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."

THE WORLD IS CHANGING – AND ASTROLOGY TOO

With Uranus currently squaring Pluto, the world is undergoing one of those big shifts that happen every 20 or 30 years, when 2 of the 3 outer planets hard aspect each other. This present shift is intensified by the fact that Uranus and Pluto are also aspecting major points, particularly the Suns, of so many of the world’s most powerful countries.

The Sun, if you like, is our inner goals. Who am I, what am I becoming? These sorts of questions are raised in major transits to the Sun in both an individual and a collective. It is very clear in the case of the European Union, which has the Sun at 10 Capricorn, that it is going through this kind of self-questioning, which often takes the form of a crisis that forces the issue – people and collectives don’t usually make big changes willingly, we prefer to stay with the known.

America, with its Sun at 13 Cancer, has yet to experience the full power of Uranus-Pluto. But it will, and if it does have a crisis, I expect it to be political, a crisis of governability: who runs America, the President and Congress (with give and take), or the right wing of the Republican Party? The right-wing is usually ascendant when a country feels insecure, and this issue seems to have been going on in the US since the fall of Communism (under the Uranus-Neptune conjunction) and the loss of the old certainties about America’s place in the world and who are the good guys and bad guys. New certainties may be the answer. Or maybe the US will learn to live without them.

Just in case anyone thinks I’m being anti-American (I’m not!) the UK (with natal Sun at 10 Capricorn) also has its own identity crisis, particularly around its membership of the EU and the potential loss of Scotland next year. (I don’t think Scotland will break away, for reasons of “If it works, don’t fix it.” There is no crisis, no survival issue to push it into happening.) And also the perennial issue of Britain’s place in the world since it lost its Empire, still trying to punch above its weight on the one hand, and grovelling to America to keep its place at the top table, while tending to doubt itself and be overly self-critical on the other. There is plenty of grist for our mill, plenty to work through.

This is some of the political dimension of Uranus-Pluto (which is also clearly very active in the Arab world.) And there is the economic dimension: the Great Recession, and the historic shift of economic power from the West to the East.

But there is also a big cultural shift, with political implications, brought about by the power of the internet. The internet came about in the mid 90s, in the later stages of the Uranus-Neptune conjunction, the power of which went on and on as Uranus and Neptune, entering Pisces and Aquarius respectively, were in mutual reception for about 7 years*. And the internet, with Uranus and Neptune behind it, developed very rapidly – within a few short years of its creation, there was an internet bubble on the stock market.

________________________________________________

Ad Break: I offer webcam astrology readings (£20 per ½ hour). Contact: Dharmaruci71(at)hotmail.com. I’ll be travelling in Canada and the USA this year doing readings and talks – if you’d like me to drop by, let me know!
_________________________________

Uranus rules electricity and computers and networking, and Neptune is the imaginative power that can be expressed through the internet. And let’s not forget the creativity of Uranus, the unexpected developments that we wouldn’t have thought of along the way.

I think under Uranus-Pluto, the internet (Uranus) has begun to come into its own as an economic, political and cultural power (Pluto).  In the 2008 US Presidential Election, in the early stages of Uranus-Pluto (and these transits have wide orbs, big changes take years), Barack Obama was the first candidate to use the internet to build a grassroots support movement.

Politicians can use the power of the internet, but its power can also be used against them. Through the social media and the bloggers, people in countries where you can’t speak freely are speaking freely. An enormous power of social interaction and free speech has been unleashed. In China, the government keeps trying to censor it, but people will always find a way round. The internet is too powerful, and it is also an aspect of the globalisation that came into the world during Pluto’s transit through Sagittarius from 1995 to 2008.

It is probably the most powerful (Pluto) voice for democracy (Uranus) that has ever existed, and it is profound. I don’t mean democracy in the political sense of choosing your government by election, because usually the choice is very limited, and you don’t really know what the candidates will do once elected. And you have no choice between elections.

No, I mean it in the sense that people can connect with each other and express their opinion and keep informed in ways they couldn’t and exert pressure on governments.

But it is not just political, it is cultural. And it applies to the astrology world. Just a few years ago, if you were yer average astrologer, you’d probably have a few astro-friends locally to talk to, that you might or might not be particularly sympatico with, and that would be that. And once a year  you might trot off to a conference or a summer school for some wider contact and inspiration.

But in recent years, under the dynamic, transformative impact of Uranus-Pluto, all that has been changing. The old structures are still in place, but increasingly astrology is taking place on the internet, allowing for a much wider ongoing interaction through Facebook and Twitter and Skyping, as well as allowing talents to emerge through the astro-blogosphere. For instance, I am a member of the Exeter Astrology Facebook group. I am local to Exeter, but we also have lots of ‘country cousins’ on the site, mainly from the UK, but also from across the world, and we share all sorts of astro-stuff on a regular basis.

Previously, to establish yourself as an astrologer you’d need to do a course and get a certificate and then advertise locally and hope a few people might be interested and that your old course tutors might send a few people your way. And I’m not criticising that at all, it has its strengths and it was what was needed. To become more widely known, you’d probably need to write a book and be invited to speak at conferences.

With the internet, all you need to do is to write an astro-blog or vlog and be good at it and keep it up. Of course, being ‘good’ at it isn’t easy. And you end up with readers and friends from all over the world, and doing readings via skype all over the world. What a change from a few years ago, what a wonderful change, who would have thought it?

And no formal qualifications are needed (I don’t have any) and it’s understandable some people may feel uneasy with that because formal training does have its place (unless like me you have Mercury in Aquarius opp Uranus!) And the internet also has its own style that is different to the traditional books and prepared talks and magazine articles. It is short, it is informal, and it is to the point. If you don’t do that, you probably won’t have much of an audience. OK, we can complain about people’s lack of attention span. But there’s also something good in it. And the blogosphere seems to be where a lot of people are now learning astrology, and one day you find they've been reading your blog for years and you never knew.

Like it or not, the internet  is the way astrology is going. A big part of astrology, probably more than we know, is already happening via the internet, and it’s only going to get more so. And bloggers have emerged who are good at what they do and they seem like a separate world to the prominent figures in the establishment astro-world, and it would be good if that divide could somehow start to be bridged. Bloggers and internet groups are a big part of astrology’s future. That is why in the US it is so good to see Rick Levine and Jeff Jawer ’s regular astro-vlog on youtube. And bloggers were on at least one occasion specifically invited to speak at a conference in the US. And The Mountain Astrologer Magazine presents a digest of astro-blogs. In the UK, there seem to be no such bridges. Like, maybe the AA newsletter could present a digest of some UK blogs?

How astrology is done, how we think about it and write about it, is being re-defined on the internet. There are a lot of very good, very experienced astrologers in the ‘establishment’ who would have a lot to offer in the blogosphere.

Politically, the internet works very differently to a traditional institution – it is more bottom up than top down. In the establishment, credibility as an astrologer comes from the top – you are awarded a certificate, you are maybe asked to teach or give talks. Nothing wrong with that. But the internet works very differently: you gain credibility because people read you and they like what you write and they talk about it and discuss with you and link to others. And everybody has a voice. And this is part of a wider cultural shift that is going on as the internet develops.

* A mutual reception occurs when 2 planets are each in a sign the other rules. Uranus was in Neptune-ruled Pisces, while Neptune was in Uranus-ruled Aquarius. It acts a bit like a conjunction.