"Ok, Abe...... Drop the Chalupa !"
"Hey, not *on* the poor kid." < smack, on the back of the head>.
The Mars Effect, in terms of graphic arts, is a little simpler than the Gauquelin mars effect: in short, sharp objects will be found in the same pictorial space position as the Mars symbol in the natal chart. Abraham's knife is then a token of Mars, and the knife's function and contextual meaning are seen here to be conditioned by either the whole of the natal chart, or the whole of the painting, in near equal measure. The artist has hit upon both a theme and the specific imagery needed to satisfy the algebraic formula nature of the natal chart. The variables have been equated with each other an amazing synchronicity.
However, the overlay makes an even better fit if we assume that the reported birth time is somewhat in error. By advancing the the natal chart to reflect a birth at about 4:17 PM, rather than 3:00 PM, three or four key planet symbols seem more appropriately placed:
http://pedantus.free.fr/rembrandt_2a.gif
But, perhaps the Placidus system of the house divisions introduces a skewed projection. I have tried different house systems, and perhaps just using a Equal house system is the proper remedy in most, if not all, situations:
http://pedantus.free.fr/rembrandt_2b.gif
Finally, we have another painting wherein Mars is even less sublimated and thus becomes both focal and more explicit, still in context of the natal chart, just tweaked into being more dominant:
The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis :
http://pedantus.free.fr/rembrandt_3a.gif
4 comments:
I'm late to the party, but am going through your blog and this caught my attention:
Both rulers of the 4th house (Abe's family) are in opposition to each other and the ruler of the 5th (Abe's kids) is Mars.
And do I detect a yod ("finger of God") in there? Moon/Mars pointing at Venus? And Venus ties into Neptune.
This is a fun theme to explore. There are so many planets and aspects pointing to the conflict and emotional intensity of the situation and the family.
Keera,
Your traditional, chart delineation, frame of reference points or guides you to notice the possibility of an empathy of the artist (Rembrandt) for the conceptual frame of the subject's (Abraham's) family crisis situation. The situation apparently attracts the artist by being inexplicably pertinent, somehow. So, I take that interpretation as being the way to show how person looks around for material in art and literature to piggy back their own Self expressive goals. I get into a lot of trouble saying this because astrologers don't seem to understand that I'm only interested in the most abstract conceptual frame--the probably wholly unconscious process of the artist's mind seeking some kind of patterning in the external world which is attracts attention by being somehow unthinkably familiar--somehow, "like me" versus "totally unlike me" To me, its the patterns of the analogical forces beneath the metaphor and the particular role players and circumstance which the mind of the artist is mysteriously drawn to reflect upon. So, its the ineffable framework of the metaphor that is my target, because I think this is the actual target of the unconscious. I mean there is no actual intelligible connection or parallel between these two entities other than the raw workings of the pattern-computing neural networks of the human mind, which are busy sorting things at the level of unthinkable simplicities (which have no linguistic equivalents).
For me, the miracle is that the mind picks up on astrology's Mars as a sharp threatening object. This because it is the knowledge of sharp objects which *invented* Mars in the first place. Astrology as a form to perceive, as a circular area in the field of the mind's optical view receives the mind's innate meaning for what different spaces (houses) mean in terms of the minds machine code computations. So, innate knowledge of Self on the mind's part *sees* that the painted knife is *in the right place* to be like Mars in house one--which it 'feels' is a prat of its own ineffable 'name'. I don't know why the image of one's natal chart is coded in the mind, but it certainly seem s to be there. Kepler thought so, and I agree with him. What Kepler never saw or thought about was that the painter here went through a lot of trouble to find just the right way to put a knife in the right place to satisfy some silent equation begging resolution from within him.
It is that last - that the artist composes a painting to coincide with an astrological horoscope drawing - that fascinates me. You've shown again and again that the product of the artist's hand and eye produces a copy of the artist's chart.
I don't do much art, but the two drawings I have on my wall do echo my own chart which resembles a full tree crown without a trunk (empty 2nd through 5th houses, but otherwise very busy). They are pastels of flowering houseplants and in both the flowers are all in the top half of the composition. Honestly, at the time, I was just trying to capture color and shadow and light. :-)
Yes, I noticed this parallel--this formula for object distribution in general. That is why I am reading about how neuroscience shows the mapping of visual perception and mind's eye imagined 'perceptions' being physically spread across a particular surface of the physical brain. There is no difference in the patterned neurological activity, just the intensity of the mental image I guess, or the consciousness level of the perception. It seem pictorial models of ideas are likely being processed as we think but we do not have access to that level of activity (hence we just call it an unconscious activity, which is a bit of a misnomer--we do this in parallel with more consciously appreciated processes).
So, if we could get persons to distribute objects based solely on the intuited Self organized preferences, then we could easily show how to that persons are unconsciously signaling the pattern of their own natal chart. It is probably our collective unconscious expeience which allowed the *invention* of the chart as graphic display in the first place...it is like the group effort of language invention, it too has has a hidden universal grammar structure silently informing all attempts at language creation, everywhere on the globe. Apparently like the language instinct, we have and astrological point to Individuality and a "language" of its own...no doubt a more deeply hidden grammar, but maybe not.
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