Memento Mori
All that lives...
“Would you lay with me
In a field of stone
Should my lips grow dry
Would you wet them dear
Would you bathe with me
In the stream of life
Would you still love me
When I’m down and out”
Remember me.
Tomorrow marks the tenth anniversary of the first session of auditions that the late Halyna Hutchins and I held for our first collaborative partnership, Down the Rabbit Hole, which was based on Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare.
What has kept me obsessed with realizing the Hamlet story for DECADES and what made it relevant enough for both Halyna and I, in 2012 - 2013, to invest a significant amount of time, capital, and effort (mind you, she had just given birth to her son the previous August — so the majority of our time was scheduled around feedings and nap times — and I was still full time as the handmaiden to a Managing Director at a fund managing over $150bn) was exploring the struggle between one’s own feeling of inadequacy in the face of a momentous task that had to be done. On a macroscopic level, we were fascinated with the play’s examination of the human propensity to forget longer cycles and the consequences for those caught between two eras. (Sound familiar?)
Coinciding with Saturn’s closing months in Aquarius and Pluto’s prepartion for a foray into Aquarius, Halyna’s spirit (much like the Ghost in our piece) has been with me, calling to me like Hamlet’s Father’s Ghost at the end of Act 1, Scene 5 as the dawn recalls him to the other side, “Remember me”. All of the signs and messages she’s been sending are quite clear: complete one of the films that we had spent years nurturing but had never been able to give birth to. (Considering that, until the last four years of her life, 48 hours could not pass without communication between us, this recent “haunting” seems like picking up where we left off. LOL.)
Without turning this into a soft launch pitch of the project, that project was also one that seemed prompted by the ghost of someone who had recently committed suicide — whose life, to the eyes of the world, seemed like a dream come true. As we sought a way to translate into film the events that lead up to a suicide without being literal or grotesquely showing the actual act, we found ourselves repeatedly asking:
What does a person do when a dream that has finally been born into reality must die?
How does this impact our perception and understanding of self? Of our relationships? Of our place in the world? Do we even have the energy to pick up the pieces, rise from the ashes, and reinvent ourselves? If we do, what does that look like? If we don’t, what does that mean?
All That Lives Must Die
“Thou know’st ’tis common. All that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternity.”
As I’ve re-entered that story telling space, it has drawn me into a further line of questioning that, in Western culture, has lost its place at front of mind — but, maybe with the recent pandemic, is becoming more present.
In the West, we’ve become so divorced from both the rites de passage that mark out clearly, through the use of ritual, for the individual and the community, the cusps between states of being AND the processes of entering and exiting the world.
Before the middle of the 20th Century, it would be normal for most people of all ages to witness family members enter the world as well as be aware of the dangers that accompanied it. Sure, maybe it wasn’t actual parturition theater, but the smells, sounds, people involved were part of the fabric of normal life — until supposed “medical advances” made it seem more “modern” and “safe” to give birth at hospitals, sanitizing the arrival of babies for children — sure, they’re delivered by the stork <insert eye roll>. Don’t get me started on the implications for the cessation of modeling sex and sexuality as natural and not taboo subjects that parents then started to out source to sex ed teachers. Sure, there has been a movement since the beginning of the 21st Century to reverse this completely unnatural state of affairs with child birth, but the damage its done to the collective psyche is still there and having legal consequences especially in the United States.
Add to this the prevalence of people dying in hospice or hospitals or (my personal fear) at home alone or as news stories removed from our common experience, has made a mystery of death. The boomers’ obsession with staying young forever and the transhumanist’s technologically aided quest for immortality has made death a topic of fear and loathing.
Ignorance of the entrance and exit onto the stage of manifest reality has divorced us from ourselves and from nature — from the cycles to which we are subject and the frameworks that can more robustly and honestly contain our meaning — as individually consciousnesses and as a collective macro-organism.
Our increasingly secular society has estranged us from what neuroscientists have found is an inherent need to believe in God or, at the very least, something beyond the limits of our perception and power. Add to this, recent findings that the human brain may be programmed to seek out knowledge of the “after life”, what happens when we can no longer rely on answers that religion used to provide? What happens when, because of our shift to scientific materialism, we need evidence that there’s something beyond in order to give credence to something we know inherently?
It injects all manner of self doubt in our knowledge and wisdom for which we don’t have receipts. How many of us have had some kind of intuitive flash of knowledge and then talked ourselves out of trusting in it? Instead, we tell ourselves we’re being irrational and wait for the receipts…and sure enough, those receipts vindicate our original response — but now there’s some fuck shit that has to be rectified.
Anyhow, back to death and rebirth.
Vanitas, Pieter Claesz, 1660
Vanitas
The painting above by Pieter Claesz is part of a genre of still life paintings called vanitas. They evolved from the Renaissance as paintings of skulls (another tie in to Hamlet, LOL) and the ephemera of life that we mistake as its sole meaning to invoke in the viewer a meditation on the true nature of existence.
Many of you may find it morbid, but I’d ask you at this point to bust out a mirror and really explore your skull. Touch your hair, your skin, explore the curves and angles, feel for the bones on which that framework hangs and which contains your brain — that organ that enables your body to function in this reality and to perceive, make judgements, and act in response. In the end, what will be left will be that skull — the bones that constitute the architecture of your vehicle through this life. It’s a humbling thought, no? Humbling and yet liberating all at once.
Now, how does this relate to the Saturn’s ingress tomorrow, which will be hot on the heels of the Full Moon in Pisces (oddly enough on my friend’s nodal axis)? Why have I taken all of you (who have made it this far) on this thought train?
You’ve heard me wax on and on about how Saturn gets short shrift when we discuss the planets. Everyone wants to discuss sexy Venus, action hero Mars, good time Jupiter, even tricksy Mercury…but dealing with Saturn always draws a shudder or a sign. Mr. Karma, Mr. Justice, Mr. Crossfit Trainer.
But even Saturn can get swallowed up into that which is beyond time. Even Saturn must experience an end. As much as I love Saturn, working on this project, has opened my eyes to his foibles…but maybe that’s my own propensity to being irreligious.
Going Beyond Time
Let us work from the supposition that there is something beyond the limits of our conscious perception (even if we don’t work within this framework, this line of thinking might still be operative), whatever that is — whether your want to call it Source, God, the Soul, use whatever works for you — exists beyond Time, beyond measurement.
And the questions then arise: When does the part of that thing that we carry around inside us decide its time to return to it? Or what causes the Universe to decide that the particular story we’re living to perceive it has run its course? Or what happens when the individual consciousness is no longer able to carry on on the particular trajectory it chose for this time and loka? What happens when someone recognizes that we live in a world of Maya and projection? Why would you keep going if you know it’s an illusion? What happens when you realize Saturn is an old man in a booth pulling levers and using smoke and mirrors to convince you that he’s the Wizard of Oz?
These are the gauntlet of questions that Saturn will undergo during its almost three year stint in Pisces — to purify its function, to relate it back to what’s even more real than Saturn real.
Pisces DISSOLVES the inessential: Whether that’s through art — through fictions that are more truthful than fact — which is perhaps the whole point of our existence. Maybe each and every one of us alive — including the plants and animals and all the life on this blue marble of a planet — is a work of art that gets at some part of the truth — oh lordy…that gets into Matrix territory, doesn’t it? Or by any other means of untethering you from “reality”. Pisces is the end and the beginning.
What of Saturn, from its last 27.5 year trek around the elliptic needs to be dissolved? The vanities of dualism especially the perception that from action arises karma, that form equals function, that external expression is a reflection of the internal state of being, that that skull I just had you feel up is all that will be left when you return to source, that time has sway over life. (Oh, yeah, I can feel Saturn getting really huffy about now.)
In Practice
Okay, so to bring this back to “practical astrology” land. What does this mean for you? How does this help you craft a more meaningful life?
The areas of life ruled by Saturn (so the houses covered by Capricorn and Aquarius) and wherever your natal Saturn resides (as well as whatever planets it interacts with in your chart) are about to hear Buffalo Bill style, “It puts the lotion on its skin or it gets the hose”.
What dualities in these areas of life have become calcified barriers that need to be dissolved — so that you can reconnect to MEANING, to HUMANITY, to the EARTH and UNIVERSE? With all its messiness and fluidity? So that you can regain that freedom and wisdom that comes with knowing and accepting that that which begins must end? What parts of your life that truly are beyond time need to be dissolved of the fetters of artificial senses of urgency that have then created frustration, fear, anxiety that are not inherent to who you truly are?
For instance, let’s take Pisces Ascendants — you know, since you’ll be hosting Saturn in your face for 2.5 years:
Saturn rules the 11th house (of gains, social networks, the manifestation of source into consciousness, humanitarianism, cash flow) and the 12th house (of ego death, encountering “Source”, being a foreigner in a foreign land, hidden enemies, isolation, large organizations).
As Saturn traverses your 1st house of your consciousness projected into manifest reality (aka your confirmation bias), you will be asked to consciously examine how dualistic conditions that you’ve accepted as real and hard boundaries aren’t actually constraints to how you manifest source into consciousness (usually in the form of cash flow or realizing the fruits of the energy invested in your 3rd house to bring into being your desires). You may have to witness some dreams/projects or connections that finally became reality die/end and decide how to proceed in order to free yourself from these boundaries of perception? You will also be asked to very deliberately explore the boundaries that keep you locked in duality based perception of self and other that undermine you in connecting with larger groups that would both recognize and utilize your unique contributions.
If you need to look up your chart to sort out what areas of life these are, head over to astro.com.
The Stream of Life
It isn’t all sturm und drang. The last time Saturn was in Pisces was one of the most pivotal and meaningful times of my life. You might even say that it made me the person I am today — as flawed and yet delightful (LOL) as that is.
Most of us enjoy a lovely bath or a shower at the end of particularly grimey — literally or figuratively — days…sure Pisces can sometimes re-enact some scenes from Silkwood (go look it up you younger ones) of getting scrubbed clean of nuclear particles by men in Hazmat suits — but that’s like after throwing art, music, poetry, sex, intoxicants, yoga, astrology, and maybe even religion or a vivid dream life at you.
Even Saturn needs a bath — 27.5 years creating rules, boundaries, dealing in the dirty business of nudging you to see beyond duality and maybe using some not very dharmic ways to get you there!
When I think of Saturn going into this part of the sky, Johnny Cash’s cover of David Allan Coe’s song comes to mind for some reason. Johnny Cash is very Saturn in my head — and it’s like the poor guy is tired AF and needs that respite to reconnect to the dreams that make what he does worth it.
Lots of light,
Anak.
THE TAKEAWAY
The stream of life is what Pisces is all about — that’s where it all winds up…and even Saturn needs to learn what it means to be immersed in that primordial water — liminal — in the bardo — suspending his disbelief.
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Books are Open!
Lots of light,
Anak.
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