THE DISSOLUTION OF THE TORY PARTY?

The nearest thing we have for a chart for the Conservative Party in the UK is that for 12th Nov 1867 in London, time undetermined. The old Tory Party had dissolved in 1830, and there was a crucial event in 1846 when a new grouping coalesced around Benjamin Disraeli, who is now regarded as the father of the modern party. But there is no date for this. There was a major re-organization of the Party under Disraeli’s control in 1867, and this seems to be the best date there is, though it is not a nativity, which an 1846 chart would have been.

Incidentally, in the last half of the 18th century the name ‘Tory’ entered common usage as a term meaning ‘Irish bandit’, but eventually the party took over the name as its own.*

So the 1867 chart for our Irish bandits has the Sun at 19 Scorpio opposite Pluto at 15 Taurus, and this has worked quite well by transit in recent decades. The bandits lost to Labour in 1964, a year in which Neptune reached 18 Scorpio. In 1979 they won an election as Uranus conjoined their Sun, and in late 1990, as Pluto was about to conjoin the Sun, they removed Margaret Thatcher as leader.

In 2001, as Uranus finished squaring the natal Sun, William Hague stood down as leader after losing an election.

The next major transit has been Neptune squaring natal Sun-Pluto, which was happening in late 2005 as David Cameron was made leader, and seemed to promise the return to electability after 8 years in the wilderness. Cameron was the Tory response to Blair, whose leadership had been characterised by a series of major Neptune transits – and, appropriately, Cameron was elected leader under a Neptune transit to his party’s Sun.

But the game has changed since Gordon Brown became PM, Neptune is no longer ‘in’, and Cameron’s leadership seems to be dissolving (Neptune) before our eyes. This Neptune transit to the Tory Sun, which isn’t quite over yet, could easily mean a dissolution of the Party itself. Because it is hard to see, at present, how they can make themselves electable again.

Interestingly, an 1846 Chart - its actual natal chart - would have Neptune at 24/25 Aquarius. So the Tory Party is about to experience its Neptune Return, another strong pointer towards the possibility of dissolution.

*The above info comes from Nicholas Campion’s ‘The Book of World Horoscopes’.

BROWN, CAMERON and URANUS-PLUTO

In one of the 1st blogs I wrote, in July 2006, I said that I expected Gordon Brown to become PM in 2007 (as did practically everyone). But then I went on to say that for purely astrological reasons I expected Gordon Brown to win the next election, which would have to happen by 2009/10 at the latest, and that he would therefore be PM until around 2015.

This was at a time when Labour was trailing badly in the polls, the Tories had a bright new leader in the form of David Cameron, and Gordon Brown was looking like a hopeless case as a prospective Prime Minister, due to his reputation for plotting and power-seeking, and his less than adequate presentational skills.

So I didn’t believe the prediction when I made it. But remarkably, it’s looking like it might well come true.

The reason I made the prediction is that we have a Cardinal Uranus-Pluto t-square on the horizon that will define the period we are moving into. And Gordon Brown’s chart makes much stronger aspects with this square than does Cameron’s. It’s as simple as that. The collective tends to produce leaders that reflect, who are strongly connected to, the times they live in. How could it not be that way?

This is not a good thing or a bad thing. Hitler, for example, had a Uranus-ASC conjunction in Libra, which was closely caught by the Cardinal Uranus-Pluto t-square of the early 1930s, when he rose to power.

(I think we need to take a very wide orb – as much as 15 degrees - when considering the influence of outer planet aspects on a collective level, though obviously they get more intense as the aspect gets tighter. And Uranus and Pluto have been within 9 degrees of squaring each other this year. The next phase of our collective existence, post-9/11, post Bush, post War on Terror, is starting to become visible, or at least I think a lot of us can sense big changes coming, even if we don’t know, can’t know, what they are.)


Gordon Brown has MC at 5 Capricorn and ASC at 16 Aries, catching the Uranus Pluto square from approx 2010 to 2015, and before that Pluto will be crossing, and potentially empowering, his Midheaven. If he has an election this year, and then another in 2012, he could well win both, and be PM right through until 2017.

David Cameron has ASC somewhere between the last degrees of Virgo and 0 Libra. So he is certainly being hit by Pluto this year and next, but then that’s it, his chart doesn’t catch the Uranus-Pluto t-square. If he loses an election this year or next year, which is starting to look likely, the Pluto transit could reflect his destruction.

And you can see why. Cameron was the Tories’ answer to Blair, he is good on presentation. But we are moving into a new era in politics, Saturn is in Virgo, Pluto is shortly to be in Capricorn: it is an era of policy not grand aspirations, an era in which you are judged by results not looks, and Gordon Brown has very quickly taken us into this era. David Cameron is out of date already, defeated by a presentationally inept but competent and experienced leader 16 years his senior.

As the last year has shown, you can never be sure how things are going to go in politics. The US is also a case in point: look how George Bush has got out of his Iraq hole. At present Gordon Brown is on his honeymoon period, and Cameron is having a backlash after Brown brought his honeymoon to a close. Brown is competent and passionate, but he is boring, and there is a big authoritarian shadow over him from his time at the Treasury. His recent conference speech made the country sound like a one-party state, with him as undisputed leader (he has Moon conjunct Pluto in Leo). So if I were him, I’d call an election soon, while the going is good. And I’d much rather have him as PM than the lightweight David Cameron and his boy Chancellor, George Osborne. And I don’t mind if Brown is authoritarian if he can keep it within his party, then it’s their problem, not mine.

ON PREDICTABILITY

There was an interesting post yesterday by Pat Paquette on Predicting the Future. She quotes the sci-fi author William Gibson who says: “It's getting harder and harder to write about the future, because life as we know it is changing too rapidly to make any kind of credible guesses as to what the future might be like.”
He also says: “Over the last five to six years it's started to seem to me that there's something else going on as well, that maybe we're in what the characters in my novel Idoru call a 'nodal point,' or a series of them. We're in a place where things could just go anywhere."

So are we moving into a future of permanent unpredictability and accelerated change? Or is it just cyclical, that there are certain times when the future is a lot less predictable than at others? It’s an interesting question.

From one point of view, we are experiencing accelerated cultural change due to accelerating technological change, and there seems to be no end of that in sight. We are also in an age where a lot of the old traditions and their certainties have gone, and this again makes the future very open and unpredictable and interesting – and insecure. Maybe it will stay like this, maybe we won’t revert to set traditions, maybe we have a new type of long-term future ahead of us that’s far less predictable than ever before.

Astrologically, we are also entering a period of major change: a combination of the upcoming Cardinal Uranus-Pluto square, along with the fact that since 1993 we have been living at the start of a new 500 year age, with all 3 outer planet pairs in the waxing phase of their cycles.

What I reckon, though, is that the future becomes more unpredictable at certain times than at others, and now is one of those times. You can see it with the rise of China and India, and the looming global crises over the environment, energy and nuclear proliferation. As well as the previously mentioned accelerated cultural change. It’s huge, and it’s started. Who can tell where it’s all going to go?

And there have been big outer planet astrological configurations before, also corresponding to periods of huge change. Like the Cardinal Uranus-Pluto square of around 1930. How many astrologers could have foreseen the Great Depression, the rise of Fascism and World War II? Or take the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1960s: how many astrologers could have foreseen the huge cultural shift of that period?

I think we need periods where the future is highly unpredictable, we need an open future to shake things up from time to time, and now is one of those periods, and it has its unique features. But we have probably been at one of William Gibson’s ‘nodal points’, where ‘things could just go anywhere’ before, and it’s a fascinating place to be.

Pat Paquette quotes the well-known astrologer Rob Hand who, she says, ‘came close to predicting the September 11 terrorist attack, but he couldn't foresee the disaster itself. "I could have and did find the approximate date of this entire matter," he wrote "But I did not see anything like the severity of what happened because I could not have conceived of it."

This is also interesting, because I think that predictability changes according to whether or not you are inside or outside an event. A British astrologer friend of mine was guest-hosting the astrology section in one of the national papers in August 2001, and he predicted in his column that in the next few weeks there would be a major terrorist attack on America that would change everything. He ended up on TV for that!

It was astrologically straightforward, really: Saturn and Pluto lining up along the ASC/DESC of the US Chart, Pluto in Sag, what do you expect? For people in many countries it would be like so you got attacked and a few thousand people died, that happens to us all the time, it’s well within the bounds of possibility. For the US, this was a new event, it was much harder to imagine and therefore to predict. It rocked the US to the core, because it was so unfamiliar, not because it was especially awful, which it wasn’t by world or historical standards.

In any case, 9/11 will seem much less significant when the events of the upcoming Uranus-Pluto square get properly underway.

Saturn in Virgo and Global Warming

Saturn in Virgo: it’s time to get down to the nuts and bolts of the environmental crisis (Virgo is associated with both the cycles of nature and technology). They’ve just found that the maize biofuels that are being grown in the US, which are starting to outstrip in quantity the maize grown for animal feed, create overall about 6% more greenhouse gases than oil. The reason is nitrous oxide, a very potent greenhouse gas, which these particular biofuels give off when burnt. It was never properly researched before being extensively promoted.

And then there’s another shoot-yourself-in-the-foot Virgo issue, this one to do with non-GM soya. To meet the demand for this crop, loads of the Amazon is being torn down to grow it. Again we need Saturn to think it all through. In this case it's because the world is so interconnected and complicated these days, you do something you think is good, and it causes harm somewhere else. It's probably got to do with the mutual reception of Neptune in Aquarius and Uranus in Pisces, as well as Pluto in Sag, two of the signatures of globalisation.

The environmental crisis has only become a major political issue in the last few years, during Saturn in Leo, a time for grand political statements. The next few years, with Saturn in Virgo, will be a time of thinking through what actually works.

Which will hopefully include some re-thinking on the causes of global warming. CO2 as the big reason for global warming has become a fundamentalist cause, you’re not taken seriously if you beg to differ. This will eventually cause a backlash.

A friend showed me an article the other day. Archaeologists working on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides have been researching how Neolithic people lived there. And it was mentioned in passing that the climate for the period from 10,000 years ago to 3,500 years ago was warm and dry, like the Mediterranean is now. This was mentioned IN PASSING. This friend has seen the same stuff mentioned in connection with archaeological research all over the world e.g. the crops grown in certain parts of China several thousand years ago were suitable for a much warmer climate. But again, the archaeologists mention this in passing, global warming is not their territory; besides which it is a hot political potato and they have their careers to consider. And so you don’t see much of this sort of stuff talked about in the arguments around CO2 as the main cause of global warming (and obviously it’s an argument against rather than for.)

It’s like our knowledge is too compartmentalised and in this case too politicised for the full picture to become available. Saturn in Virgo (analytical, compartmentalised knowledge) could well continue this trend. Or maybe it will call on its opposite, Pisces (universal, interconnected knowledge) to join up the dots.

THE DANCE OF SATURN AND VENUS

In her Sabian Symbols blog, Lynda Hill writes about The Dance of Saturn and Venus. Saturn at 3 Virgo has just finished covering the ground that Venus has already been over in the last couple of months, and will cover again by mid-October. Here is an excerpt:

"Saturn is 'the ring-pass-not', that edge or boundary where we pass from the personal to the collective. Venus wants what she wants and she wants it now and she wants it personally. Saturn's demands are far less interested in taking care of personal needs and wants; one has to accomplish, put up with and do things more on a collective, transpersonal level... and, often, Saturn wants his pound of flesh for doing it... there is often a personal cost or sacrifice which certainly doesn't leave us with the warm and fuzzy feelings that Venus often does…

The question now is: what have we learnt about duty, obligation, doing for others versus our own needs, our need to be the center of our own universe, our need to have things around us that satisfy, satiate and quench our desires. Saturn's not interested in our desires, that's the ground of Venus."

NEPTUNE and THE GROUND BENEATH MY FEET

I was sitting round the table chatting after dinner last night, and I was saying how the astrology I do is all well and good, but I’m not sure it’s the main thing I do, that I don’t think I yet know what the ‘central plank’ is, even though I know the astrology will always be there. At that point the wooden chair I was sitting on completely collapsed and I ended up on the floor.

It was brilliant synchronicity for someone who is just entering on a Neptune conjunct Sun transit: the ground giving way beneath me. Someone recently pointed out that the trouble I’ve been having with my knees (which I’ve now sorted) has the same sort of message to do with the ground I stand on.

And, as I blogged a few months ago, on the last two sweat lodges I have been in, a cockerel has been doing some untimely crowing when it was my round, and for no-one else. That’s TWICE. It’s a message about a new beginning.

The trouble with being tuned in to these sorts of processes (which astrologers tend to be) is that you get notice of change a long time in advance, and it can seem like a long wait.

But it’s very welcome. It’s like something in my foundation is no longer adequate, one of the struts on which I stand is shonky, it feels like time for something impure to be expelled, time to be swallowed up and re-born.

THE RUN ON NORTHERN ROCK

There was a run on the Northern Rock bank in the UK over the weekend, the first run on a bank in the UK since the 1970s. It finished yesterday after the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, took the unprecedented step of guaranteeing the savings of all the investors.

A run on a bank is when everyone tries to take their money out. It’s a confidence thing. Even if the bank is still liquid, if everyone tries to take their money out, the bank will founder, because a lot of those savings will have been put in long term loans to other people e.g. mortgages, so the money won’t be there to give back to the investor. So if you see everyone else taking their money out, you want to as well before it goes too far. So it will go too far. And then people who save with other banks start worrying about their money, it is infectious, confidence in the banking system can plummet. You had this in Depression America, a huge run on the banks, and what Roosevelt did was to close them all down, spend time on the radio re-assuring the nation, and gradually they were allowed to open again. And it worked.

It all seems to go back to the American sub-prime housing crisis, where banks had lent money in the form of mortgages to lots of people who had poor credit records. Eventually, of course, there was trouble, and there were big losses flying around. The trouble was, these loans had been sold on and sold on, sliced up and packaged with other debt – some good quality debt, some not so good, so no-one knew who would end up with a big hole in their accounts as these sub-prime mortgages went tits up.

What was known was that some institutions spread around the world would be liable in a big way, but no-one knew who, the debt packaging had become too complex.

So we got a ‘credit crunch’ – no-one wanted to lend money to anyone else in case it turned out they had some of this bad debt, meaning your loan to these people wouldn’t be safe.

And this was problematic for Northern Rock (or Northern Wreck, as the BBC newsreader accidentally called it the other night). Banks usually finance mortgages by using the deposits that ordinary savers have left with them. Northern Rock was doing this, but was also financing an unusually high percentage of its mortgages by borrowing money short-term on the money markets, and then lending it on to house-buyers long-term. Of course, the bank would need to borrow again to pay off the short-term money it had borrowed, but this was fine as long as there was plenty of credit around.

But then there wasn’t, and Northern Rock had to go cap in hand to the Bank of England and borrow money off them to meet its commitments. This happened late last week, and the run on the bank began almost immediately.

In a way, it wasn’t Northern Rock’s fault, in the sense that it wasn’t due to lending money irresponsibly, though of course borrowing short-term to lend long-term is always going to be risky. But they became the victim of irresponsible lending within another country thousands of miles away. Things are so complex and inter-related in the financial system nowadays that you don’t know what is going to lead to what. Even the professionals often can’t get their heads around it. (Answer: use astrology!)

But the root cause seems to be the credit bubble that has been building for the last number of years, with banks encouraging people to build up unaffordable debts, even though this wasn’t what Northern Rock was doing.

There have been much worse crises than this, but astrologically it does seem to be the sort of thing you’d expect towards the end of Pluto’s time in Sagittarius. Pluto was/is a god of riches, Sagittarius is about confidence, expansion, enthusiasm, and Pluto brings out the shadow side of a sign. So we have a bubble: confidence and expansion without foundation. (You also get people looking for meaning in their lives (Sag) through the acquisition of wealth (Pluto)). As a planet reaches the end of a sign, the meaning of the planet’s passage in that sign becomes clearer, it culminates, the transit of that sign is over and we can look back and see what it was all about. You also start to get a whiff of the next sign, which can also provide perspective. In this case it is Capricorn, and what better sign if you are trying to address a financial bubble?

Jupiter is also in Sagittarius at the moment, beginning its final run through the sign, and will conjoin Pluto in December this year. So astrologically it is the perfect time for a bubble to build up and burst, and probably could have been foreseen by an astrologer following the markets and aware of the extravagant borrowings building up.

Pluto’s ingress into Sagittarius was on Jan 17 1995, out of which we can generate a chart for the whole transit. And what do we find? Pluto at 0 Sag (of course) conjunct Jupiter at 7 Sag conjunct Venus at 9 Sag. Venus is also a wealth planet, so again a financial bubble was predictable, but here it characteristic of the whole transit. And of course there was also the dotcom bubble around the year 2000.

Another aspect of Pluto in Sag is truth and lies. This first emerged as a political issue at the time of the Iraq War, where people in the UK were upset as they had never been before because the politicians had lied to them. This was new. Now, with the BBC interviewing customers in the bank run, one person after the other was saying they did not believe the government assurances that Northern Rock would be OK. Iraq was cited. So this is perhaps a gift that Pluto in Sag has given us, that people expect more truth from their politicians and, for all his faults, I think Gordon Brown may be the right sort of leader to undo the harm that Blair did in this respect.

There is also the Saturn-Neptune opposition to consider, which was at its most intense from Sept 2006 to June 2007. One meaning of this transit is bringing reality (Saturn) to fantasy (Neptune), i.e. the bursting of financial bubbles, and what do we find in the chart for the first opposition of Saturn to Neptune? Venus at 23 Leo, square to Jupiter in Scorpio and conjoining Saturn and opposing Neptune. On the basis of this chart I predicted last yearthat Saturn-Neptune would bring about a check to the credit boom.

And what do we find as Saturn-Neptune made its final crossing in June this year? Again Venus was there in Leo aspecting the opposition, and has been hovering near there ever since, completing the cycle that began last year, and firmly keeping to her promise of a check on the credit boom.

So with my 20-20 astrological hindsight, I realise that using some fairly simple astrology (which I always think gives the best results) I could have made a killing. Maybe next time!

BEHOLD THE PROPHET!

From an essay by Tom Wolfe called ‘Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died’:

“The story I have to tell,” wrote Nietzsche, “is the history of the next two centuries.” He predicted (in Ecce Homo) that the 20th century would be a century of “wars such as have never happened on earth”, wars catastrophic beyond imagining. And why? Because human beings would no longer have a god to turn to, to absolve them of their guilt… The blind and re-assuring faith they formerly poured into their belief in God, said Nietzsche, they would now pour into a belief in barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods: “If the doctrines… of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal, doctrines I consider true but deadly” – he says in an allusion to Darwinism in Untimely Meditations – “are hurled into the people for another generation... then nobody should be surprised when… brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non-brothers… will appear in the arena of the future.”


Nietzsche said that mankind would limp on through the 20th century “on the mere pittance” of the old decaying God-based moral codes. But then, in the twenty-first, would come a period more dreadful than the great wars, a time of the “total eclipse of all values” (in The Will to Power). This would also be a frantic period of “revaluation”, in which people would try to find new systems of values to replace the osteoporotic skeletons of the old. But you will fail, he warned, because you cannot believe in moral codes without simultaneously believing in a god who points at you with his fearsome forefinger and says “Thou shalt” or “Thou shalt not.”

Why should we bother ourselves with a dire prediction that seems so far-fetched as “the total eclipse of all values”? Because of man’s track record, I should think. After all, in Europe, in the peaceful decade of the 1880s, it must have seemed even more far-fetched to predict the world wars of the 20th century and the barbaric brotherhoods of Nazism and Communism. Ecce vates! Ecce vates! Behold the prophet! How much more proof can one demand of a man’s powers of prediction?"

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Nietzsche was born Oct 15 1844. He had Moon in Sag, which is philosophically inclined, and said to be found in many teachers. He had Sun in Libra opposite to Pluto in Aries. Oppositions often engage us with the world, we find one end of it ‘out there’; in Nietzsche’s case, it was a new vision (Aries) that would transform the collective (Pluto). He also had Mercury in Libra conjunct Mars, opposite Uranus in Aries, so again we have the new vision after the death of God, expressed with force (Mars) and original insight (Uranus).

One qualification on Mr Wolfe’s analysis: he suggests we can’t have a moral code without an external authority, without a god who points the finger. I think this is actually true on a collective level, for people by and large inherit their values and ethics from their families and from the society around them, their sense of authority is external. We can see this in the vulnerability of the collective to fashion, to advertising, to cries of war from the government, to witch-hunts created by the popular press. But it is not true for the minority who claw their way out of the received wisdoms and find it within themselves to stand alone, who can live without the unconscious sense of solidarity with the herd-mind. This sounds terribly patronising, but I don’t mean it to be, it’s just how things are.

NEPTUNE CALLING

I have been wary of the word ‘transcend’ for a long time, as it was used in the Buddhist group I was once involved with as a means of control. What you do is to encourage people to ‘transcend’ their personal difficulties and problems by focussing on a more ‘spiritual’ dimension. In this way they never get to grips with their own psychology, and remain vulnerable to manipulation by others.

The trouble is, there is a certain amount of truth in the idea of transcending. In fact, there is a wonderful truth in it, as Neptune has been showing me. Neptune came close to my Aquarian Sun this year, and will conjoin it next year.



The issue is my response to pressure, which tends to make me feel very stressed and snappy. It goes back to childhood stuff, and the pressure I felt then to ‘perform’ and ‘succeed’. Recently I had a period of 6 weeks or so where I had a lot on, loads of practical stuff to sort, and I felt under pressure, and I was hating it at times, and I bit the occasional person’s head off. But I was learning also to switch into Neptune mode (he is not strong in my chart, but he is nodal!), where I just trusted that things would sort themselves, that if I waited the right person would turn up at the right time, or events would unfold favourably, and every time this was what happened. This recent period taught me a lot about a different way of going about things.

And the point is that I was sorting my response to pressure not on its own level, not by going into all this old stuff and trying to change it, trying to persuade myself that I no longer had to ‘perform’, but by going onto another level altogether, where I just trusted in being helped. Now it probably would be possible to sort on its own level, but I’m 49 and I still haven’t! On the other hand, Neptune came along and said look do it this way, here’s a way of operating that not many people know about, it’s been forgotten about in our culture (a Native American friend works like this all the time).

So there it is. If there’s a way you are that you find hard to shift, call on Neptune, he may show you a way out on another level that you’d never thought of.

SATURN IN VIRGO and the 1960s GENERATION

There’s been a lot of Virgo around lately, firstly with Saturn entering the sign last week, and then an eclipse in the sign on Tuesday. We can look forward to leaders/authorities (Saturn) who feel a sense of service (Virgo), which Tony Blair claimed he would be, but which Gordon Brown actually is. I used to be so pissed off with Gordon Brown for blatantly coveting Tony Blair’s job, and making life very difficult for him, and keeping it up for 10 years. But now I’m thinking maybe it was partly because he didn’t think Tony was very good at his job, and he knew he could do a much better one. Because he does seem to be quietly competent and thoughtful in a way that I never felt Blair was. I certainly couldn’t see him losing his head over an issue like Iraq in the way that Blair did. And Brown does have Moon in Leo, so he KNOWS he’s the best!
A young Leo who is homeless and jobless and drifting was telling me yesterday how his life was a success story when he looked at some of his friends. “Admittedly so-and-so has got a flat,” he said, “but his head’s fucked, he dresses in women’s clothing…” Good old Leos, they don’t suffer from low self-esteem, they KNOW they’re a success, they don’t have to stoop to prove it, it is an innate quality of their being.

Back to prosaic Saturn in Virgo. Uranus was conjunct Pluto in Virgo for much of the 1960s, so a whole generation was born with this powerful signature in their charts. They are all now in their 40s, and Saturn is going to sweep across this generational signature over the next couple of years. Saturn is about actualisation, concrete manifestation, worldly achievement.

This generation is of an age where they are starting to move into prominent positions in the world – like David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party, born in 1966, with the Uranus-Pluto conjunction just about conjunct his Ascendant. So this Saturn transit is going to bring in a whole new zeitgeist, a whole new spirit into leadership of all kinds. This happens anyway when Saturn moves into a new sign, but it will be particularly noticeable and intense as it moves through Virgo, because of its timely activation of this very interesting and probably very powerful 1960s generation.

We don’t yet know what this generation has to offer, but we do have clues from the nature of the 1960s. They will be unafraid to challenge existing authorities, and some will be quite prepared to have bloody revolutions in order to do so. They will put forward radical ideas, some of them creative and forward-looking, some of them archaic and authoritarian. They will do brilliant things and awful things, but they will not be dull. Technological change (Uranus) will be empowered (Pluto) in response to the environmental crisis (Virgo).

Saturn will activate this generation, get them in positions of influence, ready to play a part in the next big change and test that we will all be passing through, the Uranus-Pluto square of 2009-2019. And this aspect is itself the opening square of the new Uranus-Pluto cycle under which this generation was born. So it all fits together rather neatly.

Incidentally, the Uranus-Pluto square will be peaking from 2012-2015. This corresponds with the time of the big Mayan prediction. From a western astrological viewpoint, 2012 will certainly be a time of big change, but not the biggest, and we have been there before in e.g. the Uranus-Pluto square of the 1930s.

Virgo is about the cycles of nature and about technology, so it relates to the environmental crisis. Having talked about it for some years now, Saturn in Virgo is likely to be a time when more is actually done about it, and leaders embrace it more. As I’ve said before, the environmental crisis seems to have been boiled down to one issue, carbon dioxide, in which there is no room for doubt that it is a major cause of global warming. If you do doubt it, you’re buying into the propaganda of the oil companies. So saith the Goracle. Why do we always have to be so idiotic on a collective level?

GENERAL BETRAY-US

There has just been a solar eclipse on 11th Sept of all days, and many of us were probably wondering what significant event would occur. (See my post of 22 Aug.) Particularly as the New Moon of the eclipse squared a Mars Return for the US. The eclipse event seems to have been General David Petraeus saving Bush’s bacon by saying the surge in Iraq is working. There have been one or two protests from Congressmen, but Bush seems to have got away with it.

So you put 30,000 more troops into Baghdad and for now it gets a bit safer. Of course it does. The surge is ‘working’. And of course there would be a huge amount of bloodshed if the US withdrew, as the General also pointed out. This seemed to be enough to win the political game without the need for a coherent military strategy, which was extraordinary. As a sop, Bush is now saying some troops will be withdrawn by next summer if certain conditions are met. Big if.

The lack of military strategy was more than made up for by the copious amounts of political strategy. Not just Bush’s political strategy, but Petraeus’ as well. The man reeks of political ambition, and he said what needed to be said in order to advance himself. And betray the American people, who want the war to end. General Betray-us.

He was born 11th November 1952. He has Mars in Capricorn, a traditional placement for high military position (I have Mars in Capricorn trine to Pluto – maybe I missed my vocation?) He has Sun in Scorpio, so he is at ease with the necessary death that occurs in wars. But his Sun is square to Pluto, so he is maybe a bit too at ease with it, he maybe enjoys it, he maybe doesn’t mind too much if a death is unnecessary.

And not only does he know about power (Sun in Scorpio), but he seeks it for its own sake, and will do whatever is necessary to obtain it (Sun square to Pluto). Nasty, charming, capable, treacherous man. Or maybe I’m just pissed off with him.

PLUTO IN CAPRICORN - IT'S ALL ABOUT KNEES!

I’ve been having trouble with my knees for at least 2 years, and in the last few months they’ve got very painful. I stopped cycling recently and that helped. I was thinking I must have arthritis and that I won’t be able to walk in 10 years. On Thursday, I finally saw the doctor. He pointed out that I’m a bit flat-footed and that I should put some supports in my shoes. I bought some that day and started wearing them. You’re supposed to break yourself into them gradually. I went at it full time, and on Friday, as Pluto stood exactly still, my knees were more painful than they’d ever been.


On Saturday, as Pluto began to move forward towards Capricorn (knees), I started to improve. Today, Sunday, my knees are better than they’ve been for a long time. This is Pluto in Capricorn: it sorts out knee problems!

A MYTH FOR NEPTUNE TRANSITS

The other day I wrote about Pluto transits in terms of one of the central myths around Pluto, his abduction of Persephone. And I began wondering if I could find a myth that describes Neptune transits. Generally speaking, transits become more powerful and transformative the further the transiting planet is from the Sun. Pluto is usually further out than Neptune, but at present Neptune is further out – this is a regular part of the cycle – so you could argue that it is Neptune we need to look to for the most powerful transits.

Not, I think, that there is much in it. These two planets are the biggest transformers, and I also think there can be considerable overlap in the types of experience they drag us through, willingly or unwillingly. For example, the psychologist Carl Jung wrote in his book ‘Memories, Dreams and Reflections’ about the time in his life, as he approached 40, when he broke with Freud (Jung had been the Crown Prince), withdrew from much of his daily round of work, and was plunged into his internal world for several years. During this period, he said, were sown the seeds of everything that came later. The relevant chapter is called “Confrontation with the Unconscious.” So Pluto transit or Neptune transit?

In fact it was Neptune, and this is suggested by the image-based world that he was plunged into, the archetypal spirit beings with whom he communed and the psychic experiences. But that break with the father-figure is also classic Pluto-Sun stuff, as was the withdrawal from his old life and the sowing of the seeds of everything that came later.

Someone I know is at the beginning of a square transit from Pluto to her Aries Sun, and what has kicked in straight away is a deepening of her psychic abilities and ability to heal. So Neptune or Pluto?

I can’t find anything in the character of Neptune, or in the stories about him, that gives a flavour of what Neptune transits are about. Or what the sign he rules, Pisces, is about, apart from the fact that he’s some sort of protector of the ocean. The Romans related to him much more as a god of horses and horse-racing. So he might be wrongly-named. I think that modern science is on the whole too inimical to astrology for us to trust that the right sychronicities will occur when a planet is named. Though they got it right with Pluto.

Personally I have more experience of Pluto transits than of Neptune transits. I have just begun a Neptune-Sun transit, and appropriately I have taken up swimming. My last big Neptune transit was from 1977-81, when it conjoined my Moon-Saturn. The themes then were awakening, illusion and breaking with parental expectations. The eventual outcome was 18 years of Buddhism, which was an expression of a mixture of awakening to a wider truth, and a load of illusions about why I was doing what I was doing.

I Googled ‘god of illusion’ and the 1st result I got was Dionysus, who Liz Greene promotes as a strongly Piscean figure in her book ‘The Astrology of Fate’. In particular, there is the story of Dionysus and King Pentheus.


Dionysos

As a young man Dionysus had been driven mad by Zeus’ jealous wife Hera. “He went wandering all over the world, accompanied by his tutor… and a company of wild Maenads. He taught the art of the vine to Egypt and India, and then returned to wander around Greece. Eventually he arrived at Thebes, the place of his mother’s birth. There King Pentheus… disliked the god’s dissolute appearance, and arrested him and his shabby train. But Dionysus drove the king mad, and Pentheus found that he had shackled a bull instead of the god. The Maenads escaped and went raging out upon the mountains, where they tore wild animals in pieces. The King attempted to stop them but, inflamed with wine and religious ecstasy, the Maenads, led by the King’s mother, rent him limb from limb and tore off his head. Thus he met the same fate as the god whom he had rejected.” (From The Astrology of Fate)

And from Wikipedia: “The female worshippers of Dionysus were known as Maenads, who often experienced divine ecstasy. Pentheus was slowly driven mad by the compelling Dionysus, and lured to the woods of Mount Cithaeron to see the Maenads. When the women spied Pentheus, they tore him to pieces like they did earlier in the play to a herd of cattle. Brutally, his head was torn off by his mother Agave as he begged for his life.”

We could say that the essence of a Neptune transit is possession by the god. This is different to a Pluto transit, where you could say the essence is abduction by the god, and being brought to his underworld. Apparently this was one of the unusual characteristics of the worship of Dionysus in Roman times, that he was experienced internally i.e. you were possessed.


Pentheus is torn apart by the Maenads

The Maenads themselves are a graphic description of what happens when you surrender to the god, there is this experience of ecstasy as the normal inhibitions and controlling, rational will are no longer present. OK, they also tear animals and even people to pieces, but this is symbolic of the ecstatic freedom of primal consciousness, and the radical dissolution of ordinary, ego consciousness under a Neptune transit: you are torn to pieces, in particular your head is torn off by your mother! You are no longer in control (head), and this allows an experience of a primal, source consciousness (mother), that actually takes care of us (mother), and the transit is about learning to let more of that in to our daily lives. And it’s not like we have a choice. What happened to Pentheus is also a description of what happens when you resist Neptune/Dionysus, when you refuse, like Pentheus, to worship him. You get torn apart by mad women!

So the essence of a Neptune transit is surrender to this god, becoming a ‘walk-in’ if you like! If you oppose him you’ll be torn apart – and this will be the difficult part of the transit, because we all have our sides that want to remain in control. But this is also deeply transformative. And to the extent that we surrender, there is an initiation into his ecstatic realm. There was a long tradition of mystery cults around Dionysus, but very little is known about them. This is appropriate, for his realm is esoteric and beyond words, and people who have been there speak about it guardedly, if at all. Another reason for the secrecy is that this sort of experience/behaviour is felt as deeply threatening by conventional society. Hence the opposition that Dionysus regularly encountered. Hence, perhaps, the official opposition to ‘rave’ culture in the UK.

So the two mythical aspects around Neptune transits that I am picking out here are firstly the Maenads, who through surrender of the ‘civilised’ ego experience the ecstasy and secret knowledge of Dionysus’s realm; and secondly the story of Pentheus, who symbolises the transformation that the resistant, controlling ego undergoes. Dionysus makes you mad, and leads you to a place where you are torn apart. But which is the real madness, Dionysus’ realm, or that of the deluded ego which thinks it is in control?

P.S. I accidentally published this before I meant to. This has never happened before. OK Maenads, I'll stop trying to 'get it right' and go with you!

PLUTO IN CAPRICORN - BRING IT ON!

From the front page of today’s Times newspaper:

“Almost half of Britain’s mosques are under the control of a hardline Islamic sect whose leading preacher loathes Western values and has called on Muslims to “shed blood” for Allah, an investigation by The Times has found.

Riyadh ul Haq, who supports armed jihad and preaches contempt for Jews, Christians and Hindus, is in line to become the spiritual leader of the Deobandi sect in Britain. The ultra-conservative movement, which gave birth to the Taleban in Afghanistan, now runs more than 600 of Britain’s 1350 mosques, according to a police report seen by The Times.”

We are certainly reaching the culmination stage of Pluto in Sagittarius! You don’t have to be a neo-con to protest about the government of Britain letting this happen. On the other hand, every time the government has moved to restrict these fundamentalists, you have people protesting about human rights and making it very hard for the government to act. I think that liberalism has its excesses, and we have to accept that occasionally we will go through periods where there are dangers, and rights do have to be curtailed, and once the danger is over we can relax again. It is not necessarily sinister when a government brings in these sorts of measures. It will inevitably happen from time to time. Though I can understand that if it is the Bush government doing it, it probably is sinister!

What we need is responsible government, by which I do not mean extreme right wing. What we need is Pluto in Capricorn! Bring it on!

There was another example yesterday. A gay male couple had become foster parents, and it turned out they were sexually abusing the young boys in their care. The authorities had not subjected this couple to the usual ongoing level of scrutiny for fear of being thought homophobic. More liberal excess. Bring on Pluto in Capricorn!

George Bush is Pluto in Sag – government by ideology – rather than Pluto in Capricorn, which is more grounded, and responds to actual circumstances. As Pluto moves into Capricorn next year, he will increasingly be seen as out of step with the spirit of the times.

VISUAL ASTROLOGY NEWSLETTER

If you don't already receive it, it's worth getting yourself on the email list for Bernadette Brady's visual astrology newletter. Just go to www.zyntara.com and put your name in the box at the bottom left of the page.

This month's newletter is about the current interplay between the recent total lunar eclipse, the star Regulus, and Saturn and Mars. As ever, Bernadette Brady cites previous times in history when the sky pattern was the same. She begins:

"A strong King employs a henchman to remove a threat,
and the weather turns cold and wet….

In the last month, Regulus, the great king star, has been joined by Saturn, the planet of the king. With Regulus located on the ecliptic, this sky event occurs every 29 years, plus or minus some months. But this year it has been a little different, for several reasons. Firstly, Mars has moved into the position in the sky where it rides between the horns of the Great Bull of Heaven, Taurus, and while these two events have been happening in the sky, parts of the world have had a spectacular total lunar eclipse.

Nergal (Mars) rides the Great Bull of Heaven - Taurus

So let’s unpack this sky story..."

The strong King (Saturn/Regulus) employing a henchman (Mars) to remove a threat has obvious connections with the upcoming report on the Iraq War by General Petraeus, which George Bush hopes will save his bacon.

PLUTO STATIONS

Pluto is currently stationing retrograde i.e. standing still in the sky, about to turn round and move forwards. This currently happens in early Sept every year, and I always see it as an important time. This is because there are always people having major Pluto transits, and the retrograde period – which lasts for about 5 months – can seem the hardest and most hopeless. So I’m always telling people to hang on till late August/early Sept.

Pluto, the Lord of the Underworld, is well known for having abducted the young virgin Persephone and made her his wife.
It seems to have been a suitable match, which isn’t the usual outcome of abductions. Maybe she was an early case of Stockholm syndrome, in which hostages become loyal to their captors? Or maybe Pluto is unbelievably alluring, maybe it’s like being abducted by Brad Pitt? Or Gordon Brown? Oh Gordon, please take me to your lair!

At any rate, Persephone’s Mum Ceres, a nature goddess, was distraught, and there was a famine until she found her. Because Persephone had eaten food in the underworld, she would from then on have to stay there for 6 months of the year, which became autumn and winter, but for the rest of the time she could be back with her Mother, which became spring and summer.

So we could see the Pluto cycle like this, with summer being his forward motion, and winter his backwards motion. In the retrograde cycle we truly are in the underworld. We have been abducted by Pluto, it is not our choice at all. We are taken through a series of experiences, often difficult, often to do with old issues whose time has come. And ultimately we will be empowered. Will we let ourselves be happily married to him? That is the only choice we have. There is no divorce with Pluto, no running home to Mum. And this bastard who abducted you, you have to trust him intimately, let him tear you apart, let him put his hands in your innards and devour them, because this is deeply healing, this will renew you and change you.

But Pluto has now finished his meal, he’s untucked his napkin and is wiping the gravy off his face. And it’s time to emerge into regular life renewed. But you’ll always have the scar tissue to remind you of that realm, to remind you that, like Persephone, part of you always belongs there.

What I notice about Pluto is that he likes being taken seriously, he likes being honoured, he likes me telling other people to take note of him. We don’t propitiate the gods any more, we have a sophisticated intellectual understanding of them, and as astrologers we encounter them through words and intuition and imagination, which is great, but we don’t encounter them physically. I think there is a raw power to these gods that we can miss out on.

From Wiki:

“When the Greeks propitiated Hades, they banged their hands on the ground to be sure he would hear them. Black animals, such as sheep, were sacrificed to him, and it is believed that at one time even human sacrifices were offered. The blood from sacrifices to Hades dripped into a pit so it could reach him. The person who offered the sacrifice had to turn away his face.”

I don’t know how we could do this today without getting arrested. I’m not personally up for human sacrifice. But I think if you’re prepared to eat meat, you should be prepared to kill an animal yourself, and what better way to do that than by offering the animal to Pluto? It easily seems barbaric to us. But actually I think it can give us a reverence for life, a sense of connection to life, a sense of the awesome powers that are out there, that modern ‘civilised’ life doesn’t get near.

NEPTUNE

Neptune came within 1½ degrees of conjoining my Sun this year, and is going to cross it next April. So it’s happening. Neptune or Pluto hard-aspecting the Sun, Moon or an Angle is about as big as it gets.

What’s been happening lately is that I’ve been relaxing about outcomes and about sorting day-to-day problems in a way I’ve never done before. About 6 weeks ago I found myself with a load of practical stuff to sort that went on and on and on. Each time a problem came up, I got in the habit of thinking don’t worry about it, an easy solution will present itself in plenty of time, something or someone entirely appropriate will turn up, and sure enough they did. And this just kept happening.

This is Neptune (as opposed to Saturn). With Neptune, things happen because you need them to, effortlessly, because you know that they will happen if you don’t intrude. With Saturn, things happen because you will them to, you work hard, you plan, you MAKE it all happen – and you probably worry as well. That way is easy for me.

So this has been a really nice Neptunian initiation. And the transit is only beginning.