The Comet Hale-Bopp The Navigator for April 1997

The valiant captains will rule the sea Till the comet's return Hello, my love, here's to your heart! Release that dream into the world Joining the airwaves, leaving tonight How does it feel to follow the light? Alphaville Celestial events bear messages. That's the whole idea behind astrology. A comet is now blazing like a torch across the night sky, visible from the Netherlands and the Nevada badlands, from Woodstock and the Acropolis. Yet if it is a harbinger, the question is, of what? In the earliest days of astrology (the logos, or language of the stars), it was up to the astrologer not just to interpret, but to predict celestial events as basic as eclipses, and powerful omens were derived from whether they got it wrong or right. Today, with our humming computers and our crisp, machine-generated ephemerides and their precise tables of planetary positions extending centuries into the future, it's easy to fall into the belief that everything we experience is written neatly in the stars, and that our only limitation is the skill of the astrologer in reading it. When a comet shows up, we are blown back to our primal, pre-literate roots, beyond time and timing, to an era before the current, mostly mistaken belief that we possess any coherent understanding of the universe and its laws. The comet is a return to the mythos, the wispy roots of consciousness, trailing off into nothingness. Arriving in the sky in its own moment and from a weird angle, it represents a concept that's not listed in the lexicon; there are no books to research its specific meaning. Astrologers, who are great lovers of established technique, ancient tradition and long-sustained precedent, are left to search their own minds for its message. The one comet we can actually chart and read in astrology, Chiron, provides incredible information about hidden cycles of our lives, and how the seemingly most tragic or incomprehensible events are the transition points into our healing and fully evolved humanity. Discovering its themes of healing and revelation during the past 20 years has turned modern astrology inside-out, and harkened the return of the craft to its roots as a spiritual divination art and healing practice. Our new comet quite literally represents a breakthrough to another sphere of consciousness -- a very old, forgotten one -- careening in from far beyond any of the known planetary realms, and therefore from deep within the collective psyche. How deep? The farthest known planet, Pluto, which we like to think of in astrology as representing the depths of the subconscious and the underworld, has an orbit of just 248 years. The last time comet Hale-Bopp showed up here was about 4,200 years ago, as a nameless fire in the sky. Comets always represent a force intruding into our preconceived notions of everything that's "comfortable" and "normal," though life is really neither these days, and we know it. Comets can be very upsetting, to be sure, and they have not been viewed as friendly creatures by prophets or astrologers, but that's very likely because they defied prediction and were foreboding of change. And change itself is often seen as representing disaster (dis-aster, which literally means 'bad star'). Our attempt to understand a comet reminds us of a huge puzzle: by what process did the ancients interpret the planets in the first place? What is the art that was lost? Obviously it came through consciousness, and so the comet forces us to be conscious to investigate the nature of our own reality without asking mommy, daddy or the professor to sum it all up. In historical terms, this is no ordinary comet, having come simultaneously with a solar eclipse. The last time this happened was 1963, the year John F. Kennedy was murdered; the time before, 1948, when an assassin felled Gandhi. Where we now stand in history -- deep within the time of Revelation -- can lead to some pretty fateful possibilities emerging. And yet here, we are also presented with several options: to fear the apocalypse; to evolve and push the machinery of growth to its limits, knowing that the sum total of our individual enlightenments adds up to the culture's liberation; or merely to wonder. Read in context, though, the astrology of the past several months has been a fireworks show of positive, transformative energy, much of it on very deep psychic and soul levels, so to me it hardly portends disaster. My astrological instincts say if I want a clue about this comet's message, look at its cycle. Our high-priests of mathematics tell us this comet was last here about the year 2213 BCE. What was happening then that has come full circle now? What process was begun at that time that is reaching its culmination today? One cycle ago, 4,200 years ago, techniques for calculating and therefore predicting equinoxes and solstices -- the cycles of the Sun -- were developed in China. The lunar year of 360 days was changed a to variable Sun/Moon cycle, repeating an emphasis on the Sun and its visual energy, which grants consciousness and enables us literally to see contrasts and differences, and yet can also render a person blind. The Moon, the older god, emanates a softer, unifying energy that seems to glow more within us than without. Emphasis on the Sun can be found at this time in Egypt as well, with the Sun god Re taking his position as the father of the Pharaoh, who was himself previously believed to be the sovereign god. (The arrival of the comet this time at an equinox and between two eclipses is a beautiful thematic synchronicity on the Sun/Moon cycles, and some people are reporting healings around their parents concurrent with these events.) Mytho-historian Joseph Campbell reports circa 2213 BCE as the end of a transition into which human society was becoming seen as something that existed in many distinct parts, taking us away from a unified cosmology with the whole contained within each person. In a sense, it was around this comet's last visit here that the modern world began to form, and the natural world began to fall apart, at least in our minds. Also around this time, Sumerians were building ziggurat temples, stepped pyramids reaching to the sky in a feeble attempt to reconnect Earth and Heaven, which their own intellects had torn asunder. Not much later, Hammurabi's code gave us the birth of bureaucracy, modern "law and order" and its midnight cavity searches when you get nailed for speeding. In short, it's the very era where we find the roots of the fragmentation of the modern mind, the origins, in the words of Dr. Diasetz T. Suzuki, of a reality in which, "Man is against God, Nature is against God and Man and Nature are against each other." And now, with the return of the comet, that cycle is drawing to a close -- at least for the willing and the conscious. We know that it's time to get it together, not as some kind of luxury, but as a vital necessity. "It" means you, and "it" means us. We know that we will never heal our relationships, much less our society, without healing ourselves, and we need each other's cooperation to do this, and then together can create a future that is different from the past. Indeed, you are not your past, you are Now. You are free. You are one being, united with the One Being. You exist as a sovereign god reigning over your universe, with and as one with the Sovereign God within -- like the old Pharaoh who _was_ his god-essence and did not need to have it projected upwards or outward. As a sovereign, you must accept your power. In other words, if you don't like your life, change it. If you have something to say, say it. If you have something to do, do it. If you need help, ask for it. Ultimately, the message of this comet will be very individual, but it will always be a comment about now, because it is happening now. When you look at the comet, it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks; it's a direct experience between you and the living Word.