Corona Virus and The Pleasures of Mass Delusion

March 3, 2020

(UPDATED)

Several years ago, I wrote what was then one of my favorite articles. At the time, there was a mass panic amongst a certain segment of American Christians over the forthcoming “Rapture,” counterpointed by the uproarious mockery of the secular journalistic class at what deluded morons these religious people were .

The Christian Right is a reliable intellectual punching bag for the learned professional punditry class, and in the article I note that the air signs (intellectuals) and the water signs (emotionalists) are in eternal conflict, with neither understanding the other on their own terms. While intellectuals have spent thousands of years trying to convince religious people to abandon their “irrational” occupations, they have nonetheless failed to notice that trying the same tactics over and over again without generating different results has self-dumped the intellectual class into the same “insane” category as they pre-delivered the religious class. At the extremes, we become our opposites. Oh the riotousness of the human condition. . .

At that time, we were experiencing the first Sun/Neptune square of Neptune’s ingress into its home sign, the most irrational sign of Pisces, which rules, among other things “rapture” and redemption. The Sun at the time was in the unrelentingly rational sigh of Gemini, and so the fun was inevitable with the clearly reasonable people taking the piss out of, what turned out to be, the deluded class.

Well these days, we are experiencing the Sun’s conjunction of Neptune, which is still in Pisces nearly a decade later. In this particular coupling, the “reasonable” Sun is passing through the sign of mass confusion, delusion, and the blurring of boundaries, where Neptune has been nesting this whole time, quietly working our dissolution without us even noticing.

Neptune is a long study unto itself, but its committed exploration is one of the biggest gifts of astrology. Being able to “detach” even momentarily from our spiritual longings, our quests for redemption, and our penchant - no matter how smart we are - for being swept up in mass delusion can help us gain clarity and perspective in our lives, while still enjoying the thrill of being caught up in mass movements as well as the glimpses of enlightenment we are all entitled to while living under the burdens of our mortal coils.

After all, Neptune rules all of these things, and its power, especially when we actively deny it, is overwhelming. Which is sort of the point. Being caught up in a mass delusion is only fun if you actually believe “we’re all gonna die,” or “Judgment is at hand,” or whatever else has got your panties in a wad. Lemmings only go over the cliff because “everyone else is doing it,” not because it was part of a well thought out plan. That is the ecstasy of self-immolation.

Now happily, I am not a doctor. Nor a professional virologist. Nor any other dispenser of medical advice. But I have to say that the global PANIC that has set in in recent weeks is as Neptunian as a trident and the deep blue sea. There is a ton of misinformation, disinformation, conflicting information being bandied about like so much ectoplasm. Sometimes it seems the numbers are being depressed, sometimes it seems they are being inflated. Sometimes it appears that the tests aren’t accurate and that many of the dead may not be Corona victims after all. Some tell us to stock up on masks, while others tell us that masks may increase our risk of infection. Chaos and confusion are running roughshod over all of our reasonable faculties.

And the conspiracists are out in force and often appear to be the rational ones, reminding us that we are looking at a “mysterious” disease of “unknown origin” but with less than a 1% mortality rate. They remind us that SARS, Bird Flu and Bird Flu II, Zika, Swine Flu, Ebola, and numerous other “we’re all gonna die!!” pandemics turned out to be nothing more than clickbait campaigns of misinformation with virtually zero real consequences. Given this truth, many believe Corona is a sham put out by the Vaccine industry, which magically had a patented antidote at the ready for a disease that is less than 3 months old. Others say the disease is being “pumped” to destroy the market and dethrone Trump in November. The timing just seems so curious!!

What is absolutely certain is that nobody has any idea what is going on. Even the most informed of us are confused, and those who speak with knowing authority are immediately contradicted and sound like crazy people from almost any other vantage point, whether it be reasonable or not.

The whole spectacle is fascinating to behold and delightfully Neptunian.

Liz Greene, in her seminal work on Neptune reminds us that Neptune also rules fashion and the irrepressible desire to do what everybody else is doing. And whether they would admit to it or not, everybody loves a global freakout. They get collectivized permission to abandon their reason and go crazy for a bit, like a medically-sanctioned Carnevale for the educated class. The rush to the supermarkets, the endless gossip and innuendo fodder, all approved by the authorities without fear of “appearing” irrational while nonetheless acting crazy must be a huge relief for the buttoned up bourgeoisie who would never approve of raptures or space aliens coming down, but nonetheless get to live out their repressed prepper fantasies as soon as the CDC makes its latest confusing pronouncement.

I like to compare this secular version of the “rapture” to the Christian one referenced above, because it is exactly the same impulse. People’s medical literacy substitutes for religious indoctrination as their justification for believing things that are very likely completely untrue. It allows them to feel the rush of an “end of days” phenomenon, validating their righteousness in choosing doctrinaire medicine over silly superstition and bracing themselves for that moment when they are overwhelmed by an invisible force far greater than them that will purge out the unclean, those foolish enough not to wear masks/stockpile Clorox/get vaccinated and leave only the elect and worthy behind. They may fear the latter day rapture, but they long for its cleansing flood all at the same time. That they get to experience this anxiety/anticipation collectively across the whole globe lends an air of modern day consequence to the fear that is positively religious in scope and meaning.

In short, people love this shit. Carte blanche to go crazy for a while cause “everyone is doing it,” and even the doctor-priests approve. Those who succumb to the illness will feel a sense of significance that they may have never felt before in their lives, having been laid low, nay, martyred by the disease to end all diseases. Talk about dying with dignity or even ecstasy. And it would indeed almost make burning up in a coughing fit worth it for the feeling of universal oneness with all of humanity whom we may yet have saved if only we had recited the proper incantations or purchased the correct grade hand sanitizer.

I mock because the same people who mock the nonsense of Christian millenarianism are yet completely susceptible to rapture-fears, as long as they are dispensed from the proper medical authorities and not the religious wing nuts. But astrologically, they are identical. It is the Neptunian archetype, the flood, the mass purging, and the ominous warnings that “The End is Near” that fulfill the archetype’s goals of oneness and redemption. And indeed, once the pandemic fear is over, we will have all been cleansed of some deep seated emotional terror in the way that Neptunian drama alone can do. So whether we all die, or we all laugh about it a month hence, the experience of end of days anticipation will serve our souls no matter what.

And that is the delight of Neptune. Like any great flood since Noah, the initial experience is terrifying, confounding, and overwhelming. But in the end we are indeed purged of our fears, whether by the vaccines themselves or simply by the heightened emotionalism of a close encounter with death, whether “real” or not.

The Sun conjuncts Neptune early in the morning on March 8th (PDT) , and my guess is that will be the peak of the panic itself, with things starting to dissipate towards the Equinox on the 19th. From there, we we will start to sober up and look forward to the year ahead, renewed and baptized by Neptune’s inimitable and invisible machinations of terror and redemption. And as always, from our safely cleansed perch, we will look back and ask, “What was I thinking?” with the kind of bewilderment of the drunk or drugged seeker coming down from a righteous high.

This kind of thing has to happen from time to time, and it behooves us to start to see things from the archetypal point of view, appreciating the dramas of life in their context and with perspective, rather than buying wholesale into the lemmings’ march into which Neptune can so easily seduce us. We’ve been here before. We’ll be here again. Enjoy the panic, the uncertainty, and the eventual restoration of sanity in the weeks ahead. In the end, it is what we all need, and there is nothing like a Neptunian delusion to deliver it en masse in the most colorful way possible.

UPDATE: March 19, 2020, 10pm PST

So things have definitely accelerated in recent days, as Corona Fever has swept the nation and the world. Schools have closed, quarantines have been implemented, and businesses have been shuttered anywhere crowds may gather (except for supermarkets and hospitals. . .) in major cities. It seems that people are taking the virus SERIOUSLY.

Nonetheless, my initial opinion remains unchanged. While I won’t turn this website into a newscast, I can’t help but notice that despite there being 1000s upon 1000s of new articles in circulation about the virus, no one has any definitive numbers on anything. We don’t know how many people are infected, and therefore we de facto can not know what the death rate is. In many instances we can’t even confirm that the cause of death was corona virus. Many reporters are telling us that the tests themselves, when available, are either ineffectual or were otherwise compromised.

Instead, we have a constant stream of breathless reporting that takes some spurious claim as its foundation, and then riffs from there as to what “could” be, even though no downstream opinions can possibly make sense without a firm foundation in reality.

But there we are back to Pisces. There is not reality with Pisces. The ground dissolves beneath us like quicksand. The facts get bobbled in our minds. Our unconscious complexes take over and slip logic under the rug without us even realizing we’re doing it. We are in a cloud of delusion, a haze of misunderstanding, a mist of myopia, and yet we are utterly possessed by some urgent notion of make-believe - with the chance of salvation or subsumption hanging in the balance - that we simply can not shake, even if we wanted to.

Again, we are losing our minds, and that’s exactly as things should be with (presently) 3 planets passing through the watery sign, drowning and merrily splashing all the way down.

But I do have a correction to make.

First of all, I ave to re-predict that when the Sun moves into Aries in about 24 hours, people will start to get uneasy. The quarantines were a neat respite from normal life, but “sequestering in place” fits the Piscean hermit’s rubric a lot better than the higher/warrior motif of Aries. A lot better.

That Spring fever you feel every year to slough off the old and get on with it is the unmistakable impetus of Aries, crawling out of the womb, teeming with life and vitality and yearning to do, act, and win that is utterly irrepressible in even the sloshiest among us.

Nearly every American led war in the past 20 years was begun on the first day of Spring, and while my hope is that the ingress stirs our skepticism and we put away the mento-emotional tumult of the past few weeks (reports are indeed emerging that the virus is subsiding in Korea and China), there is some risk that the fighting impulse of Aries may yet express as actual fighting and violence. If shortages were more seveer, I’d feel more comfortable with this interpretation (and queasy with its outcome), and while I won’t rule out some sort of fighting as a possibility, my sense is that the Arian restlessness will mainly do the work of focusing our minds on action vs retreat. And we just might come to our senses.

But the correction is this: I neglected to note that even as the Sun moves out of Pisces, Mercury, which rules logic, reason, and mention, is still happily swimming through the sigh of his Detriment, that is his weakest placement. After all, the mind requires crystalline clarity to work its charms, and beneath the sea of Pisces, no such clarity exists - and when it does, it quickly morphs into something equally unrecognizable. In short, Mercury in Pisces loses his mind naturally. He is incapable of objectivity, mental sobriety, or calculated strategy. He is buoy bouncing in the open waters at the best of times, a hypoxia-maddened deep diver tearing off his snorkel at the worst of times. We may yet get both expressions as our “intellectual” class continues to labor under Neptune’s maddening influence for the next 2 weeks.

So even as the collective Sun emerges, newly born, and Apollonian Reason births from Neptune’s Sionysian womb, the collective mind will be slow to catch up. So while the libido will want to act and throw off the shackles in the coming weeks, it may take some time for the scientific rationales to emerge and back up our will with reliable facts.

Of the latter we have exactly none right now, but that doesn’t stop the mad prophets from declaring and declaiming with abandon their scientific certainties which rest on nothing but hunches, inchoate fears, and imaginal millenarian hopes for vindication. Their thoughts are the pilot’s instruments flipping and bobbing in a nosedive of confusion. When Mercury joins the Sun in Aries next month, the group mind will focus, and with a certain ferocity that would be dashing had it not been so misguided in the previous cycle.

As with any transition from Pisces to Aries, we will wake up the novo homo, the new man, the Adam, reborn as if from nothing at all. And we will realize, if we even bother to notice, that the fantastical inanities of our previous temporal passage were so much placenta and afterbirth, ready to be disposed of as a temporary container whose purpose has been served in releasing the new god from the primal terror of the collective unconscious. In other words, it will be as if none of this had ever happened. Denials, obfuscations, and perfect hindsight will make us all “right” in the end, and we will sweep the silliness under the rug and move on with whatever is next.

My only reservation with this prediction is that Neptune himself will remain in Pisces for some time to come. He has been there for many years now, quietly undoing what our cultures have wrought over the past century, but nothing in my experience imagines he would act so overtly as to completely upend the culture all at once. That seems to be the work of the faster planets passing through the sign (i.e. Sun & Mercury). But if we are yet experiencing Neptune’s Earthquake aspect, then we may indeed be in for a wild ride of total dissolution in the months and, indeed, years to come.

We’ll find out soon enough. Spring starts tomorrow night. Let’s enjoy the last round of the party before we wake up anew. . .