Risking Being Wrong

An essay by Mike Zizis, September 23, 2022

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“I want a classical heaven and Hell.” Henry Miller

This is the essay, the statement I didn’t want to write, to make.

Confucius knew that he was dying. He cast the I Ching one last time. His question was “What is my effect on people over all? What is my legacy?”

He drew hexagram 22 — Beauty or Grace. He was immobilized with shock, and horror. He thought he had battled corruption, nepotism, and the individual ego all his adult life. He thought of himself as a warrior fighting the good fight, to remake the family and the nation of China as a family, as order. In his China everything functioned in harmony when everyone attended to their assigned tasks to support the family, the nation.

Now he was being told from a sacred oracular divine source that he was creating beauty. Pretty pictures. A lovely wardrobe. A well-trimmed beard, a stunning hairdo. He was not revolutionizing his world. He was not a burning light of wisdom; he was a pretty painting. His mission was revealed as a pretty trinket, to be shelved when something deemed more lovely was purchased, not a sword of truth.

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We astrologers have ever more sophisticated tools. As I first found astrology at the age of 14, we had a few books from Alan Leo to Joseph Goodavidge. I grew up in the raw. Savage destructive alcoholic absent father, a poisoned and poisoning silent mother, and addicted brother, all seemingly chained to the broken temple of their demons. I experienced life and death and suffering in vivid raw textures and colours. Hurt and damaged, I did the same to others.

Well goodbye to all of that. I remember the pain of my initiation. Here is the reason you have made it this far in the text. I am an astrologer. I am a student of astrology. So many of my contemporaries in this highest flashing art, go out of their way to make an exceedingly complex computer-generated pretty picture, with little or nothing to say about taking a stance on elections, war, and death. I don’t blame them. Better to hide behind allusive statements about dark matter, the south node of an imaginary planet, a trans- neptunian object with 537 years to complete one orbit, or the Sun Zarse in the Andromeda galaxy, as a theme for Trump, Putin, or Qanon rather than risk the pity or ridicule of peers.

Pretty CAD pictures. Hexagram 22.

Acuyta Bhava, Robert Hand, Steven Forrest, Rick Levine, John Frawley, Jackie Stallone, Alice Bailey, Gerina Dunwich, Sybil Leek, Joyce Jillson, Françoise Hardy, Evangeline Adams, Jeane Dixon, and so many others risked being wrong by taking a stand, taking a side.

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I just cast the oracle, the I Ching, as a comment on this essay. I got hexagram 22. Now I know what Confucius never discovered. The universe does have a sense of humour.