athanor (التنور)
furnace of fluency
light and shadow, nodules and tubes,
rust and perfect Prague-roof patina
dust and a scribble of graffiti etched in the paint
abandoned blast furnace and photographer’s bright attention.
we did it (mostly)
a tour of the year as the Sun crept through the “Egyptian” bounds.
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When I began to invite people to bound through the bounds with me two years ago, I had no idea what a nutrient-rich exploration this would become. The group I formed two years ago will embark on a third consecutive year together this Thursday. It feels surreal that something created so spontaneously is about to become a toddler of traversing the ins and outs of all things astrological. Not just bound-related things. Here’s what happened.
Two years ago I created a course at CAELi called Leaps & Bounds. I wanted to teach responsively, pivoting the lessons to the conversation arising as the group moved through the astrology at hand, no set syllabus. A neurodynamic playground for astrology and art!
We began with a hardcore focus on bounds, their histories, their symptoms and suggested effects, and we created art in our preferred modalities in tandem with the Sun’s journey through the bounds and their five rulers.
This experiment resulted in, at one point, a group attempt to learn the spherical geometry at the heart of calculating primary directions and circumambulations through the bounds… I remember laughing so hard that I had accidentally created an advanced math class at a level I had never taken during my official school years…
But we also learned about all sorts of timing techniques and deepened our relationships to facets of astrology like declination, great circles, code-switching between various zodiacs, histories of astrology and astrologers, and creating new forms of astrology like degree symbol systems and more…
At one point, a person in the group began to track the Moon through the bounds, and I got dizzy just thinking about it… Another person came up with a working theory around bound dispositorships, and we all tracked how it felt when the Sun entered a bound whose ruler was in its own bound (loud!) and when the dispositor chain went through all the visible planets (diffuse!)… One person finally finished an album that had been a mere “One Day” in their mind and now has a full studio set up for future music production, and another created poems and an app, and another made intricate oracular playlists and art to match the song sequences… it’s been really fun, and really real-world productive of things we would normally put off til One Day (and then never do). So we’re doing it. Together. Through the Bounds.
Last year around this time, I widened my scope and hopped into Substack and began this public Bound Report journey. When I look at the slew of posts, with their titles and art together, I am surprised to see a coherence and an anything!, given how much else I have going on and that I had time (mostly) to do this, too. Am I sad I missed a few, sure. We are all human, though, and the flaws and failures have their own value when we reflect on them. And yet I am also surprised that there are over three hundred of you reading these missives now. Wild! Zero to three hundred. (Substack seems ripe with reports about “growth” and numbers and such, so there, there’s your moment of quantitative appreciation!)…
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So the Leaps & Bounds group wants to keep going. I’ll be tweaking some facets of our explorations for this coming year as we enter a third go. I will also keep writing this public version of the bound report because they are fun, and once the Sun hits Aries, I think we’re all going to have a bit more energy (wouldn’t that be nice?!)… And maybe after reading what the group has been doing, you might want to share in the comments what the reports stoke in your creative world.
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Athanor (التنور)… the title of this last bound report of this tropical zodiacal year… refers to a furnace that furnishes a steady even heat for digestion in lab alchemy. The braintrust of Leaps & Bounds has become a kind of athanor for digesting the participants’ astrology and art practice and deepening the roots of our awareness and interpretive acumen. The constant stoking of creativity, spawned by a simple act of paying attention on a regular basis to an irregular pattern in a sustained way enables a fluency to flourish. What are your athanors? What fluencies are you feeding?
I’ll see you again at the Aries ingress on Thursday March 20 at 2:02 am for another go around the bounds.
I’m still dizzy. 🙏🏽