The Master and His Emissary; Uranus-Pluto Update

Pluto will make his first conjunction to my Mars in 4 days time. Mars concerns what you want, the action you want to take, and he’s leading me on a bit of a contemplation. I’ve spent years ‘waiting’ to know what I want to do in some kind of big way, and that’s never happened! I would think like that, because my Mars is in Capricorn, and I have a lot of Saturn, which are ambitious placements but, because of their desire for position and recognition, they are also vulnerable to cultural expectations. And those expectations are that you work long regular hours within a prescribed set of occupations.

I’ve never felt like I wanted that, though I have often pushed myself to try and be more like that. It’s never worked, because I quickly end up feeling completely out of sorts. There are plenty of people like me around, albeit a minority. I’ll bet half my readers are like this.

And in our society, there is very little place for people who are made like this. You can easily end up in trouble – broke and with a list of ‘syndromes’ being the least of it. But you’ve also usually got some unusual abilities and insights.

There’s a Native American story about someone coming across a group of Indians out fishing, and it turns out they are on an outing from a mental hospital, and the guy in charge says that with the proper training, all these patients would have been medicine men. So it’s the same kind of thing.

I’ve been dipping into a book, The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist, who is both a neuro-psychiatrist and a former lecturer in English literature. His main theme is the division of the brain into left and right, which for the West has resulted in a struggle that can be traced back through our cultural history. The 2 sides have different types of awareness and attitude. The right side has a global, relaxed awareness, whereas the left’s awareness is more analytical and focussed. McGhilchrist reckons that the struggle between left and right sides has reached an extreme of dominance by the left side over the right side in our modern culture. In a healthy culture they would co-operate in a relationship of Master (right brain) and Emissary (left brain) as exemplified in this old story that Nietzsche also tells:

There was once a wise spiritual master, who was the ruler of a small but prosperous domain, and who was known for his selfless devotion to his people. As his people flourished and grew in number, the bounds of this small domain spread; and with it the need to trust implicitly the emissaries he sent to ensure the safety of its ever more distant parts. It was not just that it was impossible for him personally to order all that needed to be dealt with: as he wisely saw, he needed to keep his distance from, and remain ignorant of, such concerns. And so he nurtured and trained carefully his emissaries, in order that they could be trusted. Eventually, however, his cleverest and most ambitious vizier, the one he trusted most to do his work, began to see himself as the master, and used his position to advance his own wealth and influence. He saw his master’s temperance and forbearance as weakness, not influence, and on his missions on his master’s behalf, adopted his mantle as his own – the emissary became contemptuous of his master. And so it came about that the master was usurped, the people were duped, the domain became a tyranny; and eventually it collapsed in ruins.

He continues: At present the domain – our civilisation – finds itself in the hands of the vizier, who, however, gifted, is effectively an ambitious regional bureaucrat with his own interests at heart. Meanwhile the Master, the one whose wisdom gave the people peace and security, is led away in chains. The Master is betrayed by his emissary.

So there’s the wider context to what I was saying. Our culture demands a narrow clarity and focus most of the time, which some people are very good at, and they are seen as successful. But I can’t write this blog in that kind of way. I write a bit, then I wander off and do something else while my thoughts collect themselves, and then out comes another paragraph. I have to go from the focussed back to the less purposeful and more dreamy, and then back to the focussed when I feel ready. I need both to do anything creative. Too much right brain and I feel bottled up, too much left brain and I feel like a big part of me is being forgotten.

It’s a balance that I’ve got better at over the years. In my youth I was far too left brain, and even now I easily get twitchy if I'm not 'busy' enough. Saturn is the balancing planet here. Saturn is both solitude and hard work, he is both sides of the brain. In our culture, it is the hard work side of Saturn, the ‘outer’ side, that is valued at the expense of the solitude side. I think it even affects astrology, in that when we think of him, we usually think worldly achievement and we rarely think solitude. (See my posts on The Western Negative Saturn. and Sun Square Saturn.)

I think this tension is the reason behind the grumpiness of Capricorns. This Saturn-ruled sign is well known for its talent and its hard work and its achievement, and our culture being what it is, that is the side of Capricorns that gets drawn out. But there is another side to them. They are also contemplatives who need their solitude, and when it is lacking they get grumpy.

I’ve sometimes wondered about the sextile from Capricorn to Pisces, because they are such different signs. But if you think of Capricorn as solitude, then you can see the sextile to dreamy Pisces. With hard-working Capricorn, however, you can certainly see Pisces as an antidote, but they are not obviously compatible. I think that, as with Capricorn, the problem comes down to seeing Pisces as one-sidedly dreamy and passive. Pisces as ocean could be seen like this, but Pisces as ruled by Poseidon the ‘Earth-shaker’ would seem to be quite different.

Pisces is a sign of power because, more than any other sign, it is open to and can channel what the collective wants and needs. That is why it can be an ‘earth-shaker’. Mikhail Gorbachev was the President of the USSR when it collapsed as a result of the reforms he brought in. It was a necessary collapse, although he didn’t see it like that and like a good Pisces lost everything! Gordon Brown, the UK Prime Minister at the time of the global financial meltdown of 2008/9, is a Pisces. He was in a way a classic hopeless Pisces as a leader, but he played a big part in persuading western governments that the banks had to be saved to avoid a Depression. He was able to go global in a way that other signs couldn’t.

This sextile from Capricorn to Pisces is going to be crucial globally for the next 13 years, as Pluto passes through one and Neptune the other. These 2 planets more than any other describe what is going on in the world (see my piece of 3rd January.) For the next couple of years, however, what we are likely to experience most strongly is the square from Uranus to Pluto, which comes within a degree this year, and will be exact next year.

This combination usually brings dramatic change. Pluto is a god of wealth and therefore of the economy. For the west the change seems to be about the economy and the huge readjustment needed as China and other emerging economies provide serious competition to the West. Hence the ‘jobless recovery’, as China and others undercut the West’s labour costs. Politicians who can afford to say so are saying that this recovery is going to take a few years.

Pluto is also about power and therefore politics, and the Uranus-Pluto change seems so far to have a political emphasis in the East. In Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen we are seeing protests against authoritarian governments and a desire for western style freedoms. These protests have coincided with a Sun-Mars conjunction in democratic Aquarius. In China, there is growing mistrust of the government, fuelled by the internet. The nuclear-armed Pakistani government teeters under pressure from militant Islamists. We are tipping over into quite a different world, as you would expect under 2 outer planets hard-aspecting each other.