Carl Jung, the Collective Unconscious & the Age of Pisces.
Have we learned our lesson?
I was writing on the Pisces New Moon when I realized I’d gone down a rabbit hole in a much broader subject — a Jungian analysis of the Age of Pisces & the roots of humanity’s self-destructive materialism. . .
& an astrological answer for how to best shape the Self & world.
At its core, Pisces is the dissolution of boundaries, the blurring of the lines between our inner world — emotions, instincts, the soul & psyche— & the world that surrounds us.
This is the intensity of our first love that connects us to the poets. The moments of betrayal that cause the tragedies to come alive for us.
It’s listening to Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here,” high as a kite, realizing that by capturing the story of a madman as muse they’d touched on the archetypes beneath consciousness itself — the journey of a boy struggling to become a man, to be seen in a world gone mad.
Pisces feels so far into itself, the realm of the unconscious, the dreams & impressions it collects throughout the day that it comes out the other side of the rabbit hole with all the answers of Wonderland — a fantastical means to adapt to the world.
But if Pisces is so magical, how are things so fucked up?
The Elemental Cycle, Words & Symbols
The practice of magic consists in making what is not understood understandable in an incomprehensible manner.
— Carl Jung, The Red Book
Water signs are the hardest to talk about. Words are the domain of air & for the most part they’ve been invented to describe & explain the outer world, the realm of earth signs.
In the cycle of astrology —
🔥 : Fire starts the zodiac wheel. It’s the beginning of spring, our impulses, drives, motivation, the animating energy of life itself, our spirit
🌍 : Earth is the ground, our bodies, physicality & all the practicalities that arise from the limitations of physics & biology that then receives & shapes 🔥
🌬 : Air is everything we learn as bodies bumping into the 🌍 & each other as we talk about our experiences & what we’ve learned
💧 : Water is the inner experience, our visceral reaction to it all & the memories that we make from it — as well as the collective memories & inner worlds that have been conditioned by the cycle above
At their best, words can gesture to this inner world but the fact it remains inside us means there’s no proper way to fully see what’s there. The best we can do — as poets & mystics have found — is paint a picture/craft a metaphor that hopefully invokes a similar sensation within the listener as it does within us.
When we succeed at this or when life naturally instills within us an association between an object or word & an emotion, we have a symbol.
Much of the challenges of the modern-day lie in the fact that our symbols have aged & lost their potency while the patriarchy has branded our emotions as irrational & the wisdom of the inner world as superstitious.
Carl Jung, the Soul & Archetypes
It is indeed paradoxical that the category of existence, the indispensable sine qua non of all existence, namely the psyche, should be treated as if it were only semi-existent.
Psychic existence is the only category of existence of which we have immediate knowledge, since nothing can be known unless it first appears as a psychic image.
Only psychic existence is immediately verifiable.
— Carl Jung, CW 11
Carl Jung’s theory of the unconscious started off as an exploration of how archetypes developed from the evolutionary process. Positing that evolution conditioned consciousness just as much as it affected the mutations of the body.
Archetypes are the range of drives & psychological dispositions that arose from this & only become known to the individual when they begin to consciously interact & witness their evolutionary drive.
Otherwise, the archetypes, or our evolutionary impulses, act through us & we see them either as uncontrollable forces of nature or the work of spirits or gods.
In time, however, Jung expanded this theory out to include the mysterious nature of consciousness. Due to his study of synchronicities, he became convinced that consciousness was more than a byproduct of the material world as it seemed to transcend material states.
The soul then was the aspect of the Self that navigated these unconscious waters, bringing back insights from our ancestral evolution, personal history & glimpses of the cycles & patterns that transcend time & weave with them a collective story — the evolution of consciousness. . . & perhaps the cosmos itself.
Mythic Time, the Collective Unconscious & Projection
The ancients devised magic to compel fate. They needed it to determine outer fate. We need it to determine inner fate and to find the way that we are unable to conceive.
— Carl Jung, The Red Book
Mythic time transcends the personal now when the consciousness dives so far into the subjective experience that it touches on the collective experience that proceeds & surrounds it — creating a momentarily self-aware fractal of consciousness. One that is often felt more so than thought.
This is at the root of mythology. The stories we used to tell of the gods & the acts of creation all around us.
Ancient cultures cultivated this sensation via their symbols & ceremonies. Their mythologies were interwoven with their day to day experiences — from daily offerings to the ways they wove their baskets or swore.
This created a cultural hypnosis that reminded humanity that every day we’re partaking in the act of divine creation. We are connected to the ancestors, to the past & the fractals of life that live through us.
We are in essence both infinitesimally small & cosmically expansive. As Jung pointed out this allowed the psyche to project the archetypes into the world.
The rising & the setting of the sun became a cosmic drama between order & chaos. One’s actions directly affected this & either maintained the society or ushered in its destruction.
Life was a drama, our evolutionary impulses projected out onto nature & civil life as consciousness organized itself collectively — attempting to harness the individual’s libido or creative energy in service to the larger society.
The Age of Pisces, Paganism & the Birth of Christ.
Since the soul animates the body, just as the soul is animated by the spirit, she tends to favor the body and everything bodily, sensuous, and emotional. She lies caught in “the chains” of Physis, and she desires “beyond physical necessity.” She must be called back by the “counsel of the spirit” from her lostness in matter and the world.
This is a relief to the body too, for it not only enjoys the advantage of being animated by the soul, but suffers under the disadvantage of having to serve as the instrument of the soul’s appetites and desires. . .
— Carl Jung; Mysterium Conjunctionis
Carl Jung argues throughout his work — particularly in “Aeon” & “Answer to Job”— that the collective unconscious is seeking to realize itself just as the unconscious of individuals strives to become conscious.
He believed that the Age of Pisces was defined by this struggle for collective individuation, particularly in relation to duality.
The pagan mindset saw the gods as forces of nature, they were neither good nor bad, simply powers that one had to appease or contend with. This fit the ages of Taurus & Aries where humanity had just established what we think of as civilization & was still wrestling with its self-identity & the all-powerful impulses of its evolutionary drives.
People were believed to possess multiple souls & could themselves be possessed. Identity was fluid — like our modern understanding of various brain states — & morality was guided more so by a sense of taboos than a personally constructed value system.
Society — or the traditions passed on by the ancestors — tried its best to influence this internal experience of self & morality to curb the most dangerous impulses — daemons — & promote the collective’s values.
In such a state the unconscious is likely to remain unconscious without a sense of self or duality to actualize the differentiation of its many parts.
Jung believed that the evolution of religion from paganism to the slowly developing monotheism of Judaism & Christianity was a mutation of the collective unconscious, an attempt at self-realization through the experience of duality — good & evil — & the polarization it caused.
Hence the age of Pisces which coincided with the rise of Christianity once symbolically linked to fish & the fishers of men.
From Paganism to Capitalism.
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn theosophy by heart, or mechanically repeat mystic texts from the literature of the whole world — all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls.
— Carl Jung, CW 12
As a monotheistic religion that eventually became obsessed with good & evil, Christianity painted the world in a set of dualities — heaven & hell, Christian & heathen, saved & damned.
One that began to divide & thus differentiate the mind & its consciousness. No longer was nature imbued with the divine — nymphs, fae, gods. Instead, it was fallen, something a person must set themselves against.
No longer was lust — an evolutionary drive — a product of Mars or want of Venus but a sin to be avoided.
Christ himself (like many a Jewish mystic & prophet before him) taught the internalizing of the Torah. Rather than simply follow the letter of the law to maintain purity & appease the community the focus of morality was shifted inward into the realm of the psyche.
Jung thought that by denying their instinctive drives Christians (& in the east Buddhists who were also rejecting the world) redirected their libido to the conquering of the Self.
However, due to the discomfort that comes from facing ourselves & holding space for the dualities within, Christianity first turned away from the world & then became obsessed with the conquering of the world for Christ.
Rather than imitate the Christ as a man living his full life, they turned him into a symbol that excused their lack of living. Their attempt to escape the world.
This eventually led to “The Age of Enlightenment” & a thirst for science wherein the material world was put to its final death — no longer sacred or daemonic but rather inert & of little value if not harnessed.
Hence the evolution of imperialism — for God & country — into capitalism & the exploitation of the world for little more than the market & consumption.
Pisces, Patriarchy & Climate Change
We are in a bad situation in the West for we are living as decapitated heads. The intellect is indispensable in order to understand, but you must feel yourselves that our text is not just related to the head, it arises from whole man.
— Carl Jung, ETH Lecture XI
By wrestling with the contents of the unconscious — first through demonizing portions of the psyche via Christianity to then lobotomizing our inner experiences as superstitions, we lost touch with our instincts & the collective unconscious.
Psychologically we created a God that consumed all other gods & then crucified him.
“The Great God Pan is dead”
— Plutarch
“God is dead. . .”
— Nietzsche
Since the God-image & the unconscious are tied up together, a crucifixion of the God-image meant a lack of awareness to our unconscious. Suddenly men were simply “rational,” with little cosmological explanation of their many eccentricities than “natural law,” which was based again on their supposed “rationality.”
The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.
That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.
— Carl Jung, Aion, Christ: A Symbol of the Self
This goes hand in hand with the perpetuation of the patriarchy. Just as intuition & one’s experience of their inner world was seen as superstition, emotions became “irrational,” the downfall of women.
Men self-titled themselves as the superior sex due to their “rationality” — something they had claimed during the middle ages was due to God’s decree — which of course didn’t exorcise their moodiness but rather confirmed their bias.
Hence “rationally” hiring children in factories for slave wages, destroying entire generations in WWI & WWII, the extreme paranoia of the Cold War & the exploitation of the world’s environment to the point of impending collapse & universal doom.
By exploring the dualities of consciousness & becoming identified with the various polarities of it, the Age of Pisces has seen humanity shift from the worshiping of nature as sacred, to the unconscious lust for its exploitation.
Where do we go from here?
We moderns are faced with the necessity of rediscovering the life of the spirit; we must experience it anew for ourselves.
It is the only way in which we can break the spell that binds us to the cycle of biological events.
— Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul
Pisces as a mutable sign is concerned with adaptation. It doesn’t immediately divine an answer but rather feels into as many experiences as it can until it dreams up a new way of being.
Think of the last 2,000 years as humanity trying to find itself.
Paganism wasn’t enough for us. The projection of the psyche’s energy into the world of nature as the divine left the individual haunted by those same supernatural forces.
Christianity withdrew its energy from the world, causing a hunger that twisted the Kingdom of Heaven into a goal of conquest — something that must be carved into the world for the sake of our soul’s morality.
The Age of Enlightenment dismissed this as superstition & by assuming itself rationally enlightened lost all track of its subjective bias.
In each of these experiences, the psyche lost its ability to see itself in some way. That’s what’s been lacking, the collective will to fully witness the psyche, the way it’s influenced by the unconscious & the ways it is shaped by & shapes the world.
There have been teachers who taught this, mystics & philosophers, Yeshua & Jung but rather than do the work of wrestling our unconscious shadows we run with the life & conditioning we are born with. Or we rebel in direct opposition to our conditioning & society’s expectations, creating a life-based in trauma-induced reaction rather than intention — another side affect of the unconscious.
If there is any lesson to be had in the Age of Pisces it is the need to fully explore our psyche so we can see the way it affects ourselves & the world.
The Age of Aquarius
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.
— Carl Jung, CW 13
Many laud Aquarius as a golden age of technology & high human ideals but this utopian spirit lacks the truth Pisces is here to teach— even the best of intentions will be twisted if we are unconscious to the psyche that produces them.
Aquarius is a fixed air sign. It’s concerned with systems of thought, particularly ones that promise innovation.
Yes, this can lead to a technological wonderland that solves all the world's problems but it can also lead to eco-fascism where minorities are slaughtered for the benefit of the many — justified under a thorough system of “logical belief.”
Aquarius isn’t inherently moral. It determines its morality based on its system of thought, which it often mistakes for pure rationality.
If we want the best in the Age of Aquarius we have to learn the lessons from the Age of Pisces so we can build our thought systems & innovations from a place of self-awareness rather than unconscious bias.
This starts with the cultivation of our personal psyche & unconscious as we act to create systems that support others (& ourselves) in our healing, growth & general wellness in life.
