The Royal Family and the State of the Nation

1^st, the Monarchy. ‘Woman has baby’ the headlines are screaming. The unnamed Princess, the 4^th in line to the throne, was born at 8.34 yesterday. She will be the 1^st female whose position as heir cannot be usurped by the arrival of younger brothers (Jupiter in the 3^rd trine Uranus, Moon opposite Uranus). She will be attractive (Sun and Moon in Venus-ruled signs, Mars sextile Venus.) She will have star quality (Neptune conjunct Midheaven in Pisces). And she has Cancer Rising, the Sun sign of her grandmother Diana.

                                                                  

If you believe in such things (which I’m not sure I do), she may be Diana returned from the dead, attracted by the close connection to her eldest son William who, like Diana, is a Cancer with Sag Rising.

Diana changed the monarchy, brought in some modern values, a closeness to ordinary people, in the teeth of opposition from the Royal Family, who did their best to ignore her, even in death. Astrologically, as a Cancer, she began a theme of Cardinality in the predominantly Fixed emphasis of the Royal Family-as-it-was. Cardinal signs begin things, they are vigorous and ambitious.

The line of succession is now predominantly Cardinal: William has Sun and Moon in Cancer, Kate has Sun in Capricorn and Moon in Cancer, Prince George has Sun in Cancer and Moon in Capricorn. And the new Princess has Cancer Rising and Moon in Libra.

This is a Royal Family that is becoming fit for purpose, inasmuch as the UK itself is predominantly Cardinal: Sun in Capricorn, Moon in Cancer and Libra Rising.

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I think there is a certain honesty in having a royal family: we humans are hierarchical pack animals, we always have been and always will be, the arrival of ‘democracy’ notwithstanding.

The US is illustrative: having done away with kings, ‘dictators’, and established rule by the people, you now find the government effectively in the hands of the wealthy, the large corporations, along with a worship of celebrity that is more extreme than what we are used to in the UK. The US is profoundly hierarchical, while kidding itself that it is the protector of democracy. Secretly, they want and need royalty (hence the adulation of ours when they visit).

The Royal Family doesn’t exactly thrill me, and perhaps that is why it works: they are essentially ordinary people like you and I, we can identify with them. They are not celebrity in the usual sense of people who are meant to be gifted. And yet they are touched by something Other: kings and queens used to rule by divine right, and there is still something of that going on, even in their neutered state.

So the Royal Family is changing. Fixed signs, you could argue, were what was needed for the period of Empire, which is still how we think (‘punching above our weight’ on the international stage). Though that is finally changing.

And Britain is becoming something different as the EU and Scotland drift away, and our position on the world stage becomes more proportionate. Astrologically, we are probably going through the biggest change since our 1801 reincarnation as the Union of Great Britain and Ireland, which is the chart astrologers usually use.

We have had Uranus and Pluto hard-aspecting, pretty much at the same time, our Angles, Sun and Moon. It doesn’t get much bigger than that. Uranus and Pluto have ‘done’ the Sun and Angles, and the transition will be complete after Pluto opposes the Moon at 19 Cancer in 2-3 years time.

So no wonder, with under a week to go, that the possible outcomes of the General Election seem such a muddle. We have been battered by Uranus and Pluto for years now, there is more battering to come, and we don’t know who we are any more. And we won’t really know who we are for a few years yet.

Neither Labour nor the Tories look like they will form a majority, and a coalition will be needed. But will the Tories and LibDems between them have enough to form a government? Possibly not. And no-one wants to get into bed with either UKIP or the SNP.

So I suspect we will muddle along with a minority coalition for a few years until the great issues of the day, Scotland and the EU, are resolved. And because we are a conservative nation (Sun and Moon both on the axis of conservatism, Cancer-Capricorn), we will probably continue to have, in this time of muddle, a Tory-LibDem coalition, albeit attenuated.

The UK at present is very like a person who has been under major transits for some years, but still has more to go. (Like yours truly with Neptune on his Angles!) The old self and things you used to do have in many ways lost their power, or have just gone, and you’ve probably got a few ideas about what you’d like to come next, but it’s not yet time, they seem too germinal; and other things you just feel in a complete muddle about, and really there’s not much to be done about it apart from trying to stay conscious. And you hope that this isn’t the end, that it’s not always going to be like this.

And the UK is like that. We’re just getting off our knees from the Great Recession, Scotland looks like it’s going to leave the UK, we are being taken less seriously on international decisions, and we are ambivalent about even being in the EU, which is itself in a period of instability as the unthinkable, a member leaving the Euro currency, looks like it’s going to happen.

So we don’t know what we want, we can’t know what we want, and our politics reflect that. But at least we can distract ourselves for a few days with the new cast member in the Royal Soap Opera.