Yael R.

Dragwyla First North American rights

email: polaris93@aol.com 20,700 words
http://polaris93.livejournal.com

NEW MAGICKS FOR A NEW AGE

Volume IV: The Notebooks of a Magickian

Book 3: May 31, 1995

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,

“To talk of many things:
Of shoes – and ships – and Newt Gingrich –
Of thrints, and Bill the Pill.”

– Resh Lumbago

“I am the walrus!”

– King Ringo

On Thrints

Imagine. Imagine what it is like to be a ptaav, the human property of a thrint, a sentient slaver virus –
while you are still a child.
Imagine the thing playing you like a puppet, playing with your motor coordination and, sometimes
your senses. You suddenly find your hands taking on a life of their own, hurling things across the room,
breaking things, so that you get into trouble, terrible trouble, because of it. – Then you get into even worse
trouble because you quite truthfully protest that you didn’t do it, it was the being which the adults around
you patronizingly refer to as your “imaginary friend” doing it. Your parents scream at you that you are a
liar, make you stay in your room, all alone, starve you for days, beat you, or worse.

Liber LXXVII-Point-VII

Events of recent weeks show that the handwriting is clearly on the wall: Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin, with
Horus’s signature written larger than John Hancock’s beneath it. Whether it is addressed to the Black
Brotherhood, the enemies of Liberty, or to those who profess to call themselves Thelema, the children of
Liberty, remains to be seen. Who will stand up and be counted? Where are those who have called
themselves followers of the Crowned and Conquering Child, Horus, students of the Wisdom of Maät and
Athena, the heirs of Crowley and the other midwives of Thelema?
Perhaps those who still love Liberty, the true Thelemites, will find the following, posted by email the
night of May 19, 1995, to the White House, useful as a template for letters of their own on the same or
related subjects:

Dear President Clinton,

I was very sorry to see that the NRA recanted concerning its depiction of the
B.A.T.F. in a recent fund-raising letter. That depiction was but the literal truth: the
B.A.T.F. has indeed degenerated into a pack of jack-booted thugs, as recent events in this
country, e.g., the Waco holocaust and the OKC horror, so clearly demonstrate. Calling
them something more polite doesn’t change what they are – nor does a public retraction
of that description of them. The B.A.T.F. has degenerated into an American version of
the Gestapo, while the Department of Justice seems to be headed by people who combine
the worst traits of Josef Goebbels and Martin Bormann. Why shouldn’t somebody cry
out this horror to high heaven? That it was the NRA, and that they did so via a fund-
raising letter, neither changes the facts, which they stated so admirably in that very letter,
nor requires the rest of us to pretend that there is nothing to protest. They and their
group-leaders are liars and hooligans who are out to terrorize the rest of us into utter
political paralysis, any way they can. It’s time they were stopped. God bless anyone
who cries out their crimes publicly and calls for their indictment and an end to this
madness! You, Mr. President, are the one who is out of order, demanding that they
profess a lie in accordance with the claims of your administration on this matter – and in
making those claims, which themselves are lies, in the first place. For the head of a
political administration that is well on its way to breaking even the Bush administration’s
record for the number of indictments for high crimes and misdemeanors of those who
served on it, you really don’t have much room to talk, do you? As a taxpayer and citizen
(not to mention someone who still has a heart and a soul – which are sickened to their
cores by these deadly, downright evil shenanigans of members of your own cabinet and
their hirelings), Mr. President, I am fed to the teeth with this situation, which is
ominously reminiscent of Germany about 1934, regardless of which out-groups have
become the targets of the storm-troopers of your regime! It’s about time you retracted all
the damned lies you’ve been insulting our intelligence with for so long, put the B.A.T.F.
and the FBI on very short leashes and keep them on those leashes for the rest of your
administration, and stop trying to harass those of us who still believe in the Bill of Rights
and the rest of the ideals which this country once stood for!

– Lvg. Yael R. Dragwyla, KSG, citizen

We’ve had it so easy, haven’t we, living as we have in our space-age, high-tech, affluent world, in a
country which can afford to support a large part of its population on SSI and Social Security programs, with
Food Banks, Medicare, and a host of other expressions of the kindness of neighbors toward those among
them who are less fortunate than they? Surely, as easy as we have it, we ought to be far more ready,
willing, and able to fight for our freedoms and advantages than were the men and women in the far less
affluent, far more desperate times just prior to and during the American Revolution of 1776, one of whom
wrote these immortal words:

These are the times that try men’s souls.

The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot
will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of
their country; but he that stands it now,
deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet
we have this consolation with us, that the harder
the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What
we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; ‘tis
dearness only that gives everything its value.
Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its
goods, and it would be strange indeed, if so celes-
tial an article as Freedom should not be highly
rated.

Thomas Paine (1737-1809),

The American Crisis, No. 1

(December 23, 1776)

One of the most beloved Thelemites of all time added these words to Paine’s, as well:

What country before ever existed a century and a

half without a rebellion? . . . The tree of liberty must
be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots
and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Thomas Jefferson, American rebel and 3rd U.S.

President, Letter to William Stevens Smith, Nov. 13, 1787

You think you have it so hard now? Consider Harriet Tubman, born a slave in the ante-bellum
American South.
The historical person of Harriet Ross Tubman, known to history as General Moses,* of whom this
Planet is the namesake, was born into slavery in the ante-bellum American South. At fifteen, her head was
injured by an overseer who, according to one account, beat her in the head with an iron bar. As a result of
this beating, for the rest of her life she was subject to “fainting fits,” probably a type of epilepsy, during
which she frequently had prophetic visions – real ones, which always came true, true clairvoyant and
precognitive faculties, which she always believed were gifts of God, given to her by Him to aid her in His
work. It was by aid of these visions, many times, that she was able to accomplish her work of helping to
free other slaves and keep them and herself from being re-taken by slavers or killed on their long journey
North.**

*”Well has she been called ‘Moses,’ for she has been a leader and deliverer unto hundreds of her people.”
From Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (1869) by Sarah H. Bradford (b. 1818).

**She said of her unique gifts and their aid in her work, “‘Twant me, ‘twas the Lord. I always told him, ‘I
trust to you, I don’t know where to go or what to do, but I expect you to lead me,’ and he always did.”
Told to her biographer, Sarah H. Bradford (c. 1868).

Not long after that beating, while still a very young woman, she made her way to freedom and her
niche in history. She told her biographer Sarah H. Bradford [c. 1868] of her escape from slavery:

When I found I had crossed that line,* I looked at my hands

to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over
everything.

*On her first escape from slavery in 1845.

Eventually she became the most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad, the system of routes
by which escaped slaves made their way North, to freedom. She made nineteen dangerous trips back and
forth, often disguised, escorting more than three hundred slaves to freedom. Always with her was her
pistol, which she was known to have used a number of times with deadly effect to defend herself and her
charges and prevent their being taken back into slavery or worse. Her first words upon meeting new
“passengers” to conduct to freedom on the Underground Railway, were “you’ll be free or die.” Once,
when asked what her philosophy of life was, she replied, “There was one of two things I had a right to,
liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive . . .”
She is a prime example of the importance of the part played by Black women in the American Civil
War, e.g., Sojourner Truth, the legendary ex-slave who had been active in the women’s rights movement
and became a recruiter of black troops for the Union Army, as did Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin of Boston.
Tubman herself raided plantations, leading black and white troops, and on one such expedition freed 750
slaves.*

*See Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (New York: Perennial Library/Harper &
Row, Publishers, 1980), pp. 170, 180-181, 188.

***

Who is a true Thelemite, or, for that matter, a true human being, by whatever name? If you think you
are safe from the predations of the tools of a fascistically “beneficent” government, from horrors such as
the holocaust at Waco of two years ago or that of Oklahoma City this last April because you aren’t a
Branch Davidian, like those who were cremated alive in the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas
you aren’t one of those “stupid Fundies” who died in Oklahoma City this year, you aren’t one of those
“Aryan Supremacist bastards,” you, in short, are doing just fine, Charlie, thanks very much and get lost,
who needs a bummer like you around, then think again:

They came for the communists, and I wasn’t a communist,

so I didn’t protest;
They came for the socialists, and I wasn’t a socialist,
so I didn’t protest;
They came for the trade unionists but I wasn’t a
trade unionist, so I didn’t protest;
They came for the Jews, and I wasn’t a Jew, so I didn’t
protest;
Then they came for me, and there was no one left to protest.

– Pastor Martin Niemoller

The handwriting is indeed on the wall – and ashes are on the wind. In the Names Horus, Maät, Djehuti,
and Isis: Where do you stand?

– Lvg. (Ms) Yael R. Dragwyla, K.S.G.

From email correspondence with a friend, 5/21/95

>Hello, hello fellow traveler. I am stoked, I learned how to attach

>files, so now I can give extended comments, question or general
>ramblings.

Arrrgghhhh!!! – the Beast is loose! :)

>On thrints:
>In the Tree of Life, the author discusses as above, so below.
>Furthermore, he discusses that there are several planes, the
>prime material plane being the second lowest. (please, correct me
>if I am wrong) Thus could it be said that the thrints are in
>essence the our counterpart below, as we are above the last plane.(

If thrints really do exist, they are actual living organisms with all kingdom all their own (the viruses – or
maybe not a kingdom, an empire, there are so egregiously terrible dirty bad expletive deleted many of
them. Most of them are simply the biological equivalent of Qlippoth, the overspill, slop, entropic detritus
of the chromosomes of other forms of life, that is, chunks of chromosomes that got knocked off by
mutagens or radiation or simply decided to leave home and make their own way in the world, one way or
another. The Qlippoth are the leftovers of creation, thoughts that are no longer energized by living
emotions, feelings that are no longer being felt, the garbage, detritus, and fallout of the psychospiritual
world, and viruses are something like that. Qlippoth tend to pile up in what is called the “sub-Lunar
realm,” that part of the Inner Planes corresponding to the region of physical space between Earth and the
Moon. The thing is, thrints – if they exist – really are viruses, bits and pieces of things from all the
biological realm, not just our own species. Further, the ones that are viable, that last for any length of time,
are organisms (of a sort) in their own right, and so aren’t just quasi-Qlippoth, but rather whole beings. The
spirit, evil, good – all these are aspects of Life itself, not just our own kind of life. So good viruses or bad
(thrints) viruses, their goodness or badness is relative to the whole living world, not just our part of it. – As
for what Regardie says about the “prime material plane being the second lowest plane,” that is indeed part
of the accepted dogma of the Western tradition today. Also, however, it makes no sense. The lowest plane
on the traditional Tree of Life is Malkuth, and that is the material plane. Period. The Qlippoth are, most of
them, part of the sub-Lunar realms, hence along the Path Tav between Malkuth (Earth) and Yesod (Luna).
Qlippoth can come from any plane, though – they’re just distorted reflections of whatever plane they
actually come from, whether from one associated with the Solar System and thus represented on the
traditional Tree of Life, or with one associated with other Stars, or one associated with other universes (for
more on these, see those NM files beginning with “NM0C2...” as well as the works of Kenneth Grant, such
as Outside the Circles of Time). The Western Tradition, Thelema or no Thelema, is more dogma than
thought, much of the time, and some of the dogma, when analyzed for what it means, is a kind of Qlippoth
in its own right, leftover conceptual junk put together all whichaways. :)

>is not the last plane where the dog faced demons reside?). Also,
>wouldn’t this be within the limits of the rules that there is but one
>force that we all must obey?(something like that I am a bit fuzzy
>here.) Please comment.

I don’t think I remember the dog-faced demons. What comes to mind is the Dog-Faced Baboon, an avatar
of the Egyptian God Djehuti, Lord of Wisdom and Magick, equivalent of Hermes, Mercury, Odin, and so
on. He is associated with the Star Sirius, the “Dog Star,” which really comes from “Dog-Faced Baboon,”
which the Egyptians called “Thoth.” Any demons associated with it – and God knows, there might be –
would thus be clear off the top of the traditional Tree of Life. Can you quote the passages where these are
mentioned, so I can get a better idea of what he means? As for the “force that we all must obey,” well,
there’s gravity. And there’s entropy. And there’s the IRS. Can you give me the full quote, so I can see
what in fact he’s talking about? Sometimes Regardie is a bit fuzzy, this may be due to his writing.

>Ying Yang and YAVH-

>While playing a little connect the thoughts, the ying yang symbol is
>divided into two separate halves one white one black, with in each
>is a dot representing the opposite color. Y, if i am not mistaken
>represents the male and day, A represents the female and light, V
>represent the joining of the two and H represents the union of
>three. Thus, yang (I think) represents the male and corresponds to
>the Y, Yang representing the female corresponds to the A, the
>smaller circles within corresponds to the offspring in each thus
>the V, and the union of the two, together in the circle, corresponds
>to the H. If I am on the right track here, it is very interesting.
>Albeit this may not be new thought to the universe but is a new
>thought to myself, please respond.

Uh, female is Yin (no “g”), male is Yang. Anyway, you mean “YHVH”? Okay, the “Y” is for the Hebrew
letter Yod, associated with the Element Fire, which is hot/dry, both “male” qualities. “H1” is for Heh,
associated with Water, cold/wet, both “female” qualities. They get together and have two “children,” “V”
(Vav) and “H2” (Heh); “V” is Air, hot/wet, male-female (Yang-Yin) and “H2” is Earth, cold/dry, female-
male (Yin-Yang). With respect to the T’ao, which is the East is normally red-on-white, Red is Yang/male =
Fire, corresponding to “Y”, and White is Yin/Female = Water = cold/wet, corresponding to “H1.” Red-in-
White (red dot inside white area) is Air = hot/wet = “V” and White-in-Red (white dot inside red area) is
Earth = cold/dry = “H2.”

>As a side note, during my undergrad studies I learned that YAVH

>was the name of God never to be pronounced, as religion traveled,
>Germany translated this pronunciation to Jehovah, and thus were
>born the Jehovah witness. (not commenting on a particular sect,
>just sharing my knowledge).

Actually, it’s usually rendered “YHVH,” for the Hebrew spelling, which is “Yod-Heh-Vav-Heh.” These
are all consonants, no vowels; where the vowels went and what they were was a secret orally transmitted
down the generations from priest (Cohen) to priest, rabbi to rabbi. Without vowels, a word can’t be
pronounced, hence “YHVH” is literally “unspeakable,” i.e., unpronounceable to the uninitiated, who
haven’t been told how to pronounce it. I understand that today it is thought that those consonants actually
stood for something that was all vowels, no consonants at all, “pronounced” something like a wolf-howl:
“AEIOUUUUUU!!!” “Yaheeeeoooohuuuuuh!” Something like that. When the Bible was finally
translated from Hebrew (Old Testament) and Greek/Aramaic (New) into various European languages,
European Christians began arguing over how that “word” was to be pronounced. Their knowledge of
linguistics, etymology, and the history behind their subject was much more limited than it is today, so their
best compromise was something like “Jeh-ho-vah.”
In the current versions of the Western Ceremonial Tradition and Western Qaballah, “JHVH” is
incorporated into the God-Names associated with Sephirah 3, Binah (YHVH ALHIM [pronounced
“Elohim”], Lord God), Sephirah 6, Tiphareth (YHVH ALOaH Va DA’aTh, Lord God Omnipresent], and
Sephirah 7, Netzach (YHVH TzABAOTh, Lord of Hosts).

>Justice-
>The ultimate pursuit for myself is the finding of universal justice, a
>true neutrality so to speak, able to decipher that which is offensive
>to the natural way of the universe. In that pursuit I am learning
>to check myself against the suppositions of right and wrong as
>taught to me by society, a very difficult task so far. This path
>leads so far to the release of the ego, but as of yet I am having a
>difficult time in first, understanding exactly that which must be
>released, although this is probably a logic trap designed by the
>ego(thrint?) to keep form achieving my destiny. As a continuation,
>what about the warrior/wizard. What role to be played, my life has
>been spent both consciously and unconsciously pursuing the path of
>the warrior, only recently have begun to acknowledge that, and only
>really recently have I begun to see a connection. What have
>been your trials and tribulations on you path as a wizard, and have
>combined the warrior and the wizard.

Every problem, crisis, etc on the Way of Magick I’ve fallen afoul of has had to do with my over-
identification with my ego, or personal, day-to-day, individual self and identity, and forgetting that, as that
great American adept, Stephen King puts it, “We’re all just pilgrims, brother, all going along the same road
of Life.” All we are and all we ever can be as mortal individuals are conduits and tools by which the Kami,
the Gods or holy angels or whatever else we call the various aspects of the Spirit of Life, carry out Their
Will, which is to say, the Will of the Spirit of Life itself. Every time I forget that, as Will Campbell, “the
Saint of the South,” puts it, “we’re all bastards, but God loves us anyway,” and that that includes me, I
screw up, and screw up bad, and get hurt bad. (Some time, I must tell you about the evil sorcerers [all
names changed to protect Yrs Truly from lawsuits] . . .) The basic fact of existence is that I, you, all that is,
is alive, and therefore must obey the laws of the biological universe, none any more or less than any other.
All that we can do comes from that. As it happens, we are animals of community, defined by the fact that
we make and relentlessly work to keep and improve community with one another, and therefore we love.
Love of one another, any and all forms of love, however expressed, is part of our basic nature; our
collective survival depends on it, our spiritual survival as individuals depends on it, and so to defy that part
of our nature and do evil to others, to any part of the living world, is to destroy ourselves. Jesus knew this,
Moishe Rabbinu Saint Francis knew this, Hatsumi sensei knows this, so does my teacher Dale, and anyone
who comes to understand this and its full implications can also come to do anything they can do. Jesus was
just a man, my friend – but he was a man who knew what Moishe Rabbinu knew and Hatsumi sensei knows
and what St. Francis knew, and that is why he could work miracles. And it is because the Church does
what it can to keep its followers from knowing that, out of power-hunger or stupidity or fear or thrints or
whatever the hell it is, that so many professed Christians (like so many professed Jews, Moslems,
Buddhists, Wiccans, Confucianists, etc. etc. etc.) aren’t able to pull off the miracles which the great
teachers did all the time. If they knew, they could – and they would no longer feel constrained to put up
with tyranny in order to be able to draw close to the Kami.
But we are also animals of battle, warrior animals, warriors who love, lovers who do battle, because it
is only those who have been willing to defend self, loved ones, and people that have left descendants in the
world.* The rest died off. So, as Hatsumi sensei teaches us (and who knows, maybe Jesus did too and
everybody decided not to talk about it later on), this, too, is part of our nature, under Sephirah 5, Geburah,
the Sphere of Mars (ALHIM GIBOR, God Almighty). To develop ourselves fully, we have to develop all
the reflections of the Kami and Their Spheres (the Sephiroth) within ourselves, according to the wisdom of
the Preacher:

For everything there is a season,

and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to harvest;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to destroy, and a time to build;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
a time to rend, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.

– Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

This is the rhythm of the great Dance of Life itself, everything counterpointing something else, death,
battle, anger, and other “negative” emotions and actions having their place as much as birth, diplomacy,
love, and the other “positive” ones. We are all part of that Dance, and to remain in it, at least via the
generations to come, we need to learn all the steps, all the measures, not merely the “nice” ones, the Sphere
of Mars as much as that of Venus, the Sphere of Saturn as well as that of Jupiter.
– And every time I forget that, I fall flat on my ass! I have, in my time, faced the possibility of a
horrifying death several times as a consequence of my own stupidity in that matter; I have been harassed
unto nervous breakdowns by legions of assholes of all kinds because I hadn’t, at that point, had the sense or
humility to apply myself to learning street-smarts and street-fighting; and I have put people I deeply care
about in horrible danger because of the blind spots in my perceptions of people. In the bare three years
since I’ve begun to get involved learning anything about Bujinkan ninpo taijutsu, this has changed radically
– for the better, or I wouldn’t be here. I still have light-years to go, but I’m already light-years beyond
where I started in many, many ways. Before then, I’d already done work that went far, far ahead of
anything ever done by other practitioners of Magick – and for all the good it did me, in terms of how
satisfying my life was to me, I might as well have been a fried clam!
The great nutritionist Adelle Davis once said ruefully that it wasn’t until years after she’d graduated
from UCLA with a Master’s in nutritional science and related aspects of human biomedical science that she
realized that all this stuff applied to her, personally – and it was only then, when she began applying her
science to herself that she began getting over chronic health problems she’d had since childhood. Same
here. It’s one thing to talk about, write about the Sphere of Mars, Geburah – it’s something else entirely to
get out there on the dojo floor and earn bruises and sprains and aches and breaks and all the rest of it really
invoking Mars, the hard way, in your own body and Deep Unconscious! But without doing the latter,
without going all the way in that invocation, beyond mere safe rituals and discussion and writing and
reading, you’re just a sitting duck when it comes to predators or even just the ordinary idiots that can make
life so miserable for just about anyone! And that is what I had to learn before my life could become worth
a damn!

*This doesn’t apply just to men. At least potentially, the most dangerous animal in the world, bar none, is a
female human being standing between her children and anything or anything that threatens them. As
long as her Will, her spirit, has been entirely crippled or quenched, in the face of such a threat she will
turn into something which even a fire-breathing dragon might back down from – if it had any sense or
other qualities strongly conducive to survival.

>For people that seek to break the bonds of society, are these people
>within the definition of Thrint immune?

Not necessarily. Those who prey on their own kind could be said to “seek to break the bonds of society,”
and they are among those I would say are most clearly the ptaavs (slave/hosts) or even trustees, God help
them, of thrints, if anyone is. I think Jesus and St. Francis were thrint-immune, and they both taught
community on the broadest possible scale. Society is another name for community, or can be, and if that is
what we mean by it, then I’d say the answer is “No.” But society can also be another name for “oppressive
system imposed on people from above,” possibly by thrint hosts or trustees, so in that case, I’d say, the
answer is “Yes.”

>Dreaming- Wow, nice dreams. I too dream that lucidly. Although the
>ability comes and goes with the cycle of the moon, the majority of
>my dreams that are that lucid tend to come true.

Interesting. The Moon, like Neptune, rules dreams and psychic abilities, astrologically speaking. – As for
lucid dreams, I understand that most who have them report that many of these come true, it seems to be the
sort of state in which people are more readily consciously clairvoyant, clairaudient, precognitive, etc.

>I have never been to the world that you describe, but I have, mainly
>during deep meditation, battled demons, these demons do not look
>the typical D&D demons, but more like abominations of the
>human race.

I’ve seen things like that in some of my dreams. What do yours look like?

>In my dreams, I am normally traveling, and even though I am time

>out of control, I am always maintaining the focus on my destination.
>The dreams that come true are normally the ones that involve those
>matters that are close to me, and the coming true is usually in the
>outcome not the course of events. Maybe, your dreams are the
>dreams of your hell, a hell that must be walked through before
>finding heaven, find the exit and do battle with the lord of that
>realm, make the demon submit or perish, and then move on to the
>next challenge. (just a thought) I apologize for the rambling style
>of this blurb.
I suspect you’re right. It’s like Kafka, only unlike the victims in Kafka’s stories, the idea is to triumph over
the oppressor, as you say. The oppressors in this case are on the Inner Planes – same place Kafka’s were! –
I understand this is what a good deal of Buddhism deals with, getting past these hells within the self. The
Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Egyptian Book of Going Forth by Day are other versions of it, a one-step-
at-a-time course in the shortest, best route through the place and out the other side in record time! :)
Okay, I’ll wrap this up and email it to you right now. I’m still working on your chart – I may be doing
so for several days, but tomorrow I’ll upload what I’ve done of it by then, then do so again several days
later, and so on. You have a fascinating horoscope – wait until you see the analysis! (Why do Bujinkan
people all seem to have prominent Pluto, Uranus, Neptune, Chiron, and Pallas in their charts? Strange.)

From email correspondence with a friend 5/26/95

At long last, I’m baaaaak! :) Seriously, today is my day off, and I promised myself I’d answer all my
accumulated mail from you. (I enjoy corresponding with you, because it stimulates me to think along
avenues I wouldn’t otherwise, and I always end up with a new, intriguing idea to play with – what could be
better than that? [I mean, besides a million bucks, a good lay, a . . . <g>])

***

>>>Anyway, stripping out the ideas of “karma” here, let’s say that [the native’s] 12th-House Juno probably
means that [the native and his or her partner] may well have known each other in one or more lifetimes and
at those times established very strong bonds between [them], strong enough to bring [them] back together
in at least one more lifetimes, for whatever reason.

Assuming that this is true, is there any way to determine

this reason, astrologically?

You know, I still don’t know the answer to that, and it’s something I’ve wondered about myself . . . .

***

>>> “Relationship” can also mean “relationship of hate/loathing/detestation/fear/etc,” and it would be

interesting to see how Juno in 12th [or conjunct 12th House ruler, etc.] reflected that sort of relationship.)

[Subject’s] first husband, perhaps?

Could be. I’d need his natal data to confirm it, but that may well be the case. I don’t think, however, that
such mismatches are invariably “cosmically ordained” – rather, I think that how we get grabbed by a
particular synastry depends at least as much upon our cultural conditioning and the general expectations of
people around us as it does anything intrinsic to the individuals involved. Child-abuse and wife-beating
and other horrors aren’t excusable by anything, “karma” included, I don’t care what goes on – but clearly
they do occur far more often in cultures that don’t see anything wrong with them than in cultures that don’t.
Perpetrators do their thing as long as they think they can get away with it, which depends upon the societies
they are part of, the values about people those societies cherish, and they pick their victims not because
they think the victims deserve it, but because they think they’re “safe” enough, fairly easy pickin’s, and
will give the appropriate responses to the perp’s assault to provide the perp with the desired thrill.
Dysfunctional families target children for the most serious abuses for reasons that have more to do with the
dysfunctional families they came from than with anything the child does or is. And so on.*
 Likewise, incompatibility, like shit, sometimes happens for reasons that may be at least as much
sociocultural as anything else. Juno has to do with sociocultural ties among people, so I’d say this may
well be a case in which you and your first husband were drawn together for reasons that had more to do
with society and maybe the season of the year than anything else.

*People who are targeted as victims of undeserved evil aren’t just victims of the individual perpetrators;
society itself has a great deal to answer for in such cases.
Ever since Emile Durkheim’s pioneering work in establishment of a modern sociological science
was first published, it has become increasingly clear that a society, as a sort of gigantic superorganism,
will sacrifice whatever or whoever seems to it to present at least a potential threat to its survival and
well-being. If a society depends upon evil to get the goodies out of life for itself, as it were, it will
protect itself by sacrificing whatever might threaten that evil, which is seen by that society as a
resource critically necessary to its own existence, in the same way that so many societies have
established a tacit bargain with the local ogres: protect us from those strange ogres down the block a
ways, and we’ll gladly sacrifice our healthiest, most attractive and desirable virgin children to you, for
you to do whatever you want with them!
The old principle of favor-for-favor is a similar type of case in which communities will, tacitly or
openly, offer up their own young as a bribe to make them go away and stay away, the Danegeld. In the
Old Testament, for example, the story is told of Lot’s attempt to bargain with the citizens of Sodom,
offering them his two tender, virgin daughters for them to play with, any way they wanted, in exchange
for the safety of his guests, angels of God who had come to warn him to flee the city with his family.
The equally ancient story of the maiden Andromeda, offered up to a ravening monster by her people as
payment of a sort of protection tax to keep the monster from coming to get them is another example of
such a case.
The same principles operate today. Children who strongly exhibit traits that a society has learned
over the ages are clear indicators of a potential messiach or “deliverer” – someone who, if not
neutralized or even turned in some way before he or she reaches maturity, could successfully eradicate
those evils with which a society makes its devil’s bargains – are at extremely high risk for aggravated
assault, chronic aggravated abuse, and worse at the hands of members of that society, be they parents,
other relatives, friends or neighbors, or total strangers.
In the West, one such set of traits that is almost always exhibited by the person in whose natal
chart Neptune is extremely strong, especially if in that chart Neptune is also in the First House or
conjunct the Ascendant from the First or Twelfth, directly or via mutual reception: huge, deep-
socketed eyes, a tendency to “go with the flow,” to yield rather than confront, strong psychic and
visionary abilities, and strong talent as a poet, artist, or for some other Neptune-ruled avocation. Our
current cultural biases tend to make us associate these traits with a “total wimp,” someone whose
strongest defenses are all passive-aggressive, strongly resembling the more fatuously effete
representations of Jesus of Nazareth.
But it must be remembered that Neptune rules the element neptunium, which is both horrendously
poisonous and very radioactive; fluids in all forms, especially liquid water, the latter being one of the
most stubbornly incompressible substances known, such that water under high pressure can be a very
deadly weapon (ask any fireman who has had to wrestle with a runaway hose!); and (with Saturn)
Bujinkan ninpo taijutsu, the deadliest and most effective combat-arts school in human history. And
when it comes to that same Jesus, the Western avatar of the Aeon of Pisces and thus its Lord, a living
Jewish incarnation of Poseidon or Shiva, clearly that Jesus-as-wimp picture doesn’t fit the man who,
armed only with, at most, a lash woven of reeds, single-handedly drove the money-changers from the
Temple. Nor does it suggest the Jesus who told his followers, “Next time, I won’t come to bring peace
– I’ll come armed with a sword, instead.” Such human beings present a very real and present danger to
societies dependent for their existence upon tacit crime and evil, as the Roman empire did in Jesus’
day; they are quite capable of starting revolutions which can ultimately rend the fabric of those
societies from top to bottom, destroying them as well as the evils upon which they depend (or to which
they pay Danegeld in the form of the lives and souls of their own people, at least, which is what it now
looks as if Judea was forced to do in the case of Jesus of Nazareth, offer him up to Rome to keep other
Jews from being oppressed even more terribly by Rome than before). Which, in fact, is what
ultimately happened to the Roman Empire. As far as such societies or super-societies go, the New
Testament is a cautionary tale, warning them to catch such individuals before they reach full maturity
and realize their potential for revolutionary or even evolutionary change.
Thus individuals exhibiting the physical and psychospiritual “Jesus traits” typical of people with
strong Neptune in their natal charts are at high risk in modern society for everything from potentially
murderous assaults of all kinds perpetrated upon them during their childhood by family or others, or
hideous deaths at the hands of “Black Dahlia” style predators, to cultural conditioning aimed
specifically at turning them from threat to asset, a usually much more pleasant but ultimately just as
damaging psychospiritual assault upon their souls. That is, Western society will, using its own
members, try everything from seduction to bribery to turn such a child into someone useful to its
purposes, as powerful for evil as otherwise he or she would have been for good, no small thing, either
way. Failing that, it will then try to cripple that child in body, soul, and/or spirit that he or she couldn’t
possibly develop into a successful revolutionary, or else kill him or her outright – generally in some
ghastly way, perhaps as a warning to others. The how of it is still under debate, but the fact of it has
been documented again and again. Whatever the mechanisms by which society gets its dirty work
done, thrints or meetings of individual conspirators or whatever, that it does get done, all the time, and
is perpetrated against those perceived as possible threats by society, is not in doubt at all, as even a
small sampling of the files of the police in any big modern city will demonstrate.
In Western astrology, many astrologers associate Neptune, Pisces, and the 12th House of the
horoscope with “karma,” the idea that whatever happens to you in a given lifetime, good or bad,
painful or pleasant, is something you deserve. Yet it was that archetypal Neptunian, Jesus of Nazareth,
who told the paralytic to “rise, take up your bed and walk, your sins are forgiven and you are healed –
just don’t sin any more.” I.e., sins – transgressions by people against their neighbors and their own
culture – and their psychosomatic or psychogenic consequences don’t have to be expiated by endless
suffering, in this life or any other. Instead, they can be relieved through the power of human
community and love, via forgiveness, charity, and kindness, as well as the healing power of God. This
is not the principle of “karma”, by any means! The idea of “karma” implies that all suffering is a result
of sins in this or earlier lives, suffering that must be experienced in full if the sins in question are to be
expiated, and cannot be otherwise relieved. Something here smells funny – could it be a cover-up, a
deception, a trick of the sort with which Neptune is assorted? A draw, a ruse, a distraction from the
truth?
Neptune also rules the hidden – like cover-ups, conspiracies, lies, and damned lies, the Qlippoth of
the Neptunian virtues of wisdom, vision, prophecy, and psychic abilities, traits richly exemplified by
Neptunians which society manages to turn to its own purposes, rather than permanently crippling or
murdering them. Is the idea of “karma” used to hide, to cover up, to distract from the fact of society’s
ruthless determination to eliminate any and all threats to itself, via the mechanisms of the Collective
Unconscious (ruled by Neptune) and techniques including seduction, deception, forced hypnotism,
brain-washing, chronic sexual and other forms of assault, torture-murders, and so on, and then blame it
on the victims, as well, that ultimate Neptunian perversion of justice?
“Karma” has nothing much to do with punishment of past sins and evils; rather, it has a great deal
to do with the physical and/or psychospiritual destruction of people who represent enormous threats to
the evils that underlie much of civilization, by the witting and unwitting agents of that same
civilization. All that belief in it does is lay the believer open to exploitation or destruction by the
monsters who don’t believe in it, giving the latter carte blanche to do their thing – “Who’s gonna care,
eh?” In other words, those who truly believe in “karma” thereby come in danger of receiving huge
doses of its most negative expression!
For this reason, I don’t associate Neptune, the 12th House, Pisces, reincarnation, or the Collective
Unconscious with “karma.” I do, however, know that Neptune has a strong association with con-
games – not to mention the most vicious and horrifying forms of murder, and the most brutal forms of
oppression and exploitation of others by tyrants and other socioeconomic predators. Belief in “karma”
by Western astrologers only helps to perpetuate these horrors by pushing the idea that it is the victim
who is to be blamed for such things, never the perpetrator, and thereby protects those who profit off
such evil and assures that the profits will continue.
Hypersea

Note concerning Hypersea – power of healing, especially of curing infectious diseases, by

manipulation of the e-m fields associated with the water that permeates nearly everything on land, however
sparsely (chi?), using psychokinetic abilities or just employing changes in one’s own body’s associated
electromagnetic field – Neptune? (Viruses hate water!!)
(Hypersea is a concept developed in Mark and Dianna McMenamin’s Hypersea: Life on Land (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994). According to the jacket blurb: “In a bold step forward from
Gaia, Hypersea is a new theory of how life moved from the sea to the harsher environment of land, and
how on land life diversified more than marine life ever has. . . . In the sea nutrients pass with relative ease
between organisms. But when life first invaded land, it needed to evolve far more complex relationships to
sustain itself – instead of accepting nutrients passively, land life was compelled to cooperatively direct the
flow of nutrients. As a result, life on land displays an extraordinary degree of connectedness – to the point
where it can be seen as one inclusive terrestrial land form. It is this intimately connected land form the
authors call Hypersea.”)

From email correspondence with a friend, about 5/27, 1995

One quickie question [concerning] ... for the past month,

every time I do
Tarot the Princess of Disks comes up in the same spot (one
of
two possible outcome/paths for the future...the one which
will manifest if I take the present course). I’ve scattered
the entire deck out and stirred it up several times to make
sure that it wasn’t just the result of inadequate shuffling,
but there she is again, one more time. Tarot usually comes
to me fairly well, and with an accuracy that really
weirded me out at first, until I got used to it, but this
one
has me perplexed. She doesn’t seem to fit with any of the
questions I’ve had in mind, and I don’t know any women well
that are earthy types. She’s just there. Any ideas? (I use
the Harris/Crowley deck, if that makes any difference.)

The Princess or Page of Disks, according to Liber 777 (Crowley’s Qaballistic lexicon, Everything in the
Universe Filed from 0-32! <g>) and his The Book of Thoth, corresponds with the following:

A quadrant of the Heavens around the North Pole or Kether (Book of Thoth, p. 282). (I
assign it to that quadrant of the physical globe spanning 90º E Greenwich to 180º E
Greenwich, or the land-masses that include China, Mongolia, Tibet, Indochina, Siam,
Australia, Japan, etc., assuming that the Pisces-Aries line of longitude runs through
Hiroshima, Japan. Traditionally, however, the Pisces Aries line is assumed to run
through Cairo, Egypt, and the Great Pyramid near there.)

The Princess Scale of Colors (there are four others, including the Knight, Queen, and Prince/King).

The Earthy part of Earth – the Salt or ashy residue of the Earthy (solid) decomposition product of a
substance

Hexagram 52 of the King Wen arrangement of the I Ching, Ken = Keeping Still, Mountain, Ken over Ken =
Earth over Earth (Ken also being a trigram of the form

–––-
– –
– –

In the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of this hexagram, it says of it that the “image of this hexagram is the
mountain, the youngest son of heaven and earth. The male principle is at the top, because it strives upward
by nature; the female principle is below, since the direction of its movement is downward. Thus there is
rest because the movement has come to its normal end.

“In its application to man, the hexagram turns upon the problem of achieving a quiet
heart. It is very difficult to bring quiet to the heart. While Buddhism strives for rest
through an ebbing away of all movement in nirvana, the Book of Changes holds that rest
is merely a state of polarity that always posits movement as its complement. Possibly the
words of the text embody directions for the practice of yoga.

THE JUDGMENT

KEEPING STILL. Keeping his back still

So that he no longer feels his body.
He goes into his courtyard
And does not see his people.
No blame.

True quiet means keeping still when the time has come to keep still, and going forward when the time has
come to go forward. In this way rest and movement are in agreement with the demands of the time, and
thus there is light in life.

“The hexagram signifies the end and the beginning of all movement. The back is
named because in the back are located all the nerve fibers that mediate movement. If the
movement of these spinal nerves is brought to a standstill, the ego, with its restlessness,
disappears as it were. When a man has thus become calm, he may turn to the outside
world. He no longer sees in it the struggle and tumult of individual beings, and therefore
he has that true peace of mind which is needed for understanding the great laws of the
universe and for acting in harmony with them. Whoever acts from these deep levels
makes no mistakes.” (Ibid., pp. 200-201)

The Princesses are also associated with Sephirah 10, Malkuth, i.e., Key 10 on the Key Scale of Liber 777.
In particular, the Princess of Pentacles is associated with Key 10 on the Princess Color Scale, the color
black rayed with yellow. She is also associated with, e.g., the Resplendent Intelligence; the Egyptian Gods
Osiris, Seb, Black Isis (a sort of Egyptian version of Kali as well as of the “Black Madonnas” found all
over Europe, dating from about 400 e.v. on), and Nephthys; the Greek Gods Persephone, Hades, Hekate,
Psyche, Adonis, Ceres, Gaia; the Hindu Goddess Lakshmi; the Buddhist Meditation on the Body; the
Vision of or Conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel or ADoNaI; rock crystal; willow, lily, ivy; the
Sphinx; corn; dittany of Crete (a perfume); the Magickal Circle and Triangle (as the Ground of Working);
the virtue of Skepticism; the Apostle Matthew; the Altar, the Double Cube, the Cavalry Cross; etc.
For some reason, I had this odd feeling that it is Hexagram 52, described above, that will give you the
key to this. Why, I don’t know. But when the Tarot consistently gives you a certain card, it’s trying to tell
you something, as you know, and the language in which it tries to tell you comes right out of its designer,
in this case, Crowley. Crowley was an ardent (pre-Wilhelm/Baynes) enthusiast of the I Ching, and there’s
a very good chance that those Court Cards in his pack clearly corresponding to any of the Hexagrams of the
I Ching have the meanings of those Hexagrams built into them, as well, whatever else they might have.

***

>>Somehow, interpretive astrological software, or software that depends upon somebody else’s archives
rather than algorithms that can automatically reproduce things from basic principles, always leaves more
than a little to

Do you do your charts by hand?!?

No, just the look-up on things like Fixed Stars, asteroids other than the five my program deals with, Nodes
for anything other than Luna, and so on. As a matter of fact, Gary gave me a copy of his marvelous Dance
of the Planets software, from which I can get almost all the positional data for these things. But it’s the
interpretive stuff I have to look up for Fixed Stars, Nodes, and so on, which often takes some doing,
because if there are 6 different authorities on one of these, there are thus 6 different opinions, usually
conflicting, so . . .

***

>>>astrologers? Etc. At some point, there has to be a judgment call even on what Fixed Stars and other
extra-Solar objects and phenomena to use for chart interpretation, and a computer can only do that if it’s in
a book somewhere. In some cases, I’m the first one to write the book on it. So software for this that didn’t
draw on my own work would be highly inadequate, to say the least.

How do you decide which fixed stars are important? Are they
only
important if they are in conjunction with a planet?

A Fixed Star that is conjunct (or, for that matter, opposes) any Planet, important asteroid, the MC, the
Ascendant, or any other point in the chart within an orb of 1 degree is considered to be an important factor
in the chart. As to which Fixed Stars are considered to be astrologically important, in the first place, aside
from the fact that traditionally only the naked-eye ones were used, for obvious reasons <g>, it depends
upon (a) which authorities you look up and (b) how much of your own research has turned up consistencies
for stellar placements. I have found, however, that deep-sky objects, those which can only be seen with
instrumentation, can be very important, but that they usually manifest only on the unconscious, collective
level, except in the case of individuals whose lives have been spent in astronomical or related research. Of
course, for deep-sky objects and other points in the sky for which there are no traditional ascriptions, I have
to wing it when it comes to interpretation. :) But that isn’t usually very hard, as I’ve got so many things I
can associate symbolically with any such that I can then synthesize with whatever in the chart it conjoins or
opposes. If nothing else, there are always the mythological associations with whatever known
constellations it’s found in or is near, e.g., the story of Andromeda, for deep-sky objects located in or near
that Constellation, such as the Andromeda Galaxy (M31, NGC224). In fact, in the particular case of that
galaxy, the catalog numbers “M31” and “NGC224” clearly have Qaballistic correlates, both traditional and
in terms of the new, extended Qaballah I worked on, as alphanumeric strings. “M” is associated with Mem,
Key 23, value 40, Trump XII, The Hanged Man, Water, Neptune, links Geburah with Hod; “31” is
associated with Key 31, Shin, Trump XX, The Aeon, Pluto, Fire, the Smith; and so forth.
It seems to work for me. (Similarly, it doesn’t seem to be too hard for coming up with symbolism
appropriate to, ASCII characters and/or elements in the Periodic Table of the Chemical Elements, which
I’ve tied to the new, English-language, 16-Sephiroth Qaballah (see file NM3B1.TXT and NM3B1.NOT),
using correlations with, e.g., the numbers of the quantum-levels associated with the latter, lattice-position
on that expanded Tree of Life relative to its Sephiroth for elements of either set, and so on.) The human
brain and psyche are magnificent synthesists, all you have to do is pour lots and lots of symbolic material
into them on all aspects of your culture and anything it’s embedded in over the years and it’s able to take it
from there, all you have to do is ask. After a while, one even becomes rather good at it. :)
Be that as it may, a Fixed Star is important if (a) it has been thought to be so by astrologers over many
centuries, (b) it has been believed to be so in many different cultures, in whatever context, and (c) I get a
hunch and take it from there, even if it’s a galaxy or quasar billions of parsecs away that we didn’t even
know about until last year! (No matter what the operator’s manual says, the car gets driven the way the guy
with the key wants it to! <g>)

***

>>>genotypes, i.e., there are different astrological schools that work, though they contradict one another,
because each works best for a given set of genotypes or species, and the latter vary widely.

yes... how could one apply the traditional astrological

guidelines in the southern hemisphere, for example. Scorpio
would be the sign of birth, not death. Virgo would be
planting, not harvest, etc. Would you just switch the
signs to different months, should the meanings of the signs
be reinterpreted to fit the southern as well as the northern
latitudes, or would an entirely different system be
required?
And the present system is biased to temperate climates as
well. It wouldn’t fit, for example, on a South Pacific
island
where there are two seasons, one of endless sun, the other
of
rains and typhoons, nor on Antarctica, where the earthy
realms of Taurus just don’t happen. So perhaps the
astrological system that we know and love has co-evolved
with
the north/temperate peoples and climate, and when in Fiji,
do as the Fijians? On the other hand, the seasonal
correlations could just be seen as aides to understanding
human nature, and may be applicable in all circumstances
regardless of race or latitude, when interpreted more
broadly. The correlations of the signs might be reevaluated
to place less of a northern/temperate bias in interpretation
and understanding. Then again, that could just muddy the
waters. Have you had any experience with chart delineations
for people born outside the northern/temperate areas?
Not many. What makes sense to me, though, and what I’ve heard works in practice, is to use all applicable
types of astrology on a given chart, that the results don’t contradict one another in any important way, but
rather support one another, after the fashion of constructive interference.
Consider Chinese astrology, for example, which is very different from ours. There are some general
correspondences, but also lots of differences – and both types work. Initially, all astrologies seemed to
have their origins in agricultural and animal husbandry as well as medical concerns, e.g., “When’s the best
time to plant corn? When should we get the harvest in by? Should we breed the ewes this month or next
month? When is my baby due, and what will it be like? Why is the cow so sick? Will she ever have a
healthy calf? When will the river rise again, so we can irrigate and plant our crop?” Since agriculture and
animal husbandry are so dependent for their success on local environmental factors of climate, soil,
available precipitation or standing water, etc., as well as upon seasonal factors, understandably each school
of astrology had to work with highly localized matters if it was to be successful in the areas for which it
was most important, i.e., farming, stock-breeding, and medicine. So the astrologies of different cultures
incorporated psychospiritual and ecological symbolism and interrelationships appropriate to the lands of
their origin, which therefore differed widely in many respects. And those differences were preserved, at
least in a general sense, as those cultures grew to cover more and more territory, running into wider
varieties of climate, soil, and so forth. Even on a continental scale, West differs widely from East, North
from South when it comes to such things. And since we ourselves eat the food and wear the clothes from
organisms we grow according to the great environmental cycles peculiar to our home territories, ultimately
coming out of its own particular soil-types, not to drinking its water and building our own lives around the
necessities of agriculture, animal-husbandry, white-collar accounting work associated with these,
management associated with all of it, and so on, then the same factors that determine the lives of our
cultivars as well as the wild things of the region also shape and determine our lives, as well. The Law of
the Limit and Malthus apply to us no less than anything else: we, too, are born, eat, grow, develop,
reproduce, get sick, die, like all other creatures. These are the ultimate concerns of astrology, so each local
school of ecology will reflect the general and human ecology of the region of its origin above all other
things.
Yet because these concerns are so fundamental, there’s a lot about them that stays the same across the
world, no matter where you are. I think that’s where the evident similarities of these schools come in, and
why they can mesh so well, reinforcing rather than interfering and conflicting with one another.
Anyway, I use what is to hand and what I know best, which is Western-style astrology, sure. But I
also use the astrology that goes with the new, extended Qaballah, too, when it’s clear there’s a place to use
it – like using parallax to calculate distance, it gives a lot more useful detail on the subject.

Hee-Haw

1) Why can’t thrints be very intelligent?

– After all, how much intelligence does it take to sneak up on a nose? (They just order a finger to do it for
them.)

2) We should study the occult for the same reason that wildebeests should study lions – or taxpayers, the
IRS.

From email correspondence with a friend, about May 28, 1995

>>>I would say those “traditional” books come out of an older phase of our present culture that looked
askance at sex and all sorts of other things, and didn’t hold with liberated women. I think your
interpretation is much closer to the mark; in one culture, the particular expression of that placement might
come out differently than that for a different culture, but the underlying influence, I think, is just what
you’re saying here. – As far as its connection to diet and health, let me look at [subject’s] chart again, with
the new time, and see what gives.:)

If you do come up with anything that might help with

[subject’s]
digestive problem, it could be very important. I’m torn here
between giving you all the details and waiting to see what
you come up with on your own. I don’t want to bias your
thoughts with my or anyone else’s (including physician’s)
views. I will say that he is continually trying to work a
compromise between foods that will give him strength and
foods that will irritate his condition, but what he dreams
of is a cure.

Well, here goes.

Scorpio on 6th cusp indicates a tendency to toxic bowel problems; Mercury in that House indicates
that upper (small) bowel will be involved, and Neptune (Water) indicates that the large bowel will be as
well. Neptune compounds the tendency to toxicity, and may mask its effects, making it hard to diagnose.
Venus in 6th square Moon in Leo in 3rd could make for diverticulosis and other chronically irritating
(mars), potentially dangerous (Mars) conditions due to too much (relatively) rich (Venus) food with too
little roughage over too long a period of time. Bulk-builders such as Metamucil or the organic seed-based
stuff could help, if true.
Pluto, ruler of Scorpio, conjunct Uranus in Virgo could make for spastic (Uranus) bowels, both upper
(Virgo) and lower (Pluto; Pluto sextile Neptune-in-Scorpio). This could indicate a life-long tendency to a
far higher than normal need for certain B vitamins and minerals, e.g. niacin, B6, calcium, potassium, much
more than a normal diet could ever provide, so that unless supplementation were done daily for them, the
native would become chronically deficient in them, leading to irregularities in autonomic nervous-system
function as this affects the bowels and everything else.
Both such conditions together indicate a much higher than normal need for vitamin C, as well as for
zinc, because these would be needed to keep the walls of the bowels healthy and sound in spite of the
chronic wear-and-tear on them. To avoid irritating this tender tissue, the vitamin C would need to be
administered by injection or compounded with something such as vitamin E or A which would prevent the
irritation. Since these last two vitamins would also be needed to (a) keep the bowel-walls healthy and (b)
detoxify the body whenever toxicity gets too high, anyway, it would only be convenient to combine daily
doses of the two.
Occasional high colonics would also help.
Some form of problems with water itself are indicated by the square between Luna in Leo in the 3rd
and Neptune in Scorpio in the 6th. Mercury in 6th suggests the possibility that the native is exquisitely
sensitive on a physical level to the presence of electromagnetic fields of all kinds, this sensitivity
manifesting especially in the form of bowel dysfunctions and pathologies in the way in which his body
processes water, or uses water to process other things in the bowels.
Frankly, if he could be induced to do so, I would suggest that he at least meditate on Hades and
Persephone and other Gods of the Underworld, or even invoke Them several times, to become conscious of
the universal processes which, among other things, are involved in the physiology of bowel function in
human beings, as a part of Godhead. Meditation on or invocation of Mars, Kali, Pallas Athena/Medusa,
Baron Samedhi, etc are also in order. (Saturn, exalted in Scorpio, rules the chakra at the base of the spine,
i.e., in the region of Scorpio, so meditation on Saturn might also be in order.) Such practices will put him
more and more in tune with Their True, Will, hence his, insofar as the latter expresses Theirs – I would
guess that at this point, it is as if his body and mind were fighting themselves via ongoing physiological
conflicts in bowel function, of which any psychological ones are only symptomatic. The more harmony he
can re-establish in himself over this, the better.
If those who toilet-trained him, and/or those on whom he imprinted concerning “proper” reactions to
feces and bowel function, were inept at teaching children healthy attitudes about these things, it certainly
would have exacerbated the tendencies already in place for such problems. But those tendencies were there
on a physiological level from the beginning, and must be addressed via diet and other physical treatment as
well as any other approach if they are to be alleviated with any success.

***

>>>I don’t think I sent anything in the time indicated. Got behind again on other projects and was catching
up on them (as it turned out, fortunately). Everything okay now?

Yes. They reformatted the poor old server’s hard drive

*again*. You can only push a 286 running email for over
2000
people so far. The poor guy who tries to keep everything
going and the student who helps him are constantly having to
deal with outdated software, obsolete hardware, and no
money.
But I won’t get started on measure five and the damage it’s
done to the educational system here, from Kindergarten
all the way up, circling like a tornado through the library
system, knocking out the most creative and talented of
teachers, destroying children’s morale, not to mention
nearly
obliviating art, science, and music (who needs ‘em, right?
give them kids a shovel and a ditch and letem see what the
*real* world’s like) And oh yea... our computer system.
Anyway, I won’t get started on it...

(sorry... my pet peeve)

A 286!?!! Oh, dear God – and I thought we had it bad here, with Olympia’s latest shenanigans! Wherever
did they find the poor thing – the Texas Late Jurassic bone-beds? :) (Don’t apologize for the pet peeve – it’s
been mine most of my life! My great hero, Hyman George Rickover, was understating the case in his rants
concerning the degeneration of the modern public “educational” system – he had to educate his own
engineers in the three R’s, many times, because their own “educations” hadn’t addressed the basics even by
the time they were in college! Robert A. Heinlein, in one of his essays, made comparative lists of what, in
order of presentation in the essay, his grandfather was expected to have learned by the 7th grade, what he
had been expected to learn, ditto, and what high-schoolers grades 9-12 in Santa Cruz, CA were expected to
learn or have learned by graduation. The frighteningly steep downward trend over time in public education
in this country, as shown by that comparison, wasn’t just appalling – it was mind-blowing. Like, Stephen
King and Skipp & Spector meet John Holt, or H.P. Lovecraft on Dewey! :[=[ (It sometimes makes me
wonder if the “widespread Satanic conspiracies” which religious fundamentalists claim have permeated this
country really do exist – and are entrenched in the nation’s public school systems [and not just in the IRS,
as we all know is true <VBG>]? <g>)

Initial quotes from another correspondent and my replies to him, about May 28, 1995

>>>>Dreaming- Wow, nice dreams. I to dream that lucid. Although the

>ability comes and goes with the cycle of the moon, the majority of
>my dreams that are that lucid tend to come true.

>>>Interesting. The Moon, like Neptune, rules dreams and psychic abilities, astrologically speaking. – As
for lucid dreams, I understand that most who have them report that many of these come true, it seems to be
the sort of state in which people are more readily consciously clairvoyant, clairaudient, precognitive, etc.

>I have never been to the world that you describe, but I have,
>mainly during deep meditation, battled demons; these demons do not >look like the typical D&D demons,
>but more like abominations of the
>human race.

Remarks by second correspondent, with whom I shared first correspondent’s remarks on dreams:

Ah. I’m glad to know that I’m not the only one who has
“dark”
dreams. My neighbor (a perky little Gemini) tells me about
her dreams... little miniature sheep prancing around and
kindly old magicians with sparkles under their hats, etc.
Me... my dreams have often been of death and dying. One
particular dream went on for years, and no one in my dreams
would lift a finger to save me. Then one night I dreamed
that I was lying in a hospital bed dying, as usual. All the
people I knew were gathered around me, yet no one would
help,
as usual. I seemed to be unable to communicate with them.
So finally, I got disgusted, got up, and walked away. I’ve
also dreamed of near crashes... jumping motorcycles over
hills and
when I got to the top, I went out into air and into a
free-fall from miles above the ground. Dreams of people
strangling me. Dreams of falling out of moving trucks that
no one was driving, grabbing the truck by its bumper,
slowing
it down, and climbing into the driver’s seat. They often
represent a symbolic situation that reflects a conflict in
my
life, and show me what the conflict is doing to me, and what
I need to do. Sometimes it takes me weeks to figure them
out, but they always show me something that I was unable to
see with my “awake” mind. But dancing miniature lambs and
magic sparkles? How can I get to have dreams like that?

Either a flat-line EEG trace, one fuck of a case of rock-solid, 24-karat denial, or the ability to lie with a
straight face. :)
Seriously, everybody has nightmares from time to time, everybody has bad moments in his or her life.
Those who deny that these ever occur are not telling the whole truth, surely. Now, they have a right to
privacy, and maybe that’s all that is, just protecting her mental privacy, but why mention anything at all, in
that case? No, this sounds much more like someone using a most graphic way of screaming, “I’m normal!
Normal!! NORMAL!!!” at everyone, loud as she can, trying to burrow her way thereby smack into the
psychic middle of the herd and hide there from whatever has her so damned terrified. Does that sound like
cynicism on my part? It isn’t – I grew up in households hooked on “Mental Hygiene, the Panacea,” that
spent almost all their time and energy (a) pointing out everyone else’s individual traits and hallmarks and
labeling them as “proof” of “mental illness” and (b) putting on a huge, ongoing, non-stop song-and-dance
act called “WEEE’RRE NORMAL!!!” And every last damned one of them was as crazy as a bedbug in a
shoe-box. So to this day, whenever I hear about somebody trying to do Shirley Temple in the middle of
Les Miserables, as it were, I get very suspicious . . . :)
From email correspondent with a friend 5/31/1995

Yael, you are good! You’ve done an incredible job.

Aw, gee, shuckin’s, ma’am :::blush:::. . .

All I gave was the facts – just the facts, ma’am . . . (Dum-de-dum-dum! <g> – Actually, if truth be
told, I did it strictly by the book. Or actually several books, e.g., Sakoian and Acker, March & McEvers,
etc. <g>)

I’m going
to add some of my observations and comments now so that you
can see how all this is manifesting... very close to what
you
have said. [Subject] has a genetically inherited
predisposition to this disease, as you noted, and is
strongly
affected by stress, diet, and emotional factors.
It is an autoimmune reaction occurring in the intestines,
resulting in pain, lack of
food adsorption, and possibly other symptoms I’m not aware
of.

Okay, one thing autoimmune responses can be ameliorated by in many cases, regardless of what
tissues or allergens may be involved, are the herbs astragalus and echinecea, and ascorbate therapy, all of
which are cell detoxifiers, helping to flush crud of all kinds out of the body. This can be especially true for
those whose “autoimmune” responses are, like mine, actually to foreign proteins, possibly viral, deep in
their own tissues, which get badly battered by the body’s attempt to get at those Alien Invaders from the
Filth Dimension. (Mercury in 6th trine Jupiter in 3rd indicates this could help – aid from a system of ideas
(Jupiter) gained from intellectual activity/reading (Third House) rather than from more obvious, one-step
deductions.) Give the herbs a try, if possible, and/or the ascorbate therapy. If you need info on how to
keep the vitamin C from scarring his bowels (it is an acid, after all, and can be very irritating to the gut,
even when badly needed), let me know and I’ll get it to you.

>>>and because Mercury is in Sagittarius, he may have the “molehill into mountain” syndrome, having
difficulty at times keeping projects within manageable bounds. If he isn’t able to curtail his desire to
expand, expand, expand!!! when working on a project, because he’ll keep at work on it until either he drops
or he finishes it, it’s likely he’ll drop, in that event, because he will let the project expand without bounds,
beyond all limits, and find himself trying to conquer the infinite within a very finite amount of time and by
means of equally finite resources! He needs to learn how to call a halt to his ambitions at such time, to turn
off the “More! More!” thing pushing away inside him to keep at it until it’s finished, whatever it is.

here you’ve offered me an insight into him that I hadn’t

seen.
Now that’s what astrology is for – getting at things we can’t get at any other way! :) Let me know what
comes of it, please!

>>>fevers; accidents; strange STD infections; or a series of viral or bacterial ailments or similar
epidemiological problems which turn out to be transmitted to him by friends, or at work, or by people in
some large organization of which he is a member.

In this case, his overactive immune system may actually be

of
benefit, as he never gets colds, infections, etc. He’s
*never* been on an antibiotic until now... new
research indicates that his disease may be linked to a
pathogen, and he’s now trying a new antibiotic therapy.

Ha! What’d I say? But if the pathogen involved turns out to be a virus, antibiotics won’t get rid of it, and
can only harm his own tissue! As it happens, echinecea and astragalus are also anti-viral agents – as is
vitamin C. Have you seen Cathcart’s papers on ascorbate therapy? If not, let me know, I can Xerox them
for you, or give you the publication data so you can look them up from there.

>>>mystical studies, selfless labors of love, Bujinkan ninpo taijutsu (I’m not making this up, you know!
<g>), retreats, privacy, and/or other Neptune-ruled things, people, or activities.

looks like [subject couple] both need

to learn to master the twelfth
house and Neptune things.

Gee . . . whatever gave you that idea?! :)

Because Mars and Pluto are conjunct, with both trining his North Node and sextiling his South Node, his
health and its fluctuations are part of an hereditary pattern that includes one or both parents and their
ancestors. Because of the trine/sextile aspects to the Nodes by his 6th-House rulers, this pattern is critical
to his success in work (6th House), spiritual equilibrium (12th House), mental health (12th House),
attunement to his relations and ancestry (4th House), love (5th House), with any children he has (5th
House), and so on. More, there is a suggestion here that while he may have health problems for
genetically-determined reasons, those problems are perhaps only one of several different types of
expressions of those genes. Thus variations in diet, work, habits, routines, and so forth could elicit
variations in expression of the genes, one or more of which could be tremendous assets for him.

Interesting. I wonder if this has to do with his

“extra-normal” abilities? He describes it as having a closer
connection with the universal consciousness or force than
most people. He’s also quite
telepathic. I don’t mean vague impressions, but detailed,
actual pictures.

The Third House rules hands, motor-control, and perception, while the 1st House rules the conscious
aspect of the Will, the 12th House the unconscious one, and the 10th House that aspect of it that involves
destiny. Mercury, ruling his 1st, also rules his 5th House cusp, giving him access to all that incredible
reservoir of Kundalini Energy and the understanding (Uranus) necessary to use it. Jupiter is in his Third,
dispositing his Mercury (Who is in Sagittarius, in his 6th), trining it. Cancer is on his 3rd House cusp, and
Luna, its ruler, makes major aspects to a number of things in his chart, as well as being in the 3rd and in
Leo, thus being disposited by the Sun, to Whom She makes an exact square. That also might have
something to do with his abilities.
One other thing, though I’m not sure how this would figure in, but his Sun, in Scorpio, makes very
close aspects to the US natal MC, at 13º Aquarius, and US natal Sun, at about 13º Cancer, his Moon
making a close semisextile to the latter and a close opposition to the former. In addition, his Ascendant
makes broad conjunctions to the Ascendant and Uranus in the US natal chart. On a purely
Alchemical/astrological level, he thus taps into the energy of his native land, which is highly Uranian.
Uranus rules Aquarius and is exalted in Scorpio, too, so his Scorpio Sun and Aquarian MC (which exactly
conjoins the US Moon) add additional links between the two charts. So the energy of Uranus, which rules
both the understanding and scientific ability necessary to modern high-energy and quantum technology and
the energy that goes into it as well, flows through him on an active basis, since he was born here. Given
that his Uranus is also conjunct Pluto, and that both are conjunct or make major aspects to so many things
in his chart, that also could account for a lot of this.

>>>seriously eroded. So minimizing all possible sources of irritation, distraction, unshielded e-m fields,
etc. in the places where he spends most of his work-time would be a help.

Hmm. not much can be done about the lights... they’re

everywhere, and I doubt the administration would consider
remodeling the building for one employee. Anyway to
countereffect [sic] the lights?

He should certainly be taking the B-vitamins, calcium, potassium, magnesium, C, and D to replace what is
being drained, as well as lots of E and beta carotene, against e-m field damage, which is like that of
radiation burns in some ways. Invocation of Mercury and Uranus, Who rules electricity and the systems
that use it, might also help.

>>>Sign and House placements. In other words, he could become too fond of things that aren’t good for
him, overindulgence in which could make him very ill with a toxic condition. “Toxic condition” can mean
anything from septicemia to gangrene to cancer, all of them nasty. His body and his psychospiritual nature

psychospiritual toxins... would that be akin to people who

give off “bad vibes”, negative attitudes, hate, depression,
etc?

Those, of course, but there are also “bad places,” probably the areas where the things called “negative ley
nodes” are found, that would do it, too, not to mention things that have carried away psychometric traces
from whatever evil they were near or touching at one point, e.g., “momentos” from Auschwitz, Birkinau,
Hiroshima, Waco, Wounded Knee, places of murder, horror, destruction, overwhelming malice.

>>>Mars/Pluto/Uranus stellium); physical workouts to the point of strong wear and tear on the body (ditto)

this is a hard one. He tends to lose muscle tissue rapidly

if
he doesn’t work out yet, as you point out, he is susceptible
to muscle tears, etc. He has repeatedly torn a hamstring, as
well as some shoulder tendons. Perhaps he needs to do his
workouts more frequently, but with less intensity?
He should read the works of Stephen Hayes on ninjutsu, which give great sets of exercises that both
strengthen and tone every muscle in the body, but without putting them under breaking strain. The
following works, some by Jack Hoban and Hatsumi sensei, are very much worth looking into for this,
especially Jack Hoban’s book and Hayes’s Ninjutsu: The Art of the Invisible Warrior. Sort of like tai chi,
with teeth in it, and other things added.

Hatsumi, Masaaki, Dr. Essence of Ninjutsu: The Nine Traditions. Chicago: Contemporary Books,
1988.
_____. The Grandmaster’s Books of Ninja Training. Translated by Chris W. P. Reynolds. Chicago:
Contemporary Books, 1988.
_____. Ninjutsu: History and Tradition. Burbank, CA: Unique Publications, Inc., 1981.
_____. and Hayes, Stephen. Ninja Secrets from the Grandmaster. Chicago: Contemporary Books,
1987.
Hayes, Stephen. The Mystic Arts of the Ninja: Hypnotism, Invisibility, and Weaponry. Chicago:
Contemporary Books, Inc., 1985.
_____. Ninjutsu: The Art of the Invisible Warrior. Chicago: Contemporary Books, Inc., 1984.
Hoban, Jack. Ninpo: Living and Thinking as a Warrior. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1988.

>>>toxic religions or mystical practices (Neptune/Scorpio/6th);

which religions or mystical practices would you consider to

be toxic?

It isn’t the religion or mystical practice per se, though some may incline to use in that direction more
than others. Anything that enables people to live in peace with themselves, their neighbors, and the living
world as a whole aren’t toxic. Anything that encourages self-hatred, self-destructiveness, especially on a
spiritual level, murder, ecological devastation as preferred ways of life, I’d call toxic. Religions and
mystical schools that have been around for an appreciable length of time have of course made their peace
with the world and with the wellsprings of human sociobiology in both its pleasant and unpleasant aspects,
or they wouldn’t be around. But nothing is perfectly idiot-proofed, is it? Even the oldest, sanest religions
around can go bazingas, as witness, e.g., Meier Kahane and the more rabid outbreaks of the JDL. Some
claim Christianity per se is toxic, especially because of the hatred of the body and it teaches and the chronic
guilt over nothing it often seems to give its followers. But originally Christianity taught that while the body
is one of God’s wonders, its natural functions good because God made them, and our desires and needs
likewise, it is only God’s means to holy ends; because God is the spirit of Life, that means those ends are
Life’s ends, and if it is appropriate, our immediate gratification or even our lives may have to take second-
place to Life’s needs, even be sacrificed for the latter. So what? The atheist J.B.S. Haldane frequently
pointed out that that is exactly what happens all the time for members of many thriving biological
communities and taxa. Or sometime go look at that great wall in the headquarters of the NYC Fire
Department, covered with plaques, each a memorial to someone who gave his life in line of duty to his
neighbors and his city: “New York’s Bravest.” Sacrifice of self for the needs of one’s greater self
embedded in one’s community and species has always been with us, and when healthy, Christianity has not
only recognized this, but made it clear that self-destructiveness, whether of body or soul or spirit, is only
condoned under such extreme cases, never at any other time. As for the “hatred of sex,” one instance often
cited is that of nuns and monks – but monasteries and abbeys have been with us a long, long time, and there
are always individuals who would be far happier away from the world, who don’t really mind at all giving
up sex forever.
But Christianity has had quite a few toxic expressions in the world. So has Islam. And Judaism. And
Buddhism. And Paganism. And all the rest. Usually, these take the form of schismatic splinterings off the
original religion, though not always. So I would include those.
I would also include such non-religions as “New Age-ism,” which is about as toxic as you can get,
because it preaches an absolute narcissism. It grew out of the Human Potential Movement of the 1960s and
1970s, an eclectic mixture of everything from Esalen to est to astrology to crystal-gazing which teaches:
Pure, unadorned, uncomplicated selfishness is the highest good – as long as you can label it as something
which sounds a little better. It teaches heartlessness, self-righteousness, untrammeled greed, megalomania
– and it does so using a mystificational language which compounds it all by stacking lie upon lie upon lie.
Sometime, read M. Scott Peck’s People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil. An extremely
compassionate book written by a highly respected clinical psychiatrist, it goes into toxic attitudes and their
root causes. I guess I’d have to say that any religion or philosophy or mystical school which overtly or
covertly encourages the sort of thing he describes and analyzes in his book as an inalienable of itself is
toxic.

>>>romances with people who could be very bad for him

What would be bad for him in this

sense? Or do you mean the same things that would be bad for
anyone e.g. people who play head-games, are cruel, etc.?

I’m talking about “psychic vampire” types. These include aggressive wannabe co-dependents, who try to
get one hooked on something, booze, drugs, cash gifts, etc. as a way of controlling one in order to feed on
one’s vitality; people who have dedicated themselves to relentless pursuit of any one thing, such that for
them, all the rest of life and all other people becomes just means to that end; etc.

>>>Likewise, incompatibility, like shit, sometimes happens for reasons that may be at least as much
sociocultural as anything else. Juno has to do with sociocultural ties among people, so I’d say this may
well be a case in which [subjects] were drawn together for reasons that had more to do with society

Never mistrust your intuition.

Tell me about it! <VBG> One of the reasons I am so fascinated by ninpo is that among other things, it
trains you in trusting your unconscious mind, your instincts, your intuition. For 10 years, 1983-1993, I had
this “student,” George Bryson, 10 years older than me, supposedly studying Magick from me, but in fact a
very spooky sociopath who was apparently using me or planning to use me for real evil, then murder me in
some hideous way, or so the cops back in Santa Barbara think now. It was not long after I first got into
Bujinkan ninpo taijutsu that I finally took a good, long, hard look at the “unkind” aversion and repulsion I’d
felt about this guy all that time, and realized I had been palling around with someone who would have
made Ted Bundy look like St. Francis! That’s when I dropped him out of my life muy pronto! If Bujinkan
ninpo never did anything else for me, no matter how much blood, toil, sweat, tears, and greenback dollars I
put into it between now and the end of eternity it would all have been worth it, for just that one thing.
Society spends all that time and effort to slap us out of trust in our instincts and intuition, those first years
of our lives – what for? To make us easier prey for something? (“Yeah – wife-beaters, Black Dahlia
murderers, con-artists . . .)

perhaps
it’s time I should now go back into the land of the
living?

Good God, yes! (Another reason to like Bujinkan ninpo: it teaches you in the context of that world,
encourages you to be up and doing in the world.) If you are getting enough strength back to re-enter the
world, you need to – that is part of our evolutionarily shaped nature, you know. After my first really
serious abdominal surgery, in 1961, during which they sectioned 9 feet of my small intestine (intestinal
peritonitis), even before they let me have any fluids, right on the very first day those nasty, mean people
made me get up out of bed and sit in a chair by it while the nurse changed my sheets. Every day they made
me get up and move around, at least a little, until finally bowel function started, and then they encouraged
me to stay up and keep moving around as much as possible. This was new, then, making patients get out of
bed right after surgery; now it’s S.O.P. Otherwise, it takes one far longer to recovery, and there are
bedsores . . . So as soon as you can re-enter the world, do so! This is one of the reasons I’m fighting to get
off SSI any way I can, in spite of my fragile health – I just wasn’t made to be a lotus-eater, I guess, and
very few other people are, either, I suspect.

***

>>>In [subjects’] composite, erected according to classical technique, Luna, at 15º 52’ Leo, Who rules this
chart (Ascendant at 10º 54’ Cancer) conjoins both their natal Moons, and falls in this chart’s Second House
(cusp at 11º 49’). The two of them are thus in total accord on their values and feelings (Second House)
about everything, especially anything that could affect the future of the species and anything to do with
creativity (Leo). This doesn’t necessarily prevent arguments; on the contrary, it can lend them true
creative inspiration, enormous impetus, and great staying power – but at least the two of them agree on
what to argue about! Luna here is conjunct Juno (12º 57 Leo) and Vesta (19º 53’ Leo),

>>>Ultimately, of course, they want to know how it will all turn out.

Well, that’s a 4th House matter. Here, the 4th House cusp is at 3º 21’ Libra, ruled by Venus, Who is at 3º
57’ Virgo in the second and thus in mutual reception with Mercury by Sign under traditional dignities.
Luna, ruling this chart, is sextile Mercury, Who is in the 4th (House of Outcome of the union). Venus is
conjunct Uranus (2º 0’ Leo in 2nd), which presages divorce or other catastrophic breakup, possibly as a
result of explosive (11th) arguments over values (2nd) (!); but through the mutual reception with Mercury,
Venus can be “moved” to conjoin Him in the 4th, becoming sextile to Luna, and 40 degrees (novile, a
power-angle) to Uranus. According

>>>Hatsumi sensei tells us, concerning getting out there on the dojo floor and going at it, “Go play.” That
Mercury/Venus conjunction in Libra, at either 3º 57’ (Venus’s original degree) or 12º 4’ (Mercury’s) of
Libra, would also be square that 12th-House Mars – just perfect for combat arts training together,
practicing Bujinkan ninpo (12th House/Mars) technique on one another as training partners. If the
conjunction went the other way – were at 3º 57’ Virgo in the 2nd or 12º 4’ Virgo in the 3rd – it would
sextile Mars, which is good for a lot of things, but not for the strenuous, arduous (square/Saturn) work of
training. Also, there, Venus/Mercury wouldn’t sextile Luna, at best would only make a semisextile to Her.
If the conjunction was at 3º 57’ Virgo, in fact, it would also conjoin Uranus – and that would be all she
wrote for the relationship, for here, the two of them would be putting both sides of their collective head
together with all their might and main, agreeing on it at every step, in order to blow the relationship sky-
high (Uranus)!

OK... Venus in Virgo in the third is the worrier, right?

Venus in Libra in the 4th is much happier, yes? So maybe, a
problem could be that they both tend to worry about the
whole
thing too much, rather than just “going out to play.”
said. Message: they should stop worrying, and just enjoy it?
As they say, let’s run it up the flagpole and see if it salutes. – Or conversely, look hard and consciously at
the worry, maybe do chi !kung on it (How big is the worry? What color is it? What does it sound like?)
until we find out why the worry. Worry is like pain and fear: it’s a signal, telling us something.
Sometimes it’s hard to interpret the signal – it could mean “there’s a short in my worry-button that needs
attending to” rather than anything beyond itself. But it could refer to something important we need to look
at. Once we do, as pain does with chi !kung, it may well go away, its job done.

>>>Sorry to be such a bummer lately. It’s all just catching up with me, I guess. (An astrologer here in
Seattle, Shiela Belanger, told me that Chiron returns can do this to people, but it’s kind of like falling into
the prickly-pear cactus: you really can’t know what it’s like until it happens to you. <g> Transiting Chiron
will hit 0 degrees Libra later this year, where it was when I was born, and it seems to be doing just what she
said it would, in the general sense – no one, though, could have known the details until now.)

Also, it’s a new moon right now. New moons always get me
down
until I remember “oh yea, it’s the new moon... shake it off,
girl” and then I just wait it out. Probably cause of the
Cancerian influence, which is *extremely strong* in your
chart, whether your Aries sun likes it or not:) Do your
water weight gains coincide with the moon like mine do? Now
there’s an astrological influence that you can actually
*see*!

I just discovered another non-psychospiritual factor that may have been adding to my despair: Bartell
Drugs Hista-Tabs! I have been taking from 6 to 8, 2 at a time, per night for many months for my
increasingly bad sinus and chest congestion and asthma. Each tablet contains 60 mg of pseudoephedrine
hydrochloride, a decongestant, and 2.5 mg of triprolidine hydrochloride, an antihistamine. I had no other
form of either drug around, especially not separate antihistamines and decongestants, such that I could have
then taken either drug without simultaneously ingesting the other. Then yesterday my June issue of
Prevention arrived; it included an article, “Fat Pharm,” that discusses drugs which can make you can
weight, either by altering the brain-chemistry controlling your appetite, or making your body produce more
ADH, or numerous other things. These include psychiatric drugs such as antidepressants, tranquilizers,
steroids, and antihypertensives. And as I read it, I knew . . . So I went over to Bartell’s and got their house
brand of antihistamine, which is one of the original kinds, and nothing but antihistamine, and then
separately, just in case, a decongestant and an anti-asthma remedy. I took the antihistamine before going to
bed, nothing else, and I slept better than I have in the last year! Also, I don’t feel ravenously hungry right
now, as I have for a long time, and I’m not in the horrible depression I was in as of yesterday morning, and
. . . (Isn’t it funny how you only find what you are looking for in the last place you look? <g>)

>>> The men I find attractive – for what it’s worth; I realize this isn’t “politically correct,” but then, most
of the things that are part of our own essential nature aren’t P.C., either! – are hard, tough, lean-&-mean
men, “officers, scholars, and gentlemen,” highly competent in numerous fields, affluent because they are
highly competent, with minds like Einstein crossed with von Clausewitz. The men who are attracted to me
– and whom I have been urged to “fall in love with” by altogether too many people – are incompetent,
passive-aggressive, whiny jerks with auras like something left a little too long in the fridge, who are
“intelligent” and “educated” in the sense that they took a B.A. in English Lit. at UC Berkeley in the 1960s,
who are about as competent as a boiled clam when it comes to anything worth a damn, and, all in all, do
marvelous ongoing life-long imitations of Hostess Twinkies when it comes to their psychospiritual
makeup! The kind who make wonderful wife-beaters once they’ve discovered that smoking crack or
drinking heavily or getting strung out on ‘ludes’ or something temporarily makes them forget what runny
little piles of shit they really are. The kind who really inspire me to do nightly evocations of a certain
ancestral spirit, so I can get all the latest info on the fine and gentle art and science of impalement . . .
 MY you write well! That’s a beautiful piece of prose! I
sympathize with your dilemma, but you know they have to deal
with testosterone poisoning and all that. It’s rare to find a
man who wants a mate or a female friend, not a mother or a
shiny red convertible woman to impress their male friends.
So many men are so insecure. Why do you think that is?

I don’t really think the problem is testosterone poisoning. I think it’s arrested development.
Sociopathology on the half-shell. It not only doesn’t have to be that way, it shouldn’t be, not on the kind of
scale I’ve run into in my life; otherwise, Homo would never have made it past erectus! I tend to attract
real weirdos, men who turn out to have malformed genitalia and minds to match, men who come on like
utterly sweet little New Age male Shirley Temples to your face and stab you in the back in a moment if
they can get one thin dime extra that way, men who turn out to be wife-beaters, men who are just flat evil.
Unh-unh. That’s a little too skewed a sample – this isn’t accidental, and it can’t be characteristic of the
population as a whole. “Male insecurity” is one thing, and I’ve run into that, too, haven’t we all, but what
I’m talking about goes far, far beyond that, into the realm of improbability so great it’s like another
universe.
As far as “male insecurity” goes, I think this is something which has always been with us to some
extent, but is much worse at some times than at others. I know advertising plays on it, and that PLAYBOY
and HUSTLER sell magazines because they cater to that attitude, and I know that the attitude play into the
hands of the powers-that-be, because it makes people overall easier to control, directly and indirectly. Cui
bono? Who benefits? Look to our pedagogues – not only our elementary and high school and university
teachers, but also advertising, the media, the politicians, the popular writers and movie-makers – to find out
who is most likely to benefit from this in the short run (in the long run, it will prove disastrous to our
descendants, because of what it is doing to the world they will have to live in), then look at the techniques
that have been developed since WW 2 or even before and applied by everyone from military PsyOps
project groups to advertisers to see how they can bring about a steady decline in the emotional maturity of
the general population (differing in its expression as to gender, age, and other demographic factors), and
you’ll have the answer to your question.
Older, rougher societies in a far more lightly populated world also have displayed enormous male
emotional immaturity and insecurity. What else were the misogynistic catastrophes of the witch-hunts and
other patriarchist pogroms and oppressions all about, after all? But at least men in those societies were and
are still men in most ways, that is, adult human beings, capable of taking self-initiative on the things they
must for the survival and well-being of themselves, their mates, their children, and their communities –
otherwise they and their societies couldn’t function well enough to continue in existence.
No, I’m very much afraid that the handwriting is on the wall for us, and lo, it saith, “Ross, Dexter,
Dexter, Dieter, and Barnard, Advertisers,” and if we go the way of the dinosaurs, it’ll have been “Married,
With Children” that did us in, not a comet!
We live in a highly urbanized, still patriarchist society, where women evade the frustrations of their
lives via their children, whom society and their husbands and families usually leave entirely within their
control. So very often they raise those children to meet their own emotional needs, rather than the child’s,
while the fathers don’t do much at all as far as really being a father goes, and the children’s psychospiritual
and psychosexual development is often badly skewed as a result. At least the girls do have the mother to
type on, the boys don’t even have that, so they turn to the TV and other boys and male teachers in the
highly artificial world of public school to learn how to be – i.e., to fantasies, immature children, and grown
men who, however, are only seen in that one, very contrived situation, only for part of each weekday, at
most, and only in one mode of expression – and no wonder they are not exactly perfect specimens of
mental health! And they survive only because they live in cities, where there are all sorts of “safety-nets”
for them (e.g., supermarkets, welfare); if such an urban society didn’t exist, they couldn’t be.
On the average, though, young men and women aren’t all that messed up. Inner City kids, though they
are archetypally urban, grow up in a life full of desperate exigencies, and over time the stupid ones, the
slow ones, the unlucky ones are selected out, so at least there, they have something of an edge on things.
It’s the children of suburbia, really, that can turn out of the worst, and do more than any other group of
children, in terms of psychological set vs. raw survival. And it is that population that is the natural prey of
such predators as Madison Avenue and Washington, D.C.

***

>>>I’ve had several cats that close to me, including Pickman, too. I feel such heavy unstated pressure on
me to feel that this is somehow “shameful” or “childish,” but I think that these examples of mutualism – for
they are that, and very healthy ones – between us and other species are more often the case than is generally
realized, and that they provide what may be the last emotional and spiritual links many people today have
with the living world. Without them, a great many of us would lose what little ecological sanity they still
have, and the whole world would be much worse off.

Oh I agree completely. Who on earth would try to make you

feel
ashamed of bonding with your pet? That’s ridiculous!
Whoever they are, tell them to buzz off... it’s *your* life
and you’ll live and feel what you please..

Well, it is to avoid such people I’ve finally become such a recluse. And some of them, at least in the past,
couldn’t be just “told to buzz off” – I’ve had Housing Authority people order me to get rid of my cats if I
wanted to keep my H.A. contract (which is why I never got much rental aid in Santa Barbara, I preferred
cats to eating well). I also have been told by psychiatrists and medical doctors that they recommended
heartily I go to a psychiatric hospital to be checked out concerning my ‘sick dependency” on my cats or
other pets, and it was only by luck and fast footwork that I managed to keep them from screwing up my life
in various ways – at the time (back in the 1970s, when my health first went to hell), they were in a position
to get my SSI income cut off if I didn’t cooperate with their demands. All too often, I have literally been
forced to make the choice between loving and eating, between goodness to others and having a roof over
my head, between being a writer and thinker and having a decent income, free of psychiatric or other
medical molestation. No exaggeration, no kidding. Which is one of the reasons I’ve had so many
problems, so often. (Same lovely types who once ordered shock-treatments for me, when I was age 16,
because “young ladies shouldn’t have 160 IQs.”) The Gods have always come through when I’ve taken my
courage in both hands and chosen love and devotion and kindness and my avocation/True Will over what
appeared at the time to be survival – but it has often taken Them so long to do so that in the meantime I’ve
gotten into rather bad shape. Anyway, this issue isn’t just a social one – it’s literally meant the difference
between survival or well-being and the lack thereof, on a completely physical and monetary level. In the
same way, I’ve had individuals actively try to take my cats away from me “for my own good,” though there
it was easier to deal with it – the Magick word “lawsuit” conjures up such interesting things for people, eh
what? :)

***

>>>But how often does a mutualistic bond like this occur where there are hints that in other lives, they may
have been members of the same species (whatever it was), members of the same family, or maybe mates?
It would make an interesting study to research this, I think.

I’m not sure. I’m still not convinced 100% on this past
lives
thing, although I find the idea somewhat compelling. I think
there may be realms of knowledge in the field of energy
waves
 that we have yet to detect and study. When you meet someone,
whether human or some other animal, and you just “have this
feeling” and you can communicate by thinking, etc. what
does it really mean? Have you known each other in a “past
life” or are your brain waves functioning on the same
wavelength, are we sending out pheromones or the like that
the other has receptors for and can recognize? The theory
that works for me is a sort of life thread thing, similar to
what was proposed in The Celestine Prophecy, although I
don’t particularly agree with their religious connotations and the
book was a bit sappy in some places. But their overall
theories seem to have a ring of truth about them.... there is
something here, I know it, that we just don’t understand yet.

I think that ultimately it’s like Death: each of us makes his or her own peace with the idea, for better or
worse, in his or her own way. It’s kind of like vanilla ice cream: either you like it or you don’t, either it
works for you or it doesn’t. I’ve put together some things that work for me, but the only way I’ll ever
know will keep me from coming back to report on it, probably, so what can I say? :)

>>>going mad, as a result coming up with whole new realms of mathematics; and so on. The astrology of
Chiron thus makes enormous sense to me, because the classical delineation of its placement in my natal
chart fits so well so much of what has happened to me, and what I got out of it, both bad and good.

You have Chiron in the first, yes? So Chiron, the wise

healer,
in your chart has the same importance that Pluto, the need
to
regenerate, has in mine. So much in my chart has made a lot
more sense since you pointed out the one-hour time shift. It
was all “hidden” (12th house again) from me until then :)

Well, Chiron doesn’t really rule anything, he’s just sort of there, though in conjunction with Pallas,
Neptune, and, through his opposition to Sol (Whose orbs for oppositions is 10 degrees), with Jupiter, all
three of which are also in the First House of my natus (though Jupiter and Pallas are in Virgo, Neptune and
Chiron in Libra). Pluto, on the other hand, rules your 4th-House cusp, which adds another dimension to
your chart, just as Neptune and Jupiter rule Pisces (on my 7th) and Sagittarius (on my 4th) and so add the
testimonies of those Houses to that of my First.

>>>I’ve often wondered if perhaps what I’ve learned along those lines, that the power of the shaman comes
from the psychospiritual savaging of innocence – the innocent he himself was at the time of the savaging –
and that therefore those who, such as survivors of the Nazi death-camps, have gone through unspeakable,
undeserved horrors, have a sort of weregild coming to them from the universe, as it were (pahdon the pun!
<g>), maybe enough to compensate them for what they have lost. (Admittedly, however, it is a weregild
which survivors have to (a) discover exists, (b) go after themselves, and (c) survive the battle for it, with
whatever dragons guard it, in good enough shape to enjoy it! <g>) Whatever evils may have been done to
me, if out of those experiences I can derive understanding which, shared with others who’ve been through
similar abominations, can enable them to heal, it’ll go a long, long way toward a satisfactory revenge, I
think.
 Suffering definitely gives one great strength, if one

can

survive the ordeal. If, after undergoing the suffering, you

can proceed to help those who are presently undergoing pain,

and help them through it to find their own strength, you are

indeed doing something truly magical.

Let’s hope! <g>

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

From correspondence with friends 5/31/1995

Dear –

Your letter of the 19th came the other day. My delay in answering is due to – no, the houseweasels didn’t
eat my homework (but man, it wasn’t for want of trying! <g>), I was sick again. This time, though, I may
have lucked out: the current issue of Prevention Magazine, to which I have a subscription, just arrived, and
in it is an article, “Fat Pharm,” on various prescription and non-prescription drugs and some of their weird
possible side-effects. For over a year, every night I’ve been taking between 4 and 8 tablets of Bartell’s
Hista-Tabs, a combination of antihistamine and decongestant, for my non-stop sinus problems, chest
congestion, asthma, and so on. Well, those problems, which had been steadily becoming worse all this
time, may well be “rebound” effects of the stuff in the Hista-Tabs. So I stopped taking those and went and
got some regular, generic antihistamines, one of the older types (and therefore not nearly as likely to cause
the side-effects), and took those without decongestant, and slept better than I had in that same year! The
exhaustion, faintness, weakness, and so on I’d been exhibiting is now going away, too. Finally I’m
beginning to get some strength back, so I thought I’d invest some of it in replying at once.
Reading about your attaining to the rank of Shodan, I despair of my ever achieving any skill in ninjutsu
at all! I’m fighting years and years of having had my will deliberately poisoned and weakened and
hamstrung by altogether too many people – not to mention the media and the schools – that I “have no
business” thinking of myself as competent at anything, let alone combat arts, as well as bad physical health,
and that “enemy within” is the hardest one to conquer. However, I am now looking for some sort of
psychotherapeutic resource dealing professionally with survivors of ritual abuse, because many of the
psychospiritual problems I have, I have been learning these last few months, are the classic indicators of
such a history, typical of survivors of such things as well as of political torture and experiences such as
those who were interned in Auschwitz and Belsen went through. These problems are the result of having
been deliberately, expertly conditioned over a relatively long period of time at a very young age to feel
utterly rejected and unworthy, so that one would thereby become more malleable and useful to whoever
perpetrated the abuse, as well as chronic terrorization and similar emotional scarring. More and more
therapists are working with people exhibiting the results of such early abuse, and more and more is known
about what helps people like me to get over a lot of the emotional crippling this can give you. Up until
now, there wasn’t really a language to talk about this sort of thing in, either professionally or personally,
and no real awareness of the reasons underlying such problems or of possibilities for treating them
successfully. As a result, the problems were horribly compounded by the reactions of doctors,
psychologists, public, relatives and so on to the symptoms, such that, in the eyes of the survivors, they were
being punished by all of society, even their own relatives and loved ones, for having been used so evilly
without ever having deserved it. But now maybe at least some of that can be undone. If I can find a
professional who knows what I’ve been through, in general, knows it’s real and is able to work with it as
such, then maybe I can get somewhere, not only with ninjutsu but with life in general. So, we’ll see.

And congratulations on your achieving Shodan! I envy you, so much. I feel like the village idiot
gazing wistfully into a Chassidic synagogue, watching the rebbes debate over a text of Torah, not even
knowing where to begin learning all that one needs to engage fruitfully in such debate. It’s like aphasia:
you know you can’t do certain things, but you now lack even the ability to frame the questions you need to
ask to get the information to know what you need to be able to do those things (and so it goes). What
seems to have happened is that the very roots of my will, my spirit were badly damaged due to the
deliberate actions of the people who had the use of me when I was very small. If that damage can be
undone – and there is a good chance that at least important parts of it can be – then the rest may come a lot
easier. If I have seemed to be dreadfully slow at catching on and catching up, that’s why – but with luck,
maybe something can be done about it now.
You know, one nice thing about being able to use Internet is that I’ve actually been able to participate
in tipping the balance of public opinion away from the Clintonite/New Left position and toward a saner
one! People send me news as it breaks, I pass it on to others who will pass it on to others who will . . . and
so on. One of the Senators from New Hampshire has just introduced a resolution to make a full
Congressional investigation of the Waco horror, and mentioned that one of the reasons he has done so, and
that his constituents have badgered him to do so, is that so many of us who use Internet have been making
the whole damned country aware, at light-speed, of facts in the matter as well as the OKC business that the
administration and their media yellow running dogs :-P didn’t want anybody to know. Well, guess what –
now, the whole damned world knows about these things – and Yrs Truly helped in that, if only a little!
Kevin (“Back From the Dead and Ready to Party!”), my libertarian friend and landlord, affectionately
refers to me as “Paulette Revere riding an electron horse.” Oh, yeah! All of a sudden news is coming to
light about admissions on the part of BATF and FBI people concerning both Waco and the OKC thing that
don’t jibe with the official line. And apparently Billary’s diatribe at the NRA and “patriots” has drawn a
tremendous backlash from everybody from Vietnam Vets to cops to NRA people to people in Oklahoma
City who lost relatives there in the blast, would you believe! Wow! You’ve really got to get access to
Internet so you can agitate, agitate, agitate!!! <g>

Your remarks about my theories about “thrints” – nasty, semi-sentient* “slaver” viruses – follow the
same lines my own thinking has. Mars, Who rules combat and self-defense at a gross physical level, also
rules the immune system. Those with a well-trained, healthy, on-the-job Mars aren’t going to be as sick as
often as others, just as they aren’t as likely to get mugged, or badly hurt or killed if they do encounter into
an attacker. Hence those with combat experience and field-training in combat aren’t as likely to get
infected by something like that, or overwhelmed by it if they are. Hence they are, as you say, “realer” than
other people, because their minds and souls and spirits aren’t broken to thrint harness. And if there are such
things as thrints, and if I was deliberately infected with them as a child by some of their ptaavs, that may be
why I’m still have so much trouble with physical illness – they’re still in there, and want me to be as
helpless as possible (if they can’t use me, they can damn well make sure nobody else can?). (The fact that
between the herbs and giving up the Hista-Tabs and some other things, I’m getting my health back,
however gradually, may mean I’m actually finally throwing off the damned things.)

*Well, they can’t be too smart, can they? After all, how much intelligence does it take to sneak up on
somebody’s nose? (And anyway, they just make fingers do it for them. <g>)
Gee, and here I thought I was the only one annoying the **** out of people with my quotes from Patrick
Henry and Harriet Tubman (“You’ll be free or die!” she always told the slaves she came to liberate)! :) (In
response to “Live free or die!!”) – I’ve adopted a new device for the family shield: an American dragon –
a coiled rattlesnake, with open mouth, fangs ready (what’s the Latin for “Don’t tread on me!”).

Thank God you’re taking Ebola seriously! You should also have this information:

Seattle PCAs
1314 E Pine St
Seattle, WA 98122
(206) 233-8048

They have all the latest info on protocols for ascorbate therapy, how to find ozone generators and how to
administer ozone therapy, etc. Remember: if you take X grams of vitamin C daily, and don’t get diarrhea,
or doesn’t get any worse than it was, anyway, you are using all of the C you are taking, and need at least
that much. It’s acidic, and what the body can’t use goes out the colon, irritating it as it goes, but that’s the
only problem with excess. So keep boosting the dose until a mild diarrhea starts, then back down until it
stops, and that’s the level that is needed.
Ebola I am not as worried about as I am, e.g., pneumonic plague, which is on the loose now in several
places. Ebola is so frighteningly good at what it does that it kills too quickly, and people run like hell to get
away – it is relatively easy to contain. (With ozone therapy, in fact, you could cure all the people who get it
if you catch it soon enough, but that’s another story.) Pneumonic plague – airborne bubonic plague – AKA
Black Death, is something that takes longer to make its presence felt, is sneakier, and is deadly in temperate
climates, whereas Ebola is more a hot-climate epidemic. So the ones that scare me, now, are bubonic
plague, virulent TB, hantavirus, virulent influenza, and those like them – cholera can be contained, rabies is
not likely to go airborne, and Ebola – well, we had Ebola here, started in Reston, VA in 1989, went
airborne in a monkey-house there belonging to a CDC supplier, killed all the monkeys, and then apparently
slowly swept this country, but caused nothing worse than flu-like symptoms, nausea, weakness, fever, that
passed about as quickly as flu would have. It really was Ebola, too, and nobody knows why the hell it had
the effect on us it did – maybe the air-pollution did something to weaken it, or maybe it passed through a
session in Congress on the way down the road and listened to a filibuster and got so disgusted it couldn’t
carry on in the same old way . . . :-)
But plague in some form, well, it’s coming, and probably before the end of the century. Have you read
Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague: New Diseases in a World Out of Balance? Oh, my God. Or read
Arno Karlen’s Man and Microbes: Diseases and Plagues in History and Modern Times (1995), or Disease
and History by Cartwright and Biddiss (1972), or William H. McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples (1976)? Or
Hypersea: Life on Land (1994) by Mark and Dianna McMenamin? For life, and land-life above all,
disease is possibly the single most important selective factor shaping the course of evolution, and
everything is at risk for it – us included. The exigencies of life on land require that organisms cooperate in
making water available to one another, individually and collectively, for otherwise a deadly desiccation
would be the rule, and life as we know it couldn’t exist on land. So, as the authors of Hypersea discuss, we
have living things living inside living things living . . ., predation inside and outside, commensalism and
mutualism alongside parasitism of all kinds, everybody sharing everyone else’s water. Infectious disease is
one way Mother Nature makes sure the water gets where it’s needed, so that species and more generalized
taxa survive, even if it is at the expense of a lot of their individual members (“Mother Nature is a bitch”).
We’re part of the mad circus, ourselves, and the apparent conviction of Americans that they’re somehow
exempt from it is due to a rare, lucky set of circumstances such that for the last 40 years, we’ve been
coasting along on the advances made in medicine, sanitary engineering, food distribution, agronomy,
animal husbandry, and public health services by earlier generations. But we’ve let that system go to rack
and ruin – Gingrich only wants to do so a little more loudly than his predecessors, otherwise plus ça
change, plus ça la meme chose! The protections we think we still have – aren’t there, partly due to
stupidity (overuse of antibiotics), partly to lack of funding and effort (i.e., stupidity). What do we call this
situation, children? We call it DINNERTIME!!! for all good little predacious microbes . . . (Or maybe The
Stand, except it’s already been done, and I could get sued for plagiarism, and besides, we don’t even need
the guv’mint to do it, Mother Nature (= our own stupidity) will do it for us . . .
Please let me know if there’s any way I can help in your preparing to meet whatever may come down
of this nature, I’ll be glad to. Anyone I can help educate about whatever measures are possible should the
plagues hit may end up being one of the very few useful medical resources left in a plague-devastated
America, and may save numerous lives that otherwise would be toast, in that case, especially children and
the adults needed to care for them.
Did you get the copy of the diatribe I sent off to Bill the Pill via email? :)
Your illustration in b/w/y/r of your African Gray parrot was gorgeous! Wanna illustrate my fiction? :)
(I’ve been tempted to get a parrot – but if I did, between Puggsley, the weasels and the bird, I don’t know
which would generate the biggest vet-bills/dings in the furniture/general pandemonium, so I’ve kinda held
off until I can afford a bigger place, with lots of room and maybe padded walls <g> . . .)