The Signs of astrology represent twelve different modalities of consciousness. They can be rationalized in sequence as a progression of seasons, as a daily cycle of the biological clock, and as stages of enlightenment. Daily online horoscopes attest to the universal applicability of each, and that is how I choose to regard them. How do they help me identify the pitfalls of the imaginative life with which I must deal on this day, at this hour? In what state of awareness am I likely to arrive in the spotlight, on an impossible mission to resacralize this world clinging to authoritative archaisms, when I get to where the Sun will be in unsettled late Spring, the upside down Constellation which tries to be the scales of justice but looks more like the boot of the law, Libra in the Southern Sign of insecure tranquility, or of totally unjust, even fascist, aggressive assertiveness in the North, according to the authoritative archaism of Northern Hemisphere Tropical Astrology? How do I cope with aggression when I’m feeling insecure? How can consciousness rescue healing from neediness?
Why, I immerse myself in the world of the senses, of course. I listen to Mozart; I get out my colouring book; I turn off the news; I delight in the sunset, and the innocence of culturally diverse children hurrying home to dinners prepared by their brothers and fathers. In short, I activate my sensualist module. Less practised in my youth, I once tended to be seduced by the beauty of people, but this led to excesses of sexual instinct, and made my Shadow unmanageable. I now know how to circumvent the stirring of my sexuality module. The ultimate goal of the Libra module is enjoyment of the meaningless beauty of the surface of the world, the complete surrender of rational discrimination, in the Buddhist sense, to gratitude for what simply is. The tranquil beauty of sensualism is so seductive, its success in relieving me of fear, anger, shame and guilt so complete, that I am beguiled by the sense that I do not exist, except as the delight in itself of a benign creation.
Now, not only can I find tolerance of fundamentalist observance of archaic rules for separating conscious good from unconscious and instinctive evil, but I know that my impressions of beauty differ from those of others, and that the only way for me to preserve my equanimity in the company of divergent senses is to remain silent, save perhaps for an occasional “Ohhh!” of transcendent appreciation revealing only my worship. Indeed, the maxim, ‘Love yourself in order to be able to love others’ is entirely persuasive. Am I not resplendent in my spacious horizontal connections with colour and scent, dappled shadows and the tinkle of clear streams? Are we not one, dissolved in beauty?
Unfortunately, Libra is not a permanent state. The boundary the sensualist creates between light and dark is made permeable by language, the necessary vehicle for purpose, with all its ambiguities, manipulations and inferences. We must work, we must engage, and are never free of the judgment it takes to understand each other. Our unconscious reveals itself to others, even when we deny it. “By their projections shall ye know them.” There is particular irony in the experience of discrimination by minorities in multicultural societies like the one I live in, which pride themselves on diversity: in the subsumation into identity, narrative and right of what we might share in silence, the discrimination is theirs.
So verily I say unto thee, hearken unto the words of the prophet. Lift up thine eyes from the earth unto heaven. Look not upon the shadow of another, though it fall between you and the light. The prophet says, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one escapes the Shadow except through me. Shadows! Rejoice for the person who takes guidance from priest, prophet or astrologer beckoning towards the light, for be assured that the shadow of sin will remain hidden, especially if it is a lantern which casts it invisible behind us. Pity the native of the tropics who, confused by the direction of the light, sometimes in submission to error finds the shadow all too visible preceding, or lost altogether in mayhem of who knows whose making.
Where does the shadow go when the light is directly overhead? And what of the shadow cast by the Moon? When Sun and Moon are casting your shadow in opposite directions, the unconscious can be difficult to avoid. This happens in the tropics. Therefore place your trust in the prophet, and stand so that you never have to bend over backwards to gaze upon him, lest dizzily you cast your eyes down and see the hidden animal in you crawling before you with the serpents. Vigilance must safeguard us from ourselves. The shibboleths of devils who steal shadows and denizens of the underworld like zombies, bogeymen and bunyips will not trouble us who keep our eyes on the light.
This Moon, the eighth in the Islamic calendar, can deliver salvation to believers, in jihad if they face south. Rest assured that the prophet has subterranean influences under control. The Libra Moon transits in opposition not only to the Sun, but this year to the “CMB Cold Spot” in Eridanus, where unbelievers fear our entire finite universe to be in touch with another in a Multiverse. Perhaps it is so, and this is where bunyips come from, and shadows go. Fear not, if you keep your shadow behind you, it cannot attain a third dimension and take over your world, denying you salvation in perpetuity.
Peoples of the south, though you be not safe from the north, fear not the jihadists who keep the shadow behind them. They will turn as they reach you, and pass without harm like the babbling of a brook. It is written: the tranquility of sensuality shall protect you from rampant disregard of the sanctions against the unconscious.
The prophet says, give yourself up to the senses. Behold creation in its depthless measure. Your ascendant promises originality, meaning what has been here from the beginning, the perfect ideal, and the descendant chattering behind your left shoulder reminds you in awful dread that rebellion, at the edge of the world, is where the light ceases, and the Shadow will consume you.
All those in favour of a world without offence, say ‘I’!
“Gurus Can Loathe Very Little Signs Of Spiritual Change And Preach A Totality.” Abliq.
“Reality conforms to precedent certainly, and you can analyze it that way, but it is not imprisoned by immutable laws or patterns, any more than identity is. Reality is what you make of yourself, and you are what reality makes of itself, moment by moment.
I mean by reality conforming to precedent that there is something akin to intention in the world. Form emerges according to pattern. The context of an emergent thing encourages relations and structures that are readily available, practised, in a word.
A seed is an intention; the form a tree takes is an accident. If you would see a thing, you must look to the processes creating it, and they are always relational in the same way that you can never define where one thing ends and another begins.
The existence of a thing takes form, but that form is the carcass of its creative process. A thing is an imprint on the world which has left its imprint on the thing. This to me indicates the essence of identity.” Abliq.
Sahih Bukhari(49:857) – “He who makes peace between the people by inventing good information or saying good things, is not a liar.”
“Opportunism is the exploitation of form.” Abliq.
“This little planet causes more problems than it is worth. The side tilted this way is emerging from ice and snow and you would think its people could just happily forage for food and be done with conflict, but their leaders are playing “Mine’s Bigger Than Yours”, teeming millions are on the roads, displaced by war, famine and climate-change, the shamans are at loggerheads over what is fundamental, and prophesy, competing for scarce funds, seems unable to restore calm.
On the other side things don’t seem much better. Duty and self-indulgence have been their usual strange bedfellows during the summer. People haven’t made sufficient provision for the winter, and there will be anger and resentment boiling over when they are confined together and forced to share.
They don’t take much notice of me these days, and I confess it wouldn’t matter to me if they wiped themselves out, but you’re closer to them, you do care, and they still look up to you. Do something new. You’ve already tried uniting them with polarities. That’s not working fast enough. Say something to them that will placate them. Make something up, if you want. They stopped trying to agree on truth a long time ago, but though they shirk it, they crave it. Go on, little man, give them something to believe in. Their meanings are failing them, and if they don’t lift their spirits, they’re doomed.
[The grid indicates the declinations of the constellations and the paths they take across the meridian. Much of Pisces and all of Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer and Leo will pass to the north, anti-clockwise with East on the right. What are the seasonal influences of March-August? Are they Northern or Southern Hemisphere, tranquil or aggressive, neither or both? Exegesis I, ii.]
That’s the style! Show them that their chaos might simply be a matter of facing the wrong way. Throw a bit of the others in with it: love, brotherhood, sisterhood, submission, everlasting life, success, affluence, celebrity, presence, healing, enlightenment, transcendence, emptiness. Use science and mathematics. They believe that. Restore awe, for God’s sake! Take a leaf out of the Artisan’s book and just make astrology work.
Nice! You’ve got country, a powerful indigenous notion, and one to cleanse evil spirits who come to whisper young people away from rootedness in creation.
[Where you are on a two-dimensional chart, your ‘country’ as previously described, is at the zenith of your sky. Darwin people facing north would have to crane their necks 10º backwards to see the Sun in Scorpius and Sagittarius, and a backbreaking 30º+ to see all of those constellations. In fact, much of Scorpius, not to mention the Moon at major lunar standstills, is south of overhead at many southern latitudes, even when the Ecliptic is not. Furthermore, Darwin has only two seasons, Wet (November-April, conventionally) and Dry (May-October). Can these be correlated with the direction of the Sun, south with Northern Signs in green and north with Southern Signs in yellow, or to the chirality of east and west and to apparent clockwise or anticlockwise Zodiac motion? Exegesis I, iv.]
Embodiment, nice touch! Transform two dimensions into three by lying down under the stars, head one way or the other. Turning reverently to the qibla of choice, like a code for pollen danced by bees. Suitably mystifying. Let them look up with their own eyes into the mind of God. If they question the seasons, we can always say you’re divinely inspired. Or that all prophets have been known to be wrong. Now, off you go. Good luck!
Perhaps The Prophet will bring everlasting nocturnal life! “The devil will be with you in a moment,” as the hunchback in The Tin Drum said in the lavatory.”
[The Sun obtains her peculiar power, not from her light and energy, but from her regularity, from the nutrients of night and day and the cycle of the seasons. We may no longer worship her, but we still experience her movement, just as we continue to think of time as clockwise. Convention records her annual passage through the Zodiac, as though country in the night sky were not more appropriate indication of our progress on this planet. Even her regularity is a projection, revealed to inquiry as deriving from the momentum of our tilted fall. It is Earth which deserves our reverence, and yet, like some atavistic matriarch, and like our own outgrown parents, the Sun still pulls strings in our unconscious. Exegesis I, i.]
The passage of the imminent Full Moon is a blind passage. We gaze up at it as into a bright street light, seeing nothing. Its lame attempt to outshine the Sun diverts our attention from much more important things, signs which can nourish our quest for authenticity, which demonstrate the vast and timeless backdrop behind our pretences, and which confirm the vanity of life which ignores death. This is a story of the embrace of tradition: how a group of wage-slaves transcended the imperatives of economic reality and became artisans.
The story begins at lunch-time, when a group of tradesmen emerge from the Quarry Hotel to return to work up the street. They see a young man in the intersection outside drawing lines with yellow chalk, ducking in and out of traffic, and enquire into his apparently passionate project. Word passes around at their workplace and when they return to the Quarry after work, they are followed by the foreman and an engineer.
The traffic is now dense, but the young man is still at it as the workers install themselves at the bar. A desultory conversation about the weekend’s football is attempted, but nobody is really attending to anything but the single-minded effort of the young man outside. Suddenly, as one, safety being drilled into them as of paramount importance in the union industry, the drinkers pour out of the pub and set up barricades with tables from the hotel, and begin diverting the traffic.
Instantly, while the young man, in his early twenties and of middle-eastern appearance, carries on chalking the plan for a building in the middle of the street, there is uproar. The barricades are aggressively confronted by irate motorists and, very soon, two and then four tram drivers, not to mention the publican trying to reclaim his property. Some police arrive, and any pretence of restraint is abandoned. A melee ensues, until thirty police in riot gear arrive, and after dispersing the combatants with capsicum spray and restoring the flow of traffic, take the instigators, including the young man, into custody.
Under questioning through an interpreter, the young Iraqi immigrant confesses that his intention, without offending anyone or breaking any laws, is simply to create a two-dimensional representation of a mosque, facing the Quiba along Weston St, and featuring a street-wide arch in the style of the Islamic arches which gave inspiration to the architects of the Gothic cathedrals, aligned east and west like the magnificent celestial arch he saw for the first time upon arriving in Australia, and which has filled him with such joy as a Muslim student of architecture that he sees his design in the intersection as a fusion of north and south, ancient and modern, spiritual and physical, and celestial and temporal.
The Superintendent asks him, what celestial arch? The Milky Way, he responds, adding his conviction that it was the vault of heaven which first inspired the Muslim arches of medieval architecture. The workers are released to be charged on summons, and the senior policeman, intrigued, follows them back to the Quarry. Politely resisting invitations to have a beer, the Muslim spreads a number of blueprints on a table in the lounge. The first is of his Celestial Arch a few minutes before midnight, outside:
The second is of the transit of the not-quite-Full Moon one and a half minutes later:
The third is of the ever so slightly asymmetrical angles at midnight:
Nobody in the pub has seen the Milky Way more than once or twice in their lives, but there is no cynicism. Instead, laptops come out and people makes calls and consult smartphones.
Pretty soon the assemblage is joined by some influential people: the Moreland Mayor, an Imam, an Aboriginal Elder, a Catholic Priest, a Buddhist Lama, someone from the Comedy Festival, another from the Brunswick Festival, numerous architects, geographers, engineers, teachers, trade union officials, photographers and journalists, an astronomer and an assortment of drug dealers, poets, artists and astrologers from off the street.
The Imam challenges the Iraqi’s Arch by presenting a depiction of the moment as seen from ancient Babylon:
This is not the inspiration for the illustrious invention of the arch, he asserts, but the transit of the opposite pole:
He does admit that the Iraqi’s is more impressive, but the Lama disagrees, and presents a depiction of the Arch as the vault of heaven itself encircled by the 360° vision of the Buddha:
The astronomer wants everyone to know that the Full Moon will actually transit over Guatemala, and presents the evidence of an anonymous astrologer, complete with deference to the tropical sign of the Northern Hemisphere, and this gets quite a few at the bar talking:
The same sky over us will look like this, he adds:
Irrelevant, says a geographer from PNG, what matters is the Arch, and here on Bougainville is the place to build it:
This causes great consternation among the entourage of the Mayor, but faced with the Iraqi student’s increasing discomfort, the tradesmen rise to the challenge. “She’ll be right, mate,” says the foreman. “We’ll just make it work, won’t we boys?” A rousing cheer goes up throughout the pub. “Midnight it is!”
By eleven o’clock, despite the hubbub, everyone knows the disparate elements of the Iraqi’s dream and their feasibility, and believes that at midnight something real will happen. And believe it or not, there is a real chance that the Arch will be erected across the intersection:
However, that is not the highlight of this event. Rather, at the stroke of midnight, one hundred and fifty men, women and homeless children are standing in the intersection of Lygon and Weston Streets in Brunswick, facing south towards the city and craning their necks backwards in a ceremonial observation of the Full Moon. The Aboriginal Elder welcomes the Iraqi-born student to her country, and ‘the boys’ now know how to build.
Nothing is more certain than that the Quarry will become a temple of ecumenical faith, but in the same way that land is an interruption of the sea, ‘country’ is buffetted by forces which cannot be enclosed by architecture. Diplomacy may indeed farm many ‘countries’ in one place, and if it were true that it never rains at a Full Moon, then perhaps, were the Virgo Moon shining full over Melbourne instead of Guatemala, one hundred and fifty converts would not be feeling so cold, wet and foolish.
Psalm 74:20—“Have respect unto the covenant: for the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty.”
“Where were you when I called? Why didn’t you answer? I needed you! I was absolutely terrified! Listen. I was in a dream, walking to the bus after my lecture, head full of images of Islamic architecture, when the attack happened and all hell broke loose. I heard the takbir, then gunshots, then I walked into a screaming horror. Sirens coming, people running in all directions, others lying injured or dead all over the path. At the very instant I realized what had happened, staring down at an old man on his knees and covered in the blood squirting from the woman he was tending, a woman on the other side looked into my eyes with an expression on her face I didn’t register at first. I stared at her, and then suddenly I got it. I was to blame. My first reaction was outrage, but then I became aware that everyone was looking at me with the same expression, not contempt or fear, but recognition. That’s when I nearly fainted in shock: no, it wasn’t that I was wearing the uniform, but that it was I, naked and without qualities, who wore that mediaeval uniform, or any uniform, and that I felt guilty, recognized! There was nowhere to go! Nowhere to be!”
Sidereal time begins again in Pisces, and here we are again, face-to-face with our most serious, fundamental and seemingly insoluble problem. Rome is burning, like a bushfire which began as a controlled burn but escaped with a wind-change. We are caught in a feedback loop: we want our elected representatives to do something, to stand for something, and make decisions on the basis of what they know, majority decisions, even if we disagree; on the other hand, to get anything done, our representatives, monitoring the public mood, safeguard their status by telling us as little as possible, and what truth they tell is what they believe is a palatable truth in terms of who-knows-who’s interpretation of what we want to believe; and the result is that all we know is spin, and we, the minorities of one, inadvertently, are spinning the spin which disempowers our representatives. The age of Pisces might even suggest itself as the age of leadership in criminal submission.
Any fool these days knows that truth is relative. And yet, allergic to fundamentalism, to the wisdom of the Bible and the Qur’an, so many are faithful adherents to other fundamentalist notions such as universal human rights and our culpability in, and the moral imperative to reverse, climate change. Pisces, the symbol of Christ, nowadays eschews absolutist claims, but in its incarnation in the South it still attests to humanity’s resilience. In the face of the second law of thermodynamics and the inevitability of irrelevance and death, it delivers the semi-permanence of tradition and culture. By some miracle we are hanging together–remembering that the next Full Moon is the Easter Moon (no pun intended)–but doubt is no longer a benign influence, as happens when you’re being told a pack of lies: you’re supposed to doubt the strictures of your ego, not the very existence of truth itself.
Poeppel Corner is an imaginary place, situated in theory on the boundaries of the Northern Territory and Queensland with South Australia. Attesting to its imaginary nature and the obstacles faced by any agreement on anything, its marker post, accessible along the QAA Line and the K1 Line four-wheel-drive tracks 174km west of Birdsville, and beyond the GPS receptivity of your smartphone, is not where it was intended to be by the surveyors who, with 19th century technology, unimaginable adversity and incredible bravery, intended to mark the gazetted border at the intersection of latitude 26 South and 138 East. Did you know that Australia has moved about 1.6m northeast since 1994? Do you realize that your property has no fixed position? And finally, nobody knows what time it is where three time-zones, and more when daylight saving changes (on April Fools’ Day), intersect! Why don’t you go there, and decide for yourself?
The entirely speculative names I have given to the Milky Way ‘rivers of the Underworld‘ may offend you. Is it really true that people of the South born in January and February carry an innate regret for the suffering of centuries, and those born in the second half of the year are doomed to struggle with ignorance, or do I just like the sound of my own voice? Whatever the demographics of the matter, if you are familiar with the night sky of October, the Sun is in the middle of nowhere. She needs her son to validate her, to stand up and make a contribution to the society she has brought him to, and she needs him to make it in a way which substantiates her claim to ethnic and religious continuity. She needs him to build something of local value within his tradition.
The miracle of tradition is the personality that goes into its reinvention. But it is also the resilience of the underlying layers of its palimpsest. May I make one thing absolutely clear? You do not separate yourself from ‘Das Man‘ by having a story, or in narrative terms a journey. In fact, the self has no story and no journey. It stares its transparency to itself in the face, without props, because it is not an object. Far from it! Its subjectivity reveals every object as a subject, and the process of reality as civility among subjects, with an emptiness of plot. Who knows what the next encounter will demand, each from the other?
The authentic self is not interstitial. Society is not its god. What godly power can compare to the reverence of the self for the finitude of the world it has created and expires with every breath? What sense of belonging to a master plan can outweigh the sense of being unique? What calling has a voice to diminish our gratitude for just being here, when we who are about to die commune with the beauty of what we will depart? But on the other hand, if we want to be recognized, we have to make ourselves recognizable. Truth lies (sic) in all sides of an argument, but the argument has to be heard. Judgment rules over silence; diplomacy rules over noise, and mindfully, change.
The Sun entered the IAC constellation of Pisces at 17:49 AEDT today, but from the top, not the side, and so it is already approaching the centre-line of the Circlet of Pisces in right ascension (and passing the gamma star in ecliptic longitude). I would say that the Sun is there, below the notorious hilltop clearing where romantic love is both regularly revisited, and ruefully healed with self-help analysis of limerence. However, the Sun will not enter the Breamlea constellation of Pisces for five days, and it technically won’t change signs until the equinox. The ambiguity of its position is confirmed by our continuing summer heat. What is the Moon—in the last sign of winter—reflecting, the last sign of summer or the first sign of autumn? It would seem to matter to how its light shines into our beleaguered hearts at this time of year. Seasonal variability is a huge challenge to the conventions of astrology.
Tonight, Capricornian Gemini straddles the meridian at nightfall and Sirius, the marker star of South-Eastern Australian early winter is crossing to the west. The Leo Moon precedes the Easter Moon, plagued by self-doubt and yearning. This Moon resonates with our belief, not only that we are all connected in suffering, but that we are most authentic in healing. How can this be preposterous, in this enfeebled age, when we accept any cross which justifies self-medication, and virtue-signals are the default frequency of social media? How better to cling to a formal, archaic personality than to define our deficiencies as indelible wounds?
Wounds are real, but as Raphael tried to say as the Moon occulted or grazed him (Regulus) on the other side of the world on Friday night, “Get over yourself.” Even if the past can never die, the present must remain the site of optimism, and appreciation of one’s life for what it is. Only truth, elusive, transactional, never ultimate, continuously transformative, can heal our wounds. Compassion for each other’s healing wound is our Grail, but in resentment, anger, aggression and violence, in confrontation with ignorance and self-hatred, up against the wall of enablement and codependency, can we do that? And if we can’t, what does ‘healing’ mean, if not ignorant perfectionism?
Connection—the (Piscean) southern sign of Leo—is a nebulous concept at the social level. Yes, we are all citizens and we have many similar experiences but only in a theoretical sense can we be described as sharing the same values and the same social capital. It doesn’t firm our bonds to cross bridges, nor build bridges to affirm our bonds. Moreover, at an ontological level, connection consists of overcoming timeless mistakes about the nature of reality, and discovering the emptiness of our differences. Only in a theoretical way can those differences be connected by causality. The form of one’s wounding is empty, but the emptiness of one’s wound has form, as does the effect of what we self-medicate with. In short, connection is not black and white, opposite perspicacity, perfectionism, refinement and compromise as it ambiguously is. Let’s face it, we never look at the Moon as a society.
Perhaps redemption only comes with wounding, and recognizing our wound in they who wounded us. Perhaps it has to do with country. Country ends at the horizon, but the horizon is empty: one pace forward, one hour in time, and it is different. But it is not empty: beyond it is someone else’s. In fact, the conventional ‘true self’ can be thought of as a place over that other’s horizon, if the horizon is regarded as constantly changing—moving towards the sky, rotating, shrinking, expanding, darkening, emerging, including, excluding. In this train of thought, the realization dawns that country is precisely where we are standing, under our zenith. Everything within our horizon is ordered and held together by our meanings, including our orientation within it. In a ceremony of selfhood, I stand below an empty universe above an empty me. This is empty sovereignty over compassion and forgiveness. Somewhere in the 200k-odd square kilometres between the 139th and 140th meridian east, at some time in the middle of the night, another grandfather is looking at the Moon in the direction which represents the law, consoling himself that, beneath the scars of initiation, offence and loss, when all is said and done, he has always been a woman.
Miss Polly had a dolly who was sick, sick, sick.
So she called for the doctor to come quick, quick, quick.
The doctor came with his bag and his hat
And he knocked on the door with a rat-a-tat-tat.
He looked at the dolly and he shook his head
And he said “Miss Polly, put her straight to bed!”
He wrote on a paper for some pills, pills, pills
“I’ll be back in the morning with my bill, bill, bill.”
R.I.P. Bill Leak, the eternal spirit of Kirsty MacColl on an empty bench in Soho Square, and all the others who hung their heads out far enough from Desolation Row. Healing, the blessed waters of the Lethe which bathe trauma away, arises from ceremony, which arises from country. It is getting better and better. The healer, and the one healing, the parents, the daughter, the doctor, and the doll, are ‘I’.
Three gifts I bring to my fellow-Australians, all of whom are making a new homeland out of courage and determination, anger and self-control, mutual recognition and care.
The Milky Way, bridging northwest and southeast in a dark sky (limiting magnitude 5-6) at the rising of the galactic north pole, with the Emu rising too, is a celebration of your gratitude, those of you who plan to spend the national holiday asleep. Just keep your lights down and your cat inside.
Looking south, it’s 12 o’clock Southern Cross time as nautical twilight begins. These stars are now yours, and the Emu too. Alpha and Beta Muscae are what martyrs see on the cross. [Pi Puppis, the watchful creator of this timeless place, is (perhaps mis-) appropriated to honour its transit at nautical twilight on my Mother’s birthday.]
The Moon offers you a signpost to Mercury. The sign of Sagittarius is ours in the Southern Hemisphere (if we but feel like it).
My heartfelt thanks to the descendants of the traditional owners of this part of the world: the Wathaurong, Wurundjeri and Bunurong people: please keep showing us how to care for your new homeland. Continuing gratitude to the developers of free astronomy software, Stellarium, for Aussie Rules, and for any happy faces.
Attesting to the uncomfortable marriage of belief and truth, there exists in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian Territories a township known to the Palestinians as Place of Meat, and to the Israelis as Place of Bread. These are mere facts, but to Christians, who know it as Bethlehem, it remains a landmark in the timeless human search for meaning, associated not only with a birth, but a sign.
This year there are signs in various parts of the world, in the days leading up to the annual commemoration of the Adoration of the Magi, known to Christians as the feast of the Epiphany, of a possible new birth. God knows we need one!
The first sign, at sunset in Bethlehem on January 4, is the simultaneous transit of the First Point of Aries and the First Quarter Moon. In fact, the Moon transits 2 seconds before the equinoxial point, and 7 minutes before official sunset, but it is signs we seek, not facts. Some sort of new beginning might be approaching. [All times at the foot of the following charts are Australian Eastern Daylight Time, UTC +11.]
The second sign, proving just how elusive signs can be, is manifest at Regulus Gate from my observatory on Epiphany morning.
Regulus, the star of the Lion’s heart, has a complex meaning in Southern Hemisphere Astrology. Not only does ‘Regulus‘ mean ‘little king’ (not ‘prince’), an infamous basilisk who can kill with just a glance, but Leo upside-down looks more like a possum than a lion, and as anyone who has been pissed on by a possum can attest, he is a malicious creature. Nonetheless, Regulus is one of the Royal Stars of Persia, the four guardians of the sky (along with Aldebaran, Antares and Fomalhaut), associated with the healing angel Raphael, and so the worst I can think of him is that he can seem sarcastic, when really his mordant wit is simply helping you to recover from yourself. It is important to know these resonances to understand Regulus Gate, because its other end is Alnair (at top of chart), the brightest star of Grus, the Crane, which carries Asian cultural connotations of celebration.
Now, Epiphany is astrology’s big moment, so flipping the globe to my meridian on the other side to see what the celebration end looks like in Brazil, I find the second sign.
Wow, the Ecliptic is so close to the zenith (the zigzag in the meridian line), and Venus is almost there and opposite Regulus, which is right on the opposite horizontal pole! This seems special in some way I can’t quite put my finger on, because Venus and Regulus have been a ‘thing’ for thousands of years. How does Venus in Aquarius through Alnair Gate relate to what I’m seeing in Breamlea? Is she prancing on Regulus’ sarcasm? Is celebration so unwarranted that she must negate her underworld man with an upskirt?
The third sign, computed by a Solomonese Indian astrologer, is the entry of the Moon into Ashvini, the first Nakshatra (opposite Spica) at the precise moment of transit, at sunset on Malaita, one of the Solomon Islands. (Official sunset is a mere 7 seconds later.)
Indulgent Jupiter constrained by shrewd Spica: a gravitational reminder of what the politeness of a refined wife may mask? No? Well, perhaps all these cyclical rebirths are all we get. But wait! Poring over my arcane tables in retreat from the late heat of the summer sun, I realize that Fomalhaut, the angel Gabriel, is culminating, signalling affirmation perhaps of the sacred meaning I am looking for. It was no doubt the same fervour that seizes me now which gripped the astrologers of Herod’s day! I must follow that star!
It takes about 9 hours for the Earth to rotate its longitudes so that Fomalhaut transits at Bethlehem, so I have plenty of time to get there and consult my tables, but I am thrown into consternation by complete unfamiliarity when I get there. It is cold, not at all like the nativity plays where I come from, where the wise men all wear shorts. I can’t even find the sun at first, until I realize it is behind me, much lower than I left it, and setting to my right, clockwise. The chart above, my home, is where I am used to the constellations following an anti-clockwise procession, but no matter, I am already acclimatizing.
But what’s this? What are those ridiculous signs? What in Heaven’s name is Gabriel affirming? Must I become the newborn and start learning to read the world all over again? My wisdom deserts me! Whoever heard of a confident crab, or an aggressive set of scales? Never could I associate a possum with perfectionism! No wonder there is such implacable hostility between sidereal and tropical astrologers up here! No wonder ‘wise men’ no longer look at the sky here: it’s all wrong!
And so, as the sun sets into the cosmic ocean, I finally have my epiphany. Life is not a river flowing down to the sea, but a journey in the opposite direction, through ever more sharply defined contours, dwindling resources and thinning populations, until finally, the water dries up completely.
The human artefact known as the Gregorian Calendar, measuring to the second the Earth’s orbit of the Sun, indicates the pending completion of another year. Coincidentally, the Moon is completing another of its ‘orbits’. (See YouTube for a description of the real relative motion of Sun, Earth and Moon.) What meaning, if any, can be ascribed to this coincidence?
When the Sun and Moon come together in the Southern Sign of the imagination it should presage something wonderful, an empowerment of dreams, or an oceanic coalescence of individualities. But its opposite number is a tendency towards going our own way, by force if necessary, or by confronting entreaties to compromise as attacks on our defences. We all want peace, but we cannot submit to each other. This is Sagittarius, where humanity grows from the Umwelt, and where subjectivity reigns supreme, yet how readily does the hobbled divine in us genuflect to angels we should actually no longer empower, in the form of facts, and identities!
Is there anything to be grateful for as 2016 closes to us? Not only was it a political disaster for most people, and a humanitarian disaster for too many, it was also a year in which many of our generations’ icons died. How are we reacting? The North hunkers down for winter as the sidereal Sun ruminates on charisma and independence to lead it from its mess, but it is the season of withdrawal and pessimism. In the South we have entered summer beyond the redemptive rituals of a Christmas which dare not speak its name. Identities divide us, and people of Science and people of Holy Books continue to confound each other with their incapacity to identify facts and words as metaphor! Will the New Year bring renewal of optimism that equanimity, turning our other cheek and submitting to Allah will produce world peace; or that democracy will emerge through education and without hatred and bloody conflict to wrest freedom and autonomy from the tyranny of economic interest; or that the institutional denial of autonomy to parents to influence their children will end bullying, produce gender fluidity, end discrimination and demonstrate a hierarchy of values after all? Or are we not flies caught in the web of someone else’s inadequate ideas?
Pessimism is the gateway to frivolity: delinquency is a healthy experimentation in semiosis; sub-cultures transform nothingness–definable in terms of habituated exclusivity–into emptiness, and promote the location of a non-individuated personality in a flux of interpenetrating matrices of meaning. Southern Hemisphere Astrology is pessimistic about a wider promulgation of its iconoclasm in 2017. Sabotage will continue to be perceived in terms of the ‘things’ removed; only those already engaged in an interplay of self and world as metaphor will enjoy my perspective-play, and my power to persuade readers to relish the beautiful emptiness of astrology will continue to languish. Nonetheless, I will persevere as a hooligan in the Rimbaud style.
The imagination belongs to nobody, certainly not identity! Never cease from its game! Neither culture, nor history, nor parents are the wellspring of your personality, but rather this very imagination forever impregnating itself beyond the rules of fidelity to mere habit and infantile self! Yes, congratulations are in order if you have saved yourself from the snares of anger, blame and innocence in this tumultuous year. But have you? If so, be honest, the imagination says, you did not do it, but I.
Imagination is not a component of intelligence measurable by experiment, but the ground of being, the capacity of all living things to embody, and respond to, signs. Signs are not only systemic, but chosen! My imagination chooses me! But what if it doesn’t? What if I claim imagination as my own? Patent it? Entitle myself to its royalties? The Moon is nothing if not a cry of freedom from the Other’s patent. The Sun is the formative impulse; the Moon is subjectivity, the source of form’s undoing by its alternatives. It is our imagination which owns the Moon, and as truly, the Moon and we are owned by owls and frogs, rocks and tides, the dead and unborn!
What if I mistake the Moon for the Sun, discover and fetishize an identity entitled to control and permanence? Then I doom myself to pessimism, and its mirror-image, frivolity: ‘I’ cannot win, or in ordinary terms, my path through the thickets of reckless pseudo-confidence yelling, “Shit happens” at every hurtful bump leads inexorably to the belief in nothing, even the impossibility to believe in anything, including ‘me’. But anything, even nothing, is preferable to the shame of being powerless, of having no third way between tolerating the intolerable and invoking the letter of laws which have no spirit I command.
The lunar nodes cycle of avoidance and focus will morph in 2017 (May in Southern Hemisphere Astrology) into a challenge to play with the cultural lineaments of constraint and control. Every time I see the Moon riding high above the recalcitrant Ram I will recall the rampage of the Aleppo Bull, and not the presence of the Bull in a manger. I hope we have learned by then the difference between play and frivolity. Let’s drink to seriousness! Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die! Surely a massive hangover will do the trick?
The Milky Way, bridging northwest and southeast in a dark sky (limiting magnitude 5-6) at the rising of the galactic north pole, with the 
Looking south, it’s 12 o’clock Southern Cross time as nautical twilight begins. These stars are now yours, and the Emu too. Alpha and Beta Muscae are what martyrs see on the cross. [Pi Puppis, the watchful 
The Moon offers you a signpost to Mercury. The sign of Sagittarius is ours in the Southern Hemisphere (if we but feel like it).
