PRELIMINARY KEYWORDS
These are some of my tentative “keywords” or images for the centaurs I have studied, so they can be dismissed, confirmed, changed, improved, expanded, ignored, accepted, scorned…
For an explanation of how these keywords were produced, please go to the end of this page. The objects included are: Pholus, Nessus, Asbolus, Pylenor, Hylonome, Chariklo, 1999TD10, 1996TL66, Varuna, 2002AW197.
PHOLUS:
Luciferian, the Fall.
a pterodactile, a vulture
an angel, a trickster
intelligence operations, a spy
metamorphoses, overflow, invasion
orphanhood, outcast, untamed
the nobility of the wild
communion of two worlds
predator, shamanism, a wolf
clash of cultures.
dispossessed, waste
the enchanted forest
torrential rain, a waterfall
incongruity, drunkenness
danger, a hunter
un-conditioning, looseness
homeless,a nomad
exodus
the butterfly and the moth
illumination, rapture, euphoria
I know it is difficult to do it with few words, but do you think you could at least attempt to hint at (not to mention describe) how this Moon/Pholus manifests?
I would expect a Moon/Pholus person to be very passionate and intense, even extatic and inspired, but in a wild, wounded, reckless way that tends to “disperse away” or fragment the sense of belonging and the domesticity of the Moon. It is vulnerable, orphaned, socially untamed, a homeless wanderer who has difficulty with domestic stability, who is “burning” inside, who needs to live emotionally on the edge, in the rim between2 worlds, and needs to “give it all” on occasion to fulfill the longing of melting away with a “primal other”. The person may be very conventional in the outside, but in the inside is raw and longing for a world where there are no barriers, which can find an outlet through creative fantasy and imagination (e.g. the “wizard”), or in emotionally destructive or even predatory ways.
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NESSUS:
negation, smallness
abuse, horror, obscurity
blackness or nigredo, death
the delicacy and sensibility of the flower
the fragility of life,
nastiness, manipulation, cruelty
weakness, morbidity
the strength that is found in weakness
a guardian at the threshold
simple, dark, infinite
terrible and beautiful in its fragility
paradox of beauty and ugliness,
the Beauty and the Beast.
a sphinx, an owl.
Nessus has a bad reputation and is often portrayed as a monster or as a toxic animal that bites and harms, as some sort of venom. This in my opinion is extremely superficial and extremely sad. Are there harmful animals? or do they bite and harm when they are hungry, afraid, or fighting to survive? Like a wild animal that has suffered the tragedy of falling in the path of humans, or in the path of its predator, and has been hurt, when Nessus is active we can face morbidity, weakness, cruelty, abuse, negation, nastiness, and terror. But this is not because Nessus is venomous or toxic, but because it brings to the surface our weaknesses and our fears.
Nessus represents what is small and weak and extremely sensitive, but at the same time and as a consequence it brings forth the cruelty of life: a black that must live among racially prejudiced white, a woman that must live among abusive men, a poor man that has grown being the victim of the rich, a member of a religious minority that lives among the hatred and repression of the majority’s regime. These situations bring man’s beast to the front, but it is a wounded beast, a survivor that is fighting to survive and to deal with deep and acute forms of pain and/or neglect.
Nessus is the beauty and the ugliness of the lonely, unloved beast; when it is critically active or focal it is often in the form of cruelty, harm, and the infliction of pain. We don’t love the beast, we despise it or ignore it, we condemn it to the dark, and when it surfaces angry and hungry, we blame it and try to kill it. But it always comes back with a vengueance, and our continuing ignoring it creates an enormous shadow that will eventually and inexorably eat us. If, however, we face the horrible pain and see the beaty of the beast, the internal butterfly, then Nessus crosses all the barriers and shows us the miracle of the precarious, the melancholic delicacy, beauty and fragility of a flower.
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ASBOLUS:
preacher, magician
the eagle and the serpent
dreams, mist, fog
clairvoyancy
clinking glass beads
penetrating, profundity
abyss
blindness
hiding, secrets.
mystery, conspiracy
tabu, sin, confession
torment, punishment, anguish
bewilderment, bleeding hearts
the light that shines in the darkness
oven, igneous, ash and smoke
fusion, alchemy, density
the mysteries of blood
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PYLENOR:
bleeding, poison, surgery
infection, tumor, cavity
destitute, poverty, loneliness
deprivation, humility
dirty, immoral
piety, cleanliness, immaculate
fear, gothic, gruesome
cold, very old man, corpse
flesh, exposed wound, nakedness
defoliation, slaughter
butcher, rivers of blood
sordid
misanthrope, social misfit
monasticism
humbleness, shame
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HYLONOME:
death song, war song,
heroism, sacrifice
eternal youth,
longing for Paradise,
lost innocence
the sacrificial victim
purity, tragic beauty,
redemption
the cry of the poor
political and religious messianism.
the virgin and the prostitute
the voice and the cry of animals
the fallen heroes in battle
monuments, memorials
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CHARIKLO:
matriarchate,
the queen of spades,
mature passions
widowhood
illicit loves
sober,
silent celebration,
emancipation and freedom
caring for the sick, the dying,
protector of the weak
social justice
community development
ancestors, ancestral wisdom
ethnicity
mourning
a dark bond or commitment,
linked to death
sad radiance, somber beauty
luminous night
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1999TD10:
dissociation, alienation
racism, racial prejudice
oppression, neglect,
death, murder
depth, shadow
terror, terrorism
cross, seal, stigma
invincible, indestructible
rock formations
the intelligibility of chaos
concealed truth, hiding the truth
a wall of silence
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1996TL66:
avenger, death,
bombing, destruction,
blast, massacre, ashes
annihilation, devastation,
nothingness, desolation,
remoteness, non-human
escathological, apocalyptic
Purgatory, revelation,
celestial, prophecy
the gates of Hades
the aftermath,
a higher synthesis of life and death.
spiritual light, revelation
the wind of Pentecost
the Dragon, the Beast
hegemony, imperialism, conquest
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VARUNA:
social class, caste
elites, vertical segregation
hierarchy, supremacy
unquestionable authority
religious, divine, hieratical
divine or cosmic order
“playing God”
Law, jurisprudence, the Courts
the good, the just
moral superiority
sanction from above
judgement
dogmatism, conservatism
fundamentalism
conservation of wildlife
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2002AW197: (*)
worldwide forces
worldwide action
earth’s/planetary architecture
gradual/global changes
evolutionary trends
structural equilibria
global law of cause and effect
earth’s resources
adaptive spreadings/strategies
far-distance action/communication
complex assemblages
high level/widespread organization
dynamic structures
social architectures
impact on social systems
(*) NOTE: the keywords of 2002AW197 are the work of Francesco Schiavinotto, from Rome. He used the “Plate Tectonics” geological paradigm and orbital symbolism as the model for the metaphor-building process of deriving the meaning
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EXPLANATION OF THESE KEYWORDS
Mon, 29 Oct 2001 04:32:16 -0600
The procedure used to derive these keywords is very simple, something I learned from conventional methods of analyzing poetry and dreams. It consists of separating from the text or narrative the main nouns, adjectives, and verbs. When one does this in texts that are apparently unrelated, or even within a single apparently disordered text, one begins to discover a pattern.
The words extracted become a “semantic cell”, where all the different possible ideas or meanings are successive approximations to the same abstract concept. The concept itself is not defined in abstraction or a priori; it remains undefined and “free”, but the keywords or mental images are tied around the same type of “movement” or “atmosphere” that originates from the text.
The texts used are all the interpretative and speculative material found in this site.
These “keywords” or mental images are not formulas, like the keywords many astrologers are used to. I am not interested in offering abstract or “easy” formulas for interpretation. The keywords are guidelines for the associative/symbolical process of the mind, so that each astrologer can “tune” to the source from which they come without having to define conceptually what this source is.
If one pretends an abstract definition, the many possibilities of meaning according to the many different contexts in which an astrological interpretation is required are blocked, and, from my perspective, the main power of astrology, the power of the disciplined imagination, is hindered or destroyed.
Once the main keywords (nouns, verbs, adjectives) are extracted from the text, they are added to the other keywords coming from other texts having the same “condition”. The condition is that the position of the centaur in the chart of the writer, actor, musician, event, etc. under scrutiny must be very critical from a technical point of view, it must be highly “dignified” astrologically, it must be very strong relative to other parts of the chart.
After the different keywords have been piled-up, they are “processed” or slightly filtered. The ones that seem to be more clear are left in the pile, the others are eliminated. During this process, one begins to “feel” what all the different subjects or cases from which they came have in common, and some other images and keywords often come out strongly in the imagination, like “intuitions” that one knows are part of the same “semantic cell” and illuminate each of the cases. The intuitions –or rather, imaginative pictures– are therefore added to the pile, being careful not to add any that cannot be strongly related to the original data from which the pile was built.
This is how these keywords came to be. Some people cannot apply them to concrete cases because they expect that keywords should avoid them having to create their own conceptual interpretations adapted to the different contexts out of the images inherent in them; but this is how they are intended. They are far from the cook-book formulas that a lot of people expect from a set of keywords.