THE ASTROLOGY OF SCOTTISH INDEPENDENCE

The Scottish National Party (SNP) is a centre-left political party which campaigns for Scottish independence. It currently regularly polls the second highest number of votes [after Labour] for a political party in Scotland. The SNP has 6 of 59 Scottish seats in the UK Parliament, and 25 of 129 seats in the Scottish Parliament, where they are the official opposition. (Wiki)

This Thursday 3rd May, elections are being held for the Scottish Parliament, which was established in 1999 under the present Labour government, devolving certain powers to Scotland. All the signs are that the SNP will emerge from the election as the largest single party in the Parliament, displacing Labour, though without a majority. Polls among Scottish people have regularly begun to show a majority wanting full independence.

This is not good news for Labour, as it currently has 39 MPs in Scottish seats (compared to the Tories’ single seat), and independence will make it that much harder for them to win general elections in England. There does seem to be an unstoppable momentum developing, however, and I think it is a good thing. Small countries (like Ireland) seem to do well economically within the EU, so I don’t think they will have to worry on that score. But more importantly, the Scottish are a separate race to the English, by whom they have been effectively ruled for centuries, and I always think it’s a good thing if a people can govern themselves. I think it’ll be good for England too.

I also think that the smaller the country is, the easier it is for the individual to feel that they count, that they can make a difference. In a democracy, what does an individual vote count for? Absolutely nothing. It makes no difference at all. The individual is powerless at a national level, and often at a local level, and the outcome you are therefore most likely to get in an election is herd-think, rule by the unconscious mob-mind – and remember Hitler was initially elected democratically. Of course, democracy does have the ability to chuck out a leader who is a bad lot, and that is a strength. But as Churchill said, Democracy is the worst sort of political system - apart from all the rest!

I digress. Time for some astrology, and a chart for Scotland. This is not easy, as we can't be entirely confident of the year of its founding (842 AD), let alone the actual date. Scotland was formed from the conquest of the Pictish kingdom by the Irish kingdom of Dalradia (in what is now Argyle) by Kenneth MacAlpin. In his ‘Book of World Horoscopes’ (from which the above information comes), Nicholas Campion says: “We do not know precisely which year the union took place. However, if we set a chart for the Aries ingress of 842, that would fit with the astrological practice of the time, as practised in the Arab world, in which the Aries ingress prior to an important political event would have signified that event. Given that military campaigns usually took place in the summer, there is an excellent chance that the Aries ingress of 842 immediately preceded the Dalridian conquest of Pictavia.”

So we have a chart for March 16 842, 16.21, Edinburgh.

Click to Enlarge

In my blog of 18th March, I pointed out that the next day’s partial solar eclipse at 28 Pisces was conjunct the UK Moon at 29 Pisces (1066 chart) and square the UK Uranus at 29 Sag. I continued: “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.”

So there you have it, with the added point, that I hadn’t clocked at the time, that the Scottish Pluto is at 27 Pisces! So that eclipse really did have a lot to do with Scotland’s desire to break away from England (Uranus) and assert its own power (Pluto). On top of this, Pluto is squaring the Scottish natal Pluto by transit this year. So the astrology seems to suggest that this week's elections are likely to play a crucial role in Scotland’s moves towards independence. And the Scottish chart, artificial as it is, is already looking like it might work.

The Scottish chart has Moon at 7 Aries conjunct Uranus at 13 Aries (an interesting correspondence with the UK 1066 chart Moon square Uranus). Freedom and independence are important to the Scottish people. This Moon-Uranus in Aries is square to Mars at 14 Cancer, showing that we are dealing with a warrior race. If we add on Saturn-Neptune in Capricorn, we have a Cardinal t-square, which becomes a Cardinal Grand Cross if you add on Node in Libra. With this sort of astrology, I am amazed there haven’t been more rebellions, and given that conditions are now right, it can only be a matter of time before Scotland is independent. Maybe it is their Saturn in Capricorn that has kept them realistic about independence and actually quite at home in the Union, through the Protestant work ethic that they share with England (1801 chart - UK Sun at 10 Capricorn conjunct IC).

What about timing? By transit, Pluto and then Uranus will be hitting this Moon-Uranus-Mars-Saturn-Neptune-Node from 2011 onwards, at the time of the next Scottish elections, and a year or two after the next UK general election. So the move towards independence will probably be greatly empowered by these transits and the run-up to them: it seems reasonable to suppose that these 2 elections will result in greatly increased numbers of SNP MPs in both the British and Scottish Parliaments, with probably a clear majority for the SNP in the Scottish Parliament from the 2011 election onwards. This will only be the start of the Pluto transit, and we can expect to see full independence as the Pluto transit to the Grand Cross finishes about 5 years later, around 2015/2016.

Interestingly, Alex Salmond, the leader of the SNP, was born on 31 Dec 1954, giving him Sun at about 9 Capricorn conjunct Node at 5 Capricorn, which interacts strongly with the Scottish Grand Cross, and indicates a re-empowerment for him, through Pluto, from about 2011 onwards as well.

Back to the Scottish Chart. The Progressed Chart has Node conjunct MC in 2010, and the converse Progressed has Pluto conjunct MC in 2010. So the Government (MC) will have some sort of encounter with its destiny (Node) and be re-empowered (Pluto) around 2010.

So the astrology for Scotland around both the 2007 and 2011 elections suggest to me that the SNP is going to gain considerable ground in both, probably becoming the largest party this time, becoming the majority party in 2011, and this setting the stage for moves towards full independence in the succeeding few years. Looking at it the other way round, events now and where they seem to be going lend plausibility to the 842 Aries ingress chart for Scotland.

SATURN-NEPTUNE AND THE SELF

Buddhism has what is known as the ‘no-self’ doctrine which, applied to all phenomena, becomes the doctrine of emptiness (of which there are a number of kinds!) It’s easy for all this to become very heady – which some Buddhists can be very prone to – but the basic idea is that our sense of who we are is not fixed and enduring. As astrologers we’re on familiar territory here, because we regularly observe ourselves and others changing in times of major transits. But we only believe it partially: if we feel criticised, for example, we tend to want to defend ourselves, to protect our sense of who we are, instead of looking at the criticism with equanimity, and taking it on or discarding it as we feel appropriate.

So this is the reason for the ‘no-self’ doctrine: as human beings we treat what is a working construct – the self or ego – as something permanent, something that gives us a sense of security in an uncertain universe.

And this easily translates into the interplay between Saturn and Neptune. We do need a sense of self, a sense of ourselves as a centre of experience, but we need to get it right. Too much Neptune, and you’ve got someone who isn’t very present, who is too dreamy, lacks a strong sense of what they think and feel, and cannot achieve practical results; they find it hard to take responsibility for their lives, and may become parasitic and manipulative. Too much Saturn and you have someone who certainly knows what they think and believe, but their self is rigid, it is like a great wall around them, and it tends to be based mainly on their ability to earn money and recognition and respectability, along with a sense of superiority to others who are less ‘successful’. OK, I admit it, I’ve just had an encounter with someone like this, who has Sun-Saturn-Jupiter conjunct in Capricorn, and it was bruising!

So while we’re here on this planet we need an ego, a sense of self. There may be other realities before or after death where we don’t need a sense of self, but I wouldn’t know about that. If consciousness continues after death, it’s quite possible that Saturn as embodiment disappears, and we are just left with Neptune, in which we do not experience ourselves as being at the centre of things, and there is no protective barrier between ourselves and reality. That is the Buddhist view, along with the idea that we cannot handle it, and we flee back to embodied existence. That is where I part company with e.g. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, because I don’t believe that I was born just because I couldn’t handle Reality. I’m on this earth because it’s a beautiful place to be, and I want to fully appreciate that before I die. Nor do I believe I have a ‘purpose’ being here: that seems to me to be a bit of an abstraction, it takes me away from my experience, which is that I do what I do, and I feel very happy about quite a lot of it.

So whether or not anything continues after death, what I do know is that I’m here, and that I need a strong yet flexible sense of myself. I need Saturn in order to feel I’ve arrived, that I’m real, and that I am building and creating myself; but I also need Neptune to let go of all that, not to take it too seriously (“It’s only money,” as I said last night to someone who had lost some), to allow in new experiences and perspectives, and to remember that others, with equal validity, are also centres of experience.

And it’s not just an intellectual exercise in having the right attitude. In a society based on a one-sided Saturn, I think that generous actions, doing stuff for other people purely because you want to (NOT ‘ought to’ – that’s Saturn) helps get the balance right. Because practically speaking, the best way to understand the no-self doctrine is to be unselfish, but not in a self-sacrificing way.

I think a good image for a balanced Saturn-Neptune, and a balanced self, is a cell membrane. It’s tough, it lasts for years, it contains, yet it is flexible and delicate and porous.

SATURN AND WALLS

Astrological symbolism can sometimes work itself out very literally. I have noticed this in the case of Saturn, whose presence can result in the building or demolition of walls (one of Saturn’s meanings is to do with defensive boundaries).

Israel was founded in 1948 with Saturn at 16 Leo. The country has just finished its second Saturn Return, and during this period has been erecting the Israeli West Bank Barrier which, whatever the rights and wrongs of it, has succeeded in reducing terrorist attacks on Israel.

Construction of the Berlin Wall began on Aug 13 1961, with Saturn at 24 Capricorn. Demolition began in November 1989, 5 months short of its 1st Saturn Return. This wall was erected to stop defections from East to West Germany, and was known in the East as “The Anti-Fascist Protective Rampart”.

Glastonbury Festival, now the largest Festival of its kind in the world (and down the road from me) began as Glastonbury Fayre in June 1971. In the year 2000 100,000 tickets were sold and there were a further 150,000 gatecrashers. This caused such public safety concerns that its future was under threat, so the outcome of the Festival’s Saturn Return was the erection of a huge fence in time for the 2002 Festival. It certainly worked, but my experience at the Festival was that while the criminal element was hugely reduced, which was a relief, a lot of the interesting characters were also not there. I guess this is the price of Saturn: he is needed for social order, there is no way round that, but that means rules that edit out whatever doesn’t fit, which can be interesting, wacky and creative as well as criminal. But in myth he did eat his own children, so we have to expect it.

On April 10 this year, the Americans began the construction of a wall around a Sunni district in Baghdad. The chart for America’s efforts in Iraq – the Iraq War – is set for 5.33am, 20/3/2003, Baghdad. This chart has Saturn at 22.45 Gemini closely conjunct the IC. The Moon, being the closest ‘planet’ to the earth, triggers the energy of all the other planets. On April 10, the Progressed Moon of the Iraq War chart was at 21.28 Sag, almost exactly opposing the natal Saturn. So again we have a connection between Saturn and the erection of walls/boundaries.

Will the Baghdad Wall be successful? Saturn in the April 10 Chart is of course opposite Neptune, which must be the stupidest time conceivable to start building a wall. What has become apparent lately is that despite the hugely heightened security in Baghdad as a result of the American ‘surge’, the bombers are still getting through, the most prominent case being the bombing of the Parliament building. This is probably a function of Mars’ present passage through Pisces. Mars was in Pisces in the Baghdad Wall chart, and in this sign is probably very good at flowing through walls if it needs to. So the Baghdad Wall probably won’t work very well.

GLASTONBURY CALLING

A short article on the front page of the local newspaper is announcing a house for sale that has a front door carved in the shape of female genitalia, while the inside of the house has been turned into a Tantric Sex Temple. It’s business as usual in Glastonbury, UK. The local Catholic Church has a youth march up the High St every year, but last year proved to be the final one, due to those nice young Christians confronting many of the crystal-selling wand-purveying shop staff in the High St, spitting at them and calling them Satanists etc. This event made the headlines of the local paper.

Glastonbury has been a place of pilgrimage for centuries, and in the Middle Ages it was home to Glastonbury Abbey, one of the 2 great places of Christian power in England, along with Canterbury. All that changed in the Reformation, and all we have now are the ruins. It’s a small town in Somerset with a huge number of healers, astrologers, shamans, charlatans, tarot readers, psychics, mediums and just about every religion you can think of. The High St, according to Vajramala, is like Diagon Alley in Harry Potter, and she complains that you can’t even buy a pair of knickers. Mind you, it gives me an enhanced appreciation for Woolworths and Morrisons, which someone once described to me as “Gateways to Ordinary Reality.”

Of course we get a lot of tourists, and just as a lot of Brits are prepared to believe the wild claims that Native Americans sometimes make, so too are many Americans prepared to believe the invented religions and spurious claims to authenticity that you get in Glastonbury. There is, for example, an artefact called ‘The Blue Bowl’ that was arranged to be ‘discovered’ 100 years ago, and it’s put about that it is the Holy Grail. One American I know felt very disillusioned when a group of us were looking at the chart for the ‘discovery’, and not taking remotely seriously this claim. She had thought for years that it was literally true, and had brought over parties of tourists from the USA where she introduced them to the ‘Holy Grail’. Mind you, there are plenty of Brits who are prepared to believe this sort of stuff, often members of what I call the English Head-mysticism tradition. They’ve often got degrees, they know about lots of ‘occult’ things, often spurious (in my opinion), such as the Glastonbury Zodiac, and they mistake their ‘knowledge’, which is endless, for wisdom. My considered response is a desire to strangle and pulverise and dismember these people, not out of hatred, but from a sincere wish that out of such annihilation something real may emerge.

I think, though, if you leave something spurious for long enough, what you get is an established religion that does act as a genuine vehicle for something more profound. Who says mythology has to be based on historical fact? Let’s just not confuse the two. But I’ll never be able to take seriously the idea that Christ or the Buddha, who were only in their early 30s, could possibly have had the level of wisdom they are credited with. At a certain age you have to start trusting your own experience, and I ask, has anyone reading this ever met anyone in their early 30s with a full quota of the sort of experience-based insight that you can very occasionally get in old people? And how could you tell, apart from knowing someone well? I also find hard to take seriously the idea that a military general, i.e. Mohammed, could have been God’s special messenger, unless it was the Old Testament God, which fits quite well.

In our astrology discussion group, which meets every couple of weeks and is generally quite anarchic but fruitful, the subject of a chart for Glastonbury keeps coming up. We base it on the date when Glastonbury was given its charter, which was on 23rd June 1705. The calendar has shunted forward by 11 days since then (it seems to have taken us a long time to establish exactly how many days!) giving 4th July 1705. But there’s no time of day given. But there is a traditional technique of putting on the ASC the planet that you reckon rules the chart or the event. This is how one of the Gemini Rising charts for the USA was generated: Uranus, the planet of revolution, was held to have ruled the Declaration of Independence, and it was in Gemini at the time. And why not? Astrology is based on the idea that there is a relationship between symbolic reality and experiential reality, and which end you want to start from seems to me a matter of choice. Which isn’t the same as fiddling the chart to fit the facts, i.e. the dark art of rectification, which I nevertheless practice, intellectually indefensible (to quote Nick Campion) as it is.

So what we were left with was deciding what planet to put on the ASC. Neptune seemed the obvious choice, Glastonbury being genuinely a place of pilgrimage, psychic experiences, multiple religions and candy-floss spirituality. We kept returning to this one every so often, and of course plenty of bits fitted, but we weren’t going Wow! Apart from anything, it made the ASC Aries, while Glastonbury can be a very hard place to make anything happen.

A friend reminded me a couple of months back that Glastonbury is traditionally the Isle of the Dead. I’d never really thought about it before (having been here 8 years) but I realised that yes, Glastonbury is a kind of Underworld, people are drawn to live here for reasons they don’t understand (or sometimes spat out very quickly), and almost invariably get immediately shoved into some deep transformational process, often painful, and at double the usual rate of intensity. That’s what happened to me when I moved here in Oct 1998, and things haven’t slowed down since. And now it’s feeling like time to go, I’m realising that I have been in an Underworld all this time without quite knowing it, and that I’m slowly emerging into a more ordinary, concrete, collectively-lived reality again. And because it’s an Underworld, it’s not a place for overt achievement, for 10th House stuff. I’ve found it’s been a good place to build up skills, and do some good work, but it’s always held back, I can keep things ticking over but not much more. If you want to achieve things while living in Glastonbury, I think you often need to have your work elsewhere. And that, I think, is why you get so many wonky projects going on in Glastonbury, all these courses and teachers, for example, where more often than not there’s something a bit odd about them. And plenty of people who can’t see that.

So yes, Glastonbury is an Underworld, and therefore you can argue it should have Pluto on the ASC at 18 Leo. As soon as we looked at this one, everyone started going Yes! This one feels right! There’s still some questions about the Moon, but not on my part: 4th House Sag, it welcomes pilgrims and visitors from afar by the bucket-load. And Moon conjunct Chiron: I notice it time and again when people visit, something gets moved on or healed for them. And Sun conjunct Jupiter in 11th House Cancer: there is a strong community dimension to Glastonbury. It’s square to 9th House Neptune: it’s a ‘spiritually’(Neptune) based community, a good bit of it daft and weird (Neptune). There’s plenty more I could say, but I’ll leave it there.

AQUARIANS, AN ECCENTRIC PEER AND GORILLAS

You often hear this thing that Aquarians are good with computers. Well I’m an Aquarian and I’m not good with computers, and I don’t know any Aquarians who are. Of course Aquarians like the vision of where e.g. the internet can take us, but that’s not the same thing. Given that the internet arose in the mid-nineties under the late auspices of the Uranus-Neptune conjunction, I reckon Pisceans probably like the internet as well. Actually I know one Piscean who is normally not of this earth, but he set himself up as a computer repairman at one point before retiring to live in a field. And one of his strong points was this: he would sometimes have the experience of finding himself the other side of the computer screen, gazing round at the architecture of the computer, and seeing what goes where. But that’s Pisces for you! Another friend who’s pretty competent with computers has a sense of what keys she needs to press without knowing why. I’ve always thought that computers and the internet, being such a fluid, semi-physical medium, are a good place to work magic.

Anyway, I reckon it’s probably the Virgos and Geminis who are probably the ones to go to if you’re computer needs fixing. They are both Mercury-ruled signs, one good at close analysis, and the other good at processing information.

Which doesn’t bring me on to the fact that since we split from chimpanzees 6 million years ago (before people were people and chimps were chimps), chimpanzees have evolved more than we have (New Scientist mag, 21/4/7). 154 of our genes have been changed by natural selection since then, whereas 233 chimp genes have. And did you know that we share about 38% of our genes with daffodils?

I read that today at Longleat Safari Park, where we took our 6-year old for an outing. Poor kid doesn’t get taken many places by us, we’re quite stay-at-home, but he seems quite happy on it. On the other hand, he’s never known anything different, and one day he will realise (he has Sun in 9th House Sag) and ask us to pay for his therapist. Did you know that under their stripey fur, zebras have black skin, whereas tigers have stripey skin? And that elephants can’t jump?

Longleat Safari Park is owned and run by Lord Bath, a classic English eccentric in his 70s. The Safari Park was his idea after the War when his family was broke, and his Dad ran with the idea and it worked, but it wasn’t until he was 60, and his Dad died, that the present Lord Bath was allowed to run it. He quickly became known by the Sun Newspaper as ‘The Loins of Longleat’ because of the number of what he calls young ‘wifelets’ that pass through. His wife is French, and they seem to be happily married, though for many years she has lived in France. His main interest seems to be in painting murals in his stately home. He has written a 2 million word autobiography which he has published on the net, and he leaves nothing out, whether it was his early experiments fiddling with the other boys at his boarding school, or the exact time and place of his birth, which was 6 May 1932, 7pm, London. He has Sun and Moon in Taurus, which describes his aesthetic, sensual character, and the fact that the Safari Park obviously does OK financially, and it’s actually a very well run place that has its own TV programme. But for such an eccentric, there isn’t a pronounced Uranus/ Aquarius emphasis. Though he does have Jupiter conjunct MC in Leo, and his unique individuality is certainly a very public thing. As with all the opposing signs, Leo and Aquarius have a lot in common.

We visit Longleat quite regularly. The wolves are normally a disappointment, just lying there asleep. But one time, for no apparent reason, they made a beeline for our car, surrounded it and stared right at us for some minutes. That was great. Vajramala was convinced she could have opened the window and got away with stroking them, but unfortunately she decided against it. Today our experience was the silverback gorilla, who lives on an island surrounded by sea lions (who he throws sticks at if they try to land). He’s 46 years old, and his partner of several decades died a month ago. They’re not going to put another gorilla with him, as it would be too much for him at his age. He likes to watch the TV, particularly cartoons. As we passed by in the boat, he wandered over on his knuckles and sat with his back up against a tree. And it was as though it was for our benefit (like it had seemed with the wolves). I had such a strong sense of a person there, of a strong, reflective presence that knew a few things, he had a lot of dignity. And that came through in the way the guide talked about him. I had an experience of a different kind around a silverback a few years ago in Bristol Zoo, when I just looked at him for several minutes, and it was this powerful, raw, male presence, uncomplicated and really THERE, and as I left my back straightened involuntarily, something of what that gorilla was had passed over to me. And then I made my way back to Glastonbury, where men serve the Goddess (i.e. God in drag) and it’s deeply uncool to be that kind of male.

POWER, PLUTO AND CELEBRITY PROFILES

Natally I have Sun in Aquarius opposite Pluto in Virgo. It’s a wide aspect – 7 degrees – and it’s out of sign. But that doesn’t seem to have stopped it from being a very significant part of my life. It has been my main challenge apart from Moon conjunct Saturn and perhaps Sun conjunct Chiron. It’s natural to assume that because aspects are tighter they are in some way stronger, but that hasn’t been my experience when considering the hard aspects between the Sun or Moon and the outer planets. These aspects can be just as strong when wide, and it’s worth having a generous orb – I use 10 degrees with the Sun and Moon.

So what does it mean when the aspects are tighter? I don’t really know, except to say that I think it’s easier to bring awareness to bear on the aspect if it is wide, there is a ‘gap’ you can get in. And when I read descriptions of Sun-Pluto people, they do seem more driven and dominating than I think I am: all the same, my opposition has taken me on a profoundly transformative path over decades. It seems to go just as deep, even though it’s a wide aspect, but it’s perhaps a bit softer and mellower.

And the issue has been me and my own confidence - or power (Pluto), a word that I find a bit dodgy, because it can mean a lot of things. But for me the opposition has been about healing a dislocation between my conscious personality (Sun) and a sort of solid bedrock, deep within myself (Pluto) that can be completely trusted and that has always been completely trustworthy, if only I’d known it.

In Buddhism, there is a path of self-transcendence, of striving to be more than one is; and there is also a path of trusting one’s own Buddha-nature, of trusting the wisdom within that has always been there. It is this latter path that makes sense to me, and which Sun opposite Pluto has been teaching me. I think it describes a crucial point in the emergence of what we might call real power, as opposed to the sense of power and confidence that comes from one’s position in society, or from one’s earning ability, or because others think you’re good at what you do. All this may be a necessary starting point, but eventually you have to know your own worth for yourself, outside of what you have or what others think of you. And I think this is quite rare, and it is the path that Sun-Pluto has taken me on.

When I was in my early 20s, in a way I was confident and enthusiastic, but what was less obvious was that I also felt like I’d been holed below the waterline. I’d been brought up with a very narrow view of what was and was not possible with my life, and even though I didn’t agree with it, I still felt conditioned by it. It was like having been brought up in say the Amish, or the Moonies, except the cult was one of fundamentalist materialism.

So to start with it felt like Pluto was working against me (though I didn’t think in those terms), somehow I felt powerless, like there was a big bit of me missing. In many ways I didn’t trust my own judgement because I didn’t trust myself, I didn’t trust all those bits that didn’t fit into the narrow box in which I’d been brought up.

I often say to people that Pluto will humiliate you and grind you down and keep it up as long as is necessary until one day you decide “No more,” and you stand up and claim the strength that has been yours all along. Then the first part of his job is done, and you can spend the rest of your life running with the deep strength he has to offer.

So it was like that for me. Life seemed so difficult, and there were always these nagging voices in me that were in fact my strength but which I wrote off as unhealthy bits of me. But by my early 30s I’d driven myself to such a point where nothing would work anymore, that I began to trust those voices. (As transiting Pluto began squaring my natal Sun-Pluto.) And it’s been a process since of putting my own judgement first, sometimes with a lot of fear and self-doubt involved, and finding that everything ultimately works OK if I do that.

And I am determined with it: sometimes I find others strongly differing from me, but I know I must be true to that deep Pluto place, I must stick to what I think and what I value and what I believe, in a way to what I KNOW. These days it’s not really a problem. This confidence I have found, this Pluto place, is wondrous, it is an endless source of wisdom and reality. It has been hard-won, it has required a lot of courage, and yes I can still sometimes doubt myself in the wrong sort of way, like if someone disagrees, or appears to disagree with something I have written! But that’s quite a good test for me.

All this has made me very sensitive to issues around power, when I see people wanting it from others, or when I see people wanting to give it away to others. Because it’s all a betrayal of the Pluto place that is just confident and independent and knows, full stop. But I’m not naïve about it, because it’s the norm for a lot of human beings and always has been. It’s part of the human condition not to have that deeper trust in yourself, and it’s one way of describing the purpose of human existence, which is to find that self-confidence and then run with it.

As I have said before, something I like about the astro-blogosphere is its lack of hierarchy, its lack of anyone to whom others refer as an authority, its lack of people parading their qualifications together with the bigshots they have rubbed shoulders with. There’s a very important point here: what makes you a good astrologer is not the amount of training you’ve done (though we all need a dose of it), but whether you have found that independent authority in yourself that KNOWS for itself: if you have found that, you will communicate from somewhere real, there will be that extra transformative charge to what you say. That is not something that can be taught by any number of courses, although it can rub off a bit if you meet the right person. You can be a technically brilliant astrologer without this crucial quality of being. It is what makes the difference in many disciplines. And there’s usually an initiatory journey, described by outer planet transits, that gets us there, ‘there’ being in reality a starting point rather than an end point.

Which brings me to what was going to be my main point, but which looks like being tagged on to the end. Jeff at Lunar Tunes Astrology and April at Big Sky Astroblog have both raised the issue of the ethics of writing astro-profiles of celebrities. Have we a right to peer into their psyches like this?

I’m not going to give an opinion on that one, because I have my own particular thing. Which is that a profile of a celebrity can easily appear as yet another endorsement of the collective fantasy that these people are somehow different, special, more interesting, real and important than the rest of us. Of course we can learn astrology from it, because we all have an impression of these people, and we may even learn something about how they tick. But a bald profile makes me feel like these people are yet again being treated as more important etc, and I don’t feel at ease with that. The astrologer needs to make it clear, if only by the tone they use, that they do not accept the collective elevated status given to these people, otherwise their profile, however insightful, also contributes to the collective frenzy and unreality around ‘celebrities’.

Because what is a celebrity? Often it’s just someone who’s good at what they do, it’s just that they happen to be an actor or a musician or a TV presenter. Now I think it’s great that they’re good at what they do. But so am I. And so are a lot of other people. Why can’t we just leave at that? And when they’re not good at anything, and they’re celebrities, we’re talking collective psychopathology.

Because when they are good at what they do, there is at least a grain of reality in our appreciation of them. But even so, there seems to be a widespread human need, that has always been there, to bow down and worship, to grovel, to think of certain people as wonderful and who can act as a guide for us in an uncertain universe, even if it’s only by the clothes they wear. And there are plenty of people who are only too happy to be thought of like that. Whether they are famous actors or Popes or footballers’ wives. And I think it always will be like that. I think astrology at its best is about a different kind of awareness, about other possibilities for human consciousness. So please, let us not even appear to treat these celebrities as anything other than ordinary people.

SATURN DIRECT

Saturn starts moving forward again (Direct) on 19th April 2007, after 4 months of going backwards (Retrograde). As usual, the effects of this change have been visible already, a week or two before the actual change. There are lots of people I know, including myself, with significant points around mid to late of the fixed signs – i.e. approx 15-25 degrees of Taurus, Leo, Scorpio or Aqaurius – where things are just starting to shift after months of being apparently stuck.

One person I know with Mars at 23 Leo in the 10th House has just applied for a new job that would move her career forward; a young man with Sun at 20 Leo looks like he might be starting to take responsibility for his life after several months of experiencing the consequences of not doing so; a woman with Moon in Scorpio square to Uranus seems poised to break free of a stifling relationship after months of indecision; another woman with a fixed Saturn-ASC square has found a new sense of confidence in the last 2 days; and in the last 3 days, the long process of moving house (I have Sun at 24 Aquarius in the 4th House), and moving into a whole new phase, has taken several steps forward for me.

In all these cases it’s just the beginning of movement, things are just poised, it’s a pregnant moment in time – and Saturn is stationary in the sky, waiting to turn, and staring at us for a while as he does so. This is taking place under a fiery Grand Trine between Saturn, stationary Jupiter in Sagittarius and the Sun or Mercury in Aries, so I think there is going to be a strong and easy sense of progress, or even change of direction, for anyone who is affected. On the 17th, 2 days before Saturn turns, there will be a New Moon at 27 Aries, closely trine to Pluto, giving a sense of powerful new beginnings.

And it’s not just whimsical, it’s not just, “Oh, Saturn is going backwards so things are stuck, now he’s going forwards so things can flow again.” That’s astrology as superstition (although there is a sense in which events do seem to happen for no apparent reason other than the say-so of the stars, like some Mercury retrograde events.) Unfortunately there are usually good reasons for it! It’s like setting up a business (very Saturnian): before you can do it there’s all kinds of stuff to be sorted: market research, bank loans, legalities, finding an office etc etc. This is all Saturn retrograde. Then when all that is sorted, and sorted well, the business has a proper foundation, and has a good chance of prospering. This is Saturn Direct. And a lot of things to do with our own lives are like that. What needs sorting may not be as tangible as the factors in setting up a business, and we may not even know at the time quite what it is that is being sorted. But nevertheless we are learning (Saturn) something necessary for the next phase, even though we may not know till afterwards what it is that we have learnt or even the fact that we were learning something.

For better or for worse, I think we can see this process around George Bush, Congress and Iraq. As Saturn went retrograde last December, Bush was starting to have to work with a Democrat Congress that was – and is – opposed to his Iraq policy. Congress has been doing its best to frustrate his policy, and he has had to live with that. Both sides, so opposed to each other, have been forced to learn to work together. Now Saturn is going Direct, that first phase is over, there is a new status quo, both sides have got to know each other somewhat. They each have a better idea of what they can and cannot achieve. We may see a less polarised, more creative approach. But each side may become emboldened, now they know their enemy. Nancy Pelosi, an Aries and the Democrat leader, was recently talking to the Syrians, in direct defiance of Bush’s foreign policy. Bush may also feel he is off the leash in coming months, which other factors in his chart also suggest. This could easily embolden him, for example, in relation to Iran. With the Saturn-Neptune opposition hitting his Venus (popular appeal) in Leo, we may see a continuing fall (Saturn) in his popularity, but Bush unaware and self-deceiving (Neptune) about that, and continuing regardless with his foreign policy, the main cause of his unpopularity.

A DEATH

I’m just finishing a book called 'The Leopard' by Guiseppe di Lampedusa, about a Prince of Sicily in the 19th century who is the last of his line and the last of a way of life. I’ve just read the chapter that describes his death:

“Don Fabrizio had always known that sensation. For a dozen years or so he had been feeling as if the vital fluid, the faculty of existing, life itself in fact and perhaps even the will to go on living, were ebbing out of him slowly but steadily, as grains of sand cluster and then line up one by one, unhurried, unceasing, before the narrow neck of an hour glass... the sensation was in no way disagreeable; this continuous whittling away of his personality seemed linked to a vague presage of the rebuilding elsewhere of a personality (thanks be to God) less conscious and yet broader. Those tiny grains of sand were not lost; they were vanishing, but accumulating elsewhere to cement some more lasting pile. Though “pile”, he had reflected, was not the exact word, for it suggested weight; nor was “grain of sand” either for that matter. They were more like tiny particles of watery vapour exhaled from a narrow pond, mounting then into the sky to great clouds, light and free.”

On his final day, emerging from an exhausting train journey, "..it was then that he heard the crash of the cascade." And a few hours later, as the end nears: "Now it was not a river erupting over him but an ocean, tempestuous, all foam and raging white-flecked waves."

Don Fabrizio, the Leopard, is an astronomer, and earlier in his life we had seen him, outside at night after a ball: “At the cross roads he glimpsed the sky to the east, above the sea. There was Venus, wrapped in her turban of autumn mist. She was always faithful, always awaiting a Don Fabrizio on his early morning outings... Don Fabrizio sighed. When would she decide to give him an appointment less ephemeral, far from stumps and blood, in her own region of perennial certitude?”

Finally we see him on his deathbed, in a hotel overlooking the sea, surrounded by relatives:

“Suddenly amid the group appeared a young woman; slim, in brown travelling dress and wide bustle, with a straw hat trimmed with a speckled veil which could not hide the sly charm of her face. She slid a little suede-gloved hand between one elbow and another of the weeping kneelers, apologised, drew closer. It was she, the creature for ever yearned for, coming to fetch him; strange that one so young should yield to him; the time for the train’s departure must be very close. When she was face to face with him she raised her veil; and there, chaste but ready for possession, she looked lovelier than she ever had when glimpsed in stellar space.
The crashing of the sea subsided altogether.”

TALL-ISM

When I was 18 I measured my height, and I was 5ft 11¼ inches. Since then I’d always assumed that was how tall I was, but a couple of years ago Vajramala told me she thought I was 6ft. I assumed that was wishful thinking on her part, besides which her eyesight is crap, so how could she know? I submitted to being measured and there it was, I was 6ft! The magic number that puts you in a different class of being, a god. And I’d spent all those years thinking I was one of those not-quite people. For some reason I wasn’t quite convinced, and I forgot about my new status until I was at a kids party the other day (with my 6 year old, I hasten to add: I wouldn’t have gone otherwise) and there was a measuring stick on the wall, and again I was 6ft – but only just. I keep forgetting about it, which is really annoying, because it is actually a nice feeling being 6ft. My Dad was the opposite way round. When I was a kid he always said he was 5’10”, which was a good height in those days, but as I got older I grew suspicious, and I measured him, and there it was, he was only 5’8½”. I’ve also spent my whole adult life thinking my youngest brother was taller than me – in fact, I’m sure he used to be – but when we measured up a year ago, remarkably I was just taller than him.

If any male says to me they don’t care about how tall they are, I wouldn’t believe them. It doesn’t suit me as an enlightened Aquarius with civilised Libra Rising and lofty Moon in Sag to care about the mere biological fact of my height, and actually I don’t care a huge amount, but I care enough about it to know that my biology is and always will be a big part of my psychology. Which is I think a good thing for an Aquarian to realise. Otherwise you can end up as some sort of superior hypocrite living in your own idealised universe. I went through the classic Aquarian initiation into respect for corporeal existence back in 1991/2, when Pluto squared my Aquarian Sun, and I was forced to stop living by increasingly hollow ideals, in fact I was forced to stop doing virtually anything for several years while I started to learn to listen to myself. And I came out the other end better able to enjoy my height (joke).

It’s human growth hormone that determines how tall we grow, and if you give it to a young dwarf, he/she will grow to a normal height. Which I think is great, and is one of the positive results so far of genetic engineering (they insert the relevant human gene into a bacteria, and then harvest the hormone). But you can see where it’s going to go. Americans are starting to get hold of it for their kids, those that can afford it, and then it’ll become a must-have, because your kid has to be as tall as his unnaturally tall schoolfriends, and height is a relative thing, so there’ll be no end to it, it’ll get really competitive, and you’ll end up with the tall rich and the short poor, apart from those who’ve scrimped and saved all their lives and made huge sacrifices to do the best for their kid which is buying him human growth hormone. This sounds a bit fantastical, but you can see it coming. And not just in the USA, though as usual it’ll probably start there.

THE GLOBAL WARMING SCAM (PART 2) AND REFLECTIONS ON POWERLESSNESS

I’ve stopped worrying about global warming and the rest of the environmental thing, and it’s such a relief. When I was 17 I used to worry about the oil running out – they reckoned in those days there was only 25 years worth of oil left. And I’d worried about that one since, as we are so dependent on it. And then the whole apocalyptic man-made global warming thing came along and worried me even more. Having realised that the CO2 thing is far from certain as a significant factor in global warming, I feel like I’ve been liberated.

I’d got caught up in the use of fear by the environmental movement and by the politicians. It’s no different to the use of fear by the Bush administration to get the War on Terror underway. (Incidentally, I was pleased to see that the Democrats have objected to the use of the term ‘Global War on Terror’ in a Bill that Bush is preparing.) I think the real terrorists are the people who try to generate mass fear to get their way, whether it’s George Bush, or whether it’s Al Gore or James Lovelock. There, I’ve probably offended both ends of the political spectrum now.

And anyway, what difference is it going to make if I worry about it? None. I’m sure the Earth’s not worried about it. She’s seen much bigger changes than this in her time: Ice Ages, Steam Ages, Mass Extinctions, you name it. She takes it in her stride.

We’re not as powerful as we think. I’m not as powerful as I think. Parents often blame themselves for the (alleged) faults of their offspring. I say, “What makes you think you’re so influential?” I know a 22 year old, rather close to home, who has never wanted to get off his arse and apply himself to anything. He has no qualifications, and very occasionally an income. His mother feels like an awful failure. I say to her, “He’s always been like that. His Dad’s family are like that. It’s his, not yours. He’s a Leo, and wants the lionesses to do the hunting for him (he’s rather good at that). Besides, what makes you think you’ve been so influential?”

As Raging Universe said on 19th Jan: “The more the years pass, the more I see my own part in a larger situation as well. I'm slowly teaching myself to step away somewhat and make room for things to progress. Observe some of it, actually. It goes on with or without me, I've noticed.

In the end I think this is my greatest comfort. To know that almost any choice I make will be equal to any other.
I am free.”

In War and Peace, Tolstoy is concerned to make a similar kind of point, but about leaders: they don't influence things nearly as much as we or they like to think they do.

DHARMARUCI'S LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

The bug I’ve had doesn’t seem to be going away, and the usual bundle of things I want to blog about seems to be taking a holiday. But I’ve been reading some fabulous books at my usual slow rate. I’m usually able to impress people who have a double dose of Virgo and/or Gemini by telling them they’re probably speed readers. Well I’m not, and unless I concentrate hard I don’t absorb information that well, unlike those Pisceans who could sit staring out of the window in the classroom and afterwards tell you everything the teacher said and, what’s worse, understand it. The advantage for me is that I can watch a film or read a book, and then 2 or 3 years later I’ll have forgotten the plot and I can enjoy it all over again. It must be my 3rd House Saturn that keeps me reading the classics into my middle age, after a very slow start that protected me from having my enjoyment of literature spoilt by the education system, but which also makes me a bit of a plodder in some ways.

So there’s a new meaning of 3rd House Saturn: it usually means some kind of difficulty around early education – in my case, it meant a pressured way of learning that I’ve had to unpick over several decades – but Saturn can also act as a protector, a boundary between you and the education system that protects your natural desire to learn. This is quite an indictment of the education system, but in the UK it’s been heading even more that way in recent years. Loads of testing, even for 4 and 5 year olds, to make sure they’re ‘achieving’. It’s a madness that’s completely insensitive to kids’ real needs. My 6 year old son Finn is currently being privately educated, and one of the first questions I asked his headmaster a few years ago was: “Do you do the National Curriculum?” and he said “No” and I said “Good.” Finn has no tests, they’re not being taught to compete with each other, they do loads of artwork, and he loves his reading. He looks forward to going to school, which I never did. Those wretched Irish Catholics and their attempts to brainwash me, and the wretched ambitions my family had for me. One day I might make my peace with it all, but not just yet!

So I’ve just read ‘The Fortunate Pilgrim’ by Mario Puzo, who wrote ‘The Godfather’. He’s one of my favourite authors, he’s such a good story-teller. And he creates a central character in such depth, of such stature, that you’re drawn right in. He did this of course with The Godfather. And he did it in his first ever novel, The Fortunate Pilgrim, where his central character is Lucia Santa, an Italian immigrant living in New York, poverty stricken and with 6 children to feed, her first husband having died and the second gone mad. They eventually make it through from the tenements to the house on Long Island, and it’s the story of a whole generation, of the strength of these people who had battled for survival for centuries in Italy, and were now doing so again in New York. And it’s the ruthlessness and almost inhuman strength of this determination to survive that is so impressive and moving, the necessity of putting survival before sentiment, before ‘love’, as when Lucia Santa will not have her husband back from the madhouse, even though he’s somewhat better, because she cannot afford in any way to jeopardise the welfare of her family. While there is a genuine strength in this, The Godfather reveals its darker side, the brutalising effect of living on the edge of survival, as in the famous injunction to remember it’s business and not personal, as you go off to slaughter an erstwhile friend who’s now getting in your way.

I’m now reading ‘The Leopard’ by Lampedusa, which I last read 20 years ago. It’s about a Sicilian Prince in the 1860s whose standing declines as Garibaldi moves in on Sicily and the country becomes unified. And again it has this quality of a central character drawn in great depth. Lampedusa was himself a Sicilian nobleman, and this was the only book he wrote, at the end of his life, and it’s like it’s got everything he ever wanted to say in it, it’s the summation of a lifetime’s experience. Reading often has me roaring with laughter or shouting out loud, and one bit this morning had me yelling “Yes, that’s right!” and Finn saying “What do you mean, Dad?” The newly rich, and crude, Mayor is about to marry his daughter into the Prince’s family, and he finds in the Prince “a disposition to seek a shape for life from within himself and not in what he could wrest from others.” That had me shouting, because it exactly describes the conflict between how I am and what I was brought up to be.

HUMANS AND DOLPHINS: SATURN VS NEPTUNE

From the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

“Man has always believed he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much – the wheel, New York, wars and so on – while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man – for precisely the same reasons.”

A RAMBLE AROUND AQUARIUS, NEANDERTHALS AND KEITH RICHARDS

It’s nearly a week since I’ve blogged, as I’ve been laid low by one bug and then another. I’m still in the thick of it, but I'm getting itchy so here goes.

As an Aquarian I instinctively want to relate to people on an equal basis. Having Libra Rising, I want to give others a fair hearing. Wonderful as these qualities can be, I think they can also cause me to undervalue myself, and to sometimes take unfair criticism of myself more seriously than I should.

I think it is time I started being a bit more right-wing (by the way, I don’t rule out the death penalty: it seems more humane than caging people up for 30 years while the tabloids make a spectacle of them.) Yes, there are people who are like a different species to me, they are not my equal. I can see what makes them tick, but they are so unconscious that they will never have a clue what I’m really like. Of course we have stuff in common – like the ability to interbreed – but if I look at say a horse and a donkey, they seem to me to have more in common, being uncloven-hooved flight animals that eat grass, than do myself and a redneck whose thoughts are derivative and self-serving, and who will happily judge me without knowing me.

On the subject of different species, genetic studies are leading to new theories about our origins. In the 1990s, the ‘Out of Africa’ theory, which says that we all came from a common African ancestor, superseded the previous theory that humanity left Africa before it was fully modern, and then continued to evolve in separate parts of the world.

What they are starting to reckon now is that we do indeed have a common ancestor that left Africa, but that there was subsequently a certain amount of interbreeding with Homo Erectus and Neanderthal Man before they were wiped out. Interestingly, there is a gene related to brain development that only arose in Homo Sapiens 40,000 years ago, but which is hugely advantageous, and is now in 70% of us. It is quite possible that this gene started off in the Neanderthals and spread to us. So maybe we were the stupid ones, and the Neanderthals were the clever ones? I don’t know where that leaves George Bush. All I know is that he is not the same species as me.

So did Keith Richards snort his father’s ashes? He said he did, then retracted the statement. Richards was born 18 Dec 1943. He has Sun at 26 Sag opposite Saturn at 23 Gemini. Sun and Saturn both symbolise Father, and he is coming to the end of a major Pluto transit to these 2 planets. His Sun is trine to Jupiter in Leo, so he will make over-the-top statements, maybe just to remind us he is still here. But you still don’t make a statement like that with his chart and transits without it meaning something.

Pluto is about transformation, about the Phoenix being burnt to ashes and then rising again, renewed. His Sun opposite Saturn has given him the ambition and ability to achieve, but it also suggests tension with the father, and a division within himself (opposition, and Saturn in Gemini). So whether or not he did snort his Dad’s ashes, his current transit suggests the healing of divisions within himself that relate to his father, and a re-birth. Maybe this new myth he has created about himself is just his way of putting it.

JUPITER, THE 2ND HOUSE AND SAG: GENEROSITY, VALUES AND ETHICS

In her blog of a few days ago, Elsa commented: “It’s Jupiter. Giving generously can’t help but bring you up. This is universal law, have you ever noticed?”

I entirely agree with this, not only with occasional acts, but as an attitude to life. And I do NOT believe in, “Give till it hurts.” No, it’s about nourishing ourselves as well. That’s what I love about doing astrology readings: it helps the other person, and I’m also nourished by it, because I find astrology such an engaging subject, and because it’s a great feeling connecting with and being of help to others. I think having Moon conjunct Saturn in Sagittarius helps: Moon in Sag is naturally enthusiastic and generous, and the Saturn (at its best) makes sure I also look after myself in the process. In Buddhism you get the figure of the Bodhisattva, who not only does loads of good stuff for other people that is of real help to them, but he also lives in bliss. So I guess doing astrology readings – and tarot, and just listening and chucking out my sometimes helpful opinions – is a bit like that. Which is a bit ironic, that I should have had to chuck 18 years of organised Buddhism out of the window (in 1999) and leave it behind in order to encounter something a bit more real in it.

It sounds straightforward, this business of nourishing yourself while being of real help to others. But I think it can be quite difficult to achieve. I mean, I was sacrificing myself for years to do ‘good works’, and how much of all that did any real good is really questionable. Fortunately I’m not very Piscean, so I was able to snap out of it quite easily when the time came. Another thing you get a lot of is people doing stuff for others who end up feeling superior, the teacher archetype takes them over, they enjoy their ‘position’, and I think this can be a sort of substitute for being really nourished by their work. At the other end of the scale you get quite a few people who consider themselves ‘spiritual’ who are unbelievably self-centred and ungenerous, and it’s clear that probably the best starting point for solving their many ‘problems’ would simply be for them to do something for someone else. But not as an ‘ought’, not as a moral virtue, simply as something that works.

There’s a difference between values and ethics. Values are what is important to us – like, say, a nice garden, or lots of friends – and there’s no moral judgement around it. Ethics are to do with what actions we feel to be right or wrong, not in the sense of external rules (though that seems to be where we often have to start when we’re young) but in terms of our innate conscience. It’s like there is an organ within us that knows right from wrong, what will harm others and what will promote life. Values are Venus/Taurus/2nd House, ethics are Jupiter/Sag/9th House. Having Moon in Sag in the 2nd House, it’s taken me a while to stop confusing values and ethics.

So doing stuff for others is one of my values, I feel it to be important in my life. It’s a result of having a generous Sag Moon in the 2nd (and a Nodal Neptune). But my conscience doesn’t demand that I do it, I don’t feel it would be unethical to shut myself away. It would just be a wasted opportunity.

I think that doing stuff for others brings us closer to how the Universe actually is, because it connects us to other people, it helps us overcome that artificial separation into self and other that embodied existence seems to require. Being self-centred is therefore a state of delusion about our interconnected Universe. But as I say, there’s no ‘ought’ around it. If you want to be deluded, that’s your choice.

The 2nd House is what we value, and because money is something we value so highly, it almost comes to be the meaning of the 2nd House. It tends to be a very private and very loaded area for most of us. I mean, I like to think that my money is not me, but I’m damned if I’m going to tell anyone how much is in my bank account. You can see here the 2nd House’s connection to its opposite, the secretive, 'knowledge is power' 8th House. The 2nd House is also to do with our sense of worth – our ‘value’ – and again, like it or not, that gets tied up profoundly with money. Either we’ve got loads of it and that makes us feel substantial and proud, because society tells us that, and it’s hard to get away from what society thinks. Or we’ve got very little and that makes us feel inferior and defensive, even if we don’t believe all that, again because society thinks like that, and it’s hard to completely get away from that.

I’ve got Scorpio on my 2nd House Cusp, and that sign can be materialistic as hell. Which is what I grew up around, in a very crude way. A family of Scorpio Risings, the sign of my North Node. But Scorpio can also insist on depth, on a real connection to life. Money can give a sense of power and security, but that is something that can also be found within, and it’s like money can easily be a substitute for that. And it’s like my life has been a struggle between these 2 Scorpio value systems: the one I grew up with, which I have never believed, but which has nevertheless wrong-footed me, and which has been tied up with notions of success and failure; and the insistence on depth, on finding a deep connection to life, and a confidence that cannot be shaken because it comes from deep within, from tapping the deeper sources of life.

Our values are something we come to know over time. When we’re younger we have ideas about what we think is important, but it’s only through action, only through the choices we make, that we come to know what our values are. And our ethics.