Astrology at the End of the World
The Vikings are coming. You have five minutes to grab something and possibly escape with your life. What do you take? If I was a monk at Lindisfarne, the answer would have been a book. A thousand years later, my answer would be the same.
There is a shelf of books in my library that I call the “doomscrolling books.” It is full of books of cultural criticism that tell stories about civilization collapse, environmental catastrophe, and the fall of empires. There are only a few books on the shelf that I’ve read cover to cover. I’ve read pieces of most of the rest.
The “doomscrolling books” are there for those moments when I’m in a dark place in my mind, and I can’t resist the urge to wallow. Reading a doomy dead tree edition feels slightly more virtuous than scrolling the news, so I grab a book that calls to me, scan the table of contents, and flip to a chapter that speaks to my fears.
Doomscrolling on my phone drains me, but I put down the “doomscrolling books” feeling less tired and more clear-eyed. I’m sure this has something to do with the fact that reading a book requires me to focus and read paragraphs instead of flipping through click-bait headlines that lack nuance. But it also helps that many of the books on the doomscrolling shelf are old.
Reading old cultural criticism is kind of silly, like reading decades old newspapers, but I find it helps me to step out of the blindspots and biases of the present moment. I’m able to compare where they thought we were going and where we have actually gotten. The arguments that are accurate become more accurate with time, and the silly predictions are easy to laugh off as misguided fortune telling-–an attitude that helps me keep humble as an astrologer and gives me perspective when I read predictions published by authors today.
What comes after the American empire?
Recently, I was reading The Twilight of American Culture by historian and social critic Morris Berman. The book was published back at the turn of the millennium, but, aside from the references to OJ Simpson and the death of Princess Di, his arguments have held up well and are painfully familiar.
Berman points to the decline of literacy, the growth of social inequality, and widespread cynicism as evidence that things aren’t right. He bemoans the technological toys and media-hyped scandals that are lulling us to sleep. The book is 25 years-old, written before the advent of cable news, social media, and algorithmically created filter bubbles. Critiques like his have only gotten louder and more mainstream since then.
The cynicism that Berman complains about, in particular, has gotten much worse. Most of the apocalyptic visions of the present are incapable of imagining a future post-collapse. While Berman believes that the American empire is crumbling, he argues that this isn’t the end of history.
We are heading, Berman says, into a new Middle Ages.
We are doing so with the ability to prepare ourselves in a way that the people of the early Middle Ages could not. We have the benefit of looking back to the fall of Rome. We can see the mistakes they made that plunged the intellectual culture of Europe into darkness for centuries, and we can act purposefully to preserve the ideas of the past, so our descendants can find them when they’re ready.
I was born with Neptune in Capricorn, and I relish the idea of combing through the dusty attics of history, uncovering things that have been lost, and giving them new life, but there is more than hope for the archivist in Berman’s argument. His connection to the Middle Ages allows us to look back, not only for mistakes, but to find motives.
Why did the Roman Empire give way to the Dark Ages? Were the people alive at the time trying to accomplish something? Are we in a similar place today?
What can we learn from the collapse of Rome?
There is rarely a single, nuclear moment when a civilization collapses. There is a decline, a period when people stop building anew and, instead, repair and recycle the things that have already been built. It is as if the people of that civilization have gotten tired and no longer have the energy or the will to continue to improve on the work of their ancestors. Their focus shifts to conservation, keeping what we have instead of falling into decline.
In The Passion of the Western Mind, Richard Tarnas argues that the Middle Ages began because there were serious emotional needs that were being unmet by the Roman Empire. As early as the Hellenistic period, people complained about how overwhelming it was to live in a massive, rootless culture. They longed for simpler days when people were deeply connected to the land and their families, when every small population center had its own personal relationship with the local gods instead of the distant and untouchable universal deities like Isis.
Life in an empire is brain and no heart. It needs to be. Empires are built for the management of resources, not as a home for people. It is essential for the function of the empire for people to be able to go wherever their labor is needed. For centuries, citizens of the empire were functionally homeless. The empire had grown too big to fail, too inhumane to succeed. After generations of alienation, they longed to feel like they belonged somewhere again.
Life in the Middle Ages revolved around the Church. Medieval people latched onto the Church because it provided meaning and comfort in a world in which both were lacking. After centuries of rootlessness, alienation, and emotional coldness, is it any wonder that people flocked to the monasteries and convents that embraced them with open arms and said, “You will never have to leave your home ever again?”
Fundamentally, the shift from the Roman Empire to the Dark Ages happened because people became so starved for meaning and connection that they were willing to give up all of the treasures of the empire to get it.
They reacted against the extremes of the empire and shifted to the opposite extremes. Where the empire valued wealth, they valued poverty. Where the empire valued mobility, they built castles of stone. Where the empire valued enormous, impersonal bureaucracies, they organized themselves into feudal hierarchies built on relationships between individual people. Where the empire valued diversity, they valued a single creed. Where the empire valued that which could be measured and engineered and articulated with the written word, they painted in the margins, created an oral tradition of romantic poetry, and spoke the language of the heart.
Literacy was not lost during the Middle Ages, as is popularly believed. The culture merely shifted to a different kind of literacy. People of the Middle Ages were able to read stories in the stained glass windows of a church they had never visited with as much fluency as a 21st century professor picking up a book.
Berman says of it, “this was more of a 'Jungian' world than a world of cognitive understanding. The apprehension of the world, in other words, rested on myth and magic, and the prevalent mind-set was one of symbols, analogies, and images."
In a world that had been torn apart by war and conquest for centuries, the deep hunger for connection filled the people of the Middle Ages so completely, they immersed themselves in symbolic literacy that allowed them to think in webs instead of lines.
Where is hope at the end of the empire?
The idea that we are living at the end of the American empire is comforting to me. As a poet and astrologer, I feel alienated from the technocratic world that values nothing but measurements and data. As a Taurus, I resent being forced to move from place to place on an impersonal employer’s whim. I hate that to the people in power, I am only a number, and I have a deep craving for connection with the land and the people who live on it.
As such, I find Berman’s assertion that we are moving toward a new medieval period fundamentally hopeful, but I am wary of reactionary movements that want to drag us too far to the opposite extreme.
While it is true that the Middle Ages were oriented toward meeting needs that had gone unmet for far too long, there were still many problems. During the Middle Ages the rise of symbolic thinking happened within the context of a culture that was lost in mass movements. People went to church and disappeared as individuals. Knowledge of math, engineering, and philosophy was lost. Intellectuals lost the ability to reason in a clear and logical way.
I want to have the best of both worlds. I love symbolic art, and I love books. I want herbal remedies and penicillin. I want local quirkiness and universal standards of measurements. I want to feel connected with others, and I want to be treated as an individual. I want to live in a world where feelings are valid, and one that values critical thought.
If we are going to have any hope of having it both ways, we must learn from the mistakes of the past. Berman argues that the loss of individuality was part of the great downfall of the intellectual life of the Middle Ages. The life of the mind requires introspection. Without the ability to understand yourself, your biases, and your motivations, you are unable to critically engage with the ideas of others.
How can astrology help us toward a better future?
Critical thinking is the best defense we have against powerful charismatics who emotionally manipulate the masses into burning down libraries. We need a life of the mind that is critical, even as we are remembering the power of symbolic languages.
Astrology could be a trailblazer in the building of a new symbolic literacy. Astrology is a language of symbols. In learning the symbolic language of astrology, we begin to return to something like the web of meaning of the Middle Ages.
Just because astrology is symbol-based, however, doesn’t mean it can’t be critical.
Narrative Astrology has critical thinking at its core.
In my astrology courses, I don’t feed you astrological dogma. I teach you astrological techniques from many different perspectives, and I give you a framework for putting together a framework of your own.
At the end of every lesson, invite you to see the material through the lens of your natal chart so that you can relate to what you’re learning… and challenge it.
I believe that a good astrology education should constantly ask the student, “How does this make you feel? Where are you in all of this? Does this story about who you are match the facts of your life?”
In astrology, the natal chart is a tool we use to access our inner worlds, and the individual must be at the center. The symbolic language takes us, not out of ourselves, but deeper in. This is not self-centered. It is necessary work.
The world is breaking. So many of us feel it. We are alienated from each other and from the ground beneath our feet, but we cannot find connection outside us until we find connection with ourselves. By making peace with ourselves and repairing the webs of connection in the inner world, we can begin repairing the outer world. If we don’t allow ourselves to get emotionally manipulated and pulled to extremes, we might restore the lost symbolic literacy that thrived in the Middle Ages and preserve the individualism that allows us to think critically.
Perhaps, astrology can help us find a balance between the language of the head and the heart, and in that balance we can travel more hopefully into the dark.
Related Articles
