Last Quarter (Zodiac Series): Eliminating eccentricities

Hello. It's Friday, and because I'm going to be traveling in a few hours I only have so much time to write. But I would rather not skip this week's post altogether, and so I wish to offer some decidedly abbreviated but perhaps also concentrated, crystallized thoughts on the following point in Aquarius season: that as Aquarius is ruled in contemporary astrology by the planet Uranus, strange and deviant, visionary but not always comfortable, I call attention now to the ways that colonial capitalist modernity has deepened and metastasized the existing human tendency to drive out that which is different.

This is not really about the politics of "diversity," but it also is.

This is not merely a half-baked call to "nonconformism," but it is hopefully a more mature one, both subtler and louder at the same time.

Variation, evolution, disruption

We hear often from the tech hegemony about the need to innovate and "disrupt," but theirs is a misleading fantasy. They do not change the status quo; they invent new ways of enforcing it. LLMs, for example, are not intended to liberate us from capitalist wage labor, and rather are only creating inflated productivity quotas for people who are employed and a higher barrier to entry or re-entry in the labor market.[1]

By contrast, the universe's real disruptors truly do new, different things. This does not mean those things are always beneficial for everyone, nor does it mean those things are always pleasant — consider, for example, the first parasitic wasp. But in the dance of creation, because of infinite possibility we find that for each agent of destruction and predation that arises, there will be something else that evolves to counteract it or to thrive in the new paradigm. Every ecosystem is a byproduct of fierce yet balanced exchanges between beings of unique specificity, their competition and their cooperation indistinguishable. And crucially, it is not possible to sustain these perpetually shifting rhythms if each dancer always remains the same or always performs the same steps.

Chaos is creation.

I praise the refugee, the migrant worker, the descendant of souls trafficked from far away. While each of these may still fall into traps of relating to their new land as settlers, in a better, postcolonial future the flows of people between lands would not be so fraught because people would come in good relation; and for now, those people with far more violent, exploitative settler histories are many of the same ones reluctant to admit visitors past their artificial borders. In the best circumstances, newcomers should be sacred guests.

I praise those of us (human and more-than-human) who share pleasure in novel ways, who reproduce in novel ways, who choose lifemates with whom direct reproduction is not possible but for whom other forms of community perpetuation are more possible.

I praise the mutations that fail. The ones that lead to miscarriage and death. These beings and moments still play a part. Their value is no less than their fellows.

I praise the mutations that succeed yet produce disability and deformity. Not because my own disabilities make me any more superior than inferior, but because they create one more alternate perspective — and proof that where "ability" actually lies is a shifting concept depending on one's ecosystem, for in certain circumstances a disability does become an advantage, or one's learned resilience becomes especially important.

I praise those of us who resist convention, not because all tradition is useless (far from it) but because while tradition has regenerative properties, convention does not. I praise those of us who choose to see other ways beyond stasis. I praise those of us who make sacrifices for their ethics rather than for popularity.

The spirit of Aquarius is eccentric but also altruistic, showing the perfect synthesis between liberatory autonomy and sustainable collectivism.

Real witch hunts

We have lived in the time of the witch hunt for at least half a millennium. It drives me to madness when people describe an overdue reckoning for an abusive, powerful figure as a "witch hunt"; yet it also drives me to madness when people insist that witch hunts are a thing of the past.

They are still happening, all the time. A witch hunt is a frenzy for elimination of variety, elimination of the unexpected, elimination of the difficult.

This was exemplified in Europe's early modern witch trials that flowed together with the Reformation, and in the echoes that recurred here on Turtle Island not far from where I now live. Of course, there's an increasingly widespread framing of those trials as a form of femicide (deliberate persecution and killing of women) and likewise as an attempt by hegemonic Christianity to further stamp out traditional animist knowledge systems that preceded it; I largely agree with this even though statistics are sometimes grotesquely inflated[2], men were frequent victims, and a plurality if not majority of witch hunt victims did not practice any kind of real witchcraft at all. But this last observation is key to what I consider an even broader, more total view of those witch hunts constituted: they were often excuses for the seizure and private consolidation of land, occurring in tandem with the enclosure of the commons, and the best targets for such dispossessions were either people who had real oddities to use as an excuse, or people who could be cast as outsiders nonetheless. People who weren't people-pleasers; people with even mildly heretical opinions or less-than-pious lifestyles, including the keeping of older ways; Jews, Roma, immigrants; people with disabilities, mental illnesses, trauma histories; people who looked in some way "abnormal"; people trying to express sexual or gender variance in whatever way felt safe to them at the time; people who just weren't very popular in town, whether for unfair or fair reasons; people who got on the wrong side of interpersonal disputes.

Still typically women, but not always, and among them they were often poor enough to make easy targets or wealthy but unmarried (sometimes widowed) and thus lacking the privileges afforded by a husband, as well as being intolerably independent.

Things have not really changed.

We need to act wisely. We need to be fighting against the witch hunts that the hegemonic authorities and their supporters still perpetuate, and we also need to recognize how the patterns can replicate even in "progressive" communities, whenever somebody convinces the rest of their group that somebody else is dangerous even though such an assessment was not really made in good faith. We need the strangers and the strangest among us.

[1] Among ten thousand other problems.

[2] Here is my usual reminder that nine million people were not killed on charges of witchcraft in that time period. A few tens of thousands should remain an appalling figure in its own right.

Thank you for reading. Next week, I'll finally be continuing my history of the pan-Mediterranean esoteric tradition. The week after, I'll share some thoughts with paid subscribers on what I perceive as the differences between solitary homesteading versus communal land recovery (speaking from a far less experienced perspective than what the likes of Rancho de la Libertad can offer, but applying some of my theoretical and practical backgrounds to considerations I now make for any homestead or commune project I ever embark upon).