The day before the solstice last month was the last gasp of an unimaginably old era. The next day marked the start of a brand new one. As we take our first baby steps into 2013, let’s consider the unusual significance of what’s beginning.
To get a bead on any new entity — whether a person, a cat, an empire or a macro-cycle — astrologers draw up natal chart. What stands out in the chart of our newborn era?
The first thing we see in this chart (discussed in detail in last month’s Skywatch) is the Finger of God, like a hand showing the way, pointing to Jupiter, the planet of knowledge and perspective1. Saturn and Pluto generate the theme of the new epoch; Jupiter proposes the means.
The theme here is the death (Pluto, Scorpio) of the old status quo (Saturn, Capricorn), and the means is knowledge — or more precisely, perspective. That highlighted Jupiter in Gemini is telling us what the key to resolving the crises of this world moment is.
It’s to broaden our minds.
Being informed (Gemini) is part of this broadening. But the Jupiterian function goes beyond the mere consumption of facts and figures. Jupiter is about starting with particulars and extrapolating generalized truths from them. It is about copping the big picture. This chart is saying we need new ways of deriving meaning about ourselves and the world. Not just new knowledge, but new ways of framing knowledge.
Mercury’s Great Heist
In The Astrology of Awakening, Eric Meyers talks about “Mercury’s Great Heist,” referring to the way the planet of thinking monopolizes our lives. This is the planet traditionally linked with the “lower mind,” whereas Jupiter, governor of the search for meaning, was linked with the “higher mind2.” Meyers explains how the processing of information, Mercury-style, has come to dominate our functioning. Especially since the dawning of the Age of Reason, the mediating of the outer world by incessant linear thought is imagined to be the high mark of humanness.
How telling it is that the name “the Enlightenment” was given to that surge of new ideas in 18th century Europe. The fact that we use such a grand word to describe an intellectual movement – not a spiritual one — betrays how overambitious we are, in our expectations of just how much the mind alone can do.
Certainly it makes evolutionary sense that a flowering of rationality came about when it did, at that point in history. At the time, it was just what the doctor ordered. Rationalism wrenched humanity’s mental faculties out of the passivity they had settled into, over all those centuries of believing that reality was nothing more or less than whatever popes and kings said it was.
The industrial revolution continued this momentum, solidifying the predominance of the scientific mind (Mercury). Prioritizing speed, quantity and profit, we now have a world where each new generation of smart phones leaves last month’s in the dust3, each new generation of nuclear weaponry is rendered obsolete without (thank Goddess) being deployed.
Out of Whack
But our infatuation with mechanical and technological knowledge has become excessive, and has thrown us out of whack. Our stewardship of the Earth has gone derelict, and our spiritual capacities are languishing in arrested development. The proud modern mind can create some very impressive machines, but otherwise it doesn’t seem to know what it’s doing.
Wouldn’t you think Uncle Sam — Number One in the world, technologically — would have the wit to institute some common-sense precautions in the face of all these natural disasters it has suffered lately? Like buffering its infrastructure against increasingly frequent storms?4 Wouldn’t you think it could protect its children against out-of-control gun violence, like the horrible shooting at the New Moon in December? Wouldn’t you think that the richest country in the world could figure out how to take care of its poor?
These are Jupiterian questions, involving ethics and the application of intelligence. Such questions stagnate in the USA: they are disconnected from soulful understanding and thus become stillborn before being acted upon.
The “fiscal cliff” negotiations in Washington are providing another stunning example of the low level of intelligence that is considered acceptable. Here we have an elected leadership who, as the Daily Show put it, fails to display even bare bones competence and middle school-level maturity.
Mercury and Jupiter
The fact that unalloyed left-brain thinking has its limitations, even dangers, has started to dawn on many people. On the individual level, it often seems as if our never-silent brains run us, rather than us running them. As anybody who has tried to meditate knows all too well, the effort to quell our mental wheel spinning presents such a dilemma as to suggest the pathology of addiction.
In the collective realm, the public conversation is stymied by a use of Mercury that represents the very lowest rung on the intellectual level: dualism, a crudely binary worldview that has become the lingua franca of popular culture. Our dualistic worldview tries to squeeze every conceivable scenario into a yes-or-no framework.
A movie is either good (thumbs-up) or bad (thumbs down). A law benefits either my team (/country/race/religion/ etc) or your team. A US voter must be either a Democrat or a Republican. Using Mercury in this simplistic way has been, for as long as we can remember, the normal way to see life.
But among meaning-seekers there is a growing sense that the way we use our minds has become dis-ensouled5. In the frenzy of producing and consuming that has set the pace in the First World — and is in its ascendancy in the Third6 — there is little room for spiritual or philosophical inquiry (Jupiter). Like a prodigious child whose technical skills outstrip her social maturity, we have some catching up to do where understanding is concerned. In the chart of the new era, the cosmos has laid an unmistakable clue, pointing to Jupiter as if with a flashing neon arrow.
On the 30th of this month, Jupiter stations direct. This is an auspicious time to make a pledge to the new way that is beckoning. We can start by promising ourselves to explore the use of our minds that goes beyond dualism.
Just imagine the freedom of shaking off those fetters.
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Notes
1 I have erected the chart for Washington DC; the Finger of God is consistent for all locations.
2 Astrologer Robert Hand calls Mercury’s operation “automatic thinking”: the rote intelligence we use in everyday functioning.
3 Smartphones are “the new Barbie dolls for adults,” someone said recently. “We take them everywhere we go, we play with them all day, we dress them in bright colors and we buy a new one every year.”
4 Despite the growth of mass consciousness about the link between global warming and increasingly destructive storms, last year saw a billion tons more carbon dioxide pumped into the air than the year before, mostly from the burning of coal and oil {governed by Pluto } (from the journal Nature Climate Change, Nov 2012.)
5 Rick Tarnas’ word to describe the process by which the modern mind has become estranged from the spiritual.
6 The First/Third World dichotomy is fast becoming obsolete. Consider that China, the world’s fastest growing economy and the USA’s closest rival, is now by far the world’s biggest polluter.
