Guess who’s back

I’m sorry for not having written anything last week. I have been busy.

Among other things, I launched a video course in Portuguese on natal astrology. I have been telling people for quite a few years that I am not able to do an individual, one-on-one, course as John Frawley does — and I still cannot do it.

But I think I can show others how I do it, and give examples, and people seem to want to watch it. Wish me luck, people.

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This beautiful art of ours is a practical craft. This implies that, no matter how well-read you are, you don’t know how to do it if you haven’t done it. You get better with experience and maturity; and, while both require time, time is not enough. If we want to have some grasp of it, we must observe what happens when we do it: our mistakes, our small victories, etc.

A teacher can do only so much; training can only do so much.

Ok, that means young guns may not be as good as old-timers… but there is no other way. You’re either accept that you must start, or you never do.

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I like to mock Mr. DeGrasse Tyson because he never forgets, year after year, to remind everyone on New Year’s Eve that it means nothing, that calendars are just conventions, that we never stop our journey around the Sun, etc.

Year after year, he’s wrong. Conventions — at least the ones concerning time — were very, very meaningful.

A year is how much the Sun takes to complete its journey through the Zodiac, it’s one complete round of its own motion.

A month marked the length of either the course of the Moon around the Zodiac, or the course of the Moon from one New Moon (a conjunction with the Sun) to another.

A day is a full revolution of the Sun around us, dragged by the Sky.

The hours were divisions of the time that expressed the difference between day and night (day: the time between sunrise and sunset; night: the time between sunset and sunrise).

Time was, in short, qualitatively divided and measured. It had clear and deep meaning.

However, a lot of us are born everyday, and we work in shifts, and we travel, and we invent things that allow us to travel and interact with each other. And to organize this, the way we count time must be more uniform.

So, the way we calculate time (be it hours, months, etc), and the way we start counting it (time zones as compared to local time) changed.

I know, I know, there are many different reasons that I omitted, this is not a history book.

But my point is: the ancient way of marking time was meaningful. The modern way of calculating it is necessary, and so it also has meaning. Nothing in it is random or arbitrary.

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“Upon them stood the Teeth of Mordor, two towers strong and tall. In days long past, they were built by the Men of Gondor in their pride and power, after the overthrow of Sauron and his flight, lest he should seek to return to his old realm.

But the strength of Gondor failed, and men slept, and for long years the towers stood empty. Then Sauron returned. Now the watch-towers, which had fallen into decay, were repaired, and filled with arms, and garrisoned with ceaseless vigilance. Stony-faced they were, with dark window-holes staring north and east and west, and each window was full of sleepless eyes”.

Lord of the Rings, chapter “The Black Gate is Closed”.

It’s very nice that there are no windows facing south — Middle Earth was thought of as Europe and the bits of the ancient world that interacted with it, so the Sun, at noon, came from the South. Sauron and his minions didn’t want to face the Light at its peak.

But that’s not what I want to talk about that.

The passage is quite martial, and it talks about two martial things built by a martial people for martial purposes.

But they got soft. And it became something used against them.

That is what happens with anything aggressive or martial in the chart. Not only Mars itself, but cute little things such as Algol, Antares, or Betelgeuse. They are cosmic swords.

We may pick up and use in our favor, we may let it there, hanging, so anyone else can grab it and use it against us; but we cannot change them into Teddy Bears or cushions.

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King Charles the III has just been crowned. A look at the time of the coronation and… it was probably elected.

Not anything can be chosen, of course — it always starts so the actual putting-the-crown-on-the-king’s-head moment happens around noon. The day, however, is subject to choice.

And this particular puts the Sun as lord one, decreases the dangers of the eclipse, makes sure the malefics are in restrictive houses and the benefics are high up in the sky.

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On another note, he’s 74. If he outlives his father by ten years and makes it to his 109th birthday, which is highly unlikely, he will have been the king for 35 years.

There is no way his reign will be long, we don’t need astrology for that.

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The four Philosophers (by Peter Paul Rubens).

This is a depiction of, from left to right: Rubens himself; his brother, Philip; Justus Lipsius; and Johannes Woverius.

I have no idea whether their depiction here matches their work or not, but if your astro-sense started tingling when you read “four”, you’re right: I think each one of them is painted according to one of the elements.

One of them is noticeably higher than the others, and the curtains seem to be flames spreading from his head: Rubens himself is fire.

Justus is almost as high as he is, his head looks like a bubble rising (unlike the other depictions of him I searched online). His colors are as hot as Rubens’s, his right hand points upwards, there is a column behind him that seems to rise from him upwards. Air.

Philip Rubens’s face is, by far, the smoothest of the four; he seems much younger, and the only one whose eyes seem sweet: water.

We are left with Woverius, which is the lowest, and whose facial features are as sharp and clear-cut as Seneca’s bust above him. His skin tone matches the stone; he is the only one holding something. Earth.

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Nicholas Culpeper describes a plant named "English Tobacco", easily found in the English gardens of his time, in his Herbal.

Well, this is NOT Nicotiana tabacum, the most-widely know tobacco plant, and the most commonly used in the tobacco industry.

He's talking about its more beautiful cousin, Nicotiana langsdorffii, also known as green-flowered tobacco, which was discovered and described by Baron Georg Henrich von Langsdorff in... Brazil.

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That’s it. See you soon, God willing.