New Moon Hip Hop Flow by Or Nah
Over the summer I reached out to Creatrix Magazine founder astrologer Jana Astanov asking where wounded healer asteroid Chiron lay in my natal chart. She responded that curiously I asked her just ten days shy of the sun transiting the exact point at 23 degrees of Gemini in the 11th house. The Sabian symbol for this degree is Three fledglings in a nest high in a tree, which symbolizes “Embracing experience” or “The Span of Restlessness.” Curiously, the Sabian Symbologist reports that this degree crystallizes the principle of ELEVATION. Having done the Kundalini Kriya for Elevation this morning, as I string together words in simple reflection, I feel a strong resonance with the cited writing by Dr. Marc Edmund Jones which says that 23 degrees of Gemini references “The human soul is a consistent manifestation of its own special genius from the very beginning, and the individual first finds himself in the early and transcendental perspectives of immaturity.” Jones concludes with “When positive, the degree is an unconditioned creativity exalted to the point of complete freedom from any immediate involvement, and when negative, psychological witlessness and a false sense of release from responsibility.” Also refer to Bob Marley’s hit “Three Little Birds.”
Initially, Jana’s reveal provided a powerful antidote to the fact that I seem to experience massive heartbreak through strings of Gemini lovers (oddly every time I talk about this cosmological curse publicly some Gemini crawls out of the woodwork. Save the emoji bouquet I’m CELIBATE UNTIL SOULMATE here! See you in my wet dreams.) Around the same time, Jana came to me in a dream and said “The first half of your life was about Love, the second half is about Life.” This sentiment was echoed loud and clear to me around age thirteen, the first and only time I recall hearing the voice of God, or Source. I was running on a treadmill at the gym while swimming in paralyzing oblivion over a boy, like usual. Suddenly “Love is not your true purpose in this lifetime” rang out like an angelic message. I was a bit shocked, isn’t everything about love? I was hardly religious or even spiritual at the time despite having a huge crush on my yoga teacher that led weekly asana classes on the second floor of the gym. Word on the street is that “It’s all about Love,” is what every evolved human being learns by their second Saturn Return (age 59) and yet for me, Great Mystery has another plan. I know now that hearing the voice of Goddess is very likely for a clairaudient Chiron in Gemini type.
Twenty years of serious yoga practice later, I understand that while my Chiron placement may have exacerbated my deep ruts of lack in the department of romance, my healing runs much deeper than ecstatic crush. Luckily, my burning desire for Gemini butterflies means I’ve been studying their flittery ways for millennia. In the true school of Vedic Astrology I’m a Gemini Rising. As Jana explained, Western Astrology froze the cosmos and oscillates in its own dream. Much like the Gregorian calendar represents the patriarchy striving to control and dominate the chaos of nature and cosmos, the off-center truth of Western Astrology has taken on a life all its own.
Astrologer Melanie Reinhart writes that asteroid Chiron, known as the wounded healer, wanderer, maverick or outsider, is multifaceted in its elliptical orbit. It represents where we can break free of defeating emotional loops and along the Scorpio-Taurus Sex Axis, where we learn to “see in the Dark” (Pluto) and understand the ways of the Earth (Taurus). In other words, it deals with reconciliation of the “spiritual” and the “instinctual.” Mythic Chiron was poisoned with the blood of Hydra, the 9-headed serpent beast often associated with Scorpio for whom every head gets chopped off by Hercules, three sprout in its place. Unlike Hercules who sets out to slay, Chiron is the anti-hero who understands that the Hydra’s poison not only represents what is repressed within ourselves, it is medicine. Reinhart explains that when we give our inner-Hydra space with wise awareness, we are redeemed.
I’ve gone through great pains to express how in my therapeutic love of Hip Hop and rap, I’ve worked to center displaced rage and disembodied libido I experienced growing up. As Lauren Michele Jackson writes in WHITE NEGROES, “The innocence reserved for white women alone becomes the source of crisis in their adolescence…white women never truly grow up in the eyes of the world.” I recall my crushes in middle school referring to me as the “girl who doesn’t speak” superseding my first round in the cypher when as much as I dreamed of rapping, not a peep came out. I thank my teachers and guides, most importantly UNDAKOVA, native New Yorker and holistic hip hop MC, who gave me permission to carry a torch of this ancient soul tribe before I gave it to myself.
As someone with Chiron in Gemini, I often find that I project aspects of myself onto potential lovers which I need to own. This often looks like being my own best lover, doctor, guru, and MC. We could also speak to this as a general problem with whiteness, and that an integral aspect of anti-racist work is owning the instinctual part of our nature white male patriarchy has projected culturally onto fallen women, POC and gender-non-conformers. When white female sexuality isn’t splintered by the Virgin/Whore Dichotomy, it’s the lie that secured white economic advantage in the ages of lynching, before police brutality and the prison industrial complex institutionalized violence against Black bodies.
As we usher in the first New Moon of the year in the Cardinal Earth sign of Capricorn, it’s interesting how I intuitively repeated “Alma Mater” several times in my flow, referring to my home town of Santa Rosa in this way and rhyming it with daughter. Knowing that the origins of “Mater” suggest Earth and Matter as “Mother” – inherently close to the Dark Feminine and Primordial Mother/Shakti Energy, I wondered how it came to be that Universities, perhaps the epitome of white male patriarchy and Enlightenment thought, seemed to have usurped the terms. A quick search revealed that the proper latin roots refer to a “Bountiful Mother.” What the ancient Romans used to heap praise on the Goddesses of the Earth, by the eighteenth century the British were using to refer to a “prestigious university.” Devotion for the Great Mother eclipsed by the Ivory tower, which at the time was the privileged space of cis white men.
With Chiron in Gemini, one has an extra sensitivity to what is ancient and familiar about the spoken word, including hidden psychic and emotional nuances and what is not said. The gift of my natal Chiron is an ability to express feelings and emotions with words, including speaking out about what is contentious, taboo or of otherworldly dimensions. Word and sound are agents of healing. In Kundalini Yoga, it is said that sound never dies, but travels out into infinity. It’s also not incidental that many of the most famed American MCs of all time were Gemini, including Lauryn Hill, Tupac, Biggie Smalls, Princess Nokia and Kanye West to name a few.
Regarding the eleventh house, the house of friends hopes and wishes throttled by Saturnian structure and Uranian revolt, I will feel most comfortable expressing truth in the role of outsider, black sheep, even pain-stricken scapegoat. Much as the Black folk art form we know as Hip Hop represents the voice of the Other “speaking truth to power” in America, the figure of the West African Griot (at once historian, storyteller, praise singer, poet, musician) plays an essential role as keeper of the oral culture. Connected to artists, shamans and trickster figures, griots like MCs often play a central role socially, and yet, their power is limited culturally for this reason.
Poised at the borderlands to name and expand beyond the status quo – MCs and Griots both serve to remedy the current Eurocentric monopoly on knowledge production, meaning and value deep-rooted here in the West. Reinhart explains that with Chiron in the 11th house there’s a capacity to see through false ideals, and demonstrate creative non-conformism without having to be right or convince others it’s the way. Jana Astanov writes that “With Chiron in 11th house, our healing potential can be reveled through community work, that’s also were our wounding resides. Once we are ready to overcome social fears which may be inherited from past lives or early childhood experiences, we have the opportunity to rise up to the role of a social visionary with awakened sense of humanitarian responsibilities and the burning need to be involved in some type of social reform. This process may take a lifetime and the activation of the Wounded Healer archetype takes place during our Chiron Return at the age of 50.”
Ultimately, Clairaudients of the Chiron in Gemini sort hold the key to understanding and articulating with finesse how “the map is not the territory,” and our prophetic revelations serve to heal distorted thinking within the collective consciousness assuming our mind is clear and in an elevated and balanced state.
Bibliography
Chiron and the Healing Journey by Melanie Reinhart (1989)
White Negroes: When Cornrows Where in Vogue and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation by Lauren Michele Jackson (2019)
Sabian Symbologist, “Gemini 23 ~ “Embracing experience” June 14, 2008
Katie Cercone aka *Or Nah* is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, scribe, yogi and spiritual gangsta. Cercone has been included in exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum, Whitney Museum, Dallas Contemporary and C24 Gallery. She has published critical writing in ART PAPERS, White Hot, Posture, Brooklyn Rail, Hysteria, Bitch Magazine, Art511, Utne Reader and N.Paradoxa. She is co-leader of the queer, transnational feminist collective Go! Push Pops and creative director of ULTRACULTURAL OTHERS Urban Mystery Skool. Cercone was a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow for the U.S.-Japan Exchange Program in Tokyo and a 2020 Franklin Furnace Awardee. Follow her on instagram @0r__nah_spiriturlgangsta and learn more at KatieCercone.com
