STRANGE NEW WORLDS (Part II)

Jupiter enhances whatever planet it touches, and for the last year it has been conjunct Uranus, the planet of scientific discovery, as they have passed in and out of Aries, a sign of boldness and new beginnings. It would be very appropriate if indications of life on other planets were discovered under this combination. This would not just be a scientific discovery, it would profoundly change the way we see ourselves in the universe, our philosophy, which is also ruled by Jupiter: a new (Aries) philosophy (Jupiter) as a result of scientific discovery (Uranus.)

Jupiter-Uranus conjunctions occur every 13 years or so, but when there is also a hard aspect to Pluto, as there is now, it is likely to produce more powerful results than usual. The last time this happened was in 1969, with Uranus-Jupiter and Pluto all conjunct: this was when the first man landed on the Moon! The time before that was in 1900, when Uranus was conjunct Jupiter and opposite Pluto, and that year saw both the discovery of quantum energy and the publication of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams.

So we can expect something unusually big this year, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it is life on other planets. Or the so-called God particle, the Higgs Boson – though on its own, that wouldn’t be significant enough.

The Kepler Space Telescope was specifically designed to search for exo-planets – planets in other solar systems. It was launched in March 2009, and became operative in May that year. In Feb 2011 NASA announced that they had 1235 planetary candidates circling 997 stars. Of these, 68 are approximately earth sized. Exo-planets were first discovered back in the 1990s, but Kepler has brought about an explosion in their number. It would seem a matter of time before the light signatures of organic molecules associated with life are detected.

Kepler has a powerful chart – Sun-Uranus trine the Moon in its own sign in the 9th House of distant places. Astrologically, the Moon is the nearest planet to earth, and the first planet we have visited. So that’s very appropriate, and the harmony between Sun and Moon suggests success. The Sun is opposite a 10th House Saturn, which shows the ambition behind the project, and its technological nature (Saturn in Virgo). The Sun in Pisces shows the very broad cosmic awareness behind the project, and even the sense of connectedness it may bring. As well as the very sensitive nature of the science involved. Neptune in scientific Aquarius opposite the MC shows the imaginative quest behind the project, a Neptune empowered by a close conjunction to Mars. More broadly, the launch took place under a Saturn-Uranus opposition which, like Jupiter-Uranus, is a time of scientific advance.

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In 2007 I posted a piece called Strange New Worlds, describing some of the exo-planets that had been discovered up to that point. It’s very sci-fi, but it’s for real:

We’ve known for a long time of the existence of other Suns like our own, but other planets, other worlds were not definitively detected until early 1992, as the Uranus-Neptune conjunction began. They tend to be detected indirectly through their effect on their local Sun, and naturally enough the ones detected so far are mostly pretty big, because they are easier to spot. These new worlds are known as extra-solar planets, or exoplanets, and there are currently 253 of them.

Some of them are turning out to be weird and wonderful places. Here is a list from New Scientist magazine:

HD189733b (they have such sexy names) is 63 light years away in the constellation Vulpecula, with a mass of 1.15 Jupiters. It orbits its star every 2.2 days. One side is in perpetual daytime, the other side is in perpetual night-time. The day side has a temperature of 940 degrees, the dark side is 700 degrees. The dark side is so hot because winds of more than 10,000 kilometres per hour – Mach 8 – whip round the globe, spreading the heat. In July, it became the first exoplanet to have a compelling case made for water in its atmosphere.


TrES-4 is 1400 light years away in the constellation Hercules. It is the most bloated world on record, less massive then Jupiter but with a volume 5 times bigger. It has an average density less than a wine cork, and would float on water. It orbits its Sun every 3½ days and has a surface temperature of 1300 degrees. It is not known why it is so puffed up, but its days are numbered. Its Sun has run out of hydrogen and in less than a billion years TrES-4 (Doesn’t that name just grow on you?) it will be engulfed by its swelling star.

HD80606b is 190 light years away in the constellation Ursa Major. It is 4 times the mass of Jupiter. Its orbit, which takes 4 months, is wildly elongated, varying from between about 90 million miles and 3 million miles from its Sun. If you floated in its atmosphere, you would see the Sun go from the size of ours to one 900 times as big in just a few days. In the same way, the temperature would soar from about 100 degrees to 1700 degrees. This exoplanet has the most elongated orbit known for any planet, and the reason lies in the gravitational influence of a distant companion star. The orbits of most exoplanets so far have turned out to be much more elongated than those of our local planets, which are nearly circular. This has come as a big surprise.


HD149026b is 256 light years away in the constellation Hercules. It is slightly smaller than Saturn, but has an unusually dense core – packed with about 70 earth masses of heavy elements. Its atmosphere at 2000 C is unbelievably hot – hotter than the surface of some stars, and the hottest planet known. It is so hot because it is close to its star and the planet’s surface is probably very dull-coloured, so it absorbs plenty of light.

Gliese 581 is a dim red dwarf star in the constellation Libra, 20.5 light years away. Earlier this year it was reported that an earth like planet had been discovered circling this star, rocky and with temperatures of around 20C, so liquid water could possibly be present. It has a mass of 15 earths. Then 2 more planets were found orbiting Gliese 581. The smaller one, which is 5 earth masses and a surface temperature of 0 to 40 C, has been dubbed the Goldilocks planet – not too hot for life, not too cold, but just right. Then they reckoned that the greenhouse effect would make the planet far too hot for life. And then they further reckoned that the 3rd planet, of 8 earth masses, which is much further away from the star, might be just the right temperature for life because of the greenhouse effect. These planets will be visible to the European Space Agency’s 3 Darwin spacecraft, due for launch in 2015. They will probe these worlds for signs of life.


PSR B1257+12 is a neutron star, 1.35 times the mass of the Sun, 15km wide (yes, just 15km), 980 light years away in the constellation Virgo. It is the remains of a massive star that exploded in a supernova, leaving a superdense core. This neutron star rotates once every 6 milliseconds, emitting radio beams – in other words, it is a pulsar. It was round this pulsar that the first exoplanets were detected, 0.02, 4.3 and 3.9 times the mass of the earth, while the sizes of their orbits are similar in proportion to those of Mercury, Venus and the Earth. So, remarkably, these first exoplanets are like a carbon copy of our inner solar system, scaled down by a factor of 2. The discoverer reckons the 3.9 earth planet may have an iron core and a strong magnetic field. So that though the pulsar wouldn’t produce much daylight, the planet may well still have magnificent auroras, produced by the dense streams of energetic particles coming off the pulsar, and bright enough to read a book by. The particles would also gradually erode the planet’s surface, generating a low-level haze.

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.

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.

Multiculturalism

Two days ago David Cameron, the UK Prime Minister, declared that State Multiculturalism has failed. A few months ago Angela Merkel, Germany’s leader, said the same thing.

It’s about time, because the Islamists need standing up to. As do the proponents of forced marriages. It’s an area where politicians have been timid for years, fearful of being called racist.

America has its own problems, particularly with the alienation of black people, as a result of its appalling treatment of them in the past. But it doesn’t have the same problem as we do in Europe of immigrants separating themselves off into foreign sub-cultures, at least not to the same degree. Immigrants in America feel themselves to be American in a way that immigrants in the UK do not always feel themselves to be British.

For better or for worse, America has a stronger sense of national identity than we do in Britain. That brings its own problems in the form of a narrow nationalism, but at least you have a country that is less willing to tolerate foreign sub-groups that set themselves up in opposition to the mainstream culture. This approach goes back to the Founding Fathers. I'd distinguish this from opposition to aspects of the mainstream culture that comes out of engaging with it: this is necessary and healthy.

I think that immigrants refusing to engage with the wider society (and this doesn't mean surrendering their traditions, although compromises are often inevitable) belongs astrologically to the 12th House, where you find all those outside of society - whether it is those in prisons, mental hospitals, extreme political groups or religions that think they have a privileged insight into society. I'm not denigrating e.g. prisoners here. The Houses in astrology are primarily places rather than states of mind, although there is an increasing tendency nowadays to identify the Houses with the Signs, so that the 12th House is a bit like Pisces. It is a bit like Pisces, but it still is a place rather than a way of being. The 12th House can also be a place of transcendence, for e.g. the hermit who has genuinely lived the 1st 11 Houses, or the artists and writers who are outside looking in, but from a place of engagement. It is not an easy place to be, and engagement with the opposite House, the 6th of everyday routine and work and ordinariness, can provide a useful anchor.

Anyway, I think it is going too far for David Cameron and Angela Merkel to say that multiculturalism doesn’t work. I'm sure they don't mean it in that blanket kind of way, but that is how they have come across. We have, for example, had Jews in Britain for centuries without too much problem, apart from the anti-semitism of the mainstream culture, which is not the Jews' fault. Multiculturalism is always problematic, but it is do-able and stops people thinking they belong to some kind of special race, which is a very human thing to do. For Jewish people, it doesn't help them or anybody else to have a religious text telling them they are God's Chosen People.

In the UK there are particular problems that have arisen through different groups hanging onto their own cultures, but they are specific. And they will change. What will the children of an Islamic fundamentalist think? I’m sure a lot of them will find their parents’ beliefs irrelevant and laughable.

The problem hasn’t been multiculturalism, which I think can be a great thing. It has been the timidity of political leaders in not insisting, for example, that immigrants learn English, or in allowing extremist Islamic teachers to roam at large. It has been misrule, the king not doing his job properly.

A lot of it is probably down to guilt at how we have treated people in the past, whether in Germany or in the UK. Guilt masking itself as tolerant liberalism. And the Islamists have laughed at us for what we let them get away with.

Multiculturalism began to be adopted as policy in the UK from the 1970s onwards, in the wake of the liberalising Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1960s. Both planets went on in the 1970s to square the UK Sun at 10 Capricorn.

The Sun is the sense of national identity (as well as the country’s leader, who is an expression of the nation’s identity.) So during the 1970s, as Uranus then Pluto squared the UK Sun, we shifted our notion of who we are in the direction of a multicultural society. 40 years later, as Pluto conjoins, then Uranus squares the UK Sun, we are reassessing that trend of the 1970s, reassessing our ideas of who we are. (David Cameron is calling for a stronger sense of national identity to combat the downsides of multiculturalism, but I’m not sure that is something that can be manufactured, or that is entirely desirable.)

With Uranus-Pluto, we see a tension between progressive, liberal ideas (Uranus) and the need for the state to maintain the power (Pluto) to rule. In the 1970s, it was Pluto, and outdated ideas of power, that needed to be shaken up by Uranus. 40 years later, and it is Uranus that has gone too far, and a reassertion of Pluto, of state power, is needed.

The reassessment oof multiculturalism we are seeing in the UK will be part of a wider reassessment throughout the western world, where many countries have their Suns at 10 degrees of the Cardinal Signs or thereabouts (e.g. the US Sun at 13 Cancer), and which will therefore soon be subject to hard, transformative transits from both Pluto and Uranus. We will all be collectively asking ourselves who we are and who we want to be in this new world that seems to be happening around us.

Not what you were expecting....

Uranus-Pluto and the Arab World

This piece will probably be out of date by the time it is posted, but it looks like President Mubarak of Egypt will be gone very shortly, even though he has given no indication of intending to. Egypt is consumed by mass, non-violent protest, and the army is on the people’s side. What happens in a country is ultimately determined by currents in the collective, not the decisions of ‘leaders’ (this is a theme of Tolstoy’s War and Peace) and the collective in Egypt has unambiguously decided it wants Mubarak out. So it is just a matter of time, of days if not hours.

Natally, Egypt has a Sun-Mars conjunction. So significant events around the leader (Sun) involving assertive action or protest or violence (Mars) are more than usually likely whenever there is a Sun-Mars conjunction in the sky – as there is now, and in Aquarius, a sign associated with Democracy. Which is exactly what these protests are about: a desire by the people to have an elected leader rather than a dictatorship.

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The Moon in a country’s chart describes the people, and being in the sign of Virgo, the Egyptian people are slow to protest. Virgo is a sign that is happy to be useful and of service. (Being square to the Sun, Egypt’s leaders are liable to take advantage of this serviceability.) So if the people are protesting, there must be real cause for it. The Moon rules the sign of Cancer, which is the sign of Mars in Egypt’s chart. And Mars conjuncts the Sun. Hence the ability of the people, when they are roused, to take effective action against the leader.

By transit Uranus, the planet of revolution, is just finishing a square to the Egyptian Sun and starting to square the Egyptian Mars. Uranus is acting in the wake of an opposition from Pluto to the Egyptian Sun-Mars over the last 5 years or so, which has prepared the ground for the current events. They may seem to have come from nowhere, but there have been deep changes occurring beneath the surface.

The Egyptian protests are taking place in the wider context of protest spreading across the Arab world. There is similar unrest in Tunisia, Yemen and now Jordan. Tunisia has a Sun-Venus conjunction in Gemini-Cancer that Uranus is hard aspecting; Yemen has Sun at 1 Gemini, which Neptune is starting to square (and which Uranus is sextiling); and Jordan has an uncertain chart, but using the best that can be achieved, we find the Sun at 3.35 Gemini, which Neptune is also starting to square (Irrelevant trivium: the British model Katie Price, also known as Jordan, has the Sun at 1 Gemini.)

Though there have been no revolutions yet, the speed and spread of events has a resonance with the events of the early 1990s, when there was rapid political change across the satellite states of the USSR, followed by a revolution in Russia itself. Those events took place under a conjunction from Uranus to Neptune; current events are occurring under a square from Uranus to Pluto. Such hard aspects between outer planets are not very common. The Uranus-Neptune conjunction was the last such aspect before the current Uranus-Pluto square, and before that we have to go back to the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1960s. These hard aspects plot the momentous turning points in history.

So if we are to compare the collapse of the USSR with current events in the Arab world, what they have in common is Uranus, the planet of sudden change and revolution and democracy. Where they differ is that the first was Neptunian, whereas the current situation is Plutonian, and occurring under a harder aspect, a square. Communism is Neptunian, in the sense of being an ideal, as well as an attempt to break down barriers of class. So we saw sudden change (Uranus) within Communism (Neptune). Being a conjunction, it occurred relatively painlessly.

Pluto is not about ideals, it is about power and empowerment. Being in a square to Uranus, the situation could easily turn nasty. It is an attempt to bring revolutionary change and democracy (Uranus) in the face of resistance by authoritarian power (Pluto). In Egypt we are certainly seeing the resistance, but not the bloodshed. In other Arab countries, it may not be so nice.

The spirit of revolution is catching, and it may give impetus as far away as China, where there is growing mistrust of the government. The Sun of the Chinese state is at 8 Libra, which will be under intense pressure from Uranus and Pluto to reform over the next 2 to 3 years. The Chinese government is nervous about what is happening, and has blocked internet searches for Egypt.

China, however, is in a very different situation from the Arab world, because it does not have fundamentalists-in-waiting in the form of Islamists, ready to be voted in by the new democracies, and probably ready to create dictatorships of their own. This is why I don’t think we should get too excited by the protests in the Arab world, because something much more repressive could come in their wake 2 or 3 years down the line. This is in keeping with the potential harshness of a square from Uranus to Pluto: the last such square, in the late 20s/early 30s, saw the rise of Fascist regimes across the world.

Pluto in Sagittarius saw the empowerment (Pluto) of fundamentalism (Sagittarius): and this wasn’t just Islamic, it was also the religious right in the USA. Pluto in Capricorn is creating the conditions for that fundamentalism to become part of established governments (Capricorn) across the world, whether it is Sarah Palin in the US, or the Islamists in nuclear-armed Pakistan.

You don’t always know which way it is going to go, and Uranus is sudden and surprising. For now, the emphasis in the West seems to be on economic change, while in the East the emphasis seems to be on political change.