Mark Zuckerberg was in the news a few weeks ago, on the day Pluto (plutocracy) stationed during its narrowing square to Uranus (technology). Facebook’s acquisition of a smart phone app for a billion dollars had the business page so excited it could hardly contain itself.

Subscribe now to read more…

Also in late April, a new survey came out in the American media about the American media, concluding that – surprise! – most of the stories reported on the news are mindlessly superficial.

We’ve just been through a month that saw the Sun triggering the Mercury-Pluto opposition in the US chart (the signature of propaganda), transiting Pluto (corruption) stationing en route to its exact square with Uranus (sudden revelation), and Mars stationing opposed to transiting Neptune (mass hypnosis). It’s time to take another look at the nature of the information we take into our consciousness.

It is odd, in a way, how undiscriminating most of us are about where our news comes from. Especially given how careful we are becoming about, say, the origins of our food (consider how unanimously the public rejected ground beef after the recent expose about “pink slime”). In order to stay sane during the years ahead, we need to be no less careful about how much mental nutrition vs. toxicity is in the media we consume.

News channels give the public what it seems to want, and the public grows to want more of what they are offered. It’s a vicious circle of dumbness. We are conditioned at this point to desire the most late-breaking coverage possible; that is, the up-to-the-minuteness of a given event – not its meaning – is presented as its most important value. Also popular is triviality: the maximum amount of airtime is devoted to the silliest possible non-events; for example, Mitt Romney strapping his dog to the roof of his car thirty years ago. The stories that get mentioned paint a picture of the world that is so meaningless and insubstantial as to keep viewers from remembering how to use their minds, let along from achieving clarity of mind.

But the perniciousness of the media lies not just in its content but in its form. On TV events are highlighted piecemeal, without context or continuity, suggesting a soulless randomness. All tarted up with exclamatory candy-colored graphics, news stories seem to be intended to appeal to an audience of kindergarteners with attention deficit disorder — which, as has been well-noted, viewers of the mass media increasingly resemble. The viewer who hears a cursory mention of a terrible famine somewhere in the world, only to have the program abruptly cut to a commercial for fast food, risks the development of a peculiarly modern spiritual disconnection.

It is telling that it is in China right now that the breathless vapidity of the infotainment industry is especially striking. In the efforts of this newly ascendant superpower to out-capitalism the capitalists, China is mirroring back to us the manic look-and-feel of US pop culture, rendered extra obvious via the crassness of imitation. Consider the popular Chinese magazine whose title translates to: “Next!”

It’s a means of disseminating information that not only fails to encourage a holistic understanding of what’s going on in the world, but actively discourages it. Thus are the failures of the media not merely stupidly innocuous but dangerous. During these years of the Cardinal Cross, we are up against the challenge of keeping our minds and hearts open amidst an onslaught of very disturbing world events, while maintaining a grounded, thoughtful equanimity. More than ever before, we require intelligence sources of the highest quality.

The New Media poses another problem. Digital gadgets further undercut our ability to truly absorb important information: taking the time to subject it to our personal values and ethics, so we know how to use it. In the wild world of cyber data, abbreviation and speed are valued over subtlety of thought and expression. We are kept from reflecting long enough upon anything to discern patterns of meaning in it, let alone to get in touch with our feelings about it.

We really can’t afford to be drawn off focus like this. As meaning-seekers facing a rip-roaring ride over the next few years, we need our brain cells as healthy as we can keep them. This means staying vigilant about whose point of view is behind the media we are consuming. What agenda is our favorite news program pushing? Who’s sponsoring the radio show we’re listening to? What motivation does Goldman Sachs have for underwriting those tasteful PBS series?

In order to stay plugged in, we need the media. But we also need to see it as no more or less than a tool, a resource — to be used by us, not the other way around.

As April begins, Mars is completing one of its relatively rare forays into retrogradation. Since Jan. 23 the red planet has been climbing back down through the sign of Virgo.

Given that retrogradation requires a particularly sophisticated understanding to use well, this transit is doubly tricky on the collective level. Played out in society, the unconscious side of planetary archetypes gives rise our worst stereotypes about them: hence the rulership by Mars of armies, weaponry and war.

Dark Mars

The classic case of distorted Mars took place on March 11^th, when a U.S. Army sergeant massacred 16 slumbering Afghan civilians, nine of them children. Among global observers habituated almost to numbness by the ongoing violence in Serbia, Mexico, the Sudan and elsewhere, here was a headline-grabber to sicken the heart.

Virgo is the sign of service, a word whose ancient auspices in humility and helpfulness are distorted beyond recognition in the oxymoronic modern euphemism “armed services.” In the case at hand, the face of dark Mars in this placement is most obvious in the man who perpetrated the atrocity – whose unit was called, with perverse appropriateness, The Stryker Brigade. It was also expressed in the outrage his murders elicited from the Afghan civilian population.

But if we are to learn from the massacre we must look behind the singular act and consider the collective madness of which it is the tip of the iceberg. In what happened on March 11th — the first anniversary of that other catastrophe, the quake/ tsunami in Japan –  we can see encapsulated the distorted face of Mars in army life in general. In every nook and cranny of the military culture, inculcated into the recruits 24/7, we can see the foreshadowing of atrocity. Not just in the physical drills that train these young people to kill, but also in the ideological and social rituals that implicitly train them do so, as exemplified by the violent video games they play on the base in their down time.

Mars’s back-and-forth movement has been highlighting the clash between Virgo and Pisces, where Neptune and Chiron are currently transiting. Accordingly, the massacre has been raising questions about many of the dysfunctions (Chiron/ Neptune) of the world Sgt Bales and his ilk inhabit. With the planet of aggression (Mars) opposing the sign of drugs (Pisces), for example, a conversation has begun about the routine use of psychiatric meds in the military. Attention has also increased about the violent suicides¹ that are epidemic among soldiers both active and retired. Eighteen American veterans commit suicide every day. More than seventy thousand soldiers were diagnosed with post traumatic stress syndrome between 2000 and 2011.

Among his appalled fellow citizens, calls are being made for the charge of murder to be leveled not only at Sgt Bales, the perpetrator, but also at the military commanders who sent him back, again and again, into the fray, to slog on through  punishingly multiple tours of duty. On March 23rd, with Mercury retrograding back into Pisces in the sky, the army responded to the outcry by announcing that it does not track which or how many of its thousands of PTSD sufferers are sent back to active duty.

Martial anger has been lighting cultural fires in minds and hearts of all who see in this horrible incident not just a personal but a systemic disorder. With stationary Mercury conjunct Uranus — setting off the Cardinal Cross — on the Ides of March, anti-war activists took to the streets across the USA and elsewhere. The massacre of March 11^th provided fuel for their battle cry: the only way to end war crimes is to end the war.²

Mars in the Personal Sphere

By contrast with the collective level, on a personal level simple self-awareness allows each of us the chance to reach an understanding of Mars that transforms its crude expression. Nothing more or less than our mindfulness makes the difference. Mars is about challenge, and it is up to us as individuals to shift its energy from destructive challenge to the creative kind.

If you’ve been feeling a certain free-floating anxiety lately, you are not alone; particularly if your natal chart already features aspects between mutable signs (Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces). This means retrograde Mars has been aspecting them, or soon will. Two weeks into the month, on Friday the thirteenth, Mars makes a direct station, seeming to stop in the sky before heading forward again.This is our last chance to return to old ground and clean up our act.

Where Did You Put Your Yang?

 To get the most out of Mars in mutable Earth, take a moment to identify where 3°– 23° Virgo falls in your natal chart. The houses in question represent the departments of your life where Mars has been active. Make a ritual of stopping for just a moment – just as Mars seems to be doing, in the sky above us³ — and consider what you’ve learned about yourself during the eleven weeks of the retrograde. Do you understand your motivations and desires differently than you did two months ago?

Retrogradation asks us to go back to where we were before, to make sure we haven’t forgotten a part of ourselves. We’re invited to go fishing in the past (this “past” could mean a couple of days ago, years ago, or several lifetimes ago) to retrieve whatever got waylaid in a particular house of our chart, and needs to be reunited with the rest of us.

Tweaking the Masculine

When we find it, we get another crack at understanding it, and integrating it. With most such cycles there are three chances to cover the same ground, so we get to refine our understanding several times, each pass encouraging a more refined self-awareness. The Cosmos is an infinitely patient teacher.

Mars represents the archetypally masculine aspects of our lives; hence the lore about a Mars Retrograde bringing old boyfriends back. We’re finishing up two months’ worth of rediscovering any stray yang energies that we may have lost along the way, and welcoming them back into the fold. The Virgo energy Mars is channeling has urged us tweak these part of ourselves so they fit better with the other parts of our psyche.

Right Use of Will

Like all transits, it’s the inner self that is really the object of this lesson. Mars in Virgo teaches us to use our wills efficiently. We may experience the situation as a tug-of-war between a demanding inner voice and a spaced-out passive inner voice, with the former trying in vain to get the latter to toe the line (see my blog, Fog Fight).

But, being human, we usually conduct our self-studies by projecting the transits’ energies onto the outside world. Many of us have been skittering around in review, actively taking things apart to see what makes them tick, rehashing and critiquing whatever we found sloppy or disorganized. If you find that you’ve been fussing a lot over something, use the first half of April to consider whether the objects of your attention reflect something disorganized about yourself.

Some of this restless activity may have been quite beneficial. Unlike psychologists, astrologers don’t consider projection to be inherently pathological. It certainly can be, but it isn’t necessarily so. Working on a detailed project as part of our job, for instance, would be an appropriate use of this placement.

Mars stays in Virgo until July third.

________________

Note:

1 Mars governs suicide in the sense that self-destruction is anger directed inward.

2 Since the invasion ten long years ago, an enormous abyss of ignorance remains about Afghanistan among the US government and population at large. Still undecided about what “victory” would mean in this context, Uncle Sam has been trying to destroy an enemy engendered and trained by the CIA itself, back when Afghanistan was being occupied by the Soviets. It is hard for many of the Americans who fund this ill-starred war to remember that they originally green lighted it during a wave of popular vengeance unleashed by 9/11; with Washington propagandists hoping the public would not realize that the WTC saboteurs included not Afghans but Saudi nationals, who were living in not Afghanistan but Germany. Unfortunately most of what the war’s critics were saying years ago has held true.

3 The exact station is April 13th at 8:54 pm PDT.

In the USA, Republicans reinvigorated the 19^th-century war on birth control, Rush Limbaugh called a Democratic law student a slut, and a Montana judge sniggered in an email that the president’s mother had had sex with a dog. Such is the state of  American public discourse as the Equinox gets ready to shoot us into Phase 2 of the Cardinal Crossroads.

Meanwhile, at the U.N., where Uncle Sam continues to call the shots, Iran is being cast as the next evil country to “get tough” about. That this pistol-packin’ cowboy buffoonery could still be considered a viable approach to international affairs in the current world, crippled as it already is by financial, environmental and military chaos, can only strike a thinking person as completely insane.

Memory Loss

The good citizens of the NATO countries seem to be suffering from total memory loss as regards the last time they let their leaders drag them into a protracted tragic mess in the Middle East (and the war in Iraq is by no means over. Overseen by the biggest embassy in the world, CIA spies and Special Ops have a firmer foothold than ever in the country Uncle Sam has turned into a semi-permanent war zone.) Further heating up the rhetoric right now is the fact that the USA, Iran and Israel all happen to be preparing for elections at the same time. So, with grim predictability, we are seeing jingoistic, trigger-happy posturing winning the day, while appeals to reasoned diplomacy are derided as cowardly and unpatriotic.

With retrograde Mars (machismo run amok) and the Pluto-Uranus square triggered all through the month (see the March Skywatch), we are hearing every cynical politician with a bully pulpit trying to score points with saber-rattling grandiosity. The US candidates are putting on a particularly detestable display, each trying to outdo the other with escalating threats against Iran; not excluding the president, with his dark hints about “military solutions” — an oxymoron if there ever was one.

Not surprisingly with Pluto (destruction) in Capricorn (monetary infrastructures), so far the strategies Uncle Sam has up its sleeve against Iran are largely economic. Warfare is becoming more and more a starkly financial enterprise: “sanctions” really means economic strangulation. Having failed to bring Iran to its knees through spy plots and assassinations, Washington’s new plan seems to be to weaken its economy enough that the government collapses.

History-challenged Americans seem to have no clue about how chillingly the current scenario parallels their government’s machinations from sixty years ago, when the CIA coup toppled the democratically elected government in Iran, and installed the shah in its place. This inaugurated a 25-year-long reign of horror for ordinary Iranians, while shoveling their country’s resources over to US oil companies and banks.

Seized Assets

In recent months Uncle Sam has seized tens of billions of dollars of Iranian assets. Surrounded by U.S.-occupied countries and well aware of the abiding desire of American corporations for the oil beneath their feet, the Iranian people know all too well what really motivates this global nastiness. Contrary to media spin, the goal NATO leaders are pursuing in Iran has nothing to do with human rights, and everything to do with raw power.

It is Plutonian logic, not practical logic, that would lead an American to believe that his own country, with its stockpile of 10 and a half thousand nuclear warheads, and its unique position of being the only country in the world to have actually used nuclear weapons, should be the one to dictate international nuclear policy. Indeed, at the same time that inflammatory warnings about Iran’s nuclear program blare forth from his TV set, the American taxpayer is paying for the U.S. Department of Energy to triple its own nuke budget.

Washington’s long term plans for Iran are a textbook case of the Sibly chart’s misused Pluto (total control) in the 2^nd house (resources). These plans involve casting Israel in the role of regional strongman, as a means of keeping the Middle East safe for American interests. That is, safe for the financial interests of the American 1%. In every other way, arming to the teeth a reactionary regime like Israel’s represents the exact opposite of safety.

Its arsenals fattened with US-taxpayer-subsidized weapons, Israel has consistently refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, as it has refused to allow international monitors to inspect its arsenals. Neither of these dangerous gestures has elicited a peep of protest from the American and European politicians fulsomely sputtering right now about Israel’s sui generis “right to defend itself”. With Netanyahu’s visit under Mars-inflamed skies, the war rhetoric ratchets up higher by the day.

Uranus-Pluto

As the Uranus-Pluto square builds to exactitude (first hit: June 24^th) the air is buzzing with polarization. The essential conflict here, however, is not the over-hyped contest between the various stooges of American electoral politics. Nor is it a conflict between one country and another. The real choice point right now is one that is activating the minds and hearts of world citizens everywhere: the one between the power of change and the forces of fear.

Though we don’t hear much about them on the news, the numbers of individuals being inspired (Uranus) by the power of change (Pluto) right now are multiplying exponentially. For example, in the USA environmentalists are suing to block construction of two nuclear reactors in Georgia that would be the nation’s first since 1978. In Japan, where the nuclear reactors damaged in last year’s quake have sprung new leaks, clean-energy activists continue to organize and protest despite a blackout of reportage on their activities. In Germany and France, the anti-nuke movement is even stronger.

In Russia, dissidents against Putin’s corrupt government have refused to be silenced despite a campaign of suppression that has included assassination. In Syria, Yemen, Jordan and Bahrain, despots (Pluto) continue to brutalize participants in popular protests (Uranus); but the activists keep coming back, filling public arenas and city squares. Even in Israel, last month attorney general Yehuda Weinstein declared unconstitutional Knesset bills that would sharply restrict funding for human rights groups.

Power of Change

We are living in a time when the power of change to transform the world will not and cannot be stopped. Ordinary people are far less geo-politically naive than a generation ago, and able to see global patterns for what they are. Few who have been watching the world scene can kid themselves that the conflicts of the past two years are isolated flashes in the pan. For our part, astrologers have been saying for a while now that the forces of negative Pluto can be expected to tighten their grip — not relax it — when up against Uranus, as the square reaches exactitude between now and 2016.

In the months and years upcoming we need to get into the habit of taking the long view on the world situation. Bemoaning conflict is not enough; we need to remember what these energies signify. The Cardinal Crossroads period is forcing long-unquestioned injustices, obsolete group assumptions and mass delusions to the fore. With each new global event that arises, the healthy response is to resist the fear reaction, and get in touch with the intelligence and courage that is innate in each of us.

We’re feeling it on the physical level. Our bodies are mostly water, the element of universality; if there’s one thing we all have in common, it’s H₂O. We’re also feeling it on the spiritual level. Pisces is the sign that reminds us that we’re all floating around in the same cosmic soup.

The month of March features the Sun in Pisces until the 19^th, and Mercury in Pisces at the beginning of the month, then retrograding back into Pisces on the 24^th.  These quickly moving transits are bringing out the vibration of Neptune and Chiron, whose tenures in Pisces are coloring the mass mood like violet watercolor in a seascape.

In my lecture The Surrounding Sea I go into detail about Neptune’s sojourn in the sign of the fishes (2012-2026), a 14-year riff during which we are being continuously reminded that everything in Creation is interconnected. This emotional, mystical teaching provides a background to the rowdier Uranus-Pluto square. Together they are making the 2012 era complex and powerful.

Chiron is now pulling out of orb of its long-running conjunction with Neptune, but will remain in Pisces until 2018. Since its ingress two years ago, Chiron has been raising the world’s consciousness about the wounding we inflict upon the Earth’s oceans: it was on the very day of Chiron’s Pisces ingress that BP’s rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico, in April 2010.

Moody Blues

We are also having our consciousness raised about the wounding sustained by our unconscious mind, that invisible inner sea. What will we do about the wounds we find there? How will we handle the shared pain that floats around in the collective ethers?

Looking to our culture for answers won’t get us very far. A dysfunctional society is a poor role model. Our national philosophy of mechanistic materialism reduces the concept of “reality” to the physical world, giving the emotional world short shrift. We are discouraged from admitting our complex feelings. The group mind defaults instead to mass denial, the shadow side of Pisces.

Exploiting the situation is the Denial Industry, booming at the moment, as we can expect it to boom during the years ahead: muzak in the superstore trying to numb our critical thinking, and a blue-chip pharmaceuticals industry keeping millions in continuous low-level depression.

But for four years now, the duet between Neptune and Chiron has occasioned a healthy dialogue about the self-medications with which so many people stuff their pain. From its humble beginnings in the AA model, the consciousness around addiction is growing more and more sophisticated.

Overeating has been getting a lot of press lately (in the First World, that is, which is still affluent enough to afford such a problem). And there has been a breakthrough in the discussion of chronic depression — an epidemic that Big Pharma may sometimes ameliorate but cannot cure.¹

Moreover, with the Great Recession as a backdrop, social theorists have been emboldened to propose that consumerism itself can be an addiction. Recreational retail is no longer an easy fix for most people, and the psychological meanings attached to shopping are being reconsidered. Wags have joked about “retail therapy” for years, but the economic climate has recently been opening up people’s thinking about the dark side of capitalism.

In the collective psyche, chronic debt is now understood to be a social wound. The most striking example of this was the real estate bubble and bust, expressed so aptly by the 2009 Super Conjunction , with Chiron, Neptune and Jupiter (broad public awareness), solidifying the painful (Chiron) truth that people’s equity in their homes had been an illusion (Neptune). (The term “underwater” to mean irrecoverably indebted struck astrologers as a cosmic pun: Neptune governs water and drowning.)

Chironic Approach

Although Neptune and Chiron are pulling away from exact conjunction, the influence of their merged meaning remains strong through 2012. What are they suggesting we do with our pain?

Certainly it is unhealthy to focus on pain, either our own personal pain or the greater world’s. The question we need to ask is whether we are not looking at pain out of avoidance. Many of us have been trained to suffer in silence, soldiering on through heartache as if nothing were wrong. Keep it together, we are told when distressed; Don’t cry, we were told when we are children.

But experience has shown us that this cumulative suppression leads to a build-up of grief, which, after a while, gushes out in a geyser of emotional breakdown. It is only then that we notice how much pain we’d been in, and start to wonder whether we’d have suffered less had we admitted our pain to ourselves from the first. Tamping down pain only postpones its release and resolution.

The Chironic approach is, in a way, counter-intuitive: it involves leaning into pain rather than away from it. This does not mean indulging in a masochistic preference for pain. It means admitting to pain, as a prerequisite for healing. Chiron invites us to concede our wounds and then work with them, as an ally.

The Chironic principle of healing is a radical departure from the conventional approach to woundedness, but it is essentially very simple:

It is to make pain more, not less, conscious.

Mourning as Inspiration

After the Gulf disaster two years ago, environmental consciousness in the USA spiked dramatically. Many observers who had spent years stewing in passive distress about the outrages of corporate polluters threw themselves into the public discussion and became engaged citizens for the first time in their lives.

The initial reaction of many people I know was a revulsion and grief so strong that it made them feel helpless. Yet when perspective was retained — through discussion with like-minded observers, through prayer, through astrology  — it became possible to glimpse an evolutionary purpose behind the holocaust. With a bit of distance from our feelings, we could start to see that humanity was being led through a set of understandings that had existed, up until then, only on the fringes of cultural understanding. The catharsis of witnessing a wrenching destruction forced many people awake.

Many Americans reacted with outrage against the oil companies who committed the crime and at the government agencies that enabled it. There were outpourings of lamentation in magazines and blogs, some very beautiful, mourning the oil-soaked birds, the poisoned flora and fauna, the befouled sea.

Some felt the draw to political activity; others were moved to private creative exertions. It didn’t matter what form the creativity took. Those who dove into the energy of the transit found that the act of opening up to a reservoir of shared emotion set something magical in motion.

Under these skies, individuals brave enough to face their pain will be led, by Chironic Law, to their organic next step. We needn’t worry about what this next step will be; it’s folly to second-guess Pisces. But we can be sure that whatever we find under the surface of the inner sea will make us more authentic and more alive.
________________

Note:

1 Chironic law suggests that there is a difference between short-term remedial effects and true healing. A recent study reports that 70% of the antidepressants on the market helped no more than placebos.

What’s especially interesting is that the sign opposite Virgo — Pisces — is getting a lot of action right now as well, from Neptune and Chiron. We have here the planet of aggression, rendered all skeptical and fidgety by Virgo, coming up against two mysterious forces whose modus operandi is passivity and indirectness.

Neptune and Chiron are blurring the clarity of what Mars is doing and what it thinks it wants. They are pouring energies from the right brain into the workings of Virgo, an otherwise straight-ahead, left-brain sign. Those who tend to use Virgo for fussing and worrying will find that these Pisces planets are providing plenty to fuss and worry about.

In the social arena, we see an orgy of fault-finding (Mars in Virgo) operating against the backdrop of an elusive, vacillating mass mood (Neptune, Chiron in Pisces) that disdains practical considerations. Examples abound of obsessive nitpicking  fed by unconscious spiritual malaise. Consider the fuss being made right now about birth control by the Catholic Church, an institution that has displayed an astounding lack of concern over child rape.

For the USA in particular, the War of the Mutables is raging. America’s natal Mars-Neptune square is being provoked by transiting Mars; its station last month was exact within a degree. The transit’s effect on the national climate is to thicken the fog of emotional reactivity while emboldening the agents of blame.

The country’s ongoing political vaudeville act, recently described by no less a critic than Fidel Castro as “the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been”, sets the scene for an endless stream of complaint unconnected to any rational methodology for improvement. “Freedom from big government,” chant the GOP nominees, a call to arms that gets foggier and vaguer with every repetition, hypnotizing (Neptune) their base into forgetting the facts of recent history, e.g. the role these guys played in the Wall Street bailouts.

The recent fog fight over a Clint Eastwood commercial that aired during the Super Bowl is another example of outsized group feeling pitted against real-life details. The ad was a standard-issue bit of capitalist jingoism, on the order of “What’s good for General Motors [updated here to Chrysler] is good for the USA”. Juiced up with movie-star glamor (Pisces), it was the kind of sales pitch we hear regularly from the spin departments of both political parties. But the ever-vigilant Karl Rove found grounds in it for partisan point-scoring, and up rose a great hue and cry of impassioned noises from pundits and populace alike.

Pisces isn’t about to let a little thing like facts prevent it from indulging in a good drama. Amidst the hooplah was a pesky bit of relevant data that managed to get lost in the fray: the company in question is no longer American. Italy’s Fiat SpA now owns a majority of Chrysler.

Culture analysts of the future will surely roll their eyes incredulously when reading about societal antics such as these. As denizens of the present, we can take heart from remembering that each of us, as individuals, has a better shot at channeling these energies creatively than the group as a whole has. The only way humanity’s consciousness gets raised is one person at a time.

The 14-year tenure of Neptune in Pisces, the sign of its rulership, is a teaching about healing at the soul level. The more we open to it, the more we will change our lives in subtle but unmistakable ways (see my lecture The Surrounding Sea. In the Skywatch for March, I’ll be talking about the Pisces tenure of Chiron, the mythic teacher of heroes.)

These transits guarantee that we will be taught, but they don’t guarantee that we will learn. Learning depends on whether mindfulness is brought to bear. To the extent that it is, the impulses we’re getting from Mars in Virgo will be beautifully blended with the grand, sweeping sensitivities of the Pisces cluster. Then a perfect balance is achieved, with each sign revealing its most exalted side to the other. This is exactly what we need to happen, as 2012 gains momentum.

It’s a once-in-168-year event. In a year chock-full of world-altering transits, it’s one of the most important. The god of the sea is inaugurating a thirteen-year-long shift in the way we look at water. To people with water-dominant charts, Neptune’s entry into Pisces on February 3^rd will feel the way a drop of water must feel when it finally reaches the sea.

The archetype of water means many things. On the level of physical reality, Neptune governs drinking water, oceans and rivers, pipelines, gas and oil, leaks and spillages. Maximally strong in the sign of the fishes, Neptune will provoke all of these Earthly manifestations of the water principle, causing them to swell into group consciousness with a new poignancy.

And of course this ingress isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s taking place against the backdrop of the overriding transit of the era, now getting closer by the day: the Uranus-Pluto square, the longest arm of the Cardinal Cross.

The Uranus and Pluto cycle, which began when Uranus met up with Pluto in a  conjunction during the1960s, charts the seeding and flowering of cultural revolution. Its job is to overthrow stale, old, bankrupt aspects of collective life. The square’s approach during 2011 has already introduced us to a brand new era of possibility, what with political uprisings all over the planet, a breakdown of economic sureties everywhere, and an environmental urgency that is changing the way humans think about life on Earth.

Projects Backfire

When we combine the symbolism of Neptune, Uranus and Pluto, one of the trends that arises is an explosive eruption (Uranus) of toxicity (Pluto) occurring with water systems (Neptune). We can expect water issues to lead the pack upcoming among the life-and-death issues facing the world environment.

This means keeping our eyes on developments like the disastrous Keystone pipeline, still being promoted by a coalition of the usual get-rich-quick suspects (maybe we should lobby for a law against ecocide denial, just as there is against Holocaust denial). As these transits dominate the skies, we will be seeing the backfiring of a number of profit-driven water projects.

There are plenty of them vying for the crown of Most-Ecocidal-Idea-0f-2012. One of them is BP’s continuance of deepwater drills in the Gulf of Mexico, site of their catastrophic oil rig explosion in 2010. These monstrous polluters are not only still pumping, but have been sprouting leaks with impunity in recent months. Getting even less attention, in the Nigerian delta Chevron — whose profits last quarter broke a record, by the way — has been getting away with murder, quite literally, in their efforts to silence local fishermen who have been struggling to stop the fouling of local water ways. Similarly, in the Amazon rainforest, a plan to build the world’s third-largest dam on indigenous land is now working its way through the Brazilian courts. In the American Yosemite, the flooding of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, a desecration that is said to have broken the heart of wilderness visionary John Muir, is once again under discussion.

And this may be the year when California’s long-simmering water wars finally boil over. Remember the movie Chinatown?

Spiritual Pollution

With Neptune and Chiron both in Pisces, those who prize their sanity will need to be clearer than ever about the dangers of this archetype in its low-level of expression. We’re going to need to watch out for fuzzy thinking and denial (Neptune) where deep healing is required (Chiron). Escapist longings are strong when Neptune is prominent in the sky; whether through sex, beer or prescription drugs, sleep, work or depression.

Even if we do not, ourselves, eat of the Lotus, we have to factor in the reality that just about everybody else does. We live in a world where self-medication is normative. Of relevance here are two facts. One: a new study reports that almost one quarter of American women age 40 to 59 take antidepressants. Two: the tap water most of us use is reclaimed sewerage effluent. This means it’s a good bet that when we fill our glass at the sink we’re about to drink somebody else’s Zoloft.

Moreover, there is the psychic dimension of Neptune to consider. We move through our lives in constant contact with others, picking up the vibrations like an amoeba in a pond; we are surrounded by the messages of the corporate media as if by polluted water. Citizens of modern capitalist societies are subjected to some kind of advertising at every waking moment, and, given the cunning and repetition of visual and aural tropes in commercials, probably in our sleep as well.

It is not surprising that the default consciousness of modern humans in groups — that is, of those with sufficient resources to be free from the incessant struggle to just stay alive — seems to be a semi-voluntary numbness. This means that those who wish to avoid drinking the KoolAid need to take extra precautions.

Like all outer planets, Neptune has a shadow a mile long. The warnings we get from traditional astrology about this planet’s misuse are legendary. They include fraud and deceit, self-delusion and self-loss. But we would expect nothing less when we are dealing with an archetype this powerful; the bigger they come, the harder they fall. As with the Uranus-Pluto square, humanity is getting strong cosmic medicine as a function of how out of balance we have become.

Higher Neptune

That said, those who want to step out of the negative-Neptune pattern will experience the Pisces transit as a liberation. To taste the sweetness of high-level Neptune, we must cultivate a detachment from the unhealthy aspects of group life while at the same time staying in touch with what the mass mind is up to. For Americans, this might mean glancing  at the cover of People Magazine with our peripheral vision; or noticing what propaganda Fox News is pumping out this week, to cater to the prejudices of its viewers — noticing it without becoming ensnared by it.

Neptune is the symbol of the illusory nature of this world; what Hinduism calls Maya. With an appreciation for the cosmic lessons at hand, we can inform ourselves about the foibles of our era, as a sociologist might. We might get to the point where we approach these foibles with genuine curiosity; for, when we are not manipulated by them, the misadventures of an ungrounded collective are more fascinating than the most wildly improbable science fiction.

It’s about keeping our finger on the pulse of what currently passes for reality, while keeping our distance.

Like the Cardinal square above us, Neptune in Pisces has the capacity to transform the world, one individual consciousness at a time. It teaches that we are all little corks bobbing around in the same experiential sea. When we allow ourselves to open up to it, we glimpse the great truth behind material existence: unconditional interconnectedness.

It is a realization that, when it comes, comes in a flood.

We are living in a thrilling moment in history. As 2012 hits the ground running, deep-structure change is in the air.

Pluto, the planet that shows us the mortality of all things, is strengthened during the month of January by the Sun’s passage through Capricorn, the sign of economic theories and political structures. There are reminders everywhere that even those institutions we tend to see as eternal are merely temporary constructs. Pluto asks one question of the systems governed by its resident sign: Are they promoting the healthy functioning of human beings and other living things? If not, they must go the way of everything else in decay. If a social institution has started to turn against the people it was set up to serve, it’s dustbin-of-history time.

Capitalism is one of these systems. In its current state it is rotting from within. Despite the fact that most of us are conditioned to equate capitalism with modernity — indeed, with civilization itself — this economic model is no more immortal than anything else under the Sun. Under skies galvanized by the Longest Arm of the Cross, everywhere we look we see “free market” capitalism in its death throes.

Neoconservatives don’t talk much about the dubious effects of the capitalist flood that swept over Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, nor about the environmental and cultural desecration wrought by China’s voracious entry into the GDP sweepstakes. As for Uncle Sam, king of capitalism for the last two centuries, he is finding himself smack dab in the middle of the Uranus-Pluto square (America’s natal aspects become a full-on Grand Cross when the transit is factored in).

With a self-image that revolves around material wealth, America is now going through not just a financial trauma but a breakdown of its core identity (Pluto opposite US Sun). The notion of being the richest country in the world is so central to the nation’s view of itself that many Americans have failed to grasp the fact that right now, in 2012, the only thing the US economy leads in is military might and people in prison.

In many ways, of course, robber-baron-style capitalism has been wildly successful. It has generated untold amounts of wealth for a tiny sector of humanity, and has established networks of profit that have undermined whole governments – as, for example, the donor-lobbyist-representative axis in Washington that has undermined U.S. democracy. Follow the logic of capitalism along its natural trajectory and you get the immensely profitable business of trafficking and selling illegal drugs, which constitutes what is perhaps the most stunning financial success story of our era (worldwide, it is thought to be a four-hundred-billion-dollar-a-year industry), ranking it right up there with the oil companies and the arms trade.

But under skies like these, visionaries are challenging even the most entrenched and the least questioned of Capricorn operations. Uranus, the planet of people power, is capable of transforming the plutocratic state (Pluto) of modern capitalism. An example of this is the entry into the public discussion of indie capitalism, a radical challenge to business as usual, in every sense of the phrase.

Indie capitalism is based not on trading old value, but on creating new value. It is not globally but locally oriented. It is concerned not with quantity but quality; and its modus operandi is sharing rather than exploiting.

Consider Kickstarter, the internet creative funding phenomenon whereby people invest and observe the growth of products that mean something to them personally. In this model, says proponent Bruce Nussbaum, consumer, investor, audience, fan, helper, and producer conflate. People find and prepare their food the same way they find and prepare their music. And then they share it all.

The courage to challenge (Uranus) and reformulate (Pluto) even such a powerful phenomenon as big global capitalism may seem like a David and Goliath battle. But tackling huge power differentials like these is exactly what this transit is about. Giants are big, but they are mortal, and not exempt from Plutonian law. The symbolism in the skies suggests that when entities such as these start to putrefy, we should collectively grab our shovels and bury them.

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.