NMR ISSUE 16

All Together On This Earth
Astrological Forecast 16
Don't Save the Earth!
Editorial 16
Initiation and the Degree System
Letters 16
Metaphysical Messages of Addictions
New Virtual Economy
Rite to Reclaim the Power of the Snake
Snail
Spirit Lover
The Abyss and Beyond
The Eleventh House: Dreams or Destiny
The Oldest Magick
Three Magical Waters
Understanding Your Dreams
Why Love is the Law - A Primer
Winter Solstice

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The New Virtual Economy

As Seen Through Astrology and the Tarot

Antero Alli

Only twice this century do two outer planets form a conjunction aspect by simultaneously occupying the same degree of the same constellation. The first one occurred between 1964-68 when the Uranus/Pluto conjunctions in Virgo heralded the socio-political revolution of the Sixties. The next time is right now: As Uranus conjoins Neptune in Capricorn from March of 1991 through 1995, history as we know it will change, or perhaps even end. As the Persian Gulf war attests, this revolution is more economically based (astrologically, Neptune relates to oil) than the more political Vietnam war. To address these times, I hope to decipher the underlying metaphysical properties of money, using the esoteric tools of astrology and the tarot.

With Saturn's transit through Aquarius accompanying the Uranus and Neptune conjunction (in Capricorn), we must consider the unique material nature of Capricorn. Capricorn is the cardinal Earth sign; it refers to the source of the powers of Earth. Cardinal Earth symbolizes a strong, outgoing intent towards materialization. In the natural world, one of the most dynamic forms the Earth force takes is a mountain hence, Capricorn's mascot is the mountain goat (volcanoes seem to be more Plutonic, thus Scorpio's domain). Chinese geomancy, or Feng Shui, says mountains give off a strong Yin force through their undeniable depth of stillness. In the style of Capricorn, a force (or planet) finds its most direct expression through attaining the epitome of its manifestation on the earth plane. Capricorn is intent on building monuments to itself within the parameters of time, space and knowledge in love (Venus), action (Mars), thoughts (Mercury), perspective (Jupiter) and commitments (Saturn), to give a few examples.

In the Book of Tarot, we find more pieces to the Capricorn puzzle. The minor arcana consist of four suits—Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles—each corresponding to the four Elements, with Pentacles symbolizing Earth. The Ace of Pentacles refers to the source of the powers of Earth, or Capricorn. It is often depicted as a hand emerging from a cloud holding a large single pentacle. The hand emerging from a cloud is an ancient Kabbalistic icon for ayn sof, the formless nature of our spiritual origins. The pentacle's early symbology relates to the establishment of local currency and the circulation of commerce: how money is made and regulated as the local economy. It's literal depiction is as a gold coin with a five-pointed star. The number five signifies a human being—its head, two arms and two legs extended. Five also refers to the five Elements: Earth, Water, Fire, Air and their originating source, the Aether. Aether is symbolic of a formless material, or atmosphere, which pervading all things and through which all things remain in touch.

Digital Banks in Hyper-Space

As an economic philosophy, the Ace of Pentacles tells us that the source of all money is the malleable void; and setting up a relationship with its formless nature, can increase capital. What does this mean? Money, as we know it, stems from an immaterial base that is formless, invisible and indistinct. The moment we mistake money for anything solid, real and otherwise fixed and definite, we inadvertently cut off our incoming supply. This is the principle of economic malleability. The entity money" is utterly fluid; it circulates and changes form when manifesting a state of ever-increasing abundance. Ask any millionaire.

In our culture, the local economy underwent a massive shift from symbolic to accounting money during the Nixon administration, when the President took the US off the gold standard. Before then, money in the bank related directly to the real world object of gold, backing up every dollar you owned with precious metal. Since Nixon (a Capricorn!), money has ceased to be symbolic; it now represents nothing more than the paper it's printed on and what we believe it to represent. American currency is now accounted and the current economic crisis, an accounting recession.

USA banks are falling apart due, in part, to the electronic damage created by corporate computer criminals (note the Savings & Loan debacle). Monumental amounts of accounting money have been created and spent instantaneously by someone pressing certain keys on a computer keyboard hooked up to certain files in certain memory banks. What does all this mean? Delegated to bits of information in cyber-space, money is now a virtual reality at best, i.e., money is now unreal. Those who have mistaken money for its source—mistaken a part for the whole—are also turning unreal. This is why and how the forthcoming economic changes, heralded by the Uranus/Neptune conjunctions, will witness a purgatory of mass insanity/bankruptcies at the corporate level and in those lonely psyches still twisted around the dollar sign. People are nuts about money.

The two Major Arcana, or Trump, cards associated with Capricorn are #15, The Devil and #21, The World (or Universe). Subtract 15 from 21 and you also get #6, The Lovers, the twin card of the Devil (place them side by side and notice their striking similarity). The Devil symbolizes that cycle of transformation wherein we mistakenly identify a part for the whole, i.e., when we believe ego or self-image to be the whole self. Another example is in the mistaken assumption of money being a solid or fixed entity, setting up the delusion of its constancy and security. It has become standard American policy, through the commercial media, to equate money and material goods with security. Money does not control us. The faulty way we are thinking about money controls us.

Help! The Devil's Got My Wallet!

I think the Uranus/Neptune conjunctions are catalyzing a revolution in consciousness more than anything else. This means the transpersonal shocks arriving now throughout 1995 are targeting your consciousness—specifically, where your consciousness is invested. Since most people have money on the brain, it will hit their pocketbooks first which, in turn, will shock their consciousness. The accounting recession is real" to most retailers, executives and corporations. They're the ones most dependent on the accounts to survive, economically. Unfortunately, as a result of the current materialistically-identified era, these transpersonal shocks are arriving more literally as terrorism, atomic warfare, mass epidemics and loss of loved ones, private property and jobs.

The Devil of Tarot, card #15, is a trickster with an earthy sense of humor. The Devil is also a tyrant, enslaving immaterial souls in false identification with the material world. The lesson of the Devil is the spiritual necessity of humanization. We are spiritual beings learning to settle for human experience. In the human realm, there is no perfection—which is the domain of the absolute. The human condition is inherently fragile, flawed and subject to error. By learning to befriend and embrace the human condition within us, we are more free to learn from our mistakes and avoid them; we interact with the Devil to avoid becoming one. When we fight or resist the Devil, we turn into the poor devils who blindly attack their favorite scapegoats (the dark, unintegrated Capricorn), the ones exteriorizing our own internal defects and shortcomings. The war between the leaders of Iraq and the USA exemplify the tragedy as Bighead Saddam and Bighead George Bush mirror each other's Nightmare Satan from Shadow Hell.

The Devil's twin card is #6, the Lovers, associated with Gemini. The Lovers refers to a state of innocence maintained by a discriminating intelligence—one which discerns between the accounted and the real, disposing of the impurities imposed by faulty thinking. While the Devil dramatizes ego-identification, the Lovers articulate that stage of evolution where interaction and relationship with the world is still preserved. In the Devil, one has lost oneself. One has, in a sense, become bound to the material world by self-preoccupied desire, fear and suffering. As an economic theory, these two cards depict two diametrical opposite ways of thinking about money: as accounted information (Lovers/Gemini); and as the greed for more, or the paranoid panic of not having enough (Devil/Capricorn).

The more consciousness is freed from ego-investment, the more conscious we tend to be. Money is the absolute worst thing to worry about, regardless of economic position. Self-absorbing anxiety shuts down the creative channels necessary to accumulate energetic and material capital; it cuts us off from our potential. Fretting over accounting also diminishes the gratitude essential for recognizing our true resources in the first place.

The Hanged Man and The Fool

Source relations are typified in the Major Arcana by the reciprocal interaction of principles symbolized in the very last and very first cards: the World (#21) and the Fool (#0), respectively. The World, symbolizing the finality of one's manifestation on the material plane, is also related to Capricorn, which symbolizes the end of an era. The Fool card starts the cycle over again at zero. The dynamic interplay between the principles of the epitome of manifestation (The World) and the formless potential state (The Fool) animates the rest of the cards in the Tarot itself. The principle of Source relations is also reflected in the symbolism of the Minor Arcana's (meaning mundane mystery") Ace of Pentacles.

The force (planet) associated with the Fool (#0) is Uranus, The card associated with Neptune force is the Hanged Man (#12). In the context of the Uranus/Neptune conjunctions (1991-95), their combined meanings might imply a time suspended in the void. The Fool, knowing nothing, is in the void; and the Hanged Man, surrendering himself, is in suspense. Symbolically, the next four years belong to The Hanged Man and The Fool. As a pair, they certainly aren't without humor. Yet, their combined efforts also signal a profound vertigo, the queasy feeling of the bottom falling out. With The Fool about to step over the cliff into the abyss and The Hanged Man suspended upside down from a cross, these are not role models conveying control or mastery over their environment. And that is precisely the point. The Capricorn stage of external mastery is over; those who have not heard the news step over the cliff and are hung upside down. Those who expose the poor fools, run the risk of being literally hung upside down as the scapegoats of a passing era.

Those who deliberately hang themselves upside down are no fools at all. They have learned enough self-surrender to bypass the need to control others and are free to realign their beings. Often accompanying this radical change is a reversal of thought in the mind—taking on a point of view opposite to that which most accept. Most people's minds are swayed by Capricorn authority, media coverage and public opinion. The Hanged Man refers to a stage of complete renunciation of consensus reality mores, ideologies and dogma for an internal dependence on higher spiritual sources rather than on self- or public-image.

Historically, 1991-95 may be the wilder heart of a larger era of rapid transformation begun around 1945. Since World War II and the first atomic bomb, humanity entered an atomic age unprecedented in its escalation of knowledge, scientific breakthroughs and global socio-political shifts. Chaos no longer belongs to the poverty-stricken, the artists, the insane and the poets but is now the modus operandi of the times. Those who learn to work with chaos, ride the chaos, play in chaos are the ones preparing the groundwork for future orders. And the supply of vintage chaos is now virtually unlimited. To the willing and able, the Uranus/Neptune conjunctions symbolize Chaos Heaven—to the resistors: Chaos Hell.

The Nineties are the Sixties, Upside Down

The seeds of the Sixties bear fruits in the Nineties. Souls incarnating between 1964-68 are destined agents of the Consciousness Revolution. Anyone born then has the Uranus/Pluto conjunction in their natal birthcharts and lives with the Sixties' revolutionary force, albeit in an undetonated state—that is, until now. This atomic fusion powerhouse of transpersonal forces (Uranium/Plutonium) will be activated (in a trine aspect) by the Uranus/Neptune conjunctions between 1991-95. In Earth signs (Virgo and Capricorn), we can expect the direct materialization of transpersonal forces. Among these are those people instrumental to the dismantling of the old Capricorn (republican) guard. Most of these Sixties Kids also enter their Saturn Returns (occurring at the age of 28-30) near the end of this Uranus/Neptune conjunction. Then the pressure of time will obligate them to restructure consensus realities (Saturn) according to their belief in unity (Pisces). [Also, around this time (1995-96) Uranus also moves into Aquarius and Pluto enters Sagittarius—recalling Aleister Crowley's axiom: our aim is religion, our method, science.]

The Nineties will differ from the Sixties in several ways. The angry rebel without a cause of the Sixties is now the skillful, educated rebel with a cause of the Nineties. The Sixties were an explosive reaction to the domestic conditioning of the Nifty Fifties, justifying years of pharmaceutical experimentation, i.e., getting high while erasing old programs. Amidst the greed-filled Reaganomics decade of the 1980's, computer technology exploded, becoming as commonplace as television. As a result, much of the Nineties' revolution will occur, invisibly, on monitor screens with computer/media hackers rearranging the digital realities of a virtual economy in hyperspace. Don't get high, get rewired. Turn on, boot up and download! The rate of change is so much more pronounced in the Nineties that mind-altering drugs are now obsolete. Nineties' revolutionaries are too busy restoring the natural sensitivity of their Central Neural (not nervous) Systems so the brain's own pharmacy of neuro-transmitters can be accessed instead. Gets the job done in half the time, without those pesky side-effects!

In the Sixties, the hippies turned against money. Many moved to the country and lived poor; city hippies also lived poor. In the Nineties, a new attitude towards money will prevail. Realizing its accounted and aetheric nature, revolutionary agents set up non-local income bases in mail-order businesses, cottage industries and information services. By establishing a continuing relationship with a formless non-local economy, one is free to live almost anywhere on the planet with a mail station, a telephone, modem or fax machine. The true nature of wealth is non-local; it accumulates and circulates more freely in a non-local economic structure.

1991, Antero Alli

Antero Alli is the author of Astrologik: The Interpretive Art of Astrology and four other rebellious manifestoes. For a free Katalog of his books and services, write to him at P.O. Box 45758, Seattle, WA 98145.