I’ve been watching the unfolding of the current Covid-19 pandemic since the first news stories about it in the late fall of 2019, and like many people, I find the official story that’s grown up around the virus and the response to it impossible to take seriously. Partly that’s because the official narrative has been veering around like a well-greased weathercock on a blustery day, and partly it’s because large elements of that narrative are contradicted by scientific studies or, in many cases, the press releases on which the narrative itself is based. The fact that people are now being banned from social media for quoting pharmaceutical companies’ own documents is a good indication that there’s some serious falsification going on here.

Yet I find it just as hard to believe the main alternative story on offer these days. This is the claim that the virus and the vaccine are part of a sinister plan to take away what remains of civil liberties worldwide, along the lines of Klaus Schwab’s maunderings about a Great Reset. The problem here is that this sort of scheme would require governments and corporations everywhere to behave with a degree of competence they very clearly don’t display in any other context.

On reflection, it seems to me that what’s happened over the last two years makes sense if you simply factor in the shortsightedness, incompetence, and venality that government and corporate sectors alike have displayed in all their other dealings of late. With this in mind, I’ve sketched out a hypothetical reconstruction of what has actually been happening. It’s speculative but it accounts for the facts as I know them. As usual, I’ve focused on events in the United States, the one country I know tolerably well; readers in other countries will need to modify this story to fit their own local conditions. I haven’t footnoted anything; do your own internet searches on the important concepts listed below and you’ll find plenty of data.

At any rate, here’s a hypothesis about the real story behind Covid-19.

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Stage One: Business as Usual

The Covid-19 coronavirus was manufactured as part of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China. Gain-of-function research? That’s one of the currently hot fields of virus research, involving genetic engineering to make viruses more virulent in their effects on tissue cultures. It’s dangerous enough that federal regulations prohibit it in the US, which is why it was going on in China. Funding for the research, however, came from one of the many US government slush funds that prop up the pharmaceutical industry, by way of a pass-through entity to provide a fig leaf of plausible deniability. This is normal practice, part of the culture of kleptocracy that funnels tax dollars into corporate pockets with zero accountability.

Stage Two: A Minor Little Oopsie

Someone made a mistake, and the Covid-19 coronavirus got outside the supposedly secure facility where it was being kept. People in and around Wuhan started getting sick. Early on, there were a lot of deaths, but the death rate slid as the virus adapted to its new hosts in the usual way, ending up about as serious as a bad flu. (Respiratory viruses reliably do this: the sicker a patient gets, the fewer people on average they can infect, and this selection differential very rapidly turns novel respiratory viruses into highly transmissible but not especially dangerous members of the ordinary human respiratory flora.) So we saw an initial wave of stark panic and overreaction on the part of politicians and the media, followed by reassurances that everything would be fine after all, along with various more or less frantic attempts to keep anyone from finding out that the US government funded the creation of the virus.

Stage Three: Cashing In On The Sick

Then the pharmaceutical industry realized that Covid-19 had the potential to be a gargantuan cash cow. Since the Covid-19 virus could be counted on to mutate at the usual pace, if they could come up with a vaccine, they could count on being able to release a new booster shot every single year, and make the kind of reliable profits they now make from the annual flu vaccine. Since big pharma’s profiteering at the expense of patients has become a political hot potato in the US of late, the idea of a new source of extreme profits had a very definite appeal. This is why several effective dietary and pharmaceutical treatments for the virus got deep-sixed, since nobody was going to make billions off them, and it’s also why dud pharmaceuticals such as Remdesvir got hauled off the shelf and heavily marketed—they’re still patented and so can be sold for hundreds or thousands of dollars a dose.

Stage Four: Super Geek To The Rescue

At this point Bill Gates comes into the picture. Most of our current crop of kleptocratic godzillionaires like to play at saving the world in one way or another. (It apparently helps them avoid thinking about the way their firms maltreat their employees, cheat their suppliers, and screw the public.) Gates’ save-the-world hobby is vaccines, and the Gates Foundation is accordingly a major player in the vaccine industry. One of the foundation’s biotechnology patents was well suited to the situation, at least on paper. Pharma corporations thus churned out competing versions of a Covid-19 vaccine using that patent. Mind you, the technology in question has had very mixed results, because it has serious problems with antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), a known complication of immunization in which an ineffective vaccine makes it easier for a virus to make you sick. Nor was adequate testing done to find out if the Covid vaccines had that problem. The vaccines went into production anyway, since the pharmaceutical industry has a long history of launching inadequately tested drugs on the market with serene disregard for safety issues. (Remember Fen-Phen?)

Stage Five: Marketing Maneuvers

The political systems of modern industrial nations are riddled with graft, and so corporate interests can reliably get politicians to say and do whatever will help boost their profits. Once the goal du jour became marketing the vaccine to as many people as possible, therefore, politicians did what they were paid to do and turned on a dime, insisting that Covid-19 was sure to kill us all unless we all got vaccinated, and slapping on mask mandates and shutdowns as part of the political theater. That was purely a marketing gimmick. Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer was one among many official voices telling people in smug tones that if they wanted to have their lives back they’d better hurry up and get vaccinated. Various interesting irregularities in what counted as a case of Covid and what counted as a Covid fatality were also put to work in this cause. This served the necessary purpose of whipping up a classic media panic, to try to make everyone run out and get vaccinated.

Stage Six: The Pushback Begins

The problem is that a great many Americans do not trust the medical industry. There’s good reason for their mistrust, as medical malpractice has long been among the leading causes of death in the United States, and medical profiteering is far and away the leading cause of bankruptcy here as well. Thus an impressive number of people—possibly as many as half the population—flatly refused to get the vaccines. It didn’t help that the vaccines themselves turned out to have serious immediate side effects, including sudden death, at a rate a couple of orders of magnitude higher than any other vaccine currently in use. Though Soviet-style censorship was slapped on social media to keep “misinformation” from spreading, hard questions about the official narrative got asked with increasing frequency, and the number of people getting the Covid-19 shots flatlined: while the US government is now claiming that 70% of adult Americans are vaccinated, other sources of data suggest that the actual number is much less than that.

Stage Seven: Don’t Breathe A Word Of This

There was another reason for people to be suspicious, though that wasn’t clear at first. Everyone who’s had to use Microsoft programs knows that Bill Gates’ management style tends to produce second-rate, bug-ridden products that don’t work the way they’re supposed to work, and have to be pushed on reluctant consumers via high-pressure marketing and monopolistic practices. It turns out that the same was true of the biotechnology on which the Covid-19 vaccines are based. That would have been discovered in the usual way during the two to five years of testing a new vaccine normally gets, but the Covid vaccines didn’t get that; the first one to be authorized had a total of eight weeks of not especially rigorous testing, the others didn’t get much more, and so a far from minor problem slipped past. In the spring of 2021 word thus began to trickle out that the Covid-19 vaccines had a serious problem with ADE: once the initial protection wore off, a process which took a few months, people who’d been vaccinated were much more likely to get seriously ill from repeat exposure to Covid-19 than people who hadn’t. Thus the federal government and the medical industry suddenly had a self-inflicted disaster on their hands.

Stage Eight: Panic In The C-Suites

The first response of the people in power, of course, was to find somebody else to take the blame. That’s when politicians and the media turned on a dime (again) and suddenly started admitting that the virus could have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That’s when Bill Gates suddenly stopped being the poster child for the vaccine effort and got dumped in a hurry by his wife and kids, and when Anthony Fauci suddenly had to deal with a flurry of negative publicity and the unexplained cancellation of his ghostwritten memoirs. The goal was to find someone—Gates, Fauci, the Chinese, anyone—who could be made into the fall guy and blamed for the impending mess. Apparently that first round of bad news was followed by even worse news, however; I suspect that the news was that the ADE caused by the vaccine had a noticeable fatality rate, but that’s just a guess. One way or another, finding fall guys wasn’t an adequate dodge any more, since at this stage it wasn’t just careers that were at risk: it was potentially the viability of the entire political-economic establishment.

Stage Nine: Things Get Serious

All of a sudden, as a result, it was no longer enough to vaccinate 70% of the US population. Everyone without exception had to get vaccinated—if everyone gets the vaccine, after all, it will be easier to claim that what’s happening is a nasty new variant rather than vaccine-driven ADE, since nobody will be able to point out that the unvaccinated aren’t getting it. All of a sudden, officials dropped the (inaccurate) claim that the vaccines keep you from getting Covid-19. New outbreaks flared in which most people who got sick had been fully vaccinated; stories surfaced in the media about how strange it was that so many people were getting really nasty summer colds; the labor shortage somehow just kept getting worse and other shortages snowballed, but if you suggested that it was because too many people were sick you could count on being shouted down. Authorities began to talk earnestly about how a new variant might show up soon that would kill a third of the people who caught it. Under normal circumstances, there’s no way they could know that in advance. It makes perfect sense, however, if the vaccines have been found to cause serious ADE and they already have a good idea of what the fatality rate will be.

This is where we are as I write this. If my hypothesis is right, here’s what we can expect.

Stage Ten: Hoping for a Miracle

As ADE becomes more common, breakthrough infection clusters will pop up with increasing frequency, and the higher the percentage of the population in that region is vaccinated, the worse they will be. Variants will be blamed for this. Word of the imminent crisis will spread through the upper levels of society, however, causing increasingly frantic and irrational behavior, until it becomes next to impossible to get anything done if it depends on the government or big corporations. Medical laboratories will scramble to find a way to counteract ADE, though that’s been tried for decades now without success. Meanwhile the people who refuse to get vaccinated won’t budge no matter how much furious rhetoric and punitive policy gets dumped on them. Once this becomes clear, authorities will insist that everyone but a few holdouts has been vaccinated, in the fond hope that people will believe them one more time.

Stage Eleven: Into The Endgame

When ADE becomes too widespread to ignore and people begin to die in significant numbers, expect governments to proclaim the arrival of the predicted new hyper-lethal variant and impose a new round of shutdowns, mask mandates, and the like. The media will insist that the people who are dying are all unvaccinated as long as they can get away with it; pay attention to the vaccination status and health outcomes of people you know for a reality check. Unless some way of stopping ADE-enhanced infections can be found in a hurry, medical systems will buckle under the caseload and triage will become the order of the day. How soon this will happen, if it does, is impossible to say in advance. It’s also impossible to know in advance how soon it will become clear that the vaccines are responsible—or just how violent a backlash against the political and economic establishment this could provoke.

*****

So that’s my hypothesis. I hope I’m wrong. If anything like what I’ve sketched out does happen, I have friends and family members I care about who almost certainly won’t survive, given their current health and vaccination status. I also know enough about what happened during the Black Death, the Spanish flu, and other situations where a lot of people got sick and died in a hurry, to hope I can avoid seeing the same sort of events in my own time.

Nonetheless, it’s possible that the scenario I’ve sketched out is going to happen in the months immediately ahead of us. I would encourage my readers to assess this possibility and consider getting ready to weather a crisis several months in length, during which food and other necessities may be available only intermittently, medical care may be completely out of reach, and local, state, and national governments may not be able to do much more than flail helplessly and try to pass the buck. If anything like what I’ve described here happens, it will be a world-class mess, and a few basic preparations might go a long way to keep you and your loved ones safe and sound.

One more thing. I'll be moderating comments on this post very strictly. I'm not interested in arguing about whether the hypothesis I've offered is true or not -- that will be demonstrated by events, not by who yells the loudest. I've decided, after much brooding and some favorable divinations, to put this into circulation on the off chance that it may help some people. Make up your own mind and don't let anyone bully you into doing something you don't want to do.

Over the last year, and especially over the last month, I’ve fielded a flurry of questions about the astrological meaning of the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn that took place on Monday. I’ve been intrigued to note that quite a few of those questions have come from people who admit they don’t know much about astrology but have a sense, however vague, that this conjunction matters. As it happens, they’re quite correct. The conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn have a special role in astrology, and this one was of particular importance. As I’ll discuss shortly, it marks the end of one era in world history and the beginning of another.

Let’s start with some basics. Astrology is an empirical science based on more than 5000 years of recorded correlations between planetary motion and events on earth. We don’t know why it works. (Try getting funding for the necessary studies.) One of its branches—the technical name is mundane astrology—predicts political and cultural events. That’s the kind of astrology I practice. Most work with mundane astrology uses ingress charts—charts drawn up for capital cities for each solstice and equinox—but there are also larger cycles that mundane astrologers track.

One of those went through an important phase change Monday. No, it wasn’t the age of Aquarius; that began in 1879, according to the interpretation I use, and will last until 4039 AD. (In case you’re wondering why it hasn’t turned out to be an age of peace and love and brotherhood, the people who came up with that interpretation got it from smoking too much pot, not from the heavens.) The celestial odometer that rolled over on Monday is defined by the conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn—the process, as an older mythic language put it, by which Saturn gives “all the measures of the whole creation” to Jupiter.

Johannes Kepler’s drawing of the Grand Trigon.

Jupiter and Saturn conjoin every twenty years. Those conjunctions are located almost exactly 120° from each other, forming what astrologers call the Grand Trigon. (Yes, I know that sounds like something from a science fiction novel. Astrologers got there first.) Since ancient times each sign of the zodiac is linked to one of the four traditional elements of Earth, Water, Air, and Fire—scientists, who think they no longer believe in the four elements, call those “solids,” “liquids,” “gases,” and “energy” these days—and for a little less than two centuries at a stretch, every conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn happens in signs of the same element, with a little wobbling back and forth when you get close to the dividing line.

Beginning with the conjunction of 1842, all the conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn were in Earth signs until 1980-1, when a rare triple conjunction happened in Libra, an Air sign. In 2000 they conjoined in an Earth sign one last time. Monday’s conjunction in the Air sign Aquarius marked the beginning of a series of Air conjunctions, which will last until the Grand Trigon passes into the Water sign Scorpio on October 31, 2219. Astrologically, in other words, we have just passed from a 178-year-long era of Earth into a 199-year-long era of Air.

What does that mean? Since astrology is an empirical science, let’s glance back to 1226, the last time the Grand Trigon shifted from Earth to Air. That’s the chart above. In the 1226 Grand Mutation the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn was early in Aquarius, just as it was on Monday. As we’ll see, though, most of the other planetary positions were different. Most of all, notice Mars up there at the top of the chart. He’s in his rulership in Scorpio, and thus very strong; he’s in aspect with six of the other eight planets in the chart—and five of those six aspects are negative aspects, which predict serious trouble. It was an accurate prediction: among the entertaining events that took place during the astrological era that began in 1226 were the Black Death, the Mongol invasions, and the Hundred Years War.

Before any of my readers dive under the bed, let me reiterate one thing: these patterns in the 1226 chart do not appear on the 2020 chart. I’ve mentioned them here because I’ve seen people ask what is, after all, the logical first question about this year’s Grand Mutation—what happened the last time this occurred?—and I don’t want anyone to jump to the wrong conclusion. Mars in Scorpio in hostile aspect to a flurry of other planets in a Grand Mutation chart gives fair warning that mass death is on its way, but we don’t have that in the current chart.

The 2020 chart does have certain things in common with 1226. To begin with, of course, there’s the Grand Trigon passing from Earth to Air, and the conjunction early in Aquarius in both charts. The Earth era that ran from 1027 to 1226 was a period of savage ideological warfare (you’ve probably heard of the Crusades); that guttered out after 1226. In the same way, the period from 1842 to 2020 was a period of savage ideological warfare (you’ve probably heard of the Second World War and the Cold War); we can expect that to gutter out, too, as the new Air era gets under way. Wars will still happen—we’ll get to that—but the obsession with going to war against a world that refuses to convert to some ideology or other will wind down.

What replaced it the last time was a time of great cultural creativity. The period from 1226 to 1425 was the golden age of medieval philosophy, the age of the troubadors, and of a flowering of secular music and poetry and of mysticism. During those years a set of Welsh and Breton folktales about a mostly forgotten dark age king turned into the Arthurian legends. The Arabic, Persian, and Chinese spheres went through cultural flowerings of their own during the same period. In at least some parts of the world, we can expect something similar this time around, too.

The other significant parallel between 1226 and 2020 is a trine between the Sun and Uranus, which is especially important in both cases because Uranus is the dispositor of the conjunction—that is, he rules the sign in which Jupiter and Saturn are located when they conjoin. The Sun in mundane charts denotes government; Uranus is the planet of technology and change—it’s no accident that the discovery of Uranus in 1781 was followed by the most dramatic two centuries of technological innovation in human history. Sun trine Uranus predicts that government and technological change will be mutually supportive during the period ahead.

There’s a wrinkle, though. In 1226 Uranus was in Scorpio, the sign of his exaltation—in astrology, a planet in its exaltation is unusually strong and beneficent. He was also retrograde—that is, appearing to move backward from the perspective of the Earth; a retrograde planet in astrology predicts a return to older conditions. Sun trine an exalted, retrograde Uranus predicts the recovery of older, better technologies and cultural traits. (You’ve probably heard of the Renaissance.) The period from 1226 to 1425 was also an era of breathtaking technological innovation, in which printing, firearms, the magnetic compass, advances in sailing technology, and many other innovations strengthened central governments and set the stage for worldshaking changes in the eras to come.

In the 2020 chart, however, Uranus isn’t exalted. He’s in his fall in Taurus, and a planet in its fall is unusually weak and displays its most destructive influences. He is also retrograde, as he was in 1226, but because he’s in his fall we can expect not a new Renaissance, but a forced retreat to older technologies and cultural traits. Technological regress is as much a product of Uranian influence as technological progress; so, unfortunately, are disasters caused by technologies. In both cases, governments will be strengthened, because they alone have the resources to deal with disasters caused by badly managed technologies and the consequences of technological regress. Since Uranus is the dispositor of the conjunction, we’ll probably have to deal with a lot of both.

That’s about all we can learn from the 1226 chart about our future. (It has plenty more to say about conditions during the era it inaugurated, but that’s another matter.) To go on, let’s turn to the chart that launched the era that has just ended, the Grand Mutation chart for 1842, which is above. It’s a very unusual chart. Mars dominated the 1226 chart, but the Moon dominates this chart to an even greater extent. She is in her rulership in Cancer, thus very strong; what’s more, she stands alone on one side of the chart, with all the other planets clumped up together on the other side of the chart. This formation gives great strength to the planet standing by itself.

The Moon in mundane astrology represents the people. Before 1842, as in every previous age since the rise of cities, the vast majority of human beings were ruled by monarchs. In 2020 almost nobody is, and the forms of democratic governance have become so mandatory that even a straightforward hereditary monarchy like North Korea has to pretend to be a Democratic People’s Republic. This unprecedented state of affairs is shown in advance in the 1842 chart, partly by the extraordinary strength of the Moon, partly by her opposition with the Sun, the planet of kings, which is in his detriment (that is, very weak) in Aquarius.

Consider also the glorification of change for its own sake (usually labeled “progress”) that has been such a massive cultural fact over the last 178 years. Change in society is ruled by the Moon, the fastest-moving object in the heavens as seen from Earth, and an era dominated by the Moon will see just such an obsession. Interestingly, the dispositor of this chart is Saturn, lord of limits; notice the way that the struggle between Moon and Saturn, change and conservatism, has defined the politics of the last 178 years.

There’s much more to be said about this chart as it applies to the era that’s over, and much of it was said in advance by astrologer Richard Morrison, who published a set of predictions in 1842 titled Zadkiel’s Legacy; he scored quite a range of direct hits (and, let it be said, some serious flops; he thought he could predict earthquakes using astrology, and he was wrong.) Since our concern here is with the era that has just begun, let’s move to the 2020 chart below.

The first thing to notice from this chart is that no one planet has the kind of dominant position that Mars had in 1226 or the Moon had in 1842. This is normal in mundane charts, and gives us our first guideline for the era to come: it will be a period much closer to history as usual than the era of mass death that began in 1226 or the era of frantic change that began in 1842. With the Moon much less prominent, change for its own sake will likely be less unthinkingly valued, and democratic governments will be rather less widespread by the time the era ends.

In this chart, two planets—Mars and Neptune—are in their rulerships. One—Uranus—is in his fall, and he is the only retrograde planet. The two planets in rulerships show that war, ruled by Mars, and religion, ruled by Neptune, will be major influences over the next 199 years. Since Mars has only one aspect, a weak sesquisquare with Venus, the wars to come will not be the kind of all-consuming frenzy that “the calamitous fourteenth century” (to quote Barbara Tuchman) featured. Mass death from plague or nuclear war? That’s not what the heavens say.

Meanwhile Neptune has no aspects at all and is simply purring away on his own. In 1226, Neptune was afflicted by an opposition with Mars, and that unfolded over the 199 years that followed as violent persecution of dissident religious groups. (You’ve probably heard of the Inquisition.) This time we don’t have that. The Moon and Neptune are in a remarkably similar configuration in the two charts—the Moon separating from conjunction with Neptune, a little out of orb—so it seems likely that the same sort of cultural upsurge of creativity and mysticism can be expected. Since Neptune is much stronger in this chart, and not afflicted by hostile aspects, the flowering to come won’t be rendered bittersweet by persecution.

On the other hand technology, ruled by Uranus, is going to suffer. As already noted, governments will gain strength because they alone have the resources to deal with the impacts of technological regress and technologically driven disasters. With Mercury trine Uranus, the crises to come will also drive a range of clever innovations as people figure out how to cope with the consequences of decaying technological infrastructure and the like. With the Sun trine Uranus, expect governments to have a fair amount of success in patching technological systems and putting workarounds into place. Even so, it’s going to be a rough road.

Note that the Sun is square the Moon. Neither of the two luminaries is strong in this chart: the Sun is peregrine (that is, in a part of the zodiac that gives him no strength) and the Moon gets only mild strength in Pisces, the sign of her mixed triplicity. Both get help from other planets—the Sun from a conjunction with Mercury and the trine with Uranus already discussed, the Moon from a sextile with the Grand Mutation itself. Expect the next 199 years to be an era of turmoil, as centralized governments committed to crisis management in an era of technological regress have to contend with constant pushback and hostility from the population. Time is on the side of the Moon, but that only matters over the long run.

The Moon’s aspects with Jupiter and Saturn, though, have other lessons to teach. Moon sextile Jupiter is an indication of improved economic conditions. Moon sextile Saturn predicts good times for farm country and for rural populations. That may be a function of the technological problems predicted by Uranus; unemployment and underemployment driven by technology have been major economic realities for close to two centuries now, and it’s quite plausible that technological regress will lead to an improved job market as people have to be hired to do jobs in place of machines. Still, that’s a guess. Less speculative is the role of these benign conditions on politics. Prosperity will strengthen the hand of the people against the state, as it usually does.

Notice also Mercury’s position in this chart; in mundane charts, he governs communication and the media. He’s even weaker than the Sun, being peregrine in Capricorn and combust (that is, too close to the Sun). In 1842 he was better dignified, moving from a conjunction with the Sun to a conjunction with Neptune, the planet of mass phenomena. Notice how this predicts the way the press, and later mass media in general, became independent of central government but subservient to the lowest common denominator of the mass mind. That relative independence from the political sphere will not continue. Control over the media will revert to governments (Sun conjunct Mercury), and the media will become one of the main instruments used by them in their struggle with their own restive populations. Weak as Mercury is, this may do them less good than they expect.

Off by itself on one end of the line of planets, finally, is Venus, the planet of art and culture. She was in very dubious shape in 1842, weakly dignified in materialistic Capricorn and afflicted by an opposition with the dominant Moon, predicting the collapse of artistic standards and public taste in an age of schlock. In the 2020 chart she is peregrine and thus weak, but her only afflictions are two minor negative aspects with Mars and Uranus; in other words, wars and disasters will have their usual effects on the arts but the latter will be otherwise unhindered. The kneejerk hostility of artists toward the general public that afflicted the arts from 1842 to 2020 will be a thing of the past, though, and Venus in idealistic Sagittarius—where she was in 1663, the dawn of the Fire era that ended in 1842, which saw the creation of so much good art, music, and literature—bodes well for the creative arts.

One more chart is worth a glance here—the chart for the Grand Mutation in 2219, the end of the astrological era that began on Monday and the beginning of the following era of history:

Notice that the Moon is very active in this chart, though weaker and far less dominant than she was in 1842. She is again in a square with the Sun, as in 2020, and this time square the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction rather than sextile it. Mars is the dispositor of the chart, and he is exalted in Capricorn, expressing his dynamic energy in constructive labor rather than war. Neptune is exalted in Gemini, though retrograde; five of the other seven planets are peregrine, with very limited strength. Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn all challenge Uranus with hostile aspects—the Water era that begins in 2219 and ends 179 years later will be very hard on technology—while an opposition between Venus and Neptune, the arts and religion, will be resolved to some extent by popular support of both (Moon trine Venus and sextile Neptune).

Does this sound like history as usual? That’s exactly what it should sound like. The era that ended on Monday was obsessed with fantasies of universal change, but that’s another expression of that dominant Moon. Most of history consists of long periods of relatively sedate change in no particular direction, and the disasters that happen from time to time—as of course they do—are followed, not by utopia or oblivion, but by periods of recovery as people put their lives back together. We’ve just been through a very unusual period of world history, but it’s over, and once its last echoes finish dying away, we can expect something like a reversion to the mean.

What’s that you say? You want to know how all this will affect the particular corner of the world where you live? That requires a chart for the conjunction for your location. You can get that at any number of free online sites; enter the place, correct the time for your time zone, and you’re good to go. (Doublecheck your work by making sure the Moon is in the same place, 27° 52’ Pisces.) Raphael’s book Mundane Astrology or H.S. Green’s Mundane or National Astrology, both of which are readily available, will tell you what the planets mean in each house.

The point of this post, after all, is not to hand down infallible truths from on high. It’s to alert you to a useful art that might help you judge the shape of the future. Yes, I post detailed forecasts for paid subscribers on my Patreon and SubscribeStar accounts, and you’re welcome to tune in there if you like, but I’d be happier if more people cast and discussed their own mundane astrology forecasts—and happier still if more people shook off unhelpful daydreams about the future and started preparing for the kind of future we’re likely to get.

One other thing. If you’re upset by any of the predictions made above, please remember that astrology is not in the business of catering to anyone’s sense of entitlement or handing out warm fuzzy daydreams. I’m not happy about the indications that democratic governments will be much less common in the era ahead—I’m quite fond of civil liberties myself—but that’s what the heavens show. (I’m sure nobody was especially cheered by those Mars aspects in 1226, either.) One of the great lessons of astrology, a lesson many of us badly need to learn, is that the universe is not a vending machine. We don’t create our own reality; we have some influence over it, but far more often than not, the deciding vote is not cast by us. Keep that in mind, gauge the unyielding aspects of the future before it hits, and you have a much better chance of accomplishing something with the time you have on this small and lovely planet.

When it came to the fine details, though, Toynbee was the more precise and thus in many places the more useful. He noted the phenomenon that Spengler called pseudomorphosis—the process by which a rising culture takes on the political, economic, religious, and social forms of an older and more prestigious culture—and took it apart, examining the whole range of encounters between civilizations in space and time. In the process, one of the things he highlighted was the role in such encounters of an intelligentsia.

That’s a Russian word originally, by the way, but it came into being—as plenty of words in many languages come into being—by taking a word from one language and slapping onto it a grammatical suffix from a different language. This is roughly the process by which an intelligentsia comes into being, too. The intelligentsia, in Toynbee’s terms, are those people who belong to one culture but who are educated in the ideas, customs, and practices of another.

That can happen because the first culture is conquered by the second, and the new overlords proceed to impose their own cultural forms on their new domain; it can also happen because the elite classes of the first culture, in order to compete in a world dominated by the second culture, adopt the second culture’s ideas and habits as far as they can. For an example of the first category, think of the native schoolteachers and minor bureaucrats recruited by European colonial empires all through the nineteenth century; for an example of the second, think of those Third World nations today that have parliamentary democracies, build skyscrapers in their capitals, and outfit their elite classes in business suits and neckties.

The intelligentsia are the foot soldiers of pseudomorphosis. They’re the ones whose task it is to take the foreign cultural forms they themselves have embraced and impose them, by persuasion or force, on other members of their society. There are inevitably sharp limits to how far they can take this process; there is always pushback, and since the intelligentsia are always a fairly small minority the pushback can’t just be brushed aside. That’s where you get the standard pattern of a colonial society, with a cosmopolitan elite class (either foreign or native), a native intelligentsia aspiring to a cosmopolitan status they will never attain, and the vast and sullen laboring classes that regard with smoldering hostility both the intelligentsia and the foreign culture it promotes.

The position of the intelligentsia, privileged as it is, has its bitter downsides. On the one hand, they are hated and despised by the members of the vast and sullen laboring classes just mentioned; on the other, they can never quite win the approval of the foreign elites whose ways they so sedulously imitate. Neither fish nor fowl nor good red meat, the intelligentsia are caught in the gap between cultures, and within the limits of the worldview that emerges in a colonial society, there’s no way out of their predicament: they never succeed either in converting the masses to the ways of the foreign culture they’ve embraced, on the one hand, or in being fully accepted by the people who belong to that foreign culture on the other.

What breaks they intelligentsia out of their predicament, rather, are precisely those things that they fear most. To begin with, there’s personal failure. It so happens that, as I noted a few months back, it’s normal for the education system of a mature society to train far more people for managerial positions than the society’s institutions can absorb. In a society of the kind we’re discussing, the numbers of the intelligentsia inevitably balloon far beyond what the job market for schoolteachers, minor bureaucrats, and other similar positions can take in. The result is an explosive far more dangerous than mere dynamite: an educated underclass that has been cast aside by the system, after its members have been trained in all the skills necessary to understand their position and organize opposition to the existing order of things.

There are some remarkable parallels between America and Russia, balanced by equally important differences. Let’s start with the parallels. Both came into being in the borderlands where expanding Faustian cultures confronted tribal cultures with much simpler technologies and much more stable relationships to the natural world. The tribal cultures of North America and Siberia are related genetically and culturally by way of the vanished Bering land bridge, and their impacts on the expanding cultures that partly supplanted them and partly absorbed them had important parallels. What’s more, the experience of the frontier, the encounter with vast spaces inconceivably larger than anything the limited horizons of Europe could offer, shaped both cultures in similar ways.

At the same time, a crucial difference marks these two encounters, and the broader histories in which they have so important a place: a difference of time. Russia’s great era of frontier expansion took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; America’s took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. More generally, Russia has been a coherent cultural entity much longer than English-speaking North America has. Russia is old enough to have received its first great wave of cultural influence from abroad—its first pseudomorphosis, in Spengler’s terms—from the Magian great culture o the Middle East by way of Byzantium, and got its second from the Faustian culture of western Europe right about the time that the European colonies on the Atlantic coast were first getting past the subsistence stage. America, by contrast, is still in the waning days of its first pseudomorphosis and likely has some centuries to go before its second pseudomorphosis kickstarts the emergence of its own unique cultural forms.

That difference of time is mapped onto a wider difference, which has to do with place. One of the things that Spengler’s analysis stresses—and one of the aspects of his work that tends to offend Faustian sensibilities most strongly—is the way that specific great cultures are bound to specific regions of the world, and never quite manage to transplant themselves successfully to other lands. The home ground of Faustian culture is western and central Europe, for example, and whenever it has established its cultural forms or political control outside that region, the result is inevitably a layer of Faustian elite culture over the top of a very different cultural substrate. You can see this at work in both the protocultures we’re discussing; in New York and Saint Petersburg, the intelligentsia and the privileged classes go through the motions of European culture; away from the centers of power, in farm towns along the banks of the Ohio and the Volga, the European veneer is very thin where it exists at all, and something rooted far more deeply in the soil (and the soul) of the countryside comes close to the surface.

In his brilliant and neglected study God is Red, Native American philosopher Vine Deloria Jr. wrote at length about the spiritual importance of place. That’s something that Magian culture understood implicitly—notice the way that Magian religions inevitably orient themselves toward specific, geographically unique centers of pilgrimage—but that Faustian culture can’t grasp at all. To the Faustian mind, the landscape is a blank slate waiting to be overwritten by the creative will of the heroic individual whose deeds are the bread and butter of Faustian mythmaking. Note the way that Faustian cultures prefer to talk, not of place, but of space: not of localities with their own character and qualities, but of emptiness that, at least in our imagination, can be put to whatever sequence of temporary uses we happen to have in mind.

Every great culture, to use Spengler’s phrase, has its own vision of what the future ought to be like. In Apollonian culture—the great culture of the ancient Mediterranean basin, which hit its cultural stride in classical Greece and metastasized beneath the eagles of Rome—the future everyone expected was the present endlessly prolonged. The vision of time and change that guided Apollonian culture in the centuries of its maturity had three phases: first, things were in chaos, then a mighty power arose to set things in order, and that order endured forever. In religious terms, the mighty power was the god Jupiter taming the Titans with his thunderbolts; in political terms, the mighty power was the Roman Empire bringing the warring kingdoms of the world under its sway; the same logic applied to classical philosophy, which sought to teach the rational mind how to reduce the chaos of the self into an enduring order, and so on.

In Magian culture—the great culture that emerged in the Middle East as Apollonian culture peaked and began to fade, hit its cultural stride during the Abbasid caliphate and metastasized under the Ottoman Empire—this vision found few takers once the Apollonian pseudomorphosis faded out. The Magian vision of time and change, rather, is the one familiar to most of my readers through its reflection in Christian theology. The universe in this view is a stage on which the mighty drama of human salvation is played out; it runs in a straight line from Creation, through the revelation of the one true faith, to a cataclysmic finale, after which nothing will ever change again. At the center of the Magian experience, in turn, is the sense of being part of the community of the faithful, resisting the powers of evil while waiting prayerfully for the one true God to bring on the apocalypse.

As we saw two weeks ago, Faustian culture—the great culture that emerged in western Europe around 1000 CE, which hit its cultural stride in the Renaissance and metastasized in the gargantuan European empires of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—still carries remnants of Magian culture with it, which were picked up through the normal historical process of pseudomorphosis and remain more or less fossilized in place. (We’ll talk later on about why those fossils are so much more common and influential here in America than they are back in the Faustian homelands of Europe.) At the heart of the Faustian worldview, though, stands a vision of time and change starkly opposed to the Magian vision, and reminiscent of the Apollonian vision in a certain highly qualified sense.

In the Faustian vision, it’s not chaos that characterizes the original shape of things, it’s stasis. Think of all those old childrens’ stories about the first caveman to discover fire, or the echo of the same mythic narrative in the opening scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey; think of the folk mythology that surrounds the Scientific Revolution; think of the rhetoric that still frames every one of the grand crusades for social betterment that hasn’t yet crumpled under the weight of its failure and turned to Magian apocalypticism instead. (When a social movement in the modern Western world starts shouting “The world will end if we don’t get what we want!” you can safely bet that it’s already failed and its days are numbered.)

We’ve probably still got a couple of years before the next major petroleum price spike, and the crash that will follow it. It’s worth noting, though, that 35 years passed between the first price spike in 1973 and the second one in 2008, and it’s pretty clear that the third spike will arrive in much less than that time. It’ll be interesting to see if the intervals continue to decrease at the same ratio—if, say, the next price spike comes in 2021 and the ratio holds, the one after that will hit somewhere close to 2024, and the one after that in 2025—or if some more complex pattern will shape the mathematics of crisis as the Age of Oil lurches to its inevitable end.

In the months and years ahead, I plan on discussing that trajectory from time to time, and glancing back over the themes that my earlier blog The Archdruid Report covered during and after the last big oil price spike. This week, though, I want to move a good deal further from the short-term thinking I critiqued earlier, and try to fit the turbulence of our age in the broader pattern of world history.

My primary guide in that exploration, as regular readers of my blogs will have guessed already, is the redoubtable Oswald Spengler: historian, polymath, and professional thorn in the side of the comfortable certainties of his era and ours, whose major work The Decline of the West has yielded one accurate prediction after another while the sunnier or more apocalyptic futures predicted by his critics have all proved as evanescent as moonbeams. Drawing on such earlier students of historical cycles as Giambattista Vico, Spengler set out a detailed theory of the morphology of civilizations, tracing them through the stages of a life cycle—birth, youth, maturity, senility, and death—that formed the basis for his predictions about the future of Western or, as he called it, Faustian culture.

A monthly discussion of The Cosmic Doctrine by Dion Fortune, which I consider the most important work of 20th century occult philosophy. Climb in and fasten your belts; it’s turning out to be as wild a ride as I expected.

Every month or so since the 2016 presidential election campaign hit high tide, somebody has asked me to say something about the weirdest and most interesting aspect of that campaign: the role played in it by a diffuse constellation of right-wing occultists who united for a brief time under the banner of a cartoon frog. A fair number of my readers have probably encountered cryptic references to Pepe the Frog, the ancient Egyptian god Kek, a Euro-pop song from the 1980s titled “Shadilay,” and an assortment of online forums collectively known as “the chans”—4chan.org, 8ch.net, and the like—in connection with Donald Trump’s victory. Those of you who haven’t, well, you’re in for a wild ride.

When the first flurry of requests for a post about what I call the Kek Wars came my way, I decided to wait a while before responding. My thought was that after a year or so, the losing side would get around to dealing with the fact that it lost, the tantrums would subside, and it would then be possible to have a reasoned conversation about what happened and why. One of the more interesting features of the 2016 election and its aftermath is that the tantrums haven’t subsided. That’s not quite unprecedented—as we’ll see, it has some very specific and revealing precedents earlier in American history—but it’s a good indication that something out of the ordinary is in process.

Even though the leftward end of American politics is still busy melting down over Trump’s election twenty months afterward, I think it’s time to go ahead and try to have that conversation. In order to make sense of what happened, though, we’re going to have to cover quite a bit of ground that has no obvious relation to cartoon frogs and internet forums. We’re going to talk about magic, but magic always has a political context.

Magic is the politics of the excluded. It’s also, in an inversion of a kind typical in such situations, the politics of the excluders. We’ll get to the latter point later in this essay; for now, let’s explore the way that magic becomes the default option for those denied access to the political process.

Read all four parts here: https://www.ecosophia.net/tag/kek/

Of course there’s another side to the same issue. The earnest talking head telling the Trump voters that they should have voted for Clinton was far from the first earnest talking head these same voters had heard from. Do you recall, dear reader, the earnest talking heads who insisted that economic globalization would mean lots of well-paying jobs for working class Americans? How about the ones who insisted that if working class Americans ran up huge debts to get university training, there would be plenty of jobs waiting for them when they graduated? How about the one in the White House who insisted that Obamacare would mean lower premiums for everyone, and everyone would be able to keep their existing plans and physicians? If you don’t remember these, be assured that millions of Americans do.

It shouldn’t have taken a scientific study to point out that if you lie to people often enough, they’re going to stop believing anything you say. Yet this straightforward point somehow eluded a vast number of people in the wake of the election. What’s more, it still eludes an equally vast number of people on both side of the political fence—the manufacture of self-serving nonsense is a bipartisan industry these days, after all.

We can sum up the issues here in a very simple way:  nobody involved in these debates has even the rudiments of a rhetorical education. That phrase—a rhetorical education—covers more ground than a cursory glance might suggest, and a look back at certain phases of history will help make sense of what that involves. It will also help explain how we backed ourselves into the corner we’re in just now, and how we might get out of it.

The intellectual activities of any culture, ours very much included, tend to swing back and forth on a timescale of centuries between two competing ways of understanding the world. We can call these abstraction and reflection. Abstraction is the belief that the world around us obeys a set of laws that can be known by the human mind.  Intellectual activity in an age of abstraction therefore focuses on abstracting (literally, “drawing out”) those laws from the buzzing, blooming confusion of the world we experience.

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The world of spirits, as it’s understood by occult philosophy, isn’t some alien realm whose inhabitants leap through into our world, violating natural laws with impunity; the world of spirits is the inner side of the world we experience with our senses.

I’m probably going to have to explain that, and then repeat it several times in different ways, because it flies in the face of some of our culture’s most deeply entrenched notions about reality.  Thus people who’ve been raised in Western industrial societies are very good at not processing it and not thinking about it. Operative mages—people who practice magic, the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will—don’t live in some flashy otherworld like Middle-Earth, or even in a “wizarding world” linked with the ordinary world via anomalous train stations and the like. They live in the same world that scientific materialists do, and they’re subject to the same natural laws that scientific materialists are.

What makes the operative mage’s experience of the world differ from the scientific materialists’ experience is that the mage encounters the world through a wider range of senses than the materialist, and so perceives aspects of the world that the materialist doesn’t. The other senses just mentioned aren’t anything strange or exotic; everyone has them—but in most of the modern industrial world, children are thoroughly bullied and browbeaten if they admit to perceiving anything that they’re not supposed to perceive. As a result, by the time they grow up, most of them have learned not to use these senses, or at least not to talk about what they perceive, on the occasions when they encounter something that can’t be ignored.