Have you worked out what ‘Why?’ means? Pretty important question, perhaps the most important, especially for me and my friends and enemies, as Reason reaches the last moments of its bout with Instinct in old age. Are you getting anxious about how much time you’ve wasted, or don’t you have time? Of course you were meant to integrate the souls of your parents, but what if you couldn’t be bothered, or had other fish to fry? Are you just starting to get bored after forty years of having a good time? Was hedonism an abnegation of a calling or an excuse for not hearing one? Are you a better judge of what you deserve than anyone younger?

Astrology may have been just one of numerous historical tool sets for grappling with such questions, but its diagrams may reflect a crystalline template for the adaptation of life to that primordial question, ‘WTF’? Because, left to its own devices, this question, ‘Why?’, is devastating to the fabric of consciousness, and to society, even human survival, yet the rogue is characterised, perhaps defined, by the insistence on asking it. Why does the rogue emerge at this time of year? Elections? Ask him! What response can you get from a globular rock you might notice less than ten times a year?

Eddie Betts is an Australian Rules Football rogue who has a magical control of the ball which regularly produces impossible goals. When asked to teach the skill, he said something like, “Sorry mate, you can’t learn it: it’s got to be in you.” Is that the Vertex or the Anti-Vertex the Moon and Jupiter are aligned with in Tampa’s Underworld, West or East, as the Moon sets in Sydney this morning?

Nobody seems to have any idea where they come from, these rogues, for want of a better term. Dilettantes, I have previously called them: clever types who are never able to dedicate themselves to a specialty, whose convictions intensify in inverse proportion to the dilution of their interdisciplinary insights in the apathetic ignorance of the Underworld which surrounds the dead and the unborn, and their metamorphosis in ‘Why?’.