Greetings Psychonauts!
The distance to the future will differ for everyone and your mileage will vary given your trajectory. For example the distance to Prometheus Jones’ intended future is 11,388km, will involve 35,040 hours and will land Prometheus on a Pacific Shore on a random Tuesday that never was. Which is to say Prometheus has calculated the time it might take for them to reach the first half of a long-term future concocted in the mind’s eye, and potentially all the ground that will need to be covered to get there. In a word this is a post devoted to the idea of long range thinking and the imaginal possibilities of a longer future arc.
There are cosmological movements afoot that are nudging the symbolic imagination of the human species towards more long range thinking, these movements also converge seamlessly with other selective pressures closer to spaceship Earth. It seems that actions taken collectively by the humans present on this organic and alive planetary spacecraft has begun to degrade its life support systems and are creating instabilities in its operating system (namely climate the principle operating platform of Earth). Physics, Chemistry and Biology gives no f@#%s, to ideology or economic expediency and will respond to alterations in their initial conditions, results we may not collectively like. In a word long-term thinking is becoming essential to address the problems that our species has created and it needs to have begun yesterday.
A brief overview of some of the cosmological and political pressures is instructive. A mutual reception between Neptune in Aquarius and Uranus in Pisces (in the system this Astrologer is using), inspires a collective symbolic tilting towards future oriented vision and the imaginal possibilities of our extensive technological lexicon to liberate the commons from seemingly intractable constraints. There is a danger here though of falling so far into technocratic dreams that we forget to ensure data driven decisions and so this will be a salient challenge we will ever have to be mindful of. That said, by any measures confronting our crisis with a techne and scientific mastery will be many volumes easier than attacking it without them and will also help to reorient a technology that has led us to the crisis in the first place, culminating a Promethean liberation first begun by our fledgling species natal embrace of technology (it must be said that humans are born technologists as for as long as we have roamed the planets face we have been utilizing technology, whether it is hunting spears or semi-conductors).
Our closer to home pressures include growing inequality which threatens the stability of social systems. Climate Change which exacerbates shortfalls in resource streams and makes more difficult our actions taken to balance ourselves with planetary scales and limits. A growing concentration of power into a small financial elite incapable of long-term planning beyond the quarterly cycle and suffering from the structural problems associated to the profit motive on a planet with natural limits and a closed ecological system. This examination is at best cursory and also telling how deep this goes. Hopefully I can provide a useful road-map for the denizens of our astrological cyphers:
Aries: April 19th-May 13th: State of War
Aries is all lit up by the stellium of planets traversing Leo, Aries is in trine to these transits ensuring that the energy flows easily between the phosphorescence of Leonine siblings. It does also mean that Aries might find itself on edge or at least a little more wired for sound than usual. Aries is often correlated to martial actions and there is no shortage of rumors of wars in the world right now. North Korea has threatened the US with possible nuclear ambitions. China is behaving aggressively in the South China Sea creating tensions all across the Pacific region, with such profound implications it is causing a policy battle in Australia as China and the US are its biggest trading partners.
Meanwhile tensions throughout the Middle East continue their slow boil simmering under the strain of a refugee crisis and in going civil war in Syria (that word has always been disingenuous at best there is nothing civil about war). Tensions between India and Pakistan remain a flash point over claims of the Kashmir region, and this could go thermonuclear as the two nations remain in a tense stalemate, it will be interesting to see if strains on water supplies in the future become a point of inflammation that stokes this crisis. The leader of the most powerful nation on the planet responds to these tensions with bluster and bravado ignorant to the fact that a non-diplomatic answer ticks our species ever closer to a confrontation with midnight on the Doomsday Clock. It seems that Humanity is on a high tension wire and it is seconds from being electrified. Add to this that Aries planetary ruler is flying high in the sign Leo a fellow fire sign highlighting a massive crisis in leadership.
Aries with these immense alchemical pressures how do you respond. Simple, stop mourning and start organizing. The time for hesitation has passed last Tuesday and the time to mobilize was yesterday. In a word action is the magic bullet. Aries loves action, they would be the hero in an action thriller, think Bruce Willis ion Die Hard and you pretty much have captured the Arian ethos to a tee. The counsel for Aries and for the world however is act strategically. It will not due to go in guns blazing as the tensions all around us are complex and delicate and any effective action will have to be thought out carefully. Aries is a master strategist and this is the distance to the future for the rams how to decipher the difference to effective action and wasted actions that burn through resources, inflame existing conflicts or offer nothing more than symbolic gestures. The future requires swift and bold action and especially in the realms of global scale crisis, lest a failure to act on salient problems, could become the catalyst that inflames existing tensions.
Taurus: May 14th-June 19th: Terminal Velocity
Capitalism contains its own terminator genes, and has inherent structural defects that ensure its own degradation, the trouble is that it could take Humanity and the community of life on this planet with it, and therein lies the problem of our age. There is a massive race on between the endgame of capital and the continuation of complex life, and if Capitalism destroys itself it will take everything down with it. It is either Capitalism or the human and non-human species that populate Earth. This extinction paradox is created when you pit the delusion of endless growth against a group of spiritualizing animals constrained by the limits of a closed ecological system. We are essentially on a spacecraft floating in an endless ocean, hostile to life forms like us, and if we destroy the life-support capacities of the life raft we are on, then it is lights out for the life-forms including us. That our economic model is divorced from this reality is exactly the problem because it limits the range of actions we can take towards a more sustainable course of action. Taurus the distance to the future to you is to become a virus in the system that disrupts both the rationale and reasoning behind this mass delusion, and to provide the source material or cultural DNA that transforms the entire economic and related social lexicon so that Humans can design a sustainable economics, which is in line with the true definition of economics which is to devise a system of resource allocation that high-lights efficiency, sustainability and endurance, all of which our current model does the opposite of. Capitalism as it stands is a generator of waste, inefficiency and is not sustainable in the long-term.
Our current economics is fast leading us to a cross-roads that will decide of we enter the Accelerando or dance with extinction. It is us or Capitalism and quite frankly I think most of us would be happy to see the bone-crushing generator of inequality and ecological degradation mutate into something that is in line with our planetary reality, and does not build into its operating assumptions the idea of hierarchy and inequality (Capitalism cannot work without inequality). Taurus is meant to be the transformer, the catalyst that reminds us all that economics and ecology are the exact same thing and that we can indeed devise a system that provides abundance to all, and the wise use of resources, with the happy side effect of halting the sixth mass extinction event Earth has experienced and also by us time to address the inexorable climate change agents that are already locked into the climate system from the industrial age. It is nothing short of a second Industrial Revolution only this time it will involve a radically different economic model, a new suite of social relations, and industry seamless with natural systems.
Gemini: June 20th-July 20th: Eclipse Broadcast
Gemini’s by now are feeling the socio-cultural effects of the Mercury Retrograde as our imaginal self, experiences these more colloquial meanings behind apparent motion retrogrades. Even though it is traversing a fire sign, Gemini feels it due to the fact that it is a planetary ruler and so it activates the second receiver in the twins paradox that of the twin who journeyed down into the Underworld to secure the immortality of the other. Gemini might find themselves withdrawing form the world of the living so to speak to explore the wiring under the proverbial board. Likely it will be finding itself mucking about through the slag heap of the collective subliminal unconscious, seeking buried treasures and cast-offs from the parts of the collective psyche that have been repressed and shunned to the unlit corridors of the human imagination.
This is never easy work due to strong cultural taboos around digging up all the parts of the human experience that we collectively recoil from. It’s cogent however that we are in a time where these unsavory aspects are rearing their ugly heads into the collective experience once more. The rise of the alt-right has disturbing concordances with the rise of the Nazi’s in the 1930’s and we are once again having to collectively contend with an atavistic tribalism that often becomes apparent during periods of extensive social crisis. We like to say our modern world has killed the old Godds, nothing of course can kill an immortal it merely means we put them underground and out of sight. Those old war Godds will still demand their blood offerings and we are seeing it once more again. We are wise to refrain from avoiding this confrontation and instead acknowledging what lurks beneath the surface and offering a strong NO! We will not submit to your administrations, but we know you are there, it is this more mature approach to dealing with difficult hard-wired archetypes that will allow us to transcend the hold over our collective imaginations and allow us to evolve beyond them and create new psychological algorithms that better bridge the vast distances to the future.
For a future of our flourishing we must abandon these ancient impulses and place them in a new context. The violence they inspire can become the passion that fuels our resistance and allows us to use this firepower for the advancement of human rights and offer a counter valence to the backward motion of our current politics. Gemini’s play a strong role in this by understanding and advancing the concept of the Overton window, as concepts are a decidedly Geminian province as they have to do with how ideas are communicated. It is the idea that there is a collective limit on what behaviors are considered socially acceptable. This window can shift with circumstance and is often wildly shifted during times of considerable crisis, and can lead to the normalization of behaviors that may have been considered unthinkable in previous eras. Thoughtful Gemini’s will immediately understand the implications of this it means that as the window shifts behaviors can be normalized and that is the danger of our current era. The last time in history the Overton window shifted we had the Holocaust, the times before that led to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and Colonialism.
This is precisely the point we cannot allow this to become normalized, resistance must be firm and swift! It was great to see San Francisco leading the way on this on August 26th when the city came out in full force to resist the meeting of a right wing group that was forced out to Pacifica by the hostile welcome received, the city refused to offer a platform for these ideas. There are those who will moan that it violates free speech it does not, free speech protects you from retaliation from Government it does not insulate you from consequences nor does it require that others provide a platform for your speech. If the people don’t like what you have to say, and receive you with hostility that is them showing you the door and your free speech has not been violated. This resistance to dangerous ideas that incite violence is the right of free speech. A viable human future relies on this resistance continuing, otherwise we risk a world of totalitarian doublespeak and atrocity and Gemini’s are at the leading edge.
Cancer: July 21st-August 8th: Tidally Locked
As one of the more sensitive and receptive of the water signs it is hardly surprising that you are acutely attuned to the crises that the human family is currently facing. The difference between you and most others is that any are only understanding things from a purely intellectual place, and for you it is quite different in that you feel the emotion, the tugs and urges and of course the full berth of the suffering. You understand that statistics are is pain with the tears wiped away except for you the tears were never wiped away but remain. Herein lies your unique super-power, so attuned to the tides of life you can actually shape them. Emerging from the most tender place are the architectures of tomorrow’s social trends, and I imagine it is a world where there is a great deal more care for the communal ethic, instead of a neurotic focus on the individual.
Cancer cannot abide the hard reality that the vast majority of us shrug at the thought of a million refugees starving instead Cancer implores us to begin to feel the full impact of all that implies and perhaps in that awareness there will be a change in collective behaviors towards ones that prioritize a more universal consciousness that can see beyond national borders and our own skin encapsulated egos. Particularly for those of us hyper-consumers in the so called developed world this is precisely the consciousness that we need to collectively develop on a planet that is a closed ecological system orbiting in an ocean hostile to life. In a word we must learn to live simply so others can simply live, it is also the first initiatory process in creating a more equitable distribution of resources so that they are the common heritage of Humanity and not simply sold to the highest bidder in a planetary scale pricing war. Cancer you are the icon of this exact affectation, the capacity the pain of others and at collective scale and impassioned with the desire to do something about this to bring about an end to this suffering.
Further your are inflamed by the sensitivity engendered in the symbol set of the Neptune in Aquarius and Uranus in Pisces mutual reception which has subtly infused the archetypal imagination for these past few years. The capacity for hyper-empathy and a centering into the collective body politic of humanity itself is decidedly the emotional affectation that will need to be developed in this nascent century for a viable future to become possible. You feel the subtle tug of being tidally locked in this emotional landscape and it guides your decisions to advocate for the most vulnerable among us.
Leo: August 9th-September 15th: Going Thermonuclear
Leo is certainly not on the roiling white-hot intensity that will ensure it will meltdown into critical mass, instead it is lit up this month due to a number of planetary transits, a Mercury retrograde which is with us until the 4th, a solar eclipse which likely will shake up leadership structures across the globe or at the very least be symbolic of a need to shake up established dynasties. Adding to the mix is Venus transiting the sign putting unilateral relations into focus and hopefully under its exegesis they are getting more lubricated, although given the deeply contested nature of political power and the emerging crisis points this could prove the darker side of cooperation as governments collude in more politically dubious actions (then again it would be hard to argue how any of this is different historically, it is always up to the public to hold policymakers feet to the fire so to speak). Mars is also transiting through which will lead to an opposition to Neptune on the 24th, making it harder to distinguish whether actions are more fantasy than reality. It would seem that this is particularly in focus in with the alt-right contention that it is empowered when in fact this is not supported by the public will in that they are experiencing an aggressive push back against their organizing in various cities that they have attempted to march in, a decidedly happy political development, as all dubious political alignments deserve necessary democratic push-back from the public. (From any rational accounts the alt-right is nothing of not dubious at best).
What this all means for Leo is that issues related to power are particularly high-lighted right now with so many elementals lighting up its native domicile. The concentration of power, influence and wealth into the hands of a small global elite is exacerbating fractures within our planetary civilization which are becoming more obvious as time stretches on. The distance to a viable future grows ever longer thanks to governments defaulting to their secondary functions of ensuring economic growth and here in lies the structural problem, our obsession with growth and the attendant power to control policy that it creates. It is this problematic relationship that is on the chopping block currently.
It seems governments the last bastions of concentrated power have forgotten their primary motive to serve the will of the public which has increasingly been placed as secondary to creating a favorable policy environment to the very forces that are orchestrating the greatest power grab since the Gilded Age (not entirely intentional but while the world wasn’t looking they have benefitted mightily). It is this collusion that is deeply questioned now and into the future as it is tied to every other crisis point that Humanity is confronting. How it shakes out will determine the course of planetary society for generations to come (and possibly millennia if we consider the timescales of climate change). At an individual level Leo’s the world over are trying to iron out how they are complicit in all of this and to what capacity they have to push-back, it’s frustrating work to be confronting and at a time when we are all busier than we have ever been it makes it so much more daunting, and then in the context of such totalizing implications it can paralyze even the most passionate of us. Don’t give in! Leo, has the distinct capacity for taking leadership on this issue and leading by example and the world needs you now more than ever to bridge the gap to a sustainable future.
Virgo: September 16th-October 30th: Planet OS
Virgo recognizes an urgent compulsion to move our established society with its ossified forms towards the more protean and variable state of an emergent society. One that is adapted for rapid change in an environment that it unstable and in constant flux. The distance to the future for Virgo is designing a completely new planetary operating system, which is to say a new imaginal order that synchronizes with the ecological operating platform that under-girds all social operating systems. Less technically it means we x=create a society and narrative that acknowledges planetary scales, limits, processes and realities and seeks to strike a balance with the life support systems we call the biosphere, climate and ecological systems. The key here is recognizing inter-relatedness is fundamental, every interaction in a closed eco-system is dependent on the balance of relationships within it. You unwind any one part of the system and the whole thing moves out of homeostasis and upsets the balance of the whole network. What’s more in that fundamental to all of these systems are the basic three sciences that underpin, together chemistry, biology, and physics comprise the planetary operating system.
Chemistry, Physics, & Biology give no F@*#s, about quarterly reports, or commerce, or the fragile dependence of social systems on ecological systems, you screw with the planetary operating system and you will have the inexorable consequences, as we are becoming painfully aware. Hurricane Katrina was likely the first incident of screwing with the operating system, while likely not the causative agent of these events, as hurricanes happen as a result of being a watery planet, Climate Change is possibly exacerbating these incidences. The question we must keep in mind is whether or not Anthropogenic climate change is contributing to these events. What is certain is that they are certain to increase in the future and there have been many more since. Hurricane Sandy, the multi-year drought and then floods in Australia, the water crisis in Syria that indirectly fueled the Civil War and refugee crisis, the California multi-year drought which also ended in smaller scale floods, and the most recent on the list Hurricane Harvey which has effectively dumped the equivalent water volume of Lake Erie on a floodplain that hosts a city of 6.5 million (Houston). It is easy to debate whether these events are the result of climate change, that said all of them broke historical tracking records and seem to suggest that changes in climate dynamics had a hand in these events. There are likely to be more events of this scale all over the world in the decades ahead and all a result of human tampering with the big three elements of our climate system.
The crisis induced by our own machinations necessitates a complete recasting of our cultural narrative because as it stands our social operating system is suffering from a software incompatibility akin to running Microsoft Windows on an Apple computer. Our OS is incompatible with reality, and we are starting to pay the price. The task ahead Virgo, and this will stand as the distance to the future for you, is to design a new social operating system that is actually compatible with ecological realities. It is a rather tall order, then again you are Virgo the most dominant of the signs and the most hard working, so you may be secretly saying “Is that all?”.
Libra: October 31st-November 22nd: Terminal Decline
There are currently no major transits occurring in the sign of the Scales, and this might lend credence to thinking that its energies are not currently being activated, and Libra would be profoundly in error to continue in this dissonance. The fact that their air sign brother Aquarius is currently under the sway of a gentle Neptune transit in mutual reception to the decidedly more electric Uranus in Pisces transit means that Libra by association in trine aspect to the Neptune placement is acutely feeling its archetypal effects upon the psyche of those born under the Libran province. For Libra it takes on the decidedly anxious state of a humanitarian crises, and currently there are many unfolding all across the world to choose from. The cold reception of some European nations to Syrian refugees, Australia’s insidious marriage equality plebiscite to say nothing of the atrocious treatment of asylum seekers in off-shore detention centers, the abominable administration currently setting policy in the U.S. or the generalized prejudice against any number of socially vulnerable minority groups all across the world. The distance to the future for Librans is recognizing that this suffering is not something that will go away and there are converging crises that will likely create more of these Humanitarian crises. Climate Change in particular threatens to create hundreds of millions of climate refugees who will be on the move all over the world, and that is in a world committed to less than 2 degree Celsius of change in the global average temperature.
Librans recognize that the policy landscape of the future will be set upon by a need for fair witness and impartial policymakers not swayed by nefarious self-interest or the vagaries of human emotion. This is a rather tall order and perhaps the more technically minded Librans will come up with an AI interface that does a better job of circumnavigating human biases to come up with the best solutions that will benefit the greatest number of those affected by decades of economic and social policy that has not had the interests of the commons at its corrupted heart. If not then perhaps Libra can hone their prolific talent for impartiality into a laser0like focus so that they can create a policy and legal landscape that begins to acknowledge the changed reality of the world, and creates precedent to address some of the more novel conflicts that will emerge. It is a need to sensitize to collective suffering and from that state of empathy begin to create a process of adjudication that creates justice is a situation of inherent unfairness. Libra never wiped the tears off of statistics but uses this compassion to become an advocate for the rights of humans everywhere, and most essentially climate justice the one intersection that ties into every other form of justice.
Scorpio: November 23rd-November 29th: Future Terror
Human beings generally struggle with changing the status-quo and the majority default to acceptance of cultural imaginal orders as an inevitable feature of life even if they happen to be completely divorced from reality as our current ones are. Further, we may excel at future orientation in terms of our thinking but it rarely has an impact on our behavior until the blowtorch is at our cheek and then we become the eleventh hour species. Changing our entire lexicon just in time. It could easily be that our brain-stem has not evolved beyond the Pleistocene Era which created immense pressures to get it while the getting is good, and stay in the here and now as it all that matters. It would seem that natural selection is not geared for long term thinking and that it creates modalities that are efficient for immediate survival not necessarily ones that can think in terms of implications centuries away. This is problematic as many of the existential threats we face are of a more long-term trend and require that we find someway to short circuit our biological defaults to favor the executive functions of our neo-cortex which do have the capacity for sustainable long-term thinking, delayed gratification and the capacity to think along millennial timescales.
I mention the science of our brains as Scorpio is one of the few denizens that understand these primitive impulses and can effectively bypass them to activate the potentials of finding pleasure in delayed gratification and the sustainable planning. If Scorpio has not yet mastered the technique they at least intimately understand the evolutionary antecedents that have placed us at an existential crossroads and therefore can effectively navigate its complexities without falling prey to its stickier edges. In a word Scorpio along with the rest of humanity must endeavor to develop a capacity that goes beyond the limitations created by our early evolutionary environment. The distance to the future in this context is to bridge the gap between the reptilian limbic system and the neo-cortex and to strengthen the hold that this relatively novel part of the brain holds over our thinking. The crises of the future are ones that have relatively profound implications and long arcs of time attached to them, especially if we are discussing climate change which will not unfold over human timescales nor be resolved over the course of a human life. Short of terraforming the planet which we have already done to some extent it will take more than a quarterly report can truly convey to tackle some of the thornier issues it presents. To add to this mix is the threat of engineered pandemics, AI run amok, and other such issues that occupy the brightest of our minds, and are terrifyingly closer in time. Scorpio will hopefully lead by example by taking up the cause and recognizing that a confrontation with the shadow sides of our collective selves and a grappling of our unknown unknowns is the only path forward through the terrifying elements of our common future. It’s a big deal and yet Scorpio excels at confronting the dark and seeing inside of it, so most I imagine upon reading this are thinking “That’s all? I do this is my sleep”, good on you Scorpio the world needs your capacity to deal with the terrifying and mysterious parts of our common human ethos.
Ophiuchus: November 30th-December 17th: Cultural Hacking
“So, this brings us to a total impossible juncture which is to try to make sense in perspective science as to what that nature is of human nature. You know, on a certain level the nature of our nature is not to be particularly constrained by our nature. We come up with more social variability than any species out there. More systems of belief, of styles, of family structures, of ways of raising children. The capacity for variety that we have is extraordinary”-Dr. Robert Sapolsky, Professor of Biological Sciences Stanford University.
What it means to be human has always throughout time and space been a moving target and increasingly it is being seen as meaningless. The meaning of this concept is alluding us collectively as technology, social evolution and new advances in understanding ourselves have emerged that challenge the tacit assumption that there is something inherently meaningful to what it means to be human. We are finally realizing that we are an animal among many, and the one distinct feature about us is that we act like the neural cells for the entire planet and are creating a kind of externalized planetary mind whether it is through the genius of our communications technology that are creating an entirely new sphere of cognition. Or through the more plastic understanding that human nature is not fixed but exists on a spectrum of possibilities only constrained by the imagination of culture. Increasingly as knowledge of human origins increases we find that there are no set parameters for human behavioral responses and that the better angels of our nature can come to dominate by the type of social environment predominates. Regardless of more regressive elements of society that wish to state that human nature is overwhelmingly fixed, that gender occurs on a binary, that we are all original sinners, the facts continue to contradict this supposition, and prove once more that there is no meaning to the idea of human, as it is an eternally fluctuating reality.
I mention Ophiuchus only because this is a non-starter for you. You who are native to an imaginal realm that works with manipulating the constructs by which humans narrate their lives by, which is to say that you are masters at cultural change and the manipulation of the protean forms it can take. Now more than ever the distance to the future involves this subtle magic of cultural hijacking. You are the ones that can see the wiring under the board and therefore know exactly how to re-wire the deck for new results. You seem to change the currents and stories that define the human legacy as if by magic when really you are simply using cognitive technologies as silver bullets of precision change. Your capacity to turn seemingly rigid social structures into fluid and ever-changing ones is essential in an age that will continue to be challenged by climate instability, technological upheaval, mass unemployment, and staggering socio-economic transformations the likes of which have not been seen since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. As a master of the subjective realm, the only one that matters in its profound implications you anticipate the changes ahead with a sense of adventure and know that you will model to the rest of us how to ride the tide with the assassin at your side, which is to say you are the creator of the spiritual forms of a vastly different aeon now emerging.
Sagittarius: December 18th-January 18th: Future Awakenings
The world is in the throes of a populist revolt that is the result of a number of global trends. The internet and namely social media platforms have become so customizable that many are living in their own echo chambers of information that do not permit opposing viewpoints. Both sides of the political spectrum are convinced of their rightness with little in the way of wiggle room. An anti-science problem has begun to infuse itself into both sides of the political spectrum as well which has confused the dialectic on crucial issues of collective importance. This anti-intellectualism has created controversy around Climate Change, Vaccines, Genetically Modified Organisms and has hampered efforts at garnering policy decisions that would help to address many of the attendant problems that emerge from these decidedly evidence driven concerns. We also have two elder generations that currently comprise the electorate and policymaker positions and their ideology is dangerously out of synch with the objective realities of a planet with a closed ecological system. It is mainly these older voters that are driving this crisis in the protection of their relatively narrow interests which sets up a crisis that is effectively screwing over the younger generations coming up after them. It seems there is almost a kind of generational narcissism (interesting these generations are the ones who call out younger cohorts for the same behaviors little realizing their own Freudian slip is showing), perhaps a hangover from previous decades of political and economic theory that exonerated greed and a narrow definition of self to be only the skin-encapsulated ego.
Add to this a global trend among electorates empowering nationalistic and hardline politicians with platforms worse than any that emerged under the era of neoliberal economics and you have a perfect storm of a world in massive amounts of bifurcation, of democracy teetering on the edge of extinction, a global society in deep crisis, and a scientific lexicon that has become denatured by ideology and rhetoric where evidence is ignored in favor of ‘alternative facts. Against this backdrop is the Pluto in Sagittarius transit which correlates to a crisis in international relations, global systems, and foreign cultures. It is hardly surprising that these issues are coming to the fore at this time. These cries are also the result of demographic transitions that are changing the matrix of populations spurning older generations to react atavistically and take protectionist stances against a seeming cultural loss that threatens to radically change the operations of ‘their’ culture, instead of embracing the inescapable reality that culture is always in flux and the only universal constant is change. It is a kind of ideological chauvinism that is preventing any real action on serious global problems.
Sagittarians of all ages may be surveying the broad sweep of this interconnected crises and recognizing their complicity in it. They are acutely sensitive to it right now as their symbolic house is currently sitting in the crucible of evolution (Pluto in Sagittarius). Those of a perspective geared towards the future and long term thinking are really struggling to make sense of this crisis and the way through. What is interesting is that there is not long to wait and the changes in the wings are sweeping and total and will likely transform the face of planetary civilization, and seal the fate of organized society. Either we will collectively fly over the edge and collapse or we will course correct and begin moving towards sustainability. The thing to keep in mind is that it will be the much maligned younger generations who will lead the way through as they are possessed of the political and intellectual skill-sets that will allow them to grapple with these complex machinations. It will likely make those fossilized in their thinking disturbingly unsettled, and yet it is necessary as the old ways will simply no longer be soluble. It is a common drama between generations. Sagittarius has a leading edge to play in this transition as it is the symbol set concerned with the global commons. There are some profound awakenings ahead, especially as we head towards the 2020’s which completes a Saturn-Pluto synod in conjunctions that will deeply challenge governments and spur them onto to grappling with the inexorable thrust of the future. The distance to the future for Sagittarius will be recognizing that long standing corruptions and collusion of governments with powerful actors with narrow interests will be exposed, and an outraged public will likely demand they be cleaned up. It is likely that some exceptional Sagittarians will be among the whistle-blowers for all kinds of corruptions big and small.
Capricorn: January 19th-February 15th: Imaginal Infrastructures
The conditions generated by the emerging aeon of the Anthropocene have locked in a selective pressure that ensures Humanity will have to continually update both its psychological and physical infrastructures to adapt both to climate instabilities that its own machinations have caused, as well as the vertiginous rate of evolution that the Anthropocene technical fluorescence has wrought. In a word our social psychological is undergoing wrenching selective pressures along with the aging out of our physical infrastructures and a need to upgrade them to reflect both changing physical and demographic realities.
The one limiting factor is all of this that will have to systematically addressed, is Jevon’s Paradox. Jevon states that with any increase in the efficiency of use of a resource there is an attendant increase of use of that resource having the effect pf drawing it down faster than its natural recharge rate. Herein lies the prime problem of the psychology of our era, the bigger, better, more dynamic will intensify this paradox even with gains in efficiency. The use of a resource must be concordant with a shift in the psychology of use behind it. We cannot use more of the resource just because we have found a more efficient way of using it. In this our economic logic will not suffice to get us to the vaunted path of sustainability. Even with energy efficiency and the pressures of climate change we will still need to get consumption down to manageable levels and this will require improvements in both our physical infrastructures and also our imaginal ones, our cultural assumptions and related social institutions will have to shift, and this Capricorn is where you come in, the distance to the future for you will be to refine a new pragmatism that seeks to design alternative social forms that reflect changing realities, and the attendant material forms they will take.
This means that we will witness many paradigm shifts that you are likely to spearhead now and into the future. A good place to start is with the crumbling physical infrastructures in developed nations that need to be updated, the next phase is to help developing nations avoid the infrastructure shortfalls and mistakes that the developed nations made in the run-up to their development, further, this is not limited to just the built environment but also the socio-economic atmosphere, it goes beyond the physical as these are often reflective of social assumptions anyways. In a word the trick here is to be more data-driven and to create a policy landscape that reflects that, as it stands almost no social institution is doing that at the moment a side effect of 40 years of the almost religious commitment to deregulation and creating a “business friendly” atmosphere (code for growth economics run amok) which will now need to be reversed, Capricorn your long-range thinking is ideally suited to such a task.
Aquarius: February 16th-March 11th: Occulted Horizons
“The end of fascism looks like bright centuries of queers. A queer future where everyone is a Witch, & a Scientist & a Poet.”– Yerbamala Collective, Burn it all Down! An anti-fascist spellbook
2013 was the year of the witch, and 2017 has seen a resurgence in the archetype of the witch as bastion of political resistance to creeping fascism. Appropriate that given this entire stretch of time the world has been enthralled under the exegesis of a mutual reception between Neptune in Aquarius and Uranus in Pisces, placing a laser like focus on humanitarian concerns. Neptune in Aquarius looks around the world and sees societies in need of reformation and radical departure, everywhere that capital has touched it has constrained freedom, and entrapped everyone into wage slavery. It is increasingly difficult for Aquarius under this exegesis to conclude that society needs to remain as is, like damaged furniture in an Ikea showroom.
The water-carriers see the damage done and are prepared to wield the hypothetical Allen wrench and re-tool a useless coin-box into a table where everyone has a place. Adding to this intensity is Uranus in Pisces, which is causing upheaval in the deepest salient mysteries of human spirituality along with the collective domain of politics, hence the resurgence of the witch as political avatar of resistance. It would seem that the time is certainly ripe given that the collapse of economic neo-liberalism has given way to a populist infection of fascism wrapped in a contemporary package, piloted by one of the most incompetent statesman in recent memory.
Aquarius is recognizing the temporality of the weariness of contemporary situations, and maintaining a vociferous resistance in the face of totalizing energies, a great deal of which emerged during the Pluto-Uranus square years where the world order was deeply contested, as it stands a viable alternative has yet to emerge. A future politics is still in the embryonic stage of development and has to get past misplaced nationalisms, xenophobia, economic hegemony, climate change denialism, and a remnant fascism from the crucible of the last world war and the foundational myths of colonized nations. Aquarius at this unique juncture in history has a lens that allows them to see the hidden connections, the wiring under the board if you will of the world process. They are tasked with bridging vast expanse to a viable future with the creation of a future politics that can embrace the interconnected complexities of a planetary society, the realities on the ground, the requirement for a new economics that embraces Climate Change and post-scarcity and balances an advancing technological lexicon with the attendant social upheavals and ensures that it remains democratic and firmly in the confines of the human commons and not constrained by corporate agendas or the profit motive. It is nothing short of a spiritual evolution as it requires a complete redefinition of what it means to be human and it exists at the confluence between the most outlandish science fiction dreams and the centuries long development of human cultural lexicons. The distance to the future for Aquarius is being the architect of a future world that has successfully navigated it’s many existential challenges.
Pisces: March 12th-April 13th: Cosmological Limits
Pisces like her Aquarian brothers is feeling supercharged at the moment and if not for the cosmological speed limit would likely go superluminal but for now is settling on being in hyper-drive. It is akin to being hard-wired into the Cosmos at present and more so amplified with a retrograde through Mercury in Leo lasting until the 4th and also the passing of the total solar eclipse which found many feeling wired in the lead up to the culminating eclipse. Pisces being the sensitive creatures they are likely felt a deep subjective pull on their imaginations and the over-whelming sense of electric change in the air. The distance to the future for Pisces is feeling largely non-existent due to the speeds it is traveling at currently, and also fueling the profound frustrations that Pisceans are feeling at the moment as they seem to be rapidly advancing beyond the imaginal limitations of the collective psyche at the moment and chafing against the artificial constraints that limit human potential.
The counsel here is to watch out for falsehoods and for pie in the key abstractions. Humanity will continue to pursue its science fiction dreams and the danger is that it is more dream than science and so Pisces is urged to point out gaps in the data that could show the promise to be a chimera. Pisces won’t be very popular doing it, but it understands that it is a necessary task to ensure that resources invested into the infrastructures of the future truly pan out and remain contiguous with the laws of nature lest we risk the most Edenic of intentions becoming the dystopian nightmares that populate the apocalyptic trope of our literary lexicon. Given that Pisces spends one half of their existence in the other world and possessed of the more subjective ways of knowing it won’t care too much about the negativity it might receive for pointing out the limitations, and demanding the data.
The great thing is this is unusual for Pisces, that said, cosmological movements afoot are empowering different capacities to emerge, in this case the normal Neptunian ones of inspiration and silent dreaming are augmented by flashes of insight and Uranian criticality and electric surprise which are ensuring that dreams have a sense of gravitas to them and that they will likely disrupt entrenched social systems, and at this juncture of the human project disruption of social assumptions is desperately needed, as current trajectories will ensure a confrontation with planetary limits that will not end well for organized society or the human race. This deep confrontation with our collective cognitive dissonance is essential to our continued evolution and Pisces is playing it up nicely.
The distance to the future may seem vast, this is an illusion. The distance is merely a psychological threshold that is easy to cross and can happen in an instant of critical mass. It will require nothing short of an unflinching examination of current assumptions and biases and a hard edged look at structural problems to many of the imaginal orders that we utilize to organize our lives. The question is whether Humanity collectively is willing to see the limitations of its own imagination and critically look at its shortcomings, and then expand beyond these constraints before the blow-torch is at our cheeks. It is the essential task of our age if we are to avoid the Doomsday Clock reaching midnight.
My gratitude to all of you my inner space cadets out there reading and dreaming. I will check in with you all next month and please be sure to check me out on Facebook.
Flying Punk Rock Unicorn Astrology 