FOREWORD TO VENUS IN VIRGO

AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION

This is a book that explores astrological archetypes, far beyond most modern ideas of these archetypes. Using novel interpretations of ancient astrological techniques, I hope to demonstrate that a functional mythology was transposed onto astrology in a very intuitive and consistent manner that points to a very old pantheistic basis.

This work is probably unique in some ways.

But it’s much more than that. I am interested in finding moral imperatives within this framework.

When we think of archetypes, it is generally in the context of Jungian psychology.

That is absolutely in play in this book, but the wellspring of the archetypes is coming from an idiosyncratic reading of mythological sources and a revisionist interpretation of Hellenistic and traditional astrology, using these texts and many other sources outside of astrology. These ancient astrology texts are the bedrock of my understanding of the planetary archetypes, and my thesis builds on the ancient authors but also veers dramatically away from their literal texts in many ways.

Hellenistic astrology is itself a very recent reconstruction and revival of ancient astrological forms and techniques, based on new translations of Firmicus Maternus, Vettius Valens, Ptolemy, Abu Ma’ashar, Al-Biruni, Giordano Bruno and many others.

These works have provided incredible insight into astrology as it was understood in the Hellenistic period and beyond. To be sure, these works are the basis of my understanding of astrology. 

I have taken things in a radically different direction from most astrologers, and several steps further than what has been documented by the translators and interpreters who brought these ancient works to modern astrologers and scholars.

I have dug deeply into Plotinus, Porphyry, the Corpus Hermeticum and works on Gnosticism such as The Apocalypse of the Alien God by Dylan Burns. My ideas about modern apocalypticism, its narrative structure and the deeply ingrained psychology that it represents, preceded my contact with Burns’ work, which holds incredible insight into contrasts between Hellenic pagan ideas coming from Plato et al, and the Gnostic apocalyptic genre.

My contribution is rather different from these authors. I believe there are occulted metaphorical frameworks that were not openly discussed in these source translations that can be seen when a certain logic is applied. 

I am interested in recovering the depth of fundamental ancient ideas, and how polytheistic and pantheistic mental models may have worked. The modern mind has been expanded through scientific investigation of the natural world, yet simultaneously our capacity to recognize the enchanted nature of our world has been diminished, in dramatic ways. Our belief in eternal progress, the infinite expansion of technology, the march of history and the mythology of our own greatness cause us the greatest harm. We are hobbled by our inability to accept that we are, in many ways, not the pinnacle of human development.

We mistake the accumulation and hoarding of data, filtered through algorithms, for consciousness. Singularity is a religious term.

This is not an endorsement for atavism, nor do I excuse the barbarism of the past, where it actually existed. I am not advocating a return to some lost golden age of wisdom- if anything like that existed, there is no way backward: we are where we are, and the ways forward must recognize and address the real problems of our era. We must not demonize or detract from the many truly positive advances in science and technology, instead we need a radical reckoning of what serves humanity. 

However, many current, day-to-day atrocities are being covered up, hidden or excused and justified because we refuse to admit the abysmal failure of many of our corrupted paradigms. Much of humanity is in a state of delusion over what humanity even is.

I do not want to “Make Astrology Great Again”, that would be meaningless sloganeering, but we cannot break through the morass that we have landed in without an honest judgment of what is real and what is not in the age of corrupt corporate/government power consolidation. The “mainstream” is utterly rife with propaganda, false flag crises, deceit, censorship and high tech medical public relations fabrications that attempt to justify total central control of our society in a digital panopticon.

Today’s situation may be the most dire and extreme in history, but it is my contention that power and authority have been working since time immemorial to redact and obfuscate the truth about human origins and our connection to this earth.

We do not know how far back in history astrology really goes, but we do know that astronomical correlations are apparent in the building of thousands of ancient sites, sacred and otherwise, including pyramids all over the world, Stonehenge, Baalbek, Gobekli Tepe and all the other Tepes, just to name a few.

It is my proposition that Hellenistic era writers were already bereft of truly ancient knowledge of astronomy and astrology, and we can also guess that there were things that they simply did not talk about, if they did know them, because the knowledge was occulted, or perhaps proprietary to their inner door teaching.

The Masonic orders retain this ancient style of initiation, inner door teachings given out only after trust has been built and perhaps a degree of hazing. These secrets do not meet the light of day, under penalty of severe consequences.

There are things that are written down in any era, and there are other things that are not. This prevailing mindset is usually taken for granted, and clearly individuals can vary dramatically in their understanding of what is going on. Often this framework is not questioned and understood to be consensus reality, and sometimes knowledge may be actively censored and suppressed. This unspoken framework is paradigmatic. Paradigms are always shifting.

Any serious study of an ancient art or science must include a study of ancient paradigms. This invokes the study of historiography. There are limits to what we can know for certain about this.

There are complicating factors that make academics shy away from this type of study, specifically about astrology and ancient religions.

The first major reason is the fact that astrology is still regarded as weird pseudo-science, a campy counter-culture antique. At no point is astrology likely to produce a new iPhone or AI or a gene-altering therapy. It has no place in a positivist, strictly mechanistic cosmology. If the history department allows your Master’s thesis on ancient astrology in the Nazarene Jewish establishment, you had better prepare to meet blank stares, followed by severe resistance.

Beyond that, there is rigid compartmentalization of fields of study in modern academia. Scholars seldom look beyond the source material that directly impacts their work. Biblical scholars are not often interested in astrology.

Another reason is the extreme dogmatism of academia when it comes to the historical record. The prevailing historical narrative is protected by tyrannical gatekeepers. The accepted narrative is as brittle as the bones excavated from ancient sites.

Another is the tone of ancient writing. There are many, many idioms in ancient writing that strongly suggest misogyny and other politically incorrect attitudes. This constrains people’s willingness to extend sympathy to ancient authors.

Yet another factor is our “scholarly” attachment to literal readings of ancient texts, and an unwillingness to take chances or speculate in these areas. It serves us quite well to refrain from conjecture in our literal translations of ancient texts. But once the texts are translated, it is crucial to not leave things there, and not to accept these as sacrosanct. Astrology is a framework of metaphors derived from a world view, it has religious and cosmological implications. Creative conjecture may allow us to find consistency and continuity that is missing otherwise.

Prevailing attitudes toward ancient knowledge have varied dramatically in the last 150 years, and before. Attitudes have become somewhat more respectful and sympathetic in the last 20 plus years in many circles, but overall the cultural indoctrination remains quite intransigent and dismissive toward the value of ancient knowledge. The ivory tower intellectual establishment remains completely dogmatic and acts like an organized crime syndicate in its dismissal of any revision to the historical record.

The ancient astrologer and author, Firmicus Maternus, spent many chapters describing the possible consequences of multiple planets being in communication with one another by angle or by conjunction. He records some incredible techniques that yield great results, and this is also true of Valens, Ma’ashar, et al. But they do not get into any of the source material of the planetary archetypes. Mostly, these ancient authors wanted to share their cutting-edge “secret” ancient techniques, and felt no need to revisit the most basic elements of the Thema Mundi.

It is my contention that, by the time of Maternus, around the beginning of the millennia, the roots of the planetary archetypes and the signs were very hoary and ancient, perhaps even distant, confused and disputed. I suspect that the subject carried a great deal of cultural baggage even then, as to make the origins of the planetary archetypes into a relic of the lost times.

However, I believe that the ancient planetary dignity scheme holds information that allows us to extrapolate nearly everything we need to describe these archetypes, and their functional roles that move the zodiac forward when placed into the right context.

We can use the dignity scheme to help us understand how the archetypes interact with each other. Maternus and Ma’ashar did this, and so am I.

Maternus often waxes nostalgic about the great, legendary Egyptian astrological predecessors, like Nachepso and Pedisiris. The invocation of those names was a reference to the Fabled Great Ones who set the stage for astrology as it was known then. Greco-Roman astrology authors revered these men like demigods.

What I have done is to re-contextualize this ancient astrological framework based on a holistic, syncretic, very polytheistic and pantheistic cosmology which was extremely hoary and ancient. This book re-imagines what these cosmologies might have looked like in very broad strokes.

Philosophies such as Hermeticism were the inheritors of these mystic traditions.

There was Goddess consciousness and God consciousness, the interplay of the two Divine Forces gave rise to the recognition of this material plane as being Divine. These two Forces probably came from one Original Source, but whatever that Source was could not really be known.

I believe this particular type of Dialectical Monism was foundational to most truly ancient mythologies. The myths persisted, but the interpretation of this mythology was in a state of degradation: it was waning even in the Hellenistic era.

Aristotle and Socrates had popularized the idea of the “Prime Mover”, a perfect and immutable Divine Force that was morally pristine and omniscient. Aristotle decried the traditional depiction of Zeus and all of the Gods as being fallible and flawed. His idea of divinity did not jibe with the Gods being imperfect. The Hellenic philosophical tradition was based in philosophical discourse which held the highest potential for creating an understanding of the Divine. For Plato, mythology was allegory and useful not because it was literally True, but because the process of arguing and expounding upon its allegories could yield practical lessons.

Over time, dogmatism grew with the early Simple Judaism of Saul, and the Prime Mover ideal fused with a more Abrahamic apocalyptic way of thinking. This provided fuel to the intellectual juggernaut building behind Christian monotheism, a movement which can be traced back to Akhenaton, at the very least. This school of thought looked down upon the complex, flawed human-like depiction of the traditional pagan gods of mythology and scripture, who were awesome in their natural power and compelling in their human-like nature. Gnostic ideas were percolating throughout this. 

This pristine “Prime Mover” concept had an implicit shadow side: it carried the seeds of the ascetic denial of the body. The concept that the Original Source was God, and this God was The Word, was a Greek philosophical construct that emerges from the integration and merger of the larger Abrahamic intellectual tradition with the Greek in the milieu of the Hellenistic era.

The various Gnostic cults such as the Bogomils and Cathars, and their many predecessors including the Manicheans, are mostly associated with heretical Christianity, but that is not entirely an accurate depiction. Gnostics did not think of themselves as heretics. Their beliefs were not essentially very different than those of the early Christians in many ways. The Council of Nicaea drew some hard lines around what was Christian dogma and what was not, and most Gnostic groups found themselves on the other side of the fence from the establishment Christians.

Gnosticism is a fairly complex swath of ideas, but within it is definitely the core belief that we are in the realm of a Demiurge, and Creation is like a prison of temptation and illusion. The flesh is corrupted and essentially Evil.

The Pure and True God is not of this realm, although his creation, the Demiurge, created it. The Divine becomes Alien.

No one can demonstrate where and when this perfect and pristine force can be seen or felt, but belief in Higher Power does not necessarily require ideas of perfection. It is certainly useful to speculate about this layer of creation, and pantheistic pagans can allow for this or similar concepts to coexist with the imperfect gods, who may have been partially derived from ancestors and ancestor worship.

Henotheism prevailed among early Jews, a belief system that allowed for the existence of gods other than the patron of the Jews. At some point, with the advent of rabbinical Judaism, there was a move toward monotheism. Christianity may have begun with some cults holding a degree of henotheistic ideas, but that was redacted or made heretical relatively soon.

Christianity was heavily influenced by Nazarene Judaism, as well as cults of Serapis and Isis, and several Solar Cults. But it was definitely defined by Paul, or Saul, who may have been a pseudonym for Josephus Flavius. Josephus was a Romanized Jew who worked for the Emperor Vespasian, a Flavian who had been declared God Emperor by the Senate of Rome, as was traditional at the time.

Monotheism in its many forms tends to view the existence of any “other” deities anywhere, and the belief in those heretical deities, as an existential threat to this cosmological world view. This is quite totalitarian. The Roman Cult of State allowed citizens any of their chosen beliefs, so long as they accepted the God Emperor of Rome, the Caesar, and venerated him as well. 

Ancient thinkers were eager, for the most part, to syncretize the deities of other tribal or political groups. Rome certainly had an eye on compliance, and their relative tolerance for the diverse spiritual beliefs of people was maintained to enhance social harmony and keep the focus on economic and political solvency and order. The Roman Establishment did sometimes ban certain Bacchanalian cults, or at least their extremely rowdy and even murderous practices. 

The Spiritual Realm, or at least the realm of human belief, is never enhanced when it is patrolled too closely for compliance to the dictates of earthly organizations.

I am simultaneously sympathetic toward, and also deeply suspicious of, ancient authors and the paradigms and cosmologies they were part of. They were products of their historical era, and there was far more borrowing and trading of ideas between ancient schools of thought than any of the modern institutions of religion or academia would have us believe. Nor do I trust modern ideas about ancient intellectual history and our imposition of limitations to what they were capable of intellectually or spiritually, or even technologically.

I also believe that ancient authors were heavily influenced by the ancient state-sourced propaganda and dogma of their world, just as we are in today’s world. Religion and state were never separate. Religions received sanction to operate by the state or were repressed if they caused problems for State power. The Jewish revolt of AD 68 was an excellent example of this complex relationship. This one event is of monumental consequence for our understanding of religion and history. Its details are redacted and obfuscated.

The seeds of our modern intellectual and technological Promethean brilliance and success were present in Hellenistic times, and long, long before that.

The seeds of our corruption, hubris, infantile authority and power worship, and the degradation and destruction of humanity as a conscious race, were also clearly present.

We have Fallen before. We are Falling now. But we are not going to Hell, no more than we are Ascending.

The ancient archetypes are behind all of this.

Archetypes exist on a continuum. They are in flow and in flux. In each archetype there is potential for nobility and grace, and also a destructive and dangerous shadow. In certain local forms of worship, Zeus was known to manifest as wolf-man creature, a murderous lycanthrope of sorts. This may sound bizarre, violent and anti-social, far from the pristine and infallible Prime Mover, but this is profound commentary on the dual and complex nature of reality. Any and all psychological territory can become corrupted and dangerous when it is misunderstood, or the force it represents becomes energetically unbalanced with its polar opposite. Ultimately, we can only understand archetypes as individuals, although archetypes are our collective inheritance, and it is only in our individual lives that we can see how the same force can create a homicidal lycanthrope, AND a charming sex-obsessed philanderer, AND a beneficent yet despotic teacher/king.

The archetypes are eternal because they are intrinsic to human nature, which can only be seen properly through contrary forces. We have two hemispheres making up one brain; nothing real and useful to us is going to be one-dimensional. It is though understanding the complexity of archetypes within us that we are afforded the opportunity to transcend. We cannot wish them away, nor can the water of baptism absolve us of our own nature. They are us: we must recognize and truly become what we already are to move into higher realms of archetypal being- which is not ascension.

I believe that the archetypes have specific functional roles, like the characters in any narrative that move the story forward. To understand any archetype, you must understand all the archetypes and investigate their relationships to one another in great depth.

What I present here is one possible logos that can bind the zodiac into a single larger story of the seasons. We do not understand our world in any other way than through narrative.

I hope to recover and at least gain a glimpse of root paradigms that were extremely ancient, suppressed, unspoken and occulted, and perhaps barely decipherable when the Hellenistic astrologers wrote. A few ancient authors including Heraclitus did speak of contrary universal forces or tensions shaping our reality through flow or flux. I believe this philosophical strand was at the core of astrology.

There are horticultural references and themes that run throughout the Orphic Hymns, The Bible and many other ancient texts that relate the archetypes to the seasons. I believe this is perhaps the most overlooked and ignored source of information about the planetary archetypes that must be brought to the fore. I have incorporated this annual story of the Life Force in dynamic flow to add desperately needed context to the story.

All paradigms are roughly based in a cosmology, and cosmology is based in ontology, the study of what is real, and epistemology, the study of what we can know about reality.

All cosmologies rest in some unverifiable assumptions about how the world works. Modern science has given us some limited degree of insight into the material world and its mechanics, but it falls into religious scientism when its purveyors refuse to admit that it is also rooted in these unverifiable assumptions.

Consciousness is primary. Any study of the world around us must be based in the humble recognition of the limitations of human consciousness, and its relationship to universal consciousness.

Any deep and nuanced read of ancient texts will yield some surprising and perhaps disturbing sophistication in the ancient understanding of consciousness, but it will often be hidden in metaphors. Modern ideas often seem shallow and even infantile when compared to ancient knowledge gained simply from profound study of philosophy and dedicated observation of nature, in highly functional paradigms of thought, or mental models.

When we approach foreign subjects without adequate consideration and contemplation of the unverifiable underlying assumptions that the material rests upon, we tend to provide our own unexamined and unverifiable assumptions. We may even be tempted to add new, ideologically-informed content to the ancient frameworks we have inherited.

This can help us to bring the subject matter into our familiar mental models, we can then feel comfortable with it and extend more sympathy to ideas that might otherwise feel foreign and disharmonious with our preferred mental constructs.

So-called Christian astrology was practiced by William Lily, and lots more monotheistic window dressing has been grafted onto astrology to make it more palatable, less heretical, even less dangerous or lethal to the practitioner. Lily may well have titled his book “Christian Astrology” to make it palatable in an era that would not take kindly to anything other than Christian art and science, but the particularly skewed lens of Christianity was definitely in place in that era. Monotheistic landscapes are not fertile ground for astrology, in my opinion.

Modern scientific positivist thinking has demanded that astrology point to and identify mechanisms by which planetary movements influence earthly events. This is not new: to grasp for the mechanism that astrology rides on is an ancient endeavor. In principle I support this type of critical questioning; however, materialism is a foreign cosmology which was not a primary consideration for those who developed astrology. Materialist science has its own issues that should logically constrain its intrusion into this territory. Ideologies that demand complete subjugation or even destruction of non-compliant or heretical ways of thinking are totalitarian by nature- we have already established that.

Science itself must be constrained by philosophy, specifically the branch of philosophy we call ethics, but also by logic. Science has transmogrified more times than we can count and is currently in an existential crisis of its own making. It is by no means dead, but corruption, hubris and debasement by would-be authoritarians are digging a hole that will be difficult to emerge from without a reckoning of ethics and logic.

Astrology is a natural ally to philosophy. It is a highly nuanced metaphorical framework that links the outer world to the inner world. It must regularly undergo profound self-examination to obviate its moorings and seek the highest degree of metaphorical consistency possible.

Now, in the 21st century, we can see intersectionalist, Marxist, feminist, anti-colonialist, even gender theory and critical race theory being grafted onto astrology in a myriad of ways.

Theoretically, I thoroughly support syncretism and revisionism. This type of re-contextualization can propagate fascinating new applications and points of view.

However, the people who provide these different ideological and social science-based materialist contexts to astrology must be fully aware of their own world view, and how radically different it may be from the original cosmological ideas that gave us astrology. The more aware that innovators are of their personal assumptions and paradigms, the more we can move into dialogue with one another and create a vibrant discussion.

The roots of progressivist and collectivist thought that serve as the basis of the loose positivist or Marxist umbrella are also hoary and ancient. The roots of communitarianism, atheism, religious statism and cultism, utopianism, and scientism all run deep in human history. These ideologies tend to wrap themselves tightly around the cosmology and mythology of radical progressivism.

They would rather not admit their age. They will tell you that their ideas have never been tried or tested, not really, not in the special way they would do it, and that utopia will arrive once their unique wisdom is finally applied to the real world.

Heaven, or the Workers’ Paradise, will arrive once the Old Ways are purged.

Radical progressivism is based in the vilification of the past, and yet often, it maintains an atavistic attachment to some fabled golden age that will someday return. Radical progressivism promises a Utopian future here on earth- and its proponents constantly reinvent it with new names. These ideologies, I believe, are rooted in a broadly gnostic worldview. Gnosticism can be secular or religious.

Gnosticism tells us that creation is essentially evil, illusory and filled with temptation. Our bodies are vile and corrupted (currently, germs or viruses, or “bad genes” are the corrupting influence) and our spirit needs to be set free (perhaps uploaded to the Cloud…) Gnosis is escape, the way out of the corrupted realm of the Demiurge. This tends to lead to authoritarianism of one kind or another to enforce the idealized virtue upon humanity, for the Greater Good.

Darwinism is an example of one of these progressivist cosmological paradigms.

To consider Darwinism “science” is deeply problematic. Darwinism has not addressed any questions about evolutionary processes, if there are any: we do not have evidence of “bridge” species that would demonstrate life forms evolving or morphing into each other- yet this basic materialist paradigm has managed to persist tenaciously, without serious review or debunking.

It is my opinion that Darwinism was, and is, an attempt to create a scientific veneer to disguise a eugenics agenda, a proto-eugenics that preceded the coining of the term. In its original form, it was undeniably an idealized Eurocentric ideology which held the European to be the most “evolved” human.

Darwinism is racist as can be, but it is pure progressivism. It is progressivism superimposed upon biology.

Modern Marxist and Fabian Progressivists often place themselves in a dialectical opposition to religious literalism, which is largely millenarian, and also they generally claim to support Darwinism (sans the Eurocentric worldview that he represents, which they vehemently oppose.) The Marxist/ Positivists give lip service to denouncing exceptionalism, militarism, colonialism and capitalism while reinventing each of these things under State control, aspiring to Global control. They substitute their own brand of atheist Elitism for Racism, which is functionally identical, thereby giving us a false choice between “old” nationalist religious racist progressivism and their “new” “Woke” internationalist multicultural elitist progressivism.

The religious literalists (for the most part) and the Darwinists gave people of European descent an unexamined and unearned superiority to other races. On the other hand, the Woke consider people of European descent to be innately and inherently racist, misogynist and homophobic, and guilty of any number of other sins which are somehow justification for the wholesale demonization and demolition of Western Civilization. In its place, they would create Neo-fascist International Corporate Governance models, which amount to a new religious movement under the umbrella of Communitarianism. These are two shades of Progressivism- there is no actual conflict between them, both are racist.

Revisionist history is woven into this book. I could not have made the leaps I have made without a conspiratorial and deeply suspicious attitude toward mainstream history.

As an astrologer I believe it is our responsibility to understand how self-proclaimed Authority protects itself by lying. This is an ancient issue. We now call this counterintelligence.

Counterintelligence has been employed by government, religious and corporate actors as a form of propaganda, weaponized social engineering and mind control. It is an integral part of all warfare at this point. It is a set of techniques used to infiltrate, disempower, misdirect and misinform “enemies” of the establishment, that is to say, anyone who points out how corrupt and self-serving government becomes when it is dominated by Deep State actors who consider themselves above the Law.

Counterintelligence is a form of worldview warfare. This is the subtle and extremely toxic manipulation of media, religion, education and culture as a whole to dictate consensus reality to the masses. The Establishment is most dangerous and in a state of desperation when it claims to “fact check” and declares war on “misinformation”.

Lying to protect the wealthy and powerful is an ancient art, and ancient people were propagandized just as we are by myth-makers. Ancient history is taught to shape popular opinion about who and what people are: we build our identity from what we believe to be true about the world. Our ideas of history help fashion and confirm our cosmology. Anyone who strays from the acceptable parameters of debate with regard to ancient history and scripture is now called a Revisionist.

Revisionist history is not generally sympathetic to ancient thought: many revisionists attempt to debunk and dismiss all organized religion. There is plenty to criticize in the history of organized religion. This is necessary when the focus is on exposing hypocrisy, corruption, dogmatism, organized criminal activity and the various control mechanisms that religion has used to constrain and co-opt the natural human urge to explore the mysterious and unknowable nature of creation.

It is counterproductive to wish religion away or to “take the higher ground” and condemn it wholesale: the religious impulse is part of human psychology. Religion can only be replaced by another religion. Humans must have a cosmology, we all have basic assumptions about how the world works: if as individuals we do not investigate philosophy and its branches to some extent, we will likely have a jumble of inconsistent prefabricated mainstream indoctrination and propaganda, or perhaps an inherited religious or materialist set of ideas. It may seem as though when we are exposed to a massive volume of information that we must then be exposed to a wide diversity of opinions, but this is not at all true. The internet is being funneled through algorithms that select sanctioned “trusted” sources over those with alternative view points. This is far more insidious than simple algorithmic selection. it has a profound chilling effect and induced self-censorship.

Many believe that we are the most highly advanced and scientifically astute “hairless apes” rolling along toward transhumanist utopia, some believe that we have alien DNA and are the inheritors of a Panspermia-style seeding of the planet, some believe that we are quietly under the rule of Reptilian Archon bloodlines, or believe that the Watchers must be freed from the depths of the Earth. None of these assumptions are necessarily wrong, but they are assumptions that cannot be proven. All of these premises hint at models for how the universe works and is structured, but we often don’t dig deeply into the cosmological implications of our own beliefs.

The pursuit of mystery is frequently hijacked into cultism, this is nothing new. Shared belief is very helpful, in some ways, to create harmonious and cohesive communities, but there are serious problems when ideological purity becomes a source of virtue in the group, or when dissent is quashed or vilified without a fair hearing. Relatively functional groups can be co-opted into becoming cults given the right circumstances. Cults are generally not formed by chance, they organize around personalities in archetypal ruts of consciousness.

Consensus has never meant wisdom or truth. The suppression of ideas and even events that do not meet the criteria of what should be possible in the dominant consensus paradigm is nothing new. Researcher Charles Fort cataloged endless bizarre events in the 19th and early 20th centuries, such as fish or frogs falling from the sky, events that were corroborated by credible witnesses. Yet these things were swept under the rug, over and over, because the dominant scientific paradigm could not provide explanation. Fort was not telling us to return to religion: he was telling us that the Emperor is naked and running through the streets. The “experts” then, and now, acting like a cult. And no one seems to notice.

History must be a fundamentally psychological field of study; history makes little sense without the context of human psychology. The LARP (Live Action Role Playing) impulse is ancient, previously it was practiced as public ritual. We are seeing the radical return of bizarre, cultish public rituals at events like Super Bowl halftime shows, major music events, political rallies and even much more pedestrian events. Some of these turn deadly. Some “mass casualty events” such as the Battle of the Boyne, or Tonkin Bay, did not actually happen.

The assassination of JFK remains shrouded in mystery 60 years later. We can be quite certain that the Establishment narrative is utterly ridiculous and impossible. Human history is loaded with purposeful propaganda intended to protect the corrupt, the wealthy and the powerful. To believe mainstream history as it is taught leads to rank ignorance.

Revisionist history is not new. Sigmund Freud suggested that Akhenaton was Moses. That assertion may have gotten him killed. Gerald Massey held many heretical ideas that mainstream scholars still reject, and many alternative scholars won’t entertain.

My goal is not to argue any particular points of revisionism because what I have done here doesn’t rest on acceptance any one scholar’s work. Rather, I hope to emphasize that astrology is like any science, it resides in paradigms of thought which undergo revolutionary changes over time, as is documented by the work of Thomas Kuhn. These revolutions almost always subvert and distort previous paradigms- not because the old paradigm had necessarily failed, but because the basic ideas of what is real and what we can or cannot know are constantly shifting. Often there are political reasons, and related cultural reasons, for these sea changes.

We cannot know exactly what sandcastle was there before the tide went out, but I believe that sometimes, we can get a pretty clear picture.

Revisionism opens the door to the naming of conspiracies. Conspiracies are real, and we need to look deep and hard to find history’s many massive reigns of physical and ideological terror across the ages to find out what has been repressed and why. We can look to the occult to help us understand what is hidden and why.

Astrotheology has revealed an occluded pattern of star lore encoded in the Bible and in virtually all ancient texts. The power of star symbology still resonates today, as strongly as ever, in media, corporate and government logos and symbols. Jordan Maxwell has done in-depth study of many powerful secret societies, and his work has revealed how masonry’s messy fingerprints can be found all over our power structures. This field of study has been a considerable influence on me.

Joseph Atwill’s Caesar’s Messiah has revealed a remarkable conspiracy. Atwill discovered the use of typology in the Bible to hide stories within stories; this opened my mind to the pervasive use of occlusion and occultation in ancient literature, and to the fact that these things continue today. These are techniques that have been used throughout history to tell different stories to different readers, depending on their level of knowledge or initiation. A sophisticated writer can simultaneously record and document history for the insiders, and impart a partial truth, or even a complete fabrication to the average reader. Steganography is the study of occultation of content in plain sight.

Michael Tsarion is a true polymath, fearless and petulant. He has been perhaps my greatest influence. His breadth of knowledge of the strongest theories of ancient history is remarkable, his dedication to a holistic study of the fields of psychology and philosophy is stunning. His research on the tarot, Kabbalah, and astrology is thorough and painstaking. It has been an honor to discuss the outer planets with Michael on several occasions.

The works of Immanuel Velikovsky and Conors Beaumont must be mentioned at this point. Failure to do so would do a great disservice to everyone reading it. Much of what I know about these men came through the work of Michael Tsarion, and I have since read several of these men’s works. This book rests upon the tradition pioneered by these men.

Ralph Ellis’ bedrock of work is an enormous influence, and his theories are being confirmed, corroborated and proven correct time and time again. The vitriol directed at him by the establishment seems to increase exponentially with every archaeological discovery that reinforces his arguments. Ellis is simply not interested in historical half-truths, dogmatically held myths or fairy tales. He has done more than any single contemporary figure to unlock a wealth of historical mysteries in the face of extreme establishment backlash and censorship. He is a fearless and unrelenting force for sane and rational interpretation of the Bible and of ancient history. These are stultified fields of study whose tenured power brokers are the Saturnian gatekeepers of acceptable academic criticism.

Maria Kvilhaug’s translations of Norse and Germanic poetry and mythology have been seminal to my thinking. She has brought an entirely unique and rational approach to her translations. She is a positive and powerful advocate for a sympathetic and honest approach to ancient pagan history and cosmology.

Anthroposophy, the mystic Christianity of Rudolf Steiner has strongly influenced my work. Steiner astutely named the extraordinary threat posed by technocratic materialist scientism, represented by a demonic egregore he calls Ahriman. Steiner called this the Eighth Sphere. This concept frames the existential problems and boundless opportunities of our age.

As for my study and understanding of astrology, I have a giant debt of gratitude to Austin Coppock, whose astrology classes I attended for 3 years. I cannot say enough about his patient and rock solid teaching style. His real-world experience as a consulting astrologer is invaluable, and his work on the 36 Faces or Decans is truly inspired. The Decans are a source for much of the analysis of this book. He has created an incredible assimilation of Hellenistic, modern and more or less medieval astrology.

I am not trying to make friends or placate anyone with this book. Astrologers in this age are not known for being particularly political, and are not taken seriously even if they do weigh in politically. I am certainly not the first astrologer to voice political opinions. William Lilly was an extremely staunch anti-monarchist who apparently gave advice both to the monarchists and to those who sought to depose them. He was taken quite seriously.

This book is partially a reaction to the failure of many well-known contemporary astrologers to see an obvious scam, a pervasive net of establishment deception, when it was perpetrated upon society at large. If astrologers cannot identify corruption and abuse of power, deliberate manufacturing of crises, prevalent behaviorist manipulation and propaganda, what exactly are they doing for their clients? In this book, I hope to give astrologers some tools that can add additional depth to their worldview to prevent such dramatic failures from happening again.

I write this at a time of extreme peril for humanity, a fact that is still completely misapprehended by a large portion of the population. This peril is rooted in humanity’s loss of connection to the natural world and our inextricable place in it. It is rooted in a multi-generational, progressivist, Fabian Socialist takeover of our education system, our media and our government. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and we are marching rapidly down that road, waving flags of Virtue and Social Justice. The intentions behind this movement were, in my opinion, never good: they have hidden their true eugenicist motives behind a false flag social/environmental justice agenda, in controlled opposition to “selfish” straw men villains. This has left our population woefully ignorant of Natural Law, the universal code that undergirds our reality, and eager to subvert and surrender their basic freedoms in the name of safety.

Sadly, we now have a hedonistic and infantile herd, charging this way and that in pursuit of false virtue, traumatized into an infantile state, lost in their unquestioning deference to self-proclaimed authority.

This peril has been purposefully manufactured and exacerbated through crisis after false-flag crisis, psychological operation after psychological operation. Fear and terror bind the masses in a collective Stockholm Syndrome while they are looted, surveilled, herded and culled.

The Tutelary Gods of the Seasons, the archetypes, are expressions of a moral universe: their potential moral strengths and pitfalls are what I hope to begin to reveal in some depth in this and future work. Their function within the zodiac is their function within the seasons. Their exact real-world expressions are complicated and dynamic, and they are never in a vacuum.

They are elemental expressions of nature, pouring through human consciousness.

With that, I offer you my ideas for your consideration.

The Great Goddess awaits.