Helen Martineau's Blog

    The first Saturn return A powerful impulse comes to an individual around the age of twenty-eight. It’s called the first Saturn return: the planet Saturn is back where it was in your horoscope at birth. In pop culture, astrology has become a means of checking out what will happen for you each week, month or year. More seriously it’s used as a kind of soul map. The reality behind this is the spiritual connection between the microcosm of the human being and the greater cosmos, the macrocosm depicted via the heavenly bodies. The Hermetic Dictum, ‘As it is above, so it is below’, applies in all our lives.   The sign for Saturn, still used in modern astronomy, is made up of a cross and a downward facing sickle or scythe shape. The cross symbolism reveals the penetration of spirit into matter. The scythe signifies Saturnus the Roman god of agriculture and symbolically means it’s time to reap the ‘harvest’ you have sown ...

The second cycle, ages 7-14   When the baby teeth loosen most children feel that something new is in the air. It is. And it involves more than physical events. The coming of the second set of teeth marks the etheric cycle or second birth. The etheric – prana, chi or life body – is what gives the life to the physical. The invisible etheric weaves through the earth’s flora and fauna. Without these forces any physical form isn’t alive. The etheric is characterised by movement and rhythm and relates especially to the rhythms of life as  kairos  or the timely season.    A child enters a new life season at around seven years and the etheric forces begin to flow in a new way. Children develop new energies, more vivid imaginations, memory and a sensitivity to the world through an emergent feeling level. T hrough the inner rhythm of their own being   they become awake to the rhythms of the world, of day and ni...

From birth to seven years Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting And cometh from afar; Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come  From God, who is our home. Wordsworth the poet has captured it. That’s how we arrive on earth. And those clouds of glory open a mother’s heart in readiness, even while we are in the womb. There o ur brain is being imprinted with the potential we need for our spiritual development, based on the spiritual blueprint our spirit gave to our soul. It’s important that we are loved. Our dramatic birth into the physical world involves the first experience of taking in air, abrupt, sharp noises, light, unexpected faces and strange objects. It’s a shock after the intimate relationship with the mother during our womb life , held close and bathed in the warm amniotic fluid, communicating through our mother’s rhythmic heartbeat w...

Part 1 - an Introduction Our life on earth is framed by our birth and our death. From our soul’s point of view, it’s an amazing journey we undertake to help us to progress spiritually. Our spirit is like a light always shining ahead of us; our body is always in the now. The soul is a mediator between the two.   And this has implications: We came from spirit and will return to this our spiritual home. During our physical life our soul retains a connection with the spiritual realms, even if we aren’t conscious of it. Before we are born our spirit gives us a blueprint. It’s the purpose of our incarnation. Our soul chooses to incarnate into a certain family, place and into certain conditions. What we encounter throughout our lifetime needs to be experienced so we can work with and fulfil the requirements of our blueprint – for this life. In the big picture it’s part of a continuing process for the soul. We have lived before and we will live again in a new body. What we br...

As another Christmas approaches I feel urged to resolve the question of what to celebrate, and when. Our Australian timing is upside down and back-to-front. Christmas happens in midsummer. And over the years it has developed its own characteristics – barbeques, open-air carols by candlelight and all. For me the timing opens up deep spiritual questions beneath the secular activities. Are we right to change Christmas to June, our midwinter, or not? I delve into answers in my latest website post which you can read by clicking on this link: The light forever shines in the darkness.

                                                   The battle for and against assisted suicide, what used to be called mercy killing, is always fierce and heartfelt. But in the State of Victoria in democratic Australia an act to make it legal for the terminally ill is close to being passed in parliament’s Upper House. And then it will become legal. In some countries it is legal already. To take the responsibility for ending a life, even your own, is momentous. And there has been plenty of passion around the euthanasia debate, with valuable and compassionate considerations on both sides. These are widely accessible and most likely you will know them. I want to look from a different direction. Humans have a complicated, conflicted and often irrational attitude towards taking the life of another human being. There’s a universal injunction against it that lies a...

                                                                                                                                A world of difference Society on Gethen is ambisexual. That is, for most of the time people are androgynous, but once a month at the time of kemmer they become sexually active as either male or female – they never know which it will be. This is the setting for Ursula K Le Guin’s stunning sci-fi novel The Left hand of Darkness. In her mutable fictional culture, the rigid gender divisions we hold have no relevance. I think ambisexuality is worth a close look when the issue of equality in marriage is a hot potato for politicians and a sourc...

Melbourne, my home, is not the only city that has a month-long Comedy Festival. Comedy has always been popular.  It  can be cruel and crass, but good comedy  tweaks reality and tickles the mind and emotions. When we laugh, momentarily we become free as a child, released from what life has thrown at us, from the crises that create personal havoc to the mess the world is in. . Especially through the irony of self-reflective parody and satire we open up and can see the world from a new angle. This doesn’t happen when we choose to enter a comfortable bubble and associate only with those who are like us. Or when we protest until we boil over into anger that only makes everything worse. Or we sink into existential gloom. Better then to throw up our hands and turn despair into comedy – that is, if we can. I have just re-read George Orwell’s famous and bitterly satirical novel 1984, and was shocked agai...