The Aquarius Archetype: Understanding The Water Bearer
It is not, as Descartes would have us believe, “I think therefore I am.” But instead, it is I feel therefore I am.
Why is Aquarius the water bearer but an air sign?
Does understanding this peculiarity illuminate how we understand the Aquarian archetype? Let’s find out.
I was pondering this matter in preparation for Aquarius season and in honor of my husband who is born right at the very beginning of Aquarius season. Suddenly something clicked when I considered Mark Solms’ latest discoveries in neuropsychology. I highly recommend watching the linked video but the abridged version is, neuroscience has long considered the cerebral cortex to be the seat of our consciousness, however, new evidence suggests it is the brain stem, the emotional and primal locus in our brain, that is the seat of our consciousness.
It is not, as Descartes would have us believe “I think therefore I am.” But instead, it is I feel therefore I am.
Consciousness and what it is, where it is, and how we define it, is a great debate, one that has been discussed since the forums of ancient times.
Since modern science has long considered consciousness to reside in the cerebral cortex, the distinctly human part of the brain, it could be argued that this line of thinking has contributed to the human propensity for exceptionalism and even elitism. This line of thinking has been used to perpetuate eugenics and other racist theories along with distancing human beings from the rest of the animal species that occupy our Earthly habitats. In my undergraduate thesis, I posit that it is in part this exceptionalism and the language that has developed around this construct that has cost especially white folks, particularly those in America, their sustainable relationship with the environment. In an effort to distinguish white folks and whiteness from the Other and from animals, religious and political voices promoted exceptionalism and distinction from the Earth and the natural world. Today it has proven to be a convoluted challenge for white folks and many Americans to take responsibility for their impact on the environment and practices of sustainability.
In this vain, I often ask, how conscientious is the animal that destroys its own habitat?
So what if we consider Solms’ findings? What if we assume his discovery of consciousness as residing in the brain stem is correct? First, we must recognize that many many other species share this part of the brain, and next, we must consider the nature of the impulses that emanate from our brain stem. It is an emotional, instinctive core, and dare I say, an intuitive center. Suddenly it is not our intellectualism that proves our consciousness but our emotionality, our intuitive nature that confirms our consciousness. “Raw feelings are the fundamental form of consciousness,” says Solms, later explaining that this is a survival tactic. The ability to feel allows us to react appropriately to danger. If we were unable to feel suffocation, we would fail to at least attempt to remove ourselves from a burning building, for example. We do not intentionally process the notion that we are gasping for air, we feel the urgency and need to escape danger and return to the kind of breathing that requires none of our attention.
Consciousness is often associated with presence and awareness. With this and Solms’ findings in mind, I agree that feelings and our emotional experiences are our most conscious states.
It is a presence described by our responsiveness to the current moment.
Now let’s consider the elements of water and air along with their archetypes. Water represents an emotional, intuitive, and feeling archetype. Air is a cognitive, intellectual, and communicative archetype. Aquarius is an air sign, and the zodiac that is archetypally associated with systems of ideas, higher consciousness, and collective communications. For Aquarius to be a water bearer but an air sign, is, as we have established, somewhat curious if not mystifying.
So what if we consider Aquarius the water bearer, the archetype of intellectual innovation, systemic psychology, and collective understanding, the structure by which consciousness, Solms’ emotionally defined consciousness, can be contained? Without a vessel, consciousness is another ingredient in the primordial soup. But with the vessel of the Aquarian, the emotional consciousness can be carried, contained, and sustained. It is not at all that the Aquarian is an emotional archetype but instead that it is the one that offers a container for emotionality, thus giving space and form to our collective consciousness.
As a symbol of consciousness, of communal understanding, and mass communication, Aquarius forms the vessel, to bear the water of emotions, of consciousness.
Higher Power + Natal Charts
I exist only as an expression of the heritage of causes and effects that have created this particular timespace. My joy, my trauma, my power, are all contained within the context that I occupy, and that context is perfectly articulated by my natal chart. I then have the opportunity to play with this context, test its bounds and challenge its assumptions, all in an effort to engage in the games of the Universe, in the omnipotence and omniscience of God.
A professor of genetics once taught me that evolution does not behave linearly.
That is to say, while there is something to the concept of survival of the fittest, genetic mutations or the causes and effects within a sequence of genes are not exclusively ruled by this concept of survival of the fittest. Instead, there is a fifty percent chance that the fittest or ‘more favorable’ genetic outcome occurs and a fifty percent chance the outcome is random, something totally unexpected or even expected and feared. So it’s just as likely all goes according to a positivist evolutionary trajectory and as it is something beyond our understanding occurs, something seemingly random. This served to completely challenge my understanding of the matrix and all her processes. While I had once felt a type of certainty that there was a direction to it all, “an arc to the moral universe [... one that] bends toward justice” as Mart Luther King Jr. said, I was now forced to move my conceptualization of the Universe into a new dimension. I would later find it was not just a new dimension but more dimensions, that must be contended with in order to gain a satisfactory perspective on whatever the Universe is and what we’re all doing here.
I don’t claim to have all the answers by any means. However, I have a take that allows me a sense of peace I have never accessed before.
In a small college dorm room, several hours into a psychedelic trip and sprawling on any surface that could support our languid and extraterrestrial bodies, I once asked a friend what his definition of God was. He answered more succinctly than I could have ever anticipated.
“God is omnipotent and omniscient.”
…I’ve been chewing on this premium definition ever since.
If God is omnipotent and omniscient which I feel is the most all-encompassing definition of God and therefore the most appealing and accessible definition of god I have ever found… then God cannot be an entity but instead a process. The only way, at least according to my lil human mind, God could know everything and be everything is for God to be happening over time. Of course, time is one of those mystifying constructs that proves increasingly difficult to understand; linear or otherwise, from our human perspective, time certainly appears to be a process, to have a trajectory, to have some version of a direction even if that is in a multidimensional weblike context. God cannot be omnipotent and omniscient in a static or singular way, it must span time as well, stretching across all dimensions.
The God of the Hebrew Bible (the oldest definition of God I have a relationship with) is in everything, is of everything, and created all. This God is the creator of everything at the same time it is everything. We (Jews) owe our gratitude, awe, and respect to everything, from the smallest stone to the greatest mountain range, from the most brilliant invention to the most humble craft, because it is all God. These two definitions fit quite nicely together, in order for this God to be both omnipotent and omniscient, we must all be God, everything must be God. In fact, in order for God to know everything and be everything, we all must live out our experiences, embody our realities, and be ourselves. All entities from events to animal bodies, constructs to political movements, geological periods to ideas and equations, are God.
It was through this line of thinking that I came to consider natal charts as the most divine filing system, keeping track of every iteration of God. Everything, from a question to an entity, to an event, can have an astrological chart cast for it. Every entity, animal, mineral, and temporal, has a chart that marks its identity as well as trajectory. It’s like a map to that iteration of God; it is the responsibility of that entity to embody those lessons, that vantage point, those coordinates, characteristics, and context. Each natal chart is a depiction of a particular time and space in the galaxy that is interpreted through the multicultural archetypes that have developed over millennia. A natal chart might just be our contract with the Universe to embody our context in order to participate in the multi-dimensional project that is God. Each of us and everything in between has a chart that acts as a key or blueprint to our nature, our highest self, and the lessons we must learn in our specific timescape.
As we embrace our most connected and aware selves, we contribute to the omniscience and omnipotence that is God.
Finally, to bring this concept into the realm of wellness and mental health. For me, this conceptualization of the Universe and God has allowed the kind of acceptance and humor I have often sought in my most embittered and disillusioned states. If we conceive of ourselves as a version of God, tasked with the lessons we must learn and opportunities that we must take in order for God to know what that reality is like, we may find some grace on our path. Not only are we divine in our own right, but we are living with the purpose of a sacred mission, as part of a numinous collective, not simply aware of a higher power but living as our most empowered and highest self.
From my perspective, I am but a product of my context. I exist only as an expression of the heritage of causes and effects that have created this particular timespace. My joy, my trauma, my power, are all contained within the context that I occupy, and that context is perfectly articulated by my natal chart. I then have the opportunity to play with this context, test its bounds and challenge its assumptions, all in an effort to engage in the games of the Universe, in the omnipotence and omniscience of God.