Madness and Constellation
horoscopes, Pluto in Aquarius, Hegel, repetition, rupture, timing
Sweet readers, February is astrologically intense. I’ve got a handful of astrology readings left in Feb. before I close my books for two months while I teach a hardcore writing intensive, cosmic and practical, all genres. EXCITING (!!) Space is limited. Details and sign up here.
What to make of the freezeframed yet unceasing surge of water—the water that Aquarius the water bearer pours forevermore? Images of rivers flowing into the sea, or reversing back to their source, looping. There’s a paradox, a kernel to chew, inside every sign. In a sense, what shoots from Aquarius’s vessel is Pisces—the twin fishes swimming in opposite directions but forever connected, a mystical and melancholic quest for some unified origin, Neptunian. And that search’s connection to death and dissolution, to end….
We’re all Aquarians now, while the sun’s there. And Pluto has just entered that room for the first time since the late 18th century. I’ve been reading about parts of that time—Hegel, French Revolution, madness, and the terror. In Aquarius—the many airy shapes of mind, repetition and first time. If Capricorn has something to do with earthen relics, Aquarius washes them—and washes them, for better or worse, away—-in Nietzsche’s death of God parable of the madman: “Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?”
And the sponge is also a sky. The water in the Aquarian jug rinses, rebirths, energizes while also pointing to the repetitive melancholic act of this constant pouring, s/wiping, erasing. Time piles up. Habitual minutes. Saturn doesn’t preside over only the past. It rules Aquarius, too—notions of progress, future. The revolution and the terror, violence of gone horizon. Broken into bits, time digitized and streaming. And the myriad ways to cope with and cover over that loss. Mark Fisher’s “digital ether” and “material memory.”
In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, he defines madness as “a state in which the mind is shut up within itself, has sunk into itself, whose peculiarity…consists in its being no longer in immediate contact with actuality but in having positively separated itself from it.” The astrologer Per Henrik Gulfoss, in The Complete Book of Spiritual Astrology, writes that the Aquarius archetype points to subjective vs. objective reality, he writes that to think one’s personal truth is absolute truth is to ask for trouble. I and us. The axis of Leo and Aquarius.
Plus the glimmering and frustrating unbridgeable gap between what we mean and what we say, what others hear. The mobs and swarms that come for us and those we’ve been inside of. Pluto in Aquarius. The gap that language makes is alienating, but also (for Hegel) freeing, what releases us into collectivity—as Daniel Berthold-Bond notes in Hegel’s Theory of Madness: “Language is an emancipation from the inarticulate particularity of the ‘I,’ an entering into community which is the space in which genuine freedom and self-identity must be sought and struggled for.”
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