For as long as there have been tribes among people, one curious ritual persists to meet the primitive human need for sacrifice: the ritual of the scapegoat or the practice of vicarious suffering. From the ancient goat-man-god ritual sacrifice to the Goddess to modern-day celebrities shot down for impersonating the gods, scapegoat rituals have bonded and divided tribes from the beginning of time, yet no other ritual remains more misunderstood.
There is a collective human need to transcend pain and suffering. Scapegoat rituals temporarily satisfy this primitive need by transferring the accumulated pain of a group or tribe onto an object, an animal, another human being or entire races of human beings in a powerful act of contagious magick. Like a virus, this need is contagious in that it spreads upon contact. Even though the forms of these rituals change, their underlying function remains the same: to provide a tribe with a vehicle or medium to pour their demons into. A tribe's demons are made up of the accumulated force and pressures of its people's fears, guilts, taboos and hatreds. A scapegoat is any object, animal or human being that looks and acts like the demon the tribe is seeking release from.
As people become more "civilized," through the repression and/or transmutation of our more "primitive" needs and aspects of ourselves, these needs find their way into our lives and the lives of others in more "subconscious" ways. In other words, no matter how psychologically sanitized or "clear" we hope to become, we still need our scapegoats. If we are not engaging in this ritual consciously and with purpose, it will happen like a knee-jerk reflex when somebody presses those buttons. The problem with knee-jerk scapegoat rituals is they're prone to persecute living human beings. Notice: The scapegoat doesn't have to be a person, an entire race of people or (in astrology) a planet, yet how often have we seen it be such? Here in the twenty-first century Post-Information Media Age, it seems that modern scapegoat rituals have been smokescreened, virtualized and digitized by and through the mass media itself.
The Transformation of Mass Mediarchy
The passage of Pluto through Sagittarius symbolizes, to this astrologer, a decade or so (1995 through 2006) featuring two basic levels of collective media transformation. First and foremost is the disclosure of corruption and decay in all public education systems. This very broad area not only includes public schools but universities and their extensions into mass media, corporate advertising, the government propaganda machine and how all of this interacts with online global communication systems. It is important to understand how "media" is a very small word symbolizing very expansive (Sagittarian) states. By my guesstimation, we have already left the so-called Information Age and are rapidly approaching the saturation point of a new era I'll call "Mass Mediarchy."
The second level of collective transformation involves media rebirth. Symptoms of media rebirth have already appeared in the film, music and publishing industries with the emergence of more independent media producers functioning autonomously of the more mainstream media systems. Media rebirth can happen anywhere media consumption reaches its hypersaturation point - in an individual or a collective - and starts its conversion from mere consumption of media to its translation and finally its regurgitation and transmission into something different. The key to media rebirth is your imaginative translation of media.
If you cannot translate the information you are absorbing, you will continue eating it until you shut down from information overdose, media numbness and eventually: imagination death. Media overconsumption - consuming without translation - is a very dangerous thing and makes scapegoats of us all. It is fatal insofar as imagination is necessary to media translation, which it is, very much so. Without a healthy imagination, media translation may be impossible. There are infinitely more media consumers than media producers in this country due, in part, to a widespread epidemic of imagination loss and soul death. Part of the problem may have begun in the public's long-standing passive habit of consuming spoon-fed answers from corporate advertisers and politicians that have, in turn, encouraged that public (that's us, folks) to continue spoon-feeding others. We are babies feeding babies in the Media Age, and it is time to toilet-train ourselves.
The Imaginative Intelligence of the Plutonic Force
To understand the more esoteric meanings underlying the archetype of Scorpio/Pluto, I suggest Paul Foster Case's book, The Tarot (Macoy Publishing, Richmond, VA, 1975), where in his chapter discussing Tarot Key 13, Death, he associates the Scorpionic death/rebirth process with the Hebrew letter Nun. Case goes on to say how "imaginative intelligence is the mode of consciousness attributed the letter Nun... (and) the choice of the adjective 'imaginative' is in accordance with the doctrine of Ageless Wisdom that causation is mental." He adds: "All changes are primarily changes in mental imagery; change the image, and ultimately the external form will change."
Change the image and ultimately the external form will change. It doesn't say absorb or become the image but change the image. Imagination could be a word to describe that image-changing process in our psyches, capable of forming visions, telling stories, creating myths and even making our own media. As a media culture, we are extremely sophisticated in our tastes for entertainment and the kinds of images we consume and identify with. In many instances - such as with the rigid family values and fixed behavior standards set on many television sitcoms and drama shows - our lives are subliminally influenced to conform to inane and incredibly stupid definitions of what it means to be a human being. Dumb, dumber, dumbest. Without the imaginative intelligence to translate, regurgitate and reproduce the media we passively consume, not only is media rebirth unlikely, so is our own rebirth unlikely.
Pluto in Sagittarius represents a time period of mind-boggling expansion in not just more media to eat - there will always be too much - but also the means to create our own media through publishing, music production, film and video, CD-ROM and virtual reality technologies, online newsletters and the myriad art forms now interfacing with science. As people take back the airwaves and manage their own media, that crossover from consumption to production catalyzes the collective transformation Pluto in Sagittarius symbolizes. As a planet, Pluto does not cause this change; as astrologers, we must stop spoon-feeding ourselves these lies. We cause this change together during what astrology calls Pluto's passage through Sagittarius. To me, astrology is far more useful as a measure of timing than a "system of causes."
Thought Control, Media and Propaganda
As a symbol unto itself, Pluto in Sagittarius might also reflect a process of thought (Sagittarius) control (Pluto), specifically a time period when the collective is ready for more disclosure of externally imposed thought control. In Stenographers to Power: Media and Propaganda (Common Courage Press: Monroe, ME, 1992), media activist David Barsamian argues convincingly for the immediate disclosure of the numerous ways in which mass media have been used by corporate agencies for exercising thought control in America since the early part of this century.
Noam Chomsky, one of those interviewed, suggests: "In a state where government can't control the people by force it had better control what they think." When Chomsky speaks of the public school systems, he says: "They are institutions for indoctrination, for imposing obedience, for blocking the possibility of independent thought, and they play an institutional role in a system of control and coercion. Real schools ought to provide people with techniques of self-defense, but that would mean teaching the truth about the world and about society, and schools couldn't survive very long if they did that." Pluto in Sagittarius may introduce an era where the collective becomes a little more ready to learn the truth about the world and about society.
The archetype of Sagittarius the Archer relates to what Paul Foster Case calls "Tentative Intelligence" or "Intelligence of Probation or Trial" and is symbolized by Tarot Key 14, Temperance. The multiple coincidence, or synchronicity, shared in the timing between the asteroid (not comet) that hit Jupiter and the preliminary O.J. Simpson trials expresses this Sagittarian/Jupiterian principle in action. With so much exaggerated focus on the O.J. Simpson debacle, the media itself went on trial as much as the accused. I can't remember a more blatant demonstration of media hype, distortion and self-aggrandizement! Does mass media pick and choose its scapegoats, and if not, then who? In this era of dying gods and goddesses, celebrities have become the new sacrificial lambs, and the mass media, the sacrificial arena itself. It's time we turned the tables and started a revolution. I can think of no better way than scapegoating the mass media itself.
Scapegoat the Mass Media
As mentioned earlier, the function of a scapegoat is to satisfy the age-old human need for sacrifice by the projection of collective pain and suffering onto an object, an animal, another person or a group of people. Since I cannot in good conscience condone the scapegoating of any animal, person or collective, I cheerfully resort to that object out there that looks and acts most like the demon my people are seeking release from. What better scapegoat for pouring our collective demons into than the mass media itself?
Many are the ways to scapegoat the mass media. For starters, turn off the TV. Break trance. Create your own media. Make trance. Produce more media than you're currently consuming. Reimagine everything you see on TV. Stop your cocooning. Get out into the streets again. Talk amongst yourselves. Listen to international news on a short-wave radio. Really listen to each other. Make a movie with your friends. Start a newsletter. Get your imaginations back. Take an artist out to lunch. Stop mainlining the online. Make real connections with people. Turn off the TV. Break trance. Make trance. Create your own media. Do it now. Imagination death precedes death of soul.
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