This month celebrates the triumph of what is most ignoble in the human spirit, the desire and capacity to shove an opinion down somebody’s throat. Special recognition is given to the puppeteers whose armies of billions of zealots are so ready to hand.
One glance at social media in these physically disconnected times suggests that there are zealots everywhere, more than you can defeat in battle or even point a stick at. What they all seem to have in common, these stalwarts of the perennial conflict with imperfection, is the knowledge that something true is threatened with extinction.
The allure of totalitarianism is not particularly the opportunity to perfect others, but the absolute imperative to perpetuate the conditions for an identity, as a white supremacist, a queer person, a person of colour, a nationalist humiliated by history, the list goes on, or simply anyone otherwise perfect on the verge of being ignored. “Freedom!” the anti-lockdown protesters spit. I suspect they mean freedom from you.
In the beginning was time. First they diseased the future, and then they erased the past. Live in the now, they said. To fuse future and past into a present is the finitive compulsion of the zealot, but what happens to a past with no future is a black hole which haunts him. Time itself is something true threatened with extinction, like a chook running around without its head. The roots of the Tree of Life are dangling in mid-air.
Trees grow from the top, where the chloroplasts are. Is the Galactic Centre the crown of our tree or its roots wrapped around a spiritual black hole, winter in the North, summer in the South? Centres are full of zealots, and so passe.
Poet, Saint and Fool are far behind, propped in the lowest sephirot of the Tree of Man, somewhere back there among the ragged hills of youth and romance, not visible from the artificial park whose laps we avatars continue to call a journey, though it have no beginning and no end. Zealots, the shriek of the cockatoos means only, you’re facing the wrong direction. There has ever been a ready antidote to ideology.
He doesn’t trust you. It’s not that your compassion is insincere, merely hollow, gratuitous. He doesn’t ask for it. He doesn’t need it. More than that, it’s no business of his what you think or feel about him, or, for that matter, what you believe would relieve human suffering, by eradicating inequality, poverty and disease or improving difficult relationships. That is not to say that his is not in any way a spiritual path. He may appear to have given up his calling, to be bent only on his next meal, fag-end and doss, but his experience in the body of mind no more disqualifies him from transformation and becoming than yours does.
The Vagabond as an archetype may look out of place, with his odiously soiled trousers in the Maccas queue, but his affinity with country is palpable. If you don’t look up, and it is very uncomfortable to do so, you are vividly aware of his luminescence bathing the sky down to the horizon in all directions, as though the cardinal directions have been extinguished, as in a painful separation, perhaps, and only one direction remains, the non-zenith. The body of the world radiates from the mind, or is it that mind is dissolved in its body?
Look Tela up on Google Maps. It is strikingly beautiful, and with the midnight moon in the zenith it seems lit for a photograph by a professional for a tourism brochure. The last thing you would be wondering if you were here is, ‘what’s over the horizon’. But although the Moon is giving any witness to its perfect syzygy a show worth the price of admission and more, it gives the impression it is gazing beyond the horizon, like an actor delivering lines beyond the footlights and the dark silhouettes of the audience. Who or what is this Vagabond? Is he an apparition from the Underworld, a dead man walking, wandering in our waking and sleeping unconscious like an alley-cat? Murakami’s untrademarked Commendatore, perhaps?
All the powerful figures in my life are women, which explains the genders I associate with Sun and Moon. It is a moot point whether selectively listening and mansplaining at New Moon is a less potent expression of masculinity than independent and vainglorious posturing at Full Moon. Also unclear is the extent to which the undeniable subjugation of women is voluntary, and such phenomena as the #MeToo ‘movement’ are less a force driving an emasculation of men than an overdue rejection of self-loathing.
The tropical Sign associated with Taurus is Gemini in the North, Sagittarius in the South. It is both, and neither. It carries its own myths, Mesopotamian, Greek and Indigenous. To be a ‘Taurus’ is to be struck by Taurus the Constellation, not Aries or Libra (in the South). Being stuck on someone or something was not long ago much easier to recognize than it is today. We all knew with vinyl technology what a speck of dust meant. At worst we could stop playing that album, which is what most people, especially women, mean by ‘let it go’ today, but a good anti-static cloth usually did the trick.
Needless to say, the Signs of the Zodiac are seasonal Sun Signs, of which the Moon makes what he can. Regarded as female in traditional western folklore, the Moon contests the Sun’s influence on growth and decay, and the tidal behaviour of rivers, seas and the fertility of women. Regardless of how cultures have chosen to identify with it, the Moon has always hotly contested the Sun as principal guide in the measure of time.
If we could prevail upon the Vagabond to speak, he would no doubt have an abundance of calamity and disappointment to share, and we would expect much of that to be about love. Perhaps he tries to illuminate the karma of his relationships with his gaze upon and beyond our horizon of time and place, but he is more likely rejoicing in his release from the constriction of our subjugation by the hormonal mysteries of the hours, which rewards him with a realization of time’s emptiness.
In the charts above and below, two perspectives of the moment of Full Moon are presented in detail which could easily be deduced from the Mercator projection presented above them, if we only knew how to tell the time. Embedded in equatorial relationship to the Constellations of the Zodiac, the bright stars of the Vagabond’s eternal return to promise and loss, among them the denizens of the Lunar Mansions of a number of traditions, move continuously around the clock of human madness: as the time of day in this instant increases to the east, by 2 hours every 30° of geographic longitude, so the (Meridian) Houses occupied by these subjects and their corresponding Signs as viewed from any location become the next 30° to the east. Conversely, a star transiting at the cusp of the Fourth House at any location appears at the cusp of the Third 30° to the west.
If the Moon is able to perceive the powerful female forces in his world not only at all hours of the day, waking to the daily activities from which he is displaced and keenly misses, or asleep in the underworld chambers of his heart, adored by others in this instant, giving him a glance at the horizon if at all, but also instantaneously in all the realms of the bardo engendered by the negative emotions, and if he does this in a dozen guises, waxing and waning throughout the year as the Sun cloaks her tender subjects in seasonal daylight and reveals them to us in the night sky, then we may have the answer to the question, who or what is the Vagabond: detached in time and place, practising the elimination of resentment and envy, absent from history, he embodies the emptiness of memory, the presence of non-existence, and country’s transcendence of identity. He doesn’t trust your ability to tell the time; he is idea, and so are you; he is looking for a smoke.
Incidentally, before we meet again, the Sun will commence its annual fording of Acheron, the River of Woe. The Vagabond anticipates a difficult rebirth there, but I trust you will notice nothing out of the ordinary.
From Duino Elegies: The First Elegy
Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
to no longer use skills one had barely time to acquire;
not to observe roses and other things that promised
so much in terms of a human future, no longer
to be what one was in infinitely anxious hands;
to even discard one’s own name as easily as a child
abandons a broken toy.
Strange, not to desire to continue wishing one’s wishes.
Strange to notice all that was related, fluttering
so loosely in space. And being dead is hard work
and full of retrieving before one can gradually feel a
trace of eternity.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Trans. Albert Ernest Flemming
Can we be relatively confident there is no absolute truth when we are absolutely confident that everything is relative? Is a pitched battle on the street a refusal on both signs to deconstruct truths which are ignorantly clung to as fundamental, or is one side right and the other wrong? How do some truths resist deconstruction? Consider this chart:
Do you dream of destiny, good burghers of the North? Sleep on, because a snake slithers across your bed, and it is a crab who usurps your throne. We of the South know our way around your underworld, as you do in ours. Shall we continue to fight with you over whether the Sun is high in our consciousness or low in your repair? Will you continue to fight each other over who is king, crab or lion?
My fundamental belief is that everything is made out of time, and that space is simply the dimension in which we construct the illusions which give our brief, almost virtual existence the insights and values which inure us to the instantaneous and meaningless. Space gives life the evolutionary impulse of perspective, but the mirage of place. Time insists on relativity, but it can deliver community.
I suggest to you that time can be experienced in three different ways, and that we all develop attitude which centres us in one of these ways more or less integrated with the others. Seekers, it seems to me, are focussed on dissatisfaction with a synthetic space, and the fundamental organizing principle constituted by their experience of time can remain hidden to them.In grammatical terms, the three attitudes to time are: life is a constant adaptation to an ever-changing present; life is always on the crest of a wave from the past; and life is a choice of the proper future. The three organizing principles are: “How can I change the world?”; “Who is responsible?”; and “What am I entitled to?”.
My archetypes for these attitudes are respectively, Fool, Poet and Saint, and this website engages in an exploration of their many guises. Suffice to say here that the Fool is plagued by care, the Poet by uncertainty, and the Saint by evil. Integration is a necessity, normally undertaken in sleep. The highest form of evolution is not the rule of law, in secular or religious guise, but equanimity. Birds have it in spades, but humans do not. Instead, we have identity, and property, and boundaries.
It is within the confines of those primitive categories that we have curdled our cultures and raised our children during the whole of the ‘Age of Pisces’. All of our laws have evolved to reduce offence, because anger, hatred and conflict are uncomfortable. It is deplorable to live a life which is nasty, brutish and short. Privilege and repression have been our means of dealing with anger.
With breathtaking confidence in non-dualism, pluralism and the economics of globalization, privileged people all over the world have been dismantling boundaries, sharing property and merging identity, but not their own, and they have unleashed such anger that they cannot understand how to deal with it. Their own reactive anger is uncomfortable indeed. It belies their confidence in the Now. It is so correct, so impersonal, and so vain!
So how realistic is hope for a New Age of equanimity and enlightened loving-kindness? Is this hope better-founded in human brain function than the submission to chastity of Islamic and Christian patriarchy? Can post-modernism teach the emptiness of each of the ways of experiencing time, and yet by promoting the value of integration dissolve our differences?
You cannot slay the dragon, Sir Knight of the European Round Table. She is in each of your daughters and sons—heads on them like rabbits! But what you could do, Saints, Poets and Fools of the “United” Nations, is find the Holy Grail for us. Hmm? Could there be an absolute truth? Is Jerusalem one or many? Eh? Eh? The sleepwalker on stage is not whole, and how empty is sleep?
And so the Moon completes another round, and my thoughts are decidedly autumnal! Now is the meaning of a life nearing its end obliterated by the clamour and prodigal blaze of manifest implication–the hunchback Richard, misquoted in the media, as likely said.
The ‘Baby-Boomers’ will leave their over-priced houses to children grown old outbid and waiting, but do allow them a last brief moment to consider their life’s meaning. They’re a bit anxious about it, bless their secular hearts. A hundred definitions of cool have come and gone, a hundred -isms, a thousand icons, a thousand must-reads, and now in the legacy, what still smoulders?
A curious coincidence, this Full Moon conjunction with Uranus. Like many stargazers, I have anticipated this month’s opposition of the seventh planet as a rare opportunity to see it with the naked eye. Not this week. The Moon has seen to that. So what can I ‘see’ behind the Moon’s oppressive charm?
Once again it is Theodore Tasmanian at transit in the Breamlea afternoon, but in the Atacama Desert, Justfriendistan, it is Achernar at Midheaven, the star of hubris, end of the river and like Uranus, invisible to the ancients (for whom the river ended at Acamar). Hubris and charm definitely resonate, but what dimension does ‘contrite interest’ add? We should all know that the Prodigal eventually returns (Luke 15: 11-32). Will the Baby-Boomers return? What does Uranus say?
“Meaning is determined in time, and beyond my realm, but I can say this: there is no system which can be analyzed to elemental constituents; there is no cause which is not a prisoner of such analysis; and every moment is a progenitor of that prison. Most of the misunderstandings which divide and separate people, the antipathy of science to religion, for example, resolve themselves in recognition of the ground of interest, the potentials of care, noise and change.
Care is the root of loving-kindness and responsibility, and the irony of independence, but really it is simply what happens to the world when you pat a dog. It is not culturally determined or directed. It is simply being there, like the flutter of Amazon butterfly wings. Noise is the root of language, science and music: in it lies the meaning of something flapping in the wind, or the phase of rhythms of distant traffic and a blowfly in the baby’s room. It is redundancy’s midwife and the high priest of silence. Change is the root of time, calendars and clocks, but it is born to the motion of a crawling child, dies in the intellect, in structure and determinism, and is constantly refreshed in memory, the mirror and the dream.
You will find your meaning not by parsing the sentence of your time, but by remembering the great tides of interest in which you have swum. Swim on! Death will annihilate your unifying vision, but be joyous in your interest! Love, sing and dream right up until your own death, and leave the meaning of life to its misunderstanding.”
In common with Quetzalcoatl, the Morning Star (Venus) who created the humanity we think we know from wounds he inflicted on his earlobes, calves, tongue, and penis, Uranus, the sky god from before time, saw something momentous created from his severed genitals: Aphrodite, otherwise the Roman love goddess Venus, in an ironic twist of comparative mythology.
So something existed before love, something in every moment, before narrative and the search for meaning tied all the moments together and gave them causes, or tried to, and that is interest. What do we deserve? What have we enjoyed? What dictates an imperative to change gender? What does a computerized machine have that a process-worker does not? What does the train-wreck of our time leave behind? What will we take with us? Interest.
The Moon, on the other hand, is barely begun on a new circuit of the Zodiac, which begins by convention in southern hemisphere autumn. Perhaps it is never the wrong time to start again. This is of course a human perspective. No matter how empty of independent reality we recognize things to be, we still order them in systems and structures of the intellect. The global economy is a unity of alienations. The Breamlea Zodiac measures from Sagittarius as well as the equinox in Pisces. The Moon is full when it is directly in line with the Sun and the Earth, and where it transits at solar midnight.
But what does it mean, a Full Moon? How does polarity work under the hood? What would a global astrology come to consist of when naive expectations that the perspective of North America and Europe would assert its superiority over local superstition had been dashed by a combination of rigid barbarian submission to a set of rules for existing upside down and disbelief that prediction was possible at all? An energetic, impatient Sun in October? Twelve seasons in one day, shared on rotation around the globe like the solar terminator? Will the Robot one day volunteer no-fly zones over the ground tracks of Gate-Posts? Or to preserve narrative insanity just terminate me?
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.” Omar Khayyám
“What rubbish!” the Skygod echoes at this Gate. And here we have the Moon’s new motivation to keep going around in circles: my prodigal interest in the duality of every perspective, and the potential I live and breathe for a comparative astrology of time. A preview:
Each of these stars forms one part of a gate with another, six steps along on the chart, which is exactly, within 24s of right ascension, opposite it in the sky. Arbitrary definitions notwithstanding, what mindfulness of a unity with who and what is directly beneath our feet can we bring to waking-consciousness? Out of interest?
In grammatical terms, the three attitudes to time are: life is a constant adaptation to an ever-changing present; life is always on the crest of a wave from the past; and life is a choice of the proper future. The three organizing principles are: “How can I change the world?”; “Who is responsible?”; and “What am I entitled to?”.
A curious coincidence, this Full Moon conjunction with Uranus. Like many stargazers, I have anticipated this month’s opposition of the seventh planet as a rare opportunity to see it with the naked eye. Not this week. The Moon has seen to that. So what can I ‘see’ behind the Moon’s oppressive charm?
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
