It's been a minute. But a lot of stuff has happened that required a lot of processing. And that sort of clogged the pipes. I had too much to say, rather than nothing to say, and the processing had to happen first. And, frankly, it would not have happened without some recent ancestral support that emerged in a workshop in Melbourne I have just got back from. So... bear with.
As you know, my most annoying hill on which I am prepared to die at the moment is that astrology is 100% accurate because it is a language or framework of ontological understanding (that contains as a small subset a divinatory system that provides above-chance predictions).
You can nod along with this but I'm not sure you can join me atop the hill in Fort Annoying until you've gone full back-alley Jungianism on just what even am psychology or the imaginal. Consider, for instance, last week's discussion with Dr Kripal on his notion of dual-aspect monism. Astrological frames of understanding your inner life go far, far beyond that 20th century notion that your natal chart is some kind of cosmic Human Resources quiz.
Jung observed, for instance, that your own unconscious (ie not the collective but the part of it that surfaces in you) can communicate with you via someone else's words. It is insufficiently true to say he meant "we pick up the things we need or want to hear from our sensory noise", although that is certainly in play. It's more that the inner experience and outer experience are an eruption or upwelling of the same event or substance. Here's Dr Jeff's little graph of that:
This is a more nuanced and, importantly, more medicinal way of thinking with this symbol set than you're likely to find when you throw it over to Astro Twitter, pictured below:
It's more medicinal at least in part because of something Dr Daniel Foor spoke about this weekend at the Ancestral Lineage Healing workshop I mentioned at the top of the post. It's absolutely true when it comes to your ancestors, but the observation has much wider application:
Ritual decompresses spirit relationships. In Dr Foor's example, opening a dialogue with your ancestors means they don't have to flip your car to knock you unconscious so they can deliver a message to you. They can just talk to you. Pause to consider what the astrological variant of that is when it comes to something like particularly hairy transits, based on the very good assumption you exist in a living cosmos and that whatever planets/stars 'actually are', at the very least they have some form of personhood and/or agency.
At this point, it's infinitely recursive to say psychology is astrology or vice versa, but consider that in light of what we do know, which is that psychological trauma has noticeable bodily impacts. And while the dragon showed up and dunked on the giant fire as predicted to the very hour, fires as large as that take weeks to fully put out. And that was the case especially with the world heritage environments to my west where there are no human settlements. Particularly in fire-adapted environments, fire can literally 'hide' inside tree trunks and under roots for almost a month. So while the apocalypse was averted, I spent the next couple of weeks in a state of near-continuous re-traumatisation. The plane you see in the title image was flying maybe 80 metres above the farm. Why? Because there was a fucking flare-up a few hundred feet from the northwest corner of the property that required two helicopters and two planes to continuously dunk it for about ten hours. I stood on the corner of the property watching it with my mala beads, mantra-ing away, until the smoke drove me back inside.
Fires are a peculiar sort of -exhausting, frankly- natural disaster. I don't want to throw a pity parade or rank anybody's tragedies obviously, but there is something so insidious about a fire when compared to a flood or an earthquake. And that is how long you are in a state of unending horror. With a flood or earthquake (assuming you survive, thus no pity parade), your house is either there or it is not. The disaster happens and then you move on. We spent almost two weeks listening every fifteen minutes to government emergency broadcasts to hear if our town had been destroyed yet. Think about that. Is my home still there? Yes? Ask again in fifteen minutes. Satan's magic 8-ball. (Grateful though I am for the outpouring of sympathy from around the world, also think about what it was like going through that in front of tens of thousands of people.)
Hence why it took so long for me to finally leave offerings of gratitude in my river to Vasuki and his retinue. I did so about two hours after this tweet, just if you're wondering exactly what premium members can do.
Far over, the #Tassie mountains old,
The #cloud was low, and the shape was bold,
It went away, after the break of day,
I guess the dragon, couldn't find its gold.#fogdragon2019 #desolationofsmog #weather #bomtish#forecast at https://t.co/2geBRGwbHz pic.twitter.com/sW9bQJ0dsz— Bureau of Meteorology, Tasmania (@BOM_Tas) February 24, 2019
The upshot of all this is that the drama blended into the beginning of one of the more remarkably insightful transits of my whole life -the extended Mercury/Pisces season and that was the context in which I began to process just what I had been through, including some of the private fallout from this disaster, which was deeply, deeply hurtful. Obviously other things are in play beyond where the Pisces activity lands in my chart. The other main players this time were the condition of the ascendant ruler and the moon (especially as the January eclipses rang the bell on this whole thing).
James returned to the mainland the same day Jay left for London, thus I was on my own on the farm for the first week since it all began. And I got sick. Bodily sick. Nausea. Headaches. Random limb pain. Mostly the nausea, which unsurprisingly coincided with my efforts to begin unpacking and generally bringing the farm down from a war footing. (Taking the tennis balls from the downpipes, removing the hoses, washing all the wet towels that covered the doorways and windows, cleaning all the ash and grime from the outside of the house -which was probably the most traumatic chore, thinking about it.) When James arrived that Friday evening, I said the same thing may happen to him and it did. He spent most of that Saturday on the couch with nausea and stomach pains. That weekend, we nevertheless celebrated the first Sunday where the farm wasn't covered in smoke by covering it in smoke. But it was a bewildered sort of celebration. Like we were trying to remember how we used to enjoy just sitting out by the barbecue, drinking beers. Another dissociative trauma moment.
No rest for the genuinely wicked. It was time to head back to the mainland for some pre-arranged obligations. Let me tell you, it is a wild fucking ride to go and sit for an actual portrait immediately after the universe has repeatedly king hit you in the face. Will the bruises show up? What do I even look like now? Should I switch from wearing all-grey to wearing all-white? My portraitist, Matt, (below) actually remarked "you don't look like what you did when you first sat."
Like, Matt literally had to change the shape of my face. But the painting is done now and apparently my eyes follow people around the room and that's all I could have ever asked for, to be honest. (I'm hoping a professional rugby team buys it for their shower room.) It was a weird kind of perfect that I stayed in genuinely the most haunted hotel, right at a crossroads, that I have ever stayed in -and I used to specifically seek out haunted inns back in the UK.
Sounds kinda goth, but I really needed the silent-yet-noisy, cold-yet-comforting company of the dead, particularly as I was working on the Q1 Ancestors and The Dead course alone on the first floor balcony next to my fancy-ass room. (Got upgraded.) It was the perfect map to Hermes Cthonios in the murky gloom of Neptunian Pisces.
I believe it made it onto The Astrology Podcast (and thus onto the bingo board), but Austin mentioned how I described to him how Philip K. Dick this transit was for me, particularly once I got to Melbourne. Actual doppelgangers, as if in a fever dream. Hallucinatory experiences in old haunts. I would write something in my notebook in a pub and then someone at the next table would say the exact same thing. There was a point where I genuinely wondered if I was having a post-traumatic breakdown given I was immediately post-trauma. And all of it related to the house in which Pisces falls in my chart. It was astounding and I wish I could say more but firstly, it would take too long; and secondly, it's personal. The whole experience and my inability to describe it is a big part of the blogging block. Also just the general trauma that Mercury was zig-zagging over which I'm only just in a place to write about.
But honestly, here's where that ritualising comes back into it. I cut anchor. I dived backwards into it, Ellen Ripley (Alien 3) style. I goaded the spirits and planets and spirits of planets in question. Is that all you've got? Bring it. Do what you came here to do. Let's take this acid together and hit the carnival. And I'm proud of that decision. It made it worse which also made it better. It's generally true with a Merc ret, I guess, but especially with this one. The key is to resist making final conclusions or reaching final insights until it's all over, which includes the time when the little scamp direct crawls back across the degrees he retrograded.
The operational fallout was also extreme. My old Peugeot/travelling-library-of-rare-books died on James as he was driving to the airport to fly to the mainland to do his actual job and I still don't have it back from the workshop. The truck went in days before the fire so I didn't have that either, and it took almost a month because the town where the mechanic lives was evacuated almost as often as mine. But eventually I got it back, fully serviced, with a nice new covering for the tray and I had my first (ascendant ruler-related) twinge of "bring me that horizon" as I rubbed my hand along the top of the steering wheel.
Then there's the not-small matter of the Q1 course which, if you don't know, is voted by the premium members. And became, as is the funny way of these things, eerily the exact right medicine for what I was going through. And, referencing the need to lean in to ritual, meant I had the opportunity to time some big moments around the high points of this particular transit. Including some deeply healing group rituals that, firstly (below) allowed me to LARP Sister Act, but also laid me up for the rest of the day.
That's sort of the story of the Merc/Pisces zig-zag until we get to the part where it was/is gonna wind up, which is where we are now. The three-day Ancestral Lineage Repair workshop back in Melbourne, specifically in an emotionally charged square kilometre or so. Again, unsurprisingly, none of this was planned out beforehand. It's just how the universe rolls, I guess. We began with the dead, we bisected right at the station with the dead, and we end the whole Mercury dance -with its completed insights- with the dead.
Now, fairly obviously this isn't a review of Dr Foor's workshop. And I was already familiar with many of the techniques having worked through them on my own when the book came out. But, as with all magic, there is something extra about going through processes like this in a group. And it was humbling to be in ceremony with Indigenous Australians working through Really Big Stuff like Stolen Generation trauma. I'm immensely grateful for the opportunity and if you get the chance to attend a workshop or have sessions with someone Daniel's trained, do so.
So there is what went on in the workshop, but there is also the presence of the actual workshop on my timeline, and how it itself is part of this wider process. The location of what I have been cheekily calling 'death school' on Twitter was at least triply relevant for me. The venue's association with some permaculture projects I have on the burn, Melbourne itself, and this exact little corner of Melbourne. And I had unfinished business with all of it, which would not have finished up were it not for the insights and medicines that came pouring down the particular lineage I was working with the past few days. And -once again as with the opening Melbourne/Pisces trip- that spooled out into waking life in the most astounding PKD ways.
Just one example. I found a London cunning man about five centuries up one of my lineages and -being naturally and correctly suspicious of pretty much all spirit jibber jabber- gave him exactly 24 hours to prove it. Which would be kinda hard as I was staying alone in an AirBnb, walking distance from the venue, and pretty much just getting up, going to death school, coming back, ordering uber eats and silently processing. Except that night, I randomly met someone in the same street who turned out to be the thirteenth son of two Singaporean equivalents of cunning folk (as in both his mother and father). And we stayed up till the wee hours, drinking and smoking and talking about the childhood exorcisms he'd seen, frog curses, his parents' many adventures cleaning up ghosts and dispensing charms, and his now-deceased mother's often extreme interventions in his life -literally chasing off robbers comes to mind.
So I'll call that a hit.
Now, obviously I'm not pinning this whole thing on mere Mercury, which is typically over-emphasised anyway. (Although 'underworld psychopomp' was both me and all around me, yeah?) I'm mostly just using it as a through-line for the post. Coming to the end of this process of processing, we should give a 'roll credits shout out' to the Venusian clean-up crew and my (ascendant ruler) Mars return as well. But I had the intuition going into the Mercury/Pisces dance that this one was going to be big for me, and there was going to be much-needed healing down there somewhere. I had no idea it was going to look like this, and actually resisted intellectualising or 'lesson-finding' pretty much on faith. Faith that clarity will only come at the end of these configurations. Faith that was well-founded because here we are. I can't wait to share with you what I've brought back from the depths.
All praise and gratitude to my ancestors. We're back in business.