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.

Assange, Obama and Bush: the Outer Planets and Collective Projections

There was a period in 2008, when Barack Obama was campaigning to be the Democratic Presidential candidate, when you weren’t likely to get a good reception if you said anything critical of the man. He was sweeping people away on a wave of hope for a better world. One astrologer told me at the time that my Saturn in Sagittarius gave me a fear of faith, which was stopping me from seeing Obama as he really he was. (I’d say it gave me sense!)

It was all very Neptunian, and it was Obama’s natal Sun square to Neptune that gave him the ability to sweep people away like this. Even the Nobel Peace Prize Committee got swept away by his promise. Now, 2 years later, he appears much more ordinary. Smart and trying to do a good job, but also at ease with the less savoury tasks that come with his position – wars, black ops, no doubt a certain amount of torture, putting pressure on big companies and other countries to do America’s bidding, and so on. America has changed a bit, but its big resistance to change has also become clearer.

Now, in late 2010, we have a similar situation with Julian Assange, the Great Rebel, who has become a cultural hero to many, especially as his leaks have provoked the inevitable response from the US and other western countries. He is now not just the Great Rebel, he is also the victim who needs protecting. (My last piece, suggesting a less savoury side to Mr Assange, has come under sustained, irrational attack in the comments section.)

I am not trying to say here whether or not I think Wikileaks is helpful. It is complicated, and how you view Wikileaks will probably determine whether or not you think he is a cultural hero. This time the relevant planet is Uranus, which natally squares Assange’s Sun and which is the planet of rebellion. (Chiron, which makes a t-square with the Sun and Uranus, gives him his victim/scapegoat status.)

The world is as it is because human nature is as it is. Why do we think that an Obama or an Assange can make it radically different? Why do we need the world to be radically different? I think that what happens in these situations is essentially a projection onto the world, and onto prominent individuals, of our own unrealised potential, or even our own dissatisfaction with ourselves.

To the extent that you feel the outer planets to be consciously operative in your own life, to that extent you won’t get carried away by these figures. It’s going to be a mixed thing for most of us. And what others are collectively feeling also affects us.

Living the outer planets is not an easy task. It takes many years, and is always work in progress. And it’s not really under our control either. The temptation to be drawn into collective projections of the outer planets, to have someone else seeming to live those planets for us, is quite natural. And maybe a bit embarrassing afterwards. But that is precisely how we can learn, how we can become more conscious.

Say you find very appealing Julian Assange as a harbinger of revolutionary change. He may or may not be – that is beside the point. The real point is that deep appeal, which is like a gift in that it contains the potential for awakening. In this case, it is a call to live Uranus more fully. It is a call to allow a constant sense of progressive change into your life, to welcome the unexpected, and to be deeply unconcerned by what the neighbours think. Uranus breaks us away from convention. In its unsophisticated form we enjoy the breaking away, the rebellion, for its own sake, and maybe project it out onto the world. In its more developed form it enables us to progress our own lives, to have a deep sense of our own very individual life, unhindered by what others (family members!) may or may not think.

And say you find/found Barack Obama deeply appealing. He embodied the hope for a better world and a leader who could be completely trusted. OK, people were sick of George Bush and all he stood for and of course they wanted someone different and hoped Obama would be. But the feeling around Obama went much further than that, it was religious, it was numinous; for many, for a while at least, he could do no wrong. And in this sense he was a call to live Neptune more fully: a sense of being part of the ocean of life and a sense that life is always unfolding and that you are part of that and you can trust that process and that just being part of all that makes life meaningful and hopeful. Again, we may start with someone out there – and with Neptune in the 9th Obama carries the ‘spiritual teacher’ and ‘redeemer’ archetypes – but wisdom and compassion and trust in life are ultimately to be found within.

What about Pluto? I think this type of cultural figure is more obviously dark to start with. And we can look to our old friend George W Bush, who like Obama and Assange has the ability to stand for something. Bush has Pluto Rising. He came into his own once he had a clear enemy to focus on, which was firstly Al Qaeda and Bin Laden, and then Saddam Hussein. And he had much of America behind him, often in a very ignorant way – like the people who thought that Saddam was responsible for 9/11, which Bush was happy to let stand.

So Bush keyed into the unconscious shadow projection which collective humanity is prone to, and the lies and deceit that goes with it. Hitler was also, via the demonization of the Jews, a Plutonian figure (as well as, in other ways, a Neptunian figure.)

The real lesson here is to become conscious of our own darkness. What gives the game away is the sparse knowledge we often have of the people like Bin Laden to whom we attribute ‘bad’ qualities. Classically, the evil we associate with them is precisely what we are ashamed to admit about ourselves.

I was on a Liz Greene seminar once, and she said that our shadow is that which we are ashamed to admit to. She said some people claim to be at ease with their shadows, and may list off certain ‘bad’ things about themselves. But then that is not their shadow. The shadow is that which we are ashamed to admit to, and it may not be anything that is harmful to anyone else. You might just be a secret cross-dresser or something!

What is needed with Pluto is honesty and a lack of being judgemental of ourselves. There is nothing ‘wrong’ with being the way we are. We are what we are. It doesn’t of course mean we always have to act on it. And it doesn’t mean we can’t transform. But in a way the transformation isn’t up to us, with our limited human perspective and narrow sense of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Our job is just to show up, and let Pluto take care of the transformation.

Sooner or later the public figures who carry the outer planet projections will let us down, and if we haven't spotted the projection before, that time of betrayal is also when we can learn. Or we can stay feeling betrayed, and carry on hating Neptunian Tony Blair or whichever figure it is.

The Shadow Side of Julian Assange; Wikileaks and UFOs

There was an interview with Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder, in the Guardian Newspaper on 3rd December. It took the form of written questions from readers. It was telling and a bit shocking that Mr Assange refused to answer the only critical question.

It was from a retired diplomat who prefaced his question with a list of some of the achievements of his diplomatic work, in e.g. preventing ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, and pointed out that the diplomatic service needed to be confidential in order to operate. The questioner concluded: “Why should we not hold you personally responsible when next an international crisis goes unresolved because diplomats cannot function?”

The question could hardly have been more germane, and Assange replied: “If you trim the vast editorial letter to the singular question actually asked, I would be happy to give it my attention.”

And that was that. It was a big-time evasion. There were other questions which were nearly as long, and not half so cogent, which Mr. Assange had been happy to answer. And why does he call the question 'singular'? If he means 'noticeable', then why not answer it? If he means 'strange', then that is a bizarre put-down, because the question is one that everyone is asking.

The big question about Wikileaks is whether it is doing more harm than good. It has clearly done some good in the past. But it would seem that Julian Assange does not want to look at this issue, and the rudeness of his answer suggests a high degree of self-importance.

This incident reveals a shadow side of Wikileaks, and it reveals Julian Assange as a dangerous individual. There is a degree of blind anti-authoritarianism, and a sense of himself as on a special mission, that is fuelling him. But he is a cultural hero at present, the darling of the left, who are often blindly anti-establishment themselves.

Below is part of what I wrote about his astrology last week (Sun in Cancer square Uranus, Moon in Scorpio, Mars in Aquarius square Jupiter):

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Assange has Sun trine Moon (his Moon is between 0 and 12 Scorpio), so he is at ease with who he is on a basic level, he is not conflicted. But therein also lies the danger, for the primal wateriness of his Sun and Moon lack self-reflective ability; bring in the Mars square Scorpionic Jupiter, and you have someone who could be doing more harm than good, while thinking he is one of the good guys (Uranus/Aquarius). Here is the thing: Uranus comes from principles and ideals, rather than consequences of actions. And you don’t know what the consequences of all these leaks are going to be. The stage is too big, the amount of loaded information is vast. Your actions might create a more open society. Or they might lead to war. Or both. You don’t really know.

Assange also said in the interview that if anything happens to him, the cables will continue to be released, for they have been sent to 100,000 people in encrypted form. We are talking about a cultural movement, a mass protest here, more than we are talking about a single individual. And we are talking about the incoming square from Uranus to Pluto, which brings rebellion and protest, like the conjunction in the 1960s, that can do some good. But the rebellion also had its shadow side then as now, which is the tendency to be blind and highly polarised in its opposition to the establishment. You get this wherever you have opposition on a mass level. Wars are like this.

Moving on, Julian Assange makes an interesting point about free speech in the interview, saying that the reason our speech is free is because our speech does not have the power to change anything. The real power, he says, lies with the international web of financial institutions:

The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be "free" because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free. In states like China, there is pervasive censorship, because speech still has power and power is scared of it. We should always look at censorship as an economic signal that reveals the potential power of speech in that jurisdiction. The attacks against us by the US point to a great hope, speech powerful enough to break the fiscal blockade.

I presume the last sentence refers to Assange’s promise to release a load of confidential info about a major US bank. Like ‘cablegate’, it will probably give us a lot of insight into how these institutions operate, but whether these leaks will do more harm than good is again the question. Assange is basically attacking the system, he seems to want to bring it down without having anything to replace it. Money has always been where the power is, and the 20th century attempts to create a mass alternative through communism were even worse than the capitalist system. Hasn’t Assange learnt from history? I am not saying the system cannot be improved, of course it can, but these blind systemic attacks are not the answer.

On perhaps a lighter note, the topic of UFOs was raised in the interview. There have, of course, been claims for years of big military cover-ups of UFO sightings and involvement with UFO technology. If this is the case, then somewhere there will be documents, and somewhere there will be someone who wants to leak some of them. And now there is somewhere to go with them: Wikileaks.

So applying a sort of reverse logic to the Wikileaks phenomenon, if something doesn’t eventually appear on Wikileaks then it probably didn’t happen! There is currently a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, which signifies UFOs, and a Neptune-Chiron conjunction in Aquarius, which signifies the use of the internet (Aquarius) for leaks (Neptune) that have a healing effect (Chiron) – or a permanently damaging effect (Chiron). So the moment has come.

Julian Assange was specifically asked, “Have there ever been documents forwarded to you which deal with the topic of UFOs or extraterrestrials?”

He replied that no such documents had been forwarded that also met 2 of Wikileaks’ publishing rules: that the documents should be both original and not self-authored.

That said, he added that “in yet-to-be-published parts of the cablegate archive there are indeed references to UFOs.”

That sounds to me like the references are incidental, and that there is no major Wikileaks expose of military cover-ups of UFOs to look forward to. And, applying my ‘reverse Wikileaks logic’, that there has therefore probably not been any such cover-up.

Wikileaks and Uranus-Pluto; America's New Public Enemy No 1

The Wikileaks story is developing so fast that anything I write will probably be out of date by the time you read this! Wikileaks has been going since 2006, and is particularly known for releasing documents that expose corruption in regimes around the world. In 2009 it won an award for its exposure of corruption in Kenya.

Wikileaks only reached super-prominence this year, however, when it turned its sights on America. Since April it has been releasing documents relating to the Afghan and Iraq Wars. In November, it began the release of 250,000 US State Department diplomatic cables, and this is when the response reached boiling point. Julian Assange, who heads Wikileaks, is now the world’s most wanted man.

Hilary Clinton called the release of the diplomatic cables “an attack on the world community.” Actually, the cables didn’t really tell us anything we couldn’t have worked out already – like the fact that a number of Middle East countries would like the US to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities, or that the US is suspicious of Russia. Or that Hamid Karzai personally benefits from the opium trade in Afghanistan. Or that the US spies on UN officials.

America comprises just over 4% of the world’s population. Probably half that population has heard of Wikileaks (I’m not joking) and let’s say half of that remaining 2% are bothered by it. Add to that my above point that the cables don’t tell us much we couldn’t have worked out anyway and we are able to correct Hilary Clinton: instead of being “an attack on the world community” the cables are “an embarrassment to 1% of the world’s population.”

Astrologer Jim Sher makes the point that “…what is coming out is that for the most part, the U.S. policies we are being told about are basically what is really happening. It is what a rational person would expect. Diplomats are being shown to be sharp, well-informed, lucid and astute.” I thought that was a great point. The leaks empower us, they reassure us that yes, we can work out what is going on, there is not some vast conspiracy of deception going on.

Not that I thought that anyway, but it can be very hard to get a rational political discussion these days in ‘alternative’ circles, because people are so influenced by conspiracy thinking, that in some very vague way they know what is ‘really’ going on. Here’s where I will lose a lot of my readers (!), but I find most of this thinking complacent, self-serving and irrational. It seems to stem from a sense of personal disempowerment that gets projected onto governments. Of course, some government conspiracies are for real, they are backed up by good evidence, and they are fascinating. Like the German government setting up a hijack in the 70s to dispose of some Palestinian prisoners they didn’t know what to do with. Or the coups set up in South America by the US.

The Wikileaks phenomenon is presided over by Pluto (secrets) in Capricorn (governments). A lot of us probably expected the opposite – that governments would become more secretive and controlling of information. But the reverse has happened, probably helped by the incoming square from Uranus (the unexpected) to Pluto. Pluto is now properly in Capricorn, moving up to 7 degrees next year. His first couple of years in Capricorn coincided with a Saturn-Uranus opposition, bringing a high degree of uncertainty and changeability with it. But that Opposition is now over, and Pluto is far enough into Capricorn for us to begin to discern some of the trends of this long transit. And it seems reasonable, in our internet age, to foresee a period in which governments will not be able to control information in the ways they always have. Previously if someone wanted to reveal classified information, what could they do with it? They could tell the Russians, and that would be that. Nowadays they can just stick it on the internet for all to see. And there will always be people working for government who are prepared to do this.

So Wikileaks seems to presage an age in which governments will have more openness forced upon them. And the Uranus square to Pluto is only just starting: what Wikileaks is doing now is just the beginning of something that will probably become much more normal and established over the next few years.

Of course, governments will respond by tightening up security and, for example, by keeping conversations more private and verbal. And I don’t think it is at all a straightforward issue. I welcome all these cables that have been released for the insights they have given us into how governments work. And as even a Pentagon spokesmen have said, the standard government response that the release of this info puts lives at risk cannot so far be backed up in the field. It’s overblown.

But governments have a difficult job to do, and they have to be able to speak freely, both amongst themselves and with other governments. Personal communication often makes all the difference when institutions are rubbing up against each other. If confidentiality is compromised, then we may see a world in which conflict becomes harder to head off. And because information flow becomes tightened, government departments will become more distanced from each other.

So I think it is inevitable that the Wikileaks phenomenon will to some extent lead to the very opposite of the openness it is trying to create. And that will be the ironic way in which the type of Pluto in Capricorn that we all fear will come about. Uranus-Pluto, as we saw with the conjunction in the 1960s, has the theme of rebellion (Uranus) against power (Pluto). Just as Uranus has started a run-in towards its 1st close square to Pluto next summer, so has the Wikileaks phenomenon exploded. It is the opening salvo of a longer term theme, in which we will see ever more internet exposure of government activities, and ever more attempts by governments to clamp down on them, along with increasing secretiveness by governments. It will be highly polarised, just like the 1960s. By the time Uranus-Pluto is well and truly over, however, which won't be for another 7 years or so, we can expect some sort of outcome, some sort of accommodation - and quite a different world when it comes to the way governments control information and the access we are able to have to that information.

Though I think it is in many ways a good thing that the US diplomatic cables have been released, I don’t think we need a repeat unless there really is something that needs exposing. There is also an ethical issue here. If your government is doing something corrupt, and you are an employee with access to the relevant info, then there is a case for breaking your confidentiality agreement and blowing the whistle. But if it is just the usual interchange between diplomats that is needed to keep the world functioning, then I think it is unethical, and it is unethical for Wikileaks to have published them. It is interesting that Jupiter, ethics, is conjunct Uranus and squaring Pluto at the moment. The square to Pluto suggests an ethical compromise in dealing with the powers that be.

Julian Assange, who heads Wikileaks, has done some good in exposing corruption. But I think he has also shown an indiscriminate opposition to authority which made my first thought about him that he has father/authority issues. When I looked him up on Wikipedia, I read that he is from Australia, that his parents split up when he was 8, and the new stepfather belonged to a controversial and secretive cult, the Santiniketan Park Association, which seems to have had a highly abusive attitude towards children. When he was 11 his mother took Julian and his younger half-brother into hiding for 5 years due to a custody battle over the younger brother with the stepfather. Assange has his stepfather’s surname.

So a distance from his natural father clearly developed when he was young, and being taken into hiding for 5 years from a stepfather belonging to an abusive cult is pretty extreme. At the same time, his stepfather has this to say about the young Julian: "A bright boy with a keen sense of right and wrong. He always stood up for the underdog with his school friends, he was always very angry about people ganging up on other people."

So you can almost see the man in the boy here, and Wikileaks itself: the genuine and courageous desire to stand up for what is right, mixed in with a sense that any authority/father has dark secrets that need exposing.

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We have a reliable birth date for Assange – 3 July 1971 in Townsville, Australia, but not a reliable birth time. There is one circulating from someone who claims to have seen his birth records, but according to Lynn Hayes who has written about it: “…as you'll read in the comments from Australian astrologers, the method of data collection appears to be somewhat suspect since birth records there evidently do not include birth times and can be obtained only by a relative.”

So we have the midday chart, and as you can see right away, Assange has Sun square to Uranus: rebellion (Uranus) against authority/father (Sun), and also the father you are separated/split-off from (Uranus). But we can’t simply reduce this aspect to childhood difficulties, because it carries an ‘adult’ meaning in its own right that at its best involves a dynamic and progressive disruption of the status quo, both within oneself and outside oneself. It is hard to settle into a rut with this aspect. And when it seeks external manifestation, it is established authorities which are likely to be the target.

In Assange’s particular case, Uranus is in justice-seeking Libra, while the Sun is in Cancer, meaning that his target countries are likely to experience his activities as an attack on their homeland security (Cancer). With his Sun being close to the US Sun, you can see why his attacks have been so effective there. He instinctively knows how to get to them.

For Assange functions primarily on instinct, on gut-feeling. His Sun is in Cancer and his Moon is in Scorpio. They can both be hidden signs, so it may not be evident to others just how much Assange is driven by personal emotion in his quest to expose corrupt authorities. At its best, his Scorpio Moon seeks to restore power to ordinary people, and his Cancer Sun feels protective and nurturing to those he is fighting for; at its worst, his Scorpio Moon seeks revenge for what happened to him in childhood, and his Cancer Sun makes decisions based on mood and personal neediness.

Whatever mix he is coming from, the Crab and the Scorpion also provide him with the ruthlessness, the cold-bloodedness necessary to start and continue this campaign, this war.

His Mars is in Aquarius (again ruled by Uranus) giving a desire to progress humanity through action and even aggression. Aquarius being Air means he can stand back and choose his target in a considered manner, but the square to Jupiter in Scorpio means he can be more destructive than he realises.

Assange has Sun trine Moon (his Moon is between 0 and 12 Scorpio), so he is at ease with who he is on a basic level, he is not conflicted. But therein also lies the danger, for the primal wateriness of his Sun and Moon lack reflective ability; bring in the Mars square Scorpionic Jupiter, and you have someone who could be doing more harm than good, while thinking he is one of the good guys (Uranus/Aquarius). Here is the thing: Uranus comes from principles and ideals, rather than consequences of actions. And you don’t know what the consequences of all these leaks are going to be. The stage is too big, the amount of loaded information is vast. Your actions might create a more open society. Or they might lead to war. Or both. You don’t really know.

Assange’s Mars is conjunct his North Node in Aquarius. What comes easy is his South Node in Leo: the lone individual doing something unique and original – and aggressive (Mars opposite)! What comes harder is integrating that into the wider community (Aquarius). For now he has put himself at odds with much of the world. With Chiron making a t-square with his Sun-Uranus, he has made himself the outsider/victim/scapegoat in a big way. But you never know, a few years down the line, as Uranus-Pluto progresses, all this may look very different. Assange may come to be seen as a catalyst (Uranus) for a big change in the world.

Fascinatingly, Saturn is now in the same sign – Libra – as when he first went into hiding with his mother when he was 11. Saturn is a planet of confinement and therefore prison, which is where he now is, after a period of hiding. In both cases Saturn has made a square to his Sun. (Being in Cancer, you can see the involvement of his mother in the earlier instance.) It suggests the connection I made earlier between the stepfather who was a member of a secretive, abusive cult, and the desire now to reveal the secrets of governments. Saturn is also authority, which again is both the stepfather and the USA, which shares Assange’s Sun position. That said, I am not suggesting that Assange’s actions are simply a reaction from childhood. There is clearly a connection, but it may be that he has made something of his early experiences, that the response is a creative one. With Saturn, at best, we learn from experience.

Julian Assange is 39 years old, and beginning that mid-life juncture where you have lived out your earlier, unreflective impulses that propelled you through the first half of your adult life, and where it is time to look back and see why you have done what you have done, what was genuinely you, and what was the influence of others and early conditioning, and what you want now. This process takes some years as all 3 outer planets plus Saturn hard-aspect themselves. But Assange has this more intensely, for his Sun is at 10 Cancer, which will be hard-aspected by both Pluto and Uranus over the next 2-3 years.

Given what he has done, he could be a dead man. Or spending 20 years in an American jail: America will do its best to create the necessary legalities, and apply the necessary pressure, to get their man. According to an article on the BBC site, though, this will be problematic for the US. If they try to do him for espionage, for example, then that is a political crime, and there is no extradition treaty between the US and the UK, or the US and Sweden, for political crimes.

Much of the world establishment, particularly America, is rounding on Assange, and pretext after pretext is being created to hem him in and nail him. Wikileaks is being shut down; Paypal, Mastercard and various other companies are refusing to channel donations to his site; his bank account in Switzerland has been frozen on a technicality and an extradition warrant is out for him on rape charges in Sweden, which seem to be a set-up. The man has not been convicted of anything, or charged with anything related to Wikileaks, yet he is being treated as an arch-criminal. And it is America more than anyone who is after him, and able and prepared to exert whatever pressure it likes on any company or western country to get its way. It is fascinating to watch a man being singled out and hounded in this way by America. We’ve never seen anything quite like it. Some politicians in the US have said they would like to see him executed for what he has done.

America needs an enemy for its own psychological balance, to avoid the pathology underneath its perception of itself as the world’s no 1 country. And it expects other western countries to join the dance when it has such an enemy. The US has Mars in Gemini, so its aggressive tendencies are unusually divided into good and bad, black and white. Not since Osama bin Laden has someone been identified as public enemy number 1 like this, and there is a section of the country that must be starting to feel at ease with itself in a way that it hasn’t for a while. Bin Laden could never be tracked down, so he was never entirely satisfactory as public enemy No 1.

Ahmadinejad of Iran is a good candidate, but again the US hasn’t been able to run with that one, because military action was never possible due to the Iraq War (wrong target!) Now they have a visible enemy who can be caught, but unfortunately they have the wrong President as scapegoat cheerleader. There is no doubt Obama will do his best to get Assange behind bars in the US - he is an American President after all - but he is not the sort to create a personalised cult of vilification. This is part of the reason the US elects Presidents like George W Bush and Ronald Reagan from time to time: it is so the collective can feel good about itself again by finding an enemy to vilify. I have no doubt that Sarah Palin would oblige in this respect.

Back to Assange. As for the rape charges, Assange has natal Venus square to Pluto, currently being hard-aspected by Uranus. So there is a dark element to his sexuality, issues of power to be dealt with: either letting women have power over him, or the reverse, or both. Assuming the rape charges were a set-up, a honey-trap, Venus-Pluto could attract this. During August, when the alleged events took place, Mars and Venus were conjunct in Libra, and passed over Assange’s Uranus and squared his Sun. The sign of Libra suggests to me it was a honey-trap. Mars and Venus also passed over Saturn (protection) in early Libra, and apparently much of the case rests on whether or not a condom was used. Early in August Mars and Venus were also part of the Uranus-Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto Cardinal t-square, so events took place then which were hugely catalytic for Assange (and for the world via Wikileaks). The likely outcome seems to be at least bail and surrender of passport in Sweden while the Americans do their best to press charges.

HOWEVER, it is also increasingly clear that there is huge public support for Assange. In London, he has not been given bail, but people who did not know him offered to stand surety. Australia’s ex-PM Kevin Rudd has said that Assange was not responsible for the leaked American cables, it was whoever pinched them in the first place. Rudd is right, and to this extent Assange is being scapegoated for someone else’s crimes.

More than that, there is a wave of hackers called Operation Payback who are interfering with the sites of companies who have withdrawn services from Wikileaks, like Amazon and Visa. They are engaging you and I by offering a botnet tool for your computer that joins it to an army of machines which launch denial of service attacks on those sites. You can in theory find them at http://anonops.net, but unsurprisingly it appears to have been taken down. They are currently operating via Twitter.

It is quite thrilling, and true Uranus-Pluto, which is about a collective rebellion, not one man. Through his Uranus in Libra, Assange has become a voice for collective protest as it is activated by Uranus-Pluto. The internet is ruled by Uranus, but so is rebellion, so in a way the internet is coming of age as it becomes a tool for mass protest.

On another Uranus-Pluto note, in the UK we are seeing protest by students against big rises in student fees in a way we have not had since the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1960s.The rebellions are on their way!