Pluto in Capricorn: it's about keeping the patient alive

Vince Cable is the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrat Party in the UK, and their main economic spokesman. He made a name for himself during his recent brief tenure as acting leader. It was Vince Cable who at Prime Minister’s Question Time in 2007 referred to Gordon Brown’s “remarkable transformation in the last few weeks from Stalin to Mr Bean, creating chaos out of order rather than order out of chaos”, called by The Economist, "the single best line of Gordon Brown's premiership.”

Anyway, he has a clear and forthright and sensible way of putting things, and in an article I was reading yesterday he talked about the paradoxical situation we have, in that in the short term people need to be encouraged to spend more, while in the longer term they need to be encouraged to save. How you explain that to the man down the Dog and Duck, he continued, he didn’t know.

But I can see what he means. In the West we have been living beyond our means and have built up huge levels of debt, in the UK more than in any other country. So we need to break the habit. We need to start living within our means, and we need to start saving again. This is the message of Pluto in Capricorn: a realistic (Capricorn) approach to wealth (Pluto), the need for which we ignore at our peril (Pluto).

But you can’t necessarily do that all at once. The patient is on life support, and you have to keep the circulation going. At present, the patient is haemorrhaging, and will in all probability sink deeper into a coma over the course of the next year. But you have to keep giving him blood transfusions.

Imagine a very simple economy in which the main business is agriculture, and there is also a certain amount of trade in goods which you occasionally need like pots and pans and building materials. Imagine that all the farmers have got into a certain amount of debt, and all at once they all put off buying pots and pans and bricks and medicines etc. What will happen is that everyone will still have enough to eat. But the farmers will be selling off their food surpluses for gold which they will then stash under their floorboards before paying off the local money-lender. The pot makers and brick makers, who are also in debt, have now lost most of their market, and before you know it they are out of business and have sold off their equipment, so that they could no longer make pots and bricks even if they wanted. And quite quickly they can no longer afford even to eat. And then the farmers also lose their markets.

So a large part of the economy freezes and then collapses, and takes perhaps decades to recover. And this applies just as much in our infinitely more complex economy. You can’t have everyone just stopping spending on everything apart from immediate necessities and making do for a while. You need to keep the economy flowing enough so that large parts of it do not collapse and never, perhaps, recover.

I think this is also Pluto in Capricorn: Capricorn as proportionate, realistic response. Capricorn is about what works, rather than being about extreme ideological measures, like the Sagittarian free-market dogma which has been our undoing. Capricorn is certainly about saving money for a rainy day and not living beyond our means. But it is also about a healthy economy with firm foundations, in which all the pieces are alive and working.

So I think Vince Cable is right. For the moment, the priority is to keep the economy alive. Not inflated and reckless like it was, but at least alive. I don’t think we need worry too much about people over-spending, because the credit isn’t there any more for that, even if people still wanted to spend recklessly.

Once we are sure the patient is not dead, then we can begin again with a different kind of economy, that pays more attention to basic book-keeping. It’s a cyclical process, which we have seen before in the booms and busts of the late twenties and late eighties. We get carried away by prolonged booms, and then come rather heavily down to earth again.

So I don’t think that governments necessarily don’t understand the need to live more proportionately when they advocate pumping money into the economy, as both the British and American governments are doing. They are trying to keep the patient alive, and avoid too many amputations, and I think they have to do that.

All the same, I am hoping that Pluto in Capricorn will be more than just a periodic reminder to live within our means. Pluto in Capricorn may also, for a while, take the edge off the philosophy of unlimited economic growth, in which wealth becomes the main end of life, instead of playing an important but supporting role. But humanity has always been fascinated by wealth, and astrology teaches us that life is cyclical. So we may get a bit saner about money and the purpose of work, at least for a while. Until, perhaps, Pluto enters Pisces, another sign that doesn’t know about boundaries.

A giant straw goat erected each Christmas in a northern Swedish town has been burned down - yet again. The 13m-high (43ft) animal in Gavle has been torched 23 times since it was first erected in 1966. It has also been hit by a car and had its legs cut off. The vandals are rarely caught, though in 2001 a 51-year-old American tourist spent 18 days in jail after being convicted of setting it alight.


Mars (attack) in Sagittarius (burning an icon) conjunct Pluto (destruction) in Capricorn (Goat).

'Viagra lure' for Afghan warlords

America's CIA
has found a novel way to gain information from fickle Afghan warlords - supplying sex-enhancing drug Viagra, a US media report says.

In the case of one 60-year-old warlord - the head of a clan in southern Afghanistan who had not co-operated - operatives saw he had four younger wives.

The pills were explained and offered. Four days later the agents returned.

"He came up to us beaming," the Post quoted an agent as saying. "He said, 'You are a great man.' "And after that we could do whatever we wanted in his area."

The pills could put chieftains "back in an authoritative position", another official said.

The US has 7th House Mars square to 9th House Neptune: fighting (Mars) with enemies (7th) through the use of pharmaceuticals (Neptune) that enhance manhood (Mars), or at least what people imagine (Neptune) to be manhood in foreign countries (9th). Uranus has lately been squaring the US Mars: it’s certainly a novel way of going about things, and more effective, it would seem, than exploding cigars.

In May 2009, there will be an exact opposition between Prog Mars and Prog Venus in the US Sibly Chart. This will be the first hard progressed aspect since 1904, which was itself the first since Independence. In 1903, the first hotel in the USA exclusively for women opened. In 2008, the first woman candidate for President ran. There you go, it's about relations between men (Mars) and women (Venus) and, western culture being what it is, about women moving toward equality. Maybe there will also be a grand love-in, with Barack Obama presiding.

Barack Obama has Mars square the US Mars, so the men will challenge him to gunfights. Obama has Mars in Virgo, so he is the better shot. He has Venus in Cancer conjunct the US Venus. So the women will bandage his wounds after the gunfights.

Did you see that recent picture of him coming out of the sea in Hawaii? First we had Ursula Andress doing it as Bond girl. Then we had Craig Daniel, the latest Bond, doing it. Now Obama is doing it. With his Mars-Venus connections to the US chart, the stage is set for a great love affair.

Obama: Redeemer, Foreign Policy Hawk and Fiscal Conservative

Outwardly there has been a remarkable shift in US politics over the last couple of months. But from the viewpoint of us ‘liberal, educated elite’, how much of a shift has there really been? We see an outgoing President about whom it remains unthinkable for us to say anything favourable; and we see an incoming President about whom it is unthinkable for us to say anything critical. Well, not unthinkable, but you’ll get short shrift if you do.

So is there essentially any difference in mind-set between the two attitudes? To do decent astrology, we need in our analyses to stand back from our likes and dislikes of political figures. We need to be engaged by, but not identified with, the ephemeral cheers and boos of the crowd. Politics will always polarise people. For an astrologer, it is the inner attitude that matters. Once we start seeing politicians as demons or redeemers, we’ll just be using astrology to justify what we want to see.

What makes someone a conscious human being is not the views they hold, however forward-thinking and progressive and pro-Obama and pro-the Dalai Lama and anti-the Iraq War. There are plenty of people for whom these attitudes are just a reflex, a reflection of their university education and the people they hang out with. The way we hold views is what matters, for here we see the all-important dividing line between conscious human being and yet-to-be conscious member of the crowd. And this attribute cuts across lines of class, wealth, education and political affiliation. What matters is not what we think, what our political shade is: what matters is that we don't over-identify with a particular viewpoint, that our views are held provisionally (though not without conviction) and that the facts surrounding them are properly sourced, or based on experience, rather than based on hearsay and convenience.

Who do you prefer, the President who promises to double federal financing for community health centers, enabling the creation or expansion of 1,297 clinics in medically underserved areas? Or the one who wants to see Jerusalem remain the undivided capital of Israel? The first is George Bush, and it is happening; the second is a very hawkish campaign promise of Obama’s.

(For more on Obama as Foreign Policy Hawk, see this article by John Pilger.)

Yesterday I quoted from The Winter of our Discontent by astrologer Jessica Murray. I thought I’d quote today from the end of that article because it views Obama in a refreshing yet unjaundiced way. And gives an interesting take on Saturn-Uranus.

Pluto has moved into a new sign now, and the mood in the air has shifted. Now that he is choosing his cabinet and making his alliances, the impeccable Obama is revealing himself to be less a messiah figure (Sagittarius) than a canny manager (Capricorn). There is no doubt that he has been plucked by destiny to be the man of the hour. But enshrining him as a paragon of leadership misses the point of the Saturn-Uranus opposition: that no one man can take us where we need to go. Only a movement can do this.

The key lesson of the opposition above is that there is genius (Uranus) in groups of individuals who take responsibility (Saturn) for the times they were born into. The Cardinal T-square forming in the sky drives this point home. The new leadership is not a singular person but a collective: The People. The white knight in this scenario, galloping forth to save the world, is not Obama but ordinary people awake to the future. Moreover, this is the over-arching theme of the 2,000-year-long Age of Aquarius upon which threshold humanity finds itself.

No sovereigns, no saviors

There’s no room for starry-eyed idolatry here. The times are too urgent. Despite our unqualified relief at his ascendancy, if we-the-people give carte blanche to this new president, a politician with an essentially conservative temperament and some flat-out reactionary friends, he will veer to the right. Progressives will feel betrayed, and the change we all agree is necessary will not take place within the political system.

Americans who value peace and justice must face the fact that not only did Obama not run as a peace candidate, he has put forth a policy of war escalation. He has said he wants to increase the military by 92,000 soldiers, and spend as much as he needs to on military recruitment to make this possible. His first cabinet choice is the Zionist Rahm Emmanuel, who backed the war in Iraq even after the claim of weapons of mass destruction had been invalidated; and whose status as the president’s right-hand man sends a distressing signal to all who hoped the new administration would end the humanitarian disaster in Palestine.

Obama’s approach to the economic crisis is perhaps the most Saturnine feature of his approach. Besides arguing for the banker bail-out, he has chosen as advisors men who have been stalwarts of the Wall Street establishment, taking counsel from the very man who led the crusade for deregulation at the Clinton Treasury: Robert Rubin. Tim Geithner, one of the premier architects of the current global financial disaster, is a contender for his cabinet [and as of publication of this issue of Daykeeper, Geithner has been named Secretary of the Treasury—Ed.]. And then there is the odious Larry Summers, also at one point on the short list for Treasury Secretary. Another Clinton-era Friedmanite, Summers not only promoted the export of toxic debt to the rest of the world, he took the idea to its most literal extreme by advocating the export of actual toxic pollution to impoverished nations [more details here—Ed.].

On a personal level, most Americans are thrilled to have this exquisite new chief executive. But as citizens of the world under the auspices of transpersonal planets, we need to consider the event in transpersonal terms. The single most significant feature of this election was not the man who won, but the outpouring of voters who elected him; the millions of hearts and intelligences opened in the process.

As the citizens who put Obama in office, we must regard him with transpersonal clarity. We must consider what we want him to do, and what we want him to be, on our behalf.

A Leader in The People’s Image

"Electing a good president is necessary, but not sufficient."
—Tim Redmond, San Francisco Bay Guardian, 11/19/08

Do we want our new president to forget about prosecuting Bush and Cheney et al. for war crimes? Do we want him to shut down not just Guantanamo, as he has promised, but the whole abominable network of US-run secret prisons around the world? Do we agree with his advocacy of nuclear power, of large-scale bio-fuel, and of the oxymoronic "clean coal" technology? If not, it is up to us to let him know. Do we want an economy that is designed to aid and abet the banks and the police/prison/military industries while working people get the shaft? If not, what are we going to do about it?

And do we not think it would be a beautiful example of change if Barack and Michelle put their daughters in public school, instead of in the tony private schools that every other White House offspring before them has attended? Dream on, you say? Yes, I think we should dream right now. We must be extremists in extreme times. Do we want the change we were promised to become a radical reality, or do we want a good-looking, very smart president who becomes more and more polished at Washington deal-making while it wears down his soul?

The time has come for us Earth-dwellers to grow up (Saturn) to the critical nature of our times. It is we who must channel Uranus, taking our cue from the future and not from the past. We must lead Mr. Obama, not the other way around. Every great leader has had a movement behind him. Lincoln had the abolitionists, Roosevelt the labor unions, Johnson the civil-rights leaders.

It is said that Bill Clinton didn’t have one, which is why, after his election, "everyone went home."

AMERICA IN TRANSITION, DECEMBER 2008

Here's the first part of an article by Jessica Murray, who you can find at mothersky.com. She's good!

AMERICA IN TRANSITION, DECEMBER 2008

by Jessica Murray

"A crisis is a time of incredible freedom in which the past has minimal hold over the present and the present has maximal hold over the future."

—Rob Hand

Things have been pretty crazy lately. The Saturn-Uranus opposition has been wrenching us out of our comfort zones, and now Neptune is going to start messing with our sense of reality. With every day that passes, it will become more important to open up to the Now. This means not just embracing new ideas, but readying ourselves for a bona fide paradigm shift.

We are living at a critical historical moment; one where it is very important to watch the way we judge our experience. Most of us are habituated to thinking of our lives in terms of things either "going well" or "not going well." But spending time evaluating our roller-coaster world as to whether we like it, or it or don’t like it, is not the best use of our energy. A more appropriate approach is to forget about what we think we want, and instead to sharpen our intelligence for what is actually here, now, all around us.

It is clear that what these transits disallow in terms of contentment they more than compensate for in terms of excitement. All things considered, it could be argued that contentment is overrated. This idea may make us recoil, but to at least consider it as a hypothesis could come in handy right now; because the transits afoot are about something other than contentment. They are about transformation.

There is a powerful series of configurations coming up this Spring, for America and for the world. Neptune, governor of fantasy, deception and illusion, will reach the degree of the US Moon in a triple conjunction in May of 2009. At the same time, Pluto will be stationary opposed to the US Venus and Jupiter—in Cancer, the sign of housing, security and comfort.

Polarization

The seeds for this confab of transits have already been sown by the still-rollicking Saturn-Uranus opposition, the star of the show for the last several mind-boggling months. Since this transit peaked on November 4 (doesn’t that day seem like it was a hundred years ago?), we may now have enough temporal distance to get a bead on what it was trying to teach.

First of all, let us remember why the Goddess invented oppositions. As major aspects go, 180-degree angles are dreaded by many, denigrated as "hard" and "stressful." And they do create stress. But so does a tightened violin string: when sufficiently taut, it makes a beautiful sound. And more so than any other aspect, oppositions make distinctions clear. Conjunctions, by contrast, often make it difficult to sort out the merged energies they represent. But oppositions isolate and clarify differences, and give us the chance to do something we don't normally do: meet our challenges head-on.

Opposition implies polarity. On a societal level, this tension is showing up as the culture wars that peaked on election day.

The last time these two planets opposed each other was in the 1960s; indeed, it may be that the modern concept of polarization, as a sociological phenomenon, was coined back then. In the late sixties the idea of young people polarizing against their parents was a centerpiece of societal discussion: suddenly there was this thing called the Generation Gap. Opposition was the catchword of the era, whether between the hippies and the "pigs"—that inelegant slur that was used for police—or between the Viet Nam war supporters and the peaceniks. These terms seem almost quaint now, but they meet our modern consciousness with ambivalence. They are both anachronistic and strikingly relevant again.

Clashing myths

On the face of it, the presidential contest presented us with a clear case of opposing cultural myths. Obama’s espousal of "change" went beyond a mere campaign slogan; he was the perfect contender for a mass heroic projection: a champion who could redeem the country from long years of cynicism and degradation. It was not just his political party, nor his supporters, but the historical moment itself that insisted upon his victory. He was cosmically typecast to personify Uranus, the planet that governs newness, difference, and most powerfully of all, freedom. Millions of people—not just in the USA but, remarkably, all over the world—responded to his triumph as would citizens of an occupied country whose liberators had just stormed the beaches.

Read more here

The Pope’s Christmas Message

Pope Benedict does it again! Speaking on Monday, the head of the Roman Catholic Church announced that saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behaviour was as important as protecting the environment. Why he chose the environment rather than, say, people who are starving, I don’t know. Maybe he’s trying to show us how modern he is.


(The Pope is German, but don't let the salute - or the eyes - bother you)

In the sky Venus was in Aquarius, a signature for unusual (Aquarius) romantic relationships (Venus), and it was conjunct Chiron: here was the Pope sticking the knife in an old wound (Chiron) and casting these people outside of society yet again (also Chiron).

It gets nastier: Mars is in Sagittarius, a crusading place, and in an applying conjunction to Pluto in Capricorn. What would this man not do if he had the institutional power (Pluto in Capricorn) that the church once had?

In 2006 he said in a speech, quoting a Christian Emperor: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

I have to say I agree with him about Muhammad and the sword of faith. But it’s a bit rich, when you look at the Church’s own history. And he’s demonising, rather than commenting on, Muhammad: “…things only evil and inhuman.”

According to Nietzsche, we become that which we oppose. Well, I’d better not oppose the Pope too strongly! But you can certainly see the same kind of attitude that he is ascribing to Islam in the Pope and his Church.

So what is it with him and gays? Given that he views it as a kind of perversion, we again see hypocrisy, when you look at the paedophile-priest scandals that have rocked the church in recent decades. And Pope Benedict, when he was mere Cardinal Ratzinger and Enforcer for the previous Pope, issued his notorious “Crimen Sollicitationis”, which affirmed and clarified the Church’s right to keep secret its own investigations into clerical sexual misconduct. In other words, he legitimised the cover-up that was going on. Under normal circumstances, he could have been prosecuted for inciting people to withhold from the police information pertaining to serious crimes.

One consequence of Ratzinger’s actions was that once a parish got too hot for these paedophile priests, they could be 'legitimately' shipped off to other parishes, where they could carry on as before.

Having helped facilitate this cover-up in 2001, he announced in the USA earlier this year that he was deeply ashamed of the Church’s paedophile priests!

So if we want to look for real sexual perversion, rather than the imaginary targets he is holding up, we need look no further than his own church, and Ratzinger’s part in covering it up. No wonder he needs to find a target outside of the church, it is fairly simple psychology.

But again, why the gays? Why attack them at Christmas, and why compare the issue to a world-threatening one such as the environment? OK, he has a Catholic gay-bashing tradition already in place to fall back on. But there is often a personal element hidden within these things as well, and it would seem obvious there must be one here.


Click to Enlarge

Ratzinger was born on 16 April 1927 at 8.30 am, according to Wikipedia. What state is his own Venus in? It is hidden in the 12th House, in the sensual sign of Taurus, and opposed by Saturn in the religious sign of Sagittarius. I’d read that as repressed sensuality/sexuality in the name of religion.

Trainee priests often enter seminaries in their teens, and this often arrests their sexual/social/emotional development in many ways. This is one of the reasons you get so many paedophile priests. The seminary was an important part of Ratzinger’s life during his teens, and after 2 years in the army near the end of the war, he trained to become a priest, which was all he had ever wanted to do.

So there is no reason to suppose his sexuality ever went through any kind of normal development. I think in the case of Roman Catholic priests, their training is so twisted that the onus should be on them to prove they are normal and trustworthy around children, rather than the onus being on the rest of us having to catch them at it.

Time for some dodgy astrology! I haven’t researched this, but if I was asked to look for possible indicators of homosexuality in a chart, I would look for Gemini and Libra, both signs that have two poles, and that can therefore indicate femininity in a male and vice-versa. I would also look for Uranus/Aquarius because of its association with unconventionality.

And what do we find in Ratzinger’s chart? Mars (sexuality) conjunct Asc in Gemini and square to Uranus; Moon in Libra; and Venus sextile Uranus.

So there it is! It doesn’t of course prove anything. But why choose such a symbolically important time as Christmas to attack gays unless you have a particular interest in doing so? And why claim it is as important as a world-threatening issue like the environment? We become that which we oppose, and it may well be that Ratzinger likes the boys a bit more than he cares to admit.
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Disturbing fact of the week: as in the USA, the Germans do not allow human stem cell research. At least not if the line of stem cells originated from an embryo in Germany. But they are allowed to import them. So they have done. From guess which country? Israel! They are not allowed to experiment on German embryos, but they are allowed to experiment on Israeli ones.

The US Need for Royalty

Maybe I’m just a Brit looking in, but US politics seems much more dynastic than what we have over here. This is ironic, as the USA was founded on the idea of rejecting European ideas of inherited power, and the lack of true representation that goes with that.

So in the US you have your Kennedys and Bushs and Clintons, and members of these families have a much greater chance of becoming a Senator or Governor, or even running for President, than your average person. And these families are looked up to and lionised. This is why there is currently such a fuss about the possibility of Caroline Kennedy becoming a Senator, as her uncle Edward Kennedy fades from politics. She has never shown an interest in politics before now.

Of course an interest in politics, like anything, is likely to run in families. So in the UK you will get MPs whose father, say, was in Parliament. But an MP is not a big deal. You don’t get noticed unless you are a Minister or leader of the Opposition. Hilary Benn, son of Tony, is Minister for the Environment, but even then you’d hardly notice him bumbling along in his glasses. Peter Mandelson, the Business Secretary, is grandson of Herbert Morrison, a post-war Cabinet Minister, but not many people seem to know this.

I think the difference is that in the UK we have a monarchy. The Queen is the repository for people’s need for these semi-divine, regal figures to look up to. This means that the politicians, who actually run the country, can be elected on their merits rather than their name.

As I have said before, I think the US needs a King or a Queen. A decadent family with gangster origins like the Kennedys would suit. Just like our British royal family: it's French founder, William I, was effectively a gangster. It would not only help deal with the falsity of these family dynasties: it would also take a lot of pressure off the Presidents to be superhuman, and let them get on with their work. So Bill Clinton had a blow-job off an intern, and then quite naturally denied it. There would probably have been a lot less fuss if he didn’t also have to carry the semi-divine aura that comes with the President’s job.

The UK has Sun in Capricorn. We understand that humanity organises itself hierarchically, that collectively we are like a pack of dogs sniffing around after sex and status. Through our powerless monarchy, and its occasional soap-operas, we take care of a good deal of that need.

The US has Sun square to Saturn. Saturn is the ruler of Capricorn. So the US has an uneasy (square) relationship with hierarchy. In its Declaration of Independence it is in denial of this fact, it claims that everyone is created equal (Saturn in Libra). If you deny something, it goes unconscious and comes out worse than it would have been. From the word go, the hierarchy between black and white people in the USA was worse than anything we had in the UK. Nowadays, the worship of money and celebrity, the division of society into winners and losers, is much more extreme than in the UK.

You can’t fault the founding fathers for wanting a more egalitarian society, based on merit rather than inheritance. Saturn was in Libra in 1776, which was a great time for ideals of fairness. But when squared to the Sun you will also get the down-side of Libra, which is ignorance of, or disregard for the nature of ordinary, ‘base’, humanity. The way the US treats its Presidents shows what a deep longing there is in the country for a monarch. Saturn in Libra may not think very highly of this, but Sun in tribal Cancer sure wants it. Natal Pluto in hierarchical Capricorn says acknowledge this about yourself or I will be your Shadow, your undoing.

Anyway, in a few weeks time Americans have a Coronation to look forward to. Whoops, I meant Inauguration.

Some points arising out of a recent conversation with a Chippewa-Cree friend:

If we look at the natural world, it’s clear that every plant, every animal, every insect has the conditions it needs to live its life. This is the way that that mysterious greater consciousness, of which we are all a part, has arranged things, so to speak. And the same applies to us, if we act intelligently. The conditions are present for humans to live their lives. So there is a sense in which the universe is on our side, it nurtures and nourishes us, for in a sense it is simply looking after itself.

I think with humans there is an added factor that distinguishes us, for better or for worse, which is that we don’t know who or what we are. This also reveals that we haven’t been around very long. Animals and plants know what they are, they just get on with it.

But the universe looks after itself. So it would be strange if the conditions were not there for humans to take care not just of their physical needs, but also to come to know themselves. This one has a bit of a wow factor for me: our minds, our souls are so deep and complicated and rich and problematic, yet the possibility is there of becoming fully conscious of who we are during the course of our lives. It would be strange if it were not like this. The conditions are there, not through accessing some special teaching or saviour-figure, but simply by attempting to live in a conscious way.

I am the universe having an experience of itself as Dharmaruci.

So what happens when we die? What we do know is that all the physical elements that we are made of dissolve back into being part of the greater whole. The earth element goes back to the earth, the water to the water and so on. There is nothing ‘special’ about our bodies. So why wouldn’t the same apply to that other element, consciousness? Doesn’t our consciousness simply merge again with the wider consciousness, the wider intelligence that is all around us? Why would it not be like this?

I seem to be going through a phase of being troubled more than usual by the irrationality of astrology. There is no reason that astrology should work, but it does. But then it dawned on me that it needs to be like that.

When you’re doing divination of any sort, you are drawing on something outside of your normal everyday consciousness, whether you describe it as intuitive and coming from within, or guides are speaking to you or, like me, you sometimes feel these presences turn up and stand behind your shoulder.

So if astrology made rational sense, I think it would be harder to make that shift into an altered non-rational state, and the reading would have less power. I think this is the way astrology needs to be defended, if at all. If we give quasi-scientific explanations, and go on about planetary energies etc, we shall rightly make laughing stocks of ourselves.

A good reading is ultimately intuitive. Yes, the standard meanings of say Sun in Libra are always there, but we are kind of guided as to the particular meaning to home in on, and the way to put it. Computers, so far, do not have this ability, but who knows? I mean, Neptune is currently in Aquarius: Psychic (Neptune) computers (Aquarius)?

Readings

This is my occasional reminder that I can do telephone readings for any of you out there who speak English and have access to cheap phone calls to the UK. I’ll email you a recording of the reading. Payment: whatever you can afford, say 15% of one week’s income? Or nothing if you're an astroblogger. Contact details on my profile.

In the UK they passed a law this year saying that if you’re an astrologer, you have to put ‘For Entertainment Purposes Only’ on your promotional material. Well I don’t do it for entertainment purposes only, though I do sometimes crack jokes, hopefully enough to keep the regulatory bodies happy.

You also have to put ‘not experimentally proven’. As one lawyer said: “You could argue that this is no different from promises given by the Church of Eternal Life, which people pay for, in the sense that they feel obliged to give to the collection,” one said. “It’s no more proven.”

Now I think I'd be willing to put up such notices about what I do if the churches also had to. Can you imagine it, on the board outside St Paul's Cathedral: "Not experimentally Proven"? Or even outside the Vatican, if they were to make it EU law?

Astrology is quite funny sometimes. A few days ago George Bush had shoes thrown at him by an Iraqi journalist on his final visit as President to that country.

What we had in the sky was the ongoing Mars/Sag-Uranus/Pisces-Saturn/Virgo t-square. Uranus is unexpected or bizarre events, and Pisces is the feet, so we have this unusual shoe event. The shoes were thrown in anger, Mars, and it was a religious insult, so there is Sagittarius. And they were thrown at an authority figure, Saturn. The only trouble is, they missed the target, which is not what you’d expect with precise Virgo. Unless Virgo was the authority figure being sharp enough to dodge out of the way!

Under the Saturn-Uranus opposition, which will last for about 2 years, we can expect to see an unusual amount of political reform or even revolution around the world. The overturning (Uranus) of the established order (Saturn). These events are more likely to happen when the Saturn-Uranus opposition is being activated by a third planet, especially one like Mars, which has been forming a t-square for a few weeks now, but is nearing its end.

So 2 days ago we saw a political crisis resolved in Thailand, in which the Prime Minister was forced to resign, and the leader of the opposition became the new PM. It also reflected a reversion to an older, more corrupt style of politics.

This shows that Uranian political revolutions are in themselves value-neutral, like the action of any outer planet. I think we maybe need to knock the idea of ‘progress’ out of our Uranian vocabulary, while keeping Uranus’ futuristic connotation. ‘Progress’ is a modern myth, based ultimately on our current capacity for mere technological advance. History is cyclical, not progressive, and all civilisations eventually fall.

Meanwhile in South Africa the ruling party, the ANC, has formally split, and a new party, the Congress of the People (Cope), formed. This is a major development, for the ANC seems to be taking South Africa the way of much of Africa, rule by a strongman, in this case Jacob Zuma. South Africa has Venus at 17 Gemini, which Mars-Saturn-Uranus is hard aspecting. Venus in politics is popular appeal, which is reflected in the name of the new party: Congress of the People.

Political Heavyweights and Lightweights

There is a claim doing the rounds that Barack Obama said, “What a lightweight!” after meeting Tory Leader David Cameron last July. The claim comes from a recent edition of the New Statesman magazine, which is admittedly Labour-supporting. However, the pro-Tory Daily Telegraph seemed quite happy last July to publish a poll that suggested people thought Cameron a lightweight, albeit likeable. So the New Statesman report may have some truth in it.

It does correspond to my own impression. Cameron used to be in public relations, and from the beginning he carefully crafted his image. In fact that was about all that was visible for a while: this careful crafting of an image. A serious politician with something to say does not behave like this. They wade in with their point of view, and love them or hate them, you know they mean business. Like Margaret Thatcher. And like Barack Obama. Later on the image consultants catch up with them and change their hair-do, or whatever.


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David Cameron has a Moon-Jupiter conjunction in Leo in the 10th House, and just one hard aspect, which is a square from Mercury to Moon-Jupiter. In the context of a very challenging chart, that Moon-Jupiter could be a blessing, an expansive safe-haven within the storms and struggles. But it does not have that context, so it suggests to me a big propensity for complacency, for being the lazy male lion who basks in the worship that is, after all, his birthright.

I don’t see David Cameron doing this right now. What I see him doing is trying his best to be serious and sound serious. I kind of give him credit for that, but you don’t want someone like that as leader. His desire to implement social change is, I think, genuine (Sun, Asc and Venus in Libra: he cares about people). He might make a good minister for education or for the social services, for example. But there simply isn’t the weightiness you want to see in a leader, and that has nothing to do with whether I agree with his policies. On the political left, I would say the same thing about their leader-in-waiting, David Miliband.

I feel that Gordon Brown does have more weight to him, that some of his convictions run deep. Astrologically, you could see this in his Moon-Pluto conjunction in Leo. That is heavyweight, though I think it also gives him a sense of entitlement which dogged the years of Blair’s premiership. So I prefer Brown to Cameron on the grounds of substance, though I still don’t think Brown is the right leader. With Neptune on the Descendant and Chiron on the MC, he struggles with other people’s perceptions of him. Sometimes he is seen as superman, sometimes he is seen as a joke, and neither are accurate.


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He is not a natural leader. What really damns Brown is his record as Chancellor, a post he held for 10 years until he became PM in 2007. Since then he has maintained a close involvement with the Treasury. He failed spectacularly in his basic job of balancing the books, allowing an unsustainable credit boom and house price boom to occur. We were living way beyond our means, and Gordon Brown is fairly and squarely to blame for that, more than any other individual. His tenure proved ultimately disastrous. We are more exposed to the world financial crisis than any other major economy. All this is fact, not comment. Why do we seem to be forgetting this, why do we continue to trust him to run the economy?

The world is going to be going through a convulsion over the next 10 years, huge changes are on the way, as indicated by the way the coming Uranus-Pluto square impacts on the charts of all the major powers. The current economic crisis is just the beginning of something much bigger. And in the UK there is no sign yet of a leader who may be up to the job of guiding the country through those changes. We have an election within 18 months, and there seems to be no prospect other than Brown or Cameron winning it.

There is a much more well-known lightweight than Cameron, and that is George Bush. Again, he has no major outer planet hard aspects in his chart to provide challenge and depth (unlike Obama, who has Sun square Neptune and Moon square Pluto). I am not saying one has to have these aspects to have depth and substance, but their absence can sometimes indicate such a lack. George Bush has a Mercury-Pluto conjunction sextile to Neptune, and these 3 stand alone, not aspecting any other planets. Because Mercury-Pluto conjoins his Ascendant (which is not part of us, more like a gateway through which we express ourselves), his outer planet configuration does inevitably find strong expression, but it is not ‘his’, he is just a mouthpiece for the collective, in many ways the collective at its worst.


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So George Bush at his peak did in a way seem substantial, because he was touching a collective nerve, and he had the weight of that behind him. But it wasn’t his own, and it is very noticeable how much he has shrunk in apparent stature since the collective mood moved away from him. In his foreign policy he has had to relinquish the gung-ho hawkish approach, that made him look strong (kind of), and adopt a more diplomatic approach – Iran being the prime example. He has had to lay aside his old instincts and his allegiance to the neo-cons, and what is left is a beginner without much conviction, a small man who wanted to be king without earning it (there’s his complacent Leo Rising), and who happened upon an electorate daft enough to elect him. The way Obama has taken over in the last month has made George Bush’s lack of stature all the more clear.

Asked about his legacy recently, George Bush said it’s too close to say now, and by the time there is enough distance, he won’t be around any more, so he doesn’t even think about it. With America’s foreign policy and economy in tatters as he leaves office, this is a man who has been defeated, and maybe knows it.

Back to David Cameron. His given birth time is 6am. If he was born a little bit earlier, and his ascent to the Tory leadership in 2006 indicates this may be the case, then what we see (just about) is the strong outer planet configuration of the time – Uranus/Pluto opposite Saturn/Chiron – running along his Ascendant/Descendant axis. Like George Bush (apart from Mercury), it does not aspect any personal planets, just Neptune. This is quite unusual: in Cameron’s chart, all the planets from Saturn outwards aspect each other (including Chiron). They operate as a group. And this group aspects none of the inner planets. No wonder he has to try so hard to be serious and to be seen as serious.

BUT if Saturn/Chiron/Uranus/Pluto does conjoin his Asc/Desc, then when and if he does finally attain to power, we may see something quite different taking over, even something quite populist and dangerous. The presence of Saturn, however, is a reassuring factor, for this planet is part personal as well as part outer, and helps give form and a sense of responsibility. The fact that Cameron’s Sun is unaspected would make it easier for these outer planets to take over, as well as further describing what seems to me to be his lack of deep convictions.

My personal opinion is that his outer planet configuration does not conjoin his Asc/Desc, for I do not sense this other side to him. He is populist in the sense of knowing how to be likeable and how to adopt trendy causes, but that is not the same as having an instinctive sense of the desires and prejudices of part of the population and arousing that, in the way George Bush did for a while. David Cameron is not good at standing for something in this deeper sense – for better or for worse – which suggests that his outer planets do not find much expression through his chart.

ON THE OTHER HAND, just to labour the point, Tony Blair was like this to start with, and Cameron was the Tories’ answer to Blair. In his first 5 years as PM, Blair was very cautious, wanting to please everybody. Then in 2002 the Iraq War loomed, and Tony Blair turned into the psychological opposite. Enantiodroma, this is known as: psychological extremes tend to turn into their opposite sooner or later. Over Iraq, Blair didn’t care who he displeased, he was going to go to War come what may and whatever it took – even lying. It took many of us by surprise. So if Cameron does become PM – and the polls as well as his Pluto transits suggest he may well do – we may eventually see an enantiodroma, in his case a polarising possession by collective forces, and a David Cameron that we have not seen before. The wider world astrology certainly suggests plenty of crises over the coming decade, and crises tend to provoke that sort of leadership, for better or for worse. In America at the moment, it looks like for better.

Assisted Suicide

One of Pluto’s more straightforward meanings is ‘Death’. It is interesting that just as he has finally moved into Capricorn, the issue of assisted suicide has begun to become more accepted, as well as acquiring semi-legal validity, in the UK. It is legal in three states in the USA, as well in several European countries.

It is some years now since terminally ill people in the UK began going to Switzerland to die. The people who travelled with them were technically breaking UK law through assisting them, and regularly on their return we would hear about a police investigation (to satisfy the letter of the law). But nothing ever came of it.

This was, rather bizarrely, the Pluto in Sagittarius phase: death (Pluto) through foreign travel (Sagittarius).

More recently a case occurred which shocked a lot of people, because it did not involve someone who was terminally ill and advancing in years. It involved a 23-year old man who had been paralysed from the chest down in a rugby accident in 2007. He was young and not terminally ill, but insisted to his parents that he did not want to go on living like this. Eventually they gave in and took him to the Swiss clinic, where he died.

In recent days the police have said it would not be in the public interest to prosecute the parents. There has also just been a live screening on TV of the assisted death of Craig Ewart, a 59 year-old with motor neurone disease. These 2 events have contributed to giving the issue a much higher profile and more acceptance within society – which is Pluto in Capricorn.

In the case of the young man who died, I find it hard to feel that his parents or the Swiss clinic made the right decision. I feel particularly inclined to criticise the Swiss clinic. In response to this event, an interview was shown on TV with an elderly man who has been similarly paralysed for decades, but has achieved a lot with his life.

One thing that is clear to me is that I do not agree with the medical practice of keeping people alive at all costs. It is the fear of ending up with a protracted and painful and undignified death that has prompted some people to take their lives earlier than they might have done, because at least they still have some control over what happens to them.

On the other hand, as Gordon Brown said in the Commons, if assisted suicide were legal, you can envisage situations where terminally ill old people would feel under pressure to take their own lives.

I don’t have a problem with terminally ill people being assisted in taking their lives. It is just helping along a natural process that is happening anyway, but which is becoming unendurable for the person concerned. What I do have a problem with is our strange attitudes to death that inform the issue. A couple of weeks ago I thought of the word death, and there was a sweetness around it. Not because I want to die – I’m quite happy living, thank you very much – but because it represents a natural progression. I can’t see it as any different to moving from one phase of life to the next.

Lurking in our background we have the Christian idea of Death as a final judgement on us, including the possibility of hopeless, eternal damnation. There is also the modern idea of nihilistic materialism, in which death involves a complete annihilation of the personality. Even though we might agree with neither of these attitudes, they are still around, and I think it can make it quite hard to feel OK about death. Both attitudes have a finality about them, in which death becomes a one-way journey into either nothingness or possibly worse.

I think death needs to be treated exactly as we would treat life. Life teaches us not to have preconceptions about how events will turn out, and to have a broad trust in the ongoing unfoldment of our lives. As the Indian poet Tagore said: And because I love this life...I know I shall love death as well.

So I think that the medical profession’s commitment to prolonging life at all costs is rooted in the idea of death as a sort of finality, and the desperate attempt to postpone it. On the other hand, nihilistic materialism also encourages a lack of regard for life, and we see this in the advanced stages of pregnancy at which abortion is permissible. The criterion used is not whether the unborn child is sentient and human, but the technical criterion of whether medical science is yet advanced enough to enable the child to survive outside the womb.

So there is this crazy contradiction where the medical profession is quite happy to kill off highly sentient foetuses, and yet prolong for decades the life of someone who is in a permanent vegetative state. In both cases they are interfering, they are meddling, because they are insensitive to life and the need to let it take its own course. Assisted suicide, undertaken with due consideration, is not like this: it is about co-operating with a natural process that is becoming unendurable.

I think that science and the medical profession can improve on life as it presents itself, but they can also be arrogant and meddlesome. (That is why, for example, I don't rule out Genetic Modification, because nature is far from perfect, even though it leaves plenty of room for arrogant meddling, which will undoubtedly also occur.) I view it as basic to the healing professions to be sensitive to the difference between co-operating with life and meddling.

Modern doctors are healers, they partake of that ancient archetype. It is not a trade like any other. I have a theory that this is not properly recognised, which is why so many doctors end up as alcoholics. When you are a healer or an astrologer or anything like that, you are drawing on influences outside of yourself for which you are a vessel. Healing needs proper space around it in order for the healer to function effectively. If it is turned into a 9 to 5 trade with the relentless pressure that modern doctors are subject to, it distorts what they are. I think a lot of doctors do not understand this about themselves. They think they are just highly trained technicians. But they are essentially more than this: a god, Asclepios, is functioning through them. And if you do not properly honour the gods, they will turn against you.

DNA

It is noticeable, in Europe at least, that any issue involving DNA provokes a strong emotional response in many people. GM Foods are standard in America, while they are hardly grown at all in Europe. And this week the European Court of Human Rights unanimously declared Britain’s retention of DNA from 2 people who had been cleared of crimes to be an invasion of their privacy.

These 2 situations reflect the very strong feelings held by many people about DNA, that it involves the core of life itself, and that it is therefore forbidden territory. For the government to have access to our DNA is therefore an invasion of privacy at the deepest level, not equivalent to it having access to say our bank records, medical records etc. And for researchers to try to alter the DNA of plants and animals is like playing God.

It is understandable that if DNA really is the core of life that people should feel this way about it. And we have been led to believe this by scientists.

I saw a programme last week in which an organic farmer went round the world looking at GM crops trying to be objective about the subject, and to weigh up the results so far. One wonderful contradiction he found was that while in Europe you get protesters breaking into research stations and destroying the crops, in Uganda you get farmers breaking into the research stations and trying to steal the crops, because of a disease problem they are having with their bananas.

At one point he showed us a wild cabbage, which is a bit like a regular green cabbage but smaller. He then showed us the crops that have been developed out of it: not just the different cabbages, but sprouts, cauliflower and broccoli. This was very graphic, because the genetic alteration brought about by selective breeding of the cabbage is leagues beyond what scientists have so far done in their more direct, laboratory methods.

People are naturally worried about possible dangers, and they are right to worry, and not to trust big companies using this technology. But people’s concern about the dangers gets very disproportionate, because I think that behind it lies this feeling that life itself is being interfered with, and that this is wrong. But it is hard to articulate this, so it gets loaded onto the possible dangers of GM instead.

In the same way, people get very concerned about privacy issues and the national DNA database, but they are not able to say why. You never read why it constitutes such an invasion, all you read is the emphasis being placed on the term privacy, and supporting adjectives around it, but little in the way of reasoning.

So in both cases what we are dealing with is a lot of unarticulated emotion, and I think the reason it remains unarticulated is because it is based on fear of the unknown rather than on knowledge. We don’t encounter this fear of the unknown to the same degree in other developing technologies, but I think that is because people have not been led to believe that scientists are tampering with the core of life itself. As Francis Crick announced in a pub on 27 November 1963, having just solved the puzzle of the structure of DNA: “We have found the secret of life.”

So that is perhaps the question behind it all. Does DNA really represent the core of life, or the secret of life? Is there such a thing?

The irony is that while we have been led to believe that DNA represents the core of life, the mechanism science gives us for its functioning is that of a computer programme! DNA is nothing other than a chemical code for various proteins, and at various times it unravels and the code is read off.

Of course, it is DNA more than anything else that is passed down the generations, and in that sense it represents the essence that is passed on. But it is still a computer programme!

I do not feel myself to be in essence a computer programme, in the sense of operating through a predetermined set of instructions. I can’t prove this. But I think it is a big and unjustifiable assumption on the part of science that reality can be reduced to that which is measurable by the 5 senses, and repeatable through experiment. It is this assumption that leads us to the idea of DNA being somehow at the core of who we are, because it is the master computer programme behind our physical bodies. I think the onus is on science to prove that reality can be reduced to its narrow terms, rather than on me to prove that I am more than that. I know, for example, that astrology works, but there's no way it can ever be made 'scientific'.

I do not know what I am at my core, or if I even have one, but I find the idea of DNA being that core hard to take seriously. So I don’t feel that the authorities would have the essence of me if they had my DNA code. Nor do I feel that GM is a step too far.

I think there can also be a residual monotheism behind anti-GM feeling: the idea that God created life as it is, and we therefore shouldn’t tamper with it, even though selective breeding is no different. And if you're an Evolutionist, there can be a feeling that nature has created a kind of perfection that we shouldn't interefre with. Evolution is actually an ongoing bodge job, often brilliant and beautiful, but it is based on what works and on making it up as you go along. Consequently it is often far from perfect. Like the human skeleton, that hasn’t fully adjusted yet to walking upright, or fully adjusted in childbirth to the large head size of babies. I’m sure that, given time, there will be ways we can improve on where Evolution has left us.

I don’t believe in separating matter and spirit. I think that matter is alive, and what we feel to be our spirit cannot be separated from our physical existence. This is why changes in physical structure, particularly in the brain, can have such a profound effect on people’s personalities. And similarly with DNA. Changing that, when the time comes, will have a profound effect on who we experience ourselves to be. It’s the same with organ transplants: sometimes the person who has received the organ acquires aspects of the personality of the donor. But you don’t get public outcries against this.

Like any science, GM can be misused, and probably will be. It will become a particularly powerful technology. But I don’t think there is any essential difference to this technology, if you look at the effects of e.g. organ transplants and selective breeding. You could even argue that to accept the view that GM, or the DNA database, tampers with or invades the core of life itself, is to simultaneously accept that we are in essence computer programmes!

For me, what really needs addressing is the idea of humans as computer programmes. You can’t deny what Crick and Watson discovered, and the mechanism for the working of DNA. It is a brilliant truth, but only an aspect of larger, less easily defined truths about life, that are not confined to the 5 senses and physical measurement.

I don’t know what time Francis Crick walked into the pub, but here is the midday chart for the event (in those days pubs weren’t open in the mornings or during the afternoon beyond lunchtime).


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We see Uranus opposite Chiron. I have found Uranus in hard aspect to Chiron around most major scientific breakthroughs. Uranus represents the brilliant, original scientific mind. And Chiron represents the wound to humanity from the one-sidedness of that mind, that has progressively reduced us from glorious creations of the Godhead in a divine universe down to a pile of chemicals dwelling in a mechanistic universe.

And there is a yod, with Mercury at the apex, and Saturn-Neptune at one base and Pluto at the other. Pluto is conjunct the Moon.

So Mercury is the way we think about the discovery of DNA, and the way it has been communicated to us. And being a yod, there is an uneasy relationship with the points at the base that can never be resolved, just accommodated. Moon-Pluto in Leo: there is the instinctive (Moon) fear (Pluto) that our divine individuality (Leo) is under threat. At the base of the yod we also find Saturn conjunct Neptune, which is usually associated with imaginative and artistic, rather than scientific developments. But that statement ”We have found the secret of life” is not scientific, it is a philosophical, mystical statement. Neptune and DNA are both associated with the source of life.

So we have this imaginative, almost religious breakthrough – Saturn-Neptune, coupled with this fear for our souls – Moon-Pluto in Leo. And it resonates with the meaning of Uranus-Chiron – the brilliant scientific breakthrough that simultaneously reduces us.

4 years ago the Progressed DNA Sun entered Taurus, which we can associate with the rise of GM Food (Taurus).

Mars square Uranus

Mars is currently moving through Sagittarius, gradually approaching a square with a stationing Uranus. Hard aspects between Mars and Uranus are usually pretty sparky, often leading to sudden, surprising violence or protest somewhere in the world. Because Uranus is stationary, we can expect the current transit to be more powerful than usual.

And it has been so, beginning around 24 November, with Mars still 13 degrees away from a square to Uranus. On that day there were floods in Brazil, leading to 99 deaths and the evacuation of over 78,000 people; the next day there was a political crisis in Thailand, in which protesters seized hold of one of the main airports and blocked flights from taking off; from the 26-29 November there were a series of terrorist attacks in Mumbai in which 188 people were killed and 294 injured; on 29 November riots in Nigeria left 381 dead and at least 300 injured; and in early December the Thai Prime Minister was forced to resign, while a political crisis blew up in Canada; on 6th Dec the USA announced a crucial step forward in its missile defence system, after conducting a live test; on 6th/7th December there was rioting in Athens; and on 7th December the Taliban discovered a new way to frustrate the Americans in Afghanistan when they torched 90 American supply lorries.

So it has certainly been eventful in a rather grim way. And there are 4 more days to go until Mars begins to separate from its square to Uranus: though it will still be close, the fact that it will be starting to move away weakens it considerably – at least in theory. We’ll have to see what happens.

Something that has struck me lately is how early on transits become effective. With Mars-Uranus, it began at 13 degrees. Uranus was 14 degrees off a square to Pluto at the start of the year when Pluto entered Capricorn. Saturn and Uranus were then also in a separating opposition of 9 degrees. These were wide aspects, but I think anyone would find it hard to deny that the Stock Market turmoil that began in January had a big dose of Uranus in it.

And I’ve noticed it in personal charts. A friend with Sun at 7 Cancer had dramatic, life changing events occur as Pluto stationed opposite her Sun at 1 Capricorn in late March this year. She had no other major transits going on. So these transits can begin in a big way from quite a long way off.

Back to Mars-Uranus: it doesn’t have to be just grim. The US Mars is at 21.22 Gemini, and Barack Obama’s Mars is at 22.34 Virgo. So both of these are being hard aspected by the Mars-Uranus square, another meaning of which is bold, catalytic action. In his weekly address to the nation last Saturday, Obama said: "We will create millions of jobs by making the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s." That’s positive Mars-Uranus for you.

Pluto in Capricorn Themes

Capricorn rules the knees. As Pluto has entered, exited and finally re-entered Capricorn this year, I have been through a process of sorting out my knees. I’m loathe to admit it, but I’m a bit flat-footed, and over the years my joints had compensated for this – giving me, so I’m told, a hip-swinging feminine gait from the rear! But that is now all in the past, and as Pluto approaches my Capricorn Mars, I am at last starting to walk like a man!

I’d started getting a lot of pain in my knees, and the doctor thought I should just bust my way through it. I wasn’t impressed, and I persuaded him to book me in to see the physio. She gave me a load of correctional exercises, and I said I’m not doing them for the rest of my life. She did say, however, that there is such a thing as a podiatrist, who specialises in feet, and I said yes, that’s what I need. The podiatrist cautiously gave me some raised insoles, and I said raise them as much as you can, and she went all cautious on me again, but agreed. 6 months later, just as Pluto finally entered Capricorn, I noticed that my knees don’t hurt any more. I am obviously deeply attuned to the zeitgeist!

I am not the only person so attuned. Pluto in Capricorn is also about control by the government (Capricorn) of private information (Pluto), as well as general control-freakery (Pluto) by the authorities (Capricorn). In the UK, Parliament is currently up in arms because the police raided not just the home and constituency office of an MP, but his office within Parliament. They also arrested him. This was on 27 Nov, the day Pluto re-entered Capricorn. The arrest and search was on suspicion of "aiding and abetting misconduct in public office" and "conspiring to commit misconduct in a public office", in relation to an investigation into unauthorised disclosure of confidential material from within the Home Office.

In other words, Damian Green – the shadow immigration minister - was using leaked information to hold the government to account, which is a necessary part of our democracy. Gordon Brown, the PM, made his name as a young MP through using leaked information. In the 1930s, Winston Churchill, who was then in the political wilderness, used leaked information from the Foreign Office to repeatedly warn Parliament about German re-armament. His source was eventually discovered and came to a sorry end.

So everyone is finding this arrest bizarre. MPs are enraged at having had the police on their premises, particularly as it has turned out that they did not have a search warrant and could have been turned away.

Who is Pluto and who is Capricorn is hard to say here, but it is an interesting twist on the theme. Damian Green has Sun in Capricorn opposite Uranus, so you can see the event as an externalisation of a tension in his chart between supporting the establishment (Capricorn) and freedom/rebellion (Uranus).

Even more bizarre is that 2 days before Pluto left Capricorn in June, the shadow Home Secretary David Davis resigned as an MP, and stood for immediate re-election, all in the cause of a wider debate on the single issue of erosion of civil liberties. This was also a Pluto in Capricorn issue, and like Damian Green, David Davis has Sun in Capricorn opposite Uranus! In Davis’ case, however, he made the event happen, rather than have it come to him.

Another part of the Pluto in Capricorn flurry has been the landmark ruling by the European Court of Human Rights this week that British police were wrong to retain the DNA of 2 young men who were subsequently cleared of any crimes. British police have DNA samples from 4.5 million people, and it will have huge implications for their database.

Many people are strongly against this database, seeing it as an invasion of people’s privacy. Exactly how it violates people’s privacy is never said. I have a bit of a gut reaction against my DNA being on the database (it isn’t on it), but I find my reaction hard to justify. I think it is no different to officialdom having your name, date of birth, marital status, employment, home address etc etc. I can see the database being enormously helpful in fighting crime. Like the protests against GM food, speed cameras, and fox-hunting (both sides), the issue is driven one-sidedly by emotion over reason.

I think if the authorities want to victimise someone and invade their privacy, they don’t need a DNA database to do it. They can do it anyway. The issue is how much that sort of abuse goes on, not the particular means by which they do it.

I suppose if I had a reservation it would be that the government has shown itself to be spectacularly incompetent at guarding the details they have on people. They get lost in the post, left on trains, in cars etc. As the understanding of DNA progresses, you wouldn't want this information leaking out to the highest bidder.

All the same, as I've said before, I would prefer the government having any amount of information on me than living in a traditional small village where everyone knew my business.

Finally a few points from one of my readers, Geoff King, taking a historical perspective on Pluto in Capricorn:

The last time but one was 1516 to 1532 . During that time two very Pluto in Sag things happened. One was the reformation, the other the dissolution of the monasteries. We can forget nowadays that the Monasteries were a key economic feature of life at that time, with vast wealth bequeathed to them over the preceding centuries and something like 1 in every 500 males living in them.

The message then was that the traditional Capricornian authority was being Pluto-ed.

The next Pluto in Cap was 1762 to 1778. That was the start of the industrial revolution and the way I would interpret that is that up to that point the traditional authority (Cap) based itself on land. There just weren’t many other ways to gain wealth in Britain prior to 1762 other than by owning land. Then Pluto comes along and erodes that traditional wealth.

I’m sure we will see something similar this time round, it's just working out which institutions and establishment figures will be eroded. Obviously banks are very Capricorn but I think also the shift of power from West to East is another manifestation. I’m sure the Royal family will come under attack too but I’m sure there are other things I’m missing from this.

One thing that surprised me is that I expected Pluto in Cap to mean that we realise commodities like oil and metals are finite but so far the values of these things is going down rather than up.