ROMANTIC MANSIONS: HOROSCOPES
WEEK OF DECEMBER 11
ASTROLOGY & TAROT READINGS OPEN FOR THE WINTER!
ALCHEMY OF THE WORD: A CLASS ON ALCHEMY AND THE PLANETS, SIGN UP BY DECEMBER 31
Neptune, a planet that has something to do with enchantment, with the iridescent ardor that lines the search for paradise, locus amoenus—-its re-unions, enclosed bliss, mesmeric animals and tricks, is newly moving direct after retrograding all summer and fall. There’s a new moon in Sagittarius, where our sun sits, this Tuesday December 12th. The next day, Mercury stations retrograde.
[Today is Emily Dickinson’s birthday. So, in lieu of the usual, I’ve bibliomancy’d all of this week’s horoscopes from her poems and letters, at the very end of this. But first—]
Certain medieval beliefs held that Adam was not born in Eden.
But in the opposite Eden.
Eden,
a dream we belonged to
pronged, meant to be visitors
never permanent tints
In Nabokov’s novel Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969), which spans one-hundred years, Van and Ada are siblings and lovers who spend their time in a garden not unlike Eden and its sibling-lovers Eve and Adam. The estate is called Ardis Manor. At the next turning, the romantic mansion appeared on the gentle eminence of old novels. Turning, a mansion is letters and weather. Whether the siblings are there or not, Ardis appears in their minds as miniature, green, ravine-filled, twinkling and holdable. Ada will show you all the rooms in the house…
