Hyle mary

Full Moon in Capricorn

The last two times I finished active cancer treatment, I didn’t ring any bells. I didn’t celebrate in any big way. It wasn’t that I thought I could pretend it hadn’t happened. There were scars, pain, implants, an excess of matter covered by flesh that looked like mine but hid something seemingly other. On the screens, beyond the MyChart or bank account logins, we have medical debt on par with student loan debt. In the real world, that translates to an inability to make ends meet where they should. A broken-down car is the end of certain things. I refuse to work harder than I already do, or to ask my husband to work harder than he does. We sit in holding patterns, waiting to see if there will be some hail-mary financial thing, or if we’ll shift along the appearances on this plane in some other way. So, no, I didn’t celebrate the end of treatment the last two times, but I also didn’t expect the lack of celebration to do anything other than mimic a pat on my own back. I thought: maybe I could perform a certain kind of nonchalance, my favorite way to do bravery. Yes, I’ll do that. Good job, lady.

Any time I play any role, though, I’m humbled by how, eventually, the curtain does come down. The costume does come off. The cancer comes back. It has nothing to do with performance and everything to do with the material conditions of the life I’ve lived. Saying that doesn’t answer any questions, though. It’s a hail-mary statement. It’s hyle, the Greek word for matter, the stuff that’s troubled us since we looked out and saw the beautiful order of the world at the same time as we saw siblings turn on each other for no other reason except that they could.

No one knew what to do about matter, no one knows what to do about matter! We praise it, prey on it, abuse it, consume it, desire it, create it, multiply it, throw it away, watch it, avoid it, analyze it, confound ourselves on its dispersions and accumulations, its ruptures and coming aparts, its aggregations and squiggles, the little lines and holes of darkness we read off of it onto screens, diagnostic tests, tsunami waves, tectonic plates, a chicken, an egg, its albumen, the cancer cell, the breast tissue, I tried to feed my boy for years but couldn’t. In matter, I could read the effects of an ancient process now playing out in a child who knew we came from the stars, but hated that you had to eat food to grow.

“The world is beautiful and hard,” I told him on July 4, a day in which we did not celebrate freedom so much as sit around the table understanding the limitations of karma in the family, in the body, in the country, the stuff that matters. “Yes the mountains are beautiful,” he told me. “But I hate that you have to eat food to grow.” He was not distressed when he said this, though he had been earlier in the day. He was incredibly clear. Brave. One thing I have gotten from Rudolf Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom is that thinking closes the distance between what we perceive as “out there” and what we understand about it. Theo will have to develop his own moral imagination about what it means to be free in this world, in his body, as he grows up. I cannot do his thinking for him, but I do try to explain my own mind to him and his sister. “How do you know so much about gods?” Theo asked me one night at dinner. “I have been their student for a long time,” I said, feeling silly, offering Lyra mashed sweet potato and banana purée and thinking about picky eating as an analogy for Gnosticism.

“Sometimes Theo struggles against deepening his incarnation,” I told my therapist. “He is exactly what his name is. A gift from the gods.”

“And what is your relationship to incarnation?” my therapist asked me, and I said that I mistook truth for the urge to either build something up or tear it down.

“Why is your burn blue?” Theo asked me when he saw the skin rotting off my armpit, an aftereffect of a month of radiation. “Burns should be purple.”

Hyle, my little heterodox.

The heterodox in Methodius’ On Free Will walks along a seashore and contemplates the beauty, rightness, and reasonability of nature. Look at the waves of the sea, the heterodox rejoices, look at the regular movement of sun and moon, the colors of the plants, the wellness of the cosmos. The next day, though, the heterodox sees evidence of evil in humanity: “scuffles, grave robbery, desecration of bodies, murder, mercilessness, rape, and seducing another man’s wife.”¹ He can’t square the idea of a good God with the presence of evil, so the heterodox draws the conclusion that evil must stem from a primordial substance that predates God. This is hyle, the matter, the stuff, from which God created the world in order to transform it into something better than itself. This, of course, introduces the problem of hyle existing separate from or before a God that is supposed to be whole and wholly good, and philosophers and theologians down the centuries have argued over what to do with it, this hyle, how to relate to or understand matter.

I used to be a secular materialist who looked to human action on the material realm as the source of anything that went right or wrong or landed somewhere in between. But it was a role I played until the curtain dropped, just like all the others. Funny how the material circumstances of illness bring spirit right on in. I mean! What do you do with that?

When I’m naked beneath a machine’s laser beam, when I’m on my knees, when I’m ringing the bell to celebrate the end of treatment, when I’m teaching other people how to write about dying in the age of AI, I have more questions than answers about hyle. What is your relationship to matter? To incarnation? When you hold the line, when you hold off from your own personality just for a moment, just for a second, can you see a possibility for something other than donning funny clothes and a conditional position in a world that requires junk garments and shitty conditions? What moves a person from “me-not me” to “holy guardian angel” to “Divine Self?”

What moved me?

These are Capricorn questions for a Capricorn Full Moon in a world where we rely on the planets’ orderly orbits to tell us something true about ourselves. But what about something good? And what about something whole?

I rang the bell today.

ringing the treatment bell after my last radiation today, Full Moon in Capricorn altar, meeting Raechel Anne Jolie during this last lunar cycle and taking her to my favorite place, the first cosmo in the garden, an analogy for what I think the best approach to "hyle" is, maybe!

Sending love. Happy to answer questions about the astrology of the moment or pull a tarot card for you for the next lunar cycle if you comment with your rising and a specific question below. Answers from me will likely come along on Thursday!

1. As retold by Ismo Dunderberg in Beyond Gnosticism.