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The Buck Stops Where?:
Saturn Transits to the USA Chart, 2004
by Jessica Murray
You don't
have to be an astrologer to see that the United States is at a dramatic
turning point. Whether we understand what is happening in astrological,
political, moral terms -- or just want to duck under the covers and not
look at it at all, every one of us who identifies as an American feels
a sense of fatal decision in the air. What is it all about?
Above
us are planetary configurations that spell out quite clearly the themes
our country is playing out. Astrology gives us a plethora of coded information
to help us understand this critical time.
All indications
point to the planet of karma. The dance between the planet Saturn
and the natal chart of the USA for the past couple of years tells us that
the primary theme is accepting responsibility. This transit's job
is to expose how well or poorly America understands its global impact.
It is here to teach us accountability.
Do planetary
transits provoke events somehow, or do they just mark them in time, like
the hands of a clock? Let us leave this knotty question aside for the moment
and agree that transits confer meaning upon events. The search
for meaning should be our first response in times of tremendous human suffering.
And though metaphysical interpretations fall short of providing an immediate
action plan, they are useful in providing the big-picture view that must
precede any action plan.
By this
reckoning, the events of recent years represent a series of cosmic nudges
that seek to push the American consciousness into a new maturity
(Saturn). The lesson is simply to acknowledge what we put out into the
world, without blame; and to respond to the consequences. It is a lesson
that is being thrust into our faces over and over, monthly, weekly and
daily, as Saturn passes through Cancer, the sign under which our country
was born (July 4, 1776, 5:13pm).
Saturn
isolates in order to define. Since the ringed planet began passing through
America's seventh house, our role in the global community has become more
estranged and alienated than it has ever been before. The notorious Saturn-Pluto
opposition of 2001-2, under which we entered the current bellicose period,
elevated America's interrelationships vis-à-vis other nations to
a new kind of prominence, for better or worse. The two transiting planets
- Saturn, planet of responsibility, and Pluto, planet of power -- straddled
the horizon line of the USA chart, marking this country as in the crosshairs
of a rifle.
On a collective
level, the impact of that planetary opposition -- whose final exactitude
occurred just before the World Trade Center bombings -- was unmistakable,
making it one of the most exhaustively analyzed transits in recent memory.
Its timing set the stage for not only the current decade but for the current
century, putting its mark on the millennium to come.
Since
then, a series of significant transits has showed up to evoke and disseminate
the opposition's power, creating what astrologers call cosmic echoes.
From late 2003 through 2004 Saturn was hovering around the degree of Cancer
occupied by the Sun in the US natal chart, during which time Mars
returned to the USA Mars position under an eclipse.
Astrologers
of a spiritual bent can learn a great deal from this extraordinary period.
We can de-code the transits and apply them to our own lives, macrocosm
informing microcosm. Not only does planetary symbolism clarify the meaning
of the current geopolitical situation, but it sheds light upon the fundamental
meaning of the Saturn archetype, allowing us to reacquaint ourselves with
the workings of karma, and use the teaching to deepen our soul wisdom.
Saturn
governs the law that says what goes around comes around. Under a Saturn
transit, issues of responsibility heat up in group life and
in our individual
lives, as transits have both public and personal levels of meaning. That
which is juvenile and reactive will be revealed as such. Coping mechanisms
from youth (they may have been effective once, or they may have been ineffective
even then) will be exposed as woefully inadequate.
Each of
us has a sense of what it means to be a real grown-up. With a Saturn transit,
that sense is focused by internal and external events, often in ways that
smack of deprivation. Transits of Saturn bring about a sense of lack.
This lack
may be merely subjective or it may be objectively verifiable (though we
humans make a big deal of the difference, the planets do not). From a cosmic
point of view, insufficiency exists in order to push us into realizing
that our well-being is ultimately nobody else's business: the buck stops
with us. I call this the "Mother leaves town" transit. When Mom goes away
temporarily, we are forced to learn to cook our own supper. If we dig in
our heels and just stand there moping and cursing her absence, we'll go
hungry.
Saturn
insists upon making concrete whatever we have been muddling through in
vague, undefined form. Where we have relied upon some parent figure, we
will be challenged to shift the responsibility to ourselves. When Saturn
passes through Cancer, the sign of security, we are called upon to make
ourselves safe -- not through over-reaction, but through reasonable,
conscious planning. Wherever we have given our power away to an authority
figure (a person or an institution could equally apply, as in "Oh well,
I'm sure Dad/ my boss/ the head of the Department of Homeland Security
knows what he's doing"), we will find that playing the helpless child is
an obsolete gambit.
Saturn
returns to a given part of the natal chart roughly every thirty years.
But when other planetary cycles are peaking at the same time, Saturn's
lesson packs an unusual punch; and when we ignore them, the consequences
are more far-reaching. This is one of the things that makes the current
period so critical, and a clear-eyed study so necessary.
In June
of 2004, we had transits that echoed the 2001 opposition on half a dozen
fronts. Saturn conjoined the U.S. Sun, at the same time that the transiting
Sun in Gemini conjoined the freshly returned U.S. Mars; and both simultaneously
formed an exact opposition to transiting Pluto.
This situation
recalled the Sagittarius/Gemini tug-of-war established in 2001, giving
us yet another chance to digest its meaning. In addition, the solar transit
operated like a great cosmic klieg light spotlighting where Mars was at
the time of its Return (a one-and-a-half- to-two-year cycle); thanks to
which the spring and summer of 2004 was characterized by over-the-top militancy.
Both April and May's eclipses coincided with newspaper headlines expressing
the sadistic depths to which unconscious Mars can go, as exemplified by
the reports of torture, beheadings and the carpet bombings of densely populated
Iraqi cities.
Students
of astrology may want to dust off their Dane Rudhyar here, particularly
The Astrology of America's Destiny, for an interpretation of our country's
higher potential. Meanwhile, we have been experiencing our national Mars'
lower and most obvious potential. Destruction and violence in an us-vs.-them
context is the least enlightened form a 7th-house Mars can take.
What can
we expect on a personal level from these cosmic echoes?
Take a
look at where the early-to-middle degrees of Sagittarius reside in your
natal chart. This area will have been undergoing a slow, gradual devolution
for some time now. The Saturn-Pluto drama of several years ago will probably
have already made clear to you what elements of your life were crying out
for radical change. The house placements and aspects made to other mutable
planets will also provide clues, reinforcing whatever the 9/11 era had
in store for each of us personally in the way of life lessons.
Transits
which hit these degrees reawaken any realizations we have come to about
the implications of the events of 2001, reminding us in no uncertain terms
that whatever we were forced to admit about Darkness -- whether we define
it psychologically, theologically, morally or politically -- must be confronted
with a sober and mature intelligence.
These
transits teach the difference between reaction and responsibility. Blaming
is the child's way out. The adult approach is to ask ourselves why the
event is happening to us, what we are meant to learn from it, and how we
are going to respond to it, in a way that is appropriate to our
particular skills and context. This constitutes mastery of the Saturn principle.
Among
astrologers there was much ink spilled about George W. Bush's transits
during the middle months of the year. The exact conjunction of Saturn and
Bush's Sun occurred in June, three days after the Martial signature described
above. This baleful aspect takes place every three decades in the twelfth
house of his chart, where demons are hidden and deeply rooted. Called by
some the house of karma, the shadowy twelfth suggests unresolved
problems and restive ghosts dating from a past that pre-dates the native's
birth.
And in
an astounding repetition of the Martial theme, Bush's solar return chart
featured transiting Mars mere minutes away from his Ascendant. "I am
(Ascendant) a war president" (Mars), indeed.
Moreover,
the transits of last summer ('04) transits provoked the conjunction that
already exists between Bush's natal Saturn and the U.S. Mercury in Cancer;
whereby his role as paternal guardian for the country locks into America's
own mental fearfulness, at the same time that his own fears have a constraining
effect on the American mind.
They also
featured a galvanization of the USA's Uranus,
which was the apex of a pivotal T-square between transiting Uranus, transiting
Jupiter, and transiting Mercury
in June. This pushed the concept of freedom to the fore.
Though
the word freedom has been obscenely misapplied of late by government
propagandists, we must not allow its misuse to keep us from honoring its
true meaning. Now more than ever, genuine freedom must be embraced and
fought for.
We can
derive hope from the fact that USA has an Aquarius Moon, which denotes
not just a dalliance with the concept of personal liberation but an emotional
need for it. Right now this part of our national psyche is weak, for we
have allowed our instinctive (Moon)
independence as a people (Aquarius) to be cowed by fear (Saturn in Cancer).
Fear is the primitive face of Saturn; responsibility is its mature face.
The Jungian
astrologer Liz Greene once declared that deep in its collective soul, the
United States secretly yearns to return to a monarchy (an opinion perhaps
only a British writer could get away with). The placement of Saturn in
our national birth chart, elevated and squaring the Sun, bespeaks a strong-arm
father figure shored up by long tradition. Without a big-daddy form of
government, Greene argues, this country does not know what to do with itself;
and founders like a teenager without parental guidance.
For three
strident years, the USA has been confronting head-on the reality that power
(Pluto) entails responsibility (Saturn). Recent revelations about the treatment
of prisoners in Iraq have stimulated a universal call to identify culpability,
with critics demanding that the perpetrators submit to the rule of law
(Saturn). But what law are we talking about?
Is military law the corrective for America's deficient sense of responsibility?
Although a military court does not lay claim to the same standard of justice
that we expect from a civilian court, in the current chaotic political
climate many observers seem to be searching for solace in military rigidity.
In its own unabashedly undemocratic way, military justice appeals to our
Saturnine need for structure.
It was
military law that sentenced to one year in prison the hapless soldier who
had the bad luck to be photographed committing the more visible of the
Abu Ghraib atrocities, and it was military law that meted out the exact
same sentence to Camilo Mejia, the conscientious objector who refused to
return to Iraq because of the inhumanities perpetrated by the U.S. army
there. The stunning irony of this equation does not seem to have registered
as such with the American people, most of whom have disavowed their responsibility
to assess anything the Pentagon does.
But even
the dubious legitimacy of military law has been cast asunder in this particular
war, given that many of the occupation forces seem not to answer to the
army at all, but to civilian companies the Pentagon has been using as subcontractors.
Perhaps, then, the law that applies here is whatever code of ethics it
is that guides policy in those shadowy businesses we're just now hearing
about, whose employees were caught elbow-deep in gruesome "interrogation
procedures" at Abu Ghraib. Where does Saturn's buck stop in this case?
Should we look to the Titan Corporation and CACI and see if they have an
honor code?
Or should
we turn to civilian judicial law to find the accountability we seek? The
Supreme Court, which took upon itself the task of picking the president
in the 2000 election, is now deciding whether the lower courts have the
right to even question the government's incarceration of purported
"enemy combatants" incommunicado, for years at a stretch, without charge.
Many of
us are wondering what happened to the supposedly sacrosanct origins of
our federal code of law, as penned by the Founding Fathers. Apparently
no hedge against the politics of the day, the Bill of Rights is currently
being impugned by our commander-in-chief as a hindrance to "homeland security".
In what
court, then, will America resolve its accountability issues?
Perhaps
the buck stops in the court of public opinion. In theory, this is what
is supposed to happen in a democracy: when Spain's prime minister lied
to his people, they fired him. But in the current era of American corporate-sponsored
elections, where the most compelling question in the news seems to be which
candidate has spent more millions on his campaign, is there a voter so
naïve as to believe that any politician, no matter how wildly popular,
could spurn corporate interests and still win the White House?
More fundamentally,
if issues of collective responsibility are to be decided in the court of
public opinion, the public must have an opinion. This may lead us
to ask: how informed can a populace be that gets its information from Fox
News? How judicious can a court of public opinion be in a society where
scientists who talk openly about global warming are muzzled, publishing
houses are enjoined by the White House to blacklist over-candid insiders,
and administration critics are punished by outing their wives as CIA agents?
Our simple-minded
president is an embarrassment, to be sure; but how much more worrisome
is the egregious ignorance of the populace itself? We are living in a culture
where young people get their current events from MTV parodies, and where
the general populace retains no memory of history that was headlines just
a few years ago. A typical example is the public's wholesale amnesia about
the outrageous arms-for-hostages plot hatched during the Reagan administration,
whereby the CIA hired John Negroponte to sell American guns to Iran --
Iraq's enemy at the time -- in order to finance our illegal war in Nicaragua.
Now Negroponte is back in favor with Washington, having escaped disgrace
quite effortlessly; indeed, it seems he is being appointed ambassador to
Iraq. In an informed democracy, would it not be expected that the citizenry
would take this opportunity to call the whole unresolved, unprosecuted
Iran-Contra scandal into question?
The dilemma
of the American people lies in a lack of intelligence in the classic sense
of the word; that is, an essentially state-run media is distorting how
millions of Americans view the world. A citizenry disempowered by epidemic,
entrenched ignorance has no hope of deciding issues of national responsibility.
Every time our lethally clueless president holds one of his Doublespeak
press conferences, there is an increase in the numbers of Americans who
believe Saddam Hussein was somehow linked to 9/11, despite all manner of
factual evidence to the contrary. Responsible judgment cannot be expected
from a court of public opinion whose viewpoint is jerry-rigged.
The failure
of America's institutions to provide us with a working Saturn model --
that is, a social structure that could keep us on the good side of the
god of karma -- derives from something deep within our national psyche
(see America's Crisis of Maturity on the Articles page of this website).
An inability to take responsibility informs our culture on every level.
Only in America could a customer burn herself on her own cup of coffee
and then successfully sue the restaurant that sold it to her. We are a
culture that has never quite grown up. And though juvenility has its charms,
it also has its limits.
Every
time a Saturn transit hits the American chart, these limits reveal themselves.
The transit of Saturn opposed to the USA Pluto (Nov 2004 - July 05), whose
key symbol was, of course, the presidential election, was the culmination
of a thirty-year cycle, giving us an event to mark the ongoing crisis of
American power.
Meanwhile,
the buck stops with the individual. All who live under the American flag
bear the karma of the American chart. We have inherited both its blessings
and its afflictions. At this point in our country's history, the great
American challenge is utterly straightforward yet exasperatingly elusive:
it is simply to respond to what our government is doing in our name.
And though
there are plenty of visionary leaders around suggesting various responses
we could make, they are only there to offer inspiration and energy, not
to make the choice for us.
Saturn
teaches that no one can make choices for us. Ultimately the response we
come up with must be as unique to us as our own natal chart, symbol of
our soul's decision to incarnate into this particular place and into this
particular time.
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