Projections
Dear Friend,
It’s a bad habit of mine to decide that someone is projecting when I disagree with them. Every accusation is a confession etc. Sometimes it’s true, but often, it’s not.
In Scorpio III, co-ruled by Venus and the Moon, we are in the realm of fantasy, dreaming, and fairy tales. We are deep in projections.
Projecting gets a bad name, but I think that’s only half the story. Without being able to project into the future, nothing new would exist.
Like the more positive aspects of delulu, projection can be a potent force for creation but its radical capacities are often clouded by the negative associations that cling to it.
Kening Zhu’s gorgeous illustration captures both sides of this experience, and completes the Scorpionic cycle by plunging us into its delicious oceanic depths.
🜁🜃🜂🜄
Phantasmagoria, fairy tales + dreams in Scorpio III
T. Susan Chang connects this decan to the Parsifal myth and the obstacles used by the sorcerer Klingsor to prevent the knights attaining the grail.
A dark projection of the characters’ inner desires is used against them; the knights are offered a magical garden full of temptations.
In the Book of Thoth, Aleister Crowley describes the 7 of Cups as the "Palace of Klingsor". This is a reference to the Parsifal myth, in which the wicked sorcerer Klingsor attempts to waylay Grail-bound knights with a palace and temptress-filled magical garden. But when righteous Parsifal sees through Klingsor's magic, the garden withers and the palace crumbles.
The image of the Seven of Cups in the Thoth deck is woozy and weird. There is a psychedelic landscape oozing with strange colours that evoke bodily fluids – or expensive cocktails – depending on the angle you take.
This image is a reminder of the shadow side of projecting. If there is a creative aspect – the power to project a new idea, world, or reality – there is also a destructive one.
The concept of the phantasmagoria is a helpful way to understand this shadow side. The phantasmagoria is a magic lantern show that projects terrifying images of devils, monsters, ghosts etc. Though it isn’t ‘real’ it produces real effects in its viewers, as this image shows – the show is illusory, but the audience are really fainting.
Kira Ryberg captures the dual face of Scorpio III:
There is a deep level of connection that we find in this face, as it belongs to the Moon and Venus after all.
Inhabitants of this decan will prioritize the heart over the head, and they’ll respond from their sacral center more often than not. The burning flames of passion demand to be stoked in this face. Depending on what form these passions take, they can lead one down pathways that are either haunted or holy (or perhaps a bit of both).
Projections captures the whole spectrum of shadow and light in this decan, from haunted to holy.
🜁🜃🜂🜄
Bunny by Mona Awad – a darkly satirical novel all about projecting – is verrryy loosely based on ‘The Hare’s Bride’, a curious fairy tale with a complicated relationship to sexuality.
In ‘The Hare Bride;’ the protagonist, an unnamed ‘young girl’, is sent to ask a hare to stop eating the cabbages on her family plot. The hare keeps asking the young girl to sit on his ‘little hare’s tail’ – an ambiguous request that has a hint of sexual predation.
So yet again the young girl went to the cabbage plot and finding the hare eating the cabbages cried, "Hare, you must go for you are eating all our cabbages!"
But again the hare's response was, "Sit on my little hare's tail and come with me to my little hare's hut." And this time the girl did just that. She sat on the hare's little tail and the hare carried her off to his little hut.’
Yet the young girl, once she has satisfied his request – and her own curiosity – by following him to his little hut, simply replaces herself with a straw doll and walks away, none the worse for the encounter.
Though this tale is fraught with anxieties about appetites, there is an almost bathetic denouement.
This anodyne sexuality is reproduced in Mona Awad’s novel. Set at an elite MFA programme where ‘workshop’ means transforming fluffy bunnies into almost-boys (who they call hybrids, drafts, or darlings).
These creatures, without functioning hands or genitalia, say things like ‘Your beauty is nuanced and labyrinthine like a sentence by Proust’ and ‘Melanie Shingler is a whore compared to you’.
They are vapidly attentive and haunted by strange smells and charred clothing. Sometimes, they have to be culled.
She takes off her bunny mask and her apron, smooths down her dress. Looks in the blood-splattered mirror and tosses her impossibly shiny hair so that all the strands sway and dance like laughing light.
She is such magic, says the prancing pink pony in me. Isn’t she just, Samantha? Yes, I whisper, from where I am watching high, high up in the rainbow sky where the Tic Tacs have carried me. Edgeless and floating and looking down at Kira, who reaches for the ax in the corner. She doesn’t look at it. Just lightly rests a hand on it, while keeping her eyes on the door. “After this we should go to Pinkberry,” she says to the door.
This novel, filled with bitter green drinks and pills that make the ‘owies’ from the brutal transformations of ‘workshop’ disappear, asks what happens when your projections come to life, and have needs and desires of their own.
Practical Dreamcraft
Musician Cat Power describes writing almost all of her album Moon Pix in a state of distress following a vivid nightmare.
And one night, I don’t even know what the fuck happened, but hell came to get me again. It was in a dream. I wrote these songs [that became Moon Pix] that night, waiting for the sun to rise, because my house was surrounded by 150 trillion spirits pressing against my glass, trying to get in. It was fucked up and really horrifying. The songs were just like evidence.
I don’t think you need to suffer this kind of terror to use dream material in your projects, but there is something about these interior projections that can allow you to access submerged treasures.
If you are interested in experimenting with dream material yourself, I have created a resource to use the material from dreams directly in creative projects.
🍄 Fruit
Scorpio III: Projections
Fixed water: phantasmagoria, dreams, fairy tales
Projections captures the whole spectrum of shadow and light in this decan, from haunted to holy.
Seven of Cups
Fixed water: hopes + fears, unknown pleasures, the void
The holy and haunted passions of Projections are a type of unknown pleasure – a world that is conjured into being through imagining something new.
Process Diary: Television
Fixed water: prayer, holy visions, projections
In Catholicism there is endless creativity in the naming of patron saints. Some of the more obscure ones include St. Julian the patron saint of murderers, and St. Lidwina, the patron saint of ice skaters.
Atmospheres now has two live options for each atmosphere: Friday at noon GMT and Sunday at 5pm GMT.
There is also a gift option available for those who would find the cost a barrier to joining.
Find out more here.
🦠 Spores
I am experimenting with longer form essays for each atmosphere newsletter. I like the idea of contextualising the atmosphere here, and then applying it in the live rituals. It feels rich and playful.
𓍊𓍊𓍊 Mycelium
While waiting impatiently for the next Jane Schoenbrun film I am revisiting their gorgeous Dream Film Syllabus.
My friend recently hosted a roundtable on contemporary Japanese women’s writing in translation. I have been listening to her podcast and learning more about this current ‘boom’ and what it means.
Penelope Trappes’ beautiful album Heavenly Spheres has been the perfect soundtrack to Projections.
Three friends are having their solar returns in Scorpio III. Happy birthday!
I wish you a week of fairy tales, projections, and lunar dreams.
Love, LJ
this is microdosing ceremony, a letter from my artist’s cocoon to yours.
find out more about rituals and writing on the ceremony podcast.
explore creative rabbit holes on my website.
🜁🜃🜂🜄