as “Facing Our Shadow”
Autumn 2001
by Jessica Murray
As many have noted, the twin towers represented the dual sign Gemini, in which Saturn (the planet of consensus reality) has been opposing Pluto since August 2001. This opposition will be with us through the spring, though its lessons of responsibility and karma will not be confined to these months, nor should its teachings be singularly identified with the events of September 11th.
Pluto’s job in this transit is to undermine those societal values that need an overhaul. The opposition we are experiencing teaches that when the time has come for immense change, a culture’s civilized self-image (Saturn) will be traumatized, and its unacknowledged underbelly revealed. There is rot (Pluto) within every structure (Saturn).
The lesson here is not to demonize the forces that exist within the structure, but to look at the whole pattern. Energies kept covered up for a long time become distorted. What is being revealed is the dark side of global politics.
Responding from our emotional and moral layers of self (governed by the Moon, Venus and Jupiter), we may throw around terms like “evil”, as Ronald Reagan did when he called the Soviets “the Evil Empire” (back when they were our enemies). The same sort of symbolic projection is at work when churchmen call sexual urges the work of the devil. But as metaphysicians, we need to be wary of these appellations. We are not seeking to proclaim what we like, feel comfortable with, approve of, or find tolerable. We are seeking to understand archetypal forces.
The most basic fact of astrology is that one is born at a specific time and into a specific place for a reason. One starts where one is. We are here. Our government is what we have. We created it and finance it. Let us begin taking responsibility for what it has done, is doing and is planning to do.
Taking responsibility starts by waking up to our pattern of denial. There have been troubling developments leading up to the present crisis which even our xenophobic daily newspapers have duly reported. Had we been informing ourselves all along about the truth of what goes on outside our national borders, we would not be in such a state of stricken incredulity now. For example, the income gap between the highest and poorest countries was 30-to-one forty years ago. By 1997 it was 74-to-1. There is a direct connection between those numbers and the globalization of organized crime.
Does the average American have any real understanding of where the Muslim extremist gets his rage? We are shocked and appalled when we see on television anti-American demonstrations taking place in areas of the world which, up to this point, we could not even find on a map. Many Americans were unaware until recently of the ongoing U.S. bombing of Iraq, or of the mass child starvation there due to the campaign euphemistically referred to as “sanctions”. Innocents have been dying there, as innocents died in New York. Our president, who only recently took his first trip abroad, is a national symbol of our collective ignorance, and our country’s various delinquencies with the UN represent an ongoing refusal to take responsibility at the international level.
This is a stance that the Saturn opposition is rendering untenable.
For example, who supplies Israel and Saudi Arabia and Egypt et al with all that fancy ammo? (When there is a shooting in a suburban school, is not the first question the newsman asks, “Where did he get the gun?”?) And why have they been armed to the teeth like that?
Much has been written about the role of fossil fuels in U.S. foreign policy. We are at the point now where Big Oil has moved from being merely influential in government to being personified by it.
In his original proclamation of holy war, when Osama bin Laden demanded that the U.S. remove our troops from lands sacred to Islam, he centered his denunciation of the West around our much-touted secularity. But America does have a religion: the acquisition and consumption of wealth.
In the modern age, it is no longer spice, nor gold, but oil that has become talismanic in the American consciousness. A perverse symmetry exists between the American point of view and bin Laden’s, both fixated upon control of these ancient lands: the oil fields are our holy sites, too. The conflict in the Middle East has more in common with the Crusades of centuries ago than our misspeaking president realized.
If “Oil” is the answer, what might the questions be? Ask enough of them and the good guy/bad guy scenario starts to exhaust its viability, leading us beyond the compulsion of blame.
Karma works in some very intricate ways, but in the main it is a very simple concept, and morally neutral.
But what does Pluto care about such distinctions? Pluto does not honor national boundaries. From the point of view of the god of death and rebirth, to mourn one group’s deaths over another’s is myopic at best, blasphemous at worst.
Imagine the freedom that could come of Not Denying Anything any more.
Those of us who would wave flags, let us wave the flag of New York, the flag of Chechnya, the Balkans, the flags of Chiapas and East Timor, the flags for all of the African states whose people have been suffering so relentlessly that we can barely imagine how they endure. Those of us who would light candles, let us light one for all the precious dead, and for every man, woman and child alive. Let us pray to whomever we pray to, that we meet the years ahead with a dedication to clean the blood off our hands and put not one more drop upon them.
