Published in Reclaiming Quarterly Winter 2003

by Jessica Murray

October 2002

Ours is a notoriously immature culture. One could even go so far as to say we pride ourselves on our adolescent ethos. Youth is king; juvenility is cool. Our president was not offended when he was portrayed as a comic-book super-hero on the cover of the satirical German magazine Der Spiegel. He was flattered.

Our mass obsession with physical youthfulness has been widely noted; the very word “mature” has become a euphemism for “no longer young and beautiful”. But far more insidious is the damage our cult of immaturity has inflicted upon the non-physical aspects of our beings. As a group, we lack a maturity of mind and soul.

Maturity is not the same thing as intelligence. Americans suffer no lack of intelligence, if only in the classical sense of the word: access to education and information, of which we have a surfeit. If we do not read deeply enough in our newspapers, behind the puff pieces and beyond the infighting of national politics; and if we do not listen between the lines of the blaring television lead stories to see patterns of meaning, that is a problem of maturity.

The American mind suffers from a deadening superficiality. Our religious institutions have calcified into bureaucratic dogmatism, as institutions will, and have lost their ability to engage the numinous imagination. Church theologies do not help us to form the questions that would lead us deeper into our soul-lives; instead they offer pat answers to only those questions church fathers say should be asked. Religious seekers are not encouraged to seek at all; we are supposed to learn our answers by rote, as children recite the ABCs.

Theology in its most simplified form is fundamentalism, which one can find everywhere except in a social context informed by spiritual maturity. Were we encouraged from childhood to develop our spiritual selves, to cultivate our own unique cosmologies with increasing subtlety and artistry as we aged, the notion of a literal, static Paradise would find no takers. Such a reductionistic picture of the infinite inter-cyclic universe would be seen as a bizarre attempt by clerics to keep people in arrested development spiritually.

If philosophical maturity were valued in this country, a policymaker would be hired for the subtlety of his or her ideas. An elected official would be laughed off the podium if he came out with the kind of absurd black-and-white pronouncements that we have recently been hearing under the auspices of authoritative decree. Bad-guy/good-guy characterizations would be confined to kindergarten discussions, just as stick-figure drawings are appropriate at only the very beginning levels of making art. For a leader to declare that the rest of the world is “either with us or against us”, or that his enemies “hate freedom” (this, from a government that is starting to detain peace activists at airports!), would be considered insulting to the intelligence of his listeners.

Were political maturity valued in our civilization, pundits would be judged on the basis of their critical thinking. Government spokesmen would not dare to tell journalists to “watch what they say”, as if they were naughty children at a dinner party. Were ideological maturity the goal in public discourse, sound bites would be relegated to selling chewing gum, not used to sum up world affairs. Historical complexity would inform what was written on the Op Ed page. Any mention of Saddam Hussein’s current weapons capabilities would logically be accompanied by at least a fleeting mention of the fact that the Reagan/Bush administration helped him plan and execute chemical weapon attacks against Iran in the ’80s. As it is, information-vendors blatantly indulge the public’s alarmingly short attention span, instead of doing their job: expanding our understanding by providing intelligent context.

It is no accident, of course, that TV commentators do nothing to challenge the public’s ignorance. The American telecommunications industry has fundamentally changed over the past few years. A few immensely powerful conglomerates now control all the major media outlets, and the industry’s ties to Washington have never been tighter. Consumers of the evening news who imagine that this will not skew the information they are receiving have not heard the one about the fox guarding the hen house.

And what about consumer maturity? In a capitalistic society, free-thinkers are a liability. They are less likely to follow orders as to what to consume. Fashion, whether in clothes, tech toys or foreign policy, depends upon suggestibility and conformity; and both are more likely when the self is insecure or undeveloped. Blue jeans manufacturers may insist that by buying their jeans, purchasers are making a wild and crazy statement of uniqueness; but the truth remains that self-aware individuals are less likely to throng into Macy’s to acquire the latest self-image prop.

Youth is by definition a phase of life with a shaky ego-structure, and it is to youth that most of the advertising in America is directed. When we are teenagers, our relative identity-lessness and yearning to fit in with our peers make us a Madison Avenue gold mine. By the time we reach chronological adulthood, we have theoretically developed the requisite ego cohesion to be able to say, “That may be a nice pair of jeans, but I do not need them in order to have an identity.” It is the mature buyer who is more likely to beware.

However, in a cultural milieu where chronological age does not guarantee true maturity– indeed, where most forms of maturity are suspect at best and despised at worst– it is questionable whether this discernment ever fully develops. Without discernment, we are left with insecurity. And we buy, blindly.

As I write these words, the clique of oilmen who run this country are trying to bully us into war, despite immense and obvious moral, financial, international and even military counter-indications. Beginning their big media push the day after September 11th 2002, the president’s viziers made no bones about trying to “sell” the war, blandly admitting that their timing was “a centerpiece of the strategy”; that is, the strategy to exploit the fear and grief of the citizenry. Mention was made of the conventional marketing wisdom to delay the introduction of a new product until after Labor Day.

Being targeted, pitched at, and gulled is so much a part of the life of the average American consumer that as we listen now to our businessmen-cum-politicians smugly discussing the details of their plan to sell us a campaign of massive death and suffering, we are almost numb enough to accept it. The movie “Wag the Dog”, which presented as laughable just a few years ago a situation very similar to what is happening now, would fail as satire today because the scenario has lost its giggle of implausibility. The perversely ridiculous has become the perversely unremarkable.

It is time to reclaim our adulthood. We must summon up an emergency dose of intellectual maturity in order to expose and denounce the appalling onslaught of propaganda polluting the mass media, and to inform ourselves through alternative means, for example, the international press, as to what is really going on in the world. We need emotional maturity, too, an example of which would be to modify our recent 9/11 mourning rituals to reflect the reality that throughout these months of American bombing, the Afghani people have suffered as a percentage of their population more than twice the deaths we suffered that dreadful day.

Spiritual maturity would mean refusing to be infantilized by morally bankrupt leaders. We must try, like big girls and boys, to rein in our fear and reactivity, and opt instead to follow a planetary vision bolstered by a genuine curiosity about what is going on outside our country’s borders. Such maturity would mean rousing ourselves out of denial and credulity, and taking stock of what our government is doing in our name. It would mean using our thinking minds independently, grounding ourselves in the facts while centering ourselves in the heart.

It is urgently necessary that we grow up now. Within every one of us at birth is a magnificent potential, a maturity designed to be grown into, to be lovingly cultivated as we age. We must take another look at our particular version of adulthood, re-interpret it, embrace it and put it into action. If we do not, we will suffer, and cause suffering, like lost and dangerous children.

by Jessica Murray

October 2002

Published in The Mountain Astrologer, June/July 2003

Poor old Saturn, the planet of responsibility, is usually quite narrowly considered. We tend to think of its lessons as material tasks and calls to filial duty: I must go to work on Monday morning; I must call Grandma on Tuesday; I must settle down and become a parent before I’m thirty.

But Saturn has to do with being grown-up in all arenas of life. Its recent duet with Pluto has intensified the question of what it means to mature in all of our human roles, not just the immediate ones.

The Pluto-Saturn opposition of 2001-2 (at this writing, it is still in orb) has brought to light an intense need, both individually and collectively, to delve more deeply into Saturn’s mysteries. Its questions have been fanning out from the personal into the societal and the moral. What does it mean to be a mature citizen? What is truly adult behavior, as regards membership in the world family?

Ours is a notoriously immature culture. One could even go so far as to say we pride ourselves on our adolescent ethos, merrily oblivious as we gallop roughshod over the rest of the world. In the Dane Rudhyar version of the USA birth chart ¹, Sagittarius rising suggests an overgrown and overconfident teenager ². Youth is king in this country; juvenility is cool. Puerile and easy-going, untested by the rigors of life, the good-natured frat boy currently in the Oval Office matches this ascendant perfectly. The man was not offended when he was portrayed as a cartoon superhero on the cover of the satirical German magazine Der Spiegel. He was flattered.

Saturn forms a harsh square with the sun in the birth chart of the USA, making it difficult to assimilate those principles Saturn represents: cool-headedness, patience and caution among them. Indeed, Saturn’s particular area of genius, the hard-won experience that comes of growing older, is seen in our culture as a shame and a curse. So thoroughly is aging devalued in America that it is difficult to think of it as simply a natural process, with pros and cons like any other. Our mass infatuation with physical youthfulness has grown so entrenched that the very word “mature” has become a euphemism for “no longer young and beautiful”. But it is upon the non-physical aspects of our beings that our cult of immaturity inflicts the most insidious damage. As a group, we lack a maturity of mind and soul.

Maturity is not the same thing as intelligence. Americans suffer no lack of intelligence, if only in the classical sense of the word: access to education and information , of which we have a surfeit. Our collective Mars in Gemini attests to a restless engagement with information of every stripe; by now surely there are enough television channels to have the quantity issue, if not the quality issue, covered. If we do not read deeply enough into our newspapers, behind the puff pieces and beyond the infighting of national politics; and if we do not listen between the lines of the blaring television lead stories to see patterns of meaning, that is a problem of maturity.

Saturn’s transit through Gemini has just about run its two-and-a-half-year course. When the planet of limitation engages the sign of information, one expects to see all manner of variations on the theme of insufficiency of knowledge. Many have noted, for example, that since 9/11 Americans have been forced to consider parts of the world which heretofore we could not even find on a map. Perhaps even more dismaying is that the transit has exposed gross failures in applying what information we do have; witness the flak our several intelligence agencies got for not connecting the dots (a quintessentially Geminian phrase). Saturn in Gemini is represented by any and all restrictions upon, and dearth of, information flow. Incredulity is a mild version of this: when long-ignored anti-American elements lethally reared their heads two Septembers ago, the first and most abiding reaction was mass shock.

The transit of Saturn through Gemini has pointed up the limits of our anti-intellectual pop culture, with its breezy, scattered approach to information. It has never been more obvious, certainly to pundits in the rest of the world, that the American mind suffers from a deadening superficiality. Famously pluralistic, our society entertains a vast and diverse number of beliefs, as indicated by the Jupiter that conjoins our country’s Sun; yet we lack a thoughtful, in-depth philosophical life as a culture. Our religious institutions have calcified into bureaucratic dogmatism, as institutions will, and have lost their ability to engage the numinous imagination. Church theologies do not help us to form the questions that would lead us deeper into our soul-lives; instead they offer pat answers to only those questions church fathers say should be asked. Religious seekers are not encouraged to seek at all; we are supposed to learn our answers by rote, as children recite the ABCs.

This is a dangerous climate upon which to visit the transit of Pluto through Sagittarius, the sign of religion, which for years has had astrologers speculating about the likelihood of holy wars. The planes hit the World Trade Center a matter of hours after Pluto had regained its first Saturn-opposition placement ³ (conjunct within a degree of exactitude the USA Ascendant): it was at this moment when the full significance of fundamentalist religion came crashing into the American consciousness. As the Descendant (“open enemies”) of the birth chart is a mirror of the Ascendant, the transits of Saturn and Pluto over those angles seem to be telling us that Islamic fundamentalism is a mirror of our own. Whatever variation it takes, fundamentalism is theology in its most simplified form; and one can find it everywhere except in a social context informed by spiritual maturity. The lesson of Pluto in Sagittarius is to deepen and empower ourselves theologically; the lesson of Saturn is to take the requisite moral responsibility to do so.

Were we encouraged from childhood to develop our spiritual selves, to cultivate our own unique cosmologies with increasing artistry as we aged, the notion of a literal, static Paradise would find no takers. Such a reductionistic picture of the infinite inter-cyclic universe would be seen as a bizarre attempt by clerics to keep people in arrested development spiritually.

In our secular culture, it is not religion so much as politics and ideology that get the press (the recent spate of pedophile priests headlines notwithstanding), and come up similarly short in terms of the Saturn/Pluto challenge. If philosophical maturity were valued in this country, a policymaker would be hired for the subtlety of his or her ideas. An elected official would be laughed off the podium if he came out with the kind of absurd black-and-white pronouncements that we have recently been hearing under the auspices of authoritative decree. For our president to declare that the rest of the world is “either with us or against us”, or that his enemies “hate freedom” (this, from a government that detains peace activists at airports!), would be considered insulting to the intelligence of his listeners.

Were political maturity valued in our civilization, pundits would be judged on the basis of their critical thinking. Government spokesmen would not dare to tell journalists to “watch what they say”, as if they were naughty children at a dinner party. Bad-guy/good-guy characterizations would be confined to kindergarten discussions, just as stick-figure drawings are appropriate at only the very beginning levels of making art. For a leader to invoke terms like “evil” is to employ Pluto imagery in its crudest and least insightful form, clamping down (Saturn) upon the dark in order to contain it, as churchmen do when they call sexual urges the work of the devil. Such scare tactics might be used by an irresponsible adult on credulous children.

By contrast, Saturn-Pluto in its mature expression might be exemplified by a national father figure who could role-model considered judgment, the better to inform and problem-solve. What our foreign policy desperately lacks is sobriety.

Perhaps the most obvious example of Saturn-in-Gemini on a cultural level is propaganda, a system of disinformation currently being pushed to fever pitch. Propaganda is inimical to intellectual maturity. Were ideological maturity the goal in our national discourse, sound bites would be relegated to selling chewing gum, not used to sum up world affairs. Historical complexity would inform what was written on the Op Ed page. Any talk of Saddam Hussein’s current weapons capabilities would logically be accompanied by at least a fleeting mention of the fact that the Reagan/Bush administration helped him plan and execute chemical weapon attacks against Iran in the ’80s. As it is, information-vendors blatantly indulge the public’s ludicrously short attention span, when they could be actually expanding our understanding by providing intelligent context.

It is no accident, of course, that TV commentators do nothing to challenge the public’s ignorance. The American telecommunications industry has fundamentally changed over the past few years. Pluto in the 2nd house of the USA chart exposes the subtext of moneyed plutocracy which has always existed beneath American democracy. Now that we are in the information age, information is the coin of the realm; thus control of the national resources implies control of the media. A few immensely powerful conglomerates now control all the major media outlets, and the industry’s ties to Washington have never been tighter. Consumers of the network news who imagine that this will not skew the information they are receiving have not heard the one about the fox guarding the hen house.

The destructive logic of any chart with a second-house Pluto would have one consume until one burned out. This is as true for countries as for individuals: with America in the lead, the industrialized nations are poised to shop-till-we-drop on a planetary scale — though the Saturn principle could curb this madness, and render it productive, were we able to integrate Saturn’s gift of maturity. The challenge is heightened by the nature of capitalistic society, where free-thinkers are a liability. Independent-minded folks are less likely to follow orders as to what to consume. Fashion, whether in clothes, tech toys or foreign policy, depends upon suggestibility and conformity; and both are more likely when the self is insecure or undeveloped. Blue jeans manufacturers may insist that by buying their particular style of jeans, purchasers are making a wild and crazy statement of uniqueness; but the truth remains that self-aware individuals are less likely to throng into Macy’s to acquire the latest self-image prop.

Youth is by definition a phase of life with a shaky ego-structure, and it is to youth that most of the advertising in America is directed. When we are teenagers, our relative identity-lessness and yearning to fit in with our peers make us a Madison Avenue gold mine. By the time of the Saturn Return, at roughly age 29, we have theoretically developed the requisite ego cohesion to be able to say, “That may be a nice pair of jeans, but I do not need them in order to have an identity”. It is the mature buyer who is more likely to beware.

However, in a cultural milieu where chronological age does not guarantee true maturity– indeed, where most forms of maturity are suspect at best and despised at worst– it is questionable whether this discernment ever fully develops. Instead, we are left with Saturn’s darker features, fear and insecurity. So we buy whatever the cleverest advertisement is selling.

As a world citizen, the USA has shown itself to be stunningly indiscriminate as a consumer of the planet’s wealth. With Pluto in the house of resources, it is perhaps not surprising that we flirt with ecocide where the physical reality of our planet is concerned; as exemplified by our dismissiveness towards international environmental agreements. But with the ingress of Pluto into Sagittarius a newly fervent quality started to become manifest. It is becoming impossible to deny that America’s acquisition and consumption of wealth has the blind aspiration of a religion — a higher good needing no justification. And in the modern age, it is no longer spice, nor gold, but oil that has become the central talisman of this religion. Pluto (oil) is the holy grail (Sagittarius) of America’s new crusades.

Sub-rational and fanatical, Pluto’s drives make no sense to the civilized mind (Saturn); but there is no more powerful planet in the chart. As if hell-bent, the USA has allowed an unsavory group of world-resource control freaks to slip into the rulership of our government. As I write these words, the clique of oilmen who run this country are trying to bully us into war, despite immense and obvious moral, financial, international and even military counter-indications. Beginning their big media push the day after September 11th 2002, the president’s viziers made no bones about trying to “sell” the war, blandly admitting that their timing was “a centerpiece of the strategy”; that is, the strategy to exploit the fear and grief of the citizenry. Mention was made of the conventional marketing wisdom to delay the introduction of a new product until after Labor Day.

Being targeted, pitched at, and gulled is so much a part of the life of the average American consumer that we are downright blasé as we listen now to our businessmen-cum-politicians smugly discussing the details of their plan to dominate the oil market by selling us a campaign of massive death and suffering. The movie “Wag the Dog”, which presented as laughable just a few years ago a situation very similar to what is happening now, would fail as satire today because the scenario has lost its giggle of implausibility. The darkly ridiculous has become the darkly unremarkable. Many Americans, their fears stoked daily by a mass media gone hysterical and maudlin by turns, would wearily go along with the government’s plans.

The mythic face of this government is a kind of Big Boss of the World, a persona traceable to our natal midheaven Saturn. This is an ignoble use of a noble placement. If as a culture we do not develop maturity, we have no recourse but to express the crude side of our elevated Saturn, arrogant in its leadership, cruel in its rigidity.

Clearly, if we want to slow and stop the trajectory of this petrochemical bloodlust, we must not wearily go along. To do so would be to give up our Saturn and submit to an eternal puerility. It is time to reclaim our adulthood. We must summon up an emergency dose of intellectual maturity in order to expose and denounce the appalling onslaught of propaganda polluting the mass media, and to inform ourselves through alternative means — for example, through the international press — as to what is really going on in the world. We need emotional maturity, too, an example of which would be to modify our recent 9/11 mourning rituals to reflect the reality that throughout these months of American bombing, the Afghani people have suffered as a percentage of their population more than twice the deaths we suffered that dreadful day.

Spiritual maturity would mean refusing to be infantilized by morally bankrupt leaders. We must try, like big girls and boys, to rein in our fear and reactivity, and opt instead to follow a planetary vision informed by a genuine curiosity about what is going on outside our country’s borders. Such maturity would mean rousing ourselves out of denial and credulity, and taking stock of what our government is doing in our name. It would mean using our thinking minds independently, grounding ourselves in the facts while centering ourselves in the heart.

It is urgently necessary that we grow up now. Every one of our natal charts has Saturn somewhere, indicating that within every one of us at birth is a magnificent potential, a maturity designed to be grown into, to be lovingly cultivated as we age. We must take another look at our particular version of adulthood, re-interpret it, embrace it and put it into action. If we do not, we will suffer, and cause suffering, like lost and dangerous children.

Notes:

D. Rudhyar, The Astrology of America’s Destiny, Vintage Books 1974 p.69

In arguing the case for this chart over the Gemini-rising version, Liz Greene points out, “Sagittarius is a cowboy at heart, whereas Gemini is a cultured intellectual”. The Outer Planets & Their Cycles” CRCS Publ. 1983, p. 106

T. Tarriktar, The Day the World Changed, TMA Dec01/Jan02

Published in Reclaiming Quarterly, Dec 2003

by Jessica Murray

Saturn will be conjoining our country’s Sun and our president’s Sun over the next several months and will spend two years in the sign of its detriment. Now is the time to sweep away the cobwebs around Saturn’s lore and dispense with some superstitions.

To work properly, Saturn’s function should express the principles of consistency, practicality and preservation. But the core meanings of a symbol can become lost in the translation from archetype to societal expression. There has been a lot of bad press and confused thinking about Saturn’s modern face, and looking at it through the lens of the old planetary laws raises some interesting questions.

Saturn has been said to govern risk-averse economics and bean-counters in general. This is a logical correspondence, because Saturn is the planet of maximized results through a minimized expenditure of resources. Leaving to Jupiter the sticky business of ethics and the spirit of the law, Saturn confines its attentions to the business sector and the letter of the law. One can see how the politics of pragmatism came to be associated with Saturn. But policymakers who claim allegiance to pragmatic thinking (because they know how well it plays in Peoria) often champion policies that are in fact astoundingly impractical. The question is, how well do we know Saturn? Would we know true pragmatism if we saw it?

Perhaps the litmus test for Saturn is whether the viewpoint in question relies on common sense (though this phrase needs to be used with caution, as it has so many wildly divergent champions as to render its meaning very slippery). Suffice it to say that Saturn is the most nuts-and-bolts of the ten planets: it has come to be linked not with visionary geniuses, but with competent statesmen. Clear-eyed and sober, Saturn inspires good managers to create efficient systems on a physical planet where relatively predictable laws are at work. It is supposed to make the trains run on time.

That said, finding Saturn in the public sphere is not as easy as one might think. Saturn is the planet of conservation, but it is by no means clear that Saturn’s rulership extends to conservatism in its generally understood political meaning. Let us apply a little Saturnine rigor to an examination of the symbolism at hand. If we agree that Saturn’s key features include keeping a cool head in a crisis, minimizing fuss so that systems work efficiently, and securing the viability of the future, how conservative are the National Rifle Association and Rush Limbaugh?

When a planetary archetype goes way out of balance, it runs amok. In the USA right now, we have lost hold of the reins of Saturn; it is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Rather than worrying about whether we are keening too far to the right or left, we need to reclaim Saturn’s essential teachings and put them to use. They are exactly what we need in order to lend some coherence to the quagmire we are in as a nation and as a world.

Let us begin by taking a look at what is commonly known as the Conservative Agenda, asking ourselves what is actually being conserved, and how effectively it is being done. The word conservative is often used, for example, to characterize the various religious sects which attempt through legal means to ban birth control and sex education. But in no way do they meet the criteria of the dry-eyed god of functionality: if a proposition veers off the trajectory of its own stated goal, Saturn will not endorse it. Programs to keep teenagers from having sex have a very low rate of empirical success and thus do not pass muster. Moreover, Saturn in and of itself has no time for emotion, and no interest in moral posturing one way or the other. Jupiterian types may thrill to the subject matter of a passionate debate, but Saturn cares only about results. Family-values crusades, with their penchant for histrionics and righteous denunciations, do not belong to Saturn.

The same critique could be made of what has been called the War on Some Drugs¹. Self-professed conservatives tend to endorse it, but how conservative is it? If we were to measure this campaign against the yardstick of Saturn, we would first of all have trouble with the jarring inconsistency at its base: the core advocates of this domestic policy tend to favor a foreign policy which, ironically, finances regimes worldwide which make their money selling drugs, via networks so entrenched and so lucrative that our own government has exploited them, in Latin America and elsewhere, to finance its covert operations.

If wagers of this war imagine the goal to be stamping out addiction, they lack the barest shred of evidence upon which to base their optimism. Year after year, thousands of millions of tax dollars are pumped into eradicating certain targeted plants at their source, with battle zones ranging from the jungles of Columbia to the backwoods of Mendocino; but studies continue to show an overall continual increase in drug use. And if we were really thinking conservatively, surely Saturnine logic would lead us to conclude that long prison sentences to punish the use of certain, but not all, drugs (and not even the most dangerous of drugs) make no economic sense to anyone but the prison industry. Whatever is motivating this doomed campaign, it is not Saturn.

Another group of self-described conservatives who seem to be blind to the law of conservation are the policymakers who respond to budget crises by lopping off human service programs. Ethical considerations aside, are these decisions practical; do they conserve resources; are they driven by future considerations? A truly Saturnine approach would use demographic facts and figures to project what would be likely to happen, for example, to desperate public-assistance recipients when their small scraps of help dry up and disappear. We might look to the example set by Ronald Reagan, known as a conservative’s conservative, whose public-funding-slashing approach to governance is considered to have launched the modern reality of thousands of mental patients fending for themselves on the streets of California cities. Saturn’s approach to harm is not to fight it but to prevent it. Herein lies the genius of true conservatism. The Reagan paradigm could be called many things, but surely the one thing it was not was conservative.

In its healthy expression, Saturn promotes survival into the future by faithfully preserving that which has proven worthy from the past. This is the planet that reminds us to conserve berries so there is something to eat in the winter, and to conserve the rainforest so the ecosystem may continue to thrive. With Saturn as their muse, scientists, humanists, engineers and ecologists are continually coming up with new ideas about how to safeguard the world’s resources — through sustainable agriculture, for example — which cost little and have been shown to work very well. Conservationists are also rediscovering methodologies truly deserving of the Saturnine term traditional, by means of which pre-industrial cultures managed infrastructure and food production while honoring the natural cycles of vegetation and wildlife.

Such efforts get at the very heart of what Saturn is about. But it is noteworthy that they are being pursued in spite of, rather than at the behest of, the institutions in our society which hold worldly power. For example, clean-fuel cars could have been built decades ago were it not for the relentless resistance of the automakers and their government representatives. In the current era of ecological crisis, the most genuinely conservative ideas are showing up at the fringes of consensus thinking.

The sign Saturn is now in governs the care, feeding and shelter of a society’s most vulnerable members. The Children’s Defense Fund exemplifies the transit in name and deed. Among this group’s most successful projects is the Head Start program, which is well-known as a lifesaver for children and teenagers who would otherwise be swallowed up by the downward spiral of poverty. Its advocates are seeking to increase the program’s funding by an amount of money that could only be called consummately conservative (the sum works out to be one half of one per cent of the Pentagon budget). When a program has a track record years in the building and costs very little to create results, it has passed the Saturn test: Head Start should be a conservative’s dream program.

The Bush administration wants to dismantle Head Start. This is not a Saturn-driven decision. Elevated in the tenth house and showcased by a square to the Sun, Saturn is very strong in the USA chart. If all that Saturn energy isn’t going into stabilizing and preserving and shoring up the future, where is it going?

It seems to be feeding into what the Jungians would call its shadow side. This is not the fault of planetary law, but of our lack of understanding. Misunderstood Saturn results in fear: fear of the new, fear of loss of control. This in turn excites in the native a punitive impulse, of the sort that often prickles beneath the surface of crusades to keep God in the pledge of allegiance and condoms out of the pockets of teenagers.

We must pay more attention to the difference between the higher and the lower uses of the Saturn archetype — between true conservatism and its distortions through fear. The planet Saturn and the sign Cancer are both associated with security , a concept that has been heating up the airwaves in this country for two years now. The transit now upon us is likely to raise the issue to fever pitch.

What is the difference between security driven by common sense and security driven by fear?

Before we can know this, we need to rescue the concept from the sound bite makers: security has become a buzzword. The term is being touted with numbing frequency in public discourse, while being affixed with increasingly counter-intuitive connotations. Far from clarifying the issue, its endless official invocations are designed to manipulate and confuse. The only thing that seems certain is that whatever are called “security measures” by our government do not and will not stand up to the Saturn test of rendering us more secure.

“Fear is the mind-killer”, wrote Frank Herbert in Dune. In one form or another, fear has been used by leaders throughout the ages to manipulate their subjects. To maintain control, heads of church and state have traditionally exaggerated threats to public safety, or put the focus on a scapegoat — a timeworn ploy which gave rise to the Yellow Peril, the Jewish Problem, the Red Menace, and the Devil himself. Designated enemies have always been a surefire means of keeping a populace terrified and compliant.

In postwar America, the fear of invasion by evil outsiders segued smoothly from the fear of vanquished Axis forces to the fear of the creeping Communist Threat. When that particular bogeyman was banished with the fall of the Berlin Wall, ending the Cold War practically overnight, one could sense in this country an almost palpable collective sigh of relief at the retreat of the nightmare that had terrorized every baby boomer’s childhood. For the first time in memory, a true feeling of security was evident, as millions of people began to imagine a world free from the specter of nuclear holocaust.

But the hiatus was a short one. The campaign of fear we labor under today was launched as soon as the airplanes hit the towers on September 11th, 2001. Now, a couple of years later, the Bush administration has announced its intention to pump billions into building new atom bombs (the munitions makers are taking pains to qualify these as “midlevel” nuclear devices; presumably to produce only “half a Hiroshima”²).

Whether a return to nuclear build-up actually makes Americans more secure, or even subjectively more secure, is a question that has not enjoyed the widespread debate it would seem to deserve; for the Bush administration has been basking in an almost total absence of intelligent criticism from Congress and from most American citizens. People don’t think clearly when they are in a state of continuous anxiety. The object of this anxiety is anti-American terrorism orchestrated by foreigners, and the agent of this anxiety is domestic psychological terrorism orchestrated by Washington.

Surely this campaign has succeeded beyond its architects’ wildest dreams. September Eleventh used to be just a date, and is now a larger-than-life cultural legend. The ascension of the event from factual reality to galvanizing political tool has happened so rapidly and so completely that there has been speculation, supported by revelations now dribbling out about ignored pre-attack CIA warnings, that the World Trade Center tragedy was anticipated and allowed to happen by the cartel whose interests have profited most from it.³ Whether this explosive suspicion is ever proven, or even allowed to be pursued, we cannot know at this writing. What we do know is that with September Eleventh, the enterprise that used to be called the military-industrial complex has hit pay dirt.

Washington’s fear mongering over the past couple of years has worked as well as it has by meticulous design.⁴ Bush’s people have kept the public in thrall by means of top-of-the-line PR consultants (such as John Rendon, who calls himself a “perception manager”), inflammatory and obfuscating language (e.g.” axis of evil”) and primary-color-coded fear charts. Having secured control of a corporate media whose approach to debate is to shut out actual Middle East experts while showcasing the in-house opinions of ex-generals, the Bush administration has assembled an unprecedented sophisticated propaganda machine, its key precepts being terror and security.

Under the banner of keeping Americans secure from a numberless gaggle of stateless, nameless, faceless enemies, our government has snowed many otherwise intelligent people into buying the most blatantly fallacious arguments for war. To add insult to injury, the public is footing the bill when it can least afford to do so. Draconian domestic budget cuts are occurring at the same time as gargantuan increases in military funding. Taxpayers who are so financially strapped that they are refusing tax increases to keep public schools open are nonetheless green lighting the Pentagon budget to bloat into surreal proportions. The Bush administration is now easing six million dollars per hour out of American taxpayers’ pockets to fund the occupation of Iraq, an amount twice what it was predicted to cost a few months ago.

As a concept, terrorism has shown itself to be amazingly adaptive. The word terrorist has been gradually expanding in meaning, a trend signaled by the president’s introduction last year of the qualified phrase terrorist-type organization during his unsuccessful campaign to suggest a link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Whereas at first the term terrorist confined itself primarily to the WTC highjackers, now it is being pressed into service to refer to anything from anti-dictatorship guerillas in the jungles of the Philippines to Iraqi teenagers who throw rocks at G.I.s. Terrorist has become an all-purpose label, intended to trigger a vague and all-encompassing fear (the most disempowering kind) among American citizens so that we will look to our government to protect us by any means necessary.

Under the guise of fighting this mysterious million-headed hydra, Washington spinmeisters have made similarly ambitious use of the term security. Fear is stoked, and then security is promised. This maneuver has been deployed not only in the realm of foreign policy but also in any corner of the domestic realm where our astoundingly cynical leaders can use it to score an advantage. Bush’s re-election campaign is to be launched in New York City with the ruined site of the World Trade Center in the background, a setting designed to reawaken in his audience feelings of vengeance, dread and helplessness.

Flaunting the specter of another attack on American soil, government spokesmen have all but convinced the public that rounding up, incarcerating and deporting immigrants of every stripe, in flagrant violation of national law and custom, is necessary for the personal safety of those of us who do not (as yet) fit the profile. In a development almost unimaginable just a few years ago, the proudly democratic people of the United States have been cowed by the millions into endorsing such police-state tactics as the use of torture on untried incarcerees; and the use of wide-ranging domestic surveillance by a new mega-agency whose title appears to have been deliberately modeled after Nazi nomenclature, “homeland” substituted for “fatherland”.

For a people as anti-authority as Americans are supposed to be, it is noteworthy that although thousands of ordinary commuters and tourists have mistakenly been flagged by terrorist-tracking “no-fly” lists, there have been relatively few outraged voices demanding that the system be reined in. People are so scared they are even obediently taking their shoes off in front of strangers — without a whimper of complaint or a snicker of irony –while waiting in line at the airport. With big signs overhead solemnly proclaiming that security is no laughing matter, we watch our Adidas glide by on a conveyor belt staffed by the underpaid security workers who are presumably our last line of defense.

Cancer governs defense of the home front, so we can be sure that Saturn in Cancer is going to stir up interest in everything from fortified national borders to strengthened locks and burglar alarms. The sign Cancer is closely linked to biological survival, whence it gets its keen awareness of tribal and blood identity. These instincts, when used consciously, give Cancer the capacity, unique among the twelve signs, to protect itself and its loved ones skillfully and appropriately. But an irrational fear of strangers (non-family, non-familiar) can afflict low-level Cancer in the personal realm; and an irrational fear of aliens and foreign governments is the corresponding dark side in the collective realm. Cancer does not parse intellectually or assess pragmatically when it determines the likelihood of threat. It is a water sign, and reacts from feeling. This makes it all the more susceptible to overreaction when Saturn is out of balance.

We are at the point now where the word defense in the national lexicon has effectively come to mean the capability of destroying the world many times over. With the White House to generate rationales for it and the IRS to launder money for it, the Pentagon provides the structure and hardware for the most lethal war capacity the world has ever known.

A significant juncture point in the American annals of fear occurred at the moment in our history when the old Department of War was renamed the Department of Defense. Though the new moniker matches more closely the symbolism of the Cancer sun in the USA chart, our current Department of Defense is of course not defensive at all, but virulently and increasingly aggressive, with a military expenditure will soon equal that of the next fifteen most powerful states combined. Over the past 100 years, our country has been responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people all over the world. In Viet Nam we left no less than three million dead; in Afghanistan and Iraq alone we have killed — at this writing — two innocents for every one innocent killed in New York two Septembers ago.

It is remarkable that such staggering statistics fail to dislodge the widespread belief on the part of many Americans that we are merely defending ourselves; an idea whose credibility has now been strained even further by the claim of pre-emptive defense. It says something about our collective Cancerian sensibility that although Bush’s warnings about Iraq’s military were ill-disguised pretexts from the beginning, the populace as a whole responded with very little skepticism. Unconscious Cancerian individuals express the same psychology when they take very personally presumed threats to their security, genuinely feeling themselves vulnerable to attack where no objective danger exists.

When expressed without awareness and pushed to the extreme, an astrological archetype becomes the thing it abhors. Misapplied, Saturn’s instinct to conserve only brings about waste and dissolution. Pursued blindly, Cancer’s insistence upon security renders it less secure in the end. In the weeks after Bush claimed the right to pre-emptive warfare in Iraq, India announced it would consider a pre-emptive strike against Pakistan; a development that was probably not what the security-conscious among Bush’s supporters had in mind. Neither is the apartheid wall (or “security barrier”) Israel is now building in occupied Palestine likely to keep Israelis secure from the rage of the wretched, humiliated people on its other side.

Just as we must reclaim the true meaning of conservatism, we must redefine true security. There has never been a better time to do so: individual and collective safety concerns become more tense and contracted month by month as Saturn makes its way through Cancer. We do not want to have to go through the defensive shutdowns in our personal lives that can occur when Saturn in Cancer is out of balance, and we do not want the transit skewed by fear when it crosses the U.S. chart.

Saturn’s collective shadow guise is fascism, or the willingness of a people to “scoot over and leave the driving to Daddy”⁵. Giving up our Saturn by projecting it outwards onto some ill-chosen father figure, we lose our chance to develop self-mastery. The challenge we are facing is perfectly reflected in the transit’s symbolism: Cancer, the sign of the mother, and Saturn, the planet of the father, are forcing us to confront deeply primal issues of child/parent, helplessness/authority and dependent/protector. These themes will be played out emotionally and repeatedly in the public arena over the months to come, and if we do not change the script we are currently following, the drama will feature the people in the role of the vulnerable child, and a tyrannical government in the role of the oppressive guardian.

But another scenario is possible. Were enough individuals to commit to the necessary self-reflection, we could fulfill the real promise of Saturn in Cancer, rather than play out its reactive distortion. If the transit could be said to have an intention, it is that each of us nurture and protect ourselves and our fellows in ever-more-authentic ways; that is, in ways that actually work. The potential for individuals and society at large to benefit from deliberate, engaged self-parenting is stronger than it has been for thirty years. Once the inner child is nourished, there is no need to be enslaved by a false parent in the outside world.

This is the key to the transit now upon us, and for those who do not submit to collective fear, the opportunities will be there in full force to turn the key in the lock. Only in this way can we know real security. We will require no strongman-father to promise not to abandon us, for we will be un-abandonable. We will be impervious to protectionist blackmail, for we will trust ourselves to know how to make our lives safe. We will be the wise, careful parent we always wanted to have.

Notes:

1 Jon Carroll, San Francisco Chronicle

2 Ted Kennedy, debating the Republican munitions measure in the Senate, July 2003.

3 See http://unansweredquestions.org

4 See Weapons of Mass Deception by Rampton and Stauber, Tarcher/Penguin 2003

5 David Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, describing Orwell’s proles

by Jessica Murray

Money as taboo

Pluto is the planet of taboos. How appropriate it is that the god of Hell is the governor of these festering energies, always in the atmosphere but rarely discussed honestly and directly. The danger attached to these ideas causes baroque mythologies to build up around them, a system of apologias which would provide a fascinating self-study if we had the courage to look into them. In our own natal chart, Pluto’s placement points to issues we may be semi-aware of but rarely look into, because we simply don’t know what to do with them.

It is human to resist confronting this realm of the psyche. As individuals, it is difficult to even begin without a trusted, dispassionate guide. We need help negotiating that dark, uneven path, which is why we have therapists and AA groups. But what do whole countries do with their Pluto issues?

For the United States, the big taboo is money. Our enthrallment with the world of matter is something we are all too aware of, but don’t know what to do with. In the USA birth chart (July 4th, 1776, 5:10 pm, Philadelphia, Pa), Pluto resides in the second house, the house of valuables, territory, things of worth. Materialism is America’s elephant in the middle of the room.

Pluto represents the forces of regeneration which manifest as takeovers and makeovers. The second house governs resources and ownership. This placement, whether in the chart of an individual or a country, links the planet of control together with the activity of possessing.

Obsession

Through this astrological lens we can start to make sense of why money is so central to the American ethos. No other topic is held with such fierce ambivalence: coveted above all else, yet strangely despised. It is rare to hear money talked about in a sober, rational way; instead it is approached with a kind of magical thinking masked in a façade of dead seriousness. Obsessing about money sucks the energy out of Americans from every socioeconomic faction, from the high to the low, the haves right along with the have-nots.

If your natal Pluto is in this house, you are familiar with the intensity it puts into your financial dealings. You may have found that your personal karma involves “going through hell (Pluto) and back” as regards earning, selling, buying and saving. Similarly, as a group entity, America is destined to grapple with intensified financial dealings. We are meant to go through economic hell and – if we’re smart – climb back up into the light, having matured as a culture.

Certainly it is obvious to the rest of the world that the USA has a desperately neurotic relationship with money. The problem is that it is not obvious to us. Individual members of a collective inevitably have a hard time seeing the idiosyncrasies of the whole of which they are a part. But as astrologers, we are in a good position to achieve this perspective; and as souls who have incarnated into incomparably perilous times, it would seem that we had the responsibility to use it.

Considering the degree of impact our financial dysfunction has upon the world at large, it is remarkable that more thoughtful analysis is not attempted on the subject. From our frenzied consumerism to our obsession with security, we are fixated on money without any sense of what it means in the big picture.

America has been using her Pluto in the 2nd house like a nonstop partygoer, eating and drinking herself into oblivion and then shopping for the next round.

Pluto’s house placement

Let’s review how Pluto affects the activities of a given house.

What house does your natal Pluto occupy? Here is where you find yourself simultaneously repelled and fascinated by a certain set of activities. You may invest more time and energy into them than you’d want others to know about. Or you may avoid them like the plague. Even activities that would seem to be as rote and prosaic as commuting or using the telephone (3rd house) may be associated with feelings of danger or compulsion. This is not because of the activities themselves. It is because, for you, that house’s activities channel deeply compelling forces. Unprocessed feelings and urges bubble up from the depths of the unconscious, and play themselves out through the activities designated by your Pluto placement.

Pluto in America’s 2nd house does not mean that money and territory are fated to be a problem. Our money issues are merely symptomatic. At issue is our collective karma about right use of power, which gets expressed through the way we use our resources.

Material wealth is not the origin of our power as a nation. But we think it is. That is the problem.

The pathology of power

Pluto’s meaning encompasses decay, compulsion and shame. But what does this have to do with power?

The placement of this planet in the natal chart shows us where we have been operating undercover – literally (hidden affairs, espionage) or undercover of awareness – and have cultivated, over time, a set of obsessive habits. These take up residence in our unconscious, where they don’t have to answer to criticism.

Psychology tells us that repressed material gains potency as a result of the energy invested in keeping it secret. Astrology tells us that Pluto governs the Dark Mysteries of death and rebirth, which, when tapped, allow us to access tremendous power. But unless mindfully used, that power waxes destructive.

However you explain the potency of Pluto, it is the source of the greatest power available to the chart. And as a first step in getting in touch with it, we have to look at how we misuse it. Does America misuse the power of money? Our country has more wealth at its disposal than any nation that has ever existed on Earth. Where does it all go?

Most of us don’t like to think about how much of the national budget goes to the Pentagon, but let’s look at it with the dispassionate eye of an accountant for a moment. At this writing, one hundred and eighty billion dollars of our money has been spent in Iraq over three years’ time. Whether or not it has been well-spent (killing and maiming innocents, destroying the infrastructure, reducing ancient holy sites to rubble, spreading depleted uranium throughout the air, soil and water, and convincing young Muslim idealists worldwide that Bin Laden was right), let us just try to wrap our minds around that number. We are talking about 250 million dollars a day.

Moreover, we are in debt. Major debt. It is beyond this writer’s capability to conceptualize the several trillion dollars that America is apparently in debt. And how are we making amends? We are giving away money to those who need it least. In a world where four billion people earn less than four dollars a day, our leaders are busy planning additional tax cuts for the already preposterously wealthy profiteers who put them in office. And so far, Congress and the public have been letting them do it.

It is time for America to raise its collective hand, as at a twelve-step meeting, and say: “I have a problem with money.”

Plutonian cover-ups

The Plutonian level of the psyche is masterful at covering itself up. Its operations tend to take place in their own little world under their own separate laws, quite apart from our self-image and its laws. Like a cult member avoiding questions from skeptical outsiders, we tend to resent being asked about the area designated by Pluto’s chart placement. We prepare ruses to throw people off the scent. Take another look at your own chart and ask yourself whether you protect your compulsions with stories that wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny.

When the will to grow is properly engaged, however, we can drum up the courage to challenge Pluto’s blind workings and access its power creatively. This requires seeing through the tales we tell ourselves about why we are riveted upon certain subjects in a not-altogether-wholesome way. The process of transforming Pluto from a destructive to a regenerative force begins with identifying the alibis and obfuscations that the unconscious mind has erected to keep our dramas intact.

In the natal chart, Pluto’s placement by house and aspect indicates our personal myths. In the national chart, it points to our collective myths. It takes a special kind of awareness to see through our own myths. Certainly it will take a great deal more consciousness than we have thus far been using, to admit that — as a nation comprising a mere five per cent of an increasingly impoverished world population — we Americans harbor some rather incongruous beliefs about wealth and entitlement.

Middle Class Bag Ladies

One example of such a myth is the entrenched middle-class fear – currently reaching epidemic proportions among midlife baby boomers — of becoming a bag lady. (A couple of generations ago, the same phobia was expressed by the quaint Dickensian phrase “ending up in the poor house“.) The genuinely indigent do not buy into these pictures, of course; they have their own stories. But among those whose middle-class expectations are slipping, as well as among many who would, by any standard, be described as quite well-off, a peculiar strain of financial panic is on the rise that might be called First-World poor-mouthing.

When the stark realities of the world economy are taken into account, we may find ourselves conceding that the bourgeois bag lady threat seems less than dire. Indeed, in the spirit of overall ecological balance, for the American middle class to consider lowering its standard of living just a tad might not be an altogether inappropriate idea. But Plutonian fixations resist global or philosophical perspectives, as nightmares resist logic. Pluto is an all-or-nothing planet and its myths follow suit. The bag lady scenario would have us believe that any lowering at all of our financial status quo will lead to starving in a gutter somewhere, and that’s all there is to it.

This dread of insolvency, even in Americans who by no stretch of the imagination could be considered impoverished, is viscerally and painfully real for millions of people. If nothing else, this certainly goes to show that everything is relative. Of interest here is that tell-tale certitude of doom, a tip-off that Pluto is involved. Those in the grip of this fear tend to defend the likelihood of their imminent poverty with a fervency that rivals that of a trial lawyer in a capital case.

But there may be a covert spiritual mechanism operating here as well. The bag lady obsession seems to involve a kind of reverse projection, by which the American middle class is inadvertently reflecting what is going on in the greater world. Rather than making it our business to address, in thought or deed, the actual destitution that exists almost everywhere except in our own tiny demographic minority, we seem to be identifying with global poverty unconsciously. We are, after all, psychically interconnected. Perhaps worrying about our own future “in the poor house” is the American way of feeling at one with the millions of victims of genocide, AIDS, war and diaspora we hear about daily in the news.

Absolute control

Pluto is the planet of absolute control. Wherever it is positioned in the chart, we want to dominate and manipulate something or someone. In your own chart, do you detect any of these urges in those areas of your life designated by Pluto’s placement?

The positioning of America’s Pluto tell us that in the mass mind, the sharing of resources is a counter-intuitive concept. That is, in the absence of an integrated national consciousness, Pluto will take over our behavior as regards physical valuables and compel actions which fly in the face of the more refined values we harbor as a culture. A consummate example of this drive at work is the “New American Century”, the not-all-that-secret doctrine erected by our shadowy Washington king-makers. This document outlines, quite specifically, a geopolitical and military plan of action whereby our corporate titans would achieve absolute control of the world’s resources. (And here we thought that I-want-to-rule-the-world thing was just a comic book-villain trope.)

Larger-than-life and unapologetically amoral, Pluto’s vision is one of straight-up power; leaving such niceties as social justice and moral responsibility to the other planets. Plutonian impulses are too raw to be expressed on their own. Unless softened by Venus and Jupiter (personal and ethical values) and boundaried by Saturn (civil law), our Plutos wouldn’t be allowed out in polite society. Unalloyed, the planet would get us locked up, or impeached for war crimes (or would, if we had a working democracy).

The Earth plane

Let us look more closely at what we mean when we use the term materialism, a classic 2nd-house issue.

The 2nd is the house that most directly refers to life in the tangible realm, and here we immediately run into the limitations of cultural assumption. Unlike in ancient philosophies like astrology, which divides all experience down into four utterly equal parts (matter, thought, emotion and spirit), in modern scientific thought it is axiomatic that the realm of matter has greater validity than the other realms.

Modern thinkers presume that the nature of physical things is incontestably objective, whereas all other experience is more or less subjective (the New Physics has refuted this, of course, but consensus opinion has been slow to register the news). The language we use to speak about such things tells the tale. An opinion is “only an opinion”, whereas an object “really exists”.

Material things are thought to live out there in the external world, whereas we live in here in our internal world. The barrier between these worlds is seen as an absolute existential divide. Moreover, if the realm of matter has a monopoly on realness, and money is a concentrated symbol of matter, it follows that money is über-real. Ideas, by contrast, are given only qualified credence in our society; usually only marketable ideas are considered “real”. Our poor feelings are seen as having even less credibility. And intuitions? They are snubbed entirely.

With Pluto in the 2nd house of America’s chart, our selective interest in the physical plane is taken to an extreme of slavish devotion. Attention is directed to the material world and kept there, holding us captive to the bizarre assumption that our survival depends upon material security exclusively. Throughout our lives, we are explicitly and implicitly taught that a diamond, or a paycheck, or a stock quote, is possessed of a deal-breaking kind of power, a power that can either ruin us or transform us. We are led to believe that our financial lives are governed by a different set of laws than those that govern everything else.

Quite simply, this line of reasoning doesn’t make sense. But Pluto surrounds its issues with a primal urgency that makes us feel we cannot afford to question even the most blatant theoretical inconsistencies.

Practicality: the all-purpose rationale

Consider the much-touted practicality argument, often used as a last word when other justifications fail (“Well, it’s true that I hate the color and the feel and the look of this thing I’m considering buying, but it is practical.”) Pragmatism is used to justify all manner of activities in our society that are neither beneficial nor pleasurable, nor even, sometimes, cost-effective (consider the millions spent on insurance). People describe the most wildly fear-driven scenarios, such as staying at a job they hate, as being dictated by practicality. The term seems to have no meaning except to signal the entrance to Pluto territory.

Ironically, it is when using the dollars-and-cents rationale that we seem to be most bereft of common sense. And in no other realm of life do we so disrespect our inner promptings.

Pluto as Button-Pusher

Pluto’s function is to push our buttons, and in this country, money is the button-pusher. All 2nd house activities, from asking-for-a-raise to Christmas shopping, have a compulsive quality that eludes superficial explanations. When the conversation turns to money, even utterly reasonable people are apt to knit their brows and lose all perspective.

Metaphysical materialism

Indeed, even aficionados of metaphysics, who are theoretically free of this bias (meta: beyond; physic: the physical realm), can get their panties in a bunch around money. Though we purport to believe that Money is Just Energy, astrologers seem as prone as everyone else to see our financial vicissitudes as oddly distinct from the rest of our doings. We say to ourselves, “This we-create-our-own-reality stuff is all very well when it comes to relationships, maybe, or spiritual search; but, hey — this is about the bills, my job, the real world.”

What do we mean by that phrase, “the real world”? Often mentioned with a kind of conspiratorial wink-and-nudge energy, the phrase seems to be insisting on the distinction between the way any sane person would approach the material concerns encompassed by the realm of Earth, and the non-material concerns encompassed by the realms of Air, Fire, and Water. With those other three, it is implied, we have the luxury of applying our fancy metaphysical theories; whereas with this special realm, the material one, we do so at our peril.

It is as if all the cosmic principles we study – the law of correspondences, the phenomenon of projection, the theory that event-follows-belief, etc. – all somehow fail to apply where money is concerned. In this one area, we seem to share with non-metaphysicians the view that we are the helpless victims of harsh, implacable forces.

As we have seen, a theoretical exceptionalism often prevails where Pluto resides. This may explain why so many spiritual seekers, whose faith in an unconditionally supportive God/dess seems otherwise unshakable, speak of money matters as if they were under the auspices of entirely different gods — relatively unforgiving gods, whose caprices render us either lucky or out of luck.

Whether we tell ourselves that we crave or despise material, whether our story is one of paucity or of plenty, it has the same energetic valence. Consider the perfect equality of the phrases “filthy rich” and “dirt poor”. One expresses the presumably shameful presence of money and one expresses its just-as-shameful lack.

There is no way to cultivate a healthy self-image around money if we follow our society’s messages about it. These messages are contradictory — a scenario which psychologists say leads to mental imbalance — yet they are also consistent; for they make of money either more or less than it is, while attaching fantasies to it that lead to disappointment either way. We cannot hope to achieve any kind of financial sanity with a perspective this skewed.

Just as impossible is the achievement of spiritual self-awareness from within this schema. When we buy into the prevailing cultural paradigm, we take power away from our higher self and give it over to money.

Metaphysical law

The truth is that money and our attitudes towards it are no more a fluke of fate than anything else.

The metaphysical worldview is not for everyone, of course, but if it is believed that external events have internal origin and soul-driven meaning, it is surely unfair to deny the 2nd house equal access to universal principles. If karma works at all, it must work everywhere. If it is so that no event in our lives is random, then every event — from the changes in the weather to the fluctuations in our stock portfolio — must be, by definition, complicit in our greater plan.

Moreover, if we believe that there is no such thing as an accident of location any more than there could be an accident of birth time, it follows that every one of us who identifies as an American incarnated into this particular society in order to learn Plutonian lessons about materialism.

This is not the only blind spot in our national karma that we have been given to transcend. But it is the one that is most urgently necessary to understand, because it is driven by the planet of destruction.

by Jessica Murray

Reprinted from in The Twelfth House, Sept 2003

The recent black-out in New York City got me thinking about how rarely we get to experience a pure, velvety black night sky, studded with Moon and stars, shimmering with information. These days we city dwellers may even forget the Moon is there, unless we catch a glimpse of her as she rises between buildings, her magical luminosity not quite drowned out by the city’s electric lights.

Though the Moon is a universal icon, ubiquitous in our romantic language, in our psychology, literature and popular song, millions of us never actually see her. But there was a time when the Moon was humanity’s primary religious and temporal reference point, as comforting as a child’s nightlight, mysterious as a sovereign goddess.

Here in the urbanized Western world it is hard to imagine how intimately connected the ancients were with the visual dome of the sky. For millions of years before the invention of modern clocks, people simply tilted their heads back and looked up. Astronomy and astrology (there was no distinction between the two until relatively recently in human history) did not used to be the province of specialists: everyday folks checked the sky as we check our wristwatches.

Familiar and visually accessible, the Moon was the first celestial body to be the focus of an astrological calendar. Waxing or waning — approaching fullness or receding into her hidden phase — she informed the sky gazer whether the month was building towards culmination or had already reached its crest. Nomads who traveled after sunset needed to know how much moonlight they could count on to see by, as did hunters following nocturnal prey. But the Moon’s phases communicated to ancient peoples many layers of meaning beyond practical utility.

Watching the Moon gave our ancestors an immediate sense of cosmic connection. The Moon was seen throughout the ancient world as a divine Mother: her regular changes were expressions of the reliable growth/diminution cycles of an ordered and benevolent universe. As predictable as the ocean tides, as inevitable as birth and death, the Moon was not just a timing device or a light to see by. She was a steadying. nurturing power in a chaotic world; her rhythms providing early humans with a coherent symbolic logic with which to order their lives.

These days students of celestial cycles are less likely to sit in moonlight and take in the Moon’s power directly; which is a shame, for we need that magic more than ever. But the meanings of the Moon’s various phases have been retained, and are still the best-known aspect of popular astrology. The fact that lunar phases are often marked even on non-astrological calendars is evidence that the Moon’s cycle is more than an esoteric theory of narrow interest: it is a natural rhythm deeply imbedded in the human psyche, and it still works. Keeping track of where the Moon is, on the page or in the sky, grounds us emotionally, as it did our ancestors; and enables us to more fully join in the dance of the universe.

The monthly cycle starts at the New Moon, which therefore symbolizes new beginnings in general. Circle it on your calendar: tradition has it that this is the most auspicious time to initiate projects of any kind — a new job, a new relationship, a new way of looking at things. On or just after the New Moon, the energy is ready and available to get something going. This is the most hands-on part of the lunar cycle: now is the time to pro-actively set an intention. Try to identify what it is that is being inaugurated. That in itself is enough to honor the New Moon; but if you wish to give the process a nudge, do what the ancients did: make up a ritual to celebrate your intention to whole-heartedly welcome in the new beginning. Write down your intention on a slip of paper and put it on your altar; light a candle at dinner and pronounce aloud your wish for the month ahead. The most ordinary acts become rituals when motivated by an understanding of the symbolism involved. Straighten up your desktop; put a plant cutting into soil; put air in your tires and get ready to roll. We are often intuitively driven to undertake such activities on a New Moon anyway; we usually do them without thinking about the timing. But when we add that extra ingredient of awareness — deliberately trying to match the moment with an apt metaphorical gesture– then we are working magic. To paraphrase Carolyn Casey: You can sweep the floor and just have a clean floor; or you can do a floor-sweeping ritual and thereby cast a spell.

The next major phase, a week later, is the First Quarter. Whatever you began at the New Moon comes to a kind of crossroads: your undertaking meets its first obstacle. This may be an obvious event, such as a glitch that arises with the software you installed a week earlier; or it may be a more subtle development, such as getting a reality check about a new infatuation. Whatever form it takes, at the First Quarter your initial premise is tested. Again, the first thing you can do to honor this phase is to notice it: your undertaking has turned a corner. The second thing you can do is to make adjustments if necessary.

The Full Moon, which follows a week after that, is the culmination of the cycle. Now things come to a head, and you can clearly see what it is you set in motion two weeks before. This may not be what you thought you were setting in motion. The Full Moon exposes the soul meaning of the period you are in. It is no wonder that this point in the cycle has always been associated with great drama: the Full Moon is like a bright light turned on in a shadowy room.

On the literal level, new information may suddenly become available; on the psychic level, you may get a revelation about the underlying point of the whole process. Full Moons are expository, full of the potential for breakthroughs in understanding. Sometimes what is revealed is welcome, sometimes it is not. Full Moons are a markedly subjective experience, associated for millennia with both enlightenment and madness. They are often accompanied by extreme events, designed to make us see things we have not yet seen. The period a couple of days on either side of the exact Full Moon may pulse with heightened energy.

The waning half of the cycle should be spent assimilating the vision received when the Moon was full. These final two weeks of the lunar month are a devolution, as natural as leaves turning color in the autumn. At the Last Quarter, the process begun three weeks earlier runs into its final wistful crossroads. Again we must regroup, and face the reality of bringing the whole operation to a graceful close.

The last few days before the next New Moon are a mysterious and uncertain time, when the old process clearly has lost its vitality but a new process is not yet ready to take its place. During this Dark of the Moon period, we are meant to let go of something. It is not a time to try to make things happen; attempts to initiate are not likely to work. It is a time to release what has been happening. Now is the time to look back over our recent projects, while gently putting our tools and equipment away.

It was when the Moon was dark but not yet new that ancient peoples conducted their most sacred rites of healing and meditation, with a spirit not of ambition but of acceptance. They knew, better than we do, that all endings prepared the way for new beginnings, like leaves that fall and decay in order to fertilize the soil for the new growth yet to come.

There is a natural arc to the timing of the month, a pattern that we are born in synch with, as surely as other living things are who dwell upon the Earth. This is why watching the Moon, either actually or astrologically, can make us feel more at home in the cosmos. Tracking her inexorable changes, week after week and month after month, we start to see the Moon not as an inanimate rock that unaccountably looks different every time we look up; but as a living, numinous entity whose various faces take on meaning only when seen as a pieces of a unified whole.

This is the key to lunar astrology, a science of analogies and parallels. By honoring each of her phases with respect to its place in the overall cycle, we see ourselves in the cosmic mirror. Instinctively, organically, like a duckling following its mother into the water, we start to understand that our own unfolding fluctuations match those of the Moon.

And everything starts to make more sense.

by Jessica Murray
December 2002

As astrologers, we are the appointed timekeepers of metaphysics. Throughout history we have been the jealous guardians of the astrolabe, the hourglass, the ephemeris and the computer tables, clocks and calendars which use the sky to tell what time it is. Sky calendars are our lingua franca. Yet we must grapple with a basic conundrum: clock time and calendar time do not exist in cosmic reality. This is one of those things that is obvious once you think about it. But we don’t usually think about it.

Ever since humans have been on earth, they have been looking up, gazing at the sky, tracking time. The Julian Calendar used so widely today is a very recent invention. So are all linear calendars. These strange, flat chronologies that we now take for granted, which purport to replicate Time as regular, sequenced points plotted out in advance and printed up in a series of bound pages, are a relatively recent concept. Such calendars came along, as all cultural appurtenances do, to parallel a view of reality.

Human thinking did not always process information via the linear logic we now consider to be standard operating procedure. For the ancients, reality was circular rather than linear, holistic rather than mechanistic. As a species, we did not think in straight lines (which do not exist in nature) so much as in loops, spirals and parabolas. Though the fastidious modern mind tends to view every process as having a beginning, a middle and an ending, our ancestors saw themselves immersed in a natural world that was gloriously messy, with no pattern of finality imposed upon it. They assumed that everything in the universe, including human lifetimes, followed the same basic modus operandus they witnessed in plant and animal life: that of endlessly repeating cycles.

So how did they tell Time? The sundials, stone henges and round calendars of ancient peoples tell us something about the circularity that seems to have informed the prehistoric perspective. But those devices were, of course, man-made too. Every effort to trap and name Time is a concoction of the human mind.

As astrologers, we need to remember that though timing is our stock in trade, all attempts are stabs in the dark. Let us put our instruments down and ponder our roles for a moment. Who are we but translators of the unknowable, trying to aid and abet this tangible business of earth living? As we sit with our clients and try to describe how their lives correlate with celestial cycles, we are acting as intermediaries between the cosmic and the mundane; making a bridge, as best we can, between abstract principles of impossible subtlety and their probable three-dimensional expression. We cannot do this with any integrity unless we are aware that our charts are not the same thing as the ineffable universal patterns behind them.

We must not take our numbers too seriously.

To suggest that we astrologers not take our numbers too seriously has the ring of blasphemy. But let us take a second look at what is going on when we look in the ephemeris and confidently proclaim, for example, that the Full Moon will occur at 2:51pm the next day.

We astrologers tend to scoff dismissively when the layman says, “Oh, I thought the full moon was LAST night”. Trusty tables in hand, we gauge proper fullness not by sight, but by degree of exactitude. Our records tell us that at exactly 2:51pm, the 180-degree angle will be reached which defines a full moon; a geometrical occurrence which can, of course, occur at any point during the day or night. We presume to know the real story, because we’ve got the astronomical event zodiacally measured to the nearest clock minute; and we consider there to be a world of difference between our official timing (the accurate one) and the anecdotal timing afforded by the casual observer (the inaccurate one).

But let’s say an astrologer with an unusually precise approach comes along, and derides that 2:51pm figure as a gross approximation. One must determine not just the minutes, he says, but the seconds, in order to know the “right” time. Fair enough. But then along comes an astronomer with an even deeper investment in the accuracy model, who insists that any timing that didn’t use milliseconds was so inexact as to be useless. And so on.

This is the first problem with timing devices: accuracy itself is a relative concept. Like mathematicians seeking the last digit of pi, we may hunt down the chimera of accuracy until the computer blows a fuse, but we will get nowhere nearer trying to crack the mystery of Time.

So if it is not about finding the “right” time, what are clocks and calendars for?

Clocks and calendars point to things. Their job is to identify a focus– not in third dimensional space, but in that other dimension, the one which has been, equally arbitrarily, designated as the fourth. Our use of the days-of-the-week and hours-and-minutes reflects our effort to control or at least monitor Time, so that we can talk about it. We can refer to things happening before and after other things. We can get to dentist appointments, anticipate the ingress of comets into the solar system, and make fashionably late entrances at parties.

In order to re-pledge our allegiance to metaphysical truth every once in a while, astrologers need to step back and consider what exactly we are telling when we set out to tell Time. But in order to re-pledge our allegiance to metaphysical truth every once in a while, we need to step back and consider what exactly we are telling when we set out to tell Time. While we know that the deepest fact of the universe is that it is a massive swirling chaos out of which we and our world of matter unaccountably congealed, we humans nonetheless doggedly attempt to tame the roiling flux. We name the planets and identify their apparent orbits with calculated schedules.

The resulting cosmologies match the needs of the culture in question. The earliest astrologies, which focused upon the moon alone, were simple systems, sufficient for the settled tribes whose life cycles matched the lunar clock. Later astrologies, which incorporated the five visible planets, got quite a bit more complex; they were developed by pastoral peoples who needed a more involved timing system with which to clock their own wanderings.

The nature of Time does not vary; timing devices do. The question is not, Is the clock accurate? but rather, What function must the clock serve? If we’re timing the lighting of a ritual candle, a wristwatch works just fine. To call the winner of a close race, an Olympic judge requires a more precise instrument. And a physicist timing subatomic particles in a lab experiment needs a calibrating device that could barely be called a timer anymore, given that once we get down to the submicroscopic levels of material reality, time has shown itself to break the laws it follows on the human scale.

Much has been written about the affront the New Physics presented to our notions about time, notions that western science had always presumed to be inviolable. Einstein proposed a New time, alarmingly more elastic than good old-fashioned Time; and to the mechanistic materialists who would prefer Time to be as neat and measurable as woodwork, this is a hard one to digest. But to devotees of the mystery schools, who have long been hearing from the great sages that Time is an illusion, the news falls right into place.

Let us consider the transit in referenced above, for example, the exact Full Moon. At 2:50pm, it has not yet happened; at 2:51pm it is already over. The Full Moon is a moment, not a minute. Essentially, the Full Moon is not an event at all, but an idea. Its meaning is archetypal, not measurable. It is knowable only through an understanding of the greater cycle of which it is a part: that cycle which begins at the New Moon, reaches a crisis point at the quarter, culminates at fullness, and then immediately begins to wane, headed back towards its origin point.

Theories of circularity and interconnectedness seem to be coming back into favor as the scientific establishment, in spite of itself, lurches into a post-Newtonian worldview. As conventional ways of understanding Time become outmoded, astrologers will be ahead of the game: we have always been cousins to the mystics and shamans who travel between the worlds, where Time does not exist.

In contemporary western culture, where astrology is generally trivialized at best and demonized at worst, we practitioners may find ourselves tempted to cater to the lowest common denominator of understanding, framing what we know in soothingly banal, event-oriented terms. I wonder whether, as a group, we have been trying to keep our concepts as measurable as possible, and our counsel as literal as possible, so as to be judged less harshly by a skeptical public and by the new secular priests, the scientists. It is a trend which might buy astrology greater social currency, but if it is credibility we want, we must cleave to our roots in higher meaning. Otherwise we will surely find that, in the end, we will have failed to justify our ancient art to those with whom we seek acceptance, meanwhile betraying our work by downplaying our identities as chroniclers of divine knowledge.

Timetables and ephemeredes are not the truth behind Time. As systems of categorizing human experience, they can service certain predetermined needs. But to the extent that we astrologers are also devotees of universal truth, we need to keep in mind that we do not have the mystery solved, we have merely given it a name and a number; and to presume that our numbers do anything more than make respectful reference to the ineffable cosmic dance performed by the wheeling, intersecting, inter-connected planets is something on the order of hubris.

Humility is a gift of experience. It is true in every esoteric field that the veteran practitioner is more conscious of what he or she does not know than is the acolyte. When we begin a chart interpretation knowing full well how much is lost in the translation from geometry to truth, we will find ourselves opening up psychically, privy to mental pictures and flooded by the right words to say. Commencing our interpretation with the data in front of us, we will find our understanding taking off from there, until our minds are smitten with meaning from within and from behind the data in front of us. At that point we will have the illusion of Time on our side.

by Jessica Murray
March 1997

“Patriarchy is best understood as the 5,000-year birth-canal of the Great Mother Goddess.”
– Richard Tarnas, at the Cycles and Symbols III Conference, San Francisco February 1997

A long, long time ago, the cosmic creation force was seen as female: the spark of life that had begun the Universe was likened to a biological mother giving birth. The earth, which fed everybody, was seen as maternal. People saw her caves as wombs, and buried their dead back within the belly of the Mother, vagina-like cowry shells clutched in their hands.

The moon, whose phases mirrored human menstrual cycles, was the first object of astrological observation. Bone markings from the Ice Age indicate that the calendars in use were lunar. Humans saw themselves as living in an ordered, womblike universe: there was a luminous night-sky clock up there to gauge the monthly quarters, and there were the biological cycles of plant, animal and human kingdoms marking time down here on earth- not apart, not one causing the other, but interwoven in mutual reflection.

As above, so below.

While the Mother was seen to have a dark aspect, as shown in the terrifying crone archetype of myth, her destructive power was seen as balancing her all-nurturing beneficent side. As heavenly and earthly affairs were seen to be halves of a unified whole, so were these two aspects of the divine. It seems that back in those days the human mind was undeterred by paradox.

Much has been written about the relatively peaceful goddess-worshipping societies that existed undisturbed from 8,000 to 5,000 BCE, as far west as England and as far south as Malta, and how the nomadic invaders from the north swept through the fertile crescent in the millennia to follow, substituting their warlike sky-gods for the pantheon of animistic divinities that had held sway for untold ages before them. It is more than striking that these bands of Aryan horsemen from what Riane Eisler calls “the very edges of the world” could have come down to Mesopotamia in wave after relentless wave and thoroughly taken over those settled, highly functioning civilizations the way they did, transforming the sociological, political and religious bases upon which human civilization had been defined for a stretch of time far more vast than that of recorded history. It was as if the time had come for an immense shift.

Modern archeologists have likened the agrarian Golden Age of the Neolithic to the Garden of Eden alluded to in legend; and the destruction by the Kurgan conquerors of the matrilineal societies with their earth- and moon-centered cosmologies has been likened to an Expulsion from the Garden.

So it happened that by the second millennium before Christ, the seven visible planets, whose cyclical wanderings offered a timing system more useful to the pastoralists, became the primary reference point in the heavens. The Moon was removed from astrological primacy.

This was the first cataclysmic cosmological shift for the western mind.

The second, as Richard Tarnas has pointed out, was the Copernican revolution.

Once it was posited that the earth was neither fixed nor central in the cosmos, the process of severing the human mind from its moorings got fully underway. The sun, identified in the neoplatonic Renaissance with the principles of reason and intelligibility, was now seen to be at the heart of things astronomically as well. Suddenly, everything was relative. In the centuries that followed, Descartes, Galileo, Newton and finally Einstein brought this revelation into physics and ultimately into postmodern philosophy. It seems almost impossible at this point in western history to imagine that the cosmos was once seen as an ordered Home with earthlings at the cherished center. Now, we are untethered in the universe; we are no longer embedded in Nature; we have no Mother.

For with the shift from geocentrism to heliocentrism, reverence for the physical planet Earth began to dry up. She became dis-ensoulled, and the honoring of nature that had once been theologically central started to become demonized. “Pagan” rituals practiced by worshippers of the Old Religion were suppressed as abominations. Feminine archetypal principles such as the sacredness of the physical body, the sexual instincts, and the animal kingdom that had traditionally represented them, were judged more and more severely, as was the entire female race. The focus on the sun, reflected in the triumphant Big-Daddy deities of Judeo-Christian-Islamic thinking, prepared the way for a mass world view increasingly fragmented and unconnected. If original sin codified the idea that life was suspect by default, by now we have come to the point of revering a modern science nihilistically estranged from any sense of meaning in the universe, where life is seen to be a freak byproduct of material processes.

Yet the takeover by the solar-centered world view introduced something besides war and hierarchy and ecocide. It brought into the world the process of individuation. Something happened over the centuries to the tribal mind, something that bears the stamp of inevitability: humans became, individually and collectively, more and more autonomous.

Jung describes the individuation process as requiring a leaving home, as heroes in fairy tales do when they go off to seek their fortune, a departure that leads, after a series of hard tests, to a grand return. The homecoming is the Self coming back to the universal, at a new level of understanding… which was the point of the whole exercise. Deepened self-knowledge is the prize at the end of the long, hard journey, the golden fleece won after the trials. And just as individual seekers must banish themselves from the Whole in order to reconnect with it again eventually, so has the entire human species had to forget en masse our divine place in the cosmos in order to come back to it, now, as the New Age dawns.

There is a method to the madness of the past five thousand years, and it follows the archetypal pattern of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Babies must get painfully squeezed out of their warm, dark wombs to be born; initiates into mystery schools tended to go through similarly brutal emergences during the rites that led to their next level of awareness. And every one of us who has survived a psychological crisis knows that a dark night of the soul precedes an awakening into a new sense of identity.

There is a great death and rebirth scenario going on here, a Plutonian process on a macrocosmic scale. First humanity had its childhood, enclosed within the unquestioningly sanctified cosmic Mother — a phase of history likened to the planet Neptune, symbol of undifferentiated unity. Then we were forced out, through a long Saturnine trauma of constriction, into the cold of a disenchanted universe. Now we are as a species being birthed into some utterly new consciousness, a moment in history orchestrated by Uranus, governor of the shock of awakening.

As Uranus entered its ruling sign and joined with Jupiter in February of 1997, we see a signature in the sky for this momentous crossroads. This is the Age of Aquarius referred to in what by this time has become pop jargon. There is no single date for its official beginning, but astrologers consider configurations like that of this year to be indications that we are indeed on the threshold. I am struck by how much spiritual searching there seems to be among my friends and clients, by how feminism has evolved into a movement to resacralize the archetypal feminine, by how many books there are on the bestseller list that have to do with Jung, with angels, and with the soul. Most particularly I am struck by how the quantum theorists are coming to conclusions about acausality and nonlocality that sound an awful lot like the metaphysics repudiated by Descartes et al.

The Great Mother seems to be returning to mass consciousness, or, better said, we are returning to Her. And we have learned something during our adventures away from Her. It is now time for the synthesis to be forged between our hard-won individualism and the sense of fundamental unity we once knew. As the 20th century segues into the 21st one can see the signs of a new marriage between Eastern mysticism and Western rationalism, between environmental awareness and technology, between the spheres of the two sexes.

We are witnessing natural law correcting mass excess in order to return the world to health.

Bibliography:

Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade, Sacred Pleasure
Eleanor Gadon, The Once and Future Goddess

This article was inspired by several of the excellent lectures given at the Cycles and Symbols Conference III in San Francisco, Feb.14-16, 1997,
including those by:
Rick Tarnas, intellectual historian,
Demetra George, astrologer and mythologist,
Victor Mansfield, physicist and astronomer,
Stanislav Grof, psychiatrist, and
James Hillman, Jungian analyst.

Shocked and Appalled

Chaos and Secrets

A New Normal

Saturn and Pluto

Pluto and Oil

Uranus conjunct Jupiter

Wounded Seas

Published in The Twelfth House Magazine, October 2003
by Jessica Murray

Halloween arrives with the brisk autumn wind, when our sensibilities are undergoing the same subtle but profound changes as Nature herself. The energy in the air is ambivalent, prickling with unease but alive with the promise of connecting us to life in a new way, a deeper way. Halloween reminds us of the existence of powers we cannot see, and yet still somehow understand.

The keen sense of nostalgia many of us feel at this time of year may be due to cellular memory, which keeps us in touch with Halloween’s long, rich history. Archaic collective imagery of a very special kind re-awakens every year when the sun is in Scorpio, sweeping us under its spell.

The last secular festival remaining in the Western calendar, only Halloween has cleaved to its magical, primordial roots. It is a holiday that fascinates without requiring us to believe anything. Its allure is not intellectual, but visceral, dating back to a time when people explored the non-physical realms — the Other Worlds — as a natural and normal function of human experience.

For untold millennia before the Julian Calendar, Halloween, or Samhain (pron. SOW-wen) to the ancient Celts, marked that poignant moment at the golden end of the warm season when the veils between the worlds are thinnest. Back in the days when people timed their lives by the birthing of their herds and the ripening of their harvests, Halloween served as a solemn gateway to winter, the Dark Time (Dark meaning, not bad, but hidden). This was the point in the wheel of the year when ancient Europeans slowed down their activity, gathered up what they had sown literally and figuratively during the long days of summer, and turned their attentions within.

Before the modern era, the unseen worlds were considered very real. Ancient practitioners of Halloween believed in the afterlife as a matter of course; they would have found incomprehensible the idea that cultivating a relationship with the dead was wrong or evil. Nor did they think they had to go through high priests to do it. Ordinary people sought wisdom through exploring the dimensions beyond death, before death, and between lives; an exploration which had not yet been declared taboo. Moreover, the cult of rationalism had not yet come along to condemn intuition as being inferior to mental logic, a development which was henceforth to embarrass into silence those who believed in ghosts. For our ancestors, the souls of the departed were felt to be as worthy of respect as any other souls, and Halloween was when people communicated with them.

Old Samhain has suffered centuries of ignoble trivialization. Too powerful for the Church of Rome to vanquish entirely, the profound rites of All Hallow’s Eve have been reduced to a candy blow-out for children, and increasingly, an ever-more-commercialized costume party for adults. Popular culture has held onto the iconography of witches (originally, tribal wise women) and bats (thought to embody souls of the departed), but without any understanding of what they signify. As a culture, we have forgotten the deeper meaning of Halloween and have become estranged from the part of ourselves that needed it. This state of affairs is especially unfortunate for people in whose charts Scorpio or Pluto is highlighted.

In the zodiac, the power of Halloween is represented by the sign Scorpio. People with strong showings of Scorpio in their charts¹ are the descendents of the keepers of the Samhain rites held sacred by the ancient world. Making this connection will expand our understanding of why Scorpio has been called the sign of secrets.

Mystical scholarship has been conducted in secret for most of recorded history. First, because it was thought that these inquiries were too subtle for the uninitiated mind to comprehend without distortion; and second, because as alchemy and other esoteric arts became outlawed by the Church, they were pursued at great risk. Scorpionic people come from a noble lineage of clandestine activity.

The modern world, too, can be a difficult place for people with these sensibilities. Our literalistic culture is skeptical of Scorpio’s subtle intuitions, with the result that many Westerners — astrologers among them — regard the sign with suspicion. Most contemporary philosophies fear and spurn the Dark Mysteries (among them, death, sexuality, and the psychic realms), having no framework for understanding them. This can lead Scorpionic types to distrust their own essential nature. Individuals with this signature in their charts would do well to question our society’s continued demonization of the occult (the word means covered or veiled), a form of spiritual inquiry which in its pure form has nothing to do with self-aggrandizement. The true occult power of Scorpio lies in its ability to connect with the invisible dimensions of life, celebrated so long ago at Samhain.

All astrological symbols have layers of meaning, from the metaphorical to the prosaic. Scorpio and its planetary ruler, Pluto, govern all kinds of secrets: classified information, detective novels, lost objects. Those with Moon in Scorpio can pick up on hidden motives or unexpressed emotions. People with Venus in Scorpio excel (when they want to) at keeping confidences. Mercury-in-Scorpio individuals can communicate more by what they do not say than by what they do say. In a natal chart with no planets in Scorpio, the house which has Scorpio on its cusp shows us where the person is most privy to the mysteries of life.

Even more telling is the house occupied by the planet Pluto, which indicates what types of situations bring out a person’s sixth sense.

Pluto, ruler of the sign Scorpio, represents the power we all have to pierce beneath the surface of something in order to know its truth. Because this kind of perception is rarely validated by the culture we live in, most of us have grown up either minimizing our psychic proclivities or dismissing them entirely. But Pluto has much to teach those who value the human ability to fathom those areas where intellect alone cannot go.

Pluto’s house placement shows where we feel a profound drive to understand Natural Law, which exists beyond personal likes and dislikes, and beyond societal value judgments. When approached with the proper understanding, Pluto opens up even the most everyday experiences to deeper reaches of meaning, satisfying a hunger in the soul. People with Pluto in the sixth house, for example, are often extraordinarily insightful in diagnosing an illness, going beneath the level of symptom into the psycho-spiritual root of the malaise.

The season that is now upon us opens up cracks in the wall dividing the mortal sphere from the sphere of the Mysteries. There is no better time to celebrate, with humility and respect, the things in life that we know not from knowledge but from knowing. This Halloween, take a moment to light a candle to souls that have departed the physical plane. Take note of the placement of Pluto in your chart, and use the information to begin reclaiming your psychic ability. Identify which house of your chart has Scorpio on its cusp, and work your X-ray vision accordingly. In personal relationships, resolve to listen between the lines.

There are worlds out there — and within us as well — which are and always will be outside of the realm of our conscious comprehension. This may strike the proud Western mind as an affront, but our deep psyches accept it with equanimity and relief. Let us express gratitude this Halloween that the Mysteries exist, and take advantage of the perfect moment to honor them.

by Jessica Murray
as published in The Mountain Astrologer, Spring 1998

During the last few decades the inequities of patriarchy have been challenged in virtually every realm, from the legal to the linguistic. Celestial symbolism may be the last bastion of the old boy’s club that has defined civilization in the Western World, but there are stirrings of change even there. The discovery of the four major asteroids, just now, at the advent of the Millennium, symbolizes that change. From pagan sky-gods through Jehovah and Allah, male divinities have reigned in heavens perfectly suited to male-dominant cultures. Classical theologians, from whom contemporary astrologers draw so much of our imagery, voted Jupiter/Zeus as king of the sky and we have retained the male focus, with our pantheon of eight male and only two female planets, ever since.

But astrology now has a language with which to expand upon this cosmological patriarchy, and to reclaim the mysteries of the Feminine Principle. The first four asteroids discovered –Ceres, Pallas Athene, Vesta and Juno–represent the archetypal Feminine exclusively, as the Moon and Venus do, but represent it in distinctly contemporary ways. Metaphysicians refer to the Law of Correspondences to explain how it is that a planet is discovered in the sky at exactly the same time as the issues it governs occur to the mass mind. By this law, each one of these recently discovered asteroids deals with a set of ideas whose time has come. Eating disorders, for example, governed by Ceres, and the phrase “the double standard”, associated with Juno, had not been part of the vernacular until the last few decades, when the asteroids officially entered the astrological lexicon.

The sighting in the sky in the early 1800s of the first four asteroids corresponded historically with women’s suffrage. Feminism got its second wind in the early 70s, just as Eleanor Bach published the first asteroid ephemeris.

This is what astrologers mean by “As above, so below”. These bodies may have been orbiting between Jupiter and Mars since the birth of the solar system, but they are peculiarly new just now, as once again astronomical fact segues into astrological symbolism to offer a teaching about suddenly relevant concepts.

Seen in this light, the asteroids become tremendously important. Each of the four is a concentrated little package of symbolism, a particular slice of the whole that is the Archetypal Feminine Principle, expressly suited to restore a particular aspect of wisdom that has been underground for 5,000 years.

The fact that conventional astrology has used just two planets to express unqualified femininity is an accurate reflection of the fact that there were by and large only two socially acceptable roles for women: the venutian consort and the lunar mother. In a larger sense, we have all been cut off from any but these two expressions of our own feminine power, women and men alike. And the problem goes beyond sex roles, to all the yin aspects of human experience, from our attitudes towards Mother Nature to our cluelessness about the right-hemisphere of the brain.

Now the asteroids come along to fill in the blanks. In her seminal work, Asteroid Goddesses, Demetra George digs deep into prehistory in her search for their meaning, examining the four deities in terms of their role in Greek and Roman stories, and then tracing those myths back to a time before the Hellenistic period, when each goddess had a different face, and in every case, considerably more power.

This is where it gets really interesting.

Originally, each of these deities derived from the time of Mother Goddess worship, a period which began to crumble when the sky-god religions took over, starting somewhere in the Age of Taurus. Piecing together the clues as to how these goddesses were perceived by their worshippers way back in the primordial era, we see how the legends mutated over time as different political shifts in the cultures generated new religious images.

The premise here is that historical ages and cosmological imagery are inextricably intertwined. And to get the full picture of each of the four asteroids, one must take into account their goddess’ origins: each has an archaic inner face and a newer outer face. The outer face is the acculturated one: we all know this one (the extent to which classical mythology has a lock on our assumptions about sex roles in the Western world, and by extension dominant culture, could be the subject of another paper). The inner face, far less familiar, is the key to our liberation.

This makes for a whole new way of reading a chart.

Looking at the four asteroids the way George does makes me feel as if each one is its own mystery school, with the native being led through a calculated set of instructions into initiation, based on that person’s peculiar set of circumstances and absolutely individual way of receiving the information, as symbolized by their unique natal chart. It is as if each of us has the key to being an inductee into the sacred Rites of the Great Mother. Such practices once constituted the only religion in town: they held sway in the Mediterranean for thousands of years before being shut down by a Christian Emperor in the 5th Century AD. George argues that they live on in the collective unconscious, that the images are familiar to us on a cellular level; and that a thorough study of the asteroids can allow us to recognize these buried truths, to be moved by them and profoundly changed by them.

Ceres is the largest asteroid and the first to have been officially sighted.

Demeter (Da-Mater, or Earth Mother) was the Greek name for this goddess, whose young daughter Persephone was abducted by Hades/Pluto and secreted away down in the Underworld. First in grief and then in anger, Mother Ceres withdrew her blessings from the world, causing the plants to die and people to go hungry. A compromise was eventually struck whereby the daughter is allowed to spend some of the year up above ground with her mother during which time crops would grow again, but she must spend several months every year below ground, during which time nothing would grow. Apparently mollified, Ceres is said to have given humanity the gift of a grain of corn, the central symbol of her initiation rites into the Mysteries of life and death.

And so on one level, we have here a myth explaining the cycle of seasons and the origins of agriculture, as well as a universal story of innocence lost. But who was the Ceres figure before the Greeks got hold of her? A look at the antecedents to the myth shows another layer of meaning.

George points out that there had been many fertility goddesses in this part of the world leading up to the classical period, each of whom had a myth like this, except for one salient feature: the rape of the daughter. That part seems to be a late addition: an allegory illustrating the power struggle that was taking place between the new masculine-dominant cultures and the indigenous cultures they were replacing. The endless-summer state the world was in before the abduction has been said to represent the Golden Age of pre-patriarchal times in the fertile crescent. The absence of a father for Persephone symbolized the fact that in the more ancient tribes, paternity was considered secondary, if at all, in lines of descent.

Some of the themes George sees in the myth include incest, as indicated by the rape by Pluto, who was Persephone’s uncle, and the interesting sub theme of its being permitted by the authorities (Homer described Zeus in his Ode to Demeter as “seeing far, and allowing it”) as well as custody sharing, as indicated by the compromise arrived at by the Olympian judge. Custody struggles seem to align with Ceres transits. Ceres also governs food complexes, as indicated by Ceres’ refusal to eat; withdrawal of support; and work stoppages, as she halted food production as a means of control.

George argues that Ceres’ placement in the chart shows more specifically than the moon does one’s style of nurturing, both the creative giving of it, the style of receiving it, and its dark potential: withholding or over-controlling in the name of nurture. A twelfth- house Ceres might mean an elusive or abstracted maternal relationship, or one where the native ingests spiritual values along with the mother’s milk. A Taurus Ceres would lend a hearty groundedness to the nurturing style, while increasing the potential to want to possess those being fed. Interpreting the asteroid in terms of its archaic inner face, we discover the wise funerary priestess, Ceres in her crone phase, as well as the innocent transformed in Hades, Ceres as puella. Like the prehistoric crones who cradled their dying tribesmen in their arms in last rites, Ceres can inspire us as compassionate caretakers of the terminally ill to guide those in hospices, for example, to make their final descent. This asteroid’s placement also gives clues as to the types of situations where the native might “go through hell and back” as did Persephone. Ceres in aspect to the Moon, for example, would make it very likely that transformative crises would happen on the home front, not just with family but with roommates or anyone else living under one’s roof. In such a case even a domestic squabble with a house mate can put one into the state of a powerless child who must then resurface to adulthood through catharsis and understanding.

As parents, we can use both the transformative and valedictory facets of the Ceres archetype to help us through the loss and self-reinvention that characterize empty-nest syndrome. Ceres can guide us through any heartfelt–or womb felt– loss that must necessarily be integrated, as the goddess’ had to be.

Like a feminine Pluto, Ceres represents a mother-love that embraces death and grieving. It also seems to govern the kind of rite-of-passage into adulthood that is taught through an encounter with the Dark, the extreme example of which is rape. Whether the violation is literal or psychic, its teaching is that even the most terrible traumas may be precursors to a state of sovereignty, as was the case with the young victim who ended up Queen of the Underworld.

Pallas Athene is the civilizing asteroid.

She was for the Greeks the patroness of arts and healing, crafts and trades; a great warrior and strategist, who refused to be married. She was the one without a mother: Homer describes her as springing out of Zeus’s head full-blown, his favorite child. Astrologically she seems to be associated with politics and social causes.

It is a very particular type of intelligence that George sees in Pallas Athene. Not logical in the usual sense of the word, it is holistic and inventive: George associates it with whole-pattern recognition. What is noteworthy here is that we have a mental planet that is not mental in the masculine sense. It is a feminine type of mentation. And it is designed to be used in the outer world. What a concept: a distinctly feminine energy that is most at home in the career.

There is an androgynous quality to this asteroid, with humanistic camaraderie emphasized over sexuality. And the Greek stories surrounding Athena portray her as playing a pivotal role in the issue of gender-bending.

In the myth of the trial of Orestes, Athena was the tie-breaker who came down on the side of the hero who had killed his mother. Under the older blood law, matricide was the ultimate taboo. But Athena says, in essence, “Why not? The mother is not the true parent of the child. The father is.” This is an allegorical reference to the fact that around the time Aeschylus recorded the myth, the laws of mother-right were being foresworn in order to achieve some degree of leverage in the new patrilineal culture, from which we get one of the meanings of this asteroid: a woman’s ability to achieve success in a man’s world. At its most distorted, this figure represents selling out to the powers-that-be. Athena the goddess was impregnable behind the suit of armor she was born in, and Pallas Athene the asteroid can similarly denote the blocking of emotional vulnerabilities behind a psychological armor, in order to be free of the prejudice against them.

On the face of it, Pallas Athene can refer to the positive relationship a woman can have to an authority figure, as a professional woman might have with a mentor, or the daddy’s-little-girl type of bonding, with incestuous undertones, that is its shadow. She can be expressed positively as a pioneering career drive or, in her distorted guise, as the fear of success.

The other face of Pallas Athena can be uncovered by considering her origins before she became the protector of the State and apologist for the conquering order.

In the Perseus legend, Athena was pitted against Medusa, the hideous she-monster with snakes for hair. But George reminds us that stories from further back feature Medusa as a beautiful queen of the Gorgon Amazons (such tribes actually existed before the Hellenic invaders). The slaying of Medusa is again a reference to the sociohistorical shift that saw the end of female political power in its earlier form, and its incorporation into another system. The emblem featuring Medusa’s face which Pallas Athena wears in the center of her breastplate is a reference to this incorporation. In fact, Medusa is the crone aspect of the Pallas Athena archetype. When I read the asteroid this way, I see her heroism and courage in a very different light from the interpretations of Athena I learned in school. I see her valor deriving not from an identification with maleness, but from her amazonian origins: a feminine form of warrior spirit.

The placement of Pallas Athena in the natal chart indicates the best ways to use one’s holistic perception and intelligence. George has seen Pallas in Gemini, for instance, in the charts of speech therapists. This asteroid’s placement also gives clues as to how the native might respond to contemporary sex-role issues such as preference for male children, educational streaming, and the glass ceiling in the work place. It may be that the newly politicized issue of sexual harassment falls under this asteroid’s rulership. A person with Pallas Athene in Sagittarius would be particularly sensitive to the moral dimension of these issues and would address them with passion; the Libra placement would be more likely to approach them through reason and negotiation.

The idea that world leadership should be in the hands of women gets heard more and more frequently these days. Whether the 21st century prime ministers and presidents will be biological women, or men who have repudiated destroy-and-conquer methods, Pallas Athene may be our model for the new face of governance.

Vesta is the asteroid whose archaic inner face is the least like her outer face.

She’s the one who lost most in the translation. In pre-Hellenic Greece, the priestesses of the Moon Goddess practiced sexual rites. They initiated temple pilgrims into the Mysteries that way. Virgins not in the sense of being literally chaste, but in the sense that they belonged to no one partner, they would ritually bathe themselves after these unions, symbolically re-virginating themselves. The pagan festivals so reviled by later churchmen had their origins in sacred rites where groups of vestals and their consorts coupled in the darkness of a sacred cave, without knowing who was partnering whom. The children resulting from these unions were thought to be divinely chosen. This seems to be the origin of the legend, later adopted so enthusiastically by the Christians, that certain Latin kings were born of virgin mothers or were the sons of a god.

As soon as patrilineality came about, these practices became highly disadvantageous to the ruling castes, since knowledge of paternity was essential to the passing on of land and title. The Romans instituted a literal chastity into the vestal rites, which was enforced under penalty of death by live burial. The Christian mythos that followed literalized this virginity business still further, by coming up with an image of an idealized mother who even gives birth without sex.

The inner archaic face of Vesta is that of a spirituality that sees sex as a means to channel the power of the Divine Feminine: a sexuality that is not used to get a mate, nor to get children, nor to achieve personal pleasure… but to practice a religious devotion. From the standpoint of conventional morality, this has got to be the most explosive of all the ideas spiritual feminism has to offer.

The vestals of the ancient world were also charged with keeping the fires lit which established the spiritual and secular center of each community. The Greek goddess Hestia stood for the unity and cohesion of the family and state, and governed hospitality and the notion of sanctuary. Modern astrologers have thus associated the asteroid Vesta with security systems, insurance and notary publics.

Vesta functions as the ability to center the self, to focus (the Latin word for hearth is focus), and to pull in the consciousness away from outside distractions into a state of undivided attention; Vesta in Virgo, for example, has a tremendous capacity to lose oneself in work. Vesta by transit can indicate the times when one needs to retreat from intimacy in order to recharge one’s batteries alone. Vesta in Aquarius would probably withdraw in front of the computer.

Vesta stands for the memory each of us can access through the collective unconscious of sacred sexuality, a very private use of second chakra energy that is emphatically not other-oriented. Vestal sex is Doing it for the Goddess. Because of the extreme suspicion, not to mention legal prosecution, that such impulses would elicit in the contemporary world, it follows that Vesta’s expression is especially prone to distortions. Relationship separations were part of the healthy functioning of the sacred harlots. But we don’t have a cultural framework to express this energy though, and if we don’t find a personal framework either, the vestal urge to withdraw manifests pathologically. Vesta’s shadow side is sexual repressiveness, fear, even frigidity and impotence, which George has found indicated especially when Vesta is afflicted by Mars. The more a given society debases sexuality, the more potential there is for individuals with strong Vestas to suffer–either by suppressing their own sexual longings, or acting them out but thinking them shameful. Superficial promiscuity is another symptom of denied Vesta, however: the fully conscious Vesta may seek multiple partners but never in a superficial way. Vesta is acutely discriminating. For her, sex that is merely ordinary is a blasphemy.

Juno is the asteroid of the C-word: committed partnership.

Earlier than the classical period, Juno, or Hera in the Greek, was one of the tripartite Moon Goddesses who ruled quite alone. Her marriage to Jupiter, or the Greek Zeus, was the mythological record of her absorption into the victors’ theology. Small wonder that husband and wife are always fighting.

Where Vesta uses sexuality in a way that allows her to stay complete unto herself, Juno is after heirogamos, or sacred marriage. Her placement shows more specifically than Venus’ does how one expresses the desire to be a significant other, no matter what the sexual orientation. A person with Juno in Capricorn would prefer a relatively conventional marriage; Juno in Scorpio would lead a person to place more importance on the sexual bond than on the legal aspect of union. Actual engagements and weddings and moving-in-togethers and divorces often correspond to Juno transits. Zip Dobyns finds that synastric connections of Juno make her clients think of marriage even when nothing else in the comparison would seem to indicate it.

Juno is the one among the four asteroid goddesses who represented steadfast loyalty to relationship-for-the-sake-of-relationship. It is she who offers the teaching for modern spouses trying to find ways to live as a unit without losing themselves in co-dependency. Like all the lunar deities, Juno had three facets: in this case, the maiden, the bride and the widow, which described the cyclical state of a committed union. In the myths, we see Juno and Jupiter separating for some reason, usually an infidelity of his; she goes into solitude or a wandering phase, then she bathes herself in the sacred spring, and goes right back into the relationship. This asteroid is about the natural rhythm there is in uniting with and separation from and reuniting with a mate.

It is possible to read Juno as being merely about bridal showers and couples counseling. But looking beneath this level, we find a more subtle perspective on committed partnership.

To understand the archaic inner face of Juno it may be necessary to dispense altogether with the modern term “wife”, and resurrect the ancient notion of a consort. Giving this asteroid both Scorpio and Libra rulership, George posits that Juno represents the concept of a union of intimate equals: the craving to fully merge with another human being in order to find the perfect balancing of masculine and feminine energies. On a secular level, this could be seen as the mutual respect and support a happily married couple would have for one another’s work, emotional well-being and creative projects, as well as their commitment to mutual pleasure in bed. On a spiritual level it could be seen as committed lovers in meditation, exploring the psychic sharing and the raising of the kundalini life-force that transpires in conscious sex, as practiced in Eastern tantric traditions. Ultimately, Juno’s goal is not the marriage itself but the ego transcendence the marriage can offer. Though pleasure may be part of it, this kind of coupling has more to do with religious ecstasy. The union becomes a means to get beyond the separateness of the self by joining forces with another at the deepest levels–the original meaning of the heirogamos –leading to healing and spiritual consummation.

The distorted expression of Juno stems from the skewed power relationships in the institution of marriage or its facsimile.

Infidelity and the anger it inspires, jealousy and possessiveness and sexual rivalry all are potentials of dark Juno. Where there is the kind of dependency in a relationship such as the traditional wife has upon her husband, or where one partner keeps a vow of monogamy that the other does not keep, the pathology of Juno may rear its head. Greek legend is full of stories of Hera wreaking havoc on the lives of Zeus’ lovers and their children.

People in whose charts Juno is strong have a special sensitivity to the double standard, and by extension, to the underdog in relationships where there is a power imbalance, as is the case with abused children.

As George points out, the distortions of the original goddess imagery are direct reflections of their cosmological disempowerment over the ages, now imprinted in the modern psyche. If the feminine power they embody is skewed, so has actual feminine power been skewed. The study of these asteroids, particularly their dark sides, resonates strongly with those searching for a way through confining cultural patterns. The primordial ideas they embody are alive within us, and it can feel like a soul-deep self-recognition to reconnect with them. Digging beneath the distorted images –seeing who Juno was before she became the jealous wife, for instance — we can find the archaic power buried there and let it out.

Bibliography:

George, Demetra: Asteroid Goddesses, ACS 1986
Homer, “The Hymn to Athena”, The Homeric Hymns, trans. Charles Boer.
Texas Spring Pub. 1979
Aeschylus, The Orestian Trilogy