Well, it happened like clockwork. Cosmic clockwork. Just as Pluto entered Capricorn, the sign of financial infrastructures, the economy hit the skids.

Pluto’s job is to expose the rot in the areas governed by the sign it’s in. The last time this planet changed signs, its impact was similarly immediate: in the mid-nineties, as soon as it went into Sagittarius (religion), the pedophile priest scandal broke. The time before that, within days of its ingress into Scorpio (sex and death) in the mid-eighties, AIDS hit the headlines.

To fine-tune our understanding of these major themes, we have been looking at what the other planets were up to when Pluto ingressed. We have talked about the fact that Pluto crossed into Capricorn at the point of the Galactic Center (https://www.mothersky.com/skywatches/200801_skywatch.html), identifying this next fifteen years as a period of heightened drama for the world. And the fact that Mars was opposed to Pluto when it crossed that line means that we need to keep our eye on the little red planet closer to home.

In last month’s Skywatch (https://www.mothersky.com/skywatches/200803_skywatch.html) we talked about  the way Mars has been busy for months around the same region of the zodiac, pounding its lessons into the world’s consciousness like Maxwell’s silver hammer. The planet of aggression and/or assertion (it all depends on how we use it) has been teaching and re-teaching each of us some very specific lessons about how to use — and how not to use — our ego power.¹

When we watch our life as if it were a movie, one whose plot is the teaching of certain planetary lessons, we can connect the dots quite easily between a planet’s symbolism and the events through which that symbolism gets played out. In the case of Mars this approach comes in particularly handy, because it keeps us from getting wrapped up in our ego obsessions — the kind that make us feel our personal survival is at stake; the kind that drive us to all manner of behaviors we later regret.

Checking the houses of the chart through which Mars is transiting, we can see which of our daily circumstances are showcasing this force which, if we let it, turns into anger and selfishness. This is our heads-up to use Mars energy instead in ways that are, instead, boldly beneficial. It’s a matter of choice. We choose, or not, to raise our willpower to the level of Martial art.

Through April, Mars will move from 10º to 24º Cancer. Where do these degrees fall in your birth chart?

Every couple of years when Mars passes through this part of the zodiac, America gets another chance either to flex its muscles internationally — which has been the sorry state of affairs in recent memory — or to exercise its collective will with more understanding than the cycle before. There is always the chance that the former will triumph over the latter, a chance that is heightened by nothing more or less than the awareness of individual Americans.

The quantum leap heralded by the Pluto ingress at the Galactic Center in January heightens the potential of just such a mass breakthrough.

Through most of April Mars will be provoking the Sun cluster of the Sibly chart, the birth chart most astrologers use for the USA. On April 7^th-8^th Mars passes over the US Sun, and between April 29^th and May 6^th it will trigger the US Mercury-Pluto opposition. For almost half a year America has been through a hyper- extended Mars Return with several peaks, one of the most pivotal being the planet’s direct station on January 30th. This was three weeks before the mass riots following the seizure of the Serbian province of Kosovo, by which time Mars (conflict) was moving back into position opposite Pluto (domination).

Because it resides natally in the seventh house (relationships with others) of the US chart, astrologers have come to expect America’s foreign policy to take an especially bullying turn whenever the nation has a Mars Return. In February when transiting Mars was halfway between the US Mars and Venus, half a million Serbians exploded with outrage against Washington’s plans to build a huge permanent military base in Kosovo, the classic first move the US tends to make with foreign states in which it wishes to establish a foothold. Enraged (Mars) crowds attacked border posts, the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade, and most tellingly of all, ten McDonald’s outlets: the universal symbol of Uncle Sam. The people were making a statement that was so obvious it was almost a cartoon: America, we don’t want you here. Get out of our country.

The question immediately arises, how could the American populace fail to understand a message this clear? It would take a truly impressive campaign of obfuscation to undermine the statement being sent to Americans by the people of Kosovo.  A campaign not unlike the one that allows most Americans to claim ignorance, to this day, about Osama bin Laden’s reasons for launching jihad against the USA – even though he has spelled them out, with bullet-point clarity, again and again (that is: 1) the US bankrolling of Israel against the Palestinians; 2) US military bases in Arab sacred lands; and 3) Pentagon bombing of Arab cities and villages).

The key to understanding America’s humongous tone-deafness is the opposition between Mercury and Pluto in the USA birth chart, due to be transited by Mars at the end of April.

Mercury governs the mass media; Pluto governs, of course, plutocratic control. By any other logic than that of this opposition, the new Kosovo uprising would have been the perfect time for a national media to frame the episode in historical context. This could have been done by reminding TV viewers that the U.S. had bombed Serbia for 78 days in 1999, dropping artillery willy-nilly on civilian targets such as schools, hospitals and sewage and heating plants. At the time, American pundits had raised hardly a peep of protest  – indeed, then-president Bill Clinton was generally applauded for it — and the American public seems to remember it not at all. But of course the Slavs remember it only too well.

This time round, the U.S. media immediately began parroting Washington’s touching story that the Kosovo land-seizure was actually a “declaration of independence” on the part of the locals. Lickety-split, the US government recognized the province as a state — albeit one totally devoid of even minimal self-government – to legitimize the process of making it a colony. In a scenario hideously similar to what’s going on now in Baghdad, Kosovo is to be run by bodies appointed by the U.S., European Union and NATO. An old-fashioned colonial viceroy will have control over all aspects of foreign and domestic policy.²

Washington’s old “we’re helping them gain freedom” line seems to work its magic on the American populace every time. But as in every other case of US meddling (a potential spelled out by the US chart’s Saturn in Libra square the US Sun in the seventh), the people of the conquered region are never the recipients of benefit. The truth, as all Europeans know, is that Kosovo, after nine years of NATO military occupation, has become a center of international drug and prostitution rings. It has a 60 percent unemployment rate. Its once-humming mines and mills are shut down, its resources forcibly privatized — sold off to Western multinationals.

At this point, just about the only jobs available to Kosovians are with the U.S./NATO army or U.N. agencies.³ This is, as we know, the shameful scenario Uncle Sam has created in Iraq as well, where astrologers have been correlating transits of Mars for five years; each one matching up with another breakage in the old Pottery Barn… the chillingly prescient analogy for which Colin Powell will probably go down in history.

Whenever Mars comes around to trigger the US chart cluster, the possibility arises of repeating this ugly pattern somewhere in the world. So does the possibility of more and more Americans waking up to it and changing it… a job nobody else can do.

April’s Mars transit to the US Sun will make the Kosovo débacle visible for all who care to look. Since the February uprisings, Mars in the sky has proceeded from its conjunction to the US chart’s own Mars to the US Venus and Jupiter, which rule the chart’s Midheaven and Ascendant respectively. During those weeks in late February and March, Mars’ opposition with transiting Pluto made the situation not just hair-trigger but deeply dangerous – at the same time that, true to Pluto’s penchant for undercover operations, news of the Balkans disappeared from the headlines all over America.

It is clearly the intention of American plutocratic interests that the US citizenry’s attention be riveted elsewhere. As we have seen, whenever a shady foreign adventure looms, the US power structure (Pluto) will call in the media (Mercury).  While election pundits hold Americans in thrall to the glittering campaign extravaganza, the portents in the sky point to patterns building in this little patch of Serbia that will directly relate to the Grand Crosses in 2014.⁴ Were Americans to turn off their televisions and bestir themselves to taking an interest in the rest of the world, they would do well to consider the time bomb their government is setting up in the Balkans.

It is only through understanding that we humans break destructive patterns. Waking up out of denial with Mars transits is the prerequisite for healing those habits that create violence, both on  individual and collective levels.

A California sculptor recently created a welded conglomeration of melted-down guns that had been surrendered in a city firearm-buy-back program; reminding us, under these Martial skies, that a piece of art can be the highest form of magic spell. This sculptor’s creation did far more to turn the Mars-Pluto opposition around than do the faithless international conferences such as have divvied up the Balkans and other un-powered nationstates as if they were prizes in a poker game.

As we discussed in our last column, by metaphysical law it is the power of a pure intention, elevated to the level of ritual, that creates genuine change in the world.

They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
— Isaiah II (King James Version)

Notes:

1 Usually, Mars comes around briefly every 2-to-2 1/2 years. What has been noteworthy about this particular Mars cycle is the fact that its direct-retrograde-direct dance has compelled us to look at ego issues for five straight months; with an opposition to Pluto supercharging it with dark potency. It hasn’t been just a flash in the pan; the Universe really wanted us to get this business of power plays. The oppositions’ exactitudes (times of particular intensity) occurred Sept. 21, January 2 and March 6-7.

2 The American government’s recognition of Kosovo was an example of Washington breaking even agreements (seventh house) it imposes by force (Mars). In 1999 the leaders of Yugoslavia were forced to sign U.N. Security Council Resolution 1244 to end the shelling of their country. Coerced though it was, this agreement affirmed the “commitment of all member states to the sovereignty and territorial integrity” of Serbia, a republic of Yugoslavia. See Hidden Agenda: U.S./NATO Takeover of Yugoslavia (Leftbooks).

3 The only major construction in Kosovo is of Camp Bondsteel, the largest U.S. base built in Europe in a generation. One of its departments guards the strategic oil and transportation lines of the entire region. Another is the Balkan version of Guantanamo Bay, with prisoners held without charges, judicial overview or representation: the ultimate Plutonian scenario. It somehow registers as less than shocking to hear that the company awarded the contract to build it was Halliburton.

4 In the summer of 2014, Uranus will be in the early-teen degrees of Aries,
Pluto will be square to it at 13 Capricorn, Jupiter will be mid-Cancer and Mars
will station at the middle degrees of Libra.