Rebellion and Celebration

We Need Both

REBELLION AND CELEBRATION

I love to rebel against bad things. To question, resist, and nullify actions that are hurtful to others is one of my primal motivators and sources of life energy.

I also love to celebrate good things. Blending energies with what I love — cheering on, enjoying, and helping what's beautiful and true — is a primal motivator and source of life energy.

These modes are complementary and synergistic for me. One isn’t better or more necessary than the other.

My concept of PRONOIA applies to both. PRONOIA is the quest to name and rejoice in what works and thrives — and also the drive to beautify and redeem all that is ugly and toxic so as to create more of a paradise on earth.

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In the second half of this newsletter, I am, as usual, offering you my horoscopes for your inspiration and enjoyment.

In the early sections below, though, I am going to primarily rebel against bad things.

I understand and sympathize if you don’t want to read the rebellion part. During the ongoing Trumpocalypse, we are being inundated with difficult news. If you prefer to focus on celebrating good things, enjoy this week’s horoscopes and some of rmy recent positive newsletters. Here are links to them:

We Are Allowed to Feel Good: tinyurl.com/AllowedToFeelGood

Positive Steps to Take: tinyurl.com/PositiveStepsToTake

Where Do We Seek Inspiration: tinyurl.com/SeekingInspiration

Compassion Outlaws: tinyurl.com/CompassionOutlaws

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Now for the rebellious stuff:

WHAT WE RESIST PERSISTS? NO!

A certain famous spiritual teacher tells us that "what we resist, persists" — implying that our fight against the enemies of humanity somehow reinforces their power and weakens us. (I wonder if in this teacher’s view, antibiotics that fight off infections are reinforcing the infections.)

For me, it's not true that what I resist, persists. I regularly resist influences that I don’t want in my life , and I am very successful in getting rid of them. I also regulary resist influences that I think are harmful to others, and I am often successful in that work.

Furthermore, resisting evil in the world is a core drive for me. To do this sacred work strengthens and inpires me. It is one key aspect of my life’s mission.

And so I welcome and encourage the gift of my rebellion against ugliness, injustice, and cruelty. The act of working and even fighting hard on behalf of beauty, truth, and goodness nourishes my soul.

In the Hermetic Magick I have studied for decades, we learn that there are discarnate entities that actively seek to undermine the evolution of human consciousness and culture — and that it's our righteous duty to dispel them, outwit them, nullify their effects, and wound their ability to harm us.

Some New Age teachers tell us that when we name and rail against the toxicity in Trump and his many enablers, we are only projecting our own unacknowledged negative qualities — our “shadows” — onto them.

This claim is incorrect and dangerous.

I have long communed and negotiated with my personal demons — "invited them to tea" — and sought their redemption. There's no danger of me ignoring or underestimating the unripe aspects of my own conditioning that potentially obstruct me from fulfilling my soul's code and being of service to the greater good. But I guarantee you that they have nothing in common, no overlap at all, with the evil that is currently running rampant in America.

It's not even a little bit true that I am ignoring my own darkness and projecting it onto the evil that Trump presides over.

I don't begrudge others who say that they want to work on dissolving all "Us versus Them" imprints in their own psyche. I don't denounce their insistence that "all we need is love.”

But these approaches are irrelevant and meaningless to me in our current emergency. In my view, we are embroiled in a spiritual war, and we need to do all we can to ensure the good guys win.

"Winning" doesn't mean we will extinguish evil forever and completely. Evil will always be with us. The intention is to seal evil back in its containers so it's not careening savagely through our beautiful world.

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The JiveSicko SlamChoker

My allies and I are ruminating sadly about how the devil has pulled off the ultimate swindle and grabbed supreme power in our home country of America.

Not the Christian devil, of course, which is a cartoony fraud conjured up by deceptive power-mongers to manipulate uneducated pawns. We mean the real, authentic avatar of evil, known by many names throughout history, including the Zoroastrians’ Angra Mainyu, the Egyptians’ Set, the Muslims’ Iblis, the Buddhists’ Mara, and the Algonquins’ Wendigo or Wetiko.

Our name for this discarnate but very real entity is JiveSicko SlamChoker. He has always been a key player in human destiny.

And he has of course been a very active presence in the American experiment right from the start. What other nation on the planet is rooted in genocides against two different groups of people? The JiveSicko SlamChoker is a long-time influencer in United States history.

However, he had for a long time also been partially contained in our homeland—not been allowed to rampage through every crevice and cranny of American destiny. Because of this imperfect but semi-effective curtailment, the American endeavor has also managed to generate a wide array of wonders and marvels. Some of these have been inspirational on a global level.

But the partial containment broke down completely a quarter of the way through the 21st century. Through a tragic concatenation of grievous failures, the JiveSicko SlamChoker escaped all his chains and clawed his way to the role of apex predator at the commanding heights of the American power structure.

“Demonic possession” is a term that has been trivialized and diluted through its silly misuse by the same semi-dead souls who spawned the cartoon devil. But it is a real phenomenon. It happens when a discarnate entity like JiveSicko SlamChoker invades a human being, seizes control — switching off the human’s conscious awareness — and becomes a puppetmaster in full dominion.

This all-too-real version of demonic possession may not confine itself to one person, but can involve simultaneous invasions of multiple humans.

That’s exactly the predicament in the America we now live in. The JiveSicko SlamChoker has demonically possessed hordes, with an especially tight control over a cadre of ultra-rich technocrats, predominantly older white men, whose 922-page manifesto of sterile evil is known as Project 2025.

So to be clear: JiveSicko SlamChoker is a sovereign who not only operates the mind and body of the excruciatingly cruel man who holds the official position of greatest political power.

The truth is that the JiveSicko SlamChoker has strict and strenuous sway over millions, with an extra emphatic dominance over the few thousand vacant souls who authored and administer the toxic and traumatic dictums of Project 2025.

At this dangerous and precarious plot twist in the evolution of the American experiment, the JiveSicko SlamChoker has grabbed more authority than he has ever had over the most formidable nation on earth. We can’t maneuver him back into his old partial bondage simply by evicting one man or even a few men from their political positions. Their dominance is becoming entrenched. Their imperious rule is growing deeper roots.

The bigoted, cruel, inhumane, poisonous, authoritarian JiveSicko SlamChoker pulled off the ultimate swindle and grabbed supreme power in our home country, America.

Now we the people must get it back in its chains. Many of us are working very hard to do this.

Rebecca Solnit wrote all the words in this section and i the meme above.

I'm a US-born straight white person, so I intend to be loud, bold, and make more noise because some people have reasonable fear they can't make any at all. And the more of us who can and do make noise the harder it is to go after us. You can stop a hundred or a thousand but not so easily a million. (And yeah I know they try to make examples of people, and the solidarity around those seized has been beautiful.)

Speaking up while others can't means listening carefully, amplifying what others can't say, and being committed to solidarity. Not really new for a lot of us who've been making noise about trans rights, immigrant rights, racial justice, etc. But now more than ever some of us are being terrorized out of speaking up, and those of us less at risk must speak up more than ever. And I'm not assuming that I can speak for as in place of, but I can amplify.

And I know that plenty of at-risk people are making lots of good noise. But I know a lot can't. This post was prompted by someone who felt they were losing their safety in speaking. As immigrant students are trying to delete their editorials, and others are feeling they must censor themselves, lie low, delete social media, and otherwise be silenced.

(And here I'm trying to talk TO people who have the same relative safety I do. We have a duty. And I know all the ways speaking for others has been problematized, but I know the history of silence as abandonment and the opposite of solidarity too.)

THIS IS SERIOUS

The kaleidoscopic madness swirling around us — this hellish carnival of decimation interspliced with toxic whirlwinds of absurd cruelty — makes sense when you recognize an essential truth:

The bigoted misogynist theocratic empathy-despising oligarchs who have seized power are not interested in changing the policies and personnel of the United States government.

Rather, their ambitions are deeper and more comprehensive. They aspire to dismantle the very architecture of American democracy and society — brick by brick, beam by beam. All of it!

Their goals are to wreck the machinery of the federal government, to smash the judicial system, to annihilate the system of checks and balances.

They yearn — yes, yearn — to ruin American education, from the universities to the kindergartens.

Because they distrust and despise science, they lust to wound it, even mutilate it, in every way they can.

Our right to manage and shepherd our own bodies? They detest it, loathe it, and conspire to quash it.

The possibility that anyone who's not wealthy might receive decent medical care? They deplore and disdain that noble cause.

The theory that compassion is among the highest of all ideals and sentiments? They denounce it and refuse it.

Maybe more than all other hatreds, they abhor the freedom of the imagination. Artistic expression is their enemy, an irrepressible multiplicity of viewpoints their scourge.

Why such sweeping devastation, such relentless cruelty?

Because in their diseased worldview, they fantasize that these institutions themselves — the very shapes and structures, the bones and sinews of the republic — have been corrupted at the molecular level.

They hallucinate these anchors not as neutral frameworks but as secret agents of what they've branded with sneering, terrified contempt as "the Woke Left" — a fictitious bogeyman lurking within their horrific misunderstanding of democracy's design itself.

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

Week of May 1

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Taurus author Nellie Bly (1864–1922) was a daring trailblazer. It was almost impossible for a woman to be a journalist in the 19^th century, but she did it anyway. One of her sensational groundbreaking stories came when she did an undercover assignment in New York’s Women’s Lunatic Asylum. Her reporting on the neglect and brutality there prompted major reforms. I nominate Bly as your role model for the foreseeable future. You are, I believe, poised for epic, even heroic adventures, in service to a greater good. (PS: Bly also made a solo trip around the world and wrote 15 books.)

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Gemini painter Henri Rousseau (1844–1910) never saw a jungle in person. In fact, he never left his native country of France. But he painted some of modern art's most vivid jungle scenes. How did that happen? Well, he visited zoos and botanical gardens, perused images of tropical forests in books, and heard stories from soldiers who had visited jungles abroad. But mostly, he had a flourishing imagination that he treated with reverent respect. I urge you to follow his lead, Gemini. Through the joyful, extravagant power of your imagination, get the inspiration and education you need. The next three weeks will be prime time to do so.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): No, ruby-throated hummingbirds don't hitch rides on airplanes or the backs of geese. They make their epic migrations completely under their own power. To get to their wintering grounds, many fly alone from the southern United States to the Yucatan Peninsula, crossing the 500-mile expanse of the Gulf of Mexico in 20 hours. I don’t recommend you attempt heroic feats like theirs in the coming weeks, Cancerian. More than usual, you need and deserve to call on support and help. Don’t be shy about getting the exact boosts you require. It’s time to harvest the favors you are owed and to be specific in articulating your wishes.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): The golden pheasant is dazzling. Among the bright colors that appear in its plumage are gold, red, orange, yellow, blue, black, green, cinnamon, and chestnut. In accordance with astrological omens, I name this charismatic bird to be your spirit creature for the coming weeks. Feel free to embrace your inner golden pheasant and express it vividly wherever you go. This is a perfect time to boldly showcase your beauty and magnificence, even as you fully display your talents and assets. I brazenly predict that your enthusiastic expression of self-love will be a good influence on almost everyone you encounter.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Virgo poet and visual artist Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012) had a few mottoes that endlessly nurtured her abundant creative output. Here's one: "Keep your eye on your inner world and keep away from ads, idiots, and movie stars." As excellent as that advice is, it's a challenge to follow it all the time. If we want to function effectively, we can't always be focused on our inner worlds. However, I do believe you are now in a phase when you’re wise to heed her counsel more than usual. Your soul's depths have a lot to teach you. Your deep intuition is full of useful revelations. Don’t get distracted from them by listening too much to ads, idiots, and celebrities.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is essential for the functioning of your body and every other animal’s. It carries instructions about how to build proteins, and your cells are full of it. We humans can’t edit this magic substance, but octopuses can. They do it on the fly, enabling them to adapt quickly to changing environmental conditions. Even though you Libras can’t match their amazing power with RNA, you do have a substantial capacity to rewrite your plans and adjust your mindset. And this talent of yours will be especially available to you in the coming weeks. Your flexibility and adaptability will not only help you navigate surprises but may also open up exciting new opportunities.

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SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Is there a sanctuary you can retreat to? A relaxing oasis where you can slip away from the world’s colorful madness? I would love for you to be bold enough to seek the precise healing you need. You have every right to escape the rotting status quo and give yourself full permission to hide from pressure, demands, and expectations. Is there music that brings you deep consolation? Are there books and teachers that activate your profound soul wisdom? Keep that good stuff nearby. It's time for focused relief and regeneration.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): The chemical element known as arsenic is notoriously toxic for humans, but has long been useful in small amounts. Ancient Chinese metallurgists discovered that blending it with copper and tin made the finest, strongest bronze. In modern times, arsenic fortifies the lead in car batteries. People in the 19th century sometimes ingested tiny doses as a stimulant. In this spirit, Sagittarius, I invite you to transform potentially challenging elements in your life into sources of strength. Can you find ways to incorporate iffy factors instead of eliminating them? I assure you that you have the power to recognize value in things others may neglect or reject.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Renowned Capricorn author Henry Miller (1891–1980) had to wait far too long before getting readers in his home country, the United States. American censors regarded his explosive texts as too racy and sexy. They forbade the publication of his books until he was 69 years old! His spirit was forever resolute and uncrushable, though. In accordance with astrological omens, Capricorn, I recommend you adopt his counsel on the subject of wonders and marvels. Miller wrote, "The miracle is that the honey is always there, right under your nose, only you were too busy searching elsewhere to realize it." Here's another gem from Miller: He advised us “to make the miracle more and more miraculous, to swear allegiance to nothing, but live only miraculously, think only miraculously, die miraculously."

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): For now, everything depends on your foundation, your roots, and your support system. If I were you, I would devote myself to nurturing them. Please note that you’re not in any jeopardy. I don’t foresee strains or tremors. But your graduation to your next set of interesting challenges will require you to be snugly stable, secure, and steady. This is one time when being thoroughly ensconced in your comfort zone is a beautiful asset, not a detriment to be transcended.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): The coming weeks are a favorable time for you to build symbolic bridges. I hope you will link resources that aren’t yet linked. I hope you will work to connect people whose merger would help you, and I hope you will begin planning to move from where you are now to the next chapter of your life. I advise you to not model your metaphorical bridges after modern steel suspension bridges, though. Instead, be inspired by the flexible, natural, and intimate bridges made by the ancient Incas. Woven from ichu grass via community efforts, they were strong enough to span rivers and canyons in the Andes mountains.

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