January 2008
Out of the Gate with a Gunshot

In my last Skywatch I wrote that the 13-year-tenure of Pluto in Sagittarius was not going to be finished with us until its fiery swan song of late December. Not only Jupiter and Pluto but the Sun and Mercury too were going to be overlapping in the sky, deepened in significance by their alignment with the Galactic Center.¹

Transit-trackers all over the world were watching this period with bated breath, knowing that it would mark the grand finale of the planet of destruction (Pluto) in the sign of crusades (Sagittarius). There was much anticipation about the several sign changes during the days around the winter Solstice, a pivotal annual crossroads for humanity. During this period Mercury and the Sun were to join Jupiter and Pluto – the Big Bang-makers – to form a multiple conjunction.

A scenario like this is like a grandfather clock, with the big guns in the sky lined up as if to form the hour hand pointing to the twelve and getting ready to strike midnight. All that was needed to complete the picture was a swiftly moving second-hand-type transit to join them.

Mars (guns and bombs), the planet more likely than any other to spark physical events, played its role as the transit’s trigger. Jupiter’s role in the configuration was to exaggerate whatever was to happen; Pluto’s to demonstrate the workings of raw power. Uranus’ opposition to Saturn ensured that the expansion would be explosive. The darkest of the many troubling realities now simmering just under the surface of mass consciousness (Pluto) were fated to expand (Jupiter) into global awareness.

How many Americans knew, for example, that their taxes have been pumped into the black hole of Pakistan’s flailing dictatorship at a rate of 150 million dollars a month for the past six years; the senseless wastefulness of which was made blatant by Thursday’s disaster?  How many have questioned why Pakistan, with its world-wide notoriety for social injustice – including the institution of gang-rape-as-proxy-punishment for young girls, accompanied by a total lack of infrastructure for reform — has been touted by Washington as, absurdly, a prime candidate for “democracy?” And how many Americans have asked themselves why Pakistan, the most notoriously unstable nuclear power in the world (the Bhutto assassination chart features Saturn exactly square Saturn in the nuclear axis chart²), has been touted as the good buddy of Uncle Sam; whereas Iran, against whom accusations of fantasy nukes have been flying for years now, has been vilified as the great enemy of global safety?

We would expect such questions to now move from the back pages of the nation’s newspapers to the front pages, for Jupiter’s functions is to push Big-Picture thinking to the fore. Thus could heretofore-denied geopolitical realities seize hold of public opinion in a new way. Jupiter governs the publicizing of whatever was obscure before. That is, such would be our expectation if Jupiter’s search-for-wider-truth were the only player in this configuration.

But Pluto, governor of that which is by definition obscure, is a player here too. Pluto is associated with clandestine machinations and secrets that may never be solved.

Wherever it appears, the Mars-Pluto opposition is associated with brutal power-mongering, and Mars’ retrograde movement in this case adds a peculiar clout to the sword-brandishing. The White House’s bellicosity towards Iran has a four-year history of peaking when Mars is transiting the birth chart of the USA.³ The fact that we are still hearing the Iran-as-Axis-of-Evil story despite the overwhelming displeasure the US populace is now expressing with the war in Iraq gives the propaganda an eerily surreal quality. The purpose of retrogradation in general is to repeat a theme in order to force us to see meaning in it that we did not see before.

Pundits are talking already about the likelihood of the Cheney White House using the Bhutto killing as an excuse to implicate Iran, and force the attack on that country that they have long been hankering for (cf. the neo-con primer, Project for a New American Century). The astrology of the assassination confirms a link to Washington: Mars’ station in mid-November conjoined the Sun in the US chart. It was around the time of this station that Washington’s recycled arguments for a military strike against Iran once again jumped above-the-fold in the headlines.

At the moment of her killing, Benazir Bhutto moved from Muslim woman /politician/ individual to mythic figure. And if we back up even further from our immediate emotional reaction in order to decode the symbols in their abstract purity, we see what was apparently a suicide-murder as a symbol of the decade-long theme of fiery ideological (Jupiter) statements being proclaimed through death (Pluto); not only for Bhutto but for the individual(s) who took her life, and that of dozens of bystanders, along with his own.

Before there is rebirth there must be an acknowledgement of breakdown. Every death (Pluto) is an entryway into a new level of consciousness. Figuratively or literally, there is no resurrection without a corpse.

On January 25th, Pluto will enter Capricorn. For astrologers it is a very big deal when Pluto enters a new sign. Transits that happen only once in two-and-a-half centuries make us sit up and take notice. When these long cycles shift it signifies that the world is turning over a major new leaf, whether the denizens of Earth are aware of it or not.  The astrologer’s job, of course, is to be aware of it.

Over the coming months Mars will continue dodging back and forth within a few degrees of the Pluto/Jupiter zone that was the signature of the explosive last few days of 2007. For those who see astrology as chance to plumb esoteric teachings, this transit will invite a deep delving into the notion of opposition (the planets’ geometrical angle means just what we would expect it to mean: it offers a study of interpersonal and geopolitical opposition). The fact that Mars is now retrograde will give us plenty of chances to study the theme, expressed all around us in different forms – some personal, some political; microcosmic and macrocosmic.

In keeping with the symbolism of Pluto being the tiny little planet that packs the biggest punch in the solar system, we are to witness how tenacity and raw power work, as in the case of a short little guy in a bar whose iron-clad desire to dominate allows him to prevail over all comers.  This is, of course, only the crudest and least conscious use of Mars-Pluto: the use of it to which the collective mind has defaulted, out of lack of understanding.

And what is the more conscious form the transit could take? What would it look like at its most sublime? Next month we will take a look at how Mars and Pluto could manifest in a different kind of power than that of 500-pound gorillas plying their will upon the less mighty.

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Notes:

1 The Galactic Center, a.k.a. the Galactic Core, is a fixed point within the Milky Way that was discovered in the 1930s — around the same time as the first sighting of Pluto. These two recent additions to the astrological pantheon are meeting up for the first time since entering into the conscious vocabulary of Earth observers.
The Galactic Core is a mysterious locus identifying the astronomical center of our celestial home; whose meaning suggests the possibility of driving down into the core of a given situation.  This echoes the symbolism of Pluto itself, the planet that compels us to penetrate beneath the surface and achieve a more profound understanding of unsavory truths. With these two united, our urge to understand secrets is exponentially amplified. And as always, the universe has given us just the right events to exercise this understanding. Thus do we interpret the cosmic intention behind the Bhutto assassination and all other events during this time period.

2  As documented in Eric Francis’ Planet Waves newsletter, the nuclear axis chart marks the birth moment of the first successful laboratory nuclear reaction. The axis highlights early-to-mid Gemini and Sagittarius.  Francis has made note of nuclear disasters occurring when transits hit this axis; in particular the square of transiting Saturn to Saturn in the nuclear axis chart during the Chernobyl catastrophe, as well as the opposition of transiting Pluto to the axis chart’s Saturn when India and Pakistan started their nuclear-test one-up-man-ship in 1998.

3 I refer here  to the Sibly chart et al which posit July 4th 1776 as the birthday of the collective entity that is the USA. My book Soul-Sick Nation: An Astrologer’s View of Americatracks this Mars-transit pattern.