I wonder if there is a more-feared card in the Tarot deck? Yet Death is, in many ways, a hopeful and refreshing influence if only we will let it be. It is the major card for change and alteration in the entire deck. Since life itself changes constantly, in order to harmonise ourselves more completely with it, we too must be in a state of constant change – working toward our goals, attempting to fulfil our dreams and developing the quality of our spiritual understanding.When Death comes up as Card of the Day, the first question we need to ask ourselves is – what is it that needs to be changed or finished up? What situations have been lingering on well past their sell-by date? What should we have dealt with before, that this day challenges us to face and finish?Imagine, for a moment, that your life is a plot of land. If it is completely overgrown, covered with unwanted and untended undergrowth, you cannot plant something beautiful and fruitful in it can you?The Death card requires that we spend a bit of dedicated time cutting away the undergrowth, and clearing the debris so that our lives are clear and open, ready for fresh planting.Sometimes a Death card day won’t be one in which we need to do, so much as one in which we need to think. Most peoples’ lives are very busy indeed these days. So busy, in fact, that we often tend to put off thinking about the difficult or demanding issues in our lives. Yet often it is exactly this type of issue that causes emotional and mental deadwood to accumulate, if we allow it.If life is created by what we think, what we expect and how we feel about things, our deepest emotional urges, our wildest dreams, our highest ideals require a great deal of thinking about, don’t they? If not, we stagnate, never creating new channels through which to direct our energies, never determining when a habitual action has run its course, never assessing what is useful, and what is not.So, sometimes, a Death card day needs to be a day in which you re-evaluate the general patterns of your daily existence, and re-appraise your goals. You’ll know if it’s that kind of day by measuring how dissatisfied you currently feel. If you are largely happy and comfortable, then the Death card day is one for clearing the decks in a physical sense.
Affirmation: “I welcome change into my life, embracing it fearlessly and hopefully.”
Today is the day of my release, as I declare myself free of the bondage of the ego. I will do one thing, however small, to forge a path of greatness where I have formerly cowered in fear.
I need not repair every aspect of my wounded self today. I need only practice the thinking and behavior of a greater good. With this, I build new pathways in my brain and in my life.
Dear God, Please free me of the habits That keep me bound To a life I do not wish to live. Break the chains that keep me From claiming my greater good. I will try today. Please help me. Amen.
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove • May 15, 2025 Miguel Conner is host of the Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio podcast. He has authored two books of interviews about gnosticism, Voices of Gnosticism and Other Voices of Gnosticism, and also four novels. His newest book is The Occult Elvis: The Mystical and Magical Life of the King. His website is https://www.miguelconner.com/ Here he explains the origins of Gnosticism in late antiquity. He describes how it impacted both the Christian, Greek, and Persian worlds. He discusses the influence of Gnosticism upon a range of modern thinkers and writers. And, he distinguishes Gnosticism from other similar movements including Neo-Platonism and Hermeticism. 00:00 Introduction 03:21 What is Gnosticism? 11:37 The struggle between good and evil 15:05 Persecution of the gnostics 19:43 Modern gnostics 22:40 Key gnostic texts 26:24 Gnosticism and other esoteric movements 34:44 Neo-Gnosticism 38:23 Gnosis 47:06 Conclusion New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on April 14, 2025)
The oldest of three children, two girls and one boy, Mamie Phipps was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, to Harold and Katie Phipps. Her father was a doctor, a native of the British West Indies. Her father also supplemented his income as a manager at a nearby vacation resort. Her mother helped him in his practice and encouraged both their children in education. Her brother became a dentist.[2][6] Even though Phipps Clark grew up during the Depression and a time of racism and segregation, she had a privileged childhood.[7] Her father’s occupation and income allowed them to live a middle-class lifestyle and even got them into some White-only parts of town. Phipps Clark, however, still attended segregated elementary and secondary schools, graduating from Pine Bluff’s Langston High School in 1934 at only 16 years old.[8] This upbringing gave her a unique perspective on how society treated White and Black people differently. This realization contributed to her future research of racial identity in Black children.[9] Despite the small number of opportunities for Black students to pursue higher education, Phipps Clark was offered several scholarships for college. Phipps Clark received scholarship offers from two of the most prestigious Black universities at that time, Fisk University in Tennessee and Howard University in Washington D.C.[7]
Francis Sumner allowed her to work part-time in the psychology department where she expanded her knowledge about psychology.[6] During her senior year in 1937 Kenneth, another mentee of Sumner’s, and Mamie Clark got married; they had to elope because her mother did not want her to get married before she graduated.[2] A year later, she earned her B.A.magna cum laude in psychology (1938).[2][6][10] Both Kenneth and Mamie went on for additional study at Columbia University. They later had two children together, Katie Miriam and Hilton Bancroft.
In the fall of 1938 Mamie Clark went to graduate school at Howard University to get a master’s degree in psychology and while she was enrolled her father would send her an allowance of fifty dollars a month.[11] The summer following her undergraduate graduation Mamie worked for Charles Houston as a secretary at his law office. At the time, Houston was a popular civil rights lawyer and Mamie was privileged to see lawyers such as Thurgood Marshall come into the office to work on important cases.[2] She admits that she did not think anything could be done about segregation and racial oppression until after this experience. Believing in a tangible end to segregation inspired Phipps Clark’s future studies, the results of which would help lawyers, such as Houston and Marshall, to win the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case in 1954.[7]
Kenneth and Mamie Clark with their children, 1958
While working on her master’s degree, Phipps Clark became increasingly interested in developmental psychology. The inspiration for her thesis came from working at an all Black nursery school. She contacted psychologists Ruth and Gene Horowitz for advice. At the time they were conducting psychological studies about self-identification in young children and suggested that she conduct similar research with her nursery school children.[2] Her master’s thesis was entitled “The Development of Consciousness of Self in Negro Pre-School Children.”[12] This thesis was the basis from what would later become the Clarks’ famous doll study on racial preference.[11] Her husband Kenneth was fascinated by her thesis research and after her graduation they worked together on the research. They developed new and improved versions of the color and doll tests used in her thesis for a proposal to further the research. In 1939 they received a three-year Rosenwald Fellowship for their research that allowed them to publish three articles on the subject and also permitted Phipps Clark to pursue a doctoral degree at Columbia University.[8]
During her time at Columbia, Mamie was the only black student pursuing a doctorate in psychology and she had a faculty adviser, Dr. Henry Garrett, who believed in segregation. Despite their differences in beliefs, Phipps Clark was able to complete her dissertation, “Changes in Primary Mental Abilities with Age.”[2] In 1943, Mamie Phipps Clark was the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University. She was the second Black person to receive a doctorate in psychology from Columbia University, following her husband Kenneth.[7]
Career
After Phipps Clark graduated, she struggled being a psychologist as an African-American woman living in New York. She found it difficult to get a job; she lost some opportunities to less qualified White men and women. In the summer of 1939, Mamie took one of her first jobs as a secretary in the legal office of African-American lawyer Charles Hamilton Houston.[12] This law firm involved the planning of legal action that would challenge the segregation laws.[8] In 1944, she found a job through a family friend at the American Public Health Association analyzing research about nurses, which she hated.[2] She stayed at that job for one year but was grossly overqualified for the position, which she found embarrassing. She then obtained a position at the United States Armed Forces Institute as a research psychologist but she still felt pigeonholed. In 1945 she was able to get a better job working for the United States Armed Forces Institute as a research psychologist; but, as World War II ended they did not feel the need to employ her anymore. She was fired in 1946. Later that year, Phipps Clark got a job in New York at the Riverdale Children’s Association where she saw potential to perform meaningful work. Founded by Quakers in 1836 as the Colored Orphan Asylum, in 1944, just two years before Dr. Clark arrived, the then 108 year old institution had changed its name.[13] At Riverdale, she conducted psychological tests and counseled young, homeless Black people.[6] While there, she saw first hand how insufficient psychological services were for minority children. Many of the children were being called mentally retarded by the state but Clark tested them and found they had IQs above then accepted levels for such claims.[2] She saw society’s segregation as the cause for gang warfare, poverty, and low academic performance of minorities.[6] This was a “kick start” to her life’s work and led to her most significant contributions in the field of developmental psychology.
Kenneth and Mamie Clark decided to try to improve social services for troubled youth in Harlem as there were virtually no mental-health services in the community. Kenneth Clark was then an assistant professor at the City College of New York and Phipps Clark was a psychological consultant doing testing at the Riverdale Children’s Association. Kenneth Bancroft Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark approached social service agencies in New York City urging them to expand their programs to provide social work, psychological evaluation, and remediation for youth in Harlem. None of the agencies took up their proposal. The Clarks “realized that we were not going to get a child guidance clinic opened that way. So we decided to open it ourselves.”
Together in 1946 the Clarks created the Northside Center for Child Development, originally called the Northside Testing and Consultation Center.[12] They started in a one-room basement apartment of the Dunbar Houses on 158th Street (Manhattan).[12] Two years later in 1948, Northside moved to 110th Street, across from Central Park, on the sixth floor of what was then the New Lincoln School. In 1974, Northside moved to Schomburg Plaza. As of 2023, Northside continues to serve Harlem children and their families from its center at the intersection of E. 108th Street and Park Avenue, New York.
The Clark’s goal was to match or surpass for poor African Americans, the mental health services then available for other children. Northside provided a homelike environment for poor Black children that provided pediatric and psychological help.[2] It served as a location for initial experiments on racial biases in education and the intersection of education and varying theories and practices around social psychology. The psychological work they did led them to the conclusion that the problems of minority children are “neither purely psychiatric, purely social, nor purely environmental, but psychosocial.”[2] Northside was the first center that offered psychological services to minority families around Harlem.[14][11]
Mamie remained the director of the Northside Center for 33 years. Upon her retirement, Dora Johnson, a staff member at Northside, captured the importance of Mamie Clark to Northside. “Mamie Clark embodied the center. In a very real way, it was her views, philosophy, and her soul that held the center together”. She went on to say that “when an unusual and unique person pursues a dream and realizes that dream and directs that dream, people are drawn not only to the idea of the dream, but to the uniqueness of the person themselves.”[15] Her vision of social, economic, and psychological advancement of African-American children resonates far beyond the era of integration.[11]
Phipps Clark did not limit her contributions to her Northside work. She was a very involved member of the community. She was on the boards of directors for several community organizations, along with being involved with the Youth Opportunities Unlimited Project and the initiation of the Head Start Program.[7] She also volunteered in the psychiatric clinic of the Domestic Relations Court while she was completing her doctorate at Columbia and went on to teach at Yeshiva University.[11]
Published work
One of Phipps Clark’s early, published studies was titled The Development of Consciousness of Self and the Emergence of Racial Identification in Negro Preschool Children. This research was an investigation of early level of conscious racial identity in Black preschool children. The study included 150 Black children from segregated, nursery schools in Washington, D.C. with 50% of the participants being girls and 50% boys. There were 50 three-year-old, 50 four-year-old, and 50 five-year-old children in the study. Each participant was shown a set of pictures that included a white boy, a black boy, a lion, a dog, a clown, and a hen. The participants were asked to point to the drawing that represented who or what they were asked about. An example of this procedure would be a Black boy being asked to point to his cousin or brother. The results showed that the group tended to choose the drawing with a black child over the white child but as age increased, there was still some increase in the ratio of those identifying with black over white. Their finding indicated that a great amount of self-conscious development and racial identity happens between ages three and fours years old. Once past four years old, this identification with the Black boy plateaus. This plateau may imply that the picture study is not sensitive enough for children over four. It also suggests that maybe five-year-old children have reached a self-awareness and now see themselves in an intrinsic way and are less capable of external representations.[16]
Legacy
Phipps Clark’s work provided key contributions to the fields of developmental psychology and the psychology of race by shedding light on the impact of racial discrimination. She made lasting contributions at the United States Armed Forces Institute and the Public Health Association. Her unrelenting research on the identity and self-esteem of Black people expanded work on identity development.
Clark is not as famous as her husband. It has been noted that she adhered to feminine expectations of the time and often took care to “remain in the shadows of her husband’s limelight”. She often presented as shy. It should also be noted, that Phipps Clark’s tendency to remain in her husband’s shadow occurred in the backdrop of blatant sexism and racism in the psychological field and it is believed that the extent of her contributions was significantly downplayed.[11]
Together, the Clarks devoted their entire lives to improving the mental health of Black people. For her contributions, Phipps Clark received a Candace Award for Humanitarianism from the National Coalition of 100 Black Women in 1983.[17]
Phipps Clark retired in 1979 and died of lung cancer on August 11, 1983, at 66 years old[18] at her home in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.[19] In addition to her husband, Phipps Clark was survived by her daughter, Kate Harris of Hastings-on-Hudson; her son, Hilton, of Manhattan, and her brother, Harold Phipps of Pine Bluff, Arkansas.[19]
Kenneth Clark
Early life and education
Kenneth Clark was born in the Panama Canal Zone to Arthur Bancroft Clark and Miriam Hanson Clark. His father worked as an agent for the United Fruit Company. When he was five, his parents separated and his mother took him and his younger sister Beulah to the US to live in Harlem in New York City. Miriam Clark worked as a seamstress in a sweatshop, where she later organized a union and became a shop steward for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Kenneth Clark arrived in New York City as ethnic diversity of Harlem was disappearing such that his elementary school was predominantly black. Clark noted that he first “became aware of color” when he was taught by a black teacher, who happened to be Hubert Thomas Delaney.[12] Clark was to be trained to learn a trade, as were most black students at the time. Miriam wanted more for her son and transferred him to George Washington High School in Upper Manhattan. Clark graduated from high school in 1931 (Jones & Pettigrew, 2005).[20]
Clark attended Howard University, a historically black university, where he first studied political science with professors including Ralph Johnson Bunche. During his years at Howard University, he worked under the influence of mentor Francis Cecil Sumner, the first African American to receive a doctorate in psychology. He returned in 1935 for a master’s in psychology.[20] Clark was a distinguished member of Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity. After earning his master’s degree, Sumner directed Clark to Columbia University to work with another influential mentor, Otto Klineberg (Jones & Pettigrew, 2005).
While studying psychology for his doctorate at Columbia, Clark did research in support of the study of race relations by SwedisheconomistGunnar Myrdal, who wrote An American Dilemma. In 1940, Clark was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University.
Career
During the summer of 1941, after Clark was already asked to teach a summer session at City College of New York, the Dean of Hampton Institute in Virginia asked Clark to start a department of psychology there. In 1942 Kenneth Clark would become the first African-American tenured, full professor at the City College of New York. Clark also managed to start a psychology department at Hampton Institute in 1942 and taught a few courses within the department. In 1966 he was the first African American appointed to the New York State Board of Regents and the first African American to be president of the American Psychological Association.[20]
Much of Clark’s work came as a response to his involvement in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education US Supreme Court desegregation decision. Lawyers Jack Greenberg and Robert L. Carter, with resources and funding from the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and Topeka Jewish Community Relations Bureau, hired Clark to present his work on the effects of segregation on children.[21][22][23][24] After the Brown v. Board of Education case, Clark was still dissatisfied by the lack of progress in school desegregation in New York City. In a 1964 interview with Robert Penn Warren for the book Who Speaks for the Negro?, Clark expressed his doubts about the efficacy of certain busing programs in desegregating the public schools.[25] Clark also felt very discouraged by the lack of social welfare organizations to address race and poverty issues. Clark argued that a new approach had to be developed to involve poor blacks, in order to gain the political and economic power needed to solve their problems. Clark called his new approach “internal colonialism”, with hope that the Kennedy-Johnson administration’s War on Poverty would address problems of increasing social isolation, economic dependence and declining municipal services for many African Americans (Freeman, 2008).
Clark in 1962 was among the founders of Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU), an organization devoted to developing educational and job opportunities. With HARYOU, Clark conducted an extensive sociological study of Harlem. He measured IQ scores, crime frequency, age frequency of the population, drop-out rates, church and school locations, quality of housing, family incomes, drugs, STD rates, homicides, and a number of other areas.[3] It recruited educational experts to help to reorganize Harlem schools, create preschool classes, tutor older students after school, and job opportunities for youth who dropped out. The Johnson administration earmarked more than $100 million for the organization. When it was placed under the administration of a pet project of CongressmanAdam Clayton Powell Jr. in 1964, the two men clashed over appointment of a director and its direction.[20]
Clark used HARYOU to press for changes to the educational system to help improve black children’s performance. While he at first supported decentralization of city schools, after a decade of experience, Clark believed that this option had not been able to make an appreciable difference and described the experiment as a “disaster”.[20]
Clark retired from City College in 1975, but remained an active advocate for integration throughout his life, serving on the board of the New York Civil Rights Coalition, of which he was Chairman Emeritus until his death. He opposed separatists and argued for high standards in education, continuing to work for children’s benefit. He consulted to city school systems across the country, and argued that all children should learn to use Standard English in school.[20]
The coloring test was another experiment that was involved in the Brown v. Board of Education decision.[12] Mamie and Kenneth did this experiment in order to investigate the development of racial identity in African American children and examine how a negro child’s color and “their sense of their own race and status” influenced “their judgment about themselves” and their “self esteem.”[28] The coloring test was administered to 160 African American children between the ages of five and seven years old. The children were given a piece of coloring paper with a leaf, an apple, an orange, a mouse, a boy and a girl on it. They were all given a box of crayons and asked to first color the mouse to make sure they had a basic understanding of the relationship between color and object. If they pass, they were then asked to color a boy if they were a boy and a girl if they were a girl. They were told to color the boy or girl the color that they are. They were then told to color the opposite sex the color that they want that sex to be.[29] The Clarks categorized the responses into reality responses (accurately colored their skin color), fantasy responses (very different from their skin color), and irrelevant responses (used bizarre colors like purple or green). The Clarks examined the reality and fantasy responses to conclude that children typically color themselves noticeably lighter than their actual color, while the phantasy responses reflect children trying through wishful thinking to escape their situation.[30] Although 88% of the children did draw themselves brown or black, they oftentimes drew themselves a lighter shade than the mouse. Children that were older generally were more accurate at determining how dark they should be. When asked to color the picture of the child that was the opposite sex, 52% put either white or an irrelevant color.[29]
Doll experiments
The Clarks’ doll experiments grew out of Mamie Clark’s master’s degreethesis. They published three major papers between 1939 and 1940 on children’s self-perception related to race. Their studies found contrasts among African-American children attending segregated schools in Washington, DC versus those in integrated schools in New York.[31] The doll experiment involved a child being presented with two dolls. Both of these dolls were completely identical except for the skin and hair color. One doll was white with yellow hair, while the other was brown with black hair.[32] The child was then asked questions inquiring as to which one is the doll they would play with, which one is the nice doll, which one looks bad, which one has the nicer color, etc. The experiment showed a clear preference for the white doll among all children in the study.[33] One of the conclusions from the study is that a Black child by the age of five is aware that to be “colored in American society is a mark of inferior status.”[30] This study was titled, “Emotional Factors in Racial Identification and Preference in Negro Children,” and was not created with public policy or the Supreme Court in mind, lending credibility to its objectiveness.[34] The study was published only in the Journal of Negro Education before appearing before the Court.[29] These findings exposed internalized racism in African-American children, self-hatred that was more acute among children attending segregated schools[citation needed]. This research also paved the way for an increase in psychological research into areas of self-esteem and self-concept.[6]
This work suggests that by its very nature, segregation harms children and, by extension, society at large, a suggestion that was exploited in several legal battles. The Clarks testified as expert witnesses in several school desegregation cases, including Briggs v. Elliott, which was later combined into the famous Brown v. Board of Education (1954). In 1954, Clark and Isidor Chein wrote a brief whose purpose was to supply evidence in the Brown v. Board of Education case underlining the damaging effects racial segregation had on African-American children. Brown v. Board was a test case supported by the NAACP to end the precedent of legal segregation when conditions are “separate but equal,” established by the case Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.[35] In a 9–0 decision for Brown, the Court decided that segregation based on race in public schools violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.[36]
The Supreme Court declared that separate but equal in education was unconstitutional because it resulted in African American children having “a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community.”[2] The Doll Study is cited in the 11th footnote of the Brown decision to provide updated and “ample” psychological support to the Kansas case. The Brown decision quotes that, “segregation of white and colored children in public schools has detrimental effect upon the colored children” and this sense of inferiority “affects the motivation of a child to learn.”[36] The evidence provided by Clark helped end segregation in the public school systems. Regarding Brown, this question of psychological and psychic harm fit into a very particular historical window that allowed it to have formal traction in the first place. It was not until a few decades prior (with the coming of Boas and other cultural anthropologists) that cultural and social-science research—and the questions that they invoked—would even be consulted by the courts and therefore able to influence decisions.
Response to Doll tests
Not everyone accepted the Doll tests as valid scientific studies. Henry E. Garrett, Mamie Clark’s former professor and advisor at Columbia, was an avid supporter of segregation and a witness in Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, VA (one of the five court cases that combined to form Brown v. Board). Garrett argued that no tests could adequately gauge a student’s attitudes toward segregation, and that the Clarks’ tests in Virginia were biased and had too small of a sample size.[37] Garrett advocated in his Virginia school board testimony that if a negro child had access to equal facilities surrounded by his own teachers and friends, “he would be more likely to develop pride in himself as a Negro, which I think we would all like to see him do – to develop his own potential, his sense of duty…” and Garrett even claimed that they would “prefer to remain as a Negro group” instead of mixing and facing hostility, animosity, and inferiority.[38] Garrett and his colleague Wesley C. George’s 1964 letter to the Science journal further questioned the Brown decision, claiming the only reference to science in the entire decision is in footnote 11. Garrett and George argue that the Court overlooked the “mental difference” between races, and that Clark’s evidence was invalid and misleading because “integration, not segregation, injured the Negro child’s self-image.”[39] In an alternative interpretation of the Clark doll experiments, Robin Bernstein has recently argued that the children’s rejection of the black dolls could be understood not as victimization or an expression of internalized racism but instead as resistance against violent play involving black dolls, which was a common practice when the Clarks conducted their tests.[40] Historian Daryl Scott also critiqued the logic of the Doll Study, because contemporary studies suggest that black children with greater contact with whites experience more psychological distress.[41] The Clark Doll Study was influential scientific evidence for the Brown v. Board decision, but a few academics questioned the study.
In 2005, filmmaker Kiri Davis recreated the doll study and documented it in a film entitled A Girl Like Me. Despite the many changes in some parts of society, Davis found the same results as did the Drs. Clark in their study of the late 1930s and early 1940s. In the original experiments, the majority of the children chose the white dolls. When Davis repeated the experiment 15 out of 21 children also chose the white dolls over the black doll.
CNN recreated the doll study in 2010 with cartoons of five children, each with different shades of skin color.[42] The experiment was designed by Margaret Beale Spencer, a child psychologist and University of Chicago professor. Children were asked to answer the same doll test questions, such as “who is the nice child” or “who has the skin color most adults like” and choose between the cartoon people arranged in order of lightest to darkest skin. The results were interpreted as indicating “white bias,” meaning that children (mostly white, but also “black children as a whole have some bias”) continue to associate positive attributes with lighter skin tones, and negative attributes with darker skin tones.[42]
On May 25th, 2025, Saturn enters Aries, initiating a brand new 29-year chapter – a cycle that will set the tone for how we build a future from the ground up.
On September 1st, 2025, Saturn will dip back into Pisces for a final visit, to re-enter Aries in February 2026, just before the much-anticipated Saturn-Neptune conjunction on February 20th, 2026. Saturn will stay in Aries until April 13th, 2028.
With Saturn’s ingress into the 1st sign of the zodiac, a long, long story is coming to an end. A new one is ready to begin.
Saturn is the planet of adulthood. Also the planet of karma – a word for the understanding that in the adult world, actions have consequences.
In the past 29-year Saturn cycle, we’ve been dealing with an inherited system of expectations – how we’re supposed to live, succeed, and behave. This is a time to start again, from a clean slate, without the entanglements of outdated roles and borrowed expectations.
We are now invited to leave the past behind and construct a life that is a reflection of what’s meaningful to us – NOW.
This is a unique threshold moment: we are moving from Pisces (the last sign of the zodiac, a water sign) to 0° Aries (the 1st sign, a fire sign that initiates the wheel).
With Saturn’s departure from Pisces and its ingress into Aries – and into a brand new cycle – something major is being birthed.
In fact, many of the words we use around giving birth – “delivery,” “transition,” “breaking water” – come from maritime and shipping language, which is symbolic of Pisces.
These metaphors reflect the movement from the watery, dissolving womb of Pisces into the initiating fire of Aries.
Metaphorically, this astrological transition marks the emergence of a project, identity, or energy that has been brewing inside us – growing, dreaming, gestating in Pisces – and is now ready to take form in Aries.
What’s emerging is larger in scope and more significant than anything we’ve brought forth so far. Why? Because of Neptune (we’ll touch on this aspect later).
Saturn And Aries
Now let’s dive into the overall energy of this transit. How does Saturn express itself in Aries?
Saturn, the planet of time, discipline, and long-term mastery, does not necessarily feel cozy in the sign of speed and action.
When Saturn enters Aries, initiation meets limitation: Aries wants to move fast; Saturn imposes structure, delays, and mastery.
Saturn in Aries is pretty much like watching Usain Bolt running in slow motion.
It might feel frustrating – that rising feeling of impatience as you watch someone built for speed move in deliberate, slow frames – HOWEVER, the slow motion ensures we pay attention to how he moves, the micro-adjustments, some strategies he might be using – the hidden mechanics of winning moves that, if you’re into running, you can learn a lot from.
Yes, it doesn’t give you the thrill – at least not right away – but it teaches you how to improve form, endurance, and efficiency, so later you can go faster and farther.
It’s the same lesson from the tortoise and the hare: slow, steady, and intentional can get you further than raw speed alone.
Similarly, Saturn in Aries is here to redefine what true progress looks like. The goal is not to tame the ram – but to help the ram achieve more than just a head-first burst.
Saturn does not slow things down for the sake of slowing them down. It slows them down for the sake of mastery – for the sake of achieving its goal. Saturn’s goal is to deliver: to materialize, to achieve, to tick the important milestones on the list.
Saturn is the doer – and important things in life take time and persistence. Hence the slowness and the methodical approach.
Historically, Saturn in Aries has coincided with a surge in startup activity, entrepreneurship, and bold new initiatives – projects that require a certain dose of Aries guts and “I can do it” spirit, but also the stamina to stay long enough in the birthing process to make it to the other side.
Saturn will make the ram even more determined, and it will give that extra oomph and strategic endurance.
What does Saturn in Aries’ transit mean for us as individuals? It means that the part of us that is Aries – and we all have one, as indicated by the house ruled by Aries in our natal chart – will become more Saturnian.
Saturn will tame the Aries part of our chart, helping us to think things through before taking action. Sometimes, sleeping on things – or having a healthy dose of self-doubt – can actually take us further in the long run.
This slower pace gives us time to ask: is this truly what I want? Is it aligned with who I’m becoming? Some fights ARE worth fighting for – and Saturn will give us the discipline and relentlessness to stick with them.
There’s a certain quality about the 1st sign of the zodiac that doesn’t allow space for what’s already there. It creates it from scratch. In Aries – starting a brand new cycle around the zodiac – Saturn is no longer interested in the old rules. It questions the idea of “appropriate timing.”
The “as-soon-as-you-can-afford-it-get-a-mortgage-because-everyone-else-does-it” mindset.
In Aries, Saturn creates new rules. It resets the system. It writes its own frameworks.
For every one of us, this transit is an opportunity to design new systems, new timelines, and new definitions of success. Whether that’s working from home, from the road, or from the 25th floor of a corporate tower – Saturn in Aries wants us to work on our terms.
Saturn wants us to discover new goals and ambitions that actually feel like ours (Aries).
Saturn in Aries – The Aspects
We cannot separate the Saturn in Aries transit from its co-presence with Neptune, and especially the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, which happens later – on February 20th, 2026 – at 0° Aries, the “reset” degree of the zodiac.
Saturn – and Neptune – will be involved in an auspicious configuration called a minor triangle with Pluto in Aquarius and Uranus in Gemini. This will be in effect from now until late 2026, and it’s a defining feature of the Saturn in Aries transit.
This triangle is a rare configuration that brings together all the outer planets into a remarkable alignment of forces – the drive for transformation (Pluto), innovation (Uranus), and structured vision (Saturn–Neptune).
Later, in June 2027, Saturn will trine Jupiter in Leo, adding momentum, optimism, and expansion to whatever we’ve been building.
We are talking about supportive aspects with slow-moving outer planets – which is very good news!
While in Pisces, Saturn had been squaring Jupiter, a more conflicted and foggy energy. This time, we have incredible support to ground bold new beginnings in reality – while keeping them aligned with long-term purpose.
Saturn And Neptune in Aries – A New World
Saturn – as the last visible planet in the solar system – defines the boundary of what we are allowed to see and understand.
But then there’s more: beyond Saturn lie the outer planets – Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto – which may be invisible to the naked eye, but are just as real as anything else in the solar system. They orbit the Sun, doing their thing, whether we’re aware of them or not.
Of course, the fact that they’re invisible to the naked eye is a metaphor: they represent forces we’re not fully conscious of – which is why Uranus transits feel “fated,” or why Neptune transits can feel “confusing,” elusive, or strangely timed.
Yet this time is different.
Saturn follows in Neptune’s footsteps, walking nearly hand in hand, offering us a rare opportunity to consciously engage with Neptune’s source code.
And Neptune’s source code is where the intelligence of the universe originates. Neptune is the script – the cosmic architecture, the invisible design through which life unfolds. It’s the underlying algorithm of reality, operating at a meta level beyond our usual awareness.
Normally, we’re not tuned in to that intelligent design – we simply inherit the script, and so we experience life as fate. We are born into a system – a society – and we follow its rules.
When the rules change, when the script updates, we follow along, often without realizing anything has shifted at all.
But when Saturn and Neptune meet at the first degree of the zodiac, the entire operating system undergoes a reboot.
The world as we know it enters a complete and total RESET.
We are stepping into a completely new world – with a new vision (Neptune) and new rules (Saturn).
Saturn in Aries – 1984 Vs Brave New World Vs. What Comes Next
Literature has always been one step ahead of politics when it comes to imagining the future.
In George Orwell’s 1984, we were shown a society governed by surveillance, where every move is monitored by Big Brother – a hard dystopia, where people are ruled by fear, punishment, and propaganda. History is erased, language is weaponized, and people are controlled through repression and the erasure of truth.
In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the controlled new world narrative is softer, disguised as utopia – where people are ruled not by fear, but by comfort, distraction, and genetic conditioning. The control method is pleasure, sedation, and engineered consent.
Orwell gave us a world where truth is forcibly hidden. Huxley gave us a world where truth is drowned in irrelevance.
We can easily trace the resemblances of both scenarios over the past 100 years – perhaps with 1984 more resonant during the Neptune in Leo to Neptune in Capricorn era (1914–1998), and Brave New World descriptive of the Neptune in Aquarius – Pisces era (1998–2025).
So what about the upcoming Saturn-Neptune conjunction at 0° Aries? What kind of world are we moving into now? 1984? Brave New World?
If 1984 and Brave New World were crafted within systems of control, rooted in structure and institutional power, this next iteration – born at 0° Aries – bypasses what we usually think of as “the system.”
In this scenario, Saturn is no longer the “system” – it becomes the tool for the vision.
The fact that the Saturn-Neptune conjunction occurs at 0° Aries – the Big Bang degree of the zodiac – is hugely significant. It suggests a spontaneous, individuated, and archetypally raw emergence of a new world – less managed, less bureaucratic, and more primordial.
Let’s compare this upcoming conjunction to previous Saturn-Neptune conjunctions:
1989 in Capricorn – Cold war ends, walls fall, institutions crack – but everything still passes through hierarchical filters
1953 in Libra – Post-WWII world order stabilized through diplomacy, alliances, and social contracts
1917 in Leo – The fall of monarchies, rise of state-centered ideologies. Power was dramatic, visible, myth-driven
1882 in Taurus – Industrialization reshaped material values and human labor
Even 1989 in Capricorn (the fall of the Berlin Wall, often seen as revolutionary) was a structured collapse, not an instinctive rebirth.
But0° Aries breaks the pattern.
At 0°, Aries is the Fool stepping into the unknown, the Seed splitting open, and the Pioneer with no map.
When outer-planet cycles begin here, they don’t just evolve the past – they replace it.
This is not a top-down, committee-approved, softly-transitioned shift. This is a blazing reset.
The world being born is not a management project – it’s an eruption of will, truth, and self-definition. There is no blueprint yet, just the demand to act.
This is an epochal myth RESET. We are hitting “New Game” on human civilization.
So what will we build?
–> Will we build it on courage and clarity, or illusion and control?
–> Will it be a brave new world of empowered individuals with spiritual purpose?
–> Or a technocratic dystopia of digitized meaning, masked by distraction?
–> Are we engineering systems that help people wake up – or fall asleep?
The conjunction invites us to consciously design a new world myth – where structures (Saturn) serve vision (Neptune), and idealism is grounded in personal responsibility (Aries).
Saturn And Neptune In Aries – Be Careful What You Wish For
While Saturn crossing the 0° Aries threshold – and the historic conjunction with Neptune at 0° – is a complete and archetypal RESET, there’s more nuance to this.
Yes, the new world that will emerge will start from scratch and will be different from everything we’ve seen.
However, we should keep in mind that this new vision – however raw and new – is still seeded in Pisces.
There’s a cyclicity to the zodiac; one sign follows the other. So this brand new reality is ultimately not random – it’s a reflection of our own dreams, aspirations, wash-off of unlived potentials, frustrations, desires, illusions (Pisces) – where Saturn and Neptune have been quietly simmering over the past years.
Pisces reminds us that whatever is not experienced and fully felt at its time gets stored in an inner ocean of unlived potential that becomes our dream – or our nightmare.
Whatever dream lives inside of us – and not all of them are pretty – is going to be materialized by Saturn.
As the saying goes: “Be careful what you wish for – because it might happen.”
This is quite a deep reflection. We are encouraged to be careful – i.e. conscious, i.e. discerning – about what we wish for, i.e. our Neptunian longing, our Neptunian dream – because this dream will eventually be birthed into existence, in the same sequential way that Aries – the birth – follows Pisces – the dream – in the zodiac.
Ultimately, that’s the law of karma (Saturn): one thing leads to another. Actions have consequences – and so do the things we avoid or postpone. Everything we carry within eventually transforms – and what lives inside us, becomes real.
Saturn And Neptune – Midas’ Touch
When King Midas wished for everything he touched to turn to gold – his ideal of wealth and abundance – little did he consider that his deepest wish becoming real would turn into a curse.
His food, his daughter – everything he loved – became cold and lifeless.
This is a cautionary tale: dreams – what brews in our unconscious – do come true. And we need to be careful – and discerning – about what we wish for.
This happens a lot in everyday life, when the story we’ve been telling ourselves – to give life some meaning or direction – turns out to be not authentic, but just an irrelevant tick box.
Many people build their lives around a fantasy – like getting married and having the ‘perfect wedding’ – believing it will bring fulfillment or validation. The ambitious young professional becomes so focused on earning that promotion that they reshape their entire life – routine, values, even personality – just to ‘fulfill the dream.’
The vision becomes so consuming that it pushes us down a path that no longer feels like our own. We end up trapped in a dream that might have once felt meaningful, but is no longer alive.
That’s why, when we do achieve what we thought we always wanted, many Saturn–Neptune transits lead to disillusionment: “Is this really it? That’s not what I expected.”
And then we hear things like, “Ah, Neptune transits are no good – they’re all about illusions” – when in reality, we’re the ones stuck in outdated dreams.
We could go as far as to say:
Our entire life is shaped by the dreams we’ve been dreaming. And if our life doesn’t feel fulfilling, doesn’t feel aligned, it’s perhaps because the dreams we’re feeding it are not seeded in truth and presence.
Saturn In Aries – The Time Is NOW
The good news? Saturn and Neptune in Aries are not your average dreamy combo.
There’s something very alive and urgent about Aries – this is the Point Zero of the zodiac, a space where there’s no space for outdated dreams. In Aries, the time is NOW. The dream is real. And it’s meant to be pursued – with drive, clarity, and purpose. Immediately.
Aries doesn’t let the dream fade into abstraction. It doesn’t wait. It doesn’t have the patience for delayed alignment. It acts.
And that’s great news. As Saturn crosses the threshold, following Neptune’s footsteps, it brings an urgency to our dreams. If something inspires you right now – pursue it. Take it seriously.
It’s not “just a dream” – at least not in the old Piscean way. Don’t put it into a storage unit “for later.” Take action now.
Of course, the dream might take a while to fully unfold. It might morph into something else. And that’s perfectly fine, because at 0° Aries, the point is not the finish line. The point is the starting line. And you want to get started.
Saturn And Neptune – A Higher Order
Again, when we talk about the Saturn in Aries transit, we cannot untangle it from Neptune – especially given how closely they travel together in the first year of Saturn’s stay in Aries.
This co-presence and upcoming conjunction marks an incredibly important reset.
We’re talking about a reconfiguration of structure, rules, laws, and frameworks – a higher-order rearrangement.
Just like in dreams, where our daily impressions are reassembled into symbolic storylines, Neptune works on an abstract level. It dissolves, merges, shifts, and reimagines.
It initiates a subtle but profound reshaping (Neptune) of our reality (Saturn). Neptune in Aries brings the dream of a new beginning, and Saturn in Aries makes it happen.
Together, they form a higher (Neptune) order (Saturn) – a cosmic recalibration of reality.
In past Saturn–Neptune cycles, we’ve seen the birth of new power structures: redrawing of borders, foundational treaties, new legal or ideological orders:
And now, with both planets co-present in Aries, this takes the archetype to a whole new level of urgency, momentum, and initiation. Aries doesn’t reform what exists – it starts over.
Together in Aries, Saturn and Neptune signal a restructuring of collective agreements like trade deals, territorial claims, global resource distribution, digital frameworks or economic alliances – and this level of change will most likely initially bring chaos and disruption.
We’re already seeing this: tariffs, new trade blocs, AI governance discussions, and shifting alliances. These are early Neptune in Aries signals of what’s about to come.
But things will get real – solidified – with Saturn in Aries.
And when Saturn and Neptune conjunct at 0° Aries, we’ll move to an entirely new level of order-meets-vision.
Are we ready for a new world? A new order and a new dream?
Saturn In Aries – Be The Change You Want To See In The World
Now that we have an idea of what to expect on a global level, what about personally?
We can apply the same principles to the individual. The same systemic change, new vision, and reset of reality is also happening within us.
We, too, can create a life built on our highest mission and soul’s longing and potential (Neptune) – and then get serious about making it happen (Saturn).
This is a unique moment infused with 0° Aries. It won’t last forever. The following weeks and months are key – a time when we can each tap into the field of possibility that only a fresh cycle brings.
Saturn will soon cross the threshold – the field gets activated. The question is: Do we want to play an active role in this shift – or let the opportunity slip?
In the process of answering the call to act, we will most likely hit some emotional or existential walls. Drive, courage, and appetite for risk – classic Aries traits – might not come naturally to many of us, especially if we don’t have planets in Aries.
But that’s why we have Saturn here for the next few years: to teach us how to build those traits – step by step – so we can act with real confidence, grounded not in illusion but in earned experience.
If Saturn in Pisces was “fake it till you make it,” Saturn in Aries is “make it real.”
If the Pisces motto was “Be careful what you wish for,” the higher Aries motto is “Be the change you want to see in the world.”
In this new world, we can no longer wait for things to happen – for perfect timing, for someone else to take the lead, for life to magically fall into place.
We can no longer pass the responsibility outside ourselves – to family, friends, communities, governments, councils, or politicians. With Saturn in Aries, there is no more “them.” It’s us.
The shift begins with the realization that everything going on in the world is a reflection of everything we’ve done, and very importantly, everything we haven’t done in the last Saturn cycle(s).
All of our small choices – study or party, gym or couch, speak up or stay silent, confront or avoid, say yes or say no, do something or do nothing – multiplied by millions of individuals, have created our current collective reality.
The current state of the world is not random or imposed from outside – it’s a mirror of both our actions and our inactions over time.
The only way to reset the system is to create new initial conditions – start from scratch, and be active in the process as individuals.
With Saturn and Neptune in Aries, the knight in shining armor is not some leader or savior. It’s YOU.
Saturn in Aries will remind us of one essential truth: if we want things to change, we have to jump on the horse and ride.
We DO have the power. We CAN change our life. And it’s often not even as hard as we fear it is – if we just make the first step.
It’s never too late; age and life circumstances are just numbers and labels – and they don’t hold up when there’s big Aries energy in the house.
Saturn in Aries is our chance to become the person we were always meant to be. To be the change we want to see in the world.
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove • May 14, 2025 Bruce Olav Solheim, PhD, is professor of history at Citrus College in Glendora, California. He also served as a Fulbright professor in 2003 at the University of Tromsø in northern Norway. He has just begun teaching a paranormal personal history course at Citrus College Fall 2018. He is author of five books on history and political science, one novel, three plays, and two books about his personal paranormal history, Timeless: A Paranormal Personal History and Timeless Deja Vu: A Paranormal Personal History. In this interview, rebooted from 2019, he describes a variety of childhood experiences associated with the paranormal — including several of a frightening nature. His psychic abilities were awakened, as a child, when he experienced an extraordinary healing and the presence of an ostensible angel. He also describes life on the remote Norwegian island of Andøya, 200 miles above the Arctic Circle. He emphasizes the need people have for a safe space in which to discuss their paranormal experiences. The conversation also focuses on the relationship between trauma and psychic openings. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on June 19, 2019)
ARIES (March 21-April 19): What may appear to be slow or static is actually moving. The developing changes are imperceptible from day to day, but incrementally substantial. So please maintain your faith in the diligent, determined approach. Give yourself pep talks that renew your deeply felt motivation. Ignore the judgments and criticism of people who have no inkling of how hard you have been working. In the long run, you will prove that gradual progress can be the most enduring.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): The most successful people aren’t those who merely follow their passion, but those who follow their curiosity. Honoring the guidance of our passions motivates us, but it can also narrow our focus. Heeding the call of our curiosity emboldens our adaptability, exploration and maximum openness to new possibilities. In that spirit, Taurus, I invite you to celebrate your yearning to know and discover. Instead of aching for total clarity about your life’s mission, investigate the subtle threads of what piques your curiosity. Experiment with being an intrigued adventurer.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Gemini author Huston Smith was a religious scholar who wrote thirteen books. But he was dedicated to experiencing religions from the inside rather than simply studying them academically. Smith danced with Whirling Dervishes, practiced Zen meditation with a master, and ingested peyote with Native Americans, embodying his view that real understanding requires participation, not just observation. In the spirit of his disciplined devotion, I invite you to seek out opportunities to learn through experience as much as theory. Leave your safety zone, if necessary, to engage with unfamiliar experiences that expand your soul. Be inspired by how Smith immersed himself in wisdom that couldn’t come from books alone.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): More than 2,000 years ago, people living in what’s now the Peruvian desert began etching huge designs of animals and plants in the earth. The makers moved a lot of dirt! Here’s the mystery: Some of the gigantic images of birds, spiders and other creatures are still visible today, but can only be deciphered from high above. And there were, of course, no airplanes in ancient times to aid in depicting the figures. Let’s use this as a metaphor for one of your upcoming tasks, Cancerian. I invite you to initiate or intensify work on a labor of love that will motivate you to survey your life from the vantage point of a bird or plane or mountaintop.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): You now have extra power to detect previously veiled patterns and hidden agendas. That’s why I urge you to be alert for zesty revelations that may seem to arrive out of nowhere. They could even arise from situations you have assumed were thoroughly explored and understood. These are blessings, in my opinion. You should expect and welcome the full emergence of truths that have been ripening below the surface of your awareness. Even if they are initially surprising or daunting, you will ultimately be glad they have finally appeared.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Renowned Virgo author Nassim Nicholas Taleb has called for the discontinuation of the Nobel Prize in Economics. He says it rewards economists who express bad ideas that cause great damage. He also delivers ringing critiques of other economists widely regarded as top luminaries. Taleb has a lot of credibility. His book “The Black Swan” was named one of the most influential books since World War II. I propose we make him your inspirational role model for now, Virgo. May he incite you to question authority to the max. May he rouse you to bypass so-called experts, alleged mavens, and supposed wizards. Be your own masterful authority.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): I predict that your usual mental agility will be even more robust than usual in the coming weeks. Although this could possibly lead you to overthink everything, I don’t believe that’s what will happen. Instead, I suspect your extra cognitive flexibility will be highly practical and useful. It will enable you to approach problems from multiple angles simultaneously—and come up with hybrid solutions that are quite ingenious. A possibility that initially seems improbable may become feasible when you reconfigure its elements. PS: Your natural curiosity will serve you best when directed toward making connections between seemingly unrelated people and fields.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): You’re ready to go to the next evolutionary stage of a close alliance. Although you may not feel entirely prepared for the challenge, I believe you will be guided by your deeper wisdom to do what’s necessary. One way I can help is to provide exhilarating words that boost your daring spirit. With that in mind, I offer you a passage from poet William Blake. Say them to your special friend if that feels right, or find other words appropriate to your style. Blake wrote, “You are the fierce angel that carves my soul into brightness, the eternal fire that burns away my dross. You are the golden thread spun by the hand of heaven, weaving me into the fabric of infinite delight. Your love is a furnace of stars, a vision that consumes my mortal sight, leaving me radiant and undone. In your embrace, I find the gates of paradise thrown wide.”
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): In ancient Egypt, mirrors were composed of polished copper. To remain properly reflective, they required continual maintenance. Let’s take that as a metaphor for one of your key tasks in the coming weeks. It’s high time to do creative upkeep on your relationships with influences that provide you with feedback on how you’re doing. Are your intended effects pretty close to your actual effects? Does your self-image match the way you are perceived by others? Are you getting the right kind of input to help you stay on course?
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Chances to initiate creative transformations will come from unexpected sources in the coming days. I guarantee it. But will you be sufficiently receptive to take maximum advantage? The purpose of this horoscope is to nudge you to shed your expectations so you will be tenderly, curiously open to surprising help and inspiration. What sweet interruptions and graceful detours will flow your way if you are willing to depart from your usual script? I predict that your leadership qualities will generate the greatest good for all concerned if you are willing to relinquish full control and be flexibly eager to entertain intuitive breakthroughs.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): For many Indigenous people of California, acorns were part of every meal. Nuts from oak trees were used to create bread, soups, dumplings, pancakes, gravy and porridge. But making them edible required strenuous work. In their natural state, they taste bitter and require multiple soakings to leach out the astringent ingredient. Is there a metaphorical equivalent for you, Aquarius? An element that can be important, but needs a lot of work, refinement and preparation? If so, now is a good time to develop new approaches to making it fully available.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): When Pisces-born Jane Hirshfield was a young poet, she mostly stopped writing poetry for eight years. During that time, she was a full-time student of Zen Buddhism and lived for three years at a monastery. When she resumed her craft, it was infused with what she had learned. Her meditative practice had honed her observational skills, her appreciation of the rich details of daily life, and her understanding that silence could be a form of communication. In the spirit of the wealth she gathered from stillness, calm and discipline, I invite you to enjoy your own spiritual sabbatical, dear Pisces. The coming weeks will be an excellent time to relax into the most intriguing mysteries.
Homework: What do you want more than anything else but fear you’re not worthy of? Newsletter.FreeWillAstrology.com
Gen Z slang is rife with new words like “unalive,” “skibidi” and “rizz.” Where do these words come from — and how do they get popular so fast? Linguist Adam Aleksic explores how the forces of social media algorithms are reshaping the way people talk and view their very own identities.
It is such delicate work, such devoted work, the work of contouring the personhoods of persons who have imprinted the world with nothing less than revolutions of the mind, yet have left only faint traces of themselves as persons, unselved first by the nature of their revolutionary ideas — vast, abstract, lightyears beyond the solipsisms of the self — and then unselved again by the selective collective memory we mistake for history and its perennial failure at a foothold in the abstract beyond personhoods, beyond identities, beyond the narrow and unimaginative bounds of so-called human interest. There is quiet heroism to this work of rescuing from obscurity and erasure lives understanding which helps understand the entire eras in which they were lived and the fundaments of sensemaking the following epochs have taken as givens.
Such is the work Muriel Rukeyser (December 15, 1913–February 12, 1980) did with Willard Gibbs (public library).
Muriel Rukeyser
Rukeyser’s own genius came abloom in the dawn of her twenties, when her debut poetry collection, Theory of Flight, earned her the Yale Younger Poets Award — America’s longest-running literary accolade. She was not yet thirty when she composed her staggering more-than-biography of the father of physical chemistry, Willard Gibbs (February 11, 1839–April 28, 1903) — this odd and world-shifting bridge figure between classical mechanics and quantum physics, celebrated as the greatest mind of the nineteenth century, lauded by Einstein as one of the most original and important thinkers America ever produced, prophesied to outlive in remembrance all of his contemporaries except perhaps Lincoln, yet almost entirely forgotten by Rukeyser’s time.
Like Eddington, Gibbs was a quiet, reserved genius — “silent, inhibited, remote,” Rukeyser tells us — queer by all reasonable deduction; he never married and lived out his life in his sister’s home. Like Newton, who accomplished the greatest leap in science within the solitude of his plague quarantine, Gibbs imagined his revolution within the chamber of the mind, within a dense solitude — “in silence, in isolation, in the years of rejection directly after the Civil War, when abstract work was wanted least of all, when the cry was for application and invention and the tools that would expand the great growing fortunes of the diamond boys.” And yet there he was, living “closer than any inventor, any poet, any scientific worker in pure imagination to the life of the inventive and organizing spirit of America.”
Rukeyser’s enchantment with Gibbs became the crucible for her lifelong stewardship of the parallels between poetry and science, her astute and abiding insight into how they help hold “the giant clusters of event and meaning that every day appear” and in doing so “equip our imaginations to deal with our lives.”
Published in 1942, Rukeyser’s majestic 446-page masterwork of antierasure grew from the seed of a fascination first germinated with her poem “Gibbs,” written as WWII was beginning to cast its umbra of terror over all that is bright and beautiful in the human spirit, unpeeling from the hallways of time the image of every genius who ever lived as an irrelevance to this apotheosis of dumb destruction. It is always the poet’s task to defend the relevance of radiance, whatever its shape and subject, and so she did. From the life of Willard Gibbs, Muriel Rukeyser drew something larger, vaster, more radiant than his life, than any life — a celebration of life itself, of the living mind and its deathless imagination and the power of that imagination to irradiate the world with the wonder of possibility. It is the connective tissue of her thought, the poetic musculature of context and concept propping up the skeleton of the dead scientist’s life, that renders Rukeyser’s book a revelation from the opening page:
Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future. Here is all the developing greatness of the dream of the world, the pure flash of momentary imagination, the vision of life lived outside of triumph or defeat, in continual triumph and defeat, in the present, alive. All the crafts of subtlety, all the effort, all the loneliness and death, the thin and blazing threads of reason, the spill of blessing, the passion behind these silences — all the invention turns to one end: the fertilizing of the moment, so that there may be more life.
The Triumph of Life by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)
Writing from within the savage wastefulness of a particular moment in a world unworlded by its most destructive war yet, Rukeyser insists on the irrepressible aliveness that consecrates the present, any present, and that springs from the indivisibility of the life of the body and the life of the mind:
Spring, and the years, the wars, and the ideas rejected, the swarming and anonymous people rejected, and the slow climb of thought to be more whole, the few accepted flames of truth in a darkness of battle and further rejection and further battle. We know the darkness of the past, we have a conscious body of knowledge — and under it, the black country of a lost and wasted and anonymous world… jungle-land, wasteful as nature, prodigal.
Our living moment rides this confusion; it is torn by the dead wars; seizes the old knowledge; speeds on the imagination of the living and the dead, and passes, fertilized. But the hidden life today continues among all the silence, and in the midst of war. The hidden life of the senses, the vivid, speculative life of the mind. The man over his table, glass shine of the test-tubes reflected in the eyes; the woman staring into her thought of the child not yet born… We see, in this moment of the world, the lives of many people brought to a time of stress. The streams are challenged, all the meanings are again in question.
It is at this moment that we turn… In the imaginations which tapped that energy, in the energy itself and its release, we see our power. Man, the mystery; man, the pure force; man, the taproot of naked vision, the source himself, will look in such a moment for deeper sources, for the sources of power that can bring a fuller life to a desperate time. We cut away the old life, cutting down to the root. And the root of such power, of such invention, is in the imaginative lives of certain men and women, responding in their way and with their proper kinds of love to the wishes of history — that is, to the wishes of the people at that moment, however disguised, however premature and dark.
For Rukeyser, Willard Gibbs was one of those people; for me, the people whose lives and loves I contoured in Figuring were, and the people in whose lives and loves I have dwelt in the years since: Mary Shelley, Walt Whitman, Rukeyser herself.
Rukeyser notes that however rigorous our scholarship, it is always at bottom a presumption to attempt to “solve the personality” and reanimate the lives and worlds of the long-gone people whose work has shaped our own lives and our understanding of the world. In a passage to which I relate in the marrow of my being, she adds:
It is by a long road of presumption that I come to Willard Gibbs. When one is a woman, when one is writing poems, when one is drawn through a passion to know people today and the web in which they, suffering, find themselves, to learn the people, to dissect the web, one deals with the processes themselves. To know the processes and the machines of process: plane and dynamo, gun and dam. To see and declare the full disaster that the people have brought on themselves by letting these processes slip out of control of the people. To look for the sources of energy, sources that will enable us to find the strength for the leaps that must be made. To find sources, in our own people, in the living people. And to be able to trace the gifts made to us to two roots: the infinite anonymous bodies of the dead, and the unique few who, out of great wealth of spirit, were able to make their own gifts.
In consonance with my longtime conviction that history is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance, Rukeyser mourns the erasure of so many such titans of spirit from our collective selective memory, mourns their loss “through waste and carelessness,” and offers the single most poignant and precise diagnosis I have ever encountered of what ails our systems of remembrance and sensemaking, which are ultimately our systems of future-making:
This carelessness is complicated and specialized. It is a main symptom of the disease of our schools, which let the kinds of knowledge fall away from each other, and waste knowledge, and time, and people. All our training plays into this; our arts do; and our government. It is a disease of organization, it makes more waste and war.
Both in her choice of subject (a man of such singular, specialized, abstract genius) and in her treatment of it (so rigorous in scholarship, so rapturous in breadth of sentiment), Rukeyser’s Willard Gibbs (the inaugural title in Marginalian Editions) stands as a bold antidote to this cultural carelessness — and falls as one, having perished out of print by these very forces, these abiding emblems of the ahistorical and segregationist impulses arising in the puerile bosom of our species, which might, just might, one day mature to outgrow. Until then, we have the poets — in the largest Baldwinian sense — to salve our collective amnesia with their bold benedictions of immortal truth.
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Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future. Here is all the developing greatness of the dream of the world, the pure flash of momentary imagination, the vision of life lived outside of triumph or defeat, in continual triumph and defeat, in the present, alive. All the crafts of subtlety, all the effort, all the loneliness and death, the thin and blazing threads of reason, the spill of blessing, the passion behind these silences — all the invention turns to one end: the fertilizing of the moment, so that there may be more life.