Uranus-Eris and the Zeitgeist

Last year I predicted that in 2016-17 we would be likely to see sudden and unexpected game-changing events. This was due to the conjunction of Uranus and Eris (aka Discordia), which happens every 85 years or so. 

So far we have had Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as US President. Both these events were unexpected and game-changers, though their implications have yet to be seen.

There is still another conjunction to go (next March), so I expect there to be more shocks to come. In particular, I expect governments to swing to the right across Europe, more than is expected. There are several elections coming up. Marine Le Pen, for example, the far-right leader in France, could be elected President in the spring. One way or the other, I expect these shocks to lead to the  beginning of a wider unravelling of the EU in its present form, to the extent that Brexit will no longer seem such an anomaly.

But Uranus-Eris game-changers do not come out of nowhere: they are the expression of deeper, underlying trends that reach tipping points. Like earthquakes. And they come as a shock because it can be hard for us limited humans to see beneath the status quo, to something we may not want to see. Change and uncertainty are difficult for us.

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And the deeper, underlying trend is described by the major transit the world has been experiencing for about 7 years now, the square from Uranus to Pluto. The last square was in the late 20s/early 30s, and look what that led to.

Trump and the 3rd Reich: Click to Enlarge

As Ed Tamplin has pointed out, Uranus was in EXACTLY the same position when Donald Trump launched his campaign to be President in June 2015, as when Hitler was sworn in as German Chancellor. This tells us that they are the expression of similar revolutionary (Uranus) trends.

The US is not in the desperate economic situation that Germany was in in 1933, and they have a very different political system. So I don’t think we need worry that the US will end up like the 3rd Reich. But there are muted parallels: a demagogue who promises a return to past glories, the loss of pre-eminence in the world as China pulls up alongside; and swathes of the population jobless and ignored. 

So the insight that this Uranus comparison gives us is that we need to look out for these parallels: that Trump has been elected on the back of a sense of loss and privation, and the blind prejudice and grandiose fantasies that can lead to. This is Trump’s constituency, this is the mentality he feeds off and embodies. But the US political system is so riddled with checks and balances that it is amazing any President ever gets anything done. We may not like what he does, but I think it will be limited.

Saturn is prominent in Trump’s chart by transit and progression over the next year: he will find it difficult to get stuff done. And he hasn’t got the outer planet influence that could bypass that through appeals to the collective, the mania that can create, like Bush did with 9/11. Trump will want wars – he has Mars Rising and Sun conjunct the US Mars, but I think he will struggle to achieve that.

And the state of the US is something that is also reflected in Europe, which is also experiencing a swing to the right. Asia is becoming richer, Europe and the US are becoming poorer. At times of uncertainty, people elect right wing governments.

I think that Uranus-Pluto is bringing an end to the free-market capitalism of the last 35 years, characterised by financial deregulation and relatively free trade between countries. I think that an era of protectionism is coming in, perfectly described by the Saturn-Pluto conjunction in Capricorn in a few years’ time. And borders of all kinds, restrictions on ‘the free movement of people’ in Europe, the wall between the US and Mexico.

Trump and Brexit are just the first fissures in the break-up of the old familiar world. We may bemoan them, but if it hadn’t been Trump and Brexit, it would have been something else. (Trump seems determined to have another financial crisis, by tearing up the financial regulations that were brought in in the wake of the 2008/9 financial crisis, to try and avoid a repeat.)

Uranus and Pluto finished their exact crossings to each other some time ago, but the stuff they stirred up has yet to properly surface and change the world we live in. I think the next few years will bring major change. I think we will be poorer and more conservative. The EU will change in a big way. Fuck knows what will happen in the US. But I don’t think it will be World War III, and I think there’ll be enough food on the table. And as I've said before, it'll be very interesting for the US not to be No1 anymore, it's been so much part of the fabric of who they are. That, maybe, will be one of the meanings of the US Pluto Return.