CATHOLIC TRIVIA

Cherie, wife of Tony Blair, is not a good Catholic. She has just published her memoirs, in which she reveals that her 4th child Leo was conceived because she didn’t have any contraceptives with her. What a thing to tell the world about! The story is that Cherie and Prime Minister Tony were staying at Balmoral, the Queen’s Scottish residence. As you’d expect with an upper-class stately pile, it was cold and draughty in the bedroom, and one thing led to another. The reason she didn’t have her contraceptives was that the year before when they were staying at Balmoral, Cherie came into the bedroom to find that the staff had unpacked her suitcase for her!

She’s never been fond of Gordon Brown, and accuses him in her memoirs of rattling the keys of No 10 over her husband. Brown has Moon-Pluto in Leo, Cherie has Moon and Pluto in Leo straddling Brown’s conjunction. And they were engaged in a power struggle (Pluto) over who occupied the throne (Leo).

Tony Blair’s father was adopted. His biological parents were both actors. That explains a lot. Blair has a 10th House Moon, a good place for an actor, because it helps you to connect emotionally (Moon) with the public (10th House). A number of people have commented on what a good actor Blair is. The trouble is, I don’t think he knows he is doing it.

Father Funes, a respected scientist and director of the Vatican Observatory, has published an article in the Vatican newspaper called ‘Aliens are my Brothers’. In the article he says that just as there are multiple forms of life on earth, so there could exist intelligent beings in outer space created by God. So far so good. But then comes the killer bit: he speculates that some aliens could even be free from original sin. Who needs comedians when you get priests like this? Presumably he means a world with no sex, gays, unconverted Jews or pleasure. Just eunuchs with wings. Heaven!

When Will Hillary Go? Your Opinion Please.

It’s a good sort of guessing game – when will Hillary go? I invite all my readers to give a date, backed up by astrological argument, as to when Hillary Clinton will concede to Barack Obama in the Democratic nomination contest. I’m going for 4th June.

Hillary was born 26 Oct 1947 in Chicago, Illinois, time uncertain.

I think the real battle has been over for quite some time now. It began under the prolonged opposition from Mars to Pluto that lasted, on and off, from September through to the end of March. It started in earnest on super-Tuesday in early February, when a large number of US States held their Primaries. At this time Mars was stationing between the tips of the horns of the bull – what an omen for a great contest!

Arguing astrologically, I’d say the real battle finished when Mars stopped opposing Pluto on 29 March, because that had been the presiding signature of the contest.

What we are dealing with in Hillary is an enormous amount of staying power which is proving also to be extremely stubborn in the face of defeat. ‘Testicular fortitude’ is the term being used by her supporters. Her funding has dried up, Obama now has the lead amongst super-delegates, and the arithmetic for her to win just isn’t there – and hasn’t been for some time now.

This stubbornness and staying power is described by her Scorpio-Leo configuration. She has Sun in Scorpio, and Mercury-Venus in Scorpio square to a Mars-Pluto-Saturn conjunction in Leo. Very fixed and determined, very good at surviving (Scorpio) and very ambitious (Leo).

The main transit occurring for her (in the absence of a birth time) is Neptune opposing her natal Saturn at 21 Leo and squaring her Mercury at 21 Scorpio. This is not a great natal aspect for charisma, but it is good for emphasising how experienced you are (Saturn), which has been the line she has taken against Obama.

Neptune is now stationing opposite her Saturn, dissolving (Neptune) her stubborn resistance (Saturn) to conceding the leadership (Saturn/Leo). Neptune will be gaining power over the next 2 weeks as he slows right down and then goes retrograde. I reckon this will do for Hillary. Her Saturn will finally yield to Neptune’s power. Neptune is also about illusion and waking from illusion. Neptune being so active for her right now suggests to me that she is not just being calculating or determined, but that she is also refusing to face reality.

Being as fixed as she is, it is more likely she will go towards the end of Neptune stationing, or even as he turns retrograde. So she will fight not just today’s primary in West Virginia, but Kentucky and Oregon in a week’s time, and then the final primaries in Puerto Rico, Montana and South Dakota on the 1st and 3rd of June. Not that the outcome will make much difference. Neptune will just start to move again during these final 2 primaries, ushering in a new phase.

In her natal chart, Hillary has stationing Uranus. So she is sensitive to this planet stationing, and this can help time events. Uranus will be just starting to station in early June. And on 4th June, the Moon will conjoin, and so trigger, her natal Uranus. This is suitably the day after the final primary. So the astrology and the events tie in together to give this date.

Hillary's Downfall

Here is a tasteless video on Hillary Clinton's downfall, courtesy of comedian James Andomian at youtube.

OK, it's a bit harsh, but it's a comment on the fact that she won't bow out when it is time to. She is a Scorpio, so you can't expect it. She is determined to survive in this race, even at the cost of her personal fortune. But there are wider issues, and the writing is now clearly on the wall.

The Different Species of Human

I’m toying with the idea that what we call humanity is in fact a number of different species that share the same type of body. In many ways I find it makes more sense to think like this. We do not all share a common humanity. What we think of as human - the ability to reflect on and to know ourselves, to understand others disinterestedly and to empathise/sympathise – is by no means a universal or even necessarily latent characteristic of people.

With some people, you feel they do have this ability, but it is latent, or got messed up somewhere along the way, and you want to help them get there. With others, you can feel no, they are happy in their own way being e.g. materialistic, that is what they believe in, the world makes sense to them in those terms, they are not particularly messed up, they just are what they are. They are a different species, and it wouldn’t be fair to judge them negatively for being what they are. It’s like dwarves and elves and orcs. Personally, I find this can help me understand some people better if I'm not having to assume they are in some fundamental sense like me. No, we really are different species, like me and horses. And there's nothing wrong with being a horse.

In Buddhism you find the concept of the 6 realms of existence, which are inhabited by different types of being. These realms both exist objectively on other planes to our own, as well as describing the psychological realm to which different species of people belong. What characterises the truly human being is the ability to experience and understand all of the realms and not to be over-identified with any of them.

So you get gods, people say with loads of trines in their charts, who are talented and beautiful, life goes easily for them, but there is little discomfort, at least not enough to get them to reflect on themselves, to see that happiness and ease is not a given. So that when things do go wrong for these people, they really do suffer, because they are not used to it.

And you get jealous gods, those who want to seize from outside of themselves what they think will make them happy, and are ruthlessly competitive and self-centred in the process.The worlds of business and politics are full of this species. A Mars-Neptune square might describe this type – driven and competitive (Mars), but deluded (Neptune) into thinking that happiness lies purely outside of themselves. The USA, the most successfully competitive country of all, has a Mars-Neptune square, as well as a Sun-Saturn square, which has a similar kind of message.

Then there is the animal realm, characterised by the satisfaction of natural desires such as food, sex and sleep. Satisfying these desires can be very pleasurable, and there is nothing wrong with that, and some species of people are happy to live like this.

The hungry ghost realm is the passive reflex of the jealous god realm. Like the jealous gods, these people feel empty inside, but they are Pisces about it: they try to satisfy themselves by sucking energy and attention from other people, or from drugs and alcohol. It is a sad realm.

Then there is the equally sad realm of the hell beings, the opposite of the god realm. Instead of the unalloyed bliss of the gods, they experience unalloyed suffering and madness and despair. It is like a chart full of squares and oppositions and no easy aspects.

What all these realms have in common is that the beings in them are completely identified with their psychological states and they do not see that existence contains other possibilities. Human consciousness is present when, though you may have a tendency towards a particular realm, you see it is not the be-all-and-end-all, that you can change realms. I don’t think you can predict this from a chart, because self-awareness is an act of volition that is always possible (albeit very hard if the suffering or pleasure is very intense). The chart does not tell us the choices people are going to make. But perhaps we could say that a chart with a good balance of hard and soft aspects gives us a breadth of experience that lays a good foundation for reflective awareness.

So these 6 realms are one particular system, quite a good one in many ways. But it is a system and therefore needs to be treated lightly and provisionally, or it will get in the way of direct experience.

I’ve written quite a lot in the past about Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, but I’m going to drag them out again to illustrate the distinction between human and non-human, to put it rather bluntly. ‘Non-human’ carries a weight of judgement that I don’t intend, it’s just descriptive.

Gordon Brown is well-known for his jealous god tendency, his lust for power that dogged Blair’s premiership, and that has no awareness in it, no consideration on his part as to whether he is suitable for the job (which in many ways he isn’t). But Gordon Brown is not just this. He also has a genuine passion for helping those in need. So he is a human being, at least sometimes, but one with a big power thing to sort out.

Tony Blair seems to me to be more seamless, I feel he belongs to a different species to me. He believes completely in who and what he is, which I think is one sign of an absence of self-awareness. Though he may agonise about whether or not God wants him to do certain things, I don’t think this reflects a genuine awareness of his real motives. I feel much more inclined than with Brown to put his desire to change the world down to personal ambition. If I were to use the Buddhist classification, I’d probably stick him in the jealous god realm.

It’s amazing, given the number of different species that occupy the human body, that we manage to muddle along collectively to the extent that we do. An alien invasion, that would unify us!

In the Buddhist 6 Realms system, the destiny of all consciousness is eventually to become human and then Enlightened. That is where I part company. Enlightenment to me easily becomes an abstraction that takes you away from the integrity and even perfection of your current experience. And as for the destiny of consciousness – that’s a big one! Consciousness is so vast and mysterious and multiform that it seems presumptuous to me to say that it is all going in a similar, albeit uniquely individual, direction. And this also presumes that it is going anywhere, or needs to go anywhere, in the first place!

The Astrology of Peak Oil

Peak Oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum production is reached, after which the rate of production enters its terminal decline. (Wiki)

I’ve always thought that however much we are exhorted to use less petrol etc, it’s not going to happen while it remains affordable, and it will remain affordable until demand starts to significantly outstrip supply. i.e. Peak Oil.

I’m cynical about the extent to which the burning of oil is held to be responsible for global warming, because the issue has been politicised to such a degree. Even if we are the main cause of global warming, nothing is going to stop us using up the oil until it starts to run out. For all the attempts to get global agreements, we have still continued collectively to increase our use of oil.

I have no hopes of the politicians being effective, and the current biofuel fiasco proves the point. On one level biofuel is a nice idea, but any intelligent person can see it will lead to food shortages. Because the issue was politicised, intelligence went out the window. It wasn’t the individual politicians who were stupid, it was the stupidity that so often arises when you have a collective taking action.

The main problem with the use of oil in my opinion is that it is a limited resource, and our civilisation has come to depend heavily on it. This is why Peak Oil is such a significant point, because it will force significant change to where we get our energy from and even maybe a realisation that we need to use less energy. Until that point is reached, we will just be playing with alternative energy technologies.

The big question is when will peak oil be reached? Nobody knows, and there are plenty of theories about when. What we do know is that most of the countries that produce significant quantities of oil, e.g. Iran, USA, UK and possibly Russia, have already peaked. This is very telling.

The issue is complicated by the possibility of using non-conventional sources of oil, such as oil sands, where extraction is harder, but which becomes more economically feasible as the price of oil increases.


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The chart for the first Oil Strike is set for 28 Aug 1859 at 4pm in Titusville, Pennsylvania. Neptune is the symbol for Oil, and we find Neptune at 26 Pisces in the 2nd House of wealth and resources, which sounds about right. Pluto is conjunct the IC, revealing Oil to be a source of power. And the Node is in Aquarius conjunct Chiron, showing the potential for damage (Chiron) inherent in its use, particularly when combined with the scientific mind (Aquarius). Interestingly, the chart for the first man-made nuclear chain reaction also has a Chiron-Node conjunction.

In July this year, there will again be a Chiron-Node conjunction, and what is really remarkable is that it will be at 19.16 Aquarius, just a few minutes of a degree off the almost exact conjunction in the First Oil Strike chart. It's almost as if there is some sort of reckoning coming up, the need for a collective understanding that oil is not to be relied on in the way we have relied on it.

What I am particularly interested in is the Progressed Pluto of the Oil Strike chart. In the chart of a nation, a change in direction of Progressed Pluto can mark the rise and fall of that nation’s fortunes, of its power (Pluto).

This works well, for example, in the case of the rise and fall of the British Empire in the UK 1801 Chart. It works in the case of China, whose Prog Pluto changed direction in the late nineties as she began her rise to becoming a world economic power.

The US Prog Pluto will not change direction for another 70 years, which sounds about right to me. People have for years been quick to announce that the US is effectively bankrupt and owned by Japan, or owned by China, and that the end is nigh. But actually its economy is still several times the size of its nearest rival. We are likely to see the size of that difference narrowing in future decades, particularly because of China, and maybe the EU if it pulls together more. But I think it will still be a long time before the US is challenged as the main power in the world. 2076, that’s the year to look out for!

In the case of the chart for Oil, Progressed Pluto changed direction in 2004. There you have it. It is still stationing, and will not start to move again until 2014. We may not know when Peak Oil is going to be reached, but the astrology seems to be saying that actually we have pretty much reached it already (as some people do claim). However, we will only fully know this in hindsight, as Prog Pluto begins to move again from 2014 onwards - the same year that transiting Pluto conjoins the ASC of the Oil Chart.

Pluto squared natal Neptune at 26 Pisces in 2006, a further indication that Peak Oil may have been reached in recent years.

The price of oil has risen dramatically in recent months. There are all sorts of reasons for this. But if the astrology is right, one underlying reason would be the sense that there is a growing and permanent supply problem. It is perfect that Pluto should be entering Capricorn as this happens, because it reflects the deep structural change that will be necessary to solve the problem.

Neptune Stations - just Trust!

Neptune is standing still at the moment, and will be for some weeks, so his influence is stronger than usual. It is a time to trust in your intuition, trust in the unfolding of events in your life. Neptune is currently conjunct the North Node, so if you do trust, you may also meet people who will help you on your way.

Here is an autobiographical story by Philip Levine, based on the theme of finding the solitary orphan who, according to Jung, is 'hidden in the innermost soul of man.' It turns out, coincidentally, that Neptune was also stationing the day of this event in 1989.

[The pictures were added by me!]
"There have been times when I have felt that alone, wondering how I would survive in this universe, feeling a solitary place deep inside, unknown and unrecognized by those around me, and probably unwelcome.

I remember one such time, on a strange journey to Maui in 1989. My life was in chaos, my marriage of 17 years was ending, and one day I suddenly felt I was being urged to go to Maui, a place I’d never been or really even thought about. This meant a trip of 6000 miles at a time when I could not afford it. Why?

No matter how much I reasoned, the urge was insistent. Just go. So I made the trip, and on my first night on the Hawaiian island, as I was setting up my tent at dusk in a remote area, I spotted a dark young man watching me from behind a tree. He was the only other person there. He finally walked toward me, and when I said hello as he approached, he ignored me and walked right past, into the woods.

Initially I had felt scared being in a strange and alien environment with no plan or purpose. A traumatic childhood camping experience made camping feel very unsafe. But now I faced an apparent new threat. Who was this young man, and why was he acting so strangely, and worse…what did he want with me? I wondered where he had gone, and then I noticed him watching me from behind another tree.

I panicked, and once my tent was set up, I raced back to my car and drove off leaving him and the tent. The feeling was one of overwhelming aloneness, with nowhere to turn and no one to help me.

I felt like an orphan.

I sat on a cliff overlooking the sun going down. I had never been anywhere like this, and I’m sure there were many romantic couples enjoying the sunset on Maui that night. But I was so scared and alone. Where could I go? What could I do? I could feel that young man waiting back by my tent in the darkness. I was prepared to spend my ten days on Maui inside that car. I had not felt such fear since I was a child. I cried and pleaded, "Why am I here? I don’t even know why I’ve come here, and what am I going to do?"

But there was an answer, perhaps from the same inner place that first led me to un-dertake such a puzzling journey, and I unexpectedly found myself saying "I don’t know why I’ve come 6000 miles to be here all alone, and this man may be waiting at my camp-site to murder me. If I have come this far without even knowing why, in order to be killed, then let me do it well."

I felt a powerful calmness inside me, replacing the panic, and I drove back to the darkened empty parking lot. As I hiked to my tent, I thought I would probably not sleep that night, but in fact I went right to sleep and did not wake till morning.

It is in hanging out in such empty and rocky places of the soul that the orphan can be found. Sitting at the bedside of a dying loved one, faced with the inevitability of their leaving and all the jumbled feelings of fear, anger, grief, sadness and confusion, if we pause and listen, accepting what is, we may be surprised to find ourselves in a deeper place within. Perhaps this is the mythical and spiritual underworld.

Quiet, solitary, and fragile, the voice of the orphan soul within each of us can be heard. Sometimes it sounds like silence. Something had responded to my plea, calmed my panic, and filled me with the willingness to accept my fate. Was that me or someone else in me?"

Copyright Philip Levine 2006

Jupiter sextile Uranus

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5,000 evacuated as volcano blast meets thunderstorm in the Chilean sky (Times online).

Sublime: impressing the mind with a sense of grandeur or power; inspiring awe, veneration, etc.

Pluto and the End of History

In 1992 Professor Francis Fukayama published his book ‘The End of History and the Last Man’. In it he made the claim that:

"What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such... That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

It always seemed to me a bit of a daft and complacent claim to make, but no different in essence to claims such as Jesus being the only son of god: it is religion rather than thought. But it fitted in well with American neo-conservative thinking. 11 years later Iraq was invaded on the grounds of bringing democracy to the Middle East (as well as on the grounds of WMD, Oil, the war on fundamentalist Islam etc).

It could be said that the invasion of Iraq will come to be seen as a high point in Democracy as an ideology, as an absolute truth to which other countries need to be converted. The attempt to convert Iraq to Democracy has failed, and all the US can hope for is an eventual and not-too-dishonourable withdrawal.

Democracy remains a potent idea, but like all such ideas it has a beginning, a middle and an end. It is also a form of government, and with Pluto entering the sign of government – Capricorn – it is timely that the idea of democracy has been coming under question.

Kuwait, for example, is a democracy with no shortage of oil reserves. Yet the country has been overshadowed economically by its dynamic neighbours — Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Qatar — whose economies are booming under absolute monarchies.

According to the New York Times : ‘All this has left many Kuwaitis deeply disenchanted with their 50-member elected legislature. The collapse of the Bush administration’s efforts to promote democracy in the region and the continuing chaos in Iraq, just to the north — once heralded as the birthplace of a new democratic model — have also contributed to a popular suspicion that democracy itself is one Western import that has not lived up to its advertising.’

The neo-conservative Robert Kagan, in his new book "The Return of History and the End of Dreams", admits that history has not turned out like Fukayama said it would. His attitude seems to be exhortatory, a call to further battle against non-democracies. When I read some of his points, which I think in many ways are sound, I drew a different overall conclusion: that the idea of democracy as a universal good, to which the whole world needs eventually to be converted, is now on the wane, a turning point has been reached. Modern democracy is, of course, a western idea. In the Middle East for example, democracy as a universal good never was and probably never will be a potent idea.

According to BBC news, Kagan dismisses Fukayama’s satisfied pronouncement: "History has returned and the peoples of the liberal world need to choose to shape it or let others shape it for them. The world was not witnessing a transformation [as the Cold War ended], however, merely a pause in the endless competition of nations and peoples. Nationalism, far from being weakened by globalisation has now returned with a vengeance."

In particular he identifies autocracy as the new menace and singles out Russia and China. "The autocracies of Russia and China have figured out how to permit open economic activity while suppressing political activity. They have seen that people making money will keep their noses out of politics, especially if they know their noses will be cut off." He portrays the modern world as one of "global competition".

"It may not come to war," he remarks alarmingly, "but the global competition between liberal and autocratic governments will likely intensify in coming years."

What I found very interesting was this idea that “The autocracies of Russia and China have figured out how to permit open economic activity while suppressing political activity.”

The US has the idea that a thriving economy and democracy go hand in hand. In fact, much of the western world has this idea, because since the end of WWII all the richest countries have been democracies. The fact that the USSR went bust and collapsed just seemed to prove the point. (Via Marx, the USSR also had its own erroneous ideology around communism being the end of history).

Now, however, China is booming despite being a dictatorship. Kagan thinks ideologically, so he thinks his truth must be fought for all the harder. If you are not religious about it, however, you can see one of the main props underlying the idea of democracy collapsing. It is no longer the only route to a thriving modern economy.

This is a very significant shift. China’s rise, whether we know it or not, is changing the way the West thinks about its own system. With the demise of Christianity, Democracy has become one of our central, albeit secular, truths. It is not yet time to proclaim ‘Democracy is Dead’, but it is certainly undergoing a tectonic shift.

The US was the world’s first full democracy, in the sense that it did not, unlike the UK, have a monarch. (Though it was still some time before all adults had the vote.) I think that US history, and its idea of democracy, can be looked at in terms of the Pluto/Galactic Centre Cycle.

The Galactic Centre is the point at which our Galaxy revolves around itself, and there is thought to be a black hole there, or perhaps a double one. The GC moves slowly, taking approx 25,000 years to do a full cycle of the Zodiac. It is therefore associated with the biggest shifts in human consciousness. As is Pluto, with its mere 250 year cycle. As Pluto makes one of its rare passes over the GC – which it did in 2006/7 – it picks up new themes for humanity, and lets go of old ones.

Pluto last passed over the GC in 1760, just as revolutionary activity was beginning in the American colonies, activity that would eventually lead to American Independence and its new system of government (which the founders did not call democracy, but whose commitment to the principle of natural freedom and equality is seen as amounting to the same thing.)

Now, 250 years later, Democracy has had an astoundingly successful run, but seems to be reaching certain natural limits which did not seem to be there previously. The sign of Sagittarius under which this cycle has taken place indicates that it is religious truth, rather then e.g. scientific truth with which we are dealing.

This cycle also corresponds to the relentless expansion (Sagittarius) of American wealth and power (Pluto) that we have seen over the last 250 years. (See my post The Galactic Centre and American Power.) And again, limitations are now being encountered both economically and militarily. The US has lost ground relative to the rest of the world in recent years, for the first time ever, and there is no reason to suppose they will regain it. These reversals also correspond to the US Progressed Saturn and Mars both going Retrograde for the first time ever in recent years. Prog Mars went Retrograde during the Iraq War, which suggests this war will come to be seen as the point at which America went into slow reverse as a military power.

With Pluto having passed over the GC and brought the beginning of the end of Democracy conceived as a universal ideology, it is very timely that it is now entering Capricorn, which is a very practical sign. The next 16 years will see an emphasis on government that works and that, in foreign relations, advances the interests of the country. By the same token, Capricorn is about strong boundaries, and so we are likely to see a resurgence of nationalism, as Kagan also said.

To conclude, here are a few quotes about democracy:

Winston Churchill: Democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried.

George Orwell: In the case of a word like DEMOCRACY, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.

Alex Carey: The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.

Fannie and Freddie

Last September Pluto stood still, gathering itself for a very significant run forwards into a new sign. During the 6 months that followed a big chill went through the world economy as the consequences of years of easy credit, particularly in the US, became apparent.

Now Pluto is going backwards again, and the nervousness has eased. But retrograde is a time for sorting things as well, going inwards and addressing underlying difficulties. In a report in the New York Times today, it is clear that big trouble is still possible, and that prudence and belt –tightening may not be enough.

The reason lies in the fragile position of the 2 biggest US mortgage lenders, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which between them are currently handling 80% of all new mortgages. The federal government has recently given these 2 companies broad new powers and billions of dollars of investing authority, in the hope that they will help save the housing market, which is seeing steep falls in prices and rising defaults on mortgages.

But it turns out that these 2 companies are skating on very thin ice themselves. They have an $83 billion cushion between them, from which they are servicing $5 TRILLION in debt and other financial commitments. Last year these 2 companies suffered $9 billion in mortgage related losses. Analysts reckon they are sitting on another $19 billion of losses that they haven’t owned up to, and that these losses will grow further this year.

“If either company stumbled, the mortgage business could lose its only lubricant, potentially causing the housing market to plummet and the credit markets to freeze up completely. And if Fannie or Freddie fail, taxpayers would probably have to bail them out at a staggering cost.

“We’ve taken tremendous risks by loosening these companies’ purse strings,” said Senator Mel Martinez, Republican of Florida and a former secretary of housing and urban development. “They could cause an economywide meltdown if they got into real trouble and leave the public on the hook for billions.”

Because of their market position, Fannie and Freddie are enjoying new growth. The government is pleading with them to raise new capital to safeguard their cushion. The companies reply that fund-raising would dilute shareholders investments and cause the stock price to fall.

It is also said they are using their newfound clout to push Congress and their regulator to roll back the limits that were imposed after recent scandals over accounting and executive pay.

It sounds to me like we have executives who are mainly concerned about their own stock options and are thinking short-term. What we have here is the old laissez-faire Pluto in Sagittarius vs the new prudency of Pluto in Capricorn. Pluto is still straddling the 2 signs. It is maybe a pointer to how government (Capricorn) is going to need to change in the US. There is a whole philosophy around government non-interference in business. While this works in many ways, eventually you also get excess, recklessness and corruption (the sub-prime scandal involved all of these) which can threaten to pull the whole economy down with it.

Fannie and Freddie are a good example of the transition we are in. The government needs to say bugger the philosophy (Sagittarius), and pass laws (Capricorn) to make these companies raise more capital. In such an interconnected world, a failure to act could have global consequences.

No philosophies are absolute, though they get treated as such in politics, where everything is put in black and white terms. We have seen the excesses of laissez-faire Pluto in Sag, and we now need Capricorn as a correction. In the same way, by say 2020, we will be likely to have seen a swing too far in the opposite direction, and it will be the stifling effects of too much government control that will need addressing.

Dharmaruci's Crystal Ball

I’ve recently had a number of requests/comments relating to Pluto in Capricorn and its passage over the UK Sun in 5 years time. It’s still a way off, but it is no longer another era, because Pluto has recently moved into Capricorn. People are sensing the early beginnings of this transit, hence the interest.

While the transit is bound to have a big effect on the UK individually, it will be taking place in the context of a much bigger picture, a global picture, because so many countries have significant points at the early to middle degrees of the Cardinal signs. This is well known to many astrologers, and many of us have been seeing this coming for some years now. It will not just be Pluto either, because by then it will also be forming a square with Uranus.

It is a global transit, and we have been there before in the early 1930s, when Pluto and Uranus were squaring each other in the early to mid degrees of the Cardinal signs. The early 1930s saw the first ever global transit, an astrological configuration that affected the whole world in a connected way, because the world was by then sufficiently interconnected for this to happen. What we got was a huge convulsion, the roaring twenties turned into the Great Depression and then the Second World War, out of which a very different world emerged.

So we have another global transit coming up, between approximately 2010-2016, and quite possibly/probably another huge convulsion in an even more interconnected world. But that doesn’t mean Armageddon.

To give an idea of the actual astrology, among what are now the major powers, Uranus-Pluto will be hard-aspecting the Suns of the following: China, USA, UK, Germany, Russia, France, the EU, Canada, Australia. This is phenomenal, and does not even include other major points, such as the Moon and Saturn of OPEC, the MC of India, the Asc and Moon of Japan, the MC of the US, and a host of hits in the Middle East: the Suns, for example, of Saudi Arabia, Libya, Kuwait, and Syria.

The effects of the 1930s Uranus-Pluto square began to be felt in 1929 with the Stock Market Crash. The 2 planets were still 10 degrees apart, like now, and the Stock Market did recover over the following year, but the Great Depression still occurred. We have recently had a big chill go through world markets, rooted in the US credit/mortgage crisis, and like 1929/30, the Stock Market is now recovering. The Bank of England, for one, has announced that the worst is over.

I don’t want to draw too many parallels with the early 1930s, because our situation is different. The point is, though, that the events very early in a transit can point to what is coming later. In fact, as astrologers we know that the course of events and the course of people’s lives are contained in their beginnings, for that is how astrology works.

So even though the markets seem to be recovering, we need to pay very close attention to what happened in late 2007/early 2008 as Pluto moved towards and then entered Capricorn. It wasn’t just the fact that Uranus and Pluto had been moving within 10 degrees of each other last year; it was also Pluto’s Ingress into Capricorn, which was another beginning.

Pluto is going to be back in Sagittarius for a while this year, and I think we are now experiencing the calm before the storm. All the factors are there in the world economy for a period of major change to be on its way. One factor is debt in the major economies, which has ballooned under Pluto in Sag. This will be a factor, but it can be sorted straightforwardly through belt-tightening and good book-keeping. The drop in consumer spending involved may lead to a recession, but that’s not the end of the world.

The really big issue is resources. With the growth of China and India, it is becoming clear that there are no longer enough resources to go round. There have already been food shortages, with of course the poorest countries suffering. And the price of oil has rocketed. Water is going to be an issue. The price of metals has soared. And so on.

As Pluto and Uranus move towards an exact square over the next few years, this issue of resources is going to intensify. It had to happen sooner or later, because you can’t have indefinite economic growth. Many countries will feel that their survival is threatened, and there is going to be a scramble for resources and, almost inevitably, conflict. I can’t see there not being wars of some sort. Has there ever been a time when countries have NOT gone to war over resources?

But at the same time, there will inevitably have to be a new economic model. I think that there is still plenty to go round. But the West particularly will need to learn not to be so wasteful. In Britain, the general level of health reached a peak during World War II when there was what were perceived as food shortages. If there was more public transport, and if people lived closer to where they worked, we would not need nearly so many private vehicles. With good insulation, by only warming the rooms we are using, and by wearing more clothes, heating bills could drop considerably. All this and more is, I think, inevitable. And the fresh scientific vision of Uranus in Aries, empowered by its square to Pluto, will give a huge boost to the development of alternative energy technologies.

I’m not just randomly throwing out predictions here. I think it’s what is actually going to happen: there will be a worldwide scramble for resources, but we will also be learning to live a lot less wastefully, and there will be a lot of innovation. We are still living as we have lived for decades now, nothing has actually yet changed. But it’s about to, just wait until Pluto gets back into Capricorn in November, or even when it stations in September. The world will be picking up where it left off at the beginning of the year, and getting serious about change.

This is all good Capricorn stuff, cutting your suit to fit your cloth. I’m quite optimistic that it’s all going to work out OK, partly because the chart for Pluto’s Ingress into Capricorn was so nice: Pluto trine to Saturn and conjunct the 2 benefics, Venus and Jupiter.

I don’t feel it’s just about learning to be thrifty and treating that as some sort of virtue that will get you to heaven, though no doubt people will get very moralistic about it, just like they do already with green issues and smoking. What I feel is the much more important underlying issue is that we will be coming back into a much healthier relationship with the material world and with money. We have lost sight of what resources are for and what wealth is for. Wealth has become an end in itself. To my mind, for example, the point of a business is to earn a living for those who work there. You also want to ensure the business has a future, and you want to make a product or provide a service that people actually need (and yes, a bit of luxury is also necessary sometimes!) In our world, this business would be seen as a failure, as a dead end, if it wasn’t continually growing, if all it did was to sustain itself. To my mind, this is a crazy way of thinking. And what's the point of all this excess wealth we have been creating if it doesn't lead to more leisure time? Surely that is the point of earning more than you need? But it seems the wealthier we get, the harder and longer we have to work. It's all upside down.

So this is what I am looking forward to under the Uranus-Pluto square: a change in the way we feel about work and money and our material needs. And I think it’s going to happen because we’ll have no choice.

The Tragic Mr Brown

In the local elections in the UK this week, the Labour Party took a hammering. It was their worst result in local elections for 40 years. And it reflects very badly on Gordon Brown as Prime Minister.

About 4 years ago I predicted that Tony Blair would leave office at the end of 2007/early 2008, and that Gordon Brown would take over and be a ‘tail-end Charlie’. I was 6 months out with Blair, but the prediction with Brown seems to be coming true. Brown spent years desperate to be PM, and this desire of his was a major difficulty for the 10 years of the Blair administration. Unfortunately for Brown, his desire has been fulfilled at the end of a political cycle, with Labour having been in power for over 10 years, and a natural swing towards the Tories occurring.

So it’s all turning to poo for him, and he hasn’t even been in the job for a year. But it’s not just about the end of a political cycle. Gordon Brown was never suitable for the job in the first place, most people could see that, and yet he had such a position of power in the Labour Party that he couldn’t be stopped. No-one even stood against him in the election to become leader, it was a coronation. Labour was walking to its electoral doom, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

Astrologically, Gordon Brown is the Invisible Man (half his chart in 12th House Pisces) yet who nevertheless has a deep need to be number one (Moon conjunct Pluto in Leo, below the horizon).


Click to Enlarge

The pity of it is that he does have a genuine Piscean passion for helping those in need, whether at home or abroad. During his time as Chancellor, he was able to direct loads of cash towards the public services while keeping the economy healthy. Historically, this was a considerable achievement. Previously, we either had Labour trashing the economy or the Tories trashing the public services.

From the word go as Chancellor, he created a reputation for super-competence. I think this was a Piscean trick, an ability to project an image, as much as it was genuine competence. After all, the whole western world was enjoying a long period of economic growth right up until the end of 2008, and all he had to do was not to get in the way of that, which again is a Pisces quality.

So while I’m appreciative of the fact that he kept the economy healthy while promoting the public services, I think his reputation was considerably overblown. He was in the right place at the right time, Tony Blair had created the political context for him, and all he needed was a reasonable amount of competence.

It’s obviously a strong need in him to be seen as brilliant (Moon conjunct Pluto in Leo), and while he was operating behind the scenes at the Treasury, he was allowed to indulge this need.

When he became PM in June 2007, he immediately pulled the same trick, as if by magic. Here was Mr Super Competent, the ultimate safe pair of hands. Remarkably, he managed to sustain this image for 3 or 4 months. But what worked at the Treasury was never going to work as PM. You need to be able to project yourself, people need to get a sense of you, and Brown is all hidden. Worse than that, his reputation for competence, which he had done so much to cultivate, began to disintegrate.

It wasn’t just the PR blunders, which you would expect and even to some degree forgive in such a man. It was actual policy. It was the ill-thought through cutting of Capital Gains Tax last autumn to match a Tory election pledge, but which penalised small businesses. It was the recent abolition of the 10p tax rate, which was going to leave some of the poorest people less well-off. Even the PR blunders leave you gawping. Like his recent visit to the USA, where he wanted his presence felt, yet he allowed it to clash with a visit by the Pope, which almost completely overshadowed Brown’s own visit. Tony Blair, or any reasonably competent politician, would never have allowed that to happen. “Why should I re-arrange my schedule for the Pope of all people?” you can hear the obstinate voice of the Manse saying. When it wasn’t the Pope, it was the controversy over the 10p tax rate that took the headlines during his USA visit.

The local election results make it clear that the current Labour administration is done for, and that Brown is walking wounded. This is a pity, for it affects the mood of the whole country. It is like what we had in the last years of the Major government in the mid-nineties. We don’t feel we have an effective government anymore, and yet you can be sure they will hang on to power for as long as they can, which in this case will be 2010. Labour needs a new leader, but they’re not going to have one. In the Major years, there was a cartoon of the PM as a sort of Superman-manque, with a pair of grimy underpants worn outside his trousers. If anything, this cartoon has more relevance now, for at least John Major never pretended he was Superman.

Brown has a Chiron-MC conjunction in Capricorn (as does Tony Blair), and in both cases you see this combination of ambition and achievement (Capricorn) with lasting damage/wounding (Chiron). In Blair’s case it was Iraq, from which his reputation will never recover: the war began during his Chiron Return.

In Brown’s case, the defining transit is Pluto conjoining his Chiron-MC. Brown’s Chiron is at 0.53 Capricorn. On the day of this week’s elections, Pluto was applying retrograde at 0.56 Capricorn. These elections have been a defining moment for Brown, and the astrology is also telling us this. Of course there is still his MC at 4.43 Capricorn, which Pluto will not reach until 2010, the probable year of the next election, and which will make his humiliation complete.

It is a political tragedy that will be unfolding over the next couple of years. It is a great story: the man who lusted after being king, who undermined a government for 10 years until he got his way, and then fell flat on his face because he’d never been suited to the job in the first place. Everyone could see it coming, and yet nothing could be done about it: a party and a country were held to ransom by this one man’s lust. What a story!

Whether there will be a concluding chapter to the Brown story in which he resurrects himself, I do not know. The tragedy for him is that he has real talents and passions which he ignores in his pursuit of power. He would, for example, make a great UN ambassador to Africa, or fund raiser for the third world. He has North Node in 12th House Pisces, and this is where he needs to go. Whether he can learn from his experience, learn about his own need for power, remains to be seen.

Meanwhile we have David Cameron and his band of old Etonians to look forward to as our rulers in a couple of years. But that's another story.

Barack Obama and Rev Wright: an Old, Old Story

In my post of 1st April, I looked at Barack Obama’s political journey in Jungian terms, as the idealistic young hero successively encountering the Shadow, Anima and Wise Old Man. This worked out very neatly as Rev Wright, Hillary Clinton (yes, she is female!) and John McCain respectively.

Of course it is never quite as neat as that. Rev Wright has certainly been playing the Shadow archetype, the uncomfortable figure in the corner uttering all sorts of raw truths that are unacceptable to much of America, for they reveal its mistreatment of others, whether at home or abroad.


Obama and Wright in happier days

Obama has had to deal with this, and though he rejected Wright’s views, he did not reject the man himself. I don’t think you can in reality separate Wright from his views, so I think Obama’s political dance constituted a degree of acceptance of those views and the political constituency they come from.

But Rev Wright is also the Wise Old Man archetype for Obama. He is a lot older than Obama and was his spiritual mentor for many years. Obama is a Leo, and like many Leos, there was a problem with absence/wounding in his biological father. Leo as a sign is ruled by the Sun, the source of all life, and it is their path to find this source for themselves and then radiate it to others, to encourage others just by their presence to become who they are. You can see this quality strongly in Obama.

But as so often happens, we find our strengths precisely through where we have difficulties, where we have been weakened. And it’s almost like it’s necessary for many Leos that they should find themselves separated from the father-principle and the continuity of life that comes with that. In this way they are forced to find it for themselves, they know it can’t be taken for granted (and lazy Leos love to take things for granted). In finding their wellspring of life for themselves, it becomes uniquely their own: such individuality is a basic part of the Leo character.

An absent father often leads in my experience to young men who are unmotivated, because they do not know who they are, they do not have confidence in their own talents. In Obama’s case, this absence has acted like a forcing house, he has been exceptionally motivated to find his own path through life. And it has had the quality of uniqueness to it, precisely because he has been forced to find it for himself. This was a quality the Chicago political insiders noticed in his rise to Senator, that he thought differently, that he had something new to offer.

Rev Wright has recently taken the game one step further. He hasn’t just been uttering uncomfortable truths like 9/11 being the result of America’s foreign wrongdoings. He has descended into conspiratorial gibbering, for instance suggesting that AIDS was a racist plot by the US government. In a way this makes it easier for Obama to distance himself, but it is also more painful for him. This time he has had to go further and declare that Rev Wright is not the man he knew, and that his relationship with him has changed.


Saturn castrates his father Uranus

This issue has put Obama in the forcing house again. He went a considerable distance in becoming his own man in the face of rejection by his biological father. But he still, understandably, felt the need for a father-figure in the form of Rev Wright. He is being forced to grow out of this reliance as well, he is being forced to grow up and become fully independent through pitting himself against the adopted father-figure. This process is psychologically very important for Obama. And it is rarely a process that is neat and tidy.

Rev Wright is also no doubt feeling equally hurt. There has been a father-son relationship, but the 2 men have grown apart. As Obama has grown up, his values have been shown to be different to Wright’s. Neither of them are ‘wrong’. Wright is the dispenser of home truths, tinged with paranoia yes, but let’s not expect perfection, which of us would not be like this in his position? Obama is a politician, he wants to be inclusive, he cannot afford to deal in truths that damn half the population. If you want people to change, you don’t damn them for their faults, and Obama wants change.

Rev Wright was born 22 Sept 1941. He has Sun at 29 Virgo conjunct Neptune at 27.29 Virgo. Pluto is currently squaring his Sun by transit, and has 2 more crossings to make. The Sun is the father-principle. He is feeling torn apart, hurt, betrayed. As I write, Obama’s Progressed Sun is at 27.29 Virgo, conjunct Wright’s Neptune to the minute. If the chart we have for Obama is correct, Neptune is concluding its transit to his MC/IC axis at 19.29 Leo/Aquarius, which is a parental place. For Obama, the process of leaving Wright has been taking place for a few years, and is almost over. For Wright, the process is still new, he has been who he always was, and Obama’s ‘betrayal’ has been huge for him.

This is an old, old story. Father has big hopes for son, the son needs the approval of the father. Son proves to have incompatible values to the father. They clash, each feels betrayed, for neither can see outside their own value system, neither understands that there are other ways of seeing the world. These other ways may be very limited, but you can’t expect people to be other than who they are. For both father and son, there is a big opportunity for growth. I think that Obama is actually doing this. He understands the truths that Wright has to offer, or he wouldn’t have been in his church for so long. But he also sees the narrowness and divisiveness of the way Wright holds those views, and he has said as much.

The first stage is separation, and reconciliation, if it is possible, comes later. What we are seeing now is separation, with Obama rejecting not just Wright’s views, but this time the man himself. It is a cruel process, but a necessary one.

Pluto, Ceres and the Fritzls

In the UK we like our monsters. For years child-killer Myra Hindley was our favourite. Every bit of tittle-tattle about her life behind bars, whether true or invented, would make the headlines of the tabloid newspapers. She died in 2002, and for a year we had to make do with Rose West, wife of serial killer Fred West. In 2003 Ian Huntley was convicted of murdering 2 schoolchildren, and since then we have again had a proper monster to gloat over. His ex-girlfriend Maxine Carr has also been dragged in as a subsidiary monster. She served a couple of years for covering-up for him, as many women would probably have done. She now has a new identity, but the press clearly know where she is. The headlines a few months ago were that she is pregnant, and what right does she have to bear children when the parents of the children Huntley killed no longer have theirs? Why should she get state benefits? Etc.

We may as well put these people in cages for all to see, for that is the effect of locking them up for life. But perversely, it seems to be a psychological necessity for the mob (and I won’t pretend not to read the headlines myself.) Many of us could not survive psychologically if we did not have somewhere ‘out there’ to put our shadows. That way we can continue to feel good about ourselves, because evil is safely somewhere over there. Our quantum of violence is the same. Just as the Romans needed their deadly games, and not so long ago we had public hangings, so too we now need our violent films and computer games.

I think these things may well be necessary for the stability of society, but they are also a reminder of how thin the veneer is, how quickly such forces escalate in times of insecurity and perceived threat.

The process of personal transformation often begins with projection, then recognition that this is happening, and finally acknowledgement and integration of the contents of our own psyche. So these monsters can serve a transformational purpose for the individual. We first need to get away from the gloating, from the enjoyment of how awful and ‘other’ these people are. This gloating can actually take us away from what they actually did, which is usually pretty awful, as well as the awareness that they are also ordinary people, that they are in many ways like ourselves, with certain very common tendencies taken to an extreme. In this way the projection gets withdrawn, and we are left facing ourselves. And it’s not a matter of finally owning up to how ‘bad’ we are – that’s just Christian – but of a broadening and enrichment of the personality. It’s better than you think!

In the last few days a new monster has appeared, Joseph Fritzl of Amstetten in Austria. People are genuinely horrified at what this man has done, you don’t even want to think about it. He abducted his 18 year old daughter 24 years ago and since then has kept her confined in underground rooms. He has had 7 children by her, none of whom got to see outside of the cellar for their first few years of life, until he took them away from their mother and fostered them upstairs. And the process of monstrification has also begun: ‘The beast in his lair’, ‘House of Horror Dad’ scream the tabloids. In the process what he has done becomes easier to bear, as it no longer has anything to do with us.

The President of Austria has gone on a PR offensive to restore the reputation of the country. Fair enough, but there is something about Austria and the abduction of young women. A couple of years ago there was the case of Natascha Kampusch, who was held captive for 8 years, from the ages of 10 to 18. And since 1996 there have been 2 other very public cases of girls being abducted. One was found in a coffin, the other in a closet. Natascha Kampusch was on the news last night saying these abductions had to do with the nature of Austrian society, and the way women were suppressed under National Socialism during World War II. The astrology of Austria (see later) confirms that it is indeed in the national character, but takes it back further than the War.

The classic abduction myth is that of Pluto and Persephone. Pluto, Lord of the Underworld, abducted the young virgin to his lair, and married/raped her. Her mother Ceres, a nature goddess, was distraught and hunted for her. Eventually the gods intervened and returned Persephone to her mother, but unfortunately she had eaten that fateful fruit of love, the pomegranate, whilst in the arms of Pluto, and was condemned to periodically return. This is the origin of the seasons: the winter is when she is in the Underworld, and her mother Ceres grieves, and the summer is when she is back on the earth, and her mother rejoices. Unpleasant as it has been, the abduction was also a rite of passage for Persephone, for she is now a woman, and it is this also for which her mother grieves.

Since Ceres promotion to the status of dwarf planet in Aug 2006 (and Pluto’s demotion to that status), this myth has had increased astrological relevance. Synchronistically, the case of Natasha Kampusch arose at the time, and you can read a good analysis involving Pluto and Ceres at World-of-Wisdom.

I’ll come to this myth in the case of Joseph Fritzl and his daughter in a moment. But first of all, Austria herself. There is some confusion about her exact ‘birth’, but we do know it was on 12th or 13th November 1918. And on those 2 days there was a wide opposition between Pluto and Ceres. So this myth is in the country’s chart, which is another way of putting what Natascha Kampusch said.

Why it should be there, I do not know. It is one of those strange things, one of those fates that you find in the charts of people or countries for no apparent reason. It doesn’t have to manifest literally, and often these things don’t, but sometimes they do.


The Moirae, or Fates

The theme of abduction has also applied to the country as a whole. On 12 March 1938, during a Ceres-Pluto trine, Austria was annexed by Germany. The trine expresses the ease, even the willingness, with which the abduction occurred. In April 1945, during the more dynamic square from Pluto to Ceres, Austria seceded from the Third Reich. She regained her full independence (from the occupying powers) in May 1955, during an inconjunction from Pluto to Ceres.

So, with the country as a whole being so sensitive to its Pluto-Ceres aspect, it is no surprise that it keeps finding ways of manifesting. Which doesn’t make the whole thing any less strange.

Joseph Fritzl was born on 9th April 1935. He has a tight Pluto-Ceres conjunction, square to his Sun in Aries, and making a wide t-square with Mars in Libra. Perfect astrology for an abductor. On the day of the abduction, 24/8/84, the Moon conjoined his Pluto-Ceres, activating it. On the day of his daughter’s escape, 26/4/8, Mars conjoined his Pluto-Ceres, attacking and destroying Fritzl the abductor.

Elisabeth Fritzl, his daughter, was born on 8 April 1966. When she was abducted, she had recently finished a Ceres Return, as well as Ceres trining her natal Pluto. When she escaped, Ceres was about to square her natal Pluto.

So it’s all there, both in the country and in these citizens, this myth of abduction that they are strangely fated to live out. These sort of events take you out of modern astrology as psychological explanation, at which we are so adept these days, and back to astrology as descriptive of our fate, over which we have no control. There are ways in which the course of our life, for better or for worse, is already written in the heavens.

A bit more on Elisabeth Fritzl’s chart. She has Sun conjunct Mars in Aries: a violent father. And Moon conjunct Neptune: loss of womanhood. So the psychological description is there as well, running alongside her fate.

And I’d see the fate in her chart as the unaspected, and very tight, Uranus-Pluto conjunction. This reminds me of the classic case of Hitler’s chart, who had an unaspected Neptune-Pluto conjunction. An unaspected planet can describe a side of our personality that has a life of its own. When it is an outer planet, and particularly something as powerful as a conjunction of outer planets, we are not talking about a side of the personality: we are talking about a vulnerability to the forces of the collective unconscious in their primitive form. In the case of Hitler, this mild-mannered man would turn into someone completely different when faced with a collective situation, he would become a medium for its desires and frustrations, but expressed in a very primitive way, because of its lack of connection with the personal planets.

And the same applies to Elisabeth Fritzl. Her unaspected Uranus-Pluto makes her very vulnerable to the human mind at its most atavistic and primitive. She was only 18 when she was abducted (and 11 when her father began abusing her), and there’s no way she can be said to be at all responsible for what happened. And yet her astrology is also saying that at a deeply unconscious level something else was going on. She was the person to whom this happened, and not one of her siblings. It was her Uranus-Pluto, which is HERS. What happened on one level looks like fate, but there is also a sense in which a side of her is involved, which as an astrologer you would expect, but which does not mean she was responsible for it in the usual sense of the word. This is a difficult and sensitive area, which Liz Greene goes into in ‘The Astrological Pluto’ in her book ‘The Astrology of Fate’.

But if she ever recovers from what she has been through, Elisabeth Fritzl will need to find a way of approaching her Uranus-Pluto, or it will continue to find ways of destroying her. She has Sun conjunct Mars in Aries, so she is a fighter.

It’s never too late to become a Virgin…

The US has a Federally funded programme which encourages young people to remain celibate until marriage. The programme is known as Silver Ring Thing, because the teenagers involved wear a silver ring (on their finger) as a sign of their commitment to celibacy.

According to BBC news, the US government is considering cutting the funding, following a report that one in four teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease. And with some 750,000 teenage pregnancies a year, America has one of the highest teen birth rates in the developed world.

"This national programme which has wasted $1.5bn (£750m) of tax money is a failure and our teens are paying the price," says Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood "We've been wasting money on programmes that don't work and we're seeing the consequences every single day."

“State governments receive federal money they must match to fund abstinence programmes. At least 17 states have opted out of the system and others have suspended funding while Congress investigates whether such programmes work.

Critics say there is no evidence that they delay sexual activity and teenagers who have taken a vow of virginity are less likely to use protection if they break their promise.”

Such teenagers do not get taught about contraception. As 15 year-old Mildred from Arizona says: "We get sex-ed classes in school and that should be where teens get the right information - but that isn't happening."

The argument in favour of abstinence is put by a Texan lawyer, who describes himself as a member of the religious right:

"I am convinced that abstinence is the only way for kids," he says. "You begin by teaching the consequences of bad behaviour and the benefits of proper behaviour and you do that in a way that a child can grasp. "Self control leads to a happy, joyful life. If we can learn to control the most basic of drives - the sex drive - for good, then we can control drugs, gangs, alcohol and abusive anger."

If you’ve already had sex, it’s not too late: Teenagers who do have sex before marriage are given another chance by becoming ‘secondary virgins’. "Of course, if you view virginity as number one, and you've slept with someone, of course it's going to be different and you can never go back - but that doesn't mean there's no tomorrow," explains Ashley, who also says she believes teenagers who experiment with sex are laying the foundations for troubled relationships later in life. "A lot of the young people I know who go around having experiences with lots of different people are just preparing themselves for not knowing how to be committed to somebody. Once you get into the practice of doing whatever you want, it's hard to change when you're older."

16 year-old Josh has this to say: "I have a lot of close friends and we pretty much agree on the same thing so we keep each other in line most of the time.”

There’s plenty of room for comedy in all this. Exactly how do Josh and his friends keep each other in line? Do they spray each other with hosepipes? And how exactly do you control the sex drive ‘for good’? Do you have a special box with a pink ribbon on it called ‘Sex Drive’ that you keep in the attic? And where does celibacy end and sex start? When you hold hands? Or is it more akin to Bill Clinton’s definition of sexual relations? And then there are the secondary – i.e. 2nd class – virgins. Do they have to stand in the corner? Are they infectious?

The Silver Ring Thing began in 1996, but it gained Federal funding in 2003 under one of George Bush’s faith-based initiatives. As a Brit, it’s gobsmacking that this sort of stuff could be taken seriously enough to be funded by a government. It’s understandable that a country might have small religious cults that think like this, but not mainstream society. OK, you have Catholic countries which are in theory like this, but they