Gemini 17° (June 5)

 

Just a pause from going through these reviews of the Sextrology chapters as I regroup and put some things to right. I have not been sleeping well with all this unrest and I will have to take rest where I can find it in the coming days. We are in the midst of major upheaval and yet what I hope is emerging is something real and strong for the future. So I have completed reading through the first full year of this Blauge, which was specifically centered on the Sabian Symbols, and now I’m into reading through year two, five entries a day, which began at Spring Equinox 2016. Freed from pinning my ideas to those Symbols, the writing begins to open up and I know I will have offered both our own astrological insights as well personal stories, ever focused on the weird and wonderful ways in which the Zodiac works. And what I’ve realized, right out of the gate, is that there is so, so, much material, and a lot of it will be helpful in realizing the project at hand this year. Also, I am going to back off on writing à la minute this year and keep this short because you people have a lot to look at below.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 376-380  I am reading through all my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, but the time I get to my seventh, I will have through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize:

Originally posted March 22, 2016:

One of the bits we didn’t get to the other night in doing our Zodiac Club at Sid Gold’s was, to illustrate the point of the War God, Mars (namesake of the Aries’ ruling planet) whose Greek name, incidentally, is Ares, being the main archetype of the Aries Man. They can be hot heads (the body part ruled by the sign), brawling and downright belligerent. A list of head-butting Aries dudes includes Alec Baldwin, Russell Crowe, Sean Bean, Ryan O’Neal, Vincent Gallo, Gary Oldman, William Shatner, Dennis Quaid. Don’t even get me started on John Galliano.

Often, in the past, we stayed at our friend’s penthouse off University Place, next door to Alec Baldwin who we saw thousands of times. Typically, he’d be walking his ironically tiny dog—well not walking it just rather letting it do its thing—while ranting or howling into his iphone. We love Alec Baldwin. And Stella is really determined to ask him to allow her to give him a hug. She really thinks he’s one of our greatest actors (I agree) and a teddy bear (I’m not sure about that. I caution her against asking for said hug but if anyone could make him acquiesce to such a request, though he is notoriously on guard against having his privacy invaded, it would be her.

So on this trip we are staying in our favorite downtown hotel. The room is tiny but there is a great lounge and restaurant and we hang out in it all day and work and meet clients and take meetings and eat too many carbs and don’t always stick to sparkling water. Anyway, we were with a client yesterday and suddenly I heard this bellowing. I think you know where I’m going here. A red-faced Alec Baldwin has stormed up to the hostess stand where a placid slip of a young woman is seemingly meditating at her podium and he starts laying in. Something to the effect: Is anybody going to come to my table and wait on me or do I have to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s like he can’t help but come across, well, brusque would be kind. I honestly think she didn’t know who he was which is great and she was sweet and accommodating and of-coursing him to death which made him look (and I think feel) silly all of a sudden, like an anger-management audiotape was suddenly looping in his blood filled head.

The female archetype of Aries is the war-goddess Athena. She is prudent war, defensive war, more flight than fight, staying above the fray. Me thinks Mr. Baldwin needs to do some invoking of that steely-eyed deity who is the poster diva for picking your battles and channeling that feisty Mars energy into something sustainable rather than explosive. Aries men are pure energy, they really are. Unbridled fire and masculinity, Mars symbol being that masculine glyph that recalls the male genitalia—it’s on mens-room doors all around the world and was cast in gold(plate) and set on men’s chain necklaces set in chest hair framed by a velour v-neck for much of the 1970s. Male aggression. It comes from a very real place—below the belt.

Originally posted April 3, 2016:

Our work with clients basically falls under the heading of humanistic astrology, the astrology of the individual in this lifetime. There is also esoteric astrology which uses the zodiac as a lens to view the soul journey of a person over many lifetimes.. There’s horary astrology and mundane astrology and, I think at last count, 80 different brands of astrology; yes, because the Zodiac is like the Golden mean—it expresses everything and everything can be expressed by it. The individual life, the soul journey, the course of a year, or a day or the breadth of all existence, from creation to destruction of the entire universe. Everything we can know or need to know or will know about everything is encoded in the Zodiacal system, truths that are just now being discovered by science. Though the Zodiac was “divined” at least 3000 years ago by the Sumerians, Babylonians, during the Chaldean period, it has held the encoded knowledge, big things like matter is an illusion, that it is just dense energy, truths that impact magic as much as science. Which brings me/us to our next point:

Underscoring general sun-sign astrology speicific work with individuals, and all schools 80 schools of astrology is our most essential belief about the Zodiac. That beyond being a symbolically rich and ever unfolding mandala for all existence, it is actually a practicable system, like an ancient self-help manual to living a functional life of richest fulfillment. Something we like to call Natural Astrology or Cosmic Astrology or Natural Cosmic Astrology whereby we view each of the twelve signs and houses of the zodiac is a building block, one upon the other, an infinite upward spiral, guiding us to self actualization. Stella likes to say it’s “the original twelve-step program” ™. Which is no joke really because if you look at what the twelve steps are in an AA or Al-anon or any program they correspond almost exactly to the themes of the astrological houses, in turn. The main thrust of this Natural Cosmic Astrology is to attune ourselves to the cycle of nature and the cosmos meaningfully, metaphysically, indeed alchemically. No better way to do it then with the the Start of the new Year at Aries 0°, which we did with the performance of our monthly show, The Zodiac Club, in New York (which we will do monthly) and the exploration of the first sign and first astrological house, all month long here in the sign of Aries. (At the time of writing I’m about two weeks behind in this but I will be playing catch up over the next couple of days.

I will explore this aspect of astrology, daily, all year long, while weaving in personal story where applicable. But the point this year is to unlock the Cosmic Energy and wisdom of each sign , starting with the Spring Equinox, which provides something of a clean slate. We exited the womb-tomb of Pisces with its opposite facing fish, the twelfth and final sign and house of the Zodiac, that of non-material existence, mutable-water, vapor and mists and and foam and primordial soup, primeval slime, gestation, incubation and purest imagination, to be born, once again, into the bloody real, bleating and brutally honest first sign of Aries, the Ram to begin a new journey around the Sun. We are this month celebrating the energy and indeed the people of the sign, as we will for each, turning on the power, flipping the switch of each of the twelve cosmic energies, that resides within each of you.

Originally posted April 4, 2016:

Our work with clients basically falls under the heading of humanistic astrology, the astrology of the individual in this lifetime. There is also esoteric astrology which uses the zodiac as a lens to view the soul journey of a person over many lifetimes.. There’s horary astrology and mundane astrology and, I think at last count, 80 different brands of astrology; yes, because the Zodiac is like the Golden mean—it expresses everything and everything can be expressed by it. The individual life, the soul journey, the course of a year, or a day or the breadth of all existence, from creation to destruction of the entire universe. Everything we can know or need to know or will know about everything is encoded in the Zodiacal system, truths that are just now being discovered by science. Though the Zodiac was “divined” at least 3000 years ago by the Sumerians, Babylonians, during the Chaldean period, it has held the encoded knowledge, big things like matter is an illusion, that it is just dense energy, truths that impact magic as much as science. Which brings me/us to our next point:

Underscoring general sun-sign astrology speicific work with individuals, and all schools 80 schools of astrology is our most essential belief about the Zodiac. That beyond being a symbolically rich and ever unfolding mandala for all existence, it is actually a practicable system, like an ancient self-help manual to living a functional life of richest fulfillment. Something we like to call Natural Astrology or Cosmic Astrology or Natural Cosmic Astrology whereby we view each of the twelve signs and houses of the zodiac is a building block, one upon the other, an infinite upward spiral, guiding us to self actualization. Stella likes to say it’s “the original twelve-step program” ™. Which is no joke really because if you look at what the twelve steps are in an AA or Al-anon or any program they correspond almost exactly to the themes of the astrological houses, in turn. The main thrust of this Natural Cosmic Astrology is to attune ourselves to the cycle of nature and the cosmos meaningfully, metaphysically, indeed alchemically. No better way to do it then with the the Start of the new Year at Aries 0°, which we did with the performance of our monthly show, The Zodiac Club, in New York (which we will do monthly) and the exploration of the first sign and first astrological house, all month long here in the sign of Aries. (At the time of writing I’m about two weeks behind in this but I will be playing catch up over the next couple of days.

I will explore this aspect of astrology, daily, all year long, while weaving in personal story where applicable. But the point this year is to unlock the Cosmic Energy and wisdom of each sign , starting with the Spring Equinox, which provides something of a clean slate. We exited the womb-tomb of Pisces with its opposite facing fish, the twelfth and final sign and house of the Zodiac, that of non-material existence, mutable-water, vapor and mists and and foam and primordial soup, primeval slime, gestation, incubation and purest imagination, to be born, once again, into the bloody real, bleating and brutally honest first sign of Aries, the Ram to begin a new journey around the Sun. We are this month celebrating the energy and indeed the people of the sign, as we will for each, turning on the power, flipping the switch of each of the twelve cosmic energies, that resides within each of you.

Originally posted April 5, 2016:

Aries rules of the ages of birth 0-7 years, literal birth being foremost a bloody fight for life and survival, and, both actually and metaphorically, a quest for meaning and purpose. When we are amusing and suffusing ourselves with Aries energy we are endowing ourselves with the energy of new beginnings, a clean slate. Aries is the cardinal-fire sign, which is characterized as a spark, our ignition. That god Mars (Greek: Ares) namesake of the sign’s ruling planet, most embodies that sparky, initiating spirit of the sign—he is the war god, armed for the bloody fight of life, adrenaline fueled and headstrong like the sign’s emblem, the ram. He is that fight instinct in all of us, pure energy, or rather, energy incarnate—these are what the muscles are. They are the part of us that provide evidence of our being wo/men of action, in whom fight (and indeed flight) are possible—we lose muscle mass when we are inactive. We don’t cease to exist, we just get fat and flabby. But life is evidenced in the bloody lean meat of our very being. Mars, the red planet, rules the blood and also the element of iron which is what makes our blood red. We might imagine that the ancient Sumerians assigned Mars the rulership of iron because it created weaponry that befitted an archetypal landscape of war; but it is a mystery how they might have linked this to the red in our blood. And it is certainly a mystery, it can’t just be a 3500 year-old lucky guess, that we discovered the red planet of Mars not to be “fiery” but frozen and only red-colored due to it being rusted with iron. Such mysteries don’t weird me out. They are just part of a larger cosmic joke on us: That the Zodiac and astrology aren’t just some pretty pictures made for our amusement, they contain secrets encoded from the origins of existence, at least the (super-)human kind.

Speaking of superhumans, Superman is one of the modern archetypes of Aries. (We will talk about Ironman another time.) In a recent post celebrating the birthday of Aries Warren Beatty, someone quoted Carly Simon’s recounting her love affair with that womanizing Hollywood god. She termed him a Superman in the sack, which I don’t doubt. He is known to have had a habitually hard-on, bedding a number of women in any given night, and known to have thousands of female conquests, many of them the most famous leading ladies in Tinseltown. This could only describe an Aries man. He is indefatigable in this regard. The same was said of (and by) Aries Marlon Brando—that he couldn’t help spreading his seed everywhere, all the time. That he was eternally unfaithful—while Shirley Maclaine said of her brother: “he couldn’t commit to dinner.” Cardinal-fire, that spark of life, right? Well what sparks life but the male-principled sperm. Before he was a wargod in the Hellenic pantheon, Ares was a male fertility god, the proverbial horned one—the Ram’s antlers are not just his warring weapon, they will determine dominance which translates as the right to reproduce with the female population. Aries men, like their archetypal godhead, wear the mantle of assumption that they are the alpha, and comport themselves as such. But remember people of a certain sign are simply the best representation, example, personification we have of that sign’s archetypal energy, which lives in all of us.

Aries is the natural ruler of the first astrological house, whose motto is I am. The first house not only rules the physical body but embodiment (of the cardinal-fire that burns within all of us). What I’m trying to say is that: When it comes to who you are, akin to what you want(ed) to be (when you grew up), this is where we need that self-evident, alpha energy. Mars and Athena’s station as war gods isn’t just about competition, it’s about winning hands down, stopping at nothing to achieve the campaign of being yourself. The second we second-guess or make apologies or compromises or but (our own inner) baby in a box, we are already setting ourselves up to lose. We don’t have to warriors in all aspects of life, but we mustn’t be anything but when it comes to the battle for selfhood.

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree point of the Sabian Symbol may at times be one degree higher than the one listed here. The Blague portrays the starting degree of for this day ( 0°,  for instance), as I typically post in the morning, while the Sabian number corresponds to the end point (1°) of that same 0°-1° period. There are 360  degrees spread over 365/6 days per year—so they nearly, but not exactly, correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
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