There is nothing subtle in the energy today at 21° Aries, characterized as A Pugilist Enters The Ring. We have to fight to win in whatever arena we find ourselves. This is an image of total commitment and vigilance; we have presumably prepared for the task at hand. It’s all about survival of the fittest. But how do we judge fitness?

We attended a charity fundraiser at the Rainbow Room last night as guests of our friends. It is pretty fair to say that the place was filled with the richest people in New York. Fitness, in that setting, was measured in wealth and in the influence it provides. This was not my ring. In my experience, typically, fitness is measured in creative output and success in and validation for artistic expression. That is more my arena. At least I think it is. This oracle makes us realize we should have some fixed field we can enter to pack a serious punch. Moreover we have to be totally convinced of ourselves in this milieu. It certainly makes one think and wonder if we are trained enough to be up for the task, whatever that might be.

Sometimes the things we’re good at aren’t necessarily the areas in which we wish to excel. Dane Rudhyar talks about the fighters as yin and yang. But I think he’s off base on this one. There is only one fighter in this story. Perhaps the other is waiting for him, but maybe not. Victory might be assured, by default. There may be no risk of defeat or disfigurement. This is a singular fight. And I believe it’s a symbol of readiness to take on the world. We just have to ask ourselves….are we similarly prepared to do likewise.

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At 20° Aries we encounter A Young Girl Feeding Birds In Winter. As many of us still still cope with Winter in Spring, we have perhaps felt compassion for those birds, unlike our migrating geese, who have had to remain and endure the elements. Little wonder Dane Rudhyar speaks of this oracle as “overcoming crises through compassion”. Today we think of helping others survive through difficulty. A young girl might be more prone to sympathy for gentle living things—unlike boys they aren’t prone to hunt and kill. The feminine spirit is one of a nurturing source of life, in contrast to masculine energy which can seek conquest and dominion. We are distinguished from the animals for our charitable natures, accepting the guardianship of all living things. There may be an unconscious understanding that helping the helpless is ultimately helping ourselves. It certainly doesn’t cost us. We can’t control Nature but we can employ a higher principle of Love to ameliorate her negative effects.

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Sometimes you just have to detach in the face of circumstantial drama. One gets the sense of things becoming complicated, on many fronts all at once. Maybe things seemed all to be going right, and your attitude was sanguine and focused on all the positives you could affect moving forward; and then there is a sense of an unraveling. Problems with people, places and things begin to creep in—suddenly everything seems like a bit of a chore, or that nothing is working, and you can’t capture that same rosy outlook for powering through. You just want to chuck it all. Welcome to 19° Aries and the Sabian Symbol of The “Magic Carpet” of Oriental Imagery. It just seems to scream “road trip” whether it be a real journey or a metaphoric one of transcendence, if not escape. We need to feel the magic of life today, so the slings, arrows and rotten tomatoes you might be ducking can be viewed as inspiration to take a flight of fancy. When we’re feeling down or persecuted we can overcompensate, in a good way, reaching heights we never would have achieved if all was going swimmingly. “No Manure No Magic” was the theme of that great film I Heart Huckabees by that awful human being David O. Russell—and I say awful from first-hand experience. Being pushed to new heights by negative experience, even abuse, was the theme, too, of the recent film Whiplash, but sometimes abuse is just abuse, like Russell in the below clip with Lily Tomlin during the filming of Huckabees. You’ve probably seen this? He’s such an asshole.

But there are a lot of assholes out there. In fact, sometimes, you can see nothing but them. It’s always about money and status. That’s what’s usually driving the mean-spirited of the world. And living in a culture where social and financial competition are so prevalent can really wear on a kind person who isn’t designed to approach life as if it’s some kind of fight for fame or money. Not to say that success isn’t a goal for kind, compassionate people who might be more type B. It’s just that in a world filled with so many grabby sharks running rough shod over others, those who are quietly and selflessly getting their life are obscured by those who are more cut-throat Machiavellian in nature. But you can comfort yourself with the knowledge that those people rarely experience any magic at all. How can they? Their vision of life is too myopic, fixed on their own narrow need to succeed. And it’s a disease. Enough is rarely enough for people for whom life is a competition on every seeming level.

Up until recently I maintained a (one-sided) friendship with a fellow who had become fairly successful in business. We knew each other when we worked at restaurants in the late 1980s in Boston, when I was fresh out of college; and circumstance threw us together once again and it seemed that Fate had more in store for us to work through together. Well, what struck me about this person was his compulsive need to play games, actual ones, nearly incessantly, and his sinister desire to win at them, which he would cheat to do at the drop of a hat. He approached life and human interaction the same way. If he differed with you on a matter of opinion, he would go to great lengths to try to discredit your position, subjective though the challenge may be, because he had to win every argument. He had to be right about everything. This tenacity in competition masked a serious lack of confidence, of course; and resulted, too, in overt social climbing and an increasingly superficial character. Gaining the reputation for being condescending and cruel, he systematically alienated friend after friend over the years, the only people remaining in his life being those in his employ or ones who feel that somehow his worldly success will rub off on them; so they suffer his abuses for that sake. It is a losing battle.

There is a difference between those who may be your enemy and those who are your nemesis. The goddess Nemesis, was that of divine retribution. And in life we may view others as nemesis when they represent the non-you; when we might silently whisper to ourselves “there but for the grace of god(s) go I.” People and circumstance that we deem negative, or blatantly negating, are our cue to go higher, despite the pleasing worldly trappings they represent, or indeed due to them. The “Magic Carpet” of Oriental Imagery, is that of our own mind’s ability to imaginatively transcend the world of appearances and its dualistic dynamics of illusory hierarchies and terrestrial competition. We give over to the knowledge that there is more to life than that, and we leave it to the unimaginative minds to fight for scraps on the ground as we go rise up. The Oriental Imagery points to geometric patterning as figurative portrayals do not factor into Arabian art. And so we know that the carpet is woven with our own abstract designs for living, our thought forms making up the fabric on which we may soar. We’ve been dealing with a great deal of weaving metaphors these past several days and it all seems to add up to taking flight now on what we’ve fabricated for ourselves. We must detach (with love) from static situations and allow our dreams to manifest more fully in our waking life, letting those choosing to play on the ground amass and hoard all their earthly riches and rewards like dragons bound up by avarice and self-loathing, ever fearful that their treasures will be taken away. Those who live in constant fear of being cheated or taken advantage of are always those who cheat and take advantage of others.

But we have the ability to transcend notions of competition and contention; there is nothing holding us down but attachment itself. We don’t need anything. And once we feel we do we risk being incarcerated by that need. Today we are reminded that there is no strife if we don’t struggle. We can’t hang on to anything in the end, so why would one seek to do so in the process of life. We must let go loosely, all the time, not only of material things but of our limiting thoughts. King Solomon had a flying carpet with which he could transport his entire retinue; and yet, if he exhibited excess hubris, the carpet would give a shake and scores of his people would fall to their demise. Pride is forever threatening to bring about our falls. Dragons get slain, the greedy miser loses all he loves. The flight of the Magic Carpet is a selfless one. I liken this image to a lucid dream. When we awake into a dream, knowing we are dreaming, we are tempted to make something we want happen, but expressions of selfish want dissolve the dream. If we are aware we are lucidly dreaming, the way to keep the dream alive is to relinquish any need to impose our wants on it and to, simply, go along for the ride. This is challenging of course but worth the non-effort.

Life is truly but a dream so it’s more than mere metaphor to extend the notion into life. Magic is belief in the unfolding. How can we participate in life’s unfolding if we are viewing life as a competition we must manipulate and “win”—that is anti-life. So step off and hop on the magic carpet of your own soaring participation in life as a dream. Be swept away on the winds of your total faith and belief in the power of your own imagination and design as it is one and the same as that of the divine plan unfolding its patterns. Let go of your wants and so-called needs that keep you in static status quo. And by all means take a road trip of sorts if you can, even if it’s a short hop and a skip to stare at something scenic, or an inner voyage, closing your eyes, allowing your mind to wander, perhaps, through an inky landscape of twinkling stars, feeling yourself fly through outer space to the farthest reaches of the cosmos. Let yourself go.

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So I’m coping with a bad injury and also with the disappointment that I didn’t get to complete my thirty Bikram classes in thirty days. Got to twenty-seven, but I couldn’t do more than a few postures, can barely walk, and the pain in my hip is excruciating. Went for a massage it didn’t help. But this forum isn’t for complaining so I will take my lumps and soldier on. The theme today, as magically happens, is recuperation, in part. The image for 18° Aries is An Empty Hammock Stretched Between Two Trees. The fact that it is empty means that this isn’t actually a time to rest. The would-be inhabitant (us) of the hammock is off doing what needs to be done. But we get the sense that s/he knows that repose is waiting; meanwhile, the image represents the relaxed state of mind in which the “off-camera” action is taking place.

Our dearest friends bought us a hammock as a house-warming present when we first moved to Cape Cod. And we did indeed stretch it between two trees. And, though bitter sweet to think of it now, that image is never truly far from my mind. I would put the hammock out in the morning and go about my busy day, knowing, at any point, I could stop and just stare up through the trees. It’s an image of savasana, the “dead body pose” where one gets most benefit from lying completely still, letting the body absorb the action performed in other active postures. We have to know when to let the body’s intelligence take over, and mindfully release all our tension, which can be an obstacle to natural recuperation. In Bikram, one does savasana pretty much after every set of every posture. There is a natural rhythm to it, where you exert effort and then receive the benefit of it. The hammock reminds us, in the midst of our busy life, that it is unnatural not to include repose in the process of our industry.

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In the last throes of my thirty-day yoga challenge and I am somehow injured. My left hip is in agony and my entire left leg has been spasming for the last twelve hours not stop. Me no like feeling defeated or powerless or mortal for that matter. I was planning on working through it and just going and doing what I can but today’s symbol is giving me pause. Two Dignified Spinsters Sitting in Silence is the oracle of 17° Aries. Today seems to be about embracing a certain renunciation and not only accepting the things of life that passed us by, but somehow finding the meditative serenity in that. I think of the Miss Allens in A Room With A View—they were dignified but they surely weren’t silent. Still, there seems to be an elegance and yes a dignity that is reserved for the spinster, as if her station is by choice rather than chance.

The fate-goddess assignation to the term spinster is endemic, since, spinning wool was the only profession available to unmarried women of yore. And, like Jean Brodie and, to a certain degree, the character of Aunt Charlotte, also from A Room With a View (both portrayed by Maggie Smith), spinsterhood was often the result of having an over idealized view of love, or perhaps a very realistic one, knowing that the state of marriage would only disappoint, in the literal sense, of disempowering. In this way the spinsters can be read as co-conspirators of feminist freedom whose serenity stems from choosing their own life path and not being subject to the legal confines of contractual partnership. They are paired nonetheless and who knows what love affairs their memories provide.

 Rudhyar points to this image having a narcissistic character. That may be true. But I interpret their silence as more than mere self-reflection; I get a sense of meditation or prayer. They figures are inwardly focused their energy isn’t vacant or dormant, it is centered and probably purposeful. I believe they are powered by their renunciation. Like saints or ascetics, they might be offering up usual worldly trappings in sacrifice and dedication to something larger. Nuns wear black because they are absorbing all the negativity of this world on behalf of us all—that’s the concept anyway—just as they or monks, whether Christian or Buddhist or what have you, pray for the salvation of all mankind or enlightenment of all sentient beings. They’ve not escaped life, they’re working. I feel that to be true with our spinsters. They have a plan and they’re hatching it. Like Obie Wan sacrificing his life to make the force more powerful, these ladies are affecting more positive change in their stillness and silence than they could have done in the typical dance and drama of life.

It’s Monday so this uncelebratory image is rather fitting for the day. I think the oracle cautions us against too much activity, especially that which we feel is expected of us. We can sacrifice some of the usual shenanigans and approach the day, more, as a silent meditation. Let’s not junk it up with overcommitment. We may demur, even, in a dignified manner. We can be self-possessed and not only live with our sadness or rejections, we can see them as choices; we are not victims of circumstance. We often tell our clients to repeat the phrase I Want What I Have (another Starsky + Cox mantra for you!) all different ways, emphasizing this word and than that. The Spinsters are saying something similar: I Don’t Want What I Don’t Have seems to be their message to us. And they are not alone. They mediation seems to be synchronized as to make it all the more resonant. We hear you sisters!

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Yay! The image for 16° Aries is Nature Spirits Are Seen At Work In The Light Of The Sunset. So it’s not just me seeing them. Phew. Actually, I saw them as a child (as did a tall Baroness I know), an experience that peaked at the turn into adolescence, and, yes, it was typically around sunset, in Spring or Autumn, when they’d come to light, peeking out from their habitats, usually below exposed roots at the bottom of hillsides, along a creek. That’s where I sensed them most. I kind of love this supernatural oracle happening on Easter because, really, I don’t know what’s wilder, a savior rising from the dead, or hmm-hmms (as we call them in our house) going about their biz. Today’s symbol points to our ability to attune with nature and the power of unseen forces. Way ahead of you.

I know Stella will think of Ireland. We got lost in the West one day, where the road signs were suddenly all in Gaelic. We kept going in circles and we knew we were being toyed with by the hmm-hmms (we dare not use their real names); so we employed a trick we learned from the film Hear My Song, ever seen it? You should: We pulled the car over and turned our shirts inside out and started on the road again, and around the very first curve, we were stopped in our tracks. I kid you not: Standing along the road, some holding hands, were what appeared to be seven children, the “oldest” of whom was, I’d say, ten years old, tops. And they were all in order according to height, the littlest one appearing to be about two. And get this: in their non-clutched hands they were holding tiny metal tools. That’s right. A little spade, a tiny axe, wee mallets, all very antique looking. These “children” were positively diminutive, as if ancient Pictish blood ran strong in their veins, the oldest tallest boy, one would imagine, being an Owen Meany of sorts, compared with those his age. And how to describe their faces. Like slices of strawberry shortcake. Big round white poreless faces with cheeks shot through with ruddy flushes, not chubby but wide with strong broad cheekbones, their some dark and some sandy hair swooping across their brows, stuck, sweaty, to their skin. Because apparently they were working. And they seemed to be waiting for us, because they flagged us down, not we them.

We cautiously rolled down the car window and a collage of curious heads came into frame. “Are you lost?” Asked the boy whose button-down shirt was tucked taut into his trousers hitched by a thick leather belt, the skin of his lower calf exposed where his socks had fallen down and his pants had grown too short—as if that were possible. All their shoes and socks were muddy and they smelled of grass and peat. None of the others uttered a sound, as if they were one collective organism, clinging here and there to itself, with one workable mouthpiece, the others appearing to be purposefully shut tight. We explained that yes we were lost and told them where we were trying to head. And the boy wiped his Dondi swoop of hair from out his crystal blue eyes, a trait the collective shared, and said “Now…” launching into a series of directives pinioned with Gaelic names of this cnoc or that beleach. Glazing over at the musical guidance, we didn’t jot anything down, but just took it in, until the medusa of dirty, sweet, sweaty, and some snotted, faces all began to smile gappily, and nod their noggins, only one of which, apparently, was capable of thinking in English, we were sent on our way, the wee ones waving, again draped in a line across the road, holding hands and tools, in our rearview mirror.

Gleaning from what our friend Dane Rudhyar has to say (he took on that name from the Vedic god Rudra, the regenerator—it’s ruddy implications befit his sign of Aries), which isn’t ever easy to do: The sunset symbolizes fulfillment, as in “the day is done” and it is at that time when we can “see” these nature spirits, which would be hidden from us if we were too focused on achieving, in life or in the course of our work day. He also defines these spirits as being the harmonizing, balancing, guiding agents of a natural biosphere. That is to say, viewing the Earth as a living organism, the way each individual is, the spirits are likened to the endocrine system, or better yet, the chakra system of the body. The purpose of today’s oracle is to open us to the possibility of “approaching life in a holistic, nonrational, intuitive manner.” I’m down with that. Who’s with me? Rudyhar hastily adds, ‘what this means also is the process of “becoming like a little child.”‘ And of course he is quoting our main man Jesus who said “be ye like little children,” that is to say open to the wonder of the world because you will then witness it.

We flipped our shirts inside out and we summoned a whole gaggle of children, like seven dwarves or rather hmm-hmms hi-ho’ing off to work. Later in our journey we ended up at an old estate that had been turned into a beautiful inn, on a cool blue lake over which we glided in antique rowboat, and with a delicious restaurant on the premises that served world class cuisine. Our waitress, we will never forget, was called Bridget; and she was almost as tiny as the leader of that merry band we earlier encountered on the road. She had minute hands and that white-light clairvoyant far-away look simple, special peoplepossess. We have ever since thought of her as Saint Bridget, an ancient Pict of a little person over whose head our sophisticated jokes might fly, as she innocently and benignly smiled at us and served us over the course a few days with her contemplative mien. She might have been a young auntie to those children along that lush country road, they were so similar in look, with the same flushed cheeks and damp brow; and one could easily expect that at some point during her visits to our table she wouldn’t be bringing a smoked fish appetizer or a cheese course but matter-of-factly displaying a freshly materialized stigmata.

The name of the inn was Ard Na Sidhe which translates, but exactly, to Hill of the Fairies.

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First I just need to say that the synchronicities are starting. I found yesterday’s oracle had a practicable takeaway, that is to say that The Serpent Coiling…, one interpretation of which is Kundalini energy coiled at the base of the spine, came in handy during yoga yesterday as I really focused on releasing it throughout the twenty-six postures, and especially the two breathings we do in Bikram. Then, at the end of the day, we went for a little stroll to get some air—I’ve been nursing a cold and it was finally warm enough to amble here in Boston—and I was just telling Stella how I was trying to work The Serpent Coiling… oracle into my yoga when, at that exact moment, under my feet, on the sidewalk of Commonwealth Avenue, this appeared in the concrete:

Needless to say it was an arresting signpost and I thought, a-ha, some cosmic validation.

Today’s symbol, for 15° Aries is An Indian Weaving a Ceremonial Blanket which I find uplifting on the whole. It feels like a little bit of magic which always invokes some Thoth cum Hermes cum Mercury energy, which would be apt if the third sign of Gemini had something in its bag of tricks relating to this day, date and degree. It feels fitting, given it’s “Holy Week” and those around us seem to be preparing for ceremonial holidays. Of all the Christian ones, Easter is most associated with special garments. The word vestment comes from the goddess Vesta (Greek: Hestia) and her devoted vestal virgins wore ceremonial garb as do most individuals, in most religions or magic or ritual practice. The Magician in the Tarot comes to mind as does Samantha in Bewitched—how I used to love it when she’d drop her housewife mantle and don her black robes; and of course it would have been the shaman of the tribe weaving that blanket, which was worn for life changing events, rites of passages, milestones, celebrations. So at this degree of Aries we are getting ready to ritualize experience. This means we are conscious of the importance of something impending, but we are also making it important in our weaving, real or metaphoric. We are fully participating in our experience, empowering ourself in that process.

The ceremonial blanket is something specific. Most notably, Native Americans from the Pacific Northwest as well as “plains Indians” created these wearable objects. They completely circled the individual, with no edges or seams showing, and they were particularly worn for ceremonial dances. Imagine an entire party of dancing people, all completely encircled in their blankets, ritually embroidered with stars and cosmic totems and imagery, the colorful designs lighted by a sacred fire, people spinning—as if humans were transforming themselves into pure spiritual form or particles of energy, a flash mob all decked out as string theory. Dane Rudhyar believes that Elsie Wheeler “produced” an “Indian” in this symbol because there was a need to stress an individual who lived more in harmony with the cosmos. That may be so, but I think it irrelevant. Both Jesus and Mary are spoken of as being seamlessly robed by the universe, the Milky Way, specifically. Mary is depicted as having three stars on her veil. Unlike the members of that “Indian”‘s tribe, we, the people, aren’t privy to so transplendently celestial a wardrobe, even on our highest holy days. I think that’s why the “Indian” was produced; because we have an example here of a culture who believed that a magical woven blanket could transport anyone, not just the priest in the pulpit or the Pope in his fancy silk robes, cap and slippers.

One cannot talk about weaving without speaking of fate. The Fates were weavers. Penelope wove and un-wove whilst waiting all those long years for Ulysses’ return. In the Libra Woman chapter of Sextrology we talk about The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a nod to broderie, French for embroidery, and how that character, an archetype of that sign, weaves the fates of her girls, reciting Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shallot”, whose namesake is weaving at her loom all the while. Libra is the “high priestess” archetype, the white-witch Samantha Stevens of the Zodiac who does most poignantly embody the power that weaving figuratively implies—designing, intending, charming, spelling. The great Libran sage, Florence Scovel Shinn wrote the new-thought treatise Your Word is Your Wand, and indeed we weave with words just as we weave with imagery, in both ways, endowing the “work” with our intention. The ceremonial blanket is only made a power object by the weaver endowing it with that power with every turn of the loom or stitch of the thread. Stories are called yarns, are they not? We weave our plots and they can be simple or elaborate just as can be a multi-starred design on a robe or blanket meant to transport us to new heights, spiritual or otherwise.

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I remind you that when Marc Edmund Jones and Elsie Wheeler produced the Sabian Symbols, he had numbered blank index cards and shuffled them and held each blank card up to Elsie with the number hidden on the back. Yesterday, with lucky symbol number thirteen, I pointed out the first repeat of the twelve zodiac signs’ association through this system of 360° as another potential Aries big bang of An Unexploded Bomb Reveals An Unsuccessful Social Protest and, voila, today’s oracle for 14° Aries is A Serpent Coiling Near A Man And A Woman, which is a Taurean fixed-earth Edenic image, so my theory of these sign-associations, in turn, continues to bear out. Needless to say there’s a lot going on in this image. It’s not a classic temptation scene of Eve and the Serpent, it’s more of an acceptance of that snake in the grass by both the essential male and female, yang and yin. Dane Rudhyar points to Ish and Isha (Adam and Eve’s Hebrew names, which, c’mon, are fabulous) as encountering not a tempter but an “individualizer” in the form of the snake. Only the couple got cold feet and didn’t go through with it. But in this image, the story is rewritten: Ish and Isha—seriously, these are going to be my new pronouns in referring to people—are totally down with their pet snake.

I see spiraling DNA, thus evolution, in this image; I see Kundalini, therefore enlightenment, in this image. In both senses we are pointing at unconscious, essential forces that reside within us, potential but perhaps dormant. In the case of Kundalini, which the Upanishads describe as being coiled at the base of our spine like a sleeping serpent, it is something to be awakened. In its best light, the serpent brought the gift of consciousness, it was only Ish and Isha who turned that into self-consciousness. Rudhyar sees the acceptance of relationship by polarized beings here, stating, “there must be polarization before there can be fulfillment.” And this is something we preach to our clients (especially when we encounter planetary oppositions in their charts) as we find it to be a universal principle. Just as the presence of paradox in our experience often points to a breakthrough or breakout moment, involving some kind of awakening.

As an author who loves to explore the connection between the sexy and the sublime, the so-called gutter and the stars, the notion that unconscious, instinctual, libidinous energy lodged in our rootsiest chakra is what gives rise to blissful enlightenment not only excites it just makes total sense. The serpent is the acceptance of the relationship between those two seeming polar opposites too—we are not seeking to transcend some baser self to reach enlightenment, we are letting that natural, untamed, untapped force coiled with in us spiral up and power the awakening, without apology to some punishing God. Blasphemy. Not at all. Rudhyar calls it “the cosmification of desire”—Word—that is to say accepting, embracing our desire, including but not limited to our sexual desire, (which, c’mon people, is the impetus to life) as a sort of sacrament living within us that we must, by rights, let spiral up, and be the energetic anatomy of a transpersonal state, thus one devoid of ego. As westerners we’re not wont to believe that Christ consciousness could consist of desire of any kind, let alone a libidinous form. But we beg to differ.

Stella and I are always prescribing the notion of connecting our desires with our destiny, those two words sharing more than an etymological link. That is a cornerstone of our cosmic ideology. Desire isn’t want. I often say desire is like Lichtenstein or Monaco or Vatican City, it is a bit of real estate within a larger body that doesn’t belong to that body. I believe that desire is a portion of universal divine presence that resides within us—which is why we can’t choose or unchoose what our desires are. True desire. Again not want. The serpent symbolizes desire, but, you see, desire has been demonized. We do not accept and harness the pole-to-pole power within ourselves, we see ourselves as conflicted, fallen, our desires being puppeteered by demons. The lizard kings of the world seek to suppress and manipulate our true desires every which way; and organized religions that tell us we are sinners possessed by demons are the greatest tool to that end; putting us at odds with desire breeds frustration, which is a a negative power that can be harnessed as hate and militarized. Yesterday, we looked at how we might be time-bombs waiting to explode, on some level; but how doing so would actually be counter productive to honoring our true, ever-unfolding desires. Today, we accept our polarizations so that we needn’t feel divided.

Over dinner last night Stella cracked me up. She launched into this routine employing the lingo of Scientology in describing her day to day doings and encounters with people and I thought it was so perfect and hysterical. Their whole concept of reaching different levels of “Being” via audits designed to become a “Clear”—which does the opposite of what that pseudo religion professes—meanwhile all religions are pseudo religions—because you cannot eradicate desire, you can only repress it further or release it. And we thought how great it would be if people just casually tossed around Scientology lingo in describing the most banal aspects of their lives, taking the power and the piss out of that silly cult and its teachings.

So, on that note, I have to meet up with this total OTVIII yoga instructor right now who’s going to audit the crap out of me because I’m feeling like the biggest SP on the planet. I only hope that the complete Ish that does Bikram in his underwear isn’t there because he’s Fair Game if so.

Copyright 2015 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

When the Sabian Symbols were first, shall we say, divined, the one associated with 13° Aries mightn’t have had the same import, on the surface, as it does now. An Unexploded Bomb Reveals An Unsuccessful Social Protest is the oracle for the day; and it’s impossible for us to ignore the real and terrorizing correlations associated with this image and the sense of real relief that stems from such a crisis being averted. But let us turn the clock back ninety years when these symbols were first produced and the world wasn’t universally gripped by terror. Not to say that, in 1925, there wasn’t upheaval and that bomb scares didn’t happen—it’s just that the impetus was more localized and isolated to specific, not globally sweeping, causes. It’s more difficult to read this symbol metaphorically today than when it was originally meant to be. It now seems in bad taste.

For, to get the most out of this symbol, one needs to identify in large part with s/he who placed the bomb in the first place. We are all of us revolutionaries in part. Today, we’re reminded of that fact and, by extension, we might see if those who are actually born on this day personify that particular spirit. I found it personally prophetic that this was the symbol waiting for me to explore and expound upon this morning; because I’ve been feeling pretty itchy, lately, for some radical change. I feel that I am every element of this symbol. I am s/he who put the bomb there, and I am also s/he who discovered and dismantled it. There is a part of me that wants to overthrow the entire regime of my own existence, one which I’ve painstakingly cultivated into place; I want to blow it all up and start a completely new order and way of life. Unsurprisingly, the number thirteen is that of new order—I suspect it might be why it can be seen as unlucky. It would be for those steeped in the old guard. The number twelve is that of cosmic order, not just in terms of astrology, the zodiac consisting of twelve signs; but there are twelve apostles; twelve gates to the celestial city; twelve tribes of Israel, twelve years until adulthood in Judaism; twelve superior angels; twelve stations of the cross; twelve articles of the creed; twelve simple letters in the Hebraic language—the initials of the zodiacal names in Hebrew!; twelve labors of Hercules; twelve supreme court justices; twelve semitones derived from the seven notes of a scale; and twelve gods in the Greek and Roman pantheon—when the thirteenth god, Dionysus hit the scene, the goddess Hestia offered him her throne and thereafter sat at the center of the circular thrown room, tending the fire. But I digress…

The point is that when you get to thirteen, you’re at a new number one. No suprise that this symbol carries a double Aries energy, you might say. We are talking more than a spark, we are looking at a potential explosion. And yet, it is averted, begging the question: How are you an unexploded bomb?; and how are your social protests unsuccessful? Let’s talk impersonally for a moment. In post-Patriot-Act America, one does have trepidation taking a stand, as I always seem to do, on touchy subjects on social media. It’s very meta, but sounding off about Edward Snowden and what a true patriot he is, whether on Facebook, or in this Blague, does, as he has shown us, leave one open to scrutiny if not real consequence. It’s the same thing with sounding off about Scientology and their “Fair Game” policy of harrassing anyone who criticises them. This holds true for or any entity with access to retaliatory muscle. Anna Wintour—it’s all the same.

Ten years ago when Stella and I would perform shows and describe, with tongue in cheek, how it is we descend from a long line of mystics who were forever antithetical to the Lizard Kings who’ve controlled everything for eons, from the banks, to governments, to all the media, people would laugh in that sort of-you-guys-are-so-wacky type of way. Fast forward to the present and those same jokes aren’t as ha-ha funny because they ring more absolutely true. So, why does the bomb go unexploded? Fear. Fear that a motorcade of shiny black American made cars all being driven by Hugo Weaving with an earpiece is going pull up outside your house and you’ll be gently but firmly escorted away. It’s not going to happen. Probably. But, just a hair’s breadth of possibility of something like that happening is enough to keep most people’s revolutionary spirits in a perpetual state of nondetonation. Thus the metaphor of social protest isn’t just a metaphor at all, but let’s take a closer, personal look at today’s oracle:

Most of us live in a regime of our own making. If we’re lucky. I mean, we all know people way richer and way poorer, for starters, and yes, no doubt, people living in poverty or boxed in by societal limits of race or socio-economics are subject to a lifestyle largely not of their own making; so some of us have more restraint put upon us than the confines of a career and a lifestyle we’ve carved out for ourselves. The rich and famous have their own problems, and I don’t say that in an off-handed manner; from experience, with very few exceptions, the richer, more famous the person the more miserable s/he is. For real. It’s people who have enough, but not too much, who tend to be the happiest. But even they have undetonated bombs. And just because the bomb didn’t go off, it doesn’t mean it didn’t still point out the unrest, the upshot of which is going to be inevitable. We live under an order we created for ourselves and yet there will always be the seed of a new order in us. An undetonated bomb might be likened to an ungerminated seed. Dionysus is knee-jerkedly called the god of disorder, but not so; he is the god of a new order, the one to whom are given the keys of the kingdom. He just has a bad-ass party atttitude that belies the serious power he is divinely packing. But that makes sense, too.

Oftentimes, when we want to break out and break down our own old orders, such urges are often accompanied by visions of dancing on the table tops in a Parisian restaurant, well past closing with a bacchanal of wildly imaginative artists and intellectuals and fashion models and a winning football team, and of course Bryan Ferry is there, paying the tab, and hailing us cabs to whisk us off to a club privé for more dancing or to a gleaming all-night Champs Élysées brasserie for tiered platters of lobster, crab, oysters and assorted winkles . Okay maybe that’s just my vision but, when we get itching for a new order, we don’t often experience our desire for change as a safe, slow, barely perceptible shifting of a paradigm; we envision it as explosive and entailing a good blow out to mark our revolutionary change. That is how Dionysus archetypally lives in us. And this is why the detonation is thwarted. Our revolutionary motives are wildly inspiring, and they will inevitably surface in establishing a new order, but it does have to happen slowly over time, in fact. A violent reactionary move against the present order we’ve set up for ourselves would be retaliated upon by the police-state part of our own psyche, and it might actually set back our cause. The explosion is an adolescent bucking of our own inner authority; we don’t need it; we have more mature ways of instituting change, even the radical kind.

So what’s the message here? Maybe: Know where you’re going but don’t be in a rush to get there. Use your radical vision as the framework for a new order and then see what steps you can take, now, toward making it happen. And do be quick about it. It is still totally rad to create a total paradigm shift in your life over the next three to five years, say. Maybe you can do it within six months or a year. Depends on how practical you wish to be, and how itchy you are for change. Just don’t do nothing. That is the only possible crime. So ask yourself: What for you constitutes being a radical right now? How pressing is it to give that spirit life? And what you can do right now, in your present regime, toward setting the wheels of a new life into motion.

Oh and do remind me to tell you the stories, sometime, of when I was whisked off, on separate occasions, by different football teams, one Italian and one French, to some crazy doings at some wild establishments, both of which were on the Champs Élysées!

Copyright 2015 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.