The Aquarius Age and the Rise of Predator Cult

Left: A male lion in his natural environment with a Leo sign superimposed. Top right: Saw III advertisement banner. Notice the elevated brows, the eyes and the flat, elongated nose structure of the mask of Jigsaw, resembling the features of a lion. Center: A death trap from the top grossing horror cult series Saw 1-7, shaped as a mechanical set of jaws.  Bottom right: Jigsaw, his head cocked forward, gleering like a lion with cold killer eyes, and his face framed by an artificial "mane", the hood of his vigilante cape.

In 1888, in one of his letters to the press, Jack the Ripper wrote:

“One day men will look back and say I gave birth to the 20^th Century.”

The quote opens the 2001 movie From Hell, starring Johnny Depp as the police detective tasked to track down the mysterious killer haunting the streets of London.

While the film may be a largely fictional construct, the choice of citation is very perceptive.

In a deeply horrifying sense it is true that the 20^th Century was, above all, defined by the very characteristics displayed by the infamous murderer of prostitutes the late 19^th century.

Not only has the 20^th century spawned a virtual legion of deranged serial killers, but the mechanical mass murder of Jews and dissidents in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Gulag and in the camps of Khmer Rouge proved wrong a fundamental and fatal flaw in the vision of modernism: Industrialization did not automatically civilize the nations.

Rather, the instrument of automation was employed for deeper levels of enslavement and oppression and ultimately eradication than ever before.

The era revealed the most shameful taboo in human society, how our predatorial instinct nurtured through millions of years of evolution, encompasses even our own species, making humans a target for what in biology is known as parasitic or, in the worse case, parasitoid exploitation.

In the light of the new weapons and technological instruments of oppression available today, we may soon wake up to find that our worst potential for predatorial aggression has been unleashed, and Jack the Ripper did not just give birth to the 20^th  century, but to millennia of horrifying devastation.

Left: An artist's depiction of Jack the Ripper. The murderer's identity was never uncovered by the Scotland Yard. Right: The cover photos from the Hollywood film From Hell starring Johnny Depp.

Predatorial Humans in History

In some cases it is down right cannibalism, presumably passed down through the generations, hiding as a genetic trait that may be triggered by brain defects, mental health issues, traumatic upbringings or war.

Many of the serial killers we have become acquainted with due to the new police investigation methods of modern society – and the commercial exploitation in books and films – were cannibals or displayed cannibalistic traits, such as sexual sadism and necrophilia.

Several of the famous serial killers identified with or expressed fascination with Nazi Germany, the logical pinnacle of such savagery exercised in smaller scale by the murder addicts of  more civilized societies.

In Nazi Germany painful experiments were conducted by doctors on live prisoners, who were tortured and mutilated in various ways for the scientific benefit.

Tragically, and disturbingly, we derive benefits from such experimentation today, as primary producers of medicine like IG Farben ran its own concentration camp units.

The desecration of the human body, however, also had a less pragmatic aspect, favoring sadistic and parasitoid practices like skinning victims as trophies and producing of their body parts lamps, furniture, ashtrays and other abbhorent instruments.

The structural cannibalism extended to the industry, where concentration camp labor was exploited for the war machine, and the gold reserve was filled not only by property and capital robbed from the prisoners, but with gold from their teeth and from the wedding rings left, as the bodies piled up in mass graves.

The murdering of the Endlösung was a systematic, all-encompassing process, like the utilization of every body part of a slain beast in prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies.

Human beings became their own parasitoid, first exploiting the victim for sustenance and then, through a gradual process, debilitating them and finally causing their death.

Such practices – slavery, genocide, rape and torture – are known from all eras of human history, of course, and no doubt has there been serial killers in the past.

We know of them as monsters, such as Vlad Dracul, also known as “the impaler” for his obscene cruelty to prisoners of war – or Elizabeth Bathory, the “Blood Countess” who allegedly bathed in the blood of no less than 200 maidens she was responsible for having murdered in the dungeons of her castle.

In other cases serial killers, before they came to the attention of law enforcement and entertainment media, were likely known from myths, legends and fairy tales. The were vampires, wendigo, werewolves of the night, with crimes so heinous on their conscience ordinary people could only imagine them as partly bestial in shape.

They could not possibly belong to the human race. We know, today, they do.

Americanism, Crime and Mental Health

Left: Legendary American serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer, mugshots. Dahmer was a homosexual rapist, a murderer, a necrophile and a cannibal. Right: A cover for the feature film based on Jeffrey Dahmer's life before capture.

FBI estimates that approximately 30 serial killers are on the loose at any given point of time in USA, and every day about 2,300 persons are reported missing in USA – however, not all as suspected victims of a crime.

One can speculate why concentration of serial killers appears to be higher in USA than in other societies. William S. Burroughs believed that America, as a continent, was under some sort of curse:

“America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.”

More likely the prevalence of serial killers follows a general curve of violent crime, which is rampant in USA, where 1 out of every 32 citizens are under correctional supervision and 1 out of 136 are currently imprisoned.

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population, but almost a quarter of the world's prisoners, dwarfing the prison population of less developed nations and leadinge ven New York Times to conclude that America is the leading producer of prisoners in the world.

From the perspective of an anthropologist founded in science of behaviorism the answer to the seemingly brutal nature of America as a society may simply have to do with its status as unrivalled superpower.

Dominance itself can give rise to a dominance-based world view in which weakness is routinely frowned upon, castigated and marginalized into what is called an “out-group.”

In common terms this cultural trait is referred to as “America’s rugged individualism”.

Such a belief in will-power, the use of force to gain advantages in life and a certain adherence to a primitive, semi-anarchic world view, fosters a heightened sense of stress, an increased dependency on violence and a testosterone-driven social competition that may very well facilitiate high productivity and innovation as a nation, but takes a toll on the citizenry when comes to mental health.

Americans are the world’s most medicated people with approximately half on prescription drugs.

The Early Origins of Puritanism

USA was founded as a sanctuary for immigrants from the “old world”, Europe, fleeing the religious persecution of the theocratic-aristocratic continent.

The 2000 year history since the beginning of our timeline, based on the emergence of “Christ”, has been characterized by the dual forces of feudalism and theocracy, working together but also fighting and scheming among each other for control through an endless series of wars and tactical maneuvres, including the sectarian wars between Catholic and Protestant factions.

Beneath the Christian theocracy, the overarching trait of the Age of Pisces, lies a deep rooted discomfort with the physical world embodied not by Pisces itself, but by its opposite Zodiac sign, Virgo.

Esoterics have largely overlooked this highly significant factor when studying how the precession through the Zodiac influences human culturalization, falsely attributing all the characteristics of Christianity to Pisces.

If we look at the “evidence”, which in the case of mysticism can only be “the signs”, both Jesus and Mother Mary represent, just like angels themselves, visions spawned by the Virgoid mindset.

Left: Icon of The Virgin Mary in Catholic tradition. Right: The Celestial Virgin of ancient pagan tradition, dating back as far as to ancient Sumer 10,000 years ago or further.

Mary was attributed virgin birth, and Jesus presumably remained “a virgin”, sexually abstinent, to his early death by the age of 33.

Later theories, of course, speculate that Mary had an illegitimate child, perhaps with a Roman officer, or that Jesus had an affair with or even an informal marriage leading to children with Mary Magdalene.

This, however, has never been a part of the common Christian teaching in neither Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity or Protestantism, and it is still not accepted as canonic doctrine.

The dogma, which is the object of our study, claims virginity, a trait linked to Virgo, the celestial virgin.

The fascination with the ethereal and the enormous discomfort with the carnal is expressed more directly by Paul in numerous of the letters incorporated in the Christian canon.

Paul advises believers to remain abstinent, because it frees them to be more occupied with theology and evangelization. Only reluctantly does he allow for marriage as a practical necessity in order to avoid sexual sins.

An apocrypha tells of his Platonic relationship with Thecla, who – following the Pauline doctrine – renounced sexuality and passed through a series of tribulations due to her decision to decline the advances of men.

From Sexual Puritanism to Race Theory

From this point Christianity developed an unnatural obsession with sexual abstinence known as Puritanism, a trait that may be borrowed from the more rigid sects of Judaism but developed independently into a variety of abnormalities, ranging from the well-known abstinence policy for Catholic priests even sanctioned today to the more obscure historical admiration for bizarre practitioners of extreme abstinence, such as stylites and flagellants.  

The religious persecutions of the 2000 year era of Pisces, which is also what we in today’s secularized society associate Christianity with, are also aspects of a more abstract Puritanism, directed not so much against sex as against heresy.

Purity of doctrine, or protection against demonic impurity believed to infiltrate the holy communities and pollute their holiness – these were the agendas of the various inquisitions formed around Europe with the Spanish Inquisition under Thomas de Torquemada the most infamous.

In many cases those persecuted as witches were actually proto-scientists such as alchemists, who along with the parlor trick of mock transmutations also studied anatomy, natural medicine and the breeding of stock, which were all very practical and useful, but not as beneficial to their economy and safety as the conceit of being able to produce gold out of led.

In fact, the church’s persecution was so intense that likely a man like Leonardo da Vinci might have burned on the stake had it not been for the protection from secular princes, who benefited from his mundane occupation as a weapons designer.

Leonardo da Vinci was the first to conduct systematic autopsies of human bodies, an exercise strictly forbidden by the church.

Left: Leonardo da Vinci's self portrait superimposed on his most famous panting, Mona Lisa. Right: Leonardo da Vinci's sketch based on human autopsy of the grown embryo. Leondardo da Vinci means "lion of victory."

The most famous of the victims of the anti-rationalist persecutions may be Giordano Bruno, even if the story of Galileo recanting his criticism of geocentrism under threat has become better known to our age.

The heretics were another class of persecuted people and quite often and quite conveniently they happened to be of Jewish origin.

These were Christianized Jews, suspected of being “Judaizers”, who secretly practiced Judaism and had converted to Christianity only to infiltrate and recruit for their own “misguided” religious system.

Rumor has it that Thomas de Torquemada himself was a Jewish convert or from a converted Jewish family, and on top of it an extremely superstitious man who, in order to avoid the curses of the witches he sent to their death, slept with a unicorn as a talisman on the bed table next to his head.

The post-Christian or late Christian era of Europe transformed the past forms of Puritanism, mixing them with the violent strand of anti-Semitism that runs through all of Europe’s history and adding a new, disturbingly semi-scientific dimension:

Anti-Semitism became race theory, and the pollutant of Europe was no longer false religious doctrine but a combination of genetic “infection” and ideological, as Jews were largely attributed the crime of being behind socialism.

Sex crimes were the most predominant of the accusations made in such racist papers as Der Stürmer, and anti-semitic propaganda routinely asserted that Jews worked systematically to undermine the Germanic virtues, introducing a decadent and sexually depraved culture in order to weaken the Aryan race from inside.

Left: Hannibal Lecter, fictional serial killer with a cult following, played by Anthony Hopkins. Right: Charles Manson, real life serial killer with a cult following, incarcerated for encouraging his followers to murdering 9 victims. 

Puritanism and Postponement of Gratification

These were the beliefs that shaped the rise of the Third Reich and led to the horrifying culmination of 2000 years of Biblically inspired and endorsed anti-Semitism.

Even today racists will claim that Jews killed Jesus, while in fact the Biblical sources are very clear that Romans had him executed.

Jews may very well have conspired, as the evangelists claim, but Jesus was himself a Jew, and so were all the evangelists and all the authors of every book in the Bible.

The main theme of the gospel, its values of compassion and serenity and brotherly love, are all aspects of Pisces. So is the martyrium, self-sacrifice, which gave early Christianity its enormous attraction to the poor, downtrodden masses of the Roman empire.

In those days, you may argue, even the introduction of Puritanism constituted a cultural evolutionary leap forward.

Romans were notorious for their sexual negligence and generally despised by the surrounding Celtic cultures for the way they mass-produced illegitimate children who were discarded, orphaned and left to roam the streets as beggars or thieves or prostitutes.

We need not deliberate on the sexual decadence of Rome, since bizarre orgies have already become one of the traits we associate this antique empire with.

Left: Forced self-mutilation is the dominant theme of the Hollywood blockbuster franchise, Saw. Right: Self-mutilation in the modern age, often performed by young females as a response to emotional numbness, "not feeling anything" - in contrast to the flagellants and stylites of the Piscean era, who punished themselves for the slightest erotic impulse. Emotional addiction expressed through auto-aggression?

It suffices to say that Christian Puritanism may have served a purpose, not only to develop and install a new, more sustainable morality that effectively furthered social cohesiveness and protected against venereal diseases, but also promoted what psychologists call sublimation or “postponement of gratification”, universally belived to be the principal factor in extraordinary achievement.

This single-minded attention to ethereal activities – after a terribly devastating period focusing narrowly on theology – may be the single most important factor to the unleashing of literacy, secularist philosophy and enlightenment ideals that, in turn, led to intellectualism, democracy, science and the industrial revolutions.

In that sense the Christian fundamentalist may have a small point or a shred of truth to it, when they claim that democracy is a “Christian invention.”

Naturally, it cannot be a straight-forward fact, since the democratic revolutions were decisively and vocally atheist to the point of being anti-theocratic, adding a signficant number of clerical heads to the heads of monarchs and noblemen that rolled from the guillotine.

The Reverse Sign Interpretation of the Aquarian Age

No Zodiac sign is inherently more evil than another, but the sign opposite to the signifyer of the age appears to rival and persecute the proponents of the true virtues of the age - in the case of the Aquarian Age the perversion of principles is caused by adverse Leo traits - egotism, vanity, greed, brutality and  personality cult.

Technically, the age of Puritanism ended with the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, heralding the current secularist age, which is traditionally associated with the end of Christianity and other monotheistic religions and the beginning of the Age of Aquarius.

The exact inception date of the Aquarian Age is much contested, and the historical events do not necessarily coincide with the astronomical obversations.

It is probably useful to perceive the Zodiac as a structure with some graduality, the signs overlapping and the ancient traditions marked by some level of uncertainty.

After all, nobody really knows what the Zodiac is, where it originated, and how it was shaped in the form we know today.

Various versions have existed and do exist, most notably with separate astrological schools in China and India, differing significantly from the Egyptian-Greek mystical tradition handed over to contemporary practitioners, presumably after travelling all the way from ancient Sumeria.

If the interpretation of the Piscean Age holds true, a similar principle must manifest in the Aquarian Age, with the true virtues represented in the sign signified by the precession and the main vice reprented by the opposing sign, Leo.

With thelesson from the Piscean Age in mind we can begin to understand the horrifying nature of the obsession that will occupy the next 2,150 years, assuming of course humankind will last that long.

Leo, on a good day, shows a benevolent and graceful majesty, but it is a sign associated with some egotism and some vanity, a callous disregard for less favored individuals that cannot surprise, since the emblematic lion is also known as the “King of Animals” or, at least, the king of the savanna.

What we learn from the Pisces-Virgo example is that the virtues of Pisces, Faith, Hope and Love, were promoted through a vehicle of Puritanism that, at first, seemed beneficial and admirable, even if perhaps only on the backdrop of the current decadence at work.

The obvious parallel to the Aquaries-Leo age is that the virtues of Aquaries, Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood, are promoted with a forceful and charismatic culture, a culture that combines physical might with cult of personality – a dual reign over body and mind best expressed in the enormous range and power of Pentagon and Hollywood.

From Humanism to Ultra-Totalitarianism

On the backdrop of dictatorship and human rights violations worldwide, the approach adopted by USA and NATO to “democratize” the rest of the world through a combination of military invention and cultural imperialism may seem justifiable.

However, beneath the noble aspirations, we already now detect the lurking threat of an even more oppressive, even less egalitarian and racist world order, an ideological enslavement to materialism, an absolutely nihilistic blueprint for future societies that may soon deteriorate into a form of structural cannibalism as bad as or even worse than Nazi Germany in the last three years of the Second World War.

Left: Photo from the article about the Afghan "Kill Team" of US soldiers killing Afghan civilians for sport. Right: The most famous photo from the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal during the American administration of the detention facility.

Science informs us about what we are capable of in technical terms. History tells us what we are capable of in terms of conflict and oppression. If you superimpose these two lessons you have a real nightmare.

This is what science fiction writers since Mary Shelley published her masterpiece, Frankenstein, in 1818, has foreseen and warned about. From Orwell and Huxley to a modern day writers like Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, the dystopic visions of future society has one defining characteristic in common: Invasiveness.

The aggressiveness of the societal hectoring, from this point on and forward, can include every aspect of human life, from the cellular structure of the body through nanotechnology to our very thought processes through brain scanning and inception.

The transhumanist vision currently hailed and embraced by neo-modernists, who have failed to take the lesson from the industrial revolution – that technological development does not equate cultural or spiritual evolution – may be preparing a slaughterhouse for the generations to follow.

One of the primary agendas of the current period we are living in is the eradication of religious devotion.

Secularists are increasingly vocal and increasingly aggressive in their efforts to rebuke religion and prevent its influence on society.

In the light of the resurge in new fundamentalism, whether Evangelical or Islamic, this may not only be rational – as it undoubtably is – but also prudent enough.

Religious fundamentalism, if prevalent enough, could mean not just a setback to a new dark age, but the 

destruction of the world in a religiously motivated Third World War.

The tragedy is that this problem established the rationality of what may be just simply a new rationalistic nightmare with as far reaching implications.

The Reality of Structural Cannibalism

Left: The cover photo for the 2002 action film. Right: Depiction of human sacrifice in the Aztec kingdom.  "Collateral damage" is our modern form of human sacrifice, institutionalizing avoidable death as unavoidable or even admirable and exciting in a fictionalized political context.

Let me explain: With religions out of the picture, effectively marginalized, and with crude materialistic rationalism increasingly becoming the perennial world view or paradigm, humankind effectively loses access to virtue morality.

The remaining ethos will be utilitarian, an ethical theory holding that the proper course of action is the one that maximizes the overall "happiness".

We already see the gradual waning of virtue morality and consequentialism in terms like “collateral damage”, which is merely a technical phrase for “necessary sacrifice” and, in a spiritual sense, representative of human sacrifice on a multitude of levels.

It is an aspect of our inherent predatorial and structurally cannibalistic nature, only a few steps removed from the way the Mayans and later the Aztects enforced their cultural power through the dreaded human sacrifices that had the streets of the urban centers run red with human blood.

Even Carl Sagan, a preeminent scientist and atheist, gave allowance for the religious argument in his acclaimed novel contact, where a Christian demonstrator asks a scientist:

“Is there a scientific principle that prevents humans from doing evil?”

The most die-hard atheist, the materialistic nihilist, will scoff at the question and how it is phrased. He will say this is not the concern of science, but a philosophical question. This way responsibility is pushed to a class of people in society who have already lost not only its influence on society and policy making, but its intellectual foundation.

Some may even invoke Nietzsche and say that humans are moving beyond questions of good and evil, citing perhaps Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “…for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

The principle of “most happiness for the most” is a principle that slowly, but steadily transforms human society into a parasitoid on its own populace.

To the victims of agricultural reforms in the past that left millions to starve to death, and the current victims of globalization – whether indigenous people in Latin America murdered and displaced by foresters or Indian farmers committing debt suicide after their genetically modified crops have failed – modern day capitalism is an unequivocal evil.

It is only us, the survivors, who have the privilege of judging it “collateral damage” or a “necessary evil” in the progress of Western civilization, and only until we become the sacrificial lambs ourselves.

The Violation of Everything Sacred

The self-sacrifice encouraged in the Age of Pisces is now increasingly becoming a cultural demand. Society owns your loyalty from the point of birth, and that is nothing new – your labor force, your ability to fight; these are all taken for granted by the nation you happen to be born into.

However, there a degrees of liberty and degrees of meaningfulness to a sacrifice. In some cases it may have been entirely meaningful to a soldier to even volunteer to fight for his homeland against a foreign enemy, to avoid invasion and occupation and plunder and repression and rape.

Today, a great many young men must sign up for war for purposes more obscure than self-defense and possibly only beneficial to a small corporate elite consisting of people who live their lives in gated communities completely separate from the reality of common citizens.

On top of it, what may be required from them in the future far outweighs any sort of invasiveness we have known in the past.

Left: An artist's depiction of cannibalism. Right: Photo art from the movie Matrix, in which humans are born and live out their lives in incubators, generating energy for a giant computer that administrates their vegetative states by inducing a collective, interactive hallucination and feeding them proteins derived from discarded human carcasses.

Cannibalism on a more actual level than merely structural is already taking place, as human organs are not only donated by in some cases stolen and in others sold by people so poor it is their only way to acquire capital to separate themselves from a spare limb.

Cells, genes, particles specific to humans, are taken from human foetuses and applied to products for common consumption.

In theory humans can be used as spare parts, as incubators, willingly, against their will or somewhere inbetween, through the coercion imposed by a social hierarchy where the most privileged make the rules to the disadvantage of the rest.

The poorest will always remain the most thoroughly victimized.

Rape, sexual exploitation, prostitution, which forms one of the most life-changing, aggressive and invasive forms of parasitic or parasitoid exploitation, is the perfect metaphor for a range of shocking practices opened up by the Pandora’s Box of modern science.

In The Matrix humans are reduced to energy sources, batteries who are fed the mashed proteins from the carcasses of discarded human batteries in a horrifying and self-perpetuating cycle of structural cannibalism.

In A Serbian Movie, a horror film utilizing pornography as a metaphor for oppression, every conceivable violation of the human body can become a tableau in “artistic porn”, with snuff being far from the most aggravating event staged by the perverse movie makers, who are by no accident also employed by the national security industry.

“Raped from birth” is a metaphor for Serbia itself as a nation, the film itself a perfect metaphor for modern day corporatism - a big cock that keeps on fucking, until its victims are dead... and then exploits their remains for whatever use the all-knowing, all-powerful market may find for it.

Snuff, incest, rape, child abuse of a newborn infant... nothing is too low to be exploited by the porn industry in A Serbian Film, itself an agonizingly self-referential study in the depraved mindset of modern day capitalism.

The Eradication of Irrationalism

Again, some will say that such visions are exaggeration, arguing that there will be some sort of force to keep back the transgressory tendencies in man.

Such optimism crumbles under scrutiny, partly because of historical evidence and a constant stream of news relating to new forms of depravity and inhumanity taking place in the world and being institutionalized and formalized and sanctioned by governments.

Against the modern utilitarian logic, by some dubbed intellectual materialism, all arguments in favor of humanity stands to fail.

Let me give a set of very simple examples:

“Free will” is an abstraction, a quasireligious or spiritual concept. You cannot possibly prove the existence of a free will, nor can you disprove it. It is something you believe.

Likewise, “privacy” is a scientific absurdity. You are always naked under your skin, and there is no objective difference between having intercourse with or without a camera in the bedroom.

Imagine if someone proposed that all houses were equipped with hidden surveillance equipment. This would automatically reduce the incidents of domestic crimes, such as sexual abuse and wife battering, and possibly even murder-suicide.

How can you argue in favor of an abstraction like “privacy”, a mere privilege when compared to the millions of humans who suffer undetected in the “sanctuary of the home.”

Left: Big Brother society is a reality. One of the 4.2 million CCTV cameras in United Kingdom, right outside the home of Eric Blair, aka George Orwell, author of 1984 and Animal Farm, the two most indignant statements against totalitarianism in the history of literature. Right: Anonymous use of the Guy Fawkes mask popularized by Alan Moore's graphic novel V for Vendetta, adapted into a 2005 Hollywood movie.

The term “sanctuary of the home” indicates exactly what it says: Privacy is a subjective matter, a quasi-

religious concept. It is something we hold sacred for entirely irrational reasons, at least when placed inside the utilitarian matrix.

Let’s go one step further: If you volunteer to donate blood for the medical industry, or if you are forced to do so, may make a big difference to you, but objectively there is no difference between the blood cells.

You put a signature somewhere, representing your alleged free will, but someone who does not have the privilege of choice would also save lives with his blood.

In a larger perspective, is it fair that someone else may lose their lives due to lack of blood, or lack of organs, because a person has failed to donate them?

This does not just go to the question of passive or active agreement, but to the very question of property of the body.

You cannot argue objectively against donating blood or your organs upon death. The only reason it is not mandatory, is because enough people still have a strong irrational motivation to oppose it.

The same with the privacy of the home. No boundary is stronger than the will to defend it, and once the will is gone – once people have been concinved about the “greater good” of a certain course of action, then the system is free to invade and fill up another space.

The End of the Spiritual Man

Left: Hopi Indian art with a poem by the 13th century Persian poet, Jalal ad-Din Rumi. Right: A sketch of a swirling dervish in the ancient Sufi tradition of Islam. These things are all essentially worthless to the new breed of crude ultra-rationalists swarming out to possess every corner of the universe with their icy, reductionist pragmatism.

What remains are feeble arguments based on irrational convictions, such as Jehova’s Witnesses’ opposition to blood, a peculiarity that may in a not so distant future all of a sudden become a very germane act of disobedience.

My point is that spirituality may be very real, a deeper understanding of reality we share on an intuitive level, regardless of whether mechanical sciences can prove or disprove it.

What is currently deemed “irrational” by crude intellectual materialism may be very rational indeed, perceiving consequences and ramifications far down the line, which escapes the linear rationalist mind.

You can even back it up by some rational arguments:

Surveillance may, in itself, change the way we act as individuals and as a group, on a number of levels.

You can speculate it reduces involvement, the sense of civic duty and responsibility in a crisis situation.

You can speculate it makes us think less of ourselves as humans and perceive us more and more as ressources, animals, who can be utilized in the variety of semi-cannibalistic recycling processes available.

You can speculate that it lures or invites us to adopt a mechanical world view, to align ourselves with the system or the “hive”, rendering us still less sensitive to other forms of invasiveness, and more capable of accepting increasingly radical forms of social hectoring.

Once you start thinking about these arguments, comparing to social and cultural processes that are already taking place, they suddenly become less far fetched.

Perhaps the instinctive opposition to microchipped medication sending biofeeds to doctors, or religiously inspired objection to artificial methods of prolonging life, are rooted in one very rational principle: A deep distrust in humans towards humans, knowing our predatorial nature and the potential for even benign systems to deteriorate into complex and sophisticated methods of oppression and exploitation.

The eradication of religion, as it is outlined by today’s strong atheists and rationalists, ushers in an age where the cold mindset of the engineer is mixed with the predatorial greed of capitalism.

A post-religious world is, in a final analysis, not only a world bereft of fundamentalism, homophobia, honor killing, sectarian war, caste systems, theocracy and prejudice – it is also a world where the poetry of Rumi, the philosophy of the Hopi Indians, the swirling Sufis, the song of the muezzin, the mandala and the yogi, as well as schools of deep ecology, are increasingly absurdities, meaningless as anything but antiquated museum artifacts or performances in a human zoo or, at best, marketable exercises adding some spice to an otherwise profoundly materialistic existence.

Between Utilitarianism and Hedonism

US soldiers displaying the Nazi insignia beneath the Stars and Stripes, the subjects of a shortlived 2012 controversy. In the West such ominous signs do not remove the unfaltering belief in the system and ideology behind the current imperialistic wars.

Rationalism in its hardcore, unrelenting stance means not just the end of the notion of a creator, but the end of the notion of a human soul and, as such, also free will. It is not just the end of sacrement, but of all things sacred, of sacrality as concept.

All cultures through all times have held things sacred: The marriage, the conception of life, the name of an individual, the body, certain places and images and symbols, and most of all the deceased and the burial site.

Anthropologists often say that human culture is characterized by or even defined by incest taboo and by its burial rites.

It is not as alarming that American soldiers are caught on camera urinating on dead bodies, or piling up live bodies in obscene and torturuous arrangements while laughing, as the fact that so many find it literally impossible to condemn the behavior.

Even American soldiers have recently been chopped up and buried in mass graves to no significant outcry in the population, desensitized by ages of ultra-violent entertainment and by numerous actual wars.

The loss of sacrality, of a concept of something pure and untouchable, the core of all religious cultures, may be the most devastating event to modern man.

As Nietzche even admitted, the problem with God is that if he doesn’t exist, we would still have to invent him.

This, in itself, poses a mystery deeper than the vast majority of human beings – even the most intelligent – are capable of pondering.

We are star dust, a sentient part of this universe, a principle that attempts to defy entropy, the scientifically oriented thinker may be able to acknowledge on a good day, when at his most sensitive and sensible.

Yet, the implications of that realization fails most modern human beings.

What does it mean to be a replicating organism with the ability to encompass the outer world with its mind?

How can it possibly be that the universe has produced such beings, and through their eyes, observes itself at the most fundamental level of its own structure?

This is the thought that possesses every religious and spiritual individual who strive to figure out the truth about nature and the inherent meanings of the reality we inhabit for a short while.

Brutish, square and one track minded, the modern engineer with only a rudimentary understanding of modern science, dismisses all these people and their spiritual experience of life, along with the ethos the existence of such people represent.

Admittedly, there are hipocrites and fundamentalists and all manners of vicious prejudice and dangerous superstitions.

Still, what do we really offer instead?

Is Moral Decadence A Scientific Principle?

Left:  A lion slaying a buffalo. Right: The human predator in the 1995 cult movie Se7en. Hollywood is churning out movie after movie making icons or even moral examples out of  derangedserial killers, revered by the young for their ice cold intelligence and ruthlessness, giving them a perceived mastery of life and death.

We can witness in today’s society how a new upper class is forming: It consists of the financial elite, their henchmen the politicians, and entertainers, who represent the new clergy in a hedonist cult of personality and beauty and artistic talent, a gateway to the mind of the masses and a portal of hope in their despair; the celebrities are mirrors for the worker bees, an a glamorous aristocracy they can live vicariously through, making it easier to accept their mundane reality and giving a faint hope that they or their offspring can become elevated to the same pseduo-divinity.

It’s a pagan order, and it is religious by nature, cultic. It works according to the exact same principles as theocracies in the past. In fact, Hollywood, often dubbed Sin City in the past, fancies itself a new Babylon.

Our current culture – much in tune with the interpretation of Leo as the temporary contributor of negative traits (no Zodiac sign is more “evil” than another, per definition) – displays the main characteristics of vanity, conceit, greed, cruelty and gratutious violence.

The cultic following of horror movies and literally expressions of adoration for serial killers shows without any room for doubt that a prediction like the one made in this article is very much within the realm of the possible – there is, apparently, no limit to the potential for derangement and delusion and depravity in man.

Along with these ominous trends follow staggering divorce rates, out of wedlock single mother parenthood with the social ramifications thereof, widespread sexual promiscuity all the way down to the underage population, and legions of predators, online, in the streets and in public institutions, preying on the innocent or the defenseless.

40 million women in the world are estimated to be subjected to prostitution. Millions of children are reported abused or neglected, and about these numbers we must assume that many more go unreported.

The ideals of freedom, equality and brotherhood – with brotherhood by far the most neglected quality of the three – may be the true virtues for our age, but so far they produce as much murder and mayhem as they may produce some dubious privilege to those in the other end of the guided missiles and remote controlled bombers.

As we can learn from the Age of Pisces, faith, hope and love were never truly realized until, perhaps, about the end of the age. Until then a mock system comprised by a cult around the most negative aspects of the opposite sign, Virgo, took precedence, sidetracking the truly organic and spiritual movement of Christianity.

Early Christianity was hidden, forced into catacombs by waves of ferocious oppression by the Roman administration that sensed in the movement a threat more urgent than Phoenicia and Carthage.

Perhaps true Christianity was always hidden, except later on forced to go underground by the very proponents of official Christianity, the church and its clerics.

What is posing for emancipation today, for enlightenment and egalitarianism, may be subjected to the same fate, as technocrats serving predatorial masters, a new feudal regime of capitalistic aristocrats, are taking over.

They are lions, but increasingly exposing only the negative traits, supporters of democracy as Napoleon was, on surface and with the express aim of benefiting their own titanic ambition and insatiable greed.

The Dawn of A New Spirituality

The hero of the Age of Aquarius is the rainmaker, the waterboy, the unassuming but dutyful worker, the anynymous activist who claims no merit for himself and the impartial leader, who declines to enjoy special privileges of his position. 

If there is a future for humankind, the trend I describe cannot stand alone. Even for society to continue to exist long enough to make the inevitable abuses and transgressions possible, other forces have to effect the system, promoting at least a temporary and fragile balance to the mechanical cruelty of the systemic thinking.

Humanism, as a real and spiritual rather than ideological force in the world or some detached social engineering scheme conducted by Illuminists, may already exist or soon come into existence.

A fusing of religious tenets – not based on ecumenical religion or an artificial treaty between organized religious systems, but spontanous and intuitive – is very much a possibility.

The Native American prophesies, whether the Seven Generation Prophesy or the Hopi Awakening, seems to be taking effect around the margins of society.

A global society, led by vastly different principles than the formal globalization of UN and multinational companies and organizations, is very obviously forming.

The Aquarius symbol is shaped as two waves, one above the other, often interpreted as alluding to the multitude of wave technologies we operate in the industrial age.

It may, however, also signify a culture without a hierarchical structure, but instead with a flat stucture and two main classes of people who resemble each other closely and identify with each other, even if they are separate classes, master and emissary peacefully united.

The myth associated with Pisces is that of Aphrodite and Eros hiding below the water to escape the onslaught of a monster named Typhoon. It has perfect correlation to the fate of early Christianity and the genuine Christian spirit throughout the 2000 years of religious oppression and political upheavel.

The myth associated with Aquarius is that of Ganymed, who was elevated to the position of weather god by Zeus. Some sources suggest Zeus was captivated by Ganymed’s beauty, and that their relationship was a sexual affair.

Perhaps this corresponds to the enormous impact of the LGBT movement in the current age, making for new and more tolerant forms of sexual interaction all around.

The erotic element to the Greek myth, however, should not detract from the main points: Ganymed became a truly benign deity, a humane one without any significant moral flaws as in the case of the other, ever bickering deities.

Quite remarkably, in contrast to most other mortals who gained godhood, Ganymed did not have to die first, which could indicate a glimpse of hope for landmark progress in the field of longevity studies by the end of the 2150 year cycle.

It also suggests a turning away from the horrific structural cannibalism and the imposed human sacrifices our history as well as the Greek fables are so full of references to.

Weather engineering may be one of the great leaps of science, a unifying factor for the nations of Earth and a way to curb the consequences of rampant and irreversible ecological damage.

Ganymed’s main characteristic was to be unassuming and, as a god of rain, a rainmaker, he is thought of as supremely impartial, a worthy ideal for scientists, journalists, lawmakers and judges alike, and a desperately needed one.

Finally, the Aquarian age may produce insight into the wave-particle mystery of matter, suggesting that of the various competing physics theories string theory may be the most reality-adequate model we can so far produce.

I hope this text can help the genuine humanist, any friend of man and nature, and any truth seeker, to navigate peacefully through the troubled water ahead, staying clear like Odysseus of all temptations, whether Cirche or Cyclop, lotofagus or siren, and making it through the narrow strait between the extremes of Schylla and Charybdis without compromising neither integrity nor objectivity.