Your Dreams, Please!

June put the following on Facebook yesterday:

Help often comes first in what appears to be the opposite. It is why dreams often have to be turned upside down to be understood as something other than attack, or threat. But check with friends first. If we are all dreaming the end of something, it might be time to fill the pans with water, check the emergency supplies. 

With the first exact square from Uranus to Pluto coming up on June 24th, this is timely. There are big shifts happening in the collective – as if we needed telling – and they will continue for at least another 3 years as Uranus and Pluto continue to make exact squares. We don’t know what these squares are going to bring. The world seems to be slowly recovering from the longest recession since the 30s. BUT there is the indebtedness in southern Europe. Greece seems likely to default and leave the Eurozone, soon. Then the much bigger problems of Italy and Spain follow. No-one knows how this will pan out, as no mechanism for leaving the Euro was considered at its inception. Some sort of further banking crisis seems likely, and it could spread.

So, do we need to get in the 'emergency supplies'?

What I’m asking for here is your dreams. That, apparently, is how Jung saw World War II coming, during the last Uranus-Pluto square: from his patients dreams. When the collective is intensely activated, as it is now, it will push its way into our dreams.

If there’s enough material, I’ll post some of it (anonymously) unless you say otherwise.

Neptune is starting to station in his own sign of Pisces, a good place for dreaming.

The New Moon immediately before the first Uranus-Pluto square, on 19th June, is at the end of Gemini. The Moon in late Gemini is said to be an auspicious time to start a war in Arabic astrology. At 9/11, the Moon was in late Gemini.

I don’t want to take this literally and suggest a major war, because there is no sign of one, and astrology has to take facts into account. But Gemini is about polarity, and that builds as the sign progresses, so you can see why late Gemini might be a good time to start a war. So this New Moon suggests that the Uranus-Pluto square will emphasise polarisation, and in economic terms that is between rich and poor – in Europe’s case, between the rich north and the indebted south. So a fracture in the Eurozone, with who knows what consequences. But do we need to stack up on canned food? Your dreams, please!

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That said, the New Moon in Gemini in June is square to Mars. At 9/11 (or 11/9 if you are British) the attack came as a surprise. On 19th June, tr Mars will be conjunct the US Neptune and square the US Mars, and moving towards the US MC. The New Moon will be in the US 7th House of foreign countries. So some sort of Islamic attack on US interests, that has major security implications, would also seem to be a possibility in the run-up the first Uranus-Pluto square.

Europe is Screaming

Someone made the good point after my last post that it is interesting that Munch’s The Scream should have been sold now, in light of events in Europe. We are coming up to the first exact Uranus-Pluto square next month, and Greece has just had a general election in which the pro-austerity parties have not been able to form a government. Greece may not have a government now until next month, when it may have further elections.

The Scream

Edvard Munch's The Scream has just become the most expensive work of art sold at auction - $120m. It is one of 3 versions, and this one is said to be the most colourful.

It was painted in 1895, and on the frame is a poem by Munch:

"I was walking along the road with two friends
the sun was setting - the sky turned a bloody red
And I felt a whiff of melancholy - I stood
still, deathly tired - over the blue-black
fjord and city hung blood and tongues of fire
my friends walked on - I remained behind
 - shivering with anxiety - I felt the great scream in nature - EM"

His biographer, Sue Prideaux, says that it is impossible to ignore the image's wider context - a widespread late-19th Century sense of unease as the works of Darwin and Nietzsche corroded the old faiths and centuries of previous generations. It was Munch's ability to blend the deeply personal with the universal that has made his most celebrated work so enduring, she says.

"The feelings expressed in the painting were extremely subjective on Munch's part," she says. "But because this skull, essentially, has an everyman quality we can all project our feelings onto it."

I don't think this last part is right at all. In the poem, Munch says he "felt the great scream in nature." Well did he or didn't he? Are feelings purely subjective or can they tell us something about the world? To call his feelings 'extremely subjective' seems to me to be an insult to this artist, and a concession to the scientific world-view that sees people as isolated, and only able to know the world through the god of reason.

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I think Prideaux is correct to tie The Scream in with the corrosion of the old faiths and the rise of science, but she calls it a sense of 'unease'. Munch is calling it much more than that. If we see The Scream as a comment on scientific materialism - well, it's hardly a comment, it's a scream of anguish in a language that is the opposite of scientific reasoning. That is where its appeal lies. It expresses the nightmare of Blake's Single Vision, of Jung's 'poison pill of science'. But Prideaux, embedded as she is in the modern scientific world-view, cannot see this.

Painted in 1895, the painting could also be seen as prophetic of World War I, where technology was able to create mass slaughter on a scale previously unknown. Again, this perspective is unavailable to Prideaux. Jung also had his well-known vision of a blood-soaked Europe shortly before World War I broke out. He came to see this vision as prophetic; Anthony Storr sees that as narcissism on Jung's part, which again is an insult, said presumably because he also lives in a world where prophecy isn't possible.

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Born on 12th December 1863, Munch had North Node in Scorpio. The Node is where we find our greatest fulfillment, and to which we are drawn often without knowing it. Scorpio is ruled by a collective planet (Pluto) and it is the sign par excellence of hidden, instinctive feeling. Munch's planet of artistic feeling, Venus, is also in Scorpio, and opposite Pluto. So this suggests that The Scream is as much about the expression of something raw and instinctive that is hidden beneath the civilised veneer, as it is about collective pain and despair. It is saying look beneath the surface to that which has become inadmissible.