08 Jun Project Mayhem ~ Solar Eclipse in Gemini ~ June 10th, 2021

On June 10th, 2021 the solar eclipse in Gemini arrives, summoning a transformative wave of chaos to alter the shorelines of your reality forever. Conjunct to Mercury retrograde and squared to Neptune in Pisces, this eclipse is cosmically appointed to fuck with your head!

In Gemini, the head of the dragon has a voracious appetite for truth. This craving stirs a violent purging of the deception and delusion of the global mono-culture of fear. 

It is a sickening process. But if you’re strong enough to keep your eyes open, the breakthrough you need to trust your own mind again will be granted.

I am Jack’s Head of the Dragon

The hyperreality of 2021 has greatly tested your ability to discern fact from fantasy. The ruler of this eclipse, Mercury retrograde in Gemini, will glitch the mechanics of mind, dissolving logic and arrogant assumptions in favor of initiating a full on soul retrieval.

What the locusts have eaten can be restored.

Gemini, the twins, symbolizes the dual hemispheres of mind, the process of reflecting back and forth between binaries. The mechanistic quality has become reflected in the black mirror of technological progress. The dragon breathes smoke and mirrors.

An ideal life in the 21st century is the life of an android, programmed to be fully optimized for time and energy efficiency. The Information Age presents a brutal paradox: the more access to knowledge the more conformity of thought is expected. The lusterless mind of the Borg seems to threaten like never before.

As world governments reveal their authoritarian intentions more brazenly by the day, the loss of livelihoods, civil rights, and the vital nectar of social connection has ground everyone’s spirits down. 

“Was the virus made in a lab?” A year ago experts all agreed on an unequivocal NO! Today, these same experts say, PERHAPS! How does either answer justify the degradation of civilization over the last year?

Under Siri’s constant surveillance, perfect poise and efficiency in life can be achieved. The value of a human life is measured by data sold to global corporations. A predatory eye stalks your every move, studying your behavior, looking for weaknesses to exploit. Everyone on the internet is now a targeted individual.

You can get used to anything, even 24/7 digital gang-stalking amidst a global economic collapse. But the relentless invasion of privacy and violation of public trust has resulted in a tremendous amount of dissociation in order to cope with the trauma. 

Dissociation breaks your mind. It disconnects you from your thoughts, feelings, memories, and surroundings, making it impossible to think clearly. It makes you amnesiac, forgetting who you are from moment to moment. You blink and you find yourself repeating what you’ve been told by someone you don’t know and have no reason to trust.

But the Solar Eclipse in Gemini arrives to disrupt that pattern. As the light of the conscious mind is eclipsed, a deeper soul-level knowledge of Self emerges to guide you. 

Your experiences at this eclipse are diagnostic tools to help you evaluate your own level of soul-sickness. How dissociated have you become? Like swallowing a contrast dye, all the blockages to truth will be glaringly revealed. The scan will show the dark cloud of every lie you’ve obediently swallowed, the density formed where you’ve gone against your conscience for convenience’s sake.

Since the North Node entered into Gemini last May, the world has truly been turned upside down and inside out. The dizzying labyrinth of misinformation and disinformation has made any attempt at “fact finding” into a harrowing encounter with the abyss. 

The square to Neptune at this solar eclipse will make facts seem very fuzzy. In a sea of misinformation, everything becomes hyperreal. The blind are leading the blind down hallways of conclusive evidence. Without sight of what is real or artifice, the only choice is to let your soul speak. 

“Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.”

Predictably, the Information Age has descended into darkness, where the free flow of information has become the public enemy of any organization allied with globalist tyranny. This sentiment was true long before the pandemic. But it has certainly intensified in recent months. 

The spirit of this tyranny seems to equate humanity with a field of Monsanto corn, hoping that enough chemicals and genetic modification can proliferate a monoculture of corporate interests. Mono-culture and monotony. Everything gray, dimly lit by LED to reduce carbon footprint.

Fortunately, this grim level of conformity in human thought can never be achieved. Nature is diversity, color, and the infinite capacity for adaptation. And the human mind is a mirror of that nature. 

In a climate where official stories change faster than the wind, there’s never been a better time to start thinking for yourself. And if you desire a better fate than a pesticide-drenched cornstalk, that has become a necessity. 

Like a pool of water, your mind reflects the gray world of conformity, observing how ideas gather like clouds to obscure the sky. But given the smallest glimmer of light from a distant star, your mind gleams, returning to the wilderness of imagination.

At this eclipse, the sky will break open. And your mind will begin reflecting a deeper level of reality, reaching beyond the dim digital glare to dilate upon the light of distant stars. 

Consequently, many of your allegiances to certain groups and belief systems will be swept away. It may be tempting to cling, to grasp for familiarity. But you’ll have to learn to let go. The eclipse will only remove necrotic tissues, shredding away the cancerous neural networks that have been occupied by corporate interests. Let go.

I am Jack’s Adolescent Nostalgia

A perfect film to view this Solar Eclipse in Gemini is David Fincher’s 1999 cult classic Fight Club.

“In a world that has really been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood” – Guy Debord

An adaption of Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 transgressive lit bombshell of the same name, Fight Club has permeated the cultural lexicon since its release as a meta-meme for the existential crisis caused in the individual by late-stage capitalism, and the desire to liberate the self from the spectacle of consumerism through a radical turn toward primitivism, anarchism and collectivism.

The fact that this subversive message was being promulgated in a big-budgeted Hollywood blockbuster starring Brad Pitt in the same year of the WTO demonstrations that drew record numbers to descend upon the streets of Seattle to protest economic globalization, only adds to the meta-irony of Fight Club’s mythic reputation and memetic resonance.

“With insomnia, nothing’s real. Everything’s far away. Everything’s a copy of a copy of a copy.”

Flight Club tells the story of an unnamed Narrator (Edward Norton) who finds little meaning in his 30-something life stuck in a corporate job he hates which ensnares him deeper into a consumerist lifestyle that seems to perpetuate itself like a termite infestation in the soul. As a result of his alienation and angst, the Narrator suffers from crippling insomnia for which he seeks professional help (and medical prescription). His physician, unsympathetic to the Narrator’s demand that he’s in pain, assigns him to visit a testicular cancer support group to see “real pain.”

His peace is disrupted when another voyeur, Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) begins attending the same meetings with the same motives. Marla presents herself as a classic film noir femme fatale and serves as a black mirror for the Narrator’s (self) deception, resulting in his insomnia returning with a vengeance.

“On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”

“If you wake up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?”

While on a business trip, the Narrator meets the charismatic and enigmatic Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a soap salesman with an acerbic sense of humor and an unsettling knowledge of homemade explosives. When returning from the same business trip, the Narrator discovers that his apartment had blown up (and with it his perfectly curated consumer lifestyle). With nowhere left to go, the Narrator calls Tyler Durden for a round of drinks.

“The things you own end up owning you.”

Their round of drinks turns into a very strange proposition when Tyler Durden asks the Narrator to hit him as hard as he can. The Narrator obliges at which point a mutual fist fight ensues and the rest is history.

The two end up living together like postmodern Buddhist monks in a decrepit mansion in an “industrial waste part of town.” Their mutual fist fights transform into a city-wide sensation as men gather in parking lots and basements to brutalize each other, finding a momentary liberation from the monotony of their meaningless corporate jobs and consumer lifestyles.

“The first rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club.”

Meanwhile, Tyler Durden begins a kinky sexual relationship with Marla Singer that sinkens the Narrator to no end. He finds his peace disturbed again by the black mirror of his (self) deception.

“I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school.”

The underground fight clubs spread beyond the city limits, becoming a national sensation. Tyler Durden takes on a mythic cult-of-personality for his instrumental role in founding the first fight club.

Gradually, Fight Club evolves into a domestic terrorist organization called Project Mayhem that turns Durden’s acerbic wit into a full-scale counter attack on consumer culture, using highly elaborate pranks and dangerous homemade explosives to subvert the narrative of corporate culture.

“The first rule of Project Mayhem is you do not ask questions, sir.”

When Project Mayhem completely spirals out of the Narrator’s control, it is revealed to him that Tyler Durden is nothing but a figment of his imagination—a psychological projection that his fractured sleep-deprived mind created to disassociate from his ordinary identity and assume a role that was liberated from the trappings of consumer society…

…and then his imaginary friend just sort of became everyone else’s best friend, personal savior and supreme cult leader.

“I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I’m free in all the ways that you are not.”

Project Mayhem’s end game is the controlled demolition of all the major credit card companies to erase the debt record back to zero and initiate mass social disorder.

This goal is ultimately achieved, when the Narrator, having vanquished Tyler Durden, is reunited with Marla Singer and two hold hands as the infrastructure of debt slavery collapse around them.

“You met me at a very strange time in my life.”

I am Jack’s Critical Theory Degree

In a recent episode of his podcast, Gary P. Caton quoted Alexander Ruperti, who once stated that it is the job of the astrologer to “interpret human life in terms of the needs of the Epoch.”

And it is for this reason alone that at this Solar Eclipse in Gemini, the film Fight Club is required viewing.

No, it’s not due to the uncanny double/evil twin archetype that makes Fight Club essential viewing at the Solar Eclipse in Gemini—although it certainly does help.

It is because astrology’s role is to “interpret human life in terms of the needs of the Epoch.” Eclipses are times when we must face the collective shadow of mass culture—and it’s time for you to face the sacrifice of your personal sovereignty to a multinational technocratic corporate entity without compassion or humanity.

Released mere months apart from the The Matrix, Fight Club captured the Zeitgeist of the turn of the century corporate technocracy. Both films are prophetic visions of a future in which individual sovereignty is completely assimilated by corporate hegemony—and both films are now quaint time capsules of a time when the prospect of this future seemed worrisome to the vast majority of human beings.

“When deep space exploration ramps up, it’ll be the corporations that name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks.”

Corporations no longer need to colonize deep space for they have conquered inner space. Personal identities are no longer shaped through upbringing and environment so much as they are mediated by their appearance on social media. Radical social movements mobilized to subvert the status quo are assimilated by the conventional political apparatus, who perpetuates the mere representation of social justice at the prevention of any true social transformation taking place.

The French Situationist philosopher Guy Deborb predicted our postmodern condition in his 1967 treatise Society of the Spectacle. Responding to consumer culture and late-stage capitalism, Debord saw modern society as being a spectacle of images that we all participate in. Rather than being imposed upon by an oppressive state apparatus, Debord saw modern society as being mediated through mutual participation in this spectacle. Nothing is valued for its inherent utility in one’s life, and is instead valued for the image by which one can create of themselves.

Remember those “I’m a Mac” and “I’m a PC” commercials from the mid-noughties? Were they so much about the superior function of Mac over PC—or the superior image that young, hip sophisticated Mac users can flex over old, boring, uncool PC users? Solving this rhetorical riddle gets you one step closer to understanding the role that you play in the spectacle.

Debord further observed that the spectacle seemed immune to subversion, a phenomenon which he dubbed recuperation. Any attempt at a radical response to the spectacle will instead result in the assimilation of its revolutionary message and distillation into a marketable image. Look no further than the closest Che Guevara t-shirt to understand recuperation.

In order to subvert the spectacle, Debord encouraged the creation of situations that would disrupt the narrative—what he termed détournement or culture jamming, which he described as “using spectacular images and language to disrupt the flow of the spectacle.” The street art of guerilla pranksters like Banksy and Shepard Fairey are both examples of détournement in the culture narrative. And in Burning Man, one finds a veritable Mecca of détournement in the modern world.

However, in a world where a subversive street artist like Fairey flip-flops into a propagandist for an oppressive political regime and Burning Man becomes an exotic weekend getaway for Big Tech oligarchs and Instagram influencers scratching another geotag off their bucket list, you have to ask yourself if there is any escape from the spectacle—or if we are truly doomed to inhabit a post-Situationist cultural wasteland.

This is why it is crucial to meditate on Fight Club at this Solar Eclipse in Gemini—so that you can understand the needs of your own life in terms of the Epoch.

I am Jack’s Complete Mental Breakthrough

When he was coming of age in his 20s, Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk was a member of the Portland, Oregon chapter of the Cacophony Society—the same anarcho-prankertist organization that produced the founding members of Burning Man. The Situationist ethos of the Cacophony Society no doubt left an impression on Palahniuk that he later transferred into Fight Club.

When you consider the cultural impact that both the film and the book have left on the collective imagination, then it is arguable that Fight Club is simultaneously the biggest case of recuperation and the greatest example of détournement that contemporary culture has ever seen—befitting of a story centered on a protagonist suffering from split personality disorder.

“You are not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis. You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.”

Ultimately, the greatest lesson of Fight Club lies not in its political commentary or social satire but the spiritual dimensions it opens in the heart of the viewer.

The story takes on a sort of Tantric Buddhist quality, most immediately recognized in the initiation process a recruit must undergo to become part of Project Mayhem—but also in its aestheticization of violence as an antinomian path toward enlightenment. By rejecting the standards of modern society to dwell in filth and communal ecstasy, the young men in Project Mayhem follow an unorthodox path toward enlightenment laid out for them by their Bodhisattva Tyler Durden.

“It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything.”

More immediate to the story than its depictions of antinomian spiritual enlightenment is the occult concept of the egregore or collective entity. The 20th Century mystic Mouni Sadhu described an egregore as:

“…a collective entity, such as a nation, state, religions and sects and their adherents, and even minor human organizations. The structure of Egregors is similar to that of human beings. They have physical bodies (that is, collectively all the bodies of those who belong to the particular Egregor) and also astral and mental ones, the Egregor being the sum total of all these elements.”

Sadhu goes on to state that an egregore is “composed of both living and dead men, as well as elementals of all types.”

When viewed through the lens of occult science, it’s clear that beyond a mere sociopolitical phenomenon, Guy Debord discovered an actual occult entity—an egregore—in his observations of the spectacle.

“Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author’s phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.” – Guy Debord

The egregore finds a not-so-distant cousin in the Tibetan Buddhist concept of the tulpa or sentient thought-form, which are, according to Alexandra David Neel, “imaginary forms which are a sort of robot which [the magician] can control as they wish, but which, sometimes, manage to acquire some kind of autonomous personality.”

Beyond the psychoanalytic interpretation of Fight Club, it’s clear that Tyler Durden is a tulpa created by the Narrator to subvert the egregore of the spectacle. Indeed, the real conflict in Fight Club is found in the battle Durden wages against the spectacle—and the story finds its climax in the viral rate at which this tulpa magnifies its own powers.

“With insomnia, nothing’s real. Everything’s far away. Everything’s a copy of a copy of a copy.”

At this Solar Eclipse in Gemini, arriving after you’ve spent nearly a year and half participating in a public spectacle  called “the pandemic”, hiding inside too afraid to leave the house, freely giving all of your thought power and emotional labor to the involuntary creation of an egregore called COVID-19, you are encouraged to meditate on Fight Club…

…and ask yourself “What have I done to subvert the narrative today?”

If you answered “nothing” then maybe this Solar Eclipse is your chance to let the genie out of the bottle.

N.B. Much gratitude to Mark Stavish, whose work Egregores: The Occult Entities That Watch Over Human Destiny greatly informed the reading of Fight Club in this essay.