Forecast for Wednesday, July 1st
Scorpio Gibbous Moon; Part 2
The word ‘duende’ only recently found me, and I’ll admit—nostalgically captivated me, as words will…
Through my research, duende is Spanish for ‘elf; goblin; demon; or spirit’, which leads to an alternative expression, describing ‘charm; magnetism’.
So, I’m understanding this word to describe a creepy gnome-like creature of sorts which clips the toenails of unkempt children—and known to take off the entire toe!—and then I stumble onto the idea that its origins “conceptualized as a mischievous spirit inhabiting a house”, not so much as in haunted, but more like ‘possessed’… clearly there is a language barrier I might be trespassing unintentionally—either way, I’m fascinated.
But also, in an extremely alternative direction, this word manages to describe a sensation…
❝Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are.❞
——José Ortega y Gasset
Folklore is fascinating. Folklore expresses and shares life lessons through the descriptions of shadowy, creepy, and bizarre archetypal story plots… folklore illuminates the shadows.
To my lingual shortcomings, the differences may be between ‘tener duende’ meaning ‘to have duende’, or—to experience a heightened state of emotion, expression and authenticity, and ‘duen de casa’, meaning ‘master of the house’… el duende, then, “is the spirit of evocation; it comes from inside as a physical or emotional response to art; it is what gives you chills, makes you smile or cry as a bodily reaction to an artistic performance that is particularly expressive…”
Please, if you’re lingual-savvy and can assist me here—let me know!
Either way, duende evokes you to feel.
Allow me to share with you what Wikipedia offered, as this is the squishy vulnerable stuff a Scorpio moon inherently understands, down deep within the bones and nerve endings… and can never avoid, despite it all…
¶According to Christopher Maurer, editor of “In Search of Duende”, at least four elements can be isolated in Lorca’s vision of duende: irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical… the duende is an earth spirit who helps the artist see the limitations of intelligence, reminding them that “ants could eat him or that a great arsenic lobster could fall suddenly on his head”; who brings the artist face-to-face with death, and who helps them create and communicate memorable, spine-chilling art… the duende is seen, in Lorca’s lecture, as an alternative to style, to mere virtuosity, to God-given grace and charm, and to the classical, artistic norms dictated by the muse. Not that the artist simply surrenders to the duende; they have to battle it skillfully, “on the rim of the well”, in “hand-to-hand combat”… to a higher degree than the muse or the angel, the duende seizes not only the performer but also the audience, creating conditions where art can be understood spontaneously with little, if any, conscious effort—it is, in Lorca’s words, “a sort of corkscrew that can get art into the sensibility of an audience… the very dearest thing that life can offer the intellectual.” The critic Brook Zern has written, of a performance of someone with duende, “it dilates the mind’s eye, so that the intensity becomes almost unendurable… there is a quality of first-timeness, of reality so heightened and exaggerated that it becomes unreal…”
❝The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought. I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, ‘the duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.’ Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation… ❞
——Federico Garcia Lorca
¶Lorca, in his lecture, quotes Manuel Torre: “everything that has black sounds in it, has duende.” i.e. emotional ‘darkness’… this ‘mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains’ is, in sum, the spirit of the earth, the same duende that scorched the heart of Nietzsche, who searched in vain for its external forms on the Rialto Bridge and in the music of Bizet, without knowing that the duende he was pursuing had leaped straight from the Greek mysteries to the dancers of Cadiz or the beheaded, Dionysian scream of Silverio’s siguiriya… the duende’s arrival always means a radical change in forms—it brings to old planes unknown feelings of freshness, with the quality of something newly created, like a miracle, and it produces an almost religious enthusiasm… all arts are capable of duende, but where it finds greatest range, naturally, is in music, dance, and spoken poetry, for these arts require a living body to interpret them, being forms that are born, die, and open their contours against an exact present.
Wow. I’m quite familiar with this until-now nameless feeling after all… I would hope we all are.
And, always, how timely that this word emerges from the depths to find me… “climbing up inside me from the soles of my feet…”
❝The duende… Where is the duende? Through the empty archway a wind of the spirit enters, blowing insistently over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents: a wind with the odour of a child’s saliva, crushed grass, and medusa’s veil, announcing the endless baptism of freshly created things.❞
——Federico Garcia Lorca
The month of July begins with the moon still in Scorpio and Saturn moving back into the harsh earthiness of Capricorn—in fact, exactly as Saturn shifts back into the twenty-ninth degree, the moon moves into the same degree of Scorpio, thereby, simultaneously, creating a yod with the North Node, also at the twenty-ninth degree of Gemini.
A yod is aspect pattern known by astrologers as the ‘finger of God’ and this aspectual connection represents something of a fated challenge of sorts—when found in a nativity, it can represent something of a quest the native will find themselves traveling time and time again, as if possessed by a pattern of sorts; when transiting in forecast, it can suggest an opportunity disguised, a missed opportunity, or a fated conundrum… or, now informed, an experience one might learn to more intimately understand as tener deunde.
❝My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals itself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.❞
——Albert Einstein
Because this yod involves a Scorpio moon, Saturn back in Capricorn, and the North Node, this opportunity/conundrum looks like a brutally honest illumination toward the cobwebs, toenails, or shadows of what you originally, and most recently, set out to accomplish back in April, or as far back as December of 2017… and through illuminating whatever new or up-for-review acknowledgements are needing to be made now—these should push you forward, back on track, or, maybe more momentously, back in alignment with the cosmic energy that fuels you and your ideals.
“…It dilates the mind’s eye, so that the intensity becomes almost unendurable… there is a quality of first-timeness, of reality so heightened and exaggerated that it becomes unreal…”
❝Do not allow yourself to be blinded by fear and anger. Everything is only as it is.❞
——Yuki Urishibara
As Saturn remains retrograde, though is now back within the “scorched heart” of Capricorn until December 6th and cannot be overemphasized enough—this strongly suggests a demand for patience and perserverance and presence toward that which you are working toward, though some added practicality and additional realisticality (that’s a word now—through December) in overall expectations should be (re)considered—please understand, not in a way that is punishing, necessarily, but in a way that will motivate you to work that much harder, to really prove to yourself and anyone watching how badly you want to actualize your ideals in reality, despite all odds… in a way that evokes an “arrival of radical change in forms, bringing to old planes unknown feelings of freshness, with the quality of something newly created, like a miracle, producing an almost religious enthusiasm…”
Where there’s a will—there will always be a way.
In the last several days, as the moon has been moving through Scorpio, you may have been reaching down into the darkness of your own depths for some deeper meaning—for tener deunde—and today may very well reward you with validation as to how and why embracing that process was necessary.
When we are honest with ourselves we overcome ourselves in empowering ways, in ways that possess el duende… and this works unlike anything else, really—and perhaps most profoundly, unlike anything that can be rewarded through a direct exchange with an/Other.
❝We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.❞
——Hermann Hesse
This deep connective spark we possess with All That Is is private, and sacred, and incontrovertibly divine—and mustn’t ever be forsaken, overlooked, resisted, or doubted… sometimes the darkness within ourselves lies simply within a vague disconnect or distrust, of this sacred naturalness, and this invisible, unnameable affliction has the haunting ability to take over and consume all better judgement, possessing in other ways, leaving you cold.
❝Rise above the deceptions and temptations of the mind. This is your duty. You are born for this only; all other duties are self-created and self-imposed owing to ignorance.❞
——Sivananda
Realigning with All That Is, with Source, with Spirit, with God—this process mustn’t feel shameful, but invigorating… this “mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains…”
Further, today is also charged by Mars, especially after connecting to Mars by trine by a truth-seeking Sagittarius moon, which would imply this spark of realignment could really be seized, from deep within your bones and up through the nails on your toes, depending upon where your planetary influences point… regardless, today is a day for seeing the light through the lingering shadows of folklore and fancy alike—and walking forth—despite the odds, despite the unknowns and unknowables, and, just maybe, despite the very creepy potential for losing a toe *wink*
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♏︎☽＊♄♑︎• 29°60′ 4:39pm PDT; 5:39pm MDT; 6:39pm CDT; 7:39pm EDT
Image credit— @seamlessoo on Instagram