The night before the lunar eclipse clouds were on the move, coiling in strange spinner formations I've never seen before in Kimberley. Mark Creek was on the prowl, tumbling boulders--his whine more machine parts than water. The earth felt sentient, and vibrantly alive, though not in a way that inspired comfort: instead, the ground felt like the hackles of a beast, bristling, and ready to pounce.
The first decan of Sagittarius is one associated with flight and hasten razor-sharp fletchings skinning the air, and the chips falling where they may. Here we find speed for the sake of it. Reprisals and reversals are pinioned on a knife tip. Every eclipse season we are pushed through the hair-pin turns of dragon guts, as everything incidental to our evolution is broken down, absorbed--never to be seen again. There’s something about the sudden velocity of this eclipse season, however, coming out of the pando, that is feeling particularly unnerving.
Eclipses are not, in themselves, rare events, unleashing their particle colliders for periods every year. However, there's been something especially charged about this south node eclipse with Sagittarius' ruler finally empowered in domicile. Oh, the waves! The ruler of the Gemini north node is also stationed in home roost, and so their archetypal clash plays out in Shakespearean strokes: Jupiter's ponderous Ibsen squares off against Mercury's disintegrating theater of the absurd.
Lunar eclipses, in particular, have that shedding and purgative quality. In their amoral starry ledgers, outstanding imbalances are swiftly addressed so the books can finally be closed. It's all very spoils of war: there are often stark winners and losers. The aesthetic spiraling out of the universe does not care about your plans.
In the days to follow, I would be initiated once more into the mingled awe and fear eclipses can provoke in their majesty and indifference. At a certain point all I could do was weep, sealed tight as a seed pod on my bedroom floor, feeling the eclipses' zephyr winds coiling around me. If I had the time and wherewithal, I might've dug a borrow into the earth--a swallow's bolt-hole in the clay hoodoos that sidle Saint Mary's, which the Ktunaxa First Nations people here saw as the ribs of an ancient serpent and protector of this sun-flooded valley.
Meanwhile, the Gen Z centaurs of New Jersey were smelting coins and trinkets (everything that falls from the hanged one's pockets), and pouring them into the concrete molds of runes and sigils. They were recording banshee yelps of guitar feedback over Ginsberg's Howl. They called to show me the moon from their car window, saying driving without purpose was a lost art, and America was Sagittarius. "I've seen the greatest minds of my generation wrecked by TikToks and memes." One said he was Jupiter; the other the horse's ass. The latter said he moved through time and space without friction, as if on a scroll of oil.
Even through my grief, God bless the wild philosopher kids, and Hegelian shit posters, rising from the bowels of the Pluto in Sag generation… the merry, Dionysian jesters who will rove the scorched earth of the Anthropocene.
Lunar eclipses can also unleash riptides of justice, Ancient Greek style--clawing holes through the banal evil of systemic abuse and cover ups. To that end, a mass grave of some 214 children was discovered under a residential school in Kamloops--the city where I was born. The eclipse is opening its portal in Canada's fourth house: the subterraneous place, and ‘the end of the matter’, according to the ancients. It can be a spooky place of root systems twining between bones.
As horrifying as this disinterment is, it's hardly surprising to learn that no records were kept for the scores of First Nations children, wrenched from their families, who would die under a brutal colonial assimilation program rife with sexual abuse, murder, disease and neglect. Why go through the additional hassle of book-keeping when the children themselves were seen as sub-human?
Despite the past Conservative Government, under Stephen Harper, doing everything in their power to cut off funding from the investigation of these missing children, lunar eclipses have a way of bringing up the bones, and I will be following this story closely indeed.
Something I didn't realize until now is that the Doukhobors—my Ukrainian ancestors who formed break off sects, practiced a form of animism, (and occasionally burned down government buildings)—also had children put through the Residential Schools (essentially a State sanctioned form of ethnic cleansing).
I am wondering now if the eclipse portal will be Canada's 'George Floyd' moment (even if that potential revolution was largely absorbed and neutralized by the corporate monoculture). There's an undeniable electricity in the air here in Canada with protests happening province-wide this week against the ravaging of our old growth forests. With eclipses rocking Canada's fourth house of the land, and the ancestral matrix, I have a feeling we could be in for an interesting summer.
I will have more to say about Mercury retrograde, but suffice it to say that the psychopomp's role in eclipse season is crucial. A larger theme of this eclipse series has to do with narrative-management (the South Node in Sag) in the face of humanity being plunged into deeper Piscean mysteries, and a renewed hunger for meaning. For many, this is certainly a mind-breaking initiation into the true complexity and entanglement of our systems under globalism. The butterfly effect of the cough in Wuhan that was felt the world over...
As soon as Mercury ingressed into Gemini, I noticed what felt like a concentrated push, among the mainstream media, to suddenly sanctify stories like the lab leak hypothesis, or even the existence of UFOs (which before had been relegated to the realm of tin foil hats). Under the more Saturnian mood of Trump, to even venture the possibility of a lab leak scenario was enough to get you smeared as Qanon, despite the very real existence of gain of function research. Something we will have to come to terms with is that the glamour of tribalism has potentially hampered a more efficient response to the pandemic, and hypothetical future pandemics...
With the ruler of the South Node empowered now in Pisces, I think we could see increasingly brazen attempts, on part of the elites, of managing potentially powerful stories under an insidious new bureaucracy of mythology. We could see an increasingly emboldened, and censorious, arm of the State, through Big Tech, deciding what the proles should know, and when, and why.
In any case, I hope to have a longer Mercury retrograde post up very soon. I’m deep in the darkest dregs of grad school now, but I promise my writing here will increase greatly after I hand in my thesis later this June. Sending much love as we navigate the rip tides, and chthonic tremors, of what feels like a particularly charged eclipse portal.
Anyway, a trippy 1970’s prog rock, passion play for you … because how else to explain this moment?