Jun 2010
Making Transits Your Own
For seven years, the chart for this month’s Full Moon has been tacked up my bulletin board. The paper is now curling at the edges. The ink is faded from the Sun.
What’s happening on June 26th is not just any full Moon; it’s a Lunar Eclipse. (My lecture series on the 2012 years begins with this eclipse; see announcement in right-hand column).
And it isn’t just any eclipse: it’s the world’s formal debut into what astrologers are calling the Cardinal Climax. Its chart features a tight Grand Cross made up of no less than seven planets. We’ll have Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Pluto in a T-square; with the Cancer Sun supplying the final vertex. The reason predictive astrologers are watching this chart like a hawk is that the extreme tension in such patterns is often associated with dramatic outer-world events.
But humanistic astrologers see things somewhat differently. We don’t see transits as operating by cause and effect. It isn’t as if the eclipse will cause this or that to happen. It just describes the great themes afoot, telling us what time it is. Moreover, it’s not particularly empowering to sit around waiting to react. In order to learn from this or any other transit, why wait to see what the group mind will cook up by way of illustration? We don’t need the news in order to engage with the eclipse.
Tale Told by an Idiot
Then there is the fact that the mainstream news is highly unreliable as an indicator of significance. The commercial subtexts and outright falsehoods streaming into people’s living rooms day in and day out make most of what’s shown on television more mind control than teaching tool. Though the American mass media, especially, displays a diabolical psychological genius, and a state-of-the-art aesthetic sophistication as far as the promotion of consumer goods is concerned, artistically and intellectually we would have to consider it an embarrassment and a failure.
It is true that if we carefully decode the welter of distorted reporting, we may find clues in the media with which to parse transits. But on its own terms TV and radio are worse than worthless as interpreters of meaning. Those who want to connect with cosmic messages must maintain a skeptical distance from our society’s lowest-common-denominator savants, the talking heads.
What TV tells us is going on in the world is a far cry from “the way it is,” as Walter Cronkite used to say. Consider the way stories are prioritized on US TV. It’s not as if the crisis of the Euro had nothing to do with Americans because they don’t hear as much about it as they hear about the juvenile infighting of their own two political parties. It’s not as if the slaughter in Central Asia isn’t happening1. On May 28th the US death toll in Afghanistan reached the grim figure of 1,000, but you’d never have known it from my big-city newspaper, whose front page reported a local sports event. Most insidiously, it’s not as if the USA, a country where special interests pay for votes in Congress, and where candidates for high office have to be millionaires or billionaires to pay for their campaigns,2 deserves to be called a democracy just because the pundits, the government and the schools use the word.
It is time to engage, deeply and authentically, with the era we have incarnated into, and that means telling the truth to ourselves. Some of us may do so by aligning with path-showing teachers, by joining groups that speak truth to power while providing safety-in-numbers, or by choosing allies wisely. We can all do so by seeking out reliable information. When we access clean data and stay connected to the moment, we attract the truth. We draw to us exactly the right people and opportunities to help us make sense of our unique role, and perform it boldly.
The Big Four
The way to tune into the energies of this month’s Eclipse is to feel them in the belly. The pattern‘s lunar emphasis suggests that the current economic and political climate in which we’ve been stewing lately will be felt on a direct, emotional level by all who are not shut down.
In order to fully make this transit your own, look at the houses in your chart where the four cardinal points fall: zero degrees of Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn. Notice whether any planets or angles fall on or near them. These placements in your natal wheel represent the crossroads you’re standing at.
For the world at large, these four vertices represent the lessons humanity is being taught right now:
–The Jupiter-Uranus conjunction (June 8th 2010 – January 2011) expresses cardinal fire; the energy we feel, for example, in rousing street demonstrations that speak truth to power.
— Pluto in Capricorn expresses cardinal earth, cool and mercilessly realistic. It is telling us Eliminate the corruption in your monetary systems or they will fall apart like a house of cards. It is saying Either save this planet or you will not survive.
— Saturn (regulation, contraction), having retrograded back into Virgo for the first iteration of the Cardinal Cross, will re-enter Libra on July 21st. This is cardinal air, so the lesson is that we take the responsibility to review our moral and social laws; such as governmental limits on industry.
— The summer Cancer transits will express cardinal water, the most emotional of the four. For those open to it, it will feel like a reminder that neglecting our planetary home amounts to a kind of planetary matricide .
Do you keep a journal or write in your calendar? Pay attention to what happens for you at the Eclipse on June 26th, internally and externally. If you do rituals, ask for a message about your place in the world moment. If you have your chart read, ask your astrologer to describe your life purpose.
Difficult to Ignore
These transits are hell-bent on change, and the world’s dying institutions will not withstand their assault. Issues that have been heating up already will demand to be acknowledged: global debt (of which Greece, Portugal. Italy, Ireland and Spain; much of Asia; and all of Africa, are bellwethers), resource depletion and systems collapse.
For those who are receptive to what’s trying to happen, the stale bromides of conventional wisdom will chafe. The little lies of everyday life will feel unbearable. Platitudes will vex us, like toxic food in the belly that wants to be purged. The injustices and corruptions of the world will be increasingly difficult to ignore.
Uranus in Aries
The conjunction in early June of Uranus and Jupiter, fresh from their ingress into Aries, makes this corner of the Cross the most palpable of the four right now. It should put the spark of rebellion into all of us; and our goal should be to express this as mature, self-aware rebellion. Certainly we will find no lack of things to rebel against. This energy is often unconscious; and we have good reason to make it conscious this month because Jupiter’s presence will amplify it.
Regardless of what transits are happening, each of us has a lifelong relationship with Uranus, which feels like a champing-at-the-bit urgency. Your natural way of channeling it is indicated by the planet’s placement in your natal chart.
Every seven years, Uranus’ electric urgency takes on a new set of issues; and natives born under its aegis break away from whatever that sign represents. En masse, a generation is consigned to buck the trend in that particular way.
For those of us born under Uranus in Cancer (1949-56), it was our parents’ version of domesticity that felt unbearable: we couldn’t get away from it fast enough. For the Uranus-in-Leo generation who came along next (1955-56 to 1961-62), it was about repudiating old forms of creativity: new forms had to be invented that looked like nothing what had come before. As for you Uranus-in-Virgo people, you know who are you are: you find conventional attitudes towards work and health intolerable; and goddess bless you for it.
In those charts where Uranus is natally pronounced, there is an explosive urge to repudiate complacency. Now that Uranus has moved into Aries, the first sign of the zodiac, we’re going to have a crop of babies whose defiance will be pumped into full-speed-ahead action. And for those of us already full-grown, these skies are bestowing – and demanding – that we actively rebel from the inauthentic.
Everyone a Risk-Taker
We are moving into a period when we’ll need to know ourselves exceptionally well; as high-risk athletes, cliff climbers and stock car drivers do. We’ll need to know our limits because we’ll be driven to push them further.
Most of us won’t play out these energies physically. Like tournament chess players and suicide hot-line staffers, the high stakes may be psychological. If we are artists, our risks may take aesthetic or conceptual form. Like Bjork, who has Uranus is on the Midheaven to the degree.3
It’s never been more important to live through your chart. There are revelations to be had.
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Notes:
1 A report from 2009 estimates that over the past three years the War in Afghanistan – or, more accurately, the war in Pakistan – has been responsible for the deaths of 700 civilians and 14 “suspected terrorists”. That’s about fifty of the former for every one of the latter. One would think that more Americans, still reeling from the trauma of 9/11, would see their government’s current murder spree of Muslim innocents as highly dangerous to themselves; in that it could not help but fuel anti-American rage among Islamicists worldwide. With barely any pundits of national stature connecting the dots in this way, we have to ask ourselves how much use the corporate media is as an aid to understanding.
2 Influence-peddling has always existed. But in America, which wins the prize for taking the lobby system to the most dysfunctional extreme, the grotesque cost of political campaigns, and the disparity between these sums of money and those being emptied out of the government agencies that serve the public in everyday ways, has brought a new level of surrealism to what is dubiously called “the democratic process.” It is not unusual for US elected officials to spend several days each working week trolling for dollars to pay for TV spots. Without funding from big financial interests, no campaign could be waged. This is a plutocratic, not a democratic, scenario.
3 Born November 21, 1965, 7:50 AM, Reykjavik, Iceland