Not even slightly questioning this miraculous twelve-fold sequence, randomly divined symbols falling into perfect astrological order. Today is about expansion of consciousness and, of course, it is ruled by Sagittarius which is all about just that. You can’t make this shit up: Intoxicated Chickens Dizzily Flap Their Wings Trying To Fly is the Sabian oracle at 21° Leo and it, more accurately, depicts a premature attempt at mind expansion. Dionysus is the predominant archetype of the sign of Sagittarius—the thigh-born of Zeus, the sign ruling that particular body part while Jupiter (Zeus) is the governing planet, the energy of which is expansion. Unlike any of Zeus/Jupiter’s other Olympian sons—Ares/Mars, Hermes/Mercury, Apollo, Hephaetus/Vulcan—Dionysus is his true inheritor; this god of the vine is also the precursor of Christ, these “facts” not being mutually exclusive.

So we have the intoxication factor here as providing, perhaps the courage or lack of inhibition toward mind expansion. But like any drug, wine might only point the way to their being other states of perception available to us, while the altered variety which are had through the ingesting or imbibing of any agent aren’t sustainable. Likewise we can become drunk on new spiritual knowledge, the effects of which might wear off just like any buzz. Often, the result is more confusion rather than clarity because what is being stimulated, really, is the ego which doesn’t have the capacity for flight; in fact it is what keeps us earthbound and terrestrial, rather than soaringly spiritual. Heightened feelings are in the realm of the physical senses, and they are mere imitation of sublime ecstasy.

Why chickens? Well the interpretations I’ve stumbled upon all chalk up to these birds being standard issue. These birds are not rare ones. They symbolize our typical natures which are flightless and rather mortal fodder. They do flail around, as we do, for the most part in life, rarely taking to the wing on something that might sustain our flights of true freedom. They are reactionary. And what reacts in us is our ego, hurling us this way and that, and it cannot be transcended in half measures, it must be an all or nothing affair.

I think I intimated several months back that I suffered some ill treatment at the hands of a couple of friends who, despite their swinging on vines from this psychic chiropractor to that energy worker to some guru or another, are pretty wrapped up in their material fame and fortune—basically they’re total snobs who play eighth-grade games of trying to make others feel less-than or excluded. Anyway, I let them have it. I was “right” and it “felt great” to sweep my side of the street clean of all their debris; but really, in the end I would have soared more readily skyward had I just kept my own confidence, knowing what I knew, and took the fifth. It did my spirituality no good to speak my mind, really. If anything it set me back.

The true embodiment of the sign of Sagittarius is the seeker, the sign’s motto being “I see”, but the search is never truly outward. We might be guided by so-called gurus but even they should be guiding us inward as they do likewise. Expansion of consciousness is a quiet, meditative, private, unseen endeavor. If there is the slightest cackling or arm-waving about it than we are on the wrong path entirely. I like the way this image goes right for the shadow jugular of the Sagittarian experience. True spirituality cannot be telegraphed and it is only the outcroppings of, say, organized religion that we can become inordinately drunk upon. Revellers who followed Dionysus might have had a proclivity to be overserved, but the god himself never touched the stuff.

Copyright 2015 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.