An observation that’s been a long time coming:
Real life is subtle. Real people are subtle. Real history is subtle. And so, from this we might conclude that Real Politics is subtle.
Political narratives, on the other hand, are simplistic. They are stories. They are myths.
As such, they are easily recognized as fiction by those who aren’t motivated to believe them. While those who are so motivated regard them as religious truth. That is, a truth that is beyond mere factuality. A truth, indeed, that is to be defended against facts.
So it is that the culmination of the Age of Pisces is just this: a global war between religions, where every person’s truth is someone else’s damned delusion.
The astrological ages are a function of a natural fact meeting a mythological map. The natural fact is the wobble of the Earth on its axis, which causes the celestial pole (that point in the sky, currently marked by Polaris, around which all other stars in the hemisphere are seen to revolve), and the relationship between the seasons and the starry constellations to shift.
The axis wobbles so the pole revolves; the pole revolves so the equinoxes and solstice points precess against the constellations of the zodiac. To “precess” is to move in reverse.
So, how do we know this motion is in reverse? Because we take the direction of the Sun’s apparent motion through the course of the year as defining forward. The Sun moves forward in time, while the equinox point precesses backwards.
Where the Sun travels, beginning on the Spring Equinox, from Aries to Taurus to Gemini to Cancer to Leo to Virgo to Libra to Scorpio to Sagittarrius to Capricorn to Aquarius to Pisces and back again to Aries; the Equinox and Solstice points travel in reverse. They precess.
The Spring Equinox was of particular concern among the ancients who devised this astrological system. You might consider them as having a thought that would be rediscovered scientifically by the Chaos Mathematicians, who would learn of the sensitivity within any sufficiently complex system to the state of initial conditions. Not in a crude Rube Goldberg kind of way, where the chain of events is singular, however elaborate. Not, in other words, as Dominos.
In any case, point being, for the ancients, the constellation seen behind the rising Sun on the Spring Equinox was thought to define a sort of Initial Condition that characterized the whole year. And as go the years, so goes the Age.
From one perspective, an Age is just a collection of years, but it’s more than that, because each of the signs of the Zodiac is composed of thirty individual degrees, which are further grouped into tens, the Decans. And every Degree and every Decan has its own particular quality; with the Decans serving as Beginning, Middle and End of the sign they compose.
This brings us to a rather strange consequence of this symbolic understanding of Precession. It’s a consequence that’s strange in itself, that is, thinking within the terms of this symbolic system. It is doubly strange because this symbolic system is supposed, by our current worldview, to be complete horseshit. It’s supposed to be an exploded religion, and yet, the image of the present it provides seems profoundly accurate as a gestalt for the times we are living in.
The particular “strange consequence” that I’m thinking of is this: During the end of every age, the Sun precesses through beginning degrees, and initial Decan, of the sign of the Age. The energy of the beginning of each sign, thinking within the terms of this symbolic system, is initiating. It is what we could call self-certain.
In the normal forward motion of the Zodiac, as defined by the Sun’s yearly progress through the signs, the initiating energy of each sign leads into that sign. In precession, though, the initiating energy leads in reverse, back against its own premises.
It is in effect like an action that leads back against itself. It’s like driving North and heading South. The harder it pushes, the more it is undermined.
And it is exactly this dynamic, this auto-immune response, where the initiating energy of the Sign undermines the premises of its self-certainty, that causes Ages to dissolve.
In the forward motion of Time, one sign leads naturally into the other, as do the seasons, each laying a foundation, ripening, and then transforming into the next. Precessional ages, on the other hand, are the opposite of such natural making. The Ages unmake themselves, discovering by this apocalyptic undressing the structures of the previous sign, and next age, in a state of complete maturity.
The discovery of an advanced civilization within the human past in the 2012 film Prometheus provides an image of this precessional transfer.
Remember: we are thinking within the limits of a symbolic system. To do this, we must suspend our convictions about what’s real, in order to get inside the other perspective and see what can be seen from it. Just as we suspend our disbelief to experience a movie; and might further suspend our judgment to see from the perspective of some questionable, or even demonstrably evil, character.
But it is the nature of our times to view the real entertainment of questionable viewpoints as a sort of Original Sin. Everyone, instead, is gearing up to not listen as a testimony to the purity of their faith in the Right Religion. This, exactly, is the initiating energy of Pisces.
Yet, as this is the end of the Piscean Age, with the Equinox moving backward against the natural order, this initiating energy, this sense of religious conviction and corresponding revulsion toward pagan mythology – i.e. the Right Religion of other people – has exactly the opposite effect as it intends.
For the point of this revulsion, the point of this pious refusal to even look through the telescope of someone else’s worldview, is to create unity. The aim is to dominate by conversion of the masses of people. Yet the effect in fact is the exact opposite. These pious pushes to create unity only fragment things more.
And that, thinking from within the Symbolic System of Astrological Ages, is how the Age of Pisces ends: in desperate pushes for a unity that unmake themselves by means of their own passion. The end of any Age is a Chinese Finger Trap.
Meanwhile, the structures of the coming Age are as if archeological discoveries of some advanced yet extinct civilization. We encounter the future as the archaic past, and set about recovering what was long ago buried and lost.
For the beginning of the New Age is like the end of the Old moving backward, against itself. The Dead Come Back to Life, remade by the precessional reversion of their natural infirmity. The New Age has God on its side, and so succeeds in the face of its own obscurity. While the Old Age has God’s Face set against it, and so fails in spite of its overwhelming superiority.
The Old Age becomes, within the terms of this symbolic system, the definition of hubris, of vanity, of hypocrisy. It becomes a parody of itself, as was the court of Denmark.
That court had a single flaw, just as the Age has a single flaw: it has mistaken itself for the whole.
In Hamlet, Kingship depended upon the reality of virtue. To play the part of the Axial Joint, around which the whole wheel revolved, and on which it depended, a King requires the Blessing of Heaven. These are what the Laws of Heraldry, mentioned by Horatio in Act I scene i, referred to.
The laws of heraldry were supposed to keep kingship in accord with Justice. The sin of Claudius is in trying to execute kingship while being irresolvable with Justice. Claudius’ kingship and Justice are mutually exclusive.
This is a symbolic representation of the End of an Age, where instituted power is great yet terminally estranged from its own founding principle.
GWB, thus, is a Claudius figure.