*
TWELVE PHASES OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE: AQUARIUS
With Aquarius, we reach the last of the "fixed Signs"; the Signs through which power is released. Power is energy ready for purposeful use through instrumentalities prepared for it. The nature of the power depends upon the character of the energy to be used; thus "fixed" zodiacal Signs follow "cardinal" Signs, and as there are two basic types of cardinal Signs — those which start with the equinoxes (Aries and Libra) and those which start with the solstices (Cancer and Capricorn) — likewise there are two basic types of succeeding fixed Signs.
We can thus speak of equinoctial power (Taurus and Scorpio) and of solstitial power (Leo and Aquarius). Equinoctial power is conditioned by the intense dynamism of the equinoctial Signs, Aries and Libra — Signs of maximum speed of the Sun's motion in declination; Signs in which the Day-force and the Night-force are most evenly balanced. Solstitial power is the outcome of a strong concrete type of activity during the solstitial periods (Cancer and Capricorn) which begin with the Sun's motion in declination reduced to a minimum speed and which see the triumph respectively of the Day-force and the Night-force.
Where the cardinal Sign displays intense dynamism and instability, the succeeding fixed Sign must, as it were, arrest this dynamic activity and limit it. Thus Taurus puts to organic use and forces into concrete purposes the impetuous and universalistic energy of Aries; and Scorpio brings the often diffused social eagerness of Libra to a state of stubborn identification with a particular purpose or a particular person (whence jealousy, cruelty and the like). On the other hand, when the cardinal Sign shows focalization upon either personality (Cancer) or a particular form of society (Capricorn), the power demonstrated by the fixed Sign which follows manifests as a release or as an outburst of energy.
This release either expands and glorifies what has been built and focalized in the cardinal Sign, or else tends to destroy and transcend it. Thus, a release of power in Leo may mean the disruption of the home and of personal integrity through love-affairs, gambling and intemperate gestures, as well as the building of a progeny which consolidates the home. Likewise, Aquarius may see the constructive development of State and civilization through inventions, social improvements and the glorification of special social virtues. It may also mean revolution and a complete upheaval of State and civilization by the power of a new type of human being and of new ideals which the existing State blindly refuses to tolerate, or against which it must fight because it cannot possibly assimilate it.
This distinction between equinoctial and solstitial characteristics is of the greatest importance, if the more vital meaning of the Zodiac is to be understood. It finds also its expression in the traditional zodiacal terminology which states that the equinoctial cardinal Signs (Aries and Libra) are "masculine," and the succeeding fixed Signs (Taurus and Scorpio) "feminine"; while the solstitial cardinal Signs (Cancer and Capricorn) are "feminine" and the succeeding fixed Signs (Leo and Aquarius) "Masculine." Feminine fixed power-Signs concentrate and focalize masculine cardinal activity-Signs; thus Taurus is solar power impregnating the earth, and Scorpio is the power of human relationship and of social partnership fixed respectively in sexual identification and in business or in trusts. On the other hand, masculine power-Signs release what has been made concrete or what has become crystallized in feminine activity-Signs; thus Leo symbolizes creative and procreative power released from the formed personality and the established home, and Aquarius represents civilization expanding or reforming itself through its inventors, seers and revolutionists.
In Capricorn, the individual man is a politician, a social automaton, or a hermit in travail of a new vision. In Aquarius the individual may be a rebel or a true reformer, a crank stubbornly trying to peddle his personal scheme of social improvement, or the devotee of a new religion which may renew vast groups of men. He may go to social martyrdom with the same passionate obstinacy with which a Leo person takes violent pride in his own creations or clings to his theatrical emotions. He is the social man trying passionately to cease being a mere creature of the State and to pour his ineradicable sense of bondage to tradition into a specialized social group consecrated to reform — any reform. He is the Party-man who is never more faithful to his Party than when the latter is attacked by conservatives or persecuted by the State as a whole. He is the fanatic who has no individualistic steering wheel to help him direct rationally his fanaticism. But he is also the Edison who fulfills a social order through his inventive genius, and the Liberator who saves a people from bondage and renews civilization without destroying its basic structure. He may pour new wine in old bottles, or break the old bottles and spill the wine for lack of adequate containers.
It is fashionable these days to sing the praise of the noble Aquarian. This is understandable because mankind is passing through a period of swift transition and social repolarization. The feudal and bourgeois structures of European civilization are being shattered by the attacks of aroused destroyers. People feel the need of the change, even if their conscious minds resist it desperately. That Capricornian conservatism is doomed, everyone in his senses knows; but the privileged class and the guardians of religious traditions cannot let go of the keys to an order, the destruction of which obviously must mean their destruction and temporary chaos. In Europe, war is achieving what revolution began; but in America the issue between reform or revolution seems still to be open. Reform in the hands of the finest Aquarians would mean a return to the breadth of vision of Sagittarian America, to her moral sense and her healthful eagerness for big adventures and religious dreams. Revolution would mean that Sagittarian values in America have become so crystallized in the hands of negative Capricornians, that nothing but the destruction of these shells can enable us to discover the "still, small voice" of the Christos, of the New Life.
Why "Sagittarian" values? Because it is in Sagittarius that universal Principles and social, religious Ideals are envisioned by the mind that soars beyond personal racial and geographical realms and into the sphere of the most distant connections and generalizations. And what is Democracy and the principle of a universal Brotherhood of Man if not the most extreme generalization which man can make about human relationship? Tribal Law — even in its expanded Nazi meaning — is based on proximate connections, on personal and emotional experience. But the Democratic Law does violence to our archaic instincts, rooted as they are in blood-exclusivism and cultural pride.
No wonder then, that, as the modern Sagittarian ideal of Democracy crystallizes into Capricornian politics, most of the old ancestral hatred and class-prejudices tend to regain the ground they have occupied for ages. With Democracy (and all it implies fundamentally in terms of human relationship, rather than superficially in terms of the parliamentary system) the Sagittarian mind reaches beyond the previous highest level of generalization represented by the universal Catholic Order. Catholicism means etymologically, universalism. Christianity was based on the supreme human generalization that every human being was potentially a "Son of God." That generalization however became restricted and crystallized into a Church which set boundaries to spiritual salvation and provided hell-fires for all unbelievers. These Capricornian boundaries became symbolized by the Papacy and the medieval Roman Church — and they eventually called for reformers and rebels to break them down.
Democracy, in the broadest and deepest sense of the term, is a still vaster generalization because it is not limited to the religious and ethical sphere, but takes hold of every value of human behavior and repolarizes them until all blood distinctions, all emotionalism in human relationship, all sense of possessiveness based on ancestral connotations, are uprooted. Democracy, being an ideal, has to become concrete as an applied system of social-political organization. As this happens, Sagittarian values are superseded or dominated by Capricornian technique. Ideal Democracy becomes applied Federalism. What the United States has demonstrated during its 170 years of existence is a hesitant and unreliable sense of Democracy and a stubborn dependence upon the often twisted and perverted mechanisms of Federalism. We have taken for granted that parliamentarism means Democracy, that the respect for majority decisions in any elected group of representatives proves that Democracy operates. This is obviously naive, as all depends upon how elections are conducted and whether financial, social and psychological pressure is or is not applied to force a decision of the electorate.
With Capricorn, we see therefore the triumph of political machines, of personal dictatorship on the basis of special techniques of control of public opinion. We see the human personality, developed through the cycle of the ascendancy of the Day-force, now becoming the "forgotten individual": the man with a vote that can be bought or directed by emotional mass-appeals. And in Aquarius we see, on one hand, the constructive and destructive release of all the powers which modern city life can produce in the way of material comfort and technology, or in the way of mental confusion, moral pollution and physiological disintegration — and on the other hand, the many attempts of the "citified" man to reestablish his individual sense of values and his personal integrity by small or big rebellions, by eccentricities, by one-sided emotional fanaticisms, by allegiance to cults and specialized groups. In the name of "going back" to the "law of Nature" (vegetarianism, raw-foodism, nudism, etc.) or to the "law of individualistic Democracy" (anarchistic ideologies of one type or another), or to the "law of Universal Brotherhood" (spiritual, esoteric groups) the "citified" man seeks to revivify the Sagittarian vision which Capricornian metropoles and Capricornian power-groups have betrayed. Thus the Aquarian's yearning for the unfamiliar and the foreign, for the newest fads or for the movements which are supposed to revive and restore the "true" foundation of Democracy and human freedom.
In all such attempts toward liberation from the social machine and the domination of money and power-groups, the Aquarian displays most often a peculiar reliance upon the very social forces he would condemn. This must be so, because all he really knows is social action and social organization. His sense of personality is still very vague or most negative. In Aquarius, the "personalizing" energy of the Day-force is as yet very weak and barely able to operate. It operates at best fitfully and often through mere reaction against other personalities who are parts of a social situation.
Just as the Leo person makes big social gestures in order to hide his deeply hidden sense of social insecurity or his "inferiority complex," likewise the Aquarian makes big personal gestures in order to hide his usually unacknowledged sense of personal insecurity and his fear of any strong personality. Fear of course can, under favorable circumstances, turn into devotion, but not a little resentment may lurk in the shadow of this devotion, not a little hope of somehow proving himself superior to the object of the devotion.The Aquarian feels in his innermost depth the presence of a New Life; but he is often frightened by the implications of such a presence. It might force him to give up his reliance upon social background. It might compel him to be truly an individual and to prove it to himself by a completely unemotional peace rooted in nothing but that "still, small voice" which is as yet barely anything but a presentment and a disturbing promise. And, indeed, the Aquarian does not want to give up his reliance upon his social and ancestral background — except for theatrical exhibitions of "modernism" which merely add to his prestige with friends. Moreover the plunge into the depths of his personality is a fearsome venture, because individual selfhood means very little to him in the way of security. To be an individual secure in one's selfhood — that ideal evokes only as a rule an intellectual assent. Fundamentally, the Aquarian is just as afraid of being himself, independently of all social and cultural props, as the Leo leader is afraid of being merely a "social being" without the privileged personal position of leading whomsoever he is being "social" with.
Lincoln defined the true democrat as one who "refuses to be a master of slaves." But the Leo type wants to be the leader of his social group because he fears to function socially in any other capacity; and, most of all, as an equal among equals. The typical Aquarian can operate as an equal among equals, for he is at ease in society; he can also use freely whatever social power is his by ancestral tradition and social consent. But he really depends upon a social status and a legal (or fictitiously legal) status to give himself the sense that society needs him. He has to feel that he is a "man of destiny" for those he will lead; whereas the Leo ruler glories merely in being a ruler, because he wants to rule and in ruling he feels he has made his adjustment to society. An Aquarian may sincerely renounce power and, if need be, abdicate; the Leo type will do so only if he thinks that by such a noble gesture he will gain more social prestige than by holding on to a throne which seems insecure.
Where the Capricorn-organized collectivity comes close to being an ideal society, the Aquarian may emerge from it as the representative of its perfect organic wholeness. In this case he becomes the plenipotentiary of the group, or the seed which, leaving the fulfilled parent organism, is the embodiment of all its vital power. In Aquarius the power of the Christ-seed is released into the new virgin soil; this seed will germinate in due time and become lost as a seed so that the new plant may be.
In that sense, the great men who, having assimilated in their personality all the most progressive trends of European culture, came to the "New World" and identified themselves with its civilization, presenting to America the gifts of their European wisdom and personality, acted as seed-men and symbolically speaking, as true "Aquarians." The ideal Capricorn is the "White City" or "White Lodge," whose "birthday" is celebrated early in January, at the opposite pole of the year from the date of the Declaration of Independence; a significant symbol indeed. And the "Aquarians" of the Spirit are those mysterious Personages who cyclically go forth from that "White City" — the Pleroma of God — to release therefrom the "Living Waters" of the New Life.
Thus the Aquarian symbolism of the Water-Bearer, who carries on his shoulder an "urn" whence flows down to the earth a stream of water. This urn is a symbol of the mystic seed-bag, releasing the substance of a new humanity. It is also a symbol of the storm-cloud, laden with bountiful rain which will water the expectant crop, and releasing the lightning — which the old Aryans deified as Rudra. The lightning is not only a destructive force. It is the means for the precipitation out of the air of precious nitrogen necessary to living processes.
Power flows always from a higher to a lower potential, from the fulfilled to the yet incomplete or the expectant. Power in Aquarius can be, perhaps more truly than in any other fixed Sign of the Zodiac, the Power of God. Thus the Divine Manifestation for the "Aquarian Age" is expected by some to be the most powerful outpouring of creative Spirit. Perhaps that outpouring is even now flooding the human realms. Perhaps the Archetypal Man has already taken flesh and blood, and men's minds are soon to behold the fullness and the glory of the Revelation that shall be made concrete by many who will come from the celestial "White City," as seed for the new humanity.
This is the promise of Aquarius, whose "living waters" flow from celestial heights to impregnate the human kingdom as a totality for a new birth of Personality — for the birthing of the "Man of Plenitude" in our children and our children's children.
