Saturn Rising

Divinatory Hotwash

The gods are long dead, and Saturn, the ancient titan of time, watches in quiet indifference as the world succumbs to its entropy. His ascendance in the celestial sphere does not bring salvation or clarity but instead serves as a stark reminder of the unyielding march of decay. The collapse of Western society unfolds not as tragedy, not even as warning, but as inevitability—a slow grinding descent into the void from which all things emerge and to which all things return.

What is Saturn but the custodian of our failures? The keeper of time, he neither mourns nor rejoices but presides over the unraveling of our ambitions, our beliefs, our carefully constructed systems. Under his gaze, the contradictions of the West—the hubris of its enlightenment, the violence of its progress, the emptiness of its wealth—collapse in upon themselves, not with the catharsis of fire but with the dull, suffocating weight of dust and ash.

The machines of Western economy churn on, though they yield little but the detritus of human effort. Inflation rises like smoke over a battlefield, wages stagnate, and debt sprawls across the land like creeping rot. The promises of capitalism, innovation, and prosperity reveal themselves as hollow, and yet the gears continue their grinding, unaware that their purpose has long since vanished. Saturn, the god of cycles, might smile at this if he were capable of such indulgence. These systems, bound to endless repetition, echo the toil of Sisyphus. The workers who labor for scraps, the financiers who hoard wealth they can never spend—none escape the irony that all returns to the dirt. Even the earth itself, pillaged and scorched in service to the market, prepares its quiet vengeance.

Western society is not merely disintegrating; it is hollowing out from within. The culture wars rage on, fueled by competing illusions, but their fire casts no light. Social media, once heralded as a tool for connection, has instead become a cacophony of voices, each shouting into the void. Misinformation breeds apathy, truth is rendered meaningless, and the individual, stripped of purpose, floats untethered in the digital abyss.

The nihilism here is not profound; it is banal. People cling to their ideologies, their fleeting certainties, as if such things could stave off the emptiness. But Saturn teaches us that time is relentless, that the edifices of culture and meaning we construct are little more than sandcastles against an unfeeling tide.

The collapse of governance is no different. Western democracies, once envisioned as bastions of liberty, now wear the grim mask of farce. Politicians posture and bicker as the systems they oversee rot from within, their authority eroding like statues weathered by centuries of wind. Bureaucracy metastasizes, not as a means of order but as a tumor, suffocating the very people it purports to serve.

There is no grand villain in this drama, no Macbeth to lay the blame upon. Instead, there is the quiet, creeping realization that the system was always destined to fail—not because of betrayal or corruption but because time itself makes a mockery of human constructs. Saturn’s lesson is that power is fleeting, as fragile as the paper upon which laws are written.

If there is a requiem to be sung for the West, it is in the whisper of dying forests and the cries of melting glaciers. The environmental crisis, like Saturn himself, does not rage or grieve; it simply is. The Earth does not care for human ambition, nor does it mourn our self-destruction. It shifts, groans, and collapses, indifferent to whether we survive the aftermath. The climate crisis is a hoax from a political pov.

We have tilled the soil into submission, poisoned the waters, and filled the skies with soot and flame, all in service of progress. And for what? To leave behind ruins? The Saturnian truth is stark: the Earth will endure long after we are gone, its cycles continuing without pause. Humanity, so desperate to transcend its mortal limits, is now undone by its refusal to respect them. What, then, remains? The nihilist might argue: nothing. The optimist might insist that decay begets renewal, that collapse is but the prelude to transformation. Perhaps both are true, though neither offers much solace. Saturn rising reminds us that time is finite and that rebirth, if it comes at all, will not be on humanity’s terms.

There are no guarantees, no cosmic assurances that what comes after will be better or even survivable. The decay of Western society may pave the way for something new, but it is just as likely to vanish without a trace, forgotten by a universe that neither notices nor cares. The opportunity in decay lies in its finality—a clean slate upon which to write something new. Yet even this is tinged with futility, for what is rebirth but another cycle, another act in the endless theater of impermanence? Concurrency provides an apt metaphor: systems fail, processes conflict, and yet they are restarted, redesigned, reimagined. But these iterations are not infinite. The hardware itself wears down, the energy runs out, and even the most elegant algorithm eventually encounters its limit. Western society, like any system, has run up against its constraints. Its rebirth, if it comes, will demand more than ingenuity or resilience; it will require a reckoning with the very nature of existence. To rebuild is not merely to reconstruct but to acknowledge the emptiness at the heart of all human effort—the inevitability of decay, the futility of permanence.

In the end, Saturn’s indifference is a mercy. He asks nothing of us but that we endure, that we accept the weight of time and the void that follows. The collapse of the West, like all things, will pass into the annals of history, then into the silence beyond. And perhaps that is as it should be. For in the emptiness left behind, there lies the only true freedom: the chance to begin again, knowing full well that all beginnings are destined to end.op