Sacred Rhythm: Can Modern Society Bring Back the Magick of Time?
In today’s world, we love to disect everything into pieces and parts, we divide and compartmentalize and categorize. It’s so prevalent that we’ve even adapted our perspective of time and space as a linear, mechanically oriented thing.
Our ancestors knew better.
They understood that the patterns of nature have a tendency to move in circles, cycles, and spirals.
Just as Hermes Trismegistus describes in the infamous Emerald Tablets of Thoth
“Seek ye to move not in angles, but in curves”
The ancients also developed systems of science, government, and religion so that they mimicked and complimented the cycles and patterns of nature.
And it’s from this idea that we gained the concept of “As above, so below.”
We rely on the fact that the sun rises, moves across the sky, and sets at roughly the same time from day to day, season to season, and year to year. We understand that in the Spring we can expect blooming flowers, the Summer follows with hotter temperatures and abundant crops, the Fall gives us an opportunity to harvest and prepare for the cooler weather, and Winter snow beckons us to retreat into the warmth and coziness of our homes.
Today we have an agricultural industry that works hard all year long to consistently produce food and profits, and we have grocery stores where we can buy oranges and bananas, even in a December blizzard. And because of these advancements, we have lost the intensity of what these seasons mean to our lives. We must remember that humans of the past had to deeply understand these cycles and patterns because their very survival depended on them.
We also have the cycle of Life and Death — All humans know that we’re born from our mother’s womb, we become independent and grow older. At some point, we get wrinkles and brittle bones and gray hair, and eventually, we are forced to say goodbye to the world that nurtured us. We bury our grandparents, have our own children, then watch as the wrinkles begin to show on our own faces. Slowly, we begin to grasp the concept of our mortality. Because of the cycles, we know what to expect from each phase of our growth, and we gain an appreciation of what each chapter of our life brings.
On a grander scale, we see astrological changes, and we watch as humanity mirrors the celestial progressions. We watch the procession of the equinoxes and witness the movements of the sun through the constellations. We notice the planetary movements in relation to our Earth and develop a collective awareness from observing these patterns over centuries and millennia of human civilization and evolution.
The Mechanical Rhythm
The 17th and 18th centuries birthed clocks and watches. The process of manufacturing these devices, and trying to make them more precise and consistent, led us to view time in a mechanical way. We didn’t need to look for the cycles anymore, we now had technology that could show us the exact time, even if we never went outside.
The Industrial Revolution came along, and as more people left behind the simple pleasures of country life for factory jobs in the city, we relied even more on having gadgets guide the way. Our wristwatches told us the time, our wall calendars told us the day. We forgot that there was ever a reason to need nature in the first place.
Then came the assembly line and the modern world’s obsession with efficiency and time management. We viewed time as the enemy, something we were in a race to beat. Suddenly we were timed on productivity, on how much we could accomplish in the shortest time. We became little machines. Our movements monitored, our life directed by punch clocks and schoolhouse bells.
Bringing Back the Magick
Now we’re burnt out and seeking more out of life than just 9 to 5. We want sovereignty and control over our time, and we have a strong desire to reconnect with nature and our own spirits. We have come to realize that we need a more holistic approach to the way we live.
There is a strong movement towards achieving a life that nurtures our soul without sacrificing our ambitions or success.
It’s no surprise to modern mystics that this shift is taking place now. As we shift further away from the dualistic age of Pisces and closer to the age of Aquarius, we must heal the great number of divisions that currently exist among humanity. We are searching for ways to merge, to realign. Collectively, we have experienced the exhaustion of extremism, and are eager to find ways to cooperate — to reach the state of holistic balance required for humanity's future.
The truth is that the sacred and the mundane are NOT mutually exclusive. So stop trying to split yourself into fragments, we don’t have to let others dictate our every move or the way we spend our precious time on this planet. We are all being called now to perform great and miraculous feats, and we simply can’t answer those promptings if we are overburdened and depleted.
Our generation, and those that follow, will have the arduous responsibility of pushing the Wheel of Time forward, just as those who came before us. Though it is a task we all share, it remains profoundly important. Cooperative Creation takes an enormous amount of courage and energy and we have to learn how to fill up our cups in order to serve others well.
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