EVERY SOUL IS A STAR β€” 1) Gustav Meyrink

With this article we inaugurate a new section, "EVERY SOUL IS A STAR". The goal we set ourselves with this project is to investigate, article after article, the men and gods they have embodied, through the investigation of their history and their birth chart, with the means of archetypal and traditional Astrology .

In this first appointment, the birth chart of Gustav Meyrink - born in Vienna on 19 January 1868 - allows us to observe the powers that animated him, the symbols that were hidden in each of his works, and through these to attempt a suggestive synthesis of his history, as a man and initiated.

di Flavio Margotti

review: marco maculotti

β€œEverything will be turned upside down, what is above will end up below and what is below will take its place.”

Born on January 19, 1868 in Vienna (Austria) at 13 pm, even if Gustav Meyrink does not need many introductions for the goal that we are setting ourselves here, it will be necessary to draw on references from his biography (referring to the articles already present on Axis of the world dealing with the subject) to observe its character. In this sense, we will not hesitate to highlight any analogies between thought and work with the corresponding archetypal aspects: those planets which, surrounding the hidden center of man with their motions, reflecting its light beyond the filter of the moon, show the earth the destiny.

"The pivot is in deep sleep: there is the point of support of the universe, on which the lever of Archimedes can be placed to make the stars leave their orbits."

GM

Already with the superficial view of the sign and ascendant (Sun-Capricorn, Ascendant-Gemini) it can be said that he is dealing with an individual concentrated in using his intellect to achieve his objectives, an authorized and finalized knowledge, here curiosity is responsible.

The Sun in conjunction with Mercury and Mars leads the ego to project itself into thought and action. We therefore find an amplification of the already strong mercurial characteristics through the ascendant and the martial ones through the exaltation of Mars in Capricorn. Furthermore, this aspect brings strength and security in the formulation of thought and ideas, the ego manages to find an immediate body of action through the word (☿) and through the gesture, the action which symbolically belongs to war but which by analogy concerns everything what you input, you actively project through phallic energy. This property is interesting to note in the chart as it refers to a writer: the quill on the virgin sheet, the finger on the condescending key β€” these are all phallic symbols which connect writing to Mars.

However, this conjunction takes place on two neighboring fronts, on different houses: the ego and thought (Sun-Mercury) experience the XNUMXth house, therefore symbolically we can speak of an interest in philosophical themes: here we find the sense, the driving nucleus, the divine investiture in life. It is a house of idealism that forces the planets in it to face and affirm their own expansive processes, ideals, beliefs that must become tangible also through trials and blunders; it is a home that exalts, creates an impetus to make the personal archetypes involved in life work properly.

GM's literary work is a source of great suggestions, it is a desire to inspire, to arouse within the reader the need to keep the fire burning, "stay awake" β€” it is the house of Sagittarius: the individual draws experience from time functional for survival in the darkest moments of the year, it is a winter fire, a fire that is about to go out and is nourished by supporting with faith the rebirth of the sun which takes place precisely at the end of the sign, i.e. on December 21st , day of the solstice - therefore inspiring words and radical, exalting, for some even too daring, destabilizing suggestions, suggestions that in part deliberately managed to convey a tension, and a "provoking" fear: he is in any case a writer, if not horrific stricto sensu, fantastic and decadent - and in confirmation of this we note the conjunction of these planets with Lilith.

Lilith makes a sharp and "harpooning" individual, an individual who is not afraid of his own "shadow" (positively), a soul who knows how to listen to everything that is not "normal" and "compliant" for society β€” these are the main themes that bring Lilith or lunar apogee under the guise of the myth about rebellion against the patriarchy - and typical of Lilith: provide a magnetism that can scare the outside, perceive the individual Lilith as a usurper, a tempter or a being from keep away. I can only mention the juridical cases to which GM was subjected also because of his ideas and the spiritual cases such as the criticisms that Rudolf Steiner addressed to his "visions" or the trembling considerations of RenΓ© Guenon in the letter to Guido De Giorgio in which lamented the contribution of Julius Evola in publishing the works of GM, considered by the French traditionalist to be a sinister and disturbing man.

But Lilith also has a strong correlation with magic and through her transits or birth positions she can induce confrontation with another mind β€” she is an apogee or an occult moon, she does not have a physical body, but a spectral dimension β€” and I use this point to deal with from the house where Lilith and Mars lie, ie the VIII: it is the house of the beginning of death, the abode of Pluto, of the procreative chthonic marshes and of the mineral wealth that emerges by settling on the banks. It is a house of water linked to the sign of Scorpio, its environment is cloudy and stagnant. Poison makes this earth fertile: it is in fact the home of "corrosive waters" and of change (XIII arcana), connected with money and sexuality, the hidden ways of knowledge, with everything that involves a "transvaluation", an exchange , a transmutation, a β€œsolve”. The eighth house is knowledge that changes the knower.

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Mars is in this house, indicating a willingness and mastery over the issues in question, courage in knowing how to promote and direct change, courage in facing difficulties and an active reaction to the changes that fate throws at you, dominating and making the most murky and obscure of themselves in directing themselves towards their own needs, even concrete ones. Let's remember that we are talking about a writer who deals with "mysteries", a banker (to command and know how to manage money) and also a man with a strong passion for women. I could deduce that this passion is not to be understood as libertinism: this Mars is conjoined to Lilith as if to symbolize a masculine who cannot help but come to terms with a hidden, fleeting, separate part, the need to create contact through strong and atavistic, feral passions. On the other hand, the themes of tantrism and sexual metaphysics were themes dear to the author present in the same The angel of the western window. in any case Mars conjunct Lilith in this house amplifies the magnetism and projective energy of a magician, of a β€œsupernatural” operator, as confirmed in the interests and practices of GM

Speaking of the supernatural, GM was interested in practices such as spiritualism, clairvoyance or telepathy, in the latter in particular he was able to give talent right away, this can be seen not only from the aspects already treated, but also to a planetary body which, although slow cannot be left out, i.e. Pluto in the XNUMXth house. Here the archetypal occult ruler with the invisible crown, or the mask that makes invisible, reigns free in the subconscious. It is also without aspect, making the character of the planet even more "uncontrolled": it is in the twelfth house that governs those places where there can be only you (as well as the enclosure: imagination, fantasy).

Surely this Pluto is an aspect that is well suited to gloomy, decadent atmospheres. The famous novel cannot fail to come to mind The Golem, probably GM's most famous work, with its crepuscular glimpses into a Prague still dominated by an obsessive jailer and a manipulator of existences, who continues to plot from the background of the city, sowing immoral characters and tortuous superstitions in their minds . Here the recluse god speaks, left behind like a shadow: while Jupiter shines, Pluto is the "ghettoized" ruler. Neither The Golem the liminal character of the underworld guardian is strongly associated with the city of Prague considered by GM as the "threshold", the crack that opens between the real world and the afterlife.

Above, speaking of the house where Pluto lies in the birth chart of the Austrian writer, we mentioned the symbology of imprisonment and seclusion. The XII house is the most complex and mysterious - in ancient times it was generally considered the most inauspicious and was called the "house of the bad genius" - and it just so happens that GM has experienced moments of confinement and I am not talking trivially of the months in prison. In this regard, it is worth referring to a moment in his life that is to say the least "providential", which we quote from the article by Marco Maculotti, previously published on the pages of Axis of the world, Gustav Meyrink at the frontiers of the occult:

The young man with a revolver in his hand, ready to leave this "bitter valley of tears" forever, is an anonymous and wealthy Austrian banker with a hobby of women, chess and rowing. Nausea from the flat and insignificant existence of him, he is preparing to make the extreme gesture. What stops him suddenly? A printout suddenly slipped under his bedroom door. The young man puts down the pistol, gets up from his chair, takes the sheet in his hand and looks at its title: "On life after death ". By reading the mimeograph several times, the young man spends the night in a state of adrenaline wakefulness (la long night of the soul), Β«while thoughts, hitherto unrelated, began to pass through his mind... he took the revolver as one does with an object that had become momentarily unusable and closed it in a drawerΒ».

A young GM, still devoid of any concrete, inner "light of realization", lived like a young dandy "disbanded", tortured by fate because of numerous sentimental failures β€” Mars in conjunction with Lilith: the masculine is marked by rebellious women who hurt β€” and from nihilism (affliction of Sun and Mercury in the XNUMXth house), which challenges its destiny: the daimon answers, an β€œuncomfortable” demon, Pluto in the XII house. Resisting in the community, waiting to come out stronger, after labor β€” the "Long Night of the Soul" of mysticism, the conception of the surreal β€” acts through the man behind the door, the invisible hand of the god of death.

The XII house is in fact a house that poses the need to find a deep and authentic knowledge of oneself, and if the individual does not accept these requests, the daimon is truly the cacodaimon which causes failures, obsessions, illnesses and traumas. In fact there is a "possession" for which, in any way things go, the subject will have to deal with himself, germinating in the inner world. Furthermore, the act of suicide is an intimate act, a desire to respond to the obsessive call of death, an ambiguous, extreme, unconventional, but necessary home as in this case: it is GM's first radical awakening, an initiation 'high, "involute".Β 

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Returning to the discourse on his animal interests and his psychic gifts, it must be said that the XNUMXth house, like the XNUMXth and XNUMXth, is extremely connected to psychic powers. Pluto as god of the dead relates to an interest in spiritualism, as well as clairvoyance. It is interesting to note that telepathy is magnetism on thought: here the jaws of Orcus manage to hold back the hidden information we receive, what is invisible or is masked - hidden - by silence.

However, a suicide attempt is something so total that it cannot be treated with the mere observation of affliction to the stars or a Pluto in the XII house: suicide is in fact a reaction to a process that occurs through the "natural" observation ”. The emotional component is very present and, in this regard, one can only observe the Moon, i.e. the emotional mind, the reactions linked to psychic safety. Coming out of the profound but tormented sign of Scorpio, it entered Sagittarius - a sign whose symbolic values ​​we have previously stated - thus increasing the sapiential and "inspired" nature of this theme.

But what is striking is not this nor the quadratures - the Node and Jupiter make them creators of an authentic spiritual dynamism - but the conjunction with Saturn in the 4th house. This aspect is striking because, to express it symbolically, the rapid flow of the warm blood of the child crossed by genetic mothers is the opposite of the slow fossilization of the icy bones of the progenitor with titanic functions; opposites, even if complementary (it is not possible to deal further with the cardinal axis "10-XNUMX").

From a biographical and historical point of view we find a very incisive aspect: β€œIllegitimate son of a minister of WΓΌrttemberg, Baron Karl von VarnbΓΌler, and of the actress Maria Meyer. He grew up with his maternal grandmother in Hamburg ”. The characterization of illegitimate son brings us back to the myth of Kronos who, to put it in profane and familiar terms, "does not recognize his own children": this father is a man of political power - a strongly saturnine value - and the mother, struck by fate after having β€œembodied” it, entrusts the child to the grandmother β€” the Moon conjunct Saturn as an elderly mother figure or education through grandparents; in this case the grandmother, a saturnine female - in a foreign country, through a journey - quadrature with Jupiter. From an internal point of view, this aspect of concentration and seriousness in the flow of emotions, increasing the effects, leads to emotional and then mental closure, in some cases to materialism and somatization.

Let us remember that it is located in the XNUMXth house: the house of the servant, of the branded, of discipline, of giving oneself an order. Here is our altar, what alters our human substance through a ritual process in life: this is the sense in which it was also called the "house of disease". Precisely for this reason we could continue by exposing some physical phenomena in order to see the psychic and then spiritual tendencies that the Moon-Saturn aspects bring about: digestion - the bowels of Cancer and the Moon and Saturn as the stomach, associated with swallowing the gods - accelerated - the Moon is the fastest luminary, like the flow of emotions and personalities - and therefore a demonic voracity due to the lunar energy anchored to the saturnine body, and at the same time hollow, fragile, soft, stained and dark teeth and bones, despite the thinness the nourishment.

Proceeding from this first characteristic, we can say that GM lived and perceived the years of childhood and youth in a boring, repetitive, cyclical way, like an elderly person waiting for the end, or projecting himself into the future (realisation, old age and finally death). His sensitivity, despite being tried and trained to defend himself and prepare for the worst - thus also memorizing life lessons and avoiding any - dogmatically attached himself to normality, to a material vision, to the certainty in repeating himself like a machine, in fear of change, of other things, all of this in a cyclical way until, with the gradual awareness that life placed in him, he admitted his emptiness, his bestial circuit, leading him to attempt the worst.

But once this ordeal has been passed, one can observe his radical transmutation, his Promethean acceleration as he crosses the river β€” through his purified body he towers above the waters: GM was a rowing enthusiast β€” the domination, control and emotional mastery, not more repression and repetition but the concrete direction towards what the soul asks to concretely elevate and strengthen itself: "those who do not learn to see in the earth beyond certainly do not learn it" he writes in UR, and in the same writing he makes a symbolic reference β€œto jacob's heavenly ladder, the one who wrestles with god all night until day breaks and bring victory.” Here the man (Man-Moon) fight against god through time - the two faces of Saturn, the nocturnal one of the soul and the auroral one, the golden age, immortality - that is, he wins because the mental man has been able to look at and face the plane of time , concentrating in this duel of life, defending himself from it, and through it brought to the primordial state, symbol of the scale of time - divided into steps or incarnations, eons - symbol moreover present in Dante's Seventh Heaven, the sky of Saturn.

So let's see how in this example of initiatory writing we can see the consciousness with which the archetype has been spiritualized. The text quoted in UR places many other symbolic references to these symbols so connected to the conjunction in question. Here are others:

"The key of potency upon the lower nature has been rusted since the deluge, it is called being awake."

(Rust is also a symbol of the "crystal" of the corrosive action of time)

β€œWalk like this from awakening to awakening.”

(The steps of the ladder of time towards the ascent, verticality in direct action, focused on one's self)

"Would you like, man, to change into what you are today, still with your dog?"

(The dog as lunar animal par excellence)

β€œAll those who have been dear to you suddenly become ghosts.”

(The lunar affections treated for what they are).

β€œThe struggle for immortality is a battle for dominion over the sounds and ghosts that have their home within us; and the expectation of our Β«IΒ» to become King, is like waiting for the Messiah.”

(The moon, passive, receptive part according to asceticism is rectified by the Promethean will)

β€œWe know that sin does not exist; that the body is the principle with which we must begin; and that we descended to earth to transform him into spirit. They believe that it is necessary to go with one's body in solitude to purify the spirit. We know that, above all, it is our spirit that must go into solitude to transfigure the body. It is up to you alone to choose your life – ours or theirs. Your free will must decide."

(Ash mind: atheism becomes concrete spirituality and sapiential anti-religiosity; Saturn eradicates morality from reactive emotionality, materialism becomes conscience and demiurgy of its own cosmos)

In concluding I put the last sentence this time taken from The Golem:

β€œWhen knowledge comes memory comes too.”

(Where "waiting" and contemplation reverse somatization, and the crystal of the ego survives in memory as immobility of the spirit with respect to the sickle-shaped motion of time)

Through these fragments on the realization it is possible to move on to the remaining aspects of the natal chart: the Aquarian nature of the MC has increased its tendency to make an individuation, to want to create something different, wider, participating with its own name in the course of history , in a multifaceted way. The powers that the MC draws on are Venus (Aquarius) and Jupiter (in Pisces): here Venus favors the knowledge of important people and gives a natural tendency to innovate, to seek ever more effective ways to experience a lot in life. Relationships are influenced by what she has to achieve, by the inspirations of her life; her influence in the MC can be seen as β€œartistic” and β€œintellectual”, the legacy to the world through the role of author.

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In the MC Jupiter β€” who as we have seen has a strong influence in this chart β€” favors a β€œphilosophical” realization which can be seen in his participation in spiritual organization around the world β€” lodges, people known in spirituality, extensive and recognized spiritual studies β€” and in his esoteric contributions to Western culture β€” Jupiter as a "priestly" realization. Jupiter in Pisces contributes to this - cohabitation in the sign of Neptune, a sign known for its profound spirituality and for the fact that it is connected to the North Node, the "orbit" that transmits "evolutionary" tendencies. They are in fact the ends of the thread in which life passes in balance, they determine the "fatal" axis in which man's will is very limited, without bringing into play misunderstood and misleading terms such as "karma" or "reincarnation" .

When a Node, as in this case, is conjunct a planet the influence and tendencies of that planet have more power in the life, and sometimes these orbs increase the need to enter initiation and can indicate talents and powers, as in the topic in question. Taking into account that the energies of Jupiter were already very evident, with this aspect Jupiter undoubtedly becomes the main guardian of this birth.

Neptune in the XI house has a similar effect: participation through the world with an immersive character leads to operate through one's ideas and participate through one's visions, one's imagination, to see social, historical and political reality in a "surreal" way β€” the imaginary inspirations of his novels through the background of society and history. The quadrature with Uranus increases its revolutionary characteristics and dissent towards the outside world. Neptune also speaks to us of "navigations of consciousness in the astral ocean" and in fact - as mentioned in the previously cited article by Maculotti - "in some writings the author recounts liminal experiences that occurred to him personally, such as the psychedelic journey Of Hashish and clairvoyance".

The XI house, which symbolically indicates scientific and ideal "experimentation", in the ambit of individual and collective research, projects and world vision, is here governed by a Neptune strengthened by the lunar side of luck ("asc" or intuitive personality linked to the desires and talents of this life) manifests itself through the spiritual and "artistic" character of his personal experimentation, and as the Neptunian archetype often does: also through the use of psychedelics.

The somatic traits have a mainly mercurial character, the conjunction of Mercury has given small and dynamic eyes, and the Gemini ascendant has given the general structure of Saturn a serpentine character (the dynamic forehead and skin of the chin, neck, jaws, soft cheeks, smooth) no less important is the martial character clearly visible from the nose in question.


Planetary composition:

 ♃- 15.6%

 ☿- 14.5%

Β β™„- 13.6%

Β β™‚- 11.6%

Β β˜‰- 10.6%

 ☽- 9.8%

Β β™…- 8.4%

 ♀- 8%

 ♆-4.2%

 ♇- 3.6%

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