Tag Archives: Vertex

New Moon in Aquarius: Convention

17 Saturday Mar 2018

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The mere name of philosophy, however quietly pursued, is an object of sufficient scorn, and what would happen if we should begin to separate ourselves from the customs of our fellow-men?  Seneca.

One of the conventions of astrology I have found most meaningful is the notion that New Moon reveals a new perspective which the Full Moon brings to fruition with an invigorated disposition as enlightenment, another joist to bear a creative and joyful attitude. Southern Hemisphere Astrology breaks with the convention that the Moon is feminine, because it is clear to me, notwithstanding his monthly cycle, that he is like me, glorifying a peripheral existence. The most suppressed feeling in a man’s heart is the anxiety that life has no meaning. Meaning is embodied, by women and men: this is as clear to women as the day is long. Power, the meaning of energy, has always been enjoyed by them and alas, envied by men. “Are you strong enough to be my man?”

When my generation started flouting convention back in the sixties I noticed two remarkable things: the only thing we understood about what we were flouting was that it was restrictive; and whatever convention we defied we replaced with another. Correct me if I’m wrong, but today’s encounter with convention seems no different. Some people get into trouble by rejecting convention, and others get bullied into conforming. A convention is being flouted in Damascus: the slaughter of civilians is not collateral damage but a war crime. Another is emerging: if you harbour terrorists, even under force, you deserve their fate. National security is being deconstructed.

Children are dying in Damascus, in the same agony as a man on a cross. Aristotle’s view, some 300 years before Jesus of Nazareth, was that the highest good is the good of society. The view of Jesus was that the personal good is highest since it is the good of God within. Does the slaughter of these innocents mean anything to us? My heart is broken equally by their suffering and by our capacity to believe in a higher good than theirs, The International World Order. Can you identify any good in this conflict? Can you love the children as you love your own? Can you empathize with the conviction of the combatants and the communities that harbour them and abet their atrocities? Would you be prepared to die in their situation? What for?

Aquarius New Damascus Mar17

“Father forgive them, for they know not what they do!” Can submission to convention actually be evil? Is this the meaning of love, that hormones, like everything in the matrix, go awry, and our proper task is to study and modify the psychological and social conditions of their distortion, rather than send in the army? Look in your heart. Is there a hero there, or a coward? Connection or perfectionism? You have probably learned how to deconstruct history, capitalism, patriarchy and gender. What is left to believe in? Babies? God? Universal human rights? Unchanging climate? Have you balked at deconstructing those?

Aquarius New Townsville Mar17

The conventional view of the inferiority of Aboriginal culture which I can still remember, has been replaced by the agreement that white invaders passed down stolen land, and we inheritors bear the guilt for the dysfunction of Indigenous communities. The interpenetration of identity, language and country is sacred, but it seems a long way from conferring sovereignty. Who has the right to determine whether Adani may proceed, the citizens of the International World Order or the local landowners? What convention bestows that right? A superior one? Two conventions seem to conflict in Townsville: that you are your language, and that it is in the syntax of your language that you oppress others.

Mars at Woe Parkville Mar18

The two charts above and below speak to me of the enlightened connection of heart-bone meaning to head-bone convention: emptiness. Should even one other person be mesmerized by the synchronicity illustrated in them, two new friends might transcend convention. From two different perspectives, or one from different angles—Timbaúba, an hour and a half’s drive northwest of Recife in Brazil, is on the meridian of longitude directly opposite Parkville’s, or the same one on the other side of the poles of the Earth’s rotation—we are observing the moment Mars crosses the plane of our galaxy; in the same moment Venus and Mercury are in equatorial conjunction on the meridian, just as the galactic poles are also transiting. Look that up in your astrological conventions! [Signs in yellow are associated with constellations seen to the north, turquoise with constellations seen to the south—Timbaúba is a mere 7.5° south of the equator.]

Mars at Woe Timbauba Mar18

For those oxytocin addicts who muse wistfully on the meaning of life at sunset, Monday brings another enchantment at the latitude of Melbourne. The constriction of ‘Thy’ idealization subsides, and though we may seem to ourselves conventional, we find ourselves so at peace as to discover our significant other within our self-love: ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ are one. This tranquility will see us through the denouement of the Syrian conflict, and right through the confinement of winter, until Early Spring in mid-July. When Lethe Crossing is at the meridian, local sidereal time has just gone 6 o’clock.

Submission-Convention Sunset Parkville Mar19

Sidereal Vertex Temperate Australia
Friendship is trust in another to share one’s meaning. That trust is fragile. Without it we have to rely on convention, its diplomatic vacuity, lest we find ourselves overwhelmed by enmity. The power of the Moon is receding into our understanding of its light. Trust is under deconstruction. How can Syrian society exist now? As for the pillars of the emergent International World Order, one of Britain’s ambassadors to the Soviet Union, Sir Bryan Cartledge, is reported to have said, “Never engage in a pissing match with a skunk: he possesses important natural advantages.” On Monday at 19:40 in Sydney, following discussions with ASEAN leaders over the weekend, it is anticipated that the first-crescent Moon will make a public endorsement of the Sun. What else would you expect? The Sun will have gone ‘down’: of course global warming is our fault!

Peasant Moon in Aries

04 Saturday Nov 2017

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“Soon the hay-fields will ripen, soon the berry will show
Then they’ll fade into Autumn, to lie under the snow
Some years among many leave much more to remember
No need to explain how I feel about her. (Siebel, 1970.)

You could say that every Full Moon tests the understanding between lovers, but none presents greater danger than this one. “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?” (Springsteen, 1980.) “Man from Mars, this time you went too far.” (Mitchell, 1989.) My heart may harbour a different dream, but it hurts just the same as yours. The man in the Moon exults in the light of the goddess Sun, but we all too often define worship as needy, and are just as quick to label vain assertions of independence as egoistic. We cherish the freedom of Summer in Winter, and the intimacy of Winter in Summer, but Spring and Autumn are most uncomfortable bedfellows, when the one is full of hope and the other is full of resentment. But so much in love depends on attachment style. The Peasant transits simultaneously over Detroit and Columbus (Ohio), and on down through Georgia and Florida, Western Cuba, the Gulf of Mexico and Costa Rica, and as latitude decreases, the meaning of love becomes more primal, totemic and transcendent. Do you have enough yeast in you to trace the astrological g-spot?

Peasant Miserere Curre Nov03

The Scales upside-down are a policeman’s boot, which means racial discrimination and the imposition of foreign law, but Aries is a ram, both ways, all instinct. If you have a sensitivity to cultural appropriation, you ask walking directions from Google Maps for Bamaga to Melbourne, and by all means argue your arcane knowledge of water-holes and star maps for one day’s walk out of sixty. That’s Aries. Here it comes: Permanence.

Peasant Vertex Retro Curre Nov03

The Peasant is a convergence of two archetypes, one being coarse and ignorant, and the other confined to tradition and the rhythms of Nature. He is contemptuous of urban sophistication and political correctness, because every day he must, on behalf of city-slickers, do things they are too squeamish for, such as saw off the horn growing into an eye, shoot an endangered bird raiding the fruit, cut down a native tree or separate the newly-born from their mothers for butchering. He is the very opposite of late-Spring tranquility, and yet in his intransigence he is tranquil in his way. He will give you a mouthful if you do not qualify as his judge, but to let him get on with what he has to do you must be content with his reversal of your superiority. The Peasant is the quintessential Shakespearean Fool.

Peasant Moon Curre Nov03

But what stirs in his heart? What hides behind his stubbornness, his brusqueness and his sullen strength, to explain his relentless commitment and unwavering care? Fly over farmland and weep for the felled forest of the world, but marvel at the increment of life upon life of back-breaking hard work with axe and saw. How many generations, how many acres per man? The Vertex and its projector are but geometric labels in search of a symbology, but peasants do have beloveds, I’m sure, even if they don’t dream of them like lovelorn adolescents. Every peasant is a philosopher on the porch before bed, with only one rudder in the sea of stars and time straight up, his deep. How did they love their wives? How did their children love them? And how are they remembered? For atrocities against indigenous people who were just like them? In terms of the imagination, not a lot has changed.

Peasant Vertex Direct Curre Nov04

Permanence can easily be envisaged through the eyes of a peasant on a porch, raising his countenance from idealization at the horizon, comfortable completion halfway up, and then its logical implication as high as it is possible to look without straining something. But the peasant knows that the stars move the other way across the west, and it is a little more difficult to understand what’s happening when the cynic craning his neck eastward has to turn around.

The experts say that tropical weather patterns are expanding, but the lines of tropical latitude (Cancer and Capricorn) are moving towards the Equator, at the rate of about 1.5 kilometres per century. Currently, the Vertex can appear in Meridian Houses V and VIII at north and south latitudes less than 40.92°, IV and IX less than latitude 26.59°, and crosses the Meridian, twice, in the tropics, when the Ecliptic is overhead, equal and opposite distances from the Equinoxes. At the Equator, it is always at the (tropical) Aries or Libra Points–the Equinoxes–(whichever is in the west). It is permanent.

Electric Houses

The enslavement of a user by a plaything is actually quite common, and really the transit of the zodiac at the zenith is as banal if you don’t apply your attention to it. Is not accepting a truth you don’t understand mere clinging to a world made by others? Is not the task of fixing a problem you see in someone else not a column in an edifice meant to be older than time? You’ve probably heard, ‘I’ll never forget you,’ a few times, and even, ‘It was written in the stars.’ What is heaven without permanence, asks the cynic trying to analyse eternity. Idolatry is boredom’s safety net, dreaming of old flames, or the first rung on the ladder of affect.

Peasant Moon Stradford-on-Avon Nov04

“Come away, come away, death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid;
Fie away, fie away, breath;
I am slain by a fair cruel maid.
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,
O prepare it!
My part of death, no one so true
O did share it.
Not a flower, not a flower sweet,
On my black coffin let there be strown;
Not a friend, not a friend greet
My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown:
A thousand, thousand sighs to save,
Lay me, O where
Sad true lover never find my grave,
O to weep there!”

Feste, Twelfth Night.

[My vain project is not only to enhance tropical astrology with a Southern Hemisphere perspective and an equatorial connection to the still-visible stars which might help heal its visible displacement, but to present a non-linear, cyclical background to human affairs before which people might discover more of the preconception of their moment, and as whom they are being created in it. I am not an activist telling you who you are, a scientist telling you what you’re made of or a medicine-man telling you who you were meant to be. Call me deluded, call me demented, but if I say something which helps you resist the magical realism of DSM diagnosis, the abyss of stardust cosmology, and the taboo against tampering with preordained creation with bottom-up interpretations of time and place, then I am justified in acting the fool. Call me a peasant then, my fellow-peasants!]

New Moon in Virgo: Friendship

20 Friday Oct 2017

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We have reached the last days of Spring. Tomorrow, the Sun will enter Libra in the Breamlea Zodiac, the Once A Jolly Swagman Sign which in its quintessential Australian way portends a Northern copper’s boot for the Centaur’s indiscretion of killing a Lupine sheep. Springtime has calmed down, accepted the limits of possibility in the habits and rules of co-existence, internalized the consequences of experiment and choice in a crowded world, and verges on Summer (on November 8 with the nightfall transit of Fomalhaut, the star of affirmation).

Virgo New RA Paysandu Oct19

Shall we be friends, me and you, South and North, East and West? Can ‘country‘ integrate conscious and unconscious, the shared meanings of language and the personal meaning of poetry and music yet unsung? How rich must language be to nourish us with reverence for ancestors whose customs have departed with them, made invisible to us by ours? What can the loneliness and nostalgia for village of our foreign neighbour teach us about ours, forgotten in a similar experience buried in different words? We all carry the burden of our parents, but must we paper over it, and can we not honour them with our innovation and compromise? We must revitalize the invisible, and populate ‘country’ with mystery, ignorance and imagination, lest indifference overwhelm curiosity, and the black and white facts that we pass down to our children and our children’s children be dead ones, no more than the bare bones of a meagre vocabulary.

Virgo New Equatorial Paysandu Oct19

Hard to imagine, but the diameter of this horizon is only fifty kilometres on the ground, yet above it is half the universe. By the attributes invested in them by me, I know that the stars beyond the circle of daylight, if you rewrap the two-dimensional projection, are being gazed at by some Other in the Shanghai night who knows them by different names and attributes, in another language as timeless as mine, which tens of millions who do not even remember the stars are there are losing.

Friendship is defined in many ways, notably by the contributors to the Urban Dictionary, but I think the best definition of ‘friend’ is someone who ‘improves’ you, makes you feel kind–all kinds of kind are of a kind, kind of–and only incidentally someone who is kind to you. Not even your lover is your friend unless he or she fills you with kindness. Kindness is not charity. Rather than expecting something from a benefactor which never comes in adequate measure, we wait expectantly on our friends, so that we can lavish our attention on them, and discover more of who we are under their attention. There, not in identity-with, nor in identity-from, our true nature creates itself.

“In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion.” Lisa Feldman Barrett. It is the primordial Mystery: Connection is my innermost Being. Community is made out of friendship, friendship out of emotion and emotion out of language; language is made out of emotion, emotion out of friendship and friendship out of community. This is what I believe gives power to the notions of ‘significant Other’ and ‘love of one’s life’ constellated by the Vertex: the ‘Over There’ feels like it is the ‘In Here’. Can a reason be imagined why the ‘In Here’ would repudiate its ‘In Here-ness’ ‘Over There’, other than a fundamentally disconnected and erroneous understanding of language made identity-fetish?

I implore you to interrogate, not forget, the language of the past. Before you tear down the monuments to the depravity of your ancestors, try to find the old words which masked separation and deprivation in the culture in which your great-grandparents were raised, and which were filtered by the emotions of your grandparents and in turn your parents and you. Before you remove the ruthless conquest of your indigenous people from your sight, remember that they whose memory shames you are of your spirit, your love, your kindness, your disappointment and your bitterness. There are words for the courage and dogged determination to survive in the middle of nowhere, and they are just as endangered as the language embedded in indigenous country. Befriend them.

Virgo New Sao Paulo Oct 19

In this chart the official New Moon, when the two bodies have the same ecliptic longitude, is plainly exhibited at the moment the descending Sun is due west in São Paulo, because the Summer Solstice Point is crossing the Meridian, and São Paulo lies on the Tropic of Capricorn. The Sun’s path to the horizon is its line of declination on the equatorial grid presented, whose hour circles reveal that the Moon is already 1.5° past it. For reasons of symmetry with the stars and cardinal directions, I project the Breamlea Zodiac cusps by hour circles, and logically, the Moon is already in Libra, since the Sun is less than a degree from it. What beguiles me, however, is what is happening to the Vertex as the Ecliptic and Prime Vertical align. A midwife needs a ludicrously accurate time-piece in the tropics! In less than three minutes, the Vertex moves through five constellations. What tempestuous yearnings lurk in the tropical heart, if the Electric Axis really has any meaning. If dream lover and attachment style are just habits, they can be admired for their alacrity in the few seconds a day they enjoy for their reinforcement!

Peasant First Crescent Safar St Kilda Oct21

Religious scholars have been tabulating kindness for thousands of years, and making a decent living out of it, so it is no wonder that the primal, connective, responsive instinct of kindness has been institutionalized as charity, and that we have come to confuse friendship with ‘being there’ for someone. No matter, teaching your children to be righteous by obeying rules of justice and charity cultivates their attention, the conduit which affords intelligence of instinct, and instinct of intelligence. Attention alerts them to the quality of their friends as attentive friendship informs them of their own qualities. Bit by bit, their internal vocabulary expands to differentiate friend from fellow, benefactor from pauper, lover from frenemy, sharer from user.

Peasant Signs Parkville 2017

Your lights douse the night while you watch Survivor. How should I feel? Your exiled ancestors on the Friendship lie in enmity. How should I feel? You breathe in greed and your denial turns off my fan. How should I feel? Your mystery is love, and you diagnose it on the spectrum. How should I feel? My truest friend is the horizon circle I intersect with the horizontal one, and the blurry fringe of eyelashes which frame it and keep it clean, beat, beat, beating my era, keeping me present, grounding me in the sky. I call my imaginary friend, ‘Country Member’. A Tasmanian, he laughs. He knows I can, with occasional help. We grew up together. How do you feel?

Prodigal Moon in Pisces

06 Friday Oct 2017

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"Yeah the same thing's happened over again
Every time I meet a woman she tries to pin ya in
Found the only way to handle a woman
Is to keep your bag packed, keep movin'
Steppin' lightly
Eyes forward, proud, determined, masculine
Probably get horny
Can't live with 'em and you can't live without 'em
That's why I write so many of these weird songs I guess."
Jerry Jeff Walker, Ramblin' Scramblin', 1969.

The unifying epiphany of materialism is the discovery of causality and connectedness, but the Miserere commemorates a different frame of reference, not the space of objects but the time of subjects, not the primacy of identity-with but the miraculous anguish of identity-from. Have mercy, Eternity.

You couldn’t get a more potent representation of balance and normality than the chart of the Prodigal’s transit over Ghandi’s ashram as the ‘Miserere’ arches from east to west crowned by vain Cassiopeia. How appropriate seem both Pisces’ Southern Hemisphere sign of Libran refinement and compromise, and its Northern Hemisphere sign of Aries, of energy with some impatience! What a princess!

Prodigal Moon Wardha Oct06

But let’s lighten up. ‘Prodigal’ means ‘wasted’, in both meanings of the word. If only he would stop abusing substances and locating himself in the ephemeral, he could come home to love and community, couldn’t he? He could find real purpose. But look at it another way. As it is fast becoming conventional wisdom to say, the wastage of his being in mere existence may be put down to our conditioning of his experience of unlovability. Oxytocin addicts are not very good at convincing others that they are loved. While his normal parents sleep, a prodigal soul might be seduced far from their philosophy into the arms of awareness bordering on mental illness. What is there to wake up to, in this unlovable world?

Lord, have mercy on the population which can’t live with You, but can’t live without You. Who but the slightly insane can understand the dedication of a life on this earth to spiritual liberation? Who, blessed by the growing body of literature on the psychology of love, could be so engrossed in love’s endocrinology that a life embalmed in self-help books might seem like a path to spiritual liberation? What else but the travails of unlovability can explain the attempt by astrologers and mystics to tabulate the relationship between the prime vertical and the zodiac?

Prodigal Vertex VIII Wardha Oct05

“Let’s play a game,” he says, totally out of it. “Imagine that we are robots, programmed at the factory to optimize the resilience and adaptability of artificial intelligence by embodying just enough order in chaos: depending on the time of year and day, we yearn to love in one of just six different ways in sequence, each involving its own geomagnetic drive, duration and triggering device. You have to guess which drive we’re in, and I have to guess if I am the right trigger. Let’s pretend Love!” Despite his wastage, or because of it, his notch on your barrel entices, if only for the beguiling recklessness it would add on your CV.

Prodigal Anti-Vx III Wardha Oct06

“You will love me forever if I treat you like dirt? No, wait! You are anxious about death, and you will love me for thinking I will live forever?”

“Keep it up, funny man. The more you intellectualize, the more alert I become to feelings I didn’t know were there. I am germinating! Some inherited dream deep in my imagination has been given a name.”

Prodigal Vertex Fourth House Wardha Oct06

“What is it? ‘God’? I worship the goddess in you! You have the most intriguing hard and fast rules, and they’re all good! You know the best gifts to buy, and where from. You know what is appropriate behaviour, and what is not. You have beautiful paintings on the wall, fresh flowers in the vase, pithy quotations about positive attitude on the toilet wall! I dream about you! You have so many friends! I am so lucky!”

“I think it is ‘presence’. I convey my gratitude for what is to all around me, but especially to you, who get me so well.”

Prodigal Vertex Fifth House Wardha Oc06

“We will travel. I want to share the world with you, and share you with the world. I want you in my family, and to love all my friends. They will love you as I do. I am lonely when I am with my friends since we became a number.”

“My father says you should get a job, and I want you to give up your addictions. We will have a child.”

Prodigal Vertex Sixth House Wardha Oct06

“Whatever you say goes! I can do it. I’ve just made some silly mistakes in my life, but the self-help books you’ve lent me have awakened me to my self-defeat mechanisms. I am ready!”

“Yes, you could write your own book with your amazing mind. Stop reading, and write. I believe in your power to transform yourself, as I have, through counselling.”

Prodigal Vertex Seventh House Wardha Oct06

“I feel as though I have emerged from a dark cloud, since I learned how to be silent and listen. Your friends no longer tell you how arrogant and abrasive I am. I hope they don’t! Do they?”

“I don’t keep in touch so much.”

Prodigal Vertex Eighth House Wardha Oct06

“I have become a little concerned that people I know don’t understand you. One has said he thinks you are ‘arid’. ‘No!’ I said, but it does seem strange that others can’t see how beautiful, and intelligent, and witty, and supportive you are. You were quite a catch.”

“Perhaps you didn’t catch me, and you need to work harder, now that I am getting older, and finding that I interest a whole different class of people. Incidentally, I ran into my ex at that do you didn’t want to come to the other night.”

Birds in backyards, who have an innate attunement to the hours, the Earth and the stars we can only dream of, are attracted by mournful music, because it’s the easiest to sing. Humans are currently attracted to the idea that romantic love is a construction of the Middle Ages perfected by Hollywood as a capitalist tool. If you buy the idea that real love, that which connects everyone and everything, is universal compassion, and anything else is a hormonal delusion, you’re still just singing the easiest song.

New Moon in Virgo: Community

20 Wednesday Sep 2017

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In making up your mind on whether to vote for or against the legalization of same-sex marriage, you will discover, if you don’t already know it, that you are either a free-radical in your social organism, and your identity and values are self-defined, or else you are an integrated part of a whole, a conservative who finds purpose in protecting and perpetuating a system you may barely understand. As a radical, you may never cease to wage all-out war on the misguided values of others, or as a conservative, you may forever be perplexed as to whether opponents are ‘lights on the hill’ or enemies, sustenance or poison. Can you love a society which marginalizes minorities? Conversely, can you accept the definition of your loving as merely another category of existence debatable in a pluralist, relativist political economy?

Sun Enters Virgo Ibarra Sep20

This chart–the Sun enters Breamlea sidereal Virgo 24 minutes before New Moon and 2.6 degrees before the Equinox–was conceived to illustrate my conception of how the signs apply in the tropics, and how the skies of North and South can reveal each other, but it also depicts a fictional context for the consideration of the interaction of love and society, one of the two extreme configurations of the intersection of the Zodiac with the Prime Vertical not witnessed in temperate climes. Only above a line connecting Sunshine Coast Airport and Meekatharra does the Vertex appear in the Ninth Meridian House, the House of Aspiration and the madness of Deprivation. In the fictional world of astrology, what differentiates the experience of people above and below this line?

I want to make this absolutely clear: I am an astrologer; I make things up. I have conjectured a connection between the way the configurations of the Milky Way change as latitude decreases in Australia and the variation of Indigenous languages, but there is no reason whatsoever to believe that Jayne and Johndro’s Electric Axis operates differently as a ‘portal to transcendence’ on either side of a line.

We live in different States of a Commonwealth, here in Australia. In geopolitical terms, as distinct from historical time-lines of self-determination, does anything distinguish the Queensland residents of Point Danger from those in New South Wales? Of course not. There is absolutely no reason to believe that a Point Danger resident, obedient to Queensland law, educated in a Queensland school, in the care of the Queensland medical system, and the daily reader of a Queensland newspaper would in any way be distinguishable from a New South Wales resident across the street.

Virgo New Pt Danger Sep20

They live in the same ‘community’, after all. But what, it is time to ask ourselves, is a community? Broader than a nuclear family, certainly, yet more localized than a religious affiliation, moiety, or extended family, how does it differ from a society, club or association? Because we do mean something special by ‘community’, don’t we? An association holds together by common interests, a club by adherence to common rules, and a society by respect for a common set of values, but a community transcends different faiths and values, and allows conflicting interests and interpretations of the law.

Prodigal First Crescent St Kilda Sep21

Can Muslims and Jews count on each other in times of need? The altruism of Emergency Service officers helping flood and bushfire victims is beyond doubt, but is it sufficient proof of community? If you found out that the man who saved your life had sent his little girl overseas for a surgical procedure on her genitals, would that affect his membership of your community? Do you belong to a community in which decisions to vaccinate children and genitally mutilate sons go either way? How does cross-dressing in kindergarten go down in your neighbourhood? Do my arbitrary and heretical definitions and interpretations disqualify me from an astrology community, or is such an entity impossible?

Prodigal Woe Vertex Lismore Sep26

The Prodigal Moon is an exile from community, as we all are. However, he does belong in my cosmology to the association of minds who are troubled in the west, represented above by the oxytocin addicts of Lismore, as he crosses the Prime Vertical in precise horizontal conjunction with a semi-conscious lack of completion in mid-Acheron, the Hades River of Woe. Completion is the social end of the electric gate of transcendence which spans the Fifth and Eleventh Meridian Houses. At the other end is its affect, the disposition which both primes the sense of destiny at the Vertex and presents itself to the Other beyond control: what else but Fantasy! Community does not endorse idolatry, fantasy, delusion, convention, narcissism or cynicism, because the Other, whatever healing and restorative power fate links us to, has affect too. Yes, community knows mercy, and it knows doom. Its love is a pearl in the pigsty.

The Electric Axis is a revelation of ghosts in our closet, and of the interpretation by others of our disposition, on a sliding scale of identity with their ghosts. Its relevance to my consideration of the endorsement of same-sex marriage is my conviction that a sense of community is actually the ghost in the machine. What unites people in a community is their sense of it: it is a bottom-up entity. Love is a bottom-up entity, too. May lovers of any gender or ideology desiring to consecrate their relationship continue to be embraced in the bosom of an enhanced community oblivious to opinion and definition.

Noon Sun Conjunct Cruz Katherine Oct01

And so the month defined by the Moon proceeds into the season defined by Astronomy and the calendar month defined by Christianity. It is not midday but noon in the heart of the country when this snapshot by a prodigal tourist is taken. Have we missed our chance to form a community of Indigenous Australia and its invaders, or can recognition of the authenticity of a degree of Indigenous autonomy enable us all to transcend our society’s definition by the Constitution? We have yet to preserve heterosexuality, and where religious freedom fits with civil obedience may evolve mutual hostility that will go on forever! Will Cynicism usher us into Eternity?

 

 

Monk Moon in Aquarius

06 Wednesday Sep 2017

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The Monk arrives, as he always does, in the inverted sign of his departure.

Monk Transit Delicias Oct06

An equatorial grid reveals a hitherto unremarked affinity of the fabled Circlet of Pisces with the mythical vanity of Cassiopeia. Fortuitously lurking in the Mexican astrological house of the intellect, the two of them are conversely at home in the Indian Ocean aspirations of the antipodean American hungry ghost.

Monk Lower Transit Delicias Antipodes Sep06

On his way to give succour to the wretched pilgrims camped expectantly below the Circlet of Unfulfilled Love,  the Monk is waylaid by a throng of rancorous social scientists. He stands accused of not disclosing emotions which have the potential to perpetuate gender duality and white male supremacy. Additional charges, that he helped Captain Cook chart the Australian coast and is therefore implicated in the invasion which followed, and that he gave solace to unhappy priests tempted into the sexual abuse of children, have been dropped for want of credible eyewitnesses.

It cannot be denied that the Monk has triggered some pain, but if we can dispassionately judge perpetrator, why not victim? With all due respect, he defends himself, although I cannot deny being a witness to the whole of human history, I do not control it. I am not responsible for the emergent practice of connecting with the cosmos at sunset, or the associated encounter with the Other of people’s unconscious longing and exploitation. Do not delay me further, and what influence I may have, I will employ.

For generations, it has been the Circlet which has offered connection in the suffering embodied by human loving, and the Monk has been revered for the selfless love and courage of his service to humanity in renunciation of the physical comforts of biological union and material wealth. However, he is aware that some of his followers have begun to practise the contemplation towards the west of the setting Sun. As darkness falls on the last glow of the day, they quietly absorb the same feeling of primal union that dissolves the individuality of lovers and stimulates the dropping of bonded milk for the newborn.

The high priests, by computing the precise intersection of the prime meridian and the ecliptic, which half the time occurs below the horizon, have bolstered their claim to special powers of interpretation, but in doing so have introduced a potentially disturbing perspective, namely, that the rush of oxytocin may have unconscious elements which are not always benign.

“It’s sometimes known as the “cuddle hormone” or the “love hormone,” because it is released when people snuggle up or bond socially. Even playing with your dog can cause an oxytocin surge, according to a 2009 study published in the journal Hormones and Behavior. But these monikers may be misleading.

Oxytocin can also intensify memories of bonding gone bad, such as in cases where men have poor relationships with their mothers. It can also make people less accepting of people they see as outsiders. In other words, whether oxytocin makes you feel cuddly or suspicious of others depends on the environment.” Stephanie Pappas, Live Science.

Astrology is working in parallel with social science to quantify oxytocin’s effects. The Vertex faction of the Capricornia Chapter of the Australian Coastal Retirees Association is playing a prominent role. Its members are in silent uproar as the glorious rays of sunset give way to darkness. The Vertex at this latitude offers something for all who rummage in their hormones for the indrawn sigh of connection. Unfortunately, there is as yet no Anti-Vertex faction.

Monk Capricornia Vertex Sep06

As the Vertex disappears below the horizon in the astrological house of relationship, the Monk is approaching from behind, while the cosmos has clicked into perhaps its most significant configuration. The Milky Way arcs in a straight line from southwest to northeast centred directly overhead. The Monk, himself an habitual contributor to light pollution, is unaware of the profound implications of connection with fifty thousand years of indigenous culture dulled by the lights of Rockhampton above the oxytocin worshippers focused on gratitude for their superannuation and companions in retirement. However, he does have some thoughts on country.

Monk Summer Solstice Transit Sep06

The Monk taps on his champagne glass and clears his throat. Lifelong friends, he begins, I commend you for your refusal to succumb to suffering as the pilgrims waiting for me at the Circlet do, but please hear my testimony. I share your yearning for validation, but I have learned its pitfalls. As long as it comes from the Other, it can only reinforce the Self as Other too. What is it about you which gives you the power to connect with the Other? Only Thou can know. Love is not projected, nor can it be measured or deserved. Transcendence and joy can only be found right here, as the source of the real, not at the end of an investigation or journey. Let your meditation be the ground under your feet and the sky above you. Open your heart to all who share them with you, and let yourself fall into total disclosure, whether they do or not. To worship and be worshipped is a beautiful thing, but to be the place of worship is sublime.

Monk Anti-Vertex Alignment Rockhampton Sep06Observe the Vertex Calendar, true for leap years, and enjoy the rapture of prattling children, renewed friendship and new shoots in the vegetable garden, savour the mysteries of bewitchment and compulsion, but embody north, south and east too. The driver of midsummer is midwinter. The driver of permanence is idolatry. I will face my charges guilty of my innocence.

Vertex Calendar

[My disclosure: I am a Cassiopeia in the lower case: letter ‘w’. ‘You’ are not Other, but when absent, missed. Please do not colour me in. Abliq.

Everything’s been returned which was owed. Dylan.]

Responsibility Restructured: Skeletons in the Closet

01 Saturday Jul 2017

Posted by in Bardo, Jupiter, Milky Way

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Zealots have family too:

Zealot Transit Jupiter Kyrie Byron Bay South Jul01

The Zealot’s chart at transit:

Zealot Transit Jupiter Kyrie Byron Bay Chart Jul01

This lunar epiphany with massed choirs won’t be repeated in your lifetime. Just one of those days (for narcissists who get turned on by the mystery of their unexposed deceit)?

And I’m the last person who needs to be reminded of what made America great. My credulous, consumerist faith was there before your birth. No offence taken. Our ancestors died together in battle for something a bot would not recognize.

Zealot Transit Jupiter Kyrie Byron Bay FB Companion Jul01

Please, corporate California, stop imagining that you can define my ‘family”s business as a family business!

Bardo, Lilith and Thou

28 Saturday Feb 2015

Posted by in Bardo

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Bardo

I’ve been reading Chӧgyam Trungpa’s Book, Transcending Madness–very appropriate subject matter for Southern Hemisphere Astrology! My whole enterprise is mad, it seems, dropping breadcrumbs in the moonlight towards the mouth of a cave–of identity, of conventional astrology–people don’t want to leave, with birds as my only retinue.

In the process of reading, I recognized the realms of existence and the Bardo states as mapping the same terrain as my interpretation of the astrological Houses. My first merger of the two maps was this one:

BARDO

Like any map, it took a while to orientate, and playing around with it, I came up with this one:

BARDO3

This one satisfies me for now. You can see how the resonances of the Constellations align with the Zodiac and the seasons, and with their opposites across the chart. You can also see the effect of my chosen Ayanamsa of (currently) 27.73° (whose origin is Iota 1 Scorpii at 0° Sagittarius–so important to preserve the tail of the South’s most prominent constellation!) on the Sun’s sidereal location throughout the year.

Lilith

The title of this post mentions Thou, and that’s what I want to get onto, but because of its importance in my understanding of madness, and because of its prominence in the chart above, I will tell you a little about my concept of Lilith, Black Moon Lilith, whose glyph appears in each Constellation above.

Lilith is a strange compartment of the psyche, buried so deep as to have no real location, and yet its ghost lingers in the shadows of every corridor. Mathematically, it can be found as the hypothetical apogee of the Moon, bouncing around all over the place as the Moon’s orbit lurches through the turbulent influences of Sun and Earth (and Venus and Jupiter etc.). Astronomically, it can be identified by measuring the Moon’s distance at its greatest. Psychologically, it symbolizes our earliest, most distant but fundamental emotional experience, separation.

What was our first experience of emotional pain? How did we come to define it? How did we react and perceive the response to our behaviour and our training to overcome it? How did we understand the sanctions of our early training and internalize them? How did the chaotic feelings of frustration and anguish translate into behaviour? How did that behaviour contribute to the form of our early relationships? How did we modify it ourselves as we came to evaluate the behavioural models before us? Along what path to attitude did we remedy ourselves? What are we made of: remedy or pain?

Aren’t we mad, the way we’re so sane?

In the chart I suggest keywords for the possible ways in which you could differentiate behavioural pathways according to personality type, and perhaps more importantly, how you could find the seeds of personality in fortuitous behaviour type. Here is a link to some fine work on Lilith: http://www.expreso.co.cr/centaurs/blackmoon/lilith.html

Thou

The graphic representation of sidereal/tropical date-difference of Sun entry of the Signs and Constellations in the Madness chart got me thinking about what I now know as ascension difference. My question was, how long after the ascension of the first point of a constellation does the ascension of the next sign follow? It turns out that because of the tilt of Earth’s axis of rotation, and the inclination of the horizon to the Ecliptic, the relationship of sidereal and tropical zodiacs in time varies markedly. Here is a representation of that:

Ascension Difference

The times given in hours:minutes:seconds are of how long each Constellation takes to cross the Ascendant at my latitude. The time it takes the next associated Sign to rise after the first point of each Constellation varies between 5:27 and 11:18 (mins:secs). At the extremes, it takes Aries 2:29:46 to cross the horizon and 11:18 for the Sign of Taurus to follow; but Virgo is across the horizon in 1:14:04 and the Sign of Libra follows 5:27 later.

What has this got to do with anything? Well, what you see above is the opposite to what occurs in the Northern Hemisphere, where our short ones are all long and our long ones are all short. Furthermore, because the Ascendant takes longer to pass through the long ones, the likelihood is that more natal horoscopes will have Ascendants in long Signs than in short Signs.

The Wikipedia entry on the Ascendant includes this juicy morsel:

“Some astrologers, such as Richard Nolle, consider the preponderance of Ascendants in signs from Cancer through Sagittarius (known as the western signs) to be symbolic of the highly relationship-oriented character inherent in a complex or civilized society as found today in the northern hemisphere but never developed in equatorial or south temperate latitudes where eastern (Capricorn through Gemini), individual-oriented Ascendants are equally or more common.”

I can’t at present find in nature a basis for differentiating Eastern and Western Signs, other than that depicted above, but thanks for focussing me on the western hemisphere, Richard. It’s where the interesting things happen down here too, such as the behaviour of the Vertex.

Referring to the Ascension Difference chart, and bearing in mind that the Equinoxes are at 2.27° Virgo and Pisces, the Ecliptic in all of the Constellations below the horizontal line crosses the Western Horizon north of due west, so that the Vertex is below the horizon. The configuration of the Constellations as shown, with the Southern Summer Solstice in Sagittarius at the top, occurs 3min 56sec earlier each day, this morning at 08:52:49 EDST. For several hours beforehand, the Vertex, as astrology refers to another imaginary point at the intersection of the Ecliptic and the Prime Meridian (or due west), looped through Gemini, Cancer and Leo.

As the projection onto the Ecliptic of the Descendant or Shadow, the Vertex, which has been named Destiny’s Gate by one astrologer, lurks in the western, afternoon and evening Houses, in which relationship reveals the nightmarish difficulty of merging consciousness with others, and when flagging egos often suffer more than glancing blows. It symbolizes both the danger and the blissful anticipation of that most intimate Other, the Beloved.

As I configure the resonances of the Constellations in the Madness chart above, associating them with their opposite Zodiac Signs, the Vertex had quite a journey! (Lilith was in Cancer.) It ultimately reached a tense conjunction with the Shadow at the time stated, and clambered above ground like the ghost of Sadako in The Ring, lurching into the earnest spiritual materialism of Virgo. The journey will repeat itself tomorrow.