Pluto in Capricorn: religious extremism as political reality

In the economic world, Pluto’s move into Capricorn is proving to be a corrective to Pluto in Sagittarius: the financial excesses of recent years have led to a dramatic contraction in the world economy, and a re-think about how the money-men should conduct themselves.

In the religious world, however, particularly that of conservative Islam, Pluto’s move into Capricorn does not seem to be providing a corrective to the excesses of recent years. Rather, fundamentalist Islam seems in some places to be slowly establishing itself as a political norm, which is also a meaning of Pluto in Capricorn.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban have been making big gains, which is why the US is sending more troops. The war in Afghanistan was announced by President Bush on 7 Oct 2001 at 5pm. Like the chart for the invasion of Iraq, the Saturn-Pluto opposition is lined up along the MC-IC, just as it was lined up along the US Asc-Desc on 9/11, linking all 3 events together. A 'personal' event (ASC) unfolded into 2 very public ones on the world stage (MC).

The Afghan invasion chart has a close Sun-Mars-Jupiter Cardinal t-square, and I think it is plausible to say that the war will be decided one way or another around 2016/17 when Pluto transits this t-square. I think Mars can be a good starting point when looking at the charts for wars.


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In Pakistan, parts of its borders with Afghanistan have been effectively ruled by the Taliban and Al Qaeda for some time now. This is why from time to time we read about American missile strikes on these areas. An unintended consequence of these strikes, according to some analysts, has been to drive the Taliban base camps further into Pakistan.

A new development on Monday was the Pakistan government ceding control to the Taliban of the Swat Valley, which is only 100 miles from Karachi. This seems to me to be of huge significance, because it is not just a semi-autonomous tribal area. Pakistan has a weak government, and a President with a history of corruption. It is under a lot of internal pressure from militant Islam.


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Pakistan is at the end of a Neptune opposition to its Sun, which describes the dissolution process it has been through over the last 18 months as Musharraf, its military ruler who was just about holding it all together, ceded power to a democratically elected but ineffectual government. The natal Sun is in a wide conjunction to Saturn-Pluto, all of which square Angular Jupiter in Scorpio. So there is a natural tendency in the country to head towards not just the military rule which has characterised most of its existence, but also rule by religious extremists (Jupiter in Scorpio), a destiny it has not yet fulfilled, but may well do so in coming years.

So what was seen as religious extremism under Pluto in Sag may become political reality under Pluto in Capricorn, not just in Afghanistan and nuclear-armed Pakistan, but also in Iran through its development of nuclear weapons, a process the West now seems unable to stop. In going for the wrong target, which was Iraq, George Bush weakened his standing to such an extent that he was not able to go after the right target, which was Iran’s nuclear weapons programme.

As for Iraq, it would seem to me that the long-term result will have been to replace oppression of Shias by Sunnis, with oppression of Sunnis by Shias. Iraq will become a natural ally of its neighbour Iran, which is also Shia, a branch of Islam which is in the minority in the Muslim world, but which will gain in standing due to Iran’s ascendancy and its alliance with Iraq.


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The US handed over power to a new Iraqi government at 9.26am on 28 June 2004. The Sun-Moon-angular Uranus Grand Trine suggests to me a natural instability and fragility which is unlikely to last much beyond the departure of US troops. Obama intends this departure to be soon, and the major transits of Pluto to the Sun and Neptune to the MC over the next couple of years reflect this major shift that seems likely to happen. Pluto will also be conjoining the Mars of the Iraq War chart around the same time, bringing the war to a close. There is no reason to suppose that militant Islam will not also make advances in Iraq as the US presence recedes.

Pluto in Capricorn Themes

Capricorn rules the knees. As Pluto has entered, exited and finally re-entered Capricorn this year, I have been through a process of sorting out my knees. I’m loathe to admit it, but I’m a bit flat-footed, and over the years my joints had compensated for this – giving me, so I’m told, a hip-swinging feminine gait from the rear! But that is now all in the past, and as Pluto approaches my Capricorn Mars, I am at last starting to walk like a man!

I’d started getting a lot of pain in my knees, and the doctor thought I should just bust my way through it. I wasn’t impressed, and I persuaded him to book me in to see the physio. She gave me a load of correctional exercises, and I said I’m not doing them for the rest of my life. She did say, however, that there is such a thing as a podiatrist, who specialises in feet, and I said yes, that’s what I need. The podiatrist cautiously gave me some raised insoles, and I said raise them as much as you can, and she went all cautious on me again, but agreed. 6 months later, just as Pluto finally entered Capricorn, I noticed that my knees don’t hurt any more. I am obviously deeply attuned to the zeitgeist!

I am not the only person so attuned. Pluto in Capricorn is also about control by the government (Capricorn) of private information (Pluto), as well as general control-freakery (Pluto) by the authorities (Capricorn). In the UK, Parliament is currently up in arms because the police raided not just the home and constituency office of an MP, but his office within Parliament. They also arrested him. This was on 27 Nov, the day Pluto re-entered Capricorn. The arrest and search was on suspicion of "aiding and abetting misconduct in public office" and "conspiring to commit misconduct in a public office", in relation to an investigation into unauthorised disclosure of confidential material from within the Home Office.

In other words, Damian Green – the shadow immigration minister - was using leaked information to hold the government to account, which is a necessary part of our democracy. Gordon Brown, the PM, made his name as a young MP through using leaked information. In the 1930s, Winston Churchill, who was then in the political wilderness, used leaked information from the Foreign Office to repeatedly warn Parliament about German re-armament. His source was eventually discovered and came to a sorry end.

So everyone is finding this arrest bizarre. MPs are enraged at having had the police on their premises, particularly as it has turned out that they did not have a search warrant and could have been turned away.

Who is Pluto and who is Capricorn is hard to say here, but it is an interesting twist on the theme. Damian Green has Sun in Capricorn opposite Uranus, so you can see the event as an externalisation of a tension in his chart between supporting the establishment (Capricorn) and freedom/rebellion (Uranus).

Even more bizarre is that 2 days before Pluto left Capricorn in June, the shadow Home Secretary David Davis resigned as an MP, and stood for immediate re-election, all in the cause of a wider debate on the single issue of erosion of civil liberties. This was also a Pluto in Capricorn issue, and like Damian Green, David Davis has Sun in Capricorn opposite Uranus! In Davis’ case, however, he made the event happen, rather than have it come to him.

Another part of the Pluto in Capricorn flurry has been the landmark ruling by the European Court of Human Rights this week that British police were wrong to retain the DNA of 2 young men who were subsequently cleared of any crimes. British police have DNA samples from 4.5 million people, and it will have huge implications for their database.

Many people are strongly against this database, seeing it as an invasion of people’s privacy. Exactly how it violates people’s privacy is never said. I have a bit of a gut reaction against my DNA being on the database (it isn’t on it), but I find my reaction hard to justify. I think it is no different to officialdom having your name, date of birth, marital status, employment, home address etc etc. I can see the database being enormously helpful in fighting crime. Like the protests against GM food, speed cameras, and fox-hunting (both sides), the issue is driven one-sidedly by emotion over reason.

I think if the authorities want to victimise someone and invade their privacy, they don’t need a DNA database to do it. They can do it anyway. The issue is how much that sort of abuse goes on, not the particular means by which they do it.

I suppose if I had a reservation it would be that the government has shown itself to be spectacularly incompetent at guarding the details they have on people. They get lost in the post, left on trains, in cars etc. As the understanding of DNA progresses, you wouldn't want this information leaking out to the highest bidder.

All the same, as I've said before, I would prefer the government having any amount of information on me than living in a traditional small village where everyone knew my business.

Finally a few points from one of my readers, Geoff King, taking a historical perspective on Pluto in Capricorn:

The last time but one was 1516 to 1532 . During that time two very Pluto in Sag things happened. One was the reformation, the other the dissolution of the monasteries. We can forget nowadays that the Monasteries were a key economic feature of life at that time, with vast wealth bequeathed to them over the preceding centuries and something like 1 in every 500 males living in them.

The message then was that the traditional Capricornian authority was being Pluto-ed.

The next Pluto in Cap was 1762 to 1778. That was the start of the industrial revolution and the way I would interpret that is that up to that point the traditional authority (Cap) based itself on land. There just weren’t many other ways to gain wealth in Britain prior to 1762 other than by owning land. Then Pluto comes along and erodes that traditional wealth.

I’m sure we will see something similar this time round, it's just working out which institutions and establishment figures will be eroded. Obviously banks are very Capricorn but I think also the shift of power from West to East is another manifestation. I’m sure the Royal family will come under attack too but I’m sure there are other things I’m missing from this.

One thing that surprised me is that I expected Pluto in Cap to mean that we realise commodities like oil and metals are finite but so far the values of these things is going down rather than up.

Pluto in Capricorn: the End of Democracy as an Ideology?

I was just watching some American protesters making the serious point that Barack Obama is not to be trusted because his middle name is Hussein. Never underestimate some people’s capacity for stupidity. They really do believe stuff that most of us would consider comic exaggeration. Like Barack sounds like Iraq, and Obama sounds like Osama, so he must be a terrorist! But you also have to give Americans credit for showing up Sarah Palin for the idiot she is, albeit an intelligent idiot. A well-known comic, Tina Fey, has created a hugely popular and scarily accurate impersonation of her. In one of her sketches that got a lot of laughs all she had to do was recite part of a speech that Sarah Palin had actually made.

As Pluto finally moves from Sagittarius to Capricorn, we are leaving an era of fundamentalism and ideology, and entering a period of pragmatism. The ideology of unregulated markets has been receiving its death blows in recent months. Democracy as an ideology also needs a few death blows. Not that I’m against democracy per se. I’m against the worship of it. It works, sort of, and it’s better than some systems. But it also means that idiots who think that Obama’s middle name is suspicious get a say in who runs the country. And, being an Absolute Truth, it gets used as grounds for invading other countries because they are not democracies.

Democracy has gained ground as an Absolute Truth because its main protagonists, Europe and the USA, also happened to be rich and capitalist. Therefore democracy becomes equated with that great virtue, wealth, and the capitalist system that has produced it. This has been particularly so since the West’s triumph in the Cold War.

However, now we have the rise of China, which is not a democracy, but which is becoming very wealthy through capitalism. So this will relativise democracy, it will no longer be the One True Path. So this may be a theme of Pluto in Capricorn: the undoing of some of the West’s hubris about its own political system, and a more accurate understanding of it as a political approach that works quite well in some ways and under certain circumstances, but not in others. i.e. a pragmatic, Capricornian understanding.

Reports of the death of globalisation have been greatly exaggerated

Appropriately for the end of Pluto in Sagittarius, the UK government has just released a load more files of UFO sightings, this time from 1986-1992.

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. Reports of the death of globalisation have been greatly exaggerated, at least by me. My reasoning, just over a week ago, was that the globalising impulse of Pluto in Sagittarius was coming to an end, and with Pluto entering Capricorn, with its emphasis on boundaries, and with each country having to save its own banking system, we might see a withdrawal into separateness, at least for now.

But I think there are more possibilities than this. And globalisation has been taking place on many levels – economic, cultural, political and technological. In some ways it has been helpful, in other ways it has been unfortunate. If you see life as occurring in cycles, like I tend to do (and like astrology does), then globalisation looks like a phase we are passing through for now, and eventually we will do so again. If you believe that humanity is engaged in a sort of collective evolution, that we have a kind of destiny, then globalisation looks like the point at which humanity finally began to come together as one. This looks like a fundamentally good thing, being a collective evolutionary stage. Just because you believe one or the other viewpoint strongly doesn’t make it truer. It’s a good one to argue over a few bottles of wine.

Another possibility for Pluto in Capricorn, on an economic level, is that proper form is given to the globalisation that has been taking place in recent decades. An attempt is being made at this, in the wake of the near-meltdown of the global banking system. George Bush, in the final months of his Presidency, is hosting a series of summits to try and come up with some new rules and institutions for international finance. Meanwhile South Korea is going to guarantee loans made to its own institutions by foreign banks. So people are looking to the future again, even though a recession seems certain. And it does seem that economically there is a lot of political will behind maintaining the level of globalisation we have achieved.

So this is how Pluto in Capricorn looks to be shaping up, on one level. Rather than a retreat into national boundaries, it looks like economic globalisation is going to get even stronger by being given firmer foundations. Another meaning of Pluto in Capricorn is World Government, and this might be a direction we go in over the next 16 years. Pluto in Sag has been a bit like the Wild West, and now we have proper government coming in.

There is also the issue of resources. It is becoming clearer that we can only consume so much oil, water, commodities, food etc, and the world seems to be getting towards that point of maximum consumption. So whatever improvements are made to the world financial system, Pluto in Capricorn will be increasingly marked by a struggle for resources. Towards the end of this transit, for example, we will see the Neptune Return of the first oil strike of 1859, and Neptune rules oil. So there will be a tension between the increased trade and prosperity that economic globalisation, with an improved set of international laws (Pluto in Cap) gives, and the withdrawal into national boundaries (also Pluto in Cap) that a struggle for resources will tend to lead to. Pluto will reach its mid-way point of 15 Capricorn in about 7 years time, while it is still square to Uranus, so it may be then that the really defining issues of Pluto in Capricorn become clear.

The trouble with globalisation so far is that it hasn’t been so much about interconnectedness and the realisation of our common humanity etc, but about American culture and values and business practices becoming the world’s culture and values and business practices. Globalisation has to a large extent been about domination.

But that is the nature of countries. It became very clear at the Olympics, for example, that China has huge ambitions to occupy the top spot. Personally, I’d rather have America there. What seems almost inevitable, however, is a return to the old system of competing superpowers.

The internet is a result of the globalising process we have recently been through. That seems likely to develop rather than disappear. But it has also had its Wild West, Pluto in Sag, aspect. Pluto in Cap will inevitably bring in more regulation which is sorely needed, for it has become a haven for thieves and paedophiles. But there is always a price to pay for that. Like with Glastonbury Festival when, during its Saturn Return, a wall was built around the site. It kept out much of the criminal element, but also a lot of the free spirits.

The Large Hadron Collider

On 21st October the Large Hadron Collider will be unveiled in Switzerland. It will be the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. Through colliding sub-atomic particles at energies never before achieved, scientists are hoping to make breakthroughs in their understanding of the fundamental nature of matter.

From Wiki: ‘When activated, it is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and missing links in the Standard Model of physics and could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass. The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would be a significant step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory, which seeks to unify three of the four known fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force, leaving out only gravity. The Higgs boson may also help to explain why gravitation is so weak compared to the other three forces. In addition to the Higgs boson, other theorized particles, models and states might be produced, and for some searches are planned, including supersymmetric particles, compositeness (technicolor), extra dimensions, strangelets, micro black holes and magnetic monopoles.’

The LHC is being commissioned just as the Saturn-Uranus opposition starts to become exact (4th November). Good timing! Saturn-Uranus is associated, amongst other things, with scientific/technological breakthroughs: Uranus gives the brilliant ideas, and Saturn the impulse to give them concrete form. It is hard to imagine that the LHC won’t produce breakthroughs.

Approval for the project was given in 1994, just as Pluto entered Sagittarius. Construction began 4 years later, within a 27 kilometer underground tunnel on the Swiss-French border. It is an enormous project, and has involved thousands of scientists. Now, with Pluto in its final months in Sagittarius, it is about to bear fruit. It will give us the power (Pluto) to further our understanding of the universe (Sagittarius).

On 21st October there will be a Void Moon between approx 1pm and 4pm GMT, so they would be advised not to have the opening ceremony then. Events beginning under a Void Moon have a way of not bearing fruit, like the first voyage of the Titanic and the Tibetan protests against the Chinese.

Another Pluto in Sag project is ITER, which is an international attempt to create a nuclear fusion reactor. Formal agreement to build the reactor occurred on 21 Nov 2006. Pluto was in Sag trine to Saturn, which is nice for the project actually happening. The Moon was in Sag, and crossed the nuclear axis on that day. And the Sun was conjunct Jupiter. So plenty of expansive Jupiterian/Sagittarian energy. The idea is to produce 500MW of energy through a sustained reaction of up to 1000 seconds. If they pull this one off (and construction alone is expected to take 10 years), then it opens up a future of much safer nuclear power, and a lot more of it, with virtually no radioactive waste.

I long for the world to operate in a simpler and more sustainable way, that brings us back to the basics of life, and reconnects us to the natural world. (I have Virgo Rising). At the same time I am thrilled by futuristic technological advance. (I have Aquarius Sun). I like reading space operas set in the far future. (I've just read Peter Hamilton's 'The Reality Disfunction'). I think that genetic engineering as applied to people could create some fantastic advances – elimination of inherited diseases and disorders, whether physical or mental, for example. Most people I know do not share my enthusiasm! They tend instead to be horrified by GM or nuclear fusion. There are, of course, horror scenarios which many scientific advances have brought and will continue to bring. But I think it is hard to argue that scientific advance has overall made the world a worse place, and that major branches of research should therefore be stopped. In any case, it's going to happen anyway, and I'm not going to spend my life opposing the inevitable.

Pluto and the Technological Singularity

In a personal chart, an outer planet can effect permanent change. This is because as individuals we have the capacity to learn from our experience. Not so with mundane charts i.e. for countries and other collectives. As has been said, what we learn from history is that collectively we don’t learn from history. At least, not very much, and it’s soon forgotten.

The good side of this is that when e.g. Pluto passes through Sagittarius, and you get an outbreak of religious fanaticism, you know that it won’t last forever. Similarly with Pluto in Capricorn. We may end up being spied on by the government more than we’d like, but again it won’t last forever.

Actually so far I’m not too bothered about being spied on because I’m not planning on breaking the law. It’s still better than living in a village where everyone knows everyone else’s business and their history. I think that however many CCTV cameras there are around, and however many government agencies have my medical records etc, it’s better by far than living in said small village. That is my perspective on the surveillance society!

Another feature of Pluto in Capricorn will, I think, be moves towards a world economy based more on sustainability rather than endless growth. This is going to happen because resources are dwindling relative to demand. I think this will be a lot healthier. But I don’t doubt that if we manage to invent our way out of this predicament, greed and excess will return (another name for an economy based on endless growth.)

Speaking of inventions, Pluto’s passage through Aquarius from 2023 could bring new power (Pluto) to science (Aquarius). We will, of course, also be faced collectively with the shadow side of science. This is a big subject, and perhaps a bit premature! But one intriguing possibility is that Pluto in Aquarius will usher in the ‘technological singularity.’

No, I didn’t know what that meant either until a few weeks ago. A singularity is a point beyond which it becomes impossible to predict what will happen, like the edge of a black hole, or where a mathematical curve shoots off to infinity.

So the technological singularity is a point where technological progress has accelerated to such a degree that the ordinary methods of extrapolating into the future become too limited to be useful. Certainly for at least the last hundred years the rate of progress has been accelerating, and it is becoming harder and harder to keep up with the new inventions. Who, just a couple of years before it happened, could have predicted the internet and all that rapidly came with it?
So you could argue that we are already entering an age where the future is becoming harder to predict due to the accelerating pace of technological change. The technological singularity is just a logical extension of this.

Even more intriguing is the idea of a technological singularity brought about by developments in artificial intelligence to the point where you have machines that are in certain respects more intelligent than we are, and therefore able to initiate technological advances more effectively than we can. You really do get a singularity then, a whole paradigm shift where no prediction at all is possible. Even if these machines were only slightly more intelligent than us, “they could improve their own designs in ways unforeseen by their designers, and thus recursively augment themselves into far greater intelligences. The first such improvements might be small, but as the machine became more intelligent it would become better at becoming more intelligent, which could lead to an exponential and quite sudden growth in intelligence.” (Wiki)

This then leads to sci-fi scenarios such as the robots trying to take over.

In Wiki we also read: "Berglas (2008) notes that computer speech recognition is approaching human capabilities, and that this capability seems to require 0.01% of the volume of the brain. This analogy suggests that modern computer hardware is within a few orders of magnitude as powerful as the human brain."

So in 15 years time, as Pluto enters Aquarius, I expect some of these themes to start moving from the realms of science fiction and into reality.

UFOs and Conspiracies

The British Government has just started releasing batches of previously classified UFO files after a number of requests under the Freedom of Information Act. The files document reported sightings of UFOs by members of the public and the RAF. With Pluto about to make its final visit to Sagittarius, the timing is appropriate. Eight files have been released, part of almost 200 to be released over the next 4 years.

Here are some drawings made by members of the public. (From the BBC news website.)
They include this diagram, whose author believed alien craft used decoy methods to avoid detection, carrying not humans but "fallen angels".

This drawing of a UFO was made from a description given by a 78-year-old man, who claims he was taken on board an alien craft at Basingstoke Canal in Aldershot during 1983.

This reproduction of a UFO was made by a Metropolitan Police officer after three officers saw an object at Stanmore in Harrow in 1984.

A 1979 government briefing for the House of Lords dismissed the idea of political collusion with aliens:

d. There has been no approach to Governments, and no direct knowledge of UFOs by Governments. Lord Clancarty has an answer: there is a great inter-governmental conspiracy of silence, initiated by the CIA.

15. The idea of the inter-Governmental conspiracy of silence is at once the most astonishing and the most flattering claim of all. On so few things can the Governments of the world agree unanimously, but they have all supposedly agreed to conceal the evidence of UFOs from their peoples. Let me assure this House that her Majesty’s Government has never been approached by people from outer space.

Personally, I have no reason to doubt that these experiences were real. And I'm sure they weren't all just mistaking aircraft for UFOs. Beyond that, I don't know.

It's an excellent subject for conspiracy theorists. I like the point about how hard it is to get governments to agree on anything, so what chance a world-wide conspiracy of silence? Of course there are things we don't get told. But I'm continually disappointed by conspiracy theories, because I'd love it if some of them were true. What I keep finding is that the people who promote these theories make very shoddy use of any available evidence or theories that don't agree with their own theory, and 'facts' are presented which turn out to be anything but. These people clearly have a strong psychological need to believe their theories, quite possibly rooted in a sense of powerlessness.

If anyone knows of a conspiracy theory where the case is well-argued, and both sides presented, please let me know! With Pluto entering Capricorn, a time in which we can expect more government control and secrets, we may be about to enter a Golden Age of conspiracy theories!

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 Large Binocular Telescope

From BBC News:

'The world's most powerful optical telescope has opened both of its eyes. Astronomers at the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) in Arizona have released the first images taken using its two giant 8m diameter mirrors.

The detailed pictures show a spiral galaxy located 102 million light-years away from the Milky Way. The $120m (£60m) telescope uses two mirrors in tandem to maximise the amount of light it gathers, which allows astronomers to look deep into the Universe.

The resolution is 10 times greater than the space-based Hubble telescope. "The images that this telescope will produce will be like none seen before," said Professor Peter Strittmatter of the University of Arizona.'

The telescope has been 20 years in the planning. It has a lot of Pluto momentum behind it: actual construction began in 1997, 2 years after Pluto entered the very appropriate sign of Sagittarius, and it has begun functioning just as Pluto is leaving the sign.

Eris and our 100 Year Collective Journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is there anybody out there?

Why is it that on the one hand there have been loads of claimed sightings of alien craft over the decades; and yet the extensive monitoring of the skies for radio signals showing signs of intelligent life has yielded not a sausage in 50 years?

SETI (search for extra-terrestrial intelligence) researchers have just had a conference called The Sound of Silence to discuss the problem of the sky yielding no signals. Some said that it’s not enough to sit and listen, we need to be putting signals out to other universes so that in 20 or 30 years we might get a response. What if aliens also have the same attitude and are just sitting and listening for messages, with no-one actually putting them out there?

There is another problem, however, which is that if another race turned out to be hostile, it would give them helpful information in order to attack us. So there is a security issue. But Seth Shostack at the SETI institute is not worried: “It’s quite paranoid, given that the one thing we know about aliens – if they do exist – is that they are very, very far away.” He notes that we have been announcing our presence for decades: “Military radar signals have already penetrated deep into space, and early broadcasts of Star Trek and I Love Lucy are washing over one star system a day,” says Shostak. “If they’re listening, they already know we’re here.”

Which still for me leaves the problem of alien spacecraft (which doesn’t seem to have been part of SETI’s agenda). I’ve never seen one, but there are too many documented sightings to dismiss the phenomenon. Many sane people do see these things, and they have been photographed. I tend to think they are fully real, but not real in the same way that, say, a fridge is real. I think there is a lot in what Jung said when he claimed that sightings of flying saucers are projections of the collective unconscious that fit the way modern people look at the universe. I guess hundreds of years ago someone might have met the Virgin Mary or something like that. As I say, these experiences are no less real, and have no less objective content, than ordinary experiences. They are not ‘just’ projections. And they really are communications from another dimension.

I read a book called Daimonic Reality by Patrick Harpur about 10 years ago, and he makes the same sort of point around all sorts of unusual experiences which are real, but which can never seem to be finally pinned down and proven in the way that the existence of a fridge can be. And he showed how people’s experiences of aliens had changed over the decades since World War II, and how this could be seen as a reflection of general changes in the culture, including science fiction writing.

So as I say, I think this dimension is fully real, but quite possibly not in the normal sense. I guess I’m tempting fate here, and I’m going to find myself beamed up one night!

Pluto has still got a little more work to do in Sagittarius this year. It makes it an appropriate time for the SETI conference, and perhaps also for an indisputable visitation from aliens. Especially as Pluto is also still near the Galactic Centre.

OUR NEW GILDED AGE

There is a seagull in Aberdeen that once a day swoops into the local branch of W.H.Smith (as you do), pinches a packet of Doritos off the shelf, flies out with them and eats them. If the shop is busy, he waits until it’s quiet so that he can get a clear run at his target. What sign do you think this bird is? Gemini with Aries Rising? Hatched soon after dawn last summer, with Venus in Taurus opposite Jupiter?

At least animals don’t pretend they’re not materialistic. I was saying in yesterday's blog how in certain circles it’s seen as perfectly normal for women to chase after blokes because they are rich, and to marry them mainly for that reason. They are seen as having made a good catch. This is the general approving opinion, but you’re not allowed to say it. You’re supposed also to think that the couple got married purely because they are in love. People have these contradictory attitudes in their heads, and they’re not aware they are contradictory, because they lead unexamined lives. When I turned 40, my father said to me, “You know, there’s still time to go out and make £100 million!” I said, “And what then?” This threw him for a moment, because having £100 million is such a self-evident virtue, then he said, a bit blusteringly, “Well, the world of women will open up to you!” This is a man whose present wife once announced in his presence (quoting someone else) that the only thing a wife can’t delegate is the bedroom.

I’m not going to pretend I don’t like money, but it isn’t a source of meaning for me. With Scorpio-Taurus Nodes, however, it has been a long struggle to get a balanced view of the material realm, and not to feel defensive about not being materialistic. The challenge of Scorpio is to move away from the false sources of power – money, status etc – and to find real power within, that can’t be taken away. It seems to me that money is a big deal for most people, even if they’re not materialistic. I don’t mean a big deal from the point of view of getting hold of enough, but all the psychological issues around it. We are in the 8th House here.

And we are living in an age in which there are a lot of extremely rich people, what the New York Times called ‘America’s New Gilded Age’, a reference to the period before World War I, when “powerful enterprises, dominated by men who grew immensely rich, ushered in the industrialisation of the United States.” With Pluto (riches) coming to the end of its time in Sagittarius (expansion, excess), it is perhaps not surprising that we are in such an age again.

I haven’t got anything per se against people dedicating their lives to becoming rich. If that’s what turns them on, then who am I to try and stop them? Obviously the way they go about it has to be contained, because such people can be extremely ruthless. What also needs containing is the parading of these people as superior, as possessing more virtue than ordinary people, when often they’ve just got a big hole of inadequacy in them that they’re desperately trying to fill.

Many CEOs now get vast salaries, and as one chief executive said: “Obscene salaries send the wrong message through a company. The message is that all brilliance emanates from the top; that the worker on the floor of the store or the factory is insignificant.”

Such CEOs argue that though their incomes are very large, it only reflects a small share of the corporate value created on their watch. In reply, Paul Volcker, a former Federal Reserve Board Chairman, says “I don’t see a relationship between the extremes of income now and the performance of the economy…The market did not go up because businessmen got so much smarter.” He added that the 1950s and 1960s “were very good economic times and no one was making what they are now.”

It doesn’t necessarily seem wrong to me that someone who has trained for a highly skilled job and who works long hours should earn more, but what is happening now is out of all proportion, it really is Pluto in Sagittarius at its worst, bloated and arrogant and out of touch with reality. Pluto in Capricorn would classically correct this, Capricorn has a sense that there should be a proportional relationship between what you do and what you earn. So there may be a corrective coming. On the other hand, Capricorn is also big business, so it might get worse.