Wheel of Life Full Moon Meditation – CAPRICORN

Monday, 17th January, 2022, 12 noon, local time.
Capricorn, the Initiator, Earth; Cancer, the Guardian, Water.

CYGNUS – ‘THE PURE POET’ OF DIVINE WISDOM’

‘The pure poet is a dialogue of love between our two selves, the spiritual and the personal… [adapted from Peter Dawkins 2021]

In Capricorn at the winter solstice 2021: the blueprint for the future emerges in my mind’s eye as two swans sail elegantly towards a ‘bridge of dreams and the arches of initiatory transition’.

SPANNING CAPRICORN AND AQUARIUS – The Stratford ‘Sweet Swans of Avon’ – this landscape holds a star map of Cygnus stretching N-S from the Rollrights to Warwick, and E-W from Stratford to Banbury (Peter Dawkins Zoence.org.uk.)

(see Sarah Dawkins: https://gatekeeper.org.uk/2020/06/sarah-writes-from-cygnus-the-swan )

A pair of swans in flight represent our two selves: personal and cosmic, we are a blend of pure consciousness and physical awareness-based psyche, both the rational and intuitive voices in dialogue. This inner dialogue holds a potent spark of new light/self awareness. Capricorn consolidates experience of incarnation, and incubates the light of experience into a new seed contained safely by our third eye and dedicated heart-love.

Cancer represents the ‘good boundaries’ that guard and protect this flash of illumination, due to give birth to a new year of experiences. How can we prepare for and be good guardians of our future ’blueprint’ seed of light? Holding the light within our ‘witnessing’ self, with unconditional love? We find the prototype in all our stone and henged circles of which there are many in Capricorn: Avebury/Stonehenge; Durrington Walls, Amesbury Henges, speculated under Winchester Cathedral, Twyford (under the Church Tower); Dorset circles (Rempstone, Knowle, Kingston, Nine Stones of Winterbourne Abbas, (see more in Peter Knight’s ‘Ancient Stones of Dorset’).

Anthony Thorley inspired me years ago to consider circular sanctuaries as theatres for initiation: ‘The 'memory theatre' of the third eye is another term for a landscape zodiac within which we envisage the imaginal world of the star map archetypes, which some can actually see with their third eye.’

WINCHESTER’S ROUND TABLES – imaginal theatres of the liminal space

The Round Table of 24 Knights, The Great Hall, Winchester.
In the city chakra system, this lies at the brow.
Sleeper’s Hill in the St Catherine ‘wheel’ landscape lies aligned to St Cross in the West.

King Arthur is said to have fallen asleep on Sleeper’s Hill, and dreamt he walked into a cave in the hill. The Capricornian blueprint for the future is set, with each of the 12 positions carrying a dual role, two knights, white and black. The alchemy is for an awakening ‘true star self’ after transforming all roles into conscious love-wisdom and being the sovereign of inner space.

On a short pilgrimage on 9.10.21 I reflected on the two ‘memory theatres’ in the landscape around Winchester: St Catherine’s Hill ‘wheel’ and the ‘Punchbowl’ at the Temple Valley below Cheesfoot Head. These both are oriented towards solar cycle directions, and are theatres of liminal conscious emergence for those participating. St Catherine’s Hill has clearly marked sanctuaries around its 1-2 mile perimeter, and has a history of a maze still being kept pristine by the college. It is marked by the NW direction which contains the city chakras and cathedral. The South point is marked by a 12-stone circle buried under Twyford church tower. In the North the remainder of barrows on Magdalene Hill, NE is Temple Valley, East - Chilcombe Church, SE - Morestead barrow, SW - Compton barrows, West - St Cross church/Sleeper’s Hill.

Rough Diagram of St Catherine’s Hill Wheel showing Temple Valley and Punchbowl in the NE – (at the point Imbolc/festival of dedication) - marks the junction of the South Downs pilgrim way, with St Swithun’s pilgrim way, to Farnham and the North Downs pilgrim way. What was the ancient role of the Punchbowl but to ‘charge up’ the pilgrims with aspiration to face their ‘inner wheel of life’?

Punchbowl’s modern role as music/circus and sport arena:

In the early 1990’s our local Gatekeeper pilgrims asked Peter Dawkins to look at this natural amphitheater, in which early forms of crop circles had appeared. He said it looked and felt like a ‘squared circle’ – the alchemical measure of a sacred space or ‘round table’. The landowner was approached and a modern interpretation emerged from his need to repurpose his fields. It became a place for theatre of the imagination: arts, music, sport and circus in the ‘punchbowl’ now form a modern link with ancient energetic lines of the South West: St Swithun’s Way to Farnham, North Downs Way to Canterbury; and from the South Downs Way to Eastbourne, and finally the Kent Downs and Canterbury.

WORKING WITH THE THIRD EYE - SCIENCE OF THE INVISIBLE

Do these pilgrimage lines serve to energise the sanctuaries and circles along the way? (see my article for Sagittarius last month’s full moon at https://gatekeeper.org.uk/events/full-moon-meditation-sun-in-sagittarius/].

WINCHESTER OBSERVATORY –
A ‘Theatre of the Stars’ at the end of Magdalene Hill, linking Temple Valley with St Giles Hill barrows and the city.

View from of circus and music tents down Temple valley through the Punchbowl (Matterley Bowl: https://www.folkandhoney.co.uk/all-our-uk-gigs/the-matterley-bowl-v1853/]

Barrow on Telegraph Hill, aligned with the Observatory.

A lantern light for children with cancer, and a modern prayer is overlit by an awesome horizon of St Catherine’s ‘Wheel’.

St Catherine’s Hill aligned with Telegraph Hill, above the Punchbowl
At Temple Valley. This forms the centre of a ‘wheel of life’ with eight marked directions.

Training the ‘third eye’?

In the 1980’s I spent some time in the Salisbury Plain area. My work with paraphysics research took me to a little laboratory where 'skin vision' (or dermal optics) was being tested, and I wrote about how social awareness and emotion conditions our ability to discern subtle infra-red energy through the skin. It is the basis of the effectiveness of ‘healer’s hands’, and patients report how warm the area of focus can get. The brain has a primordial ‘infra-red sensor inherited from the reptilian stage of evolution. Is this a potent message for us to become aware of extra-senses, or invisible senses yet to be rewired into our conscious cortex?

Discovering the healing power of the third eye. Perhaps an underlying shift of resonance triggering current challenges has helped us develop deeper insights? It is stimulated through reminiscence and deep meditational thought, awareness of ourselves and Nature, and things that help this 'extended sensing' to open up within a protected arena (using heart awareness, lanterns, art of the sacred etc).

Throughout Capricorn the traditions of wheel-art or star maps, stone calendars, and celebratory sanctuaries, can be found as a blueprint for visualizing inner transformation through each rotation of the year - starting with Capricorn and going through the theatre of imagination into a state of enlightenment.

ISLE OF WIGHT
Situated at the root of a North-South Line of the British Zodiac – through to Cygnus and High Cross – wheel-art is found in the development of powerful mythology from the Romans to medieval Christian art, an modern psychology of sub-personae, we are held within a cultural ‘theatre of imagination’.

Medusa mosaic at Brading Roman Villa, Isle of Wight. [screenshot adapted from https://bradingromanvilla.org.uk]

The theatrical alchemical symbol for the multi-layered personae of the human psyche, or ‘Round Table’ of heroic challenges leading to radiant initiation of the ’ true self’ and the opening of the heart chakra.

Pilgrimage to the Isle of Wight, and Brading Roman villa 2016

A mosaic depicting the Orphic/Baccanalian mysteries in Romano-British, a centre of the mystery tradition as the first anchor-point of Roman Culture/religion. All rooms displayed a mosaic pavement depicting the Orphic mysteries. Was there an early initiatic learning centre being offered through Roman mythology? It would have been a proper ‘alchemical landscape’ act of service, which developed the Belgic or Celtic religions of Esus and Bran the Beloved.

Brading Roman Villa Mosaic: In the theatre of imagination, we find our own mirror – the inner cockerel could be one of our personae, can it be accepted and transformed?

Initiation in the landscape through the ‘wheel’ of time and ‘fortune’s wheel’

Through the gateway landscape of Capricorn, The Romans brought a highly psychologically defined and illustrated mythology, making explicit the blueprint for Pisces – the mystic ‘high self’ as it illuminates the personal psyche of our round table of sub personae. Orpheus is torn apart by titans and resurrected. Our psyche provides ‘titans’ or archetypes that raise our ‘soul self’ like bread in an oven, to become a body of wisdom or ‘light body’.

The Orphic myth of the titans became a root for the medieval ‘ breaking wheel or execution wheel’ and the myth of St Catherine in the Judeo-Christian tradition, where she was tortured for her devotion to knowledge and philosophy.

In modern times, we can recall the wheel of life as a creative ‘theatre’ of wisdom that enacts the emergence of wisdom from emotional and mental crisis.

- [left] Fortuna/Kronos, [Peter Dawkins, Zoence.co.uk]
- [right] St Catherine and her transformative wheel, [https://commons.wikimedia.org] which is mirrored in her saintly halo at her crown.

‘Kronos or Pan (Time) is known as the Hierophant of the Mysteries. He initiates us. He is teacher and tester. He takes us through time-cycles of experience so as to teach us the hidden wisdom….’ – Peter Dawkins: https://www.zoence.co.uk/philosophy/infosheets-philosophy-eternity-time

Through our landscapes run symbols of time, conscious transformation and the laws of our existence: the spear of truth and wheel of love.

Charlotte Yonge (2022)

* [For more reports on research and local Full Moon activities round the British Zodiac, go to: https://gatekeeper.org.uk/wheel-of-life/wheel-of-life-events-2021/ ]