the medicine beast

Here I am writing from a stalled Summer in mid June, grey, damp, cool and humid, moving so slow we may well be going backwards, it’s difficult to tell. A bit like when you’re on a train coasting to stationary, and another train is doing much the same right next to you, with the flicker flicker of windows passing, as if the carriage is being impossibly sucked backwards. It’s a “signal problem on the tracks” Summer, which is quite common for England.

So how to break this spell? Back to writing, and maybe writing backwards the summer will be righted, by the time I’m finished, by sly coincidence.

In May I wrote about a third consciousness, which I termed “mercurial”, which does sound more poetic. It  spans both the lunar and the solar, and transcends them also. But there’s something more.

When we deal with these things that we call “lunar” and “solar” we are engaging with profound states, ways of seeing and ways of being. If they become settled and undisturbed, or closely defended, then they become invisible to us, not “how we are right now”, but “how things are”, how life is. The relation between the lunar and the solar, our relation with the lunar and the solar, is a big question in our lives individually and collectively. The third consciousness, the mercurial, is really of considerable import, because not only can it travel between the two worlds and ways of seeing, but it is something all its own as well. Something in the mercurial is of the nature of individuality itself in a sense.

But here’s the thing. We’re not culturally good at getting beyond basic polarities (actually we’re not that good at getting beyond monoliths). We’re not really that good at honoring real individuality either. Androgynes have their place in style and fashion, in a kinda arrested development, Peter Pan sort of way, but not really beyond that. The tired but endlessly acrimonious “war of the sexes” seem to remain an inherited constant of heterosexual life (as far as I can observe), and however it gets tweaked, we’re all expected to bow to that game when the chips are down, by virtue of having bodies at all, even when we’ve made it plain that we’re not playing. “Choose your side!”, we are admonished, subtly and anything but, from the moment we limp from the womb, and get chosen for. The one glimmer of hope seems to be the painfully slow extension of understanding of gender as something other than biological sex, and lord knows when I say slow, I mean “from my cold, dead hands” slow in terms of a light dawning and being taken seriously. But what the mercurial, androgynous consciousness portends is immense, freeing and blissfully loving. It portends peace.

Let me posit a fourth element though. Something that might bring the angels to earth. Because our androgyne is light, ethereal, quick, youthful, awesomely free and beautiful, somehow aerial even if he, she or it traverses every sphere from the highest to the lowest. And that’s not entirely how our lives are.

We all must come home. We all must grow to maturity, if we are to have any fullness. If we are to transform life, our lives, as a thing of subsisting value, then there needs to be a mortal future for the androgyne, brought back into our bodies. This fourth thing is not spoken of, because it challenges the dogma of what binary gender means to our culture so much. If the androgyne is sylph like, youthful, asexual in characteristic, ethereal, then this fourth state is grown, ripe, full, furry, bisexual if anything (but most essentially just what it is), mature, earthy. If the androgyne is angelic, then this angel is different, a long suffering beast of much enjoyments and many medicines. If the mercurial androgyne is indicative of individuality, then this creature is indicative of the process of individuation.

Peter Pan is easy to put away, and androgynes are gone like the breeze, when they are never allowed to grow up. But the medicine beast is us as we could be in our fullness, Nature given a million crowns, and our earth kissed by the love of heaven. Heaven on earth actually. Everything as it actually is.

This great transformative agent, this magnet of the soul’s libido, it can only make you who you are.

St John the Baptist – Leonardo da Vinci [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

And the Sun did come out with some blue sky just then, but slyly it’s gone back again.

[14th June 2013 - one word edit done without change of passage meaning.]

bull feasts, and the road to the Whisky a Go Go

I was going to write a post somehow commemorating and commenting upon the sign of Taurus, before the Sun left it (which it has done now), pulling in the start of Summer in a Venusian sign, and the festival of Beltane which happened on May eve with its coupling and amorous and fertile themes, and thinking about some rather red goddesses. But I just stop.

I have to walk on, and realize that I can’t go back.

The divine couple, and the sacred marriage, it’s in another room, a book that was closed some time ago, and placed back on someone else’s shelf. The message that’s coming through, it’s not that.

As a middle aged gay man not only is that not my story, but the fact that it could never be my story is, well, old. Another story, yes. A different marriage (and a different kind of sacred), for sure. The message that’s coming through comes with its own blessings, brimming with interest, love and home coming.

But the male and the female, the “balance”, the anima and animus of a hundred Carl bloody Gustav Jung quotes, even the proffered ”androgyn”, oh please no. Because that isn’t needed, unless that’s what you want. It’s not true. Which isn’t to say that it isn’t someone else’s poetry, but soft dogma is still dogma. Guzzle it down with a chaser of Robert Graves, it doesn’t change a thing. Bet me a Great Mother, I’ll raise you a Devil, but really it’s all ok, all good, if that’s what calls to you, your life, among the myriad multitude of lives, all shining equally, equally, lawless, shining bright.

The ball of yarn, that short tall tale, wound tight, it unravels all the way, to a place where all rejoice in the spirit and the soft, hard, yielding, smooth, furry flesh. The as it is, and in your dreams, your heart.

Then I was delivered from that consideration by news of Ray Manzarek’s passing on, the thought of his floppy dark blonde hair and so intelligent eyes,  of leather clad Jim transfixed at the microphone, with the throb and circling of the organ pulse in the dark, a sober, wonderful underpinning to that magical sound. Opening up a road to a distant time, where there was a road, opened up ……….

“is everybody in?”

Travel well Ray, and thank you so much.

Miss you.

By Polfoto/Jan Persson (Den Store Danske – The Doors) [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

a morning of the magicians

I am starting to think there are three kinds of people, or rather three types of consciousness, and I’m really liking this idea. Of course you could see more than three, but I’m finding this scheme useful.

It fits quite a bit with Richard Gardner’s ideas about fire and water consciousness, two dynamic elements in the evolution of awareness.

What I am seeing is that there are people who are solar (or going through a solar phase), and people who are lunar. The lunar has a wildness and an expanse of feeling and imagination to it, and it is both more inclined to go with the flow and also get stuck in attachment to the biographical past. In has both vision and personal phobias. One of its shadows is a kind of unenlightened consensual consciousness. Xenophobia is an essentially lunar phenomenon, but so are the wonders of trance, imagination and enchantment. There is something miraculous about lunar consciousness, but it can settle into the ignorance of emotional prejudice if it is never disturbed or awakened properly.

Solar consciousness is brilliant, and has the idea of individuality and freedom, progress and “civilization”. It dries out and warms our awareness, and gives us standards, criteria to judge by, the spark that goes into changing how we do things. But it can develop its own dogma, not the emotional dogma of lunar herd mentality, but the dogma of inculcated righteousness, or a black and white moral universe, a day irreconcilably opposed to a night.

These two, solar and lunar, are associated with fire and water consciousness in Richard’s scheme, and in the world of mass patterns and mass assumptions, they are conventionally associated with men and women respectively.

I was very lunar in my younger days, and I am just starting to really enjoy that quality again. I had to also go through a solar phase. But Sun and Moon are not all there is in the world.

A third consciousness also arises. A consciousness that spans both, travels between both, and yet belongs to itself as well, once you recognize it. This consciousness I will call Mercurial, and it is the alchemical, magickal consciousness. Here is lightness that does not shrink from darkness, morning that rejoices in night, dry crispness that lingers at the lake’s edge, women and men who are woman and man enough to not be man or woman at all. Here is the court beyond the king and queen, and a smile that floats in the delicately scented air of twilight.

Good morning.

Mercurius, Groningen, by ZanderZ (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

a song to the soul

The idea of Witchcraft as religion, which I love so much, has been launched into public interest and imagination by various people over the years. Margaret Murray and Charles Leland are two figures that between them span the mid 19th to mid twentieth century, and planted potent seeds in our cultural dream life with respect to the survival of Pagan religion within Christian societies in the form of “witchcraft”. Gerald Gardner towards the end of that period seems to have drawn together various influences to fashion his initiatic, coven based witch cult, with the aid of Doreen Valiente, who herself went on to do a lot of independent work towards furthering, quietly popularizing, and diversifying this emerging, modern religious stream. By now we are entering into the ferment of the mid twentieth century and a mounting counter culture with a great interest in alternative spirituality and the occult. Alex and Maxine Sanders in the 1960s and 70s led an engagement with the media which spoke the language of that extraordinary little time that many of us saw, and I personally think that it is from here that religious Witchcraft entered the modern popular imagination more fully.

The old historical assessments of Witchcraft as “The Old Religion” were often simply incorrect though. No doubt there were many cultural streams, religious or otherwise, which fed into both the modern phenomenon, and all manner of folk practices and beliefs. But a clandestine, cellular but organized Pagan religion, surviving from before the Middle Ages, that wasn’t on the cards. I also think that the amount we claim to have had lifted from us by Christianity, as opposed to the opposite, is often quite questionable in a world where cultural transmission and inheritance is more profound and fluid than what someone calls themselves.

Nevertheless, the publicising and propagation which people from Gerald Gardner onwards pursued had led to the creation of a popular desire for this kind of alternative religion. At the same time, the image of Witchcraft that was forming was closed, mysterious, gated and tended, a cult of living poetry and ordeal. This was part of its appeal. But the transmission, the aura, went further than this, to myriad people who felt called but were either unable to find a genuine coven, or for whom this form couldn’t be an open door. I think there were quite a few people who could neither answer nor forget that call, and they had to find their own way to answer. Or to put it another way, the answer had to find a way through their lives.

A number of writers did seem to try and answer the need that many were feeling, to find a way back to Witchcraft. I say “way back” because that’s what it felt like to me. Doreen Valiente brought out a DIY witchcraft book. The Feri and feminist influenced Starhawk brought out “The Spiral Dance”. Janet and Stewart Farrar brought out “The Witches Bible”*, because they knew people were trying to do this stuff anyway, so they may as well have what they considered reliable material. Marion Weinstein, Raymond Buckland, Paul Huson, there have been quite a few.

The first time I saw Scott Cunningham’s “Wicca: a guide for the solitary practitioner” was I think the very beginning of the 90s, and two things struck immediately. The use of the word “Wicca” rather than “Witchcraft” in the title. We all knew the word “wicca”, usually quoted (incorrectly) as a root of the word “wise”, from whence we referred somewhat fancifully to the “craft of the wise”. But we used the terms “Witch” and “Witchcraft”. Maybe people in initiated circles used the terms Wicca and Wiccan prominently, I really don’t know, as if they did then I had missed it. But I think the rest of us would have felt a little like pantomime characters taking ourselves very seriously, when “Witch” really said it all, and couldn’t be confused with basket weaving. I think for my generation the word “wicca” didn’t really have the same edge to it either.

The second thing was the cover of the book, which was actually rather beautiful, showing a painting of an androgynous looking character carrying incense in front of an outdoor altar, with the moon emerging from the trees, all in harmonious, warm colours. It was a long way from the shadows and glamour of the 1970s, but it looked more like the nature religion that a lot claimed Witchcraft to be.

Scott’s book didn’t really talk to me, but it did speak to an awful lot of other people. It was friendly, accessible, useful, ethical and wholesome. It seemed to hold the reader’s hand and guide them through things, but at the same time encourage them to find their own way.  It was magical religion for the individual, and say what you like about Scott, he was serious that people could lead a magical life, practically and fully and with good balance. I was happy to see that, and I was happy to see quite a bit of what Llewellyn was putting out, because of that serious intention to help people lead a magical life.

Clearly times had really changed, and I was glad of that myself. While Scott was launching “solitary Wicca”, on this side of the Atlantic we held on to the term “Witch”, but had various forms of “hedgewitch” and non-coven forms of Witchcraft that didn’t require apostolic initiation, aided by writers like Rae Beth and Marian Green.

Nowadays anybody can try out some witchcraft, and find their way to a tiny bit of the Sabbat. It’s a different world to the one which beckoned 40 years ago, and it needed to be. But without the work of the Gardners and Valientes and Sanders many of us would not have received that vision the way we did, however we have responded to it. Maybe it was something which was of that time, funneling 19th century esotericism through Edwardian bohemia and the 60s counterculture. But then I do believe that it is a perennial romance.

I hope that vision and romance has not been lost in DIY religion, and a hundred causes that we might rationally attach to a faith that we could approve of. The need for genuine search, work and discriminating awareness is still there, but so is the need for healing, nurturance and the care of a full life.

There has been an ongoing spiritual and psychic dialogue between the emergent stream of spiritual witchcraft and the souls of those who have felt called to it. That congress is far from over, indeed if it ever will be. For all our talk of Nature, we are also talking about the soul, for if the attraction to Witchcraft does not come from the soul, then really it is not there.

And that really is where the discussion begins and ends. It has never mattered if someone could call themselves a Witch or a Wiccan, or even if anybody thinks that is a religion or not. What matters is what someone’s soul has seen, and how they make their way to it.

The first answer of a call is the hearing of it.

“Harvest Moon” by Helen Allingham (1848 – 1926) (The Bridgeman Art Library, Object 283763) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

 

* originally published as two books, “Eight Sabbats for Witches” and “The Witches Way”.

[Very minor edit done 5th May 2013.]

loving the gods

I had an interest in Pagan gods going back a long way. I started in childhood with the family cyclopedia looking up Greek mythology pretty much every chance I got. I had a serious interest in the gods as real. I wanted them to be real, and I wanted to understand their stories and how to worship them. Even as a child I wanted the gods to be there, and in my day dreams they were.

In my teens I was mesmerized by the figure of Pan, and I would go on little pilgrimages to museums and art galleries to gaze at statues, paintings or ornaments that showed Pan, or satyr figures that might have been Pan. I would go and search these out like secret shrines.

The first book I got on occultism proper was “Magic: an occult primer” by David Conway when I was 15 years old. The sense of the gods here was quite distant and lofty, but far from unreachable. The gods were too powerful to apprehend directly, but through ritual we could have congress with their planetary spirits and the angels, and reach a union with the essential energy of the gods safely and in a controlled fashion. I never did do those “master rituals” of the book, but it was part of my education. Later reading of books by Israel Regardie and Aleister Crowley continued some of the same drift.

Looking back, my first experience of sustained deity contact came in 1976, when I was 17. A friend had lent me “What Witches Do” by Stewart Farrar, and that book had an enormous impact on me. It brought about a healing and integration, and I wanted very much to be a Witch. However, at this time, you couldn’t just become a Witch on your own. The common received wisdom was that “it took a Witch to make a Witch”, so I wasn’t a Witch, and becoming a Witch wasn’t a viable option at the time. All the same, I just kept on and did stuff anyway, on my own, as I suspect many people did.

I felt called to Witchcraft, and to a magical and devotional relationship to the gods of Witchcraft. I painted pictures, I made talismans, I lit candles and incense, I prayed, I visualized and dreamed, I sought out magical times and places. I listened inwardly. I talked to my gods and listened. My life had previously been a chaos of something opening up inwardly, since I was 16 anyway. A jumble, a cacophony, random discharges of energy running up and down my body, a plethora of uncertain voices. An uncanny world which however lacked trust and anchoring. It was nuts.

During my experience of Witchcraft all this changed. Peace returned, depth of feeling returned, inward quiet returned, the sensory world flooded with natural colour and texture and mutual responsiveness. Communication from the other world became trustworthy, and led to integration and stability. I felt a union with Nature, and my heart was lightened. The summer of 1976 was a beautiful time. It drew to a close with the communications saying “that was it” basically, they were withdrawing for now and I should find my own life in the outer world.

I went on to explore and experience a lot of other things in my spiritual journeying, but when I came back to Paganism properly in 2000 to 2001 I got the chance to talk with a lot of other Pagans online (mainly people younger than myself) and I found that this same experience of deity contact was a kind of lingua franca amongst many different Pagans who had worked on their own, as well as among those that had worked in groups. It was a deeply personal and meaningful experience which many worked with. It wasn’t flashy, there was little to show, no performance to speak of, no “credibility points” and no esoteric brownie awards. When it came to it, this seemed to be the simplest common denominator of a household spirituality, highly individual yet amenable to sharing. Sharing with other Pagans got me slowly taking my own experiences more seriously.

There are lots of questions as to how the gods actually are, and how they can be in relation to us. Are the gods too powerful and distant to be apprehended personally, or are they open to direct, seemingly personal relationships with their devotees?

There is no question for me that the gods are powerful, and I do believe that an unfiltered experience of their unveiled natures is not something that we are generally designed to cope with in our incarnate state. But that still leaves a great deal of leeway for genuine relationship.

A beautiful illustration of this is a passage in the Bhagavad Gita where Arjuna asks Krishna to reveal to him his real nature. The vision that Krishna grants his devotee is completely beyond the human, and terrifying in its scope and scale, though Arjuna is given safe passage through the experience of his lord.

A more tragic illustration of the gulf between god and mortal is the story of Zeus and Semele, where she is blasted by the revelation of his nature, though in this instance the request comes from doubt and suspicion, prompted by a jealous Hera, rather than faith. Maybe there is something in that, because the demand comes from the machinations of Semele’s mind apparently.

So how closely can we touch the gods, and how intimately can they enter our lives?

If we turn inwards, I believe an enormous amount is possible, and the key I believe is the heart. When we are able to have a genuinely devotional relationship to a deity then the capacity for direct experience opens, and a deity that is amenable to us seems to meld from their end into that experience in ways which are appropriate for us. Devotion is not the only way, but it is a way with many safeguards, and a stable pattern of unfolding.

It is fruitless to talk about the gods as if we were talking about objective, material experience, which is the stuff of the most superficial part of our consciousness. The more seemingly objective we try to make this discussion by reaching authoritative consensus, as if the gods were X, and X is like this in all cases, the further are we from the truth of experience of deity, which is immensely personal.

There is a saying that Witches live between the worlds, and I think that phrase says a lot about the challenges and liberating virtue of Witchcraft. It is so simple that a child might grasp it naturally, and the place where we can do this naturally is that place I call “the heart”. This is one reason why love and intuition are central to my own interpretation of Witchcraft.

In my experience, the gods are very interested in us, which is to say the gods that are right for you. These are the gods of your heart. Indeed, I feel that if you truly love a god, then that god’s love for you may have come first.

photo of altar by Mo Batchelor

red as rust and sweet as honey

Probably due to the conjunction between the Sun and Mars that occurred this week, I have had some reason to think about the red planet, though I actually feel some real curiosity and interest about Mars in any case.

There’s a lot of traditional bad vibes attached to Mars, he’s a bit of a bad guy to a lot of people really, as the litany goes something like: war, violence, aggression, murder, rape, destruction and the kind of wildness that people don’t consider romantic and noble. But is that really the story?

There is a clue in astrology of course, for though he is traditionally the “lesser malefic”, he is in modern astrology associated with energy, vitality, drive and sex, as well as aggression and conflict and accidents. When we say sex of course, we don’t so much mean flirty, toying eroticism and all the refinements of love making. The eroticism of Mars is a fiery, locked on chemistry where you know already that full consummation is gazing right into you, intelligently and deeply.  You might say “no thank you” and so might they, but the horse power is on the tracks, and it shakes and humbles all. Not the chase and the charm, but the timeless end game. Put it down, condemn it as you like, try to control it as you will, the eroticism of Mars is the unfurled plot line of eroticism. Which in part is probably why Mars rules Scorpio as well as Aries.

If Mars is destructive, it is the destruction that life depends upon. If his wildness isn’t all nice or controllable, that’s because that is what real wildness necessarily includes. So have a heart for a god not so simple.

His metal is iron, that rusts red, that colours our blood red also, so that the blood can carry oxygen to our cells to burn fuel, and carry carbon dioxide away to dispose of the waste of respiration.

Iron that conducts lightning, and forms much of the heart of our own planet Earth, and gives us (along with nickel) a magnetic field that protects us from the radiation of space. Iron that is one of the last elements to be formed in stars, which can only be burned into heavier elements by the star exploding as a super nova.

Iron than gives rose quartz its delicate pink colour. Is it a surprise that Mars’ mineral is what gives rose quartz its pretty, misty colour, with its association with the heart? I don’t think so really.

And if Mars has an association with blood and muscle and exertion, there is surely an association somewhere here with menstruation and childbirth?

According to Ovid, Mars himself was born from Juno without being fathered, except by the touch of a special flower which Flora provided for Juno. The tale goes that Juno wished to bring forth a child all of her own, as Jupiter had brought forth Minerva from his head without a mother. Juno’s own child was Mars.

In fact Mars has associations not just with war, but old associations with agriculture. The kind of war he was associated with was a protective fight that should lead to safety and peace, not jubilation in  bloodshed. He is very different to the Greek Aries in this sense. He has associations with the wild as well, and with forests, but again there is a sense of a balance here. Wilderness must have its place, so that cultivation can as well. Mars’ animal was the wolf, which we endow with endangered nobility often nowadays (and I find them extraordinary and beautiful animals), though our fairy tales betray an older prejudice.

Some years ago me and my husband had a therapy business, combining hypnotherapy and Reiki. We had a number of concessionary offers, eg for students, and one of the concessions was for military veterans. I found people’s reactions to that to be puzzling, because some were quite bemused, almost verbalizing “why do you do that?”. Why would you make special offers for soldiers? Like, is that a necessary thing to do? As if no one should be looking after the soldiers themselves, as if that were a strange idea. It reminds me of people who seem to resent firemen their wages. Like, can’t they just get on with it, doing that physical, risky stuff? Didn’t they sign up to be sacrifices? Well, no. They signed up to protect you, and be respected for it, not to be your willing sacrifices. And I do wonder what part the eye on the blood sacrifice has to play in our attitudes and subconscious relationships to martial issues?

And as blood flows through the vampire myth with an almost mystical allure, morphing between sex, seduction, violence, bestial transformation, immortality, life, soul, magical power, the body and it’s transcendence, I would say that Mars has his place there as well.

Richard Gardner used to say that blood sacrifice was one of the fundamental characteristics of human civilizations. I don’t know how accurate that is anthropologically, but he made a poetically persuasive argument. Basically that we are here to transform energy, and the bargain basement way of doing it is bloodshed. That’s part of our relationship with the Earth, and with being here. It doesn’t need to be blood, but in the absence of a finer consciousness, blood becomes the default. Richard thought we could do away with this subconscious need for bloodshed through the cultivation of good will. Gurdjieff also used to characterize human civilizations as going through cyclical processes of periodically destroying everything that they had built and developed, a process which his Beelzebub bewails as a tragedy. Richard was of the opinion that we couldn’t transform consciousness (and so energy) effectively without the free and enlightened exploration of Mars’ other domain of sex, so enlightened sex also becomes a remedy for social violence, as well as much else in his view. Love transforms energy basically, so that violence does not need to do it as a default. On this he was in broad agreement with Wilhelm Reich I think.

The transformation of energy must inevitably fall partially under Mars’ domain astrologically, because he is our personal, passionate and fully embodied experience of energy. So it makes sense that Mars is associated with sex, drive, energy, violence (and you should probably add sacrifice), and of course, transformation of energy. He should also be associated with a profound kind of healing.

Mars is a great and mighty need. The Wolf cannot be condemned or denied by a few inches of conscious awareness, and a mountain of righteousness. Blood and sex will have their way, because what both he and they spell out is the transformation of consciousness.

It is not Mars’ fault if we choose our own default of denial. But it is an ever present opportunity, that we could have such wonders and bliss in a world where our relationship to energy was affirmative, enlightened and free.

detail from “Mars and Neptune” by Paolo Veronese, retouched electronically. Original image in public domain via Wikimedia Commons

all the perfumes of Arabia ……..

In case you had not heard, Monday saw the death of one of Britain’s most recognizable and infamous prime ministers, Margaret Thatcher.

Someone I will always associate with what became the truly ghastly decade of the 1980s, the decade that went backwards socially, and feral economically, in a way which we have by no means yet escaped from.

When I heard the news I initially felt a certain lightening of the spirit, as I’m sure many did. Many, many people suffered bitterly under Thatcher. I’m not even going to begin cataloging the malign influence of the governments which she led, but lead them with relish and a great sense of personal identification she did seem to do. To this day I’m astonished by people who say “but you have to admit, she was extraordinary”. Words I’ve heard quite often. It’s like someone saying of Charles Manson: “but you have to admit, he was charismatic”. Umm, yes.

But I’m not inclined to demonize her. Horrible as her mock reign was, and delightful as her political undoing at the hands of her own party was to behold, in the deliverance year of 1990, yet it was  the voting British public who put her in power. And if she was ruthless, socially backward, economically destructive, and a reveler in a philosophy of selfishness that the Tea Party could marvel at, she was doing it in an elected  role because she reflected accurately a mean, ugly and failed aspect of the British public. The same aspect which has more recently led to an increase in hate crimes against disabled people, because they are seen as “scroungers”, or useless liabilities.

Margaret Thatcher was a down market caricature of British Class, and in an age which should have been shedding the associations of dead Empire and stifling tradition, in favour of something with a future, she embodied a parody of those very things, paid for at the expense of the most vulnerable. It’s like someone looked at the morality tales of Dickens and got it all perversely backwards. And she was actually almost Victorian in reverse, destroying any sense of developing social conscience, destroying industry, science and art. She was also the antithesis of the post-war period, with her concerted attacks upon welfare and the National Health Service. She was like a pyromaniac, burning, burning, burning. And a lot of people lapped it up. Not all, and not all areas of the UK by any means. But many supported her. Election after election, bewilderingly.

And I do think it’s important, especially as her legacy is very much alive, though transmuted into a cross party worshiping of “austerity” and deluded management culture, to remember that it was a large enough section of the British public who chose her.

I recently saw Thatcher’s astrological birth chart for the first time, and it is surprising how much is there. The fight picking Libra Mars. The ruthless Scorpio Saturn rising. The grand trine of Pluto, Saturn and Uranus in water, with its feel for how social structures could be changed and demolished, how resources could be extracted from those structures and set alight. The T squares unlightened by a hobbled Jupiter in stoney Capricorn. You can probably hear how much I like this chart, but of course untold people have that chart and didn’t do what Thatcher did.

Most of all though, what I notice is the Moon conjunct Neptune in Leo. There it is. High up in the chart, in the 9th house but close to the public midheaven, here is some clue at least as to why this person would become such a mirror to a popular characteristic, and give it both its tabloid philosophy and its image. There lay her perverse glamour, which could only hook into a certain kind of mass psychology. Square to Venus in Sagittarius in the 1st house, it would never look happy, expansive or adventurous, but then the part of the “national character” that she was reflecting wasn’t either.

She was a highly destructive figure in British politics, and was bound to be a divisive one, for there was no choice of neutrality offered in Thatcher’s regime. You were part of her brave new sold off world, or you were part of what she was going to destroy. And those who plugged into the pseudo-Victorian and pseudo-Imperial glamour were suckered by themselves, taken hook, line and sinker. Those who didn’t plug in seemed to be sharing our lives increasingly with a grey twilight zone.

She played the part of the evil queen, but the role was called up by a people one would have to characterize as not entirely well.

It really wasn’t her. It was a civil war in a troubled mass psyche. Not that I’m saying she was without responsibility, but she didn’t create the mentality that she mirrored, which is actually more disturbing. And we still live with the remnants of that, which managed to give us the likes of the present government sponsored war on the disabled and the sick, and the encroaching dismantling of  universal healthcare in the UK.

Already there are plans for some kind of massive, publicly funded funeral, as if the pretense needs to be recreated. You have to ask who are these people, these pretend courtiers of a pretend empress of a pretend empire?

But I don’t want to be drawn into any of this. The 80s was enough to live through thanks. Let her die, privately and quietly. She was the mirror no one had to look into, of a post-imperial Britain that was more messed up than any of us dreamed it could be in the 1960s and early 70s, as the Queen in her plain suits and silly hats waved at the “Commonwealth”, all those “grateful” brown faces, whose futures we had of course just been taking care of, until they were old enough, like less fortunate adopted children. From our heart of darkness, to yours. Still, a world that actually saw wars and suffered them, and came back and got treated like crap, and then let my generation grow up thankfully oblivious to such horrors. Rather than the world that sent soldiers off in boats to the South Atlantic, and plowed it all into PR (though the soldiers still suffered). A world that before, someone like DH Lawrence emerged from, to have the police called and his books burned. A world that jailed Oscar Wilde. OK, it was always messed up. It just didn’t seem that we were.

The worrying thing was not so much that Thatcher was at war with the people, but that she was so characteristically of  the people, at least that part which hated each other and seemed to have love for little that couldn’t be summed up by an accountant. For someone who was said to represent a kind of individualism, she really was not that individual. Though her philosophy claimed there was no such thing as society, it lauded the shadow of that very thing.

It should be high time to look into the real mirror, and break the spell. What the hell went wrong, that it was even ever thinkable? What had we become? Are we collectively becoming something different now? Or have we just learnt to use smaller, less ostentatious, fake mirrors?

Who’s the prettiest of them all?

Globe Theatre by Tohma (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons