Visual Frame of Reference for Astrological Houses:

House 12 versus House 1

Advertising images are created to be psychologically effective. This studied art of touching just the right human nerves also shows us that there is little or no separation in the unconscious mind concerning the art of horoscope graphic projection and the more common experience of visual metaphors upon which these graphics of ad-men apparently rely. From the Wikipedia article describing astrological House 'meanings' we find the parallel ideas, the shared poetry, of these two often unappreciated-ly similar graphic projections of symbolized human expectations of 'reality'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_%28astrology%29

House 1:
"House of Self -- Physical appearance, traits and characteristics. First impressions. General outlook into the world. Ego. Beginnings and initiatives.

HOUSE 12:
House of Self-Undoing-- Mysticism. Places of seclusion such as hospitals, prisons and institutions, including self-imposed imprisonments. Things which are not apparent to self, yet clearly seen by others. Elusive, clandestine, secretive or unbeknownst matters. Retreat, reflection and self-sacrifice. Unconscious/subconscious. Unknown enemies."

Why humor 'works' is because it relies on something acceptedly true but as yet not clearly revealed. The "self-undoing" of our poor file clerk is foreshadowed first by simply positioning his paperwork project in the visual space which astrology calls House 12.

The graphics used in advertising are not confined to merely Freudian-styled seductions appealing to the sexual libido, as was popularly discussed at length perhaps in the 1960's. When we want to tap the intellect of the ad consumer , the observer of the graphic metaphor, we need to stimulate the naturally occurring relationships between visual information and language proper--need to bridge the pre-consciously construed and manipulated language productions which emerge as conscious awareness, impressions and thoughts, with our intended spin on "truth" relations...what-goes-with-what-and-why. Our most common notions of how everything is related to everything else probably remains a silent sort of half-unconscious 'knowing'.

The image of the ream of paper being drafted down the wind tunnel is the perfect visual parallel for the meaning of astrology's House 12--of "self-undoing".

Likewise the House 1 theme of self projection and the ardent pioneering of egoistic goals is visually projected by the Ducati rider and his orientation to this scene. Man, bike, and slip stream all working together to hammer away on the the 'meaning' of astrology's House 1.

The more general psychological/linguistic connection of Motion versus Speech , or more correctly the inseparable intellectual experience(s) of Transportation and Communication, is also here very well illustrated. The limitations of foreign language confinements are of course going to be overcome by Xerox, and, as well, any time or distance constraints. Thus the subliminal message here is 'astrological' in spirit--the human unconscious experience of what astrology calls Houses. Unlike an attempt to make the viewer feel thirsty, hungry, or sexually aroused, the creator of this ad wants you to feel the self-confining and almost suicidal nature of your present copying and publishing practices versus the speed and freedom of a Ducati rider. And he does it very well, where I'm concerned...I cannot watch those papers flying without suffering needlessly... ;)

Astro-twins? Patty Hearst and "Armature" --a graphic novel character

http://www.olyoptics.com/test/arm-comics.html



For those unfamiliar with Patty Hearst:

"[..] On February 4, 1974, Hearst, the nineteen-year-old daughter of Randolph A. Hearst and Catherine C. Hearst, of the Hearst newspaper chain, was kidnapped by a tiny group of political extremists who called themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). They locked Hearst in a closet for many weeks, where she was taunted, sexually assaulted, and raped repeatedly. The SLA held her for an unusual form of ransom: they demanded that the Hearst family distribute millions of dollars of food to poor and needy people of the San Francisco Bay area. Although the Hearsts complied with this and other SLA demands, the young woman did not return to her parents. Instead, she sent them a tape recording in which she announced that she had decided to become a revolutionary, join the SLA, and go underground. [..]


Patty Hearst's Stockholm syndrome episode is uncannily like the life experience of "Armature," the latter being a totally fictional character and the creation the graphic novelist, Steve Oliff. Patty Hearst also became a, "A chaotic neutral amnesiac, a cross between a doomed kid and an alien."
I only found these existing similarities by making a little experiment, by searching for any artist who may have been born on the same date as Patty Hearst. I was testing out my premise that there are what I call parallel expressions of the "influences" of a given day, and these are manifested in the way persons express themselves 'artistically'. These related expressions can be found in different people, or more often from the same person at different times, are like variations on a theme in music, or in the arts in general.


question:
If there is any truth to the premise of astrology, how come people born on the same day are obviously not the same ?

answer:
Well, the answer is really another question--what does the same really mean ?

The better question might be, how much are they alike, and why any likeness at all? Why is it that Patty Hearst 'real life' fictional character, "Tanya," was created in such a way as to be mentally or emotionally similar to Steve Oliff's , Armature--the first character he ever created and wrote for on his own.

I was stunned when I read the description of Armature. I mean, what are the odds that I could intentionally seek out a person born on Patty Hearst's birth date, and get such an eloquently relevant introduction?


The second part of this experiment was to see if I could use Steve's art work to make an educated guess as to what time of day he was born. The following illustration shows how we can use one of his promotional drawings from Amazon.com to identify his birth time.

illustration comparing drawing to birth chart:
http://pedantus.free.fr/Oliff_S_01b.gif

Mars, the astrological planet symbol, has its expressed parallel in drawings as a "pointy thing," in male drawings. Birth charts are of course drawings too, of a sort, and I find that artistic (expressive) drawings show the same inspiration, the same something-or-other in the human psyche which finds its way in to language and graphic arts. This character, Stiletto, has such a big sword that it covers quite a bit of angle. At four minutes of time for each degree of the Zodiac, I could only come close to the exact birth time. I did not realize that if we split the sword in this picture (above) we do get nearly the exact Zodiacal degree said to be ascending at the actual time of birth. So, it was a successful anecdotal "experiment", which of course pleases me to no end... : )

Rog

Objectivising Ayn Rand

Having taken up a renewed interest in Ayn Rand, I thought I would do a search for a quotation in which Rand uses a figure of speech, and see if I could relate that to her natal chart in terms of the visual positioning of birth planet placement. I got lucky on the first quote I found, and here it is:

from: http://www.mondopolitico.com/ideologies/atlantis/whatisobjectivism.htm

"[..] Ayn Rand was as much an advocate of philosophy in general as she was of Objectivism in particular. She made the point that, whether you have chosen to study philosophy or not, everyone holds beliefs consciously or unconsciously that give rise to, at least, an implicit or subconscious set of principles. As Ayn Rand put it:

"You have no choice about the necessity to integrate your observations, your experiences, your knowledge into abstract ideas, i.e., into principles. Your only choice is whether these principles are true or false, whether they represent your conscious, rational convictions - or a grab bag of notions snatched at random, whose sources, validity, context and consequences you do not know, notions which, more often than not, you would drop like a hot potato if you knew. [..]"

I wondered if the assertive Ayn Rand would give us a projection of natal Mars, but being that Mars was on the very bottom of the chart, I couldn't imagine how this might be accomplished, especially since females generally do not get involved with sharp objects like spears , swords, knives, etc. . However they do refer to Mars as something hot, and here the trite sounding trope is simply about something to hot to hold on to, "drop like a hot potato".

This quote, like most figurative language, is a combination of ideas and images, or better, ideas in the form of images. The processing of human language seems very involved with the brain's processing of visual information, if you see what I'm saying, here... : )

[ a little update/addition : ]

Thanks to a bit of feedback, I see another quote worth citing after having looked for Rand's first novel:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand
[..]
Her first novel, the semi-autobiographical, We the Living, was published in 1936. Set in Soviet Russia, it focused on the struggle between the individual and the state. In the foreword to the novel, Rand stated that We the Living "is as near to an autobiography as I will ever write. It is not an autobiography in the literal, but only in the intellectual sense. The plot is invented, the background is not..." [..]

http://quotes.livejournal.com/6730364.html
[..]
"It's because...you see, if we had souls, which we haven't, and if our souls met--yours and mine--they'd fight to the death. But after they had torn each other to pieces, to the very bottom, they'd see that they had the same root." [..] --Ayn Rand, from, We the Living

Its handy for us when author's admit that they are being autobiographical. This being Rand's first novel allows me to think that it probably is a better (less diluted) sort of Self-expression than in later works. There's something about a freshness in art which usually occurs earlier than later; maybe not on the very first try, but certainly before a certain sophistication of self editing renders works less personal, or less raw, whatever the right word here. In reading the above quotation our mind's eye is directed again to the lowest point--to the "bottom. " What could be more at "root," concerning this aggressiveness, as described, than natal Mars--the potential for violent aggression which the author definitely intends to explicitly address?

(Illustration: Any Rand's natal chart showing Mars at the lowest point possible, visually.)

http://pedantus.free.fr/Rand_Ayn_01a.gif

From the standpoint of, well, perhaps ego psychology, it appears that the projection of the Self is complete, in that the other here seems assumed to be just the same as, a mirroring of, the speaking character (--who is the author herself, for my purposes).



Why do I bother to do such a silly seeming exercise ?


Astrology when limited to a search for a Helgelian sort of understanding of Individualism lets us practice thinking of persons as integral parts of a whole, which is of course humanity in all its varied possibilities. But, some people aren't aware that Hegel did talk about the phenomenology of the Self as truly being an individual existence in its own right. So, I'd better clear that up for any anti-Hegel readers.

[..] In Hegel's thought we can find the beginnings of the distinctly "modern" self -- a self emphasizing the unique personality and the idea of individual freedom -- in particular the freedom to express and actualize the unique individual will. In the Phenomenology of Mind Hegel developed his logic of individual growth to increasing levels of self-awareness. While the ultimate goal in his philosophy was to link the individual with a collective community of like spirits, his self begins that search toward self-actualization through an individual subjective encounter with the material world. [..] (--Neala Schleuning) http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SA/en/display/292

The phenomenon of a given individuated person (Hegel's' term, a "Self-consciousness" ) can be seen as the successful manifestation and transmission of certain Particular Universals which apparently dominate a human being as if these options for being are the result of some kind metaphysical 'genetic' inheritance. My metaphysics are injected here of course, Hegel doesn't admit any relationship to astrology as holistic philosophical structure. And I don't admit any relationship to Hegel's statist political vision, whatever. For an astrologist, individuals and a required individualism absolutely do exist, as they say, in-and-for themselves. The variously distributed elements of astrological 'influences' are here considered particular universals simply assumed available via the time-ordered lottery of possible celestial inheritances, these obstensibly seeking manifestation in each, more or less, unique individual human being.

The beauty of this natal chart art view, horoscopic expressionism, is how little it matters what one says or thinks, but rather, how one says it--how one depicts one's Self in the form of an appreciable linguistic figure. It helps always to remember that persons are all, at some moment, engaged in abstract self-portraiture as a means to 'being there' for us--a way for someone to be objectively observable to us. However, creativity, a creative act of some kind, seems the only way out of the isolation of one's individual mind and into the the mind of another as perceiver of our presence in the world of human beings. Our individual presence in the world, our being as a separate person, cannot simply be a random quotation of another person's existence. If not successful at this art of being an individuated presence, by way of one's own creativity, then we run the risk of simply becoming objectivised, and probably cataloged in someone else's expedient collective human typology and its socially devised nomenclature. We remain a kind of 'thing' that is more brute physical presence than a spiritually present human entity.

One of the reasons I like the spirit/mind of Hegel, or his Phenomenology, is that he too saw that we can turn everything around to find truth in just about any proposition, and thus while I detest the stated aims of Ayn Rand's "Objectivism," I too am a kind of objectivist. I can quite without the slightest quiver of conscience treat Ayn Rand as an object for my dissection . And, in so doing, I can find her both as an interesting object, and as a subject capable of eliciting my spontaneous compassion. What choices did she have, how did she choose, and how do I fairly judge her choices for Self-expression.

Here then is an illustration of Ayn Rand's birth chart relationship to the Hegelian/Marxist philosophical structure which so animated her that she seems inextricably entangled within in it.
http://pedantus.free.fr/Ayn_Rand-v-HegelsDialectics_01a.gif

Though we like to imagine that we have a great deal of choice in how we align ourselves with social expectations and such, I think there are many uncatalogued mental 'illnesses'--like the hundreds of trivial viruses which go unidentified and unnamed due to the small impact these have on our basic vitality, their impairments not being anywhere near fatal even if to become chronic. As well, she may have actually been a true sociopath, but there is no way I could actually know such a thing. But these socially unpleasant forms of one's being-one's-self, seem not so much the products of an enabling 'creativity' but as a social burden and a form of personal suffering which apparently can become a chronic dis-ease. This then is how I see Ayn Rand; her creative offerings as the product of her personal suffering which she projects out upon the world, the objectified world of an Ayn Rand. She is of course attempting to be herself, but perhaps narcissistic-ally trying to be more a Universal rather than merely a very ordinary sort of an inherited collection of particular universals which are ubiquitously available to the spirit/mind/consciousness, and are routinely worked into any soul's personal art of individuation--the creative act of Self potential (Identity) being (with learning and effort) made manifest as socially significant Being.

That existence which we see and come to know as another individual seems totally dependent on the learned creative use of language as the outlet facility for natal chart-like sets of particularized inheritance of universals. Simply put, Ayn Rand, at one moment in time, solved the need to project her personally particular inheritance of what astrology calls Mars by employing the common trope, drop like a hot potato. This creative choice gives a measure of Ayn Rand-ness to an otherwise hopelessly cliched figure, by pointing to where we will find Mars visually located in her chart. In making this observation we have totally objectivised Ayn Rand... : )

Kojève's reading of Hegel

The following quote (below) is from, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT, (p. 229), by Alexandre Kojève . In this paragraph Kojève does a nice job of pulling together several ideas found in Hegel's description of what he (Hegel) sees as that which defines being human in terms of Man's dialectical reality (Totality). Below that paragraph one will find a graphic illustration as to how Hegel's terms seem drawn from the underlying philosophical structure of astrology. We can observe that Hegel's opposed notions, like "the action of Work" versus "the innate Given" which are responsible for the "realized Idea" are here; opposed to one another, and also related to one another by both specific astrological signs and specific angular relationships between related/interacting terms of his "Dialectic". In short, Hegel's reality just seems to go together this way, and we can use the structure of astrology's cyclical Zodiac to better illustrate, to better map, (or chart) his reportedly "obscure" points of reference. I have used a green dotted line to show how Kojève starts his discussion talking about how an idea is born from Desire. Using this astrological framework we can more readily grasp how Kojève explains the dialectical process of an idea's becoming, and how it is not Hegel's intention to confuse this birth of an idea as something Platonic, not something simply arriving a priori from some place beyond reality, the Idea is not given to Man as if from a god.

Persistence of Identity versus "Death of the Author"

Even though I think I am in near total agreement with Roland Barthes , "The Death of the Author." (Image, Music, Text. Ed. and trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill, 1977) ,
I am very reluctant to concede the non-existence of an identifiable individual person who performs the role of the author in his/her individuated manner. In short, literary assemblies of words are not, or may not necessarily be, reliant upon an individual author for their individually transcendent meaning, or their perpetual symbolic societal existence as preserved acts of language. However, the Identity of the person performing the "author function" remains a matter for astrology to define, discover, and (if necessary) recover. The maw of society's materialistic, humanistic, blank slate-preaching, individuality swallowers is ever gaping! And here, by identity, I mean that pattern of recognizable individual human potentials which comes to us in symbol form only by way of the art of astrology, and its very basic idea, the individual birth chart--that which plots the planets of the solar system and the angles of each relative to the others. These birth planets in aspects can be shown to be as if , for the purposes of critical analysis, algebraic formulations of human; references, perceptions, desires, and intentions peculiar to a given artistic expression and its 'author'. Art's perceivers can use astrology to identify an author in terms of his/her birth chart pattern, if they will but also learn the basic vocabulary of modern Western astrology.

By way of specific example of how to introduce empirical evidence into a realm previously considered to be completely dominated by revelatory subjective perceptions, I have the following example which was prompted by a recent email exchange with a skeptical person wholly uniformed about the nature of what I call Horoscopic Expressionism (--the unconscious natal chart patterning of one's creative/artistic self-expression). As much as practically no intelligent person wants it to be true, something very like astrology exists in the human psyche. To show its presence, we can actually form testable hypotheses which are completely fallible, falsifiable--'predictions' which can be dead wrong...or, we shall see, can be dead right. But at no time are you going to witness a magic act, you, the reader, are going to have to be interested in, at least mildly interested in, art, literature, humanity, and the unconscious nature of individuality; and, you will have to be willing to work at appreciating/understanding the relevance and the importance of the following example. Nobody gets it for free... : )

Here is the some email text which stimulated this blog post:

"[..] I think I responded way too hastily to your last message. Sorry. I will get back to you on this. You have given me a lot to consider.

My belated, quasi-Hippie experience may have scared me into letting the Establishment build it's walls around me. And, in fact, I may have gotten out my favorite spackling tool and helped it. I'm thinking _One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich_. Remember that book? [..]"

And my (edited/rewritten) reply to the stimulating email :

No, I have never read the book, but we can read a short summary from Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Day_in_the_Life_of_Ivan_Denisovich



from the Plot Summary:
"[..] The rest of the day mainly speaks of Shukhov's squad (the 104th, which has 24 members), their allegiance to the squad leader, and the work that the prisoners (zeks) do—for example, at a brutal construction site where the cold freezes the mortar used for bricklaying if not applied quickly enough. Solzhenitsyn also details the methods used by the prisoners for survival; the whole camp lives by the rule of survival of the fittest. Tiurin, the foreman of gang 104 is strict but kind, and the squad grows to like him more as the book goes on. Though a "morose" man, Tiurin is liked because he understands the prisoners and he tells them a lot and does a lot to help them. Shukhov is one of the hardest workers in the squad and is generally well respected. Rations at the camp are scant, but for Shukhov, they are one of the few things to live for. He conserves the food that he receives and is always watchful for any item that he can hide and trade for food at a later date. [..]


So, by now, even professional astrologers are likely as not to scratching their heads trying their level best to see what I might be thinking about here as we read the summary (above). To explain--this is the point at which we enter into the analysis phase of the astrological-literary criticism task at hand. The goal here is for us to somehow see evidence of an identifiable 'author' of the text , here simply referencing a text which is merely describing a text for us on the basis of its redacted imagery--its excised idea content alone is our sample! The specific record a particular act of human ideation, itself, is the piece of the individual author we now are holding here in our hand for close reading and translation.
To detect the presence of an individual author we have to translate his idea/word picture into astrological symbolism. We must turn meaningful words into a similarly meaningful, (but algebraic), symbol figure which is comprised of at least two astrological planets appearing to us as probably being in a specific angular relationship to one another. In short, we must convert English prose snippets of metaphor and metonymy, into an analogous statement in the language of astrology.. into astrolog-ese. The writer's literary tokens, which are meant to symbolize expandable ideas, must themselves be conjured up in our mind as similarly expandable/extendable symbols found in planet/aspect 'algebra'. This is an algebra of qualities, not quantities, but because the planets positions relate to specific date and times of day, the dimension quantification is not lost. Once we make an analysis, decide on what planets are situated thus and thus to one another, we automatically introduce the dimension of chronological time, and thus the capability of objective measurement concerning the validity or falsity of our perception and deductions. We can make a testable hypothesis measured in terms of ordinary units of time, as in any other science.

<>

No, I have not read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but I just did the Wiki search for a summary, and found the reference of brick and mortar construction--the mortar freezing before bricks being laid, if not quickly accomplished, and the parallel symbolism of prisoner solidarity, the difficulty of necessary bonds being likewise quickly over come if there was to be a general hope of survival through constructive behavior.
My mind often leaps to analytical, literary tropes, before I finish reading the brief descriptions of such expressions. I grasp the analogy in its many variations whether I want to or not, like an asperger's case I guess. I see symbolic formula equivalents in 'astrolog-ese'. I make a hypothesis to test.
In this instance I was promptly excited about the sense of an inverted simulacrum (the word used correctly I hope) in the art and person of Robert Frost--perhaps best symbolized in a holistic manner by his poem, "Mending Wall"

How these two authors are similarly unconsciously organized such that they are successfully expressed by this trope , this wall/construction analogy/metaphor, goes to my sense of the individuated existence of an author/the authors. If the perspective of the observing critic here is guided by a desire to see these authors using this creative act as a means to a substantial symbolic existence (ek-sistence), then said observer must also conclude from the privileged viewpoint of one immersed in literary 'astrolog-ese' (as living linguistic real), that the first deduction leading to a testable hypothesis is that these two authors may be expressing the same astrological referents, (Saturn as form, bond, construction and wall: Uranus as both Promethean creative invention, and the dis-uniting capability of any agitating chaos) . So the mind can hypothesize that we are looking at Saturn and Uranus in a cooperative dialectic..yet somehow in an inverted form from author to author.

Frost's wall and the poem's intentions are a part of my experiential vocabulary, and rapidly I remember, see, in my mind Saturn opposite Uranus ...I hear it "speak" from the unconscious of the author--from his Identity, not his Id or whatever...(don't really know the specifics of the difference(s) I'm intuiting here). But anyway, Individuality is the product of a combination of genotypic and phenotypic identification potentialities being manifested, here, as artistic Self-expression . ( I am thinking of the Self as like the astrological natal chart very abstract and not comparable to self, which , to me, seems more like personality than as pure potentiality.

I here illustrate what I 'see' as key to understanding the new author by way of the one already experienced.

Partial natal chart of Robert Frost illustrating my sensing the presence of an astrological tropism:
http://pedantus.free.fr/Frost_R_001a.gif

This graphic shows Saturn opposite Uranus. This potential of Frost' is voiced in his introductory lines of "Mending Wall"
"[..]SOMETHING there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.[..]"

Uranus as chaos threatens the permanence or stability of the stone wall structure , = Saturn. But as we read the poem we discover the intentions of the author to say that this is probably nature's way of showing us we are probably wrong to build walls between neighbors anyway--the chaos is a just intervention of the world's unspeakable wisdom. Well, at least the poet, Frost, suggests something like this view of nature's 'frost' performing with intentions to take down the wall. Saturn as authority imposed arbitrarily, and all sorts of nuanced themes with that flavor are suggested as existing in the Real of life.

So the hypothesis is that Solzhenitsyn also may have his kernel of inspiration in the form of Saturn opposite Uranus. We can objectively test this up until know wholly subjective revelatory awareness. And, before I forget to mention it, this experience was fully conceived in my mind before finishing a small impatiently scanned potion of the novel's Wiki summary.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
graphic illustration:
http://pedantus.free.fr/Solzhenitsyn_A_001a.gif

The timing of these two births separated by four decades is such that they show the inversion of the Saturn opposite Uranus astrological trope. Now the building of a wall is not about merely separate and reluctantly cooperative neighbors we find in Frosts poem. Saturn now in Aquarius (the opposite of Frost's Uranus in Aquarius) is the inversion of the societal relationships--a negative image appearing in the reversal--no longer about a contentedly independent farmers communing at a negligibly necessary task of wall building due to their contiguous physical and social circumstances. In the inversion from Frost to Solzhenitsyn we see forced labor, in a gulag, working quickly to keep mortar from freezing, and persons only cooperating under complete duress--persons suffering a 'society' restricted to limitations of survival of the fittest and canniest. [..] "

With just a little experience and an open mind, I think it is easy to detect the 'feeling' and subsequent mental image of Saturn opposite Uranus, which comes to me quickly when reading the summary of Solzhenitsyn's plot. I think it is easy to remember Frost's poem...what he meant to say and why he says it...easy to remember that he was born with Saturn opposite Uranus (thus Solzhenitsyn logically should have been born with just such a figure in his natal chart) and how those birth planets are expressed as a slight chaos of frost heaves and unsettled boulders atop walls , and the rocky relations with reluctantly social neighbors. In all of this I could be so completely unimaginably mistaken, but to me, I just see academic intellects avoiding this rich understanding of humanity simply because of some kind of totally unfounded metaphysical bias. Individual identity as a function of the dreaded art, astrology, is not hogwash or superstition if we can measure phenomena in terms of rational units of time..this horoscopic expressionism, for want of another term, is the objective, empirical , scientific, observation of a human psychical phenomena.


Rog