a defence of astrology: Mike Zizis

 I've been reading Margaret Atwood's fascinating autobiography Book of Lies: a memoir of sorts.  Among the many things I learned about her is that she's a fan of several arcane arts, including astrology and palm reading. If one of the planet's greatest living writers is a fan, there must be something useful in learning these skills. hint: some clever Phd student will one day write their thesis on this topic - wish it could have been me ;  )-

Our Shared Human Condition

- Mike Zizis December 14, 2026

Some few people get to bypass the crisis of fear and doubt and loss and breakage that a majority of us must pass through, as these things pass through us. They are fortunate. They are unlikely to bring an open heart to their own breakage and the breakage of others. Of course I also mean the rebirth of others who overcome horrid situations. Wealth and solace is attracted to those who deeply understand human cycles as reflected in planetary cycles.

We possess big brains. Collectively we have little idea as to how to use them. There are some who only look for weapons. Treating science as a secular religion, murders curiosity. Weaponizing against astrology secures a place in the hierarchy.

Agriculture, far older than reductionist Cartesian science, reveals that planting crops and harvesting crops follows the cycle of the sun and the moon. That's how astrology was born.

Astrology is far older by 10,000 years than 400 year old science, it becomes harder for the doubters to do anything except use harsh divisive language to silence those of us who know what the seasons, and the stars bring in the way of endless repeating cycles.

So, in order to achieve the Procrustean bed, a one-size-fits-all, they must follow the tradition of ‘no and here's why no is all I have to say’. Every every human being if we live long enough will have crises and transformation to grow through. As I've pointed out numerous times, these will often occur at the ages of 14, 28, and 57 / 58 years old. In astrology we call this the Saturn cycle.

Those who practice hierarchies, are always, and I mean always, afraid of doing their own horoscopes. They are not afraid of cloaking fear with an overlay of anger. In astrology all knowledge begins with self-knowledge. Think how much better off those who brutalize the organizing principle of astrology, would be if they claim their human gifts and vulnerabilities as revealed by astrology. Of course that would mean that they are no longer in lockstep with their peers and their superiors. Carl Jung and Charles Darwin piled up thousands of examples to present to the graybeards … thus proving that quantity, is all that matters to the old boys club. Astrology in part discusses the quality of moon light.

“The song that you hold in your heart is one man's version of moonlight.” - Donovan

Denial is a part of human nature. Everyone goes through crisis.

check out Mike's website:

https://michaelzizis.com/

New Moon in Cancer: Michael Zizis

 This Saturday, June 28, I'll turn 77! Can't believe I've made it this far ;  )-  One of the privileges of having a blog is I can post what I want, and it's my birthday, so I'll party if I wanna. 

George Thorogood - I Drink Alone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E9ydw_aDMg 

you gotta listen and watch this one! Gracious George features a slide better than him . . .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--AvCsh48bk&list=RD--AvCsh48bk&start_radio=1

New Moon in Cancer

Michael Zizis

4 min read

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20 hours ago

an essay by Mike Zizis

Each New Moon — every 28 days, gives us the chance to begin again, again. Please keep it simple.

Wednesday June 25, NEW MOON 04' Cancer — 6:31pm EDT / Toronto

Attention astrologers; please relocate this new Moon to your local coordinates.

Today I am curious. Tomorrow I am brilliant. The next day I am clueless.

This is what it’s like having a moon-ruled character. A solar ruled person just gets stuff done, regardless. Get up early — write everyday in the morning for 3 hours — it ain’t me, babe.

I am dreamy, procrastinating, and romantic. My character is ruled by the moon.

“I’d jump in the Mersey, but it looks like rain.” Ringo Star — Cancer.

The Sorrows of Young Werther - Wikipedia

The Sorrows of Young Werther (; German: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers ), or simply Werther , is a 1774 epistolary…

en.wikipedia.org

There is a novel written by Goethe, called The Sorrows of Young Werther. In it, Werther’s beloved woman rejects him, and he commits suicide. After reading this book many young German men took their own lives. This shocked Goethe, as he tried to create the opposite meaning.

Deserted Cities of the Heart: CREAM

https://youtu.be/wn5DZ6Uk7bA?si=JCZYl6qFtScpJ9BH

The previous new Moon was in the capricious sign of Gemini. (Adjacent astrological signs have nothing in common, not even their differences with the possible exception of Capricorn and Aquarius, both are ruled by Saturn, and yes the ‘modern’ ruler of Aquarius is Yoo- RAHN — uS.) Gemini is ruled by Mercury.

The sign of Cancer is ruled by the moon.

Ancient Greek astrologers, and probably the Egyptians and the Babylonians before them, considered the sign of Cancer to represent the soul’s entrance into this world, to be born into this world. Analogous to this concept, is the idea that we are dying away from the astral world. There is said to be a lot of grieving by others upon our departure from that place.

The previous sun and its new Moon, contain metaphors of mind, and a kind of playfulness ascribed to scrabble, chess, checkers, and treating everything lightly, and often with playful and sometimes immature humor.

If the previous sign represents the capris of the mind, Cancer symbolizes the ferocious, wild, beautiful and sad emanations from the heart. There is a Gemini-esque statement that goes something like … Sincerity, that’s the thing. If you can fake that, then you’ve got it made 

…

Nothing is more terrifying than re-inhabiting the deserted cities of the heart.

That is the sign of Cancer — as if we were serenaded by a lover with a mandolin under a full moon. Beautiful, sweet, sad, nurturing music that is sometimes in the shadow of simple fear, or even dread by acknowledging loss.

“From time to time
I realize
That I was sent here
To perfect All men.”

- Leonard Cohen

About a decade ago, I got a kiss from my Lover. She made funny squeaky sounds with her lips. I asked her if she kissed me with her mind or her heart. From that point on her kisses became more beautiful, and heartfelt each and every time.

“What comes from the heart, goes to the heart.” — Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

What would it be like if we sold air conditioners to others, rather than killing each other. After we kill each other to death, we have also murdered the chance to sell them anything. This is not good commerce.

During this new 28 day cycle, it is good to overcome your fears of loving this small blue miraculous planet.

Astrology

New Moon

New Moon In Cancer

Lovers

Haunting, powerful essay on parenthood by Michael Zizis

 

Honouring My Mother and My Father;

Michael Zizis

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5 min read·Dec 26, 2024

An aging child’s guide thru language

An essay by Mike Zizis

December 26, 2024

“Songs to aging children come
Aging children I am one.” 
~ Joni Mitchell

What to leave out — what to leave in. Some of us have had to make rude choices in life. Like many I have had to choose between lifting my spirits and my life with the help of others, or drowning to death in addiction — as did my dad and my younger brother.

So this is what I am about. My lifelong nurturing my mother to this day was, is, and always has been, language, and the ever fertile dominion of words and their meaning.

My birth mother Maimie, was, for as long as I knew her in the grip of some real evil and the demons of her own making. She was one of 10 children. She and her siblings grew up in the rude and weedy jungle of America: in Pittsburgh. Her Sicilian Greek parents had the old country to remember, while she and her siblings were the firstborn on a new soil, with no memories of the old country, and the threats of the mafia to her father. So she took on the role of silence or death in raising us single handedly, my younger brother and I.

In one of my poems I described her bitterness and stubborn silence — ‘with a mouth as long as winter’.

She was raised in severity, fear, and silence, tho she had her brothers and sisters. She thought that was the way to raise children. I was and am a verbal child always in love with language. I was always getting praise in grade school to high school for my use of language, sadly only and singularly, the English language.

I came home from fourth grade excited to tell my mother what my teacher had said about me; mom the teacher said that “I use language so well I must have an excellent mom and dad.” Her response was “Don’t tell her anything.” As well as our Salvation Army clothes, I was wrapped daily and nightly in her embittered silence.

Some of us who are lucky enough to have at least one parent — don’t have any memory of ever being held or been told anything comforting or complementary as a child. My mothers Hell didn’t slowly or ever depart.

On my dad’s side my father, James, was a muscular and powerful man, in love with opera, and maybe other arts that I knew not of. His severe dad was Greek and his mother was Polish by way of Austria. He was a raging and violent alcoholic perfectly fulfilling the Jekyll and Hyde character who is sober and kind then drunk and a monster:

(The) Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is an 1886 Gothic horror novella by British author Robert Louis Stevenson about alcoholism.

My dad worked in a meat processing company as a truck driver. There were gangs of slaughtered 300 lb. cow corpses — carved in crimson and white down to meat and bone slabs — in the carrier portion of a refrigerated truck. There they were hung by massive meat hooks. There was no take your child to work day but he did anyway when I was 10 years old to the slaughterhouse.

And at 11 years old, I witnessed him trying to strangle the life out of my mother in one of his many violent drunken rages. I went to the kitchen, picked up a frying pan and hit him on the head with it, while we — my slightly younger brother and my mom and I ran to hide in the bathroom. We barricaded the door with an ironing board as he pounded the door and yelled at me from the other side — “You can dish it out but you can’t take it!”

Now on to honouring my mother and my father. In the eighth and ninth grade I fell in love with Walt Whitman and Dylan Thomas, (before all the other authors) with their words and their language. I had found my resting place for my stormy mind and heart. Whitman reminded me, of how lofty, grand, elegant, elegiac, and transcendent language could be. Dylan Thomas revealed how atomic and nuclear — desire and life and death could be.

So then as now I am pursuing a goal that never can be attained, chasing gifted precise descriptive language, up and now down that never ending beach. Every day I stare backwards transfixed by my own footprints in the sand while running and stumbling forward as the sun sets on the ever stormy ocean, with an occasional watery tranquil moment caught in my breath and my eyes.

And like James Joyce, I’m a boy wandering on the beach while the waves wash up everything I need. My nurturing mother is language. My guiding moral source, away from that previously calling abyss — that addiction that my dad and my brother suffered, seems not to be my fate, is also the power of words to wound and to heal.

I am addicted of course, to the precisions of language in that poetic sense. Charles Darwin used the most precise language of his time to guide his writings — most especially The Voyages of the Beagle. The most precise language he could conjure up was that of the poets, not other scientists. And likewise Picasso hung out with poets and not painters. Don’t let anyone tell you — there are no words, only those who have given up the struggle.

My father’s fate was to end up in the poorest part of Pittsburgh, consumed by alcoholically induced gangrene, with his lower legs gradually cut off, like vegetables in a cart, in his wheelchair. My mother died in hospital of a viral disease, drowning in her own lungs. As much as I could I helped her cross over to that other distant shore. My aging child, my own fifty-three year old son — we were separated for forty years — is having trouble believing this story that has been etched and burned into my flesh. And so it goes.

Language

Poetry

Addiction

Transcendence

Survivor

Written by Michael Zizis

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https://michaelzizis.com/ Over 40 years as a professional astrologer, I am ready willing and able to craft trends in your journey.