Why Astrology Shouldn't Work

The whole point about astrology is that it ‘shouldn’t’ work. That is why it’s so wondrous. It catapaults us into a different sense of how the universe works, a universe that has its mystery and charm back. This is half the reason that readings can be so powerful: it’s not just that what is said is true, it’s also how the hell can the astrologer know this about me?

I’ve spent quite a lot of time struggling with the fact that astrology ‘shouldn’t’ work. A simple demonstration of this is the zodiac, the various signs in which we find the planets. Several thousand years ago these signs were all declared to be thirty degrees each, yet nature is of course not regular like this. And then the signs have slipped along the ecliptic by 23 degrees since then, so that what we term 10 Pisces, for example, is in fact about 17 degrees Aquarius.

So the signs are pure hokum. Any notions of ‘energies’ and 'vibrations' (the last refuge of a New Age scoundrel) are out the window. And yet the signs work, and work very well.

The planets themselves can be a bit misleading, because they are real bodies in real places, and their relationships to each other do tell us a lot about ourselves. This can lead us to conclude that astrology is somehow rational, that there is a subtle physical relationship between the astronomical bodies and ourselves.

You even get astrologers who try to iron out the ‘irrational’ bits – i.e. the signs – and just stick to the planets and the asteroids. But this is to miss the point. The fact that the signs work when they are hokum needs to be faced, because it tells us a lot about the nature of astrology and indeed all divination systems, which is that we are dealing primarily in symbols. We may need to be able to put the meanings of these symbols in a rationally coherent form, but their fundamental function is not rational: their function is to awaken the imagination, our sense of an expanded and meaningful universe; and to awaken the intuition, our sense of knowing that precedes sense-based evidence.

It is the same with Tarot. There is no ‘reason’ a bunch of symbols picked out blind should tell us anything useful. But they do, and they are the ‘right’ symbols; you can easily imagine cards that would not have been appropriate for that person. Why the 'right' symbols should turn up, whether in astrology or tarot, is a mystery to be lived with and to be awed by. We could of course call it the Law of Attraction or something, but that just beguiles us into thinking we have an explanation when all we have is a name and a description.

The imagination and intuition precede the rational mind, though it is easy to forget this. The sense-based, ordering mind performs a very necessary function, but it also has a tendency to think it is in control, and that reality can be reduced to its terms. This is the Scientific Materialist Fallacy. When life is very busy, as modern life usually is, it is natural to think of the imagination and intuition as at best adjuncts to our advanced rational endowment, which has been so successful at bringing material benefits and improvements and a certain type of understanding.

So astrology, tarot etc remind us of how the universe really works, precisely because they ‘shouldn’t’ work. Reality precedes rationality. Reality is to be felt and wondered at, and then thought about.

If someone asks you to explain or justify astrology, I think the honest starting point is that there is no reason that it should work, and that we don’t know why it should work, but for some weird reason it does.

The logical fallacy that astrology’s debunkers are prone to is that astrology doesn’t work because it can’t work. The problem is not that astrology is non-rational but that its opponents are irrational. These are 2 different things. The non-rational is that aspect of things that cannot be described by the sense-based reasoning process. To be irrational is to ignore inconvenient evidence. (By the same token, it is irrational for astrologers to ignore the fact that the zodiac signs are hokum.)

Astrology doesn’t work because it can’t work. This is the assumption going on in the mind of many people who dismiss it. What you’re up against is religion, in the sense of metaphysical beliefs that are not open to question. It is the religion of scientific materialism, which perhaps produces a higher proportion of fundamentalists than Islam or Christianity. In these cases there’s no point trying to convince people, because they can’t listen to evidence.

What’s great about astrology is that it’s not a belief system. Astrologers have all sorts of beliefs, and it doesn’t stop them being astrologers. Astrology is practical, you can see it working. Of course, you can create a belief system around it to do with rays of energy and harmonies of the spheres etc if you want to. But I think it’s most helpful and honest to remain in that slightly uncomfortable place where you admit that you don’t know and can’t know what’s going on, but which also therefore occasionally opens up a sense of the unknowable and mysterious nature of the universe.

Pluto in Capricorn and the Rise of Christianity

I'm away at Glastonbury Festival for much of this week, so here is a piece by Ed Tamplin that gives us historical perspective on Pluto in Capricorn:

When Pluto moved through Capricorn from the first century 42 AD, St. Paul had experienced his own “plutonic transformation” on the road to Damascus. It set him on a new path of missionary zeal. Meanwhile the Romans at the height of their empire began building Londinium. But their pagan gods were about to fall. Over the next millennium the face of Europe changed under the new banner of the cross. Each time Pluto accessed Capricorn the rate of Christian influence multiplied.

Christianity was a perfect vehicle for Pluto. Here was a religion whose foundations were built on death and resurrection. Jesus taught the resurrection as a Doctrine of Rebirth. One must be willing to die to their former selves to access the true kingdom of heaven. And the martyrdom of the early saints was a physical embodiment of the same principle.

The Roman hierarchy’s suppression of the seeds of change greatly empowered the process. During Pluto’s return to Capricorn in 287 AD, Emperor Diocletian, presiding over a then divided empire, instituted mass Christian executions to stem the religious tide. These mass killings were famous for their failure, and during the same period Constantine the Great was declared the new Emperor. Constantine’s baptism into the new faith would elevate Christianity to the religion of the state, and assist him to reunite the empire.

The following entry of Pluto into Capricorn witnessed the material phase—temple building. It came in the form of the grandiose reconstruction of the most famous church outside the Vatican—the magnificent Hagia Sophia of Byzantium. Dedicating the new building, (which utilized columns from the wondrous Temple of Artemis), Emperor Justinian declared, “Solomon I have exceeded thee.” By Pluto’s fourth and final cycle of the first millennium the devout Frankish King Charlemagne had subjugated the Saxons to Catholicism, in establishing his vast European Empire. The religion and the state were now united across the majority of mediaeval Europe and Eurasia.

The universal church had grown from the true believers to an institution, with its attendant hierarchal corruptions. In doing so it had inadvertently made itself a target for Pluto’s major charter of Reformation midway through the following millennium. On 31 October 1517, with Pluto back in Capricorn, Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church. It led to a new divided Christianity rising like a Phoenix from the old. (more…)

THE BIGGER PICTURE

I'm away for a few days, and I first posted this piece in 2006, but it's worth another look. The basic ideas come from Andre Barbault and Richard Tarnas.

Since 1993 we have been in a rare period in which all three outer planet pairs – Uranus-Neptune, Uranus-Pluto and Neptune-Pluto – have been in the waxing phase of their cycles with each other, and will remain so until the year 2047, when Uranus will oppose Pluto and begin the waning phase of its cycle.

The outer planet cycles govern the longer-term patterns and developments of humanity. The waxing phase of a cycle is a creative, constructive phase, which reaches its culmination at the Opposition; after that comes the waning phase, when the fruits of the waxing phase may be lived out, but which also results in the decay of the old pattern and the planting of the seed of the next cycle.

The last time that all 3 outer planet pairs were waxing was during the years 1479-1538 AD, when the Renaissance was spreading through Europe; and the time before that was during the years 965-1029 AD, the period when most of Europe finally came under Christian influence. These were both periods of cultural re-birth, shaping the character of the western world for centuries afterwards. (1)

The earlier period gave rise to the Middle Ages, when the orthodox Christian Church reigned unchallenged as the presiding cultural and spiritual force in Europe. And the period of the Renaissance saw a re-birth of classical learning and knowledge, and an artistic and scientific flourishing, all of which led to a breakdown of the cultural hegemony of the Catholic Church and the birth of the modern world.

So the outer planet pairs are telling us that we too are living in a rare time of cultural re-birth, and that what is happening now will fundamentally shape the character of our culture for centuries to come, presumably until the next time all 3 outer planet pairs are waxing, from 2508-2553 AD. Because it is a time of cultural re-birth, it is also a time of a death of the old culture, just as paganism pretty much died out when Christianity gained ascendancy, and just as the Catholic Church as a unifying cultural force began to die at the time of the Renaissance.

It is hard, if not impossible, for us to know very clearly what it is that is being born and what it is that is dying, because we are living through it, we ARE it. But astrology does at least give us the insight that such a tectonic shift is occurring.

The nature of the cultural change that we are passing through is a whole subject in itself, but it is worth suggesting for now that much of it may be based in the gradual death of an Age in which the solar principle has reigned supreme at the expense of the lunar principle, in which man has been elevated above woman, rationality above feeling, spirituality above nature. This split has clearly characterised – even vitiated - our western culture for many centuries, and yet at the same time it has clearly begun to break down. What will replace it has only just begun to be born.

Like any major cultural change, it has been a long time in the making, and the current astrological configuration needs to be seen as the intensification or fruition of a pre-existing trend. The Renaissance, for example, began not in 1455 but in 13th Century Italy. In the same way, Freud’s work, which displaced man as a rational animal and gave power to an irrational ‘unconscious’, began to be published at the end of the 19th Century, 100 years before the present cultural re-birth.

It is easy to be pessimistic about humanity’s future in the coming decades. We do, after all, face a number of major problems, any one of which could lead to a collapse of our present civilisation: there is the coming energy crisis, when the supply of oil will no longer able to meet demand; there is the spectre of uncontrolled nuclear proliferation, which has started to become a reality over the last decade; and there is the environmental crisis, just one aspect of which – global warming – could eventually make the earth a lot less habitable.

All of these problems are becoming immediate, and with the Uranus-Pluto square that is coming up in just a few years time, it is hard not to see some kind of a reckoning, a necessity to really face these problems. I think we are on the verge of a very testing period. The Uranus-Pluto Square will hit major points in the charts of all the major western powers.

So there may well be wars, famines, environmental disasters etc. But also, something deeply new is coming into being, a seed that is only planted once every 500 years. It seems to be in the nature of human civilisations that we do sometimes pass through very difficult times, and since WWII we have had a remarkable run of peace and prosperity, at least in the West. But there is also renewal.

So we need to see the coming Uranus-Pluto Square against this essentially creative cultural backdrop. It doesn’t mean that we won’t have wars, plagues and natural disasters. But it does suggest that it is not the end of civilisation as we know it: rather, it is a period in which, at all sorts of levels, something new is trying to be born.

The last Uranus-Pluto square was also Cardinal, and it was in the late 1920s/early 1930s. It resulted in WWII. As a t-square with Saturn it lasted longer, and was tighter, than the coming Uranus-Pluto-Saturn t-square, which I therefore expect to be less cataclysmic. Also, the last t-Square took place against the backdrop of a dying civilisation, it was one of the death throes of the last 500 year period. So I think we can be more optimistic about this one, even though there are similarities to the 1920s/30s t-Square.

I think that the essential meaning of the coming Uranus-Pluto Square is an intensification at all levels of the wider process of renewal – social, political, artistic, religious, technological, environmental and so on. Uranus, the planet of evolution and revolution, of sudden change, of originality, inventiveness and genius is being re-empowered and transformed by Pluto. It is a very testing and challenging transit, but because of that it contains the power to re-energise and move things on in all sorts of creative and unexpected ways.

If we think in terms of centuries – a human rather than an astrological category – then the Uranus-Pluto Square is the first real test of this new century. The Saturn-Pluto opposition of 2001/2 was obviously very important, but it was not 2 outer planets aspecting each other. So even 9/11, traumatic as it was for the USA, will start to fade in significance as Uranus begins to square Pluto. It will be seen, perhaps, as just one incident in a relatively short-lived struggle with the Arab world, based ultimately on control of the oil supply.


(1) For the sake of accuracy, there have been 3 major periods since 965 AD (including our own), of between 52 and 78 years, when all 3 outer planet pairs have been waxing. There have also been 2 minor periods: 5 years between 1137-1142AD, and 10 years between 1891-1901AD. These 2 periods could be seen as prefiguring what came later, e.g. the re-discovery of Aristotle’s works in A.D. 1150, foreshadowing the Renaissance re-discovery of classical texts.

The Western Negative Saturn

Saturn sets boundaries and limitations and pushes us to achieve, to become good at what we do and to gain recognition for it. Negatively, he fills us with thoughts of what we ought and should be doing, and makes us feel guilty for not measuring up. Well, he doesn’t in reality push us or make us do anything, but he does describe those positive qualities and dysfunctions within ourselves.

The guilt for not measuring up is endemic within our society; it’s what I call the western negative Saturn. You see it in America’s natal Sun square Saturn, and you see it in the Capricornian Sun of the UK, the EU and all those other countries and institutions that were founded on January 1st.

I regularly encounter it in readings, usually in the form of a conflict between what someone wants to do and ideas of career and achievement, which invariably turn out on examination to be someone else’s ideas and not their own. But it’s very powerful, it’s deep within the culture, which is why people find it so difficult when for some reason (usually a major transit!) they can’t keep going like they used to and can no longer ‘justify’ their life to themselves by being busy.

Being busy and working hard: those are the 2 great virtues of negative Saturn. So and so worked very hard for many years, so he is virtuous. No doubt many drug smugglers, gangsters and tyrants have ‘worked hard’ to get to where they’ve got to. And keeping busy and working hard are often an escape from guilt, from the miserable loser-ship of being idle or poor.

Negative Saturn divides society into winners and losers, judges on appearance and never looks beneath the surface to see what is of real value. It does not produce happiness, but it does produce a wealthy country, in which people can be relied on to keep working, keep busy and not to think. It is like the drug that the queen bee produces to keep the workers working and serving the needs of the hive. It is a brainwashing. It is the real conspiracy, except it is collective and unconscious.

It is easy to appeal to people’s sense of inadequacy. Christianity has a lot to answer for, with its notion of Original Sin, as does the Protestant Work Ethic (in East Asia you get the Confucian Work Ethic).

On a bad day, I notice this sense of ‘not measuring up’ as a sort of free floating element within me, and whatever I say to myself, however much I say but I do this and I do that and I’ve done this and I’ve done that, it’s still there. And I don’t think it’s personal, I think I’ve absorbed it from the culture, even though there is also a pronounced Saturn in the charts of my family background.

Gorran Haven, Idless Wood and Neptune

This should take your mind off the General Election. In my piece a week ago, I talked about ‘Building an Altar to Neptune’, and over the weekend I tried it out myself in Cornwall. Firstly, a reminder from last week’s piece:

The story behind the ceremony goes back to Odysseus, one of the heroes of the Trojan War (the Wooden Horse was his idea) who got stuck on his way home to Ithaca. What happened was that he had blinded the one-eyed Cyclops, and this angered Neptune, who was his father. So Neptune made sure that the sea was against Odysseus in his attempts to return home. Eventually Odysseus went to the Underworld to seek the advice of the blind prophet Tiresias, who said he had to perform a ritual: take an oar, a symbol of the sea, and carry it inland to a place where no-one has heard of the sea, and there you must build a temple to the god who has been oppressing you. Odysseus did this, found favour with Neptune, and was able to make his way home.

So I thought this ritual could apply well to a Neptune transit, to that time when you feel you are in a swamp and seeking a new vision for your life. I’ve been living in Glastonbury for nearly 12 years, and for some time I have felt the need to move on, but the way forward has not been clear. For the last few years I have had first Neptune conjunct my Sun, and now Neptune conjunct Desc, and it just seems to be going on and on. I’m feeling oppressed by Neptune, I need to get him onside. Neptune is the ocean, the place of dreams. In carrying something from the ocean to the land you are giving a dream a place to grow, to take root.

On Friday I travelled in my van (which I slept in) down to Fowey, had something to eat, but felt a bit exposed in the car park there, especially with me having a bottle of wine and not wanting the police to try and do me for being over the limit in charge of a vehicle, even with my keys concealed in a hedge! So I went a few miles down the road to Golant, a tiny village by the river, and parked up. A car with blue flashing lights promptly drove by and parked at a hotel just up the hill. Hmm, I thought. But nothing seemed to be happening, and I FELT safe, in a way that I hadn’t in Fowey. I thought I can’t prove anything here, but I do trust my feeling of being safe here. At that point a van with blue flashing lights appeared and pulled up by me. Oh shit, it’s the police and they’re going to get awkward with me, this stranger who has parked up in a tiny village. But it wasn’t the police, it was an ambulance, and the earlier car had been an ambulance, and I was OK. But it was a nasty moment, and it was interesting that it happened at just the moment where I’d said to myself ‘OK, I trust my feeling.’ It was like a joke, or a test, and a kind of affirmation that yes, I can trust my feelings in these situations. Because we all have the capacity to judge situations accurately with our feelings, but we are not taught to do this, it is a like a limb that has become withered through lack of use.

The next morning I set off for the beach. I’d given notice, so to speak, to the ocean, and something would be waiting there for me to bring inland. Like any good quest, I had to try a bit. I spent some time in the Fowey area, where there is an amazing beach, but they were building on it, so I didn’t go near it. I tried another road, and ended up back there again. OK, not Fowey, I’m going to have to go somewhere more remote. I drove down the coast and it became easy. I ended up in a small, remote village called Gorran Haven, which had a beautiful, sheltered beach and cliffs. I walked out onto the expanse of sand. There was apparently nothing there. I kept walking, and suddenly in a direct line with where I was headed was about the only object on the beach.

It was an exquisite razor shell. I couldn’t believe what a beautiful object the ocean had thrown up especially for me, the only object in sight and directly in the line I was walking. I was in tears at what had happened, and thanked the sea.

Now it was time to move on. Previously I had tracked down a forest on the internet, Idless Wood, just north of Truro. Inevitably I took the wrong turning (Mercury retrograde) and ended up going up and down a section of the A39 before I realised that I has misread the map. But you don’t want these things to be too easy, so I didn’t mind.

Idless Wood is mixed deciduous and conifer, and lies on the side of a hill. It has a wide path going up and through it, and I realised that I wanted the shell to be high up, to give expansiveness to the vision. I walked for about 20 minutes until the path seemed to have reached its high point. I then went up and into the forest. Progress was not easy, as the undergrowth was thick. Soon the path was no longer in sight, and my only concern was getting back! I eventually found a tree – not the tree, it didn’t feel like that was necessary, as it would be the whole woods that would carry and nurture the vision. But it was a mature tree, a conifer, and it was there that I buried my shell. The shell from the place of dreams has been planted in the earth, and the trees symbolise the growth of something from that seed. I told the woods the qualities I was looking for, and that I would return in due course to thank them again.

Later I drove up to the north Cornish coast. The sky and the sea were grey as I approached, but the sun was breaking through some clouds on the horizon, casting a pool of light on the ocean, the sort of crystal light you only get in Cornwall. The next day I headed towards Dartmoor, and spent the night in my van in some woods high up on the moor. In the morning I woke up from a dream of a man, a presence, in the front of the van, which persisted after I woke. He was tall and sinewy and I realised it was the god Mars. There was another presence, lower down, dark and with a helmet, a bit spooky. It was Pluto. Why had those two showed up?

I gradually pieced it together. I currently have a Pluto conjunct Mars transit. Mars, on one level, is about knowing what you want. My trouble at the moment is that, though I know I need to move on, I don’t know what I want. Pluto will sort that out. But not just yet, for he doesn’t exactly cross my Mars until next year.

So I had honoured Neptune, I had gone to his ocean, received his gift and planted it in the earth. And I got a response. The Cornish coast had shown light breaking through the clouds, so it is going to happen. But nothing can happen until I know what I want, and the time is not yet ripe for that, as Pluto and Mars were showing me. A few more steps down the line, and it will be time to return to Gorran Haven and to Idless Wood to thank them.

Fashion; building an altar to Neptune

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gaia, the End of the World, and Jung

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

The Nuclear Axis

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Papal Paranoia and the Astrology of the Christian Era

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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