We are in the Sun sign of Aquarius again – brightening and cold in the Northern Hemisphere, plateauing in high Summer’s heat in the South. We went out shopping earlier and it certainly felt more frozen than the thermometer says it is.
I’ve written about Aquarius before, as part of the scheme of the “wheel of the year“. If you know me then it’ll be no surprise to you that I don’t have much time for the standard format of cyclical, reproductive repetition, as propagated by some others who share the designation of “Pagan”. But there is a cycle obviously.
For me, there are two “centres” to that cycle, in the heart of Summer and the heart of Winter. It’s quite easy to see in the heart of Summer, where we get Cancer and Leo, signs ruled by the Moon and Sun. It looks like it rules the familiar motif of a “sacred marriage”. It looks archetypal in a way which is familiar to anybody that has perused popular works on transpersonal psychology.
But on the other side of the year there is another centre, in the signs of Capricorn and Aquarius. Here it is not Sun and Moon, but Saturn and Saturn (or Saturn and Saturn and Uranus in more modern terms). There does not appear to be any formal motif of sacred marriage here, no luminous “king” and “queen”. It might appear more obscure, but I believe it is key. Between Capricorn and Aquarius we get the means to bear and ignite selfhood, and go beyond (and indeed against) Nature. So with this we actually get something to go forward with. Not cyclical, reproductive repetition.
If I were to be asked what it is that makes life worthwhile, I would have to answer that it is love. As always for me. But there needs to be selves that love and are loved. Think about it. Without the negatory, creative, imaginative capacity, what is there? No art, no science, no occultism, no conceptual meta-levels of language, in fact what language at all?
Of course this is also of Nature, as we all are, and as is the gull that goes against Nature by flying a shellfish up into the air, in its beak, to drop it to the ground in order to smash it open.
But without this playful, instinctual heresy, what is there?
The unfolding of a divine plan? The intervention of the angels? That all seems a little pedestrian and suburban, compared with creative response to the appalling predicament of being born into separate consciousness, in this astonishing meat instrument, so close to frogs, and butterflies and baboons (count off the beads on the DNA rosary), where something as simple as a naturally occurring substance like DMT can catapult a “person” somewhere utterly different.
Maybe when we go on to Summer, we can then do something different with it.
And not to forget that if there were any astrological sign associated with science it would be Aquarius. For all our ever so religious sounding exhortations to each other, to change our world to make it more reasonable, or kind, or sustainable, or ethical, I think it is worth remembering that if anything is going to do it, it is probably going to be people doing science. Maybe also, not in spite of science lacking inherent morality, but because science is not conventionally moral. In that respect at least, where we most clearly negate Nature, we are like Nature.
Otherwise we would never let ourselves see, recognize or transmit a truth that was ahead (or outside) of our cultural environment.
Where would you like to go?
The 64m Parkes Radio Telescope. Photo credit: Robert Kerton – CSIRO [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons23rd January 2015: very minor edits done.
I’m writing this here, rather than on say my facebook page, because it’s easier to do so on what is basically my journal, rather than a medium which is taken to be a public noise generator, even when you aren’t public.
I feel profoundly tired by the after effects of the Charlie Hebdo murders, and like I need to go back in my mind, like I left something behind. It is already 9 days ago, that the news came in of this brutal killing.
The initial reactions for me were shock and grief, as also when something big happens that sinks into the psyche. You know that a significant threshold has been crossed, and something shifts. But I would say again, it was grief. I know some people will think you cannot feel grief for those you don’t personally know, but it isn’t true. You feel grief on occasions, even when it is not personal.
When I first saw the news I shared it, because people needed to know what had happened. And then there was the sense of loss, the sobering, half comprehending sadness. And just the realization that this had actually happened. Obviously what people share at those times looks sentimental, and it’s easy to sneer at, but that’s not the point.
But the second shock came maybe two days later, when I realized (naively) that the leftist commentators had come trotting in on their horses, to tell us how ashamed we should feel, how not good enough in our concern, how actually “racist” our sympathy was, and how racist the dead were.
And then on came the mainstream British news, smoothing down the cushion covers, “balancing” the “issues”, making sure that it acknowledged the problems of causing offence, and disrespecting sensitivities. After an entire group of people were murdered for just that? How exactly do you “balance” that?
But whatever. Does anything really surprise? Well not when I think about it, but what had been grief got frozen in that cold blast of air. At least all the talk of secularism was relevant to the cartoonists’ probable concerns as satirists. But the “deconstruction” of the dead, for the sake of a political point, that really stunned me.
I did read an interesting article in The Big Issue magazine today (but written on the day of the attack), by Robert McLiam Williams, a writer who grew up in a Belfast rent by violence, and who now lives in Paris. He has quite a few interesting and unflattering things to say about the kind if people who resort to this kind of violence.
“You don’t shoot people if you can do the empathy trick. You don’t blow them up. We can talk of people’s trauma, of their history, their culture or their grievance. But to unhesitatingly kill for some half-formed credo is one of the best IQ tests going. An imagination is a vital piece of equipment. I’m not sure a conscience can exist without it”
Robert McLiam Williams
“They killed people who lived to make you laugh. And that is exactly why they killed them. This bears repeating. That iswhy they killed them. These people were killed by despotic halfwits because they were funny. The universe of funny ran smack into the abysmal depths of the terminally unfunny. They encountered the definitively humourless and the infinitely offendable. And they were massacred”
Ibid
And maybe that is the thing. Because politics doesn’t allow you to laugh at what it calls serious. It never has. Thus satire. The court buffoon is always outside the whole game. But somehow we all like to think of ourselves as players nowadays, don’t we?
“All day I have watched and heard supposedly left-wing commentators talking urgently of racism and fear-mongering. In truth, such remarks are important, even vital. But on this day, I would humbly suggest that if this is the first of your talking points, then you are in some trouble. Something has gone badly wrong. They killed the funny people because they were funny”
Ibid
Something has gone badly wrong. It certainly looked that way, for some people. When a room full of jesters are gunned down, and we discuss if their jokes were really worthy of the kind of court we’d create. Is that how we bury the dead? And have we forgotten what a jester is?
But this isn’t a sermon (please no). I just want to find a way back to the grief I felt 9 days ago, and move on.
fire bombed previous offices of Charlie Hebdo by Coyau / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0
The first New Moon of the new year will be on January 20th (UT) and it will be in Aquarius, only just in Aquarius, but only just in a sign always makes it really that sign. Let’s have a look at it:
Above is the simple astrological view, no asteroids or anything, apart from the centaur Chiron. It looks quite clean here, but remember that the Nodes also form aspects, in this case a T square with Uranus and Pluto. Uranus is actually really close to the South Node here, not just near but only 3 minutes off, while Pluto is under a degree off exactly squaring the Nodes. Whatever has built up through all these Uranus-Pluto squares, all that breakdown and breakout and pressure and suppression and disillusion and gasping for collective sanity, it’s accumulated karmically at that South Node, and it is one very big pissed off “think different” vibe. But that’s not where the conscious growth is. That’s at the North Node, and it’s all about other people in Libra.
The Nodes are of course always in opposition to each other, and oppositions can very easily involves projection. The Nodes are an object lesson in how to handle projection in some ways, as the South Node is a resource which can be called upon to do the work of growth in the area of the North Node, thus they remain different, but they really can both be owned at the same time, and they need to be in order for growth to occur. In this situation here there is a strong tendency to polarize and project, but the pattern actually asks us to own the Uranian impetus for change, rebellion, and not-give-a-fuck action, and use it constructively to benefit relationships. We should not drop this ball, because when it involves the Nodes it doesn’t give you a no consequence option.
The first New Moon of the year, being in Aquarius like this, does also highlight that Uranus, as it of course rules Aquarius. The Sun-Moon conjunction of the New Moon happily has a helping hand from Saturn here, which is sextile to it (a harmonious aspect that just needs a little work to get it going). That is a tempering aspect, as Saturn always adds a little caution, a little cooling or slowing, and in Sagittarius the slowing concerns meaning, morality, law, religion, all of which can of course be bullshit, and Saturn in Sagittarius is very aware of that. That’s part of its challenge – finding the real thing.
There is in fact a lot of Aquarius in this chart, with Venus and Mercury being conjunct there as well, from where they oppose Jupiter in Leo. Venus rules pleasure, the arts, and what we value as beautiful or desirable; Mercury rules communication and a certain kind of mental “climate”. In Aquarius this is on the cool side, potentially open minded and original, reinforced by a harmonious sextile to Uranus from Mercury (but remember that ruling Uranus is under a lot of stress here too, which could distort things).
Jupiter is an expansive influence that seeks to push out our horizons, whether physically or in terms of meaning and learning, and in Leo is nicely placed in some ways, but it’s not a diplomatic or subtle placement. He’s big, larger than life and lovely, but he can be a bit of a Tarzan when he wants to be. Jupiter is retrograde here though, so that makes his influence a bit more internalized and reflective, while a trine from Uranus is likely to give him quite a big taste for freedom and letting it all hang out, so slightly mixed messages, “anything goes”, but maybe a more private affair than usual. The opposition here has I think got Venus and Mercury wanting Jupiter to be more reasonable and “socially aware”, and Jupiter wanting Venus and Mercury to lighten up and lose their mental iciness. If these energies don’t lead to projection, then you get a vibe which is more creative, more fun, doesn’t take things quite so seriously, but still manages to encourage originality and some serious thinking. But if there’s projection, then there’s going to be a food fight over ideas and tastes. More fun is the better option.
Coming back to Saturn, which gives us our structure, our sense of limitation and realistic achievement, we see that it is also squaring a conjunction of Mars and Neptune in Pisces. What occurs to me here is that Mars and Neptune are much concerned with collective hurt and suffering in this position, as well as the power of the irrational collectively. Saturn in this position is concerned with drawing a line under that (the square from Sagittarius), marking the limit of what can maintain meaning (Sagittarius) and coherence, especially in areas that we see reflected in law and religion and learning (Sagittarius again), which Saturn itself tests against its baseline here.
Saturn and Neptune are not an easy combination, and it takes something of a quantum leap to encompass both: structure and liquid, material science and the world of the psyche, the empirical and the irrational. Squares aren’t even about mutuality and encompassment, they are working something out through a conflict, and that suits Saturn but it doesn’t even compute for Neptune.
The entire chart actually gets drawn back to Neptune if you look at which planet is in whose sign by planetary rulership (something called disposition in astrology), and Neptune is quite clearly preoccupied with Saturn at the moment. So while the last 4 – 5 years have been dominated by the square of Uranus and Pluto, right now we are going through a show down between Saturn and Neptune. Just imagine that Harry Houdini has taken over behind the scenes in government for the time being. We don’t know how he’ll get out of it (or even quite what “it” is right now), but he will eventually.
But let’s not forget our “Summer of Love” Chiron in Pisces. Both Chiron and Pisces have a concern with suffering, its meaning, its alleviation and at times its unavoidability. If there is something especially toxic in the suffering of Mars-Neptune in Pisces, when combined with the undiplomatic limitation and containment of Saturn in Sagittarius, then there is at this same time a new perspective offered by the unhealable yet wise Chiron, which is also in Pisces, sign of suffering and undoing, as well as so much which is positive and illuminating.
Chiron in this chart sextiles Pluto, thus helping to alleviate the Uranus-Pluto square, but it also quincunxes the North Node, which makes it key at this time. A quincunx is not an aspect that gives an easy answer, because Pisces and Libra have so little in common in a formal sense. But through an original insight, the connection between the energy of Chiron and the work of the North Node can be made, for a quincunx shows that the relationship is there, it is just not conventionally recognized. So that helps us do the work that puts that Uranus-Pluto square to good use (because of its present, close involvement with the Node axis). And yet it also helps us out of the potential lead poisoning of the Saturn-Neptune square, because like Mars-Neptune it is also in Pisces right now, but it is free of the Mars-Neptune-Saturn complex.
Chiron is the small, quiet voice, behind the wailing of Mars-Neptune, or the grinding of Uranus-Pluto.
Such a small key, but very much a key, that can help us gain the wisdom, that lets us not drop the ball. Because even when we can’t heal the wound, or tell the truth, or right the world, we can sometimes still keep hold of the ball.
“Thetis entrusted Chiron with the education of Achilles” – Pompeo Batoni [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Astrologers talk quite a bit about the Uranus-Pluto square which is now nearing it’s end, and of course about the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the mid 1960s, to which is credited a good deal of the upheavals of that decade, or at least the flavour of them. We tend to remember hippies and civil rights protests, riots and marches, psychedelics and the Vietnam War, Kennedy and the space program.
I thought it would be interesting to find a spiritual organization that was founded right in those times, and I drew up this chart for one:
As you can see, it is right on the nose for the conjunction, just 16′ off exact, and it’s in the “hippie capitol” of San Francisco. So what do you think it might be? A psychedelic mission? A propagator of peace and love? A fighter of social injustices?
It’s actually, as near as I can ascertain, the foundation chart for The Church of Satan. Now you might have got some clues that this wasn’t a typical flower child enterprise from a few things, but pretty much by definition (due to the exactness of the aspect here) this is a typical child of the Uranus-Pluto conjunction, or at least one of them. There would no doubt have been many different manifestations, but this was a clear candidate.
Should we be surprised by this? I don’t think so. Uranus-Pluto is about freedom and power, the destruction of the restrictive, the unvital and the untruthful, and the liberation of a new order (and one might well cringe at those words if they came from the mouth of a politician). It’s psychic physics, not morality. There was no reason why someone shouldn’t make such a process their own in the name of Satanism. It is no surprise in the world of Uranus-Pluto that people might find truth in what seem like strange or previously demonized places, and find a source of power through that truth.
I think my point here is that things aren’t always what you expect them to be, and the same goes for the square we are emerging from now. Except that I think the square might finish off some misconceptions about what happened since the 60s. It’s a testing aspect, and there’s a whole load of stuff since 1965-6 that could do with testing, some to be confirmed, and some to be put in the fail bin.
It won’t be sudden, it will have been a long time coming. Some of it will actually already be here. But it won’t necessarily be what we are expecting. And it won’t be about good guys and bad guys.
Psychic physics, not morality.
La messe noire détail du tryptique de la tentation de saint Antoine 1502 – Hieronymus Bosch [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
I thought this might be a good time to look at the sky again, and for this snapshot I have taken today at noon (fairly arbitrarily), and simplified the chart somewhat. I have kept the asteroids and centaurs to the minimum that seem to be really engaging*, and I have taken out the Sun and Moon as they will quickly be moving on, and this isn’t a point such as Full or New Moon, and have also erased the Mars-Jupiter opposition which is about to end.
10th January 2015
Seen this way, the sky appears to be dominated by several aspects, especially two sets of squares, which are aspects of tension, testing and resistance.
The first one (though it actually started coming into play before Saturn went into Sagittarius last month) is a square between Saturn and Neptune, and here Saturn is joined by Pallas. Caught up in this is Mars, which is within range of conjunction with Neptune (and square Saturn), and presently closely conjunct Nessus. Add to this that there is a tight T square formed by Neptune, Black Moon Lilith and Pallas.
With things like the recent religious terrorist attacks in Paris it is easy to see things in retrospect, but there is quite a bit to be seen in this chart, so what would the essentials be?
Saturn in Sagittarius is very much in the realm of religion and philosophy, and while with an individual it would tend to demand that a person work to find what is true for them in terms of philosophy or religion (or avoidance of), collectively it also relates to those parts of belief systems and outlooks that become rigid and fossilized, highly structured or dogmatic. Such things don’t ultimately work out well unless they are reviewed and reformed (the structure and longevity of Saturn working with the mutability and movement of Sagittarius’ fire), and it is characteristic of Saturn that the interface between the personal and the collective becomes critical in the working out of the processes it pushes. Pallas here adds a certain militancy, but of a very intellectual, strategic sort, and if there is battle, it is never literal by choice. Pallas is extremely smart.
Neptune in Pisces is very different. This could be a very humanitarian, universalist placement, highly conscious of mass suffering, but it could also be really flipped out. This is enormous collective feeling, about as pure as it gets. The square with Saturn and Pallas in Sagittarius is really mismatched, and it looks to me like this points to a potential for collective irrationality. Saturn will deal with it, because Saturn always asserts the necessary, but it’s not an easy combination. Add to this though that Mars is coming into conjunction with Neptune and it adds a further layer of mismatch, of potentially delusional emotion, of directionlessness, of dodgy motives unless there is considerable purification from negative emotions such as anger and fear. Pallas and Saturn are a quite benign pairing here, but in mutable, overreaching, far shooting Sagittarius they are not best positioned to be able to direct or contain things. Apply the Neptune-Saturn square individually and consciously though, and of course there is a lot more scope for creative resolution (so don’t despair if this plays out in your own chart!).
But this is not all. Mars is very closely conjunct Nessus, which is still in amongst the applying Mars-Neptune conjunction. Nessus has a connection with abuse and atrocity, usually spanning several generations, but it is also associated with things coming to a close, or a head. “The buck stops here” is one of the key phrases for Nessus.
So there are issues of collective emotion and its potential negative manifestations, and collective emotional issues of violence and control which may come to a head through this pattern, become explicit to the point of coming to an end finally. Part of this pattern also concerns religion and philosophy, and structure/dogma versus movement and revision. The hope in it is the resolution of something really very poisonous which has been going on for a long time.
The other square which dominates the chart is of course the Uranus-Pluto square which we are familiar with by now. We are now heading for the last exact square of this entire series, which occurs this March. This aspect has formed the backdrop to the last 4 – 5 years, and it has been a very long haul for quite a few people, and can be thought of as a “generation defining” aspect in the same way that the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 60s, or the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of the 80s were. I think for a lot of us, life “before and after” seems quite distinct already. It has been a testing aspect, and it will have strengthened some things and destroyed others, in a way which changes the zeitgeist, or at least gives us a much clearer picture of what, how and if things are possible in terms of social change. We’re heading for the last exact square of the series, so don’t breathe out just yet, but after March it will be the first time in 5 years when we weren’t heading for a Uranus-Pluto square. It will be about 2071-2 before we see another one, when Uranus will be closing in on a future conjunction with Pluto, rather than heading away from a past one.
The Nodes are always a good thing to look at, and here they line up with Uranus-Pluto to form a close T square. So this square is mining a vein of karmic growth (or challenges), and where it is telling us to look is Libra. Not that individualistic, liberational Uranus in Aries is irrelevant or “bad”, but at the South Node it is an already developed resource in this pattern, one that we can call on, but that we have to apply with reason and awareness of relationships and interrelationships, otherwise growth and transformation don’t take place as they could. With Pluto straddling the axis, there is not going to be much choice. It is probably only after March that we will slowly get a better sense of what it’s all been about.
And I think we should then take a well earned breath.
Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, Poppy installation art at the Tower of London. Detail of poppies hung on fence with individual dedications – by The Land (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons* there is actually also a yod pattern formed between Chiron, Pluto and Juno over in Leo, which has some deep bearings on the subjects of marriage, partnership and partners, I would think culturally, in a way which calls for transformation and healing, probably of roles and freedoms, but I did not included this in the main post as though it is important, I wasn’t sure where to fit it in. But given the role of religion and philosophy in the formation (and distortion) of our ideas of marriage, who and how we can marry, and what being a spouse means, I think it is quite possible to also link this in to the Neptune-Saturn square, and the passage of Saturn through Sagittarius.
I had this idea that I would be going into this year with a more definite focus on peace and healing, and while that does hold, I found the first week unexpectedly challenging.
I write for the Rainbow Pagans UK blog every so often, and last month I wrote a short piece on the question of what Pagans might learn from The Satanic Temple, who have had a very successful year in terms of their public campaigns. This week I got a very nice reply on the post from a Satanic blogger who would like to see bridges built between Paganism and Satanism. I thought that was very cool, and I took the idea to the message board of the Rainbow Pagans UK Group, just wanting to see what people would think. Most people voted against it in a poorly attended poll (which didn’t surprise me), and the message responses ranged from positive and interested, to suspicious and questioning, to expressions of outright prejudice and bigotry. The latter disappointed me with their determined stupidity, and very few of us challenged them on this. If they had been talking about the adherents of any religion (not the analysed characteristics of a religion) other than Satanism, there would have been no question that this was prejudice, but here we were, a Pagan group, happily treating another religious group as a pariah. Questioning just brought evasive jokes. I thought it was frankly pathetic. Not entirely surprising for Pagans, but disappointing. There were however probably more positive responses than you would get from most religious communities, so that does show something.
On a much more serious note, on 7th January 2015 the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were attacked by “Islamic” gunmen in Paris, murdering 10 journalists and two policemen. I think four of the magazine’s cartoonists were killed. Again, it was cartoons targeted by the psychopathically religious. Like many people, we were stunned by this, and it is one of those times when you can feel something sink into the collective psyche with the grief and shock that came with it. We have had years of artists and cartoonists (especially) being threatened, fire bombed and occasionally killed by Islamic “militants” for their “blasphemy” in doing things like lampooning or even just depicting a historical personage they claim should be off limits for everyone, of any religion or none, but this felt like it finally crossed the invisible line of bullshit that has been piled on the question of religious and community “sensitivities” versus human rights. “Sensitivities”, spelt out in bodies.
In what I think was a shared sense of grief, I posted a number of things about the attack on my facebook page, not even imagining that there could be anything to argue about here. A friend of mine expressed her own fears and concerns with the power of violent religion, and we were both clear that we knew the majority of muslims we had ever met would be horrified by this act. But there are questions here, about any religion that seriously countenances violent retribution for “blasphemy”.
Then on come the comments, and oh my, the grand project is upon us! The protest about what a right wing press is going to do with these sentiments, all to make “whitey” feel better (ah yes, religion would really be about race, and human rights about privilege). How dare we be especially concerned about Islam?!
Actually, we aren’t. Put another religious maniac there, I’ll be concerned about that. But it’s just that no one has been threatened that I am aware of, for drawing cartoons of Jesus, or Buddha, or Moses. So when Islam steps off the stage of violence and threat and bullying entitlement, believe me, no one is going to take any notice. But at the moment it is like a drunk with a megaphone shouting “why are you looking at me!!”. And I love Sufism, and appreciate the subtlety and brilliance of parts of the muslim culture of the past, and I’ve known many muslims and loved a few as friends and lovers, and I long for the day when Islam has its political teeth pulled to at least the same extent as Christianity, and muslims can actually benefit from that freedom. But it most certainly is not there yet, and it needs to get there, and while it is in the process of getting there, it should not be allowed to act “as if” in countries where we have already been through that god awful battle with political religion, and at least got the incomplete freedoms we have.
More disturbing though, I saw on a news report last night a commentary that puts a predictable, hypocritical spin on this tragedy. They talked about the massacre of course, and the violence of the religious extremists, but they also talked about attempts to respect religions and not offend. The report ended with the statement that people are now concerned with the question of “how freedom of expression can be balanced with respect”.
What the actual fuck? No. Enough of this concern with “offense”. 12 people were just murdered in the name of religion in order to prevent satirical “offense”. You do not need to show “respect” to someone that cannot control their desire to interfere with your life, because a book, or the voices, or their culture, or their family, told them to do so. They need to deal with their problem, quite obviously.
It’s completely irrelevant what religion someone is, or if someone has no religion. We are meant to be over this shit. And it may be terribly hip and post modern to think of “the Enlightenment” as some imperialist scam to make “whitey” feel better about screwing the world, but credit where credit is due. If it did anything to help punch out the political lights of religion, then there is something to be thankful for.
And of course anyone who turns on muslims in general for this happening is a complete jerk. These are fellow human beings, and they need to be helped to get out from under malignant religion, just like anyone does. Secular minded muslims should be really supported and listened to. And I look forward to the days of trendy, guitar strumming mullahs.
But liberal guilt – I’m afraid I just don’t have it.
image from internet – I don’t think Charlie would mind
If there were a place in human life to identify where our “trouble” is situated, it would surely be the mind. And if there were a place to identify where our talents and creativities and so many of our potentials arise, it would surely be the mind. Our Pandora, our Prometheus, our Lucifer; our Teslas and Einsteins, our Leonardos and our serial killers, it’s all in the electrical theatre of the mind.
Someone I once knew referred to psychedelics as spiritual laxatives, and while I have never taken powerful psychedelics myself, I have done holotropic breathwork, and had experiences that could be described as “psychedelic”, and I would entirely concur. It gets things moving.
Magically speaking, the area that I would find most interestingly relevant here is evocation, as described by Israel Regardie in “The Tree of Life”. Whether or not you use a “triangle of art”, the fact is we are all right in it, with our personal demons, that just might be our daemon, or its preliminary accompaniment.
The mind of course includes many things. In the East the mind is much wider and deeper than it has generally been taken to be in the West (until at least the advent of psychology, and more particularly trans-personal psychology, and even then I’d be cautious to claim too much). In traditions such as Buddhism the mind goes all the way down, and right to the centre. In the West, the profound area of the mind has generally be termed the heart, while what we think of as “mental” has tended to be termed the head. Whether we are talking about the “essence of Mind” in the eastern sense, or “the heart” in the western terminology, it is characterized by peace, bliss, and a resplendent, luminous quality. This is where we experience Oneness of Being, and love in the sense that mystics talk of it. This is where we are who we truly are.
But what then of the “mind”, the “head”? In truth this is surely the whole question, for there is no problem in “the heart”, and indeed no separation.
The heart is in fact the key to the head, but the head must be clear to allow it. Thus the Sufi’s talk of “polishing the heart”, because our thoughts and judgements obscure it. But the head is a wonder, and it reveals to us a distorted mirror show of our own divinity, a blessed freak show which we should honour. Sometimes reversed, sometimes twisted, sometimes heartbreakingly longed for, sometimes feared. It is a wonder, and all we take to be art and science and genius and poetry and vision, if it has any language at all, then it is the child of our head. Demons indeed, illumined by our daemon.
And this is where those psychedelic processes come in, and healing processes too. Between healing, and manifestation, and the tumbling cyphers of questions that we already have the answer for, the language we reach for, that articulates us.
So we can see, with clarity, and with cleansing, with what I call the dispensation of the heart, that all becomes simply mind, or simply heart, according to how it may appear to you. And all in relationship.
Such an amazingly dark time of year in Northern Europe, just after New Year. Before the Solstice it seems positively cosy by comparison, but after, it can be quite dreadful. The darkest time heading for the coldest time, under Saturn’s rule. Well if Saturn rules this mid-winter coniunctio (opposite the union of the Sun and Moon in Summer) there must be something to it. Maybe we just have to be strong to withstand forces so important to our individuality (for nothing is more individual than the co-ruler of coming Aquarius, Uranus).
I sometimes wonder if anybody really has that rosy life of a world that they fit into. The stories all suggest that, and I think we all dream of that nurturing, life affirming world of belonging at one time or another – but is it only a minority that find themselves excluded and in need of remaking the world, their world, to be able to live as who they are? I can’t think that is so, because individuality is a freak’s curse and gift, and surely we are all individuals?
How very hard it is to live that though, how depleting and at times seemingly hazardous, when what we all crave inside is healing and safety and protection. But nothing is ever as it first quite appears. The healing safety can end up harmful, and the individual, risky quest turn out to be the only reasonable course. At the end there is a oneness in it all, and our separateness cannot be denied union, even if we cannot live in denial of unique separateness. It is, after, relationship.
After all, we know nothing really, but that we have to live, and that we love.
Studies by Michelangelo Buonarroti [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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Summer Thunder 