Zeitgeist Update

The economic indicators are starting to look good: France and Germany, for example, have just moved out of recession, and Japan is also set to show growth in the last quarter, after 4 successive quarters of contraction. Some of the banks are showing big profits again, and with that we are seeing a return of the big bonuses. The financial system is putting up strong resistance to new rules designed to avoid a repeat of the credit crunch, and in the UK at least, the government seems to be caving in. So it looks like we are gradually moving back to business as usual, with very little of substance having changed.

BUT astrology tells a different story. We are in the middle of a series of 5 Saturn-Uranus oppositions, the first 2 of which were responsible for the prolonged financial chaos we saw from the Autumn through to the Spring. The unexpected events that Uranus brings are probably at their most chaotic in Uranus’ current sign of Pisces.

We have had a lull in Saturn-Uranus this summer, along with the feelgood factor brought about by the Jupiter-Neptune conjunction. A return to economic business as usual would suggest that Pluto’s entry into Capricorn and the Saturn-Uranus opposition mean nothing apart from some temporary chaos and contraction. Well they never mean this, they mean a lot more than this, they always bring in a whole new zeitgeist, in this case an economic one.

I don’t know from my own observations what is going to happen to the world economy. But I do know from astrology that we are not returning to business as usual, and that the next Saturn-Uranus opposition in mid-September is therefore likely to bring disruption, perhaps the ‘double-dip’ that people fear. That disruption will probably begin in the next week or two. I welcome that, because I don’t want things to return to how they were. Mars is in an applying opposition to Pluto until the 26 August, and this is a good aspect for digging up underlying issues that have not been addressed, and which have allowed this false dawn to occur. Particularly as the exact opposition is in Cardinal signs, which are good at initiating.

The other big sky story, which I have mentioned in passing, is the Jupiter-Neptune-Chiron conjunction in Aquarius. You could call this a big (Jupiter) healing (Chiron) dream (Neptune). Sounds a bit New Age, but you get the idea. A triple conjunction of 3 outerish planets that lasts for 6 months is remarkable. These 3 were briefly together in 1945 when the UN was founded, and before that in 1881 when the American Red Cross was founded. We have to go back hundreds of years before we find another triple conjunction, for it is is an irregular occurrence.

The current conjunction in late Aquarius is close to the American Moon (the people), and Obama’s attempts to reform the US Healthcare system must be a reflection of this. I think he will succeed where others have failed because the astrology is so brilliantly favourable. Obama as the first black President (apart from Bill Clinton!) is also part of this triple conjunction. George Washington, the first US President, was inaugurated on 30/4/1789 at 12.45 PM, with a Descendant of 28.40 Aquarius, which Jupiter-Neptune-Chiron is this year conjoining.

Jupiter, Neptune and Chiron are currently all retrograde, so whatever new dawns this conjunction will bring about are being processed right now – it is a time when obstacles need to be faced, difficulties overcome. That is exactly the stage the US Healthcare plans are in right now. Such difficulties can be a good thing, as they force things to be thought through and fought for.

Virgo is a sign of health issues, so the Saturn-Uranus opposition is just as important when considering Obama's Healthcare plans: a progressive (Uranus) and compassionate (Pisces) idea that will break up (Uranus) old systems (Saturn) of healthcare (Virgo). Put this with the triple conjunction, and you have the moment in history when this idea can work.

Kathleen Sibelius, the US Health Secretary, was born 15 May 1948. She has a Sun, Mars, Chiron t-square that is completed by the Neptune-Jupiter-Chiron conjunction i.e. it creates a Grand Cross. Perfect! She is the right person for the job. Barack Obama is in this too: he has a Uranus-North Node conjunction in Leo, opposite the triple conjunction. It is his path in life (Node) to break the mould (Uranus), which he did by becoming President, and which he again seems destined to do through the Healthcare plans.

I think the US Healthcare issue is part of a bigger question, which is does America care about its own people? It seems unbelievable from a European point of view that America should have 46 million of its poorest people without access to proper healthcare, when it could afford to do so more easily than most countries. Do the people (Moon) care (Neptune)? Or do enough of them care to make it possible? I think it is a test of the quality of a government, or of a people, how it looks after the poorest people and those who don't, and never will, 'fit in.'


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The New Moon of 20 August is at 27 Leo, making an opposition to Jupiter-Neptune-Chiron, and this runs along the Asc-Desc axis in Washington. So there could easily be some kind of breakthrough, some kind of resolution on the next few days in the debate over Obama’s healthcare plans. But they are unlikely to really start moving forward until Jupiter, Neptune and Chiron are all moving forwards again, which will occur between early October and early November.

This also applies on an individual level, particularly if the triple conjunction makes a significant transit to your chart (or if you were born with strong aspects between any of Jupiter, Neptune and Chiron). Whatever new dawn, new dream is trying to come into your life, right now may well be a time of frustration, of unclarity, of patient waiting, until the 3 planets begin to move forward again in the autumn.


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In fact we have 2 powerful New Moons in a row: the first in August opposes Jupiter, Neptune and Chiron, the the following one in September lines up on the Saturn-Uranus Opposition, which will itself be almost exact. Being in the sign of Virgo, another phase in the US Healthcare plans is indicated. More broadly, the 2 main indicators of the zeitgeist this year, Saturn-Uranus and Jupiter-Neptune-Chiron, will be particularly in evidence over the next month successive New Moons pass over them. So I expect the next month to be very formative, or very indicative, of what is currently happening in the world.

Here is my previous 'Zeitgeist Update' from June, which included an attempt to draw the 2 big sky stories together.

I’ve just turfed up these notes from a Liz Greene seminar I was on probably about 5 years ago:

We are all subject to

Chiron’s pain in the face of life’s inequality and injustice;

Neptune’s yearning, arising from our vision of something eternal that was there before birth and awaits us after death;

Pluto’s realization of our ultimate powerlessness in the face of nature and the collective;

Saturn’s recognition of our aloneness, our separateness, our mortality and our ultimate insignificance in the chain of earthly life.

I don’t seem to have jotted down anything for Uranus. Any suggestions? How about:

We are all subject to Uranus’s sense of existential insecurity, that whatever certainties we have come to rely on can disintegrate without warning.

Of Piggies and Buggers

I have recently read a couple of Orson Scott Card’s sci-fi novels, ‘Ender’s Game’ and ‘Speaker for the Dead’. In the first of these, a young boy is intensively trained to become a military commander to fight ‘the buggers’, an alien race that at one point attacked humanity. Ender is trained for starship battle through the use of video games, and does become the military genius on whom the hopes of humanity are pinned. It turns out, however, that all is not quite as it seems. In the next book, set 3000 years later, Ender has become a Speaker for the Dead, who turns up when asked and recounts the truth of a dead person’s life: their real hopes and aspirations, as well as all the uncomfortable bits you’re not supposed to talk about. Central to this novel, however, is the presence of another alien race, ‘the piggies’, and Ender gets involved in humanity’s relationship to this race.

At one point Ender is a professor at a university, and we are introduced to 4 levels of ‘otherness’ which humanity has come up with in response to its encounter with alien races (so far, just the buggers, who it eliminated, and the piggies, with whom humanity is super-constrained, super-PC even, as a sort of contrition for what happened to the buggers). The names themselves are a parody of how we view the ‘other’. The 4 increasing levels of otherness respectively describe a human from another part of this world, a human from another world, another species that is nevertheless regarded as human and finally another species that is not regarded as human, such as animals.

Science fiction gives a freedom to explore ideas about what it is to be human in ways that ordinary fiction cannot perhaps do so easily. In Speaker for the Dead there is an anonymous commentator called Demosthenes, and a rather brilliant point he makes is that humanity’s ability to declare an alien species to be human is not a comment on the moral maturity of that other species, but on the moral maturity of humanity.

I can’t help thinking of America in this respect, and its list of rogue nations, its ‘axis of evil’ (which the Obama administration is perpetuating). Orson Scott Card is an American. You can just see the generals out of Dr Strangelove calling the alien species ‘the buggers’ and ‘the piggies’, with no sense of irony or parody. The USA sets itself up as the moral judge of other nations. (For the astrology of this, see my audio-blog on America’s Preachiness.) For all Iran’s faults, America makes itself look ridiculous when it talks (as Obama did a few months ago) about wanting to admit Iran to the community of responsible nations. It will be a sign of America’s moral maturity when it is able to treat Iran as a nation just like itself, rather than as ‘other’. Then there may be progress.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t think Iran should be stopped from getting nuclear weapons. I think it needs to be stopped. My point is that in trying to acquire nuclear weapons, Iran is behaving no differently to how America would behave in the same situation. Iran also has an ugly and intolerant ideology, but so does America. In a fundamental sense, nations are all the same, they have very similar motives.

Which is why I don’t want to single out America here, because it is in the nature of nations and of people to consider themselves superior. I once read an anthropological book which cited a tribe in the Amazon who did not consider the neighbouring tribe to be human. These days we tend to idealise indigenous peoples and Tibetans (when you see the word ‘Lama’, think bishop, it cuts through all the hyperbole. And when you think bishop, think Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers!) People have always tended to consider the 'other' to be less than human.

So America is an example of not just how all nations will behave in certain circumstances, but also how people behave individually and always have behaved, and that is really what Orson Scott Card is getting at in what is not just an allegory but also a great story.

Robert A Heinlein uses ‘otherness’ to raise taboo issues in his book Stranger in a Strange Land. What happens is that a human colony is set up on Mars, and everyone dies except for a human baby who is brought up by indigenous Martians, and who eventually returns to Earth. So he is physically human, but he thinks and acts like a Martian, in ways that are completely incomprehensible to humans. This first of all relativises the way we look at the world, but Heinlein goes beyond this and has the Martian human breaking just about every taboo going, including ‘free love’, murder and cannibalism. For him, it is an honour to be eaten after you’ve died, while ‘disappearing’ people who are threatening you is not a problem. In Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott card also looks at the murder taboo, when ‘the piggies’ kill a couple of people in a really gruesome way, but from the piggies point of view they are honouring the humans; eventually both sides have to discover the other’s point of view.

The point about taboos is that they are absolutes, they are laws written in stone, so consideration of their merits and demerits is impossible: to think about a subject, you have to suspend your idea of what you think the conclusion should be, and with taboos many people would think you are some kind of pervert if you did this, like you were half way to breaking the taboo. Paedophilia has entered the taboo zone much more strongly in recent years, paedophiles are the modern witches. I’m not trying to defend them, but rather to make the point that intelligent thought about this subject has become increasingly difficult.

There always have been and always will be taboos, these moral areas that cannot be questioned without bringing the questioner under suspicion. After Stranger in a Strange Land was published in the early 60s (presciently, given what happened later in the decade), half of the USA thought Robert A Heinlein had lost the plot, and the other half thought he was a genius. So these authors are serving a necessary function within the tribe, dragging back into consciousness parts of the collective psyche that have drifted into darkness and judgement. Of course, not everyone will thank them for it. As some guy said a while back, no man is a prophet in his own country.

Earthrise

This was one of the first 'earthrise' pictures, taken on 24 Dec 1968 as Apollo 8 went into lunar orbit. No one had thought to schedule in this photo, so consequently the first picture was taken in black and white.

It is a Uranus moment, when perspectives are suddenly and surprisingly changed. This picture has been called the most important environmental picture ever taken. It occurred under a Uranus-Jupiter conjunction, square to the Sun. 20 years earlier, under a Uranus-Jupiter opposition, the British astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle predicted that when spaceflight enabled us to see the whole Earth from space, the view would change us forever.

7 months after this photo was taken, on 20/7/69, the first Moon landing took place, with Uranus 4 minutes off an exact conjunction to Jupiter at 1 Libra, and the Moon also in conjunction to these planets, naturally!

Neil Armstrong's natal Moon is at 25.24 Sagittarius, the sign of long distance travel and new horizons, as well as being very close to the Galactic Centre, naturally! His Moon is square to his Virgo Venus, reflecting his distaste for the fame accompanying the Moon landings. He was born under the Uranus-Pluto square of the 1930s. The landings took place at the end of the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1960s. 40 years later, as Uranus and Pluto approach a square, there are calls to revive the Moon landings.


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The chart for the 1st Moon landing (set for Washington, as it was the Americans who did it!) is one of those rare charts where no planets are in hard aspect to each other.


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There is a Pluto-South Node conjunction in Virgo, showing the transformative power (Pluto) of technology (Virgo) that created the event; it also then points us to the North Node in Pisces, opposite Pluto, that takes us out of the narrow, analytical mindset of Virgo and into the soul-wisdom of Pisces. If you listen to the astronauts who went to the Moon, they were all changed by it (though we don't know about Armstrong, who has always shunned publicity.) But it is interesting that the Nodal Axis shows on the one hand the sheer technological power behind the event, and also that technology leading to something beyond itself.

I'm touting the Camel as the symbol for Aquarius, because it is both a water-bearer and contrary.

Neptune seems to be dissolving my desire to apply myself to anything I don't have to do. So I may not post much for a few weeks. With Virgo Rising and Sun in Virgo's House and a prominent Saturn, maybe it is time to stop being diligent and time to play!