THE JUPITER, SATURN AND PLUTO STATIONS

When a planet changes direction, it slows right down first, and then takes a while to speed up again after it has changed direction. This is called stationing, and the planet becomes unusually powerful at that degree, due to it lingering there: as Ronnie Gale Dreyer puts it, “How can you compare the effect of a fleeting gaze to that of a fixed
stare?”

Beginning 31 March, we have 3 planets changing direction within 19 days of each other: Pluto, then Jupiter, then Saturn. The stationing of all 3 has already begun, as they are all within a degree of their actual turning points: Pluto at 29 Sag, Jupiter at 19.47 Sag, and Saturn at 18.9 Leo.

So if you have significant parts of your chart near these points, or making aspects to them, you will be feeling the power of these stations. As the Jupiter and Saturn stations are in trine to each other, this effect will be more than doubled if you have a planet or Angle that aspects both of them. Like I do. (Planets in combination are more than the sum of their parts.)

Natally I have Moon at 17.56 Sag sextile Chiron at 17.57 Aquarius. The Jupiter and Saturn stations catch both of these. Jupiter and Chiron are both associated with horses. Yesterday we agreed to buy two white Lipizzaner mares, who will join our two younger Lipizzaner fillies. This is an expansion (Jupiter) that we haven’t really got the facilities for, so we’re doing it on the basis of faith/trust (Jupiter, with Neptune sextiling) that it’ll help us move house (Moon) by creating the need to do so. Paradoxically, it feels like a responsible (Saturn) way of going about things! My partner Vajramala’s Moon is at 19 Pisces, so she’s catching the Jupiter and Saturn stations as well. This resonates well with her natal Moon, Jupiter, Saturn Grand Trine. Watch this space!

Politically these stations do some interesting things. George Bush’s chart is affected powerfully. The Saturn-Jupiter stations sextile his Natal Moon-Jupiter conjunction at 17-18 Libra, while Progressed Mars is conjoining these 2 planets. Retrograde Saturn has been checking George Bush for some months now – this has manifested mainly in the opposition to his Iraq policy by Congress – but Saturn will soon change direction. All this together suggests a reinvigorated George Bush over the next month or two while the stations linger. In George Bush’s case, a strong Jupiter is dangerous: recklessly expansionist, fantastical, arrogant, and driven by a belief that God is on his side. His Prog Moon is currently at 29 Sag, exactly where Pluto stations, making the whole cocktail very powerful indeed.

His 2005 Presidential inaugural chart has 8th House Mars at 18 Sag (conjunct Pluto at 23 Sag), another dangerous, fanatical combination that is also of course picking up the Jupiter-Saturn stations. This lends weight to what I said above.

The Iraq War has Sun at 29.04 Pisces, which is being very closely squared by the Pluto station. The recent eclipse was at 28 Pisces, and many of its astrocartography lines ran through Iran. It’s hard to make definite predictions here, except to say that the Iran-Iraq situation, and GWB’s approach to it, are all intensifying. And GWB may form a strong intention to attack Iran.

Though all the above put together looks extremely dangerous, there is one restraining factor, which is Congress. The current chart (4 Jan 2007, 12pm, Washington) also has a Mars-Pluto conjunction at 21-27 Sag, but in the 9th, and this reflects its connection to the Iraq-Iran situation. BUT this Mars-Pluto is in a Grand Trine with Saturn at 24 Leo and the ASC at 20 Aries. This says to me, as I have written before, that Congress will be able to be an effective restraining force on GWB over Iraq-Iran, and they will be further empowered by the Jupiter-Saturn stations. They have certainly managed to put boundaries round him over Iraq, and the noose is gradually tightening.

But what about Iran? GWB has the authority and the proclivity to launch a mad, ill-considered attack, and in the next couple of months he may well want to do so, judging from his astrology. Personally, I think a ‘surgical’ strike on Iran to take out their developing nuclear capability will be necessary at some point and will probably happen, and I don’t think you need to be a neo-con to want that. What I think people are rightly concerned about is George Bush, with his unaspected natal Mars and out-of-bounds natal Pluto, going about it in the way he likes to go about things, which could be disastrous.

So I take faith in the Grand Trine of the current Congress Chart, which suggests that Congress is powerfully involved in GWBs foreign 'policy' through its Mars-Pluto conjunction, that it can restrain GWB through the trine to Saturn, and that it can take the necessary initiative and action through the trine to the Aries ASC. So this is the hope that this chart gives me: not that there won’t be action against Iran, but that it will be more considered and responsible than the attack on Iraq.

SPRINGTIME FOR SATURN-NEPTUNE

It’s been great having an outer planet alignment to write about since I started blogging last July. The current Saturn-Neptune opposition continues until August, when Saturn will move out of range of Neptune and then into Virgo in September. Mind you, that by no means says the opposition will be over: last time there was an opposition in the early 1970s, one of the main events of it, the oil crisis, began in Oct 1973, when Saturn and Neptune had moved out of reach of each other. So we may move into an outcome phase later in the year.

The next major outer planet alignment, the opposition between Saturn and Uranus, doesn’t begin until the end of next year, although we should see some early signs of it towards the end of this year. After that, in early 2010, we move into a really big one, Pluto square to Uranus, and there is the added interest of Neptune conjunct Chiron in 2009/10. I think that the outer planet alignments are probably my favourite subject to write about, so it looks like I’ll have plenty to keep me going.

One of the interesting things you get with two planets dancing around each other is a succession of different phases as they exactly aspect each other and as they each successively move from Direct to Retrograde and back again.

In February, Saturn and Neptune made their second of 3 crossings (the last will be in June 2007). I think this was in some ways the hardest part of the transit, when everything was at its most stuck (Saturn retrograde) and unclear (Neptune), that is if you are affected by this transit. Since then there has been a bit more flow, a bit more of a move towards the new, flowing outcome we should see later in the year, but still pretty stuck and unclear. This isn’t a whimsical stuckness and unclarity, it’s there for all sorts of good reasons, like things needing to be thought through and sorted out and new life needing the time to emerge in its own way and patience and the realisation that, as Elsa puts it, “the universe wants you to see that things are out of your control and further that this is in your best interest.”

The main reason things are still quite stuck (though starting to move a bit) is that Saturn is still going backwards, and will be doing so for another 3 weeks. He’s been retrograde since early December, and it’s been a long haul, but the end is in sight. What you may find over the next few weeks is that Saturn Retrograde ‘culminates’ (my term – I don’t know if there is a word for it), in the sense that something has been growing and sorting during this whole 4 month period, and it will start to become clear what it is, and you’ll start to see how things can start to move forward again. There will then be another shift 4 weeks after that as Neptune changes direction. And 4 weeks after that Saturn and Neptune will make their final crossing (on 25th June).

So we are about to see some regular movement, with just about the time to absorb one phase before the next one begins, right through from April to June. It’s like an underground rhizome that has spent all this time preparing for spring, and in the next few weeks it will be upon us, with shoots then leaves then flowers appearing in quick succession.

The last week here in Somerset, UK has seen the beginning of spring, and it’s been great. I’ve started to feel like doing outside stuff for the first time in months, and I feel a wonderful quickening in myself, like it’s more than just spring ‘out there’, that there’s some new dawn beginning for myself as well.

INDEPENDENT PEOPLE

I’ve just finished reading a very poetic novel with the rather prosaic title of ‘Independent People’, by the Icelandic author Halldor Laxness. It’s about a guy who’s insanely proud and independent, a crofter in Iceland at the turn of the 20th century. The author enters so deeply and poetically into the lives of the crofter and his family that it wasn’t until half way through the book that I realised they were living in a hovel and were desperately poverty stricken. But the crofter was too proud to accept help from anyone. He gets given a cow at one stage and, thinking it’s charity from the parish, is determined to have none of it. But then he finds he’s been out-manoeuvred, because it was the local Women’s Institute that had clubbed together and bought the cow for him. Because Laxness is so concerned to enter deeply into the lives of the people, very little happens in the book, so that when the cow arrived I got really excited. I was telling everyone around me, “He’s got a cow!” As a friend pointed out, that’s the sign of a really good story-teller, if he can get you excited by something like that.

My only reservation was towards the end of the book, where socialist ideals are brought in, and used to explain the ongoing poverty of men like the crofter, who do not benefit from the arrival of modern machines etc. This feels a bit imposed on the hitherto organic unfoldment of the book, and made me suspect there may have been a degree of this imposition going on throughout.

In this respect it reminded me of Upton Sinclair’s ‘The Jungle’, a very good novel, set around the same time but in the Chicago meat-processing industry. Again, at the end the author brings in socialist ideals, and in a much more heavy-handed way.

This socialist idealism dates these novels. What is enduring for me in Independent People, as in any good novel, is that I recognise the people in it, whether they are turn-of-the-century Icelanders or, in the case of 'War and Peace' (which I recently re-read), early 19th century Russians. It’s like “Wow!”, these characters are just like me and people I know. You even get enduring national stereotypes. Writing about the German officers in the Russian army, Tolstoy has one of his characters complaining: “Once a German starts being accurate, there’s no end to it!”

Tolstoy, of course, has his own tendencies towards imposing his ideas on his novels. One of his main intentions in 'War and Peace' is to communicate his view of history, which is that leaders have much less influence over the course of events than we or they like to think (which I agree with, and which is why I tend not to be a conspiracist). This view is grounded in his experience of the chaotic nature of war, where the main function of generals (according to Tolstoy) is to appear to be directing what's going on. He's really scornful of the alleged military genius of Napoleon. Inasmuch as his view is grounded in his own experience, it blends really well with his descriptions of war. But his lengthy asides on the nature of history don't, I feel, really belong in a novel, and I think he goes too far in the direction of saying that leaders have no real influence over the course of events. In the UK, for example, the Iraq War is known as Blair's War, and it was genuinely up to him whether or not we fought in that war.

Tolstoy's next novel, 'Anna Karenina', has no such imposition of ideas, and in this sense it is a better novel - a really good read, if you like a tragic romance. 'Resurrection' was the novel that came next, by which time Tolstoy had turned into a full-on social reformer, and I found the book unreadable, it was so full of his own proselytising.

MY ECLIPSE PREDICTIONS and A TESTOSTERONE MEME

Some of my eclipse predictions (for last Monday’s partial eclipse) seem to be coming true, which is quite encouraging. Amongst other things, I predicted developments around the Iran nuclear situation, continued unrest in Zimbabwe, and various places in which there might be earthquakes, including Japan (which has just had one).

My prediction for Zimbabwe was that though there would be continued unrest, the astrology was not strong enough to make it look terminal yet for Mugabe. The unrest has indeed continued, but it does look like it might become terminal, with western leaders starting to openly discuss the post-Mugabe situation.

As for Iran, 15 British Royal Navy sailors have just been captured by the Iranians, who claim they had strayed into their waters, which the British deny. This incident looks like escalating the crisis between Iran and the west.

It is interesting that, as I mentioned in the earlier blog, the last time there was an eclipse in this Saros series (in 1989), the Iranians broke off diplomatic relations with the British over Salman Rushdie’s ‘Satanic Verses’. The eclipse before that, in 1953, occurred in the year that the British and Americans organised a successful coup in Iran. (The British wanted to protect their oil interests, so they persuaded the Americans that Iran was coming under Soviet influence).

The UN has also just unanimously voted for a load of new sanctions against Iran. So it looks like Monday’s eclipse is reflecting an overall escalation in the current crisis.

Completely off the subject, I read about some research yesterday showing that men who have a conventional ‘tough’ attitude to illness and accidents on the whole recover more quickly than those who don’t. (It also pointed out that men with such attitudes are more likely to have an accident in the first place – though I don’t think they’d researched that one!) At any rate, it’s one up for testosterone, which has been blamed for all the world’s ills in the last few decades. I invite comments that say nice things about testosterone. I will then compile them into a blog: ‘Thirteen nice things you didn’t know about testosterone’.

OBAMA THE REDEEMER

In her blog of 22nd February, Nancy, as ever, wrote a really good article on Barack Obama. She gave an upbeat assessment for his prospects of becoming the next President of the USA. She’d also managed to get hold of a birth-time for the man from a reliable source, which no-one else seemed to have been able to do. (Here in the UK we have Annabel Herriot, who is particularly good at buttonholing prominent Tories at their conferences and asking them what time they were born. In the case of David Cameron, she refined the time he gave her by getting his secretary to ring his mother and ask!)

Barack Obama, 4 Aug 1961, 13.05, Honolulu, Hawaii.

I checked some of the major transits to his Angles, and this chart works. For example, he met his wife in 1989 and married her in 1992. During this period, Pluto was opposing his DESC at 17 Taurus (exact in 1990). Pluto squared his MC at 19 Leo in 1991 as he shone at Harvard, becoming the first black President of the Harvard Law Review in 1990, and winning his degree magnum cum laude the next year. As the Saturn-Neptune opposition lines up along his MC-IC axis, he has launched his bid to be President.

Now I don’t know much about Barack Obama, and I’m not sure many of us do yet. But it’s still hard not to fall in love with him and want him to be President. Natally he has Sun square to Neptune, and by transit Neptune is currently opposing his MC, so we can project onto him whatever we want him to be. He can redeem (Neptune) the USA from the awful, seedy Bush years. Tony Blair received the same sort of projections and adulation in the run-up to becoming the UK Prime Minister in 1997, and he too had Neptune transiting his MC (conjunction). With his natal Sun square Neptune, Obama is if anything more prone to this sort of phenomenon.

Obama may well be the best of the bunch, even though in my opinion he is still too young to be President. But I have a few caveats on purely astrological grounds – as I said, I don’t know him.

Firstly, as I pointed out in my January blog The Next American President , the chart of every President for the last 80 years has been significantly hard aspected by any major outer planet alignments that have been going on at the time. Bill Clinton, for example, has ASC at 18 Libra and MC at 20 Cancer, both of which were hard aspected by the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of the time.

In a few years time, Uranus in early Aries will be squaring Pluto in early Capricorn. This will hit Obama’s Venus at 1 Cancer, but this is not enough. In the case of earlier Presidents, it has always been a much more significant part of the chart: Sun, Moon, Angles or Nodes. A leader will always be characteristic of his/her time, and this analysis suggests that for some reason Obama will not be.

The other caveat, to put it very bluntly, is that Obama is in danger of being assassinated, just as the Kennedys and Martin Luther King were. He is black and idealistic and Democrat and seriously capable of gaining power. His natal Mars is at 22 Virgo, which will be opposed by Uranus all of next year. And his Solar Return Chart, relocated to Washington for 2008-9, has a Moon/Mars-Uranus-Pluto t-square, with Moon-Mars conjunct the IC and Uranus conjunct the MC. This SR chart covers the time of the election, and at least suggests that that the election won’t give the result we might be expecting for him (Uranus conjunct MC). At worst, violent death is a possibility.

Certainly all the charts suggest a brilliant run-up to the Presidential election, with a very good chance of him becoming the Democratic candidate early next year. There are just these 3 caveats: (1) Obama being uncritically turned into a Redeemer (2) His lack of connection with the upcoming Uranus-Pluto square and (3) the possibility of assassination due to the SR chart, due to history, and due to the level of polarisation that the Neptune/Redeemer configuration can create.

A NICE ECLIPSE FOR GORDON

I think that one function of the ongoing Saturn-Neptune opposition has been to reveal Gordon Brown’s true nature. There have, of course, always been mutterings that the man ‘isn’t right’, but in the interests of cohesive government his fellow ministers have been able to keep a lid on the fact that they have a power-mad lunatic in their midst.

As Tony Blair’s reign comes to an end, and we are faced with having the man as Prime Minister, with no-one apparently having any say in the matter, not even the Labour Party, the conspiracy of silence is starting to crack.

Gordon Brown has Moon at 12 Leo conjunct Pluto at 18 Leo. Now I am sure there are plenty of very nice people with this aspect – I can think of at least one astro-blogger who has owned up to it – but in Gordon’s case it gives him a desperate and ruthless need to be king.

His Pluto is nicely placed to catch the Saturn-Neptune opposition, and a week after its first crossing at the end of last August, Brown attempted a coup against Tony Blair, that forced Blair to announce he would be gone in a year. At last the public had proof of what had been said about the man for years. Charles Clarke, a former cabinet minister, declared Brown to be ‘totally un-collegiate.”

On Monday, the eclipse at 28 Pisces caught Brown’s Venus (popular appeal) at 24 Pisces, while Mars and Chiron were moving in on the Neptune end of the Saturn-Neptune opposition. And the following was published:

‘Speaking to the Financial Times – as part of a series of interviews for an in-depth analysis of Mr Brown’s 10 years at the Treasury – Lord Turnbull, permanent secretary to the Treasury for four years under Mr Brown before becoming cabinet secretary in 2002, accused the prime minister-in-waiting of a “very cynical view of mankind and his colleagues”.

“He cannot allow them any serious discussion about priorities. His view is that it is just not worth it and ‘they will get what I decide’. And that is a very insulting process,” Lord Turnbull said.

“Do those ends justify the means? It has enhanced Treasury control, but at the expense of any government cohesion and any assessment of strategy. You can choose whether you are impressed or depressed by that, but you cannot help admire the sheer Stalinist ruthlessness of it all.

“There has been an absolute ruthlessness with which Gordon has played the denial of information as an instrument of power.”’

Brown’s former spin-doctor Charlie Whelan was quick to leap to his defence, saying that to be a good Chancellor, you need to be determined and ruthless. And Lord Turnbull, in an extraordinary statement, declared he had not realised that the Financial Times was going to publish what he was telling them!

Along with this recommendation from his former Treasury secretary, there have also been polls released in recent days that not only show Labour to be trailing the Tories by about 9 points, but that gap widening if and when Brown becomes PM. There's the eclipse on his Venus again.

The headlines a couple of days ago announced that scientists have been able to create a malaria resistant mosquito that is better able to survive than those that aren’t resistant. The hope is to create a GM mosquito for Africa that will eventually replace the current wild population and reduce the incidence of malaria in people. I thought well if they can do this, why can’t they create GM humans that do not have the genes for electing stupid (Bush, Reagan), despotic (Thatcher, Brown) or joke (Berlusconi) leaders and release these new humans into the wild, where they will hopefully interbreed and eventually create a saner society? Or doesn’t it work that way?

MORE ON MONDAY'S ECLIPSE

The eclipse of Mon 19th March kicked in for me a few days ago, with a big ouch! factor. The main events around transits and eclipses seem to happen for me in advance of their exact occurrence. The eclipse, at 28 Pisces, is trine my MC (less than 2 degrees) and square my Saturn (less than 5 degrees). In her blog on the eclipse, Kathryn Cassidy predicts my experience quite well, though a bit more dramatically than I (being male and English) would put it:

“Saturn is still in opposition to Neptune and with such intense emotions unable to find expression, depression is common. The eclipse could trigger everything to come up for review and change - we just can't live with this kind of tension for too long before the forces explode leading to collapse (or floods of tears). Once this occurs though truths emerge, the air is cleared, everyone becomes more aware of the boundaries and structure that need to be put in place. Life then moves on, for the better.”

The Saturn-Neptune opposition is occurring between my Sun at 24 Aquarius and my Chiron at 18 Aquarius, on my 4th-10th House axis. Ah! The eclipse is in Pisces, ruled by Neptune, there’s the Saturn-Neptune connection.

In my blog on the eclipse a few days ago, my main prediction was around developments on the Iranian nuclear issue. Something I didn’t spot, which is really obvious, is that the eclipse at 28 Pisces is sitting on the Iranian Mercury-Mars conjunction at 27-26 Pisces in the 8th House, which is currently being squared by transiting Pluto. This just adds to my point, and makes the situation even more dangerous.

And another one, that applies to the UK. The UK 1066 chart has Moon at 29 Pisces tightly square to Uranus at 28.30 Sagittarius. The eclipse is at 28 Pisces, tightly square to Pluto at 28.55 Sagittarius. This is quite remarkable. Charles Carter says that the 1066 chart “appears to retain a marked significance for England. In particular, the place of Uranus, which is in close square to the Moon, remains a highly sensitive point.”

Uranus is, amongst other things, about splitting, and only today Alex Salmond, the leader of the Scottish Nationalist party, has been announcing his plans for how a Scottish government would work and his plans for a referendum. I don’t know why, but I think this eclipse will also reflect developments around the end of Tony Blair’s leadership. Time to look up the astrology.

Tony Blair was elected leader of the Labour Party on 21/7/94 in London, with the results announced just after 12pm BST. With the Sun at 28 Cancer trine to Pluto at 25 Scorpio, the eclipse at 28 Pisces makes a Grand Trine. So it will be an easy end, being ushered in by the eclipse.

There will also be an unexpected element to the end of his leadership, because in the Prog chart Uranus is finishing a conjunction to the IC, and the Solar Return for this year has Uranus conjunct DESC. In the Converse Prog chart, all the angles change signs over the next 2 years, and there has just been a CP New Moon, so fundamental change is indeed occurring.

This Uranus theme is repeated by transit in the chart for New Labour in power (i.e. 2 May 1997, 3.17 BST), and in its Converse Prog Chart. This chart has an exceptionally difficult 2007-8 Solar Return. (Angular Sun-Moon-Saturn-Chiron fixed grand cross, and a Mars-Uranus- Pluto-Venus t-square).

So the eclipse helps suggest a smooth ending for Tony Blair, but other factors suggest surprising events to follow, and a really difficult year ahead for the government.

A CONVERSATION

I was chatting the other night to a Native American friend who does a lot of ceremonial and teaching work, and who is staying with us. He commented that astrology is based on cause and effect (unlike his own cosmology), so I leaped in to point out that it isn’t. “It’s more of a correlation,” I said, “Astrology doesn’t work by a mathematical, predictable relationship between the planets and our lives. That's why it's often hard for westerners to understand it. It is more that there is a symbolism around the planets that reflects a symbolism going on in our lives, but you can’t say exactly how that symbolism is going to unfold. But using the planets you can get a take on that deeper, symbolic dimension of our lives. I don’t know how astrology works, I don’t see why it should work, that is the beauty of it. So that sometimes when the symbolism in the skies exactly describes the nature of the events in someone’s life, it takes your breath away, it awes you.”

“I don’t know why I’m an astrologer,” I continued, “I sometimes scratch my head and wonder why I’m doing this thing that I would never have thought of and which seems such an odd thing to be doing. It’s like it grabbed hold of me, rather than the other way around.”

“It sounds like it's your medicine,” my friend commented.

NEXT MONDAY'S PARTIAL ECLIPSE

On Monday 19th March, there will be a partial eclipse of the Sun at 2.33am GMT. Eclipses can be quite hit or miss to work with – not that I’ve worked much with them, but why should I let that stop me writing about them? I’m not pretending to be an authority on astrology, and I hope I never start. (But I can do some good readings!) The famous total eclipse of 11 Aug 1999 affected me strongly. This eclipse is famous because it was part of a Grand Cross, with a Sun-Moon conjunction (naturally) at 18 Leo, opposite Uranus and square to Mars and Saturn. So it was a very pokey line-up. Two months before the eclipse I’d made a decision whereby I moved from one life to the next, and the eclipse occurred within 5 degrees of opposing my Sun in Aquarius. Which says to me that (1) An eclipse doesn’t have to be within 1 or 2 degrees, which some people would say and (2) The events can happen before the eclipse.

The line of totality stopped about 400 miles (i.e. 8 degrees) East of New York. The astrocartography for the eclipse had a Saturn line passing through this closest point of totality to New York, a Mars line a bit closer in to land, a Sun-Moon conjunction passing through New York, Uranus-Jupiter lines crossing just outside Washington D.C., and a Node line passing not too far away. Eclipses do not necessarily kick-off events at the time, and I think this one was a harbinger of 9/11 two years later. No doubt someone else has pointed this out previously.

But sometimes they do kick off events at the time, and sometimes it’s hard to be definitive about their effect even years later. This is why they’re hit and miss! Kathryn Cassidy scored a hit with the lunar eclipse a couple of weeks ago when she predicted the possibility of earthquakes in Asia. This coming eclipse is a partial solar eclipse, so it won’t be as powerful as a total solar eclipse, but it will still be covering 88% of the Sun in places, and the Sun-Moon conjunction in Pisces will be closely square to Pluto, so it’s a fairly pokey line-up.

Eclipses come in series that can last over 2000 years, beginning with an eclipse that covers a very small part of the Sun and then over the centuries moving towards a total eclipse, and then back again. This is why total eclipses are so powerful, because they are the product of centuries of growth.

My main prediction for Monday’s eclipse, which is part of a series that began in 1664 and so is still waxing, is that there will be developments around the Iran-Nuclear issue. My reasons for saying this are:

(1) The Eclipse passes within 200 miles of Iran.
(2) The astrocartography (ACG) for the eclipse has a Sun-Moon-Pluto conjunction passing through the middle of the country, and a Uranus-Node conjunction passing through western Iran.
(3) The ACG for the previous eclipse in the series, on Mar 7 1989, had a Pluto line passing through Iran, and on the very day of the eclipse Iran broke off diplomatic relations with the UK over Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.
(4) Iran’s Progressed Chart will be in the middle of a 10 day period where Prog Mars (in the 8th) is EXACTLY opposite Prog Pluto – at 17.16 Aries/Libra respectively.
(5) Transiting Uranus will be within 5 minutes of an exact opposition to the Composite Iran/Israel Pluto in Virgo (which is itself square composite Mars).

Further information about the eclipse can sometimes be gleaned from the first in the series, in this case the chart for 21 Aug 1664, 9.12 GMT. Bernadette Brady has this to say: “This is a very physically expressive Saros Series. Accidents, great physical effort, violence or any sudden physical events.” Adding to this (Brady only reads the midpoints) is the Saturn-Pluto opposition within the 1664 chart, which is the aspect of war par excellence, and which has been the presiding configuration behind the current period of East-West conflict in the Middle East. This 1664 Pluto is at 26.14 Gemini, and so is currently being opposed by transiting Pluto, and squared by the Sun-Moon of the eclipse.

So I think the period around this eclipse will probably see the pressure being upped on Iran, and may even involve steps being taken towards a military resolution of the Iran-Nuclear issue.

There are other areas of the world where significant events – including natural disasters – are possible. Zimbabwe currently looks like it might be reaching a tipping point. The ACG has a Uranus-Node conjunction passing within 400 miles, which is do-able, and conv prog Uranus is within 2 minutes of prog MC, in Scorpio. It’s all a bit weak astrologically, so we’ll probably see continued unrest, but not a revolution.

There are Mars, Chiron, Saturn and Neptune lines cutting a swathe through Africa, from Egypt and Libya down through Chad and Sudan then Central African Republic, Zaire, Congo and Angola. So war or flooding (Mars-Neptune) are possibilities here. (Mars-Neptune was prominent in chart of the New Orleans flooding).

There is also a concentration of lines running down through Japan and on to New Guinea and Australia – in this case Uranus-Node, Jupiter, Sun-Moon and Pluto. Uranus-Jupiter can indicate earthquakes, and is strongest around the New Guinea-Indonesia area. Japan has a Pluto-Uranus-Node conjunction – as well as being on the very outskirts of the eclipse itself – so some sort of earthquake etc is a possibility in this area as well.

GLOBAL WARMING

"There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years. On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century's modest warming?" (Tim Patterson, paleoclimatologist and Professor of Geology at Carleton University in Canada).

Up until recently, I’d accepted that man-made carbon emissions were causing a lot of the global warming that we’re experiencing, particularly as the opponents of anthropogenic warming often seemed to be members of the oil industry or its backers, like George Bush, or the habitual (and useful) mavericks you get in any debate who oppose simply because they perceive a pressure going on to take a particular point of view.

Taking another look, it does seem that the issue is a lot more debatable than I’d thought. Attribution of global warming to increased carbon dioxide levels seems to be based on models rather than hard evidence. This doesn’t make them wrong, but I think equal weight needs to be given to hard evidence that suggests otherwise – like the Medieval Warm Period, like the Little Ice Age out of which we are emerging, like the coming and going of settlers in Greenland and so on. There is also evidence that the cycles of Ice Ages and warm periods correlate most closely with solar activity, and that if anything, increases in carbon dioxide levels tend to follow warming rather than precede it.

I know it’s important to act in case we are causing global warming, but the trouble is that to do so political consensus is needed, and to get that you generally need a black and white case, with the doubters written off and not taken seriously. And as the fundamentalist feminists of the 80s and 90s showed, it is not that hard to intimidate academics into shutting up and appearing to conform. (I am NOT saying that feminism didn't also do a lot of good.)

Scientists are the medieval priests of our time. They are the authorities about many important things on which we are supposedly unqualified to comment. Science is our main source of knowledge about how the universe works. It is the orthodox religion of our time. Not to have knowledge of the basics of Science puts us in the position of the medieval yokel who is subject to the authority of the local priest. I am often amazed about how lacking in knowledge of Science intelligent people can be, and how easily they can therefore be hoodwinked by spurious claims, such as water-based cars or ‘evidence’ for alien life-forms within junk DNA or – dare I say it – that the twin towers ‘must have’ been a controlled demolition job. I only studied science up to age 18, but it seems to have given me enough basics to have an informed opinion.

On possibly another subject, there was a nice quote in a novel, Independent People by Halldor Laxness, that I’m reading: “..for the soul of man has a liking for the incredible, but doubts the credible.” Is this another Saturn-Neptune reflection?

GORDON BROWN AND CHIRON

For the last 10 years, the relationship between Tony Blair and his Chancellor Gordon Brown has defined the British Labour Government. Despite his unprecedented success in winning 3 consecutive Labour victories and his huge majorities in Parliament, Tony Blair has at the same time been at the mercy of his Chancellor in a way no other British Prime Minister has ever been. Gordon Brown has a big following of his own within the party, and for Blair to have sacked him at any point would have made it extremely difficult for him to govern. And Gordon Brown has used his position as Chancellor to control the other ministerial departments to a degree that is also unprecedented.

In the election to become leader of the party in 1994, Brown did not stand so as not to divide the party (so he said: he would have lost had he stood). He has since built on this myth that he sacrificed his own ambitions for the sake of the party, and has made it seem like he has a right to be the next leader, and that Blair has been repeatedly treacherous in not standing aside for him.

It looks like his moment will finally arrive during the course of this year. There have been mutterings about someone standing against him in an election to be leader, but no prominent MP has put their name forward yet. If one did stand and lost, he/she could expect no largesse from Gordon Brown: their ministerial career would be over.

If I admire anything about Tony Blair, it is his ability to contain the feud with Gordon Brown. Unlike Brown, Tony Blair is not vindictive. I don’t think Gordon Brown is a leader of people – I think he is tyrannical – and I think his reputation as a brilliant Chancellor, so necessary for his self-esteem, is overblown. The fact is that the West has been in a period of sustained economic growth for a long time now, and Brown has managed not to get in the way of that. It was the Tories who set up the conditions for the boom in the UK. If he has achieved anything, it has been in raising large amounts of cash through taxes to put into the public services, without alienating the voters by raising personal income tax.

There seems to be a widespread perception that the man is ‘not right’, and also a sense that we have no choice but to have him as our next leader. This is not a good omen, and the opinion polls put the Tories well ahead if Brown becomes leader.

Astrologically, he continues the Chiron/Damage theme that we have seen in both Bush and Blair. Both men have a prominent Chiron, and in both cases the transits to or from Chiron have reflected the irrevocable and self-inflicted damage they have done to their reputations through the Iraq War.

Bush’s Chiron is central to his chart, being both conjunct his Moon and square to his Sun, and the failure of his Iraq venture has fatally damaged his whole Presidency. In 2003, as the Iraq War got under way, transiting Chiron in Capricorn squared his natal Moon-Chiron and opposed his Sun. This was not a good omen, and as Chiron moved on to conjoin his Descendant at 7 Aquarius in 2006, the chickens came home to roost. Public opinion turned decisively away from him, and he is now a lame-duck, ‘damaged’ President.

Blair’s Chiron is not so central to his chart, but it is conjunct his MC in Capricorn. And we see the same pattern as with Bush. In 2003 Blair had his Chiron return, and in 2004 Chiron conjoined his MC. In 2006, as the failure of the Iraq War became accepted politically, Chiron conjoined Blair’s North Node at 7 Aquarius. This year it conjoins his Moon. The Iraq War has not been central to Blair’s leadership in the way that it has been with Bush, but it has still done him enormous damage. Apart from the damage to national self-respect that his toadying to Bush has caused, the huge issue has been the falsification of evidence in order to provide grounds for war. To my mind, there could hardly be a more serious offence than this, and a lengthy jail-term should be the outcome. But it won’t be, and I think Blair has that common psychopathic ability to cheerfully carry on as though he’s done nothing wrong.

Gordon Brown has natal Chiron at 1 Capricorn, conjunct his MC at 5 Capricorn. Given that his leadership appears flawed before it has even begun, it is not hard to predict that Chiron is going to play a major part in his trajectory as PM. Blair had 5 years as PM before Chiron was activated and damaged his premiership. In Brown’s case, the transits to and from Chiron will begin almost straight away. Being PM is not going to be a happy experience for him. He has lusted after the job for years, and it is going to turn into ashes. And it will be a self-inflicted wound.

When I do readings for people, Chiron normally reflects some psychological injury early in life, and not of one’s own making. So it is interesting to see, through these political figures, Chiron representing the self-inflicted damage we can bring about later in life, if we don’t develop the self-awareness that Chiron necessitates.

From Brown’s progressions and transits, we can see that 2007 is mainly about the ascent to power, but that the trouble will begin straight away.

Gordon Brown: 20 Feb 1951 8.40am, Giffnock, Scotland. (See also my 2 earlier blogs on Gordon Brown, Should Gordon Brown Be Leader? and The Sexy Mr Brown.)

This year he has the following: Prog Moon opposite Prog MC and natal Sun, and Prog MC conjunct natal Sun. His solar return (SR) has Sun sextile Pluto and (a bit of trouble here) Moon and Venus square to Pluto. His converse SR has Pluto and Neptune conjunct the MC. Tr Chiron is opposing his natal Moon all year. So he certainly looks likely to become PM, but he will have problems around people accepting him and liking him – popular appeal – from the word go (the Venus, Moon, Pluto trouble in the SR, tr Chiron opposite Moon).

Brown has a natal 12th House Mercury (much of his chart is hidden in the 12th) opposite a Moon-Pluto conjunction, which describes his continual power-seeking and plotting. In 2008 Chiron will conjoin his Mercury and oppose his Pluto. This way he has of going about things is likely to seriously damage him next year. Pluto will also be conjoining his natal Chiron all of 2008. With natal Chiron conjunct MC, his general reputation will become damaged. This theme is repeated in Converse Prog Chiron conjunct CP ASC all year.

Uranus will also be conjoining his passive-aggressive 12th House Mars in Pisces in 2008, reflecting the infighting that will be going on, and his difficulties in genuinely asserting himself in relation to others. His Solar Return for 2008 has Pluto conjunct ASC opposite Mars conjunct DESC, further confirmation of the likely power struggles and infighting within his government. This SR chart repeats the Chiron theme through Moon opposite Chiron, and reflects his difficulty in governing through a Sun-Saturn opposition.

Brown’s astrology for 2008 suggests his premiership will be everything one might have feared from his current reputation. He will be forced to call an election by 2010 at the latest, and that year he will have transiting Pluto conjoining his MC. It seems to me that this will signify him losing the general election.

There is, of course, a very slim chance that Labour will come to its senses and not elect Brown as their leader this year. This would be extremely difficult for him to accept, and in this case I think his upcoming astrology would reflect that lack of acceptance, and the damage it will do to his reputation.

THE US PLUTO RETURN

According to one poll last year, 27% of 18-26 year old college students in the USA had doubts that NASA went to the Moon. In another 2006 poll, 38% of Americans suspected that the government assisted in some way with the 9/11 terrorist attacks. A 2003 poll found that 70% of respondents believed there was a plot to kill Kennedy.

I’m not concerned here to pass any sort of favourable or unfavourable comment on these beliefs. What I’m more interested in for now is the enduring level of mistrust in the US government that these beliefs reflect – a level of mistrust that may or may not be justified. This mistrust, if anything, is intensifying. The 27% who doubt the Moon Landings are educated college students from the younger generation, a sign of things to come. And the level of mistrust over 9/11 is phenomenal.

It is not just this particular Bush administration that is mistrusted: it seems there has been a heightened mistrust ever since the cover-ups over both Vietnam and Watergate. (I didn’t know it, but the young Colin Powell was involved in the My Lai cover-up). But it is reaching new heights as Pluto finishes his time in Sagittarius and moves on into Capricorn. Pluto in Sagittarius demands the Truth, and in the UK Blair’s lies over Iraq have become an honesty issue in an unprecedented way. But in the UK we do not have the level of mistrust in the government per se as you get in the USA.

What occurred to me recently is that this level of mistrust cannot endure indefinitely, something has to give, and with Pluto soon to enter Capricorn, it is likely to be the form of government itself that changes. AMERICAN DEMOCRACY AS WE KNOW IT MAY WELL NOT SURVIVE THE PASSAGE OF PLUTO THROUGH CAPRICORN.

The planet Uranus was discovered in 1781, 5 years after the American Declaration of Independence, and just before the conclusion of the War of Independence. The revolutionary nature of this struggle is rightly associated with this planet, particularly as it was discovered during this period. But Pluto was at 28 Capricorn at the time of the Declaration of Independence, and I think this is just as important. Pluto is also revolutionary, but not in the sudden, precipitate, ideological way of Uranus. Pluto change tends to be more of a gradual process with an enduring outcome, in which the old is completely cleansed and a new centre of power is established – either within oneself, or in this case, within a nation. And it was in Capricorn, the sign of government.

In the US, Independence was not just about the country ridding itself of rule by what had over time become a foreign power – i.e. the British. It was also the British – and European – form of rule, monarchy, that was overthrown, to be replaced by elected government (even then there were many who didn’t have the vote.) It was a shift of power (Pluto) to the people (Moon): Moon conjunct Pluto in the July 2 chart, Moon in Aquarius – democracy – in the July 4 charts. It also emerged as a radical de-centralising of power, which was spread between the legislature, the executive, the judiciary, and the individual states.

So with Pluto returning to Capricorn next year, and reaching its natal position of 28 Capricorn in 15 years time, America is about to complete its first full Pluto cycle as a Democracy. It seems to me that the system was very well thought through and in many ways works well. I like, for example, the fact that Senators are only elected every 6 years. This means they have the leisure to take a considered, long-term view, without having to worry all the time about responding to changeable public opinion. And I also like the fact that members of the House of Representatives are re-elected every 2 years. This means that in an urgent situation such as Iraq, where the national self-interest is being harmed by an intransigent President, the situation can be addressed relatively quickly via the ballot box.

But there is also this huge mistrust, which Pluto in Sag has revealed and heightened, and which I think Pluto in Capricorn is likely to address – gradually, culminating around 2022 as Pluto reaches its natal position. What form this will take is anybody’s guess.

Revolutionary activity began in America long before 1776. It started around 1760, with Pluto in late Sag conjunct the Galactic Centre, which is what we have now. So the Revolution itself was the outcome of Pluto’s journey through Capricorn over about 16 years, having been seeded by Pluto’s conjunction to the GC. When the time was ripe, Uranus joined in, and the USA was born.

It might be worth asking: is the current level of antipathy and mistrust towards the US government comparable to that felt towards the British in the run-up to 1776?

What, I wondered, might be going on around 2022, when the US has its Pluto return?

First of all, the Presidency itself has a transit of Uranus conjoining the MC in 2023.

The US Sibly Chart has Prog Uranus conjunct Prog MC in 2023-4.

The Sibly also has a converse Prog Pluto, Moon and MC conjunction in 2024, all around 25 Cap, near the degree of natal Pluto, and within 1/2 a degree of each other. (Converse Progressions are calculated by going backwards a day for a year instead of forwards, and they can indicate conditioning from the past that is influencing the current situation.) With the MC signifying the government, this converse line-up suggests that around 2024 the US government will be experiencing a shake-up that was inherent in its founding.

The 2 July 4pm chart has a natal Moon conjunct Pluto (the chart ruler) in Capricorn, and in 2022 this chart will have Prog Moon conjunct Prog Pluto.

The list seems to just keep running. There is going to be a big shake-up, some fundamental re-thinking of the way America is governed, around 2022/3, and there will be a long process between now and then to get to there.

Other charts also say something similar. The chart for the Federal Constitution in 1787 has a conjunction of Prog Uranus, MC and Moon in 2023-4. In 2020/1, Prog Neptune conjoins Prog ASC.

The Presidential inauguration chart for 2021 has Pluto conjunct MC at 26 Capricorn. And a LOT of tension: Sun, Saturn, Jupiter conjunction all square to a Moon, Mars, Uranus conjunction. Also Sun conjunct Pluto, Moon square Pluto.

The inauguration chart for 2025 (assuming there still is a President by then) has Sun conjunct Pluto conjunct MC opposite a Mars-IC conjunction. So these Presidents won't be having an easy time of it.

The thing about Progressions is that they take centuries or even thousands of years to repeat themselves (except the Moon). If we were dealing with transits, we could more easily say oh, this is a cycle the US has been through before. But with progressions, we are encountering something entirely new, partly because America is a young country. For example, the US Sibly Prog Mars went retrograde for the 1st time ever in 2006, and will remain so until 2087: and what we may be seeing, via Iraq, is a long-term military reversal - the first ever - for the USA.

So with all these Progressions around Pluto, Uranus, the MC and the Moon ganging up in 2022/3, we are likely to see something completely new come into being, a whole new phase, a reformed governmental system. And it's likely that the process is beginning around now.

SAVAGE LOVE

After my last posting – EIGHTH HOUSE RAMBLE – I received a comment referring me to the Savage Love online advice column. Being a Brit, I’d never heard of it, and this is what I found. It might not be to everybody’s taste, but I found it hilarious. If you like it, then there are two books by Philip Roth you MUST read: Portnoy’s Complaint and Sabbath’s Theater.

Serious question: I have always had a thing for Anna Nicole Smith and frequently masturbated to her Playboy photos. I’ve always felt some guilt about masturbation to begin with, but since her death, I now feel a little creepy doing it. Do you think it’s okay to continue now that she has passed away?
—Missing Anna Nicole

No, MAN, I don’t.
But not because it’s disrespectful—there’s nothing you can
do to Anna Nicole Smith in death that could possibly outdo the
shit Anna Nicole Smith subjected herself to in life. No, the reason you feel creepy about beating off to Anna Nicole’s photos now,
MAN, and the reason you must stop, is this: Whacking off to the dead violates the hope that masturbation represents. When Anna Nicole was alive and young and beautiful, MAN, a tiny part of your brain somehow managed to convince your dick that your fantasies existed within the realm of possibility. If the right set of circumstances, however improbable, were to occur, you might actually find yourself in bed with Anna Nicole Smith. So long as she lived, MAN, you lived, and whacked off, in hope. But masturbating to the dead inspires only feelings of hopelessness and despair. Which is why no one beats off to James Dean or River Phoenix or Marilyn Monroe or Mary Todd Lincoln without feeling a little creepy, a little hopeless, and a little closer to the grave himself. Knock it off.

EIGHTH HOUSE RAMBLE

Only a few more days of Mercury Retrograde to go, and I read about a bizarre one this morning. Don’t read on if you’re squeamish. A couple in Michigan received 2 parcels through the post (Mercury) from China. What they didn’t know was that it was the wrong address, the parcels were intended for a research lab, and they were human body parts. The husband opened the first parcel, which turned out to be liver, and he got part way into opening the second, and stopped when he saw the human ear (it contained part of a human head). Mercury was conjunct Uranus when it began retrograding 2 weeks ago, so I was expecting some bizarre events.

Talking of human body parts, something else that can be strange is THE AMERICAN RELATIONSHIP WITH DEATH. (I’m not saying the Brits are any better – come try one of our funerals!) What I have in mind is the people killed when the twin towers collapsed, and how for a long time afterwards the investigators were finding body parts in the rubble, which they went to extensive lengths to identify using DNA analysis. They would then return the body part to the family of the dead person. One family received no less than 9 pieces of body - probably just lumps of tissue - over a long period, belonging to a relative they had lost, and each time they had a ceremony for the dead body part. You couldn’t make something like this up. Does anyone understand the psychology behind this?

I’ve sometimes written about things where I’ve had to tone down what actually happened or else no-one would believe me. Truth can indeed be stranger than fiction, and if you write it as it happens, and you’re South American, you get called ‘Magical Realist’, a term the authors aren’t necessarily very happy with. In ‘100 Years of Solitude’ by Marquez there’s this small stool in the house and no-one knows what it’s for except the teenage boys, and they use it to stand on when they’re shagging the donkeys. I thought well that’s just Marquez at it again, until a South American friend told me how when they were kids living in the jungle, they would shag anything that moved. There was a field that when they entered it, the donkeys would run to a particular tree, beneath which they were used to getting laid. And they lent a donkey to a friend to take stuff to market, and the donkey wouldn’t go further than a particular point on the journey, so the friend had to come back, to be told that that was the place where the donkey was used to being serviced, and if you wanted the donkey to go any further, that was what you had to do. Such demanding creatures!

I don’t know why I’m going on like this today, and maybe it’ll get my site filtered out from the ‘safe search’ on Google. Perhaps it’s because Mercury Retrograde is practically on my Aquarian Sun.

YET MORE SATURN-NEPTUNE

In her blog of yesterday, Lynn Hayes accused herself of sounding like a broken record for writing about the Saturn-Neptune Opposition so much. To quote Mr Bush, I say “Bring it on.” There’s so much going on both personally and in the world that is expressive of this opposition, and between us bloggers and commentators we can create a very full picture of it as it happens, and the extent to which these planetary aspects really do permeate our reality.

An aspect of Saturn-Neptune that has been on my mind has been the testing (Saturn) of faith/trust (Neptune), particularly as the opposition reached its darkest, most stuck period last month, in the run-up to its second exact crossing on 28 Feb (the third and final one is in June).

Reality is much bigger and deeper and more mysterious than the 3-D box we need to function through to make everyday life possible; a 3-D Box that the orthodox religion of our time, Science, declares to be the only reality. This wider reality is not directly perceptible through the 5 senses, but through feeling/intuition. It is a faculty that naturally grows through time, through the experience that somehow we are being helped, protected and looked after. And that if we reach out to this wider reality, if we live it, in turn it will reach back to us and help our lives unfold in exactly the way they need to.

Our side of the bargain is Saturn: there are things we need to take care of. God’s side of the bargain is Neptune: there are things he takes care of. (I don’t believe in God, it’s just a way of putting it). Saturn-Neptune is about the dance between these two, knowing when it is time to act, and when it is time to get out of the way, so that our limited understanding doesn’t get in the way of the deeper patterning of life. And this deeper patterning is a positive power, it’s tangible, and it runs through everything.

The darkest spot of the current Saturn-Neptune opposition, which we are emerging from as of today, has been a real test of not getting in the way. It’s been like OK, things aren’t flowing as they might be, the way forward isn’t clear, it’s been like that for some time now, but don’t be tempted to take precipitate action. Now is the time to steadily hold on to that trust and put yourself in the hands of that greater spirit which runs through things. If you can do it now, you’ll be able to do it anytime. And it’s not like a ‘deliberate’ test, like God’s wilful destruction of Job. There are generally good reasons for these important issues taking the time they take and getting apparently ‘stuck’, it’s just that those reasons sometimes are not and cannot be clear at the time. It’s often that there are processes and transformations that we need to go through but which we may not recognise: we just want the result. So we just have to trust that we’re being taken where we need to go.

As human beings our job is to achieve balance on all sorts of levels, one of which is Saturn-Neptune. It’s probable that most of us start out by learning about Saturn, and Neptune comes later. The classic thing in our twenties is learning to apply ourselves, to build work experience, to develop responsibility for ourselves. All good Saturn stuff, which reaches its first fruition at the first Saturn return aged 28-30. But it’s based on the exertion of our own will and our own understanding. I think it tends to be later, and as the result of experience and reflection, that we get a developed sense of their being a greater will and a greater understanding which our human will and understanding need to be in the service of. This is Neptune. There are, of course, plenty of people who start out with a strong sense of Neptune, but lack Saturn, lack the ability to consciously shape their lives. And our society tends to be one-sidedly Saturn, it is not ruled by elders who have a deeper sense of the purpose of human life (Neptune), but by younger men, who embarrassingly still have something to prove (Saturn), and which inevitably clouds their judgement.

The subject of faith and trust belongs to both Neptune/Pisces and Jupiter/Sagittarius. Jupiter began sextiling Neptune and trining Saturn on Feb 12, and will continue to do so right through until May. So this has added to the intensity of this time of faith being tested and strengthened, while at the same time adding a mellowing factor. Jupiter and Neptune are co-rulers of Pisces, so there is a resonance between them, yet they rule signs that square each other – Sagittarius and Pisces – so there is also a polarity.

I’m not entirely clear on the difference between the faith/trust of Jupiter and that of Neptune. But they do seem to divide into masculine/feminine, active/passive, with Jupiter being the active faith and confidence in the Universe that goes out and prays for outcomes and actively participates in the creation of meaning and in the process of evolution; while Neptune knows that the Universe is already beautiful and perfect and everything is as it should be and if we just trust then things will unfold as they need to.

So with Jupiter hooking in to the Saturn-Neptune opposition until May, and with that opposition having passed its darkest moment, the next few months are a great time for building a stronger faith in the unseen powers that guide our lives, through engaging with them (Jupiter) and through quietly trusting that they are helping anyway (Neptune).

In writing this I came to look at the process of faith in my own life, and how it has progressed over the years. And I could see a correspondence with the hard aspects of the Saturn-Neptune cycle. (Having a Moon-Saturn conjunction in Sag, and a nodal Neptune, I was destined to have this particular journey!)

During the 1979-80 square, when I was 21/22, I got involved with a Buddhist set-up, and it was such a powerful experience for me: faith awoke in a big way, and everything was full of light and promise.

Around the 1989 conjunction, I began to become seriously aware of the hidden authoritarianism you easily get in ‘spiritual’ groups, that it’s not all light and progress. Saturn (authority) attempts to dominate Neptune (spirituality), and the shadow of Neptune (illusion) conceals this fact from view. At the same time, I was reaching a peak of Saturn, trying to be ‘spiritual’ through will, through making things happen, and not paying Neptune his due. At the time I dreamed of being stuck on a cliff face with no direction to move in. Uranus and Neptune between them blew this apart a couple of years later as they reached my Sun-Moon midpoint. It’s like I had to deny Neptune before I could begin the long process of getting to know him.

During the square of 1998-99 I completed the process of removing my faith from institutions and other people – which I hadn’t been fully aware I was doing – and found a new confidence in relying entirely on my own connection to those deeper realities. The light and promise of my youthful perception turned out to have had so much illusion in it. What I saw around me now were hidden shadows and dull lives.

The last 9 years have been a process of establishing that sort of existential independence. And now we have the Saturn-Neptune opposition, which is close to my Aquarian Sun, and I know is taking me into some new phase. I don’t yet know what that is, all I know is that the awful sense of conflict which characterised the last 2 Saturn-Neptune aspects is no longer there. It’s more a process of unfoldment, instead of exposure of illusion and breaking away. I am being tested, though, in that I know we need to move house and possibly area, and have known for some time, but we still don’t know how or when or where. What’s being tested is my trust that it will happen, even though I can’t see how. I think that faith and trust grow through quite practical means, through seeing Neptunian reality moving through and influencing our 3-D Saturnian reality.