Oct 2011
Seeing in the Dark
To get a bead on the energies of this month, let’s first consider its place in the solar cycle. A time of Dark Mysteries, Scorpio has a strong seasonal character. It is governed by the planet Pluto, governor of taboos and secrets.
Not only the Sun, but Venus and Mercury ingress into Scorpio in October. This will make for a potent Halloween (or Samhain [pronounced SOW-en] in Wicca): our annual celebration of the human desire to know forbidden things .
Mars will conjunct the natal Plutos of a good many baby boomers this month, as it moves from early to late Leo. For some people, the transit will worm its way into pockets of shame, or touch off power plays. For others, it will stimulate a relentless work drive. It all depends, as always, on the level of awareness we bring to bear.
The Longest Arm
To understand this month’s place in humanity as a whole, we need to look at what the Longest Arm of the Cross is up to. Right now it’s just hanging there in the sky, waiting for us to catch up to its meaning.
Uranus is heading backwards and Pluto is proceeding forward: their orb of exactitude is lengthening. This gives us a slight break from the intensity of the square, like the breathing room a laboring woman experiences in between contractions. The birthing process is still underway, and it’s further advanced than ever; but right now we are being given a few months to assimilate it.
Uranus stations direct on December 9th, after going all the way back to the inflammatory Aries Point (I have discussed elsewhere this uber-intense zodiacal degree, which was reached by Uranus the day the quake hit Japan).
Pluto, god of darkness, is in his glory. Each of us is being invited to take on unsavory material. This is especially true if your natal Pluto is being transited right now. You boomers may have it conjoined by Mars, opposed by Jupiter and/or squared by the other personal planets.
It’s about confronting dark issues in order to transform them through the light of consciousness. In our personal lives, psychologically difficult matters are nagging at us now. We are being dared to dig beneath the surface of the very things we least want to look at.
The Unspoken
On a collective level, the Pluto corner of the Cardinal Cross is calling our attention. This is about secrets hidden in plain sight. What are the key taboos of our day? What are the biggest issues given the least discussion?
I think we‘d have to say that, for Americans, a big contender for the prize is the money the nation is shoveling into the death pit of war.
To call it ironic that this much money is being spent in this particular way, when the country’s gargantuan debt is causing all hell to break loose, is an understatement. It feels insufficient to describe as counter-intuitive the fact that while entire states are going belly-up, the Pentagon budget is rising. The outrageousness of the situation is so extreme that normal logic doesn’t suffice to explain it.
But Plutonian logic does.
The clue that Pluto is afoot is the lack of discussion. The disparity that exists here between the degree of America’s financial investment in war and the paucity of public debate about it is so striking as to suggest inverse proportion.
This is a defining feature of Pluto. It is the governor of any issue that dares not speak its name.
The Dark Continent
“Do you think they’d be bombing the place if its main export was broccoli?”
— Global Exchange’s Kevin Danaher in March 2003, just before the Pentagon’s assault on Baghdad.
The latest place to make the Pentagon list is Africa, once dubbed by Westerners “The Dark Continent.” The true darkness here is that of ignorance and unconsciousness, on the part of those non-Africans who have been raping and pillaging Africa for hundreds of years.
England, France, Italy and the USA conducted more than eight thousand bombing attacks on Libya between mid-March and mid-September 2011. Were the good citizens of these countries to reflect upon the fact that Libya possesses the largest oil reserves in all of Africa, it would probably not take long for a substantial number of them to connect the dots and discern a pattern.
Oil is obviously the engine behind NATO’s involvement (discussed in detail in my column in this month’s DayKeeper Journal). But to call it “obvious” needs qualification. The geo-military role of oil is obvious only in the Plutonian sense: hidden-in-plain-sight. It is taboo for governments and their media arms to mention it. It is utterly left out of the official accounts.
My belief is that in the absence of propaganda to the contrary, everyone would see as clear as day that the Great Powers — as these NATO governments used to call themselves — have laid waste to any sovereign government unlucky enough to have the sticky black stuff beneath its soil.1
Kill the Bad Guy
But among a media-hypnotized populace, the fantasy prevails that the evilness of a given foreign leader constitutes an open invitation to swoop in and bomb his country to smithereens.
Not all evil foreign leaders, mind you. Not those of, say, Saudi Arabia, one of the most brutal oligarchies on Earth. This is a place where a king’s promise to grant women the right to vote (in three years!) is being lauded as an enormous step forward; where courts can sentence a woman caught driving a car to be publicly whipped; and where any hint of dissent is met with imprisonment, torture and execution. The reason the Great Democracies of the World don’t touch a hair on the head of this despicable regime is clear to all. We have been granted petro-privileges.
But the Let’s-kill-the-bad-guy scenario is sexier, and it has so seized the public imagination that there seems to be no brain space left over to consider anything else. Such as the implications of the fact that Libya’s “rebel fighters” have been directed by NATO’s own ground forces and commando units.
Americans like their morality neat. They like their foreign policy in no-frills, good-vs.-evil terms, just as they remember from Sunday school and children’s cartoons. It is a story line designed to streamline complex ideas for ingestion by juveniles. In its simplicity, it presumes the absence of any more complicated intellectual function.
One of the most insidious features of the kill-the-bad-guy approach to warfare is that it blurs any distinction between a dictator and his populace. By limiting their focus to Gaddafi as an individual, Americans have been able to ignore the effect upon Libya’s citizenry of all those US Tomahawks and nuclear submarines.
What else do we miss, by framing the military assault upon Libya as a noble, tyrant-eliminating crusade?
We blind ourselves to the lessons of history. With all the emphasis on Gaddafi’s wickedness, geopolitical context goes out the window. The citizens of the NATO countries – after all, it is we who are financing the slaughter — are prevented from seeing the campaign as one more example of straight-up colonialism (see former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney’s video).
This assault on Libya is just the latest salvo in what was once called “the scramble for Africa,” a series of invasions perpetrated by the same Western powers. Indeed, Gaddafi rose to power 42 years ago on the wave of the Libyan people’s backlash against Italian domination.
X-Ray Vision
It could be argued that the very reason for the darkness of this era on Earth is to force truth-seekers to learn to see in the dark. Many souls are meeting these transits’ challenge right now; piercing through the ambient noise of cultural corruption and social nonsense with a bold (Uranus) X-ray vision (Pluto).
We do so by asking questions. Such as, in this case: From what set of assumptions does the notion derive that because Muammar Gaddafi is bad, destroying the country he rules must be good? It derives from our enslavement to a dualistic worldview. We’ll be discussing this further in next month’s Skywatch.
As to whether such assumptions have been proven valid by global events, we need only remember that this Libya story uses the same argument that was deployed by the same cabal eight years ago. Remember when all objections to the US bombing of Bagdad were countered by the non-sequitur about Saddam Hussein being a torturing brute?
We might further ask ourselves: Does a familiarity with military history suggest that war is a good idea, or that warmongers are friends of the human race?
By asking common-sense questions, it is possible to stay engaged yet unscathed by the violence and mendacity of these intense times; even to be inspired by them. It is possible to use the perversions of mass thinking as a grindstone, against which to hone our own independent thinking sharper than it has ever been.
It is possible to see clearly, whether or not the Sun is out.
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Notes:
1 An article in the 8/22 New York Times Business section made no bones about it: “”Colonel Qaddafi proved to be a problematic partner for the international oil companies, frequently raising fees and taxes and making other demands. A new government with close ties to NATO may be an easier partner for Western nations to deal with.”