SAGITTARIUS (November 22-December 21)

Modern cosmology has stumbled across a truth that the ancients have always known, but tried to repress: our world is essentially meaningless, and in constant decay. This is why healing magic requires a sacrifice: in an entropic universe, it’s not a restoration of harmonic balance, but something close to blasphemy. The cosmological principle states that the universe is homogeneous and isotropic: certain constants, the speed of light, or the permittivity of the vacuum, remain the same regardless of the position of the viewer. At a large enough scale, everything is the same. Scientists refer to this, in a rare moment of poetry, as the End of Greatness. The universe is made of enormous walls of galaxy clusters, each billions of light years across, containing millions of galaxies that themselves contain billions of stars, forming a fragile web between vast and empty voids. Its story is an epic. Clusters collide, stars are born and burn out, intelligent life stares out into the darkness and sees something of itself reflected back. But if you look at the universe on a slightly larger scale, the filaments and voids vanish. Viewed as a whole, the universe is a flat grey expanse, all matter and all energy distributed evenly across its infinity, with no structure and no hidden meaning. All things are slowly collapsing, but on the highest possible level, the heat death of the universe has already happened. The world we think we live in, with stars and planets and trees and daily horoscopes in the back pages of the newspaper – it’s a translation error, a glitch between the blankness of the large-scale universe and the blankness of subatomic chaos. If we’re honest about our Hermeticism, it doesn’t tell us that the reason for all our daily injustices is encoded in an astral infinity. It tells us that there’s no reason for anything at all.

CAPRICORN (December 22-January 19)

An astrology that properly recognises its magical responsibilities is the only possible point of contact between human reason and the seething anarchy of outer space. There are twelve houses in the zodiac, and all of them are on fire.

AQUARIUS (January 20-February 18)

Another horoscope is possible, but astrology can only help us if it proceeds from the fact that our galaxy is fundamentally ironic. Any meaning that can be gleaned from a universe whose map is a blank sheet of paper will always be fleeting, evanescent, puckish, and bleak. As critics of astrology are always keen to point out, the actual information contained in any daily horoscope is usually vague to the point of meaninglessness – in that respect, at least, it’s a perfectly accurate mirror of our world. For the reader of horoscopes, who finds some meaning and comfort in them, neither the arbitrariness of the positions of stars and planets nor the fudgery of the prediction make their truths any less valid. A linguistic signifier can have meaning only because it itself is meaningless, thrown together with a signified with which it has no positively articulated relation and which it can never quite touch; signification takes place somewhere in the void between the two. Similarly, astrological truth doesn’t happen in the stupid depths of our solar system, but slips through the sky at that moment near dusk, when the first point of light howls gloomily near the horizon. It’s the shiver you get looking up at something very cold and very distant, shining from across an endless void. Linda Hutcheon describes irony as the possibility of simultaneity of multiple signifieds with any signifier (in its most radical sense, it’s the simultaneity occasionally encountered by Derrida of meaning and nonmeaning). Astrology is an ironist’s playground: its lions sleek or mangy, its virgins coquettish or forbidding, its water-carriers upright and obedient or leering through a gummy grin and spitting blood-flecked gobs in the swill. Constellations are vast, and any number of meanings can tumble through their nets. If, as Bataille knew, ‘the world is parodic and lacks an interpretation,’ interpretation doesn’t then become pointless, but radically democratic. A proletarian astrology will hang all the court charlatans that crowded around Pharaoh and Reagan, guillotine the blue-rinsed flatterers of musicians and actors, and shoot every billionaire who really thinks the galaxy exists just to increase his stock yields. Our destiny might be written in the stars. But we must hold the pen.

When the ice will creak
Between green shoes, and from the pale
Blue bitter airs
Barbarous globes of spring
Will break through.

We will be far away.

We would like to return and look,
Caress the clover of the heaths
The doorposts of the new home
Cry in pity
Where our mother passed.

Instead we will be far away.

Instead we prisoners
Will laugh without respite
And hate as far as the knife
Blades are gripped.
Damned those who lead us.

Far, always far away.

And when we have returned
wild grass will cover the courtyards
and the breath of the dead in the air.
The creases on the hands,
the rust on the shovels.

And still we will be far.

We will still be far
From the face that welcomes us in our sleep
here, tired of hate and love.

But new hands will come
As new leaves do.

Now to our distant camps.

But the bud will open
And the water spring speak, as it once did.
You will shine, buried stone,
Our ancient human heart,
Raw shard, bare law.

In the gaze of the distant sky.

PERSON: [reading from the card] … ‘egregore’.

THE INTERROGATOR: Do you know what it means?

PERSON: Do you?

THE INTERROGATOR: Of course I do. It’s a collective work of imagination made real through ritual. The Roman Catholic Church is an egregore. The limited liability corporation is an egregore… or was. The Fourth International… well, you need a critical mass, you see, if you want people to believe as they do at Mass. An egregore is an occult concept that some Surrealists used to use as an excuse not to build the party. Capitalism was this amorphous, totalising thing, so the only way to destroy it was to disrupt its ritual by running through the streets in dumb costumes. [sneers] Surrealists were so fucking playful.