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.

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.

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 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.”

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Translating the symbolic configurations of a birth chart into terms the client can understand is the art form that the astrologer practices. Symbols are abstract for a reason. Just as Egyptian hieroglyphics refer to concepts far more complex than a single word could convey, planetary glyphs and signs and the geometrical angles between planets are rich with layered meanings.

I prefer giving and getting readings in person, especially the first time I’m meeting someone, because face-to-face more channels are available for intuitive information to flow. There is an occult (hidden) component to astrology that melds rote technique with something more mysterious. As we sit and have a cup of tea together, our conversation begins with the data on the page and quickly expands into the psycho-spiritual implications of that data. The chart becomes a conduit for psychic pick-up.

After your reading, most astrologers will give you the chart itself and a tape of the session.

In a transit or progressions reading an astrologer can read the larger meaning of whatever is happening to you at the time. S/he can see what the chart says your Higher Self is trying to learn during this phase of your life, this month, this week, or even this particular day. What really motivates a job change, for instance. You may assume it is financial; she may look at your chart and see an inevitable emotional shift which would be occurring no matter what you were doing or how much money you were making.

In a chart comparison an astrologer can help you see whether your needs look anything like your new boyfriend’s needs. Astrology is very good at pinpointing a person’s wants, tastes, beliefs and desires; and contrasting them with another person’s. Themes underlying a relationship which might not be obvious on the surface are thus revealed. When you know where you fundamentally differ from someone, and where you are on the same wavelength, you have a lot of information to work with.

It is true that you may hear some very precise and accurate feedback from your astrologer over the course of your reading, due to the extra-sensory aspect of astrology that transcends geometry. Even the astrologer herself may be hard pressed to explain how she came up with the images she comes up with. She may see in your chart that a sudden shift towards elimination is upon you, for example, and the image of a garage sale may occur to her. She may suggest it to you, intending it as a metaphor, only to find you have an actual garage sale scheduled for next week.

The reason this happens is because everything in life is a symbol. Your life already chose the symbol of the garage sale, as an expression of that elimination theme — which was slated to be expressed, one way or another, during the period in question. The astrologer can see the meaning of the period in question, but only in thematic form. Your Higher Self chooses the perfect way to play it out.

Especially if you are having your first reading, your astrologer’s imagery may be quite abstract. Not knowing you from Adam, she will be reading overall patterns, not trying to guess what form they take. The astrologer who gets the garage sale image while looking at your chart does not know whether you are downsizing your company or giving your old shoes away or weeding through your inner values. It would depend on what needed to happen in order to teach you the cosmic lesson at hand.

And that is what you really want to know. Consider, before you hasten to fill her in with back story, that you will get more out of your first reading by listening to the truth of your chart on this level.

The planets themselves have nothing to say about what you are going to do. They only say why you are going to do it. Knowing the why allows us to more consciously participate in what happens.

It may disappoint some to hear that no specific events are made to happen because heavenly bodies form certain angles in the sky. Nor do celestial cycles force us to understand anything; they do not have agency. They simply announce themes, which can, if read with discernment, become lessons for us. And they specify when those lessons are going to be taught.

For example, each of us has our own version of ideal masculinity, expressed by the planet Mars. A chart with a bellicose Mars is more likely to incline one towards Marines, policemen and competitive athletes than is a chart with an introverted Mars.

But your chart does not really describe outer reality at all. It only describes the state of your own psyche. A self-aware person with a fiery Mars could manifest it as raw courage, and would tend to attract others who personified that quality.

An astrologer can help you understand your inner maleness (and we all have a Mars, men and women alike, whatever our sexual persuasion), in terms of its highest potential. Astrology’s goal is to re-acquaint you with your Mars’ strongest and finest qualities. This puts you back in touch with a part of your psyche that might have become estranged or under-used. Getting to know your Mars increases the likelihood that you will encounter male energy in this heightened form. Instead of bullies, you might begin to attract heroes.

The same goes for every other planet in your chart, each of which would then tend to be reflected back to you in a more creative way in the mirror of other people.

An astrologer sees only what themes are being highlighted. If a new boyfriend would offer a teaching about one of them, a new boyfriend wouldn’t be ruled out. Certainly important emotional and psychological lessons show up in a person’s chart; and as we all know, the cosmos often uses relationships to great effect, to teach those kind of lessons. But if a boyfriend came in during such a transit, he would be coming in as a carrier of that theme, not necessarily to fulfill your picture of what a boyfriend should mean.

That said, in the same way that your astrologer might see that the workplace will be a hotspot for you this summer, or that old business with your father is due to surface, she might see your relationship arena activated. This will mean the issue is up. You may find yourself thinking about romance more, you may indeed meet someone who personifies it for you, you may become engrossed in a movie or a book or a song that plays it out.

So though your soul mate is not in the chart per se, the urge to find him might be (and because intention creates reality, this often amounts to the same thing). This urge will be stronger at certain times than at others; and that is definitely in the chart. Similarly, your spouse’s changes are not in your birth chart, but your attitude towards them is.

Simply put, there are no other people in your chart. But there are many indicators of your relationship karma and how it is developing. An astrologer might see, for example, an urgent need to be free from limitations in relationships. And if that attitude shift led to an actual shift in your marriage, it wouldn’t be surprising, would it?

But all the chart shows for sure is the inner event. That is what a good astrologer can help you understand and prepare for.

It is a perspective that allows one to live life with more grace.

But let us take a moment to qualify the term spiritual, for it is a peculiarity of the times we live in that the word has taken on a newly controversial buzz. To mention spirituality at a dinner party these days is to risk being shown the door; and in many circles “New Age” ideas have become as d?class? as rancid patchouli oil. Pluto’s entry into Sagittarius in the mid-90s made the topic of spiritual belief downright explosive, given that the function of the transit was to turn inside out stale, old ideological verities and the institutions that represented them. Then Saturn opposed Pluto in the second year of the new millennium, contracting the issues of higher truth (Sagittarius) and karma (Saturn) with such violent pressure that something had to give.

The result was a new equation in the collective mind of religion with worldly power struggles. Humanity has been struggling through a twelve-year catharsis during which all things spiritual began to smack of chicanery at best and wholesale destruction at worst. Believers and skeptics alike have been forced into new ways of thinking about the quest for higher meaning. It is this transit that established the background of mass malaise against which the upcoming transits must be understood.

It is noteworthy that astrology — which, even if one doesn’t view it as a spiritual system, still qualifies as a theoretical worldview (Sagittarius) — seems to have emerged unscathed from Pluto’s eradication of philosophical nonessentials. ² Perhaps this is because astrology is composed of essentials already. As a language of archetypes, it had no nonessentials to be eliminated. Throughout the Plutonian rout, astrologers have continued to ply our ancient trade, decoding the firmament to make sense of turbulence in the world below. As part of the rebirth phase of the Pluto transit that has dealt faith such a blow, I propose that we astrologers not shy away from the notion that leaps of faith are still, and have always been, part of the workings of our craft. By faith in this context I refer to a confidence in that which is eternal and essential: ³ for example, the cosmic principles that underlie the astrological alphabet. In order to be of significant use to the world in the critical times ahead, astrologers must recognize as axiomatic our commitment to these principles.

To confer a spiritual significance upon astrological symbols is to see in them not just a theoretical but a numinous meaning. Even a resolutely secular-minded student of astrology who picks up a book by a visionary such as Alice Bailey or Dane Rudhyar, for example, might find herself learning more than just a methodology of symbolic logic. She might feel herself taking on a kind of soul-mindfulness, a quality of openness that links her to a venerable tradition that was once evocatively referred to in European mystery schools as The Dark Mysteries. She might feel that what she is reading is not just informing her but inspiring her. To study astrology in this spirit is not merely to learn a craft. It is to unify the body-mind-soul intelligence.

Cultivating this kind of intelligence does more than uplift us as individuals. Through the refinement of each person’s awareness, consciousness is brought into the world.

Wisdom demands perspective. Yet the partisanship, us-against-them factionalism, culture-war labeling and all the other small-picture models being tossed around by the media in contemporary society undermine perspective rather than promote it. What we need is a Big-Picture perspective, and not simply for the sake of being “spiritually correct.” We need it because the world moment has come to feel too overwhelming for many of us to even look at, let alone to productively address, without it.

The opposition set up a tug-of-war between the planets of realism (Saturn) and surrealism (Neptune). For about three years, Neptune’s penchant for the non-ordinary seeped into humanity’s conception of “real life”, giving us a fools’ paradise of disillusion, meltdown and revelation. A notable example of this theme occurred at the transit’s second peak, on February 28th, 2007, when the stock market plummeted on Wall Street: here we had, in one fell swoop, a symbol of three of the themes for which the opposition is notorious: illusion (was the wealth signified by all those little stock numbers real in the first place?), deflation and anxiety. Another stunning synchronicity was the release of Michael Moore’s documentary “Sicko”, which explored the relationship between the American insurance industry (Saturn) and the ideal of universal healthcare (Neptune) four days after the transit’s final exactitude in late June 2007.

As is true of all oppositions, this one was a juncture point in a larger whole; that is, the Full Moon phase of the cycle that began when Saturn and Neptune conjoined in 1989. That was the year the Berlin wall (Saturn) melted away (Neptune), a benchmark of modern world history. These last few years have given us the cyclic aftermath of that development: we have watched geopolitical verities that were once held as gospel being exposed as illusory or downright fraudulent.⁴

Make-believe is governed by Neptune. It represents the image-making capacity of the mind, very strong in children (Let’s play house); and makers of video games (You are now in a mist-enshrouded castle). For the media-defined cultures of the West, this transit had a field day. From the point of view of collective psychology, there is a relationship between the wholesale resignation with which America accepted the contested elections of George W. Bush and the glazed-eyed avidity with which it gobbles up stories about Lindsay Lohan’s stints in rehab. Saturn and Neptune have been hosting a game of Let’s-pretend-this-is-reality.

During the Saturn-Neptune years we saw water disasters (Neptune) wipe out villages in Southeast Asia and inundate a great historic city in the USA as if they were sand castles leveled by the tide. We saw national boundaries (Saturn) effectively crumble (Neptune) as immigrants found their way into the First World wherever and however they could. We saw the concept of global warming transform in the public mind from a science-fiction-like notion or “hoax” (Neptune) to a consensual reality (Saturn).

The Third World has experienced a different set of teachings from the opposition of Saturn and Neptune than has the First World. The developing countries of the Earth are moving from chronic to acute material crisis. Meanwhile, the First World – with its peculiar tendency to think of itself as the only real world — remains deeply, existentially confused. But confusion is the language Neptune speaks. Confusion is porous, and opens up space for a different kind of truth to get a foothold. From the point of view of spiritual astrology, the foggy free-for-all of melted-down sureties that has characterized these years is part of a cosmic plan to confront the various forms of denial that afflict and endanger human consciousness. Many sacred cows have collapsed during these insecure times; many heretofore credulous thinkers have reconsidered the nature of deceit – including self-deceit—and the illusions that make up popular culture. The nature of reality itself has changed for millions of people. ⁵

This is the deeper purpose behind the Saturn-Neptune conundrum. As it ebbs during late 2007 and early 2008 its lessons are sinking in, laying the groundwork for the era-defining transits to come.

It is from the vast, slow-moving outer-planet cycles (Uranus, Neptune and Pluto) that we expect the most far-reaching effects; and when these make major aspects with the social planets (Jupiter and Saturn) as well as with the personal planets (such as the Moon and Mars) at the same time, the rarity of the patterns that result puts them into a category that deserves a unique degree of awe, respect and attention.

There will be a series of Grand Crosses in the summer of 2010 –one of which occurs a few days after the solstice, with seven planets participating. The square between Uranus and Pluto will form the backdrop, with Jupiter coupled with Uranus in early Aries and a Moon conjunction with Pluto in Capricorn adding a late-breaking note of immediacy. Saturn in late Virgo will form the third corner, and the Sun and Mercury, in Cancer, will form the fourth. This will give the solstice period — already considered a sacred portal for many spiritual thinkers, ancient and modern — the quality of a bulls-eye. Two years later, the Grand Cross of June 2012 will feature the ongoing square between Uranus and Pluto now joined by the Quarter Moon; meanwhile Neptune will have entered Pisces, and will be forming an exact mutable T-square with Jupiter, reinforced by the lunar nodes. By 2014 the two outer-planet overlords will have made their way to the middle degrees of the cardinal signs, paralleling a square between Mars and Jupiter in Libra and Cancer respectively; with a Moon-Pluto conjunction on April 20th again providing the grace note.

Students of the Mayan calendar may recognize this timing as lining up with the dates singled out at the Harmonic Convergence in 1987 by Jose Arguelles. ⁶ The ancient Mezo-Americans numbered among many indigenous traditions that foresaw the period we are now in as the end of a great cycle in human evolution and the beginning of another. The visionaries of prehistoric India referred to this era as the Kali Yuga: the Dark Times.

It is not only informative but humbling to recognize that other prophetic traditions besides Western astrology have identified our epoch as a pivotal turning point. A little comparative cosmology will go a long way to universalize our understanding, which supports our goal as sky watchers: to respond –rather than react — with equanimity to the times ahead.

To hold the Big Picture is to remember that perilous times augur the appearance of planetary healers, as a wound galvanizes white blood cells. A given culture will generate the very souls who are necessary to meet that culture’s demands. It should not surprise us that it happens this way in the human world, for this is obviously the way it works in the natural world: a pond will be inhabited by the very marine life exactly suited to its specific temperature, depth and degree of salinity; including just the right types of microflora and fauna to regenerate its detritus, turning dying into rebirth. Human societies follow the same laws. Right now, planet Earth sorely needs vision; and so we are getting visionaries. ⁷

Global warming is at the forefront of the mass mind right now, and is of course being viewed — by those who have come to take it seriously — primarily as a terrifying catastrophe. But though fear is naturally part of our human response – what we might call in this context our “secular” response – I propose that when we back up from our everyday view of the world, deliberately seeking the distance that astrology provides, it becomes possible to conceive of global warming as the Goddess’ gift to this epoch. The sheer enormity of the situation is forcing humanity, in a gun-to-the-head kind of way, to completely shift gears. The fact that the fate of the Earth is at stake makes for a compelling incentive to connect dots that were not connected before: suddenly everybody from Arnold Schwarzenegger to the automotive industry is clambering onto the bandwagon, trying to be seen as going green. The dubious sincerity of many of these gestures notwithstanding, we can be sure that when even government and industry start paying attention to issues such as these, their cultural meaning can be said to be entering a new level of mass consciousness.

Less widely discussed but getting increasing media attention is the fact that the poorer countries of the world will suffer sooner and more severely from these climate changes than will the wealthier ones. What we must come to terms with here is more than an ecological issue. In the decades ahead, the societies who contributed most to the problem by burning fossil fuels too heavily will get off relatively easily compared to the millions of Earth dwellers who never saw the inside of an SUV. ⁸

Informing ourselves of realities like resource depletion and social injustice through geopolitical awareness is a first step. But to maintain our sanity as well as to be of some use to the world, we need to then press into service our spiritual intelligence. It is unarguable that global scenarios both real (mass suffering in impoverished parts of the world) and imagined (terrorists on every street corner) will elicit in the years ahead no lack of collective worry and fear. What I am suggesting is that we astrologers, each in our own way, have the ability to offer a kind of dispassionate observation to replace the fear we see around us, as circumstances arise. For the sake of this discussion we will define “fear” as an acute awareness of the seriousness of the situation but without the requisite understanding. Astrology, as a vocabulary not of literalisms but of meaning, has the potential to stand back and be the calm, judgment-free observation point that offers perspective amidst the chaos. As the Neptune-Saturn opposition has signified, right now there is an epidemic lack of clarity afflicting the mass mind. But astrological archetypes, at their most essential, allow us to cut through the fog. They allow us to look at mass feelings without being caught by them. They allow us to look at horrors without being horrified.

The times are ripe for a wide dissemination of the astrological viewpoint, though I am not speaking solely of foisting forecasts upon a skeptical public. Even if we astrologers do not succeed in imparting to our society the data of what we see in the years ahead, if we are able to impart the scope inherent in the astrological way of seeing — the transcendent principles that underlie our worldview – I believe we will add tremendously to the clarity that will become more and more urgently needed.

Uranus represents the unstoppable force of ideas whose time has come. Pluto represents the raw power and inevitability of breakdown and renewal. Together they force consciousness changes in the collective that are – relatively speaking — explosively sudden. Already we can see the accelerated speed that will characterize this next phase of human evolution. When we consider the normal snail-like pace of changes in entrenched collective consciousness, it is nothing short of astounding that a massive shift in popular awareness about global warming has happened in no more than a couple of years’ time, thanks not just to Al Gore but to the Saturn-Neptune opposition and the square between Jupiter (social reform) and Uranus (revelation).

In the mid-1960s, Uranus and Pluto occupied the same location in the zodiac for a few mind-blowing years; a period that those who lived through them will never forget. This was the transit that made the sixties The Sixties: Uranus, governor of revolution, and Pluto, governor of social decay, conjoined in the sky while opposing Saturn: status quo thinking — and KABOOM: the counter-culture was born. Taboo-busting cultural ideas raced around the globe like an uncontained wildfire, changing the mores of the generations extant and the ones not yet born. The babies who drew their first breath under that epochal conjunction – which was in Virgo when it occurred: the sign of health, work and service – are in their prime productive years now. We have seen some of the members of this intense generation create subcultures of skateboarder punk and nihilism, and others use their Virgoan genius to remodel health movements both personal (natural nutrition, alternative medicine) and global (radical ecology, sustainable agriculture).

From 2010-2015 Uranus and Pluto will take the next big step in their relationship, analogous to the First Quarter Moon. The heady revelations of the hippies and yippies will be ready for post-millennial application. The winsome flower-child vision will have developed into a set of responses –or reactions, depending on the level of consciousness involved — to the crises the globe is facing at present. To cite the most obvious example, the precedent of the Nixon presidency, a casualty of the massive social dissent accompanying the mid-60s transit, will find its First-Quarter parallel in the elections of November of 2008.

To understand this sixteen-year transit in Big-Picture terms is to see that Plutonian change is neither about punishment nor about demonstrating right-and-wrong thinking. All Pluto wants is to rid the global organism of toxins in a certain arena so that the world body as a whole can survive.

We can expect the notion of physical death to shift dramatically when the Uranus square yanks Pluto into the 21st Century. Experimental life-extension technologies will very probably push and pull at mass assumptions about this most dreaded of human experiences, with existential quandaries and ethical questions coming along for the ride. The square will certainly jack up the tension that already exists in the human mind between the role of human intelligence (Uranus) and those Dark Mysteries which ordinary intelligence alone cannot fathom (Pluto). The secular societies of the West are not known for their acceptance of the role of mortality in the human condition; on the contrary, a fear-driven stagnation in the collective unconscious has stymied our understanding of death and shrouded the subject in denial. ¹⁰ There is reason to hope that the blaring klieg light of Uranus will stimulate a new curiosity in the mass mind about this and other cultural taboos. Through the elegant balance of a perfect ninety-degree angle, Pluto — which represents scenarios that are often so viscerally disturbing that they are difficult to even think about clearly, let alone act upon — is going to be confronted by a planet that is, especially in warrior-like Aries, fearless in the face of taboo.

Another opportunity for breakthrough that the transit will bring not a moment too soon is a revolution (Uranus) in the world’s approach to recycling detritus and waste (Pluto), now being generated at breakneck speed by the consumer cultures of the world — China being the latest contender for this sorry award. Radioactive waste in particular (Pluto) is one of those issues that is so troubling that most of us try to avoid thinking about it, unless, that is, a toxic dump were being proposed for our own neighborhood. ¹¹ Uranus, associated with ingenuity and pristine clarity of mind, is the antidote to mass unconsciousness around this Plutonian subject matter. Again, in Aries, the Great Awakener is likely to express itself through actions, not merely words and ideas.

Another Plutonian arena that has become fatally distorted is the world’s relationship with oil. Tem Tarriktar’s prescient articles in this magazine¹² linking the peak oil years and 2010-12 anticipated what now seems to be a general consensus in the industrialized West: that our dependence upon fossil fuels is untenable. The pairing of the words “addiction” (Pluto) and “oil” has become a commonplace in American parlance. More and more of us have come to understand that the USA has ignored its manufacturing base –as well as any serious search for clean energy solutions — like a drunk who has forgotten to eat. The oil-drunk First World has been in the driver’s seat of the globe for some time now. Uranus is coming along to slap that drunk sober before he drives us all over the cliff.

With every passing month, the meaning of oil in the collective consciousness – due to the geo-military patterns that have grown up around it and the ecological side effects of its use — segues into a new and complex transitional meaning, encompassing the hybrid symbolism of wealth and war, power and destruction. Now less Neptunian than Plutonian¹³, oil is undergoing an iconic status change.

Uranus’ job is to jolt humanity into alertness, jettisoning stale material like a wet dog shaking its fur. The petro-politics of foreign policy, the grotesque profit disparities that accrue to the fossil fuel business, and all the other aspects of what oil represents will no longer remain the privileged information of political observers but will be pushed into the domain of received wisdom among the populace. The squaring-off between common knowledge, i.e. that of The People (Uranus) and the clandestine knowledge held by elite power groups (Pluto) will be a running theme during the peak oil period.

Uranian genius will be forced to apply itself to pursuits that match the needs of the times; e.g. the new engineering techniques that will become increasingly necessary to deal with the results of climate change. The way the world uses its technology and medicine (Uranus) will be rapidly updated as civilization turns to science to save itself.

When we imagine the sign Aries at its highest — not the ego-driven warmonger but the fearless pioneer — we have an appropriate archetype with which to characterize Uranus’ new model of leadership. This kind of leadership is not just irascible, but mindfully iconoclastic: Uranus has been linked with the myth of Prometheus, the divine outlaw who broke rank in order to bring fire to humanity. Optimally used, Uranus in Aries will provide the people of the world with the courage to shake off whatever political, economic and social circumstances that have grown oppressive. Many will feel the impulse to assert (Aries) their vision of democracy (Uranus) rather than just talk and argue about it. Pluto will provide the life-or-death circumstances that make this a requirement.

Pluto’s pressure upon Uranus suggests the will of the citizenry to throw off its passivity and to become boldly pro-active. Forward-looking Uranian individuals will be prompted to perform from the core of their beings. The adolescent infighting that afflicts so many progressive movements has the chance, now, to change relatively suddenly, and be replaced by coalitions of mature and responsible social reformers.

Ultimately, the puerile arrogance of contemporary humanity itself – that aspect of the modern personality that imagines it shoulddominate Nature simply because it can – will be given a dose of Pluto’s cold, dark comeuppance when the square becomes activated.

I have suggested that the spiritually oriented approach to the Cardinal Climax years is one that deliberately cultivates a viewpoint that goes beyond fear. Neither is passive incredulity an appropriate response at this point: none of the global challenges being heatedly discussed right now — by the U.N., by the media, by concerned citizens amongst themselves — is new or surprising to anyone who has been paying attention. We are seeing conditions long in the making rendered obvious for the sake of wrenching the collective into a new consciousness. Our goal must be to get in touch, on a gut level, with the fact that the breakdowns we see around us are signals of incipient breakthrough.

As Rick Tarnas and others eloquently remind us, the modern Western mind itself, with its machines and weapons and power games, has grown so out-of-whack as to be needful of tough-love intervention, like a self-harming child.¹⁵ The transits up ahead are no more or less dramatic than they have to be, in order to apply the appropriate restorative treatment. And when our hearts are open to the task, we may find ourselves not only able but eager to engage in the healing, as if a part of our being knew all along that we were born to the task.

As astrologers regarding these intimidating transits we walk a fine line. We must neither lapse into unrealism about their severity, nor forget that though the trends they suggest are immutable their specific manifestations are not. The spiritually informed response to the upcoming Grand Crosses will be to name, confront and transform – as a collective, and as individuals each blessed with different gifts and proclivities – the transits’ potentials at as high a level of expression as possible. This is fundamentally what is meant by the much-touted truism We create our own reality; whose corollary is that we each decided, on a soul level, to incarnate into this particular place at this particular time.

2 And yet we did suffer a purge of a kind, when the astronomers demoted Pluto itself, in August of 2006, to “dwarf planet”.

3 To have faith is not the same thing as being optimistic. To lack faith is not the same thing as pessimism. The terms optimismand pessimism refer to character traits, not to the presence or absence of that transpersonal Neptunian phenomenon we are calling faith. This distinction becomes important when the words are used to shift and trivialize the terms of public debate. It is a misapplication of the term pessimistic to use it to refer, for example, to the observation that the world is running out of oil; or that fish populations are dying off. To characterize such discussions as “pessimistic” is to confuse the facts themselves with one’s emotional responses to the facts.

4 The last time these two planets had opposed each other was in 1971, when America was going through a similar mass disillusion (Neptune) with its official stories (Saturn). Consider Viet Nam, currently an enthusiastic trading partner with Uncle Sam, its former mortal enemy. Contrast this extraordinary development with the scenario being spun by Washington during the sixties, about what was sure to happen in Southeast Asia if the USA lost the Viet Nam War. Virtually unquestioned at the time, the domino theory of communism turned out to be a Neptunian chimera.

5 For a Jungian analysis of this transit, see Bill Streett ’s superb discussion at http://www.astro-noetics.com.

6 See, for example, http://www.wilsonsalmanac.com/converg.html

7 The work of Paul Hawken wonderfully illustrates how this Natural Law expresses itself in human society. Hawken has set up sort of a Wikipedia for Lightworkers: www.wiserearth.org, which lists and interconnects thousands of environmental and social justice movements and puts them into historical context. The project gives the lie to the illusion that consciousness workers so often labor under: that they are lone voices in the wilderness.

8 Early in 2007 the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel addressed the fact that despite a new plethora of recommendations about how to accommodate upcoming climate changes (diversifying crops, shoring up levees, etc.), poor countries – impoverished even further in recent years by globalization — simply do not possess the resources to take remedial action. The fact that several African states are expected to face starvation from the lack of freshwater supplies by 2020; and that the economies of Latin America are expected to suffer disproportionately when decreases in moisture trigger a shift from their tropical forests, are but two examples of a myriad potential humanitarian catastrophes scientists are beginning to catalog.

9 Bill Herbst’s article, “Empire of Community”, in The Mountain Astrologer of June/July 2007 provides a thorough documentation of this and other far-reaching outer-planet cycles.

10 For a historical overview on how the phenomenon of death changed in meaning over the millennia in the Western world, see my essay athttp://www.reclaimingquarterly.org/web/astrology/astrology-1-pluto.html.

11 It is in the Third World that tens of millions of toxic consumer items have been piling up in dumps, where they are picked apart for reusable parts by, in many cases, the tiny fingers of children (see Giles Slade, Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America, Harvard University Press, 2006).

12 Among them, the editorial “Saturn-Pluto and Peace” in the April/May 2003 issue and “The Neptune-Pluto Cycle and the Next Seven Year” from the June/July 2004 issue. Tarriktar has linked the recategorization of the physical planet Pluto with the global changes of the underground treasure which it symbolizes: oil (“The Years Ahead and the Oil Crisis”, op cit).

13 Neptune, governor of lubricants, is the traditional ruler of oil. But a joint rulership with Pluto is gaining in astrological logic. Because the stuff originates underground it has always borne the mark of Pluto; and its having become in recent centuries a coveted treasure (Pluto governs hidden wealth) argues further for the linkage. But there is a further consideration that argues for Plutonian rulership: the kind of wealth oil creates is peculiarly plutocratic. A miniscule proportion of the world’s population is awash in oil’s staggering profits. By contrast, most Americans, for example –ordinary gas and oil consumers — are seeing nothing but higher costs; and the denizens of those Third World countries where the oil companies have set up shop, such as Nigeria, are seeing destruction of their environments on a massive scale. Finally, the epitomical expression of the Pluto-oil linkage is the war in Iraq, which is believed – fairly universally among international observers and by an increasing number of Americans– to have originated from a plan to control (Pluto) the Middle Eastern oil fields. The fact that this war has lined the pockets of a very few military contractors to the tune of 27 billion dollars, all paid for with the tax money of millions of Americans, illustrates a baldly plutocratic state of affairs.

14 It is estimated that at least 90 per cent of the 315 million still-functional personal computers discarded in North America in 2004 were trashed; along with, the following year, 200,000 tons of cell phones (see Slade, op cit).

15 See Rick Tarnas’ The Passion of the Western Mind, Harmony Books, 1991; and Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World, Viking Press, 2006.

Much has been written about the world-altering configurations overlapping in the sky between now and 2022. In order to tease out their meaning, this article will present the period in terms of two overriding themes: that of Neptunian meltdown and Plutonian transformation.

The Moon in a national chart can be read as the collective inner child: that collection of needs and vulnerabilities shared by a whole culture. As we know from studying its function in an individual chart, the Moon shows us our instinctive self, a layer of our being that reaches far deeper than theories and rationalizations. The multiple transit hitting the US Moon throughout 2009 is showing us the tender feelings of a whole populace undergoing a mass meltdown.

For ten years now, Neptune, the planet of dissolution, has been in Aquarius, the sign of humanity as an intelligent collective. Under this transit we were hit with the bombshell of global warming, a learning curve that is demanding a unique kind of flexibility from the peoples of the world. The fact that the US Moon is involved suggests that something far more primal is taking place here than merely an increase of geological-meteorological information. It is America’s emotional body that is getting hit. Our feelings about our planetary home will never be the same.

Perhaps the closest historical antecedent was the blow delivered by Galileo, whose astronomical discoveries wrenched humanity out of its Earth-centered complacency by proposing that our planet was just one many, revolving around the Sun. The news of global warming has, in a scant few years, ruptured a set of associations that had been lodged in the mass mind since the dawn of time: the perception of the physical Earth as the ultimate solid mass, the epitome of security and stability. Age-old assumptions about polar ice, permanent and immutable, are being undermined daily. Consider the quiet distress felt by American parents reading their children the Christmas stories they listened to when they themselves were young, and having it dawn on them that by the time these children read the same stories to their children, Santa’s home, the North Pole, may have become open ocean.

As the collective inner child, the USA’s Moon is undergoing what in an actual child would feel like a visceral threat to its relationship to its Mother; more than enough to justify many future hours on a psychoanalyst’s couch. Here the maternal relationship is between ourselves and Mother Earth. Neptune is unmooring our collective cradle, and we are feeling it drift out to sea.

From this perspective we see that the power of climate meltdown derives from the fact that, somewhere in our collective psyche, we’ve always known about it. It isn’t news at all: the tale has existed since the beginning of time. The role of the Neptune/Jupiter/Chiron transit is to raise this apocalyptic imagery to the surface; a necessity if humanity is to evolve beyond its current state. We are being reminded that, among the myriad potential futures we could create for ourselves, we could choose this one.

When we look at the astrological symbols involved, we can easily understand the peculiar disquiet the issue is provoking for Americans. The Moon represents our need to feel safe, and here it is being broadsided by a planet that obliterates stability (Neptune). Jupiter is supplementing these gut feelings with the requisite scientific knowledge (Aquarius) to support our understanding, while simultaneously stretching our perspective to an international scope hitherto unfamiliar to many Americans. Meanwhile, Chiron is rubbing salt into the wound. The Centaur has been linked to the universal human memory of being excluded, rendered separate — through the act of incarnation — from the All-That-Is (or, to be more precise, separated from our inner knowing that we are not separate).²

For all humans on Earth, Chiron’s involvement symbolizes an anguished reminder of our aboriginal untethering from Source.

Yet the external realm does provide a kind of help, for astrologers. As a patient gets perspective from her caregiver, sky-watchers can get perspective from the planets, decoding their configurations to reveal the themes we are experiencing down here on Earth. This allows us to respond not merely with fear, natural though such a response may be, but with a curiosity about the larger meaning of the crisis. We cannot do this unless we loosen our allegiance to the literal. Indeed, many astrologers see the literal level of events as being merely the universe’s ploy of last resort: the means by which the cosmos gets its point across when the recalcitrant human mind fails to comprehend it in any other way.

For those who believe that everything in life is a symbol, even catastrophic events can be seen as invitations into an unprecedented state of possibility. To view global warming and its attendant Earth changes this way is to see that an infinite number of potential scenarios are at our disposal. The years ahead start to look not like an ending, but a beginning: a tabula rasa. If we base our observations on the premise that a benign universe is behind everything that happens, what clues might we glean from the transits about how to meet this challenge? What would it look like to use the energies of Chiron and Neptune in the highest possible way? To answer these questions we need to return to the planets’ raw meaning, and commit ourselves to absorbing, embodying, and actually working with the lessons they represent.

Those who have worked therapeutically with visualization and other meditative techniques on an individual level can attest to the fact that they can elicit results that can only be described as magical. We are suggesting that affirmation works in the same way on the collective level. Many spiritual groups will convene during the years ahead to create such visions together (Aquarius); and many single individuals around the world will explore similar imagery alone, the better to pool it psychically. We are not talking about pie-in-the-sky prayers for protection, of the type that dismiss the peril the Earth is in, trying to wish it away like a frightened child. We are talking about aligning our imagery with the forces these transits represent; accepting and honoring them from a place of spiritual maturity.

An example of such an affirmation might be to imagine a child being rocked to sleep in its mother’s arms to the strains of a lullaby about drifting off to sea in a boat. Rather than reacting against the terror of the idea of being swept away and lost, the overriding feeling might be one of being watched over by a benevolent force far greater than a mortal caregiver. The image here is one of being released by gentle waves into an infinite dream, as if being welcomed back into the amnios; not backward, into the womb, but forward, into a state of recognition that the cosmos itself is our ultimate womb. Our intellects may scoff at meditations like these, confusing them with escapism and/or denial of the literal facts. But we are not calling upon the intellect here. We are calling on the inner child (Moon) and the image-making capacity of the human mind (Neptune). Actual children are capable of terrible fears, but are also capable of seeing beyond the mundane to the numinous. When we were very young we understood the power of our imaginations. Remembering this power now is an appropriate response to the transit upon us.

A more-all-embracing willingness to believe, and to work with belief as a consciousness tool, is in the air. When we consider Jupiter’s association with philosophy and Neptune’s with mysticism (the most yin of worldviews), we see that the transit indicates a subtle but profound change in humanity’s construction of faith. In particular, the ideological climate in America (conjunction to the US Moon) is experiencing a sea change. As in my example above, where the child in the meditation moved from its human nurturer to a divine one, those seekers (Jupiter) who are alive to the transpersonal promptings of Neptune may find their yearned-for safety in the shift from mother to Mother.

And what of the father-gods humanity has worshipped for the past several millennia? It would seem that the patriarchal religions of the world have not been very helpful lately in the world-healing department. Jehovah, Allah and Yaweh spent the past thirteen years of Pluto in Sagittarius slugging it out on center stage, exhibiting their ugliest faces. The current transit gives us a hint about a different kind of religious vision.

If we are to tackle severe problems of international proportions such as global warming and a worldwide financial crisis, humanity will need an unprecedented ecumenicalism of vision: precisely the kind of vision symbolized by this Aquarius conjunction. Used optimally, Jupiter (theology) and Neptune (universality) suggest a spiritual approach that will defy religious categories already extant. Rigid ideologues will not feel comfortable under these skies. Traditional frameworks of belief are likely to leak out of their previous confines, becoming broader (Jupiter) and less-defined (Neptune).

There are those who will be inspired by the Neptune/Jupiter/Chiron transit to move beyond intolerance into tolerance. And there are those who will move even further, understanding that mere tolerance alone is not enough: that a deep mutual understanding must be cultivated between the peoples of the world.

The limitations of old-fashioned flag-waving are already apparent by virtue of Pluto (breakdown) having moved into Capricorn (national boundaries). Though resistance is strong among those segments of the population who would build walls to keep out the diaspora, the truth is that human beings will not stop hitting the road to destinations that they believe offer them a chance at survival. Indeed, the old way of constructing “immigration” is anachronistic: these are refugees. Globalization and global warming have hit the Third World hard; and chaos, poverty and violence make for porous borders. The Neptune cluster on the US Moon is our heads-up that realities like these are forcing a reconsideration of what many Americans think of as patriotism. The world is moving in a trans-national direction. All over the globe, exclusionary chauvinisms will prove to be increasingly problematic.

Aquarius’ association with technology is playing a key role in this process. Neptune (interconnectedness) in Aquarius (advanced machinery) has utterly transformed what people think of as normal human interaction. Thanks to the internet we can sit on a chair in the comfort of our own home and dive headfirst into the universal waters of the group mind. Heralded by the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of 1993, the speed with which personal computers have changed humanity is so extreme, historically speaking, that we have yet to get our breath. From farmers in rural China to guerilla fighters in the Amazon, everyone has a cell phone. It will be centuries before sociologists fully grasp the immense implications to human functioning of the incessant communication that digital messaging has made possible.

When channeled creatively, this pooling (Neptune) of ideas (Aquarius) is not only healthy but revolutionary. The capacity for citizens to share opinions over the web has broken through government censorship here and abroad. Free-downloading is allowing musicians and filmmakers to get around the corporate entertainment moguls. And the role played by web networking in the Obama victory has changed the face of politics. The generation credited with putting their candidate over the top is sending its brightest nerds to Washington to wire the White House. As an apt symbol of 21st century democracy, the new president carries a Blackberry everywhere he goes.

In an immature state, Neptune’s urge to merge expresses as a desire to conform as a plan of least resistance. We identify with what we imagine “everyone” is thinking; we release our personal data into the infinite space of FaceBook; we run out and buy the same dress we saw the starlet wearing in the movie. Purveyors of fashions and cosmetics make a lot of money off of Neptune. But an even more insidious – because more subtle—form of Neptunian fantasy is the self-loss that accompanies the process of idolization. Similar to falling in love (as opposed to loving), infatuation is an expression of Neptune, whether on an individual level or on a collective level — as when we fall in love en masse with a rock star or a glamorous new president. ³

When the essentially spiritual impulse behind such yearnings is understood, a torrent of creativity is released. What starts out as a nagging psychological restlessness becomes the inspiration to pour ourselves into something larger than ourselves; something bigger and more meaningful than our little lives. Immense freedom comes of making contact with the timeless soul that lies behind our time-bound lifetimes. The mundane world then becomes not a prison, but a playground.

In an epochal shift that spanned several political administrations, the concept of fraudulence (Neptune) has changed meaning in the public mind. Official con games at the highest levels have been grudgingly accepted as normative. Lying has lost its ability to shock. The involvement in the lending industry meltdown of sums of money so staggering (Jupiter) as to be beyond an ordinary person’s conception, and of financial instruments so bizarrely abstract (who can wrap their mind around a credit default swap?) that even their inventors have no idea how to track them, have given the crisis an aura of surrealism (Neptune).

Neptune’s entry into Aquarius coincided with the Clinton impeachment scandal, a paltry sex fraud upon which was displaced all the other truly impactful frauds that were going on at the time. The gargantuan con games at Enron and WorldCom passed right over the heads of many news-viewers who were riveted instead on that stained blue dress. From the point of view of the economic crisis then building, the transit’s most significant expression was the dismantling under Clinton of Depression-era protections in the financial industry. It was during these years that outright fraud by big-time lending institutions was handily legalized via deftly rewritten laws. It is more than noteworthy that several of the masterminds of this chicanery (e.g. Larry Summers, Robert Rubin, Tim Geithner) have been appointed by the new administration to watch over what’s left of the federal treasury. ⁴

The disastrous legacy of these Wall Street shenanigans was deregulation, a product of unbalanced Neptune. This is the planet that loosens strictures, blurs definition, makes amorphous that which was once explicit. Misused Neptune undermines rules and governance, creating disorder where there was order before. With foreclosures reaching epidemic proportions, evicted families (US Moon) personify the deeply personal pain (Chiron) behind the numbers. When Jupiter (runaway growth) entered Aquarius at the beginning of 2009, Americans started to realize that the economic crisis was bigger than the partisan divides that had riveted the nation’s attention for the previous several years.

This trajectory of out-of-control expansion echoes a theme that resides deep within the national psyche. The Sun is conjunct Jupiter (excess) in the Sibly chart, ⁵ a natal warning that the transit has brought home. The giddy exorbitance of an American Dream predicated upon the credit card is over.⁶ The country’s self-image (US Moon) is struggling to re-configure itself at a higher level of awareness.

The second is the house of our physical attachments, usually expressed through the act of ownership. This natal signature hints that the USA is fated go through radical ruptures in the financial arena, regardless of which economic theories happen to be in fashion and regardless of what political faction happens to be in power. Pluto demands so thorough an overhaul of the arena signified by the resident house that the experience feels like a death, after which the only option is rebirth.

The only other valuable (Venus) that has anywhere near this degree of symbolic freight in the American mind is the automobile; and right on schedule, this most sacrosanct of American possessions is also going through a meaning shift. Americans are waxing very ambivalent lately about big fat American cars, and the traffic and pollution that come with them. SUVs are gathering dust in car lots as Detroit designers scramble to come up with models that match the new consumer mood. ⁸ Amidst this sea change in American values the tide is turning towards electric cars, hybrids and high-speed trains. The preferences (Venus) of an entire country are being transformed (Pluto).

While Neptune dissolves deeply held domestic aspirations (US Moon), Pluto (taboo-busting) is digging beneath the surface of commonly held beliefs about the country’s wealth: who controls it, who doesn’t, and how real it is. The transits are revealing a gaping chasm between the romantic dreams of abundance that loom so large in America’s legend, on the one hand, and the facts of people’s actual material lives, on the other. This disparity has been extant for some time, but a rupture is occurring in the mythic scaffolding that has held the disparity intact. True to Plutonian form, a truth that was hidden in plain sight before is now becoming part of the collective consciousness: that the country’s economic gains have been merely trickling to the top. As news of bail-outs, layoffs and foreclosures blare out of their TVs day in and day out, Americans are being forced to recognize the economic facts; such as that many CEOs make several million dollars a year whereas the incomes of workers adjusted for inflation are lower today than in 2000.

Pluto does not reveal anything new; it just unmasks what has been masked before. In this case the economic disparity between America’s captains of industry and its rank-and-file has been masked because ordinary consumers were living beyond their means (more working mothers, more workaholism, and over-mortgaging the house.) As the transits remove the mask, the financial crisis is making these uncomfortable realities common knowledge.

Uranus (sudden awakening) and Pluto (cover-ups) on the US Venus/Jupiter are using the economic crisis as a purgative. Pluto’s regurgitant function is perhaps the most unpleasant of all the planetary healing techniques; but an appreciation of the whole transit sequence allows us to see its rigors as just another step in the process of transformation. As distressing as the financial facts are, the deeper issue is that of collective psycho-spiritual health. The cosmos is using the recession (the act of receding or withdrawing) to force us to reassess the role of physical resources in our lives. As we wend our way towards the Pluto Return of 2022, we can see that profound change to the American system is inevitable. If the republic is to survive as an integral entity, a whole new economy will have to be created.

The question that arises at this point is “What would this new economy look like?” and, as astrologers are forever telling their clients, this we cannot know. A certain surrender is required with outer-planets transits, for countries as well as for individuals. All we know for sure is that there can be no renaissance without rupture: the new economic model will rise out of the ashes of the old. When one acknowledges the organic logic of this idea, one does start to get a sense of some of the qualities the new approach would necessarily possess. We can infer already that if the USA survives its Pluto Return intact, its new financial philosophy would need to be based not simply upon maximizing shareholder profits for a relatively small number of wealthy Americans, but upon prioritizing the health of an Earth now in geological as well as financial peril.

It is not that there was no cosmic meaning in the thunderous political excitement accompanying America’s recent regime change. It’s just that the real news was the astounding influx and degree of engagement of those millions of voters who had been disengaged before. The new president, with his exquisite intellect and character, is clearly the man of the hour; but after all is said and done he is just a man. It will become increasingly clear to even his most adoring fans that The People must embody the change he personified. The People (Uranus) must inspire the government (Saturn) and not the other way around. As Tim Redmund has said, “Electing a good president is necessary but not sufficient.” ⁹

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by Jessica Murray

If we want to know what makes a month tick, the obvious place to start is the Sun sign. The fact that the Sun occupies Sagittarius from late November until the winter solstice tells us that the overriding issue of the period is search for meaning. Then there is the significant portal two-thirds of the way through December – the ingress of the Sun into Capricorn – which lends a tremendous intensity to the season. Thickening the plot further in recent years is the involvement of the planet Pluto, which has been in Sagittarius between 1994 and 2008.

The personal planets tend to group together in Sagittarius around the holidays; and during the past few years the proximity of Pluto deepened and intensified this search. The need for complete overhaul (Pluto) of the way we seek meaning (Sagittarius) distinctly increased the drama of December’s emotional arc. The nature of Plutonian change is such that the imprint of Pluto’s impact on the Christmas season will remain even after the transit has moved on.

Ordinarily, the way astrologers read lunations (New Moons and Full Moons) in an individual’s chart is primarily personal: the Sun and the Moon are intimately subjective archetypes that invite us to look at how we feel about ourselves. Every month when the Moon is in Sagittarius, for example, a part of us waxes philosophical: Somewhere in our consciousness, we ask ourselves, “How do I feel about my spiritual life?”¹ And when the Sun is there too, every New Moon in Sagittarius, the emphasis is doubled: “How do I see myself – as well as feel about myself – as a spiritual being?”

But the question takes on an exponentially heightened significance because of Pluto’s involvement.

The vast collective evolution signified by Pluto’s thirteen-year transit through Sagittarius has had to do with the spiritual life of the whole world, which has been undergoing a decay (Pluto) of outworn cultural mores (Sagittarius). We have all felt this decay in the social fabric, and December’s lunations ask us to confront it on a more intimate level: “What effect do epochal changes in religion have on my own spiritual life?”

The failure of modern theological structures is everywhere in evidence. The young jihadists who burst into global awareness around the millennium, sabotaging with Plutonian extremism the sublime premises of their ancient faith, are only the most obvious example. Also highlighted by the transit was that “old-time-religion” extolled by American fundamentalists – which isn’t very old at all when compared to the cosmologies humans have been coming up with since the beginning of time, nor new enough to meet the unprecedented challenges of a world in severe distress. Equally close to home is the pedophilia cover-up scandal that started to rack the Catholic Church as soon as the Pluto transit began, revealing the “infallible” papacy to be quite fallible indeed.

We have lived through an age where ministers were defrocked left and right; the medicine men packed up their shingles and left town. Worldwide, religious institutions fragmented in pre-mortem hysteria – as all organic systems do when in their last throes. Pluto in Sagittarius was trying to teach us that the work of finding meaning in this troubled world is nobody’s job but our own.

Against this background, our sense of being poised on a mortal threshold increases as we move into December. It derives not only from the planet Pluto, governor of rebirth, but also from the symbolism of the winter solstice at the deep nadir of the year.

By mid-December, warmth and heat have been steadily ebbing, animal and plant life have slowed down, retreated underground and gone dormant. Since the beginning of time, the human mind has fashioned legends to try to come to grips with the fear provoked by this all-encompassing decline. Take a moment to consider the implications of this idea. In every age, this time of year has inspired stories of a world-shattering death redeemed by a glorious return to life. Every epoch has solemnized the solstice with its own reverent stories – of kings ritually sacrificed, of old heroes ceding the way for new ones, of miraculous pregnancies heralding a brand new cycle.

The exquisite irony of the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, of course, is that this promised return to glory and radiance is announced by an imperceptible spark in the dark. It is at precisely the year’s darkest, deepest point that the magic turnaround occurs. And although those who know the cycle may understand, in theory, that the days will thereafter start to lengthen, it is noteworthy that the switchover from decreasing to increasing light is impossible to see. The solstice moment is heralded by no dramatic contrast, no obvious signal. All is coldness and darkness, just like the night before.

When the cycle is seen as an integral whole, this timing is revealed to be systemically perfect; but the fact that it is also utterly counter-intuitive has a meaning too. Nature could conceivably have come up with a boldly reassuring sign that the Sun was starting its critical return, but She did not. This makes one wonder whether the winter solstice was meant to involve a massive leap of faith.

Researchers who study the emotional vicissitudes of the annual cycle (e.g. the effects of light deprivation, cold temperatures and lack of outdoor activity) have tried to help modern thinkers make sense of the Christmas blues. Take this thinking a step further and we have the astrological view: that there is something symbolically appropriate about the sense of doom many people feel around this holiday. The year is indeed dying, and on a soul level there is a need to acknowledge it. Our rational minds know, of course, that the Sun will come back; and that in three month’s time there will be budding trees and baby birds. But our rational minds aren’t the only parts of our beings in play. The archaic layer of our psyche is left uncajoled by scientific knowledge and its guarantees. On a cellular level we are aware that a mortal drama is taking place.

And what is the point of this mortal drama? That this phase of the cycle might have a function, a psycho-spiritual raison-d’être, is hard for non-holistic thinkers to grasp. How is human consciousness served by mass existential doubt? Only when we see Time as an ever-turning wheel can we make sense of it. Just under the surface of the holiday gaiety – rendering it a tad hysterical, in fact – is an all-encompassing awareness not only of our own personal mortality, but of the world’s mortality. And mixed in with this sobering awareness is a sense of poignant hope and faith, unique to this time of year, and the aspect of it that is rightly glorified, even in mass-produced greeting cards.

At the winter solstice all of humanity’s energies are funneled into this primal drama of the Sun/Son’s rebirth. The human race holds its collective breath, counting the days until the forces of life once again begin their ascent. The great wheel is poised at its bottommost turning point, ready to slowly wend its way back up towards the top. It is easy to see why this annual crossroads filled ancient peoples with such awe, and infuses Christians, to this day, with such fervor. It is the universal story of Darkness turning into Light.

What is remarkable is that this tale has remained intact, with varying degrees of literalization, despite the wholesale disconnection of the modern world from natural cycles. This seems to prove as much as anything could that there are certain inborn stories deeply embedded in the human psyche; and that though astronomical events reflect these stories, they can hardly be said to cause them.

December’s transits in the sign of ritual constitute an invitation to reconnect with the aboriginal auspices of the universal holidays, and make them our own again. Pluto in Sagittarius has shown us that we must resacralize those rituals that have grown stale – jettisoning some altogether, inventing new ones from scratch. For some this may mean celebrating the divine without the involvement of a priest or a rabbi or an imam or a retail outlet. For others it may mean a new attentiveness to the patterns in the sky that map out these sacred juncture points over the course of the year.

And there is plenty of imagery to choose from in rewriting the sacred scripts. As descendants of the Judeo/Christian/Islamic tradition – not to mention the myriad animistic systems which pre-dated these three – we have inherited a symbolic vocabulary rich in classic rituals.

The goal spelled out in the etymology of the word religion is that of re-linking us to the universe. From the whimsical to the profoundly solemn, new rites are being created, and ancient ones are being resurrected. On the New Moon in December, try writing yourself a new tradition. On the sacred solstice, celebrate it.

Now it’s real. And now it’s yours.

February 2005

And there is an art to going to an astrologer. It isn’t like signing up for a workshop or going to a lecture, where you just sit there and listen to information that could apply to anybody.

Astrology is an uncharted sea of misconceptions for most people. Not only do they not know what astrology is, but they don’t realize that they don’t know. This article is an attempt to rectify the situation. It addresses some frequently asked questions, some not-frequently-enough-asked questions, and some questions which, from your astrologer’s point of view, are asked altogether too frequently.

It is a point of faith with spiritual seekers that one is drawn to just the right teachers at the just the right time. To believe this is to expect that you will be drawn to the appropriate astrologer when you are ready. But it will greatly enhance the experience if you come in with your eyes open.

Especially for those new to the mystical healing circuit, it’s a good idea before setting up the appointment to have a sense of what an astrologer can and cannot do. You will avoid disappointment by dispelling expectations you might not have even known you had. And you will get more information for your time and money spent.

The best way to find any service practitioner is word-of-mouth. Otherwise, look at ads on the web or in a magazine related to psychic arts, and apply the same criteria you would use looking for a therapist. Check out several websites and see what inspires you. Call the person up and get a feel for them. Do they speak in a way you can understand, and do they seem intelligent? Sensitive? Professional? How long have they been in practice? Do they have the kind of background that might indicate a worldview compatible with your own?

And sometimes what you are asking will line up quite predictably with the hot spots in your chart. Before addressing your questions, your astrologer may re-frame them in terms of the big picture of your life.

That said, certain practitioners, most notably clairvoyants, do specialize in the kind of sight that receives pictures about what your mother is doing and thinking. And most astrologers, too, possess a degree of psychic sensitivity that informs their readings to one extent of another. But the chart itself does not describe your mother. It only describes your perception of your mother. It is axiomatic in metaphysics, no less than in the New Physics, that there is no such thing as an objective, absolute truth about anyone or anything. Reality exists only as relative to the observer (called in some divinatory practices the querent).

Your astrologer’s focus is upon what your Higher Self needs you to know about the changes you’re going through, and about other people entering your life who reflect those changes. You may come into the reading wondering what’s going on with your best friend, and leave the reading with a new understanding of what your best friend’s soul is here to teach your soul.

Likewise, if you ask your astrologer for a chart comparison between yourself and a new love interest, what you will get is a general picture of the two personalities and their soul intentions. Astrology can be very useful in comparing and contrasting one chart’s needs (Moon) with another’s; one chart’s communication style (Mercury) with another’s. It will allow you to see how the two modus operandi (Mars) compare; how the belief systems compare (Jupiter); and so on. There is a tremendous amount of information there. Indeed, making selective choices as to what to include in your session is one of the challenges your astrologer faces.

Your astrologer will welcome any questions you may have that haven’t been addressed, as well as requests to go back over something you did not understand. But whatever the subject of your reading, you will learn more if you just listen. You will be relieved, later, that you avoided the classic astro-virgin scenario of going home to listen to your tape only to hear mostly your own voice, saying things you already know.

Naturally, what you are most concerned with is what is happening right now; but your astrologer is focused on why it’s happening. It’s sort of an apples-and-oranges difference. Keep in mind that your astrologer’s bigger picture includes — but does not confine itself to — the meaning of what’s happening in your world at the moment, so it has more information in it. Thus it would be to your benefit to follow where she is leading the discussion. When you allow her to re-frame your concerns in terms of your chart’s lifelong themes, they will make sense not only right now but when you listen to your tape ten years from now.

At the same time, it is perfectly permissible, and often quite welcome, for the client to reel the practitioner in if her rap is looping out into the esoteric stratosphere and you’re getting lost. At any juncture you may ask her to sum up the last paragraph, to repeat the main point, or to rephrase what she is trying to say.

If we agree that the goal of a reading is self-understanding, we would have to agree that you’d get nothing out of a black-and-white answer like that, even if your astrologer could give you one. But in truth he cannot, because the chart shows only potentials: its scenarios are multiple, mutable and totally up to you. The Ultimate Rule of Metaphysics, we-create-our-own-reality, prevails in relationships as everywhere; though it may be harder to accept where other people are involved.

Your love interests are reflections of your own psyche, even as in a dream every character is a version of the dreamer. This is what makes relationship astrology so educational. After the reading you may see not just your new relationship, but your whole relationship history, with new eyes.

Consider that we each carry around a certain definition of what a good (or “real”) relationship is, which we vaguely imagine to be a universal constant. Part of what we want (or think we want) comes from our unique set of criteria, part of it comes from our culture. But astrology relies on very different assumptions. An astrologer’s take on relationships is based on the principles of metaphysics, not on social or psychological notions of what constitutes health, happiness or normalcy. From your astrologer’s point of view, why you and your boyfriend came together may have nothing to do with your conscious choices, nor with your society’s (or your age group’s or your family’s) definition of a successful relationship.

Astrology posits that people connect in order to mirror back insights about the self that the self cannot see alone.

But please do not ask your astrologer “What signs am I compatible with?” It will make him whimper softly and begin to dream about a desk job somewhere.

The astrological symbols and their placements merely indicate trends in your chart, not specifics. The specifics are up to you. And the more aware you are of your chart’s fundamental purpose, the more sublime and effective those specifics will be. This is to say that we really do create our own reality.

It is too bad that this premise has become a New Age cliché, and the deal-breaker for many would-be metaphysical thinkers. As a concept, it is resented, misused and half-understood. But astrology would not work if it were not so.

Remember, too, what spiritual teachers say about such discomfort: often when we hear something new about ourselves, it throws us out of our comfort zone, which is actually a good sign. If you are ambivalent about some of the things in your reading, it could be just growing pains. Our egos tend to get disturbed when faced with heretofore-unconscious information. But it is not the ego that gets us to grow and change. That is the job of the Higher Self.

And it is your Higher Self that your astrologer is there to validate. She is not there to validate your self-image. Her job is to explain what your chart says about your life purpose: a set of pure potentials. Your self-image is your own business.

It’s a lot of information, but that’s all it is: information. And there is no quiz at the end.

The first misconception will be dispelled as soon as you are introduced to the astounding subtlety and complexity of your own chart. As to the fear that astrology wants to make people out to be who they are not, the truth is just the opposite. Your astrologer’s goal is to get you in touch with your essence; so that you can go forth and express that essence however you want.

It may be that because the information involved is so profound, and the experience of hearing it is sometimes so unexpected, that a client who usually doesn’t take things personally may do so in the case of an astrological reading. But you will get the most out of the session by remembering that your astrologer is a professional you have hired to read your chart: he is not your best friend, your parent, or your judge. He does not need you to agree with his interpretation. He respects you as the master of your chart.

Nothing you don’t already know. If you are paying attention.

by Jessica Murray

Before the sky-god religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) rose to dominance, a movement that began around five thousand years ago, spirituality was Nature-based. The Earth was seen as a Great Mother, and all living things were her children. When death came to a member of the tribe, it was the crone priestess who presided over last rites. It is said that she cradled the dying in her arms like a newborn child, crooning the funerary version of a lullaby. The pronouncement of anathema was the priestess’ official statement that the dying person was about to cross the mortal threshold, and should prepare for the great surrender.

These were not mere theological distortions. They were the strategic decisions of a new institution trying to consolidate its power. Through the canny misconstrual of ancient practices, the church conducted the world’s first mass negative propaganda campaign ever attempted on this kind of scale. As we know, it was an astounding success.

Under the new priesthood, it was untenable that female elders be allowed to announce the Mysteries. All evidence of feminine religious authority had to be expurgated. Here, as with so many other tenets of ancient cosmology, the church found a way to cast blame for death onto the Feminine principle. During the centuries that followed, the old priestess’ rite mutated into a rationale for the persecution of “witches”.

But the spin churchmen put on the pronouncement of anathema has a further significance, even more profound: it points up the way our thinking about death has changed over the ages. No longer a sacred phase in the Wheel of Life, death came to be seen as a non-inevitable calamity of which humanity was the cause as well as the victim.

Any historian who aspires to a rigorously honest analysis of the early church must confront the question: What inspired church fathers to come up with the perverse new explanations of mortality, sex and childbirth that they came up with? How much of it was pure political co-option; how much projected collective neurosis?

However we explain their motivation, their edicts heralded the way death would be seen by an increasingly dis-ensouled world. Eventually their explanations came to be accepted as normative, and evolved into a cosmology whereby modern people imagine themselves to exist outside of and at odds with Nature, and alone in the Universe.

But under the Christian system, independent explorations into the Mysteries were condemned as heresy. Looking death in the eye was outlawed; and by prohibiting it, the church suppressed the likelihood of a person reaching spiritual maturity. Christians were denied the license to cultivate their own unique spiritual intelligence. Passivity was encouraged. It became a crime even to ask questions that didn’t fit the program.

Thus the church made death taboo in the modern sense¹: too dangerous to talk about, think about or confront.

But with the advent of the patriarchal religions, humanity was presented with a whole new set of death stories: stories of a bellicose and rejecting deity, of inborn human evil and hideous afterlife punishment. The new myths wrenched humans out of their sense of planetary belonging.

Death became linked with fear.

The changeover from the original view of death to the Christian view was a revolutionary philosophical crisis. It was the most critical ontological threshold humanity has ever crossed, marking the chasm between the primitive mind and the cosmically estranged modern mind.

The new death stories represented a definitive parting of company with Plutonian law.

If we take a broad enough historical view, we begin to see that notwithstanding the current clashes between Darwinists and creationists, the truth is that modern science itself evolved out of the victory of the patriarchal church over the ancient ways.

Back when the great Goddess-to-God shift was taking place, the contest for the right to explain the Mysteries was between folk (”pagan”) tradition and Christianity, whose crusaders were armed to the teeth and dispatched to “convert” heathens across the globe. It took several thousands of years of persecution, pogroms and inquisitions for the new system to prevail.

It is no wonder that it took so long. One can only imagine how freakish the idea of original sin must have sounded to the goddess-worshiping cultures that came under the conquering sword. To ancient peoples, the idea of demonizing sexuality was not merely bizarre; it was a sacrilege. And for the church to condemn across-the-board the entire race of women — givers of life, like the Goddess Herself — must have seemed an incomprehensible blasphemy.

To declare death an aberration was a consummate power play. Cajoling the populace away from seeing their own death as part of a larger cycle, as organic as leaves falling from the trees at the approach of winter, the church presented death as a weird human error that could be rectified only through institutional intervention. By enforcing the belief that we die because of an aboriginal act of human wickedness (Eve and the apple, etc.), death became a problem. The ultimate problem. And one that no amount of self-knowledge or independent spiritual search could solve. There was no choice but to submit to the priests and popes, follow their rules and pay their tithes. Otherwise the horrors of hell awaited.

It was the biggest scam in human history.

The church made it its first order of business to denounce reincarnation as a pagan travesty. This campaign proved largely successful in the Western world, where great cosmic truths are now under the auspices of a scientific establishment that dismisses and ridicules the idea of past lives. And by declaring it taboo to sacralize Nature, church founders laid the groundwork for the kind of modern thinking that leads us to treat the environment as a commodity to exploit and consume.

The impact of the new teachings extended far beyond the theological arena. The early church accomplished nothing less than an all-but-total repudiation of the ancient, circular view of existence. Instead they substituted a linear model. The new model said: We are born and then we die, and whatever happens after that — whether heaven or hell — is forever. Simple as one, two, three.

This worldview has become so ingrained that atheists and fundamentalists alike hold it as an unquestioned assumption. One cannot help but see it as darkly humorous that both battling camps unthinkingly subscribe to the same postulate. The anti-spiritual crowd considers what happens after death to be a moot point, while the religionists consider it to be the whole point. But both presume after-death experience to be final and static.

It is difficult to overestimate the significance of this change in the collective worldview. The modern mind considers it axiomatic that human life — and Time itself — operate in a line, not a circle. Death is seen as the phase farthest away from birth. Indeed, just phrasing it this way sounds absurdly self-evident, which tells us how deeply entrenched the notion has become.

By contrast, the ancient mind saw death as the phase that took a person’s life full circle. Thus it was the point closest of all to the point of birth.

Greene has associated Pluto-in-Scorpio through history with the reawakening of interest in various doctrines which reclaim humanity’s place in the natural order of ever-repeating cycles — all of them heresies in the eyes of the world’s dominant religious establishments. These include reincarnation, astrology, alchemy and other occult traditions.

The New Physics, which entered the collective vocabulary in earnest during the late 80s and early 90s when Pluto was most recently in Scorpio, is of course not new at all. Its basic tenets are merely the latest restatement of the eternal truths: that everything in the universe is interconnected, and that energy can never be created or destroyed, but just changes form — the key premises of the Old Religion.²

To the extent that we in the industrialized world are all educated in this myopic perspective, we overestimate the proportion of human history that the father-god theologies have been in power. And we underestimate the significance of the countless millennia before then, during which the human race viewed the world very, very differently. But as Carl Jung and others have made clear, this knowledge is in fact retained by the human mind; or, to be more precise, by a part of our beings that might be termed the body-mind intelligence. Each of us is born with a collective memory that contains within it ineradicable imagery of profound emotional and spiritual power, deeply hidden but very much alive despite the all-encompassing influence of conventional thinking.

It also seems likely that each of us carries within our cells the memory of ceremonies conducted by our ancestors to honor Plutonian law, such as the Eleusinian Rites: rituals practiced for thousands upon thousands of years before the relatively recent sky-god religions came along. Deep species-knowing cannot be stamped out, even by centuries of oppression and brainwashing.

I believe we also retain collective memory of the gallows, the stake and the rack. Nine million women are estimated to have been killed in the name of the father-god during the European Renaissance, an epoch glorified for being a high point for (male) education and the arts; but which, for believers in the Old Ways — or those mistaken for same — was a holocaust that makes subsequent historical abominations pale by contrast.

For a discussion of the parallels between the New Physics and ancient worldviews, see Physics vs. Metaphysics: A False Divide on the Articles page of this website.