Tag Archives: Southern Hemisphere Astrology

The Artisan: Full Moon in Virgo April 10-11

10 Monday Apr 2017

Posted by in Moon Phases, Tales, The South

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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.

Milky Way E-W South

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:

Artisan Blueprint GNP Transit Apr10

The second is of the transit of the not-quite-Full Moon one and a half minutes later:

Artisan Blueprint Transit Apr10

The third is of the ever so slightly asymmetrical angles at midnight:

Artisan Blueprint Midnight Apr11

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:

GNPTransit Babylon

This is not the inspiration for the illustrious invention of the arch, he asserts, but the transit of the opposite pole:

GSP Transit Babylon

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:

Artisan Blueprint GNP Transit Kathmandu Apr10

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:

Artisan Moon Guatemala City Apr11

The same sky over us will look like this, he adds:

Artisan Guatamala Sky East Brunswick Apr11

Irrelevant, says a geographer from PNG, what matters is the Arch, and here on Bougainville is the place to build it:

Artisan Blueprint Moon GNP Transit Haisi Bougainville Apr11

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!”

Artisan Under the Bridge East Brunswick Apr11

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:

Artisan Arch

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.

Artisan GNP Transit Polluted Apr10

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.

https://youtu.be/fj6r3-sQr58

Diplomacy: New Moon in Pisces

28 Tuesday Mar 2017

Posted by in Moon Phases

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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.

Pisces New Moon Lower Transit Cabo Frio Mar27

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.

Artisan Under the Bridge East Brunswick

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?

Rajab

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 Healer: Full Moon in Leo, March 12-13

12 Sunday Mar 2017

Posted by in Moon Phases, Pop Psychology

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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.

Healer Moon Mt Isa South Mar13

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.

Healer Moon Solar Midnight Poeppel Corner Mar13

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.

Healer Covenant Gununa Mar13

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’.

Australia Day 2017

26 Thursday Jan 2017

Posted by in Stargazing

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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.

australia-day-rise-galactic-north-pole-box-hill-2017The 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.

australia-day-crux-box-hill-2017Looking 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.]

australia-day-dawn-box-hill-2017The 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.

Epiphany January 6

04 Wednesday Jan 2017

Posted by in Astral Gates, Breamlea Zodiac, Underworld

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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.]

veteran-at-first-point-of-aries-transit-sunset-bethlehem-jan04

The second sign, proving just how elusive signs can be, is manifest at Regulus Gate from my observatory on Epiphany morning.

regulus-transit-epiphany-2017-breamlea

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.

alnair-transit-floriano-peixoto-jan05

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.)

veteran-at-ashvini-transit-sunset-malaita-jan06

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!

epiphany-fomalhaut-transit-breamlea-jan06

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.

epiphany-fomalhaut-transit-bethlehem-jan06

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!

epiphany-sunset-bethlehem-jan06

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.

Frivolity: New Moon in Sagittarius

29 Thursday Dec 2016

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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?

sagittarius-new-noon-riet-india

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!

sagittarius-new-ra-snapshot-breamlea-dec29

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.

rabbi-ul-thani-dec31

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.

veteran-transits-sydney-2017

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?

Full Moon in Taurus: the Vagabond

14 Wednesday Dec 2016

Posted by in Astral Gates, Moon Phases, Underworld

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The story so far:

The vagabond is homeless, disconnected, a refugee from the world of the therapeutically discriminating intellect. Is he unpacking his “stuff”? Is he on the way to realizing that the enemy of a perfect world is the undeconstructed self? Shall we ask him? Are we bored enough by our pallid Nothingness to inhabit with our self-aggrandizing ‘compassion’ another’s tedious wound? Do we have the temerity to apply our triumphant empathy to the capacity to deal with the shame of eating garbage, being constantly afflicted with diarrhoea and having nowhere to do it but in our pants? Are we ready to deal with the stereotypes he has us cast in?

Now read on.

vagabond-full-bilbao-dec14

Does this look like a smiley face to you? You’re sadly deluded. The Moon is a piece of rock without legs, and its ‘head’ is all face. If that doesn’t give him away as a shady type, the one eye confirms he is ‘other’, not to be trusted, potentially evil. Of course, as compassionate people, we have long abandoned physiognomy, but our compassion is anchored to the otherness of the ‘other’. Compassion is part of our identity, and the identity of the ‘other’ is as fixed: indigenous people must remain in traditional culture, disinherited and victimized, and disabled people must remain the recipients of our largesse, defined by their disability. To expect otherwise is racist and elitist, disrespectful of their identity.

The Sign of the constellation Taurus in the southern hemisphere is Sagittarius, the sign of charisma and independence. Re-inhabit your subjectivity and respect the ‘other’ in theirs! Nobody’s identity is fixed, at birth or in an analytical, managerial mind. There is no form which is not empty. There is only time, and the dark art of becoming. And the timelessly true subject of the subject, love.

Part The Second

If you want to justify yourself–tidy yourself at the margins–spare me some change, says the vagabond, the loser, the weirdo. Pause for a dialogue in the daylight world of your power to imagine away my exile. But if you can brave it, meet me in the middle of the night, in the chaos of your fears, the world of my power to make you an infantile irrelevance.

Chapter 1. Saiph

Who is God?

SAMAR KHEL
HANGA ROA

These people on the streets and roads of Afghanistan know the folly of disrespecting a man who will kill you instantly with impunity. If one is uneducated in the nature of offence, as I am, and you too, then one is in mortal danger. One must shroud oneself, maintain an attitude of deference and submit to any indignity. Is it wise to leave questions about God to the Imam to decide? No, it is stupid to voice an opinion. And that is why I will be long gone from the shelter of this moai by dawn. The power of Polynesians is immense, and under the gaze of their ancestors existence itself is an impertinence. Saiph has the laughter which incites a man to be bigger than his grandfather. It is very, very dangerous.

Chapter 2. Butch

Who are you?

BAGNOLI
PUKAPUKA

Why do I sing “O Sole Mio” when all the beautiful people at this beach have their earplugs in? Because this is a dream, and singing a Neapolitan song gives me an aesthetic reason to be dressed in rags. My people forgive my problem with the bottle, and the years I wasted reading the history of the world, because I entertain the tourists. They tell me a woman’s beauty is not so much degraded by wolf-whistles in Italia these days. You can wear these revealing clothes. Is it true? A woman’s beauty in Pukapuka is the secret which keeps us alive. You will all leave and take your secrets with you, and here another cyclone will come.

Chapter 3. Avior

What is life?

SAN ANDRES
PHUKET

You boys are trouble, no? Hahaha! No, just having fun, I know. That’s all I’ve got, and I don’t know when I’ll have more, but you’re welcome! A cricket team, eh? We play baseball where I am from, but last year I was in India. There it is big, I know. Howzat! Hahaha! The world is just a big game of cricket, no? Tampering with the ball! Hahaha! Go over there to vomit, man! Hahaha!

Chapter 4. Regulus

What is death?

RECIFE
MELBOURNE

“O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” When will the Holocaust be forgotten? When will the Twin Towers be forgotten? For ever and ever. Now get out with me and witness the moment. I am pausing the meter, see?

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That you will never see again. The star is the Archangel Raphael. I thought it was him when you started raving about death. Why do you want to talk about death? Is that my “stuff”? No. “I found more bitter than death the woman who is a trap, whose heart is a snare and whose hands are like prison chains.” That’s mine. “Eh quoi! n’est-ce donc que cela? La toile était levée et j’attendais encore.”

“Finally, I got home. It was tantamount to harassment.”
“Well, at least you got to see the Archangel Raphael”
“Not funny.”
“And you might refrain from turning our Christmas party into a conversation about death?”

Doubt: New Moon in Scorpio

29 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by in Astral Gates, Moon Phases

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Would you speak of objective empathy? The objective ‘soul of America’? An objective definition of your community? Of course not! But in fact, politicians, journalists and academics make utterances every day which assume you can. We are so accustomed to the use of such terms as ‘multi-cultural’, ‘global’, ‘universal human rights’ ‘culture’ and ‘community’ that we don’t question them. It’s time we remembered that economic and political systems are powered by individual activity. Naturally, since we are saturated by relationship, we are stimulated by a sense of relativity, but our activity does not occur in a systemic context unless it first occurs in a personal space. The dismantling of personal space is a human disaster. This, and any statement which generalizes from the particular, should occasion extreme doubt.

When the Sun and Moon come together in Breamlea Scorpio, this means, as far as can be practicably obtained in an equal division of the ecliptic by twelve, that the conjunction occurs against the background of astronomically-defined Scorpius, which the Sun enters in the last month of northern hemisphere autumn, and so carries the sign of the archer Sagittarius. In the southern hemisphere it carries the sign of the last month of equinoxially-defined spring, Gemini, the sign of over-thinking, intellectual constructs and mind-games. The relativity of northern and southern seasons is a mind-game, as is the relativity of solar and lunar calendars, and the imposition of boundaries in the sky by astronomers and astrologers. Be aware of being in your head, and be cautious of letting others get in there and play with it.

The spirit of the law is disobedience, therefore do not speak of cultural relativity and universal human rights in the same breath. That is a contamination. Being is becoming. Evangelism is not proselytism; love is not therapy. If Spirit beckons to the wilderness, Ideology belongs in the marketplace, not the mosques and law-courts.

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Look upon the multitude of zombies who have lost the capacity to follow signs from a ‘within’, and instead, heads reeling with post-truth shock, set their course between different analytical impossibilities. Are you in this state? Is the next chapter of your life story so predictable, because your calling is ‘within’ a shape? Is your Tree of Life fully formed? You just haven’t finished painting all the leaves? Is doubt a blight on those leaves? Emptiness a one-way ticket to boredom and death? This is a lack of faith in the perpetual becoming of the self, the nurture of a pot-bound purchase from the nursery. The ego remains in charge of consciousness in a sort of secular agnosticism.

The sane person–any being overwhelmed by the suffering of the world and alive to the real and pressing predicament of their own finitude–who seeks salvation ‘within’, creates a relationship to the world, to outward appearances, by doubting logic, moulding reality to suit desire. Such madness, if madness it is, is truly founded in a nobility, even a sanctification of suffering. The more common madness makes suffering a malady. The ego doubts the self because it doesn’t like the view out the window. Between the magical realms of body and society it finds only a wound. The madness of the therapeutic solution to suffering pathologizes passionate love as limerence and anxiety as hormonal imbalance. The madness of activism, the political solution to suffering, destroys the validity of the ‘social inclusion’ and ‘cultural property’ it glorifies in minority by stigmatizing ‘elitism’, ‘racism’ and ‘fascism’. Sanity doubts all of this, surely?

Location, location, location! That the position of the Moon against the background stars affect its influence, I doubt. I doubt too the phases of the Moon: when and where do they exist? But I do not doubt that the Moon transits, and is in every instant transiting somewhere. The Gates give me a frame of reference to our Earth’s rotation more tangibly instantaneous and real than the Moon’s elongation from the Sun. In this instance, I like the balance of the instant at which South Africa, and all who share her meridian, lead the way into the new month:

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Years are marked by the slow precession of the Moon’s nodes through the constellations. This has been the year the Moon has risen above the Ecliptic in Aquarius and fallen in Leo, a sign to me that we can be such perfectionists that we are inclined to overlook new connections which are not logical, seeing their potential as messy rather than liberating. We have dealt with issues in a relativist sort of way, but we have been blind to obvious signs of ‘our’ elitism and ‘their’ resentful conformity. The geometry of difference has imploded.

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A sign is not merely a piece of evidence, like another piece of an academic jigsaw puzzle, a climate statistic, or the elongation of the Moon. It is totally subjective. It is almost a gravitational force, drawing an absolute necessity from somewhere deep inside a being’s sense of itself towards growth, connection, union, realization. Eureka! Epiphany! The world of reason and the law is an exoskeletal structure, but living, breathing reality is a lingering, lurking pulsation of signs.

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What are the signs at top and bottom of the chart above? They may be the scented breath of a wind from the east, a seeking of the significance of the force which draws the Moon, the Sun and wandering stars inexorably in that direction. Alternatively, they may register the ownership of the universe by the human spirit. The character of the stars can and ought to be disputed, but that they have no character is a claim made by someone watching too much TV. These signs of the labelled stars and their underworld opposites indicate a geometrical reality, not of the Solar System, but of the observer’s instant in relation to time and geography. They connect continents, hemispheres and populations by meridian to their  underworld being. They are gates of subjectivity standing on opposite sides of the globe punctuating this mental month as a personal, post-truth Moon passes through going eastward.

Part The First

Chapter 1

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Where is the Bangladesh-India Border? Between ethnicities? Languages? Religions? Who inhabits an Indian enclave within a Bangladeshi enclave within an Indian enclave within a Bangladeshi region? Where does Pegasus end and Andromeda begin? Where are the astronomical attributes of  Alpha Andromedae? Spectrographic printout? Somewhere in space? The time of the printout? Of the emissions? How can a constellation be defined? How can Alpheratz not be ambiguous? It appears in a flying horse as well as a chained sacrifice.

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If you can imagine yourself up on the cross, “Verklaerung”* (Transfiguration) is directly above you, and flanking it are the alternative directions of spirituality: the ecstacy and heightened awareness of “Sinistra”* (Delta Centauri), and the asceticism and moral rectitude of “Destra”* (Epsilon Centauri). Which do you choose when you are a prisoner enslaved to the construction of The Wall of Tears? Which leads to survival? Whose cries do tourists in the Galapagos hear?

*”Breamlea” nomenclature.

Chapter 2

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Young indigenous offender, what has robbed you of the enjoyment of life and set your heart among the briars of your mind? What deity has initiated you into perpetual deprivation?

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Seek him in the break on Brazil’s shore. He is a natural force, a cycle, a habit; but in the Underworld, he is the memory to unlearn. Only you might crest that wave.

Chapter 3

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Gazing out into the dark sea from your module in the launch stage of Punta Pacifica, you do appear to have presence. Where will you land? Will you choose, mythical minotaur of the labyrinth of capital?

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Is it by transcending the ego that you will overcome fear, anxiety and despair? Or is mindfulness a detour around your infantile defences against failure, loss and finitude?

https://youtu.be/CDcpWmHMP7k

Rectitude: New Moon in Libra

31 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by in Jupiter, Moon Phases

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Today’s New Moon occurs in sidereal Libra, which carries the Sign of the second month of northern Spring, Taurus, and once again, visibility blurs its relationship with the seasons of the two hemispheres. The Sun occupies the Sign a month earlier than the Constellation, in northern Autumn and southern Spring, but the Constellation is prominent in the night sky through northern Spring and southern Autumn. It transits at dawn in March, solar midnight in May, and nightfall in August.

libra

The traditional view of Libra, with autumnal associations of refinement and compromise (when the Sun is nowadays actually in Virgo), is of the scales of justice, a symbol which resonates with its Southern season and surroundings. Below it is the Spring star Arcturus and the Ploughman—impossible to see as such—or the Chinese ‘Great Horn’, which unmistakably resembles a corporate tie. Above Libra, over the zenith at the back of your head when you face north, is the array of the Centaur and the Wolf skewered on his spear.

Because of its proximity to the symbol of justice, this array has always represented for me the quintessential colonial Australian conflict between indigenous people and settlers, and settlers and colonial powers. Tranquility is guaranteed by the police if you’re a squatter and some swagman or band of blackfellas kills your sheep, but how secure are you in your moral rectitude? Who is interfering with whose livelihood? Is it a sheep, or a kangaroo? Is Ned Kelly a national hero or a murderer and thief? Whatever our decisions, we Australians transfer their shortcomings onto the ‘suits’ in the big smoke (Bootes).

My life has been witness to both an evolution of ideas of what is good, and an erosion by cultural relativity of absolute meaning. My ancestors stole the children: ‘good Christians’ they were who put the interests of indigenous children—whom they regarded as tainted in indigenous communities by white blood—before the need of their mothers, because they saw only dysfunction and destitution in indigenous communities. Of course, we can acknowledge the cause of that dysfunction in our simply being here, see the missionaries as henchmen to capitalist exploiters, and believe that a guilty conscience was a poor foundation for ethical action, but my ancestors did not only think they were doing the right thing by the “stolen generation”, they were at that time also sacrificing their husbands and sons in world wars believed—naively, as it can seem in retrospect—to be defending the good against evil. There’s nothing secure about rectitude.

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Saiph is sublimated. It’s Halloween! Imagine this: at the ‘stroke’ of solar midnight in a dark churchyard in the Barossa region of South Australia, directly below its graves, the Moon aligns with the Sun. Notwithstanding that, because of daylight saving, this is the only midnight on Halloween, the return of the souls of these dead and the opening of the doors to the spirit world occur in the other tonight of the 31st. And yet something is happening here. Let’s just say that the spirits are having a dress rehearsal. “And his ghost may be heard….”

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To be honest, I was drawn to the Lutherans because of the German connection with the swagman [linked above], but here’s another spooky connection. What unseen power guided my search to Our Lady of Navigators? What is it about two places—two churches—which are precisely opposite each other on the globe? What other questions am I being asked to answer? Where do we go when we die? What underworld does the Sun enter after dark? Does it die? What will happen to me if I’m awake at midnight? Am I alone?

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Can you see a sign in the form of a halo of light from the south side of the igreja? Peasant superstition? An uncanny similarity asserts itself with the phenomenon known as the Brocken Spectre, a magnified shadow of an observer projected into mountain mist on the very same mountain, in the Northern [see?] German Harz Mountains, where witches meet on Beltane Eve to hold revels with the Devil. The Lutherans came from Germany, and it is Beltane in the Southern Hemisphere—or near enough—on the First of November! Phew! Fortunately, I can give you these salutary lines about limerence, addressing this apparition, to calm you down:

And art thou nothing? Such thou art, as when
The woodman winding westward up the glen
At wintry dawn, where o’er the sheep-track’s maze
The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist’ning haze,
Sees full before him, gliding without tread,
An image with a glory round its head;
The enamoured rustic worships its fair hues,
Nor knows he makes the shadow he pursues!
From “Constancy to an Ideal Object“, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Coincidences? A demonstration that everything is connected? That everything happens for a reason? Or are the ‘suits’ right, and the world simply turns? On we go…

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Today sees another portentous omen. Is the appearance of mighty Jupiter in the dawn sky a sign of the welcome return of the Prodigal, or is it to confirm our optimism towards the chance of a bountiful harvest untroubled by further calamities like the floods we have endured during the Spring? Is it the long-awaited sign that the ‘suits’ will stop Aleppo, the incarceration of Aboriginal youth and the global annihilation of wildlife?

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And on the eve of the new month, the Moon reaches its apogee, which some foolish people believe has an influence on which things we are ashamed of and keep buried within us, instead hating their manifestation in other people, unaware that discriminating rectitude like this merely enables and perpetuates infantile, unconscious self-hatred.

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So Happy Safar! The month when fighting is forbidden is finally over, and we can get stuck into it. ‘Safar’ means ’empty’, as in empty homes, when sanctions are lifted against trading and feuding. However, it must be pointed out that this coming month, regarded by some pre-Islamic Arabs as unlucky, is like all months, neither good nor bad in itself. Let there be an end to all such superstitions. No month, and no position of the stars, Sun, Moon or planets exerts any influence independent of the will of God. Does God wear a suit?

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If you have ever been anaesthetized, it is not difficult to imagine Limbo. As deeply personal as your last experience might be, there might yet be something you wish to say, some further comment on an umpiring decision, perhaps. You may get many opportunities to dress-rehearse but it may be a considerable time before you are heard. I would add that we have this in common: my sincere wish in what I have written above is not to offend anyone—even if you’re wrong.

Happy Halloween!

https://youtu.be/lc7Ke9Org9U