Taboo
If you use transits for consciousness work, this month’s Pluto station has your name on it. It initiates a five-month inquiry into the forbidden realms within the self 1. In April’s Skywatch I talk about how we might handle this transit in our personal lives, as well as how to use the lunar eclipse on April 25th, when the Moon and Saturn in Scorpio will bring things to a head.
And what about humans in groups? Why do religious and secular authorities declare certain ideas taboo? 2 If they are misusing Pluto, they proscribe certain ideas to protect other ideas. The reality they are protecting– the official story about how the world works — is the one that maintains their power. (Their worldly power, that is. Not their true power.)
For example, a few thousand years ago when the sky-god religions started to take over as the dominant global cosmology, the old truths 3 went underground. They became taboo. For a while there, any mention of Mother Earth got you burned at the stake (discussed in this essay). If you were a surviving devotee of the earlier, animistic worldview and you wanted to keep practicing your beliefs, you convened in secret, at great risk.
This is one reason why the concept of the occult (“hidden”) has been sending shivers down Christian spines for centuries. Among the populace, ignorance about and fear of the pagan worldview developed quite deliberately, enforced by church fathers who, themselves, had only the vaguest and most distorted notions about what was going on in those alchemists’ laboratories, and in those midnight rites in the forest glen.
Censorship
Censorship is ad hoc taboo-making. I thought about this recently when I heard that TED, the high-end conference venue that hosts speakers like Bill Clinton, had shut down Graham Hancock’s YouTube video.
Hancock is a British journalist and visionary in the Terrence McKenna mold. His bowdlerized lecture was about the psychotropic vine ayahuasca, traditionally used in the Amazon jungle as a conduit to experience the spirit of planet Earth. His studies have found that, all over the world, people who partake of the plant as a spiritual exercise experience similar visions: that of an Earth goddess who presents herself in order to bring a new state of consciousness into the world.
The honchos at TED, whose branding slogan is “Ideas Worth Spreading,” declared Hancock’s material “unscientific.” Clearly a more apt tagline for these guys would be “Ideas that Fit the Dominant Paradigm”. It is worth noting, in this context, that Big Pharma is one of their sponsors.
In mid-March, when the video was pulled, the square between Pluto (taboo) and Uranus (technology) was being triggered by Mars (war). And are you ready for the name of the banned lecture? “The War on Consciousness.”
Hancock makes the case that modern industrial society allows us only one kind of consciousness: the left-brain kind. He points out that we’re allowed momentary respites from it, via alcohol, sugar, pharmaceuticals, etc.; but if we try psychedelics we can be sent to jail.
He draws a parallel between the government’s criminalization of ayahuasca and the unspeakable destruction being visited upon the Amazon jungle by profiteers trying to turn it into soybean farms to feed cattle to serve the hamburger industry. He reminds us that throughout history, the thought police have targeted any belief system that sanctified the Earth.
Not a Right
Another expression of the square between Pluto (mind control) and Uranus (the internet) reappeared in recent weeks. Bradley Manning, the young soldier who is now a prisoner of the US government for leaking military secrets to WikiLeaks, was back in court for another pretrial hearing. On the New Moon of April 10th, just before the Pluto station, it was decreed that media access to this hearing was “a privilege, not a right.”
The Pentagon’s judge was playing the role of Pluto in dominance/ submission mode. The punishment of truth-tellers like Manning and the silencing of visionaries like Hancock fall along the same continuum as the extermination by papal decree of worshipers of the Divine Feminine.
But it won’t work. No matter how ruthless its machinations, a human agency can’t close off the entryway to the cave of wisdom. The Church’s declarations of anathema, the government’s efforts to stifle the truth about wars of conquest, even the heartbreaking ravishing of the Amazon jungle are, in the long view, temporary gestures. They must fail in the end.
Cosmic law, like the root of a hacked-down vine, runs too deep to be vanquished.
Notes
1 The word forbidden is perceived as a dare by our inner adolescent, who rebels against being told we can’t have something; and the ego is titillated when it feels naughty — per the sexy exhortation “Forbid yourself nothing.” We are so busy gleefully reacting to proscription that we usually miss the deeper significance of Plutonian taboo.
2 The original sense of this Polynesian word is sacred. Its modern connotation of danger is linked to its etymological meaning as a warning against sacrilege. Like a temple within which it feels disrespectful to speak aloud, certain mysteries are so sublime that they need to be shrouded in silence, or coded, to protect non-initiates from misconstruing them.
3 That is, paganism. But we must qualify the term, because the Church of Rome has appended it with diabolical connotations. All it means is “country ways.” It was in the rural areas, where life was lived cheek to jowl with Nature, that the ancient worship of the devas, sprites and the Great Mother was hardest to stamp out.