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TWELVE PHASES OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE: PISCESS
The last stage of the Sun's zodiacal journey is reached in Pisces as the Day-force, steadily waxing stronger, prepares to balance and overcome the waning Night-force. The Christ-seed, which was activated at the winter solstice in the hidden depths of a world utterly dominated by social behavior and by the concept of the State, has now unfolded to the point where it has to be recognized by a society breaking down under the weight of its crystallizations. The once-powerful Empire is attacked from all sides by waves of destructive energy, by the rip-tide of Barbarian invasions. New blood is flowing into the old ruling classes, utterly transforming them. The proud "isolationists" are swept away when they refuse to link themselves up to the rising crest of the spring-to-be as wintry icebergs are sent to liquid deaths by the equinoctial storms which rage through the Piscean period.
Pisces is an era of storms and of wholesale disintegration. But Piscean winds of destiny may impel men of vision and courage to discover many a "new world," as much as they do destroy or suffocate the many who stubbornly resist change. Pisces is an era of often sharp and violent repolarization. It is an era of purgation and cleansing. Tradition has made of the month preceding the vernal equinox a period of fasting and repentance. Beginning with Ash Wednesday, the devotee of the New Life must learn to identify himself willingly with the death of all established structures. He must be willing to face the chrysalis state for the sake of the butterfly-to-be. Pisces is the mythical Deluge and the age of universal dissolution. Man must accept structural dissolution under the insidious power of Neptune, ruler of Pisces. He must cling to no stability or no past greatness. "No-security" is for him the only possible security. He must learn to operate in terms of the waxing Dayforce and to stand unmoved while the structures built by the Night-force are shattered all around him.
In the opposite Sign, Virgo, the individual, having proudly released in Leo the energies of his personality, is confronted by the results of such releases. His progeny must be cared for. His creative works may show failings and inadequacies. His health may have been impaired by passional excesses; his patrimony may have been squandered through useless speculation. In Virgo, the individual faces this need of repolarizing his emotional attitude as well as of improving his technique of behavior. Self-criticism, study, hygiene and discipleship to a "master of technique" are therefore his needs. By satisfying them he begins to get a new perspective upon human relationships. He learns to serve, to have patience, to listen, to meditate and to criticize the most basic impulses of his personality. If he does not learn willingly, he may be compelled by illness or servitude to open himself to the true life of human relationship and to become in Libra a "social" being.
With Pisces we find the winds of destiny turned to the opposite point of the compass. Here it is the "social" man who must learn to give up his comfortable, or even his tragic, reliance upon the structure of society. He must learn to stand alone and to rely only upon his own inner Voice. He must be willing to "close accounts" and face the unknown with simple faith; to re-enter the womb of nature, leaving behind the beautiful mirages of the Aquarian civilized life and bracing himself for life in the wilderness of some greater realm, for long voyages to a new world. He must learn to un-learn and to give up even his set ideals and his possessions. He must learn even, as mystics do, to pierce through the wondrous sphere of the "glory of God" and to search, undaunted, through the darkness of human consciousness for the "poverty of God," that hidden state where there is silence and nothing, yet whence all things that have form and name emanate in the stillness of the supreme Mystery. In Virgo, the proud personality must learn to be an apprentice and to serve a master. But, in Pisces, the social man who relies upon machines and formulas accumulated through centuries of culture to perform his daily tasks, faces the realization that his allegiance to social progress and intellect-born learning will not save him. To serve a social ideal will mean nothing in a life-or-death crisis. To serve God, to serve that which no revolution can disturb, yet which is the cause and raison dκtre of all revolutions that is the Piscean's duty.
Transcendence, overcoming, piercing through illusions and false security, severance of social ties, embarking for the great adventure with utter faith and in denuded simplicity of being: all these things are to be learned in Pisces. Man is here face to face with himself, and with that Greater Self which he names: God. He can refuse such a confrontation. He can cling to oppressive and decadent cities. He can bundle up with refugees and moan forever before the Wailing Walls provided by dying religions and bloated social "Saviors." But then, he will be plouged under, as manure for the spring sowings.
To renounce and to transcend means mental criticism of a sort. Mind, in the Signs preceding the equinoxes (Virgo and Pisces), is the constant critic, cutting away the crystallizations or fallacies of the past and intent upon clearing the stage for a new kind of living and realization. It is mind telling what should be forgotten, pruned away, regenerated or transcended. In Pisces, the social delusions, the exaggerated idealism, the cranky notions, the revolutionary fetishes, the scientific materialism, the civilized monstrosities which have swarmed through the Aquarian period must be cut away. Man sheds here his social gestures and stands bare before God within that is, before the Christos, the burden of his future Destiny. Indeed, more than social gestures must be laid aside; for these social factors, now that the Night-force wanes, are turning not only negative but also subjective. The social becomes the psychic. Social dreams are transfigured into psychic phantasms; social frustrations, into subconscious complexes.
Pisces, in its negative or subjective aspect, represents the realm of the subconscious (Freud) or the personal unconscious (Jung). This personal unconscious is the end-product of all the individual's failures at adapting himself successfully to his environment from family up to organized society, from Cancer to Capricorn. The contents of the personal unconscious are negative, because produced by a subjective defeatism which leads to self-pity and feeds the multitudinous fears constituting inverted psychic energy. Complexes are crystallized fears. Energy, in them, is "tied in knots" and circulates no longer. The power-filled substance of the psyche, through them, has turned slowly destructive, or at least distorting. The complex is at times like a concave or convex mirror which dis-shapes the images of living. It is psychic astigmatism. At other times, it becomes revengeful and cancerous: a growth that eats up the psycho-mental substance of consciousness and produces schizophrenia and the various kinds of manias.
In Pisces, these complexes must be faced. The confrontation may be met through understanding, through guided self-introspection (psychological analysis under a trained analyst), through the many techniques devised by Oriental gurus. But, in a great many cases, it implies not only an individual effort but as well a collective arousal, such as comes through a wave of religious fervor. This need be so, because crystallizations to be dealt with are not only caused by the individual's failure, but even more by the fallacious and atrophying traditions of family, religion and society, which impose upon the child since birth a collection of often ludicrous obstacles some, however, unavoidable and on the whole constructive to the spontaneous and natural flow of his energies.
Thus it is said that the "sins of the fathers" shall visit seven generations. Our modern neuroses are likewise to be laid at the doors of the Victorian era, which in turn merely revealed the pressures and fallacies forced upon our European-Christian humanity for centuries and which only an aristocratic framework of society had kept from contaminating every man, woman and child. This framework having collapsed, the individualistic rule of the bourgeoisie, exacerbated by the release of vast powers through technology, let loose all the monsters of the subconscious. Thus, our many complexes and manias, just as the early Middle Ages heirs to the decay of the Celtic and Roman Empires had their succubi and incubi, their demons and their witches.
Man has to face not only his personal unconscious but also the collective unconscious of his particular race, of his particular culture. Birth in Aries means having passed through this deceitful and dark realm of racial memories, which the occultist has named the "astral world" or the "lower astral light." Rebirth in Aries means, for the mature personality, to have faced the "Guardian of the threshold" whose terrors are graphically pictured in Bulwer Lytton's famous novel Zanoni; and to have won in the encounter. In a positive sense, every birth means assimilating the mother's blood. The future must ever feed on the substance of the past. This past, the eternal mother, is Mary; which means etymologically, the "sea," whence all life must always spring, whether for birth or rebirth.
Nothing is produced vitally anew which does not emerge from the "sea." And the "sea" is Pisces, ruled by Neptune. Neptune's trident has three prongs and Pisces' zodiacal hieroglyph has also three lines. For this reason, the Gospel symbolism speaks of the three "Marys": Mary, the Mother; Mary, the lovebearer; Mary, the servant birth, rebirth and every-day living in consecrated activity. In Pisces, the individual must go through the Eternal Feminine. This is the eternal Chrysalis, which is as nothing, yet which contains all potencies of renewal. It is the realm of metamorphosis and that of psychic glamour; the world of rapture and that of eternal mist; openness to God and mediumship to the phantasms of a decaying past; the martyr's sacrifice and the ghastly Inquisitions which feed sadistic frustrations under the mask of religious work.
Pisces must not be considered only as a Sign of social or mystical openness, with an under-meaning of passivity. In its sea-depths there is violence and storm. Severance is performed by the sword. Fanaticism is ruthless and the monk's retreat into the desert, where he can best face, in aloneness, his entire past and all the human races' memories, is a trial of courage and resilient strength. For this reason, many generals and heroes carried the zodiacal signature of Pisces in their nature. They knew how to stand still and to unfurl their energies; how to be ruthless, with themselves as with others. Pisces is aroused depth; and nothing can be more devastating than the tidal wave or the sea-born hurricane.
In Pisces, there is always something of finality, yet of expectancy. Even gentleness has undertones of mystery. There are transitions bidden in every corner of the being. There is often personal aloofness and distant nobility, as if issues were too big or too set to involve the mere personality. There is a sense of possession by an eternal unrest, on the background of which all set things appear temporary or useless. And if that mood prevails in the personality, a fatal kind of introversion slowly empties the consciousness of living contents. Men return to the ghostly world of the unconscious perhaps as Roman Stoics living in noble aloofness while their world is destroyed, perhaps as dreamers translating all memories into phantasies, or, if afraid of psychic phantasies, building rigid intellectual systems and useless algebras to frame their hollowness with elegant arabesques.
In its highest and most spiritual aspect Pisces reveals itself as pure compassion. Here we see the great Personage whose being is full to overflowing, because he has absorbed the wholeness of his race's experience. In his plenitude, society is mirrored and endowed with the fullest significance. And because he can go no farther, except he ascend to transcendent and formless Nirvanas, to him comes the great choice: solitary bliss or compassion. The former is the goal of "spiritual selfishness," sought after under the great delusion that there can be individual salvation. But the Compassionate One understands that, in reality and in truth, there can be no individual salvation. No man can rise to a Reality that is vital and significant, who does not take with him the past whence he arose. The individual can only be "saved" in that day when the whole of humanity will have reached fulfillment. Isolationism is the only sin that life cannot forgive, because he who conveniently forgets the rungs of the ladder which helped him to reach the pinnacle, leaves a mark upon life which nothing and no one can eradicate but himself.
Compassion is the absolute Law of a universe in which there is order and harmony. Compassion is the heart of reality, because reality is based on the experience of organic wholeness, and he who truly experiences all things as organic wholes cannot fail to see himself as part of some Greater Whole, however much he may have attained integral wholeness in his own being. In Pisces, therefore, the "Messenger from the White City" meets the men whom it is his burden of destiny to teach and to impregnate with the Glad Tidings of the New Life. Should he recoil in dismay before the picture of decay and materialism which a crumbling civilization presents, he would then fail his true destiny.
The burden of Pisces is that one should not recoil before anything, low and horrible as it might be, on the basis of one's own purity and excellence; that one should move on toward the common plains with arms and soul laden with the significance and glory of the hills "whence come salvation." The "Cedar of Lebanon" must willingly let itself be cut, that houses may be built for the homeless, that ships may sail to lands of riches, that "Temples of Solomon" may become in fact dwelling places of God among men.
In Pisces, the "White City," that is far and beyond, can be erected, in reality and in significance, among men. This is the end of the cycle, which bears within its vital depths the beginnings of the New Life. The Day-force and the Night-force have come once more to the point of equilibrium. What is to become "initiated" is no longer, as it was at the threshold of Libra, the individual; it is now Humanity, as an organic whole. And this is the last blessing of the closing cycle, the eternal promise of all cyclic consummation: that the constant dualism of ever-changing life can be integrated in organic wholes ceaselessly more encompassing, through the creative behavior of Personalities ever more compassionate and more deeply integrated; that Day and Night may be realized as the two complementary poles of life and consciousness, in moments of human perception so lucid and so rich with universal contents that such illuminations may remain as beacon lights to be guidance and joy to ever vaster reaches of life. It is the promise of eternal rebirth, which leaves nothing unredeemed and excludes no one; the promise of the everlasting and timeless Presence of God in the man who fully welcomes the total integration of all that brought him to his present consummation; in whom, therefore, is accomplished the synthesis of past and future in the fullness and glory of moments that are the "eternal Now."
