Pluto's Tomb and the Great Recession

I don’t think I’ve ever been so ill as I was last week. Flu or something. Must be Neptune turning direct to leave my 6th House of Health. I was in bed for the whole week, and I was hardly present to the outside world. But I was fully present inwardly, I was dragged inwards and downwards to a more image-based place than I am used to, and stuff was happening. Must have been Neptune.

Turns out our new neighbour is a homeopath, and things began to turn round straight after she prescribed me bryonia on the Wednesday. All the same, unreasonable doubt that the homeopathy was doing anything crept in after a day or so. I have the same thing with astrology: reasonable doubt and unreasonable doubt, and I’m not sure I can always tell the difference. Unreasonable doubt is a cultural demon that knocks the life out of anything ‘unscientific’. Probably more of a male thing.

The Pluto-Node conjunction in Capricorn, which peaks on 27th November, has been working itself out very literally over the last 3 months, as we have seen a series of miners trapped underground around the world. The first 2, in Chile then China, resulted in the miners being saved. The 3rd incident in New Zealand ended yesterday with all the miners being killed in a series of underground explosions – if the gases had not killed them before that.

Pluto is Lord of the Underworld, and Capricorn adds a sense of constriction and confinement. In the case of the Chilean miners, the entombment was long and they were eventually freed. Ceres was moving in to conjoin Pluto and the Node during their incarceration. Mythologically, Ceres’ daughter was abducted by Pluto but eventually freed (sort of) from the Underworld. She subsequently had to spend six months a year there. This shows how this sort of experience changes us, just as it will have changed the Chilean miners. They will never be entirely the same after their experience.

In the case of the New Zealanders, the experience was short and sharp. Ceres was moving away from Pluto and the Node, so her redemptive presence was no longer there. In addition, Mars was moving into a square with Jupiter and Uranus (which it was not during the Chilean crisis), making a sudden, violent ending more likely.

Jupiter and Uranus are back in applying conjunction yet again, and the applying square to Mars makes sudden, violent crises likely. So North Korea has been shelling a South Korean island, provoking an international crisis, as well as revealing the much greater extent of its nuclear reprocessing facilities than we knew about. A stampede on a bridge in Cambodia has killed 450 people. And Europe, and the world economy, has gone into the jitters as the debt crisis has reared its head again in some of the countries that are part of the Euro. This time Ireland needed bailing out. Portugal, Greece and Spain remain unstable due to their banking debts. On the other hand, we have seen the sudden release of Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, showing that these sudden Mars events (she was released by the military/Mars) do not always have to be destructive.

This theme of miners and entombment has gripped the world, on and off, since August. Before that it was the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, that went on for months. Pluto’s realm again: a raw, destructive, uncontainable force from the depths that we seemed to be able to do very little about. All these events triggered off by man as he sought to exploit the earth’s natural resources.

There is nothing wrong with using the earth’s resources. But it needs to be give-and-take, there needs to be a sense of gratitude and of being part of a renewable cycle. Our westernised culture continues to accelerate away from such an attitude. We are offending the gods as never before. There has never been a culture so out of balance, so full of hubris at its own god-like powers.

So it is not surprising there is the odd kick back, particularly when Pluto conjoins the Node. What do we need to learn collectively, what karmic debt are we building up (Node) by not honouring the forces of nature (Pluto)? Pluto will always prevail. He is the dragon guarding the earth’s resources, and this summer he breathed out some fire – casually, in his sleep, irritated, a warning.

Maybe the mining incidents have also come to our notice because they describe how we feel collectively: trapped. We are in the midst of the Great Recession, and we cannot see our way out. It has been going on since Pluto entered Capricorn in early 2008 and the stock market began bucking and lunging. Sure, the US has just released better than expected growth figures, but then unemployment refuses to do down. The UK is also reporting growth figures, but then the Euro again threatens to go into meltdown.

So we are like the miners, in a pit of our own making. The ‘toxic’ debt of the banks is very like the toxic, explosive gases in the mines, threatening everything. There are still high levels of unstable gases in the mine shafts called Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Greece, which could shut down the whole mine if we don’t attend to them. We don’t want to seal them off because there are people trapped inside.

The reason this recession is so protracted is because, despite our best efforts, the outcome will not be a return to economics as we know it. We are on the brink of a square from Uranus to Pluto. They will come within one degree of an exact square next summer. Such outer planet hard aspects only occur occasionally, and they take us from one age to the next, as Uranus-Neptune did in the early 90s, and Uranus-Pluto did before that in the sixties.

So that is why the recession won’t budge. It is because we are on the brink of something new. With Uranus now starting to station before changing direction and making a 6 month run-in to an almost exact square to Pluto, now is the time when, at last, we may start to get some indication of the new world order that is coming into being. One thing we can be sure of is that it will be a world in which the West is less wealthy and powerful in relation the East, particularly China – maybe even less wealthy in absolute terms. And probably less confident in its ability to contain its new enemy, militant Islam, which is spreading worldwide. For the West, a keyword for Uranus-Pluto will probably be ‘humility’, just as for China it will probably be ‘hubris’.