SATURN ON AMERICA'S SUN:
WE MEET THE WORLD OUTSIDE OUR BORDERS
Excerpted in Vanguard in the Belly of the Beast, May 2003
by Jessica Murray
The
planet Saturn is potent this year.
It is orbiting in perihelion -- as close to the Sun as it gets-- with a
peak period in July 2003. In this state of maximized strength, Saturn will
ingress into Cancer in early June, which means that for the next couple
of years, all charts with Cancer planets have an appointment with their
karma.
Saturn,
governor of karma, completes its turn around the zodiac every 28 years,
necessitating the native to reap that which he or she (or it) has sown.
There is nothing mysterious about the operation of this law. It is one
of the least opaque principles in metaphysics.
When
we look at the current global situation from a metaphysical perspective,
things start to look oddly simple. The law of karma is doing its job, and
in the mirror of its alliances America is being shown who it is.
A
Karmic Birthday
Much
has been written about the rare and profound transit which the planets
Saturn and Pluto have been making
in the chart of the USA since August of 2001.1
Moreover, George W. Bush and the USA itself 2will
both have Saturn-transit birthdays this year. Meanwhile, Saturn will continue
unveiling our national karma in the seventh house of "open enemies".
Saturn's
job is to give back to a source whatever that source has put out into its
environment. To understand a Saturn transit, first one identifies the source,
then one considers what it has put out into the environment. Let us begin
with our not-quite-elected national leader. George W. Bush's natal chart
has a twelfth-house sun, indicating that his outer persona bears little
resemblance to his public persona. Protected by the benign sheen of a Jupiter/Moon
conjunction in Libra, he has gotten a lot of mileage out of the puerile
charm by which he is commonly known. But the planet of accountability is
heading in his direction. Underneath his easy manner is a scared little
boy, and right now he is the most hated man in the world. These are not
the optimal circumstances in which to welcome the transit of Saturn, which
will soon be conjoining W.'s sun and that of his country. But it is a very
good time to gain a deeper understanding of what it happening and why it
is happening. This transit represents the culmination of the cycle3that
began fourteen years ago at the first Gulf War, when the father of the
current president was in office.
Our
understanding of karma is usually confused by the notion of blame, an invention
of the human mind, not of cosmic law. Neither self-blame nor projected
blame has anything to do with universal principles. This is the first speed
bump we must get over in seeking to comprehend the deeper truth behind
the pain our planet is in. All over the globe right now, the human impulse
to judge is running rampant, as whole societies and factions of societies
struggle to come to grips with a worldwide climate of breakdown and fear.
Let us back away for a moment from the lens of human subjectivity and examine
this universal law on its own terms.
Karma
is impeccably neutral. If you throw a ball up in the air, it will slow
to an arc and head downwards. If you study hard for your test, you are
more likely to pass than if you blow it off. If you bury land mines, they
will eventually have to be unearthed or exploded. If you drive people off
their land, bomb civilians and destroy Arab cities, you are going to get
terrorists.
The
USA in Relationship
Saturn
is active in the corner of the USA chart that deals with the Not-Self.
Whether in the chart of an individual or a country, the question posed
by a transit to the seventh house is this: Who am I vis-à-vis others?
Each of us has been tested in one-to-one relationships, trying to play
nice; trying to balance. Nation states work through knots and tangles,
too, with other nation states. Nobody said relating was easy. With Saturn
in this placement, you have to work at it even harder. You have to earn
whatever cooperation you get.
Or
not. Since Saturn and Pluto opposed over the USA chart's horizon, this
country has been struggling with its relationship to Relationship. Saturn
was on the Descendant when the airplanes hit the towers on 9/11/01. With
Pluto, the life-and-death planet, simultaneously on the Ascendant, the
stakes were raised to a whole-world-at-risk level. It is not merely that
we must learn mature relating skills; it is that if we do not, we will
all be toast.
Political
scientists may never be able to identify for certain the many-tiered forces
behind the so-called War on Terrorism at ground level, as it were; but
as astrologers we can identify these forces in the sky. And we can time
their arc of event manifestation. The USA crossed a zodiacal threshold
in 2001, inaugurating a long lesson about our approach to any and all non-Americans.
Saturn has been testing this country's isolationist patterns and pushing
us to transcend our collective narcissism, through the gradual, inevitable
return of international chickens to the roost.
An
Era of Censorship
The
biggest stumbling block in turning the current world crisis around is that
most Americans do not know what is going on. The millions of people who
are in the best position to correct the current global trajectory -- that
is, the American public -- are estranged from the rest of the world by a
paucity of information while being deceived by their own government with
a deadening shroud of disinformation.
Saturn
governs all forms of institutionalized restriction. In the sign of Gemini,
it indicates authoritative control over language and data. Saturn (delay,
shutdown) was just ingressing into Gemini (media access) when Bush Junior
rescinded the provision that gives access to a president's records twelve
years after he leaves office. In perhaps his most symbolically significant
first act as president, he proposed that disclosure be indefinitely postponed.
Some
of the manifestations of this campaign of curtailment, such as the proposal
to take the French out of French fries, come across as farcical. Others,
such as the music giant Clear Channel's do-not-play list of presumably
un-American songs (John Lennon's "Imagine" among them), and Viacom's reluctance
to rent billboard space to peace groups, represent Big Media's awkward
first attempts to define an identity in Ashcroft's America. More deeply
impactful developments, such as the gradual deregulation of and government
control over the mainstream media, have accelerated exponentially since
the transit took hold two years ago. While the Iraqi invasion raged, the
front pages of our newspapers featured G.I.s tenderly ministering to wounded
children, instead of showing us what newspapers in other countries showed:
the ghastly results of the American cluster bombs which turned those children
into orphans.
What
is happening to our media represents more than mere intellectual inhibition,
governed by Saturn. It falls into the category of mind control, governed
by Pluto.
Censorship
and Criminalization
All
of the official censorship since September of 2001, from the ban on the
networks' airing of Osama bin Laden tapes to the ban on congressmen at
White House intelligence briefings, has been justified by the claim that
access to the information would aid and abet the machinations of a faceless
yet larger-than-life horde of lethal international outlaws.
After
their stunning policy switcheroo in 2002, whereby bin Laden was replaced
with Saddam Hussein as the face of this amorphous evil, Bush et al have
vastly expanded their criteria for censorship (Saturn) and criminalization
(Pluto). Now these apply not just to suspected terrorists, but to presumed
terrorist sympathizers, a net cast to snare American immigrants with and
without documentation. More recently, these criteria have been expanded
to include any person or entity with the gall to criticize Washington.
This last is an especially ambitious category, encompassing, unprecedented,
longtime allies like France and Germany. Indeed, professors, peace activists
and movie stars who have dared to condemn the occupation of Iraq -- born-and-bred
U.S. citizens all, whose citizenship could be officially revoked under
the attorney general's new law -- may be the latest entrants into the ever-widening
pool of treachery suspects.
September
11th: More an Effect Than a Cause
"The
day the world changed" was less than two years ago and already the date
is mythic. At first blush, the events of 9/11 seem to be the cause of which
the current world situation is the effect. The astrological view, by contrast,
is to see events not in terms of agency, but in terms of symbolism and
timing. Planetary cycles constitute a complex clock, signifying certain
lessons which are due to be learned, en masse, at certain times. We look
at this clock to see what time it is for the world; then we look at the
events which come along to symbolize the lessons of that time. From this
point of view, 9/11 was less a cause than an effect.
Before
the transit hit, the D.C. buzz was all party-politick squabbles about sexual
misbehavior and campaign finance. But when Pluto and Saturn moved into
position, decades' worth of clandestine foreign policy patterns with immense
global consequences very quickly began to surface. Osama bin Laden's early
communiqués raised three issues that seem to get right to the heart
of the matter as regards America's karma in the Middle East: foreign troops
in lands sacred to Islam, the bombing of Iraqi civilians, and non-neutrality
in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
After
the transit reached exactitude, a handful of uncowed American critics and
a great number of international ones began sniffing around the roots of
America's investment in these ancient desert lands. The Iran-Contra affair
suddenly returned to relevance; several of its key deal-cutters having
quietly crept back into powerful positions in Washington. Our long-moribund
affair with the Shah of Iran once again became newsworthy. Curious Americans
started looking up the Crusades in the encyclopedia.
The
Invasion of Iraq
Saturn
highlights unfinished business; Pluto pinpoints corruption and cover-up.
The prospect of vanquished Iraqis showering their American "liberators"
with flowers of welcome, a fantasy engendered by the Pentagon and supported
by the press, proved harder to spin than the spin-meisters expected. A
surprising number of Iraqi civilians, despite their oppression at the hands
of Saddam, showed themselves capable of fighting their new colonizers tooth
and nail; prompting a quick change of terminology in the U.S. media from
"civilians" to "enemy".
When
the famous video clip of Saddam's statue crashing to the ground amidst
cheers from the crowd was pressed into service, over and over on all eight
news networks at once, it offered American viewers a picture of the invasion
not shared by viewers in other parts of the world. The foreign press was
taking note of the fact that despite Geneva Convention stipulations, the
conquerors made no move to protect Iraqi men, women or children after the
looting began; the soldiers' orders were neither to guard the hospitals
nor to restore water. Their first move was to secure the all-important
oil fields.
The
uncensored international press reported that Iraqis had actually been flowing
back into Iraq, not to fight for Saddam, but to fight for their country.
That native resistance to invasion could have surprised anybody is a testament
to the depth of ignorance the American public suffers about even the most
recent Middle Eastern history. Every one of Iraq's schoolchildren has grown
up knowing about the British occupation of their country, its 1958 revolution,
the twelve years of deadly sanctions and the current imperial intentions
of the United States. Americans, by contrast, can hardly be bothered to
remember back to 1983, when none other than Donald Rumsfeld himself was
dispatched by Reagan to pledge undying American allegiance to Saddam during
Iraq's conflict with Iran.
The
forces of karma do not bend to government spin. Karma identifies a particular
energy at its source, and returns like energy to that source. So what will
the gods do with the fact that it was a germ warfare manufacturer outside
Washington D.C. who supplied anthrax to Saddam? This was in 1988, six months
after the historically ambiguous gassing of the Kurds, an atrocity which
began to shock and appall Washington only last year.
Or
so they would have had us believe. From the onset of the weapons inspections,
it was whispered that the committee behind this war had been planning to
invade Iraq all along, a campaign that would be facilitated by pre-disarming
Iraq's already fourth-rate military. After Baghdad fell and nary a weapon
of mass destruction could be found, Hans Blix publicly cried foul, with
the rage of a man humiliated and defrauded. Bush's prize pretext for invading
had been Saddam's offensive arsenal; but there was no smoking gun. All
that was smoking was the rubble of a ruined Iraq. Washington's bluff and
posturing reaction to the U.N. investigation had been a long, drawn-out
charade.
Plutocratic
Motives
Pluto
resides natally in the second house of the USA chart: the signature of
plutocracy, not democracy. The links between huge but secretive corporations
and the politicians they finance-- and by extension the laws which those
politicians enact-- are by now old news to all but the egregiously naive.
With perverse appropriateness, producers of the network news shows posted
running stock quotes beneath the battle reportage, making no bones about
the war-as-marketplace rationale (at least for certain favored companies)
behind Washington's lethal adventure. War cheerleaders like CNN, which
made its mark during the first Gulf War, are beneficiaries of the boom
no less than war suppliers like Lockheed and postwar builders like Bechtel.
Our Plutonian vice president (secrecy, back-room dealings), who in the
early '80s was deep in discussion with Saddam about a pipeline that was
then President Reagan's pet project, is now best known for his ties to
the companies whose contracts --awarded without any bidding-- will earn
billions from rebuilding Iraq once the fires amidst Baghdad's ruins have
smoldered into ash.
The
USA and the Rest of the World
Saturn
refers to authority, Pluto to raw power, and the seventh house refers to
generic "Others", friend or foe. For the entity that is the United States,
that means the rest of the world. The double transit upon us has forced
the examination of patterns of foreign involvement not just current but
long-evolving, not just overt but covert.
Critics
are returning to questions not raised since the '70s about the CIA and
FBI's involvement in counter-revolutionary sabotage around the world. The
assassination of the democratically-elected President Allende in Chile,
perhaps the most public of a series of hundreds of military incursions
since 1945 initiated by the United States, has become emblematic of a new
point of view; one which asks: Why was the storming by Kissinger's men
of the presidential Palace in Santiago acceptable, whereas the idea of
a suicide bomber hitting the White House is heinous to the point of devilry?
The
answer, of course, is: That was Them; this is Us.
Herein
lies the central issue of the seventh house,
and the code we must crack in order to plumb the deeper meaning behind
the relationships we draw into our lives. The first law of the seventh
house is that one must see beyond the Us vs. Them paradigm if one wants
to avoid the transiting planet's coming right back at us -- and in its
least benign form -- come the karmic deadline.
The
Laws of Projection
In
order to make sense of the astounding hypocrisies streaming forth from
Washington, let us consider how a psychologist interprets the blaming patterns
of warring spouses. The law of projection is at work when the accuser condemns
in others the very features he needs to see in himself but cannot see.
If we decode his diatribes, we find an uncannily accurate self-description.
4
The
very generals who expressed outrage about purported Iraqi chemical weapons
are themselves responsible for unleashing upon the Iraqi people depleted
uranium, a munitions seen by some as a radiological scourge with the power
to destroy Iraq's genetic future. The same George W. Bush who regaled the
American public with tales of Saddam's use of torture is permitting his
army to conduct unspeakable "interrogation procedures" right now upon hundreds
of unnamed, unlawyered apprehendees within the soundproof cells of Guantanamo.
Indeed, his is one of several administrations that have refused to extradite
an estimated 1.000 torturers whom Amnesty International says are now living
safely in the USA, most of them graduates of the infamous School of the
Americas.
From
the Pentagon brass who ordered the bombing of hospitals and foreign reporters,
we heard charges of war crimes regarding Iraq's handling of captured GIs.
After they had boasted about the shocking and awesome effect their latest
mega-bombs would have upon the terrified residents of Iraq, these men cried
"terrorist" when a ragged Iraqi blew himself up defending his home.
And
as an apologia for the carnage abroad, the word "freedom" was touted in
the war propaganda like a litany. Meanwhile, on the battle front, Iraqis
fighting for their freedom from a foreign power died -- and are still dying
-- by the uncounted thousands, while on the home front the noose on freedom
of speech and freedom of the press tightens with every week that passes.
Projection
and the Father
As
family therapists know, projection gets particularly heated when the parties
in question are personally related. Bush the Younger's righteous denunciations
of dictatorship were a centerpiece of his call to war, but of course his
own father was among those policymakers who supported the bloodiest dictators
of a generation. It could be argued that Mobutu and Suharto make Saddam
look like Mr. Rogers.
George
Senior was also supposedly the object of a murderous plot hatched by Saddam,
and thus the star of a vengeance fantasy W. was thought to harbor; though
one must decode the language of projection to see the simple tit for tat.
In George Junior's 2003 State of the Union address, he implied, with horrible
smugness, that his men have murdered scores of purported terrorist masterminds
(they are "no longer a problem" he said, with a wink and a nudge). By contrast,
had Saddam's forces succeeded in killing George Senior, nothing less than
the noble term assassination would have been pressed into service, with
Washington no doubt reacting to the murder as if it were the martyrdom
of Jesus Christ. As to the military retaliations, given the thousands of
innocent Iraqis now dead from sanctions and invasion combined, one shudders
to imagine the scale of the vengeance that would have been meted out had
the elder Bush been hit.
The
Face in the Mirror
One
need only look at our government's recent obsession with the concept of
"weapons of mass destruction" to see projection in its baldest guise. Ours
is the country whose military expenditure will soon equal that of the next
fifteen most powerful states combined. We are by far the number-one producer,
seller and deplorer of weapons that create mass and every other kind of
destruction. Among disarmament activists, much has been made of the "irony"
that the USA, the only country responsible for killing hundreds of thousands
of innocents with an atomic bomb, should thereafter claim to be the arbiter
of which nations can possess nukes and which cannot. But far from being
ironic, this is exactly the way projection works.
Astrology
posits that relating is not just mirroring in a figurative sense; it is
mirroring in an absolute sense. After the fall of Baghdad, American newspapers
put the term "looting" in bold-face headlines -- referring to mobs in the
streets of Iraq. A few pages further into the paper, in the business section,
they reported the triumphs of American corporations contracted to loot
that country's oil.
The
axiom behind the Ascendant and the Descendant proposes that both are houses
of identity. First-house action (I did this) shows us who we are in a direct
way; seventh-house action (you did that) shows us who we are in an indirect
way. When we're too unconscious to create friendship, we create enmity.
Though we may prefer the former to the latter, from a cosmic point of view
the two have the same valence. In fact, either one has the same valence
as the self. To paraphrase Robert Hand: "People we relate to are as indicative
of our level of consciousness as we are ourselves".
This
is an understanding that would take the bite out of the whole He-said/She-said
game were we to apply it to our personal relationships. It is an understanding
that could deflate moral righteousness and defuse international violence
were we to apply it to group relationships. Every instance of Us-vs.-Them
thinking can be opened up to a higher level by identifying the mirroring
mechanism at its core. It may be over-optimistic to imagine that such a
shift in perspective could be espoused widely enough to render moot warfare
in the world. But we are in an Endgame as far as old global paradigms are
concerned. Ambitious leaps of consciousness are no longer a luxury but
a necessity. The secret of the Descendant -- "We have met the enemy and
he is us" (Walt Kelly)-- must be told. It is the understanding we need
in order to make sense of the international sea storm into which our drunken
captain would otherwise lead us.
Friends
and Foes
The
Descendant refers both to our interchanges and to the alter egos ("other
selves") with which we have them: the partners, rivals, friends and peers.
Pluto's opposition to this angle in the chart of the USA, still in orb,
has been exposing several generations' worth of hidden patterns motivating
our nation's feuds and alliances.
Pluto
governs domination and genocide, thugs and warlords. Soon after Saturn
and Pluto together opened the Pandora's Box of American foreign policy,
our military bankrolling of Israel moved from being an open secret to high-profile
news. The Pentagon's old friend General Pinochet was indicted as a war
criminal. And a coup in Venezuela was linked to the CIA without us having
to wait a decade to hear about it.
Each
of our government's rapports with foreign governments in the past couple
of years has been met with a new level of suspicion from those observers
unconvinced by official explanations; and the stonewalling from Washington
has taken on a new fierceness as the worms come crawling out of the can.
Pluto
also governs betrayal. The crisis in Iraq has thrown a spotlight upon the
White House's history of embracing, and then demonizing, puppet-strongmen
all over the world. Turning the idea of loyalty on its head, our government
has traditionally exhibited no real allegiance except to those U.S. business
interests for whose benefit a given country needs to be stabilized. With
rigorous consistency, Washington has trained, armed and then repudiated
despot after despot -- men like Pol Pot, Trujillo and Somoza. Even in the
censored American press one can find mention of how the Pentagon supplied
guns to the same Mujahadeen our soldiers would later gun down; and about
how it supported and then betrayed dissident Iraqis during the first Gulf
War. Tony Blair himself may be the latest to feel the sting of Washington's
betrayal, as he hears now from Bush that Britain's share of Iraq's post-war
plunder will not be as extensive as promised.
What
kind of karma are we accumulating as a nation? We might ask ourselves what
fate we would expect a good storyteller to divvy out to a fictional lover
who woos, jilts and then murders his ex.
Dark
Comedy
Around
the time of Pluto's station at the spring equinox 2003, America's foreign
policy began to degenerate into a veritable film-noir of behind-the-scenes
power plays. The Bush administration's tactics vis-à-vis other countries
moved from being disguised to undisguised manipulations, creating a string
of grotesquely dysfunctional international relationships. Washington was
caught bugging the bedrooms of swing-vote U.N. Security Council diplomats
like a jealous husband, while trying to bribe, coerce and threaten Iraq's
financially bankrupted neighbors for war access, like a mafia goon. As
the U.N.'s weapons inspection efforts started to bear fruit, thus deflating
Washington's pretext for war, the thuggery approached the level of dark
comedy. Charges of forgery arose surrounding Colin Powell's supposedly
damning evidence of Nigerian uranium sales to Iraq. And in a detail worthy
of Peter Sellers doing Inspector Clouseau, the revelation surfaced that
intelligence reports solemnly touted by the Pentagon had been plagiarized
from a grad student paper ...downloaded from the internet, typos intact.
World-Scale
Wrongdoing
What
are the consequences of a superpower's world-scale wrongdoing? The United
Nations was set up to be the venue to try such cases, but the United States,
as the only country with the might to refuse to play fair, has excepted
itself from war criminality jurisdiction. From issues ranging from global
warming to the prevention of nuclear holocaust, decades of painstakingly
eked-out international efforts have been summarily dismissed and undermined
by Washington.
If
the world body's other members had any faith left in the USA's integrity
after this shameful legacy, we can be fairly sure that the contemptuous
game-playing Bush et al demonstrated over the arms inspections has killed
off any last vestige of that faith. What is the karmic blowback for sabotaging
the only international peacekeeping body in the world?
In
a heartrending coda to the military violence, word came that American soldiers
had stood around callously watching as Iraq's museums were ransacked with
a barbarism that hearkened back to the sacking of Constantinople by the
Fourth Crusade. What is the karma of dismissing with a sneer the desecration
of antiquities seven thousand years old?
If
a schoolchild is caught cheating on a test, we expect there to be a punishment.
If a doctor is convicted of malpractice, we want him to lose his license.
The laws of karma do not exempt the high and mighty. Whether the perfidy
is individual or collective, blind universal law will prevail. Ultimately,
the gods do not care who or what is the agent of a particular injury, who
received the harm, nor in what form responsibility will ultimately have
to be taken. To them, it is nothing personal. But as mortal beings, we
must try to fathom our stance towards these issues.
The
phrase "an accident of birth" reflects the prevailing assumption that our
birth data are among the few things in this life that are incontestably
arbitrary. But from a metaphysical viewpoint, we are each denizens of a
certain place and members of a certain generation for a reason. Our collective
identity is one of the many layers of who we are. As surely as one is indelibly
bonded with the parents one was born to - not just actually, but psychologically-one
is a part of one's country for better or worse. In a karmic sense, if not
in an electoral sense, we each have a relationship with our country's government;
and like all relationships, this one can be used to burn off karma -- both
our own karma and that of the planet.
If
one believes that we each somehow choose our soul's lessons, it follows
that we must express ourselves not in some theoretical elsewhere but where
we are, alert to what is happening now. Again, this has nothing to do with
blame; nor does it imply that all people must express their sense of responsibility
in the same way. Some may march in protest, some may support politicians,
some may read and write, dance, speak, weep or pray. We must neither try
to escape -- an impossibility anyway -- nor merely react: we must respond.
Though we may feel powerless in the face of terrible global events, we
are never powerless when we truly respond.
In
times like these, each of us must actively cultivate his or her own unique
heart connection to the greater world of which we are a part. Otherwise,
we descend into a state of victim hood, denying yet absorbing the toxicity
in the atmosphere all around us, condemning or ignoring its perceived source,
and making our lives very small.
1.
See "America's Crisis of Maturity" and "Limiting the Dark, Deepening the
Light" on this website. Return
to Article
2.
July 4, 1776 5:13pm Washington D.C. Return
to Article
3.
" The Saturn-Sun cycle is one of the few cycles where the conjunction is
a culmination rather than a beginning. The cycle begins at the opposition...
" Rob Hand ("From Bush to Buddha", The Mountain Astrologer, April/May 03)
Return
to Article
4.
The metaphysical understanding of projection differs from the psychological
in one major respect: projection is not necessarily a fantasy. Natural
law dictates that we attract individuals who do in fact play out those
same themes that we are denying in ourselves. Saddam may well have been
a brute and a mass murderer. Projection does not address accuracy or exoneration.
It merely explains the choice of sins with which the accused is condemned,
and the exaggerated fervor of his accusers. Return
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