• About

Southern Hemisphere Astrology

~ Turning astrology the right way up…

Southern Hemisphere Astrology

Tag Archives: Pessimism

Convention: New Moon in Sidereal Aquarius

23 Sunday Feb 2020

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Antipodes, Aquarius, Climate Change, Convention, Country, Full Earth, Leo Earth, New Moon, Pessimism, Underworld

“Defeat, my Defeat, my deathless courage,
You and I shall laugh together with the storm,
And together we shall dig graves for all that die in us,
And we shall stand in the sun with a will,
And we shall be dangerous.” from “Defeat“, by Kahlil Gibran.

One of the first conventions we learn as infants is that the difference between zero and one is the same as the difference between nine and ten. Who knows how many tens of millennia we took to dismantle the convention that the difference between zero and one is infinite? What is ‘country’, as I use the term, if not an attempt to restore the sacred awe implicit in that ancient convention? Of course, conventions have ever been challenged by the truth. If, after half a millenium, our horoscopes are still governed by Northern Hemisphere seasons, and we still have trouble recognizing the Zodiac because its Constellations are upside down, don’t blame me.

Aquarius New Brazil Near Brasilia Feb23

However, it is not truth, but convention, not righteousness, but compassion, which hold communities together, especially when they originate from all over the world. A lot of healing is in progress: it has been a summer out of hell across Australia, grief never far beneath the surface. Community resilience is not in question, or the courage and kindness of good neighbours from all over the country and the world, but in the debate worldwide about how to prevent a repeat, it is difficult not to hear the same divided bickering that characterizes our efforts to deal with the racist, sexist and colonialist conventions we were all made of.

Aquarius New Brazil Near Brasilia Underworld Feb23

Has not the extant population of Earth, like a forest held together by subterranean fungus, arrived at an optimism, a raison d’être, a motivation for getting out of bed, deriving from a sense of powerlessness normally associated with depression, which is invisible, and ultimately unbelievable? Are we not, like a wind turbine in a coal-driven economy, or an ego in a yoga routine, going through the motions? Does not the survival of humanity beyond the next generation lurk in the legacies of the beneficiaries of our last wills and testaments, framed and interpreted by nobody who ever understood or respected the pain we old ones put the world through?

Aquarius New Philippine Sea Feb24

Pessimism looks like another secret to keep from our grandkids. How much easier that would be if they just had partners who preferred refined white bread because they ate it as children, revered secrets because their mothers were narcissists, and also cannot wait to get the kids out of the house for the sake of some me-time. Pessimism looks like a race to see who grows up first, the coffin we need to lose a huge amount of weight to fit into, in the grey area between one and zero. Hey kids, the song of the magpie out there means another perfect day! Off you go now.

Aquarius New Full Earth in Leo

One day, we might agree that hope and heartache both start with the same letter as hallelujah and hell, but apparently not yet. In the meantime, it’s in country I need to recover some equanimity, lest I go conventionally mad somewhere between nine and ten.

 

Frivolity: New Moon in Sagittarius

29 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Frivolity, Identity, Imagination, Pessimism, Sagittarius, Sagittarius New Moon, Southern Hemisphere Astrology

The human artefact known as the Gregorian Calendar, measuring to the second the Earth’s orbit of the Sun, indicates the pending completion of another year. Coincidentally, the Moon is completing another of its ‘orbits’. (See YouTube for a description of the real relative motion of Sun, Earth and Moon.) What meaning, if any, can be ascribed to this coincidence?

sagittarius-new-noon-riet-india

When the Sun and Moon come together in the Southern Sign of the imagination it should presage something wonderful, an empowerment of dreams, or an oceanic coalescence of individualities. But its opposite number is a tendency towards going our own way, by force if necessary, or by confronting entreaties to compromise as attacks on our defences. We all want peace, but we cannot submit to each other. This is Sagittarius, where humanity grows from the Umwelt, and where subjectivity reigns supreme, yet how readily does the hobbled divine in us genuflect to angels we should actually no longer empower, in the form of facts, and identities!

sagittarius-new-ra-snapshot-breamlea-dec29

Is there anything to be grateful for as 2016 closes to us? Not only was it a political disaster for most people, and a humanitarian disaster for too many, it was also a year in which many of our generations’ icons died. How are we reacting? The North hunkers down for winter as the sidereal Sun ruminates on charisma and independence to lead it from its mess, but it is the season of withdrawal and pessimism. In the South we have entered summer beyond the redemptive rituals of a Christmas which dare not speak its name. Identities divide us, and people of Science and people of Holy Books continue to confound each other with their incapacity to identify facts and words as metaphor! Will the New Year bring renewal of optimism that equanimity, turning our other cheek and submitting to Allah will produce world peace; or that democracy will emerge through education and without hatred and bloody conflict to wrest freedom and autonomy from the tyranny of economic interest; or that the institutional denial of autonomy to parents to influence their children will end bullying, produce gender fluidity, end discrimination and demonstrate a hierarchy of values after all? Or are we not flies caught in the web of someone else’s inadequate ideas?

Pessimism is the gateway to frivolity: delinquency is a healthy experimentation in semiosis; sub-cultures transform nothingness–definable in terms of habituated exclusivity–into emptiness, and promote the location of a non-individuated personality in a flux of interpenetrating matrices of meaning. Southern Hemisphere Astrology is pessimistic about a wider promulgation of its iconoclasm in 2017. Sabotage will continue to be perceived in terms of the ‘things’ removed; only those already engaged in an interplay of self and world as metaphor will enjoy my perspective-play, and my power to persuade readers to relish the beautiful emptiness of astrology will continue to languish. Nonetheless, I will persevere as a hooligan in the Rimbaud style.

rabbi-ul-thani-dec31

The imagination belongs to nobody, certainly not identity! Never cease from its game! Neither culture, nor history, nor parents are the wellspring of your personality, but rather this very imagination forever impregnating itself beyond the rules of fidelity to mere habit and infantile self! Yes, congratulations are in order if you have saved yourself from the snares of anger, blame and innocence in this tumultuous year. But have you? If so, be honest, the imagination says, you did not do it, but I.

Imagination is not a component of intelligence measurable by experiment, but the ground of being, the capacity of all living things to embody, and respond to, signs. Signs are not only systemic, but chosen! My imagination chooses me! But what if it doesn’t? What if I claim imagination as my own? Patent it? Entitle myself to its royalties? The Moon is nothing if not a cry of freedom from the Other’s patent. The Sun is the formative impulse; the Moon is subjectivity, the source of form’s undoing by its alternatives. It is our imagination which owns the Moon, and as truly, the Moon and we are owned by owls and frogs, rocks and tides, the dead and unborn!

What if I mistake the Moon for the Sun, discover and fetishize an identity entitled to control and permanence? Then I doom myself to pessimism, and its mirror-image, frivolity: ‘I’ cannot win, or in ordinary terms, my path through the thickets of reckless pseudo-confidence yelling, “Shit happens” at every hurtful bump leads inexorably to the belief in nothing, even the impossibility to believe in anything, including ‘me’. But anything, even nothing, is preferable to the shame of being powerless, of having no third way between tolerating the intolerable and invoking the letter of laws which have no spirit I command.

veteran-transits-sydney-2017

The lunar nodes cycle of avoidance and focus will morph in 2017 (May in Southern Hemisphere Astrology) into a challenge to play with the cultural lineaments of constraint and control. Every time I see the Moon riding high above the recalcitrant Ram I will recall the rampage of the Aleppo Bull, and not the presence of the Bull in a manger. I hope we have learned by then the difference between play and frivolity. Let’s drink to seriousness! Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die! Surely a massive hangover will do the trick?

Subscribe

  • Entries (RSS)
  • Comments (RSS)

Archives

  • January 2023
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015

Categories

  • Astral Gates
  • Bardo
  • Breamlea Zodiac
  • Emu
  • Jupiter
  • Kaballah
  • Milky Way
  • Moon Phases
  • Pop Psychology
  • Seasons
  • Stargazing
  • Tales
  • The South
  • Uncategorized
  • Underworld
  • Vertex

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Southern Hemisphere Astrology
    • Join 80 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Southern Hemisphere Astrology
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...