He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good And Evil, trans. Helen Zimmern.
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. Carl Sagan, Cosmos, Random House, 1980, p. 218.
Sagan highlighted our connection to the cosmos, but so what? All of us must make that apple pie for ourselves, or it is merely words to say that we are star-stuff. The name of our construction is like the name of God, beyond words, but I create mine myself as a panorama of language and emotion and finitude on the three-dimensional backdrop my senses give me, begging for more at the depth of a finger, and I call it Country. I create mine with every effort to resist the centrifugal force of forgetting and boredom, but it is not that resistance I will mourn as I die—how undignified a deathbed recantation of nihilism!—but the mountains, deserts and streams of my youth, the ache of love, the subject and source of beauty and humour and honour, the music of Dostoyevsky, Hardy and Faulkner, of Beethoven, Schubert and Mahler which my youthful heart immortalised as Humanity, and my own most familiar beauty which immortalized them. No, if there is nobody to hear it, there is no sound. And so, children of your own time, place your hands under my thigh when your time comes, and swear to leave your country, not somebody else’s, not your teacher’s say, or your doctor’s; and by that effort you will perpetuate mine.
What is your country, Migrant? Are you bringing it with you, or leaving it behind? Your resilience is not in question, but your instinct is. North and South are not hard to find, if you don’t confuse East and West with left and right. Just ignore your shadow if East must be where it was, left or right. It may be in front of you, screaming noon, but nobody need know you’re lost in their instinct. We all know the resentment of being peripheral, and relevant only to alien perspective, and that is not cause for anger. It remains that who you are is up to you to desire. Go ahead, create a new centre at the periphery. Whose? Those whose self-centredness stayed behind, or those whose reflections of you are your haunting, your country. The task is in front of you. Without stealing my country, without appropriating any earthly culture, with no reference to climate change or corona viruses or global panic and economic recession, I challenge you to reject me from your instinct: no seasons; no hours; no houses.
The Full Moon in sidereal Leo is in the Northern tropical sign of Virgo, close to Regulus, the star of the healing archangel Raphael, but redolent with Northern seasonal associations adapted from maiden aunt characteristics of shrewdness, clarity of thought, and orderliness. The strategy of conventional astrology is to announce the sign and its associated constellation, but this is quite unsatisfactory to someone watching the Moon and familiar with the night sky. It took me a long time as a stargazer to stop associating my natal Sun Sign Capricorn with Capricornus, and it was only when I did that I realized not only how a centaur may adapt to season drift, but how it inhabits the imagination on this side of the Equator too. Think of the terroir of European grapes transformed into wine in the Cambrian soils of Heathcote in the State of Victoria.
So it is with Leo. As astrology evolved, it drifted from the throne of Northern Midsummer, one month and then two, gradually adapting to its displacement by tempering its ferocity, overcoming its vanity and getting its palace in order for the Autumn of its ceremonial role. All the while, it has also adapted to the different latitudes astrology has colonised, including Australia. It is now the last constellation before the Northern Autumn Equinox, and downside up it is the last constellation of Winter. Just as importantly, it culminates in the night sky from dawn in January to dusk in June, and around midnight (Full Moon phase) in late February-early March.
‘To heal’ is both a transitive and intransitive verb. The Healer plays a role in a sequence. Following the Migrant, he represents all those who cannot find their way home, dispossessed of the time and place in which their culture made sense, trying to understand the personal effect of intergenerational acculturation and trauma. He is the lion playing possum, his identity the creation of a god who has disappeared, or worse, a pathfinder to an objective identity in relativity and chaos. The meaning of life is threatened by an unfamiliar cosmos. Mortally wounded self-medicator, he can do more harm than good.
I commune with St Michael the archangel, Royal Star and Watcher of the East, leader of the righteous against evil, assessor of souls and Guardian of the Vatican. Let not his presence be diminished by objectifying perspectives of human intellect, lest I be cast adrift in a soulless cosmos without a Creator. Let this moment reinforce my determination to atone for my egregious sins by defeating the evil in me now and always.
Relationship 4:30am Saturday, Breamlea. We know that the Moon is a satellite in a monthly orbit, but there are many things we don’t know which were meaningful once. For example, there is a Full Moon in Leo at the beginning of March every 19 years. How and with whom were you healing on March 2 in 1999 or 1980? This Moon might have related to your life in such a context until the Christian Church made such a fuss about keeping the Earth in the centre of God’s plan, that we transferred our faith to science, which has persuaded us that we are objects, not subjects, and who we are under the microscope is much more interesting than where the Moon is.
I succumb to temptation. Public condemnation of moral laxity in others is a good way of pulling the wool over the eyes, and its volume seems to match its hypocrisy. I know I am weak to be tempted by a naked body washing in the reeds by this river, but I also know that while most people pay lip-service to freedom, they are afraid of it. They disown their instincts, call them bad habits, something to be improved under counselling. Once I would have been on my way to a fortifying sermon. Now I say, grasp the moment: we’re a long time dead!
Boredom 9:26am Sunday, Breamlea. Impiety is an old-fashioned word, but it simply means lacking respect, and Saiph-gate suggests a connection between one person’s disrespect and another’s behaviour: written in the stars, according to me. I see Orion as an upside down hunter, but its more identifiable asterism in the South is the Saucepan: the sword of the Hunter is its handle. This is as impious as a hunter’s boot in the sacred waters of the Underworld, or indeed the Moon’s worship of a tributary of Arethusan urine. To pay proper respect to the fundamentalism of Southern adherence to Northern astrology, you must face south like a Northerner, and look behind you past the Zenith: you must crane your head to see what is there upside down. I have a T-shirt that says “No Fear”, which I wear as though designed inside out, so that it scans in the mirror. That’s country. Bending over backwards like an idiot is country too, and as is walking fully-clothed on a sandy beach, deserving of impiety.
My mood of self-loathing dissipates as families gather for their weekly get-together. Death holds no fear from this vantage point, since genes are reincarnated in grandchildren, and will be in theirs. I am unconscious of the genes of my ancestors, but they are artesian wells nourishing all growth and regrowth, I’m told.
Discrimination 6pm Sunday, Breamlea. Meaning comes from the Underworld, to which we follow signs. There are no signs of the Moon’s galactic alignment with the myth of the Lethe at this time of year in broad daylight, when the ancestors are clamouring like birds for our intuition, and so it has no meaning. It is a perfect, powerless forgetting.
Watching the clock. What is the point of the building of this or any wall, he says, Regulus, my most difficult wife. Choose friendship, Raphael the healer says. Trust. Carouse. Believe. Die.
“I am your friend, and not just I, but everyone has had her, the one you worship. I bring you this odorous revelation of how I see you, as the gullible ghost of my own victimhood, here at the business end of the right way up, in the spirit of friendship. Drink more water; know her urine and our shame.”
Ignorance 16:38 Thursday, Breamlea. Without empathy, being interior with another subject, there is no love. Without idealisation, playing exteriors with another object, there is no desire. Without power, the meaning of energy, there is no friendship. Should any one of these be abjured, or sought and not found, healing is a mirage.
Fear 4:30am Friday, Breamlea. Kyrie eleison: Lord, have mercy. Not a heart attack now, O Wounded Self of distant ceremony! I pray to thee, medical science of my Underworld, that thou wouldst worship me as thy Higher Self.
Deprivation 11:51am Friday, Breamlea. All hail the belligerent instinct of the Irish diaspora, the republican plaque in the heart of the British Empire, subsiding now in senescent history. May all the Irish blood in the indigenous peoples of the Antipodes circulate with more water, and be believed!
Relationship, 10:21am Friday, Yankunytjatjara and Pitjantjatjara Country. As above, so below. ‘Welcome to Country’ is an invitation into the spirit of place. I would offer it as meaningful subjectivity, which is healing, not divisive. History has a horizon: it languishes within the eyeball. My Country, on the other hand, as far as the eye can see and beyond, embraces an attitude to meaning: the seer and the scenery, the victim and the healer, penetrate each other in a way of being real which is unique and at the same time shared with every being which has bequeathed its vision and its dream. It is not the territory of one’s map. It is the otherness of one’s creation, the identity of one’s absence. It is nothing; it is the eternity of meaning. Thank you, Underworld healer, energy of my country.
Southern Hemisphere Astrology 