I write, therefore it is

I decided to buy an astrological datebook this year, after years of relying on electronic calendars. By chance, I picked up a copy of We’Moon 2011, and I really like it.*

Apart from noting lunar cycles, it also gives you daily aspects made by the transit of the moon. Geared towards ‘womyn‘, it aims for a holistic celebration of our common humanity. Its pages also take us beyond the ordinary datebook: they are full of amazing pictures and inspirational writings, poetry, as well as a wealth of astrological information and even an ephemeris. It’s brilliant! Makes me happy to write stuff in it.

I use it to record daily tarot card draws, dreams and other metaphysical phenomena. In the notes pages at the back, I listed my new year’s intentions on the day before the Capricorn solar eclipse, and felt something powerful as the words emerged on the page. As a triple Gemini, I’m as wedded to my computer as anyone else — I used to make these lists on Word, and notes on iCal — but I am slowly recuperating the pleasures of taking pen to paper and savouring their materiality.

* I don’t work for We’Moon! Just sharing my experience of it.

Out of complexity, brutality

In this article, sociologist Saskia Sassen analyses the collective hardship produced by the recent meltdown of financial institutions as the result of a cynical process by which systems of extreme complexity are created for the sake of profit, and which results in also delivering a base brutality.

I can’t think of a better way of describing what going on right now. What’s disheartening is I’m starting to see this equation everywhere now. Recently came across the term ‘knowledge harvesting’ (Google it if you must, I refuse to link to these organisations), which in effect refers to a systematic retrieval of ‘knowledge’ from people before you sack them. If words can be said to have an aura, ‘knowledge harvesting’ brings up the sense of cold, hard steel, every science fiction nightmare come to pass.

Hades Moon III: When our darknesses meet

Part I, II.

One of the characteristics of natives with the Hades Moon, Judy Hall notes, is the karmic link to other people with Hades Moons. She provides numerous examples in her book, which point to individual and familial karma.

After I put the book down, I logged in to my astrology software and looked at the charts of my family and close friends, including those with whom the closeness was only short-lived. Should I be surprised that every single one has a Hades Moon? Either with Moon in Scorpio, or with Pluto in (Ptolemic) aspect to the Moon. I didn’t look up the more minor aspects because I didn’t need to. Everyone who is, or was at one time, important to me had a Hades Moon. Given that the moon changes signs every two and a half days or so, this doesn’t feel like simply a series of random coincidences.

Hades Moon II: The darkness that is mine

Parts I and III.

Judy Hall’s book spooked me (in a good way) because nearly everything she described about the Hades Moon I recognised from my own life. Now, I like working with astrology, but there are times when the general descriptions in astrology ‘cookbooks’ don’t necessarily apply, and thus require creative interpretation. Because Hall’s book focuses on individuals with the Pluto-Moon aspects, and thus their specific life circumstances, description and implication of the aspect become that much more personal and vivid. The Hades Moon is not about behaviour or circumstance but about psychic experience so deep there are few words to describe it.

Until I read Eric Francis’ delineation of the Capricorn Moon, I could never really identify with textbook descriptions of the Cap moon as ambitious, money-grabbing, and so on. It is likely that many with Cap moons come across that way because they channel their repressed emotions into tangible achievements, as if to say ‘If my material circumstances are okay, I’m okay’. The impact of Pluto aspecting this fragile but tough moon never really crossed my mind until, in consultation with Eric Francis himself one day, he said, ‘Pluto aspecting your moon gives me the sense of hanging onto a cliff by your fingertips’. He meant having both planets at their anaretic degrees, or the last degrees of the signs. My Pluto at 29+° Virgo was in exact trine to my moon at 29+° Capricorn.

Mutable muddle

I have no planets in fixed signs in my chart; only cardinal and mutable. Fortunately, I have enough Saturnian and Capricornian aspects and elements usually to insist that I finish what I start. But having Sun and Saturn in a mutable sign also means that I am sometimes apt to change the mind I thought I had made up. A predominance of mutable signs in a chart lends itself to increased flexibility and adaptability, for which I am mostly grateful. However, the same tendency also lends itself to uncertainty. There is such a thing as too much flexibility.