The Right Sort of Weirdness

I haven’t been posting lately because I’m occupied instead with writing a talk on Uranus-Pluto for the local astrology group I go to in Exeter. (All are welcome.)

The talk’s not for another 2 weeks, but I’m not used to doing this sort of thing and I’ve written 20 pages so far and I know I won’t get through all the material. But it’s great having the chance to write something longer.

What I like about the group is that it is weird in the right sort of way. What for me is the right sort of weird? It means for example that when scientists announce that certain neutrinos seem to have broken the speed of light, I can discuss the thought that maybe it used to be the case that nothing could go faster than the speed of light, but the laws of physics may be changing – those laws are, after all, a product of our imaginations, and imagination co-creates reality.

The wrong sort of weird is when someone announces knowingly that the moon may well be hollow, without good reasons for thinking it, and with the implication that they possess a superior insight that they are opening me up to. Apart from the fantasticness of living on Dartmoor, escaping the wrong sort of weirdness was a big reason I left Glastonbury in 2010. Along with the abundance of self-appointed fake ‘elders’.

Maybe it’s to do with being an Aquarian, but there don’t seem to be many situations in which I feel fully comfortable and able to say what I think. I suppose any astrologer gets used to editing themselves. But even amongst astrologers it can be difficult, particularly I find at large gatherings such as conferences. I tried hard for a while, but I never felt at home. And I don’t see it as my ‘issue’.

I think it’s a healthy response to the rigid hierarchy you get in the astrological establishment, the division between the high priests and priestesses who give the talks and form a closed circle of authority and who often even all eat together at the same table, and everyone else. Yes they know their astrology, but they tend to assume the teacher position if you try to talk to them, and if you don’t play that game, they often don’t want to know. (Rick Tarnas, incidentally, is someone who doesn’t play that game, the standard game of organised religion.)
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Astrology, while not being illegal, is becoming in effect a proscribed art. It wouldn’t surprise me if it gets to the point where it is seen to be so much of an obvious fact that astrology is nonsense, that it becomes illegal to charge for a reading. As it is, if you’ve got a respectable sort of career, you probably have to hide your interest in astrology, because it could harm your professional reputation, make you seem unreliable and flakey. And in the UK, you are now supposed to add ‘For entertainment purposes only’ if you are advertising astrology readings.

In my local village of Bridford there is a parish magazine that advertises just about everything. So I put in an ad for astrology readings, had it accepted, and then got told a week later that the local vicar had over-ruled it. When I emailed the vicar and asked him if this ban applied generally to matters that contradicted his faith, such as Islam, he simply said that it was church policy not to advertise astrology and that it was a decision made by the bishops. Which is another way of saying that he wasn’t prepared to discuss the matter. But also an admission that he is not his own man. The usual eunuch in skirts that you get running churches.

I suppose what I object to in the matter is not church policy, for that is their business. What I object to is that by running the local magazine that has all the ads, the church is able to have control over what goes on locally in a way that is not their business. And they are prepared to use that control. In any case, I don’t see why certain fantastic notions such as the virgin birth and the resurrection are seen as acceptable, but not the notion that life on earth has a symbolic relationship with the movements of the planets.

I think it works both ways: astrologers shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss others’ fantastic notions, because ours are fairly way-out too. I think it’s the way that people hold their ideas that matters. It’s rigidity and literalism that is the problem rather than the idea, or belief, itself. The right sort of weirdness.

Astrology has intellectual foundations if you are that way inclined. But not the sort that cut any ice with the sort of one-to-one causality that science uses. Astrology is to a great extent a fiction, because the signs of the zodiac do not correspond to real 30 degree constellations behind the planets. They never did. The signs are segments of sky behind the planets that have symbolic meaning, but there is no physical reason why they should have that meaning.

Another fiction is created when you use astrology in the southern hemisphere, in which the seasons are reversed. Aries, for example, becomes associated with autumn rather than spring, yet so much of the symbolism of Aries is associated with springtime and the beginning of the year. Yet, as far as I know, astrology still works in the southern hemisphere. Aries still behave like Aries, despite being born in the autumn.

I don’t think we should be in too much of a hurry to try and reconcile all this. I don’t believe it can be reconciled, and the one-to-one causalists would rightly laugh even harder were we to attempt to do so.

I think it is important for astrologers that there should be such fictions in our cosmology, because otherwise we might make the mistake of literalising our relationship to the sky. i.e starting to think the relationship is in some way physical and causal.

It is neither of those, and these ‘unfortunate’ fictions are in fact the way into understanding the real nature of astrology, an understanding that someone who thinks exclusively in a causal manner will never get.

I’m not sure I can do the job justice. But it is to do with astrology being a projection of the mind onto the universe, not in an imaginary ‘as if’ sense, but in a way that has real power because that outer universe was never a separate thing to the mind. And when a divinatory art has that felt power, then it is real, and when a lot of people are doing it in a real way over time, then it accumulates the power to reveal truth. In essence it has nothing to do with the physical movements of the planets, but it also does, for you feel that extra power, that extra awe when there is a corresponding real sky event, and even more if you can see it with your eyes.

So astrology is to do with wonder and awe and the power of intuition and it is contradictory. It is also acausal, in that the most you can say when e.g Mars is conjunct Jupiter in Aries, is that such and such a type of event tends to happen. It doesn’t always happen, and it doesn’t cause the event to happen. The Mars-Jupiter event and the earth event just tend to coincide and to have a symbolic relationship through which you can explore the meaning of the event. So there is depth to be found, but no explanation as to why planetary and earth events should coincide. You are not even thinking that way.

So how on earth is someone who has been brought up on the scientific world view supposed to understand this? And how are we supposed to explain it to them? Astrology makes no sense unless you have the capacity to feel the power of symbolism, and the intellectual inclination to take that feeling seriously, rather than seeing it as a primitive leftover from the childhood of humanity.

I’m inclined not to discuss astrology with those who have, as Jung was told he had done by a dream figure, swallowed the poison pill of science in childhood. Astrology is precious, it is an inner thing, and you take the power away if you reveal it to those who would mock. So it’s not that astrology needs defending to those who could not possibly understand; it is more that it should not be discussed around profane ears. For that is what these Dawkins-like people are. They may not seem like that because of the authority they carry and the books they have written. But it is a case of casting pearls before swine, and I think astrologers have a kind of duty to their art not to do that.

The Greek Debt Crisis

The Greek debt crisis is back in the news again. The deadline by which the country will have to be bailed out is 20 March. 2 days later there will be a New Moon at 2 Aries, conjunct Uranus at 4 Aries, and opposite the Greek natal Moon-Pluto at 4 Libra.

The Moon in a country is the people, and in the sign of Libra the people have a strong sense of what is fair. The conjunction to Pluto makes them feel that their very survival depends on standing up for what is fair. Hence the rioting that has come and gone as successive austerity measures have been imposed.

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Many members of the government have resigned over the latest round of cuts. Partly as a result of the cuts, the Greek economy is shrinking, making repayments even harder.

It is a very cruel situation, but it is not like there is a nasty regime somewhere behind it all, just politics as usual. You have mother Merkel, with her Sun in Cancer, wanting to keep all the Euro countries within the fold, but she is also constrained by domestic politics: the German people have had enough of bailing out other countries, and that is understandable.

The Greek Parliament has just voted through the latest round of austerity measures, but the EU and IMF are not convinced they will be carried out, and have delayed agreement and demanded further cuts. Today’s headline announces:

The Greek people have been pushed to the limit by austerity measures demanded by the EU and IMF, the country's public order minister says. Christos Papoutsis said Greece had made "superhuman" efforts to comply, and the people "can't take any more".
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It’s clearly a situation that has to give sooner or later, when you have members of the government resigning en masse, siding with the sentiments of the rioters, and the public order minister saying the people can’t take any more.

And the New Moon of 22 March, just over a month away, is very powerful for Greece: a new start (New Moon/Aries) for the people (natal Moon) who are standing up for themselves (natal Pluto) but anything could happen, there is a lot of instability (tr Uranus).

And the Chart for the New Moon itself, set for Athens, has Mars Rising opposite Chiron-Neptune: action, possibly violent (Mars) dealing with an impossible situation (Chiron) of mass suffering (Neptune.)

If Greece can’t take it any more, and it appears they can’t, then the only course would seem to be a disorderly exit from the Euro and a default on its debts. Followed by a period of grinding poverty and probably a military government: the sheer instability of Uranus suggests this.

Meanwhile Uranus and Pluto draw ever closer to their first exact square in June. After Greece, it will probably be Italy again, and a default there would shake Europe to its foundations, and possibly put the whole world back into recession. We’ve had a lull since the crisis period of November-December, and it’s even seemed like maybe the crises had somehow gone away. But debts don’t do that, they always come back at you. And the tightening Uranus-Pluto square suggests an escalation of a sense of crisis in the coming months.

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Next week’s New Moon at 2.42 Pisces conjoins the Italian IC at 1.22 Pisces, so we may expect the Italian crisis also to begin to re-emerge. More broadly, Neptune is conjoining the Italian IC this year, so some sort of dissolution is likely.

Psychopaths

I was watching a BBC programme on psychopaths late last night. They are people who, basically, do not feel empathy, so it is not a problem for them if they do awful things to other people.

Researchers have been doing brain scans on psychopaths, and there are areas of the brain that do not light up in the way normal people’s brains do. And they’ve also found a gene responsible.

Fascinating stuff. Incidentally I’m not anti-science, though I might sometimes give that impression. What I’m anti is science using its establishment power to insist that it is the only valid way of describing reality. In that way it is no different to the medieval Catholic Church.

Anyway, one of the researchers, James Fallon, who is a well-known brain scientist, decided to test his family for the psychopath gene. In his family there is a history of violent murderers. And guess who in his immediate family turned out to have the gene? You’ve guessed it, Mr Fallon himself. He was astounded, as he is not an obvious psychopath, yet when he asked his family, they all went actually there is something odd about you, something a bit detached, it’s like you are 2 people, and then he confessed that when something awful happens to someone, he really doesn’t care.

The reason he says he is not an active monster is because he had a healthy childhood. He reckons that the combination of an abusive childhood plus the gene is what is needed to create a real psycho.

The programme then moved on to a legal case in the US, in which a man had murdered his wife. In court it was argued that he’d had an abusive childhood AND had the psycho gene, and could therefore not be held fully responsible for what he had done: what he did was inevitable when you look at his brain and background. The arguments were accepted and the guy got done for some sort of manslaughter instead of murder.
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This is fascinating, for it raises all sorts of questions about free will and determinism and responsibility and is our behaviour just the inevitable product of brain chemistry? Being responsible for your actions in relation to others is fundamental to being human, so though that guy got off the charge of murder, the reason seems to imply that he did so because he is less than a human being, he is a mere animal.

And it’s not just that people are going to be getting off with things because you can prove their brains are f**$=d. The other side of the coin is that if someone does something harmful and the empathic part of his brain is functional, then you can insist that they were responsible for their actions. And it proves to the criminal that he has the capacity to act otherwise, to make different choices, and that seems to me like a good thing. And probably most criminals will be in this category. Even though a high percentage are psychopaths – in prisons it is around 25% - they are still a minority.

Anders Breivik, who slaughtered 77 people last summer and shocked Norway, is not in my opinion a psychopath. He did it for political reasons but, importantly, he said that when he started the shootings, he found it very difficult, he had an instinctual resistance to killing which he had to overcome. A psychopath would not feel like this. Breivik made a choice: he wilfully ignored his own feelings, which is characteristic of the Aquarius Sun square Uranus that he has in his chart.

The programme explored the training of US marines, and the problems you get afterwards with soldiers who have been trained to kill. It can tip them over the edge and they can end up violent in their civilian lives. And they reckoned it was because killing goes so much against people’s natural instincts. Yes, we have testosterone which makes us aggressive and selfish and capable of killing, but there is also oxytocin which produces empathy. What people do have is a natural desire to protect, so the army trainers, instead of getting the soldiers to hate the enemy and to see them as sub-human, were experimenting with the 'protecting your people' motive. Either way it is a grisly business, but as George Orwell said: “We sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us.”

Perhaps psychopaths are there for evolutionary reasons, they are the ‘rough men’ that a community needs to survive. Psychopaths love to win, to rise to the top. Maybe that is why we glorify the warrior, in order to attract the psychopaths to the role they were made for. Just a speculation.

The programme also briefly looked at psychopaths in the business world, which is said to contain about 4% of them, as opposed to 1% in the population at large. An interesting point made here was that the psychopaths in prominent positions usually produce poor results, but through a combination of charm and force of personality they are able to talk their way out of this.

Neptune Enters Pisces; Israel and Iran

Neptune has a shadow side just as much as Pluto does, and on a collective level it comes out in the form of mass suffering and victimhood. Neptune entered the sign it rules, Pisces, 2 days ago, and the next day there were reports of a massacre of 200 people by the security forces in Syria.

Just as on the day Uranus entered Aries last year a nuclear power station exploded in Japan, so too has Neptune entering Pisces revealed its presence from day one.

Neptune is currently conjunct Chiron, and the last time this occurred was in the sign of Libra in 1945: then it was the signature of both the founding of the UN and Hiroshima.

Conflict between nations is a Chiron issue because it is in a sense incurable: it has always been there and always will, and Neptune in Libra conjoining shows an attempt to heal (Chiron) through diplomacy (Libra) and the dissolution of barriers (Neptune). 66 years later, the day after Neptune entered Pisces to make an in-sign conjunction with Chiron, the UN proved unable to pass a resolution condemning Syria for its brutal treatment of protesters. Astrology sets a lot of store by beginnings, and this has not been an auspicious start to Neptune’s final entry into Pisces (the first was April 2011).

More broadly, though, I think Neptune in Pisces has to with re-dreaming our collective mythologies.
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Chiron-Neptune also describes the use of nuclear weapons. It was in the first House trine to Mars when the first bomb exploded. Chiron here is the damaging technology that is ‘incurable’ in that it cannot be reversed; and Neptune again is the mass suffering.

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We can expect some sort of cycle around nuclear weapons to be completed during the present conjunction of Chiron to Neptune, the first since 1945. The most notable feature of nuclear weapons is that they have not been used since 1945. This is truly remarkable. It is an impressive collective achievement, and maybe the present conjunction is a time to reflect on that.

But the nuclear clouds are gathering in the Middle East. Iran is close to having enough weapons grade Uranium and technological understanding to make a bomb, and Israel is said to be close to attacking Iran in order to disable its nuclear effort.

That will not be easy. The Israelis will have to fly some 1500 miles each way, crossing Iraqi airspace in the process. And then the Iranians have their facilities guarded by fighter jets, and buried under 100 feet of concrete. You need bunker busters to get through this, and I remember noting a few years ago that the US had agreed to sell some of these to Israel. But delivery remains the difficulty.

The simplest solution (by yours truly the military expert) would seem to be a nuclear bunker-buster missile, guided by satellite. I have read that this is the only real alternative to conventional bunker busters, which would seem to be difficult to deliver in the circumstances.

Israel’s existence will be under threat if Iran develops nuclear weapons, and I have no doubt that if Israel considers a nuclear payload is needed to take out Iran’s facilities, they will do so. I’m not siding with Israel here. I don’t think the country should have come into existence in the first place, but now it is here, it must be allowed to exist. It is possible that this conjunction of Neptune and Chiron will result in the breaking of the taboo that has built up against the use of nuclear weapons.

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Like many countries, Iran is undergoing some major transits over the next few years. But there is a particularly military flavour in Iran’s case, due to its Sun being in Aries opposite Pluto. Tr Pluto and Uranus will be hard aspecting Iran’s Sun, so we can expect radical change and renewal in its leadership, and for Aries issues of war and winning/losing to characterise that change. Iran’s natal Mars is at 25 Pisces, to which tr Mars recently stationed in opposition. Mars will head back to early Virgo in April, and then move forward to exactly oppose Iran's natal Mars in June.

So there are multiple factors for Iran between now and June: Uranus and Pluto both coming to within 2 to 3 degrees of hard aspecting the natal Sun, and exactly squaring each other in June. And Mars, dispositor of the Sun, performing its retrograde dance opposite natal Mars. In early April, as Mars stations, it will be conjunct Israel’s natal Mars at 28 Leo.

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It is Iran’s Solar Return chart for this year, ending 31 March, that is most interesting, for it has Ascendant at 23.56 Taurus; Israel’s natal Sun is at 23.40 Taurus. This suggests something very strong going on between those countries in the next 2 months. And Iran’s SR Mars is at 29 Pisces, the most vulnerable and open part of the zodiac. And conjunct Uranus. This well describes a disabling attack. There is nothing, however, that points particularly towards that attack being nuclear.

Evolution, Psychopaths and Fred Goodwin

Somewhere in our brains is an area associated with mystical experience – or, at a lower level, mere religious belief. So little is known about the brain that we don’t really yet know whereabouts this area is, or whether it’s generalised, or whether it’s a number of areas. But human beings have always had these experiences that point to a wider, deeper, unifying meaning to existence. It gets muddled up with a need for certainty and psychological insecurity and literal thinking to produce fundamentalist religion. But that sense of something transcendent is still there. Most Americans have it.

And it is a product of biological evolution. Evolution is a bodge job, but everything it produces is there for a reason, and usually finely adapted. We treat the 5 physical senses as telling us something about the world we live in, so why not that inner sense of transcendence?

Evolutionists can’t have it both ways. If you believe the story of evolution, then you have to believe that our sense of transcendence is telling us something real. Evolution does not produce characteristics for no reason. And it’s hard to squeeze this one into that ghastly mechanism of ‘survival of the fittest’, which reduces our modern creation story to a justification for capitalism, which is presumably what was (unconsciously) intended. A Creation Myth that reflects the zeitgeist. We understand part of the mechanism behind evolution, but only part.

Evolution is a great story, and what is more you can go out and find evidence for it in the form of exquisite adaptations and the fossil record. But it is not a scientific theory, for it cannot be tested in the laboratory or even very much in the field. There is enough evidence and elegance in it to satisfy most reasonable people. It represents a return to common sense in our idea of what constitutes proof. So evolution is both unscientific and affirmative of the value of religious experience. I think it is going too far to then say that God created the world: that is mere belief, it is something we cannot know by direct experience, and it therefore interferes with our actual experience. But in the Creationist vs Evolutionist debate, the former are ignoring the fossil record and common sense, while the latter (at their worst) are ignoring an aspect of brain evolution because it doesn’t fit their theories.
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I’ve just been reading a book called The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson, subtitled A Journey through The Madness Industry. He’s the guy who wrote The Men Who Stare at Goats, which is about the US Army’s exploration of the potential military applications of the paranormal. It seems that about 1% of the population are psychopaths, rising to about 25% in prisons (where they cause 60% of the violence) and 4% at the top of the business world.

It gives a new take on the idea that “We are the 99%”, particularly as the 1% could be conjectured to play a large part in what goes wrong in the economic world. That is why ‘free market capitalism’ is wrong-headed when it is allowed to go too far. There really are bad people out there, they’re very smart and they will cause a lot of trouble if you don’t regulate them! There's no point blaming them, though, for our ills. It's like blaming a big cat for doing what a big cat does. It comes down to regulation and why governments and the people who elect them don't do it properly. And it comes down to human gullibility and folly for electing some of these people as leaders.

There is a well-known 20 point test for psychopathy, the Hare Psychopathy Checklist. These are the characteristics:

Factor 1: Personality "Aggressive narcissism"
 Glibness/superficial charm
 Grandiose sense of self-worth
 Pathological lying
 Cunning/manipulative
 Lack of remorse or guilt
 Shallow affect (genuine emotion is short-lived and egocentric)
 Callousness; lack of empathy
 Failure to accept responsibility for own actions
Factor 2: Case history "Socially deviant lifestyle".
 Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom
 Parasitic lifestyle
 Poor behavioral control
 Lack of realistic long-term goals
 Impulsivity
 Irresponsibility
 Juvenile delinquency
 Early behavior problems
 Revocation of conditional release
Traits not correlated with either factor
 Promiscuous sexual behavior
 Many short-term marital relationships
 Criminal versatility
 Acquired behavioural sociopathy/sociological conditioning

The lack of empathy and grandiosity stand out for me. I’m sure there are also plenty of psychopaths in the political world, who put on an excellent show of cuddling babies at election time. When the empathy goes, all that is left is the predator who desires to win. I think a lot of gurus have psychopathic traits: disciples are there to feed the guru's grandiosity, and when they no longer fit in or are useful, they are quickly dropped. Jon Ronson also makes the point that if you are a psychopath from a poor background, you end up in prison; and if you are from a privileged background, you end up running a business!

I don’t know if Sir Fred Goodwin, ex-head of the Royal Bank of Scotland, has psychopathic traits. He was known as Fred the Shred for his ruthless cost-cutting style. He eventually led the bank to disaster, and had to be bailed out by the government. He walked off with a huge and controversial pension pot (which he eventually agreed to reduce), and in the UK he has come to symbolise everything that was wrong with the banking system. His successor at RBS (which is still mainly government owned) has just foregone a £1m bonus after huge political pressure and a lacklustre performance. Two days ago Sir Fred was stripped of his knighthood, which had been for ‘services to banking.’ I don’t know if I’m for against the honours system, but I like seeing excellence rewarded. It seems right that Sir Fred lost his knighthood, but it wasn’t entirely for the right reasons. Even George Osborne, the Chancellor, was justifying the stripping in terms of Goodwin being a symbol of what was wrong with the system. If you are doing something to someone because they are a symbol, then that indicates it is a witchhunt. It is the wrong reason.

But Fred was and is a symbol. He never admitted any wrongdoing, but you can’t afford to when you are the subject of a witchhunt. In the last few years he has lost everything: his career, his reputation and his marriage. It is Shakespearean watching somebody being destroyed like this. It was clearly his own doing, but it was also the mob.

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Fred was born 17 Aug 1958. He has Sun in Leo conjunct Pluto and opposite Chiron. When RBS had to be rescued in 2008, Neptune was in the process of conjoining his Chiron and opposing his Sun. Both Chiron and Neptune are associated with scapegoating, and Neptune and Leo are both associated with grandiosity.

Now as Neptune moves on to oppose his Pluto at 2 Virgo, the long process is completing with the loss of his knighthood, which is also a loss (Neptune) of his power (Pluto.) You never know with people. If the guy is irredeemiably superficial, then he will never recover, for he is virtually unemployable. But Sun-Pluto has a propensity towards depth, towards developing a basis in yourself that is authentic, that does not need the worldly trappings. The sort of destruction he has been through may be the necessary catalyst. You never know. John Profumo was the Defence Secretary in 1963 when it transpired he had been seeing a prostitute who also had relations with the Soviet Naval Attaché. He lied to Parliament about it, and was eventually disgraced. Profumo also had Neptune hard-aspecting his Sun at the time, and he went on to be awarded the CBE for charity work.

Back to The Psychopath Test. There is a story in the book (which I had heard before) where someone put American psychiatry to the test. He got a load of volunteers to go to different mental hospitals and act perfectly normally, except to say they occasionally heard a word in their head that said thud or echo. All these volunteers were quickly diagnosed as schizophrenic and locked up. It took them up to 2 months to talk their way out of the institutions. When the results were published, the profession was furious, and said that if they cared to do the experiment again, they would spot all the volunteers for what they were. The experiment duly went ahead, and the mental hospitals proudly declared they had spotted 40 imposters, only to be told that none had presented themselves!

It was a body-blow to the reputation of psychiatry in the US. And rightly so, for it is a pseudo-science. We know very little about the brain, let alone, for example, about the effect of psychiatric drugs on the brain. Yet they are administered freely. It can be a way of controlling embarrassing non-conformity in the population.

Ron Jonson also mentions the rise in the diagnoses of bi-polarity. He suggests that there are such strong pressures to conform in society, that if someone is different, then getting a label like bi-polar can be a way of helping that person to feel OK about being different. I've noticed that celebrities sometimes wear these diagnoses as a sort of badge. But maybe for them it is also a way of coping with fame. Keith Richards said that heroin addiction was his way of keeping his feet on the ground in the early years of the Rolling Stones.