The Four Workmen of the Apoplexy

Stephen King's novella, "Stationary Bike" is about a man named Richard Sifkitz who goes to the doctor to check out his cholesterol levels. He discovers that they are too high, and his doctor tries to describe his high cholesterol levels with a metaphorical scenario of workmen clearing off junk foods on the roads of his arteries. Richard becomes obsessed with this idea.


So, Richard, an artist, buys a stationary bike in order to lose weight. He sets it up in his basement, and he actually uses it all the time. On the blank wall in front of him, Richard puts a map of the United States, imagining where he travels with every mile he pedals. As he continues to daydream on his bike, he decides to paint a mural of these metaphorical workmen that his doctor described to him. He pains four workmen clearing fat off of a road. However, the mural starts to come to life.


When he rides, he enters a trance where he actually enters his mural. When he sleeps, he dreams of the workmen. One of the workmen enters his dream which inspires him to paint his garage. However, when he paints the garage, he discovers that this workman has hung himself. Richard realizes how serious this is all getting, so he decides to dismantle the stationary bike.

Richard parallels drug addiction to his addiction to this stationary bike. He tries to make his addiction to riding it to be less than that of someone addicted to drugs. He ponders the idea of doing the drug or the addiction that "one last time," thinking that drug addicts say it all the time and don't mean it, but he is somehow stronger and really can do it one last time. In any event, his one last time is the most intense and really does become the last time.


He interacts with the workmen in the mural who are angry that Richard has led to the death of their friend. Since they've cleaned up all the fat in the streets, they no longer have work. Their lives are ruined. Richard tries to tell them that they are all imaginary, but their comebacks seem to make him think otherwise. He tries to take one of their hats with him almost as a test. He wonders if it was all a dream.


How it ends: Richard receives a hat in the mail that says LIPIDS on it, affirming that the mural, perhaps, was real.  Or just messing with his head.

Sabian Symbol Gemini 17: The head of health dissolved into the head of mentality.

Saponification

image source musingforamusement

Jung famously declared in 1929 that the ‘gods have become diseases’. He meant by this that the archetypal forces that govern our lives have so thoroughly been suppressed or ignored by modern reason that they have nowhere else to go but to appear in distorted form in symptoms, psychosomatic disorders and physical afflictions.


As in Jung’s day, in the early to mid 20th century, the gods are still off the official radar and most of us today do not ‘believe’ in the gods. They are as much banished from official consciousness today as they were in the time of Nietzsche, Freud or Jung. But as Jung might say, we don’t have to believe in the gods, because they have taken possession of us unconsciously. They do not require our belief to maintain their existence, because if we ignore them they simply move into our lives and take over, granting us less personal freedom than before. This is one of the big themes in media and cinema texts today. We consider ourselves to be free agents, secular persons in a free society, but this is a mere illusion or veneer which masks the fact that we are entirely conditioned by forces we do not see and over which we have no control.

Hitting bottom isn't a weekend retreat. It's not a goddamn seminar. Stop trying to control everything and just let go! LET GO!

In this regard, cinema, media and popular culture generally have served us well in recent times. These popular forms of expressions simply ignore high culture’s insistence that God is dead and the gods are no more, and they tell a very different story about our lives. Our lives are literally shot through with mythic themes, motifs, cosmologies, and archetypal patterns that suggest that, far from being dead, the gods are having a field day at our expense. The prevalence of myth in contemporary movies and media productions is too great to be ignored.


As Nietzsche said in 1872: we are starved of myth today, and we are prepared to seek it out wherever and whenever can:

And here stands modern man, stripped of myth, eternally starving, in the midst of all the past ages, digging and scrabbling for roots, even if he must dig for them in the most remote antiquities. What is indicated by the great historical need of unsatisfied modern culture, clutching about for countless other cultures, with its consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, the loss of the mythical home, the mythical womb?

(Nietzsche 1872: 109-10)
Nietzsche, Friedrich 1872: The Birth of Tragedy. Trans Shaun Whiteside. London: Penguin, 1993.

The modern hunger for myth suggests that our instinctive nature is filling in for what our minds reject. Our minds continue to call myth crap, but we must have our regular fix of the mythic diet. We are at war with ourselves in this regard, and I would describe this as a conscious aversion for gods and myths, versus an unconscious addiction to these same realities.

Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.

Work cited The Gods Have Become Movies, LaTrobe University, 18 May 2010
Dr David Tacey has written extensively on religion, health and society. His most recent book in this field is Gods and Diseases: Making Sense of Our Physical and Mental Wellbeing (Sydney: Harper Collins, 2011).

David is Reader and Associate Professor at La Trobe University, Melbourne, where he teaches courses on the crisis of meaning in Western culture, Jung's cultural psychology, literature and postmodern theory. He is the author of twelve books, including Edge of the Sacred (Daimon, 2009), ReEnchantment: the new Australian Spirituality (Harper Collins, 2000), and The Spirituality Revolution (Harper Collins, 2003).

Nessus: Envy and Self-Sabotage

Prague School, late 16th Century
The centaur Nessus, pierced by Hercules' arrow, carrying Deianira across the river Evenus
traces of black chalk, bodycolor heightened with gold on vellum

Image carried away from Christies

In astrological circles, I feel that the Centaur asteroid Nessus is too easily pigeon-holed as "The Abuser's Asteroid".  The mythology is foreshore black-and-white cut-and-dried and a slam-dunk: Nessus is a Bad, Bad, Horsey.


One thing I have learned to appreciate with ye olde mythologies -  and to delve deeply for -  are their subtle nuances; which you don't get if you are content with being spoon-fed other people's interpretations. I always encourage students of astrology to hit up the source material themselves and not accept willy-nilly whatever bastard blend of myth/astrology is being served up.  I was a student of Joe Campbell's long before I trip-trapped my way across the bridge to the cookbooks of astrology.  Methinks we are overdue for a bonfire of the vanities! 


 Carl Jung, that pioneer of the transpersonal, wrote:

The archetypes themselves are forms, without content of their own, that serve to organize or channel psychological material. They are somewhat like dry stream beds whose shape determines the characteristics of a river once water begins flowing through them. The archetypes are carriers of energy. When an archetype is activated, it generally unlocks a tremendous amount of energy. All creativity has an archetypal element.

It is vitally important that students of asteroidal astrology do their own legwork, for sometimes that dry stream bed can turn into an abyss the size of the Grand Canyon.  And then you're stuffed because only mules can get down the canyon and you could be cooling your heels for sometime before a dude riding an ass turns up.


Envy and self-sabotage.  That's a pretty heavy load to carry through life and humans learn from early childhood to want what they can't have and to take from others what they want.  Or to give that a good try until they are standing before a Magistrate for petty theft.  Nessus is kind of a 'troubled teen' energy and the whole juvenile delinquent thing was a contrived concept developed in the 1940s.


Nessus is everywhere and cantering through Aquarius.  Don't believe me?  Don't take my word for it either. 


The next time you go to the supermarket, find a mother pushing a shopping trolley with a toddler sitting in it, who is red-in-the-face and screaming blue-murder because its desire has been thwarted.  You tell me that product placements aren't designed to evoke envy in the poor of those with money to burn, or to self-sabotage those who are on diets or restricted by health reasons in what they can eat.
Do not be fooled: this is not greed. That is too simple a ratiocination.


O yes indeedy, it is a brave New World shoppers!  

New World Supermarket, Waikanae, New Zealand

What To Do When Things Get Nasty
by Annemarie Cross

Tall poppy syndrome is well and truly alive.


For those of you who may not be familiar with this saying, Wikipedia describes the tall poppy syndrome as: “a social phenomenon in which people of genuine merit are resented, attacked, cut down, or criticised because their talents or achievements elevate them above or distinguish them from their peers”.


As you continue to grow your business and increase your credibility and reputation within your field, not only will you capture the attention of your potential prospect/clients – you’ll also be noticed by your competitors and other people in your circle.


And, unfortunately, some of these people may not always have your best interests at heart. In fact, you may find that they try to hinder your progress through a direct attack on you personally and your work, or they’ll try to drag you down with their critical (naysayer) comments and/or actions.
I’m not talking about constructive criticism where someone is trying to offer you advice with good intentions because they want to see you grow and prosper.


I’m referring to the vindictive comments that are coming from a place of ‘do or die competitiveness’ or out of spite and envy with the sole intent on tarnishing your credibility or keeping you down.
read more


I currently have Black Moon Lilith piggy-back transit conjunct natal Nessus. What can I say? Hi-Ho silver and lock me away........I'm channeling the Queen of Mean.  In combination with a Hades Moon in Capricorn....tee hee.... I'm loaded for bear.  My appointment this coming Tuesday morning with Social Security may yield a spiritually advantageous moment to deliver a kick in the astral.


Further Reading

Envy and Self-Sabotage - Joseph Burgo Ph.D.

Basic Shame, Toxic Shame - Joseph Burgo Ph.D.
It is the awareness of being damaged, often an unconscious awareness, that I refer to as basic shame. It is intrinsic and internal, though we may confuse it with the outside world: those of us who are troubled by basic shame dread being seen and usually fear that others will look down upon us. We feel as if we are “ugly” or “deformed”. We may be burdened by a feeling of self-hatred throughout our lives.

Defenses Against Shame - Joseph Burgo Ph.D.
Narcissism is the primary defense against shame and often goes hand-in-hand with the other two defenses. When people suffer from an unbearable sense of shame, they often seek to elicit admiration from the outside, as if to deny the internal damage. Beautiful outside versus ugly inside. We’ve all known such narcissistic types. 

The Gift of Seven Extraordinary Days of Grace - Caroline Myss
Grace comes in many expressions. It intervenes in raging arguments, calming your anger so that you do not say what you can never take back. Grace whispers thoughts of hope in desperate times, giving you the stamina to hold on through the storms of life. And grace delivers inspiration, awakening creative resources deep within your being. The power of grace is endless, silent, and powerful.

Sleeping With the Anomie

Hermann Hesse's Der Steppenwolf expresses a picture of anomie.

The novel tells the story of a middle-aged man named Harry Haller who is beset with reflections on his being ill-suited for the world of "everybody", the regular people. In his aimless wanderings about the city he is given a book which describes the two natures of man: one "high", spiritual and "human"; while the other is "low" and animal-like.


Thus, man is entangled in an irresolvable struggle, never content with either nature because he cannot see beyond this self-made construct. While Haller longs to live free from social convention, he continually lives as a bourgeois bachelor.


Haller argues that the men of the Dark Ages did not suffer more than those of  Classical Antiquity,  and vice-versa. It is rather those who live between two times, those who do not know what to follow, that suffer the most. In this token, a man from the Dark Ages living in Classical Antiquity, or the opposite, would undergo a gulping sadness and agony.

Jumping Jehoshaphat!

The “Human Monsters” from Conrad von Magenberg’s “Buch der Natur”, Augsburg, 1475. In the bottom row, the third woman from the left has an elongated sack hanging from the mandible region.                                   

In the fourteenth century, astronomy was by far the most advanced branch of systematised scientific knowledge. For students of the stars, totally at a loss to explain what was happening around them, it was only natural to extrapolate desperately from what they understood and seek to compose from the movement of the planets some code of rules which would interpret and give warnings of events on earth.


"The medieval cosmic outlook," wrote Dr. C. Singer, "cannot be understood unless it is realized, that analogy pushed to extreme lengths, unchecked by observation and experiment, was the major intellectual weapon of the age'.


Astrology, that arcane compound of astronomical research and semi-magical crystal-gazing, was near the peak of its prestige in the fourteenth century.  It was the Arab astronomers who had evolved the theory that the movements of the planets and their relationship to each other in space dictated the future of humanity.  Since the Black Death was clearly far out of the normal, some abnormal behaviour on the part of the planets had to be found to explain it.


Various theories were propounded from time to time but the classic exposition was that laid down by the Medical Faculty of the University of Paris in the report prepared on the orders of King Philip IV in 1348.


On 20 March, 1345, at 1pm, there occurred a conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the house of Aquarius.  The conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter notoriously caused death and disaster while the conjunction of Mars and Jupiter spread pestilence in the air (Jupiter, being warm and humid, was calculated to draw up evil vapours from the earth and water which Mars, hot and dry, then kindled into infective fire).  Obviously the conjunction of all three planets could only mean an epidemic of cataclysmic scale.

remains of 14th century plague deaths
Thornton Abbey, Lincolnshire.

The doctrine that the movement of the planets was the force which set the Black Death in motion was never overtly challenged except by Konrade of Megenberg who argued that no planetary conjunction lasted for more than two years and that therefore, since the plague persisted longer, it must necessarily have had some other cause.  Besides, he pointed out, all movements of celestial bodies were subject to strict order while the plague was patently haphazard in its action.  Among a few other writers, however, a certain skepticism can be detected or, perhaps more correctly, an indifference to remote causes which were not susceptible of proof and were anyhow beyond the power of men to mend.


Gentile da Foligno referred to the planets in general terms and then went on...."It must be believed that, whatever may be the case with regard to the aforesaid causes, the immediate and particular cause is a certain poisonous material which is generated about the heart and lungs".  The job of the doctor, he concluded, was not to worry about the heavens but to concentrate on the symptoms of the sick and to do what he could to cure them.


Such admirable common sense was the exception. The European, in the face of the Black Death, was in general overwhelmed by a sense of inevitable doom.  If the plague was decreed by God and the inexorable movement of the planets, then how could frail man seek to oppose it?  The preacher might counsel hope, but only with the proviso that the sins of man must first be washed away by the immensity of his suffering.  The doctor might prescribe remedies, but with the tepid enthusiasm of a civil-defence expert advising those threatened by imminent nuclear attack to adopt a crouching posture and clasp their hands behind their necks.

Jehoshaphat Aspin, designed whimsical astronomy cards in the early 19th century.

The Black Death descended on a people who were drilled by their theological and their scientific training into a reaction of apathy and fatalistic resignation.  Nothing could have provided more promising material on which a plague might feed.


Work cited Ziegler, Philip The Black Death, 1969
Photograph by Ian Goldby

Gemini 3: The Garden of the Tuileries

Lion Monument, Lucerne, Switzerland

Near the village
The peaceful village
The lion sleeps tonight
Near the village
The quiet village
The lion sleeps tonight

"For more than 500 years, young Swiss men went out into the world in a controlled military environment at an age when they are quite naturally a little wild," said Anselm Zurfluh, director of Geneva's Museum of Swiss in the World. "They usually returned calmed down and wanting to work, settle down and have families. I firmly believe this is one reason Switzerland is so peaceful." 


The most famous episode in the history of the Swiss Guards was their defence of the Tuileries Palace  in central Paris during the French Revolution.  Of the nine hundred Swiss Guards defending the Palace on August 10, 1792,  about six hundred were killed during the fighting or massacred after surrender. One group of sixty Swiss were taken as prisoners to the Paris City Hall before being killed by the crowd there.

 An estimated hundred and sixty more died in prison of their wounds, or were killed during the September Massacres that followed. Apart from fewer than a hundred Swiss who escaped from the Tuileries, some hidden by sympathetic Parisians, the only survivors of the regiment were a three-hundred-strong detachment which had been sent to Normandy to escort grain convoys a few days before August 10th. 

The Swiss officers were mostly amongst those massacred, although Major Karl Josef von Bachmann  in command at the Tuileries was formally tried and guillotined in September, still wearing his red uniform coat.

Two Swiss officers, the captains Henri de Salis and Joseph Zimmermann, did however survive and went on to reach senior rank under Napoleon and the Restoration.

Linda Koelbel's persian cat, Rascal, sleeping

The Swiss guards so beloved by tourists at the gates of Vatican City are the most colourful remnant of a mercenary tradition that goes back 700 years. But the tradition may be seeing a controversial 21st-century revival in the form of private security guards in conflict zones. [read more]

"Ja. Three cheeseburgers"

Hush, my darling
Don't fear my darling
The lion sleeps tonight
Hush, my darling
Don't fear my darling
The lion sleeps tonight



4,003,221 Tears From Now

Gabriel's Gully, New Zealand

At a place where a kind of road crossed on a shallow bar I shovelled away about two and a half feet of gravel, arrived at a beautiful soft slate and saw the gold shining like the stars in Orion on a dark frosty night" ~ Gabriel Read, 1861

On a late autumn evening in 1861, when the infant village of Dunedin was at its evening meal and the dark already falling, a lone Australian prospector stopped to try his luck at a small creek 70km away as the crow flies.

The man was Gabriel Read. The place, a few kilometres from modern Lawrence. The date, the 20th (some say the 23rd) of May. Shovelling away more than half a metre of gravel and reaching the slate bed of the creek, Read found, in his famous phrase, "gold shining like the stars of Orion on a dark, frosty night". By the time he had panned out the first shovelsful and with darkness already upon him, he had to stumble back to his tent to strike a light and see the rich residue of gold gleaming in the dish.

In Norse mythology, Freya was said to cry tears of pure gold.

Photograph Gabriel's Gully sourced from Spring Pictures

Gold Tears painting by Paul Tokarski sourced from Fine Art America

Ko tona mea nui he tapu.

A prominent Catholic priest and theologian has been exposed as a self-confessed paedophile, who was quietly placed on a sex offenders programme by the church and is suspected of having abused dozens of children for decades.The Herald can reveal Father Michael Shirres, who had lectured in Māori theology at the University of Auckland and wrote several books on Māori spirituality, confessed to sexually abusing a young girl and is suspected of abusing many other victims.The Catholic church has confirmed it received five complaints against Shirres and placed him in a programme for sex offenders. Another victim says a therapist told her Shirres admitted to abusing dozens of children.  ~ Winter of 2018

"His greatest possession is his tapu".

Michael Shirres, born at Timaru, New Zealand on 12 July 1929, was a Dominican brother who worked for over twenty years with Maori elders on the the inculturation of Christianity and Christ into the cosmology of the Maori : mauritanga.

Brother Michael passed away on 5 October 1997 after being companioned through the last three years of his life by Progressive Bulbar Palsy, a form of Motor Neurone Disease (ALS): a terminal disease for which there is no known cure.

One of Brother Michael's legacies is his website on Maori Theology which would appeal to the serious scholar of Polynesian cosmology.     Website returns 404 Error.

In his lifetime, Brother Michael made the fullest attempt to define and redefine concepts from pakeha Christian theology and Polynesian cosmology, and in doing so weaved what Theologian John Charlot entitled:  The Maori-Christian Theology of Michael Shirres.

An organisation that offers therapy to child sex abusers says more needs to be done by organisations referring clients to them to dismantle their own cultures of secrecy and silence.

"It is one skeleton I didn't expect to come out of the closet."
The nephew said he was glad his own mother had died not knowing what Shirres had done. Shirres' brother, John, had also died about five years ago.
"I don't believe his own brother had any idea of what his brother had done," he said.

Father Walsh released a statement to Catholic media last month expressing ''deep sorrow and heartfelt apology to those who have suffered, and continue to suffer, because of Michael Shirres' actions."

Hinepūkohurangi: Woman of the Mist

Jupiter and Io c. 1532 by Antonia Allegri Correggio

In traditional Māori belief there is something beyond the world of everyday experience: we do not live in a closed system where what we see is all there is. This other world or dimension is known as Te Kore, the ‘void’, in most tribal traditions.

Cleve Barlow has suggested that Te Kore means chaos – a state which has always existed and which contains ‘unlimited potential for being’. Māori Marsden, a Tai Tokerau elder and Anglican minister, had a similar belief. He said that Te Korekore (a variant of Te Kore) was ‘the realm between non-being and being: that is the realm of potential being.’

Some believe that Te Kore is where the ultimate reality can be found. Others think that it is where Io, the Supreme Being, dwells. The idea of Te Kore is central to notions of mana (status), tapu (sacred and restricted customs) and mauri (life force).

Until the arrival of Europeans in the late 1700s, Māori held a world view that originated in their Polynesian homeland. This grew and changed according to life in the new land. The Polynesian influence is still widely evident, although it is challenged by some.

Some iwi (tribes) hold that their ancestors did not come from over the sea, but sprang from the New Zealand landscape.

For example, the Ngāi Tūhoe people claim that their ancestor is Hinepūkohurangi, the mist that dwells in the valleys of the Urewera Ranges.

Hinepukohurangi over Lake Tekapo

Cited Works:

Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal. 'Te Ao Mārama – the natural world - The world of light and darkness', Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, updated 1-Mar-09
URL: http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/te-ao-marama-the-natural-world/3                     

Landscape image sourced from Waitaha