If The Principle Dies, You Don't Have A Chance

There can be few groups more thoroughly, remorselessly forgotten than Easterhouse. This is especially ironic given that the title of their debut album was Contenders, although at the time of its release this name was far from anomalous. Having been endorsed by Morrissey, a dubious honour even back then, Contenders was released by Rough Trade in the same week in 1986 as The Queen Is Dead, and only The Smiths' release held it off the top of the independent charts. It was a record that embodied the band's deep contradictions, which were reflected in both their towering strengths and chronic weaknesses.

Easterhouse were as musically conservative as they were politically radical, their outspoken revolutionary socialism framed by what initially sounded like the most pedestrian strumming imaginable, like The Smiths without the cutting-edge effeminacy. On Contenders this was further immersed in multiple layers of production lacquer, such that you could almost smell the varnish when you cupped an ear to it. However, the record also showcased Easterhouse's tremendous strengths. The first of these was that although even at the time their politics verged on the anachronistic, their world-historical vision had an epic grandeur, such that their apparent muscial ordinariness could nonetheless evoke colossal vistas of torment and resolution. Perhaps the group's greatest boon was singer Andy Perry's voice, which I personally think was the finest male voice of the Eighties. Finally, their songs were just really, really, good, being ambitiously structured and featuring memorable and penetrating lyrics. Lenin in Zurich is, quite simply, a great, great song:

Easterhouse's weltanschauung hinged on two of the great revolutions that had convulsed the early part of the 20th Century, and their consequent impact on the British working class. The first of these was obviously the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917, whose tenets the Perry brothers were still openly loyal to. Indeed, Get Back To Russia, the band's anthemic paean to the land of the Revolution, is remarkable in hindsight mainly for demonstrating just how much confidence the Western left still had in the USSR, just a few years before its demise:

The other land of revolution revered by Andy and Ivor Perry was Ireland, and Contenders was replete with Irish Republican folk songs and hymns to the Easter Rising. Perhaps the best song on the album that dealt with the travails of 20th Century Ireland was 1969, their chronicle of the genesis of the Troubles in the North, this again adopting an unashamedly pro-Republican standpoint:

However, these sentiments would also date quickly, as even at this time the fire within Irish Republicanism was starting to abate, as the movement inevitably became domesticated by moving further towards practical, pragmatic electoral politics. Furthermore, Easterhouse had strongly backed the recently defeated Miners' Strike, and had even featured Arthur Scargill on one of their record sleeves, so if the intention of Contenders had been to raise consciousness and inspire action, it instead resembled a lament for a worldview that was fully in retreat.

Nevertheless, if the revolutionary socialism that Easterhouse espoused is unlikely to again be the engine of global change that it had been at the beginning of the 20th Century, it has at least endured, and is in many ways in a healthier state than the various unlovely models of liberal capitalism that once threatened its complete annihilation. And, as the wheel has turned (almost) full circle, so too has Contenders aged surprisingly well, its incongruity to its era having been its greatest strength of all.

That was the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius

One of the persistent tropes of the late 1960's, along with "Flower Power", was the notion that the world was entering an "Age of Aquarius", which was to be a time of universal love and understanding, in which peace and harmony would reign supreme. This was famously given voice in The 5th Dimension's paean to the coming age, Let The Sunshine In, itself taken from the counter-cultural musical Hair, which celebrated the demise of the old era of organised religion, authoritarianism and racial oppression, and the immanent rise of:

Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind's true liberation

All this suggests that these people actually knew very little about astrology, for whatever the zodiacal sign of Aquarius represents, it has very little to do with love and understanding. So what exactly does the Age of Aquarius represent? It is in fact a product of a natural process known as the Procession Of The Equinoxes, in which the Earth's axis of rotation gradually shifts over a 26,000 year cycle. Its astrological effect can be visualised by looking at the wheel of the zodiac, and imagining a horizontal line being traced from its centre directly left to its circumference. Where the line meets the circumference is our current position in time, and the wheel rotating anti-clockwise is the Procession of the Equinoxes. Each 30 degree portion of the zodiac that represents a specific sign takes 2160 years to pass our point on the circumference, this of course meaning that every astrological age, including the Age of Aquarius, lasts for 2160 years.

Each of these ages in turn takes on the characteristics of the zodiacal sign that governs that particular Age, while the signs themselves are influenced by what are known as their ruling planets. Aquarius is ruled by the planet Uranus, which was discovered by William Herschel in 1781. Uranus had previously been unknown as it is not visible to the naked eye, and the fact that it had to be observed by the artificial means of a telescope means that it is strongly associated with technology. It is also an unusual planet in that its axis of rotation is not longitudinal, as with all other planets in the solar system, but rather latitudinal. As such it rotates "horizontally" rather than "vertically", and is thus also associated with eccentricity and individualism. Finally, Uranus is considered by astrologers to be "Mercury at a higher octave", and so amplifies those characteristics already associated with Mercury, which include communication, deceit and theft. As a result, the Age of Aquarius can broadly be defined as the era of technology, mass communication, eccentricity, mass deception and globalised fraud.

The Age prior to Aquarius was the Age of Pisces, this being the 30 degree segment that abuts Aquarius in the anti-clockwise direction. Pisces is governed by Neptune, another previously unknown planet, which as its name suggests is associated with an endless oceanic formlessness. Neptune is also considered to be Venus, the planet of love, at a higher octave. As a consequence, Neptune is considered the planet of universalism, humanitarianism, helplessness, and addiction, amongst other things. Perhaps the archetypal expression of the Age of Pisces is Christianity, which emerged at the beginning of the Piscean era. Prior to the birth of Christianity the majority of religions were polytheistic, each with a pantheon of gods that competed and fought and loved and deceived each other, their struggles mimicking the chaotic forces of nature. As polytheistic religions innately fail to posit a single truth or litany of truths, religious strife in the polytheistic world was rare, and it was possible for faiths to live alongside one another, and for gods to "drift" from one religion to another. However, a monotheist religion such as Christianity, with its one God and single source of knowing, had by its very nature to be a universalist faith, banishing and destroying all those creeds that contradicted it. Equally harsh treatment had to be meted out to heretics and sinners as to infidels, as there could be no deviation from its edicts.

This in turn implied that the Age of Pisces was to become an era of totalising conflict over belief systems, and when Christianity encountered its first universalist rival in Islam, the result could only be war. Another by-product of universalising monotheism was that as a creed expanded it required an increasingly complex system of bureaucracy in order to maintain it, and thus it birthed ever more rigid hierarchies. As such, the Age of Pisces effectively became the age of universalism and hierarchy. This also applied to those conflicting Piscean civil religions that gradually supplanted Christianity following the Enlightenment, such as Marxist socialism, liberalism and conservatism. In each case Jehovah was superseded by a remote and unquestionable arbiter of godlike truth (Dialectical Materialism, "progress", "The Market") with sinning non-believers being subjected to such scornful of epithets as "reactionaries", "luddites", and "protectionists".

The actual start of the Age of Aquarius is disputed by astrologers, although the most commonly quoted commencement date is 1879, when it began to gradually eclipse the Age of Pisces, its establishment being heralded by those three clarions of atomisation: Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, and Sigmund Freud. One of the most fascinating insights into the emergence of the Age of Aquarius was during that great clash of universalisms, the Second World War, as recorded in the book The Magical Battle of Britain. This documented the symbolic battles against Nazism conducted by one of the 20th Century's greatest occultists, Dion Fortune, as she outlined in a series of communications to her magical group, the Fraternity of the Inner Light. However, Fortune's letters to her fraternity also contained her premonitions of the world that would emerge from that great conflagration, such as her Letter 77 of 15th June 1941, in which she commented that:

"The Piscean Age has passed and the Aquarian Age is drawing away from the phase that astrologers call the cusp, or sphere of mingled influences, and beginning to show its true characteristics. Not only are the conditions of life changing, but its moral standards also. This does not mean that there will be no standards of conduct in the Aquarian Age and that freedom will be extended into anarchy; there are certain standards that are eternal, such as truth and honesty, but there are others that change with the changing age".

This statement confirmed the principle that there is no "hard edge" between astrological ages, but that they gradually blend into each other. In her subsequent Letter 118 of 31st May 1942, Fortune expanded on her theme, as:

"I have stated that the old order has passed away and a new phase of evolution is already with us. That it is the Age of Aquarius is an astronomical fact, calculated mathematically. Basing my conclusions on the occult teaching concerning the nature of Aquarius, I have tried to indicate how the New Age may be expected to work out. When I say the old forms of social organisation will break up and everything will be in a state of flux, that racial and social barriers will be eroded and a general intermingling take place, I am not enunciating socialistic doctrines but astrological ones."

This mixing and intermingling would be a result of the breakdown of the racial hierarchies of European imperialism, and the cultures of deference that maintained class divisions in the metropoles. Fortune anticipated the erosion of the "colour bar" that denied positions of responsibility, or even entire careers, to non-whites both in the colonies and in Britain, and they would indeed disappear, although some would linger in place even up to the late 1970's. From the ruins of the old order, Fortune imagined a new economic order, governed by "neutral" trans-national organisations, and based on free trade, that would expand across the whole world, as:

"It is the men and women of the New Age who must make contact across national barriers as soon as the fighting is over, and they must meet as Aquarians, not as English, French or Germans. They must bring in the New Age for all men, not for their own people only because the New Age is an age of co-ordination of the whole earth, and it cannot be brought in piecemeal. Those who share our ideals are on our side, whatever language they speak, whatever may be the colour of their skins, or the shape of their skulls, or by whatever name they may call their God or gods or no-gods."

This world would require the dismantling of colonialism, and so:

"The rightful owners will resume ownership but there will be strategic points all over the world which will be held by the United Nations for international commerce and international policing and they will be mandated. For the whole of the New Age turns on the concept of the ownership of the land by the people versus the ownership of the people by the land. So you will see a great many places hitherto under English ownership reverting to the original owners.

Dion Fortune's vision was remarkably prescient, and it indeed guided much of the self-declared "enlightened thinking" over the long post-war era. However, what was also notable about it was that in its positing of a single, peaceful, harmonised world of multi-cultural liberal capitalism, it was actually rather universalist. This in turn implied that the Piscean energies that she thought had already largely dissipated were in fact still strongly in force. As a result, what Fortune was predicting was not the forthcoming Age of Aquarius, but an interregnum in which the Aquarian energies were still constrained within a Piscean framework. This was the world that most of us grew up in, and mistook for the permanent shape of the future; a world in which a musical like Hair could erroneously be considered prophetic. The neoliberal unipolar moment that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union perhaps marked the zenith of this premature Age of Aquarius, before the real Aquarian energies pressed in with Brexit and the election of Trump. That the Chinese, on whom the hopes of a New World Order were effectively based, had not actually bought into the notion was perhaps the most unwelcome surprise of all.

The Age of Aquarius as it actually is, with its socially mediated mass deceptions, eccentric populist insurgents, fragmenting established institutions, and emerging civilisation states with incommensurable values, is not proving accommodating for the universalist idealists. But this is the future, and its most disorientating qualities are only going to intensify, because it was the utopian visions of a harmonious global order that had actually constituted the interregnum.