Welcome to October, 2005, when it seems this time around that many things are hanging in the balance even more than they usually do in Libra month. If you're reading this, and you rely on the web for most of your news and other attempted truth, you already know that several streams of science and prophecy are converging this fall toward the icy premise that for Earth and her people, the moment of crisis is at hand. In the view of some sober-minded observers who can by no means be dismissed as doom pimps or ego-driven attention trippers, we have passed the point of no return, and the best we can expect from here on is the grace to bear as bravely as we can a cascade of natural and human disasters that we can no longer hope to check, much less reverse. The tough news, if these estimates are true, is that we are like the soul in Rumi's "Full Moon, Bilal" (in Coleman Barks's version), who says "I'm like a cat in a bag / lifted up and whirled around overhead. / That's how much control I have over circumstances." The good news is that we are still "In the hand of love," and we are still in the bag, which for the moment remains intact.
The question is not whether profound changes will now occur on our planet and in our societies; nor whether the changes are coming now, soon or next year; or even whether we will only roll with the tide, or use our creativity and intention to cushion the ride as we work proactively as awakened human beings to ameliorate the damage that less conscious human beings have done. We are in fact in a galactic scenario of signs and wonders. As Richard C. Hoagland and David Wilcock wrote almost a year and a half ago in “Interplanetary ‘Day after Tomorrow’?,” the Earth is but one player within a sweeping drama of transformation that now manifests throughout the solar system in solar flares of unprecedented size and number, in huge storms on the supposedly dead planet Mars and a surge of X-rays from the equator of Saturn, increased global cloud activity on Uranus and weather anomalies on all the planets. Some of these changes – such as a 300% increase in atmospheric pressure on Pluto even as the planet moves away from the Sun – are theoretically impossible. But they are happening.
Like the contractions that come more rapidly now as the moment of birth approaches, the warnings accelerate and intensify. Simon Hunt's "Hopi Elders Say Earth Changes Are Upon Us," though first published a year ago, is cited everywhere now as the chilling anomalies multiply: tornadoes that spin the "wrong" way, the jet stream descending from the upper atmosphere to touch the ground for the first time in history, migratory birds that no longer fly to their nesting grounds, salmon that no longer swim upstream to the same spawning places, indigenous tribes who are no longer producing children. Most human beings, focused only on their own questions about where the good life went, if it was ever there at all, remain unaware of all this, though they do notice events so big that they can't be missed. The Aceh Tsunami. And still at center stage, the agony of New Orleans and the American gulf coast.
Considered in physical terms, Hurricane Katrina is a matter of meteorology and engineering, measured in how much damage winds at very high speed can do, and how much pressure a levee can bear before it gives way. In political terms, she's the focus of a whole choreography of blame directed mainly at an increasingly beleaguered and unpopular regime of government. In social terms, the storm exposed the ugly racism of American media and society in general, even evoking from some observers the view that Katrina's "purpose" was to force Americans to face and negotiate the karmic debt from 500 years of racist hatred and exploitation. In economic terms, the bills are staggering, reckoned in everything from still higher oil prices to the costs of reconstruction. And there are other terms too, in dramatic stories of victims, looters and heroic rescuers, and the self-righteous speeches of those who always seem to know whom God hates, usually movie moguls in LA, liberal media in New York and homosexuals everywhere.
With these last viewpoints we are at last approaching mythic territory, since one of the unifying ideas in all mythology is the spiritual belief that human actions impact, and evoke responses from, the natural world and the gods who rule it. Apollo drops a plague on Thebes to punish the sins of Oedipus. Darkness falls at mid-day and the earth quakes as Jesus expires on the cross. The Black Death scourges Europe because there is no knowledge of God in the land. And so on. How would our forebears in ancient Greece and Rome have looked on Hurricane Katrina? Many of them certainly would have thought at once about how many drachmas or sesterces have just been blown all to Hades, and some would surely have said that the archons, the aedile or whoever could have acted a lot faster. But there is one thing on which almost all the people would agree: Poseidon, or Neptune, is about as angry as he gets, and we had best figure out why, and what we can do to placate him.
To those who think in mythic terms, the Earth ordeals of the past year may wrench the heart, but they do make perfect sense. Neptune, already surly and vindictive by nature, is incensed at the human beings who continue to poison his home, and is happy -- if that is the word for this watery, depressive character -- to deliver payback. And the stakes are higher than they've been for a very long time. Neptune is, after all, the ruler of Pisces. As the Age of Pisces surges toward its end and the Age of Aquarius is about to arrive, Neptune cannot be expected to go quietly. He never does. He will try to flood the entire globe for mere spite, and dare his brother Zeus, or Jupiter, to do anything about it.
So our purpose here is to look at our current and coming situation as what we may expect as the Age of Pisces ends, and Neptune pushes the qualities of the sign he rules to the point of extreme toxic release and inevitable purification. Here are a few of the leading qualities of Neptune and his constituents, the Fishes.
Neptune's Element: Water
Every Age in the Great Year brings new technologies that are quite specific to its element. So it's not surprising that the Age of Pisces has learned to redirect and “control” water in projects such as the Suez and Panama canals, and ambitious dams in the United States, at Aswan in Egypt and the Three Gorges in China, and has also developed new water technologies that are so familiar we no longer notice them. Steam engines and boilers. Hydraulic lifts, water gauges, liquid crystal displays and other devices that exploit water’s properties of being non-compressible, and seeking its own level. Water closets, water sprinklers, water pipes and water beds.
At the end of the Piscean Age, we also see the Return of the Goddess and a new recognition of the medicinal and purifying power of water as the element of the sacred feminine. It’s been well over a century since Helena Blavatsky published Isis Unveiled, and with it opened a new surge of interest in the river goddess who knew the properties of herbs, used her mastery of healing to bring her husband Osiris back to life – not once, but twice. Imagine a god who is unable to accomplish his own resurrection, but must rely on the love medicine of the goddess. And then imagine how Osiris goes to rule the spirit realm in the Earth, while Isis, the first celebrated widow in history, raises the young hero Horus to grow up and strive for freedom. It is no wonder that Isis rises again at the end of the Piscean Age, and points to the empowerment of women in the Age of Aquarius.
Pisces' Ruling Planet: Neptune
The planet Neptune was first predicted and observed in 1846, and soon afterwards astrologers – who are not at all upset by new planets, but wait as patiently as we can for astronomers to find them – designated Neptune as the ruling planet of Pisces. As Neptune has an orbital period of 164.8 years, it will happen, interestingly enough, that Neptune will complete in 2010 - 2011 one full orbit since his discovery in 1846. In fact, Neptune’s entry in 2011 into Pisces, the sign of his rulership, is one of the key milestones on our way to 2012 and Aquarius.
Neptune is the obvious symbolic favorite for the Age of Pisces. While the journey by sea is an ancient archetype reflected in the Taurean Age story of Gilgamesh seeking immortality in the depths of the sea, and more famous stories from the Age of Aries – The Odyssey, Noah’s Flood, Jonah and the Whale – it is in the Age of Pisces that explorers sail across the ocean, even sail all the way around the world, for the first time. The mastery of modern shipbuilding, of the navigational compass and “rutters” showing safe sea routes, all become indispensable in the competition among the nations of Europe, and later the United States and Japan, for overseas empire.
Now, as the age of Pisces comes to an end, this all shifts radically. The competition for water resources gets grimmer and deadlier as big agribusiness seeks to control all food production, the last rainforests are cut down to make grazing land for future hamburgers, the oceans have become so polluted that some wonder whether they can ever be brought back to health, and the once-abundant tuna stocks of Sicily have now been almost fished out to provide the finest sushi for Japan. U. S. Navy testing of LFAS sonar weapons disorients and kills dolphins, whales and other marine life. Neptune is likely to feel much disempowered and disrespected by all this, and one wonders how forcefully he will respond before the Age of Pisces is out.
Zodiac Sign: Pisces the Two Fishes
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In the constellation Pisces, the lines that hold the two Fish meet at a single point. While this picture suggests that the Fishes are facing in different directions, there is no nuance yet of opposition. The Egyptian Pisces image shown here, from late in the Age of Aries, is typical. The fish are facing the same way, with the glyph for water -- Aquarius -- between them. |
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The link between the Fish and Christianity came from the early centuries of the Christian movement, when believers who wished to stay well hidden from persecutors would signal subtly through the sign of the fish because the Greek ichthys is an anagram for the words meaning “Jesus Christ, God and Savior.” As everyone knows, some of the original disciples of Jesus were fishermen, he empowered all his devoted followers to be “fishers of men,” and one of the Latin titles still used by the pope of Rome is Piscator, “the Fisherman.”
But there is much more to it than this, for the shape of the fish is actually an ancient mystic symbol that may have originated as far back as the Age of Taurus, but begins to spread everywhere in the Age of Pisces, and exerts an enormous influence on the art and architecture of Christian Europe and on Islam as well. To understand this symbol and sense its importance, we’ll have to dip for a page or two into the well of mysterious knowledge known as sacred geometry.
The Vesica Pisces
Take a deep breath. If the word geometry, any geometry, raises an alarm in the orange sector of your self esteem, and brings back that year in high school when the only possible advantage of studying geometry was that it gave you a momentary respite from thinking obsessively about sex, please be at peace. In what follows here, the pictures are easy, there are no Greek letters or different kinds of dotted lines, and the only terms in the equation are body and spirit.
Geometry simply means “Earth measurement.” And while there are a lot of practical uses for the principles of sacred geometry, it is called that because as a spiritual study, sacred geometry is based on the idea that geometric shapes, as they appear in nature and as they may be constructed by human art, are a means by which God aims to teach the secrets of the universe to those who wish to know.
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The sacred geometric shape that interests us here is called a Vesica Pisces, literally a “fish bladder.” A vesica pisces, as shown here, is the football-shaped overlapping area shared by the two circles drawn through each other's centers at top and bottom. The shape defined in red by the two additional circles at right and left clearly resembles a fish's body, with the lines of the tail extending below the edge of the vecisa pisces in the center. Why is the vesica pisces of any importance to us? Not just because it helped give the cathedrals of the Age of Faith their compelling vertical thrust, and appeared in countless other images from Islamic as well as Christian art. |
Interestingly, while many Christian saints are depicted in niches and paintings surmounted by the pointed shape of the vesica-like shape of the "gothic arch," they are never shown entirely enclosed by the vesica pisces. The only one who ever appears surrounded by a vesica pisces, as he does here, is Jesus. Why is this? Why is the vesica pisces apparently reserved for him?
| Because, in Christian belief, Jesus was the only dual being with both divine and human qualities. If we imagine that the first circle in the vesica design is the circle of spirit, representing the unity and perfection of God, and that the second circle is God’s self-expression in the creation of matter, then the two circles symbolize spirit and body, and the zone where they overlap is the intersection of the spiritual and the physical. This duality between soul and body is crucial – this word comes from “cross,” – to our understanding of the Piscean Age.
Earlier eras certainly believed in the soul, and its power to survive the death of the physical body if one has led a virtuous life. The Jews, not called “the people of the Book” for nothing, believed that a Jew who lived piously would be “gathered unto his people” at death, and an angel would inscribe his name in a Book of Life. From the New Kingdom of about 1,500 BC, the Egyptians held faith that people besides the king could be accepted into eternal life with Osiris.
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The Agony of Duality
But the Christian movement, and Islam a few centuries later, were the first world religions to teach that every soul, no matter how poor or humble, could aspire to and achieve immortality and the bliss of paradise. And more than this, both these faiths imagined the body and the soul as adversaries locked in a struggle that must end in Heaven or Hell, with each human being torn between the body’s desires to pig out on food, pass out from drink, get laid, get rich and get rowdy, and the soul’s desire to rise above the body’s nasty lusts and seek only the rarefied, airy delights of the soul. The wealth-loving Taurean Age would have been amazed to hear a term like “filthy lucre,” and the warriors of the Age of Aries would have rubbed their bronze beards in puzzlement at the idea that the most important battle we face is not between princes or peoples, but between God and the Devil for each human soul. The two great religions of the Piscean Age are not the first ones to imagine, though they were the first to propagate through the planet, the idea that the soul is pure and the body is dirty, and that in each human being body and soul are not just split in duality, but are at war with each other.
This Piscean theme of conflict has shown up everywhere for the last 2,000 years in everything from the war within the soul to dog eat dog business, the battle of the sexes, sibling rivalries and family feuds, thesis and antithesis, class struggle, split personalities and seemingly so many million other ways for human beings to go against each other, and struggle within themselves too, that to many people in the Christian West and the Muslim East, it may seem that conflict is not only the lifeblood of the drama, but the law of life itself, the essential truth of the way it is here in the three-dimensional world.
We can see this here in the way that the position of the two fish in the constellation of Pisces seems inevitably to turn into a stylized glyph that expresses not just difference, but opposition.
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The version of the Pisces symbol we see here, from a medieval zodiac, shows the two fish moving in opposite directions. The best we can expect in this paradigm, it seems, is that even when we are not aligned against each other, we will not be with each other either, and will always be seeking to move away from rather than toward each other. |
It is this desire to move apart, to listen for the different drummer, that defines the essential loneliness of the Piscean paradigm, as each one is faced, especially in the middle-class cultures that have appeared in the last three centuries, with the choice of conforming or rebelling, breaking out or fitting in, following the fashion or starting one, living as an other-directed person who fits in with others and meets their expectations, or as a self-directed one who does not necessarily defy society, but refuses to let it limit him. The result, as we reach the end of the Age of Pisces, is that conflicts are everywhere, and even those who are not in a fight long for the vacation that gets them away from it all, or even dream, like the heroes of Kurosawa’s I Live in Fear and Theroux’s Mosquito Coast, of moving their families to a South American jungle to get away from all the danger and struggle.
It is no wonder that now, in the twilight of the Age of Pisces, national governments look urgently for a way to unite their people without having to incarcerate all of them, and even a horror like the events of Sept. 11, 2001 may seem “a blessing in disguise,” as Donald Rumsfeld actually called it, a way to pull what seems a hopelessly fractious and centrifugal country into some kind of cohesion. The Age of Aquarius will soon show us much more pleasant ways to do this, for our communities, countries and our whole global village, but first, for the next few years, we will witness the continued pulling apart, into what once were opposites but are now poles as far apart as they can get, all of the areas ruled by the sign of Pisces.
As Pisces rules hidden knowledge and secrets of all kinds, we can expect that human beings will continue to divide into seekers of mysticism, esoterica and profound meditation on one side, and on the other obsessive “security” experts determined to hide everything from to high crimes and state secrets to trade formulas and computer codes to the silliest skeletons in the closet. It can’t all be hidden, of course, and this is why we will see on the way to 2012 a parade of dirty laundry so lurid, shocking and elegant that not even Fellini could have imagined it. This great director, incidentally, had a quintessentially Piscean world view. “I must have opposition,” he said in his last filmed interview. “Someone to annoy me, someone to oppose me. I need an enemy to do anything good.”
Something’s got to give, and the Age of Aquarius will bring it. For now, a little secret before we leave the Age of Pisces. If we keep focusing on the two different circles that form the vesica pisces, then naturally we will keep seeing duality, division and separation, and the other symptoms of the glass half empty. To see the glass half full, we focus on the vesica shape in the center. It is, of course – don’t tell this to anyone who isn’t seated and ready – a vagina. It encloses the sacred figure within just as the cow’s horns of Hathor and Isis enclose the disk of the Sun. The vesica pisces is the sacred feminine. We understand this better now, and are better prepared to give due reverence, as we near the dawn of Aquarius. This awareness of the healing power of the goddess, and the energizing dynamic of dualities that are complementary rather than conflictive, and competitive ("striving together") rather than merely destructive, are among the key principles that will help us navigate the turbulent waters ahead. They will not soothe all of Neptune's ire -- but they may mollify it enough to give us a way through.
Best wishes for smoother sailing by and by. Keep Holding That Frequency.
