PISCES: The Next 2 Years

I’ve had a request to do Pisces in this series, so here goes. Using a Solar Chart, with 0 Pisces on the Ascendant, you have Pluto entering your 11th House, Neptune is in the 12th, and Uranus is in the 1st House. Saturn is in the 7th.

So Pluto entering the 11th House of groups, friends and aims and ideals. Pisces is a wonderfully open sign: for better or for worse, you are able to empathise with and trust just about everybody. Pluto reveals the shadow side of whatever it touches. And if you are naïve about people, you will be betrayed, you will be taken advantage of. As a Pisces you want to love the whole world, and maybe you do, but appropriate mistrust does not contradict this. Yes, give people the benefit of the doubt: but sometimes there is no doubt to give people the benefit of. Some people are nasty and not to be trusted, period. (This is also a Libran lesson). Thinking critically about people does not make you bad or hard-hearted.

As a Pisces you can attract friends or groups with whom you have a deep soul connection. Pluto’s dark lessons can lead you to a point where you know who your friends are, who you can work with, and who to be circumspect with.

This also applies to aims and ideals: as a Pisces you can launch into something that feels good, without quite knowing where it is going or weighing it up coolly. Again, Pluto will pull the rug from under your feet. As a Pisces you know that everything can’t be worked out in advance, but you need to learn to trust in grounded and sharp intuition that can be trusted, rather than a woolly feelgood factor that has maybe been generated by someone else. So your aims and ideals tend to be felt rather than articulated: but discrimination on that level is still needed.

Neptune is very comfortable in your Solar 12th, his natural home, where he has been for the last 10 years. During this period you have become increasingly attuned to the spirit of the times, to collective desires and needs, to a sense of being part of something much larger than yourself, as well as to your own unconscious, your hidden depths. At the same time, your capacity for escapism and self-delusion has been revealed to you. With Neptune 10 years into his journey, you have probably begun to get a handle on this.

Uranus is in your 1st House, not the easiest house for you: you prefer to attract life and events towards you, rather than engage and express yourself directly. So Uranus has been showing you how to do this. How does the Invisible Man get himself noticed? How do you create an identity for yourself through which to live? Who ARE you? You have a tendency to become whatever the people and circumstances around you require, you can appear to be seamlessly part of whatever is going on. Uranus, however, has been putting a spanner in the works, because he wants individuality from you, he can’t bear conformity for its own sake. The very Piscean Gordon Brown has had this: he is now the UK Prime Minister, people need a sense of who he is, it is no longer enough for him to be running the Treasury behind the scenes, while plotting against Tony Blair. He is uncomfortable and awkward in the spotlight, but it is forcing him to reveal who he is.

Saturn is in your 7th House of significant relationships, which has a similar lesson: is anybody in? He is in your opposite sign of Virgo. So this provides a strong and healthy pull towards groundedness. It is the ocean (Pisces) encountering the shore (Saturn) and knowing itself by the shape of the coastline. Yes, you can roam the formless depths, but here through the shape of another you can find your own shape reflected back. It is not just you adapting to who and what is around you anymore. The responses and reactions of the significant others in your life will paint a picture of who you are, for it is you they are responding to.

Saturn is the bridge between the outer and inner planets, he makes all those transformative currents real, he gives them form in the world. So the challenge from Pluto to wise up about who you can trust, the challenge from Neptune to become aware of your self-delusion, the question from Uranus as to whether anyone is at home, can all be met in concrete form in your significant relationships, through staying the course, through assessing coolly whether these relationships are right for you, through being present, and through noting how people respond to you.

Mars in Leo square Neptune in Scorpio?

Pluto in Capricorn: Structural Change is on its Way

Astrologically, it has always been fairly clear that Pluto’s time in Capricorn would lead to a world economy that will be perhaps less exciting than Pluto in Sagittarius, but which will have much surer foundations. First of all, though, the Sagittarian credit bubble is having to be pricked, and almost like clockwork the world markets went into turmoil in January as Pluto entered Capricorn.

They didn’t crash, because this is not Capricorn’s way, which views crashes as just as unrealistic and ungrounded as bubbles. Just a good bit of Capricornian depression/ recession, like a hangover from a party, to try and persuade us not to get so drunk again. I think we can expect the hangover to last at least the rest of this year.

But the positive side of Capricorn is also starting to be felt. Noises are starting to be made in the UK about the need for structural change. From bbc news :

“The Financial Services Authority (FSA) has warned banks that the crisis in the financial markets will force them to change the way they do business. Chief executive Hector Sants said banks would never again be able to raise as much money as cheaply as they had been doing by selling off their loans.

In an exclusive interview with the BBC, he said they would have to keep more of their loans on their own books. That, in turn, could permanently push up the cost of borrowing. Many banks are requiring customers to put down larger deposits before they can get loans for house purchase.

"Banks themselves need to give consideration to how their business models will need to adapt to the changed market circumstances they have seen," said Mr Sants. "Secondly, we will be looking for firms to treat their customers fairly in these arguably more difficult times in prospect."

There has been concern that the way bankers are rewarded has contributed to the credit crisis by encouraging short-term risk taking. Some shareholders feel bankers' bonuses should take into account the long-term consequences of their investment decisions, not just short-term results. "There is a risk that the remuneration structures are too short-term and they do incentivise behaviour which is not helpful in maintaining long-term financial stability," Mr Sants said.”

Meanwhile, the US government seems to be doing its best to try and get the country to spend its way out of looming recession through its $167bn package of payouts and tax rebates.This is a Pluto in Sagittarius measure, not a Pluto in Capricorn measure. Sooner or later the USA will have to bite the bullet and go for structural change. But maybe not in an election year.

Here’s another Pluto in Capricorn event: in an extensive test of anti-depressants like Prozac and Seroxat versus placebos, the anti-depressants were not found to have a significantly better effect than the placebos at lifting depression. Now I am sure that there is a bio-chemical basis to some depressions, but there is also the wonderful Capricornian lesson that happiness has to be earned and learned, it is not to be found in a pill.

I have always found it paradoxical that while the USA is economically very hard-working and Capricornian, psychologically the nation has a reputation for wanting these quick happiness fixes and believing they have some sort of ‘right’ to be happy – which of course you don’t, you have to find it. Maybe it is the flip-side of an over-emphasised work ethic, a culture where you are a ‘loser’ if you don’t work extremely hard and achieve ‘prosperity’? It’s enough to make any sane person reach for the pills.

The Nodes and I

I turned 50 a couple of weeks ago, and I hadn’t been looking forward to it. Being a Moon-Saturn type, I felt like it would just show up my (imagined) lack of achievement with my life.

In fact it has had the opposite effect. I’m feeling thank god all that achievement business is out of the way, it was just a youthful fantasy that I am no longer subject to, and I was never very good at it anyway. I’m free just to get on with my life now. It was quite remarkable how the new feeling began on my actual birthday, and has seemed to take root since then. Maybe when I am 60 I’ll be able to stop pretending I'm a responsible adult?

Natally I have a tight Neptune-North Node conjunction in Scorpio. This aspect has all sorts of stuff to do with karma and destiny and why I’m here on the planet. Being very watery, it doesn’t fit well with the rest of my chart, which provides an interesting challenge. How does an airy-fiery person become watery? It means that when you eventually do, it is well-integrated with some of the other elements.

It also means that I am very sensitive to Neptune-North Node conjunctions. Both – aged 16 and 33 – were times when I was having to ponder my direction. This coming one is conjunct my Sun, so it will be very powerful, and it’s happening over the next 2 months. I think it means that at last there will be a coming together of my deepest purpose (Neptune-North Node) with my conscious personality (Sun). It might even be a sort of remembering. "Oh yes, of course, that’s why I’m here."

The Nodes are the points at which the Moon’s path through the sky crosses the Sun’s path. The Sun and the Moon are the two main personal planets, between them they describe most of your personality. So these points of intersection, the Nodes, represent points of integration in which the whole of you is involved. They represent a coming together of who you have been (the Moon) and who you are becoming (the Sun). This is not an easy thing to do, it usually takes a lot of sorting and self-knowledge. But fate also intervenes to lend a hand: the Nodes are associated, for example, with significant encounters with other people that can change your life. Traditionally, Saturn is associated with the South Node, the place of old karma that needs to be shed; and Jupiter is associated with the North Node, the place of new development.

By the way, I’m not an authority on the Nodes, I worked out half of the above as I wrote it, and I rarely mention them in readings. But I think I might pay them a bit more attention.

Uranus-Neptune, Magic and Consciousness

A conjunction of 2 outer planets is a very powerful thing, it sets all sorts of new and transformative forces in action for many years afterwards. And we can use quite a wide orb when assessing its influence. The most recent such conjunction was Uranus and Neptune, which was exact in 1993, but operative for pretty much the rest of the nineties. And then, remarkably, since 2003 we have had a mutual reception of Uranus and Neptune, which acts like a conjunction, and so has prolonged the influence of the original 1993 conjunction.

A mutual reception occurs between 2 planets when each is in a sign that the other rules. So Uranus is in Pisces, a sign ruled by Neptune; and Neptune is in Aquarius, a sign ruled by Uranus.

I think that one expression of this continuation of the conjunction has been the continual development of the internet: we haven’t just seen an initial burst of creativity, followed by a period of adjustment. The creativity has gone on and on and shows no sign of letting up. We can expect this exceptional vitality to continue for at least another 2 years, when Uranus starts to enter Aries.

We can compare this to the previous outer planet conjunction, that of Uranus and Pluto in the sixties. This caused a huge social upheaval, with all sorts of progressive ideas coming in and old values being discarded and authorities being challenged. Its effects are still with us, but that initial burst of creativity did not last into the seventies, which were much more characterised by disillusion. If Uranus and Pluto had moved into mutual reception, the sixties would most likely have continued well into the seventies.

Uranus governs electronics and insights and progressive social ideas, and Neptune governs the imagination and the dissolving of boundaries. So we can see globalisation coming out of this, and its particular expression via the internet, where boundaries between people are dissolved (Neptune) electronically (Uranus) and new types of communities (like the astroblogosphere!) can spring up (Uranus).

It is sometimes said that people had much stronger psychic abilities when they lived tribally or as hunter gatherers. And the reason was that these abilities were needed. You needed to know where the game was, you needed to know where other people were and if they were safe etc. We are less psychic now, not because we represent some sort of degeneration from a pure original humanity (which is sometimes how it gets put: the idealisation of tribal people), but because we haven’t needed to be psychic. It’s like a muscle that hasn’t been used.

I have often thought that the internet is a good place for psychic occurrences, because it is such a fluid, immediate medium. And you NEED to be psychic if you are going to make friends and communicate coherently with all these people that you will never talk to or meet in the flesh. I keep getting this when I do email readings for people from all over the world. They keep accusing me of being psychic in my interpretations! Now this is not something I am conscious of. But it may well be happening, because to do a useful reading, you have to tune in to someone. To do this purely over the internet, you need to be ‘psychic’ – a modern word that kind of mystifies and sets apart and even rubbishes what is a perfectly natural human ability.

It is easy to think of computers as dehumanising, and they can be. But looked at in this kind of way, they can be humanising, boundaries that have developed over the last few thousand years are melting, as people re-discover their ‘psychic’ abilities when communicating over the internet. But we’re probably hardly conscious of it. This is a big collective shift in consciousness going on, particularly perhaps among young people. You NEED, for example, to have a sixth sense that tells you that your nice new friend is actually an old pervert who’s grooming you. Or not to open that attachment. Or that so and so has just emailed you.

On Monday I put up a post on Eris on this blog. Later on I also posted it at the Visual Astrology blog, and as I did so I changed the first sentence. I came back to this blog to make the same change, to find it had already happened, apart from one word! So magic happens on the internet, my intention alone was enough to bring about an event. What do you make of that?

Speaking of intentions bringing about events, here is an article from bbc news:

Gamers will soon be able to interact with the virtual world using their thoughts and emotions alone.

A neuro-headset which interprets the interaction of neurons in the brain will go on sale later this year. "It picks up electrical activity from the brain and sends wireless signals to a computer," said Tan Le, president of US/Australian firm Emotiv. "It allows the user to manipulate a game or virtual environment naturally and intuitively," she added.

The brain is made up of about 100 billion nerve cells, or neurons, which emit an electrical impulse when interacting. The headset implements a technology known as non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG) to read the neural activity. Ms Le said: "Emotiv is a neuro-engineering company and we've created a brain computer interface that reads electrical impulses in the brain and translates them into commands that a video game can accept and control the game dynamically."

Of course this isn’t quite the same as what I have been talking about. But it is still also about the dissolution of normal boundaries (Neptune) via an electronic medium (Uranus), and the bringing about of events by intention alone. And this is only the start. There have been plenty of lab experiments already where you wire a person or monkey’s brain up to a computer and they get something to happen by brain activity alone. But it is now just starting to go mainstream. It will be a common experience. And it will really get us all thinking about the nature of consciousness. In a sense it is nothing new, for we do it all the time when we move our body: we think it, and it happens.

Science is getting closer and closer to the seat of personality. For some, this will prove that consciousness is merely an epiphenomenon of matter, an illusory by-product of chemical and electrical activity that can be manipulated just like anything else. For others of us, perhaps, it will show that consciousness and matter are inseparable, it will re-enchant the physical world we live in, which has for so long been separated from, even inimical to, the world of ‘spirit’. And even then, I suspect there will continue to be something elusive and essential that cannot be explained scientifically. We may be able, for example, to provide an objective, physical description of what goes into creating the subjective experience of ‘I’. But you can never describe the experience itself. The closer science gets to this physical description, the more the inherent limits to its type of knowledge will become clear. We have nothing to fear. We are being slowly led into a fascinating contemplation on the nature of consciousness.

Eris and our 100 Year Collective Journey

In practice, Pluto tends to be the planet most used to describe the times we live in. This is because until recently it was the outermost planet, and therefore had the strongest effect on a collective level. Pluto has of course been downgraded to a dwarf planet, but that hasn’t stopped astrologers treating him as a full planet. Which suggests we can do the same for Eris, another ‘dwarf planet’, larger than Pluto and with an orbital period of about 500 years, double that of Pluto.

So the Pluto period we are living in (which is just changing from Sagittarius to Capricorn) needs to be seen in the wider context of the Eris era that we are living in. Eris is the planet that has the most powerful effect on our times, and Pluto and Neptune and Uranus are subsets of this.

So far, so logical. But I’ve found it hard until now to get much of a handle on Eris in Aries, and I suspect others have as well. But if you bring in visual astrology, in which Eris is passing through the constellation Cetus, it becomes easier to unpack.

I’m covering ground I wrote about the other day in my last post on Eris (please read this first). But it occurred to me that this point about Eris being the most defining planet of our times needs emphasising, particularly as, through Cetus, it is possible to get more of a sense of her influence.

Eris averages about 40 years per sign. Her orbit is highly elliptical, so that she spends far longer in some signs than others. She is spending over 100 years in her present sign of Aries, so for our generation Eris is not really a personal planet. She moves much faster through some other signs, so Eris could be considered a personal planet for the people who live through those times. For us she is pretty much a planet belonging to mundane astrology (though as a static element in the natal chart she can be interesting, particularly for people who represent a collective in some way. Just forget the transits.)

In the same way that Eris mischievously threw an apple into the wedding feast, an event that eventually brought about the Trojan War, so we can see Eris as a catalyst, as small events leading to large results. But it is not just any old large result. With Eris being in Cetus, the monster of the deep, the results of Eris’s actions are to transform the collective, for better or for worse.

So 9/11, which occurred at 8.46am on 11 Sept 2001 in New York (with Mars appropriately on the bow of the Archer of Sagittarius), has Eris at 20 Aries square to the MC at 17 Cancer and opposite to the ASC at 14 Libra. (Hmm...New York is the Big Apple (Eris), just as it was the Twin Towers (Saturn in Gemini) that got hit.)

9/11 was a small event relative to what followed, if you look e.g. at the carnage in Iraq. And it deeply transformed the times we live in, collective consciousness went through a huge shift. Pluto in Sagittarius describes part of the nature of that shift: the bursting onto the world stage of religious fundamentalism, whether it was the nationalist Islamism of the Middle East, or the God-driven American desire to impose democracy on the rest of the world.

(Incidentally I tend to doubt conspiracy theories, but here was a real one: the American government’s successful conspiracy to persuade Americans that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. It shows how unintelligent, and how easily manipulated, the Collective can become in times of crisis.)

The same was true of World War I. It completely changed the world, and was catalysed by the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, with Eris opposite the ASC and square to the MC, just as with 9/11.

I think that Eris is very empowered being in both Aries and Cetus. Aries is a good sign for initiating ‘trouble’, and Cetus is the perfect constellation for a collective planet wishing to have an effect on a collective level.

Regardless of the specific nature of Eris, her current placement in Cetus (1930-2036) suggests that we are living through an era in which the Collective is all-important: there can be great and positive transformations on a collective level, and the worst excesses of the mob-mind (as we saw with both Japan and Germany soon after Eris entered Cetus).

So this is the wider, 100 year period we are living through: a time when the collective is very powerful, and humanity is going through some sort of journey in this respect. Add in Eris in Aries, and we have a period in which that collective journey is being continually stimulated by catalytic events which open everything up, bring about the best and worst of humanity, and through that enable us to understand ourselves.

Globalisation, which has intensified since the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of the early 1990s, and of course Pluto in Sag, is a key word here. On all sorts of levels, humanity is becoming like one big nation in the context of which we see our own local reality. This is very new, it has never happened before, and it is the journey that Eris in Cetus is taking us through. It is an unprecedented collective transformation, brought about by Eris at her most catalytic in Aries, and in possibly her most natural constellation (as the most collective planet) of Cetus.

So this is what Eris in Cetus is telling us. We’re now all in it together, whether we like it or not. Eris has been showing us since the 1930s how awful we can be together, but also what we can achieve. Look, for example, at the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, which was also described by the Pluto (empowerment) Uranus (radical ideas, progress) conjunction of the time. So again we can see the Uranus-Pluto conjunction taking place within the wider context of Eris and the long transformational collective journey she is taking us on.

Eris has taken us a long way since 1930. We have become increasingly aware of our collective nature in its heights and depths, and there are still 28 years to go till she leaves Cetus. So you can see why so many people have been talking for years about a coming collective shift in consciousness, about 2012, and so on.

I’ve always been a bit sceptical, I tend to think that transformation happens primarily on an individual level, and that you can’t place much faith in people behaving intelligently in large numbers.
But I think Eris is showing us, over a long period, that it doesn’t have to be like this; she is showing us a new vision (Aries) for our collective depths (Cetus), she is showing us how to work together. Which is timely, because without global co-operation in the coming decades, we will cease to flourish, our survival will be threatened. So it needs to be possible, it has to be possible, and Eris is showing us how.

Who knows, maybe Barack Obama is part of this new collective possibility? Because if it doesn’t happen in America, and soon, then it’s not going to. Being English, I back off with distaste from the religious zeal surrounding him. I don’t like it at all when he begins with “Good afternoon believers”. If he was English, I’d take it as irony. But Americans don’t do irony. And he is raising huge expectations in people. But his South Node conjoins the US Sibly Moon (the people) in Aquarius, and Neptune will soon pass over them. And his North Node conjoins the Royal Star Regulus. So something very strong is happening, and it would be strange if he didn’t end up as President one way or another. He is too inexperienced for anyone to be able to know whether he can deliver, whether he can work with Congress, people are having to hope here, which isn’t really what you want when electing a President. But a collective shift is urgently needed, and none of the other candidates seem to be offering it.

Our Sci-Fi Future

Here's one for Pluto in Aquarius (2023-2043):

From bbc news

Machines will achieve human-level artificial intelligence by 2029, a leading US inventor has predicted. Humanity is on the brink of advances that will see tiny robots implanted in people's brains to make them more intelligent said engineer Ray Kurzweil. He said machines and humans would eventually merge through devices implanted in the body to boost intelligence and health.

"It's really part of our civilisation," Mr Kurzweil said. "But that's not going to be an alien invasion of intelligent machines to displace us."

Machines were already doing hundreds of things humans used to do, at human levels of intelligence or better, in many different areas, he said.

"I've made the case that we will have both the hardware and the software to achieve human level artificial intelligence with the broad suppleness of human intelligence including our emotional intelligence by 2029," he said. "We're already a human machine civilisation, we use our technology to expand our physical and mental horizons and this will be a further extension of that."

Humans and machines would eventually merge, by means of devices embedded in people's bodies to keep them healthy and improve their intelligence, predicted Mr Kurzweil.

"We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons," he told BBC News. The nanobots, he said, would "make us smarter, remember things better and automatically go into full emergent virtual reality environments through the nervous system".

Mr Kurzweil is one of 18 influential thinkers chosen to identify the great technological challenges facing humanity in the 21st century by the US National Academy of Engineering. The experts include Google founder Larry Page and genome pioneer Dr Craig Venter.

Eris, the Zodiac and Cetus the Sea Monster

In my piece of 13th Feb, I referred to Bernadette Brady’s recent article in which she traced the path of Pluto through the constellations in the sky. This is not the same thing as the zodiac, even though the zodiac was originally rooted in certain of the constellations, those which lay behind the path of the Sun through the sky, also called the ecliptic.

The zodiac now is rooted in Earth-Sun based events. So Aries begins at the spring equinox, the point in late March when day and night are of equal length; Cancer begins in late June at the summer solstice, when the Sun is at its highest point in the sky; Libra begins at the autumn equinox; and Capricorn begins at the winter solstice, when the Sun is at its lowest in the sky. So there is a reality to the zodiac, it is just not what you would think it is.

You can work this out for yourself. Look up Equinox on Wikipedia. You will see a table of all the equinoxes and solstices. Go to spring equinox 2008. It occurs at 5.48 GMT on 20 March. Look this up in your ephemeris or astrology programme, and you find the Sun at 0.00 Aries. And you can do the same for the other 3 points.

Admission: I wasn’t aware of some of this until the other night when I managed to find it out from someone at our astrobabble group who is technically more proficient than I.

So the zodiac as we use it is purely a projection onto the sky, but it has its own reality, and it works. But I also think it is through a glass darkly: we are astrologers because we have a visceral sense of the connection between earthly events and the sky, and modern astrology to some extent gives us this. But it is obscured, it is through a glass darkly, because the actual stars are not involved.

You get a much purer and more powerful sense of why you are an astrologer once you start bringing in the stars, and basing at least some of your astrology around sky events you can actually see.

But this wasn’t what I set out to write. I wanted to say something about Eris, because Catherine at Visual Astrology has come up with a list of the constellations that Eris has passed through since 1507.

Eris is larger and considerably further out than Pluto and was only discovered in 2003. She was classified as a dwarf planet about 18 months ago, along with Pluto and Ceres. Because her passage is so slow – moving just under a sign during the whole of the 20th century – it is hard to relate her to the life of an individual person. Astrology sees life as an interlocking series of planetary cycles or part cycles, but Eris’ movement during any one of our lives is so negligible that it is hard to see her as part of this.

This doesn’t make her any less powerful, but she needs to be seen in the context of the much longer cycles of human history. In theory, being the outermost planet of all by a long chalk, she should be the most powerful of all – yet only visible in her effects if you take a sufficiently long view. She properly belongs to mundane astrology.

Eris was a goddess who mischievously threw an apple into a wedding feast, sparking a row that eventually resulted in the Trojan War. So small causes leading to large effects. She is a catalyst. For example, the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 occurred with Eris opposite the ASC and square the MC: this event was the trigger for World War I.

In 1930, Eris moved into the constellation Cetus, the sea monster, just a few years (not long for Eris) after moving into the sign of Aries. She will be in Cetus until about 2030, and in Aries until 2044.

Cetus is the whale, which in ancient times was viewed as a monster of the deep. Cetus is therefore a symbol for the collective unconscious. Put the Eris Ingress into Cetus alongside the Eris Ingress into Aries in the late 20s/early 30s, and you have a very potent and warlike combination.

The 1930s saw the rise of collective consciousness in its most destructive form, which this Eris/Cetus/Aries Ingress aptly describes.

Pluto was discovered in 1930, a planet that like Eris can be about small causes leading to large effects; and that like Cetus symbolises the power of the collective.

Nuclear energy was first experimentally achieved by Enrico Fermi in 1934, when his team bombarded uranium with neutrons. Nuclear energy, like Eris, has the quality of small causes (the nucleus, a tiny part of the atom) leading to huge effects. It’s first use was destructive (Eris in Aries) and its impact on the collective has been massive (Cetus), it really has been like a monster emerging from the deep, for better or for worse.

More broadly, this combination of Eris, Aries and Cetus suggests that we are in a long period where the collective can easily be stirred up, often to destructive effect. And we could see the 20th century as the triumph of the collective mind. Democracy became more widespread, for better or for worse. Communism in Russia and China saw society much more in terms of the collective than the individual. Globalisation has its strengths, but the world is also increasingly becoming one westernised mass culture.

In 1937, America changed the date of the inauguration of their Presidents to 20 Jan, at 12pm, a time that since 1949 has had Menkar, the brightest star in Cetus, on the Ascendant. (See my posting of Of Presidents and Sea-Monsters.) This suggests that the President has become less of an independent force, and more of an expression of the collective will. Under this aspect, the best sort of President will be very tuned in to the collective, and able to creatively direct it; while the worst will be not much more than a reflex of the mob-mind.

With Pluto entering Capricorn, a sign of society rather than the individual, we are not likely to see any let up in the near future of the forces attempting to subsume the individual into the collective. On an ordinary level, we can see this in terms of the various crises - environmental, economic, nuclear - that we are facing collectively, and the resultant insecurity that creates. Individuality is seen as a luxury by an insecure society.

But perhaps from 2024 onwards, as Pluto enters freedom-loving Aquarius, and Eris starts to near the end of her long sojourn in Cetus and Aries, there may be more room for the individual.

The Rosette Nebula

Here is a Valentine's Day image from Astronomy Picture of the Day. It is The Rosette Nebula (aka NGC 2237). It was sent to me by Becki of Telling touch.com

Click for larger image

AQUARIUS- the Next 2 Years

OK, I should be doing Virgo as the next sign in this series. But I didn’t feel like it. I’m doing my own sign instead. Which demonstrates the main point that needs to be made about Aquarius over the next 2 years: it is Neptune-time, big-time. Poor old orderly Virgo has just got queue-jumped.

So Aquarius has it’s ruler Uranus in Neptune’s sign of Pisces (and in the solar 2nd); Neptune itself is in the sign of Aquarius (and solar 1st); and Pluto has just moved into the solar 12th, which is of course Neptune’s House. Jupiter has also moved into the solar 12th.

So the main theme here is Neptune/Pisces, with Saturn being in the very opportune sign of Virgo (and solar 8th), which provides the balance to Pisces.

Aquarians love their advanced and inspired ideas, and they want everyone else to know them, they want to benefit humanity, there is genuine goodwill there. But they are still a fixed mind-based sign. They can create their own world out of what they think, it can get quite disconnected from how people actually are. And they can be quite rigid and unbending and dominating in their ideas, and function one-sidedly from Will.

So Neptune’s lessons can be quite difficult. Neptune wants you to trust in the unfolding of events around you and in your life. Your ideas and your Will come second to that. These next 2 years are an exercise in humility for Aquarians which can initiate them into a different kind of wisdom.

The Aquarian Dick Cheney, Vice-President of the USA, will be losing his power-base in a year’s time, and between now and then he will have increasingly less power as this administration comes to an end. Cheney has been known for the unusual level of control he has exerted over the President. Neptune will be dissolving all of this, he will never have the same level of power again, he will need to adapt.

Nicholas Sarkozy was elected last year as the tough guy President of France, the man who would sort out the economy and the bloated public sector in the way Margaret Thatcher had done for Britain in the 1980s. And what has been his main achievement so far? An ongoing media frenzy over his affair with, and rapid marriage to, a model (Neptune), Carla Bruni. The Latin countries applaud you for this, the Anglo-Saxon countries impeach you. But all the same, it shows Neptune determined to get in on an Aquarian tough guy. Maybe he won’t make it as President unless he softens a bit. Ms Bruni is known for her serial affairs with big-shots, and Sarkozy could easily be tossed aside after a few months. He could look very foolish.

The people of the USA are Aquarian (Moon of the Sibly Chart). As Pluto has entered the Aquarian Solar 12th House, so has the politician Barack Obama risen spectacularly. Many people view him as either a cult leader or the potential saviour of America, depending on their political point of view, but in each case he is Neptune. The USA is also about to have a Neptune-Moon conjunction by transit. The first rule of a Neptune transit is that in certain respects things/people will not be what they seem. Personally, I would feel a lot easier around Obama’s popularity if he were not being voted for under the early stages of this Neptune transit.

Neptune may make a fool of you, sometimes that is a necessary first step. But what he’s really trying to do is move Aquarius on to its next sign of Pisces. Aquarius has wisdom, it is the penultimate sign of the zodiac. But it needs to be moved on from a tendency towards ideology and mental construct and arrogance and into the more holistic wisdom of Pisces, where truth is revealed by something greater and bigger than an inspired ego.

Prometheus is a good figure for Aquarius. He helped humanity in all sorts of ways, but was ultimately undone through his mocking of Zeus’ ignorance. It was his arrogance that undid him, and for this he was condemned to having his liver torn out daily by a vulture. You could say this is the result of Aquarius resisting Neptune. Extreme pain. It can be extremely painful when we hold on to certain ideas about our life in the face of what’s going on around us. And it can be like a huge burden being lifted, that connects us much more deeply with life and other people, as we find the wherewithal to let go.

Neptune can take us to dark, difficult places just as much as Pluto can. Saturn in the solar 8th gives Aquarians the ability to make something of this Neptunian dismemberment, to rebuild out of the ashes - or puddle! - of the old.

Pluto's Cycle through the Stars

In her latest Visual Astrology Newsletter, Bernadette Brady has the really interesting idea of tracing the path of Pluto through the heavens from early last century to well into this one. It is interesting not just because Pluto in many ways defines the times we live in, but because Pluto strays way off the ecliptic and so passes through constellations that are not a normal part of the zodiac, but which still have their traditional meanings.

Here is a key excerpt:

"Pluto's cycle through the stars.

If we start the cycle as shown in Figure 1, you will notice that Pluto moves through the top of the constellation Orion and actually sits on the tip of the club. This last occurred in the year 1914 and as Pluto moved onto the weapon of the great heavenly warrior king, World War I erupted. Pluto will, of course, be on Orion's club every 248 years, so it is interesting to note that in the previous occurrence in 1666 that it was the year of the Great Fire of London 2 - 6 September, 1666.

Pluto then moves towards the ecliptic and crosses it (moving south to north) and as it crosses over this point of the two hemispheres, it also passes between the feet of Castor and Pollux, effectively splitting the two twins. It is "coincidences" like this that remind me that the sky, for astrologers, is an enchanted place, for the central issue of the mythology of these twins is that of polarity. Thus to have Pluto, with all its symbolism of polarity in modern astrology, cross from one hemisphere to the other and, at the same time to be "splitting" the heavenly twins is a strong pictorial representation of the nature of this constellation and this planet. Now the last time Pluto split the twins and crossed hemispheres was in 1930, the time of the Wall St Crash and resulting world Depression.

From 1951 to the late 1960s Pluto was traveling through the stars of Leo and entered this constellation through the head of the lion, stressing, I believe, the heady arrogance of the West as it fought against communism and strove for global capitalism in this period. However as Pluto "rolled" down the back of Leo, in 1962/3 it reached the star Zosma. This star is the point where the lion's back was broken by Hercules and as such is associated with the theme of perpetrator /victim. It is a star of suffering, of minority causes and of being "crushed" by a heavy hand. In this period of the early 1960s, as the US was establishing a military base in South Vietnam upgrading the conflict of the Vietnam war there were also race riots in Birmingham, Alabama. The authorities heavily crushed the African-Americans at that time and this lead to the eventual arrest of Martin Luther King. From these two issues - the race riots and the upgrading of the Vietnam conflict, lead to the emergence of the Peace Movement of the 1960s as well as the human rights movement respectively. Thus as Pluto "rolled" down the back of the Lion and over Zosma the floodgates of human rights and of the peace movement opened."

This article isn't yet out there on the net, but you can get the newletter emailed to you free every month if you go to www.zyntara.com and subscribe at the bottom left of the page.

Is there anybody out there?

Why is it that on the one hand there have been loads of claimed sightings of alien craft over the decades; and yet the extensive monitoring of the skies for radio signals showing signs of intelligent life has yielded not a sausage in 50 years?

SETI (search for extra-terrestrial intelligence) researchers have just had a conference called The Sound of Silence to discuss the problem of the sky yielding no signals. Some said that it’s not enough to sit and listen, we need to be putting signals out to other universes so that in 20 or 30 years we might get a response. What if aliens also have the same attitude and are just sitting and listening for messages, with no-one actually putting them out there?

There is another problem, however, which is that if another race turned out to be hostile, it would give them helpful information in order to attack us. So there is a security issue. But Seth Shostack at the SETI institute is not worried: “It’s quite paranoid, given that the one thing we know about aliens – if they do exist – is that they are very, very far away.” He notes that we have been announcing our presence for decades: “Military radar signals have already penetrated deep into space, and early broadcasts of Star Trek and I Love Lucy are washing over one star system a day,” says Shostak. “If they’re listening, they already know we’re here.”

Which still for me leaves the problem of alien spacecraft (which doesn’t seem to have been part of SETI’s agenda). I’ve never seen one, but there are too many documented sightings to dismiss the phenomenon. Many sane people do see these things, and they have been photographed. I tend to think they are fully real, but not real in the same way that, say, a fridge is real. I think there is a lot in what Jung said when he claimed that sightings of flying saucers are projections of the collective unconscious that fit the way modern people look at the universe. I guess hundreds of years ago someone might have met the Virgin Mary or something like that. As I say, these experiences are no less real, and have no less objective content, than ordinary experiences. They are not ‘just’ projections. And they really are communications from another dimension.

I read a book called Daimonic Reality by Patrick Harpur about 10 years ago, and he makes the same sort of point around all sorts of unusual experiences which are real, but which can never seem to be finally pinned down and proven in the way that the existence of a fridge can be. And he showed how people’s experiences of aliens had changed over the decades since World War II, and how this could be seen as a reflection of general changes in the culture, including science fiction writing.

So as I say, I think this dimension is fully real, but quite possibly not in the normal sense. I guess I’m tempting fate here, and I’m going to find myself beamed up one night!

Pluto has still got a little more work to do in Sagittarius this year. It makes it an appropriate time for the SETI conference, and perhaps also for an indisputable visitation from aliens. Especially as Pluto is also still near the Galactic Centre.

LEO – The Next 2 Years (and a dose of Barack Obama)

This is a series in which I am attempting to combine the outer planets and Sun-sign astrology to predict the next 2 years for each of the signs (see my posts of 4 Feb and 6 Feb.) If you think this analysis works for any of the people you know in those signs, please let me know.

LEO
Pluto is moving from your solar 5th to 6th Houses, so it is time to put to use all those talents which so characterise you and which you have spent so long developing. The Leo Barack Obama is a good case in point. We can all see he is very talented. But people want to see him tried and tested before they can feel fully confident in him. They want to see his talent and charisma come down to earth and into practical policies, “This is what I would do if I was President, and that is what I would do.” So this is the transitionary point at which he now stands as Pluto enters his 6th, and in their own way it is where all Leos stand this year. It is no longer enough to be liked and admired for the wonderful, unique, talented person you are: it is time to develop more of the practical skills necessary to use those talents, it is time to think more in terms of how you can be of practical service to the community. Not because you ‘ought’ to, but because you want to, because you will feel more fulfilled if you do.

And this period of working and developing more skills might well involve directly and unconditionally helping other people. Neptune is in your 7th House of relationship. And you may do this literally or, for example, artistically.

In the case of Obama, I think one way this Neptune in the 7th is coming out is in people feeling they have a strong individual relationship with him, even though they don’t, and a deep perception of what a profound person he seems to be – that, like the Republican leader a few years ago, he has been sent by God, he is an old soul come to save the USA and therefore the world at a critical moment in history. That sort of guff.

So Leos watch out – you have the charisma to have this effect on people, particularly while Neptune remains in your solar 7th, but do not encourage it. It is tempting as a Leo to grandstand. Yes, you can do some really good stuff. But just do the work, don’t talk it up, don’t announce its ‘significance’. Pluto in the 6th wants humility of you. People will come to see just how good you are, and how much you help others. But let it creep up on them, then they will appreciate you for the right reasons.

And with Uranus in the 8th, this compassion and transparency to other people that Neptune is giving you can lead to sudden insights, you can grasp why people are like they are, the hidden conditionings that are driving them, their secrets, and also insights into your own dark places and family conditionings.

For Barack Obama, I think it indicates an unexpected (Uranus) shadow side (8th) to him. He is seen so strongly as a figure of light by many people, and there is always a shadow side to this phenomenon. I know I’m coming across as quite critical of the man. I think there could be a lot of good stuff that he does. But there is also this big shadow thing being created, just like with Bush. It’s almost as though in people’s understandable longing to get away from Bush, they are doing the same thing on the other end of the political spectrum. Bush is the shadow, Obama is the light, and they go together. Bush is demonised by the same people who are worshipping Obama. Pluto in Sagittarius is having one last laugh.

Anyway, back to Leos generally. Saturn is in your 2nd House of values, talents and money. So this is giving a similar message to Pluto in the 6th. It is time to see what your talents, what you, are worth in the marketplace, what people are prepared to pay for you. Beneath the swagger, Leos can lack grounded confidence in themselves, confidence based on actual achievement. So what is being got at here is not about surrender to Mammon, but the sort of confidence that comes from putting your abilities to work, and seeing them earn you money.

This is a sort of initiation that a lot of talented people have to go through. It’s not about developing a skill – say a lawyer or a plumber – which you do to earn a living, but where it’s usually not a passion, and where you in a deeper sense are not on the line. What I’m talking about is the ‘you’ in a deeper sense, with all its richness and insight and passion and vulnerability, exposing itself to the world, testing itself in the world. This is not an easy thing to do, but it makes your gifts real and allows them to develop.

So for Leos the next 2 years are about bringing the transformative currents from the 6th, 7th and 8th Houses – the skills and ability to work hard, the unconditional desire to help others, the insights that come with that – and putting them out there so that you and others can see their worth. It is a sort of incarnation from Leo the child with potentials, to Leo the adult with self-knowledge and self-confidence.

The 2007 Computer Virus Surge

From bbc news:
“The number of malicious programs found online has reached an unprecedented high, say security firms. Reports vary but some estimates suggest there were five times as many variants of malicious programs in circulation in 2007 compared to 2006.

Security company Panda Software said it was getting more than 3,000 novel samples of so called malware every day. Criminals pump out variants to fool anti-virus programs that work, in part, by spotting common characteristics. Security software testing organisation AV Test reported that it saw 5.49 million unique samples of malicious software in 2007 - five times more than the 972,606 it saw in 2006.

Most of the malicious programs detected by these security organisations are aimed at the various versions of Microsoft's Windows operating system. The vast majority of these unique malicious programs will be made up of elements from older viruses that have been scrambled to look fresh.

"It started about nine months ago, in early 2007, we saw massive surges of new variants," said Gerhard Eschelbeck, chief technology officer at anti-spyware firm Webroot. "There are days when we see 1,000 or more new samples. It's a low-effort high-frequency type threat. There's no completely ground-breaking new stuff out there." He added that hi-tech criminals were adopting several tactics to avoid being spotted by anti-virus programs which try to spot the "signature" of each malicious program they know about.

Increasingly, security firms have turned to new techniques to combat the rise in malware variants. Some use heuristics, or rules of thumb, to spot programs that are similar rather than identical to the ones they have seen before. Others are using behaviour blockers that shut down any program that shows malicious intent.”

A few years ago I saw a wonderful programme about wolves and bison in a North American wildlife reserve. They are predator and prey, and the commentator made the point that over thousands of years of co-existence they have continually sharpened and re-shaped each other. The bison need to be fit and fast and on-the-ball to avoid the wolves, and the wolves need to be the same to catch the bison.

And I’ve often thought that about computer virus creators and the big software firms. It is the same predator-prey relationship, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing overall. There will never be any room for complacency on the part of the software firms, they will have to get better and better at what they do.

Why should there have been this surge in 2007? Astrologically, Uranus was square to Jupiter for most of the year, and Jupiter was in the same sign as Pluto, eventually forming a conjunction. Uranus-Jupiter is associated with technological expansion and advancement, and Uranus has a particular association with computers. Pluto is the malicious virus threat.

So the challenge (square) to computer technology (Uranus) expanded (Jupiter), particularly as Jupiter conjoined Pluto (malicious virus) in 2007. And you can see here how squares can force you to be creative. If the virus threat is ignored, it will destroy you; if you respond, you will have a better system than before.

This response is about protecting yourself, which is a Saturn quality. Saturn is moving up to oppose Uranus this year, so we will eventually see better protection (Saturn) of computers (Uranus) from the virus threat (Pluto – currently trine Saturn, soon to be squared by Uranus). Until the next time!

Kevin Mitnick, said to be the world's most famous computer hacker, was born under the 1960s Uranus (computer) Pluto (virus) conjunction in Virgo (technology). Probably a lot of them were. And it's having an evolutionary effect, as you'd expect from Uranus-Pluto!

Uranus and the US Election

The big astrological event of 2008 is Pluto’s Ingress into Capricorn, which won’t be complete until the end of the year. The second biggest event will be the Saturn-Uranus opposition. The first exact opposition takes place remarkably on 4th Nov, the polling day for the 2008 US Presidential elections. If this isn’t a sign from the heavens, then I don’t know what is.

It certainly suggests a choice between opposing principles, between e.g. the past and the future, between conservatism and progress, between sense and reckless change. And it looks certain now that it is going to be one of John McCain, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama who will win that election.

In the sky, the planet Uranus will be amidst the life-giving waters of Aquarius as they are poured from the giant urn. So this is quite an encouraging sign: we seem to be looking at positive progress rather than backward-looking reaction (another side of Uranus).

So which candidate is Uranus - the maverick, the outsider, the force for change? It could be any of them: Obama for being black (ish), Hillary for being a woman (ish), or John McCain for being John McCain.

This is what happens when you play with oppositions – they can swap places, and when you do it with politicians, it very much depends on your political point of view which planet you are going to assign to which candidate. Is it John McCain who is Saturn because he is the Republican? Or the uncharismatic Hillary Clinton with her much-vaunted ‘experience’? Or the thoughtful and considered Barack Obama who does not believe in ‘dumb wars’?

So I think it will be probably be impossible to use the Saturn-Uranus opposition to successfully predict the outcome of the election. What we can feel confident about is that it will be more unpredictable than most elections, and there may well be events surrounding the election and its outcome which are unusual and unprecedented.

For my money, I’d say it’s Obama who will end up as President (note, I didn’t say wins the election – that’s far too straightforward!) Astrologically, the biggest transit coming up for the US Sibly Chart will be Neptune conjoining the Moon in 2009 - the people (Moon) seeking a redeemer (Neptune). The candidate who most clearly fits this bill, for better or for worse, is Barack Obama. “Good afternoon, believers,” as he began one of his campaign speeches. (Natally he has Sun in Leo square to Neptune). In 2000, the big transit coming up was Pluto conjoining the Sibly ASC, which was clearly more George Bush than Al Gore.

The other reason I think it’s going to be Obama is that a slightly unworldly Native American friend who can be very intuitive saw a picture of Obama a couple of years ago, did not know who he was, but had the words “That man is going to be President one day” go through his mind. Another intuitive friend, without knowing who Obama was, had a vision of him at the White House a year or two ago, and subsequently recognised his face after he became a Democratic candidate. She also has a sense that it might be Hillary who initially becomes President, but something then goes wrong and Obama as Vice-President steps in to the job. But I do live in Glastonbury, so who knows!