March 2008
Aggression vs. Assertion
The Mars-Pluto opposition
Before we venture into the guessing game of “What’s going to happen?,” let us consider once again the nature of cosmic laws, which are never boring; given that they are utterly consistent and, at the same time, completely inscrutable.
If one believes that the essential point of a human lifetime is to learn, and that the external world exists to provide the settings and the props for each new lesson, it is perhaps not so outlandish an idea that transits are tailor-fitted to the recipient. The cosmos will do whatever it has to do, to impart the lesson we are destined to learn at a given time. The role played by the individual soul in this scenario is to “decide” what expression the transit will take, based on our ability to imagine certain things and not others.
A shepardess in 1858 France, if she has a rendezvous with the miraculous, is very probably going to see an apparition of the Virgin Mary; maybe wearing the same type of robes as the statue in the village church in Lourdes where the little girl lives. This is the way that child would expect the vision to appear, so that’s the way it would come to her. If a Jewish intellectual living in New York in 2008 had a similar transit, the fated rendezvous would undoubtedly involve different imagery.
This is why it makes sense to put our energy into understanding the symbolism of transits, rather than into hazarding guesses about their event-packaging. If we first equip ourselves with a solid sense of the astrological meaning of a certain time period, we’re in good shape to notice how those themes express themselves in specific. In this frame of mind it is much easier to name occurrences for what they are, even alarming or unforeseen ones. To know “what time it is” astrologically is to align with what is in the air. That’s why people throughout the ages have looked to the sky to get a bead on these patterns. They want to make an amicable alliance with the transit before the bell tolls.
Thus can we can respond to the new vibration in a way that matches what we want out of life. Even when the transit assumes an unexpected form, we will be able to respond, organically and immediately, instead of blaming our spouse, the traffic, our boss, our childhood or the planets.
The fact that Mars was retrograde when it reached exactitude opposed to Pluto in January gives its teachings a perverse twist. We have seen very recently power plays like those in the air right now; we should be able to smell them coming, the way animals do.
Mars’ station in mid-November conjoined the Sun in the chart of the USA1, initiating the current retro-cycle with a set of themes directly associated with America. It was around the time of this station that Washington’s threatening rhetoric against Iran reached a new level of desperate bellicosity, as the administration’s arguments for a military strike ran into those pesky old problems with the facts (the report announcing that Iran had dismantled its nuclear arms plans in 2003).
In January’s Skywatch we looked at the Mars-Pluto opposition’s association with the crude desire to dominate. We discussed the Iran-as-Axis-of-Evil story as a function of Mars’ transits to the USA chart, which has what psychologists might diagnose as a weak ego (Mars square Neptune).
If it were not so hideously tragic the whole situation would be laughable. For over a decade, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II conducted a campaign of demonizing Saddam Hussein, claiming to be saving Iraqis from his tyranny while in fact cutting them off from clean water, food and supplies through a brutal type of economic warfare insouciantly termed “sanctions.” Now it is the president of Iran who is being demonized: Uncle Sam is claiming to want to save the people of Iran from Ahmadinejad.
The astrology of the situation could not be more pertinent. Mars begins the month of March at the same degree it occupied on January 7th, extending and repeating the USA’s Mars Return. Pointing up the meaning of the word retrograde, it was on January 7th that the dubious speedboat incident occurred in the Persian Gulf. As is now believed by most informed observers, the American shipmen who heard the garbled message that they were about to “explode” were in no danger. The crewmen themselves did not believe they were in any danger; most thought the message to be the prank of a local radio hacker known for pestering ships in the Gulf. Nonetheless, within minutes the faux-threat was played up by top Navy brass and the White House in an orgy of over-reactivity. Washington fed the story to the news media as fodder to run on the nightly news, echo-chamber-style, as part of its ongoing effort to kick up enough war fever to win a terrified US public over to the idea of attacking Iran.
What was noteworthy about this charade was not that the speedboat incident was dangerous in and of itself, but that the event it was resonant of was one of the most dangerous chicaneries in modern history: the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, the lie for which Lyndon Johnson will go down in history. That episode also featured an alleged attack on US destroyers, and successfully snookered the American public into the war in Viet Nam, in which three million Vietnamese lost their lives.
The astrological signature of this repeat performance corroborates the parallelism in alarming ways. This latest Martial dust-up got its deadly potential from Pluto, which was opposed to Mars at the time. The “Filipino Monkey” incident suggests darker forces afoot than the caprice of a mischievous local sea-hacker. This opposition is linked with shadow powers, covert agencies and manipulations from above.
Such machinations are a default mechanism, not the true purpose of the transit. They represent the ways humanity expresses Mars-Pluto out of lack of understanding.
In microcosmic parallel, if we are seeing bullying and might-makes-right struggles in our private lives, we are seeing only the crudest and least conscious use of Mars-Pluto. Is this what we want?
The highest use of Pluto-Mars combination is to model the distinction between aggressionand assertion. Right now the whole world is being given a chance to discern the difference, and given the force to act out the latter. For in its pure form Mars is not merely bold; it is courageous. The connecting thread here is consciousness. I refer here to the idea, fundamental to spiritual traditions the world over, that global peace becomes a possibility only when it is glimpsed within the minds of individual human beings.
Consider the image of the nations of the world reconsidering aggression. This is a hope so cherished by every emotionally engaged person that the very notion of it cannot help but strike the heart with profound poignancy. And that poignancy has a role to play in the transformational process.
It is a rule of thumb when working with transits as esoteric teachings that one presses into service all the layers of one’s being – the physical body, the emotional body, the mental, spiritual and etheric bodies – to reach the goal. In this case we are talking about identifying the essential impulse of Mars and taking note of whatever emotion bubbles up when we are musing about how Mars might be ideally used. Instead of dismissing that feeling as belonging merely to the personal self – shrugging it off as just a fleeting twinge, a mood, an idiosyncrasy of the moment — we use it as a signal from the soul-self that something important and real is being hit upon. Our hearts, in this case, know something our minds do not.
The exercise entails seizing upon this signal from the heart, and pressing it into service.
To perform the Mars ritual in question, we would pause at the little jab of pain that accompanies our recognition of misunderstood Mars (war). We would hold that little jab in a cherished way. Immediately it would change and deepen. This is what happens when one respects a feeling enough to sit with it for a moment: it mutates. As we watch, that little jab of pain will segue into a heart-based commitment to use our own Mars (behavior; ego impulses) differently.
Burning a red candle while doing this exercise would be appropriate, as would gracing one’s altar with talismans associated with Mars (something of iron or steel; a ceremonial dagger; a knife used as a tool). One might use a set of words from one of the great teachers that understood the teaching at hand. The line that comes to my mind when I think of ennobled Mars is the one Shakespeare gave the great warrior Othello, who, when surrounded by a rowdy mob, bid them “Put up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.”
This is energy work. Whether one does it in meditation and calls it visualization, or in a Wiccan ceremony and calls it spell-casting, or in a temple or church and calls it prayer, it amounts to the same thing. When the heart and mind are combined in setting an intention – in this case, to experience a world where Mars is used creatively rather than destructively — a kind of power is invoked that doesn’t go by the laws of statistics and logic.
By metaphysical law, it doesn’t matter how many or how few people engage in the exercise. The power of such a spell is exponential.
There is consciousness work to be done with Saturn too, as it moves backward through a part of the zodiac it occupied last autumn: the first few degrees of Virgo. We are being asked to look again at the revelations we might have gotten a few months ago (seehttps://www.mothersky.com/skywatches/200710_skywatch.html ) about true adulthood.
March is offering us another shot at it. Whether the same events come up again to provoke this deeper understanding, or whether the pressure to be more grown-up comes from different quarters, it doesn’t matter. Saturn’s second swipe over this territory will allow the same lessons to sink further in. Rather than seeing this planet as a malefic – a harbinger of obstacle and doom (an interpretation that leads to self-fulfilling prophecy, which we definitely don’t want) – keep in mind that a benevolent universe is repeating whatever our particular Saturn lesson is for a reason: to give us another chance to understand a story that is too profound to be absorbed with just one telling.
Identifying where 4º, 3º and 2º of Virgo fall in our chart will give us a clear picture of where Saturn is insisting that we differentiate between responsibility and reactivity. Do these degrees fall in your seventh house? Then it’s about looking at when you are blaming, as opposed to simply considering your own role in a given interpersonal snafu (this does not mean finding fault with yourself, either. It means learning about yourself by watching how you respond to people). Do those early degrees of Virgo fall in your second house? Then it’s about looking at where you are falling prey to deprivation anxiety, instead of simply managing your resources with care and realism. Is Saturn active in your fifth house? Then it’s about differentiating between performance anxiety and the need to work a little harder at practicing proficiency.2
Saturn’s opposition to Venus and Mercury towards the middle of the month, the 15ththrough 17th, may trigger an event that feels like a teacher is entering the room to check up on how well we’re doing. In preparation for this transit let us visualize a paternal figure who is stern but fair. He or she should be firm — because that’s what we need — but essentially on our side. This is using the image-making capacity of the mind to mold the Saturn archetype into a form that will be reflected in our reality. All Saturn transits are opportunities to learn how to stand up to challenge without whining about it; as a serious student would who pays big bucks to be critiqued by a master in their field.
Until the first week of May, Saturn will be retrograde, allowing us to mull over these understandings, take them more deeply within, and apply them with a new seriousness. When Saturn finally goes direct again, we will feel the reward of this work: a new self-respect.
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Notes
1 I refer here to the Sibly chart et al which posit July 4th 1776 as the birthday of the collective entity that is the USA
2 I go through Saturn’s transits through the twelve houses in my book, Soul-Sick Nation: An Astrologer’s View of America, available through this website ((see links, top of page).