Wall and Wormhole

DECEMBER 3RD

The Moon swells to fullness just before 11am (EST) on December 3rd in a complicated array of intertwining rulership relations. All of the planets in Sagittarius, (Venus, Saturn conjunct retrograde Mercury and the Sun), while the Moon opposes he Sun from Gemini, which our retrograde Mercury rules, while the luminaries square Neptune in Jupiter’s sign of Pisces, Jupiter being trine Neptune from Scorpio, and it is this Scorpionic Jupiter that hosts the group in Sagittarius and Neptune to boot. Clearly it is Scorpionic Jupiter at the base of this inverted pyramid, and the Moon that has swollen to fullness rises in the night but really descends down into matter as she is led by Mercury tight to Saturn and moving in reverse motion.

Deep and intimate transformational-philosophical coherence in harmony with fantasy and dream or perhaps photography and illusion. This is stressed by Mercury’s retrograde motion, the ‘what must be done details’ to finish elongated sequences reversed by returned or suddenly revealed information that had been buried or hidden. This Geminiic Moon is overbrimming with impressions of curious information and how such facts should be felt about; Being pulled two directions at once from multivalent emotions of endgame information; such as: “This photo means I must condemn someone I love” etc. This is hard on the luminaries; mind, emotion and soul intention suffer from coherence of the illusion. If the illusion is to be understood, it means the vision of the world previous is false. With Saturn so close to Mercury it may be some information be confidential or restricted; maybe a matter of an abundant awareness of damning information withheld. The fantasy agenda was pushed so hard it slipped through the wall of sleep and into office hours; this can happen with fantasies that become obsessions; the photo you saw of yourself arm and arm with the object of your desire that gets passed around by the Paparazzi; but you were not there, even though you wanted to be, you wouldn’t have, but now the picture is proof of the affair, and the illicit details follow; it doesn’t matter if you did or didn’t, the dream simply became too real, the desire too strong, something slipped through your psyche and into causality.

And Luna looms like a lens, in which is reflected the specters we thin match flames in cold steel blue, upon wooden spindles turned by time; this particular notch in the rod old grey wood looks different than it did then when we were not around to see and so have to trust what photographs have been left behind.

I recently asked my grandmother if it looked different when she was young. ‘Of course’, she replied, we dressed nice back then’, etc, etc. and I said, “No, I mean reality itself” She thought for a second and added, “Yeah, a little bit, it did look different.”

So, depending on which part of this array your planets are pinged may involve you in a different part of the drama. Though, if we pull the lunation itself out of the scene in which its set, (although it really makes little sense to drop its context) it may at least FEEL like a conflict of choice that leaves you simultaneously frenetic and melancholy; maybe the way one feels toward the tail end of a serial binge. But as previously stated, this array combines what you see on the screen with what is in your dreams, those you immerse in while asleep and those that rest as chin on palm in doldrum projections into possible fates, and somewhere in between you’re tipped off that there is a clue that changes the game by melting its mechanics; mousetrap of wax beheld where snake and ladder shafts are elastic hierarchies that infect us with new cultural aesthetics; where was the letter dropped? At what stage of play? And we search and stab at this or that phrase as we might in lunar light of divinations that fret us more than before we posed our questions.

The lunation takes place in the 6th Lunar Mansion, Athaya, Alchaya or Alhanna. Both Agrippa and the Picitrix mention its benefit to hunting in the country and its thwarting of medicines. We might remember that this is a Moon cycle begun in Scorpio, the sign of predatory desire and poison. The Trigon Lord of the decan which hosts the Moon at full is Mars, yet the ruler of this decan by the Chaldean order is Venus. Indeed, this decan is about both separation and combination, and this is parallelled in the issues of the greater array. The severance caused by the mingling of fact and fantasy; this is not necessarily the loss of rationality derived from swallowing lies, but the victory of subjectivity over objectivity. Someone’s experience being more important than the technical facts. The Nocturnal holding sway over the Diurnal; what seems to be champions over what clearly is. This current flows a bit both ways, and in the moiré a third vision emerges, but this is only held by the few, as in miracle, perception of the subtle is rarely seen by the masses. Although, this dual illusion may reveal itself to more than just the usual pairs of eyes.

Hopping back about 24 degrees to the Jyotish nakshatra we come to Rohini, which speaks of the unseen processes that go on behind the scenes of reality to make manifestation firm enough for us to believe the illusion. Considering Rohini’s consort, Rohit, who is red, and achieves this substantiating of reality by being the blood through which vitality is maintained. Hopping back to Tropical from Sidereal we see this as in Gemini, an air sign, and by humoric theory sanguine, which is the humor of the blood, and the meta-humor that moves all the other humors around. Sanguinity inclines itself to culture, charm and élan, in Libra the culture of society and the arts, in Aquarius the culture of science and innovation and in Gemini the culture of ideas and media. Rohini leads the soul into the world to experience ‘all its pleasures and attachments and drunkenness’. Similarly, Gemini’s influence is to cause curiosity to the point of being utterly lost and scattered in confusion, going this way and that after the sparkle of interests. In India Rohini also symbolizes first menstruation, and in our comparison it is a waking up to sanguinity, a realizing and gaining awareness of what blood pumps and circulates behind the curtain; that maybe our dreams are connected to our fates; and maybe our use of language and movement do have a subtle correspondence to what manifests around us; and all this vicious business we’ve been through is not at the hands of monsters or men but the sentient subtext that hangs over the syntax and lingo and lexicon of the monoculture; and at the level of our loins there is a fire of change; where the synapse fires like crooked lightening within our grey matter comes a surging static skeleton that glistens with plasma and pulsates with script; that above in the brain is a switchboard wired to the instincts of love, and lust, and death and wrath and rapture; that when our dreams walk into the light of day, and night and sunlight swirl and mingle like balsamic and oil, even if these visions be nightmares; and especially when they are; they may be the leg and breast and haunches of our horses above which rise the trunks and napes and arms and crowns of those who carry bows sinewed tight and ready for what bouquet’s of poison quills collected into side-slung satchels from which are silver missiles and ebony darts— or the Sun disgorged up from a well; finally released to those that prostrate to the earth in equal tide and tender to those that veil themselves and spect the hot hours hidden in caves. All this. An irritating loss of boundary between life and illusion; a fork in the road; our own fantasy or the lies we are given. We only have one blood, and it shant be wasted boiling in a false crucible when it could be distilled by the subtlety of our own enchantment.

With the Moon sweeping to full in the territory of Aldebaran we may be feeling like honoring our sacred contracts. This is probably one stabilizing factor in a not wholly negative but conflicted array. A lunation that begins with the poisons and desirous indulgences of Scorpio and ends in possible information overload is not dissimilar to the ingestion of a sacred entheogen; you are healed by your hallucinatory and dissociative journey but in the way that you re-calibrate life, you frame the world differently, you have a more intergraded and expanded idea of how your body exists in reality. This generally occurs by receiving an overload of visions, ideas and sensations that essentially fry or jam your circuitry, requiring that you make new connections. Receiving the starfire of Aldebaran the Moon might make us feel like going through for what our souls signed up for despite the maximalist barrage. A Full Moon is always an opposition with the Sun; vision and emotion, mind and spirit on either end of a leveling (hopefully) seesaw. The Sun here near Antares could fix our intents on our obsessions, again, readying ourselves to endure the ordeal that transforms us. Bernadette Brady mentions “behind the scenes power games”, and this reminds us that across the Zodiac Rohini is perhaps a lifting of the veil so that we see the mechanics beneath. This is spoken of in various magical, mystical and plant medicine traditions, and being Sagittarius season we might be especially open to the alien and exotic. Jupiter being newly oriental (as is Mars, Scorpio’s ruler), and in this configuration near the star Acrux, especially attempts to make these experiences of dream, ordeal, hallucination and obsession with sacred contract fulfillment an initiation of productive materialization; he wants us to walk away turned on to a grounding and growing philosophy. The place that probably hurts most is our logical communications and sense of structure, not surprisingly; those are the first things to go out the window in a hallucinatory and frightful ordeal. Mercury retrograde conjunct Saturn is close to fixed star Acumen, the tip of the Scorpion’s tail, and stings with poison which if it doesn’t kill corrodes its target over time. It may be a long sought and fought after goal, or lifelong philosophy lived by must die in light of reversals and revelations of new information. Quitting old habits and shedding skins has certainly been the name of the game for this round of Scorpio, and on this Moon we may get the final tail shake, and start seeing the results of the hit; this is the peak of the trip.

DECEMBER 4TH

The Moon, newly waning but still very bright, just beginning her period of reflection, maybe not saying yet “What happened?”, but “What’s happening?”, opposes the MercuryRx-Saturn pair on December 4th, and we may feel the physical tension and emotional distance the sting inflicts. We may inspect our wound for the first time, maybe the moment in trip you first realize you’re bleeding and wonder where you’re wounded. Luna immediately enters rulership in Cancer from here. Time to nurture, protect and heal. We start applying balms and drinking water and seeking warmth and shelter. Our survival instincts kick in. We’re coming down, all we know is we need safety and sustenance. The real and deep reflection comes after. But this is a good phase. We’ve made it.

DECEMBER 5TH

The Moon then activates a loose and brief grand trine with Jupiter and Neptune around noon (EST). This may not hit us like a ton of bricks, but those able and inclined may want to take this time to meditate on what the past few weeks had been about. Let your mind wander, or even your astral body if you’d like. There might be valuable insight to gather out there.

DECEMBER 6TH

Mercury’s backward walk brings him back to a partile conjunction with Saturn as they sextile Mars pretty much at the same time, throughout most of the day on the 6th. The Messenger has to go back from whence he came in the clutches of Time; he’s stunned and not yet on his feet and moving, but looking the other way. A carrier pigeon comes over the distant hills bearing a hot coal clutched in its tiny talons and drops it within eyesight. Smoke signals spring up describing disturbing events and disorderly conduct. The mirages form into solid structures, balustrades and buttresses, towers and holds from which emerge slow moving mimes and mechanical mannequins, they pul scarfs from their sleeves and unfurl them into flags. The heraldry is both clear and confusing. Scores must be settled, wrongs righted, communities defended, but maybe we are too far away to reach the battle in time to join it, our voices lost in the wind and we fail to warn our neighbors of the attack, or something we’ve learned from Time, that the law binds us from taking action; we are not allowed to speak with our client out of court. There may be energy and an impetus to bear arms, even if the pen is drawn from the sheath instead of the sword it still requires ink to write. You might have to scrawl so hard you scratch the characters through the page into the desk and etch the stone permanently, or, if you find you cannot get hold of the utensil at all then simply use the energy to commit the words to memory.

DECEMBER 9TH

Early in the morning (3 and 4 AM (EST) respectively) Venus enters the second decan of Sagittarius and Mars enters rulership in Scorpio. All the crusading and questing of Sagittarius becomes highly romanticized as Venus enters the middle degrees, including literal romance, that of love and war. Allow yourself to imagine the passionate embraces of romance novel covers to flood into your mind, especially those that feature warriors costume and ancient cities burning in the background. This is Hollywood style questing, where there is always a leading lady whose entanglement in the epic affairs of the brawny and heroic protagonist lead to subtheme conquests which are what many theatre goers came for in the first place. Obviously, reality is not as generic and gender binary, but when roses bloom in the middle of our missions we tend to be ready to defend them as much as the tenets we strive for. Expect these two strands of romance to mingle and mix, which is much eulogized after victory, like the dedication that begins an accomplished publication to the authors true love: “I couldn’t have done it without NN.” We pause and daydream about the desk-side dragons slain, the tea-stained trials and throes of passion which rolled over scattered manuscripts papers, the flowery poetry emerging between the fecund black soil of ink penetrating the creative voids of the paper, etc etc. Whatever is your agenda, ready yourself for the airbrushing and glamor shooting as you fulfill your destiny as poster patron of the endeavor, and be prepared to be paired by fate with your picture partner.

Mars’ ingress into Scorpio dumps the whole vial of #9 into the cocktail, and the resultant narrative is a love born on the road to hell where two star crossed lovers may not make it out alive. You can imagine how gruesome Romeo and Juliet might be if redone today; the psychological thriller series version, or simply the horror slasher version. Perhaps I’m aiming more at Othello, or the Scottish Play, I’m not sure, but with Scorpio Rising we may more than hunger after desire, we are likely to eliminate everything in our path until we clutch it. Of course, some areas of our lives could use some ruthless nighttime stealth if we are to realize what we want, but it is up to us to make sure we like what we have done once the lights have come back on, or at least, that we have hidden our crimes well enough. So, there is an element of morality at stake here; how upset will your chart be at itself when it catches you engaging in merciless plots and subterfuge? When there is an assassination on your hands, the red prints on the walls, the rails, the wheel? Restraining these attempts is largely useless, and perhaps more dangerous; they must be channeled. A vicious underground syndicate owes you one; choose wisely, put their methods and means to positive use. Of course, they promise you anything you want, so what you desire most is the first thing to come to mind, but maybe it should not pass your lips so readily. Try to remember your most noble desire. For this you may have to check in with your higher and perfected self. This is typically part of the martial tempering program, to make sure that the physical training you achieve doesn’t simply make you a killing machine, that you also are of highest possible mind and spirit. Sagittarius season will definitely infect you with philosophy and drive to achieve heights of ideal, but the aforementioned romantic context of Venus may want to let the beauty of the pursuance extend to the libidinous, and we may more than anoint wounds with our lips but also kiss with blades and sink our teeth into what we embrace. Don’t under estimate violence with Mars here, instead learn to respect it, learn that there are things that are sharp and dangerous, and that poisons should be approached with reverence, even when the intent is to imbibe.