Sagittarius 19°: Pelicans menaced by the behavior and refuse of men seek safer areas for bringing up their young.

13:02, 12/12/2014, Sagittarius 19°

p. 221     AN ASTROLOGICAL MANDALA, by Dane Rudhyar (1973)

PHASE 259 (SAGITTARIUS 19°): PELICANS MENACED BY THE BEHAVIOR AND REFUSE OF MEN SEEK SAFER AREAS FOR BRINGING UP THEIR YOUNG.

KEYNOTE: The need for people concerned with the future to discover a new way of living and more wholesome surroundings.

The evident reason for using "pelicans" at this stage of the cyclic process is that tradition tells us that these birds are so concerned with their young that they give their own blood and flesh to feed their progeny. Whether this is fact of symbol, the meaning of this picture refers to a situation that lately has acquired great urgency. Our technological society is polluting not only our global environment, but the mind and feeling -responses of new generations as well. The search for a new way of life is seen by many people to be imperative.

In this fourth symbol of the fifty-second sequence we are told that the race's SURVIVAL has become a matter of extreme importance. Whole animal species may be destroyed by our civilization; mankind itself is in danger. Going to distant planets is hardly the answer. A generation may have to sacrifice itself for the sake of its descendants.


Girlcapsule's Response:

In today's first image there appears the word NOÖSPHERE. This is a word I learned about in connection with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's conception of cosmogenesis. It indicates sphere of human thought likened through analogy to the atmosphere or biosphere. Think of all the orchestrated packets of meaning flying around the planet—weaving themselves via Fourier Transform in and out and in, from time to timelessness and back again. We are most certainly adding a layer of thought to Earth's collective experience.

Portal to safety
Image of John Ringhofer's album cover art

Today I would expand my conception of the Noösphere to include also the thought-sphere of pelicans. This is the kind of developmental move that is surfacing in discussions of consciousness evolution: developing an I/Thou relationship rather than an I/it to the wider world.

Thomas Berry, a seminal voice in this lineage, is quoted as saying: "The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects." Many fields of learning are discovering the ways in which beings of Earth are designed by evolution to love each other well as a matter of SURVIVAL.

Today, I have felt empathy with a pelican parent. I have felt a lot of emotion well up in me as I opened to the possibility of feeling empathetic. It is overwhelming to the body to have to process the true state of things, as we now understand them. Rudhyar mentions the possibility of humans causing the extinction of an entire animal species. This is happening every day. The rate of species die-off is now competing with the last great dying 65 million years ago that wiped out so many of the dinosaur species. We are witnessing the rapid ending of the Cenozoic Era, mostly due to damage to Earth's systems caused by human activities.

From Hofstadter's GÖDEL, ESCHER, BACH

Consider the graphic organizer (image above) depicting a model entitled "Well-formed formulas". I was drawn to this image as upon first comprehension it seemed to send a spark of recognition through my being in a visceral manner—and I felt a surge of curiosity rise in the form of a question about the role of imagination.

Perhaps the imagination functions as a means of recovering wisdom that is maybe completely off the neatly connected path-ways of theorems and axioms symbolically represented in the diagram above. Intuition plays an accompanying role to guide one's ponderings. This is how I would represent one benefit of engaging in a process such as this: a meditation on the Sabian Symbols—just allowing for the possibility that as a prismatic model of wholeness it might open in my imagination a similar flourishing that might otherwise remain dormant.



In the post correlating with Sun in Sagittarius 15°, Rudhyar wrote of the need for "eonic consciousness". I'm happy to report I experienced the synchronicity of discovering in the back pocket of a sky blue notebook the seemingly random lone page 28, torn in some earlier session from Rudhyar's book and hidden away. When and why did I tear page 28 out of An Astrological Mandala? I have absolutely no idea. I remember thinking to myself that I should look up what Rudhyar meant by "eonic consciousness". I had it on my to-do-list, and this morning it appeared to me.

The blue notebook jumped out at me, in the way of calling itself to my attention through color resonance with the images I was working with this morning. Here is Jung's The Red Book open to a mandala on page 169. Darger's collection is open to an image of a watercolor, pencil, carbon tracing, and collage on pieced paper measuring 31-1/2" x 131". In a process of meditating on the resonance between the images I drew out the notebook seen under the torn page in the image above. You can see Darger's image also there in the background. It was as simple a process as that: color matching!

Jung's The Red Book, pp. 168-169, and The Henry Darger Collection, pp. 46-47

Henry Darger—Extreme innocence?

I was very pleased to find a reason to include Henry Darger's influence to the on-going discussion. Darger spent his childhood as an orphan in an asylum and his adult life as a janitor. In his free time and with all the resources he could pull together he created a prodigious body of work. His imagination opened to him an epic narrative that compelled itself through him.

From the perspective of Depth Psychology, it soon becomes apparent that Darger's creative process bears evidence of a psychological churning. Darger likely suffered sever trauma as a child which haunted him. Darger's epic story is of a group called the Vivian Girls who chose to ban together and fight an army of adult male soldiers whose intention is to gain control over them. In the battle scenes the girls are sometimes depicted as being bound or strangled.

The blue-tone picture shows a sample of one typical way in which Darger chose to depict his heroines. Why? I have no idea. Is it possible he never realized the ways in which male and female bodies differ? He was never known to have a partner of any sort. He lived his whole life alone.

Darger's art can be felt as utterly heart-breaking, but there is also an incredible wealth of joy from the imagination to be found. Consider the image below. Notice the imaginative enlarging of the flowers and the attention to decoration of clothing and hair. The second image shows a girl with horns like a ram and butterfly-like wings. Darger's Vivian Girls in their struggle against abusive and oppression and for the freedom of self-governance certainly carries the echo of today's keynote: The need for people concerned with the future to discover a new way of living and more wholesome surroundings.

Suggestion: Google search images for "Darger, Vivian Girls"