Yael R.

Dragwyla First North American rights

Email: Polaris93@aol.com 24,100 words
http://polaris93.livejournal.com/

New Magicks for a New Age

Volume 4: The Notebooks of a Magickian

Book Six: 9/4/95

Thrints

Would it be possible to take an individual eukaryotic organism, e.g., a human being or dog or tree, and
turn it into a virus? That is, could its genotype be encoded in DNA or even RNA together with other
appropriate genetic material so that the result would be able to survive as a virus? If so, you could then fire
the thing off into interstellar space in some sort of encystment medium, e.g., a very large chunk of rock or
as part of a comet, and it might very well make the long, terrible journey to the world of another Star that
way, in a sort of fossilized version of suspended animation. Upon impact on a new world, assuming there
was any carbon-based life there at all and therefore a biosphere friendly to such life, it might very well be
able to find itself a niche and survive, even thrive, in a viral way of life. Shades of H. P. Lovecraft and
Aleister Crowley! In such form, the Old Ones could have crossed the Abysses of Space and Time many
times, discovering our world on one or more of these passages, landing here to take up life among us as
slaver viruses, domesticating Earthly life for their own purposes. And in this way beings we would
perceive as “demons” could have come here and taken up a way of life known only too well via
documented reports of possession and exorcism from numerous cultures.

Further, such “demons” could grant the favor of a kind of immortality to their human pets or partners,
permeating their bodies and, in the process, retro-retro-copying the latter’s human genetic information into
some of their own genetic particles, which would live on after that individual human being died. Those
human/virus hybrid particles, replicating many times and infecting people over a large territory, might then
come to infect a newly-conceived human embryo right at the beginning, and be “incarnated” again as a sort
of genetic hitch-hiker in that child. Is this the origin of some of the extra personalities in certain cases of
multiple personality syndrome – as expressions of human/virus hybrid genes that were not part of the
original intranuclear complement of genes bequeathed to that child by its parents, but rather came on board
in the form of viral invaders close to the moment of conception?

***

“. . . [I]t occurred to [Teppic] that there was one thing left to do which he had not done. He’d never
known how to before, but now he could see that it was just numbers, arranged in a special way. Everything
that was magical was just a way of describing the world in words it couldn’t ignore.”

– Terry Pratchett, Pyramids (New York: ROC Books, 1989), p. 221

***

Magick

The “Tunnels of Set” are Qlipphotic reflections of the Paths of the Qaballah. They are associated with
Tav (Trump XXI, The Universe/World), the Path connecting Sephirah 9, Yesod with Sephirah 10, Malkuth,
because this Path is in turn associated with the sub-Lunar realm, the Lower Astral, encompassing a region
between the Sphere of Luna and the Sphere of Earth into which ultimately, inevitably fall all the Qlippothic
spill-over of Creation and Life. This realm comes under the dominion of Luna, and is therefore associated
with everything else ruled by Her. Luna rules mirrors and, in general, all reflecting surfaces, i.e., all
surfaces not only opaque to certain electromagnetic wavelengths but which cast those wavelengths away
again, after the fashion of mirrors. This includes all those materials which reflect electromagnetic waves
not in the visible spectrum, and either absorb or actually transmit visible light, e.g., lasing or masing gases
which are transparent to visible light but which reflect infra-red, etc.
In the ancient Greek religious story of Perseus, it is told how Perseus killed Medusa by use of mirrors.
He dared not look directly at her, because if he did, he’d be turned to stone, like all her victims. So,
looking at her reflection in a mirror and setting his aim by that reflection, he shot arrows back over his
shoulder, killing her instantly. Could various aspects of or dwellers in the Tunnels of Set be used as
Magickal Mirrors in this way, providing reflections of what the Operator dare not or cannot look at directly,
so that he or she can use that reflection as a source of sighting data by which to deal with the otherwise
deadly unknowable as Perseus used a mirror to kill Medusa?

***

From email correspondence with a friend during July 1995 e.v.

He wrote:

>>>Dear Yael:

>How do you find People of the Lie? Lovely portrait of certain

>Billaraceous types we know, isn’t it?! :(

>>>How did I find it? I just moved my mashed potatoes, and there it was!
>>>(Sorry. . .always wanted to do that. <G>)
>>>Honestly? I thought it was rather tepid, but I admit my expectations were high. “I didn’t sleep with
this woman, so she was evil.” Pshah. I also believe his anthropomorphisms concerning God (sex:male)
and the devil (sex:neutral) are exactly backwards. I feel this reflects the pratfalls of his Christian thinking,
which was sprinkled a little bit too thick in this soup.

I already answered the above – forgot to respond to the following question:

>>>And was I reading an earlier edition? Mine had nothing about the Indiana girls case, and I thought it
would. In fact, as a first draft, I felt the work had merit. It’s a wonderful start. But it needs development,
and better examples.

The book about the killing of the young woman was Cruel Sacrifice, by Aphrodite Jones. It came out in
1994. As for examples – well, I suppose that the reason that Peck’s work struck such chords in me was that
the destructive, devouring parents and the soul-destroying spouse all were so typical of all the people I kept
getting beat up by and beat up by and beat up by from birth on (right down to the present, of which I’ve
already written to you . . . .

My reply:

Dear –

I was a little surprised that you didn’t even seem to notice what Peck had to say about the two sets of
parents that seemed hell-bent on destroying their own children for no particularly good reason, or My Lai,
which many people have agreed was an apotheosis of perfect, senseless, absolute evil. The part about the
woman who came to him for psychoanalysis really didn’t have much to do with sex – it had to do with
issues of power and the way in which people try to connive, manipulate, and bully others into doing what
they want, often rather senselessly and stupidly and without apparent good reason. It certainly isn’t only
Christians who are concerned about such things as wanton child-abuse, soul-murder, mind-rape, and
similar things, I assure you – for one thing, Peck does talk at some length about the horrors that occurred
under Nazism, and those affected Jews, Gypsies, Christians, theosophists, and many others! What I find so
striking about his book is that it deals with the Lie, Evil’s great weapon, and the way in which people
manage to poison themselves and everything and everyone around them by falling into its subtle, seductive
snares. It’s so easy to lie – it gets easier over time – but in the end, it proves to be utterly destructive.
Rather like addiction to crack or something. I had no trouble setting aside issues peculiar to Christianity
and concentrating on those Peck raised which are crucial to all of life, regardless of our beliefs. Evil isn’t
just something Christians dreamed up to scare themselves senseless with – do you think the Clintons are
just a mass hallucination impressed on others by telepathic Christians? And if so, if there is no evil, why
object? Who cares? We all have a concept of what evil is and why it is an abomination: the thing that
attacks the very heart of life, all life, regardless of denomination or even species. Peck makes that clear.
He’s honest enough to warn you that he is in fact a Christian, so you aren’t getting sold a bill of goods – it’s
easy enough to separate the Christianity from the meat of the book, once you’re aware of it. And there’s
plenty of meat left afterwards. At any rate, I think the Clintons and whoever or whatever they front for are
perfect illustrations of People of the Lie, don’t you? Peck describes such very well, and gives a good set of
reasons for why those who still have hearts and souls fear and detest the Lie that make sense to anyone,
regardless of their particular religion. And that’s why I liked that book.

***
Astrology

From email correspondence with a friend:

Dear –
In your charts, there’s nothing ruling out the possibility of the two of you having children together.
Summarizing what I found, while there might be some difficulty conceiving them or bearing them to term,
and also the possibility of adverse effects upon your health, these are only potential problems, which could
be headed off with such things as nutritional supplementation et al, and the children you could have
together would be well worth the trouble and effort.
His Sun, at about 13 degrees Scorpio, squares your Uranus, Moon, and Mercury, indicating potential
friction or something but not much more. His 5th-House ruler, Mercury, at about 3° Sagittarius, trines your
Uranus and Sun, opposes your Mars-Venus midpoint, and squares your Pluto. I.e., your Mars and Venus
together form a Yod with his 5th-House ruler, which could indicate that you two are likely to have children
together, perhaps fraternal twins, a boy and a girl, while the Pluto square may indicate that timing is all-
important when it comes to a successful conception and live birth (not insuperable as a problem).
He has a conjunction of Pluto and Uranus in his 5th House. These square your Venus, sextile your
Sun, conjoin your Part of Fortune (which is in your first House) as well as the midpoint of your Mercury
and Jupiter (another testimony of fate; also, Jupiter rules your Fifth House), squares your Saturn (ruling
your 6th), and quincunxes your Chiron (which is in your 6th House). The square to your Saturn indicates
the possibility that gestation of his child might put a high demand for calcium and other micronutrients,
especially vitamin C, on your system, so you’d need to consult with a nutritionist about that during
gestation. The quincunx to Chiron also means the possibility that unless you took special pains to keep
your body in the best possible shape, nutritionally and otherwise, you could become ill. But this, too, can
be overcome. Everything else is positive.
Your Sun, in your 11th House of hopes and dreams and wishes, trines his Saturn/Chiron conjunction,
conjoins his Jupiter (his 11th ruler), sextiles his Pluto/Uranus conjunction (in his 5th House of Children),
trines his Neptune (which is in his Sixth of Health), squares his 6th cusp (not insuperable, but watch for
blood incompatibilities or genetically inherited allergies or something), and sextiles his 5th (positive).
Your 5th-House ruler Jupiter (which conjoins Spica, a wonderful testimony for children in general),
conjoins the midpoint of his 6th-House Neptune and his 5th-House Uranus/Pluto conjunction (testimony
not only of fate, but also of great power – your children may be badly needed to do a job for the whole
world), quincunxes his Chiron/Saturn conjunction (health or allergy or similar problems to watch for),
trines his Ascendant (tends to cancel out some of the aforesaid problem tendencies), conjoins his 6th (ditto;
he needs to have children with you for his well-being, I think).
Your chart indicates you are both fertile and would be fortunate in any children you do have, and
between your two charts there is more than enough positive stuff to make it highly likely the two of you
will have at least one successful conception (twins?) between you. So go for it!! :)
PS: I could also drag out the Arabian Parts book and try out some of those, but those are only after-
the-fact weighting factors, as it is. Let me know if you need those also.

***

Subj: Gun Love

Date: 95-07-27 15:06:17 EDT
From: Polaris93
To: [Various friends on Internet]

Thought y’all might enjoy the following exchange I had with a correspondent, a most aggressively
passive man, a journalist of the “liberal” (=Clintinoid zomboid) school, who very much enjoys “making
poems to the silver wire,” as Richard Adams puts it in Watership Down:
>>>>>Hmm, [your landlord and his employee] not being too likable unless I’m n their wavelength. .
.sounds like that cracker fool Ackerman that was hanging out at Gary’s “casa” in ‘84, he probably got shot
dead by a well-meaning friend one night in his own home whilst he crept to the bathroom (by the way,
forget what your NRA friends might tell you, having a gun in your home now means that you, an adult
woman, are at least four times more likely to be killed than you were before you bought the damn thing – I
feel sorrier for you because of the attack in ‘88 than I can express but this won’t make you safer). . .

Actually, no, they’re not like Ackerman. Ackerman was a functional illiterate, for one thing – these
two men are well-educated, dedicated science-fiction fans, and politically rather savvy. They are also kind.
They are as capable of hoof-in-mouth outbreaks as anyone else (including me ‘n’ you, brother, including
me ‘n’ you), and they each their own garden of peculiarities – but so do I, and they are my friends, as Gary
was, and friends are good to have. As for what my “NRA friends tell” me, they didn’t. I live in a very
rough neighborhood, the cops do not protect householders here, only investigate after the fact, and the
criminals avoid the places where they know householders are likely to shoot, just as they do the places from
which loud barking sounds emitteth, unless they are stone crazy, which is what the gun is for, the “hot
prowlers.” The sort of guns they “break in” for are collections of expensive, high-power weapons, not the
little revolver I carry and know how to use well. The FBI crime statistics files also show that householders,
male and female, who have a gun, know how to use it, are prepared to use it if necessary in self-defense,
are something like a tenth as likely to suffer from violence done to their persons in their homes – if there
are break-ins, they take care of those in short order, and they are less likely to suffer from break-ins,
because they are also foresighted enough to make it harder to break in undetected and harder to break in
period. We all die sometime, some way, and there is no such thing as absolute physical security, but you
can sure as shit shift the odds! As for feeling sorry for me – the people who felt sorriest for me, so they
said, were the radical feminists who then tried to harangue me into their thing and/or push me into
committing suicide, but who sure never offered me any protection. The same is true of men who “feel
sorry for me,” but do nothing either to protect me or teach me how to protect myself. So I decided, the
sob’s may get me, but I’ll sure as hell go down fighting. All the gun does is give me a chance – but that’s
one fuck of a lot better than the cops, most of my friends, or anybody else ever did! There’s a thing about
empty sympathy that sends cold chills down my spine, too – I’ve been stalked by predators all my life,
from birth on (my adoptive father and his buddies were predators), and one favorite trick predators use is to
ooze sympathy for you as a way of getting inside your guard so they can then get you. It’s like
“compliments.” Lots of good people give both sympathy and compliments, but I’ve been exposed to the
bad ones too many times. I’ll do what I can to protect myself, thanks – it’s better than nothing at all. (Eric
or Kevin, should they hear something going on here, or hear me call for help, would come to the rescue, but
what if they don’t hear, or don’t have time to get here to do any good?) It wasn’t the NRA that convinced
me to join the NRA – it was the perp who raped me, the cops who did nothing to catch him, all the people
who made fun of me or tried to use me afterward, and so on.
And where did you get the statistics on which you based your assertion that “you are four times more
likely etc”? Or are you just passing on that some anti-self-defense group is pushing? Because, as I’ve said,
the official US crime statistics tell a very different story – and out of curiosity, I did check those, for twenty
years running! Since the FBI, BATF, and like that hate the NRA, they don’t have reason to pad the data,
and if anything, they’d err on the side of whatever would hurt the NRA. So I trust these data.
And of course the perps I’m really worried about are those workin’ for the US guv’mint. If they’re
gonna burn me to death in my own home, don’t I at least get a pistol to fight back with?

>>>>Statistics don’t make your case as far as this weapon making you and your companions safer; quite
the contrary, in fact. sigh.

As I said, I’m curious about where you got your statistics. The FBI collects theirs from all police
precincts in this country, insofar as is possible. They may or may not dick with the data, but the data-base
is quite sound, and nobody has access to a better one. I’ve also looked at independent tallies by various
police organizations in this country using those same statistics, all of which say pretty much what the FBI
stats do – people who are prepared to protect themselves are at less risk than those who are not, since police
cannot protect citizens except by sheer accident, only precincts, and otherwise only investigate afterward. I
learned long, long ago that whenever I needed protection, no one but me would ever be here to do the job.
I don’t give a shit whose sensibilities I offend by my willingness to defend myself at need – I have no
intention of ever putting myself at risk of the sort of thing I went through in 1988 for anyone’s
sentimentality, because I know very well that whoever it is whose sentiments I’d be protecting would never
do jack to protect me, nor anyone else. Eric, some of us are of value to others – I was never one of them,
and I’ve long since lost all illusions that I ever was. I’m not rich, I long ago lost whatever dubious physical
attractions I ever had, and as far as my intellectual value goes, the fact that I’ve never been able to get my
literary work, whether fiction or otherwise, commercially published says it all. We are biological creatures
in a biological universe, the nature of which is pretty well summed up in that awful but all-too true phrase,
“There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Those who have no value to others either do for themselves or go
under – and people who were never valued as people, right from the very beginning, as was true of me,
never have much of a chance to accrue such value later on. To put the best face on it. So you can shun me
or think I’m crazy or whatever the hell for my determination to protect myself at need – without, mind you,
putting innocent bystanders at risk in the process; my Bujinkan Budo taijutsu combat-arts instructor would
shit if I ever did such a criminally irresponsible thing! – and it is absolutely irrelevant, because I am the
only one who will ever take any responsibility for my safety and well-being.
If that makes me a “gun nut” – so sue me.

***

Astrology: Chiron returns

The 50th anniversary of any historically important event is always important to us – for example, in the
Old Testament, in Judea every 50th year in succession was a “jubilee year,” when all debts were forgiven,
all servants set free, and so on. This may be because it is also the Chiron return of the event, the time when
the giant planetary comet Chiron returns to the same celestial longitude at which He stood when the
original event occurred, of which this is the 50th anniversary. This year, 1995, is the 50th anniversary of
the end of World War II and its aftermath – of the liberation of Germany’s death-camps and the Japanese
concentration camps by victorious Allied military forces, of the dropping of the Bomb upon Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, and so forth. While there have been many memorials of these events, in a great variety of forms
from literature and cinema to memorial statuary, paintings, and journalistic photographic portfolios, it
would be expected that anything that comes out as Chiron returns to His place in the sky where He stood
during those horrifying times 50 years ago will have far greater psychospiritual, legal, social, and other
human impact than any that went before it.

Between 1984 and the present, with Pluto’s ingress into Scorpio and Neptune’s into Capricorn, rapidly
followed in 1988 by Saturn’s and Uranus into Capricorn as well (Saturn thereafter entering first Aquarius,
then Pisces, remaining in mutual reception with first Uranus, then Neptune, while the latter two conjoined
in Capricorn in 1993-1994), the mood of the whole world has been tumbling down into despair. Chiron’s
perihelion passage in the last couple of years and, possibly, the splendid but unnerving impact of the
fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy onto Jupiter during July 16-21 in 1994, last year, may well have
added to that mood. Everything bad that could possibly happen, did; then it got stuck that way; then it
rotted – such has been the effect of Pluto in Scorpio sextile Neptune in Capricorn. Uranus in Capricorn is
like a maniac in a straight-jacket, while Saturn in Pisces (1993-1996) is Arsenic and Old Lace. With this
background, what revelations are likely to come forth as Pluto goes direct on the 8th of this month (August
1995) and enters Sagittarius (November 10, 1995), followed by Uranus’s ingress into Aquarius in January
of next year? Pluto in Sagittarius is the funeral pyre on which all the rot of Pluto in Scorpio is burned
away; Uranus in Aquarius is the Eagle in Flight. The former brings jihads, the latter brings freedom –
what revolutions will come forth now, as well? What new information will be made public about the A-
bombing of Hiroshima (a uranium-core version of the Bomb) and Nagasaki (a plutonium-core Bomb),
Hitler’s death-camps (Pluto/Neptune/Uranus/Saturn all associated with it), the establishment at the end of
WW 2 of clandestine arms of the US government such as the National Security Council that were
accountable to no one, not even Congress (Neptune, Pluto, possibly Uranus), and all the rest of the world-
shattering, culture-blasting end and aftermath of World War II?
Anyone out there have any ideas? Anyone seen stuff come out that matches the current configuration
of transiting Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, and Chiron and Their aspects to Their positions back in 1945-
1946? I’d be interested in any feedback you might have, as the Outer Planets are all prominent in my natal
chart (March 20, 1945, @ 5:48 p.m. PWT, Pasadena, CA, USA) and my life has had disturbingly close
synchronies with the major historical events of this century (e.g., my natural mother was born on Aug 9,
1909, exactly 36 years to the day prior to the A-bombing of Nagasaki). Be interested in anything you come
up with.

***

Alchemy and Astrology of Health

AolMail
Subj: Kombucha Tea
To: [Various correspondents on Internet]

After years of increasingly, frighteningly bad health, I just discovered kombucha tea – and in just 3
days, since I first began taking it, suddenly I have the energy I did 20 years ago, the symptoms of my
illness are suddenly clearing up, and even things such as eyesight and hearing are better! Kombucha is a
type of fungus that is made into a drink which tastes something like a good tart wine or a honeyed apple
vinegar, with an admixture of “bite” to it like ginger-ale or other carbonated drink. Fungi are ruled by
Pluto (Hades), Who rules regeneration, rebirth, transmutation, blacksmithing, and Alchemy, the study and
practice of the process by which the Great Changes of Nature come about within the time-scale of a human
life rather than over centuries or geological eras, as is usually the case. It seems I’m being given a second
chance by Lord Pluto, in the form of the marvelous natural alchemy provided by this fungus, one of His
subjects! Pluto has been trining my natal Sun (0° 3’ Aries Sun) since His entry into Sagittarius and return
to Scorpio earlier this year, and will complete the trine early in November of this year, as He re-enters
Sagittarius on November 10 and leaves Scorpio permanently (at least, as far as our lifetimes go!). Does
anyone know anything about the astrology of fungi, especially with respect to Pluto? (One is reminded of
the collection of the poetry of H. P. Lovecraft, Fungi from Yuggoth – “Yuggoth” was his name for Pluto,
the Gateway to the Universe for the Solar System, and the beings that came from or through Pluto from
other realms to terrorize us here on Earth. Apparently, as in the story of Pandora, at least one of them may
not have been so bad – the good spirit “Kombucha”! <g>) I’ll keep you posted on this – it looks as if all
the hype about the stuff wasn’t just hype, after all!

***

The Astrology of Health

AolMail
Subj: The Astrology of Alchemy
To: [Various correspondents on Internet]

I’ve been concerned lately with the astrology of Alchemy, because Alchemy is an artificially
compressed and revved-up version of Nature’s way of doing things, carried out as a spiritual discipline by
human beings in order to study the spiritual aspects of the natural, physical world. Therefore Alchemy has
long been concerned with the biochemistry of the body and its relationship to its environment, especially as
these have to do with health. My own health having been bad for so long, I’ve been very interested in
learning how biochemical function has to do with health. Since Alchemy has long studied just this aspect
of nature, and the production of medicines produced by Alchemical means has probably been part of
Alchemy as long as the discipline has existed, I have been interested in the relationship between the
Alchemical and the astrological rulers of matters concerned with healing, health, disease, regeneration,
regrowth, rejuvenation, and so on.
While Mercury, in the person of Hermes Trismegistus or Djehuti Greatest of Gods, is ruler of all the
esoteric Arts and Sciences, and thus the general ruler of Alchemy, as He is of astrology, Pluto (Hades) is
Lord of the arts of the smith and transmutation, death and rebirth and rejuvenation, and therefore is also a
Lord of Alchemy. Between 1971 and 1989, Pluto transited through first the Sign Libra, in which He is in
His detriment, then the second half of the Via Combusta (0° - 14° 59’ Scorpio), in which He, like all other
Planets and the Lights, is weaker than anywhere else. Now He is finishing up His term in the second half
of Scorpio, where He is in His essential dignity; on November 10 of this year, He will enter Sagittarius,
where He is exalted, and in a few years He will enter Capricorn, of which He is esoteric Lord, stronger than
in any other Sign save Leo, His other esoteric rulership. I find it fascinating that His influence on Earthly
life during His traverse of Scorpio, Sagittarius, and Capricorn – Signs of His strength – matches the
essential process of Alchemy: the Black Dragon of putrefaction (Pluto in Scorpio), Calcination (Pluto in
Sagittarius), and Manifestation/Transmutation/Condensation (Pluto in Capricorn).
Incidentally, Alchemy, like Thaumaturgy, is a study of the Spirit in matter and through matter, of the
establishment of a scientific morality grounded in belief in God as manifest in Creation, including the
physical world, and the perfection of the spirit through matter and vice-versa. Chemistry is Alchemy
without Spirit (God = AL), just as modern physics and engineering are thaumaturgy without a spiritual
emphasis. Science not centered on God-in-Nature inevitably produces horrors such as the Union Carbide
disaster in Bhopal in 1977, or Hiroshima in 1945, just as religion not centered on God-manifest-through-
Creation produces horrors such as the mass burning of heretics throughout Europe during the Middle Ages.
Like all other Hermetic Arts and Sciences, Alchemy is built upon astrology, which is the study of the Will
of God as manifest in the Heavens. So that aspect of God ruling Alchemy is the God or Archangel we call
Pluto (Hades), and it is by His Will that the natural Alchemical transmutations that we perceive as the
processes of falling sick, healing, dying, birth, and so on take place. It is when we resist the Will of the
Gods that life goes wrong, or so all the esoteric disciplines teach; so if one is to achieve and maintain
health, Alchemical processes that replicate in the microcosm what Nature does in the macrocosm through
the changing seasons and centuries and geological eras and eons, then it is necessary to conform to the Will
of the Gods having to do with health. While Mercury (Hermes) rules health, Pluto (Hades) rules the most
profound aspects of health, illness, and healing; Mercury is exalted in Capricorn, of which Pluto is esoteric
Lord, and perhaps by research into the functions and influence of Capricorn more may be understood about
these all-important aspects of our lives.
If anyone has any thoughts on this, any criticism, comments, or questions, I’d like to see them, because
all of it will have a bearing on the nature of health and the things that influence it, which are foremost in
importance to me right now. Thanks in advance.

***

From email correspondence with a friend, Summer of 1995 e.v.

How long has Pluto been retrograde? Pluto R in

Scorpio has go to be the height of self-transformative
energies, yes? Rather like being in a cocoon? When it goes
direct, then the nature of the transformation changes?

Pluto has been retrograde this time since about March 2 or 3. Pluto and Neptune both do things like the
pupal stage of organisms like butterflies and moths. Neptune is the cocoon itself, and the disorganized goo
into which the transforming larva first breaks down, and Pluto is the seed of new form within the goo, and
the process by which it becomes the imago. Pluto has His essential dignity in Scorpio, while Neptune is its
diurnal esoteric Lord; both have to do with different aspects of transformation, just as they both have to do
with different aspects of death, re-birth, and so on (for example, Neptune and Pisces rule the Crucifixion,
Pluto and Aries rule the Resurrection). Neptune rules the breaking-down of the old form into something
that Pluto can then transform into the new, but both are aspects of Scorpio. Neptune rules the rot that Pluto
requires to take away the last of the Old so that the New can come into being, but Pluto does the killing off
of the Old that provides the substrate for Neptune to use to produce the rot – in other words, the two are
partners, sort of, at least in the “dirty work” of Nature’s Alchemy (i.e., death, rot, suppuration, and other
Guh-ROSS stuff like that). Anyway, Pluto retrograde does that portion of His work that requires stillness
and darkness, hiddenness, or that must take place on the Inner Planes before it can manifest on the Outer
Planes; when Pluto goes direct, this work is completed and it is then made manifest unto the Light. Pluto’s
Scorpionic side is more evident when He is retrograde; His Arian side, when He is direct.

Received your illos yesterday. Figures 1 through 20-C and

Tables 1-11. Also cartoons, etc. Didn’t know you did covers!
Do you collect them as well? Some very interesting ones in
there.

Well, I doodle covers. By “collect,” do you mean by others? I have a couple of coffee-table-type
portfolios by Michael Whelan (did the black/white/gray/red covers for Ballantine’s reprints of Lovecraft
and some stuff by Stephen King), Virgil (“Weird Science”) Finlay, et al, that contain a lot of their best, if
that’s what you mean.

>>>>>Perhaps it is the memory, biochemically embedded in the tissues of all modern Earthly life, of that
ancient world-cracking catastrophe, the close approach of Luna to the young Earth, that accounts for so
much of Luna’s power over us and Her central place in so many of our mythologies, religions, and
Magickal systems. Were the echoes of that cataclysm sensed by Hans Horbiger when, inspired by the sight
of molten metal falling upon frozen mud, he had the mystical vision out of which evolved his infamous
Welt-Eis Lehre or “World Ice Theory”? This theory, which asserts that our world and all its life were the
products of a series of catastrophic interactions between cosmic fire and cosmic ice, eventually became the
quasi-official cosmological doctrine of the Nazi Party in Germany during Hitler’s chancellorship of that
unhappy nation. Were Herr Doktor Horbiger and his followers, all unknowingly, acting on an ancient,
ancient memory locked into the tissues of all Earth’s modern life?
The ancient Greeks believed that in the beginning, Eurynome, the Goddess of All Things, was born of
Chaos into the Void. Finding nothing substantial for Her feet to rest upon, She therefore divided the sea
from the sky, and danced all alone on the waves of the sea for unknown Aeons. Dancing toward the South,
She set in motion a wind in her wake that seemed to be something new, not part of Her, suitable as raw
material for Her to begin the work of creation upon it. Wheeling about, She caught hold of this North
wind, rubbed it between Her hands, and thereby created the great serpent Ophion. Coupling with Ophion,
She gave birth to the Cosmos – the Sun, the Moon, all the Planets, the Stars, and the living Earth with all
Her creatures, plant and animal and all else.
But there was one school that believed that black-winged Night, a Goddess of Whom even Zeus stands
in awe, was courted by the Wind and laid a silver egg in the Womb of Darkness. Eros, Whom some call
Phanes, was hatched from this egg, and set the Cosmos in motion. This silver egg was of course the Moon,
Who is thus the Grandmother of All Things.*

*Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, op. cit., Volume 1, pp. 29-31.

In such origin stories, are there echoes of an ancient, world-cracking catastrophe without which all
modern forms of life could not have come to into existence? Is it possible that, knowingly or otherwise, we
are able to access all the biological information in all the components of our living bodies, including all the
“silent” DNA in the nuclei of our cells, or even the extra-nuclear DNA of the mitochondria and other
organelles of those same cells? More and more, current biological theory holds that modern eukaryotic*
cells – including those of our own bodies – are the descendants of ancient compacts among unicellular
organisms of the early Earth, by which various types of cells banded together to form the first complex
cells, ancestors to those in the bodies of all modern eukaryotic life.
 It’s fairly-well accepted now. Here’s a quote from the latest
textbook: “Both chloroplasts and mitochondria appear to be
remnants of organisms that established symbiotic
relationships with the ancestors of modern eukaryotic
organisms. This endosymbiotic theory of the origin of these
organelles postulates that chloroplasts are derived from
photosynthetic cyanobacteria, whereas mitochondria are the
descendants of aerobic bacteria. . . .Primitive eukaryotes
lacking chloroplasts or mitochondria probably could only live
in aerobic environments. Oxygen is toxic to most anaerobes
and they are killed if exposed to air. The formation of a
symbiotic relationship with the aerobic bacterial precursors
of mitochondria enabled these organisms to live in an
atmosphere containing oxygen, whereas a symbiotic
relationship with a photosynthetic organism would enable the
eukaryote to use light energy to drive synthetic chemical
reactions. There is considerable evidence to support this
theory. . . .” Plant Growth and Development. ed. Donald E.

Fosket. Academic Press Inc. 1994.

I know. But when I first wrote up that chapter, about three years ago, I used what was then available to me.
This will all (I hope! <g>) be thoroughly edited and updated before it ever gets published for real; for now,
I’m getting down onto disk what I’ve got and putting backups in safety-deposit storage as well as leaving
copies with friends who can critique them, to make sure it gets done in some form before I’m not around to
do it any more. I may live another hundred years, who knows – but Gary’s death got through to me as
nothing else ever has that I don’t have forever, that this has to get done now, because otherwise it might not
get done at all. Hence some of this stuff may be a little out of date – for now. But the intention is that by
the time it is published in final form, whenever that is, it will be completely revised and updated to conform
with state-of-the-art/science understanding of the subject at hand, insofar as is possible.

>>>>>According to the work of Lynn Margulis et alia,** the organelles of modern cells, each of which has
its own compliment of DNA, separate from that of any other organelle in the cell, including the nucleus
(which is an organelle in its own right), were originally free-living organisms which somehow came
together to form obligate symbiotic partnerships.

No. . . not all organelles have DNA. . . only mitochondria and

chloroplasts.

Noted – please understand, I never was able to get even my bachelor’s, in spite of some 250 quarter-hours
of study at university level and, later, all my reading in various aspects of biology since, because of my
long, long invalidism and all my illnesses since I was about 24. I’ve had to wing it, unfortunately <wistful
sigh>, and consequently there are vast, terrible gaps in my knowledge. These are being closed up in many
cases due to the very kind and helpful feedback from friends like you who do have the solid grounding in
the life sciences I lack. As I said, I’m getting this down any way I can – but it all badly needs editing, and a
good critic, especially someone well-educated in biology, is a Godsend! Thanks so much for pointing out
errors such as these – if this tome ever makes it to the public and is well-received, it will be because of help
such as yours to make sure it is as scientifically accurate and state-of-the-art as possible!

>>>>>These partnerships did so well that they have persisted right down to the present day, billions of
years later, comprising all modern Earthly eukaryotic life.
*Eukaryote: any organism, unicellular or multicellular, whose cells have membrane-bound nuclei and
organelles. As opposed to prokaryotes, also called bacteria and monera, unicellular organisms which
lack these.

**There are a number of excellent sources for discussion on this theory and research behind it. These
include, e.g., Lynn Margulis’s Origin of the Eukaryotic Cell: Evidence and Research Implications for
a Theory of the Origin and Evolution of Microbial Plant and Animal Cells on the Precambrian Earth
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), Mark and Diana McMenamin’s Hypersea: Life on
Land (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), and many others. See Section 2.2.3 of Appendix
5 of Volume I (NM0CEBBC–), especially Section 2.2.3.3 (NM0CEBBC.C00, works on evolution and
sociobiology), for a listing of works in the biological sciences for more sources of discussion
concerning this concept.

Are some of those organelles remnants of Earth’s life that existed prior to the cataclysmic near-
approach of Luna to Earth and the world-rending trauma that were the consequences of that approach? Is it
somehow possible, consciously or otherwise, to commune with the organelles in the cells of our own
bodies, including those outside the envelope of our cellular nuclei, which may be the descendants from
beings that existed before that unthinkable catastrophe, and learn from them something of their ancestry
and history? Is it possible in this way to catch glimpses of the way our world was before Luna’s close
approach to us – or of the shattering horror which destroyed Nykte, Earth’s pre-Gaian early biosphere,
several billion years ago?

The shattering horror? Do you mean the evolution of

photosynthesis, which rusted the world’s oceans, and
suffocated all the anaerobic organisms present except those
that found an anaerobic niche deep within the earth or within
another cell (=mitochondria)?

No, actually, I was referring to the damage done to the physical body of the Earth by the close approach of
Luna, and the consequences thereof, e.g., the vast outwellings of magma from the deep mantle released
along huge cracks girdling Earth at 4g degrees North and South of Her equator, caused by Luna’s approach.
In Gary’s last couple of years, he and I frequently discussed recent findings by planetary scientists of all
types concerning revenants of Nykte, Earth’s first, pre-approach biosphere, which apparently was nothing
like Gaia, the current one, except that it did possess DNA and/or RNA, and may have provided the
ancestors of modern life. It seems likely, according to what has been found, that modern aerobic life was
given its first start on a world-wide scale by that catastrophe, a la some of the implications of Stephen
Gould’s “punctuated equilibrium” model of the evolution of life on Earth, which is now pretty much
accepted as the Way Things Were by biologists, I understand (or is that just what Gould & Co. say about
it? <g> – Frankly, it makes sense to me, too, so I accept it, until something more convincing comes along).
In other words, those Nyktean organisms which produced oxygen and/or used it may have had a selective
advantage over anaerobic ones, so they gained the edge right after Luna’s close approach, and became the
ancestors of most of Earth’s life today. If I run across discussion of this among the books I inherited from
Gary or my own periodicals or anything else, I’ll let you know – it’s a fascinating window on Earth’s first
life and what happened to it. At any rate, truly the Oxygen Catastrophe was a very real cataclysm as far as
most of Earth’s first life was concerned, but not as bad as the thing that preceded it and laid the ground for
it, the close approach to the Earth of Luna, which gave the oxygen-producing aerobes the edge over the
anaerobic competition, and also wiped out vast chunks of Nykte as She was then, right before Luna’s close
approach. Seas boiled due to the magmatic outwellings from the mantle along the vast cracks at 45 degrees
North and South of the equator, the atmosphere was made highly poisonous over much of the globe from
toxic fumes vented from those cracks, and the tectonic effects must have been horrendous, to say the least.
So much or most of Nykte must have been wiped out within days of the opening of those vents, as Luna
almost pulled our world apart by Her close approach – Kali Destroyer! Shiva, Shatterer of Worlds, indeed!
Are those ancient Lunar Gods personifications of that primordial memory in the cells of all living things of
that catastrophe? Well, be that as it may, that was the “horror” I was referring to. The advent of the Green
Marauder, as Larry Niven refers to photosynthesizing life such as cyanobacteria and Kingdom Plantae, and
the Oxygen Revolution it brought about only came later, a byproduct of that far greater catastrophe, the
maiming and wounding of the physical Earth due to Luna’s close approach some 2 gigayears or so ago.

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

The true hallmark, the unmistakable signature of life is Will, by whatever name – purposiveness,
intentionality, spiritedness – which from an objective, external point of view as homeostasis. Where Will
and its signature trademark of homeostasis appear, there is life and spirit, two sides of one coin. You can
hear brain-damage due to any cause, possession due to neuroendocrinological viral infection, or any other
non-psychological dysfunction of the central nervous system in the sufferer’s voice, and always it has the
signature of life, homeostasis, deliberate, willed return to a set-point – in this case, a set-point and a timing
of return not willed, consciously or otherwise, by the afflicted person. So some other organism or aspect of
life, if only a mechanical injury to the brain, is involved in such cases, not the person. Even possession
thus has a biology, one best described by epidemiology, microbiology, and xenological psychological
rather than human psychology.

***

Memory is not only psychological – it is physiological, encoded in the tissues of our bodies. Scars are
histological memories of injury; when they occur in the brain, those memories can seem very
psychological in nature, yet are nevertheless quite physical in their origin or, at least, the source of their
elicitation, as in the case of, e.g., epileptiform seizures. In auto-immune diseases, is it perhaps true in some
cases, at least, that the immune system perceives the scars of old wounds – whether in the form of
connective tissue, replacing tissue destroyed by a mechanical or thermal wound, or intracellular scarring
inflicted on individual living cells in various tissues by chemical and/or radiological traumae and insult – as
“the enemy,” thereupon attacking those inert scars as if they were live microbiological invaders? In such a
case, obviously the immune system is out of whack; the body is attacking what it ought to be ignoring,
cleaning out, or replacing with healthy tissue. Here, memory, ruled by Luna (neuroendocrinological or
“psychological” memory, an effect, direct or indirect, of the experience of the whole organism) and
Neptune (endocrine function, chemical/intra-cellular memory) are involved, as well as Mars (immune
response, scar-tissue).

***

From email correspondence with a friend, Summer 1995 e.v.

Well yea. . . wouldn’t expect you to know all the details of

mitochondrial genomes. I think your book *will* be published
and well-received. That’s why I offer what tidbits I can from
my particular field of expertise. Just trying to keep you
honest. But don’t expect much useful critique from me in the
field of astrophysics. . .
For astrophysics, we have other critics – ever had your ears pounded by a ghost because you confused a
nebula with a galaxy? :) (Gary, I know that was you, dammit . . .)

>>>Hope you’re doing well – hoist a few brewskies in your celebrating for me if that’s your thing, and may
this be the beginning of wonderful things for you!

Thanks. (Had a few last night |*)

Oh, so that’s why I had that astral hangover! <G> But seriously, folks . . .

>>>I’ve been concerned lately with the astrology of Alchemy, because

Alchemy is an artificially compressed and revved-up version of Nature’s way of doing things, carried out
as a spiritual discipline by human beings in order to study the spiritual aspects of the natural, physical
world. Therefore Alchemy has long been concerned with the biochemistry of the body and its relationship
to its environment, especially as these have to do with health. My own health having been bad for so long,
I’ve been very interested in learning how biochemical function has to do with health. Since Alchemy has
long studied just this aspect of nature, and the production of medicines produced by Alchemical means has
probably been part of Alchemy as long as the discipline has existed, I have been interested in the
relationship between the Alchemical and the astrological rulers of matters concerned with healing, health,
disease, regeneration, regrowth, rejuvenation, and so on.
While Mercury, in the person of Hermes Trismegistus or Djehuti Greatest of Gods, is ruler of all the
esoteric Arts and Sciences, and thus the general ruler of Alchemy, as He is of astrology, Pluto (Hades) is
Lord of the arts of the smith and transmutation, death and rebirth and rejuvenation, and therefore is also a
Lord of Alchemy. Between 1971 and 1989, Pluto transited through first the Sign Libra, in which He is in
His detriment, then the second half of the Via Combusta (0° - 14° 59’ Scorpio), in which He, like all other
Planets and the Lights, is weaker than anywhere else. Now He is finishing up His term in the second half
of Scorpio, where He is in His essential dignity; on November 10 of this year, He will enter Sagittarius,
where He is exalted, and in a few years He will enter Capricorn, of which He is esoteric Lord, stronger than
in any other Sign save Leo, His other esoteric rulership. I find it fascinating that His influence on Earthly
life during His traverse of Scorpio, Sagittarius, and Capricorn – Signs of His strength – matches the
essential process of Alchemy: the Black Dragon of putrefaction (Pluto in Scorpio), Calcination (Pluto in
Sagittarius), and Manifestation/Transmutation/Condensation (Pluto in Capricorn).
Incidentally, Alchemy, like Thaumaturgy, is a study of the Spirit in matter and through matter, of the
establishment of a scientific morality grounded in belief in God as manifest in Creation, including the
physical world, and the perfection of the spirit through matter and vice-versa. Chemistry is Alchemy
without Spirit (God = AL), just as modern physics and engineering are thaumaturgy without a spiritual
emphasis. Science not centered on God-in-Nature inevitably produces horrors such as the Union Carbide
disaster in Bhopal in 1977, or Hiroshima in 1945, just as religion not centered on God-manifest-through-
Creation produces horrors such as the mass burning of heretics throughout Europe during the Middle Ages.
Like all other Hermetic Arts and Sciences, Alchemy is built upon astrology, which is the study of the Will
of God as manifest in the Heavens. So that aspect of God ruling Alchemy is the God or Archangel we call
Pluto (Hades), and it is by His Will that the natural Alchemical transmutations that we perceive as the
processes of falling sick, healing, dying, birth, and so on take place.
It is when we resist the Will of the Gods that life goes wrong, or so all the esoteric disciplines teach;
so if one is to achieve and maintain health, Alchemical processes that replicate in the microcosm what
Nature does in the macrocosm through the changing seasons and centuries and geological eras and eons,
then it is necessary to conform to the Will of the Gods having to do with health. While Mercury (Hermes)
rules health, Pluto (Hades) rules the most profound aspects of health, illness, and healing; Mercury is
exalted in Capricorn, of which Pluto is esoteric Lord, and perhaps by research into the functions and
influence of Capricorn more may be understood about these all-important aspects of our lives.

Capricorn is patient, slow growth. Pluto is radical

transformation. Reconciling the two seems difficult, but I
 think it’s possible. A long, slow, process which leads
ultimately to major change, perhaps? Like years of physical
therapy which result finally in recovering the use of a limb.
An unhealthy Capricorn/Saturn is a sad thing indeed. . .
depression, discouragement, loss of the will to go on. But
it’s said that Saturn delays yet does not deny objectives.
The trick is to keep going, despite delays, despite setbacks,
to always keep moving and growing, albeit it ever so slowly.
Pluto, the transforming principle. Like making compost from
dung and dead weeds. A long, slow process that brings about
a major transformation. The caterpillar in its cocoon.
Applied to health, it could mean making many small, positive
changes in one’s attitude or lifestyle over the years.
Keeping a positive attitude, yet not getting caught up in
trendy panaceas. Good, sensible health practices. Above all
Capricorn is down-to-earth common sense. Giving the body
proper nourishment, both mental and physical, in order to
grow in a healthy way, ultimately to emerge transformed, as
Pluto promises. What do you think? Any of this sound right?

Pluto is also raw power, power in its most elemental aspect, and Capricorn is politics – the two go together
like bread-and-butter! Also, think of catastrophe theory, or the way in which crystals suddenly beginning
to saturate out of solution after a long time of adding solute to no apparent effect. Like toasting toast – the
bread doesn’t change at all for quite a while, then suddenly goes dark, undergoes a phase-change at the
moment the last of the moisture in the bread leaves due to the heating of the toaster. Pluto in Scorpio is that
phase of the Alchemical process called decomposition of the original substance, during which the original
material is subjected to things which detach its quantum-body essence from everything not part of that
essence, not essential to its nature; Pluto in Sagittarius is the Refiner’s Fire, burning away the dross, the
unessential garbage rotted away by Pluto in Scorpio; Pluto in Capricorn is the sudden appearance of new
form, the result of recomposition of the mercury (essence), sulfur (energy) and salt (calcined ash) of the
substance, its decomposition products. This manifestation comes at the end of the long, long, tedious,
weary Alchemical process, and comes all at once – form suddenly manifesting from force and flow, like
salt or sugar suddenly precipitating out of a supersaturated solution, or super-cooled water suddenly turning
to ice in one overall phase-change due to a sudden loud noise or shock. The radical change (Pluto), in this
case, is the virtually instantaneous transition from formlessness to form; the form (Capricorn) is the
result of that change, which is proceeded by force (Sagittarius) and, before that, flow (Scorpio).
– Not that I’m an alchemist, by any means, or even any sort of Alchemical scholar! But this is the
basic idea. I think. :-| . .

***

Comet Hale-Bopp 0195: From email correspondence during August 1995 e.v.:

AolMail
Subj: Comet Hale-Bopp 0195
To: [A friend on Internet]

John P., you were right! Comet Hale-Bopp 0195 is quite real, and if its current apparent
brightness/size aren’t just the result of temporary outgassing, it may well be one of the biggest, brightest
comets in history, at least as much so as Halley’s Comet was at the latter’s best! (Q.: Why was Halley’s
Comet so disappointingly dim and non-noteworthy at its last passage? – Ans.: When it came back in 1910
to pick up Mark Twain, he cussed it out so bad that he shocked the daylights out of it, and it’s only been a
shadow of its former glory ever since! <g>) This new comet is currently (as of August 8, 1995, the day
Pluto went direct for the last time in Scorpio in our lifetimes, just a couple of day’s after the comet’s
discovery) at a celestial longitude equivalent to 18 h 33 m sidereal time, and a declination of -31° 38’ (i.e.,
31° 38’ south of the celestial equator, far South of Sol’s or even Luna’s greatest southern declination, but
not very far south of Pluto’s greatest southern declination). 18 h 33 m sidereal time is equivalent to about
16 degrees 30 minutes Capricorn, a little over halfway through that southern Sign. The comet is now just
inside Jupiter’s orbit, and if it is as big as its current brightness indicates, it is over 100 miles across – about
the size of the planetoid/cometoid Chiron, which is a comet by dint of its physical makeup, but a planetoid
because it is in a true orbit around Sol, between the orbits of Uranus and Saturn.
Capricorn’s mundane Lord is Saturn, and its esoteric Lord is Pluto, both Gods of Winter, death,
desolation, and darkness. The Babylonians referred to everything North of the celestial equator as “the
Heavens,” everything South of it as “the Hells.” These Planets – especially Pluto, with His extreme
Southern declination – are thus truly Lords of the Hells, and it is out of Their frigid, desolate realm that this
comet comes. At this point, it is only about 7 degrees West of Neptune, also in Capricorn, and thus
technically in conjunction with the Lord of Oceans, and about 11 degrees West of Uranus, Lord of the Sky,
Who is now still conjunct Neptune in Capricorn and sextile Pluto in Scorpio.
Back in Spring of 1984 e.v., when I was still living in Santa Barbara, California, an outstanding
astrologer who had briefly moved there from Oregon and was on the verge of moving right back to Oregon
again (Santa Barbara has had that effect on a lot of people – like me, f’rinstance! <g>), gave a lecture on
various astrological topics. At one point, some dear soul in the front row with too much money and time
on her hands and not much sense asked the lecturer, “Ooooh, what wonderful things will Pluto in Scorpio
bring us, my de-ah?” The astrologer’s answer: “Well, first, by way of background, you are of course
aware that Pluto goes through Scorpio faster than any other Sign, taking just 11 years to the 30 it needs to
go through, say, Taurus? – Good. Well, then, I am reminded of a quote from the Book of Matthew: ‘Save
that time be shortened, not one shall be left alive.’ Essentially, as a result of Pluto’s transits, ‘Everything
alive shall live – and everything dead shall die.’ . . . Any questions?” (You could have heard a pin drop. In
that wonderful, totally plastic New Age community, which lived in a reality shared by nobody else on the
planet, that was about like farting in church – “Trouble is only an attitude! Your mother died because she
had bad thoughts! It’s only your karma! So go be here right now – over there.” For the remainder of her
excellent lecture, the atmosphere in the room was, shall we say, more than a little subdued.)
Well, on top of all that, in 1988, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune were all together in Capricorn, with
Neptune sextile Pluto then as now. Uranus slowly moved to conjoin Neptune in Capricorn, which He did
last year, while Saturn went on into Aquarius, where He was in mutual reception with Uranus, then Pisces,
where He was in mutual reception with Neptune. And now, this comet, while Pluto is still in Scorpio,
Uranus and Neptune are technically conjunct in Capricorn with both sextile to Pluto and Uranus exactly
sextile Pluto on the day of the comet’s discovery, 8/6/95 (which is, incidentally, the 50th anniversary of the
A-bombing of Hiroshima, two days before Pluto’s last direct station in Scorpio for another 237 or so years).
What does it mean?
Is a Great Dying yet to come before Pluto enters Sagittarius (where, perhaps, He will light the funeral
pyres for the dead of that Dying), something like the Black Plague of Medieval Europe? Comets
traditionally herald cataclysms and great disasters and the deaths of kings – what disasters and deaths does
this one herald? It has the parabolic orbit of a true comet, but is the size of the cometoid/planetoid Chiron –
is this, like Chiron, a refugee from the trans-Plutonian Kuyper Cloud of cometary bodies, but on a cometary
trajectory rather than something that will take up a regular planetary orbit around Sol? If so, will it herald
the sort of woundings that Chiron does, except on a collective scale? Its appearance in Capricorn, near
Pluto’s southernmost declination, conjunct Neptune and, through Neptune, Uranus, argues that it might
well do so.
Every major body in the Solar System has a place on the Tree of Life, at least it does on my 16-
Sephiroth extended Tree of Life (see my file NM3BA000.000, “Magickal Applications of the New, 16-
Sephiroth English-Language Qaballah for more on same). Where do comets fall on that Tree? The
seemingly parabolic trajectory of a true comet (which in most cases actually has a highly elongate elliptical
orbit with the Sun at one focus thereof that extends far, far out beyond Pluto, perhaps into the Öort Comet
Cloud, 20,000 A.U. beyond Sol, in some cases) argues that perhaps true comets are associated with Ain
Soph, on the of Three Veils of the Negative or Three Zeroes, “Limitlessness,” “Without Limit,” which is
associated with the parabola – that a comet is a thing beyond the bounds of our local universe of the Solar
System, transcending all our Solar limits, a guide to the Stars and the true Starry Wisdom, taking us right
out of the Tree of Life and into true interstellar space. In the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, it was from
interstellar space that the true horrors came to Earth, monsters and demons to which we are nothing more
than ephemeral pests – or slaves, or stock-animals. This goes well with the ancient association of comets
with death, horror, destruction, devastation. Will this comet prove to be an exception?
(Personally, I like to think it comes to pick up the spirit of my late friend, Gary Csillaghegyi, who was
an astronomer by training and calling, who loved the Stars his life long – indeed, his name, translated from
Hungarian, means “Star-Mountain.” Comets herald the death of kings – Gary was a true King, a true
Thelemite, soul and spirit, for whom the Valkyries always ride, in the form of the Aurora Borealis. There
should also be a comet for him, as there was for another true American King: Mark Twain. Halley’s came
to pick Mark up again, 76 years after it brought him here as an infant, the comet he was born under. It
would be most fitting if Comet Hale-Bopp 0195 was the great cosmic Chariot sent to pick up my friend:

Because I could not stop for Death,

He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,

And I had put away,
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played

At wrestling in a ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed

A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then ‘t is centuries, but each

Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses’ heads
Were toward eternity.

– Emily Dickinson [1830-1886])

Anybody have any more on this comet? If you do, please contact me at polaris93@aol.com. I find it
fascinating!

AolMail
Subj: Hale-Bopp boo-boos ::::blush::::
To: [Various correspondents on Internet]

Everyone –
::::blush:::: Mea maxima culpa!, everybody, my report of Comet Hale-Bopp’s discovery date was off
by a couple of weeks! Just got (by request) a data-sheet on the comet from the Seattle Science Center (take
a bow, folks there at the Center!), which I called yesterday for info on the comet. (Gary will wring my
neck when I Cross Over myself!) Here’s all the comet poop not included last time, as well as corrective on
the discovery date:
It was announced on July 24 that Alan Hale (Cloudcroft, NM) and Thomas Bopp (near Stanfield, AZ)
had independently reported the discovery of a new comet. The comet was discovered by Hale shortly after
11 p.m. (local time) on July 22, 1995, and was independently found by Bopp about half an hour later. The
comet was then in the Constellation of Sagittarius (the Sign Capricorn), not far from M70 (Messier catalog
# 70). It was described as diffuse, with some condensation, and about magnitude 10.5. Daniel Green
(Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams) made the announcement on IAU Circular 6187, issued on the
afternoon of July 24, and followed it up with IAUC 6188 listing numerous precise positions that had been
received from Australia and Japan after a confirmation request had been sent out. A prediscovery image
was announced on IAUC 6198. R. H. McNaught (Anglo-Australian Observatory) found the image on a
plate exposed by C. P. Cass on April 27, 1993. The comet’s total magnitude was then 18 and the coma was
0.4 arc-minutes across. The orbit given on IAUC 6198 indicates the comet was then 13.1 AU from the Sun
(an AU, or Astronomical Unit, is 93 million miles, the distance of Earth from the Sun). During the first
few days after discovery, the comet was between magnitudes 105 and 11. It had some condensation and a
short tail or elongation toward the north. The coma was reported to be about 1-2 arc-minutes in diameter.
As of the beginning of August, various observers indicate that the comet is magnitude 10.5, about 2-3 arc-
minutes across, and weakly condensed. There is still the trace of a tail, or a slight elongation of the coma,
towards the north. CCD imaging by W. Offutt (Cloudcroft, NM) July 24-31 indicates the comet may be
shrinking. JPL’s measurements show the comet may be spiral-shaped. At this time, it is believed the
comet will pass perihelion in early 1997. An orbit calculated by Brian Marsden (which is still “somewhat
uncertain”) has a perihelion date of April 1, 1997, and a perihelion distance of 0.9 AU. The comet likely
has an orbital period of about 4,000 years, but the original orbit may have been somewhat shorter. Marsden
comments that the comet “is not on its first pass from the Öort Cloud.” The orbit from IAUC 6198, based
on 248 positions, is as follows (equinox 2000.0):

Epoch=1995 Oct. 10.0 TT; T=1997 April 1.3922 TT; e=0.996348; q=0.916702 AU;
argument of perihelion=130.4405 degrees; ascending node=282.4733 degrees;
inclination of orbit=88.8797 degrees.

The comet’s brightness is still a matter of question. The brightness in April 1993 is about 4 magnitudes
fainter than the predicted magnitude based on the comet’s currently accepted brightness model. The comet
may have been undergoing an outburst at the time of the 1993 photograph, or the current brightness model
doesn’t fit this comet and might need to be revised. Additional observations are needed before an accurate
brightness model can be developed.
Sorry about the boo-boos!

***

From email correspondence with a friend, Summer 1995 e.v.

>>>>>garbage rotted away by Pluto in Scorpio; Pluto in Capricorn is the sudden appearance of new form,
the result of recomposition of the mercury (essence), sulfur (energy) and salt (calcined ash) of the
substance, its decomposition products. This manifestation comes at the end of the long, long, tedious,
weary Alchemical process, and comes all at once – form suddenly manifesting from force and flow, like
salt or sugar suddenly precipitating out of a supersaturated solution, or super-cooled water suddenly turning
to ice in one overall phase-change due to a sudden loud noise or shock. The radical change (Pluto), in this
case, is the virtually instantaneous transition from formlessness to form; the form (Capricorn) is the result
of that change, which is proceeded by force (Sagittarius) and, before that, flow (Scorpio).
– Not that I’m an alchemist, by any means, or even any sort of Alchemical scholar! But this is the
basic idea. I think. :-| . . .

ok, ok. But I thought we were trying to relate all this to

health. . .?

The Alchemist, like the ecologist, thinks of everything as a living system, all such systems governed by the
name natural laws. The human body, the Alchemist’s lab set-up and the world at large all are such
systems. So whatever the Planets do in the world at large, they represent the way in which processes take
place in the lab set-up, and the natural processes of the living organism, human or otherwise. Hence in
terms of the human body, e.g., Pluto in Scorpio means the “putrefaction” (weakening to the point of
unviability) of everything that shouldn’t be part of the body, so that all that binds it to the body is ready to
fall apart; Pluto in Sagittarius makes the rotten stuff fall apart, so that it is no longer bound into the tissues,
and is thus flushed away via the kidneys and bowels; and Pluto in Capricorn represents the body, now
completely cleansed and purified of all contaminants and putrid/morbid conditions by the Refiner’s Fire of
Sagittarius, suddenly manifested in its best, essential, healthiest form, rejuvenated, strong, virtually
invulnerable to illness and wasting and aging (or at least in a lot better shape than it was before!! <g>). “As
above, so below.” What the Planets do in the sky, what Their positions in the Signs represent, is mirrored
by events here “below,” on Earth, Earth as a whole organism in Her own right, and among Her various
types of organisms, and within the bodies of all individual organisms. Does this help? If not, let me know,
I’ll give ‘er another try . . .

***

From email correspondence with a friend, Summer 1995 e.v.

>>>>The Alchemist, like the ecologist, thinks of everything as a living system, all such systems governed
by the name natural laws. The human body, the Alchemist’s lab set-up and the world at large all are such
systems. So whatever the Planets do in the world at large, they represent the way in which processes take
place in the lab set-up, and the natural processes of the living organism, human or otherwise. Hence in
terms of the human body, e.g., Pluto in Scorpio means the “putrefaction” (weakening to the point of
unviability) of everything that shouldn’t be part of the body, so that all that binds it to the body is ready to
fall apart; Pluto in Sagittarius makes the rotten stuff fall apart, so that it is no longer bound into the tissues,
and is thus flushed away via the kidneys and bowels; and Pluto in Capricorn represents the body, now
completely cleansed and purified of all contaminants and putrid/morbid conditions by the Refiner’s Fire of
Sagittarius, suddenly manifested in its best, essential, healthiest form, rejuvenated, strong, virtually
invulnerable to illness and wasting and aging (or at least in a lot better shape than it was before!! <g>). “As
above, so below.” What the Planets do in the sky, what Their positions in the Signs represent, is mirrored
by events here “below,” on Earth, Earth as a whole organism in Her own right, and among Her various
types of organisms, and within the bodies of all individual organisms. Does this help? If not, let me know,
I’ll give ‘er another try . . .

I’m sorry, but having been married to a Capricorn for many

years I find it hard to think of Cap. associated with
anything being cleansed and purified. Strong, yes. Stubborn
too. But pure and clean? Uh uh.

Okay, there’s a fundamental misunderstanding here of terms, probably my fault. Let’s see if I can clarify
what I mean. No organism, including H. sapiens (? <g>), is its Sign. Nobody, ever, is a “pure anything in
the Zodiac. Living beings are flesh & bone/chiton & lymph/blood & hair/scales/feathers & whatever else
they are made up of; they do have fundamental, evolutionarily entrained tendencies of response to
astrological phenomena, but the phenomena themselves – including placement of the Sun in a Sign at the
birth of a given organism – are no more part of those organisms than a hot-point that I instinctively pull my
hand away from is part of me. The reflex to do so is part of me, but not the thing reflexively reacted to.
Further, no one is ever just his or her Sun Sign! He or she “is” also a Moon-Sign, an Ascendant, a
Mercury placement, and so on for everything else in the native’s chart. Your husband may have “been” a
Capricorn, but he had to have had Planets in other Signs, not to mention his Ascendant, Part of Fortune,
and so on for everything else in his chart, nu?
The point is, no person, no individual living being is ever purely one Sign and one only – he or she or
it “is” everything in his/her/its chart, and, furthermore, isn’t even those, but rather a set of biologically
hardwired tendencies of reaction to various astrological phenomena which are represented by his/her/its
natal chart, which is in fact a (very) partial map of his/her/its genotype. Alchemy and other esoteric
sciences, on the other hand, are describing pure ideals when they talk of given Signs, substances, and so
on. Just as Alchemical mercury is no more the metal Hg than I am Ozma of Oz (it’s actually the quantum-
body or “essence” of any substance which has been Alchemically decomposed into a “mercury,” a “sulfur,”
and a “salt”, as the “sulfur” is a sort of oil produced from it and the “salt” is the substance’s calcined ash),
so your ex wasn’t “a Capricorn.” He “was” Capricorn plus . . . – and on top of that, wasn’t any of those at
all in fact, but rather a rag, a bone, a mortal hank of hair, as we all are, one who happened to be born at a
time when the Sun was between 0 and 30 degrees past His Winter Solstice point in the sky, who had his
Moon God knows where, his Ascendant ditto, and so on, and who was about as “pure” any astrological
ideal as Dorothy Parker was Queen of Romania (to borrow one of her own jokes!). So when I was talking
of Pluto through the Signs Scorpio through Capricorn, I was talking about pure processes and phenomena,
as they would be if this were a universe of uncontaminated ideals – which it isn’t. “Jesus was a Capricorn”
– yeah, and Jesus was a God, they say, like no one else on Earth ever could be. Nobody can match the
astrological ideals with perfect fit – everything is an approximation and an admixture, here in the real
world. So if your husband didn’t fit the ideal Capricorn portrait – why should he? Neither he nor anyone
else born at the time of year ever could.
Also, remember that you and I and everyone else have Capricorn somewhere in our own charts, just as
we have 10th Houses and Saturns, the former ruled by Capricorn, the latter ruling it. Yet all of us are
different from one another. I used to hate Leos, because for years, the only one I knew well was this
woman Ruth Haber who damned near destroyed me at one point in my life. Then I met a lot of other Leos,
and found out they aren’t all alike. My adoptive mother was an Aries, I’m an Aries. My adoptive mother
sickened me – but does that mean all Aries are therefore detestable, that I am detestable? My adoptive
mother was crazy – does that mean all Aries people, or Aries women, anyway, are mad as hatters and
March hares?
Capricorn is just the first month of Winter, as well as representing a stage of Alchemical
decomposition and recomposition of materials. There are a lot of good people out there with Sun in
Capricorn – and a lot of bad ones, too, same as for all other Signs. But in the discussion above, I was
talking about ideal processes and ideal expressions of astrologically-represented potentials, not real, live
people, good or bad. Okay?
If that doesn’t work, lemme know, I’ll give it another shot.

***

Bacterial multicellularity: research findings

AolMail
Subj: Bacterial “Multicellularity”
To: [Various correspondents on Internet]

Everybody –
I realize that DISCOVER magazine is not the be-all and end-all of scientific authority, but I found this
affirmation of an aspect of my own work in the current (September ‘95) issue of that magazine to be rather
comforting:

. . . [R]esearchers are now discovering that everywhere

you look in the bacterial world, rather than immortal
life, you find death.
[Regardless of what you call it,] the death of a
single cell that can potentially reproduce forever
appears to violate evolutionary good sense. A dead
bacterium is nothing but a dead end. ‘Apoptosis doesn’t
make adaptive sense for single-celled organisms,’ notes
microbiologist James Shapiro of the University of
Chicago. ‘But it makes lots and lots of sense for
 multicelled organisms.’
If you look at each bacterium not as an individual
but as a unit in a much larger organism – the microbial
equivalent of a brain cell, a stem cell, a sperm cell –
death takes on new meaning. ‘You tend not to think of
bacteria as having differentiated populations, where one
part of the population has one function, serves that
function, and then dies,’ says Martin Dworkin, a
microbiologist from the University of Minnesota. ‘But
there are populations that behave in a coordinated
fashion, that have differentiation.’
Biologists have long recognized that groups of
microbes can assume a coherent form . . . . And they
have long studied how populations of bacteria – often
several species working together – carry out chemical
processes in the environment . . .
But this view of bacteria has been overshadowed by
their identity as pathogens, each cell eager to cause
disease single-handedly. This latter view harks back to
1880, when bacteriologist Robert Koch published his
criteria for identifying disease-causing bacteria: for
the identification to be certain, a culture had to be
grown of a single microbial species. And to be
absolutely pure, so pure that there was no question the
species caused the disease, each culture had to come
from the seeding of a single bacterium. ‘That was the
tradition that ultimately led to molecular biology,’ says
Shapiro, ‘and became the intellectually dominant
tradition in the history of microbiology and
bacteriology. That’s where out concept of the bacteria
as single-celled organisms comes from.’
For more than a decade now, Shapiro and a small
cadre of his fellow microbiologists have been working to
turn that concept on its head. . . . ‘No matter how you
look at an E. coli colony,’ says Shapiro, ‘you see that
it is a highly differentiated structure – that there are
many different kinds of cells. They have different
sizes, they have different shapes, they have different
enzymes in them. And you also see that it’s a highly
organized structure.’
These differences – found in cells that start out
as clones of one another, carrying identical DNA – come
about because as a colony of bacteria grows, the cells
experience different conditions. As conditions change,
the bacteria change as well: some will begin to express
different genes or will even pick up mutations that
enable them to adapt to their new environment. Along the
way, however, many cells must die; cell death is, in
this way, inextricably linked to life.

Ibid., p. 100.

In other words, “unicellular” life is, very often, as multicellular as well ourselves are – but its cells are
distributed in different ways than those that make up our own bodies. Our inability to grasp that a
bacterium is indeed not a species of unicellular organisms, but rather a multicellular organism comprising
countless clones all with the same genotype comes from a paradigm adopted by biomedical science in the
1880s initially for very understandable reasons, to enable researchers to identify unequivocally the
pathogen associated with a given disease, in order to be able that much more easily to come up with a cure
for that disease. But because of the runaway success of that technique and its results for biomedical
science, the nature of bacteria as colonial organisms whose colonies differentiate much as the tissues of our
own bodies do was forgotten – the phenomenon was there, but we forgot to pay attention to it.
The article is a fascinating one, and is well worth looking up in the library, if you don’t already
subscribe to DISCOVER.

***

From email correspondence with a friend, Summer 1995 e.v.

>>one who happened to be born at a time when the Sun was between 0 and 30 degrees past His Winter
Solstice point in the sky, who had his Moon God knows where,

Cancer

Well, there you are! (But seriously, folks . . . <g>)

>>>Capricorn is just the first month of Winter, as well as representing a stage of Alchemical
decomposition and recomposition of materials. There are a lot of good people out there with Sun in
Capricorn – and a lot of bad ones, too, same as for all other Signs. But in the discussion above, I was
talking about ideal processes and ideal expressions of astrologically-represented potentials, not real, live
people, good or bad. Okay?

Yes, I know that. The original subject was, I thought, the

relationship of the movement of Pluto, Alchemical processes,
and health. I mentioned that Pluto in Capricorn might signify
a return to basic common sense regarding matters of health. . .
a movement away from panaceas and “quick cures” to
fundamental issues. Health practices which take time, but
which lead ultimately to major changes. For the
average American examples might be eating a proper nutritious
diet for years, getting regular exercise over a period of
many years, etc. I’m not talking exotic diets or glitzy
health clubs. I’m talking about a change in the way we
care for ourselves over the long haul. It’s hard work, it
isn’t glamorous, but it works. Like Capricorn. And brings
about transformation. Like Pluto. Pluto in Sag., as it
relates to health, probably relates to the opening up of
minds to new possibilities. . . Chinese medicine, folk
remedies, yoga, etc. These ideas have been bounced
around in some segments of society, yes, but they’ve
never been understood nor accepted by the medical
profession nor the general public. There are undoubtedly many
more new possibilities and ideas out there. Pluto in Scorpio
was the transformation of old ideas. It was, so typically,
the AIDS epidemic, an STD that stays hidden, and the way it
has drastically changed society. But with Pluto in
Capricorn, I think, comes the hard work of reality. . . .
putting what we learn from Pluto in Sag. into practice over
the long haul, using lots of common sense. Alchemically,
 Pluto in Scorpio was a transformation which came about due to
decomposition. Pluto in Sag. is a trial by fire. . . trying
out lots of new ideas. Pluto in Cap. is the materialization,
the condensation of these ideas into the earthly world.
Putting them into actual, useful practice over the course of
a lifetime. It seems to me that the purification process
corresponds more closely to Aquarius. . . cleansing, refreshing
waters and all that. Maybe it will take us that long to clean
all the crap out of the medical establishment. . . wouldn’t it
have been nice if the medical professionals and drug
companies had cheered for the Aussie that found a 10-day,
$50. cure for ulcers, rather than trying to discredit him. . .
and you know even though he’s shown undeniable proof that 80%
of ulcers can be cured with a simple round of antibiotics,
most physicians still don’t prescribe the treatment,
promoting instead a lifetime of pain and restricted diet
while taking hundreds of dollars worth of Tagamet every
month? I think this is the sort of new idea that will gain
wider acceptance with Pluto in Sag.
Back to Capricorn, I think as Capricorn represents the
skeleton, Pluto in Cap. may represent the building of a new,
solid framework. But I don’t think it will be all clean and
pretty. I think it will be built with sheer willpower and
lots of hard work.

Pluto in Sagittarius, as it relates to health, might well have to do with psychospiritual beliefs and practices
as these can be used to effect health and the basic workings of the body. For example, it might be a time
when Westerners might become very interested in chi !kung as a therapeutic tool, and Easterners might
examine Western Alchemy and Ceremonial Magick and Qaballah for the same. Sagittarius rules religion
and spiritual practice and belief (e.g., Magick, Alchemy, etc.), hence: regeneration and rejuvenation (Pluto)
via religious and spiritual practices and ideas (Sagittarius).
As far as Pluto in Capricorn goes, by “purification” I was referring to the Alchemical ideal, that of
decomposition of a material into its “mercury,” “sulfur” and “salt” and recomposition of these, after further
processing to remove all (Alchemically) extraneous matter/energy, into the “ideal” form of the material,
which often takes an unexpected form of some kind, condensing suddenly out of a yucky mixture that
initially doesn’t seem to have anything to do with that material. The result behaves chemically and
physically in a way different from the “unrefined” substance, i.e., in an ideal fashion – it has been
Alchemically “purified” of everything, every influence and energy, that heretofore kept it from conforming
to that ideal state.
As far as this applies to human health, perhaps Pluto in Capricorn signifies a time when medicine,
psychospiritual science, and biology will approach one another and come together in a grand synthesis in
which the basic underlying principles that apply to all three will become the basis of a new biomedical
science, one that considers body and spirit to be two aspects of one thing, biology and psychology and
spirit and ecology all aspects of the functioning of any living thing, including human beings. So all the
acculturated crap that has kept us from understanding what we need to do in order to stay healthy would, in
that case, be purified out of our biomedical philosophy and practice. On an individual scale, I think Pluto
in Capricorn represents the achievement of perfect, idealized health – not actually possible in the real
world, but we can approach it asymptotically. And since Capricorn also is associated with ecology,
perhaps when Pluto enters Capricorn we will all be much more willing to accept that health depends upon
our relationship to everything around us, and upon the ecological dynamics within our bodies, minds, and
spirits, and because of this realization and acceptance of it on a broad scale, people will become healthier
because they begin to live right, in an ecologically saner manner than before. Nu?

***
From email correspondence with a friend, Summer 1995 e.v.

>>>>>And since Capricorn also is associated with ecology, perhaps when Pluto enters Capricorn we will
all be much more willing to accept that health depends upon our relationship to everything around us, and
upon the ecological dynamics within our bodies, minds, and spirits, and because of this realization and
acceptance of it on a broad scale, people will become healthier because they begin to live right, in an
ecologically saner manner than before. Nu?

Yes. I see what you mean. Let’s hope you’re right!

The thing with Pluto is that He definitely is a “Planet of the Collective,” affecting large masses of
organisms and whole generations or even epochs of them. Those individuals whom He does affect on an
obvious individual, conscious level – and you and your S.O. are among these, your natal charts just scream
it and you yourself demonstrate it for yourself, at least, in person or via correspondence – will at any time
be strongly affected by the way in, say, society or his/her peer group or other collective to which he/she
belongs is responding to Pluto transits at that time. So while in general people are affected by Pluto-in-
Scorpio and responding to it, he is also experiencing Pluto-transiting-Sixth, as well, and his ability to make
the most use with the least pain of that transit will depend upon what other people are doing around him,
what resources they make for him and what obstacles, willingly or not, consciously or not. So interpreting
the way in which Pluto, say, right now would affect your S.O.’s health (Pluto transit 6th) depends also upon
what Pluto in general is doing (Pluto in Scorpio). Here, I’d say that until Pluto finally (thank God!!!)
leaves Scorpio, he’ll experience Pluto’s Scorpio function of putrefying everything not viable to the point at
which it falls apart and can then easily be flushed away from the system, which makes all the problems
come to the surface and rot, rot, rot and remain, remain, remain in place until your ready to die or go mad,
mad, MAD!! Entering Sagittarius, Pluto burns up all the rot, and by the time He enters Capricorn, the
system is cleaned out, purified of all the rotted problems, ready to rejuvenate and achieve maximum health.
So when Pluto enters Sagittarius, that begins the time when he begins to get rid of his physical problems,
and to heal, and by the time Pluto leaves his Sixth, still in Sagittarius, he will likely be a good deal healthier
than when it entered! The problems were there when Pluto entered his Sixth, but almost certainly not as
horribly obvious as they are now. Now their roots have been exposed – waiting to be burned out when
Pluto enters Sagittarius this November 10th. Does that make sense?

Speaking of Pluto, Saturn, etc., I have another question for

you, if you’re willing. Right now, if I’ve calculated it
correctly, my SO has Saturn conjoining his natal Saturn and
Chiron, coming into opposition of his natal Uranus, then
Pluto. I sensed a lot of confusion and turmoil within him,
looked at his transits, and thought perhaps this may be the
culprit, given the close opposition in effect at his birth.
Can you help me out here with your expertise? Given the
positions in his natal chart, and any other things you may
feel are significant, what is happening? Should I stay out
of the way ‘til it’s over, or is there something I can do to
help without jeopardizing our relationship? He sure seems
miserable. Your help would be much appreciated by me

Since he has Gemini rising, he is likely to tell you what’s wrong when he can, especially with Mercury
(chart-ruler) in 6th in Sagittarius. When he can’t, he’ll be going within, trying to find a way to express
what’s wrong, where it hurts, and as long as he isn’t telling you that he needs help and what kind, stand
back and let him look for a way to say it as long as you can. If something obviously wrong were to happen,
that’s different – but as long as he’s ambulatory and isn’t openly saying something to the effect of, “I hurt
here – do this for me,” best to just stand back and stay alert and wait and see what happens. I learned from
Gary not to try to “help” unless either he asked for it or I really knew what he needed, from long experience
– otherwise, no matter how distressed he seemed, he’d jump down my throat if I tried to help before he was
ready for it, which he’d always show or tell me. Gary had Scorpio rising, Sun in Scorpio in mutual
reception with Pluto (Who was in Leo in his 9th), Mars in Scorpio in 12th conjunct Mercury. Gary always
was able to find a way to tell me what he needed – in his case, though, it was sometimes telepathic
(Scorpio) and unconscious (12th House). Anyway, with 6th-House Sun in Scorpio and Mercury ruling his
chart, Mercury in 6th and in Sagittarius, it’ll be something similar. He’s got a hard transit going there with
that Saturn return, but as long as he doesn’t tell you he needs help, either verbally or by obvious behavior
or some other obvious thing, he’s handling whatever’s going on better than anyone else could. No one else
can help him usefully until he can tell them how, and that’s his problem right now: trying to figure out
how to put it in words, so he can best understand it himself, and then communicate it. (His mother
probably never understood that – and it may have driven him up the wall at times.)

***

Astrology: Comets

Comets are harbingers of catastrophic (8th House) opportunity (2nd House) (the astrological portrait
of which is a Yod). What will Comet Hale-Bopp 0195 bring?

***

Magick is the Art & Science of causing changes in conformity with Will – and therefore, of Life itself.
For that is the very hallmark of living organisms, of the living world: changing things around to suit the
needs and desires of living beings. Engineering, biology, alchemy, thaumaturgy, theology – from worms to
Gods, from quarks to quasars, all these are the Arts & Sciences, theory and application of the study of one
aspect of life or another.

***

When a doctor, psychologist, psychiatrist, mortician, politician, minister, or any other member of the
“helping” professions tells me that I’m “too suspicious of other people’s motives,” that I all I have to do is
trust” (him/her/it/them) “and all will be well,” it sends cold chills up my spine. We hominidae are big
animals, animals who eat meat and are known for occasional indulgence of cannibalistic or sexually
predacious tendencies and thrill-killings. And there are ’way too many of us. So Nature will inevitably try
to relieve the pressure on the rest of the living world by setting us to do our own population control, since
we breed beyond the capacity of even Plague and Famine to do the job on us for Her. And what better
occupation than one of the “helping” professions to enable a perp to get in under your guard and have a free
field for his or her preferred method of feeding?

***

Bujinkan Budo Taijutsu and Theology as a Teaching Method

On a Qaballistic level, everything is interconnected. With a given Qaballistic Key is associated, e.g.,
an organ of the body, a physiological function, a Magickal Power, a God, a Planet, etc. To call on the God
associated with a given Key is to call on the Spirit in everything else associated with that Key, to call on all
their strengths and virtues. Hence in combat arts, body-parts, kata, etc. are called by the names of the
Kami, for the Kami are each linked Qaballistically to these.

***

Never Discuss Religion or . . .

 Belief and faith constitute the pivot of the Will; Magick constitutes the machinery by which Will is
turned on that pivot. To take away a man’s belief, his faith – in short, his religion – is to destroy the focus
in him necessary for the exercise of his Will; while making him lose his faith in his Magick, his
Knowledge and Understanding, is to destroy that by which his Will is fulfilled, whether it be the
“meaningless” gestures and babbling of a lunatic or the pinnacle of late-20th century technological
sophistication. It is for this reason that religious wars are the deadliest of all, for the aggressors are trying
to destroy all obstacles to the free exercise of their Wills, while the defenders are fighting to repel extreme
threats to the exercise of their own Wills. Will is the essential signature, the essence of Life; that which
impedes it, or threatens to destroy it, thus threatens Life’s extinction, body and soul and spirit, and therefore
triggers jihads of all flavors.

***

On the Real Location of Mind and Memory

Most of our memory and intelligence lie outside our bodies, in cueing processes and phenomena
everywhere in our environment. Hence the jet-lag syndrome, the reason that cats are confused after a move
away from their accustomed home. A spider’s mind and soul are manifest as her web, though their true
throne is in her genes; a mammal’s is in its home territory and its accustomed range, in the same way.

***

Thrints and Astrology

Are thrints – slaver viruses – creatures of an astrology of long ago and far away? If so, all their life-
cycles and phases will be off by so much – our advantage over them.
Astrological phenomena are just one more set of selective pressures on life, the cosmos acting through
its effects upon the Sun’s electromagnetic field on all living things.
“Only through a broken heart / Can Lord Christ enter in” (Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading
Gaol”). The only way you can get your soul (psyche) back once it’s stolen (so that everything in it of any
psychospiritual importance is completely repressed) is to feel. What you feel is pain, underneath it all,
especially emotional pain, compounded by repression. When the heart breaks, it all comes back up at you
at once – and you thereby gain back your soul.

***

Thrints and Racism

The combination of phenotypical attributes including blond hair, blue eyes and fair skin predisposes
their owners to greater susceptibility to damage from the ultraviolet and other hypervisible portions of the
Solar spectrum, including a lowered resistance to viral and other infections. Therefore blond, blue-eyed,
fair-skinned human beings would be more susceptible to possession by thrints (slaver/possessor viruses)
than dark-skinned, dark-haired, dark-eyed ones, all other things being equal. Were thrints behind the
notion of “racial supremacy” of fair-skinned, blond, blue-eyed human beings? Did they push this idea on
many of us by way of trying to get us to breed for such traits and thus ensure them with a steady supply to
susceptible hosts for them?

***
Human microbiology

A case of a possible evolutionary link between human physiology and microbial commensals of Homo
sapiens, as reported in the January 1994 (Vol. IX, Number 5, No. 101) issue of Elle:

[Margie] Profet recently won a $225,000 MacArthur

“genius” grant . . . for coming up with a theory of
menstruation that makes beautiful Darwinian logic of
what strikes many women as a senseless monthly mess.
Textbooks define menstruation as a sloughing off of
blood and tissue when the body signals that they’re
not needed to nurture an embryo. Profet . . . posits
that the purpose of uterine bleeding is to fight
bacteria that hitch rides on sperm. She also says . . .
that most, if not all, mammals menstruate. . . . and
there has to be a reason.
‘Natural selection works,’ Profet says. ‘If
menstruation didn’t serve a purpose, it would’ve been
eliminated long ago. Losing a lot of blood and tissue
every month is so costly – especially for our hunter-
gatherer ancestors . . . Sloppiness isn’t tolerated.’
...

[Concerning the contention of the Center for

Disease Control] that sperm don’t transmit many path-
ogens, Profet says: ‘That’s like saying there’s a
shuttle bus and all it does year after year is go up
and down Frat Row at different colleges for 200 million
years, with a giant sign that says, “Free Beer and
Babes,” and not once has anyone hopped on. I mean,
pathogens exploit what they can – that’s how they get
to be pathogens.” She cites electron-microscope
photographs that show various pathogens riding sperm to
the fallopian tubes. ‘They’ve been caught in the act,’
she says. ‘Look, the vagina of a seventeen-year-old
virgin is full of microorganisms, but they’re not riding
up! The girl in class who’s got to go to the clinic
to get antibiotics because she has terrible pain in the
ovaries – she’s the one who was out with the boys
Saturday night. When a woman begins to get sexually
active, that’s when she’s at risk for bacterial infection
of the uterus and fallopian tubes.
Instead of viewing menstruation as a potential
cause of infection, Profet contends that it and other
forms of uterine bleeding could be signs of infection.
She’s already won over at least one convert in the
medical community. ‘One ob/gyn told me he’s going to
change what he does,’ Profet says. ‘When women come
in with a sudden onset of heavy bleeding, he’s not going
to automatically prescribe hormones to curtail the
bleeding. He’s going to check for infection and treat
the infection, not the bleeding. It may save someone’s
fertility.’
 Ibid., pp. 150-151

Concerning the menstruation of non-primates, Profet says:

‘Four species of bat are very well documented

to menstruate in dissection studies . . . . A lot of
animals menstruate covertly rather than overtly, so it
can be overlooked.’

Ibid., p. 151

In response, gynecologist David Grimes, a distinguished professor of medicine at UC San Francisco,

observed that

‘[I]f you can’t measure it . . . it’s hard to document

it’s happening, isn’t it? There may be covert aliens
governing my thoughts right now.’

Ibid., p. 151

Thrints, anyone? :)

***

Magick and the Second Amendment

The “anti-witchcraft” pogroms of many times and cultures have in some sense been the esoteric
equivalents of the current “anti-gun” and “anti-self-defense” movements now in full cry in the USA. Or
perhaps it is more accurate that the “anti-gun” movement in this country at this time is a secular analog of
all “anti-witchcraft” movements, and that both are just different expressions in different times and places of
“anti-self-defense movements” and laws and official penalties of all kinds the intent of which is to restrict,
hinder, even ban outright any and all forms of self-defense, especially citizen self-defense against
oppressions visited upon them by statist, religious, or other authority. Magick is just a generalized form of
engineering and technology that includes biophysical – psychic and telekinetic – applications as well as
strictly physical ones, and can be used to produce very effective methods of self-defense against any and all
comers. Aleister Crowley was just the Ned Buntline or the Winchester of esoteric Art and Science; Anton
Szandor LaVey is their Gatling – or maybe their J. Robert Oppenheimer or Leo Szilard or Enrico Fermi.
Whosoever is truly serious about banning Magick – or any of the other disciplines upon which it dependent
for its theory and techniques, such as astrology or Alchemy – is therefore just another manifestation of the
same spirit that would cripple or destroy the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security

of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear
arms shall not be infringed.

This Amendment was put in place so that the people would be able to guard the other rights guaranteed
them by the Bill of Rights, especially those covered by the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment

of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;
 or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to
petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It is only by exercise of the First Amendment that men’s souls are kept alive. If a man’s* soul is dead, not
all the guns in the world will give him the Will to take charge of his life or act of his own initiative, for his
own reasons, in his own behalf or those he loves. And if his soul and Will are dead, Magick is impossible
for him – for Magick is the Art and Science of causing change in conformity with Will, and is only possible
for live-souled men with healthy hearts and Wills. The First Amendment is to esoteric engineering and
technology – Magick – what the Second is to physical engineering and technology: an end-product of
weapons technology by which men are capable of defending themselves, their loved ones, and all else they
hold dear – especially their liberty, their right and ability to determine their own destinies, free of
interference by tyranny of any sort. The right to Magick springs from the same roots that the right to
possession and responsible use of physical weapons of all kinds does: the love of liberty and the
determination to defend it from any and all would-be tyrants and oppressors, whatever it may take,
whatever does the job best. Pagans, neo-Pagans, and occultists of all kinds therefore are on the same side
of the political fence as those dedicated to defending and preserving the Second Amendment, whether
either realizes it or not: for all of them are dedicated to preservation, study, development, and application
of technologies which can enable anyone, of any age or gender or ethnic background, to defend him- or
herself against oppressors of any kind. I therefore think we’d better hang together, gang, whether we are
“evil sorcerous nigger-lovin’ queerboy Jewboy nerd wimp bra-burnin’” occultists/Pagans/Neopagans/etc
and/or “religious right-wing Fundamentalist gun-nuts” promoting the Second Amendment – because
otherwise, one of these days the Conspiracy is gonna hang us all separately (assuming that they don’t just
do a mass barbecue trip on us, instead, or blow us to smithereens with a pocket nuke that CNN then tells
everyone was a “fertilizer bomb” . . .).

*Nota bene: “Man” here is meant generically, the same word used in German to mean “one,” “any
designated sentient individual of either sex and any age,” etc., rather than “adult male human being.”

***

Virgo/Pisces & Health

Just a short :) note concerning the Virgo/Pisces-6th House/12th House rulerships:

Traditionally, Virgo and Mercury rule sickness and health, while Pisces and Neptune rule epidemic
diseases. It may be possible to refine that still further. First, Virgo, Mercury, and Persephone, the
hypothetical first trans-Plutonian Planet Who shares the rulership of Virgo with Mercury, may have
dominion over viruses of all kinds, whether associated with illness or not, and DNA and RNA, the
molecules in which the genetic code of all Earthly life is carried. Second, Pisces and Neptune may rule all
bacterial and other unicellular forms of life, whether or not they are associated with disease.
The first assignment turns partly on a pun that may also, however, be a memo from the Collective
Unconscious: the fact that the words virus and Virgo share their first syllable, vir-, etymologically linked to
the Latin word virtus, meaning “strength” or “vital essence.” DNA and RNA are in fact the vital essence of
all Earthly life, the heart of every living cell, whether an organism in its own right or part of a multicellular
one. They are Life’s “handwriting,” as it were, its signature – and it is Mercury who rules writing and
communication, and therefore all the information sciences. Today the biological sciences are evolving into
information sciences themselves, since the principles of their disciplines are becoming more and more
based on molecular biochemistry and the behavior of the genes. So Mercury rules genetics as a branch of
the information sciences as well as its implications for biomedical science. Persephone, as an Outer Planet
also ruling Virgo, therefore rules all these as expressed at the level of whole populations or even Gaia, our
living world, as a whole.
In addition, viruses, which are little more than naked RNA themselves, chunks of genetic information
passed around the biosphere from desk to desk like Ghidarillions of office memos sent from desk to desk or
department to department in a gigantic, world-spanning mega-corporation, love-letters mailed by Life to
itself as if every second were Valentine’s Second, almost invariably hate water, which tends to kill them
rather quickly. Virgo is a dry Sign, and therefore more suitable for rulership of viruses than Pisces, Sign of
the Ocean Sea, would be. And while cellular life had to have begun in water, because of its internal
chemistry, RNA and/or DNA may have first come into existence in clay, a slightly dampened mineral
formation with a crystalline infrastructure that many now thing would be perfect for service as a template
on which long, complex molecules, even self-replicating organic ones such as RNA or DNA, could be
assembled relatively quickly and easily.
Pisces and Neptune, on the other hand, are much more suitable as rulers of cells of all kinds, since cells
essentially comprise outer envelopes made of fatty acids, which enclose intracellular media that are mostly
water, together with some fatty acids and carbohydrate molecules, including the genetic templates of DNA
and RNA within.. Pisces rules liquids of all kinds, and therefore is much more suitable as ruler of the
mostly-liquid cell than is the dry, clay-ey Sign of Virgo. It and its ruler Pisces are therefore also much
more suitable as rulers of bacteria, whole one-celled organisms, not just DNA or RNA scantily clad in
protein panties as viruses are. This applies not only to bacteria associated with disease, such as tuberculosis
or syphilis, but to all others as well, including benign ones such as Lactobacillus bulgaricus.
As far as illness of any kind goes, though, Mercury is much more suitable as ruler of its expression on
the level of the individual, while Neptune, ruler of the Collective Unconscious, is much more suitable as
Lord of epidemics of any kind, bacterial or viral, as well as of public-health organizations and institutions
which deal with them, while Persephone, Lord of Natural Selection, another Planet of the Collective, would
be most likely ruler of all wisdom associated with health and sickness and the processes and institutions by
which these are passed on from generation to generation. She would therefore be the likely Lord of the
nutritional sciences, herbal remedies, and orthomolecular psychiatry, which use such wisdom to treat and
prevent disease in individuals and at a population level.
Finally, we come to poor little Chiron. Chiron seems to specifically rule “cool” viruses which prefer
the mammalian central nervous system for their vital medium, allergies, irritations, and other problems
connected with which sometimes drive people infected with them into endlessly repeated episodes of self-
destructive, apparently obsessive/compulsive, sometimes downright criminal and evil behavior that seems
totally senseless until it is realized that it is by this behavior that the poor, benighted, ill-used host of the
virus, usually all unawares, vectors the damned thing on to new hosts. Chiron also rules the paradigm
shifts necessary for diagnostician and sufferer to realize that that is the problem and do what is necessary to
get rid of the virus, generally long, unbroken courses of anti-viral herbs and tinctures, ascorbate therapy,
and anything else suitable. If Virgo is an electron microscope and Mercury is the One using it to study
microbiological life, Persephone is the head of the entire research project that ties all the results of the study
together and hands them on to the public. Chiron, for his part, is the lensing or other focusing mechanism
in the microscope that does the actual work of enlargement and makes clear the real nature of the thing
under study.

***

The following letter was just emailed today (August 31, 1995), to the editor of the Atlantic Monthly,
concerning the article by George McKenna n the current issue of AM, “On Abortion: A Lincolnian
Position.” Pagans, neo-Pagans and others who are concerned about the rights of women and children, the
damage which human overpopulation is doing to this living world and to human beings themselves, and all
related issues, might find the following of interest. (I myself am an Elevener, a follower of the 11th
Commandment [“Thou shalt not devastate the Earth nor Her life”] as well as of Bujinkan Budo taijutsu,
and a Ceremonial Magickian. I am also female. So my views on this subject are not disinterested.)

Dear editor of Atlantic Monthly,

I just read with great interest George McKenna’s article, “On Abortion: A
Lincolnian Position” in the current issue of Atlantic Monthly (Sept. 1995,p p. 51-68).
I have a problem with his assertion that abortion is to be opposed “because it is an
absolute evil.” It is – but I don’t much like the alternatives to it, either. And it may be
that banning abortion promotes other absolute evils, evils that must likewise be
unequivocally opposed by anyone with any moral sensibility at all.
Last year, CNN did a special on organ-legging in South America. As they showed,
in many areas of South America, where birth-control of any kind is generally unavailable,
at least officially, because of Roman Catholic opposition to it, there is a lucrative trade in
organs taken from living human beings – “organ-legged” – by roving bands of off-duty
police. These gangs, consisting of otherwise terribly underpaid police who engage in this
sort of thing to supplement their incomes, roam the back-alleys of the streets of the big
cities of S.A., looking for indigents, homeless people, especially street-urchins who have
no one at all to protect them or care. Way-laying these as they catch them, they drag
them into dark alleys and simply carve out one or more of their living organs, usually
kidneys (which command high prices on the black market and can be sold quickly, a
boon because the organs tend to go bad in a few hours), without benefit of anesthetic or
anything else, toss the organs into containers and run off with them, leaving their prey to
die in bloody agony behind them. They prefer to take the organs of adolescent homeless
orphans, since these are usually much healthier than those of the older homeless people,
or else the organs of younger urchins, because these also command high prices from
medical establishments which do transplants for the children of the wealthy who are
ailing from various things. One sometimes wonders: is the stiff official opposition to
birth-control in any form, especially abortions, due at least in part to the protection it
affords to this grisly traffic and the profits that accrue from it?
Jonathon Swift’s “modest proposal” was the soul of kindness and charity themselves,
compared to such traffic. Yet in an ever-more overpopulated world, something has to be
done to relieve the human population pressure and stop the damage our sheer numbers do
to our living world and one another. If Mother Nature and the Hand of God aren’t to do
it by loosing the traditional 4 Horsemen, are we to send our surplus young to organ-
ranches, perhaps?
Of course, all absolute evils are indeed absolute, and therefore to be repudiated
absolutely – but some absolute evils seem to be somewhat more absolute than others, e.g.
letting children be born who will then become a sort of roving organ-bank stock, to be
regularly and ruthlessly harvested by entrepreneurial (or statist?) teams of organ-leggers,
as an alternative to aborting them by, say, the end of the first trimester of pregnancy.
Somehow, I don’t find this to be all that desirable or charitable an alternative to abortion,
and there seems to be more than a hint of lobbying by vested economic interests in the
anti-abortion rhetoric I hear these days: they don’t want their source of supply
threatened, whether the demand be for live, healthy organs, or disposable sex-toys for the
rich, or indentured slaves, or whatever. Is the motive of the anti-abortionist simply to
prevent murder of an unborn child? Or is it to protect a vested interest of some kind?
That’s an ugly question to raise – but history itself is replete with examples of the
ranching of people by other people for purposes of varying degrees of evil, so one has to
ask.
If we could guarantee that every child who was born would be loved and adequately
cared for by someone, protected from predators of any kinds, then we’d damned well also
guarantee an absolutely fool-proof form of birth-control, and make sure that everyone
who needs it, gets it. Or else Nature and Nature’s God will take care of the resultant
ever-increasing overpopulation crisis their own way, as they always have: via War,
Famine, Plague, and Death in every other conceivable form.
Where the anti-abortionists err – whether unknowingly or deliberately – is in not
making clear to the public the other absolute, absolutely intolerable evils, the ones that
will come about if the alternatives we have for abortion are inadequate. Mr. McKenna?
What do you say about that?
(By the way, I am absolutely opposed to state support of – or intervention in, or
opposition to – abortion or birth control of any kind, including tacit opposition in
 supporting all women’s clinics except those that practice abortion-on-demand. The state
has no business meddling in anyone’s lives – male, female, of whatever age. The state
was made to serve humanity, not the other way around. Like fire, it’s a great servant –
and a horrible master. Give it the ability to fund abortions and soon it will demand the
right to impose abortions on those it deems “genetically undesirable.” Give it the ability
to fund women’s clinics and deny it the ability to fund abortions, soon it will demand the
“right” to refuse funding to women’s clinics that practice abortion. The hell with the
state –any state. As a woman, I don’t want to have to account to any state for my life,
liberty, or pursuit of happiness, dammit! I believe that each of us has the right to swing
his fist any way he wants – except that that right stops where someone else’s jaw begins.
And that goes double for the state. I don’t want the state to have any control over my
body, either by funding abortions or refusing to fund any other medical care unless
abortions are denied. I’m not Lincolnian. I’m libertarian. We won one war in 1865,
over individual liberty, but lost another, just as important, that over states’ rights. The
South was wrong to promote chattel or any other sort of slavery of individuals – but right
in insisting on states’ rights, the main check against ever-increasing concentration of
political power in the hands of a central federal government. And I think we have the
same sort of “heads I win tails you lose” situation here: the idea that the state has any
business running our lives, any state, whether it’s a confederacy or a federal government,
any aspect of our lives, whether the lives of men or lives of women.)

– Sincerely, Lovag (Ms.) Yael R. Dragwyla

***

Notes on possible Qaballistic and mythological correspondences for astronomical systems and other
phenomena both within and outside the Solar System

The meaning of celestial phenomena – Planets, Stars, Signs, Houses – and the import of their ever-
changing configurations is drawn from their correlations with other things that have meaning for us, such
as the Seasons, birth and sex and death, and everything else to which they have resemblance. This should
extend as well to astronomical systems, their meaning for us also being drawn from the systems and
collectivities in our mythologies.
For example, in the Greek Underworld (Tartaros) there is a great river, the Styx (“Hateful”), whose
waters are deadly poison; it is across this river that the dead are ferried to the banks of Tartaros by Charon,
Hades’ ferryman. This river, whose west bank bounds Tartaros, has five tributaries: Acheron (“Woeful”),
Phlegethon (“Burning” or “Fiery”), Cocytus (“Wailing”), Avernus, and Lethe (“Forgetfulness”). Another
river, Erebus (“Covered” or “Hidden”), runs near the palace of Hades and Persephone.* Tartaros itself is
either a vast land West of the Straits of Gibraltar and/or the land below the surface of the Earth, comprising
a system of gigantic caverns and caves that may be old magma-tubes, some of them containing great
oceans filled with strange life. (For more on which, see Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, Chapter 31, “The
Gods of the Underworld” (NY: Pelican Books, 1960), pp. 120-125; Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy,
Vol. 1, Inferno (a good translation is, e.g., John Ciardi’s 1954 translation, published by American
Library/Signet); Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle, Inferno (NY: Pocket Books, 1976); Michael Shea, Nifft
the Lean (NY: DAW, 1982); the series of paperback anthologies & novels edited/written by Janet Morris,
beginning with Heroes in Hell (NY: Baen Books, 1986); Yael Dragwyla, Club Vesta, The Basement
Rooms, Hellmall (what there is so far of them) (unfinished novels-in-progress); etc.)

*It isn’t commonly known, but Hades and Persephone have a pied-a-terre in the Capitol Hill district of
Seattle; They delight in riding around Seattle at 2 a.m. on Hades’ big Harley-Davidson hog, scaring
Hell out of hapless motorists they happen to pass (They wear Their death-masks on these occasions,
 especially crafted for them by Baron Samedhi’s young Rasta nephew, “Bob” X, of course), Persephone
riding pillion behind Hades, He in his midnight-black irons, She in Her full-Moon white ones . . .

Rivers are dynamic systems made up of a great many particles; Tartaros is imagined as either a vast,
open land or a vast underground cavern or series of caverns. What celestial phenomena do we know of that
would fit such descriptions?
How about the Kuyper Cometary Disk, between Pluto out to the Öort Comet Cloud (from about 200 to
20,000 A.U.), comprising a family of cometary bodies of which the planetoid Chiron and perhaps even the
Pluto/Charon double-Planet might be runaway members? How about the Öort Cloud itself, the far
boundary of the Solar System, 20,000 Astronomical Units out from Sol and more? What better name for
the Öort Cloud than the Styx, an icy-cold (about -255 degrees C) stream of poisonous particles (in this case,
cometary bodies, each made up of highly toxic frozen gases and water-ice mixed in with frigid rock)? How
about, e.g., Charon for the Kuyper Disk?
Then there is the region bounded Solward by Saturn and Starward by Uranus, in which the orbit of
Chiron lies. On the Tree of Life of Qaballah, between Sephirah 4, Chesed, associated with the Planet
Jupiter, and Sephirah 3, Binah, associated with Uranus, lies a gap, the Abyss, associated with the “11th
Sephirah,” Da’ath, which is sometimes associated with Saturn and sometimes with the vital energy of the
entire Tree (i.e., the Solar System) as a living thing in its own right. Astronomically, it is here that both
Saturn and Chiron fit, having Their orbits between Jupiter and Uranus. Both are associated with pain and
woe, and it must be remembered that Saturn, after His death, went to the Elysian Fields, a part of the
Underworld given to the Heroes, Great Kings, and the Saints. Obviously this region should be associated
with the mythological realm of Tartaros, Saturn (Kronos) being Lord over the Elysian Fields, Chiron
associated with the rest of Tartaros. Chiron after His posthumous ascent to the Stars (Zeus, after granting
Him death as relief from His agonizing, unhealing wound, set Him in the heavens as a constellation in His
own right, Centaurus) is of course associated with Uranus (Freedom) and Binah (Understanding,
Knowledge, Enlightenment, Magick); before His death, He is associated with Saturn (pain and woe); His
death itself is associated with Tartaros and the Abyss between Chesed and Binah. So astromythologically,
the region between Jupiter (Chesed) and Uranus (Binah) is associated with Tartaros, personified by Saturn
and Chiron, and the Abyss of the Tree of Life.
What mythological system, from what mythology, should the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter
be associated? About the system of asteroids called “Earth-crossers,” because their orbits literally cross
those of the Earth at various points? How about the region between Mercury and Sol – is this
“Phlegethon”?
How about whole systems of deep-sky objects, such as galactic clusters, the Great Wall of Stars, near-
by galaxies such as the Clouds of Magellan, and so on? To what do they correspond mythologically – and
in what mythologies? Qaballistically, these all are in the region of the “Three Veils of the Negative” which
gave birth to the Tree of Life itself: Ain (“Nothing”), Ain Soph (“The Endless”), and Ain Soph Aur
(“Limitless Light”), Ain giving birth to Ain Soph, Ain Soph to Ain Soph Aur, Ain Soph Aur to Kether,
Sephirah 1, “Crown”, the first Sephirah of the Tree of Life, from which all the rest evolved. The Tree of
Life is associated with the Solar System as a living system, and with that within every living thing that
reflects the Solar System, our biologically and culturally programmed responses to the every-changing
heavens. The Three Veils of the Negative are associated with everything beyond its far boundary, the Öort
Cloud. Kether is associated with Pluto. And Pluto/Persephone are the Lords of the Underworld, Pluto
being the judge of the dead and their King, Persephone being the One who decides what life each dead soul
shall have next, dispensing justice in all cases in which justice has not yet been done at the time of death.
These are the Lords of Birth and Death and Rebirth. How fitting that all deep-sky objects be named after
the landmarks of Their vast, awesome domain?
I propose, then, that the great systems of astronomical objects at the far boundaries of the Solar System,
and the deep-sky objects beyond, be named after the landmarks of the dominion of Persephone and Hades,
while the region between the orbits of Jupiter and Uranus, including Saturn, Chiron, and all else therein, as
an astromythological system be named Tartaros, associated with the Abyss on the Tree of Life.
Nota bene: The Abyss of Qaballah corresponds to the Void Element of the Japanese Zen version of
Chinese Taoist alchemy, so important in Bujinkan Budo taijutsu combat arts and philosophy. It is out of
Void that all genius springs; Void is the ultimate source of the Kami, the Spirits and Gods. In Melanie
Reinhart’s Chiron and the Healing Journey (1986), she analyzes in great deal the relationship between the
sorts of trauma associated with Chiron in the natal chart and Shamanic initiation and gifts. In our culture,
those with very prominent Chiron in the natal chart also are the ones most likely to become greater healers,
Magi, shamans of all kind – that is, they are the ones who are likely to develop strong bonds with the Kami
or Gods and to gain spiritual power. By analogy, they are like the knights of old who were crazy enough to
go into the dragon’s cave to try to kill the damned thing, which had been ravaging the countryside and
generally raising merry hell all over the land. A few of these actually lived to tell the tale – and, dragging
themselves burned, bruised, and battered from the cave where lay the dragon’s dead body, later went back
in again to take the dragon’s head to prove it was dead . . . which was how they found out that all those
terrible years, the great dragon that had so wounded their land had also been guarding a vast, priceless
hoard of treasure, which was now theirs to keep. The Void, the Abyss is the home of Dragons, such as the
great, terrifying daemon Choronzon – but it is also the place of almost incomprehensibly great treasures of
both the mundane and the spiritual world. And it is this with which Chiron and Saturn and the region
between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn are associated.
With what, by the way, is Chaos associated? As the Quintessence of European alchemy is associated
with chi, so the Void and the Abyss are, to some extent, associated with Chaos, whose Lord is Eris,
Goddess of Chaos and Discord. But Chaos, I think, corresponds more closely with the asteroid belt
between Mars and Jupiter, whereas the Void and the Abyss correspond more closely, astromythologically
speaking, with Chiron, Saturn, and the vast gap between Jupiter and Uranus that holds Them both.
With what is Bifrost of Norse Mythology associated? Or Jotenheim? What correspondences do we
find between the angelologies and hagiographies of Judeochristianity, including the infernal ones, and
astrological phenomena, both in and beyond the Solar system? How about Tibetan and Hindu
mythologies? I think these and other culture can be mined profitably for correspondences for astrological
phenomena of all kinds, including those far beyond the bounds of the Solar System.

***

On the Goddess Eris and the Asteroid Belt Between Mars and Jupiter

The belt of asteroids lying between Mars and Jupiter is truly the domain of Eris. For it is just there that
one of humanity’s first great extra-terrestrial civilizations may form, distributed throughout artificially
maintained terrestrial-normal environments on the asteroids that make up the belt. Living in low-gravity
conditions, facing appalling environmental exigencies on a quotidian basis, as a matter of course that
everyone in their civilizations takes for granted, Belters (a term coined by Larry Niven as a nickname for
people living on and in those asteroids in his Known Worlds science-fiction series) will grow up in
conditions unlike anything which human young have ever known before. From Day 1 – which means from
conception on – their entire psychological set will develop in ways that differ markedly from the human
normal today, simply as a matter of survival. Their cultures and societies will therefore develop along lines
we really can’t yet begin to foresee, in spite of all our future-history scenarios and science-fiction novels
and cinematic productions. On top of everything else, the Belters will have available to them Hades’ own
treasure-house of mineral and other essential wealth and a gravity-free environment to process it in. Even
their need for water, oxygen, nitrogen, and other essentials of life can be satisfied rather easily by mining
the asteroids themselves for water-ices, frozen gases, and minerals. What can’t be found there will be
available to them from the Moons of the great gas-giants – and since they will be as used to moving from
asteroid to asteroid via personal jet and/or small “scooter”-type vehicles as we are to climbing into our cars
and going from, say, Los Angeles to San Diego or New York City to Washington, DC, or taking a plane
from San Francisco, CA to Denver, CO or Bangor, ME.
Such a Belter civilization will provide a constant source of uncertainty and discord for Planetary
civilizations, whether on Old Earth, Luna, or Mars. Their incredible, progressive technology and
manufacturing, freed of all gravity’s restraints, having a ready supply of every raw material needed by their
industry and for their agriculture, would serendipitously spin off new principles of engineering, new
scientific breakthroughs on a continuous basis, driving an endless technological and industrial revolution
that would ultimately become evolutionary in its effects on and meaning for humanity and all other Earthly
life. And, of course, eventually there would be wars between the Belters and the Dirtsiders, whether those
of Old Earth or Luna or Mars or Planets of other Stars. All these would combine over time to present an
endless source of uncertainty, insecurity, and, ultimately sheer chaos for Earth and Her colonial offspring
of other worlds and Stars – the chaos which, in the long run, is the driving force of all evolution, the
endless source of that challenge to living beings which evokes from them their ultimate strengths, the tests
of the Gods themselves as a result of transcendence of which at least some of Their creatures will
themselves finally attain to some species of divinity, the true children of the Gods.
The Givers of the Tests have many names in many cultures, some sacred, some of opprobrium, from
Saturn to Satan to Entropy. But they are the ultimate sine qua non of life, for without the challenges which
They continuously present to living organisms, Life would still be in the forms in which it first appeared,
billions of years ago, hanging out here as fat, dumb, and happy as a Kobe steer – until the inevitable Planet-
wide disaster hit, in the form of a Great Extinctor comet or meteor, or some other agent of Doom, and Life
here would have been as dead as that Kobe steer is the day after being slaughtered out.
The Lord of all of those Tester Gods is Eris, Goddess of Chaos and Discord, Lord of the Tests of Life.
Surely, then, the trans-Martian/sub-Jovian asteroid belt, which even exhibits strange attractors and other
chaotic patterns among the orbitals of its component asteroids, is the true domain of Eris. For someday it
will harbor a flourishing Belter civilization that will stir Life’s pot more than it has ever been stirred before,
the true Sons and Daughters of Uncertainty and Discord. Eris therefore rules no one world – but rather a
whole system of worldlets, the potential collective home of a great extraterrestrial human civilization and
countless transplanted, artificially maintained terrestrial microenvironments: the great belt of asteroids
spanning the region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

***

Definitions of “Natural” vs. “Supernatural”

These words have meant different things to different people. The occultist uses them somewhat – at
least! – differently than the religionist, and both use them very differently than many lay-persons. The
resultant ambiguities in their meaning reveal fascinating things about the intellectual history of our species.
Ultimately these words refer to will – to the will or spirit animating or responsible for a phenomenon.
There is the Will or Spirit of Nature, which men of the Enlightenment theorized was behind Natural Law,
the more-or-less mechanistic tendency of things to behave in a certain completely predictable ways unless
some outside agency, e.g., a God or a man or some other living being, interfered – a sort of Universal
Momentum of Things, if you will, left over from the first moment of Creation, when the Great
Watchmaker, having wound everything up, set it all going and stepped back to watch the show. Newton’s
Laws of Motion, for example, were seen as expressions of the Natural Will.
There is the Mineral Will, the Vegetable Will, the Animal Will – the basic nature and purposes of the
types of entities falling into these categories. These are one step more articulated or individuated than
Natural Will, and can interfere with the Primordial Will of Nature, at least to some extent. For example,
water does not, of its own accord, flow uphill; it seeks the lowest level, if left alone. But plants can draw
water uphill via osmosis; animals such as beavers can dam water, and make it back up for long miles, or,
as men do, make pipes to conduct it up hill and down dale far from its origins.
There are the wills, the intentions and purposes of individual entities, from rocks and volcanoes to
bushes and trees to human beings and all other animal life. Not only can they subvert Nature’s purposes,
they can interfere with the will of one another, and even subvert their own basic natures and True Wills.
And there is the Will of God or the Gods, which set all things going and can, at any time, interfere with
the way things are and make them all go differently. Divine Will can intervene in the lives of individual
entities, or the Elemental nature of animal, vegetative, or mineral being, or even the cosmos as a whole.
It is this last that medieval theologians and modern occultists referred to when using the terms
“supernatural” or “preternatural.” They did not and do not actually mean “going against nature and natural
law”; the Gods are the origin and ground of all nature and the laws that govern it, and cannot subvert Their
own natures. But They can change Their unfathomable minds, and such changes are exactly equivalent to
changes in the cosmos and the basic laws that regulate all things that occur within it, since it from those
minds that Creation itself came in the first place. Thus in a sense there is nothing that is supernatural, for
all things come from the Gods, and take their nature from the nature of divinity itself, which nothing can
transcend or subvert. But the latter can individuate, in the Jungian Sense, e unus pluribum, and can then
contend among themselves in true Darwinian competition, the will of one sometimes being uppermost, the
will of others other times taking precedence. And when this situation arises, we can thus speak of
“natural,” the pure mechanistic, non-sentient tendency of things to go on as they have unless interfered with
by some outside agency, versus “supernatural,” phenomena which are the result of interference by some
outside agency with otherwise non-sentient processes. The distinction is simply that between “sentient,” or
“directed by sentience,” and “non-sentient,” without the presence and will of a sentient agency, rather than
between “that which is or could be” and “the impossible.”
Yet many of us today, as in the past, assume the latter distinction to be the case, rather than the former.
Many an argument – or outright battle – has turned on misunderstandings based on lack of agreement over
definitions of these terms coupled with lack of awareness of the lack of agreement. Such
misunderstandings are part of the driving-engine of History. How much of what the world is today is so,
because of them? In the dichotomy of natural-vs.-supernatural is an abyss filled with the rubble of lives
and even whole cultures, not to mention that of formerly thriving ecosystems since destroyed to serve the
purposes of industrialists, politicians, and religious fanatics, all of whom have seen in the “natural” world
something less than the “supernatural” purposes of God – and the “more than natural” human being created
by that God – and therefore have found no reason not to ravage and loot and destroy the first for the whims
and greed of the second and third.

***

AolMail
Subj: Scurrilous Gossip
To: [Various confederates on Internet <g>]

One the media will probably never present (but if they do, please send me a clipping!!!)

When last Slick Willie came to town, several months ago, our mayor, Norm (“Normie” AKA
“Wormie”) Rice, who is a Staunch Democrat and a Good Token Negro (by the way, he is cheerfully hated
by the entire Black community of Seattle, an absolute first for any Seattle mayor, Black or otherwise), of
course went out to glad-hand the s.o.b., which he did, in front of God and everybody, at the Westlake
Center here, not to mention other places (ahem!). At the time, Normie was wearing a big bandage on his
arm, which, he explained, was for a wound “due to a household accident.”
The accident, it turns out, was that he was accidentally found by his wife in bed. With another dude.
She shot him. Unfortunately, she missed the centerline and only gave him a flesh-wound in the arm (she
has since sworn to practice every day until her aim improves; the citizens are passing the hat to purchase
her a target-range for this purpose).
Thought you might enjoy this. [Is the Bear Catholic? Does a wild Pole . . . <VBG.]
(By the way, here at Hydro-House we’re of the opinion that American Memorial Cemetery over there
in Renton – remember them? The ones that may have cremated Gary after taking money to bury him – are
part of our local political scene, here . . . Hey! Haven’t you heard of the Graveyard Vote? <g>)
Yours for restoration of the hemp (rope) vote, Lovag Yael R. Dragwyla

***

Dream (9/2/95 @ 11:20 a.m.

This morning I had a long dream complete with background music, which happened to be a lovely
instrumental version of “Put Your Hands on the Radio” (a SubGenial hymn by the Texas Jewboys, a group
that performed in night-clubs around Dallas back in the 1980s), in a minor key (the instrument, by the way,
was a calliope). The dream itself had to do with a Halloween weekend house-party at a friend’s estate (the
Addams family?). Just before the party broke up and everyone went home, we all gathered in the living-
room in our party-clothes one last time, to sing together, and I was wearing a lovely gown with a long,
long, flowing, bright-orange skirt decorated with black-and-yellow bats, pumpkins, etc.; a black, long-
sleeved bodice; bright yellow gauze petticoats; and a black shawl. A friend of mine who was there with
me was telling me in disgust about her mother, who was stupid enough to flaunt her tattoos while
committing a crime, or else to try to conceal her tattoos with something even more flamboyant than the
tattoos themselves . . . One wonders if I had had too much Halloween candy that evening before going to
bed, maybe.

***

The Real Difference Between Men and Women

It’s in the walk. Women walk around their uteruses, a kind of combat-ready walk that is not only
unconscious, but hard-wired somewhere in the mammalian biochemistry, because female mammals in
general have either a four-legged or two-legged version of it: the psychospiritual center of mass of the
body, as it were, is deep in the lower abdomen, inside the uterus. Even female mammals which have been
neutered walk this way, uterus or no uterus – they all walk as if their emotional, spiritual, and physical
center, the origin-point of the will, is where the center of the uterus is or would be if they still had a uterus.
Most men, on the other hand, walk either from the sternum, the head of their dicks, or some other place in
the body well away from the center of their mass. The only men who even approach the normal motion of
women are the U.S. Marines, combat vets who tend to walk that way because, just incidentally, it’s part of
a gut-protective reflex you learn under heavy fire. Female mammals are the combat veterans of Life; like
the Marines, they are there to protect something – in the case of the female, children and the equipment that
produces those children, most of the second of which is located right in the middle of the lower abdomen.
Fertile male mammals are programmed to sire as many offspring as possible, to “vote early and often,”
producing at least 2 offspring before getting done in or sterilized by something. Because this requires
taking a great many risks that the female should not take if she is to produce sufficient healthy carriers of
her genes, the psychology associated with it is normally better off not built around that gut-protecting
reflex. Hence males not experienced in open combat tend not to move in that “coiled around the center,”
pantheroid way, while combat-trained ones, like females, do.
I know a couple of people who are both part of the transsexual community, theoretically women in
male bodies who are trying to get their bodies changed to match their psychospiritual makeup. One is a
very good risk for the operation, psychologically speaking, and one isn’t – and it’s clear from their
respective walks which is which. The one who really does seem to be a true transsexual, female in a male
body, walks like a woman, moves like a woman, always has, in a way that clearly isn’t an act and never was
learned as one, even as a very little girl. The other walks like a man, and even when he is “walking like a
woman,” it’s very clearly an act – one which, by the way, doesn’t hold up when he is stressed, tired, angry,
or otherwise not paying attention to the act he is putting on. He is clearly a dude in a dude’s body, and
always will be, whatever his motives for “wanting to be a woman.” His movements and actions so much of
the time look like cruel parodies and caricatures of women – which may be, at least unconsciously, because
this whole thing may have had its origins in his long-standing hatred of his father. He is definitely
somewhat androgynous, but not female, and would be far better off not going through the operation to
change his physical gender, unlike the first person, who really is female, regardless of the shape of the
body.
It’s all in the walk – and combat experience.

***

PsyOps and the Will

PsyOps is short for “Psychological Operations,” psychospiritual technology used by military and other
intelligence communities to sabotage, subvert, or destroy outright the will of whoever the enemy is, and
thereby rendering the latter unwilling and/or unable to resist invasion, takeover, whatever. Its techniques
include shaming, humiliation, guilting, to cripple it; persuasion, subliminal seduction, brainwashing, to
turn and shape it; and a host of others. In other words, this is a psychospiritual technology for both
defeating and co-opting Magick, the Art and Science of Causing Change in Conformity with Will – to
defeat the will of the enemy and turn it to one’s own purposes. Is it entirely beyond belief that therefore a
great many members of the world intelligence community are themselves occultists, having become so as a
consequence of checking out the occult for ways to improve their technology, or being recruited for PsyOps
because of their knowledge of and experience with the occult?