12 Dec Revelation ~ Solar Eclipse in Sagittarius ~ December 14th, 2020

On December 14th, there will be a Solar Eclipse in Sagittarius, the sign of prophets and revelators. Not only is this last eclipse of the year—it’s the last eclipse of an era.

These are the darkest days of the year as the Sun ambles through the final degrees of Sagittarius. In this dim light, perception operates on a very slow shutter speed. With eyes wide open and unblinking, all the available light is gathered, developing into visions of eternity.

This long gaze is key to understanding the Sagittarian spirit of revelation, for it is the sign that sees in the dark, living in anticipation of the resurrection of the light. Thus in Sagittarius, true faith is born: an unwavering fidelity to the promise of redemption and renewal after a long struggle.

And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters: With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication.

At this eclipse, the revelatory influence of Sagittarius will become intensified, stirring the primordial chaos. In this spin, the dross of the collective unconscious will be purified by waves of hallucinatory sickness, purging many poisons of deception. 

If the Sun in Sagittarius is the eye of awakened consciousness, then the eclipsing Moon is the lid that blocks the light and turns the visions inward: eyes wide shut.

At a solar eclipse, everything fades to black. You are drawn into the void, beyond the veil of illusion to see things differently than you’ve ever seen them before.

This Solar Eclipse will be conjunct to Mercury, purging the mental debris that compromises your quest for truth. This Mercurial Solar Eclipse inspires a philosophical poise as the apocalyptic scene of the last days of 2020 come into focus. 

Reality is ripping apart at the seams, torn to shreds by the desperate claws of fanaticism. It seems that the ideological atom was split, unleashing the furies that have torn so many relationships and communities apart. In this explosion, the myth of progress was incinerated. And in the fall out, unholy mutations of the human spirit have crawled out to haunt the earth.

In the name of compassion, all manner of cruelty has been perpetrated. In the name of health, all manner of illness has been spread. And in the name of freedom, all manner of restrictions have been imposed.

But the slow shutter speed of the Sagittarian gaze takes all this in, patiently developing a picture of everything that has been hidden under the cloak of darkness. 

The Mother of Harlots

In times of apocalypse, the fires of revelation burn. The most well-known reference to an apocalypse is from the Book of Revelation in the New Testament. The Biblical Revelation of St. John is as provocative as it is iconic, inspiring centuries of theological controversy and a great flourishing in popular imagination.

Even if you haven’t read the Bible, you still respond to every invocation of its famous imagery: Armageddon, the Four Horsemen, the Mark of the Beast, 666, Judgement Day and the Whore of Babylon.

In the true spirit of Sagittarius, St. John’s revelation passes through great darkness, gazing calmly into the chaos to discover the timeless consciousness of God: the beginning and the end, the Alpha and Omega.

In the 1st Century A.D., apocalyptic writings were a specific genre, a type of prophecy that journeyed into the dreams of God that glimpsed magnificent scales of time, where centuries of human suffering is finally redeemed.

Rather than foretelling the future, these writings were more like an ancient psychoanalysis of a primordial sea of images that emerged from the source of creation.

And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.

And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration.

The Whore of Babylon is always the juiciest and most provocative passage, often imagined as a woman/ fallen goddess for a myriad of poetic and mythic purposes. But a more historical interpretation of the dream symbols of the 1st Century qualifies the Whore of Babylon as being the Great City of Rome that ruled over all the cities of the world.

Walled cities with penetrable gateways were personified by the image of a woman. In Jewish symbolism, the city of Babylon epitomized the worship of commerce, a materialist dogma that darkened the spirit of its people.

In God’s dream, as seen through the eyes of John, a city is an aggregation of thoughts, led by the Rulers of Reality who control people’s minds. In Revelations, Rome was called the Whore of Babylon to describe its lust for material wealth and worldly power. 

In the First Century, Rome was the largest empire in history, having massively exploited its subjects economically and ideologically. But the nature of imperialism is the same today as it was two thousand years ago, making the ferment of images in Revelations timeless.

The Beast and His Image

A perfect film for meditating on the apocalypse—for psychoanalyzing the dreams of God—is Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.

Kubrick’s final film mystified audiences when it hit cinemas shortly after his untimely death in 1999. Released as a summer blockbuster, it was met with lackluster reviews and little fanfare.

But Kubrick did not make a movie for film critics or cinema audiences in 1999—he made an alchemical elixir that was intended to ferment in the collective unconscious until the End of Days. And like a wine that grows better with age, Eyes Wide Shut is a film that reveals more of its subtle complexities with every viewing. This is not a film that requires multiple views but perpetual viewings. Every scene reveals a detail previously eclipsed from sight—and every year reveals a hideous truth concealed in the film’s many layers.

An adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Traumnovelle (literally “Dream Story”), the narrative of the film is a dreamlike psychodrama that is impossible to describe upon waking.

Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) lead a comfortably middle-class lifestyle in turn-of-the-century New York City (a modern day Babylon).

After Alice confesses her repressed fantasies of infidelity, Bill experiences his own personal apocalypse as his reality is ripped apart at the seams when he descends into a psychosexual underworld journey that leads him into the darkest corners of occult power and elite cryptocracy.

Through a series of seemingly random accidents, Bill crashes a mysterious masquerade ball at a stately manor in the country (the real-life Mentmore Towers, a Rothschild family estate).

When Bill enters the scene, there is an occult ceremony underway. A haunting and infernal chant penetrates the room as a red cloaked figure in  a gold mask holds a wand in one hand while swinging a ball of fuming incense in the other. He walks clockwise through a magic circle that is surrounded by twelve cloaked and masked women. They bow, rise and derobe with robotic movement—as if under a hypnotic spell—whenever the red cloaked figure gestures with his wand.

One of the women from the circle tries to warn Bill that he’s in grave danger—that the cult is on to him and he must leave if he expects to keep his life. He forgoes the warning, and proceeds to explore the wild orgy raging among masked revelers in the Imperial manor beneath portraits of British aristocracy.

Bill is eventually discovered and brought into the magic circle with the red cloaked figure at the center. He’s told to remove his mask and strip naked. The woman who warned him earlier intercedes in his fate, proclaiming that she would “redeem him.” Bill is sent away and sworn to secrecy, with a severe warning that harm would befall him and his entire family should he speak of what he saw to anyone.

The Venetian masks in this scene invoke the historical Venice—the birthplace of the modern banking system—recalling the center of financial and political power during the Renaissance where the seeds of the modern world were first planted.

Windows of the Soul

Dr. Bill Harford is the audience’s surrogate—the vehicle through which our voyeuristic desires may be fulfilled. You see this earlier in the film when he’s shown in his medical practice examining a topless woman with the same detached professionalism used to treat children and the elderly. It’s this unflinching medical gaze that makes him the perfect vessel for the revelation of our most perverse fantasies.

Cinema itself is a surrogate ritual. You sit motionless in a dark room with your senses suspended. You are transported outside of ordinary space and time as images are emblazoned on the unconscious mind, just as symbols are invoked in a magical ritual. By way of example, consider the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Initiates seeking its highest degree are alleged to have been locked in a coffin for 24 hours, during which time they are required to work their way up the paths on the Tree of Life through the sheer force of visualized imagination. When they emerged, the initiate would be “reborn” into a higher consciousness and a new reality. Remember this the next time you Netflix and chill.

Film is to the unconscious mind what the telescope is to the stars or the microscope is to cellular anatomy—an instrument to penetrate its mysteries. It may be pure coincidence that Freud published his first paper on the interpretation of dreams in Vienna on the eve that the Lumiere Brothers debuted the first moving picture camera in Paris—or it might be a magical synchronicity.

Much like how Kubrick used the film medium to comment on itself in the Ludovico Technique scene in A Clockwork Orange, the ritual scene in Eyes Wide Shut self-reflexively invokes the ritualistic and dreamlike qualities of the cinema arts.

But beyond a clever commentary on the art of cinema itself, these scenes are shockingly clear mirrors of the reality they represent. When A Clockwork Orange was released in 1972, Project MK-Ultra was still active. MK-Ultra was the CIA’s clandestine mind control program that experimented on human subjects with a variety of methods (LSD, hypnosis and sleep deprivation) in an attempt to break the individual will and take total control of the subject’s mind.

When Eyes Wide Shut was released in 1999, the ritual orgy scene seemed like something that would spring from the imagination of your crazy conspiracy theorist uncle. But in the years since the film’s release, multiple news stories have emerged into mass awareness revealing that the film’s depictions are more fact-based than fantasy.

The #MeToo era and Weinstein effect revealed the role that sexual domination plays in the power structure of media and politics. And when the Epstein scandal hit widespread awareness, the overwhelming evidence of what the power elite do behind closed doors became undeniable to those willing to see with eyes wide open.

These are the inheritors of Rome’s imperial power and domination over the world—the modern day Whores of Babylon and Rulers of Reality that run the show from behind the curtain.

You Will Kindly Remove Your Mask

Dr. Bill Harford doubles as the audience’s surrogate not just as voyeur but as sacrifice. His ordinary, middle class life is interrupted and invaded by the secret sex cult the same way that the lives of ordinary people like you and I are forcibly penetrated and dominated against our will by the omnipresence of the elite cryptocracy who rule the world from the shadows.

Reality is ritual and ordinary consciousness is its sacrifice.

Anyone who practices magic knows the way it permeates every aspect of your consciousness. Magical consciousness informs every aspect of your being and determines every decision that you make. A world awakens beyond the senses, and every moment of your life is an opportunity to engage with it through ritual, offerings and prayer. A blogger might invoke the powers of Mercury when writing a blog post while a nurse might call on archangel Raphael in the treatment of a patient. Once you’re keyed into the world beyond the senses, there’s really nothing the spirits can’t do for you—often times at a cost.

And anyone experienced with the basic formula of sigil magic (create a symbolic representation of your desire and use the psychic charge of orgasm to implant it in the unconscious mind) is well aware of the power that sexual energy has in magic ritual.

When you couple the knowledge of magical consciousness with the power of sexual energy—and you consider the overwhelming evidence that there exist power elites in media and politics who run the world that hold these beliefs and engage in these behaviors—it really isn’t  a stretch to understand that reality is a ritual and ordinary consciousness is its sacrifice.

Behold a Pale Horse

The descriptions in occult lore for the third decan of Sagittarius, where this Solar Eclipse takes place, could easily be read as an esoteric film analysis for Eyes Wide Shut.

This face of Sagittarius is described by Austin Coppock as the moment when the “vehicle must be sacrificed in order to achieve the will” like a “horse ridden until collapse.”

Coppock goes on to explain that:

“The subject of this decan is what one is willing to sacrifice in order to achieve what one wills. It is thus the formula for the perfection of the will and subjugation of all to it, granting power for both good and evil.”

The evil aspects of this decan were noted in magical lore. The Picatrix pictured a man in the act of committing a murder, stating that it is “a face of evil inclinations… and evil effects.” Cornelius Agrippa described its “activeness for evil things, contentions, and horrible matters.”

The Tarot Key assigned to this decan is the Ten of Wands, dubbed “Oppression” by Aleister Crowley. He describes it thus:

“It is Fire in its most destructive aspect… The whole picture suggests oppression and repression. It is a stupid and obstinate cruelty from which there is no escape. It is a Will which has not understood anything beyond its dull purpose, its ‘lust of result’, and will devour itself in the conflagrations it has evoked.”

The modern day Whores of Babylon treat reality as a means to an end in their alchemical experiment in mass consciousness—consensus reality itself has become the vehicle which “must be sacrificed in order to achieve the will” of its rulers.

We see this in Eyes Wide Shut as Dr. Bill Harford’s ordinary reality is effectively sacrificed for the will of the secret sex cult at the film’s center. The good doctor will simply never look at the world the same way again.

But there’s a plot twist.

No Dream is Ever Just a Dream

Just because the elites are rich and powerful doesn’t mean they are very smart.

The Rulers of Reality aren’t very bright at the end of the day. They are possessed by a “Will which has not understood anything beyond its dull purpose, its ‘lust of result’, and will devour itself in the conflagrations it has evoked.”

Let it be known that this Solar Eclipse in Sagittarius the masks come off—and whosoever has eyes shall see in light of day what has been done in the shadows for centuries.

Even in the darkest hour on the darkest night, St. John anticipates the coming of a New Dawn with great joy. And with visionary fervor, he meets his Creator, the Redeemer, his Eternal Friend.

I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.

An insatiable craving for truth will evolve consciousness at a primal level, one that can taste the difference between an empty lie and the fullness of knowledge.

This Solar Eclipse in Sagittarius, the masks come off, the ritual ends and the dreamer awakens.

N.B. Much gratitude to Jay Dyer for his analysis of Eyes Wide Shut in his book Esoteric Hollywood. Learn more about Dyer’s work at jaysanalysis.com.