"When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance." - Nikola TeslaIn previous entries I have explained some of the mystical connotations to the current Pluto transit of Capricorn, but without touching on the essential meaning of the sign or being very specific about the main critical events to characterize the era.
First of all, it is important to understand that the speed of cultural evolutions and paradigm change is escalating.
A Brief Overview of the Evolution of Consciousness
To get a picture, life has existed on Earth for about 12 galactic years. Primate evolution began about 85 million years ago, about half a galactic or cosmic year ago.
Homo Sapiens distinguished itself from anthropoid apes between 400,000 and 250,000 years ago, requiring about 50,000 generations to make the distance.
In comparison we have been industrialized for about 13 generations, modern democracy functional for about 10 generations, and slavery abolished for about 9 generations.
As for changing cultural seasons, 200 years ago and back most people were "fortunate" to experience two regimes. In fact, they were mostly unfortunate, if a society changing event occurred, because it most often involved mass death through war or violent revolutions.
Many Lives in One Lifetime
The generation that experienced the 1960 youth uprisings in the West, synthesizing to some extent Western and Eastern philosophy, the baby boomers, experienced two radically different cultural systems.
They lived their life in the crossfire that defined the traditional left-right political dichotomy of parliamentarian democracies.
Their next generation has already experienced three major eras, the Cold War, the post-Cold War era of unbridled neo-liberalism, and the Age of Terrorism, a phase through which developing the new sophisticated infrastructure of information technology has been a persistent trait.
These events are all coalescing right now, with 2011 as the temporal focal point for a spontanous global uprising triggered by the self-immolation of a Tunesian shopkeeper, Mohammed Bouazizi.
Those who are children today are born into a world defined by digital technology, known as the Information Age, a structure that was foretold by Jean Jacques Servan Schreiber, who already in the mid 1980s dubbed it a more important infrastructural revolution than the railroad.
It is the beginning of "cultural grafting" or cultural convergence, the birth of true globalism as opposed to neo-liberal top-down globalization.
The children of tomorrow are likely to experience a major change every decade, living as many as 5-6 lives or more in a lifetime, redefining themselves as many times.
Esoteric Meanings and Use of the Pisces-Virgo Axis
Without having definite proof, since only parts of the current Babylonian Zodiac has been found in excavations of ancient Sumeria, it is fair to assume that the Zodiac and the rise of our legendary first civilization or "instant civilization" is associated with the gnosis contained in Zodiacus.
To some extent, or from a certain perspective, the wheel embodies man's technological progress with every sign representing a significant step in culturalization, from discovery of agricultural science to fish farms.
Observed from a different angle the astrological ages also correspond intimately with the dominant mythological symbols of the major cults in the area:
Thus, the Age of Pisces manifested as a Christian cult that identified itself with a stylized form of the symbol of Pisces, two fishes interlocked, moving symmetrically, but in opposite directions.
The correlation between the paleo-Christian IXTUS symbol and the embedded Pagan symbolism of Pisces is more than visual - the Hellenistic myth associated with Pisces is that of Afrodite and her son, Eros, trying to escape the onslaught of Typhon by immersing themselves in water, shape-shifting into fishes.
Similarly, the paleo-Christians were forced to hide underground from the ruthless persecution from Rome, whether by mimicking Romans and feigning assimilation or by hiding in the catacombs, navigating by the sign of Pisces.
Later Christianity adopted the Virgoid cross, a stylized representation of the folded legs of the Celestial Virgin, Astraea, who left Earth to live in the sky, appalled by human greed.
The church, from the point of Constantin and onwards, grew increasingly Puritan in outlook, inventing a strange perversion based on morality virtue, enforcing sexual and intellectual and ultimately racial Puritanism by fire and by sword. That was the Age of Theocracy in the West.
Esoteric Meanings and Use of the Aries-Libra Axis
Before this, the Ram (Aries) and the Scale (Libra) were dominant symbols, whether in civilizations like Egypt or in the Semitic cult arising out of Egypt, a different and diametrically opposite strand of Sumerian culture.
The era lauded the ram as a symbol of vitality and fertility, occasionally also ferocity. It hailed the virtue of rightous war, and logically also became preoccupied with the concept of justice, represented by the symbol of the scale.
Following the principle of precession, Judaism expressed its Messianic hope by the symbolic sacrifice of a lamb for Passover or Pesach, an adaptation of a Pagan or post-Sumerian celebration of Innana, again the Queen of Heaven, in India known as Kali, in ancient Greece manifesting as Astarte or Aphrodite, in Assyria called Ishtar and in Egypt Hathor.
This symbolic overthrowal of the spring goddess from the East, hence Easter, represented the temporary death of the pantheon connected to Taurus-Scorpio. Particularly the popularization of Kali as a vindictive goddess with disastrous powers express very well an important aspect of both Taurus and Scorpio, the hard and dark side hidden in Taurus, emerging as untameable temper, and apparent in toxic Scorpio, covering for a soft and vulnerable interior.
To the Hebrew culture and, increasingly, in Judaic lore, these traits became synonymous with evil, attributes of Satan. The practice of divination, occultism, scrying, was outlawed by the Mosaic scribes. A veritable world war against the old world order was launched from a small strip of Mediterranean land, criminalizing also ritual sex and a varity of sexual practices associated with it, such as homosexuality, promiscuity, prostitution and bestiality.
The symbol of the ram became a collective identifier, with virtually ever hero of the Old Testament employed as a shepherd, pointing to the Messianic hope for a shepherd of humans, a benevolent manifestation of the Aries principle, fused with the impersonal justice of Libra.
The scales are used repetitively in the Bible, with "just scales" representing honesty in commerce and punitive legislation, and used in inspiring and motivating ancestoral narratives, perhaps most famously in the story of Nebukadnezzar's predecessor, Belshazzar, who saw the "writing on the wall" after having been "weighed and found too light."
Hammurabi's code of law also belongs to the Libraid tradition, just as the emergence of literacy and the great Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh and his heavenly twin Enkidu were products of the age spawned by the Earth axis pointing at the Gemini-Sagittarius axis.
What Popular Astrology Conveys About Capricorn
With these principles established we can continue to investigate the deeper meaning of the lesser, but perhaps more individually and politically relevant Pluto transition of Capricorn.
I would advise all students of advanced astrology to visit and study my previous blog entries about the Pluto in Capricorn transit, since they elaborate on the implications and establish the principle behind the reading in more detail than here.
The Capricorn mythology is as strange and multi-layered as the rest of this fragmented mystical tradition from Sumer, known to us only in distorted form, adapted to the various local cultures who made use of it to organize their cultic rituals.
In the popular tradition Capricorn is described as the archetypical male authority and social climber, a sign representing all things associated with central administration, bureaucracy and economy, a word that literally meant household in Greek.
The symbol is, oddly, a mythological creature with the upper half shaped as a goat and the neither as a large snail or sea shell, interpreted - again, in pop astrology - as signifying the personality of the Capricornoid personality, slow to move, protective of sexuality and privacy, but also capable of keeping balance in untenable territory and advancing under the harshest conditions.
Capricornoid personalities are thought to be extremely tempered, even to the exclusion of common passions, and in some cases to the detriment of their own emotional life. Capricorn is associated with Zeus or Jupiter (Jove, also Jehova/Jahveh/YHWH).
The Ancient Origin of Capricorn
On a much deeper level the Capricorn symbol depicts the legend of Typhon's uprising against the celestial gods, which is an ancient myth as durable and reproduced as the pre-Sumerian legend of the astrological 7 day Creation, passed on through the Jewish Torah and widely distributed through the implementation of the Torah (Old Testament) in the Holy Bible of Christianity.
The fable of Adam and Eve, Fall from Grace, also carries the signature of great epic literature from Sumeria, and likewise the tale of Noah, which we know for a fact was a part of Sumerian tradition and later on represented in virtually all the great civilizations rising from the collapse of Sumer (the legend of the Tower of Babel is likely a post-Sumerian adaptation of Sumer's eschatological myth or an artistic interpretation of the division of the driving force behind ancient culturalization).
Typhon survived through a different strand of Sumerian legacy, the Babylon-Egypt connection through time and space. It migrated, became a part of the Egyptian mysteries and, in turn, the Greek mysteries, greatly occupied as the ancient Greek scholars were with Egyptian lore.
For some reason Typhon never gained the same popularity in modern days as other myths summarized by Greek storytellers, such as the Iliad and the Odyssee, aspects of which can also be found in the great Indian epic, Mahabharata, or many of the other treasured fables from Greece.
It does live, as a mirror image, in the Judeo-Christian mystic tradition of a heavenly war between a beast on Earth, Satan, and Jahveh/Jove (Jupiter/Zeus).
Originally, however, Satan had little to do with the serpent in the Garden of Eden, which was in fact a dragon, testified by the fact that it was condemned for its sedition to "crawl on the belly." It had legs, at the very least, which may have been a proto-Sumerian "memory" of either an age, where dinosaur, or rather, large descendants of dinosaurs, such as crocodile and comodo dragon, and man lived side by side, competing for food and dominance.
This, of course, provided our retrospective scientific measurements are that inaccurate. A more scientificially accurate theory would be that the proto-Sumerian collective memory referred to observations of skeleton from big dragons, interpreted correctly as reptilian and fictionally associated with an ancient metaphysical power.
The Esoteric Meanings and Uses of Capricorn
In Greek tradition, much younger than the original legend, Typhon became a monster spawned by Gaia and sent to avenge the entrapment and incarceration of her sons and daughters, the Titans. Zeus had managed to overpower them and punish them for their rebellion, but Gaia was not pleased. It was time for a change, once again, only Zeus had become as power hungry as his own ancestors.
The myth of Capricorn takes up enormous space in the Zodiac, ranging from Capricorn to Pisces, a full quarter of the entire super-narrative. It begins right after the sign that embodies the life and death of the founder of Sumeria, legendary warlord Orion, known in the Bible as Nimrod, the mighty hunter.
After initiating urbanization he was slain by a scorpion, and the Scorpio symbol is actually an isolated representation of the mythical poisonous dart or claw hidden inside the mythological lion, Leo, likely identical with the Egyptian-Greek sphinx.
So, in essence, we have a Sumerian origin myth covering a quarter of the Zodiac, leading to the eschatological part, covering the last quarter of the Zodiac, beginning with the sign of Capricorn.
In Sagittarius Orion/Nimrod falls, having outlived his purpose, condemned by the gods for his bad deeds, but blessed with a place in Heaven, the celestial night sky, for his good deeds.
After that comes the destruction at the hand of Typhon, a conglomerate of natural disasters, associated with tropical thunder storms as well as volcanic eruptions - in Greek tradition he is caught and buried under Mount Etna, explaining why the core of the Earth appears so virulent to gods and men at times.
As I said, Typhon was sent by Gaia to help overthrow or at least punish Zeus for his cruelty to the Titans, who interestingly enough were subjected to a tight gender quota with six female and six male giants competing with Zeus for power, harbingers of a post-Olympian order to come.
The Birth and Death Myths of Civilizations
The post-Olympian order arrived, and it didn't. The Greco-Roman mythology, vanquishing other great cultures like the Celts, Etruscans and Phoenicians around them, in the end succumbed to the Semitic tradition, the Puritan-Theocratic strand of Sumerian cultural legacy.
The Judeo-Christian tradition took over, utilizing the mechanical genius of Martian Rome to distribute its virtue philosophy and religious cult to virtually all inhabited continents, according to its birth legend.
Rome had been successful in war, just like Mars promised. Mars was the father of the fabled founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, and his vow to his sons were to make their descendants ever victorious in war for as long as they had the will to fight it.
The Christian birth myth alleged that the religion would be a sword, a source of conflict and division between all classes of people, even splitting up homes, husband against wife, parents against children.
It also alleged that the Gospel would be preached until the ends of the world, before "the end" would come.
The Christian eschatology, like Hindu and Norse mythology, is closely related to the organic roots in Judaism and the Hebrew culture and bloodline. It is a story that perceives the world ethno-centrically, and describes the end of an era, an astrological age, rather than necessarily mankind or history as such.
The Norse mythology describes, for instance, a new Heaven and a new Earth, one in which the more peaceful of the Norse gods would live again, Baldur and Heimdal, while making no such promises for the martial and racist gods like Odin and Thor.
So, in a sense all birth myths came to fruition, and so also all eschatological myths, at least likely so. We are currently witnessing the end of the age of organized Christianity and, in fact, all the Puritan Abrahamic religions.
The Post-Olympian Order and Ecological Disruption
The Olympian order is long gone, with faith and sacrifices and rituals banished into the absurd world of fable. But in a metaphorical sense the Olympian order still reigns, with a tight and rather arbitrary hierarchical structure in which some humans are capable of, for a time, usurping dictatorial and almost divine power over life and death.
The quibble between Gaia and Zeus, however, embodied in the rage of Typhon, points towards a larger astrological movement, the precession, which is currently shifting from Pisces to Aquarius.
Aquarius, in pop astrology dubbed an air sign, but originally and obviously through its symbolism associated with water, ties together the two chapters of the story of Typhon.
In Capricorn the legend goes that Pan - a morphed aspect of Sagittarius with its legendary libertine and sanguine nature - first notices Typhon, the emerging ecological disaster. He saves himself from the storm by immersing himself in the sea, where he is transformed into a sea goat.
The sea goat is likely based on an observation of the strangely goatlike fish, perhaps found lying next to a large conch, making people believe they belonged to an existing hybrid - in the same way as the fables of mermaids and sirens are likely caused by delirious hallucinations by sailors, combined with blurry observations of dolphins or sea lions.
However, this is the more recent Greek interpretation of the fable. The symbol itself, with its mysterious origin, depicts a creature more resembling Typhon himself.
Cancer was, according to Greek tradition, placed in the night sky by Hera, who sent it, immortalized even if it joined the Lernean Hydra in the battle against Herakles (Hecules). Cancer was crushed under Herakles' foot, but it gained notoriety as a celestial sign.
If Typhon, similarly, was elevated into the night sky, the very sign of Capricorn does, in fact, suggest a major ecological disruption.
The Complex Nature of Ecological Blowback
This is very important for a correct interpretation of Pluto's transition through Capricorn. Pluto is associated with death, with shady dealings in government and commerce, and aggregation of wealth and power. That is the modern, semi-Greek interpretation, to some extent a distortion, since Pluto, the roman name for Hades, is mistaken with Pluton, the god of wealth - only later these became fused in vulgar retellings.
However, it is observable that the absence of Pluto, its furthest position in opposition to a sign, gives temporary rise to bloom in the said sign. That means that in the transit of Capricorn, Pluto threatens or overshadows with gloom the aspects governed by Capricorn, but blesses, as Death, Cancer with his absence.
I have elaborated on this principle as well as the "axis interpretation" of the precession in several previous articles.
Here I will just make the additional comment that financial gain can be found from the observation, while the period is initiated by a collapse or combustion that seems to contradict such a prediction. For instance, the IT market erupted in a series of bubbles with Pluto in Gemini, but at the same time the distribution and penetration of IT and telco bloomed like never before.
Likewise, the current Plutonic era was initiated with a devastating collapse of the real estate market.
The negative aspect of Pluto transits are more linear, more easily identified. In this era numerous troubles beset authorities, and they respond to challenges with Draconian measures, all very accurate manifestations of the fusion of Plutonic energies with Capricornoid themes.
Lots of commercial astrologers have commented on this, but hidden beneath the glossy surface of pop astrology lies a complex warning for the near future, one involving rampant ecological disruption and blowback - BP oil spills, the Monsanto crop failure and, most notably so far, the Fukushima triple strike with an Earthquake, a tsunami and a nuclear disaster.
The complex nature of Typhon, his double-shape, may reflect the intricacy of ecological blow-backs, known to have been experienced and observed by many primitive cultures. The "father of all monsters" had a human torso and a head with hundred dragon heads, while his lower body shaped as a serpent coil, corresponding to the conch shell on the goat-fish stylized in the Capricorn symbol.
Self-Interest Properly Understood is Altruism
The similarity between the transformed Pan figure and the Typhoon, however, could also signify mimickry, self-protection through apparent similarity, a common adaption technique in evolutionary biology and observable to the scientific mind with the naked eye.
In other words, this too could be based on observation and right brain interpretation, subconsciously or intuitively adding layers of meaning to observations too complex for the mind to grasp at this point of human cultural evolution.
Pan, the evolved principle of the centaur or horseback rider from Sagittarius, Nimrod or Orion, survives in Capricorn, just like Sumerian culture survived, greatly diminished but still powerful. In Capricorn the lecherous forest faun becomes aware of cultural responsibility, and cosmic, warning Zeus for the sake of both god and men of the impending disaster.
For this reason Zeus elevated Pan, in the shape of Typhoon, to celestial status. Mimickry as a survival technique can be understood as submission to an inescapable decision imposed by outside circumstances, acceptance of hard political and material imperatives, even acceptance of Typhoon's metaphysical purpose, to remind the gods of social and ecological and economic responsibility.
In essence, the gods act in self-defense against Typhoon, but it is also morally justifiable, because Typhoon threatens the lives of humans as well. Pan's alert may be a case of someone supremely uninterested in the matters of Olympian matters acting out of extended self-interest, first saving his own life in a very acute manner, and then saving his own life again by setting in motion the mechanics of power against what also represents a threat to himself.
Alexis de Tocqueville would have called that "self-interest properly understood", and as we can observe there is currently a very vivid debate about the "social gospel" in the Bible, splitting the American right wing, along with a criticism of the limitations of Randian philosophy of self-interest and Randian capitalism.
On the cultural level, these themes submit to the Pluto in Capricorn principle.
The Dawning of Planetary Consciousness
To some historians modernity began on October 24, 1946, with the first photo of Earth from space. That was the dawn of planetary consciousness, the first rudimentary step toward the ecological mindset that people and even politicians increasingly realize is an absolute ultimatum from Mother Nature.
The Titanic shift in the world order, briefly suggested by Pluto's 12 year passage in Capricorn, may point towards what a more egalitarian rule, while not necessarily producing it in very tangible terms.
This Titanic order may still be a hierarchical order, a rule by committee, a semi-celestial bureaucracy, less than ideal communism and much less than ideal anarchy or full participatory democracy. It may very well still seem Olympian, entitling and gratifying and rewarding a few, who do not necessarily exhibit the virtues expected from someone in a high office.
Yet, the composition of the group of siblings suggest that gender equality and carefully measured gender quota like it exists in some African countries, may become universal reality.
The Northern part of the Earth axis is moving from Pisces towards Aquarius, a transition stage that will last for hundreds of years into the future. Pluto is moving towards the same spot, but from the opposite direction, from Capricorn, and much faster.
Pluto will make the same movement many times before the events and phenomena triggered by the Aquarian Age become fully observable.
But we are operating inside the same chapter of ancient Sumerian mysticism: The Aquarian Age, with Ganymed as the prominent deity, raised up to be weather god by Zeus, speaks of gentle and genuine and youthful qualities in focus.
In general terms foretells a more benevolent human elite, as the Olympian pantheon is a metaphor for human authority, and it also speaks of a coming age of meteorological and geological engineering on a large scale.
Leading Up To Age of Technocratic Abuse
When Pluto hits Aquarius, however, we will be alerted to the dark side of hyper-modernity. Currently the focus is on abuse of authority, nefarious scheming against authority, the cultural and political aspect of Typon's manyheaded menace.
Ten years from now technocrats will come under fire for abuses that appear to most people today unimaginable. Paradoxically, detachment, even to the point of cruelty, is a dark aspect of the otherwise benevolent and impartial humanist, represented symbolically by Ganymed.
Capacity for horrific obscenity and bodily invasion and inhuman cruelty will be displayed on and off through the next couple of thousands of years of human history, particularly considering that the negative or dark aspect is usually indicated by the Southern Axis, pointing towards Leo.
It is entirely imaginable that we will witness a tecnocratic Dark Age, as predicted by so many science fiction writers, only far worse than anything our imagination can encompass today.
We'll get a taste of that a decade from now, and the trend will be very apparent by the end of this decade already, as Pluto begins to manifest in the next sign, in Aquarius.
Pluto's gravitational field is smaller, too small to justify the title of "planet" - a strange astronomical quibble that quite adequately expresses the essence of Pluto's fate and quibble with man and god. As the god of Death he is banished from live, deprived of what he may perceive as his proper rank, just like the black clad witch from the fairy tales and with the same sinister implications for humans involved in the metaphysical psycho-drama.
In essence, the Aquarian Age will be both better and worse than what we currently know, but the much shorter era ahead, where Pluto transits Aquarius, will be mostly horrifying. It will also be conductive of arts and entertainment, as Pluto favors Leo with its most remote position from that sign.
The effects of the soon to occur ecological disruption, a series of disasters of land shattering such proportions, will linger on into the next Plutonian era, just like terrorism has lingered on into the current age of economic exhaustion and social crisis.
Gaia is Calling Man Through Dreams and Visions
The visions, hallucinations, fabulations and fabrications of mankind, the mythologies of tribes, the rituals and traditions and legends, the sacred criptures and the shamanic orders, through time, has changed a multitude of times.
Behind all of it is the only god that we may know, Gaia, this vaguely, yet distinctly creative, totally disorganized and yet highly planned planetary organism.
In a sense, since humans are merely members of the body of Gaia, Gaia is the only "person" doing any thinking.
Einstein saw the deepest truth in the experience of the mystical; Tesla believed himself to be a conductor, someone who received his insights from a universal consciousness.
I doubt we are talking about the universal consciousness as such or even galactic consciousness. Life on Earth is barely a teenager in cosmic years, and we are still far from having explored the solar system.
What we are thinking, and what we receive in dreams and visions, may all just come from this small blue dot, our lonely planet, the fourth from the sun.
Our cultural history, even our political history of battles, may all be a gigantic, messy, bloody heurism, a process of learning through trial and error, a labyrinth of mistakes and misdeeds, coalescing, at least temporarily, in our age, with the dawning of consciousness in a new form, collective consciousness, collective self-awareness, leading to the gradual fading and inevitable banishing of ethnic and religious tribalism, and nationalism.
In other words, our way of thinking and our way of life must change, because we are getting a phone call from the planet.
The Meaning of Life is Progressive Self-Awareness
This may not seem too distinctly different from mythologies in the past. After all, Gaia is just another god in the pantheon, right?
Well, it seems likely that while the other gods are metaphors for dynamics and forces in nature and in human nature, and all our religious concoctions hallucinations installed and distributed through some sort of planetary suggestion, likely biochemical intoxication and natural hallucinogenics and electro-magnetic fields from micro-organisms.
We may perceive the same facts at all times, but we perceive them differently, interpret them differently, depending on the direction of the planet's suggestions.
In the past, Gaia may have actually made a bunch of errors, and even employed misdirection and so many outright lies, it is hard to "believe" her. You cannot embrace this new consciousness as a religion, at least not without missing the point entirely.
The point being that we may be discovering Gaia now, because she wants us to. We are sufficiently prepared, and it is the next long chapter of human history to find some sort of accomodation between the natural and the anthropocene environment.
We discover her, because it is time. It necessary. It is the next logical step in the heurism, and this time, paradoxically, the "deity" may be real enough. Her vision may not be a red herring or elaborate false flag operation, suggesting us to expand and develop along certain terms for a variety of complex purposes that exceeds the interest of the individual, even the interest of cultures and races.
Rationally, why on Earth would Gaia disguise herself as Apollo, as Jahveh, as Zeus or Odin or any of the other gods? Why would she allow, even guide humans, through the strange hallucination religion is, into a dominant position in the food web, from where we launch destruction against her.
Doesn't that counter the notion of planetary sentience?
Well, only if self-preservation is the primary interest of the organic life of planet Earth. Life can be defined as a principle characterized by defiance of entropy through replication, and the so-called "meaning of life" may be the evolution of self-awareness, increased sentience, cosmic consciousness on an even higher level than planetary consciousness.
Does Gaia Hide Inside Us?
In this total spectrum of sentience we are merely particles and wave forms. The individual mind is the quantum space of consciousness, but the essence is something manifested on a completely different level and ultimately an unintelligible form for our human mind, at least in its current use and composition.
The small leaps we make forward, from stepping stone to stepping stone, as the mutable stars, the planets, move around in the fictional geocentric cosmic screen display, is all representations of Gaia dreaming, Gaia waking, Gaia fabulating.
We are the eyes through which the universe studies itself and marvels.
We are dual receptors and transmitters, sensory devices as well as agents, receiving input from the magnetic core as well as sending and storing data in the noosphere.
Our very ability to discover, perceive and understand these phenomena are not individual accomplishments, but collective, and collective accomplishments do not even belong to mankind, but to Gaia herself, as she is the only constantly remaining life forms, everything else mutable and transient.
Gaia herself, like all matter in space, may be a finite entity and, as such not corresponding to archaic concepts of god. Fair enough.
It is not problematic at all to deny Gaia status as godhead, not even academic. It is a semantic quibble, since this paradigm change also redefines the essence of what is contained in the concept of god or divinity.
Say Gaia is a larger and longer lasting and more complex life form. Say Gaia is a metaphor for a set of dynamic scientific principles or structures. Say Gaia is a nonsensical theory, or that the planet is not alive on any level. It does not change the picture, and it does not offend a cult or overthrow a purpose.
If true, if accurately described, and humans really are, as it would appear, not only subjects to Gaia but random aspects of her ever changing form, then we know all that we know, we see the future as well as the past, because Gaia wills it.
What seems such a costly waste to us, the deforesting, the extinction of species, is everyday business to Gaia. Even if she should have self-preservation, or more accurately, an acute interest in maintaining a high level of bio-diversity, who knows if the anthill of human civilization on any significant level violates the planet's interest.
With our growing grasp of bio-technology, mankind may soon enough be able to reproduce virtually all known species that have once walked the Earth. And sophisticated as we are, capable of launching manned aircrafts into the sea of space, who knows, maybe we can even contain the negative side effects, master our own destructive nature as well as succesfully maintain an artificial ecological equilibrium.
Maybe all the tragically unnatural events in human history and our current divorce from nature, is simply a digression, or perhaps even a necessary chapter, one in which nature inside us temporarily hides in order to move us through a billion subtle suggestions per micro-second, towards an even stranger outcome.
