“I knew that established orders could vanish overnight. Change could also be as fast as lightning. “It can’t happen here” could not be depended on: Anything could happen anywhere, given the circumstances.”-Margaret Atwood

Greetings Psychonauts,

Humanity lives and dies by the stories it tells itself. Our world radiates stories, and we make meaning using these stories to order our lives. Culture and the capacity to collectively believe in subjective narratives which are not objectively verifiable are a hallmark of our species and the one evolutionary tool we have developed Humans did not develop fur, claws, sharp teeth, or other physical relics to protect ourselves against the evolutionary arms race. What we did develop are cultural stories that helped  link us together into cooperative behaviors and social networks that offered the strength of numbers against existential threats, this became what we would call culture. It is culture that has given us an adaptive edge, we may not have grown claws for protection but we did develop a social story that allowed us to develop weapons to hold our predators at bay and eventually allowed us to form complex societies that would one day give our species a massive influence over the planet that spawned us.

These systems of intersubjective belief are called imaginal orders and they shape the meaning we derive from our lives. They are essentially a perceptual lens that we utilize to organize the inchoate sensory carnival that is existence into something we can make sense of, they are ways of ordering the randomness of our world that give us the power to manipulate its variables in our favor, in a way they give us the techniques that allow us to bend the world to our will (albeit this can also be done gently or aggressively it is a matter of intent and action). Imaginal orders are in essence not objectively true but inter-subjectively true and they allow us to create the ideological structures that empower cultures.

There are many imaginal orders that have emerged since our species emerged 200,000 years ago and underwent the neurological revolution which gave rise to a period of cultural explosiveness in the Upper Paleolithic in which the human cultural imagination flowered. Since then we have had many imaginal orders, The Agricultural Revolution, the Phaoronic and Babylonian Dynasties, the proto-civilizations of Sumeria, Mohenjodaro, and Athens, the Roman Republic, Christianity and the empires it spawned including Byzantium and up into the modern age of the Enlightenment which gave rise to Science and the Information Age. We live and breath many different imaginal orders that are equally as useful as these former fictions (and let’s be clear, all imaginal orders are fictions or constructs if you will).

Another feature of imaginal orders is that they all eventually evolve like a recombinant organism, they are subject to the same evolutionary selective pressures that shape life-forms, these orders are in essence an algorithm that maximizes the survival potential of our species.

Contemporary Imaginal Orders are in Flux

Currently we are in the midst of one of these evolutionary changes and the story that has guided us for centuries is beginning to breakdown and a nascent narrative is yet emerging. Constructs which have guided our culture are beginning to see their first real challenges. The rule of law is being challenged by the hegemony of multi-national corporations which supersede the reach of national governments to reign them in. It is not helped by the fact that many governments are actively being seduced by said corporations to make policies and laws that favor their interests to the detriment of the public. Another salient example is law enforcement agencies that are tasked with upholding laws meant to protect the public are instead flaunting them and using them to shoot unarmed civilians based on thinly veiled racism.

Liberal democracy is on the retreat with Donald Trump at the helm of the singular global superpower, Theresa May steering the moving disaster that is Brexit, Marina Le Pen being a serious contender in France and the ongoing authoritarianisms of Duterte, Erdogan and Oban. It highly likely that these political upsets are largely the result of the failed imaginal order of neoliberalism that has destabilized much of the world an entrenched inequality. It is a sign of empires dying and the last ditch attempts to revive them, instead of letting go of a political form that no longer serves humanity.

The sharp hierarchies of the elites running the world are decaying, and the ruling powers are beginning to lose their grip on valuable assets and rapidly losing cultural cachet while the climate is warming and social chaos is spreading. The abrupt swing to authoritarianism that is threatening the imaginal order of liberal democracy is a symptom of this systemic failure, and a desperate attempt to place stasis into the inevitable changes that are mutating the imaginal order. The elites fear that as their power fades and a new imaginal order emerges they will no longer be the ones pulling the levers of society and perhaps they are going to experience the revenge of the commons for their cavalier ignorance of it, extent for the last three hundred years.

The recent Mercury and Venus retrogrades in Pisces made these issues abundantly clear especially as they passed over the Uranus transit point which led to upheavals and unexpected reversals in perceptions and relationships and the social contracts that have bound us together as a global society. What has become apparent is those in leadership are violently estranged with reality and the will of the people they are tasked with representing. This is particularly acute in the US where we have a Republican dominated Congress which has attempted to ram through legislation that is deeply unpopular among the American Public and has essentially screwed a significant number of them out of health insurance coverage. This is a drop in the bucket compared to the legal challenges that have been brought against the slew of Executive Orders which fly in the face of significant institutions that uphold fairness. It seems in these unstable times that it is necessary to begin reimagining what Civilization is going to look like going forward, it is time for a new imaginal order, so before this gets any more insufferably long, let’s get to it!

Aries: April 19^th-May 13^th: A General Strike

Aries battle Cry: “I can’t believe I still have to protest this shit!” France has developed a novel cultural tradition that would deeply appeal to most Arians the world over. It’s called a general strike and it occurs anytime the French government attempts to pass policies that abuse the public trust and make life harder for people. It is such a successful revolt that it actually shuts down cities, gas refineries and nuclear power plants grinding the entire society to a halt until the government responds to the demands of the people. The government responds in kind because it is terrified of its people revolting (governments should always be afraid of their public, never the other way around) and this should ideally be the natural order of things, and it certainly is the one that our current imaginal order is supposed to provide. How sad it is to imagine that France and Brazil seems to be the only modern examples of this model working, and also inspiring as we could all borrow the same tactics. Lest we forget that many of our modern democracies were founded in the crucible of riot and revolt.

The White Rose Rebellion was a concerted effort by impassioned German youngsters who violently opposed the Fascism of the nascent Nazi party and paid the ultimate price for it. However they are a symbol of the spirit of resistance that is needed to navigate these troubled times when imaginal orders are in flux and our greatest values are being challenged by nascent fascisms wrapped in patriotic fervor and religious extremism. To add to the mix is a technological lexicon that is rapidly developing beyond human comprehension and could develop the next imaginal order with very little human input, largely the individual will fade in importance to economic concerns and the commons will matter a great deal more in age of distributed connected networks and the Internet of Things. In a word the future is contested and we all have to fight for the future we want and for the imaginal order we want. Aries understands the need to fight for autonomy and liberty in an age when many of them are being challenged.

Taurus: May 14^th-June 19^th: Enslaved to Financial Hallucinations

“2060: The basic necessities of life are becoming a shared commons.”–Futuretimeline.net

The monetary system is perhaps the most enduring and perpetual of all the human imaginal orders, it is also our most delusional, a collective hallucination that has persisted for 5,000 years and has put Humanity into a long strange trip. It appear now that we stand at a crossroads in regards to this deeply divisive order, one in which the economic assumptions are beginning to break down and lose their hold on our imagination. Wealthy elites have demonstrated over and over again that when empowered by policy fiat that they will commit murder and get away with it. Much of the political discontent along the political spectrum and possibly what is driving the current swing to the authoritarian exegesis of late is the fact the trickle-down economics has been an utter failure at distributing the wealth of the nation in a way that is equal or reconciliatory to inflation or fairness. Capital has engineered every downturn because it cannot contend with the non-linear dynamics of our world, and largely it generates profits by capitalizing on its engineered disasters. Even more perniciously is that it may make natural disaster profitable as the Shock Doctrine makes clear so much it now has the moniker of disaster capitalism. It is also a weapon used in the maintenance of its own status quo which is predicated on an utter blindness to life, in the delusion of the invisible hand of the market.

People increasingly do not want the maintenance of “normal” as it is a status-quo that parasitizes off of them and does more to bolster elites terrified of losing their grip on collective social order than it does to actually bringing people what they ultimately need. The reason being is that money is controlled by those who have concentrated the wealth produced through the labor of the populace. Neoliberalism has exacerbated inequality, destroyed social mobility and limited the social options of an entire generation. Money has become a prison that entraps and strangles the life-force of humanity, saps our creativity and actively prevents us from developing the cultural forms needed to deal with the complex realities of a planetary civilization. It keeps us chained to jobs we hate and ties the necessities of life to to access to money, perhaps its time to imagine a world where the necessities of life are decoupled from money. In a word the monetary system has got to go and for the first time it is being challenged by novel technologies giving rise to crypto-currencies, divestment movements and transitory steps to post-scarcity and resource based economics. The imaginal order that has given rise to the monetary system is finally in terminal decline and your job Taurus as the symbol of finance is to hasten its decline and establish the foundations of the emerging transitions into a different medium of exchange and economic development.

Gemini: June 20^th-July 20^th: Radiating Stories

Our world radiates stories, not only the ones that guide human social organization and behavior. Our world is quite literally radiating stories in the form of radio waves carrying our broadcasts into the extra-terrestrial medium and possibly interstellar space albeit in deeply fragmented versions.  The imaginal order of data is on the rise, especially in light of the nascent emergence of the Internet of Things (network linked devices). Increasingly we are coming to rely on data streams and algorithms to run the major systems of our world. For instance all of our major infrastructure from chemical management to electrical grids utilize the SCADA (Supervisory control and data acquisition) data architecture which works as an operating system that regulates these critical infrastructures that we depend on for survival. These networks currently are incredibly vulnerable to outside attack and so this imaginal system also represents a threat as it could be a new frontier for electronic warfare, no more will it be a bomb that is dropped but instead a computer virus could take out the power grid.

This is perhaps the singular threat among many that will be huge in the continuing change in the imaginal order shaping the future. It is certainly something that will have to be addressed going forward even as we create a global commons and come to rely on these technologies. It is perhaps so that instead of the hyper-security culture we seem to be careening towards with its loss of liberty and ironically loss of security and safety that a more decentralized approach might be more effective. Instead of relying on centralized nodes of security forces and policing we can begin to utilize the data streams we are engulfed by and the emerging network of intentional communities throughout the world to solve our most salient threats. If we can harness the power of communities interfacing with technologies we can perhaps develop novel approaches to these salient problems. We can utilize the commons to act as a kind of digital immune system that can find these vulnerabilities and patch up the leaks. What’s more we do not have to lose our liberties in the process nor rely on aggressive and overly militarized security forces, we can use the inherent intelligence of the world itself. This is decidedly Geminian in that it exploits the need for open and universal access and the ceaseless feedback of polyvalent communications an area in which Gemini excels. It is almost as if a nascent signaling pathway is developing that allows decentralized networks to talk with one another and come up with evolutionary solutions that bypass outmoded social institutions.

Cancer: July 21^st-August 8^th: Perpetual Revolution

Francis Fukuyama stated in 1992 that we had reached the eschaton or end of history, and what ensued was a lost decade of complacency and stagnation in the democratic tradition. This created widespread complacency, low engagement in the political process that lasted nearly two generations, and facilitated the neoliberal gutting of the economy which has hollowed out the hinterland of the US and led to a slow concentration of wealth furthering stratifying the population so that two different social world’s would emerge and the national wealth once held in commons was being restricted to an over class. This is the danger of becoming comfortable with imaginal orders and taking them for granted, they can easily erode into something we may not like and that restricts freedom instead of granting it. Cancer recognizes viscerally that history has no end, it simply can’t because cultures evolve and new forms emerge and coalesce into new established orders with frequency. Cancer is often depicted as traditional, hide-bound and security obsessed.

This is a declaration that this is a universe in distance from the actual truth that Cancer simply understands social dynamics better than most because they perceive them at their most emotional and deeply felt. Cancer is the voice of a culture and its established traditions as well as any evolution to those established systems that occurs, and gives rise to a new cultural narrative. Our current narratives are deeply in flux and being challenged by regressive nationalisms and ancient enmities, a process that Cancer finds deeply distressing as it takes an evolutionary mechanism the preservation of culture and turns it into something that imprisons individuals in a cultural matrix that disenfranchises them. This is singularly the Cancerian challenge how to define a narrative that includes all human diversity and makes a space for the flourishing of a number of cultural traditions. To make a world as accommodating and as big as the sky that allows all clouds to pass through it, that is the Crab’s principle catalyst for future imaginal orders. Cancer gets that the revolution of society is protean, perpetual, and never fixed.

Leo: August 9^th-September 15^th: Institutional Violence

Leadership is contingent on what stories people tell themselves about how legitimate leadership is empowered. As it stands the imaginal order that predominates gives the State a monopoly on the use of violence and it is largely why breaking windows in the course of civil disobedience is viewed as violent but the revoking of access to healthcare to millions is not. The contemporary political moment is challenging the efficacy of this monopoly and putting to question whether governments and leadership can meet the challenges of 21^st century complexities. Many of the imaginal assumptions of current leadership culture are too estranged from the complex social realities of this newly incepted century. We are seeing the first real crises of democracy and how it can lead to authoritarian regimes and because of this our order is fraying at the edges and new wisdoms are going to have to be drawn upon. Our institutions instead of protecting liberty and sparing us the violence of tyranny are now the very things that empower it. It may seem that our order is immutable.

It seemed as though the right of kings was immutable, and yet it was swept away in an instant even as it had endured for centuries. Current leadership and governance may seem equally as immovable and concrete as kings and queens and yet it is as ephemeral, and likely to be swept away in an emerging imaginal order. An order in which humans may play a co-starring role, especially as AI evolves and surpasses our capacities and can better model the intersecting realities of our world and therefore better manage it than we ever could. In our marriage to our own technologies are we willing to face the fact that our imaginal order no longer works and dare to become the leaders of a new order that is without leaders. The idea of presidents and prime ministers it seems is on its way out and the leadership of distributed networks and group commons is likely to be the order of the day. This concerns Leo deeply as it is a symbol of leadership and monarchies and in an age when governance is moving beyond the supremacy of individual figures into the idea of collective governance, Leo is experiencing a crisis of identity and an opportunity to midwife a new conception of governance that does not lead to the pernicious capriciousness of tyrants.

Virgo: September 16^th-October 29^th: Kardashev 1

“2050: there is a growing consensus that money itself – the profit motive – is a major obstacle to future progress, and a new driving force may be required for civilisation to flourish.“-Futuretimeline.net

Our imaginal order suffers from a fatal flaw, it distorts reality and allows for an incredible amount of delusion to such an extent that the elites running the world can be disturbingly estranged from objective reality. This does not bode well for a world and future with a central narrative that will continue to blur the line between reality and dreams. There is now an undeniable need to create an imaginal order that is married to the limitations of reality and no longer estranged. The only way for us to move beyond our current limitations and technical difficulties is to work within the set of natural laws that underpin the global system and design a system that utilizes them to the best of our advantage. A huge piece of this is recognizing that a civilization that wishes to become an eco-technic and sustainable society cannot destroy the environmental base that is the ground of being for all of us. The natural world is the envelope for our existence without which we are extinct. The integrity of the global ecosystem is a pre-requisite to becoming a Kardashev 1 Civilization which is to say a society that has managed to gain mastery (which is not dominance) over its environment and eliminated existential threats to its own extinction. If there was ever an argument for the preservation of the natural world beyond the obvious fact that it has intrinsic value, this is it, for without it we cannot continue to evolve nor survive.

Every civilization (including ours) has built itself on the backs of a disposable workforce, the trick of the 21^st century will be to build one that requires no disposable workforce in the first place but one based on the voluntary contributions of its members and it’s willing labor (if you lived in a civilization that attended to your every need, it is likely that you would want to contribute your time and energy into improving those delivery systems knowing you’re your contributions would improve the life course for everyone else that lived within that civilization) Automation is likely to be a huge piece in this capacity hence the feverish and almost religious pace at which Humanity is developing it, even at the expense of possibly eliminating an economic utility to human beings themselves. In a non-capitalist society this technological unemployment would be a liberation and the ultimate aim that society is working towards as it would free individuals up to explore the diverse dimensions of humanity and begin to allow a great deal more of us to have the freedom to explore our humanity and the probe the last frontier, Inner Space.

Why is this a decidedly Virgoan task? Because it is going to require a practical set of systems that link technology, resource distribution, creative labor, and ecological dynamics into a synergistic relationship. It will also require a true centering into a human-commons that acknowledges the governance of the people and the elimination of elites. One basic premise of this new societal order is the understanding that the integrity of ecological life support systems is essential to the possibility of creating a civilization that can flourish enough to allow for a level of autonomy that is unbridled in all of human history, and this grappling with the planetary operating system is decidedly a Virgo province of influence. It will also require nothing short of a new imaginal order one that once and for all eliminates the need for societal elites that control access to production and resources and keep a choke hold on their equitable distribution. In a word it will mean power to the people and given that Virgo’s domain covers everything related to the rank and file this is decidedly Virgoan in focus, of course it is Virgo with a hyperactively futuristic persona, and Virgo none the less. A month will certainly never be long enough to address this huge ask, it is merely an interval to initiate the process.

Libra: October 30^th-November 22^nd: What Post-Modernism got Right

It is universally stated that life is not fair, and to a certain extent this may or may not be a good thing. That said the principle idea of our current imaginal order is that we strive to level the playing field and to make society fair if life cannot be. Complacency and the inertial forces of a thinly disguised hierarchy in Western Civilization has ensured that the world is anything but fair. The central question of justice remains and history reveals that many historical arcs do not bend toward history and that people often have to revolt to force the hand of fate that direction. At the moment humanity is at a similar crossroads and forces are wrenching apart sacred institutions and showing them to be largely ideal in name only. A rude awakening to be sure brought to us under the exegesis of Uranus’ disruptive power in the realm of grand cultural narratives a decidedly Piscean domain, the cypher of which Uranus is currently transiting and heading toward retrograde motion in. It is painful sometimes to remember the central tenet of postmodernism, and yet it is the thing this philosophy got right. It is the idea that all there is narrative, life is entirely context driven, meaning is relative, and humanity lives by the stories it tells itself, and there is a terrifying freedom in this. We get to decide the course of history, we get to decide id the arc bends towards justice, this also means eternal vigilance and non-complacency. Libra likes stories, its namesake means book.

Libra is unquestionably devoted to the creation of a fair, just, and egalitarian society and the story of human rights is one very close to home for the denizens of this sign. Libra’s know however that it is just a story and that there are no defaults in history that guarantee justice it is something that must be constantly struggled for and expressive of the other side of its axis Aries, which understands that everything is contested and history is made. The arc of history may not by default bend toward justice but it can certainly be pushed that direction by people rising up in revolt as the storming of the Bastille in 1789 made perfectly clear, or perhaps the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion that the anarchists won, or the American Revolution that established our liberal democracy. We collectively find ourselves once again at another historic crossroads, facing the birth of a different imaginal order, and one where justice is not assured, being on the razors edge is a hard place for the more equanimity centered Libra, that said I suspect you have a significant role to play in creating a truly fair world that favors human tights and accountability over the deranged administrations of political and financial elites.

Scorpio: November 23rd-November 29th: Taboo Busting

Scorpio is characterized as being ruthless, and generally this is always portrayed as a negative capacity. In light of the more dangerous times we are living in it might actually be a necessary skill. Ruthlessness is predicated on destroying falsehoods and not harboring illusions.As the imaginal orders which had their genesis in the Enlightenment experience system failure, new orders are competing for dominance something Scorpio understands intimately.

When the choices that one has are between fascistic authoritarianism, nativistic ethnocentrism, capitalistic imperialism, and some as yet to be articulated third way ruthlessness is an intelligent approach. Scorpio brokers no bullshit and isn’t interested in supporting outdated atavisms or the usurious emotions of financial elites and has little patience for their administrations or tolerance for the normalization of dubious ideologies that disenfranchise the vast majority. Scorpio is also not giving a pass to anyone who throws their support behind questionable charades. Responsibility has been abdicated for contending with the interconnected realities of the 21^st century by representatives of the current order in favor of isolationist approaches.

Scorpio says in this time of flux, and changing social orders, there is no going back to a golden age that never was, the way forward is an unequivocal acceptance of the future. This necessarily means pushing the edges of taboo, entertaining wildly unpopular opinions and coming up with new tactics and ideas regarding social organization. It is the difference between dystopia and apotheosis.

Ophiuchus: November 30^th-December 17^th: Universal Access

There are many selective pressures that are putting our imaginal order through its paces and demanding a new narrative. Demographic transitions, minority populations slated to become numeric majorities, the ascendancy of feminism, the threat of authoritarianism and regressive politics, vertiginous technological evolution, and the widespread demand of the populace to address growing inequality and the blindness of political elites that refuse to acknowledge anything beyond their own narrow interests. We have reached a point where it is confront or collapse. One of the most salient issues in the creation of an egalitarian society is that of universal access and design which adapts to the bio-physical and social diversity of human populations. This is especially important in the rights of people with disabilities within society to have a place at the table and the capacity to participate in its evolution. The reasoning is very simple, this is a category of human experience that includes and transcends race, class, sexual orientation, religious creed, gender and circumstance. At any given time 20% of the U.S. population is living with either a permanent to temporary disability (and not all of them are visible, as is the case with chronic pain, HIV/AIDS, or epilepsy) and it is something that can happen to anyone at any point in their lives, and it makes far more sense to structure the world around this, than it does to stigmatize much as our current (Un)Civilization does.

Why does this matter to imaginal orders and to Ophiuchus? Simple, our current imaginal order does not account for human diversity even though it is very much a reality of the world, and further if we ever hope to experience a relatively egalitarian society it is an issue that will have to be addressed head on because it knows no limitation. It is essential to make the necessities of life into a global commons with wide access for every type of human being, and this includes universal design that makes public spaces accessible for all individuals. Diversity is reality which is the underpinning of future imaginal orders. Ophiuchus spearheads this because of the intimate connection this egalitarian idea has with a feminist perspective that does not become blind to human diversity. Further, if the philosophy of transhumanism becomes a mainstream imaginal order that guides the future it will have to confront the idea of wide access which is a salient feature of trans-human ethics. Ophiuchus interestingly enough may hold to a more animistic and shamanic view of the world, and yet it easily lends itself to some of the features of a trans-human order. What’s more the feminist piece ‘The Cyborg Manifesto’ deals with these said issues in a very Ophiuchan manner. It’s seems that Ophiuchus is deeply invested in establishing an order in which the premise is the throbbing creative chaos of human diversity and the potential of technology to address the most fixed points of ideology and identity, and leads us into a future of fluid and changing identities. Ophiuchus advances a new vision, one in which diversity truly is reality.

Sagittarius: December 18^th-January 18^th: There Are No Nations Here

The future of globalism and our international civilization is deeply contested in the current political climate. There are in many quarters of the world rising nationalist and isolationist tendencies emerging everywhere in the maintenance of elites and economic hegemonies and yet a massive and collective cry for autonomy and international cooperation in light of crises that can only be addressed through unilateral action and horizontal political alliances. Exacerbating the crisis of globalism is the Pluto approach to retrograde motion through the international symbol of Sagittarius. This will put the idea of nation-states and national sovereignty into deep question and crisis. Climate change, ecological degradation and inequality are all planetary issues that require supra-national responses (conceding that it requires strong national policies to gain momentum). The world has its first nascent horizontal agreement, the Paris Accords have created the first real impetus for global action to meet thresholds preventing catastrophic climate change from occurring, albeit its targets are not legally binding and create no incentive for national policies to adjust.

The European Union represents a super-national body that allows for ease of cultural, economic and political discourse that transcends the limits of national borders, and retains national sovereignty albeit an imperfect union which is under considerable stress from more regressive forces. The United Nations is the latest human attempt for global integration albeit suffering from a sever crises of elitism and hierarchical dominance from wealthy nations, yet on the positive maintains national sovereignty. There remains a problem of elitism infecting each attempt at integration on a planetary scale a pre-requisite for the future imaginal order that is now emerging. This is a Sagittarian concern as it involves foreign affairs a province tied to the symbolism of the Archer. There are yet small-scale and nascent attempts to address this problem of elites.

Among many communities the world over with a strong anarchist philosophical focus is the idea of international solidarity and the concept that no one is illegal and there are no nations here. It is the radical acceptance of cultural diversity and the outright rejection of nation-states as meaningful political distinctions. The idea is that diversity is respected and reinforced by the idea of mutual aid. It is quite literally this idiom that may provide the underpinning for a future politics. Instead of one size fits most approach to international integration the new model calls for a ‘let a thousand flowers bloom’ concept to become the chaotic and decentralized organizing principle of a 21^st century imaginal order. It involves a new planetary myth in which each human being represents a vital piece of its planetary home. It manifests in a speciation of countless local scale cultural experiments and inter-weavings of diverse cultural variants, into decentralized and self-regulated social networks and physical communities that can interdigitate with one another forming a decentralized and globally networked web of communities that establish trade networks and other cooperative alliances, all done without the need for elites.

If this evolutionary process is allowed to continue to develop there will come a time when the Human race will reach equilibrium, in this scenario governments, police, and institutions as we now understand them will eventually become irrelevant and this fits nicely into the Capricornian antecedent of being ungovernable. Accounting for the emergence of strong AI that may one day surpass human capabilities and we may find ourselves in a completely new imaginal order that has managed to ensure human autonomy by default without the need for parasitic elites. Let May be an interval when Sagittarius begins to figure this out for themselves, think globally, act locally as the exhausted trope says. Even in the face of significant nationalistic pushback being seen all over the world, it is best to characterize these regressions as what they are symptoms of the fact the empire is decaying and no longer works as a viable political form.

Capricorn: January 19^th-February 15^th: Be Ungovernable

The future will likely not lend itself to institutionalization. It would seem that this feature of human imaginal orders is failing as an evolutionary device and perhaps exactly why it is under threat from so many sectors of society. Technological dislocations which are fueling social unrest and recursive nationalisms and proto-fascism, the collapse of economic mechanisms as it becomes apparent that our economy is estranged with physical reality, and the corruptions of political institutions which make apparent their limitations and all of this crisis is possibly pointing the way out, and it may mean that we must abandon the idea of institutions and develop novel methods for ordering the inchoate forces of existence. Likely we might see that instead of established structures there will instead be throbbing chaotic networks distributed along decentralized nodes that continually and perpetually evolve and faster than human cognition can fathom. It will mean much of established society will be upended and radically changed.

Part of recognizing this is accepting that the current swing we see to the authoritarian praxis is a reaction to these changes and the anxiety they are empowering. It is truly the last gasp of empire. Part of living through these challenging regressions is accepting that those in charge and established factions are prone to unhinged and deranged actions, that really they are best classified as criminal and beyond redemption, as such the only remaining approach is a fierce resistance that is unapologetic and boils fluff down to essence. Along these lines Capricorn with it long view of the cycles of time is committed to a dogged and sustained resistance until the time comes that outdated institutions which are a province falling under Capricorns exegesis are transformed beyond recognition or transcended altogether. The tactic is to become ungovernable, resistant to being controlled, no longer convinced society can be changed through law or electoral politics but only through cultural mutation and direct action in the defense of the commons and this represents the primordial manifestation of an emerging imaginal order that will define the chaotic structure of a protean and forever evolving future. To be ungovernable is to throw off the yolk of outdated ideologies and institutions and to dare to find another possible world.

Aquarius: February 16th-March 11th: Tomorrow’s Optics

The motto for the water bearer has always been to face the future fearlessly. The Venus and Mercury retrogrades through Pisces were of considerable import for Aquarius as they fell in mutual reception to the Neptune transit through Aquarius and activated the ruling planet Uranus as the inferior planets traversed over the Uranus trajectory in Pisces.

The belief in human progress is a myth, and one that is no longer serving us, this has become increasingly clear with each new iteration of the Uranus-Neptune-Pluto axis.  While Aquarius may be an idealist their brand is idealism without illusions. Aquarius is coming to terms with what it cannot control, and accepting reality as it is so we can move forward. Shock and outrage only paralyze. Aquarius is accepting things are as bad as they imagine and from this taking action.

Aquarius recognizes we are in an age when altruism and human rights are essential, and there is going to be a vigorous fight for them, a fight the water bearer is not altogether unfamiliar with. Aquarius’ planetary ruler was discovered under the exegesis of the French and American Revolutions. Uranus’ association to the myth of Prometheus means stealing fire from the Gods to emancipate humanity from theocratic tyranny came with some steep consequences but Aquarius is willing to risk it. Aquarius carries the karmic trace of the brutal punishment and enslavement of Prometheus not to mention the enslavement of Ganymede as cupbearer, which is to say Aquarius is not willing to wear the stain of enslavement ever again and will do everything to retain autonomy, and this extends to the human race.

Aquarius will not broker with misanthropes, even if they happen to run the world currently, they will not be given “the benefit if the doubt” when they consistently demonstrate that they get away with murder. As the imaginal order that has defined civilization up to this point begins to mutate and change and the last gasp of empire emerges in the form of authoritarian politics, Aquarius is keeping their gaze solidly on the future. Anticipating the next moves of authoritarians is essential, and understanding that they are going to act in evil and illogical ways is a given. Aquarius cannot waste its time on moral outrage, the imaginal order of the future calls for equanimity and swift action to defend against the insidious corruptions apparent. Aquarius’ embrace of reality allows them to focus of fighting for human rights and accountability, which are the essential architectures of an emerging imaginal order. As much as there is a need for Aquarius to stay in the moment, they will always be seduced by the strange light of the future and it will paradoxically anchor their work in the present tense, and not a moment too soon as the world is desperate for the outlandish perspective they bring, as this novel thinking is the only way forward.

Pisces: March 12th-April 18th: Biology Enables, Culture Forbids

The future belongs to a new imaginal order. Pisces is in in the process of tying up the disparate threads of a new order emerging into a coherent narrative. Of considerable importance for Pisces individually was how the mutual reception of Neptune and Uranus which is ongoing was activated by the Venus and Mercury retrogrades that passed over Pisces. It has many natives of this sign enlivened with a new creativity that is thinking along the lines of the narratives that unite humans into coherent groups and into collective cooperation for better or for worse (not all forms of cooperation are beneficial).

In the imaginal order of the future, power & resources including technology are customized to fit individual preferences only up to a point. The interests of the commons will potentially supersede those of the individual in an increasingly ecologically fragile and interconnected global world. The basic premise is that if the life support systems and collective groupings that support the individual are not maintained than the individual, which is inextricably linked to them, will fail to thrive. This will require a re-orientation in what our culture has defined as primary, namely our more egotistical desires will have to be relinquished for greater ones that serve all individuals instead of just singular ones in privileged positions.

In the new conception it is not the individual alone who matters but the collective systems and groupings that support the individual, and it is within this context that the individual matters because without these systems being in a state of integrity the individual cannot survive. The individual is embedded in the world system in a mutually supportive symbiosis.  Further if the Dataist perspective is any indication it will be collectives working as distributed networks with individuals embedded into them that will be the source for future meanings. This perspective is vastly alien to us in a culture that has placed a premium on hyper-individuality and exonerated negative liberty. The reorientation will require addressing some hardline ideas about ourselves, namely the narrow parameters to which we have defined self, no longer are we skin encapsulated egos, but we are really amalgam of the greater world that is the ground of our being. Pisces already has a deep understanding of this connection and is the catalytic solvent that can dissolve the fixed points of our rhetoric, that which prevents a coherent narrative from emerging.

Pisces understands the fluidity of all orders, and that they can change rapidly as they are inherently fragile and mutable. The idea of the Divine Right of Kings was swept away in just over a decade with the French Revolution (which oddly enough also coincided with the Enlightenment).For centuries this imaginal order was entrenched in the collective imagination of Humanity going as far back as Phaoronic Egypt and the Babylonian Dynasties. For centuries this idea was perceived as immutable and fixed, extending from “the order of nature” when in fact it was only a chimera of the human imagination. Orders change, new narratives emerge and all the crisis we are experiencing is the birth pangs of the next evolutionary phase.

Terminal Forms

A few parting concepts, namely any future imaginal orders that emerge will have to be married to reality as many of our current forms are violently estranged from the reality of the world. One concept that will be key to navigating the many confusing dislocations of the future, the changing cultural norms that will be shaped by ecological pressures, evolving technologies, and advancing understanding of consciousness and the advent of artificial intelligence which will add to the mental diversity of Earth and could be the best or worst thing that happens to Humanity depending on how it unfolds.

The other essential perspective is that Diversity is Reality and tied to this is Biology Enables, Culture Restricts(thank you to Noah Yuval Harari for this concept). There is a litany of considerations that go with this, and yet it is likely to be a salient feature of future imaginal orders, all the more empowered by increasing data streams that will bring a more precision perspective to the interconnected workings of our world. Future moralities are likely to be based on compassion and evidence and a great deal less on myth, instinct, superstition and religious prejudice and this is perhaps a favorable development for our species. It is likely that our most sanctified understandings will be toppled and re-engineered in new images that have yet to emerge from the imaginal genesis of that strange light of the future.