Fashion; building an altar to Neptune

Neptune governs what is fashionable, and he changes sign every 14 years or so. Next year he moves from Aquarius to Pisces, so fashions will change, and are probably starting to do so already. Well, fashions are always changing, or they wouldn’t be called fashions. It’s more the underlying character of what is fashionable that will be changing.

“For the fashion of this world passeth away.” (Corinthians Chapter 7)

So in the last couple of years there has begun to be protest against the fashion for anorexic catwalkers. Aquarius can be disembodied and sci-fi, so not only have we had women held up as icons who are virtually ill from malnourishment, but the Japanese have even managed to create a robot dressed up as a woman that walks and talks. You could say that Chiron in Aquarius over the last few years has brought the matter of anorexic models to a head.

While the ideal is to be thin, the actuality is increasingly the opposite, an epidemic of obesity that has been flagged up as Neptune approaches Pisces. So we may have the opposite problem for some years yet, as Pisces knows no boundaries, but at least, I hope, women will be allowed to have a shape again.


Aquarius is associated with electronics and networking, so he is the sign above all others that governs the internet. Putting this together with Aquarius’ odd relationship to the body, and we have kids whose main source of sex education is the online porn industry.

Teenage girls are now under pressure to remove their pubic hair: the boys find it off-putting after what they’ve seen on the internet. Admittedly the Romans weren’t too keen either on pubic hair, but that was more to do with their ideas on hygiene. This is different. Its origins are pornographic display. To my mind, there are also paedophilic undertones, in the same way that holding up boy-shaped girls (ie the catwalk) as an ideal also has this flavour. At the same time we demonise paedophiles, they are the modern equivalent of the Jews in medieval Europe.

There is another fashion which has been around for some time, which is for women to dye their hair bleach blonde. It used to be just young women who did this, but now it is all ages, and to start with I used to find it hideous and undignified when an elderly woman did this. (I’m not protesting against dyeing, which can look good, it is the bleach blonde effect). It is so common now that I’ve got used to it. I think it is again Neptune in Aquarius – which has been going on for 12 years – because it is an attempt to deny ageing.

Bleach blonde has always had the connotations of sexy and brainless (as in ‘I had a blonde moment’). After several decades of the social advances brought about by feminism, it’s as if many women decided, after all, to choose sex over brains. OK, I’m being a bit hard here, as it’s in many cases not true, but there is still a symbolism going on.

I’m still trying to get my head around Neptune transits, because I’m not very Neptunian, but for the last 4 years I’ve had Neptune conjunct Sun and now it’s approaching my DESC and I still seem to be in a swamp with no way forward. Someone just lent me ‘Making the Gods work for you’ by Caroline Casey and here was a bit that I liked:

BUILDING AN ALTAR TO THE GOD WHO’S BEEN OPPRESSING YOU

The Odyssey provides a Neptunian initiation tale. After fighting the Trojan War, Ulysses’ single goal is to reach home. But because Ulysses has angered Neptune by blinding the one-eyed Cyclops, one of Neptune’s children, the sea god sends disorientating winds and extravagant, weird, exotic adventures to distract Ulysses and blow him off course. Who can’t relate?

Finally, Ulysses consults Tiresias, the blind Underworld prophet, a kind of Pluto figure, who says: “You have angered Neptune. Here’s the ritual you must perform. Take an oar, a symbol of the sea, and walk it inland. When you get to a place where no-one has ever seen the sea, there you must build a temple to the god who has been oppressing you.”

So Ulysses does this, walking inland until somebody asks him if the oar is a piece of windmill, so he knows he has found the right place. He builds a temple to Neptune, the god who has been oppressing him, and it works. In an act of reversal magic, Neptune becomes his ally and sends him sweet winds. Ulysses sails for home, where he reclaims his kingdom.

Our task is to reflect upon what it might mean to build a temple to the god who has been oppressing us. What kind of oar do we take inland? The Neptunian part of us says that to liberate ourselves, we must carry our vision inland to where nobody has ever heard of it before, and give our gift there. It is easy to hang out in a homogenous neighbourhood; go somewhere new.

Gaia, the End of the World, and Jung

I’ve just been away for a week in West Wales, and the weather has been great for the first time since last September. We started getting heat waves in England a few years ago, and it seemed like global warming was for real. But the last two summers have been crap, and we have had 2 cold winters, so I’m not so sure any more.

What we do know is that the ice-caps are melting, and that the earth generally is warming up. It’s hard to know how much of that is man-made, and how much is a natural process. It certainly has a momentum of its own now, however, because the more ice-free ocean there is, the more sunlight gets trapped instead of reflected back by the ice. This is why James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis, is now so dire in his warnings. He reckons the earth is going to get very hot through this positive feedback cycle, that most of the world’s population will die, and that there is nothing we can do about it any more.

I often say that Mars in Cancer is a good place for an environmentalist, and that is what we find in the chart of James Lovelock, who was born on 26/7/1919 in the UK. A challenged Mars – in Cancer, or square Saturn – can be tedious in a man, because deep down they aren’t very sure of their Mars, so they’re always trying to show just how manly they are. But Lovelock isn’t like this at all. I saw him on BBC4 the other night. I hadn’t had a very favourable opinion of him, because of his doom-mongering, and because the Gaia hypothesis seemed a bit flabby and mystical.

In fact he is highly intelligent and down to earth. He has the originality and poetry of a Sun in Leo conjunct Neptune, and the concern for the planet of Moon, Jupiter, Mars and Pluto all in Cancer. As a teenager, he had the intellectual precocity of Mercury conjunct Saturn, and the willingness to stand up for his ideas of Mercury opposite Uranus. I’d say it is his Mars conjunct Pluto in Cancer, square to Chiron, that reflects his fight (Mars) for the survival (Pluto) not just of mankind but of life due to the irretrievable damage (Chiron) we have done to the planet (Cancer).

In a way it all came out of the planet Mars, because in the 1960s Lovelock was part of a project by NASA involving methods for detecting life on Mars. Lovelock came up with the idea that if there is life on Mars, you would be able to detect it in the atmosphere, because life would both use the atmosphere for raw materials, and deposit its waste products there. What they found using spectroscopy was that Mars’ atmosphere had carbon dioxide and very little else, so Lovelock concluded there was no life on Mars.

This perspective from Mars got him thinking about the earth from outside of it, so to speak, and he began to see the earth’s atmosphere itself as a product of life on earth, and regulated within a narrow band that makes life possible. So well-regulated by life is our atmosphere that it has been stable within this band for a billion years or more.

It is not just the atmosphere, but many of the conditions on earth that are regulated by life, so that the earth itself is like this self-regulating organism. This made immediate sense to me. Of course it would be part of the evolutionary process for organisms to regulate their environment to their advantage, because those that could do so would have a selective advantage. An early example Lovelock gave was of a sea algae that needs warmth, but not too much, so it releases Sulphur Dioxide, which causes clouds to form, which blocks out the sunlight. So you can see the regulating mechanism here: lots of sunlight leads to expansion in the numbers of algae, leading to release of lots of SO2, which stops the water getting any hotter and in fact probably cools it and keeps numbers of algae down.

Of course, for Gaia to work you need a much more complex interactive system than this involving thousands of species, and this has been one of the arguments against it: that there is no way such a complex system could have arisen through natural selection. My argument against this is two-fold: the self-regulating systems that have arisen within our bodies through natural selection are at least as complex as those in the environment; and secondly we do not understand evolution yet, if we ever will. I can’t see how the slow process of natural selection and random mutation could have produced the life-forms we have in the time available. I don’t dispute the fact of evolution, just the limited mechanisms we have for it. It’s too much like a monkey at a typewriter. That’s why I like Lamarckian ideas, for example, with their notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

In understanding Evolution, I think it is also important to realise that the idea originated and has been developed within a society that is highly competitive and makes a virtue of that sense of competition. So quite naturally the mechanism for Evolution has been seen in fundamentally competitive terms. I think this is a large part of the reason that our understanding of Evolution is so limited. The idea of Evolution as co-operation is staring us in the face through Gaia. And not just co-operation as enlightened self-interest (as in symbiosis), which brings us back to competition again as the root motive. I mean co-operation for its own sake, because it is in the nature of life to promote itself, even between species. Just as Lovelock had to stand outside the earth to undertand it, so we need to stand outside our competitive society to acquire a broader understanding of Evolution.

Anyway, the Gaia hypothesis is an entirely scientific idea that to me makes complete sense. It has a ‘Eureka that’s obvious’ quality to it. It also has a beauty and a poetry to it, reflected in the name (which William Golding came up with). Lovelock was tolerant of what religions did with the idea, who saw it as reflecting their understanding of God. But he was appalled at what the New Age did with it (see picture on left!), and I think it was probably exposure to that which has put me off Gaia for so long.

Back to his doom-mongering. What in a way makes it worse is that there is no sense of fanaticism around it. He is just putting forward the quite reasonable idea that there is a positive feedback process when it comes to global warming and the melting of the ice-caps, and the earth is therefore going to get a lot hotter for a while and this will make large parts of the earth uninhabitable by people. I’m not quite sure what to make of it. I don’t feel it’s going to be as bad as Lovelock makes out, but I can’t justify that. I suppose I tend to think that the earth is quicker to self-regulate than we may think, that life is quicker to respond to changes in its environment than we think. There is one natural process, for example, which is that if the oceans heat up, more water will vaporise, creating clouds that block out the sun, and thereby cooling the earth.

I suppose I’m back to my original observation: the earth is warming up, and the consequence for English weather for the last 2 years has been wet summers and cold winters. It’s so important in life to take account of your own immediate experience, whatever the priests/scientists say, and my experience tells me that we don’t know what the consequence of warming will be. The positive feedback loop around the melting of the polar ice-caps is of course worrying, but I don’t think we can be as certain of the outcome as Lovelock thinks.

I watched a documentary of another great man recently, CG Jung. It was a DVD I bought called Matter of Heart, which I’d recommend highly to anyone. I’d seen it twice before over the last 25 years, but I keep coming back to it. It’s pricey, but well worth it. One of the special features is a ½ hour interview Jung gave to the BBC 18 months before he died. In this he is asked about survival after death, and a point he makes is that whatever our conscious attitude may be, his work with old people had shown him that the Unconscious behaves as though life is going to continue. I thought this was fascinating.

I think another word for the Unconscious, whether in its personal or collective forms, is simply ‘life’. It’s as though life over billions of years has become this huge reserve, this huge resource and we have this fragile consciousness that floats on the surface of it, so fragile that it is extinguished for 8 hours in 24 while it recovers its ability to exist. Of course this fragile consciousness goes into some sort of abeyance at death, but the great river of life itself that flows through us, ‘the Unconscious’, is in no doubt that it will itself continue.

This is something I always take away from Jung, this sense of being part of a much bigger and richer current of life. And it removes that sense of anxious isolation that the ego often feels, its desperate sense that its own death – which after all occurs for 8 hours in 24! – is the end of everything.

The Collective Unconscious doesn't just contain human history, it contains the whole of evolution (in the same way that physically we have the principle of 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny' in embryonic development). We don't belong just to the human species, we are also amoebae, we are crocodiles, we are plants, we are apes... we belong to life. This again brings us back to the idea of evolution as co-operation rather than competition. It is life that is the project, not the individual species, which is ephemeral and not as clear-cut as one might think. They keep finding new species of human, for example, and in its current form (us) hasn't been around very long at all.


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It is not immediately obvious from Jung’s chart why he should have been such a great explorer of the Unconscious. Certainly you can see the analyst in him through his Sun on the Descendant, the point of ‘Other’, and the healer in the square from the Sun to Neptune and Chiron. You see his willingness to break with psychoanalytic tradition through his Aquarius Rising, its ruler Uranus in the 7th, as well as the Sun in Leo. (Leo-Aquarius is the axis of individuality and originality and coming to terms with the collective resistance to that.)

The only way we can explain his connection to the unconscious depths is through 2 wide aspects: Moon conjunct Pluto (8 degrees) and Pluto conjunct IC (8 degrees, out of sign). The Moon and the IC describe the personal unconscious, Pluto describes the necessity for facing and transforming it, as well as the connection through to the Collective Unconscious. In this sense, another word for Pluto is also ‘life’: it is only our resistance to life, unique in the animal kingdom, which makes it appear as a dark god, which is how we usually know Pluto.

Jung’s chart is an example of why I don’t treat wide aspects as necessarily weak. In Jung’s case, they were about as powerful as they come. I think wideness and out-of-sign-ness can bring space and therefore perspective and consciousness to these aspects. I’ve seen it in myself with my wide, out of sign Sun opposite Pluto. It has always been very operative, demanding that I find authenticity within myself. But the wideness has made me sensitive to the negative aspect of Pluto, which is the misuse of power, the need to dominate others, which you can often see going on unconsciously in the tighter aspects of Sun to Pluto.

Back to the Leo-Aquarius axis. I think these types can start out life very uncomfortable with themselves, because they don’t fit in. Life makes this constant demand on them to be true to themselves, rather than true to the values and expectations they see around them. But when they get older, after a lifetime of learning to trust who they uniquely are, they can be unusually comfortable in their own skins, because their base is real, it is not dependent on others. You see this in Jung, this old man who is deeply who he is, and part of that process was living with the scorn of others, whether it was from the king of the psychological establishment, Freud, or the wider dismissal of him as unscientific and mystical. Lovelock also, as a Leo, has spent much of his life at odds with the establishment.

Jung, incidentally, wasn't very optimistic about the future of mankind, thinking that we might just about 'make it round the corner'. In a sense this isn't that different to Lovelock, though I think Jung was thinking more in terms of nuclear weapons, as his last years coincided with the height of the Cold War.

The Nuclear Axis

The ‘nuclear axis’ is due for another shake-up. The chart below is based on the first man-made sustained nuclear reaction, which took place in Chicago in 1942. What is immediately noticeable is the Saturn-Uranus conjunction: the splitting (Uranus) of matter (Saturn). These 2 planets are opposite the Sun, and 8 to 10 degrees of Gemini-Sag has become known as the nuclear axis. It has proved very sensitive to transits. When Hiroshima took place 3 years later, for example, Mars was at 9 Gemini. I first wrote about this in one of my earliest blogs in 2006.


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The early 60s, when Pluto in Virgo squared this axis, was at the height of MAD, or Mutual Assured Destruction, which involved the advent of ballistic missile submarines that ensured a 'second strike capability'.

In the early to mid seventies, Neptune in Sagittarius crossed this axis, and this was the time of the SALT I & II talks, which for the first time limited the nuclear arsenals of the USA and the USSR.

In the late nineties, Pluto in Sagittarius crossed this axis, and this was the time when India and Pakistan came out as nuclear powers, beginning a new era of proliferation.

Next year, Neptune will enter Pisces, squaring by sign the nuclear axis. It will be 7 degrees off, but that is close enough for a hard aspect from Pluto or Neptune to be operative, as it was in the early seventies when Neptune entered Sagittarius.

So far, it seems, the hard Pluto transits have been about proliferation and stand-offs, whereas the one hard Neptune transit we have had has been about containment and reduction of the nuclear threat.

So we are about to enter another Neptune period, and it seems to me that it is again going to be about containment, after a period of proliferation that has drawn in North Korea as well as India and Pakistan, and in which attempts are being made to stop Iran joining the club.

The issue of nuclear arms does, paradoxically, seem to be one that can draw the major powers together. What I’d expect to see over the next 10 years, as Neptune does his work, is for Iran to be stopped from developing nuclear weapons, and for India and Pakistan to be drawn in more formally into agreements on limiting nuclear weapons. As for North Korea, the ‘zombie state’, and the ‘special case’ of Israel, it is hard to say.

If we take the Solar Returns for the Nuclear Chart, the year 2012 looks very interesting, with a Pluto-Venus conjunction on the ASC, trine to Jupiter on the IC. So in 2 years time I think we could see some real progress on containing nuclear weapons.


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The Fixed Stars around the birth of nuclear energy are a bit spooky. In particular, Algol was closely conjunct the ASC. Traditionally, this was the most evil star of all. I don't know what the more modern psychological interpretation is, but Brady gives it the meaning of female passion and intensity. I think I'll stick with the traditional meaning, because nuclear energy is about the most ill-omened event ever to have occurred.

The star Regulus is conjunct the Chiron-Node conjunction in Leo. Nuclear energy is something that once done cannot be undone, and it is very tied up with our destiny and where human curiosity and reason can lead us, and how it can be our undoing. Regulus is one of the Royal Stars and is in the constellation Leo. Brady's meaning is success if revenge is avoided, which sounds about right: success if nuclear energy is only used for peaceful purposes.

Papal Paranoia and the Astrology of the Christian Era

First, the real news. A Geordie (a person from Newcastle) has beaten the world underpants record by donning 211 pairs at once. He began with 40 inch pairs (large) and finished with 60 inch. He commented afterwards: "I felt like if I'd had more pants I could have carried on."


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The record-breaking event took place on Thursday evening in South Shields. I haven’t been able to find the time, but between 7.15 and 8.15 there was a Grand Trine between the Moon, Jupiter and the MC. The Moon was in Scorpio (gonads!) and expansive Jupiter is associated with record-breaking. As the evening progressed, Mars (drive) crossed the Midheaven (public event) in square to Venus in Taurus (beautiful clothing - ?)

Anyway, onto the Pope, who is making a counter-attack. His first response to the latest round of paedophile cover-up allegations, which are starting to home in on Himself, was to accuse his critics of gossip and backbiting. The Buddhist teacher I had in my misspent youth was, and is, just like this when he deigns to respond to personal criticism. It’s like these people think so highly of themselves, they are so above ordinary humanity, that they cannot take seriously criticism from petty worldlings. How can ordinary humans have the temerity to comment on one who has a hotline to Absolute Consciousness?

Round two of the counter-attack came from the Pope’s personal preacher Raniero Cantalamessa, who compared the criticism of the Church to anti-Semitism. It really does show that these ecclesiastical hierarchs think the criticisms are essentially baseless, because the whole point about anti-Semitism is that it is not based on anything the Jews have actually done, it is just racial prejudice. In the case of the Catholic Church, of course, the criticism is very much based on things they have done – not just the paedophile priests, but the institutional cover-up, and even tolerance of paedophilia, that has gone on.

To give the Vatican credit, they did say that Raniero Cantalamessa’s remarks did not represent its official view. But the comparison with anti-Semitism is so outrageous that this bland response amounts to a tacit approval. The head of Germany’s Council of Jews was quite right to call the remarks unprecedented "insolence”.

Fr Cantalamessa was born on 22 July 1934 in Italy. He has a very weakly aspected Mars at 4 Cancer. This is the planet to look at when someone is being belligerent. It is not well-integrated with the rest of his personality, so he may come to regret his remarks. Cancer is a tribal sign, so Fr Cantalamessa is defending his tribe, and being weakly aspected, his Mars can express itself, and did express itself, in a primitive way. Furthermore, Pluto is making an opposition by transit to his Mars, revealing and empowering the archaic nature of Fr Cantalamessa’s Mars. Both Pluto and Cancer can be very primitive in their expression.

The Pope’s Mars in pugilistic Gemini is also being activated by a transiting square from Uranus. It is natally square to Mercury, so he has had plenty of years to hone it (unlike Fr Cantalamessa, who isn’t very skilled with this planet.) Even so, accusing your critics of backbiting and gossip when there is a very clear case to answer is not very sophisticated, and shows the degree to which the Pope feels under attack.

I think the Catholic Church is a primitive institution, and some of its true colours are being revealed in the way it is responding to criticism.

This could be a terminal crisis for the Catholic Church. It is a huge issue. Rowan Williams, the head of the Anglican Church, recently commented on BBC Radio 4: "I was speaking to an Irish friend recently who was saying that it's quite difficult in some parts of Ireland to go down the street wearing a clerical collar now. And an institution so deeply bound into the life of a society, suddenly becoming, suddenly losing all credibility - that's not just a problem for the Church, it is a problem for everybody in Ireland."

I am sure the same situation must be arising wherever the paedophile scandal has come out. And of course it is not just about paedophiles. It is about the whole culture that has created so many of them. They are symptoms of a deeper sickness. The Church of course does not see it like that, and to that extent I think it will not be able to adapt and survive.

Since writing the above, a top Cardinal has referred to the "petty gossip" characterising the furore around the paedophile scandal, and the Pope managed not to refer to it directly in his Easter Sermon.

The Christian Era began on 1st January 1 AD, and it seems quite reasonable to me to draw up a chart for that moment as descriptive of how Christianity is faring at any given time.


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The Sun-Mars-Jupiter Angular t-square shows the evangelistic (Jupiter), crusading (Mars) yet conservative (Sun in Capricorn) nature of the beast. By transit, it is in for a hell of a time over the next few years as both Pluto and Uranus hard aspect this t-square. Pluto has come within 2 degrees of the Angles in the last month, and shows the deep crisis into which the Church is only just entering. The transits show that this crisis is not going to go away. Rather, it will deepen, and it is saying that the Catholic Church has to change or die. At present, it is choosing to die, and I cannot imagine any other course of action under the present Pope. If we look at the progressed chart for the Christian Era, there is a square from the Sun to Pluto that will be exact in one day (5th April 2010). The exactitude of this square tells us just how strong this challenge (square) to the power (Pluto) of the Church leadership (Sun) is. It emphasises that this crisis can only deepen.

It is fascinating to look back 500 years to the Reformation, which split the Church in two. It began in 1517 when Martin Luther posted his criticisms of the Church on the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg. That year Pluto was in early Capricorn, a couple of years short of an exact conjunction to the Christian Sun.

Of course it is not just the Catholic Church which is influenced by these transits, because the chart we are using is for the Christian Era itself. So we may expect convulsions in other Christian Churches, and that is certainly what we find in the Anglican Church (or Episcopalian Church as it is known in the US). There is currently a split between the US and African branches of the Church over the ordination of gay men that seems almost certain to split the Church in two.

As I wrote in my last post, Popegate, the Pope's Solar Return for 2014, combined with his transits, strongly indicate he will cease to be Pope that year. So I expect to see 4 years of an embattled, disintegrating Church, followed by some sort of rebirth, maybe of an institution that is a lot smaller and poorer, but that maybe has more sense and humility.

The chart for the Christian Era has some interesting aspect patterns, but I think I'll leave that for another posting.

Popegate 2010-2015

So the Pope is at last under direct pressure over his role in the long-running cover-up over paedophile priests, many of whom were quietly moved to other parishes, where they could, and did, carry on as before. It’s about time the Pope came under scrutiny, because he was in the thick of the cover-up for many years when he was the previous Pope’s Enforcer, or ‘Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’, formerly known as the Holy Office, the historical Inquisition.

As I wrote 2 years ago, “Ratzinger (as he then was) also had authority over other matters including clerical sexual misconduct. In 2001 he issued his notorious “Crimen Sollicitationis”, which affirmed and clarified the Church’s right to keep secret its own investigations into clerical sexual misconduct. In other words, he legitimised the cover-up that was going on. Under normal circumstances, he would have been prosecuted for inciting people to withhold from the police information pertaining to serious crimes.”

Look at the fancy Latin name they gave to it, Crimen Sollicitationis. You just know there’s a scam going on.

The current case involves a paedophile priest at a school for deaf boys in Wisconsin. Complaints were made to the Vatican office in 1996, and it seems there was no response.

There are no doubt dozens of other similar cases in which Ratzinger was involved, but the trouble is that he was at the very top, and people at the top rarely take the rap. You just have to look at the Iraq torture cases involving the US army. It was the lowly soldiers who were charged and convicted, not the senior officers who presided over the culture.

So I have no doubt that Ratzinger was involved in the paedophile cover-up in a big way for many years. But I doubt that he will take the rap for it, at least in the near future. Even if the secular authorities went for him – and the Church seems to remain above the law in many ways - I think it would be very hard to prove anything. The most we can hope for now is a damaged reputation.


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What we see in his current transits is the tail end of a Uranus square to his MC and Mars, and Saturn conjunct his Moon, which rules his 5th House of Children. So his position could be under a certain amount of pressure and destabilising influence and attack for the rest of the year, but that will probably be that. For now.

His natal Moon in Libra is also square to natal Pluto. So it could get very heavy indeed a few years down the line when Pluto and Uranus begin to hard-aspect his natal Pluto and Moon. Pluto will also be culminating his long passage through Ratzinger’s 10th House of career and reputation. (He became Pope just as Pluto was entering his 10th House.)

The paedophile issue will run and run, because there is too much pain involved for it not to. It has been going on for years now and only seems to get bigger. And it is only just starting in Europe.

So for now and for the next year or two the Pope is looking like he’ll remain untouched, albeit under a certain amount of pressure. But the nature of the issue put together with the astrology suggests to me that the noose will gradually be tightening.

It looks to me a bit like Watergate, but set over a longer time period. For the next couple of years, the Pope will be able to blame others. But in 3-5 years time, with Pluto and Uranus starting to make some serious aspects to his natal Moon-Pluto, we may see a process leading to the Pope's resignation, the first to do so since 1415.

I can back this up with another major transit, Neptune square natal Saturn. The Pope’s Saturn is in Sag in the 9th House, a classic position for religious authority (the Dalai Llama also has this placement; the previous Pope had Pluto in the 9th). This authority could begin to diminish in 2011 when Neptune enters the sign square to Sag, Pisces, a process that could deepen until the exact square of 2014. Saturn is also our physical structure, and being in his early 80s, this transit could reflect an increasing frailty over the next 4 years.


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The Pope’s Solar Return for 2014-15, relocated to Rome, has Pluto conjunct MC opposite Jupiter conjunct IC, forming a Grand Cross with Mars and Uranus. There is also an eclipse along the ASC-DESC axis. This will surely be the year when he ceases to be Pope, and Pluto’s involvement in both the Solar Return and by transit suggests to me it will not simply be the gentle passing away of a much-loved pontiff.

The issue of men in religious positions, like any position of power, getting up to sexual shenanigans is an old story. Normally it is adult female pupils that the male teachers are sleeping with, and different cultures have different attitudes to this. Amongst Native Americans, for example, it is assumed that the teacher will be sleeping with his female pupil. In our culture it has recently become an absolute no-no, which I think has a lot to do with the influence of puritanical feminism and its fear of male sexuality. Timothy Leary was once asked if he'd slept with any of his students, and after pausing for a moment, replied that he couldn't think of any he hadn't slept with. The French sculptor Rodin slept with most of his young female models, to the extent that he felt obliged to let them down gently if he didn't feel so inclined. In rural Ireland, the Catholic priest usually had a female housekeeper, and it was understood that she also shared his bed. My view tends to be that if 2 adults decide to sleep together, it's not really my business, and if one of them happens to be a teacher and the other a pupil, well it can be messy, but so are a lot of relationships, and people often learn from that.

The above, though, is a bit beside the point when considering the Catholic Church, which has managed to twist and pervert to an unprecedented degree the sexual desires not just of its priesthood but also its lay congregation. A lot of the trouble seems to lie in the training of the priests, who from a young age are hidden away in boys-only seminaries and taught that sex is dirty. Consequently they suffer from arrested development, and their repressed sexuality finds unhealthy outlets. I don't think celibacy (which was originally introduced for economic reasons) is so much the problem, because hypocrisy is always an honourable way out.

Personally, though, I think they should do away with priestly celibacy - they can leave that for the monks and nuns - and not let a priest near a congregation unless he is married. They also need to look at the training that causes the problem in the first place, but the trouble is that you are up against religion, which often has a doctrinal, rather than pragmatic attitude to its practices and trainings. So far, the Church has shown no sign of common sense on this one.

I wonder also if priestly paedophilia may be a power issue. These priests are bummed up as spiritual and superior, but in reality they have been neutered, they are men in skirts, they are disempowered. Apart from the odd cowering parishioner, perhaps the only time these ghosts of men feel they have any real power is when they force themselves on children.

I watched the film 'Doubt' recently. It is set in a Roman Catholic School in the US, and involves a tussle between a male priest who is a teacher, and a nun who suspects him of being a paedophile. You never quite find out if he is, but it is also clear that he has enormously helped the boy with whom he is also suspected of sexual activity. The film gives the issue the moral complexity that you find in real life, rather than the simplistic black-and-white demonisation that you find in the tabloids.

Part II of Number Symbolism

My last post covered numbers 1 to 6 of Liz Greene talking about number symbolism in the context of a Tarot Weekend. The whole seminar lasts about 9 hours, is well worth getting, and you can buy it here.

So here's part II. (Again, the pictures are my choosing!):

The 7 is again like the 5 not divisible by anything. They’re both rather odd numbers. The 7 is the Sephirah called Netzach, and it’s sometimes translated as victory and sometimes it’s called splendour. It’s on the feminine side of the tree of life. It’s almost like the rainbow or the peacock’s tail in alchemy. It’s this glorious expression of all possible manifestations, all forms of life. It’s as if Adam in the garden is suddenly presented with every possible variety and form of living being. He hasn’t yet named them. But the whole range of possible manifestations is revealed. 7 is a number which of course is also associated with the 7 planets. So it’s a number that seems to pertain to the variety of dynamics inherent in the cosmic system. It’s the complete cosmic system, it’s all the components. And you find it turning up a lot in many different symbolic systems. Because it’s a very specific representation of ‘Here’s the cosmos and it’s all one.’ But by the time you get to 7 it’s been broken down into 7 primary ingredients, which are the astrological symbols of the planets, all the possible choices.

It’s also associated with ceremonial magic. It seems to have that connotation. Ritual. Different from the 5 connected with the pentagram. 7 has to do with invocation. It’s the knowledge of correspondences, the understanding of all the links and connections. So the number in Cabbala, in Pythagorean thought, seems to have to do with the recognition of the diversity of manifestation and how to manipulate it, how to work with it. And also the beauty and glory of the range of things that are available in life.

So you can see how something that starts as a unity gradually enters further and further into the realm of manifestation, it gets more and more diverse as it goes. It appears to fragment, it has more and more colours, more and more shapes, more and more names. It’s still not complete because the numbers from that perspective are a process of emanation into reality. So the completion only comes at the last one.

So 7, you get a sense of the variety, and it does seem to connect with Psyche’s choices. She just has all these possibilities thrown at her.

8 is connected with worldly knowledge. And I think that the card reflects it very well because it’s about having to understand and name and learn about all these different facets of manifestation that are presented in the number 7. So like 4, 8 is connected with the earth plane. It’s the Sephirah of Hod. In some systems it’s associated with the planet Mercury because it has to do with industry and knowledge and understanding applied to reality. It’s Adam naming the animals, taking power over the material world. It’s the application of knowledge to the diversities of life which seems to link up very well with the 8 here in the suit of cups.

The 9, which is the last but one of the Sephirot, is called the foundation. It’s name is Yesod. And it’s an unashamedly phallic connection. It is literally the ejaculation of the divine energy into material reality. So if you take that quality of the number 9 and you put it together with the suit of cups, which has so much to do with the heart, then of course you’re going to get ecstasy. Which is precisely what it is.

10 is the completion of the system. It’s called Malchut, the kingdom, so manifestation is now complete. It’s the miracle of the completed universe into which all the prior 9 qualities have been embedded. This is the permanent relationship, it has a foundation as a kingdom, it’s anchored and earthed.

I know that it’s very abstract, trying to get a sense of the quality of a number. Although from the point of view of reading these cards as they turn up in a spread, simply working with the mythic image is immensely helpful. You can actually get a picture of Psyche going down into the underworld and that gives you something to hang on to in terms of interpreting a card. The numbers behind them really form the structure of the whole Minor Arcana. It is worth trying to get a sense of the quality and colour and flavour of the number.

Numbers in these kinds of systems are not just quantities. They are qualities and they are also entities. They are beings, they have life, they have sentience. Just like the planets in astrology do. The numbers in the Pythagorean and Cabbalistic systems which I think underlie the numerical symbolism of the Minor Arcana of the Tarot are not simply measuring something. They have a power of their own. So it’s not only the image on the card that is important to remember in giving you a key to the divinatory meaning. It’s what is this number about? Because as it comes through the 4 suits it’s almost as if the number is a deity or a living entity and it’s going to wear the clothing of the element that the suit belongs to. It’ll wear the clothing of water when a number represents one of the cards in the suit of cups.

To get a sense of the entity under the clothing you lock into the meaning of the card in a way which I think is impossible if you’re just trying to remember a divinatory meaning for it. So although it’s quite abstract, it’s worth trying to learn more about these numbers. There are variations as to what’s involved from one symbolic system to another.

If you read Plato’s description of the geometric forms, they don’t really sound a lot like trying to read a Cabbalistic text about the Sephirot. So they’re not going to squash together neatly as in A on top of B fits exactly. But the more you get a sense of how numbers are used in the various systems that have fed into the Tarot, I think the better your ability to read these Minor Arcana will be.

All the numbers come out of Oneness and Oneness is just a point. If you have ever done geometry or played around with it, a point doesn’t have any shape or form or can’t see anything, it’s just a point. You can’t see what its depth is, what its height is, it’s got nothing, no dimensions. And a point is visualised in number symbolism as the centre of a circle. This is the Godhead as a unity. The moment you draw a diameter across the circle you have 2. You’ve cut the circle in half. If you take the radius of a circle, which is from the point at the centre to the circumference and you line it up around the circumference you wind up with 2 triangles, or a hexagram.

So all the geometric shapes, what Plato called the plane figures, all come out of a circle, from a point. The whole of the structure of material reality, all the solids, the pyramid, the cube, the dodecahedron, all these amazing structures that form the imaginal basis of material reality, come out of a point. So when you’re thinking of numbers, they’re perceived as a metaphor for the creation of the universe out of a Oneness. It’s a very, very profound perception of numbers that they’re working with here. Not just 1,2,3 to count up how much sterling you’ve got in your pocket.

So if you can make the effort to do a bit of reading around this kind of symbolism, it really will help your understanding of the cards.

I think astrologers have an advantage because they know their aspects, so you can get a lot of insight from the nature of how aspects are interpreted, because they’re based on the same number symbolism: an opposition is a 2, a square is a 4, a trine is a 3, a sextile is a 6, a septile is a 7 and so on, a quintile is a 5. And there is such a thing as a decile which nobody ever uses, which is a 10. And then we also have the reptile! The puerile, the imbecile! Which are very, very esoteric aspects, not often used.

It’s remarkable how it gets you going. 3 is the 1st plane figure, but there’s no doubt it’s only 2 dimensional. The moment you’ve got 4, a square is a plane figure, but you can get a pyramid out of 4. It’s got 4 sides, it’s the first number that can actually create something solid. It’s wonderful stuff, but as far as what to read, there isn’t really a handbook, and most Tarot books don’t go into it. A good place might be Frances Yates’ books.

Liz Greene on Number Symbolism (Part 1)

While I was hobbling about recently after having some bone removed from my foot, I took the chance to transcribe a section from a Mythic Tarot Studyshop by Liz Greene and Juliet Sharman-Burke. It was the section in which Liz Greene talks about number symbolism in the Cabbala, and applies it to the Minor Arcana in the Tarot. The particular context is a discussion of the suit of cups, which in the Mythic Tarot uses the myth of Eros and Psyche. The whole studyshop is brilliant - I managed to separate the spoken part from the image part and put it on CD to play in my car - so below is a taster. Numbers 7 - 10 will be in my next post. The images are of my choosing.

The 4 suits do seem to correlate with the very ancient idea of the 4 elements, being the basic substances out of which everything is created. The stories that they tell therefore apply to one of 4 possible levels of life. That’s why we’ve tried to find myths that correlate with that element.

The suit of cups seems to relate to the element of water in terms of the traditional meanings associated with the numbered cards. We chose Eros and Psyche not just because it’s a myth about relationship, because in fact all myths are about relationship on one level or another. It’s because it’s a myth that involves the development of feeling values. That myth is unique because first of all the central character is female: rather than a hero we have a heroine. And her journey has very much to do with her establishing her values in the realm of the heart. So it seemed to be a particularly appropriate story for the element of water because the element of water is connected with feeling values.

It’s worth remembering that the very first record we have of the 4 elements is in Empedocles. And he calls them the 4 roots. And they are divinities, they’re not just stuff, they’re actually gods. And the element of water he associates with a goddess who he calls Nestis which is the Sicilian epithet for Persephone. And his version of Persephone is not the one we usually think of as being the young maiden who’s abducted by Hades and dragged into the Underworld. She is the mother of Dionysus and her background is in Orphic myth. And when Dionysus is dismembered and destroyed by the titans she weeps, and her tears in Empedocles’ cosmological model are the element of water. The element of water for him is a deity that represents grief and the pain of separation, the inevitability of separation that happens to all living beings.

(The divinatory meaning is jealousy as well as love).

These 10 numbered cards are full of number symbolism and it carries through in all the suits. The symbolism is linked with Pythagorean ideas about the cosmos being built on geometry and number and also with the cabbalistic idea of 10 Sephirah, each of which is an emanation of increasing complexity and further distance from the original source. So the more you understand about the numbers, the more you’ll get the feeling of the card. And 1 of course is unity, 1 has always meant unity, 1 is the One, everything is part of the One, everything emerges out of the One.

In the Cabbala, one is the 1st Sephirah called Keter which is the crown. Everything is contained within it, all the other Sephirah are contained within it, before they begin to emerge and differentiate. So that primal 1, the Ace, always carries the meaning of a raw primal unity which contains the whole story. And that’s why we put the deity on the Aces, the deity that presides over the myth, because that deity encapsulates the entire story, inside her she’s got all the characters. That goddess, in a sense aspects of her, are represented by Eros, by Psyche, by Psyche’s sisters and by all the other characters that we meet in the story.

2 It should be obvious, it’s one becomes 2, it’s male and female. So immediately you have the connotation of relationship, of conflict, equilibrium, mortal enemies, passionate lovers, everything that has to do with opposites, both in the dark and the light sense. The 2nd Sephirah in the cabbalistic tree is Chochmah. That Sephirah is the beginning of manifestation, you have the beginning of the pronouncement of the word that’s going to generate the cosmos. So already there is the deity and an Other, there is already the beginning of a separation of the deity into two.

The 3 is a very powerful number in many different religious systems. The Trinity in Christianity is a form of completion. It could be argued that it’s a very early form of completion because it’s an entirely male trinity and missing the 4th leg. Tables tend to be very unstable with 3 legs.

But the triangle in Pythagorean thought is a conflict which is tentatively not resolved but kept in equilibrium by a 3rd point which has emerged out of the conflict or its opposition.

So we have the equilateral triangle. It’s a very tenuous kind of balance, it’s not going to last because it’s static, there’s no movement in it, and the tension that’s still there between the opposites is going to erupt again because there’s something not complete about it. So the Sephirah which goes with it in the Cabbala is Binah. This is known as the Sepurnal triad of Sephirot. Binah is usually understood to be female. And the initial movement towards manifestation that happens in the 2nd Sephirah now is ready to be actually given birth to in form, in Binah, but it’s still not out yet. So you get this gradual movement toward manifestation, toward the animation of the cosmos. And in Binah the foetus starts to become recognisable as the universe, but it’s still not born yet, so there’s a deceptive harmony about it.

The 4. In Pythagorean thought, 4 is the number of manifestation. It represents the earth. So it’s a very stable structure and at the same time there’s something dense about it because it has to do with something concretising. And where the triangle is often associated with spirit, the square is associated with matter.

Also in astrology, which took up this Pythagorean idea of number symbolism, the trine is seen to be a beneficent aspect, the square is seen to be an aspect of friction, and I think largely because of forces linked in to manifestation. So possibly one of the reasons why the 4 in the suits of cups and pentacles is uncomfortable is that these elements are already very much embedded in life, and so if you then take the qualities of the feeling realm and sensory realm and you push them even further into incarnation, there’s a sense of entombment, it’s a sense of being trapped, because there’s already enough substance in those elements. So you put the element together with the form, it’s too much. Whereas if you put the form together with air, which is the realm of the mind, or fire, which is the realm of the intuition, the imagination, they can manifest and there’s not so much of a sense of being trapped.

The Cabbalistic 4 is very different, and this seems to be a place where it’s hard to apply the number symbolism because the 4th Sephirah in the Cabbalistic system is Chesed, which is Mercy, and this is very benign and generous, it’s the flow of energy in the deity down into manifestation with generosity and with compassion and with mercy. Too much of it, if it’s not in balance, is perceived as allowing evil to happen because there isn’t enough of a sense of justice. So the negative component of 4 in the Cabbalistic system is that it’s too soft and the dark can raise itself and begin to destroy if there is not sufficient structure to stop it. So the 4 in the Cabbala is quite different.

Psyche is too generous. I think in her relationship with these sisters she’s quite blind, she’s mercy without justice. They’re her sisters so she wants to make them welcome, she’s going to give them all some jewellery, and it wouldn’t take rocket science to work out that these sisters don’t wish her well, they’re green with envy. Anyone with any sensitivity would pick that up, but she doesn’t. So she herself is very much the Cabbalistic 4, she’s full of generosity and kindness, she’s discontented, but nevertheless she can’t draw the line and say I’ve got to protect myself or it’s wrong for them to say insulting things about my husband. So it does fit in that context. Part of what goes wrong with the 4 is that there isn’t enough strength to prevent evil and so the problems that arise out of it later have a lot to do with that lack of boundaries.

5 in the Cabbala is the Sephirah of strict justice, of severity, which is called Gevurah. In Cabbalistic philosophy Gevurah is the root of evil in the world or in the cosmos, because evil is understood to be severity unchecked by mercy or anger, unchecked by compassion, bitterness unchecked by forgiveness. So it’s a very peculiar, necessary but rather dark aspect of deity. And it’s interesting the way it comes through in medieval magic, because the pentagram has become the common symbol of magical working and whether its horns are pointing up or down is supposed to distinguish whether it represents white magic or black magic. But in the medieval popular mind the pentagram is associated with the conjuring of demons, with the darkness. When it’s pointing with its horns up it’s the head of the goat, when it’s this way it’s supposed to be positive, when it’s the other way it’s supposed to be negative.

The very fact that the number is associated with the dark side seems to be connected with the Cabbalistic idea that the dark side comes from this Sephirah. How it relates here, I think it does have to do with the appearance of something very destructive that is injuring or contaminating or spoiling. It’s very much about spoiling. In the Eros and Psyche myth, the love has been spoiled, at least apparently so, although not irrevocably, any more than it is irrevocable in the Cabbala, it isn’t, but something has contaminated the cosmos with that number 5.

The 6 is two 3s which suggests there is some component in the 6 which involves equilibrium and harmony. 6 is also the Sephirah at the centre of the 2nd triangle of Sephirot. It’s called Tiferet and it has to do with equilibrium. The extremes that precede it from mercy to severity are joined together in Tifiret which is still not yet complete, it’s not yet finished, but it’s a point where there’s this very tenuous equilibrium and balance between forces, and I think the 6 of cups has that quality. It’s a place of stillness which is not entirely comfortable, because you’re having to reconcile past and present and future fears, future hopes, anger and blame, compassion, forgiveness, and somehow hold all of them in a place of rather uncomfortable balance which is that central point in the tree of life.

Tifiret is a very interesting complex of ideas. Another word for it is beauty. It’s perceived as the bridegroom in Cabbalistic iconography. It’s the male quality of the godhead which is now ready to mate with the feminine in order to generate the world. But it’s the bridegroom that’s not yet done it. It got picked up in the Christian Cabbala as an image of Christ because it’s holding this extremely tense point between divinity and humanity, between what is above and what is below. It hasn’t quite become embodied, or not entirely, but it is not entirely in the spirit. It’s neither entirely male nor entirely female. So it’s having to hold everything together right at the centre of the tree. 6 is a terribly important card in the sequence of numbers because it’s having to pull together all the 5 cards before it, which involves something extremely beautiful, full of godhead, full of divinity. And yet there’s this tension and difficulty and the emergence of evil and things that have been spoiled, and finally there’s a temporary place of rest which involves a certain degree of sacrifice, which I think is why the Christian Cabbalists connected it with the figure of Christ. Sacrifices have to be made around that figure 6 in order to maintain the equilibrium. (to be continued)