Cross of Principles

Full breakdown

Gates: 14 Power Skills, 4 Formulization, 49 Principles, 8 Contribution. Gate numbers: 49.4/14.1, 4.4/8.1.

As the Sun moves into Gate 49 at the end of the 4th line, the unconscious Sun shifts from 43.6 into 14.1. Gate 14 is Possession in Great Measure, the gate that feeds the Sphinx, giving it the energy to find direction in life, and it also carries the potential for real material wealth. In the struggle of that first step, there comes a point where moving forward requires allies — Gate 49 is, after all, a tribal gate: you work together, and if it comes to it, you kill together too. And killing, paired with God, has always somehow made a workable team.

Gate 49 is where we find Abraham: God says 'kill your son for me,' and he answers 'fine — where?' That relationship is the point. One way we've made peace with killing is by turning it into religion, making it sacred — hence sacraments and holy feast days, so everyone can feel good about it. 'We killed the bear for God. God doesn't need it, God doesn't eat it, but I feel better having killed it for him rather than for myself.' That's the tribe — it offers exactly these kinds of deals, which no one outside the arrangement can really share in.

In Juxtaposition we find fixed fate and principle, since this is the Cross of Principles. Principles here concern the most fundamental things — starting with getting rid of whoever's causing the problem. The 43-23 channel disappears from the unconscious here, replaced by 14 and 8; the individual mind and its certainty step aside, and with it goes much of the explaining and chatter that came before. What's left is a step toward principle itself.

These people are always ahead of their time — perpetual revolutionaries who rarely live to see the revolution they helped set in motion, since they tend to die long before any council convenes. In other words, they're forerunners with unbending principles, and because those principles are so rigid, they can be genuinely unbalanced in other ways. Human rights matter enormously to them — this is the one Cross whose purpose is making sure human rights actually get protected.

This is the person who, four hundred years ago, looked at the first factory built in southern England and said, 'they're about to enslave the workers' — without waiting for Marx, simply because they were centuries ahead of their time. Looking back through history at people with this Cross, we find remarkable figures largely forgotten — people who started something important but were too rigid, and so broke easily. Being so far ahead of their time, they tend to vanish from the history books.