Part Two:
Twelve Phases of Human Experience
PISCES - Page 3 of 3

Pisces must not be considered only as a Sign of social or mystical openness, with an under-meaning of passivity. In its sea-depths there is violence and storm. Severance is performed by the sword. Fanaticism is ruthless and the monk's retreat into the desert, where he can best face, in aloneness, his entire past and all the human races' memories, is a trial of courage and resilient strength. For this reason, many generals and heroes carried the zodiacal signature of Pisces in their nature. They knew how to stand still and to unfurl their energies; how to be ruthless, with themselves as with others. Pisces is aroused depth; and nothing can be more devastating than the tidal wave or the sea-born hurricane.
      In Pisces, there is always something of finality, yet of expectancy. Even gentleness has undertones of mystery. There are transitions bidden in every corner of the being. There is often personal aloofness and distant nobility, as if issues were too big or too set to involve the mere personality. There is a sense of possession by an eternal unrest, on the background of which all set things appear temporary or useless. And if that mood prevails in the personality, a fatal kind of introversion slowly empties the consciousness of living contents. Men return to the ghostly world of the unconscious — perhaps as Roman Stoics living in noble aloofness while their world is destroyed, perhaps as dreamers translating all memories into phantasies, or, if afraid of psychic phantasies, building rigid intellectual systems and useless algebras to frame their hollowness with elegant arabesques.
      In its highest and most spiritual aspect Pisces reveals itself as pure compassion. Here we see the great Personage whose being is full to overflowing, because he has absorbed the wholeness of his race's experience. In his plenitude, society is mirrored and endowed with the fullest significance. And because he can go no farther, except he ascend to transcendent and formless Nirvanas, to him comes the great choice: solitary bliss or compassion. The former is the goal of "spiritual selfishness," sought after under the great delusion that there can be individual salvation. But the Compassionate One understands that, in reality and in truth, there can be no individual salvation. No man can rise to a Reality that is vital and significant, who does not take with him the past whence he arose. The individual can only be "saved" in that day when the whole of humanity will have reached fulfillment. Isolationism is the only sin that life cannot forgive, because he who conveniently forgets the rungs of the ladder which helped him to reach the pinnacle, leaves a mark upon life which nothing and no one can eradicate but himself.
      Compassion is the absolute Law of a universe in which there is order and harmony. Compassion is the heart of reality, because reality is based on the experience of organic wholeness, and he who truly experiences all things as organic wholes cannot fail to see himself as part of some Greater Whole, however much he may have attained integral wholeness in his own being. In Pisces, therefore, the "Messenger from the White City" meets the men whom it is his burden of destiny to teach and to impregnate with the Glad Tidings of the New Life. Should he recoil in dismay before the picture of decay and materialism which a crumbling civilization presents, he would then fail his true destiny.
      The burden of Pisces is that one should not recoil before anything, low and horrible as it might be, on the basis of one's own purity and excellence; that one should move on toward the common plains with arms and soul laden with the significance and glory of the hills "whence come salvation." The "Cedar of Lebanon" must willingly let itself be cut, that houses may be built for the homeless, that ships may sail to lands of riches, that "Temples of Solomon" may become in fact dwelling places of God among men.
      In Pisces, the "White City," that is far and beyond, can be erected, in reality and in significance, among men. This is the end of the cycle, which bears within its vital depths the beginnings of the New Life. The Day-force and the Night-force have come once more to the point of equilibrium. What is to become "initiated" is no longer, as it was at the threshold of Libra, the individual; it is now Humanity, as an organic whole. And this is the last blessing of the closing cycle, the eternal promise of all cyclic consummation: that the constant dualism of ever-changing life can be integrated in organic wholes ceaselessly more encompassing, through the creative behavior of Personalities ever more compassionate and more deeply integrated; that Day and Night may be realized as the two complementary poles of life and consciousness, in moments of human perception so lucid and so rich with universal contents that such illuminations may remain as beacon lights to be guidance and joy to ever vaster reaches of life. It is the promise of eternal rebirth, which leaves nothing unredeemed and excludes no one; the promise of the everlasting and timeless Presence of God in the man who fully welcomes the total integration of all that brought him to his present consummation; in whom, therefore, is accomplished the synthesis of past and future in the fullness and glory of moments that are the "eternal Now."