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.

Government Surveillance, Saturn-Pluto and Uranus-Eris

Back in 2007, as Pluto was about to enter Capricorn, one fellow astro-blogger (who I can no longer locate) predicted that a theme of this long transit would be government (Capricorn) secrets (Pluto). This guy has proved startlingly right, and it has come about through the growth of electronic communications, and governments’ need to bring law and order into this new domain.

Uranus covers electronics and the internet (amongst other things), and he operates through sudden, disruptive action. As Uranus came into square with Pluto in Capricorn, so came Wikileaks and Edward Snowden – the massive, unauthorised release of government secrets.

The motivation of Wikileaks, under Julian Assange, was to undermine the authority of government, which he saw as inherently tyrannical, and replace it with…. well who knows? Snowden’s motivations were more mixed: he wanted people to know the extent to which they were under government surveillance, but he also released many classified documents that revealed details of US security operations. Any country has the right to protect itself, and this action of his suggests to me that he wanted to harm his country as well as to help it. He has Sun in Gemini opposite Neptune, and Moon in Scorpio, so there is plenty of room here for self-deception (Neptune) and revenge seen as just cause (Scorpio). As well as the self-sacrifice of Neptune and the desire for truth of Scorpio.

But the big issue that has been raised, both in the US as well as in the UK, is the extent to which governments should be allowed to surveil (yes, the word exists!) via electronic media.

Some people seem to view any surveillance as an unwarranted intrusion by government. I take the view that if the words ‘bomb’ and ‘semtex’ were to start appearing in my private emails – or even in my phone calls -  I would expect a government computer to pick up on that and pass it on to a real human being. I would regard it as a dereliction of the government’s basic duty to provide safety and order if this were not to happen.

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That is my starting point, and I have little patience with the basic position of simply opposing government surveillance, and the paranoia about any form of authority that often comes with that. It has been dressed up to sound spooky, when in fact it is a fundamental duty of government, and always has been: knowing what is going on and who is up to no good.

Imagine you were living in a village 200 years ago, as most people did, where everyone knew everyone else’s business. Think of the freedom we have from that now – but also its price, which is lack of belonging, the loneliness and anonymity of big cities. And all we are being asked to do is to sacrifice some of that modern privacy to a computer, so that if we’re intent on harm, real people can then get involved.

The English are a very private people, so that is probably the issue here. Whereas Americans tend to be more open about themselves, but also more suspicious of government, so that is probably the issue there. (The US its roots in the rejection of authority, expressed by its Sun square to Saturn; whereas has UK has Sun in Capricorn on the IC, which is very private - yet in square to Uranus, one effect of which, I think, is to make us feel our privacy is not secure - hence an Englishman's home being his castle.)

One way or the other, there is genuine debate to be had, because the government will inevitably overstep its powers. There will be abuses, however tightly we regulate and surveil the surveilleurs (not sure if that is a word – well it is now!). The debate is not whether to have surveillance (it’s been happening and will continue whatever we might want) but the degree to which it should be allowed and how to oversee it.

So Uranus-Pluto has raised the issue in a very in-your-face manner. In 5 years’ time, Saturn will conjoin Pluto in Capricorn. That is probably the time it will take to get this area properly regulated, and in a way that people are relatively happy with. And this is partly because all the issues are not yet clear. Saturn (appropriate regulation) of government (Capricorn) surveillance (Pluto).

In the news today is a story about Chinese hackers gaining access to sensitive personal data on millions of US intelligence and military personnel. This seems to me a worry several orders higher than the necessary evil of the government  potentially knowing details of my personal life through my phone calls or google searches.

There are probably more shocks, like the above news story, to come, shocks that change the issues involved.

Next year, Uranus will conjoin Eris, which he does every 85 years or so. Eris is a dwarf planet beyond Pluto whose astrological meaning is not well understood yet. She moves so slowly that I think it makes it hard to discover or ascribe meaning to her. Eris is brother of Ares, the god of war, and she is a goddess of chaos, strife and discord. She causes trouble. Snubbed at a wedding, she created discord between some goddesses, using an apple, that led to the Trojan War.

Conjunctions and oppositions are the most powerful dynamic aspects, and in the case of slow moving planets like Uranus and Eris, the aspects last for a year or two either side of the exact aspect. The last exact conjunction was in 1928, the year before the Wall St Crash. The Watergate break-in, which came to consume American political life, occurred with Uranus within a degree of opposing Eris.

Both these planets have disruptive, game-changing effects on the collective, so when you put them together…. I think the Wall St  Crash and Watergate speak for themselves. I’d say 2016-17 are the years to watch out for. It could easily involve sudden events that show the frailty of the internet – superhacks, or a worldwide crash of the internet. And all leading to the more solid foundations and regulations of the 2020 Saturn-Pluto conjunction.

Of course, Uranus-Eris could be events other than internet – like Islamic State setting off a bomb filled with nuclear material, contaminating a wide area. But this is pure speculation, I am NOT predicting, just trying to give a flavour of the sort of game-changing events we are likely to see in 2016-17.

Eris and our 100 Year Collective Journey

In practice, Pluto tends to be the planet most used to describe the times we live in. This is because until recently it was the outermost planet, and therefore had the strongest effect on a collective level. Pluto has of course been downgraded to a dwarf planet, but that hasn’t stopped astrologers treating him as a full planet. Which suggests we can do the same for Eris, another ‘dwarf planet’, larger than Pluto and with an orbital period of about 500 years, double that of Pluto.

So the Pluto period we are living in (which is just changing from Sagittarius to Capricorn) needs to be seen in the wider context of the Eris era that we are living in. Eris is the planet that has the most powerful effect on our times, and Pluto and Neptune and Uranus are subsets of this.

So far, so logical. But I’ve found it hard until now to get much of a handle on Eris in Aries, and I suspect others have as well. But if you bring in visual astrology, in which Eris is passing through the constellation Cetus, it becomes easier to unpack.

I’m covering ground I wrote about the other day in my last post on Eris (please read this first). But it occurred to me that this point about Eris being the most defining planet of our times needs emphasising, particularly as, through Cetus, it is possible to get more of a sense of her influence.

Eris averages about 40 years per sign. Her orbit is highly elliptical, so that she spends far longer in some signs than others. She is spending over 100 years in her present sign of Aries, so for our generation Eris is not really a personal planet. She moves much faster through some other signs, so Eris could be considered a personal planet for the people who live through those times. For us she is pretty much a planet belonging to mundane astrology (though as a static element in the natal chart she can be interesting, particularly for people who represent a collective in some way. Just forget the transits.)

In the same way that Eris mischievously threw an apple into the wedding feast, an event that eventually brought about the Trojan War, so we can see Eris as a catalyst, as small events leading to large results. But it is not just any old large result. With Eris being in Cetus, the monster of the deep, the results of Eris’s actions are to transform the collective, for better or for worse.

So 9/11, which occurred at 8.46am on 11 Sept 2001 in New York (with Mars appropriately on the bow of the Archer of Sagittarius), has Eris at 20 Aries square to the MC at 17 Cancer and opposite to the ASC at 14 Libra. (Hmm...New York is the Big Apple (Eris), just as it was the Twin Towers (Saturn in Gemini) that got hit.)

9/11 was a small event relative to what followed, if you look e.g. at the carnage in Iraq. And it deeply transformed the times we live in, collective consciousness went through a huge shift. Pluto in Sagittarius describes part of the nature of that shift: the bursting onto the world stage of religious fundamentalism, whether it was the nationalist Islamism of the Middle East, or the God-driven American desire to impose democracy on the rest of the world.

(Incidentally I tend to doubt conspiracy theories, but here was a real one: the American government’s successful conspiracy to persuade Americans that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. It shows how unintelligent, and how easily manipulated, the Collective can become in times of crisis.)

The same was true of World War I. It completely changed the world, and was catalysed by the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, with Eris opposite the ASC and square to the MC, just as with 9/11.

I think that Eris is very empowered being in both Aries and Cetus. Aries is a good sign for initiating ‘trouble’, and Cetus is the perfect constellation for a collective planet wishing to have an effect on a collective level.

Regardless of the specific nature of Eris, her current placement in Cetus (1930-2036) suggests that we are living through an era in which the Collective is all-important: there can be great and positive transformations on a collective level, and the worst excesses of the mob-mind (as we saw with both Japan and Germany soon after Eris entered Cetus).

So this is the wider, 100 year period we are living through: a time when the collective is very powerful, and humanity is going through some sort of journey in this respect. Add in Eris in Aries, and we have a period in which that collective journey is being continually stimulated by catalytic events which open everything up, bring about the best and worst of humanity, and through that enable us to understand ourselves.

Globalisation, which has intensified since the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of the early 1990s, and of course Pluto in Sag, is a key word here. On all sorts of levels, humanity is becoming like one big nation in the context of which we see our own local reality. This is very new, it has never happened before, and it is the journey that Eris in Cetus is taking us through. It is an unprecedented collective transformation, brought about by Eris at her most catalytic in Aries, and in possibly her most natural constellation (as the most collective planet) of Cetus.

So this is what Eris in Cetus is telling us. We’re now all in it together, whether we like it or not. Eris has been showing us since the 1930s how awful we can be together, but also what we can achieve. Look, for example, at the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, which was also described by the Pluto (empowerment) Uranus (radical ideas, progress) conjunction of the time. So again we can see the Uranus-Pluto conjunction taking place within the wider context of Eris and the long transformational collective journey she is taking us on.

Eris has taken us a long way since 1930. We have become increasingly aware of our collective nature in its heights and depths, and there are still 28 years to go till she leaves Cetus. So you can see why so many people have been talking for years about a coming collective shift in consciousness, about 2012, and so on.

I’ve always been a bit sceptical, I tend to think that transformation happens primarily on an individual level, and that you can’t place much faith in people behaving intelligently in large numbers.
But I think Eris is showing us, over a long period, that it doesn’t have to be like this; she is showing us a new vision (Aries) for our collective depths (Cetus), she is showing us how to work together. Which is timely, because without global co-operation in the coming decades, we will cease to flourish, our survival will be threatened. So it needs to be possible, it has to be possible, and Eris is showing us how.

Who knows, maybe Barack Obama is part of this new collective possibility? Because if it doesn’t happen in America, and soon, then it’s not going to. Being English, I back off with distaste from the religious zeal surrounding him. I don’t like it at all when he begins with “Good afternoon believers”. If he was English, I’d take it as irony. But Americans don’t do irony. And he is raising huge expectations in people. But his South Node conjoins the US Sibly Moon (the people) in Aquarius, and Neptune will soon pass over them. And his North Node conjoins the Royal Star Regulus. So something very strong is happening, and it would be strange if he didn’t end up as President one way or another. He is too inexperienced for anyone to be able to know whether he can deliver, whether he can work with Congress, people are having to hope here, which isn’t really what you want when electing a President. But a collective shift is urgently needed, and none of the other candidates seem to be offering it.

Eris, the Zodiac and Cetus the Sea Monster

In my piece of 13th Feb, I referred to Bernadette Brady’s recent article in which she traced the path of Pluto through the constellations in the sky. This is not the same thing as the zodiac, even though the zodiac was originally rooted in certain of the constellations, those which lay behind the path of the Sun through the sky, also called the ecliptic.

The zodiac now is rooted in Earth-Sun based events. So Aries begins at the spring equinox, the point in late March when day and night are of equal length; Cancer begins in late June at the summer solstice, when the Sun is at its highest point in the sky; Libra begins at the autumn equinox; and Capricorn begins at the winter solstice, when the Sun is at its lowest in the sky. So there is a reality to the zodiac, it is just not what you would think it is.

You can work this out for yourself. Look up Equinox on Wikipedia. You will see a table of all the equinoxes and solstices. Go to spring equinox 2008. It occurs at 5.48 GMT on 20 March. Look this up in your ephemeris or astrology programme, and you find the Sun at 0.00 Aries. And you can do the same for the other 3 points.

Admission: I wasn’t aware of some of this until the other night when I managed to find it out from someone at our astrobabble group who is technically more proficient than I.

So the zodiac as we use it is purely a projection onto the sky, but it has its own reality, and it works. But I also think it is through a glass darkly: we are astrologers because we have a visceral sense of the connection between earthly events and the sky, and modern astrology to some extent gives us this. But it is obscured, it is through a glass darkly, because the actual stars are not involved.

You get a much purer and more powerful sense of why you are an astrologer once you start bringing in the stars, and basing at least some of your astrology around sky events you can actually see.

But this wasn’t what I set out to write. I wanted to say something about Eris, because Catherine at Visual Astrology has come up with a list of the constellations that Eris has passed through since 1507.

Eris is larger and considerably further out than Pluto and was only discovered in 2003. She was classified as a dwarf planet about 18 months ago, along with Pluto and Ceres. Because her passage is so slow – moving just under a sign during the whole of the 20th century – it is hard to relate her to the life of an individual person. Astrology sees life as an interlocking series of planetary cycles or part cycles, but Eris’ movement during any one of our lives is so negligible that it is hard to see her as part of this.

This doesn’t make her any less powerful, but she needs to be seen in the context of the much longer cycles of human history. In theory, being the outermost planet of all by a long chalk, she should be the most powerful of all – yet only visible in her effects if you take a sufficiently long view. She properly belongs to mundane astrology.

Eris was a goddess who mischievously threw an apple into a wedding feast, sparking a row that eventually resulted in the Trojan War. So small causes leading to large effects. She is a catalyst. For example, the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 occurred with Eris opposite the ASC and square the MC: this event was the trigger for World War I.

In 1930, Eris moved into the constellation Cetus, the sea monster, just a few years (not long for Eris) after moving into the sign of Aries. She will be in Cetus until about 2030, and in Aries until 2044.

Cetus is the whale, which in ancient times was viewed as a monster of the deep. Cetus is therefore a symbol for the collective unconscious. Put the Eris Ingress into Cetus alongside the Eris Ingress into Aries in the late 20s/early 30s, and you have a very potent and warlike combination.

The 1930s saw the rise of collective consciousness in its most destructive form, which this Eris/Cetus/Aries Ingress aptly describes.

Pluto was discovered in 1930, a planet that like Eris can be about small causes leading to large effects; and that like Cetus symbolises the power of the collective.

Nuclear energy was first experimentally achieved by Enrico Fermi in 1934, when his team bombarded uranium with neutrons. Nuclear energy, like Eris, has the quality of small causes (the nucleus, a tiny part of the atom) leading to huge effects. It’s first use was destructive (Eris in Aries) and its impact on the collective has been massive (Cetus), it really has been like a monster emerging from the deep, for better or for worse.

More broadly, this combination of Eris, Aries and Cetus suggests that we are in a long period where the collective can easily be stirred up, often to destructive effect. And we could see the 20th century as the triumph of the collective mind. Democracy became more widespread, for better or for worse. Communism in Russia and China saw society much more in terms of the collective than the individual. Globalisation has its strengths, but the world is also increasingly becoming one westernised mass culture.

In 1937, America changed the date of the inauguration of their Presidents to 20 Jan, at 12pm, a time that since 1949 has had Menkar, the brightest star in Cetus, on the Ascendant. (See my posting of Of Presidents and Sea-Monsters.) This suggests that the President has become less of an independent force, and more of an expression of the collective will. Under this aspect, the best sort of President will be very tuned in to the collective, and able to creatively direct it; while the worst will be not much more than a reflex of the mob-mind.

With Pluto entering Capricorn, a sign of society rather than the individual, we are not likely to see any let up in the near future of the forces attempting to subsume the individual into the collective. On an ordinary level, we can see this in terms of the various crises - environmental, economic, nuclear - that we are facing collectively, and the resultant insecurity that creates. Individuality is seen as a luxury by an insecure society.

But perhaps from 2024 onwards, as Pluto enters freedom-loving Aquarius, and Eris starts to near the end of her long sojourn in Cetus and Aries, there may be more room for the individual.

ASTROLOGY AND ENVIRONMENTALISM

There could hardly be a more important subject than that of climate change and the environment, and yet I haven’t been able to find an astrological take on it via the internet or anywhere else. I’d been occasionally pondering this one for a couple of years, and I finally came upon a way in last December through my blog on The Uranus-Pluto Generation. I was talking about David Cameron, the leader of the UK Conservative party, who has been attempting to make the environment for the first time a major issue in British politics, and I realised that this guy has the 1960s Uranus-Pluto conjunction in his chart, probably conjunct his ASC, and despite him being a Tory, his environmentalism is therefore probably for real.

And the conjunction is in VIRGO. Virgo is concerned with the cycles of nature (through her presiding goddess Astrea) and with technology (Virgo is Mercury-Mind ruled, an earth sign, analytical and perfectionist). And what technology has done is to disrupt the cycles of nature, leading to our environmental issues. So it is a very Virgoan issue. Eureka! It’s obvious when you think about it.

During the 1960s, when David Cameron was born, Pluto was in Virgo (1956-1972). For most of the 1960s, depending on what orb you use, Uranus was in conjunction with Pluto. During that period we saw the beginning of environmentalism as a radical protest movement (Uranus-Pluto).

In Sept 1962, for example, Silent Spring was published, a book that “claimed detrimental effects of pesticides on the environment, particularly on birds” and which “is widely credited with launching the environmentalism movement in the West.” (Wiki). Uranus was at 1-2 Virgo, Pluto was at 9-10 Virgo and both were opposite Chiron! The Sun may well have been in Virgo as well.

The two international environmental protest movements that we have probably all heard of, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, were founded in 1969 and 1971 respectively, though Greenpeace arose out of protest movements that were around a year or two earlier. So these two are also offspring of the Uranus-Pluto conjunction as it came to an end, with Pluto in late Virgo and Uranus in early Libra. The World Wildlife Fund was founded on 11 Sept 1961, with Sun and Pluto in Virgo, and Uranus 11 degrees off in late Leo. (I have heard it said that outer planet conjunctions are so far reaching on a mundane level that we need to consider them as operative up to 15 degrees apart).

The common factor in all of this is Pluto in Virgo: this was the period when humanity’s protest against environmental destruction (Virgo) first became empowered (Pluto). And Uranus was the protest, sometimes out of sign.

30 years later, from 1995 onwards, Pluto moved into Sagittarius, squaring its position in the 1960s, and so re-empowering the environmentalism that began in those times. And that re-empowerment consisted in the fact the environmentalism moved from being a protest issue to a mainstream political issue.

Probably the most significant move in this direction was the Kyoto treaty, which assigned mandatory targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to signatory nations. The treaty was negotiated in Kyoto, Japan in December 1997, opened for signature on March 16, 1998, and closed on March 15, 1999. The agreement came into force on February 16, 2005. (Wiki) It originally came out of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, established in 1992. So Kyoto and what led up to it takes us through virtually the whole of Pluto in Sagittarius.

Even though George Bush notoriously opted out of Kyoto, environmentalism as a real political issue has still progressed in the USA, through eg. the Gubernator’s initiatives in California and even in GWB’s recent State of the Union Address. So with Pluto at the very end of Sag, the issue is still being empowered politically.

As Pluto finishes squaring its 1960s Virgo journey, so is Uranus in Pisces now working its way through an opposition to Virgo, but some years behind. So out of this Pluto re-empowerment we can expect to see all sorts of interesting and radical and unexpected developments, both political and technological. There may well be a major leap forward as soon as the end of next year, as Saturn moves into opposition with Uranus, a combination which is well-known as a signature of technological breakthrough. As well as, politically, the bringing of radicalism (Uranus) into the status quo (Saturn).

And ironically, it may well be the USA, the worst polluter of all, and the last to come on board, which will come up with many of the breakthroughs. The USA has historically proved very inventive and able to rise to a challenge, and its natal Saturn-Uranus Trine can only help.

Incidentally, Barack Obama, the rising star of the Democrats and a contender for President, has Uranus in late Leo and Pluto in early Virgo, so I think we can see him as a member of the 1960s Uranus-Pluto generation who may be central to addressing the environmental crisis. When there is a pressing collective need like this, leaders will tend to get elected who are instinctively in tune with it. This is a point in favour of him winning the next US election. The Saturn-Uranus opposition, at 19 Virgo Pisces, will be hitting his Mars at 22 Virgo, and all at election time in Nov 2008. This is again a favourable pointer, not just to him winning, but to him having the dynamism to bring something new into politics that breaks the mould and which also addresses the environmental issue.

The Uranus-Pluto Cardinal square of 2010 onwards is the opening square of the cycle that began with the Virgo conjunction of the 1960s, so we should see the issues that began to be raised in those days receive new impetus from 2010 onwards - and probably even now.

Back to Pluto. Its square since 1995 from Sag to its 1960s Virgo journey is also relevant by sign, because Sag, for all its questing and enthusiasm, is well known for its lack of interest in mere earthly, ordinary matters. (In the system of esoteric rulerships, the earth is the ruler of Sag, suggesting what this sign needs to do to function at its best). And in this case it has been disastrous. We have our ever expanding quest for knowledge and know-how (Sag) based on a dismissive and exploitative attitude (Square) towards the cycles of nature (Virgo). This current transit is on the one hand a square in the worst sense, in that our destruction of the environment is accelerating; and it is also a square in the best sense, in that we are slowly beginning - in some countries - to rise to the challenge of addressing the issues it raises.

In my December blog on Pluto and the Galactic Centre, I made a connection with the Pluto-GC cycle and the environmental issue. Pluto last conjoined the GC in about 1760, as the steam engine which was crucial to the Industrial Revolution, which powered (Pluto) it, was being invented. Now, as Pluto conjoins the GC again last year and this, we are unavoidably faced with the environmental consequences of that Revolution. The GC’s involvement suggests that this issue is an important part of humanity’s evolution. It is not just a technological problem we have to solve. It has all sorts of deeper ramifications to do with our attitude to the planet.

Incidentally, the 1760 Pluto-GC conjunction also had Eris involved a few degrees away. Little Miss Mischief. Yes, here’s this wonderful opportunity to live as you have never lived before and generate untold wealth. There’s going to be this little problem 240 years from now, but I’m not telling you about that. What we have done to the environment is an externalisation of what’s in our own psyches, and Eris set us up for that. It’s horrible, but it’s been necessary, that’s how transformation sometimes works, and it points to part of Eris’ function in the transformational process. She sets us up for a necessary fall. 240 years later, with Pluto again conjunct the GC, Eris has turned up trine to the conjunction, ensuring we know that she has also been part of the picture – and maybe even to help us sort the mischief, while she creates some more for the next Pluto-GC conjunction.

So far we have Virgo and Pluto-GC-Eris as the main players in the environmental crisis. I think that Ceres also needs to be brought in. Ceres was promoted to the status of dwarf planet last year, so she obviously wants us to look at her. The promotion took place on 24 Aug, with the Sun in Virgo. As the goddess of growing plants she has a strong connection to Virgo. And through her daughter Persephone, who was a virgin (until Pluto got his hands on her) there is another strong connection to Virgo.

Ceres goes through all the signs every 5 years, so is bound to have aspected Uranus-Pluto during the 1960s. There were still some interesting ones, though. On 9 Nov 1965, Pluto and Uranus were between 18 and 19 Virgo, and Ceres was opposite at 18.32 Pisces. There were other occasions as well where Uranus and Pluto were very closely conjoined while Ceres was making a very tight aspect to them. So I think we can draw her in to the environmental issue as well.

Ceres and Astrea are both goddesses who love nature, which I think all humans also do, when they think about it. In looking at Ceres we also need to look at the main myth surrounding her, which is the abduction of her daughter by Pluto, her grief and her eventually finding Persephone, but only having her back for 6 months of the year – which became summer – while the other 6 months her daughter spent in the underworld with Pluto, and this became winter, Ceres’ time of sorrow.

So Ceres becoming prominent now suggests to me that we are entering the initial winter where Ceres has lost her daughter and doesn’t know where she is. We have lost our innocent, and unknowing, attitude to nature, as we collectively realise we are destroying her. But we can never go back to how we were – our technological advancement cannot be undone: Persephone has lost her virginity. To solve the problem, some sort of arrangement has to be made between the Ceres of Nature and the Pluto of destructive technology, just as Ceres and Pluto in the myth have to come to an arrangement. Ceres is resigned to it, but as a mother she is never happy with it. In the same way, Nature will probably never be as wild and bounteous as before humanity became technological. But at least an arrangement can be made to the benefit of both.