DONALD TRUMP and THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL

How does one write astrology at such a politically charged moment? It's probably when we need astrology more than ever, for this craft requires that we haul ourselves away from our personal responses in order to see what the planets are saying. The planets are not left or right wing. They are not promoting humanity's 'evolution' by favouring who we consider to be the 'good guys'. Their perspective is bigger than that, it is infinite. The best we can hope for is to catch awed glimpses of that infinitude - especially, perhaps, at times when our merely human desires and preferences as to what 'ought' to be are frustrated.

Trump's re-accession to the US Presidency can be seen as the first event in the coming Saturn-Neptune conjunction, both of which planets will have entered Aries by late May 2025. The last conjunction was in 1989, and it led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. A seismic, world-defining event.

This election seems similarly seismic. This Saturn-Neptune conjunction will not have Uranus sitting alongside it as in 1989. It will, however, sextile both Pluto and Uranus. This suggests a powerful transformation that also has an ease to it. The world does not have to fall apart for it to happen.

The US Sibly IC is at 1 Aries, so the US is entering a particularly transformational time, comparable to the Civil War period, when Neptune was also in this place (and, as is soon to come, Uranus conjunct Uranus). At that time, 2 different visions of the US brutally fought it out. I think that gives a clue to the meaning of the current, upcoming transit.

My interpretation is that it is the end of progressive, post-war liberalism as we know it. The battle between left and right has been particularly intense in the US in recent years. In the US, and across Europe, we have been seeing the political right making considerable gains. It has been practically illegal to be right wing in Europe since the war, but all that has been changing, most notably in Germany. Note I am not saying 'far right', because that term is a judgement that comes from the left, and I am trying to be descriptive.

Saturn-Neptune in Capricorn was a collapse of the structures (Capricorn) of the redemptive ideology (Neptune) of Communism. Saturn-Neptune in Aries is a new vision (Aries) of redemption (Neptune) through a move to the political right. Note I am not saying it IS a redemption, I am saying that is how it is seen by those who are voting it in.

Human societies move between left and right over time, when they feel that one has gone too far. The right is like the centre of a wheel, that holds it all together, that unifies. The left is like the perimeter of the wheel, that allows for diversity and creativity. Both have their places, both are necessary.

The next few years will not be pretty in many ways. Think Margaret Thatcher in the UK in the 1980s. She effected a profound transformation from the political right, but there was much misery along the way, and many came to detest her.

I think we will be seeing epoch-making change of that kind in the US under the Saturn-Neptune conjunction. I suspect that Trump will not serve a full term, as he has no major transits propelling him through, and Pluto is entering his 6th House of Health. JD Vance will finish the job, as Pluto empowers his Leo Sun.

All this, however, may not be what long-term history sees as the most significant event of this Saturn-Neptune period. What it may remember most, if Elon Musk has his way, is the first unmanned spaceship landing on Mars in 2026, followed by people in 2028. Now there's an Aries redemptive vision for you!

Blair the Fundamentalist

There’s a series of programmes called ‘The Blair Years’ on TV at the moment, and I managed to catch part of one of them the other night. It was dealing with 9/11 and Iraq. What struck me was Blair’s position on it, after all this time and after he has left office. What we have, he convicted, is “a visceral struggle between what is right and what is wrong.”


Yes, he really does believe this. The man has learnt nothing from the war, all it has done is give birth to his latent fundamentalism. When there is a war, you have to look at it from both sides if you are going to make any sense of it. And it seems pretty obvious to me that the War on Terror is rooted in Arab resistance to western influence. It’s as simple as that. A bit like how many European tribes must have felt at the time of the Romans.

The West needs the Arab oil, and they’re going to make sure they have enough control and influence in the Middle East to safeguard their supplies. You can’t expect the West to behave otherwise. Nor can you expect the Arabs not to resent this influence in their homeland (for which they get nicely paid). This tension is going to continue for as long as we need their oil. Of course, it isn’t put like this by either side. America is ‘The Great Satan’, and the West is struggling against ‘Evil’.

If anything is ‘evil’, it is the fundamentalism you find on both sides that makes any sort of understanding of the situation impossible. If anything is ‘evil’, it is the way Bush and Blair see the ‘war’ as a battle of good versus evil, with themselves of course on the side of ‘good’.

It is hard to believe that Tony Blair is so foolish and superficial, so psychologically primitive. But he is, and we elected him 3 times to run the UK. Which doesn’t say much for we the British people, or for the American people who elected Bush twice.

Before the Iraq War, Tony Blair went to see the Pope to try to get his blessing. Yes, he really did do this. You couldn’t make something like this up, it is priceless comedy. It also makes it clear that Blair was unknowingly engaged on a medieval crusade against Islam. To the Pope’s credit (and I’m not inclined to give Popes much credit), he didn’t give his blessing.


It is gradually coming out that Blair was always much bigger on God than he let on. He was afraid, rightly, of being seen as a ‘nutter’. He has for some years been close to converting to Catholicism, the main barrier appearing to be political considerations.

Tony Blair was born 6 May 1953 at 6.10am in Edinburgh. He has Moon in 10th House Aquarius in a t-square with Sun in Taurus and Pluto in Leo. The challenge of Pluto is to find your own inner power, your own independent sense of confidence and strength. If you are unaware, if you are not up to this challenge, you will look for this sense of power and authority outside of yourself, and this is exactly what Blair has done with his religious certainty and crusade against ‘evil’. And through his need to be in a position of power. Unlike many leaders, he went straight from being PM to being a Middle East envoy on behalf of the major powers.

Aquarius at its worst can be rigidly ideological, which is where his Moon comes in, and we also see it in his Jupiter-Mars conjunction on the ASC. The fixity of his t-square doesn’t help either.

It was Neptune which liberated the fundamentalist within. Up until 9/11, Blair had been a bit timid as PM, trying to please everybody. After 9/11, and particularly in the run-up to the Iraq War, he became the opposite, he was going to do what he believed regardless of popularity. Neptune made its first exact crossing to his Moon a month before the Iraq War, and since then has squared his Sun and is now in the final stages of opposing his Pluto. As it was Neptune that was activating his chart, we can see what happened in terms of what he would have felt to be an Enlightenment, a waking up to his true mission of battling evil in the specific form of Islamic ‘terrorists’; from the outside, many of us would see Neptune as having created delusion and guru-inflation. As an astrologer, my job is to describe both sides rather than say which is ‘correct’. As an opinionated blogger, I have no doubt which is correct!

They say there is no-one so ‘ex’ as an ex-Prime Minister, and I was slightly taken aback when I realised that Tony Blair still has transits going on, that he is not in suspended animation. Neptune is still finishing with his t-square, and what it seems to be creating is this mad fundamentalist, reminiscent of his hero Margaret Thatcher after she had finished as PM.


Her time as PM was characterised by a series of major Pluto transits, and there were more to come in the 5 years following her demise. The same applies to Tony Blair, who will have Neptune squaring his Mars-Jupiter-ASC in 5-6 years time. It will probably mark his appointment as Archbishop, on his ascent towards the Papacy! At any rate, it would not surprise me if, like Thatcher, we see him becoming more rigid, more of a caricature of himself, over the coming years.

CONVICTION POLITICIANS

Politicians frequently present themselves as “conviction politicians” in order to convince voters that they are principled, that they will not be swayed by the demands of political expediency and career aspirations. What it comes to mean when they are in a position of leadership is somewhat different and less favourable: it tends to mean that they are the sort of politician who will pursue a particular course of action regardless, that they have a certain ‘gut instinct’ as to what is right that they are determined to pursue.

Margaret Thatcher, the 1980s UK Prime Minister, was a seen as a conviction politician, and for a while it worked. Britain at the time was ‘the sick man of Europe’, and some basic economic housekeeping was needed, and she did it. But because she was functioning from ‘conviction’, she was also very rigid, and in the end this was her undoing.

‘Conviction’ is not an air quality, astrologically speaking. It is a ‘gut instinct’, and it is rigid. It is Scorpionic. I have always thought that to have such convictions about the right course of action – which can be an appealing quality to voters – you need the ability to ignore inconvenient facts. Not consciously ignore, but actually be opaque to them, so that to you it’s as if they don’t exist. So here we also have a Neptunian quality, the ability to delude oneself.

Margaret Thatcher (born 13th Oct 1925, 9am, Grantham, England) has Saturn Rising in Scorpio, which gave her her ruthless (Scorpio) and patronising (Saturn) ‘gut instinct’ about what was best for the country. She also has a Neptune-Moon conjunction in 9th House Leo, conjunct the MC, which is where we see the delusory side to her that became more and more clear as time went on. When her son had his first child, she made a public pronouncement that “We are a grandmother” (i.e. the royal ‘we’ - her Moon is in Leo). This was apparently the moment at which her cabinet ministers began to think she really had lost it. But in my interpretation, and delusions of grandeur aside, this Neptune also gave her the ability to shut out inconvenient facts, to delude herself so that she could maintain her convictions. Moon-Neptune in the 9th also gave her the remarkable ability to turn something as basic as economic prudence into a religious crusade. Her MC is in Virgo, and I think there is a sense in which she genuinely – and quite rightly - felt herself to be serving the country. For someone so rigid and one-sided, it is surprising that her Sun is in Libra. I think she is Libran in the sense that she is permanently polarised, always seeing two sides, but rigidly pitting one side against the other. The square from Sun to Pluto probably doesn’t help.

George W Bush is another conviction politician. (Born 6 July 1946, 7.26am, New Haven, Connecticut). Though he may or may not be able to understand a page of print in front of him (opinion seems to be divided here), he certainly does not base his decisions on reason. His believes in his gut instinct and that it will ultimately be proved right. It is a sort of magical thinking. That is why, for example, there was very little planning as to what to do after the successful invasion of Iraq, and he was able to keep repeating the mantra of ‘staying the course’ over Iraq, in the face of all the facts.

Sometimes politicians are saying something for the sake of expediency, and we know it’s not true and we know that they know it’s not true. It’s not entirely satisfactory, but that seems to be part of how politics works. What is worrying about conviction politicians like George Bush, however, is that they will say things that are patently not true, but you get the sense that they actually believe what they are saying.

Astrologically, GWB has Pluto Rising in Leo and Sun in Cancer, between them giving him his ruthlessness and primitive, unconscious ‘gut instinct’ way of operating. I don’t want to offend anyone here, but America has a capacity for electing stupid leaders like Bush and Reagan almost BECAUSE they are stupid. “Ah, you’re thick like me, I can trust that!” And the genius of these leaders is that they know exactly the sort of stupid thing to say that will win them votes. Like Ronald Reagan saying about his ballet dancer son, “He is not gay. We made sure of that!” Or George Bush saying, “People misunderestimate me.” Oh yes, you’re not one of those tricksy, liberal intellectuals, we can trust you!

To be fair, the UK and the US have a different method of electing leaders. In the UK, our leaders are elected by their fellow MPs (or, in the case of the Tories, were until recently), so being the new kid on the block with mob appeal ain’t going to get you elected leader. What I admire about the American system are the checks and balances built into it which are proving so effective at present.

Back to GWB. He also has Moon conjunct Jupiter in Libra in the 3rd House. This is the chart of someone who potentially has a good mind, who in fact probably DOES have a good mind when he bothers to use it. But the Moon is conjunct Chiron, so there is a problem with it, and it is square to the Sun in Cancer, which seems to win out. Maybe some years down the line, when Pluto hits this square, and his father has died and he has some distance from the failure and humiliation of his last 2 years in office, he will be able to reflect on the shortcomings of gut instinct on its own, and in so doing empower his Libra Moon. Don’t get me wrong, ‘gut instinct’ is a powerful and necessary part of our make-up – and who would not be ruled by it when faced with a survival situation? – but it can also get things terribly wrong if reason and reflection are not also properly honoured.

GWB’s Sun in Cancer is in the 12th House, so here we see the Neptunian element that seems also to be necessary to make a conviction politician, the ability to delude oneself and so maintain self-belief by shutting out inconvenient facts. This Neptunian element (which we also saw in Thatcher) also gives a redeemer quality to the politician, that they are in some sense going to save the country, whether it is from terrorists (in GWB’s case) or from the Trades Unions and bad economic practices (in Thatcher’s case).

Finally, we come to Tony Blair, who I think has behaved like a conviction politician in the worst sense over Iraq, but who I do not think is otherwise a conviction politician in the full-blown sense. He certainly campaigns like one. In 1997 he presented himself as the redeemer of the country, and people believed it in droves. Quite what he was redeeming us from wasn’t clear, but no-one seemed to mind. Yes, we had a bit of Tory sleaze and they’d been in power too long, but the UK was basically muddling along OK and prospering economically.

Tony Blair was born 6 May 1953, 6.10am, Edinburgh, Scotland. We can see the redeemer and the ‘shut out inconvenient facts’ elements from his 12th House Sun, as well as from the fact that his premiership has been characterised by continuous major Neptune transits to his MC, Moon and then Sun. It is only now, as they are coming to an end, that his ability to hang on to power is evaporating. We can also see his ruthlessness in his Sun square, and Moon opposite, Pluto.

Apart from Iraq, however, Tony Blair is able to stand back and use the air element. He has been able to have ministers in his cabinet who back Gordon Brown as PM. Most remarkably, he has managed to work with Gordon Brown, who has always schemed against him. He had no choice politically but to have him as Chancellor, and I think it is remarkable that he has managed to work with him for so long, and to put the interests of the party first. As Charles Clarke said of Brown, “He is totally un-collegiate.” Full-blown conviction politicians like Bush and Thatcher can’t take dissent, which they see as plain wrong-headed and treacherous. Like Bush, Blair has 12th House Sun square to an air Moon, but the square does not seem so one-sided in Blair’s case. Which goes to show that you often need a fair bit of information about the person to do a good astrology reading.

Neptune and Pluto have featured a lot in this analysis. Perhaps the ultimate conviction politician was Adolf Hitler, who had a Neptune-Pluto conjunction that made no major aspects to the rest of his chart, meaning that the power of the collective could flow through him unhindered by his personality. And it worked for a while, but his inability to stand back from it led to Germany’s downfall. And this is another aspect of the conviction politician, which is that they are a vehicle for some powerful need within the collective, which gives them their power, but because it is so powerful it can easily take them over and make them unable to direct it wisely. Neptune: channel for the collective; Pluto: the sheer power of the collective.