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)

Saturn, the Moon and the Education System

The Cancer-Capricorn axis represents respectively family life and one’s place in the world. Both are necessary. One is the archetypal world of the mother, the other of the father. Childhood represents a progression from one to the other. The early years are Cancer, the close and nourishing family life (ha-ha!) As we get older, we need to start to get a sense of the world and the demands it will place on us, and this is Capricorn.

Astrology has an answer for the age that this transition needs to start to happen: around the age of 14 or 15. I don’t know if this is traditional, but the astrology seems sound.

Cancer is ruled by the Moon, and around the age of 14/15 we find the Progressed Moon opposite the natal Moon. So the childhood world is starting to change. Capricorn is ruled by Saturn, and around the age of 14/15 we find transiting Saturn opposite natal Saturn: the adult world begins to call us.

Astrological events often occur a year or two before an exact crossing, so I’d say age 13, depending on the individual, is the earliest age this process should start.

In a way the education system reflects this: at aged 14, kids begin in earnest a 2 year process that leads to the first Saturnian event, in other words an event in which the world judges our worth, and that is (in the UK) GCSEs.

I’m not a child psychologist, but I am an astrologer, and I trust its answers. Astrology seems to be saying yes, it is necessary and appropriate that a bit of pressure to achieve and be measured is put on the kids from their early teens. But astrology also seems to be saying that the emphasis before that needs to be on being a kid and having a good home life, that a sound basis in the Moon principle is needed in order for the Saturn principle to work in a healthy way.

Of course, there is a Saturn square Saturn around the age of 7, at about the time you get a Prog Moon square natal Moon. This is also a change, but it is not an opposition, where the demand to change comes from without. A square is more of an internal challenge, so this is when kids need to begin the discipline of learning to read and write etc: as a square, however, the challenge is not from outside themselves, it is not at this stage about achievement, about being measured against other kids and against external criteria.

This, according to the astrology, is where the UK government is getting it wrong in testing all these kids at a young age. It is putting them into the Saturn phase before the Moon phase has had proper time to develop, and this reflects the one-sided Saturn of modern society.

It’s not just the government getting it wrong, because there is also the private educational system, which operates outside of the government system. Here, if anything, it is worse, the classic example being 8 year olds being sent to boarding school. This is big-time premature curtailment of the Moon principle, and premature introduction of the Saturn principle. Without proper development of the Moon, of the emotions, the person is liable to become over-identified in the long-term with the achievement of Saturn as a sort of compensation for lack of emotional fulfilment. It is a good system for creating business leaders of a certain type, for ensuring wealth and success, but at the expense of a narrow personality and probably misery in some of the people around them.

Another way of putting this is that we all have have a natural curiosity and set of interests. Education should be about fostering these (Moon), whereas it is too often about the opposite: negative Saturn puts money and success above all else, and achieves its ends through pressure. So you can end up as an adult without knowing, let alone having developed, your real interests. In its place is a programme that says you must 'succeed'.

Saturn without the Moon is a wilful husk. The Moon without Saturn is a directionless blob. Both tend to be self-centred.

The Saturn Return aged about 29 coincides with Prog Moon conjunct natal Moon. So this needs to be a time when both principles are brought together. Classically, this is a time of both promotion at work, or knowledge of one’s vocation (Saturn) together with becoming a parent for the first time (Moon). But both events involve the other pole as well: parenting is a responsibility (Saturn) while meaningful work is also emotionally fulfilling (Moon).

The Saturn Return is normally thought of in terms of worldly advancement. But bringing in the Progressed Moon suggests more of a balance, it suggests that this period also needs to involve emotional self-knowledge, knowledge of what one needs for personal happiness.

Charismatic Psychopath charged over Killer Sweat Lodge

Pluto is currently turning red due to its poles shifting. It’s part of a regular cycle, but he’s turning red much more strongly than astronomers had predicted. The reason for this is that he was demoted to minor planet status a few years ago, and he’s not pleased. What a way to treat the Lord of the Underworld. Pluto is also said to be the higher octave of the red planet Mars, so there is another resonance there.

Someone who clearly doesn’t honour the Lord of the Underworld is James Ray, the ‘motivational speaker’ under whose ‘expert’ leadership 2 people died in a sweat lodge in Arizona last year, and a 3rd died later from multiple organ failure. 21 of the 64 people inside the lodge were taken to hospital. According to participants, Ray kept the ceremony going despite people’s distress. Now he has been charged with manslaughter, and has pleaded not guilty.

What was he doing with 64 people inside the lodge? The leader needs to be aware of all the participants, and that is not possible with those numbers. It might have something to do with the event it was part of, which cost thousands of dollars. You make a lot more money from a lodge with 64 people than with, say, 15-20. This incident is the latest in a series going back years.

James Ray was born 22 Nov 1957. His Sun is on the Scorpio/Sag cusp, square to Pluto, and his Moon is in Sag. You have to watch it when you’ve got a hard Sun-Pluto aspect and you find yourself in a leadership position, because you don’t have an easy relationship with power. Honesty is needed. Sagittarius, with its eyes fixed on its lofty goals and grand horizons, is one of the signs that can be least interested in, or comfortable with, examining its ordinary human motives. It's a good sign, for example, for thinking that you are doing God's Will. I'd put Mr Ray in that well-known lineage of spiritual teachers, the 'charismatic psychopaths'.

(Note: if you talk to God, that makes you religious; if he talks back, that makes you psychotic!)

It has surprised me for some time that there has not been a load of legislation around sweat lodges from the health and safety people. I’ve been glad there hasn’t been such legislation, because it’s a pain and it’s restrictive, and if you’re being reasonably responsible, you don’t need it. But people like Mr Ray can spoil it for everyone else by producing a need for legislation.

A friend used to teach rock and roll dancing at a local adult education college. For him it involved people having fun and feeling at ease being sexy. He ran it for years, and then the education mafia came along and said they weren’t happy because his course did not lead to a certificate; furthermore, in the short meditation he led them through at the end, he had his eyes closed, which meant he couldn’t see what was happening, and this created health and safety issues! My friend realised it was time to stop running the classes.

But this is what the health and safety people do, and I can’t see it lessening under Pluto in Capricorn. I can imagine sweat lodges horrifying them. You’d need, for example, a building permit, a light inside, a barrier around the rocks and a door that opened automatically if it got too hot, or stayed hot for too long. You’d need someone with first aid training (not a bad idea), insurance and a doctor’s clean bill of health for all the participants. The rocks would need to go in while everyone was outside having their health checked between rounds. There would need to be a couple of emergency exits apart from the main door. The rocks would need to be of a type that let off no noxious fumes. The firekeepers would have to wear special fireproof clothing and faceguards and have a certificate.

And so on. Let’s hope Mr Ray’s behaviour doesn’t bring the health and safety mafia down on the rest of us who have been running sweats for years without serious incidents.

There is actually a Chippewa-Cree form of sweat lodge that is set up as an underworld experience. It is for moving on particularly painful or traumatic experiences. Before you go in, you put on a mask, so it's like eradicating your old identity, and that is how you remain inside the lodge. At the end you are reborn. This is very like a Pluto transit, where you die, you lose your old identity, and then you are reborn, transformed. I haven't been in one of these lodges, but a friend who has been in one described it to me (slightly against the rules, as the element of not knowing is important). The next night something old and painful moved on as if I had actually been in the lodge. In my case, it was because it made such mythic sense, because it was using a form that I was so familiar with from astrology, that I was able to connect in this way.

Cherie Blair versus the National Secular Society

Cherie Blair, the barrister wife of Tony Blair, has come under fire from the National Secular Society. Sitting as a judge in a case where one Muslim broke another’s jaw in a fight over a place in a bank queue, she decided to suspend the man’s sentence because he was a religious person and had not been in trouble before. She added: "You are a religious man and you know this is not acceptable behaviour."

The National Secular Society has complained to the Office for Judicial Complaints that her attitude was discriminatory and unjust, and suggests she might have treated a non-religious person less leniently.

I fully agree. Cherie Blair should not be let away with this. No doubt in her own head she is being liberal and open-minded, because the guy is a Muslim, whereas she is a Catholic. But actually she is putting religious people above those who are not, and this is prejudice and intolerance. (Maybe also it's a case of 'Nice Lion', the Blairs being a prime target for muslim extremists).

If anything, I would argue the case the other way around: many people take to religion because they can't handle living in an uncertain universe. With the false certainty that religion provides comes a sense of rightness and superiority that can be used to justify unethical actions. So if I were in Cherie Blair’s position, I would be asking how much this guy’s religion justified the violence that occurred when the other person ‘sinned’ by shoving in front of him in the queue.

Christianity and Islam both have a long history of righteous violence. The recent/current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are a testament to this. In the case of Christianity, there is on the one hand the teaching of Christ, but there is the Old Testament as well, which Islam also accepts, with its eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth teaching.

So I find it ridiculous that Cherie Blair should raise religious people above secular people in this way. Islam, I guess, is her enemy’s enemy (secularism), so for now it is her friend.


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I don’t know much about what Cherie Blair is like, but her chart reveals a Virgo Sun and Leo Rising and Moon. The Virgo Sun gives her the analytical, flexible mind that a lawyer needs, and the Leo gives her the ability to perform that a barrister needs (her father was an actor). Pluto squared her Sun in the last few years, and part of the meaning of this must surely have been the more independent identity that was possible when her husband stepped down from being Prime Minister.

Jupiter is near the Ascendant (also square to Mercury and Neptune), and this gives her religion, but with Uranus also there, I am surprised her religion is so conventional. What I have noticed with the 1955 Jupiter-Uranus bunch is that while on the one hand they are often forward thinking, they also tend towards fanaticism and intolerance – a bit like Aquarians, who are Uranus-ruled. If you mix this in with the sense of rightness that a double fire sign gives, as well as the conservatism of Leo, then I think you have Cherie Blair. She also has a liberalism (Jupiter-Uranus) to her – she is, after all, the wife of an ex-Labour PM, and is famous for saying in reference to Palestinian suicide bombers: "As long as young people feel they have no hope but to blow themselves up, we're never going to make progress, are we?"

Pluto is squaring, and Saturn opposing, her MC this year, so I would expect her career to move forward significantly. She’ll probably be appointed as a full-time judge.

George Bush and my Neptune-Sun Transit

Last night I dreamed I was in a boat at night that capsized, and we were all left swimming in arctic waters. I knew I was going to die. After a while, I hit land off the coast of Norway. I was able to guide everyone else to safety too.

I think that is about right for the end of my Neptune-Sun transit (which has also coincided with my time on the astroblogosphere). With Neptune-Sun it can be like the light has gone out (night-time) and there is no solid ground underneath you. So we’ll see what happens. Pluto conjoining my one personal earth planet – Mars – will no doubt be implicated.

I’m reading American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld. It’s a fictionalised account of the lives of George and Laura Bush in the form of Charlie and Alice Blackwell. It’s a very good dissection of 2 incompatible characters, though how much they correspond to George and Laura is hard to say. It’s written in the 1st person, from Alice’s point of view. She is given the birthday of 6th April 1942, which doesn’t suit the character. Laura Bush’s birthday of 4th Nov 1946, though, works excellently for the Alice character. Sun in Scorpio trine Moon in Pisces: quiet, insightful, truthful, compassionate. Also a bit of a goody-goody and uptight.

It’s interesting that the rich people behave in exactly the same tedious, superior way that moneyed people in England do. I’ve only got to the point where Charlie/George buys his baseball team, but he is obsessed with his ‘legacy’, which Laura cannot understand. As she puts it, some men ‘panic’ about it, which sounds about right. I know glimpses of the feeling from the middle of the night, when I am briefly appalled at my lack of ‘legacy’. Then I return to my senses! It’s just another brainwashing that stops you actually living, and it’s the curse of ‘successful’ families. I’ve spent 30 years undoing this one, and the more I do so, the more I feel I’m connected to life. It’s a Saturn thing – I have Moon conjunct – which gives the ability to apply yourself over a long period and to become good at something. But it also curses you by reducing your self-respect to what you are good at, what you have to ‘show for yourself’, instead of self-respect as a natural part of being human.

A life on this planet is a very short, ephemeral thing in the grand scheme, in the vast stretches of time that have been and will be. It isn’t important enough to get so serious about a ‘legacy’ or an ‘achievement’ or about anything. Your legacy will be forgotten within a short time anyway, apart from as a measuring stick for your children and grandchildren to feel inadequate by! (It’s part of the 8th House of inheritance.) We’re only here very temporarily, so trying to create something solid and lasting is delusional. And it gets in the way of that wonderful, rich, charmed experience that day-to-day living can provide, if we’re not trying to improve on it!

Also spoken like someone at the end of a Neptune-Sun transit.

Jupiter-Uranus and the 2010 Scientific Breakthroughs

I’ve been noticing that both the macrocosmic and microcosmic scientific worlds are abuzz with the excitement of impending discoveries. This is an unusual situation, because discoveries don’t usually happen that way. For example, you don’t know in advance that you’re going to find new remains that reveal more about human ancestry, or a cure for cancer. But in both cases new, far more powerful instruments have just been put in place, so it’s like travelling to new worlds where you are bound to see new things, even though you don’t know in advance what they are.

On the macrocosmic level, a whole bunch of new telescopes, both ground-based and in space, have recently been coming into operation. One of these, the Kepler, is a planet spotter: we are at the point of being able to see earth-sized planets. From there it would only seem to be a matter of time, maybe the next few years, before we start detecting wavelengths of light from those planets that suggest the possibility of life as we understand it. This was pointed out recently by the astronomer Lord Rees, and it would be revolutionary, it would mark an epochal shift for humanity. It would suggest, for example, that life is a universal principle that turns up whenever conditions are right.

Microcosmically, there is of course the new CERN particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, on the Swiss-French border. It is being gradually fired up (after a sticky start that shut it down for a year) and has already set new records for the energy of its experiments. But that is only a start, it has orders of power left, and it is bound to reveal a whole new landscape.

Meanwhile a crucial breakthrough has been achieved by the Americans with controlled nuclear fusion, which is the Holy Grail of large-scale energy production. The American experimental method involves firing lasers at pellets of heavy hydrogen. For decades there has been concern that the resulting plasma would mess up any ongoing fusion, but this has now been shown not to be the case.

The astrological signature for all this is the upcoming Uranus-Jupiter conjunction, which is associated with periods of scientific breakthrough. Uranus is associated with the scientific mind and with brilliant insight, and Jupiter expands whatever it touches. The last exact conjunction (the most powerful of all the aspects) was in 1997, and shortly before that Dolly the Sheep, the first cloned mammal, was born.

This next conjunction begins in June in Aries, and then occurs twice more in Pisces over the following 7 months. The June conjunction is in an applying square to Pluto, empowering it.

So I expect this year’s Jupiter-Uranus conjunction (which occurs about every 13 years) to be unusually significant.

The North Node

I’ve been toying with the idea that the North Node becomes more visible as we get older. The (North) Node, you could say, describes what we are here to become for karmic reasons, it describes the deeper issues that will sort, that will become empowered, if we become that Node. Because these things are deep, they are hard to see; in fact our life may apparently have had little to do with the Node, until after 40 years we look back and see how it all adds up.

So I dragged a few names out of my famous people list to see what turned up. Elizabeth II of England has Angular Node in Cancer, conjunct Pluto and trine to Saturn-MC. That is a powerful placement, and shows how seriously (Saturn) she takes her vocation (MC) that was given to her (trine) by her people (Cancer) who are the source of her power (Pluto). As she has got older, so has she become the matriarch (Cancer) of her country.

President Kennedy did not live long, so his ‘later life’ is his reputation since his death. His Node is in Capricorn, opposite Pluto. He is remembered as a great president (Capricorn, a sign of leadership and authority), and this is partly because of his early death (Pluto).

Rupert Murdoch has Node in Aries, conjunct Uranus and square to Saturn and Pluto. A very powerful placement. He has maintained his ability to fight and to initiate (Aries) into his old age, and continues to be a mould-breaker (Uranus-Node, which Obama also has.) It’s not necessarily very pretty having Saturn and Pluto in square to the Node, and you don’t feel there is much that Murdoch would not do in pursuit of power and wealth.

An odd one: the Batman story seems to keep going, with yet another re-invention in the last few years. I wondered if he has Node in Scorpio (re-invention continuing into old age), and sure enough he has. The chart I use is that for the first publication on 1st May 1939. Note that Batman does not have superpowers, unlike the Incredible Hulk etc. This is reflected in the astrology, where the superheroes tend to have Jupiter-Chiron aspects: superpowers (Jupiter) created by a wound (Chiron e.g. the Hulk’s exposure to radiation, Superman losing his family and home planet as a baby.)

Bob Geldof has the Sun conjunct Neptune of a musician and the Sun conjunct Saturn of someone who is determined to achieve; but as he has got older, so has his compassionate Node in Pisces become more prominent, through Band Aid etc.

Margaret Thatcher has Node in Leo. She was a singular leader, unable to adapt as time went on (fixed Leo) and adopting regal airs (Leo). She is loved by many (Node trine Venus) yet also did a lot of damage on a human level (Node square Chiron).

Prince Charles has Node in Taurus, conjunct the Moon and in a Grand Trine with Saturn and Jupiter. So here we have issues of wealth, which on the one hand Charles is comfortable with and which gives him security (Moon in Taurus), but which he has also grappled with (Node), using his wealth to create sustainable, healthy projects, such as his organic farm and the village of Poundbury in Dorset. This is the aspect of Taurus as Values: what value do I place on money, what do I consider important about money?

The answer that is perhaps predominant in our culture is that money is a value in itself, and the more you have of it, the more ‘value’ you have. The Taurus-Scorpio Nodal axis is interesting in this respect. There is often some kind of struggle around money and material values with this placement. While Taurus Node asks us to look at what value we place on money, Scorpio Node asks us to understand the power of money.

Getting that power right is what it is all about. With money we can have power over others. It can also have power over us, when its lack makes us feel disempowered, or when its presence makes us feel substantial and powerful. Money is a power, and that cannot be wished away, but its real power is as a resource to make things happen. We can do things, meaningful things, with money that we could not otherwise do.

So money in itself is not evil, and being wealthy does not make you bad, despite what Jesus said about camels and eyes of needles. (Who’d want to go to the Christian heaven anyway?) Like anything, it is about why you want it. It is an energy, and it can be used in healthy and unhealthy ways. Getting this one right is the lesson for many Scorpio Nodes, in the context of the general Scorpio inquiry into the nature of power.

Like Batman, however, Scorpio Nodes (such as myself!) also need to continue to re-invent themselves into old age.

The Idea of Sufficiency

My Native American friend Xbox (not his real name, and anyway he’d rather be called Indian) talks about the idea of sufficiency. He does a lot of obscure reading and is a mine of unusual information and original conclusions. Anyway, he’d observed that when a tribal people were largely wiped out through disease or whatever, they would often return to their original numbers quite quickly, and then stay at roughly that number. It was like they would collectively have a sense of what was enough, what number could be supported by the environment. And from that came his idea that humans have a sense of sufficiency, of what is enough. Like when you’ve had enough to eat.

In a way the idea seems obvious and very sane, but our culture has lost sight of it. We no longer have any collective sense of there being enough people, or enough wealth, or having done enough work, or whatever. Prosperity no longer means thriving, it means greed.

Sufficiency is a Saturnian idea. A healthy Saturn sets appropriate boundaries and regulates the proper measure of everything. An unhealthy Saturn is empty inside, and endlessly compensates through ‘achievement’ and hard work and wealth.

It has become central to our collective sense of well-being that the economy is growing. It doesn’t matter so much that it should adequately provide for everybody. No, what matters is that it should be growing, so we are told, and we believe it. This is the negative Saturn at the heart of our culture. Things are bad in the UK at the moment because we are in a recession. No-one says well we’ve all still got enough to eat and a roof over our heads – and we could easily cater for those who haven’t – so what’s the problem?

Working long hours is part of the same thing. We feel good about ourselves when we’ve been working, which isn’t altogether a bad thing. But it is more than that, it is a moral thing, we feel like we are good people because we have been working, and we want others to know. I know a small farmer who will often watch kids TV in the day, and then at night he’ll get in his tractor, put on the lights and start working, and it looks to the neighbours like he is this incredibly hard-working farmer who is at it even in the evening. This over-identification with work is also negative Saturn.

Sufficiency is different to sustainability. The problem with our current western way of life, as we see it, is that it is not sustainable, due to climate change, limited resources etc. That’s a good start, but it’s not the real issue. Because awful things can be perfectly sustainable. The early USA slave culture was perfectly sustainable. Some wars seem to go on and on, they seem quite sustainable.

The reason we have reached a point of unsustainability is because we have lost sight of sufficiency. What we seem to be looking for collectively with all the climate change stuff etc is an economy based on sustainable greed rather than unsustainable greed. As I said, it’s a start, but it is paradoxical, because an economy, a way of life, based on greed always wants more, and so eventually becomes unsustainable.

So I think that the political buzz word needs to be sufficiency rather than sustainability. It takes the pressure off in all sorts of ways, morally and psychologically, as well as materially. But I think it is a mind-set way too far to be accepted, simple as it is. Perhaps Pluto in Capricorn will help, although it could just as easily mean more power (Pluto) to the banks and other financial institutions (Capricorn). Maybe we have to wait for Pluto in Aquarius in 14 years time, which will empower (Pluto) the progressive thinkers (Aquarius).

Sabotage from the Future?

The Large Hadron Collider is almost back in commission after its accident last year. It is the biggest atom smasher in the world and it is not American. It has been designed to discover the Higgs Boson, the current fundamentalest particle of all. For the super-conducting magnets which contain the stream of particles to work properly, it has to be very cold, and it has just been announced that it is now colder than deep space.


The quantum world does not obey the usual rules, and Niels Bohr, one of the pioneers of quantum physics, said that if you are not shocked by the laws of the quantum world, then you haven’t understood them. In this world, for example, certain events can only be explained by time going backwards.

I haven’t got too much of a problem with that, because if you look at neuro-pathology, you start to realise that the 3-D ‘external’ world, together with time, are created by the brain to create order out of our sensory input. As a model, it works pretty well, but that doesn’t make the external world real in a hard and fast way. Astrology also works, a lot of the time, at any rate. But it’s just another model, which is why it doesn’t always work. Just like our senses aren’t always reliable. And even if they are reliable, if you ask 2 people to describe the same event, you’ll probably get different accounts.

Anyway, the Large Hadron Collider. It was just starting to get up and running last year, amid a lot of publicity, when it had an accident. There was a liquid helium leak and it’s taken over a year to sort. And 2 physicists have seriously suggested that the damage may have been caused by Higgs Bosons (which of course have yet to be discovered) travelling backwards in time from a future experiment.

I doubt it is the true explanation, but I liked the idea that real physicists were suggesting it. Of course, the LHC doesn’t ‘know’ that it is going to be used to discover Higgs Bosons. Otherwise it could just as well send back some other particle. Which means that human intention must also be playing a part in creating this future that has not yet happened and from which Higgs Bosons could be travelling back in time to upset our plans.

I don’t know if the scientists are thinking that way. But it makes complete sense to me. Because so much of what we call reality is the product of people’s imaginings, if not all of reality. There is a deep way in which the world is a product of consciousness. Our culture, for example, gradually developed the idea that reality is material and follows empirical, rational laws and sure enough, reality obliged and we find ourselves in such a universe. Some ancient cultures developed the idea that there is a relationship between the movements of the stars and human affairs and sure enough, reality obliged and we find ourselves in an astrological universe.

I don’t mean all this in a superficial way, like reality is simply what you think it is. It’s to do with the imagination. The imagination seems to connect what is ‘in here’ with what is ‘out there’. So that when an idea about how the universe works stirs our imagination, it is because it is in some way real, and it’s probably hard to say which came first, reality or our idea about it. The fact that quantum physics is, properly understood, shocking, says a lot in its favour. If it is shocking, then it touches us, and that gives it reality.

I’ve just turfed up these notes from a Liz Greene seminar I was on probably about 5 years ago:

We are all subject to

Chiron’s pain in the face of life’s inequality and injustice;

Neptune’s yearning, arising from our vision of something eternal that was there before birth and awaits us after death;

Pluto’s realization of our ultimate powerlessness in the face of nature and the collective;

Saturn’s recognition of our aloneness, our separateness, our mortality and our ultimate insignificance in the chain of earthly life.

I don’t seem to have jotted down anything for Uranus. Any suggestions? How about:

We are all subject to Uranus’s sense of existential insecurity, that whatever certainties we have come to rely on can disintegrate without warning.