“We are never going to survive, unless we get a little crazy” -Seal, ‘Crazy’
Greetings Psychonauts!
Welcome to your re-education. The assumptions about reality and the imaginal order that organizes our social life is already dust on the slag-heap of history and won’t be missed. Everything we take for granted is under radical change. We are moving from an Aeon of established society to one of emergent society. An era marked by upheaval, extreme change, and a protean mutability marked by migrations, diaspora’s, new frontiers, and scientific mastery that goes beyond mere understanding. We are in the early phases of what I have come to call the Accelerando, a period of intense and rapid change and development, which if we are wise in its application will lead us to a truly sustainable eco-technic civilization (and I mean that in the truest sense of actually being civilized, which our current order is not).
It requires nothing more than a strange divergence a radical bifurcation from the current ideology that guides decision making. It implies the courage to live in a longer now and to engage in thinking that dreams into the deep future, at least 10,000 years hence. It may seem impossible to think that far ahead, and that is entirely the point to demand the impossible, and begin to radically shift your orientation to acknowledge that we are all enfolded into a conspiracy bigger than any of our skin-encapsulated ego.
For too long society has equated stasis with security and yet what Nature teaches us is that the only constant is change and the only stability and security is being willing to change and adapt to the variability of a system constantly out of reach of equilibrium. Stasis at this juncture of collective human evolution is suicidal, we must change and become a species worth saving. August it seems has change and divergence in the winds, much of this being due to challenging aspects between evolutionary catalysts in the astrological sense. These radical departures will go well beyond the confines of August that said, since I have to provide content for this parameter here goes:
ARIES: April 19th-May 13th
Going Feral
How tame we have become seems to be the Aries lament of late. Looking around the Rams are seeing people more concerned with paying off artificial and socially imposed debts, than they are with issues of existential concern that truly matter. Aries is not having any of it, and they are impatient with the glacial pace at which the world seems to be responding to the slow moving apocalypse that the human species seems to have submitted itself to. At a time when we all need to be getting feral and strange and accessing the part of ourselves that has not forgotten the soft animal body, the power of resistance, and the sheer joy that comes from being in the moment of rebellion. Aries is not satisfied by the reluctance to contend with the converging realities of a more interconnected world. There is an impatient with rabid nationalism, climate change denialism, and the continued obsession with a growth economics at a time when it should be left in the dustbin of history. Aries is so over establishment politics that refuse to contend with reality.
Aries wants to experience the smutty and feral beauty of life again beyond artificial social expectations and will not be keeping up with the Kardashians if they can help it. The desire is for action, community, and a simpler life unfettered by a need to chase status and the ridiculous economic incentives that are emptying our lives of meaning and substance. The promises of capitalist uncivilization are ringing incredibly hollow and herein lies the crux of the Aries contribution to a strange divergence. It is the joy of unrestrained rebellion against the non-logic of our current social model and the headlong rush into a new way of being human on this planet with a pioneering spirit to blaze the trail of a course correction. Aries, wants change now and is not going to wait for it. Not a moment too soon as science it seems compels us to rebel against our own exploitation and the tyranny of endless growth.
TAURUS: May 14th– June 19th
Out of the Boxes, Out of the Cages and Into the Wild
Generally Taurus is concerned with the artistic and sensual pursuits, but lately has been noticing that there has been a tendency in human cultures to deny the flesh in a neo-gnostic sense. Technology arcs in some of the more imaginal realms of debate are reifying a cultural body denialism that is a dangerous ideological current. It represents a salient paradox that humans have occupied since our inception, it our desire to transcend the limits of our bodies and also our desire to attune with them at the same time. It has led to ancient religious practices which garner altered states of consciousness through various techniques and there is even a theory that our desire for altered states and the consumption of various mind altering plants is what might have given rise to human consciousness, it is eponymously known as the ‘Stoned Ape’ theory. This has created our paradox, as we are aware of our limitations and how to transcend them and with technology developing at a vertiginous pace it stands to reason we may soon be hacking and altering our own biology which in and of itself may or may not be a bad thing, however there is a dark said to it that must be acknowledged. In our rush to transcend our flesh we may forget that it is the vessel of our being and that it too can be a method for transcending our limits.
The bodily capacity for pleasure and pleasant sensations remains an unexplored frontier, that Neuro-science is only fairly recently exploring. I imagine a technology that develops to heighten these capacities and there are pieces of literature that have alluded to such. In a word the Taurean contribution to the strange divergence our species is on the eve of is to remind us that the body is a celebration and that it has the capacity for transcendence. In our headlong rush to escape let us not forget that it also capable of incredible sensuality, appreciation of beauty, and the vehicle of immense pleasure. Ideally we would avoid escaping it and instead seek to augment it, extend its capacities, regenerate portions of it that are subject to damage and degeneration. In a word we would exalt in our flesh and use it to transcend our limitations, this is Taurean wisdom. What’s more is that in our denial of fleshly liberation we also deny the sensuality of the natural world and demonize it. An almost Gnostic level of world hatred that is potentially driving our obsession with growth economics and ecological collapse, because we will not accept earthly cycles. We could just as easily acknowledge the beauty of the world and seek to augment it and turn it into the Eden that it is, it first requires us to stop denigrating our animal selves, and locking our feral nature into a cultural prison. Taurus puts us back in touch with our senses and reminds us to approach all sensual pleasures from a full embodied approach one that integrates body mind and yes even that transcendent aspect of self ‘spirit’.
GEMINI: June 20th –July 20th
Paradox Logic
The world is a paradox and largely has been one since the emergence of a species conceiving f something called the world. On the one had is the human desire to attune with nature and on the other the desire to transcend it. This central paradox has come to define the major cultural trajectory of our global civilization which is an amalgam of countless cultures that are antecedents to the contemporary one. It is a paradox that we are grappling with on a collective scale. To a large extent it could be what is driving our obsession with a development model that demands continued consumption and growth to work even though it is the very thing that is making most of us miserable. It seems the expansion of the material base has done very little to expand a sense of happiness. Once an individual moves beyond a certain threshold where their material needs are met abundantly it seems that happiness stops growing and we must contend with the eternal spiritual questions that bring ultimate meaning to our lives and the answer is a surprising one. It seems what makes people the happiest is the company of each other of like minds in a social arrangement that allows for continual engagement. What’s more it is a face to face interaction that generates the most enduring happiness.
The modern world is designed as such to over-schedule many of us to such an extent that we become effectively atomized and cut off from each other as societies of a simple social nature cannot develop in the presence of such time constraints. It creates a sense of anomie’ and alienation when so many of us feel profoundly cut-off from each other. The insanity to all of it is that productivity and production have reached such dizzying heights of efficiency that we no longer have to struggle to meet our most pressing material needs and can be said to be on the verge of a post-scarcity world. Our social programming has not caught up with our technical evolution and we are paying a big price for it, a price we no longer have to be paying. Our world could easily alter its economic arrangements to support more leisure time to engage socially and do the very human things that bring the most enduring pleasure. This is perhaps the single most important contribution of the Gemini archetype to the world, the importance of the human commons, the need to communicate and engage with each other, and the importance of communal society. In a word you are teaching the world how to re-tribalize itself in a more enlightened and cosmopolitan fashion, a kind of international society of local communities connected to a vast global mind empowered by communications technologies that compress the constraints of space and time. This task is nothing short of re-personalizing the world and putting a human face on it once more, in an age of emerging super-intelligence.
CANCER: July 21st– August 8th
Sovereignty in Global Perspective
National sovereignty is a pressing issue of late with many developments challenging the veracity of national borders. Increasingly humanity is witnessing a more interconnected and condensed global stage in which our societies are struggling to balance their own sovereignty against a heightened crisis situation requiring unilateral international cooperation. It seems that many societies are in a state of emergency and are having an inflammatory response to many of the more global realities. Brexit, the rise of a regressive populism, extremism in the political discourse, the alt-right, the near miss campaign of Marine Le Pen, the slow moving epidemic of a Trump presidency, and the various tin-pot authoritarianism that have emerged, along with a rabid islamophobia and protectionist stance regarding refugees have all been the culmination of a freak out at vastly changing global realities. None of it helped by four decades of neoliberal globalist economic policy with its programs of austerity and structural adjustments which have thoroughly hollowed out viable national economies and have sold governments to financial elites. This has created a largely angry populace which is having the flames fanned by elites using the sentiment as leverage politically.
It creates an interesting Cancerian dilemma of how you go about balancing national sovereignty with the needs of an emerging global commons, our society is planet sized now and needs to develop along lines that recognize this expanded scope. Paradoxically in order to have a well-coordinated global approach you need strong national policies, herein lies the challenge. What happens when the national government is acting in regressive ways, for example the Trump (non)administration pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, weakening the national response? Interestingly enough city and state governments can step in and band together to work towards a collective response which can be akin to a national response, and we have seen this in the US with 30 states and countless mayoral offices pledging their support for the Paris Accord climate control objectives (less than a 2 degree Celsius rise in average global temperature). In a word Cancer is contributing to the strange divergence by developing a strategy for balancing national sovereignty with the needs of a global commons of increasing importance in the years ahead. It means they are questioning nationalism, populism, ethnocentrism and other regressive responses to crisis, that have historically shown to lead to seasons of human suffering. It begs the question of how to nurture a nascent global society while at the same time having a sense of place. It is a difficult balancing act, and Cancer is commensurate to the task being adept at riding the shifting tides of the public mood, and guiding perception beyond a regressive mentality to breakthrough to a brave future.
LEO: August 9th– September 15th
Distributed Power
Governments are not interested in actually serving the people who empower them, they are actually more committed to the idea of normalization and maintaining a status quo. Witness the glacial pace of marriage equality in the Australian Parliament, the withering answer from Nancy Pelosi in a response to a question about the problems with Capitalism, Brexit, the Trump non-presidency, the empowerment of Tar Sands projects in Canada, and countless other examples. It speaks to the fact that power has become concentrated into the hands of too few elites who are setting an agenda that only is of benefit to them and at the expense of the global commons now emerging in a more interconnected age with converging economic and environmental crises. It is a problem of power that Leo is all too familiar with. Leo is also not having any of it, after many karmic lifetimes of having to grapple with the responsible uses of power, the Lions have finally concluded that power should never really rest in the hands of any one individual as it creates the problems of the cult of ego and the corrupting influence of concentrated privilege which naturally places blinders that allow an individual to become blind to suffering and the other limitations that life imposes. Leo’s contribution to the strange divergence is a critique of power predicated on the concept that it has been invested into incompetent individuals and no amount of education will change that because power should not be concentrated into the hands of a few elites, it is best served when it is distributed across many involved players working as councils and collectives to decide the fate of its members. In a word for Leo gone are the days of the statesman and the legislator and here we ring in the days of the power of the commons.
Or more accurately the power of the free flow of information and data that allows for the public and the human commons to coordinate collective action across multiple sectors. Increasingly governments, corporations and the like will become increasingly illegitimate as the free flow of information will eventually create systems of transparency and accountability that will make it impossible for power to concentrate in the first place and also make it difficult to hide most back-handed dealings, witness the current Russian collusion probes on the Trump presidency. Imagine a world where instead of clueless politicians making massively impactful decisions and lacking any real awareness of how the world actually operates, we see councils of concerned citizens running simulations on sophisticated AI interfaces that allow in real time to see the systemic and multivariate consequences of any given policy decision. From this awareness policy is made that removes human biases and eliminates the concerns of election cycles, encourages long-term thinking and allows for more local control. This is likely how power will move in the future making much of what government does today obsolete. This of course is distributed power that utilizes the wisdom of the crowd, and is based in reality, instead of deeply delusional ideology.
VIRGO: September 16th– October 30th
Rewilding the World
Climate Change presents a pressing problem for all of the ecological systems that collectively represent the operating system of our planet. More poignantly it presents a massive problem for one of the most functional elements of these life support systems, wildlife. Increasing temperatures will force wildlife to migrate to cooler regions and this of course presents both a crisis and an opportunity. Human development has been such that our cities are beginning to form conurbations along well traversed corridors which fragment existing animal habitats and present migration obstacles to wildlife that will begin migrating in the decades ahead. Along these lines two trends are emerging as part of a greater cultural divergence towards sustainability, provided they can truly gain altitude. Idea one is creating wildlife corridors interspersed within the urban conurbations developing throughout the world, this way we strike a balance between development and the community of life. The second is to move development away from areas that fragment these habitats in the first place and to create open corridors for these migrations. Both ideas converging is the ideal set-up, as it accounts for the intricacies of Systems biology and implements a system designed to seamlessly integrate the multivariate features of natural systems.
The Virgo contribution to our strange divergence is formulating a working operating system for society that blends seamlessly with the planetary operating system which undergirds the social dimension. It is by far one of the more complex and immense tasks that can be given to any one sign, here’s the thing about Virgo’s though they have the capacity to get it done with their superior organization skills, analytic capacity and affinity for natural, inter-related systems.
LIBRA: October 31st-Novemeber 22nd
Songs that Break Chains
Libra is obsessed with two things equality under the law, and the importance of human rights in the creation of a truly peaceful society. Libra knows that you cannot have reconciliation until you have justice, and as it stands the world is far from the equilibrium that justice would provide to a more peaceful society. There are any number of injustices perpetuated by a society that fails to account for the life value. An array of issues comes to mind, inequality which has become a global issue, the preposterous suggestion of a plebiscite to decide marriage equality in Australia (which was mercifully struck down, with the unfortunate side effect of delaying the issue further), , the degradation of democracy in the U.S., the eco-cidal decision to build more pipelines to export more oil out of the Alberta Tar Sands in Canada, and the fact that almost every aspect of the development model for the world calls for economic expansion on a planet of finite resources at a time when a more equitable and sustainable use of resources should be advocated for and that is before Climate Change gets thrown into the works.
This diatribe against the injustices in the world is entirely the point because it is in telling these poignant stories and placing a human face on them that words can become the revolutionary tools that break the chains of our cognitive dissonance. Libra uses this sense of jurisprudence and the capacity to organize it into salient words that acknowledge brevity with impact to act as their contribution to this strange divergence that is quietly fomenting beyond the mainstream. With the clarity of a Rebecca Solnit or a Naomi Klein, Libra speaks truth to power and becomes the clarion call of justice in a very unfair world. Libras sing the song lines that crumble empires.
SCORPIO: November 23rd-November 29th
Secrets are Lies
It seems that the modern state largely props itself up with secrecy and obscurity. Governments and other organized social institutions go out of their way to maintain a stance of secrecy which could be tied to an addiction for security. Going even so far as to utilize encryption technologies to protect so called “state secrets”. Human rights abuses are glossed over, or never make it to light and when they do governments attempt to distance themselves instead of dealing with the issues head on and using a transparent process. Much of this can come down to a lack of accountability, the public has become complacent in in demanding accountability form involved players and what’s more is how can there be accountability in a system built on secrets, which are really nothing more than another forming of lies? What does not get revealed is still withheld information and in essence a lie.
In an age when international cooperation is becoming essential to the survival of human society, secrecy is suicidal as it exacerbates salient problems, encourages a destructive competitiveness and does little to assure mutual trust. It seems technology may come to our aid once again in the form of various mechanisms that allow for surveillance on a broader and more individual scale. Wearable cameras for instance which are already becoming part of police protocol to prevent brutality. The problem as it stands is they can be turned off, that said, what if they were re-designed so they could not be turned off? Or perhaps as the move ‘The Circle’ made clear in its very unsettling depiction, that these cameras are in fact activated by sounds of distress or screaming?
While these technologies do bring up massive issues of privacy that will ultimately have to be contended with broadly (a Scorpio issue par excellence), what it does do is make accountability unavoidable. If every human rights abuse will eventually come to the awareness of the world, then how likely does it become that governments can feign ignorance any further. Scorpio does not broker falsehoods of any kind, they are profligate investigators, exposing secrets, unmasking lies, and demanding accountability. This natural capacity is also their contribution to the strange divergence. They must stand as witnesses to the abuses of power and call them out as they see them. In a word Scorpio is building accountability and transparency into the architecture of the future.
OPHIUCHUS: November 30th-December 17th
The Future is Androgynous
There is an insidious tendency among the cultural mainstream in western societies to break out into hysterics over the changing gender landscape of the emerging 21st century aesthetic. A kind of panic has emerged as traditional gender roles begin their inexorable terminal decline and the transgendered and third gendered individuals of the world demand their equal human rights. The rapid rate of change has led some to embrace hysterical responses such as bathroom bills which are thinly veiled discrimination policies, and have potentially also empowered the likes of regressive policy-makers taking significant political positions of a highly reactionary bend responding to people who feel that their grip on culture is slipping away and what they value is not being respected. Nothing of course could be further from the truth, they are free to pursue whatever values or ethics strike their fancy provided they can understand that they do not get the right to impose it on everyone else nor use it as justification to deny other individuals their rights or freedom to pursue their own value clusters, as we know the cornerstone of most liberal democracies is securing the rights of minorities and also not establishing any one reigning value system (secular society).
The future presents an even more challenging proposition in that the breakdown of gender as it is currently constructed will continue unabated. The future is looking increasingly androgynous and many of the structured ways of being a “man”: or a “woman” are becoming fast outdated. AI will only add to the furor as it is likely that it will avoid the gender trap altogether. I perceive an age when humanity will finally be freed of its final taboo, the forced performance of gender, and will be empowered to understand that human identity including gender is quite fluid, and not constrained by biological realities. While it might be true there are slight variations between “men’s” and “women’s” brains these variations are vanishingly small to be of considerable concern to identity.
Yes, there are those who will argue the difference in hormonal productions can impact behavior and that is certainly true, however as we are finding out we are not constrained by this, and changing endocrine function can also change behavior, and as technology advances our capacity to hack our own biology is likely to grow exponentially and we will increasingly find we are less defined by biological limitations and more customizable. I would dare say by 2080 a common census question will be “have you experienced a period of your life as the ‘opposite’ gender to the one you were born as?” (a problematic question in what it assumes). Ophiuchus your piece of the strange divergence is to demonstrate to the world that gender does not confine the development of human personality and to reveal the flexible and protean nature of human identity. Being an example of this fluidity will reveal that the future is indeed androgynous.
SAGITTARIUS: December 18th-January 18th
Liturgy of the Future
Imagine for a moment if you will that when Humanity does finally allow AI to go online it is likely we will not design it in our image but more in the image of what we have failed to become as of yet. Imagine, that we create algorithms modeled after the immense powers of Godds of Mythology, and they start to replicate like memes (non-material replicators). Capable of manipulating data streams, reproducing themselves on the internet (ala Skynet from the Terminator series), and becoming like Godds. It is both a fascinating and terrifying prospect. The vertiginous and exponential rate of technological evolution ensures that it will only be a few short decades before we are contending with these questions, and the likely mutations that our religious and social traditions will undergo as a result will be very disruptive. It can be tempting to begin to turn our technology into a future Godd but it would be a mistake as technology should only ever be a tool we wield.
Let’s be clear this is not an indictment against technology or the empowerment of a neo-Luddite philosophy it is instead a questioning of the underpinnings that technologies are being developed along. It is a reminder that technology is a double-edged sword, you can get the fusion reactor and you can also get the nuclear warhead, you can get electricity that powers a city protecting the lives of millions and also the electric chair which takes life away. In a word, technology must not become our Godds, but must always remain a tool for our liberation, and one we can wield, instead of it pulling our strings. There are some technologies we may wish to avoid creating due to how invasive they may prove to be, and how potentially destructive they are.
It is a warning Even in the face of emerging techno-religions Sagittarius reminds that we all must remember that it is all just a metaphor and to not take it with a deadly seriousness, technology alone will not be our savior, it will however make the transition into a hyper-drive world a great deal easier, and it will also be a powerful device for addressing converging crises and emerging ecological considerations, provided we can utilize it in this fashion. The Sagittarian contribution to the Great Divergence is clarifying what is appropriate technology, and exactly how we can deal with its godlike powers in a way that turns it into effective planetary medicine instead of the architecture of our downfall and the entrée to our endgame. It’s a question of existence and extinction and whether we are willing to risk that by our tools running amok.
CAPRICORN: January 19th– February 15th
Project Tesseract
Capricorn has a radically altered vision of time, which is to say they are capable of occupying the sense of a longer now than most, and are acquainted with the longer cycles of time. What I mean by this is they have a capacity to see centuries into both nodal points in the human linear conception of time. What’s more is that they see time as it really is in any accounting of good cosmological physics, instead of how it has been bio-culturally constructed. Capricorn understands that space-time is like a fabric stretched out to infinity and that you can travel all over it and experience it happening all at once, because when you have relinquished the idea of linear time you begin to understand that everything that will ever occur is happening in the Nowever and the Everywhen, no matter what your praxis on the continuum you are always Now-Here. It is not an unusual way of perceiving time, countless cultures have viewed it this way and have use religious practice to access this altered state of consciousness. It is also in vogue among theoretical physicists and does have some observational support, it is also a central thesis to the Einsteinian idea of relativity and time dilation.
In a word Capricorn your capacity to take the long view and plan for centuries possibly even millennia from now is the evolutionary role you are playing in the Great Divergence. There is a cognitive dissonance among, governments, and other social institutions that prevents them from strategizing beyond the five and ten year mark. The world that Humanity is on the eve of entering is one in which long term thinking is essential if not from technological then from the existential crisis that is Climate Change. It falls to you from a mytho-poetic perspective to essentially mid-wife the world into the synchronic and poly-valent capacities of long-range thinking, it is akin to planning for the next 10,000 years, and thankfully you are not alone in this regard as the Stewart Brand think tank the Long Now is working on exactly this perspective.
AQUARIUS: February 16th-March 11th
The Future is Indigenous
“The worst thing that ever happened to the world was the white man coming across gun powder.
– the end of the world | the beginning of white supremacy”- Narriyah Waheed, Salt
Perhaps one of the modern world’s most contentious issues is the narrative of decolonization. History reveals the very ugly truths of colonialism and the impacts it has had on the indigenous populations of the world. That the arc of destruction continues today under the guise of economic progress rarely gets any airtime and yet it continues. The !Kung of the Kalahari desert continue to be assimilated into mainstream society losing their culture and for those who do manage to hold onto social autonomy they are pushed into the fringes of ever marginal areas of desert. This has the impact of altering their culture irrevocably. This trend is happening the world over to many indigenous peoples who continue to be dispossessed of their ancestral lands and cultural heritage. The trend is being exacerbated by ecological degradation which is making certain areas uninhabitable that have been cultivated by indigenous people since time immemorial.
A particularly cogent example comes from an island in Louisiana. Isles de Jean Charles, is an island in the Gulf of Mexico that has lost 98% of its land to sea-level rise and a significant portion of its population is being forced to migrate out. This island is one of the traditional homesteads for the Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe, and due to increased climate change linked natural disasters the island is being forced to relocate, irrevocably losing its cultural heritage in the process, as the migration is causing community fragmentation.
This process is not inevitable and certainly can be reversed and is an element of the strange divergence which first begins by acknowledging the right of these cultures to preserve their life ways and be re-patriated to their lands, which is the ground that their cultures are rooted in.
Canada and Australia are examples of two modern nations that have taken strides to begin to address these issues. Canada in particular enshrined multiculturalism and the protection of indigenous people’s into its 1982 Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, which acts as a modern bill of rights, and makes the preservation of diverse cultures an integral part of Canada’s national heritage. Australia coordinates social justice issues including Aboriginal concerns to a government funded body called the Australian Human Rights Commission. Their mandate includes a broad scope of aboriginal cultural preservation issues along with the protection of minorities, LGBTQI individuals and immigrants in Australia.
By no means have these attempts been perfect and there is still quite a bit of ground to cover, Canada is only now beginning to acknowledge the violence of Indian Residential Schools. which destroyed the Native Canadian cultures that once fluoresced across the land now called Canada. Or the fact that it took over ten years before an inquest was opened into the mysterious disappearance and deaths of over 1,000 Native Canadian women. Australia continues to contend with considerable racism and lack of services for its Aboriginal populations. These issues will need to continue to be addressed, yet it must be acknowledged that these represent important first steps in the Great Divergence that will bring us to a civilization that re-integrates its indigenous peoples to their ancestral territories and respects the land-base that is the ground of our being.
Additionally, new movements have emerged made up of Indigenous people and their supporters that work actively to preserve the cultural heritage and ecological integrity of traditional lands. The people of Sarayaku in the Amazon Rainforest of Ecuador were present at the People’s Climate March in New York City on September 21st, 2014, and continue to actively address the Western world politically, legally, and philosophically. That there are many of these groups operating all over the world as part of the greater Indigenous People’s Movement is encouraging and it falls to all of us indigenous and non-indigenous to support these efforts, and Aquarius this is exactly where you come in.
Aquarius naturally lends itself to movements that support human rights due largely to an ancestral memory of enslavement. The experience of which is codified into the story of Ganymede attributed to Aquarius. Ganymede was a shepard before Zeus abducted him and brought him to Mount Olympus where he was made into the cup-bearer of the Godds, and forced to serve the drink of immortality, Ambrosia to the Olympian Godds. Aquarius carries the pain of this enslavement and loss of autonomy in its mythopoetic memory and as such will fight to end enslavement and oppression anywhere it is found. The story of the abduction of Ganymede is a mythologizing of the experience of cultural loss and enslavement that many indigenous peoples have experienced, this is perhaps the point of entry where Aquarius may team up with the dispossessed people of the world and work in solidarity with them to restore their cultural autonomy and traditions. It begins by first reaching out in friendship and engaging with the indigenous and asking them directly what they might need from you individually, and what you might do to help them. It is a start, and it is evolutionary and implicates you into a longer sense of now, and it is the piece of the Great Divergence that falls to your sign.
PISCES: March 12th-April 18th
Are you Receiving?
It is a strange query to as Pisces is always receiving, in fact it is the best receiver of the zodiac and sensitive to any transmissions no matter how subtle. The question is more to spur a general divergence from accepted norms as the signals that are integrating beyond random noise of late have been very slow to diffuse into the collective consciousness of the human species. Pisces however has been feeling them in a big way perhaps inspiring a flight into escapism just due to the intensity. This is not helped by two planets being in mutual reception that are effecting Pisces and Aquarius respectively (which may explain why denizens of both of these signs may be experiencing high tension and feeling a bit on edge). There is this sense of something novel arising and yet Pisces can’t quite put their finger on it, as it feels more like vague agnostic mysticism than any clear message ringing from the Godds.
It is the energy of divergence, of charting a new course and coming up with the coherent narrative that will eventually midwife the rest of us into a new Aeon. The novelty and shock of course coming from Uranus in Pisces which is shaking up the Piscean mythos with the strange light of the future. Then we have Neptune in Aquarius bringing a sense of reality to the most outlandish and bizarre of our science fiction dreams, tellingly, sci-fi is feeling more like an account of future history and a more reliable guide to emerging trends than any annual report being cranked out by the World Bank or the United Nations.
Pisces is feeling it first and of course creating art and other symbolic productions that will help to bypass the resistance of human cognition and speak more to the ‘better angels of our nature’ which is to say it will speak the non-verbal language of the global mind, and lodge itself deeply in the liminal threshold of waking consciousness, where it will slowly infiltrate and inspire decisions that will allow for course correction and eventual radical departure, behaviors that our more chaotic age require. In a word your role in the great divergence is to tune into the subtle signals all around you and bring them to clarity, then communicate this to the world. It means active listening and constant attention to the transmission band that you secretly possess. The question of the moment is “are you receiving?. For you there is no ignoring the unspoken emergency behind the sober words of scientists, policy analysts, and others who are discreetly sounding the alarm that humanity is in dire need of a new trajectory.
The dream of the world never ends, and the emergences of the future lay in wait to be brought into manifestation. It is tempting to hold our heads down and pretend everything is normal except that the world we are entering is demanding that we avoid the trap of normalcy and get strange. The world seems to be going crazy and yet it is on the verge of breaking through and the only way to thrive is to become stranger, bizarre, eccentric, protean, in a word evolutionary. Embracing the vertiginous rate of change and transformation is the best strategy any of us has for long-term survival, the upheavals will come unabated, standing still is suicidal.
I’ll see you all next month space cadets.
Flying Punk Rock Unicorn Astrology 