The red planet has been throwing its weight around like a bully on the school bus. As we have seen, Mars set the tone for the whole season when it set off the Uranus-Pluto square at the Equinox. It is to Mars that astrologers are chalking up the hue and cry over weaponry in the USA.

Bullies

Martial in both form and content, the culture war between gun lovers and gun-control advocates has stimulated a much-needed national discussion. So far, the chief revelation is about the nature of the NRA, which is being exposed as a group of bullies.

The opponents in this battle: the US citizenry on one side and the gun lobby on the other. Despite the legislative defeat in mid-April, it is clear that popular opinion is on the side of restrictions. Polls show that the majority of the populace favors closing the gun show loophole, and reinstating the ban on assault weapons and on high-capacity magazines.

Li’l Guns

So how is it that the gun lobby triumphed? Where did they get the money to prevail over the lion’s share of the American population? Granted, a highly spirited defense has been mounted lately from backwoods survivalists and would-be home-defenders. But these consumers are not the source of the gun lobby’s power.

We often hear NRA boosters rhapsodizing about their bloody rites in forest and duck pond. My suspicion is that hardly any of the voices extolling deer-killing-as-male-bonding actually hunt for their dinner. My guess is that these are the guys who trundle out to the woods every year, decked to the gills in expensive paramilitary gear, to slaughter harmless creatures for fun.

But the hunting argument is mostly PR image-making anyway. In fact, the use of guns for any kind of hunting is tiny to the point of statistically negligible, and getting more so. The hunter demographic — overwhelmingly white, male, Southern and elderly — is dying off; a fact of which the gun makers are painfully aware.  Which is why they’re targeting women now, as well as, astonishingly, children. Big Tobacco used this same advertising strategy in the 1950s and early ’60s, which earned them a black mark of infamy in popular opinion.

On April 30th, with Mars opposed to Saturn in the sky, a 5-year-old boy killed his 2-year-old sister in Kentucky, with his very own weapon. He’d gotten it for his birthday, from a company that also makes pink ones, for girls.

Big Guns

So though the yahoos have big guns, they’re not the Big Guns in this fight. That role is played by the global arms traders: the shadow reality looming behind the gun debate, to which remarkably scant attention has been paid. Certainly the US media won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. As gun narratives go, this one’s not as sexy as the culture-war angle. It’s just the familiar old corporate-overlords-undermining-the-democratic-process angle.

Weapons makers are the subject of Bob Dylan’s scathing masterpiece from 1963, “Masters of War”. But the public conversation seems to have gone mum about them ever since, despite the fact that their profits dwarf those of industries that attract far more attention (these profits will exceed $100 billion in the next four years, according to Amnesty International estimates.) Even from those social critics who excoriate every other source of ill-gotten gains, we don’t hear Big Armaments mentioned very often. Though it’s hard to imagine gains more ill-gotten than this.

United Nations

That’s why what happened in early April was so significant. As the Sun, Venus, Mars and Uranus were ramming their way through Aries (Mars’s ruling sign), the United Nations overwhelmingly approved the first international treaty regulating the worldwide trafficking in armaments. As the final vote was taken, the chamber erupted in cheers.

Only three countries voted against it: Iran, North Korea and Syria. Uncle Sam, the world’s biggest arms manufacturer and exporter by such a wide margin that no other country even comes close, voted yes. But whether or not the treaty gets ratified depends on what transpires with the domestic gun debate.

Strange Bedfellows

In a sense it is not surprising that the NRA has come out against the UN vote. Disagreeing with the treaty’s prohibition against exporting weapons used for genocide, the gun club finds that it cannot, in good conscience, say no to the right of war criminals to arm themselves.

In another sense, the NRA’s position is more than surprising: it is downright bizarre. In voting against the treaty, they have thrown their hats in with a handful of countries that, in any other context, would elicit from them a double-barreled fusillade of jingoistic condemnation. North Korea and Iran are, after all, at the very top of Uncle Sam’s Bad Guys List.

Mars seems to be saying: Behold the brothers-under-the-skin.
 

Note:

The post Masters of War appeared first on MotherSky.

There are four ingresses into Gemini this month — thrilling news to lovers of mental engagement. With five planets in the sign of communication, the skies favor word-clever dialogues and back-and-forth exchanges.

At the Full Moon eclipse on May 24^th, the Sun in Gemini (discussion) will be opposing the Moon in Sagittarius (teaching). This polarity encourages us to talk back to the teacher, whoever our teacher happens to be. It’s question time: a time to be philosophically curious; to step back and look at our lives – and the world at large – from the big picture. And there will be a lot to see…

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The post May 2013 Preview
Stay on Your Toes appeared first on MotherSky.

At this writing bomb squads in Boston are searching house-to-house, and citizens are being told to stay inside. I don’t know if the authorities there are calling it martial law, but astrologically that’s what this is.

The professional warriors are out full force on city streets, weapons drawn. The ersatz warriors of the NRA, in living rooms across the country, are cheering on their senators as the latest attempt at gun control submits to defeat. On Wednesday the 17th, the day the vote was cast, Mars and the Sun were conjunct to the minute of arc.

Spring Chart

Transit trackers were well aware that Mars (warriors, armaments) would be a major player this spring. Its signature was stamped on the chart of the Equinox, triggering the square between Uranus (explosions) and Pluto (destruction), discussed last month in Arms of Fire.

By mid-April the Sun and Mars had moved into conjunction. As this week began Mercury had just ingressed into Aries, the sign Mars rules (for background on the ignition effect of the Aries Point, see my lecture).

Security

TV viewers are now watching swat-team-like personnel (are they police? soldiers? special-ops? The lines between these categories seem to have blurred since I was a kid, back when the going stereotype was a friendly Irish flatfoot, like the cop in Make Way for Ducklings), being deployed round the clock, with what look like small missile defense systems hanging off their belts. I don’t know what they’re being paid, but they are making quite a showing for a country so broke that entire towns are going bankrupt.

With their space-suit-like uniforms and their cutting-edge technology, these fellows are part of a brave new world of soldiery collectively known as “security” forces. But when I see a squadron of them swarming out of a tank or helicopter, “secure” is not the word that  comes to mind.

Terror

The fact that little is known yet about the Boston bombers – except that one has probably been killed – is not keeping news programmers from playing over and over again whatever random factoids and video clips they have at their disposal.

There is something more going on here than is conveyed by the good-guys-vs.-bad-guys narrative. It revolves around the concept of terror, as opposed to “terror”. The first usage denotes the straight-up human feeling. The second usage, in quotation marks to distance ourselves from buying into it, is a propaganda concept. It was designed to serve both a policy-making function, e.g. justifying torture and extrajudicial assassination, and a psychological function: to foment fear.

Terrorism is a relatively new coinage, but its root and driving juice are as old as time. In Greek mythology, Deimos (terror) was a son of Ares (i.e. Mars, the war god). Astronomers have given his name to one of Mars’s moons.

The modern picture of terror is a bomber’s rucksack full of sudden death, designed not just to destroy people, but to make those who survive afraid. The second part succeeds especially well these days because of echo-chamber media reportage, which exaggerates and dramatizes the fear, spreading it for miles beyond its point of origin. The original violence thus generates echoes of itself, far and wide, like the aural concentric circles of an air raid siren.

Neptune was setting on the Western horizon when the first marathon bomb went off (April 15^th, 2:49 pm EDT). This put the planet of free-floating anxiety, fantasies and paranoia exactly on the Descendant.

A sentence from Dune, remembered from the 7th grade, has been coming back to me this week: “Fear is the mind-killer.”

Neptune

Neptune is about the irrational workings of the human mind, which in its low-level expression takes leave of fact and dives head-first into illusion without knowing it has done so. When un-integrated, it makes us ideal hypnotic subjects.

Consider the endlessly repeated videos of those planes hitting the towers on 9/11, inducing in stunned viewers a sense of the trauma being reenacted again and again, a re-stabbing of the open wound. It should not surprise us that, thus psychologically primed, many Americans fully expected that highjacked airplanes would thereafter be a regular occurrence. Little wonder that so many of us submitted immediately and pliantly to rules we’d have judged preposterous before — like taking off our shoes in a crowded line at the airport — and to legal and military monstrosities to which our intelligence and sense of decency would never otherwise have consented, like The “Patriot” Act and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

There are better ways to use the image-making capacity of the mind (Neptune), and better ways to use the ferocious courage of Mars. Where will we invest our energy in the weeks ahead?

The post Martial Law appeared first on MotherSky.

And what about humans in groups? Why do religious and secular authorities declare certain ideas taboo? ² If they are misusing Pluto, they proscribe certain ideas to protect other ideas. The reality they are protecting– the official story about how the world works — is the one that maintains their power. (Their worldly power, that is. Not their true power.)

For example, a few thousand years ago when the sky-god religions started to take over as the dominant global cosmology, the old truths ³ went underground. They became taboo. For a while there, any mention of Mother Earth got you burned at the stake (discussed in this essay). If you were a surviving devotee of the earlier, animistic worldview and you wanted to keep practicing your beliefs, you convened in secret, at great risk.

This is one reason why the concept of the occult (“hidden”) has been sending shivers down Christian spines for centuries. Among the populace, ignorance about and fear of the pagan worldview developed quite deliberately,  enforced by church fathers who, themselves, had only the vaguest and most distorted notions about what was going on in those alchemists’ laboratories, and in those midnight rites in the forest glen.

Censorship

Censorship is ad hoc taboo-making. I thought about this recently when I heard that TED, the high-end conference venue that hosts speakers like Bill Clinton, had shut down Graham Hancock’s YouTube video.

Hancock is a British journalist and visionary in the Terrence McKenna mold. His bowdlerized lecture was about the psychotropic vine ayahuasca, traditionally used in the Amazon jungle as a conduit to experience the spirit of planet Earth. His studies have found that, all over the world, people who partake of the plant as a spiritual exercise experience similar visions: that of an Earth goddess who presents herself in order to bring a new state of consciousness into the world.

The honchos at TED, whose branding slogan is “Ideas Worth Spreading,” declared Hancock’s material “unscientific.” Clearly a more apt tagline for these guys would be “Ideas that Fit the Dominant Paradigm”. It is worth noting, in this context, that Big Pharma is one of their sponsors.

In mid-March, when the video was pulled, the square between Pluto (taboo) and Uranus (technology) was being triggered by Mars (war). And are you ready for the name of the banned lecture? “The War on Consciousness.”

Hancock makes the case that modern industrial society allows us only one kind of consciousness: the left-brain kind. He points out that we’re allowed momentary respites from it, via alcohol, sugar, pharmaceuticals, etc.; but if we try psychedelics we can be sent to jail.

He draws a parallel between the government’s criminalization of ayahuasca and the unspeakable destruction being visited upon the Amazon jungle by profiteers trying to turn it into soybean farms to feed cattle to serve the hamburger industry. He reminds us that throughout history, the thought police have targeted any belief system that sanctified the Earth.

Not a Right

Another expression of the square between Pluto (mind control) and Uranus (the internet) reappeared in recent weeks. Bradley Manning, the young soldier who is now a prisoner of the US government for leaking military secrets to WikiLeaks, was back in court for another pretrial hearing. On the New Moon of April 10^th, just before the Pluto station, it was decreed that media access to this hearing was “a privilege, not a right.”

The Pentagon’s judge was playing the role of Pluto in dominance/ submission mode. The punishment of truth-tellers like Manning and the silencing of visionaries like Hancock fall along the same continuum as the extermination by papal decree of worshipers of the Divine Feminine.

But it won’t work. No matter how ruthless its machinations, a human agency can’t close off the entryway to the cave of wisdom. The Church’s declarations of anathema, the government’s efforts to stifle the truth about wars of conquest, even the heartbreaking ravishing of the Amazon jungle are, in the long view, temporary gestures. They must fail in the end.

Cosmic law, like the root of a hacked-down vine, runs too deep to be vanquished.

Notes

1 The word forbidden is perceived as a dare by our inner adolescent, who rebels against being told we can’t have something; and the ego is titillated when it feels naughty — per the sexy exhortation “Forbid yourself nothing.” We are so busy gleefully reacting to proscription that we usually miss the deeper significance of Plutonian taboo.

2 The original sense of this Polynesian word is sacred. Its modern connotation of danger is linked to its etymological meaning as a warning against sacrilege. Like a temple within which it feels disrespectful to speak aloud, certain mysteries are so sublime that they need to be shrouded in silence, or coded, to protect non-initiates from misconstruing them.

3 That is, paganism. But we must qualify the term, because the Church of Rome has appended it with diabolical connotations. All it means is “country ways.” It was in the rural areas, where life was lived cheek to jowl with Nature, that the ancient worship of the devas, sprites and the Great Mother was hardest to stamp out.

The post Taboo appeared first on MotherSky.

All Cardinal turning points (Equinoxes and Solstices) are paradigmatic: their transits set the template for the season to come. These martial placements are giving us the measure of the themes that will be in our faces this Spring. During early April the Sun, Venus, Mars and Uranus continue ramming their way through Aries, heating up the atmosphere with head-first force.

This force has courage in it. Our goal should be to put it where it can do some good.

Such as walking down the basement stairs to visit the ghosts.

Pluto Station

April’s transits are a light switched on in a dark cellar, inviting us to look at unconscious contents we’ve hidden away. Whether or not we want to see this shadow material is another question. But if our goal is to be rid of psychological toxins, we won’t let our squeamishness deter us.

Pluto made a retrograde station on April 12^th. It’s as if the planet were slowing down just for us, so we can get a good, long look at it. Where does 11½ Capricorn fall in your natal chart? Pay attention to this zone of the wheel. Its house position and the aspects to this degree tell you where in your life power plays will show themselves. In all senses of the word power: worldly power, psychological power, spiritual power.

For a couple of weeks on either side of the station, situations in decay will be identified as such. Like a diseased organ, they need to be eliminated if the greater organism is to thrive. We might imagine ourselves as a patient going under the knife. In this picture, Pluto is the expert surgeon; the transit is the needle-thin beam of light exposing the rot that must be removed. Unlike the patient in my analogy, however, we definitely want to stay conscious. And we needn’t experience pain.

To this end, a ritual is always a good idea. Let us light a candle this month at the altar of renewal. The intention here is to step aside and let Pluto eliminate what needs to go. We are making a solemn promise to release it willingly.

Eclipse with Saturn

Mercury activates the Pluto-Uranus square on April 20-21 and will keep the energies simmering as we lead up to the Full Moon on April 25^th. An Eclipse, this Full Moon is in Scorpio and conjunct Saturn. Those uncomfortable energies festering below the surface are our guides. They’re pointing out where purging needs to happen.

The beauty of transits like this is that there’s nowhere to hide. In our relationships, incipient manipulative impulses may come to a head. At work, stealth dealings become apparent. In our dream life, we may get echoes of a theme that goes back many years; maybe it feels lifetimes old.  This is why the feelings it provokes are so troubling, and seem so ineradicable.

Spiritual Will

But they aren’t ineradicable; they just feel that way. Most of us have become adept at stuffing the emotions associated with this material. We identify with our conscious lives and we dis-identify with what’s in the basement.

The station and eclipse are opportunities to confront, with courage, the energies down below. Then we let Good Doctor Pluto dig out that shrapnel lodged in our heart. It doesn’t have to take years of psychotherapy; indeed, intellectual analysis alone won’t crack this nut. The Saturn-in-Scorpio years (last October through 2015) support hard-core inner work. With a canny use of these windows of opportunity, we can resolve even the most entrenched  wounds.

But it takes no small degree of focus. It takes focusing our spiritual will.

Mass Mind

On the collective level, the disruptive energy that arose at the Equinox is prickling in the air. It is provoking long-term global issues, themes we have been referring to collectively as the Cardinal Cross. Mars, in Aries until April 21,^st is intensifying them.¹

Mars is not known for being creatively modeled in the societal sphere. One of its low-level manifestations is impulsive, testosterone-fueled violence. The US public has had a good look at this energy in recent months. In addition to triggering an outpouring of empathetic grief  — a gift of Neptune in Pisces – a spate of high-profile shootings in middle-class settings have brought the public conversation to a boil.

The rampage in Newtown Connecticut, a week before the fated solstice of December 2012, dealt a decisive blow to America’s numbed complacency about the violence in our society. This time, the victims were little children.

Gun Debate

As with Richard III’s alleged murder of the princes in the tower,² it was the slaughter of sweet-faced children that made Americans perceive this particular rampage as qualitatively more unspeakable than all the others. For our Cancer nation (family, parenthood), these murders were not just tragic but blasphemous (US Sun/Jupiter/Venus): the crime was one of innocence violated (Uranus-Pluto). It took Newtown to give the gun debate traction.

The public discussion features many voices. Reactions have been chaotic and crazy, heartfelt and considered. Mike Huckabee, for one, hypothesized that Newtown was caused by atheism. The spokesman for Tea Party Nation blamed sexual stimulation in the media. The NRA proposed posting armed guards in every school.³

Last July, on the day the mathematician’s son⁴ shot up that movie theater in Colorado, the NRA’s online magazine had posted: “Good morning, shooters! Happy Friday.”

But the NRA has not been issuing cheery tweets lately. Like a weather vane on the roof, their fierce, nervous defensiveness represents a shift in the wind.

Notes

1 On July 19^th 2012, a few hours before the Aurora shootings, transiting Mars in Libra had hit the degree of the Uranus-Pluto square, forming an exact T-square.

2 I think Henry VII did it. See The Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey (Davies, 1951)

3 A call to arms that, by mid-March, had inspired policymakers in several states (including Texas, of course) to propose legislation.

4 When the Aurora rampage was first being blogged about, it looked like we might be seeing an exposé of the financial industry far more consequential than that of 2008. It was reported that the murderer’s father happened to be one of the handful of experts who knew the code to crack the LIBOR scandal; he was scheduled to testify about it when the massacre occurred. But this extraordinary bit of information disappeared from the news without a trace.

The post Apr 2013
Courage Under Fire appeared first on MotherSky.

Arms of fire. Once, they were called fire sticks by the astonished natives who found themselves at the business end of the muzzle.

As Spring dawns upon the USA, martial havoc is all over the news. Although drone murders have been happening for years (see February’s blog), only now are they part of the American public conversation. As are gun murders on the part of private citizens.

A lot of people are wondering when it was that firearms became so ubiquitous in American culture. These days guns are in the streets, in the garage, on TV and in the movies. There are guns in cartoons and comic books. There are lots and lots of guns in video games. A member of Oakland’s ultra-violent Nutcases gang confessed that he and his bros used Grand Theft Auto as a model.

Mars’s spotlight is widening to include interconnections between social themes. Such as the relationship between guns and drugs. Both kinds of drugs: street and ‘scrip. As to the former, the phrase “a drug deal gone bad” has become a tragically predictable tagline of crime reporting.

As to the latter, the first thing that comes to mind when we hear about the latest mass shooting is, “What was he on?” (In the mug shots below, just look at these guys’ eyes). Soon after the Newtown shootings in December, a YouTube video came out called “I am Adam Lanza’s Doctor,” in which a psychiatrist excoriated pediatric psycho-pharmacology. She persuasively blasts shrinks who medicate children and young adults instead of listening to them. And as Mars (violence) conjoined Neptune in Pisces (drugs) in early February, out came “Side Effects”, the first Hollywood thriller to use Big Pharma as a backdrop.

Domestic violence, too, is on the radar in a new way. It takes a mass shooting to grab the headlines in the USA, but the overwhelming majority of gun murders are committed by someone the victim knows. In 2011, 565 children were killed by guns, according to the FBI. No serial killers here, no random strangers. Something more disturbing still: family. This is the dark underbelly of the sign Cancer (the domestic sphere), which will become increasingly visible over the next two years, as transiting Pluto’s opposition to the US Sun moves into exactitude.

If firearms made for a safer country, the USA would be the safest in the world. But per capita gun murders here are about twenty times the average of other industrialized countries. If guns are around, they’ll get used. It cannot surprise anyone that the states with the worst gun control, including Alaska, Louisiana and Montana, have the highest rates of deaths by gunfire. If you’re packing, you’re more than four times as likely to be shot during an assault than if you aren’t.

The gun debate, while polarized, is splitting the usual factions. The Second Amendment argument is being espoused not just by libertarians and Republicans but by some leftists as well, whose distrust of  officialdom makes it anathema to think of the government being armed when the citizenry is not. To which progressive journalist Tim Redmund responds: “When the black helicopters arrive to round us up, your handgun ain’t gonna help.”

The NRA argues that burglars avoid the houses of gun owners, but the evidence suggests the opposite. Increasingly, guns are a hot item to steal, and the trend is to break into cops’ cars and houses to get them. Inevitably, those hideous exploding-bullet guns — the ones police chiefs insist should be allowed, but for cops only — will end up on the street if they are allowed at all.

This is prompting some of us to ask: Why do the cops need these, anyway? Why use flesh-ripping, high-tech military guns, that insure a death? For that matter, why does the military need them?

Why are these monstrous concoctions even in existence?

At some point along humanity’s evolutionary arc, these questions have to be asked. The cultural eruptions which prompt them are signs of the times. Transits tell us when it is time for collective consciousness to ripen in a certain area, at which point events occur like a milkweed pod bursting open. Those seeds scatter and land somewhere. Sooner or later they sprout.

The post Arms of Fire appeared first on MotherSky.

Sunken Treasure

All year we are being asked to reconsider the importance of water, as a physical substance – that stuff that covers 70% of our planet — and as an energy: the universal matrix whence all life springs.

There is no escaping water, the most mysterious of the four elements. It connects and unites everything we can see and everything we cannot see.

Treasure Islands

This month the Pisces corner of the water triad¹ is peaking. In early March, our innermost selves are marinating in imagination. Neptune, Mars, Mercury, Venus and the Sun will be spreading a thin mist of feeling over ourselves and our surroundings. To take full advantage of this dreamy time is to surrender to spiritual and artistic musings, accepting and enjoying the nature of illusion.

In the external realm, the geopolitics of water look to be big this year. As astrologer Austin Coppock reminds us, oil speculators are setting their sites on the Pacific Ocean, which is starting to look far more attractive to them than the war-torn Middle East.

Consider the renewed hubbub over the Falkland islands. Thirty years after the British-Argentine war, as politicians from both sides once again blather on about sovereignty and government, the true motives behind the conflict are revealed by the news that fossil fuel reserves have been discovered offshore.²

And Not a Drop to Drink

At this stage of the human awareness curve, our most obvious water crisis is the scarcity of H2O in an unpolluted form.

It’s an issue every living thing can identify with, since we have all experienced thirst. And even the privileged can at least imagine what it would be like to not have enough water to keep clean. Even so, water scarcity gets nowhere near the press that its enormous impact warrants; and it is doubtless because it impacts the global poor disproportionately.

This is going to change. No crisis is more urgent in the world today than the availability of clean water. Soon it will be deemed the most precious commodity on Earth.

Stewardship 

This is the year to get sensitized: to contemplate humanity’s guardianship of the Earth’s waterways. Not since the BP rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico, two days before Earth Day 2010,³ have the portents of marine disaster been as acute as they are now.

It is being brought home to us that the healing of Gaia cannot wait. Every time we turn around, we hear of a new scientific report saying, in so many words, “Oh wow, it turns out Antarctica is melting a lot quicker than we thought” (New York Times, Dec 23, 2012); or “Oh dear, actually soot is three times more damaging to the atmosphere than we said in our last study” (New York Times, Jan 15, 2013).

More and more people understand, at least conceptually, that a massive clean-up must be begun, and that it is a time-sensitive undertaking. But being a recalcitrant species, we humans tend not to rouse ourselves until an issue is in our faces.

This year it will be in our faces. This is good news, because otherwise we would tend not to think about it. Water, the subtlest of the four elements, is the least welcoming of analysis.

The Choking Dragon

It is gratifying to environmentalists that so much attention has recently been given to the suffocating smog enveloping Beijing; to the point of embarrassing the Chinese government into responding with uncharacteristic transparency. Transparency is more than you could say for the air itself. (When the news about China’s record-breaking smog went global in February, Mars in Aquarius [sort of a cosmic pun, isn't it: Aquarius is fixed {unmoving} air = smog] was opposite China’s natal conjunction of Mars and Pluto [pollution].)

But the fouling of the air is more obvious than that of water. Of the four elements, water’s energies are the hardest to see. They are hard to see in the figurative sense; in that intuitions, feelings, dreams and psychic hunches are so inscrutable that many people dismiss their importance — even deny their existence.  They are hard to see in the literal sense, too. Water pollution usually escapes the naked eye.

The most outrageous global offender in terms of water pollution is, once again, China; as it stumbles all over itself at breakneck speed, trying to out-capitalize the capitalists. Global researcher expert Maud Barlow suggests that 80% of China’s rivers are so thoroughly fouled as to be unrecoverable.

Nature bats last, but She may have to start over from scratch where China’s waterways are concerned.

Water Visibility

The acidification of the oceans, too, is likely to make inroads this year on the collective mind.  Another consequence of fossil fuels, acidification has gotten much less attention than has global warming.⁴ But the transits of 2013 may push it onto the public’s radar.

Another aspect of worldwide water use is the staggering amount of water employed in industry and agriculture. The reason this issue is so seldom discussed may be because it’s too complex to be communicated in a sound bite. Guzzling water for everything from generating power to lubricating machinery, industry accounts for an astonishing 88% of water consumption worldwide. Big Oil alone — already criminal because of what happens to the environments in which it is drilled and shipped — uses a billion gallons a day in the refining process.

It was eye-opening for me to learn, from Charty Durant, former fashion editor for British Vogue,⁵ that the fashion industry is one of the most water-intensive industries on the planet.

Diving In without Drowning

As individuals, how might we approach these water teachings? These transits want us to learn how to honor water both in form and content. Accessing the information is the content part. Letting the information in is the form part. To get it, we must feel it.

People with a lot of water in their natal charts are used to this meta dilemma. We are not only getting hip to what’s happening to the waters of Earth, but being invited to deepen our understanding about the process by which such knowledge comes to us.

The challenge here is not merely to inform ourselves about the issues. It is to consider them while keeping our hearts open. Daring to absorb what is happening in our world requires the courage to dive into the feeling realm — in both personal and transpersonal ways.

The former is symbolized by the personal planet transits. The latter is symbolized by Neptune in Pisces.

Jupiter in Gemini

It is human to want to shut down to pain, and it is not inappropriate to experience this information as painful. All the same, these transits are daring us to feel, fully, without shutting down.

It is no walk in the park. A certain stress should be expected, between the part of ourselves that knows things intellectually and the part that knows them intuitively. This stress is symbolized in March by the square between Jupiter in Gemini — which represents the knowledge that comes from information — and the Sun, Mercury and Venus in Pisces — which represent the knowing that comes from deep within.⁶

All squares are a challenge from the two signs in question. We are being dared to accept both energies at once. In letting ourselves feel both, and deny neither, we integrate them; and we grow. In the case of this mutable square, we are waking up to the genius of Water (some call it emotional intelligence, though it is at least as psychic as it is emotional), in the process of which we become more intelligent.

Notes

1 Cancer is cardinal water, Scorpio is fixed water, Pisces is mutable water.

2  A deal is being struck between an American company with links to the Pentagon and the UK company Rockhopper, which made the discovery. If these enormously valuable reserves come within the 200-nautical-mile area surrounding the islands, Argentine President Cristina Kirchner will claim them for Argentina.

3 Which famously took place the very day Chiron ingressed into Pisces (grief, universality), which is conjunct Neptune (water) in the explosion chart.

4 Water acidification is a result of the 80 million tons of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere daily, from not just the burning of fossil fuels but also from deforestation and the production of cement. Since the industrial revolution began, about one third of the CO₂ released in the atmosphere by anthropogenic (human-caused) activities has been absorbed by the world’s oceans.

5  See her article on fashion, The Tyranny of Trends.“The fashion industry mirrors back to us in myriad ways all things Neptunian,” she has said,” including deceit.”

6 In February Jupiter squared Mercury, Mars and Neptune.

The post Mar 2013
Blue Gold appeared first on MotherSky.

In its current manifestation, the evil monkey archetype does not wear a fetching little fez. It has no face at all. The drones are utterly impersonal. And they have been flying under the radar in more ways than one.

But they are inching their way into American discourse; notably since Mars (warfare) crossed the Moon (the public) of the US (Sibly) chart, ingressed into Pisces and then met up with Chiron (wounds) while T-squaring the US Uranus (democratic impulses)/ horizon axis between late January and mid-February.

Until now, Obama’s authority to commit unaccountable, extrajudicial assassination has been backed up by a mysterious legality no one could inspect or confirm, because it was classified. (Never mind that the White House had no qualms about declassifying the memos about Bush’s torture policies. That atrocity belonged to the last guy.) Then Mars started poking and prodding around, and now we’re hearing on the news about the official policy that justifies the drones. Drafted by federal lawyers, it spells out the protocol, such as it is, for Obama’s “kill list”. It’s now official: The human targets get no due process, no court trial, no even charges. And the program has virtually no oversight.

How is this situation to be judged? By what moral compass do we assess it? The astrological answer lies with Jupiter (law, ethics), a planet whose domain is both societal and personal. With our entry into the Age of Jupiter, we have left behind the planet’s purely passive expression. We are being challenged to take individual responsibility for what we believe; the work of cobbling together an ethical foundation belongs to each one of us (see January’s Skywatch). That finger of god in the epoch-defining solstice chart suggests that cultivating a sense of morality is part of the work of becoming human.

Time was, when your prophet, shaman or priest came up with the answers for you. They told you what was right and what was wrong. These days, many of us are still trying to get off the hook, by adopting the party line of one or another political affiliation. There are Americans who, although they consider themselves anti-war, accepted with a shrug Obama’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan, because, well, he’s our man: he’s on the right team and he said the right things.

As long as we keep allowing the ruling duopoly to frame the narrative for us, it’s enough that Candidate X is superior to Candidate Y. It’s enough to hear humanitarian-sounding promises in well-cadenced speeches, such as in Obama’s Inaugural Address when he claimed to be against “perpetual war”.

This, from the guy who initiated, on our watch, undeclared wars in Pakistan, Yeman, Somalia and Libya.

These are countries where the sky can spit a missile at you while you’re having a picnic. The total number of air strikes Obama has collectively green lighted, according to investigative journalist David Sirota, is twenty thousand. One in five people who die in these strikes is said to be a civilian.

But we know that estimate is low, because of a shrewd linguistic trick Obama’s men have retained from the folks who invaded Iraq: that of counting all military-age males in a strike zone as “combatants.” An oddly quaint word, in this repurposing it serves to green light the murder of all young males because they could, theoretically, be enemies.¹

Many Obama supporters also seem to be swayed by that fatuous all-purpose apologia, “national security.” If so, they are ignoring what studies by this very administration have conclusively found: that there is a predictable blowback effect whereby the drone strikes result in “heightened anger towards the USA and sympathy with al Qaeda among local populations.”

Duh, right? Surely any thinking person would come to the same conclusion without a formal study. If we were living through our charts, we would get there with Mercurial common sense, which is the basis for Jupiterian moral sense.We were each born under those planets; they reside somewhere in every one of our charts. We don’t need church dogma or political rhetoric to know right from wrong. We knew, when we were mere babes, that filling the sky with evil things was terribly wrong.

Notes

1 It entered the political lexicon around the same time as those comic-book coinages dreamed up by some Pentagon branding genius for the invasions of Iraq: “Desert Storm” and “Operation Iraqi Liberation,” (which of course had to be scrapped when somebody realized that its acronym, OIL, gave the game away).

2 Per a new analysis by the Council on Foreign Relations citing the concurrent increase in drone strikes and “terrorists” in Yemen.

• Janeen

February 16, 2013 at 11:53 AM

This is so stressful to read and know! I want to be glad that Obama is in (barring a God-forbid mishap) for the next four years. Now I will have to mention the fraudulent civilian death count and the whole shameful business instead of simply pressing “like” on his facebook postings. Thanks for your unwaivering stand for moral justice against seemingly impossible odds. As technology evolves sadly life gets ever more complicated! Can you imagine if Lincoln had had to deal with the possibility of drones on top of all the other horrors of that war! And how can any administration think that the technology being used now won’t someday be turned on Americans having picnics?

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