THOUGHTS ON IMMUNITY
(February 1999)
The myriads of asteroids are akin to our immune system,
or the microbes with which antibodies or leukocytes "engage" in battle.
Like them, asteroids are many, disseminated all around the system. Like
them, they are essential to our integrity but remain "small", invisible,
unconscious, in the dark. Like them, they act as a collectivity, and produce
inflammations and disease, pain... but it is all part of the healing and
the striving of the whole to remain whole.
Probably not the more regular, well-behaved orbits of the
main-belt asteroids, though. I see this immune system analogy mainly in
the orbit-crossers, like apollos and centaurs. They are really fighters,
catalysts, intensifiers, destroyers and liberators (in other words, all
those asteroids with high eccentricity and inclination). They inflict pain,
but it is a healing pain. And especially the centaurs, "they come from
afar", from the other side, from what is apparently not me, from what looks
as my enemy (disease, pain, death) but is really my healer and my very
self.
Crossers like Pholus don't respect boundaries; they will
penetrate, like an invasion, into our cultural conditionings, into our
shadows, manifesting themselves in areas of our lives which correspond
to the planets they cross. They will provoke our immune reaction: this
is why we are strengthened, like a homeopathic effect, or like the effects
of a vaccine. What looks as an enemy is really a friend, a healer, a teacher
on wholeness. It is something that comes from the vastness of life and
opens our hearts to the darkness that, after all, was not so dark, and
is there for us to love.
SAMUEL HAHNEMANN
Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann was born April 10,
1755, at midnight (10-11) in Meissen, 51N11/13E28. The hour is from Notable
Nativities, which cites Zadkiel's "The Future", i:166, Feb-Dec.1892, "time
approximate". I have no other source, but the "t.a." suggests that they
were using one. We have:
Chiron = 9,08 Cap
Pholus = 11,41 Cap
Nessus = 25,08 Sag
Pluto = 16,05 Sag
Ascendant = 18 Sag
July 2, 1843, 12h GMT (death):
Sun = 9,54 Cancer
Pholus = 6,56 Capricorn
Hahnemann died at the time of his Pholus return, which
was then in opposition to the Sun, 2.5 degrees past the exact point (precession-corrected),
while the Sun was in opposition to his natal Chiron, by less than a degree,
and very closely moving to the opposition to natal Pholus. (Transiting
Pluto was in conjunction with his natal Sun by 2.2 degrees at the time
of death, but if we correct for precession, that would place Pluto only
58' from his natal Sun).
I've always believed that the horoscope of death offers
us a picture of what the person "left" as deeds in the earth, his work,
his legacy, that for which he will be identified by future generations,
something that transcends his personal life. So this opposition with the
Sun suggests that his consciousness, his will, his purpose, his presence...
is strongly identified with Pholus.
In 1810, Pholus was at perihelion, staying at his closest
distance from Earth. It was in this year that the "Organon" was first published.
Pholus wouldn't approach the Earth again until 1901. This may mean something,
since Nessus was at aphelion in 1809, at his farthest point from us.
I don't know what this Pholus means, but it certainly is
here very significant. It shows how revealing dynamical astrology can be,
too. But what is he telling us? How would you relate the two, homeopathy
and wolves? It can be done with the "similitia similibus curantur" principle.
Can you see it?
What I see as an enemy that wants to hurt me or destroy
me, what I keep away and in fear, what is outcast... I can touch... for
a while, for a little bit, like a little friend... I can feel... that it
is part of me... and by loving, by embracing it without fear... for a little
bit.. like a little friend, I can heal.. both them and me!
SOME THOUGHTS ON LUPUS
There is a disease named after wolves. It is "lupus erythematosus",
and is usually mortal. Why was it called "lupus"?
My encyclopedia says: <<Among the features that lead
to identification of the disease are the typical skin lessions, the characteristic
way in which the skin reacts to sunlight, the inflammation of the joints
that does not cause deformity, the inflammation of the kidneys, and the
presence in the blood of autoantibodies that bind to the nucleic acid and
protein constituents of cell nuclei. The chemical binding action triggers
the inflammatory process. The first of these typical autoantibodies to
be recognized was named the lupus erythematosus cell factor.>> [Britannica]
The end result is that your immune system wants to "eat"
your vital organs, and the "wolf" comes from the corrosive manisfestations
on the skin, especially the face. These manifestations, following homeopathy,
are part of the overall pattern of feelings and personal history, so the
disease has the same "face" or personality as the one who suffers it, becoming
an expression of a condition of the soul.
... it is intriguing that 1 in 5 cases of lupus are women.
To my mind, it is a fixed-sign disease, everything going
inside, but, as astrologer Josh Payne suggests, it manifests itself "dynamically",
i.e., in a cardinal way (kidneys, face, joints). What is behind that "apparent"
cardinality is fixed stagnation. Speaking abstractly, it seems to be a
cardinal disfunction coming from an excess of fixicity.
There is a "stigma", however, associated with the skin
lesions in the face, resulting from exposure to sunlight, like a denial
of life and warmth, a denial of going out, the stigma being outside what
you feel inside about yourself. It is "pholusian" in that it comes from
your social alienation and your "hunger inside" that literally eats you
to death, evidencing here the plutonian aspects of the centaurs' dynamics.
PHOLUS AND HUMOUR
Jonathan Dunn, of "Chiron and Friends", has found Pholus
associated with the idea of "the fool", applicable, for example, to the
self-deprecating type of humour. This is interesting, because humour, symbolically
speaking, is one of the most formidable immune reactions.
Let's think for a moment in the figure of a clown. What
is a clown? What happens when one goes deeper into the psychology and personal
history of a clown? Is self-deprecation an elevating experience, or is
it a symptom? Is Pholus humourous? Or we approach it with a sense of humour,
as a device, as a psychological mechanism? Caricaturists, for example,
can make a clown of everybody; they are able to portray features that are
a very sharp representation of human misery and a form of social criticism.
If Pholus "incarnates" in outer experience as relationships
with lost parts of ourselves, he may appear as social waste and misfits,
orphaned parts of humanity, wounded and wild people, or... human rats.
There is a lot of beauty and joy to be found in misery, when it is acknowledged
and thrown into the light. This is a Neptunian reality, brought about and
transformed by Pholus, "The Fool". Yes!... This is one of the most wonderful
and sublime paradoxes of Life. But try to hide it, try to ignore the misery,
and you will become a human rat!
THE TRICKSTER
Jonathan also finds Pholus (together with Nessus) associated
with the "the coyote and the roadrunner story", which I think is very appropiate.
But putting the t.v. series aside, we find that the coyote, in general,
is very strongly a pholusian character, and illuminates the Pholus/fool
relationship. "Fool" may not be THE archetype of Pholus, but one
of the characteristic ways it manifests. Probably, the archetype is "the
trickster".
C. G. Jung wrote an essay called "On the psychology of
the trickster figure", which appeared in part 5 of a book by anthropologist
Paul Radin called "The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology"
(1954 in German, 1956 in English). Here are some quotes:
[typical trickster motifs:]
"... his fondness for sly jokes and malicious pranks, his power as
a shape-shifter, his dual nature, half animal, half divine, his exposure
to all kinds of tortures, and --last but not least-- his approximation
to the figure of a saviour."
"There is something of the trickster in the character of the shaman
and medicine-man, for he, too, often plays malicious jokes on people, only
to fall victim in his turn to the vengeance of those whom he has injured."
"The shamanistic techniques in themselves often cause the medicine-man
a good deal of discomfort, if not actual pain. At all events the "making
of a medicine-man" involves, in many parts of the world, so much agony
of body and soul and permanent psychic injuries may result. His "approximation
to the saviour" is an obvious consequence of this, in confirmation of the
mythological truth that the wounded wounder is the agent of healing, and
that the sufferer takes away suffering."
"If we consider, for example, the daemonic features exhibited by Yahweh
in the Old Testament, we shall find in them not a few reminders of the
unpredictable behaviour of the trickster, of his senseless orgies of destruction
and his self-imposed sufferings, together with the same gradual development
into a saviour and his simultaneous humanization. It is just this transformation
of the meaningless into the meaningful that reveals the trickster's compensatory
relation to the 'saint'".
Jung relates the trickster character to the "shadow". This
"shadow" --as I have suggested in "Political Predators"-- may be strongly
related to Pholus, and is part of the "wings" of Pholus seen from the "dark"
side.
Juan Antonio Revilla
San José, Costa Rica, February 16, 1999 / June 4 1999