19 Jan Rapture on the Lonely Shore ~ Aquarius Season – January 20th – February 19th, 2023

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society where none intrudes,

By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:

I love not Man the less, but Nature more…”

– Lord Byron

The season of Aquarius begins on January 20th, 2023. The following day, the New Moon in Aquarius heralds the Lunar New Year that the Chinese astrologers have named the Year of the Water Rabbit.

This will be a much more fortunate New Year celebration than January 1st, because all the planets will be in direct motion. 

Throughout Capricorn season you struggled against gravity. And the heaviness was increased by the fact that Mercury, Mars and Uranus were all retrograde at the beginning of 2023, gathering into thick clouds of inertia. It’s only natural if you succumbed to illness, apathy or melancholy during the last few weeks.

But now that Capricorn season has come to an end, you may ponder its final lesson: that so much of life’s meaning is discovered in the struggle to remain awake to the sublime. Over the last month, you were asked to keep your eyes open to life’s wonder and majesty, even during your suffering or through your dark night of the soul.

The strength you’ve shown over the last few weeks will now be rewarded by renewed inspiration as the Sun transits into Aquarius, transmuting the density of matter into the lightness of air.

Many roads that have been blocked will now open wide. And you’ll become swept off your feet, enraptured by a newfound spirit of freedom. 

When the Sun enters into Aquarius, the steep cliffs and mountain peaks flatten out to reveal an expanse of wilderness stretching on into infinity. Your longing for another world, a better world, stirs a vision of what’s truly possible for the future. And in this vision, humanity is healthy, spirited and united by love.

So far out in the zodiac, the atmosphere of Aquarius is thin and cold, its air is fluttering and fragile as a butterfly. Yet it goes where it pleases and it pleases wherever it goes. That’s the beauty of it.

Aquarius observes the dissolution between worlds, the place where dimensions bleed into one another like colors of the rainbow. Thus, the consciousness of Aquarius travels freely between the dimensions of spirit and matter. It is from this  inter-dimensional edge of reality where ancient wisdom is remembered and the future is dreamed into being.

Modern astrology attributes Uranus to be the ruler of Aquarius. But in traditional astrology, Saturn is the ruler of Aquarius, demonstrating that the mind evolves tremendously by adopting an objective or outsider’s perspective. And it emphasizes the importance of meditation and contemplation, where you can be alone with your thoughts.

The only place where you can discover infinity is deep within your own mind. 

As the 11th sign of the zodiac, Aquarius is the region where the Sun is approaching its final destination. As an air sign, Aquarius demonstrates the power of a focused mind to breakthrough the world of matter, to see beyond the matrix of space and time with the power of focused imagination. In Aquarius, Saturn reveals that the mind has the power to break through the finite limitations. Your soul is free and your spirit is boundless.  

And with the Sun’s transition into Aquarius, you will have an opportunity to break the conventions of mind and matter, seeing beyond obvious circumstances into a vision of a brighter future.

In Aquarius, the importance of the external world fades, giving rise to the internal world that can imagine what lies beyond, traveling far from the noise of the world in search of the sublime. 

And with Saturn transiting Aquarius until the March 7th, 2023, this season is heavy with the burden of power and responsibility. The increasing pressures of tyranny and oppression in the world are causing tremendous suffering, but many blackened spirits are hardening into diamonds right now. A great renaissance is on the horizon.

The spirit of Aquarius seeks to know infinity, to go beyond limitations. Thus, the mood becomes open to new possibilities and potentials. The mind becomes more experimental, appreciating novelty and originality more than ever.

But these leading edges of thought are forever darkened by a grim feeling of isolation. The Aquarian spirit knows that the farther you wander into the wilderness of your imagination, the more alone you feel.

The spirit of Aquarius bears the mark of the heretic and the exile, the outsider looking upon the world from a distance. But there is rapture on the lonely shore.

The spirit of Aquarius stands alone, attuned to the collective consciousness- the group mind of humanity itself. On the frayed edges of reality, the Aquarian imagination sees ecologically and knows all time as eternally present.

To be alone can seem like a great punishment. But it can be a great luxury to those who seek to see beyond consensus reality. Aquarius has the unique ability to be alone while remaining deeply in love with humanity as a whole. 

At the dawn of 2023, the collective fear about the future is palpable. Grim reports loom over every horizon. Supply chain issues. War. Corruption. And with the rising costs of food and energy, most have suffered financial setbacks. In this age of ideological warfare and algorithmic censorship, it’s become increasingly difficult to trust anything you hear.

The year ahead brings Pluto’s final days in Capricorn. And though these are dark and destructive times, a time of revolution and rebellion is fast approaching when Pluto enters the airy realm of Aquarius. Evolution will occur. New stories and philosophies can emerge. New inventions, sustainable energy, and economic systems can emerge.

But this evolution can’t be born unless the major failures of the last century are recognized and reconsidered. A golden age of intellectual freedom, individual sovereignty and humanitarian values isn’t going to be carried in softly upon the breeze.

The late-20th Century dream of spreading liberal democracy across the globe to end poverty and war has been an atrocious failure. On a larger scale, the 20th Century’s myth of progress has failed. Human happiness is not on an upward trajectory alongside technological advancement. Instead, a decidedly anti-human world has emerged, where everyone feels exiled.

Nobody with any spirit really believes that this is the best humanity can do. 

Despair and alienation are now commonplace symptoms of being alive. And all this disfunction is built upon more slavery than human history has ever known. Even the privileged people in this system, have their humanity threatened by ceaseless artificiality, their spirit and imagination clouded by the pollution of light, noise and chemicals. 

Caged in a heartless algorithm, any human being can descend into madness: a paranoid android wound up by so many conditioned desires and facsimiles of feeling. Please, could you stop that noise?

Compliance with this system destroys creativity, stifles joy and destroys enthusiasm. Sometimes, violent sociopathy emerges. But more often, people die slowly from soul loss for which there is no medical treatment. 

But technocratic slavery is a dull vision for the future of humanity. There are many brighter worlds that can be born.

And the spirit of Aquarius will summon a wild rebellion against all these failed myths, philosophies and social prisons. The decades to come will offer the opportunity to develop new visions and values that represent maturity, and a deeper consideration for the real needs of humanity. Blessed by Saturnian wisdom, the influence of Aquarius can focus the collective imagination and build a civilization worth living and breathing in.

The wisdom of Aquarius demonstrates that all life is sacred and all souls are born free. Any functioning human society should naturally reflect these simple truths. 

The love for humanity inborn in the spirit of Aquarius will change the shape of history for the better in the decades ahead. The Great Conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn in Aquarius sparked an evolutionary current that will change the course of history over the next 200 years. Astrologically speaking, December 21st, 2020 was the end of the Industrial Era and the beginning of the Information Age

The mutation of the earth element into air signified the death of dogmatic materialism and the rebirth of a radical spiritual sovereignty. What is unfolding is an age that will be in closer communion with the realm of spirit as the true  source of all intelligence and information. 

In alchemy, operations of air are those of separating and sifting the mind from beliefs and ideas that ensnare it in repetitive patterns and rigid dogma. Thus, in the centuries to come, the orthodoxy of materialism will be sifted and will lose much of its power, just as Rome fell to the heretical religion of Christianity.

This is thematic of the first degrees of Aquarius, a place in the zodiac that Austin Coppock refers to as one of “exclusion and intentional exile.” He goes on to explain:

“For some, the exile from the standard reality system may be forced, but for others it is an intentional exodus, even a liberation. While the material circumstances that come with such choices are rarely luxurious, the spiritual benefits can be great. To gain a wider and deeper understanding of reality one must inevitably break with the orthodoxies of their time and accept the mark of the heretic.”

Technocrats of the 21st Century can only imagine the future through the expansion of technology, aka more surveillance and enslavement. But that is the imperial orthodoxy that will be broken by the heretical spirit of Aquarius which seeks true freedom of spirit, born from communion with the divine. 

Despite the unique challenges of this age, tyranny is nothing new and the human spirit always breaks free, evolves, and responds with a better idea. The soul of Aquarius guides you with the reminder that there is nothing on earth that can imprison a free mind and a free spirit. You are the master of your own mind.

The divine spark burns brightly beneath every darkened cloud. And the spirit of Aquarius speaks to your soul that was born free, as a divine child of heaven and earth: a spark of infinite intelligence, a flowering of the Creative Principle in the universe. We are the music makers. We are the dreamers of dreams. The pulse of that truth never fades and continues to guide the evolution of humanity.

Aquarius season is enriched by this fresh air, aerated and unbound, your imagination will begin to flower with new visions and inspirations. The mark of the exile is a free spirit.

Lord Byron, the Aquarian 

 

To connect with the unbound freedom of the Aquarian spirit, consider the life and work of the great Romantic poet, Lord Byron, who had his natal Sun, Venus, Saturn, and Pluto in Aquarius. As such, his life was marked by the pain of exile, loneliness and alienation.

He was an only child, raised in obscurity without a father. His foot was deformed, which attracted cruel bullying and solidified his status as an outcast. When he was ten years old, he inherited the title of Lord Byron, but never had enough money to embody the role of aristocrat. He inherited a giant home that he couldn’t afford to heat. Such is the journey of an Aquarius.

Blessed and cursed with great vision from the outskirts of consensus reality, Aquarians struggle to define their sense of self. But they have an uncanny ability to tune into the thoughts and feelings of the collective. Thus they can appeal to a mass audience, speaking to the evolutionary undercurrents of their time. The scholar Sir Walter Scott writes that Lord Byron was: 

“the first poet who, either in his own person, or covered by no very thick disguise…directly appeared before the public, an actual living man expressing his own sentiments, thoughts, hopes, and fears.” 

The story goes that Byron woke up one morning in 1812 and found that he was famous. He was 24 years old and had just published Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a philosophical travelogue filled with yearning, hints of sex and heroics.

His Aquarian nature enabled him to stir the hearts of the public. Thus, his celebrity was an intoxicating mixture of loneliness and mystery. His persona juxtaposed the glamor of his youth and poetic brilliance with his suffering and solitude. Byron was beautiful and damned. The lonely space he occupied as an artist is expressed in Byron’s fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which begins with:

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep sea, and music in its roar

Freed from convention, tradition and routine, the pleasure in the pathless woods is an immersion into the wild web of nature, a tangle of fear and excitement. In the very next line, Byron imbues the image of a lonely shore with rapture, defined as a feeling of intense pleasure or joy.

I love not Man the less, but Nature more…

This poem celebrates solitude as an opportunity for revelation. In the vast emptiness, a deep peace emerges and the exquisite music of nature can finally be heard. And the best music evokes feelings where you’re not quite sure what the emotion is.

Byron’s celebrity may have initially offered him the acceptance in the world he had always craved. But the nature of celebrity includes the contradiction of love and hate, familiarity and distance. Only four years after he had published Childe Harold, he was exiled from England, forced to flee from mounting debts and rumors of incest and homosexuality. Though his personal fortunes suffered, his celebrity was only strengthened by the scandal. 

I loved — but those I loved are gone;

Had friends — my early friends are fled:

How cheerless feels the heart alone

When all its former hopes are dead!

What’s more amazing about Lord Byron is the true courage of his convictions. At 36, he went to war for Greece and died as a hero fighting for the country’s independence from Turkey. His body was brought back to England for a public funeral procession where the poet John Clare observed:

 “The common people felt his merits and his power and the common people of a country are the best feelings of a prophesy of futurity.”

The mark of the exile offers powers of observation that have a deep focus lens. This is why Lord Byron was able to articulate so well what it felt like to be alone in a world that was being rapidly industrialized and imperialized. The spirit of Aquarius defies conventionality, creating a unique vision of beauty and wonder from places on the outskirts, where space and solitude are plentiful.

Few are my years, and yet I feel

The world was ne’er designed for me:

Ah! why do dark’ning shades conceal

The hour when man must cease to be?

The rapture on the lonely shore is the joy being alone with your own thoughts, discovering that your mind is not a prison but a receiver of divine knowledge, ancestral wisdom and higher intelligence. Every question has an answer. And every problem has a solution. All that’s required is focused imagination and a willingness to receive insights that seem to descend from the ether.

This Aquarius season, those who wish to free their mind of its confinement and conditioning will find deep pleasure in that shiver of loneliness. For as you can feel from Lord Byron’s poetry, it is a tremendous luxury to be on the edge, the shoreline between worlds: ancient and modern, spirit and matter, life and death.

Much Love,

Rachel