Seize and Capture Games

{Today is host to a dramatic and normally history etching opposition of Jupiter in Libra and Uranus in Aries, of which I wrote about much last week, so if curious refer back, for now we look forward into the aspects to come}

Mercury enters Libra on the 29th, where the planet that can see two in one and one in two becomes the jongleur, as this is a Venusian sign, lutes are strummed, balls are tossed in balance and the conversation of the kingdom is contorted vocally in bird warble of the court or cawing of the crossroad corner. From our minstrel’s ambulations through the realms he has come to see many perspectives and is able to approach the subject of Justice diplomatically, freeing the puppet to marionette about on liberal strings that still stand to tether the flitting form from falling off the tabletop precipice. Mercury is much better than the Sun at seeing how the other side of something is, and is adept at looking at situations from every angle, plus being the prime communicator has an innate ability to connect verbally in each and every relationship encountered. Even though the Sun is much too busy being an individual expression for this to be its forte, the presence of two planets in Libra’s first decan maybe help us remember that the radical balancing of all the world’s social woes is beyond accomplishable except by rashness and rigidity. By equanimity and tolerance in each interaction and all forms of relationships we might embrace the expressions of other types not only ones that appear to mirror ourself, allowing us to love a psychopath and even love our killer at the moment of death. Indeed, a stretch, but some radical philosophical grace of antipathy is necessary as an antidote for rampant polarization, which scathes and scorches bonds in the colloids of culture and is willing and ready to banish and book burn, thwarting art and beauty. When books begin to get tossed in the flames remember to rethink your politics, or surrender political thinking in general, as it is a warning sign that culture is getting intentionally scourged and scoured, and this task is always put in the hands of the unknowing at the time; those that are reacting to the stimuli. Having a Mercury around is like having a dowser in the ranks, and a silver-tongued mediator.

Simultaneous with this fresh narrative we have Venus oppose Neptune also on Friday the 29th, the last in the train. This is an altogether different situation than the others. Venus does not mind slipping into Dionysus’ embrace and in Virgo she is better off being a little too drunk to nitpick details. She gets a moment to swoon in the sway of intoxication, maybe the kind of hallucination which extends every musical note in a symphony into an articulate universe within itself, and though you are displaced, on a parallel cloud, you rise and fall to the silver shapes that curve and canter in ribbonlike cavalcade and cascade over elaborately carved swan slides into centrifugal fountains that took eons to carve and are at last complete. Towers of copper fiber doused in holy oil gleam polychromatic perfume, for every sprocket a scent that keys twist and turn a locket open to reveal pearlescent pomade in impossible orifices that serve as spindle socket female inlet ends for needle thin and rounded numerically assorted fibers corresponding to the aroma color combinations submerged in sloshing mediums that preserve the fermentation process and allow honeybees entry into the cortex of the palace where the sugars shed their cellular costumes and molecularly naked couple with oxygen agents who climax as tiny bubbles rise to the peaks of the city spires and leave the solution for an escape into ether where they are no more in essence but leave behind an effervescence like no other that can be calmly calculated on an autumn afternoon.

No surprise that Mars is altogether lost in the dark, while his opposite and compliment is deep in lingual forest of this Venusian tome of verse; she is led by phosphorescence and he by musk and bloodlust. Mars trines Pluto September 30th through October 1st. This might be the moment in the film when a helpless child sees his kin slain from some vulnerable vantage. Vowing to avenge his family he matures to become a deadly, much feared swordsman and master of stealth; foreshadowing planet’s time in his sign of Scorpio just around the bend. Mars on the 1st slips a wrench down the drain in the garage and must dive into a vat of used motor oil to retrieve the tool. —The thick and viscous blankness suffocates like serpent stoles or midnight assassins, silent with a scarf slid around the throat— Virgo would love to find the needle in the haystack, but this is more like the needle beyond the frontiers of our solar system and the Lamborghini sent to retrieve it. You could flip the model to a previous (or later) era of western conception and send the sports car to hell. Although, maybe there is no needle after all. Maybe the cherry wood English style medieval era cattle barn you are reproducing with only hand tools ends up being a gateway to the Underworld, whose vacuity you simply could not have predicted, and looking over your shoulder you see the jaws clamp down behind you, the hatch-hole you crawled down into slams shut. You might try to run blind and find another exit, or you might take the crowbar you happened to be carrying and carve your way back out the way you came. Either way, on the surface Mars is MIA for the day, and beneath, you have to at one point at least ponder the void, muttering under your breath or between cigarette puffs: what it is, where does it lead to and what lies beyond? This is two fold. An exhilarating digression, and maybe just the blank mind you need to get your work done; how keeping a beat is easy until you think about what all your body parts are doing and you lose it. We do nothing if we thought all the time, and vis versa and their opposites. There is something to be said of operating from the void. Be/think nothing and do the operation, do what thou wilt and so on.

Directly after this Venus trines Pluto on the 2nd and 3rd. This is a lot of ink to fall on a flower, but depending on the hardiness of the plant it describes an entirely different story. A little black rain is not going to bum out thick jungle vines and tendrils, mighty banyans enveloped in dark smog is a common sight in some parts of the world, or the perma-shadow beneath impenetrable canopies. Although, eventually it is only shock white fungi that persist in cavern tunnel terminus or in the vacuum of space. For the brief time these planets transmit to one another, such “what ifs?”, like romanticism's everlasting farewells, are considered in the apex chord when picked apart, but over all it is again the serpent’s under cover crawl and slither that we feel like the throbbing hearts at the centers of our beds, the writhing sheets, stretched on a frame would appear like dark lacquer canvases, perhaps blacker than Goya’s 14, where you strain at the detail of black layered on black, telling the nocturnal narrative, the alchemical process played out in the procedures of the night, the Nox who slips betwixt the Nuit and weaves the celestial jet-streams into eternal tapestries of the unseen influences; the Light-Stealing Nymph, he/she that flees from light like voluptuous cockroaches or other legion pestilence, the veil over nude plaster pulled away, the grainy light of bleary eyes who rise in the interim and stumble through the house with a mind swollen with dream visions; but they’re then more than mere visions; they are the pregnant memories befalling the mind like gravity plucked apples— The memories perhaps of the Venusian escapades of the 29th, gnomish caricatures entering through slits in overripe tomatoes, dragging along with them the sun-scabs and hornworm scars that smell of basil, whipping up and mopping nymphoid drool and dream poolings, like cold saucers of inert sexual fluid that never belonged to no one, smothering sound and drowning the hard bone sphere there within like a bob in a flushing mechanism; you must tilt your head and drain it out your ear, embroidering long and elaborate tags to stitch on the ends of every object adjacent lest you forget where you were, artful and crafty indicators to go on when you’re missing that describe the things that are quickly losing form and meaning. Then swoosh! The darkness recedes and all your left with is a scrawling pencil penetrating the pages of a dream journal, over riding its rigid streamers of rule.

Tricky to get anything done with all of this going on. Especially as the Sun and Mercury are now much more focused on collecting callers and rotating their rolodex. Venus peers up from below to assess the social scene through a periscope as the speaker horns bleat and burn and the encaged bulbs blink red alert. Venus conjoins Mars on the 5th during a Full Moon in Aries. This is the first lunation since the eclipse season that hasn’t intimately involved Neptune. This lunation takes on its own unique flavor. The Sun, with Mercury close behind applying to superior conjunction feeds the Moon full of light in Mars’ initial sign while Mars is being conjoined by Venus in Virgo. This is Yin overtaking yang on a full Yin night, when luminary Yang is filling up luminary Yin, who blossoms and climaxes. The sexual interplay is obvious here. It is a chiasmic exchange of gender polarities, receptions and actions, givings and takings, catching and conjoining. Not really a Moon for real life management, but appropriated for dominance play, regardless of who’s holding the crop and who must lick who’s boots. The Sun and Mercury have our intellects and communication concentrating on oaths, promises, alliances, and contracts of all kind, bondage scenarios included, as our minds and mouths are driven to connecting with other’s, as our bodies and moods swell with impulsive and intemperate heat, pushing our thoughts into imaginings of control or being controlled. This might communicate simply overstepping our sovereignty at work or in our social spheres, but coincidentally our other sexually polarized pair of planets conjoin in Virgo at the same time. Venus holds steady vision of the object being perfectly crafted, and overtakes Mars, dictating instructions, perhaps via breath in the ear, giving him the job of chiseling, tempering, scouring and polishing the obelisk and orb they together create. The Moon showers the pair, whose sensual scene is set in an open air blacksmith shop by the hot forge, the leaves outside falling and fluttering, the coyotes ululating in the distance, playing their own seize and capture games.

It is of course easy enough to edit out the sexual connotation and reframe this forecast, although, it must be first considered how the very creative principle is a sexual one; a universe spinning out of the conjoined linga/yoni; or how in Tarot traditions the Wand/Club/Staff category typically consolidates all of the fire, spirit, sexual and creative aspects of life. Whether or not this Moon includes literal coitus or its equivalent, there is a spark of creation here, as early autumn Librian light bathes and fills the Lunar cup in the opposite zodiacal pole of Aries, a reflecting back and forth across the wheel, mirror signals that code a creative cipher, those words Venus whispers to Mars in their conjunction, that stir what is deep within and motivate us to bring our desires into manifestation. Here we again return to ‘do what thou wilt’, and with good reason, this reminds us that the sexual energy we all have access to can be used for a VERY wide variety of applications, depending on wether or not you are willing to lasso the fiery serpent and temper its tongue. Though not a night for just any or all magical operation or mundane life management, it appears Ideal for practical procedure regarding kundalini climb.

As far as charm making, we peruse the first Mansion of the Moon, called Alnath in both the Picitrix and Agrippa’s Three Books… While Agrippa scantly mentions journeys, he mostly concentrates on discord, explaining that when the Moon was in the Horns Of The Bull images were made ‘of a black man wearing a garment of hair in an iron ring, girdled and casting a lance; this was sealed in black wax and perfumed with storax for the purpose of hexing someone. The Picitrix, speaking similarly of discord and causing people to flee otherwise also elaborates more on the positive aspects of this Mansion: “The wise of India begin their journeys and take medicines when when the Moon is in this Mansion . This Mansion is also ought to be used as the root in every image that you wish to make in order to go on a journey, so as to travel safely and return in good health.” The correspondent jyotish mansion or Nakshatra is Uttara Bhadra which is characterized by Kama (desire) and its opposite, the nil, personified by the Dragon of the deep sea, the state of primeval ignorance. Here we witness the same polarities present in this lunation in the tipping time just after the equinox as well as the concurrent Mars-Venus conjunction: light and darkness, hot and cold, desire and sleep. Uttara Bhadra is said to be in a state of celestial slumber until a planet touches it, and here we certainly have a trigger, as Aries is often likened to the bullet from the barrel, this is Moonlight shot from a gun. If that is how you’d like to mark the outset of your journey, do so, but with Mercury conjoining the Sun on the 8th, it would be best if it were a lift off into outer space, which at this point, might still be best accomplished astrally, with your body left on earth. This somewhat satisfies Uttara Bhadra’s schemes of transcendence of the physical form and the Western material’s emphasis of the initial discord of ingesting medicine and taking a trip. I’ve never made a “Matrix” analogy before but the reader is free to insert one here. That being accomplished I’ll summarize my suggestion: if you wish to make a charm or talisman under this Full Moon, make one for astral travel into higher spheres under the auspices of a roused fire-snake, and do so either as the astrological opposition is applying (before 2:38 pm (est) on Thursday the 5th, adjusting accordingly for planetary hour and benefics on the ascendant) or during the dark hours the previous evening, as the Moon will still be waxing on the night of the 4th and early am of the 5th, but will be waning in the pm of the 5th. Common calendars label “Full Moon” on the date given the 24 hour period within the Moon opposes the Sun, even if that is at 1:05 am, which confuses layWitches who tend to accidentally schedule their Full Moon magic for after the Moon is already waning. The calendar makers don't technically lie but they deceive none the less.