THE ZODIAC, THE FIXED STARS and HITLER'S MERCURY

I’ve lately been feeling more dissatisfied than usual with the imaginary nature of the zodiac in modern astrology. The planets are in real places, and their relationships with each other are real, but the constellations that are supposed to be behind them and influencing them are not there. This is partly due to precession, but actually the neat 30 degree segments they were divided into several thousand years ago are also a fiction, because nature is never like that.

In a way western astrology is more straightforward than Vedic astrology in this respect. A western astrologer will tell you that the zodiac we use bears no relationship to the stars. I don’t want to put words in the mouth of a Vedic astrologer, but their astrology takes precession into account, so there seems to be more of a relationship with the stars, but actually the neat 30 degree fiction still remains.

This is not to say that western astrology doesn’t work, because it does, and it does so very well. But as an astrologer, what turns me on is my symbolic relationship to the sky, that is the foundation, that is what moves me, and that is what in large measure is not there. It’s like modern western astrology for me is part relationship to the sky and part tea-leaves.


I don’t need a scientific explanation of astrology, I don’t think there is one, it is not that sort of knowledge, and it’s a mug’s game to try and ‘prove’ astrology in scientific/statistical terms. But I do explain astrology to myself in terms of the multi-layered symbolic nature of reality, that if you know how to read them there are all sorts of omens in nature that can guide us. That for me is a satisfactory explanation, it’s part of the way things are and their interconnectedness.

But an astrology without a real relationship to the stars for me has no explanation, and I don’t get that visceral sense of looking at the sky and having a sense of the gods speaking to us, of human destiny unfolding.

So I’ve been having this notion that maybe I should take a look at Fixed Star astrology. The stars are called fixed because they stay in pretty much the same place, unlike the planets, which are ‘Wandering Stars’. Using the Fixed stars, you are not artificially confined to those stars which happen to lie along the ecliptic, the Sun’s path along the sky. Of course, you suddenly find yourself with thousands of them, but it seems to be the brightest that have the most significance, as you’d expect, and there are about 30 of them.

All these stars have their own ancient meanings behind them, which are not expressed in the sophisticated psychological terms which we modern astrologers have become used to. They are rawer and in a way more powerful. And they perform their own dances in the sky into which symbolism can be read: some of them are visible all the time at night, and some have periods in which they disappear below the horizon for months and then re-appear, enriched from their time in the Underworld; some have periods in which they either rise or set at night, and so have an ongoing interaction with human affairs. And so on.

In case I’m sounding like I know what I’m talking about, I don’t, I’m just looking into it. But that’s one of the nice things about the blogosphere, you can open your mouth without being an expert or having a certificate. And all my info is coming from Brady’s Book of Fixed Stars, by Bernadette Brady.

Anyway, one thing you can do is look at an individual planet’s relationships with the fixed stars on the day you were born. What is significant is if a particular planet was on an Angle at some point during the day at the same time as one of the Fixed Stars was on an Angle – any Angle. This is called a Paran relationship. The Angle the Fixed Star is on points to the period of your life when that Star will tend to be expressed. And the planet involved gives you the lens through which the Star expresses itself.

So here’s an example from the chart of everyone’s favourite Fascist, Adolf Hitler. He was born on 20 April 1889 at 17.37 in Braunau an Inn in Austria. He has Mercury in the 7th House at 26 Aries, but there would inevitably have been points during that day when Mercury was Rising, on the MC, on the DESC and on the Nadir. And the point at which Mercury was setting i.e. on the DESC –at 18.24 – the star Wega rose. So Mercury and Wega have a Paran relationship in Hitler’s Chart.

This is what Bernadette Brady has to say about it:

Wega is the magical, charismatic star and having it linked to Mercury implies either magical ideas or fantasies, as well as the ability to talk, to charm, to have charisma by the spoken or written word. This skill would have been with Hitler from his early childhood. He was therefore a naturally skilled, charismatic orator who had the potential of creating the magic of Orpheus’ music with his voice: hypnotic and entrancing. This is further emphasised by the star being in curtailed passage: the star has less contact with the Earth and is therefore more extreme or less easily modified by life’s experiences.

Bernadette Brady and Darrelyn Gunzburg regularly do a free Visual Astrology newsletter by email. You can subscribe by going to http://www.astrologos.co.uk/ and signing up.

BUSH, BLAIR, BROWN and their 12th HOUSE SUNS

George Bush was born 6 July 1946, 7.26 New Haven, Connecticut. His Sun is in the 12th House, which is a secretive, withdrawn place for the Sun to be, and strange to find in a national leader. Gordon Brown, the current UK Prime Minister, also has Sun in the 12th House, as did his predecessor Tony Blair. Very strange!

Robert Hand has some interesting things to say about Bush’s Sun. The main point he makes (coming from the viewpoint of a traditional astrologer) is that Bush’s Cancer Sun is in aspect to its ruler, the Moon, and is also in aspect to Jupiter, which is the exaltation ruler of Cancer (i.e. Jupiter is exalted in Cancer). This strengthens the Sun considerably, and the fact that both aspects are squares does not matter. So there it is!

Furthermore, Bush’s Sun is square to a Moon-Jupiter conjunction in Libra. The Moon square is separating, but it is applying in its conjunction to Jupiter, so it is pushing the power of Jupiter onto the Sun. This is another strengthening factor.

His Sun is given further prominence by the fact that it rules his Leo Ascendant, and is the exaltation ruler of his Aries MC. Being a day chart, the Sun is also the triplicity ruler of both his ASC and MC.

So despite being in the 12th House, George Bush’s Sun is pretty powerful. Of course, he still has some strong 12th House characteristics, the secrecy of his government and his messianic tendencies being amongst the most obvious.

I wondered if this sort of analysis could apply to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

Tony Blair: 6 May 1953 6.10 Edinburgh, Scotland.

In this case, his 12th House Sun in Taurus is square to its exaltation ruler, the Moon, which sits prominently in the 10th House. So, though his Sun is not as strong as Bush’s, it is still strengthened to a degree. (On the other hand, in the case of Bush I would drag in something non-traditional, the fact that both his Sun and Moon are in hard aspect to Chiron, which I think in his case is a considerable weakening factor.)

Gordon Brown: 20 Feb 1951 8.40 Giffnock, Scotland

In Brown’s case, the Sun is not just in the 12th, it is also in Pisces, which isn’t easy at all if you want to project yourself as a leader. In traditional astrology, Jupiter is the ruler of Pisces (the outer planets had not been discovered then; and even so, being beyond ordinary visibility, they are a different kind of planet to the inner ones). What we find is that Gordon Brown has the ruler (Jupiter) and the exaltation ruler (Venus) of Pisces in the sign of Pisces along with his Sun. They don’t aspect his Sun, but there is a limited strengthening called ‘generosity’ due to them being in the same sign – and being in the sign of their rulerships presumably also helps. Venus or Mars (depending on the system) is the triplicity ruler of the Sun, and both are in Pisces, so here is a further ‘generosity’. Finally, the Sun is the exaltation ruler of his Aries ASC.

So it would seem to me that in Brown’s case, there are no major strengthening factors to his 12th House Sun (unlike Bush and Blair), but there are a considerable number of subsidiary favourable factors. So he’s not a complete washout as a leader –or he probably wouldn’t have got there – but it’s still pretty weak. And I think this is evident to anyone who has observed him over the years. He is much happier projecting a strong leader image from behind a wall of policy, than he is actually putting himself and his personality out there. He got away with this for his first few months as Prime Minister, but then the bubble burst. Though he may maintain a good handle on policy, as a leader per se he is already wounded and floundering, and his personality and astrology are such that it is hard to see him recovering from this.

David Cameron, the leader of the Conservatives, may be exactly the opponent he needs to drag him out of his shell. Cameron’s Sun at 15.26 Libra is within 10 minutes of a degree of Brown’s DESC/Neptune conjunction. The Descendant is where we encounter others, so it would seem that Cameron is just the job for Brown.

I wrote previously about the weakness of Brown’s Mars in the 12th House at 23 Pisces, and how Uranus will be challenging this Mars to wake up over the next couple of years. Using traditional astrology, Brown’s Mars is not quite as weak as it appears, because it is conjunct the domicile ruler (Jupiter) and exaltation ruler (Venus) of Pisces, in their own signs, and conjunct the triplicity ruler (Mars/Venus). So there is some hope for him when it comes to fighting Mr Cameron. And what his Mars is up against in the form of Cameron is the signature of that whole generation: Uranus-Pluto in Virgo opposite Saturn-Chiron in Pisces. He is up against the younger generation that has its eye on the future in a very particular kind of way, that embodies a new spirit in politics, and Brown is being challenged, through his Mars, to rise to this. And being so very 12th House Pisces, he can adapt, he can flow into his surroundings and become whatever is required of him. So it will be interesting, now that the honeymoon for both leaders is over, to see what happens over the next 2-3 years, because Brown and Cameron, who are so different, could affect and change each other powerfully.

SCOTLAND

I’ve just been away in Scotland for 6 days, hence my absence from the blogosphere. One of the first places I went to was Kilmartin on the west coast, which has about 650 ancient sites within a 6 mile radius. It is a wide valley, and its most prominent feature is a chain of 6 cairns, running in a straight line along the floor of the valley. I’d previously thought of cairns as small piles of stones gradually built up by travellers on the tops of hills. But these are giant, up to 40 metres across, and as usual nobody quite knows what they were about.

The first one I went to had a burial chamber in the middle that you could climb into. The second one - Temple Wood Circle - had much fewer stones, but what you could see here was a stone circle that was in the process of being gradually buried by the stones. Again, no-one really knows what these circles are about, or why it was getting covered with stones. One thing we do seem to know about many of these stone circles is that they have precise astronomical alignments: you’ll find, for example, a stone in the East that is exactly aligned with the midsummer sunrise.


I got a strong sense of this circle being a ceremonial place that symbolically contained the whole universe, the whole of life, with the astronomical alignments having not just the practical function of marking out the seasons, but also making a symbolic connection with the macrocosm.

Sweatlodges similarly have a circular shape with the various directions marked out, and they too contain the whole universe, they are the whole universe while you are in them. It was this that led me to feel that stone circles work similarly. I have been fortunate enough to have been in many Sweatlodges led in a traditional Native American manner, with the leader having decades of training behind him, and the flavour of such ceremony is completely different to anything I have encountered in the modern ‘New Age’ scene (or even around the modern, high-profile Native American teachers). I don’t want to discount what goes in these recently developed ceremonies, because in many cases they represent a serious attempt to bring ceremony back into our lives. And it’s the best that can be done. But there is a depth of knowledge, an invocation of the whole of life in all its inter-relatedness and beauty, a seriousness of purpose along with common sense and humour, a sense that these ceremonies really do matter, that I have only seen in traditional ceremonies.


So it was with this sort of background that I felt yes, these Celtic ancestors of ours with their stone circles were doing their ceremonies in an essentially similar manner thousands of years ago, and it was part of a connection to life and its cycles that has been lost.

A day or two later I noticed a sign for Glencoe, famous for its massacre, so I thought I’d drop in. In 1692 the Campbells, who were guests of the MacDonalds, treacherously murdered 13 of their hosts for political reasons, and the incident has been notorious ever since. I visited a monument to the massacre, and while I was there a South African couple turned up, and the man started telling me about how such an incident lays a curse on a family down the generations, but if you confess to Jesus, he’ll wash it away.

I replied that you can’t confess to something you haven’t done, and he agreed, but said that you can confess to Jesus on behalf of your ancestors, and this will remove the curse. We left it at that, but what he didn’t know was that one side of my family is Campbell, and I have sometimes wondered if there might not be something lingering on from the Glencoe massacre, even though I don’t know if we are direct descendants of any of the participants. So I think in his own way the guy was right, and if you believed in Jesus (which I don’t) what he recommended probably would work. I think these things do get passed down, but I’m not sure they are susceptible to a psychoanalytic approach. Some sort of ritual or act of atonement is probably what is needed. Such as confessing to Jesus! But it was strange that this guy should have turned up and said what he did while I was there.

CHIRON and SUPERHEROES

A few days ago, Top Ten Sources flagged up an interview with the British astrologer Dennis Elwell that is well worth reading.

Here is what he had to say about Chiron:

“On the subject of Chiron, it is as significant as any planet, but I do not go along with the 'woundedness' interpretation. Mention Chiron in a lecture, and you can see the little thought balloons go up over the audience's heads - 'Ah yes, the wounded healer.' But when you are dealing with Chiron in practical work it is better to remember that his mythological namesake conducted a school for heroes. In Cosmic Loom, back in 1987, I described Chiron as 'a provocative planet that quite enjoys giving things a stir, but which above all gives the audacity to attempt.' As old Chiron trains us up towards accomplishments we never thought we could achieve, we need to be able to take the dare, to have an irreverent disrespect for the wise ones who say this or that can't be done. Chiron's style borders on cocky impudence, but perhaps its basic function is to persuade us that nothing is impossible.

The provocative side of Chiron is apt to show itself strongly in combination with Mars. Hitler was born with these bodies in close parallel, as well as septile. There are a lot of quintiles in his chart - the signature of an effective will - and the quintile between Chiron and Mercury is relevant to how he talked his way to power.”

Last year I looked up the date of first publication for the superheroes Superman, Spiderman and The Incredible Hulk. What I found was that they all had Jupiter-Chiron aspects. Jupiter I interpreted as their superpowers, and Chiron as the incurable wound that each of them had that brought about their powers: Superman was torn from his planet and his family as a baby, and The Hulk and Spiderman had both been subject to radiation. So Elwell’s take on Chiron enriches this symbolism, even though he doesn’t accept the ‘wound’ interpretation. (Batman does not have a Chiron-Jupiter aspect, but nor does he have superpowers).

It can also be quixotic: George ‘Top Gun’ Bush has a Jupiter-Chiron conjunction. He had ‘the audacity to attempt’ when it came to Iraq, but it was foolish, and the initial victory he prided himself on had been a turkey shoot.

I emailed Dennis Elwell about his article, and in his reply he included the comments: “Like Bush, Sylvester Stallone was born with a Jupiter Chiron conjunction, Christopher Reeve had a sesquare. In Arnold Schwarzenegger's chart they are in the fifth house, exactly 15 degrees apart. I think all 15 degree contacts are valid, but of course the orbs vary greatly.

As you know I am a bit sceptical about the woundedness of the mythical Chiron playing out in astrology. Every planet has its own wounds.”

AND

NEPTUNE STATIONS

Neptune will be stationary on the 31st Oct, but already he is virtually at a standstill, being within 7 minutes of the stationing point at 19.14 Aquarius. So if you’ve got a Neptune transit coming up, like me, you’ll be feeling his effects quite powerfully just now, and you’ll be getting a bit of a flavour of what the transit is going to be about. But only a bit of a flavour, a few warning shots across the bow. Because these transformations can’t be second-guessed. And if you're at the end of a Neptune transit, you'll now start to properly emerge from it, it's springtime, it's time to begin living the changes that Neptune has brought about in you.

What Neptune fundamentally requires of us is an attitude of surrender to and trust in the flow of events, a surrender of our attachment to outcome and our need to plan and control. Neptune will often take us on to new phase in our life, but along the way we also have to become more like him.

Last time I had a major Neptune transit was in 1997/98 - conjunct IC - and it turned my life upside down. I really hadn't been expecting that. So with Neptune conjoining my Sun next year, I'm having to accept that anything could happen, it will probably be really big, but for now I can't see how.


All I do know is that life seems a bit limiting at present, I'm increasingly aware I'm only functioning with part of myself. The astrology readings and blogging are fine, but then I sometimes feel it's all these words and there are big bits of me left out of that, and I want a break from all these words. There suddenly isn't quite the same energy available for it all, and I think this can be a sign of things to come: with a major transit beginning, you can find energy being withdrawn from aspects of your life, and it's outside your control, and it's necessary so that something new can arise, it's like the leaves in autumn.

STRANGE NEW WORLDS

We’ve known for a long time of the existence of other Suns like our own, but other planets, other worlds were not definitively detected until early 1992, as the Uranus-Neptune conjunction began. They tend to be detected indirectly through their effect on their local Sun, and naturally enough the ones detected so far are mostly pretty big, because they are easier to spot. These new worlds are known as extra-solar planets, or exoplanets, and there are currently 253 of them.

Some of them are turning out to be weird and wonderful places. Here is a list from New Scientist magazine:

HD189733b (they have such sexy names) is 63 light years away in the constellation Vulpecula, with a mass of 1.15 Jupiters. It orbits its star every 2.2 days. One side is in perpetual daytime, the other side is in perpetual night-time. The day side has a temperature of 940 degrees, the dark side is 700 degrees. The dark side is so hot because winds of more than 10,000 kilometres per hour – Mach 8 – whip round the globe, spreading the heat. In July, it became the first exoplanet to have a compelling case made for water in its atmosphere.


TrES-4 is 1400 light years away in the constellation Hercules. It is the most bloated world on record, less massive then Jupiter but with a volume 5 times bigger. It has an average density less than a wine cork, and would float on water. It orbits its Sun every 3½ days and has a surface temperature of 1300 degrees. It is not known why it is so puffed up, but its days are numbered. Its Sun has run out of hydrogen and in less than a billion years TrES-4 (Doesn’t that name just grow on you? Don’t you want to just take it home, like Gordon Brown, and tuck it up in bed?) will be engulfed by its swelling star.

HD80606b is 190 light years away in the constellation Ursa Major. It is 4 times the mass of Jupiter. Its orbit, which takes 4 months, is wildly elongated, varying from between about 90 million miles and 3 million miles from its Sun. If you floated in its atmosphere, you would see the Sun go from the size of ours to one 900 times as big in just a few days. In the same way, the temperature would soar from about 100 degrees to 1700 degrees. This exoplanet has the most elongated orbit known for any planet, and the reason lies in the gravitational influence of a distant companion star. The orbits of most exoplanets so far have turned out to be much more elongated than those of our local planets, which are nearly circular. This has come as a big surprise.


HD149026b is 256 light years away in the constellation Hercules. It is slightly smaller than Saturn, but has an unusually dense core – packed with about 70 earth masses of heavy elements. Its atmosphere at 2000 C is unbelievably hot – hotter than the surface of some stars, and the hottest planet known. It is so hot because it is close to its star and the planet’s surface is probably very dull-coloured, so it absorbs plenty of light.

Gliese 581 is a dim red dwarf star in the constellation Libra, 20.5 light years away. Earlier this year it was reported that an earth like planet had been discovered circling this star, rocky and with temperatures of around 20 C, so liquid water could possibly be present. It has a mass of 15 earths. Then 2 more planets were found orbiting Gliese 581. The smaller one, which is 5 earth masses and a surface temperature of 0 to 40 C, has been dubbed the Goldilocks planet – not too hot for life, not too cold, but just right. Then they reckoned that the greenhouse effect would make the planet far too hot for life. And then they further reckoned that the 3rd planet, of 8 earth masses, which is much further away from the star, might be just the right temperature for life because of the greenhouse effect. These planets will be visible to the European Space Agency’s 3 Darwin spacecraft, due for launch in 2015. THEY WILL PROBE THESE WORLDS FOR SIGNS OF LIFE.


PSR B1257+12 (Now that really is sexy) is a neutron star, 1.35 times the mass of the Sun, 15km wide (yes, just 15km), 980 light years away in the constellation Virgo. It is the remains of a massive star that exploded in a supernova, leaving a superdense core. This neutron star rotates once every 6 milliseconds, emitting radio beams – in other words, it is a pulsar. It was round this pulsar that the first exoplanets were detected, 0.02, 4.3 and 3.9 times the mass of the earth, while the sizes of their orbits are similar in proportion to those of Mercury, Venus and the Earth. So, remarkably, these first exoplanets are like a carbon copy of our inner solar system, scaled down by a factor of 2. The discoverer reckons the 3.9 earth planet may have an iron core and a strong magnetic field. So that though the pulsar wouldn’t produce much daylight, the planet may well still have magnificent auroras, produced by the dense streams of energetic particles coming off the pulsar, and bright enough to read a book by. The particles would also gradually erode the planet’s surface, generating a low-level haze.

MARS AND PISCES AND GORDON BROWN

Both the Brown and Cameron honeymoons are finally over, which is a relief. Cameron’s began to end earlier this year, when he ran into trouble with his party over grammar schools, and was truly over when Gordon Brown became Prime Minister at the end of June, creating a surge in popularity for Labour.

I’d thought it might be the Mars-Pluto Opposition which did for Brown, at the Labour Party conference in Sept. Instead it was after the Tory conference in early Oct, when the Tory ‘bounce’ impacted spectacularly on Brown’s weeks of election planning, forcing him into a humiliating climbdown over his intention to hold an autumn election.

So Brown is now like a wounded animal, having been playing the capable strongman for months. With Mars in 12th House Pisces, he is not good in a straight fight, and he has always taken refuge in being seen as competent at what he does, firstly at the Treasury for 10 years, and now as PM. (Tony Blair has Mars-Jupiter Rising in Gemini, so no problem there for him).


Like Tony Blair, Brown has a Chiron-MC conjunction in Capricorn, and while on the one hand this comes out in both men as a desire to heal (Chiron) the World (MC), it also has the interpretation of damaged (Chiron) reputation (Capricorn/MC). With Blair, this damage primarily occurred during his Chiron Return, when many people lost their trust in him over the way he dealt with the Iraq War issue. Once you’ve lied you’ve lied, and just as Chiron’s wound is incurable, so too will Tony Blair always be remembered with misgivings.

Gordon Brown has already had his Chiron return, but Pluto will be conjoining his Chiron/MC for 3 years from next March. In my opinion he will, in his own way, become increasingly wounded over that period. Which doesn’t mean he can’t win the next election – Blair did so after the Iraq fiasco – but I think we will start to see his well-known faults undermining his reputation. It was extraordinary how he seemed to transmute when he became PM, as perhaps only someone with Sun in 12th House Pisces can do so, and suddenly he was the competent strongman with all those nasty rumours put behind him: his lack of ‘bottle’, his inability to communicate himself effectively, his lack of human qualities, his authoritarianism and his plotting and petty vindictiveness.

Brown knows about the dark arts in politics, and he used them to good advantage soon after he became PM, when he orchestrated a new relationship with the Bush administration over Iraq. You would hear junior ministers suggesting in public a new relationship, and then a senior minister would come in and say, “Oh no no, that wasn’t what we meant at all. We’re right behind the US.” No-one was directly offended, but the message was clear.

As a slippery Pisces he is good at this sort of thing, but as a Pisces he also doesn’t know when to stop. Like bringing forward his visit to Iraq to coincide with the Tory Conference, and making an announcement about increased troop withdrawals while he was there. This is about as unsubtle as it gets, and undermines the ‘gentleman’s agreement’ between the parties not to try and upstage each others’ conferences, which I think is good for democracy, as it gives each party a clear platform to present themselves. And the extra 1000 troops he said would be withdrawn appears in fact only to be 500 above what had previously been announced. As Cameron recently and rightly said about Brown in another context, he’s treating the British public like fools, and this is a sign of authoritarianism.

All this doesn’t stop Brown being a competent PM, and this may be his tragedy – his Chiron/MC – that he needlessly makes himself look weak and slippery, over Iraq, over the autumn election that wasn’t, when actually he is in a strong position, in which people are only too happy to trust him after the spin and lies of the Blair years. His judgement when it comes to making decisions and policies I think is good. But his personal political judgement can make him look a fool.


Brown’s natal Mars is at 22 Pisces, which Uranus will be conjoining over the next couple of years. I think he will regularly be caught off-guard, and will need to learn how to stand up and fight his opponents – rather than just retreating and blathering on about vision and policy – or Cameron, with his Mars in Leo, will run rings around him. Uranus is the awakener, and Brown has the opportunity, and necessity, to wake up his Mars.

REFLECTIONS ON MARS-PLUTO

Mars was opposite Pluto (at 26 Gemini-Sag respectively) in September 2007 and, because Mars is soon to go retrograde, there will be 2 more oppositions as part of the same cycle, one in January (at 29 Gemini-Sag) and then one in March (at 1 Cancer-Capricorn.)

Mars frequently makes a hard aspect to Pluto, but it doesn’t last for long unless, unusually, it coincides with the Mars retrograde cycle. So now is a time for seeing more deeply how these 2 planets interact, because of their prolonged contact.

Mars and Pluto are 2 of the ‘baddies’ amongst the planets, they are associated amongst other things with war and violence, so we should expect to see some sort of process going on around war between September and March. With the opposition, you’d expect to see more of it. But interestingly, there has recently been a marked fall in the levels of violence in Iraq. And the Iraq War has Sun at 29 Pisces (20 March 2003, 5.33, Baghdad), so it is strongly affected by this Mars-Pluto opposition.

What can this mean? Politically/militarily the ‘surge’ is one cause, and I don’t know what other factors might be involved. But astrologically, it suggests to me the possibility of Pluto acting as a restraining or deepening factor on Mars.

The sign that Mars rules, Aries, is associated with active aggression. Mars is also co-ruler, along with Pluto, of Scorpio, and here we find a different kind of Mars. Scorpio, of course, is perfectly capable of wanton aggression, but more classically the type of Mars we find here in Pluto’s realm is defensive. It is a Mars that swims about below the surface of the seemingly still pool, and it can find it hard to motivate itself… unless there is a threat, a survival issue, something real that needs attention for oneself or another, and then it can be there with almost superhuman strength, the monster from the deep rises up. It’s not so strong on initiative, but it is strong on having a good reason for fighting, and strong on strategy.

So it seems to me that Pluto has for now restrained, and in a way deepened, the Mars of the Iraq War. Mars in its pure form wants to fight and win, but it is not patient or strategic. The Iraq War has an unaspected Mars (George Bush also has an unaspected Mars), suggesting a violence for its own sake that is not serving a well-considered strategic end. So it is possible that this Mars-Pluto cycle may bring in a new phase of the Iraq War in which all sides have clearer aims and a degree of negotiation becomes possible. Certainly with Pluto squaring the Sun of the Iraq War over the next year, we are going to see some sort of fundamental shift.

This possible shift is reflected in the sign shift of the Mars-Pluto opposition. Gemini-Sag can be associated with polarisation (Gemini) and fundamentalism (Sag), and therefore with the sort of war we have been seeing. Capricorn-Cancer is known as ‘the political axis’, partly due to the number of countries that have their Sun on this axis, suggesting a shift from military to political solutions.

I think that Mars-Pluto is probably always going to be associated with painful experience in one way or another, but this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad thing. I know one young person who undertook a journey on the September 11 eclipse, in which the Sun-Moon conjunction in Virgo was part of a Grand Cross with Mars-Pluto and Uranus. This journey resulted in a painful, even brutal experience of rejection that has brought to a head all sorts of issues that needed addressing, and begun a healing process. So here you could say that Mars-Pluto acted as surgeon's knife to the very painful but necessary catalyst of Uranus.

Mars-Pluto has also been squaring the ASC of David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party in the UK. He has had a hair-raising ride since Gordon Brown came to power at the end of June. The Conservatives were comfortably ahead in the polls before then, and many of us expected them to cruise the next election. But Brown has proved unexpectedly popular, and Labour were suddenly well ahead in the polls and likely to call a snap election. Cameron had to make the speech of his life at the Conservative conference a couple of days ago, and they bounced back in the polls. But with Mars-Pluto active in his chart through till the spring (and Pluto all year), this is unlikely to be the end of the story – he has a whole process around his leadership to go through over the next 5 months, and who knows how it will end? He will need to draw on new depths (Pluto) to fight (Mars) for both his job and his party. It is make or break for him, and possibly for the party itself.

MATTHEW ON NEPTUNE

Matthew The Astrologer can be both insightful and funny at the same time, which I like. Here is part of yesterday's blog on Neptune:

"Neptune is a drug. Avoid drugs, we're told by the public service announcements, and your life will be a better place. And who am I to argue with public service announcements?

Here are some drugs to avoid today, and I've made it all as metaphor-free as Neptune itself will allow:

Being drunk is a loud party with no ride home. Marijuana is flipping through the channels looking for news but only finding cartoons. Ecstacy is dancing to the beat of a song that's ruining your hearing. Mushrooms are like realizing that everything is alive, and everything is moving, and your house is running away. Heroin is a world where nothing goes wrong, ever, even when the roof cave in on you. Cocaine is all the speed of the Autobahn, with a thousand times more and deeper potholes. Caffeine is a commissioned salesman on a roll, and who cares if the store is closed? LSD is seeing what God sees, only to wonder later if God wouldn't rather have cable instead. Nicotine is five seconds of clarity and ten seconds of death. Ketamine is like being in a giant hamster ball at the rodeo. Salvia is like sitting in a hot bath with a head full of helium.

Also:

Religion is half an answer in an oversized hat. Spirituality is a muscular ditch-digger without a shovel. Politics is a band of attacking monkeys with written justification. Society is a beauty contest where you're the only contestant and everyone else is a judge. Materialism is a starving man filling his face with styrofoam packing peanuts. Community is an angry mob with torches that accepts you... today. Romance is a beautiful child who screams for cookies every ten minutes. Sex is an itch you'd gladly tear your skin off for one day, and just a rash the next. Patriotism is a loyalty oath directed towards an empty drum. The Internet is a room full of parrots all offering advice, all at once, all caked in each other's crap. Astrology is a weatherman who can't make it rain or stop raining. Love --

Love is the reason we're all here, and is not the dominion of any one planet."

MARS, PLUTO and a DEAD LEG

A guy called David Wood in North Carolina put his barbecue smoker in storage. He didn't keep up with the payments, and it got auctioned off. The new owner found a human leg inside the smoker. After the police were called, it turned out to belong to Mr Wood, who had one of his legs amputated above the knee in 2004 after a plane crash. He'd hung on to the leg and stored it in the smoker. Now he wants it back, but the new owner says he has a receipt for the contents of the smoker, though he is willing to share the ownership of the leg.


Mars in Cancer is currently opposite Pluto in Sagittarius (and nearly in Capricorn). So we have a fight (Mars) over the home (Cancer) of a dead (Pluto) leg (Sag and Cap).

HERSH on BUSH, IRAQ and IRAN

There’s an interview with the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh at alternet.org on Bush, Iraq and Iran.

Here’s an excerpt:

Hersh: You have to ask yourself what interest we had 40 years ago for going to war in Vietnam. You'd think that in this country with so many smart people, that we can't possibly do the same dumb thing again. I have this theory in life that there is no learning. There is no learning curve. Everything is tabula rasa. Everybody has to discover things for themselves.

Spiegel Online: Even after Iraq? Aren't there strategic reasons for getting so deeply involved in the Middle East?

Hersh: Oh no. We're going to build democracy. The real thing in the mind of this president is he wants to reshape the Middle East and make it a model. He absolutely believes it. I always thought Henry Kissinger was a disaster because he lies like most people breathe and you can't have that in public life. But if it were Kissinger this time around, I'd actually be relieved because I'd know that the madness would be tied to some oil deal. But in this case, what you see is what you get. This guy believes he's doing God's work.

Spiegel Online: So what are the options in Iraq?

Hersh: There are two very clear options: Option A) Get everybody out by midnight tonight. Option B) Get everybody out by midnight tomorrow. The fuel that keeps the war going is us.