The Eclipse Tunnel 2022

A Sojourn in the Poop Chute of the Dragon

[This essay probably has one thing or another that almost any human incarnate on earth at this time will find insensitive or offensive, for which I do not apologize at all, as the world itself is insensitive and offensive; but read on at your own risk]

Some things are difficult to write about because they are intensely personal. Other things are difficult to write about because they are so intensely weird. All I can do is try to tell my story and hope that my words can convey the meanings that have been revealed to me during my time in the guts of the Dragon. In order to accomplish this, hypothetical reader, I will have to try to weave many strands into a rather odd tapestry, so please bear with me.

I’ll start with the eclipse tunnel. This idea was introduced to me by a class from Rachel at the website Aeolian Heart. The short version is that the solar eclipse in Scorpio on October 25th 2022 initiated a strange and liminal phase that would be infused with the essence of both Scorpio and Taurus, the astrological signs occupied by the Sun and Moon at that time. We would remain in this liminal state until the Lunar eclipse in Taurus on 11/8/2022. This could be likened to a metaphysical wormhole, with a transformed reality on the other side.

The Scorpio eclipse, she noted, was all about purging stagnant emotions and pain that are holding us back from flourishing. 

(Rachel is a pretty rad teacher and I’ve learned a lot from her, although the specific form of astrology I’m learning is somewhat different from her methods). 

She discussed the Nodes of the Moon in her class. The North Node is known as the Head of the Dragon, while the South node is the tail. The solar eclipse in Scorpio that began the “eclipse tunnel” took place at the metaphysical Tail of the Dragon. This detail is important, because the tail end is where the poo comes out.

Scorpio is also a sign of death and sex, while Taurus is the sign of new life.

I think that gives us enough of an astrological backdrop to make sense of the rest of the story. Things get personal from here on in, which is appropriate because we are all microcosms of the macrocosm, and spiritual revelations are often, in my experience, intensely personal.

I work in hospitality in a small, quirky tourist town. One of my responsibilities is managing the laundry and housekeeping department in a hotel. I do not have a particularly elevated position in the company hierarchy but these departments are, in a way, the most important in the hotel (if you don’t have clean rooms to sell you don’t have a product, and if you don’t have laundry you can’t clean the rooms).

Like every other business in the country, we’ve had to cut services and quality due to major staffing issues post-covid. Demand has remained incredibly high (we have been setting sales records all year). Around the time of the eclipse, laundry started to fall behind. Dirty linens are dumped by the housekeepers down a chute that leads into the laundry room. By the day of the eclipse, the chute was packed full and laundry started to pile up.

We also had a number of tour buses come through, which is part of the reason we were so busy these last few months. Bored tourists get on a bus and get shuttled from hotel to hotel, taking in various sites at different midwestern tourist traps. One of the prime activities for people on these tours is stuffing their faces. Our town has an all-you-can-eat buffet with homestyle cooking. Many of the people who take these tours are older folks, some of whom have continence issues.

Basically, these people gorge themselves at the buffet, then come to the hotel and crap everywhere. The day of the eclipse, and for days afterward as more tour buses rolled through, the hotel was literally full of shit. All of the staff loved it.

Deep thinker that I am, I reflected upon the symbolic meaning of all of this. I share esoteric insights with a few of my staff, so I had the opportunity to work out a lot of the fine details during lulls in the job. Since everyone was complaining non-stop about the endless shit all over all of the rooms (sometimes in places, dear reader, you’re better off not contemplating), many of my meditations were on scatological themes.

During this time, laundry also had a crisis. We ran dangerously short on sheets. We had to pull literally every sheet from the backstock and put them in service, as the dirty sheets overflowed every stripper cart we had to spare in the laundry room. The chute was overflowing. Laundry was constipated. The laundry chute is a tunnel as well. It came to me in a sudden burst. We were in the tail end of the dragon. Up its ass. And the dragon was full.

When I realized we were in the belly of the beast, as it were, my thought drifted to the Dutch painter from the time of the Renaissance, Heironymus Bosch. Forced to describe his work, I’d say he was like a religious Dr. Seuss who drew Heaven and Hell in a very quirky, whimsical, and distinctive fashion. One of Bosch’s paintings literally depicts Satan on a toilet, crapping damned souls into Hell. (My favorite Bosch image is a giant demon bird wearing a cauldron on its head like a hat. A nude man is stuffed in his beak, his lower torso protruding. A flock of blackbirds is flying out of this unfortunate man’s behind. Neat!)

The world, as Bosch conceived it, was basically the Devil’s shit, and we were more or less living in Satan’s innards. This view, or some variation of it, seems to have been somewhat common at the time. Apparently Martin Luther and Dante both also characterized our world as Hell, and all of us passengers through the Devil’s digestive system. An interesting factoid I picked up during my research was that Martin Luther commissioned another painter, Louis Cranach the Elder, to make woodcuts of the Devil shitting out the Pope, which my inner 14 year old found absolutely hilarious.

One other odd synchronicity arose immediately after the solar eclipse that touches on the Scorpio/Taurus axis of energies that were kicked off in my microcosm at that time. Just after the eclipse, a guest labeled a VIP in our computer received a number of noise complaints from the rooms below and adjacent to his room. The front desk clerk breathlessly told me that he must have been having wild and crazy sex all night because of the weird noises and constant moaning. It was so extreme, one of the guests checked out two days early.

Later that day, EMTs showed up and took the guy to the hospital, where he died. The clerk had assumed that he was having great sex, but it turned out he was just dying.

In the process, he shit all over his suite. Scorpio. Sex and death.

Somewhere around this time, I started thinking about Jim Morrison, the Lizard King and self proclaimed shaman (and singer of the Doors). The great Dragon in the sky got me thinking about the seven mile long snake from the End, and I recalled an interview wherein Jim talked about the snake being a peristaltic being. 

Peristalsis is a cycle of muscular contractions and expansions that is involved in swallowing, digestion and the movement of food through the digestive system, labor and birth, and the expansion and contraction of orgasm. I started thinking about peristaltic waves, which brought to mind Eliphas Levi’s drawing of Baphomet. On its arms are written coagula and solve.

Expansion and contraction. The Big Bang and Big Crunch. It’s all a big cycle, and it never ends. We are all just along for the ride.

I’ve had thoughts along this line before but it never really hit me until I had this epiphany standing in the laundry room, which was super constipated and backed up. There was too much coagula and not enough solve. I thought about everything I’ve been holding on to these past few years, emotions I haven’t processed, grief and fear and rage, all built up and coagulated inside me, forming gross clots of negative emotions, emotional shit from the smorgasboard of cacomagic (shit magic) upon which I’ve been dining for years.

My big eclipse lesson is that I’ve got to let it all go.

Well, that is my tale of the eclipse wormhole. Except for one small thing.

Last night, Rachel sent out an email about the lunar eclipse in Taurus. It was entitled The Garden of Earthly Delights, and featured art from the painting by… Hieronymus Bosch.