The real question, of course, is this: Is this cycle calculation true? Does it describe an actual reality, or is it just a dream of an aboriginal culture (a series of aboriginal cultures) overlaid on a modern fabric with no necessary causal result? Is it a dream? Is it a phantom? Is it an illusion? I don’t know. We will find out eventually.
This does not mean that this all happens at once on December 21, 2012, an alarm clock goes off, and the world is dramatically changed for ever. Of course, it didn’t happen like that. A second wave of catastrophic selling could hit world financial markets as a result of endless spending to cover-up the original unfixable Debt Implosion and world civilizations could be swept away in the resulting tsunami of chaotic implications for the world’s wealth structure.
A global war could break out, pitting Western Christian/Capitalists against Islamic zealots.
A series of storms could continue to hammer the Earth with hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, catastrophic winds and droughts.
This could happen. Again, it could also been a slow depletion of energy to uphold a tired world in which people are losing their belief. It takes energy to hold an empire together, material energy, and human energy. If people lose their faith in the underlying idea of the enterprise, then dissolution can happen quite quickly.
The enduring symbol of the 1929 transition from White Hole Jupiterian Day-Cycle expansion to Black Hole Saturnine Night-Cycle deflation was the Black Monday Wall Street Collapse, followed almost immediately by the rise to power of fascist Japan and Germany.
The enduring symbol of the 1965 transition from Jupiter to Saturn was, first, the killing of President John Kennedy in Dallas by reactionary rich Americans; then, next, in 1965 by race riots in Detroit and Los Angeles (Watts Ghetto) as the rebellion of the Dark Soul against the Tyrant Father led to 18 years of death and spiritual initiation (the Sixties Generation being the emblem of this) and eventual rebirth in 1983.
The enduring symbol of the 2001 transition from White Jupiter to Black Saturn was, clearly, the September 11 attack on the White (phallic) symbols of American capitalism and empire, the Twin Towers, the World Trade Center, by Muslim revolutionaries (Osiris attacked and killed by Set).
A planned attack on the White House itself was thwarted by heroic American citizens.
In each of these Day-Cycle apex crises, failed capitalism was at the center of attention – failed in the sense of being an elitist doctrine that elevated only the top crust of society, while increasing inequality in society, increasing the division between the White King and his struggling subjects.
I don’t intend to fight the battle of capitalism’s worth in this essay. I know capitalism has value, and that it has a kind of purity (in its purest form). When the Capitalist/Individual/Roman ideal goes down into the waters of dissolution – when the overripe apple finally falls off the tree – then the world inherits a Dark Age, a Dark Age when memory is reborn, and when reflection becomes the key: looking back on the Life-Cycle of the Roman Hero, what were its causes, its meanings, and what was the Life’s relation to God.
These are the questions that have to be answered by the Dark Age that follows.
And, as always, the Night-Cycle is interrupted, eventually, by the Knight Cycle.
Lash’s conclusions about the culmination of this Long Count is very similar to my own vision of what the world is approaching – what I have suggested is another stage of the Christian Crusades against Islam and the implosion of the White Sun (the White Hole that spews out Matter) into the Black Sun (the Black Hole that collapses in on itself and destroys matter and destroys the material world).
The White Knights of the Western Crusade, of course, as always, are led by the White Knight himself, Michael the Archangel. But Michael has two aspects, as we have seen; he is also Jesus Christ, the Autumnal judge of the living, who leads his society down into the Dark Night-Cycle of material dissolution.
America has two forces and two futures: the Patriarchal force identifies with America-as-Rome mythology and wants to extend the influence of the American Empire around the globe as far as possible through the use of its technology and its military as the police-arm of Capitalism – getting richer and richer is the goal of this ‘dream’ – it’s an old-new form of Colonialism. This is the idea/energy that Lash says is dying and ends December 21, 2012.
The second potential, projected and optional and inevitable future of America was present at her birth, and was represented by Thomas Jefferson as the America-as-Greece idea, the decentralized agrarian, philosopher-farmer archetype vision – Culture as Idealism and Youth, as opposed to Civilization as Pragmatism and Maturity – Rome sprang into existence without a Culture Period, without a Youth, being the maturity and pragmatism – the Adulthood – of Greece, as America sprang into existence as the Maturity, the Pragmatism, the Adulthood of Europe, or, even more precisely, of England.
This Jeffersonian, agrarian, decentralized vision of the future is the Matriarchal idea – the Earth as Mother-Master – and this vision implies the centripetal motion and energy of a turning inward, (after the Soul is born in the Fourth Day), of a rebellion against the empire, a secession from the Washington/New York ‘romanism’ and the breakdown of America into parts (the dismantling of Osiris and Actaeon in mythology), into the Dark Age Night Period, a germination similar to the post-Roman Empire Dark-Age of rest, Winter destruction of karmic debt. Interestingly, seeds need darkness for germination to be successful.
(‘Germination’ is an interesting word: it breaks down into ‘German-Nation’. Was it not Germanic tribes that disassembled the Roman Empire piece-by-piece, bringing the edifice back down to Earth, using the remnants of Rome as fertilizer through the Gothic night to nurture the ‘seeds’ of the Roman fruit which later would become the new plants of the European/English Renaissance?)
In Lash’s view, the Patriarchal World Domination Empire-Civilization period defined by the Long-Count IS the Dark-Age. His view is that the passing of this Long-Count Day-Cycle will result in a period of Nature-Rule, true sexual equality with respect and love. He sees the Day-Cycle as being a period of madness that ends when the split between Dark and Light, between Man and Woman, between Sun and Moon, between Science and Religion, which is the nature of the Day-Cycle, will be healed by the mystic marriage of the two principles, defined by the expiration of the separation, December 21, 2012.
Oswald Spengler distinguishes between the Patriarchal Empire Period (what I call the Day-Cycle), calling in Civilization, and the Matriarchal Earth-Wisdom Period (the Night-Cycle), calling it Culture, with a capital ‘C’.
Lash writes:
Narrative Spell
So, my expanded definition of Kali Yuga is: the age of darkness (ignorance) and decadence (moral and material derangement), due to the break from Goddess wisdom, the imposition of off-planet morality dictated by a father god, and the cancerous spread of faith-based religion operating on the theocratic authority of The Book (Torah, Bible, Koran). Over the last 5000 years, the entire human species has fallen under the thrall of The Book. In Not in His Image, I propose the term narrative spell for the uncanny power of the salvationist script that encodes the beliefs of the three Abrahamic religions.
The mandate of the male-only creator god has a vast, fixating power based in fear and shaming. Those who adopt the Paternal Lie, or, more often, have it mindlessly imposed on them, live it out as if they are acting under post-hypnotic suggestion. Those who are forced to believe in the story of revealed religion enact it madly and without critical reflection or restraint. What they have received mindlessly, without consent, they act out mindlessly, disregarding the free choice of others. They behave as they believe. What they are told to believe is inscribed in The Book (Torah, Bible, Koran).
The end of the Long Count plunges the entire world into the violent drama of the culmination of such behavior.
In the Mayan Calendar, 21 December 2012 represents the point – I am suggesting this – at which the Soul, Mercury, abandons the Empire, the West, the White Man’s Reason and Day-Cycle Power and chooses to love the woman instead, Venus/the Virgin Mary/the Moon, becomes the Rejected One of Civilization, becomes Jesus Christ, going down among the poor and the weak Earthlings, abandoning his home in Heaven, choosing to become the Prodigal Son, the Buddha who leaves his palace and journeys back into Nature.
The myth of Jesus and Mary Madeleine as lovers stems from this very curious and reasonable iconography. When Jesus is subsequently crucified, for threatening the Patriarchy, the Empire and the Capitalistic Civilization, darkness falls across the land. Heaven is gone. The Empire is gone. And the Dark Ages, the Night, rules. Thus, the meek, those living close to the Earth, do, in fact, ‘inherit the Earth’.
In fact, the Virgin Mary is the Moon of the welcoming Night-Cycle – Venus and Mary are obviously connected in Libra as Venus is ‘born from the sea’ and Mary, from the root ‘mare’, means ‘the sea’ – as the Sun (Jesus) descends through the Virgin Mary (the Virgin Sea) in ‘an immaculate manner’ (the Holy Ghost passing through the Virgin Mary) in order ‘to be born’ in the lower world of the Night-Cycle, a spiritual immaculate procreation.
The Moon is the female emblem, the Womb, the Virgin Womb, by and through which (through whom) SPIRITUAL BIRTH is accomplished, in this transition from Day-Cycle Empire (the White Hole of Jupiter’s Expansion) and Patriarchy to Night-Cycle Culture (the Black Hole of Saturn’s Contraction and Deflation) and Matriarchy.
In my vision, 21 December 2012, with be the birth-date of the Jesus energy returning to the Earth. Jesus comes again to judge the living, to condemn the material world, to proclaim the losers of the material rat race of wealth- and status- and power-accumulation to be the actual winners of the race for the Spiritual Kingdom, those who will be given a place to live in the coming Kingdom of the Spirit.
Those who have won the Day-Cycle race will not be given life in the ‘next world’. Having rejected the Soul, they will not be given what the Soul gives, the gift of immortality. They will remain clinging to the high branches in the Tree of Life, rotting, begging for more free taxpayer money (zirp, zirp…), as the night falls, and then, suddenly, everything goes black.