Have you ever been told to lighten up? Then you know the meaning of ‘frivolity’: letting go, moving on, getting over it, getting a life.
Frivolity is a question, not a statement, a New Year’s resolution you have no capacity to keep to, whether you know it or not. It’s the quality of the change to Australia’s national anthem from “We are young and free,” to “We are one and free,” when you’re broke and marooned outside your state by sudden and remorseless Coronavirus lockdowns.
Adherents to the settler narrative of Australian history and sympathisers with indigenous dispossession have been yelling “Get a life!” at each other for decades, and who knows which side is Morlocks and which side is Eloi? Finally, the issue has been resolved, along with the implications of absurdity our foretaste of Armageddon flings at our compulsive drive to be someone else.
The good burghers of a community in Queensland have invited the Moon down from the south to join with the elders Jupiter and Saturn, and the social media influencer Mercury, to help celebrate the day Sarina rejoins the Southern Hemisphere and brings Australia as one a day closer. All over town posters are advertising the upending of astrological meaning and the trivialisation of winter-sign intentions. Only those with permits will be allowed to enter from the north from midnight when police from Mackay and Rockhampton will glare at each other across a formidable barricade. But it’s not really an imposition on anyone’s freedom, just a harmless bit of fun: on Bramble Cay Day, February 25, every Australian will be south of the karma police blockade!
It is early in the morning of the year. We go abroad with faith alive in us, but let us not confuse the task of nurturing our faith with the insanity of perfection. If no amount of mindfulness can discourage you from striving to improve yourself, do try not to be motivated to be better than me. Keep faith not only with hope, but with anxiety, not only with imagination, but with dread. It is not wise to erect confidence on the entertainment of your judges, nor on the vanity of self-worth. The world of power and the subservient self are what they are, not what they ought to be.
Without in any way seeking to trivialise the sentiments of the previous paragraph, but also without further ado, let us sashay on into 2021 with those memorable words resounding in our aerodynamic Dumbo flaps: a day without a good belly-laugh is a day wasted!
“Superfluous lags the vet’ran on the stage…”, Samuel Johnson, l. 308, The Vanity of Human Wishes, 1749, derived from Juvenal, Satire X.
Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations: ask thy father, and he will shew thee; thy elders, and they will tell thee. Deuteronomy 32:7, King James Bible.
It’s no use. The Veteran cannot hide from the truth. It’s not just that his triumph in Northern skies comes in the middle of a Coronavirus-infested winter, as humanity struggles to celebrate the turning of the year with breaking heart, or that in Southern skies his diminutive opposition to a searing Sun needs the compensation of the un-moonlit symmetry of the Eurocentric mythical Twins to impress, but having crossed the Lethe immediately before syzygy, he realizes in his curtain call only the magnitude of the reintegration which lies ahead for the audience (who are yet oblivious to the Acheron River which daytime has just crossed), and the possibility that he no longer has the will to help. Oh God, not more feelings!
On the other hand, the Veteran has died and been reborn so many times that the Bardo provides his second name: “The Hell You Say!” The Tenth Bardo House of Boredom is one he particularly enjoys, where the cleansing of the Lethe affords him the luxury of staring out of the window of the Northern Tropical Indolence bus on his way to Total Withdrawal, paying no attention to dark continents rolling him around their clocks. His fellow-passengers cannot wait to get off: being bored is akin to being boring; the emissions from the bus out-thrust its propulsion; grasping is mindfully consuming acceptance; and forests of wild viruses are being cleared for the graduation of sated ignorance. “We must alight at centre-stage,” they cry. Not the Veteran. He is indifferent to the footlights, and to his demotion from a starring role for the next twenty-four times he appears on this stage: you will not see a Full Moon in Gemini (the Constellation) until January 2023.
What tortuous labyrinths of despair might just squeeze a sleeper up to the surface? What convulsions of suppressed hatred, what intestinal convolutions of corruption and deliberate pain? What catacombs of memory, what collapsed and utterly expunged escape routes out of anxiety? What tectonic shifts of catatonic stress? And reversing direction, the Ngaanyatjarra Lands in the Australian Central Ranges is no country for old fish.
It is time and memory which stamp Veteran country, a duration of exile from the permanent present. Aligned with the course of the Moon’s progress across the faintly visible constellations between Sagittarius and Gemini, Woe and Forgetting, and irrevocably past Regulus and Spica and Antares to the Acheron again, an artesian underworld meanders beneath a landscape dotted with caves, one of which is yours, another mine.
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.
“The last men, far from being the heirs of power, will be of all men most subject to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners and will themselves exercise least power upon the future.” Lewis, C. S.. The Abolition of Man (Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis) (pp. 58-59). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.
“The past is the present’s food, and the present’s digestive system is synchronized, adapted as it has always been.” Abliq.
The phases of the Moon are conventions. The mathematical definitions of the relative positions of Sun and Moon on the Ecliptic are real enough, but what they define is imaginary, illusory, transient, relative and nebulous. When the Moon will be in conjunction with the Sun is important for anticipating eclipses and tides, and convenient for dividing the year, but the event itself as dependent arising occurs in nature as a disappearance, an invisible transition from morning crescent to evening crescent lasting several days. You would be right to call any moment in that transition a New Moon, wouldn’t you?
We all ‘know’ that it is the movement of the Earth, not the Sun, which continuously changes the Sun’s background stars, but once again, the stars behind the Sun’s present ‘location’ are invisible, and only tangible as somewhere between which stars are rising in the dawn and which are setting in the dusk. Nonetheless, thanks to the scales of measurement and frames of reference developed in astronomy for thousands of years, we can be confident that if the astrologers tell us this New Moon is happening in Pisces, it is, and if the astronomers tell us Aquarius, we can be confident of that too, and that the wet season the North once associated with the Water-Carrier asterism has gained on it a month.
Such matters as these present themselves for our contemporary scrutiny because the conventions of cultural interplay and civilized discourse seem to have dissolved into the contested perspectives from which they emerged. Southern Hemisphere Astrology focuses on norms at this time of year because Aquarius down here carries the conventional sign which precedes the Autumn Equinox, Virgo, associated with perspicacity tending towards perfectionism, not necessarily the obsessive compulsions you would not be alone in seeing everywhere at the present time. Aquarius upside-down resembles the post-graduate waiter who skilfully manages two armfuls of dishes while imparting a sniff at the conventional choice of wine a mealtime assemblage of newly independent MPs might have made.
By curious coincidence at the moment of New Moon as defined, a divine promise is being given to the good people of the Bowen Basin, where local and indigenous sovereignty has been under attack ever since it became conventional wisdom that the best way to pass on a better world to your grandchildren is to impoverish them, and the best way to beat the colonialist rap is to cede your sovereignty as a mark of indigenous ignorance. Perhaps the Adani coal-mine will proceed, honouring the wishes of the majority of traditional owners, and perhaps there will be fewer numbers in endangered species in the area for the rest of us to be unconscious of.
The Solar System orbits the Galactic Centre at about 230 kms/sec; the Earth orbits the Sun at about 30 kms/sec; and the Earth’s surface at Australian latitudes rotates at between about 350 and 460 metres/sec. If you add the approximate velocity of our galaxy through the universe of 583.3 kms/sec, that’s a lot of motion to be physically unaware of. It is up to you to decide which elite will be victorious: those who would override your sovereignty in the cause of mitigating climate change, or those who would override your sovereignty in the cause of minimizing the cost of energy. If it were up to me, I would not accept a scientific basis for the supremacy of any value, certainly not a rigid one.
The asterisms and myths of the Zodiac have been influential conventions on at least 500 successive generations, in ways we are as unconscious of as we are of our astronomical motion. These days, the Gregorian calendar and its widespread end-of-year celebrations, the urban lifestyle of the vast majority of the global population, and climate change itself, have largely supplanted the seasonal basis of human behaviour, and general precession will eventually associate every seasonal sign to every constellation, if it has not already done so, especially below the Tropic of Cancer.
Is a coking or thermal coal deposit below the surface or in the underworld?
Should the evaluation of the needs of others be an extrapolation of our needs, an ownership of theirs, or a continuous contestation of both by experts on the nature of ‘Reality’ and ‘The Good’? When it’s a simple matter of projection, why are we always compliant in the wars of the powerful?
The solstices precessed to the Galactic Plane in 1998 CE, and so for as long as recorded history into the future, the Sun’s maximum positive and negative declinations will precede its crossing of the Milky Way, assuming the IAU don’t fiddle. In 2177 CE, the December Equinox will precess into Scorpio in the Breamlea Zodiac. In 2228 CE, the Sun will cross the Galactic Plane on Christmas Day, and cross it New Year’s Day around 2700 CE. In all that time there is one thing that will not noticeably change, as it has not during the millennia of human civilization, and that is the stars in the background of the nodes where the Ecliptic intersects with the Galactic Plane. The Milky Way is as real as the seasons were when mass media began popularizing Sun Signs in the 1930s, as the Underworld Zodiac was when children asked 10 thousand years ago, “Why does the Sun go down?” and as the unconscious was at the dawn of the twentieth century when its geography was desacralized.
I, writing my epitaph, and thou, resonating with it, have this in common: we resist convention, but end up accepting that we belong in a timeless tradition–of accepting the wisdom of our ancestors, unscientific as it might be, as a prescription of who we are–into which we might be seen to have groomed those of our descendants who listened and were grateful for their culture.
Hidden deep within conventional astrology is an undisclosed intention, to help you make something of yourself. It is not just yiddishe mamas who define parental accomplishment as providing the world with more doctors and lawyers, and it is not just Western culture which judges a life by its social benefit. For 3000 years poets, storytellers, philosophers and priests have been teaching us the art of creating a self, and astrology has merely delivered a universal tool to the same end with its Sun Sign daily horoscopes. Astrology provides an aesthetic dimension to subjectivity’s game of chess with the world machine, but the aim of the game is to win.
Not necessarily fame and fortune, but something approaching those supremely admired achievements is still unquestioned as the purpose of life by those still desiring entry to heaven and those dutiful to heaven’s creation on earth, if only to convert the world, by force if necessary. Self-improvement is the madness of the House of Constriction in my astrology, but lack of motivation to better oneself and others verges on psychosis in the minds of most. What life discloses is a way forward, and if we don’t take it, some self-defeating mechanism must be involved.
The September Full Moon reflects both the impulse to leap into the traces and the grasshopper threat of not having enough laid by, and in keeping with the ostensible self-disclosure we admire in our delusion, the gambler mourns wasted opportunity. Does the father in the parable welcome the wastrel home because everyone deserves a second chance, or did his own youthful impatience reveal itself as it decayed into world-weariness? How many more eggs can we put into the basket of gender?
What image the prodigal doesn’t live up to, and where it resides, what initiation into the desirable path they receive, and who really desires it, are fraught questions. The imagery, not the morality, of cultural tropes would bear closer examination. The expectations of tiger mums may be deplorable, but would not self-awareness be more effective in discouraging her than stigma? The meditations of astrology on the subject of the vertex may serve better than a lifetime of therapy in the hands of professional imagery.
The image we harbour of the desirable other and the demeanour we develop, unconsciously and reactively, as a projection of our response, is as hidden as the ecliptic from which astrology derives its quantities. Even as avid a stargazer as I could not assert an observational basis for any significance in the altitude of the zodiac due west or east, and naturally I regard magnetic or electrical resonances with extreme suspicion. Previously explored here, the rapidity with which the Vertex can change Signs and houses in and near the Tropics, a huge chunk of Australia, may disqualify it as an element of personality formation. Nonetheless, as offering a spectrum across which to observe in ourselves the mysterious hormonal interaction of coincidentally waxing and waning images of the ideal, the Vertex is a fruitful concept.
As Alan Watts said, “It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.” The Vertex is quintessential astrology. It is as the music of our soul that it discloses itself, just as the chemistry of photosynthesis discloses itself as wood and height. As the intersection of the western Zodiac and the Prime Meridian it makes no sense, but as the focus of all the important people who come into our lives, and leave them, it discloses the hormonal shades of our interest in others, what it is in them which arrests and seduces our instinctive will to be.
The pleasure of observing sunrise and sunset is part of it, and the degree of comfort I feel in the presence of another. The primordial resonances of east and west are part of it, and the feedback loops of projection. I experience the character of my love-image, and the success or otherwise of its projection, in cyclical patterns. They morph into different forms as the Vertex inhabits different constellations, in other words at different altitudes above and below the horizon, and at different times of life, of the year and day. The higher the zodiac, the more intense and constellated is the effect of the Vertex in the west or the anti-Vertex in the east; the lower it is the more primal and potentially transgressive. But these are my moves. Now you have a dance!
You be the judge. Do you find yourself varying the dosage of your self-medication at these times?
Incidentally, it seems patently obvious to me that conjunctions of stars and planets with the Vertex should be measured horizontally, not along the Zodiac. Here is a particularly seductive alignment in Charleville’s narcissistic Prodigal underworld. Note the configuration of the Milky Way, giving the lie to the synchronous Covenant invisible on the Australian side.
Here’s another one, possibly the hormonal undercurrents of a bleary elevator ride following another $50,000 of inheritance blown on the roulette wheel.
This graphic way of representing or imagining the underworld, as the hidden correlates of the conscious or visible, not only unites the hemispheres, but persistently alerts us to the existence of the Other in ourselves, a partner in the dance. No culture is alien to any other. No way of looking at things is entirely wrong. No perspective is unique, or entirely conscious. There are no opposites in gender. Projection is the very definition of imagery.
What if the altitude of the Zodiac around the time of your birth, in the evening or early morning according to outhouse visitation preferences, had a big influence on what your parents decided, perhaps in a narcissistic epiphany at the pan, to impose on your meaning in their lives? Must such self-unawareness surely ordain your eventual repudiation? Is “What went wrong with you?” our universal doom? A global government must surely take this seriously, and coordinate biometric data on transnational emotional and imaginative responses to the Vertex, in order to remove parental bias from the resonance of upbringing in our careers and relationships!
Let it be emphasized that the natural resonance of the Vertex is unifying, that across the threshold of consciousness, across the seasonal polarity of the hemispheres, its Signs are the same, and cardinal directions are interchangeable.
However, unity is a dangerous thing to wish for. Not only could astrology-savvy AI enable police reinforcements to be mobilized in anticipation of conjunctions of a full moon with disruptive angles (cue Charleville), but its design might impose extreme intolerance, of resistance to careers in medicine and the law for example. Our cultures are divided in their attitudes to gender fluidity: artificial reunification might as easily be designed to eradicate it, and prohibit homosexuality as a sacrilege and mental disorder, as be designed to destigmatize its hormonal fluctuations. One could ask, what went wrong with the hormones of Indonesian Islamists? ‘Eternity’, the Vertex in the Ninth House (Aspiration), in the Tropics? Or ‘Permanence’ in the Fourth (Reputation), eternity’s fetish?
The words of the Prophet belong in the world which discloses itself to childhood. They are the lawns of suburban parks and backyards, evolved to minimize injuries and indelible stains through generations of debate about the Good. They exist in Reason, as binary gender does, but they are made of grass, which is the disclosure of Instinct. You could say that lawns help grass to make something of itself, but they are really weeds dancing with the machine.
“Defined in the end by its disenchanted context, the human self too is inevitably disenchanted. Ultimately it becomes, like everything else, a mere object of material forces and efficient causes: a sociobiological pawn, a selfish gene, a meme machine, a biotechnological artifact, an unwitting tool of its own tools. For the cosmology of a civilization both reflects and influences all human activity, motivation, and self-understanding that take place within its parameters. It is the container for everything else.” Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche [Viking, 2006, p.33].
A drone is an unmanned aerial vehicle, like a satellite without responsibility for its own trajectory. The meanings we have given the Moon’s orbit derive not from its motion, which is straightforward, if subject to gravitational influences and historical violent collisions, but from our perspective. However, not only its elliptical orbit and the inclination of its orbit to Earth’s but their phenomena belong to the body of the world. The Moon’s angular distance from the ‘First Point of Aries’ and its deviation from the Ecliptic are real, and so is its apparent size and phase, though these are not its properties. The law which has always addressed and divided humans, punitive and often aggressive and cruel, is real in the same way. Its initiates are drones; it is inherent in country as a phenomenon, not a property. Country is the body of the world we are made of as we perceive it, or rather create it with our perception and account of ourselves.
To recognize the Constellation of Capricornus in the night sky is to be seduced into an expansion of its proportions. The smallest Zodiac Constellation is also exceedingly dim over cities, but to compensate, it can impose its shape beyond its boundaries, across the entire field of vision, because it is replicated by the stars surrounding it, as the personage inhabits the child who wears an item of its clothing.
The Fish-Goat was placed in the heavens by ancient reverence for duplicity as the birth-pangs of subjective consciousness: for the state of being one thing in the world of aggression and another in the inner space of difference. Capricorn is the symbol of deceit. The fish-goat was fatally flawed: it was ruled by the desire to under-stand the gods. It was obliged to climb out of the waters of oneness with the tides of spirituality to actualize the commands of its god. Sadly, by the time it clambered onto the historical shore, social relations were no longer a chorus of inner voices, but a mime of certainty obtained from the soundless reading of the written word, and the goat-fish could not read. He became a goat, his own body, and lost his mind to goat’s head soup.
To this day, Capricorn in the Breamlea Zodiac continues to resonate with the concern for authenticity which is the hallmark of the present age. As a late summer constellation, a mansion the Southern Sun occupies from January to February, it carries the fifth Sign of Leonine confidence, but as the winter mansion of the Southern Full Moon it also carries the eleventh Sign of Aquarian altruism. It symbolizes our struggle with deceit, life making do with the subordination of care and the subterfuge of being. Gone is the Aquarian impulse to found a harmonious commune—the New Age has morphed into a therapy for addiction and dissent—and gone is the respectability of an inner life immersed in canons of literature and music. The techniques developing today are to affirm identity from hostile country, to give voice which overcomes noise, to colonise public space, to stop hiding, to dream the life, to think the body.
You have been brought here to the Port Louis Casino to observe how these techniques might be more successfully developed and employed on country. For tens of thousands of years the Moon has presented its metaphor for human existence, waxing and waning, emulating the path of the Sun optimistically in winter, soberly in summer, regularly and irresistibly receding and drawing near. Tonight, by remote control, we are synchronized with the Moon’s eclipse at apogee. What can we learn from the Moon’s survival of bombardment of our own experience of persecution by the world? Can we emerge from violence non-violently? Can we slough the fishtail of an eye for an eye, pause in the struggle for existence on the stony paths of goathood to enjoy ourselves, without creating enemies of mind and body, self and world, instinct and expertise? Can we create country in our own beautiful image? Can we both empty and own our body, its eccentricity, obliquity and remote-control eclipse?
The good people of Nhill have set the standard for living on country. All you need to know is how to put yourself on the map, obliquely perhaps, but always with good grace. We’re all winging it, aren’t we?
“‘Where is God?’ he cried; ‘I’ll tell you! We have killed him – you and I! We are all his murderers. But how did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? Are we not continually falling? And backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an up and a down? Aren’t we straying as though through an infinite nothing? Isn’t empty space breathing at us? Hasn’t it got colder? Isn’t night and more night coming again and again? Don’t lanterns have to be lit in the morning? Do we still hear nothing of the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we still smell nothing of the divine decomposition?…’”
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book 3, §125, “The madman” [Trans. Josefine Nauckhoff, Cambridge University Press, 2001].
“…It’s not anger that I feel towards the two of you, it’s something much, much worse.
It’s pity.
You have no empathy for your fellow man, and you clearly have no idea what love is.
So you have nothing.” Anthony Maslin.
“…To be different/ imperfect/ not normal is scary.
To be different/ imperfect/ not normal in a world where everyone projects ‘perfect’ is a fear
I tell my story here to confront that fear.
To show the world who I am.
I am Grief. This is me. Grief is me.
To look at me is to see your own fear reflected back at you.
To look at me is to also see strength.
The strength of us all.
All of those who stand behind me.
The strength of my fathers and grandmothers.
An ancient strength.
The strength of my land.
My land of burnt umber and dry sand.
The strength of laterite and million year old tears.
The strength of the broken who rebuilt.
What do you see when you look at the bully?” Rin Norris.
I see stars. I see someone controlled by the body. I see a drone.
And wash thy white thigh, beautiful God, In the moon, of the woods, on the marble mount… Crowley, Hymn to Pan
“To give each emotion a personality, and a soul to every mood! The girls came around the bend in a large group. They sang as they walked, and the sound of their voices was happy. I don’t know who or what they might be. I listened to them for a time from afar, without a feeling of my own, but a feeling of sorrow for them impressed itself on my heart. For their future? For their unconsciousness? Not directly for them, and perhaps, after all, only for me.” Pessoa, The Book Of Disquiet.
Chorus: We are the voices trying to make sense. Interesting expression, isn’t it? No, the Zealot is not your enemy, but still a dangerous fool. While Sol completes her ritual cleansing in the history fade of the Lethe, Chaos rules, except in the heart of the Zealot, who crosses the Acheron in such emotional pain as to defy description. If we have welcomed you to our people with the rape and murder of your daughter, or your son it was who defiled our world in that act, you know the Zealot’s pain. It is shame: there will never be an end to the suffering of innocents while he continues to cause it, and he can do no other. He is driven by animosity to the identity we have moulded for him: his mind is unhinged from ours; his heart is in his brain, not our mind. The underworld is a dangerous place: the brain makes our body, and it is visible.
Forget the tour leader and the bus driver, ignore the American tourists. How beautiful is this? Would you rather listen to the tour guide’s explanation of the way the Milky Way turns, be left alone to discover this intriguing synchronicity for yourself, or just go back to the hotel and get warm? For ages I was a man, then in a small pocket of the human imagination a woman. Recently, above an infinitesimally small outcrop of sedimentary rock in Terra Nullius, I have been restored to masculinity, but an emasculated masculinity, reflecting with counterfeit beauty the life-force of the feminine, trying forlornly to outshine her. And yet, looking at me high over your head, can you have lost all amazement that I do not fall on you? I am an ancient symbol of polarity and duality but I will overcome inequality. I will transcend gender. Men, together, we can restore our beauty.
Chorus: The Zealot is a voice inside you, another voice claiming with overwhelming justification to be yours, but calling you to be Other, with no other power than yours to be, Other, here. It is not a will to meaning per se, but a persistence of meaning through the consciously bewildering bombardment of the ego by meaningless objective relativity: the possibility of instinctive truth, but a truth resisted by complacent social identity unto death. The Zealot campaigns for the body against the sovereignty of the social. The Zealot is in the body of the world, your sky. It is none other than the will to live, the autonomy of the organism. Awareness of the Zealot has its equivalent in our consciousness of geography: it’s called the Antipodes, and its sky, reflecting ours, illustrating the duality of Signs, provides an opportunity for us to evade the trap of fixed identity, whether imposed by ourselves or others.
If not in your gaze I am a rock with 0.120 albedo. You are required to notice that I am getting older, my teeth falling out, my waist thickened, my breasts and buttocks drooping, and to find that beautiful. It took the greatest minds of the modern age to understand my mechanics, but it only takes you to make me beautiful. I am a sports car hurtling through a deserted alley, and I am not to blame for nearly hitting you when you appear out of nowhere.
Chorus: It is the age we have arrived in, that Solstice Full Moons bring widespread confusion of the mind. We are apt to believe that opposites are reconciled within systems, transgression is a schism like the parting of the Red Sea, and dismantling narratives leaves us with something to be. We are not astounded by the approach of Venus to Regulus after another eight years, because that is just the way things are, in the Solar System. Woe to the Goddess of Love and Beauty, voided by mathematics! What has happened to our hearts since 2010, and will they be filled with the joy of intimacy by 2026? No, the condition of the heart does not depend on a system, of compatibilities or irreconcilable differences, but on whether or not the discovery of Beauty and constant reverence for it have transformed chemistry into astonishment and gratitude.
If you have ever talked to somebody so close it was really yourself you were conversing with, and if ever one night you have found nobody there, or she was asleep, then you may have been praying, or heard, in a social vacuum, your ancestors, giving voice to the body of the world. It’s a way the universal brain has of reassuring our mind that madness is normal, like the Chorus in Greek tragedy. You call it God.
Chorus: The universe is conscious, except not a mind but a body like ours, controlled by a brain we call the laws of physics. Only beauty can create universal mind, in its beholding. We are not here to be elsewhere. And yet elsewhere is here; unconsciously regulated by the brain. That bodily function is peculiar to you, not your identity, but merely a constant refining and adapting of your organism to your affect on the world and its affect on you, a correction of mistakes and a rearguard action on behalf of yesterday against who would swap healing for beauty. The more you trash beauty, the more habitual become both the impossibility of intimacy and the reinforcement of your doubt in yourself.
A woman once thanked me for giving her back her body. I now know that she was inadvertently giving me mine. In every moment that men shine, half of their wives are shining elsewhere, but incessantly active in a warrior’s sleeping body. Tomorrow in Rome, the warrior awakens at first light. Let him remember the ineffable beauty of his white thigh as it disappears down the rabbit-hole of hers. It is the country we came from.
Bikini Mosaic, Villa Romana del Casale, Photo by Bernard Muir
Chorus: We make only metaphorical claim that the arms of the Milky Way are rivers of Hades, and ever were so regarded, and that the orientation of the galaxy influences human behaviour, and that the crossing of the galactic plane by the Sun, Moon and planets, invisible in daylight, bright moonlight and light pollution, has an effect on us as social beings. Coincidences of position and configuration do have the potential to enthral. The current production is intended to entertain—is meaning anything else?—and why shouldn’t we entertain ourselves with synchronicities of human behaviour and perspective that can enthral? Self is country, which is embodied emptiness. We leave the stage now as the Covenant of the upright Cross begins its annual extinction in daylight.
You have twelve nights to give body to the embrace of the goddess of beauty and the venomous Little King, but half a year to make tangible what terrain may lie between the Lethe and the Acheron. Better get to it!
Are we down a rabbit hole? Are there emotional vampires here? Am I one? Are you strong enough to be my woman, werewolf?
“If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you… Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!” Rudyard Kipling, “If—“.
“Who cares for you?” said Alice (she had grown to her full size by this time). “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” Lewis Carroll, Alice In Wonderland.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The astrologer sat in the concourse of the shopping mall, feeling very strange. Hundreds of people were milling past him. They must have been talking and calling and laughing, he could see from their faces, but aside from the strains of some inane pop song thrumming intermittently inside the electronics store all he could hear was an inchoate groan, like what you hear when a recording is played backwards. No snatches of conversation, no click-clack of shoes on the tiles, nothing in the foreground. Every idea in his head was no more than background noise in a world which needed faith, not information, hope, not truth. Not one person needed to know that later that day the rising of Sirius at Giza would not align with Orion’s Belt and the pyramids, but indeed would in four days at Athens, where the myth of the Lion’s Gate evolved in the minds of astrologers who had probably never seen a heliacal rising, let alone at Giza.
The world is an operation of four dimensions: it falls, it speeds, it spins, and it changes. Being fabricates meaning, intention, suffering and perfection. Religion and ideology promise identity, reward, equanimity and love. Country is the emptiness of submission, narrative, relativity and survival: horizon engenders the fall, form the speed, energy the spin and utility the change. In other words, country turns the zenith into ground, the stars into seeds, the weather into shelter and decay into food. Country is the intersectionality of your identity, but essentially, the empty essence of your world. What urgent need has the shopper to be somewhere else?
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The human habitat spins and speeds towards the east, and our desire for novelty, the possibility of fresh perspectives, and curiosity about what’s coming, incline us as individuals in that direction. In the North you have to swing left from your normal orientation towards the Sun; in the South we swing right. Your planets and circumpolar stars revolve anti-clockwise; ours clockwise. This may give us different inner workings: I don’t know.
In the opposite direction, our identity is constrained by logic, language and relationship. In a sense, we lean towards the west to balance our eastward spin. But the west is also the gravity which captures our momentum: the Shadow is not the unconscious, but its revelation in the reaction of others to the unconscious meaning of our behaviour. It is by expressing ourselves that our dreams take shape, in language constantly mediated by others.
All the while, we share with all being a trajectory and entropy of time and change, which in us leads to the mission to construct a consciousness which will give our frightening transience at least semi-permanent status. We have invented science, the humanities and religion to do this, to live ‘the way’, and to connect in us the past and future. The timetables of arrival and departure so fabricated make us unfortunately easy to control.
The north-south axis frames the meaning of all this. We are never either fully conscious or unconscious, rather there operates at all times a feedback loop between the two which dissolves any definition of a boundary. Ego straps us into our seat and emotions unsteady us, but the journey is mapped as we embark: reason and instinct are impressions of each other, like practice and confidence, skill and habit, law and ceremony, result and intention, challenge and dream. Left and right hands on the wheel, peripheral vision and feet ready for brake and gas guide our trajectory down slot-car alley.
Unlike every other being in the universe you may believe you lack a sense of direction. If you have been in both hemispheres, you wouldn’t believe that. However, perhaps if direction as a tool for understanding is my vanity, and the enterprise of caring for each other is based on the delusion that we can know what’s good for each other, then I am wasting my words. Why does anybody bother to speak?
Are all of these shoppers medieval fundamentalists, caring only to carry the harmony, or like worker insects, simply following a mental map?
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Are concepts of humanity, altruism, equality, entitlement and human rights any different from other constructs of worship, based not in reality but in separation from it, in withdrawal to a fabrication called ideology where disbelief is subhuman? Is empathy real? There are oodles of interpretations of the partial eclipse superimposing themselves on its path, but who can understand someone else’s country, even when they’re standing in it? Can my southern mystification of time and direction give any more meaning to Kolkata experience? It takes an entire childhood to learn to read a map.
Perhaps belief inhabits two separate functions of mind: idolatry and miracle-worship which evolve out of woe and a narrative of oppression and exclusion into a conflation of separation, transcendence and identity; and iconoclasm and mystery-worship which evolve out of forgetting, not just suffering, but individuality as a fabrication of guilt and shame, and which conflate a cloud of emptiness, immanence and corruption.
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The former might be referred to by the latter as Gratitude, which in turn might know the latter as Kindness. Equally, Kind people could scoff at Grateful people as unkind consumerists, and be mocked themselves as ungrateful addicts. Perhaps they are mutually abusive voices in an endpoint argument, or are each polyphonic embellishments of medieval chant?
Perhaps a drone is of a spiritual nature and cannot be heard in the physical world, but perhaps to hear it is the one spiritual experience available in the physical world, and reality’s way of suggesting that there is always more to existence than meets the eye, at the same time as a drone adds a pleasant undercurrent to the transient which makes it almost seem permanent. Is it the map or the territory which is the background groan?
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Astrology is very old, and its habits are set. The astrologer is dependent on his habits, and because they deliver faith and hope, has no intention of changing them, let alone doing away with habit altogether. However, for as long as sentient beings have felt obliged to curb their emotions, the habits, wisdom, expertise and most tried and tested beliefs of others have been perceived as preventing them from realizing true potential–which only we can see. This we call charity.
The South looks at the North, where False Dreams are in Discrimination:
The North looks at the South, where the Covenant is in Relationship:
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The covenant of the cross is not continuously visible in the North, nor are the elms at the entrance to hell in the South. Furthermore, of what value is a sky clock to a traveller with charge in her smartphone, especially one which turns backwards? How should I know? Just another thing I dreamed up, along with the map of hell and the madness of the hours, while I was respiring, photosynthesizing, drinking from the earth and resting birds here in country. Why don’t you go out one night, turn away from the Zodiac, and allow a covenant and a grove of false dreams to roam in the rooms of your disintegration? Or just absorb the energy bursting through the Lion’s Gate Portal and move on: does the astrologer pocketing his schedule of trains really care?
As should be evident by now, my astrology of the Southern Hemisphere is evolving from the bottom up, in every sense. It is beginning to codify Southern observations in Northern terms, as every language must submit itself to translation, but essential elements of traditional Northern astrology are missing and must be supplied. For instance, every bright star of the Northern sky has a name, associated through millennia of common usage with mythical figures, folk stories, parts of the body, humours, remedies and the like. Despite the best efforts of colonial anthropology, and against the background of catastrophic language loss, such a vocabulary exists in the South only in piecemeal and ambiguous form.
As a discourse, astrology must relate to reality as it is interpreted across a vast range of experience. In order for it to be shared, it must have a lexicon, but no language begins with a lexicon, and develops one only as its speakers discover they mean the same thing. Obviously, the basis of shared meaning is success in expressing what you want to say, and that desire comes first: the basis of language is interplay, with the emphasis on play. I observe phenomena of the Southern sky which you don’t, and I want to share what they mean to me. I want to play. It’s as simple as that.
That is how and why this Moon comes to have a peculiar Southern name.
As the midsummer Moon in the North riding low in the sky, it has a traditionally calming influence in the winter sign of dogged determination, but in the South, in the middle of winter, Sagittarius nears the zenith, and bears the tropical sign equivalent to the Northern sign of summer, Cancer, the glorious potential trap of the imagination. The polarity of these signs eloquently represents our contemporary predicament. Assailed by aggressive assertions of distinctive identity, we nevertheless cling to a faith in our connectedness, despite daily acts of extreme non-acceptance which begin to define the insipid defensive culture they reject. Like the good burghers of Nazi Germany, we are learning how to tacitly disown propaganda as the only way to protect our values in compassion and inclusion from stigma and violent enmity.
Highlighting our capitulation comes a Full Moon on the ninth of July over a city named after the ninth of July. What a sign!
The voice which stands out as unacceptable, because it distinguishes itself from propaganda, is no other than the voice of the zealots who gave independence to Argentina, and in wave after wave through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to polities around the world. What is independence? Why are we witnessing its renewed contesting all around us? What is the self we assume in self-determination? Must we renounce the security and comfort bequeathed by the zealots of our patriarchal and colonialist history? Will we all be happy in the swamp when the zealots of resentment have calmed down?
If the rabbit lives in hardship, she has few babies and the farmer can tolerate her. But it is the instinctive mechanism of rabbits in good times to make up for lost procreation, and it is this instinct which threatens the survival of farmland rabbits more than any other factor. The farmer must declare war. In plain words, the rabbit instinct defeats itself: they kill their offspring by having them; or they wouldn’t need to bear so many if they didn’t bear so many. Is this an analogy for what is happening in human communities? Is it time to fight even though we know we will lose? Is the instinct at war with reason? Does the left hand not know what the right hand is doing?
Our days revolve through one madness after another, as the Moon’s full phase in each of the twelve houses around the world fittingly demonstrates. In Argentina, it is passing from paranoia to ambiguous survival in relativity, but in Washington, it is agonizing in the third house.
If we rotate our view west, the Moon is reflecting nicely the discrimination which our material survival drives over Mexico City, and the perfection we throw tantrums to demand over Pitcairn Island.
As we cross the Pacific we catch up to the setting Sun, when animal seriousness and ignorance lurk opposite the constricting complexities of afternoon attachment. Then we come to Australia, where east and west divide the world soul between boredom and deprivation, clinging to the future and clinging to the past. Things are always of great import in hell. In mid-morning India, profound emotional difficulties underlie the last swagger of gender traditions. Now, as we reach the early morning Middle East, the Moon is in the house of aggression.
What we do when we don’t get what we want is question what we want, but what we do when we don’t get what we deserve is take it. Mecca’s latitude denies it the Northern tropical signs of summer, and makes them Southern winter signs on the northern side of the zenith. This is a problem, because it does not get a playful intellect or a luxurious imagination. Perhaps this goes some way to explaining its rejection of astrology.
Paradoxically, we cannot linger if we wish to get maximum significance from this moment. The Moon in European and African western skies is dealing with our most pressing concerns in the dawn, with dreams of divine help to overcome intolerance and instinctive imperatives.
Perhaps withdrawal is the only way into heaven, as a northern orientation of the zodiac in the style of the South suggests. The vanity of Cassiopeia and her culpability in the sacrifice of Andromeda are perpetually represented at the elms near the entrance to hell by a justly deserved waterboarding chair. You want to change the world, right? As much prone to zealotry as you, but also, as a clock-watcher drawn to the infinite ways astrology can tell the time, I reckon you boring lecturers need to look north.
When we screw our eyes shut in grief it is not to stop the tears, and it is not to lock out rationality so that we can indulge, but it is because we are overwhelmed by something which must be protected from expertise as the deepest, most precious part of us, the spirit we offer in play, but are in danger of losing in dialogue. It is all vanity, which we don’t need to be told. All that is left of our whirlwind tour, before we head back across the Atlantic to North American midnight paranoia, is the fear of Western Europe as it awakens to the effects of its addictions in the early hours of another sleepless morning.
There is something demeaning in the proliferation these days of experts in motivation, nutrition, self-packaging, wellness, healing and the like. The factories are all closed, so I accept their existence, but their pitch is that life’s problems are delusions, and a trap they know how to spring. Bodhisattvas delaying nirvana for the sake of those who would be left without them in the coils of Maya, they are zealots in the vanguard of our battle with ourselves. What is demeaning in that is its erosion of faith in those who have already fallen, our forbears and the icons of our traditions, our continuity. I would be more comfortable in the company of experts if there were more explicit admission of the discriminatory symptoms they share with their clients, more respect for self-administered cures and compensations, and acknowledgement that when delusion goes, connection often goes with it.
Fitzroy in inner-urban Melbourne was a dangerous hippie haven once, teeming with atheist, Catholic, trade-unionist and Aboriginal zealots. Today, only conscientious caste-members and the usual contingent of mentally-ill criminals remain. Whenever a strident voice aches into the sky with the news that the world will end, because it is evil, corrupt, ignorant or unkind, they all say, you’re just healing.
