This post has an astrology preamble, due to a major transit. You can skip this if you prefer, and go on to Part Two. The main material was written last week, to discover what insights the transit might unveil. It turned unexpectedly towards the Sun – to nuclear fusion.
Part One – Neptune Transit – Hanging Man in the Moon: the World in the Hermit
Tarot Keys for Neptune transit opposite natal Saturn. “The Hanged Man’s” planet is Neptune. Tarot Key 18 “The Moon’s” Zodiac sign is Pisces. “The World’s” panet is Saturn. Tarot Key 9 “The Hermit’s” Zodiac sign is Virgo. Key 1, The Magician, is the path on the Tree of Life which links Kether and Binah – Neptune and Saturn.
These Tarot Keys picture my current big astrological transit. Indeed, all of us over a certain age experience it in our various ways. I have natal Saturn just below the Ascendent, at 5.28 Virgo. Last week, Neptune reached 5 Pisces, exactly opposite, and in my 7th House. I felt and worked with the approaching alignment; then sensed a slowing down. The 7th house focuses a priority to clarify my partnerships in what I call “the Great Work”.
(In fact the full transit is only approached this time. At the beginning of June, at 5.22 Pisces, Neptune turns retro, and will backtrack to 3 Pisces at the end of January 2014, then advance again, then drop back a little. On 7 March next year, he will reach precisely 5.28 Pisces. Not until December 2014/January 2015, will the Neptunian tide crescents move onward and away from the 5th degree in my 7th house. As seen from our orbit around the Sun, Neptune’s retro pulse is approximately an eleven month one. It seems each year it is brought forward a month or two. But during this whole period, my compass is set. As with the other slow moving outer planets, it is a generational aspect: how we respond to it individually, depends on what the nearer planets are up to, in our chart.)
This chart was drawn about ten years ago, when my Progressed Sun stood at 18 Pisces (misprinted 22): it is now at 27 Pisces.
Being a person of vision and poetry, and having obviously been countless other times, a person of vision and poetry, or vessel for the same … it follows that the chart I pulled at time of birth, was one in which vision and poetry are deeply and repeatedly embedded. Wherever I look in it, there are rhymes, the way it is in life.
Last Thursday, when Neptune entered 5 Pisces and quietly chimed, I was riding my new bike along the Quantock hills to a family reunion. The weekend party – my mother dreaded it – felt prepared for, and in its way OK. Living the parental arch – the widening landscape, as I grow – I rediscover Saturn’s arduous way to the Spirit (Neptune). My father (Capricorn) in his early shepherding days, tramped the Scottish hills in blizzards with his dog, day and night, to find, dig out and drive the sheep down to safety, before they got drifted over and died. When he got back to the house, my mother remembers, his face was covered with icicles. Nowadays no one walks, they all have tractors; they cannot smell where the sheep are, and so they lose them.
Listen and feel Neptune, be in love with it, get to know this slow oceanic fringe feeling, the clearing of the coast.
In Kabbalah, in the Tree of Life, Neptune represents Kether, the Crown: the I am that I am: the Divine thread. Without an esoteric discipline to define it, Neptune in astrology casts a shadow: deception, spiritual delusion, even addiction.
Sensitivity to an outer giant orbit, many billion miles distant, reveals the life preparation – in detail like an insect wing – the consciousness a year, or years in advance, of the event: the gravity of the related in-drawing threads; the choices made; the detachments; the cultivations, the precision.
Meditate on Neptune in every way I can. Till now I was rather woolly about it, astrologically. Natal Neptune was in Libra – my wartime and postwar generation. Our parents’ spiritual fibre defeated Hitler with the Scales of justice, and with Venus, Libra’s ruler or “worker”. Nothing flimsy about that. Keep looking at the vast cloud along the horizon which is Neptune – there was a beautiful one to the northwest the other day, and I imagined again that it is a great mountain range, as seen from London – discerning through it, the refined and delicate Neptunian crystal of the peaks. Find out which geodes and gems pertain to Neptune; become more crystal conscious.
Neptune entered Pisces which it rules, early last year. Collectively, this suggests a pendulum swing to core spiritual values, and to meet each other face to face, rather than online.
Subjectively, Neptune travelled through my subconscious hemisphere, and now proceeds into my conscious hemisphere, against the rotation of day and night and seasons. Reflect on the hanging-man reversal theme; and watch; for a new elemental consciousness is growing, heedless of time.
Arcanum 12 – the Hanging Man
I never call him the Hanged Man – always the hanging man which he is, at peace like a pendulum at rest: nature’s gravity and shower of gold. He treads the heavens. This is the most profound card of the Tarot: “Walk contrary to the way of the world.” An art of life, is to flow with its reversals.
Neptune’s tarot is Key 12 the Hanging Man – the first Completion of the Great Work. Its Hebrew letter MEM is assigned to the east-west axis of the Cube of Space, joining the Empress (east face) to the Wheel of Fortune (west face). But as an End-letter (gematria value 600), MEM also shares the Cube’s centre with TAV. MEM and TAV as Keys 12 and 21, unify at this centre point, the planets Neptune and Saturn.
Cube of Space, showing the planets and zodiac signs of the 22 Tarot Keys. Each of these is assigned to a Hebrew letter (not shown).
There was not room to draw the MEM end-letter in the centre here, with Saturn/TAV. But there is the wonderful resonance of their Keys back to back – 12, 21.
Our life is a walking Cube of Space if we learn to let it be so. Our life is this compass if we open our sight and inner heart. In sacred geometry, the Cube’s inmost centre is identical to each of its outward points. These illustrations can only suggest this study, which is a book of wonder in itself.
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BOTA Key 12
MEM is a Mother-Letter. It is the Waters. The Hanging Man is born head down in the water of life which does not wet the hands. The radiance round his head is the way he hears and thinks, at ground level where the roots of trees grow. He is reversed – contra to the mass mode of life. Perhaps this is why, during these years, I feel the heaviness of life as I slow down and begin to move not so much in the inertia momentum, but through it, through the head-rush stream.
Such a movement is through the bottleneck, the hour glass, the passage where everything begins to change.
Neptune’s Sign is Pisces, Key 18, the long, long road to embody the Hermit’s mountain peak.
Making myself more transparent and less hurried, to hear, I am the Magician: the garden as above, so below.
The Hermit’s cap is a Yod, coloured
blue as the Waters of the Hanging Man
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Part Two – Thoughts on Solar Fusion
On the 27th April, I caught sight of, and cut out an article in The Independent about a huge international project to generate power by nuclear FUSION, not fission. It is called ITER, which means The Way. I was thinking about fusion-not-fission already in the blog.
(Pictures from The Independent, Saturday 27 April 2013)
When perfected, this process is unlimited, and they say it has no toxic or military application. The programme began secretly in 1956, and grew to an international fusion-energy project in the mid 1980s, under Gorbachev, when the Cold War shook hands across the pond. The Russians discovered the way, and shared it with the Brits and a-Merry-cans. Now 34 countries are involved in it, with unprecedented concordance. The main site is in southern France; there is another one near Oxford. It is characterized by a Union of interests, rather than by their division or fission.
The depth psychology is obvious. Psychology, as in all science, is part and parcel of the observation and the material being developed. If all goes well with this bright star on the horizon, and so far it has, it will begin to operate commercially in about 2050 – in roughly 37 years or so. It will halt our major catalysts of pollution and global warming. It will have to oppose and overcome deadweight commercial investments in toxic power. It will fuse atoms with a contained yet greater heat than that of the Sun itself; so it learns from the stars and birth of nebulae.
Symbolically, this sunrise of hope, under the horizon, stands in about the 2nd house, at the moment. It reached a landmark of self verification, and the way ahead – so they say – is clear.
Tree of Life Jnana marga – path of knowledge
By 2050, Neptune will be moving towards the end of Taurus, with Pluto at 7 Pisces, and Uranus in Virgo. Saturn at that time, is in its Zodiacal element – end of Capricorn, beginning of Aquarius. In December 2049, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune form a Grand Trine in Earth signs – the “Earth” or materialising element for the Neptunian ideal. Saturn’s influence is executive – the power to govern, to limit, and to build. Uranus in Virgo suggests radical changes in methodology.
In early 1989, these three planets – forming Binah, Hokhmah, Kether, the supernal Triad on the Tree – were conjunct in Capricorn. The ITER solar fusion design work was in its fourth year. Later that same year, the Berlin Wall fell, and the cold war ended.
Sixty years later in 2049, those same three Great Wanderers are fanned out around our Zodiacal heavens in a perfect triangle, each occupying an Earth sign.
Binah Hokhmah Kether
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I look at history in long cycles. When we realise that we are Solar System citizens – and that is only a beginning – deep undercurrents are glimpsed, as they follow the planetary curves. The outcome is never quite as expected, because the mind is limited to conditioning. But the harmony of the spheres – and ourselves in its wake – is the hallmark, especially when inexplicable in our linear terms.
It is easy these days to despair; we are at the end of a rope in history.
In the wisdom of the Tarot, The Sun is called “the Collecting Intelligence”. A collective project pooling the minds and finances of many nations, which engages the Sun itself, may be just the thing to turn the tables over.
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I cannot subscribe to the belief that humanity is destroying itself. When I have insight, I feel a wider dimension than we can see at present. The pendulum swings. We are in nadir, our noses rubbed in our muck as deep as can be – the only way historically, that we change and learn.
I always felt the sunrise under the dark cloud. The long shadow stretches back through history, whose plutonic fallout we confront these days, and in whose daydream headgear we blunder along. But the sun rises above the horizon and as it ascends, it shortens the shadow and clears the murk beyond expectation. Then we understand the window which opened in December 2012. Life is not actually as complicated as it seems! The dawn will begin to glow, during the 2020s and 30s, after Pluto goes into Aquarius. There may be a scientific turnaround. Technologies will obsolesce, as the dawn gains strength – or rather, begins to reveal its strength. During this period, things may be lean, and we will have to help each other as the old energy supply dries up. The world wide web may even clean and refine itself – an emphasis on ethical practice, and its opposite. A marginal telepathic consciousness is in the bud.
Isaiah 1958
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Up until 2008 when the finance crashed, there was a media obsession with partying and substance abuse. At present the issue is the penalising of those in need, against billionaires’ bargain basements and the ever increasing engine. As the brakes burn the rubber, it stinks. Bankers and gangsters thrive – some of them still – in the governmental belief that they re-boot the market: the residue of “Margaret-force” when the remaining gold standard was discarded.
But in a few years time, that greed too, will be a goner. Till 2008, the talk was of partying, boom and bust. Now it is the tightening financial screws and the bouncing billionaires: the gross inequality of wealth, abuse and food distribution.
As for war – war’s agony is our history, as tensions rise and fall: friction. We are still in that friction phase, as the energy sources we collectively use and indulge, are divisive. Nuclear fission splits apart. Blowing things apart to stick them together, depletes the reserve, and the waste product is toxic. That means, it has no use. It has to eat – it replaces living organic tissue. Alongside it, the exploitation and excretion of carbon fuels continues. The nuclear-fission mindset is integral to our commercial chemistry and food-chain interference. Human psychology is one with its way of industry.
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So what is nuclear FUSION?
I understand that nuclear fusion overcomes electro-magnetic forces of repulsion, by ampliflying solar heat in a such a way to “fuse” or unite the poles. This technology generates much more energy than it uses. Its waste product is clean helium – a product with industrial application.
Can we see the “fission” analogy to our debt economy, this way of life? And can we see how “fusion” might inspire a Gaia based economy, based on fair exchange?
Our present Fission is the bitter learning curve to Fusion. Earth is the planet of the battle for the light, red in tooth and claw; dark with our waste products and enslaved subconscious, beautiful with our oceans, swirling skies, meadows and humanities.
And … the dandelions and the daisies prevail.
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Children of the world, 2007
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Aquariel – an angel of the waters and of the air through the woods of life.
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Aquariel 