The Outer Planets and the Anima Mundi

Two days ago we entered a new phase in the main transit affecting the world, the square from Uranus to Pluto. Pluto was effectively standing still for a week or two, and then on Saturday he started to go backwards from 7 Capricorn, as Uranus continued to move forwards in early Aries. By early August they will be within a degree of an exact square to each other.

Pluto is the basic energy, the life-force, that keeps the planet going, and Uranus is disrupting this and taking it off in new directions. Pluto rules the economy (because it is so basic to our ability to live), and with Uranus challenging Pluto, it is hard to have continuity and steady development, which is what you need for a thriving economy. The last 3 Uranus-Pluto squares – the present day, the 1930s, and the mid-1870s – were all associated with long recessions, or depressions, depending on what you want to call them.

To see clearly, we need to get it out of our heads that a recession is inevitably ‘bad’. Of course, for many individuals there will be economic hardship. But confidence and mood are big factors not just in how we experience a recession, but also in how long it lasts. And that mood is strongly influenced by the idea that an economy needs to be growing (note: NOT long-term sustainable, or developing) to be healthy. So as soon as economic indicators come in saying that e.g. the economy shrank by .1% for the last 2 quarters, then we are told we are in a ‘recession’, which is ‘bad’, and you start getting a feedback loop, based on confidence, that makes everything worse.

However, if e.g. sustainability is your criterion for the economy, then a downturn does not necessarily affect your basic measure of economic health: it may even heighten sustainability, and everyone might breathe a sigh of relief that resources are being used in a more balanced way, and there will be enough left for future generations. It would be an entirely different mindset that has a healthy feeling relationship with the planet, based on reciprocity. Another criterion for a healthy economy could be 'sufficiency'.

From the point of view of Uranus and Pluto, human affairs are not ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Their only concern is that humanity is always moving on to the next stage, and when you get a hard aspect between these 2 planets – every 35 years or so – then we are collectively pushed into a new era. The old era has reached a natural point of decay, whether we recognise it or not. You can see this process happening like clockwork, if you look back at the last 3 hard aspects: the present day square, the 60s conjunction, and the square of the early 30s.

The big question is that, since Uranus-Pluto change is in principle evolutionary, is there then necessarily some kind of collective progress going on? It is, I think, a comforting belief that gives meaning to suffering and the sense of participation in a sort of divine plan.

But I don’t think the facts bear it out. Humanity does not learn on a collective level for very long – why should it, for each generation naturally wants to learn for itself? – and our relationship with the planet is now f?@*ed (no other word will do) in a vast and unprecedented way. Our consciousness has changed, but the main actual progress has been technological.

That said, Uranus and Pluto ARE evolutionary: put another way, life has a natural urge to advance, to become more complex and responsive. You see it with the development of species. And you see it on an individual level with people as they learn (by no means always) from experience and become more uniquely themselves, a species of one.

But humanity collectively is more problematic. The physical evolution of our species may or may not be happening, but that is not the issue. (It may however be that in some respects our brains are atrophying, in that we no longer need to respond so creatively to our immediate environment.) The issue is collective human consciousness. If you say it necessarily evolves over time, then you take individual choice away, because that is the nature of conscious evolution. Uranus and Pluto are only evolutionary if that is what we want. We can’t avoid their cycles of decay and renewal, life has to keep changing. And on a collective level, good choices will sometimes (all too rarely) be made. And whose consequences last for a limited period.

So we can say, with the current Uranus-Pluto square, that change and renewal are coming about. But you can’t second-guess the choices we will collectively make. During the last square, Germany and Japan made certain choices that led to WWII. Those countries moved towards becoming less conscious.

All that said, the sum of human history remains meaningful, in fact the whole history of life on earth is meaningful. It has all had its impact on the anima mundi, the world soul, an idea that goes back to Plato: Therefore, we may consequently state that: this world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence ... a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related. (Plato: the Timaeus.) The modern version of this is the Gaia Hypothesis. It’s not something you can ‘prove’, only feel. In a sense, the Anima Mundi is Neptune.

(By the way, some readers make the mistake that because I occasionally quote people like Plato, I must be learned. I'm not. My knowledge is very sketchy, and if you sit me down with a book that's at all academic, I switch off. I haven't got a clue, for example, what 'The Timaeus' is!)

With Uranus-Pluto, we know that big change is happening, and we can also describe the type of change. Pluto is the basic force of life that will, if we want it to, move us onto a more conscious level collectively. And Uranus is the great Disrupter and Progresser and Awakener that moves it all along, that facilitates the often sudden shift from one stage to the next, like a young bird cracking its shell.

With Uranus and Pluto now both moving into the square (from opposite directions), the speed of change will be intensified over the coming months. The necessary sense of crisis and instability that accompanies Uranus-Pluto will intensify.

We have already seen this instability and sense of crisis growing over the last couple of years – as Uranus and Pluto have come within range of each other – economically, politically and environmentally. Economically, we are a long way from being out of the woods, even though we continue to take hope from the latest sets of figures.

The debt problems seem intractable. Politically, there is the intensification of polarisation that you see under Uranus-Pluto both across the Middle and Near East and in the US.

We can expect a highly polarised US Presidential Election campaign next year – and probably polarisation within the candidate selection race as well, particularly in the Republican Party, involving its right wing ‘Tea Party’ movement.

Sarah Palin’s star, however, will no longer be rising, as transiting Neptune, which gives charismatic appeal, has now finished conjoining her Sun, Mars, Saturn in Aquarius; and Uranus-Pluto will next year have finished with her Venus (popularity). It would seem that her period of appeal will therefore be over. Prediction: she will declare her candidacy, and be knocked out after Uranus makes his final conjunction to her Venus, Prog Mars starts to separate from natal Venus and Prog Moon from natal Neptune. Not so Mr Obama, where Neptune will have moved on from squaring his MC to an applying square to his Moon. So his election-winning charismatic appeal will still be there, for better or for worse. He will also be experiencing a Progressed Full Moon (applying), which suggests a peak in his life.

The crisis that doesn’t seem to interest voters much is the environment and our profligate use of her resources. I think the Pluto Discovery chart, which has Pluto at 17 Cancer, warns us of the Power (Pluto) of Nature (Cancer), which can be for us or against us. The first Pluto Opposition is in 5 years time, while Uranus-Pluto is still operative. So I expect this crisis to intensify.

In a way it is the Spectre at the Feast. It is the issue behind all others that we still effectively ignore. But you can’t separate the earth from human consciousness. It is the ground of our consciousness. The increase in natural disasters from oil spills to flooding to earthquakes in recent years is like something we are repressing coming out at the edges. Somewhere we KNOW, and it seems so huge and it threatens us so much that we don’t want to know, and the more we try to keep it down, the more it will express itself as an autonomous, destructive personality. We have effectively treated nature as an enemy in our use of her, so that is how we think of her, and the natural disasters kind of ‘prove’ this.

The earth herself is the collective unconscious in its widest sense. She stores the imprint of the whole history of life. We are not separate from that, we are integral to the animus mundi. And there are profound patterns to life that we will never know: how can one small human consciousness ever know more than one small part of life? We sense this, and experience it as a profound mystery, the unknowability of life.

The problems we have created with the environment are incredibly difficult to solve, for we cannot easily conceive how 7 billion people could live in a sustainable way on the planet, even if countries co-operated, which they won’t. Neptune in Pisces represents the new dream of how we could do that; but it also represents the loss of the old dream, the sense of hopelessness even, that needs to come first. I think that sense of hopelessness is already there in the collective unconscious, but we are not admitting to it. Acknowledged, it is a good thing, it is soulful (Neptune). Alternative energy sources and ways of life remain the dream of a few.

The nuclear problem in Japan, occurring just as Neptune was about to enter Pisces, is synchronous. Nuclear energy still represents the dream of unlimited energy supplies, and while we have that dream, it is hard for an attitude of sustainable use of resources to come about.

Even if nuclear power isn’t terrible environmentally – I don’t think there is a clear answer here, and I don’t think dogmatism against nuclear power helps – it still represents an attitude of taking as much as we can from Nature without giving back.

So we get a total picture from the outer planets here: Uranus-Pluto describing an intensifying sense of crisis around the environment as Pluto moves towards its ‘natal’ opposition; and Neptune’s Ingress into Pisces representing a loss of faith in the stand-alone power of Science (Neptune in Aquarius); a collective sense of loss of vision and even despair as Neptune further establishes itself in Pisces; but also the distinct possibility of a new, more holistic vision as Neptune moves towards the end of Pisces and on into Aries in 12-15 years time. This will be the time when Pluto moves into Aquarius, when the shadow of Science will have to be faced.

Let's get really cosmic: the North Node is currently conjunct the Galactic Centre. This happens every 19 years or so. But it has happened at the same time as a Uranus Ingress and a Neptune Ingress, and at this turning point in human affairs. (By the way, I subscribe to the idea that 2012, if it is indeed significant, happened in 2010 at the lunar eclipse on the winter solstice.) We are starting to discover earth-sized planets, and therefore the possibility of life, around other stars. It seems like a matter of time. It is as if what is happening here now has wider significance, that consciousness with its cleverness and potential for self-centredness always eventually reaches the sort of impasse we are in now. It is our Battlestar Galactica moment. The Anima Via Lactea is watching.

Pluto and the End of History

In 1992 Professor Francis Fukayama published his book ‘The End of History and the Last Man’. In it he made the claim that:

"What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such... That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

It always seemed to me a bit of a daft and complacent claim to make, but no different in essence to claims such as Jesus being the only son of god: it is religion rather than thought. But it fitted in well with American neo-conservative thinking. 11 years later Iraq was invaded on the grounds of bringing democracy to the Middle East (as well as on the grounds of WMD, Oil, the war on fundamentalist Islam etc).

It could be said that the invasion of Iraq will come to be seen as a high point in Democracy as an ideology, as an absolute truth to which other countries need to be converted. The attempt to convert Iraq to Democracy has failed, and all the US can hope for is an eventual and not-too-dishonourable withdrawal.

Democracy remains a potent idea, but like all such ideas it has a beginning, a middle and an end. It is also a form of government, and with Pluto entering the sign of government – Capricorn – it is timely that the idea of democracy has been coming under question.

Kuwait, for example, is a democracy with no shortage of oil reserves. Yet the country has been overshadowed economically by its dynamic neighbours — Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Qatar — whose economies are booming under absolute monarchies.

According to the New York Times : ‘All this has left many Kuwaitis deeply disenchanted with their 50-member elected legislature. The collapse of the Bush administration’s efforts to promote democracy in the region and the continuing chaos in Iraq, just to the north — once heralded as the birthplace of a new democratic model — have also contributed to a popular suspicion that democracy itself is one Western import that has not lived up to its advertising.’

The neo-conservative Robert Kagan, in his new book "The Return of History and the End of Dreams", admits that history has not turned out like Fukayama said it would. His attitude seems to be exhortatory, a call to further battle against non-democracies. When I read some of his points, which I think in many ways are sound, I drew a different overall conclusion: that the idea of democracy as a universal good, to which the whole world needs eventually to be converted, is now on the wane, a turning point has been reached. Modern democracy is, of course, a western idea. In the Middle East for example, democracy as a universal good never was and probably never will be a potent idea.

According to BBC news, Kagan dismisses Fukayama’s satisfied pronouncement: "History has returned and the peoples of the liberal world need to choose to shape it or let others shape it for them. The world was not witnessing a transformation [as the Cold War ended], however, merely a pause in the endless competition of nations and peoples. Nationalism, far from being weakened by globalisation has now returned with a vengeance."

In particular he identifies autocracy as the new menace and singles out Russia and China. "The autocracies of Russia and China have figured out how to permit open economic activity while suppressing political activity. They have seen that people making money will keep their noses out of politics, especially if they know their noses will be cut off." He portrays the modern world as one of "global competition".

"It may not come to war," he remarks alarmingly, "but the global competition between liberal and autocratic governments will likely intensify in coming years."

What I found very interesting was this idea that “The autocracies of Russia and China have figured out how to permit open economic activity while suppressing political activity.”

The US has the idea that a thriving economy and democracy go hand in hand. In fact, much of the western world has this idea, because since the end of WWII all the richest countries have been democracies. The fact that the USSR went bust and collapsed just seemed to prove the point. (Via Marx, the USSR also had its own erroneous ideology around communism being the end of history).

Now, however, China is booming despite being a dictatorship. Kagan thinks ideologically, so he thinks his truth must be fought for all the harder. If you are not religious about it, however, you can see one of the main props underlying the idea of democracy collapsing. It is no longer the only route to a thriving modern economy.

This is a very significant shift. China’s rise, whether we know it or not, is changing the way the West thinks about its own system. With the demise of Christianity, Democracy has become one of our central, albeit secular, truths. It is not yet time to proclaim ‘Democracy is Dead’, but it is certainly undergoing a tectonic shift.

The US was the world’s first full democracy, in the sense that it did not, unlike the UK, have a monarch. (Though it was still some time before all adults had the vote.) I think that US history, and its idea of democracy, can be looked at in terms of the Pluto/Galactic Centre Cycle.

The Galactic Centre is the point at which our Galaxy revolves around itself, and there is thought to be a black hole there, or perhaps a double one. The GC moves slowly, taking approx 25,000 years to do a full cycle of the Zodiac. It is therefore associated with the biggest shifts in human consciousness. As is Pluto, with its mere 250 year cycle. As Pluto makes one of its rare passes over the GC – which it did in 2006/7 – it picks up new themes for humanity, and lets go of old ones.

Pluto last passed over the GC in 1760, just as revolutionary activity was beginning in the American colonies, activity that would eventually lead to American Independence and its new system of government (which the founders did not call democracy, but whose commitment to the principle of natural freedom and equality is seen as amounting to the same thing.)

Now, 250 years later, Democracy has had an astoundingly successful run, but seems to be reaching certain natural limits which did not seem to be there previously. The sign of Sagittarius under which this cycle has taken place indicates that it is religious truth, rather then e.g. scientific truth with which we are dealing.

This cycle also corresponds to the relentless expansion (Sagittarius) of American wealth and power (Pluto) that we have seen over the last 250 years. (See my post The Galactic Centre and American Power.) And again, limitations are now being encountered both economically and militarily. The US has lost ground relative to the rest of the world in recent years, for the first time ever, and there is no reason to suppose they will regain it. These reversals also correspond to the US Progressed Saturn and Mars both going Retrograde for the first time ever in recent years. Prog Mars went Retrograde during the Iraq War, which suggests this war will come to be seen as the point at which America went into slow reverse as a military power.

With Pluto having passed over the GC and brought the beginning of the end of Democracy conceived as a universal ideology, it is very timely that it is now entering Capricorn, which is a very practical sign. The next 16 years will see an emphasis on government that works and that, in foreign relations, advances the interests of the country. By the same token, Capricorn is about strong boundaries, and so we are likely to see a resurgence of nationalism, as Kagan also said.

To conclude, here are a few quotes about democracy:

Winston Churchill: Democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried.

George Orwell: In the case of a word like DEMOCRACY, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.

Alex Carey: The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.

THE ASTROLOGICAL AGES

The Age of Aquarius has no clear starting point. The various ages are based around the fact that the vernal equinox moves backwards very slowly, due to the way the earth spins (Confession: I don’t understand it). The vernal equinox, which occurs in spring when the day and night are of equal length, is the point at which the Sun is at 0 Aries, and this point moves backwards in relation to the constellations at a rate of about 1 degree every 70 years. Our astrology does not take this into account (though Vedic astrology does), so that for what we would call say 24 Sag, the Vedics would lop off about 23 degrees (the amount the zodiac has shifted since about 90BC), and call it one degree Sag. So the point we call 0 Aries - the beginning of the astrological year - has been moving backwards and is now, in reality, somewhere in early Pisces. Which makes this the Piscean Age. When it reaches Aquarius, we will be in the Aquarian Age.

When it will do this is a matter of debate. Do we, for example, treat the constellations as they actually are, or do we use the artificial division into 30 degrees each that our astrology uses?

Whenever that date is, it is clear to me that we are moving from the Piscean Age to the Aquarian Age, if only from the point of view of what is the defining source of knowledge in our western culture. The ultimate source of authority in the Piscean Age was Christianity, whose central motif is the figure of Christ on the Cross – a Piscean motif, if there ever was one. Our new priests of the unseen are the scientists, science has become the ultimate source of authority. And Science is associated with Aquarius.

In my blog the other day ‘The Galactic Age of Sagittarius’, I was arguing, based on the equally slow movement of the Galactic Centre, that we live in a Sagittarian Age, an era of ‘sky religion’, where the ultimate nature of things is to be found in the Christian heaven, or the Muslim paradise etc, though that age is coming to an end, and in 200 years we will be in the Galactic Age of Capricorn.

To say that we are moving from the Piscean Age to the Aquarian Age is the conventional way of seeing things, and it makes sense. The Galactic Ages are my own invention, and they also make sense. But now that the Galactic Centre is part of astrology - and its presence is undeniably fundamental - I think we have to view its 2100 year journey through each sign also as an important Age in itself. So how do we reconcile these 2 systems?

The 2 systems are coming from opposite ends of the psyche. The first system is based on the apparent movement of the Sun in relation to the constellations – that which is brightest and most conscious and differentiated within ourselves; and the other system is based on the movement of the Galactic Centre in relation to the constellations – that which is most unconscious and least differentiated in us, but which is no less powerful for that, and which connects us to our primordial origins and the universal process of evolution.

So with these 2 different symbolisms being in relation to each other, we are in a position to give more clarity to each of them. The Solar Piscean Age (as I shall call it) is not just an age where things are more generally Piscean. It is more specifically an Age where the individual, differentiated consciousness, the ideal human being, if you like, is pointed in a Piscean direction, thinks of itself in Piscean terms. And the ideal human in this Age has been the Saint, one who is above worldly desires, connected to God and working for the benefit of others.

The Galactic Ages connect us to the whole process of unfoldment of matter-consciousness, from singularity to universe and back again, and the meaning of that journey. The Galactic Ages, in other words, deal with cosmology – our conception of the universe in its totality, and by extension, humanity’s place in it. In the west, we are drawing towards the end of the Sagittarian Age, which began in about 80AD, and has had a Christian cosmology as its most defining influence: the universe was created by God, who is a sky god, somewhere up there, and who is also an authoritarian, jealous, fundamentalist God. These are all Sagittarian themes.

The Solar Piscean Age has to a large extent overlapped with the Galactic Sagittarian Age. These signs are square to each other, which suggests that our creation myths – as found in the Old Testament – and our ideal human being, in the form of Christ, do not rest easily together. Christ’s message was one of love, whereas the Old Testament universe was ruled by fear of God. And this contradiction runs right through the church, particularly in its orthodox Catholic form. At the same time, both signs are Jupiter ruled, and the God of the Old Testament is held to be the same God as that of the New Testament.

So what does the future hold? What are the natures of the Solar and Galactic Ages we are moving into, those of Aquarius and Capricorn respectively? I think we can see signs of them already. In the Solar Aquarian Age, the ideal human is rational, scientific, benevolent, forward-thinking, original, individualistic and non-conformist. We can see this emphasis in schools – R.E. (religious education) has a lowly place on the curriculum, the Piscean saint is no longer our ideal. Whereas Science has a very prominent place in the curriculum. And the education system concentrates on the development of the rational mind – one-sidedly, some might argue. And the universe we are moving into – the new Galactic Age - is no longer one created and ruled by Yahweh, by God’s Law (Sagittarius), but one based on Natural Law (Capricorn).

This process is still in a transitional stage, as we have not reached these new Ages. But the combination of Aquarius and Capricorn is an interesting one. On the one hand, we can see them working well together: the scientific Aquarian living in a universe governed by natural law. And to the extent that the co-ruler of Aquarius is Saturn, which also rules Capricorn, this will work well. But Aquarius is also ruled by Uranus the rebel, and will feel trapped in a cosmology that is too relentlessly mechanical.

In 2000 years or so, the Solar and Galactic Age points will coincide (in late Capricorn or early Aquarius), an event that only happens about every 12,750 years. It is a point at which humanity can feel fully at home in the universe, when we’re not scratching our heads, so to speak, and wondering why we are here, and putting ourselves at odds with nature. The last time this conjunction occurred would have been around 8750BC, just before agriculture became widespread and large-scale settlements arose. It was a time before ‘civilisation’ and developed technologies and all the problems that come with them, when we would have known our place in the universe much more clearly.

So in 2000 years or so we will have another chance to feel at home in the universe. We have taken the evolutionary steps of developing technologies and civilisations, but it has inevitably put us at odds with nature, and alienated us from the instinctive knowledge that we too are part of nature. Perhaps, in 2000 years time, as the Solar and Galactic Ages come together again, we will find that new synthesis, and then begin on the next cycle of evolution.

THE GALACTIC AGE OF SAGITTARIUS

Well I got up to Christmas time and I thought I’m going to have a week off blogging, I want a break, and before I knew it I’d done 5 posts in succession on the Galactic Centre. And all out of my own head, because the GC hasn’t yet got much in the way of accepted astrological meaning.

Before I say any more, I have to declare an interest: I have the Galactic Centre conjunct my Saturn, widely conjunct my Moon, and sextile both my Sun and Ascendant. With my Saturn and GC in the 3rd House, it is not surprising that I should be writing about it. And with a staid planet like Saturn being the strongest aspect, the GC is not so likely to go to my head, as it can so easily do. But it also means I am less likely to do something earth-changing. I’m just likely to do quite a good job of writing about it – giving ‘form’ to it. And it happened because I let go of Saturn, so to speak, in deciding to have a break from blogging.

The Galactic Centre is at just under 27 Sag, and moves at just under a minute a year. From the point of view of a human lifetime, it is effectively stationary. It will move just over 1 degree in the course of a human life. So instead of one fixed point – the earth – astrology now has two, one very close to home, and one extremely distant, with the planets and their cycles positioned between them. (The stars, of course, are also fixed, but in our astrology they are a background that shapes, rather than elements of the psyche). These planets – or gods – partake of both fixed points. From the point of view of the earth, these gods are like us, only more powerful. From the point of view of the Galactic Centre, these gods are archetypal forces, elusive and subtle enough to be an expression of Absolute or primordial consciousness, consciousness as it was before time and space and the universe unfolded from its black hole ‘singularity’. That was a bit of a mouthful, wasn’t it?

So the planets mediate between ourselves and what we feel to be the ultimate nature of things (which is not something fixed, but alive and vast and beyond the grasp of any one human consciousness). And as the planets move outwards, they become less recognisably human and more the expression of something other, something bigger and wider than ourselves. If there is anything that Pluto is not, it is a human being. Pluto represents the death of everything that to us is ordinary and human – and in that death lies the possibility of an experience of something very real, not conditioned by the fears and insecurities and delusions that seem to be part of being human. Funny thing, but whenever I write about Pluto I feel him turn up in the room behind me. I'm sure he won't mind me telling you.

From a wider point of view, the Galactic Centre is not a fixed point. It moves through a complete sign in about 2150 years. Which means that it moved into Sagittarius in about 80 AD, and into Scorpio in about 2100 BC.

It’s about the same time-scale – 25000 years for the whole cycle – as the precession of the equinoxes, which gives rise to the various ages, and describes the apparent slow movement of the Sun at 0 Aries in relation to the astrological constellations. (We are currently moving from the Piscean Age to the Aquarian Age, which is allegedly an age of brotherhood. Huh!) They are probably therefore astronomically related phenomena, and perhaps someone could enlighten me here? I guess the answer is that the GC moves along with the stars in relation to the Sun, it is part of the same background, and its movement through Sag is part of the same fiction, due to precession, that we tell ourselves about the signs the planets are in. Presumably the GC occupies a fixed place in the sky at about 4 Sag, and always has done, if you include the precession of the equinoxes (like the Vedic astrologers do). Or am I completely muddled? Can anyone follow me?

So this slow movement of the GC suggests that humanity’s relationship to the Absolute changes over time, we see it through different eyes. We are currently in what we could call the Sagittarian Galactic Age (which has about 200 years to go), and before that we were in the Scorpionic Age. What might this mean? You could say that this relationship to the Absolute is the most fundamental relationship of all. It concerns why we are here at all and what constitutes a fruitful life. It concerns the metaphysical underpinning to life, on which we all have our own ideas, formulated or unformulated, wrong-headed and derivative or intelligent and considered. It concerns religion and ‘spirituality’.

You could say that the present Sagittarian Age is one of sky religion, often of a fundamentalist nature, which fits well the meaning of Sagittarius, as well as fitting in well with what has been going on, in the ‘civilised world’ at least, for the last 2000 odd years. The real nature of things is not to be encountered here on earth but somewhere else, in the Christian heaven or in the Muslim paradise or, in Buddhism, beyond the endless round of death and re-birth. And people often hold these beliefs dogmatically, particularly when they are part of a religious organisation or society where you believe what you believe because your neighbour does.

So it looks like we have another 200 years of this to go before we start to see the Galactic Centre through another lens. But 200 years is also a short time, it is only 10% of the GC’s time in a sign. And though there is no lack of religious fundamentalism in the world, it has nevertheless become possible in the last few hundred years to opt out of the religious orthodoxies, and it is this, perhaps, that is the sign that the GC is gradually coming to the end of its time in Sagittarius. I don’t think ‘sky religion’ is all bad – it’s just not to my taste. I don’t see anything in principle wrong in seeing life in terms of light and transcendence. And the idea of an immortal spirit does appeal to me. It’s just that Sagittarius often also has a well-known reluctance to engage with the earth element running alongside, and informing, its enthusiasm for light and transcendence. And this reluctance weakens people and makes them vulnerable to the crusading, dogmatic element, with all its false certainties, that we also find in Sagittarius.

This disregard for the earth element is reflected, as the GC nears its term in Sag, in our environmental crisis. Chiron (not the usual asteroid) is the image that makes up the constellation Sagittarius, and he is also an image of nature wounded: he has the body of a horse that has an incurable injury to its knee.

In Europe, the time when it was least possible to be heretical was probably from around 1000 to 1500 AD, when the Catholic Church was at its most powerful, and this would have started around the time the GC reached the middle part of Sagittarius; just as, in our own time, Pluto reached the middle of Sagittarius in 2001 at the same time as militant Islam reached a peak through 9/11 and the events following on from it.

So what might the Galactic Centre in Scorpio have meant – i.e. from about 2100BC to about 80AD? Scorpio is a strongly instinctual sign, for Scorpios the instincts and nature are what is sacred and a source of power (Scorpio). This is much more characteristic of tribal, ‘pre-civilised’ religion than it is of Sagittarius, and this is what, to a much greater extent, we would have found in those times. A friend of mine who is Native American, and a teacher from the Chippewa-Cree tradition, refuses to speculate about what came before or will come after this life – for him it is unknowable – and his ideal is to be a balanced human being, entirely content to be here on the earth.

Scorpio is also associated with the planting of a seed – just as a Pluto (Scorpio’s ruler) transit can plant the seed of some new way of being, and just as Christopher Columbus planted the seed of New World settlement through reaching America in 1492, while Pluto was in Scorpio. A seed is something small and hidden, yet powerful in its unfoldment.

The ‘Axial Age’, a coined termed by Karl Jaspers, lasted from 800 to 200BC, while the Galactic Centre was in Scorpio, and was a time when many of the early revolutionary thinkers/mystics were alive in Europe, India and China, men such as Confucius, the Buddha, the authors of the Upanishads, and many of the Greek thinkers. During this period, according to Jaspers, “the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid simultaneously and independently... And these are the foundations upon which humanity still subsists today". (Wikipedia)

As with the events around the GC in Sag peaking in the middle of the sign, so too did the Axial Age begin soon after the Galactic Centre reached the middle of Scorpio.

So what might characterise the Age we are moving into, the Galactic Age of Capricorn? The GC is nearing the end of Sag, so we might expect to see a few signs of what GC in Capricorn might be, even though it’s 200 years away. What immediately springs to mind is the religion of materialism. I don’t think there was ever a Golden Age when humanity was not materialistic. It’s just that we’re a lot better at it these days, to the point where the creation of wealth for wealth’s sake has become a sort of widespread religion, an ultimate value that gives meaning to many people’s lives, or so they think. Even the creation of the wealth we need to live on is given an inflated moral value, particularly in the USA. (So you can take care of yourself - good, now do something interesting!) All this is a relatively recent phenomenon, and may therefore signal the Age to come: the Age of Mammon! It may be that we ain’t seen nothing yet when it comes to mankind’s ability to worship material wealth. More positively, it may be an age when people with real wisdom, based on age and experience, will come to be valued more – hierarchy in the best sense. Sagittarius, with its bias towards the ‘puer’ archetype, reflects our modern youth culture that does not know how to value old people. And the tendency of organised religion to worship dead images of perfection instead of valuing real people. What we're likely to get in the Capricornian Age is the 'senex' archetype, which at its worst is the "appalling old waxworks" - Prince Charles' description of the current Chinese leaders.

THE PERSONAL GALACTIC CENTRE

It is not easy having an outer planet make a hard aspect to an inner planet, as it requires us to acknowledge and integrate a dimension from outside of the ordinary personality. But it is also part of what life is about, for if we do not have such aspects natally, we will sooner or later meet them by transit. Life requires us continually to transform ourselves and to connect with dimensions outside of our immediate, perhaps narrow, interests.

We are helped in this process by the fact that the outer planets are at least part of our solar system; they are gods that we can recognise through the stories about them. They are like us as well as being ‘Other’.

But when it comes to the Galactic Centre, there is no such overlap. The GC represents the evolutionary impulse within matter-consciousness in its widest yet most direct form. It is the force within the universe that makes all forms of life feel the urge to grow and unfold. And having it aspecting a personal planet is like being directly connected to a nuclear power station, without the usual series of steam turbines, transformers etc that make its energy usable by ordinary household appliances.

So if you can work with the energy of the GC, amazing things with wide significance will be achieved – after all, it is the evolutionary energy of the whole universe that one is being plugged into, so a wider significance is inevitable. On the other hand, it is also hard not to also be driven a little bit crazy by it. I think that George W Bush is a good example. For now I want to stick to 4 degree conjunctions and oppositions, but I’m going to make an exception in the case of GWB. His nodal axis is at 20.35 Gemini-Sag, and his Galactic Centre is at 26.07 Sag.

The thing about Sagittarians is that they are prone to feel that God is speaking through them anyway, even without the Galactic Centre getting involved, so I think the GC intensifies this possibility. With Gemini (North) - Sag (South) Nodes, it is easy (South Node) to feel you are the voice of God, and the lesson (North Node) is to bring in discriminating awareness (Gemini). With the GC sitting there, the lesson is that much harder. For GWB, who has a weak Sun – in the 12th House and square to Chiron – it is very difficult for him to sustain his individuality in the face of what he feels to be God speaking through him.

Saddam Hussein was executed this morning at just before 6am (local time) in Baghdad. The ASC was at 21 Sag, straddled by Mars at 17 Sag and Pluto at 27 Sag – an appropriate signature for a violent (Mars) death (Pluto). And there is George Bush’s nodal axis running along the ASC-DESC axis of the death chart. The Galactic Centre, of course, is involved as well, sitting next to Pluto at 27 Sag – less than a day after the exact conjunction, which only occurs every 240 years. And Saddam’s death has been a direct result of George Bush’s decision, or rather his directions from God, to invade Iraq.

There is a further connection with GWB’s chart, in that both have a Mercury-Pluto conjunction just below the ASC – in Bush’s case, I have always thought that it is this that has given him his ready association with death while in office, whether as governor of Texas or President of the USA.

To give a more positive example of the Galactic Centre in a chart, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the internet was born on 8 June 1955, with North Node at 26.21 Sag, and GC at 26.14 Sag (he also has Mercury opposite at 28.07 Gemini). I think that a characteristic of the GC in a chart is that one’s actions are connected to the Collective and can have a profoundly progressive, evolutionary effect on a wide scale. Which Berners-Lee has achieved through his invention of the Internet.

And which Neil Armstrong achieved through being the first man on the Moon. He has Moon (of all planets!) at 25.24 Sag conjunct GC at 25.53 Sag. Note the tightness of the conjunctions in this case and in the case of Berners-Lee, and how central to our culture their achievements have been. Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the Moon, has DESC at 26.44 Sag, less than a degree off the GC at 25.53 Sag.

A few other figures with conjunctions to the GC are: Steven Spielberg (Sun 20 minutes off GC), Rupert Murdoch (Moon 1½ degrees, ASC 5½ degrees off GC), Tiger Woods (Moon 4.08 degrees, IC 2.34 degrees off GC), Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (MC 4.13 degrees off GC), Billy Graham (Moon 3.03 degrees off GC).

Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma Bomber, had DESC within 31 minutes of the GC, as well as Moon, Uranus and Pluto more widely square the GC. He was at war with the government, and seems to have lived in a fantastical, extremist way, consistent with a personality unable to handle the extremely high voltage of the GC.

David Cameron, the leader of the UK Conservative Party, has his IC within a couple of degrees of the GC. We have yet to see what he will achieve, but being one of the 1960s Uranus-Pluto generation, and with it (widely) square to his GC, he has the capacity to creatively lead the UK through the testing times that the upcoming Uranus-Pluto square seem to portend – that is, providing he doesn’t identify himself too much with the outer planet/GC energy that is working through him. (Winston Churchill, a Conservative leader who certainly led Britain through testing times, had IC within 5 degrees of the Galactic Centre).

Prince William, 2nd in line to the British throne, has his ASC and Neptune within a degree of the GC, and his Sun opposite the GC within 3½ degrees. His Moon is more widely opposite it. So, however he turns out, he seems destined to be deeply involved in the events of his time: he won’t be just an irrelevant anachronism, another perfectly feasible outcome for a British king.

Of the people I know with close conjunctions to the Galactic Centre, I have noticed in a number of them what could technically be called a wonky connection with the bigger, wider issues of life: they are strongly connected to that dimension, but they also tend to become identified with it and make pronouncements around it that are simply wrong! One person I know of has Sun conjunct GC, and has spent the last 30 years as the leading disciple within a religious group. He’ll make pronouncements about anything, and takes what he says terribly seriously, but it’s all based around quite a skewed and limited view of human nature. Another person, with GC conjunct ASC, gets grandiose visions around what she can achieve – but then, to her credit, realises what she’s been doing when she falls flat on her face. Until the next time!

So with the GC conjunction, I think there tends to be an unusually strong energy running through people that means they can achieve a lot, for better or for worse, and that at best can profoundly advance whatever collective unfoldment humanity is going through. In a personal chart, where it is strongly aspected, I think there can also be a need to separate out, and become discerning of, what seems to be the ‘voice of God’ within oneself. Because the GC can be very destructive if it is operating unconsciously.

GALACTIC CENTRE: 4TH POSTING

It’s easy to feel pummelled by superlatives when reading about the astrology of the Galactic Centre, so I thought I’d begin my latest G.C. blog by comparing it to an onion. The G.C. is a black hole, an incredibly massive body about which we can access no information. It is a singularity, but out of singularities unfold galaxies and universes, which eventually collapse back into singularities: the journey of matter-consciousness over billions of years.

Which is a bit like an onion, the essence of which, the bulb, lives out of sight underground. But every year it unfolds into a plant – the universe – and eventually the plant/universe dies back into the bulb. But the bulb is enriched by its experience of unfoldment, it grows as a result. And who knows what sort of enrichment matter-consciousness goes through in its long journey from singularity to universe and back again. All we know is that some sort of enrichment, some sort of learning DOES go on. We know this because we have the experience of learning in our individual lives.

I don’t think that matter and consciousness can be separated. If we arrange matter in a certain way, then what we recognise as life is also present. If we synthesise some DNA, and put the right sort of gloop around it, there will be observable life or consciousness there. We KNOW this, it is not speculative or a belief. Logically, therefore, we have to say that consciousness is an inherent quality of matter, all matter, and that consciousness becomes more sophisticated and can even start to come to know itself as its material counterpart, the ‘body’, develops.

Evolution seems to show us that there is some sort of urge to unfold in matter-consciousness. I don’t think that the fact of evolution can be argued with. There is too much evidence for it. The mechanism for evolution is another matter. That does not seem to be well understood, and personally I think there is much more to it than natural selection combined with random mutations. I think, for example, that the urge to unfold and know itself that is inherent in matter-consciousness, and which is probably not scientifically measurable, also plays a large part.

Certain things are outside the remit of science. If you have an emotion, say anger, this can be described in terms of chemical pathways in the brain, electrical impulses and behaviour. But what it actually FEELS like to experience anger can never be described by the scientific method. Science can describe very well the objective, measurable correlative to a subjective experience, but it can never get near that subjectivity. It can never, in other words, get near the most important thing of all, which is the experience of being conscious, of having a body and emotions and feeling alive. Describing that needs to be left to the poets.

And I think that the urge to unfold belongs to this subjective but essential realm, which is present even in apparently inanimate stardust.

So to return to the onion metaphor, the Galactic Centre is the bulb beneath our feet, and we are the plant. It is our origin and source, and as such we will have a natural feeling for it, remote maybe, for it is perhaps billions of years since we were last in that form. It is like a distant bell sounding, or a sense of something that we only distantly recognise but which nevertheless sustains us.

In this sense the Galactic Centre has an affinity with the planet Neptune, the ‘womb’ of consciousness from which we arose and to which one day we will return. The G.C. also naturally provokes wider questions of purpose and meaning, and as such also has an affinity with Jupiter. Being an immense but hidden source of power – its existence can only be deduced – the Galactic Centre is also connected to Pluto.

The Galactic Centre introduces a new level of unknowability into astrology. The inner planets such as Mercury and Mars can, to some extent, be known as part of our conscious endowment. The outer planets – Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto – can be known to some extent, but they are more like gods we have to honour and collaborate with, and whose purposes we can only know in a limited way. At the same time, there are plenty of myths and stories around these gods, so we can know them as characters. The Galactic Centre, however, cannot be known at all. It is not a god with its own legends. Being a singularity, anything we try to say directly about it is not true. We can say what it is not – it is beyond time and space etc – but apart from that we can say nothing. It is the ‘Great Mystery’ at the heart of things, of which to some extent the outer planets also partake.

The Galactic Centre also points to the beginning and end of astrology itself. Before the G.C. we had the Sun, Moon and planets performing endless cycles around the earth (motion is relative, so it is just as true to say, albeit more complicated, that the Sun goes round the earth as to say the earth goes round the Sun: importantly, it is closer to our actual experience.) The G.C. puts astrology itself in the context of a larger cycle, the great inbreaths and outbreaths of singularities, in which galaxies are born and die. This makes our astrology relative and temporal, expressive of eternal truths yes, but in a particular form that will one day be swallowed up, allowing new gods to be born.

THE GALACTIC CENTRE AND AMERICAN POWER

In her blog of 19 Feb 2006(collaboratingwithfate.blogspot.com), Kathryn Cassidy plots some of the hard transits of Pluto to the Galactic Centre over the last 500 years. She says: “If we look back over history we can see that this cycle always has a great deal to do with emerging nations and deep cultural transformations.” The conjunction of 1760/1, for example, coincided with the French losing all of their possessions in North America. In terms of the meaning of Pluto, what we are seeing are shifts in the balance of power (Pluto).

And it’s as if the Galactic Centre, being the most undifferentiated and powerful source of energy in the galaxy, simply intensifies whatever it touches – in this case, Pluto and all things Plutonic. Including, one could say, Pluto’s status itself, which has been downgraded to ‘dwarf planet’ during the current conjunction between Pluto and the G.C.

The cycle of hard transits from Pluto to the G.C. is reflected in U.S.A history, particularly in terms of its power as a nation.

The 1760 conjunction, for example, saw the beginning of the revolutionary activity that eventually resulted in American independence from Britain.

The square of 1817-19 came between the war with Britain of 1812 to 1815, and the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which proclaimed the United States' opinion that European powers should no longer colonize or interfere in the Americas. This was a defining moment in the foreign policy of the United States.

The opposition of 1910 to 1912 occurred as America rose to prominence as a world power.

During the square of 1969 to 1970 we saw the beginning of the end of the Vietnam War, as American public opinion turned against the war and America, the world’s most powerful country, gradually withdrew from Vietnam and lost its first war. America came to know the limits of its power.

With the current conjunction, and with the present situation in Iraq, we have to see its meaning as the next stage in the cycle after Vietnam, which is a loss of global power for America. I have blogged about this before in terms of America’s progressed Mars and Saturn going retrograde for the first time ever (see e.g. blog of 1st Dec 2006), but the Pluto-Galactic Centre cycle drives the point home further. We are entering a new time when American power will not be what it was. The Vietnam War showed America the limits of its power. The War in Iraq will probably come to be seen as the beginning of America’s actual decline as a superpower. This will be George Bush’s legacy to the USA and to the world.

So we are also seeing the completion of a cycle for America, that began with the Pluto-Galactic Centre conjunction of 1760 and the very beginnings of America's rise, through to the closing square of 1969-1970 and the first signs of the end of the cycle, and finally through to the conjunction of 2006-7 in which, in my opinion, we are seeing the early beginnings of an actual fall from power.

PLUTO AND THE GALACTIC CENTRE

As I was saying in my last post, I think the Galactic Centre points us to the vast journey of matter-consciousness as it unfolds from the singularity of a black hole, and back to singularity again billions of years later. Within a singularity, matter-consciousness is in its primordial state, beyond all the categories such as space and time that we impose on reality in order to make sense of our experience. It is the function of our various mystical traditions to help us deconstruct these impositions and gain insight into our real nature, into ‘the mind of God’.

The Galactic Centre, therefore, involves us in both the wider evolutionary journey of consciousness, and the individual journey each of us has to bring a reflective awareness to our own particular share of that wider consciousness.

The outer planets, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, each in their own way address both this collective evolution and our individual paths of unfoldment. So transits to the G.C. by any of these planets will intensify their function, particularly the conjunction, which ends an old cycle and begins a new one.

Over the next year we will be experiencing a conjunction of Pluto to the Galactic Centre, at just under 27 Sagittarius. It may be some years before we understand what this transit is about, as we are talking about a deep shift. But these things often run in cycles (tip: if you’re doing a reading for someone, and they have say transiting Neptune opposite their Sun, look at what happened when it made a square all those years ago, and how the current transit may be helping to move on those old issues).

The last time Pluto conjoined the G.C. was at about 24 Sag in 1758-60. The big thing that has happened since then was the Industrial Revolution and with it our exploitation and destruction of the environment. Crucial to the Industrial Revolution was the steam engine, and it was during the 1760s that the first condensing steam engine was developed by Gainsborough and then Watt. The increased efficiency of the Watt engine finally led to the general acceptance and use of steam power in industry. Pluto empowered the Industrial Revolution.

Now, 246 years later, as Pluto agains conjoins the G.C., we are encountering the consequences of that Revolution and, for the first time, environmentalism entering mainstream politics. In the UK, the Tory leader David Cameron has in the last year brought the environment onto the political agenda as a serious voter issue for the first time. After some years of questionably warmer winters, this year it is undeniable. Swallows have begun wintering over in England for the first time. Bears in Spain are not hibernating for the first time. And so on. Like the 1758-60 Pluto transit, the timing is pretty close to the transit (unlike what one might have expected for such a deep shift.) I am aware there have been environmentalist politicians, such as Al Gore in the USA, for some years. But it has not been seen as a major political issue.

And it is an evolutionary shift. The Industrial Revolution was something that would inevitably have happened sooner or later as part of humanity’s technological evolution. And with it came humanity’s less than perfect attitude towards the rest of the planet, an exploitative attitude that I think had always been latent. Yes, early indigenous peoples seem to have had a more harmonious and ‘sacred’ attitude to other life forms. But, strangely enough, many large mammals died out in various parts of the world around the time mankind first arrived there.

So now another shift is being asked of us through Pluto’s current conjunction to the Galactic Centre, in which we will have to address our exploitative attitude to the environment as revealed by the last cycle. And just as the Industrial Revolution took a while to get under way, so too will the crucial entry of environmentalism into mainstream politics, empowered by undeniable evidence of climate change and increasingly scarce resources, take a while to make a real difference.

We also need to ask why Pluto and why Sagittarius? How does the symbolism relate to these events? Pluto in Sag can only describe certain aspects of the situation, because the other planets are also there as well! Concurrent with the development of the steam engine, for example, was a Saturn-Uranus conjunction square to Pluto, which is a much more satisfactory signature for technological development, with Pluto being the empowerment of industry that this development led to. We could also see Pluto as emphasising the creation of riches (Pluto) through the exploitation/rape (Pluto) of the environment (and people), the great expansion (Sag) this involved, and the sense of meaning (Sag) this material progress has given to our lives. And this raises another issue: the expansion (Sag) of riches (Pluto) – i.e. an endlessly growing economy – gives us collectively a sense of purpose and meaning (Sag). A great deal of collective soul-searching as to what constitutes the purpose of human existence will therefore be required if we are to address the problems created by our ‘progress’. The Galactic Centre is demanding of us a philosophical (Sag) death and rebirth (Pluto).

There is what is known as the ‘esoteric ruler’ of each sign – I think Alice Bailey channeled them – but they are quite interesting, and could be said to show the signs functioning at their best. In the case of Sagittarius, normally ruled by lofty Jupiter, the esoteric ruler is the Earth itself. It is characteristic of Sagittarians to be passionately involved with the visionary, idealistic, philosophic realms, but not to be so interested in more ordinary matters. They need to come down to earth and ground their vision. As one Native American elder said: “Don’t tell me about your visions unless they grow corn.”

So this esoteric ruler, the earth, points to one of the major lessons for Sagittarius. And I think that this current conjunction of Pluto to the Galactic Centre in Sagittarius is raising this issue, and raising it in a Plutonic way: we need to acknowledge the earth beneath our feet or die, it is a survival issue. Though we have become very good at manipulating the earth element, it has become in the service of a mad dream of endlessly expanding prosperity. When I say ‘mad’ I mean it literally. We are no longer involved with the earth in the sense of a simple recognition and appreciation. We need to collectively ground this Sagittarian quest, and learn to find meaning again in the simple provision of our material needs through a give-and-take, appreciative attitude to the planet. It is a new synthesis that is required, because we cannot unlearn that new technological power that the last conjunction of Pluto to the Galactic Centre gave us, and which is also part of our collective evolution.

THE GALACTIC CENTRE

Well Pluto conjoins the Galactic Centre this month (and will do so twice more next year). The Galactic Centre moves at just 84’ per century. It is a black hole that is the gravitational centre of our galaxy, and it apparently both eats up stars and spews out new ones. What it means astrologically is up for grabs, as it was only identified in the 1960s, though the Mayans had some sort of take on it, and they called it Hunab Ku.

The thing about black holes is that all the usual rules of physics break down, time and space go out of the window, and we are left with a fantastic symbol for primordial consciousness, with all its creative potential – consciousness before all the constructs we add on in order to make some kind of sense of our experience, and before the arising of this really weird notion we are born with, that we individually are the centre of the universe; before, in Buddhist terms, we have artificially divided the universe into Subject and Object. The Galactic Centre is Mind, capital ‘M’. It holds the key to the nature of consciousness, and our job individually as human beings – perhaps - is to bring some sort of new awareness to that consciousness. That original consciousness is so vast and mysterious that no individual human being can become aware of more than a part of it: this is where I feel at home around Native American mysticism, and move away from Buddhist mysticism and its hubristic notion of an omniscient Buddha.

Living in Glastonbury, UK as I do, there was inevitably a shop in the High Street called Hunab Ku until recently, and it sold legal psycho-active plants, as well as a few illegal ones under the counter. No doubt they helped people connect with the Galactic Centre.

Back to the way we impose structure on consciousness. Oliver Sacks’ book ‘The man who mistook his wife for a hat’, which I read many years ago, gives an account of the author’s experiences with patients with neurological disorders. So far, so medical. But what is fascinating is what happens to these patients. One, for example, loses the ability to recognise generalities, so that he can tell you that a playing card is the Jack of Hearts, but not that it is a playing card. Another has the opposite disorder, so that he can tell you it is a playing card, but not which one it is. Another loses all sense of ‘right’, so that he eats the left hand part of the food on his plate (he cannot see the rest), and then moves his plate round to the left, and eats the left half of what is still there, and continues in this way. All pretty bizarre, but you are left dumbstruck at the implications: the way we experience the world is intimately and profoundly shaped by the hard-wiring in our brain. What seems to be ‘out there’ is almost entirely a construct of our brain that enables us to cope with our experience. Personally speaking, and I cannot prove this, the only reality I cannot deny is other beings, particularly other people, and the impact they have on me. Other people are real, and knowing that I guess helps keeps me sane. Other people experience themselves as a centre of consciousness just as intensely and individually as I do, yet we are profoundly interconnected, there is something very deep that we share, even if I don’t know those people.

So like I said, the Galactic Centre seems to me to embody this original, undifferentiated and endlessly creative consciousness. And we are on a journey through time and space to bring some sort of new awareness to this consciousness. We are like the individual petals on a flower, each bringing a unique aspect of this awareness, and contributing to a whole.

For a good introduction to the Galactic Centre, see Lynn Hayes article.

It’s now a day since I started this, and the great thing about blogs is that they don’t have to be polished articles. Or I’d never do them. Yesterday was the first time I’d ever thought about the Galactic Centre. What I’ve realised since then is that as an astrologer I take the movements of the heavens seriously, they symbolise the movements within our consciousness. And by ‘symbolise’ I do not mean an abstract analogy but a real, living, inter-connected correspondence. Astrology normally concerns the cycles of planets around the Sun. But by bringing in the Galactic Centre, we are adding a whole new dimension to astrology, a dimension which we have to add to maintain integrity within this body of knowledge.

The Galactic centre is a black hole, it is a ‘singularity’ beyond the normal laws of physics, it is akin to the state of matter before the ‘big-bang’, and akin to the state of matter after the universe collapses back in on itself (assuming it ever does), and certainly describes a galaxy after it has collapsed back in on itself, in which its sheer mass concentrated in one place becomes too great for the atomic structure of matter, under intense gravitational forces, to avoid collapsing – and with it, time and space break down. We are dealing with infinity, infinite gravity from which light cannot even emerge, but from which, mysteriously, new stars can be born.

So, given that the cycles of the planets around the Sun describe the cycles within consciousness, so too does the great in-breath and out-breath of singularity to galaxy and back to singularity describe a much wider cycle, or journey, of consciousness itself – from a time before any differentiation has happened, right through to all the different life-forms, including human, that consciousness seems to evolve into, and with all the learning and transformations that are involved, and back to a singularity again, but a singularity that has, hopefully, been in some way enriched by the journey of consciousness-matter that has occurred. I don’t think we can separate matter and consciousness, mind and body. We tend to do this unconsciously, due to our Christian heritage, but astrology would not work if they were separable. We inhabit a living universe.

A big question for me is “Does human consciousness progress?” From the point of view of this incredible journey of consciousness from black hole to unfoldment and back again – a perspective which the Galactic Centre opens up – it seems to me that something supremely important is going on through time, in which human consciousness, which is so particular, has its own role to play. From the narrower perspective of the last few thousand years, I cannot use the word ‘progress’ about humanity. Civilizations rise and fall, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, and within which we keep finding individuals who are outstanding. Our civilization too will fall, one day. The emergence of outstanding individuals, who are not simply a product of their species and circumstances, seems to characterise human consciousness, unlike other earthly life-forms. But humanity does not seem to learn on a collective level. The 20th century had more wars in it than any previous century.

So, empirically, human consciousness does not seem to me to progress collectively, although different potentials do seem to open up at different times in history. At the same time, astrology teaches me that our nature is to be found in the heavens and, in the widest sense, in that incredible journey of consciousness over billions of years that the Galactic Centre reveals. The nature of that journey is necessarily beyond the grasp of one individual human, but the fact of it remains a source of wonder.