Doubt is the necessary condition for meaning, and the necessary condition for doubt is time, and specifically time’s experienced intervals. What measures your mindfulness and interrogates your ego? Habits? Addiction? Divorce and remarriage rate? Child milestones? Reunions? New Year’s Eve? For some of us it is Full Moons, and Saturn Returns. The longer the interval, the more abrupt and bittersweet our apprehension of the brevity of the time we have. Were we right?
In a week from now, a Great Conjunction will divide our lives into twenty-year chunks. For a very long time, observers of the cosmos like Kepler have understood that successive conjunctions occur roughly 120 degrees apart, so that every third return occurs in the vicinity of its forerunner, but advancing through the Zodiac by 4-10 degrees every 60 years. The previous occurrence of this triad took place in sidereal Sagittarius in 1961. A Grand Return, a full circle, takes 1767-8 years, by my calculations. The last time it occurred in the vicinity of this one was in February 253 CE, and before that, ‘February’ 1455 BCE. How much time have we got?
I will leave it to the Sun and Moon to tell us how long it takes for a Great Conjunction in sidereal Capricorn to coincide with a New Moon. I am content to leave it in doubt. This Moon will be near First Quarter.
The last time the New Moon occurred on December 14-15 at the tail-end of the Scorpion was in 2001, and the next will be in 2031, when we may have another eleven years to look back on, and maybe not. At nightfall tonight Jupiter and Saturn are less than half an outstretched fingertip apart.
Salta Noon
I doubt if anybody here still holds to the view that seasons have a fixed starting date and duration. Perhaps there are Australians who regard scorching-hot weather before December 1 as an aberration, and purists who don their summer outfits at the Solstice. I know there are many who believe the Northern Hemisphere tropical signs apply down here with some sort of transcendental cosmological impact, and many of you up there incorporate Southern Signs into a meaningful polarity. Pity those migratory birds who arrive down here in a drought! But do notice how Ascendant and Descendant play out in the Antipodes.
Heyuan Underworld Solar Midnight
Along with the doubt which plagues us at this time of year that the brilliancy of our appropriate gifts will be under-appreciated, we have become accustomed to the devaluation of the Christian festival which draws nigh, just as the Christians devalued pagan antecedents. But as we prepare for the insufferable rectitude of pubescent nephews and nieces, can we admit the ambiguity and indefinability of the seasons?
After all, as our youngsters are fond of pointing out, it’s 2020, and it’s we who’ve changed the seasons, and perhaps invalidated all Tropical Signs, North and South. Have we really changed the seasons? Let’s have recourse to the timeless wisdom of indigenous peoples, or are they now wrong too?
There are no seasons on the Moon, only day and night, lasting 13 1/2 days each, which can be described as bloody hot and bloody cold. Perhaps the siderealists are right: Signs are no more than myth and appearance. If we abolish the seasons from the Moon’s view of us, what remains?
Moon view at 173 celsius below.
So back where we start from, we persevere in creating the antidote to doubt. What the Great Conjunction means depends on the Sign it occurs in, which I leave to the vested interests. All I know is how small it makes me. Country is time distilled. Will 2020, and the disadvantage its catastrophes have imposed at the margins, never end?
The mechanism at the root of community is rectitude, confected as integrity and projected in hateful battle with any recalcitrant other which threatens its compensation. Rectitude stares at corruption and does not recognise its own reflection. Unable to find this mechanism in the self, rectitude finds itself starkly revealed in the face of the enemy. The Bardo of madness seethes with it.
Sun and Moon are conjunct in the Constellation of Libra, once the home of self-knowledge and -mastery, but consigned by the retrograde march of the seasons to the Sign of the Scorpion, whose assertiveness is better unopposed. In the South, its seasonal attributes are of the Bull. Not for nothing do we accuse each other of bullshit.
Of course, what the world of others tells you is not all lies, if you’re listening. I don’t wish to argue with you about Astrological Houses, you who make a living from imposing alien perspectives on Southern skies, but just look at the correspondence of the astro.com traditional chart of the birth of the Australian Commonwealth and compare it with a Stellarium view.
Turn the traditional numbering of the Houses back to front and upside down and they correspond. And what choice does astrology have? To show the Ascendant on the left to anyone orientated to the North looks like deliberate and self-defeating obfuscation!
The Southern way of going, if we imagine the first Spring Constellation in the First House, with the other Constellations arrayed anti-clockwise across the sky from East on the right to West on the left, introduces some strange yet resonant bedfellows to the self-defensive mind (Southern Signs in italics):- I TEMPERAMENT Virgo Perfection Aries II FORTUNE Leo Discrimination Pisces III INTELLECT Cancer Paranoia Aquarius IV REPUTATION Gemini Relativity Capricorn V ATTACHMENT Taurus Fear Sagittarius VI CONSTRAINT Aries Self-Development Scorpio VII RELATIONSHIP Pisces Aggression Libra VIII CHANGE Aquarius Relationship Virgo IX ASPIRATION Capricorn Deprivation Leo X REALIZATION Sagittarius Boredom Cancer XI HOPE Scorpio Ignorance Gemini XII MYSTERY Libra Seriousness Taurus
But, hey! Let’s not mess around with what works! Let’s not play with this confirmation bias thing lest tuning its relationship with what is really happening create identity issues, gender dysphoria or any number of other neurological implasticities. But ask yourself this question, ‘What is my intention in taking astrology seriously?’ And play with the answer, that regardless of the time of day, I may be stuck in the Twelfth House, and all you others may be holograms, projected from my Underworld memory without anyone’s consent.
Would you speak of objective empathy? The objective ‘soul of America’? An objective definition of your community? Of course not! But in fact, politicians, journalists and academics make utterances every day which assume you can. We are so accustomed to the use of such terms as ‘multi-cultural’, ‘global’, ‘universal human rights’ ‘culture’ and ‘community’ that we don’t question them. It’s time we remembered that economic and political systems are powered by individual activity. Naturally, since we are saturated by relationship, we are stimulated by a sense of relativity, but our activity does not occur in a systemic context unless it first occurs in a personal space. The dismantling of personal space is a human disaster. This, and any statement which generalizes from the particular, should occasion extreme doubt.
When the Sun and Moon come together in Breamlea Scorpio, this means, as far as can be practicably obtained in an equal division of the ecliptic by twelve, that the conjunction occurs against the background of astronomically-defined Scorpius, which the Sun enters in the last month of northern hemisphere autumn, and so carries the sign of the archer Sagittarius. In the southern hemisphere it carries the sign of the last month of equinoxially-defined spring, Gemini, the sign of over-thinking, intellectual constructs and mind-games. The relativity of northern and southern seasons is a mind-game, as is the relativity of solar and lunar calendars, and the imposition of boundaries in the sky by astronomers and astrologers. Be aware of being in your head, and be cautious of letting others get in there and play with it.
The spirit of the law is disobedience, therefore do not speak of cultural relativity and universal human rights in the same breath. That is a contamination. Being is becoming. Evangelism is not proselytism; love is not therapy. If Spirit beckons to the wilderness, Ideology belongs in the marketplace, not the mosques and law-courts.
Look upon the multitude of zombies who have lost the capacity to follow signs from a ‘within’, and instead, heads reeling with post-truth shock, set their course between different analytical impossibilities. Are you in this state? Is the next chapter of your life story so predictable, because your calling is ‘within’ a shape? Is your Tree of Life fully formed? You just haven’t finished painting all the leaves? Is doubt a blight on those leaves? Emptiness a one-way ticket to boredom and death? This is a lack of faith in the perpetual becoming of the self, the nurture of a pot-bound purchase from the nursery. The ego remains in charge of consciousness in a sort of secular agnosticism.
The sane person–any being overwhelmed by the suffering of the world and alive to the real and pressing predicament of their own finitude–who seeks salvation ‘within’, creates a relationship to the world, to outward appearances, by doubting logic, moulding reality to suit desire. Such madness, if madness it is, is truly founded in a nobility, even a sanctification of suffering. The more common madness makes suffering a malady. The ego doubts the self because it doesn’t like the view out the window. Between the magical realms of body and society it finds only a wound. The madness of the therapeutic solution to suffering pathologizes passionate love as limerence and anxiety as hormonal imbalance. The madness of activism, the political solution to suffering, destroys the validity of the ‘social inclusion’ and ‘cultural property’ it glorifies in minority by stigmatizing ‘elitism’, ‘racism’ and ‘fascism’. Sanity doubts all of this, surely?
Location, location, location! That the position of the Moon against the background stars affect its influence, I doubt. I doubt too the phases of the Moon: when and where do they exist? But I do not doubt that the Moon transits, and is in every instant transiting somewhere. The Gates give me a frame of reference to our Earth’s rotation more tangibly instantaneous and real than the Moon’s elongation from the Sun. In this instance, I like the balance of the instant at which South Africa, and all who share her meridian, lead the way into the new month:
Years are marked by the slow precession of the Moon’s nodes through the constellations. This has been the year the Moon has risen above the Ecliptic in Aquarius and fallen in Leo, a sign to me that we can be such perfectionists that we are inclined to overlook new connections which are not logical, seeing their potential as messy rather than liberating. We have dealt with issues in a relativist sort of way, but we have been blind to obvious signs of ‘our’ elitism and ‘their’ resentful conformity. The geometry of difference has imploded.
A sign is not merely a piece of evidence, like another piece of an academic jigsaw puzzle, a climate statistic, or the elongation of the Moon. It is totally subjective. It is almost a gravitational force, drawing an absolute necessity from somewhere deep inside a being’s sense of itself towards growth, connection, union, realization. Eureka! Epiphany! The world of reason and the law is an exoskeletal structure, but living, breathing reality is a lingering, lurking pulsation of signs.
What are the signs at top and bottom of the chart above? They may be the scented breath of a wind from the east, a seeking of the significance of the force which draws the Moon, the Sun and wandering stars inexorably in that direction. Alternatively, they may register the ownership of the universe by the human spirit. The character of the stars can and ought to be disputed, but that they have no character is a claim made by someone watching too much TV. These signs of the labelled stars and their underworld opposites indicate a geometrical reality, not of the Solar System, but of the observer’s instant in relation to time and geography. They connect continents, hemispheres and populations by meridian to their underworld being. They are gates of subjectivity standing on opposite sides of the globe punctuating this mental month as a personal, post-truth Moon passes through going eastward.
Part The First
Chapter 1
Where is the Bangladesh-India Border? Between ethnicities? Languages? Religions? Who inhabits an Indian enclave within a Bangladeshi enclave within an Indian enclave within a Bangladeshi region? Where does Pegasus end and Andromeda begin? Where are the astronomical attributes of Alpha Andromedae? Spectrographic printout? Somewhere in space? The time of the printout? Of the emissions? How can a constellation be defined? How can Alpheratz not be ambiguous? It appears in a flying horse as well as a chained sacrifice.
If you can imagine yourself up on the cross, “Verklaerung”* (Transfiguration) is directly above you, and flanking it are the alternative directions of spirituality: the ecstacy and heightened awareness of “Sinistra”* (Delta Centauri), and the asceticism and moral rectitude of “Destra”* (Epsilon Centauri). Which do you choose when you are a prisoner enslaved to the construction of The Wall of Tears? Which leads to survival? Whose cries do tourists in the Galapagos hear?
*”Breamlea” nomenclature.
Chapter 2
Young indigenous offender, what has robbed you of the enjoyment of life and set your heart among the briars of your mind? What deity has initiated you into perpetual deprivation?
Seek him in the break on Brazil’s shore. He is a natural force, a cycle, a habit; but in the Underworld, he is the memory to unlearn. Only you might crest that wave.
Chapter 3
Gazing out into the dark sea from your module in the launch stage of Punta Pacifica, you do appear to have presence. Where will you land? Will you choose, mythical minotaur of the labyrinth of capital?
Is it by transcending the ego that you will overcome fear, anxiety and despair? Or is mindfulness a detour around your infantile defences against failure, loss and finitude?
