age – 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.

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.

November 2, 2022November 1, 2022

The Birthday Article

This article is scheduled for publication just before my birthday of November 7th. I’ve always been fond of saying that I was born 7 days after Halloween, but I have only recently become aware that my birthday may be the actual date celebrated by the ancients as Samhain.

The ancient calendar (or so I was told) was based on the Equinoxes and Solstices that divide the year into quarters. The Cross-Quarter Days, were the midpoint between those, which, being a middle space, heralded the Opening of the Ways.

Apparently our modern November 7th is the Cross-Quarter Day midpoint between the Autumnal Equinox and the Winter Solstice. It’s 15 degrees through the sign of Scorpio which sits between the Libra of the Equinox and the Sagittarius of the Solstice. The equinoxes and solstices are 90 degrees apart on the zodiac, and 15 degrees of Scorpio is 45 degrees from either side.

So, like I told the clerk at the store the other day, I am Halloween.

That certainly would explain a lot.

Lab Experiment 2 — Since last week’s article fell before the Samhain/Halloween holiday, I thought I would adorn this week’s posting with pictures from my Haunted Firehouse setup. The props are things I have collected or made over the years, employing lighting and basic stage trickery to delight and frighten the visitors. It seems to have been effective. The lab experiment is a hairdresser’s mannequin I acquired in one of my other lifetimes when I worked as a professional stylist. That was between being the cemetery caretaker and international man of mystery.

The good news is, we all get Halloween for another week, and that can’t be a bad thing. I no longer have to call it second Halloween. It’s Halloween. Which I guess makes the other Pre-Halloween, but let’s not spoil it with technicalities. Tis time, Tis Time!

My birthday this year commemorates 57 trips around the Sun. I still have a little time ahead before my second Saturn return, but when you get close, you start feeling it. The first one in our late-twenties/early-thirties usually knocks us on our ass, dropping a load of adultness on us in one fell swoop. I am hoping that this second round is a tad more refined, mature, and circumspect, owing to those changes in myself. I think, perhaps, I needn’t be conked on the head quite so forcefully this time to get the message.

Though if this year is any indication. the conking has begun. My family has been visited by death three times closely, and three more times nearby, and the year still has a few more weeks to work. Despite the months that have passed, I still find myself working through things related to the realization of the permanence of these losses. Regardless of all other things that may come to be, these things will never be altered. They are now a permanent part of the web of memory and thought and emotion that constitute who I am in the universe.

So pardon me, Saturn, if I say I’m ready to get through this return thing sooner rather than later.

This blog is partially due to hearing that ticking of the clock a bit louder every day. Now, I am in relatively good health, I am taking steps to improve my health and hope to see Saturn return at least once more, if not twice (it’s possible). But as you reach certain points in life, you start thinking about things that you’ve put off, or allocated to someday.

My life has been full. It has moved in unexpected ways, and I consider every twist and turn to be one step closer to where I stand now. Some of the things that have happened I planned. Some of them I dreamed. Most were thrown at me by the universe in a mad game of existential catch. I’ve done my best not to drop the ball, though I’d be a liar if I said I hadn’t a few times.

In walking down that road, some things that were the dreams and ambitions of my youth were cast aside, to be filled with more useful, enjoyable, and worthy pursuits. But there are those that linger, that I still find joy in, and thanks to the advent of the Internet and the broad community connected to one another by it, I have opportunities to explore those things.

The fire department has excellent fog machines. They are used to simulate the conditions inside a burning building and boy howdy do they work. It was difficult to get pics of the various stations of the spooky tour, and this clip from the video is about the best shot I got of my coffin. Yes I have a coffin. Oddly enough I got it at work. Not the job at the cemetery.

The series of articles I have been posting here since around April are part of that. Originally I intended this to be something of an aside to the webstore, which I still hope will appear on this domain. But life, the universe and everything frequently interferes with my plans, and this has become a larger, and hopefully more enjoyable, offering.

I get that even today a written blog is fast becoming an anachronism. In an environment dominated by “influencers” and social media, anyone wanting to be seen and heard has moved on to the podcast circuit, and my friends know I considered that at the beginning. It’s not been completely ruled out, as I have the equipment from my filmmaking work. But the time required to produce, record, edit, and publish a regular podcast is just not something I have right now. Maybe in 2023. Or 2024. Still lots on my plate.

The weekly dribbling from my mind’s eye that you will find here was initially motivated in a previous incarnation by my feelings that many in the modern occult community were getting a lot of surface but little depth. I think that may still be true for a lot of people, but either the tide is turning, or I am just becoming more aware of the deeper voices.

This clip is Charlie who you might just make out on top of the coffin in the previous image. Charlie was made for a sculpture class I took in the mid-90s. Over the years, the latex and foam rubber have naturally degraded to give him a wonderfully creepy countenance. He comes out now and again. He was seen briefly in my short film Silent for the 48 Hour Film Festival, but usually he stays in his cage. It’s better for everyone that way.

I have been working with the unseen since I was about 7 years old and got my first Tarot deck. Along with a book on a broad range of esoteric disciplines, and a later book on witchcraft directly, this journey was undertaken in comparative secrecy and on a solitary path. After decades, it is likely that I will always be more or less solitary, but in later years the secret part has slipped away. This is the result of moving from a very restricted rural community in the hills of Eastern Kentucky to the suburbs of the largest city in Texas. There are more weirdos here than me, and I have been lucky enough to meet up with a few.

I am that guy on the Hermit card. While it is relatively easy for me to be loquacious on the most bizarre of subjects here on the internet, in person I am less so. This is a holdover from those years when talk of such odd things was considered evil sacrilege or worse by the local populace. But I still am not entirely trusting of people I meet who present a strange and unusual vibe.

Let’s be honest. Some of them are crazy. For that matter, I might be crazy, too. But there’s a good crazy and a bad crazy, and I have had that experience of sharing perhaps too freely with someone who needs professional help.

There are doubtless some who might say I would probably benefit from professional help, myself. But it’s hard to find a reliable alchemist these days.

See, that flippancy is what the therapists call a deflection. Avoiding the deep complicated stuff by making a joke. There’s the meme that goes around about “sarchotic” being the state where people don’t know if you’re being sarcastic or if you’re psychotic.

I never know either. But it’s usually fun, and it can be entertaining for those paying close attention. For the rest, well, I’m not really all that interested in keeping their company. There’s that Hermit thing again.

The world has over 7 billion people on it, and a lot more in it. You can’t possibly be friends with all of them, and you’ll go mad trying. In my youth, I lived in a community where conformity was the standard. Think about that. Being like everyone else meant you had to be like everybody else. That’s soul-crushing and sadly not isolated to small towns in remote regions.

I chose not to conform, and that rebellion ultimately got me cast out. Figuratively at first – being ostracized from the social groups, both in school and afterward. I was considered as weird by “adults who should know better” as my so-called peers. The kids had to learn it from somewhere. Eventually I just up and left, because there was a wider world beckoning.

And in that wider world, I ran across, from time to time, others who had a similar outlook, and formed connections both short and long. I also ran across people who were utterly despicable, wasters of my time, lost souls, mad, bad, and dangerous to know. I was lucky enough to recognize those encounters and move away from them as fast as was practical and possible. You can’t always tell the boss to shove it.

Esmerelda here was probably my favorite setup. The Temple of the Golden Idol had to be drastically scaled back to comply with new fire codes, so the Fortune Teller ended up being a big hit. Of course when you have Tarot Cards and crystal balls around the house, it’s a fairly easy scene to put together. Esmerelda has been seen on my instagram multiple times as Erasmus. It’s handy to have gender fluid props when trying to set up something like this.

I find as the years pass that some of that latter group might simply have appeared to be that way because of who I was at the time. And to be honest, some of the “friends” I made along the way turned out to be that only because of who I was at the time. We change, we transition. we hope that we grow. Or at least learn not to mistake simple change for actual growth. I am as guilty of seeking greener grass as the next person.

The Hermit is not at the end of his path. He is just at a stopping point for this moment.

“The road goes ever on and on, down from the door where it began.”

I use my birthday as a kind of regeneration. I attempt to assess, improve, reject, and jettison any unneeded parts of myself that have ceased to serve. In a way, it’s a personal Samhain. It signals a new beginning for the next year.

I hope that you will continue to join me for it. Back next week with hopefully less introspective content.

May 18, 2022July 18, 2022

Since Before You Were Born

I found myself thinking a rather odd thought the other day. I was in conversation with some people about Tarot, and realized, quite to my surprise, that I almost proclaimed: “But I’ve been doing this since before you were born!”

See, I have been working with Tarot since I was seven years old. That means that this year, I have a half century of experience with cartomancy and the use of Tarot symbology.

Fifty. Years.

And it occurred to me that my companions were neither over 50 years old.

That’s a jarring realization.

Don’t get me wrong. I have great respect and have learned a tremendous amount from the people in question, and I am glad to have been taken into their company. But the thought put me down a rabbit hole, regarding my own experience and practice of the mantic arts.

Obviously at seven I was not a master Tarot reader. I had a book that had introduced me to many concepts regarding magic and the occult, and I had the thin book that came with my cards, now lost. But, for everything there is a first time, and for me it was back in the early 70s.

So by the time I reached my teens, I had memorized the standard meanings for the cards, the reversed meanings, and the general layouts, and could do a reading without having to refer to the book.

I had intuited that “reading” meant assessing the entire context of the layout, perhaps not exactly in line with the book interpretations, or even with respect to the traditional significance of a card’s placement. That didn’t come from the books I had, but anyone who has been reading a while will tell you that comes with practice.

My augmentation of the box containing my Dragon Tarot cards. My third oldest deck, a gift from my wife sometime in the early 1990s.

I was on my way to a more personal, and more powerful, relationship with the cards before I was able to drive a car. And that’s likely before any of my friends ever even picked up a deck.

I did stop myself from blurting out “I’ve been doing this since before you were born!”

We all hate hearing that kind of answer. It smacks of arrogance, judgment, and perhaps a little condemnation. It’s right there with “You kids get off my lawn”, and effectively ends any substantive conversation. It presumes an authority that may not exist, purely derived from the passage of time.

All of us have different experiences, and just being older or doing something longer doesn’t automatically connote superior knowledge. But yet we all have either had the urge to proclaim our superior position in the timeline, or we will have that urge.

I stopped reading the cards for people in the mid 2000s for a number of reasons, but I still collect and work with Tarot (and some oracle decks). I use them both as personal divinatory aids and for meditative journeys based on the imagery. And their symbology has influences into my art and craft and magical workings.

However, not being an active reader working with clients means I may be missing out on some insights that happen in that environment. Most experienced readers will tell you that there’s an intuitive, possibly even psychic, process to interpretation, and that certainly is impacted by the presence of the person for whom you are reading. So there is every chance that I can learn something new from my friends who have an active public practice, even if they haven’t been at it as long.

On the other hand, there are potentially things that I have come across because I explore the cards in context of other magical practice, so their elemental, astrological, kabbalistic, and numerological aspects come to the fore. Certainly these can and do have a bearing on reading for other people, although perhaps not as prominently.

It’s not likely to be found in the “little white book” that comes with the deck, at least not in depth. There are so many layers and correspondences that it can take years to find them, and I don’t claim to have found even most of them.

Every time I get a new deck, I rethink and reinvent what I know about Tarot. I collect decks that “speak” to me. That would be the case with most of us who collect them.

There’s a very personal relationship between the Taroist and their cards. In my case the connection is the art. As an artist myself, that is the first touchstone.

Knowing so very well the “standard” Rider-Waite-Smith deck, I am constantly on the lookout for a fresh expression of both the themes and the artwork. Some of my decks are very different and provide completely new images for the traditional meanings. Others take the established symbols and evolve them in new and exciting ways.

tarot collectiion — This was only a portion of the decks I had accumulated in the spring of 2020. I think there may be more than 40 now. It’s hard to say. Some go hiding from time to time.

I can’t connect to a deck if I don’t connect to it’s artwork. My original deck, as I learned from Ms. Via Hedera, is called the Hoi Polloi. While substantially using the standard artwork, it is more brilliantly colored, and the line work simplified. It was my only deck for around fifteen years. Living in the boonies as I was, I honestly didn’t realize there were others.

I was gifted an RWS deck for my 21st birthday. I found the rather drab cards of the “official” deck underwhelming. I very rarely referenced that deck. That said, I have recently become aware that there are some important differences between it and my favored Hoi Polloi.

Likewise, I do not currently own a version of the so-called Marseilles Tarot.

Because I think it’s butt-ugly.

They’re based on wood-cuts made to mass produce decks as the Tarocchi game became popular outside of Italy. (Tarot is the French name of the game).

As the transitional point between Italian decks hand made for merchant princes, and the RWS designed specifically for use as an oracle, it is important, and as I look back on 50 years of working with Tarot, I am obliged to examine it more closely.

It’s easier, of course, to just hold fast to my old way of doing things. It’s easier to think that if I have been doing this since before many of you were born that I have nothing new to learn.

That would be wrong.

Should I reject the restless dreams of youth as novelty and folly, I miss out on the opportunity to grow. Likewise, I immediately erect a wall between myself and that same youth, who will then take everything I say as a criticism or judgment. Any pearls that may fall amongst the dogma and rhetoric are wholly dismissed. This is the road to sterility and stagnation.

One thing the years brings is perspective. And from that perspective we should take confidence in examining the road behind. We may find that there was something we missed the first time through, that only now, with the benefit of years, makes sense. Or we may find that cherished and hotly defended concepts are hollow and faulty, and in need of remediation.

Finally, we may find that we have something to pass on, after all. Because someday that knowledge, be it favorable or false, will pass out of this world, unless it is shared. Never set yourself so far apart that you lack for at least one ear to hear it.

Thank you for reading this. I look forward to our next encounter.

Larry S. Evans II

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !