Over the next few weeks, we’ll go through some of the more intense Astro-weather in this heavy, tricky year - the triple conjunction between Mars, Uranus, and the North Node in Taurus. In many ways, this is a peak moment, a crescendo in the long epoch of Uranus’ seven-year journey through Taurus, which started in 2018 and will last till 2025, transforming our relationship to the basic material realities represented by Taurus, often in fast and uncomfortable ways. Through this time, we’ve seen incredible innovation and a quickly changing mindset with regard to food, farming, currency, ecology, and even in the way we speak the Earth itself, through movements like Land Back and the establishment of land acknowledgments as best practice on Turtle Island. As the North Node - the Head of the Dragon that is RahuKetu, the Eclipse being - has moved into Taurus, this process has accelerated and intensified, even to nightmarish extremes, mirroring a commodity crisis, war over some of the most fertile land on earth, and rapid inflation. Over the next couple of days, Mars joining this party spells out the triggering of new levels of this uncomfortable revolution.
I can speak of these processes in abstract, archetypal ways, but of course, this doesn’t capture the fright and terror of these quaking shifts, which many are forecasting to get much worse. Walking through the worlds I do, it’s not hard to be exposed to some extreme imaginings of where the world’s heading - the Anthroposophical world in which I live, study and am employed, concerned with warnings Rudolf Steiner gave about vaccines and the potential horrors of abuse by materialistic medical authorities, is a hub of worldly skepticism and conspiracy theories. In truth, esoterically minded folks and those drawn to divining the secret mechanisms of power have always been neighbors, if not sharing a porch, and all of us trying to understand the subtlety of Truth have to contend with some wild ideas. Perhaps it’s just my Sagittarius Mercury, but I’m sympathetic to and curious about a wide variety of them, and although most of the time they just turn out to be data, no more or less important than the other 10,000 things that cross my desk, sometimes there’s an authoritativeness or gravity that I have to stew over.
One of these authoritative voices that I regularly struggle with is Gordon White, who I truly believe is one of the most brilliant minds in the world today, even if I also think he’s prone to narcissism and paranoia. His book, Star.Ships was a breathtakingly intricate and expansive history of our relationship to spirits, and I’m currently reading through his Ani.Mystic, which is in part field notes from a rich experience of animism and in part an ambitious project to overturn the materialist way of thinking that cant quite wrap its head around a living, wild cosmos. He writes as a magician adept in navigating the spirit realms, but with more intellectual breadth and nuance than any academic I read. Even walking amidst a world of Astrologers that knew something crazy would happen with the Saturn-Pluto-Jupiter conjunction in 2020, Gordon’s ____ book, The Chaos Protocols, was the only one that I truly felt predicted the gravity of the transformation that we’ve been going through over the past several years, and he’s adamant that it’s only going to deepen - he thinks that in our lifetimes, we’ll live through nothing less than the downfall of our civilization, which is in some way natural, inevitable, and likely past-due. Gordon thinks it’s in large part a planned destruction and that Covid-19 was one step in a succession of events enabling the wealthiest of the wealthy to inaugurate a technocratic surveillance state and escape from the climate crisis and collapse of empire with their private jet lifestyles mostly unscathed. This thread of thought is not rare or hard to find these days - I’m sure you’ve encountered it before - but the confidence and urgency with which he’s banging the drum is impressive, and the specific, grave predictions he’s amplifying are truly troubling.
In some way, I can view Gordon’s dark thoughts as a symptom of the times - specifically the waning influence of the Pluto-Saturn conjunction which perfected in 2020. As Richard Tarnas wrote about this archetypal pairing in 2005, having just had lived through a round of the two which was particularly strong in 2001,
… the successive quadrature alignments of the Saturn-Pluto cycle coincided with especially challenging historical periods marked by a pervasive quality of intense contraction: eras of international crisis and conflict, empowerment of reactionary forces and totalitarian impulses, organized violence and oppression, all sometimes marked by lasting traumatic effects…
The vivid complex of qualities, emotions, and meanings connected with those grave events—the beginning of the two world wars, September 11 and its aftermath, and many other such events during the periods of Saturn-Pluto alignments—fits with remarkable precision the synthesis of archetypal principles associated with those two planets in combination, expressed in their most extreme form, both negatively and positively: profoundly weighty events of enduring consequence; violence and death on a massive scale; the irrevocable termination of an established order of existence; collective intensification of division, antagonism, and hostility; the deployment of massive, highly disciplined, carefully organized destructive power; and a widespread sense of victimization and suffering under the impact of cataclysmic and oppressive forces of history. (From Cosmos and Psyche)
This is not to write off or explain away the type of thinking exemplified by Gordon White - there’s clearly something fishy about 9/11 to me, for example, and if that might have been at least in part an inside job, then any number of other ‘crazy’ things could be true. As I’ve dug deeper into the UFO phenomenon, it’s clear to me that there’s at least some level of government obfuscation of the facts, and potentially a much deeper set of hidden projects. But we can also see these same archetypal Saturn-Pluto qualities of consciousness manifesting through the QAnon phenomenon, Trumpism/certain reactions to it, and the intensity of and intensely fearful response to the first few waves of Covid, all of which are clearly starting to subside, for better or worse. In the same vein, I genuinely hope that the present wave of obsession with conspiracy will wash away - as well as the Russia-Ukraine War which is fueling much of its resurgence. Even as I’m interested in stoically exposing myself to grim possibilities - in the same way that I love cold showers and contemplating death - I also think that conspiratorial thinking can be profoundly unhealthy, leading to late nights being pulled down rabbit holes, a sense of powerlessness against the enormity of the powers that be, and an undue amount of hate and disdain for our fellow humans. Unfortunately, this is the norm in a number of individuals and communities that otherwise have a tremendous amount to offer.
I also think that the other side of the coin is worth giving equal consideration to - as much as the world may be obviously going to shit, one can also make a case for what Rob Brezsny calls ‘Pronoioa’ - a sort of inverse of paranoia, the conviction that the universe is conspiring to shower us with blessings. This comes about in part by laughing at the way the human imagination can be utterly doomy and gloomy, and has been for centuries - Brezsny says,
As far back as 2800 BC, an unknown prophet wrote on an Assyrian clay tablet, "Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end." In the seventh century BC, many Romans believed Rome would suffer a cataclysm in 634 BC.
Around 300 BC, Hindus were convinced they lived in an "unfortunate time" known as the Kali Yuga—the lowest point in the great cosmic cycle. In 426 AD, the Christian writer Augustine mourned that this evil world was in its last days.
Pronoia is our word of power… the antidote for paranoia… the spell we cast to gleam ourselves awake again and again. It means that even if we can’t see and don’t know, primal benefactors are plotting to emancipate us.
The winds and tides are on our side, forever and ever, amen. The fire and rain are scheming to steal our impossible pain. The sun and moon and the stars remember our real names, and our ancestors pray for us while we’re dreaming.
We have guardian angels and thousands of teachers… provocateurs with designs to unleash us… helpers and saviors we can’t even imagine… brothers and sisters who want us to blossom.
Thanks to them / from whom the blissful blessings flow / we are waking up.
Of late, I’ve experienced a resurgence of this pronoiac optimism by stumbling upon some high-quality evidential fuel for the miraculous potential of the human race. Tony Robbins’ new book, Life Force, is a compendium of the cutting-edge healing technologies that promise to reshape how humanity relates to illness, aging, and the major chronic diseases of our times. From stem cell therapy, organ printing, gene therapy, and beyond, there’s serious evidence that we’re cracking the code of a number of diseases, and that we may even be able to reverse aging itself. Although these technologies are currently experimental and costly, there’s clear precedent to show how, over time, they’ll become cheaper and more widely available - 25 years ago, it took a decade and $2.7 billion to read a complete human genome; today, it can be done for $100 and overnight. Robbins’ co-author, Peter Diamandis, brilliantly surveyed the human history of constantly overcoming perceived limitations through technological breakthroughs in his book, Abundance. With exponentially increasing computer power, there’s a real likelihood that we’ll have a number of these transformational technologies available at a mass scale by the end of the decade, for ecological conundrums as well as health epidemics. It occurs to me that this research is funded by the same high-level philanthropists that regularly get cast as evil in a conspiratorial worldview - although their actions might have consequences they might not realize, as in the case of a lot of agricultural technology. At the end of the day, I think most humans have some sort of altruistic core - focusing upon this seems to me to be essential magic, especially through the coming months of Mars retrograding through Gemini.
I see the same potential for rapid, wide-scale, deep healing through the establishment of psychedelic therapy centers around the United States, which could very well provide a solution for some of the deep-seated trauma and existential suffering that seems to be at the root of a lot of the social strife we’re experiencing. Netflix’s new series, How to Change Your Mind, based on Michael Pollan’s book of the same name, does a great job of succinctly diagramming this. Likewise, it’s clear that, in part, the UFO phenomenon is one of encounters with technology beyond our current level of understanding. In her book, American Cosmic, UNC Wilmington professor Diana Walsh Pasulka documents her findings after exploring these mysteries with unnamed sources in the ‘Invisible College’ of folks that have been studying these phenomena secretly for the past decades - her two main sources were an esteemed professor of Materials Science and an individual, (Tyler) who worked at a NASA lab, where supposedly there was some otherworldly object, a remnant from some Area-51-like crash, that radiated ideas for novel technologies - including the iPhone.
“Let me tell you about a room where I work. It is a special room outfitted with the latest technologies. It is a smart room. We put the best scientists and thinkers in the world in the room, and then we just let them think. There is a complete sense of freedom in the room. Nothing that is ever said in the room is laughed at. We could talk about a purple unicorn flying through space on a pickle. No one would laugh. The point is this—that some of the most innovative technologies we have and use come from what goes on in that room. In that room, we dream the impossible, and then we make it possible. See that phone near your coffee cup? I assume you use its technologies?”
Jeff [Kripal] and I looked down at my pink iPhone.
“That room?” Jeff asked.
“That room,” Tyler said.
“There was something in there that either emitted frequencies or signals and they didn’t want those to escape or they didn’t want signals to get in. I never knew which. It was a mysterious place, and we weren’t allowed to talk about it.”
That room, Tyler felt, zapped him with energy that changed the “frequencies” of his body and his thoughts. It was after this experience that he began to have more “memories” of biomedical technologies.
Charles Eisenstein might write off this worldview as techno-utopian, leading to unforeseen consequences and failing to make the total paradigm shift into the Story of Interbeing, that New and Ancient story in which the place of the human being is radically re-contextualized, but I’m skeptical of that sort of pessimism - there are clear grounds here, for me, for hope, and one that isn’t necessarily just based on belief in the scientific Story of Progress, but rather in an ingenious aspect of humanity, which may indeed have its source in the more-than-human. Just as indigenous traditions say the plants themselves speak of their usages, perhaps our contemporary scientists have a more sympathetic resonance and conversation with the secrets of the universe than many contemporary spiritually minded folks might think - or indeed they could be guided by the same spirits from sky country that have always aided humanity along in their evolution, even if they were written off as ‘fallen angels’.
These Aquarian potentials, too, can be mapped astrologically. One of the only astrologers who distinctly predicted a pandemic starting in 2020, the French master of Mundane Astrology, André Barbault, saw the potential for the period starting in 2026, with a trine between Uranus and Pluto and each of them sextiling Neptune, “a splendid relaunch of civilization.” Returning to Tarnas, we can see this time period as bringing a smooth and quick fulfillment of many of the seeds from the late 60s and early 70s, when Uranus and Pluto were in a conjunction. Granted, this is happening amidst some other time cycles that are worrying - notably, the return of Neptune and Uranus to the positions they were at at the start of the American Civil War. Regardless of which way you cut it, we’re at a moment of great change: the turnover from the Mayan long count calendar, the change of the 200-year long Jupiter-Saturn Triplicity from Earth (which started in the early 1800s) to Air (starting in 1980, 2000, or on 2020’s Winter Solstice, depending on which way you cut it), or the good ole’ Age of Aquarius.
In the end, perhaps these two are the same side of the coin that flips and spins through history - especially through periods of incredible change, there is both great pain and great beauty. The faces of Good and Evil morph and transform according to perspective. An old, huge tree falls and creates an opening and resources for the renewal of an entire ecosystem. Utopia and Dystopia arrive simultaneously. I think this is a part of what is represented by Uranus, so strongly present this year and through the changing of epochs, and a planet somewhat synonymous with Aquarius. ‘Disruption’ comes bearing chaotic gifts. We experience the Daimonic as both creative and destructive. Revelation initially comes as a shock, breaking taboo or order or unleashing potentially fearsome possibilities. Prometheus gifts humanity fire and is punished brutally for it. Angels, terrifyingly brilliant, come with the greeting, ‘Be not afraid.’ It’s awful, thrilling, and beautiful, all at once.
It seems to me that the coming decades will entail a collective encounter with this great, otherworldly Daimon. Whether it comes in the form of ecological chaos or a spidery realm of surveillance, it will be easy to find the Devil, terror, and Evil. And these exist - there’s no denying that. Certainly, there will be moments we need to name and discern these evils, to resist and escape its grasp - but there will also be the need for the light-hearted trickster magic that creates levity amidst heaviness, that spins polarity into a spiral, that finds the threads of destiny that can pull us through and weave this wild, wounded mess into some beautiful story. As Ellias Lonsdale perceives, ‘Souls scramble to incarnate in such times.’ This mess is a gift, even if a dangerous and difficult one.
Anywho, this all started out as a preamble to say that my monthly horoscopes for Austonia Magazine are out.
As always, I’m around for readings.
And now, time for Robert Anton Wilson memes: