November 2009
The Empire Strikes Out

Okay, now things are really getting exciting. The Cardinal Cross period has passed another milestone.

Saturn has entered Libra, the sign of its exaltation. Throughout November it is within two degrees of an exact square to Pluto, the planet of death and rebirth. And because Saturn is the ruler of Capricorn – the sign Pluto is in — the energy between these two dark gods has an especially ambivalent and intense quality. Meanwhile, Uranus, still in opposition to Saturn, is inching its way closer to an exact square with Pluto. The symbolism contained within this pattern is so complex, and the issues so pressing, that the best interpretative approach might be to isolate the levels (e.g. material, psychological, esoteric) and consider them one at a time.

On the material level, the question asked by this transit is: How will the world handle its wealth, energy¹ and power?

The square between the Great Awakener (Uranus) and the planet of Breakdown (Pluto) will be exact seven times between 2012 and 2015. This tells us that its various lessons are being taught in careful stages.

We will get nothing we cannot handle.

Wealth

Over the next few years, the issue of right use of resources will be topic number one. Battles over supplies and valuables are nothing new, of course, in the annals of human experience. But has become obvious over the past several years², the denizens of Earth have reached a tipping point in the ecological arena. in order to underscore the fact that we, the peoples of the world, are all in the same boat, the Grand Cross will use our mismanagement of global resources as a teaching tool.

Many seers and prescient economists saw the financial crisis coming years ago, and are now predicting that the coming years will further concentrate global resources in the hands of a smaller and smaller elite. Certainly we can see this image in the astrological symbolism: the tiny little planet of powerful, amoral cartels (Pluto) is moving into direct confrontation with the planet associated with

ordinary people (Uranus).

Those astrologers who consider the future to be mutable – decided at every moment by the imagination and will of aware individuals – see such a scenario as one possibility among many. But it is the scenario towards which our current levels of collective numbness and panic lead.

The critical point here is that denial will no longer be possible, even for the wealthy. Meanwhile, the denial in which many of the non-wealthy are shrouding themselves is at least as poisonous.

In the developed nations, the most dangerous threat to change is not unscrupulous leaders. It is the forces of ignorance and stasis in the masses, whose materialist worldview keeps them imprisoned in fear. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin: “If the country fails it will be because of the corruption of the people.”

Consider the anti-Obama forces whose hysterical accusations of “socialism” have all but taken over the national conversation in the USA. Although these folks seem to be getting their ideas from the ravings of corporate-sponsored radio and TV pundits, Messrs. Beck and Limbaugh find fertile ground in the paranoia and reactivity of their audiences. It is these good citizens who are holding hostage the forces of reform. They represent the Saturn pole (status quo) of the Saturn-Uranus Opposition, as they cling to the tenets of an economic model that is being exposed as ludicrously fraudulent by an avalanche of evidence that grows more damning with every month that passes.

While corporate kleptocrats continue to rake in sky-high profits against the backdrop of rising unemployment, foreclosures, de-funded social services and homelessness, the false promises of “free enterprise” maintain their grip on a surprisingly large chunk of the American imagination. These self-styled patriots seem to view any challenge to capitalism as a threat to the millions of dollars they believe they have a shot at making, someday. The “American Dream” may be corrupt to the bone and falling apart at the seams, but it’s their Dream; and they’ll fight tooth and nail anybody who says otherwise.

Quantum Leap

Yet there is cause for celebration in the fact that the problems humanity faces are becoming quite unmistakable, and are being discussed with increasingly creative energy. It is dawning on more and more people that, in our role as stewards of the Earth, the human race has been oblivious for several millennia.³ The population experts would say that the reason we’ve gotten away with our cluelessness for as long as we have is that the global population was of a manageable size; but it no longer is. We can no longer sustain ourselves at a level of awareness this low.

So what is the conscious person’s response to the perils of economic meltdown, climate change and the global systems collapse associated with peak oil?

People who read analyses like this one will have heard many times that a quantum leap of awareness is the only thing that will save humanity’s sorry ass. In the spiritual view, this leap is the whole point. If the cosmos can be said to have an intention, it is that humanity’s current perils will break our resistance to the great paradigm shift that must take place.

This month, with Saturn fresh into Libra, would be a good time to let this theory – which has perhaps sounded rather remote, until now — become more real. How would our own personal thinking about life be changed, were we to let this idea sink into our minds and hearts? For a start, it’d make us more able to accept, without fear or value judgment (Saturn in Libra) the collapse of rotten cultural structures (Pluto in Capricorn). Even when we don’t know what would replace them.

Imperialism

Against the backdrop of these assembling energies, it is more important than ever for us to keep track of our leaders’ military and political decisions (and not just those reported in the mass media , which are as likely as not to be smokescreens for the truly significant ones). Pluto in Capricorn is isolating the various forms of patriarchal power for us to look at good and hard. The various toxic expressions of Father Right that have held the world in thrall for centuries will wax extreme before they finally crumble away.

This includes the type of geopolitical arrogance that motivates big, greedy nations to move in and occupy other sovereign nations. Old-fashioned imperialism is coming under the spotlight.

People see intra-national bullying differently than they once did. Over the years, notions of individual rights and national sovereignty have come into being. The world has gotten smaller, communication has gotten easier, and enlightened ideas about the behavior of governments have opened up to question previously taken-for-granted notions like colonialism, expansionism and manifest destiny.

Founding Fathers

The last time Pluto was in Capricorn was from 1762 to 1779. To consider the difference between its previous tenure in this sign and its current one, let’s use as an example what was going on in the USA. This was the era when America’s revered forefathers were rebelling from the craggy old despots back in England.

In retrospect we can see that the new Americans were expressing in a nascent form some of the understandings that are now becoming available in a more sophisticated, post-millennial form.

Pluto had not yet had its first Return in the USA chart when the Founding Fathers (Capricorn) conceived their analyses about freedom and oppression. It’s a good bet that these bright, bold lads were quite oblivious to the fact that their incursions into indigenous American territory would be judged as atrocities by later generations. I think we may assume that in the minds of men like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, there was no comparison at all between their own tyranny over aboriginal and enslaved peoples, and King George’s tyranny over themselves.

So it is noteworthy that the treatment these early patriots meted out to the native tribes and to the Africans who worked their plantations is seen by much of modern humanity in a very different light than it was seen by18^th-Century thinkers. Despite the fact that it is still in practice, the principle of might-makes-right is no longer unquestioned.

This shift of viewpoint can be understood in terms of the Pluto cycle. The planet of power is once again in the sign of political maneuvering, having made its way through almost the entire zodiac, back to where it was in 1776 (it will reach exactitude in 2022). The kind of power-mongering that was the accepted standard the last time Pluto was in Capricorn has a new meaning now.

Geopolitical perspectives have a life span just as everything else does. Racism, though still alive and well, has been given a name; the first step in the devolution of a cultural assumption. The divine right of kings, once de rigueur, is now moribund. Imperialism will join these in the Capricorn graveyard of obsolete constructs. We can see it happening. The moral and financial credibility of the latest world empire, the USA, is crumbling by the week.

But as we know, human evolution is no walk in the park. The agencies that have benefited from these decaying ideas will not go gently into that good night. The battle between dying cultural models (Pluto) and their emergent replacements will register explosively on the world’s radar (Uranus) during the years ahead.

What Next?

As Pluto kills off the old Capricorn frameworks, we may well wonder what will take their place. If imperialism bites the dust, how will the world define national power?

Economist Barry Buzan has this to say: “The strength of states is primarily measured by their resilience, not by the number of fighter-planes or tanks. Many weak or failing states have strong military forces, and in the case of Pakistan. even nuclear weapons. The strength of internal repression, and the use of torture, are increasingly the mark of weak or failing states such as Egypt, Iraq, Algeria, and Pakistan. The outcry over the apparently routine and widespread use of torture by the United States may be ultimately based on the unspoken understanding that the USA is undermining the legitimacy of its existence … acting like a weakened power.”(“People, States and Fear, An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era”, Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead, 1991 (2^nd Edition).

It is not as if any one of us, alone, is responsible for coming up with the future; but collectively, our thoughts do make a difference. Many of us are all too aware of how we don’t want global power to express itself; and here is where we must use our imaginative energy with care. If we believe that reality is created afresh at every moment, it follows that the contents of our minds and hearts must be managed responsibly. Even as we acknowledge all these dystopian visions as potential realities, we must observe them from a distance. Otherwise fear may induce us to inadvertently pump energy into places we don’t want it to go.

By contrast, fear gets crowded out of the picture when we approach the future creatively, with a sense of excitement and a trust in Natural Law. This implies a trust that the new structures will arise organically from the old, like green sprouts pushing up through the ashes of a forest fire.

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Notes:

As the climate crisis deepens, energy theorists and conservation experts will have to be careful not to work against each other. For example, consider the poorly-thought-out enthusiasm for bio-fuel. Once thought to be a panacea, in the main it is turning out to be a water-guzzling and forest-destroying nightmare.

It was under the Saturn-Neptune Opposition (2004-7)that the idea of climate catastrophe broke through mass denial in the educated world and became part of the collective consciousness.

This writer believes that it was not always so. Before the notion of social hierarchy became dominant, about five thousand years ago, humanity lived in relative peace and equality. This pre-historical phase of the group soul’s development had to be outgrown, per the mysterious laws of evolution; but trace memories of it can be inferred from references, in legends and myths worldwide, to a long-lost Golden Age. .