Astrology – A Sacred Life

March 6, 2024March 6, 2024

And Awakening In Springtime

Seek ye the openings at the edges.
Places where water comes from nowhere.
The doors invisible at first sight,
Only noticed in passing.

I am, at least for this week, back from my temporary sabbatical . I did not get to do most of what I took the time off to do, but I did do some of it, and in the doing found sufficient inspiration to return here, again, at least this week. And probably next. And then we’ll see.

Yesterday was my second Saturn return. As I write this on the day before that, I can’t offer any specific recollection of the passing of that milestone, save to offer what I posted the other day on threads.

It’s not a date, it’s a process.

Although I have had an interest in astrology since I was first acquainted with magic and the occult in childhood, it remained for many years outside my practical grasp. For those of you without recollection of the pre-internet era, once upon a time, the construction of natal charts, and from thence the progression toward a predictive astrology, was done without the aid of software.

One had to have at least one ephemeris. Considering that most clients would have been born in the 20th century, a good one for that century centered on midday or midnight was essential. Ephemerae for early periods were available, used for calculating the charts of various famous personages, organizations and states, whose nativity predated the current era. Sometimes this was for instructive purpose (“see here, you have your Moon in Aries squared by Mars in Leo, just like Mozart”), and sometimes you would be called upon to cast a horoscope for something like a corporate merger so you needed to create a “birth chart” for the involved corporations whose origin may have predated 1900.

I don’t recall how much mine cost, but I know I considered it expensive as a first year college student trying to get by on a meager stipend and acquiring potentially expensive habits beyond the already pricey ones of art supplies and books. There was also a need for a Table of Houses, at minimum, and a set of fairly accurate mathematical instruments. Fortunately I had some of those already left over from high school trigonometry and/or art class, and I had possession of an antiquated (even in the early 80s) slide rule. Doubtless many people reading in 2024 will assume this has something to do with measuring, but before computers and calculators became ubiquitous, the slide rule was a precision instrument for dealing with complex calculations out to many decimal points. In fact they were more accurate and capable of handling bigger numbers with greater precision that most affordable electronic scientific calculators making the rounds.

If you’re not a math nerd (guilty) things like significant digits and scientific notation will possibly leave you staring at me like a doomed deer on a lonely country road. But let me take you through the steps of calculation a planetary position for a natal chart as I had to do it in the 1980s, and you’ll get some sense of the weight of this process, and why software is a wonderful boon to the practice of astrology.

Titan Saturn Chesley Bonestell 1944 — Saturn and I are old friends. This illustration by the great Chesley Bonestell of Saturn as seen from its moon Titan, was part of a solar system map that hung on my wall in early childhood. My interests in things that were beyond the mundane was part of me from the very beginning, and I am happy to say, that interest has not waned. If anything, it has become stronger with age.

An ephemeris is a table of planetary positions taken from a fixed point in space and time. That is, depending on the ephemeris, it will tell you at what degree, minute, and second of arc a planet occupies on a given day at a given hour when viewed from a specific latitude and longitude. The one I bought was set for midnight (’cause I’m a night person) at the Naval Observatory of Greenwich, England -home of the Prime Meridian. These were compiled by the Observatory for the purposed of aiding naval navigation, because it could be used with a sextant and trigonometry to plot one’s position out of site of land in the days before GPS. The data has also been handy for astrologers, who no longer had to watch the skies directly and extrapolate this information.

We’ll start with talking about the Sun’s position, since our “Sun Sign” is generally what everyone in the 70s and 80s sort of understood about astrology. So we look up your birthday in the ephemeris and find out what degree, minute and second of arc the sun occupied at midnight in Greenwich, England.

Which, of course was not where or when you were actually born. So the first thing we need to do is figure out your birthplace.

Did I mention you need an atlas, too? A very good one with lots of detail, so that little bitty town in Eastern Kentucky where you were hatched shows up close enough to the big latitude and longitude lines to make calculating it’s true position less difficult. Because that’s what we’ll do now, using the nearest main line, and the map’s scale, correcting for the convergence of those lines as they get further from the equator.

Got it? Good.

So now we just have to figure out the difference in time between that location and Greenwich. This is generally a little easier, because we have time zones. If you live to the west of Greenwich Mean Time (or GMT) then it’s a negative number. East is a positive number. What we call Eastern Time in the United States is GMT minus five hours. Be sure to correct for Daylight Savings Time (which is different here than it is in Europe, but GMT doesn’t change for DST, so Eastern Time DST becomes minus 4 GMT). Also remember that modern ephemerae may use UTC instead of GMT, but it is nearly the same thing. That is, UTC is the same zero hour as GMT which preceded it, but is derived from precise atomic decay clocks kept by the observatory, and synchronized with other such clocks around the world as a basis for determining the local offset time zone.

Luckily, the chart I am working with is a winter chart, and in the Eastern time Zone, so I take Midnight GMT and subtract five hours. This means that I now know which degree, minute, and second of arc the sun was occupying at 7:00 PM (or 19:00 on the 24 hour clock) at the birth location. We’re making progress. Unfortunately, the subject was born at 3:30PM so we’re going to need to calculate where the sun was four and a half hours earlier.

Saturn Brooch — I got myself a little something for my second Saturn return. It was auspiciously on sale last week. I have a whole box full of costume jewelry like this that I swap out on my cape and other magical wear as the mood strikes, but I had yet to have an image of Saturn. Which is surprising considering the image of the ringed planet is quintessential to the attire of any self-respecting wizard depicted in fairy tale illustrations.

For the record, I do have a pointy satin blue hat with stars, crescent moons, and of course, Saturn, on it in my costume closet. And one of the earliest pieces of magical clothing I made still bares the faint impression of the giant planet on the back of it, so none of this is new.

The sun transits the zodiac once every 365.2422 days. The zodiac is divided into 360 degrees of arc. Each degree is then divided into 60 minutes, and 60 seconds, just as we divide terrestrial maps in order to translate the vast distance between the degrees on land and sea into something specific. We’ve already done that with the location of birth. To get the sun’s rate of travel, we divide the 360 degrees by the 365.2422 days and get a velocity of .9856473321 degrees per day. Then we need to divide that by the 24 hours in a day to determine how far it moves in an hour, which is .0410686388 degrees of arc, or rather, 2.464118328 minutes, or 2 minutes, 2.784784709080 seconds.

This is where we get to those significant digits. With a slide rule and scientific notation actually compute those numbers out to the ends of those decimal points. And a quality astrology software program currently available on the market is doing that for you. We couldn’t do that in 1980 unless we used the slide rule. But even then, it starts coming out with numbers that are frankly, impossible to plot a chart of the size that one would prepare for a client, which might at most be the size of a standard letter size sheet of paper. I did bigger poster style charts for the few I did, because, the art was as much a part of the service as the chart, and it also made it easier to draw all the lines.

So at some point, I default to saying that the speed of the Sun through the zodiac is roughly 2 minutes and 3 seconds of arc per hour. So in four and a half hours (GMT Midnight and 7PM local) the Sun will be a little over 8 minutes and 12 seconds of arc ahead of where it really was at the time the subject was born at this location. I then take the position of the Sun and subtract 8 minutes and 12 seconds of arc, and I know where the Sun is at the moment of birth.

Now I just need to repeat this process for the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, and the Ascendant (position of the Eastern Horizon). Most general texts didn’t even talk about asteroids, or the Arab parts, or any of the number of other calculations to be made in a complex natal chart.

Oh, did I cover the part about sidereal versus tropical zodiac? Natal charts in the west are usual done with a tropical zodiac that has a neat division of twelve signs of 30 degrees each. It is locked to the solstices, so the Sun moves from Gemini to Cancer on the Summer Solstice and from Sagittarius into Capricorn in winter. The latitude lines where the sun is visible directly overhead on these dates are called the Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn respectively, and relate to earth’s 23-ish degree wobble on it’s access over the year. Without the wobble, we’d have no seasons.

Sidereal time, however uses the position of the sun (and subsequently the other planets) in relation to their location in the constellations taken at sunrise on a given day. The Vedic astrology practiced in Hinduism uses the sidereal system. Lucky for your, the switch is a simple option in most modern software. But if you happen to have purchased a sidereal ephemeris and you are making a tropical zodiac, you’re going to have to work out the math. The variance between the two is 23-24 degrees on average, but it’s another layer of calculation, and is a big enough number to put planets and your Ascendant in other signs.

Saturn Devouring His Son — I can’t think about Saturn and especially not the portents of a Saturn return without recalling this haunting image by Francisco Goya. This is far and away my favorite painting by that mad Spaniard (followed closely by the etching “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” from his Los Caprichios series).

He painted this, along with a number of other mystical and magical “Black Paintings” on the interior walls of his home in the 1820s. Proclaimed a pariah by both the ruling class and the Inquisition, and on the outs with his own family, some speculate he may have been experiencing a deep depressive episode. Still, these works are unquestionably genius.

He’d have been a bit past his own second Saturn Return, which was the day before my birthday in 1804. He died some years short of his third one, but at 82 was at a respectable old age for the 18-19th century.

So now that we know where the planets and the Ascendant are, we can start to plot the chart. We start by scribing a circle on the page. We’ll then draw a horizontal line through the center.

The Ascendant is where the sunrise horizon is at the moment of birth. In the case of our test subject, that’s about one and three quarter degree into Aries. So the point where the left side of the line intersects the circle is marked as 1 degree, 44 minutes of Aries. Now we’re going to take a protractor and locate a point 1.75 degrees above that center line. A line drawn from the edge of the circle to the center now represents the start of the Sign of Aries. From that line, we measure 30 degrees counter-clockwise, mark a line, and label that the beginning, or cusp, of Taurus; 30 degrees counter-clockwise from Taurus is Gemini, the next is Cancer, and so forth, until 30 degrees from the cusp of Aquarius/Pisces is the beginning of Aries.

Now we take those hard won positions of the planets and put all of them in on the chart, since we now know where the signs begin and end. It’s time to take a well-earned break, have some lunch, and maybe even a long nap.

The next steps are both necessary but don’t necessarily have to be performed in a specific order. We need to calculate the aspects for the planets, and we need to calculate the positions of the Houses. In order to give our brains a bit of a break, I’ll go with the aspects first.

Planetary aspects are simply the distances between each planet (and sometimes calculated positions, like the Ascendant, Descendant, Mid-Heaven (abbreviated MC for Maximus Coeli, the “top of sky” or Zenith) and Immum Coeli (“bottom of sky” or Nadir), Part of Fortune, and other Arabic Parts. These aspects are in degrees of arc, and generally are on divisions of 30, or the breadth of a full sign.

Objects said to have Square Aspect are 90 degrees apart, or three full signs different, and these are considered difficult or unfortunate. At 60 degrees we have a Sextile aspect, and at 30 degrees a Trine aspect, which signal better cooperation between the planets and a positive relationship in general. Objects at 180 degrees are in Opposition, and work against each other, and objects that are within a degree or so are considered to be in Conjunction and have the most beneficial aspect. There are several minor and special ones, but this is just the basics I would go for in a hand-calculated chart.

Planetary Aspects are arrayed in a grid which has the planets across the top and down one side, where the intersecting boxes are marked with the glyph for the type of aspect. These are generally also drawn of the page with the chart, for quick reference.

Before we bring the Houses into the picture, it may be also helpful to make a note of the Elemental positions, and the Modalities.

Each sign has an elemental nature, in that it corresponds to Fire, Earth, Air, and Water, in that order, starting with Aries, and moving counter-clockwise around the chart. Thus Taurus is considered an Earth Sign, Gemini Air, and Cancer the first Water Sign. Leo is the next Fire, Virgo, the second Earth, and so forth. Four elements means that this happens three times in a 12 sign zodiac and sometimes these groups of signs are called Triplicities.

The Modalities speak to how that Element interacts with the Sign, and any planets within it. These are Cardinal, Fixed and Mutable. Cardinal signs represent the first full blush and power of the element. They frequently mark the beginnings of the seasons, but do not necessarily fall in line with the first time the element appears in the zodiac. For example, both Aries (Cardinal Fire) and Cancer (Cardinal Water) mark the beginnings of Spring and Summer. But Taurus, while being the first Earth sign, is considered Fixed, because it represents that element as it is established and in it’s fullest natural influence. Likewise Scorpio, as Fixed Water, represents a world that is firmly in Autumns grip, which began with Cardinal Libra and the Autumnal Equinox. Mutable signs are the endings of a season, when the Element in one is beginning to transition into the Element in the next, thus Mutable signs precede Cardinal ones, and Fixed signs precede Mutable. As there are four seasons this occurs four times in the zodiac.

These natures are used to describe the Signs, and so they influence how a planet’s nature will be interpreted when entering into them. In drawing a chart, it is sometimes helpful to make a notation of element and modality at the rim or down nearer the center for reference when the actual reading begins.

At this point, we can begin to overlay the Houses. The Houses reflect various parts of our personality and our life, as well as the world we live in. This is where we can look for indicators of personality, aptitude, relationships, children, career, health, longevity, and spirituality. The most basic system of Houses is that of the Equal House system, where each house, like each sign, has 30 degrees. The houses begin at the Ascendant, and move counter-clockwise around. Depending on the position of the Ascendant, this may mean that an equal house system matches, or nearly matches, with the signs, as is the case of our test subject. By having the Ascendant only a hair inside of Aries, the first house will overlap most of Aries, the second most of Taurus, etc. such that the houses, who share many traits with the underlying signs, would not greatly vary the reading of the planets and their aspects. Aries and the First House speak to the I, the Ego, the Individual.

However if the Ascendant were over in Gemini, which is concerned with communication and interaction (as is the Third House) planets here might be analyzed for their influence on how well the person speaks and presents themselves. Such a shift places Gemini’s native Third House, over in Leo, which then may be reviewed as to how our subject commands, leads, or influences. These are over-simplifications, not so much as one gets with a daily newspaper horoscope, but they serve here simply to illustrate the connection between the nature of a given sign, and the nature of a given house, and then how the houses have different origin points than these signs. Houses change as a factor of location, since the position of the Ascendant is related most directly to where the subject was born.

This further complicates matters though, because the lines of longitude converge at the poles, so the distance between them is shorter the further one moves from the equator. This brought about the first calculations of the unequal houses, to compensate. Possibly the eldest, and potentially the most common, is called the Placidian, and is calculated based on degrees of latitude. When these houses become known, you get a chart where the houses are wider on one side than the other, and thus their influences can vary. For example, one might have a fourth house that spanned two or even three signs, in which case the planets and signs there would all be taken into account in terms of expressing tendencies in home and family life. Consequently on the other side of the chart the seventh, eighth, and ninth houses might share portions of a single sign, such that the planets and the sign would govern issues of marriage, business, death, and life goals.

In extreme northern latitudes (which thankfully I have never had to create a chart for) the various forms of unequal houses can cause some to collapse entirely, and frequently astrologers simply revert to an equal house system. This, of course, leads skeptics to pronounce that if the calculations are this quixotic, then the whole thing must be an utter sham.

Again, that is not my point, I am just trying to give the texture of the experience of working with astrology prior to the advent of small personal computers, and accurate natal astrology software.

Where once creating a serviceably accurate natal chart could take days or weeks, not even considering the study and contemplation to interpret it, I can now get a reliable result inputting a few key data points into the computer, or even into my mobile device. While arguably this has made the practice of astrology much easier and more accessible to those who have a true gift for reading a chart, I would counter that that is also something to be gained from the experience of finding and placing all that information oneself.

Because this task was so onerous, I admit to have only done a very few charts, and since Tarot and numerology were much simpler and more readily available, my career as a world famous astrologer never really took off. I did follow my horoscopes and such in the mass media, and I tried to keep enough of the skillset to smell when these were gilding the lily. Somehow I never won the lottery, had a windfall inheritance, or was an overnight sensation, so I took it with a grain of salt.

A few years ago, I ran across the Planetdance software which I have mentioned in previous articles, and started digging more deeply back into the charts. Particularly my interest was in why the majority of the new friendships I was making in the witch community on social media were mostly Piscean women. One of them told me it was that Pisces in Saturn in the 12th House placement. I’m still trying to work that all out, but it started me looking into this whole Saturn Return business.

Saturn takes around 30 years to get through the zodiac back to where it started. The actual orbit of Saturn is about 29.5 years, but because of retrograde motion, your Saturn return could vary a year or more. But generally speaking it hits us first as we are exiting our 20s, looking at the “big 3-0” and wondering just what the hell we are going to do with our lives.

I’ve only learned recently (like yesterday) that there is a secondary cyclic process called the Inverse Nodal return that hits around age 27, and so consequently the approach to that first Saturn return, with all the changes it portends, appears also to be a while. I am still looking into that as it applies to the second time around, as if it runs in a 27 year cycle it should have hit right around 2019 and thus just before the upheavals of 2020. Yet when I am cycling through my software, I see this event as happening in 2011. In fact, it looks like after the initial 27 year cycle that preceded the Saturn return, it now seems to be running on 19 year intervals. That’s actually somewhat concerning and I am going to ask some folks more familiar with astrology than I am to puzzle that one out.

At any rate, the second return hits as one is approaching that Big 6-0 and wondering just what the hell we have done with our lives, and thinking, quite significantly, if we’ll manage a third pass with this enigmatic outer planet as we approach our 90s.

When I was in my twenties, that idea never occurred to me. A life span of three-score and ten seemed to be around the norm. My great-grandmother passed at age 83 when I was in my early teens. My grandfather died of cancer in his early 70s a few years after that, so the perspective of a longer game seemed highly unlikely. When he died, my own father was not yet 40. When my father passed in 2022, also of cancer, I was almost 57, and already had a different perspective of that road.

As I have delved deeper into the supposed influence of Saturn’s return, I see some the impacts of reaching my age. These are, I believe, perhaps common to my peers. Many of us are beginning to lose our parents. Some of our contemporaries are also passing away. We are experiencing a sense of the clock ticking, of an urgency to our actions, that impacts our choices. We are thinking about that last hurrah, the big swing at that thing we always wanted to take a swing at. Maybe it’s writing a novel, maybe it’s touring the world. Maybe it’s finding a quiet corner of the world and letting go of the day to day frustrations and simply being able to breath deeply and listen to the birds sing.

Whether we as humans are doing this because the milestone of age 60 is driving it, and that has become associated with Saturn, or whether Saturn’s influence causes us to start thinking this way is really irrelevant. We have made this journey together, Saturn and I, and for now, I plan to keep on traveling.

We’ll see what I come up with next week. I may also move the day this article gets regularly posted so I can spend time getting it done without it impacting my other recent art projects, which are the reason I got into this thing in the first place. Also, I plan on making them shorter articles, which I am sure will please my readers immensely, so that they have the time to do their other projects.

November 8, 2023November 8, 2023

Another Trip Around The Sun

So yesterday was another birthday. I am now officially in my late 50s. While that is hardly old, I think it is, with a few exceptions, at least a decade on from most of my readership.

And that’s okay. I don’t build relationships around age. I build relationships around personalities. If you are interesting, and I like you, then I will make an effort to get to know you, regardless of your age or other physical factors. These are, after all, transitory, and probably illusional anyway.

My physical manifestation has been experiencing linear time for almost three score years. My mind goes further back. Way back. Back well before back. infinitely back if I squint hard enough.

And so, I believe, does everyone else’s, though most get hung up on that linear time, physicality, and other limitations. Letting go is difficult. Letting go is scary. Because, there is a very real danger that once you make that trip, you won’t ever come back.

Entering an altered state of consciousness that transcends time and space effectively dissolves one’s physicality.

Our attachment to the meat suit means it is very very difficult to reach a point where we aren’t wondering if the meat suit is sitting somewhere, in a quasi-vegetative state, slowly ceasing to function, to the horror and sorrow of all the other meat suits who were also attached to it.

There are, in fact, accounts of monks and hermits in many faiths to whom this actually happened. Their spirits roamed beyond the limitations of the world around them, but their physical bodies starved to death.

Which of course brings about the question as to whether or not the freedom of the spirit was the necessary death of the physical host. Is the dissolution of the physical experienced by the total awareness of the spiritual ultimately only possible by breaking that bond and letting the physical cease to function?

And if the limitations of the physical are only illusions, then why does it matter? Why do we worry about what happens to that meat suit?

And why do we put up with the aches and pains and longings and hungers and frustrations and limitations of the meat suit as it starts to wear out? Each day I feel more and more the weight of the years on this physical form, so why, if we know that the ultimate expression of self is in a dissolved spirit where all are one and one are all, do we continue to return to the burden of physicality and temporality?

Life is a constant mystery.

Instruments — A selection of instruments for measuring space and time. The armillary, on the far left, is designed to plot one’s position on the earth at a certain point in time. This was done by sighting for a particular star and then rotating the rings round till things lined up properly. Armillaries weren’t usually thought of as portable instruments. That is, they were usually something kept at home and used from that location. They show up frequently in depictions of astronomers, astrologers, alchemists, and the smart set from the Renaissance onward.

The middle image is of a modern orrery. An orrery is the forerunner of the planetarium, and is a cunning clockwork device that simulates the relative motion of the earth and moon, and sometimes other planets, around the sun. Orreries came about after Copernicus succeeded in replacing Ptolemy’s earth-centered universe with a sun-centered system, although astrologers continued to use the geo-centric model, and still do today, when calculating aspects and planetary influences.

The instrument on the right is a more or less modern device called a sextant. This is because the curved piece on the bottom represents 60 degrees of arc (30 degrees to each side of the center position). A similar instrument called a quadrant represented an arc of 90 degrees, but as it offered no great advantage in navigations, the larger size was quickly dropped for the improved model. The principles of the sextant derive from the more ancient astrolabe, but essentially involve calculating one’s position in space by using the angle of sun or a star at a certain time of day. The sextant can also be used horizontally to measure angles between points in the distance, and through the use of trigonometry, calculate range to one of the points.

The accuracy of these antique analog instruments varied by manufacturer and user, but a quality device in the hands of an experienced user would be comparable to a modern GPS locator, at least for purposes of general navigation.

Even in those moments when I can take my mind way back before way back before before, there is still some mystery to work out.

We are responsible to ourselves, to the nature of life itself, to keep poking at that mystery.

We should never take anything at face value. We should always wonder. We should always question. We should always wonder if the reality that we are experiencing is the final and ultimate one. Because if one is an illusion, then there is always and ever the possibility that all are.

I have been something of a cynic since childhood. A cynic is different than a skeptic. The skeptic says, “I don’t necessarily believe this, but if you have proof, I am open to changing my mind.” A cynic says, “I don’t necessarily believe this, and I need to see the proof of your proof. Which I also may not believe.”

If I look up the definition of cynic on the various web resources, it’s been boiled down to a general distrust of people’s motives and/or a school of Greek philosophy that was based on the rejection of convention or societal norms in favor of harmony with the cosmos. I’m not entirely sure I agree with either definition, which, of course, is the cynical point of view.

Of course, if you dig into it, skepticism is also a philosophical concept, based on the idea that we cannot know some things.

So for the skeptic, “It’s a mystery.” is sufficient explanation.

For the cynic “But is it a mystery?” is the more apt question. Why do we accept this is an answer? Is it impossible to know the answer? If I say I do know the answer, should I be believed?

I have spent the majority of my life in pursuit of wisdom, knowledge, and insight. Yet for every guru or teacher or prophet or messiah or philosopher or iconoclast, I am always asking “but what if you’re wrong?”

Because I am always asking myself that question.

“What if you’re wrong?”

This is not the same as the apostate or heretic, who doubts their resolve against the dogma of their former faith. It is not the fear of those who, upon hearing the soft tread of the psychopomp approaching, strive to find some peace of mind in the shadow of impending demise.

It is a simple, semi-scientific, quest for error.

I bought off on scientific method early on. It appealed to my sense of logic and reason. I’m not sure it even gets taught in the schools today, so I’ll cover it briefly here.

Theorize. Test the theory. Observe the results. Refine the theory. Repeat as necessary.

Theorize is that part where we all go “this is the way things are”.

Test the theory is that part where some go “but is this the way things are?”.

Observe the results is something like “no, this is not the way things are”.

And finally we come to “Oh, so this is how things are”.

But life is a constant mystery. We have to keep running the loop. We must repeat as necessary. And it is always necessary.

Starchart01 — Expressions of space and time vary greatly in human experience. We live in a four-dimensional space time that consists of up-down/left-right/forward-back/and past/future. Yet as humans we are able to conceptualize these dimensions and abstract them into three and two dimensional versions, and still work out what they mean.

A sculpture represents a specific moment. That is, it has the dimensions of up-down/left-right/ and forward-back, but within itself there is no past-future. It is a fixed point in time, that occupies space. Ironically, because all sculptures as we experience them exist in that four dimensional space-time, it is a representation of a fixed point in time that is moving through time.

Two-dimensional images abstract this even further. They represent our mental experience of four dimensions frozen at one point, and then flattened out. They no longer contain the dimensions of forward-back and past-future, but our minds are able to accept this because we innately learn how to abstract four dimensions to two as our brains grow. We have a further complexity in that we are able to perceive two dimensional images that contain representations of three dimensions (see below) and two-dimensional images that represent two dimensions. This was a conundrum explored by the Cubist and Surrealist movements in art, and ultimately gave rise to non-representational art in the mid-twentieth century.

Yet the history of visual and plastic arts gives us a number of examples of intentional manipulation of our perception of space time. If one looks at the conventions of Ancient Egyptian art, we are confronted with figures who have heads, hands, and legs and feet in profile, but torsos and hips portrayed frontally. It’s clear, however, from their sculpture work that they not only understood, but mastered depictions of three-dimensions. The deliberate choice to create such distorted flat images in two-dimensions derived from their concepts of the nature of things. They had to include, as much as possible, a clear picture in two dimensions, of the three-dimensional form, otherwise the gods and spirits might not recognize it, and the magic would fail to work.

Science and spirituality would both have you believe that they are mutually exclusive disciplines, but this is an erroneous idea. To paraphrase from Pauley Perrette’s character on NCIS “I believe in magic, prayer and logic equally”. Arthur C. Clarke, who was both a famous science fiction author and inventor of the geosynchronous satellite, gives us “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. And for me, the one thing that I think both science and spiritualism should have in common is that desire to always question the status quo.

Time and space have changed significantly since I was a child. Our understanding of modern physics today embraces concepts that were considered in the realm of science fiction when I was growing up. This is because the more we learn about the nature of the observable physical universe, the more we are forced to alter the accepted viewpoint, and in some cases, to admit an as-yet-unknown nature which is not quantifiable using the current means.

Isaac Newton had to invent calculus in order to express his understanding of the nature of space and time. Modern physicists have expanded on his work, but we may require another watershed like Principia Mathematica or the General and Special Theory of Relativity to leap past our present limits.

Most people work their way through the world without an awareness of even the basics of Newtonian physics, to say nothing of the implications of quantum uncertainty and the potential of multiple universes with alternate timelines. Gravity is a literal fact. It does what it does, and keeps us all from sliding off into space, and that’s a good thing.

Yet the complex interaction of gravitational forces alone that make possible our habitation of this little rock are staggering to ponder. We are all of us pulled toward the center of the Earth. Yet we are also pulled toward the Moon as it slowly circles the earth overhead. Both Earth and Moon are drawn inward toward a massive star we call the Sun. It is only the speed at which we travel around it, and occasional tugs from other planets in orbit, the smaller one’s due to their distance, and the larger ones due to their size, that keeps us from spiraling in and melting.

Our meat suits have evolved to live in this soup of interlocking forces that move the universe on a cosmic scale. The invisible engine of gravity moves the stars in the heavens, and causes them to be born and to die. It whirls the galaxies together, in orbits around great dark objects of such unbelievable size that space is curved toward the infinite, and light itself cannot escape. It is a truly amazing and terrifying cosmos we inhabit.

Before Mr. Newton and the Enlightenment, the operation of this system was bound by the works of Claudius Ptolemy, a researcher and encyclopedist at the library of Alexandria in the first century AD.

His Four Books provides the basis for Western astrology, and his Mathematic Systems was the astronomical text that taught how to plot the movements of the stars. Like Newton, he wrote the math text to explain the apparent motion of the heavens. Unlike his latter day counterpart, though, his interest in that motion was for the use of astrological horoscopy.

Astrology, and most likely the mathematical models necessary to support it, was practiced as a science by the ancient Chaldeans, and probably older civilizations. There are increasing numbers of discoveries that stone-age peoples were observing and possibly recording the passage of time using the positions of celestial objects around the world.

Stonehenge is probably the most famous such site, but there are a number in the Americas, and recently many more have been found in Asia and Africa, so there is some reason to believe that humans marked time and specifically events like the solstices and the equinoxes at a very early point in our development, and that we used similar methods regardless of geography.

We might expect that the reason is simply agricultural. When one is dependent upon the crops, one should probably know when to plant and when to harvest, and a solar observatory is a more accurate means of working out that information than a tally stick or other similar counting mechanism.

Yet these constructions, some of which obviously required a lot of people and sometimes centuries to build, seem a bit over the top for this purpose alone.

Evidence supports that Stonehenge actually began as a wood-henge (and Woodhenge is also a nearby site) that was modified repeatedly over a span of several hundred years. So a simpler, and certainly easier to build version was sufficient. We can speculate that stones were later involved, because they would be more permanent and lower maintenance.

But that only explains the small stone circle, at least as far as practical function is concerned.

To harness the labor and skills necessary to bring the great big stones that make up the final stage, you really have to be looking at more than just keep track of time for the harvest. Recent discoveries at Stonehenge, and at places like Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, suggest that perhaps it was the other way around.

Both sites appear to have been places where large groups of more or less nomadic stone-age tribes would gather at specific times, and have large festivals. Theoretically such festivals included a lot of eating and drinking, and logically might also involve trading, cultural exchange, marriages and betrothals, etc. before the crowd sobered up and went back to their usual ranges.

The desire to support these occasional meetings may have led to increased domestication of both animals and plants, in order to meet the demand for annual or semi-annual feasts.
As we now know these supposedly “primitive” people were gathering at pre-appointed times, we have to consider that they had a fairly good command of both time and space outside of the calendrical functions of the solar sites themselves.

That is, a tribe needed to know how many days (or thereabouts) it would take for them to travel from their usual stomping grounds to the ceremonial center. They then would need to be able to subtract those days from the date of the meeting, say, the Summer Solstice, in order to know when to leave so they could be there on time.

While it’s hardly rocket science, it does mean that at least some members of the tribe both had the necessary information, and could keep track of the passage of days, without the need of a Stonehenge type calendar. While one might argue that the numerous other stone circles and semi-circles around the world were local “clocks” there’s a bit of problem.

Solar calendars like Stonehenge are “set” according to equinoxes and solstices. If your travel time from the local clock, in say, Northern Scotland, to Stonehenge, takes about three months, then you can leave on the equinox and arrive on the solstice and reasonably expect to get back on the next equinox. But, aside from the issues this brings up with planting, harvesting, etc. in a fixed agrarian society, it’s also just not right.

According to internet mapping software, one can walk from Inverness to Stonehenge in around 8 days. Now presuming one is not actually constantly walking, and is possibly also bringing along slower moving livestock, a more reasonable journey is probably about a fortnight. So one would need to know about two to three weeks before the Summer Solstice that they needed to pack up and head south.

On the other hand, we might look at the equinox to solstice ratio as indicative of seasonal migration, where both people and animals left the colder northern climate for a more favorable winter on the Salisbury plain, and returning to the fields in Scotland just about the time the spring grazing was beginning.

So many of the ancient magical dates revolve around the agricultural imperative that it’s impossible to say which came first, the farm or the festival? But if people are migrating to festivals rather than fields, then we have to admit the possibility of early calendar devices being accessible to stone-age peoples without being locations in a landscape.

Tools similar to quadrants are known to have existed in Ancient Mesopotamia. The exact date of their invention is unknown. These devices are designed to work out the position of the stars above the horizon, and thus can be used to calculate both location and time of the day as well as the day of the year.

Prior to the global positioning system, a variation of this technology, the sextant, was used for the same purpose.

In the Middle Ages a very complex version called an astrolabe was probably developed in China, and made it’s way westward along the Silk Road, which the development of the astrolabe made possible. In later times, as the Muslim culture spread out across northern Africa, this amazing device took on more significance in that it could be used to determine the location of Mecca and calculate the proper times to stop for prayer.

Astrolabes, quadrants, and sextants all operate on measuring the angles of the sun or other fixed celestial point, in relation to an horizon. The astrolabe uses a full circle, while a quadrant and sextant use a fourth and a sixth, or 90 and 60 degrees of arc, respectively. The accuracy of these analog devices when used by a skilled technician is comparable to computers and GPS systems. Manned space craft in Earth’s orbit still carry a sextant.

I obviously have a fascination with the mechanics of the planets and stars. In a quantum multiverse, where nothing is ever in the same place at the same time ever, it seems to me difficult to casually dismiss that unique moment into which we are all born as an irrelevance.

As we draw near to, and enter into our birth date, even though it is not the same as it was when were were born, the nearer factors, that gravity of the Earth, Moon, Sun, and planets, swirls similarly around us. All our local planets inhabit the gravity well of the Sun, so it is not surprising that our Solar Return augurs importantly. Our Moon signs, though the Moon is smaller even than the Earth, derive from a much closer relationship with her forces. The meat suits evolved to have about the same amount of water in them as the Earth does on it, so the effects of the Moon on tides cannot easily be dismissed.

Astrology, astronomy, and the human need to quantify time and space are as ancient as our brains. If we limit ourselves to the scientific only, and suggest that the spirit is a quirk of evolutionary mutation, present only between the fertilization of the gamete and the end of respiration, we are still faced with the question of how that consciousness comes to be, and what it’s purpose is, because it simply can’t be explained as an adaptation to environmental survival. Self-awareness might argue somewhat of an advantage. Language and the ability to pass on information, certainly is a powerful survival factor. But the bees have that and they’re not doing so well.

It’s fascinating to think, though, that the bee language, and the information system that affords them an evolutionary advantage, appears to be related to navigating based on the position of the Sun. So our own connection to space and time may be as integral. We may be drawn to the sky because somewhere back in our evolution, we had a built-in orientation to the positions of the celestial objects.

Ignoring that because “astrology is a pseudoscience” is not to our advantage in our journey of self-discovery as a species.

As always, I question everything. I recommend it as a way of living. It can take a lot of time and energy, but you may find it worth the extra effort.

I’ll return next week, after few more days around the Sun.

August 9, 2023August 9, 2023

Light Unchallenged

All Hail the Coming of The Sun King!

Well, not me, thank you. I am a Creature of the Winter Dark, and the exultation of the primary luminary in his sign of Leo is not a comfort here in Texas with another week of 100°+ temps. The Sun is one of my least favorite cards. It’s certainly in the bottom five. I frequently avoid incarnations and avatars of the Sun in various mythologies. Save for it’s placement in my natal chart (only a couple of hours before dipping peacefully below the horizon) I do my best to avoid it. But here we are, and I shall try to assay it as best I can, though I shan’t say it will be without bias. No reading ever is.

sun-rws-tarot — Bit over the top, this one. But that is in keeping with the reverence for the top luminary.

Card XIX The Sun is characterized by a large solar disk, with 12 straight rays (assuming one behind the Roman numeral as logical) and 12 wavy rays. Beneath it in the background is a row of sunflowers planted behind a garden wall. In front of the wall there is a white horse. On his back is a nude child, crowned with a ring of smaller sunflowers and a red feather in the center. The child holds a great red banner.

The imagery here appears to be the more straightforward of almost any Tarot card. The rays can be taken to represent the hours of the day and the wavy rays those of the night (of which the Sun still holds sway). Alternatively, the rays can represent the signs of the Zodiac and the wavy rays the Houses, which are dependent upon the Rising Line. This meridian, most important in astrological calculations, is essentially the horizon at the time of birth. Since this is also a factor of the hour and moment, the Sun may be said to also control where the Houses are laid out. Equal Houses in a perfect system are synonymous with the signs, but because the Sun travels sign to sign over the space of about 30 days, and house to house in a period of twenty-four hours, there is likely to always be some variation. If a latitude driven House system like Placidus is used, then there is even more to take into consideration, but it is the Sun as arbiter of the hour that determines the Ascendant, and the Ascendant that determines the Houses. Since it is the Houses that are used to express good or ill omen of planetary placement and aspect, the Sun’s influence here may be as important, if not more important, than the Sun sign alone.

Sun signs are what most people who look at the daily horoscope are aware of. The Sun, as the biggest brightest and fastest moving object in our skies, has taken the lion’s share of the astrological celebrity. And lion’s share is appropriately given to him, as he is ruler of the Sign of Leo, that brightest and hottest season, following just after the Summer Solstice. The Moon, as his opposite, second largest, and second fastest, was given dominion over neighboring Cancer, preceding the Solstice, and expressed as water. Water as opposite the Sun’s fire makes a more complete analogy.

From these, then, the ancient Chaldees put the remaining five visible “wanderers” in charge of the chart in opposing pairs, starting with Mercury holding Gemini and Virgo, Venus with Taurus and Libra, Mars ruling the notorious Aries and Scorpio, Jupiter the burgeoning Pisces and Sagittarius, and finally old dark Saturn having sway over the cold winter signs of Capricorn and Aquarius. Comparatively recent discoveries of additional planets have necessitated given them rulership of signs in ways that seem most suitable, so the dark deep waters of Scorpio have been assigned to Pluto surrounded by his river Styx, Neptune rules the seas that Pisces swims in, and dreaming Uranus presides over Aquarian skies.

It is however the annual solar visit into each sign that gave us that popular Seventies singles scene question: “Hey, baby, what’s your sign?”. The Sun being biggest and brightest and fastest was given greatest influence in determining which characteristics would most mark an individual’s personality, or at least, their Leo-ness. The big and bold and egocentric and externalized aspects of ourselves are, like the bright Sun, and the charging Lion, what we see in ourselves and in others. The Moon, by contrast, governing the nightly tides, is equated to our tendency for emotional passions, thus our Moon Sign, is more frequently associated with our subconscious selves. Rounding out the top three is the Rising Sign, which is that sign where the Ascendant is placed, the sign on our “dawn” horizon at the hour of our birth. This is influential, in that it defines the First House, and the First House is the house of our ego, our self-image, and often our selfishness. Awareness of Sun, Moon, and Rising is becoming more common in the casual astrology follower these days, and are at least helpful if one doesn’t grasp the complex webs of planets, houses, aspects, rulerships, exaltations, detriments, falls, decans, parts, etc, that go into a full chart workup.

But what does all this astrology have to do with the Tarot card? Well, again, my approach to the Sun as a card is somewhat ambivalent. I think it’s a showy one-note card that just comes in bringing cheery good fortune and positive vibes and is very much often read like the Sun sign in a natal chart. That is, much more importance is given to its appearance than to the rest of the chart, or the rest of the Tarot spread itself.

sun-tarot-Marseille — This sample from the Tarot of Marseilles shows a French preference for two children playing in the sunlight. This variation is not unique, though there are a number of interpretations to it’s meaning. Some say it represents a young couple – or marriage – one of the potential inferences of this card. Alternatively the pair are the offspring of a successful domestic life, which is by extension the same thing. Others may see them as the denizens of the Tower, reborn in the full light of the New Dawn. I can find some other potential sources for them, though perhaps not so likely ones. Levi acknowledges them, as does Waite, but both elect for the version with a single child, and Waite goes further to prefer the single child on the spotless white horse. Through this we may be meant to associate the radiant Sun with the Christ Child.

The “arrival of Baby New Year” artwork smacks of the Baroque style of France’s Sun King Louis XIV. Now don’t get me wrong. I love Baroque art, but I am also conscious of the egotism involved. This is, after all, the man who, when told his plans for the palace at Versailles would bankrupt the state, replied “L’etat c’est moi.” – “I am the state.” While his great-great-great-grandson would lose it all (including his head) late, Louis XIV influence on the world and history was certainly worthy of the title he bestowed upon himself. Part of his propaganda was indulging a neo-pagan cult of Apollo, with him as the dutifully Catholic, but also fully mythical embodiment of the solar deity. The art and decoration of his palaces are resplendent with scenes of Greek myth, frequently erotic (and even pornographic) depictions of the Sun- centered sagas.

Which is why it’s curious to find that on the quintessential French Tarot decks, there are two children on this card. Most obviously when we find two of anything we expect an allusion to Gemini. Yet Gemini and the Sun are hardly related, as we’ve already expressed. The Sun rules Leo, little Mercury is charged with authority over Gemini. So who are these two, who often show up as cherubs in the iconography of other decks? There are perhaps a couple of candidates.

Let’s go with a French intrigue first. During the reign of the Sun King, a warrant was issued for one Eustache Dauger. Dauger was held in prison for the rest of his life, dying in the infamous Bastille. In this time he was the responsibility of a single jailer. This unusual arrangement has lead to much speculation, and expounded upon by the misreporting by the salacious minded Voltaire, that Dauger had been sentenced to wear an iron mask, forever obscuring his identity. It was also Voltaire who suggested that this person was an older bastard son of the previous king, and thus a longshot contender for the throne. Alexander Dumas, who penned The Man in the Iron Mask based on Dauger, makes him a moments older legitimate twin, whose existence must be kept secret by the usurper Louis. So perhaps these two children are a bit of naughty French parody that came at a later time (since during the reign of Louis XIV and indeed his successors, such a comment would send one to the Bastille or the guillotine.).

Another possible origin for the two children is an artistic theme quite common in Renaissance and later art associating the infant John the Baptist and the Christ Child. John, as the predecessor and prophet of Jesus, is a significant figure in the Gospels. John was an older cousin, according to the lore. When he was executed by Herod for preaching against him and the Roman occupation, Jesus moved up in prominence. It was fashionable in many works of religious art to show the two children together, often in the company of their mothers. Leonardo painted at least two such works, and the dual children on the Marseilles card always get me thinking of them.

The-Virgin-of-the-Rocks — Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks. This is the version that is in the National Gallery in London. There’s another one in the Louvre that is somewhat different. It is generally acknowledged that this version may have been finished by apprentices, or later altered. In the Louvre version, the angel is pointing toward the Christ Child, here signified by the cross on his shoulder. The other infant is John the Baptist, his cousin and predecessor. The pointed finger as a symbol of the presence of the Divine is a common feature in Leonardo’s works. The French version is missing the cross, and the halos on the children, and the “modesty cloth” on the Christ Child. These alterations to the London version suggest a later “correction” by the church rather than a contemporary alteration to the painting by Leonardo’s helpers. The two children may be a possible source for the dual infants in some versions of the Sun Tarot.

The single child on the white horse is almost certainly a metaphor for the Christ, with his far too large red banner symbolizing the blood sacrifice that is reputed to save all of humanity. Confuting the Sun and the Son was useful in converting early pagans, and adopting some of the heliocal energies and attributions with the growing Christian cult. It’s important to remember that early Roman versions of Christ were not the bearded dark man we tend to view as Jesus today. Roman Jesus was Roman, often depicted as the Shepherd, clean-shaven, and light-haired or sometimes blonde. The infant in the Sun card is much more a remnant of that tradition, which is quasi-pagan, than of the later Gothic faith. This may be why I tend to bridle at the imagery of this card, which -at least artistically- doesn’t fit well with the style of the rest of the deck. I have no doubt that it was executed by Smith. Her definitive squiggle is buried down in the stones of the wall on the right. But it’s depiction is anachronistic in an otherwise congruous deck. It looks more like a Tiffany window than a Gothic icon. To me it just seems all too showy.

That is the nature of the Sun though. In hottest August, when all the summer’s growth has ripened and the true bounty of the earth has burst forth, we are perhaps able to appreciate this boisterous celebrant trump. If we are able to divorce it from the rather ham-handed Christian symbolism, and look at it rather as a pagan Sun that is part of the pagan celestial triad of Star-Moon-Sun, then it’s munificence and fertility might be felt as meant, and the traditional associations of fruition allowed to radiate out into the cards of the surrounding reading.

Two cards remain in the Major Arcana, styled XX-Judgement (sic) and XXI, The World. For many these last two complete the Tarot Journey begun with our ambling Fool about to walk off the cliff. Within them are the bones of their ancestors, and both artistically and oracularly they present a number of problems for the modern non-Christian reader. But I hope I am able to provide some incite into how I have worked around these shortcomings when using the traditional Rider-Waite-Smith deck.

As for this week’s trump, my best effort was to take it as astrologically as possible, because again, I just don’t like it.

We all have our favorites, and our non-favorites. We must be aware how that colors the story we tell to the client, or to ourselves, when either of those come up in the reading.

Until next week, thank you for your continued interest.

August 2, 2023August 2, 2023

Wolf and Hound

I went looking for a good Shakespearean quote to open this week’s article. He has quite a few that are moon-centric, but none of them really fit with the theme of the Tarot, or my take on this card, so I suppose I shall forego the poesy in favor of just getting to it. But the Moon is oftime mistress of our inner tides, so it seems a shame not to wax a bit poetic.

This will post just after the Full Moon in Aquarius. I didn’t plan it that way, though I do have a nifty app for the moon phases so I guess I could have. Next week the Sun will post just after the apex of the Lion’s gate, so it might seem that I am far more astrologically savvy than I really am. Truth be told, I wanted to start with the Fool nearest to April Fool’s Day, and this is the way they all laid out. If there’s a correspondence to it, well, I’ve already covered that apparent coincidences may not be coincidences, but sometimes a cigar….

moon-rws-tarot — Pamela Smith’s Moon card is hardly different from the Marseilles version that was extant since the Renaissance. I am forced to wonder if this was a concession to deadlines.

Without further ado, then, shall we begin our discussion of the XVIII Card- The Moon. This second of the “celestial” cards is marked by a large disk, with a number of large rays, and an equal number of small rays. Assuming that the position of the Roman numeral overlays the top rays, we have a total of sixteen of each. Within the disk is a faced crescent, and I am inclined to say this is a female face. Outside of Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Moon has almost exclusively been cast as feminine (and we have more of that gender baggage to deal with here). Below the disk are the little shapes that are identified as flame in the Tower card, so I am comfortable regarding them as flames here. Flanking the image are two flat topped towers with a single high window. Behind them, in the distance, are mountains with a single winding road going over them. The road rises in the foreground of the card, from the edge of the water. To the left side of this road or path is a baying hound. On the right is a howling wolf. In the center appearing to be about to walk onto the path is a lobster. At the water’s edge are a variety of shapes which may be meant as aquatic plants, stones, or possibly mushrooms.

We have seen this scene before. In the Death card (XIII) we can clearly see these towers at the far right of the horse’s head, atop the waterfall. The luminous body between them is most likely, in that card, meant to represent the setting sun, so we can interpolate that we are looking west into the Moon card, and that the Moon herself is lowering.

As in the Temperance card at XIV we see a winding path coming from mountains on the left, we may also infer that we are looking at the mountains from the Eastern side, and so behind the environs of the Moon card, or rather on the opposite side of the mountains where the path goes. So in a sense, this card fits between Death and Temperance, between the transformation and the alchemy. It is a gateway, a passage, and not a place in itself. This is in keeping with the constantly changing state of the Moon itself. From Full to New to Full, the lunar cycle never stands still. The sun rises and sets each day, but it is always that same round bright disk. The journey may be cyclic but the traveler is unchanged.

But the Moon alters her face with each day, as she passes through each sign of the Zodiac in rapid fashion, arising to her greatest prominence in her opposition to the sign that the sun occupies. She is moody and mysterious. She makes the tides to ebb and flow, and by popular account, causes our human tides to also run, giving rise to madness. The terms lunacy and lunatic are derived specifically from lunar, and indicate a most ancient belief that our local satellite is responsible for the ungoverned passions.

This association is highlighted by the howling wolf. The howling of the pack when it raced through the brightly lit night in pursuit of prey was terrifying to our ancestors. The wolf was a real threat to human life in many parts of Europe and American up into the late 19th Century, before hunting dropped the wild populations. But before that, the threat of the wolf, likely combined with the incidence of rabies in survivors of wolf attacks, gave rise to the legend of the werewolf. Werewolves and lunatics were not easily separated in the minds of earlier people. Violent insanity, which could have many causes, would certainly have been terrifying, and mental illness was poorly understood (some would say it still is). When we are faced even today with serial killers and cannibals whose motivations defy any reasonable or logical pattern, it’s easy to see how less educated populations, living in remote isolation, might attribute such horrors to “moon sickness”.

moon-deviantmoon-tarot — I really couldn’t have the moon article without using the Moon card from the Deviant Moon deck. These dreamlike impressions of a dark Venetian Carnavale seem tailor made to express the subconsciousness associated with this card. The artist has here dispensed with many of the cards typical hallmarks. Gone is the crescent, the hound and wolf, the crustacean, and the water and towers are merely suggested. But instead, we see a full and stern-faced Moon pulling puppet strings on a pair or royals or nobles. This card is almost more like the Devil with his chains around the symbolic pair representative of the governance by passions. But that is also inherent in the message of the Moon card. Our emotions and moods can drive us to distraction.

There are less horrible versions of “moon madness” of course. The phrases “mooning over” someone, or being “moon-eyed” over a desired suitor are examples of this more benevolent version of our belief in the lunar influence over our rational mind. Thus the Moon has come to symbolize our unconscious mind, the deep dark waters of our dreamlands, which stirs both the untamed beast, and his gentler, more domesticated cousin, the humble hound. The Moon governs the passions, whether they be a lust for the carnal or the martial . Since very often our drive for romance and intimacy are much interlaced with envy, jealously, and territorialism, the two are inextricably linked.

Sitting between that sunset of Death and the Resurrection of Temperance, The Moon gives us access to Hamlet’s undiscovered country. It is within sleep, that death-like state that remains a mystery, that we walk in the world of the Moon card. Are the experiences of our dreams the illusions of reality, foisted upon us by this fickle perpetually shifting orb? Or is that landscape a real place, visited again and again, as a rehearsal for the journey beyond this gateway?

It is doubtless a gateway. The two flanking towers in Smith’s version are reminiscent of the defensive architecture of a Medieval feuding Italian town. These structures we meant to survey the surrounding streets to spot an approaching gang, and to provide an easily defensible refuge for the family who built it. One wonders then, what they may be looking for upon the path between them?

moon-thoth-tarot — The Moon from the Book of Thoth by Aleister Crowley, and artistically executed by Lady Frieda Harris. Like many of the Thoth cards, the images are formed by a synthesis of shapes whose negative spaces describe objects, rather than defining them linearly as is traditional. This is due in part to trends in art at the time, but also due to trends in metaphysical and physical theory. The various wave shapes here are, to my thinking, inspired by the idea of the waveform of light, and early quantum theory. Things are because we see them to be. If we don’t see them, then they are not. This is something quantum mechanics calls the collapse of the waveform, and ties into things like the uncertainty principal and the famous example of Schroedinger’s cat. Because the energy of the universe sometimes acts as a wave and sometimes as a particle, it really depends on how we are perceiving it. It is a wave, until it becomes a fixed thing in space time, at which point it behaves as a particle. This point is our observation of the event itself.

This highlights one of the characteristics of the Moon card, that it is a symbol of illusion. It is about what things appear to be rather than what they are. Witness that the beetle (which is closer to the scarab than the lobster or crab) holds a solar disk, opposite to the Moon which occupies the top of the card. The Moon appears to be the dominant source of light here, but that is because it is above the horizon. It is really only the reflection of the Sun’s light, which here has not risen yet. It is the unfortunate connection of this “lesser light” with the supposed “femininity” of the Moon that gives us the troubling gender bias inherent in much occult practice. It is not a lesser light, it is the light formed by opposite, just as the pairs in other parts o the deck must be seen as opposites but equals. The Moon is the mirror of the Sun. Therefore it reflects back the Sun in equal measure in it’s realm of influence. But because the Moons mirror is not always facing directly toward our little world, that influence is sometimes diminished.

It is not the lobster, which, by the way, is a bad Medieval rendering of a crab. The crab and lobster or crayfish interchangeably represent the Zodiac sign of Cancer, which is ruled by the Moon. The Sun rules the adjacent sign of Leo, although it is the transit of the Sun into Cancer that marks the Summer Solstice, and thus it’s greatest dominance. The Solstice is the point where the Sun appears to rise and set furthest north of the equator, due to the tilt of our planet’s axis and it’s wobble as we go about our orbit. This is thus named the Tropic of Cancer, and lies about 23.5 north latitude. From the first degree of the sign of Cancer, the planet starts to wobble back in the other direction, resulting in the Sun appearing to rise and set further and further south, until the first degree of the sign of Capricorn, which is recorded as Yule in the Wiccan Wheel of the Year.

I personally don’t think that Cancer is a lobster or a crab, originally. I think it’s a scarab beetle, and representing the Egyptian deity Khepera, The scarab was seen early on as a sign of resurrection, because of it’s curious habit of making balls of animal dung, to lay it’s eggs in. The resulting larvae were thought to miraculously appear in the balls, and thus the scarab’s process of rolling the ball became symbolic for the path of both sun and moon.

Egyptian religion is most likely a synthesis of various local pre-historic beliefs. Like the Greek myths that amalgamated gods introduced by trade, migrations, and conquest, there were multiple versions of why things happened in the universe. So the movement of the sun and moon was boats on a celestial Nile, orbs being pushed by beetles, and the eyes of a giant hawk (or hawks). These were all perfectly compatible to the Ancient Egyptians, because, the gods could be and do anything they wanted. And in a particular case, or for a particular temple, or holiday, or magic spell, one explanation might work better than another.

Crowley in his Book of Thoth makes the towers of the Moon card into the ceremonial gateway to a sacred district. In place of the hound and wolf he has given us two jackals, who most would assume to be Anubis, but to initiates are Anubis and Wapuet. Anubis guards the cemetery, the west bank of the Nile. Wapuet is called the Opener of the Way, and is probably a counterpart of the eastern shore. It’s a fair argument that these distinct beings were possibly personifications of the sunrise and the sunset, and that, by extension over the centuries, came to be metaphors for life and death. Since “Opener of the Way” sometimes occurs with a figure that is distinctly Anubis, and is involved in various rituals of the Book of the Dead, it’s also likely that over time the two beings became confounded, even to the educated priesthood. If they represent dawn and dusk, however, their position on either pylon placing the moon in center is appropriate.

Lady Frieda in designing the Thoth Moon card also gives us a beetle instead of a lobster, though it is of a rather different variety that the scarab. I can only surmise that it was a design consideration, or a miscommunication. The history of this deck is rife with spats between the author and the artist, going up to and following Crowley’s death and the subsequent publication of the cards. In any case, the arthropod in the Moon card is most definitely the astrological symbol of Cancer. and significator of the Moon as ruler of that sign. It ties also then to Water, and the other lunar affiliations. Cancer and water are both deeply interconnected with our emotional life, our moods, and our passions. This is potential one of the most astrological of the Major Arcana for this reason.

moon-legacy-of-the-divine-tarot — The Moon card from the Legacy of the Divine Tarot deck by Ciro Marchetti. This rendition, like many of the cards in the deck is an imaginative and insightful expression of the traditional symbolic language. Here the crab of Cancer is more fully realized. Water is clearly present and also noted by the traditional elemental glyph. Crowley’s jackals have been supplanted by greyhounds, a perhaps not too distant cousin. That they are related is expressed by the golden chain between them, holding the more modern lunar triglyph.

The moon is here also personified thrice. In the middle is a nude woman, reminiscent of the figure of the star. But on either side is a statue of the god Thoth. Thoth is one incarnation of the Egyptian moon god (Khons, or Khonsu is another, and there is a version where the moon is the left eye of Ra, or Horus. It’s complicated). One might argue that this is a priestess, or witch, worshipping the moon, rather than the Moon itself. That is precisely why Tarot gives us so much opportunity for expansion of the intuition. It can be all things we see, or none of them. Like the quantum wave, it is what we perceive it, and when we don’t perceive it, it isn’t.

The “flames” that come down from the Moon are a curiosity. They are a remnant of the earlier versions of the card using this symbol as metaphor for energy, or “Moon power” in the same way that the fire dropping in the Tower represents the power of the lighting bolt, and not the actual fire that is destroying the building. In the Marseilles cards, these are both represented as multi-color dots, so when Smith assayed the task of re-interpreting the cards to Waite’s instruction, the energy flows became flames, because in the early samples the same artistic convention was used. Of the Major Arcana, this only occurs here and on the Tower. In the Minor Arcana, we can find these “flames” about the hilt of the sword on the Ace of Swords, and we can find the same shapes, albeit painted blue, in the air around the Ace of Cups. In all cases we are meant to understand these as energies or emanances that come forth from a powerful dynamic source. They are the invisible energies of that source, the secret rays, that impact and alter, but are perhaps not observed save by their effect.

As I mentioned at the beginning, we are in and approaching the apex of what is called the Lion’s Gate portal by many practicioners. This is marked by the rising of the star Sirius above the horizon just prior to sunrise, and event which occurs while the Sun is in the sign of Leo. It begins a few days after the Sun departs Cancer, and a few days after the Sun reaches the midpoint of Leo. On August 8, (8/8) the sun is a the 15th degree of Leo, or about halfway. So all these layered coincidences are seen by astrologers to be significant.

Yet it is the ancient importance of this occurrence that probably is most interesting, and that is that rising of Sirius was what the Egyptians used to predict the annual Nile flood, from which the entire ceremonial, economic, and social cycle of the kingdom depended. And it is the Moon here, taking us back to Egypt and the sign of water, that links into that exaltation of the Sun next week, just before the article on the Sun card is posted.

I hope you’ll join me for that. We are now but three cards from the end of the Major Arcana.

Thank you for your continued interest.

July 26, 2023July 26, 2023

Seven Sisters Light

Starlight
Star Bright
First Star
I see tonight
Wish I may
Wish I might
Have the wish
I wish tonight.
Traditional

This old rhyming spell came to my dream soaked brain in the wee hours this morning as I started thinking about my approach to this week’s card. While the interwebs call it a “19th Century American nursery rhyme” it is undoubtedly a rhyming spell, as many nursery rhymes are. It may as easily be phrased “O, Great Inanna, I beseech thee grant me this boon!”, because that is essentially what it says. It is calling upon the Evening Star to grant a wish, and the Evening Star is Venus, whom the Sumerians called Inanna. Venus is her Roman name, but among others she goes by Aphrodite, Ishtar, Astarte, and possibly even Freya. Venus is both the Evening Star and the Morning Star, depending on the time of the year. She is that “first star I see tonight” in the winter months in the Northern Hemisphere, where the ancients proclaimed her “The Queen of Heaven”. Inanna was part of a triumvirate of sky deities for the Sumerians, which are frequently represented together on various cylinder seals and other relics. They are the Sun, the Moon, and the Star, which are not perhaps entirely coincidentally the “celestial” cards we find as we approach the end of the Major Arcana.

The imagery of Card XVII – The Star poses several conundrums to the seeker of it’s origins. My various interpretations here are derived largely from my own speculation and not the traditional meanings. The internet offers a number of readings of these same symbols which, to my mind, are equally speculative, and potentially easily dismissed.

star-rws-tarot — The enigma of the Star.

The card shows a naked woman kneeling next to pool or inlet. Her right foot rests on the surface of the water. Her left leg is bent beneath her and rests on the land. She has a pitcher in each hand from which she pours water. From the right, the water is poured into the pool. From the left the water is poured onto the ground, where it runs away in five rivulets, one of which appears to touch the edge of the pool. There are seventeen small budding plants in the landscape (ten around the perimeter of the pool, and another seven clustered behind her left foot); the same as the numeral assigned to this trump. A small hill arises just behind her left arm, on which grows a small tree. On the tree sets a red bird. There is a mountain range in the far distance. In the blue sky behind her are seven small white stars, surrounding a large yellow central star. All the stars have eight points.

The parallels between this card and XIV – Temperance have not been lost on generations of Tarot readers and scholars. Rachel Pollack in her Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, says that the energies of Temperance are those released by the transformative experience of the preceding Death card, and are still structured and managed. With the Star, the more complete destruction present in the Tower leads to a more complete, untamed, and freely expressed energy. This, she says, can be seen by the need of Temperance to remain closed, and to control the flow of the water between the vessels. The Star, in her natural state, pours the water out freely, aware now that there is an infinite source.

I don’t fully agree with those interpretations, but I can see them as avenues to explore when a more obvious read is not forthcoming. It does get me thinking about the combinations of The Hanged Man – Death – Temperance and The Devil – The Tower – The Star in terms of how those sequences represent the process of overcoming a restrictive situation. Both the Hanged Man and the Devil signal imprisonment, a stifling, or enslavement to the wrong choices. Death and the Tower represent catastrophic events, sea changes in our lives or at very least our ways of thinking. And then Temperance and the Star can symbolize the resulting actions that are possible following those changes.

But that wasn’t my first intention when I went to Pollack. I was looking for a possible meaning for the seven stars.

Seven is a sacred number. Well, all numbers can be sacred depending on context, but “Lucky 7” is a frequently recurring motif in many cultures. We have sevens all around. We have seven days in a week. While the names in English derive from Norse Gods, the equivalent Latin precedents (that you run across in French and some of the other Romance tongues) refer to the ancient Chaldean “planets” that figure in astrology. These are, the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

Prior to the advent of the optical telescope during the Renaissance, these bodies were the ones that could be seen “wandering” in the night skies over ancient Mesopotamia. While it’s possible that maybe, on very clear nights with no light pollution at all, the two larger gas giants of Uranus and Neptune might be visible, their extremely long periods probably prevented them from being recognized as moving objects against the background stars.

Modern astrology recognized (and retroactively connects) Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, along with a number of dwarfs, asteroids, and other bodies in calculating natal charts and casting horoscopes. But up to the Middle Ages, seven was the limit, and so seven became an important number.

plaiedes and crab nebula — A deep space image from NASA’s Hubble Telescope showing the Crab Nebula at left of the Plaiedes Star Cluster. The nebula is the remnant of the 1054 supernova that might have inspired a design similar to what we find later on the Star card. Although the stellar event was only visible for a couple of years, it was certainly unusual, and given a public mindset inclined to omens and portents, there is little doubt that at the time it would have been seen as a harbinger of some sort.

Now, the easiest thing to do here would be to say that the seven stars of the Star card represent the seven planets. It’s neat, ties us back to ancient astrology and tradition and puts us into a stream of Medieval thinking that seems to influence much of the early Tarot imagery.

But the problem then is to determine exactly what the big star in the middle is supposed to be. Why is it so special that it gets it’s own card? It can’t be the Sun, since the sun is just another Chaldean planet, and like the Moon get’s its own trump. So I went back to the old texts and find that The Sun, the Moon, and Venus are all revered in ancient Sumeria because they all were the brightest objects visible in the sky, If you’ve ever been lucky enough to see Venus rising before the dawn or just after sunset, you know this planet deserves their epithet of “Queen of Heaven”.

But of course, Venus is another planet, and so having it brightly at center of seven other possible planets just doesn’t work. If the smaller stars are supposed to be the ancient astrological planets, then the big one has to be something other than Venus. It has to be an exceptional phenomenon.

Now if we go looking about in the Medieval mind, there’s a ready made solution for that, and it’s the Star of Bethlehem. This is the great star that supposedly appeared over the birthplace of Jesus and foretold his coming to the Wise Men, and shown for several days and nights as a beacon to all who would come see the Christ Child.

Well, fair story, and considering the established Judeo-Christian bent that we know Waite put on the deck, it’s not too far-fetched to consider. But I tend to find it a bit dissatisfying with the naked water bearer, and the connection Star-Moon-Sun here in the trumps. I think these “celestial” cards are just that, aimed at expressing an astrological metaphor, possibly tied to the idea of cosmic order or cosmic control by a divine being. And I am looking at them in the context of their original use as playing cards, not any later assigned esoteric value. From a purely decorative sense, I don’t think we can look at this as the Star of Bethlehem, or as expressing any Chaldean oracle,

Melishipak-stella — Another possible candidate for the Star. This stella in the Louvre shows the ancient King Melishipak presenting his daughter to a goddess. Above are the three primary stellar deities, the Sun, the Moon, and the Morning or Evening Star, which we know today is Venus. The ancient astrologers would certainly have known this was also Venus, but attached a great significance to it’s brightness in comparison to all the other “wanderers” they observed in the heavens. The eight points are almost identical to the octagram on the Star card, but as we often see elsewhere, they show two sets of four rays, with one apparently on top of the other. This symbolism can perhaps also be connected to the four corners of the year, the two solstices and the two equinoxes, with the subordinate rays signifying the cross quarter days. The dates on the modern Wiccan “Wheel of the Year” derive from ancient festivals, and it is possible that some meaning was attached to this by the Mesopotamian astrologers as well.

But there’s another very interesting possibility. In the year 1054, there was a supernova in Taurus in the region of the Plaiedes star cluster. It is supposed to have been bright enough to be observed in the daytime, and was visible for approximately two years.

One of the names give to the Plaiedes is the Seven Sisters. It’s seven brightest stars can be seen with the naked eye, absent modern light pollution, and a supernova visible in the daytime would certainly be spectacular at night. 1054 was just after the First Millennium. Then, as now, there was a lot of apocalyptic thinking, interpreting of prophecies, political and social unrest, and general fear in the popular imagination. Then – BOOM – a great bright star appears in the sky – much as the legendary Star of Bethlehem had been described. Surely this was a port of the Second Coming.

Four hundred or five hundred years on, the event would most likely have been relegated to a notation in ancient chronicles that probably were not read by the common person. Yet the impact of such an event might have led to an image of a bright giant star, in the vicinity of seven smaller stars, becoming something of a motif. Seven, after all was a lucky number. And that motif might then have been copied down into the early Tarocchi trumps without any realization of it’s origin.

star-journey-egypt-tarot — The Journey Into Egypt Tarot gives us an alternative star cluster to site against. Here the seven brightest stars of Orion serve as marker to the rising of Sirius, which foretold in elder times the coming of the Nile flood. This annual event, and the ability to prepare for it, insured continuation of the stability of Egyptian culture. As another expression of Ma’at or Cosmic Order, the cycle is recorded by Tehuti, here symbolized in his form as the Ibis. A small red ibis may be the bird in the tree of Pamela Smith’s Star card, or it may be a more fanciful representation of the Phoenix, another symbol of rebirth following the cataclysm of the Tower.

Or not, of course. This is the issue when working with symbolic oracles. Do they mean what they appear to mean, or are they a stand-in for something else?

One online definition says the seven stars represent the seven chakras. While knowledge of the ideas of chakras had certainly made it to Victorian England via the Raj, and these concepts were probably known to Waite and Smith when composing the cards, it doesn’t adequately address the presence of the seven stars surrounding the larger central one that we see on earlier decks like the Marseilles, which certainly were composed without that awareness. As moderns we have the opportunity to see them as chakric symbols, and like the potential reading of the Star as emblem of Inanna and her descendant goddesses, seek meanings that go beyond those revealed in Waite, and other sources.

As reading is an intuitive, rather than extuitive process, it is our impressions of the images, and how our own minds associate them, that gives rise to the wide range of possible outcomes. And in the case of my sometimes overthinking brain, seeing significances in number, pattern, shape, etc. – even if unintended by the creator of the image – sends me in search of possible meanings. These deep rabbit holes span the interwebs and my own library of occult, history, mythology, and science texts. The amalgam of these researches lay in my subconscious as well as unconscious mind, so when a given card – say The Star, turns up in my reading, the triggers will pull at that special red thread, and drop all these possible options.

That has been the purpose of this exercise, to explore how my mind, after 50 years of working with the cards, and numerous decks, and a number of books (good and bad) on the subject, has arrived at what meaning I see when a card pops up. I hope that you continue to find value in these explorations, and that it leads you to “go off book” and seek your own answers. All are equally valid as they represent our subconscious arising in reaction to the visual image.

When next I write, we will see that next of the Chaldean luminaries, the Moon. As a natural contrary and creature of the night, I hold great respect and great affection for our lunar neighbor. As such, my take on the meanings and significance of this card are likely to vary greatly from the usual, but again, that is the whole point.

I hope you will join me next week and thank you for your continued attention.

April 26, 2023April 26, 2023

Aries Risen

As last week was a card I associate with Venus, it is logical that this week we explore a card that is certainly the embodiment of Mars. The Emperor, as nominally the mate of the Empress, should occupy the role traditionally ascribed in the Venus-Mars relationship. Again we are tied to antiquated gender dynamics, but again, we are free to turn them on their head, or ignore them completely, if we choose. But because the cards carry this baggage, it is instructive to remember it may be used as tool to interpreting them in context.

The card as imagined by Pamela Colman Smith shows us an armored bearded man sitting on a carved stone throne. The throne and his mantle are decorated with ram’s heads, connecting us to the symbol for Aries, who is the Greek Mars. In his right hand he holds a scepter that is similar to the Venus symbol (we’ll return to this later) and in his left an orb. These traditional Medieval symbols of royal power are affirmed by the Imperial crown he wears. His garb is red. The sky behind him, unique in the entire Tarot deck, is a fiery orange. The landscape is a sere mountainous desert, with only the hint of a stream running through at the base of those mountains. Nothing grows along it’s banks, indicating that the land itself is barren.

Emperor_RWS_Tarot — In this card we find a full on commitment to a kind of Medieval Gothic iconography that dominates the rest of the deck. It’s a reductive style, almost architectural in many ways, particularly when used for the Trumps of the deck, who have little motion in them. Yet it gives us an insight into the mindset of the person who commissioned them, if not the artist.

The figure of the Emperor is confrontational. His throne echoes the perch of the Priestess between the two columns. Rather than promising a gateway, he seems determined to block our path and require us to acknowledge him. His expression, might at best be considered dour, but often it seems as angry as the red sky behind him. He seems frozen in this pose, a perfect rendition of a Gothic decoration, down to the clunky arrangement of his armored feet. He might as well be a funeral brass as a person.

As the Empress is the mirrored manifestation of the Magician’s desire for structure and form, the Emperor offers a dry rigidity to the fluid mysteries of the Priestess. She is the Balance between Opposites, the bridge to contemplation of the depths of Sea of Darkness. He is the Monolith that marks the border to the Wasteland. Both of these figures lie between us and extremes that without mediation (and meditation) would destroy us utterly. So even though the Emperor appears to offer nothing but rage and rigidity, we can still be instructed here.

I don’t care for this card much myself, because it always feels like woe and misery. Most of the traditional readings of the card make it almost a symbol of hypermasculinity. In an age where “hexing the patriarchy” is in vogue, it’s easy to regard this card as representative of the tired old men too long in charge of things. That’s a perfectly fair interpretation, and one frequently associated with the Emperor reversed in earlier times. I do feel it presages conflict, if not outright war. It is so Aries/Mars intensive as to be emblematic for toxic masculinity.

We could easily replace his Medieval accoutrements with a beer and a hotdog, and he’d look at home cheering on his favorite sports team. He strikes me as an armchair quarterback, or the armchair general, sending out other people to die on his behalf. This would have been the role of the Emperor in elder days. It is believed that the card character was meant to be Charlemagne, who certainly was responsible for significant bloodshed on his way to becoming “Charles the Great”.

The Emperor is an autocrat. He is a dictator. This we can see from the great stone chair he sits upon. It is designed to be unchangeable with the ages. It is a monument to the war gods. Even though he garbs himself in the royal robe, underneath he still wears his armor. This may indicate subterfuge and hidden aggression when it turns up in a reading. Certainly the presence of this card adds a layer of severity or restrictiveness to the meanings of the cards around it.

Emperor-Klimt_Tarot — I went perusing my decks to find alternative views of the Emperor that still carried enough of the vocabulary of images without being a direct copy. This one in the Golden Tarot of Gustav Klimt offers a perhaps more human version of the figure, though it potentially seems that way when juxtaposed against the abstract patterns around it. This, of course, was a hallmark of Klimt’s art, and I think that the artist A. A. Atanassov has captured it very well. I have seen a number of “artist-style” decks deriving from the works of popular masters, but this is the only one I have ever purchased, as it comes closest to the proper homage and undertsanding of Klimt’s work, and also of the Tarot itself. Both elements are necessary for a successful variant deck.

The mountains and the desert are gone, replace by abstract borders that might suggest windblown wastes. The triangles of the Emperor’s kilt against the orange background echo those mountains against the fiery sky. While the figure no longer stares straight at us, there is still a suggestion that he is blocking a doorway. The curious orb design is mirrored on the Empress card of this deck, and essentially uses the human form as a stand-in for a cross or crucifix.

There is guilding on the card that does not reproduce in the scan. It adds a glimmer to all the cards in the deck, and makes them more visually interesting. Klimt used gold leaf on many of his paintings and then painted over it, mimicking the methods of a Medieval illuminator.

In the role of rigidity or restriction, there is perhaps another message to be found. It is this card which firmly declares that the style inspiring Smith with this deck is that of the Gothic or Medieval manuscript. The figures, to this point, might be construed as coming out a more romantic interpretation of that period, similar to that pursued by the Pre-Raphaelites. Certainly there is something of a romantic air about them, but that they are truly Medieval comes out strongly in this fifth card. And it is that Medievalism that we must consider in looking at the iconography of many of the coming cards. It is that period which precedes the Reformation, with a single Christian church dominant, that informs much of the imagery in the rest of the Major Arcana. And that itself is ironic, in that the invention of the cards seems to come from a secular humanist Renaissance.

It is thus a conundrum, if not a contradiction, as to why Smith and Waite chose to make some many of the cards even more Christian than they were traditionally. And at the same time, they plant classical and oriental paganism inside them. It’s possible that Smith, working from a simple brief, let her imagination roam, once the general style was established. Waite clearly was influenced by Levi and the Golden Dawn, and these sources are closet Christian in many aspects, or at best quasi-mystic Judeo-Christian. The dichotomy between maintaining that link to a Kabbalist, Gnostic, or esoteric Christianity, while at the same time trying to divorce from it’s symbols, is why many of the crosses are not crucifixes, and have been altered, to push back against an orthodox Christian theme.

Let us return to the example of the Emperor’s scepter. A scepter is an ancient symbol of royal authority. It is essentially a stylized stand in for the mace or war-club of the old tribal chieftains. As the “rod of rulership” it is metaphor for the potentates ability to physically punish those who disobey him. In Roman iconography this is part of the fasces, an axe – representing the right of the state to execute its enemies, tied inside a bundle of rods – representing the right of the state to beat transgressors. It evolves into the royal scepter as Rome evolves in the Holy Roman Empire. In the Visconti Sforza deck the Emperor carries a simple golden rod, much like that born by the Magician, and in his other hand the Orb.
In the Marseilles decks that intercede between that and the modern Tarot, the orb and scepter are combined (as they are in many post-Renaissance regalia) exemplified by a rod with an orb, jewel, or other more or less round object on top. These are sometimes styled maces rather than scepters, harkening back to their origins in battle gear.

Emperor-Mary-El_Tarot — Going further in search of a different Emperor, I selected this one from the Mary-El Tarot. The Mary-El is one of the strangest and most unique decks I own. It came to me by way of serendipity, and continues to excite and inspire my exploration.

As you can see the card disposes of all the structures of preceding and traditional decks and gives us a space that is both intimate and intimidating. The artist Marie White took 11 years to create. They employ styles and motifs from many world cultures and historical periods. This one, for example, seems to portray an ancient Asian monarch. His various accoutrements however, range in style from 17th century Europe to 20th century Art Deco.

The scepter and orb are gone, replaced by this strange sword, whose scabbard is decorated with the ichthus fish of early Roman Christians. He bears magical sigils on his hand, including the pentagram, and his crown is festooned with dragonflies that would be the envy of a Tiffany or Lalique. A lone flame snakes it’s way up his sleeve, reminding us that behind all this pomp and splendor is still a warlord capable of unchecked destruction. While we don’t see the desert, there is very little living in this image, save the birds that fly in the gray smoky sky. My impression is that they are carrion birds hovering over the aftermath of a battle,.

You can view the entire deck on Mary-El.com. Printed copies were somewhat scarce when I obtained mine. Second editions (or later reprints) are available now on Amazon.

But the RWS scepter is different from these European prototypes. Waite in his documentation calls it a “crux ansata” which essentially is the Egyptian ankh. We’ve seen the ankh before on the Empress card, and one reason that it may be here is that on earlier versions of the royal couple, both were shown with an Imperial Eagle. So when the Eagle is replaced on the Empress card with the Venus symbol, there may have been a conscious choice to add it to the Emperor as the shape of the scepter. Now, perhaps logically this scepter should have been more Martian, given the Mars/Aries heraldry on the throne and mantle, and the context of the Mars-Venus relationship between the two. But changing the Imperial Eagle to the Imperial Ram, is not as random or arbitrary as one might think, especially with other images in the Tarot.

In two later Major Arcana we find the Eagle in company with three other figures, a Bull, a Lion, and an Angel. This figures in Christian symbology are supposed to refer to the Four Gospel authors, and that derives from the four faces or heads of the “living beings” in the Old Testament vision of the prophet Ezekiel.

But these are also seen as being astrological symbols, namely Taurus, Leo, Aquarius, with the Eagle representing Scorpio. Scorpio, in the old Chaldean, was ruled by Mars, as was Aries. So there is a connection between the Eagle and Mars and Mars and the Ram.

On the other hand, the ankh would seem ill suited here, beyond Waite simply wanting to use it. But the fact that it is very stylized away from most depictions of the ankh that I wonder if there is something else to it. It looks to be a circlet of gold balanced atop a T-shape. If we take away the circle, it looks more like a hammer or axe than any kind of cross, and it seems very odd to separate the loop of the ankh from the crosspieces. It’s position atop a long shaft is never shown in Egyptian illustrations.

To imply that somehow this Emperor, who has so many other emblems of war, anger, and sterility, should somehow hold the Key of Life argues for a mystery we have few clues to decipher. Yet even Set, the Egyptian god associated with evil, carried an ankh. Set also was associated with wrath, the Wasteland, and the color red. In ancient Egypt, the scepters have Set’s head, and are said to represent both Set and Khnum, the old Ram god of creation. These are all associations that may be connected to the Emperor’s scepter when exploring this card.

The orb in the other hand is a late Roman convention denoting the sovereignty of the royal personage over the physical world. It probably derives from images of Christ Pantocrator (Christ King of the World) that developed at the end of the pagan Roman period and are a common feature of Byzantine mosaics and Eastern Orthodox icons. Frequently these royal orbs were banded with cross-straps and topped with a cross or crucifix, symbolizing the authority of the monarch through Christ himself, the so-called Divine Right of Kings.

The cross is missing from the top of the RWS orb, leaving us with something that more resembles ah old-fashioned cartoon bomb. The bomb or grenade did come about during the Renaissance, and it certainly would be in keeping with the overall martial character of the card to interpret this as such, though I doubt it was ever intended. Another way to see this ball in his hand is to cast it as a stoppered flask, similar to that used for holy water. In that context, perhaps we have another secreted instance of “water in the desert”.

There’s no oasis here, of course. As noted the rivulet that flows past the foot of the mountains behind his throne brings no green blossoms. It, or the land it flows through, is poisoned. Depending on the version of the deck, I have seen this stream go from blue to grey or from blue to nothing as it goes from left to right. The coloring on this card is unusual too, in that the mountain on our left is yellow, as is the glove of the Emperor, and the mountain on the right is orange, as is his glove.

I can see this as depicting the setting of the sun, or the ending the day or that “dying of the light” Thomas writes about. Taken in context with the change in the coloring of the water, there seems definitely to be a movement from the left side to the right that indicates a worsening condition. If this card were to come up between two others in a reading, it might indicate that the right side card is a deterioration of the situation shown by the left hand card.

Emperor-Empress-Voyager_Tarot — A final look at a different Emperor, this time in company of the preceding card. These are from the Voyager Tarot, and I show them together as I find it may be more instructive as to my approach to card reading. These photocollages are the work of James Wanless, a life-coach and motivational speaker. They function in a way like a Rorshach inkblot, where the rather disconnected images serve to stimulate the imagination and drive the mind to an inner reverie. And yet, they also respect the traditional RWS cards they evolved from.

The Empress here expresses the Edenic nature of the garden and orchard, with the waterfall in the background. She also, by standing in from of the orb of the Earth, let’s us know that this is a material garden – a real physical experience that stimulates our senses and sates our pleasure.

The Emperor card in contrast shows us works of handicraft and edifice, the machinery of the modern world, imposed over nature without permission, asserting a dominance. Yes, the earth is still there, but it is smaller and less important in the image. There is a small tree growing, but notice that it grows contained by the hands of the Emperor. It is not nature as it is, but nature as He would control it. That old whale in the bottom right I cannot but think is a rough phallic symbol. Or perhaps it is Leviathan, the great monster of the deep spoken of in the Book of Job to express the dominance and power of the Hebrew Man-God. The Eagle and the Ram are here, and as importantly the Dove is with the Empress.

The Emperor image is chaotic and unsettling. The Empress harmonious and well-composed. These are the kind of visual cues I take from any Tarot deck to go beyond what gets written in the book. With the Voyager the mixed images make this a bit easier, but after a bit of practice, any cards will yield similar results.

Try as I might I can find little to nothing to redeem this card. While others may shudder at the appearance of Death or the Tower, I argue that the Emperor is as much an omen of hard times and bad things as either of those two. As the Priestess, in the stars, is hope and reconciliation, the Emperor is, on earth, privation, meanness, and greed.

He is power celebrated for its own sake, and sought for its own sake, and respected only because power demands it.

It’s even sadder, in that there is a suggestion that these woes and worries are inevitable. At the top of the crown, much smaller than we find it on the Magician or Strength cards, is another infinity symbol. We are perhaps doomed to contending with these negative attributes of our society and ourselves in perpetuity. This is the warning of the Emperor.

Rather than ending this week’s article with such a down vibe, though, I offer that the Wasteland of which I speak above is, like the Sea of Darkness it reflects, a path open to the spirit in search of enlightenment.

If you have ever experienced a time alone in the desert, even if you were within a safe distance of “civilization” you may have found yourself contemplating profound and vast concepts. There is something about the emptiness of such expanses that invite our minds to soar. Like an external isolation tank, when we are stripped of the artificial world that most of us find ourselves in, we start seeking some meaning that is not part of that world.

So if the Emperor troubles you, consider him a boundary marker between the strictures and authorities of that artificial world, which he most certainly represents, and the vast untamed unknown. Like the modern manufactured world, the Emperor ties us up with contradictions and prejudices, with things we are told we should believe and things which we are told not to question.

The Wasteland holds mysteries and terrors and wonders and secrets. Beyond the desert and behind the mountains you may find the source of that stream. You may find something else entirely.

On that boundary, the Emperor, impotent, is forever bound to that stone chair.

You have the freedom to walk around him.

Next week we will address another difficult authority figure, who much like the Emperor seems well out of place if we only look at the richly decorated surface Smith has given us. The original name of that next card, the sixth of the Major Arcana, was simply, the Pope. It was seen in that very Catholic Christian context throughout most of Tarot’s history.

In the post-Victorian revision, he has been restyled the Hierophant, a word which means more interestingly Keeper of the Secrets.

I hope you’ll join me then.

March 8, 2023March 7, 2023

The Old One

Yesterday, at just before 9 AM at my location, the planet Saturn returned to Pisces.

The significance of this is personal to me, because Saturn was in Pisces when I was born, though I have to wait another year for this plodding ancient god to reach that point.

But as Saturn is the outermost planet generally visible to the naked eye, and therefore the last of the great Wanderers known to the ancient astrologers of Mesopotamia, it’s entrance into the last sign of the zodiac carries a good deal of mystic import.

Yes, certainly, there are at least three more planets out there (Pluto is a planet, Degrasse-Tyson can bite me) that modern astrologers use in their horoscopes and calculations. Yet there are some significant considerations for perhaps demoting their importance.

First, they’ve only been known and applied to astrology for a couple of hundred years, so despite them being named after elder gods, they’re newcomers on the scene. Certainly, their invisible influences were there throughout our human history, but if no one took notice of them before they were discovered and their orbits tracked and added to the ephemeri then how much influence did they actually have, hmmm?

Additionally, because their orbits are very distant, and they move through them very slow, the changes in sign are very gradual, and aspects formed are usually more dependent on the travels of their speedier siblings.

Uranus, next in line after Saturn, has an orbit of around 84 years. This means that in many cases a person may not live long enough to have a Uranian return. It spends about 7 years in each sign, enough to be noticed, of course, but if we are waiting for the full cycle through signs and houses, well, it’s going to take a while.

Neptune and Pluto, who flip-flop for furthest planet have even longer cycles. Neptune’s is 165 years, and just under 14 years in each sign. Pluto at 248 years spends just a bit over two decades to get through a single sign. It’s not likely we’ll see a Neptune or Pluto return in our lifetime, so astrologers typicaly talk about their influence on nation states and institutions that outlive human beings.

An additional quirk of these terribly long orbits is that retrograde motion casts shadows that are almost constant. That is, Uranus, and definitely Neptune and Pluto, are either in retrograde, or in the shadow of retrograde, all the time. So essentially their influence is either more or less malefic, or more or less diminished. So let’s just give them the respect they’re due, but not worry overmuch about how that impacts us.

Saturn, on the other hand, has a period of 29 years, 166 days, 20 hours, 11 minutes, and 45 and two-thirds seconds. If we live the allotted three score and ten years, Saturn will come visit us at least twice. I personally am hoping that better habits and advances in medicine (which I pray will be more natural/herbal and less of big pharm) will get me to a third meeting, and a forth is not an absolute impossibility (I’d only be 117…but who knows how long I can last as a head in a jar?).

Now think about our ancestors, and the world they lived in for a bit. Life expectancy before the 19th century was dismal across the board.

Wealthier persons, who had better food and better medical care (such as it was- “Frau Gilda, more leeches!“) and less of the burden of physical labor, tended toward perhaps a four decade lifespan.

Kings and princes, who didn’t get killed in warfare or jousting, might expect to get into their upper fifties even.

The poor, with the worst and least food, meager medicine, and a destiny of toil, hardship, and privation, could consider themselves blessed to make it to their 30s.

If we now overlay Saturn’s orbital frequency on that life map, we can begin to see why it is looked upon with such importance. Until a couple of hundred years ago, when Saturn came back, he was coming back for you. He was the Grim Reaper, telling you that your sands had run out and it was time to join the Choir Invisible.

True if your station in life was a fortunate one, you might be lucky enough to get a pass on the first one, but still, that was at best what we modern folk call “middle age”. You’d had your salad days and there were more aches and pains when you got up in the morning. Saturn over your shoulder just meant you were thankful to be getting up at all.

The myths associated with this god don’t do him any favors, either. In Greece, he is the Titan Kronos, son of Uranus and Gaia, and so among the first beings to inhabit the world. In the complicated soap opera of Greek mythology, Gaia convinces Kronos to depose his father, by castrating him (the symbolism of virility being necessary to rulership is an ancient and widespread one). By maiming his own father, he invites the destiny of his own destruction at the hands of his children. Thus, to defeat the prophecy, he logically just eats them all at birth.

To muddy the waters even further, he is frequently confounded or merged with Khronos, the god of time. Khronos was the god that turned the zodiac wheel. As such, he was generally considered ancient, dour, and unsympathetic. Time shows no favorites, after all. Khronos was that old man in the sky, yelling at everyone to get off his lawn.

Anthropologically similarly named gods tend to originate as either local deities that get included in a wider myth structure as villages grow into city states; or they evolve as schisms within a particular myth, where aspects of the same deity develop their own sects and eventually become distinct beings. The Greeks have a number of these overlaps, where there are several gods associated with a particular power, place, event, or idea.

So it’s hard to say whether Kronos the titan and Khronos the time keeper were village gods that met up in the Agora and everyone thought they were related, or if Kronos the Reaper and Eater of Children came to be associated with the indifferent passage of time and the coming of iniquity and began to be worshipped also as Khronos the Unstoppable Wheel.

In either case, they end up frequently appearing together, and having aspects of either story show up in the mythology associated with the other. The Sickle that castrates Uranus becomes the Scythe of Time, until it gets lent to Death during the Great Plague, who pretty much kept it. In Greece, Death, Thanatos, is the sibling of Sleep, and goes about unarmed. It’s only the absolute horror of the Black Death of the Middle Ages that turns our passing, untimely or otherwise, into an object of horror.

So Kronos/Khronos wends his way into Roman culture as Saturn, though the association with the planet of that name has already stuck. Claudius Ptolemy in his Tetrabiblos is writing in Greek Alexandria, from ancient Greek, Mesopotamian, and possibly Egyptian manuscripts, when he lays out Saturn’s traditional astrological role.

Modern astrology says that Saturn represents the rigid, the ordered, and the structured. It’s influence in the chart is said to be that of established institutions, like government, religion, or academia. As a natural contrarian and iconoclast, I personally have a hard time equating this view of the staid old man with the violent mad titan, but I suppose I can stretch it.

In his attack on his father Uranus, he has ended the creative and generative reign of nature. Uranus is often considered by astrologers to be the planet of imagination and raw creativity, as the being was responsible, with Gaia, for the making of the world.

In devouring his children, Saturn has effectively stopped forward innovation and growth, so despite his own violent immoral actions, he is a poster child for the establishment status quo. He will stifle any attempts to deviate from the way things have always been, because they have always been that way. Saturn is the natural tendency of institutions to resist change.

Yet he carries within himself that constant of change. Time marches onward. His paranoia derives from the knowledge that he can’t stop change, no matter what kind of horrific act he must commit. The wheel keeps turning overhead.

Tempus fugit. Omnis gloria transit. Memento mori.

When Saturn sweeps through a sign of the zodiac, he is bringing that message. This too will pass away. At the same time, he will push forward those aspects of the sign in such an uncompromising manner because he is so very afraid of that passing. He fears Death but Death is inevitable.

Saturn is the Tower Struck By Lightning. The destruction of the status quo is already happening. It is always already happening.

hermit-time-and-tower — Although official tradition equates the Hermit card with Virgo (probably some idea about monastic celibacy) I have personally always felt a Saturnine connection. And here it is. In the Visconti-Sforza deck, one of the earliest, this card represents Father Time, the Khronos figure that is now almost entirely merged with the titan Kronos who becomes Saturn. Saturn as a time keeper is certainly evident in his regular circuits through our lives, and as his Greek predecessor was responsible for the unstoppable spinning of the heavens, his place as a herald of our passing years is well cemented.

It is precisely the inevitability of time of which Saturn reminds us. The Tower card is a frozen moment. The Tower represents the rigidity of old structures, established dominions, and conservative thinking. These are the province of Saturn. Yet the Tower is destroyed. It erupts into flames. Time itself will wear away all edifices, all will come to naught. Like the song says, all we are is dust in the wind.

The realization of our own fate is the mad prophecy of Saturn. We continue to devour our children, struggle against a future that will come no matter what we do. We fall as the Tower falls around us, and yet we cling to it’s burning form because to let go is to end.

His return tends to invite our own contemplations of such things. Though we live comparatively better lives today, barring serious accident, war, or illness, the inexorable march of time presses upon us all at points.

Saturn first hits us in our late twenties. We’ve had a decade to really grow up, and get serious, and stop staying out all night with friends at wild parties. Or at least that’s what we’re expected to think by the external social order. Time to settle down, get a mortgage, and worry about the crabgrass. These are the institutionalized structures that Saturn is in charge of; his way of eating the children of our youth, with all their silly little dreams and ideals, which clearly don’t fit into a mature lifestyle.

We start to look backward – not with nostalgia, but with a kind of vague dread. What have we accomplished? Why are we not where we thought we’d be by now? Are the things we do now going to be what we do forever?

We start to feel the walls closing in and understanding David Byrne lyrics, and not surprisingly we often make fundamental changes to career, relationships, locations, and other established parts of our lives. While Uranus may be considered the planet of revolutionary change, Saturn’s internal paranoia and violence can certainly shake us up,

If you don’t know about the Saturn return, you probably won’t recognize these things as anything other than approaching the big 3-0. In my lifetime that’s been the catchphrase for the personal reset that we all tend to do to some extent as we enter our third decade on the earth.

We’ve been clueless children. We’ve been wild teens. We’ve carried the hormonal madness, questionable behavior and poor judgement out through our twenties as we try to hang on to the freedom of being irresponsible pre-adults.

Now, Saturn has come around to tell us to get over it. We need to pay bills, get healthy, start saving for retirement, and stop doing things that could get us killed. Time to be boring and stiff and wondering what the hell those kids are doing on our lawn.

Coming up on Saturn return redux, as I am myself, is a whole different set of circumstances. By the time we reach our late 50s, many of us have become the establishment. Hopefully we kept enough of our wild and crazy to make some changes, so that my establishment doesn’t look like my parents establishment, but it’s a gradual thing, because, well, Saturn keeps eating the kids.

And in our late 50s we start wondering about these kids today and how do they expect they’ll ever amount to anything with all that and how in our day we had to walk two hundred miles in the snow uphill just to use a dial-up phone with a cord. We stop listening to new music (and frequently yell at them to turn that @#$@% down!) and become focused on whether the latest international crisis is going to sour the market and tank our 401k.

And we start to hear the approaching hoofbeats of the pale rider.

We have reached the point in life where most likely our grandparents are all gone, and now our parents and aunts and uncles are going. We watch their decline toward the waiting darkness and think far more frequently of the nearness of it, the realness of it.

We feel the days passing faster and start understanding Dylan Thomas poetry.

This period now comes with the label “Middle Age Crazy” thanks to a 1980 Bruce Dern movie. This was about the time when a lot of the “Baby Boomers” would have been going through their first Saturn return. And I’d guess some of their parents would be hitting that second one, and lamenting the fact that they had to be responsible, practical, reasonable, and build taco stands instead of staying out, driving fast, and chasing young nubile things.

At the end of the movie, (spoiler alert) Dern basically figures out that he maybe didn’t have things so bad, and maybe his life was pretty cool after all. He was married to Ann Margaret after all (you’ll have to Google who that is, probably, I ‘ll wait). And so it is expected that we will ride out our second Saturn visit with a similar satiation, and prepare ourselves for the inevitable downhill run.

Or we can stop eating the children and embrace our inner Rodney Dangerfield (again, go ask Google, I’m old and have less time than you) and rage against the dying of the light.

Saturn is not just returning to his place when I was born. He’s returning to the beginning. Pisces is the end and Saturn is at the end. He’ll wander across and hop into Aries near the end of May 2025, but until then he’s going to be bringing his personal psychosis to all the Piscean traits.

Saturn has also left his own realm and descended into that of his son and deposer Jupiter. Per the old Chaldean chart, with only seven planets (including Sun and Moon as planets), the signs ruled by Saturn were Capricorn and Aquarius. There’s a lot to look at here, too. Capricorn is the cardinal earth sign, and Aquarius is the fixed air sign. The parents of Saturn were Gaia (earth mother) and Uranus (sky father). So there’s more to his rulership of these two signs than just mathematical synchronicity. The fact that usually, in the Northern Hemisphere where our astrology originated, these signs are the coldest parts of winter is also not coincidental. Saturn is a god of the Outer Dark. Before the other planets were discovered, he was the guardian of the Outer Dark.

Pisces, on the other hand, is a mutable water sign, ruled in the ancient charts by Jupiter. Jupiter is the one child of Saturn who didn’t get eaten, or more accurately swallowed, and through a series of interesting circumstances rose up to defeat his father and cut the other gods whole out of Saturn’s stomach.

I doubt there’s much love lost between the two since then and well, I’d expect the fact that Saturn is now in Jupiter’s Spring Palace to be a bit. . . awkward.

Pisces natural tendency to be expansive, creative, and generous go well with the Jovian nature. As a mutable sign, Pisces represents the aspect of its element proceeding toward the next sign’s element. Pisces is water about to become fire.

Water itself is emblematic of some aspects of chaos. It has not set form, it changes to embrace it’s circumstance. In mythology, water is often the symbol of the unformed void. We find it in Genesis, and in the Egyptian creation myth. Water is the boundary in many stories between worlds, often the boundary between the living world and the world of the dead. Water is the mirror in the scryer’s cauldron and the Norn’s well. Water quenches fire and drowns air and washes away earth.

Pair this with ancient angry, psychotic, ultra-conservative Saturn, and touch that off with the motility and quixotic nature of Pisces mutability into the coming fire of Aries, and slather it all with some cosmic 12th house overtones, and it’s time to cue Bette Davis.

Well, at least we have the Equinox coming up this month, and in next week’s article.

Until then, keep your seatbelt’s fastened and your hands and arms inside the cart at all times. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

January 25, 2023February 2, 2023

Hidden Figures

A black draped figure seemingly glided to the front of the classroom and began scribbling on the chalkboard.

Professor Snide spoke without turning.

“Turn to page twelve-thousand, six hundred, and seventy-four and begin reading the rubric at the end of the third paragraph; subsection two, heading four, chapter eight hundred eighty-two. . .” Pausing he added “. . . aloud. . . in four part harmony. “

Wes Rongley peeped his bright orange tufted head above the antique leathern tome on the desk in front of him and peered at the board. He squinted.

To his growing horror, he could clearly make out in the ever-growing scrawl that flowed unceasingly onto the slate from the chalk in Snide’s hand integers, operators, exponents, and not a few letters of Greek.

He shuddered. He had inexplicably stumbled into a maths class.

Wes slunk back down behind the ponderous mouldering volume and wracked his hazy brain for some memory of how this could have happened. The first few days here at Hogwash’s had been a heady blur, but surely he could not have made such a colossal blunder.

There was nothing for it but to try and escape.

He slid further down in the seat, as if he could melt into liquid form and seep quietly out under the classroom’s big oaken door. He tested the floor board with the slightest pressure of his left toe.

It creaked.

“Going somewhere, Mr. Rongley?”

Caught in the act, betrayed by the ancient timber, he had little choice but to respond to Snide’s withering gaze.

“I. . .uh. . .I’m in the wrong room, sir. I don’t think I’m supposed to be in this class.”

Snide inspected the desktop and at length drew out a square of browning parchment.

“You are Wes Rongley, First Year?”

“Yes sir.”

“Then you are on my list and you are in the right room.”

The room seemed to dim when Snide had said ‘my list’. Wes felt every follicle of his flaming shock of hair contract. Perspiration formed on his upper lip. On his tightening scalp. beads of sweat began to coalesce into rivulets that ran down the nape of his neck. He ventured.

“But . . .sir . . . that looks like maths. . .”

Snide turned, his expression softening . . .which for some reason was more disturbing.

“Hmmm. . .really? Are you sure?”

Wes nodded meekly. Professor Snide leaned a bit back and regarded the unfinished equation he’d been scribbling.

“By, Jove, Mr. Rongley, you’re right! It is maths! Seen them before, have you?”

“Yes. . .yes, sir!”

“Well, now you’ve seen them again. Turn to page twelve thousa-“

“I was told there’d be no maths, sir.”

“What?”

“I was told there wouldn’t be any maths. When I signed up, sir. That old chap, Humblebore was it? He said that maths weren’t required for my programme.”

“Headmaster Mumblesnore,” Snide corrected, “may have been a tad vague on this point. Let me assure you, Mr. Rongley, maths are indeed required.”

Wes felt Snide’s dark presence swirling toward him down the aisle but couldn’t move. He was a mouse transfixed by a great black cobra, knowing doom was coming but powerless to escape.

“How else do you expect to tease out the subtler courses of the orbs on their wanderings through the heavens, or divine the sublime secrets of the Gematria, or calculate allowed deductions for consumable spell components and the depreciation of cauldrons of more than a hogshead’s capacity when filing with the Inland Revenue?

‘Let there be no doubt in your mind, Mr. Rongley. Maths. Are. Required.”

Satisfied, Snide turned and had made it halfway back toward the front when Wes exploded:

“But I don’t like maths!”

Snide whirled. There was a flash and puff of sulfurous vapor.

There, atop the vast ancient folio, in the middle of an unwholesome looking greasy spot, sat a rather confused looking amphibian with a shock of flaming orange hair.

-Excerpted Unabridged from Hairy Plodder and the Half-Done Script

Like young Mr. Rongley, I too, did not care for ‘maths’ as it is commonly styled in Britain. Seeking a similar avoidance of all things mathematical, I pursued a career in the creative arts.

It is one of life’s little ironies, that when my own term at the Hogwash School of Wizardry, Witchcraft, and Computer Repair was over, that I entered a field where mathematical calculations are both necessary and intensive.

In further evidence of the universe’s perverse sense of humor, my personal occult studies are repleat with examples of the necessity of mathematics, algebra, geometry and trigonometry, and yes, calculus.

Having avoided many of these courses in school it fell upon me to educate myself over the years as required. The result is that I perhaps have not approached the topics in the same staid way that they are typically taught, and though I do get the needed accuracy of result, my methods are more in tune with the way my left-handed right-brained operations work.

I feel confident that, insofar as I am not building a nuclear reactor in close proximity to inhabited areas, said methods are sufficient for my goals. I’m sharing a bit of them this week in order to acquaint you with the delight I often find now in working with purity of numbers and the permutations thereof.

In a previous article I have spoken about the absolute reality of number itself. That is, number is a real immutable infinite and eternal thing, which remains fixed regardless of time, space, velocity, or dimension. One is always one. Two is always two. One and two are and have been and will always be three. Whether we call that three or tre or trois or drei is irrelevant, the actual thing that it is never changes.

There’s a comfort to that. It’s nice to know that regardless of how much chaos swirls around us there’s still something that remains unchanged. It is the Anchor in the Sea of the Night. It is a Fulcrum in the Void. It is a Beacon on the Shores of Infinity.

Of course, sometimes, it’s fun just to play around and see what comes up. My subject for today is the hexagon, a regular geometric shape having six equal sides.

While the word hexagon doesn’t have a connection with our use of the word hex in occult circles, the doctrines of sympathy and correspondence would argue otherwise. Hex in witchcraft comes at us out of Old German and Old Norse, and probably shortens and corrupts from hagatesse – a word used to refer to the Norns, the old women who sat at the base of the World Ash Ygdrassil and pronounced the fates of man. The connection between Norn and witch is an easy one, and the term haxa and haxxen have been used to apply to witches since early times in various north and central European dialects. Thus it crossed the Channel with Hengst and entered into the Anglo-Saxon tree.

The hex in hexagon, though, is ancient Greek for six, and merely means it’s six sided, or six angled, and there’s no magical connotation at all.

Except that there is. And frequently this confutation between the witchy hex and the mathematical hex is expressed in the darnedest of places.

For instance, among the “hex signs” of the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch. The Dutch are more accurately Deutsch – Germans, who settled in Penn’s Woods along with other emigrees seeking arable land and the ability to worship openly. They are noted – among other things, for the curious geometric designs that grace barns and some houses, which are said to drive away the “devil” and other malicious spirits. In this case the “hex” is the old German haxxan – a specifically magic application. Yet many of these geometries are based on six sided figures, though perhaps as many, if not more are eight-sided.

The hexagon is the natural regular shape that is formed if you outline from point to point on a hexagram. Now the hexagram is an established magical and talismanic shape, known as the Star of David, Solomon’s Seal, and other specific names. It is the figure below, which is composed of two overlapping triangles, and as you can see, it fits neatly into the hexagon.

In the parlance of the occult, this image has many meanings. The following image comes from Eliphas Levi’s Histoire de la magie and demonstrates the maxim supposedly extracted from the Emerald Tablet penned by no less a personage than Hermes Trismegistus himself. It is “As Above, So Below”

The actual text,

That which is above is from that which is below, and that which is below is from that which is above

translated into English from Latin or Arabic, which was probably translated from Greek, essentially says that all things in nature are aspects of a single cohesive whole.

From the standpoint of Greek philosophers laboring in Alexandria, this might be a convenient expression for the atomos proposed by Democritus in 400 B.C.E. and a forerunner of our idea of the atom.

Thrown into the rather more fanciful environs of medieval Europe, accompanied on it’s way with tales of djinns and efrits and the glorious magics of Solomon the Wise, the idea became a binder between the heavens and the earth, and justification for the correspondences of metals, stones, plants, and the like with the natures and virtues of the planetary wanderers.

And yet in this aspect was the roots of modern medicine, metallurgy, and chemistry, as well as enduring metaphor for the expansion of the consciousness. Alchemists revered this phrase and it’s interlocking trines throughout their search for the Elixir of Life and Philosopher’s Stone. It carries within it even more secrets, hinted at in the texts of the Emerald Tablet.

Its father is the Sun and its mother the Moon.
The Earth carried it in her belly, and the Wind nourished it in her belly,
as Earth which shall become Fire.
Feed the Earth from that which is subtle

Here then are references to at least three of the four classical elements – Earth, Wind, and Fire. This kind of phrase, along with the most imaginative of illustrations, form the rhebus instructions of the alchemical manuals. But I think the really neat trick is how we find the elements with our hexagon/hexagram.

First, of course, we just have to separate the “Above” from the “Below” and we get Fire and Water. But look more closely at the joined triangles. If you take the upward pointing triangle and the bottom line from the downward pointing triangle, you get the sign for Air. Flipping that to the downward pointing triangle gives us Earth. So the four elements are hidden figures within the As Above, So Below hexagram.

But, like any good late night infomercial pitch, that’s not all. The hexagon/hexagram combination does that same nifty trick that the pentagon/pentagram does. Within the hexagram inside the hexagon is another hexagon. You can then create another hexagram in that, which creates another hexagon inside it, ad infinitum.

Welcome, my friends, to the concept of fractals. And also the basic ideas that lead us into the murky waters of quantum theory – no matter how small something is, it’s always made up of something smaller. And, well, no matter how big something is, there’s probably something even bigger outside it, that maybe you don’t see until you get outside that, and outside that, and outside that…

So again, turtles all the way down. Most of which have no connection to Renaissance artists or togakure-ryu. But if it helps, you can think of all those repeating hexagon/hexagrams as being diagrams of turtle shells.

If infinity has you’re head spinning, let’s jump back onto a more solid ground. Platonically solid ground, in this case, as a few choice lines from the angles in the hex give us a nice diagram for the first two platonic solids, the pyramid, and the cube. From two dimensions we have moved into three, or at least we are representing three dimensions in a two dimensional space, and that’s nifty in itself. The cube is more elegantly expressed of course, because in addition to just looking better, we have the added symbolic link of a six-sided object being used to represent a six-faced object. I’ve tried to find some sacred number related to the four faces and six sides, but it’s not there, so it’s just that you can draw it if you need to, though again it’s not as isometrically clean.

On the other hand, if you wanted to get a four faced pyramid (which is actually five sided; four triangles and a square) you just have to modify that upward pointing triangle and the square of the cube. It’s not exact to the one’s that the Egyptians built, mind you, and I make no claim that it has any relation to them. I think I will probably due a future article on the legend, myth, and symbology associated with pyramid structures in human history, but that’s not for today. In the meantime, it’s a satisfying exercise.

Of course, one of the most basic ideagrams that we can render from the hexagon shape is the “hex” itself, as six-rayed assembly of lines. This equivocates to the “grove” symbol in the Ogham script. Again, I can’t say there’s any evidence of a connection, but that doesn’t prevent you making one, and drawing on the power of that symbol. In some permutations of the Ogham grove I have found it also flexes to represent the transits of the luminaries on the equinoxes and solstices. That is, if you take an aerial view of Stonehenge – or the Great Pyramid of Giza for that matter – and plot the sunrise and sunset positions of the sun and moon on the equinoxes and solstices, you get a hex line shape. In this case, the angles are much more shallow, as the Tropic are around 23.7 degrees north and south of the equinoctal line, and in a regular hexagon, the angles are 60 degrees.

Which is to say, they are sextile for the purposes of astrology. Which we can also derive from the hexagon shape. For instance, if we take one of our inner triangles, and draw a line from each corner to the middle (instead of all the way across) we get a three rayed shape with angles of 120 degrees. This is a trine. you can also achieve the same design by erasing half of the rays in the hex. Have of six is three. Half of sextile is trine, even though the angle measurements double. I always had trouble understanding that relationship until I started playing with these hex diagrams. Maybe this will help you.

You can find the 90 degrees of a square aspect with a hair more work. Put the hexagram back in and draw a line from the top of the upper triangle to the bottom of the bottom triangle. Now draw a line across the point where the two triangles join in the middle. Erase the extra lines and viola – a four rayed shape with 90 degree angles.

You have now derived the three major aspects used in astrology. Of course, you’re going to need a chart.

So take the hexagram, and draw lines through each point of the triangle, like we do to get the hex, and then draw lines through each of the intersecting angles, like we did to get the square. You end up with 12 rays, and the cusps of 12 signs. In the diagram I’ve reduced the size of the hexagram, so the relationship is clearer, but you can see it does indeed contain the keys to a zodiac.

Overlaid in color here are two of the trine diagrams, one in blue, which shows you the relationships of the water signs. You can rotate this to locate the air, earth, and fire signs, respectively. The red one also shows the locations of the cardinal, fixed, and mutable triplicity, in this case for the signs of fire, but just rotate it around and the others fall into place.

Is this all that we can tease out of the humble hexagon? No. Fiddling around in my art software I was able to come across a few more totally unrelated, but poignant connections using just the geometry and some imagination.

Taking our hex lines again, you can look to them as Cartesian coordinates. They are the X, Y and Z axes of three dimensional space. Anyone who struggles with that train leaving Chicago problem may remember some of these exercises from algebra classes. I do a lot of 3-D animation work, and the 3-D grid is almost second nature to me. Essentially the center where the three line cross is 0, and any point in space can be plotted using positive or negative values along those lines, so X is left and right, Y is up and down, and Z is forward or back. In order to see clearly the values of all three lines, the diagram is usually tilted in almost exactly the same way as our hex. So you can use a hex to put anything anywhere.

Now, I have mentioned before that we all live in a four-dimensional space-time. If I want to diagram it on my hexagon, I can just drop it in at a right angle to Y axis, and get the following figure.

So any point in space and time can be reached by virtue of the hex. That might explain why the capacious interior of a certain blue phone box has had hexagon wall decorations for several decades. Or not. Still, it’s an intriguing expression of the concept.

Moving back into more esoteric spaces, I was also able to take the basic hex, add a few curves, and arrive at the Xi-Rho symbol, usually with Alpha and Omega, this is supposedly the vision of Constantine at the Malvern Bridge, with motto “in hoc signio vincis” – In this Sign, you will Conquer. While historians generally believe that Constantine took it as a message from Sol Invictus, later Christian records give it as the Xi-Rho, a short hand for Cristos, and the basis for what became Christian Rome. While his mother was a devout Christian, and Constantine did order the Council of Nicea which firmed up the Nicean Creed and laid the foundations of modern orthodoxy, the Emperor himself didn’t convert until his deathbed.

Another imaginative permutation is the zig-zag “lightning bolt” that is said to travel down the Quabbalistic Tree of Life bringing Divine Wisdom (Ain Soph) into existence in the material world. You need to stack a couple of hexagons for the full diagram, and add a tail at the bottom, but you can get there from here. Those claiming that abracadabra derives from the Hebrew “what I speak I manifest” might want to play with this idea a little further.

Am equally interesting object from the hexagon and As Above/So Below angles is a three dimensional construct known as a merkaba. The word merkaba comes from the Hebrew as “Chariot” and so we have an immediate link with the seventh card of the Tarot major arcana. As many others have posted, 2023 is considered a “Chariot” year as it numerologicaly resolves to seven. Seven is a sacred number all on it’s own, so if a merkaba is a chariot, then we’ve managed to find seven hidden in six. That’s an alchemical spontaneous generation worthy of old Bombastis himself.

The merkaba is the three dimensional extension of As Above, So Below. It is the two triangles, expressed as interlocking three-faced pyramids (see there was a reason I talked about the platonic pyramid) such that each face of each pyramid is pierced by the the point of another one. The diagram here is derived from the hexagon. I have mocked up one in Lightwave 3-D to show how interesting this thing becomes as an object. Pretty nifty trick for an old Hebrew chariot I think.

Some also say the word merkaba is derived from the ancient Egyptian root words mer-ka-ba. Several online sources style this as “light, spirit, and body” or “love, spirit, body”, It may be more accurately translated “Pyramid of the Soul and the Shadow” or “Food of the Blessed Dead” since “mer” can be either pyramid or cake. The Greek “pyramid” derives from “pyramis” -wheat cake. The Egyptian wheat cake was called ben-ben, which is the word for the top of the pyramid or the obelisk, which had a similar shape. These shapes were also symbolic of the sun’s rays, and the primordial mound of earth rising from the flood of the celestial Nile where the Lotus that Ra emerges from grew. Mer, then, is not the cake, but the ritual use of the cake, either in feeding a god or a deceased relative, both rituals we know of. It’s not fair to say the Greeks got it wrong, because over the long age of Egypt mer came to mean “love” and “pyramid” as well as the ritual use of the cake.

Those are fascinating concepts to explore. Relating them onward to a Hebrew chariot that is visually complex and symbolically loaded, draws to my mind some of the Old Testament angels connected with the prophet Ezekiel. Plenty of places to go with this one if one is interested.

Speaking of going, in my own explorations, I have used the hexagon/hexagram as basis to develop this symbol, which I will eventually put on an amulet or an altar stone. To my mind it connects with symbols of Hekate, and well, Hekate, Heka, Hex, Haxxan, Hagatesse and Hexagon can all blur lines in rhyme, alliteration, and the verbal games we play in spell work. And now you can see that there are mathematical and geometric games you can play as well, so if you are looking for right angle (pun meaningfully intended) to approach a particular magical operation, I hope I have given you some new tools to work with. If nothing else, I hope it encourages you to spend time looking past the surface of things as presented.

Before departing this week’s article I fully admit to lifting the title from a very much more important work. Even though you can’t copyright titles, and the words fit my little exercise, equally well, I clearly acknowledge, respect and admire the work of the pioneering African-American women the book and film Hidden Figures is about. Their contribution to the advancement of both the space program, and cause of racial justice in this country, cannot be minimized. If you are unaware of it, I strongly encourage you make yourself familiar.

Thank you again for reading all the way to the end of this week’s piece. It is longer and potentially more complicated that what I have offered in the past. More like this is forthcoming, so I hope you find it useful. I’ll be back again in a week.

December 28, 2022December 28, 2022

Here We Go Again Again

That’s right folks. Tomorrow is another Mercury retrograde. Chances are you’ve been feeling that wiggly shadow period already, which began on December 12th, just in time to bollix your credit cards before last minute shopping. This year just wasn’t going to let us go without a fight.

The earlier retrograde through Taurus was one of the first times I actually acknowledged the hit from drunken Mercury. I was traveling. Late flights. Missed appointments. Lost items. Connecting flights halfway across the continent from origin and destination points.

September’s dance through Libra to Virgo and back to Libra was a bit different, though. Yes, both office and cell phone experienced spectacular foul-ups as Mercury made that outside turn, but there were a lot of things that could have gone wrong that didn’t.

Which got me to thinking about our general dread of these wobbles in the apparent position of the innermost planet.

I preface this by again saying that I am not a professional astrologer, though I am comfortable to say I’m a competent amateur by this point. What follows is a personal observation and not studied lore to be found in the works of the revered and ancient Chaldees.

I think I was first introduced to astrology in a monthly column in the McCall’s magazine my mother subscribed to. It was a long time ago, and memory is hazy, but I recall that she read it, and on occasion commented, though I think her older and more Christianized self might deny that. In any case, I found the articles frequently missing the mark, and can say the same for the daily newspaper horoscope. I don’t even remember these mentioning the influences of the planets, the houses, or anything beyond a random “weather report”.

Obviously, this is because they have to be generic. The people reading the entry for Scorpio are not all going to get a winning lottery ticket next Thursday. It’s a fact that everyone born with the sun in Scorpio- with the possible exception of twins born seconds apart, will have had different placements of the planets, houses, and other significators, because they were all born at different points in space and time.

Mercury Retrograde Spirel 1-1-2022 to 12-31-2023 — The retrograde chart for Mercury’s tripartite dance through 2022 and 2023. Our current jog is that wiggle just above the 9 o’clock point. It occurs entirely in Capricorn, in contrast to the previous two that crossed back over the cusps from Libra to Virgo and from Gemini to Taurus.

On this chart time spirals out from center, so the one closest to the hub is the one that began at the end of December 2021 and the one next to the outside ring crossing from Capricorn back into Sagittarius will end the coming year.

You can see that the beginning and ending of retrogrades are also moving backward as time goes on. The Gemini retrograde of 2022 starts in Taurus in 2023.

This image is called a Flower Chart, and is generated by the free Plantedance software available for the Windows platform.

So while “Mercury in retrograde” is a generic ill omen, it really comes down to how it behaves in your personal chart. That is, it’s how Mercury relates to the specific and unique positions of the other planets that make up your birth horoscope, and the transit positions of those planets as they are now.

If you don’t have a personal birth chart, go get one. It’s not enough to say you were born with the sun in Scorpio. Nor is it adequate to observe that your moon was in Aries and Aries was your rising sign. There are five more classical planets out there up to something, not to mention the modern trans-saturnine ones, and all those wibbly-wobbly asteroids, dwarfs, and centaurs. And you need to know which House that sun was in, so there’s actually a couple of registers to keep track of, before we even get to the elements, triplicities, decans, rulerships, aspects, exaltations, falls, and everything else in the Great Big Book of Astrology that is missing from the newspaper forecast.

Small wonder that most of us who are serious about astrology at least once in our life spend the not insubstantial amount to have a professional personal chart done. It’s not the positions, which may be simple enough with an app on the phone, but the interpretation of all those interwoven threads of influence. I respect the professional astrologer and the fees they charge because going deep is a complicated process, even with software. While the heavy lifting of making the chart is now done by computer, the subtleties required to read the chart still demand a practiced mind that frequently will still need to consult a number of reference texts, and synthesize the multiple factors into a cohesive whole.

That drunk Mercury is going to plow through like a bowling ball around three times a year.

But armed with your own personal chart, you may be able to minimize the trouble he gets up to while meandering through your skies. The basis of predictive astrology is to build that fundamental picture of who you are, who you could be, and why you might be that way, from the stars at your birth, and then compare that to the ever-roving heavens at the moment you are interested in. For our purposes, this is the next couple of weeks while Mercury is being a sotted ass.

This is what the professional astrologer does. They look at the influences as of now, and interpret them in regard to a birth chart. If your sun was in Scorpio at birth, it’s influence is greater when it returns to that sign each year. That’s why most of us seem to experience things more intensely around our birthdays, or at least that’s the theory. When the planets (which include sun and moon) come back around to where they are during your birth, this is called a return. Your Solar return is your birthday. It happens every year. Your lunar return happens once a month, and is the day when the moon has most influence on your chart. The rest of the planets (including drunk Mercury) have returns at differing times due to the size of their orbits. The Saturn return, for example, is about every 29 years, and consequently is seen as a sign of major life changes. Pluto and Neptune have orbits so long that their returns only influence things like nations and institutions that have longer lifespans. You and I will never see them again.

But I am going off-track, in a very Mercury retrograde fashion. The point I am making here is the transit of Mercury, even when it’s wobbly, must be assessed in regard to its relationship with the other planets, signs, houses, etc. and the planets, signs, houses, etc. in your birth chart.

Mercury-False-Color — A false color image of everyone’s favorite astrological troublemaker. False color photographs are made by imaging an object using filters that screen out various wavelengths of light.

For example, an image can be made filtering for everything expect ultraviolet light, or infrared light, or even radio and x-rays.

If we were to look with the unaided human eye, much of Mercury’s surface would be the same dull grey brown we see on our own moon.

By combining exposures from variable wavelengths, we get a final product that is often more detailed, and having a certain stark beauty.

For example, let’s roll back the clock to September of this year, at the fixed point of the Autumnal Equinox and look at the skies. In my latitude of about 30 degrees north, and situated in the U.S. Central time zone, under Daylight Saving Time, the sun enters Libra at 8:03 PM on September 22. Your location and time will vary, and this will mean that you are looking at a different Ascendant and the Houses will likewise change. I give my data for comparing charts if you have an app.

Overhead pesky little Mercury is at 29 degrees and 41 minutes of Libra, on it’s way back toward Virgo. It is in the sixth house, meaning it has influence on your day job, your health, and your domestic animals, among other things. It’s major aspects are a conjunction with the Sun, and an opposition to Jupiter. Ordinarily the conjunction with the sun would be a good thing and the opposition to Jupiter would be bad.

Mercury in opposing Jupiter, means that his usual expansive nature, in this case as it applies to communication and transportation, is curtailed. Yet as Mercury is retrograde it should signal the opposite.

But at this point Jupiter is also in retrograde. And just like in basic math, two negatives equal a positive, so we are back to the normal forward interpretation. Taking into account Libra’s balance, and Mercury in the Sixth House, we might interpret this as “don’t talk too much at work”. That’s a good maxim for any Mercury retrograde period. It also could be a caution about getting your prescriptions mixed up, or that your cat is meowing because the bowl really is empty this time.

The solar conjunction with retrograde Mercury is a sure indicator that your thoughts are going to be fuzzy for a few days, that it will be harder to concentrate, that you might forget things, so make notes, and jot things down on the calendar. I mean the paper one, since the app may get screwed up when your phone reboots. Electronic brains are subject to this as well as meat puppet ones. It will probably be the worst in a day or so when the sun passes Mercury going backward with a WTF look out the window.

These are some examples of the general tendencies that affect things on that day at that time, and are by no means absolute. Yet in addition to these, one must consider the synastry – which is a fancy term for comparing that time and space with the time and space you were born.

I choose not to publish my personal birth chart, here. It’s a fairly private thing. But for the purposes of illustration, I’ve picked someone from the list of famous people included in the software. He’s a majority stockholder in one of the world’s largest software companies. You’ve probably heard of him, but as I don’t want to get sued if a spybot finds his name, I’ll leave it to your imagination. For the record I did not create his chart, so I can’t say if this is even accurate or his real birthday.

If we limit our review here to what Mercury is doing and how it connects to the birth chart (on the outer ring) we see that it is sextile to the birthchart position for Uranus, and is in the birthchart’s Third House, which is the house of communication. This is a bad placement for this person’s drunk Mercury. As you might imagine Mercury rules this house, so stumbling and stammering are on the horizon. Likewise, as Uranus is a planet of change and evolution, and Mercury is about communicating change, it is probably not the best time to schedule a corporate press conference announcing Windows NC-17. He does so at his own peril.

And that is really the lesson for today, my lovelies, as we end an eventful and, for me personally, unpleasant year, we should take care to not over-react to drunken Mercury. If you have the knowing of the ways of the stars, and a handy pocket astrology app, you can tease out the raw exposure to the worst of his wrath, and decide how best to avoid it.

If not, a general and circumspect approach to issues involving communication, planning, and travel, is never a bad thing anyway.

Eventually he’ll sober up and head home, and nurse his hangover for around four months before he goes on another bender. At least he’s predictable.

I hope you found this enjoyable and perhaps helpful, and that my words weren’t tangled and twisted. I’ll be back in the new year with another article.

December 21, 2022December 21, 2022

The Solstice Article

I’ve been trying to place these articles just ahead of the major Sabbats and Esbats but today we have the great good fortune to land smack dab in the middle of the Winter Solstice, longest night of the year, and the time when all good ancient pagans lit great big campfires to bid the sun return.

The date is so significant that many ancient peoples around the world built stone calendars that marked the sunrise or sunset. Stonehenge is probably the more famous, but there’s one in Machu Picchu high in the Andes. As far as we know these two cultures were not friends on Facebook. If we discount that they both learned the ritual requirements from some long lost mother civilization like Atlantis, Mu, or Lemuria (and I tend to), we begin to see that the shortest day held special importance throughout human memory. And this means that it probably was known and marked as far back as our time in the cave.

If you’ve been reading my articles for a while, you know there’s ample evidence that we observed and understood the cycles of the earth and sky in at least the time of Cro-Magnon man if not earlier. My first awareness of this came when I discovered the so-called Venus of Laussell while studying early human art in college. The horn she holds has 13 marks, equivalent to 13 lunar months in a solar year. This interpretation comes from my awareness of magical practice and symbology, and you may not find a similar viewpoint expressed by art historians or anthropologists. But these articles are aimed at an audience interested in exploring the possible roots of magical practice in humanity, so we’ll go with that.

It’s actually not too much of a stretch. When you are utterly and completely dependent upon the raw, wild, scary, indifferent, and dangerous Nature around you for your very survival, you need to become an expert on that Nature. And since you don’t have the distraction of social media, cable TV, or the mall, you actually have time to observe Nature and operate in the context of it.

Winter Solstice 2022 — The chart for the moment of the Cusp of Capricorn, which is astrologically the Solstice. This is for my location in the environs of Houston, Texas, so time and space (at least as far as the placement of the Primary Directions and the Houses go) will vary depending on your place in the universe.

I think it fitting that the transition here is from the Mutable Fire of Sagittarius to the Cardinal Earth of Capricorn. We have a metaphor for the Solar deity descending into the Underworld, at the nadir of it’s annual journey. Here it will become transformed to rise again. From this time the hours of daylight grow, until they peek on the opposite side of the Zodiac, between Cancer and Leo. Thus the Great Spring of Water gives way to the Establishing Summer Fire, and the Throne of the Sun.

According to the Chaldees, who charted these stars well before the discovery of the outer planets of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto (only a little over a hundred years ago), both Sagittarius and Capricorn were ruled by old Saturn, that Elder Chaos of the Outer Dark. I know the moderns associate Saturn with rigidity and institutional convention, mainly due to a symbolic connection with antiquity. His reputation as devourer of his children speaks to an angrier and darker memory, one pondered on cold winter nights when fires were lit on hill tops to bid the Sun return.

I see a number of articles and documentaries discussing this idea these days. We modern humans see ourselves as distinct and separate from nature (small n intentional) and therefore seek to dominate, control, plunder, monetize, and ultimately consume it. I don’t disagree with this assessment of our present culture, and I think it is the root of many of the major problems we face as a species.

We have recently reached over 8 billion in population. I think that is astounding and terrifying. There are probably not 8 billion of any other species on this planet. If there are, they are only an insect or a microbe or possibly a virus. In any case, there are not 8 billion of any species with an effective lifespan of nearly a century crawling around, making even more of itself on a world that is finite, under stress, and starting to fight back.

The simple fact is that, regardless of our vast technological civilization, the almost instantaneous hyperknowledge of the Internet, and global interconnectivity, Nature, with a capital N, will eventually consume us.

I don’t believe we can go back to the garden, regardless of how charming that idea may be. If you are reading this, you are consuming fossil fuels, heavy metals, rare earths, and quite probably whole nations of slave labor. And so am I while I write. We cannot simply turn off the switch, dump it all into the river (more than we already are) and “live in harmony with Nature”. As soon as our big brains figured out that they were bigger, we have been on this unbroken path toward dominance or oblivion.

We have evidence of mass extinctions occurring multiple times on this planet. Whole ecosystems have died off, and only a handful of surviving creatures were left to carry on, evolve, and occupy the altered world left unto them. So will it be with humanity. Even if we correct our course, even if we find a way to stop hewing at Mother Earth with mad blind abandon, our brief light might still go out.

Meteors whiz by every day with the potential to not only end civilization, but wipe out most, if not all life on this tiny blue world. Multiple supervolcano sites around the world seem poised to erupt, blackening our skies and shutting off the all important sunlight. The recent global pandemic is hardly as horrific as the Influenza Epidemic of a century ago, and both of them pale in comparison to the Black Death of the Middle Ages, but we shouldn’t pat ourselves too well on the back for “fixing it”.

In Nature, when a population exceeds the ability of it’s environment to support it, that species experiences a die-off. Nature always wins.

Nature will go on without air conditioning, high-speed rail, or interstate commerce. We will not.

Nature will consume us.

This fundamental truth was closer to our ancestors who looked upon the Winter Solstice with great dread that the growing night would go on forever. They did not “live in harmony” with Nature. They had no choice. They could not ideate that their little fire might someday embrace the secrets of the atom, or the great furnace at the heart of that waning sun. All they could do was hope that the spirit up there in that pale orange ball might see a kinship in the bonfire, and once more come back.

And to insure it did come back they learned to count the days and mark the movement of the sun and moon and stars around the sky. They needed to know when to light the fires, and when to make the sacrifices, and when to call the magic.

SmartSelect_20221220_132139_Armillary Sphere — I wanted to use a screenshot of my armillary sphere app to illustrate the Solstice, but discovered that the makers apparently copied the band of the Ecliptic from an antique original that was made before the advent of the Gregorian calendar. Thus the Solstice on the 21st of December is past the Cusp of Capricorn, and off by about 12 days.

On the right is a more modern system, used by photographers and filmmakers to forecast the placement of the sun (and moon) for a given location at a particular point in time. While the goal is different, the idea is the same as the ancient instrument.

Like the Zodiac in the first picture above, these are calibrated for my location. Were I located on the equator, the systems would show the sun moving overhead from East to West at the Equinoxes. At the Summer Solstice, the Sun would arc over about 23.4 degrees to the North, and at the Winter Solstice would be inclined southward by the same amount, due to the tilting of our planets axis during the year.

If I stood at 23.4 degrees North at the Summer Solstice, I would see the Sun directly overhead at noon. But any further north, like the roughly 30 degrees I currently inhabit, and I will always see it trending toward the southern sky. In winter it will not come up very high because of this, which is why in farther northern locations the days appear to get shorter. In extremes near the poles the sun never rises above that southern horizon in winter.

The lines on the globe where the sun appears to reach the limits of it’s travel north and south with the seasons are called the Tropic of Cancer (and the Summer Solstice is the Cancer/Leo Cusp) and the Tropic of Capricorn (Sagittarius/Capricorn Cusp in Winter). Summer and winter as seasons are arbitrary, of course, depending on whether you live north or south of the equator. But within the “tropics” the sun stays more or less direct year round, generating the high temperatures associated with those areas.

The movement of the earth betwixt and between the two Tropics is the origin of tropical cyclones, which distribute heat around the planet and make it livable. Current theories suggest that we are tampering with this system by our use of fossil fuels, altering the mean temperature of the planet and causing shifts in the thermal regulation patterns that are impacting climates worldwide.

From this simple need not to starve and freeze to death, magic arose among humans, and ritual grew to religion, and religion built temples and ziggurats and pyramids and civilizations. We have good evidence now from places like Stonehenge and Gobekli Tepi that these early ceremonial centers may actually have fostered the need for domestication of grain crops and food animals, simply to insure that the ritual feast was supplied to keep the sun from going out.

It’s ironic that the cooperation required to propagate a Solstice ritual might have led to our current culture of conspicuous consumption that threatens to plunge us all into perpetual night. Our leap from 7 billion humans to 8 billion took only a few years. That is untenable, regardless of our technological breakthroughs. We simply cannot sustain this rate of growth. The inevitable outcomes is war, famine, pestilence, and death. Those harbingers of the end times from the Biblical Revelation are the natural consequence of too many of us on a world with finite resources and a long regeneration cycle.

We can’t go back, but we absolutely have to go forward as better stewards of this planet. We must all realize that simply because a few nations have “cleaned up” their industrial pollution, they have done so by moving it elsewhere. The toxicity associated with American industrialization prior to the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts of fifty years ago is now spreading across Asia because their hunger for growth easily dominates “environmental concerns” just as it once did in the U.S.

We need a greater cooperation, and a greater awareness, than even “green” movements are giving us. We need first and foremost to find reliable renewable energy sources that do not rely on consumption of resources and creation of toxic waste products. Secondarily, however, we need to find a means of creating all the devices and equipment we demand to live our modern lifestyle, that also do not rely upon consumption of resources and creation of toxic waste products.

Kat Borealis in her podcast offered the phrase “If it cannot be farmed, it must be mined”. This is a real assessment of our modern culture. Whatever we do not grow is taken from the planet below us, whether by drilling, mining or other extraction. Computers, so central to 21st century life, are composed of petrochemicals, metals, and minerals. There is no part of the laptop I am typing on that has a living renewable source. It presently cannot be “farmed”, so how do we address the desire to remain technological and interconnected if we have to drag every such device from the womb of the earth for an ever increasing number of people? Recycling of such things in the present state is minimal in comparison to the demand for new ones, and the planned obsolescence of aging tech. And the parts that are going into the landfill can be among the worst sort of environmental toxins.

Our demand for “clean water” drives us to package it in an unimaginable amount of cheap plastic. Despite it being recyclable, in theory, our oceans are teaming with these disposable nightmares. The action of sun and water on these things eventually erode them into microplastics, which are now considered a major threat to all life on the planet as they are being consumed by the edible fish that sustain a number of Earth’s populations.

My point is that we are, in a real sense, experiencing that longest night in terms of our tenure on this planet. We have a choice now, to light the bonfire to call back the springtime and growth, and abundance for all life on this world, or we can let it all slip away into the permanent night.

I look forward to trying to light the fire in my corner of the world, and invite you back next week. Thank you for your attention. I hope it counts for something.

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