I\’m not up on my astrology, but y\’know, when\’s that ever stopped me from taking a topical issue and twisting it until it gives up wisdom? However, what with the recent election circus in the US and the odd archontic currents floating around in certain areas, I thought I would pontificate a little. That said, if you are into proper astrology rather than your average tabloid crap which boils down to trying to cram the vast celestial machinery into half a bloody page to be gulped as greedily and unthinkingly as the morning coffee you need to function?

Go see the Art(e)ist formally known as der Baron. Seriously, get him on your case, because the man knows his stuff and is currently hard at work  on the next version of his wondrous Astrological Almanac. Tell him I sent you while giggling into my prodigous beard – it probably won\’t get you a discount or anything, I just like people to know I\’m…watching.

Yes.

Seriously though, most people will have heard of Mercury Retrograde which is when communication and other such things within the Planetary Purview of Mercury end up going a certain creek without a method of propulsion. Now, if you\’re caught in this particular mess, nothing seems to go right at all, does it? Yet it\’s interesting that US Election Day happened at the same time, and in a a peculiar way you can see the strangeness looming in American politics. People are unfriending folks on Facebook over election choice and other such things. There\’s a pall of despair hanging over the world in general, or so the narrative goes. Gordon has his finger on a pulse which anyone with half a brain in the UK can see – I suggest you read his posts on James Bond vs The Demiurge, The Rex Mundi Jigsaw and The REALLY SCARY HALLOWE\’EN STORY to get a flavour of the deep weirdness of what\’s going on now, on a mythic and on some horribly real level.

It doesn\’t matter if you believe it – you don\’t have to. All that\’s required is to spend enough time to get that odd, acrid taste in your mouth. You know the one I mean – the electric-chemical tang of artificial sweetener mixed with sour lightning. The faintly disgusting spiky cloyingness of texture you just want to scrape off your tongue; it lingers even afterwards, and just when you think its gone, it queers up your dinner and makes you feel nauseous. You push the plate away, formerly nutritious and delicious fare suddenly rendered with the spoiled nastiness of something rotten.

It\’s the bad acid, the ominous rumble, the Murdochian Black Magic; the reptile tongue flicking obscenely to taste the air, fouling it with dirty fire of Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt. It\’s the spell Geist or Spirit casts over the world, the divisive and tricky blade that teaches things are only really there if they have a border that cannot be crossed. The deathgrip of avarice, the glorification of apparent objectivity, the Panopticon dread that means everyone must see and be seen to have any value. You might say it\’s Mercury in its poisonous form – for all its shining glitter, its reflected gleam it brings that most fearful of things – death.

Let me tell you a secret though – its a caricature. Its an exageration, an overloading. Watch the news and you\’ll taste it everwhere, this distilled vileness, and in that noticing, perhaps you\’ll begin to wonder why it\’s so damn effective about getting down into your hindbrain.

Notice how it makes your heart-rate kick up, your breath quickening as the fingernails of adrenaline begin to scrape the inside of your veins. Notice how it polarises and strengthens your identity; predator/prey, black/white, Republican/Democrat, male/female, straight/queer, Christian/Atheist, dead/alive, friend/enemy, Us/Them.

Feel the rage, feel the fear. Feel the hopelessness in the guts of the Kali Yuga. Feel the Kyriarchy grinding its boot into your face.

 \”You\’re nothing. Nothing at all.\”

Maybe They are right, or maybe you want to deny Them. Maybe you want to fight, to rebel. To go to gods-damned war, to  burn the the world They\’ve made and make something from the ashes? To be a shining Phoenix gleaming with glorious light.

Can you feel that surge, that rising in your heart? Good. Because that is what They want. Because there is no Them, not really. There\’s only Us. And that\’s the point, whether you believe in shadowy intelligences playing games to leech energy off people or not. Anger, fear, hopefulness and hopelessness, social position, money and wealth and countless other things?

Thse emotions are strong animal survival drives. They kick your body in action, set your mind awhirl, heat your blood. Think about how powerful you feel, how righteous  and mighty, when you\’re going to prove someone wrong. Really, take a minute to savour the idea of being victorious, of being free of restraint.

I\’ll wait.

…

Bet it felt good, on some level. I bet you felt a little less helpless, a little more in control, yes? A little more sure of yourself and your place on this spinning space-ship in an ever expanding universe, this little bubble of life voyaging in the endless interstellar gulfs.

Welcome then, to the archontic urge. Welcome to the desire that makes people \”sell their soul\” and allow obscenities to go on for fear of not being believed, or because it might affect their position. Welcome to the bestial awareness that you can do horrific things and get away with it because you\’re covered by a big, trusted organisation or position. Welcome to the realisation that you can make or break someone else\’s life.

Welcome to Empire, to the conversion of the heathen and the slaughter of the infidel. Welcome to signing your name to kill-lists, to being a Super-power, to Weapons of Mass Destruction. To gas chambers and concentration camps, to nationalism and fanaticism. To killing with words and drones, to demonising sections of the population for wealth and political gain.

Welcome to the evocation of authority without soul and understanding. Welcome to a morality based on fear of exclusion and conversion, lacking any higher aims other than maintaining social coherence based on a framework of sin and scarcity. Welcome to the age where the only authority comes from the barrel of gun, and the individual lifespan is more important than the whole.

What has this to do with Mercury Retrograde, I hear you ask?

If Mercury is the messenger, is the medium of communication, then its retrograde is by necessity divisive. When you consider Mercury\’s elder form of the Greek Hermes, you get some more answers. Hermes is the god of thieves, merchants, tricksters, travellers, lord of roads:

Hermes, draw near, and to my pray\’r incline, angel of Jove [Zeus], and Maia\’s son divine;
Studious of contests, ruler of mankind, with heart almighty, and a prudent mind.
Celestial messenger, of various skill, whose pow\’rful arts could watchful Argus kill:
With winged feet, \’tis thine thro\’ air to course, O friend of man, and prophet of discourse:
Great life-supporter, to rejoice is thine, in arts gymnastic, and in fraud divine:
With pow\’r endu\’d all language to explain, of care the loos\’ner, and the source of gain.
Whose hand contains of blameless peace the rod, Corucian, blessed, profitable God;
Of various speech, whose aid in works we find, and in necessities to mortals kind:
Dire weapon of the tongue, which men revere, be present, Hermes, and thy suppliant hear;
Assist my works, conclude my life with peace, give graceful speech, and me memory\’s increase.

– Orphic Hymn to Hermes

And:

Hermes I call, whom Fate decrees to dwell in the dire path which leads to deepest hell
O Bacchic [Bakkheios] Hermes, progeny divine of Dionysius [Dionysos], parent of the vine,
And of celestial Venus [Aphrodite] Paphian queen, dark eye-lash\’d Goddess of a lovely mien:
Who constant wand\’rest thro\’ the sacred feats
where hell\’s dread empress, Proserpine [Persephone], retreats;
To wretched souls the leader of thc way when Fate decrees, to regions void of day:
Thine is the wand which causes sleep to fly, or lulls to slumb\’rous rest the weary eye;
For Proserpine [Persephone\’s] thro\’ Tart\’rus dark and wide gave thee forever flowing souls to guide.
Come, blessed pow\’r the sacrifice attend, and grant our mystic works a happy end.

– Orphic Hymn to Hermes Kthonikos

Hermes, the leader of souls, the stealer of cattle, guardian of sheep and shepherds. Hermes with the rod, Hermes with the magic wand that drives souls and leads them to their destination. If you look at all these things, you find a guide and manipulator, through magic, communication and language. If Hermes were retrograde, all these things would not be good and right. To drive cattle, to tame them and move them where you want to go takes skill and discipline, and there\’s a secret there. Imagine then, that these arts were deployed to divide an conquer, to amass wealth and hoard it instead of letting it flow along the roads in a constant shifting exchange. Imagine what would occur if language was deployed to divide and separate, to isolate and destroy?

All of these things can be easily seen – the map becoming divorced from the territory, the abstraction and disconnecting from the actual into the theoretical framework, where prediction and its short-term practical efficacy is viewed as more important than seeing implications and wholes, or at least in seeking them.  \’Good enough\’ becomes the new watchword, oversimplification destroying nuance and subtlety. Excellence is valued only so long as it makes money, as long as it is profitable.

So, in a sense, our entire culture is governed by those who\’ve made Spiritual pacts with the demiurge – everyone wants the disks, the pentacles, the earthly prosperity. And this is a mistake, because Mercury is the root of merchant, merchandise, mercenary etc etc. It\’s about trade, about movement, not about profit and loss, and that\’s a mistake many occultists make. But let\’s look at the swiftness of Mercury/Hermes; he\’s the fastest bastard there is, the trickiest bugger there ever was. He invents musical instruments, carries messages for the gods, is patron of memory and most of all, is kind to mortals. He passes through the air, unstoppable as speech as conjoining as desire. He acknowledges no difference between living and dead, he\’s the guide of the soul. He\’s air, breath, music, leader of the trail of the dead.

Wednesday is Mercury\’s Day in Romance language – Wodan\’s in the Germanic. Both of the wander roads, and ride through the air Woden is the storm, the mantic speech, the warrior poet, the inspirer of men. That\’s the trick of it, you see – the breath. All life respires  even if it\’s not oxygen based. There\’s movement and exchange, and that\’s how you beat the Archons.

The secret is that everything breathes and that\’s the truth of it. Everyone breathes and shares that breath. It\’s a fundamental fact that cannot be denied, the great leveller, and if you\’re clever, you can do something with that, the Air which is full of Mercury power. You can outrun the Archons while you\’re standing still, and the ancient Gnostics knew that, and the Stoics definitely did. Have you ever heard of the pneuma? Go on and look it up. The breath shot through with Primordial Fire – the word of God. Hermes is the Herald of Zeus, the speaker of that divine word that makes supposedly dumb matter leap to life. Even inanimate objects hold the pneuma, according to tradition, slumbering until it is  quickened – quickened by the soul that is disciplined, that is not pulled hither and yon like an animal that isn\’t being driven correctly.

The archontic forces are divisive, distracting you, enflaming your emotions, leading you by the nose by hacking your body, flooding you with hormones and worry, reducing you to something a thousand times less than you are. There\’s no point striving for excellence, just get good enough, says that little voice. But who decides what\’s good enough? Society? Your family and friends?

So what about excellence in breathing?

On a practical level, there are many breath techniques which can help you, the key is mindfulness over automatism. When was the the last time you breathed well, for more than one breath? When was the last itme you disciplined that most basic of functions, and enforced a rhythm upon it? A pattern that you decided, a breath of ice and fire in which your thoughts suddenly seemed like pebbles in an icy rushing stream, so easily picked up, examined and put to one side as your whole body begins to to share as part of a whole, as part of life itself.

Control is a fallacy, and your money is going to slip through your fingers, your lives are constantly moving. How many  people do you meet every day? How many of them do you give something to, with kind words and an implacable heart full of the knowledge we\’re all together, because we\’re all breathing? If you don\’t give, then why not? What exactly does it take from you? Networking is under Mercury\’s purview, but does he do it for a return, or does he do it because it\’s what he is?

In today\’s world, we\’re being pumped full of FUD, convinced we\’re losing our grip on sanity and sense. The tried and tested ways seem to be breaking down, sand what was once thought to be immutable morality has been shown to be the mumbling of a child hanging on to their security blanket with a death grip. Today\’s technology merely reveals, through a glass darkly, what\’s always been known, that we all breathe the same air.

So go on, take a deep breath of the Frankincense and the Storax that call Hermes, and learn from it.

Be seeing you.