Part Two:
Twelve Phases of Human Experience
PISCES - Page 2 of 3

Pisces, in its negative or subjective aspect, represents the realm of the subconscious (Freud) or the personal unconscious (Jung). This personal unconscious is the end-product of all the individual's failures at adapting himself successfully to his environment — from family up to organized society, from Cancer to Capricorn. The contents of the personal unconscious are negative, because produced by a subjective defeatism which leads to self-pity and feeds the multitudinous fears constituting inverted psychic energy. Complexes are crystallized fears. Energy, in them, is "tied in knots" and circulates no longer. The power-filled substance of the psyche, through them, has turned slowly destructive, or at least distorting. The complex is at times like a concave or convex mirror which disshapes the images of living. It is psychic astigmatism. At other times, it becomes revengeful and cancerous: a growth that eats up the psycho-mental substance of consciousness and produces schizophrenia and the various kinds of manias.
      In Pisces, these complexes must be faced. The confrontation may be met through understanding, through guided self-introspection (psychological analysis under a trained analyst), through the many techniques devised by Oriental gurus. But, in a great many cases, it implies not only an individual effort but as well a collective arousal, such as comes through a wave of religious fervor. This need be so, because crystallizations to be dealt with are not only caused by the individual's failure, but even more by the fallacious and atrophying traditions of family, religion and society, which impose upon the child since birth a collection of often ludicrous obstacles — some, however, unavoidable and on the whole constructive — to the spontaneous and natural flow of his energies.
      Thus it is said that the "sins of the fathers" shall visit seven generations. Our modern neuroses are likewise to be laid at the doors of the Victorian era, which in turn merely revealed the pressures and fallacies forced upon our European-Christian humanity for centuries and which only an aristocratic framework of society had kept from contaminating every man, woman and child. This framework having collapsed, the individualistic rule of the bourgeoisie, exacerbated by the release of vast powers through technology, let loose all the monsters of the subconscious. Thus, our many complexes and manias, just as the early Middle Ages — heirs to the decay of the Celtic and Roman Empires — had their succubi and incubi, their demons and their witches.
      Man has to face not only his personal unconscious but also the collective unconscious of his particular race, of his particular culture. Birth in Aries means having passed through this deceitful and dark realm of racial memories, which the occultist has named the "astral world" or the "lower astral light." Rebirth in Aries means, for the mature personality, to have faced the "Guardian of the threshold" whose terrors are graphically pictured in Bulwer Lytton's famous novel Zanoni; and to have won in the encounter. In a positive sense, every birth means assimilating the mother's blood. The future must ever feed on the substance of the past. This past, the eternal mother, is Mary; which means etymologically, the "sea," whence all life must always spring, whether for birth or rebirth.
      Nothing is produced vitally anew which does not emerge from the "sea." And the "sea" is Pisces, ruled by Neptune. Neptune's trident has three prongs and Pisces' zodiacal hieroglyph has also three lines. For this reason, the Gospel symbolism speaks of the three "Marys": Mary, the Mother; Mary, the lovebearer; Mary, the servant — birth, rebirth and every-day living in consecrated activity. In Pisces, the individual must go through the Eternal Feminine. This is the eternal Chrysalis, which is as nothing, yet which contains all potencies of renewal. It is the realm of metamorphosis and that of psychic glamour; the world of rapture and that of eternal mist; openness to God and mediumship to the phantasms of a decaying past; the martyr's sacrifice and the ghastly Inquisitions which feed sadistic frustrations under the mask of religious work.