Yesterday’s full moon in Cancer was really nice with its sextile to Jupiter and trine to Saturn, but Mars and Mercury were square Neptune, which may have added a sinister touch to your day, or you may have experienced someone driving a truck through your boundaries, or you may have been confused, misled, or gotten some wrong information. I’ve been thinking about the sinister aspect of Neptune because tonight instead of reading like I planned to, I watched almost an entire hour of MTV’s Catfish where a TV crew confronts people who leech off the photos and credibility of people they find online. Apparently it’s not illegal in the US to take someone’s profile photo online and pretend it’s you, so MTV has been some victim’s best hope of getting their identities back and confronting their online imitators. As a viewer, I will say it is not satisfying enough because you want to see some of these creeps behind bars.
A badly aspected Neptune can manifest as a creepy imitation, like an uncanny valley that follows you around. In Ibrahim X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, he describes how white people essentially do the same thing to black people by appropriating their dance moves on TikTok, or pretending to talk like a black person. Since before Elvis (going back to the slave trade), white people have essentially decided what they wanted to plunder from black culture and taking it like it belongs to them, leech-like, sucking the lifeblood from another organism to sustain one’s own circulatory system. As Kendi says, white pop culture “marches in sinister lockstep” with black culture looking for something new to steal and brand itself as “hip” with.
Creepy copying reminds me of my Christian past when Christians would come out with their own PG-13 version of a cultural phenomenon shortly after it appeared on the secular stage, a copy of the original, but “redeemed by God”. For example, growing up Christian, my siblings and I weren’t allowed to listen to rock music because secular artists had anger and evil in them which is why they needed to yell so loud, but Christian rock musicians just yelled because that’s how you do rock music.
In his essay, Answer to Job, Jung points out several holes in Christian theology, one of them being the Church’s portrait of god the father who claims to be all-loving, but has so much wrath in him that the torturous death of his son was the only way he could be appeased when the humans disobeyed. I’d say Buddhism and Carl Jung are two of the main contributors to the concept that would eventually be termed “emotional intelligence” in the 1990’s, and without having that term available to him, Jung spends a good portion of Answer to Job basically saying, “this is not emotional intelligence, folks. Killing your child isn’t ‘propitiation’, it’s not ‘redemption’, it’s low-brow animalistic behavior, and let’s not forget the fact that it didn’t even work to deal with the problem of evil, which is a pretty big logic problem for an ‘omnicient’ God.”
It feels like Jung was trying to get Christians to think in terms of emotional intelligence instead of fighting on their battlefield of theology where, as a former Christian who formally studied theology, I can attest that theologians have come up with a wide array of psychological and metaphorical pretzels to essentially slip through the exegencies of logic and say, “This is not that”. However, most lay Christians only argue their theology to a certain point because there is a way in which they are taught to weaponize their psychology, where the medium of the debate becomes a venue for the Christian to start exhibiting Christian feelings and virtues like “compassion” for the debating partner, or “love”. Because they believe Christ has “redeemed” their ego battle, what arises from them during the debate will be virtuous “feelings” emanating from them toward the non-believer. Another common disguise is “comfort” that they claim to feel with the Christian story which manifests as a certain blissful resting face (?). I have been on the receiving end of some smarmy “compassion” and “love” and now that I know now how creepy it feels to be on the receiving end of it, I have considered contacting HR over it. The force with which this person wanted me to experience their “care” was annoying to the point that it was almost harassment. To adapt a Riso-Hudson phrase, it’s psychological colonialism disguised as wisdom.
Christians are not exactly alone- according to the Enneagram, anyone with a human ego structure imitates one of nine divine principles out of a sense of lack, but Christianity seems to take the imitation to a whole other level- it reads like a meta-weaving of all nine egoic imitations of the divine into one grand slipknot of Neptunian imitation of psychological integration. It presents itself as a paradox, but only ends up looking like white liberals who appropriate black speech and call it social justice.