Your Dreams, Please!

June put the following on Facebook yesterday:

Help often comes first in what appears to be the opposite. It is why dreams often have to be turned upside down to be understood as something other than attack, or threat. But check with friends first. If we are all dreaming the end of something, it might be time to fill the pans with water, check the emergency supplies. 

With the first exact square from Uranus to Pluto coming up on June 24th, this is timely. There are big shifts happening in the collective – as if we needed telling – and they will continue for at least another 3 years as Uranus and Pluto continue to make exact squares. We don’t know what these squares are going to bring. The world seems to be slowly recovering from the longest recession since the 30s. BUT there is the indebtedness in southern Europe. Greece seems likely to default and leave the Eurozone, soon. Then the much bigger problems of Italy and Spain follow. No-one knows how this will pan out, as no mechanism for leaving the Euro was considered at its inception. Some sort of further banking crisis seems likely, and it could spread.

So, do we need to get in the 'emergency supplies'?

What I’m asking for here is your dreams. That, apparently, is how Jung saw World War II coming, during the last Uranus-Pluto square: from his patients dreams. When the collective is intensely activated, as it is now, it will push its way into our dreams.

If there’s enough material, I’ll post some of it (anonymously) unless you say otherwise.

Neptune is starting to station in his own sign of Pisces, a good place for dreaming.

The New Moon immediately before the first Uranus-Pluto square, on 19th June, is at the end of Gemini. The Moon in late Gemini is said to be an auspicious time to start a war in Arabic astrology. At 9/11, the Moon was in late Gemini.

I don’t want to take this literally and suggest a major war, because there is no sign of one, and astrology has to take facts into account. But Gemini is about polarity, and that builds as the sign progresses, so you can see why late Gemini might be a good time to start a war. So this New Moon suggests that the Uranus-Pluto square will emphasise polarisation, and in economic terms that is between rich and poor – in Europe’s case, between the rich north and the indebted south. So a fracture in the Eurozone, with who knows what consequences. But do we need to stack up on canned food? Your dreams, please!

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That said, the New Moon in Gemini in June is square to Mars. At 9/11 (or 11/9 if you are British) the attack came as a surprise. On 19th June, tr Mars will be conjunct the US Neptune and square the US Mars, and moving towards the US MC. The New Moon will be in the US 7th House of foreign countries. So some sort of Islamic attack on US interests, that has major security implications, would also seem to be a possibility in the run-up the first Uranus-Pluto square.

Europe is Screaming

Someone made the good point after my last post that it is interesting that Munch’s The Scream should have been sold now, in light of events in Europe. We are coming up to the first exact Uranus-Pluto square next month, and Greece has just had a general election in which the pro-austerity parties have not been able to form a government. Greece may not have a government now until next month, when it may have further elections.

The Scream

Edvard Munch's The Scream has just become the most expensive work of art sold at auction - $120m. It is one of 3 versions, and this one is said to be the most colourful.

It was painted in 1895, and on the frame is a poem by Munch:

"I was walking along the road with two friends
the sun was setting - the sky turned a bloody red
And I felt a whiff of melancholy - I stood
still, deathly tired - over the blue-black
fjord and city hung blood and tongues of fire
my friends walked on - I remained behind
 - shivering with anxiety - I felt the great scream in nature - EM"

His biographer, Sue Prideaux, says that it is impossible to ignore the image's wider context - a widespread late-19th Century sense of unease as the works of Darwin and Nietzsche corroded the old faiths and centuries of previous generations. It was Munch's ability to blend the deeply personal with the universal that has made his most celebrated work so enduring, she says.

"The feelings expressed in the painting were extremely subjective on Munch's part," she says. "But because this skull, essentially, has an everyman quality we can all project our feelings onto it."

I don't think this last part is right at all. In the poem, Munch says he "felt the great scream in nature." Well did he or didn't he? Are feelings purely subjective or can they tell us something about the world? To call his feelings 'extremely subjective' seems to me to be an insult to this artist, and a concession to the scientific world-view that sees people as isolated, and only able to know the world through the god of reason.

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I think Prideaux is correct to tie The Scream in with the corrosion of the old faiths and the rise of science, but she calls it a sense of 'unease'. Munch is calling it much more than that. If we see The Scream as a comment on scientific materialism - well, it's hardly a comment, it's a scream of anguish in a language that is the opposite of scientific reasoning. That is where its appeal lies. It expresses the nightmare of Blake's Single Vision, of Jung's 'poison pill of science'. But Prideaux, embedded as she is in the modern scientific world-view, cannot see this.

Painted in 1895, the painting could also be seen as prophetic of World War I, where technology was able to create mass slaughter on a scale previously unknown. Again, this perspective is unavailable to Prideaux. Jung also had his well-known vision of a blood-soaked Europe shortly before World War I broke out. He came to see this vision as prophetic; Anthony Storr sees that as narcissism on Jung's part, which again is an insult, said presumably because he also lives in a world where prophecy isn't possible.

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Born on 12th December 1863, Munch had North Node in Scorpio. The Node is where we find our greatest fulfillment, and to which we are drawn often without knowing it. Scorpio is ruled by a collective planet (Pluto) and it is the sign par excellence of hidden, instinctive feeling. Munch's planet of artistic feeling, Venus, is also in Scorpio, and opposite Pluto. So this suggests that The Scream is as much about the expression of something raw and instinctive that is hidden beneath the civilised veneer, as it is about collective pain and despair. It is saying look beneath the surface to that which has become inadmissible.

Aries discussion: tell the other person why they’re wrong, get in a fight about it and don’t be seen to give any ground. Aries is the authority on what is right or wrong, but it is often not their own authority. They are the warrior serving the king or a ‘principle’. An Aries needs to find his/her own authority; it’s a visionary thing that doesn’t have to be defended at every turn.

We visit Pluto when we die. He is Lord of the Dead. When I die I want a coin put in my mouth to pay the ferryman. He is also the death of the old self when we go through a Pluto transit. And he is the ghosts we carry with us that need to die. Like Jung’s ‘poison pill of science’, which his guide Philemon told him he had swallowed as a child.

We swallow pills from our parents and from the wider culture. To what degree are you living your own life, and to what degree are you compulsively copying your parents? For some people, that’s fine, they are quite happy to live the life laid down for them in quite an unconscious way. If you’re not happy with that, then those blueprints become demons that need exorcising, ghosts that need to be let go. If you invoke Pluto, he will help you, he will show you how. Talking about it and willing it are often not enough. ‘The unconscious’ needs to be activated through ritual and ceremony. Not living in a traditional society, we have to invent our own rituals, our own ways of meeting the gods. Again, the gods will show you how.

There must be some Neptune thing going on, because it has been clear for a long time that Spain and Italy have probably unmanageable debts. Yet between periods of crisis (when some of the debts become due for repayment) the financial markets start to get bullish - until the next crisis, which is starting now over Spain's debts. There's a lot of false hope around, and it regularly gets replaced by fear. Maybe it is Neptune entering its own sign of Pisces.

The EU has Pluto and Uranus hard-aspecting its Sun for this year, next year and probably the year after. Fundamental change (Pluto) brought on by periods of crisis (Uranus), with Pluto empowering Uranus and Uranus radicalising Pluto. This change has not yet happened, and the EU is doing its best to hang on to the old paradigm. The first actual square between Uranus and Pluto will be in late June this year. It is quite possible, therefore, that the period between now and then - 2 months - will be one of heightened crisis, possibly culminating in a default. Or maybe they'll manage to put it off until the next exact square in September.

There is a huge amount of change due over the next 3 years as Uranus and Pluto make 7 exact squares. There's probably not a lot more we can say than that.

 I'm starting a counselling course next week. I love doing astrology readings, but I'm also increasingly aware that there's stuff I can't do in that context, like chewing stuff over at length with people. I'll probably keep blogging, but maybe not as much as I used to.

 

Uranus-Pluto: A Few Predictions

Nicolas Sarkozy, the President of France, has transiting Pluto square to his Moon-Mars in Aries, and Uranus conjoining his Moon-Mars. He came in 5 years ago with Pluto hard-aspecting his Angles. You expect something like that when a politician rises to power. But then he had a gap, Pluto didn’t continue to empower him. Now Pluto has come back and in a different sign, so it looks like the chop for Sarkozy. He was a bit behind in yesterday’s elections, but did well enough for there to be a second round of voting in a couple of weeks’ time.

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When a politician lasts and lasts as leader, you often series a whole series of either Neptune or Pluto transits that keep them in power. And whether it is Neptune or Pluto characterises their period in office. When the transits come to an end, so does their period in power. We saw this with Margaret Thatcher and Pluto, and Tony Blair and Neptune. We are probably seeing it with Barack Obama and Neptune: he came in under Neptune square MC, and looks set to continue with Neptune square Moon. The Neptune leaders are showmen and redeemers, the Pluto leaders turn around difficult situations.

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Mitt Romney has had Neptune squaring his Asc this year and last year, and arguably next year as well. And that is it in terms of major transits. He is unlikely to be elected US President, and if he is, it would not be a successful Presidency. His moment was the 2008 election.

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David Cameron became the UK Prime Minister in 2010, in the early stages of Pluto squaring his Sun at 15 Libra. Pluto will still be squaring his Sun in 2015, the latest date for a general election, so he seems likely to be re-elected. However, he will run out of major Pluto transits half way through his second term as PM, so that is when he is likely to go. His leadership is clearly characterised by Pluto, in that he has a difficult economic situation to turn around and his main act has been to implement spending cuts. When it comes to Neptunian matters – such as choosing his ex-PR adviser Andy Coulson – he is liable to blunder. Obama in the US has also inherited a difficult economy, but all the same he presented himself as a redeemer, and his main early act was to institute health care reform, a Neptunian matter.

All this under the most far-reaching transit of our lifetimes, Uranus square to Pluto. It is in itself no ‘bigger’ than the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of the 1990s, or the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1960s. It is, however, particularly ‘big’ for 3 reasons: it is the opening, dynamic square of a Uranus-Pluto cycle; there will be 7 exact squares over 4 years (beginning this June); and most importantly, it takes place in the early to mid Cardinals, which is where we find the Suns of most of the major powers. __________________________________________________ Ad Break: I offer webcam astrology readings (£60 full reading/£30 update) and written responses to specific questions (£30). Price negotiable if you’re hard up. Contact me on Dharmaruci71(at)hotmail.com. __________________________________________________ Just because it is the biggest change doesn’t mean it will be the most dramatic: you have to look to Uranus-Neptune and the fall of Russian Communism for that. We have already had plenty of drama, particularly in the form of the banking crisis, the Euro crisis and the Arab Spring. And much of that occurred because of the presence of Saturn, the planet that is able to help the outer, invisible planets become manifest. In 1989/90, Saturn conjoined Uranus-Neptune in Capricorn. In 2010, Saturn hard-aspected Uranus and Pluto from the sign of Libra.

So we can expect deep, far reaching change over the next few years as Uranus and Pluto perform their series of squares around the Suns of the major powers. But it may require hindsight to see it at all clearly. It may not be overly-dramatic. It may be incremental, adding up to a new world. It will certainly be a new world, but not necessarily ‘better’. The last Uranus-Pluto square, in the early 30s, led to a world which was by any human standards worse. There’s no particular reason to suppose that this time, however.

By the time Uranus and Pluto have really finished with each other, say in 2017, the Chinese economy will probably be well over half the size of the US economy and closing fast. Uranus-Pluto has brought a make or break moment for Europe, and too much is at stake for it not to be make, no doubt with some collateral damage such as Greece and maybe Spain or Italy, the ‘irresponsible’ southern countries. Europe will be more united, and therefore more effective as a world power: it is currently the biggest world economic power.

Brazil and India are catching up, but by 2017 there will be a clearer world order made up of 3 empires, the US, Europe and China, each with their competing spheres of influence. China will be the main imperial power in Africa.

And there will be new governments as well. Recessions change people. In France, Sarkozy’s loss is the first time a sitting president has lost in the first round of voting. The Dutch government has just fallen in a dispute over the economy. This is the Great Recession, and it looks like it has a few years to run. Much depends on Europe's debt crisis resolving. We think of recessions as undesirable. But for a while at least, priorities change. There has been a backlash against excess. Collectively we can’t help ourselves, and we will eventually get infatuated with the good times again. But now is a time for re-evaluation, and that is a good thing. We are, for now, collectively more conscious. That is not a party political statement, for neither the left nor the right has the high ground on consciousness.

There is re-evaluation, but there is also political extremism, for that is the nature of Uranus-Pluto. There is the horror of Anders Breivik in Norway, who murdered 77 people as a protest against multi-culturalism. In the UK, there has been a swing against multiculturalism, but that has some sense on its side: a re-evaluation from experience of the liberalising Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1960s. In the US, the anti-democratic right wing of the Republican party still has ways to go. The intransigence of these extremists has already directly led to a downgrading of the US credit rating, a diminution on the world stage. During Obama’s 2nd term, Uranus-Pluto will hard aspect the US Sun at 13 Cancer. There is likely to be some kind of reckoning, with Obama claiming increased executive power in response to a stalled Congress. The US Progressed Ascendant has just moved from Leo to Virgo. The Prog Sun has already been in Pisces for about 7 years. Humility seems to be on its way.

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Meanwhile there has been a backlash against secular dictators across the Middle East. The rise of fundamentalist Islam that we have seen in recent years could take hold, for it is rooted in a reaction to the influence of foreign powers who want their oil: this pressure from outside is only likely to increase as the demand for oil continues to increase.

While its economic rise seems unstoppable, China is likely to undergo deep political change during the course of the Uranus-Pluto square. A political scandal involving the suspected murder of an Englishman (a spy?) is making headlines in a way that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. It is a significant moment. We are seeing a government emerging that is more open and accountable. I don’t think that has to mean democracy, a system we are so enamoured of in the west as some kind of evolutionary necessity. China has done very well economically so far without democracy. It is able to govern itself in a way more effectively than the cumbersome American system. I’m not anti-democracy, but in many ways it is a laughable system, asking unqualified people like you or I to decide who should run the sophisticated organisation that is government. Would you want to vote on who should be the brain surgeon at your local hospital? And should those surgeons first have to perform like monkeys to get our votes?

 

Big Sister Is Watching You - Or Is She?

Legislation is shortly to go before the UK Parliament allowing the intelligence agency GCHQ to monitor the phone and internet activity of everyone in the UK. They won’t be able to look at the content of calls, emails etc without a warrant, but they’ll be able to see who you’ve been in contact with. Similar legislation failed under Labour and was opposed by the Tories. Let's see what happens now it's the other way round.

The civil liberties groups are up in arms, but it seems like common sense to me. Through mobile phones and the internet, new worlds of communication have opened up and it is the government’s job to make sure they don’t become a secure haven for harmful activities such as terrorism, paedophile rings and organised crime.

It’s always been the government’s job to prevent criminal activity, and it would be failing in its most basic duty – to maintain an ordered, safe society – if it didn’t introduce such legislation.

You need to be able to look at certain activities in real time, and monitor extensive patterns of communication without having to go to a magistrate each time. Note the police won’t be able to do this, and even GCHQ won’t be able to look at content without a warrant.

It’s easy to react to this sort of legislation and feel invaded, but let’s imagine a real situation. You have Slimey the known paedophile. I would hope that GCHQ is already monitoring his electronic communications for signs of contact with other known paedophiles.

But supposing Slimey is suspected of being part of a paedophile ring with people who are not known to the police? What you need to do firstly is to monitor all his communications, and then those of all the people he is in contact with, and then all the people they are in contact with, and so on. It's immensely complex. And what do you find? 3 steps down the line Gropey, another known paedophile, turns up. Gropey and Slimey are not stupid enough to contact each other directly, but who are these intermediaries? And one particular email or text was recklessly sent from Sri Lanka, hotspot for paedophile sex tourism. Dodgy. And all this is without even opening any texts etc.

Now I know very little about most of my Facebook friends (let alone my friends’ friends). For all I know, one of them could be Gropey. It’s perfectly possible. He just happens to be interested in astrology, for example. GCHQ would then need to monitor my electronic communications and those of all my other Facebook friends, and then their friends in turn, at least for a while, to see if a pattern emerged. And it probably wouldn’t be some prurient bureaucrat fingering through my messages, but a computer algorithm trawling through millions of connections and looking for patterns.

If you lived in a village 100 years ago – as most people did – everyone would have known your business. If someone did something, people would have a fairly good idea who did it. Nowadays we have people we don’t know – or maybe just computers - knowing some of our business, instead of people we do know - and may not like - knowing all of our business. I think I prefer it like it is now.

The issue is not the creation of these powers for GCHQ. It has to happen. The issue is ensuring the powers do not get abused. Spying on people for political reasons. Or being paid to by journalists: the recent phone hacking enquiry has proved what we all knew, which is that the police can be bought. Presumably, so can some people working at GCHQ.

And if the government didn’t introduce these powers, we’d probably find we were being snooped on anyway, but in an unregulated manner. So for this reason as well, the legislation is needed.

Of course there will be abuses, in the same way that the police will always do bad things, like framing people when they are under pressure to get a result, or being prejudiced against the minorities that many of us are also secretly prejudiced against, or taking bribes. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a police force.

This issue is current in the US too. 2 days ago, in the New York Times, a headlined article began:

Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight, documents show.

And in yesterday's New York Times we read:

The director of the F.B.I. said cyberattacks would soon replace terrorism as the agency’s No. 1 concern as foreign hackers, particularly from China, penetrate American firms’ computers and steal huge amounts of valuable data and intellectual property... the executive assistant director of the F.B.I. told Congress last week of an American company that had all of its data from a 10-year, $1 billion research program copied by hackers in one night. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, head of the military’s Cyber Command, called the continuing, rampant cybertheft “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.”

Because it is fearful that government monitoring would be seen as a cover for illegal snooping and a violation of citizens’ privacy, the Obama administration has not even attempted to develop a proposal for spotting and stopping vast industrial espionage. It fears a negative reaction from privacy-rights and Internet-freedom advocates who do not want the government scanning Internet traffic.

Currently Pluto is stationing in Capricorn, just as the UK government has released these legislative plans. Government (Capricorn) control (Pluto) is an issue here, highlighted by Pluto’s being stationary. Whether you see the plans as the shadow side of Pluto in Capricorn – authoritarian, over-controlling government – or as a necessary exertion of power (Pluto) by the government (Capricorn) probably depends on your political position.

My opinion is that it is mainly the latter motive, though over time it will tend to shade into the former motive. But it would be wrong to try to use astrology to justify my opinion. Astrology doesn’t tell you what to think. It just indicates what principles, what archetypes, what gods are at work.

For the UK, Pluto is stationing at a very significant point, around 9.30 Capricorn: the UK IC is at 9.20 Capricorn and the UK Sun is at 10.11 Capricorn. What is happening with the GCHQ legislation is therefore very significant in terms of the government taking control. The astrology tells us that. What it doesn’t tell us is what value to place on it. We will each have our own opinion.

Something I object to is the reflex reaction against the legislative plans by the educated liberal consensus, that they are simply a bad thing, Big Brother, end of story. Like GM food is simply a bad thing to be opposed. Or nuclear power. Nothing is like that. It is unthinking. Being educated is unfortunately not the same thing as being able to think - being able to weigh up emotive subjects dispassionately and to question one’s own values and attitudes. I think these plans need intelligent opposition. There will be abuses, there will be too many of them at times, and governments have to be kept on their toes.

Uranus-Pluto Part 8 of 8: The Arab Spring and the Downsizing of the UK

So we’ll look at a couple of charts from the Arab Spring. I won’t be doing the sort of extensive analysis that I did for the US Chart. I just want to show the activity of Uranus-Pluto. And then we’ll look at the UK and Scotland.

The Arab Spring seems to be a revolt against secular dictators, something had obviously been brewing for years. But we don’t know what the final outcome will be. Islamist theocracy, Uranus-Pluto in its repressive form of ‘this is the only way’, could be the outcome in many cases. That doesn’t make democracy necessarily the non-repressive option. Americans, for example, see their style of democracy as the only way and are quite prepared to impose it on other countries. (With natal Sun conjunct Jupiter, which rules the Ascendant, the US easily inclines towards fundamentalism in its beliefs.)

First of all, Libya.

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This is the chart for its independence, and its recent revolution occurred under Uranus square Sun – the overthrow of the leader, which is classic. The Pluto conjunct Sun transit was over, suggesting that a feeling of revolt had been growing for some years. That is the way Pluto transits work sometimes: something grows unseen and then eventually pushes through into life, and it’s only when you look back that you can see the process.

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This is the Chart for the Gaddafi regime, and the obvious transit is the Uranus opposition, the mid-life crisis. Uranus rules the Descendant, foreign partners, so there is the foreign intervention in its mid-life crisis.

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Syria is still having its attempted revolution, and we don’t know which way it’s going to go for now. The rebels are not receiving the same help from the west that the Libyans did. This year Uranus and Pluto are hard-aspecting the Syrian Sun, the leader, and they will go on to hard-aspect the Angles over the next couple of years. So it is a very difficult process that is going to continue. But it's hard to see how in the longer-term the present leadership can survive when you've got such a demand for change from the outer planets.
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Time for the UK. The usual UK Chart is the 1801 Chart, the Union of Britain and Ireland. And as you can see, we are going through a Uranus opposition. A country has a Uranus opposition every 84 years or so, and the last one was around 1927-28, when we also, interestingly, had a coalition government.

It’s as though under a Uranus opposition you can’t decide who you are any more, all these possibilities are there, but you no longer have a foundation from which to decide. Particularly when Uranus is so prominent in the chart, being conjunct the Ascendant and square the Sun and MC. It is what makes us the awkward squad in Europe, and Uranus in the sense of a splitting off suggests the UK as island nation. It also gives us our inventiveness.

This year and next year are particularly pokey. The Uranus –Pluto transit will this year almost, but not quite, square the Sun and MC, but will exactly hard aspect the Ascendant.

So it’s a huge period in terms of who we think we are. And there are 2 tanks in the garden: Scotland and Europe. Scotland is holding a referendum on independence in 2 years. And Europe is drawing ever closer together, leaving the UK potentially adrift on the outside, lacking power within Europe.

The UK may well be downsizing in the next few years due to the splitting action of Uranus. It’s like the very last vestiges of Empire going. And we may decide to consider ourselves European in a way that we haven’t so far. And the English may also reclaim being English in a way they haven’t for a long time.

And it’s about Pluto sitting right on the bottom of the chart, conjunct the IC and Sun. The last time this occurred was before this chart came into existence, in 1767. And that was a time when conflict was building with the American colonies, resulting in the Declaration of Independence 9 years later. So there’s a theme of Empire there.

Pluto at the bottom of the chart is saying the foundations are no longer adequate. Pluto kind of says that anyway, even without Capricorn and the IC. Britain has been in this weird situation for a long time now, thinking of itself as one of the major powers, feeling it has a duty to go in there where there is trouble in the world – with the say-so of the US of course - and having a seat on the UN Security Council. But the Empire and wealth are no longer there to justify that attitude, and haven’t been since WWII really.

So I think this transit could be very good for us, it could bring us down to earth, it could mark the English knowing who they are again not just after the kind of misfit of the post-Empire years, but in a way after the inflation of having an Empire in the first place. It’s an inflation that has been there for several hundred years. When a country gets successful, when it gets to be top dog as the British were, you can forget who you are. And Pluto can bring you back there, back to your foundations.

I think this Pluto transit will be doing the same for America too as China snaps at its heels. Not to the same extent as Britain, not by a long way, because America will be top dog for a long time yet. But it’s the beginning of that process of in a way coming back to itself. Pluto brings humility and the self-knowledge that can come with that.

So, something about Scottish Independence.

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Nick Campion has a speculative chart for Scotland, which is the 842 Aries Ingress. It works well in terms of transits. Over the last few years Uranus and Pluto have been hard aspecting the Sun as their leader, Alex Salmond, has promoted the idea of independence.

He is taking it to the people, the Moon, in 2014, and look at that Moon, 7 degrees Aries conjunct Uranus at 13 Aries. The Aries-Uranus symbolism suggests a people for whom independence is vital, and that is being hugely activated by Uranus-Pluto over the next couple of years.

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In considering Scottish Independence, the UK 1707 chart would seem to be the one to work with, because that is the chart for the union of England and Scotland. In 2014, Pluto and Uranus will be hard aspecting the ascendant, and Saturn will be crossing the Midheaven. The ascendant is how we give expression to ourselves, and an easy interpretation of that is to say by splitting, by dividing, Uranus.

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The referendum will be in the autumn of 2014. On the 4th of October that year, the progressed Ascendant moves into Sagittarius. So a major new beginning, a freedom in a sense. Freedom for the Scots, and in a way freedom for the UK from having to be this falsely imperial nation. And a new sense of what gives meaning (Sagittarius) for both countries. Prog Sun exactly square prog Moon: what the people, the Moon, want, and what the government wants are at odds. And then the fiery Grand Trine between the Moon, Pluto and Venus, suggesting some new vision that will unfold very naturally. And the Progressed Chart Ruler, Jupiter, conjunct the Prog Midheaven, adding to the sense of expansion.

The idea of division, of split, also applies to the UK 1801 Chart, not just because of the square from Uranus to the Sun and MC in 2012/14, but because Uranus goes on to exactly square the UK 1801 Moon, the people, at 19 Cancer in 2015. So something big will be happening, and putting all the factors together, it looks very like independence for Scotland.

Uranus-Pluto Part 7 of 8: the Rise of China and the US Political Crisis

Uranus-Pluto, the US and China.

I’ll come back now to the US and what I think may be a looming political crisis.

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So the US is a couple of years behind Europe with the Uranus-Pluto square, as our Suns tend to be around 9 or 10 of the cardinals, whereas the US is at 13 degrees. So we are in the middle of our crisis now, an economic crisis that has political roots, in the sense of Europe having attempted monetary union without the necessary political union.

The US Uranus-Pluto is still a couple of years off peaking, but I think we had a strong indicator of what it could be about when America had its credit rating downgraded for the first time ever last year because the politicians couldn’t agree on a budget. The credit agencies weren’t saying we don’t trust your economy, they were saying we don’t trust your politicians to run the economy.

America had been there before many times with its budget, and under Clinton parts of the government had to shut down for a while because there was no money available to run them because Congress couldn’t agree on a budget.

But this time it was different. It happened during a major world economic crisis, and the difficulty in running America had only got worse since Clinton’s time. It was the outcome, if you like, of Uranus and Pluto hard aspecting the US MC, the standing of the US in the world. Pluto was finishing with the MC, Uranus was still active. But it was also a run-in to the Uranus-Pluto hard transit to the Sun in a couple of years.

I think the roots of the problem go back to the founding of the USA, and what I think of as a bit of a paranoid element in their system of government which is now being exposed. That paranoid element is their fear of dictatorships, arising out of their experience of being ruled from 3000 miles away. The early Americans set up such a strong system of checks and balances to stop their President becoming a dictator that it can be very hard for him to actually do his job.

I think this is expressed by the Sun in square to Saturn in the chart. It gives a fear of authority, which in a way was appropriate at the time, but a whole system that is founded on that is out of balance and will sooner or later be exposed by Pluto.

So you have this slightly crazy situation which occurs regularly where you have a President of one political persuasion, and one or both houses of Congress will be of the opposite persuasion. So to get any legislation through an incredible amount of horse-trading has to be done. There’s this saying that there are 2 things that you don’t want to know how they are made: laws and sausages. And in the 2nd half of a President’s 2nd term, you usually get a lame-duck President, who is unable to get any major legislation through. That is ¼ of the time he is President.

To function, the American system relies on each party being to some extent bi-partisan, willing to go along with the other party. But in recent decades the right-wing of the republican party seems to have become ever-more determined not to deal with the Democrats. Under Clinton, they seemed to be trying to make it as difficult as possible, even impossible, for him to be President. Going for him over a tawdry affair, while the whole world mocked.

And it happened again with Obama last summer. The House of representatives is now controlled by the Republicans, and they are again pushing their far-right agenda, and as under Clinton, they are prepared to bring America to its knees in order to get their way.

So what is interesting about this is that, in effect, a kind of dictatorship has been created, a dictatorship of the far right. In fleeing from dictatorship, another kind has been created.
The reason it is different now is because for the first time it has affected America’s economic standing, and this is as Uranus-Pluto comes up to hard-aspect its Sun-Saturn. In 2014 Uranus and Pluto will hard-aspect both the Sun and Saturn.

So that is extremely intense. America will be needing to re-examine its relationship with power and authority and leadership. If you have a leader, you have to give them the power to lead, and America doesn’t want to do that. President Kennedy famously bemoaned his lack of power compared to his opposite number in the USSR, Khrushchev.

America has never trusted its leaders – Sun square Saturn – and they have responded by being untrustworthy. That is why the US is so prone to conspiracy theories about dark government plots. Of course, some of them are probably for real, but a lot of them are fantasy, wish-fulfillment, they’re childish. When the US had 9/11, a large part of the population immediately assumed, and still assume, that it was a government plot. When we had our July bombings in the UK, the common assumption wasn’t that the government had done it.

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In the UK we have Sun in Capricorn square to Uranus. So we love authority and tradition – Capricorn – but we also rebel against it – Uranus. We look up to the Royal Family – Capricorn – but we also believe that no man is better than another – Uranus. We are contradictory, but I don’t think we have that same disempowerment around authority that the US has. For better or for worse, UK leaders are usually in a position to lead. They have to bring their party with them, and that can be hard enough, without having to persuade their opponents as well.

So a likely scenario in a couple of years, as Uranus-Pluto aspects the US Sun-Saturn, is that we will see a Democratic President blocked by Congress to such an extent that the country is yet again ungovernable, but it’s going to be a bigger crisis than before in some way or other. It may be a crisis in that people finally get sick of it and turn against the Tea Party. Or it may be a budget impasse with much bigger consequences for America’s world standing.

Whichever way, the problem seems to be rooted in this unease with authority – Sun square Saturn – that is self-fulfilling. And America is going to have to deal with that, at least to some extent. In a way, America is going to have to grow up.

When you have Sun square Saturn, it can be hard to feel at ease, you always have something to prove, and I think that also lies behind America’s great economic and military power, along with the expansiveness of natal Jupiter conjunct Sun. In a way this transit is telling America to become more at ease with itself. Sun square Saturn can achieve a lot, but it can also be very superficial, for it only values what can be measured, if you like it is the Protestant work ethic. In the US’ case, it could also be seen as the tension you get on the Capricorn-Cancer axis, with the Sun in Cancer and Saturn ruling Capricorn. Any axis has issues to work through, and with Capricorn-Cancer it is the values of the world vs the values of family and home, it is like Germany and Greece.
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Another factor for America under this transit is the rise of China.

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We’re not certain of the exact time for this chart, but it’s not far off, and we can see that China is currently in the thick of the Uranus-Pluto transit. Economically, I think the transit has been about China going from strength to strength. So far it has just been Pluto, which did an exact square last year. It has been about China, in literally the last few years coming from an economy smaller than the UK’s to being the world’s second largest economy. It has been an empowerment for China.

And I think it’s also an illustrative case of why it can be hard to attach human values to Pluto transits. Is what is happening in China a good thing or not? It’s awful in some ways and good in others. But even those are just my value judgements, which are not part of Pluto’s world. Pluto is an empowerment rather than a death and maybe rebirth for China, because it has already created a sound base for economic growth. But that doesn’t make that economic growth a good or a bad thing.

Politically it may be interesting, for this chart has the Moon in Aquarius, and the progressed MC is about to enter Aquarius. And the natal Sun is square to Aquarius’ ruler, Uranus.

I think the Moon in Aquarius expresses the name ‘The People’s Republic’, the idealism under which the communist regime was founded. But Aquarius is also democracy, as is its ruler Uranus. So we have these 4 potentially democratic influences: Moon in Aquarius, Natal Sun square Uranus, Prog MC moving into Aquarius and transiting Uranus hard aspecting the Sun and sextiling the Moon. So politically there could be a lot of change in the coming few years.

But back to the USA. The Chinese Sun at 7 Libra conjoins the US Saturn and squares its Sun.

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So the newly empowered Chinese Sun is impacting on that American insecurity, it’s drive to be top dog – because Saturn likes to be pre-eminent. The Chinese Sun is also conjunct the US MC, its place in the world. So China is like a tank in the US front garden. What seems to characterise China’s rise is it seems to keep happening faster than we thought. China’s economy is now about 1/3 the size of the US economy. In 6 years time, as Uranus-Pluto finally start to put some distance between each other, we may be talking about an economy well over half the size of the US’s and closing fast.

America has got used to being the undisputed No 1 and to having its own way. The Uranus-Pluto transit will be signalling the beginning of the end of that period and a difficult adjustment for a country which, with Sun square Saturn, values itself one-sidedly in terms of its wealth and position.

Of course, all countries do that. But when you have Sun square Saturn, you can feel you are nothing without that position. So it is going to be a very difficult adjustment for America, and with Sun in Cancer, it is possible it may turn inwards. And this at the same time as its hallowed democratic system comes under pressure for change. So it’s like a change in the character of America that I think we will slowly see.

The Chinese Sun conjuncts the US Saturn and squares its Sun, while the Chinese Saturn squares the US Asc. A pronounced Saturn is what you look for in long-term relationships, it is the planet that binds and gives strong foundations. Mars and Venus are just there to start you off. And the US and China have the same Moon. So there is similarity there. But the Chinese Sun activates the US Saturn, the place where it doesn’t feel at ease with itself. The US tends to need an enemy to feel at ease, it has the Sun and Mars in the 7th, it projects its unease onto foreign peoples, whether it’s the USSR or Islamic terrorists. It’s that paranoid element again. So China would seem to be well-placed to take up this role for the US, and this demonization could be an outcome of Uranus-Pluto. At the same time, the US needs China economically, so it can’t afford to demonise her. But the US will still want to. It’ll be interesting to see how this one develops.

I think if we were to boil this Uranus-Pluto transit down to one issue, it would be the rise of China and the shift in the balance of power worldwide. This rise has already been indirectly responsible for the western debt crisis. The Chinese were saving lots of money due to their booming economy and lent it at low interest rates to the west, who borrowed too much and got into difficulties. Along with China, India and Brazil are also rising – just a few days ago, Brazil announced its economy had overtaken the UK economy as the 6th largest in the world. So the shift in the balance of power is not just China. It is a long-term trend, but this Uranus-Pluto seems to be a sort of tipping point, a change in the world order. And we still have 3 years of crossings to go.

The US has shown itself to be very sensitive to Uranus-Pluto. In 1878 there was an opening square with Uranus at 25 Leo and Pluto at 25 Taurus. It impacted the US Moon at 27 Aquarius. This saw the end of post civil war reconstruction and the start of the Jim Crow Laws in the South, which segregated black people and gave them an inferior status. So this was a disempowerment – Pluto – and a separation – Uranus for a large minority of the people –the Moon.

The opposition of 1901 at about 15 Gemini Sag runs along the US Asc/Desc, just like Saturn Pluto did at 9/11, and it also involved foreign affairs: the Descendant is foreign partners, and Sagittarius concerns foreign places. In this case it was the outcome of the Spanish-American War of 1898, in which America seized Spanish possessions in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and it led to the globally oriented American foreign policy that continues to the present day. So it was a turning outwards and an empowerment of US foreign policy.

Then there was the closing square of 1932-34 at 20 to 23 degrees of the cardinal signs. Uranus and Pluto were moving in on the US natal Pluto in the 2nd house at 27 Capricorn. Pluto is where we feel our power lies, even what we feel our survival depends upon, and in the 2nd house that is wealth. This was the time of the Great Depression and the New Deal.

The conjunction of the mid sixties was in middish Virgo, square to the US Asc and conjunct it’s Neptune. This was a time of protest and the enactment of civil rights legislation: that is the 9th House – the Law – and Neptune, rights for black people.

And now we have the square of 2012-15, which impacts on the Sun, the leader, and there is the first black President, political deadlock and the first ever credit downgrade.

A theme running through Uranus-Pluto and the USA is the changing fortunes of black people.

The conjunction of 1850 at 29 Aries was square the US natal Pluto. Pluto if you like is the shadow, and slavery and wealth were closely tied together in the US. Note Pluto in the 2nd House. Slavery was already a hugely divisive issue, and 1850 saw the Compromise of 1850, a series of bills which sorted the issue of slavery in the states recently taken from Mexico. It’s hard to untangle it all, but slavery was nevertheless centre stage and civil war was already a possibility.

Then there were the Jim Crow Laws of the opening square of 1878, the civil rights bills of the next conjunction of the 1960s, and the first black president under the current opening square.

Uranus-Pluto Part 6 of 8: the Nature of Collective Transits (2)

Loss of individual consciousness under collective transits; scapegoating; why countries go through Uranus-Pluto change; out-of-control events as a sign of deeper change.

So I’ll be wanting to say something about the Arab Spring and about the USA and China. But firstly I want to circle back and talk more about collective transits and the individual, and ask what in essence the world is experiencing when there is a Uranus-Pluto square.

This square is something that every country will experience, probably more if their chart is transited by it, and it’s also something that we experience individually – not necessarily in the sense of personal transits, but in the sense of our aerials into the collective, a sort of impact on us personally that the stirring collective has, and that can draw us into it uncritically if our hold on individualised consciousness isn’t very strong.

Martin Heidegger

A classic case of this was under the last Uranus-Pluto square when intellectuals in Nazi Germany were drawn into the party, for example the existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger. The intellect as rational mind is treated as the highest faculty, as the decisive faculty, in our culture, but these outer planet transits seem to show this is not the case, it is something else, probably authenticity in a Plutonian sense, or self-knowledge, that is decisive.

I’d say an example of this sort of loss of individual consciousness under the present square would be the tendency to blame all our woes on the bankers. I’m not saying they don’t have a lot to answer for, but our economic difficulties have been brought about by a complex of conditions including, for example, lack of government regulation and general infatuation with the good times. And when there are difficulties, the collective tries to find a scapegoat, a simple answer, and the scapegoat may well be to some extent culpable, a good scapegoat usually is. But I think blaming it all on the bankers is a good example.

Above is the man we have all (in the UK) learned to despise. Fred Goodwin, the ex-head of the Royal Bank of Scotland, was stripped of his knighthood a few weeks ago, and he probably deserved to be, but that’s missing the point: the judgement that he deserved it covers up a collective ritual of revenge and blame, it means that we don’t have to face our own part in the economic difficulties. This is what collectives do, they blame somebody else, it’s childish, and we all get caught up in it to some extent. It’s the same with America and Osama bin Laden, judging him as evil and killing him was a means for Americans to avoid looking at their own part in 9/11, the foreign policy and business practices that led to it.
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9/11 was a Saturn-Pluto event for America, but killing bin Laden was a Uranus-Pluto event, triggered by an exact Mars-Jupiter conjunction in Aries, which makes it a great story of daring super-warriors. Pluto, planet of collective death and revenge, was just about to rise over the eastern horizon. Uranus was opposing the US MC, and Pluto was still within range of squaring it, and being the MC it concerned the US’ reputation and standing on the world stage.

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So the collective stirs under these transits, but what is it in principle that it goes through when Uranus squares Pluto? These transits work both ways. Uranus affects Pluto and Pluto affects Uranus, and they join together to create something more than the sum of their parts. Pluto empowers Uranus, and Uranus awakens and radicalises Pluto.

Pluto, being the outermost planet, is in a way the main one, and setting him as the main context for change is probably a good way of looking at it. And this brings us back to earlier in the talk and the example of the Euro and Greece.

Pluto is the life-force, the underlying energy that keeps us living and unfolding. And you get Pluto change whenever the form can no longer support that need to keep living. The resilience to Pluto-change of a system or an institution often depends on how well thought-out it was in the first place, how well it took into consideration the nature of the institution and the nature of the people running it, and therefore how much room it gave for further development. When it runs out of room, then you need a new basis, a death and a re-birth, you can no longer tweak it. Because you are dealing with a collective situation, there is no guarantee that what replaces it will be well-thought out: it may just be a collective reflex that seems for now to provide a way of carrying on.

I think Nazi Germany, which arose under the last Uranus-Pluto square, is an example of this, a reflex collective response to a very difficult economic situation and the humiliation of that and World War I, a response that seemed for a while to give the country its pride back, but in a very narrow way that could only lead eventually to trouble.

So going back to the Euro, it only had a short life, about 10 years, before it ran into trouble, as many had foreseen it would, because it hadn’t been properly thought through in its enacting. Politics got in the way. Because it is facing a major Pluto transit, it will change in a big way, that much is guaranteed. But what we don’t know is how much consciousness will be brought to that change. Will the replacement be properly thought through? Or will it be every country for itself? Or will it be somewhere in between, some countries leaving in a chaotic way after being crushed by the demands of the central powers of Europe, and those remaining creating a new constitution?

I think in a way it is easier to make mundane predictions than personal predictions, because collectives leave themselves less options. And sometimes it’s pretty obvious what’s going to happen. But other times you just don’t know. All you know, from the astrology, is the shape of the change, the principles behind it. I think with Europe we just don’t know. I think the Euro will continue because it is almost a survival issue for Europe, and Pluto gives us the power to survive. But in what form is at present I think unknowable. I don’t think the future is writ out there and with the right astrological tools you can predict it. I think often it really could go in a number of directions.

I think an example of a well-thought through institution, that has therefore had a longer life, is the US system of government. That was hammered out in the late 1700s, with all sorts of checks and balances that took human nature into account, and it has therefore survived a long time. But no system or institution can take the whole of human nature into account, we cannot be reduced to rules and laws, and sooner or later therefore that system no longer provides the basis for life and Pluto will come along and change it. I think that is what is starting to happen now with the US system of government, but I will come to that a bit later.

We need also to bring Uranus into the equation. On his own he demands new life, new forms, and when a system is not outworn, new possibilities within the system emerge. But when the system is outworn, Uranus speeds up the process and presents possibilities that you wouldn’t have thought of. That can make him revolutionary. But again, because we are talking collectively, those new possibilities may not be thought through and considered, they may just be collective reflexes.

Uranus is an archaic god who hated his children and had them imprisoned within the earth. And you could say this is Uranus in its unconscious form. He concerns the opposite of the awakening and the progress that we often associate him with. Instead of promoting new possibilities – his children – he stifles them. It’s as if the vital spark that is Uranus, if we don’t want it, if it is threatening in some way, then it turns into its opposite, it actively stifles new life. On an individual level, it could drive us crazy or depressed. On a collective level, it can lead to fundamentalism and repression.

There may be examples of this over time in the Arab Spring. Uranus-Pluto if you like caused these revolutions, but there is a strong element of Islamic fundamentalism in many of these countries which may eventually be politically dominant. The point about fundamentalism in whatever form is that it stifles new life, whether it takes an Islamic or scientific materialist form. It is saying this is the only way. It creates a seemingly secure but actually false foundation, because nothing is ever the only way. Pluto in his negative form is this false foundation, and Uranus is the stifling of anything that opposes it.

So with Uranus-Pluto on a collective level there is this intense pressure for change on any system whose foundations have run their course. The obvious sign with these 2 planets often seems to be crisis, which is Uranian, revealing the underlying problem, which is Pluto. At least that is one way of putting it.

Another way of putting it is that events start going out of control. This is often a sure sign that the outer planets are getting active. Normally the world is governed by Saturn, life is regulated, and we need Saturn for life to function. But then events happen that can’t be controlled. Under Uranus-Neptune, the Soviet Union could no longer control its satellite countries, and there was a series of revolutions. Under the present transit, the loss of control began with the collapsing of the banks in late 2008. Soon after that were the debt crises in Europe, that are still with us. There was the exploding nuclear reactor in Japan and the Deepwater Oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. There will always be events that are out of control, but more so when the outer planets are activated. They point to the need for change and they often are that change. Sometimes they are symbolic, like the zombie parades you were getting last year, the gates of hell, Pluto’s world, opening. This picture above is from Brighton last year.