Bless the Gates and Portals and Thresholds, Whether They’re “Real” or Imaginal
My writing below was sparked by, indebted to, and in conspiracy with Sarah West, who said it brightly and clearly. A link to her original essay appears after mine, and I hope you read it.
I’ve been loving astrology and writing horoscopes for many years, which obligates me to file the following report: The Lion’s Gate Portal that allegedly opens every year on August 8 isn’t in my ephemeris. There’s no particular recurring aspect.
The star Sirius performs its heliacal rising around that time, and eight is a handsome fat number that resembles the infinity sign. Somewhere in the last decade, the internet committed an act of spontaneous folk mythology and built a door in that day.
Here’s my testimony about that as a dues-paying member of the astrologers’ guild: I loved it, and I don’t care if it wasn’t grounded in actual astrological data.
The compulsive skeptics and scoffers were out in droves, of course, doing what they do best and worst, which is to mistake their own lack of enchantment for a rigorous epistemology. They imagine they’re defending reality. What they’re actually defending is the small studio apartment they rent inside of reality with the blinds drawn and one light bulb glaring, no visitors.
I could hand them a more robust debunking if they would be open to it, which they aren’t. I know that my own beloved craft is a system of poetic metaphors and evocative symbols, and not a set of meticulous instructions about how to run our lives.
I say this in print regularly. Along with my beloved, now deceased astrological colleague Antero Alli, I am the most cheerfully agnostic astrologer you will ever meet.
Here’s what actually occurred on August 8th, whatever the sky was or wasn’t doing: Millions of human beings decided the day was porous and generative and full of possibility, and then behaved as though it were. And behavior is the most concrete substance in the cosmos.
Somebody who hasn’t asked the universe for anything in years finally asked on August 8, the Lion’s Gate Portal. Out loud in a voice that cracked while they drove to the grocery store.
Somebody wrote the thing they really, really wanted on a napkin at work and put the napkin in their shoe and walked around on their own longing all afternoon.
Somebody lit a ritual candle on a stove burner because they couldn’t find the matches, and then did a sacred ceremony unlike any they had ever done. Somebody whispered a stirring vow about their future intentions into a glass of lemonade and then drank it. Somebody stood in a laundromat at 9 pm under the worst lighting God ever permitted, spoke their dead mother’s name aloud, and knew at last what they needed to whisper to her spirit on the other side of the veil..
Note the addresses on these holy moments: kitchens, laundromats, parked cars, bathtubs. The Lion’s Gate, if it opened at all, opened at ground level, in bodies, using lungs. This is the kind of magic I love best.
Our imagination is the single most valuable asset we own. It’s the engine room. Everything humans have ever built, including cathedrals, vaccines, labor unions, and escape routes out of a bad marriage, was envisioned by somebody before it was real.
To let that faculty atrophy, to sand it down into content consumption and irony, is a mutilation, and we modern humans are doing that to ourselves at a rapid rate. The people snickering hardest are frequently the ones furthest along in the debilitating procedure. How dare the scoffers ridicule the Lion’s Gate Portal even if it’s “just” a product of our imagination?
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Did unseen intelligences lean in and listen on August 8 during the Lion’s Gate Portal? I would testify yes under oath.
I’ve spent decades in the company of dream-beings and tulpa companions and unseen forces that have mystified me nonstop. And my field notes say the universe is far weirder and more responsive than the fundamentalist materialists have budgeted for.
But here’s what’s most important to me: Whether the answer comes from a listening, sentient cosmos or from the ferocious reorganization that happens inside a person who finally says the true thing out loud, prompted by playful magic, either way there is dramatic movement.
The sincerity is a catalytic ingredient. Any being worth praying to is going to lean toward the prayer that has actual blood in it and away from the one mumbled out of obligation.
I’ll make one distinction, because I refuse to be conscripted into the flabby wing of this movement. I’m not talking about the version where you visualize a Mercedes-Benz and wait for the universe to make it appear in your driveway. That’s the imagination declawed and put on a leash and sent out to fetch merchandise.
Real imaginative work is closer to labor than to lounging. It’s daily and disciplined. It might ask you to keep faith with invisible beauty for years while nobody confirms it, and then it asks you to go do the dishes and make the phone calls and show up.
So was the Lion’s Gate Portal real?
Wrong question.
The right question is whether anybody got closer to their own longing. Whether the fear loosened or whether a disempowered soul felt for a while like a participant in the world rather than a spectator being marketed to.
If yes, then magic opened itself up, and I don’t need it to have a street address in the heavens.
The gate was in our bodies.
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Sacred Advertisement: This dispatch has been brought to you by every wish ever spoken out loud with a shaking voice, and by Sarah West, who articulated what I believed in her stirring words.
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Addendum
While the narrow-minded debunkers were busy congratulating themselves for knowing that the August 8th Lion’s Gate was “only” imaginary, the sky was loading a big portal for August 12th and 13th. And every bit of this one is in the ephemeris:
• total solar eclipse
• new moon
• Perseids meteor shower
• Six planets strung pretty closely across the heavens in the hours before dawn: Mars and Saturn should be the most conspicuous; Mercury and Jupiter will be very low in the twilight. Uranus needs binoculars, and Neptune a telescope.
Can I tell you, with rationally consecrated logic, what it means that the moon blots out the sun in some parts of the world while six wanderers line up at dawn and the sky rains the crumbs of a comet all night?
I can’t. Nobody can. The instruments measure the phenomena beautifully but are struck dumb at the threshold of significance, as always.
So I hand this overflow show over to your imagination with a formal directive: Have fun with it. Speculate wildly and with abandon
You could also try on the following ideas, or discard them and dream up others: It’s a favorable time to break and escape our harmful habits and the fixations that sap our life force. My muses tell me it’s a reset time extraordinaire.
Feed your imagination this code: DESTINY WORMHOLE.
The brilliant witch Amanda Yates Garcia recommends we do a ritual to shift our focus from what we want to get rid of, to what we want to create.
She says: Start by filling in the blanks in this declaration:
Instead of _______________________
I choose to ______________________
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Read Sarah West’s original essay, which inspired mine:
tinyurl.com/SarahWestImagination
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YOU ARE A PROPHET
One of my beloved tasks as an astrologer of the soul is to help readers learn to distinguish between the wasteful, demoralizing use of the imagination and the uplifting, regenerative use of the imagination.
A good way for me to earn the right to discourse on this subject is to keep learning more about how to distinguish between my own wasteful, demoralizing uses of the imagination and my uplifting, regenerative use of the imagination. I was not adept at this early in my adult life. My skill has improved, but is still far less than expert.
Here’s the foundation of our meditations: Our imagination is the most important asset we possess. It’s our power to create mental pictures of things that don’t exist yet and that we want to bring into being. It’s like the magic wand we use to shape our future.
We are all prophets. Our imaginations tirelessly churn out images of what we will be doing later. The featured prophecy of the moment may be as simple as a psychic impression of ourselves eating a fudge brownie at lunch or as monumental as a daydream of building our dream home.
Our imagination is a treasure when it generates scenarios aligned with our deep desires. In fact, it’s an indispensable tool in creating the life we want. We call on it to formulate images of the conditions we’d like to inhabit and the objects we hope to wield.
But for many of us, the imagination is as much a curse as a blessing. We may use it conjure up fearful or distasteful premonitions that are at odds with our conscious values.
That’s in part the result of having absorbed toxic programming from the media and influential people.
Chaotic, disturbing, and even sickening fantasies regularly pop up into our awareness, many disguising themselves as rational thoughts and genuine intuitions. These disheartening fantasies may hijack our psychic energy, directing it to exhaust itself in dead-end ruminations.
Every time we entertain at length a vision of being rejected or hurt or frustrated, every time we dwell on a memory of a painful experience, we blast ourselves with a hex.
Meanwhile, ill-suited longings are also lurking in our unconscious mind, impelling us to want things that aren’t healthy for us and that we don’t need.
Whenever we surrender to the allure of false and trivial and counterproductive desires, our imaginations are practicing putrid magic.
This is the unsavory aspect of the imagination that Buddhists dub the “monkey mind.” It’s the part of our mental apparatus that endlessly exudes pictures in the manner of an agitated critter. The teacher Jeff Brown adds a crucial nuance. He says our “monkey hearts” are forever churning up forlorn, fractious, frightful feelings that are at the roots of the monkey mind’s disquiet.
Is there an antidote? Maybe. If we stop locating our sense of self in the relentless surge of the monkey mind’s and monkey heart’s slapdash chatter, we may become more gracefully attuned to the life that’s right in front of us.
Whether our imagination is in service to our righteous desires or in thrall to our compulsive commotion, there is one constant: Its prophecies play a prominent role in shaping what happens to us. Many of our visions of the future do come to pass. The situations we expect to occur and the experiences we rehearse and dwell on are often reflected back to us as actual events that confirm our expectations.
The well-documented placebo effect in drug research, for which there is plentiful evidence, has broader implications. So much (not all!) of what unfolds in our lives, for good and for ill, is shaped by what we believe will happen.
Does that mean our mental and emotional projections help create the future? Let’s consider that possibility. What if it’s at least partially true that what we presume will happen does tend to materialize?
Here’s the logical conclusion: It’s downright self-destructive to keep infecting our imaginations with pictures of loss and failure, doom and gloom, fear and loathing. The far more sensible and practical approach is to expect blessings.
That’s one reason why I’m reverent in composing my oracles for you, dear readers. If I’m to be one of the influences you invite into the intimate sanctuary where you hatch your self-fulfilling prophecies, I want to conspire with you to disperse fear and invoke relaxation and joy and pleasure.
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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY
Week of August 13
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Given how extra vibrant and refreshed you have been feeling, I would understand if you had zero interest in confronting The Dilemma That Refuses to Fade. Why deliberately tangle with that stale, long‑term energy drain when your spirits are so high? Here’s why: At this moment, you possess a new and unprecedented advantage over The Dilemma That Refuses to Fade. You may not manage to completely vanquish it once and for all. But then again, you just might. At the very least, you can now sharply curtail its ability to siphon your energy and meddle with your life.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Virgo mathematician Katherine Johnson (1918–2020) was known as a “human computer” who specialized in carrying out large volumes of intricate calculations. She also had an uncanny ability to translate complex problems into elegant equations, which was why NASA called on her help to guide its early space missions. She said she simply asked the right questions until the numbers disclosed their hidden patterns. Be like her in the coming weeks, Virgo. Instead of forcing quick and simple answers, focus on dreaming up the smartest questions. Well-crafted inquiries will unlock sweet insights that brute effort can’t.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): In the art of mosaic-making, tiny fragments of stone or glass are fitted together into intricate patterns. Each piece is insignificant and meaningless on its own, but together they compose luminous images. Let’s deploy the mosaic as a metaphor for your life, Libra. I invite you to consider the possibility that you are assembling minor details and small clues into a big, beautiful masterpiece. You may not even be fully aware of how exactly you’re doing it or what it will ultimately look like and do. That’s fine. Your higher self is in charge of accomplishing this minor miracle.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Before launching spacecraft, engineers perform countless simulations of situations they hope will never happen. They repeatedly practice failures so that success becomes more likely. This is a different version of your current assignment, Scorpio. Your task is not to worry about disaster but to rehearse courage. So I encourage you to use your imagination to strengthen your resilience. Visualize yourself responding with creativity, grace, and humor whenever life springs surprises and unexpected blessings. Your confidence will thrive because you will have lots of inner practice in collaborating adeptly with uncertainty.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): The horizon line is always the same distance away from you, about three miles at sea level. If you walk toward it, you will never reach it because it moves with you. Now I’d like to propose that some of your personal goals work like horizons. They are orientations, not actual destinations. You’re supposed to move toward them indefinitely, never arriving. In the coming weeks, I invite you to distinguish between your horizon goals and your destination goals. Some aims are meant to be reached, while others basically guide your direction without ever needing to be attained.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Here’s my normally $600-per-hour advice, provided at a very low cost to you: Don’t get back to where you once belonged. Instead, go toward where you must belong in the future. Maybe the old place feels cozier because it’s familiar, even if it no longer fits the person you are now. But I recommend that you heed the subtle pull of the life that’s calling you from ahead. Who exactly is the even more beautiful self you’re on your way to becoming? Visualize in detail the situation where that sovereign majesty will thrive.
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AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): If you’re single, the coming weeks will be one of the most auspicious periods in ages for cultivating your own fan club of admirers. Your allure is turned up higher than usual, and the universe seems to have decided that what once might have counted as excessive is now perfectly appropriate. If, however, you’re happily ensconced in a lively monogamous bond, don’t sabotage it with daydreams of juggling multiple lovers. Instead, conspire with your partner to expand the range of flavors inside the relationship. Try stepping into different personas together: Adopt new names, experiment with strange accents, and imagine you’re living in 1453 Italy, or 1506 Spain, or 1685 Japan, or 1721 France.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): The speed of thought can zip along at over 200 miles per hour. That’s the rate at which signals travel through neurons. Electrical impulses in computers, on the other hand, may travel much faster, at half the speed of light. So your thoughts are very leisurely compared to machines. But they do what computers can’t. They’re creating meaning, not just moving data. Their slowness is where the richest reality unfolds. Remember that well in the coming weeks, Pisces. It’s extra important for your mental and physical health that you not imitate machines and algorithms. You need to ruminate and meditate and muse as gently and unhurriedly as you dare.
ARIES (March 21-April 19): At the post office, I mischievously plucked a crumpled piece of red paper out of the trash can. I don’t usually do such things, but I sensed some horoscope material was lurking there. It turned out to be a handwritten love note addressed to “My Lush and Luminous Aries Laugh-Lover” and signed, “Your Flawed but Fiery and Funny Provocateur.” The Provocateur had written, “Let’s be rowdy investigators of wonders and miracles. Let’s hack our way through the frontiers to discover the wildest beauty and truth ever.” I was shocked that anyone would have discarded such a tempting proposal—especially an Aries. Please avoid making comparable errors in the near future, my dear.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): The ancient Romans could be obsessive perfectionists in their approach to building stuff. They were extra thorough and scrupulous. That’s why some of the roads they constructed are still usable today, 2,000 years later. Workers dug deep foundations, then layered stones, gravel, and sand before placing the final surface. In the coming weeks, Taurus, I recommend that you, too, carry out meticulous groundwork as you upgrade your foundations and optimize your stability. Don’t you dare be lazy or hurried in doing this grunt work. Your dogged and ingenious attention to detail will make your future safety zone shatterproof and shockproof.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): I appoint you to be the Chief Role Model in charge of showing everyone how to be a smart lover in all situations. Yes, all situations, not only those involving romance. In addition, I bestow on you the title of Chief Administrator of Amazing Grace, hoping this will inspire you to make elegant interventions in every situation where you have influence. Finally, Gemini, I exhort you to be devoted to seeing the beauty in everyone you encounter, even if you must work hard to find it. In asking you to carry out these humongous responsibilities, I’m interpreting the clues offered by the astrological omens. They have revealed to me that cultivating a generous spirit is crucial to you attracting what you want most.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): I confess I have succumbed to a very modern misdemeanor: tossing the word “sacred” around more often than it deserves. To be fair, I haven’t stooped to the tacky depths of New Age hustlers hawking “sacred e‑mail marketing” or “sacred dog-walking.” But still, I would prefer to invoke the word more sparingly, so that on the rare occasions I do, you will feel a genuine shiver of awe. Like now. I predict you will soon be stirred by marvelous encounters and realizations that flood you with reverent feelings and turn your inner life deliciously upside down.
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"Millions of human beings decided the day was porous and generative and full of possibility, and then behaved as though it were." So perfect. Thank you!
Wow! You talk like Yeshua bar Joseph, dude. Deep gratitude to the Goddess for birthing you.