“……the companion Inyan created for himself was the Thunder spirits. Their form was so terrible that they must conceal themselves within a cloud, or people would go insane merely from glancing at them. But their purpose is noble. They are here to rid the world of filth. They are here to wash away the demons, like the ones who destroyed (and are destroying) your mother. Like the ones who want to destroy you…..” (1)
As this article goes to press the deadline to clear the Oceti Sakowin camp at Standing Rock approaches – 2.00pm local time. By the time you read this it will almost certainly have passed and the battle for Standing Rock will have reached what may prove to be its crucial turning point. Time will tell, but, we are witnessing a moment in history that could be repeating itself, seeking resolution. The background for this possibility is clearly reflected in the astrology that links Standing Rock with one of the most crucial and well known events in the history of the struggle between the indigenous peoples of North America and the armed forces of the European settlers, the battle which has come to be known as ‘Little Bighorn’.
The onset of Lt. Colonel Custer’s assault on the Sioux nations on the 25th of June 1876 and its eventual bloody conclusion on the 26th give us a timeframe in which to reference the planetary positions then, and the period from 22nd February 2017 to the new Moon/solar eclipse of Feb. 26th give us the relevant timeframe for their position in the present.
The aim of this article is not necessarily to forecast any outcome for the present stand-off at the camp of the Sacred Stone, but, it provides adequate insight and food for thought to alert us to a powerful correspondence between these two events, a heads-up to its signifiance and repercussive nature.
The current planetary backdrop for the 22nd to 26th February 2017 sees a major T-square playing out between Jupiter rx in Libra opposite Uranus in Aries, both squaring Pluto in Capricorn; Mars is within 3 degrees of Uranus as I write, just 4 days from their conjunction in Aries which becomes exact at the eclipse. Alongside this, Saturn in Sagittarius is connecting into the T square through sextile with Jupiter and trine with Uranus.
The release point of this T square is opposite Pluto, around the 16-20° mark of Cancer. Going straight to the correspondences we quickly find that they speak for themselves as Mars is currently squaring its LBH (Little Bighorn) degree – that degree is 19 Cancer. Mars will arrive at this degree on July 4th 2017, American ‘Independence Day’.
We find LBH Saturn in the 9th degree of Pisces, the degree of the solar eclipse on 26th February.
Chiron, presently squaring Saturn, is precisely on the degree of the LBH north node.
Although not necessarily acting as triggers the present transiting positions of the major outer planets reveal some of the qualitative tensions now being played out.
In the LBH chart Jupiter opposes Pluto from Scorpio; Jupiter is now quincunxing LBH Pluto, while Uranus quincunxes LBH Jupiter.
Pluto is also presently quincunxing LBH Uranus.
Mercury, now entering Pisces, is quincunxing LBH Venus. In addition Mercury is also in softer aspect to other luminaries in the LBH matrix, trining LBH Sun and sextiling LBH Neptune, and as the solar eclipse approaches Mercury is transiting the current lunar south node’s degree, activating awareness of our spiritual past and the legacy of events related to this.
In the LBH timeframe the Moon transits the present position of the lunar north node, not a temporal marker necessarily, but a transit that brought it into opposition over June 25-6th 1876 with Saturn. The solar eclipse is effectively activating these degrees across the lunar nodal axis.
This may be a time for closure to be sought, but, our ability to realise this will certainly be founded on more than transient phenomena.
Although the quincunxes suggest the tension underpinning the playing out of the unresolved legacies of Little Bighorn, and the disconnect between the forces now involved, the hard aspects and direct correspondences between the events by transit of key degrees confirms the connection. Mid points are also brought into play and Pluto is also currently applying to the LBH Saturn Jupiter midpoint, directly tieing in the current T square.
But, it is within the present Uranus Mars conjunction that we find the most striking connection and transiting Mars is undoubtedly the catalyst, a warning that the unresolved ghosts, if not energies, of conflict are being raised once more. Could it be that Chiron’s position on the LBH north node indicates the that healing needed for resolution is finally manifesting, that its time has come, or will the wound of the past be deepened by these triggers? Will the ghosts be laid to rest or infuse the present with a spirit of retribution?
It is notable that a 26th Feb. solar eclipse chart cast for Standing Rock (14.58 UTC) has the current T square directly on the Asc/Dc axis with Mars and Uranus rising – Pluto squares from the mid 10th house. This carries a heavily loaded potential for resurgent and insurgent action. Strong leadership with powerful revolutionary potential is indicated in this, but, it can swing both ways and with Jupiter in Libra setting in the west, the eclipsing of justice is not beyond the scope of this chart either.
The Mars square suggests that conflict will continue to unfold, with Uranus potentially bringing unprecedented and traumatic consequences. There could also be significant breakthrough as a result of the enforced eviction. This may not be obvious at first but there are larger patterns at work in this and it’s dynamic is going to continue, and these dynamics are now applying out on a much wider scale.
It helps to reflect upon how crucial ‘leadership’ is in the current time and, in terms of leadership involved then and now, it is worth remembering Custer’s own downfall and its essential core reasons. He was an ambitious and daring individual, willing to lead from the front, whose reckless vanity was almost certainly his undoing. Without going into the well documented timeline of events that illustrate this at Little Bighorn, consider Sun Tzu’s commentary on military leadership in this light :
“There are five dangerous faults which may affect a general: (a) Recklessness, which leads to destruction; (b) cowardice, which leads to capture; (c) a hasty temper, which can be provoked by insults; (d) a delicacy of honour which is sensitive to shame; (e) over-solicitude for his men, which exposes him to worry and trouble.
These are the five besetting sins of a general, ruinous to the conduct of war.
When an army is overthrown and its leader slain, the cause will surely be found among these five dangerous faults. Let them be a subject of meditation.” (2)
Custer was undoubtedly guilty of points (a) and (d), and as (c) would suggest, was certainly over hasty and rash; he utterly failed to carry out vital reconnaissance and sought a greater glory (a delicacy of honour) in dealing what he hoped would be the decisive blow within the Sioux Wars. He faced strong leaders and warriors who easily matched his courage, but who also demonstrated the advantage of a superior knowledge of the terrain and an ability to out-think the Colonel – with overwhelming numbers on their side there was little impediment to their victory. If there is a lesson to be learned here, present leaders might do well to consider its relevance and application in our times. The blinkering ‘vanity’ of leadership is one of its greatest stumbling blocks, but, when the scale of resitance is growing, such myopic leadership will see its misplaced values severely tested. But, the point of Sun Tzu’s strategies was always to avoid conflict and still gain the benefit.
No matter the nature of this conflict or how it plays out in our time, while the land rights of the indigenous people, whose ‘medicine’ Chiron could also be symbolically respresenting here, are crucial to the outcome. But, the scope of the battle has widened and we now see opposing forces of a different nature at work unfolding its dynamic on a much broader front.
An ancient opposition seeded in the far distant past, a struggle symbolised by the conflict between encumbent authority and individual sovereignty through the deeper polarity between the secular and the spiritual, is itself coming to a head, but, is doing so now on a global scale. Our human relationship with land and environment are at its center. Water protectors, choosing peaceful resistance over bloodshed, now oppose militarised federal forces. The people’s sovereign rights are overtly aligned with Earth rights and oppose the power of State aligned with vested corporate interest.
Entangled within this are issues around immigration and boundaries, associations that the current T-square and Saturnian influence are reflecting in an exacerbated state of national and international affairs, politically volatile and shot through with violence. Thanks to innovative Uranian technologies and the power of social networking they facilitate, the current situation is deeply affected by both manipulative co-oercion and instant connectivity of a nature never before seen in the ‘historical’ period.
The stand-off at Standing Rock, encapsulating so many of these factors has, like the battle now known as Little Bighorn, become iconic and is deeply charged with these dynamics. Natural resources are central to both conflicts, gold being at the heart of the government’s landgrab in the 1870’s. Now the ‘protection of the waters’ from the dangers of the exploitation of such resources is at the heart of Standing Rock, and the same spirit is at work in protection of the natural world in general.
Protectors of the waters, of the Earth and of the people are uniting to defend sovereign rights and the honouring of lawful treaties. They share many of the attributes and aims with the Native American warriors who fought at Greasy Grass, the indigenous name for Little Big Horn. But, the nature of resistance has changed.
As Custer approached the Sioux settlement he drove captured Sioux women and children before his column of soldiers. Seeing this Sioux scouts alerted the camp and the warriors were mobilised. In our time it is the women of Sacred Stone camp who are leading the way in protecting the sacred waters, a restorative reflection of the peaceful resistance that the protectors embody. May peace prevail.
Such is no less the case at any site where the appetite of greed and disrespectful ambition is tearing up the Earth and being met with protective resistance. But, division has become deeply instrumental and the contrast between one side and the other much more stark. The stand-off at large will continue, so long as respect for life and reconciliation is absent and the conflict remains unresolved.
What prompted me to look into the astrological correspondences here were the clear historical and tribal connections and their dynamics being played out now at Standing Rock. Just as the State attempted to order the Sioux nations off their lands under difficult conditions on the ground during the winter of January 1876 , the protectors at Standing Rock have been given a deadline amidst adverse conditions brought by snow melt and heavy rains, but, it was a video that Chase Iron Eyes posted this morning that caught my attention and prompted this article.
Chase Iron Eyes is a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, an attorney and activist who is also a member of the Lakota People’s Law Project – I leave you with the video in which he talks of the importance of the Thunder spirits to the situation as it is now unfolding at Standing Rock……
(1) ‘Coyote Medicine’ – Lewis Mehl-Madrona, Simon & Schuster, 1997 (Italics, mine)
(2)’The Art Of War’ – Sun Tzu, various translations
Images by Frank Howell – from the top :
‘Circle Of Life’
‘Lost Warrior’
‘Lakota Blue Aura’
‘Fruit From The Light’
Just four months ago our outlook on the world appeared very different. Few could have foreseen the full consequences of the choices that were being made around that time or the speed with which the global change we are experiencing would be catalysed to a new level of intensity – I am of course referring (at least in part) to the significant impact of the USA’s presidential election. But, the arena within which this change is now unfolding is more than simply ‘political’ – behind the regime change driven legislative and geopolitical restructuring that we are now seeing a planetary process has been unfolding that reflects our terran experiences quite clearly.
Jupiter and Uranus are now fully within the mid-phase of their current synodic cycle and, if the ‘effects’ they reflect on the ground are undeniable, the transformation at work within them is equally startling. Here we will map out some of the ways in which these two transformative aspects of what is actually a singular process relate to and inform each other.
Enough time has now elapsed since entering the midpoint (November 2016 to November 2017) of the current Ju/Ur cycle for us to begin assessing how Uranus and Jupiter’s opposition is working out. In this article we will see how, in our immediate time, this ties into the current lunar cycle. In the process we’ll also unpack some of the key points of the midpoint period as a whole and look into correlations between this and the Moon’s phases.
Confused? Well, it is a revealing journey that we have embarked upon that will, hopefully, help us to make some sense of this chaotic time!
Back in October I published an article here that began exploring the current synodic cycle between Uranus and Jupiter and its significance for us now. It revealed some of the key signatures of this cycle, as seen through the lens of their initiatic conjunction (2010-11), particularly in relation to pivotal events carrying global implications around that time.
We found connections with events like the Deepwater oil rig disaster and the Fukushima nuclear disaster. One of the characteristics of these are events is their profound environmental impact, and we found further echoes in the historical record of oil spills that have brought much environmental damage to our oceans and land. We also found connections to the history of landmark nuclear events – all of the events highlighted were shown to have clear astrological signatures that tend to repeat themselves as these incidents arise.
Power generation and the widespread traumatic impact of the energy industries, especially when they fail is very much at the heart of these events, as might befit the combined signatures of Jupiter and Uranus. The nuclear story is equally impactful in its ‘military’ applications, as well as its ‘domestic’. Both radically change our outlook on the world.
Both mythologically and integral to our experience of the world, Jupiter and Uranus together have the ability to wield power that transforms us intrinsically, but, as we reach the height of their cycle the opposition between them is turning the dissemination of this power more fully inwards. At their first opposition both planets were direct, but Jupiter is now retrograde as we approach their second opposition, and at their final opposition it is Uranus that will be in-volving, in retrograde.
We have entered a period of augmented ‘inner adjustment‘. Whether we engage with the process or not depends on our outlook and personal capacity to see the bigger picture – however, and this is a big ‘how-ever’, the more we do engage with this process the easier excercising this capacity will become.
At an individual level the moral of this part of the story is to trust in our selves and our inner guidance in dealing with the world – augmenting and facilitating this, this is a time to take up the inward momentum to observe our personal bias and use this process to shed our personal blinkers.
Within this, over the coming year we will also see another aspect of the Jupiter Uranus dynamic begin to accelerate and expand, in ways that will radically alter how the world looks – the impact of revealed truths, and their ability to both generate reaction and disclose deception, both of which are intimately related to each other, will begin to transmute our ‘reality’.
To begin now, lets pull focus and come more fully into the present.
On February 6th (2017) Jupiter stationed at 24° Libra beginning a four month period of retrograde motion that will change to direct when it slows down in the skies again to station at 14° Libra on June 10th. There is a connection here between these degrees and the lunar phases. Taking a look at 24° Libra through the eyes of the Sabians and their symbology gives us some insight.
The Sabians tell us that 24° Libra is associated with “the ability to develop, for inner strengthening, new modes of response to basic life situations….” and what makes this particularly interesting is that Jupiter entered 24°s of Libra precisely at new Moon on January 28th, the beginning of the current lunation. There is a cross fertilisation suggested here that the Sabians further elucidate :
“A special development of an aspect of the spiritual life is shown…..some power has been added to the normal spiritual life of the individual person (within) the instinctual field of the consciousness….A new strength is shown, perhaps as yet unrealized.”
What we will see beyond this initial seeding is the “unrealised” gathering energy – we will feel this as a latent ‘knowing’, an increasing feeling that we need to be paying real attention to our instincts and intuition. The Sabians go on to say :
“A fourth stage symbol usually refers to some kind of technique or technical achievement. What is implied here is that the contact with the revivifying Life-force can result in the appearance of a new faculty, the use of which may not as yet be consciously evaluated. Indeed it is the establishment of such a contact which constitutes a technique for ORIGINAL MUTATION.”
“A BUTTERFLY WITH A THIRD WING ON ITS LEFT SIDE“ is the Sabian symbol for this degree.
‘Original mutation’ is an interesting term…..the reality of this symbol is being seen here as a non-physical change of state, but, the image itself reminds us of the mutations caused by radioactive isotopes. There is an intimation of genetic engineering about it as well.
For us, the fall-out of this process of incursive energetic insemination, of the primary mental realms in particular, is initiating an inward expansion of connective awareness and energising consciousness. Imagine the primary impulse that causes the single cell to divide and multiply within itself at work. Go a step further and we are in the realms of ‘Life making’.
With the Sabians, who gave symbolic form to each of the 360 degrees, this is translated in our time into an anomalous ‘third thing’, the wing being symbolic of flight (higher dimensions/spheres of consciousness) and the butterfly being symbolic of both transformation and the intrinsic nature of the imaginal.
There is a deeper and more hidden layer to this as well that is worth noting here : the meaning of each degree, which the Sabians codified, has ancient roots in the 360 senses which describe the original range of human senses, each referring to its own divine origin. Referred to in ancient Egypt as the Neters, the divinities involved are spiritual entities that reside, within the Earth sphere, within nature, ours as well as the planet’s. Are we being opened up to this fuller range of senses…..if so, the breakdown of the ‘status quo’ and the ‘establishment’ is deeply entangled within this process.
If we return to the bigger picture of the present Jupiter Uranus cycle and look back to the end of its first quarter we will find some clues as to where within this cycle the breakdown first began to show.
The first square became directly active between June 2013 and May 2014 and the following are some of the key events that occured through that period.
Edward Snowden exposed the covert mass surveillance programme being run by the NSA and other intel agencies.
Egypt saw a military coup which removed its president.
India launched a rocket carrying its Mars orbital observer.
The Ukraine regime change was instigated.
Iran agreed to limit its nuclear development programme.
China soft-landed its Yutu rover on the Moon.
Flight 370 disappeared.
Russia was suspended from the G8.
The UN and Russia came into dispute over Crimea.
The USA enforced sanctions on Russia.
The militant organisation known (amongst other things) as ISIS emerged in Syria.
Flight 17 crashed in the Ukraine, under accusations of it having been shot down by a ‘Russian’ missile.
Disclosure and changes in perception, as well as regimes and boundaries, are intrinsic to these events. If there are trends visible here they continue to play out. Within the geopolitical arena in particular, they became exacerbated as the US elections and the current Ju/Ur opposition were simultaneously coming into effect.
The environmental arena has also become intensified. This period also saw the rise of mass marine die-offs within the Pacific, especially on the eastern seaboard. The isotopes that are Fukushima’s fingerprint are now being acknowledged to be present in the marine life found there. The truth about Fukushima is presently becoming harder and harder to deny, six years after the event.
Hurricanes and Typhoons also ravaged the eastern Pacific and eastern Atlantic. Globally, the occurance of ‘extreme weather’ has increased. While sunspot activity is now at a minimum it has been shown very convincingly that such solar minimums accompany lowering temperature on Earth and, if the climate change meme of human driven causes insists upon the opposite, it has also been shown that global distribution of temperature increases is matched by redistribution of seasonal cold. Selective data use to push official agendas not withstanding, it is rarely mentioned that in some parts of the globe the glaciers are growing and new ones being formed.
Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are more related to coronal holes than sunspots, and quakes above 7.0 during this period were observed to be above the long term average, the largest occuring in Russia and Chile, many of 5.0 and more focused around the Pacific ‘Ring of Fire’. The atmospheric influence of vulcanism is a more powerful driver than any effects of CO², in fact it is now acknowledged that CO² follows temperature rises and currently remains far below high levels know prior to the industrial revolution. Geo-engineered weather manipulation, however, is deeply instrumental in climate change.
Our thirst for material comfort is no less impactful of our environment and little needs to be said further on this – it is self evident. But, the oil industry is the source of widespread pollution in many ways, oil derivatives such as plastics chief amongst them. Oil spills from pipelines are a hot topic now and are increasingly being reported (although you’ll often have to look beyond the MSM to find reliable coverage).
Notable for its visibility in this respect, the stand-off between indigenous/environmental ‘protectors’ and federal agency backed oil ‘enforcers’ at Standing Rock has intensified alongside the current Ju/Ur opposition. Standing Rock has now entered a critical stage as a direct result of the US election and its symbolic significance has amplified as the situation on the ground has escalated in intensity. We can expect the ennvironmental, political and sovereignty issues involved here to become more intensified, but on a wider scale. They will continue to do so as the fossil fuel industry fights to maintain its centralised role in power generation…..the technology that makes this role redundant is ‘bringing the edges to the centre’.
Coping with this prolonged intensity will take its toll and it is here that the Sabian’s mention of “inner strengthening“ finds its purpose. We cannot know what will transpire over the next four months, but, we know that we will need our strength. A brief look at Jupiter’s station degree in June helps clarify the likely effects and our best strategy for dealing with them.
14° Libra carries this Sabian symbol : “IN THE HEAT OF THE NOON HOUR A (HU)MAN TAKES A SIESTA.
KEYNOTE: The need for recuperation within the social pattern of everyday activity.”
The emphasis here is on the emotional/cultural level and the fact that we cannot maintain the same level of activity indefinitely. As the Sabians go on to say, “….this fourth stage symbol can be seen as emphasizing the need for techniques of RELAXATION, and the need to allow the functions of body and psyche to “digest,” free from external pressures, the complex experiences of social living and particularly of business.”
Jupiters stationing direct occurs simultaneously with the June full Moon, shortly before solstice. Culmination and balance is emphasised. We should anticipate the risks and make efforts to avoid ‘burn out’. Intense processes in the mental realms can have a deep impact upon our feelings and emotional body and impact directly our ability to continue functioningas we have been. We need to release our own inner tension,the better to be able to think ahead.
In the face of outward shocks to the system the key here is to remember that an internal process is at work, one that is aiding us in developing our ‘seeing’ capacity and, through this, understanding more clearly what is happening around us. The millenia of ‘control’ are now culminating. The blinkers are falling away. But, that is not all that is falling away…..the millenia of censorship of our innate senses, our complete natural range of intra-action within the world, is also coming to and end. Here is our unified process.
The next direct opposition we will see between Uranus and Jupiter is exact on March 2nd, just four days after the February new Moon (Feb 26th) in Pisces. This will be a time to be especially vigilant of our thoughts and impulses, the more so as Mars is moving through conjunction with Uranus during the week before and after new Moon. To add spice to the recipe, this will also be a strong solar eclipse, a real turning point and reset.
With such heat applying to the new lunation the confrontational aspect of the Ju/Ur opposition could be what creates the turning point. With Uranus involved and Mars powering up the unexpected, it is fairly safe to say that some form of disclosure or acts that will ‘blow the lid’ will be ‘in the air’. Make sure your mind is not blown into a state of cognitive dissonance along with them!
Whatever happens, Uranus and Mars direct intervention will push the boundaries within the mundane world and force the issue….we should use our increasing accuity to maintain inner balance during this time. Hightened discernment will be ‘de riguer’. But, that is precisely where our inner process can be most pragmatically put to use, in developing an inner strength of ‘knowing’.
With the February new Moon close on both the Moon’s south node and Neptune in Pisces the spiritual aspect of this lunation is also emphasised. A great need for compassion, especially self compassion alongside compassion in action, is likely to be matched by challenging events, so inner strength rests upon our inner balance. We can each use our most favoured methods for maintaining inner health to foster this, as a way of grounding.
Mars will also figure in the third opposition between Jupiter and Uranus in the latter half of September and Venus is also in Aries tracking Mars at the February new Moon. While Mars is domicile and excercising great power, Venus is in detriment in Aries. Here it is the fragility of isolated values that are emphasised….we each need to ask an important question now – ‘what do I value and love most in life’? However, their unity finds its mark more fully in September and the answer to this question may also become more pragmatic as a result.
Uranus and Jupiter’s third opposition is in the late degrees of Aries and Libra respectively. An accompanying opposition at that time is between Mars+Venus in Virgo and Neptune in Pisces. Venus is in fall in Virgo. I am seeing financial dissolution in this, perhaps appearing to be driven by hyper-inflation, the seeds of which may well be sown around the February new Moon. We could see a hidden agenda behind this, as well as an underlying necessity – looking beneath the surface will provide the answers.
The third Ju/Ur opposition is also exact at first quarter Moon after the equinox and will see all the outer planets beyond Saturn retrograde at that time. The ‘powers that be’ may well be in retreat, but, the impulse to shape our future will be firmly in our own hands with Saturn Uranus and the north node trining each other in the fire signs. We will need to ask then, as now, a second important question – ‘what are my responsibilities‘?
Venus and Mars in Virgo at that time will pull us down to earth and both astrological impulses and world events will help us answer these questions. But, there is an equally important third question that we must ask of ourselves at this current ‘entry point’ in time. ‘What are my Gifts’?
We can sum up here by focusing on this question as it is now presenting itself.
The full Moon that is coming into phase as I write is a also penumbral eclipse. This dimming of the lunar disc is at the edge of the Earth’s shadow, but, the full Moon is accompanied by a green comet in a fly by 7.5 million miles from Earth. Comets are the ‘mysterious travellers’ of our solar system, augeries of the unknown.
We are seeing disclosure all around us and what has been marginalised and hidden is coming into full view. We have arrived at the boundaries that demark the balance between illusion and truth. As we cross this threshold the weirdness of it all is ramping up; who would deny it. Expect more over the coming year and beyond.
The unknown faculties of perception and thinking that are being activated are in fact innate within us, even if we are relatively unconscious of them. This is their novelty, the Uranian gift, which Jupiter is helping spread. Beyond what we already know of ourselves lies much more, amongst which are gifts that have long been deliberately overshadowed and suppressed. But, the agencies of that suppression are collapsing under the same impulse now. We are witnessing the impact of truth upon the delusion that they have created, and that delusion is dispelling.
The long spiritual and mental war that has been waged upon us as natural beings is coming to an end and the physical wars will be unsustainable if we embrace this process fully. As Jupiter and Uranus might be urging us to realise, the more who do so, the stronger will be the transformation. Jupiter’s energy spreads from a centre, an effect that is now potentiating our awareness while spreading consciousness. Uranus breaks through the boundaries within our selves.
The three important questions above help us to redefine ourselves, in the context of our own lives – it will help us now if we consider that the anomalous ‘third’ thing symbolised here suggests a redefinition of our selves. The process we are in, for all the mundane turmoil that attends it, aids and abets this redefinition, but, it is taking us on a journey into long forgotten terrain in which our answers will also change, based upon different values and perceptions to the ones we have become ‘accustomed to’.
The reality of this planet is not as we have been told. But, it is being revealed. The planets and the living energetic matrix they and we inhabit are wise in this. Uranus itself holds many clues, being anomalous amongst the ‘known’ planets, its axis of rotation perpendicular to those of the other planets. Why this is so, and why the planets are in their current orbital positions will become more widely known to us, founded in disclosed reality, beyond the redundant musings of the orthodox scientific priesthood.
When Voyager II left the heliosphere and our solar system, its internal language was altered, 0 flipped to 1 in its communication systems. According to the scientists working with the probe, this could not have happened by itself. If it was hacked, it was not by any terran source, they say. While such revelations are often cloaked in untruths and can lead us astray, it is the eyes of experience that will rule here. The Indian Mars orbiter and the Chinese lunar rover are not alone exploring our solar system. Whether they are instrumental in accelerating ‘disclosure’ remains to be seen, but, this too is a pathway of discovery that could, amongst other things, reveal the truth behind ‘Apollo’. It is my understanding that the Moon is no stranger to the human footprint, but, it was not the technology we have been shown that took us there.
As many medicine people and carriers of indigenous traditions tell us, we have our origins beyond this Earth, and we always have belonged to a wider community both seen and unseen. Many eyes are upon us, beyond our known mundane world, watching our progress; we are being gifted with a chance to return to our senses and become mysterious travellers in our own right. Think of it as initiation that opens this wider community to us, while revealing our true identity.
Footnote
This article and ‘Jupiter & Uranus – In Deep Waters’ are part of a continuing series that will be exploring the midpoint of the current synodic cycle between these two planets. The next article will be published around the second week of March, shortly after the second exact opposition between Jupiter and Uranus. At that time we will be collating some of the evidence that has been found so far in the midpoint period alongside that for the key points of the waxing half of their cycle. A deeper analysis will begin to emerge then so that, by the time of their third and final opposition, we will be able to anticipate the denoument of this part of Jupiter and Uranus cycle and look forward with a clearer understanding of their synodic cycle and its significance as a way shower in our times. Thanks for tuning in….!
The first Full Moon of 2017 illuminates the night skies on January 12th, reaching its height at 22°28′ of Cancer, 11.38am UTC. The lunar disc reflects the radiance of the Capricorn Sun and is squared by Jupiter in Libra and Uranus in Aries, together forming a grand cross that is resonant with confident and inspired energy. Its a good time to embark on establishing something new.
The possibilities for expanding upon our foundations, being inventive with and exploring new horizons in our lives now benefits the support that comes from feeling at home with ourselves and in our element, itself a reflection of the domicile Moon.
The strong presence of feminine archetypes, coming notably through the asteroids and smaller celestial bodies that accompany some of the major planets at this full Moon, are here assisted by the masculine energies, and indicate that it is the creatrix within that is activating our souls and pushing the boundaries of possibility.
But, the key element in all of this is the practical magic that naturally arises from being able and willing to let our personal light shine, illuminating our lives with real purpose. Being at home with this inner magic brings an openness to new possibilites – with all the planets direct over the next month this is a time to step more fully into our power and trust in our ability to embody a positive influence within the world.
Amongst the grounding elements which accompany this open minded and forward looking full Moon is Saturn’s trine with Uranus from Sagittarius. Saturn has a beneficial influence on Uranus impulse to break free of the past and embody our creativity in the present, giving it worldly form. This is where the magic happens, in the moment, when we are unencumbered by ‘what has been’ and are not distracted by hopes, fears and anxiety for the future, when we are fully present with our selves.
Mercury stationed direct in late Sagittarius on January 8th. Sagittarius is the sign of Mercury’s detriment, so, with Mercury having turned direct and on the cusp of Capricorn at full Moon a clearer focus is now becoming available that will allow these distractions to fall away and assist in this grounding. Inner connections are being restored and personal integrity renewed.
The Sun is also close on Saturn’s south node in Capricorn, a subtle further indication that it is through being true to the well grounded magic of our personal power and gifts that we can burn off the restrictions of collective conditioning that have dimmed our inner radiance in the past. There is much now happening in the world that reflects this process at work, the exposure of suppression and subversive controls coming into the full light of day, and the drive to establish equanimity, especially in relation to imbalances between the ‘feminine’ and the ‘masculine’ are at their center ground.
This is nowhere more visible than where injustice and inequality prevails between men and women, in so many aspects of life, but especially in issues of ‘power’, the relationship between ‘power-over’ and ‘power-to’, macht and kraft, and we will feel this most strongly where we encounter limitations on our personal power and how it is expressed.
Nodal influences of the outer planets are epochal by nature, and I would include Saturn and its nodes in this context as we are seeing the accumulative effect of millenia of that particularly masculine manifestation of Saturnian ‘control’ surfacing now, coming ever more under scrutiny. Pluto is within 3° of the Sun at full Moon and has been applying pressure to the foundations of the most outmoded expressions of this culture of control, dissembling its structures and eroding its influences, in its present Capricornian phase since 2008. In fact Pluto is also chasing its own south node in Capricorn and will catch up with it in a couple of years, bringing this long process of transformation within the institutions and politics of power to a head, reconstituting their past by forcing their karmic shadow into the present.
Saturn’s north node in Cancer is 2 degrees beyond the exact full Moon, suggesting that while we are on the cusp of an emancipatory period, at this time it is out of the work we do in giving integral form and balance to our personal power that the foundation of a more caring and equal world can be built – not necessarily a new focus for us, in our era and current lifetime, but one that is very much of the moment.
Venus is also bringing a strong nodal influence into this full Moon, being conjunct her own north node at 8° Pisces as we enter full Moon, so there can be no doubt – it is the women who are leading the way. Venus in Pisces is in exhaltation and the feminine spirit is resurgent. She is also conjunct Neptune, domicile in Pisces, and together they are otherwise unaspected. This conjunction is infusing the entire field with a visionary reminder of the value of passion and how love can shape and influence the world. The source field and the creative spirit that is its expression are also pushing the boundaries of possibility. Go to the waters, listen…..and give thanks.
The full Moon is also aspecting Chiron by trine in Pisces, further grounding the transformative spiritual potential we have available to us. The power of self confidence, the willingness to go beyond our own boundaries and to take the leap into the unknown are emphasised here – the practical side of trusting in our own spirit’s power to endure all and prevail. In the days around full Moon consider what your own passions and gifts truly are, how they are and can be most fully expressed, and let them be the guide.
Mars will join Chiron on the 17th of January, on his way to meeting with Uranus, and together with Chiron Mars squares Saturn throught this full Moon period. So allow yourself the space to gather your energies and direct them towards a higher goal through this time. This focusing of the masculine energy will serve best here, a spiritual re-alignment with our purpose and purposefulness.
The opposition between Jupiter and Uranus is now in full swing – they too tell us that we can gain much by opening the doors of possibility in our lives now, and will see the scope of our thinking and ability to relate expand as a result. I will be writing more about this in the coming months, but the focus brought out by the beginning of their 12 year cycle in 2010-11 has already been covered in previous articles and, having had time to observe their first exact opposition (the first of three this year), a clearer analysis of its most active forms of expression is now becoming available. The ecological theme of their cycle and focus in issues surrounding energy production and consumption have been very much in the spotlight over the last few months, and nowhere can this be seen more clearly than at Standing Rock which stands as a clear example of how the prevailing conditions can be and are being met. This is going to continue to be a clear focus for the coming year and, lets remember, it was the women of Standing Rock who arrived there and set up camp first.
And then there are the asteroids…..amongst all this expansion and personal growth a certain mental accuity is becoming more prevelant, and necessary, and the finer influences at work highlight both the dynamics and possible stumbling blocks that are intrinsic to this process. While this is a great time in which to really begin shining our light in the world, it is no time for self-serving egotism….that will backfire, immediately, in the present planetary climate. There is a process of differentiation at work here – as distinct from seperation; neither is this a time for condemnation.
Juno is conjunct Saturn in 22° Sagittarius at full Moon, tempering the patriarch with a just hand and reminder of the sacred laws that govern relationships – their trine with Uranus in the 20th degree of Aries is made the more exact by Eris at 22° Aries, tieing Eris very strongly into the grand cross. Eris is a dwarf planet who, astrologically, brings an extra level of impulsive and reactive energy to this trine. Not much escapes this nexus of responsive and catalytic awareness and, as we are seeing in a very Uranian way, the reaction time to injustices and degree of tolerability surrounding them, within the internet especially, is diminishing continually. It represents a kind of quickening that is becoming exponential through Jupiter’s opposition with Uranus. The current ‘witchhunt’ that singles out ‘fake news’ as its target, especially in the ‘alternative media’, is itself a prime example and is rapidly backfiring on its perpetrators, the MSM and their masters – if we can learn anything useful from this, it is that we have and can access an innate ‘higher sense’ for the ‘truth’ that cannot be subverted so easily now; it is our prerogative to use it and follow it, not least as the more we do, the stronger it gets, as the fake-news fiasco is proving.
At the shoulder of Pluto we find asteroid Magdalena, while at the side of Mars, his co-ruler in Scorpio, we find Borasisi, one of the astrological Centaurs.
The divine lover and the alchemist of the zodiac make for an intriguing couple, suggesting a revision of spiritual sexuality to be at the very root of the planetary transformations we are seeing – in union with Uranus and Jupiter’s opposition this may come across as a collective awakening of kundalini like energies, but, Magdalena is already present in each chakra, as an awakened psychic energy. The re-emergence of the goddesses of old as active agents of change within our midst is no imaginary matter; we are talking the ‘realism’ and ‘real magical power’ at work within it all – the Goddess does not deal in anything but practical magic, when it comes down to it, and the karma of centuries of priesthood is crumbling under the pressure of Her re-emergence. It is only a matter of time, but, Magdalena is highly intuitive, representing the embodied feminine psyche turned on and tuned in at all levels, and this is where the real transformation is now at work – that same realm of intrinsic magic, and power.
There are many breakthroughs coming amidst the breakdowns now and this time marks the beginning of a sustained period in which the latter begin to more fully prevail. We will see more of this manifest as the second quarter of the year progresses, but, Uranus is injecting much energy into this process from Aries, initiating new ground for us to build our futures upon, and Jupiter in Libra is emphasising how mind expanding and liberating this can be, when we allow it….it all sounds great; so what could possibly go wrong….
Borasisi and Mars in Pisces bring a piercing ability to penetrate the veil and understand the nature of illusion into active mode here as well. The astronomical Centaur Borasisi is a neighbour of Pluto and shares some of Pluto’s more masculine astrological qualities – with Mars these are doubled. The personal power we have to cut through the crap is heightened here, bringing a higher level of self determination based on our own incisive insights. We can gain a stronger vision for our future from this. But, this can also be provocative and, in the wrong hands, push us to ‘publish and be damned’, and to press the red button of our own intent and purpose, no matter what, all of which may sound like a dangerous facility and energy to have at our disposal. And, ‘there’s the rub’….in the midst of the prevelant energies is there any reason this energy cannot also be made to serve the higher good, and goal – right now, the answer to that question rests with each of us, and our ability to let our light shine from within, without impediment, or self doubt – Borasisi and Mars tell us its time to banish those shit-fairies! And, more importantly with Borasisi and Mars, this is not about displays of ego either – where we see those driving the agenda, they too will be seen through. We simply have to be who we are, knowing that the power of our gifts is enough.
If anything our inner luminosity is boundless, and this is an energy that rests not on the light of our inner drives, but, of our soul. It is at its best a spiritual matter. This is also the energy that, in ceremony, sets the clearest and strongest intent to that end. When the masculine is in service, in this sense, it can work wonders…..and, with the feminine, bring them into being. This is what we are, wonders, and this is practical magic.
On the 20th of April 2010 the world suffered a forbidingly deep wounding of its ‘wine dark sea’, as two hundred million gallons of ‘crude’ that is to say ‘unrefined’ oil lay its suffocating shadow upon the living waters. This stifling of the Gulf of Mexico pressed down upon its soul rich heart a heavy hand of crude inhumanity and brought death forth in the dreaming sea, an unrefined nightmare that haunts us still. We saw its image, a spume of black blood issuing from the wound, a toxic rainbow mirroring the flame raged cloud that rose from the crippled rig. Such images burn themselves into the heart of our concerns for life, but, how many more warnings do we need…..
…..it was a warning that the natural balance had been recklessly disturbed once more and, as many others warnings have been since Trinity unleashed Shiva’s dance upon the Earth, that the boundaries of sanity were being pushed to breaking point – we could have turned back then; the first testing of the atom bomb showed us how far the insanity had reached within the corridors of power, but, Hiroshima and Nagasaki pushed it further still and Trinity’s unheeded forebodings were finally fulfilled within a year of the Deepwater Horizon disaster when Fukushima let loose on March 11th 2011. The boundary had been breached.
The stricken reactor nailed humanity to a disastrous cross of its own making, at least three of its cores going into meltdown, signalling the advent of the ‘China Syndrome’. But, just as the news hoisted Fukushima’s dread tree aloft our own Golgotha, then too officials spoke through sealed lips, drew their own blanket of lies tight around the fact and washed their ‘pontius’ hands of culpability. The images that accompanied this deception told otherwise as the fury of Neptune’s own hand swept down upon the Japanese people, scouring the land and sea through tsunami and irradiated chaos. As Oppenheimer had ironically foreseen, too late, the dance of Shiva once invoked, cannot be contained.
Such were two of the momentous events that framed Jupiter and Uranus meeting on the Aries point which, on June 8th 2010, marked the opening of their current synodic cycle; the midpoint of their cycle approaching, it is time to take stock of our ability to turn the tide.
What have we learnt from this, the last six years since Deepwater and Fukushima, and the ever raging war being wrecked upon our Earth? Mars complicity notwithstanding, did the Thunderer and the Awakener ignitethe cardinal fire of our deepest concerns through these acts? We have entered far deeper waters than Homer’s odyssean mariners ever sailed, and our wine dark sea has become oil black, a dumping ground for the dominant culture’s inherent complex and its objects of denial. Its eerily illuminated undertow is reflected in the harsh light of the defiled flesh and bleached irradiated bones that whales and dolphins cast upon our shores in the wake of such terrible folly.
Event Horizon
Can we hold ourselves responsible? When an ‘accident’ of such serious magnitude happens more than once, and happens again, and again, does it wear the mantle of fate, as might be presaged in the stars, or is its persistent knocking on the doors of our consciousness and conscience not trying to tell us something about our destiny and what must happen for us to claim it; if we do not bear responsibilty and ultimate culpability, do we have the power to counter the vested interests of those who, ultimately, are culpable? By its very repetition do they not reveal themselves and their cronies to be what they truly are by such account, violating perpetrators? These too are questions that must be asked, and have been asked increasingly since these epochal events stimulated beyond any doubt the need for their asking. We can all hear them being asked in Dakota right now…..
Fukushima struck while Jupiter was still connected with Uranus, their conjunction still just in orb, at its critical point of departure, but the connection and the event, though appearing late in the day, was no less prescient for this. The Japanese disaster, in fact and nature a global disaster for sure, might have brought us to our senses and alerted us to the fact that, for us too, it is late in the day, very late. We might yet sense, were we to fully take in its import and rise to its calling, that we are not entering but are leaving the epoch of planetary destruction, but, such rests upon our ability to respond and, if we do so, first realise that the path of planetary healing leads not away from the wound, but through it.
Both in scale and consequence the role of the power industries has been disastrously epochal, none the less so, regardless the nuclear desert in whose shape we are rapidly terraforming our future, as for more than a century the oil industry has held such a dominant and deeply influencial role in our current culture of power and commerce. It is a geopolitical battle ground whose theatre of war we can see playing out now. In nuclear power many were, initially, duped into believing that we were being shown the way out of this paradigm, such was the naivety of the time with which many accepted its promise, in spite of Trinity, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The planetary matrix at the opening of the first fully commercial nuclear plant, Windscale, on 17th October 1956, reveals astrological themes that we will see recurring again and again here – Pluto sextiled Neptune, both on sign cusps, formed a yod to the Moon at 0° Aries, the ‘Aries point’, and Pluto squared the Moon’s nodes; Saturn was conjunct the north node, precisely on the cusp of Scorpio and Sagittarius; Venus opposed Mars from mid Virgo, and Mercury sextiled Uranus, trining Chiron; Jupiter was exactly semisquare Uranus, the first critical angle of their cycle, and Uranus opposed Chiron. The role of the outer planets in particular is key in our examination here and this must include Chiron who sat firmly in Capricorn, the power base, as Jupiter and Uranus opened their cycle in December 1954; Neptune’s role too is central to this article and Neptune exactly squared Uranus and Jupiter at that moment.
Without getting too deeply embroiled in the planetary matrix at this point, suffice it to say that one of the main aims of this article is to illustrate the key role that certain astrological factors have repeatedly played in the charts connecting major environmental disasters, both accidental and not, but, all here relating to the ‘industries of power’. I could have chosen many more examples, especially those relating to the nuclear industry, but that is a project that requires its own space. The Jupiter Uranus cycle, however, has much to tell us within all this and this is a long article, of necessity…..
……the ‘power industries’ have led us into very deep water and to continue following this way of power leads nowhere, except to the dead-end of a lifeless culdisac, an event horizon that is a point of no return. The voice of the industry tells us otherwise, but, the ‘authorities’ of power are clearly seen to be in the business of selling us down the river. We do not need the oil or nuclear industries to power our planet.
With the cracking of the atom we reached the ‘event horizon’ of our times and were pushed, as an exploration of the Trinity chart will indicate, beyond the brink of containment. The illness of our times became psychotic as the button was pushed, such that now the progressive pursuit of dominance through the material use of power has induced an unchecked tsunami of consequences that blight our human presence on Earth. This is no time for political correctness – we need a stronger more passionate language to voice our burning concerns.
Astrologers often try to hold a neutral ground when dealing with interpretation, avoiding such rhetoric in the pursuit of an unbiased view – but, if their is a rule in this, this astrologer favours its breaking, and with good reason. As a diviner I have found that the energy of emotion is a powerful healing tool in itself and, in taking a diviner’s approach to astrology this informs this practice equally. This is not a surgery or lab, and we cannot afford to pussyfoot around our most pressing issues…..
…….I could have gone the conventional route of including charts, but, it is a custom here to focus more on the narrative, as divination does, to give voice to the story behind the chart rather than focus on its technical elements alone; the power of the imagination is what we are after restoring, not a supplimentary science, or meta-science, to justify it, and in responding to the current of our times the poetic medicine of this innate power is essential.
We have seen enough of how science works – as much as its findings excite, it speaks a dead language. As one of our greatest scientists once ironically proclaimed, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand”.(1)
Our response is gathering apace, but, our common tongue is itself afflicted with numbing irony. Buzzwords abound, ‘sustainability’ jostling for space with ‘ecocide’, ‘the environment’ and the ‘biosphere’ become flatline synonyms for our living Earth. We must not be afeared of finding and using our poetic tongue, or be heckled into submission, believing that to do so is to depart from the facts. The drama being enacted in this theatre is deeply tragic and requires equally dramatic language to disclose its true import – a journey into the wound cannot help but bring us face to face with its inherent pain; but, it is a journey we have the means to navigate and we must be unflinching in our determination to see it through. In navigating Neptune’s world this is a de rigueur necessity……
Trinity
If the celestial mirror is anything, it reveals itself to be unflinchingly precise, not least of all in asking for our attention – after the detonation of the first atom bomb, given the unholy name of ‘Trinity‘, was Oppenheimer’s invocation of Shiva any more accidental than the test itself? Is it pure coincidence that within the chart for this event the asteroid ‘Shiva’ was conjunct the Sun to within 2 minutes of arc at the moment of detonation?
The chart for the Trinity detonation is a regular dragon’s egg of powerful potential energy, its key signifiers revealing a deep coherence that carries a profoundly assertive quality; the chart carries a depth charge of meaning and portent that mirrors the moment in which the cosmic egg was rent asunder. This is a chart that warrants much deeper exploration than be given here, but, in the context of this article a relatively brief summation will indicate its unquestionable importance.
Saturn, in detriment, was conjunct the Trinity Ascendant in mid Cancer, precisely squaring the Moon, the ruler of the Asc, in mid Libra. Sirius, the brightest of stars in our night skies, had just risen, barely a degree above the horizon – a symbol of the event’s magnitude and historical significance. In Gemini, Libra’s own ruler Venus precisely sextiled Pluto in Cancer with the Moon’s north node exactly at their midpoint, just six degrees from Saturn – it was a moment of extreme collective soul crisis, a violation of the generative principle and lockdown on our future and collective identity.
The repercussions of this fateful moment have afflicted our collective soul’s journey to this day, its catatonia inducing impact contagiously propagated at the deepest levels as Pluto fell precisely on Neptune’s north node in Leo in the Trinity chart. In this vision of the future the ‘egg of creation’ has been fatally cracked open, creating a breach in time that has released the unbounded powers of the Underworld within the earthly realms. Entering the realm of this unthinkable nightmare we suffered a loss of soul that reverberated well beyond the earthly sphere. But, as Neptune and Pluto are also reminding us here, it is in plumbing the depths of the dream and retrieving the transformative scope of its vision that the keys to its own redemption can be found.
If there are shades of Orpheus at work here the soulful task in hand is brought fully home as the asteroid Orpheus occupies the mid-point of the 10th house, at 15° Aries, precisely square Saturn and the Asc, directly opposing the Moon. The wandering stars are unerring in their precision……..but, what of Jupiter and Uranus?
In the Trinity chart Jupiter is in detriment in Virgo, squaring Uranus in Gemini, a sign in which Jupiter is also in detriment. This critical juncture in their cycle is no less crucial, or fatalistic; it was a cycle that began amidst tumultuous warring, but, the degree upon which its opening fell was perhaps more fatal still as Jupiter and Uranus met conjunct the fixed star Algol, the star of the Medussa. That alone is an ominous imprint to carry, but, the chart for that moment is something to behold (12.20am UTC, May 8th 1941).
Jupiter is loosing power in the Trinity chart as the square seperates, but, while Uranus is the stronger, in its own natural element, Jupiter carries the power of two fixed stars that lend the Thunderer’s presence a symbolic poigniance in ‘earth’ and the sign of the Virgin.
In orb of Denebola, the blue star in the tail of the Leo constellation, Jupiter compounds the import of Robson’s commentary (2) on its conjunction with this star, words brought to a new level of Uranian intensity – “Pride, hypocrisy, disappointed life, troubles abroad or through relatives, secret enemies, danger of imprisonment or death by sentence.” Ebertin tells us Denebola “is of the nature of Uranus”, and that “in mundane horoscopes major catastrophes are triggered off by it” (3)
However, in closer orb of Nu, the fixed star at the head of the Virgo constellation, Jupiter’s culmination of its waxing square with Uranus opened a reckoning time, a time of awakening in which we must pay heed to the catastrophic seeds of destruction that were being sown.
Nu’s esoteric significance is not lost here and echoes something of the Jupiter Uranus theme in relation to Trinity – as the 13th letter of the Greek alphabet, one of Nu’s sigils resembles the lightningbolt. It also symbolises ‘specific volume’ in thermodynamics and, in nuclear physics, the number of neutrons released per fission of an atom.
Within this star’s rich symbology Nu also associates with the truly anomolous, a truly Uranian quality. Its energy is further indicated by its algebraic signification of wave frequency, the modulation of which is at the very heart of energy work and field propagation. Science aside, this is a star that, while being much overlooked, indicates the workings of subtle energies – numinous by name, numinous by nature (pun intended). However, with this resonance between the star and these two planets in mind, Jupiter in square aspect to Uranus becomes an amplified critical point around this energy. An extreme has been reached – in calculus Nu’s symbol is used to signify ‘the greatest fixed point of a function’; as a calculated act Trinity nailed us to the fixed point at the center of the cross of fate and destiny. It was a chronically Chironic.
If the need for the deepest of healing sought confirmation, Chiron was closely conjunct the IC of the Trinity event chart, in the final degree of Virgo, a degree that seems fated to play a recurrent role in this energetic drama – the deepest and most fatal of wounds was opened and we have been repeatedly called to its healing ever since. And, as if to drive the point home, the chart’s MC is precisely on the Aries point, within 4 minutes of arc of the point of entry into Uranus and Jupiter’s current cycle.
The Widening Breach
At Hiroshima, three years later, at 8.16am local time on the 6th of August 1945, the sensitive degrees were activated again. Mars joined Uranus in mid Gemini, with Uranus precisely conjunct the chart’s MC, squaring the Ascendant and the Trinity Moon’s degree. In the Hiroshima chart the Ascendant falls exactly on the degree occupied by the asteroid Shiva in Japan’s national chart. Hiroshima’s Jupiter opposed Japan’s Mars and squared Japan’s Moon…..and this too is a chart carrying a yod with the Moon’s nodes as its central axis.
This time it is Pluto and Mars that are feeding their energies into the Moon’s north node, with the south node at their midpoint! In the deafening roar of the bomb you could almost hear the ancestors howling in disbelief at this ultimate act of aggression. Mars is conjunct the fixed star Aldebaran, a union signifying violent death and sickness. Mars also trines Neptune and Pallas, with Pluto at their midpoint framed by the Sun on one side and Shiva on the other. The correspondences begin to show themselves as the celestial evidence mounts.
Chart comparisons of such events reveal much; they can also lead one down a very wearying path when the destructive element is being highlighted – but, when we look further afield Shiva’s presence and the roles of Uranus, Pluto, Neptune, Saturn, Chiron and Jupiter in particular spring out with an unerring call from the outer planets for our attention.
The Evidence Mounts
In the chart for the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, 1.24 am 26th April 1986, Uranus this time falls exactly on the Ascendant, along with asteroid Orpheus, and is once again in a waxing square with Jupiter! The Sun opposes Pluto close on the Moon’s south node and the chart’s MC/IC axis.
Pallas is exactly conjunct Pluto’s south node in Cancer, weighing our lack of wisdom in the ancestral balance of creation. Pluto was also trined with Ceres in early Virgo as Chernobyl went critical, alerting us to the depth of the event and the need to see its widespread effects within the earth realms more clearly. Did we take heed?
Mars and Neptune once more sextile Pluto, with the asteroid Shiva this time close on Neptune. The pattern at work here is revealing itself. Some say that there was no accident in Chernobyl’s meltdown, that Fukushima was no accident, that politically motivated revenge and deliberate sabotage was at work. However we look at it, there is an old old war at work in our world.
During the Gulf War massive oil spillage was unleashed by the Iraqi army in an attempt to prevent American forces from landing – the planetary positions on that day, 21st of January 1991, are very revealing.
Saturn, domicile in Capricorn, was conjunct the Moon’s north node within two degrees of the Sun at 0° Aquarius. Chiron opposed Saturn from Cancer, trining Pluto, domicile in Scorpio. Mars at 0° Gemini trined the Sun with the Moon transiting the Aries point midway between them. Meanwhile, Jupiter in Leo, squaring Saturn and Chiron, quincunxed Uranus, Mercury and Neptune, whose stellium in Capricorn is very telling. The dice are heavily loaded in this chart, activating critical degrees and pushing the power base into overload.
Neptune’s influence in Capricorn by itself might have alerted us to the message that such violent geopolitically driven disregard for the Earth’s and Life’s sanctity expresses, but this entire complex of interwoven apsects belies the pursuit of a wreckless strategy of dominance. It is a strategy that finds its purpose in creating emotional turmoil and unbridled drama, as a distraction from the underlying wound that it meanwhile deepens. It has deception at its heart and is achieved, as the American campaign in Iraq of 2003 brazenly broadcast, through the widespread delivery of ‘shock and awe’. It is also at the heart of the attempt at a perpetual war, not on but ofterror, that now sustains this intent and purpose. Neither is it confined to the military battlefield…..
…..if the military delivery of such globalised trauma is ongoing so is its environmental twin. And, if Deepwater Horizon has anything to tell us about this veiling of our sanity and its relationship with the current opposition between Jupiter and Uranus, perhaps a closer look at Neptune will reveal it.
There is a certain irony in Neptune’s role in the Deepwater chart; conjunct Chiron on the cusp of Pisces the oceanic wound carries its heart in its mouth – as environmental disasters go its magnitude, if not its cause, was both openly pronounced and concealed in the process as we heard its dry echo on the news. This was ‘the worst‘, we were told, ‘environmental disaster‘, we were informed, ‘in US history‘, we were duly advised, as if official notification of its scale and national appointment were a measure of its weight…..there was no ‘solace’ or ‘measure’ offered in the fact, or its presentation in the media.
The familiar machinations of obscuration surrounding this event are highlighted when we look closer, as Neptune and Chiron on the Pisces cusp sextile the Sun at 0° Taurus, with Uranus at their midpoint. Uranus on the Aries cusp opposes Saturn rx in the final degree of Virgo. Echoes of the charts mentioned above also resound here. The key planets here had barely moved a single degree by the time Jupiter and Uranus opened their current cycle.
In the Deepwater chart the Moon is conjunct its own south node, in the process of transiting Saturn and Pluto’s north nodes in Cancer. The soul of the past must inform the transformational building of our future. Mid Cancer, if you remember, was sensitised in the Trinity chart and the key angles are trigger points activated by the outer planets at all these events.
Jupiter and Uranus both square the Ascendant. In the Deepwater chart’s 10th house Jupiter and Uranus signal the importance of this event in the relationship between the industries of power and our ability to transcend their dominance, but it is Neptune who is the ruler of the MC, calling for redemption. Is the society of the future we dream of now a dream we can share with our descendants…..
…..in their yod with Saturn, Neptune + Chiron’s sextile with the Sun shows us how the message is being both perceived and not perceived. At 29° of Aquarius the critical point of Neptune’s transit into Pisces is overshadowed by the karmic sensitivity of Saturn’s place at the head of the yod. It is a karma both shut out of view, concretised and delivered into our hands – we have to feel it to believe in it and only the power locked up in our human passion and will to live harmoniously can redeem it for us. Some might say that, with such a diagnosis, humanity is in dire need of a soul retrieval – so, who might we find who could facilitate such an undertaking; its a rhetorical question.
Opposing Saturn, Uranus becomes the revealer who alerts us to the event’s true nature – this is not simply an act of extreme negligence, as the courts ruled against BP, the company responsible for Deepwater, it was a call to rein in the destruction to our living Earth. It was also a call to a much more profound and powerful vision, one that engenders and protects life and can be lived by. Answering such a calling would be the purpose of Jupiter and Uranus meeting at 0° Aries and such a vision forms the positive core of their new synodic cycle.
If The Path Leads Through The Wound…..
Such disasters bring catastrophic and deeply affecting damage whose images nevertheless point towards the painful heart of the healing being called for. The impact of Deepwater upon marine life has been far deeper than has been acknowledged – we are told that hundreds of whales and dolphins, many of them babies, died as a result – the toxicity of the chemicals used in the ‘clean up’ is no less pervasive to this day; but, the reality behind these events is far more deep reaching and forms part of a much bigger picture.
At the time, Deepwater Horizon was but the latest in a long history of environmental disasters falling at the hands of its industrial power base. Yes, BP were found guilty of negligence, but, to call it ‘negligent’ is an insult of the highest order, one that ignores the long list of ‘negligence’ behind its perpetrators. Over one billion gallons of crude have poured from that ongoing industrial wound into the oceanic biosphere within the last half century alone. And this figure does not include one of the biggest spills ever recorded which was not accidental by any means – millions of gallons were deliberately unleashed within the Persian Gulf during the Gulf War and it is openly admitted but never spoken knowledge that a nine foot deep crust of ‘tarcrete’ covers afflicted areas of the desert to this day. The damage within Neptune’s realms goes almost entirely unmentioned – further hard evidence must be called to the dock……
Forgetting is at the deep core of the construction of Onkalo, a mile deep repository for nuclear waste being built under a granite mountain in Finland. But how, millenia down the road, do we tell our descendants of the lethal dangers our legacy has created for them in such an irradiated tomb? The radioactive waste buried at Onkalo has a half life of tens of thousands of years, and we struggle to decipher the signs left by our ancestors 5,000 years ago, let alone 50,000. (4)
The thousands of starfish that have been dissolving on the eastern Pacific Coast, the dead seals and fish, the mass die off of marine flora and their mirror, the hundreds of deformed human babies born in Japan after Fukushima and Russia after Chernobyl are not considered hard enough evidence to halt the madness, yet. Neither are these facts redeemed by the use of depleted uranium in wars fought over geopolitical gains; gains, no matter how opposed to them we are, from which we continue to benefit; our hand is being forced, while running our cars, heating and lighting our homes, powering our computers……
……Trinity was the first of many tests, themselves running to the thousands, that have produced generations of dead and cancer afflicted ‘downwinders’, and the military personel involved in these tests, ordinary footsoldiers used in that ‘good old military tradition’ of ‘cannon fodder’, were treated with equal disdain being nothing more than a ‘part of the experiment’.
Official figures attached to these events differ wildly when they do actually appear within the public realm, by astronomical factors in some cases, an open indicator of the confusion and deception at work within. This in itself is not newsworthy enough to warrant reportage either, it seems. The hegemony of the scientific priesthood will always try to sell us the official line. Hundreds of ‘alternative’ researchers will tell us different, alternative in many senses simply because they are never consulted by the media. And yet, when these events are thrust in our face they invariably filtered down, delivered through the official channels with just enough force for the figures to wash over us, and we are expected to swallow them. This is a reality fully manifest in Fukushima where, over five years after the event, the authorities continue to massively downplay the truth and its consequences. Regardless, we know the truth – these events are all of one ilk; they are all acts of war, ultimately destructive crimes against Life. So….
…..What Is The Antidote?
At Fukushima the asteroid Shiva was exactly conjunct Pluto at 8° Capricorn and, as I began to write this article Jupiter was exactly square this degree – the burgeoning sphere of radioactive threat is upon us again as the drums of global war ratchet up their rhythm. And, it has long been known that the nuclear fuel industry is but a front for the manufacture of weapons grade uranium.
The reactors are getting old, as are the warheads. Instability rules the day. One strike from a significant coronal mass ejection will take down the grid and the failsafe on these ‘facilities’ will be tested to its extreme. It is madness to continue in this way. If Jupiter and Uranus are to have a hand in this it is our prerogative to find their higher calling and it is to this that we will be looking in the next post.
Neptune’s realms are suffering through widening pollution and irradiation, and yet the fact of the whales and dolphins carcasses in relation to these events remains obscured. If we are to bring a passion to bear here, it must surely be upon what in our times has become that most mercurial of things, Truth. The truth is there for all to see, deliberately veiled if not ignored by the official channels in order to prevent widespread panic, we are told – and insurrection, we might surmise. The cover up is no less great above our heads where the daily deposition of many thousands of tons of heavy metals, nano-technologies and viral particulates infuses the skies that carry the oceans irradiated waters and bring its heavy load to our lands, lakes and front doors. Its a ‘hard rain’ thats falling, to be sure….but the truth behind this reality does not escape our notice; witness this latest appraisal. The perpetrators know that truth is the most powerful of weapons and have no inhibition in concealing it and affecting our capacity for recognising it. Our very ability to think and dream for ourselves is under assault.
The scientific foundation upon which the industries of power have built their edifice has done everything in its power to seperate our thinking from our dreaming – we cannot imagine without either, and Neptune is the archetypal ruler of the imaginal realms.
As the planetary matrix of Deepwater and many of these charts might have indicated it is in Neptune’s, and Chiron’s, realms that the soul of Jupiter and Uranus antidote might be found. In indigenous lore the Whales are Earth’s keepers of the great repository of knowledge that give us access to the ancestral dreaming of our planet. This is knowledge that encompasses a far older memory than is widely acknowledged, a memory that reaches far back into the migration of the planets, and of our ancestors, into this solar system.
Water has memory, conveys information, responds to emotions – when we are born our body’s primary element is water (around 75%) and remains so in healthy humans ( dropping to an average of <60%>) until death; we are born from water……and the primary source of oxygen on our planet is in the oceans; phytoplankton photosynthesises over 50% of the world’s oxygen into the atmosphere……..and oxygen is the bane of cancer. It is also essential to our capacity to imagine, but, we will return to this next time.
The Whale’s return to the oceans signalled a change in our planetary atmosphere and gravity, a transformation of Earth also intrinsic to the human evolutionary path; they hold the memories of a unified consciousness that are braided into our own dna – the release and recovery of these memories is essential to our world, a central part of the antidote.
When Uranus and Jupiter met at 0° Aries they signalled a new beginning for us all in retrieving the power within these memories, of memory itself, and their current opposition across the Aries Libra axis will tell us just where and how this journey could continue, its great promise and startling reality……in future posts over the coming year we will pick up on the incoming attributes of the Jupiter Uranus cycle, looking more deeply into the story as it unfolds, and begin to unpack what the return of the whale dreamers might mean for us. The next post in the series, Mysterious Travellers, can be found here…..
(1) quote attributed to Albert Einstein
(2) Fixed Stars and Constellations in Astrology, V E Robson, 1923
(3) Fixed Stars and their Interpretation, Elsbeth Ebertin, 1928
On September 18th fire maned Venus met with her dark sister, the ‘Black Moon Lilith’ and, stepping into the Lilith corridor, donned her robe of dark feathers. As she did so she opposed Uranus, the cosmic fire wielder and ancient consort of the Earth goddess, and through the mantle of the dark feminine power ignited a Need-fire that will burn for 13 Moons. Mark this time and set a lunar calendar by which its phases can be counted. There will be many as the inner and outer realms are being activated in unison with a pulse that brings many synchronous levels of planetary phases into an entraining sequence.
The die is cast for the coming months as She also carries the seed energy of the eclipsed Moon from 16th September, striking the ground of the fertile darkness with black lightning, the shadow side of Uranus fire, as she traverses the ‘fiery road’ that leads into the heart of the Scorpio.
With this subtlely convened entry into the other worlds Venus path may have gone unmarked and, leaving no visible trace, undetected; save in the hearts of the wise women, the poets and seers whose vibration of the membrane between this world and the next within this world would have felt like a sweet rage of passion upsurging to issue forth with new verse, insight and knowing…..the zone of extreme psychic sensitivity that the Lilith corridor demarks is below the sweep of the ‘common’ mind’s radar. And yet, in us all, there is this path and we know it, even if only by its dream traces and the ‘anomalous’, the unbidden scents of ancient forest of knowledge through which it leads, whenever we stumble across the boundaries between the worlds within our own world and hear their whisperings…..
As I write, Venus has now left the ‘via combusta’ but remains yet within the Lilith corridor, having met with Black Moon Lilith’s sister ‘Dark Moon’ Lilith on the way. As the corridor closes behind the ‘fire-maned’ goddess, on October 10th, the two Liliths having also swapped places, such is the weaving of their own paths, Black Moon Lilith once again ushers ‘Fire Mane’ out and into the company of Juno who awaits her at the sacred portal in late Scorpio.
With this passage into the realms of the dark fire, Venus activated the degrees upon which the thunderer Jupiter and the awakener Uranus will mark the mid point of their current synodic cycle. She opens the pathway for the Sun and Mercury to follow in her wake before the storm bringers get to work. Having sensitised the degrees of opposition with Uranus and initiating a year long archetypal influence that promises a widening of mental perception and injection of paradigm shifting potential into the planetary field, She also marks the second half of the current lunation with a potent homeopathic dose of intense otherworldly energy, the subtle workings of which will underpin the coming year with psychic sensitivity. Her journey through the via combusta has carried this psychic imprint and, as Venus accelerates through the zodiac towards the slow down and retrograde that precedes her eventual meeting with Uranus in Aries, June 2017, is pushing feminine issues and the reconfiguration of ‘wealth’ distribution to the top of the agenda.
Following Mars lead, as he opened the transit of the outer planets by starting a new synodic cycle with Saturn in August, Venus and Mercury will be activating the outer planets through this time zone to mid year, and we can expect big shifts on the ground, and in our personal lives as a consequence. The issues at stake are rampant, complex and global, but they boil down to one major effort to end the abuse, of our planet, of each other and of ourselves. This is a massively important time for us all and Venus has found the best of company with which to open the flood gates for serious healing.
Venus has been gathering a storm behind her and She, with Juno, who oversees the boundaries of the sacred marraige and who upholds its lore and sacred laws, will be seeking justice for all the wrongs done in the name of falsity and greed to the Feminine ‘archetype’. The sacredness of Life has become threatened to the point of extinction, through the violation of the sacred marraige that a rampant army of patriarchal genocidal murderers has wrecked upon the holy, our Earth, no less than holy women, and men, our brothers and sisters…..and we are all of their kin, as they, holy, within our bones….
…..the wound is deep, so deep, a maw of millenia wide abuse, torture, rape and pillage, whose scouring of the temenos and razing of the circles of sacred power undid what Venus, the Fire Mane, Comet Goddess began when she seeded this world with the holy fire of the otherworlds at the turning of the worlds, the beginning of ‘our’ historical time. The turning must, in turn, be turned.
The Liliths are not bound by the material, but are of an ilk that embodies a knowing and imbues our acts with unchecked raw passion, is uncensored in its primal power, deeply erotic with the love of the life force at full flow, capable of no less a cataclysmic transmutation of the known through their own dark fire than Uranus lightning strikes, and it is this furious compassion that they invoke, for a cleansing of this world; no less than this will turn the world from its present destructive course – we are disposed to take its spark into our own hands and hearts to this end. Without it ‘goodness’ alone will be inadequate to the immensity of the task.
There is a voluminous depth to their emotional power now, banked up behind them by generations of murder at the stake, inflamed by usury and enslavement of the creative embodiment of the life force in service to a specious post modern psychosis of scientific materialism…..and, in Scorpio, this reaches down to the primary building blocks of life itself, to the encoding hardware of our DNA, its inwoven story of ancient memory itself a path between the worlds. The mutation of all life forms at the hands of controlling yet uncontrolled hubris that has so marked the later phases of the ‘modern era’ cannot continue without severe consequences.
The Dark Goddess has been reviled, suppressed and seared to the bone for being the source of wisdom that needs no mandate from a higher ‘God’ to manifest its fecund life affirming creative energies in form. Lilith was the original serpentine Eve, the true repository of such wisdom and empowering knowledge and means – empowerment as it could be, has been and will be again, within the incarnate realms. This violation is the great wound of the modern ‘Christian’ Era, at the hands of the ‘church fathers’, their armies, mercinaries and plunderers, who have sought to wipe her power from the earthly realms – but Christianity is not alone in its subjugation of the Feminine and the propagation of this wound. All wars carry the vile seal of their murderous intent, ‘holy’ or not. And War rages on, until we end it.
Expect now fierce reprisals, fearsome even……but, that would be an understatement…..for there must now be a swing in the balance, archetypal and paradigmatic in scope, in favour of the Feminine power, for a purging of the unholy cankers that scab the wound, to clear the way for a truer balance between the sacred energies of creation to be created anew. For the wound to be healed. Libra and Scorpio propagate this process, are at work in this.
Do not expect the world to end; do not expect an end, without a fight, for fight we must, not with violence but with the sacred passion of protectors……and will need the lightning seeds of a revolutionary resurgence and passionfires of raw wisdom that Fire Mane has been gathering in her wake, to burn in our own hearts and minds as we do so.
The Need Fires must burn away the rot and its shadow, and will, with Her blessing. And this is not man’s fire, but, the ancient fire that was invoked to scour the illnesses and dis-ease from the face of this world with sacred purpose. The knowledge of the Need-fires was one of Fire Mane’s gifts to our own ancestors and were ignited from, carried the sacred spark of, the original fire at their heart, as must we. Sacred Fire keepers we must be, as Uranus gatekeepers……promethian heirs to an unbound legacy, the buck stops here.
Within the Lilith corridor Fire Mane will have gained necessary knowledge from the ‘lunar’ sisters that will restore Her vitality in this resurgent cleansing of the world, the better to find its mark; the wise ones, medicine people, healers, poets and seers will know it, invoke its inner flame, sound it wide and far, for this is now their time, our time; but, its markers will be seen in the mundane world, the world of the ‘common’ mind, and minded, as the collapse of its secular gods, upon their own alters, impaled upon the barbs of their own greed and lust for power….economies will crumble, the swaggering ozymandian empires of this world will follow Percy’s prophecy and the New World will find its coat of lies burnt to ashes, its imposed Order-out-of-‘chaos’ destroyed in the wake……
….the high priests of this Order have long lost control of their own minds, their hearts hollowed, their souls long reduced to dust beneath the feet of their own uncaring pantheon…..they long ago instituted the ‘death of all caring’ and will suffer their own fate accordingly; it is not for us to perpetrate such, lest we merely perpetuate their crimes, we who would see all souls redeemed…..and can any diviner, astrologer or seer, poet, wise woman, or man, proclaim any other intent…….I, for one, would say not, for the chain of guilt that binds the violators will be the nematic rope of karma that hangs them, the chasm that swallows them, for guilty they are, and even now pile further crime upon crime……such is the psychotic vortex that surrounds them, of their own making. Its mark upon the world is not hidden; look to where their is unjust pain, like Chiron’s wound, awaiting redemption…..this wound is real, its source no less so, and this is where the Need-fire must be applied.
To say that the wounding is ‘real’ is to reduce it to banality, but, at the risk of such, it is true to say that the planetary alignments brought out this theme with the penumbral lunar eclipse conjunct Chiron at full Moon on September 16th, just as Venus was coming into orb of opposition with Uranus. And Chiron is no less an architect of the subtle than Saturn is an architect of the material. As the lastest of the group of eclipses across the Virgo Pisces axis, that sweeps the ecliptic following the lunar nodes with its own fated destiny every 18.6 years, this ephemeral eclipse may have slipped its own influence beneath the radar; but, the world and the celestial sphere reflect each other with unerring acuity, and there is little in the world of human and planetary affairs now that does not reflect the need to pay heed to the wounds that have been created, and are being creating still.
As an augery of the times the opposition between Venus in Libra and Uranus in Aries is by itself a powerful indicator of the erotic power of primal creative energy, of the profoundly transformative effect of peak experiences and ‘divine’ insight on our human mentality and how we, as humans, relate to the world. Seen together they suggest the rapid transmission of kundalini energy, ‘serpent power of the goddess’, into the higher generative realms of the mental sphere, the source field of the mind’s architecture.
By itself, this energy is potent requiring a purposeful and timely integrity, a soul possessed of a level of self reflection and ‘completion in understanding’ in which clarified intent and a high degree of self honesty are already established. Otherwise, it is a transformative power that belies the positive aspects of its potential; the shadow side of these transformative experiences are latent within their manifestation – if one is not prepared for their influx these arcs of Uranian kundalini like power can be equally devastating, wreaking immense damage to both body and mind, subverting Uranus potential for transformational liberation into deep psychosomatic wounding from which only equally deep cleansing can restore its liberating potential. But, this is the true reflection of the world, of what the Fire Maned Goddess and Her dark sisters are invoking in our minds and hearts, the ‘need’ within the need-fire, and be sure, their Need-fire must burn within, as well.
When the Black Moon Lilith is involved with Uranus, especially in opposition and union with one of Her planetary sisters, the Uranian power manifests its shadow, and such healing becomes the absolute necessity. Uranus castration brought forth a new order in the realms of creation, an order in which his own wound and seperation from the Earth goddess realms is complicit. With this firmly in mind, it is of great significance to a world undergoing such deep wounding, as ours is, of Uranus usurped creative power, that this opposition activated the Aries Libra axis in anticipation of the major opposition that sets the 13 Moon time frame, that between Jupiter and Uranus. Their orb is activated as the current Black Moon lunation closes and completes in October 2017, as Jupiter enters Scorpio.
Not only Uranus but Jupiter too is calling forth a revolution. Juno’s husband will test us, call us to levels of understanding we cannot foresee, unweave our knowing and weave it anew, bring elemental power into our mental workings and reverberate the collective mind, awakening the Planetary Mind. To understand the visceral significance of this necessity we must revisit the beginning of their synodic cycle back in 2010. And this will be our theme next time…..
…..for now, make still your sacred center, gather the kindling of your passions and set the hearth in your own sacred temenos to receive the fire seeds of Venus and the dark sisters of the Moon. And in the meantime let us come one step closer to the present moment…..
…..this post enters the neural pathways of the ‘virtual’ etheric as the second waxing quarter of the Black Moon opens, the Moon preceding Samhain, just as the lunar disc joins with asteroid Lilith, close on Pluto in mid Capricorn, having first called forth the sacred fire of the protectors at Moon’s passing of Mars one day ago. For we are here within the embrace of an older calendric, under the rising energy of the Black Moon, and this will be our closing invocation here. Let it be understood by this that the naming of this Moon is quite other than that which popular ‘modern’ pseudo folklore has applied; this Moon is Black by another name……
The Black Moon
The Black Moon lunation which began on October 1st completes in the 8th degree of Scorpio on October 30th and fully describes the arc of the transition involving Jupiter and Uranus, making of this lunation a powerful augery for the primary archetypal signature not only for the emergent power of the Lilithian Fires, but, of the coming year over thirteen lunations. That it completes at Samhain provides us with a clue to the subtle pathways it is engendering and through which its energies are working…..if it is karmic it is also cyclical and its karmic roots, as we will soon see, in the next post here, were clearly delineated at the beginning of the current Jupiter Uranus synodic cycle.
The major archetypal marker however for the first half of Jupiter and Uranus cycle has been the Uranus Pluto square, whose transmutative series it perfectly frames. As this solar year ends and the new year begins the last reverberations of the Pluto and Uranus square will be felt as they come to within 4° of orb, signing off the current phase of their cycle. By that time Venus will be transiting the Moon’s south node in Pisces and the Sun will be transiting Pluto. The ancestral legacy of 5,000 years or more of sacred violation is loaded in this time, awaiting its great turning, and Pluto has opened a wide portal of his own, all the roots of that ancestral tree ablaze with the Sun’s light as the solar disc crosses its meridian.
The intensity of the last six years is shifting in focus, density and pace as we move out of the zone of radical transmutation brought through Uranus and Pluto’s seven waxing squares to the fundaments of power at work in this world. Complicit with this emergence, new cyclical relationships are forming between the inner and outer planets, amongst all the planets in their synodic phases. We are seeing the beginning of a new planetary phase which will, ultimately, help us to make sense of the turmoil and dissonance we have been experiencing.
Astrologically, it is Jupiter and Uranus opposition across the Libra Aries axis that is providing the underlying planetary influence behind this emergence, stimulating new levels of intuitive thinking and instinctive knowing. We must ready ourselves for an expansion of neural connectivity that reaches beyond the habitual limitations of our own mental frame. But, before we can fully integrate with this powerful influence we would do well to call forth the inner wisdom of the Goddesses, to light our own need-fire and purge our own inner lives of the mental canker that we carry and project onto others and the world. This Black Moon is the grounding time for this preparation.
In this light the new Moon which began this current lunation was labelled with a deceptive yet provocative epithet – hailed with populist new-age fervour as a ‘Black’ Moon, its apparent ‘rarity’ no less than obscurantist, freighted with imaginary significance that does little more than distract us from its relevence by drawing on an artificially created human thirst for meaning.
Flattened into desouled meaninglessness within the scientifically refracted spectra of sensual reality that blights our times there is, on the one hand, no especially ‘black’ Moon, at least none any shade significantly darker than at any other new Moon; this use of name is ‘simply‘ down to the fact that two new moons occur within the same calendar month, one of which is called ‘Black’, in the same way that one of two full moons occuring in the same Gregorian calendar month is called a ‘Blue’ Moon – such is the anodyne post materialist view of the ‘literalist’, no less ironic for its unacknowledged Papal endorsement, who will tell us, “neither are black or blue or gain any special meaning from the term”…..
…….except that, as the poets and people of medicine remind us, on the other hand, by some subtler construct and equally subtle irony, to which the unquenchable if curiously human desire to clothe the mundane in a livable story responds, the Soul is re-awakened through such fertile symbolism to a possibility beyond the senses, beyond the literal. The same fertility sown through Lilith and Venus transactions between the worlds.
The synchronous advent of this symbol, as it has perhaps unwittingly been applied to this Moon, with the invoking of the ‘need-fire’ reminds of the presence of this inextinguishable fecundity at work behind our world. It is a symbol we need, that is calling for our attention. It tells us that this possibility for other-worldly intervention between the worlds persists, even now, that it enters via backdoors, hidden behind the hard reflective surface of homogenised reductivism, a magical propensity that somehow, perhaps miraculously in the face such rampant literalism, by dint of iteration and innate need, is constellated in this Black Moon and its lunation.
Lilith, in all compensatory and redemptive senses, has begun to dance this magic back into our lives…..only the soul-less will fail to feel it, but, Hers is a dark fire, both invisible to the physical eye, and seen by the soul, that is the need-fire. It comes, as the ‘need-fire’ has been invoked by Earth loving peoples for countless millenia, in response to the times, in anticipation of the Samhain Moon, as a purge of illness and disease between ourselves and the ancestors….
We are thirsty for such magic, as they are for us to invoke its healing power; the soul feels that ‘need’ as a magnetic pull from the heart, whose knowing responds to the innate, to the already known, which the ancestral realms give us access to, which itself carries healing resonance, and accepts the wound as the passageway to wholeness.
The ‘via combusta’ in which this Moon finds its own fiery culmination earned its uneasy reputation from the fall of the luminaries, the Sun and Moon, within its own respective signs of Libra and Scorpio, as well as those same signs loaded associations with the ‘malefic’ aspect of their ruling planets, but, the archaic roots of the ‘burning way’ have almost certainly been overlayered by these meanings. There are certain times in Earth’s history when such a term would have carried a very different meaning, and this too we now invoke, in preparation.
The cyclical cleansing of earth, of homesteads and of livestock through Fire is not an apocalyptic biblical construct, but, the same very old tradition, surviving into post-glacial times within emergent cultures, that relates to celestial events that preceeded and prompted their advent. The great comet that has been recorded globally amongst indigenous peoples to have brought these planetary changes, and marked the rise of aggression against the Feminine, was described as trailing hair of fire and scouring the earth. She became subdued through capture into the Sun’s magnetic heliosphere and became known, amongst other names, as Venus, and thus began the rise of the solar cult and its shadow, the cult of Saturn so loved of the violators. She was a planet become a comet, before she resumed her planetary status, and her-story carries the memory of our true ‘his-tory’. All the planets have undergone massive transformation before achieving their present orbits around this, our second Sun, become our central Sun. But, that is a story for another time……
As we have seen, it was Venus who, under the astrological shadow cloak of Her romanised form, called up her dark sisters prior to this Moon, igniting this lunar ‘need-fire’ and, in so doing activated the greater resurgence that will come into manifestation over the coming year.
Regardless the human folly, Lilith will not be held back and in the process our Story will be returned to us. This will be a part of Jupiter and Uranus gift to us.
This is the time for the raw power of the ‘Feminine’ to emerge, to be given voice and the fierce fire that burns behind its wisdom to become manifest, reinstated. As a creative force it is unbridled, knows the intimacy between life and death, and pulses with passionate intensity. It casts no shadow for its own light is innate, the darkness transformed – this is the healing within its fire, burning off the illusions of the shadow realms. This is the Black Moon lunation’s gift – let us use it well……at Samhain there will be celebrations if we do; the Great Fire tended by the ancestors at the center of their village will burn the more brightly and ignite new dreamings in our souls. Our medicine people, seers, poets, wise women, and men, will sing us the way….
As we end now you may have noticed one major planetary player by their absence here, Neptune. Neptunes realm will be at the heart of the next post when we take a very different look at how the oceans of this world have suffered the wound of our times and how this relates to the Jupiter Uranus cycle…..in the meantime,
“Generosity is a virtue for individuals, not governments. When governments are generous it is with other people’s money, other people’s safety, other people’s future.” (1)
The potential of the eclipses we have witnessed in the first half of this year is ours to be be realised, and, as the year progresses intentional conscious participation in our own evolutionary process becomes central to working with the eclipse signatures. This is a very political signature when it comes down to it, but, amongst the eclipses the lunar eclipse of March 23rd, while being partial and relatively subtle, just within the ‘eclipse zone’ so to speak, is notable for having activated the Aries Libra axis, a shot of adrenalin to the social arena – the other three eclipses of 2016 all highlight the Pisces Virgo axis and show more of the internal processes at work that are setting the agenda within that arena, both at an individual and collective level.
If the solar eclipse of March 9th highlighted the need for conscious self determination based upon personal experience and knowledge to take precedence over globalised top down ideological determinism the lunar eclipse of March 23rd raised the question of whether we are capable of creating a social context that is coherent enough to support such self authority without diminishing it or its potential for creating real change.
The Aries Libra axis points towards challenges in consciousness that are intrinsic to this socialising process. This is a process that aims to create a society in which the power is returned to the people. Within the predominant paradigm the Aries drive that fuels such a process itself must become conscious and Venus higher octave of ‘relative values’ within Libra, if based upon lucid perception and listening, can provide the drive for awareness necessary to such a society with its own mirror. It is this self reflective quality that helps the new social consciousness seeded at the March solar eclipse and emphasised at the March lunar eclipse to take on its potential protean qualities, adaptive, able to respond to immediate needs and to find appropriate shape accordingly. The rhetoric for change is empty without this mutable potential.
The Sabian symbol for the Sun’s degree in Aries at the March lunar eclipse speaks of the emergence of dipolar qualities within its conscious imprint, the awareness of dualism within the evolving self, but, as embryonic as this may appear does its innate naivety work against it? How we create such a context, one that is itself free of the effects of those ideologies it has been formerly programmed by, formed in service to and which itself does not perpetuate their faults, is dependent upon utilising the potential within this polarity.
The Sabian symbol for the eclipsed March Moon also reveals something here; it shows us a circle of young people gathered in communion around a central fire – intrinsic to this symbol is Listening, a quality that underlies the positive aspects of Libran consciousness. To quote, the Sabian text tells us that, “If a new society is to be built, those who yearn for it, or perhaps who have envisioned its outlines, should commune. But communion is useless where no central “fire” burns, IN-SPIRITING the group“. While listening is a fundamental human necessity within this social context it is the central fire, its creative principle, that calls us together and defines the space within which it is activated and illuminated. The ‘creative principle’ at work within ‘gathering’ reveals the nature of our common ground.
Here Mars elemental thrust is reclaimed from the prevelant ideological paradigm of ‘progress’ and consciously put to work in our midst, supporting the process of self determination and social formation. This signals a reframing and revisioning of the ‘democratic processes’ itself, a need that is all too present in our time. While the UK debates whether to remain in the EU or not, a debate that highlights the need for change in ‘representation’ either way, it is the US electional process that we can look to here for some primary indicators of how this is playing out, especially within the ‘Democratic Party’ itself. If Bernie Sanders represents the new re-alignment and activation of social consciousness Hillary Clinton is well positioned to continue the dynastic tradition peculiar to American politics within our time. Between them they encapsulate the paradigmatic political struggle that is its characteristic.
“A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.”(2)
As the Sabian symbol for the Moon at the lunar eclipse also indicated the signature of the preceding solar eclipse is here ‘evolved’ forward indicating that an answer can be found in fostering a ‘grass-roots’ movement ‘of the people, for the people, by the people’ – that may in our times have the ring of irony about it (in respect of the Gettysburg Address), but, doesn’t it also sound like a familiar battle cry from the hustings?
The transits to Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton’s natal charts in connection with these eclipses are worth noting here. With Clinton we have a problem as her birth time is in dispute, but, while I would have gone with the 8:02 am time giving her a Scorpio Asc I am leaving out references to the houses in both charts and to the angles in her own chart, while I’ve included Sanders Asc and MC as they are significant here.
The eclipsed March Moon was conjunct Sanders natal Mercury, sextiling natal Pluto. This coincided with an acrimonious 8th debate between Sanders and Clinton in Miami, as well as Sanders victory in the Michigan primary. The March solar eclipse fell on Clinton’s natal Moon and squared her natal Uranus, the day she delivered her “counterterrorism” speech at Stanford. Do politicians utilise such transits intentionally…..it is certainly not unprecedented for them (and their masters) to do so.
Sanders is also seeing Uranus transit his natal Moon + Mars, a sustained transit that is igniting his popularity as a champion and fighter for social change. Clinton has natal Pluto and Mars conjunct in mid Leo forming an exact square to her Scorpio Venus and a loose but applying square to her nodes – an indicator of an ambitious nature which her Sagittarian Jupiter emphasises. She will stop at nothing in its pursuit, which her Scorpio Sun will risk everything for – even if it means her downfall she will remain undetered.
The fight is well and truly on as transiting Saturn is squaring Sanders natal Virgo Sun and transiting Mars squaring his MC, while Neptune is transiting his IC. He is having to draw on his most innate visionary qualities in bringing his deepest social values into realisation. Transiting Mars will conjunct Clinton’s Jupiter twice during the current Mars retrograde, stationing direct on her Scorpio south node. These transits reflect the uphill battle Sanders has faced as an ‘independent’ pitted against Clinton’s ambition and establishment platform, but, show how while these make her a formidable opponent these same qualities can also be her achilles heal, especially when her south node is activated by Mars and her personal history is under attack. Clinton’s natal Saturn, in detriment in Leo, also squares her nodes indicating a life heavily suffused with karmic lessons.
The remaining eclipses of this year will also directly affect both Sanders and Clinton’s natal charts. The solar eclipse of 1st September falls just one degree from Sanders Midheaven, and the lunar eclipse of September 16th falls on Sander’s south lunar node, this time both luminaries squaring Clinton’s natal Uranus. If Sanders appears fated to carry a revolutionary vision to the people as a break from the past, Clinton appears as his perfect foil, a woman in pursuit of the precedent of claiming the ‘top job’, but, in the midst of such ecliptic interaction the Uranian element is absolutely key – Uranus will conjunct Sander’s natal Mars on the September lunar eclipse. This could signal both ‘breakthrough’ and equally ‘martyrdom’, though no-one would wish the latter upon him, save his detractors. His Scorpio Asc makes him tenacious but equally susceptible to fault in the midst of power and deception – there are vulnerabilities at stake with both candidates. If they both have it all to fight for, what that ‘all’ means to them both as well as to us is deeply and significantly polarised.
The fight for the Democratic ticket and the challenges to its holder will continue to be ignited by astrological transits to both candidates charts in the run up to election day, but, that is a matter best served in a seperate post. Either way it is the longevity of the prevelant political ideology that is ultimately going to be the deciding factor. We are poised on a knife edge and it is the people who will decide, if their votes and voice are to count for anything…..
“The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves.” (3)
If, as it often seems, it is the People who have been made fools of by the political power game, in the current political climate, which has its tentacles reaching into all our personal interests, there is an emergent level of consciousness at work here that cannot be denied. It is a consciousness itself born out of the need to be free of hegemonic ideologies and their encumbant effects. Such consciousness holds attributes we might associate with Mercury and Uranus in combination and it is worth remembering here that Uranus north node is in mid Gemini. However, as the outcomes of many social revolutions and dictatorships alike have shown, being solely self determining, a hegemony unto oneself, is a seriously dangerous business, in fact it is the inherent danger and runs counter to the ‘grass-roots’ theme; to evolve and be able to establish coherence beyond its own anarchistic undertones such consciousness requires acceptance of ‘difference’ and a willingness to acknowledge that no one individual or group of individuals can represent ‘the whole truth’. This was always the caviat inherent in the March solar eclipse, the truth that requires revitalising in the process of emergence from the millenia of power struggles that have shaped the cocoon of our body politic. It applies equally to any sustainable future in which a new social vision might take flight.
We are looking then towards engendering a shared coherence based not on homogeneity or its ideological counterpart ie. democratic conformity, but, through bringing a mutable quality to its conscious formation and sustainability, and, while as a species we are not without precedent for such a context, those who have lived it have, historically, been suppressed, their fire all but stamped out – we must accept that we are both returning to the beginning and making a break from the past in rekindling that fire.
There is an evolutionary consequence to this – while we are not being called upon to re-invent the wheel, in exploring new ground we must be ready to make allowance for what we do not know, to suffer our own foolishness in the process. Such a task belongs to individuals who are, at core, secure enough within themselves to undertake the fools journey without its pitfalls undermining their self authority. It is perhaps a consequence of human consciousness that we do so, as we witness each other speaking and acting upon our personal truths. It requires of us a balancing act between being able to have the courage of our convictions and to be ready to learn from our errors, and laugh at ourselves in the process. Discernment without over-ruling judge-mentality is key, a signature of maturity as well as a more egalitarian society.
As we venture further into the cauldron of the year we will find this evolved and evolving capacity serves us all well as the matrix is now breaking away from rulership under the cardinal face off exemplified by the Pluto Uranus square. We will be resonating more with the meaning seeking qualities set up by Jupiter, Neptune, Saturn and the Moon’s nodes through their mutable T square active through Virgo, Pisces and Sagittarius. The sixth, ninth and twelth signs of the zodiac bring that much needed mutability into focus in the run up to the September eclipses, and how this will carry our impetus for social and personal evolution forward will be explored further in future posts. As we enter a self reflective period in which Mercury will station retro in Taurus joining Jupiter, Saturn, Mars and Pluto already retrograde it is the mutable Geminian signature and the revolutionary Uranian future which will bring its potential into conscious synthesis.
ROOT MEDICINE OF THE STARS ON EARTH 