As I write the gist of this, there is a rare but refreshing humidity in the air with scattered thunderstorms, opposite of the norm here in Arizona. This is an appropriate conclusion to the synchronous events over the past month which were accompanied by a very rare moon cycle. This force of opposites saw the full moon in the same sign (Capricorn) twice within a single tropical sun season (Cancer). Since I happen to be so intimately familiar with these particular positions, I’ve felt compelled to reflect on this 2024 Cancer season for you in a spiritual context that I hope anyone, astrologers and laypeople alike, can take value from. I would also like to maintain throughout that my reflections here are merely that, and that they may help to enrich your journey through life in some way would be a great honor, albeit an inadvertent consequence.
That said, this article isn’t solely about astrology, but rather is about an overall shift in consciousness that has taken place. This shift is not the effect of any astrological cause, but is simply in synchronous coherence with it. As with anything, what we deem causal is only an arbitrarily chosen target by our ego-mind’s attention and not a cause at all. It is one of infinite events that exists by its own accord, and combines in 3D with all of those others to represent the “perfect conditions” for every other event to also manifest. In some subjective regard, we really can “manifest our own reality”, but that doesn’t make it true. This causal, spatial-temporal sequence of observations is an illusion. It stems from our disposition toward linear, dualistic thought, and the bare-minimum survival needs that gave rise to that disposition at some point in our evolutionary past.
In my experience, astrologers are just as guilty of dualism as anyone, and in some cases even more so. After all, to layer ancient knowledge over a human ego can be dangerous! They often complain about the struggles of the full moon because the full moon brings us into touch with oppositional forces, and the tension that results from one’s misperception of duality everywhere in the universe, including that which is mirrored back within ourselves. Upon digging deeply enough, dualistic judgment – e.g. this or that, either/or, true or false, good or evil – is the root of all depression, anxiety, fear, and grief. This special Capricorn cycle has brought us in touch with itself and its opposition, Cancer, for the second time over the past month to grant us a divine message or two, and strangely, I haven’t heard of many people complaining! This is probably because the struggle came in the first instance, and finally, in the second, we surrendered to its process instead of ignoring it and having to face it anew again next year as we do with most cycles. Moon cycles are quick, so they’re easily lost to mind, but so are the lessons that they bring when our egos get defensive against forces beyond our control.
Time itself raises another key problem with “mind”. We often tend to look at our “past” with strong reaction. It can serve as inspiration to build a better future, correctly or not, or it can trap us in depressive attachment to many things we cannot change. Regardless, astrological symbolism is a way of understanding time itself as something both significant and illusory. It provides us with symbolic checkpoints for marking, not events themselves, but event forms which repeat over time via different material vessels, some over imperceptibly long periods. That we value time so dearly, yet we’ll never come to terms with enough of it to understand the full context of things within any given paradigm, reveals the paradoxical relationship between our limited, potentially narcissistic perceptions and the divine permanence of Truth within each of our souls. For example, your birth chart shows the unique lens through which you see the same world that everyone else sees. There is truth in that there are an infinite number of ways that we can perceive anything, but only insofar as the objects of our perception remain eternally the same, whether they manifest before our eyes or remain in their own potential. Without any objective constants, we would not have reference for our unique orientations.
And that is just on the level of individual perception. There are many other shifts that we are all subjected to, and the uniqueness and rarity of them to some extent indicates how universally significant the concordant events will be. This double-Capricorn full moon month is a good specific example of an indication that a new perspective or two will reveal itself, but as the moon goes through its entire cycle, and therefore every part of each of our charts, every single month, the particulars of that event will manifest differently for each of us just as each of our moods might be affected differently by a northeasterly breeze (Capricorn moon people aren’t all that affected by a northeasterly breeze, by the way). On the other hand, the most general example of perceptual shifts can be represented by the concept of “astrological ages” which change signs once every ~2,000 years as part of a ~24,000-year cycle. These ages outline the very broad, stylistic, collective themes of how the authority of Truth is valued in immanence, and therefore how Truth is expressed and conflict is resolved in manifestation.
For the 2,000 years before Christ, as represented by much of the Old Testament and the city-state of Sparta, the age of Aries saw much overt bloodshed in the name of “courage and honor”, without anyone’s knowing (except for a few spiritual sages) toward what such actions were intended. The error of this age was an appeal to experience itself as the arbiter of knowledge – face your opponent in battle, and if you live, only then might you learn something. Even knowledge itself had limited context in the eyes of the otherwise advanced state where Socrates met his fate. The age of Pisces, beginning with Christ, saw Truth take the form of a personified God, where conflict was resolved either by crucifying “non-believers” (in Him or the prior state) or by creating further division regarding that God-person’s form – depending on which “side” to which you were faithful. Although Truth then was rightfully raised to the level of a kind of consciousness, it was still too local to our own experience for the ineffability of Truth to be conveyed, so God was proposed as a person who favored one tribe over all others in numerous us vs them conflicts. The error here was the fundamental spiritual fallacy of dualism, and this resulted in the birth of hundreds of religions over the span of just a few centuries, none of which encapsulate the essence of Truth in its totality, due to an overemphasis on material relics, rituals, documents, and other mechanisms which were vulnerable to being subverted by the unconscious. Still to this day, we can’t seem to drink enough black coffee to cure this spiritual hangover.
Since the beginning of the age of Aquarius in 2012, one of those religions had already been on the rise for a few hundred years and has already made many infectious attempts to stake its claim as the ultimate authority. That one religion is – in perfect accordance with the Aquarian attempt to be objective, along with its aloof and condescending attitude in its unevolved state – scientific materialism. This religion states that if something cannot be observed or measured by the tools of the scientific mind, then it lacks the “quality” of being real. This dogmatically Newtonian belief system fails on a number of fronts which have been fleshed out by the greatest philosophers of our recent age’s past. Just a couple of those refutations include (1) The quality of measurability itself cannot apply to those things which are most dear to us and which all souls seek, such as love and peace, and (2) Logically-speaking, “real” is not a quality at all, despite the fair sophistication of our language to describe things; reality just is.
It is fair to say that, in holding materialism (or scientism, as my advisor Roger Scruton coined) as the ultimate truth, we are currently quite “unevolved” as Aquarians who ironically pride ourselves in objective, cultural awareness, for the great water-bearer is too high among the clouds to see beyond himself. We’re even employing the same crucifixion methods today that we did in the latter stages of the previous age, but for far less severe offenses – e.g. saying something of mere fact online, or being Jewish… again.
Well, maybe being Jewish has always been “problematic”, but the point here is that we aren’t that different now than we were in the times of the Old Testament, much less just over a decade ago.
Although we have a new and exciting way of gauging authority, we are so narcissistic in our attempt to own truth and condemn others, that we end up doing the opposite of what our conscious minds would intend – i.e. claiming that truth and goodness are merely relative – all the while making many of the same specific mistakes that our recent ancestors did in their process of disrupting establishments. That said, we seem to be even more similar around the cusps between astrological ages than we are over the course of observable, linear time, regardless of the particular age in which we find ourselves. There is a degree to which we begin every astrological age worshiping the intellect and thinking we got this, to find out rather quickly that we definitely don’t got this, and the cycle of playing consciousness catch-up repeats, just with different astrological themes.
You’ll notice that these astrological ages move backward through the zodiac, unlike the sun and the moon which always move forward. This on its own has great significance. Whereas all other planets move forward too, despite retrogrades and stationary periods, so do the more conscious areas of life that they represent, such as our measurement of time itself (Saturn), the birth and growth of everything in nature (Venus + Mars), and the sense of progress you feel in reading through this article word by word (Mercury + Jupiter). However, this “forward movement” is only in our perception, for we are always left to ask “in reference to what?”.All astrological events happen from our geocentric perspective so that our geocentric concerns can be made more clear, while in fact they’re all just moving in constant, cyclical orbits around their energy source just like any life form. The forward movement is also illusory because there are far greater astrological symbols at work which move backwards, balancing our spatial-temporal minds and offering our soul’s journey an opportunity to find the actual stillness that is implicit in karmic Truth and the peace that engrosses us when we aspire to it. These backward-moving astrological markers are, as we have discussed, the age through which we all live as “history repeats itself”, and, more individually, the nodal axis as it uniquely shows up in each of our charts, proclaiming the roles and duties we must fulfill both to leave a positive mark on the world as well as to feel fulfilled by the end of life.
So, what comes in 2,000 or so years, after the age that has only just begun, and of which we’ve realized we’re making a royal mess after exactly one Jupiter cycle? What will be left to aim for after we’re all dead and gone and have made mistakes that our descendants will be so desperate to correct? Does it even matter? Shouldn’t we all just focus on having a good time?
I’ll answer all of those questions at once: the age of Capricorn comes next, so yes it matters, and NO, of course we aren’t here just to have a good time! The age of Sagittarius will take care of that in 4,000 years, don’t worry. The archetype of Capricorn for now, as well as the Saturnian themes that it accords with, is the lasting legacy of the divine after which our own legacies should be modeled. Because Capricorn’s opposite, Cancer, along with its correspondence with the moon, represents nature’s maternal patterns, there is something more masculine, permanent, and stoic that it must be balanced with so our Mother doesn’t devour Herself. That is the grandfather of time, Capricorn, who more mystically than the crab merges land and sea, contemplates the ineffable over a pipe and whisky by the fireplace, speaking only true words only when they’re needed, and passing the gift of integrity down to his granddaughter as to guide her children, even if he won’t be around to see it through. Capdaddy trusts the natural unfoldment of time, dutifully responding when called, not to interfere.
Whether we take this wisdom straight to heart, find it in other myth, or simply learn this underlying message through painful trial and error like your Aries sun BFF does time and again, the more conscious we are of our duty to “nurture all things from timeless integrity”, the sooner the world in our own time will improve and the better prepared our descendants will be for their age. This is precisely the lesson from this full moon thingy I keep talking about, by the way. It is a foreshadowing of the things to come by appealing to principles which always were.
We’re only just beginning the age of Aquarius, but Capricorn is also just upon us, in the greater context of karmic reality. All of the sign archetypes are always with us, really, but Capricorn has had a unique role to play in this shift because it represents the style of valuing Truth that is most-nearly out of reach from our current paradigm. Capricorn might be considered “the sage of our age”, not in reference to any particular individual (although Capricorn ascendants have been totes killing it lately… Russell Brand, Vic DiCara, Ariana Grande, myself, and based on our same hairdo, Jesus could make a comeback too), but in terms of a guru whose form is beyond the linear, causal, and personified sources of knowledge to which our limited mental capacities are accustomed, just as the Aquarian essence was during the age of Pisces – in a mature states like witchcraft during the middle ages, as well as in its overreaching expressions as political and technological revolutions of the 20th Century.
While astrologers will say that the moon is “in detriment” when in the sign of Capricorn, that’s not to say there’s anything wrong with it, but that given the right context and power of will, it is well worth the hard work to revive that wisdom which was lost in the ages of the signs after it under the illusion that we have progressed. The rise in consciousness over the past month or so will continue on a long but consistent path, I am sure, though some struggle will ensue while our intellectualist dogmas fall away. Perhaps having more than a touch of “oppositional conditions” this season, including two full moons in Capricorn and a few thunderstorms in Arizona, is what we needed to spark the spiritual homeostasis necessary for growing out of the infancy of our current age.
Overthought Consulting 