A Political Ramble

If the army had chosen to, it could have put down the protests in Egypt very easily, and Mubarak would still be in power. I don’t know why it didn’t, but looking at Egypt’s chart, you can see the Moon in the 6th House. The Moon is the people, and the 6th House is the Armed Services. So the people and the army have a close connection in Egypt, which is at odds with the leader: the Moon is in challenging aspect to the Sun (the leader).

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Moreover, the Moon and the 6th House Cusp are in the non-violent sign of Virgo. So we saw the will of the people enacted in a relatively peaceful way with the co-operation of the army.

Mubarak has Sun in Taurus and Moon in Scorpio, both of which are fixed signs. A man like this does not let go of power easily. The Moon in Scorpio has a need for power, and a Taurean leader could easily treat the country as his personal possession, as an extension of himself. Hitler and Saddam Hussein were both Taureans, and both had to be forced out of power.

In the UK we do not have a dictatorial system, but that doesn’t mean that Taurus-Scorpio leaders won’t need to be pushed out. Margaret Thatcher has Sun square to Pluto (Scorpio’s Ruler) as well as Scorpio Rising, and we all know what happened to her. Tony Blair has Sun in Taurus square to Pluto, and he left quite gracefully, but only after 10 years of his Chancellor Gordon Brown (who has a fixed Moon-Pluto conjunction) doing his best to get him out. Blair’s ‘Presidential’ style is another way of saying he governed autocratically rather than collectively i.e. he treated the government as his personal possession.

Of course, few leaders go willingly, but it’s as though the fixed grip of Taurus/Scorpio eventually attracts the crude power struggle necessary to evict them.

After the brief interlude of Gordon Brown (who as a Pisces did not have much idea of how to rule) we have the Libran David Cameron as the UK leader. Libra is good at listening to the point of view of the other and operating in partnership (unless, like Thatcher, there is a hefty dose of Pluto/Scorpio, when Libra becomes oppositional – the scales as opposites rather than partners.) So it is appropriate to find a Libran heading the first coalition government for decades.

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Cameron also has Venus (popularity) in Libra, so it is going to be interesting to see how this plays out with the inevitably unpopular spending cuts he is enacting. Librans can be tough (the iron fist in the velvet glove), but they also want to be liked.

I have been wondering for some years about Cameron’s Mercury in Scorpio square to Moon-Jupiter in Leo, which is potentially quite devious: concealing your intentions (Mercury in Scorpio) about your vision as leader (Moon-Jupiter in Leo). And in recent weeks it has shown itself in Cameron’s desire to revolutionise the Health Service, which he kept quiet about when he was trying to win the election. He concealed a major policy.

The NHS was under continuous pressure to reform and to meet targets under Labour, and now the Tories are doing it all over again. You talk to anyone who works in the NHS and they’ve been feeling under a lot of pressure for years, and are not happy about it. With Virgo Rising and Saturn-Chiron in the 6th House, the Health Service is inevitably important to Cameron. In the UK Chart, Uranus has been passing through the 6th House for the last 5 years (and approaching it for a couple of years before that) and will not leave for another 2 years. So the unsettling change is set to continue, and is likely if anything to get harsher and more radical as Uranus moves from Pisces to Aries.

(It is ironic that you find both the NHS and the army in the 6th House of health and service. It is because the army is part of the armed services - it is there to serve the country.)

I always think of Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s clown of a leader, as a Gemini, which he is not. But his MC, the face he presents to the world, is Gemini, which explains it. He is blatantly corrupt, but because he is entertaining and has the popular touch, many Italians love him and keep voting him into power. Italy has Sun (the leader) in Gemini, which gives the connection.

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Gemini, however, is light and dark, and we see the other side of this with Italy’s Sun being in the 8th (Pluto’s) House, and Moon and Ascendant in Scorpio. Underneath the fun and the clowning lies the Mafia. Berlusconi himself has Venus in Scorpio in the 2nd House of money, in square to Pluto. This gives that mixture of wealth, sex, popular appeal and corruption that we see in him.

Just when you think it can’t get any more bizarre with Berlusconi (who owns half the country’s TV stations), it does. He is being charged with paying for sex with an underage girl.

With an unaspected Sun-Mercury conjunction in pleasure-loving Libra, combined with a transgressive Venus-Pluto, Berlusconi cannot help himself (a bit like Bill Clinton, who has a Mars-Venus-Neptune conjunction in Libra on the Asc.)

Berlusconi was briefly PM in 1994, but his real period in power has been on and off since 2001, as Pluto has successively squared his Moon-Saturn, hard-aspected his Angles and is now squaring his Sun. Like Margaret Thatcher, it has been transiting Pluto that has put him in power and kept him in power, and again like Thatcher, as these transits come to an end (which they are currently doing), we will probably see him finally fall from power.