Inviting in Tim Leary’s Ghost
An Astrological Invocation
CAROLINE W. CASEY
The Song of Being
From the Irish bard Amairgin
I am a wind upon the sea,
I am a wave upon the ocean,
I am the sound of the sea,
I am a stag of seven tines,
I am a bull of seven battles,
I am a hawk upon a cliff,
I am a teardrop in the sun,
I am a boar in its boldness,
I am a salmon in a pool,
I am a lake on a plain,
I am a tree upon a hill,
I am a hill of poetry,
I am a god who kindles fire in the head,
I am that which shapes,
I am myself shaped,
I am that which dreams,
I am myself a dreamer,
I am all beings,
I am that which all beings become.
I am Tim Leary.
Shape-shifting is the Celtic visionary bard’s task, reminding us first of life’s infinitely rich possibilities and our joyful responsibility to explore them, and second of the empathic identification with all of life.
Tim Leary’s assignment was to be an Irish Libran and therefore to incarnate the charming Celtic hero shape-shifter. Traditionally periodic fits of madness in the forest are both the balance for extroverted charm and the prerequisites of being the prophet/storyteller of a desirable future.
Charm is both an Irish and a Libran blessing/curse. The word itself is tricky—a charm is an incantation, which casts a spell upon both the charmer and the charmed. The ease can prove difficult, lulling us into a belief in temporal invincibility like the Native American ghost dancers who believed that the power of the dance would render them invincible to the white soldiers’ bullets. We have only to think of Oscar Wilde to be reminded of another Libran Celtic Bard who underestimated the power of repressive law and the humorless antagonism to charm of the tired old regime. To be the sacred clown, who defies the authorities with wit and élan, to demonstrate to others that s/he has done it and survived requires the shape-shifting magic represented by Neptune.
I was initially surprised to find that Tim Leary’s natal chart was all Uranus, no Neptune—all technological, intuitive, experimental Promethean trickster, no Neptunian mystic visionary. Long on experiment, short on ecstatic self-loss. To carry the incarnational assignment of not only charming Celtic Irish bard but also Promethean trickster is a daring assignment and gift to the whole team of creation. Prometheus steals fire from the grouchy gods of elite privilege and gives it to humanity for which he is punished by being chained to a rock, where each day his liver is plucked out by a giant eagle only to regrow so that the ordeal is perpetual. Very often those with a strong Uranian/Promethean signature to their charts, minus Neptunian mythological literacy, are possessed by the archetype so that it is literally embodied. Tim’s liver was weakened by Hepatitus C, which according to his wife, Rosemary, was a prime contributor to his physical demise.
A less well-known, yet crucial postscript to the Promethean myth is that Prometheus could see the future and thus knew that he was to be rescued by Hercules, a heroic Mars animation of his own feisty strength and determination. This is a more heartening redemptive Fifth Act to the rascal-rebel part of us that defies the stodgy gods of convention. The strength of our alliance with Mars determines how much time we spend chained to the rock. Both radically and traditionally, Tim’s Mars was accessed through women. Time and again women saved his ass—yet he was the celebrity. So Irish. Still in the ancestral thrall of the traditional Irish male, about whom it has often been said, “Brilliant talkers, brilliant failures.” While the men were off at the pub being gallant poets, spinning tales about life, the women, by default, were back in the hardscrabble cold with the kids and the dirt protecting life, resentful at having been “hired” to be the conservative “responsible” drudge (see Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, etc.). Radically, Tim attributed his own words, “Only intelligent women can save the world,” to fellow Celt John Kennedy’s exquisitely experimental lover Mary Meyer.
Tim’s life and death would remind us: the shadow of being the trickster is that to rebel against something is to be just as much in its thrall as to conform. Eaten by shadow is the epitaph for much spirited extroverted idealism. Authentic inner mythological work and equal friends to give us a loving hard time are needed by all who aspire to cultural influence. The sixties (on into now) were full of antiauthoritarians who became authoritarians. All too often we have witnessed within and without patriarchy duking it out with itself, too cocky, too certain, too celebrity, too “Let me tell you how it is,” too much defined by having an enemy.
As the “Song of Being” reminds us shape-shifting is the antithesis of certainty and bestows the gift of empathic compassionate identification with all that allows us to have no enemy in the dance of life.
Yet when Tim died shortly after midnight on May 31, 1996, Pluto was directly overhead, signifying his successful alchemy. All foibles had been cooked in the crucible of death, distilling a legacy of intensely generous insight and teaching whose full value will not be fully understood nor valued nor applied until several years after the millennium. Jupiter, Neptune, and Uranus were rising due east. His departing communication was of the joyful necessity of fusing what these gods represent both in our psyches, then on out into the culture. The irrepressibly boisterous spirit of Tim bequeathed to us the exhortation to be sacred clowns who evolve into social change artists of compassionate rascalry. Allan Watts’s great one-liner about Western man’s relationship to religion is that “they sucked the finger instead of going where it pointed.” Tim says, “Death has completely released me from the foibles of celebrity so, hey, no finger sucking, there’s serious play to be done.”
Libra represents the experimental art form of collaboration—even after death. Astrological charts live on as a kind of permanent e-mail address even after the animator has journeyed on. Tim’s spirit is released from its own incarnate impediments in order to more effectively contribute to the collective.
William Blake used to set his table and invite dead prophets to join him for tea. Tim joins Billy Blake in saying, “Invite a great interesting dead person to tea—create a portal whereby they can contribute to the ingenuity of now.” (On occasion I’ve invited the dead to be guests on my radio show. They are much easier to book, almost always available, and eager to collaborate with the living. Tim Leary and Paul Robeson came on together and reminded the audience that we cannot live through the dead but the dead can live through us.) Remembering Tim’s famous quip, “Everyone gets the Tim Leary they deserve,” we ally ourselves with the Tim Leary part of ourselves that we most need now.
To write of Tim, and in fact to read about him, is to invoke him. I had traveled with my Tim Leary file for months—yet was unable to write about him due to my own Celtic Libran busy sloth, trickster procrastination, magical impediments, and curious obstacles. Until.While driving to the airport with Bob Forte, he remarked that it would be wonderful if I could meet Tim’s wife, Rosemary. We hesitated, passed her exit—then on impulse pulled over into a shopping mall, where I went into a bar to use the rest room, while Bob attempted to call Rosemary on the phone. As I emerged from the bar Bob was walking toward me, shaking his head, saying, “Well, I tried—called someone, got her number, left a message on her machine,” whereupon Rosemary Leary pulled up into the parking space immediately in front of us. We love that electrical chi, back on cosmic appointment time; there is an order, magic is alive, we are connecting with those with whom we should connect. And furthermore, it was as though Tim (whom I had not met in life) was still being a Libran artist, introducing teammates, will continue to do so, is doing so now through this book, and had given me permission to write about him. And he said it was OK to keep it short.
Birth charts live on like perpetual holograms, even after the animator has journeyed on. Jupiter transits result in reissues of books, allowing people to become wealthy after death. Uranus conjuncts Tim’s Moon trine with his Sun in 2003, revealing to us that it is around that time that Tim’s full joke, contribution, and influence will be acknowledged by the collective.
The astrological language says that there have been two great strategical social change times during the twentieth century, as characterized by the coming together of any two of the outer planets, the Change Gods, Pluto, Uranus, and Neptune. The first conjoining was of Pluto (death, rebirth, intensity) and Uranus (Tim’s trickster god of Promethean experimentation) in 1964–69. This pattern conjoined Tim’s Jupiter, god of storytelling, philosophy, and theater, in his 9th house of teaching. His understanding of what to learn and how to teach it certainly underwent a transformative exploration. He taught the ’60s, became its icon, then put out his sails and windsurfed this collective elemental wave to Pluto’s underworld. The Sabian symbol (a set of images for each degree of the zodiac) for his Jupiter is “Groom snatches the veil away from the bride—eliciting a response.” His task was/is to be a cultural agent provocateur. He was programmed to come alive in the ’60s and to consistently carry and embody both the zeitgeist and the teaching stories that first began to emerge then.
The second significant social-spiritual change time was the mid-to-late ’90s, characterized by the coming together of Uranus (same player as in the ’60s, but this time with a different dance partner) with Neptune, god of shape-shifting, dreams, vision, imagination. Tim rode out as this conjunction was rising in the east. Poignantly yet appropriately we now move into a time when the gifts of the compassionately inventive trickster in all of us are about to be welcomed by the collective. Now is the time of great teams assembling for the Grand Intrigue of successful social influence. “Take the zircon to Foppa and tell him we move tonight!”
Tim’s Death chart contains some specific pointers, and scavenger hunt clues:
The Sabian symbol for Mercury is “finger pointing to an open book.” This guides those who crave immediate intimacy to simply close their eyes while opening one of Tim’s books (or perhaps any book, or perhaps this book) and point for the necessary guidance of now. In his ancestral mode Tim becomes an agent of divination.
There are three biquintiles—rare 144-degree angles that are talents better than talent—that describe Tim as exiting, being like a tuning fork, humming these talents awake in all who are willing to resonate. The first biquintile is from the Moon in Scorpio in the 9th to Venus retrograde in the 5th—the art form of being playfully dark about death—making light of darkness. In her cycle Venus was retrograde in Gemini, beginning her descent to the underworld to reinvent culture, escorting Tim really. Even in death Tim had a charming powerful woman for a date. The Moon’s image was both that of “a parrot repeating a conversation overheard,” and “a woman draws back two curtains to a sacred pathway.” Sacred theater would like to make a comeback, and we are hereby invited to entertain the possibility that popular culture is willing to be the theatrical venue for the emerging mythos of conscious kinship. “Entertainment” is willing to be telepathic again, as it was in the ’60s, when there was collective expression given to the interior life of the collective.
The second biquintile is between the North Node of the Moon in Libra in the 8th to Mercury (“finger pointing to an open line in a book”). This pattern bestows the capacity to open up spirit faxes, call and response between the visible and the invisible—the living and the ancestral—so that no creature, no creative rascal, need ever feel alone or unsupported again. The 8th house is an ancestral bank account that has been set up by Tim to endow those continuing the work of inventive, compassionate cultural experimentation. A Perpetual Day of the Dead is declared. Operators are standing by.
The last biquintile is from the Sun in Gemini in the 4th (home base) to Jupiter rising in the east. The image for the Sun—the central comforting communication—is found in its Sabian “Newly Opened Lands. Having Something New to Explore. Leaving a Trail. Virginal innocence.” “If I can do it, you can do it,” Tim exhorts.
Now is the fulcrum moment in historical time where all that each of us thinks, does and says matters enormously, tilting the balance toward species extinction or the necessary leap in shape-shifting pragmatic compassion and effective implementation of the most lovingly ingenious vision possible. Jupiter, the god of storytelling and theater, strong in both natal and departure charts, is particularly fond of the redemptive fifth act—How do we tell the story of how it all turns out OK?
Now is the time to offer ourselves to unleashing the forces of compassionate rascalry upon the world stage. We live in wild times, entrusted with the task of midwifing an emerging global mythology of conscious kinship. In order to do this we fill ourselves with gratitude for the generosity of all devoted to this task—and certainly our recent ancestor and perpetual teammate, Tim Leary. The festival of now requires that we honor and invite in any ancestral compassionate trickster with whom we resonate. We cannot transform apocalypse into renaissance without them, and indeed current crises are designed to compel us to experiment with the full
spectrum of collaborative possibilities.
Tim’s message to us now: The sabian for Uranus at the time of his death, “A council of ancestors—hidden guidance.” In death Tim completed himself by becoming a mystic, and giving us the gift of enhanced conspiracy—we can breathe together, even with the dead. In fact the alliance between the visible and the invisible is the unbeatable alliance—the experiment before all of us who love life, and who serve the greatest evolutionary development and happiness of all beings in all realms. Thanks Tim, we are in touch. Let’s dream, conjure, and implement the most lovingly ingenious world possible.
Tim bequeaths to those of us on this side of the dream the task to continue the blooming of culture through the unfettering of imagination that we may all aspire to be increasingly conscious players on the team of creation.
We are a hill of poetry,
We are gods who kindle fire in the head,
We are that which shapes,
We are ourselves shaped,
We are that which dreams,
We are ourselves the dreamer,
We are all beings,
We are that which all beings become.
We are Tim Leary.