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Shriek and double shriek, my daft and daring addlepates! Last time, you were off to Athens on a secret mission with a yet to be unmasked assassin as your comrade-in-arms. While awaiting this dreadful fate to overtake you, I overslept, more likely because of a particularly piquant increase in my dosage rather than any trembling of my maidenly bosom on your behalf. But, in a benighted universe ruled by insane gods, who shall ever truly know the truth of anything at all. Sigh!
So, let us waste no further time but rush to see what the vile and bitter prognostications hold for doleful December. Let's hope the birthday present is good for us and not for you, my little ninnies! As I'm starting late, I have the pleasure to inform you that, due to nasty aspects involving mischievous Mercury, wretched Saturn, marauding Mars, vamping Venus and narcotic Neptune, you have been waylaid on the road to Athens. Your would-be assassin has knocked you unconscious and secreted you in an ancient tomb (the countryside abounds with the wretched things). From there, he trekked onward to the birthplace of democracy (for that part of the populus with male genitalia at least). This he did in order to arrange your apparent demise at the hands of a band of hired ruffians, so as to satisfy your comrades in the Corinthian Popular Army that you died a noble and heroic death. I myself would take some convincing on the topic.
Thus we find you at the New Moon in your odious sign, snivelling and talking to yourself (Mercury is retrograde) as you wait in a subterranean chamber for whatever it is that will happen next. As vamping Venus moves to your own idiotic sign, you discover your place of lodgement is in fact the tomb of heroes past. You open the coffins, despoil aging bones of heroic garb and prance about the confines, gesticulating and yelling in what you believe to be a heroic manner. You threaten what you will do to this now unmasked assassin on his return. Your words and gestures ring hollow in the tomb, little urchins from the gutters of life.
Sadly, we shall never know if you will carry out such threats for, at the moment you make them, your would-be killer arrives in Athens, becomes inebriated in a tavern and confesses his Corinthian heritage. He is persuaded to join the Athenian League for the Advancement of Local Oppression (ALALO), thus exchanging plastic sword and rat for a large sum of money and promptly forgets about you and the native sons and daughters of Corinth. As the great Sol Invicti enters Capricorn at this time, I will say 'merry Christmas'!
Marauding Mars now clatters into your annoying sign and you thrash about your place of confinement, driven by a sweet mixture of hunger, boredom and the lamentable state of your personal hygiene. But what's this! Great gods alive and dead, it's a Full Moon in the neurotic sign of Cancer and your solar eighth house and strange things manifest in the air about you. Light shines! Heavenly music plays! A vision appears before you! Eek! This may be some divine creature come to rescue you from the plight you're in.
But by my little brown bottle, it's not! It's something else again! Or should I say 'someone'! It's Saint Paul, my little addlepates. He comes to you in a vision on the road to Athens! It's just like the road to Damascus but in a different place! He glows divinely, something I believe saints and visions are inclined to do. He gesticulates in your direction, something I believe we're all inclined to do. He speaks! Great gods alive and dead, the vision of Saint Paul speaks to you!
“Leave my epistles alone, you godless, garrulous, brainless, unthinking nitwit!” It appears he knows you quite well, my tiny imbeciles. You fall gibbering to the floor. At that very moment, the tomb is opened in the fading light of New Year's Eve, by a tour guide with a peculiar tic and a party of tourists from across the sea. Marauding Mars clashes with idiot Uranus at the time. They see you gibbering, twitching and talking to yourself in a fit upon the floor. They scream and gesticulate wildly, thinking you yourself to be a sainted wild person! A lunatic of the old-fashioned kind, both blessed and cursed by the gods with a divine madness.
You're to be Saint Archer of the Tomb, my little addlepates. And local people will soon sing jolly tunes in your honour. What do you think? Gods, I'm exhausted now and terribly bored. I'll have to stop writing. Click here next month to see if I've come up with any more of this outrageous piffle! Ta! Ta! And happy New Year!
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