February arrives at the depth of winter in most of the Northern Hemisphere, when we live in the shadow of cold, rain, and snow. Within February’s first few days lies one of the four high holidays—or sabbats—of the pagan calendar, called Imbolc in Celtic times. Its corresponding holidays are Beltane (or May Day, May 1, or May 5, depending on your tradition), Lammas (also called Lambess, Lughnasa, first harvest, or second planting in agricultural communities, August 1), and Samhain (also called Halloween, October 31, aka Days of the Dead).
The cross-quarter days lie at the midpoints between the equinoxes and the solstices. Imbolc, traditionally honored on February 2, is right near the halfway point of the Northern Hemisphere’s winter solstice and the spring equinox. The equinoxes and solstices are called the “quarter days,” so the midpoints are called “cross-quarter days.” Imbolc, also called Midwinter, literally means “in the belly,” and at this time we are deep in the belly of winter, held in a kind of gestation for the coming spring at the vernal equinox on March 20. The sun crosses the middle degree of Aquarius at Imbolc, the symbolism of which we will visit in a moment. Think of Imbolc as the tipping point where the energy of spring starts to be felt more strongly than that of winter.
If you’re paying attention to your environment, you will notice that each of the cross-quarter days contains a shift in momentum. For example, think of the sensation of Halloween, when autumn is giving way to winter. It’s almost as if there are really eight mini seasons rather than the four we normally think about.
In the contemporary world, we associate early February with Groundhog Day, which hardly gives a clue to the importance this holiday held not long ago. For most people, the day passes unnoticed, except for a photo in the local paper of a cute little critter in Pennsylvania who has wiggled out of his hole for a breath of fresh air, just like he does every other day, only this time confronted by 100 TV cameras. Which is kind of a funny comment on Aquarius.
His “stirring to life” in midwinter is bullshit; groundhogs don’t hibernate. The media, though, are practicing the tradition of weather divination; all of the cross-quarter holidays are associated with some form of augury or communing with the spirit world. Astrologers know that Imbolc falls with the Sun at the midpoint of the sign Aquarius, the Water Bearer, who lives today as the astrological symbol of individuality and eccentricity. Yet Aquarius is also one of the signs most prominently associated with technology, in particular, digital technology. In addition to the theme of individuality, Aquarius also embodies the theme of order, conformity, and regimentation. This is one of the things we experience with digital technology, wherein everything is reduced down to code that does not think for itself and must perform perfectly or it may not do anything at all.
The constellation Aquarius, known to be among the oldest named configurations of stars, stands, according to Catherine Tenant, “with his foot on the head of the great Southern fish, into whose mouth his waters pour.” She traces the god Aquarius back to Babylon, noting that he rules over a huge area of the sky where are gathered the Southern fish, the dolphin, the zodiac fishes (Pisces), the River Eridanus (the River of Night), and Cetus the sea monster. These ancient waters and their primal creatures were “seen as the source of life, through which the Sun passed during the rainy season.” Today it seems like the primal waters in which humanity is swimming are entirely digital. If we are in the belly of anything, that would seem to be the G4 network. As the Sun moves through the sign Aquarius, so too is the planet Mercury transiting here, only in reverse—Mercury will be retrograde through February 11.
One of the fairly typical manifestations of Mercury retrograde is to make apparent the environment that is usually invisible, transparent, or taken for granted—that of technology. That’s one way to consider the “things get weird when Mercury is retrograde” phenomenon—we notice the digital and electrical environments. We also notice the mental environment, which might account for how Mercury retrograde is associated with technological glitches as well as a check you’re expecting in the mail getting stuck between the pages of the Pennysaver.
I’m not sure how Aquarius came to be the sign associated with technology, but while I’m on the topic let’s see if I can figure it out. In the oldest English-language astrology text, called Christian Astrology, the only clue we get is that Aquarius is associated with mines and places that minerals are dug up—an activity essential to all technology except maybe milking a cow, but then, the bucket is made of metal.
We may have a warmer clue in that British astrologer and publisher Robert Cross Smith, who wrote under the pen name Raphael (namesake of the ephemeris), spontaneously declared Uranus, the first planet discovered by science, the ruler of Aquarius early in the 19th century. There was no precedent for that; Saturn was and remains the ruler of Aquarius. Planetary rulership of signs was settled before the days of Ptolemy.
But it stuck, and Uranus is very much a planet associated with technological breakthroughs—for example, its own discovery. By that kind of intergenerational telekinesis (and PR chicanery), we wind up with Aquarius being the sign of technology. Thomas Edison, whose Sun was in Aquarius, comes to mind. Notably, checking my chart files, many more scientists have their Moon in Aquarius than have their Sun there.
Anyway, Aquarius, with its waves of transmission and association with being plunged into a river of something technological, seems to be an excellent fit as the sign describing the Internet. Aquarius is, in modern astrology, also the sign of social patterns. And if any one thing impacts the shape, the scale, the movement, and the feeling of society, it is technology.
An English professor named Marshall McLuhan, who I mentioned in this space last month, was the first person who described the impact of technology on society to society. Other people had things to say, but McLuhan managed to get the word out. All this stuff we surround ourselves in and fill our senses and our heads with, from books to magazines to radio to TV to billboards, not only affects the state of mind of individuals; it shapes society. And it does so irrespective of content. It’s not the content that is shaping society, McLuhan said ,it is the medium itself—an idea for which many people wanted to skewer him.
One example McLuhan gives is how roads were paved during the Roman Empire in order to deliver messages from the capital to the remote regions of the country. The messages were written on papyrus. So it was papyrus that led to roads. When Egypt split off from the empire and the supply of papyrus failed, Rome went into decline because government orders had no way of being conveyed; and as a result, the roads crumbled.
We are experiencing something similar with digital technology, which can also be described as the digital environment. This environment is so pervasive that it’s soaked its way into everything we do. I used to joke about the Japanese rice steamer that comes with an IP address and USB port. Now if you sold a rice cooker that was Bluetooth compatible nobody would blink. They would just be thrilled they could control it from their “smart” phone.
Some sensitive people are questioning this onrush of technology. What most of them are not saying is that humanity has never gone through anything like this before—there has never been a technological onslaught that came on this fast, this ferociously and this fully. We all must adapt, every day. The digital era is a tide that keeps rising. I have been on the Internet for 20 years (incredible, isn’t it) and publishing there (here) for 19 years. It seemed like high tide when the dot-com bust happened in 2000. Then there was the high tide of Google, of Apple, of Facebook, and Duck Duck Go (the next big thing).
We are now at the point where we live our lives through a gigantic robot, which keeps time in nanoseconds and remembers everything we write, nearly everything we say, many things we see, and knows nearly everything we do. This robot is warping the shape of society around itself, but nobody that I know really understands what that impact is. How could they?
We could look to McLuhan for some information. In his 1964 book Understanding Media he suggested that someday a computer would track all details of an individual purchasing and chewing a stick of gum (hello, Amazon Prime). He said that the users of media would become the content of media (hello, Facebook, YouTube, Vine, Snapchat, and Instagram). He suggested that we shape our tools and then our tools shape us. We create the media, and then it creates us. This has always been true, but it’s now happening at a pace so fast, nobody can keep up. And digital media is coming very close to fully merging with the biological realm (from life support devices to injectable plasma nanocomputers to biotechnology to the way that the digital environment is shaping brain function).
One thing that’s clear is that the digital environment is very, very different from the television environment that preceded it. The television environment was (and remains) like a living dream, an inner trip that you could just lie back and watch 24 hours a day, endlessly, without even changing the channel. It does not end. Anyone old enough to remember the test pattern that came on at 3am could get a laugh out of anyone young enough to think that’s weird—that TV would stop for some reason (after playing the “Star Spangled Banner” to a crusty black-and-white image of the American flag flying).
The question is, in what ways can we see that our nonstop involvement with digital technology is shaping us? On a positive note, it demands nearly total involvement. You have to move the thing along by typing, mousing, talking, or dragging your fingers along the screen. If you don’t, it kind of just stalls out.
People communicate through it a lot. I jabber with friends all day while I’m working, and it’s great fun. I work in the realm of ideas and I am fed constantly—and I feed the robot back. Thanks to the Internet, I have met all kinds of people in all kinds of places—real people, in person.
On the other hand, we have all seen people who get together and everyone is sitting around texting someone else, somewhere else.
In Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch, there is a part that I think of as the Atlantis passage. “As I have said, this isn’t the first time your civilization has been at this brink,” God says. “I want to repeat this, because it is vital that you hear this. Once before on your planet, the technology you developed was far greater than your ability to use it responsibly. You are approaching the same point in human history again. It is vitally important that you understand this. Your present technology is threatening to outstrip your ability to use it wisely. Your society is on the verge of becoming a product of your technology rather than your technology being a product of your society. When a society becomes a product of its own technology, it destroys itself.”
We are definitely the products of our technology, in rapidly increasing degrees. Whether we destroy ourselves or save ourselves with that technology remains to be seen, and there may be a very thin line between the two.
Additional thinking: Mark Stahlman.
This article appears in February 2015.
