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Southern Hemisphere Astrology

Tag Archives: Precession

The Healer: Full Moon in Cancer

29 Friday Jan 2021

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Altruism, Astral Attributes, Australia Day, Bardo, Cancer Moon, Forgetting, Healer Moon, Healing, Idealism, Indigenous Seasons, Invasion Day, Kyrie, Milky Way, Praesepe, Precession, Southern Cross, Southern Tropical Aquarius, Tropical Leo

Well! The Moon is right in its element above our divided world this phase! Somewhere in the wilderness of tropical timekeeping, Cancer, as an angular distance from the Spring Equinox, may today attach itself to Gemini or Sagittarius, but as a Constellation, though it adopt the Sign of Leo or Aquarius, it remains a crab, the home of Praesepe, the Beehive Cluster, the Manger, the Crib. And the principle function of the Moon is to nurture, isn’t it? And what, may we ask, as we awaken to our utter helplessness as humanoids, needs nurture more than ‘Healing’?

Healing, like Praesepe, when your sky is dark enough to see it, is an island. Cancer is a homestead in the desert, aerially disclosing the feint tracks of its organism; it is the digestive system of a spider on a web, waiting. Can it be found in the Strait of Hormuz, or the South China Sea? No, the Island of Healing lies in an ocean vaster than the Milky Way, beyond the cosmic shards of objectivity, totality and truth and other attributes of wholeness which progressive education, in the name of critical theory, moral relativism and Buddhism 101, has shattered. Should you desire to go there without drugs, you will join an interminable queue, for the bureaucrats in the ticket office demand evidence that mental illness has been officially processed. Leaving the world a better place wasn’t meant to be easy. Wholeness without allness? Oh well, sleepwalking in country might have to suffice for authenticity.

What preceded the Big Bang? When was time created? How important was the cataclysm which resulted in the Moon’s momentum? How smug was the ecological niche vacated by the dinosaurs? The dynamism of Earthly gravity and Lunar momentum embodies an encouragement to the timeless legion healing physical or emotional discomfort, the evolution of habitat, and the loneliness of gender duality: Cancer is the partner of Capricorn, and to imagine perfect harmony with the Other as Self is not neediness, but humanity. Is it stretching it too far to suggest momentum to be the healing of gravity, and gravity to be the healing of momentum?

Welcome to Late-Summer island country, girls and boys. Aldebaran, the star of presence, is crossing the Meridian in south-east mainland Australia at nightfall this week. The Emu is rising. “We’ll all be healed,” said Hanrahan. The Covenant is serious business, and by dawn, beyond paranoia: the Southern Cross is scarecrowing into the Bardo of Relativity.

It is the third day after Invasion Day here, or Australia Day as it was once known. We invaders have the unenviable task of healing the legacy of our ancestors, those primitives who believed that the culture of the people who were living here when they arrived was even more primitive than theirs, and whose dogged effort to transform country into a country bequeathed us everything we own. ‘Sorry for buying stolen goods’ doesn’t cut it. We must heal our dependence on authority, integrity and trust, on our comfort, our recreation, our individual identity. How else can ‘all’ and ‘permanent’ not exist? And indigenous Australians must heal too, not only from dispossession, but from their inheritance of child abuse and family violence. We must ‘all’ heal the primitive societies which spawned us whole, when absolutes like ‘permanence’ and ‘wholeness’ still existed.

Is there a way to heal being born? Should we, can we, disown our birth trees? Indigenous cultures remember what individualism forgot: that property is only a right if it is also a duty. Insularity may well market itself as wholeness, but it merely transforms any temptation to identify property and value into a mortgage. Having submitted to ownership of the village by outsiders, we orbit duty to shareholders and our momentum is the right to take a second and third job. The Moon’s orbit embodies a more benign healing: of gravity versus momentum. If only our healing were eternal like his. If only we were rocks. Yes, there he is, our guru, above his birth tree, in his own world, trading shamelessly in reflected light futures.

January Moon in Gemini: The Veteran

10 Friday Jan 2020

Posted by abliq in Moon Phases

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Acheron, Climate, Dasein 2020, Dementia, Lethe, Mental Health, Precession, Salvation, Veteran Moon

‘”…Jorge feared the second book of Aristotle because it perhaps really did teach how to distort the face of every truth, so that we would not become slaves of our ghosts. Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.”

“…The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless…”‘ Umberto Eco, The Name Of The Rose, Picador, 1984.

The veteran finds he can remember the name of everyone in his high school class, but cannot remember taking his blood-pressure pill today. As he reads the news of the world going to hell in a handbasket, who is manipulating whose doubt in democracy’s inclusivity, and who is crowdfunding what ego trip, he admires the new methods of driving forward what feels like it must be done, but he cannot remember much about what that was in his own youth. He imagines a reunion of his high school class dividing into contact groups asked to explore one question, ‘What happened?’ How did you lose all your money? How did you rise to those dizzy heights over there? How did you raise five children and foster nine more, alone? How did you interpret the platitudes of the sixties and seventies to make yourself that best self you committed yourself to find after school? In straggling formation like cockatoos, squawking eternity across the timeless vault, they would possibly share an inexpressible need to absent themselves from their children’s resentment, but would be unable to articulate what in the moment they would need to adapt … in these terms, my darling grandchildren, you achieved greatness merely by getting here!

Veteran Moon Haifa Jan10

Upon what glistening trackside web in the light of dawn shall time, the flight of its captives, zigs or zags, be transfixed? The zigs and zags of the veteran similarly flutter no more. He remembers the past as the foundation of its future, but karma in each instant depends on karma in the next. The future is indeterminate; the present is a polynomial guess, whether the climate emergency means you, or you mean it. The distinction may already be between a zig and a zag.

As humanity begins to fall apart, the Veteran Moon wonders at the meaning of his velocity, his phases, his background and his gravity. Humans have created history, society, science and religion out of cultures of meaning, which is a great achievement on the face of it, since the meaning of all phenomena, the Moon and your heart, for example, only phenomenologically exist. Rights and duties, and genders, for that matter, circle each other like pugilists, as the planets circle the Earth, and the Sun.

Veteran Anniversary Haifa Sky 11101BCE

Perhaps you don’t believe in Gaia, but what of the sea and the sky? You may not believe in God, but what of awe, and your vocation and your muse? How do you define your family? How do they define you? Meaning is the situation you create for yourself, your country, in that existential terrain which sustains your interest. Poof! One day it will be gone. How can it have been so important? How will the next generation of veterans define an ingenue? Does your judgment of your elders mean anything? What does it mean to be on the verge of extinction?

Religions abound which offer authoritative measures of the meaning of life, and have ever done so. And as surely, the doctors of the spirit have never shirked from the issues of suffering, fear and despair. Salvation is at hand, cry the wellness spruikers of today, on a million social websites, in the form of answers to questions like, ‘who am I?’ and ‘what shall be my legacy?’, or ‘how may I cling eternally to something which will survive me?’ On the other hand if, unlike Southern Hemisphere Astrology, you believe the rock of permanence is best left unturned for the red-back spider it will disclose, there’s a tour for that, and it heads out well after dawn.

Veteran Moon Zomba Jan10

As for the Full Moon near the ‘June Solstice’, the Elder or Veteran in Gemini, it resonates with the overarching values of human community, forgiveness and compassion, because on the other side of the world from the Sun’s woe, it’s the Moon’s job to say, “Keep going, it’s all downhill from there.” Trouble is, 866 crossings of the Lethe to the Sun’s 70 doesn’t make the Moon an authority, it just makes him mathematically correct, one who has done it all, including compassion, without remembering how.

What is the nature of the reality in which an Earthling’s local perspective can find meaning in geometrical intersections of galactic and orbital planes which are no more visible than the Stone Age in an urban streetscape, or a name for someone’s awe? What cannot be disproven by algorithms such as I use, whose formulae are based on polynomial expressions of previous observations, is the good fortune of Earthlings in 1998 CE that the Sun’s crossing of the Lethe did not exactly coincide with the June Solstice (difference 6 minutes), the New Moon (difference 3 days) or the North Node (difference 2 constellations), because the coincidence of all four would have wiped out all memory, tipped the magnetic poles and caused 10m tides, catastrophic floods and bushfires, and hundreds of thousands of fatalities in collisions of aircraft with each other and with migrating birds.

Dasein 2020

For me, there can be no more satisfactory explanation of contemporary utopian, even soteriological, notions of secular safety, mental and physical health, and identity and personal improvement, than that Earthlings are learning less and less about more and more, and more and more about less and less, resulting in widespread distribution of ingenues who know nothing about everything and veterans who know everything about nothing.

“Dear Lord, may this stone, a symbol of my efforts on the pilgrimage that I lay at the feet of the cross of the Savior, weigh the balance in favor of my good deeds that day, when the deeds of all my life are judged. Let it be so. Amen.” Emilio Estevez, The Way, Elixir Films, 2010.

Populism: New Moon in Taurus

14 Thursday Jun 2018

Posted by abliq in Milky Way, Moon Phases

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Ancestors, Anger, Bicamerality, Country, Despair, Emptiness, Galactic Plane, Populism, Precession, Taurus New Moon, Vocation

“…can you remember the last time life felt long or kind, or like it was yours and mine?” Maria Tumarkin, Axiomatic.

In the beginning was country, and then when gods learned language, the Word. In the end it may be Neurolinguistics. Most of us get our first glimpse of country when our child’s eyes begin to see who we are not, and we begin to embrace a role on their stage, sitting in the darkened audience. As I’ve said, I am in it when it is what will vanish with my death, but when I drive through the rent wilderness of suburbs under construction I recognize a future country in which I am absent, in which my sense of the beauty of these new emptinesses, these fraught playgrounds of a new generation, is absent too.

Taurus New Lismore Jun14

Like all New Moons which occur in the second fortnight of a tropical month, this one sets the psyche on a path to enlightenment which will resonate to rumblings in the underworld affecting its impetus and destination. Just as we experience the transformation of a project’s potential according to the attitude we bring to it, which changes from day to day, hour to hour, the Moon’s orbit and ours can never be pinned down. This month begins on the Gemini-Sagittarius tropical axis but in five days the Sun will enter sidereal Gemini (in the Breamlea Zodiac), at 87.45° ecliptic longitude (next year 87.46° etc.), or a smidgeon wider than a finger-width east of Alheka; in eight days, it will change its tropical stripes to Cancer-Capricorn. These are geometric conventions.

Of course, none of this is visible, and if the point has to made, nothing is. Not the Earth’s motion, or even the apparent diurnal motion of the Sun, though we notice it in different parts of the sky. At least we see the Sun, you might say, and of course that phrase, ‘we see the Sun’ has meaning; there is a seeing happening, it cannot be denied. But who is doing it is a linguistic convention, and so is what is being seen. All things, including the identity of the seer, are made facts by language. Beyond what we can say about ourselves and the entities of our existence, there is emptiness, nothing which can be put into words.

Taurus New Beirut Jun13

And put into words it is, -Isms of every stripe. Muhammad said: “No, carry on doing good deeds, for everyone will find it easy (to do) such deeds that will lead him towards that for which he has been created.” (Surah al-Lail 92:5-7.) There is a holiness about the Good, when the words of one’s inner voice are echoing in the soul of millions. The intersectionality of social forces invokes a call to arms, but first sociology has wrapped the warrior in its embrace of intelligent design, its Night of Power. The appeal of submission to ‘respair’ is seductive. Kierkegaard had a good crack at defining despair, as the failure to obey one’s calling, and what could be more crippling than to hear none, to inherit the silence of the Omniscient, to be busy, constrained, obedient and good, to be free, to have an identity, to shout anything in the emptiness of finitude, to be the Word of no god?

They say that populism, defined as an appeal to the spirit of a people to revolt against the rule of an elite, began to mushroom in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. I might equally say, for the sake of argument, that its first rumblings began in 1998, ten years earlier, and isn’t it the way of awareness, to take ten years from trendy epiphany to filter into the lowest social strata? Isn’t it the organism’s way of enhancing its existence, protecting itself and maintaining homeostasis, to notice a change, to instinctively react, and to modify its operation according to the responses it generates?

Forgetting Winter Solstice Clock Gladstone 1998

Be that as it may, the crossing of the rivers of Hades is another factor which complicates the passage of this Moon to Opposition. Of course it means nothing to the elite, just another superstition, like ‘the spirit of the people’, or the collective unconscious. ‘As above, so below,’ what a lot of ‘rubbish’, (not in the least ‘cheeky’). The common people can’t even see the stars these days, let alone the Milky Way. Wouldn’t that mean, ‘extinguished above, collectively unconscious below’? But it can surely be admitted to have passing mathematical interest, that the nodes where galactic equator and ecliptic intersect, while increasing in longitude by 180° in 13,000 odd years, haven’t noticeably changed in galactic perspective.

Miserere Jericho 10088 BCE

It’s really quite amazing that, although absolutely everybody through the ages has reacted angrily to trespass across their boundaries, which the shamans, astronomers and philosophers have always been trusted to arbitrate—even marginality has status—that the science of change is still without a myth in which we can live separately and respectfully in an enlightened Now connecting us to the vivid lives of our ten thousand generations of beauty and truth.

Kyrie Ruma 1300BCE

If I wrote that during the Late Bronze Age the shamans of Thrace drew power from the convergence of two phenomena, the summer to autumn procession overhead of the ancestors in a straight line joining due east and west, and their orderly winter to spring return to the underworld, and that during the Iron Age a great schism developed between those migrating northward to preserve the power of the former and the others migrating southward to preserve the power of the latter, according to the direction the roof of heaven was moving, you would interpret it as fantasy. If, on the other hand, I asserted that Neolithic awareness of celestial change was reassured by the faith that explanations were possessed by specialists who could thereby justify their status and upkeep, you might accept that as a confabulation of the birth of metallurgy and astrology, or of the emergence of propaganda in the service of political exploitation, in short, populism.

Miserere Ruma 1300BCE

Tropical astrology has largely succeeded in confounding the intellect to the extent that most associate their ‘birth-signs’, which the popular press has portrayed as fundamental to their personalities, with the asterisms of the same name, and the association of the Constellations with the seasons, which 2000 years ago was so real to Ptolemy, has been mystified, with the end result that even when we’re reading our horoscope on the train, we’re on the outside looking in.

NGP Transit Athens Year Dot

It took until quite recently to insert emotion into economic value. Zoe Williams has written about anger cycles and Kondratiev Waves: “Anger is remarkable not in and of itself, but when it becomes so widespread that it feels like the dominant cultural force.”
“The causes documented by Kondratiev waves, primarily include inequity, opportunity and social freedoms; although very often, much more discussion is made of the notable effects of these causes as well.  Effects are both good and bad and include, to name just a few, technological advance, birthrates, revolutions/populism—and revolution’s contributing causes which can include racism, religious or political intolerance, failed-freedoms and opportunity, incarceration rates, terrorism and similar.” {Wikipedia, Kondratiev Wave.) Are cycles of this kind self-regulating, or are the shamans still with us, filling us with righteous indignation at trespass of boundaries whose limits they continue to control with cultural indoctrination? Are we pawns in a war amongst shamans, or are we merely oblivious to how easy our instincts are to hack for a living? Perhaps the revolution has arrived, but I think not. Love is not in the air, so it’s much more likely that the anger boiling around us is simply paying shamans’ wages.

The ancestors are indeed alive and well in the bardo, as attested to by today’s sensitivity towards cultural appropriation, and perhaps it is out of reverence for such wisdom as, “It never rains at a Full Moon”, that a few of us pay astrology heed. On the other hand, the resilience of the ancestors may show in the inheritance of chirality, or the danceability of songs of woe and forgetting. And while you’re rummaging in the Underworld for the voice of Harpocrates, what a child means with a finger deserves a rethink.

 

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