ASTROTABLETALK

Uranus-Pluto Across the World

2012-01-23T13:58:00.002Z

The sense of crisis in the Eurozone has eased since Christmas. But you never quite know with that one. It lurches from Greece to the more problematic Italy and back again, with many soothing words along the way from the leaders of France and Germany. In the summer, it seemed to go away altogether as the world’s attention focussed on the USA’s inability to pass a budget. Once a deal was reached, the Euro crisis returned, and peaked before Christmas, with the major concern being Italy, which was seen as unbailoutable.

The crisis has recently focussed again on Greece, which can be bailed out, provided its debtors agree to major write-downs on their loans. This has been made more difficult because many of the lenders have sold on their loans at cut rates to speculators who, by using brinkmanship, hope to make large profits on their investments.

With Uranus moving up to its first exact square to Pluto in June, we can expect the sense of crisis to keep coming back. The times are about crises and their resolution, rather than about normality. No effective solution has yet been provided for Italy’s problems. I don’t know quite what governs the timing of the crises around Italy. Sometimes it seems like a background problem, sometimes like a crisis that could bring down the whole world economy. But the fundamentals remain the same.

You can always read different explanations as to why these southern European countries are in trouble. But it seems that neither the Italian public nor the Italian government have been particularly reckless with their spending. The problem seems to be an economy that is poorly regulated and lacking in modernisation. Investors are therefore not confident that Italy can grow its way out of its current levels of debt.

It is very hard to know what is going to happen. It really could go a number of ways, all described by the symbolism of Uranus-Pluto. Ultimately, we can expect a renewal (Pluto), with many shocks and unexpected turns (Uranus) along the way. It may be that Italy goes under, followed by Spain, the Eurozone breaks up, and there is a banking crisis that plunges the world back into recession until the end of the Uranus-Pluto crossings in 2015.

Or it may be that the Eurozone, having faced the abyss, spends the next 3 Uranus-Pluto years building a tighter, more integrated economy. It has been make-or-break time for Europe: either you pull this loose alliance into a proper union, or it will fall apart with unimaginable consequences. This is a classic Pluto decision, which is often not a decision at all: it is fate, you do what you have to in order to survive.
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I was writing before Christmas about how the EU was displaying the classic signs of a Pluto transit in its first stage, of the life-energy having been drained from a status quo that was no longer tenable, and that the EU was now going through the motions of a vision no-one believed in any more. I drew the conclusion that the EU would fall apart. That may still happen, but also possible is a renewal (the later stage of a Pluto transit) based on stronger foundations. It has been the provisional vision of Europe that has been taken apart, the Europe that wanted economic union without political union. That has been the meaning of this transit.

Before Christmas, the break-up of the Eurozone was seeming inevitable. With the current lack of pressure on Italy, the resolve to bail out Greece, and the decision to seek closer union at the end of last year, Europe may indeed come out of this stronger. It has to, or be walked over by the other 2 big economic blocs, the US and China. It is a survival issue, and it is remarkable what people and nations are capable of when faced with a threat to their survival. Pluto helps us draw on a power to live that we never knew we had.

It will still be a rocky, Uranian path. And there are further crises to face. But I’m starting to think that the outcome of this crisis will be renewal rather than dissolution. It will still be a while before the world is properly out of the Great Recession. But a collapse of the Euro would lead to something much worse, and I don’t think that would do any good, however much we may dislike the present system, and however unsustainable it may be in the long-term.

You just can’t tell with these outer planet transits. You know the overall shape of the transition. With Pluto, you know there will be a dissolution of that which does not have strong foundations, and possibly renewal afterwards. But you don’t know at what point. Quite often, the major events in a transit occur before any exact crossings, and the rest of the transit is about processing those events. So it is quite possible that we have seen the major destructive events of Uranus-Pluto as far as Europe is concerned. The rest of the transit will be the difficult path of absorbing those events.

Looking at the big 3, China is not in recession and never was: Uranus-Pluto seems to be describing the rise and rise of the country. The USA is not in recession and there are encouraging signs, like the reduction in unemployment last month, and like General Motors regaining its place as the world’s largest car-maker. It is just Europe that remains in trouble, but I think the world can handle that (even though Europe is the largest of the big 3) providing it continues to sort the debt problem.

Politically, the picture is something else. Pluto and Uranus are hard-aspecting the Suns and other significant points of all the major powers, including the EU as a body. To survive economically, profound political change is needed in Europe, particularly in the form of surrender of individual sovereignty. It’s only the UK and Hungary that are not prepared to go there.

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It is interesting what may happen here in the UK, because Scotland may vote in favour of independence in 2 years time. The 1801 chart for the UK shows an inherently unstable union, with natal Uranus conjunct the Asc and square Sun and MC, all in early cardinal, which is where Uranus and Pluto are now hitting. This is so powerful that it is almost a test of whether astrology is actually real: of course the UK will split up. And where will that leave once mighty England – without its Empire, without Ireland and unable even to hang onto Scotland? England has a strong financial industry, and the fear is that in joining the Euro much of our business will drift to Frankfurt. But the world is changing, England’s power is diminishing all the time, and Europe is becoming a much less provisional place: you will be either in or out. England’s sense of who it is will be going through a big change in the next few years, and Europe may come to seem the natural option.

In the Middle East, the Arab Spring continues, with the battle for Syria still being fought. The rebellion against dictatorships, while starting in the Middle East, has spread like a virus over the world, and we are also seeing the beginnings of reform in countries such as Russia and Burma. Rebellion and Revolution is classic Uranus-Pluto territory. As with Europe, it may be that the most dramatic events are largely over (remember the Occupy protests?), and the actual crossings of Uranus-Pluto may represent a deeper working through of those initial events. The Arab Spring may result in extreme Islamic governments in some countries. I used to call that Islamist, but the press is now labelling as Islamist the moderate Islamic government that has, for now, been elected in Egypt, so I will need another word for it.

I think it is a mistake to call Pluto ‘evolutionary’, though it certainly can be so, and often is in the case of personal transits. Pluto, if you like, is the life force, and that urge of something living to move onto another stage. If the people of a country wants one thing, and the government another, then that government is blocking the life-energy of the people, and a Pluto transit (with a helpful dose of Uranus) can bring it down. Life ultimately triumphs. But what the people want may, in the case of some Arab countries, be very traditional, even extreme, Islam. Pluto enables a person or a body to become more authentically who it is, sweeping away outdated structures. And that, I think is a good thing, because there can be no progress without authenticity. The Iranian people in 1979 needed to sweep away their western-backed Shah and replace him with a theocracy, because that is what they had become. In the West we tend to think that political progress equals democracy, and if you view Pluto as evolutionary, then it becomes the eventual goal of all countries, aided by Pluto, to become democracies. Sounds daft when you write it out.

So what we are seeing with the Arab Spring is the sweeping away of long-standing political structures that no longer express the will of the people. But it would be blinkered to assume that what people want is western-style democracy. It may, in some cases, be like that. But we don’t really know, they are a long way away and they think differently to us. What we CAN tell, from the astrology, is that these people are re-birthing themselves, that something very new (Uranus in Aries) is ready to come into existence. And there is probably a common pattern. But we won’t really know for a few more years, as there is a lot more change still to come as Uranus and Pluto do their 3 years of exact crossings.

In the USA, there is a Presidential election this year. Uranus-Pluto is not a time for moderates, and for that reason Newt Gingrich (who uses facts and reason more than you might expect) seems more likely to be the eventual Republican candidate than Mitt Romney. We do not know Gingrich’s birth time, but he has his Sun and Moon between mid and late of the mutable signs, which will not be subject to major transits (square from Neptune) for some years yet. The same with Mitt Romney, who has Neptune squaring his Asc this year, but not much after that.

I expect to see major transits in the chart of a leader, that power them through their time in office. Barack Obama has had Neptune squaring his MC and will go on to have Neptune squaring his Moon over the next few years. So providing nothing happens to him (and with Uranus starting to trine his Sun, and having been sworn in under a Void Moon, something could happen), he would seem likely to again be President, which doesn’t mean it won’t be a tight race.

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But what about Uranus-Pluto more generally in America? You expect some sort of systemic change. As with Europe, the change may be political. The US has a fault line that caused its credit rating to be downgraded for the first time last year, because the agencies did not trust that the US had the political capacity to sort out its budget shortfall. The fault line seems to be caused by the right wing of the Republican Party’s determination to push its own agenda at the expense of the country being able to function.

It is interesting that Newt Gingrich has re-surfaced at this time, because it was under his tenure as Speaker of the House of Representatives in the 1990s that attempts were made to impeach and remove from office Bill Clinton, a Democratic President. Gingrich stands for this fault line, this Republican extremism that will not let a Democratic President be President.

It is exactly this sort of instability in the foundations of an institution that Pluto transits address. The US Sun at 13 Cancer is 4 or more degrees on from the Cardinal degrees of the sensitive points in Europe (eg the UK with Asc/MC/Sun at 7-10 degrees). The US is therefore a couple of years behind Europe with its pressure for Uranus-Pluto change. Europe has it now, whereas we can expect the US issues to have that sort of intensity in 2 to 3 years time.

If a Republican is elected President this year, then the fault line will not be exposed. If Obama is re-elected, then we will almost certainly see the Republican right wing making it as difficult as they can for him to govern. But they will go too far, and it will result in a constitutional crisis. It will be a Pluto survival issue, for America has to be able to govern itself. This, from the present standpoint, seems to be a likely meaning of Uranus-Pluto for America.

America prides itself on being a democratic country, but this Republican extremism is deeply authoritarian. It is my way or the highway. But it is not like something separate from the rest of America. It is a part of the national psyche that comes out in its foreign policy, in its way of forcing other countries to do business with it. The US has historically been quite prepared to support, or even create, dictatorships that serve its economic desires. The country was founded on slavery and genocide as much as it was founded on the Declaration of Independence, and it has not yet come to terms with that.

So you could say that the Republican right stands for the barbarism behind the democratic, civilised facade. In this way, Uranus-Pluto could involve a soul-searching for the US, brought about by a clash on the national stage between these 2 elements. America's ideals are real, and the election of a black President shows that. But the barbarism is also real, and if this coming election is Gingrich vs Obama, then you will have 2 candidates who stand for this divide. More than most elections, it will reveal America's conflicted nature, and it could get ugly. But it is exactly that sort of clash of extremes that Uranus-Pluto produces, and that because of its intensity can eventually result in some sort of resolution. Last summer's battle over the budget, while nothing new, came at a very significant time, and could be the start of a bigger political war in the coming years.

The Insanity of Anders Breivik

2012-01-14T14:30:00.000Z

The alleged insanity of Anders Behring Breivik is under review. Breivik is the man who murdered 77 people in Norway last summer – 8 with a bomb, 69 on a shooting spree. He did it for ideological reasons, fearing a Muslim invasion of Norway.

At the time I thought he reminded me of someone, and after a few days it became clear who it was: Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks. That might seem an appalling thing to say about Assange, but I’m not trying to say he is a murderer. What Breivik and Assange have in common is the ability to do for ideological reasons things that most of us would not do, and at a scale that shocks.

In Assange’s case, he released 250,000 US diplomatic cables, with little thought for the damage that might do to fragile international relations, and the lives that might be endangered. Newspaper editors were shocked by how cold he could be on these issues.

Breivik is a right-wing ideologue, Assange is from the left wing – anti-authority, and convinced that if present governments can no longer function because their secrets are out, something better will replace them. This is delusional, though Assange expresses it coherently and intellectually. Breivik has also written a manifesto and, it goes without saying, he is delusional.

Astrologically, they have in common Sun in square to Uranus. This is a classic signature for someone who puts ideals before human feeling. Uranus is the ideals, and the square is the unbalanced, hard – but also dynamic - way in which they can be expressed.

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Breivik’s chart is considerably more extreme in this respect than Assange’s: he has a Sun-Mars-Mercury conjunction in Uranus-ruled Aquarius, and Moon in detached Virgo. Without knowing the person, you would say there is likely to be an issue around detachment and aggressively (Mars) putting ideals before human feeling.

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Assange is actually very watery, with Sun in Cancer trine Moon in Scorpio. Scorpio, however, can have its own kind of coldness, born of a hatred of self and others. As a child (Moon), Assange’s mother and partner were involved in a secretive cult, and there is an obvious connection here with his later desire to expose the secrets of authorities.

The trine from the Sun to the Moon can, paradoxically, be quite an unfavourable aspect. Such people often expect life to go their way, and lash out when it doesn't: there can be a lack of empathy.
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Is Breivik, however, insane? There is political pressure in Norway for Breivik not to be labelled insane, because he could be released after a relatively short number years. And people understandably need what they call justice. I’m old-fashioned, and I call it revenge. You see relatives of a murder victim unable to rest until the culprit has been found and put away for a long time. I repeat, it is understandable and I would feel the same. But I can’t see how it is different from revenge. What does it actually solve?

If someone is insane, then they are deemed not to be responsible for their actions. And, crucially, it puts them in a safe category where we no longer need to attempt to understand them. They’re just nuts, and what’s more, there is something wrong with their brain chemistry, which proves it. We actually understand very little about brain chemistry, and we certainly don’t understand the biochemical effects of the drugs we give to nutters. Psychiatry, however, has a special place within science that doesn’t need the usual standards of proof and theory.

I don’t think that the category ‘insane’ helps us understand someone. In Breivik’s case, and in Assange’s to a lesser extent, you can see from the astrology, and from their actions, that the problem is ideology combined with a detachment from human feeling; and that the feeling is unconsciously fuelling the ideology, or even you could say the rebellion, another way of describing a hard aspect to Uranus.

Uranus has its positive side: it can be associated with a strong desire to help humanity. Both Assange and Breivik were known as kids for helping children at school who were being bullied. So it would seem there is an idealism, but twisted.

Whether or not Breivik is deemed insane, I don’t think it will have much to do with his actual mental state. The massacre he carried out was so horrifying that in a way it is easier just to call him insane: a wild animal was on the loose, an irrational force, Grendel, and some people were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the darkness in him is a darkness in everyone: we could all kill. Scandinavia particularly, so controlled and conservative and respectable and successful, has had a swathe of literature and film in recent years dealing with serial killers. With Breivik, there is something for the Norwegians – the Vikings – to understand about themselves.

People want him to be insane so they can distance themselves from his behaviour. And they want him to be sane so they can put him in a cage for a long, long time.

There may be another factor that eventually comes into the equation, which is that when an event occurs that traumatises a nation, a simple explanation is not good enough. Princess Diana did not die because of the incompetence of her driver, JFK was not killed by a lone gunman, and 9/11 was not caused by a bunch of Islamists catching the US authorities napping. Labyrinthine conspiracy theories proliferate. Of course, the simple explanation may sometimes indeed be a cover-up, but that’s not the point. It is as if the meaning is knocked out of existence if a traumatising event occurs for too simple or random a reason, and people want something bigger, equal to the scale of the event, to blame, to hate. Princess Diana carried a huge collective projection as a caring, nurturing goddess. People couldn’t believe it when she died. What sort of cold, meaningless universe do we live in if someone like that could die so randomly and so young?

In the case of Breivik, if you look on the net there are plenty of conspiracy theories out there blaming e.g. the Israelis or the Freemasons, and some wondering if he is a closet Muslim.
But of course there are also people who genuinely want to understand why Breivik did what he did. I don’t think he is ‘insane’. I think he did what he did for reasons that can be understood. And as they say, “to understand all is to forgive all.” Conspiracy theorists are often fixated into blame, as are people (most of us) who are satisfied simply by finding a culprit and locking them up. It’s far harder to look at the people and societies surrounding the perpetrator and to understand the complex of conditions, because we are part of those conditions – it connects us to the pain of the events, gives us a responsibility. It’s much easier just to call Breivik insane.

But maybe also it is to do with stages in grieving. To start with, Breivik’s crimes were too difficult to deal with, so society in the form of the psychiatrists labelled him insane. 6 months after the deed, there is a bit of distance, and the country is starting to feel ready to take a peep at what happened, so there is a move to have their monster returned to sanity.

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Norway has a Sun-Pluto conjunction in Gemini. Gemini is the polarity between light and dark, and the need to balance both – if you like, to confront the shadow. This is part of the Gemini path. The presence of Pluto confirms this, suggesting that if it does not, dark events will occur to force the issue. The lack of aspects to Sun-Pluto, and it's interceptedness, also suggests a kind of autonomous shadow.

At the time of the shootings (July 22nd 2011) transiting Mars at 22 Gemini was conjunct natal Pluto, and by Progression there was a Moon-Pluto conjunction in Gemini in the 8th (Pluto’s) House, also conjunct tr Mars. So the astrology adds up quite remarkably to give a picture of a society that probably thinks it has it all sorted (light side of Gemini) to a bit of an extreme degree, calling forth an equally extreme response from the Underworld. The wider meaning for Norway of the shootings probably lies in this sort of area.

Mercury and Venus

2012-01-13T12:43:00.001Z

Today there are exact conjunctions between Mercury and Pluto in Capricorn, and Venus and Neptune in Aquarius.

I don’t usually try and interpret the inner planets in a general way. It seems more the forte of women astrologers. In fact I don’t usually even notice, but Melody’s Facebook entry
today got me thinking. I’m usually more at home trying to tie the outer planets to specific events.

So let’s see what happens. It is quite a striking pair of conjunctions, particularly as they are both drawing in the power of an outer planet.

Mercury and Pluto together in Capricorn give Douglas Adams’ computer Deep Thought. This computer spent thousands of years (Capricorn) working out the meaning of existence and eventually came out with the answer 42. The real joke is that perhaps there is something in it, for in Western Hermetic sphere work, "42 is the sum of the values of the 'true' spheres, 3,4,5,6,7,8 & 9 each of which represent one aspect of the body of God through which we observe the world."

Non-joking apart, the few days of this conjunction are a time when you can do some serious thinking, particularly if it involves putting a lot of thoughts together into some kind of structure. Lay out a plan for that book you’ve always been meaning to write, or think about starting that course of study you’ve been meaning to undertake.

Neptune and Venus conjoined in Aquarius is the relationship between Dr Gaius Baltar and the blonde robot Caprica Six in Battlestar Galactica. It is also a good time for cultivating your Facebook friends and finding true love through an internet dating agency. __________________________________________________
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Academics have begun researching the data that these agencies have been collecting, and some interesting results are starting to come through. For example, the type of person someone may end up dating may be very unlike the sort of person they claimed to be attracted to in their list of likes and dislikes. There are strange statistical results such as people who say they like beer are more likely to have sex on their first date, and people who say they like horror films are more likely to form a relationship that lasts.

Most importantly, and this is what I find fascinating, the data increasingly reveals what relationships are most likely to work, who is really suitable for who, which of course is probably quite different from who we think is suitable for us.

Of course, a lasting relationship may not be what someone needs right now. They may not know it, and usually don’t, but they may have something to learn by being with the ‘wrong’ person for a while. Or even a long while. It’s a complicated area.

But Neptune and Venus are in a fixed sign and in Aquarius. So this is about enduring relationships, and those that are maybe a bit unlikely. And being Aquarius, it is also about friends.

Neptune and Venus are also the imagination and creativity respectively, and Aquarius is networks of friends, so it’s a good time to write a blog about the meaning of Neptune and Venus in Aquarius. Or any creative activity that connects people.

Pulling Mercury and Venus together, what is powerful about these two is that they are both conjoining an outer planet simultaneously. Outwardly, communication and relating are empowered, something can come through you when you simply communicate what’s on your mind. Inwardly, it is a strong time for contemplation, thinking your life through (Mercury) and re-assessing which are the important bits (Venus.)

Astrology iphone apps; Altered States

2012-01-12T10:57:00.001Z

First of all, here is a piece from astrologer Lynn Hayes on astrology apps for iphones that sounds very handy:

The Time Passages free app provides everything you need to cast your own birthchart, and even gives you a real “horoscope” showing the effect of the current planetary positions on your own birthchart. This is a great way to learn about astrology and the effect of the planets on our personal lives. If you want the option to show a transit wheel or progressed chart, you can purchase this and other options for a very modest fee ($.99). (more...)
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And then we have a great piece from dream consultant June O'Brien:

In the early morning when I wake and before I turn on the lamp, I sit in the half-light for a while. It helps me unreel the night’s dreams. Sometimes as I wait, other images come. They aren’t dreams strictly speaking, but they aren’t daydreams or fantasies either. These dream-like states use the same metaphoric language as dreams. The messages are often abstract but apply to very specific situations that I can pinpoint during the course of the day. The images chosen, the method of communication seem far more intelligent than I am. More artful.

These are not visions, not three-dimensional representations, but they send me into long thoughts about altered or expanded states. I learned something about these early in life because my father had a wealth of spiritual gifts. Before he was an adolescent, he had a vision during a near-death experience; it was a vivid, beautiful visitation. Afterwards he was spiritually gifted. At times he predicted events to the hour, details exact. If he was distressed for someone he loved, he’d go to the woods in the evening or the early morning. There he argued with his god; even yelled. Their relationship was passionate, fierce.

Living with papa’s gifts was demanding. If he said we had to get in the car and leave – we were out of the way when the tree fell; if he said we had to go see Harvey, trust me, Harvey was in crisis. Miracles happened in his presence. His faith was absolute, tangible. (more...)

Astrology in Wikipedia

2012-01-10T11:53:00.001Z

I don't know if anyone knows much about editing Wikipedia. I don't. A year ago there was an edit war in the Astrology section, and eventually some of the astrology friendly editors were banned.

I put in an edit this morning, which I don't expect to last. This is how the introduction to Astrology concluded:

While astrology may bear a superficial resemblance to science, it is a pseudoscience because it makes little attempt to develop solutions to its problems, shows no concern for the evaluation of competing theories, and is selective in considering confirmations and dis-confirmations.

I changed this to "some consider it to be a pseudoscience" and added the following:

Astrology, however, pre-dates modern science. Its truths lie in the skilful reading of symbols and in the observation of human behaviour, in much the same way that a psychoanalyst or novelist would glean his or her insights. These kinds of human truth are not easily testable by the very particular methods of science.

It is not for astrology to show that it stands up to the scientific method of testing; the onus is on science to show that its methods are applicable to astrology.
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The US Election and a Warning for Obama

2012-01-09T12:20:00.001Z

It’s starting to seem a foregone conclusion that Barack Obama will win the year’s Presidential election. Not because he has been spectacularly good, but because the Republicans haven’t got a candidate they can unite behind, and the primaries have started. Obama is not just a sitting President, he is also a superb showman, a vital quality in modern politics.

You can usually tell well in advance who is going to win an election: it’s the one with the charisma, the showmanship, the one who can make the crowds go woo! That was why George W Bush won 2 elections, and Bill Clinton, and Reagan, and Tony Blair and Silvio Berlusconi. I don’t know if France’s Sarkozy has enough of it: he tries a bit too hard to be sexy, and it doesn’t work like that. So he may not be re-elected. President Putin also tries a bit too hard, and he is looking set for a downfall.

A lot of people seemed not to agree that George Bush had charisma because they thought he was a bad lot. But charisma is not a virtue or a vice in itself: it is just an attractiveness that inspires a following. You didn’t need to like or agree with George Bush to see that he had the ability to connect emotionally with certain types of people. Making a folksy virtue of his own ignorance was part of that appeal. And that was why his father did not get a second term: he did not have what he called ‘the vision thing’. The same with Gordon Brown in the UK.

The outcome of leadership elections is often that simple. Sometimes substance wins the day, when there is enough of it. Angela Merkel of Germany has looked like one of them from the start.
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In the 2008 US election, the North Node at 13 Aquarius had crossed Obama’s Ascendant 2 months earlier, and opposed his natal Node in March that year. In the 2012 election, the North Node in Scorpio will have crossed Obama’s MC and squared his natal Node 2 months earlier. So there is continuity of themes there, as well as in the Neptune transits: he was elected under Neptune conjoining his Ascendant, it went on to square his MC and is now in the early stages of squaring his Gemini Moon.

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What I have noticed with leaders is that they are usually elected under hard outer planet transits, and they stay in power until those transits end. Tony Blair, for example, won his first election in 1997 with Neptune conjoining his MC. Neptune went on to hard aspect his natal North Node and then his Moon-Sun-Pluto t-square. When it was done, Tony Blair left power. Neptune put him there and kept him there, just as Pluto put Margaret Thatcher there and kept her there till he’d finished transiting her chart.

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So Obama is likely to stay in power until Neptune has finished with him, which will be well into his second term. With the Nodal emphasis at the election shifting from his Asc to his MC, he will need to make his appeal less personal (Asc) and more based on his achievements in office (MC) to win the 2nd term, which is what you’d expect.

On a grimmer note, Obama will need to be careful from summer 2012 onwards as Uranus in Aries comes up to trine his Leo Sun. Presidents Kennedy, McKinley and Lincoln were all assassinated under Uranus transits to their Suns, as were Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Moreover, Obama was inaugurated under a Void Moon: as I showed in my piece on 21 Jan 2009 and then again on 29 Jan 2009, Void Moons have historically been associated with major disruption to the Presidency.

For this year, Uranus only comes to within 4 degrees of trining Obama’s Sun, so it is may be too soon to worry. On the other hand, with this Presidency being Void Moon, and with Uranus exactly squaring Pluto this year, we are likely to see extremism and major incidents that change the course of events in the world. I think it would be bad for the world if Obama was assassinated. I’m not predicting it, and it feels like bad taste to even say it. But it is astrologically possible over the next 2 years, so if there are any astrologers left in the White House, please take note!

Fun

2011-12-30T22:12:00.000Z

This is the Rizzi-Haus in Braunschweig in Germany. It is an office building designed by the American pop artist James Rizzi, who has just died aged 61. I wish more buildings were as fun as this. What is not always known is that medieval cathedrals were brightly coloured inside. I think it is natural for people to surround themselves with bright colours, unless they are Protestants.

Rizzi had Venus conjunct Saturn, not what you'd normally associate with a fun aesthetic.
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Here he is again:

What fun! What joie de vivre! Saturn can simply mean that you are good at what you do. Not in the Neptunian sense of a gift, but in the sense of a good craftsman who has earned his skill. Which is why Saturn is often a tough placement to have when we are young, a demanding taskmaster.

Rizzi's Venus-Saturn suggests that his work was highly skilled. Who says that Saturn isn't joyful once you have learned his lessons? In Roman times they had the Saturnalia, a carnival in honour of Saturn at the time of the winter solstice. The social norms were overturned: gambling was permitted, and masters served their slaves. The poet Catullus called it "the best of days." This is Saturn: he builds the social norms, and once they are in place, he takes you beyond them. To the Rizzi-Haus office block in Germany.

Iraq

2011-12-26T12:51:00.001Z

The war in Iraq, and the American occupation, ended a few days ago. Almost immediately, it seems, all hell has broken loose. The very next day the Iraqi President, who is a Shia, ordered the arrest of his Vice-President, who is a Sunni, on terrorism charges. The Vice-President has gone into hiding in the autonomous Kurdish area, and the Kurds, who traditionally mediate between the Sunnis and the Shias, won’t give him up. And there are the usual bombings.

It’s a farce. You couldn’t have made it up. Under Saddam Hussein, you had the minority Sunnis suppressing the majority Shias. All the American attempts at democracy, and the hundreds of thousands of lives lost, always seemed likely to result merely in the reversal of this equation: namely the suppression of the minority Sunnis by the majority Shias. That is precisely what has started to happen the day after the Americans formally relinquished their role.

You could argue, though, that as the Shias are in the majority, they won’t have to try quite so hard, or have to be quite so brutal, in keeping their opponents under control.

It’s a family feud. You’d have thought that as they were all Muslims, they could get on. But no. Look at the way Catholics and Protestants treated each other in Europe a few hundred years ago. (Or even in Northern Ireland now.) We are talking a medieval mentality, and perhaps family fights are the bitterest of all. Sunni Muslims are in the majority overall in the Middle East. A friend who is a Sunni, a quiet, friendly chap, once informed me in very relaxed terms that Shias are not real Muslims. It was a simple fact for him. He did not need to adopt a fanatical attitude to tell me this.
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Geopolitically, the Iraq invasion has led to a shift in the balance of power between Sunni and Shia in the Middle East. Prior to the invasion, the only major Shia country was Iran. Now its neighbour Iraq is a Shia country. Iran is almost nuclear-armed (although we don’t know how much damage the recent air strikes, which were played down, caused) and likely to dominate its oil-rich but fragile neighbour. By invading Iraq, all America is likely to have achieved is another dictatorship that will be the friend, instead of the enemy, of its own greatest enemy, Iran.

Talk about irony, defined as ‘a situation in which something which was intended to have a particular result has the opposite or a very different result.’ It is a great, modern story of human folly.

America’s larger motive was to maintain control of the Middle East, a vital energy source for the country. It’s secret motive was access to the Iraqi oil-fields: that may be the one thing it has achieved out of all this, but to what extent and for how long?

Sovereignty was formally handed back to the Iraqis on 28th June 2004 at 9.26am. I noted that chart (you could argue for other ones, like the first elections) about 6 years ago, as it seemed very descriptive of what was likely to come.

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The chart has a Grand Trine made up of the Sun, the Moon and Angular Uranus. This is a country (leader plus people, Sun and Moon) that is naturally unstable and divided (Uranus.) That’s it, really, reading over.

The Sun is at 7 degrees of Cancer, and over the next year will be experiencing the full force of the Uranus-Pluto square. The one thing you can be sure about is that in a year’s time the government that is in place will not be the same as the one they have now. If the President, Nouri al-Maliki, remains, he is likely to be more of a dictator than a democratically elected leader.

But what else can you do? When a country is made up of warring tribes – as is Afghanistan – often the only thing that will work is force. Dictators are sometimes a necessary evil.

Not only is Uranus-Pluto hard-aspecting the Iraqi Sun. Neptune is concluding a square to the MC and beginning an opposition to the Asc. When you see a person going through transits of this intensity, you know they are moving not just from one phase of their life to another, but probably to a totally new life.

We can expect events to unfold very quickly in Iraq over the next year, and probably not in the way the Americans would have wanted. They began the war at about the most inauspicious time possible. It almost makes you think George Bush must have consulted an astrologer.

As a member of the 15 families who secretly rule America, he needed the war to be as expensive as possible in order to benefit the military-industrial complex. Joke! I'm not really a conspiracist! Read the comments section in a day or two and I'll probably have said why.

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The time to begin things is in the cardinal signs, the time to establish is in the fixed signs, and the time to let things fall apart, to go with the flow, is under the mutable signs. The Iraq war was begun with the Sun at 29 Pisces, the most mutable degree of the (in a sense) most mutable sign, the end of the zodiac. The worst possible time to start something. And the Angles were mutable as well, with Saturn-Pluto running along the MC-IC, telling of death and destruction that is out of control (mutable.)

This war came to an end as Uranus stationed within a degree of the Pisces Sun. What you really want is an ending under Saturn: properly thought through and done at the proper time. A Uranus ending is anything but this, but the Americans probably didn’t have much choice, not after such an inauspicious start.

Christmas Stocking

2011-12-24T10:44:00.000Z

For those of you who don't follow my posts and shares on Facebook, here are some from the last month:

Louise Erdrich is one of my favourite novelists. She's part American Indian

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Happy Solstice! Here's a poem for anyone who is any sort of counsellor or teacher:

It is always a danger
To the aspirant
On the
Path
When one begins
To believe and
Act
As if the ten thousand idiots
Who so long ruled
And lived
Inside
Have all packed their bags
And skipped town
Or
Died.

Hafiz translation by Daniel Ladinsky

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I'm still waiting for the 4th series of True Blood to come out on Blu-Ray. Meanwhile this will have to do.
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The Higgs Boson is nicknamed the God particle. A guy called Leon Lederman wrote of it as the goddamn particle because it is so elusive, and his publishers censored goddamn to god. So now you know.

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Mystic Mayan Power Cloak for 2012 Protection

The Winter Solstice and the Next 3 Months

2011-12-22T19:37:00.000Z

The Cardinal signs – Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn – initiate processes that establish under the succeeding Fixed sign, and reach fruition and die under the following Mutable sign. Rather like a tree going from spring to winter. So the Cardinal signs are the beginnings, and as such the moment the Sun enters them gives a flavour of the next 3 months.

Today we have had the Capricorn Ingress, the Winter Solstice, which has a mixed symbolism. In one sense, it is the beginning of a new year, as the days begin to lengthen again. In another sense, it is the last gasp of the old year, before the new begins again with the leaves of spring. Astrologically, it is the latter.

Actually it’s not the last gasp. It’s rather that the Cardinal Ingresses also progress through the elements as they progress through the year, from Fire to Water to Air to Earth, and it is only when they reach earth, or Capricorn, that they fully manifest: the visions of fire in the spring translating into feeling in the summer, then thought in the autumn and finally

they solidify and become fully real when they reach Capricorn. As the old native American saying goes, “Don’t tell me about your visions (Aries) unless they grow corn (Capricorn.)”

The usual astrological progression is Fire, Earth, Air, Water – as in Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer – and that has its own logic. And as I mentioned earlier, you also have the Cardinal, Fixed, Mutable progression.

Cycles within cycles, with the spokes sometimes changing places. I wouldn’t take any of them too literally. But the symbolism is ancient, so there is depth and power to them. They are real, but not literal.

So the world is at the start of a new 3 month cycle, one that culminates, that pulls together and gives full form to, resolves if you like, the currents of the previous tempestuous (in this case) 9 months.

And the Ingress looks different depending on where you are in the world. In Washington it looks like this:

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Pluto opposite the MC square to Uranus opposite the Libra Asc. I think this has a political reading, particularly as the primaries begin in February to determine who will be the candidates in next year’s Presidential election. It suggests some kind of sea-change, a real challenge to the political status quo (Pluto opp MC) that could go in a number of directions (Uranus). Even if Obama is a shoo-in as the Democratic candidate, he looks set to face real Republican opposition, which didn’t look so likely a few months ago until Newt Gingrich bounced back.
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In the EU it looks like this:

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Moon Rising conjunct Asc at the very end of Scorpio, square to Neptune. The end of a dark tunnel of suffering, or the darkest of dark tunnels, dissolution. Uranus conjunct IC: instability at the foundations, rooted in economic challenge - Uranus square to 2nd House Sun-Pluto.

And in China, the other big economic bloc, it looks like this:

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Jupiter in Taurus stationing conjunct Aries Asc, opp exalted Saturn on the Desc, forming a T-square with Venus. Continued dynamic economic expansion (Jupiter-Venus-Saturn T-square) while protecting itself from other countries (Saturn on the Desc).

The near Middle East – Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Syria – all have an Ingress chart looking something like this:

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Again it is powerful because of the planets on Angles, in this case Pluto on the Asc, and Saturn-Jupiter running along the MC-IC axis. Saturn-Jupiter is to do with the rulership of these countries, suggesting a transformative tension between the past (Saturn) and the future (Jupiter). And Pluto rising, conjunct the Sun, all in Capricorn, suggests a change in the traditional structures of leadership that will be demanded by the collectives for their survival.

On a lighter note, today brought the headline US Navy lesbian couple share first gay dockside kiss. It continued:

Two female US sailors have become the first same-sex couple to share the traditional dockside "first kiss" since the US ended a ban on gays in the army. Petty Officer 2nd Class Marissa Gaeta, who had been at sea for 80 days, won the right to be the first person to kiss her partner on shore in a raffle.

The couple said the moment had been "a long time coming". The US Army's Don't Ask Don't Tell policy was lifted in September, after years of debate.

Yesterday Venus had, inevitably, just entered Aquarius, the sign that breaks the rules in the interests of progress. And it was in a dynamic t-square with exalted Saturn and stationing Jupiter, as it moved societies standards from the past (Saturn) to the future (Jupiter), from restriction (Saturn) to freedom (Jupiter).

Korea and Uranus; the New Flower Power

2011-12-19T18:57:00.000Z

In the last day 2 deaths have been announced: Vaclav Havel, philosopher-king of the Czech Republic, leader of the Velvet Revolution; and Kim Jong Il, leader of secretive, paranoid North Korea, who had a fresh ‘joy team’ of schoolgirls laid on annually for his private amusement.

You can trace history through the hard aspects the outer planets make with each other. Until recently, we were living in an age defined by the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of the early 1990s. Havel’s death is a reminder that that age, which began with the collapse of Communism, and led to a New World Order (with the US as lone superpower), is over.

We are now entering a Uranus-Pluto era, and we are seeing protests against malign dictators and decadent democracies worldwide. It is a virus that is spreading quite remarkably. Every week, it seems, some new dictatorship comes under threat. In the last few days, it has been Kazhakstan. Kim Jong-Il’s death is very timely in this respect. Will the virus spread even to North Korea?

We do not have an accurate chart for North Korea, but we do know that the country has natal Uranus at 0.17 Cancer; by transit, Uranus has been stationing square to this point this week, at about 0.40 Aries. So a sudden, challenging transformative event for North Korea, that is what the astrology seems to be saying.

Outer planet-to-outer planet transits normally signify a transition from one phase of life to another (such as the well-known ‘mid-life crisis’, heralded by the Uranus-Uranus opposition of the early forties.) Uranus isn’t just about freedom and awakening; mythologically, he was a tyrant, born of the primordial chaos, who hated his children. In the sign of Cancer, this aspect is emphasised, but more usually as lack of parental urge. In North Korea’s case, the natal Uranus in Cancer could be read as infantilisation of the people by the dictator, and the transiting square from Uranus in Aries as a chance for something new and liberating. This transit suggests to me that the virus of political change, carried by Uranus in Aries, will soon reach North Korea.

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The chart for South Korea is a bit clearer than North Korea's. We can be fairly certain that the Moon is within a couple of degrees of 1 Capricorn, and that Uranus is therefore currently squaring it. Korea was split at the end of WWII by the ideological differences of its 2 liberators, the US and the USSR. The Moon is the people, and with natal Moon opposite natal Uranus, the South is acutely conscious of the separation. With both countries subject to Uranus transits, it is well possible, in the current climate, that Kim Jong Il's death may begin a process of re-unification. Because it is Uranus, it could be sudden. North Korea may collapse quite suddenly and go cap in hand to the far richer South.
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The protests within the westernised democracies are increasingly reminiscent of the 1960s, when there was a Uranus-Pluto conjunction; the current square is the dynamic awakening of the seeds sown by that conjunction. In the 1960s the Uranus-Pluto conjunction, which is idealistic but hard and confrontational, was sextile to Neptune in Scorpio: flower (Neptune) power (Scorpio). This Neptune placement was also the transformative power (Scorpio) of altered states of consciousness and of psychedelic drugs (Neptune).

45 years later, and Neptune is still in sextile to Pluto, rather more widely, but they will be within 5 degrees in the spring as Neptune finally arrives in Pisces, the sign of its empowerment, for the next 14 years.

As Neptune has changed direction to move forward into Pisces, so there seems to me to have been a shift within the Occupy protests: away from what people don’t want, which is the present system with all its injustices; and towards what they do want, which is a world of love and peace, in which you can dance in the Jefferson Memorial and not get arrested. This has to be Neptune in Pisces.

Etymological footnote: in the 16th and 17th centuries in England, 'Occupy' was a euphemism for sexual intercourse, and fell from polite usage. Maybe that gives a 'free love' 1960s connection to the Occupy movement?

Aries and its problem with ageing

2011-12-16T14:05:00.001Z

I admire the sign Aries. They are not unlike Capricorns in their desire to be at the top. Except with Capricorn it is a long game requiring years of training, whereas with Aries they have a brilliance and competitive spirit that can get them to the top very early in life.

Aries is the first sign of the zodiac, so they are newly born, they are fresh, naïve even, convinced that theirs is the best way. And they are relentless. The sign is ruled by Mars, and in debate they are always attacking. It is very hard for them to take on the other’s point of view: that is a quality of Libra, the opposite sign. It is rarely worth crossing swords with an Aries, even when they are clearly wrong, for they will fight and keep it up and keep it up until you feel worn down. Gentler souls can feel bruised and out of harmony with their Aries friend, but for him or her conflict is the stuff of life.

Aries qualities and attitudes are youthful, and it is often difficult for them to mellow as they grow older. Because the sign is the first of the zodiac, self-awareness does not come easily, even as they age. So they keep fighting, keep needing the challenge, and in a way this is refreshing and admirable. But you also want them to be able to stand back and have an ironic take on this continual need for challenge.

Otherwise life is likely to hit them with something. I know one Aries who has spent 30 years living in tough physical conditions, enjoying the battle and the romance of it. But it has taken a breakdown in his health that could have killed him to get him to move on. They are very tough, and will die for their cause, but that toughness can become obstinacy.
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It’s not just Sun in Aries. Moon in Aries can be the same. Bill Gates is a Scorpio with Moon conjunct Midheaven in Aries, opposite Mars. There was the early brilliance and desire to beat off the competition. What is interesting about Gates is that he has changed. He no longer runs Microsoft, and is instead putting his wealth into conquering malaria worldwide. It’s still a very Aries thing to be doing, but he is not fighting people in the form of other corporations anymore: his business had for many years a bad reputation for squeezing out and destroying the opposition.

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Steve Jobs had Moon and Mars in Aries, and he remained clearly Aries through to the end. Illness seemed to intensify rather than mellow him. And he seems to me of an example of an Aries who wouldn’t change, being hit by something that might just break the mould. But as I say, Aries will die for their cause, and in a way Steve Jobs did that. And it is now his company that has the bad reputation, in this case for controlling and overcharging its customers, and for having an unhappy, pressurised workforce.

You could say that Christopher Hitchens, who has just died of cancer aged 62, is another Aries who didn't mellow. He had Sun conjunct Mars, Venus and Mercury in Aries. Hitchens was a well-known literary critic and political commentator who couldn’t be fitted into any neat category. As he got older, so did he develop a crusade against religion. He certainly had a point, and he was entertaining, but reason was his god. Richard Dawkins, another crusading atheist, admired him. Hitchens was a champion of the New Atheism movement, which advocates the view that the evident truths of science have now reached the point where "religion should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises."

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To my mind, this is Aries at its worst. It would be understandable, if naïve, in a young Aries, but in a man in his 60s? It is Libra, the opposite sign, which has ‘the live and let live’ quality that Aries needs. Religion in a way is awful, but it is just another manifestation of mass unconsciousness, of collective dynamics, in a way that membership of political parties can be, or the blind worship of science and reason. It’s just part of the human condition. Aries perhaps more than any other sign is likely to be fighting its own shadow, and I’ve often thought that the New Atheism has, in its zeal and fundamentalism, the characteristics of a religion.

Religion does trap people, but it’s often where they are at, they need that kind of security, they would fall apart without it, so you need to let them have it. And, in its favour, it does advocate a view of reality that is non-rational (as well as often irrational, unreasonable.) It is saying that not everything can be reduced to reason, reason is just a tool, and there is a place, a need, for some kind of faith as a foundation, even though the object of that faith is often crude and intolerant of other faiths.

I have Moon conjunct Saturn in Sagittarius, so the idea of what to have faith in has always been important to me. Particularly because in our age, everything tends to get reduced to reason. But the quest for faith gets confused with the need for certainty (which science is just as capable of providing). And so you always have to look beyond the images and the doctrines and to your own experience, and to a sense that comes and goes that there is some kind of unifying beauty in the universe – or something like that – which can never be pinned down.

Hitchens had a yod in his chart, which is 2 planets that are sextile, and both inconjunct a 3rd planet at the apex of the triangle. I’m not sure I know what yods mean, but they are supposed to indicate some kind of fated element in your life that can never be resolved, but has to be accommodated.

A good example is in the composite chart of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, which had Mercury at the apex, and Neptune and Pluto at the base: these 2 men were forced to communicate (Mercury) by the forces in their collective (Neptune and Pluto), but it was always a very difficult accommodation. Neptune and Pluto were, perhaps, the 2 wings of the party they represented, with Brown being Neptune and Blair Pluto. Or maybe the other way round.

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In Hitchens’ case, Jupiter in Aquarius was at the apex (faith in humanity), with Saturn (tradition) and Uranus (science) at the base. This suggests an ongoing attempt to reconcile religion and science. But Jupiter was square to his Aries Sun, suggesting that his crusading temperament may have got the better of that other dialogue.

In my piece Blair vs Hitchens, Religion vs Science, I gave a recent quote from Hitchens that to my mind is not consistent with the tone of his attacks on religion and to some extent sets the lie to them:

“… the sense that there is something beyond the material, or if not beyond it, not entirely consistent materially with it, is, I think, a very important matter. What you could call the numinous or the transcendent, or at its best, I suppose, the ecstatic. I wouldn't trust anyone in this hall who didn't know what I was talking about. We know what we mean by it, when we think about certain kinds of music perhaps, certainly the relationship or the coincidence but sometimes very powerful between music and love. Landscape, certain kinds of artistic and creative work that appears not to have been done entirely by hand. Without this, we really would merely be primates.

I think it's very important to appreciate the finesse of that, and I think religion has done a very good job of enshrining it in music and architecture, not so much in painting in my opinion, and I think it's actually very important that we learn to distinguish the numinous in this way. I wrote a book about the Parthenon, I will mention it briefly. I couldn't live without the Parthenon, I don't believe every civilised person could, if it ... much worse than the first temple had occurred, it seems to me. And we would have lost an enormous amount besides by way of our knowledge of symmetry, grace and harmony."

The EU Avoids its Problems

2011-12-11T14:29:00.000Z

Britain is the bad boy of Europe again for vetoing proposals for closer integration. But you can’t expect a country – or a person – with Uranus on the Ascendant, square Sun and square MC to co-operate easily. It’s easy to see people with a strong Uranus or Aquarius element as deliberately awkward, wilfully contrary – and sometimes they are – but usually what is going on is that they are making their own minds up, often unaware that there is a consensus thinking to which they are supposed to conform.

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In this case, the Eurozone and the UK are each attempting to act in their own interests, which is fair enough. But it doesn’t suit either side. For all the headlines about the agreement that has, despite the UK, been reached, there remains the problem of Italy – and Spain, Portugal and Greece. How can the EU leaders possibly be envisioning a future of tighter fiscal control when Italy is about to go bankrupt? And perhaps several others as well? All bets about the future of Europe are off until those countries debt problems are sorted.

In 2001, Argentina went bust. The value of the currency collapsed, inflation rocketed, the banks shut down, people lost their savings and there were years of widespread poverty which continue even now.

The EU is not offering to bail out its struggling economies. A number of its members are quite probably about to spend years in extremely difficult circumstances, making the ‘austerity’ measures in the UK and elsewhere look like a picnic. There’s no way the EU can implement any sort of further integration and tighter controls in these conditions.

The EU collectively and all its wealthiest members are undergoing major hard transits from Uranus and Pluto. (Italy isn’t – it has Neptune opposing its MC, suggesting a political meltdown.) With these transits, you are forced to deal with underlying problems before progress can occur. The underlying problem is not tighter fiscal control. It has gone beyond that. The underlying problem for the Eurozone is what seems to be inevitable defaults and fragmentation and planning for that.

In my piece The Sun Sets on Europe I was considering Saturday’s Total Lunar Eclipse and exact station of Uranus. I expected some sort of announcement concerning the future of Europe, probably the default of Italy, since the eclipse was closely conjunct the Italian Sun. In the end there was a major announcement, but about closer integration and the UK opting out. I still think the eclipse has to mean something important for Italy because of the aspect it makes. We shall have to wait and see. Eclipses are operative for a week or two either side.

Them The 1%

2011-12-09T20:50:00.002Z

We live by stories, but we don’t always see them as such. For many, Jesus being the Son of God is not a story but a fact. And for others the scientific narrative is a fact. Some astrologers talk about ‘planetary energies’ as though they were a fact.

But they are stories, they are human inventions about how the world is. We need those inventions. But we also need to see them for what they are.

After my last posting, Ruan Mor commented that we have currently “the austerity story (austerity for some while the rich carry on trousering vast amounts of money).”

There is a certain truth to this story, enough to make it a ‘fact’. But it is also simplistic and has a very obvious ‘bad guy’ in it, like any good story. It feeds into conspiracy mythology, where you have a very small number of people – usually a shadowy cabal – who secretly control the country, if not the world. In the case of the austerity story, however, the secret is out, for it is the bankers and other wealthy people who have ruined everything and continue to do so. Their excessive salaries prove it. And the austerity is not just for some but for the ‘99%’.

A corollary of this, at its most simplistic, is that the government spending cuts are wrong. It’s as though it’s the bankers and wealthy people who should be suffering, not us, as if they could afford to pay off the country's debts. (I think it's quite right, though, that they should be asked to pay more than they do.) I find a lot of the protests against the cuts hard to understand. It’s basic housekeeping, and it has to be done, because we are in debt, for whatever reason. I can understand protests against specific cuts, but even then you need to suggest what should be cut instead. But the protests aren’t usually like this. The cuts often seem to be billed as unnecessary per se.

People are suffering, not dreadfully, but they have less to live on, and there are more unemployed people. The future seems very uncertain. And it is true that many bankers' salaries are excessive and have been for some years. This is just as true of many CEOs, but it is the overpaid bankers who are the target of so many people’s wrath.

If we took the excess salaries of these bankers and CEOs and distributed the money around the country, it would not go very far. Their salaries, in themselves, do not make other people poor. But those salaries are symbolic of a system that has been allowed to get out of balance. And who allowed that to happen? If you live in a democracy, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t elect a government and then blame the politicians, or the bankers, when it all goes wrong.

For many (myself included), the bankers salaries are representative of what has gone wrong. But that doesn’t make the bankers bad people, or make them the cause of what has happened. I was watching an interview with the actor James Earl Jones. And he said that top actors, including himself, get paid far too much, and that is at the expense of the other actors in the film. But, he said, you don’t therefore refuse your salary, you take what you are paid. Some bankers undoubtedly have been and are greedy and corrupt. But most of them, like everyone else, do their job and take home their pay, and if they are capable and ambitious, they take home a lot of pay. That is the way the system works in all industries, for better or for worse.

Why is Italy in such dire straits? It wasn’t the bankers. It was the government spending too much, because it suddenly found it could borrow cheaply due to its membership of the Euro. And no doubt a lot of that spending was to make the government popular so it would be re-elected, which it duly was. The Italians enjoyed having a corrupt clown for a leader. They knew he was a corrupt clown, and they kept electing him. And the US elected Bush. You could say the reason Italy is in trouble is because it is a democracy. If you had an authoritarian government like China, that didn’t have to be so worried about popular opinion, then the country would not have run up the same debts.

No, it is not the bankers who are to blame. Bankers are bankers, and we need them. It is we the 99% who are to blame for electing governments who didn’t properly regulate the financial system and who overspent and who allowed far too much wealth to be concentrated in too few hands. But we were enjoying the boom times too much to question them.

In the 30s, after the last Uranus-Pluto square, a load of regulation was brought in to control the financial system and avoid another crash. In the 1990s, the regulation was repealed and within a decade or so the same thing happened all over again.

Personally, I’m not big on blaming, it doesn’t necessarily help. But there is a shadow projection going on right now, and it comes from the liberal left, which can make it hard to see, because they think they’re the nice guys. But once you have a collective scapegoating going on, then you have a mob mentality and all sorts of awful things can eventually come out of it. The phrase "we the 99%" says it all: it is the 1%, the rich people, who are the problem, the bad people. And actually it's not, it's all of us collectively, we've fucked up like we always have and always will, and we're looking for someone to blame.

This is the nature of the idealism of Uranus-Pluto. There is good in it, but it also polarises, it divides, it demonises. We worship wealth and we condemn it. What is needed is reform, not revolution. Camping out in the middle of cities isn’t going to do it, because where are the politicians who reflect that mood? Is the West really so enervated from decades of good living that all it can manage is a minority silent protest with no clear message? The Arab world has taken the bull by the horns and overthrown its dictators. We do not need to do that. But we need their energy, and we need to vote in reformers.

The Revolutionary Zeitgeist

2011-12-06T16:56:00.000Z

It has been remarkable to see the wave of protest and revolution that has swept across the world as Uranus has neared its square to Pluto this year. The Arab Spring in the Middle East and the Occupy movement in thousands of western cities are perhaps the most obvious cases. China has its own unrest, but they keep a lid on it. And now even Russia has joined in, with Vladimir Putin’s party United Russia having taken a hit at recent Parliamentary elections. And thousands have taken to the streets claiming the election was still rigged in favour of Putin’s party.

Uranus is the revolutionary spirit, and Pluto shows how serious people are about change. The Occupy camps can easily be dismissed as harmless. But the fact they are occurring under Uranus-Pluto means they are the expression of something widely felt in the collective: that people have had it with the present system, with its injustices, its instability, its needless poverty and glorification of greed, and the overarching ecological threat to the planet.

We may not yet know we feel like this. These feelings take time to ripen. The Occupy protesters, some of them at least, do feel this, they are the future. I dropped in on the Exeter camp last week, and it was the mixed bag of motivations you’d expect. But somewhere deep down a lot of us have had it with the present system. We just don't yet know it. Time and further events over the next few years, as Uranus and Pluto exactly square 7 times, will widen and deepen these feelings in the collective and bring political reform across the western world. And not necessarily in a way that we would want. It often makes people look for redeemers. In the late twenties, under the last Uranus-Pluto square, Germany was brought to a similar pass, when its system no longer worked.

It is strange that these revolutionary events should happen together across the world, because they have different causes. It makes you think. It is not that Uranus and Pluto cause these events, this spirit in the world. Astrology works synchronously. You notice that 2 types of event tend to happen at the same time, one in the world, one in the heavens. Because we are trained to think causally, we look for a causal relationship and can’t find one because there isn’t one, and so we think astrology is nonsense.

A Native American friend who is a story teller was once invited to partake at an academic conference. And the professors had all their theories about indigenous people and their stories. And my friend said to them that until they learned to think mythologically, they would never understand the way the indigenous people saw the world. The academics were quite put out by this, even quite offended, because to their minds they represent a more advanced, rational humanity. But my friend was right, and exactly the same point applies to astrology.

It is only in the last 500 years, out of our 100,000 year history, that we have stopped thinking mythologically, symbolically. Science and rationalism seem so mighty, but they represent ½% of our history. Astrology belongs to the other 99.5%. We have that weight of history and tradition behind us, we think in a way that has always been natural to humans.

So there is this similar thing happening right across the world for different reasons. It suggests some deep way in which we are all connected, not just humans, but the natural world as well, because look at the number of oil spills, earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis that have been occurring as Uranus and Pluto have started to square up.

It is all one big thing that goes through cycles of transformation in different ways according to which outer planets are talking to each other. What a strange, unknowable universe we live in.

Russia is the latest major chunk of the world to join the Uranus-Pluto revolutionary party. We will have to wait and see with Africa and South America. In the case of Russia, the chart I use does not show a major influence from Uranus and Pluto, not for some years yet (when Uranus then Pluto will hard-aspect its Libra Ascendant.) This is unlike the major western powers plus China, who nearly all have their Suns in early to mid cardinal signs.

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The chart does, however, have the Uranus-Neptune conjunction which saw the end of Soviet Communism. That is at 10-14 Capricorn. Uranus and Pluto are starting to hit that hard, and I think with countries you can take transits to outer planets more seriously than you do with personal charts, because the outer planets are collective, and countries are collective. That said, in Russia’s case, natal Uranus-Neptune does not aspect any other planets (apart from a sextile to Pluto), which weakens the transit. Russia also has progressed Mars at 4 Libra, so again we have a weak effect from transiting Uranus and Pluto.

It is interesting that Uranus-Neptune is virtually unaspected in Russia’s chart, because the idealism of that combination was subsequently completely by-passed as Putin constructed an authoritarian, gangster state.

What I think is currently happening in Russia is more down to transiting Neptune than to Uranus-Pluto. When Putin took over at the end of 1999, Neptune was opposing the Russian MC, suggesting Putin was a Redeemer out of the chaos that the country was descending into. (When Hitler came to power, Neptune was starting to square the MC of the previous Weimar Republic, so he was also a Redeemer. Neptune is currently opposing Italy's MC, so they may soon be seeking a Redeemer.)

Though Putin is no longer President, that has been in name only, and he remains the most powerful man in Russia. Since 1999, Neptune has gone on to square Russia's natal Pluto and oppose natal Sun-Jupiter in Leo. That is now over: Neptune is changing sign, Russia has the new start of a Progressed New Moon, and it no longer feels the same need for a Redeemer.

Putin is standing again as President next March. He has Sun at 14 Libra, and Moon in early Gemini. He is being hit full-on by the outer planets in the next few years, and is moving on to a very different phase of his life. The transits may not be close enough by next March to stop him becoming President; but if he does, I couldn’t see him lasting for more than a few years.

The Sun Sets on Europe

2011-11-30T11:21:00.001Z

EU officials are having another meeting to try and sort the Eurozone debt crisis. The monetary commissioner said: "We are now entering the critical period of 10 days to complete and conclude the crisis response."

8.05 am in 10 days time is the exact moment at which Uranus starts to move forward, after 5 months going backwards through the sky. There will also be a total lunar eclipse that day.

Uranus has had a way of being exact this year. On his last day in Pisces, 11 March, there was a tsunami off Japan. The next day, Uranus’ first in Aries, a nuclear reactor exploded as a result of the earthquake that caused the tsunami. Uranus describes sudden, catalytic, even cataclysmic events. Pisces is the ocean, Aries is the first fire sign. The symbolism and the timing were great, enough to make you believe in astrology!

So it looks like Uranus is doing it again, but with the debt crisis. Many people in the markets expect Italy to default before Christmas. The 10th of December looks like being a crucial date. It’s a Saturday and the markets will be closed, just the right time to make an announcement without having immediate market panic.

It seems clear that Germany and France have decided to leave Italy to her fate. Their leaders continue to make noises about closer European integration etc, but they are not making serious moves to bail Italy out. It’s their actions, or lack of them, that tell you the real story.

And there is the total lunar eclipse as well that day. The Eclipse Moon will be at 18 Gemini, closely conjunct the Italian Sun at 19 Gemini. It looks like a defining moment.

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If and when Italy defaults, the foreign banks to whom it owes money will lose out. We will probably see another banking crisis and another recession. After that there will be a Spanish debt crisis, and France could also be in trouble.

It’s a remarkable astrological line-up, that Uranus should change direction on the day of a total Lunar Eclipse, and that the Eclipse should so closely aspect Italy’s chart. The Eclipse will occur as the sun sets, sets on Europe’s vision of itself and, quite possibly, on the post-war world of the last 66 years.

The fabric of everything is a little loose right now.

2011-11-24T14:00:00.000Z

Vladimir Putin, the most powerful man in Russia, was booed at a boxing match yesterday. This would previously have been unthinkable. The President of Yemen has just agreed to step down. The President of Syria is under intense pressure to do the same. The King of Bahrain is making concessions to protesters. In Egypt, they have had one revolution this year, and now they are having another one against the military. Libya has deposed, after a long struggle, its leader Gaddafi. As a result of the financial crisis, the governments of Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Greece have all been toppled this year.

Meanwhile, the American government is paralysed yet again by partisan politics, unable to reach agreement on budget cuts to control its huge deficit. The previous bout of paralysis downgraded the country’s credit rating in the summer. Like the booing of Putin, this had been previously unthinkable.

And then there is the biggest crisis of all, in the Eurozone. The world’s biggest economic bloc has huge debt problems, and is unable to deal with them because it has an unworkable shared currency. Solving the problem through bail-outs by richer countries is becoming politically impossible. And unravelling the Euro is, again, unthinkable.

But it’s probably the unthinkable that will win out, because those are the sort of times we are entering. Outer planets do unthinkable things. We have Uranus squaring Pluto: Uranus catalysing the world into Pluto’s shadowy lair, a world that appears the dark opposite of our own, but which contains the seeds of renewal.

We have all these individual crises occurring simultaneously, but what will probably drag us all in together are events in the Eurozone. The most likely scenario is that a large economy like Spain or Italy will no longer be able to borrow the money it needs to repay loans and to keep functioning. That is the point beyond which it is hard to think.

But it doesn't do to try and second guess. Look, for example, at the Libra New Moon Chart set for Washington:

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Libra is a political sign, and this chart is extraordinary. The New Moon conjunct the Asc in an Angular t-square with Uranus and Pluto. OK, this New Moon period is well over, but it is a catalytic chart, and suggests that the present Congressional impasse over the budget will be a mighty clash, and the political landscape is going to shift. It may be political events in the US, rather than the obvious candidate of Europe, that change the game. And it may also have to do with Newt Gingrich's emergence as the Republican front-runner.

Uranus has slowed right down, ready to change direction in 2 weeks time, beginning a run-in to an exact square to Pluto next June, the first of 7. When an outer planet slows down, its effect intensifies, and it draws to it the next phase of its influence. Uranus brings instability and crisis.

In the summer I wrote a number of pieces called The Crisis Season part 1, 2 etc. I expected the Crisis Season to end for a while, as Uranus and Pluto separated over the autumn, but it hasn’t, it has got more intense. You start running out of superlatives.

We are living in a kind of limbo, a bit like the ‘phoney war’ in Britain at the start of WWII, when not a lot happened for a while, but huge events threatened. None of the major powers were militarily engaging with Germany. And then she invaded France.

So I think we are all waiting for something to happen. And it will probably be disorderly default, brought about by political paralysis, of one or more major European countries.

The world is in the early stages of the biggest change in our lifetimes. The astrology is very clear. Over the last 120 years we have had the 3 outer planet conjunctions: Neptune-Pluto, Uranus-Pluto and in the 1990s Uranus-Neptune. Between them they have sown the seeds of a new 5 hundred year era. Now, with Uranus in an opening square to Pluto, we have the first dynamic expression of this new era. And the first thing that is occurring is the death of the old. The old really is going in a very big way. This change will be bigger than the 1930s, which also had a Uranus square Pluto, because that square was closing a cycle, it occurred 5 times instead of 7, and crucially it did not aspect the charts of the major powers in the way that this one will be.

Yes, appearances are still the same, but what is hard to see is how much the old has already been hollowed out, how much it is just a shell that remains that cannot possibly recover because the life is being drained out of it. This is how Pluto works when there is resistance, he eats you up from within, until one days the husk collapses.

And that is the stage we are at now. We are carrying on in the same old way in a kind of dream, waiting for something to give. The change in direction of Uranus in early December will probably mark the end of this period of waiting. Meanwhile, in cities across the world, people are camped out, asking for change. It is a quiet groundswell. Part of its integrity is in not claiming to know the answers. All they know is that the present system, with its injustices and poverty and uncontrolled greed, needs to go. It’s that big. It’s not just a tweak here and a new law there, it’s the whole thing. It’s systemic. It’s not often in history that we reach that sort of point.

As June put it, the fabric of everything is a little loose right now.

The Kissing Pope

2011-11-17T21:47:00.001Z

Benetton have put up a series of ads of prominent people kissing. There is Sarkozy and Merkel:

And there is Obama and the Chinese leader:

And then there is/was the Pope and a leading Imam. Benetton took it down after the Vatican said it was taking legal action. No sense of humour, these Catholics. While it's still available, here is the offending image:

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The Pope has natal Venus in Taurus square to Neptune. He is sensuous and indiscriminate with it. But his Venus is opposite Saturn, so he is afraid of his sensuality and lets Benetton (and paedophile priests) do it for him. Unfortunately, his Saturn is in 9th House Sag, so he gets legal about it. With Nodal Mars in Gemini opposite the MC, he likes to pick a fight in public. Because his Mars is square Mercury-Jupiter in Pisces, he is not good at knowing which fight to pick, and with Mars square Uranus, he can be impulsive.

For a history of the pope and his potshots, see my blog from nearly 3 years ago, which begins:

Pope Benedict has done it yet again. First in 2006 it was the Muslims: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

Then just before Christmas he announced that saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behaviour was as important as protecting the environment.

And then last week he reversed the excommunication of a bishop who is a holocaust denier.

In any normal job, he'd have been sacked years ago, and many of his priests would be doing lengthy jail terms for the sexual abuse of children. The Pope and many of his colleagues would also be in jail for concealing it. But this is religion, where the rules are different.

Italy and the Scorpio New Moon

2011-11-12T09:57:00.001Z

There is a New Moon once a month, when the Sun is in the same position as the Moon, and this creates one of the most basic cycles in astrology. A New Moon doesn’t show you the major currents passing through someone’s life – you have to look to the outer planets for that – but it does show you events and phases within those larger cycles.

The chart for Italy has the Moon at 4.5 degrees Scorpio. The New Moon on 26th October took place at 3 Scorpio, while Italy’s Progressed Midheaven was at 4 Scorpio.

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Italy has an unserviceable debt, and austerity measures in these circumstances are usually counter-productive, slowing the economy down and making repayment harder. Greece was small enough to be bailed out, sort of, by the larger economies. Not so Italy, and the European Central Bank isn’t even trying. Events are going to move very fast over the next couple of weeks as Italy fails to borrow the money needed to keep going and pay off old loans.

In a way it was unfortunate for Greece to be small enough for a protracted pseudo-rescue. Boils need lancing, unwelcome realities have to be faced, and this is Scorpio’s territory. The Moon in the chart is the people, and the current New Moon cycle indicates that the Italian default is probably about to occur. Scorpio is associated with surgery and healing, and this is what it will be for the Italian people, who have had this amazing triple conjunction of natal Moon, New Moon and progressed MC. The MC is the institutions of government, suggesting not just a new leader (which we all know about) but a new type of government. This is reflected in the larger, outer planet cycle, in which Neptune will next year oppose Italy’s natal MC at 1 Virgo.

There is a Full Moon half way through every New Moon cycle, when the events concerned reach some sort peak. The Full Moon at 18 Taurus/Scorpio was on 10th November, coinciding with Berlusconi announcing he would stand down as leader. It ran along Italy’s Asc-Desc axis at 19 Scorpio/Taurus, while the Full Moon Mars at 29 Leo was less than a degree off the natal MC. This remarkable set of line-ups shows the significance of the events. And there is so much Scorpio involved: it is about purging and ultimately about healing.

(The natal Moon in 12th House Scorpio, square to Pluto, is also the Mafia and the widespread corruption which no doubt has contributed to the present state of affairs.)

So Berlusconi has agreed to stand down once a load of austerity measures have passed through both houses of Parliament. It has pacified the markets, giving some hope that the politicians are in control of events. But no-one in the markets really thinks that any more. As Uranus slows down to a standstill over the next few weeks, intensifying his influence, so will the crisis deepen further (if that is possible), and the game will change.

Without any pretence at rescue occurring, there is going to be a major train wreck very shortly. I’d say before the next New Moon, on 25th November. This New Moon, in early Sag, will be a degree off the ascendant in Rome. In a way it shows a liberation, a new optimism, albeit in very difficult circumstances.

We are seeing a series of New Moons in the early cardinal signs at present, meaning they are hard-aspecting Uranus and Pluto. The Cardinal Ingresses are also doing this, which is why world events have been so dramatic – remember we had the US debt crisis immediately before the European one. This is a good example of using inner planet events to predict points of change and crisis within outer planet transits. I thought events were going to ease off in the autumn due to Uranus and Pluto separating for a while, but if I’d looked at the New Moons and Ingresses I would have thought otherwise.

And after the Italian train wreck, what next? More train wrecks, maybe even bigger ones. Maybe France at some point. In a way it is exciting, it is high drama. I encounter some people who are enthusiastic about it because they are rightly so fed up with the old system. But we really don’t know what is coming afterwards, we are right at the beginning of the avalanche that Uranus-Pluto is ushering in. That is my point here: people assuming that the world will be moving in a direction they want it to move in, that because the ‘bad’ is self-destructing through its own contradictions and excesses, that whatever comes after will be in some way better. This way of thinking is much wider than the 2012 movement. Well the ‘good’ also has a way of coming to an end under Uranus-Pluto. I don’t think we can assume anything. Look what came out of the last square: the Great Depression followed by WWII.

As astrologers, we watch in a hopefully detached way and we detect patterns that are reflected in the heavens and we can to some extent predict. We can probe quite deeply into the nature of events, using planetary symbolism. But there is too much chaos and complexity with world events, certainly at present, to be able to predict much. Later in the Uranus-Pluto transit, maybe, but right now we are at the chaotic, destructive start. The future really isn’t written in the heavens, it really could go in a number of directions.

2011-11-10T10:54:00.001Z

For those of you who don't go on my Facebook, here are some of the pictures that have been doing the rounds over the last month:

The End of Capitalism?

2011-11-06T12:11:00.000Z

The Greek Prime Minister, George Papandreou, has been very clever, but not clever enough, if you look at the chart for Greece. What’s happened is that he needs to get the latest EU bail-out deal through Parliament, and he only has a wafer-thin majority. The opposition were going to vote against it, and so were some rebels within his party. So he said he would call a referendum. The people, of course, could give the wrong answer, which would be “No” to a further round of austerity measures, and which would effectively end Greece’s membership of the Eurozone.

So the opposition were forced to go OK, we didn’t really mean it, we were only playing politics, we will vote with the government on this issue. So Papandreou got his way, and has just survived a vote of confidence, and has promised a government of national unity.

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But there is a price to pay, because he told the people they could have their say, then took it away again. He played with them for his own ends. And Greece has a Moon-Pluto conjunction. The Moon is the people. You cannot play with Pluto this way. We have already seen riots in Greece over the austerity measures, so the people are prepared to make their case. The chart I am using for Greece is the 1974 chart for the new democratic Greece that arose out of the old military dictatorship. The Moon-Pluto conjunction shows that history, a disempowered (Pluto) people (Moon.) But also a people who reclaimed their power, and will not be treated in the same way again.
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With Moon-Pluto, it is not a matter of if the people lash back at Papandreou, it is when. (Since writing this, an opinion poll has suggested the people want a national unity government rather than the present one.) Mars is often a good planet to look at when considering confrontational or military situations. Right now, the country is having a Mars Return at 27 Leo. The Greek MC, the institution of government, is at 24 Pisces. Mars will move into the sign opposite, Virgo, next week, and will gradually approach the exact opposition, stationing at 23 Virgo in January. Progressed Mars is already at 21 Virgo. Meanwhile, Uranus will change direction next month and start moving towards an exact opposition to the natal Moon. Pluto is moving away from an exact square to the Moon, but it is still highly influential.

The people are going to be restless (Uranus) and demanding power (Pluto), and the state itself (MC), not just the government, will be under siege (Mars by both transit and progression.)

Pluto and Uranus are also hard aspecting the Greek Mercury and Venus, and starting to hard aspect Saturn and the Ascendant. Greece has a long, hard road ahead of it. It could easily be that the country goes into some sort of meltdown (Pluto opposite Saturn) and the military takes control again, especially when you consider its history and the current actions of Mars: the pressure on the MC from transiting and Prog Mars will be intense right through until June 2012, due to the retrograde cycle of Mars. Moreover, the Progressed MC has just changed sign, another indicator of a change in the form of government. (Italy, where the real debt problem lies, has MC at 1 Virgo, which Neptune is about to oppose, again suggesting a change in the forms of government, even perhaps meltdown.)

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Military governments have a bad name, and like all governments they enjoy the taste of power and want to stay on regardless. But if a country goes into meltdown, I think sometimes the army has to take control. It can sometimes be better than a chaotic, corrupt democracy, such as you get in Pakistan.

Greece, though, is just the start of something much, much bigger. It will be the start of an avalanche. Uranus square or opposite Pluto is the toughest, most dramatic and most transformational configuration in the heavens. And a series of exact squares will begin next year.

The last time this aspect occurred was in the early 1930s, at the time of the Great Depression, German re-armament and the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. At that time there were 5 exact squares in just under 2 years; this time there will be 7 exact squares in just under 3 years, beginning June 2012. Last time, the squares occurred quite late in the cardinal signs. This time, they are occurring in the early to mid-cardinals, which is where so many major powers have their Suns. This one, therefore, will be much further reaching in its effects. Look at these Suns: the US at 13 Cancer; the UK 10 Capricorn; Germany 9 Libra; France 13 Libra; China 8 Libra; the EU 10 Capricorn.

Last time, the square was closing, leading up to the conjunction of the 1960s. So even though it churned everything up, the same basic system remained: the continued rise of world powers and wealth under a capitalist system, fuelled by technological advance and limitless energy supplies. This time, we have an opening square. It suggests that the old system itself will be to a large extent destroyed. This is all in the next few years. I’m not hyping this up, my arguments are based on a straight reading of the astrology.

Some say it will be the end of Capitalism. It may be, but only aspects of its present form. I don’t think you can get rid of capitalism itself, in the sense of people’s desire to trade and create wealth for themselves, unless you have a feudal or a communist system. You can’t go against human nature, not indefinitely.

It is very hard to see what is coming next, after the avalanche. You can see a number of European countries defaulting as part of the avalanche, and Europe restructuring itself. Banks would take a huge hit, and there would be another banking crisis. And you can see the world being knocked back into recession as a result, probably more deeply than we have experienced already, if you look at the intensity of the astrology. (The previous opening Uranus-Pluto square, in the 1870s, was associated with what is called the Long Depression.)

And you can also speculate that there will be increasing levels of popular protest against a system that has brought us so low: Uranus-Pluto is associated with radical protest (Uranus) against power (Pluto). The Occupy protests may or may not last, but they will come to be seen as the precursors of much wider waves of protest in the next few years. Beyond a certain point, governments have to listen to the voice of protesters, for they are the electorate.

The protesters are the voice of the future, they are what is coming. And what will be required, at a minimum, is legislation against the excesses and unfairnesses of the old system. Against a growing super-rich class who pay little or no taxes; against the inflated salaries that directors pay themselves; against a speculative financial system that can ruin banks and ordinary people’s savings and pension schemes. Those are the obvious changes.

But even those sorts of changes can be relatively cosmetic, and reversed again a few years later. What we are talking about with Uranus-Pluto is deep structural change. So far, that has not happened, even remotely. We have not had an exact square from Uranus to Pluto yet, and we are still at the stage of hanging on as best we can to the old. Governments have talked about legislation to avoid a repeat of the 2008 crash, but it’s not gone much further than that.

Yes, there will be a shift in global power from west to the east, and that is a big part of the change. But that is still the same system re-arranging itself. Uranus-Pluto applies just as much to China, which has Sun at 8 Libra. The most important shift will be systemic. What is called the Second Industrial Revolution, or the Technological Revolution, occurred after the last opening Uranus-Pluto square in the late 1800s. A new phase in the economic history of the world will probably be opening up. But from this vantage point, it seems quite opaque as to what it could be.

And that is as it should be. Have you ever been able to see the other side of a major personal transit? I haven’t. I can get an idea of what needs to go in my life, but not what is positively going to develop out of that. It has to be lived. And I think it’s the same with this major transit that the world is going through. We are getting an idea of what needs to go. The Euro, or aspects of it, would seem to be part of that. But I don’t think we can have much idea of what is going to come out of the chaos that seems to be coming our way. Even when I talked about taxing the super-rich etc, that was as much wish-list as anything, which is not a good way to predict. Because the world that is coming will not necessarily be a ‘better’ one. What constitutes ‘better’ is often just a point of view anyway. ‘The end of capitalism’ seems another example of wish-list prediction.

I think it is possible to be influenced by the evolutionary idea that humanity is in some way advancing. That seems to be part of the ascensionist background to the 2012 Mayan prophecy movement (which is a bit like the Chinese taking up one of Merlin’s prophecies! I wonder what modern Mayans make of it all?) Even with a person, you cannot assume that they will progress when they have a transit. Will this be the point at which they hit the wall and give up on their life, or will they learn from their mistakes? That is the crucial point, learning from your mistakes, and that is what collectives are so bad at. What is evolution without that?

This does not mean there are not patterns to human history, and this is what astrology can be good at illuminating. And the pattern, like a kaleidoscope, is about to change. And it is changing because a life and a society are made up of lots of different forces and currents that reach a balance for a while and then gradually tip over into a new balance, sometimes painfully.

So this huge change that is about to happen as Uranus and Pluto make their exact squares has to be lived. Some psychics maybe can see the other side of it, to some extent, but that is their own experience. If you adopt it yourself because they have said it, it becomes a belief, it is not yours, it is not authentic, it is a hindrance to your own way of seeing.

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Uranus changes direction in a month’s time, and will begin its run-in to its first exact square to Pluto. At the end of November it will begin to station in preparation for turning round. I think from then on we will start to see events that change the structure of the system, like the Eurozone actually fragmenting, instead of just threatening to do so. The stage is set. As I put in a previous post, Pluto has already made at least 2 hard aspects to the Sun, Asc and MC of the chart for the Treaty of Rome, the vision behind the EU. That says to me that it is already an empty shell, it has been eaten from within, nobody really believes in it anymore, at least not in its present form, and probably all we are waiting for is Uranus to change direction.

The Crisis season (Part 6)

2011-11-04T11:45:00.000Z

I’m going to put on my Joe Bloggs hat today and say why all the fuss about a few countries defaulting on their debt? You get companies within a country going bankrupt all the time, sometimes major companies.

A few very small countries in the Eurozone, and a couple of larger ones – Italy and Spain – have borrowed too much and will eventually have to default. Let’s ignore the small countries, and assume Italy and Spain default. Their total GDP is 3.5 trillion dollars per year, the world total is 63 trillion dollars*. Their total debt is 3 trillion, of which say half needs to be written off. It’s do-able.

The real problem is not that these countries will eventually need to default, it is that Europe isn’t allowing it to happen. Iceland effectively defaulted a few years ago, banks lost money, the country is struggling, but it is not a crisis any more. Iceland, however, isn’t part of the Eurozone.

Europe is throwing good money after bad in trying to shore up these countries, and is only weakening itself in doing so. Europe must go back in order to go forward. What is spooking the markets is not the prospect of default, it is the prospect of disorderly default, events happening in an uncontrolled way. It does not have to be like this.
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Behind the scenes, governments are planning for countries defaulting and leaving the Eurozone. But they are not allowed to say so, it’s like revealing your contingency plans for defeat when you’re fighting a war.

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This uncertainty is classic Uranus territory. He is currently going backwards in early Aries, and will slow down and change direction in early December. That will usher in a new phase. We are likely to see some sort of bubble burst in the period around the change of direction, something like Greece defaulting and Europe having to work out the implications. Over this period, transiting Pluto will square the Asc, and conjunct the IC of the chart for the Treaty of Rome, the founding vision of the EU.

It may be that Greece leads the way. If it defaults and leaves the Eurozone, then a precedent has been set, if you like the unthinkable will have happened. Because that is part of the problem: Europe has been on a trajectory of closer integration for many decades now, often against sense, and the dream has never been seriously questioned. And the resistance to doing so is the real problem. So a few countries leave the Eurozone and maybe come back at a future date. It would be expensive, but do-able.

Europe shows all the signs of being in the grip of an ideology, and that is why it cannot sort it’s house out. It’s like the free market ideology leading against all sense to an under-regulated financial industry, which sooner or later goes tits up. Or the Catholic Church’s inability to deal effectively with paedophile priests, because it is unwilling to question the priests’ training which arrests their sexual/emotional development.

The unthinkable is good Uranus-Pluto territory. We are forced, institutions are forced, to question the unquestionable. I think this is the real issue behind the Eurozone crisis, because the practical solutions are relatively straightforward, albeit expensive.

There may be a much bigger problem looming that doesn’t seem to get a mention: Japan. It is the world’s 3rd largest economy, and it’s public debt is 198% of GDP. Compare that to Greece and Italy, which are a mere 143% and 119% respectively. Japan is way more indebted than any other major country. It has almost as much debt – 8.5 trillion dollars – as the much larger US at 9 trillion dollars. If the markets lost confidence in Japan’s ability to repay its debts, and raised the interest rates on its borrowings, then there really would be a problem.

*Throughout I’m using statistics from 2010

The Greek Referendum

2011-11-02T18:13:00.000Z

The fate of the world seems to be hanging in the balance – yet again! – over the debts of just a few countries. The presiding planetary influence is the square from Uranus to Pluto, which won’t reach exactitude until next year, and which is in fact currently separating. The financial crises began in early 2008 when Pluto first entered Capricorn. But they’ve really ratcheted up this year as Uranus and Pluto have come within one degree of the exact square.

The EU leaders keep trying to patch it up, but you can’t patch up Pluto. It looks like it’s going to be huge when the defaulting begins. Greece is covering for the bigger economies of Spain and Italy. Greece could be bailed out indefinitely, but not Italy, no way.

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The chart for Greece that seems to work best at present is the 1974 chart, when the country shifted from a military dictatorship to a democracy. It has a Moon-Pluto conjunction at 4 Libra: this describes the initial empowerment (Pluto) of the people (Moon) when it became a democracy. But it also describes the depth of suffering that is potential in this combination and which is being activated now by the square from Pluto and the opposition from Uranus. The Greek people are being torn apart by the impossible austerity measures being imposed on them.

With natal Pluto conjunct the Moon, and transiting Pluto squaring it, the people are probably feeling betrayed. Betrayed by the EU, which is imposing cruel austerity measures as a condition for remaining part of the club. And betrayed by its own government for allowing such huge debts in the first place and then for being the willing agent of these measures. With Pluto, issues of survival come up, and even whether you want to go on surviving. And under a Pluto transit, you can reach a point where you go no, I’ve had enough, I can’t, I won’t go on living like this anymore. The life leaches out of the old way of being.

And it seems that Greece is reaching that point. The Prime Minister has been astute enough to see which way the wind is blowing, and has called a referendum for next month on the austerity measures. And it seems probable that the Greek people will say no, we are defaulting. We can’t, won’t go on like this anymore.
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This has caused turmoil in the financial markets and a huge uncertainty in the EU, just when they thought they had wrapped up the latest deal to hold a lid on things. The immediate planetary aspect governing the referendum declaration is Mars in Leo opposite stationing Neptune: an assertive action that has caused confusion. And Mars is currently conjunct Greece’s natal Mars at 27 Leo. Greece is standing up for itself. Greece's Solar Return chart for this year has Neptune-Chiron on the MC trine to Mars Rising: this suggests that the state itself in its present form will undergo some sort of dissolution.

The Greek people are probably feeling betrayed. But it was the overspending that did it, and whose fault was it? With Moon (the people) in pleasure-loving Libra sextile Sun (the government) in indulgent Leo; and with Moon square to disciplined Saturn Rising, you can kind of see how it might have happened. One response to a Saturn square is to shrug off responsibility, like the Greeks have done; another is the opposite, which is to worship work and achievement like the Americans, with their Sun square Saturn. (Actually, I’d say the Americans are a mixture of the 2 extremes.)

But it wasn’t just the Greeks. Joining the Euro gave the country access to far cheaper borrowing, and being a collective it was inevitable that it would give in to temptation. There would have been big pressure on the government to give in to popular demands for more spending. This was foreseeable, yet the Eurozone went ahead anyway. And now there is no central political institution that can sort it. It’s a mess.

But you have to expect these big messes. You got a huge mess in the 30s due to an unregulated financial industry, and then we did it all over again in the noughties. It seems to be the nature of large collectives. That’s why I’ve never been very political: intelligent change seems very hard to achieve, and even then you never quite know the consequences. The least a country can do, in my opinion, is to have people properly trained in government, which the Chinese seem to do, but democracies do not.

Steve Jobs and the US Midlife Crisis

2011-10-27T15:30:00.001+01:00

I don’t use an Apple computer, but there is one in our house. It looks good, it works well, but I prefer my regular Windows PC. I was a bit amazed at the outpouring of hero-worship when Steve Jobs, the Apple CEO, died a few weeks ago. I didn’t know what I thought, and I also knew that if I said anything critical, it would probably not go down well.

I remembered Obamania in 2008, when Barack Obama could do nothing wrong in the eyes of many otherwise intelligent, liberal leaning people all over the world. At the time I was told by one astrologer that my problem was having Saturn in Sagittarius, which meant that I was afraid of having faith! Actually, I think that Saturn in Sag has given me a long lesson in where to have faith and where not to have faith, and to always be critical.

Let’s be realistic about Steve Jobs: the man was on a mission to conquer the world with gadgets. And he was brilliant at it. This is understandable in a man in his 20s or 30s, but if he’s still doing it in his 50s, then somewhere he has got stuck. That sort of heroic mould belongs to young men (I won’t try and explore women’s psychology here, I wouldn’t know): they want to achieve something, they want to be recognised, they want to excel, and other people are probably going to get trampled on along the way. The actual value, in itself, of the thing they are achieving is secondary. It is the glamour of the thing, what it stands for, that matters. And how you go about achieving your end also tends to be of secondary value. Steve Jobs turned Apple into the USA’s biggest technology company, and he was also known for his anger, for humiliating and belittling people, and for putting his employees under a lot of pressure. Apple was known for not being a happy company. All this is classic young man warrior stuff, but in the body of a dying middle-aged man.
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It has been well-said that in the first half of life, men are ruled by Mars, and in the second half by Venus (and vice-versa, it is said, for women.) Mars is what I have already described. Venus is where you go hang on, what is this doing to me and the people around me? And what is the value, in itself, of the product? This changeover is part of the mid-life passage, which by no means all men go through.

It passes some by with no discernible side-effects, like Rupert Murdoch, for example, still trying to conquer the world in his eighties and still in good health. Some, like Bill Gates, change their values away from money and raw power and want to give back to society, which he is doing in a big way. He does have a Jupiter-Pluto conjunction, so will always want to do something big. But all the same, in trying to free the world from malaria – which is hard to fault – he seems to still be in thrall to the glamour (Neptune) and obligation (Saturn) of achievement, albeit in a less crude form. These things are not black and white.

And then there are others who receive the wake-up call but choose to ignore it. Like Steve Jobs. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003. It can be too easy to attribute someone’s diseases to what you criticise them for, what you don’t like about them. Sometimes cancer is just cancer. And maybe that’s all it was.

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But he was diagnosed as Uranus was starting to conjoin his Sun, and Pluto and Saturn were squaring his Ascendant. With this sort of concurrent demand for transformation, there has to be a connection. Because of our scientific culture, we tend to think in terms of simple cause and effect: Steve Jobs’ refusal to re-examine his life ‘caused’ his pancreatic cancer. But the relationship is synchronous, in the same way that astrology works on synchronicity, which Jung called an ‘acausal connecting principle.’ Two events with a symbolic relationship.

Astrology can help show these synchronous relationships, where one event is saying something about the other event. Not everything is synchronous, discernment is required. In Jobs’ case, not only do we have the transits, with their psychological, even metaphysical demands to awaken and re-examine; we also have medical astrology, in which Pluto and Virgo are associated with the pancreas, and Pluto was squaring Jobs’ Virgo Ascendant in 2003. Moreover, Jobs’ Sun was in the 6th House, affirming a general connection between his health and his realisation of his inner goals.

I suspect that Jobs was ruled by his Moon and Mars in Aries and that his Piscean Sun, which was unaspected, was used by the Moon and Mars for their own ends. Who was Steve Jobs apart from the companies he founded and built? It's hard to find out much about the man apart from his business career, suggesting an over-identification with that. It is possible to be fully and authentically identified with a project, if you are, say, an artist, but conquering the world with electronic gadgets? A Pisces Sun will eventually need quite different conditions than these to continue to move on and unfold.

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Apple itself was an expression of Jobs’ warrior cast of mind. Incorporated on 1st April 1976, it has Sun at 11 Aries in a Cardinal t-square with Mars and Pluto. Jobs’ Moon is at 7 Aries. This t-square is exceptionally dynamic. Uranus conjunct North Node makes it a mould breaker (Obama has this aspect in Leo), while the sign of Scorpio suggests issues to learn around money and power.

If a planet is unaspected, it can be hard for it to find expression, for the rest of the personality can put it to one side. It is interesting that Jobs was adopted. I knew someone who was adopted who also had an an unaspected Sun, and his life seemed to be for him a series of ‘important’ events that proved he existed. He was lacking a foundation. The nature of Apple is interesting in this respect, because it is not built on a stable product that can be developed over time, like say Microsoft or Google are. It is built on relentless innovation, the next big new thing. Jobs was always racing. What did he think would happen if he slowed down or stopped?

Jobs' Moon was also unaspected. The personal planet that was most joined up was Mars in Aries, which aspects 5 other planets. So one could say that it was Mars more than any other planet that ruled his life, subsuming both the Sun and the Moon to its desires and demands. The Moon, being in Aries, fitted well, but the poor old Sun in Pisces didn't have much chance. Jobs spoke about his life in terms of holding fast to what you want and going for it, and this is very Martian. As was his desire to conquer, to be the best, and his often unsavoury way of dealing with people.

Jobs was an American hero with a cult following. Don’t get me wrong, I admire the American ability to get things done and to re-invent itself and to think big. But you need something behind that, something you can come back to that is actually more important. Jobs heroic status in the US says a lot about that culture, that it is still adolescent. The US Neptune and Jobs’ Ascendant are both at 22 Virgo. He made technology (Virgo) sexy (Neptune).

I think America is starting to enter its mid-life crisis, which is a good thing, and Jobs may come to symbolise the end of an age – a golden age for some, depending on your perspective. Natally, the US has Sagittarius Rising and Sun conjunct Jupiter. Hence the expansiveness and optimism, but also the reluctance to grow up, to come down to earth, outside of all that futurism, and find who you are.

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When you enter the mid-life passage, things often stop working so well. This is happening to the US. It’s not just in a recession, which has happened before. China is at its door economically, threatening its pre-eminence, and that is new. It has had its credit rating lowered for the first time. It can no longer control the Middle East, the source of its energy, in the way that it has become used to. The US seems powerless in the face of Iran's nuclear ambitions. And the US progressed Saturn is, for the first time retrograde and starting to pick up speed, just as the US has experienced a Saturn Return. With Saturn, there is pressure to grow up, to move on to the next stage of life.

I have no desire to see America brought low, and America will remain wealthy and powerful for a long time yet. But its confidence is taking a knock and that is a good thing. Failure, or the perception of it, can bring out the best in people. And for America, its best may cease to mean economic and military eminence. What you’re looking for in the mid-life crisis is an ability to value things and people in themselves. With its Venus-Jupiter-Sun stellium in Cancer, America needs to learn to value itself for what it is, its own values and culture, regardless of its place in the world. You could say this is true of any country or individual, but with that stellium in Cancer, the US has a particularly rich and expansive home culture that, with the natal square to Saturn, has been undervalued.

Sun square to Saturn is a particularly difficult aspect when it comes to creating depth. With Sun square Pluto, for example, you will really suffer, or you may do something abominable, if you continue to seek power outside of yourself. But Saturn acts as a barrier that you cannot see through, a voice that tells you that reality lies 'out there' in position and prestige, and which may always seem to you a self-evident truth. You do not have the suffering of Pluto to make you question it, just the self-doubt of Saturn that keeps telling you your value lies in your achievement. It’s painful, but maybe not painful enough.

So the US will always have this niggling doubt about itself that it has been so good at covering up. This aspect is classically related to fathers and their achievement, or lack of it. The US grew out of, and rebelled against a burgeoning British Empire. It had something big to measure up to, and it succeeded many times over. But that niggle is still there. Look at the fascination with British Royalty, which says so much. When I do a chart, I focus on the major challenges. And in the US chart, Sun square Saturn stands out. The real measure of the US is not its ability to achieve, for that is a reactive pattern expressive of the Sun-Saturn aspect. The real measure will be when it can no longer be top dog – for China, with 4 times the population, will eventually beat it hands down. Will the US find another way of feeling at ease with itself? This is not easy for an individual, let alone a collective.

The Undead and Plutonian Change

2011-10-23T13:46:00.001+01:00

3000 people took to the streets of Brighton dressed as zombies this weekend. Some of the anti-capitalist protesters in Wall Street have also dressed as zombies. Vampires, another undead phenomenon, have also been very popular in recent years. It’s not all just for kids, either. Anyone out there a True Blood fan?

The world is undergoing a major Pluto transit as it squares up to Uranus in the early cardinal signs, hard aspecting significant points in the charts of all the major powers. We are collectively undergoing a death, with much resistance and hanging on to the old, and maybe the young people dressed as zombies are acting that out for us. The young often sense the future better than we do, and maybe that’s because they are the future.

As you get older you get more ‘realistic’ and you try to stay engaged with it all and there is wisdom in that. But there is also wisdom in the instinctive youthful rejection of the adult world. It’s often inarticulate, but that’s no reason to dismiss it. There’s something for us in it, and it’s also a psychological necessity for them. The Occupy protests, which are occurring under the Uranus-Pluto square, are strongly resonant of the student protests of the 60s, which occurred under a Uranus-Pluto conjunction.

They are not just resonant, they are in a way the same thing one step on, being part of the same Uranus-Pluto cycle. The conjunction sows the seed, while the call to action is much more urgent under the opening square. The conjunction is a sign of things to come; the youth of the 60s saw the deep flaws in the system, but the economy was still boomimg. Now, under the dynamic opening square, the system is reaching decadence, and the protests have a more immediate relevance.
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Uranus and Pluto are often described as ‘evolutionary’ in their function. I think that is putting a human wish on them. They certainly bring about change, each in their own way, but it can be anything but ‘evolutionary’. The last Uranus-Pluto square of the early 30s resulted in the Great Depression and World War II. And then we carried on as before. Different empires, a few tweaks like the UN, but same basic values.

And it is the same with the present Uranus-Pluto square. Things are certainly under pressure to change in a Uranian-Plutonian manner. Deep structures are under threat, the balance of power is shifting eastwards, there is protest and revolution. But to say it is evolutionary suggests that what comes afterwards will be better, and who can judge that? It depends on your point of view. Or you can try saying that Pluto’s ‘real’ intent is evolutionary, it’s just that we ignore it so he becomes destructive or something. But Pluto is not human, and evolution is a human idea, a recent one at that.

We are seeing the cruel side of Uranus-Pluto at present. Col Gaddafi was shot on capture in Libya. Most Libyans are delighted. It’s understandable. The Libyan authority wanted him captured alive and put on trial. Then they would have shot him, a year or two down the line. Parade the monster in a cage for a while, like they do with Death Row in America, then kill him. I think the Chinese system is more humane: a prompt trial, and a prompt execution. And let the collective deal with its own shadow.

We are also seeing the Greek people treated cruelly. They are subject to inhuman austerity measures at the behest of the EU. They are rightly protesting, and the cost-cutting may just drive the economy further downwards. But who is being cruel? Is it Angela Merkel, Germany’s leader? She doesn’t strike me as the type. Is it the Greek Prime Minister? He just seems to be doing his best to save the country. By being a member of the Eurozone, Greece can’t simply default, declare itself bankrupt, which in a way was what Iceland did in letting its banks go to the wall, costing foreign investors huge sums.

It is a cruel situation, created by folly: the Greek government’s overspending in an era of cheap borrowing, and the EU’s creation of a currency without proper controls. You could say the humane thing for the EU to do would be to simply bail out Greece properly and write off enough debt for it to have a good chance, rather than just enough to survive until the next crisis. But looming in the background are exactly the same problems with Spain and Italy, but much bigger, much less affordable. So the EU is paralysed. And so is Greece: in order to default it would have to leave the Eurozone, and it would be on its own, a small indebted country in a world of empires, its trading relationships severely compromised. And behind it all is the dream of a United Europe under threat.

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The EU is in a classic Plutonian crisis. You cannot move, nothing will work, because the paradigm itself has to go. The founding vision for the EU was the Treaty of Rome in 1957. This chart has Sun at 4 Aries, Asc at 6 Libra and MC at 7 Cancer. Pluto has already hard-aspected all these points at least twice.

The way that Pluto change often occurs, especially when there is a lot of resistance (as in this case), is that the entity is destroyed from within by the crossings of Pluto, until all that is left is a shell that one day finds it no longer has the will to go on living. This is what has been happening to the vision of the EU in its present form. The astrology tells me that no-one really believes in it anymore, and that we are simply going through the motions. There is no underlying strength or will to continue. An important crisis meeting of all the leaders has been going on in Brussels this weekend, at the same time as 3000 people dressed as zombies marched through Brighton.

The October New Moon

2011-10-21T20:17:00.000+01:00

Every month there is a New Moon, and it sets the agenda for the coming month. The New Moon that has been with us this month occurred at the end of September, and I'm drawing attention to it because it was powerful: Sun and Moon in early Libra in a fairly close t-square with Uranus and Pluto. Set for New York, the t-square is Angular and well describes the Occupy protest which began in New York and has spread over the world. Libra wants justice and balance, Uranus protests and Pluto wants to reclaim power. You don't often get astrology as good as this.

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Cardinal New Moons tend to initiate action, and at present they can be particularly pokey because of Uranus and Pluto also being cardinal. The next one is in late December. It is not Angular in New York, but the New Moon is conjunct Pluto and trine to Jupiter Rising, suggesting a New Year of good economic news. However, Jupiter is in a t-square with Venus and Angular Saturn, suggesting it will be a false dawn.

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The October New Moon did not have anything on the Angles in London, but the January New Moon has Uranus on the MC, suggesting protest and government instability in the UK that month:

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I set off on this piece having listened to a double-act by Rick Levine and Jeff Jawer on the astrology for October. They're good!

The Crazy Ones

2011-10-20T22:13:00.000+01:00

Here's to Uranus, currently being empowered by Pluto:

Uranus-Pluto and the Occupy Protests

2011-10-18T21:31:00.001+01:00

When Pluto was in Cancer – from 1912 to 1939 – the predominant issue was the shadow side of the Cancerian theme of homeland. Two world wars were fought over territory. Now that Pluto is in its opposite sign of Capricorn, the issue is the shadow side of governments and corporations.

Hence the ‘Occupy’ protests in 900 cities across the western world, which have in common "the feeling that the system is stacked against them, with the rules written to benefit the rich and the connected." (NYT) Uranus, in its square to Pluto, brings the protests against power. They began in New York a month ago as Pluto was standing still, showing the strength and significance of the collective feeling.

It is very difficult, in our global society, for governments to control international corporations. It seems to be they who control the governments. And if you make life too uncomfortable for them, they’ll take their business to another country. And free market ideology has encouraged the idea that corporations are best left alone. Survival of the fittest and all that.

It has happened before. The Great Depression, which occurred under the last Uranus-Pluto square, was a crisis caused by lack of regulation in the financial system. Rules were introduced as a result, and then junked in the 90s. And now we’ve got another financial crisis.
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Though people are protesting against the power of the corporations, things may get worse. Pluto is only 3 years into Capricorn. It may be a time when big business becomes more powerful than ever.

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On the other hand, the Ingress Chart for Pluto into Capricorn has some nice things going on. The Ingress Chart for Pluto in Cancer in 1912 had Pluto in square to a Mars-Venus conjunction, and what we got was 2 world wars. The Capricorn Ingress chart has Pluto conjunct Venus and Jupiter in Capricorn, trine to retrograde Saturn, and an out of sign opposition to retrograde Mars. So a lot going on, a lot to sort out, but the potential for war seems less. And Pluto is surrounded by much nicer aspects compared to the Cancer Ingress Pluto.

The Capricorn Ingress Chart also has Moon opposite Uranus, suggesting protest (Uranus) by the people (Moon); and as Uranus has started to square Pluto, so have we seen the Arab Spring and the Occupy protests.

As Above, So Below; The Quantum Origins of Life

2011-10-15T14:13:00.001+01:00

This picture has been doing the rounds on Facebook. It’s a great example of the idea of ‘As Above, So Below’, which is a symbolic truth rather than a literal truth. If you were to push the comparison between brain cells and galaxies, it would probably break down fairly quickly. All the same, the pictures are similar and the comparison has deep appeal.

Why? Speaking for myself, it makes me feel connected. It is a Neptunian experience. Why do our brains work like this? It is worth remembering that outer reality is a construct of our brains – space, time, left, right etc – and that includes the brain itself.

We forget this. We have created a dream, and the dream has become real. It is humanity’s enduring amnesia. Anything that reminds us of what we have forgotten resonates, it reminds us of home, of where we came from. And the universe, so impossibly large and far away, is at a deep level a construct of our minds. This picture reminds us of that, it reminds us that we are not just the brain cell, we are also the galaxy.

This is also why astrology works. The universe out there is just our minds writ large. If you can read it, it not only gives you self-knowledge, it gives you that sense of connection and homecoming. As with the brain/universe metaphor, astrology works on poetic/symbolic truth, so pushing the metaphors in the wrong sort of way, particularly with the literalising methods of science, will cause them to break down.

Strangely, literal truth and symbolic truth connect through astrology and other divination systems. Astrological truth can also be literal truth, such as ‘Given your work situation and the strength of the astrological factors affecting it, you will almost certainly have a new job in 6 months.’ But it doesn’t work the other way around: literal, observable truth doesn’t easily lead to psychological and metaphysical truths, not unless you’re sensitive with it, which is not part of the remit of the scientific method.

I bought an edition of the New Scientist recently, because it promised an article on the quantum origins of life. As usual, they were spinning an article out of a few maybes, and even then it was about biochemical processes using quantum effects, rather than on the origin of life. But the title was thought-provoking.

I view quantum theory as the point at which the scientific method starts to break down. Science is a model, and like a metaphor, it breaks down when pushed too far – like to the nano level and beyond. Or to the galactic level and beyond: look at the ‘dark energy’ fiasco. Quantum theory has required considerable ingenuity to make it work and even then, after 100 years, a coherent and proven model of that world has yet to fully emerge. The tinier the world that science explores, the more it explodes into multidimensionality and irrationality and indeterminacy.

So when I read about life having quantum origins, I thought that was about right. The ‘rules’ of consciousness are more similar to the rules of the quantum world than they are to the rules of everyday science. Perhaps you could also talk about the galactic origins of life, in that the ‘rules’ of the galaxy require it to consist of 96% unknowable, unobservable ‘dark’ energy, which is again rather like consciousness in the sense of its predominant ‘Unconscious’.
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Incidentally, I think ideas about humanity having been seeded by aliens is part of the same poetry as the brain cell/universe picture. We live in a literalising age, and people easily make fools of themselves when they insist this poetic truth is a literal truth. But that doesn’t make it mere fancy. Poetic truth, mythological truth needs to be experienced as real, as more real than literal truth. Get your head round that one!

So the more science pushes to the extremely large and extremely small, the more it is pushing at boundaries, boundaries between consciousness and matter. The scientific method is based on a hard distinction between inner and outer, on there being a solid, real world ‘out there’ that can be measured. An elementary training in philosophical thinking would make it clear that this outlook is a case of ‘let’s suppose for a moment’. But the undeveloped, the uncivilised human mind wants simplicity and certainty, and mainstream science seems only too happy to provide this.

Particularly with the nano world, it has been clear for a century that we are no longer dealing with a solid, separate, ‘out there’ world. Not just because of its indeterminacy, but because it is known that at this level you can’t separate the observer from the observed. This insight has not been carried through to mainstream science, perhaps because the effect of the observer is not so obvious on an everyday level, and because of its subtlety.

But on the nano level, we are dealing with a place where the connection between matter and consciousness is clear, and where the rigid boundary between ‘subject’ and ‘object’ starts to break down. Quantum Reality has huge philosophical implications that have been explored by some authors, but even after a century have not reached the mainstream in a rigorous way.

They probably never will, if you look at the history of religion. Religions tend to have a mainstream that is sustained by simple, collectively-held certainties, and a mystical heretical fringe composed of individuals who have their own unique relationship with the truth. Science is no different. It has many of the characteristics of religion. One of this year’s Nobel Prize winners discovered a new form of crystal, and had to endure years of ridicule before his ideas were taken seriously. That’s religion for you.

Liam Fox: is he in or is he out?

2011-10-10T15:59:00.002+01:00

The UK Defence Secretary Liam Fox is under pressure over his working relationship with a male friend, Adam Werrity. Werrity, who is 17 years younger than Fox, sat in on several MOD meetings despite having no government role or national security clearance. He has been a regular visitor to the MOD and has accompanied Fox on holidays and on official visits abroad. He used to be Fox’s flatmate and was best man at his wedding in 2005. Fox said at the time that his wedding should put paid to the rumours that he is gay. He had announced his engagement in June 2005, just in time for the Conservative leadership race, which he entered but did not win. In the early 1980s, as a medical student, he backed the university’s policy of not allowing gay organisations in the student union, saying he did not want them flaunting their gayness in front of him.

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It seems highly unlikely from his behaviour over the years that Liam Fox is NOT gay. Natally, he has a Venus-Uranus-North Node conjunction at 27-28 Leo. Uranus is associated with unconventional behaviour, which in this case it is bringing to Venus, relationships.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that he is gay, but it does mean that he needs to live out his love-life free from conventional restraints, and that doing so will be an important part of his overall development (North Node). Princess Diana also had a Venus-Uranus contact (square). It didn’t make her gay, but her attitude was not conventional within her milieu of the Royal Family.

It’s not so much that Uranus requires one to be unconventional – that is a side effect, albeit challenging and strengthening. It is that Uranus requires you to be who you are in relation to the groups around you. If you deny Uranus, then he will find a way through.

This seems to be what is happening with Liam Fox. His inappropriate professional behaviour with Adam Werrity was bound to come out. There is a Leo blindness to it.

It is as if there is a deeper level to the psyche that will out, and the outer planets represent that evolution. It is more important that you become who you are than that you maintain the structures of your life, like being Minister for Defence. Somehow, without knowing it, Liam Fox has set this situation up. He is responsible for it, and he has done it because it is a psychological necessity for him to come out as gay. Because he is a public figure, the concealment has been the greater – but the acknowledgement will be the greater when and if it comes out. With Neptune currently opposing his Venus, it is time to admit that he loves men.
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In the early 1980s, when he was vocally anti-gay, Uranus was squaring his Venus. In the mid 90s, Pluto squared his Venus, empowering it, and it was a few years later that he began his 'friendship' with Adam Werrity, then a university student. Fox was in his late 30s, Werrity was 20/21. Werrity's career has been on the coat-tails of Fox's, and he is known in Westminster bars, where he boasts of his connections and influence. Fox would seem to be the father-lover, Werrity the young man who has never achieved independence. Fox has a wide Venus-Pluto conjunction, and a Moon-Pluto opposition, so there are clearly power issues when it comes to his personal life.

Liam Fox's situation resembles that of the Liberal MP David Laws. He is prominent in his Party and was briefly in government in 2010, until a parliamentary expenses scandal broke around him. He had been claiming rent for a room in London owned by a man who turned out to be his boyfriend. This broke parliamentary rules. The rule had been in place since 2006, and Laws continued to claim the expense until 2009. Paradoxically, he could have claimed instead, and quite legitimately, for his house in Chard, and claimed more, but he did not do so.

Again, it seems clear that Laws wanted to be outed. Here he was, a public figure living with his boyfriend, and even his parents did not know he was gay. It is a very understandable situation, but what is interesting is the unconscious steps he took to expose himself. Afterwards he said what a deep relief it was to have admitted who he is in public. It cost him his governmental career, but becoming who you are is the real imperative.

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David Laws also has a Venus-Uranus contact, in this case a trine from a conventional Venus in Capricorn. With Fox, who has Venus in Leo, there is a kind of flaunting and yet too much pride to admit his gayness, probably even to himself: look at his student opposition to gays. With Laws, there does not seem to have been so much of a problem admitting it to himself, reflected perhaps by the trine, an easy aspect, to Uranus. The big problem for him was what others would think, which is Capricorn.

Being gay is increasingly not an issue for senior politicians. The real 'crime', from the point of view of the psyche, is not whether you fiddled a few expenses or were a bit lax about national security: it is not owning up to who you are.

Beware the Vogon Commander

2011-10-06T19:35:00.001+01:00

Somebody commented on my last piece, The Mid-Life Crisis, as follows:

For decades I developed and implemented trauma recovery programs for American Indian Tribes. It was a life's work - or so I thought. Driven by dreams and insomnia into retirement, I found a new world open, one with new requirements and blessings. I feel like a child. Here is a line I recently wrote:

Unravel.

Let go the spiny structure so carefully erected.

See what remains – the song of stones, the language of water, the voice in the trees.

Let these be the sacred text of your resurrection.

I don’t usually pay a lot of attention to poetry, but it seems to be around a bit at present. Yesterday my 10 year old son was reluctant to read out in the local church some lines he had written for the Harvest Festival, but the teacher told him his poem was the best in the class, so he wasn’t getting out of it! It made me think, maybe I can do that as well. His Uranus conjoins my Sun, so maybe he is my awakener?

Here are his lines:

The Autumn Playground

Brown dead leaves parachuting off their autumn tree

They ride on the midday breeze, twisting and turning.

Something cold and hard encased in an unsolvable safe

Whizzes through the air, faster and faster,

Then plummets into the lonely ground.

The safe is solved and the conker is released.

Like the Vogon Space Commander in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, who used to punish people by forcing them to listen to his poetry, I would perhaps be taking advantage of my readership if I inflicted some of my own lines on you. But I’m going to!
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A few weeks ago I was on a 4 day event, ‘Dreaming the Land’, at a place in North Wales called Cae Mabon. A big part of what we did was to visit ancient sites in the area, where Eric and Angharad, who were leading it, would tell us some of the history and mythologies about the sites. They suggested we put any reflections we had in the form of 9 line poems.

One place we visited, Dinas Emrys, is associated with a prophecy by Merlin. It is a hilltop to which a British Celtic Chieftain, Vortigern, betrayed by the incoming Anglo-Saxons, fled. He tried to build a castle there, but it kept falling down. A local seer told him he needed to sacrifice a boy with no father. Reluctantly, for he was desperate, he agreed to this and sent his men to search for such a boy. Eventually they found one, and brought him to the hilltop.

The boy, of course, was Merlin, and he told the king that sacrificing him wasn’t the solution. Rather, there was a pool beneath the castle in which two dragons fought – the red dragon of the Celts, and the white dragon of the Saxons. It was this battle, currently being won by the Saxons, that was causing the castle to fail. But eventually the Celts would prevail. Merlin then uttered a prophecy about the coming of King Arthur, the ‘Boar of Cornwall’. Such was the boy Merlin’s presence that Vortigern took his advice rather than that of the local seer.

As we left the site, a large black bird circled above us. Here's what I wrote:

Dinas Emrys

Eagles live at Dinas Emrys.

You may not see them

But you can feel them.

A wizard with the ear of a king

Needs eagle’s vision,

Born of height and solitude:

Disinterested, far-seeing, seizing the moment.

The king is a politician,

A boar at full tilt in the dense forest.

He needs his magical counsel.

Merlin still lives at Dinas Emrys,

A black eagle - circling, returning.

Anyone else out there written some lines? Maybe I could do some readers' poetry blogs?

The Mid-Life Crisis

2011-10-04T13:00:00.001+01:00

We all know about the mid-life crisis that corresponds to Uranus opposite natal Uranus, occurring sometime between the late thirties and early forties. I’d noticed that this ‘crisis’ seems to go on longer than that, and also that all the outer planets reach challenging points in their cycles between our late thirties and mid-forties: Pluto square Pluto, Neptune square Neptune, Uranus opposite Uranus and Saturn opposite Saturn. Chuck in that over-egged asteroid Chiron, and you have the Chiron return at 50-51.

I think Uranus gets singled out because his effects are often dramatic, but I think it’s much more accurate astrologically to talk in terms of a mid-life passage that lasts for up to 9 years. Events usually occur in this period that can cause us to reconsider our values, what is important to us, and to make corresponding, and often major, changes. Often it means finding OUR values as opposed to the ones we grew up around. The choice always remains ours: you see some people, subject to distressing events that confound their expectations of life, coming out the other side as though nothing has happened.

This 9 year period could be seen as pivotal rather than as the whole change, because that search for a life that is authentically us, and not just the product of unexamined hopes, fears and compulsions, is a gradual process, often taking decades. Mine began in my early thirties, and twenty years later it is still going on. But that 9 year period, where all the outer planets hard-aspect their natal positions, was when I made a decisive change from one life to another, that put me out there on my own. It is always a solitary journey; you no longer have the implied affirmation of others. The source of authority moves firmly within.

The Jungian analyst James Hollis writes about this extended period of change in his book The Middle Passage. Here is an excerpt:

I call the period roughly from 12 to 40 the first adulthood. The young person who knows, deep down, that he or she lacks a clear sense of self can only try to act like the other big people. It is an understandable delusion that if one comports oneself as one’s parents have, or rebels against their example, one will thereby be an adult. If one holds a job, marries, becomes a parent and taxpayer, the confirmation of adulthood will surely follow. In fact, what has occurred is that the dependency of childhood has partly gone underground and has been projected onto the roles of adulthood. These roles are not unlike parallel tunnels. Out of the confusion of adolescence one walks through them with the assumption that they will confirm one’s identity, provide fulfilment and still the terrors of the unknown. The first adulthood, which may in fact extend throughout one’s life, is a provisional existence, lacking the depth and uniqueness which makes that person truly an individual.
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These tunnels are of an indeterminate length. They endure for as long as the projected identity and dependency upon them still seems to work. It is next to impossible to tell a thirty year old who is productively working, married and expecting a second child that he or she is still in a form of extended childhood. The parent complexes and the authority of the roles offered by society have sufficient power to attract the projections of anyone still exploring life in the world. As suggested earlier, the Self, that mysterious process within each one of us which summons us to ourselves, often expresses itself through symptoms – loss of energy, depression, sudden fits of rage or over-consumption – but the power of the projections is such that one may keep the larger questions of the journey at bay.

How terrifying it is, then, when the projections wear off and the person can no longer avoid the insurgence of the Self. Then, one must confess to powerlessness, to loss of control. The ego never was in control but rather was driven by the energy of the parental and collective complexes, sustained by the power of the projections onto the roles offered by the culture to those who would be adults. As long as the roles have normative power, as long as the projections work, the individual has managed to forestall the appointment with the inherent Self.

The third phase of identity, the second adulthood, is launched when one’s projections have dissolved. The sense of betrayal, of failed expectations, the vacuum and loss of meaning which occur with this dissolution, creates the mid-life crisis. It is in this crisis, however, that one has the chance to become an individual – beyond the determinism of parents, parent complexes and cultural conditioning. Tragically, the regressive power of the psyche, with its reliance on authority, often keeps a person in thrall to these complexes and thereby freezes development.

In working with the elderly, each of whom has to face loss and anticipate death, there are clearly two categories. There are those for whom the life remaining is still a challenge, still worthy of the good fight, and those for whom life is full of bitterness, regret and fear. The former are invariably those who have gone through some earlier struggle, experienced the death of the first adulthood and accepted greater responsibility for their lives. They spend their last years living more consciously. Those who have avoided the first death are haunted by the second, afraid their lives have not been meaningful.

Science and Astrology

2011-09-29T05:58:00.001+01:00

You’ve probably noticed I bang on about Science a lot. I’m going to do so again today, but with more astrology than last time. I think. Why do I bang on about it? Probably because I’ve got Sun in Aquarius, which gives a natural interest in science. But also because I have Sun opposite Pluto, which makes me acutely aware of anything I find disempowering. I struggle against it until my head emerges above the water.

Some people find it difficult to understand that one can be critical of something without being agin it. I find science to be a beautiful and useful creation. But I am strongly against its tendency to usurp its place, its evangelical tendency to oppose anything in society that does not see truth in its own narrow terms. And the collective brainwashing that comes with it, so that many people feel, maybe despite themselves in many cases, that scientific reality IS reality.

I don’t think views are that important. It’s the way you hold them that matters. A failing of the ‘alternative’ section of society can be to assume superiority because of the views they have adopted, usually green, left wing, ‘spiritual’ and often anti-government.

In my experience, these views can sometimes be rigidly held, not thought through, and adopted as part of a package. Much more impressive to me might be, for example, a wealthy Tory-voting businessman who has come in his own way to feel a degree of responsibility to society.

My job as an astrologer is to help people develop and trust their own judgement, rather than foist my views on them (which are many!) Human development has nothing to do with whether your political views are left or right wing or the degree to which you believe in green energy or alternative medicine. It is the degree to which you have made your experience your own that matters, and the degree to which you are able to observe and use, rather than unconsciously take on, trends in the collective.

So this is why I bang on about Science: because I feel it has a collective power over people’s minds that is not healthy, that is a form of brainwashing (just like Christianity was in the Middle Ages) – the Enlightenment idea that everything needs to be reduced to reason, and reason in the particularly narrow, lab-rat form that science takes for truth. Don't get me wrong - as an Aquarian I am in love with reason. But it has its limits.

This is why in my piece last Friday I was expressing delight that the speed of light appears to have been broken. Because it meant a foundation stone of modern science had been undermined, an 'immutable' truth was slipping away.
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What I wanted to do was to look at some of the astrology around current developments in Science.

First of all, Einstein’s chart. Charts of famous dead people continue to work because their influence continues. Einstein’s Mercury, his mind, is still around.

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Saturn can make you old for your years (or the opposite: you may need to wait till you are old for that aspect to come to fruition.) In Einstein’s case, his Mercury-Saturn conjunction gave him a precocious intellect (that became Saturn in the negative sense – conservative and closed to new ideas – as he grew older.) And this conjunction is in Aries (fresh and groundbreaking) and in a yod with the North Node in Sagittarius (universal vision) and Uranus (radical and original science).

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And what do we find now that his idea about the absoluteness of the speed of light appears to have been proved wrong? By transit, Uranus is conjoining his Mercury, and Pluto is squaring it. By Progression, Mercury is moving up to conjoin his natal then prog Uranus! And the Prog Node is moving towards opposing his Prog MC.

All this suggests to me that indeed the speed of light has been broken, and there is more to come over the next few years as the progressed aspects become exact. More of Einstein’s thoughts, so fundamental to the way modern science sees the world, will unravel.

Uranus is the planet that rules Science, and at present he is in Aries in a square to Pluto in Capricorn, which will continue for at least another 4 years. So this is the bigger picture behind the breaking of the speed of light: the destruction (Pluto) of established (Capricorn) science (Uranus) and the creation of a new vision (Aries).

But Capricorn is also about limits. Science is a model of reality, rather than reality itself. This gets forgotten. Maybe Pluto in Capricorn will have a lot to do with science realising its limits.

It is not just the speed of light that has been broken. In the last few weeks the evidence has started to go against both dark matter and supersymmetry, theories which are foundational to our understanding of the macro and micro universes. This is happening again under the Pluto-Uranus square, which suggests it is not just one or two theories being proved wrong, but something more fundamental that is happening.

To me, it is obvious that Science must sooner or later start to find its limits, because apart from being a mere a model of reality, it also confines itself to rationality. Maybe this is what is starting to happen. You push a model to extremes – in this case to the extremely large and the extremely small – and it starts to break down, it becomes harder and harder to make progress.

That said, in the ‘middle-ground’ where Science works very well and will no doubt continue to work very well, we are seeing a string of developments brought on by the creation of superior instruments. There have been a series of new space telescopes, and the building of the Large Hadron Collider, the biggest ever atom-smasher, at Cern.

As I have said before, my dream is that every schoolkid will learn the wonders of Science, but will also be taught that it is just a tool that eventually breaks down, perhaps when faced with the extremely large and the extremely small.

For most of last year, there was a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, which is particularly associated with scientific advance and breakthrough. This conjunction overlapped with a Saturn-Uranus opposition, the time when these new instruments were being built.

So Uranus as Science has been considerably activated over the last few years: firstly by Saturn, a time of planning and building; then by Jupiter, when the new instruments started functioning and results – such as lots of new exo-planets - started coming in; and now by Pluto, suggesting a radical overhaul of our scientific understanding, as well as an empowerment of Science.

The Jupiter-Uranus conjunction took place at the end of Pisces and at the beginning of Aries, the last and first signs of the zodiac, suggesting the beginning of a new era. If we were to find signs of life on other planets, now would be the time: the incredible newness of Jupiter-Uranus at the beginning of Aries, followed by the transformation of vision under Uranus-Pluto that would result. And the new, cosmic dream of Neptune in Pisces.

Some would say they know there is life out there anyway, because aliens have been visiting for years. I tend to think these experiences are real, no less real than material reality, maybe even more so, but they belong to Neptune. An Indian friend once told me that when you have a visionary experience, it appears at the time as just as real as everyday experience, and it is often only afterwards that you realise what it was. I think experience of aliens falls into this category. Otherwise it’s like why do they ALL play hide and seek?

It seems to me just a matter of time before we scientific evidence out there of life-as-we-know-it, as we are now finding so many new exo-planets. What you need to find is light that has the signature of complex organic molecules. It’s going to be inference, rather than actual sighting.

Dreaming the Land

2011-09-27T12:41:00.001+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I spent a few days in North Wales on an event called Dreaming the Land. The place we were staying, Cae Mabon, is an oakwood on a hillside overlooking a lake; it has a fantastic rocky stream tumbling through it, and all sorts of structures to be in: a roundhouse, a hogan, a hobbit hut and so on.

Eric Maddern, who has created the place over 25 years, is a storyteller and musician, and in those few days we were visiting ancient sites in the locality, listening to stories and writing poetry. Below is an interview from 2009 with Eric at Cae Mabon.

Cae Mabon from dobraidea on Vimeo.
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Call Me Mr Fahrenheit

2011-09-23T23:11:00.002+01:00

Hurray! Einstein’s Law, that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, appears to have been broken. Physicists at CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider, designed to discover the ‘God particle’, the Higgs Boson, have found neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light.

This is all the language of some arcane wizardry. These various particles are essentially mathematical entities, and no-one has a clue what one would actually look or feel like. Instead, by way of compensation, they are given attributes such as strangeness and charm. For me, they bring up ideas around what it means to exist. Something that exists for a few billionths of a second and can only be described by an equation, does it have an inner life? What does it feel like to be a quark? Or a tau neutrino? Or a gauge boson?

Is it all some kind of joke that just about holds together mathematically, enough to convince these modern wizards that their world is real? I’m serious. The powers of a real wizard come from a dynamic balance, from harnessing and harmonising the elemental energies of Earth, Fire, Air and Water. On an inner level, this means paying attention with all the faculties – Sensation, Intuition, Thought and Feeling respectively – in order to know and in order to act. Let’s chuck in Imagination as well, just so the scheme’s not too neat. Wizardry is quite natural, it’s just that most of us aren’t very good at it.

But these modern wizards are one-sidedly using a rational model of reality. And what has happened? It long ago exploded into irrationality. That’s what I mean when I say there’s a joke being played. A joke that any psycho-analyst would understand. It’s like trying to function in an orderly manner around a Piscean. The more you try and organise them, the more will events occur that subvert those attempts. You are going against the nature of a Piscean, the sign that is the summation of all the other signs, and that operates in an intuitive and free-flowing manner. (You see the hideous mess Pisceans get into when they try to live in an organised way!)

Reality, even material reality, is like this. Yes, it can be labelled and organised by processes of thought. Up to a point. Go too far and it will explode back at you, just as the quantum world has done. There is a place for science, for rational modelling. But it also has its place in a wider scheme and these sorcerers apprentices, for that is what they are, mistake the book of spells for the actuality.
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The Pisces Albert Einstein never accepted quantum physics – relativity and the macro universe were his forte – but for the wrong reason, for the reason that “God does not play dice.” In other words, that the universe is governed by immutable laws, and everything is therefore in principle predictable. In the quantum universe, events happen by probability, and things lose their thingness – on alternate days of the week, these particles are waves of energy.

Einstein had a brilliant imagination, yet his instincts were that there were immutable laws. Sun in Pisces (Imagination) widely square Moon in Sagittarius (the law-giver.) Laws are useful – up to a point. The conflict between Einstein’s Sun and Moon was a conflict between creative imagination and a need for certainty. The latter won out, to the extent that his only significant achievements were in his twenties, and thereafter he lost credibility as a research physicist. Mercury conjunct Saturn in Aries gave him a precocious (Saturn), groundbreaking (Aries) mind (Mercury), which at the same time became very conservative (Saturn again.)

That nothing can travel faster than the speed of light was a brilliant insight couched in terms of immutable law. Perhaps Einstein’s Jewish background, rooted in tradition and the Old Testament, contributed to this temperament, because Moon in Sagittarius does not have to be like this (though it is the classic signature of religious fundamentalism.)

Be that as it may, a pillar of 20th century physics seems to be crumbling. The scientists have tested and re-tested their results to the extent that their findings would normally by now be called a discovery. But they remain too controversial.

I have several thoughts. Firstly, that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light is counter-intuitive. You just press the accelerator a bit harder and you go faster. Secondly, whose laws are these? They are purely human laws. We the sorcerers apprentices invented them, not nature. They are essentially mathematical abstractions, yes with a beauty and relevance of their own, but they are still abstractions. To say they are immutable, unlike all other products of the human imagination, seems absurd.

And finally, here’s my thought for the day. Maybe the ‘laws’ of physics have changed over the last century. 100 years ago, nothing could travel faster than the speed of light. But this theory has been so insisted upon, made such an immutable foundation stone of the way we think about the world, that there has been an equal and opposite reaction. Just like the quantum world exploding into irrationality. Reality cannot be pigeon-holed like this. You try to put it in a box, and it will do something contrary.

Again, I’m serious. Reality is fluid, not fixed. And it is vast compared to our tiny human brains. How can we have the presumption to proclaim universal truths? You do that in an insistent sort of way, and sooner or later something contrary will happen.

"Imagination is Reality", said the poet William Blake. We imagined a Christian universe, we felt it to be real, and people had visions of God and Angels and the Virgin Mary. Miracles occurred. Reality conforms, transfigures according to human mythologies. Being a product of the Imagination, the Christian mythology eventually started to lose its power, maybe after centuries, but this is what happened.

Then again, you imagine a rational universe with truths based on empirically-tested theories, and what do we find? Reality conforms (maybe it humours us), and the universe appears to obey scientific laws. For a few centuries, maybe, until that paradigm, that mythology starts to lose its hold over our minds. The law that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light is breaking down, at a time when science and its offspring, modern technology, have become inimical to our survival. What laws will begin to break down next?

Humanity Enters the Dreamtime

2011-09-18T14:46:00.001+01:00

Neptune began to change sign earlier this year, from Aquarius to Pisces. Neptune governs the underlying myths, the underlying dreams by which we live. This is not just an overlay on ‘objective’ reality: these myths ARE the objective reality. They generate it. It requires a certain amount of subtlety, however, to see this. Naïve literalism, with black and white values, is a much easier and more certain way to live.

A simple example would be the experience of space as a real 3-d box within which everything happens. If you think about it, 3-d space is just a way in which the brain builds relationships between the objects it experiences. It is not literally there, it is just a story. It is a story which, to us, is real.

When Neptune changes sign (about every 14 years), our dreams, our mythologies change. They change anyway as Neptune moves through a sign, they gather momentum. But particularly when Neptune enters a mutable sign, and particularly when it is Pisces, the 12th and final sign of the zodiac, old dreams and mythologies fall apart. Humanity collectively enters the dreamtime, the land where all things are possible, but where all is spirit and it can be hard to manifest.

Humanity is embarking on a big bit of dreaming for the next 14 years, but we will not be properly ready to live it until Neptune enters Aries, the 1st sign of the zodiac, the place of new vision, in 14 years time.

Neptune is leaving Aquarius, the sign on a collective level of Science and Democracy. And what do we find? In America, the home (as they see it) of Democracy, the system is ceasing to work. In July and August, at a time of financial crisis, the government was paralysed by partisan dispute, and as a result America for the first time had its credit rating reduced. In Europe, another proudly democratic continent facing a financial crisis, the collective government is also paralysed, not this time by partisanship, but by a system that was a product of political idealism that got carried away with itself. The system that is working and that is on the rise, and which is anything but democratic, is Chinese totalitarian government.

As Neptune leaves Aquarius, so is the dream of Democracy starting to fade. With Neptune’s dying breath in Aquarius, we have this year seen the ‘Arab Spring’, the widespread and sometimes successful revolts against autocratic, secular leaders. But as in the Iranian revolution 30 years ago (which took place with the Sun in Aquarius), the eventual outcome seems just as likely to be theocracy: you don’t even need a majority vote for this, just a determined minority, and the Islamists are certainly determined.
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Only yesterday on BBC News there was an article entitled ‘Dark matter theory may be wrong’. A few days ago there was an article in which the idea of supersymmetry was brought into doubt. In both cases the doubt came as a result of experimental evidence. These theories have become fundamental to the way science sees the universe at the galactic and quantum levels respectively. Science has been stuck for some decades now in trying to develop theories, backed up by evidence, as to how the universe works when faced with the extremely large and extremely small.

I have always doubted the existence of dark matter. You could say Dark Matter is a projection onto the universe of our own ignorance: there’s lots of it – 96% of the universe – and it’s impossible to detect. It’s a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes.

It’s been as though any theory that will explain major gravitational anomalies, however outlandish, is better than no theory. It’s based on a primitive need for certainty.

As Neptune leaves Aquarius, so it seems to me is the dream of Science as in principle able to explain everything, fading. I, for one, am delighted!

There is a difference between ignorance and not knowing. Not knowing is a wonderful place to be: the Universe opens up as a ‘Great Mystery’, and wisdom flows from it. Socrates claimed to be the wisest man in Athens because he knew he didn’t know. In the West, we have become addicted to certainty, whether through the claims of Christianity, or latterly through Science and political ideologies. And this is ignorance, which comes from the word ignore, suggesting something wilful: it’s obvious when you think about it that there’s very little, if anything, that we really know. But we don’t think about this, we feel about it, and it feels uncomfortable and insecure. So we ignore it, we choose to be ignorant. Ignorance is thinking you know.

So this is where Neptune is starting to take us as he enters Pisces: into the place of not knowing which, for humanity as a collective beast, is a very uncomfortable place to be. I think this is why the prophecies around 2012 are so popular: they provide a sense of certainty and even hope in a world which is increasingly uncertain, and in which we are rapidly destroying the environment and resources we need in order to have a future.

To this extent I think the 2012 mythology is a cop-out, a collective delusion. To sort a situation you need to head straight into it, taking the time to re-dream it as you go, on an individual level. There are no inevitabilities in either direction. 2012 mythology is not mainstream, it belongs to the ‘alternative’, more ‘enlightened’ culture, which in this respect is showing itself to be just as superstitious as any collective is in times of insecurity. Some 2012 mythologies are apocalyptic, others describe collective spiritual transformation. In either case, they produce disengagement from the actual problems while we wait for the causeless big event that will change everything.

All the big ideas of the 20th century are failing: communism and democracy as political absolutes, scientific knowledge as metaphysical underpinning, the inevitability of economic progress. Neptune in Pisces is underscoring this. The Great Recession, which seems about to double-dip, and the rise of China, have given the West a tremendous blow to its self-confidence, and this has not fully played through yet by a long chalk. We are still hoping that things will go back to what they were.

Pluto is usually considered to be the planet of ‘power’. And he is that, he gives us the power to live and the power to transform and unfold. His power is basic and raw. But Neptune has his own power, which is the mythologies we live by. People will live and die for them, they are that real to us. There is something human about Neptune that Pluto does not share, because animals and plants do not live by mythologies: they just live, they know what they are, and they get on with it. Pluto lives in the Underworld, he is not human (though he still has a very important role to play for us.)

Neptune, in a way, is also not of the human realm, because he is god of the ocean. But while we cannot visit the Underworld – not, that is, if we hope to return – we have always sailed the seas, we have always visited the life-giving waters of the Imagination which Neptune represents. For humans, Pluto alone does not enable us to live. Without Neptune, we will die of a different kind of thirst.

So Neptune in his own sign of Pisces is tremendously powerful. It is a cauldron of the Imagination. His Ingress into Pisces represents the old certainties failing, and that creates much collective anxiety. We can inevitably expect a retreat into right-wing governments and fundamentalist religions as a response, for now, to that anxiety and insecurity (as well as into millenarian, 2012-type prophecies.) And that is described by the Uranus-Pluto square which is occurring concurrently: the empowerment (Pluto) of radicalism (Uranus), whether of a left or right wing variety. Uranus is an archaic god, and can describe a collective retreat into primitive, less conscious forms at times of insecurity: look at the rise of Fascist regimes under the last Uranus-Pluto square in the 20s/30s.

Rick Perry, Mr Texan Death Penalty, who is starting to lead the Republican race in the US, is an appropriate expression of this.

There is an issue of survival which has not filtered through to the collective yet, blinded as we are by advertising and politicians. The survival issue is of course based around environmental degradation and the profligate consumption of limited resources. Perhaps the larger a collective is, the stupider it gets. Any intelligent individual can see the danger, but what can they do? Preach to the converted? Any ‘primitive’ tribe would have acted by now.

And unfortunately, the party isn’t over yet. There are still enough resources left so that when a humbled West picks itself up again some years down the line (as Uranus finishes its square to Pluto around 2015), it can continue for a while as before, albeit less sure of itself, less dominant in the world. This shift in the world balance of power, away from the West and in favour of the BRIC countries, seems to be much of the meaning of this Uranus-Pluto square.

But all the while Neptune will be in Pisces, a subterranean collective re-dreaming on the part of what is now a global tribe. Uranus-Pluto will come to an end in 4-5 years, but Neptune will remain in Pisces for a further 9-10 years. The party will be continuing, but not with the old certainties: they will be in Neptune’s cauldron.

Interestingly, Neptune’s passage through a sign, 14 years, is about the same time as Saturn takes to complete half a cycle round the Sun. Saturn is the opposite of Neptune, he is the planet of manifestation. When he is opposite himself – opposite where he was when Neptune entered that sign – then there is a strong impulse to manifest. In this way Saturn brings Neptune’s dreams into reality, makes his visions grow corn.

Uranus-Pluto is not just about the shift in the world balance of power. Its influence will be felt at many levels, locally as well as globally. And the empowerment of Uranian radicalism, which is so central to the meaning of this transit, will feed into the re-dreaming of Neptune in Pisces, in the progressive sense of Uranus. Pluto is about survival, and while one response to the current crisis will be a retreat into right wing governments and fundamentalism, another will be a growing awareness of the real threat to our survival.

So there is this other, more hopeful, side to Uranus-Pluto which is kind of inevitable, because Pluto is there to ensure our survival. He is the life-force. You put that together with Neptune in Pisces, and you can see a growing current in the collective, determined that we should survive (Pluto), open to radical solutions (Uranus) and quietly dreaming the sort of world in which this is possible (Neptune.) As I said earlier, there are no certainties, and if we do build a slightly saner world, there is no knowing at this stage what form it will take. But if the outer planets teach us anything, it is that there are powers beyond us, creative depths to nature that in our hubris we overlook. The present situation is certainly an outcome of hubris, and you cannot avoid the eventual cost of that; but the outer planets, nature itself, has a way of surviving, and humanity is part of nature.

We are not just another species, we are a new development, and maybe we won’t last, or maybe most of us will be wiped out, only to repeat the same mistakes, as in Battlestar Galactica, some millennia down the line.

But what we have forgotten is that there is a deeper knowing within us, that knows where to go from here on a collective level, and Neptune in Pisces can take us there. It comes down to whether collectively we are prepared to listen. We ain’t there yet, but as we emerge from the Uranus-Pluto reckoning of the next few years, and as Neptune – as we collectively - have time to dream deeply from there on, a way forward will gradually present itself. Neptune is, after all, the planet of redemption.

The chart for Neptune’s first entry into Pisces, on 3/4 April 2011 (depending where you live) is quite remarkable, for it has 6 planets, including a New Moon, in Aries.

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It sends a strong message that out of the collective re-dreaming, the search for new ideas/mythologies, of the next 14 years, something very, very new will be born. As if to underscore this point, the Ingress chart for Neptune into Aries in 2025 also takes place under a New Moon in Aries. Spooky!

I want to be fanciful for a moment, but I have talked about Neptune in Pisces in terms of the Dreamtime, which is an Australian aboriginal idea. And Uluru, or Ayers Rock has come for us westerners to most symbolise that dreamtime. So what was happening at Uluru when Neptune entered Pisces?

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As you can see, the Ascendant was at the midpoint of Pluto and the North Node, both of which were within 5 degrees of the Ascendant. This suggests the power (Pluto) and significance (Node) of the idea of Neptune in Pisces as humanity's Dreamtime.

The Crisis Season (Part 5)

2011-09-15T13:42:00.000+01:00

Uranus and Pluto have been moving away from their square for a few weeks now, so I was expecting the sense of crisis to ease, but it hasn’t. The crisis over the Euro continues under that most ruthless of taskmasters, the markets. It is nominally over the threat of one small country, Greece, defaulting. If it does, then the bond markets will turn on Italy and Spain, and that will be a much bigger crisis. It is a world crisis, because the EU is the world’s biggest economic block, and the world is threatening to tip into another recession.

As I understand it, governments regularly borrow money to keep functioning, and eventually have to pay it back. They borrow in the form of government bonds from international markets. If the markets are not confident in that country's ability to pay back its loans, then it has to borrow at a higher interest rate. That makes it all the harder to pay back, because there are higher interest repayments along the way. It can be a vicious circle, because the higher the interest, the less is your ability to pay back, so lenders then want even higher interest. Without the ability to simply print more money (and devalue your currency), which is the usual way out, you are stuffed. And member countries of the Euro cannot do this. Greece is, to use the technical term, stuffed.

There will be deep financial restructuring over the next few years as Uranus and Pluto start to make some exact squares to each other. For now, the inevitable is being put off. It would be nice if part of that restructuring included restrictions on short-selling: this practice involves making bets on a price of a share going down. It’s like betting that the health of a hospital patient will get worse! And the worse they get, the more money you make. And if they die, well it was dead wood anyway that needed to go, and the betting probably helped. It is exactly like that. It encourages investors who don’t care about anyone or anything.

A few years ago, a rich English investor made a large bet on a referendum in Ireland going a particular way. He then donated money to an Irish political party that was pushing for the referendum to go the way that investor wanted. In the end, he lost the bet. But this investor is treated as a wise man in the City of London, a financial guru, famous amongst other things for making tens of millions out of the collapse of Bear Sterns. It’s a grisly way to earn a living when you think of the human consequences of a company collapsing. And the short-selling creates a climate where collapse becomes more likely. And it’s not even about earning a living, which has some merit. It’s about money for its own sake.

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When Pluto first entered Capricorn in Jan 2008, it was conjunct Venus and Jupiter in Capricorn. This says to me that the economic transformation that we are being slowly and painfully dragged through will involve Venus and Jupiter issues: that is, values and ethics. And in a Capricornian way: that is, values and ethics that also make long-term practical and financial sense. Short-selling is about short-term gain, and it can easily damage or kill companies or even whole economies unnecessarily. It was banned outright in England in the 18th century after shorting led to a major banking crisis.

Off my soapbox. The journalist John Pilger has a saying: “Don’t believe anything until it is officially denied.” Well it has now been officially denied that the EU will let Greece go to the wall and be pushed out of the Eurozone. This would not have been said unless it was strongly in Europe’s interest to offload Greece, and unless the possibility was being discussed in political circles.

It’s an impossible situation, because you have a common currency yet no central control over the individual Eurozone economies. A course of action cannot be plotted. Creating that central control is politically out of the question. In the meantime, German voters are increasingly against their country supporting the weaker economies. The only possibility indeed seems to be to let Greece go. But then the markets will turn on say Italy, which is also hugely indebted. And there’s no way the Germans, Europe’s paymasters, would be prepared to bail them out. So Italy will have to leave the Eurozone. And then Spain.

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The EU was founded as an organisation on 1st Jan 1958 at midnight. The Angles were at 29 degrees of the Mutable signs, which is the worst time to begin something, because it is a time when things are falling apart in preparation for the start of the Cardinal signs. The Iraq War began with the Angles at 29 degrees of the Mutable signs. Moreover, the EU Moon (the member countries) is natally square to Uranus, showing on the one hand a progressive idea, but also inherent instability, a fissiparous nature.

Later this year Uranus will station one degree away from hard aspecting these Angles, concluding a transit that has been going on for a few years, a period that has seen Uranian instability within the EU as the world financial crisis worsened. The Angles are actual, they are our basic connections to the world, and the EU has been shaken and loosened. As Uranus finishes his transit, we are likely to see the EU starting to split apart.

Next year, Uranus will move on to within 2 degrees of a square to the EU Sun. As the EU unravels, so too will the governing body of the EU (the Sun) start to fragment. The EU is not just a trading bloc: it was founded also on political ideals of a united Europe, beginning with a trading agreement between war-weary France and Germany. It is that political idealism, which was never going to be practical beyond a certain point between such different cultures, that is at the root of Europe’s problems, because any economist could have told you that the Euro could never work.

The chart above is for the EU as an organisation. The EU (or EEC) began with the Treaty of Rome in 1957.

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The Fire and Air emphasis of this chart shows the idealism – Sun in Aries opposite Libra Asc, Moon in Aquarius opposite Uranus. What is notable is the lack of earth. There is only Jupiter retrograde in Virgo in the 12th House, which for an earth placement is about as unearthy as you can get! The EU, on the other hand, is about as earthy and practical as you can get: Sun in Cap, Virgo Rising, Moon in Taurus. But the ideals behind it, arising out of the treaty of Rome, were never very practical.

The Euro itself, the cause of all the trouble, was formally launched in Frankfurt on 4 Jan 1999 at 4am. Because it is money, we need to look to the 2nd House, where sure enough we find an ambitious Sun in Capricorn. But the ruler of the House is Jupiter, which is in Pisces, square to 2nd House Mercury in Sag. This strongly suggests an idea that is inflated, that has got beyond itself.

Rupert Murdoch’s Balls

2011-09-08T19:26:00.001+01:00

Wendi Deng, Rupert Murdoch’s young Chinese wife, recently revealed that Tony Blair became godfather to one of their children earlier this year. The baptism took place on the banks of the river Jordan, at the spot where Jesus was said to have been baptised. Further, Tony Blair is said to have been robed in white for the ceremony, but I think that bit of the story could easily be someone taking the mick.

You can see that Blair could have been behind the river Jordan idea. There’s nothing wrong with the idea in itself, but when Blair is involved, you start thinking of his visit to the Pope to try and get a blessing for the Iraq War. Only the best will do for someone so spiritual as Blair.

I think that Blair’s religiosity is described by his Mars-Jupiter Rising. A pronounced Jupiter or Sagittarius (which Jupiter rules) is likely to give a religious/philosophical temperament. The US, a nation which is more religious than most, has Sag Rising. What the chart never tells you is the level on which that attribute will be expressed. Is this the chart of a subtle philosopher or a fundamentalist bore? Or is it the chart of a sacrificial chicken?

What were Rupert and Wendi thinking of? Wendi is Chinese, and there is no mention of Christianity in her wiki bio. The daughter, Grace, was 10 years old. What did she make of this strange occasion? Let’s hope she has a sense of humour.

All these relationships are based on power, whether between Wendi and Rupert or between themselves and Blair. Even the daughter’s baptism seems to be part of some PR stunt. OK, who am I to comment on the Murdoch’s marriage, but when you read Wendi Deng’s relationship history, you get the impression she uses men. And Murdoch needed an entry to the Chinese market. I’m not condemning them, because this is perfectly normal behaviour for many people. And the real motives remain hidden. At least, in earlier times, people didn’t have to pretend it was romance. It was because the wife brought a big dowry. Or, as the young Genghis Khan was advised, choose a wife with sturdy legs. It was a practical approach for practical people.

In his memoirs, Blair says that he came to like and admire Murdoch, despite disliking many of his views, because “he was an outsider and he had balls.” Well, Hitler was an outsider (Austrian) and had balls. These monsters can be impressive. You have to admire the Israelis, particularly the way they fought off invading Arab armies immediately after they were founded. You have to admire Thatcher for her ruthless determination. And the Terminator. And Roy Cohn in American Angels. But would you invite these people to dinner?

When you sup with the devil, use a long spoon. The reason these people are so impressive is that they will stop at nothing to get their own way. Monsters are fascinating, and any good story needs one.

It is clear that what Tony Blair really admires is power. He is drawn to it, and the possessors of it are no doubt charming enough to convince Tony Blair that he likes these people for their personal qualities. His ‘friendship’ with George Bush was an example. What is it in Tony Blair’s chart that gives him this fascination with power (and which is totally at odds with his professed Christian convictions?) It is Pluto, which forms a t-square with his Sun and (widely) with his Moon.

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Whenever you see a prominent Pluto in a chart, you are looking at issues of power, that can come out in a number of ways. It can come out as submission to others, or as a need to dominate. And it can come out, more consciously, as genuine power – as a connection to something real that other people instinctively respond to, and that transforms. And, if you have a prominent Pluto, it can be any of these at different times.

Pluto connects us to what one might call instinctual power, or simply to life itself. A wild animal wouldn’t need to distinguish Pluto like we do, because they simply are what they are. They are not separated from themselves by human self-consciousness and all the complexity and judgement that comes with that. And so they have the power to live their lives, to be what they are. Pluto gives them that.

Humans are the animals that do not know who they are. With a prominent Pluto, there is a need to forge a new relationship with the side of us that, on a simple level, has the power to live. But, as humans, it needs to become conscious, and it can get twisted along the way. And when it does, you get monsters and victims. The sheer energy of the monsters is a testament to the power of Pluto.

So the need to create genuine power is fundamental to Tony Blair. So far, he has seemed quite unconscious, as we can see in his choice of friends. He seemed quite unconscious of the submissive relationship he had with George Bush. We can chuck in the North Node as well, which is also fundamental to what we need to learn. Blair has it in the 10th in Aquarius conjunct the Moon. You can see him groping towards it in his international networking with the aim of saving the world. And who knows, he may have done some good (though in Iraq it led to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people.)

I find it fascinating when I see people who are clever and talented and who ‘achieve’ a lot, and yet who are unconscious and stupid in quite a basic way at the same time. It’s probably part of my prominent Pluto to see these people as they are, rather than feeling dazzled and disempowered by all they seem to ‘achieve’.

Iran's Nuclear Reactor

2011-09-05T13:11:00.000+01:00

The reversal of Iran’s nuclear ambitions used to be central to US foreign policy. It was a major crisis in the making. By invading Iraq – the wrong target – George W Bush lost the necessary political and military capital to invade Iran and stop its weapons programme.

On Saturday Iran connected a nuclear reactor to its national grid, and there has been barely a squeak from the US. Of course, Iran says it is developing its nuclear ability for purely peaceful purposes, and of course this is not the case. There would not be many countries one would believe in these circumstances, but particularly not one with a Mercury-Mars conjunction in Pisces in the 8th House square to Neptune. There the issue is being deceptive even when you don’t have to be.

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In his Presidential campaign, Obama said he would do everything in his power to stop Iran developing nuclear weapons, which doesn’t sound like someone who thinks you can just invade. It seems clear that the US, faced with so many other difficulties, has given up on this one.

In its natal chart, Iran has Venus at 3 Pisces in the 7th. Venus and the 7th both describe relations with others. Neptune is starting to cross the Iran Venus.

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The chart for the reactor being connected has Neptune conjunct the MC, square the Moon in Scorpio and opposite Mercury (communication.) It seems to be Neptune wherever one looks.

Of course, with Neptune one never quite knows. All you do know is that the situation is not what is being presented. But it would be very odd if Iran’s ‘peaceful’ programme were not also to be used to build up weapons grade material as a by-product.

The chart for all nuclear activity is based on the first man-made controlled chain reaction in Chicago in 1942. This chart has the Sun in Sag opposite a Saturn-Uranus conjunction: the splitting (Uranus) of matter (Saturn). This opposition, particularly 8-10 degrees of Gemini-Sag, is what has come to be known as the Nuclear Axis, and it has proved very sensitive to transits.

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The early 60s, when Pluto in Virgo squared this axis, was at the height of MAD, or Mutual Assured Destruction, which involved the advent of ballistic missile submarines that ensured a 'second strike capability'.

In the early to mid seventies, Neptune in Sagittarius crossed this axis, and this was the time of the SALT I & II talks, which for the first time limited the nuclear arsenals of the USA and the USSR.

In the late nineties, Pluto in Sagittarius crossed this axis, and this was the time when India and Pakistan came out as nuclear powers, beginning a new era of proliferation.

Now we have Neptune coming up to square this axis, exactly in about 5 years: sometime during that period, we can expect Iran to develop nuclear weapons, hugely shifting the balance of military power in the Middle East away from American/Israeli domination. If we look further ahead, to 8 years time, then we see a Progressed Moon-Pluto-Asc conjunction in the nuclear chart, and transiting Pluto hard-aspecting the Angles on the Israeli chart. We also see Uranus starting to conjoin the Iranian MC, and Neptune starting to conjoin the Iranian Mars. You don’t need to know much astrology to see trouble brewing here.

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The thing about Iran is that its Uranus in Scorpio conjoins the Scorpio Mars of the nuclear chart. So it is likely to behave in a very unpredictable, threatening, and at the same time secretive, manner once it possesses nuclear weapons. So while we may not see an actual exchange of weapons, Iran is likely to use its possession of them to keep everyone guessing as to whether it would use them, and to keep the Middle East in a state of instability.

It’s quite possible that Iran may in the meantime join the ‘Arab Spring’ and have a new government through popular protest. It did this before, in 1979, when it had its theocratic revolution. There are 2 charts for Iran: the chart for the February Revolution, which is a chart that expresses the will of the people. And the chart for April 1979, when the new state was founded, and this is a chart for the government. It is the government that has been making the nuclear decisions, and that is therefore the chart I have been using for its nuclear matters.

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But the chart for the people suggests that they are not happy, that there is a lot of unrest. There were protests earlier this year as Mars in Aquarius (the signature for these uprisings) passed over the Aquarian Sun-Mars of the Feb Iran Chart. But bigger change would seem to be in the way, because of the Moon Rising in early Aries, and MC in early Capricorn. With Pluto and Uranus already hard-aspecting these 3 points (Moon, Asc and MC), I’m surprised more has not happened. I expect a big change in government in the next couple of years, an outcome of popular protest.

But that doesn’t mean a change in nuclear policy. I think any country in Iran’s position vis-à-vis America and Israel would do the same. That doesn’t mean I support them in their ambitions, it’s just realpolitik.

Pluto in Capricorn and Neptune in Pisces: the New Reformation?

2011-09-01T09:37:00.000+01:00

I’m starting to think that Pluto functions particularly powerfully in Capricorn. Look at the present transit: just under 4 years in, and we are in the thick of the Great Recession. Pluto’s last transit through Capricorn saw the American Declaration of Independence. And the time before that saw Martin Luther kicking off the Reformation.

Huge stuff that revolutionises the establishment, as you would expect from Pluto (transformation) in Capricorn (the establishment). In the first case, it was religious. In the second case, political (the French Revolution followed soon after.) And in today’s case, it is so far looking economic, though with clear political implications.

Why should Pluto function so powerfully in Capricorn? Maybe it is that Pluto, after his discovery, took on many of the attributes (such as death) previously associated with Capricorn’s ruler, Saturn. Maybe Capricorn, with its tendency to become encrusted and conservative, is like a red rag to Pluto who, underneath his demolition hat, is really concerned to bring about renewal.

In the 1520s, when Martin Luther was starting the Reformation, it was particularly the Church’s decadence, such as its sale of indulgences, that he was attacking. In what became the US in the 1770s, there was successful rebellion against the old-style established European Monarchy, heralding the rise of democracy across the western world.

Pluto in Capricorn destroys that which is decadent in the establishment. We don’t yet know what is being destroyed by Pluto’s present passage through Capricorn. Unlike the 1520s and 1770s, this transit is being intensified and made more dramatic by a square from Uranus. We can speculate: the West has had continual prosperity since soon after WWII. Taking it for granted, we have borrowed far too much and lived beyond our means. And growth has become an end in itself, a sacred mantra. That is decadence, an economic establishment that is no longer useful. The same with the American political system and European politics in the form of the EU. Both have recently shown they cannot work effectively in a crisis. That Democracy which was heralded by the last transit of Pluto in Capricorn has itself become decadent. America treats its political system as sacred and as an example to the world. It would be mega if that changed, but the astrological signs are that it will, particularly as the US comes up to its Pluto Return at 27 Capricorn in 9 to 10 years time.

The big question is what is coming next. Many people, astrologers and non-astrologers alike, can see a storm coming, particularly economically. In a way it’s obvious. My reading of the 2008 Pluto Ingress Chart is of a prolonged Recession coupled with deep structural change. I’m not thinking Depression, which suggests a much bigger drop in output and rate of unemployment. If Pluto was in Sag or Pisces, for example, I would be thinking Depression because you get boom and bust under these signs to a much greater degree, both being Jupiter and or Neptune-ruled.

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But Pluto in Capricorn is not like that. It is about creating solid foundations after an initial tearing down. In the Ingress Chart, Pluto is conjunct Venus and Jupiter and trine to Capricorn’s ruler, Saturn. I think this set of planets is probably a key to understanding the Recession. Saturn is Retrograde, suggesting Recession in order to restructure. Venus indicates that the economy is part of what Pluto in Cap will be addressing. Jupiter is the expansion that will return to the economy. And Pluto is gradually transiting all these planets. He will make his final crossing of the Ingress Jupiter in December 2012, a few months after the first exact square from Uranus to Pluto. This Pluto Ingress-Jupiter transit in Cap suggests the West re-formulating its ideas around economic growth, moving towards something more realistic and sustainable. For one, that means lower growth, and therefore new ideas around what matters in the economy: economic values, which is the Venus part of the stellium.

We haven’t hit bottom yet, but I suspect by the end of next year, after the Ingress transits and the first Uranus-Pluto square, we will be beginning to see a new kind of future; the Capricornian new foundation will be there, at least as an idea.

This, of course, is 2012 that we are talking about, a year that has its own mythology built up around it that can be quite apocalyptic. Remember the year 2000 also had this kind of mythology, and so have many years before that. Most prophecies do not come true, particularly these apocalyptic ones, and particularly ones that have become part of the collective and which do not have the proper discernment of a competent diviner behind them. When you are making a prediction, you are using intuition, but you have your own plumbing to pass it through first, and that needs to be clean. And there are all sorts of qualifications and justifications (if you are an astrologer) that need to be made around the prediction you are making. 2012 is a speculative prediction based on an extinct culture that has gained considerable collective momentum. I think that a lot of people probably do have a genuine intuition that a lot is going to happen in 2012, and western astrology backs that up, like it would for a lot of other years where a lot has happened.

I think it’s important not to let that genuine intuition be blurred by the New Age hype around 2012. These collective things do not have the discerning intelligence that an individual has, they scare people, and they are usually wrong.

I began this piece while thinking about the combination of Pluto in Capricorn and Neptune in Pisces, and when did that last happen? Because these 2 planets more than any other describe the age we are living in. The last time it happened was 1520-1531, when the Reformation began. This was a huge event, because the Church had so much power, and because it was so fundamental to the way people saw the world.

So not only was a major institution torn apart – Pluto in Capricorn – but people were also freed to have their own direct relationship to God, without the need for an intercessionary priest: this was Neptune in Pisces. Neptune is the mythologies we live by, and religion as myth (rather than as belief and dogma, which is Jupiter) comes under that heading. In Pisces, there are no barriers between you and God, it is the aspect of the mystic.

So that maybe gives us a clue as to the meaning of the age we live in now, which has the same signature as the Reformation. It is fascinating, because it is so unlikely, to find these 2 planets in the same signs so recently, and for such a huge and descriptive event to have occurred.

What we are looking for is the tearing apart of an encrusted establishment that leaves people free to experience reality for themselves. An establishment that has dogmas behind it. There are a few possibilities.

Politically, there is the dogma of democracy. We are led to believe that this is the most advanced political system, and that all societies will naturally evolve towards it, particularly if they get a helping hand, militarily if necessary, from ourselves. The democratic system, as I said earlier, is proving ineffective in the current crisis after 240 years, one Pluto cycle, in the ascendancy. To be ‘undemocratic’ is to be a bad person, and this dogma subverts free thought.

Economically there is the dogma of growth and free market capitalism. The economic success of the West has led to the belief that its political system, Democracy, must also be responsible for that success. So there is a tangle of beliefs here which will take a hit as the West becomes relatively less powerful and China, which is not a democracy, gradually becomes the leading superpower. The triumph in the Cold War confirmed the West’s belief in its own politics and economic system. The triumph of China will reverse that belief.

But if we are going to stick as closely as we can to the events of the 1520s, then we need to look for the undermining of a state-backed religious establishment that has undue power over people’s minds. That religious establishment is Science. The Ingress Chart for Pluto in Cap in 1515 had Pluto in a loose stellium opposite Jupiter, religion and belief. The current Ingress Chart also has Pluto in a stellium involving Jupiter, so a revolution in Science-as-Religion seems plausible.

Moreover, the Ingress Chart for Neptune in Pisces has 6 planets, including a New Moon and Jupiter, in Aries. This is very strong, and suggests new guiding mythologies.

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Science today provides the answers to the metaphysical questions that the Church used to provide. Like the medieval Church, it has state power behind it, and presents itself as the only possible reality. There is an enormous amount of freeing up of people’s minds that is needed here – it is a collective brainwashing as far reaching as occurred under medieval Christianity. Science, of course, has its validity: the brainwashing lies in the notion that it describes the only reality, the one true way of seeing the world.

The astrology is there, over the next 10 years, for this primitive way of seeing the world to start to fragment decisively (just as the events of the 1520s, dramatic as they were, were just a beginning – and beginnings are not always apparent at the time.)

The reason I think this may happen – and I am being speculative – is that we may be reaching the limits of Science at the micro and macro levels. In the middle ground, so to speak, Science continues to progress and technological developments occur apace.

But when we go down to the quantum level, or up to the galactic level, there are indications that the scientific paradigm may be breaking down. At the galactic level, there is the phenomenon of dark matter, an undetectable form of matter that allegedly makes up 83% of the universe. It has remained undetected ever since it was first postulated in the 1930s to explain the rotation of galaxies, which do not obey Newton’s Law of Gravity. In any other discipline, it would by now have been laughed out of court. I think it is a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Science has also been stuck for a long time at the micro level. For decades this counter-intuitive world has been described by a model that involves the notion of supersymmetry. But there has been no experimental evidence for it. Evidence does now seem to be being gathered, but it leads away from the idea! The quantum world is one that no-one can ever see directly, possessed of numerous attributes that the mind can never fully grasp, and which seems to become more complex and fragmented the more it is pursued.

Then there is the Holy Grail of Science, the Theory of Everything, that would unite the micro and macro levels in one Grand Theory. For some decades String Theory has been the leading contender.

For some time there were 5 competing versions, then someone united them all under M Theory, which posits 11 dimensions, some of them existing at a nano level and wrapped up inside other dimensions. The theory is still not complete, and has been criticised for being untestable and lacking predictive power.

I think my point is clear! At the micro and macro levels, science seems to have been stuck for some time. And it doesn’t seem to me like some Einstein needs to come along and resolve it all. Science is and always has been a model of physical reality, and as a model it inevitably has limits: the model will break down when pushed to an extreme. Those limits seem to me to be being reached, and this will have a profound effect on the way we see the world. Every schoolkid will one day learn that Science no longer works when faced with the extremely large and extremely small, and it is therefore just a tool rather than a metaphysical system to which all other disciplines should bow. Pluto in Capricorn alongside Neptune in Pisces seems a good place to start: the dismantling of a rigid orthodoxy and the freeing of the individual to have their own perception of reality. This cultural impulse could be further established as Pluto moves on to Aquarius, the sign of Science; and as Neptune moves into Aries, a place of new mythologies. And let us hope that in the process the West moves on from its 1000 year love affair with monotheisms.

Why Things Go Wrong Under Mercury Retrograde

2011-08-30T00:50:00.003+01:00

I don’t know if I’ve talked before about my theory as to why things go wrong during Mercury Retrograde (which occurs for 3 weeks, 3 times a year) but here it is: the world is not a separate ‘thing out there’. It is a product, to a large extent, of human consciousness. Think about it: our brain is hard-wired to make sense of the data coming in, and has created categories such as left and right, up and down, near and far, time and space, self and other, to make sense of it all. We all have the same hard-wiring, so we think this working model is more real than it is. This is not a philosophical head-game: if you read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which has case studies of dysfunctions in the hard-wiring, you will be left aghast and mystified by the constructed nature of all aspects of our experience.

‘Primitive’ peoples understood this relationship between consciousness and the world when they ceremonially greeted the Sun every morning, for fear it would otherwise stop rising. The world as we know it keeps functioning because we continually create it through paying attention to it.

Mercury is the Mind, and when Mercury goes backwards, our attention collectively shifts inwards. For those 3 weeks we are not paying quite the full attention to the world out there that we usually do, so the world does not work quite so well, and my broadband slows down. It doesn’t matter that I as an individual may be paying full attention, because the collective as a whole is not, it’s a bit more reflective and inward than usual.

This theme reminds me of Greg Bear’s Sci-fi book Blood Music, in which a scientist develops a bacteria that can perform logic. He injects it into himself, it develops self-awareness, and it takes over the scientist and gradually the rest of the human population. Because the world is increasingly being perceived by a different type of consciousness, things gradually stop working properly. The bacteria eventually triumphs completely and the world itself shifts onto another plane. It’s a chilling story.

Hurricane Irene

2011-08-27T13:40:00.000+01:00

You know how accidents can happen to people who don’t want to change? Particularly when there is a major transit coming up, and they can no longer get away with staying as they are. Sometimes it’s easier to change. The amount of effort people sometimes put in to staying limited and miserable, because it is familiar, can be far more than the effort required to change and become happier.

I can’t help looking in this way at the storm that is starting to hit the East Coast of the US. I know it’s going to create a lot of damage and a lot of people will suffer, and I don’t want to make it sound like it’s some sort of divine punishment. But as an astrologer I get used to making symbolic connections. It is an art, because you can make everything symbolic if you want, every event meaningful, and I think that’s a sort of madness.

In the case of the US, however, I’m aware from the Uranus-Pluto square just how intense are the forces for change right now, and how intensely the US as a whole is trying to hang on to things the way they have been. The paralysis we saw in Congress over the debt ceiling is suggestive of this conflict. And the category 1 storm that is about to hit the US, a ‘historic’ storm according to the POTUS, is exactly the sort of event that can occur when there is this level of resistance to change.

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Pluto and Uranus have been hard aspecting the US MC at 1 Libra since 2008 and the beginning of the Great Recession. They are now moving on to the US Sun-Jupiter at 5-13 Cancer, and intensifying as Uranus and Pluto themselves move towards an exact square. This square will be exact in 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015. The storm symbolises the level of change that is coming, and which has so far been resisted.

This Uranus-Pluto will probably be the most intense force for change that the US has ever experienced, and the reason for that is that Uranus and Pluto will be exactly squaring each other for such a long period and increasingly closely to the US Sun – in 2014 and 2015, they will be on top of it.

So this is a ‘historic’ storm presaging historic change. Europe is subject to similar historic change, but it will on average be taking place a year or two earlier than in the US. This is because the Suns of, for example, the UK and Germany are at about 10 degrees of the Cardinal signs. France is at 13 Libra, so it could lag a bit behind. Why, I don’t know. But you can see in the case of the Euro that something has to give soon, because Germany and France cannot continue to be subject to the debts of Spain and Italy. The US can probably hang on a bit longer before something is forced to give.

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On the other hand… the US Solar Return for this year has Pluto closely conjunct the IC and square to Uranus very closely opposite the Asc. So a very intense year for the US. The UK, remarkably, also has this configuration in its current Solar Return, but a bit wider.

Collective Folly and the Mutable Signs

2011-08-23T14:50:00.000+01:00

As I write, Col Gaddafi is about to be toppled, amidst jubilation in Libya and pronouncements about the end of a tyrannical dictator from western leaders. But what is usually forgotten in the heat of this (for the West) ideological triumph, is that tyrants are usually there for a reason, the reason often being that a country is so riven by warring tribes that it is ungovernable except by a tyrant. This was the case in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Already, in the case of Libya, there is talk of the power vacuum and the many contending tribes.

History does not seem to teach the West to tread very carefully before supporting, or bringing about, revolutions with which it agrees ideologically. That is the trouble with ideas and ideologies: they often get given more importance than practical outcomes, and can cause more harm than good. (A lot of it because leaders are dishonest about their real motives.) I don’t know if Libyans will be better off or worse off without Gaddafi. At least the country was stable, and without NATO interference, Gaddafi might well have prevailed again.

In its fear of dictatorships, America has developed a political system that is also so riven by warring tribes that recently, at a time of crisis, the country proved nearly ungovernable. The country had been there many times before, but not at a time of such crisis, and not when Uranus and Pluto were so nearly squaring. We become that which we oppose, and in the recent debt ceiling crisis, America was effectively being dictated to by a small number of Republicans.

America’s political polarisation is fascinating from across the pond, because Europe is not so extreme. It seems to be largely the fault of the right-wingers, what used to be called the neo-cons, in the US. We saw it before with Bill Clinton in the 1990s, where the Republicans seemed determined to make it as difficult as possible for him to govern, to the extent of making America a laughing stock in the world. How far are these ideologically driven Republicans prepared to go to get their way? They, more than any straightforward economic factor, may be what brings America down. Bush was one of them, and his Presidency saw a weakening of America economically and militarily. All these Republicans achieved in the recent spat was a downgrading of America’s credit rating.

Uranus-Pluto brings about intense polarisation and crisis, followed by the collapse of old power systems and the birth of new ones. During the ‘Arab Spring’ earlier this year, Mars was in Aquarius, a sign of rebellion and democracy, and activating the bigger, underlying current of Uranus-Pluto. Now Mars is in Cancer, but square the ruler of Aquarius, Uranus, and again we have protests, in India and Israel. And a wave of mindless looting in the UK. And the end of Gaddafi’s regime and intense pressure on the Syrian regime. Again, would the Syrian people be better off with a revolution? One sympathises with the Syrian people, and with the Libyan people, and with the Iraqi people, but do we have the wisdom to know that intervention would be helpful?

I read an article about Folly yesterday, in relation to the Euro crisis. Folly was defined as something collectively decided, whose outcome is known to be at best problematic, but which is pursued anyway. The classic example was the wooden horse of Troy. The Trojans knew not to trust it, they had both oracles and common sense telling them. Yet because they so wanted an end to the war, they so wanted to believe that it really was a peace offering from the Greeks, that they accepted the gift. And that was the end of Troy.

The Euro also has the characteristics of Folly. How can you manage a currency if you do not have a proper say in how the economies to which it belongs are run? And if one of the countries belonging to the Euro gets into trouble, it cannot take the usual fiscal measures to get out of trouble, like printing more money and devaluing its currency. Nor can the European Central Bank continuously organise bail-outs, particularly when the larger countries, like Spain and Italy, start getting into trouble. So neither the ECB nor the individual countries themselves have full control over their economies.

One of the main factors that has led to the trouble in Europe is that some of the weaker economies like Greece, having joined the Euro, suddenly found themselves with much lower interest rates than they were used to and went on a borrowing spree.

So here we have Folly. Europe put itself in a situation whose outcome was very predictable, and which no intelligent individual, acting on their own, would have done. And yet collectively, Europe went and ahead and did it. Europe has paralysed itself in an entirely predictable way: the individual countries cannot act to save themselves, and neither can the collective act to save them.

The same with the US invasion of Iraq. Any intelligent individual could see that without careful post-invasion planning, there would be chaos and slaughter. Yet the collective went ahead anyway and created that chaos and slaughter.

Why do collectives, run by people who on their own are intelligent, do this? It can only be because we get caught up in collective hopes that are stronger than reason. You saw this in the election of Obama. I’m not saying he’s a bad President, but people got so caught up in a collective hope for a better future that rational discussion was often not possible. Fortunately, he hasn’t turned out too bad, but he could easily have been.

Can we see Folly in the charts of either the Euro or the Iraq War? In a way, yes. Astrologically, the cardinal signs are needed to begin something. Under the fixed signs you establish, and under the mutable signs you adapt and, if necessary, allow things to end.

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So generally you do not want begin things under a strong mutable signature, particularly the end of the mutable signs, when you really need to be allowing matters to end. And what do we find? The Iraq War was begun with the Sun at 29 Pisces, and with mutable Angles. And the Euro became legal with the Angles all at 29 degrees of the mutable signs! An unaspected Sun, showing a lack of leadership, didn’t help either. And as for that other Folly, the invasion of Afghanistan, with its entirely predictable long and unwinnable war, one chart I have is for George Bush’s announcement of the invasion, at 5am on 7 Oct 2001 in Washington. What we find are mutable Angles, with mutable Moon, Saturn, Venus and Pluto conjunct the Angles.

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This is classic astrology: you do not begin something under a strong mutable signature, yet Iraq, Afghanistan and the Euro were all begun under such a signature, and they went wrong. But particularly that 29 degrees of the mutable signs: it is remarkable that both Iraq and the Euro should share this. It seems to me particularly wilful to begin something at this sort of time. Astrology is a connected art, it’s not like oh they should have consulted an astrologer: if the astrology is saying don’t do it, then so will common sense be saying don’t do it. So I think the insight that astrology gives us here, particularly with Iraq and the Euro, is the sheer degree to which common sense was ignored in starting these events.

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Afghanistan also, but the mutability is not 29 degrees, and in a way America had to do something in response to 9/11. Iraq and the Euro, however, were not driven by events, they were undertaken entirely voluntarily.

Cameron's 9/11 Moment

2011-08-19T12:42:00.000+01:00

Dr Johnson once said, in relation to the death penalty being handed out for sheep-stealing, that if you raise sheep stealing to the level of murder, then you reduce murder to the level of sheep-stealing. The same could be applied to some of the sentences being handed out as a result of last week’s rioting and looting in England. One person, for example, was given 6 months in prison for stealing a few bottles of water.

A sense of proportion is being lost. In the same way that a collective hysteria resulted in looting by many people who would not normally have stolen, so is the judicial response also proving to be to some degree hysterical. The politicians gave the judges the nod to be harsh some days ago. Yet David Cameron is now saying he is glad the judiciary feels free to hand out extra tough sentences, as though there has been no political involvement.

You learn a lot about collective behaviour at these times of crisis, and also about the real positions of the politicians who lead us through them. When Princess Diana died, we saw Tony Blair’s populist genius in his ‘people’s princess speech’, and we saw collective grief on a scale we had never witnessed before (that Tony Blair also predicted), much of it because a symbol had been lost.

When 9/11 occurred, Tony Blair the religious warrior emerged, prepared to go to bed (in the passive position if necessary) with whatever politician shared his views on good and evil.

David Cameron’s right wing instincts are currently on display. He has unreservedly praised the tough sentences being handed out, and while there is a case for these, there is not for the disproportionality.

Boris Johnson, the Tory Mayor of London, is also behind the judiciary, but it has always been clear there is a nasty right-winger beneath the bluff, jokey exterior. As in, for example, his reference a few years ago to pickaninnies, which basically means the same as ‘wogs’. Being loveable, clowning Boris, he got away with it.

It’s difficult writing about politics, because as soon as you criticise a politician, a lot of people assume you are from the opposite party and are being biased, and shame on you for using astrology to justify your political leanings.

My position is that who I would vote for depends. Generally I trust the Tories more to balance the books, and Labour more with social policy. At present, our national debt is huge, and could still topple us a few years down the line. I trust the Tories more than Labour to ensure this does not happen. I also think something urgent needs to be done about welfare spending, and I think the Tories are more likely to do something about it, though I might not always like their methods.

However, just as left-wingers can be mindlessly anti-capitalist (and capitalism is just part of human nature: we need it but it has to be controlled), so too do you get Tories lacking feeling for their ‘inferiors’. This is the Tories as the ‘Nasty Party’ (an appropriate play on ‘Nazi’). I don’t think it would be politically too difficult for David Cameron to give out a message of ‘tough but proportionate’ on sentencing policy, but he is not doing this, and it gives the impression of a right-winger bashing his inferiors.

This is David Cameron’s Mercury in Scorpio square to Moon-Jupiter in Leo. Moon-Jupiter in Leo has natural leadership abilities but also, at its worst, a sense of entitlement to rule, a sense of superiority and lack of feeling for those seen as inferior. But it is concealed by Mercury in Scorpio. Someone I know has Moon conjunct Neptune in Leo, without the Scorpionic concealment, and they are straight up that there are superior and inferior classes of people, that is just how life is, and that the credit crunch was caused by the lower classes spending too much! In a way this person is right, in that humanity, like a pack of dogs, is hierarchical: we wouldn’t for example have celebrities without it. But that doesn’t mean it corresponds to anything real. Of course there is such a thing as superiority when it comes to e.g. talents and achievements (and this is classically Leo/Capricorn), and it’s important not to let tall poppy syndrome get in the way of that. But that doesn’t make one person ‘better’ than another, let alone a whole social class better than another.

David Cameron’s Leo Moon is ruled by his Libra Sun, and it is the approaching Mars square to his Sun, and more immediately to his Libran Venus (popularity in a politician) that is governing his actions. Mars is currently squaring his Venus, and he feels he has to be aggressive (Mars) to be popular (Venus).

Mars, unsurprisingly, has generally played a central role in the riots and their aftermath. Mars is in early Cancer, in a t-square with Uranus and Pluto. That is heavy and explosive. All the planets in that t-square are now separating from each other, so the intensity is easing; but at the time of the police shooting of Mark Duggan, and the beginning of the riots, the t-square was applying, particularly from Mars. Astrologically, it was a tinderbox, that hard-aspected the UK Uranus-Asc conjunction and Sun-MC opposition. Hence their national significance.

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What seems to have been forgotten is that these riots were triggered by the police shooting dead a black man (who Boris Johnson might call a pickaninny). The police claimed the man had shot first, but people obviously didn’t believe them, and it turned out later that the police had indeed lied. They claimed the lie was simply miscommunication, but you don’t make a mistake about something like that. The police shoot dead a black man, lie about him having fired at them, and people riot because they rightly don’t believe the police. There was justified grievance on the part of the rioters here, and it’s the only course of action people have when the police are against them. Of course, the riots escalated into something else that the politicians can unreservedly condemn, but the part of the police in causing it has strangely been forgotten.

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When Mark Duggan was shot, Mars had just changed signs and was moving through the 9th House of the UK chart. The 9th House is the Law, and Mars is aggression – an instinctive planet in the instinctive sign of Cancer. It was probably spur of the moment, unlike airy Mars in Gemini, under which the carefully planned Norwegian slaughter took place. A policeman felt threatened and opened fire without thinking: that is what the astrology is telling us, particularly when you see that Mars is also in an applying square to Uranus and opposition to Pluto. We do know that an illegal firearm was recovered from the scene, and if Duggan was carrying it, then I think it’s his look-out if the police shoot him. But the police have already lied in a big way, so did they also plant the gun afterwards? At the time of the shooting, Mercury was stationary retrograde closely opposite retrograde Neptune, with both planets about to change sign. Mercury is the planet of communication, and with this aspect it is very hard to know where the truth lies (no pun intended.) It is certainly the aspect par excellence under which to tell whoppers, like the police did.

In itself, the shooting chart has a Mars-Pluto opposition lying along the Asc-Desc axis. So death (Pluto) as well as aggression (Mars) was intended on the part of the establishment (Capricorn)/Police (Sagittarius). The North Node was also conjunct the Ascendant, in the sign of Sagittarius (the Law/Police). This adds significance to the event. And the Asc was closely opposite David Cameron's MC, suggesting an important moment for his career. So I think attention will focus once again on the shooting, once the bigger, morally more cut-and-dried issue of the rioting has died down.

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The rioting began 2 days later. In a mundane chart, the Moon is the people, and here we see it in Scorpio in the 9th. Scorpio has a strong sense of justice/revenge, and in the 9th, it is the Law/Police with whom it has this grievance. Aquarius Rising shows the sense of rebellion. So this was how the riots began, even though they turned into something else. The actual aggression, Mars, was in the 5th, showing the part young people came to play. Being in Cancer, and opposite Pluto, reason was soon left behind.

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The UK Progressed Sun/IC is closely conjunct Cameron’s Moon, so this is a time when he can take a lead. The UK has a Progressed Mars-Pluto opposition that will be applying until the end of 2012, so further protests and outbursts of violence and rioting are likely. Some have described the rioting as Cameron’s ‘9/11 moment’. He has seized it, just as Mars conjoins the UK MC, as an opportunity to promote the social transformation, the ‘big society’, that is central to his political philosophy. The focus will be on less government and more local community involvement, and active intervention at an early stage in families locked into welfare and criminality. It could be read as a restatement of traditional Tory policy: less government, ‘on your bikes’ to those on the dole, and boot camps for young criminals.

This is just as Neptune is entering Cameron’s 6th House of work. A leader is a public figure, in some ways they ARE the collective, and I think you can therefore give a mundane interpretation to their charts. In this case, one meaning of the 6th House is ‘the working classes’. This could be read in an appalling way as redeemer of the lower orders, and as a Tory there’s bound to be a bit of that flavour, but it doesn’t mean he won’t do a lot of good. Neptune may give a more compassionate flavour than we experienced under Thatcher. In the UK chart, Neptune is about to pass over natal Pluto in the 5th House of children: we saw this transit in the riots, where most of the offenders were teenagers and young adults, and we will no doubt see a response in terms of government policy and intervention in the next few years as the transit progresses.

In an individual’s chart, a Neptune to natal Pluto transit may not be personally very significant. But a country ‘lives’ for so much longer, and being also a collective entity, these collective planet transits acquire a lot more significance. Pluto is also the country’s power, and the sign of Pisces reflects Britain’s naval power in 1801. You can also, rather fascinatingly, trace the rise and fall of the British Empire – its time as a world power - by the long Direct and Retrograde periods of progressed Pluto. For example, Prog Pluto was stationing at the end of WWII, and moved to retrograde in the 1950s: this was the post-war dismantling of the Empire. The Neptune-Pluto transit over the next couple of years is also like to mark one more downgrade in Britain’s place as a world power, which will complete as Neptune also passes over Progressed Pluto at 5 Pisces in a few years time. Just as people are often more real in failure than in success, so too do I think it will do Britain good to wear shoes that fit.

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We don’t know what David Cameron is like yet (just as we didn’t know Blair till 9/11), but with Pluto squaring his Sun over the next few years, and with the rioting providing an opportunity for implementing his social philosophy (which he has always said is his main political goal), we are probably soon to see what type of leader we really have. His Progressed Sun has just moved into Sag, trining his natal Jupiter: so his beliefs will be coming to the fore. And with prog Moon in the Prog 5th in Aries, these beliefs are likely to result in initiatives around young people.

English Monsters from the Deep

2011-08-10T10:52:00.000+01:00

It is interesting how unclear the reasons have been for the civil disorder in England. The worst is now over, even though the disorder has spread across the country, because London, which gave a lead, is now quiet. Forcibly so.

No doubt reasons will be given, but just the fact that we don’t really know says quite a lot. It started with alleged police racism in Tottenham, but turned into disorder by all sorts of people, burning down businesses and looting. The austerity measures are clearly an element here. And resentment against the Tory government. Last night 3 Asian men were run over and killed as they left a mosque in Birmingham. That seems like racism.

The point is that ‘reason’ has been left behind and we are dealing with something archaic and collective. People who would not normally riot and loot are doing so. The news showed quite unlikely people in the police cells.

This is what is fascinating. When the collective takes over, people’s usual sense of who they are switches off. It is exactly what happened in Nazi Germany, at a time, like now, of national insecurity. A responsible government opposes and contains these energies. The Nazis used these mob energies against the enemy within. Right now, the British government could, if it wanted, set up a pogrom with the greatest of ease.

It is a rare moment when the dark side of the collective rears its head, and people forget who they are. It is an amnesia, and in the coming months we will see interviews with many people saying they do not know what came over them. It shows how fragile is our civilised consciousness, even after decades of liberal democracy and what some might see as political evolution.

The rioters were just the tip of the iceberg. For every rioter, there were probably hundreds more who could have been drawn in if the circumstances were there, and thousands more who were tempted. The government will isolate the rioters off as an unrepresentative aberration; but in fact it is saying something big about the English collective unconscious. Nothing happened in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, and this shows we are separate races, that it was a racial, tribal phenomenon.

So firstly, there is such a thing as the English race. And secondly, something is going on in its collective unconscious. As in Nazi Germany, people are feeling insecure and powerless. Usually we see attacks on minorities in such circumstances. But what we have in this case is a new element brought in by a new type of society, the ‘consumer society’: greed. Looting has been so characteristic of this unrest, and it is probably a consumerised twist to the pogrom mentality.

The important lesson in these events is that they are saying something about the English collectively: our general nature beneath the ‘civilised’ surface; and something particular about how threatened people are feeling about present circumstances.

It is easy to put it ‘out there’ and just blame the rioters. It’s like in a family that is unconscious. The family neurosis is often embodied by just one member, the black sheep, putting it safely ‘out there’, so that nobody has to look at themselves.

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We saw in the 1930s how Uranus square Pluto gave rise to the same primitive collective energies to which each one of us is vulnerable, even if we let others do it for us. How many people are secretly satisfied by the rioting? Perhaps those who damn it most? Uranus square Pluto will be interacting with the charts of all the major powers in the next few years (including China, which has Sun at 7 Libra). We will be seeing a lot more of what we have been experiencing in England. Why in England right now? Because Mars has been in early Cancer, forming a t-square with Uranus and Pluto: this configuration forms a hard aspect to the UK Sun, MC and Asc at 7-10 Libra/Capricorn, and in particular to the UK Angular Uranus at 1 Libra, a planet of unrest.

The monsters of the old myths, like Grendel, live within us, and emerge when the protective shell of a secure society is weakened. What is happening in the collective now in England is a great moment for collective and personal self-knowledge.

The Crisis Season (Part 4)

2011-08-09T18:04:00.000+01:00

I’m off camping for a week in South Wales. I was starting to get cabin fever. Mercury Retrograde is in full swing. It happens for 3 weeks, 3 times a year, and it's when things go wrong. Sometimes it is just that, but also a big part of its function is to reveal underlying difficulties that need addressing. About every other Merc Retro my computer goes on the blink almost to the day. This time it is the speed of connection, and my provider, BT, has had the grace to accept the blame rather than say it’s my computer. After that, though, they went AWOL and I’ve had to shove them a bit. They’ve got a clever one, though: if I ring them during the week it will take them to fix it, I will get a new guy in India and the process of fixing it will have to start all over again!

Meanwhile there has been turmoil in the markets across the world, and rioting and looting across London. Uranus and Pluto are now starting to separate, so I hold to my prediction that things will quickly stabilise, but will come back again next year as Uranus and Pluto approach each other again: this time they will make an exact square, and will continue to make exact squares for a couple of years after that. That series of squares will properly address the debt issues that the West is currently backing off from.

Uranus-Pluto often involves crisis followed by deep change. It is a purging of the old. Something that has reached the end of its time and can no longer be sustained comes crashing down, often after much resistance. Pluto is the movement of tectonic plates, Uranus the accompanying earthquakes.

Why in the UK do we seem to get protests under Labour governments and rioting under Conservative governments? It’s probably because people on the sharp end of Conservative policies feel they are up against bastards who do not care about them and want to keep them down. I’m not saying I think this is what the Conservatives are actually doing (though George Osbourne can be aristocratic and supercilious), but this is what a lot of people seem to feel.

Uranus and Pluto are making a t-square with Mars at present, and this afternoon the square from Mars to Uranus (which is explosive) began separating. So I think we have seen the worst.

It’s not yet clear from the news what the rioting is about. Undoubtedly the government’s austerity measures are part of it, and in a way it’s a pity it’s not Labour doing the cuts, because at least it wouldn’t have been felt to be the upper classes sitting on the lower classes. But it began as a police thing, the old story in Tottenham of the police singling out black people. One black person got shot dead by the police, who said he fired first, but that story is now being questioned.

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You can make predictions for the next 3 months using Cardinal Ingress charts, set for the particular place under consideration. The Capricorn Ingress for London (Winter Solstice) had Mars conjunct Pluto and the UK Sun/IC. At the time this looked to me like protest. Then the Aries Ingress (Spring Equinox) had Mars opposite MC; the Cancer Ingress (Summer Solstice) – which pertains to now – has Mars opposite Scorpio Ascendant.

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And it doesn’t stop there, because the Libra Ingress Chart has a Moon (the people)-Mars conjunction in Leo; and the December Capricorn Ingress has Mars conjunct MC. We may not see rioting – and it is the government’s job to ensure there isn’t – but we may see a lot of protest continuing. Each of those Ingress charts has the Sun in hard aspect to Pluto, which suggests power struggle (Pluto) against the government (Sun).

Much of the rioting is by young people. The official line is that they are mindless criminals, the liberal line can be that they are children that need looking after and listening to. The first is harsh, the second patronising. There are undoubtedly genuine grievances that need addressing. But feeling you are in the right can be a dangerous thing, you can feel all sorts of behaviour is justified. And what has been coming out has been primitive and destructive, it is Mars and Pluto at their most unconscious, and the most basic function of government is the containment of these energies. The government needs to be fast in stopping these riots and prosecuting where necessary; but also fast in addressing the grievances that led to the riots.

The Crisis Season (Part 3)

2011-08-07T19:26:00.002+01:00

I’m English, and I have nothing personal against America. I’ve always said that as empires go, it could be a lot worse. I’d rather have America as the lone superpower than China. But America is being brought down at the moment, and for astrological reasons I think it is permanent.

The last couple of days have seen the square between Uranus and Pluto standing still at its tightest, at just over one degree apart, so any events in that period can be particularly significant.

The principal meaning of the Uranus-Pluto square (which has yet to be exact) seems to have to do with a shift in the balance of power worldwide, from the West to the East, and particularly from Europe and America to China.

In the last couple of days 2 events have occurred that are humbling for America: the single biggest loss of life in Afghanistan, and the downgrading of America’s credit rating.

In Afghanistan, 31 soldiers were killed when a helicopter was shot down by the Taliban. (As Mars moved into a t-square with Uranus and Pluto.) As the New York Times said: “Saturday’s attack came during a surge of violence that has accompanied the beginning of a drawdown of American and NATO troops, and it showed how deeply entrenched the insurgency remains even far from its main strongholds…”

Many of those killed were SEALS, the elite fighting group that took out bin Laden in May. There is a symmetry to it, and it shows very clearly that this long war is destined to end in failure for the US.

5 years ago, the US Progressed Mars went retrograde for the first time ever. It had been standing still for some years before, and continued to do so for some years afterwards. So America’s military pre-eminence was due for a fall, and it now seems to be happening as Progressed Mars picks up speed. It will remain retrograde for another 75 years.

It is the same with the American Progressed Saturn, whose meaning is broader than Mars, and describes America’s economy and its standing in the world. This went retrograde for the first time in 1997, and as with Mars, as Progressed Saturn has begun to move, so has America’s credit rating been downgraded for the first time ever. It is below that of the major European economies.

It was completely unnecessary that this should have happened, and it is only one of the credit rating agencies that have downgraded America. It was unnecessary because it was brought about by political infighting. It was a case of Nero fiddling while Rome burned. It is a sign of an empire becoming decadent. In an up-and-coming country, this would never have happened.

America needs to address its over-spending in a coherent manner, rather than by a series of last-minute horse-tradings between opposing parties. That way you get a camel, which is said to be a horse designed by a committee. America was downgraded not because of the economy per se, but because Standard and Poor rightly does not have confidence in America’s ability to govern itself.

As I said in my post on The American Crisis of Democracy, what we are seeing is a crisis in the American political system. We all knew it was the same game we had seen before, where Congress would agree on a budget at the last moment, but this was so not the time to be doing that. Uranus and Pluto were almost exact in their square, which says that it may look like the same old game, but it’s not. The politicians were playing with fire, and many of them didn’t know it, and the result of it has been the historic downgrading of America’s credit rating.

What America is up against essentially is religion. It is very hard for the country to transform itself politically because Americans have religious faith in their own brand of democracy. And where you have religion, the truth is pre-ordained rather than based on observation. With Sagittarius Rising, and Sun conjunct Jupiter, it is perhaps not surprising that America is like this.

(Remember that America was founded by many of Europe’s religious extremists who were fleeing persecution.) It gives the tremendous self-belief that has been behind America’s growth as an empire. But it is also rigid, so that when the system no longer works, it is hard to change.

America is very adaptable practically, but very rigid in its beliefs, and those beliefs are now threatening its existence. Which is another way of saying that the US has Jupiter at 6 Cancer, and Pluto is opposing that Jupiter all year. For many, this would not be a huge transit. But for America, Jupiter rules its Ascendant, and conjoins its Sun (which Pluto will oppose in 2-3 years.)

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I think this transit is asking 2 things of America: to downgrade its inflated, ‘exceptionalist’ view of itself, and to adopt a softer political ideology. The 2 things probably go together.

When an empire falls apart, it can do so very quickly. Only a few years ago it was said that it would take until 2050 for China to overtake America economically. China has shot beyond Japan and into second place more quickly than many of us would have imagined, and America is stumbling in a way we might not have imagined.

America is hamstrung by its political system and the influence that a few die-hards, refusing to be bipartisan, can have. And there are no signs of political change in the way that is needed.

Europe is in a similar situation. The individual countries do not have a problem governing themselves, but there is a lack of political will collectively. This is caused not as in the case of the US by a rigid system that is no longer working, but by insufficient reasons for federating in the first place. The EU got beyond itself in its size and ambitions, in particular through creating a common currency without having control of the economies that were using it.

Now that the immediate US economic crisis is over, attention has reverted to Europe and the potential default of 2 of its largest economies, Spain and Italy. The crisis season remains in full swing, even with Uranus and Pluto starting to move apart. What I suspect, given that astrologically we should be seeing the beginnings of a (temporary) easing of the crises, is that the European central bank will move quickly to begin buying up Spanish and Italian government bonds for more than they are actually worth, but which will mean those governments can keep functioning for now. Europe will patch itself up again, but with bigger plasters than before.

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The EU as an organisation began as the EEC in 1958. It has a strong 2nd/8th House emphasis, showing its function to be the creation of shared wealth. The Treaty of Rome, which provided the legal basis for the EEC, began 8 months earlier. The emphasis here, with Libra Rising and Sun conjunct Descendant, is the creation of partnership.

Both charts are in crisis, replete with hard Pluto and Uranus transits. Its survival is at stake. But so is the survival of the EU’s constituent countries, most of whom are (as it happens) subject to the same transits. An unravelling seems an obvious outcome.

As with the US, the function of the not-quite-exact Uranus-Pluto square seems to have been to reveal deep problems that are essentially political, but then to patch them over for now. The crisis season will probably end this week, but we all know it’s just temporary. If I was buying gold, I’d probably wait for the price to fall in the short term as the sense of crisis eases, but then buy in January as Uranus and Pluto start to move together again. That, of course, is not financial advice!

Astrology and 2012

2011-08-04T04:54:00.004+01:00

Astrologer Chris Brennan has written a piece opposing attempts by some astrologers to make 2012 the year of astrology. It's proved controversial:

Over the past few years a well-meaning group of astrologers called the Cosmic Intelligence Agency has led a campaign to “make 2012 the year of astrology.” Their goal is to use some of the hype surrounding predictions about the significance of the year 2012 to draw greater attention to astrology and the astrological community as a whole. At one point they even went so far as to see if they could lobby the United Nations in order to officially designate 2012 as the year of astrology.

I would like to respectfully point out that this isn’t a very good idea, at least in my opinion. Let me explain why. (more...)

Illness

2011-08-02T16:59:00.000+01:00

Sometimes I’ll get asked health questions. I’m not trained in medical astrology – in a way, I’m not trained in any sort of astrology – but I don’t usually let that sort of thing stop me. A bit of common sense and an understanding of symbolic thinking goes a long way. The other day someone asked me about their spine, and I went to the very useful Medical Astrology section on Wikipedia, and there it was, symbolised by the Sun. The Sun is also parental, classically the father, and I was able to tie together father stuff and spine stuff in a way that made a lot of sense to the person. Healing one involved healing the other.

Even I would balk at using astrology to recommend physical treatments for people’s ailments. I think that would definitely require training. But through its system of correspondences, astrology can give you strong clues as to the psychological component. Not, not psychological, that makes it sound like disease is just in people’s heads, which it’s not. It’s the soul component, what the ailment is saying about the state of your soul. There isn’t always this connection – sometimes a broken leg is just a broken leg, a cold can be just a cold. And you can’t insist on a connection. But sometimes the symbolism is too strong to ignore.

I’ve spent the last few months reading Patrick Harpur’s The Philosopher’s Secret Fire. There’s so much in it that I only do a few pages a day. Today I came across this section:

The rejection of Hades’ advances – the resistance to death – is the hallmark of modernity, and especially of our approach to medicine. Of all the technological developments which have changed our lives since the Renaissance, medical technology is perhaps the one we can point to with most confidence and say: “There, at least, things are getting better.”….

We are better than ever – so why do we so often feel iller? Why does spending on health increase every year, but we do not seem to be happier? Why are we beginning to question the benefits of longevity? Why are we now plagued by complaints which may not be life-threatening but which make our lives a misery and which doctors can do little about – unexplained headaches, chronic backache, stomach disorders; anxiety attacks, stress disorders and depressions; plus a host of ills that seem to hover on the border between mind and body, such as ME, MS, chronic fatigue, hyperactivity, allergies, asthma, eczema and other ‘nervous’ disorders? Why can we never rid ourselves of Big Killers – we may have done away with the Black Death, but now we have Cancer and Heart Disease?

There are lots of answers to these questions; but the single most neglected answer is that we have neglected soul, especially in the field of mainstream medicine whose materialistic presuppositions tell us that the body is all we have; that it is more or less a machine….

The daimonic tradition, on the other hand, tells us that the body is the physical expression of an individual soul connected to the Soul of the World and, as such, it is – like Nature – a citadel of metaphors. None of its expressions, including its symptoms and diseases, is merely biological. They are also imaginings which invite us to see heart disease, for example, as a sickness of the emotions, perhaps of the imagination itself, since these are traditionally seated in the heart; which invites us to see cancer as a revolt against the materialistic conception of the body itself, because cancer is like the body’s madness, the body turning on itself, eating into itself, as if to free itself from itself or free it from its own literalistic conception of itself.

From the daimonic point of view, the tiny agents of disease such as bacteria and viruses are, like subatomic particles, daimonic entities whose existence was postulated hypothetically – that is, imagined – before they were ‘discovered’. This is not to say that they do not exist; it is only to say that their existence is not only literal, even though we demonise them, ward them off and exorcise them in the literalised rituals we call vaccination, disinfection etc. Viruses in particular have been fashionable in recent times. They are blamed for more and more diseases whose cause is uncertain. They may be different viruses – or, more alarmingly, they may be the same viruses which have mutated. The elusive, shape-changing mature of viruses suggests that they are the usual literalised daimons.

Moreover, there is a dark suspicion that the mass of ‘wonder’ drugs we have invented do not necessarily cure diseases but suppress them. According to this view a disease is then driven deeper into the body, only to reappear later in another, more virulent guise – exactly like the daimons we repress at our peril lest they mutate into demons. The high incidence of cancer would, from this viewpoint, be conceived as the suppressed form of diseases that we no longer manifest.

Despite all our medical triumphs, a groundswell of grumbling has grown in volume over the last 40 years, a dissatisfaction with the materialistic and technological approach to our bodies, which has encouraged a lot of people to experiment with ‘alternative’ medicine and ‘holistic’ therapies – many of which are administered in as literal a way as conventional medicine, using a kind of spiritual ‘technology’ which equally ignores soul.

Nevertheless they do point to a growing feeling that it is insane to treat the body in isolation, as if it were the only thing we consist of. We watch the Holy Grail of Total Health recede ever further from us as we increasingly understand that that soul will never let us be totally well. Psyche constantly makes itself felt in psychosomatic disorders, in hypochondriacal feelings of dis-ease, in anomalous symptoms which chronically subvert the quality of our lives. It will always prise open a crack in our armour of health to let sickness in or to leach health, like a wasting disease, towards death.

Of course we should do what we can to avoid sickness and to cure it; but we should not let our Herculean efforts blind us to the inner meaning of sickness, the opportunities it is offering us for psychic transformation, for initiation, which is an engagement with death rather than its denial. Many of the daimons a shaman encounters are called by the names of diseases. He engages with them in order to know them and to enlist their help in the care, and cure, of souls.

The tendency of medicine to deny soul is present in its mythic foundations. Asclepius was the first doctor, taught medicine by his father, Apollo, and (some say) by the centaur Cheiron. But when Asclepius began raising the dead, Hades complained to his brother, Zeus, that Asclepius was robbing him of his subjects. Zeus killed Asclepius with a thunderbolt, but later restored him to life.

Here, in Hades’ complaint, we see medicine’s predilection for affirming natural life, denying the life of the psyche and refusing the soul its connection with death. Hence medicine’s emphasis on preserving life, raising up bodies at all costs, cheating Hades by depriving soul of its underworld dimension and keeping it in the upper daylight world.

Astrology and Faith

2011-08-01T13:29:00.001+01:00

A few weeks ago someone asked me if I had a faith and I was a bit stumped for an answer. I mumbled something about astrology and something about symbolic thinking, but I don’t think I made much sense. And then a couple of weeks ago I realised that when I die, I want a coin put in my mouth. I didn’t think it up, it came to me with a force. In ancient Greek and Roman times, a coin was often put into the mouth of a dead person so they could pay Charon the ferryman to take them over the river Styx into Pluto’s realm, the world of the dead.

As a modern astrologer, I am dealing with the Greek gods all the time. (Note classical astrology seems not to have been like this; the planets were not gods, but sets of principles. In this respect, I think modern astrology is a considerable improvement on the old.) These gods are what I ‘believe’ in. I didn’t choose them, they chose me, and they might seem a slightly ludicrous cosmology to hold to in 21st century Europe.

But nevertheless they are often present when I write, and who am I to judge the appropriateness of mythological powers? My astrological connection with the Greek gods helps me understand that something need not be literal to be real. When Pluto turns up, he is just as real as the desk in front of me. In some ways, he is more real, for he has a power and a presence that the desk does not.
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So going back to the question of faith, I don’t think I could say I have one, in the usual sense of a belief in the divine nature of some historical figure like Jesus or the Buddha that gives meaning to someone’s life. If anything is ludicrous, that is. How can we be sure of anything factual about these people, and why the big deal about someone who was around so long ago? Why are they so special compared to any number of people with good things to say, who are alive now? Jesus or Buddha as mythological figures with mythological power is another matter; I think people easily confuse these levels of reality, as we are trained to think that something is only real if it is literally true, in the sense of being external and concrete and material and provable as so.

But if you have the experience, like I do, of the reality of the Greek gods, who were never presented as fleshly, historical beings, then you are freed from the tyranny of religious faith in the sense described above. What gives life meaning is the sense of these presences working alongside you, without the need for a proven historical event to make them real.

The American Crisis of Democracy

2011-07-26T13:15:00.001+01:00

Every political system has its strengths and weaknesses, and in the US at the moment we are seeing democracy at its worst. I’ve often thought that the system of ‘checks and balances’ that the founders of the US set up has a paranoid element that can make the country ungovernable at times. Like now.

The US political system was set up as a reaction to the British monarchical system, which was unelected. So concerned were the founders that the President did not turn into a dictator, that every move he makes has to get through 2 Houses of Congress, and the elections every 2 years often mean that one or both Houses are controlled by the political opposition.

You certainly won’t easily get a dictator under this system, at least not for very long. But the price is decision-making, particularly at times of crisis, like the present need to raise the debt ceiling and cut government spending/increase its revenues. I don’t think it’s politically biased to say that the main fault lies with what Vince Cable (the outspoken UK Business Secretary) called ‘nutters’ in the Republican Party, who will not countenance any rise in taxes for wealthy individuals or large corporations.

The Chinese must be scratching their heads. Under their system, the decisions would have been made a long time ago, and there would be no crisis, either politically or probably financially. Even in Blighty, our government is at least allowed to govern for the period in which it is elected.

The American crisis is dominating the world news. It affects all of us. A default by the US would send the fragile world economy into a tailspin.

Uranus and Pluto still have another week of moving towards an exact square. They will get to within one degree, and then back off, and then next year will make the exact square. Crisis, brought about by the need for deep structural change, is typical and expected of this combination of planets.

I don’t think it is just a financial crisis, which we are also seeing in Europe – a crisis we keep patching up, but which will inevitably come back in even bigger form with Spain and Italy threatening to default.

I think what we are seeing in the US is a crisis of Democracy. It is the political system itself that has brought the US to this pass. Republicans or Democrats, allowed to govern, would have different solutions, which one might or might not agree with, but at least there would be some sort of solution, via a reduction in government spending.

And I think the US has this political crisis because their form of Democracy is extreme. Like I said, it has a paranoid element that denies power to the person who has the power. (Kennedy used to bemoan that Khrushchev had far more power to govern than he did!) America needs to let the governing party/person actually rule, and then deal with the consequences. Otherwise it will never grow up as a country. You see it in teenagers, who are rebelling against/afraid of adult power, and yet vulnerable to charismatic leaders.

And you see it in the strange relationship of the US to British royalty. On the recent tour by Prince William and his Missus, all the top Hollywood celebs, who would normally themselves be the stars of the party, came out to meet them. And one star was cravenly saying that the US only has celebs, whereas Prince William is the real thing! You don’t know where to start in unpicking that!

So I think this financial crisis in the US is essentially, as everyone knows, a political crisis. But I think this political crisis has deep roots that go back to its founding. It’s like Dad treated you badly, so all authority is bad and to be mistrusted and must be legislated against. (This is Sun square to Saturn in the US Chart.) And yes, leaders will mess up and become corrupt, and one of the strengths of democracy is that at least you can throw them out every 4 or 5 years. But while they are in power, they need to be entrusted with power, and this is what America finds so difficult. It adds to the conservatism of the nation. And it paradoxically creates another kind of tyranny, where a few extremists in Congress can hold the country to ransom.

Will the US default? The administration clearly thinks it might happen, or it wouldn’t be rolling out Timothy Geithner and Hillary Clinton to say there won’t be a default. As John Pilger says, don’t believe anything until it is officially denied.

The MC is at the top of a chart, and for a country it is expressive of the institutions of government. And the Sun is the leader. The US is currently coming out of Pluto square to the MC, while Uranus is still opposing it. And in the coming few years Pluto will oppose, and Uranus square, the Sun at 13 Cancer. So this political crisis has a few years to run.

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This suggests to me that we are not going to see agreement on a budget and a raising of the debt ceiling that will see the US through to the end of 2012, which is what the administration is seeking. This would amount to stability for the next 18 months, and the astrology suggests anything but stability: it suggests ongoing crisis, that will peak for the next 4 years as Uranus and Pluto undergo a series of exact squares.

For now, we will probably see a raise in the debt ceiling for a limited period, but no budget agreement. There will not be immediate default, but the world economy will not get the stability it needs to build a recovery.

In the 1970s Pluto and Uranus also hard aspected the US MC and Sun, and what we had was Watergate, a major and lasting crisis of government. If anything, this crisis will be deeper, because Uranus and Pluto are operating in tandem, whereas in the 1970s they were some years apart.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the US does eventually default, and for basically political reasons. Deep change is coming to its politics, and there would be little motive for change unless there had been consequences, such as a default.

Europe is under the same politico-economic pressures. We are patching up the countries that are threatening to default, but the debts are so big that there is little realistic prospect of them being paid. The deal with Greece amounted to a default, because as far as I could understand it amounted to creating favourable repayment terms over an extended period, and some debts being written off. This doesn’t mean the Greece problem has gone away, and Italy and Spain, which are much bigger economies, are looming in the background.

The Uranus-Pluto square affects the EU and all the major European countries. So as in the case of the US, the sense of crisis will continue for the next 4 years. I think that the Euro, whose creation was driven by politics, and not thought through properly, will unravel. It seems unavoidable for the sake of the economic survival of the wealthier EU countries. If not this year, then next year or the year after. And if the Euro unravels, the EU itself could unravel. If you were Greece, and you got kicked out of the Euro, national pride, apart from anything else, would insist you left the EU.

On 5th August, Uranus and Pluto will begin to separate, and the sense of crisis we are now experiencing may well start to lift, both in Europe and the US. But it will be back, and it will be more intense, and will remain so until something gives, some radical step is taken. In the case of the EU, it may involve leaving Spain or Italy to its fate. In the US, the debt ceiling may continue to rise until the default is actual, rather than temporary and politically driven. Whatever it is, it will result in a lot of soul-searching on both continents in the coming years. The financial crisis is turning into political crisis in both Europe and the US.