Saturn, Pluto and the Postponed Recession

At the end of September, Saturn will start to move forwards again, closely followed by Pluto. Jupiter will have gone direct a couple of weeks earlier. These 3 planets conjoined in January, and marked the beginning of the Covid crisis. So we will be entering a new phase in a month, and I think that will mark the transition to a recession proper. So far it has been held at bay by government furlough schemes and, probably, by the public spending much of the money it saved during lockdown.

By paying the wages of struggling businesses, governments are saving them from going bankrupt. But they can only do this for so long, and Covid shows no sign yet of going away. So I think the theme across the West this autumn will be the winding down of furloughs and subsidies, increasing numbers of businesses going under, and unemployment rising. The recession proper will have begun, as Saturn's forward motion in Capricorn brings a dose of realism to world economies.

The hardship for many that this will involve is the price we will be paying for the lives saved by lockdown. How much this has also been a postponement - of people dying from Covid later rather than sooner - remains to be seen, as does our view of the lockdown as it ends, and whether it was worth it. At present this discussion is hard to have because many people have been frightened into thinking of Covid as a deadly disease, rather than the nasty bug with a low mortality rate that it actually seems to be.

We have been trained to think of recessions as bad, and booms as good. But recessions reflect the natural need to go inward and reconsider and attend to our underlying values, after a period of outward expansion. In this way Saturn embodies natural law.  

The current recession began with lockdown, and has been given added transformative power by the presence of Pluto. This is no ordinary recession. Saturn-Pluto is a powerful transit that marks a transition from one era to another. It will be a different world that we will be waking up to at the end of this year, as Saturn finally moves into Aquarius and away from Pluto. The Saturn-Jupiter cycle, which begins anew in December, also marks the beginning of a new era.

So, come the new year, we will be thinking about life as before and after Covid. Already we see the huge boost that this has given to the big tech companies - Apple is now worth more than the top 100 UK  companies combined - while the High Street spirals downwards as people shop more online. Fear has stalked the land in a way not seen in Europe since WWII, and this will be burnt into the collective psyche for some time to come.

Political eras will come to an end, inevitably, as the world moves into its new phase. Merkel is on her way out anyway. It is hard to see Trump surviving with his consistent trailing in the polls, and the likelihood of the recession becoming more real between now and the US election. Is Boris Johnson part of the new order, or part of the old order? He has at least another 4 years in office - short of a resigning issue like Suez arising - and I think he is strategically too sure-footed for that, flawed as he is in the details of day-to-day management. Starmer is not a performer - a vital ingredient for political success - and Boris (like Blair before him) will have Neptune on his side in the coming years. So I think that Boris is part of the new order. 

The US will undergo its Pluto Return in 2022. This will be in its 2nd House (Sibly Chart). So expect a big psychic wobble about its place in the world, as China emerges from Covid hotter on America's heels than expected. What is it to be American if you are not No 1 in the world?

PRESIDENT HARRIS?

Donald Trump, at the time of the US election, will have Pluto moving forward and about to make his first opposition to his natal Venus (ruler of his MC), having opposed his natal Saturn, which is next to Venus, this year. This does not look good for him. Venus in a politician is popularity, and he is trailing badly and consistently in the polls. I will declare an interest at this point, which is that I want him to lose the election; but that did not stop me, correctly, predicting he would win last time.

More than that, Neptune will square Trump's Sun and Moon next year. Normally such strong transits are empowering in a leader. They would suggest some kind of landslide in his favour. That is clearly not going to happen, so I am thinking he will lose, which for a sitting President is a considerable failure. And Neptune can also describe that.

 

Joe Biden's chart is interesting: Neptune is about to oppose his MC for the 3rd time, and next year Uranus will enter his House of Health (the 6th). Meanwhile, Kamala Harris has an almost ridiculous amount of powerful transits in the next few years: Pluto square Sun and Moon, Neptune square Asc, second Saturn Return followed by Saturn conjunct MC. She is being propelled somewhere very big.

 

Putting all this together, I think the probablity is that Biden will win, and after a year or two will have to stand down due to ill health, and Harris will take over. At this point Saturn will be squaring both the ruler of Biden's MC (Mercury) and the ruler of his 6th (Venus). Pluto will also be starting to square his Moon, our embodiment, so that further suggests health issues. Jupiter will cross his IC in March 2022, you can draw your own conclusions from that.

 

The initial Neptune opposite Pisces MC transit that could propel Biden into the Presidency also has a theme of loss and sacrifice around it, the sacrifice needed to end a dark Presidency.

THE SOLAR ECLIPSE

Sunday's solar eclipse in Cancer will be a powerful trigger for any changes to home and family that are in the offing - and that have maybe been brought to a head by the Lockdown. What it is that nourishes us (Cancer) is the question to ask. The eclipse is given extra power by the fact that it is occurring within hours of the summer solstice, when the Sun goes into Cancer and the world starts to shift on its axis, moving (in the northern hemisphere) towards shorter days and longer nights.

Outcomes are delayed by the number of retrograde planets in the sky - Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto. Practically, that refers to the need to wait for lockdown conditions to ease more fully (when Saturn goes Direct in late September), as well as the need to think things through calmly, to which the pressure cooker effect of the lockdown may not easily lend itself. But changes are on their way.

The esoteric ruler of Cancer is Neptune, which will be conjunct Mars in Pisces. So a good time too for magical acts, in which the emphasis is on creating a space for the divine will, rather than your own will, to have effect.

THE WORLD OF YESTERDAY

If you are an astrologer, then you are inevitably thrown up against the ideas of Fate and Free Will, and their apparently contradictory nature. I don't think they are contradictory. Both are true. And it is a good exercise to sit with them, like it is always a good exercise to sit with contradictory ideas, without reaching after certainty - Negative Capability, as Keats called it. It enables us to sit with the Great Mystery that is behind everything, because really we know nothing. I wrote a blog on this subject some years ago.

Meanwhile, I have been re-reading a wonderful memoir "The World of Yesterday" by Stefan Zweig. He is a vivid and compelling writer, and this book is richly descriptive of Europe from a cultural point of view, from the end of the 19th century to the early 1940s.

And here is what he says about Fate: "Only in youth does coincidence seem the same as fate. Later, we know that the real course of our lives is decided within us; our paths may seem to diverge from our wishes in a confused and pointless way, but in the end the way always leads us to our invisible destination."

Or as Heraclitus said: "Character is Fate."

Or as Jung said, "Free Will is doing gladly and freely that which one must do."

SATURN-PLUTO and THE ENDING OF THE PANDEMIC

The lockdown restrictions started easing as Saturn changed direction in early May: it is the nature of retrograde motion to undertake a review. This phase will conclude at the end of September, when Saturn goes Direct. There may well be restrictions left at that point, but they are likely to be ongoing, such as a restriction on large gatherings of people where there is little space between them; and a requirement to wear masks on eg public transport.

Since the pandemic started under the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, we may not see 'normality' return until Saturn starts to put some serious distance between himself and Pluto. That will be mid-December this year, when Saturn will be 7 degrees from Pluto, and in a different sign. That, at any rate, seems like the earliest point at which Covid will no longer be the main point around which the world is revolving.

Indeed, with the Saturn-Jupiter conjunction occurring in Aquarius a few days later, on the 21st Dec, 12 hours after the winter solstice, that is likely to be the time when we seriously begin to discover, or re-imagine, what world we are living in post-Covid. This excites me :) Aquarius is the sign of the future, moving beyond the outworn traditions of Capricorn.

It is interesting that the 2 solstices this year are so powerful: the summer solstice on 21st June occurring on a solar eclipse, and the winter solstice so close to the new 20-year age of the Saturn-Jupiter cycle. This really is a year of turning points.

Mars in Pisces

Mars is in Pisces for another 3 weeks. Definitely a case of 'Not my will but thine'. And nicely descriptive of lockdown, when we can't do many of the things we would want to do. Add to this the retrograde movements of Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto, with Mercury joining them on the 18th, and we do not have a time for moving life forward, but for going within and allowing the new to emerge when it is ready.

SATURN-PLUTO: GOVERNMENTS VS THE MULTINATIONALS?

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The last time that Saturn and Pluto conjoined in Capricorn was in 1518, 3 months after Martin Luther nailed his theses to the church door at Wittenberg and began the Protestant revolution against the transnational power of the day: the Catholic Church. 

Saturn and Capricorn both describe governments and the establishment, and Pluto describes a major power shift within that. So what are the equivalents today? 

The transnational power of today within Europe is firstly the EU, and Brexit formally took place a couple of weeks after the conjunction in January. So because of the astrology I think we have to read that event as pre-figuring a major shake-up of the EU and its power structures. I am stating this as a factual inference, not as a judgment in favour of or against the EU (it is very hard not to be taken as such these days.) This major shake-up will be reflected in Neptune's hard transit to the EU Angles, which will be exact in 4 years. 

The other major transnational powers of today are the multinational companies, which are increasingly difficult for individual governments to control, even the mighty USA. Though I don't expect China has quite the same problem.

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And this is my main point. With the coronavirus outbreak, individual governments have taken a lot more control of their countries, and this includes their economies. They are taking care of their people. And they may continue to take more care of their people as we emerge from the outbreak, a process that could take a long time. 

The priority of multinational companies is not about taking care of people. They are amoral beasts that need to be regulated. Their priorities lie in where their products can be made the most cheaply, and creating markets where their products will be bought, whether or not they are truly needed.

In the major recession/depression that seems likely to follow on from coronavirus, the priority of governments will be to ensure that basic needs are met and that people have jobs. And that may be a habit they get into. The multinationals may not continue to have it their own way to the same degree. The governments may say if you outsource those jobs to the Philippines, we will tax you, we need people to be employed at home. They may say to Amazon and Google and Chevron we are broke right now, you have to start paying taxes.

I am not an expert in how these things work. But I am wondering if the 'new normal' will involve more power to national governments working in their people's interests, and less power to the multinationals working in their own interests.

TRUMP'S EARLY-STAGE DEMENTIA?

According to this article, "Most GOP (ie Republican) Congress members recognize that Donald Trump is a pathological narcissist with early stage dementia and only peripheral contact with reality." And that is what his allies think. (It doesn't make him all bad either.) I think that most of us can see that his cognitive abilities are declining. The article contains a video interview with him from the 80s, and the cognitive contrast with now is very striking.

At the end of the month, Neptune will exactly square his Nodal axis, and will square his Sun and Moon next year, when Pluto will also oppose his Venus (popular appeal). He may well get re-elected this year due to lack of a charismatic opponent, and because Neptune can be that political charisma (as well as the dementia.) But will he be removed from office, due to increasing incapacity, in his 2nd term?

With his Progressed New Moon in Virgo last September, he is personally entering a new phase, probably autumnal, of his life.

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CONSPIRACY THEORY and THE SPIRITS OF THE DEAD

When events occur that disrupt our settled sense of the world, that is difficult for many people. For some, it is an opportunity. The curtains are, briefly, open, because the world was of course never settled, it was always fluid. But that is also why conspiracy theories intensify and proliferate in times of crisis.

The word 'conspiracy' comes from the Latin meaning 'to plot': ie someone has done something to you, whether it was 9/11, the death of Diana, or Covid 19. In this way the anxiety of living in an uncertain world is relieved by blaming it on someone else. So strong is this need, that facts are overlooked. This is shown by the constant refrain of the conspiracist for others to 'look at the evidence', which is exactly what they are not doing. To be concrete, some of the theories proliferating at present include linking Covid 19 with 5G, Bill Gates and deliberate engineering by the Chinese in order to gain economic advantage over the US. Or that the whole thing is a hoax.

There is a theory that Coronavirus escaped from a lab in China. That seems like a possibility from what I have read, but probably not the case. However - and here is the key - if I was a conspiracist I would be insisting that the lab escape was the case, and that it was deliberate. There is little room for doubt in conspiracy theory.

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 Another avenue to look at is 'agency'. I think that conspiracists feel they are acted upon, rather than acting, in their lives. At least, to an extent. I know conspiracists - and I won't mince my words when I say that what they talk in this respect is nonsense, disturbed, bonkers - who are clearly agents in their own lives at quite a deep level, they may be quite long in the tooth, yet when it comes to how they think of the collective, and governments and big business especially, they feel they are acted upon to a degree that is irrational: they are convinced they are being manipulated by powerful people and forces that I can never quite pin down, and usually they have an evangelical desire to 'wake others up', which is in itself revealing. They feel certain they have the hidden truth that the 'sheep' do not see (for myself I find it hard to be certain about anything!) And these people and forces acting on them are BAD GUYS, they make these big simplistic judgements on them that they would never make about people they actually know (and most of us do that with politicians, don't we?) More than that, there may be forces that are alien in origin that are manipulating us.

I don't know what to do when people start to come out with this stuff, because there may well be other ways in which I respect them. The one thing I know I can't do is discuss it with them, because I am up against a need to believe. But for me it is a big limitation in my relationship with them, because I like to think about the world and what is happening in it without someone insisting that Bill Gates - who has given away $30 billion - means harm. Gates may be misguided, but that is a different matter, and I have my own reservations about him in this respect.

The collective noun for lemurs is a conspiracy. (And therein lies a nickname for conspiracists). And 'lemur' is from the Latin meaning 'Spirits of the Dead'. Wow! I think etymological and mythological connections need to be taken seriously. So conspiracy theory is the Spirits of the Dead speaking. Have you seen the Judgement Card in the Mythic Tarot? 

It shows the dead arising, and means old gifts emerging. It points to what I was saying about agency. Whenever our power, our gifts, are suppressed, they come out in wonky ways, often projected in negative form on the world outside. So this is my case. The conspiracists' urging of others to 'wake up' is really a message to themselves to wake up. To claim whatever it is in themselves that they are not claiming.

BORIS JOHNSON'S ILLNESS

It will be interesting to see how the virus has affected Boris Johnson. Illnesses often change us, and as he said, it could have gone either way. 

 

With his loaded 9th, and a Nodal Return in Cancer in the 9th happening now, I think it has been incredibly significant for him. To do with what gives meaning to his life. And to do with compassion. People who have worked under him say he is a good boss. I think it may be that he turns out more compassionate than what you would expect from a Conservative leader.

With Chiron in Pisces conjunct 6th cusp, and Neptune still conjoining that, his illness has also been a sacrifice in service of the collective. And the story of the Fisher King comes to mind. Whom does the Grail serve? It has a mythological dimension.

 

Boris changed almost overnight on becoming Prime Minister, from the previous bumbling clown persona to something much more weighty and serious. This is reflected in his Solar Return chart, which began last June, and which has a Moon-Saturn-Pluto conjunction in Capricorn in the 10th: you don't get more gravitas than that! It can also suggest the near-death experience he has had, further indicated by Pluto's opposition to Mercury in the SR chart, ruler of his 6th House of Health.