bibliomancy for venus - uranus

'groom'

The Lover comes, the Lover comes!
Open the way for him!
He’s looking for a heart,
Let’s show him one.
I scream
“What you come to hunt is me!”
He says laughingly,
“I’m here not to hunt you but to save you.”

(Rumi)

the language of the birds...

you look more like a magpie these days '07

Writers write every day. Artists create all the time. That's what I'm told - a real writer is compelled toward setting words in print, come foul or fair. In worst of times, the true writer will come up with just one word rather than fail to create.
Julia Cameron, author of The Artist's Way , insists that many self proclaimed 'writers' are in love with the idea of being a writer but when it comes down to it are without the drive or the stamina to do the work. Others possess talent but internal voices of critics past and present snuff out any sparks of motivation or inspiration. There's also a category of women, in Cameron's Way, who produce baby after baby rather than show up at the page and answer an artistic call. Fruit of the womb as a substitute for real world success is the gist of that bit of pop-psychology.

You can imagine that someone such as myself, who has indeed produced baby after baby and not much else (by some standards), who may well be one of those who are in love with the poetic image of the solitary but brilliant artist and who could just as well qualify for the other, would be suitably shamed and chastised by all of it and duly set a course of remedial action.

Actually, no.

There comes a moment in a person's life, hopefully for all of us, when the realisation dawns that enough means enough, that yes there are difficulties, possibly some cellulite (I jest!) or a lack of funds, but these needn't be a reason not to accept oneself and one's life completely as is. Exactly as is. Not the potential of oneself, not the idea of how one could be, and not the way one would be if all the problems were overcome. Yes, just like this.

There also comes a moment of reckoning (and I'm having one of these) - a kind of straighten-up-and-fly-right type message from the divine. It hasn't escaped me that after over a year of drawing birds and working with words I've moved into a house where the previous occupant went to great measures to repel all things feathered. The now fully laden fruit trees in the back garden are enclosed in a gigantic metal cage - which at first glance looks like an aviary but is designed to keep birds out. Every now and then a cheeky little bowerbird will squeeze under the gate and help himself to some windfalls while I watch with admiration - with that much determination the little guy is welcome to anything he can get. Even with the limits set in a most obvious way, life thrives.

Work with what you've got, the signs all say, no remedial action required other than what it takes to move from stone-still to action - openness (and maybe a small measure of that little bird's cheekiness).

So what if one isn't built for creating epics - one can always come up with an haiku or two. If there's only a small gap in a busy day (perhaps otherwise filled with nappy changing, runs to school and the market and the like) there's still opportunity enough to look around and notice things - to see life in one's own way - get under the fence and be inspired.

And if all else fails, take a look at what has been created so far.

In honour of Mercury's retrograde phase, I'm doing a review of my work - including some of my favourite bird drawings.

there goes my angel... ds '08

waiting for moonrise ds '08


unfinished business ds '08

balsamic sparrow ds '08



heron now ds '08

and for a new moon in sagittarius (that almost slipped my mind)

"Attention to the qualities of things resurrects the old idea of notitia as a primary activity of the soul. Notitia refers to that capacity to form true notions of things from attentive noticing. It is the noticing on which knowledge depends..."

(James Hillman, Anima Mundi)

bibliomancy for the end of an era...

'magician' d sinclair '08

"...'the death we speak of in our culture is a fantasy of the ego,' and from that perspective we lose touch with subtlety. 'For us, pollution and decomposition and cancer have become physical only.' He notes that in the great art of other cultures there is a different kind of sensibility with respect to dying, one that has faded from our attention and become part of the modern unconscious and of the psychic underworld..."

(Stanton Marlon, The Black Sun: The Alchemy and Art of Darkness, 77)

bibliomancy for a full moon with uranus...

young whales ds 'o8

"At this point in the work the ego and the unconscious have both dramatically changed.  The ego and the principle of consciousness it represents have gotten closer to the inner world of instinct and freedom....at the same time, the unconscious has moved closer to the world of consciousness by casting off its chaos and confusion and by allowing a certain level of harmony and order to affect it...its wildness and ferocity are now ordered by its relationship with the ego; the two are cooperating and entering into new depths of relationship..."  

(Jeffrey Raff, Jung and the Alchemical Imagination, p 111)

bibliomancy for pluto and jupiter direct

ds '08

"you must go into the dark in order to bring forth your light"

- Debbie Ford, the Dark Side of the Light Chasers

(apologies, I'm on a sort of 'hiatus' - or rather I'm seeing how far I can go into 'not doing' before the forward motion begins again)

memories...

'heron now' ds '08

"Perhaps this intimacy between calling and fate is why we avoid the daemon and the theory that upholds its importance. We mostly invent, and prefer, theories that tie us tightly to parental powers, encumber us with sociological conditioning and genetic determinants; thereby we escape the fact that these deep influences on our fates don't hold a candle to the power of death...." (James Hillman, The Soul's Code)

(*archetypal psychologists hold that memories are fictions, flights of fantasy...)

for venus and mercury square pluto...

'art class' ds 'o6

"my workshop participants, too, were in touch with their intution - but they assumed that intuition meant clear direction rather than intuitive guidance. They hoped one good intuitive 'hit' would give them the power to reorder their lives in complete harmony and happiness. But intuitive guidance does not mean following a voice to the Promised Land. It means having the self esteem to recognise that the discomfort or confusion that person feels is actually directing him to take charge of his life and make choices that will break him out of stagnation or misery."

(Carolyn Myss, Anatomy of the Spirit)

dark moon..or ..Saturn in Virgo?

'other half of eden' ds'o8

"The humanly impossible, rapid change out of dark motherhood into bright virginity is discernible against the cosmic background. The inner tension and opposition between motherhood and a maidenhood that is dedicated to the father and signifies a prohibition against all other men is a human reality. If we have understood the peculiar birth of Pallas Athene through the epiphany of the new moon, we must not forget the bondedness of a real father's daughter to her progenitor, to the dominant spirit of the father."

(Karl Kerenyi, Athene)

routine...

'a little privacy, please' ds 'o8

"They look at me in a way that says, "My, what an intriguing question, but don't come any closer."

When they offer responses, the first chorus invariably includes descriptions of power as the ability to maintain control over one's environment, or as a vehicle for getting things done. The second chorus describes power as the internal strength to control oneself."

(Carolyn Myss, Anatomy of the Spirit)

and for the sun in virgo

'half of eden' ds 'o8

"While Mary the mother is swamped by the tragedy, this Magdelene stands up and turns towards the world. Her story is of the gaining of inviolable presence through traumatic initiation. She flings her right hand outwards. There may be anguish shading into horror in her face but she is rising through it. Her work will be in the world and for the world, where she will both command and nurture."

(John Carroll, The Western Dreaming, p 61)

detached...

'there goes my angel...' ds '08

"..the office of conversation is to give me self-possession. I lie torpid as a clod. Then comes by a safe and gentle spirit who spreads out in order before me his own life and aims, not as experience, but as the good and desirable. Straightaway I feel the presence of a new and yet old, a genial, a native element... I regain, one by one, my faculties, my organs; life returns to a finger, a hand, a foot. A new nimbleness - almost wings - unfold at my side..."

(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

bibliomancy for venus with saturn

"...earlier we considered the demonic feminine who must be appeased, as in the appearance of the rabid dog in the 'Font of the Knight of Treviso." Here, in this part of the alchemical text, we see her other face, the redemption bringer. Redemption comes experientially, when human and divine essences of being open to one another, and the cosmic heart of being penetrates between the mortal and divine spheres, and peace arrives..."

(Monica Wikman, Pregnant Darkness, Alchemy and the Rebirth of Consciousness, p 143)

but wait - there's more.... mercury enters virgo and a free set of steak knives...

'danae and angels' ds '06

"Greek myth has it that the goddess Demeter personally showed the people of Eleusis 'the conduct of her rites and taught them all her mysteries..- awful mysteries which no one may in any way transgress or pry into or utter, for deep awe of the gods checks the voice...we might say, then, that in many traditions the injunction to silence is the speech act by which a particular narrative is made sacred. The rule of silence separates or cuts these stories off from all other stories and makes them special, holy, sacred..."

(Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World)

Just kidding about the steak knives...

and not forgetting a generation of pluto in virgo....

'unfinished business' ds '08

"...since modern roses of sin and sorrow tend to go beyond those of the past in extremities of anguish, the number and force of our roses maintaining affirmative roots become significant as a measure of our still surviving hope. It is surely a healthy sign that even in the troubled present the rose has continued to be far more often linked with attempts to resolve man's problems than with the deceptiveness of such attempts..."

(Barbara Seward, The Symbolic Rose)

This morning, while trying to figure out where this (almost) petrifying fearsome feeling I have is coming from, two things occured to me. First, that with planets moving through Virgo, including new entrant Venus, that these are touching an area of my own chart that's particularly potent; and second, that there's a whole generation of us with Pluto (and Uranus) in Virgo who are likely to be feeling it, to varying degrees, too.

Mars goes by this region of the cosmos regularly - about every two years; likewise Venus transits Virgo every year, so a lot of what we're experiencing now is familiar. However (and wherever) Virgo energy manifests itself in our lives, we're getting a fresh wave of Mars and Venus vibes and more opportunities to do as we Will, love as we can and continue soul-making as we do. Pluto, Lord of the Underworld, will have us come-what-may. Mars as the archetype which carries forth our desires, plus Venus's wont toward beauty and transformation - well, these are the easier energies to work with when it comes to Pluto's compulsion toward destruction-regeneration and digging through our depths for hidden treasure. The process can bring out parts of ourselves we didn't know we had and polish them up so that they're a pleasure to notice.

Born with Pluto in Virgo, Saturn's (once in 28 years) transit feels at once like a double dose of fear, death and pain. The darkest depths of Soul stretching to the outer limit of Ego. Mythical outcast Titan, King, Terrible Father (eater of offspring) - Lord of time, Dweller of the Threshold - the Grim Reaper - meets The Guy in Charge of Hell (where all things squalid and sordid dwell), in the constellation that represents service and honourable servitude and all things wholesome. It calls to us to a new awareness of how much our unconscious - both personal and collective - (Pluto) controls our lives and how our ideas about need (Saturn) do likewise.

I'm looking to Virgo's ruling planet, Mercury (who in this guise I like to think of as a girl, as the glyph for the constellation suggests) who has a part to play here - as psychopomp or guide of souls. In this capacity Mercury keeps our minds on our work, on the journey - vigilant against hungry ghosts that may pull us into a downward spiral towards despair - and points us toward the signs and the way out if we get carried away during this time.

Stay well, stay the path - and see you on the other side!

bibliomancy for Neptune's oppositions

changing gaze d sinclair '06

"This is the Alchemy that is the Sister of Prophecy, a Prophecy that is rupture, iconoclasm, and a call to waken from the sleep of the dead and hear the voice of the Verdant One, the Green Man who is the Incarnate One and the Angel of the Earth. The prayer of the fourth century North African Bishop Serapion can stand as the great cry of the human heart: "We beg you Lord, make us truly alive!""

(Tom Cheetam, The Unrefused Feast)

and for mars opposite uranus...

'naked man dancing' d sinclair '06

"Overtly sexual relationships are often being driven by something deeper, more fundamental. This has to do with the need to be held together as a cohesive personality, so that we do not easily fall apart with unbearable anxiety or depression, so that we can maintain reasonable self esteem, and so that we can withstand the usual fluctuations of life's successes and failures with reasonable equanimity, without excessive inflation or despair. I believe that the elusive bonding agent which is required here is what the alchemists referred to as the glutinum mundi."

(Lionel Corbett, The Alchemical Glutinum Mundi, in Fire in the Stone: The Alchemy of Desire, p 127)

and for the coming solar eclipse...

'swallow and don't stop' d sinclair '08

"To paraphrase an old saw, the wound becomes the window to the soul. Without the affects, our unconsciousness would continue and we would be deprived of the opportunity to grow, to live more fully, more authentically, more responsibility.

For this reason, shame and dread, although experienced as painful psychological chaos, are, if worked through, opportunities to establish order by integrating into consciousness elements of our lives which were both unconscious and critically important...."

(Sandra Edelman; Turning the Gorgon, a Meditation on Shame)

bibliomancy for the sun in leo

self, again. d sinclair '06

"How are we to take these references to the gods of Greece or Rome? Or, how are we to interpret his quaint and occasionally downright insane remedies? He advices a person lacking in the spirit of Jupiter, for example, to add peppermint to his diet. Is this legend, folklore, precocious pharmacology, or pure metaphor?"

(Thomas Moore; The Planets Within, on Marcilio Ficino)

"... Soul - psyche - and psychology, these are not merely personal things; they're about the whole world.." (me, from my paper journal)

bibliomancy for a capricorn-cancer full moon

d sinclair '06

"In the Florentine view the human body was a manifestation of the soul. It was possible to entertain a soulless notion of the body, but that was considered an aberration. Such a body was unnaturally split off from the soul. We might call it schizoid - lifeless, meaningless and without poetics. But an ensouled body takes its life from the world's body, as Ficino said, "the world lives and breathes, and we can draw its spirit into us" What we do to the world's body, we do to our own. We are not masters of this world, we participate in its life." (Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul, p 172)