It is a once-in-168-year event. In a year chockfull of world-altering transits, it is one of the most important. The god of the sea is inaugurating a thirteen-year-long shift in the way we look at water.

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Now begins a calendar year that’s been well worked over before it was born. Variously interpreted eschatological imagery and dubious pop culture prophecies have been pouring forth for years now, exploiting poor 2012 like an MGM child star. Now that it’s here, let’s separate the hype from the essential meanings that underlie it.

The Longest Arm of the Cross

The star of the transit show is a first partile 90º angle, a First Quarter square, between Uranus in Aries and Pluto in Capricorn. It will be exact to the minute of arc seven times between this Spring and March of 2015. During 2012 the transit comes into its glory, with its first two exactitudes in June and September.

If you follow Western astrology you’ve been hearing a lot about this square, the longest arm of the Cardinal Cross. The sky has been leading up to this transit for at least four years. To understand what will take shape in 2012 let’s look at the themes presented during the transit’s approach.

The Cardinal Cross era can be said to have begun when Pluto entered Capricorn and initiated the Wall Street scandal in 2007-9. This financial cataclysm seemed to have to happened overnight, but of course it was really years in the making: the deregulation of the financial industry and the government-abetted corruption of the banks took place under successive US presidential administrations, right under the noses of the public.

But upon deeper consideration we see that the economic crises upon the world now have their origin in failed policies that have held sway since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Uranus (massive disruption) and Pluto (decay) represent cosmic forces that are breaking down models of social organization so deeply ingrained in the mass mind that most people can’t imagine that the world could work any other way.

As it had a long on-ramp, this transit will have a long off-ramp. Humanity will be integrating its effects until at least 2023.

Transits

In addition to its June and September exactitudes, the Uranus-Pluto square will be activated when it is hit by trigger planet transits, on which I will release lectures throughout the year. Astrologers expect extreme events each time a quickly-moving planet moves through the early degrees of Cardinal signs; such as Venus in February, Mercury in March and Mars in July.

A noteworthy singular event this year is the occultation of Venus (money) in early June. While retrograde, Venus will pass over the disc of the Sun. As Julija Imas has noted, the Wall Street meltdown took place at the midpoint between the last Venus occultation, in 2004, and this coming one.

Then there is the extra-long passage of Mars in Virgo, 8 months long due to its retrograde-direct dance, which will agitate mutable signs (Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces) wherever they reside. One of the peak times for this transit is January 23rd, when Mars will station at 23º (hitting natal Mars and Neptune in the US chart).

Resistance

In taking the pulse of the year to come, we should use what we already know about life on Earth. We need to factor in human nature, which isn’t going to change overnight. It’s not realistic to nurture fantasies of a sudden, magic awakening, where all beings on Earth see the light and drop their fear trips. Such expectations are no more helpful than those of a spontaneous ascension into heaven of the faithful, or of a UFO swooping down to fetch the cognoscenti.

It doesn’t happen like that. Evolution is slow and incremental, even when in the throes of a steep learning curve.

We know that change – especially change as immense as the world needs now — provokes resistance. The deeper the changes required, the deeper the status quo is going to dig in its heels. Every spasm forward is likely to be met by denial, at best, and by violent reaction, at worst, from the forces of stasis.

Our focus should be to zone in on the burgeoning wave of creative, health-affirming energy all around us, at the same time that we avoid being naïve about the negativity that human entities tend to express when under threat. We need to keep both of these realities in mind. One without the other won’t work.

We want to maintain a perspective that will protect us upcoming from overwhelm, confusion and fear. Knowing how to observe, with detachment, humanity’s resistance to change is no less important than knowing how to support humanity’s fundamental desire to be free and made new.

Backlash and Vision

Resistance to change can take either active or passive forms. An example of the latter is induced escapism: large numbers of people diving into self-loss, with a little help from manipulative agencies. When Neptune reenters Pisces in February it meets up with Chiron; their conjunction will be exacerbated by retrograde Mars. We can expect the media-consuming public to indulge in a surge of fantasies. These may include a paranoia about “terrorists” fed by psychological propaganda, and reactive consumerism fed by a no-holds-barred advertising industry (e.g. ceiling-to-floor, wall-to-wall ads in heretofore public spaces, such as transport terminals, and city buses shrink-wrapped in advertising).

At the same time, we will doubtless see the anti-consumerist movement grow increasingly imaginative and committed. Prescient pioneers in this area include Adbusters Magazine¹ and the brilliant Bill Talen², of the Church of Stop Shopping.

Almost everywhere in the world, I expect the backlash expression of the Uranus-Pluto square to take the form of coordinated efforts of government, military and police agencies to crack down, no-more-mister-nice-guy-style, on protests and cultural critics, as began to happen with the Occupy movement (see Naomi Wolf’s analysis ) when Uranus was at the Aries Point under the solar Eclipse, in late November 2011.

In American politics and perhaps elsewhere, we may probably see an increase in Throw-the-bums-out syndrome: the undiscriminating reaction, on the part of most members of the public against any and all incumbent leaders. Whoever had the job last will be blamed for society’s increasing hardships, regardless of their ideas, character or actual responsibility. As we are seeing already, this public attitude opens the field to extreme and unhinged ideologues, making for a highly unstable, unserious candidate pool.

Uranian Voices

We need to be more and more selective about whom we give our energy. As the action ramps up throughout the year, it will prove a waste of time to give too much energy to the elements of society that are fighting change tooth and nail, though their resistances will make big claims on our attention as they wax ever more absurd, idiotic and heavy-handed. We need to be remember that, realistically, it is never more than a small minority of the population at any given time who grasp the world-altering changes required by the whole.

These are the visionaries, the Uranian voices of the future. We will recognize by their life-affirming messages. Our focus and support should go to them, and to the parts of ourselves that we see mirrored in them.

________________

Note:

1 The glossy quarterly magazine whose editors conceived of Occupy Wall Street.

2 Talen, a master parodist, has been known to collect soil from mountains that have been strip-mined, stroll with his cohorts into bank lobbies with an air of having been invited by an art curator, and proceed to sculpt dirt peaks while singing; thus exorcizing the demons out of the ATMs.

This Solstice season, bells are tolling for the death of the Old Paradigm. You can hear them all over the globe.

The shifts they signal are too profound to stay local, or national. The changes upon us right now are not confined to either the First World or the Third World; the Northern of the Southern hemisphere; the 99% or the 1%.

Ours is a world made up of intricately interlocking systems. Rising sea levels and other environmental degradations don’t give a pin about boundaries and borders. Non-physical changes, too, are spreading like wildfire. Not even the Great Wall of China will be able to keep out the impulse that was ignited in Yemen last year when a fruit vendor, protesting his government’s corruption, set himself aflame. An epoch is coming to an end, and its death knell is reverberating across seas and continents.

Die Hard

Unfortunately, some things die hard. There are big, dying entities that are tightening their grip on the world rather than going out gracefully. Even movements that once bristled with life and promise, like the industrial revolution, tend to turn nasty when obsolete. Forward-looking members of humanity are up against stubborn resistance from adherents of the old ways.

The industrial revolution has turned counterrevolutionary. In its current, toxic form, it brought us the Gulf disaster of April 2010, and the nuclear catastrophe in Japan one year later (when Uranus was exactly where it is right now, again, at its station December 9th) Once world-alteringly creative, the machines-over-Nature model has turned anti-life. But it is not about to quit on its own.

The industrial approach, joined at the hip with a profit-driven approach to world management, can only continue repeating its old mistakes, enabled by a governmental system that has grown too corrupt to help us out. We should not be surprised that the US Department of the Interior has recently granted BP permission to resume oil and gas exploration in the Gulf, nor that the Japanese industry is champing at the bit to get their reactors up and running again.

We will wait in vain for the powers-that-be to graciously usher themselves out. It is we who hear the bell tolling who must make the call.

Neptune

As the Longest Arm of the Cross nears exactitude, we see this happening everywhere. As Neptune (oil and gas) slowed down for a station in early November, thousands of environmentalists — many of them wealthy former donors — surrounded the White House to protest Obama’s support for the disastrous Keystone XL Pipeline

The uprisings we are seeing right now, all over the world, feel fated, irresistible. Yet we know that, human nature being what it is, many people will resist to the teeth their call for change.

For better or worse — depending on your point of view — resistance will become increasingly difficult. At this point, to deny what’s going on is tantamount to plugging our ears against the sound of the Now.

Euro Peril

The bell is tolling for the economic models of the past.

As we saw at the Pluto ingress into Capricorn (monetary systems) in 2008, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, the IMF and the World Bank left no country untouched by their accumulated corruptions. Four years later, Goldman Sachs’s advice to their top international clients is worth our attention as a bellwether for upcoming trends. Not what they tell the public, which is that everything is going to be just fine; but what they are telling the highest tier of their clientele: to bet on a huge financial collapse.

The European Union teeters on the brink of disintegration, as the still-nominally-solvent countries scramble to contain the spread of their neighbors’ bankruptcy. The Euro crisis is making it all too clear that these member states are indeed their brother’s keeper.

We hold on to our national provincialisms at our peril. Neptune (universal values) is about to re-enter Pisces (meltdown of boundaries), where Chiron (humanity’s wounds) has been waiting for it. Just before the Full Moon in November, Neptune went stationary direct and opposed Mars in the sky. The symbolism expressed precisely what Europe was struggling with that week: the reality that no one country operates in a vacuum.

Nervous market commentators are using the word “contagion” to describe the probable effect of one country’s financial crisis on the others. It’s a coinage that sums up the collective mood. The catastrophe in Greece – which may turn out to be dwarfed by that of Italy — is being compared to a microbe that multiplies and spreads like an epidemic.

The USA itself, whose debt is anywhere from fourteen trillion dollars to many times that, is believed solvent right now only by means of the wildest possible suspension of disbelief. Pluto is still opposing America’s Jupiter — a bottoming-out of credibility/credit.

Too Big to Fail

You could hear the bell tolling in New York City just before the Autumnal Equinox, with Pluto direct in the sky. Before his handlers could shut him up, Mayor Bloomberg gave voice to the worst nightmare of the rich: He said the poor might riot.

Calling unemployment and poverty in the United States a potential powder keg, Bloomberg was speaking on WOR Radio the day the OWS encampment began. This was before anybody had any idea how big it would become, nor how important.

The specter of the great unwashed hordes rising up en masse has struck fear into the hearts of the upper classes since patriarchy was born. It is now, at this crossroads in human history, closer to happening than it has ever been. All it would take is a mindset shift: the simple realization, among the denizens of the world, that 99% makes for a lot more people-power than 1%.

Everybody’s starting to realize something, all at once, something quite marvelous: that it is the 99% who are too big to fail.

Occupy

The Occupy movement is a manifestation of energies that had been festering below the threshold of collective awareness, waiting to explode. They erupted into public consciousness just as the Equinox transits (discussed in my “Emperor” lecture) provided the spark of ignition.

To many astrologers it is nothing less than thrilling to see a cultural phenomenon cleave so tightly to the archetypes behind the defining transit of our time: the square between Uranus (revolution) in Aries (raw, unmediated activism) and Pluto (demolishment) in Capricorn (corporations, financial structures). We cannot doubt the authenticity of a movement that serves so precisely the purposes of these two celestial giants.

Six years ago, writing in Soul-Sick Nation about the significance of Pluto in Capricorn, then two years away, I said the transit would bring fatal challenges to hierarchical models of organization. Capricorn governs the concept of layered tiers of power: hierarchies of every stripe. Astrologers knew that when Pluto – which breaks down whatever is distorted beyond repair – went into this sign, serious threats would arise worldwide to the vertical model of authority.

It’s happening before our eyes. The deliberately leaderless Occupy movement, with its ingenious “human microphone”, its über-democratic assemblies, and its  avoidance of demagoguery through rotating authority figures constitutes a stunning rebuke to the stratified structures of the corporate-centered state.

By contrast with traditionally liberal agencies (e.g. the unions, NPR, MoveOn.org, the Democratic Party) the Occupiers are not part of the establishment, and they don’t want to join it.  They are up in the bell tower, throwing their whole weight into pulling the ropes, making it known– to everyone who hasn’t plugged their ears — what is wrong with the Old Order.

Think Cosmically

Nothing less than a world-encompassing perspective will help us now. Never has that great aphorism of the ‘60s been truer: we must act locally and think globally. Better yet, we might update this advice to Think Cosmically.

When we watch these crises from a cosmic perspective, we remember that these death knells are also baptism bells. Brand new human systems are waiting to be created from the ashes of the old.

Eleven Eleven Eleven

Get your yellow highlighter out. It’s time to mark your calendar; the Full Moon this month is a stand-out.

First off, it peaks on the eve of eleven-eleven-eleven. Eleven is considered a master number in numerological tradition. Even just one eleven is enough to raise the eyebrows of those who assign to numbers a numinous significance. As the lunar cycle peaks, we will get the power of eleven iterated by three, itself considered a perfect number by the ancients.

Make yourself a tuning fork during the two-and-a-half days before and after the lunation’s peak (12:17 pm PST Nov 10th). Allow yourself to resonate with the vibrations of these powerful numbers. Let in what is happening at this moment in your life; both its blessings and its tests.

Grand Trine in Earth

One of these tests has to do with entitlement complexes.

During the second half of November, Mars, Jupiter and Pluto will make a perfect equilateral triangle in the sky. I talk about the Grand Trine in Earth in a recent lecture, suggesting how we might take advantage of its invitation to free ourselves from limiting cultural notions about wealth and poverty.

This transit is a learning opportunity that has both personal and collective applications. It is coming along at a time when humanity’s old assumptions about resources will not work any more. Dramatic shifts are afoot — global access to food and clean water foremost among them — to which the wealthy individuals of the world will not be immune.

Smug and Isolated

The cultural bubble that surrounds upper- and middle-class Westerners allows us to be physically removed, psychologically disconnected and spiritually estranged from the atrocities of penury. This isolation is considered good and right by those encased in it. In fact, it’s considered a birthright.

Some members of this small class of world denizens use ideology to justify their material smugness. There are religious Americans, for example, who’ll tell you that there’s something uniquely deserving about (white) denizens of the North American landmass. For others of this demographic,  it’s not so much a belief but a vague, unstated assumption that Those dreadful things only happen in other countries.

Whether conscious or unconscious, spiritual isolationism is an obstacle to the cosmic learning curve represented by the transits overhead. One of the questions posed by the Grand Trine in Earth this month is this: In a world where a famine in Somalia has killed 30,000 children, does it feel appropriate to whine about the fact that we can’t afford to go out to restaurants as often as we used to?

Entitlement Complex

I am not proposing that we should, instead, upbraid ourselves for having a full belly, or indulge in a fear of lack. These reactions slow down our growth, and can even incapacitate us. For those who wish to get beyond them, November’s Grand Trine in Earth is a good time to work on identifying within ourselves any vestiges of deprivation anxiety; to which Americans, who live in a culture obsessed with dearth and abundance, are particularly susceptible. Now is a good time to work on purging this fear, by catching it in action, noticing what a drain it is, and saying No to it.

Nor am I proposing that we discount the income disparities that exist within even the most affluent societies, dividing the citizenry up into haves and have-nots. Domestic imbalances of wealth deserve our attention as much as international ones; and are getting it, thanks to the Occupy Wall Street protests.¹

What I am proposing is that the First World, in general, start to re-think the strange economic exceptionalism with which we view ourselves. It’s time to review our astonishingly outdated expectations of material abundance, some of which date back to the Eisenhower era, During the Pluto in Capricorn years (2008-2023), entitlement complexes both individual and collective will become more and more ethically, spiritually and even pragmatically ill-advised.

In a very practical sense, this false sense of exceptionalism blinds us to the world moment. To imagine that the ideal way to live is to have a big, fat house with a three-car garage is a grotesque anachronism in a world that is running out of oil. There are new material ideals to aspire to now. In those countries where most people live in cities — where the disconnection from our food sources is most acute — we’ll need a new set of creative responses to the years ahead.  Those who know how to live simply, and who can adapt creatively, will not only survive but flourish.

By contrast, the more we expect the economy – and the larded lifestyles of former times — to get back to “normal,” the harder a time we will have… if by “normal” we mean two dozen pairs of shoes and imported fruit in our cocktails.

Lessons in Empathy

Ceres, Neptune and Chiron all make direct stations in the days immediately surrounding the Full Moon. The purpose of these three bodies is to teach empathy and the acknowledgement of pain; both of which lead to healing when entered into full-heartedly.

Ceres in Pisces has been stretching and extending our nurturing impulses, so that they embrace the least fortunate denizens of our world. We are being called upon to be more ambitious with our empathy. If you’re in touch with this transit, you feel a yearning to universalize your spiritual focus.

Neptune will strengthen this yearning. Now in the last couple of degrees of Aquarius, Neptune has spent more than a decade blurring group boundaries, a job that is almost complete. For those who have tuned in to Neptune’s lesson, it’s harder than it was 13 years ago to confine our identity to one dinky little niche of the human family. We feel more a part of the whole teeming seven billion.

The station of Chiron, that most ambivalent of celestial creatures, is at zero Pisces. Our susceptibility to the world’s wounds is very high right now. In order to take them in without drowning in them, we need to confront a fundamental stumbling block of the mass mentality: the illusion of dualism.

Dualism is the essential falsehood that says < I occupy one realm and everybody else occupies a different realm>. It’s the big lie that holds modern culture in thrall and keeps us blind. Those who follow any kind of spiritual path must come back around to it again and again.

For consciousness seekers, slaying this dragon wins the key to the kingdom.

Us vs. Them

Dualism shows up as the way we judge our experience, in big and little ways. A bad habit of the collective mind, it is considered normal. This makes it even more of a trap.

For most of us, this evaluating and judging is so incessant that we can’t imagine not doing it. A cloudy day is bad and a sunny day is good. When we’re ill, we view our own worth as less than when we’re hale and hearty. And we buy into group judgments, those of our family and our culture, without even thinking. We harbor the unconscious assumption that poor people are less worthy of our respect than wealthy people. Pretty people have more social value than the rest of us.

The granddaddy of dualistic viewpoints is Us vs Them. We build whole worldviews around this one, by means of intricate social and global hierarchies. A dark-skinned applicant is less valuable to the condo association than a Caucasian applicant. The death in war of one of our countrymen is more tragic than the death of a foreigner.

The media panders to this simplistic schema so completely that most television watchers seem not to realize there’s any other way of seeing things. If you support human rights for Palestinians, you must be against Judaism. If you criticize Obama you must be Republican.

Every life circumstance is reduced to a zero-sum game.

Beyond Dualism

The alternative to dualistic thinking is experiencing life as a unity. When we live as if we and everything else were part of an unconditionally inclusive whole, we free ourselves from the trap.

One way to get there is ecological consciousness. An understanding of Earth’s interconnected systems can’t help but encompass unity thinking. So do any number of legends from wisdom traditions the world over (even those, like Christianity, whose appalling histories as institutionalized powers have rendered them suspect in other ways. Consider the beautiful image of every-sparrow-falling and every-grain-of-sand). All spiritual teachings are founded upon the premise that everything in existence is inextricably linked.

There are innumerable variations on this theme, but there is only one truth. Consciousness is the way we interpret that truth.

Carrot and Stick

For those who are ready for it, this month’s transits will give us a glimpse of what it might feel like to go find an interpretation of that truth that goes beyond dualism. The teaching is coming at us from several different directions.

Cosmic intelligence always offers us both a carrot and a stick. The stick in this case is our realization that if we stay stuck in Us-vs.-Them we’ll kill ourselves and the planet. The carrot is the feeling of peace that we feel when we know ourselves to be part of a universe in perfect synch with itself.

When both Neptune and Chiron are in Pisces together, many will take this leap, and there’ll be no turning back.

Opening our heart to what’s happening in the Amazon Valley, in Afghanistan, in the Congo and Ethiopia – daring to feel the truth of what people there are going through as if it were our truth, too — will make the years ahead feel like coming home.

________________

Note:

1 Right on time, the OWS movement has arisen to educate millions to the process by which modern democracies have turned into plutocracies. The Uranus-Pluto square, a.k.a. the Longest Arm of the Cross , has the USA chart in its cross hairs, breaking down Americans’ delusion that they live in a class-free society. See my blogs Whose Streets? and Fingering Wall Street.

To get a bead on the energies of this month, let’s first consider its place in the solar cycle. A time of Dark Mysteries, Scorpio has a strong seasonal character. It is governed by the planet Pluto, governor of taboos and secrets.

Not only the Sun, but Venus and Mercury ingress into Scorpio in October. This will make for a potent Halloween (or Samhain [pronounced SOW-en] in Wicca): our annual celebration of the human desire to know forbidden things .

Mars will conjunct the natal Plutos of a good many baby boomers this month, as it moves from early to late Leo. For some people, the transit will worm its way into pockets of shame, or touch off power plays. For others, it will stimulate a relentless work drive. It all depends, as always, on the level of awareness we bring to bear.

The Longest Arm

To understand this month’s place in humanity as a whole, we need to look at what the Longest Arm of the Cross is up to. Right now it’s just hanging there in the sky, waiting for us to catch up to its meaning.

Uranus is heading backwards and Pluto is proceeding forward: their orb of exactitude is lengthening. This gives us a slight break from the intensity of the square, like the breathing room a laboring woman experiences in between contractions. The birthing process is still underway, and it’s further advanced than ever; but right now we are being given a few months to assimilate it.

Uranus stations direct on December 9^th, after going all the way back to the inflammatory Aries Point (I have discussed elsewhere this uber-intense zodiacal degree, which was reached by Uranus the day the quake hit Japan).

Pluto, god of darkness, is in his glory. Each of us is being invited to take on unsavory material. This is especially true if your natal Pluto is being transited right now. You boomers may have it conjoined by Mars, opposed by Jupiter and/or squared by the other personal planets.

It’s about confronting dark issues in order to transform them through the light of consciousness. In our personal lives, psychologically difficult matters are nagging at us now. We are being dared to dig beneath the surface of the very things we least want to look at.

The Unspoken

On a collective level, the Pluto corner of the Cardinal Cross is calling our attention. This is about secrets hidden in plain sight. What are the key taboos of our day? What are the biggest issues given the least discussion?

I think we‘d have to say that, for Americans, a big contender for the prize is the money the nation is shoveling into the death pit of war.

To call it ironic that this much money is being spent in this particular way, when the country’s gargantuan debt is causing all hell to break loose, is an understatement. It feels insufficient to describe as counter-intuitive the fact that while entire states are going belly-up, the Pentagon budget is rising. The outrageousness of the situation is so extreme that normal logic doesn’t suffice to explain it.

But Plutonian logic does.

The clue that Pluto is afoot is the lack of discussion. The disparity that exists here between the degree of America’s financial investment in war and the paucity of public debate about it is so striking as to suggest inverse proportion.

This is a defining feature of Pluto. It is the governor of any issue that dares not speak its name.

The Dark Continent

“Do you think they’d be bombing the place if its main export was broccoli?”
– Global Exchange’s Kevin Danaher in March 2003, just before the Pentagon’s assault on Baghdad.

The latest place to make the Pentagon list is Africa, once dubbed by Westerners “The Dark Continent.” The true darkness here is that of ignorance and unconsciousness, on the part of those non-Africans who have been raping and pillaging Africa for hundreds of years.

England, France, Italy and the USA conducted more than eight thousand bombing attacks on Libya between mid-March and mid-September 2011. Were the good citizens of these countries to reflect upon the fact that Libya possesses the largest oil reserves in all of Africa, it would probably not take long for a substantial number of them to connect the dots and discern a pattern.

Oil is obviously the engine behind NATO’s involvement (discussed in detail in my column in this month’s DayKeeper Journal). But to call it “obvious” needs qualification. The geo-military role of oil is obvious only in the Plutonian sense: hidden-in-plain-sight. It is taboo for governments and their media arms to mention it. It is utterly left out of the official accounts.

My belief is that in the absence of propaganda to the contrary, everyone would see as clear as day that the Great Powers — as these NATO governments used to call themselves — have laid waste to any sovereign government unlucky enough to have the sticky black stuff beneath its soil.¹

Kill the Bad Guy

But among a media-hypnotized populace, the fantasy prevails that the evilness of a given foreign leader constitutes an open invitation to swoop in and bomb his country to smithereens.

Not all evil foreign leaders, mind you. Not those of, say, Saudi Arabia, one of the most brutal oligarchies on Earth. This is a place where a king’s promise to grant women the right to vote (in three years!) is being lauded as an enormous step forward; where courts can sentence a woman caught driving a car to be publicly whipped; and where any hint of dissent is met with imprisonment, torture and execution. The reason the Great Democracies of the World don’t touch a hair on the head of this despicable regime is clear to all. We have been granted petro-privileges.

But the Let’s-kill-the-bad-guy scenario is sexier, and it has so seized the public imagination that there seems to be no brain space left over to consider anything else. Such as the implications of the fact that Libya’s “rebel fighters” have been directed by NATO’s own ground forces and commando units.

Americans like their morality neat. They like their foreign policy in no-frills, good-vs.-evil terms, just as they remember from Sunday school and children’s cartoons. It is a story line designed to streamline complex ideas for ingestion by juveniles. In its simplicity, it presumes the absence of any more complicated intellectual function.

One of the most insidious features of the kill-the-bad-guy approach to warfare is that it blurs any distinction between a dictator and his populace. By limiting their focus to Gaddafi as an individual, Americans have been able to ignore the effect upon Libya’s citizenry of all those US Tomahawks and nuclear submarines.

What else do we miss, by framing the military assault upon Libya as a noble, tyrant-eliminating crusade?

We blind ourselves to the lessons of history. With all the emphasis on Gaddafi’s wickedness, geopolitical context goes out the window. The citizens of the NATO countries – after all, it is we who are financing the slaughter — are prevented from seeing the campaign as one more example of straight-up colonialism (see former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney’s video).

This assault on Libya is just the latest salvo in what was once called “the scramble for Africa,” a series of invasions perpetrated by the same Western powers. Indeed, Gaddafi rose to power 42 years ago on the wave of the Libyan people’s backlash against Italian domination.

X-Ray Vision

It could be argued that the very reason for the darkness of this era on Earth is to force truth-seekers to learn to see in the dark.  Many souls are meeting these transits’ challenge right now; piercing through the ambient noise of cultural corruption and social nonsense with a bold (Uranus) X-ray vision (Pluto).

We do so by asking questions. Such as, in this case: From what set of assumptions does the notion derive that because Muammar Gaddafi is bad, destroying the country he rules must be good? It derives from our enslavement to a dualistic worldview. We’ll be discussing this further in next month’s Skywatch.

As to whether such assumptions have been proven valid by global events, we need only remember that this Libya story uses the same argument that was deployed by the same cabal eight years ago. Remember when all objections to the US bombing of Bagdad were countered by the non-sequitur about Saddam Hussein being a torturing brute?

We might further ask ourselves: Does a familiarity with military history suggest that war is a good idea, or that warmongers are friends of the human race?

By asking common-sense questions, it is possible to stay engaged yet unscathed by the violence and mendacity of these intense times; even to be inspired by them. It is possible to use the perversions of mass thinking as a grindstone, against which to hone our own independent thinking sharper than it has ever been.

It is possible to see clearly, whether or not the Sun is out.

_______________

Notes:

1 An article in the 8/22 New York Times Business section made no bones about it: “”Colonel Qaddafi proved to be a problematic partner for the international oil companies, frequently raising fees and taxes and making other demands. A new government with close ties to NATO may be an easier partner for Western nations to deal with.”

The Sun’s in Virgo and the Moon’s in Pisces at the Full Moon on September 12^th. Both are misunderstood signs, so this lunation can be hard to deal with.

It isn’t that Pisces and Virgo are inherently any more difficult than any other zodiacal pair; it’s that our society doesn’t value the impulses they represent– impulses which we are brought up to assume are steering us in the wrong direction. Unless we look beyond their stereotypes we will misinterpret the urges that come through us during their transits.

Both these signs minimize the ego. Neither sign buys into society’s messages about success, messages that tell us to focus exclusively on Number One, and that we’re undermining ourselves unless we do. Neither Virgo nor Pisces prioritizes individual aggrandizement over collective good. Their special genius is to pinpoint flaw (Virgo) and acknowledge suffering (Pisces), which prompt acts of service.

It is a shame that such urges are given short shrift in the modern world, where empathic communion with our fellows and the ability to do humble, diligent work, are, at best, dismissed; and at worst, disdained.

During September Chiron, the Moon and Ceres are in Pisces; and Mercury, the Sun and Venus are all in Virgo. We will be encouraged to reflect upon our attitudes towards service (Virgo) and compassion (Pisces) all month long. These oppositions will ask us: What are we to do with our instincts to help and to empathize, in a culture that failed to encourage these qualities in us when we were growing up, and fails to respect them now?

Self-Critique

This is what we do: We gently distance ourselves from the limitations of our upbringing, and look around, with clear eyes, at what’s really happening. Unmitigated by cultural nonsense and group think, the Here and Now itself will rouse our true natures to respond appropriately. First tentatively, then enthusiastically, our inborn resources will rise to the fore. They’ve been waiting with bated breath for an invitation to do their part.

The healthiest kind of self-critique (Virgo) under skies like these begins this way: with retiring our old stories. That’s the first step in making ourselves available to the era we inhabit. The fact that ours is an era replete with immense and ubiquitous crises is not random. The cosmic plan has provided opportunities galore for us to explore our capacity for helpfulness and empathy.

But there is a step even before this. In order to distance ourselves from obsolete cultural pictures, we have to know what they are. To be of use during the Cardinal Cross years, we have to root them out. Even the most independent-minded of us has absorbed any number of collective fantasies over the course of being socialized into our tribe. To pierce through these stories and become fully functional, we need to ask ourselves:

Do the ideas in our heads about what’s “normal” compare with what’s really going on?

It’s ironic that this is harder to do for those of us in the still-somewhat-operational First World, where food and clean water are available and our nights are uninterrupted by missile-firing drones. The down side of a non-life-threatening lifestyle is that anachronistic mass assumptions stick around longer.

What’s Normal?

One of these is the assumption that, sooner or later, the economic conditions of the 1950s will come back; and that life will settle into a Leave-it-to-Beaver- or Brady-Bunch-style “normalcy.” (It says a lot that we have to go back a couple of generations in order to find an exemplary sitcom that portrays a dumb, happy nuclear family; the kind that represents ür-normalcy to many nostalgic Americans. As exemplars of domestic normalcy, Ozzie and Harriet have been replaced by dark, dysfunctional clans [e.g. Shameless, The Riches, Arrested Development].  Even more revealing, of course, is the fact that we have to turn to television to find them, rather than to statistical reality).

In last month’s Skywatch we talked about how those of us who live in the relatively functional parts of the world are going to be less and less able to isolate ourselves from the disasters that are rocking other parts of the globe. Americans, especially, a notoriously insular tribe, seem to be shrouding themselves in the belief that the post-WWII years of booming industry and unquestioned consumerism represent base-line reality. According to this worldview, today’s economic, military and meteorological crises are merely temporary aberrations.

But it is increasingly difficult to find a spot on the planet to which Brady Bunch “normalcy“ bears any resemblance. Included in this shrinking pool we might still count patches of the USA, Western Europe, and isolated pockets of stability such as Singapore. Just about everywhere else in a state of emergency: either in out-and-out systems collapse, as is true in the narco-economies of Latin America; in continuous war, as in Iraq and Afghanistan; or in dire privation, as in drought-stricken Ethiopia. Most of these stricken countries are struggling with multiple catastrophes at once: right now almost every African state is in a state of crisis that is chronic, acute, or both.

As the old ways devolve, we are seeing the inevitable rise of reactionaries such as the American Minuteman movement and the English Defence League. The word reactionary does not mean merely “extremely conservative.” It describes a state of reaction — as opposed to a response — driven by fear and resulting in overcompensation.

A reactionary tries to push away and repudiate the source of his phobia. The postmillennial specimen of this breed is motivated by a dread that the world’s calamities will spread to his own home town, like a plague virus. Thus the cruelty shown to the sea-tossed asylum-seekers who approach the shores of Australia and Italy seeking safe quarter, only to be turned away.

Inhumanities like these vie with expressions of humanity everywhere we look. The choice to identify with either one or the other confronts us every day. We are constantly being asked to choose (this is the meaning of the Crossroads in esoteric thought, and the Cross in astrology.) If we believe that the purpose of life is to learn, then our goal is to choose the humane way. If we believe that the world’s chaos is a phase in a great collective growth arc, our goal is to keep our sights trained upon where the evolutionary trajectory is leading.

In the case of the Virgo-Pisces axis, the consciousness shift has to do with deepening our response to the suffering among us. Especially when Neptune goes into Pisces to stay (Feb 2012-25), the efforts of the reactionaries — those desperately trying to dis-identify from the masses –will become increasingly far-fetched, awkward and implausible.

The realization will come to every one of us sooner or later, no matter how many lifetimes it takes: victims of catastrophe are not Others, but human beings like ourselves.

Autumn Equinox

After the Full Moon peaks, we will enter a powerful Solstice period.  The Sun opposes the Aries point (discussed in detail in my lecture, “The Emperor Has No Clothes”) on September 23^rd, one week after Pluto stations direct while squaring Uranus within two degrees of exactitude. Crossing the Autumnal threshold will set off the Cardinal Cross.

Find Virgo and Pisces in your chart. Identify what house they fall in. Notice what aspects they make to your natal planets and angles. These clues will point you to the ways you can use this month’s call to service.

The interface between the transits (what the sky is up to right now) and our own individual chart (our soul plan) is the answer to the question September’s skies are prompting: “How do I serve?”

I don’t have to tell you, dear reader, that there’s nothing like astrology for knowing which way the wind is blowing. Not just in our own individual life, but knowing the meaning of the storms we’re all being buffeted by together right now, during this thrilling, surreal, crazy-making epoch.

The Moon is closer to us than any other celestial body ; not only astronomically but in other ways as well. As planetary cycles go, the lunar cycle is a relatively accessible chunk of time to wrap our minds around. The emotional arc it symbolizes is short enough to relate to, psychologically. Sizing up the major transits of a given month is an easy way to stay astrologically organized. It helps us feel in synch with the cosmos.

So even if you do no other kind of transit tracking, try to keep tabs on the month to come. Once we’ve familiarized ourselves with the twists and turns of the upcoming four weeks, the future feels less daunting. The more we do it, the easier it becomes to get a sense of the nature of the period. The month starts to take on a distinct character. We can become its ally. We can friend it. When we do this, we’ll be aligned with whatever chooses to happen on the event level.

Star of the Show

August opens with a new lunar cycle: the New Moon in Leo of July 30^th. Neptune dips back into Aquarius in August; Mercury has a retrograde spell, dipping back into Leo; Venus ingresses forward into Virgo; and Jupiter pivots in Taurus on the 30th.

But there’s no question who the star is of this show. It’s Mars.

From the 7th through the 11th, the god of war will be in early Cancer, bisecting the Longest Arm of the Cross. And when we factor transiting Saturn into the mix, we get a full-on Grand Cross. This is the tinderbox pattern that astrologers were calling “the Cardinal Climax” during the summer of 2010.

There’s an enormous amount of tension in the air. It is forcing us to take action (Mars), in a way that is as radical (Uranus) and uncompromising (Pluto) as our particular personalities and circumstances allow.

Early to mid-August is one of those trigger points that can be glimpsed in the landscape of the month to come. It is good to take note of these in an abstract way: imagine them as daunting mountain peaks in the distance. We don’t know yet what we’ll do when we come right up upon them. But we do know we’ll be challenged to summon up the boldest and best in ourselves.

It Starts with Noticing

The Cardinal Cross period as a whole (2008-2023) is trying to sensitize us to the meaning of our role in the larger collective. A tension exists between our own individual sensibility and the immense force of the external world, generated by global events. Keep an eye out for this theme whenever a Cross-trigger (a quicker-moving planet, such as Mars, that comes along and provokes the Uranus-Pluto square) moves into position. In August this tension will spike acutely.

How do we keep abreast of what’s happening in the greater world, without buying into denial? We already know the corporate media isn’t going to tell us the truth. We can’t expect the increasingly tabloid-like press to describe the new realities (we’re now finding out, for instance, that some of the juiciest headlines in Murdoch’s News of the World were simply made up, out of whole cloth [discussed in my latest lecture, "The Emperor Has No Clothes"]).

And if we think we’re going to get the New Earth mirrored back from our TV screens, we will wait in vain. There is something obscenely false about the way humanitarian crises are discussed on the news. The anchor people are given things to say that are so spiritually disconnected that, watching them perform, one is embarrassed for them. How are they supposed to find the right tone of voice with which to read two sentences’ worth of statistics on the Somalian famine before cutting to a commercial? We know it isn’t in the interests of the modern corporate media to provoke compassion or understanding in its viewer-consumers. Quite the opposite: complexities are to be avoided at all costs. Thus the grotesque dissonance between form and content, as newsreaders are given a hairdo and a script and three minutes to address-without-really-addressing issues of staggering human pathos.

The Mars T-square in August is an example of a several-weeks-long time frame when noticing the inhumanity and insanity that pass for normalcy in our world can go a long way. Mars is giving us an invitation — perhaps the most important we’ll get this year — to disassociate from the conventional narrative.

There But for Fortune

If we want to disassociate from the conventional narrative, we first have to identify it.

Consider the epidemic human diasporas afflicting the globe right now. According to the UN, forty-five million people were forced from their homes last year because of systems collapse, climate crises and war. Half of them are estimated to be women and children. Many are escaping from villages doomed by poverty. Others are fleeing civil war, persecution, war, murder, rape, and mutilation. They are making their way to the relatively functional parts of the world that are closest to them, even if that means risking their lives hanging on to an overcrowded boat in the Sicilian sea, or allowing themselves to be stacked like sardines in a hidden compartment in a truck crossing the Mexican border.

On the rise as the Uranus-Pluto square nears exactitude: politicians like US Gov. Brewer of Arizona and xenophobic groups like the EDL in England and the nativists now making gains in Switzerland, France and Italy. Even an open, progressive society like Norway has now given us Anders Breivik.

In a social climate of animosity and fear, we should take into account that language can be a form of unconscious collusion. The term “illegals,” for example, deserves repudiation. What must be the effect on a person’s human dignity, to be identified with the noun “illegal” when you’ve done nothing more untoward than exist in a place where people don’t want you?

In fact, I propose we disassociate from the narrative at an even earlier linguistic step, by questioning the anachronistic term “immigrants.” The vast majority of these unfortunates are not “immigrants” but refugees. Continuing to use the word “immigrant”, with all its connotations of estrangement and suspicion, is one of the ways that people who aren’t yet directly afflicted by the catastrophes of the postmillennial world are able to distance themselves from those who are. It’s a means of denying, for a bit longer, the reality that in the era we live in, instability is not the exception but the rule.

Our Brother’s Keeper

In any case, we won’t be able to keep up the pretense for much longer. Those of us living in the still-relatively-privileged parts of the world will find it harder and harder to distance ourselves from our struggling brethren.

Geopolitically, we are all connected in the experience of global suffering. Everywhere we look, we see the First World’s own consumerism causing the Third World’s anguish. Two examples among many: the drugs whose violent sales networks are destroying civilization in Latin America exist to satisfy demand up north, in the putatively civilized USA. And the endless wars in Central Africa that are fought over columbite, the mineral used to make cell phones for customers worldwide, destroy the lives of those in whose homeland it is mined. To ignore these connections is to shut down a part of our consciousness.

As the Cardinal Cross years do their work, the perverse attempt on the part of one group of human beings to estrange themselves from their fellows will come to seem more and more arbitrary and grotesque. One of the great purposes of the Neptune in Pisces years (2011-25) is to drive home the experience of compassion. In people who are open to it, this transit will deepen the instinctive awareness that all beings are part of the same whole.

It always struck me as so quintessentially American, that Pottery Barn metaphor that Colin Powell and Thomas Friedman used to refer to  Iraq: “You break it, you own it”. (You wonder whether a public speaker elsewhere in the world would have chosen a less explicitly commercial metaphor; such as, say, a mother saying to her child, “If you spill that milk, you’re cleaning it up”.) Buzz-phrases that catch on as solidly as this one did clearly resonate with something deep within the collective imagination. “You break it, you own it” has wormed its way into the American vernacular. It even has its own Wikipedia page.

The phrase makes a great exercise for students of the Sibly chart of the USA (drawn up for July 4^th,1776 at 5:10 pm in Philadelphia, Pa, discussed in my book about the nation’s karma). Via the imagery of home furnishings, the Pottery Barn metaphor supplies Cancer symbolism; the US chart has Venus, Jupiter and the Sun in Cancer.

But it is Pluto’s placement that gives “You break it, you own it” its power. America’s Pluto (annihilation) falls in its second house (possessions). Deep within the national unconscious, the ideas of destruction and ownership are inextricably fused.

Three Eclipses

The third of July’s three Eclipses is a New Moon on July 30^th. In between the Eclipses on July 1st and July 14^th, Uranus makes a retrograde station. On the ninth of July, the god of revolution stops square to Pluto, barely a degree away from exactitude. This makes the Longest Arm of the Cross the strongest it has yet been.

When the Solstice Eclipses moved into position last month, the Uranus-Pluto square was kicked into a new level of fervor. As the world rolled its eyes in disgust and dismay, Pluto’s two most salacious expressions, sex and corruption, found tawdry expression in the failure of Anthony Wiener and Dominique Strauss-Kahn to keep their appetites in their pants. But it is the square’s impact on the world’s governments that is making history. Rebellions (Uranus) against entrenched corruption (Pluto) are now threatening an astounding number of the world’s heads of state (giving the lie to those that are democracies in name only, such as India and Indonesia).

It is hard to think of a single spot on the globe where individuals (Uranus in Aries) are not up in arms against centralized institutions (Pluto in Capricorn).

Waves of Meaning

The Japanese earthquake-tsunami will go down in astrological history as one of the most stunning instances of the power of ingresses (a planet changing signs), in general, and of ingresses to the Aries point, in particular. The catastrophe took place on the very day Uranus moved into Aries for the second time this cycle, March 11^th, 2011.

Like the angry ocean that destroyed northeastern Japan, the wider meaning of this catastrophe has come at us in a series of waves. The first shock wave was local, as we would expect. Its focus was the immediate human tragedy of the earthquake. Its effect was to magnetize the world’s sympathy for the victims, with attention funneled to the islands themselves.

The next wave of meaning extended beyond the local. The earthquake and threat of nuclear reactor meltdown that ensued expanded the sense of threat into a significance that was, for many observers, universal and dystopic. Environmental implications started to dawn on people worldwide. Baby boomers old enough to remember the clumsy civil-defense newsreels they’d seen as schoolchildren wondered whether their worst Cold War-era nightmares were coming true. As the aftermath from the quake in Japan was televised all over the world, people everywhere watched hundreds of thousands of gallons of irradiated water being pumped into the sea, making its way towards their own shores, poisoning everything in its wake.

Now that the solar dial has shifted a full quarter turn, the meaning of what happened just before the Equinox is in its third wave. This one is far more demanding than the first two, which were merely about shock and horror. Now we are left to confront the sobering realities, the realities of what we humans have done. Starting with the fact that we built dozens of nuclear reactors in the world’s most quake-prone series of islands. Isn’t it difficult, at this point, to imagine that we thought that was a good idea?

When we factor in the global frequency in recent years of climate change-induced tsunamis, and of freak storms that can no longer accurately be called “freak”, surely what happened on March 11th comes to look not shocking at all but downright inevitable. The question is not “How could we possibly have seen that coming,” but rather, “What kind of denial have we been in that we could have not foreseen it?”

Unasked Questions

If you think of human existence as one long evolution of consciousness, you place no small significance on the things certain segments of humanity learn from hideous blunders like the Japanese quake. You pay attention to the fact that in the months since March 11^th, Germany’s government has taken the vanguard position and moved to ban nuclear plants altogether; and that elsewhere in the world the anti-nuke movement has been revived after a relatively complacent hiatus. If you believe that the Uranus-Pluto years are about consciousness raising, which is signaled by questions being asked, then the Cardinal Cross is doing its job with daunting precision and right on time.

More and more people are asking whether it is possible to have nuclear power without the dangers of unimaginably toxic contaminants. But a tougher question hides behind this one: What will we do when the oil runs out? Global peak oil production, speculated by some energy analysts to be reached any time between 2012 and 2020, has long been associated by some astrologers with the transits of the Cardinal Cross.

Uranus hits the Aries point again in November. It will stay there without budging until January, stationing right there upon it on December 9^th.

Culture Clash

In the 1960s, Uranus & Pluto (counter-) were opposed to Saturn (culture) and created the counter-culture (see my latest lecture, “Something’s Happening Here,” ). Right now the same three planets are creating a new set of stringent societal polarizations. One of them surrounds nuclear energy.

Worldwide, most environmentalists are incredulous that there could still be any doubt about the folly of nuclear energy. But, predictably enough, as soon as the initial shock from the quake and tsunami died down, the nuclear power industry, in the USA and elsewhere – even, goddess have mercy, in Japan – started qualifying their contrite moratoriums, and quietly making plans to return to business as usual.

Among political and social progressives there is, at the moment, no clear consensus.

Just Doing Their Jobs

But among readers of astrological archetypes, a clear theme starts to arise. Humanity is being asked to integrate Uranus (technology) and Pluto (power) with Saturn (responsibility).

The specter of explosive (Uranus) mass death and toxicity (Pluto) that arose in March in the seas of Japan was a textbook example of Pluto and Uranus run amok, unleashed from all restraint (Saturn). Both Uranus and Pluto are associated with the breakdown of the atom. Inventing a power source for which there is no disposal plan is an example of heeding Uranus and Pluto without Saturn. Saturn’s placement at the Solstice Eclipse, stationary and positioned right between the other two (this summer is the last hurrah of that three-year T-square), was telling us loud and clear that Saturn, and only Saturn, can contain the wild energy of the Cross.

Wild and crazy Uranus and Pluto certainly are; but we would be wrong to think of them as malevolent forces, though this is a mistake many beginning astrologers make. In truth the planets do not have motive or agency; they are value-neutral symbols, representing cosmic laws. Uranus governs technology and Pluto is about power. They are just doing their jobs, in this case manifesting as the nuclear power industry, cooking up ways to meet the world’s energy needs.

Saturn, meanwhile, exists to rein in Uranus and Pluto; because wherever there is enormous power, there is the potential for it to backfire enormously badly. Saturn represents the impulse towards caution which, when integrated with the other two planets, allows all three to function well.

Why do we need Saturn? It governs the legal regulations that are set up to rein in big business; cautions which would, in theory, prevent us from the kind of desecration that Big Oil inflicted upon the environment in the Gulf in April 2010.  It governs the kind of safeguards that could have prevented the financial catastrophe that Wall Street inflicted upon the world economy. During these fiascos the absence of Saturnine accountability was the object lesson.

Examples abound of modern societies that have thoroughly mastered Uranus (exemplified by all those shiny new gadgets rolling off Chinese assembly lines) and Pluto (exemplified by the unstinting production of weapons of war) — but that have not mastered Saturn.

Saturn is now moving ahead through Libra, and will find new ways to teach us that everything we do has a consequence. Under skies like these, the society that does not find a balance between all three is doomed. It’s toast.

Fouling the Nest

Uranus is a very fancy planet, a taker of high-concept risks. If you have Uranus prominent in your natal chart, you know what I mean. It specializes in that spark of mind-power that makes humans different from the “lower animals”. Saturn, by contrast, is the most soberly practical of the planets. Its caution is based on some simple rules of survival. Such as the instinctive rules that prevents birds from fouling their own nests. If modern humanity were as hip to the Saturn principle as birds are, we wouldn’t have created an industry whose wastes we haven’t learned how to take responsibility for.

On the weekend before the Full Moon Eclipse of June 15^th, the streets in parts of Tokyo were jammed with protesters demonstrating against nuclear power. These were messengers of high-level Saturn: thousands of ordinary citizens making the case that we cannot continue to foul our own nest. Three months after the Uranus ingress sent that scorching message to humanity about how dangerously easy it is to spill poison, these folks were doing their part to clean up the mess.

Here it is, the Murravian Mantra: Only by living through our charts can we understand the world, and our place in it.

Two clarifications:

1. I don’t mean that astrology is the only way to reach this understanding. “Living through the chart” is just my way of saying committing to our life purpose. Astrology is one of the best means I’ve ever found to arrive at that place; but “living through the chart” is a state of being, that we can get to with the help of any number of spiritual paths and modalities. We just have to be ready to be authentically and fully ourselves (I talk about this in August’s Mountain Astrologer Magazine).

2. When I say understanding, I’m not referring to some stash of esoteric knowledge that we acquire, as when we get a degree and hang our diploma on the wall. I mean the kind of understanding that comes from our core essence. This is about tapping into what we already know.

The way we sky-watchers get in touch with our core essence is by continuously going back to our natal charts. We ground ourselves by remembering what those symbols say about who we are, at the deepest level of being.

Then we forge a relationship between what’s happening in our inner world and what’s happening up there in the sky.

King and Queen of Transits

What’s happening up there in the sky are year-by-year, day-by-day, minute-by-minute planetary changes. By decoding these changes, astrologers discern the meaning of the world moment. It’s like watching a giant crawl-feed screen in Times Square…  except that, instead of being a message from Disney or the Gap, this one’s from the cosmos.

Right now the king of transits is the Cardinal Cross, whose longest arm is building to its first exactitude in June 2012 (I cover its main themes in many other recent essays and lectures). This month the Cross is in fine fettle. In addition to being provoked by the two lunations, on June 2^nd, Mercury ingresses into Cancer, setting off those same early cardinal degrees. Pay particular attention to the Solstice on the 21,^st when the Sun follows suit; I will be posting a lecture on the Eclipses of June 15th and July first soon. After that, from June 26^th-28^th, the Sun will T-square Uranus and Pluto, activating the Cross still further.

Covering roughly the same period as the Cross is the other momentous transit of the era: Neptune in Pisces. For the duration of 2011, Neptune remains neck-and-neck with Chiron, from which it is slowly separating from exactitude. Loaded with teachings about the difference between pain and suffering (Chiron), Neptune is now more universal and mystical (Pisces) in its feeling-tone than ever before. Wistful, melancholic, ecstatic and all-encompassing, Neptune’s call is bewitching. We will want to come up with strategies to keep ourselves from diving overboard into its waters. This is what Ulysses feared he might do, which is why he asked his fellow sailors to bind him to the mast: he knew about the power of the sirens’ song. We will be addressing such strategies in future Skywatches.

Neptune made the dramatic plunge into the sign of its rulership on April 4^th. We have never experienced Neptune with this degree of strength; not in this lifetime, anyway. And we have never before experienced it squaring other planets from Pisces: to Mercury (6/2-3), Venus (6/10), and, the most insidious of the three, Mars (6/21-22).

Watch for delusion, deception or malfeasance during these peak periods. What house of your chart are Mars and Neptune transiting? This is where we start, in order to identify where in our life the transit is playing itself out. Knowing this will come in especially handy when the square waxes to opposition in a few months. Then the illusions of this particular cycle will come to a head.

Collective Illusion

In a longer-range sense, we’ll be working with Piscean illusion for 14 years.  To keep our sanity – indeed, to bring it to a higher level – we’ll need to start making vital distinctions between pernicious and non-pernicious forms of illusion. Everywhere we turn, we’ll find that what we thought was true is in fact just somebody’s story.

Neutral illusion — that is, illusion that manipulates and deceives, but without malevolence — is consciously received, does no harm and sometimes delights. The best example of this form of Neptunian illusion is art: “the lie that tells the truth”. In an art gallery, we look at a canvas, a flat surface on which a series of paint marks conveys an illusion of forms in space, and we conspire with the artist to pretend that three-dimensionality is going on. If what we are looking at is great art, and we are able to let it in, the boundaries of our perception are expanded; and Neptune has done its job.

Also in the neutral-Neptune category are myths and legends, including religious tales for adults and fairy tales for children. These, too, are “lies that tell the truth:” their rich imagery conveys important cultural messages that speak the language of the unconscious mind. They are automatically understood by all who hear them to be symbolic, not literal. An example is the tale about young George Washington chopping down a cherry tree and supposedly saying to his father, “I cannot tell a lie”. Everyone knows it is apocryphal; it is a fable about a national hero’s honesty.

More insidious are those lies that we don’t know are lies. Pernicious illusion is when a story about what happened masquerades as what happened. We see this with government-generated and media-promulgated narratives, that have been given a shiny gloss of credibility by the stamp of officialdom. For Americans, the most epoch-defining of these in recent times include the assassination of JFK, the bizarre events of 9/11/01, and the shooting of Osama bin Laden on May first of this year.

In theory, no interpretation of a cultural event has to be harmful, necessarily; any more than a theatrical event is harmful. Even advertising can be construed as an art form; after all, in France they even give awards to the cleverest commercials. If the conventional narrative of the bin Laden killing were to be viewed as a modern legend, in the Rambo revenge genre, it could even be instructive. Sociologists studying the mores and values of American culture who turned their attention to the assault of the Seals-6 (now trademarked by Disney) in Abbottabad would find a treasure trove of material.

The problem arises when we buy into what we hear on TV as if it were the truth. Whatever that means.

The Assassination of Osama bin Laden

The truth under Neptune in Pisces is a very slippery commodity. As Voltaire said,“Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.”

In the case of this most recent cultural myth, that of the bin Laden killing, a global meaning has not yet gelled. It is far from clear whether any commonality exists between the spin America’s self-congratulatory politicians are putting on it and the meaning it has for the Arab street. Or, for that matter, how it will come to be seen in Libya, or Ivory Coast, or India. Even the official American version of has already been through multiple permutations (recall it was said at first and later retracted that Osama was armed, and that he used his wife as a human shield).

Under Neptunian skies, the lack of consensus about the meaning of this episode is more telling than anything else about it. One of the biggest question marks is how Uncle Sam’s interests will now be received by Washington’s erstwhile ally, the Pakistani government; and by its civilian population, who are still getting slaughtered in Pentagon drone attacks. What is the meaning, for these people, of the fact of bin Laden’s death, and of the way he died?

Which is more likely to become the more globally dominant legend: bin-Laden-as-martyr, or the purge-of-the-antichrist spin popular in the USA?

As reactions to the assault came in from governments around the world, we saw the subjectivity of truth exemplified. Washington’s staunchest rival, Beijing, has been eager to capitalize on the strain between the Obama administration and Islamabad. Their spokesflacks heaped fulsome praise upon the Pakistani government for being a brave and true fighter against terrorism. Meanwhile, the sheiks of Saudi Arabia, supposedly Washington’s staunchest allies, issued a statement so cautious it could only be called a non-statement, calling the death a “step that supports the international efforts.” (The sheiks know they’re sitting on top of a powder keg: their subjects are as anti-American as they are desperately poor. They’re watching the Arab Spring revolts erupting everywhere else but in their own feudal petrocracy, and they’re angry. See my lecture “Something’s Happening Here,” to be released in June.)

In Cuba, Fidel Castro decried the way “Osama was executed in front of his children and wives.” In Palestine, the event was protested by both Hamas and non-Hamas Arabs as the murder of an “Arab holy warrior.” In the USA, John Yoo, the Justice Department official who made torture legal under Bush, gushed that the killing was a success generated by the “tough decisions” of his former boss.

We are watching myriad stories bouncing off of each other, like refracted shards in a kaleidoscope.

No More Cause-and-Effect

For those who deeply integrate the Piscean lessons of the coming era, old notions about cause-and-effect will come to seem very limited. When we consider the probable effects of the bin Laden killing, we need to remember that the great Neptunian Law of Unintended Consequences trumps all human plans, guesses and purposes.

Where did this long and violent story begin? It depends on who is telling the tale.

One way to find meaning in this miasmic saga might be to ask ourselves how future historians might tell it. We cannot even know now, in 2011, whether history will unquestioningly attribute responsibility for 9/11 to Osama bin Laden. History makes mincemeat of our cherished certitudes. We all know this, yet we seem to forget it every time we read about a new discovery in the newspaper. Scientific announcements about the age of humankind, for example, or about the danger of cell phone radiation, tend to be disproved every few years — completely discrediting what was accepted as gospel before. And the history books are constantly being rewritten: in this morning’s paper I read that journalists are now debating whether the poet Pablo Neruda actually died of cancer after all, or whether he was killed by the same Kissinger-financed assassins who murdered his friend Salvador Allende.

Perhaps Osama bin Laden will ultimately be remembered by some scholars less as the mastermind of the WTC catastrophe (about which there remains all that curious evidence showing the CIA knew about it well in advance) than for his early communiqué to Washington; the one most Americans didn’t get a chance to see, because it was censored in the USA media as soon as it was leaked. In it he demanded 1.) an end to foreign troops in lands sacred to Islam, 2.) an immediate halt to the bombing of Iraqi civilians, and 3.) that the USA stop bankrolling Israel against the Palestinians.

I am not suggesting that, after questioning the official story, we should swing over to a different point of view and cleave to it just as tightly. Under skies like these, certainty is a lost cause. I am suggesting that under skies like these we are meant to be learning about the folly of there being only one story to anything.

“It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”

–character in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia

From now until 2025, the world will be treading the waters of Neptune-in-Pisces. On April 4^th Neptune glided into the sign of the oceans, where Chiron had been waiting for it. That very week, Japan dumped 15,000 gallons of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean.

Recall that a year ago last April, BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig blew up in the Gulf on the very day of Chiron’s last entry into Pisces. Thus has the theme of wounded waters announced itself as a key teaching of the Cardinal Cross period.

Environmental horrors like these are uniquely attention-grabbing; this is part of their cosmic intention. But it is the symbolic meaning of a polluted sea that grabs us on a soul level, and it is on this level that we need to begin our search for a response.

To heal these abominations we need to understand mass psychic unconsciousness.

Psychic Pollution

Chiron (woundedness) and Neptune (impressionability) in Pisces sensitize us to circumambient mental and emotional noise. All around us, the content of the collective mind seethes and roils like the ocean. And like the actual sea, this energetic sea is susceptible to being poisoned.

If we want to be part of the clean-up crew, we must recommit to our life purpose (i.e. Know thy chart), meanwhile taking care to add no more negativity to humanity’s pooled experience. This means staying open, while at the same time avoiding the spikes of anxiety and reactivity that attend groups in crisis.

How do we stay open, yet avoid the negativity all around us? It’s a daunting paradox. But then, this is a daunting era.

To keep our wits about us while we do our soul work, we have to vigilantly identify group fears that enter our energy field. Then we allow them to wash over us and pass through us, so they cannot carry us away.

So, to begin, we have to know pollution when we see it. Such as the noise streaming forth from our infighting politicians, which is growing increasingly hysterical. So are the religious End-Time theories and the fear-driven pictures from pop culture. Regardless of their lack of merit, these pictures are all charged up with the insistence of the collective voice. Times of crisis have a habit of bringing up every fear known to humanity.

Since all fears ultimately derive from the fear of death, let’s cut to the punch and talk about it.

Reincarnation

I see it as highly likely that human beings were created by the same force that created everything else in the Universe. If this is true, then our consciousnesses must have the same access to cosmic intelligence, and our physical beings must follow the same rules. Maybe it’s all the Taurus in my chart, but to me it seems only logical that if Nature thought her Laws were good enough for pigeons and potatoes, she’d apply them to human beings too. I think it must be true that, like every other living thing on Earth, human beings get recycled.

We know that every other organic system is wired to get rid of their built-up toxins, decompose and self-re-create. Everything in Nature decays and then gets reborn, into a new form. I realize that to many people reincarnation seems like a wild and crazy leap of faith, but to me it seems just plain consistent to posit that, like fallen leaves in damp soil, our bodies break down and our constituent parts mutate into new forms; releasing our spirits to take off for parts unknown.

Spooked by Death

If we could view death from Mother Earth’s point of view, would we see it as a tragedy? I think that despite our charged feelings on the subject, most of us would agree that death is inevitable and natural (unless you subscribe to the very weird theories of early Christian propagandists ). Moreover, from the point of view of spiritual astrology, death is miraculous; as are all processes governed by the outer planets (Chiron, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto). We don’t think of the tail end of the Pluto function – dying – as any less miraculous than its front end — being born.

But the in the post-Enlightenment, secular West, we’re terribly spooked by the idea of dying. Not just ourselves dying, but of anything dying. Like all fears, this one derives from ignorance. We can’t think clearly about death because we humans are, compared to other sentient beings, staggeringly out-of-touch in the cosmic truth department. We’re brought up to believe that we have precious little in common with flora or fauna. We seem to imagine we’re not part of the warp and woof of the planet we live on, an insanity that has gotten to the point of poisoning the sea and – as the latest news from Japan suggests – even the rain.

But I don’t believe this insanity is permanent and ineluctable. And I don’t think we were always this clueless.

I very much doubt that aboriginal humans saw themselves as apart from the great life-death wheel. I think they looked around and saw how things worked, and drew conclusions from the parallels. They saw dogs shedding their winter fur in the summertime; forests self-recycling after a fire; the ocean cleansing itself with every wave… everywhere they looked they saw the creation and destruction of form — while the whole of Life kept on going.

They noticed that each thing’s underlying essence (e.g. bear energy; rabbit medicine; essence of green bamboo) remained inviolate, though its outer shell morphed into some new shape. I think it’s very probable that they believed in reincarnation as a fundamental and universal given, humans not excepted. And they saw that the endings and beginnings of cycles blended one into the other, supporting each other, as rotting leaves on the forest floor fertilize the soil where the new saplings are taking root.

At this point in human history it would help us immeasurably to get back in touch with this perspective. It would shed a lot of light on the world’s current paroxysms. It would remind us that whole civilizations have death phases and renewal phases, and that these interpenetrate each other — the dregs of old societies fertilizing those to come.

End-Time Pictures

When (not if) we find ourselves caught up in the death throes augured by the Cardinal Crossroads , our best bet is to keep in mind humanity’s allegiance to Nature’s eternal laws.

To forget them is to risk flailing around in panic, in which state we tend to grab at whatever idea is around. This will, unfortunately, become easier and easier to do. There will be an increasing number of emotionally charged theories blasting from the television and flitting around the internet; there will be toxicity in the mass mood, born of confusion and unprocessed emotion. There will be a lot of chasing around after something to blame.

A great hunger is building for explanations. In response, there will be no dearth of quickly graspable parables on offer: Hollywood-packaged modern myths, like the film “2012”. People want predictions, even though the future is not yet written. And they want their predictions nice and simple, framed in good-or-bad terms as in an action movie. But we won’t assuage any of our anxiety by reducing the vicissitudes of human evolution to a cartoon.

Fundamentalist religions — which claim to possess more legitimacy than science fiction movies, but which appeal to the same instincts — are having a field day with the apocalyptic buzz in the air. But if all they do is simplify everything to a caricature, they’re not teaching us anything. There have always been priests, in every religion, who frighten their parishioners with tales of heaven, hell, deliverance and Armageddon. When social systems are breaking down and the populace is freaked out about the future, there is a huge market for apocalyptic scenarios.

These can be entertaining, like a good yarn. And if viewed with detachment, they can be psycho-sociologically instructive: they tell us where the mass mind is at. But identifying with them emotionally and intellectually is dangerous.

Truth Stories

To see these scenarios as truth stories undercuts our spiritual intelligence. Getting attached to End-Time pictures interferes with our ability to entertain subtleties; such as the Natural Law about endings blending into new beginnings.

Worse, buying into the polluted sea of fear stories prevents us from manifesting elegant and creative realities. I think we can concoct a future more sophisticated than reptilian extraterrestrials (The Earth invaded!) and vanquished supervillains (We got bin Laden!).

What will it take to create a more copacetic collective future? Consciousness. The process starts and ends with individual consciousness. That’s where each of us comes in: living through our charts, as if the fate of the Earth depended on it. Which it does.