As I wandered across the fields and wilds on my rounds, I liked to imagine how it would all look millions of years from now. Would the same plants be here? And what about the colour of the sky? Would it be just the same? Would the tectonic plates have shifted and caused a range of high mountains to pile up here? Or would a sea arise, removing all reason to use the word ‘place’ amid the idle motion of the waves? One thing’s for sure – these houses won’t be here; my efforts are insignificant, they’d fit on a pinhead, just like my life as well. That should never be forgotten.
If I went beyond our bounds, the landscape changed. Here and there exclamation marks stuck out of the ground, sharp needles piercing the scenery. Whenever my gaze caught on them, my eyelids began to quiver; the eye cut itself on those wooden structures erected in the fields, on their boundaries, or at the edge of the forest. In total there were eight of them in the Plateau, I knew the exact figure, for I’d had dealings with them in the past, like Don Quixote with the windmills. They were knocked together out of wooden beams, set crosswise; they consisted entirely of crosses. These grotesque figures had four legs, and a cabin with embrasures on top. Pulpits, for hunting. This name has always amazed and angered me. For what on earth was taught from that sort of pulpit? What sort of gospel was preached? Isn’t it the height of arrogance, isn’t a diabolical idea to call a place from which one kills a pulpit?
I can still see them. I squint, as a way of blurring their shape and making them disappear. I only do it because I cannot bear their presence. But the truth is that anyone who feels Anger and does not take action merely spreads the infection. So says our Blake.
As I stood there, gazing at the pulpits, I could turn around at any moment to take gentle hold of the sharp, jagged line of the horizon as if it were a strand of hair. To look beyond it. Over there is the Czech Republic. The Sun flees over there, once it has seen enough of these atrocities. There my Damsel goes down for the Night. Oh yes, Venus goes to bed in the Czech Republic.
This is how I’d spend my evenings: I’d sit at the big kitchen table and devote myself to my favourite occupation. Here on the table sat the laptop Dizzy gave me, though I only ever used a single program. Here were my Ephemerides, some notepaper and a few books. The dry muesli that I nibble while working, and a small pot of black tea; I don’t drink any other kind.
In fact I could have done all the calculations by hand, and perhaps I’m a little sorry that I didn’t. But who still uses a slide rule nowadays?
Though if I ever had to calculate a Horoscope in the desert, with no computer, no electricity or Tools of any kind, I could do it. All I would need are my Ephemerides, and therefore if anyone were suddenly to ask me (though sadly no one ever will) which book I would take to a desert island, my answer would be: The Complete Ephemerides, 1920–2020.
I was curious to know if the date of a person’s death can be seen in their Horoscope. Death in a Horoscope. What does it look like? How does it manifest itself? Which planets play the role of the Fates? Down here, in the world of Urizen, the laws apply. From the starry sky down to moral conscience. These are strict laws, without mercy and without exception. As there is an order of Births, why should there not be an order of Deaths?
In all these years I have gathered 1042 dates of birth and 999 dates of death, and my minor research is still in progress. A project without funding from the European Union. A kitchen-table project.
I have always believed that Astrology should be learned through practice. It is solid knowledge, to a large extent empirical and just as scientific as psychology, let’s say. One must closely observe a few people from one’s own environment, and match moments in their life with the planetary system. One must also monitor and analyse the same Events in which various people participate. One will soon notice that similar astrological patterns describe similar incidents. That’s when one’s initiation occurs – oh yes, order does exist, and it is within reach. The stars and planets establish it, while the sky is the template that sets the pattern of our lives. Extensive study will make it possible to guess the arrangement of the planets in the sky from tiny details here on Earth. An afternoon storm, a letter that the postman has pressed into a crack in the door, a broken lightbulb in the bathroom. Nothing is capable of eluding this order. It works on me like alcohol, or one of those new drugs that, so I imagine, fill a person with pure delight.
One must keep one’s eyes and ears open, one must know how to match up the facts, see similarity where others see total difference, remember that certain events occur at various levels or, to put it another way, that many incidents are aspects of the same, single occurrence. And that the world is a great big net, it is a whole, where no single thing exists separately; every scrap of the world, every last tiny piece, is bound up with the rest by a complex Cosmos of correspondences, hard for the ordinary mind to penetrate. That is how it works. Like a Japanese car.
Dizzy, who’s prone to effusive digressions on the topic of Blake’s bizarre symbolism, has never shared my passion for Astrology. That’s because he was born too late. His generation has Pluto in Libra, which somewhat weakens their vigilance. And they think they can balance hell. I don’t believe they’ll manage it. They may know how to design projects and write applications, but most of them have lost their vigilance.
I grew up in a beautiful era, now sadly in the past. In it there was great readiness for change, and a talent for creating revolutionary visions. Nowadays no one still has the courage to think up anything new. All they ever talk about, round the clock, is how things already are, they just keep rolling out the same old ideas. Reality has grown old and gone senile; after all, it is definitely subject to the same laws as every living organism – it ages. Just like the cells of the body, its tiniest components, the senses, succumb to apoptosis. Apoptosis is natural death, brought about by the tiredness and exhaustion of matter. In Greek this word means ‘the dropping of petals’. The world has dropped its petals.
But something new is bound to follow, as it always has – isn’t that a comical paradox? Uranus is in Pisces, but when it moves into Aries, a new cycle will begin and reality will be born again. In spring, in two years’ time.
Studying Horoscopes gave me pleasure, even while I was discovering these orders of death. The motion of the planets is always hypnotic, beautiful, impossible to halt or hasten. I like considering the fact that this order goes far beyond the time and place of Janina Duszejko. It’s good to be able to rely on something totally.
And thus: to determine natural death we examine the positions of the hyleg, in other words the heavenly body that sucks vital energy from the Cosmos for us. For daytime births it is the Sun, for nocturnal ones it is the Moon, and in some cases the ruler of the Ascendant is the hyleg. Death usually ensues when the hyleg reaches some radically inharmonious aspect with the ruler of the eighth house or with the planet positioned within it.
In considering the risk of violent death, I had to take note of the hyleg, its house and the planets situated within this house. In doing so I paid attention to which of the harmful planets – Mars, Saturn or Uranus – was stronger than the hyleg, and was creating a negative aspect with it.
That day I sat down to work and pulled from my pocket the crumpled piece of paper on which I had written down Big Foot’s details, to check if his death had come for him at the right time. As I was tapping out his date of birth, I cast an eye at the piece of paper and saw that I’d written his details down on a page from a hunting calendar, headed ‘March’. There was a table featuring the figures of Animals that could be hunted in March.