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TWELVE PHASES OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE: CAPRICORN
The time of the winter solstice has now come, opening the Gates of Capricorn. The days have decreased in length as much as they ever will. Long winters nights absorb nature in their repose, as snow covers the ultimate disintegration of living things with its vast expanse of peace and quietude. Death seems to rule supreme over the visible universe. And yet, somewhere and forever, a new Christ is born. Life surges once more with the Sun from its southern decline. The Sun moves northward, its daily arc of light becomes slowly tauter and more radiant. The promise of spring spreads like a mystic fire over the earth to tell "men of good will" that the New Life has begun to win over arrested death.
What is this new life which men have symbolized in the beautiful Christ-story, whose roots go deeply into the soil of older mythologies? Who is the eternal Christos, whose significance remains everlastingly true and vital, whether or not men believe in the historical or religious Christ? It is the "Day-force"; that aspect of the bipolar life-force which, as a personalizing energy, tends to transform the scattered and disintegrated remains of a previous cycle into a new organic whole, integral because defined by limitations, creative because conscious. That new organic whole in the realm of mankind is what will grow in time into the fulfilled personality: that is, the human individual, conscious of his relative uniqueness, centered in the sense of his "I-am-ness," in an ego. The Christos is that power in the universe which leads men to "individuation." It is the foundation upon which all concepts of equality and democracy, of the abstract value of the individual, of the dignity and intangibility of the human personality, are based. It is the foundation of the "self-evident truths" of the Declaration of Independence, the center of the "Rights of Man."
The Christos is the universal energy of the Day-force during its period of ascendancy through winter and spring. It is "born" at the winter solstice, because, from that day onward, it increases at the expense of its polar opposite, the Night-force, which thenceforth begins to decline. The Night-force is an in-gathering, collectivizing energy. It expands personality into society through the magic of human relationships. It begins with the building of the family, at the symbolical summer solstice, in Cancer, the sign of the home. It extends progressively the sphere of this family through the zodiacal phases of Virgo and Libra. It glorifies man's responsibility to his progeny and man's participation in all social groups. It impels the individual to seek an ever deeper identification with ever larger collectivities. It brings to man the generalizations and the discoveries of civilization, whose development binds together generation to generation, racial group to racial group, individual achievement to individual achievement — until personalities discover themselves to be but relatively insignificant cells in the vast organism of human society. Tribal groups and small nations ultimately disappear. The days of the empire have come. The State rules supreme; and its symbol of power, Caesar, multiplies itself in effigy through the ubiquitous and all-corrupting power of money.
Caesar and the Christos: both of them operate through the zodiacal field of Capricorn. Caesar is at the apex of his power; Christ is only a hunted baby. Yet Caesar's empire will soon collapse and the power of the Christos will wax ever stronger through Aquarius and Pisces, until it arises as an irresistible challenge of life and personality with the coming of spring and the ascendancy of the Day-force in Aries.
In Capricorn, the individual power of the human personality is seeking its way out, struggling from under the great weight of the State. The Night-force triumphs. Society is seen as an ultimate in that vast collective organism, the State, which dominates even its leaders. The great flights of civilization soaring through Sagittarius on the wings of the philosophical, scientific and social mind have now reached a point of crystallization. Perceivers of the beyond are superseded by organizers of empire. Ever shifting and remote boundaries must be watched and fortified by armies and administrators. The central authority must establish rigid patterns of government so as to hold under its impersonal rule many and diverse races, many trends of thought, many traditions.
The imperial Rome of the Caesars is no longer the original citadel of Roman citizens, the sturdy and vigorous Rome of earlier days. It is a sprawling metropolis, a universal city. Likewise, when a man has passed successfully through the evolutionary periods represented by Scorpio and Sagittarius, he is no longer the direct and aggressive ego hiding his social uncertainties under big dramatic gestures. The ego has expanded by becoming established in social groups, through partnerships of all kinds, through identification with the strange and wondrous powers which rise from all collectivities, from their ancient past, from that reservoir of unfathomable energy which has been called the Collective Unconscious.
This Collective Unconscious, time after time, has flooded the merely personal ego with intoxicating powers released by non-procreative sex and by civilization. Either the human person has become the tool of such powers, passively submitting to lust and the hectic rhythm of city-life; or else he has mastered these powers. He has become adept in Scorpio and philosopher in Sagittarius. His ego, then, instead of expanding into a power-greedy monstrosity ceaselessly avid for more lust, or more knowledge, or more money, has undergone a basic metamorpbosis. It has surrendered its energy to a greater center of organization and of consciousness, which is the Self — the center of both the conscious sphere and the vast Unconscious around it.
Centered in his ego, a human person is but a limited and narrow organism of life and consciousness. He is, symbolically, a small tribe, a small State. He is separate from all other personalities. His Leo pride is a perpetual bondage. His creative gestures are rooted but in the small realm of his personal experience and his own geographical surroundings. But when man ceases to refer every feeling, every valuation, every thought to the center of his own narrow being; when man, through social interchanges and through love, through education and world-understanding, through commerce, travel and planet-wide contacts, succeeds in assimilating the vast contents of the civilized world of his time — then he must discover another center of reference; he must accept another framework of consciousness to hold all he has obtained. The "fortified castle" of his ego is left behind and he moves his residence to the "metropolis" of his greater Self. However, it also may be that by making such a move away from his small center of power, he becomes a mere attendant at the court of some powerful Emperor, a passive participant in the greatness and the glory of the empire.
The growth of a small tribe into a vast empire, like the Roman Empire, parallels most accurately the unfoldment of a personality from his narrower sense of ego and his individual pride to the condition where either the man becomes a master of greater life, or a passive participant in some vast power-group from which he absorbs knowledge, sustenance and power in reflected glory.
Capricorn symbolizes thus any typical State-organization encompassing large territories and various racial groups, and all that goes with such an organization, especially politics and the play of power. It symbolizes also in the individual human being that mysterious stage of being and consciousness, of which the perfected Oriental Yogi is the most characteristic representative: viz. the man who, though he live alone, has made of his personality a vast cosmos over which he exercises a special kind of control, and, though he be a mendicant, is rich with the wealth of all society and a participant in the power and glory of transcendent Hosts. Nevertheless Capricorn represents also the courtier who worships at the shrine of some potentate and receives crumbs of power, and the modern politician (or bureaucrat) who is a little wheel in a big machine draining vitality from the State which it is meant to serve.
In Cancer, the personality finds the consummation of its selfhood in becoming completed by a permanent partner and definitely established in a home; yet this consummation contains also the seed of that which will ultimately overcome the individual ego. The triumph of society over personality lurks in the conjugal embrace which, at the time, seems to the man but an exaltation of self and of the powers of self.
Likewise in Capricorn, society and all the collectivizing forces of life seem to triumph in the establishment of the powerful State. There also the individual man, having assumed a profession and a particular social function, seems to have consolidated himself forever in this function. But such Capricornian achievements have in themselves the germ of their destruction. Behind any perfected State stands the impending and unavoidable Revolution. No professional achievement is stable because society is not a static entity, and, out of the constantly moving flux of social relationships and social opportunities, challenges to any established order must arise from new generations, from new inventions, from new materials conquered but not assimilated.
The Capricornian State cannot be set; because it is, by definition, built on far and forever expanding factors, on credit and commerce, on metaphysical speculations which are not susceptible of concrete proofs, and on religious organizations which must be destroyed by the very men who take their beliefs most to heart and incorporate them in their lives: mystics and saints. A small tribal organism can persist for millennia because it is so concrete; because the value of its regulations is evident and its blood-unity is incontrovertible. But an empire must keep shifting its boundaries; politicians must make compromises and bargains with those who, aroused to a taste of power, will want constantly more and will destroy their leaders. The wealthy, in order to increase their wealth, must educate the masses into becoming both technicians to handle machines and consumers to absorb the machines' products. And the masses, thus educated, will rise. Civilization — the Capricornian god — must forever destroy itself while increasing its scope and its powers. Its noblest children are the very ones who will be the leaders in this destruction: the reformers and dreamers, these minds whom no achievement can ever satisfy. They will carry in their souls the signature of Aquarius.
Why, however, must these Aquarian reformers feel so deeply dissatisfied with the status quo, so eager for transformation and revolution? Because within their depths of as yet unconscious being the newly awakened Day-force stirs. And the destruction of the old, which they may engineer, is but the operation of that "sword" which the Christ told us he came to bring: "not peace, but a sword." The Aquarian reformer follows the lead of the Capricornian seer. What he voices is indeed the power of a new human type born within the unconscious depths of the Empire, the power of submerged classes which, having been stirred by their masters into consciousness or into greed, are fated to rise.
This new human type is the Christos, born at the winter solstice in the "manger" — in the cradling deaths of unconscious mankind, hardly aware beyond animality. It is a new type of personality, a new type of home. Both will be completed only during the coming Cancer period, but they begin to take form within the motherly peace of the snow that covers the vast seed-potential of the earth. Just as society becomes eventually in its imperial State what was formed in seed in the conjugal embrace, likewise the individual personality in its glory can be traced to that seed which was sown at the apex of the once great Empire "among the sheep and the goats": the Christos-seed. That seed is the source of the Day-force. It is the well-spring of "living waters" — of those "living waters" which will be poured abundantly from the urn of Aquarius, the Water-bearer.
In Capricorn, the Christos-seed is almost entirely unnoticeable, so completely overwhelmed is the renascent Day-force by the vast structure built by the Night-force. It is to be seen only in the heart of the Capricornian Yogi or Seer; the recluse Hermit; the lonely Wanderer on the heights of snow-covered peaks; the solitary Individual, who, after having assimilated within the strong structure of his selfhood the total contents of the Collective Unconscious has become a "womb of human totality." In that "womb" which represents the fulfillment of an entire cycle of human expansion, he who has become a seed-man receives in utter consecration the New Life that comes from on high. Nine months have elapsed since prolific nature became impregnated by the Sun in Taurus. Nature is thus ready for the birthing of the New Type.
This is the mystery that dwells within the unconscious depths of the noblest among natives of Capricorn. They bear within themselves a living seed; yet know not yet the meaning of that seed. And in despair of loneliness and frustration they seek forgetfulness in social activities, social sins and intoxicants. They crave power, yet power fails to satisfy — and they know it. So they seek lust and eccentricities to soothe their emptiness. They are called "selfish," because they wear a mask. And they dare not let go of the mask, for fear they would have to see their social stature and their ambitions crumble while worshipping the new babe within their souls.
A typical Capricornian was Woodrow Wilson — whom intuitives have identified with the ancient Pharaoh Akh-na-ton, who was the first to promulgate in the Western world a transcendent monotheism, a new religion of the One God which he forced upon his unwilling people and which was destroyed after his death. Likewise Wilson attempted to force upon his people his lofty international idealism, his vision of united mankind. In the Egypt of the XIVth century B.C. religious monotheism represented the New Type of human consciousness. Today, the Federation of Humanity is the promise of, and foundation for the new Man. And a noble Capricorian, with all the faults and the loneliness of a Capricornian, attempted to bring to men the realization of that new birthing of Reality — and failed because his people could not see above their inertia and their politicians. Now an Aquarian is taking up the burden of the New Life.
In due time the New Life always wins. The new type of human being pierces through the crust of the decaying matter of what was once the powerful State erected by Caesar, as spring impels seeds to germinate after the Piscean deluge of equinoctial storms. The Christos always wins against Caesar. The Federation of Man must win over the imperial machines erected by power-groups using Sagittarius energies — machines and propaganda, tanks and fanaticism — to crystallize their ambition. The cycle of life does not allow static fulfillment. Everything turns into its opposite. The wheel moves on everlastingly and the Day-force interplays with the Night-force in an ever-renewed drama which is life itself.
