Since the zodiac was invented during the transition from the Age of Aries to the Age of Pisces, it naturally started counting at Aries and stopped counting at Pisces.

But since we are now approaching the Age of Aquarius, the time has come to update the zodiac and shift this default permutation!

The transition that restarts the zodiac, Pisces → Aries, stands for the passing of something from theory to practice, from virtuality to actuality, from thoughts to acts; in brief, it is always the application of one thing or another.

So the “experience inaccessible to rational theorization”, the famous Kantian Thing-In-Itself, actually stands for some vague memory of the long-gone Age of Aries from the standpoint of the present Age of Pisces.

In the current end-times of Pisces, the iconic “apps” on our smart phone, the enjoyment of fingering the screen and hearing the phone whimper, is actually nothing other than some vague nostalgia for the Age of Aries.

And this is why the still widespread political tradition of emphasizing people’s practice at the expense of intellectuals’ theorization (think of Karl Marx’s famous Eleventh Thesis) is inherently regressive and reactionary, it’s an attempt to revert back to some imitation of the Age of Aries (think of the recent rise of neo-fascism) although this is an understandable reaction because the Age of Pisces has always gotten more and more confusing.

It was Hegel who famously said “What is rational is actual, what is actual is rational.”

This means that the widespread nostalgia for the Kantian Thing-In-Itself (in popular wisdom: “less talking, more doing!” or think of the ridiculous ennobling of sexual activity) is pointless because there is no going back to the Age of Aries.

We are absolutely dependent on the linguistic confusion that was unleashed during the Age of Pisces (whose latest name is “postmodernism”) and this is why we must learn “how to do things with words!” (as Freudian psychoanalysis did and still does with its “talking cure”)

Astrology is an Hermetic technique (practice) that was invented in the last centuries before the Christ (Age of Aries) whereas its philosophical support (theory) was constructed in the first centuries after the Christ (Age of Pisces) in the form of Corpus Hermeticum [1].

This means that astrology is the ultimate “app” that is now gradually replacing the pointless Arien nostalgia.

Now as we approach the Age of Aquarius, the Pisces → Aries axis loses its dominance to the Leo/Aquarius axis, which stands for the individual (Leo) versus the society (Aquarius).

In the current end-times of Pisces, our imagination is preoccupied less with “applying theory in practice” and more with “the individual traversing the society” (otherwise known as the Hero’s Journey).

Hollywood film industry boomed by quickly tapping into the new Leo/Aquarius axis but our intellectual tradition is still stuck at the Pisces → Aries axis, it’s still looking for different “apps”.

Let me conclude with my proposal:
We must initiate the zodiac from Leo and conclude it with Cancer.

If not anything else, the symmetry of the ruling planets dictate that the Zodiac must begin with the Sun and finally reach the Moon, just like the sunlight does every night (see the figure above). Moreover, Cancer is the best conclusion one can reach because the Zodiac already looks like a crab.

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] Listen to this podcast as to why: “Hermeticism and Ancient Astrology”