Uranus-Pluto and the Arab World (Part II)

Astrology reminds us that events take place at a number of levels, and within those levels there can be all sorts of considerations. On the level closest to us there is the innermost planet, the fast-moving Moon, which describes the immediate experience of what we are feeling right now. At the other end of the spectrum are the slow-moving outer planets, describing the transformative undercurrents, lasting for years, to which we are all subject.

Another way of putting it is that all events take place within a context, and that context itself has a wider context, and so on all the way out to the Galactic Centre! Levels of causality.

The extraordinary unrest and revolution we have been seeing in the Middle East has its immediate explanation in the movements of Mars, a planet of conflict, protest and action. Mars, however, has had the function of a trigger for longer standing undercurrents coming to a head as Saturn opposes Jupiter and as Uranus moves into an almost exact square to Pluto later this year.

In mid-December, as protests began in Tunisia, Mars was in Capricorn, the sign of Government, conjunct Pluto, a planet of destruction, transformation and deep renewal. When Ben-Ali, the President, was ousted on 14 Jan, Mars was being activated by its conjunction to the Sun (a country’s leader) and approaching the sign of democratic Aquarius.

We have since had a month-long conjunction of the Sun and Mars in Aquarius, which has perfectly described the wave of revolutionary protest against dictatorial leaders sweeping the Middle East during that period. We have seen Egypt’s Mubarak toppled, and protests in Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain and Iran. As I write, Libya’s Gaddafi looks almost certain to be gone within a few days – 42 years after he seized power, as his rule encounters its Uranus Opposition, its mid-life crisis.

From 23rd Feb, however, the Sun and Mars will both be in Pisces. They will remain conjunct for another couple of weeks, so we can expect the protest (Mars) against leaders (Sun) to continue, but with a different flavour. It may be, for example, that the ideological basis (Aquarius) becomes less clear, and the remarkable restraint that the armies have shown will break down (Pisces can be a lot messier, even savage, and lacking in boundaries.) We have perhaps seen the start of this in the recent deaths of hundreds of protesters in both Bahrain and Libya.

Moving to another level, Jupiter entered Aries in late January. Jupiter is faith and belief and optimism, and Aries is the New. So it’s all there, the movement of belief from fatalistic, downtrodden Pisces to bold Aries. In the context of the Middle East, democracy is a new belief. Mars is action, but it has to be fuelled by something, and in this case it has been the new beliefs of Jupiter.

Jupiter is most of the way through a 10 month opposition to Saturn, which occurs every 20 years or so. These 2 used to be the outermost planets, and still are if you confine astrology to that which can be seen with the naked eye – for which I think there is a good argument if you want to take astrology out of the computer, where it has been headed for the last 2 thousand years, and back to a relationship with the sky.

Both planets concern worldly rulership, Saturn representing stability and the past, Jupiter representing progress, expansion and the future. If you give Uranus, Neptune and Pluto collective functions, then Saturn and Jupiter come to represent those parts of collective affairs which can be consciously influenced and understood. The Saturn-Jupiter Opposition, representing conflict between the old and the new, is almost too obvious to be worth mentioning in the case of the Middle East. The Opposition has been going on, however, for nearly a year, so the seeds of the current conflict could probably be traced back to that time by close observers of the Middle East. The opposition will be formally over at the end of March and well out of range by the end of April as Jupiter moves towards Taurus. So I would expect the current phase of protest and revolution to be over by then.

What comes after that, however, is impossible to predict, initially due to the actions of Uranus. We are moving out now to another level of causality, a much bigger and less predictable level. Uranus will move from Pisces to Aries on the 12th of March. Like Jupiter, Uranus is future-oriented, but highly unpredictable. Whatever you think Uranus is going to do, it’s not that! How many people predicted the sudden collapse of the western financial system a couple of years ago, heralded by the Saturn-Uranus Opposition of the time?

Humans can control and plan events up to a point, and we need to be able to do that to live and to build and to progress. But if it were just that, life would end up samey and unchallenging. We need something outside of our control that upends things in ways we could not have imagined, and which demands creative responses, that necessitates us thinking and acting in ways that we have never done before. This is the function of the outer planets. The inner planets are gods with whom we can to some extent dialogue. The outer planets – well, we just need to have altars to them and hope we’re staying onside.

So the new faith and belief that Jupiter in Aries has brought to the Middle East will be twisted and turned in ways we cannot foresee as Uranus enters Aries (like Jupiter, for the second time in the last year, showing, like the Saturn-Jupiter Opposition, that these revolutions have been coming for a while.)

The conventional wisdom is that democracy in the Middle East could well eventually lead to Islamists gaining control. In Egypt, the main political opposition has been the Muslim Brotherhood, an international movement and a proscribed party in Egypt until recently, which has built up a substantial record of charitable works. They are playing it cool, which is probably the way to go, and they are moderate; but they also want Sharia Law, which is Law determined by religious authority rather than being decided by the people. (A line from Bismarck: there are 2 things that you do not want to see how they are made - laws and sausages.)

So Uranus coming into Aries makes any sort of prediction foolish at this stage. Uranus will be within a degree of a square to Pluto this summer, and Pluto is in Capricorn, the sign of government. So this is the biggest picture of all. Revolutions in Government. But when and where we do not know, and this is just one meaning of the square. What we do know is that Uranus-Pluto is in its early stages, so that the Middle East revolutions are the start of something bigger that will be happening over the next few years.

The Uranus-Pluto square powerfully aspects the charts of all the major powers. The Middle East is crucial to the world’s energy supplies, and it is in political ferment. This is big, very very big, as big as you’d expect from Uranus square to Pluto (I’d started wondering what had happened to Uranus-Pluto!) Because we are at the start of Uranus-Pluto, though the current ferment may be over in a few months, we will not be returning to stability and normality. A bit like the Great Recession: we are still waiting for the economy to return to normal, but because of Uranus-Pluto, that is not what is happening – the economy is incrementally becoming something else, and there will probably also be drama to come before the new paradigm emerges. The same applies to the Middle East, and the geo-political consequences are likely to escalate rather than settle down. These revolutions are kicking off something much bigger.

It’s a bit like the last Uranus square to Pluto, in the late 1920s/early 1930s. Fascist/military regimes arose that led to war some years later. I’m not at all saying we are going to have a world war, just that these revolutions are leading to a much bigger change that we cannot currently foresee.

The rise of China is obviously a huge part of the emerging picture. In recent months it has overtaken Japan as the world’s second largest economy. For America, this is psychologically huge, for China’s next step is to overtake the US. And it seems to be happening faster than anyone thought. It used to be 2030, now they are saying the next decade. American decline has been prematurely predicted for decades, but now it is for real, and there seems to be a crisis of confidence, of self-belief, in a way that there has not been before. America’s enormous self-belief comes from a conjunction of an exalted Jupiter to its Sun, and Jupiter ruling its Sagittarius Ascendant. That Jupiter is at 5 Cancer, which Pluto is currently opposing (after which it will oppose the Sun.) So the change in self-belief is real. At the same time, Pluto is starting to square the Chinese Sun, where it is having an empowering, rather than disempowering, effect. Power, that is, in a crude, worldly way. Real power is something else, it has humility, and this is where America could be taken to if it has the integrity.