bibliomancy for venus-jupiter

"...there are tales within tales that do not further the plot, showing that psychic history goes on in many places at once - meanwhile, back at the farm, in another part of the forest - and in many figures at once... other personages of the story are as interesting as the main character, just as the other figures within our our dreams and fantasies often bear more upon our fates than does our ego.." (Hillman)

"those in literature see the psychology in fiction.. its our turn to see the fiction in pyschology..." (HILLMAN)

Jupiter and Venus together are supposed to bring about love-bliss; tomorrow's conjunction is apparently great for lovers, would-be lovers and all things beautiful, in big ways.

Here in South Australia the weather is set to be hot during the day, promising one of those lovely balmy summer's evenings that are perfect for walking hand in hand on the beach, for dining al fresco and general blissful canoodling.

Hm. How lovely for those with someone whose hands will be held and those canoodling lovers. I for one say yes to those, absolutely, but for this transit, I need another paradigm for expressing the energies of such magnificent love.

So, there are lovers strolling the beach, eyes locked in restaurants and cuddling up in cinemas; there are couples everywhere - but meanwhile, here in a house in the suburbs, is a woman who is learning for the first time what it is to love, and there isn't a man in the frame.

What does it mean? How will it happen? Is this story told from her own point of view or is there an omniscient narrator?

How many ways can the fiction of love be told?

I guess we shall have to wait and see.

mars direct , mercury awol..

...I've been trying to get a clear bibliomancy reading for this astro-current - but it seems our friend The Trickster has scattered my focus somewhat, as well as messing with the electric circuits in my house, the air conditioning, the car, my online banking and, well - this is just the beginning.

Mercury retrograde in Aquarius feels very Promethean - so perhaps we shall see how much of the fire of the Gods can be snatched away in this transit.

I for one quite enjoy it, as long as I don't have anywhere important to go, there's no heatwave or blizzard, and I pace myself.

Its a good time, for one thing, to examine the metaphors that present themselves.


Power issues, for example - I've a long history of troublesome on-again-off-again appliances, impossibly high utilities bills, household circuits that blow up in dramatic showers of glass and smoke and, just recently - power 'transformers' melting down, shutting off electricity to the whole street (not just once!).

It doesn't take too much genius to figure out that I have some kind of imbalance occurring, and which areas of life I can work on in order to improve things - application of power - how much is being paid for it - connectedness, transformation - these are all fundamental. I'm being shown, through these events, something of myself - my own overloads, explosive anger, meltdowns - drama.

As for Mars' station in late Gemini in preparation for returning to direct motion on Thursday - well, that feels like a cat of a different colour.


The men in my life are suddenly and inexplicably irritating. And I say 'men' plural because the retrograde period itself manifested - shall we say concentrated interest - from two of them. They both know they have competition. One tried to win me over by being understanding about the other guy (giving me advice, being supportive) while referring to him constantly as 'The Rigger'.

Said Rigger referred to the first guy in turn as 'The Greek', and was not in the least bit 'understanding' - using plenty of rigger-style expletives in letting me know what he was thinking (and riggers really know how to swear). It was kind of cute, really.

Well, sort of - although its been a long time since I had that kind of attention from two men at once, and its flattering in a crazy way - both of these men are ex-lovers and neither one of them ever had any long term intentions with me. That remains unchanged, tantalising promises and imagined futures notwithstanding.

What was I thinking??

Well, as I keep saying - there is no outer event that is not also inner. It always comes back to that. There's a case of indecision - of internal double-talk - at least something going on at the soul level, working itself out moment by moment - it'll be amazing to watch what becomes of it all next.

Meanwhile, I count my blessings that the airconditioner not working means a smaller power bill, that with car troubles we'll walk a bit more and drive less and that less focus for a while may let me dream a little more.

bibliomancy for pluto's ingress to capricorn

"...given this unconscious paranoia, there will be a need for a projected fantasised enemy and fantastical defences against the fantasised enemy. Situations will always be valued by constructs of strength and weakness, winning and losing. Demand for unconditional surrender and the fear of it will be paramount, Treaties based on compromise will be all but impossible to negotiate. .." (Hillman, 'paranoia' p49)

For the first time one of my 'bibiomancies' actually comes across as prophecy. Its a bit dire, but then again we are talking about Pluto here. Planet or not, the Lord of the Underworld isn't exactly subtle.

And speaking of that - the downgrading of Pluto from planet to dwarf or whatever - doesn't it seem like a sign of the times? Come to think of it, not only does this world seem to want to diminish the devil, hell, evil and darkness aka shadow, it appears to do so in line with the public declaration of the Sun as being dangerous, risky, something we must protect ourselves against. A backlash against God/dess and downplaying the power of His/Her counterpart... interesting.

So, paranoia - well, this isn't exactly news, afterall we are in the midst of a 'war on terror' which pivots upon the assumption that there is a threat. We have 'baddies' so we can feel 'good'... there's someone out there threatening our 'freedom' and we must seek it out at all costs, invade a few countries if we must, and damn the consequences. We will reign down terror until all the Terrorists die. Insane.

Well, that's a macrocosmic viewpoint - what about the microcosmic events of our everyday lives? How many times do we demonise the 'other' in our midst?

"You must be wrong so that I can be right" is a common standpoint, as if there isn't room enough for rightness or wrongness on both sides. As if only one way is the way that's acceptable. Monotheistic. Dualistic (is that the correct term?).

And, as there is no outer event that is not also inner - on macro and microcosmic levels - we are only harming ourselves - our 'earth' or matter - the stuff we are made of - has got to suffer.

If Pluto into Capricorn means that we can finally own the terror, fear, paranoia and fantasies of 'other', then maybe the planet (this one, the one we live on) has a chance.

bibliomancy for a full moon in leo

"..so the first basic characteristic of the coeur de lion is that thought does not appear as thought because it emanates like the sun into the world and remains disguised in that conformity with its motion.." (Hillman, Thought of the Heart)

Last night Jodi gave me a roar, and this morning I thought of lions, forgetting about tonight's full moon in Leo.

Its not unusual for me to think of lions - they are potent symbols and often used in alchemy - red, green, pointing to desire, to the work of making gold.

They remind me that Venus and the Sun are not so very far apart, of the tarot card, Strength (also called Force) in which a pregnant woman gently holds the mouth of the beast.

Something else that Hillman writes stays with me - that the dry desert of the heart is the birth place of lion cubs - stillborn - needing to be roared into life.

Perhaps I love this image - of cubs being roared into being inside my heart - because of the promise it holds, awakening the poetic, beautiful animal side of love.

None of the transcendental, 'spiritual' models of love hold me like this. To me there must be sulphur - desire - and salt - experience, for love to be made whole.

But this passage seems to say that heart-love is like the sun, that hearts-thoughts and imaginings are akin to consciousness, solar, central and essential to the point of taken-for-granted-ness.

It makes me wonder what else the heart has to say other than what is always there, circulating, beating out its rythym and keeping the body alive.

Are lion cubs, deserts, romantic poetic images the thoughts of the heart or just ideas about the heart?

bibliomancy for a Venus - Pluto Conjunction

"Eros always leads to Psyche..." (Moore)

"how to analogise the dream I've had for the past year? -

I ask myself - what is he like??

He's like Pan;
dirty, dark, smelly and sexy

He's like Jesus;
only he won't die
and he won't be coming back

He's like me;
but with balls and a job and social life

He's too-hot water; a take-away dinner I didn't order and have to pay for; a dress that doesn't fit (something like I would have made for myself when I was learning to sew); he's a stranger grabbing at my belly and asking me if I've got another baby coming; he's a dog, fox, wolf, dingo - other wild things I cannot love that scare me except in symbolic form, in idea, in imagination... he's like Mephistopheles too... asking too much for only bad things in return...

He doesn't exist; he forces me to see how much I create in my mind. He's never the same person twice;he forces me to see how much I change.

He isn't the man I think he is (and I'm not either)

...but for some reason it hurts me so much not to love him and imagine him as every bit as wonderful as I want him to be. It hurts me in my chest; deep ache, burn, stab.

I don't know what to do about it, what am I supposed to do about it? How can I move this out of my body, out of my mind? How can I make space for anyone else while every bit of me is consumed by this weirdness? Its in my blood stream, pumping through all of me. "

(August 18, 2007; paper journal entry)

five things I love

1. etymology; the wondrous thing about this is that words of common use often (mostly) have completely obscured origins - uncovering the roots of these opens up entire universes for me - words then have sparkly new meanings and possibilities.

2. Watching people; imagining how they are 'outer expressions of an inner state' of my own; asking - What part of me is this?
Yes, its self-indulgent, and I still love it.

3. running into people in the course of a day, whom I'd 'thought of' briefly only a short while prior to the 'chance meeting' - synchronicity! A game, I suppose, is to deliberately 'think' of long-gone aquaintences and watch how they show up 'unexpectedly'.

4. brass bands; what more can I say?

5. Shoes that are not black or white; maybe this is a 90's thing - from hanging with 'the beautiful people' (who must wear the right shade of black) - now when I see coloured shoes I'm delighted. Black is so boring. White shoes are just tacky.

bibliomancy for mars retrograde

"...building the psychic vessel of containment, which is another way of speaking of soul-making, seems to require bleeding and leaking as its pre-condition. Why else go through that work unless we are driven by the despair, of our un-stoppered condition? The shift from anima-mess to anima-vessel shows in various ways; as a shift from weakness and suffering to humility and sensitivity; from bitterness and complaint to a taste for salt and blood; from a focus upon the emotional pain of the wound - its causes, perimeters, cures - to its imaginal depths..." (Hillman, The Wound and the Eye)

I've been sitting with this passage for a few days (hence, no blog entry), waiting - allowing - some understanding and inspiration to present itself.

Of course, my first instinctive reaction is the same final conclusion arrived at after weighing up, sorting through and putting aside various other 'more sensible' ideas.

Its this; having 'revisioned' the dirt and mess in my life, both the actual physical clutter of this existence, and the inner trash that refuses to be cleared - the stuff I have because I need it - I've been looking at why I need it.

The urge toward solar heroics dies hard, even in the dark.

bibliomancy for a Monday morning

"On the evening of the second day, the crescent of the new moon would become visible in the evening sky, as though having sprung from the head of the sun, a phenomenon in which we recognise the cosmic referent in the birth of Athene. The greatest festival of Athene thus contained two cosmic situations: the time of the conjunction, the night of the new moon, which is shrouded in darkness and during which the sun and the moon seemingly encounter each other, and an epiphany." (Karl Kerenyi, Athene, p41)

Finding Aphrodite and Psyche

'african venus; d sinclair '06

"..can we realise that we are each, in soul, children of Aphrodite, that the soul is a therapeutes, as was Psyche, in the temple of Venus - that is where it is in devotion - the soul is born in beauty and feeds on beauty, requires beauty for its life...

...psyche is the life of our aesthetic responses - that sense of taste in relation with things, that thrill or pain, disgust or expansion of breast; these primordial aesthetic reactions of the heart are soul itself speaking." (hillman, thought of the heart, p39)


Actually, I'm not all that sure that Aphrodite or Psyche can be 'found'. Not that its impossible to know them, only that the 'searching' may be fruitless - because they're experiences of the senses and the emotional body, and in as much perhaps only need to be recognised as and when they arise.

When we feel something and the thought 'beautiful' surfaces, where is it is any of it surfacing from, but within? Aphrodite is surely a necessary part of our inner workings, as much as is needed in the outer, physical cosmos.

Thomas Moore writes about Aphrodite 'rising from the sea' as per her creation myth - and this is very apt. Beauty originates from the unknown depths; rises through the body, catches in the throat, takes away breath, and puts a blindfold on one's other faculties.


Oh, I'm just musing - waxing poetic. There's no better subject to do it on.

Yes, Aphrodite is more than Beauty, but as a starting place, we can't do better. If there were a map of the human cosmos, Beauty might be found were land meets water, and the unconscious meets lived experience. Beyond there is Pleasure and then Desire, past mountains where warm breezes blow and earth's fires burn with melted ores spill over into green forests.

I have to believe that until we can get in touch with our inner beauty, our inner Aphrodite, we are closed off to a whole realm of sense and taste - and life. The beach will be closed, so to speak, forget the volcanic springs, the river mouth, the forest.

I took life drawing classes at the School of Art; enrolled in the course without really thinking about it and realised with horror on the first day that life drawing involves drawing naked people. Naked people!

For an ex ballet dancer the idea of physical 'imperfection' (that is, anything less than the ideal ballet dancer's body) is hard to, er, well, stomach.

After a while it became clear to me the 'imperfect' bodies - people - had a beauty of their own that had nothing to do with any ideals of mine. It's as though looking without ego - and nothing is better for stripping away ego than doing something so new, in the presence of a naked person no less - gives a new perspective on form.

Hillman calls for us all to practice that which the classical texts call notitia - seeing and imagining through the heart. Its about looking - really looking - and seeing things, not our ideas of things. Its allowing without describing.

Its like seeing through childs eyes - before Old Mother Bone Maker comes along and names everything, defining and setting in stone the world around us. Before being taught that this is 'self' and this is 'other' - when, without knowing what things are, everything is amazing and interesting, and there's no difference between 'it' and 'me'.

Its an old cliche; beauty is in the eye of the beholder - but its the eyes of soul that are calling it, because like calls unto like. This is a truth that takes practice to realise.

Aphrodite's way

'embrace' copyright d sinclair 2008

...these couples, Petrarca and Laura, Dante and Beatrice, had no personal satisfaction, no human relationship. Yet what emerged from these happenings in the heart was the transformation of all Western culture, commencing as an aesthetic transformation; it was generated by Beauty..(hillman, thought of the heart, p39)

memories like mould

"...Aphrodite is the 'psyche tou kosmou' or soul in all things... if we would recuperate the lost soul, which is after all the aim of all depth psychologies, we must recover our lost aesthetic reactions, our sense of beauty.." (Hillman, Thought of the Heart, p41)


There's not much traffic to this blog at the moment, and life elsewhere has gone very, very quiet too. After a week or so of intense heat, the air is cooler and the days are clear and calm. The children seem more centered, less demanding and we're in the house simply going about our business, with no plans.

Today is the darkest phase of the moon before renewing again this evening in the vicinity of the sky we call Capricorn (but that is only metaphoric - the moon is still in her wobbly orbit around the earth).

There was a moment that this would have meant Something Very Important to me, but I'm in the process of stripping the meaning from things - this is a teaching from the Course in Miracles, and it helps with the stories that bind the mind and cause suffering. Without the story of a tree, for example, one can allow the tree to reveal its true nature. Without the story of 'me' I allow my own true nature to be known.

So the moon is dark, the moon will be new again. Yes. What am I getting at? Am I going anywhere with this? I've already written that I won't be doing any 'de-cluttering' - rather that I'm taking stock, re-visioning my clutter, my rubbish, my mess. And the memories continue to surface, and I watch, knowing I need them for something, although I don't know what yet. Maybe only this.

I do truly believe that I have everything I need, and nothing I don't. Wanting any part of my life to be any other way is to argue with reality. Reality always wins. Its exhausting to do battle with the way things are, to want what 'is not' and to deny one's own emotions.

Perhaps what it is I want from all this - what this wants from me - is to honour my Lunar nature, as an expression of my inner cosmos, even though all meaning is illusion.

In fact what I'm called to do is to honour the entire Pantheon. I want to put an end to my Solar Heroics - my questing and striving and overcoming.

As for Aphrodite - as a true child of Venus I have no trouble at all with paying homage to beauty, or so I thought. Upon presentation of the above quote this morning I questioned that. Have I turned away from beauty - from notitia, seeing with one's heart - because it has often been such a focus of mine that I've seen nothing else?

Like this - I met a man in a bar; he swaggered past me, then, turned his head and with one eyebrow raised asked 'are you bored? come with me!'.

Dirty, I thought - Beautiful, my heart insisted. A year later I found myself giving birth to his daughter, and he was elsewhere.

But things are exactly as they are; no more, no less. It may be that this is what it is to be at the darkest phase of the moon - to let go of the solar consciousness - singlemindedness - and live by lamplight, where shadows can be beautiful - to dwell in wisdom rather than understanding; to be still and watch life take shape.

bibliomancy for a balsamic moon

"..in short, I am calling for a return to memory as more than mere mental "flotsam" - as more than a mere engrammatic inscription of the left-overs, the rags and tatters, or our lives. Remembering, rather, is soul-making, is its very basis. As such, remembering needs itself to be remembered - just as soul itself needs to be remembered in this soulless time of ours. Moreover, remembering needs a re-recognition, a recognition not accorded to it since the Greeks, who made Mnemosyne one of the original Titans, the Mother of the Muses, and a partner of Hermes himself..." (Edward Casey, from Memory, Time and Soul)


OK, I admit I've been more than just a bit difficult of late. It happens every year, around this time - when I feel the weight of something I'm yet to understand pushing down on my other-times contentment. The cosmos, with Mars and Pluto doing a spaghetti western style showdown somewhere up there, seems to conspire. Outer events show me inner turmoil; other's ideas of me overtake my hard-one psychic autonomy.

But, I tell myself, these are all just stories about how things are with me, and one of my new year's resolutions is to whine less, to spend more time in gratitude and to show others the best of me.

Right now the moon is dark, waning toward the new moon, and real astrological new year, on Tuesday. So its time to throw out the junk and clear space for the new.

In taking stock I'm noticing that memories keep surfacing, some of which are not the kind I want to keep - delving into them seems akin to listening to gossip - it just makes me feel like a bitch. But, like eating the cheese you know will make you bloated and sluggish, that cheese is going to be eaten, all of it, and regrets can come later. So I let those fiendish memories surface from their deep places and try very, very hard, not to get caught in them. I try to find ways of clearing them out and 'letting them go', and like mould they keep coming back.

There's a bit of wisdom that says its impossible to 'let go' of thoughts and memories - that they will let go of their own accord when they're ready.

So, I wonder, what is the value of 'throwing out the trash' both metaphorically and literally?

Maybe there's something important about it, after all? Maybe we need those dark, mould filled caves-of-memories? Would the world - the Earth - be a better place without them? It seems to me with all the 'space clearing we do - all the throwing out of the trash - we've just been moving things around.

There are no accidents - I can almost hear my friend Robyn laughing right now and telling me 'Dan, you're the only one here' - my last post was about the ego (I've come to think of as Mother Bone Maker) and how She 'makes' or brings into form the wisps of thought that are our stories, our ideas. This bibliomancy brings another element in - that memory, far from keeping us living in the past, makes us more of who we are now.

So, rather than 'throwing out the junk' I think I'll revision it, have another look and see what it really is.

Who knows, maybe the answer to the weightiness I've been feeling is in there, in that cave, necessary and divine.