Usually every three years, when Full Moon phases with the range of dates the Sun enters a Breamlea Constellation, there are two Full Moons in the same Constellation. Three years ago, spectacularly, it was the Aquarius Crone in August-September. This year it is the Capricorn Addict, this Moon and next. How to differentiate them, and how do they derive a common meaning? Is there any valid foundation to this exercise in giving Moons a Southern Hemisphere existential identity?

Responsibility, Gemini’s calling-card, is really the basis of all life: not just in the sense of being responsible for a state of the world, or of oneself; or of being able to respond to the world, or demand that ability in others; but as a combination, even a continuum, of the two. It is a feedback loop, in which a calling from within adjusts itself to reality, and a real desire is driven by a sense of unrealized potential, of oneself and the world to care for each other. This is what I think ‘ownedness‘ means. You have to own yourself, and where you and the world meet in mutual creation, to be authentic. Responsibility is the transformation of emptiness into gratitude, generosity and joy.

You only have this one life, and you don’t have to be anxious about that. Responsibility can take you in a million directions, in despite of the final destination. Culs de sac like death are an illusion. So are images of the higher self you want to attain, and the wound which stops you getting there (or keeps you trapped in ministration). Of course, responsibility as calling is not without its complications. The absence of responsibility is despair, which Kierkegaard powerfully defined as the refusal of one’s calling, the loss of the eternal. And where is the eternal, if not in emptiness? Immediacy has no self, to use Kierkegaard’s words.

Take courage, through this and the next Full Moon in Capricorn: we will construct an enlightening interpretation of this fortuitous coincidence together! And authentically, I hope we can share a laugh. After all, a calling does not come from the newspapers, does it? Millions of people in post-industrial western democracies are searching for an authentic inner voice calling them to the future. It’s very hard to hear. My own calling to write about this most significant of New Moons, at the heart of Winter when the God is born, and when intimacy and duty entail an appreciation of role and judgment, has fluctuated in its audibility, and I’m afraid I cannot do it justice. Two events have drowned it at times in static: a federal election facing a polarized electorate which democracy dooms to ineffective and reactive division; and a resurgence of bodily pain which asserts my lifelong irresponsibility, a black bird come home to roost.

Three faces of inauthenticity: venting, subservience and the higher self.
We are not reaction, nor perfect.
We are not victims, nor independent.
We are not on a journey, nor lost.

Procol Harum once said, “Life is like a beanstalk, isn’t it?” Yes, in every moment of every day the tree of life contends with the elements in whatever form it has managed to preserve, automatically continuing the primordial transformative processes which create it out of nothing. Its ‘tree-ness’ can be located in its chloroplasts, at the empty threshold of energy transfers; or in the hydraulics implicit in its structure; or in shade, timber, firewood or home. As a tree, to be the gestalt of all of those identifiers, and none, is responsibility.

The moment of New Moon is an experience of being, similar in relation to the Full Moon as the house of realization is to that of reputation, in the sense that Being at the Imum Coeli represents the emptiness of ego. In that moment the Moon embarks on a mission to fill the emptiness, or allay the boredom, of what in essence prefigures what he is propelled towards. New Moon is not an embarkation from or towards an ultimate form of being. Any consciousness of higher-order being is already ego bored with emptiness. It is more valuable to think of it as a new infusion of care into will: a renewal of ‘human-ness’.

The Moon is cursed to swivel two hoops: an elliptical orbit and an inclined orbit. His gyrations delight us until we know what they mean. In the rush of his proximity he makes more urgent the task of unlearning the infantile solutions to shame which fuel so much of our judgment of others. As he composes his anguish in the Sign of determination and withdrawal (the dichotomy of twinship) in very dubious company, he has already rushed us by, but his apogee, in Libra the shame of greed and the reaction formation of disrespect, hangs from the top of the tree, impossible to ignore. Although nobody can see him, we do know that high above the Sun, he is giddily reminding us of the responsibility of prominence, with the Ascending Node in Aquarius, to focus our insight on overcoming avoidance and perfectionism.

The Tree of Man [sic] is a cross, constructed from an upright pole joining identity and emptiness, and a crossbeam joining dependent arising to transcendence, from which the bound human arms of value and intention regularly lift in supplication and dangle in despair. However daunting that symbol may seem, it doesn’t have to be. The imagination can function as a chloroplast. Just as the stars immediately above the Southern Cross symbolize the thoughts of the crucified, the left way of intoxication, the right way of asceticism, and in between, the immanent reality of transfiguration, so a child gazing up into the foliage of a parent can get an expansive perspective beneath their posture: the twitter of the cosmos in the branches.

At the moment of this New Moon, accompanied by Mummy’s ghost, Alphekka is at transit. He is the habit which affects to answer the calling. Alphekka has the quality of ‘disguise’ because he rotates very quickly and is surrounded by dust. He resembles Taz, the Tasmanian devil with a vicious temper in Bugs Bunny, and appears as the repressed accountant Theodore Tasmanian in the Looney Tunes Wabbit series now showing. Go Theo! I hope you’re happy with your vote! Now, where are those painkillers?