Fun Loving Titan

The Moon is in Capricorn right now and waning, twenty-one days since the New Moon. While preparing this forecast I was writing in my journal about pan-magic-dream-happenstance cemetery coincidences when someone texted me about meeting a man who’s last name was Ghostwatcher because his family were the protectors of a cemetery. I looked on Instagram and people were posting photos of gravestones exhibiting names like Beach and Barefoot simultaneous with people offering images of baby crows and the backsides of famous photographs. The Moon will be in a Saturn ruled sign until the wee hours of April twenty-first, and it seems that, as predicted, the square with Venus in maximum exaltation has made our driest planet’s perspective seem very whimsical to art’s eye. This will undoubtedly persist as the Moon transitions to Aquarius, aided by the current trines applying to both electric Uranus and slither-swerving Mercury retrograde; this is some wonderful the ‘dead are speaking to us’ shit. NASA’s spacecraft Cassini has just found evidence of sub-oceanic hydrogen vents on Enceladus suggesting that one of Saturn’s 62 moons might be able to support life. Things are looking up for the planet of Death and Inevitability. Indeed, right now many eager Scarlet Imprint fans are pouring over Peter Mark Adams’s newly published book The Game Of Saturn, which illuminates a renaissance Venetian elite’s sinister workings with Cronus and Moloch. The old Titan seems to be making a vivacious comeback.

As previously mentioned in last week's forecast, female conceptions of Saturn have been mentioned since ancient times, despite their being kept in a dark and cool cabinet like tinctures infusing. Could this feminine Kronos be like Tarot's Temperance? The sifting sands in the enclosed hourglass having become water and freely poured from receptacle to receptacle by an androgynous angel? If the state of dryness is subtracted from the Earth element it phase shifts into Water element, Earth and Water sharing the condition of coldness. Cassini collected water samples from Enceladus by being sprayed; the moon regularly contracts from gravity squeezing its ice shell like an atomizer ball metronome-ally. This is a softer Time, perhaps the one Mick Jagger sings about... "Time, its on my side, oh yes it is..." The angel that gaurds over the circulating waters of the fountain is perhaps the most classic example of a funeral monument we have.

Normally, waning Moons are given far less attention than waxing Moons, full Moons and New Moons. There’s no question why a silver daylight night that has predator fangs a-drip with salivation, or a dead, magma black quiet that threatens to pull you forever into the evergreen, take precedence over a gradual corruption into obscurity. Promises of climax falter the attention of wandering minds under wax, the throb of drums dilating as the globular orb swells into a circle. As much as erotic anticipation distracts us, don’t we also reminisce extraordinary sexual episodes? After the summer’s most gauntlet song, the most oracular bonfire or fearsome festival, where flags and banners fly as exalted phoenixes that shred over the heat of fealty, lusty raindrops cascade fat as chipmunks, replete with death throe spasmodics― squirming, restless melted glass in the eyes of friends and lovers, whispered oaths through hair whipped forests, moist laughter captured briefly in moth nets of phosphorescent fungal parchment; after such Lughnasadhs don’t we live the following weeks colored by what had transpired? By the friends we hadn’t seen for too long, the peels of illicit magic and the smell of smoke in our clothing. With these realizations we paint in our interior caves. That after-blot period is like the waning of a great and luminous lunation blossom. Strangely, we tend to only have a few per year, or, being liberal, half as many as there are Full Moons. If we were to sync up to the lunar sine wave, we’d have twelve rigorous Tower Card episodes a calendar year, thirteen if it be Blue. To seize this advantage we must diligently try to optimize our wanes.

As we know, Mercury rules over communications, travel, technology, and it is those elements of everyday life that fray and fry and fritz when he is retrograde, essentially, because he is then vacant from his office for the duration. Alternately, you could metaphorically leave him in there, but picture he is in a deep trance, moving and speaking strangely. Imagine the backwards action in The Black Lodge. Distracted by fitful possession, his mind more in the Underworld fountain-water than up in our world’s air, allowing for abrupt lapses in his normal functions. Mundanely irritating, although, for us, this creates a superb opportunity for various divination and sorcery, which Mercury also presides over. Take the opportunity of his trance state to consult the oracle. Any deceased Magi you had been wishing to schedule a tête-à-tête with? Such rendezvous is appropriate wane activity, beside being a period to reflect on what was made manifest by last wax bloom, and integrate the experience of those manifestations with all levels of your frame, form and numen.

Mercury and the Sun swap early in the morning of the 20th at 0°20’ Taurus, then Mercury heads back in to Aries by two in the afternoon. Divination will be quite blind during this period, not to say I don’t suggest it, but that it may not be of the most cerebral sort. Try putting the cards and pentacles aside for the while and get some synapse going in your body, move around freely and remember it. Arrange some stones or branches automatically and leave them to look at later. Mercury won’t be beyond the threshold of combust until the 29th, but as he moves closer to Uranus over the next two weeks there should be some mercurial plasma bursts that spume through the solar haze; imagine drizzle of mercury from the Sun at midday that seeps into a focal spot on the ground, in moments fixed lightening erupts up from the crust, frozen for the space of a divination. Try to have your photopaper poised and at ready to collect the exposure. Mercury is Decanically well placed in Aries, so get ready to burn many images, incendiary rosettes, shadow etchings stencil vaulting choreography, charcoal spasm blown figures, or maybe just film footage of it.

Mercury and Uranus reach a partile conjunction on the 27th, and then move in relative unison until almost mid may, syncing their speeds, holding hands, sharing the burden of something they carry, a shocking delivery; in matching uniform they will begin to act as one. With no doubt, this will be an explosive season for sorcerous as well as divinatory works, spiced with many eureka moments and flashfires in magical laboratories. Afterwhich, (we’re talkin’ May 16th) Mercury gains speed and rushes back into Taurus, whence you can resume the theme from a couple weeks back, this time with Mars in Gemini, Mercury’s sign, so we’ll have our emissary of action doing symbolically impregnated shadow dances in the aerial fires, where every movement motions for something else signaled behind the curtain. Mercury will be too combust the sun to pull martian strings just yet, but we’ll still get a chance to thoroughly inspect our warrior-puppet by the 21st of April as Mars ingresses into the Twins’ sign.

Mars’ exit from Taurus will be a long needed upswing on the energy pendulum. You’ll suddenly have enough energy to do more than one thing at a time, and you’ll probably attempt it, but at least as long as Mercury is retrograde you’ll most likely blow your first jongleur audition. Loosen the reigns and head out for the circus after May 4th if you want your orbs to volley impressively. An additional note here: Mars should not be made in an image of the first face of Gemini. This is volatile energy, gas that can flare up in your face, maybe even with the potential to inhale the heated vapor. Using him in a more Mercurial way is the key. You’re not creating martial talismans with your action, you’re simply splitting your actions into multiple meanings with the aid of Geminaic, symbolic thinking. This evokes the god Ares, originally a god of dance before being a god of war. Quickly summoning images of indigenous and/or any tribal/traditional martial styles reveals the connection, an overt example being Capoeira; if you're unfamiliar you may catch a lovely glimpse by watching the film Madame Sata.

Before all this, on Wednesday the 19th, we’ll experience Mercury-Day followed by Sun-Night, where both planets (as well as Mars) will all be in Taurus. Questions of what the world means and how multivalent abundance can be manifested roam the newly cleared pastures in our heads. After Mars enters Gemini even our physical movements and acts of destruction become laced with intellectual cross-examinations. We might consider how ascension being the primary goal of many world religions over the ages is an incomplete schema. The stress on ascension of the individual being is largely a growing pain to societies becoming acquainted with the accumulative progress oriented mindsets that technology ushers in. These were world religions whose technological senses were phantoms that danced enchantingly on the lexiconal archons, over writing systems themselves, loadstone navigation, lain aside frighteningly mind-boggling inventions such as the Antikythera mechanism as if they were game hares. These are the technologies of pre-rational, magical thinking worlds. As we are now much in the throes of a later technology (whose bleeding edge is not unlike the Marseille Arcanum XIII’s), and certainly in a world sincerely ready to consider slowing down if not reversing much of its hubristically blind and obsessive progress patterns, the emerging shape of religion that rises out of Monotheism’s well scattered ashes doesn’t require such singular focus on goals of ascension. Possibly, a much older interpretation of the spirit, and the cosmology it resides in, is finally returning. The sublunary realm is surely one of the nine spheres, astrological timing having profound effect here on Earth, although, there are other ground level systems with in which we are immersed that play off the four cardinal directions and the three divisions of matter; animal, vegetable, mineral. Planetary hours and demonic days correlate, but not always interchangeably so. The realm of Earth and the Celestial heavens dance, but in a chiasmatic juxtaposition of forces. Taurus can remind us that we don’t perforce do our best karmic work in isolated prayer, but by putting materia through processes that result in the bettering of other people’s lives. The process of becoming continually more ethereal runs sometimes parallel but on separate tracks from the carnal process of transforming materials. We have many bodies, many beings that merge together in array to form our whole, one of which is ascetic, another one is diabolic. We must remember that the goal is not necessarily to coerce all of these bodies to conform with abstinence. The illusory world is of beguiling profundity, teeming with spirits who are literally just waiting to be invited into our talismans, medicines and bodies.