Giving Away The Store?
The dire events of 2007-2011, strange as they look from the usual economic perspective of policies and numbers, make perfect sense within the context of history and astrology. The financial calamity of the early 21st century, and the climate of fraud and folly that made it possible, are in fact exactly what we could expect at the end of the Piscean Age.
Pisces, ruled by the dark, mysterious lord Neptune, is the most spiritual of all signs, and also the most mystical and deeply compassionate. It is appropriate, then, that the beginning of the Piscean Age in the second century BC was a time when social ideas of human equality and liberation, religious forces of pantheism, and messianic prophecies of a universal teacher coming to free and save all mankind, entered the stream a century before Virgil wrote of a new "glorious age . . . [who] shall rule the world that his fathers' virtues have set at peace." These cryptic lines from the Fourth Eclogue, envisioning a new Prince of Peace about to be born, have often been said to prophesy the birth of Jesus.
Pisces: The Age of Fantasy, Imagination & Illusion
Pisces rules theatre and dance, and arenas of the imagination — in places both sacred and profane — where atmospheres of mystery are created by artful arrangements of light and fragrant smoke, color and fabric and sound that can fuse all present into one heart and soul united by the same mythic experience.
The downside to all this enchanting, magical illusion is that Pisces rules all manner of altered states of consciousness, in everything from mystical vision, shamanic travel and meditation, to dreams, drugs, and delusions. Thus the unevolved, needy Pisces type can be a perpetual victim and energy vampire, the artist of addiction who gets stuck in every available substance and then is deceptive about it. He is also the wishful thinker who conceives the most fantastic, gorgeous dreams, but can't seem to start himself toward realizing them.
It is only to be expected, then, that the combinations of technology and propaganda that exist now at the end of the Piscean Age have created fantasy images so brilliant and seductive that millions who will believe anything now live in the enthralled narcosis of a continuous waking sleep.
Welcome to the End of Pisces
Welcome to the end of the Age of Pisces. If the sleep of reason produces monsters, as Goya named one of his paintings, it also invites Ponzi schemers, inside traders, addicts, emotional vampires, co-dependents, denialists, delusionaries, and the whole menagerie of deceit who proliferate at Neptune's negative pole — not because our imaginations are overactive, but because they are not being used at all.
The inescapable result is late Piscean corporatism, which concentrates immense wealth in fewer and fewer talons while the many live in despair, so disempowered and dumbed down that they have never sensed the forces of mind and will that lie within them, and are unable to help or free themselves or their loved ones, much less their communities and their planet.
The Late Pisceans: Great Corporations & The Nations They Own
The qualities of the corporations that have led us to unprecedented prosperity, followed by incalculable disaster will help us define, by contrast, the Aquarian economy:
- The Piscean corporation is as hierarchic as any church or army, concentrating all decision-making and power in a few tiers, even a single tier, of executives at the top.
- It is a competitive dog-eat-dog struggle for survival, in which aggressive firms create a pervasive culture of fear in which executives learn to trust no one and covet everything.
- It is secretive, having moved far beyond the protective security that Winston Churchill described — in time of war, truth is escorted by a bodyguard of lies — to the premise that information has power when it is hidden, but loses power when it is shared.
- It is obsessively fearful of scarcity, seeing planetary resources as finite, so that the company must grab what is left before it vanishes, or, even worse, a competitor gets it.
- It is all-consuming, seeking like Neptune's ocean to dissolve everything into itself. It not only aims to seize resources, as banks have done in the bailout robbery of late 2008. It corrupts and thereby controls governments. It has grown relentlessly since 2001, when 51 of the hundred largest economies on Earth were multinational corporations, to such power that it manipulates the boom-and-bust cycle at will, invariably to its own profit.
- It is deceptive and delusive, using the most narcotic, seductive tools of modern media to reduce entire societies to what Tom Robbins called "a vast herd of homogenized consumers, individually expendable, docile, and beyond basic job skills, not too smart."
©2011 by Dan Furst. All rights reserved.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Weiser Books,
an imprint of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. www.redwheelweiser.com
This article was adapted with permission from the book:
Surfing Aquarius: How to Ace the Wave of Change
by Dan Furst.
Learn how to thrive in the Age of Aquarius! Surfing Aquarius is for people who want to make the best of the years just ahead by making brave, optimistic choices in a spirit of community. Surfing Aquarius shows how 2012 is the beginning of a spiritual transformation when awakened human beings will create new societies based on Aquarian principles of inventive teamwork and empowered service.
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About the Author
Dan Furst has been an actor, astrologer, singer, theatre producer, and ceremonial artist in New York, Japan, India, Indonesia, Hawaii and Egypt. His Universal Festival Calendar, published on his website since July 1998, has been widely cited and reprinted, and has made him one of the world's most respected authorities on sacred and mythic time and the Age of Aquarius. He has been a professional astrologer for 33 years and has read astrology and astrocartography for thousands of clients all over the world. He lives in Pisac in the Sacred Valley near Cusco, in Peru. Visit him online at www.hermes3.net
