Capricorn 14° (January 4)

 

The car had to go in today for its little check up. I ended up talking to that Brandon guy on Brian’s behalf. Digging into promoting the Dan Fishback show in earnest now, while promoting the books, while trying to move the larger creative projects along. I do feel like butter spread too thinly on a piece of toast. And that is why I am only again working a half a day and making sure to chilax by the fire and binge watch a bunch of movies and tv series. Don’t ask me to do too much thinking right now. I did manage to circulate a lot of gratis books to folks who’ve been supportive, and to friends bien sur; As well I have started putting together my list of artists to perform this year’s festival in Provincetown and next season’s series at A.R.T. in Cambridge in advance of any conversation I have with folks there.

 

First I just need to say that the synchroncities 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 uplifiting 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 incircled 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 unwove 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, Frances Scovill Schinn 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.

 And not to get all meta on your asses, but this is me, here, at my loom. I’ve decided to devote myself daily to the writing of the Cosmic Blague—this is my ritual experience whereby I’m creating something inspired by what are meant to be symbols divined by clairvoyants capable of producing them. There is precious little written anywhere online about these symbols—be my guest and go and check—but for brief descriptions by Dane Rudhyar, via whom I know about Jones and Wheeler’s Sabian symbols to begin with. I pick up a few threads from Rudhyar and then I sit here and I weave and sometimes, not always, it might transport us, or I might get a little nod from the Universe as I did yesterday with that Serpent in cement. But this is the charm of making. What this symbol really points to is our weaving of what Rudhyar deems the “immortal body” in which we are “clothed in light”. The thing is folks we are weaving that all the time in everything we say and do, our metaphorical looms churning out random shapes and patterns and some pretty ugly designs we might get stuck wearing for all of eternity—yeah, that’s right, most of us have already made spiritual robes for ourselves which are the cosmic version of Lucy and Ethel’s Parisian originals—”what an inspired use of burlap!”

 So we want to be mindful with our words, our wands, our embroidery needles. We want to take gentle hold of our loom and weave wondrous and loving intention into the fabric of our lives. We also want to ritualize this shite! All the time. Because, guess what, all of life is a ceremonial dance. And we need to wrap ourselves up in our most transplendent rainbow coats of many colors, wearing our most compassionate attitudes, attuning our minds to the notion that this—right here, right now—is spiritual life seamlessly unseparated from so-called physical existence. Physical? Matter, we know, is no such thing. All is energy. And there isn’t a single element in your body that wasn’t wrought in the furnaces of oh, so many stars. It makes you think, doesn’t it: That, those native people, entubed in their ceremonial blankets, decorated with stars, sparks from the fire flying by, are really just ritually transforming into their truest selves, beings of pure energy and light, whose ancient parents are the twinkling celestial gems. We are all Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Put that in your peace pipe and smoke it!

 

 

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree of the Sabian Symbol may be higher than the one listed here  as the symbols cluminate in the next degree. There are 360  degrees spread over 365 days.

 Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*
Copyright 2018 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2019 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox