With the solar Eclipse of July 1st upon us, Greece is in flames. The cradle of Western civilization is exploding with the Cardinal Cross.

Glimpsed sneaking away from the mayhem: none other than Goldman Sachs, whose world-famous (this was before they became world-notorious) consultants helped Greece mask its debt crisis with the same credit-swapping tricks that trashed Wall Street. I swear, not even the snarkiest black humorist could have come up with a scenario this outrageous. (I’m obliged to reader Preston for turning me on to an excellent article by Michael Hudson on the deeper echelons of the financial crisis.)

We are seeing a stunning encapsulation of everything astrologers have been expecting, as the summer Eclipses trigger the showdown between Uranus (revolution), Pluto (breakdown) and Saturn (debts come due).

Karma is an overused term, but astrologers have a very precise meaning for it: the results of processes we set in motion. This is Saturnine Law. In July’s Skywatch I discuss what happens to us when we get seduced into transformative action without remembering these laws. All hopped up by our fancy new technologies (Uranus) and enthralled by their immense power (Pluto), humanity’s got the bit in its teeth right now. But when we fail to factor in the potential results (Saturn) of what we’re doing, we get the kind of thing that happened in Japan in March.

In the karma department, the USA’s Saturn Return is peaking; its last exactitude is this August. Everywhere Uncle Sam turns, chickens are coming home to roost.

Buried beneath the big news stories on the Eclipse in mid-June was a disquietingly touching item about the war in Viet Nam, that military morass which kick-started The Sixties for many insular Americans. It was announced that Washington will join together with the Vietnamese government to clean up the defoliant Agent Orange, with which the Pentagon laid waste to that nation 50 years ago. The Cardinal Cross has offered up another parallel between our own era and that of the last rendezvous between Uranus and Pluto (1965-6), this one with a Saturnine twist: an invitation to take responsibility for crimes committed when the Cross was born.

And yet another old sin came forward to be redeemed, as the lunar Eclipse started to wane. The day before the Solstice, a group of Native Americans were awarded the largest settlement ever approved against the US government. It seems Washington stole or squandered billions of dollars worth of royalties intended for American Indians in exchange for grazing and other leases. The suit had been pending for more than a century.

The July first Eclipse is one of a series of portals of consciousness; opportunities for drastic breakthrough. I talk about these in my latest lecture, Something’s Happening Here. There are individuals all over the world who are making extravagant leaps of awareness right now.

It takes courage of a special kind to take this leap . Depending on the potentials within your own chart, these leaps could take various forms: active, private, whimsical or deeply solemn. They might take the form of unplugging from the internet for a week, as a means of reclaiming your brain. They might take the form of questioning conventional wisdom about current events; asking yourself, for instance, whether this latest quest for regime change in Libya has anything to do with the fact that that country has the largest oil reserves in Africa. They might take the form of letting yourself feel – in your belly (governed by Cancer, the sign of the Solstice) – the significance to the World Soul of a massive drought in China, a country that is home to 20% of the world’s population.

Don’t get stuck in “But what can I do about it?” Activism may be in the cards for you at some point; but the first step, for the purpose of this exercise, is to feel the questions. To defy the urge to deny. If we can obviate our usual blocking mechanisms and simply let the thought in, we are answering the call of these Eclipses. Musings like these stimulate the part of us that aches to be connected to the planetary moment.

Think up your own thought-seeds on July first. Use them to get a running-start leap through the portal.

I do not have the stars-and-stripes flapping in the breeze this Spring evening. I don’t have my “We’re Number One” T-shirt on. I’m not giddy with jubilation about my country shooting Osama bin Laden in the face.

President Obama claims that “justice was done;” seeming to gloss over the associations the word justice has with charges, public trials, evidence and so on. Does it matter, if we flout international laws by sending killers to off people on foreign soil? Does it matter, if we violate our own Constitution by waging war on Libya without Congressional approval? Apparently, if the cause is popular enough, it doesn’t matter. I guess those Americans who think that what happened in Abbottabad is an example of “what makes America great” took away different ideals from 5th-grade social studies than I did.

The assault occurred at the Dark of the Beltane New Moon, with Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Uranus all in Aries. This stellium bristles with the potential for subterfuge, violence and militarism; but, like every other daunting transit of the Cardinal Cross period, we were given it to learn from. Of course, this is only possible if we open our ears and eyes… not a strong suit of the American public.

I have written elsewhere about the strange events of  September 11th 2001, and will look at it again in an upcoming Skywatch. Most Americans did not ask questions then, and they are not asking questions now. They seem to prefer watching earnest airheads on TV ask questions (and not questions that genuinely seek information; just questions that play gotcha to score political points.) We like to let our pundits do our non-thinking for us.

At first blush the Osama killing seems like a classic American showdown, the kind we could find between the pages of any X-men comic book. But it is highlighting a jarring ethical divide for the US public. Transiting Pluto — the most critical piece of the Longest Arm of the Cross — is approaching exactitude in its opposition to the US Jupiter (ideals), and the group mind is at a crossroads of moral ambiguity. Many people are feeling profoundly disquieted by the shift; others are cleaving blithely to the old simplicities. But my sense is that all of us are experiencing this one in the gut, where we keep our deepest notions of right and wrong.

Neptune, now in its glory in Pisces, is also about ambiguity; which comes in two flavors. There is the reasoned kind of ambiguity, which opens us up to the subtlety of nuanced understanding. Then there’s the blind kind, where we get lost in a fog. We slip into the latter when, for example, we become hypnotized by the media’s engineered version of events.

To resist this, we might notice that those elements of this bloody adventure that are attracting the fewest questions are far more interesting than those being repeated ad nauseum on the news. One example: I found myself wondering about the unnamed women and children who had to watch Osama get shot in the head. One of them was apparently his twelve-year-old daughter (the White House has been changing its story about this child, which ought to make us even more curious).

The  existence of these tragic bystanders parallels the killing of Moammar Khadafy’s youngest son and three grandchildren a few days ago. The White House didn’t devote much time talking about them, either. And I haven’t heard a peep in the mass media about the murder — all-but-forgotten but newly relevant — of Khadafy’s baby daughter in 1986, by a US missile strike (does it not chill the blood to imagine this man’s feelings about America right now?).

It’s pretty clear why these specimens of collateral damage are being given scant air time. It would complicate things for the American public to think of their designated Evil Ones, bin Laden and Kadafy, as human beings with actual flesh-and-blood daughters. The fact of their humanity (in the literal, not the ethical sense) does not justify or diminish bin Laden’s or Khadafy’s crimes. All it does is complicate things.

It throws off the narrative, by leading us to other thoughts.

It might lead us, for example, to think about the millions of lives destroyed by Uncle Sam’s wars. And that might get us thinking about how the Iraqi and Afghan and Pakistani widows and orphans must feel, watching clips on Al-Jazeera right now of Americans gleefully singing “The Star Spangled Banner.”

And then we might start thinking about the disparity between the number of Arab dead and the number of US dead in the World Trade Center. This is not to say that crimes against humanity can be quantified. But any line of inquiry that provides perspective is called for under transits like these; and we are talking about the difference between some 753,400 deaths in Iraq (WikiLeaks figures are available up until 2009) and Afghanistan; in comparison with fewer than 3,000 deaths on 9/11 in New York.

Thoughts that complicate things invite nuance into our thinking, and nuance creates confusion in a time of fevered groupthink. This is why, in all the brain-numbing hours of TV coverage about the extra-judicial assassination of bin Laden, we hear so little historical context. The mass media will not touch with a ten-foot pole any subject that flies in the face of the neat, dumb simplicity of the official narrative.

Such as the fact that before bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were styled as arch-villains, both spent several years on the CIA payroll. I’m not suggesting this makes them any less odious. For some of us, it makes them more odious still. But what does it make the US government?

Moral ambiguity is not easy to embrace. Nor are any of the other wrenching cultural changes upon us between now and 2023. But on a soul level, we know we are ready for them. In the monthly Skywatches, we’ll continue to talk about how to use transits to negotiate the turbulence from the center of our charts — the only vantage point that allows us any understanding.

The confetti had barely been swept up in town squares all over the world after the triumph in Egypt. The American public was distracted elsewhere, trying to find a job, or keep a job. And suddenly we were in another war.

Word was buzzing around the blogosphere that a post-March 11th natural disaster was likely

(I detail these transits in my new lecture, Uranus Squared). The approach of Mars, the god of war, to the Aries point – the red-hot degree set off by Uranus on the day of the monster quake– called to mind disasters of a less natural variety: military ones. As the perigee Moon was waxing to Fullness, on March 17th the USA strong-armed the UN into passing a resolution to allow its cruise missiles to attack Libya.

Last week President Obama forewent the Constitutional nicety of waiting for Congress to declare war before sending out the Tomahawks, aircraft carriers, destroyers, nuclear submarines and F-16 bombers. He didn’t attempt the kind of long, drawn-out justifications that made Bush’s military incursions so blatantly disingenuous. Our kinder, gentler warmonger just went ahead and sent the death metal flying.

The “no-fly” zone (one of the Pentagon’s more opaque euphemisms) was declared under the banner of “humanitarian intervention,” a sentiment around which all who watched Moammar Khadafy’s hideous attacks on his own countrymen could rally. Moral imperatives are very tricky, however, when deployed geopolitically. In a military context, contingencies are as slippery and interconnected as strands of spaghetti on a plate. Try to isolate just one and you get a whole pile of them coming at you, making a big mess.

The questions begged by Washington’s morality argument are legion. Why does the mandate apply here but not to the Ivory Coast? Or to the Congo, with its thousands of rape victims and child soldiers and disappeared dissidents? Or to Uganda or Zimbabwe or the Sudan, where innocents are being murdered by dictators who are surely no less certifiably insane than in Libya? How do Washington’s moral imperatives apply to the bombing of Libya by Reagan in 1987, that killed Khadafy’s two-year-old daughter? Do they explain why the corrupt monarchs Uncle Sam is choosing to support right now  – in Yemen, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, where protesters are bleeding blood just as red as that of the rebels in Libya – aren’t eliciting the same degree of righteous outrage as is the madman in the caftan?

And how does the international peacekeeper argument apply to the fact that the USA is by far the biggest manufacturer and seller of armaments in the world?

Pluto is slowing down for a retrograde station on April 9th. Since the Equinox, the Sun has been triggering the Cardinal Cross in the early degrees of Aries, lighting a fire under the US Jupiter: the planet of ethics and ideology. Every one of us is having to ask ourselves: How do Right and Wrong shake out in this complex, troubled world?

Transiting Saturn is opposed to transiting Jupiter now, as well. It is not only dogmas that are breaking down; it is our most cherished ethical ideals. These transits warn us against facile moral positions. Americans in particular are being asked to look more closely at their country’s use of idealistic truisms (Jupiter) to justify policies of dominance and control (Pluto).

Would that it were as simple as good-guy-vs.-bad-guy. But this supposed white-knight crusade on the part of the US military smells rankly of unintended consequences and hidden motivations. And as the ones whose taxes are paying for it, Americans ought to be asking themselves whether this bloody expenditure is really likely to help the people of Libya. Does recent military history suggest that the intervention of a Western power into an Arab civil war will bring peace? Is this attack likely to endear the USA to that part of the world?

In 2003 Washington’s hideously cynical decision to bomb Baghdad was framed, first, as a vengeance ideology (something to do with 9/11; it was never clear exactly what), and later as an enlightened-government ideology (introducing American-style elections at the point of a bayonet). But the ideologies employed were never the point, and they showed themselves to be fungible. The warmongers used whatever sales pitch they could get to fly.

What does seem to be clear about the tragic situation in Libya is that the petro-powerbrokers would very much like to secure a foothold into a strategically critical region. The forces behind the UN resolution seem to be beefing up their own hand-picked contingent amidst the fracas, with an eye to giving the French, the Brits, and the USA (say, aren’t these the same folks who divvied up the Arab world between themselves after WWII?) control of the oil spigot to Europe. A reliable puppet state there would also allow them to keep an eye on those other pesky revolutions in the area.

Mars enters Aries on April first, making it a part of the Longest Arm of the Cross. On April 11th it squares Pluto, maximally strong from its station on April 9th. The preceding weekend anti-war protests are planned for cities across the USA. These build on the demonstrations the week after the Equinox, where students carried placards asking, Why is there no money for our schools but always money for another war?

Pluto in Capricorn oversees the breakdown of authoritative systems that are too old and corrupt to survive. During the decay process, the falsehoods at the core of these systems become increasingly obvious. They can no longer be hidden within the folds and recesses of cultural habit. Those institutions fall apart that once sheltered the Old Guard, whose well-worn power plays become clumsier and more artless. Techniques of control become threadbare. The forces of deep change are ascendant. Not cosmetic change. Rebirth-style change.

This Spring a decisive confrontation is taking place within citizens of the world. Where do we stand vis-à-vis these Earth-shattering crises? How do we want these urgent energies to be expressed?

The revolution has reached Wisconsin.

All in the scope of a bare few weeks, the world’s mind has been blown by the jasmine rallies (see new lecture, Uranus Squared) in the Middle East and Africa, student protests in the U.K. and anti-government eruptions in China and Pakistan; among other uprisings all over the globe. The world-altering transits that have kept astrologers buzzing for the past several years are coming to fullness. We are now in the latest phase — begun last summer and peaking through 2016 — of a long destabilization process, cosmically designed to rend asunder humanity’s sense of stasis.

Provoked by retrograde Saturn (resistance), the square between Uranus (rebellion) and Pluto is moving in for the kill. Among Pluto’s manifestations are agencies of control that are so deeply rooted in the group mind that they have become a way of life; even for — especially for — those whom they dis-empower. Two examples of such agencies: dictatorships that have eliminated all political opposition for 40 years, and plutocracies so riddled with corruption that reform has heretofore seemed impossible.

The transit astrologers call The Cardinal Cross is destabilizing Jupiter (values) and Saturn (authority issues) in the chart of the USA,. To keep us guessing, the cosmos has set the drama in a place more closely associated with apple-pie county fairs than with guerilla politics: the American Midwest.

In the role of Uranus we find schoolteachers and other public employees, whose dramatic camp out in the state capitol alerted millions of observers to the governor’s efforts to crush the unions. Personifying the role of Pluto, we find those chilling eminences grises the Koch Brothers and their paid mouthpiece, Gov. Scott Walker (whose bland, wholesome cover was blown on Feb 23rd by a prank call that purported to be from David Koch, in which the boyscout-faced governor admitted that he’d considered hiring agents provocateurs to disrupt and discredit the demonstration).

Representing Pluto on an institutional level, we have the propaganda machine comprised of Fox News and right-wing radio, which have come out against the workers. At first blush, their taking this stand seems utterly counter-intuitive. How do these self-professedly populist commentators manage to side with The Man, in fight after fight, and still maintain their credibility with thousands of Americans as the voice of the underdog?

The enormously well-funded, well oiled-machine that is the corporate media makes full use of the dark psychological urges governed by Pluto.  These originate in the viscera — Pluto is an emotional planet, not a mental one — and relate to the human fear of failing to survive. Plutonian impulses tend to lurk in the shadows of semi-consciousness, as if aware that they wouldn’t pass muster with our rational thinking and ethical values.

These impulses are what gives the attack on the unions its ugly power. Fear, rage and envy are being used by the state and its cheerleaders among the talking heads to pit one group of struggling citizens against another. Frustrated and infuriated Fox viewers are being exhorted to dis-identify with the hard-working teachers — essentially, to blame the lousy economy upon them — for having the gall to expect a decent living. The cri de coeur here is “Goddammit, I don’t have a secure job; why should they?”

Making schoolteachers the enemy must have been the easy part. Appealing to the anti-intellectual insecurity of its listeners has always been a winning strategy for Fox. Last week, railing against how high teachers’ salaries were, Megan Kelly’s sneering tone when she  pronounced the phrase “50 thousand dollars” was clearly meant to convey that the figure was obscenely unwarranted; her voice dripped with scathe when she condemned the teachers’ “guaranteed paid summer vacations.”  It is beyond ironic that these same commentators take the exact opposite tack where taxing millionaires is concerned.“$250 thousand dollars a year is not all that much money,” said one of them recently, defending the fat-cat tax cuts.

Presumably, the interests of the bailed-out hedge-fund crowd, unlike those of teachers and firefighters, are deemed worth safeguarding. In the upside-down moral universe of American plutocracy, the value of Wall Street’s work  — all those arduous hours spent speculating, foreclosing and  trashing the global economy — trumps the value of educating children, putting out fires and policing the streets. Thus the oft-heard apologia for executive compensation: We have no choice but to offer the rich-and-successful all this money, in order to stay competitive. In one of the more twisted justifications for the increasingly feudalistic income gap in the USA, the common folk are shamelessly told that their country would suffer a “talent exodus” if those bloated CEO bonuses were to be reined in.

It was when Pluto entered Capricorn in 2008 that political and economic injustice started to break through the floorboards from beneath collective consciousness into open public discussion. In the USA, a poorly educated and dis-informed public has so far largely embraced the narrative of a political establishment that stonewalls genuine social change and condones sociopathic greed. But this scenario is unraveling. Uranus moves into Aries on March 11th, to be inflamed even further by Mars’s ingress in early April. As impoverished autocracies across the globe boil over with citizen revolt, the populace of the USA is having a harder and harder time staying in denial about the gaping abyss between rich and poor here at home. With Cardinal trigger transits accelerating the Cross this Spring, the realization is hitting the common folk that there’s something wrong with the way free market capitalism prioritizes private wealth (Pluto) over individual human lives (Uranus).

The word crisis, linked to the idea of the crossroads, implies decision-making. The cross spelled out in the sky right now is a prompt to each of us, to respond (not merely to react) to the tensions in our world. This response may be one of thought (air), emotion (water), action (fire) or creative gesture (earth); but it must be a response. The only way to do this is to get into the moment — which is where every transit tries to get us to go. Awake and in present time, we are able to truly consider what’s at stake, to draw on our powers of discernment and to stand up and be counted, using the unique resources that make us who we are.

You may have heard, dear readers, about the astronomer who went on NBC and made a pronouncement that has led astro-philes everywhere to worry that their Sun signs were misdiagnosed.

Setting off the ruckus was a timeworn objection to modern astrology that turns up like a bad penny now and again (the last time I heard it was 35 years ago). In this latest reiteration, it was declared by Dr Kunkle (after whom I hope they name the next new planet, or maybe a trendy new search engine) that “The 12 signs were designated to different periods of the year almost 3,000 years ago, when astrology began, and since then the Earth’s position in relation to the Sun has changed.”

Well, yes, that’s true. That’s why we have both a sidereal zodiac and a tropical zodiac. Both zodiacs (the word means wheel of animals) are in wide use, and have been for a long time — as all astrologers are aware. You’d think scientists, too, would be aware of it; at least those who presume to speak publicly as experts on astrology. In fact, the idea that an astronomer could be ignorant of the difference between the sidereal and the tropical zodiacs seems so implausible that it makes me wonder whether this whole kerfluffle isn’t a deliberate faux-scoop: an example of somebody trying to make a splash on a slow news day.

Sidereal astrology is used by Vedic astrologers; tropical astrology is used mostly by Western astrologers. If you had your chart done by a sidereal astrologer, you may indeed end up with a different Sun sign than if you had it done by a tropical astrologer. That’s because they’re different systems — not because you’ve been living a lie all this time and you’re really a Capricorn instead of a Sagittarius. Astrologers normally specialize in one or the other system. Now that we have computers, it’s just a matter of clicking on either the sidereal or the tropical option on our chart-erecting programs.

The sidereal zodiac derives from the apparent movement of planets through the constellations, which provide a fixed frame of reference (relatively speaking) against which to map a planet’s wanderings. Thus the sidereal zodiac is based on space. The tropical zodiac, on the other hand — the one most Western astrologers use — is based on time: It begins when the Equator intersects the Ecliptic (zero degrees of Aries is when the Sun is overhead at the Equator, midway between its extreme north and south declinations).

It has always seemed fitting to me that the Vedic system, which is based on the idea of predestination and uses the sidereal zodiac, continues to be used in India — a culture whose ties to the ancient world’s fatalism are far closer than in the West. By contrast, the tropical zodiac — in use in the more psychologically-oriented cultures of the world — gets its meaning from pure symbolism: that of the four seasons, whence the signs are understood to get their character.

It’s not about one being true and the other false, any more than we’d say that the tarot was true and the runes false, or that the I Ching is true whereas the Enneagram is false.

The slow backward movement of the equinoctial point that the good doctor mentions is called the precession of the equinoxes. This is an astronomical anomaly that happens because the Earth, not being a perfect sphere, has a wobble to its orbit; which causes its rotations around the Sun to end up just a hair behind the [Vernal] point at which it began its orbit the year before. Add up all those tiny little fragments of a degree, and after a couple dozen thousands of years you get a Great Year: twelve World Ages of about 2,000 years each. The World Age we’re on the threshold of now is the Age of Aquarius, which has gotten a lot of press; even Dr Kunkle has probably heard of it. If he has, I don’t know how he imagines astrologers could have come up with the World Ages without knowing about the precession of the Equinoxes.

So yes, astrologers who use the tropical zodiac are fully aware that the Equinoxes have diverged over time from their celestial reference points. We realize that it has resulted in the sidereal signs being 24 degrees behind their seasonal counterparts. The crux of the matter is that most modern astrologers use the zodiac as a symbolic construct, not a literal one. If we depended on literal astronomy to measure planetary placements, consider the difficulties that would arise. Trying to determine the exact beginning of a sign by looking at when the Sun seemed to be entering a specific cluster of stars? Pretty much a crap shoot.

As for the professor’s advocacy of Ophiuchus, that constellation does not fall on the ecliptic (the narrow band of sky that the planets seem to travel through, from Earth’s point of view), so it isn’t included within either the sidereal or tropical schema. Goddess knows there are oodles of star-pictures up there, beyond those included in the ancient twelve. I guess anybody who has nothing better to do is free to lobby for their favorite constellation to become a thirteenth sign. But approaching astrology as a parlor game in this way would reveal the person’s fundamental ignorance of what it’s all about.

It would indicate that the person sees astrology’s twelve houses and twelve signs (which are composed of 3 modes times 4 elements: 12) not as essential components in a holistically structured system, but as a collection of random ingredients, arbitrarily assembled… which is the way a mechanistic thinker tends to see everything. It would betray a blindness to the signs’ spiritual and numerological interconnectedness. Astrology is a complex holographic language with a very precise geometrical logic. It works not because of Western scientific principles but because of an underlying matrix of numinous meaning.

In the end, one either takes the leap of faith or one does not. One either sees archetypal significance in this system of orbiting rocks and stellar dust, or one does not. To those who do see the planets and stars as something more than accidental outgrowths of astrophysical material, it will be obvious that the zodiac can’t be added to and subtracted from without violating the system’s integrity. To imagine, as Dr Kunkle does, that all there is to astrology is what’s physically up in the sky is to get it all wrong; which is what happens when scientists expect mechanistic materialism to explain esoteric truths.