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By
Francis D. Grabau
Gnosticism and Astrology, two subjects almost equally hard to
define or contain within clear, precise, and tidy boundaries.
And what sort of rare hybrid would we have if we were to
crossbreed the two and give birth to something called ‘Gnostic
Astrology’ ? Would it be a hybrid form of fate, a kind of
ouija board full of planets, signs, and archons leading us
toward the dark and predetermined depths of futility ? After
all, there exists in the ‘popular mind’ a notion that
astrology predicts one’s ‘fate’ and that gnosticism posits an
‘evil’ world brought into being and ruled over by a ‘Demiurge’
who has captured us all in his dark prison of matter. An
ancient and Gnostically conceived ‘Universal Fate’ technically
referred to as the Heimarmene condemns us to a rather robotic
existence in matter until such time as we free ourselves and
return to the True Creator pictured as a Spirit of Light. But
these are ‘popular’ notions which are based upon the quick
labeling of ideas and systems of thought, and such superficial
evaluations do not take into account the fact that both
astrology and gnosticism once shared a common root, a common
heretical attitude of questioning the appearances of what has
been called (for seemingly endless ages of historical time)
REALITY. In fact, both astrology and gnosticism are rooted in
the Spirit’s struggle to overcome the illusion of time as the
prison which binds us to a wheel of life and death popularly
thought to be natural, inevitable, and ‘normal’. But is it ?
Wasn’t it James Joyce who cried out (through one of his
literary characters) that history was a nightmare from which
he was trying to awaken ?
If we are to take a Gnostic approach toward astrology one of
the very first things we must do is to question this notion of
TIME. In terms of the mythical and symbolic language of
astrology, that means we must look closely at Saturn-Chronos
for ‘he’ is spoken of as the Lord Of Time. He is the principle
of binding, focus, form and time, and contemporary astrology
is still essentially a study of time cycles based upon the
number of days and years required for each of the classical
planets ( Luna, Sol, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and
Saturn) to complete one full circle around the zodiac of
twelve signs (Aries through Pisces). Of course, contemporary
astrologers also study the cycles of the ‘newly discovered’
planets, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, but always and everywhere
astrologers are concerned with tracking the passage of TIME !
Now, any decently self-respecting Gnostic must sit up and take
notice of this practice because the very core of Gnosticism is
to question appearances. The Gnostic is nothing if not a
person who rebels against the norms, the taken-for-granted
‘facts’ which reduce life to an experience of sleep-walking
through time. The traditional cry of the Gnostic is: Sleepers,
Awake! The Gnostic feels that humankind are caught in the
delusions and snares woven by the Demiurge and his appointed
executive bureaucrats known as the Archons said to be seven or
twelve by count. These variously seven or twelve Archons have
traditionally been associated with the seven ancient planets
(see above) and/or the twelve signs of the zodiac. So, from a
certain classical Gnostic perspective, astrology is a study of
the bureaucratic games played by the CEOs of the false
creator-god, the Demiurge known as Yaldaboath and often
understood to be the Yaweh of the Old Testament, or the Father
of the political Christian’s Jesus Christ. This Old Testament
Demiurge, this Yaldaboath-Yaweh is the caricature of Old
Father Time making his appearance each year at countless,
global, New Year’s Eve parties carrying his sickle and his
hourglass announcing the death of the old year (time) and
ushering in the child who is the new. Unfortunately, each year
that child is forced to age and, in turn, becomes Old Father
Time too. The hourglass and the sickle are the traditional
symbols of the Lord Of Time, the planet Saturn, he who binds
humankind into the reasonable, serious, and linear prison
called time. He is the ‘elder’ among the Chief Executive
Officers appointed by the Demiurge-Father-God to run his
corporate business of enslaving humankind to the wheel of
work, suffering, and weekly paychecks which keeps his world
turning round. Isn’t it the Corporate World which teaches that
money is time and time is money ? And isn’t it astrology which
reinforces this ‘time equals money’ myth by teaching that
Saturn, Father Time, is the tester, the symbol for the ‘hard
facts of life’, the Author of ‘Reality’ ? When Saturn is
active by transit in the Horoscope of your life contemporary
astrologers are the first to caution you that you must ‘bite
the bullet’ and buckle down to conformity. What are we to make
of the newly arising ‘schools of astrology’ which offer
‘accreditation’ by way of the authority of the established
University system ? What are we to think of astrologers
teaching ‘clients’ how to adjust through contemporary
psychology to the status-quo of the increasingly psychotic
world ? To any living Gnostic it is apparent that astrology
itself has fallen into the grip of Saturn !
If we view Saturn through the lens of historical gnosticism we
can see this Realist, this Authority Figure of Old Man Time,
as the chief warden of the prison earth. Saturn’s authority is
precisely what binds us to the realistic and linear time which
begins for each of us at birth and ends at death. Life, as
brooded over by this nasty Archon, is a pre-determined, cause
and effect vale of tears, a medieval Dance Macabre. He
determines the rules, the facts, and the sequence of events as
each of us moves from minute to minute through life. He is the
measurer, the statistician, the policeman, the priest, the
judge, the no-nonsense guy smoking the fat cigar or drinking
the Perrier water while basking in the pure groundedness of
his astute timing and his ‘common sense’.
He says, -‘This is it; this is what works as time has tested
and experience has shown.’ He’s the one who used to write on
the old flat maps of the world: ‘Beyond here there be
Dragons’. The Rule Giver, the jealous bigot of a ‘god’ who
gave us his ‘Ten Commandments’, the guy who always manages to
pull the wool over our eyes by claiming to simply be stating
the FACTS. Given the truth of all this, the first thing any
Gnostic must do is see through the limiting external authority
of Saturn to the real authority which resides within each of
us as individuals. We have to make up our own rules, define
our own terms, and watch out for the rigidity that often comes
from self-complacent certainty. When we remain focused
exclusively upon our own boundaries, when we cease to question
even our own authoritativeness, when we are fixated upon cause
and effect as well as linear time we cannot sidestep this
Archon who blinds us to the spark of Spirit within ourselves
and thereby isolates us from the Divine Light. That ‘Light’ is
characterized by ease and flow, by joy and laughter, by direct
experience of the plenitude of the Pleroma.
Even scholars (much to their bewilderment) recognize that
there is no authoritative Doctrine that can be said to fixedly
define Gnosticism, but the last thirty years has produced a
growing number of astrologers who do not question that a
scientific and psychological study of planets, aspects, and
statistics can produce a ‘qualified’ and ‘certified’
diploma-wielding astrologer ! A Gnostic approach to astrology
cautions us to be wary of anything billing itself as a
‘certified astrologer’ because certification, in Gnostic
terms, can only rise from within and cannot be confirmed on
anyone from without. It’s that old saying that if you meet the
Buddha on the road you must slay him.
But the tricky Archon who speaks through the mouth of Saturn
will always certify uniformity and statistics because these
are the tools of his homogenized Power and pervasively
blinding Authority. Saturn, in astrological parlance, is the
symbol of the lowest common denominator of collectively agreed
upon social-cultural reality. Perhaps we should view him in
the alternative shamanic sense. See him as a ‘worthy opponent’
who does, indeed, test us mercilessly before he will yield his
limiting scepter of externally imposed authoritative rule to
our own inner sense of urgent self-remembering. After all,
it’s that very self-remembering which alone can lead us inward
past the famous Threshold (whereupon he is the fabled
‘Dweller’) through the infamous ‘Ring Pass Not’ and out from
forgetful sleep!
Liberation from the thralldom of Saturn does not come without
consciously focused hard work. But this kind of ‘hard work’ is
not imposed from without. Instead, it rises up from within
each of us as we hearken to the voice of Spirit within and
around ourselves beckoning us to join the dance of
consciousness that is the Divine. It is an invitation to
wholeness and openness, and it does not fear or reject the
Archons -nor even Yaldaboath himself- for they and he alike,
together with everything else that exists on whatever level or
‘plane’ are but part of the Whole which is the Divine. For the
Gnostic there is neither Christian evil nor sin though there
is ignorance, inertia, and a very human craving for some
final, ultimate ‘end’ or cessation. One can grow weary, tired,
and afraid of the Dance of Spirit as long as one feels a need
to control -in any way- that dance, but as soon as one learns
to let the dance dance itself, one is carried and buoyed up on
the pulse of the rhythm that is the Light of Spirit. Saturn’s
great teaching is that there is a Light that appears as
Darkness, a Black Light that is part and parcel of the
fullness that is the Pleroma, the Whole. But that Black Light
which often triggers in us fear, inertia, and the entropy of
despair has its roots in the cells of our own bodies which
partake of the seemingly ignorant resistance we find in matter
itself.
Though the scholars who classify systems of philosophy,
belief, and theology usually claim that the historical
Gnostics (the authors of the Pistis Sophia or the Nag Hammadi
Library etc.) believed this world to be evil, and ‘matter’ to
be ‘fallen’ away from the Light of Spirit …they are mistaken.
And during the Twentieth Century at least two self-proclaimed
Gnostics, Aurobindo Ghose and Mirra Alfassa, have clarified
this ‘error’ by pointedly stating that matter is spirit, and
that ‘evil’ -though phenomenally ‘real’- is actually nothing
but the ignorant resistance of the ‘inconscient’. What we
perceive as negation and, consequently fear, resist, and try
to flee from is the very energy which we cling to as ‘Death’.
We wear ourselves and each other out fleeing from Death, we
imagine a pure life free from the pain and suffering of mortal
life, and we call it immortal life as disembodied Spirit. But
the Gnostic Christ revealed the fact that ‘ultimately’ the
body itself and all the Earth (not the World, which is a
human-archon distortion) are ‘destined’ to be Whole,
Transfigured, Immortal. There is no Spirit apart from matter
or apart from the Earth; there are no elect, all evolution is
elected; as Mirra said, “ All the splendors one can experience
by going up, by getting out, by leaving are nothing! They’re
nothing; they don’t have that concrete reality; they seem
vague compared to HERE. That is truly why the earth has been
created. It’s in terrestrial matter, on EARTH, that the
SUPREME becomes perfect.” Anyone who knows these truths has
nothing to fear from Saturn or any other Archon !
I am writing about Saturn as an Archon because this year and
next (2001-2002) humanity is collectively experiencing a
thrice repeated astrological opposition between the planets
Saturn and Pluto respectively expressing themselves through
the zodiacal signs of Gemini and Sagittarius. We are
experiencing a ‘face-off’ or ‘tug-of-war’ taking place between
the Lord Of Time and the Dark Lord Of The Underworld, between
Authority and Invisible Powers, between Saturn and Pluto. Of
course, to the scientists among us it’s merely a neighborhood
pool game taking place between billiard balls in our local
solar system, but this is where we live and walk around in our
human bodies, so it’s bound to have some kind of an affect
within us both individually and collectively. What might that
affect be, and how might it be related to the dumb Demiurge
and his puppet Archons ? Well, it is said that all the other
Gods of Olympus felt a formidable respect for Pluto due to his
‘helmet’ which granted him the gift of invisibility, and his
rather absolute control over Death. So we may suppose that we
are witnessing (and participating in) an equally formidable
‘face off’ between Death and Time. And we may further suppose
that this struggle has about it a certain air of invisible
‘powers’ competing with each other over who is the true
authority in the Saturnian realm of business and government,
and who is the covert dealer in the Plutonian realm of wealth
and death. We might look at the situation as a battle between
Archons which may generate so much heat that a little spark of
the Divine could accidentally escape and throw some new Light
on the perpetual games played by the Demiurge and his
attendants who ‘cause’ the ‘imprisoned’ plight of humans and
the Earth. A real possibility may exist for us to wake up
through a sudden flash of Insight ! What if we are the
Demiurge and the Archons ? What if fear, authority, and power
cease to mesmerize us ? Wasn’t it Pogo who said that we have
seen the enemy and he is us ? And who was it who said: What if
they gave a War, and nobody came ? This could be our chance to
let the fanatical authorities and bureaucrats shoot it out
with each other and with the plutocrats in their own version
of Hollywood’s ‘High Noon’. What else was going on when
airplanes crashed into the Pentagon and the World Trade Towers
? We could choose to unplug ourselves from the media hype and
tune in to the Light of our Spirits, we could choose to sit
back and sing along with John Lennon: IMAGINE … !!!
One of the things we must imagine as contemporary Gnostics
and/or astrologers is that times and consciousness have
really, substantially changed, and if we are going to escape
the ‘universal fate’ or heimarmene posited by the Gnostics
living around the time of the historical (or mythological)
Christ we must re-examine this whole notion of ‘fate’. An
astrologer must feel or assume that there is some kind of
‘connection’ between the planets, stars, black holes, quasars,
etc. and man; indeed, if astrology is anything at all it is a
tool by means of which we humans can tune in to the tides of
the moon, the exchanges of energies taking place between one
heavenly body and another. But a living attunement to such
forces, such waves of mutually interfacing energies is the
traditional territory of magic, witches, wizards, and shamans.
Man is involved not only with the planets and stars, but with
the local winds in the neighborhood, with the flow or
pollution of the streams and rivers. The mighty waters of the
World Ocean girt us round -whether we delineate that Ocean by
labels such as Pacific, Atlantic, or the Persian Gulf. We are
inextricably woven into the fabric of Nature, we are part of
the Anima Mundi, the Dreamtine, and the Erdgeist. It is
probably this feeling, this direct personal experience of the
connectedness of all things which gave rise to the notion of
predetermined, predestined, ‘FATE’. All it really amounts to
is that we as humans undergo certain experiences which we do
not understand, can’t figure out, and can’t seem to avoid.
Many of these experiences are painful or negative ones which
we did not want or desire in any way, shape, or form …that we
are aware of, -consciously. But let’s not stop there and call
in the word, ‘FATE’, to get us out of our perplexity. Fate
explains nothing, resolves nothing, leads us nowhere. It’s
just a word, a kind of operatic trick full of sound and fury
and signifying nothing. True, it has the sort of hypnotic,
repetitive and driving rhythm we hear so clearly in something
like the overture to Giuseppe Verdi’s, La Forza Del Destino.
But Fate is a cheap device suited for TV soap operas, not for
conscious human beings. Gnostics were and are people who seek
to Awaken, to free themselves and others from the daily soap
operas which are the bread and circus of the unexamined life.
Gnostics seek direct experience of and unity with the Divine,
not second-hand books or lectures or media reports purporting
to reveal the truth but always reinforcing the same old
‘revelations’, the same re-veilings of the truth. Gnostics
continuously cry out to themselves and others, -Awake, Awake,
Awaken! To be awakened is to be CONSCIOUS or AWARE, and a
person who is conscious or aware does not cry out, - O Cursed
FATE !
A Gnostic approach to astrology seeks to utilize the language
of the stars to get at the deeper connectedness flowing as a
conscious exchange between all aspects of life. The planet
Jupiter is a being, not a chunk of inert matter or a whirling
storm of gases. Who among us cares to recall a ‘past-life’ as
a methane molecule on Jupiter ? A Gnostic approach to
astrology would encourage us to do so, would encourage us to
directly experience the synergy which takes place when a human
being speaks with a planet. Conscious speech and thought are
important realities, but so are conscious feelings !
We can speak in conscious feeling with the planets, and with
the winds and trees and oceans. We can even participate in a
conscious feeling dialogue with the constituent cells of our
organs and blood stream. Mars is the way we do that. Mars is
the life-force churning within the blood. Jupiter is the way
the heart beats outward. Saturn is the way the heart contracts
and reaffirms its organic form. Saturn is the way our bones
and teeth talk. The Moon is the water that flows within us,
the juices encasing the cells, the zig and zag of the
reptilian brain. Venus is the desire we feel to be at ease
within our own bodies and to relate physically through touch.
Venus is the way our glands secrete those special fluids which
ease us into and out from states of balanced attunement.
Balance is poise, but it’s also a state of rest, and when we
need to move out from a state of poised rest Venus dances with
Mars and we go into motion. Mercury is the nervous system
coordinating all these movements; it’s the way one cell thinks
of and talks to another; it’s the consciousness alive in each
and every sub-atomic particle (or wave) which resides in
ourselves and all the rest of creation. Mercury works
hand-in-hand with the Spirit of the Sun who symbolizes the
star matter out of which we are formed and through which we
reconstitute ourselves daily so as to assume the famous
Gnostic ‘Robe of Light’.
Ah yes, but every time we reach a moment of rest or
centeredness we are also communing with Saturn, and he is the
metal known as lead -heavy with weight. Saturn, being the
principle of form, likes to hold things in form -whether on
the dense physical plane or on the astral ones. Saturn is the
holding power of form, the force of inertia and contraction,
and that’s why I’ve spoken of him as the Chief Executive
Officer of Old Yaldaboath himself. Who benefits by having us
cling to the ‘tried and true’ ? Who tells us that a bird in
the hand is worth two in the bush ? Who wants things to remain
in the forms they already have ? Why, Saturn, of course. But
in these coming months bridging the years 2001-2002 we must
remember that Saturn is ‘facing-off’ with Pluto and this
indicates to any gnostic astrologer that there are some old
forms that will be facing the kind of radical change we call
death. This is why it’s absolutely important, it’s critically
urgent that we humans begin to tap into the faculty of our
Spirit known as IMAGINATION.
While Pluto opposes Saturn in the skies above, below, and
surrounding us a Gateway opens into the Unknown and we
collectively approach a new Threshold. But Saturn, recall, is
the ‘Dweller On The Threshold’ whom we, ourselves, have set up
there as a guard. As we approach our own personal inner and
outer Forms, as we question the nature of Reality and Time
itself we will be interrogated by whatever we want to call
that force inside us (individually and collectively) which
binds us to the familiar, secure, and known. It will present
itself to us as the Law of Cause and Effect, as the guardian
and stern defender of Practical Reality. So we must -each of
us- turn a Spiritual and Imaginative gaze its way, we must
hold Saturn’s nobler visage in our inner eye and commune with
him the way we would with any other Form of Spirit, lovingly
and with kindness. He will test us because that’s the job
we’ve assigned him, and he will freeze the smiles right off
our faces if those smiles are of the ‘Disneyland’ variety.
Nothing ‘airy-fairy’ will get past this Guardian, nothing
superficially positive, nothing blindly optimistic. But, if we
face him fair and square, if we face him in full consciousness
of the practical power of Awakened Imagination and with a
grounded grasp of our own immortality he will allow us passage
through the threshold he guards and we will be able to walk
into a new time and a new reality. Into the time and reality
of what the ancient Gnostics called Aeonic Consciousness. It
is the reborn, renewed, rejuvenated realm of Pluto; the realm
where life and death commingle as one…just imagine it…‘nothing
to kill or die for, and no religion, too!’
The zodiacal gateways through which the current opposition
between Saturn and Pluto pours down upon us here on Earth are
the signs of Gemini and Sagittarius. These are the
astrological signs naturally associated with the third and
ninth houses in any horoscope,
and these houses are the areas of life experience which deal
with communication and journeys. Daily, mundane communication
of facts and data (as well as short trips around town and
quick telephone calls) are the priority of the third house,
while the ninth house deals with communications from the
perspective of goals, intentions, and purposes, (as well as
travel to foreign countries and global communication via the
internet). In Medieval and Renaissance times the third house
was the house of Heresy while the ninth was the house of
Religion. We can rest assured, then, that the Saturn to Pluto
opposition occurring in the very signs concerned with such
themes will focus the death and rebirth of Authority in the
area of everybody’s belief systems. It tells us we are ready
and in need of rethinking all our goals, beliefs, and
intentions on a global as well as a personal scale, especially
as these issues affect all forms of travel and communication.
The Saturnian, status-quo notions of business, law, and order
are definitely up for redefinition as the invisible power of
Pluto pounds against those structures which Saturn has built.
Voila! Two airplanes fly into the Twin Towers of the World
Trade Center in New York, and another one dives into the
Pentagon. The establishment businesses that run America in the
guise of Bush, Chaney, and Powell immediately
scream…‘Terrorists’ …‘Religious Fanatics’… as the walls of
multinational corporate money and war come crashing down.
Thousands of people literally die in the explosions which all
the world watches on television, listens to on radio, and
talks about via the near-global internet. A picture begins to
circulate on the new electronic ‘information highway’ of the
face of a gargoyle described as the Devil himself which is
leering out from the fiery and billowing clouds. Who created
that picture ? It is dismissed as a fake. But every image is a
Rorschach test and obviously somebody needed to see the Devil
himself in the image of the event.
Why ? Because, says the Gnostic astrologer, this is Pluto the
very ‘God’
of death and ruler of Hades. He is expressing himself via the
sign of religion and belief systems, the zodiacal sign known
as Sagittarius. He is the invisible ‘terrorist’ from a foreign
(Sagittarian) country bringing hellish death to America by way
of the arrow symbol of Sagittarius flying as an airplane
directly into the Gemini Twin Towers of the World Trade Center
which are Saturnian forms and structures housing the
high-powered
wheeler-dealers and their business lawyers. To a Gnostic
astrologer the event is a transparently planned covert
maneuver on the part of the
Multinational-Military-Industrial-Complex which is already
operating as the ‘Government’ of the entire globe of Earth.
There is only One Government running all nations. It ‘staged’
this event, and it has quite a few more in store for us. The
goal is a One World Government intended as a Global
Plutocracy. The goal is the Rule of the Wealthy over all the
peoples of the planet.
The goal is the imposition of an invisible world-wide-web of
electronic surveillance leading to mind control, to mood
control of all the people all the time everywhere. The force
behind all this is the Moloch of ‘Old Testament’ fame, the
Gnostic Demiurge Yaldaboath whom the poet, William Blake,
called ‘Old Nobodaddy’ !
It serves Business to set one Religious group against another,
to set one Culture against another, to set one Nation against
another through the age-old strategy called ‘Divide and
Conquer’. Put the fear of the Lord into the people. Tell them
their Nation is being attacked. Tell them they are not safe.
Tell them the ‘enemy’ and the ‘evil’ is everywhere
and invisible and threatening. Create fear and paranoia,
‘destabilize’ all belief systems and all values. Use the
familiar ‘cloaking device’ of the Klingon ships from Star
Track.
Use Pluto’s helmet of Invisibility. Use the ‘Men In Black’. Or
the Reptilians from outer space. Or the Greys. Use anybody and
anything, but bring all the peoples of the Earth to their
knees. Make them beg for stability and security. Tell them it
can only be achieved if they all agree to be implanted with
microchips, if they all agree to eat corn flakes and use
microwaves on Thursdays, if they all wear Nike shoes. Hell,
tell them anything you need to tell them to have them eating
out of your hands. Create Christian fanatics, Muslim fanatics,
Buddhist fanatics, New Age fanatics…anything to ‘divide and
conquer’. But above all else you must make sure to destroy
IMAGINATION, to eradicate it from the collective mind. Visions
and Dreams of the Spirit must be banned and labeled as mental
diseases indulged in by drug consuming paranoia theorists.
Patriotic submission to the only God of Investment in money,
work, and security is all that can be tolerated in this
dawning ‘Brave New World’. And the corrupting Archons, -the
Priests, Bankers, Gurus, Rabbis, Generals, Lawyers,
Psychologists, Police- must be installed and supported in
every Nation. Is this what is meant by ‘the dawning of the Age
of Aquarius’ ? Hardly; it smells like deep shit to me !
We all know and realize that 'terrorism' is part of our daily
lives. We live in 'terror' of collapsing any day from the
strain of our efforts just to survive financially, and we know
the real 'terrorists' are those who create this daily
atmosphere of 'where is the money going to come from'. We also
know that the American lifestyle is centered squarely in this
daily competition to 'make profits'. There are always more
'bills' to be paid, and we must always be thinking about how
to get the money to pay those bills. This is the strain on our
nerves that dulls us and numbs the voice of our souls and robs
us of joy. We know that life should not be focused upon making
money at all cost, and we know that JOY ...simple joy in life,
completely disappears under these circumstances. Who could
dare to be happy or joyous -let alone act in playful and
'silly' ways- when buildings such as the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon have been bombed and thousands of quite
'ordinary' and innocent people killed ? We are being
programmed to 'feel' now and because of these events, and the
'feelings' we are supposed to feel are being fed to us:
sorrow, sadness, and compassion for our fellow citizens
slaughtered in these events, and righteous anger and
indignation at the 'outsiders' who engineered this atrocity.
These programmed feelings are intended as a 'break' in our
daily grind of working hard and doing whatever it is we need
to do to get all the money we need for our bills. We are
being given 'time-off' to react to a staged 'Tragedy' !
I notice that no public figure suggests that in recognition of
the media trauma being inflicted upon the world of nations and
exhausting each and every one of us spiritually and
emotionally and psychically we shall all be exempt from paying
rent this month. The multinational corporate government isn't
suggesting it will mail to each citizen a check for $10,000 ?
No, we are even expected to pay for this orgy of psychic
debauchery. I'm sure that the same commercials selling the
same products are running hand-in hand with images of death
and destruction, while the same public announcers, reporters,
and 'pundits' are telling us exactly what it is we are feeling
and what we are going to be doing about all this.
Okay then, mate, if all this is so …-what are we to do ? Well,
don’t ask me! I don’t want to play that kind of ‘God’ ! Just
IMAGINE for yourself what it is that we are to do. Imagine you
are omniscient (the Gnostics claim that you are both
omniscient and divine) but temporarily suffering from acute
amnesia; you actually know what to do, you just don’t know you
know! Take a look at that word, ‘temporarily’, and note that
it derives from the Latin root, ‘tempus’ meaning time. We’ve
already talked about this notion, ‘time’. We’ve said that
astrologers recognize it as the domain of Saturn, and we’ve
noted that Pluto is currently opposing Saturn bringing about
the ‘death’ or radical rebirth of our concepts, beliefs, and
experiences of ‘time’. We are on the ‘Threshold’ of a new kind
of ‘time’ and the Guardian of that Threshold is Saturn, Lord
Of Time. The job which we individually and collectively have
given him is to test us, to warn us that time is a linear
experience, to tell us to slow down before we walk right off
the line of time and end up dead, crazy, or disoriented in a
timeless Void. Time is the keyword in a warning sentence, and
we are the subject of that sentence, and if we rush to
conclusions we will end the sentence. Period. Birth is the
start of the sentence and the period is the end: Death. The
end. But Pluto is luring us on, tempting us to walk off the
line, telling us every line is a curve, tossing toward us the
fractal geometry of the chaos theory. Telling us it’s real, or
at least worth the walk over the threshold. Who dares to cross
the doorway of linear time and come out of the closet ? What’s
out there ?
If Saturn is the Threshold then we know what’s out there: the
planets beyond the orbital threshold of Saturn are Uranus,
Neptune, and Pluto. The late Dane Rudhyar, a Gnostic
Astrologer of the first order, suggested that we view these
three planets as “ Galactic Ambassadors ” bearing news
intended for us from solar systems outside our own. Together,
they constitute a three-fold message every Gnostic is glad to
hear and that message is AWAKEN! Uranus shocks us into seeing
all the exceptions to Saturn’s laws, authorities, rules, and
linear views of Time. Neptune seeks to ease us after that
shock into an imaginative feeling as to what life might be
like if our timeless visions and dreams came true. And Pluto
completes the siren lure away from the centrality of our Sun
by saying something along these lines;
-Look, you know that until now your world has revolved
exclusively around the Star you know as your Sun, but every
Star in the Galaxy is a Sun, and there are many Galaxies in
the Infinite Universe. Just what do you think this implies ?-
I answer that it suggests many dimensions of space and time
beyond what the old-fashioned lawgivers have spoken of, that
it is no accident we are hearing of possibilities of ‘folding’
space and time, that we’d do well to remember and ponder upon
Bucky Fuller’s language about Spaceship Earth. I think it may
be quite possible to travel (not just astrally) from one
dimension, one lifetime, one planet to another without the use
of any craft external to our bodies. I think Pluto is rattling
the bars of our Gnostic prison and offering us his assistance
if we want to cross yet another threshold into a greater, more
comprehensive freedom. And I think this offer has all the
Archons and the Demiurge himself frantic to find ways to
prevent such an escape from happening.
The events on September 11th 2001 in Manhattan and at the
Pentagon are evidence of what is going on.
The American Government, which is synonymous with most of
mainstream American Media, is responding to Pluto’s message
with terrorist games conducted in what they like to call the
‘theatre’ of War. They are having a certain measure of success
with this newest theatrical production, but nothing like what
they hoped for, so we can expect in the next year that they
will ‘stage’ more terrorist events. Hundreds of thousands -if
not millions- of Americans can see the truth behind their
government’s lies. They do not take to the streets or rise up
in physical rebellion because they tried that in the 60’s and
saw how the powers that be easily contained their efforts.
They know that the greater majority of their fellow countrymen
are still comfortably asleep, but they are talking to each
other all over the internet and sharing their insights with
sleeping family members and friends as well. The veil is
lifting. Insight is happening everywhere among us. It’s true
that we ‘Americans’ are a spoiled and indulgent lot who like
the much advertised ‘good life’ we are being spoon fed. But
now our so-called government has decided to aim its weapons
right on the folks at home, and more and more of its citizens
are dimly awakening to this fact. As a people, we do it slowly
and reluctantly as ‘couch-potatoes’ gawking into our TV sets,
watching our Hollywood movies, eating our micro-waved popcorn
and paying our ‘mort-gages’. But the government’s attack on
Manhattan in downtown New York brought the U.S. ‘theatre’ of
War to Broadway, -right into the heart of America’s love
affair with Imagination. An old song is being triggered in the
country’s collective show-time memory, and it ain’t ‘God Bless
America’. It’s more like the song Judy Holliday sang in the
musical called
‘The Bells Are Ringing’ and it goes a little like this:
“ The party’s over, the candles flicker and dim. You’ve danced
and dreamed through the night, it seemed to be right…”
But it wasn’t right, it was woefully wrong. The ghosts of the
workers slaughtered in the attack are walking the streets and
whispering the truth from the ‘other side’ into the ears of
their fellow citizens. Many a truck driver, cab driver,
waitress, and cook is reflecting as Hamlet did when he mused:
“ Something’s rotten in the STATE ……”
America is not the whole world throughout which the effects of
Pluto opposing Saturn are being felt, but the whole world is
watching these events in America and that gives them a certain
symbolic value. In the Birth-chart of America cast for July 4,
1776 at 5:13:55 PM in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania when the
‘Declaration Of Independence’ was signed the very degrees of
Sagittarius and Gemini around which the current threefold
series of Pluto to Saturn oppositions is focused were the
Rising and Setting degrees of the country’s destiny. And on
that day so many years ago the American Mind, symbolized by
Mercury in Cancer, was in opposition to the Collective
American Unconscious, symbolized by Pluto in Capricorn. The
‘Dark Lord Of The Underworld’, the Archon-Archetype of the
hidden power of wealthy Plutocracy has always stalked the
minds of the country’s citizens. The very ‘Declaration’ that
declared “that all men are created equal” was signed by slave
holders who counted black folks as fractional ‘men’ and gave
them no vote. Businessmen from Europe stole the North American
Continent from the Native Americans already living here and
step-by-step turned the entire country into a Business
Deal -the whole Island of Manhattan was ‘purchased’ from the
‘Indians’ with a few strands of glass beads !
At the very hour when the World Trade Center in downtown
Manhattan came crashing down in flames the planet Mercury was
moving in the skies on the exact degree of Libra where Saturn
is found in America’s birth-chart and that degree of Libra was
Rising in the East over Manhattan. This suggests that what is
going on is very deliberate and carefully planned by the
'LAW'...you know the famous American Independence claim:
'In America we have no Kings because the LAW is King'.
The problem has been in our face since the internal coup which
assassinated JFK and has never been publicly acknowledged.
Consider that Mercury 'rules' Gemini on the US Descendant and
that is where Saturn now stalks in transit. We will be told
that the enemy is 'out there' ( on the Descendant, in the
seventh house of ‘open enemies’ somewhere), but the enemy is
within. It is the thoroughly corrupt Law of the United States
Government, the Federal Government. All the sleeping
'Patriots’ can shout about defending 'Democracy' as much as
they like, but any fool can witness George Bush speaking,
gesturing, behaving just like a corn-pone Texas King ready to
ride rough-shod over all constitutional rights in the
'Emergency' he and his fellow corporate cronies have
concocted. Does it not seem ironic that we originally rebelled
against a British King named George and are now giving full
powers of War and unlimited budget to George Bush ? We are
installing him as our Monarch, the New King George. Let’s hear
it for the Gnostic Demiurge !!!
When our unduly elected government arranged the events of
September 11th, 2001 attacking the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon they made a big mistake. The
immediate reaction of Americans was toward exalting their
Libran Law as King (as George and Company had planned) and now
we face the Coronation of our own King George. But, at the
Birth of this 'America' the Sun itself was occupying the 13th
degree of Cancer and in tight square aspect to the proffered
notion that in America the Law itself is King. This 'moment'
is THE great turning point for the country. America was never
'meant' to be a typical country; the famous 'melting pot'
image truly does point to
America's 'destiny'. This country is meant to be the country
that ends all countries, that puts an end to the very notion
of discretely isolated national borders and beliefs. America
was meant to be a global vision for the future of all peoples
around the globe. In short, the famous Declaration Of
Independence was meant to be a shared reality by each citizen
of planet Earth. All peoples are brothers and sisters and
share in One World. This 'One World' is definitely NOT the One
World Order King George is always proclaiming; it is NOT the
imposed uniformity of global corporate business on the
citizens of Earth, and it is most emphatically NOT the
'normalization' and ‘homogenization' intended by the Kings,
Queens, and Princes (etc.) of a wealthy Global Corporate Elite
!
But how do we get to the vision of global unity without
falling prey to the One World Corporate Government ? I think
that individuals all over the globe are the True ‘Americans’.
I think the word, AMERICA, like the words AFRICA, ASIA, and
AUSTRALIA -because they begin and end with the first letter of
the alphabet
...the A, the Aleph, the Alpha
signify ever-renewed Beginnings. I think we need to keep
Imagination ( Neptune) alive within us as the creative and
joyous mother of Spirit. Imagination is the key to awakening
from the dull dream of the Gnostic Demiurge and his Corporate
Archons. All the sleepers will awake. It’s just ‘fated’ to be
that way; it’s ‘in the cards’! In what cards, you ask ? How do
I know, you ask ? And I answer, -Hey, I’m a Gnostic
Astrologer: I know just because I want to know, I’m burning to
know, I need to know, and I love to know, and -besides- my
mommy ( a little birdie ) told me so !
The Cancerian Mother of all card games is the Tarot, and in
the Tarot the A of America (beginning and ending) is the Trump
Card known as the FOOL (Uranus) ! The FOOL is the TRUE CHILD,
and in the end it is the CHILD who will show us the way.
Because the Child knows the true 'LAW' hidden behind human
'Laws' and is always FREE to play with laws. The Declaration
Of Independence called AmericA (imperfect as it most clearly
is, was, and ever shall be) is born from the Sun in Cancer,
from the Light in the Womb, and this Declaration belongs to
and originates from a Cancerian CHILD about to be born in all
of us. This is the 'moment' of the AWAKENING of that
Child....just don't expect too much from it, the imp is still
an infant in swaddling clothes. We must nurture and protect
this foolish child within us and not succumb to the horrible
program of fear, paranoia, and hatred being broadcast to us by
the phony One World Government whose newly crowned KING is
George !!!
All of us shall have to struggle hard, and increasingly harder
if we are to overcome the mountingly adverse impact the
'State' intends to have upon us. Our struggle is with a deeply
hidden Plutonian agenda, with powers and principalities
cloaked in religious costumes and full of the language of
righteousness and the battle between 'Good & Evil'. We are and
have been since our birth indoctrinated into a Dogma of
fearful dimensions and fear based realities. I don't know how
to fight it, but I must insist upon laughing in its face,
laughing at my own indignation, fear, and paranoia, laughing
at fear and paranoia wherever they pop up because I know I am
-like you - a creature of joy. I am happy to be alive and on
this Earth, and I am very happy to have all you fellow
Gnostics out there as my friends. Happy Birthday, kids, may we
all keep our imaginations active and tune in to our sense of
humour because if 'evil' and ‘archons’ and ‘yaldaboaths’ are
anything at all, they’re certainly far too serious! Laughter
and Joy open new dimensions in time and space, and if you
listen with your rebelliously insightful Uranian vision, your
invisible Plutonian Ears, and your imaginative Neptunian
heart, you can hear the bells ringing. Thus speaketh the
Gnostic Astrologer.
______________________________________________________________________________
Francis
D. Grabau is a poet, writer, and practising astrologer who
has been steeped in the stars since 1968. He welcomes
the opportunity to interpret your birthchart through writing
and tapes as well as by phone call. He can be reached
via Internet at: www.starpathvisions.com
as well as www.astrologyforthepeople.com;
his personal email address is: starpath3@earthlink.net.
He currently lives on the Hawaian Island of Kauai. He can
be contacted via telephone in the USA on (808) 821 0710, or
write to: Francis D. Grabau, 5359 Kumole St, Kapa’a, Hawaii
96746, USA.
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