kimberlysteele | Entries tagged with senex

Dead mall in Heikintori, Finland. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

There was a notable absence of Black Friday stampedes in Chicagoland this year. For the past twenty years, Walmart has been infamous for its Black Friday shopping debacle. In times gone by, herds of greedy humans camped outside the building in long, snaking lines, suffering the cold in order to snatch a perceived deal on the latest gaming console, big screen TV, or toy.

Not so much this year. One of my young adult students reported that Walmart did not stay open all night on Thanksgiving as it used to do and that Black Friday was underwhelming. My husband said that Sam’s Club (warehouse store and competitor of Costco) was remarkably quiet two days after Thanksgiving on a Saturday that should have looked like a mob scene. Of course lots of people are going to say “It’s because everyone is shopping online” but I don’t think so. Online shopping didn’t stop people from thronging in stores every Black Friday from 2000 until the Plandemic. I think something else is going on. The vibe is different, at least for the time being.

Perhaps after three years of being artificially prevented from seeing loved ones, it is finally beginning to dawn on some people that human togetherness is much more important than we have previously been led to believe. I certainly hope so. I am the sort of psychic who cannot possibly win the lottery or a horse race but is often tormented by my sense of whatever astral shifts are going on all around me. As Carole King once sang, I Feel the Earth Move. I sense a shift going on. I believe it is related to Saturn.

Saturn is the most misunderstood of planetary influences. As an astrological novice, my knowledge of him is severely limited and I freely admit it. For many, Saturn = Evil, which is a grotesque and hubristic misinterpretation commonly found among certain factions of Christians who dwell in constant pathological fear of their god having viable competition.

At no time does this competition become more apparent than the Winter Solstice, when ancient egregores do battle underneath the surface of the apparent and the obvious. The Christian church’s cold, dead hands are being pried off the Yuletide season one finger at a time as we speak. Christmas is reverting to its Saturnalian roots. For the Winter Solstice celebration never belonged to the Christians in the first place; they only borrowed it for a time.

Ancient Incans saw the Milky Way galaxy (much more easily visible in the sky back then) as a spiritual river that connected the worlds of the dead and the living. The bridge between worlds was most easily crossed at the Winter Solstice. They weren’t the only ones to associate the crossing of worlds with the time around December 21st. Natives of America from the frozen Arctic to the much warmer climes of the Amazon basin believed the Winter Solstice was a sacred, once-yearly chance of communing with those who had already crossed over. It was also party time. Capac Raymi was its official name in ancient Ecuador.

The last time the Incas celebrated the December rite of Capac Raymi in its full, uninhibited splendor was in December of 1533, this time in conjunction with a victory celebration of “liberation” from the hated occupying army of Quito and its now-deceased renegade Emperor, Atahuallpa. The Spanish, just then “allies”, witnessed the saturnalian spectacle, and were particularly impressed by the unending rivers of urine that poured through the city’s gutters from the tens of thousands of inebriated celebrants. -William Sullivan, The Secret of the Incas

The Faces of Saturn

Though Santa is one benevolent depiction of Saturn, there is another aspect of Saturn that appears every Christmas in the form of Ebenezer Scrooge, courtesy of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Scrooge is a malevolent Saturn in the beginning of the story, a Senex gone down the wrong path of penny-pinching and bitterness. After some divine intervention, Scrooge gets a taste of his own future medicine and reforms his wicked ways, returning to a balanced Saturnian state of compulsive generosity and blessing. Dr. Seuss’s Grinch is merely Scrooge re-imagined as a lanky green beast with an extended philtrum.

Santa was never a Christian deity, and thereinlies much butthurt. It irked me to see a bunch of Facebook materialist Christians trashing Halloween as a Satanic pagan holiday enough to get me to write an essay about it earlier this year. If Halloween is being cancelled for its pagan origins, Christians need to cancel Christmas right along with it for the same reasons. If Halloween is bad with its candy and costumes and sticking of heads in water for apples, Christmas is ten times worse with its Yule logs, Christmas trees, and thinly-disguised representation of Saturn riding the skies with his flying reindeer and sacks of presents. He comes through the fireplace because he is a fire god. Though Santa has been watered down to suit modern tastes, he was once a fearsome deity named Krampus who would just as soon abduct awful, bratty children and spirit them away to an unknown and distant realm where they would become crushed fodder for future universes. Re-imagining Krampus as a stupid Elf on a Shelf and attempting to neuter him does not remove his influence. I would argue it only serves to piss him off, and you DO NOT WANT to piss off Saturn.

Speaking of ways to piss off Saturn, the materialism of our ostensibly Christian nation is what created the Christmas retail monster in the first place. When I was an upper middle class child being brought up in the 70s, I acted the royal brat a great many holiday seasons and still got loads of Asian-made presents anyway. The children and grandchildren of upper middle class Generation X America are so spoiled, many only want cash or gift cards for Christmas because they already have every toy and game. Saturn is going to solve the conundrum of upper middle class entitlement in the near future, and I would argue the process is already under way. The death of retail is upon us.

Retail is the way people who have lost any viable religion go to church. It is the Church of Progress. For this reason, the formerly richest man on Earth, Jeff Bezos, is a retail giant. When people lose touch with the Divine, they shop for stuff they do not need.

Recently I was in a chain store that sells fun imported food, kitchen stuff, and some small pieces of furniture. I had the misfortune of being checked out by an extremely unhappy young woman. The first thing she tried to do was push me into buying more stuff. Since I was buying noodles, she insisted several times that I should buy a jar of sauerkraut to go along with the noodles I was buying. She asked if I had a membership to the store and I said “No, but I would like to sign up”. She nearly panicked several times when I could not successfully scan the QR signup code to my old iPhone 6. I finally figured out how to join the store’s club via text, which barely soothed her frayed nerves. I have run into some store associates who were a barely-concealed mess before; sadly this was not the first time. There is a tea store in downtown Naperville I will likely never set foot in again because the retail associate (also a 30-something white woman) was so unpleasant and pushy. I am not rude to retail associates even if they are rude to me. This is because I used to work retail.

The interesting thing about the aforementioned imports store and the clothing stores I used to work in as a young woman is that nobody who needs to work in stores like them to make a living can actually afford to do any significant shopping there. In the imports store with the rude sauerkraut-pushing associate, there was another woman, this time a shopper, who was the sort of well-heeled Karen you expect to be Christmas shopping. She was on her mobile phone, moodily demanding whoever was on the other end be informed about their “options” for Christmas ornaments.

These snapshots are how I hope to illustrate why the collective astral plane is a seething pit of festering filth. As I parlayed with the sauerkraut-pusher, I was reminded of how horrible it was to work retail. My managers at The Limited back in the day basically told us we associates were worthless unless we got people to buy thousands of dollars worth of crappy, Chinese-made clothes. A typical day at The Limited was six to eight hours of stultifying boredom, wandering through brightly lit clothing racks, straightening them, and hoping for that golden customer who would try on and later buy an obscene amount of clothing. Though nobody worked on commission, in order to be favored by management, you had to entice women to buy by acting the maid-in-waiting while the same loop of weird pop music droned overhead, repeating itself every few hours as an annoying, yet ironic score to accompany squandered time. Retail has its own toxic egregore that was munching heartily on sauerkraut-pusher’s soul. Thankfully that egregore is going the way of the dodo. Good riddance! That’s the thing about Saturn… he may represent death and dying, but all things must die in order for the new to be born.

Scene from the film American Beauty

The opposite of one thing is almost invariably another equally bad thing. Nowhere is this better demonstrated in the opposite of Puer Aeternus, whose opposite is Senex.

Puer Aeternus as a god is symbolized by Dionysus and Mercury/Hermes in equal measure. He knows how to party, can be prone to debauchery, and suffers an airy detachment because of his cherished collection of unattainable ideals. Where Puer is dependent and childlike long after his actual childhood, Senex is all work and no play except for a few brief moments near cradle-time and near decrepit old age. Senex is ruled by Saturn, Lord of Time, and when imbalanced, he casts a warped reflection as a child who is old before his or her time, stodginess, conformity, and compliance.

The C Word

Much to my disappointment, almost every vegan I used to pal around with ended up getting the MRNA quaxxine and its multiple boosters. I have meditated many times on the Compliant, and from what I can tell, there is a direct correlation between compliance and a desire for material comfort, status, and unearned wealth. Enter the MRNA quaxxine mandates: those vegans of supposed moral fiber did not stand a chance. Give up travel by plane because it was either take the quax or forgo the overseas trip? Not them. Skip a chance to virtue signal about being quaxxed despite mounting evidence of its dangers, plus busloads of dead athletes dropping dead on the field every day? Nah. There is absolutely zero reason for a so-called vegan to get an injection that was dreamed up and pushed HARD by the same people who tortured beagles in labs by sticking their heads in boxes so their heads could be eaten by sandflies. Though mainstream media has done their level best to disown #beaglegate by fact checking it into Google oblivion, as they say on the X-Files, the truth is out there.

Puer Aeternus clings to his ideals with recklessness and would sacrifice all of his potentials for human connection, love, and loyalty on the altar of adventure and free-wheeling excitement. Senex is the opposite. Senex throws ideals under the bus, happily forgetting them as they are ground into a pulp between rubber and iron. Senex extremists cling to the notion they are the Good People and Family Men (and Women) but they only love what they can control. Senex is more than happy to hoard and it is the mark of the Senex to amass far more than what is needed or even wanted. If we are judging on deeds and not words, Senex does not do any good deed without making a minor spectacle of it. If Senex gives to charity, you can bet your bottom dollar that it will be tax-deductible and the money will flow back to him in a cycle of grift, such as the money that was supposedly donated to Ukraine war efforts and got funneled into Democratic election funds in 2022.

The egregore of Senex personified is Karen. Now, all of you who are named Karen who are outraged at the use of this name to denote a tacky, “I need to speak to your manager”, middle aged, designer leggings-wearing harpy should take a moment to consider the plight of men named Richard. Many of the vegans I used to know were Karens about food. They would go into restaurants and get mad if the restaurant did not have vegan options, or worse, they would get mad if the restaurant did not have oil and gluten free vegan food. Sure, they could have stayed home and eaten their dry baked potato (with no salt of course) and a chopped apple, but that would be too easy. Instead, one of the vegans who came to the restaurant meet ups I used to host argued for a good fifteen minutes with an underpaid counter worker how the cook should prepare her falafel without oil. If said vegan had ever bothered with the tiniest bit of self-reflection, she would have understood that she was power tripping. That is Karen’s game, which I will discuss in a future essay about toxic femininity. Karen does not care about the pittance she receives from returning her craft supplies at Michael’s or Hobby Lobby, she does not care about the oil in a falafel, and she does not actually want her child to get an undeserved A in Reading Comprehension. What Karen wants is power, and she gets it by feeding off the negative emotional reactions of the people she treats as underlings.

Senex the Witch

Senex wants to be King (or Queen in the case of Karen). Whereas Puer wishes to be free of domination, Senex wants to dominate and control, preferably forever. Puer has plenty of negative traits, but at least he does not need to be worshipped. Senex does, and her black tar of ill-will is directed at all who do not worship her. Because Senex is a cheerless scold, she hates seeing other people having more fun than she perceives herself as having. Instead of turning inward and working on herself, she thrusts her ill-will at them in the form of jealousy, bitterness, and self-righteous anger. Truth be told, Senex is an emotional vampire who gets off on stifling the free will and humor of others: misery loves company and she is hell bent and determined to suck the universe into her blackened womb. Perhaps you can tell I am more than passingly familiar with the Senex archetype. Perhaps this is because I personally hosted it for longer than I would like to admit.

Senex wants to win the game of life — who knew it was a contest? In order to be a Queen, she has to emulate Queens, and that means acting in accordance with royal dictates. Senex forms her Queendom with the accoutrements of conformity: a family made up of parents and children, an owned house or condo in the best part of town, and a tribe around her of other compliant conformists. She prefers orderliness and she will have it at all costs, including the shunning of any Puers who dare defy her or the government/corporations/TV she takes marching orders from. She believes in Law, and because at her core she believes that she is the Law, she will carefully overlook minor things such as other people’s basic rights in order to maintain her unelected holy rule.

Male Senexes

Saturn himself being male means there are plenty of male Senexes. In the 1999 film American Beauty, Kevin Spacey plays a suburban father of a teenaged girl who is in love with the boy next door. The boy next door has a domineering, control freak father who was an Army colonel and served in Vietnam. Col. Frank Fitts beats his wife and son regularly. His fixation with perceived order manifests as a virulent hatred of homosexuality and Nazi memorabilia in his private home office. In my own novel, River’s Heart, a male Senex named Nathan Yardie hosts weekly church services in his private suburban McMansion because the local church expelled him for his extremist views. Hosting his own also gives Nathan the control he desires and enables him to feel that he has power over others. In both stories, Senex’s lust for control ends in tragedy.

When I was a kid, I had the misfortune to have spent time with contemporaries who were growing up in homes ruled by a Senex extremist father. The home ruled by a Senex is a terrifying place. Though it may appear orderly and disciplined, with its beds made the moment they are exited in the morning and its meals served on-time by an obedient Senex wife, on the astral plane it is jibber-jabbering chaos. Senex-ruled homes are foul and teeming with bad feelings, repressed emotions, and parasitic entities who feed on the energy flows of psychic discord. Senex homes are essentially broken no matter how “together” they appear on the outside. Narcissistic Senex’s hatred for those who do not ask “How high?” when he tells them to jump spills over the most onto his family, and unless they are already earthly saints, his family can only react by secretly hating him back.

To be a Senex of either male or female variety is to suppress and squelch the Puer instinct, even when that instinct would lead to spiritual development, emotional maturity, and happiness. Though the Senex is mature when it comes to making a living and following orders, he or she is a vulnerable baby of unexamined urges on the inside. Puer, having rejected the automaton Get a Job/ Make Money/ Buy a House cycle, at least knows and respects himself to invoke fearlessness when it comes to a little risk. Puer runs away from responsibility on the material plane but does own himself more than Senex does, because Senex seeks control over others instead of owning his fear of not being in control of himself.

Just like Puer, Senex’s choice to get out of the monkey trap starts with Number One. Senex has the double burden of being a compliant little robot and wanting to be Ruler of the Known Universe. Since Senex loves routine, of course I will suggest that anyone who takes umbrage at their resemblance to this article gets into a routine of daily, relentless discursive meditation. Harnessing the power of Type A diligence when it comes to discursive meditation is likely to have amazing results. I know it did in my case. My autistic tendency to maintain daily routines come hell or high water has translated into performing the Sphere of Protection and discursive meditation every day for the last seven years except for the day I rescued my aunt’s cats in 2019. Like an elephant, I never forget to do Ogham readings every week, except of course that one time I completely forgot and then read on Monday instead of Sunday LOL.

In yet another future essay, I will be discussing the history of Christmas and its relationship to Saturnalia. If Senex wants to be free, he or she needs to manifest the benevolent side of Saturn, also known as Ebenezer Scrooge at the end of A Christmas Carol or modern day Santa Claus. When Senex loosens his/her wallet deathgrip and sends the stopped flow of hoarded resources of money, warmth, and mirth into the community, the result is a healed and balanced Senex who has all of the good aspects of reliability and stability with a dash of healthy, balanced Puer. Just like a healed, balanced Puer, Senex too can turn a state of stagnation and retardation into a springboard for growth and true contentment.