Sighting the Fisher King

AUTUMN EQUINOX  23rd September 2018, 01:55 gmt

(image: http://www.bowlofwheaties.blogspot.com)

The autumn equinox, marked by the Sun’s entry into the sign of Libra teaches us about the experience of balance. It is a time of poise and pause before we tilt towards the dark part of the

year. Balance, as the wheel of the year shows us, comes and goes; it is not a place you can pitch your tent. We move in and out of it and we can’t hang on to it, but simply have to taste it when it’s present. The equinoxes, joints in time where the forces of day and night are, for the whole globe in balance, are governed by Aries and Libra: the forces of self-actualisation and the call to relationship.

If Aries were to operate autonomously the wilful impulse towards self-actualisation would be crudely aggressive. The unmoderated will of the isolate self can be brutal. Autonomous and unmoderated Libra would yield sycophantic appeasement of others and the need for agreement at all costs, with no regard for self or truth. Mars/Aries and Venus/Libra need to be held in a fruitful and dynamic tension, they do after all belong to each other, extremes of a continuum of energy. Aries enacts the will of the self while Libra calls for regard for other and the path of harmony and balance that must be found between contesting forces. Aries, the warrior, can be seen as wielding the sword of light, Excalibur; while Libra, the lover, the bringer of peace, carries the Grail into the court of the Fisher King. The sword represents what we might call the masculine principle: its role is to defend and champion the feminine principle and to direct the light. It is truthful. The Grail is the feminine principle, the chalice or cauldron: the womb. It holds sacred substance – spiritual forces, bringing them into manifestation, holding, healing and inspiring the masculine. It receives the light.

The Arthurian legend of the Fisher King presents us with a character that belongs to the Chiron archetype (the wounded healer). The shock of being burnt by a mouthful of hot salmon (the Salmon of Wisdom, one of the totemic animals of Britain, the “honeyed isle”) made a prince stumble into a fire where an ember wounds him in the groin. The injury is such that he cannot be healed and yet he cannot die. It causes him such weakness that he retreats to his court. His pain is only relieved when he is in a skiff with a fishing line in the water, so he is sometimes seen alone on lakes of his increasingly devastated lands. As the land is laid waste he, in parallel, becomes less and less substantial, his lifeforce retreating to the more subtle realms of the etheric, to the extent that his castle seems no longer to be on the ground and sometimes simply cannot be found. To travellers who sight him and ask for hospitality, the Fisher King will direct them to his home where, to their amazement, they will see a nightly procession at the head of which a fair woman bears the wondrous radiant Grail into the hall. All who drink from the Grail are healed and restored; the Fisher King is too weak, too energetically refined, to lift the cup to his mouth. And yet, he is the Grail’s custodian.

The Fisher King, trapped between worlds, reluctantly rules over a wasteland. Meanwhile the brotherhood of Knights of the Round Table have disbanded, each going his separate way, riding into dense and pathless forest in a quest to find the Grail and restore harmony to the land. Lacking the Grail, they are just a bunch of desperate sword-wielding men, seeking it, but unable to protect and champion the sacred feminine. The Quest for the Grail is the call from the soul to the personality to restore and honour the feminine principle, the Goddess; to inspire the personality (the knight) into action on behalf of the soul that, bodiless, cannot act; and to unite the inner and the outer worlds, bringing healing (wholeness) to both.

The Grail is trapped between worlds with the Fisher King; Excalibur has been thrown back into the hand and waters of the Lady of the Lake. Things that belong together have been put apart and the quest of the soul is to reunite them. The knight of personality is the vehicle that has to undertake this task. The personality first must hear the call of the soul and then heed it, ride into that pathless forest with the sheer desire to recover and bring together the chalice and the blade.

This quest is for all of us and it is urgent. We know this. The land is laid waste; we have to find the faith and courage to act: to reunite head and heart, inner and outer worlds, the divine feminine and masculine, the soul and the personality, spirit and matter…

We stand at the gateway to the dark half of the year and the winter journey will be marked by the energy of this time. It promises us a sighting of the Fisher King, who can, if approached, direct us to his court. This is because the equinox Sun on 0° Libra is exactly opposite Chiron (wounded healer, Fisher King) on 0° Aries. We are likely to touch into the shame and pain of our deepest wounds. How to feel those places without massive reaction; how to feel them and know that they are the key to our deepest gifts of wisdom and compassion? These cosmic powers (Sun and Chiron) are occupying both equinox positions where the solar plane intersects with the celestial equator, calling out for a balance of forces between the warrior and the lover, making us painfully aware of the woundedness that results from their separation. The rulers of the spring and autumn equinoxes, Mars and Venus, meanwhile are in a fixed t-square with Uranus, planet of rude awakenings and ambassador of the soul. The challenges we are facing are soulful interventions, rattling our cages and requiring us to find new and very different ways of being and doing.

Embrace the difficulty, cleave to it, as the poet Rilke advises dear Mr Kappus in his Letters to a Young Poet:

And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. … [Y]ou know that you are in the midst of transitions and wished for nothing so much as to change.

Kate Hubert

Awen Astrology

kate@spiral7.co.uk

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A New Indigeneity: going off grid

There are many resources our access to which is governed by adherence to the idea of a Grid. There are grids for energy, for lighting your home and cooking your food and powering your transport; there is a grid of water providing clean water for you to drink and bathe in; care grids exist for your sick and elderly and an education grid for your young. Grids provide all manner of foodstuffs and there are even transportation, information and communication grids. You could even say there are grids of thought and attention.  Grids take natural resources and monopolise them, turn them into commodities and then sell them to consumers. Grids also take human energy and resources, monopolise them, turn them into commodities and sell them back to humans. This is very easy and very convenient. We find we are fed, clothed, housed, educated, nursed and entertained in exchange for money. Money, however, we need.

We get money through giving our labour. We exchange the hours and days of our lives for money so that we can exchange that money for all the things we need that we are unable to provide for ourselves. This can work quite well, so long as the labour of your days pays you enough for all the things you need. Some folks like the idea of living off grid, wild and free. Like skiers going off piste, those who venture off grid have to be inventive and resilient, finding ways to supply their own needs; they’ll need to use the financial grid to buy perhaps some solar panels and woodburners. They’ll run up against planning laws, for sure, and soon discover that the culture is hostile to the spirit of independence.

Grid culture is powered by dependency and passivity. It needs us to need: to be in need. It needs us to want and want and want. It takes hold best in a de-skilled and unimaginative population. For example one where human energy is so engaged in making enough money to pay the bills – and a bit freaked out about the future – to question the basic assumptions of why it should be the way it is. Why should it be that very few people own enough land to grow food for their families? Why do we not generate household energy in little local schemes rather than rely on ‘the big six’? Why don’t we even try? Dependency has been taken to such extremes in our culture that we are now in a condition so parlous we no longer know how to feed or clothe ourselves. We can eat (oh can we eat!) and we can get dressed. But we cannot hunt, gather and grow our own food or create clothing. Nor do most of us have the resources to do so should we wish to try, because they are enclosed and monopolised by corporations. This situation, absurdly, has had the western world defecating in its own water supply in the name of hygiene for the last 150 years. Funny old world.  Still it all makes work for the working man to do.

In her book, Wild, Jay Griffiths quotes an amazonian tribal person commenting on contact with missionaries:

We learned things, though: we learned money and Spanish and work. We learned that we had to work for money for needs that we didn’t have before: matches, salt and sugar. Why were we civilised? For what were we civilised? To be taught that we needed sugar and oil and money and clothes from the markets, more and more.

We, in Britain today, want a lot more than sugar and oil, do we not? Griffiths comments that when populations do that thing that is so difficult for the civilised and live ‘for free’, off grid, as all indigenous populations do and always have done, they perceive themselves as having other fundamental freedoms too. But ‘once they are made dependent on money, their other, more conceptual, freedoms can be taken away: freedom of will, freedom of time and freedom of thought.’ 

Here is an interesting thought experiment.  Do we retain and exercise freedoms such as these? Is your will free – are you self-determining and self-authorising, responsible for and to yourself? Do you know what you want to do; do you know your will? Do we even know what it might mean to have freedom of time? What would that look like? And what is freedom of thought, and what could be its preconditions?

From this perspective it seems we are giving a whole lot more than money for our basic needs, even given that money represents the labour of our bodies and minds and increasing amounts of the time of our lives. It seems to me we are in a state of collective hallucination and addiction: a kind of cultural psychosis. Our own indigenous ancestry is long distant. I don’t even have a notion of first-nation britons. But undoubtedly they were here on this island, speaking a lost (?) language (one I increasingly long to hear) that related to this landscape, feeding and clothing themselves, relating strongly, of necessity, to the genius loci; autonomous, resourceful and responsive to their own here and now. Our indigeneity is distant in time, but the elements, I feel sure, are long memoried – and they do live in us after all; we weave our lives out of them all the time, mundanely and beautifully.   Here and now belong to us and are always essentially wild and free.

It feels like time for us to come out of our demented collective amnesia and recall that we are natural beings that depend utterly upon our land, this earth and its resources. ‘Freedom,’ Griffiths says, ‘is the absolute demand of the human spirit.’ It is necessary that we see the grids that monetise and commoditise resources and services for what they are: instruments of domination. In essence we are still wild and free, a feature of the natural world: the green fuse of the wild fizzes through us. Whatever our schemes and contingency plans, whatever the claims of our civilised materialistic culture, nature remains wild and free, and all of life participates in that wild freedom and all of culture is subject to it. Our bodies and the earth beneath our feet are speaking all the time of the crazy and fantastical meeting of nature and culture. If we seek meaning for our lives and times, we don’t need to pick greedily over the remnants of the more recently devastated first-nation cultures of elsewhere to heed the call of the wild within and without. We need to connect and relate to the spirits of this place and this time: to find autonomous, resourceful, authentic responses to our own here and now; to find a new and urgent indigeneity. Show up, listen up and, as they say, join the conversation.

Kate Hubert

Awen Astrology

kate@spiral7.co.uk

Re-imagining Physical Realities

“The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.” 

I’m persuaded of the truthfulness of this statement. So, I’m offering a day of exploration and recalibration in Ashburton, South Devon on Sunday 16th September, 11am – 4.30pm:

“Creating Good Soil: Re-imagining Physical Realities”
(or Uranus in Taurus and all it may bring!)

The springboard for the day will be the transit of Uranus through Taurus – but the workshop is not about acquiring information or astrological technique. It is about enquiring into the nature of this time and the possibilities that are opening up for recalibrating our own energy fields and seeing physical reality through new eyes (as Uranus liberates radically new perceptions in us).

Rediscovering indigeneity
Tuning in to the wisdom of the body and the Earth
New perceptions and new possibilities
Inspired mind, inspired voice

Using imagination and intuitional intelligence, our tools will be sound/song, meditation, discussion and elements of ritual. We’ll explore our perceptions of embodiment and connection to land/Earth/Gaia with the purpose of creating good ‘soil’ within ourselves for the seeds of the future to begin to transform and ripen towards their highest expression.

If this calls to you, please book a place (spaces are limited) and come and do the work.
Cost £20 (or more if you wish, less if you need).

Beloved

Between Star and Stone

Summer Solstice, 21^st June 2018, 10:08

Rabindranath Tagore

Source: http://www.cycledessaisons.wordpress.com

(Verse: Rabindranath Tagore.  Image: http://www.cycledessaisons.wordpress.com)

The beloved Sun, source of all life, source of all consciousness, stands at the peak of its power, its northernmost point, bathing us in its vitalising rays. We are livingly aware of the dance between Earth and Sun of which we are a crucial part. We channel the Sun’s etheric force into the body of the Earth and the Earth’s etheric force out into the cosmos. Human beings are a significant means of interchange in this cosmic dance of star and stone, of Sun and planet. This interchange is necessary, not optional. We are capable of conscious participation in this process – we can assist and co-operate in it. Our assistance is richly rewarded with increased vitality and deep understanding, arising both inwardly and outwardly. Power and purpose pour from the Sun into our human lives. Go outside and breathe it in!

Stand barefoot on the Earth, under the Sun. Breathe deeply in the golden cosmic light of our star, all the way through your body. Your hands can help you direct this flow of energy. Then gently exhale the vibrant light of the Earth out towards the Sun. Feel the interchange of Sun and Earth in your body.

Through the light and warmth of the life-giving Sun we are changing and we are changed. The Sun makes available power beyond our imagining. It is wild and free and exceeds all the petty oppressions of the mean shadow of power that forms the basis of the ‘systems’ that seek to govern us. The Sun offers us life and power in abundance, it gives to us unfailingly – all we need to do is stand upright on the Earth.

Perhaps we can make a meaningful distinction between the Earth and the World, where the Earth is Gaia, a being made up of physical and refined substance, and the world is all that human culture lays over Gaia, good and bad. Our World stands in sore need of real, meaningful connection to the source of all vitality, the Sun. At the time of solstice we are under the eye of the Sun, and it is a time of reckoning. When the light is strong so are the shadows.

The solstice Sun shows the reckoning to be painful (Sun square Chiron) – we see that the force that is used to get things done in the world can be cruel. How can the human heart tolerate the abuses we are witnessing? How can the human heart deal out such abuses? Through the expedience of needing to manage situations, achieve outcomes, comply with procedure, safeguard profits, keep my job, feed my children… We harden our hearts and close our eyes. The world’s not perfect after all. And we can’t be open to all the suffering we are part of twenty-four hours a day; can we? How to be with this?

The Sun’s principle is consciousness. The power and purpose it bestows come through its primary gift of consciousness. Can we say we want to live lives of power and purpose while remaining unconscious of the manner of our participation in the world? The Sun wants us to wake up; Gaia absolutely requires it. But the world encourages a weary, anaesthetised, broken-hearted kind of somnambulism that allows our vitality, power, energy and attention to be syphoned off for private profit. We yield readily. We are such obedient servants.

Pluto through Capricorn is revealing the dark underside of the culture we call the world or public life. The revelations of corruption and toxicity have been oozing out thickly since Pluto entered Capricorn in 2008. The latest scandal is the final coming to light after many years of patients being killed in their hundreds in an NHS hospital: managed to death. There is more of this to come, have no doubt. This is what happens when the expedience of status and bureaucracy are interposed between human beings and considered a higher value. When an algorithmic bureaucratic system governs the place where human relating should live and breathe there is already an abuse of power. Be aware: these spaces are broadening and becoming ubiquitous in our lives. Learn to spot them. Where we confront such abuses – and we all do – we have to call them out. We have to come into relationship with each other, to talk and share, to gather our forces to resist the bureaucratic paradigm. We cannot at this point, racing towards the meeting of Saturn and Pluto in 2020, afford to stand down. Bureaucracy and technology in combination have totalitarian instincts to which human energy is simply fodder (income).

Certain organisational grids overlay earthly resources. Its a feature of modernity: management, distribution and, of course, commodification and monetisation of resources is effected through creating grids. And we are all authoritatively pressured to be dependent on these grids. Think of water, sanitation, gas, electricity – we are dependent on grids of service and supply, and profits are made out of our dependency. There are other resource grids too that it is hard to opt out of: transportation, health and education services, internet, money and financial services, media. These grids govern flows of power back and forth between individuals and the public culture. They are modelled on the fundamental grid of energy which runs through all things (which we might call prana or qi, lifeforce, tao or the way it is) and represent attempts to tap into, warp and profit out of this ineluctably wild and free fundamental grid, to which we all are connected all the time, totally free of charge. The fundamental grid is created from the interchange of Sun and Gaia. We need to be aligned with the fundamental grid for its power to flow optimally into our beings. We Our standing between heaven and earth is what energises this grid: we complete the relationship between star and stone (Sun and Earth). The birth chart describes the unique alignments for which we are designed.

Uranus in Taurus sextiles the solstice Sun; Taurus rules resources and thus refers to this matter of grids. Uranus here is bringing a radically new perception to the matter of physical resources and their modes of organisation. Your ultimate resource is your body. It is the vehicle of your thought, feeling, consciousness, soul and spirit. It is plugged into Gaia’s fundamental grid, and fed by the light of the Sun. Corporations are seeking to plug it into grids of their own making. The energy and attention we give to the fundamental grid increases our vitality and power. There is no alternative source of vitality for earthly beings. The time between now and the equinox offers a particular opportunity to work with Uranus in Taurus – to enter into exploration of a new indigeneity, a natural belonging to the Earth, one that truly belongs to you and the land you walk.

Don’t let your path be perplexed by the idle dust of days!

Kate Hubert

Awen Astrology

kate@spiral7.co.uk

To Heed & to Thrive: Uranus in Taurus

Taurus deals with the manifest reality of our physical bodies and the physical environment, the defining basis for life on Planet Earth, whose principle is manifestation.  Attuning us to sensation and wellbeing, Taurus seeks the resources and conditions that assure thriving life.[i]  What is it to thrive?  Thriving requires stability, the organised consolidation of resources to optimise growth and a sense of connection to the protective forces (seen and unseen) that cluster around living things (and all things have life).  This is a falling into line with the energetic patterns of physical reality that instinct tends to serve.  There is a natural relationship between physical life and the sign of the Bull.  At an individual level this pertains to our bodily experience, and the possessions, resources and material conditions that we have at our disposal.  At a general level we can extend these concerns to include our relationship to the ‘land’, agricultural processes, use of planetary resources and environmental concerns.

As Uranus, disruptor of certainties, moves into Taurus on 15^th May 2018, we can expect material conditions and physical resources to be thrown into radical review.  This presents an unsurpassed opportunity to become familiar with what thriving life might really mean for us and require of us.  Uranus brings awakening – forcibly, when we didn’t even know we were sleeping.  It illuminates us with bolts of lightning to allow us to glimpse that things are not as we were led to believe.  Uranus is cerebral and radical and will bring brilliant insights into taurean matters: physical conditions, bodily reality, land and resources.

 

The issue of plastics is finally becoming subject to policy in Britain due to the Chinese refusal to continue receiving our exports of rubbish. The vision of fields full of plastic waste tarped down across this green and pleasant land focuses the mind wonderfully well.  This is the very beginning of a journey that will entirely reframe our very understanding of the words ‘resource’ and ‘waste’ as Uranus moves through Taurus over the next eight years.  Uranus is associated with technology and we can hope that the next few years will promote the pioneering engagement of engineers and scientists with the challenges of assuring thriving life for all beings.  Our resources need to be honoured and protected – this is a requirement of all of us, but it is not a feature of capitalistic obsession with profit.  We will have to see our relationship to resources and our coercion into behaviours of consumption as being deeply pathological and damaging.  Waking up to this is hard already.  After all, what can we do?

Virtual reality and cybernetics will be used in ways both pioneering and pathological to re-order and extend human sensual and sexual capacity. The harvest of this is likely to be awesome: both brilliant and stomach-churningly appalling (I don’t need to spell it out).  At the outset I referred to the principle of Earth being physical manifestation; I believe this to be true.  It does not incorporate the mimicry, however technologically accomplished, of physicality.  VR, to the extent that it takes us away from the conditions of thriving, is not essentially supported in this place.

Which raises the following question: if human energy and attention are increasingly consumed by non-physical, fictive realities what happens to Planet Earth for whom they are essential to thriving? Our energy and attention have to remain rooted in physicality or else we begin to die.  At the moment human energy and attention are being harvested on a massive scale in an entirely unprecedented way by big business for profit (and we don’t yet know what else).  Obviously this will intensify and it is strange new territory.  We need insight into the underlying nature of this dilemma.  In her wise Guide to the I Ching, Carol K. Anthony suggests that the inner truth of a situation is itself the vehicle for change.  This is an oblique and very fertile way forward.  Our energy and attention are being harvested for someone else’s capital.  These are our fundamental resources and we are divesting ourselves of them, in return for what?  Netflix?  Instagram?  God knows.  It puts the Opium Wars into deep shade.

Our more or less global online addiction comes at a great cost not only to personal liberty and quality of energy and attention, but increasingly to the environment: data processing long ago exceeded aviation in energy consumption. Five years ago it was estimated that we used 50 per cent more energy to move digital information than was used to move aircraft in global aviation.[ii]  You can opt out of air travel, but there is no meaningful way to opt-out of the digital economy.  So what happens?  The inherent limitations of physical reality become apparent, that’s what happens.  Anthony remarks, ‘Limitation has to do with accepting that it is our Fate to learn how to respond correctly to challenges and adversities.’[iii]  And humans will respond by pioneering and innovating, by raging, grabbing and warring, and by realising, in some cases, what a profound responsibility it is to interact with fire, earth, air and water.

Kate Hubert

Awen Astrology

kate@spiral7.co.uk

 

[i] I am borrowing this term, ‘thriving life’, from Pat McCabe (www.thrivinglife.weebly.com).

[ii] Mark Mills, ‘The cloud begins with coal: big data, big networks, big infrastructure, big power’, Aug. 2013, www.tech-pundit.com.  Accessed May 2018.

[iii] Hexagram 60 in Carol K. Anthony’s Guide to the I Ching, 3^rd edn, 1988.

Fixing the Spirit

‘Don’t turn away your head. Keep looking at the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters you.’¹

There is a curious medical condition that manifests as the loss of sensation in the skin: the nerves of the skin are unreceptive to stimuli. Interestingly, this results in a condition that we tend, in our mental, emotional and bodily lives, to strive towards: painlessness. We often consider comfort and painlessness to be the markers of wellbeing. They could well be the markers of closure, stagnation and imminent danger. The child suffering from loss of sensation in the skin is in danger of serious physical damage; the warnings, experienced as pain, are not registered, so the child can get into threatening situations very readily. Pain is not the problem in our lives; suffering is not the problem. The problem is the disconnection between sensations and awareness that results in unconsciousness.

Chiron into Aries

Chiron, wounded healer, leader of centaurs, is moving into Aries today, breaking over the celestial horizon and entering the very first degree of the zodiac. It was last here in 1968, except then of course it was undiscovered (discovery came in 1977). Chiron was the teacher and mentor to the solar heroes: it was one of Hercules’ deadly poisoned arrows that wounded Chiron’s thigh in an accident, leaving him unable to recover and yet unable, being the son of Saturn, to die. He has to learn to live with the wound.

From celtic legend we inherit the Fisher King, charged with keeping the Holy Grail, who has also been wounded in the thigh, too sick to live and to sick to die. He is forever growing weaker and is unable to father a child to whom to pass on the duty of keeping the Grail; as he weakens his realm becomes increasingly arid, until it is a wasteland. His palace, full of riches, can no longer even be found.