Margaret Thatcher and the British Character

When Princess Diana died in 1997, there was an outpouring of grief like we’d never seen before in the UK (Tony Blair, prescient political animal with a 12^th House Sun, saw it coming).

 In his series on the British Stiff Upper Lip, Ian Hislop saw this outpouring as a signal that something was changing in the British character. Namely, that the stiff upper lip (produced by the needs of Empire and in response to the frighteningly liberated emotion of the French Revolution) was on its way out. And that we are returning to who we used to be, a very emotionally expressive nation, about whom foreigners used to complain of the excessive kissing in public.

My point is that at moments like the death of Diana, a nation can get to know itself. And I think it is the same with the death of Margaret Thatcher.

The nation has been touched and divided. With Diana, you either felt the grief or (like me and Ian Hislop) you didn’t. With Thatcher, the nation has split into opposing camps, just like it did when she was in power. And that says a lot about the British people.

____________________

Ad Break: I offer webcam astrology readings (£20 per ½ hour, £60 maximum, no time limit). Contact: Dharmaruci71(at)hotmail.com.
________________

"the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe" Mitterrand

 I have mixed feelings about her. I have a bad taste in my mouth because of the loveless, patronising way she implemented her policies. But something had to be done, and she was the only one ruthless enough to do it. And many people either hate her for her lovelessness or love her for ‘saving’ the nation. But in reality I think it is a complex mix and we need to sit with it for a few years. Her death has energised that process.

At one point I agreed with Russell Brand, who said if you didn’t like Thatcher because of her lack of love, that means you believe in love, so you shouldn’t be celebrating her death. Well, he’s right if you are just expressing hatred. But I don’t think it is just that. Her death is also the symbolic death of a harsh trait in the British character (that built the Empire and still sends 8 year olds away to boarding school, amongst other things: I was at school with her disreputable son Mark!) and I think it is healthy to celebrate that death. 

The BBC should be playing the full version of Ding Dong The Witch is Dead (from the Wizard of Oz), which has seen a surge in popularity, because it is expressing something healthy in the population (as well as hatred, but you’re never going to have purity!)

Click to Enlarge

The UK chart has Sun in Capricorn and Moon in Cancer. And there, I think, you have it. Capricorn is the demands of the world, the demands for law and order and an economy that works. Cancer is the need for nurture, for belonging, for caring about each other. Capricorn is the Empire, Cancer is the emotionality we used to be known for and which is re-emerging. Princess Diana was a Cancerian.

And the nation is split along that axis. The split over Thatcher is expressive of an enduring split in the nation between these 2 principles. That is the self-knowledge that the death of Margaret Thatcher is making available to us.

And we all have both, at least if you are British. We are a collective as well as an individual species, and that split over Thatcher, those 2 camps, is in all of us. If I were doing a reading for an individual with this chart, I would be saying that you need to bring Capricorn and Cancer together. These axes are basic to astrology. If you have a planet in a sign, then you need to cultivate the opposite sign for balance, and if you don’t, you are likely to express the negative characteristics of that opposite sign.

Even more so if you have planets in both those opposite signs, and even more so if they are the Sun and Moon, the 2 most important and descriptive planets.

William and Kate: Cancer and Capricorn

In the case of the UK, the astrology suggests it is the government (Sun) that is more likely to be one-sidedly Capricorn, putting efficiency before feeling; and it is the people (the Moon) who are more likely to be one-sidedly Cancer, sentimental (Diana’s death!) and allowing the welfare bill to get out of control.

But the 2 themes are tightly woven together: the Sun is within orb of an opposition to the Moon, while the Sun is in Cancer’s natural House (the 4^th) and the Moon is in the Sun’s natural House (the 10^th). There’s probably a technical name for this, a bit like mutual reception, but I don’t know what it might be.

So I think the country needs to understand and gradually get over this division on Thatcher, because the UK chart seems to be saying that the 2 camps are intimately connected, and that they are probably in each of us. If you are taking one side of it, you may well be in denial of the other side in yourself. A bit like Russell Brand’s point: are you being loveless in your celebration of Thatcher’s death, are you allowing yourself to hate her? Because if you are, then you are being just like her. And do you see the current welfare cuts just as a bad thing done by bad people, because that is a denial of Capricorn, which Thatcher was all too good at.

And if, like the Tory politicians you go misty eyed and talk about her as the saviour of the nation, well then you are being sentimental, which is feeling that is not objective, it is unconscious Cancer. All that feeling they have for her, that is what she didn’t have. She was not loyal or respectful to her cabinet members, they became her mere functionaries who she would readily discard or freeze out.

So it’s about the UK becoming a nation at ease with itself. Thatcher in many ways embodied an old Britain, which built an Empire, conquered and converted savages (as it saw them) and became the world’s most wealthy and powerful nation. (I’m talking about the UK here, not the USA :)) The Australian PM was shocked by Thatcher’s racism, and saw her as part of an old Britain. I think he was right. I think the UK is still getting over its loss of Empire and all the attitudes that go with that. And I think the death of Thatcher may be an important milestone in the country moving on from its past.

Our past, our Empire, created a Capricorn-Cancer imbalance in the nation: we lost our emotionality, we became efficient and cruel. Thatcher so much embodies what we used to be, and still are to some extent, but are moving on from. The character of the British people is changing. And that is also reflected in the major transits from Uranus and Pluto to the UK Sun, Moon and Asc. But that’s another article.

ZEITGEIST UPDATE

Over the last week or two the Eurozone debt crisis has reared its head again, firstly with Cyprus, like Greece before it, having to accept crushing terms to stay within the Eurozone, and now Portugal, a larger economy, having problems; the US economy has slowed down, with less new jobs being created than was expected, and some saying it is due to the cuts that were imposed due to the political impasse in that country; and North Korea is manufacturing a military/ nuclear crisis with no-one quite sure how far they will go. And the latest round of talks with Iran have ended with Iran triumphant about its nuclear progress.

All this as Pluto slows down to turn retrograde (12^th April) and begins approaching an exact square with Uranus (its 3^rd) on 20th May.

With Uranus-Pluto we expect crisis and economic recession, and the events of the last week or two are the pre-amble to the forthcoming square between those 2 planets (7 of them between 2012 and 2015). This 3 year period is an axis on which the world is turning, moving us from one era to the next, and it is slow and grinding and hard to see the wood from the trees, but the astrology gives us, to some extent, the bigger picture.

________________________________________________

Ad Break: I offer webcam astrology readings (£20 per ½ hour, £60 maximum, no time limit). Contact: Dharmaruci71(at)hotmail.com.
_________________________________

Pluto wants life to move on from one stage to the next, and the dying of the old stage can be painful; and Uranus brings in a shocking, creative, disruptive, awakening element. You put those 2 together in challenging aspect and it’s a rollercoaster, particularly when the Suns of most of the major powers are being aspected. The last time we had Uranus square Pluto was in the late 20s/early 30s, and look at the grinding change and recession we went through then, and that was without the Suns of the major powers being aspected like they are now.

The 30s was the closing square of a cycle – Uranus and Pluto were moving towards a conjunction – so it was about the death of an old world, which the ensuing World War decisively provided. This square, however, is the opening square of a cycle, so something new is being born. I don’t want to place a value on that and say it will be ‘better’ because I don’t think the outer planets necessarily work like that, but it will certainly be different and, because Uranus is involved, there will be a distinctly new element that isn’t just a re-arrangement of the old.

So what is being born? This isn’t astrology now (OK, it’s a bit based in it), it’s just me leaning on the bar venting my opinion. One factor is the world getting more used to being globalised. It’s been on our lips for a good 10 or 15 years now (Pluto in Sagittarius empowered the process). The internet is international, corporations move themselves around the world doing their best to avoid tax, everything is made somewhere else. There was recently a meeting on international tax laws, the first apparently since the 1920s and about time. As China rises, and along with America and the EU comes to dominate world trade, we will probably see an era of increased international law brought about as a response to globalisation.

Power is shifting from the West to the East, that is one of the major changes under Uranus-Pluto, and the western recession – us becoming relatively poorer – is part of that.

Europe looks increasingly to me like it will stay together, but with a more pronounced divide between the rich north and the poor south. We have still only had 2 out of 7 Uranus-Pluto squares, so there is a lot further to go in the European debt crisis. Surely a bigger country will sooner or later face the same savage cuts as Greece and Cyprus. These countries can’t go bankrupt if they want to stay in the Eurozone, their debts are cut, but are still kept at a level that will keep them desperately poor and struggling for decades. That is the level of divide we are likely to see: a southern Europe that is to a large extent crushed by debt by the time Uranus and Pluto have finished, and dominated economically and politically by the north. An empire ruled by Germany and its smaller but still wealthy neighbours. And Britain a close trading partner but politically on its way out of the system.

And America? Well, like I’ve said before, it seems to have a decision to make over the next few years about how it wants to run itself, making itself governable again. It’s been there before. And then it has its 1^st Pluto return a few years after that. That should be interesting, though it will be gradual. The US Pluto is in the 2^nd house of money and values (money is a value, a big one). Pluto as a planet of death is where we confront our survival: what do we feel we have to have in order to feel we exist and for which we will fight to the death? In a personal chart, it’s the house placement that is important, as the sign is generational. But for a country, sign probably has equal significance.

So the US has Pluto in 2^nd House Capricorn. The institutions (Capricorn) that produce wealth (2^nd House). The corporation, which as we know has undue influence over the political process in the US. As they said in West Wing, there are 2 things which you don’t want to know how they are made: laws and sausages. So some shift in values here, gradual and some years down the line, just as Chinese corporations start to equal the power of American ones.

The so-called ‘nuclear axis’ is between 8 and 10 degrees of Gemini Sag, and it is very sensitive to transits. It is based on the first man-made controlled nuclear chain reaction. Look at the symbolism: Uranus (splitting) conjunct Saturn (form/matter) brought into significance by the opposition to the Sun. See my previous posts here and here.

As Uranus-Pluto goes through its squares, so does the Iranian (and possibly North Korean) nuclear crisis proceed. But as we come to the end of those squares, so does Neptune begin squaring the nuclear axis. So we will be entering a new nuclear era. Will it be one in which the major powers assert more effective control over proliferation? Or will it be one in which, hamstrung by differences between the US and China and Russia, no action is taken and we have a new era in which Iran is threatening the Middle East with nuclear weapons?

Margaret Thatcher

We are moving, slowly and painfully, from one era to another, as Uranus makes a series of 7 squares to Pluto. As I was writing this, news came through of Margaret Thatcher’s death. That certainly symbolises the end of an era. People generally love her or hate her, even now, 22 years after she left power. I didn’t hate her. I didn’t like her, and wouldn’t have wanted her round for dinner, but I think she did a basic housekeeping job that needed doing, that only she had the ruthlessness to do. The books needed to be balanced, and power taken from the unions. She wasn’t kind, she was patronising and simple-minded, but I think in politics you can need to think in black and white terms to get a job done. She saw herself as on the side of good against evil, just as Tony Blair came to do.

Click to Enlarge

Saturn rising in Scorpio, co-ruled by Mars and Pluto in square to each other, and Sun in square to Pluto: there is the ruthlessness and the fight to the death. Darth Vader. With Pluto/Scorpio, purging is the theme, and being nice is a luxury. Some politicians have called her a 'force of nature', which is very Scorpio. That connection to 'gut instinct' gives unusual strength. I think it's hard not be impressed by that sort of force of character.

________________________________________________

Ad Break: I offer webcam astrology readings (£20 per ½ hour, £60 maximum, no time limit). Contact: Dharmaruci71(at)hotmail.com.
_________________________________

When she came to power in 1979, Pluto was conjoining her Libra Sun, and that set the tone for her premiership. Pluto went on to conjoin her Saturn/Asc towards the end of her time in office. With Tony Blair, Neptune was the theme: the spin, the religiosity and the eventual reputation as a liar.

With natal Neptune conjunct her Midheaven, people saw what they wanted to see - or what she wanted them to see. With Moon there as well, it is a good placement for connecting to the public, which she certainly did: everyone seemed to feel strongly about her. And so much of it was and is projection: she is either the Redeemer (David Cameron: "She saved the nation") or the devil incarnate ("Ding dong the witch is dead"). Classic Neptune stuff.

Towards the end of her time on power, she lost her touch: like Blair, she no longer felt she had to court the public. Moon in Leo conjunct MC: the 'royal we'. When her son had a child, she announced "We are a grandmother". That was the point at which some members of her cabinet felt she had lost it. Like Reagan, I suspect she had early Alzheimers while still in office, because of the increasingly intolerant, black and white way she saw things.

Thatcher had a couple of classic transits around her death: Neptune conjunct IC (‘the end of life’) and Saturn Return in the sign of Scorpio. And one that perhaps only she would have had, Uranus in Mars-ruled Aries exactly opposite her natal Mars: there goes a warrior, for better or for worse.

Maybe I'll leave the last word to Giscard D'Estaing, President of France at the time, who said; "I do not like her. She is not a man and she is not a woman."