Fun

This is the Rizzi-Haus in Braunschweig in Germany. It is an office building designed by the American pop artist James Rizzi, who has just died aged 61. I wish more buildings were as fun as this. What is not always known is that medieval cathedrals were brightly coloured inside. I think it is natural for people to surround themselves with bright colours, unless they are Protestants.

Rizzi had Venus conjunct Saturn, not what you'd normally associate with a fun aesthetic.
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Here he is again:

What fun! What joie de vivre! Saturn can simply mean that you are good at what you do. Not in the Neptunian sense of a gift, but in the sense of a good craftsman who has earned his skill. Which is why Saturn is often a tough placement to have when we are young, a demanding taskmaster.

Rizzi's Venus-Saturn suggests that his work was highly skilled. Who says that Saturn isn't joyful once you have learned his lessons? In Roman times they had the Saturnalia, a carnival in honour of Saturn at the time of the winter solstice. The social norms were overturned: gambling was permitted, and masters served their slaves. The poet Catullus called it "the best of days." This is Saturn: he builds the social norms, and once they are in place, he takes you beyond them. To the Rizzi-Haus office block in Germany.

Iraq

The war in Iraq, and the American occupation, ended a few days ago. Almost immediately, it seems, all hell has broken loose. The very next day the Iraqi President, who is a Shia, ordered the arrest of his Vice-President, who is a Sunni, on terrorism charges. The Vice-President has gone into hiding in the autonomous Kurdish area, and the Kurds, who traditionally mediate between the Sunnis and the Shias, won’t give him up. And there are the usual bombings.

It’s a farce. You couldn’t have made it up. Under Saddam Hussein, you had the minority Sunnis suppressing the majority Shias. All the American attempts at democracy, and the hundreds of thousands of lives lost, always seemed likely to result merely in the reversal of this equation: namely the suppression of the minority Sunnis by the majority Shias. That is precisely what has started to happen the day after the Americans formally relinquished their role.

You could argue, though, that as the Shias are in the majority, they won’t have to try quite so hard, or have to be quite so brutal, in keeping their opponents under control.

It’s a family feud. You’d have thought that as they were all Muslims, they could get on. But no. Look at the way Catholics and Protestants treated each other in Europe a few hundred years ago. (Or even in Northern Ireland now.) We are talking a medieval mentality, and perhaps family fights are the bitterest of all. Sunni Muslims are in the majority overall in the Middle East. A friend who is a Sunni, a quiet, friendly chap, once informed me in very relaxed terms that Shias are not real Muslims. It was a simple fact for him. He did not need to adopt a fanatical attitude to tell me this.
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Geopolitically, the Iraq invasion has led to a shift in the balance of power between Sunni and Shia in the Middle East. Prior to the invasion, the only major Shia country was Iran. Now its neighbour Iraq is a Shia country. Iran is almost nuclear-armed (although we don’t know how much damage the recent air strikes, which were played down, caused) and likely to dominate its oil-rich but fragile neighbour. By invading Iraq, all America is likely to have achieved is another dictatorship that will be the friend, instead of the enemy, of its own greatest enemy, Iran.

Talk about irony, defined as ‘a situation in which something which was intended to have a particular result has the opposite or a very different result.’ It is a great, modern story of human folly.

America’s larger motive was to maintain control of the Middle East, a vital energy source for the country. It’s secret motive was access to the Iraqi oil-fields: that may be the one thing it has achieved out of all this, but to what extent and for how long?

Sovereignty was formally handed back to the Iraqis on 28th June 2004 at 9.26am. I noted that chart (you could argue for other ones, like the first elections) about 6 years ago, as it seemed very descriptive of what was likely to come.

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The chart has a Grand Trine made up of the Sun, the Moon and Angular Uranus. This is a country (leader plus people, Sun and Moon) that is naturally unstable and divided (Uranus.) That’s it, really, reading over.

The Sun is at 7 degrees of Cancer, and over the next year will be experiencing the full force of the Uranus-Pluto square. The one thing you can be sure about is that in a year’s time the government that is in place will not be the same as the one they have now. If the President, Nouri al-Maliki, remains, he is likely to be more of a dictator than a democratically elected leader.

But what else can you do? When a country is made up of warring tribes – as is Afghanistan – often the only thing that will work is force. Dictators are sometimes a necessary evil.

Not only is Uranus-Pluto hard-aspecting the Iraqi Sun. Neptune is concluding a square to the MC and beginning an opposition to the Asc. When you see a person going through transits of this intensity, you know they are moving not just from one phase of their life to another, but probably to a totally new life.

We can expect events to unfold very quickly in Iraq over the next year, and probably not in the way the Americans would have wanted. They began the war at about the most inauspicious time possible. It almost makes you think George Bush must have consulted an astrologer.

As a member of the 15 families who secretly rule America, he needed the war to be as expensive as possible in order to benefit the military-industrial complex. Joke! I'm not really a conspiracist! Read the comments section in a day or two and I'll probably have said why.

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The time to begin things is in the cardinal signs, the time to establish is in the fixed signs, and the time to let things fall apart, to go with the flow, is under the mutable signs. The Iraq war was begun with the Sun at 29 Pisces, the most mutable degree of the (in a sense) most mutable sign, the end of the zodiac. The worst possible time to start something. And the Angles were mutable as well, with Saturn-Pluto running along the MC-IC, telling of death and destruction that is out of control (mutable.)

This war came to an end as Uranus stationed within a degree of the Pisces Sun. What you really want is an ending under Saturn: properly thought through and done at the proper time. A Uranus ending is anything but this, but the Americans probably didn’t have much choice, not after such an inauspicious start.

Christmas Stocking

For those of you who don't follow my posts and shares on Facebook, here are some from the last month:


Louise Erdrich is one of my favourite novelists. She's part American Indian

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Happy Solstice! Here's a poem for anyone who is any sort of counsellor or teacher:

It is always a danger
To the aspirant
On the
Path
When one begins
To believe and
Act
As if the ten thousand idiots
Who so long ruled
And lived
Inside
Have all packed their bags
And skipped town
Or
Died.

Hafiz translation by Daniel Ladinsky

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I'm still waiting for the 4th series of True Blood to come out on Blu-Ray. Meanwhile this will have to do.
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The Higgs Boson is nicknamed the God particle. A guy called Leon Lederman wrote of it as the goddamn particle because it is so elusive, and his publishers censored goddamn to god. So now you know.

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Mystic Mayan Power Cloak for 2012 Protection

The Winter Solstice and the Next 3 Months

The Cardinal signs – Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn – initiate processes that establish under the succeeding Fixed sign, and reach fruition and die under the following Mutable sign. Rather like a tree going from spring to winter. So the Cardinal signs are the beginnings, and as such the moment the Sun enters them gives a flavour of the next 3 months.

Today we have had the Capricorn Ingress, the Winter Solstice, which has a mixed symbolism. In one sense, it is the beginning of a new year, as the days begin to lengthen again. In another sense, it is the last gasp of the old year, before the new begins again with the leaves of spring. Astrologically, it is the latter.

Actually it’s not the last gasp. It’s rather that the Cardinal Ingresses also progress through the elements as they progress through the year, from Fire to Water to Air to Earth, and it is only when they reach earth, or Capricorn, that they fully manifest: the visions of fire in the spring translating into feeling in the summer, then thought in the autumn and finally

they solidify and become fully real when they reach Capricorn. As the old native American saying goes, “Don’t tell me about your visions (Aries) unless they grow corn (Capricorn.)”

The usual astrological progression is Fire, Earth, Air, Water – as in Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer – and that has its own logic. And as I mentioned earlier, you also have the Cardinal, Fixed, Mutable progression.

Cycles within cycles, with the spokes sometimes changing places. I wouldn’t take any of them too literally. But the symbolism is ancient, so there is depth and power to them. They are real, but not literal.

So the world is at the start of a new 3 month cycle, one that culminates, that pulls together and gives full form to, resolves if you like, the currents of the previous tempestuous (in this case) 9 months.

And the Ingress looks different depending on where you are in the world. In Washington it looks like this:

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Pluto opposite the MC square to Uranus opposite the Libra Asc. I think this has a political reading, particularly as the primaries begin in February to determine who will be the candidates in next year’s Presidential election. It suggests some kind of sea-change, a real challenge to the political status quo (Pluto opp MC) that could go in a number of directions (Uranus). Even if Obama is a shoo-in as the Democratic candidate, he looks set to face real Republican opposition, which didn’t look so likely a few months ago until Newt Gingrich bounced back.
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In the EU it looks like this:

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Moon Rising conjunct Asc at the very end of Scorpio, square to Neptune. The end of a dark tunnel of suffering, or the darkest of dark tunnels, dissolution. Uranus conjunct IC: instability at the foundations, rooted in economic challenge - Uranus square to 2nd House Sun-Pluto.

And in China, the other big economic bloc, it looks like this:

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Jupiter in Taurus stationing conjunct Aries Asc, opp exalted Saturn on the Desc, forming a T-square with Venus. Continued dynamic economic expansion (Jupiter-Venus-Saturn T-square) while protecting itself from other countries (Saturn on the Desc).

The near Middle East – Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Syria – all have an Ingress chart looking something like this:

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Again it is powerful because of the planets on Angles, in this case Pluto on the Asc, and Saturn-Jupiter running along the MC-IC axis. Saturn-Jupiter is to do with the rulership of these countries, suggesting a transformative tension between the past (Saturn) and the future (Jupiter). And Pluto rising, conjunct the Sun, all in Capricorn, suggests a change in the traditional structures of leadership that will be demanded by the collectives for their survival.

On a lighter note, today brought the headline US Navy lesbian couple share first gay dockside kiss. It continued:

Two female US sailors have become the first same-sex couple to share the traditional dockside "first kiss" since the US ended a ban on gays in the army. Petty Officer 2nd Class Marissa Gaeta, who had been at sea for 80 days, won the right to be the first person to kiss her partner on shore in a raffle.

The couple said the moment had been "a long time coming". The US Army's Don't Ask Don't Tell policy was lifted in September, after years of debate.

Yesterday Venus had, inevitably, just entered Aquarius, the sign that breaks the rules in the interests of progress. And it was in a dynamic t-square with exalted Saturn and stationing Jupiter, as it moved societies standards from the past (Saturn) to the future (Jupiter), from restriction (Saturn) to freedom (Jupiter).

Korea and Uranus; the New Flower Power

In the last day 2 deaths have been announced: Vaclav Havel, philosopher-king of the Czech Republic, leader of the Velvet Revolution; and Kim Jong Il, leader of secretive, paranoid North Korea, who had a fresh ‘joy team’ of schoolgirls laid on annually for his private amusement.

You can trace history through the hard aspects the outer planets make with each other. Until recently, we were living in an age defined by the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of the early 1990s. Havel’s death is a reminder that that age, which began with the collapse of Communism, and led to a New World Order (with the US as lone superpower), is over.

We are now entering a Uranus-Pluto era, and we are seeing protests against malign dictators and decadent democracies worldwide. It is a virus that is spreading quite remarkably. Every week, it seems, some new dictatorship comes under threat. In the last few days, it has been Kazhakstan. Kim Jong-Il’s death is very timely in this respect. Will the virus spread even to North Korea?

We do not have an accurate chart for North Korea, but we do know that the country has natal Uranus at 0.17 Cancer; by transit, Uranus has been stationing square to this point this week, at about 0.40 Aries. So a sudden, challenging transformative event for North Korea, that is what the astrology seems to be saying.

Outer planet-to-outer planet transits normally signify a transition from one phase of life to another (such as the well-known ‘mid-life crisis’, heralded by the Uranus-Uranus opposition of the early forties.) Uranus isn’t just about freedom and awakening; mythologically, he was a tyrant, born of the primordial chaos, who hated his children. In the sign of Cancer, this aspect is emphasised, but more usually as lack of parental urge. In North Korea’s case, the natal Uranus in Cancer could be read as infantilisation of the people by the dictator, and the transiting square from Uranus in Aries as a chance for something new and liberating. This transit suggests to me that the virus of political change, carried by Uranus in Aries, will soon reach North Korea.

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The chart for South Korea is a bit clearer than North Korea's. We can be fairly certain that the Moon is within a couple of degrees of 1 Capricorn, and that Uranus is therefore currently squaring it. Korea was split at the end of WWII by the ideological differences of its 2 liberators, the US and the USSR. The Moon is the people, and with natal Moon opposite natal Uranus, the South is acutely conscious of the separation. With both countries subject to Uranus transits, it is well possible, in the current climate, that Kim Jong Il's death may begin a process of re-unification. Because it is Uranus, it could be sudden. North Korea may collapse quite suddenly and go cap in hand to the far richer South.
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The protests within the westernised democracies are increasingly reminiscent of the 1960s, when there was a Uranus-Pluto conjunction; the current square is the dynamic awakening of the seeds sown by that conjunction. In the 1960s the Uranus-Pluto conjunction, which is idealistic but hard and confrontational, was sextile to Neptune in Scorpio: flower (Neptune) power (Scorpio). This Neptune placement was also the transformative power (Scorpio) of altered states of consciousness and of psychedelic drugs (Neptune).

45 years later, and Neptune is still in sextile to Pluto, rather more widely, but they will be within 5 degrees in the spring as Neptune finally arrives in Pisces, the sign of its empowerment, for the next 14 years.



As Neptune has changed direction to move forward into Pisces, so there seems to me to have been a shift within the Occupy protests: away from what people don’t want, which is the present system with all its injustices; and towards what they do want, which is a world of love and peace, in which you can dance in the Jefferson Memorial and not get arrested. This has to be Neptune in Pisces.

Etymological footnote: in the 16th and 17th centuries in England, 'Occupy' was a euphemism for sexual intercourse, and fell from polite usage. Maybe that gives a 'free love' 1960s connection to the Occupy movement?

Aries and its problem with ageing

I admire the sign Aries. They are not unlike Capricorns in their desire to be at the top. Except with Capricorn it is a long game requiring years of training, whereas with Aries they have a brilliance and competitive spirit that can get them to the top very early in life.

Aries is the first sign of the zodiac, so they are newly born, they are fresh, naïve even, convinced that theirs is the best way. And they are relentless. The sign is ruled by Mars, and in debate they are always attacking. It is very hard for them to take on the other’s point of view: that is a quality of Libra, the opposite sign. It is rarely worth crossing swords with an Aries, even when they are clearly wrong, for they will fight and keep it up and keep it up until you feel worn down. Gentler souls can feel bruised and out of harmony with their Aries friend, but for him or her conflict is the stuff of life.

Aries qualities and attitudes are youthful, and it is often difficult for them to mellow as they grow older. Because the sign is the first of the zodiac, self-awareness does not come easily, even as they age. So they keep fighting, keep needing the challenge, and in a way this is refreshing and admirable. But you also want them to be able to stand back and have an ironic take on this continual need for challenge.

Otherwise life is likely to hit them with something. I know one Aries who has spent 30 years living in tough physical conditions, enjoying the battle and the romance of it. But it has taken a breakdown in his health that could have killed him to get him to move on. They are very tough, and will die for their cause, but that toughness can become obstinacy.
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It’s not just Sun in Aries. Moon in Aries can be the same. Bill Gates is a Scorpio with Moon conjunct Midheaven in Aries, opposite Mars. There was the early brilliance and desire to beat off the competition. What is interesting about Gates is that he has changed. He no longer runs Microsoft, and is instead putting his wealth into conquering malaria worldwide. It’s still a very Aries thing to be doing, but he is not fighting people in the form of other corporations anymore: his business had for many years a bad reputation for squeezing out and destroying the opposition.

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Steve Jobs had Moon and Mars in Aries, and he remained clearly Aries through to the end. Illness seemed to intensify rather than mellow him. And he seems to me of an example of an Aries who wouldn’t change, being hit by something that might just break the mould. But as I say, Aries will die for their cause, and in a way Steve Jobs did that. And it is now his company that has the bad reputation, in this case for controlling and overcharging its customers, and for having an unhappy, pressurised workforce.

You could say that Christopher Hitchens, who has just died of cancer aged 62, is another Aries who didn't mellow. He had Sun conjunct Mars, Venus and Mercury in Aries. Hitchens was a well-known literary critic and political commentator who couldn’t be fitted into any neat category. As he got older, so did he develop a crusade against religion. He certainly had a point, and he was entertaining, but reason was his god. Richard Dawkins, another crusading atheist, admired him. Hitchens was a champion of the New Atheism movement, which advocates the view that the evident truths of science have now reached the point where "religion should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises."

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To my mind, this is Aries at its worst. It would be understandable, if naïve, in a young Aries, but in a man in his 60s? It is Libra, the opposite sign, which has ‘the live and let live’ quality that Aries needs. Religion in a way is awful, but it is just another manifestation of mass unconsciousness, of collective dynamics, in a way that membership of political parties can be, or the blind worship of science and reason. It’s just part of the human condition. Aries perhaps more than any other sign is likely to be fighting its own shadow, and I’ve often thought that the New Atheism has, in its zeal and fundamentalism, the characteristics of a religion.

Religion does trap people, but it’s often where they are at, they need that kind of security, they would fall apart without it, so you need to let them have it. And, in its favour, it does advocate a view of reality that is non-rational (as well as often irrational, unreasonable.) It is saying that not everything can be reduced to reason, reason is just a tool, and there is a place, a need, for some kind of faith as a foundation, even though the object of that faith is often crude and intolerant of other faiths.

I have Moon conjunct Saturn in Sagittarius, so the idea of what to have faith in has always been important to me. Particularly because in our age, everything tends to get reduced to reason. But the quest for faith gets confused with the need for certainty (which science is just as capable of providing). And so you always have to look beyond the images and the doctrines and to your own experience, and to a sense that comes and goes that there is some kind of unifying beauty in the universe – or something like that – which can never be pinned down.

Hitchens had a yod in his chart, which is 2 planets that are sextile, and both inconjunct a 3rd planet at the apex of the triangle. I’m not sure I know what yods mean, but they are supposed to indicate some kind of fated element in your life that can never be resolved, but has to be accommodated.

A good example is in the composite chart of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, which had Mercury at the apex, and Neptune and Pluto at the base: these 2 men were forced to communicate (Mercury) by the forces in their collective (Neptune and Pluto), but it was always a very difficult accommodation. Neptune and Pluto were, perhaps, the 2 wings of the party they represented, with Brown being Neptune and Blair Pluto. Or maybe the other way round.

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In Hitchens’ case, Jupiter in Aquarius was at the apex (faith in humanity), with Saturn (tradition) and Uranus (science) at the base. This suggests an ongoing attempt to reconcile religion and science. But Jupiter was square to his Aries Sun, suggesting that his crusading temperament may have got the better of that other dialogue.

In my piece Blair vs Hitchens, Religion vs Science, I gave a recent quote from Hitchens that to my mind is not consistent with the tone of his attacks on religion and to some extent sets the lie to them:

“… the sense that there is something beyond the material, or if not beyond it, not entirely consistent materially with it, is, I think, a very important matter. What you could call the numinous or the transcendent, or at its best, I suppose, the ecstatic. I wouldn't trust anyone in this hall who didn't know what I was talking about. We know what we mean by it, when we think about certain kinds of music perhaps, certainly the relationship or the coincidence but sometimes very powerful between music and love. Landscape, certain kinds of artistic and creative work that appears not to have been done entirely by hand. Without this, we really would merely be primates.

I think it's very important to appreciate the finesse of that, and I think religion has done a very good job of enshrining it in music and architecture, not so much in painting in my opinion, and I think it's actually very important that we learn to distinguish the numinous in this way. I wrote a book about the Parthenon, I will mention it briefly. I couldn't live without the Parthenon, I don't believe every civilised person could, if it ... much worse than the first temple had occurred, it seems to me. And we would have lost an enormous amount besides by way of our knowledge of symmetry, grace and harmony."

The EU Avoids its Problems

Britain is the bad boy of Europe again for vetoing proposals for closer integration. But you can’t expect a country – or a person – with Uranus on the Ascendant, square Sun and square MC to co-operate easily. It’s easy to see people with a strong Uranus or Aquarius element as deliberately awkward, wilfully contrary – and sometimes they are – but usually what is going on is that they are making their own minds up, often unaware that there is a consensus thinking to which they are supposed to conform.

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In this case, the Eurozone and the UK are each attempting to act in their own interests, which is fair enough. But it doesn’t suit either side. For all the headlines about the agreement that has, despite the UK, been reached, there remains the problem of Italy – and Spain, Portugal and Greece. How can the EU leaders possibly be envisioning a future of tighter fiscal control when Italy is about to go bankrupt? And perhaps several others as well? All bets about the future of Europe are off until those countries debt problems are sorted.

In 2001, Argentina went bust. The value of the currency collapsed, inflation rocketed, the banks shut down, people lost their savings and there were years of widespread poverty which continue even now.

The EU is not offering to bail out its struggling economies. A number of its members are quite probably about to spend years in extremely difficult circumstances, making the ‘austerity’ measures in the UK and elsewhere look like a picnic. There’s no way the EU can implement any sort of further integration and tighter controls in these conditions.

The EU collectively and all its wealthiest members are undergoing major hard transits from Uranus and Pluto. (Italy isn’t – it has Neptune opposing its MC, suggesting a political meltdown.) With these transits, you are forced to deal with underlying problems before progress can occur. The underlying problem is not tighter fiscal control. It has gone beyond that. The underlying problem for the Eurozone is what seems to be inevitable defaults and fragmentation and planning for that.

In my piece The Sun Sets on Europe I was considering Saturday’s Total Lunar Eclipse and exact station of Uranus. I expected some sort of announcement concerning the future of Europe, probably the default of Italy, since the eclipse was closely conjunct the Italian Sun. In the end there was a major announcement, but about closer integration and the UK opting out. I still think the eclipse has to mean something important for Italy because of the aspect it makes. We shall have to wait and see. Eclipses are operative for a week or two either side.

Them The 1%

We live by stories, but we don’t always see them as such. For many, Jesus being the Son of God is not a story but a fact. And for others the scientific narrative is a fact. Some astrologers talk about ‘planetary energies’ as though they were a fact.

But they are stories, they are human inventions about how the world is. We need those inventions. But we also need to see them for what they are.

After my last posting, Ruan Mor commented that we have currently “the austerity story (austerity for some while the rich carry on trousering vast amounts of money).”

There is a certain truth to this story, enough to make it a ‘fact’. But it is also simplistic and has a very obvious ‘bad guy’ in it, like any good story. It feeds into conspiracy mythology, where you have a very small number of people – usually a shadowy cabal – who secretly control the country, if not the world. In the case of the austerity story, however, the secret is out, for it is the bankers and other wealthy people who have ruined everything and continue to do so. Their excessive salaries prove it. And the austerity is not just for some but for the ‘99%’.

A corollary of this, at its most simplistic, is that the government spending cuts are wrong. It’s as though it’s the bankers and wealthy people who should be suffering, not us, as if they could afford to pay off the country's debts. (I think it's quite right, though, that they should be asked to pay more than they do.) I find a lot of the protests against the cuts hard to understand. It’s basic housekeeping, and it has to be done, because we are in debt, for whatever reason. I can understand protests against specific cuts, but even then you need to suggest what should be cut instead. But the protests aren’t usually like this. The cuts often seem to be billed as unnecessary per se.

People are suffering, not dreadfully, but they have less to live on, and there are more unemployed people. The future seems very uncertain. And it is true that many bankers' salaries are excessive and have been for some years. This is just as true of many CEOs, but it is the overpaid bankers who are the target of so many people’s wrath.

If we took the excess salaries of these bankers and CEOs and distributed the money around the country, it would not go very far. Their salaries, in themselves, do not make other people poor. But those salaries are symbolic of a system that has been allowed to get out of balance. And who allowed that to happen? If you live in a democracy, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t elect a government and then blame the politicians, or the bankers, when it all goes wrong.

For many (myself included), the bankers salaries are representative of what has gone wrong. But that doesn’t make the bankers bad people, or make them the cause of what has happened. I was watching an interview with the actor James Earl Jones. And he said that top actors, including himself, get paid far too much, and that is at the expense of the other actors in the film. But, he said, you don’t therefore refuse your salary, you take what you are paid. Some bankers undoubtedly have been and are greedy and corrupt. But most of them, like everyone else, do their job and take home their pay, and if they are capable and ambitious, they take home a lot of pay. That is the way the system works in all industries, for better or for worse.

Why is Italy in such dire straits? It wasn’t the bankers. It was the government spending too much, because it suddenly found it could borrow cheaply due to its membership of the Euro. And no doubt a lot of that spending was to make the government popular so it would be re-elected, which it duly was. The Italians enjoyed having a corrupt clown for a leader. They knew he was a corrupt clown, and they kept electing him. And the US elected Bush. You could say the reason Italy is in trouble is because it is a democracy. If you had an authoritarian government like China, that didn’t have to be so worried about popular opinion, then the country would not have run up the same debts.

No, it is not the bankers who are to blame. Bankers are bankers, and we need them. It is we the 99% who are to blame for electing governments who didn’t properly regulate the financial system and who overspent and who allowed far too much wealth to be concentrated in too few hands. But we were enjoying the boom times too much to question them.

In the 30s, after the last Uranus-Pluto square, a load of regulation was brought in to control the financial system and avoid another crash. In the 1990s, the regulation was repealed and within a decade or so the same thing happened all over again.

Personally, I’m not big on blaming, it doesn’t necessarily help. But there is a shadow projection going on right now, and it comes from the liberal left, which can make it hard to see, because they think they’re the nice guys. But once you have a collective scapegoating going on, then you have a mob mentality and all sorts of awful things can eventually come out of it. The phrase "we the 99%" says it all: it is the 1%, the rich people, who are the problem, the bad people. And actually it's not, it's all of us collectively, we've fucked up like we always have and always will, and we're looking for someone to blame.

This is the nature of the idealism of Uranus-Pluto. There is good in it, but it also polarises, it divides, it demonises. We worship wealth and we condemn it. What is needed is reform, not revolution. Camping out in the middle of cities isn’t going to do it, because where are the politicians who reflect that mood? Is the West really so enervated from decades of good living that all it can manage is a minority silent protest with no clear message? The Arab world has taken the bull by the horns and overthrown its dictators. We do not need to do that. But we need their energy, and we need to vote in reformers.

The Revolutionary Zeitgeist

It has been remarkable to see the wave of protest and revolution that has swept across the world as Uranus has neared its square to Pluto this year. The Arab Spring in the Middle East and the Occupy movement in thousands of western cities are perhaps the most obvious cases. China has its own unrest, but they keep a lid on it. And now even Russia has joined in, with Vladimir Putin’s party United Russia having taken a hit at recent Parliamentary elections. And thousands have taken to the streets claiming the election was still rigged in favour of Putin’s party.

Uranus is the revolutionary spirit, and Pluto shows how serious people are about change. The Occupy camps can easily be dismissed as harmless. But the fact they are occurring under Uranus-Pluto means they are the expression of something widely felt in the collective: that people have had it with the present system, with its injustices, its instability, its needless poverty and glorification of greed, and the overarching ecological threat to the planet.

We may not yet know we feel like this. These feelings take time to ripen. The Occupy protesters, some of them at least, do feel this, they are the future. I dropped in on the Exeter camp last week, and it was the mixed bag of motivations you’d expect. But somewhere deep down a lot of us have had it with the present system. We just don't yet know it. Time and further events over the next few years, as Uranus and Pluto exactly square 7 times, will widen and deepen these feelings in the collective and bring political reform across the western world. And not necessarily in a way that we would want. It often makes people look for redeemers. In the late twenties, under the last Uranus-Pluto square, Germany was brought to a similar pass, when its system no longer worked.

It is strange that these revolutionary events should happen together across the world, because they have different causes. It makes you think. It is not that Uranus and Pluto cause these events, this spirit in the world. Astrology works synchronously. You notice that 2 types of event tend to happen at the same time, one in the world, one in the heavens. Because we are trained to think causally, we look for a causal relationship and can’t find one because there isn’t one, and so we think astrology is nonsense.

A Native American friend who is a story teller was once invited to partake at an academic conference. And the professors had all their theories about indigenous people and their stories. And my friend said to them that until they learned to think mythologically, they would never understand the way the indigenous people saw the world. The academics were quite put out by this, even quite offended, because to their minds they represent a more advanced, rational humanity. But my friend was right, and exactly the same point applies to astrology.

It is only in the last 500 years, out of our 100,000 year history, that we have stopped thinking mythologically, symbolically. Science and rationalism seem so mighty, but they represent ½% of our history. Astrology belongs to the other 99.5%. We have that weight of history and tradition behind us, we think in a way that has always been natural to humans.

So there is this similar thing happening right across the world for different reasons. It suggests some deep way in which we are all connected, not just humans, but the natural world as well, because look at the number of oil spills, earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis that have been occurring as Uranus and Pluto have started to square up.

It is all one big thing that goes through cycles of transformation in different ways according to which outer planets are talking to each other. What a strange, unknowable universe we live in.

Russia is the latest major chunk of the world to join the Uranus-Pluto revolutionary party. We will have to wait and see with Africa and South America. In the case of Russia, the chart I use does not show a major influence from Uranus and Pluto, not for some years yet (when Uranus then Pluto will hard-aspect its Libra Ascendant.) This is unlike the major western powers plus China, who nearly all have their Suns in early to mid cardinal signs.

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The chart does, however, have the Uranus-Neptune conjunction which saw the end of Soviet Communism. That is at 10-14 Capricorn. Uranus and Pluto are starting to hit that hard, and I think with countries you can take transits to outer planets more seriously than you do with personal charts, because the outer planets are collective, and countries are collective. That said, in Russia’s case, natal Uranus-Neptune does not aspect any other planets (apart from a sextile to Pluto), which weakens the transit. Russia also has progressed Mars at 4 Libra, so again we have a weak effect from transiting Uranus and Pluto.

It is interesting that Uranus-Neptune is virtually unaspected in Russia’s chart, because the idealism of that combination was subsequently completely by-passed as Putin constructed an authoritarian, gangster state.

What I think is currently happening in Russia is more down to transiting Neptune than to Uranus-Pluto. When Putin took over at the end of 1999, Neptune was opposing the Russian MC, suggesting Putin was a Redeemer out of the chaos that the country was descending into. (When Hitler came to power, Neptune was starting to square the MC of the previous Weimar Republic, so he was also a Redeemer. Neptune is currently opposing Italy's MC, so they may soon be seeking a Redeemer.)

Though Putin is no longer President, that has been in name only, and he remains the most powerful man in Russia. Since 1999, Neptune has gone on to square Russia's natal Pluto and oppose natal Sun-Jupiter in Leo. That is now over: Neptune is changing sign, Russia has the new start of a Progressed New Moon, and it no longer feels the same need for a Redeemer.

Putin is standing again as President next March. He has Sun at 14 Libra, and Moon in early Gemini. He is being hit full-on by the outer planets in the next few years, and is moving on to a very different phase of his life. The transits may not be close enough by next March to stop him becoming President; but if he does, I couldn’t see him lasting for more than a few years.