The purpose of empire is separation from spirit
Reflections on doing witch shit in the woods
I fell into a black hole at North Star and came out spiritually spaghettified. I also came out with a renewed vigor for the dismantling of empire.
During their deeply moving lecture, delivered under an ancient maple tree on a breezy Saturday, late morning, breakfast fresh in our bellies, Jupiter trining my natal Jupiter, the Moon traversing through her exaltation in the lush landscape of Taurus, Aidan Wachter brought up the concept of empire.
I, too, found myself in a lush landscape, experiencing intense satisfaction in my environment. What glorious bounty lie all around me, in so many forms: endless blueberries which stained my feet, richly textured air carrying music and chatter and breezes across the land, the scents of meals cooking in the cauldron layered upon the fragrant grassland.
Without cell service, my phone was reduced to a camera and time-teller, minimally relevant and suddenly quite foreign in my hands. Even then, I did my best to exist without the need to know what time it was. I let other folks document the weekend with their film cameras most of the time. As one of my fellow campfire watchers quipped, “What is a cell service? It sounds evil.”
The majority of Aidan’s talk was magical in nature and I will be gatekeeping almost the entirety of it, but it was something they said toward the beginning of the talk which has really stuck to my ribs and given me something greater than pause: everybody has spirit allies, and domination—AKA empire—wants you separated from them.
Furthermore, Aidan insisted that empire is a pathology whose goal is “the divorce from spirit”. To my own surprise, tears rushed to my eyes when Aidan proclaimed, “We did not create this world,” speaking in reference to the world which domination and empire have co-created. The truth is sensational, I reminded myself, and allowed the goosebumps to cover my flesh as the breeze picked up and brought a satisfying chill through the clearing under the big maple tree.
We did not create this world.
But it is up to us to birth a different world, one where empire is dismantled from within.
What is empire, exactly? It’s the combination of forces of domination which exact abuse and control over the planet’s people and resources for the simple reason that those people have a resource which they desire. So it’s colonialism, yes, but it’s also the systemic injustices and social attitudes which encourage interpersonal abuse—as long as it keeps the scaffolding intact. So it’s patriarchy, too, but it’s also the pattern of extraction from a multitudinous “lower” class toward the pocketbooks of an exclusive “upper” class. So it’s capitalism as well, but empire is also a pathology, like Aidan said. I prefer to call it the “sun cult”. I’ll get into why that is later.
We didn’t create this world, but we have the expectations of this world etched into our DNA, your body remembering further back into the reaches of your ancestry than your waking mind can comprehend. Your spirit allies are always with you, and they possess that ancient memory, too. The purpose of the sun cult (empire) is to separate you from spirit, from yourself, and make you fear death more than anything so you can be easily controlled.
I refer to this system of domination as the sun cult (and I’m not the only one) because it relates to the binary of day and night and how these two sects, ruled respectively by the Sun and the Moon, have come to represent two distinct types of consciousness. Empire is result of too much solar consciousness and not enough lunar consciousness. Too much day, not enough night. Hence, sun cult.
For too long, the sun cult has prioritized the needs and desires of an exclusive and very tiny number of people on the planet, at the expense of literally everything else. It emphasizes endless growth, and “progress” as an unimpeachable human virtue and the mark of a healthy society. Innovation and advancement for their own sakes. Extraction of labor and resources and time and livelihood from the “lunar many” so the “solar few” may never know lack or discomfort.
It doesn’t take specialized knowledge to see that this imbalance has reached a fever pitch. As Aidan also pointed out, people often reference the phrase “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society,” and there is a timeless truth to that. However, there is also a profound power in acquiring a type of saneness which says “I see the world as it is, and that shit is insane.”
That famous phrase, which was never actually uttered verbatim, is attributed to Jiddu Krishnamurti, and I think the fullness of his proclamation lands a bit more poignantly than the shortened version:
[W]hy should the individual adjust himself to an unhealthy society? If he is healthy, he will not be a part of it. Without first questioning the health of society, what is the good of helping misfits to conform to society? […] Is the individual to be healed only in order to kill or be killed? If one is not killed, or driven insane, then must one only fit into the structure of hate, envy, ambition and superstition which can be very scientific?1
What is the purpose of adjusting to a society which is overrun by solar worship and principles of homogenization, globalization, and extraction from a bottom majority to an artificially elevated minority?
In my new 3-week course, Escaping the Sun Cult, I will be leading you through the astro-historical roots of the sun cult and pulling apart the differences between solar and lunar consciousness so we can trace the path of empire up to the present, and go beyond imagining the end of empire—it’s time to start living out the end of empire. Click the link above to learn more and sign up to receive updates when the cart opens (very soon).
Remember: we did not create this world. Empire may not be your fault, but it is your responsibility to end it. The purpose of empire is separation from spirit. What happens internally—lunar consciousness—becomes a microcosm for what unfolds externally—solar consciousness—and there can be no degrowth, no dismantling of empire, no end to the sun cult unless and until you orient your internal reality toward something better.
Your spirit allies are not only depending on you to usher forth a more balanced world, but they want to actively support you in that endeavor. There can be no well-adjusted individuals and no well-adjusted societies when connection between human and spirit is rigorously and systematically trained out of our consciousness. But the good news is: you can always bring that connection back to life. All you have to do is ask.
Thank you for reading!
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I kinda be living like the re-balance is already underway, because like, of course it is. And we are it.