RamaGenesis
Introduction
There sometimes come moments in the familiar round of life as we know it when the cosmic drama of creation and evolution, cataclysm and redemption, suddenly takes on immediate form in epic events. There was the outbreak of the Great War a century ago, an upheaval that took the world by surprise and shattered the prevailing fantasy that an age of everlasting peace had been attained. It was utterly inconceivable in the aftermath that there could ever be a Second World War, but this, too, came to pass. In between there was the stock market crash of 1929, and afterwards the fall of Communism. The new millennium kicked off with the 9/11 attacks, followed by a new kind of enduring war and an economic meltdown that some pundits still think will trickle down into a second great depression.
Did all these mind-blowing events just materialize out of nowhere? Were they merely random blips in the temporal slipstream? Self-styled metahistorians say of course not, and dutifully analyze the sociopolitico-economic patterns that underlay the events and may have triggered them. But there is another dimension to the equation, a great hidden variable without which the real causes cannot be known. The true "meta" in history and all other fields is metaphysics. It almost always transpires that tectonic shifts in the slipstream happen first in the numenal realm ~ the metasphere that overlays the visible world ~ and only later make a material impact for all to see.
Such was the coming of RamaSpirit in a monumental planetary alignment in May of the year 2000. Sky & Telescope magazine highlighted the human impact of such events with a feature article on how past alignments changed history, not because the celestial portent had an objective effect on the material world, but rather on the collective psyche.
As for the numenal effect, literal belief in astrology is irrelevant for those who grasp the value of symbols and synchronicity on a grand scale. In fact the inexactitude of astrology in the mix-&-match New Age Zeitgeist even added an extra impact. While the astronomers were unanimous in their observations of the May 2000 (5-2K) alignment, the astrologers were caught in the cleft between East and West, and could not reach consensus on whether the seven planets had assembled in Aries or Taurus. In terms of the most basic archetypal import, the contrasting augury of the two signs foretold drastically opposite courses for the new millennium.
