“When the Moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then Peace will guide out planet
And Love will steer the stars.
This is the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius…”
“Age of Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In” sung by The Fifth Dimension
The dawn of a new age, the beginning of a new paradigm is not a sharply delineated event. It is more of an on-going process; something that happens with its own momentum, proceeds according to its own agenda, and creates along the way ever-richer patterns of previously unglimpsed meaning. As the new ordering principle emerges, there are swirls and eddies of psychic energy that all too often in the past turned into an avatistic and aggressive pattern of revolutions, wars, and religious orthodoxies. As Taurus turned into Aries, Moses smashed the golden calf and Akhenaton invented monothesism; as Aries turned to Pisces, Jesus preached the gospel of love and his apostles built a church on the gospel of fear; and now, as Pisces turns to Aquarius, we must face the issue of power, and the fate of our species, and all the species on this planet.
We face the death of History, which in fact is simply the bragging chatter of alpha-male apes huddled around a fire, and the beginning of Myth, which is the collective dream of a new kind of “humanity.” Many ancient cultures from around the planet, including some of the most sophisticated, such as the Egyptians, the Mayans, and the Tibetans, have assigned to this time the label, “THE END.” The temporal calculations from the Great pyramid end at 2001. The Mayan calendar ends in 2012, after a twenty-five year preparation period that began in 1987, which is, of course, the origin of the Harmonic Convergence. The year 1987 was also the last year of the Kalachakra calendar of ancient Tibet, being the last of the 16 cycles of 60 years since the Kalachakra teaching were released from the mythical kingdom of Shambala in 1027.
The Kalachakra
Curiously, the legend of Shambala gives us the meaning of the seemingly nonsensical astrological information in the song, “Age of Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In.” The Vishu Purana, one of the oldest of the Hindu classics, mentions Kalki, the Hindu Messiah, an avatar of Vishu who will be the last King of Shambala. Kalki is very similar to Kulkan, the Mayan White Messiah, and he is shown leading a great army of enlightened beings against the barbarians. “He will then re-establish righteousness upon the earth; and the minds of those who live at the end of the age of strife shall be awakened, and shall be as pellucid as crystal… As it is said ‘When the sun and the moon, and …Tisha, and the planet Jupiter are in one mansion, the golden age shall return.’”
We are living at the end of the age of strife. The War to End all Wars is winding down in the Serbo-Croatian hills where it began 85 years ago. The rumble of mortar fire in the streets of Sarajevo are the dying echoes of the thunder from the Western front. The barbarian Communist Chinese vandalize and genocide at will in Tibet, the land of the Dharma, as the Precious Guru Padmasambhava foresaw. To awaken, to receive that clarity “pellucid as crystal,” we must resolve the problem of power.
In attributing the letters of the Hebrew alphabet to the images of the medieval psycho-technology known as the Tarot, we come upon the deeper archetypal forces at work within this time of transition. The zodiacal sign Aries is attributed to the Tarot Trump The Emperor, a good choice given the Imperial quality of the Aries current, such as the Roman Empire and the Orthodox Church. The sign of Aquarius was attributed to the trump called The Star, the image of a beautiful young woman pouring the Sea of Crystal, the Milky Way, out upon the earth. This image is appropriate, for the most amazing advance of the early Aquarian era is space flight, the urge to reach the stars. The images and the astrological concepts match, but, until 1904, the attribution of the Hebrew letters confused the issue.
The fifth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, HEH, the pictogram, originally, for a window, was assigned to the Emperor and Aries. TSADDI, the seventeenth letter of the Hebrew Alphabet (and pictogram for a fish hook) was equated with The Star and Aquarius. It seems as absurd to speak of opening a window on Imperial Authority as it does to say the Stars fish for souls, hooking them and pulling them out of their environment. Yet, patriarchal violence is killing our planet and our spirits, dehumanizing our functions until we no longer feel the rhythms of the earth tides. And there is something eerily suggestive of the image of “stars fishing” in the tales of UFO abductions.
These attributions seem even more odd when we consider the passage in the Bahir, or “Book of Brilliance,” where the transformation of Gimel into Daleth and then into Heh is described. Gimel is the High Priestess in the Tarot and Daleth is the Empress–why then would they transform into the Emperor?
The Bahir also tells us that Tsaddi is composed of the letters Nun and Yod, or Death and the Hermit in the Tarot. To be hooked by the stars is to endure the death of the ego self might be the simplest way to put it. This certainly describes the old ways of ascetic renunciation, the only path to transcendence in the fallen or “quarantined” condition of humanity. But, in the new age of renewed galactic contact, these concepts have changed.
In 1904, the Star Goddess Nuit announced: “All the old letters of my book are alight, but Tsaddi is not the Star.” What then is attributed to the Star? The obvious attribution for Tsaddi is the Emperor, given the prevalence of Caesar, Kaiser and Tsar as Imperial titles, which means that Heh becomes the Star-window, the direct channel for inter-stellar communication. This shift in attributions produces the correct alignment of meanings: The Emperor is the very symbol of alpha-male dominance and power-over-life thanotropic spiritual illness. The very disease that got this planet quarantined in the first place!
In the new alignment, the Emperor’s attributions are Aries (the sign of Imperial structures and patriarchal religions) and Tsaddi, with its element of embracing the spiritual necessity of death of body and of personality. This gives us a clear archetypal view of the disease of patriarchal violence.
The Star then returns to its original meaning of spiritual guidance. The Star-Window is open, and we are receiving the assistance of the galactic rescue squad. We are receiving medical attention! The progression from the Bahir suddenly makes supreme sense: The Priestess becomes the Empress, and then transforms into the Star Goddess. Even the name of God in Hebrew YHVH returns to its original sense. Where once we could read YHVH as Hermit-Emperor-Hierophant-Emperor, all male dominant qualities (suggestive in another sense of the masculine Yod controlling the name, Eve, of the original mother), now the name of God reads, Hermit, Star, Hierophant, Star, or a balance of male and female potencies. The meaning shifts from outer authority of Power-over, which is essentially the ability to destroy, to inner authority, Power-with, the co-creative function of the intuition which is the ability to change and evolve.
The shift was announced in 1904 and occurred 88 years later in the summer of 1992. At dawn on July 26th, a wave of energy swept the planet as the galactic communication window opened. Some people thought of it as a time shift–from a 12/60 rhythm to a 13/20 rhythm–while others saw it in terms of photon clouds and UFO landings. Every man and every woman on this planet has begun to come to terms (in whatever way they can) with their and our stellar nature and origins. History falls away and we can now begin to dream the dream that collective dream of peace and love and hope. We can now begin to braid our monkey minds into a new humanity.
Earth Odyssey ‘92 saw the beginning of the journey of spaceship Terra, our earth, through the dimensional vistas of galactic citizenship. Our goal is to create a sense of community and then endow that community with the experience of the forces of change so that decisions concerning our planetary future can be made with the free will and consent of all sentient beings. As a species we must allow the old tactics of power-over authority to fade away, as we turn instead to the bright inventive strategies of power-with authority, the forces of co-creation and co-operation.
The choice is ours! The consequences, however, belong to our children, and our children’s children. Let us choose well, O Nuit!