#mundane astrology

The most pertinent astrological event of our time is the once-every-two-centuries procession of the elements in the Jupiter-Saturn synodic cycle. In December 2020, we are moving from an earth age to an air age. I will be cataloguing reflections and predictions, as well as amplifications of the elements and their zodiacal signs.

Food is the Reward
We say that Venus, ruler of taurus and libra, governs ethics and aesthetics. Ethics is the more immaterial, and best represented by libra, the air sign. Aesthetics is concrete, and best represented by taurus, the earth sign. Taurus is the sign of food, values, and art. We talk about tasting food and having taste in art. Taste in art is essentially a measure of appropriateness, and so are our values. “[Something], in what measure?” A tone of voice, a texture, a shape or color. Recall, taurus also rules money. Wealth in what measure? What results in pleasure.

What is this association between the material and value? Why does something hold more value if it is objective and physical?

Tina Fey once said something very wise: that the only real reward is food. When you are celebrating a success, the feeling is cemented by food. Regardless of scale. Finished fixing a pipe at home? Have a nice lunch. Successfully stage the opening night of your epic opera? Go out to dinner. The act of consumption is tied to the success of the deed, this is especially obvious on the occasion of a toast. Not only does the food tether the success around it, but it binds together the people who are sharing in it. We see that food is not only a consolidated symbol of value, but that it also concentrates the group into a set of values. Thus food is a bedrock of tribal life and tribalism. How offended is the tribe when you refuse to eat with them, or in their manner?

The word “binding” means three things: attaching, reinforcing and restricting. Tribal life is restricted by convention, but the affixing of concrete images and values to the symbolic order of the tribe fortifies its strength by providing it new organs, new capacities. In alchemical psychology, the stage of “coagulation” is all about the affixing of images, and closely relates to the process of personification. When a psychological complex is given an image—or better yet, personified—it is far easier to deal with. But the carrying around of an image that has been outgrown is, of course, restrictive. So images must not be permanent. Our bodies too are images, and they are beautiful and valuable because they die.

The attachment to our bodies is very important for life. If we did not care about our bodies and find them beautiful we would die much faster. “Let your wicked desires keep you pinned to this earth so your work could go on,” wrote Jung to his suicidal friend. Desire keeps us in life, and the desire of all the beings within us keep the body together. The countless microorganisms within do not have minds, but they have wants.

Dissolution Under Analysis
Supposing that there is a mesh of matter underlying the various objects of the world. After all, bodies die and buildings fall to rubble and then to dust. So if we think about matter as a whole, without its temporary approximate forms, it certainly is a diffuse mesh, a matrix. Then the cohering of that mesh into one of these forms is a desire.

Consider also the process of logic, which must operate upon abstractions that have been crystallized into units. Set theory, for instance, deals with the abstraction of set, drawn into coherence by its categorization as a set. Each member of a set is also itself a set. It is sets all the way up and down. So it is the bundling of axioms, the coagulation of the set, that makes it all operable.

An Amp for Christ
When Christ came to earth, he vitiated the magical projections of animism. The spirits of nature withdrew from the rocks and trees. This is the root of the opposition between Christianity and paganism. The keynote here is that Christ did this by taking these projections upon himself—he sheathed himself in the symbols of the world. This was an axial moment in the development of consciousness, where people realized they could find all the spirits of the world inside themselves. Here psyche could make an integral step in its pivot to self-reflection. We don’t know what the world appeared like preceding or directly after this event, but we might imagine that the world of matter suddenly appeared much more real and substantial.

And he said something about how he was the living bread, and from then on people have been eating his body in the form of the Eucharist. Is this part of his great deed, to make explicit the bundling of values that goes into a physical object? And that the consumption of the physical object brings with it an isomorphic psychological change?

We Want Stuff
The Industrial Age, the age of earth, came after the Enlightenment, the age of fire. And it is clear how science and reason set the stage for all the marvelous technology of industry. The achievements of the Enlightenment were very exciting, but somewhat abstract, and so did not look like much. It is the movement from age to age, from principle to machine, that gave us something to look at.

Then with this new industrial speed, we had so much to look at. We have now a lot of stuff. Without effort, I can get a mug with anything I want on it and in it. So many, many objects.

As stated, matter is energy drawn into form by desire and objects are therefore crystalizations of desire. So we desire objects. And we want them because they radiate their energy, their love upon us. A statue painstakingly carved from marble can sit in one’s home for a very long time and continue to radiate, to unfold new dimensions. It took a lot of desire for it to get here. A mass-produced object, not so much.

Lacan’sobjet petit a is the object of desire that is never attained, because once it is attained, the desire fades. But the more something is wanted, the longer it can radiate its magic upon us once we have it. Things that take longer or are harder to find are obviously going to stoke more desire, and radiate for longer once they are in our apartments.

Because goods are produced so fast, we have to compensate for this through artificial anticipation: a culture of drops. The new sneaker is about to come out, better cop at launch. A Funko Pop based on a guy I like will be released shortly—I had better be the first to click. The Funkos are terrific examples because of their monstrously dead eyes and immobile bodies, and their interchangeability implying disposability, though the character they represent is always predicated on some attachment. We loved him, once, didn’t we? When we saw him in the show, and he surprised and delighted us? If only I could have a reminder of that in my home. Yet once the package arrives we just set him onto the shelf and expect him to do all the work. We do not vivify these collectibles; the sneakers are too nice to wear out, so we put them on display. The Funkos often do not even escape their sad little boxes.

When a child plays with toys, they nurture the object so it can continue radiating itself upon them. The beloved toy is another being, an animate partner, and they continue to want it even though they have it, because the breath of life comes into it, and it continually creates new experiences. It is born anew through play. This resembles certain rituals of old, where the cosmic origin is recreated, and the human participants are born anew with the world. The creation of the world is constant, it is only whether we care to be involved again. Spirit is breathing its love into matter always, always.

Notes on the Triple Conjunction

Hello friends. What follows is a short introduction to the incredibly rare and historical astrological conditions of the year 2020. This was written with the intention of accessibility first and foremost; I believe it’s important that people have some idea of this moment in a historical context, and the tools to evaluate the themes and stories that are emerging currently and in the near future. To my eyes astrology is at its most useful when it is neither prescriptive nor prophetic. It is foremost a tool of psychological midwifery; reading the meaning of the world and its events.

So it’s in my interest to be painting in broad strokes. If you want concrete predictions or exact dates for orbs of conjunction now and in history, then there is a vast field of mundane astrology for you to Google. The myths I’m unfolding here are only for context and consideration—I hope you find them helpful.

Also, there will be a major western bias in my evaluation of history, which sucks, but that’s the milieu I grew up in and can speak to, and it remains the information most easily available. But of course astrological conditions are affecting the entire world. We can still trace the vibe through western examples.

Our Axial Moment
There are two incredibly rare astrological events happening this year. One event is the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the sign of Aquarius. These two planets come together routinely, mechanically, every 20 years. But the rhythm of their waltz is such that each meeting takes place in signs of the same element for 200 years at a time. So when they conjoin in Aquarius, in the last weeks of 2020, that will be their first time together in an air sign since the 14th century.

Since 1802, all of their conjunctions have been in earth signs. (Much more on the significance of this later, but some may already notice this 200 period’s coincidence with the industrial revolution and the age of capital). In the 200-odd years before 1802, they would join every time in fire signs—and for the 200 years before that, water. One waltz more brings us back to the 1300s and 1200s, the previous epoch of air signs. Returning to the present day, we should realize that since an age like this persists for two centuries at a time, it is essentially impossible for someone who witnesses such a transition, to have ever even known anyone who witnessed the previous transition. That is, the 100 year old person in December 2020—even if they had, as a newborn, shared a breath with a 100 year old person—would not reach far back enough in history to have even a dim, second-hand knowledge of the epoch of fire (1603-1801). These periods are effectively the frame edges; the curtains around the drama of the world stage.

Rare as it is, the other historical aspect of the year is much rarer: the fact that Saturn and Jupiter will also conjoin Pluto in Capricorn before they dance their first step together in Aquarius. Though these 3 will never occupy the exact same degree together, they will come very close, on and off throughout 2020. Of course a triple conjunction of planets will always occur in more unpredictable intervals than any pair of planets because of the 3 separate orbits. Famously—well, famous among astrologers—it last happened in the sign of Capricorn during the founding year of the city of Babylon, 1894 BCE.

History of the Elemental Epochs
Because the Jupiter-Saturn synodic cycle is so regular, and because we didn’t know about outer planets til the 18th century, the dance of these two planets through the elemental stations is by far the oldest astrological tool for determining epochal periods. It has long been assumed to be the basic attitudinal/affective backdrop of the zeitgeist. (Now that we know about Pluto, we have a new vibecheck every 12 years! But isn’t it funny that generations didn’t have names until we noticed Pluto in 1930?)

I would be remiss not to mention that there are overlaps between these periods. For instance, Jupiter and Saturn were briefly conjunct in an air sign (Libra) for a few months in 1981. So toward the end of each epoch, humanity gets a little multi-month preview of the coming age. 1981 and the transitional period is a whole other topic in itself, but that’s all I’ll say here.

Even though these elemental ages have been observed for so long, we don’t have a ton of historical examples to draw upon to get a sense of the nature of a particular epoch. As for the air age that we’re entering into, we can refer to the high medieval period as the last instantiation, but to get a third example we have to go into history 6 centuries before that! Soon the world starts to look so different from the current day, that we have to stretch the imagination that much farther. So let’s just a get a brief summary of the previous cycle through the elements.

Earth
1802-2020

This is the epoch we are still in as I write this. It began during the industrial revolution, and the earth themes are undeniable. Human begins have had a resolutely atomic understanding of the universe; materialism is rampant; and it feels that capital and capitalism are catalysts of most human drama. We take things literally and concretely: instead of speculating about other realms, we want to drive our spaceships to big slabs of land like the moon and Mars. We have discovered how to build and make so much STUFF!

Fire
1603-1801

This period is famous for the enlightenment and the French and American revolutions. The time of great sparks! Reason, brilliance, luminance … self-validation and self-determination. This is really when human beings began to appreciate the value of the idiosyncrasy of a particular thinker. “THIS dude’s contribution” etc. Rights, laws, freedom, were all in vogue. “Here I am!” say the fire signs.

Water
1425-1602

Just as materialist scientism was born out of the liberating thought of the enlightenment, so were the insights of the enlightenment enabled by the world-broadening discoveries of the renaissance. During the water epoch, everyone was sailing everywhere, being introduced to new cultures, and the “new world” was reached by the Europeans. At home, classics of antiquity were being rediscovered and the world was broadened in that sense. Shakespeare was poppin off in a big way. The concept of the stage is essentially water; water is the idea that there is an affective component to reality at all.

Air
1226-1424

Is it a coincidence that the least widely known stage of the cycle is the one we are now entering? Or is that just the nature of history, as it fades further into the past? This period was called, in the West, the “high medieval” era. It was marked by civic demarcations that more or less persist to this day—the previous few hundred years saw constantly changing borders, but now people grouped more firmly into ethnic or national identities drawn to territories. This is also where we got chivalry and the first real rights for women in a long time. And there was the discovery of an actual social life and leisure. “Hanging out” was invented, thank God.

Reality itself received a major patch update: we invented mechanical clocks, which caused people to relate to the passage of time in a totally new way. We used to just slice up the sunrise-to-sundown period into 12 equal parts; now hours were a constant length throughout the year. Common folk had glass windows in their homes for the first time, and the elite even wore glass in front of their eyes to correct their vision. Music became much more complex, as people had more time to take it seriously and form theories. People could go to libraries; for the first time ever there were more books in cities than in monasteries. Cities were finally the place to be. We invented the compass, the game of chess, and the printing press. The astrolabe, like the compass, allowed us to orient ourselves to something that was formerly hopelessly abstract (the stars). Most of this cool shit came from the Arab world, which was flourishing.

Air Epoch 2.0
That’s the historical overview. Obviously there is much, much more there for any anthropologist or history of philosophy ass person. But we are beginning to see some idea of the relation between the qualities symbolized by the elements and the respective periods. Now we can begin a more informed speculation.

The movement from the previous earth age to the previous air age seems to be one of dramatically more complex social relations. Less emphasis on the riches of a kingdom, and more emphasis on its culture, civility, and sophistication. Abstract things became the treasures. As we look to our own incoming air epoch, it is easy to envision a world that places more emphasis on networks instead of objects. Social media, gig economy, and blockchain all appear to be prefigurations of this. In terms of philosophy, it no longer seems very radical to conceptualize oneself as part of a universe whose essential composition is not defined by particles (nouns) but relations and processes (verbs).

What Was Babylon?
I ain’t no student of ancient culture. Until a few months ago, I didn’t even know Babylon was where Iraq is. Of course I think it would behoove all of us to research as much as possible the previous instantiation of this astrological aspect, but I also think it’s valid to speak about its cultural impact through a layman’s osmosis.  As far as I can tell: what is Babylon best remembered for? The miraculous hanging gardens, the Tower of Babel, and the law code of Hammurabi. Hammurabi’s code, inscribed onto a stele about a century after the founding of Babylon is celebrated as the first known written laws, some 190 edicts long—and by the estimation of modern scholars, supremely humanitarian for its time. What is the modern equivalent of the ancient innovation of codified laws? Hard to fathom, but something for us to consider as the new age dawns.

More famously, there is the story of the Tower of Babel. A persistent image of human hubris, even today people respond to the tower motif as a symbol of defiance of God or of nature, and it is routinely invoked when artists and pundits comment on the ecological folly of industrial enterprise. Human beings tried to use their intellectual capacities to reach the position of God. Without reading the Bible, I can tell you that the punishment for this was the diversification of languages. All of a sudden people couldn’t speak to each other, because there were so many ways to speak.

Today we take for granted the many languages of human beings, so what is the modern equivalent of this event? Taken as a metaphor, the variation of languages could represent a variation of worldview. Styles of interfacing with reality. Because the element of air is so closely associated with concepts like perception, the structuring of thought, communication, and virtual realities, we might imagine that in the new age we will begin to understand just how deeply diversified our mechanisms of interpreting reality are. Phenomenology seems like a pretty fringe field in our current world, but AI is certainly not; and content creators have increasingly brought phenomenological themes to the center of their work over the last couple decades. Just as the previous air epoch (12/1300s) saw the advent of movable type, perhaps we will soon develop novel means of recording our impressionistic realities.

Finally, Babylon was host to the famous hanging gardens. Supposedly built by king Nebuchadnezzar to please his wife who missed the natural beauty of Iran, it is still unclear whether this wonder of the world ever existed in physical reality. In any case, the story is relevant: a ruler, in the midst of tremendous infrastructural expansion, and with it the inevitable subjugation of nature, finds that his greatest cultural influence across the centuries is ecological restoration. Looking at these three legacies of Babylon together is rather interesting: the law code stele, though purportedly divine in origin, is unquestionably real to our materialist sensibilities—you can go and see it. The Tower of Babel, taken from the Bible, was probably not real in the same fundamental way; though there was without question a great ziggurat in Babylon, the Biblical account is not literal. The hanging gardens is the most mythological. So between the three we have different concentrations of myth and historical fact.

Second Second Life
I write this in the first few weeks of social isolation during the coronavirus pandemic. There is much more to be said about the connection between this unprecedented social condition and the imminent radical astrology—maybe the subject of some other essay. But off the dome, we can see plainly the defaulting of Capricornian things: governments, businesses, economies, and social infrastructure. Without much of a choice, we are withdrawing our energy from the material to which we are accustomed. We’re cooped up in our houses, where the merciful currents of the internet continue to draw us on, to operate in cyberspace as normal. New social functions and vocabularies are already emerging as we are forced to reconsider the online networks that have seemed so toxic for the last few years. People find themselves operating “peer to peer” out of necessity. Some “inessential” products may no longer be available on amazon, but your neighbor might have them. More importantly, people are reaching out to each other for nothing more than human contact. We’ve been wringing our hands about the importance of human connection, but capitalism—through spectacle or stranglehold—has drawn us away from putting it first.

Social service is (along with certain essential aspects of the internet) ruled by Aquarius. Saturn, governor of concern, has already ingressed into this sign, but will retrograde back out in a few months; and then at the end of the year, it will be joined by Jupiter, who greases the wheels, expands the potentiation of Saturn’s concern, and affords prosperity to those who take social service seriously. And together they will inaugurate the new age.

We have less than 2 weeks before the new astrological epoch! “The air age.” I would like to use this time to celebrate this historical transition. Here’s a comic for starters