It’s moments like these, in the dead of night, that I wonder about my legacy and even more importantly my own, current state of affairs. Last night seems like last year. I was tucked into the corner of the Sheraton’s banquet room, transformed for one night into a citadel of faux heroes, with latex biceps and flesh hugging spandex. I’m the guy reading tarot cards for computer nerds dressed up as action figures, rewarded for their year’s past service. The booze is flowing like a river and karaoke breaks out with more and more frequency as inhibitions dissolve like sugar in the bloodstream.
I’m flipping cards and freestylin’ like Charlie Parker. The cards are the standards and I’m deconstructing their eight-note-song, according to their particular harmony or dissonance. Conducting challenge, tragedy, triumph and inertia, I summon the gods and gaze into their spirits.
It goes on for hours. Almost always, I am left with, “how did you know that”? Or, “The cards told you all that”?
After an hour or so, the line to sit gets longer. It’s always been this way. I remember one night in Tucson, on my 36th birthday, the Autumnal Equinox, on a warm, Saturday night–it was like something out of a Garica-Marquez novel. People were ten deep to hear their fortunes. Some wept. Others had mile-wide grins, beaming at their own reflection.
The next morning I went into the desert to commemorate my new year and to beat back the loneliness in the aftermath of that kind of night, where such intense, temporary intimacy is gripping and alive with a deep sense of service. It’s like jazz, deconstructing the code of the moment, running on the through lines of meaning, articulating the darkness, coaxing forth the light.
I once read something by Bird, something about his addiction to smack and how it was the replacement of the emptiness, the void that would inevitably creep back into his life after an evening of wild improvisation and deep listening in soulful reverie, swinging on the rhythms of Orishas, descending into the chordal vortex of bluesy invocations.
As the painted faces of court cards stared back at me, I felt less like Crowley and more like Trane.
But it’s in the aftermath that the darkness and the void return. What was once whole and full, naturally becomes empty. It’s the way of things. I’m grateful for the gift, but it’s a strange one by any standard, jazz or otherwise.
My son’s “other” family is reveling in their new found affluence under the decidedly less burdensome financial gravity of the Lone Star’s orbit and here I am telling people about their future, floating on the elliptic of the fringe, my central nervous system jacked into the grid of the planet. I couldn’t think of two, more disparate lives or ways to get by in the world.
The skies here in my old world reflect my inner atmosphere, the only difference being that the outer is decidedly more artificial than the inner. I shudder at the utter absurdity of it all, like how magically the baddest of the bad guys that led the bloody uprising in Benghazi just might have been caught pulling the same sort of shit in Egypt. We’re supposed to feel some sort of closure I suppose, but it feels more like Oceania fighting Asia or whoever we’re fighting this week. Bad guys have absurdly short shelf lives these days. How many years did we live with the scraggly and ever-changing-mug of Bin Laden?
Now, some unpronounceable, who had recently committed the unthinkable, gets removed under unbelievable circumstances. What are we supposed to feel? Who is it really for? Us? Them? Are we supposed to feel relieved that we got the Benghazi mastermind of the Embassy massacre?
The artificiality of it all trumps the Truman Show and life itself becomes a set within a set, set within, within a set. Nothing feels real.
NFL players die on a weekly basis now, apparently. Last week it was guns, this week, booze and cars. I wonder if Bob Costas will get on his soapbox this Sunday night and go from 5’7 to a soaring 6 feet and declare that, “If cars and alcohol were illegal, that Cowboys linebacker, Jerry Brown might still be alive.” He could, but it would royally piss off Ford, GM, Budweiser and Coors, sponsors of the NFL and Sunday night football. Oh well, don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
In England, jolly old England, which ain’t so jolly anymore, Jacintha Saldana supposedly took her life over a prank call, where she fell prey to two Australian DJ’s and their crappy accents, pretending to be Charles and the Queen. Saldana was anything but the suiciding type. She had two children and a loving husband. She was deeply devoted to her profession as a nurse. In 2009, they were named family of the day at the “Boom Christmas” party for the Mangalore, Christmas celebration. They were very close.
Alternative researchers are circling the event like hawks now, combing over the symbols and dates with steely vision. This is no secluded hotel room in Mexico. This is open air carnage at noon. A sharp, collective gaze is decidedly fixed on Buckingham palace.
Speaking of fixed, Saturn in Scorpio is a revelatory portal and this Mercury retrograde, now gone direct has unleashed an absolute laser beam into the soul of the Vox Populi. As it gets ready to move into Sag, prepare yourself for the carnival of revelations. Stay focused, stay present and get ready to witness what you cannot or will not believe. Don’t avert your gaze, don’t crawl back into the comfort of that rotting shell. Medusa will not turn you to stone this time around. The mirrors of the soul will shield you from the serpentine horror.
We need this moment to break the spell, to see the world as it really is, the illusion cracking and fading, pixilating and crashing down around us. Only when we can do this, will we be truly free. Drop your feel good warm and fuzzies, your permissive, false sense of freedom and justice for all and look, look at it.
About four years ago, I stumbled like many onto Dave McGowan’s magnum opus work, “The TLC”. That’s short for “The Laurel Canyon” for those of you that don’t know it. In it McGowan deconstructs the sixties, the Summer of Love culture, and essentially reveals it to be a grand, military industrial exercise, performed like an acid-laced talent show, by kids from military families and faded blue-blood dynasties.
One of the core players of the scene was Vito Paulekas. Paulekas was a sculptor, who used to give sculpting lessons to socialites (code for fucking) at the foot of the Laurel Canyon, in his studio. Paulekas was the leader of a group of free lovin’ fully expressive free spirits in a big, sprawling house in the canyon that would be the crucible for the 60’s as we know them.
Paulekas and his band of merry mavericks called themselves, “freaks.” When early Sunset Strip bands like The Birds would play at The Whiskey, Paulekas and his crew would be bussed in like ACORN members and start doing really strange, free-form dances, which of course, they called, “freaking.”
His little extended family had charming names, like, “Strawberry Giggle Glow” and “Starshine Happy Love.” Style points were obviously not rewarded. Well Vito got into a little trouble when his young son mysteriously wound up dead right around the time he was supposed to be part of Kenneth Anger’s movie, “Lucifer Rising,” Future Manson Family member, Bobby Beausoleil would wind up taking the little boy’s place in the film. Things got a little hot around the canyon as a result and Vito had to leave town.
The reason I’m bringing all this up, is because I was on FB the other night, cruising through the pages of friends of friends. I still have some Marin County, compassionately communicating, ecstatically dancing, raw foodies in there.
I tripped through the second and third degrees of separation and wound up in SoCal, skimming through a poly amorous network, where I saw names like, “Shiva Love Juice” and “Coconut Divine Deva” and it dawned on me that Paulekas’ family of freaks had cracked through to the mainstream, that it had mutated into this strange collective hybrid of raw food, yoga, esoteric piracy, arrested development, toxic narcissim and rampant horniness with no commitments.
This, is when I fully realized that some people are in the Marianas Trench of conscious awareness, masquerading as enlightenment.
There was a time, not too-long-ago, that I might have entertained the notion of a poly-life. I have Venus sextile Uranus and my 11th House is a Libran gang-bang with Neptune in Scorpio on the bottom, with Venus also trining my Mars in the 8th, but now, I simply see the irony of it all, projected onto the world’s plasmatic screen, broadcasting the weird visions of twisted seekers looking for something, anything, that will liberate them with the least amount of work possible.
So, it’s in these empty moments, after contact with the numinous, that the dark light seeps in.
I’ll watch football tomorrow and try to have some mundane marker, some reminder of a normalcy that never really existed. I’ll watch for Russell Wilson, the Seahawks Sag phenom, born 11/29/88, his Sun in trine with transiting Uranus. I ‘ll watch for Colin Kapernick as Saturn moves closer and closer to his Sun/Pluto conjunction. It will give me a Hemingwayesque moment or two for a few hours and then I’ll retreat back to a world where Syria as we know it is on the edge of extinction and WW3 could be just around the corner as a result.
Yours truly, “Heart Chakra Vanilla Wolf.”
14 thoughts on “Mercury Into Sag–Let The Carnival Of Revelations Begin!”
Woke up to this wonderful post and as the late Libra moon is trining my Mars/Jup and nearby Merc, I am transposing out a comment, or maybe a commet.
I feel 100% the same way, through my own perspective of course, about the true meaning of life and what is real these days.
Yes, it would be incredible to break The spell ….and as much as I want to, as I get peesed every time I think how from childhood how hoodwinked
I was as a result of the programming of the day, and how every year since 2007 I’ve wanted to deconstruct every ridiculous notion such as doing the
appropriate Christmas for the kids every year… something always stops me.
Maybe it’s like Reality is a two-way street. I mean, what really is reality, and where does it really lead?
I think that’s the road no one likes to travel on… the what if…. the well, if we we deconstruct this, then what ?
So yesterday was the anniversary of John Lennon’s tragic passing.
Did he really die…. I’m now wondering… or as I pretend to remote view, is he really in that Siberian castle holed up in luxury sipping cognac before
a stone fireplace, safe from the cold while reading every novel he never had the chance to and awaiting the latest shipment of some real porcelain doll?
I mean afterall, Heart Chakra Vanilla Wolf, it was he, John, who said, “….nothing is real ….and nothing to get hung about…”
So, I guess we shouldn’t really despair.
And, as hard as it is for us truthseekers, maybe we just need to go with it ….. the “non-reality” — but maybe not.
Maybe, just like being a kid in the 60s and licking off layer after layer of the sweet sticky non-significant sugar coating on that spherical “little world” sucker pop,
we really knew there was something better at the center of it all .
Signing off,
Strawberr-Sucker tummy Chakra, love to all.
My readers are the absolute best. What’s interesting, is that this kind of reality deconstructing is exactly what the likes of Manson and Crowley advocated. For Crowley, it was all about understanding words, pictures, sounds and movement, backwards. Manson preached to his followers that they must untangle their culture and break free from their conditioning. Even Jesus said that, “you must leave your parents” which is the inherited conditioning and genetic signal of your line and time. I once hung with a naughty shaman who imparted a brilliant jewel to me; “The two greatest fears people have are death and madness.” Madness is all about losing control and having no familiar moorings. Strip away the illusions, no matter how painful and what is left? How does one person see a chemtrail and another a contrail? How does one person view Obama as an anti-christ, another as divinely guided social reformer?
There are Three questions for man to answer, what is it, where is it, and, why is it.
That is all folks.
On a side note, we know the picture wasn’t doctored.
3ws, yes, i see, it is the same, but a different piece of the puzzle.
Hi Robert: Thanks for jumpin’ on that London thing. Scary stuff. Just in time for Merc in Sag. I’d still rather know the truth about things. That’s what life is. As we mature, the truth presents itself for our conteplation so that we may integrate these new facts and move on to the next. The trouble is when the truth becomes evident before we’re quite ready and forces itself upon us. – Moving us out of our compfy womb whether we like it or not. A rebirth of sorts. And who among us does not feel a twinge of sadness at birthdays? A fond farewell to the past.
Really love this post… so much here. Not sure that I can articulate a real response (am just waking up), but just to riff with you a bit — I have natal Venus conjunct Pluto in Virgo, sextile Mercury/Neptune in Scorpio — with Jupiter in Sag in the 5th. I, too, was caught up in the wild life for at least a decade. And then I had an unexpected conversion/reversion experience/awakening. I realized all of a sudden that God does exist — and that the Ten Commandments, etc… are not a joke or an unrealistically heavy yoke placed upon us for no reason — or just to control us. They are a gift of light to help us keep to the correct path and avoid being swept up in sin, loss, lust, chaos.
Remember that sin means “missing the mark” — like an arrow that misses the target. It means allowing ourselves to be swept away by collective trends, peer pressure, what everybody else is doing, what seems to be “cool” … and now and in the future it means being very susceptible to whatever plans the elite, if you will, have in store for us.
The Book of Revelation predicts a time when there will be a push for a one world government with a tyrant at its head — a completely godless and anti-God/anti-Christ regime. It will attain this power through duplicity and through a spiritual philosophy/religion that will appear to be good and fair — but will in fact be complete and utter tyranny, ugliness, and evil once it receives full power.
This is certainly the time to exert effort to discern what is real and what is not; what is lasting and what is ephemeral; what is true and what is false.
Robert,
You are the best. I love your writing and the way you weave astrology.
I have a strange question about tarot. I use to work in a new age bookstore, many, many moons ago and became very familiar with tarot, and was quite good at reading for friends, but not for myself (strange how that works). A few years ago I threw away my cards because I got the feeling that I “may” be guided by spirits (none that I was actually aware of, but the thought occurred to me). That thought then lead me to think: if I “could” be guided by spirits, they could be good or bad or tricksters. Kinda Christian thinking I guess. Now I just use my knowledge of numbers in a free association (!) way. If I see four birds flying I immediately think of the emperor (tarot) and youthful folly (I Ching). Ever ponder that? I haven’t really made up my mind.
Lastly, I’ve wanted to mention an amazing blog to you and your readers. Have you heard of Drivingthetrancecanada.blogspot.com by Ann Diamond? If not you will find a fellow traveler. Trust me.
Hi Holly,
I have thought many times about the cards and their roots. I even use the Crowley deck. Some people have actually buried or burned their Crowley decks. I never have, but I have gone away from the tarot for very long periods of time. In the 90’s, it was my religion I suppose. Now, i only use it under special occasions. I do have a funny story though. I was in Atlanta during the 96 Olympics, reading tarot in public, which I used to do quite a bit. I was resting in a park near the Olympic Village and I was doing a spread. Soon, I was surrounded by a flock of young Christians who were their to convert and save souls. I was prime, grade A, pagan game. They quoted the bible about false gods and prophets. We had a rather philosophical talk and they went on their way. Well one of them came back and knelt down next to me to pray for me. I grabbed his hand and we prayed together. I had a truly great stay in the ATL. I will check out her blog. Thanks.
wow!! I didnt stop reading this as I sometimes do and come back later to finish reading. This was my most favorite part it was like a lightning bolt iluminating across the deep dark night sky.
“Speaking of fixed, Saturn in Scorpio is a revelatory portal and this Mercury retrograde, now gone direct has unleashed an absolute laser beam into the soul of the Vox Populi. As it gets ready to move into Sag, prepare yourself for the carnival of revelations. Stay focused, stay present and get ready to witness what you cannot or will not believe. Don’t avert your gaze, don’t crawl back into the comfort of that rotting shell. Medusa will not turn you to stone this time around. The mirrors of the soul will shield you from the serpentine horror.”
I’ve never known anyone else who was familiar with “TLC”, and often wondered why Dave’s work didn’t get noticed.
Very interesting connections you’ve made.
Another fan of your writing here, Robert! Phew – those first 8 paragraphs where you liken your immersement into tarot to jazz – those are so coo-ooo–l – masterly “licks”, man. 🙂
Sounds like a VALIS moment. Those kinds of places will stick with, through thick and thin, and warp and weft. Cards, and runes, and sigils, well, there is the thing itself, and if that happens to more than one at a time, that could be some hidden histories.
Probably OK, maybe really needed, just always going to hurt.
Stories, and maps, and third person narrative, the thing itself makes most of that seem almost self emergent, but that is crazy talk.
Robert,
I made myself read the entire Laurel Canyon piece, and it really made more senes than a lot of the commonly accepted nonsense. I was particularly interested to read that Jim Morrison had no desire to be a singer (none, according to his own word.) This is your best post yet. Thanks. Don’t worry about the emptiness, it only seems empty. Tom
Thanks Tom. TLC fits into MK Ultra and the hijacking of consciousness in the 60s. If you haven’t seen “Mullholland Drive” by Lynch, I highly recommend it as a companion piece.