HOROSCOPES: SACRED AND PROFANE
Week of November 27. Agamben, full moon in Gemini, profanation as play
Hi! Some new things: including astrological gift cards, a revamped list of offerings, and an upcoming course on alchemy and the planets. I also have some open slots for miniature, cute yet hardcore full moon readings tomorrow.
“Sacred or religious were the things that in some way belonged to the gods. As such, they were removed from the free use and commerce of men; they could be neither sold nor held in line, neither given for usufruct nor burdened by servitude. Any act that violated or transgressed this special unavailability, which reserved these things exclusively for the celestial gods (in which case they were properly called ‘sacred’) or for the gods of the underworld (in which case they were simply called ‘religious’), was sacrilegious. And if ‘to consecrate’ (sacrare) was the term that indicated the removal of things from the sphere of human law, ‘to profane’ meant, conversely, to return them to the free use of men.” (Giorgio Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation”)
“Intelligence offends by its very nature, thinking annoys the people in the cave.” (Simone Weil, Lectures on Philosophy)
4:16am ET Monday November 27th: a full moon along the Gemini-Sagittarius axis. Sagittarius houses the so-called big picture—myth-making divine yeses, high and hive mind, with its counterpart opposite being the zoomed-in playful minutiae of Gemini. More here. This axis of wisdom and information has something to do with the sacred and the profane, especially how they relate to language, with the sky being the caesura we cross to move between altered states. Plus, it’s dramatic, as the moon gets very full of it (sun), Mars squares Saturn.
While Mars slashes and burns, Saturn with- stands/holds, makes heavy, asks what’s necessary. In his essay “In Praise of Profanation,” Giorgio Agamben says that religion is that which removes things from common use and places them into a separate sphere. No religion without separation. Sacrifice is the apparatus that regulates the separation—typically through a ritual in which something or someone passes from the profane to the sacred, human to divine——Gemini to Sagittarius and back again, choruses hurt and high, true and false prophets, gossip, revelation, and argument along the road’s raucousness.
Mind the gap—-or what Agamben calls the caesura that divides these arenas. It is a threshold the victim must cross “no matter in which direction.” Mercury, planet of language’s glittering plasticities, can slip into the farthest edges of our vast ecliptic because of its small size. This energy backs tomorrow’s full moon in Gemini from Sagittarius—-Jupiter’s autumn home, where the sun currently shines. I quote this a lot, but—-Georges Bataille says poetry is a sacrifice in which words are the victims. Said differently, poetry can make language sacred by taking it out of the realm of utility. In both sacrifice and profanation: ruination and exaltation. Words get pulverized so that they can do more, rise then melt into diamondhard shards. Repeat repeat repeat.
Agamben tells us that one way to pass from the sacred back into the profane is through play. Lithelyargumentative Mercury profanes the house of Jupiter, king of lightning and thunder, cosmic ordainer. We swim in Mercury’s technology: screens, phones, constant communication—-we’re all messengers, texters, everyone is everywhere and the screen’s the whole scene. Plus, we have pulpits. Jupiter! In this environment, people get pissed when you don’t tell them exactly how to read you. I wonder if we’ve forgotten that other Mercury thing: how to seriously play in joyous ambiguity. Mercury gets the joke because he’s been to the underworld, escort of souls. Notoriously hard to read, slippery and frustrating. Remember that Adorno thing: “Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.”
And possibilities for true sacredness and profanation—-in language, in life, dissolve with the imperative to make every- thing/one useful and transparent and immediately graspable—-words become drearymanagerial and mad literal, avoiding any whiff of humor, offensiveness, bizarre blur. Fake see-through and not too groovy, we risk overdosing on both Jupiter and Mercury. The full moon prayer: let us not manage each other’s utterances. How lame. Let us play in the caesura between the sacred and the profane.
Horoscopes for the week—-for all signs—-below—-