Pattinson, Buddhism and Taurus

 

The Buddha was exceptionally handsome. “The Brahmin Sonadanda described him as handsome, good-looking, and pleasing to the eye, with a most beautiful complexion. He has a godlike form and countenance, he is by no means unattractive.” 

"It is wonderful, truly marvelous, the good Gotama's appearance . . just as the golden jujube in autumn is clear and radiant, just as a palm-tree fruit just loosened from the stalk is clear and radiant, just as an adornment of red gold wrought in a crucible by a skilled goldsmith, deftly beaten and laid on a yellow-cloth shines, blazes and glitters, even so . . . his complexion is clear and radiant."

“A disciple named Vakkali . . . was so obsessed by Buddha's physical presence that Buddha had to tell him to stop and reminded Vakkali to know Buddha through the Dhamma and not physical appearances.” (quotes from Wikipedia)

Buddha was a Taurus, and after years of restless seeking, with Taurean stubbornness he decided to sit under a tree until Enlightenment came, which it did after 49 days, at the Taurus full moon. So it’s interesting that Taurus Rob Pattinson had this profound Buddha experience – note the Taurean, fixed-earth emphasis on the vision’s concreteness, duration and practicality.

The Birthdate of Sigmund Freud

For some time I’ve been pursuing the idea that Freud’s correct birthday was March 6, not May 6. The almost universally accepted May 6, 1856 date (6:30 pm, Freiberg, Moravia, now Pribor, Czech Republic) appears authoritatively in the first sentence of Freud’s official biography, written by his close associate and disciple, Ernest Jones. Yet that very sentence bears a footnote (deleted from the abridged edition) joking that the actual birth may have taken place two months earlier, only seven months after the wedding of Freud’s parents.

Freud wrote a book called Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, yet this jocular slur against his mother remains relatively unanalyzed by biographers, even though Freud himself raised suspicions that he was sired by one of his own half-brothers, that his official father was actually his grandfather.

To my mind, given all that we now know about Freud, the March 6 horoscope is the more apt of the two. There is much in the early years of Freud's biography to support this idea. (I have published a comparative analysis of the competing birthcharts in the Astrological Journal of March/April 2000). Only recently, however, have I come across Freud and Moses: The Long Journey Home by Emanuel Rice, MD., where it is reported that one of the most compelling documents supporting the May 6 birthdate, the so-called “inscription” in the "family Bible", is not an inscription at all, but merely a sheet of paper tucked inside a Bible which itself contains no family records at all. Yet in Peter Gay's authoritative biography, again the issue is relegated to a complacent and jocular footnote: "But the documents, amply supported by the Freuds' family Bible, shows that Freud [Sr.] and his bride seem to have obeyed the proprieties: the conventional date of the biographies, May 6th, is correct."

  The sheet of paper in question is headed with a solemnly phrased record of Sigmund's grandfather's death, which took place after the wedding of Sigmund's parents but before his birth. There is of course something touching about this record of the grandson who attended his grandfather's funeral as a fetus. But the unique elaborations of this record may indicate that the deceased was not Sigmund's grandfather, but his great-grandfather. 

On this sheet of paper the May 6 birthdate appears or is implied no fewer than eight times: as the date of the month and day of the week for both the birth and the circumcision (mandated to take place one week after a Jewish birth), in both the Jewish and the Christian calendars; the insistent reiteration seems overdone and anomalous. We find nothing like it, in fact nothing at all, about the birth of Freud's five surviving siblings, or the brother born just a year after Sigmund who died in early childhood. Why does the so-called family bible only contain a record of this one child's birth? Freud biographers all seem to take it as a matter of course. 

The list of dates is followed by a spontaneous sentence which is marred by a Freudian slip of the pen: “On the fourth of [illegible], [1]856, my son mentioned above, long may he live, got three teeth." The change in tone chides the solemnity of the formal sentences above it and undermines trust, and the illegible slip may reveal the writer's embarrassment over the true date of the first dentition. (Born with a full head of hair, Freud's baby teeth would probably also have appeared precociously, and impossibly early if he was born in May.) The document perplexes; does one record the death of the grandfather and baby teeth on the same page?

The page also contains a list of the names of four officiants at the circumcision. Just as the page has been presented as a sacred inscription in the "family Bible" while it is merely a piece of paper placed into a Bible, so this list of names has been taken as a list of signatures attesting to the correctness of the date. A mere list of names is taken for a list of dated signatures, which it is not. In short the so-called family bible evidence strikes one as having been over-elaborately written in order to securely corroborate the wrong date for future readers.

Granted, other documentary obstacles remain in the way of the March birthdate. However, the reverential attitude towards and legendary status of some of these documents suggest they may not have been examined interrogatively. The so-called birth certificate reproduced on the Library of Congress website (http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/freud/images/vc008101.jpg) is a document that was issued in July of 1886, not a contemporaneous document. Other documents seen in poor photo copies are contradicted by earlier reported descriptions.

Many biographies elide the fact that Freud's two uncles were professional forgers. One of the uncles was imprisoned, much to the 9-year-old Freud's shame, and the Manchester branch of the Freud family was implicated; Manchester was the manufacturing  source of counterfeit rubles that flooded eastern Europe via Vienna prior to WW 1. We know surprisingly little about the Manchester Freuds, or and nothing about Freud's father's source of income.

The circumstances around Freud's birth records are clouded. He was not born, as has been stated, in an Jewish shtetl where no one could keep a secret, but in a small enclave of suspiciously foreign Ostjuden, hardly distinguished from gypsies by the local population, stigmatized, secretive itinerants, possibly petty criminals. At the time of his birth, the largish family was crowded into one room above the shop of a gentile locksmith (not blacksmith). 

It is worth pointing out that the March 6 birthdate is not without support among Freudians: Marie Balmary made the most extensive argument in Psychoanalysing Psychoanalysis (1979); Wladimir Granoff assented in the published 1975 lectures Filiations; as does philosopher Andrea Nye in her Feminist Theories and Philosophies of Man (p. 156); as do Jay and Jean Harris, MDs , in The One-Eyed Doctor Sigismund Freud (1984). At least one authoritative textbook has : "Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was born on either March 6 or May 6 in Freiberg, Moravia (now Pribor, Czech Republic)."  [An Introduction to the History of Psychology (B. R. Hergenhahn, 6th edition, 2008, pg.518] 

It is hard to read the last chapter of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and not feel that Freud was, at times, massively daft, in a way best described by the amazing and intense conjunction in Pisces of Sun, Moon, Neptune and Jupiter, all square Saturn, which took place on March 6, 1856. Pisces, the last Zodiacal sign, is traditionally associated with nescience and void, ergo, the Unconscious; while the quadrature of Saturn evokes pathology and pessimism.

    There is a gradually assembling consensus that the vast influence of Freud on the mind of the twentieth century was in some way delusional, rhetorical, pseudo-scientific. I relish the paradox that another pseudo-science, astrology can offer insight here. As former markers of personal identity erode under the influence of psychopharmacology, assisted reproductive technologies, globalization, the internet, etc., we look back on the Freudian mythos with the newly-liberated cultist’s stunned sense of incomprehension and wonder. 

Taurus/Gemini cusp

Hermes/Mercury stealing the Oxen of Apollo, one of several mythic resonances at the cusp of Taurus and Gemini.

Taurus art 1.10

Full-Figured Statuette, 35,000 Years Old, Provides New Clues to How Art Evolved. New York Times, May 12, 2009

Willem De Kooning (b. April 24, 1904)

Mother, mater, matter. Note the lack of feet, of locomotion, in the primitive female generative principal. My first dream in Jungian analysis was of a lady too fat to stand, in the parking lot of a supermarket, a group of us trying to help her up. My analyst, a sharp old thing now deceased named Greta van Fenema, (who knew Jung, gray hair in a bun, slacks), leaped to a high bookshelf and took down a volume with a large picture of the Willendorf Venus (11,000 years younger than the one pictured above). She explained my thralldom to the Great Mother archetype, and all the deplorable psychological and behavioral consequences ensuing.

cy twombly Taurus art 1.09

In the characteristic Cy Twombly (b. 25 April 1928) reproduced above, the singularity of matter (Taurus) is differentiated into two (Gemini) stones, slate and chalk, representing the possibility of communicative meaning (writing) as yet contentless. In the work below, he pays hommage to Taurus's tutelary deity, while exploring the way meaning and sensuosity awaken in crude scratchings.

Taurus Bull's Eye (1.08)

Jasper Johns, TargetAnecdote of two Tauruses: Mme de Stael, notorious conversational bulldozer, extorted four words from the famously taciturn Duke of Wellington ("who was scarcely known to speak"). 'Let me go away,' he cried, on hearing her announced. (in V. Woolf, Books and Portraits ) Illustrates the physical, Taurean principle that two material objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time.

Taurus art 1.07

Jasper Johns, b. May 15, 1930: the homogenous Taurean physicality of the sculp-metal substance  negates the on-off binarism, the communicative Geminian essence of the light bulb. Always in Johns's work there is a reductive interplay of signal and substance, yet, despite the reduction, the stubborn physical integrity and sensuous materiality evokes multileveled reflective meaning.

Aries/Taurus cusp

 Reflect that this Aries/Taurus cusp is the site of the great crisis of modern primitivism, modern solipsism, materialist despair: births of Hitler and Lenin. The two simplest, densest signs butt heads. Where the impetuous, irresistible force of Aries, fleeing the entrapping womb of Pisces, still filled with dreams, encounters the immovable reality of Taurus -- there can be much gnashing of teeth.

Taurus art 1.05

A Taurus bull-etin pre-empts my planned programming.

I was going to post a massive Buddha. Did you know He is said to have been born, and to have achieved Enlightenment under the sign of Taurus? More pertinently, no restless seeking for Him: He declared he would sit under this one banyan tree until Enlightenment came, and so He did, they say, for thirty years. Stubborn.

Taurus art 1.04

"Jill" (1959) enamel on canvas, 7'6"x6'6" Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo

Frank Stella (b. 12 May 1936) took up large monochromatic canvases in the late fifties, around the same time as Yves Klein, but with the consistent organizing motif of the stripe, rather than the single Kleinian pigment  

" . . . binary, cruciform or concentric symmetries create an unworldly, hypnotic fixity, as of immutable, venerated emblems."

Taurus art 1.03

O Bull, return!

Taurus wants the concrete, the real. Here is one of the first substantive projects of astrological research to come out of digital data power.  Test Produces Significant Result for Astrology in World News Report. According to researcher Richard Schulz, the astrological outlook for the global economic situation is bleak.

But take heart: the nature of astrological prediction is to be incorrect. That's why it's such a delight when an astrological prediction comes true. It is the historical role of astrology to continually produce critique, challenge and failure. It is the Sisyphean science, to invoke another Taurean reference. Anyway, fixed earth Taurus is grounded in the unchanging. The Bull Tauruas always returns, or rather never really leaves;  the powerful energy of human productivity, labor, value, capital, all responses to natural, objective necessity--the World, all proceed and harness the subjective explosion of Aries.

Taurus Art 1.02

Norham Castle, Sunrise (c. 1845)

One of Turner's most popular paintings, it was never exhibited in his lifetime, and may be unfinished, yet is taken now to be one of his most characteristic works. The Taurean cows incorporate the elemental  massiveness of castle, sun, water and air.

 "Turner never lost his connection to reality. One of the last, semiabstract paintings in the show’s final gallery is a sunrise view of Norham Castle. . . . Amid its gorgeous smudges of blue castle, yellow sun and pale ochre shores are two cows, faint but definite, who have come for their morning drink.   New York Times

Taurus Art 1.0

Yves Klein (28 April 1928 - 1962). His "search . .  for the realization of matter" led to his fanciful commitment to a single color, the patented International Klein Blue, a mineral (lapis) pigment. Most of Klein's work is conceptual, abstract or geo-metric. Rarely, and only with tongue in cheek, did he descend to the mimetic or iterative, those being the province of the next sign, Gemini. His Globe reclaims Earth from history and language, and presents it as a mounted physical specimen, a planetary body. Venus is, of course, also a body, as well as the planetary ruler of Taurus, as fertility and the senses are bestirred out of the passive Earth.

Aries-Taurus cusp (#30)

The cusps are controversial. Although the word usually denotes a precise demarcation, I like to use it to describe the range of relationships, from antithesis to blending, which exist between adjacent zodiacal signs, a range that implicitly permeates even the purest expression of a sign. As the tropical and siderial zodiacs approach complete overlap, many new and penetrating truths are cuspal in nature.

The tragic sacrificial splendor of the corrida ritualizes the first zodiacal crisis of Self, where Aries encounters Taurus: freedom-craving spirit encounters material necessity, the obdurate World. The bull is color-blind, and it's the movement that he reacts to; it is the human participants in the corrida who react to the red color. More red even than the capote (which is in fact usually magenta) is the copious blood, the blood-soaked hide, that makes the point. The next, Taurus / Gemini, cusp is summond in the gesture of the stinging picadors and the banderillos, or the legend of the gadfly. The fixed earth principle provokes attack from both sides --