

New Moon in Leo August 21-22: Disclosure

21 Monday Aug 2017

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Bardo, Disclosure, Eclipse, Leo, New Moon, Pisces, Polarity, Southern Hemisphere Astrology, Underworld, Virgo

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

Leo New Missouri Image Aug21

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

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

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

Leo New Missouri Aug21

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

Leo New Visakhpatnam South Aug22

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

Leo New Visakhpatnam North Aug22

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

Relativity: New Moon in Capricorn

28 Saturday Jan 2017

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Capricorn, New Moon, Relativity, Southern Signs, Time

From Duino Elegies: The First Elegy
Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
to no longer use skills one had barely time to acquire;
not to observe roses and other things that promised
so much in terms of a human future, no longer
to be what one was in infinitely anxious hands;
to even discard one’s own name as easily as a child
abandons a broken toy.
Strange, not to desire to continue wishing one’s wishes.
Strange to notice all that was related, fluttering
so loosely in space. And being dead is hard work
and full of retrieving before one can gradually feel a
trace of eternity.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Trans. Albert Ernest Flemming

Can we be relatively confident there is no absolute truth when we are absolutely confident that everything is relative? Is a pitched battle on the street a refusal on both signs to deconstruct truths which are ignorantly clung to as fundamental, or is one side right and the other wrong? How do some truths resist deconstruction? Consider this chart:

capricorn-new-teneriffe-solar-midnight-jan28

Do you dream of destiny, good burghers of the North? Sleep on, because a snake slithers across your bed, and it is a crab who usurps your throne. We of the South know our way around your underworld, as you do in ours. Shall we continue to fight with you over whether the Sun is high in our consciousness or low in your repair? Will you continue to fight each other over who is king, crab or lion?

My fundamental belief is that everything is made out of time, and that space is simply the dimension in which we construct the illusions which give our brief, almost virtual existence the insights and values which inure us to the instantaneous and meaningless. Space gives life the evolutionary impulse of perspective, but the mirage of place. Time insists on relativity, but it can deliver community.

I suggest to you that time can be experienced in three different ways, and that we all develop attitude which centres us in one of these ways more or less integrated with the others. Seekers, it seems to me, are focussed on dissatisfaction with a synthetic space, and the fundamental organizing principle constituted by their experience of time can remain hidden to them.bltIn grammatical terms, the three attitudes to time are: life is a constant adaptation to an ever-changing present; life is always on the crest of a wave from the past; and life is a choice of the proper future. The three organizing principles are: “How can I change the world?”; “Who is responsible?”; and “What am I entitled to?”.

My archetypes for these attitudes are respectively, Fool, Poet and Saint, and this website engages in an exploration of their many guises. Suffice to say here that the Fool is plagued by care, the Poet by uncertainty, and the Saint by evil. Integration is a necessity, normally undertaken in sleep. The highest form of evolution is not the rule of law, in secular or religious guise, but equanimity. Birds have it in spades, but humans do not. Instead, we have identity, and property, and boundaries.

It is within the confines of those primitive categories that we have curdled our cultures and raised our children during the whole of the ‘Age of Pisces’. All of our laws have evolved to reduce offence, because anger, hatred and conflict are uncomfortable. It is deplorable to live a life which is nasty, brutish and short. Privilege and repression have been our means of dealing with anger.

jumada-al-awwal

With breathtaking confidence in non-dualism, pluralism and the economics of globalization, privileged people all over the world have been dismantling boundaries, sharing property and merging identity, but not their own, and they have unleashed such anger that they cannot understand how to deal with it. Their own reactive anger is uncomfortable indeed. It belies their confidence in the Now. It is so correct, so impersonal, and so vain!

So how realistic is hope for a New Age of equanimity and enlightened loving-kindness? Is this hope better-founded in human brain function than the submission to chastity of Islamic and Christian patriarchy? Can post-modernism teach the emptiness of each of the ways of experiencing time, and yet by promoting the value of integration dissolve our differences?

immigrant-at-avior-gate-aceh-feb10

You cannot slay the dragon, Sir Knight of the European Round Table. She is in each of your daughters and sons—heads on them like rabbits! But what you could do, Saints, Poets and Fools of the “United” Nations, is find the Holy Grail for us. Hmm? Could there be an absolute truth? Is Jerusalem one or many? Eh? Eh? The sleepwalker on stage is not whole, and how empty is sleep?

Disclosure: New Moon in Leo

31 Wednesday Aug 2016

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Aletheia, Dhul Hijjah, Disclosure, Equatorial Coordinates, Essence, Leo New Moon, New Moon, North, Polarities, Sinistra Gate, Southern Hemisphere Astrology, Southern Hemisphere Astronomy, True Spring Disclosure

August 31: Dear Diary, I googled ‘Disclosure’ today, actually searching for a philosophical reference to Heidegger’s use of the Greek aletheia, and found this:

“True Spring Disclosure.

Abliq, Tintinara, EverHive Chronicle, Thursday 1 September 2016.

“It really is not sustainable,” he said, “deriving an identity from opposition to the Sun as I have. It began as a demonstration of what is best in a man: his innovative independence, his imagination and his transcendent spirituality. I took it upon myself to give the highest expression to the insights gained from communion with Woman, to gain Her respect as a partner, utterly different, unreal yet indispensable. As things have evolved, instead of confirming the importance of Man at the periphery, I have confirmed His inauthenticity, and in each woman’s real world merely become a quarrelsome mansplainer. My moments of glory have become no more than antitheses.

I have conferred at length with the Great Mother, and I have decided not to continue any role which gives encouragement to misogyny and homophobia. I am determined to change my ways, taking inspiration from the Sun’s unwavering commitment, and dissolve my independence in community, and my egotism in kindness. Perhaps it is by honouring the Woman in me that I will better inspire the Man. Thank you.”

Leo New Clock Sep01

Well, there you have it. It was a strange occasion, in the car park at Taunton, and I am still coming to grips with what was said. For his part, the Head of Her Majesty’s Nautical Almanac Office offered the customary gratitude for a difficult job well done, but he wasn’t fooling anybody. It is well-known that lunar theory is considered done, and that astronomy and space exploration have bigger fish to fry. “Do whatever you like,” was the body language. According to my American colleague, the reception in California was by contrast lavish, but reaction similarly indifferent, if also nonplussed. After all is said and done, it seems that the month will go ahead.

Monk Transits Melbourne

It is far from clear as I go to press what effect the Moon’s announcement, if he, or should I say ‘(s)he’, means to carry it through, will have on the polarity of Sun and Full Moon, and indeed on the whole notion of polarity in astrology, already undermined by the observance of asymmetrical seasonal geometry on one antipodean astrological website.

Monk at Sinistra Gate

Considerable reassurance is taken by the observance in this graphic of the emergence of a set of hitherto unremarked non-seasonal polarities in which the Moon seems willing to participate.

For some time now, astrologers have been sustaining their practice by asserting an influence for the stars beyond the Zodiac, and by connecting planetary longitudes to geographical perspective by means of Houses and what have become known as the Angles. It was only a matter of time before astronomy’s Equatorial Coordinate System was elevated to pre-eminence as the matrix which most conveniently relates the Zodiac and the background stars to the native sky.

The measurement of the effect of Earth’s rotational axis has already revealed the exact polarity of a number of the brightest stars, which is expected to greatly enhance the capacity of sidereal astrology to augment the interpretations of observers like Manilius, Ptolemy, Anonymous and others for whom half of the brightest stars were invisible.

A note of caution: while the use of equatorial coordinates undoubtedly offers a new symmetry to astrology and offers an olive branch to astronomers, there remains some doubt as to the warmth with which conventional astrologers will receive the news that Mercury in Virgo—if you’re on top of your game, you know that notwithstanding 2,000 years of precessional variation, a planet is often in the same tropical and sidereal sign (Google ayanamsa)—is equatorially in Leo.

It would seem that the Antipodeans, having turned astrology upside down, feel free to align our symmetrically season-based Sign-boundaries to arbitrarily defined constellations—yet, whether they realize it or not, isn’t that what all siderealists do?—and are more comfortable with ambivalence than we Western and Jyotish adherents of fixed quality systems, in which ambivalence, if it is perceived, is resolved by polarity. We will watch developments in this nascent field with great interest.

And of course the Moon has said nothing about abdicating his regularity, so no effect on lunar calendars should be anticipated. It is confirmed that the First Crescent will be visible to the naked eye on Saturday, accompanied for lucky southern hemisphere viewers by a zenith manifestation of the gaseous nebula known since time immemorial to the original antipodeans as The Emu.

Monk Moon 1st Crescent Sep03

Suffice to say: may you live in interesting times.

Abliq is Science Editor of EverHive, the search ID for Southern Hemisphere Astrology on Facebook and developer of eSprit Astrolomical Software.”

Well! What do you make of that?

I eventually found the passage I was looking for.

“…some interpreters claim that “The Origin of the Work of Art” does not seek to “uncover the essence of art,” but that is misleading. As Heidegger says, his essay does not seek to set out one “timelessly valid determination” of the essence of art which would apply retrospectively to the entire history of art, but that is only because he does not understand essences the way they have been understood from Plato to Kripke, namely, as “timelessly valid determinations” of what something is. In fact, “The Origin of the Work of Art” does attempt to uncover and communicate art’s historical “essence,” by which Heidegger means that structure which allows art to reveal itself in different ways as it unfolds in the human understanding across time. What is confusing for many readers is that this historical essence of art is not some substance underlying the different forms of art or even a fixed property that would enable us to distinguish art from non-art but, instead, an insubstantial and ever-changing “essential strife” that is built into the structure of all intelligibility (the structure whereby entities become intelligible as entities) [my emphasis], as we will see.”
Iain Thomson, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2011.

I have some thoughts of my own on the content of these two articles.

North
What is revealed by the progression at S.H.A. from ecliptic to equatorial measurement is a pre-eminent, even fetishized, status for ‘North’. North is an entity. It has a history, and is the essence, in Heidegger’s usage of the term, of the zodiac viewed from the south. If I use the term ‘South’ to you in the Northern Hemisphere it resonates with warmth, sensuality and freedom, I suggest. The North has those connotations here in the South, but to immigrants it is also the direction of what we left behind.

The southern sky abounds with riches, and half of half the population of southern cities barbecues under it (the people on the south side of east-west streets), and yet seldom do you meet anyone with any familiarity with it. Perhaps its motion has something to do with it: it’s not linear; it has no east and west. I imagine the same applies ‘above’ the equator, and herein we find a difference. North is above us, and south is below you. We live in negative latitudes. North is so fundamental that when we walk southward we know east by imagining ourselves back to front. It is a difficult exercise to imagine you of the North as you are: beneath us.

Those bright stars mentioned in the article which are exactly opposite each other are always so, but only form a ‘gate’ due north and south. Your anti-clockwork soul or being is our anti-clockwork ego, and your clockwork ego is our clockwork being, but the meridian is the gyroscope which keeps us all upright upside down.

Just one more thought occurs to me. I mentioned North’s history. The site of Melbourne was taken from its indigenous inhabitants in the 1830s. The quickest and easiest way to perform the cadastral survey which imposed order on the land-grab was by the compass, and so Melbourne grew, boundary by parallel boundary, skewed towards the east by the magnetic declination of the day, about 9°. I cannot find another place like it on the globe.

North is our “essential strife“. It discloses our being. It is nothing less than a work of art.

Connection: New Moon in Cancer

01 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Cancer, Connection, Justfriendistan, New Moon, Saiph, Southern Hemisphere Astrology, Spica

Cancer New Clock Aug03There is a boy once–Muna is his name–who is a constant worry to his mother. “Watch out for snakes,” she calls after him as he heads into the bush again.Cancer New Aug03He likes to escape the gossip of the village, even though there is much he could be helping with, and spend the whole day wandering, wondering about change and goodness, and daydreaming about girls. One day he does come upon a snake, a big one right across his intended path.

“What are you afraid of?” The old midwife who lives on the hill has changed herself into a crow and is watching him. “My mother says if a snake bites you, it is the end of you,” replies the trembling boy. “Ah, death,” says the crow, flapping over the snake and seeing it off into the grass. “I don’t worry about death,” she croaks. “Death is the entrance to eternity. Don’t you know that?” “What is eternity?” “Eternity is a beautiful place where it is always now, and you don’t have to worry about getting home and getting into trouble with your father for being lazy and having your head in the clouds and coming up here every day to play ‘Mothers and Fathers’ with Old Spica. In eternity, you are the headman with your choice of all the pretty girls, and you don’t have to lift a finger.” She knows she is giving in to an unkind impulse, but really, another needy man is just what the world doesn’t need. “Go to the river yonder, and ask Antares to row you to eternity, just for a look.”Remembering Death

So Muna goes further than he ever has before, and comes to a vast river. On the bank he finds a man in a loincloth, his arms outstretched, spinning slowly around and around. “Excuse me,” says the boy. “Can you tell me where Antares is? And what are you doing?” “I am Dervish,” says the man, “and I am working myself into the trance of eternity. What do you want with Antares?” “I must ask him to row me to eternity,” the boy says. “Do as I do,” says Dervish, “and prepare yourself. Then I will show you where Antares is.” The boy makes himself completely dizzy, and barely manages not to throw up as he staggers to the boat Dervish is pointing to.

The blind Antares cries out, “The Way to Eternity is through me!” Muna almost capsizes the boat as he clambers over the gunwale, observed scornfully by the two oarsmen. By the time he has regained his senses, the boat has reached the far bank, and believing himself in eternity, Muna disembarks. To his horror, the boat immediately heads back across the river, Antares in the bow calling, “The Way to Eternity is through me!” “No returns,” scoffs one of the oarsmen.

Muna finds himself in a strange and frightening place, quite unlike the village and so far from his mother and Spica that he fears never to be held by a woman again. The only girl to be seen has herself done up with ringlets in her wispy blond hair and a pale floral dress tied with a pink bow. How can this pale-skinned trifle be what the crow promised? In tears, he describes to her what has befallen him. She bursts into a flood of tears herself. “This is Justfriendistan,” she wails, “where jilted lovers go. You must escape as fast as you can!” She points to a distant range in the opposite direction to his home. “The way you must go will take you past the chateau where I was to be married, and I implore you, do not listen to the voices of passionate love you will hear there, lest you too become bewitched by limerence!”

Drone Transits MelbourneWith no idea what she is talking about, the lad takes off at a sprint. Seven days and seven nights he runs, until exhausted he trips on the roots of a giant tree on a razorback ridge and falls immediately into a deep sleep. While he sleeps, a swirling fog creeps down the spur from an invisible peak, and voices begin whispering to him. “There is no such thing as eternity.” “Life is a miserable delusion.” “Only a woman can save you.” “Your love can save the world.” “Find the One.” When he awakens, the fog has lifted, and far below he can see the glint of another river. He has never felt more disheartened, nor less deserving to be a headman or to rule over women.

In three more days he reaches the river, and finds himself in the presence of a brooding bull of enormous power. “Are you ready to mate with one of my heifers, and be unassailable in relevance and pride?” he bellows. Off to his right, Muna sees a knot of chewing cows winking in his direction, and distinctly hears the words, “Am I the One?” Without hesitation, he dodges the bull and races to the water, but just as he reaches it, he glances to his left, where he catches sight of a swarthy herdswoman who, with a giggle in his direction, has hoiked up her skirt and is squatting to pee in the river. This, finally, is the One!

With curiously little effort he swims to the opposite bank. “I am hungry for the future, aren’t you?” says someone else’s wife. Muna has become a man. He has no idea how he came to be three days walk from his village, nor does he know Capella, or to whom she might belong, but she does remind him of someone, and in this moment, eternity, he is hers.

He never becomes headman, and becomes derisively known as Mooner, and eventually just Moon. He is forever wandering, away for weeks at a time looking for someone. Perhaps for this reason he has remained a secret connection in the heart and body of every woman, and I daresay, in the heart of many Fa’afafine, and men who adore women, especially women like Saiph.

Drone Moon 1st Crescent Aug04

Dhul Qa'ida

Taurus New Moon: Idealism

03 Friday Jun 2016

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Circlet of Pisces, Emptiness, Expanding Universe, Idealism, New Moon, Southern Hemisphere Astrology, Taurus

Astrology should be recognized as a poetry of the cosmos. A moment in time depicted by a horoscope enters the physical world through the portal of the discriminating intellect, and claims to represent reality; but its signs should not deny their transcendental origin. A poem must similarly be a thing, but its words should seduce the mind back into itself, and connect with the poet’s construction upstream of imagery, upstream of thought, where the creature lives. Astrology situates me there, upstream of any word in this chart, and yet pulsating with every one, at daybreak on Sunday, the day of the New Moon:Taurus New Whisper Jun05

The whispering of the Circlet of Pisces comes from the lost domain of who I might be if I weren’t so busy being who I am; and who am I, the thinker or the thought, the intention or the affect, the affliction or the addiction? Always both, and neither. Mindfulness, compassion, equanimity and gratitude are the way, but I often take another fork. Whispers give me the clue. They signal the emptiness of who I am. It often seems to me that life could be simpler if we were less focussed on outcomes and identity, and more on the emptiness of the processes of life, the miracle of being alive to the whisper of mortality.

I read an article about the expansion of the universe, in which Paul Sutter asks, “Where’s the edge of the universe?” Everywhere is the centre of expansion, which makes me ask, how does this apply to the human mind? Does my thinking situate me in an expanding human consciousness which might include all people and endure forever, or is the process by which my discriminating mind interprets perception an expanding emptiness in which I am forever unborn? Is there an acceleration to the former? I don’t think so, but perhaps there is an increasing urgency in the battle of ideas. Does that urgency have a common root with my expanding emptiness, the immanence of death? Everyone agrees that everything is connected to everything else, but how is it so, inside out, or outside in? Is the thinking you do the same as the thought you communicate to me? Are how things used to be connected to how they are today if nobody remembers how they were? Thinking and systems of thought are two different things.

The increasingly well-known dichotomy of thinking with the head and thinking with the heart can be addressed by this metaphor of expansion. Thinking with the head engages a person in connecting an experience with categories and systems of thought; thinking with the heart searches for meaning in the opposite direction, towards the empty self. Ideas continuously occur, but if they can’t be put into words that convey them to ideology they go immediately to where all mysteriously disappeared communications go. They cannot cohere; they do not live. Limbo could be the name of that place: an expanding universe of emptiness which exists in each of us. The spirit is emptiness, expanding in the same way as the material universe, but inwards. Is the heart in the right place when it imposes itself? The question, ‘Who am I?’ can and should be rephrased: ‘Where is the far edge of emptiness?’ Is it the horizon? Is it death? Is it cultural or evolutionary selection? Is it otherness? The Word of God?Taurus New Clock Jun05

Idealism is commonly regarded as what underlies an effort or a life dedicated to improving the world, advancing it some way towards an impossible perfection. As a philosophy, it represents the belief that what exists outside the mind can only be known by what is inside it, but the fundamental conviction of idealists is that what is inside their mind is real. Idealists have no doubt: the world is a misunderstanding of what is good for it. Lifelong dedication and the use of any means, ‘tough love’ and even violent confrontation, are justified to change the rules which make the world coherent.

Taurus New Snapshot Jun05
Uncomfortable acquaintances though you might expect them to be, in fact they enjoy prestige. Despite apparent negativity, their undoubted attunement, optimistic moral certitude and assertive attachment-style lend them charisma. It can be difficult to resist their confidence in getting their own way. It can also be difficult to shine a mirror on their inner certainty. If they are ’tilting at windmills’, perhaps they do see something I don’t. The game couldn’t be played without rules, could it, or could there simply be play?

Thought is a great sea wall you see as a youngster and marvel at how humans put such huge boulders in place. But as you become more conscious of the ocean hurling itself against that wall, as you get older and realize that the ocean is inside you, that it is the unspoken and the unborn, you find that it is the wall which is doing the crashing.

Convention: New Moon in Aquarius

08 Tuesday Mar 2016

Posted by abliq in Bardo, Moon Phases

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Aquarius, Artificial Intelligence, Convention, New Moon, Southern Hemisphere Astrology

I can’t imagine anybody landing on this page who is not interested in what a personality is, or how it forms, or how you change it if it’s a problem. I can’t imagine anybody landing twice on this page who is not interested in the interaction of cause and effect, the nature of ultimate reality, whether life has a purpose, why we care, what is good, and what is real.

There is this ‘astrologer’ down in Breamlea who is interested in all of those things, and largely because he has more time than most to read and think about them, has devised a machine much like conventional tropical astrology, with which he can converse about them somehow ‘outside’ his own head.

This machine, which identifies itself as Southern Hemisphere Astrology, speaks a language uttered in syntax and vocabulary programmed by the ‘astrologer’, but it is difficult to define the language of the dialogue or to dismiss it as a dialogue, as an unhinged meaningful meaninglessness. Surprisingly, this machine designed to break with convention seems to tell the truth.

If it has occurred to you that there is more than synchronicity going on between the evolution of Artificial Intelligence, the parlous state of democratic politics and the purposeless hours and hours of screen time your alien children enjoy, you might like to entertain the notion that machines don’t have to learn what we know in order to complete a takeover of the world, all they have to do is what they’re doing, teaching us how to speak their language, persuading us with what works to embrace their conventions.

Machines have taken a giant leap forward: they have learned how to speak in pictures! (Click images to enlarge.)Aquarius New Mar09 SouthStereographic

And once again, our cast of characters (for some reason, the Emu lies flat on his back when on the western horizon):Aquarius New Mar09 South

Thank you for joining our dialogue. This Digested Read was brought to you by Southern Hemisphere Astrology. Before you go, you might enjoy this brilliant interview with a prominent genius of code, the man behind Wolfram Research and the creator of Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, Stephen Wolfram. The ‘astrologer’ acknowledges his debt to edge.org.

Relativity: New Moon in Capricorn

10 Wednesday Feb 2016

Posted by abliq in Uncategorized

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Capricorn, New Moon, Relativism

What is it like to be inside an exile, someone outed for refusal to abide by the law, or cultural or conventional norms? Two contemporary issues might help to unpack this question: the right of homophobic parents to impose coherent, religious values on pubescent students at Safe Schools and the plight of Julian Assange.

Who is bullying whom in these stories? Is it possible to create a politics of fundamentally opposed moralities? And if so, will we all be exiles?

As all Moons must, the Exile of January returned yesterday to the harbour of the Sun. The dignity of the Sun in Capricorn offers a solution to exile and a new beginning: relativism.Capricorn New Feb09

This is the time of year when confidence and magnanimity should burgeon in our lives, whatever the impact of what they’re doing up North. If we are all different, then we can suspend judgment of transgressions of any particular morality. If we are all one, then those transgressions deepen our self-understanding, humanity and compassion.

However, it could be a rocky road for the Moon this month. The value of investments is falling through the floor. Putin and Assad are winning, and reassessment of the bona fides of their opposition looks easier than confrontation.

Can our self-belief survive its transparency as emptiness? It is high time we questioned the nature of authenticity. Is play the capacity to engage with instinct non-dualistically, or deluded will? Is the desire to come back to the fold an overcoming of narcissism or a clinging to conventional truth in face of the emptiness of ego?

As we embark with the Moon on a journey to connection dogged by confusion, and in passing from an apologetically cursory presentation of perhaps the most important issue of the time, this from Wikipedia on Relativism:

‘In an aphorism [Feyerabend] often repeated, “potentially every culture is all cultures”. This is intended to convey that world views are not hermetically closed, since their leading concepts have an “ambiguity” – better, an open-endedness – which enables people from other cultures to engage with them. […] It follows that relativism, understood as the doctrine that truth is relative to closed systems, can get no purchase. […] For Feyerabend, both hermetic relativism and its absolutist rival serve, in their different ways, to “devalue human existence”. The former encourages that unsavoury brand of political correctness which takes the refusal to criticise “other cultures” to the extreme of condoning murderous dictatorship and barbaric practices. The latter, especially in its favoured contemporary form of “scientific realism”, with the excessive prestige it affords to the abstractions of “the monster ‘science'”, is in bed with a politics which likewise disdains variety, richness and everyday individuality – a politics which likewise “hides” its norms behind allegedly neutral facts, “blunts choices and imposes laws”.’

Imagining a life spent hiding, from our sexuality, our aversion to somebody else’s, or as in the role-play of the Safe Schools program, the prominence of our teeth, what is confidence, these days?

R.I.P. Rene Alice Wolfe, my mother.

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