A Cosmic Doctrine Hypothesis
Mar. 31st, 2023 02:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ecosophia
A few days ago I spent some time reading Dion Fortune's The Cosmic Doctrine, looking for material to help explain polarity magic -- yes, I've got a manuscript on that subject in process. In the process, though, I reread a section that might just explain the weirdness of the times in which we live. Some background will be necessary. In Fortune's cosmology there are seven Cosmic planes. Our solar system, and every other star system in the universe known to astronomers, is on the seventh of these planes. The six other planes are composed of varieties of matter our senses cannot detect -- yes, it's been pointed out that this corresponds rather closely to the "dark matter" today's cosmologists have to postulate in order to explain the results of their experiments. (Fortune got there first -- The Cosmic Doctrine was originally written, and circulated in mimeographed form, in the 1920s.)
The other six Cosmic planes have their own star systems. These, like the systems in our plane, are seen as revolving around a common center, which Fortune calls the Central Stillness. The attraction of the Central Stillness holds the whole vast system in balance, in the same way that the gravitational attraction of the sun holds the solar system in balance. In Fortune's cosmology, of course, we are not just talking about astrophysics, but spirituality as well, so the balance in question is spiritual -- and it affects the intelligent inhabitants of any planet that happens to have them.
Here's where the complexity comes in. The Cosmic planes aren't actually separate in space -- they're all present right where you're sitting now -- but it helps schematically to think of the other planes as closer to the Central Stillness than our seventh plane is. When a star system of one of the other planes passes between our solar system and the Central Stillness, metaphorically speaking, it replaces the influence of the Central Stillness with its own attraction, and things get weird.
You can tell which Cosmic plane is the source of the disruption, in turn, by paying attention to which of the sub-planes here in the seventh Cosmic plane get shaken up. There's a straightforward correspondence between Cosmic planes and sub-planes:
First Cosmic plane --> Upper spiritual plane, governing relations with the Divine
Second Cosmic plane --> Lower spiritual plane, governing relations with meanings and ideals
Third Cosmic plane --> Upper mental plane, governing abstract thinking
Fourth Cosmic plane --> Lower mental plane, governing concrete thinking
Fifth Cosmic plane --> Upper astral plane, governing the emotions and the arts
Sixth Cosmic plane --> Lower astral plane, governing the passions
Seventh Cosmic plane --> Physical plane, the realm of physical and etheric matter
With this in mind it's not too hard to sketch out what might be happening.
First, sometime around 1900 a star system on the fifth Cosmic plane got close enough to our solar system to start having a disruptive influence. It was after this that the arts abandoned millennia of focus on beauty and started pursuing deliberate ugliness instead; it's also when a lot of human relationships started getting problematic in odd ways. People's aesthetic and emotional lives got very strange and stayed there.
Second, sometime around 2016 a star system on the second Cosmic plane did the same thing. It was after this that a great many people suddenly lost the ability to relate their actions and words to their supposed ideals -- when civil libertarians started rejecting the idea of free speech, people who'd spent years insisting that natural healing methods were better than corporate medicine turned on a dime and insisted that everyone had to get the latest and most inadequately tested product of Big Pharma, Green parties in Europe abandoned their longstanding pacifism and started baying for war with Russia, and so on. People's grasp of meaning and value got very strange and stayed there.
My working guess is that the first process peaked sometime in the early 1960s and has been fading out since then -- it's not accidental, in other words, that modern art remains stuck in place only because of institutional inertia, and most of the really interesting new trends in art and music involve returning to classic technique and its forms. My guess is that the second process, which is much faster because it's on a higher plane, peaked sometime in 2021-2022, and has just started to fade out -- though I'm less certain of this.
This is a hypothesis from which predictions can be made. If I'm right about the first part, the collapse of interest in what used to be modern art will accelerate in the years to come, and nearly all of what's been produced during the Age of Ugliness will be stuck in warehouses if it isn't simply consigned to dumpsters. Older forms of art and music will be revived by new artistic movements, and everyone will shake their heads and wonder what they were thinking back then.
If I'm right about the second part, we're going to hear a spreading silence when it comes to the extreme claims and actions of the last few years. As the influence of the second Cosmic plane system passes off, a good many people will be embarrassed and shamed by their actions; human nature being what it is, most of them will do their best to pretend that it never happened, and may respond with frantic rage when their behavior gets brought up. If the consequences of those actions turn out to be as bad as some of them seem to be, that may make things very, very brittle for a while. But of course we'll just have to wait and see.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-03-31 08:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-03-31 09:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-03-31 09:59 pm (UTC)b) If comets are markers of of when other systems pass by, then the fact that we suddenly discovered 2 interstellar comets in short succession in 2017 and 2019 seems to suggest something very odd happened...
(no subject)
Date: 2023-04-01 01:46 am (UTC)2) An excellent point, and this would tend to confirm my hypothesis.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-04-01 02:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-04-01 02:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-04-02 02:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-04-02 10:54 pm (UTC)But then, the last 7 years have been humanizing to me, so maybe there are two processes in play depending on where you're looking (NEOWISE did have two tails - a red and a blue one) - the trends I've seen have been toward the more humanizing in general, and while some part of the process certainly did seem to peak in 2021/2022, I would argue it does seem to intend to stick around. (The song links seemed relevant - Cold War and Tightrope were Monae's two-parter about the difficulties being a pioneer in new forms in the music industry).
I worry Fortune garbled her metaphor with the comets; though it probably merely indicates she was not above being under the same spiritual influences of other occultists operating in her time, which led to their better publicized obsessions with purity and purges... I contrast that bad idea with say, the Ramayana.
At least she didn't join Parsons et al. trying to bring about the birth of a child that would be an incarnation of the biblical Scarlet Woman of the Apocalypse (unsuccessfully, one assumes; otherwise how embarrassing would that have been??); leading even Crowley to say, "I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts."
A condensed, relevant timeline:
2016, the Standing Rock protests started. Signs and omens were seen.
A shot was also heard in the right place where the revolution is really happening.
2022, the Pope visits the pilgrimage at Lac Ste Anne in Alberta (the largest religious pilgrimage in North America). That resulted in the largely symbolic, but ultimately, hopefully, meaningful, putting of the ball into the US' courts on March 30, 2023. Other stuff happened shortly thereafter.
I see it as comets zoom around by literally undergoing the alchemists' "calcination".
The introduction of Alchemy and Mysticism by Alexander Roob describes the prima materia in all these ways that reminded me of a comet: as the "dark lump" or "our chaos" that resulted from the fall of Lucifer and Adam (he cites the internal fire of sulphur explicitly ruled by Hades according to Empedocles). "The alchemist's journey required him to pass through that outermost circle of the underworld - the serpent's circle of Saturn".
When NEOWISE went by, technically I guess it didn't always have two tails; we actually got my son out of bed so he could see it with the binoculars as he asked, and as he was watching, a large gas pocket must have exploded, and the green tail ("green vitriol, a highly corrosive sulphurous acid known as the green lion of the digestion stage assigned to the sun") split into the two as he watched, a red and a blue.
His eyes were better than ours, we couldn't see it, but I checked the space news the next day, and sure enough that had been recorded by the big telescopes.
"The intensity of the fire is raised, for the soul must be sweated out... In a torture by fire lasting several days, the stone now matures to its perfection and resurrection...after much suffering and torment, I was resurrected at large, pure and immaculate."
(no subject)
Date: 2023-04-01 02:45 am (UTC)If so, I wonder if people are aware of this at a deep subconscious level, particularly those who cling to Pluto the strongest. Pluto being Pluto, I could see the reaction being split: some would react with horror, thus driving the pathological fear of death that seems to have come in with Pluto, and be intensifying as he fades away; and other would have a strong sense of hope and optimism. I now wonder if the point of the transition of so many areas of society towards various forms of suicide cults is on some level people (unconsciously) trying to be in a position to catch a ride on Pluto before it leaves.
This would make an uncomfortable amount of sense of a lot of things....
(no subject)
Date: 2023-04-01 02:47 am (UTC)That's unpleasantly plausible.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-04-01 02:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-04-01 07:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-04-02 04:20 am (UTC)How many souls can fit in a given volume of space anyways? Kinda sounds like the old Medieval Scholastics arguing over how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. I doubt it will be billions, but given certain factors at play, the number could be considerable.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-04-02 04:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-04-04 12:46 am (UTC)So, your lower estimate might very well be not 3,900 (you added an extra zero) but rather 78,000,000. All of which assumes of course that there is a relationship between comet mass and soul capacity, but it's still a much more troubling number...
(no subject)
Date: 2023-04-01 01:14 pm (UTC)- From 1979 to 1999 it was closer to the Sun than Neptune was. This is itself very comet-like behavior, crossing through the orbital bounds of the planets proper, and it also included the entire period when Pluto was in Scorpio (its rulership). This may go a long way towards explaining the 1980s.
- When Pluto is near perihelion, it more or less matches speed with Neptune, Since roughly the onset of World War II, Pluto and Neptune have been locked in a more-or-less sextile (granted, there are periods where it's been wider than a true sextile). This sextile went exact in the early 1950s and late 1970s, and will go exact again in the early 2030s. However, if this means anything, we should have seen a "reprieve" from Pluto's influence on Neptune from around 1995 to 2009, when there was a fairly substantive separation. I don't know of any such reprieve, but do note that the early 1950s were the peak years of baby boomer birth and that the late 1970s where about the time when everything started to change...
(no subject)
Date: 2023-04-04 09:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-04-01 04:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-04-01 07:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-04-01 07:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-04-01 12:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-04-01 08:00 pm (UTC)Is this something that differs according to which version of the book you read?
(no subject)
Date: 2023-04-01 11:25 pm (UTC)I believe, historically comets were viewed as omens and coincided with disasters, etc. Maybe that's the price to be paid for cleaning out irredeemable soul.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-04-01 02:55 pm (UTC)