Illness and Vocation; Sun and North Node

I often encounter people with long-term illnesses that are hard to diagnose. And it seems to me that the illness is often ‘spiritual’ (for want of a better word) in origin. There is something within that needs to be a found - a talent, a gift that is uniquely theirs. It is one of the hardest things to do, there are often fires of self-doubt to be gone through. But it is only when you start to acknowledge what you have within, stop being afraid of your own light, that you start to get better.

You see people circling their gift, sometimes for decades, going to see any number of healers and conventional doctors, looking for a diagnosis on the physical level. Sometimes they get a diagnosis: it’s ME, or its post-viral something, or they’re allergic to all sorts of things and end up on elaborate diets. They can even end up identified with being ill, it becomes who they are. They may get worse, the life-force may gradually recede. And don’t get me wrong, these symptoms are real, they are not psychosomatic.

Astrologically, these are Sun illnesses. The Sun is the life force, the life-principle, as well as our inner goals, who it is we need to become. The 6th House is usually health, but this is not a 6th House issue. Sometimes a cold is just a cold, sometimes cancer is just cancer (the ‘c’ word that we all shudder at, I felt rather uncomfortable putting it in.) That is the 6th House. But sometimes it is the Sun, sometimes it is the life-principle being denied.

And nor is it just a matter of psychotherapy in the sense of sorting out old wounds. That may be part of the process. But at the end of the day, there is still something that needs to be grasped, gold to be found in the Otherworld and brought back. And you have to find it on your own. You can only get so far analysing old wounds. It is important to understand them and see how they have made you what you are. They give you wisdom and empathy. They ground you. And they often provide the gateway out of conventional reality and conventional values into the Unconscious, the Underworld, the Otherworld. But then in that other place there is something to be found, that only you can find. An astrologer cannot tell you what it is (fortunately!), only that it is there. Once found, it needs to be developed over many years.
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It is the archetype of the shaman’s illness. The illness will eventually kill him unless he acknowledges the spirits who want to work with him. Astrologically, the Sun will be extinguished unless the outer planets are honoured, unless they are allowed to replace the ego as the guides to your life. Of course, not everyone is so fortunate as to be torn apart until they form a relationship with the spirits, and even then they may end up living hand to mouth, not quite sure where they fit in in this modern society. It can be very tough, but there is a fulfilment to be found that no amount of conventional success and happiness can equal.

Pluto and Neptune transits inevitably have a part to play in this process. They can tear us apart, in the interest of claiming something new within ourselves that changes everything. Paradoxically, that which is most deeply you is not yours, which is why the ego has to be dissolved first. (That doesn’t stop the ego trying, which is why you get teachers and healers who are both gifted and a bit dodgy at the same time.)

Particularly in the case of Pluto, it can be like an abduction has occurred. Pluto is well-known for having abducted a young girl, Persephone, and taken her to his lair. Eventually she returned to this world, but as a woman.

So these prolonged illnesses can be as if Pluto has abducted your soul and you will not get it back until you have followed it to the Underworld and taken Pluto as your guide in life. Pluto marries Persephone, providing the basis for her seasonal return to this world. It is only seasonal because once you have met Pluto, once you have looked him in the eye, you can never be the same again. You will always have one eye looking back, looking inward, to the source of life, which is Pluto, which is something within you which you know to be true. And then you will get well. Gradually.

I think the North Node is also involved. The North Node is generated by looking at the intersecting paths of the Sun and the Moon. In a way, we ARE the Sun and the Moon, this combination of inner goals with instinct and embodiment, the future and the past, the sky and the earth. So the North Node points to a complete fulfilment of our nature. The Sun shows us our goals, but the North Node shows us where to go to complete them.

The Dalai Lama is a Cancerian. He wants to look after his people. With his North Node in Capricorn, he needs to do this through occupying a high institutional position. If he had renounced his Dalai-ness, he wouldn’t have been able to do nearly so much for his people, and his Cancer Sun would not have been able to function in the way it wanted to. Along the way, he had everything torn from him as a young man, and has faced the relentless pressures of the Chinese and the modern world. The initiatory fires have been strong and continuous, purging him even of his attachment to Buddhism.

Princess Diana was also a Cancerian, and she quickly became a mother after she got married. But she also had North Node in Leo, the sign of individuality and uniqueness, and as this kicked in so did she become troublesome for the Royal Family. But it meant she was able to express her Cancerian nature more fully through her charity work. As well as modernising the Royal Family, dragging it forward into the 19th century.

I’ve got Sun in Aquarius and North Node in Scorpio. When I was younger, it was natural for me to be on the outside of society, looking in with an angle on it. That is Sun in Aquarius. But I ended up feeling deeply out of sorts and like I didn’t have a life. It was only as I acknowledged the power of my more ordinary, earthly nature (Scorpio) that I started to come right, and the potential insight within a collective of the Aquarian could become real through being lived. For Scorpio, everything is sacred, there is no higher and lower, spiritual and worldly.

Bill Gates has Sun in Scorpio. Under his leadership, Microsoft became the most powerful computer company in the world, and notorious for the ruthlessness with which it squeezed out the opposition. This is Scorpio power, but at its most primitive. Bill Gates also has North Node in Sagittarius, and as he has got older, so he has decided to try and do something meaningful with his money. He is using his Scorpio power for the benefit of the collective. This transition occurred in 2000, when his philanthropic foundation was inaugurated. At that point Neptune was squaring his Sun, while Pluto was to conjoin his North Node 2 years later.

What is Uranus?

A couple of years ago I got myself a projector and screen. After years of not watching films, since then I've hardly stopped. So I thought I'd begin with my recommended list from the last few weeks: The Wave; Tetro; A Single Man; Broken Embraces; The White Ribbon; Little Miss Sunshine; Lars and the Real Girl; Pierrepoint; An Education.

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Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are well known to astrologers as Greek/Roman gods. Uranus is the Greek name for the Roman Caelus, while Neptune and Pluto are the Roman names for the Greek gods Poseidon and Hades respectively.

As gods, we can feel their influence. But being modern, we tend to locate the psyche within. And I have been wondering recently what ‘bits’ of the psyche these gods correspond to?

I landed Neptune and Pluto quite quickly, and wrote about them. But Uranus has taken longer, and even then was someone else’s idea around the dinner table!

These planets are not aspects of our personality like the inner planets are. We may sometimes be aware of them, but they are not a part of us – if anything, it is the other way round. Individualised consciousness is a temporary bubble carried along by the more fundamental, primordial forces that the outer planets represent.

Pluto is the life-force itself. Pluto gives the energy, that we usually take for granted, to go on living and to want to go on living. He gives us the ability to survive. He is also evolutionary: the nature of life is to continually unfold, to keep moving on to the next stage. We don’t know what that stage is – or we would be in it – but we feel the imperative to go there. So Pluto is both the life force and the mysterious pattern of unfoldment that is integral to life.

Neptune is the Imagination, which at its deepest level is the picture, the story that consciousness presents to itself about life. Beginning with subject and object, me in here and everything else out there. That itself is just a story we tell ourselves, which any mystic worth their salt will tell you is an illusion. But our brains are hard-wired that way, so it’s hard to jump out of. Then there are all the other stories like time and 3-D space and left and right. After that come the Creation Myths that tell us how we came about. And then the myths that tell us how to live. It’s Jupiter who tells these stories. But it is Neptune that is the mythopoeic imagination.

That leaves Uranus. He is the vital spark that got life and the universe going in the first place and keeps it moving from level to level. Mythologically, Neptune and Pluto have parents, while Uranus does not; he emerged from the primordial Chaos. So Uranus comes first. Uranus then Pluto then Neptune.

In the beginning was the Big Bang, but it was Uranus who sparked it off. In the beginning was the primordial soup of chemicals and oceans on earth. But it was a lightning bolt from Uranus that turned it into life - on the material level, anyway. Life, when it began, did so on many levels, each presided over by Uranus.

Imagine a firework. Uranus is the match on the touchpaper, Pluto is the gunpowder that takes it into the sky, and Neptune is the display it creates. Saturn is the ability to give material form to these principles, the bridge between human consciousness and the wider powers it is working with.

Uranus is integral to creativity. Creativity occurs when you come up with something that is not just an extension of something that has come before, but that contains a new element. For that you need the vital spark, the divine spark of Uranus.

Uranus is also integral to moving on from one stage of life to the next. For the individual, it is new; it may have been observed in others, but it has not been lived before by you. So it happens to you; you suddenly find yourself wanting to live, or having to live in a new way. You’ve been sparked!

You can’t will this to happen, any more than you can will yourself to want to be alive. It has to come from somewhere else, like all outer planet energies. But we have a big part to play in being open to these energies; in recognising that life is always moving on and looking in that direction.

We do also have the choice to shut down and keep repeating the same mistakes. Some people sort of seem to get away with that; with other people, it’s like the outer planets keep hammering them, they make life so painful that eventually you give in and say no more! I can’t carry on living like this!

At present, Uranus and Pluto are in square, with Uranus lagging just a bit behind. So there has been a particular process of transformation for people in recent years, where first of all you have Pluto and then you have Uranus. Pluto pulls you apart, gets you to confront your weaknesses and acknowledge your powers and real interests. Through Pluto we establish a new and more solid foundation. On that basis all sorts of new possibilities are there, and Uranus comes along and awakens them in the succeeding years.

We are now entering a period where Uranus and Pluto are almost exactly square, and this will make transformation almost unbearably intense. It will be like being in a barrel that someone is shaking vigorously in all directions (Uranus); meanwhile inside the barrel with us is a vampire chimpanzee intent on tearing us apart (Pluto). Actually, it’s easy to channel a hell-fire preacher when it comes to transits. So I take it back! But it will be/is intense.

In a few years’ time, Pluto will be lagging behind Uranus, and the dynamic will change again. Uranus will be preparing people for the Pluto transit, softening them up, if you like, opening them up to new possibilities so that the Pluto transit won’t be as disorienting when you find you can’t carry on in the same old ‘normal’ way.

I thought it might be worth a quick look at the Discovery Chart for Uranus, much as I have already done for Neptune, Pluto and Chiron in previous blogs. Uranus was discovered at a particular moment in time, and as an astrologer, that is significant; it tells us something about the particular meaning of Uranus for modern people.

Click to Enlarge

The time is accurate to within half an hour, so I won't make too much of the Angles. What I think is most notable is Uranus in Gemini in a t-square with Saturn in Sagittarius and the Sun in Pisces. As the divine spark, Uranus is associated with brilliance, and in Gemini, it is the brilliant intellect, the brilliant scientific mind: this was a time when the modern technological revolution was just beginning. But it is in opposition to Saturn in Sagittarius. Sagittarius gives a context of meaning, of philosophy, of religion to the intellectual curiosity of Gemini. All this in a traditional sense, as we are dealing with Saturn. So the lasting aspect in this chart shows a tension between traditional wisdom and scientific brilliance. Because Uranus was discovered under this aspect, it is like the gods telling us to pay attention to this theme, that it is an important one for the collective in relation to Uranus.

As it is an opposition, these 2 poles of the past (Saturn) and the future (Uranus) need to be brought together; their natural tendency is to polarise. So we see people who think Science is all bad; and more commonly, we see people who think religion and traditional wisdom has had its day and scientific understanding is the understanding to which all others must be reduced.

So there is a great lesson here, because I think people do tend to polarise in one direction or the other. This chart is saying we need both. We need our brilliant scientific/technological future - and at this stage, it may be only that that can save us! - but we need our roots, we need the wisdom of previous generations. One should not need to say that, it is so obvious. But Science has been so spectacular that I suppose it's kind of understandable.

I don't think we can ignore the Sun, around which Uranus revolves. It is in Pisces, a non-rational place that defies the usual expression of both Saturn and Uranus and the signs they are in. (Although, of course, the original vital spark of Uranus was in the oceans!) But it is as if that Sun is holding out 2 arms that end in Saturn and Uranus, which he is holding in balance/tension; or as if Saturn and Uranus are the outpourings of the original oneness of the Sun in Pisces, to which they again need to be resolved. It is as if the Sun is reminding us of what came first: the direct experience and sense of interconnectedness, unfragmented by mind, in the case of Uranus in Gemini; and not obscured by the veil of hallowed tradition, in the case of Saturn in Sagittarius.

A Mythological Ramble around Astrology and Science

We make sense of the world through myths, the big stories that describe creation, the end of the world, the birth of the gods and all aspects of life. These myths are true, they are real, but they are not literal. This is Neptune’s Realm.

The Birth of Athena from Zeus' Head

That is the big difference between the modern westernised world and every society that has gone before. Our myths are cold facts that point only to themselves and permit no others. Saturn, and possibly Uranus, have abducted Neptune.

For Peter Bell, in Wordsworth’s poem, “A Primrose by the River’s brim/A yellow primrose was to him/And it was nothing more.”

But when William Blake was asked, “When the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea?” He replied, “O no, no, I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.”

Our 2 Creation Myths, the Big Bang and Evolution, have this literal quality, especially the latter. That is my main objection to the Theory of Evolution: that it is presented as a cold fact, the only possible reality. And it does not point to anything beyond itself (except perhaps to a sense of humanity as the superior species.) That on its own makes it wrong, whatever the fossil record says.

Evolution could hardly be a more important myth, for it tells us what we are. In its literal form, it says we have no soul and the world has no soul. The Creationists are literal at the other end of the spectrum, but they have a point. They feel the need for a soul, in however crude a form. So do the people who say humans were planted here by aliens. It may or may not be literally true. But it is a reinterpretation of the myth that we are descended from the gods, and I like that. It has the ring of truth to it, and I am prepared to believe it. It is a perfectly respectable myth, provided you don’t fall into the modern trap of literalism.

Mythologically, the seed of Evolution is to be found in the medieval idea of the Great Chain of Being, with God at the top, and working its way down through angels, people, animals, vegetables and minerals. Evolution inverts this – a common phenomenon in mythologies – and works upwards from minerals, but puts people instead of God at the top. In response to this, many of us now feel God to be immanent rather than transcendent: he has become Gaia, the World Soul, or the Goddess. Scientific materialism pays unconscious homage to this, for ‘matter’ and the Latin ‘mater’, or mother, are etymologically related.

For someone of literal bent, astrology is patently untrue. This literalism has a long history. As far back as 1623, we find the influential monk Marin Mersenne baffled by magic of any sort. “Belief in the power of magic images of the stars seems to him quite mad.” He had even then gone beyond the demonization of practices such as astrology, which implies a tacit acknowledgement of their power.

It is a death of feeling. I feel the power of astrology. I feel it like a presence, and sometimes the planets as gods turn up as presences.

Mersenne launched a 30 year crusade against magical thinking. A bit like Richard Dawkins today. You could imagine Dawkins as a member of the Spanish Inquisition: polite, charming, educated and quietly certain of his point of view as the only reality, convinced that he is actually helping heretics to avoid eternal damnation.

What people like Dawkins need is a proper philosophical training, where you come to understand that a point of view is just that, a point of view. It can always be argued either way, and in the end is only a description of reality, it is not reality itself. And we cannot get beyond our perceptions. At least, not using just the rational mind. It is a big assumption that reality is fully susceptible to rational interpretation. Ironically, it is a superstition.

We need to be able to hang loose to how we see the world, and enjoy all the creation myths, including evolution. These myths are thrown up by the imagination, by the dreamworld. We may profitably analyse and compare motifs between them, but it is hubris to denounce them, because they come from the gods, not from the human mind.

It is similarly hubris to denounce astrology, for it has imaginative power, it comes from somewhere else. To the extent you have hubris, to that extent you are in a state of suffering, you have soul loss.

My idea of a viewpoint as only a viewpoint is not the same as you find in postmodernism, where such deconstruction seems to me the next logical step in the march of scientific materialism towards nihilism. For me, a viewpoint on a metaphysical level has the power of myth behind it; its essential truth does not lie in how well it can be argued, but in its imaginative appeal. The value of reason in this context is to counter the tendency of the mind to latch onto that imaginative truth as the only truth. Once you start doing that, even the myths you live by start to lose their power; they develop a leaden, literal quality.

Blake again: “Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.” Science’s remit is the ‘vegetable universe!’

Science itself is a myth, a model, and it has its place. But you can’t push it too far, or it’ll break down, because it is a model, not reality itself. This is why you find weird things happening at the mega and nano ends of the spectrum. We push the idea of matter as a solid ‘thing’ that is ‘out there’ to the limit, and what do we find? Irrationality! On the nano level, we have the counter-intuitive quantum universe, where to understand it we have to sometimes let time go backwards, and accept that matter is both a wave and a particle at the same time, and that the more we know about where something is, the less we know about its speed, and vice versa. On the mega end, the only way we can understand the larger universe is by accepting that most of it is invisible, dark matter, that has a mysterious nature unlike anything we know and undetectable by any of our instruments. It’s funny!

Astrology is the same: at the mega end, the universe is so big, with so many different objects, that it would be very hard to develop a system of correspondences based on a living relationship with these bodies. Even in ancient times, you couldn’t use every single visible star. On the micro end, if you have a tiny, insignificant event, like the dog walking in the door and out again and you looked for it in the stars, it would be a form of madness. You can’t have that sort of astrological micromanagement. Astrology works somewhere in the middle, and there it is powerful. And it’s probably the same for Science. They are both models that have a function, but models break down if you push them to extremes.

Many of the ideas above come from a book I’m reading, the best I’ve read for a while. It’s called 'The Philosopher’s Secret Fire: a History of the Imagination’ by Patrick Harpur.

I’ll finish with a quote from it, which refers to the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who analysed myths from around the world. Myths, it seems, are the best way into the human soul, they kind of ARE it.

“So, at the close of his Mythologiques, after he has structurally related hundreds of myths to each other, Levi-Strauss cannot say with any certainty what Imagination is doing. It is generating myths which apparently go on embodying and striving to resolve contradictions, until all the permutations are exhausted – but to no purpose, it seems, beyond the process itself.

The labyrinthine shape-changing of myths mirrors the pathways of soul which ‘seems more interested in the movement of its ideas than in the resolution of problems. Therefore no classical psychological problem can ever be solved…’ It is as if we recognise the contradictions of our human existence and are intensely preoccupied with them. We are self-transcending, paradoxical beings – both part of Nature, for example, and yet outside of it. We use abstractions to express our contradictions where traditional cultures use concrete images. 

The problems of mind/matter or consciousness/unconscious about which we philosophise are only re-statements of the problems of this world/Otherworld or Skyworld/Underworld about which we mythologise. However, in neither case can the problems be solved because they are not problems, they are mysteries. Myths tell us to live without resolutions in a state of creative tension within our two-foldness.

Myths do not, so to speak, get us anywhere. While there are myths about progress, myths do not themselves progress. Indeed, Levi-Strauss even saw literal scientific ‘progress’ as, in reality, a system of myths which ‘will never consist in anything other than proceeding towards re-groupings, in the midst of a totality that is closed and complementary with itself.’ In fact, ‘… mythological thought is not pre-scientific; it should rather be seen as an anticipation of the future state of science…’

Finally, and incidentally, if there is one classificatory pair, one contradiction, which acts as a kind of rubric for all the others (says Levi-Strauss), it is heaven(sky)/earth. It is their primordial separation which brought on all our woe; and it is their impossible, longed-for reunion wherein all our happiness lies.”

Astrology, of course, is based around this most primordial of myths. When astrology really works, when we feel its power, it is at a moment of symbolic correspondence between events on earth and events in the sky. Astrology gives us par excellence that “impossible, longed-for reunion wherein all our happiness lies.”

Deathbed Regrets

I found this link on Facebook. Below is a summary:

Nurse reveals the top 5 regrets people make on their deathbed

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2. I wish I didn't work so hard.

3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Readings (Part II); the Importance of Being a Mess

I’ve decided to offer written astrology readings in response to specific issues and questions.

The more information you give me, the more specific I can be. Job, career, relationships, house-moving, impossible parent, horrible transit, life falling apart…. I’ll write about half a page. Price £30, or £20 if you’re hard up. My email address is on my profile on the right of the page.

It’s not my job to make decisions for people, but I might be able to point you in a useful direction. Nor is it my job to predict the future in a definite sort of way. But I’m happy to be nebulous!

I’ve been thinking how useful it can be to feel like you’re a mess and you don’t know what to do about it. That’s when a lot of change can happen, and often does happen, though maybe over a period of years.

There’s the light and the dark. The light is following your deeper interests, whatever it is that gives you joy. It is also doing the things that make you happy in an ordinary kind of way, and feeling it’s OK to do that – which, remarkably, people don’t always feel.

But I think it’s also important that there are periods where it all stops making sense, where much of what gave your life meaning no longer seems to. And you’re scrabbling around feeling like this retard who can’t make their life work, unlike all the jolly, directed people up there above your private underworld.

As an astrologer, you’re more likely to encounter people when things aren’t working, rather than when they are. And you can re-assure them that no, they are not a retard, it’s a normal and often necessary experience that gives depth to your life.

‘Spiritual’ paths are often presented in terms of movement towards the light. Towards ecstatic experience, union with God, your original self etc. But I think if you’re a teacher (which I’m not), your real job is often being around for people when their life doesn’t add up anymore. And helping them focus on finding their own way through it, rather than latching on to someone else's 'answers'.

It’s very easy for ‘spiritual’ teachers to stop their own underworld journeys, or even never to have been there properly in the first place. You can see it in them: the unprocessed scripts, classically the desires for power or sex or wealth or success, running alongside the undoubted gifts and insights and probably charisma. These people are betrayers. Their 'rightness' or their success is more important to them than you are. Ironically, betrayal can be what is needed, it can pull someone's world apart in a way that is ultimately useful.

I'm sceptical that teachers with followings can ever take people beyond a basic level. The next level, after you've heard what they have to say, is often claiming your power back by leaving! Followers create a collective projection and a handing over of power which even a good teacher can do little about. You see people hanging around for years, trying to advance themselves, when their next real step is actually to leave.

I think we often only end up an underworld mess if there is conflict in us, if there is a deeper element that goes no, I can’t live like that. You see many people happily leading their lives from relatively narrow motives or worse, but it doesn’t bother them.

They appear successful, and it’s we who can’t live like that who can appear to be the ones with ‘problems’. But as is so often the case, the reality is the opposite of what it appears to be. And part of what gives you depth in this sort of situation is that you are not having the approval of the world to make you feel OK about who you are. You have to find it for yourself, independently. But the confidence you emerge with is real, it stands on its own.

Pluto in Leo, Pluto in Capricorn and Death

There’s a test coming out this year, costing about £400, that will tell you how long you are likely to live. It is based on the length of your telomeres, lengths of repetitive DNA at the ends of your chromosomes that help keep them intact. Every time the cell divides during the course of your life, the telomere shortens. Eventually it is no more, and then the chromosome itself starts shortening at every cell division and soon becomes ineffective and the cell dies.

So there is a general association between the lengths of your telomeres and how quickly you will start to age. It seems to hold as a general rule, though there are for example some species of seabird where the rule doesn’t hold.

The generation who are now entering retirement, for whom ageing is the big issue, are the Pluto in Leo generation. Pluto is associated with both the power to live and with death, and Leo is associated with youth. So this generation is likely to live longer than previous generations (Leo and youth) and also have a harder time accepting the process of ageing (Leo and youth again!) But also, some are likely to remain young in spirit as they age.

This is happening under Pluto in Capricorn, a sign that is associated with old age. So there is rich symbolism here. Puer aeternus meets senex, eternal youth meets old fogey. Opposites are needed to create an interesting synthesis, and this is what we have. The best of this Pluto in Leo generation will keep the power to live as they age, they will see their lives as having a future.

I think that the notion of death as extinction, as the opposite of life, tends to create pessimism about old age, which can seem like a long process of delaying the inevitable, even of denying it. The Pluto in Leo generation, functioning through Pluto in Capricorn can, and probably are, changing this. CG Jung analysed many old people, and he said that the unconscious did not behave as though it was going to be extinguished, it behaved as though it were going to continue. So life itself (the unconscious) does not see death as the end of life, and who are we to argue with that? Do we know better? We do not know, we cannot know, what death holds in store for us. But I don’t think deep down we feel it to be an extinction. It is a matter of which we trust: our feelings, or scientific materialism.

So Pluto in Leo will be the first older generation to have a fairly good idea, barring accidents, of how long they are going to live. I think Science is doing us a service here, because it will be giving us information we didn’t previously have. It will have huge consequences for the nature of old age, it will be uncomfortable for many, I find myself slightly balking at it, but I don’t think it serves anyone to ignore information that is there waiting to be had. It would be like a family secret, an elephant in the room.

What Science is capable of doing with that information, on the other hand, is not the same thing. It is one thing to discover information, it is another to take action with it. There are enzymes called telomerases that can rebuild telomeres, and you find a lot of these enzymes in cells that need to do a lot of dividing, such as stem cells (remember them?) and certain white blood cells. Here it is: scientists have injected telomerases into lab mice, and they have in many ways shown dramatic rejuvenation. The effects of ageing were not just prevented, they were reversed.

"What we were expecting was a slowing or stabilisation of the ageing process," Professor Ronald DePinho told the BBC. "Instead we witnessed a dramatic reversal in the signs and symptoms of ageing. These animals had their brains increase in size, they improved their cognition, their coat-hair was restored to a healthy sheen and their fertility was also restored."

There is a Holy Grail here. How long before the process is refined and a billionaire sets up a lab on his private island and injects himself with the stuff? It will be the fulfilment of an ancient fantasy. The first Emperor of a unified China, Qin Shi Huang, sent expeditions to find the elixir of life so that he could live forever. The emissaries never returned, knowing they would be executed when their mission failed. The Emperor ironically died as a result of Mercury poisoning, ingested to prolong his life.

This issue hasn’t entered mainstream discussion yet, but it will. Firstly under Pluto in Capricorn: power (Pluto) over old age (Capricorn). But then under Pluto in Aquarius: Science (Aquarius) appearing to defeat Death (Pluto.) Again, it will be the Pluto in Leo generation who will initially have most to gain from the possibility of rejuvenation. And it is a puer aeternus vs senex issue: that aspect of Leo, more than any other sign, that wishes to remain a child, versus the realities of life.

But which of us wouldn’t be tempted by the possibility of physical rejuvenation? For many of us as we age it is, or could easily become, a deep longing, and you can’t just say no to that. You could have a whole nation wanting it. Paradoxically, if you prolonged life indefinitely, people could not be allowed to have children. By extending life in one fundamental way, you curtail it in another.

This possibility and its implications feel almost too big to talk about, especially in just a few short paragraphs. But there is astrology around it worth pointing out, and the issue itself needs flagging up as one that seems to be on its way.

I think like nuclear power and GM, these things cannot be stopped. The issue is how we deal with them, what attitude to take. If you just say you're anti, that's all very well, but it doesn't change anything; it doesn't add the complexity and ambivalence that the wider culture needs, where the debate is often quite black and white due to the influence of politicians and the media.

Leo understands that life is eternal, that it is a deep, ever renewing source to be tapped into. That is the Leo path: to become that source, but each in their own unique way. Death, therefore is not to be feared, because it is not the end of life. But that is the self-aware, the integrated Leo. The archetype of eternal life will always be at work in a Leo, however aware they are. In its more primitive form, the archetype is literalised and an egotistic desire for eternal life is attached to material existence. The debate about rejuvenation, which has yet to start, could hardly be starting under a more appropriate outer planet configuration – the Pluto in Leo generation encountering Pluto in Capricorn.

Meanwhile, research in separate studies in the UK and the US has revealed that the length of your telomeres, and therefore the speed at which you will age, depends on how educated you are. And that education needs to have taken place when young. The 'better' educated you are, the more slowly you will age.

As one of the Professors put it: "Education is a marker of social class that people acquire early in life, and our research suggests that it is long-term exposure to the conditions of lower status that promotes accelerated cellular ageing."

The studies corroborate well-established links between health and socio-economic status. But even if you acquire high status and education as you get older, it's the early conditioning that matters. Which suggests to me it's not just about lifestyle, it's also about how you think about yourself. Humans are pack animals, and we are deeply conditioned to think in terms of status, of pecking order. (Hence celebrity worship, which is nothing new.)

Our education system does not produce rounded people, but it does produce people who feel they are high status, and it seems to me that that feeling somehow translates into physical well-being. It's not fair and it's primitive, but it's there. It also seems to me a clear example of the mind-body connection that goes as far as influencing our DNA, but the researchers didn't go into that. With Pluto in Capricorn, we can expect plently more research into ageing (Capricorn) as well as its connection to social status, another Capricornian consideration.

Internet Writing and the Ownership of Ideas

I started wondering yesterday if Facebook was superseding my blog, because of the sheer amount of exchange of comments and links that you get on Facebook – including links to my own blogs. And the fact that my last 2 blogs were composed either of links or short, independent, paragraphs.

But no, my main blogging consists of longer pieces that would exceed by a long way Facebook’s limit. And then I thought there is a hierarchy (in a neutral sense) going on now in the publishing world, that goes in 2 directions. There is firstly a hierarchy of length and finish, at the top end of which you find books, which are highly edited and hopefully thought through at length, developing themes over hundreds of pages. Then you successively get magazine articles, blogs, facebooks and finally twitters, each of which become gradually shorter and less polished.

But then, in the other direction, you get a hierarchy of flow and exchange of information, at the top end of which is twitter, and at the bottom end of which are books, where you have to go to a great deal of trouble firstly to read and then perhaps to comment on an author’s work, and he/she may well not reply – or if they do, it may be a standardised letter. And to get the book in the first place, you have to find it and buy it. One of Britain’s national treasures, the anti-astrology Stephen Fry, is at both ends of this hierarchy, writing the odd book while maintaining a following of hundreds of thousands on twitter. Although if you have this sort of following, only a few of you can actually exchange information with the twitterer.

So you have this hierarchy - books, magazines, blogs, facebook and twitter - which going in one direction encourages depth of thought, and in the other encourages exchange and flow of information. In a way all this is obvious, and I’m sure it must have been said many times before. But I’m not going to search people out and credit them, partly because I thought of it myself, and partly because I don't see the need to do so.

Which brings me to another point, which is ownership of ideas. If someone directly quotes me, fair enough, credit me, though I won’t be heartbroken if you don’t. But if you take an idea from my blog and run with it, I really don’t mind if I am not credited with it – I would just be glad to see it out there, getting woven into astrocyberthought, unencumbered by a name tag. (NB I do, nevertheless, tend to credit other people for their ideas!)

Internet writing is not yet based much around money, it is hard to control, and I think that frees us from ownership of ideas. OK, you may one day put your blogs together into a book, but I don’t think it’s going to affect sales just because some of ‘your’ ideas have become well-known in an unattributed sort of way. Just make sure you write in an engaging style!

I think a lot of it is just egotism. Medieval religious artists used to not sign their names on their pictures. It was the work that mattered. And I think it’s the same with ideas. (There is something about publishing a book that can make some people feel they are real in a way they weren't previously, it makes them a 'name'.)

I had a daft situation arise a while ago, that got me thinking about this. I had interpreted some charts on my blog, and someone was miffed because they had apparently put on Facebook and Twitter the idea that these charts needed interpreting, and were now claiming ownership of that idea and wanted me to credit them. Note they had not actually interpreted these charts, they had just had the idea that someone else should do so, charts which were in the public domain anyway. It was a ridiculous situation.

Internet writing is transitory, and the ideas get passed around. Some of my readers weren’t very enthusiastic when I experimented with audio blogs, because what they wanted to do was read my pieces quickly and move on. That is also how I work on the internet. I pick up the basic ideas and move on. Longer pieces, such as you’d get in magazines or books, often also have just a few basic ideas, but expounded at length. That is why I resist giving talks or writing magazine articles.

Because it seems to me it often involves trying to find a way of saying something in 10 pages instead of 2, or finding a way of talking for an hour instead of 10 minutes. For the same reason I often find it hard to read astrology articles in magazines, or listen to astrology talks.

Significant ideas can be communicated quickly, and you will keep your audience. And the audience can interact. On the blog, we exchange comments. If I’m talking, I like to keep it brief and then see where the ‘audience’ takes it. Ownership of ideas starts to seem a bit daft in this sort of context. It’s for wannabe bigshots who take themselves far too seriously!

I don’t know where that leaves ownership of photos, but again, with so many people putting their pics on the net and passing them around, it’s hard to keep control of what is ‘yours’. I don't know who 'owns' the pictures I use on my blog, and I'm not sure what purpose it would serve to put a name under them, though I would do so if asked.

With both ideas and pictures, whatever the rights and wrongs of ownership, the fact is that we have a situation that is very hard to control. The net is a free-flowing universe in its own right, and I think the best thing is just to let go and be part of it. The free flow and exchange of information is its strength and getting too hung up on what is ‘yours’ just gets in the way of that. You are playing into the hands of those who want to over-control the net.

Shamanic Bits and Pieces

I took a look at Facebook first thing this morning, and there was Tom asking if anyone wanted to talk about shamanism. Liz Jones Iwasiuk had commented, “From what I understand it's a very very old way of life........I met one about three years ago and he was very interesting. He said to me that "women are the leaders of men and as soon as a man relaxes and lets his woman lead him life is much much easier" ........he has a point!

I then made 6 comments in the next 25 minutes:

I'm reading 'The Secret Fire of the Philosophers' by Patrick Harpur (who wrote Daimonic Reality). It's a History of the Imagination, but it's grounded in the experience of daimons in the natural world, from pixies to animal helpers.

Neptune is in Pisces for the next 14 years, so I think there's going to be a lot of interest in the Dreamtime.

I tend to think that for many men, their strength is in getting things done, and for many women their strength lies in the wider vision of what needs to be done and how to go about it. Women can act as a sort of soul guide for men, who also need to woo their own anima, move towards a sort of ecstatic union within. It probably works the other way round too, though I wouldn't know how. (Any women out there care to comment?) I think women's leadership can be esoteric, not everyone will see it.

A shaman or a poet who is a man has more than the usual sense of the feminine within, which is experienced as ecstatic. He follows it and trusts it, it is what gives his life meaning. There is little place for this in our society, where it is having a job that validates you!

What is the opposite of Death? The answer is Birth. We think the answer is Life, and that causes a lot of problems. That when you die, life ceases. That is not traditional. The dead are dead, but they are still with us, they have moved on, they have had the next initiation. (Pinched from Harpur’s book above.) Jung found that the unconscious of very old people did not behave as though it was about to be extinguished, it behaved as though it were continuing indefinitely.

You've caught me when I've just got up and thoughts come to me! I think the above might go on my blog! I guess when I'm just up I'm fresh, but still close to the dreamworld.

;) Emoticon with a hairy right eyebrow.

End.

It is because we fear death that Pluto appears to us as a dark god. That is our own projection. Pluto is certainly a god of power, the power to live and the power to survive. He is weighty but has a sense of humour. He is the power beneath our feet, pushing upwards. If you live from that power, then you don't need to fear him. He is the bountiful nature of life.

Here's an interesting quote from Harpur's book that brings together fairy abduction and conspiracy theory:

The Sidhe need human robustness, wrote Yeats, while we need their wisdom. Just as they take young mothers to suckle their babies and young women for wives, so the modern 'aliens' - the so-called greys - take female ova or foetuses in order to strengthen their race. The lack of reciprocity in early versions of this interesting folklore was later amended when it became widely believed that the aliens were in cahoots with the government, who sanctioned their activities in exchange for their 'wisdom' - in this case an advanced extraterrestrial technology.

Here's another one I picked up from Facebook, by John Perkins (who wrote The World is as You Dream It, as well as Confessions of an Economic Hitman):