The Elixir of Immortality

Defeating old age and death is an ancient dream of humanity. The Elixir of Immortality. The first Emperor of China went mad from Mercury poisoning in a vain attempt to avoid old age.

From Wikipedia: “Comte de St. Germain, an 18th century nobleman of uncertain origin and mysterious capabilities, was also reputed to have the Elixir and to be several hundred years old. Many European recipes specify that elixir is to be stored in clocks to amplify the effects of immortality on the user. Frenchman Nicolas Flamel was also a reputed creator of the Elixir.”

I don’t dismiss these stories. Somewhere I believe they are true.

As an astrologer, I want to interpret this quest allegorically, as the alchemists may have done. Eternal Life is found not in a chemical compound, nor even in Jesus, but in the qualities of Leo, ruled by the Sun, the source of Life. This is the Leo quest: to find that very individual wellspring deep within, that keeps one young well into old age, and which paradoxically connects one to the universal source of life. And makes hir the life and soul of the party.

[Hir, pronounced here with a Scottish accent: my neologism to avoid the ungainly him/her]

But we live in a literal age where matter is more real than the soul. And science, the religion of matter, is hot on the trail of the Elixir of Immortality.

Telomerase. During our lives, our cells keep dividing to maintain and replenish the body. But a cell and its descendants can only divide so many times. What happens in cell division is that the chromosomes in the nucleus, the brains of the cell, replicate and divide, and in this process the ends of the chromosomes, the telomeres, get a bit tattered. Eventually, they get so tattered that the functional DNA is exposed and the cell ceases to function. This seems to be one of the primary causes of ageing.

The function of telomerase is to reverse this process, to rebuild the tattered telomeres. But our body only produces so much telomerase. Correlations have been found in humans between longevity and the production of telomerase.

Mice engineered to lack telomerase aged very quickly. Activating telomerase production dramatically reversed the ageing process. Researchers feared it would also lead to cancers, but it didn’t.

Telomerase may be the Elixir of Immortality. It has not been tested on humans yet. But if you see any ageing billionaires starting to look young again, it may not be botox and facelifts. One or two of them with nothing to lose are surely trying it already.

Pluto will be in Capricorn until 2024. Capricorn is associated with old age, Pluto with death and transformation. A synchronous time for finding a way of limiting, if not halting, the ageing process. And the generation entering old age at this time have Pluto in Leo. Leo is the child, the youth, so they are a generation that on the one hand can become more youthful in spirit as they age; but on the other hand they can be a generation that fights old age, firstly with botox, and with telomerase if they can get hold of it.

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Meanwhile, last year researchers discovered that in either 774 or 775 AD the earth was struck by a massive blast of gamma rays . German researchers reckon it came from two black holes or neutron stars colliding and merging in our own Galaxy, the Milky Way. Others reckon it was a solar flare.

But which year was it? And what was the cause? In both those years there was an opposition from Uranus in Gemini to Pluto in Sagittarius. Uranus suggests an explosion, which could be either a solar flare or colliding black holes. Pluto is nuclear energy, and Sagittarius suggests Fire from a long way away i.e. it wasn’t the Sun but the black holes. I’d expect Leo if it was the Sun.

And the year? In 774AD Jupiter joined Pluto, suggesting a massive event, and again suggestive of distance.

So that is my astrological take: it was 774AD, and it was colliding bodies.