17 Nov Redrum ~ Lunar Eclipse in Taurus ~ November 19th, 2021

On November 19th, the season of Scorpio comes to a climax with the first lunar eclipse in the fixed earth sign of Taurus. This will be a Blood Moon, where the earth casts its shadow to produce a dim red glow in the night sky.

 

The final days of Scorpio season have arrived. The Sun is now crossing through the darkest tunnels of the underworld where all light is swallowed by fear and despair.

Whatever vague haunted feeling you’ve been trying to avoid since late October is about to start bleeding internally. And as it gushes, a primal feeling of horror will start to surge.

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

Lunar eclipses are super magnified Full Moons, a climactic moment of culmination and release. And this eclipse represents a shift in the cosmic tide, as the North Node in Gemini prepares to transition into Taurus in January of 2022. 

The lunar eclipse will be at 27 degrees Taurus conjoined with the fixed star Caput Algol, aka the head of Medusa. From a mythic perspective, this indicates that at the final gateway of the underworld, there will be a confrontation with great horror. This will urge a catharsis, a tremendous release of the fear, hatred, revulsion that poisons your heart and soul.

Squared to Jupiter in Aquarius, the horror will be hyper-inflated by the existential crisis of the collective that demands you sacrifice your sovereignty for the greater good. The loftiest humanitarian notions of Aquarius reveal their necrotic intentions to assimilate you into the Borg.

The Borg is always hungry, so you must stay sharp and be ready to change tactics to avoid its devouring jaws.

The ruler of this Moon in Taurus, Venus in Capricorn, is trine to Uranus in Taurus and sextile to Mars in Scorpio, still separating from an opposition with Uranus. An electrified current of rebellion will summon an overwhelming urge to try something new, to make a break from anything that is holding you back against your will. Cutting ties with toxic relationships should feel easy right now.

We Want You To Play With Us…

Eclipses bring shadows. And the eclipses over the last 18 months certainly brought the demons of the Information Age out to play.

Since spring of 2020 when the Gemini/Sagittarius eclipses began, the overstimulated collective mind (Gemini) was gorged on so much information that reality was swallowed up by a churning sea of data. Even the best navigators have barely survived, for most lighthouses were obscured by the “Game-Over” nihilism that destroys some of the best minds of every generation.

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

The real disease of this time is information overload, when your heroic mind can no longer make sense of anything and collapses. When the world is spinning wildly without meaning, the end of the world seems nigh. Exhausted beyond belief, you become tempted to give up or just give in.

The mind is dull when it has no questions. “I believe in science.” 

And the mind is dim when it has no faith. “It’s all lies.”

And the mind freezes in response to trauma, numbing your senses and transfixing your spirit in a state of dissociation.

A traumatized mind becomes so rigid that higher functions of reason and intuition become inaccessible. The mind no longer perceives or reflects upon new information, but acts like a tape-loop playing the story of the past over and over. This is how the mind dies before the body, automatically reciting the same story.

To behold another living being who’s caught on a tape-loop instead of actually being present provokes a feeling of true horror. And no doubt, this eclipse will haunt you with interactions that are predicated on those dead-eyes that see without seeing you.

You may call these people drones, pod people, cult–members, robots, zombies…

….or Interpolated Subjects of the Ideological State Apparatus.

Whatever name you use to describe the uncanny feeling, it is this dissociated state of consciousness that is the shadow of the Information Age. Knowledge is power and has become weaponized like never before to proliferate mental numbness through the 24/7 buzz of mass media. The onslaught of corporate ideology and misinformation wears everyone down.

…Forever and Ever and Ever

This Algol Lunar Eclipse in Taurus comes to stir your soul’s agony and awaken you from the numbness of information overload. The axis of the Sun in watery Scorpio and the Moon in earthen Taurus awakens a primal form of consciousness that rides on feeling and pulses within the marrow of your bones.

The wisdom of the body speaks from a place beyond the mind’s grasp, where trauma has no power to silence the truth. Once connected, you know you can trust your senses. You can taste poison. You can discern who is telling you the truth instinctually… viscerally. And you naturally recoil from anything that threatens your freewill and autonomy.

The momentum stirred by the eclipses in mutable air and fire will crash against fixed earth and water. This will be felt viscerally as a shock, a sudden paralysis, as if you’ve been petrified by the evil eye of Medusa. There’s no choice but to sit still and listen to your soul speak.

Your soul speaks loudly through your body’s tension, in the trembling weakness and pain that has been creeping up on you. In the failing of your appetites to define what is too much or too little. 

As the numbness thaws, your mind blinks awake in flashes, becoming aware that great violence has been done to your soul. And it can no longer be ignored. The pain throbs because the lunar eclipse in Taurus demands that you experience a deeper level of sentience.

Matters of Life and Death

Ancient star-lore imagines Caput Algol as the head of slain Medusa in the hand of Perseus. And the blinking star is her wrathful gaze, brutal and destructive even in death.

Medusa was said to stand as a guardian at the gates of hell. The myths describe her as a beautiful woman with serpents for hair whose gaze turned men to stone.

Feministic scholarship will remind you that in Paleolithic religions, the serpent-haired Medusa was a goddess of sex and death: the mythical Ouroboros eating its own tail. She was the bloody cycle of creation, procreation and destruction laid bare.

But Medusa is a monster in the face of 21st Century technocratic society, for her writhing snakes of sex and death threaten the reason that seeks to dominate nature with science. And her eyes kill pride and paralyze arrogance about social order. 

Psychologically speaking, Medusa is a monster from the abyss that gazes back. She is a black mirror for all the repressed fear and revulsion hidden inside anyone who approaches her. She reveals your soul sickness, lays it naked and bare for you to see.

It is the dark waters of the abyss that the Sun in the final decan of Scorpio illuminates. You stare into the abyss and the abyss stares back. Looking across the zodiac, the Moon conjunct Algol reflects back the gruesome visage of everything you fear. Thus, this confrontation with Medusa marks a sudden paralysis that forces introspection.

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

Paralysis offers a certain power, like the transfixed oblivion that a great film sweeps over you. Suddenly, you can’t move, in awe of the images that are unfolding. The horror genre in particular has the power to hold you captive, writhing in your seat but powerless to stop the cathartic onslaught of terror. Medusa’s eye glares through the screen, turning the audience into immobilized bystanders who must bear witness to the pain. 

Great cinema is dreamwork and dreamwork is alchemy, where one distorts or dismembers nature in order to re-member nature as spirit ensouled in matter.

Here’s Johnny!

The perfect film to view for the Lunar Eclipse in Taurus is Stanley Kubrick’s 1981 horror masterpiece The Shining. An adaptation of Stephen King’s 1977 novel of the same name, Kubrick’s film holds a unique place in the annals of horror for its subversion of genre conventions that rely on terror and suspense alone to frighten us, instead drawing from a much deeper source of dread in the unconscious: the uncanny.

King’s novel was an undeniably fresh and original take on the haunted house genre in horror literature when it was published in 1977, but Kubrick’s adaptation turned its source material on its head by asking what is it that truly makes a house haunted?

In searching for an answer, Kubrick drew inspiration from Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay Das Unheimliche or The Uncanny. Freud defines the uncanny or unheimliche in contrast to its inverse: heimliche means “concealed, hidden, in secret,” so that which is unheimliche or uncanny reveals secrets that were buried long ago and in effect makes conscious the unconscious.

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

But there is a double-meaning to the uncanny, for that which is canny is “cozy,” “familiar,” and “homey.” Therefore, the uncanny is that which is uncomfortable, unfamiliar and un-homey. This is not to be confused with something that is new and different or “other.” It’s that dreadful feeling when familiar objects become a source of terror. By way of example, Stephen King claimed that terror is the peak state a horror writer could achieve, and he described it as the feeling of coming home to find that everything in your house has been replaced by an exact copy.

The uncanny is what makes dolls and clowns so fundamentally horrifying. It’s the irrational fear that inanimate objects will come to life—not even necessarily harm you, but just unsettle you in a way that is unfathomable to reason and logic. It’s what makes zombies so scary—the categorical impossibility of the dead coming back to life. It’s the root terror of the doppelgänger or double—the irrational fear that somewhere out there is an exact replica of you who could replace you at any moment. It’s that equal feeling of awe and dread that young children experience when gazing at their reflection in the mirror—simultaneously mesmerized by their own self-identification and horrified by the person staring back who looks like them but patently is not them.

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

The Shining itself is an uncanny entry in the horror genre, appearing to be an ordinary haunted house movie like The Amityville Horror, but underneath its surface revealing itself to be anything but a recognizable horror movie. Of course, it has everything that makes a horror movie categorically a horror movie: terror, suspense, violence. But that’s not what makes it scary.

What makes The Shining scary is its unrelenting uncanniness. It looks like other horror movies but it isn’t anything like other horror movies. Something seems off about it, doesn it? It just doesn’t seem right, does it?

The story seems simple enough: a down-on-his-luck writer named Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) gets a second chance when he’s hired to be the winter caretaker at the majestic Overlook Hotel in the Rocky Mountains. The job requires that he and his family take up residence as the sole occupants of the luxury hotel, spending the entire winter isolated from the rest of the world by merciless snowstorms and hostile terrain. The Overlook has a tragic history, marred by one of the previous winter caretakers having murdered his family with an ax before committing suicide by shotgun.

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

Jack’s son Danny (Danny Lloyd) possesses a psychic gift, a sixth sense dubbed the shining by the Overlook’s head chef Dick Halloran (Scatman Crothers), who has the same gift. Early in the film, before the family departs for the Overlook, Jack’s wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) confides her husband’s history of alcoholism and child abuse to a concerned psychiatrist. After months of being cooped up in the Overlook Hotel, the Torrance family slowly goes mad. Danny’s shining is clearly affected by the hotel’s haunted atmosphere while Jack’s abusive tendencies resurface into a murderous rage and all hell breaks loose.

In Kubrick’s own words: “It’s the story of one man’s family quietly going insane together.”

It’s Just Like Pictures in a Book…

The Shining is not what it appears to be. It does not produce terror by any conventional means. Kubrick eschews cobwebs, dark shadows and jump scares for abstract imagery and subliminal visual distortions that get under your skin in uncanny ways.

The image of the elevator doors opening to reveal a river of blood pouring through the Overlook’s hallways visually conveys the uncanniness of it all. This shot appears as one of Danny’s horrific psychic visions without any relationship to the plot. It has no basis in the novel, either. But its message is clear: what was meant to stay hidden can remain secret no more and the unconscious world of psychic repression now threatens to flood the corridors of conscious awareness.

The subliminal effect of The Shining has been carefully analyzed by amateur film critics since it was released on home video in the 80’s, when it was discovered after multiple viewings that the Overlook itself is a spatially impossible structure, with doors where they shouldn’t be and stairways that lead nowhere. It’s not an aesthetic choice that is pronounced, either. Instead, it subtly haunts the background, aggravating an unconscious awareness of the uncanny in the viewer. This phenomenon was brilliantly covered in the documentary Room 237, a film that reveals in the Internet age, The Shining has produced a community of obsessive film fanatics quietly going insane together.

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

The visual disorientation of the Overlook is mirrored in the hotel’s hedge maze, another deviation from the novel fabricated by Kubrick. This maze reflects the labyrinth of King Minos, and Jack’s psychotic pursuit of Danny at the film’s climax conjures the minotaur, an image that is doubtlessly resonant with the energies of this Lunar Eclipse in Taurus.

A terrible monster with the body of a man and the head of a bull, the minotaur is the bastard spawn of Minos’ wife and a bull that the king refused to sacrifice to Poseidon. Minos instructed his architect Daedelus to build a labyrinth wherein to imprison the hideous creature. Every nine years, seven boys and seven girls were sent into the labyrinth as a sacrifice to the minotaur. This wretched cycle was finally broken by the hero Theseus, who with the help of Minos’ daughter Ariadne, entered the labyrinth and slayed the minotaur.

It doesn’t take a doctor of psychology to read the minotaur myth as one of sexual repression, and the labyrinth as an analogue for the unconscious that imprisons your fear and revulsion within its uncanny walls. True heroism means entering into that abominable mystery to face your fear, integrate the shadow and, in the words of Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, make the unconscious conscious.

…It’s Not Real

The minotaur is not the only monster that we will face in the Lunar Eclipse in Taurus. Conjunct to the fixed star Caput Algol, this blood moon eclipse conjures visions of Medusa, who we encounter in The Shining during the film’s most dreadful scene in Room 237.

If the Overlook is the basement of the unconscious where we hide all of our fear and revulsion, then Room 237 is the lockbox in that basement that contains all of its worst secrets. Early in the film, Danny is warned by Halloran about the dangers that lurk in Room 237, who emphatically tells the child, “…you haven’t got no business going in there anyway, so stay out. You understand? Stay out.”

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

After resisting the temptation to enter the forsaken room during one of his endless tricycle rides through the Overlook’s impossible corridors, Danny eventually succumbs to the siren’s call when a ball mysteriously rolls toward him while he’s playing with toy trucks on the floor outside of Room 237. Danny later emerges in a trance, sucking his thumb with bruises on his neck. He’s been petrified by what he found in Room 237, effectively turned to stone by his own curiosity.

Initially, Wendy accuses Jack of having strangled Danny, evidence that the patriarch’s history of abuse has reared its ugly head—a return of the repressed, as it were. But as they both learn, there is a “crazy woman” in Room 237 who strangled Danny and Wendy implores Jack to investigate.

In what is arguably the uncanniest scene in all of film history, Jack enters Room 237 to discover a beautiful woman in the bathtub. She emerges from behind the shower curtain to ravish Jack, who does absolutely nothing to resist her seductions… until he looks into the mirror to see the decomposing corpse of an old woman in his arms. Slowly, he backs out of the room, pursued by the old hag whose maniacal cackling dominates the soundscape like the uncanny laughter of a fortune telling automaton carnival attraction. Jack eventually escapes, promptly locking the door behind him so that we never have to think about what’s hidden in Room 237 ever again.

Can’t Live With ‘Em, Can’t Live Without ‘Em

Freud was no stranger to the Medusa myth. In a posthumous essay titled Medusa’s Head, Freud equated decapitation with castration. He maintained that the head of the gorgon was a perfect reflection of the castration complex aroused in men at the sight of female genitalia, which brought home the truth that females have no penis. However, the male subject is reassured of his manhood by the stiffening of his member, effectively turned to stone by his own arousal.

But the Medusa myth is ripe with readings of repression and revulsion beyond Freud’s outmoded interpretation. In Ovid’s account, Medusa was a fair maiden who was raped by Poseidon (Neptune) in a temple of Athena (Minerva). Rather than take vengeance on Poseidon for defiling her sanctuary, Athena punished Medusa by transforming the maiden into a gorgon—a hideous beast with snakes for hair whose gaze turned men to stone. As the goddess of wisdom, Athena was horrified by the unrestrained unconscious mind (Poseidon) and therefore banished the object of its desire to maintain the rational order of things.

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

Post-structuralist philosopher Julia Kristeva termed this psychological phenomenon abjection in her 1980 work Powers of Horror. A bastard child of the uncanny, abjection is the “the state of being cast off” that occurs during a breakdown between the distinction of Self and Other. Abjection is the stuff trauma is made of. Physically, abjection is experienced as bodily waste like blood, saliva or excrement; but socially, abjection takes on the form of racism, misogyny and genocide—a purging of that which disturbs the rational order.

This connection comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with the myriad of fan theories surrounding The Shining, one of the most popular being that Kubrick embedded messages about the Native American genocide in the film’s complex cinematic code. In yet another deviation from its source material, the Overlook of the film is “built on an old Indian burial ground” (another horror film cliche that Kubrick turned on its head) and decorated by art “based on Navajo and Apache motifs.” When the elevator doors open, it is a return of the repressed history of bloodshed and betrayal that bely the myth of Manifest Destiny.

For the last two years, the eclipse point on the Gemini/Sagittarius axis has been like a bipolar elevator ride, taking us to the heights of spiritual awakening and depths of information overload. But with this Medusa blood moon eclipse that initiates the Taurus/Scorpio axis point, those elevator doors will finally swing open, promising to release a torrent of repressed trauma on both the personal and collective scale.

Plan accordingly.