Saturn’s entry into Virgo, an ingress that happens once every thirty years, took place under skies that were shimmering with significance. It happened a few days before the New Moon, also in Virgo, on Sept 11th; and this was a New Moon with a vengeance: not only was it a Solar Eclipse, but it took place on a date that has become iconic in the collective imagination. Moreover, it occurred during a Grand Cross in mutable signs.

It was a celestial sonata beginning with a cymbal crash.

Eclipses signify themes that endure for several months. Saturn’s ingress into a new sign signifies themes that extend for two and a half years. And Grand Crosses are the most stressful planetary formations in astrology. When cycles like these coincide, as they did here, the events that accompany the transit have the potent symbolic resonance of an augury. Their immediate literal meaning is dwarfed by the long-term patterns they set in motion. Whatever happened in your life during the several days surrounding 9/11/07 was just the tip of an iceberg.

In America’s collective life, the Virgo Eclipse signaled the beginning of a couple of years that could, if sufficient group consciousness were brought to bear, expose to the light far more about the circumstances around Sept 11, 2001 than most Americans have been willing to even imagine.¹

The period immediately surrounding the eclipse was rife with omens spelled out in worldly terms. The Petraeus Report, much-hyped by the media as a significant piece of news but understood by everyone who has not been living under a rock for the past four years to be just another official whitewash, arrived right on time.² The following Saturday, five hundred thousand peace activists amassed in Washington DC, and at the head of the march was a contingent of war-rejecting military families and soldiers in full uniform. This stunning visual made a poignant new statement about the depth and breadth of national antipathy to the occupation of Iraq. The contrast between peace-craving people and sabre-rattling governments was further exemplified a few days later by the new French president, who started making Washington-ingratiating noises about war with Iran.

This same period saw Jimmy Carter and Alan Greenspan both declaring publicly what no American establishment figure has dared to say out loud for four years: that the invasion of Iraq was about securing control of the oil fields.³

The Eclipse also brought us the tragicomic fall of Senator Craig, and he was not the only one caught with his pants down. In the financial sector, many were blown away by the not-terribly-surprising news that property loans come with a piper to pay after all. The housing bubble burst on Wall Street (Uranus opposed to the Sun and Moon at the Eclipse) while in England long lines formed outside banks as nervous citizen investors saw the writing on the wall.

As astrologers our job is to connect the dots between these events, not merely to react to the  “endless succession of short-term controversies”⁴ that the media cooks up to alternatively scandalize and entertain us. Discerning the patterns behind these and other news stories allows us to understand energy shifts that signify far more than the isolated episodes themselves.

The months ahead have much to teach meaning-seekers.

To keep our footing amidst the instability of the outer environment, it is always a good idea to go back to the natal chart and reconnoiter with those signs that are getting particular emphasis. Wherever Virgo and Pisces fall around the wheel of your birth chart, whether they are represented by planets or not, indicates what these signs mean to us as individuals and how our soul would have us use them. In last month’sSkywatch we discussed the woefully under-used esoteric side of Pisces, whose genius Uranus is giving us a chance to glimpse during its seven-year tenure through the sign.

Uranus is being pelted with transits right now, like a seed pod pecked by birds to release its nourishing contents. Jupiter’s last square to Uranus this cycle was on October 9^th.  And now that Saturn has moved into Virgo, the sign opposite Pisces, the pressure to define this most elusive sign of the zodiac may lead us to drop the fishy old stereotype of pathos and bathos once and for all.

All stereotypes do violence to our use of astrology. The counterpoint between Uranus and Saturn, which will wax and wane during the next couple of years,⁵ will give us a chance to better understand both of the two fluttering, fluctuating signs they occupy.

Opposition creates friction, as we know; but it also creates attraction. And if we follow where it is leading us, on a consciousness level, it can bring revelation. In human terms, we may have learned from antagonistic personal relationships that once we drop our ego attachment, suddenly we see similarities with our opponent that in retrospect seem embarrassingly obvious.

Opposite signs, too, have compelling features in common. Both Pisces and Virgo are signs of service. Pisces is at home when it is offering up its subtle emotional and psychic energies to some sort of whole that is bigger than itself. Virgo is in its element when it is offering up tangible skills in practical ways. Neither sign is about pleasure and gratification in their conventional senses. Neither is motivated by ego-aggrandizement.

In Western culture, the idea of donating one’s skills, money or time, is considered a little weird. Who in their right mind would want to do something without getting anything in return? ⁶ One of the blinkered snobberies of First World cultures is that which equates the whole concept of service with inferiority; the underpayment of our service professionals being a case in point.

Even our psychologists, trained as they are to define a “healthy ego” as one that is crisply definite and self-promoting, may unknowingly disparage the essential impulses of both these signs. In modern industrialized societies, Virgo and Pisces just don’t fit the profile of “Most Likely to Succeed.” This is not because they are incapable but because the notions of success in our time and place tend to be limited and superficial.

Each of the twelve signs possesses its own unique definition of success. If we ignore what our individual chart says about what success means and try instead to mimic consensual standards, we sabotage our life purpose. In the case of these two signs, to realize this is to commit oneself to the idea of devotional service (Pisces) and efforts carefully expended (Virgo).

The irony is that when Virgo and Pisces do tap into their soul-motivated urges and yearnings, it is then that they succeed in outer-world terms as well. We are rewarded both externally and internally when we live through our charts.

For the past couple of years, Saturn has been in Leo, where its job was to critique the excesses of all things Leonine. The absurdities of pop celebrity culture were inescapable during this period. As Jon Stewart et al pointed out, our faux-self-reflective meta-media spent at least as much time chastising itself for caring about Paris and Lindsay and Nicole as it spent reporting their banal shenanigans.

On a personal level, Leo has to do with our sense of being the star of our own life. Saturn’s transit through Leo forced us to cut back on whatever creative and romantic exuberances (see July’s Skywatch) we had been indulging in that had been getting out of hand. Saturn’s job is always to curtail the excesses of the sign it’s in: it is the cosmic garden trimmer who cuts back straggling shoots so that the plant as a whole can survive and flourish.

Now that Saturn has moved into Virgo, for the next couple of years it will be making more efficient the little everyday methodologies with which we order our lives. We will be paying more attention to health and work routines, to the making of lists and scheduling of appointments; to all the various ways we take care of details so as to stay grounded on the Earth plane. Since Virgo excels at organizing, sequencing and getting things done, Saturn’s purpose is nicely matched here. To understand ahead of time the point of the transit is to realize that our subjective experience does not have to be onerous. Saturn in Virgo is simply a call to get to work.

There is a dark side to Saturn in Virgo, too, of course; as there is to any placement. Readers whose natal charts feature this placement will already be familiar with the tendency for worry to take over when they lose their center.  Fussing, over-criticizing and failing to see the forest for the trees –whether it’s mental or behavioral — are indications that Saturn-in-Virgo’s penchant for discrimination has gone too far and needs to be reined in.

On a collective level, the current public attention to health care reform should explode during this two-and-a-half-year transit. Moreover, Virgo, as the governor of efficiency and hygiene, will keep the pressure on to clean up the environment. Trends towards sensible nutrition, such as the banning of junk food in school vending machines and the movements towards slow-food and local, sustainable agriculture also fit the symbolism. It is easy to imagine how Virgo’s core impulses could serve ecological awareness, which is right now at a tipping point in the mass mind.

This modest Earth sign bestows a sense of sobriety, and, at its most elegant, a genuine humility. An extreme version of Virgo is the ascetic monk, who does without worldly niceties — not out of loss or  deprivation but as a deliberate part of his soul work. Now, there’s an image to send a shudder down any red-blooded American’s spine! But the abstinence and renunciation associated with this picture of Virgo are anachronisms. Realistically speaking, there is no danger of this transit inducing the citizens of modern capitalist societies to eat gruel dinners in hermitages.  These images are best understood as metaphors, helping us to assimilate the minimalism that is the true genius of Virgo. Saturn has entered this sign just at the point when the dangers of excess on every level are staring the world in the face.

One of the blessings we may hope for over the next couple of years is a moderation of the notorious materialism that has burgeoned among all classes in America, morphing from a cultural peccadillo into an ecocidal peril. As the effect of supersized meals on the typical American body has made clear, the public has been living in widespread denial about how much is too much. Luxury spending in the USA has been growing more than four times as fast as overall spending. The availability of relatively cheap luxury goods from overseas has created an illusion that the dollar is not falling as fast as it actually is.

The housing market shock last month was a wake-up call, begging questions about the myriad self-destructive spending patterns that afflict the financial integrity of the USA. As James Spurlock ⁷ et al have documented, credit card companies have made trillions of dollars of high-interest, unsecured debt available to the average American, to the point where living in the red has become normative. Our incomes have risen an average of 1 per cent in real terms, while our household debt has increased over 1,000 per cent.

These numbers are staggering when seen for what they are; but the most troubling thing about them is that they are seldom considered for what they are. The insidious aspect of the phenomenon is that since everyone is doing it, it fails to shock; and so far the trillions of dollars the USA is in debt, both personally and collectively, has elicited almost no impulse to forebear. In one short generation, Americans have moved from being the ant in Aesop’s fable to being the grasshopper.

This is, of course, not just an American problem. The heedless consumerism for which the USA sets the standard is now being exported to America-wannabes all over the world. With terrible irony, many up-and-coming crypto-capitalists in China are giving up their bicycles for the fanciest cars they can afford.

But luxury-for-the-sake-of-luxury is an affront to Virgo’s healthy function. Seen in this light, we have just the right sign coming around at just the right time. Saturn has reached the one sign in the zodiac to which ostentation is anathema.

For those born in the mid-sixties, this Saturn transit will be nothing less than explosive. In next month’s Skywatch we will look at the Saturn cycle in historical context, the better to get a bead on how this particular generation will be singled out for a coming-of-age that will transform not only themselves but the world.

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Notes:

1. The parallels between last month’s 9/11 chart and the one for 2001 are astounding. In the latter — the most analyzed astrological chart in recent history — much was made of the fact that Mercury was rising in New York City at the very moment the WTC was hit (for details, see my bookSoul-Sick Nation, Jessica Murray MotherSky Press 2008). At the 9/11/07 Eclipse, Mercury was in the very same position: on the Ascendant in New York. Venus, too, was within a degree of the exact same placement she had been in on that fateful day. And whereas she opposed Neptune on 9/11 last month, she was opposing Uranus on 9/11 in 2001. These strident oppositions suggest a cloud of deceit (Neptune) and a shattering of innocence (Uranus) of collective values (Venus). Astrologer Lara Owen: “ The presence of Mercury [in the Eclipse chart] suggests that some information will be revealed within the next few months that will add significantly to our understanding of what happened that day in 2001. The position of Mercury in the 2001 chart always suggested that the full story would take many years to come out”(http://planetaryenergies.net/). To get a jump on it, see http://www.911truth.org/.

2. Anyone still looking hopefully to the Democratic Party to introduce sanity into Washington’s war policy might consider the fact that Dianne Feinstein, the senior senator from what is supposedly the most “liberal” state in the nation, joined right in with the status-quo-affirming majority in voting for a resolution “strongly condemning attacks” on General P. This bogus bit of political theatre was an obvious attempt on the part of the Senate to distance itself from the MoveOn.org ad which meekly proposed that perhaps the General’s “stay the course” plan might not be the best idea.

3. The most striking thing about these seemingly taboo-shattering statements is that their big news has never been a secret in any sense of the word. This information has been literally part of the public record for seven years. In September of 2000, the ill-starred Cheney-Rumsfeld think tank openly called for an invasion of Iraq as a means of establishing a permanent foothold in the region; and Greenspan fully supported the idea from a blandly economic point of view.

4.Tom Tomorrow, San Francisco Bay Guardian.

5. The two will form a wide opposition next month when Uranus stations at 14º; by that time Saturn will be at 8º Virgo. Transits take on a special buzz when they station, so it will be around 11/24 that this tug-of-war is likely to be especially palpable for the first time.

6. Even the question contains a misguided assumption, since “getting something” is presumed to mean financial reward or obvious self-advantage. Of course Pisces and Virgo “get something” from the efforts they expend; but the gain may be neither material nor immediate.

7. See Maxed Out, Scribner 2007.