Prophecies of the Doom Fairy, pt. XIV

More than a year has passed since I discussed the Scottish Referendum as an absolute certainty.  Back then the idea of a Yes vote seemed unlikely to me but it was always going to be close, had to be close to accomplish what I felt were the underlying necessities that propelled it.  My point of reference for that analysis was my own experience as a Canadian with the Quebec referendum of 1995.  There remain all the similarities I originally discussed but there are also some distinctions which have made the possibility of a Yes vote in Scotland seem increasingly possible to me as I have been watching the drama unfold over the last couple weeks.

When Quebec went to vote Canada had perhaps its most charismatic Prime Minister since Pierre Trudeau (under whom he had served as a cabinet minister), a Frenchman by the name of Jean Chretien.  An astute Liberal who had salvaged and renegotiated Canada’s place in NAFTA averting an economic disaster orchestrated by the previous Conservative leader, Brian Mulroney.  He had also implemented a federal budget which significantly reduced national debt, so much so that the budget of 95 is often held up as a model for national deficit reduction.  These are important juxtapositions to the current state of affairs in the UK, currently lead by a deeply unpopular and charmless Tory almost universally reviled in Scotland who has led the UK into a very nearly unmanageable deficit which currently accounts for almost the entirety of the unions GDP.

These are important differences.  When Quebec said it would seek a currency union with the rest of Canada, Chretien could say it wouldn’t happen and actually be convincing.  With a manageable debt load, he held all the cards at the bargaining table.  Scotland on the other hand can leverage the runaway debt in the UK in its pursuit of a currency union.  In the event of a Yes vote, and a further weakening of the Pound, England would be hard pressed to avoid default especially with the loss of the tax revenue generated by the oil and natural gas operations in the Scottish North Sea’s.  If England wants an independent Scotland to assume responsibility for a portion of that debt it would have to give Scotland the currency union it seeks.  In fact, a currency union would necessitate Scotland’s assumption of a portion of that debt.  A third factor is that Scotland generates most of its revenue internally, whereas England relies mostly on foreign holdings.  I say this is a factor because it means that a weakened Pound would hurt England considerably more than it would Scotland.  It is hard to sell your shit when no one can afford it because of the exchange rate.  To illustrate, have any of you in the America’s ever purchased anything from the UK and realized it was going to cost twice what you expected?  England casually imports while Scotland struggles to export.

So when the British Prime Minister Fishlips Pastyface (that’s his real actual name) says a currency union is out of the question, he is frankly full of shit.  Scotland actually has an unusually strong bargaining position for a nation undertaking independence.

Finally, the 2 factors I consider most pivotal, the movements of the heavens and the not-so-secret architect of your fates Mark Carney.  If you will recall it wasn’t politics or media excitement that lead to my certainty that the referendum would come to pass, it was the establishment of Carney as the governor of the Bank of England.  Carney has recently intimated that he already has a notion of the political concessions he would require from Scotland in the event of a currency union.  I find that telling.  Also, the referendum is expected to elicit a 10% devaluation in the Pound Sterling while parity with the Euro would require roughly 20%.  At 10%, every billion to leave the EU would lose 100 million to the exchange rate.  It needs to be closer than that.  If it was to drop farther than 20%, even if only very briefly while the new rules of the union (Carney is right when he says that a currency union is not true political independence, this would be a new set of rules for the union and not the birth of an autonomous state) were being established an enormous profit could be turned in the exchange.

There will be a very loose grand cross hanging over Scotland when it comes time to vote and if there is an astrological marker for an event that would lead to economic turmoil it’s a fucking grand cross with two generational influences in it, especially one that has Uranus in Aries square the  Moon in Cancer.  That is some emotional decision making.  (Did I mention you can vote in this if your 16? You can vote in this if you're 16.)  Pluto in Capricorn will inspire a desire for both independence and a longing for old cultural identity, Scotland has never been a contented member of the UK and has attempted rebellion or referendum repeatedly since the Redcoats defeated them.

So yeah, I am less convinced that a No vote is inevitable.  If Carney has a plan for Scottish Independence then it is entirely within the realm of possibilities. 

On the Altar of Dead Presidents

or Them Dollar Bills

While western occulture may find gauging their personal efficacy as mages by bank balance distasteful, I think it’s because as a general rule our bank balances aren’t terribly impressive.  It’s easier to stack up our knowledge of archaic models and dead languages with some structural support from that time we fucked up somebodies life or revealed the special butterfly inside with a chart reading.  Occasional mastery of the malefica and insight into the mechanics of being is good stuff and it certainly isn’t my intention to demean those aspects of the craft.  Really though, in times like these malefica is fucking easy.  The world is just aching to bring a little pain and doesn’t need much encouragement.  Getting a broke-ass Nigerian citizenship in Canada, now that is fucking hard. 

The truth however, is that money is no longer a pile of gold and silver, it has no meaningful material basis.  A nation’s currency’s value is established by an occult formula of unemployment levels, gross national product and its dependency on imported technology and resources.  It is aethyric in every sense.  All money is now fairy money, conjured out of the air and perpetually tending back towards non-existence, turn your back for one second and all you got is a pile of leaves stuffed in an old boot.  That being true, our collective lack of mastery over the currency of existence in the modern world is a sad state of affairs.

Part of the problem is that there isn’t a single old book of magic that provides even the beginning of mastery over modern currency.  Not.  One.  Maybe, if we want to be generous we could count Dr. Hyatts’s encyclopedic record of American hoodoo.  Yet, even that material is grown up out of a period before ‘money’ had taken control of the political and social mechanics in the way it has in the contemporary age.  When the stock market crashed in the 1920’s bankers threw themselves out of the windows of tall buildings.  When the markets crashed in 2008 bankers gave themselves raises and bankrupted national governments.  It was a weaponized collapse that in the overall scheme of things served to solidify their position and hamstring the political body that had up until that point held their leash.  People freaked the fuck out, the international banking cartels could catastrophically fail and destroy the world, they said.  Wishful thinking right there and beyond naïve.  The international currency and commodities markets are actually more robust than they have ever been.  Wall Street trading blocs have turned more significant profits in the last few years than they had in over a decade before the crash.

In the modern age you are not really a fortune-teller unless you can speak the secret language of dead presidents.  You have failed to penetrate Yesod and make of it a cypher.  Bold statement right there I suppose but I believe it to be true.  That collective fantasy we use to negotiate the strange intermingling of non-/existence currently manifests in the form of ‘money’.  Everything else, science, religion, politics, fashion, art, is tertiary to this one central mystery.  Without some grasp of its immaterial mechanics you cannot truly read the ebb and flow of social dynamic or political influence, you lack the means to achieve meaningful personal autonomy at the very least and to inform or manipulate the scheme of history on the grander scale.

This is not a self-congratulatory post, I am by no means independently wealthy or capable of influencing the cosmic economy (and when we are colonizing other planets with robots and mining asteroids it is cosmic) with my vast fortune.  If Peter Grey’s assertion in Apocalyptic Witchcraft that ‘the witch is to be found at the end of the pointed finger’ is true, then the great wizards of our age are a small cabal of bankers and commodities traders.  They alone have all the fingers routinely pointed at them.  The fingers of the religious right, the political left, occulture and pop culture.  Like virtually everything else in the world, they have a complete monopoly on pointed fingers. 

The most common accusation I hear levelled at the financial sector in the west is how they have co-opted government accountability from the ‘people’.  This simply isn’t true.  Democratic accountability to its general populace is directly related to the general populace’s interest and participation in government.  The ever-decreasing amount of governmental accountability is directly proportionate to the ever-decreasing number of voters.  A ‘vote’ in a western democracy does not constitute meaningful participation in legislature and justifying not voting on this ground is inherently deceptive.  It was never intended to be that.  It is a reminder of how much of the populace is paying attention to its legislative body, how much it cares about its government and its actions in the grander scheme.  A western nation that routinely has less than a third of its population turning out to vote is by default a tyranny because it no longer answers to its populace.  You asked to be ruled, to be kept, to be spoon-fed.

Another popular accusation that I hear is that international finance is responsible for the destruction of the planet.  There is a modicum of truth in this, while I think words like ‘responsible’ are over-statements they have most certainly participated.  We collectively as a species have destroyed the ecological balance of the planet, me and you.  This is a collective responsibility that we share as a species and so therefore by default includes bankers.  Really though, the apathetic destruction of our immediate environment is a hallmark of human existence.  The Sumerians destroyed the Fertile Crescent by salting the earth with ocean water.  As far back as we know how to go; unilateral ecological disaster is kind of our thing.  It is a convenient bit of buck-passing to give the whole of that burden to the corporate establishment, if we stop buying world destroying products I assure you they will stop manufacturing them.

Corporations, banks and governments are inherently amoral.  The moral component of each is determined by the humanity it contains.  Money, the aethyric current by which our contemporary fate is manifested and weighed is equally amoral or perhaps more purely so.  I think this makes meaningful mastery of it difficult for a contemporary practitioner because we have become extremely moral.  Even occulture, traditionally a bastion of freaks seeking to challenge conventional morals reflects this.  The return to old religious models and sexual dualities I think makes it impossible to truly challenge the conventional models we have to work with currently.  They are in point of fact, the grand-parents of the mono-cultures that dominate the contemporary landscape.  The average Wiccan or western ceremonialist is as quick to jump to the defence of monogamy or marriage, devotion to God (whichever it may be), or an excellent work ethic as any Protestant or Catholic or Muslim.  Somewhere along the line it ceased to be about the deconstruction of out-moded moral structures and instead became a contest as to whose spiritual beliefs made them ‘good’ in the purest sense possible.  Far-removing the spirit of a given practitioners practice from the reality which would grant them meaningful control over the single most valid measurement of autonomy and influence in the contemporary age.

Money.  I use Saturn and Jupiter (commodity and currency respectively) to parse the seemingly opaque world of international finance.  I start at the outside and work my way in, the inner and more personal planets provide effective vehicles but are not the core of thing.  Fashion (Venus) and conflict (Mars) are economic esthetics and their aspects to the slower moving outer bodies define where the money will flow and how it will get there.  Finally, the most ephemeral and least influential of all, politics (Mercury) is observed in relation to legal and therefore national level influences.

Fixed star conjunctions to Jupiter and Saturn and any aspected planets are my primary filters.  The signs themselves provide an element of staging, a sort of general thematic setting.  I don’t get the mileage out of the traditional signs as most do though, I find their interpretive significance to be weighed down with personal egoic significances and that makes it harder to track macro-influences.  A lot of the readers of this blog will be familiar with these astrological influences, most likely the intricacies of currency and commodities trading a bit less so.  I like the fixed stars as cyphers for the planetary energies because they are never wholly positive or negative, much like global economics and they fell out of fashion before astrology became a wholly personal model.  Lots of big picture to work with there.  Currencies closely tied to a material basis, the old gold standard trope are suspended between both Saturn and Jupiter and fixed star conjunctions to both are weighed; the socialist ‘manipulated’ currencies are wholly Jupiterian.  Those more purely Jupiterian currencies respond viscerally to shifts in the value of commodities and these market adjustments can be observed through the planet’s aspects to Saturn.

That is what I got so far.  More on Fixed Stars and Debt value soon.

Prophecies of the Doom Fairy, pt. XIII

So Mark Carney, the Great White Shark has moved to the Bank of England.  Here is what is going to happen next.  First he is going to freeze the interest rate at the Bank of England, ostensibly this is to encourage borrowing in general.  I point this out because it is not what the last Governor of the Bank of England would have done.  Usually in times of economic turmoil the central bank will raise interest rates to secure the necessary capital which falters due to high unemployment and capital flight. 

In continental Europe things will seem to rally a little over the summer, economically speaking but the simmering political tensions will continue boil up.  In concert with this a strange phenomenon will take place in the UK.  Although there will be no real significant changes in the level of overall unemployment, overall borrowing will increase and real estate values will rally.  All this will appear to happen under Carney’s loving guidance while Parliament is summering wherever it is British politicians go to polish their evil. 

Then the fucking unthinkable, it will turn out the Scots are semi-serious about their whole separatist movement.  Over the course of the coming winter this will become a hot debate both in Parliament and within the British media.  The rules of a separatist referendum will be itemized and indexed and catalogued and fluffed and spanked and called sexy names all right out in the public eye.  Murdoch will use the holiday break of Parliament at the end of December/beginning of January to talk a lot about the economic doom of a fractured UK and the faltering romance of the British aristocracy.  By the time 2014 is really up and running the British as a whole will have entirely forgotten about the Canadian running their central bank. 

The longer this dialogue takes place the worse it will affect the British Pound as a stable trade currency, causing its value against the Euro and the other Western currencies to fall towards parity.  The only event that could bring the Pound to meaningful parity with the Euro would be a referendum on Scottish soviergnty, it is an obscenely valuable currency.  Referendum talk and playing fast and loose with interest rates will definitely cause a drop in the trade value of the Pound but it will take some real national instability to move it, even temporarily, towards parity with the other western currencies. 

By this time next year I suspect the Scots will have committed themselves to a referendum, most likely before Parliament summers in 2014.  They will set the date for the vote sometime in 2015.  In the period between British Parliament setting a date for a referendum vote on Scottish separation and the actual vote itself the economic alliance behind the Euro on the Continent will begin to truly fail.  Some member state will abandon the Euro. 

During this period continental European wealth will flow invisibly into Britain (I say invisibly because Britain has some very opaque and nefarious banking channels, just like Canada), the depressed value of the Pound allowing the transfer to take place painlessly without substantial losses in currency exchange. 

Held up against the failed EU the Scottish push for independence will falter, overall political instability throughout the rest of Europe will inspire the UK to ’Keep Calm and Carry On’ as it has before.  Once the failed referendum is over the Pound will quickly rally.  Possibly less than a year to retake its original trade values if the chaos is bad enough on the Continent, which I think it is safe to assume it will be.  I am looking at 2016-2017 for the rally of the British Pound following a failed Scottish referendum.  

Parity between the Euro and the Pound is what you want to watch for because that is the most meaningful marker for the collapse of the Union.  The referendum will ultimately be a false flag, so if the talk is enough to drive the Pound to parity alone then I doubt the vote itself will ever materialize.  The over-arching necessity is the temporary parity between the two currencies. 

When the Pound rallies the European elite will turn vast profits off of the collapse of the Euro, 25% gains just off the appreciated value of the trade currency (based on current exchange rates, so in actuality probably much higher than 25%).  Conversely, the Euro (anyone still using it at this point anyway) and whatever break away currencies are left in Europe will be massively depreciated by the collapse, allowing those same wealthy elites to buy back European holdings for a fraction of their original value, basically the profit they turned collapsing the European economic structure can then be used to buy back the destroyed industrial and civil infrastructure.

Then Mark Carney will laugh maniacally because ALL UR BASE ARE BELONG TO ME.        

Prophecies of the Doom Fairy, pt. XII

Truly this moment is the beginning of some dark times.  Scorpio is gaining steam as the astrological marker which will shape the coming winter months.  To be frank, even I am a little surprised at just how thoroughly malevolent the general tendency is.  The political debate in America is now so entirely fucked, so remarkably divorced from the necessities of the times that I don’t even think it matters what happens south of the border.  Either way Netanyahu will force NATO’s hand and regardless of what America does it will be seen to have left Israel to collapse, decay and chaos.

All of this is necessary, the chaos is necessary.  Scorpio has a narrative, a couple actually but the two that will have the spot light upon them will be that of the rending apart of seemingly certain allies and confidants as well as that of new purpose and direction being nursed to life by the forces of untamed chaos and the wild necessity of basic desire.  It’ll be some Lord of the Flies type shit.

When Venus gets in the mix in mid-November we will collectively shed the last of that righteous civility which has marked the last couple of years and get down-right self-serving and that is going to cast some dark clouds over the next year.  As the troubles in N. Africa worsen the flow of shell-shocked, emotionally and physically battered Muslims will stream in ever increasing numbers into Southern Europe and they will bring dogmatically extreme forms of Islam with them (because that will be all they had to take with them out of the middle east and what they credit with their survival).  Places like Spain, Greece and Italy and Southern France, portions of the European Union already feeling the pressure of economic collapse and austerity.  France, hitherto Germany’s ally and support throughout the economic struggles of the Union will collapse under the ongoing pressure of an unstoppable flow of N. African refugees and its own bloated hedonistic self-identity, I wager the cracks will start showing by this time next year if it takes that long.

Needless to say, civil unrest will increase proportionately with austerity compounded by illegal immigration in Southern Europe.  Austerity measures will encourage a nationalist revival, the mechanics of which I discussed a bit in the previous column and that nationalism married as it is to unreasoning deprivation is already turning quickly to fascism and that is a trend I unfortunately see continuing for the next couple of years.  Truly I believe that there is a subtle fascist overtone to the UK’s consolidation of power among its previous colonies.  In the months since my last column Canada has changed the name of its military forces (marking them as an extension of Her Majesties Forces) and more recently combined all of its foreign embassies with those of the UK.  British conservatives are lauding this development as a concretizing of the ‘Anglosphere’, causing Francophone Canadians to cringe everywhere.  The consolidation of the Sovereign Banks of Canada and England will be the final step in that messy business.

Spectral Nazis indeed, except some of them weren’t spectral or even Nazis. Some of them were just pervert fetishists dressed up for a particularly elaborate fetish ball.  That guy in the side-car was hung like a suspension bridge.  When Venus passes through this deep malefica in November that’s what the perceptive will see in all of this.  That really it’s all just costuming for our selfishness, that the world is now too big and inter-connected for an old world problem like nationalistic fascism.  It’s all just costuming for the greatest of Foucault’s mystery plays.  It’s not really a regression to WWII mentalities, it’s Halloween at a gay leather bar.  As it becomes more apparent that there is going to be those who come out on top and those who don’t we will get more callously unconscious in telegraphing our fears and desires onto the world.  All the old symbols and socio-political fascist window dressing are really just adverts for the current collective’s immediate willingness to forcibly make you subject to its own ideologies in increasingly unreasoning attempts to preserve the status quo. 

Keep Calm and Carry On.  Obviously, the answer is to ignorantly continue on as though nothing is happening.  Obviously.

Opening Books

or Hadean Press Chapbook Review #3

I am developing a great appreciation for Hadean Press and the philosophy which underlay their humble chapbooks.  This day, I have added 'Opening the Book of Lambspring' to my rapidly growing collection.  I met the author of this text in the early part of this year and we became quick friends.  The fusion of simple home-spun hoodoo which punctuates so much of his practice always seemed a bit out of place with his deep dedication to the processes and ritual of classical alchemy.  Now it doesn't.

In my own defence (which I am always quick to jump to), that is perhaps because there is no single occult subject as deeply shrouded in obtuse lore and misdirection as that of the old wise men.  So most of what I understood of the alchemical process was either badly cobbled together out of unverifiable sources or whatever my imagination happened to make out of the romantic obfuscations the discipline has been shrouded in for so long.  I was pleased to learn that what ones imagination makes out of the romantic obfuscations is a part of the process so I got that at least.

The idea here that with a little exposition the Book of Lambspring might function as a sort of alchemical primer, was in fact intended to be so, is wonderfully illuminating.  This is especially true since it wouldn't necessarily seem so to the unfamiliar, yet in Christophers hands this seemingly indecipherable (for the uneducated at least) text becomes a simple and logical picture-book primer.  Its most practical use to me however, is the simple demystification of the basic alchemical processes which allows the little text to serve as a touchstone which makes meaningful penetration of the more elaborate alchemical texts possible. 

Like really actually possible.  

Prophecies of the Doom Fairy, pt. III

Astrology for Whore and Hustlers

( 5:45 pm, March 6^th, 2011)

Now that Venus has moved into Aquarius and heads towards her trine with Saturn and the Moon has gotten through Pisces some of you have most likely found the inspiration to get up off the couch, put down the mixing bowl full of chocolate-chip cookie dough and do something.  Others however are lost in their haze of refined sugar, alcohol and fat and stand at risk perhaps of missing out on the tremendous growth possible beneath our Jupiter ruled skies.  To these latter I say; STOP EATING THE CHOCOLATE-CHIP COOKIE DOUGH, YO.  THAT SHIT IS FUCKIN’ GROSS.  At least masturbate or something.

If your still recovering from gun wounds received during last month’s all Saturn gang-bang extravaganza then please, disregard the first paragraph of this entry. 

While it is true that the whole of this March will not be negotiable without varying degrees of intoxication and sexual indiscretion this is not to be misconstrued with a free-pass to lay in your water-bed until you get sores.  You totally can do that for most of March if want but your pass isn’t free, your ass will get dumped in April.  I am glad to find that for many the increasing pressures of the last couple months terminated in bottles of Jack Daniels and enough weed you could stuff a mattress with it and so are really just to fucking hung-over at this point to go hard.  Saved from your feeble self-control by your complete lack of motivation, it’s the Piscean way.           

The bright clear inspirations of February already begin to tarnish beneath the weight of practical execution, if you have even managed to act yet.  Pisces will happily reward a less-than-Herculean effort, you really don’t have to work that hard for the universe to take notice of you right now but it is your efforts it will notice.  If last month brought legal problems for you prepare to be confronted with them, Venus makes her pass through Aquarius behind the rest of the gang and her trine to Saturn will likely initiate the legal proceedings.  The truly unlucky still sitting in jail will probably get out over the next couple of days while the Moon makes its pass through Aries and transits Jupiter.

As I mentioned in the last Doom Fairy entry, this is also an excellent time to find out who stabbed you in the back last month.  Back-biting, slanderous gossip, complete fabrications slung in the name of character assassinations and unconscionable seductions are pretty much par for the course over the next couple of weeks so you might as well get in on the action.  Be forewarned however that if you’re not careful with your confidences they might catch up with you in April when that chick you slammed while you were dishing with your girlfriends punches you in the tit because it got back to her from her brother’s cousin’s ex-girlfriend. 

Tweet

Prophecies of the Doom Fairy, pt. II

Astrology for Whores and Hustlers

(Written, 12:30 am, February 24^th, 2011. )  

For the last two days hustlers and whores everywhere have rejoiced.  Finally that epic 4 planet stellium in Aquarius has moved on to Pisces, and rulership has passed from Saturn (who just turned retrograde and mean) to Jupiter.  Finally we can go back to be rewarded for our charm and craftiness instead of how hard we work.  That shit was getting tedious.  I am reaching back about a month here.

Saturn and Jupiter are opposing each other and that is creating some high weirdness.  Our relationships are being tested at every turn, (is this guy in the dashing khaki’s a narc? do I really have to tell you again to stop jizzing in my ear?).  Keep in mind that you are being simultaneously just as annoying as everyone else is, (what does this shithead have against khakis? whats the big deal if I jizz in your ear?).  The imposition of rules was what that was all about, a sort of generalized ‘this is how it’s going to be’. 

Some of you are probably up on charges already or crashing and burning.  You got a month or so for recuperation.

If you didn’t get popped and you didn’t freak out then you’re in pretty good standing.  Even if that meant being regrettably confrontational over things that were previously non-issues, Saturn the planet that loves rules was on your side ($500 extra to jizz in my ear, never ever wear khakis in my sight ever again). 

Who knows, maybe that khaki-wearing, ear-jizzing freak was a narc or something and those that didn’t bounce his ass are most likely the same as those that got popped.  That brings us up to now roughly.

I am relieved to say, that part is over.  Those of you left standing after the bombs finished falling are in for a prosperous time one way or the other because half of your rivals went down in the crossfire, so there is some business to be had and vacuums to be filled.  The caveat to this new found plenty is that half your allies also got taken out in the crossfire so you’re likely a bit more vulnerable then you were in January. 

For now however, the battle has ceased and some dangerously ambiguous espionage is going to happen. This many planets in Pisces means some accentuated 12^th house action … you might want to find out who invited the khaki-wearing ear-jizzer.  Careful observation over the next couple of weeks will reveal where your new alliances should lay and who you should avoid (this might surprise you).

If you got popped or freaked out, stop freaking out now.  If you can sort the wreckage in the next couple of weeks then you’re golden, no permanent damage done.  Most likely anyone popped over the last month won’t see a court date until April at the soonest so lay low this month and obscure your trail, they’ll have a mess of new problems to deal with by the end of March and you’ll be long forgotten by then.   

For the next month, make your very presence in the room a gift.  Do not ask to be accepted for your horribly flawed secret self (which everything being in Pisces is going to make you want to do,) instead radiate only your best and most seductively charming persona.  Defer to the emotional and egoic needs of others and Jupiter will see you properly rewarded with something other than the long-suffering of your friends, like an extra 500 bones for ear jizz at the very least. 

Tweet

Prophecies of the Doom Fairy, pt. I

Astrology for Whores and Hustlers

Already the shockwaves are travelling.  A lot of astrologers are looking at the Saturn-Jupiter opposition and talking like they know something special.  That election is however, a pale foreshadowing of things to come.  The Egyptian revolution began on the Saturn retrograde station, a very loose opposition to Jupiter at the time but as the opposition got tighter the momentum of that revolution gained weight.  Soon that retrograde Saturn will enflame the rest of humanity, as the Sun and Uranus and Mercury and Mars and Venus lend their weight to that exchange.  Jupiter will square Pluto and the powers that be will retreat into what they know and we will see this in action in America more than anywhere else in the world.

Normally, I avoid talking about the States because the world is full of interesting people and ideas and places and Americans have forgotten that.  This time I can’t avoid it and to be honest, don’t really want to.  America is Pluto.  Not always and definitely not forever but right now they are the powers that be.  If the retrograde Saturn could kick off something like the Egyptian Revolution imagine how the full opposition is going to affect the state of things in the world’s leading super-power.  On the international scale America is Mubarak, the oligarch clinging to control in the face of overwhelming social pressure and they will have to answer to that opposition in the same way that Mubarak had to finally answer his people.

The Jupiter-Pluto square is not a thing to be underestimated.  It is a guarantee that America’s forward progress will shudder, choke and then fail.  The heart of the people is not behind progress in America, it is ignorant and innocent like a five year old.  The people who will stand up for what they believe in America right at this moment have coalesced into the Tea Party movement and what they want is a return to the old ways and the old securities (Jupiter-Square-Pluto) and they are going to fight for it.  That America cannot hope to sustain itself by the old rules is obvious to the rest of the world because the rest of the world already knows that America has functioned as a colonial super-power for the last 50 years or more but Americans don’t realize that.  To the average American their entire patriotic identity is caught up in the idea of America as an enemy of oppression and tyranny.  The average American doesn’t understand that their security was bought at the cost of the freedoms of millions around the world.

You America are the tyrant the times are making everyone want to overthrow.  While hope will fill the hearts of millions around the world this year, it will do so after it has fled America.

It is the Tea Party that will capture these astrological elections and run with them.  Their ranks will swell over the coming months, Republicans and Independents will ally themselves to the populist movement and it will take on a life of its own.  For decades now America has held itself up as a shining example of Christian morality and the propagandists have succeeded in convincing a once secular nation that its real power is its moral certainty.  Without jobs, money and ease of living this illusion quickly shatters.  

The educated Left in America has grown fat and lazy and so there is no meaningful mechanic to correct this.  I believe (as does Arianna Huffington and several other political commentators) that we are seeing the birth of a third party in America, or at the very least a populist movement that will reinvigorate the Republican Party.  Leaders in America will be unable to secure position without adopting the Christian morality espoused by early propagandists and the Tea Party movement.  Needless to say, that will not endear the nation to the world as a whole. 

If Turkey throws its weight behind a new Islamic Bloc in the middle-east (which they have suggested they will, while supporting the overthrow of Mubarak) then an over-identification with Christianity will enflame an already heated religious conflict.  What’s more, the American retrogression will earn the disdain of the forwardly progressive (sometimes socialist... evil word I know) western nations of Europe and South America.  Your black President won’t earn you any points internationally when he makes abortion illegal and redefines rape according to biblical sources.

So keep this in mind a few months from now.  If you don’t vote, don’t write your congressman when outraged then your opinion is empty and without meaning because it doesn’t even attempt to change things or exercise influence.  The world won’t care about how socially conscious you are when you do nothing to stop the resurrection of a colonial theocracy and really why should they?  Most likely America will lose its fluid and pervasive identity, Obama’s healthcare plan will become a rallying point for and against progressive change and the States will shatter like glass.  Already the Supreme Courts of several States are seeking to overturn that Federal mandate and it is my belief that they will succeed because it is the will of the people.

Enjoy the Tea Party and don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Circus Burlesque, pt. I

or An Attempt to Idenitfy Saturn in her Decans

Saturn in her decans? I hear you saying. Her decans. We know that there was hidden formula in the goetic and grimoire texts. We know because there is holes in the information they have left. This does not in any sense come as a surprise to the critical thinker, those mysterious karcists who penned these works were mysterious out of necessity. One of the most infamous periods of activity of the necromancers of European sorcery were the Poisoners of the Court of the Sun King.

It is often suggested that the alchemical texts from the renaissance and later periods were also encrypted with false or misleading information so that the true student would have to truly grasp the work to perceive the hidden (occult) meanings of the texts. It is possible that a similar motivation underlay the motivations of the authors of the grimoires but it feels unlikely that is the whole of it in a deeply intuitive sense.

While the scholars quibble over the correct structure of Abra-melins acrostic squares and the spelling of phonetic mantra's one can't help but despair. Worthy tasks for certain but the alchemists weren't making spelling errors to throw you off your game, these were smart men being crafty. Great and elaborate cyphers became necessary to decode the alchemical texts. One was compelled to actually participate in the Great Work to truly decipher the hidden secrets of the alchemists. I have come, over many years of active experimentation with the grimoires to regard them in a similar light. Though the object of these works differ from those of the alchemical magics and the motivations of their protagonists are often strikingly mercenary, they were also written by smart men being clever.

Two great and hideous weaknesses became apparent over those years. An almost complete inability to access the daemons of the feminine currents of western necromancy (which is a curious thing since they are right there in the history of it but not the handbooks of those who engaged said history,) and another almost completely synchronous absence of formula by which one might engage the daemons of astrology's grand malefic saturn (which is also curious since the texts of the grimoire traditions are heavily influenced by the astrological models). These are, if I don't say so myself, pretty marked and notable absences. To the astrologers of the same era, saturn is the grand malefic and the source of the dark and material magics as well as the much observed marker for trouble and illness. Whats more, the feminine current in the European traditions has always been notoriously potent and its daemon are well recorded in the histories and folklore. Pretty strange that the mercenary necromancers of this same era almost completely neglected this in the majority of what remains of their texts.

Interestingly, upon further investigations it is made apparent that it is to saturn that the darkly sexual current of the primal feminine is associated in much of the mystical literature of the era. "Gregorius held that the negatively polarized manifestations of Saturnian and Lunar forces were, on Earth, incarnated in the forms of women, who are the vicars of the Luciferian Principle. The sometimes ambivalent attitude toward this principle leads to an ambivalent stance toward women as a phenomenon. It is even stated at one point that the esotericist should seek to free himself of the feminine daimonium by means of sexual magic. In contrast, men are esoterically the manifestation of the Solar and Jupiterian forces. For sex-magical work, of course, women are seen to correspond to the planet Venus, and men to the planet Mars." (Fire and Ice, Edred Thorsson.) We see this perspective not just in the adepts of the Fraternus Saturni but in many of the sorcerous models of the gnostic greeks, hebrew, egyptian and assyrian/babylonian. Our study is then simplified as we come to realize that the resolution of the absences in the grimoires is really in actuality a singular event.

Much of the earliest of the eastern european necromantic texts (such as the CLM 849) were in fact clerical adaptations of indigenous witchcraft which has always embraced this current for obvious reasons. This relationship is nonetheless reinforced in such texts as Solomons Keys wherein the saturnalian decans are given primarily to venus and the moon which as has already been established are notable feminine aspects of the current. As well, in the cases of the more definitively astrological models like Francis Barrets 'The Magus' saturn is treated among the rest of the planetary signatures as it is in most of the grimoires. Providing one with at least a circuitous route to their object. It is conceivable that it was this information that the crusades of the Inquisition sought to erase, this is hinted at in a very direct manner in the journals of John Dee regarding his work with Kelley. Dee and Kelley like any contemporary practitioner to this day making use of the grimoires, began with the daemons of venus. In their case the spirit Madimi but she led them ultimately to Lilith or at least a very dark feminine manifestation. It gets better, since in classical european witchcraft it is these very figures which serve to initiate one into the magical disciplines.

Tantalizing, no?

Kittens

There is a new cat in the house. A black and grey tortoise-shell. Still counting age in months although I have no idea how many, she just showed up here. Climbed through the window and made herself at home. Cats are everywhere, the cliche of venus in leo made universal truth. Whats left for a mars ruled dude to do when his planet hits cancer? Watch a kitten act like an idiot.

A tortoise-shell showed up once before, far enough back that I didn't know the astrology of the times. Deep in my saturn return. In some ways its a fearful omen. It means that somehow I am again deep into it. I remember the last time vividly and it is recorded in the gnostic piece 'Six Days in Sodom' which describes my confrontation with the devil of a 14th century heretical exorcism (CLM 849). Good stuff that was the product of some evil times in my life.

Its when the shit is hitting the fan that people seek out the services of the bokors. So a bokor has to be able to work while the shit is hitting the fan. Sometimes that means getting deep into it. That's why there are so many grimoires. Necessity. This round I see a daemon of the grimoire traditions, a duke named Gramary (Gremory, Gamori), everywhere I look. Whats more she courts my attention and I find it impossible to find fault with her. I mentioned this last night to V and she said, "ya, her name means glamour. In the Feri magic sense of the word. So you see whatever she wants you to see." That caused a pause in my consideration of this daemon which allowed me to finally conceive of the tremendous danger hidden in this spirit.

You absolutely must be able to penetrate her glamours in your continuous observation of the world beyond you. Seeing what you want to see leads to an unimaginative, limiting and impractical praxis. In its most destructive forms it is paranoia and delusion. With glamour you have to turn the dynamic around to really benefit from it. You want the world to see whatever they want in you. Real talent in glamours is pretty rare, and it has a very steep learning curve as far as the old magics go. I have never gotten it exactly right. The contemporary daemon I have encountered that are masters of it are as I mentioned earlier, tremendously dangerous. I speak from experience here. When the orange and black tortoise-shell came those years ago, the great devil within the exorcism was Satanachia. In the old hierarchies, the Grand Duchess and a Lieutenent to Lucifer. She too could make me see whatever she wanted me to see. I remain to this day deeply frightened of Satanachia, my grand mal. Always take saturn seriously, or it will fuck you up.

Saturns energy isn't traditionally equated to the duchies, but libra very much is and that's where saturn is headed. Out of virgo and into libra. So it goes like this. The Grand Mal(saturn)+Venus-rulership(libra)=Duchess of Hell, Gramary. Already a space has been created for her. Her sigil chalked out on the floor and marked with candles and offerings of cigarettes and perfumed oils. Already she has reunited lost lovers, and seduced men and women into acts of daring romance. Thus far she has asked nothing of me. No fetish or ritual or sacrifice. Nothing.

But there is a tortoise-shell kitten.