English Monsters from the Deep

It is interesting how unclear the reasons have been for the civil disorder in England. The worst is now over, even though the disorder has spread across the country, because London, which gave a lead, is now quiet. Forcibly so.

No doubt reasons will be given, but just the fact that we don’t really know says quite a lot. It started with alleged police racism in Tottenham, but turned into disorder by all sorts of people, burning down businesses and looting. The austerity measures are clearly an element here. And resentment against the Tory government. Last night 3 Asian men were run over and killed as they left a mosque in Birmingham. That seems like racism.

The point is that ‘reason’ has been left behind and we are dealing with something archaic and collective. People who would not normally riot and loot are doing so. The news showed quite unlikely people in the police cells.

This is what is fascinating. When the collective takes over, people’s usual sense of who they are switches off. It is exactly what happened in Nazi Germany, at a time, like now, of national insecurity. A responsible government opposes and contains these energies. The Nazis used these mob energies against the enemy within. Right now, the British government could, if it wanted, set up a pogrom with the greatest of ease.

It is a rare moment when the dark side of the collective rears its head, and people forget who they are. It is an amnesia, and in the coming months we will see interviews with many people saying they do not know what came over them. It shows how fragile is our civilised consciousness, even after decades of liberal democracy and what some might see as political evolution.

The rioters were just the tip of the iceberg. For every rioter, there were probably hundreds more who could have been drawn in if the circumstances were there, and thousands more who were tempted. The government will isolate the rioters off as an unrepresentative aberration; but in fact it is saying something big about the English collective unconscious. Nothing happened in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, and this shows we are separate races, that it was a racial, tribal phenomenon.

So firstly, there is such a thing as the English race. And secondly, something is going on in its collective unconscious. As in Nazi Germany, people are feeling insecure and powerless. Usually we see attacks on minorities in such circumstances. But what we have in this case is a new element brought in by a new type of society, the ‘consumer society’: greed. Looting has been so characteristic of this unrest, and it is probably a consumerised twist to the pogrom mentality.

The important lesson in these events is that they are saying something about the English collectively: our general nature beneath the ‘civilised’ surface; and something particular about how threatened people are feeling about present circumstances.

It is easy to put it ‘out there’ and just blame the rioters. It’s like in a family that is unconscious. The family neurosis is often embodied by just one member, the black sheep, putting it safely ‘out there’, so that nobody has to look at themselves.

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We saw in the 1930s how Uranus square Pluto gave rise to the same primitive collective energies to which each one of us is vulnerable, even if we let others do it for us. How many people are secretly satisfied by the rioting? Perhaps those who damn it most? Uranus square Pluto will be interacting with the charts of all the major powers in the next few years (including China, which has Sun at 7 Libra). We will be seeing a lot more of what we have been experiencing in England. Why in England right now? Because Mars has been in early Cancer, forming a t-square with Uranus and Pluto: this configuration forms a hard aspect to the UK Sun, MC and Asc at 7-10 Libra/Capricorn, and in particular to the UK Angular Uranus at 1 Libra, a planet of unrest.

The monsters of the old myths, like Grendel, live within us, and emerge when the protective shell of a secure society is weakened. What is happening in the collective now in England is a great moment for collective and personal self-knowledge.