Astrologers are looking at the chart of the Virginia Tech shootings for hints about the mind and motivations of Cho Seung-hui, America’s latest Troubled Young Man (With a Gun). A dread new cultural archetype, the TYM(WAG) is a desperately attention-worthy sign of the times. We have come a long way from the 1950s’ Man in the Grey Flannel Suit.
But the chart does not tell us just about Cho. It tells us about the season we are living through. The two transits which dominated the chart of April 17th were both just shy of reaching exactitude: Mars exactly conjoined Uranus a week later; its impact extends through early May. The Saturn – Neptune opposition is getting ready for its final exactitude at the end of June, and on May 24th it reaches a peak of another kind when Neptune makes a direct station.
In each case, the full significance of the aspect was timed to go off not coincident with but following the mid-April shootings; a beat or two after the smoke had cleared and the shock had worn off. On both an individual and a collective level, we have been given several weeks to sort out the pieces before the meaning of the episode comes together.1
Massacres at Home and Abroad
Cho’s guns were still warm when the news machine took over. The saturation coverage of the shootings was itself endlessly remarked upon in the new meta-media, wherein the industry reflects upon its own workings in real time2.
Many pundits mentioned the fact that there had been an unusual number of killings in Iraq that day as well — killings to which Americans typically remain relatively oblivious, even as they tend to devour this closer-to-home type of massacre with voyeuristic intensity. The irony was not lost on commentators from all over the political spectrum: that of a nation dropping to its knees in outsized mourning for these local college kids, while hundreds of miles away in distant deserts thousands upon thousands of innocent deaths provoke, by comparison, barely a sniffle.
In the wake of what happened at Virginia Tech, if we look back over George W. Bush’s collection of faux-rationales for going to war, one in particular jumps into view: the one about us having to stamp out “terrorists” in Iraq so they don’t follow us home. That warning was intended, of course, to evoke in the collective American mind no more than a vague childhood terror of the bogeyman comin’ to getcha. But as so often happens with W’s utterances, a perverse kind of truth-out-of-the-mouths-of-babes can be inferred from his words. 3 Inadvertently, Bush was referring to something very real: the “terrorists” have followed us home. Only they didn’t come from Iraq. They are ours — America’s — as much as the purple mountain majesties and amber waves of grain.
Saturn-Neptune Opposition
The Saturn-Neptune opposition that has been brewing for a couple of years now reached one of its several peaks the week of the campus murders4. This opposition dominated the chart of the event, providing the American public with one of a series of stunning clashes between cultural reality (Saturn) and unreality (Neptune).
The young killer, a child of the media age, seems to have precisely anticipated the dark spectacle his spree would become in the public imagination. He cannily negotiated the fine line between his acts (Saturn) and their televised aftermath (Neptune), and forced us to do so, too.
Ever since the transit moved into place, “reality” and its various media replications have been engaged in a strange dance of mutual mirroring. Popular entertainments such as “reality shows” represent our society’s attempts to explore the threshold between the real and the fake – a distinction that used to seem quite a bit clearer than it does now. In the literary arena we have bestselling authors who turn out to have made stuff up when writing their memoires (as the transit peaked, a movie came out with the apposite title The Hoax). Films featuring ever-more-realistic CGI, especially popular among those of Cho’s age demographic, further express the public’s obsession with the interplay between reality and fantasy.
In a society that buys its children electronic toys featuring mass-murdering pixels, how were people to react to the hideously telegenic crime in Virginia?
Distinctions Blurred
As discussed in last month’s Skywatch, Saturn-Neptune is about blurring easy categories. Who was this Cho, this supervillain-wannabe kid (clearly the bad guy)? And who was this “America” that sustained the attack (presumably, the good guys)?
Simple answers to standard questions are impossible under Saturn and Neptune aspects; as many idealistic citizens soon realized who had hoped the crisis would stimulate a national epiphany about gun control. (Without missing a beat, the NRA crowd came back with the argument that, far from being an augury of too many guns in our society, Cho’s rampage proved only that we have too few.) As reporters mined the story for more details, counter-intuitive subplots arose, confounding a public hungry for simple explanations. Those proponents of national border fences who looked to the crisis to vindicate their anti-immigrant wrath were quickly subdued by the facts, as it turned out that a surprising number of the young casualties had been immigrants like Cho. Surprising, that is, only to those who haven’t been paying attention to the reality of modern multi-racial America.
The tragic sociological rainbow represented by the Virginia Tech dead exposed a deep rift in America’s self-image: a divide between what America imagines itself to look like (Neptune) and what it really does look like (Saturn). One more collective fantasy bit the dust: the 1950s stereotype of campuses populated by white middle-class youth. As the reports came in, the public saw that a remarkable proportion of the shooter’s victims fit the category into which the xenophobes would have liked to put Cho alone: foreigners, i.e. the Other. The last nail in the coffin of this stereotype was hammered in when the story came out about one of the victims in particular: the Holocaust survivor who’d died shielding his students with his body. Not the kind of guy the America-firsters could easily vilify.
With Neptune confusing the meaning of seemingly straightforward scenarios, attaching blame is slipperier than usual. Explanations don’t quite satisfy, and it is hard to identify any one crusade rising from the chaos. Those observers of the tragedy who are casting around for a single causative factor are failing – which is, from Neptune’s perspective, exactly the point.
Mars and Uranus in Pisces
Those reading this column doubtless share with the writer the metaphysical presumption that nothing is an accident. Nor do humanistic astrologers see events such as the Virginia Tech massacre as having meaning only in terms of the personality of the individuals involved, despite the tendency of broadcast psychologists to jump in at this point and try to explicate the trigger-man’s personal problems. Events that seize the public imagination with this degree of intensity always have multiple meanings, on micro and macro levels.
The Jungian view is to see a figure like Cho as a fated projection of the group mind. People who “lose their Suns,”5 the way this Troubled Young Man lost his, lose their capacity to identify with the life force: this is “losing it” as far as “it “ can be lost. They become subsumed by the darker forces in their environment. Some become mythic figures – like Marilyn Monroe did, or Martin Luther King, or Sadam Hussein– no longer singular individuals, but a personified composite of the fantasies and demons of their society. There is a kind of collusion here between the person’s own karma and what Jung called the collective unconscious. When that merger is complete, the person is typecast to act out the collective’s darkest nightmares.
In this sense, Cho was a scapegoat: an archetype associated with Pisces, the sign in which Mars are Uranus are currently conjoined. Not a scapegoat in the vernacular sense of the term — a wronged victim (though that is how he saw himself) – but in the original sense: an individual chosen for expiatory sacrifice, who ritually embodies the group’s unexpressed terrors and evils. In ancient cultures, when the scapegoat was banished or destroyed, the tribe was purged of its toxins.
But was this purge accomplished by what Cho did? When enacted without awareness, the profile of the scapegoat veers towards its unconscious meaning: the terrible loser, the rejected sociopath who personifies the homicidal loneliness that is epidemic in a highly competitive, emotionally disengaged society. Because the USA lacks any consensual structures of understanding to frame mass events in this light – there are no shamans to officiate over expiations, no collective understanding of the principles involved, and no conscious agreement about the illness of the group in the first place –we cannot be surprised when mass enlightenment fails to ensue.
Yet it is an axiom of metaphysical law that all learning is in the observation. Those who find big-picture meaning in such events not only derive but supply consciousness to them.
Unconscious Uranus-Mars
The Mars-Uranus conjunction is associated with social upheaval (at its most extreme, armed revolution), as well as with sudden flare-ups within existing social movements. When we combine the bellicosity of Mars with the abrupt intensity of Uranus, we get rebellions within groups both small and large — “surges”, in the new parlance. These can take the form of suddenly inspired political convictions as well as crazily intensified violence.
Mars governs guns; Uranus governs explosions. The conjunction this Spring has once again thrown the subject of firearms into live debate. Assault weapons are now everywhere in this society. As new types are manufactured, they usually start out in the hands of the police, the military and the subcontracted “security” forces; then they find their way into the hands of The People. Given these legitimized provenances, it is no wonder that the preposterous over-availability of American weaponry fails to register as such. Gun customers are the same citizens whose taxes go to buy bunker buster bombs, helicopters that fire thousands of rounds a minute, and – providing the biggest bang of them all — nuclear weapons. It is an astounding but little discussed statistic that the USA’s arsenal exceeds that of all of the other nations’ in the world combined. This country produces, sells and employs not just more guns and bombs, but so many more that it puts our weaponry in a category by itself.
One cannot help but find it a tad disingenuous for civic leaders to be all shocked and appalled by the mayhem of a gunman like Cho in a society where the average little kid sees thousands of murders on television before he reaches puberty, and where the government, the movie heroes and the cop at the city high school are armed to the teeth as a matter of course.
Expressing the Transits Consciously
As always, the consciousness of the group – or the individual – determines the particular expression a transit will take. In a person of awareness, Pisces transits in general inspire spiritual cleansing grounded in feelings of profound empathy; and when Mars is involved, the desire is there to act them out. There is a strong yearning to surrender, but rather than surrendering in the way Cho did, through militaristic fantasy, the Pisces transit can be expressed in spiritually informed, immensely creative ways. The scapegoat then becomes a transcendental altruist, donating her singular identity to some larger whole. In its undistorted expression, Pisces inspires the kind of self-loss that “loses” nothing but the ego, while finding the true Self.
In a backhanded way and at a terrible cost, Cho’s massacre was finally quite successful in stimulating Piscean compassion. International observers watching the USA go through yet another paroxysm of grotesque, headline-stealing violence could only shake their heads with pity and dismay over this blood-soaked nation. Americans themselves were forced to stop in their tracks and consider the profound reality of human grief and suffering.
This is a reality that eludes far too many of us when it concerns grief and suffering on foreign soil. But these transits ushered it across our country’s borders, where it found its way into millions upon millions of hearts. The planets will do whatever they have to do to drive their point home.
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Notes:
1 The chart of Cho’s mayhem features the Sun, Moon, Mercury et al in Aries, the sign associated with the god of war. Especially telling, as Eric Francis has pointed out, is that Mars was conjunct Pallas — the asteroid of planning and strategy. This combined Mars’ capacity for violence with the symbol of calculated, systematic thinking, suggesting that Cho’s was not a crime-of-passion in the legal sense, of I-suddenly-got-very-emotional-and-majorly-lost-it. But if we consider the full meaning of the sign Mars and Uranus were in — Pisces — we may find ourselves seeing what he did as a crime of passion in the psycho-spiritual sense.
The closest lunar aspect was the exact conjunction with Ceres at the moment of the first shooting. Ceres is the symbol of mothering, whose dark side involves the mourning of heart-wrenching personal loss. In the Greek myth, Demeter, a Ceres-like mother goddess, was inconsolable after her young daughter was abducted by Hades (Pluto). Right now the parents of Virgina Tech are mourning their dead young with this same energy. A timeless human experience has been enacted.
The Venus/Mars square (which peaked on 4/23) triggered by the Moon’s passage glances at the tensions inherent in engaging with other people, which in the case of the young killer went beyond post-adolescent awkwardness into full-fledged misanthropy and explosive (Uranus) paranoia (Pisces).
2 The shootings were as much about the media as they were about Cho. Recall the Pluto-Sun square at the Exquinox in the third house (telecommunications).
3 Bush’s Sun is in the twelfth house of the unconscious mind. Like a ventriloquist’s dummy, he exists in a state of unfocused vacancy; channeling what he has been told to say or what he imagines he is supposed to say, rather than being animated from a moral core (not to be confused with twelfth houses that function with awareness).
4 Saturn stationed on 4/19, intensifying for a few days the three-year-long transit; and Neptune stations May 25th. The opposition’s last peak will be June 25th.
5 I discuss these principles in detail in my book, Soul-Sick Nation. See also The Madness of George Bush (Paul Levy, Authorhouse 2006) for a brilliant examination of the concept of collective projection.
