11 Feb Electric Sheep ~ New Moon in Aquarius ~ February 11th, 2021

The New Moon in Aquarius arrives on Thursday, February 11th, 2021.

It’s the beginning of the Lunar New Year and the end of the world as we know it. Can you remember what you did for the Lunar New Year in 2020? Take a moment to recall, because it was not that long ago—and yet the world you live in has completely changed.

This New Moon in Aquarius will see you enter into a truly new world. This is not a New Age promise of a Great Awakening, nor is it a devotional prayer for global salvation. It is a fact staring you in the face like the cold black lifeless eye of a grey alien: the world has forever changed.

The recent Great Conjunction and current Mercury Retrograde in Aquarius—compounded by the fact that there will be six planets (including a conjunction of Venus and Jupiter) in the fixed air sign for the New Moon—will only serve to accentuate and exaggerate the Aquarian themes of this lunar cycle.

Aquarius is one of Saturn’s domiciles, and as such it is a cold and merciless place. If Capricorn is the city, then Aquarius is the wilderness. To be rejected by the former does not necessarily mean you are embraced by the latter. Both landscapes are built of dark ecologies that place the highest value on adaptation and innovation for survival.

The current social climate is a rude wake-up call to the countercultural myth that the Age of Aquarius will be an era of independence, free love and radical self-expression. Far from being a worldwide transformational festival where everyone has a place to find themselves, the Aquarian Age is defined by desperation, deprivation and scarcity.

Painful to live in fear, isn’t it?

But necessity is the mother of invention. As the astrologer P. James Clark has pointed out, Aquarius is a sign of humanitarian innovation but not necessarily loving compassion. The technocratic wet dream of the Great Reset is part and parcel of the blind progress hidden in the shadow of Aquarius—and the recent Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn was a perfect celestial marriage reflected in the mundane merger of corporate tech giants and the deep state to consolidate absolute power for the good of humanity.

In order for humanity to survive, at least half of it has to be thrown into the meat grinder for the other half to live. Sacrifices must be made for the good of all. Local communities, entire economies, and individual privacy must be sacrificed for the survival of the planet. Whether or not you consent to that sacrifice isn’t really a matter of concern, so long as we bring the greatest good to the greatest number.

Moloch It a Lot

The astrologer P. James Clark has pointed out the associations of Saturn with Moloch.

“Moloch is Saturn by another name,” Clark writes. “As the god of money, he emphasizes the materialism of Saturn. More grotesquely, he is known as the god who demanded child sacrifices, consumed by a furnace in his belly.”

Moloch is first mentioned in the Old Testament, where in the Book of Leviticus it is said:

And thou shalt not give any of thy seed to set them apart to Molech, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God: I am the LORD.

In the modern world, Moloch has come to symbolize the unsatiated appetites of corporate greed, its ravenous lust for ownership and control of material resources and financial capital as well as its willingness to enslave the vast majority of the population to meet these ends.

But in the postmodern world, Moloch has gotten woke. He knows that in order for the traditional top-down power structure to hold, we need to shift our focus from share-holder capitalism to stake-holder capitalism. He’s become climate conscious and his sacrifices now leave a 100% reduced carbon footprint. He’s adopted a vegan diet that replaces ecologies with economies, slave labor with artificial intelligence, and child sacrifice with cancel culture.

Saturn finds sympathy with Moloch in that, like his Grecian counterpart Chronos, he has a reputation for devouring his young. However, where Moloch is nothing more than the force of mindless consumption, Saturn conceals a deeper wisdom.

Saturn is Father Time and Lord of Karma, sowing seeds of confusion and harvesting the fruits of your labor. The very substance of time is matter, and it is through material incarnation and our inevitable death that we most intimately know Saturn as Father Time. But as Lord of Karma, he offers us a different view of the merciless path between space and time. Through our acts and works in this incarnation, we might come to push beyond the limits of matter and discover the secret of eternal life.

As the ruler of Capricorn, Saturn traps us in matter. But as the ruler of Aquarius he offers us the gift of true liberation in exchange for personal freedom. This is exemplified in that most gnostic of the canonical scripture, the Gospel of John, where Jesus said:

He that loveth his life shall lose it;
and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.

I Want More Life, Father

The third decan of Aquarius (where this New Moon takes place) is associated with the Seven of Swords in the Minor Arcana of the Tarot.

The Rider Waite deck pictures a thief escaping a military encampment having looted five swords. It’s an image of going back for something that was forgotten, or claiming something that was lost or stolen—of paying and/or collecting on a debt that is owed.

The third decan of Aquarius is the unknown wilderness, the absolute edge of certainty. In these unprecedented times, it is a place where most of us have taken up permanent residence. The image of the thief fleeing the encampment is the spirit of this decan, preserving what’s left worth saving before leaving it all behind.

This decan has historically been associated with a growing disgust in the social order. Agrippa describes a “black and angry man” adding that “the significance of this is in expressing insolence, and impudence.” The Picatrix declares this decan to be one of “insulting behavior.”

There may be a growing sense of insult added to injury among a vast majority of the population this New Moon in Aquarius. This is why it is worth considering where you stand in the world, looking within and asking yourself… 

What do I need to save and what can I leave behind?

Tears in Rain

A perfect film to reflect upon for the New Moon in Aquarius is Blade Runner.

An adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ridley Scott’s 1982 dystopian scifi film noir broke new ground in what the genre and the film medium as a whole were capable of doing both aesthetically and thematically.

The film opens with Vangelis’ otherworldly synthesizer score as a text scroll establishes the dystopian world of Blade Runner:

Early in the 21st Century, THE TYRELL CORPORATION advanced Robot evolution into the Nexus phase – a being virtually identical to a human – known as a Replicant.

The NEXUS 6 Replicants were superior in strength and agility, and at least equal in intelligence, to the genesis engineers who created them.

Replicants were used Off-world as slave labor, in the hazardous exploration and colonization of other planets.

After a bloody mutiny by a NEXUS 6 combat team in an Off-world colony, Replicants were declared illegal on earth – under penalty of death.

Special police squads – BLADE RUNNER UNITS – had orders to shoot to kill, upon detection, any trespassing Replicant.

This was not called execution. It was called retirement.

Once the scroll is complete, a title card stating LOS ANGELES, NOVEMBER 2019 fades into a nightmare dystopian hellscape—an urban sprawl that threatens to consume the horizon stretches out before billowing smoke stacks breath hellfire on the skyline.

The entire scene is then reflected into a giant disembodied eyeball, establishing the weird fractal space that the film opens in the mind’s eye of its beholder.

The eye theme is a main focus in Blade Runner. It is an eye test that establishes empathy in its subject, determining their status as human or machine (like they say, windows to the soul). Photographs provide a pivotal plot point as characters rely on them to create memories that never happened. A device lets a detective recreate an entire crime scene based on a single photograph. And the film’s most renown line of dialogue starts by saying “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.”

On its surface, Blade Runner is a typical detective story. Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a retired blade runner forced back onto the job to hunt and retire four Replicants who return to earth from the off-world colonies. During his debriefing on the case, it is established that after four years, Replicants start to develop their own emotional responses. As a fail safe measure, they are given a four-year life span. When investigating the Tyrell Corporation, Deckard learns that in order to prevent a complete nervous breakdown at the discovery of their mortality, they are “gifted the past” via artificial memory implants.

Blade Runner is almost too painful to watch in the post-pandemic world of 2021. In its philosophical meditations on memory & identity and life & death amid the backdrop of a totally alienating dystopian world, the film has become a sobering Aquarian arcanum. Saturn lurks in the shadows of the film as Father Time and Lord of Karma.

I want more life, fucker.

The Replicants who have returned to earth are led by the formidable Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer). They have risked their lives in search of more of it: they wish to override their four-year life span. When he eventually meets with the uber Saturnian demiurge Dr. Eldon Tyrell, the bioengineer who designed the Replicants, Roy learns there is no hope in expanding his own life expectancy nor those of his compatriots. Like the thief in the Seven of Swords, Roy has returned to earth to collect a debt that is owed to him. When Roy learns that Tyrell cannot pay up, he mercilessly takes his maker’s life as penance.

During his investigation, Deckard falls in love with a Replicant named Rachel, a show-room model at the Tyrell Corporation who doesn’t know she’s a Replicant. She learns that her memories are not her own, but implants derived from Tyrell’s niece. This causes Deckard to reflect on his own humanity, at times doubting his own memories while gazing at antique photos laid on his piano, leading to the fan theory debate of whether or not Deckard himself is a Replicant. (Hint: he’s not.)

Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.

In the final chase, Roy Batty embodies the true spirit of Aquarius—a wild child with nothing left to lose, chasing humanity to the very edge of existence like a haunting ghost of all its wrongdoings. Abandoned by his creator, cast out into the wilderness and raised by wolves, his only means of survival is the regression to a primitive animalistic state. He breaks Deckard, taunts him and torments before ultimately redeeming him and saving his life.

In his dying moments, Roy delivers the film’s most famous line of dialogue, declaring to a bewildered Deckard:

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”

In death, Roy becomes a paradoxical Christ figure for the dystopian age—the android who becomes more than human, the savior who forsakes his God, the gnostic messiah who sacrifices himself to save a dying age.

Memories, You’re Talkin’ About Memories

Have you taken a moment to remember where you were for the Lunar New Year in 2020 yet?

If not, close your eyes, take a deep breath and think back…

I was seeing Beethoven’s 5th Symphony performed at the Walt Disney Music Hall in Downtown Los Angeles on January 24th, 2020 for the Lunar New Year. I remember on the drive home passing through the side streets in Chinatown, hearing the celebration and seeing a parade file out of a Buddhist temple, led by a lung dragon.

I will not forget the feeling of awe and wonder of seeing these two worlds collide—East and West—in the City of Angels on the Lunar New Year. There was a spirit of freedom and celebration in the air—a feeling that greatness was on the horizon. Little did I know how the year ahead would unfold.

While my spirit has been dampened by the last year (as I am sure yours has as well), I still believe that freedom and greatness lie at the horizon—otherwise I would give up my journey. The exile is kept alive by their memories. It’s not the desire to go back to the way things were, but to carry the seed of promise stored in the banks of eternal memory so that it may find new soil to take root in.

This is the paradox of exile in Aquarius: to be cast into the wilderness without any hope of salvation, to cry out for a voice that you know will not answer, but to continue your quest because you carry in your memory something precious that you know is worth saving—even though you instinctively know…

All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.