Aug 2012
Aerial View
It isn’t just you. Everyone who isn’t completely shut down is feeling it. Disruptions on the inner and outer planes are inevitable and absolutely appropriate right now. They are part of our destiny.
We are just about midway between the first and second exactitudes of the most important transit of our lifetimes: the square between Uranus, the planet of revolution, and Pluto, the planet of renewal. Their first exact hit was June 24th. The next hit is Sept 19th.
Patterns
August 2012 begins with a Full Moon: it clocks in on the first of the month at 8:28 pm PDT. Over the next few days, the atmosphere is leavened with air: Venus is in late Gemini; Mars is forming a glorious Grand Trine with the Moon in Aquarius and Jupiter in Gemini. The promise here is to cop a modicum of distance, through reason and analysis.
Conditions are just right to step a few paces back from the craziness swirling around us. Despite living in a time of global upset – which for most of us is also taking a personal shape — we are embraced right now by the cool, clear energy of air. It’s an invitation to assuage the confusion by using rational thought.
Air confers a peculiarly human capacity. It is the one element of the four (Fire, Earth, Air and Water) that distinguishes us from other sentient beings. Through air, our minds can detach from a situation in order to understand it. As when we’re up in a jet looking at the landscape below, we see patterns we can’t see when we are down on the ground.
Air trines, especially, enable us to see conceptual shapes: abstract meaning- pictures, which overlap and repeat. These include the patterns in human history. When these reiterate, we start to see themes rising up from the great sweep of time. Combined with astrological patterns, historical patterns reveal the meaning in the chaos.
Uranus and Pluto Cycle
Many astrologers have been calling attention, for example, to earlier periods that featured Uranus and Pluto in the same sign placements they are in now. When we compare what was happening in the world then and now, orderly patterns float up into view.
Pluto goes through Capricorn roughly every two and a half centuries. Pluto is the planet of power and control, and Capricorn is the sign that officiates over the material realm. So, every time this planet is in this sign, astrologers expect power struggles over territory and other valuables. During Pluto’s last tenure in Capricorn, 1762- 1777, the USA was born: the country that took the idea of control over global resources to a whole new level, and raised materialism to an art form.
Pluto’s co-star in the sky right now is Uranus (shocks and upsets) in Aries (activism, populism), a placement that repeats every 84 years. Uranus’ last tenure in this sign began in 1927 and was squaring Pluto by 1932, when the Great Depression was underway.
The financial theme here is clear. But there are even bigger cycles implied by the current transit, which is making a waxing square now, as opposed to the waning square it made in the thirties. And there are booms and busts of a non-financial nature: political, military, sociological and spiritual as well.
Solstice Hit
The current Uranus-Pluto square, which reached its first exactitude just as summer began, was accompanied by a historic election in Egypt. In keeping with the nature of the transit, this closely watched event raised more questions than it answered. The world was also rocked that week by escalations of the military catastrophe in Syria as well as the economic one in Greece, each of which edged ever closer to sucking the rest of the globe into its vortex. In the USA the politically polarizing healthcare bill reared its head again, with a Supreme Court vote switch that shocked the pants off everyone.
What other events arose under Uranus’s first square with Pluto? A group of particle physicists identified the Higgs boson, which a Vatican astronomer has heralded as illustrating “the personality” of God.1 And filmmaker Ridley Scott came out with “Prometheus” (Uranus), an action movie named after the courageous Greek hero who broke rank in order to introduce mortals to fire [advanced technology], ushering the human race into the future.
As Bill Herbst reminds us, first-quarter squares are known for being aggressive. Humanity is in the grip of a perfectly timed clash between two planetary titans. Struggle is inherent in this evolutionary phase.
The fact that there is conflict in the world right now, and friction in our personal lives, is not a sign that something is wrong. It’s a sign that we are growing.
Note:
1 The coinage “God particle” comes from Nobel-Prize winning physicist Leon Lederman, whose 1993 book was wonderfully subtitled, If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?