Would you rather be a Libra or an Aries? Have you of sidereal Virgo birth decided which season you were born in, or committed yourself, though energetically and impatiently, to a refined, compromising northern tribe? Somewhere in Web-Rot we have previously encountered the astrological migration southward of Indigenous Australians, and suggested that (a) our planet is divided into two astrological hemispheres by the declination of the Sun and whether noon shadows are falling north or south, and (b) that any meaning ascribed to the Vertex, where the Ecliptic intersects the Prime Vertical, must derive from the limits imposed by latitude, namely, the increasing angle of the Vertex with the zenith as distance from the Equator increases.
In other words, epiphany retreats south and north, according to hemisphere, into ever less mystical and more pusillanimous wish-fulfilment, until it exhausts itself in idealization and submission; or alternatively one could say, the limerent finally reaches a quarter-acre block and a triple-fronted brick-veneer. Mountebank, charlatan, you cry! How dare you draw a line between North and South Island of New Zealand, Tasmania and the mainland of Australia, the Mediterranean and Northern Europe, the United States and Canada? Please, no offence intended: the atrophy of limerence is a good thing, isn’t it?
Community is the elephant in the room. Can community exist through Destiny’s Gate? Of course not, by its very nature, despite the fact we all yearn for something. Perhaps Bass Strait celebrates the division of two different tribes yearning for dry land. There is an undercurrent of anarchism among the opponents of compulsory vaccination, mandatory restrictions such as mask-wearing, and lockdowns. Two tribes are facing off. Prisoners of society, each resents being told what to do by the other, but fundamental to their antagonism is belief in community. Community is the original top-down concept of a balance of paranoia and relativity.
Conversely, the acquiescence of the majority in the removal of their liberty speaks to the tenuous nature of tribal relationships and the extent to which their neighbours have been replaced as helpers by experts, professionals and institutions. Ironically, people in lockdown are rediscovering their neighbourhood, while confronting the tribal fracture of multicultural community: unanimity abides about the need for the freeways, hospitals, airports and police forces whose ownership they have handed up.
If Christianity and Islam could not meld tribes into a community, what chance does astrology have? The Vertex does determine hemisphere at least, as the noon Sun in the Tropics crosses the zenith to the south, but can you picture how difficult it is to ascertain the direction of zenith shadows? Would the transfiguration of cynicism into the yearning for permanence give the clue? What other compensation could a secessionist acquire for the blistering heat of being here now, especially being unable to breathe?
“True singing is a different breath, about nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind.“ Rilke, Sonnets To Orpheus.
You need to listen to this. Do you think of community as a timeless thing, with age-old issues, or a problem of your time to which you personally must address yourself? Are you aware of your underworld, or do you identify it as an antipodes inhabited by others?
Country transcends the visible. Before it can become authentic existence, life in death, empty and real, it must include its ghosts. We all have ghosts, even if we ghost them: real people we have clothed in norepinephrine, epinephrine and cortisol in our hippocampus, unreal people we have idealized, our own selves as we wish we were or hide in shame, people we have lost or never had. The visible, material world ghosts them; Indigenous country shares them, dances them. Community is not possible without ceremony which keeps them in place, in the living, breathing underworld, our world’s body. Is it better to preen and screech like one’s cockatoo, and gossip like one, or try to wing it from a tree?
Did I forget to mention that the only person who can really tell me Cessnock’s location is its representative? The episteme of the age of democracy, the belief in representation, is dissolving in instinctual dissatisfaction, and the normalizing mechanics of power, institutional propaganda addressing a shared morality which no longer exists, are only reinforcing the experience of powerlessness and a universal sense of loss of sovereignty. Country is under threat from the ghosts of its underworld (read emotions!). Passion overwhelms regularity and cause overshadows effect. Trauma relives its anniversaries.
Community, which has historically been an honourable battle against a common enemy, the forces of nature, seasonal deadlines, ignorance of the law, zombies and psychopaths, poverty, inequality etc., has in many places forgotten honour in action in order to heal, to demand dignity, to ghost its ghosts. Community means safety, and in a society terrorized by the rare disasters which dominate the news, and driving the kids to school so they don’t get abducted, at 40kph 500 metres either side of a pothole repair, it means confidence that nothing horrible is going to happen. The common enemy is now the unknown. Blessed be the ghost who walks, for the warrant on his head.
How can a person be there for you if you don’t know who they are? (Read: Indigenous Australians, do your Underworld homework,)
“Advance Australia Fair” is the epitome of anachronism as the national anthem of a modern state. What is the national character it celebrates? Who even knows the words, let alone how offensive they are? How does it promote the sense of community schools are trying to inculcate in Australian youth? Can any of us truly sing it, as a national community? What virtues do Australians distinctively and unanimously extol, which are not equally valued by every society on earth? What is the true nature of a community in which a hundred distinct cultures may coalesce? Silent respect? Empty breath? Or secret psychosis?
Is community akin to the synthetic co-existence of the agglomeration of cells and processes we call the body, the universal template which differentiates identity in terms of the incidental repercussions of time and place? Does it transcend or inhere in narrative? Can we own our different bodies without honouring universal body-consciousness? Must identity divorce personal perspective from the emptiness of country, defining the delusory as the particular?
Such are the questions which engage a consciousness which revolves in a sequence of emergent ideas, beginning afresh in the waters of Lethe to rediscover and explore in turn the corridors of responsibility, connection, disclosure and community. The geocentric conjunction of the Sun and Moon and position of the Full Moon are mathematical fictions. Can they really transcend differences in chirality and topocentric perspective of North and South and unite a community? I might laugh at any Southern astrology which divorces itself from the practice of observation which birthed it, but I seem to be the only one laughing.
The evolution of intelligence has always involved regulation in a feedback loop of consciousness and voice, law and instinct. In every utterance in the history of human thought you can hear the voice of some element of human yearning, for freedom, tolerance, immortality, victory etc., in a dialogue (we call sensibility) with accepted meanings of prior utterances in the cultural forms of the everyday. Community has never existed in law, but in the resonance of voice in the underworld.
Community will be one of the last redoubts of the unconscious to resist the inexorable march of the robotic mind. It disappears when you try to think it, turns into something else, culture, ideology, society, nationality, kinship, class, race and gender, any of which can be rationalized and is constantly redefined by the robotics of the sociological mind, but none of which comprises community or can exist without it.
We held our annual solar midnight fling in the first week of this month, lined up around the horizon, and detonated our usual tonne of fireworks. Nobody even noticed, although last night the waning Prodigal Moon made audible supplications, and we are bound by thousands of years of tradition to grant him what he wished for: community. After all, this week marks five years of the astrologer’s exile.
Back in the good old days, we used to line up across the zenith from east to west, and what parties those were! We only do that up near the Arctic Circle these days, a kind of wildling banishment it seems.
Alack, poor Orpheus, we knew him well, we who have danced our blood and conjured ghosts. Yes, 2,148 years ago communities were no masters of their underworld either. And still it is our nature to wish the other’s imperious flesh to be made of dream.
Silence cannot be the foundation of community, because silence enables secrecy, secrecy enables corruption, and corruption usurps power, which evolves to manipulate trust and destroy community. Why is there no safe passage through the Sahara? What happened to hospitality? Why are hungry Rohingya babies crying in exile? Why can’t Uighurs, Syrians, Yemeni, Sudanese, Londoners and Bavarians breathe peacefully? Because silence and submission are one, and for millenia have provided a vocation for witch-doctors.
Many undesirable things come from the underworld: wounds, illicit desire and other unsavoury instincts, bad habits, attitude, habits of any kind, evil, anger, fear, and most dangerous obedience to voice, psychosis. Never tell a psychopath they’re a psychopath, it upsets them. But that’s not the real reason. After they’ve killed you, or done to you whatever was done to them, they will do their homework, and correct the mistake by which you recognized them. You’ve made the world a more dangerous place by perfecting its mask.
So what to do? Nobody in the history of civilization has ever figured that out.
Do you have someone in your past who speaks to your anguish in the words of pop songs? Or are you someone’s ghost? Have you hurt a lot of people in the past, and even though you’re more in control of yourself now, do you find people looking sideways at you when you speak from the heart? Do you dig up graves? Do you own shares in BHP?
Do you hate people who couldn’t care less about the Great Barrier Reef, or the feminist implications of hijab, or what eighty-year-olds from other cultures get up to in the privacy of their pre-pubescent nephew’s or niece’s bedroom? Yes, you may be a psychopath, and yet belong to a community. Is community never telling anyone they’re a psychopath? Is being a psychopath any more than having a mind that’s made up? Can a community exclude? A mind can be, ought to be, aware of its thought patterns and the patterns of others as the workings of a machine which situates itself malignantly in it, but a sense of the beauty of life’s dance with the machine of the world blooms out of the change of mind. That sense is the machine personified, the world’s living, finite epitaph. Immortality is an exclamation-mark, the sarcophagus of the made up mind.
Nothing, never too little, ever too much: that is the community we enjoy here, in the underworld. When do you join us? Q was dancing at Caboolture! How satisfying it is, that the impossibility of community is embodied by its authentic existence among your dead and us ghosts-who-walk-upside-down!
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).
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
Ostensibly, the conjunction of Sun and Moon in sidereal Virgo signals a debate about community, since we are venturing out into a busy springtime period of competing agendas.
In contemporary usage, ‘community’ means a group of people who share an identity, and Southern Hemisphere Astrology would agree with this usage. However, I seem to stand alone as regards the meaning of ‘identity’. Identity is not a characteristic. It cannot be defined, decided or owned, since it is not fixed, but always becoming in a feedback loop engaging waking consciousness with deeper subconscious levels of awareness and meaning.
My generation, at least to some extent raised among religious precepts, link ‘identity’, and logically ‘community’, with aspiration and dream, not with character or personal history. They simply do not understand how anyone can actually believe in communities formed from definable static identities, as compared with their participation in communities articulating a shared vision or commitment.
Young secular progressives on the other hand seem unable to understand “We are all one” to mean anything inclusive outside their group. I submit that two perplexities are at the root of this divide. One, a loss of historical perspective, a dissolution of time and causality into the now; and two, a hyper-inflation of waking consciousness and personal space at the expense of a subconscious reality of dreaming, ancestral voices, and vocation.
An identity framed and maintained as a real entity by waking consciousness is like Sisyphus doomed never to get what he is pushing to the top of the hill. What this identity is pushing is community. The force of gravity is lent by opposing groups with profoundly other instantaneous perceptions. Ultimately, identity politics will discover that unity in shared grievance has only one imperative, warfare between grievances to create ever more grievance, and implies only one community, a community of one.
First Crescent 2nd October, 19:54 Parkville [1 Muharram]
Identity used to subsume difference, because change, alternative means to an end and ambiguity of relation were assumed. Difference was an accident, and community a coincidence. Somewhere along the line, secular societies, without even realizing they had thrown a precious baby out with the bath water of religious participation, began to really believe in universal human rights as though they existed separately from universal human obligations, and before you could say, “Hey, Presto!” there was a world full of victims equating identity and pain-body, focussed on the identity of both those to blame and of any heretic with the balls to say,”I’m not hurting that bad”; and suddenly, the biggest crime was to inhibit someone’s healing.
This world is just fiction, ladies and gentlemen–Hollywood, Bollywood, love, fear and everything in between–and the most important element of it is making it real. Performance, and performance there must be, is real to its audience, the silent ones beyond the footlights who know it’s a role you’re playing for their sake, and who love you for it. Sit in the audience. Recognize fellow-players when you see them. That is community: you cannot sit twice in the same one.
Nobody owns his space, ladies and gentlemen, and no amount of proselytism and appropriation-resistance will alter the fact that personal reality is fiction. Sharing is messy, and judgment and exploitation are perhaps built into it, and degrees of success in marketing, that is to say, comparative numbers in ashrams, churches and mosques, or in social forums on the net, but that’s the nature of self: it’s designed to be expressed, not hoarded but shared. You cannot wake twice into the same identity.
When it all boils down, community may be nothing but the kindness of the audience, suspended disbelief. How can you be what you’re becoming? Perhaps kindness is the way society dreams. What the so-called ultra-right represents may be no more than slighted generosity, and we should hear the underpinnings of their utterances in that way, because we need their kindness.
The North is a story, the location of mythology, the inching across the night sky of the primordial artefact known as the Zodiac. The South on the other hand, defying narrative, simply revolves. Reverse directions if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, but my astrological focus is on Southern Hemisphere experience, because nobody else’s is.
It is by no means paradoxical that the most important attribute of the North is that it is opposite the South. Astrology is a system of symbols of human existence, and the upper (northern) Meridian, or Medium Coeli, where the stars, and approximately, the Sun, Moon and planets, culminate in their daily arcs, is given pride of place as the symbol of the conscious self. However, there is in each of us an awareness of the limitations of that waking, egoistic consciousness, which works in our body-consciousness as under-arching and over-riding necessities like eating and sleeping, and, I would argue, in our dream-consciousness as moral, spiritual or metaphysical questions, such as, “Am I responsible for what I’ve just done?” All of that deeper dimension of consciousness, and therefore any possibility of individuation, wholeness, or oneness, is symbolized by the Meridian, the direct, continuous connection of above and below, North and South.
Southern Hemisphere Astrology 