mercury retrograde

03
Aug
2011

Wednesday Webshares: Mercury, Crowley, and Scrolls


Welcome to another Wednesday Webshare on the first full day of the current period of Mercury Retrograde. This is a video heavy posting, sorry about that.
Remember if you’re ever unsure about which direction Mercury is going and don’t want to bother with an ephemeris and numbers there is the site Is Mercury in Retrograde which provides a handy countdown for when you have to stop blaming Mercury and find another thing to blame for your bad communication skills and travel disruptions.
I haven’t discussed this much here (I’m managed to be surprisingly impersonal) but I’m a practitioner of Traditional Japanese Reiki. If you know what Reiki is…well it’s not really much like that. I’m the crotchety old geezer who complains that what gets called Reiki in the Western world isn’t that close to Reiki anymore. Regardless I was sent an interesting video recently. Judith Pennington studies EEG (Electroencephalographs or brainwaves) specifically in some relation to spiritual practices. She had studied many “Reiki Masters” but then studied someone who practiced Traditional Japanese Reiki (TJR) and found that the brainwaves were different between western Reiki users and TJR practitioners. This doesn’t surprise me considering the differences in how Reiki is accessed in those systems. I enjoyed watching the videos and it is food for thought, but I wish that Pennington stuck more with the actual observations (like what the brainwaves actually are) without her recoding it into her newage psycho-spiritual language. I’m not saying her interpretation is wrong in any way, but I think a stronger case would have been made without discussing “the field” and such and focusing on how interesting the brainwaves are.

And here is her write up based upon the experience.
Oddly enough I have an EEG machine (that isn’t odd…is it?) and I’ve recorded myself performing things like the LBRP, Middle Pillar, the Sphere of Self, as well as various meditations, but it never occurred to me to record my brainwaves while doing Reiki. I’m not sure if I’ll get the chance in the near future, but we’ll see. This wasn’t done in the most controlled manner, but still it is nice to see some slightly scientific research going into it and something to think on.
Out of the East and over to the Near East the Dead Sea Scrolls are up for adoption. For a mere £1,200, or $1888 (Canadian, Yankees can do your own conversion) you can adopt a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Sadly it’s not like adopting a kitten, it’s like adopting an animal at the zoo, your name will get put on a plaque beside your fragment at the museum so people know this is your baby. Personally I’d love to own parts of The Book of Noah, or the Book of Sirach: Angels and Lovecraftian horrors in the Jewish tradition, but $1888 is a lot for a book, especially one I don’t actually get to keep.
In slightly related news, the University of Oxford is stepping into the future of internet teamwork. There is a wealth of untranslated Greek papyri and they’re turning to the internet for help. Over at Ancient Lives you can look at papyri and help label/identify letters on various pages to help make the process of decoding these ancient texts go quicker. Largely they will be early Christian texts (they assume) but frankly those are the fun ones. I mean that’s where I got the actual quote about Archangel bukkake on Eve, I wasn’t making that up. I wish I could have. Angels were freaky. The less I say about that lipstick wearing leather daddy Azazel the better.
I’ve been watching Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, hoping it would be nearly as good as Xena. I’ve been wrong but there was an interesting Crowley reference I just saw. Basic context and spoilers. Outside of our world is Dahak, some big-bad evil that even the gods are afraid of -all of them Greek, Sumerian, Celtic, Norse- he crept into this world and possessed Iolaus and set up a religion of light, love, and debauchery…and well…apparently the evil from beyond our world is Aiwass.

Speaking Crowley, he makes an amusing cameo in the satirical public service video “The Bizarre World of the Bisexual.” Reading the comments I’d like to point out this is satire, if you watch the other videos they all play with a similar humour, if you take it serious it will be offensive (about sexuality, not about Crowley).

The US Army is apparently looking to create technological telepaths . Money for machine telepathy, thank goodness your country doesn’t have some sort of financial issue that this could be better spent on…wait what? Seriously though I think this is fascinating and I wonder how far this research will get, and what non-war applications it might have.
Lastly for a bit of Lovecraftian awesomeness I’ve recently come across the awesome and hilarious site Better Myths in which myths are retold…kinda. Aside from the awesome written versions the webmaster also does videos. This is a three part retelling of The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath
Again, sorry it’s so video heavy, that’s just the way the net worked for me this week.

Posted by kalagni in blueflamemagick
19
Apr
2011

Mercury Retrograde: Background



My Mercury Retrograde post got a surprising amount of attention, even though I was really just babbling about it not being a big deal to me, but it and the conversations it inspired made me realize how unfamiliar a lot of people actually are with Mercury Retrograde and the Shadow of it I mentioned.
Now as I begin, in honour of Mercury Retrograde (being confused and meaningless communication) after loving harassment of my friend Psyche (who has four websites so I didn’t know which to link to or should I link her twitter?) I have finally broken down and have decided to give twitter a try, so you can follow me here under the name Blueflamemagick. As far as I know I’ll be using it mainly to mention blog stuff, and to share interesting articles/links that don’t deserve their own posts but are fascinating none the less. This apparently gets me into this century.
Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging. I was surprised that a lot of people who dread Mercury Retrograde don’t even know what it is, much like a Saturn Return. Simple put Mercury Retrograde is when Mercury goes backwards in the sky. Obviously the planet doesn’t actually start to travel backwards but that is what it looks like from Earth. Why? Because we’re both orbiting the Sun at different distances and different rates and that creates the illusion of it travelling backwards. Have you ever been in a car and as you pick up speed that car ahead of you gets closer and then once you overtake it that car looks like it is travelling backwards? It’s the same illusion; Mercury just looks like it is going backwards because we “lap” each other in the race around the Sun.
So why does this disrupt our lives? I don’t know, it’s astrology, I find it works but no known mechanism, moving on. What it represents is everything about Mercury going backwards, against the flow of things. So it tends to be a time of travel issues, technological hiccoughs, miscommunications and the like. Now essentially all the bodies used in astrology go retrograde, so why does Mercury get all the glory? Mercury is a personal planet, which means it moves fast and affects people in more individual ways than a slower planet like Saturn does, but because it moves so fast when it goes Retrograde it “hits” a lot of other planets. When Mercury travels backwards it covers around a dozen degrees and if there are any planetary aspects in that range they get a touch of Mercury Retrograde. This is why it seems to hit people so much, Saturn hits around 8 degrees when Retrograde and it takes almost half a year to do it, so when it does affect something it is a smaller range, so less people are likely to share in the experience. Mercury is also an interpersonal planet, it’s communication, it’s commerce, it’s about you and other people, so it seems like it hits more people because by its nature it is a shared experience.
What is the Shadow of Mercury Retrograde? It’s a fancy name describe the time before and after retrograde when it is in the affected degrees. So right now Mercury started at 24 degrees of Aries and will go back to 12 degrees. So this area of 12-24 degrees is the shadow period. March 31 to April 23 Mercury is travelling backwards, but on April 23 Mercury will be in the same spot in the sky it was on March 17, and on May 12 it will finally be as far ahead as it was on March 31. So while March 31-April 23 is Mercury Retrograde, March 17-March30 and April 24-May 12 are the Shadows of Mercury Retrograde. They aren’t nearly as bad but share some of the same influence. One way of thinking of it is the first shadow is like walking on uneven terrain, retrograde is when you actually stumble, and the second shadow are your first few shaky steps as you catch your balance.
So what is the lesson of Mercury Retrograde? Like I said in the last post all retrogrades are about re-doing that planetary influence, and turning it inwards. Mercury you have to rethink, replan, rewrite, recommunicate, and such. While life must go on if you can avoid it never start something during the retrograde planet associated with it. That would be like a certain blogger who stupidly decided to upgrade Windows during Mercury Retrograde and has spent the last two days trying to get everything functional again. When you can’t avoid something in a retrograde people, always try to “re” it over in your head. Mercury Retrograde is commonly known for miscommunication, so when sending that important email or letter take time to reread, and revise it because now is the time where mistakes can appear more easily. Other than that, sit back, and relax, it is only Mercury Retrograde, it lasts for a short while and then you’re safe…for three months.
(Disclaimer: All spelling and grammatical errors are the result of Mercury Retrograde, milk the excuse while you have it.)

Posted by kalagni in blueflamemagick
09
Apr
2011

Welcome To Mercury Retrograde: Spring 2011


For those not keeping score at home Mercury decided to turn backwards on the 31st of March and will continue his moonwalk until the 23rd of April. Of course to those more sensitive to the horrors of Mercury Retrograde there was a build up starting on the first of March and we’ll be in the shadow of Mercury Retrograde until May 12th.
For those slightly more astrologically inclined he is travelling backwards from 24º Aries back to 12º so if you think you’re getting hit hard and aren’t sure way, you can take one of the links from my last post and draw up your birth chart and see if you have anything in his way.
I have a very tight chart, with the exception of Pluto, Neptune and Venus, everything in my chart is between 14 and 26 degrees, and all in all everything in my chart takes up a mere 120 degrees. They’re also in such signs that everything other than my Saturn will get hit by this Mercury Retrograde using the basic five aspects.
I’m fine with this. I’m a Mercury Rx baby. I was born with Mercury Retrograde in my chart, and it went Direct in my life in the early 90’s. Mercury Retrograde rarely hits me in the way it does other people. No disrupted travel, no crappy communication. Though it sometimes hits me with Retrograde splash-back, meaning other people in my life get hit with it, and I get rebound effects. Within the first week of Mercury Rx both my father and my sister got hit with pretty resilient computer viruses that all their anti-virus, malware, rootkit programs and the like couldn’t handle. So I was called to help. Both were surprisingly tough challenges taking probably about two to three dedicated hours of work to clean up each.
See I’m not hit be retrograde, but people near me are, and I have to deal with it that way. When I was studying astrology, my mentor would tell me that to understand a retrograde period just put “re” infront of the keywords for the planet. So Mercury Retrograde is about recommunication, retransportation, rethinking, and reconnecting. Whenever Mercury Rx is going to hit my chart hard, it picks a time of my life and I’m sent back there. This time it is focusing on high school, and I’m not sure why. Since Mercury Rx I’ve seen two friends from high school, one who I haven’t seen in 2 years, the other 8, this morning I wake up to a facebook message from a high school friend I haven’t seen in 8 years who thinks we should go out for coffee, this week a friend I haven’t talked to since high school due to a falling out added me on facebook (but hasn’t said anything), and another whom I’ve seen twice in the eight years invited me to her birthday party which I had to decline.
This is what happens to me. For me it’s all about reconnecting with my past. It never lasts past the retrograde (okay rarely), I’m not going to resurrect relationships eight years dead, but I’ll catch-up, get my curious closure and move on. That’s what I love about Retrograde periods, specifically personalized ones, they give me a chance to go back, tie up loose ends, and then continue forward. So I don’t see what everyone’s problem is, I just do a little recommunication, a little reconnection, and then I can get on with my life. So stop your fighting, Mercury is bigger than you, if you’re getting hit by the Retrograde, take the time to turn in, reconnect, recommunicate, rethink, and when this is all over you’ll be refreshed and better prepared to tackle what is ahead of you.
I’m just hoping that I don’t have to deal with any more splash-back, and now that I think about it, perhaps this is why two of my book orders are a week late. If Mercury Retrograde starts interfere with me getting books there will be hell to pay.
Also, since we’re discussing Mercury and communication at such, I have two things I want to say.  First off, if you haven’t noticed on the top of the right sidebar there is now mention of an about page.  It only contains a short biography for me, but it contains an email address for me to save a certain commenter from posting a comment meant just to talk to me, and then realizing they can’t delete it because comments are hidden until your first one is approved…not that anyone had done that and panicked.  So yes, if you want to email me, rather than communicate through the site, the About page has that.  Point two, which hopefully addresses another person…  Someone keeps googling “blue flame magick blog” to get here, which is fine, glad to have you, but don’t forget there is a subscribe by email function on the right sidebar, so you get posts emailed to you, or you can add my blog to google reader to keep up with me.  Or you can just randomly google it every once and a while, I’m trying to make it easy.

Posted by kalagni in blueflamemagick