Grand Slam
A few days ago a skeptical acquaintance said to me, “Well, here we are almost at the end of 2012 — the year that was supposed to be so dire!” I think she meant that, despite the prophecies she’d read about on the internet, everything was just fine. I thought, Are you kidding me?
On just about every count, 2012 has so far expressed, with cinematic color and clout, exactly the sort of cataclysms that the Uranus-Pluto square 1 had led astrologers to expect.
Everywhere in the world, economic instability, political disruption and record-breaking fires, droughts and storms have been up-ending the complacency of the inhabitants of Earth. This is Uranus at work.
Everywhere in the world, the pollution of the natural environment and the corrupt social agencies that seek to cover it up are being exposed, destabilizing the status quo and leaving no path open but that of deep-structure change. This is Pluto at work.
Global Storming
The USA, whose entry into the Cardinal Grand Slam2 is building by the month, is in the home stretch of a presidential campaign whose every aspect emits the rancid falseness of a civilization (Capricorn) in an advanced state of decay (Pluto). Characterized by a newly brazen use of outright lies, the messages hammered home by the various Capricorn figures at the podium have all been declaiming for the furtherance of an economic system based on bubbles — whose last calamitous bursting (Uranus) in 2008 seems not to have fazed in the least a segment of the Republican-voting underclass: the very voters whom it has harmed the most.
Politically and meteorologically, the summer of 2012 has expressed the Cardinal Cross to a tee. The Republican convention, which took place during a drought more extensive than any on record, occasioned a fitting bit of guerilla theater in late August under a Moon waxing to fullness in Pisces (melting, dissolution). Conventioneers in Tampa were greeted by giant blocks of melting ice that Occupy protesters had arranged to spell out the words “middle class”.
Though many Americans saw the unprecedented temperatures as a message from the gods about global warming, Congress did not get that memo. They went ahead and green lighted Big Oil to drill in Alaska. I used to think that no environmental calamity could possibly compete in awfulness with letting oil companies despoil the last remaining American wilderness. That was before I’d heard of fracking.
In August we saw jobless laborers and impoverished farmers in New York join a growing list of fracking-friendly states in a bid to sacrifice their environmental health in the name of “job creation”. About the kindest thing you can say about this logic, which would pit supposed economic necessity against a clean and functioning ecosystem, is that it represents short-term thinking in extremis. What is the cost of wages earned by poisoning the groundwater, sickening the population and turning the landscape into a dystopian dead zone?
The fracking already going on in California is supposedly a kinder, gentler sort. Its lobbyists present it as innocuous because it uses less water.
Death vs. Life Wish
But the public is starting to rouse itself. Protests against this hellish practice are popping up all over the country.
Fracking and other environmental desecrations represent a kind of death wish in the American psyche (Pluto). The function of the Grand Slam is to push to an extreme certain strains of collective darkness, in order to slap us awake (Uranus). These are the consciousness wars of the Cardinal Cross years. Some of them are taking place on the battlefield of industry vs. the environment. Some are taking place on the battlefield of the many vs. the few.
On a personal level, the combatants consist of our egoic mind vs. our spiritual perspective.
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Notes
1 The transit’s first exactitude was at the summer Solstice, its second over the Autumnal Equinox, and its third will be May 20th, 2013. My new book discusses the square in detail.
2 The transiting Uranus-Pluto square, when configured with the Sibly chart’s natal Sun-Saturn square, becomes a Grand Cross in Cardinal signs which will peak in 2014-15.