Dec 2012
The Finger of God

Here we are, at last, at the end of 2012: the end of world as we know it.

I am joking. Sort of. I do think that if we play our cards right, we have a chance to make this the end of many aspects of the world, as we have known it. And to usher in a new version of the world. As we want to know it.

The Mayan cycle of thirteen baktuns was 1.8 million days long — 5,125 years — and it ends this month. Per natural law, as soon as it ends, a new cycle begins. Dec 21st, 2012 is its birthday.

Yod-Ho-Ho

An intriguing pattern in the chart of the new era is a yod, whose other name I find more evocative: a Finger of God. These configurations look like isosceles triangles, made up of a sextile flanked by two quincunxes. In the solstice chart their angles are exact to the degree, which always makes the astrological eyebrows go up.

Saturn and Pluto, which have been traveling together in a roughly sextile relationship since October, form the base of the triangle. Saturn represents the world’s old, outworn institutions and the conventional narratives of officialdom. Pluto represents the corrupt agencies of power: the aspects of our world that are dying.

Does this sound familiar? It’s the essential meaning of Pluto in Capricorn, the over-arching transit that dominates the whole Cardinal Cross period. Here it is being reiterated by the sextile in the Dec 21^st chart.

Jupiter’s position in the Yod is that of the pointing finger, through which the energy generated by Pluto and Saturn shoots up and out. The star of the show here, Jupiter is the planet of collective beliefs, the dissemination of truth, ideals and morality. Strengthening this theme is the close trine between the fiery Moon and Venus and Mercury in Sagittarius, the sign ruled by Jupiter. The fiery trine will enflame some with idealistic vision, and inspire others with religious zeal.

The highlighted Jupiter in Gemini makes the case for access to information: wide-ranging and pluralistic; its opposition to Mercury refers to a battle that can take many forms: the societal polarization between secular and religious worldviews, between empirical and intuitive thinking, between academic aridity and righteous passion.

In a remarkable bit of symmetry, the chart also features the Moon conjunct Uranus and the Sun conjunct Pluto: the two Lights are amplifying the two arms of the epochal square. Uranus, all-buzzed-up from its station a week before, is electrifying the mass mood (Moon). It is bringing the energy home, in many senses of the word.

On the level of mundane symbolism, real estate and domestic issues are highlighted. On the level of group psychology, many of us will feel an emotional and somatic sense of urgency. Some will feel the impulse to channel revolutionary change. Others will just feel very impatient and very angry (Aries).

Moon, Mars and the Nodes

The square between the Moon and Pluto in the Dec 21^st chart implies that strong collective feelings will be focused upon all things Plutonian. At the forefront of these is oil. Ours is the era that will see this highly prized black goop running out, necessitating a complete transformation of the way the world is run (details in my lecture).

The lunar nodes in the solstice chart repeat this theme, calling attention to our defunct attitudes towards resources (south in Taurus), and contrasting them with the sharing of resources (north in Scorpio) that needs to happen if we are to survive as a planet. The sextile of Mars in Capricorn to the north node hints at harnessing practical business know-how to this end.

The chart emphatically restates the theme of the whole Uranus-Pluto period: Each of us, as individuals fully grounded in our uniqueness (Uranus), need to come together to make a new world happen, taking back the power (Pluto) of our collective destiny from the old way: that of the patriarchal hierarchies, oligarchic governments and plutocratic economies of this post-industrial age.

Leave it, Beaver

As the stakes rise on planet Earth, people who are clinging to the status quo and its dysfunctions will be adamant in their identification with anything they are familiar with, insisting that it is the sole standard of normalcy. Consider pundit Bill O’Reilly, heatedly fretting after Obama’s victory that “Ward, June and The Beaver have no place in today’s America.”

The first crazy thing about this complaint is his implication that there’s something wrong with the fact that the American family doesn’t look like it did in 1957. The second crazy thing is that Mr O’Reilly he seems to be forgetting that Leave it to Beaver was, well, not real. Bill my man, I hate to break it to you, but that was a TV show, filmed against painted backdrops on a studio lot in L.A.

Betting on Numbers

Those who feel the need to break away from all that is rotten about the Old World will feel just as heatedly that the time for change is Now. Will enough people comprise this demographic, the one following where the Finger of God is pointing?

My sense is that betting on numbers is not the most meaningful way to approach the question. Most denizens of Earth are just trying to stay alive; a billion souls on this planet live on less than $1 a day, another billion on less than $2. We are told there is a bell curve to human evolution, with a few Uranian types out front leading us towards the future; a few reactionary stragglers holding back and pushing hard against the inevitable; and the vast majority of us in the middle.

But even the bell curve model may be obsolete during extraordinary times like these. We may be barking up the wrong tree looking at quantities. Where consciousness is concerned the issue is one of quality.