Last Days of Pluto in Capricorn: Animism, Pan, and Nightmares

Hey, everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology. Today, we're going to spend some time reflecting on Pluto's final days in the sign of Capricorn. And to do that today, we are going to draw some parallels between the symbolism of Capricorn and the ancient mythology surrounding the God Pan, who was a half goat, half man, God that ancient philosophers and mystics sometimes associated with the sign of Capricorn for various reasons.

So we're going to look at some of those reasons. Today, I'm going to read you a few excerpts from one of my favorite books of all time, written by James Hillman, called Pan and the Nightmare. And so there are going to be some really interesting ways that we connect the sign of Capricorn and the sea goat to the symbolism of Pan and to things like animism. There's an interesting way in which the experience of nightmares comes into play in Hillman's book as he draws out some of the deeper archetypal and psychological significance of the God Pan.

So I think you'll find this really entertaining and interesting, and certainly it will give us a really nice way to think about Pluto, this lord of the underworld, and a God that is often associated with the processing of unconscious material, that often comes up in nightmares and dreams in general.

There's another book that Hillman wrote that's very Plutonian, and I thought about drawing on some things from that book as well, called Dream in the Underworld, but I thought today we're just going to focus on Pan and a few of the excerpts from this text. And I think you'll find it really interesting, especially as it relates to the sign of Capricorn and reflecting on what Pluto and Capricorn have been about, what it's done within us, and maybe how we've noticed it at work in the world. I think that there are some really nice ways of summarizing some of the philosophical and psychological value of this transit that we've been experiencing for, you know, going on, 16 years.

So that's what we'll do today. I think you'll really enjoy this. And again, I would also recommend, if you like the excerpts from this book, and I think you will, there's just a few brief ones that I'm going to read, and I would recommend reading the whole book, because it will blow your mind. But anyway, that's our goal for today.

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All right, let's go on now to talk about these final days of Pluto and Capricorn. We've done some horoscopes this week for Pluto and Capricorn, and today, we're going to reflect on a sort of deeper philosophical level about the meaning of Pluto and Capricorn.

So we can see Pluto having turned direct here in the sign of Capricorn. And let's just roll this forward. Pluto. It is going to start picking up speed after turning direct. And at that 29th anaretic degree, it has some culminating medicine for us between now and about November 19.

On November 19, we will see that Pluto will move into Aquarius by late afternoon. That's Central Time. I'm in Minneapolis. So, at that central time on the 19th, late afternoon, we see Pluto enter Aquarius, which will then stay for quite a long time. In fact, if we draw this out, let's just drag Pluto all the way through Aquarius, and you'll see that it's not going to fully enter Pisces until about 2045.

So, that is almost 20 years since Pluto was in Aquarius. Now, after leaving Capricorn, it is just such a different experience. They were both signs that were ruled by Saturn, and yet the Aquarian Saturn is very different from the Capricornian Saturn. We're going to talk about that today because I think that one of the things we forget, and part of this, is due to the way we think about Saturn. We forget that Capricorn is a feminine earth sign that is so closely related to an animistic and what I would broadly call the pagan experience of the world. Pagan only be. I mean that in an honorary sense. I'm not someone who thinks of the word pagan as a bad thing, you know, not like, at least not the way that Christians I heard in church growing up talked about pagan, right?

For me, pagan taps into something that is almost, I could almost describe it as Indigenous and global and archaic or primal, and it has to do with the way that divinity is experienced from the ground of physical being from the matrix of biological experience, and not from a place that is abstracted from that biological reality. Capricorn is such a sacred, beautiful, earthy sign that has so many spiritual values and lessons and offerings for us if we can understand that it is more than just a sign of, you know, keywords we throw around like limitations and strictness and duty and patriarchy and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, yes, there are some associations with Saturn and things like strictness or authoritarianism or whatever.

And there are dark sides to Capricorn. And we visited some of those in a couple of talks we did maybe several weeks ago now, where I looked at the things, the things Capricorn wants to impart to us before Pluto leaves, and Pluto and Capricorn wants to impart to us before it leaves, and maybe the things are ready to leave behind, and we explored the light and dark side of Capricorn.

But one thing that can be very valuable outside of extracting psychological lessons or attitudes and so forth. On an archetypal level, it can be to meditate on a figure or a god that was associated with the sign because when you meditate on a sign in relation to a god or goddess, there are so many that we can draw relationships to in the Zodiac, not even just the Roman or Greek gods, right? But so many from different traditions and cultures around the world will have an archetypal resemblance to the various signs of the Zodiac.

But when we do that, it gives us a deeper level because we're considering a figure or person, and just like you or I, we have experiences with each other or intimate friends or lovers. A person is multi-dimensional. You can't if someone says, Do you feel like you know your lover? There are two answers to that: yes, I know them very intimately. And because you understand how deep and ongoing and unfolding intimacy is, you also will say something like, I feel like I'm still getting to know them.

So, in some ways, penetrating into the deeper offerings of a sign happens more so when we meditate on Gods and Goddesses than when we just try to abstract theme themes or things that are applicable to our human experience. Sometimes, it just helps to think and meditate and learn about Aphrodite or, in this case, Capricorn Pan, which is one of the gods that was often associated with Capricorn.

So that's what we're going to do today. And then, after I read you a few really nice passages from this text by James Hillman, an archetypal psychologist who is a student of Carl Jung's Pan in the Nightmare, I'm going to tell you five features of Pan that we can take away, or that I've sort of taken away from this text in my life, and that I frequently associate with Capricorn because of the way that I think about Pan and the way that I have this ongoing, reflective relationship with this God.

That's the beauty of Gods and Goddesses. When you think about the Zodiac, not in terms of abstracting from the Zodiac, what I am is that I am a Capricorn. I am a this. I am afraid that my 12th house is a this or a that, blah, blah, blah. Instead, you look at the mandala of the Horoscope of your birth chart, and you think about it as an ecology, an animate, divine ecology of gods and goddesses, and that their positions and their conversations reflect something that can speak to you in a relationship, that it's not a blueprint of who you are.

But that it's this Mantic or oracular ecology that's filled with living, animate presences that you can relate to and that you can go and speak to. When you think of your chart like that, it changes everything. One of the figures in mythology that is actually most fundamentally associated with this kind of living, animate cosmos is Pan. We'll find out as we go that Pan is actually the one who teaches Apollo the skill of divination.

So anyway, let's read because I'm starting to get so excited I'm getting into a panic. All right, these are just a few various passages, and after I go through them, I'll offer some reflections as we go, but I want to make it clear that we're using all of these reflections about Pan as a bridge to understanding Pluto and Capricorn, and I'll try to draw that together by the end today. Okay, so again, this comes from James Hillman's Pan in the Nightmare. You can find it on Amazon, as far as I know.

Above all, we must remember that the pan experience is beyond the control of the willing subject and his ego psychology, even when the will is most disciplined and the ego most purposeful. I am thinking now of men in battle. Pan appears to be determining through panic the outcome of the fray. Twice in antiquity, at Marathon and against the Celts in 277 BCE, Pan appeared, and the Greeks had their victory. He was commemorated with Niki. The panic flight is a protective reaction, even if in its blindness, the outcome can be mass death.

The protective aspect of nature that appears in Pan shows not only in his affinity for herdsmen, nor in the word root pan of pastoral and pabulum nourishment, but also in his role in the Dionysus train, where Pan carries the shield of Dionysus on the march to India. In the Eros and psyche tale told by Apuleius, Pan protects the psyche from suicide. The soul is disconsolate. Its love gone, divine help denied. Pan's psyche throws her away into the river, which refuses her. In that same moment of panic, Pan appears with his reflective other side echo and brings home to the soul some natural truths. Pan is both destroyer and preserver, and the two aspects appear to the psyche in close approximation.

When we panic, we can never know whether it may not be the first movement of nature that will yield, if we can hear the echo of reflection, a new insight into nature. As Urbig says in his monograph, this God is always a goat. The goat is always a divine force.

Pan is not represented by a goat, nor is the goat holy to Pan. Rather, Pan is the goat God, and this configuration of animal nature distinguishes nature by personifying it as something hairy, phallic, roaming, and goatish. This pan nature is no longer an idyllic display for the eye, something to walk through or long back to for sweet nature, as Pan is hot and close, his hairy animal smell, his erection, as if nature's arbitrary, wayward force and uncanny Mystery were summed into this one figure.

I found a really interesting summary of Pan online, and I thought it was really interesting. This is just a brief summary. Pan symbolizes the untamed aspects of nature and the primal instincts within humanity. His character embodies the balance between civilization and the wild, representing both the beauty and chaos of the natural world.

Overall, Pan is a comp. X figure, whose stories highlight themes of love transformation and the connection between humanity and primal nature, one of the reasons that we typically want to ban Pan and that we want to push Pan out, and hence we tend to degrade the sign of Capricorn because there's a strong affiliation with the goat god Pan and the sign of Capricorn is that Capricorn is about the way in which A civilized world cannot ever keep out those wild, untamed and primordial instinctual elements of nature. They are part of us.

Pluto will bring up the darkest elements at certain times while in Capricorn, which reminds us that this instinctual peace cannot be banned from the city. You can build walls around the city to keep nature out, but nature will always find its way back in because it is the ground from which we live and breathe and have our existence. We are biological, instinctual beings.

Let me give you an example. This is a really dark example, so it might be a little triggering, but one of the things that I noticed as Pluto was in Capricorn, especially in the early days of Pluto and Capricorn as it was working its way through the first and second decan, there were a lot.

There was a growing number of gun-related acts of violence in public schools. Now, that's been growing exponentially over the years and so forth. So I'm not saying Pluto and Capricorn caused this to happen, but when I reflect on the symbolism of Pluto and Capricorn in relation, What I think about is the way in which those images affect our psyches, that the walls of a civilized place where something refined, in Jupiterian-like education, is taking place, and where there is a semblance of order and goodness and virtue, ideally, that is at work is going to be interrupted by the primordial instincts and impulses of often of things and people that we have either consciously or unconsciously tried to keep out. This often comes up in the image or picture of someone who committed acts of violence, who has severe mental health problems, or who has been left behind in some way.

I'm not making excuses for anything. I'm just saying Capricorn will always bring us back to needing to have some kind of awareness of that which is primordial, wild, instinctual, chaotic, and natural. Natural is a word that Capricorn always wants us to think about at a deeper level because our images of natural are like natural soap and natural food, and we think of natural as pure, but natural, from Capricorn's point of view, includes the things festering in swamps and the bacteria that grows in, you know, puddles and damp places.

And I'm not trying to be overly dark. It's just that, to the extent that we repress or try to keep out this level of reality, the worse it becomes. And just turn off something that's beeping here, and so this in Hillman's book Pan in the Nightmare, what he's trying to do over and over again is draw us back to the need that we all have to stay in touch with this, rather than demonizing it, which is why The Goat and Capricorn are often related to the devil, and also the entire history and meaning of the word scapegoat that we would like to it's easy to project that part of our own nature onto a Bad guy or a bad force, or the devil or something evil, something that's lurking, something that's malicious.

Capricorn is always inviting us to consider that it is neither good nor bad. It just simply is that nature is not natural soap and natural food and beautiful. Pictures of wholesome organic purity, but that nature also includes forces of destruction and chaos, and there is an amazing and purifying force that comes with panic.

So, when you are in nature, there's always, like, a video of someone who's on a hike, and then all of a sudden, like, a cougar starts following them. And we all are just like our we just, it's like a gravitational pull. We have to watch this video. We see; how does the hiker get away from the cougar? You know, they live because they probably wouldn't see someone getting mauled on Instagram.

So, but you watch this, and afterward, the panic that the instinctual fear and adrenaline and anxiety and panic with this, the encounter with a wild animal on a path, a path that you thought was civilized, right? Capricorn is always playing that role in our lives, trying to bring us back to the most basic and primitive realities, which we could describe as hard or harsh or cruel, or, you know, or in some ways, like dark. But it's actually the more that we live with an awareness of those forces as real, and we don't try to whitewash them and live in a little ivory tower of nature being pure and good only that we stand to exist in a tentative but holy relationship with those realities.

It's not that we have to invite them in and become a cougar that destroys a person, you know, something like that. But it's that if we don't live with some kind of felt connection to those forces and presences, then we're not in the real world. We're not in the world as it is, as is its nature. All right, let's read another passage. These are so interesting to grasp. Pan as nature. We must first be grasped by nature. This is why we do the grabbed series. When you are grabbed by Gods and Goddesses in your actual life, in the everyday living of a material life that can't be abstracted through ideas and intellect, that is as raw and libidinal and physical, and it responds with sweat, or your skin goes pale, or your hair stands up on end when you're living that life out there.

We use astrology to understand what we are living with and through our animate forces, which is by means of being able to see and perceive. These are forces. These are persons. These are gods and goddesses. These are elements. When you are able to use astrology in that way, then you're able to understand that this thing that grabs you in your experience is sacred. And somehow, you understand that even though it feels kind of violating to be grabbed by planets and gods and goddesses in the walking of our lives, we all know what that's like.

If you've experienced an astrological transit and you go, God, I was grabbed. Then, we write in and share our story. I but being grabbed like that is a physical experience. It's a human experience. It's a biological and instinctual experience, and it is sacred and divine. Astrology, in that way, is Capricornian. It's Capricornian in the sense that it's trying to get us into the smelly odor of the gods and their smelly armpits that are wrapped around us as they're putting us in a headlock. So that's Pan. That's Capricorn.

One of the most beautiful mystical things about Capricorn is it says, Make your spirituality pagan and animate. Make it instinctual. Make it a little stinky, make it physical, make it real. Don't try to bypass this material world that is littered with animate magical forces. They aren't somewhere else. You don't get to something beyond this world by meditating or praying your way out of it. Here, you get to the sacred thing by connecting the sweat and the smell to the world, to the gods and goddesses, to grasp Pan as nature, we must first be grasped by nature, both out there in an empty countryside, which speaks in sounds, not words, and in here, in a startled reaction.

Uncanny is the goat's eye; nature comes at us through the instinctual experience that Pan personifies. But to speak of personification does the god injustice since it implies that man makes the gods and that nature is an impersonal, abstract field of forces, such as thought, conceives it boo, where, whereas the demonic shape of Pan turns the concept nature into an immediate psychic shock, Western philosophical tradition, from its beginnings in the pre-Socratics and in the Old Testament, has been prejudiced against images Fantasia, in favor of thought, abstractions. In the period since Descartes and the Enlightenment, conceptualization has held preeminence. The psyche's tendency to personify has been disdainfully put down as anthropomorphism.

One of the main arguments against the mythical mode of thinking has been that it works in images that are subjective, personal, and sensuous. This, above all, must be avoided in Western epistemology, and so in descriptions of the forces of nature to personify has meant to think animistically, primitively, and pre-logically; the senses deceive images that would relay truth about the world must be purified of their anthropomorphic elements. The only persons in the universe are human persons. Yet the experience of the gods, of heroes, nymphs, demons, angels, powers, sacred animals, places, and things as persons, indeed precedes the concept of personification. It is not that we personify but that epiphanies come as persons.

Could we step back from our times and step out of the pretensions of the fearing ego, who would bring every atom of nature under its control? Then, we might realize again that we are not the source of personified gods. We do not make them up any more than we invent the sounds we hear in the woods, the hoof prints in the sand, the nightmare pressure weighing on our chests for millennia, and most everywhere, it was palpably evident that divine and demonic figures appeared as persons.

So what I love about this passage and what he's saying about Pan is that Pan is that force that bridges the gap between what we consider to be spiritual or sacred and our immediate biological experience, and what he what I love, that he's saying is that this is why we really need to spend more time thinking About Capricorn as a feminine sign, a feminine earth sign, that is of the nature of Saturn.

Remember that Saturn sat as the dimmest, most distant planet at the edge of the visible cosmos, separating as a gatekeeper the realm of the gods and the realm of the numinous that lay beyond Saturn in Capricorn is about the boundary between the earthly and the numinous, and as a gatekeeper sitting on the threshold, it speaks to our tendency to polarize the two things, as well as the ongoing process of bringing them back together in synthesis, which is the underlying purpose of all oppositions, which Saturn is The aspectual is the ruler of an aspect theory.

So the way we tend to separate spiritual from earthly things is then projected onto Capricorn, and Capricorn becomes a scapegoat for all of the things we don't like about human nature that are here inside the city walls, no matter how much we try to wall them off, it's amazing how puritanical and rigid and unimaginative our ideas about what constitutes natural are. They exist within the city walls.

There's no actual contact with nature going on, and all of those images of what looks natural, most of which is like skincare products or, you know, I'm being a little cynical, but Capricorn is always about bringing us back into that instinctual awareness that river has a spirit. You don't know what its intentions are, like not saying it's a, but you can't assume you have to be walking as a citizen of Earth, knowing that you are in a complex biomatrix of living presences, energies, elements, gods, goddesses, and in that world, you as a soul, are Never you're never apart from the spirit of the room you are in, or the house that you live in, or the land that you live on, and that you will have interactions with animate forces all of the time, and that when you start to experience the world in this way you live in a kind of sacred realism and a kind of sacred tension or fear with natural forces. And natural is now a lot broader of a word.

The Nightmare is natural, just as much as a blissful dream is natural. Panic and the hair is standing up on your back because there's a predator nearby is natural. Potentially becoming a predator to something else is natural. And I'm reminded of this whenever I hunt flies in my kitchen; it's not separate.

So, in The Nightmare, he goes on to say he's talking about nightmares in another passage, which indeed gives a clue to the reapproximation of lost, dead nature. In the Nightmare, repressed nature returns so close, so real, that we cannot but react to it naturally. That is, we become wholly physical, possessed by Pan, screaming out and asking for comfort and contact. The immediate reaction is demonic emotion. We are returned to instinct. We are returned by instinct to instinct.

So that hiker that's walking down the trail and the cougar comes out. I actually had a friend who had something like that happen to him once, and he was a biker, and this happened on a bicycle, I mean, and so one of the things that I'll never forget him saying I was visiting him in Northern California, and this was the story he told if I remember this correctly.

Anyway, he said, yeah, like I hadn't I the panic and the adrenaline and the fight or flight and the survival, I came away from it feeling like I was in touch with what it must have been like to be a primitive person living 30,000 years ago, and that was something that he described as deeply valuable, even though It was terrifying and in a very basic way, nightmares do this to us.

They return us to a more imminent reality of animate forces that we can easily abstract from, especially in a day and age where abstraction has become so dominant, dissociation and alienation have become so dominant, and we are, in a sense, looking at the universe as mechanistic rather than animate and living and relational. There was a great book that I read some years ago called the master and his Emissary. And I cannot remember the name of the author, but it was so good. It was about the two hemispheres of the brain.

One of the things that I loved about this book was it basically said the exact same thing: primarily, reality is conscious, alive, relational and interactive, communicative, living, and sentient. Secondarily, those processes can be reflectively described through mechanisms of cause and effect, but primarily So, we have to learn how to let that part of the brain that is primarily subjective, instinctual, conscious, alive, relational, and more subjective, but not irrationally subjective.

It's not like it's just devoid of any kind of order. We have to let that part of us lead first because it's only through that ground of being, that abstraction, and you know, the description of mechanics has any real relevance or meaning, and because we've put everything in the opposite order, in the opposite hemisphere of the brain is sort of taking over. There are all of these problems.

And then one of the ways in which that part of us comes back, that more personal, subjective, wild, instinctual, relational, living thing comes back is through the Nightmare. It comes back through these primal forces that come up and disrupt our little veneer of natural and civilized and contained and abstract and rational, and it has to if we are to get back into the actual ground of our being. Capricorn is doing this for us.

So, isn't it ironic that we demonize Capricorn? Do we demonize the feminine? I think it's super ironic that people think about this sinus patriarchal that is so far from the truth of what Capricorn is about; at the same time, you can recognize some of the shadows of the sign of Capricorn. I'm not saying there are none; it's all just rosy.

I mean, Pan is not exactly an easy God to know or have an encounter with because often the experience is panic. Those encounters with nature, a cougar on the path, awaken and enliven the instinctual body and help us to remember that ground of being, which, if you're staying in the cozy protection of a Cancerian world, the opposite sign, right, and you're always protected, and everything's sweet, and there's never any encounter with those destructive or chaotic forces of nature.

These are both feminine signs, Cancer and Capricorn, by the way, so they are the different faces of Yin. But if you're never in touch with those things, then when they appear, it's so easy to just call them evil, right? All right, here's another one. I like this one a lot. It might be well at this point to interpose something about the nature of fear, that it is a so-called primary effect that has been stated by psychologists since St Thomas and Descartes and is still confirmed by physiologists and biologists specializing in animal behavior.

Cannon has it as one of the four fundamental reactions that he investigated, and Lorenz regarded it as one of the four basic drive complexes. The traditional western approach to fear is negative, in keeping with the attitudes of our heroic ego. Fear, like many other effects in their images, is, first of all, regarded as a moral problem. To be overcome with courage, as Emerson might say, or tillix courage to be in an age of anxiety. Fear is to be met and managed by the hero on his path to manhood. An encounter with fear plays a major part in initiation ceremonies because our culture's first reflection upon the psyche is habitually moral. The psychological value of fear tends to be prejudiced if not occluded from our perspectives altogether.

So entrenched is the moral approach to psychological events that psychology has had to go to physiology and to the study of animals in order to find a path free of moralisms. Although physiology recognizes the protective function of fear, the emotion of fear is generally regarded to be either an accompaniment of instinctual flight patterns or these same patterns blocked or retained within the organism. This inhibition of motoric behavior, together with increased and prolonged excitation of the organism, vegetative nervous system, and neurohormonal chemical activation, is called anxiety simply.

There are two faces to panic, lived out in relation to a stimulus. And called fear, held in with no known stimulus, and called anxiety. Fear has an object. Anxiety has none. There can be a panicky fear of a stampede. Say there can be panicky anxiety, as in a dream. In either condition, death can result in psychoanalytic and psychosomatic case reports, as well as dream research and anthropological studies, for instance, on voodoo death, provide instances of the fatal consequence of panic.

The anxiety dream can be distinguished from the Nightmare in the classical sense; the classical Nightmare is a dreadful visitation by a demon who forcibly oppresses the dreamer into paralysis, cuts off his breath, and releases come through movement. The anxiety dream is less precise, and there is no demon, no dyspnea, but there is the same inhibition of movement, a literary prototype of the anxiety dream, emphasizing an inhibited peculiarity of movement occurs in the Iliad Achilles in pursuit of Hector, as in a dream, a man is not able to follow one who runs from him, nor can the runner escape, nor the other pursue him. So he could not run him down at his speed, nor the other get clear.

Some theorists of emotion would use the anxiety dream as evidence for their view that anxiety is inhibited, fear, a flight pattern retained within the organism, as if instinct were divided into two pieces: action and emotion during the anxiety dream, the action being impeded, emotion intensifies anxiety, whether in dreams or not, remains in this rather positivistic and behavioristic perspective, a substitute, secondary, inadequate reaction.

Could we take arms against the sea of troubles? Could we take arms against the sea of troubles? We would not be sicklied over contemporary existential philosophy gives to anxiety, dread, or angst, a more intentional and oppressive interpretation. Angst reveals man's fundamental ontological situation, his connection with not being so that all fear is not just dread of death but of the nothing on which all being is based. Fear thus becomes the reflection and consciousness of a. Universal reality. Buddhism goes yet further. Fear is more than a subjective human phenomenon. All the world is in fear. Trees, stones, everything, and the Buddha is the Redeemer of the world from fear.

Hence, the significance of the mudra hand gesture of fear is not merely a sign of comfort but of the Total Redemption of the world from its fear and trembling. It's thralldom to angst. Buddha's perfected love, in the words of the Gospels, driveth out fear to further mix the context; let us say that the world of nature, Pan's world, is in a continual state of subliminal panic, just as it is in a continual state of subliminal sexual excitation as the world is made by Eros, held together by that cosmogonic force and charged with the libidinal desire that is Pan, an archetypal vision, most recently presented by Wilhelm Reich. So its other side, panic, recognized by the Buddha, belongs to the same constellation.

Again, we come back to Pan and the two extremes of instinct. Brinkman has already pointed to the bankruptcy of all theories of panic that attempt to deal with it sociologically, psychologically, or historically and not in its own terms. The right terms, Brinkman says, are mythological. We must follow the path cleared by Nietzsche, whose investigation of kinds of consciousness and behavior through Apollo and Dionysus can be extended to Pan; then panic will no longer be regarded as a physiological defense mechanism or an inadequate reaction but will be seen as the right response to the numinous the headlong flight then becomes a breakthrough out of protected security into the uncanny wilderness of elementary existence.

Panic will always exist because it is rooted in human nature as such. So it's management. Brinkman says that they must also follow ritual mythological procedures of gesture and music. One is reminded of the pipes in battle and that Pan's instrument, in many paintings, is not a syrinx but more a trumpet. Rosher's enumeration of animal panic does indeed remove the discussion from the level of the only human and psychological in the narrow sense to more universal hypotheses, such as offered by the existentialists, the Buddhists, and the archetypal psychology exhibited in Pan.

If we take the evidence that Rosher cites of Pan's terror to be a form of psychic infection attacking both man and animals, then we would seem to have an archetypal event that transcends the only human psyche, thereby placing the nightmare panic in a profound realm of instinctual experience with man, which man shares, at least with animals, with trees, stones and the cosmos at large, this sharing, if panic and animals are not substantially different from panic and man, and if panic is at the root of the Nightmare, then the Jones nightmare hypothesis is not enough for even the boldest Freudian has not extended the universality of the Oedipus complex and of repressed incest, desire, fear, beyond the shepherd to the sheep. Freud's psychological hypothesis stops with the human world.

Rosher, however, points beyond the human to a wider area of panic phenomenon. So what he's getting to here is that this is something, this instinctual response, that seems to exist in reality itself, that it is an archetypal feature of the cosmos itself. He goes on to make that point over the next few pages; I just wanted to read that part to you because it's really profound. At the very end of that chapter, he says this panic, especially at night, when the Citadel darkens, and the heroic ego sleeps, is a direct participation Mystique in nature, a fundamental, even ontological experience of the world as alive and in dread, objects become subjects.

They move with life while one is oneself, paralyzed with fear; when existence is experienced through instinctual levels of fear, aggression, hunger, or sexuality, images take on compelling life of their own. The imagination is never more vivid than when we are connected with it instinctually. The world alive is, of course, animism, which means that this living world is divine and imaged by different gods with attributes and characteristics, which is polytheistic. Pan-theism, which believes that fear, dread, and horror are natural, is wisdom. In Whitehead's terms, nature alive means Pan and panic flings open the door to this reality. I take five features of Pan from these excerpts.

One is what Pluto and Capricorn have put us in touch with over 16 years. So, not all at once, but through a process, is what is instinctual. And smelly about us and about the world, but if we are able to embrace that non-deodorized element of ourselves and reality becomes a bridge back into a numinous and animistic Cosmos, it's not easy work with Pluto doing this through Capricorn that there is something both exciting and sexual and blissful and fearful and anxious about being alive and being instinctual, and no matter how many things we do to try to shelter ourselves from ever having to feel anxiety or trauma or fear or anxiety, you know, just anxiousness, socially or physiologically. Without those forces, we aren't really alive. And so the right relationship with those forces is so much better than the idea that they are somehow bad or that they should be pushed outside the limits or boundaries or walls of our ego because then all they do is go into a repressed state where they come back ever more forcefully, no matter what drugs we take, no matter what we try to do.

And I'm not anti any kind of treatment, right? I'm open to all of it, whatever's helpful. But there's some way in which we have to make room for the cougar on the trail. It is as real as the sudden chemistry when you meet someone and end up making out with them passionately. You know, it's just those forces are connected, and there is something inherently blissful and anxious about existence in this animate world. Capricorn wants us to be real about those things. That's what's meant by real.

Not like, not some version of, of, kind of like a conservative pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, hard work, and discipline. Those are such a small part of what Capricorn is about. A lot of the time, those philosophies or those answers are also ways of trying to overcome rather than live with those forces. Discipline. Yes, if you have enough discipline and control, then you will keep out the instinctual, darker elements of nature and of yourself. Does that work? You know, Capricorn is about that approach not working as much as it is about trying to control and restrain and tame those wild forces, which is a shadow of Capricorn, but it's a natural shadow. It's something we all deal with.

Nobody wants to be in reality, for the most part, where Cougars can jump out on you on the trail. You know, we all try to control our lives away from that, which is why we live in houses imaginal and prophetic, the instinctual level of things when we are really living in our bodies, in the Animate pagan reality of the world, there is something about that that is necessary and conducive to the divinatory experience. In other words, it's only someone who has a kind of instinctual awareness of the diversity of animate, pagan, natural, and divine forces living around us and through us all the time. It's only someone who's really in touch with that on a very embodied instinctual level, who has the ability to recognize signs and omens in nature as speaking as a part of how the gods speak.

You know, animistic cultures are the progenitors of all divinatory traditions on our planet. The reason for that is that when you walk through this world, you are aware that there is a material, phenomenal level, and then there is a spiritual, animate level, and they coexist. You're able to see when a bird is just another being flying by and when a bird is appearing as an omen. It is the instinctual level of our lives that allows us to live in, habit, and read signs and omens in nature, including the stars. They're not abstract from nature. And it's interesting because there's another passage in the book where he talks about how Pan teaches Apollo the art of divination. That's a fascinating little part of bodily closeness to death. Capricorn was called the gateway of the gods and was associated with the transcendence of the soul into the realm of the gods upon death.

All mystical traditions are built on an understanding of impermanence and mortality. Reality, as uncomfortable as it is, and as much as we might want to live in the moment, keeping the instinctual like that, there's just the sacred anxiety and reality of our mortality and our death and this kind of transient space that we're actually living in, keeping that close to us, not so close that we become paranoid, not so close that we become zest, but close enough so that there's a felt tension.

There's no guarantee I'm here tomorrow or an hour from now and that there's a kind of physical and primal awareness of mortality that lives with us. It is that tension that allows us to also perceive and speak with animate forces because the ability to sense aliveness in the world and to relate to it is so closely related to our awareness of death and impermanence and decay and destruction like you can't have a felt connection with animate presence is tied to your understanding that animate things are dying all around you, and that you are an animate but mortal being as well. Capricorn wants us to stay in touch with that. Pluto and Capricorn want us to stay in touch with that. It holds us accountable as if we can't drift too far from that because this is the very edge upon which beauty and bliss and music and art and divinity live. They live on this sort of razor's edge.

We see how that says the polar opposite feel of cancer, where we feel this nexus of sweetness and safety, and we can relax and sleep at ease in the mother's womb, but both are necessary. Sacred. Earthiness means that we live with an awareness that the directions have power, that there are ancestral spirits, that your house might have a living presence, that a Creek near where we live has a personality, and that the stars and omens that we see are the mouthpieces or symbolic omens of gods and goddesses. Capricorn is a sign that keeps us close to that by keeping us in the actual ground of our being; I mean, what the feminine does, broadly speaking, is, says, not just above but below two right here.

So, I hope that these five features of Pan have been enlivened. You know that if they shake your instinctual body a little bit and awaken it, we should. We should be. We should feel fortunate that the universe is always conspiring to try to keep us aware of and appreciative of the very ground that we're on, the very body that we live in.

For as scary as it is, we also live in so much shame of the material world and of our bodies and of physical, sensual, stinky life. The instinctual world is one that a lot of religious traditions, especially in the West, have taught us to feel ashamed of, and then we demonize it. We make it into a scapegoat. This is, like, there's a lot here. We could talk about the whole history of the devil, you know, in the imagery and thoughts about the devil or evil or personifications of darkness, and a lot of them are goats, you know.

Anyway, I'll leave it there because I'm sure that this has opened an interesting door for everyone to go through. And, you know, think about and explore. But if you want, check out the book Pan in the Nightmare. It is a fantastic read that has really informed me a lot about Pluto and Capricorn over the years. And let's think about what's left. There may be weeks left of Pluto in Capricorn, trying to excite and awaken that instinctual, animate reality that we live in. So, I hope you have a great day today. After I sign off, there's an informational video about the upcoming program, Ancient Astrology for the Modern Mystic.

I think you'll love the program, so check it out. I think it is really good for anyone who likes astrology at some point to learn more about the philosophy and craft because becoming your own astrologer opens things in a way that. But you'll always have people you rely on channels, astrologers. I do, too, but learning to be your own astrologer and your own reader of the symbols because you have a more advanced or even intermediate understanding of the language and its history and philosophy is just so positive for people who find this to be a valuable part of your spiritual life.

So check out the program. It is meant for people like you. I think who watches this channel; I think that most people who have come through from the channel to the school end up enjoying it immensely. So yeah, stick around for the informational video, and hope to see some of you in class soon. Bye.