Eclipses and Cthonic Creatures
Ramblings on the thinning veil
Eclipses, am I right? (I want you to hear this in Groucho Marx’s voice as I ash my cigar)
Montreal, by Anais Remili
I love eclipses. They are so eery and otherworldly that they make me very happy. However, these last many, and a few more in the future, are hitting both in conjunction and opposition twice a year some of my most major planets in my natal chart so I am counting down the months to when Rahu and Ketu decide to chomp and excrete a different part of the zodiac. I’ll be glad to be done with this particular intense total life overhaul. (exhausted emoji)
Rahu and Ketu are the names of the Lunar Nodes in Hindu mythology. Rahu is the head of a dragon and Ketu is the tail. The idea is that during an eclipse, the sun or moon gets eaten by this dragon and there is a literal hole in the cosmos that opens up to the otherworlds for a short time. See the story is, after a long war, the Gods finally chill out and cooperate to churn the cosmic sea, using a giant serpent, to create Amrita, the nectar of the Gods. Only the Gods were supposed to drink this divine cosmic cocktail but one of the Demons, who happened to squeeze in a seat between the Sun and Moon, took an illicit sip. Outraged, Lord Vishnu, the sustainer of the universe, decapitated the Demon. The joke was on Vishnu however as the Demon was immortal, having drank of the Amrita. Now, both halves, his head, and his body tail, were alive and sentient. One became known as Rahu and the other Ketu.
This eclipse was because of Rahu and it took place in the tropical zodiac in Aries. One of the most fascinating pair of episodes I’ve ever listened to from the Astrology Podcast were the ones Chris Brennan and Nick Dagan Best did on eclipses. You can watch/listen to them HERE and HERE and I cannot recommend enough that you take the wormhole down into this nerd tunnel. Mind-blowing. It seems that because so much intense shit happens around eclipses, like kings dying and whatnot, that the ancients really began to take notice. The ancient Babylonians not only recorded eclipses but learned to predict them and voila, astrology was born.
There are so many wonderful myths as to what causes eclipses. A friend forwarded THIS to me and I am passing it along to you all. Because not only can we predict them today, but we know that the world is round and eclipses, lunar and solar happen about twice a year each even if where we are geographically sees only one or none of them. However, because they are irregular, sometimes you can get as many as 5 solar eclipses a year, which happened in 1935 and won’t happen again until 2206! Wild. Imagine though that you didn’t know any of that and you wake up one morning and it just feels weird that day and then later on the Sun goes dark and reappears again. That is some next-level crazy shit. Plants and animals don’t have ancient Babylonian eclipse calculators and they straight up just think it became night for a few minutes. In our own fibers, this reaction is still there. The irregular uncanniness of the whole event can conjure dragons and giant wolves, especially when you take events like a giant hail storm in the Bay Area and an earthquake in New York into the equation. The veil is certainly thin and it is palpable.
Mama Cthulhu, oil and egg tempera on canvas, in the collection of Andre Kostov
Above is my eclipse myth which was inspired by the Legend of Cthulhu. Ever read Lovecraft? Every description he wrote about Great Cthulhu sounds feminine, even erotically so. I recall the first time reading it and thinking wow, this guy has a real Dark Mother complex. Yikes. (Turns out this is totally true. Look up his bio and his relationship with his mom. Double yikes.) Cthulhu is wet, slimy, glistening and more intense and terrifying than the mind can comprehend. Sounds like lady parts to me. This isn't your garden variety Mother Mary description, however. I'm talking more like Kali, the destroyer and ultimate creatrix of the universe. Now that's more like what Cthulhu, rather Mama Cthulu embodies in her full presence.
Ushering in a new era of the Divine Dark Feminine, Mama Cthulhu sits atop her throne, the USS Enterprise from Gene Roddenberry's original series Star Trek. Why? Because unlike in most of sci-fi, Roddenberry had a deep respect and love of women and engendered the DNA of the series and its many offshoots to approach the Other with curiosity and wonder. In fact, one of the all-pervasive themes of all of the Star Trek series is to try and communicate and understand Beings that are not human and often completely different than we are. Often in other sci-fi, it's shoot first, ask questions later. Star Trek embraces the essence of the dark feminine more than any other science fiction out there. If it's dark, unknown, utterly incomprehensible, and frightening, all of the captains issue orders to attempt to communicate with the creature first. In an era where we are on the brink of unleashing untamed new technologies and potentially awakening great cthonic energies literally and metaphorically, this way of being in the world, I hope, is our true future.
Here is my most recent YouTube video. I am in a unique place where two paintings are in the exact same place in the underpainting but each with a different blue glaze. It’s really cool to see them side by side and see what the different blues create as far as lighting and color go.
Love this painting!