Things are starting to cook.
Over the next few weeks we’ll have a series of short-range transits that will serve as triggers for the dramatic long-range ones that have been the subject of so much astrological buzz: the transits of 2010-15. These are the years singled out by many ancient traditions as the make-or-break threshold for humanity.
When discussing these matters with your skeptical friends, keep in mind that it’s allowed to use both the right and the left hemispheres of our brains when assessing this information. Considering ancient prophecies doesn’t have to mean going all woo-woo (by the way: it’s probably always been obvious to you, but I just realized that the adjective “woo-woo” –- meaning, I guess, dubiously credible, unscientific, occultish — must derive from the sound made by cartoon ghosts).
Both Western astrology, with its roots in Mesopotamia, and Mayan astrology, which put the year 2012 on the map for modern seekers, lay out these cycles in an impeccably organized way. Though they refer to ineffable truths, the chronicles of macro-astrology are utterly coherent and systematically rigorous. In fact, they make so much more sense than our current social worldview that it really begs the question: Whose approach to the dramas of our day is more woo-woo: the Mayans’ or Glen Beck’s?
Pluto makes a direct station on Friday, Sept 11th, at the third quarter Moon. The tiny little planet with the great big clout will hover in the sky, apparently motionless, as if staring down at us and demanding, “Have you been paying attention?” Keep an eye out for events that illustrate what Pluto’s been up to in the USA chart, and which play out the T-square it’s been making, all year, to Saturn and Uranus (soon to morph into what’s being called The Cardinal Cross). On Sept 15th, Saturn and Uranus will reach their third exact opposition. A week later, at the Autumnal Equinox, the Sun will move into Libra, exactly squaring Pluto. Those sky-watchers who have been following along will notice that whatever happens around these dates will display the ongoing themes with stunning clarity.
Sensitive souls will feel a frisson as these latest pieces of the great Cardinal puzzle click into position. It’s all about abrupt shocks (Uranus) to recalcitrant systems (Saturn), and the power of decay to break down inoperable dysfunction (Pluto).
When you watch astrological cycles, you start seeing world events differently from the way most people do. You see an underlying order between one phase of a cycle and the next. You start listening for the other shoe to drop.
This month we’re waiting for the third shoe. The Obama victory last November happened on the day Saturn and Uranus opposed for the first time. The second hit came with his stimulus packages, which fired up his supporters and detractors into a new surge of oppositional virulence. And right now, as the transit reaches its third exactitude, the health care debate is stoking the flames of divisiveness to its highest burn yet.
How might we look at the situation through the eyes of Pluto, the key player in the Cardinal Cross? Pluto’s job is to seek out and identify rot, wherever it exists. Its purpose is to oversee the death process, so that renewal can get underway.
Does the current American health care system still have a pulse? By cosmic law, if something shows signs of life, Pluto will not mess with it. But if there is decay to the point of putrefaction, Pluto
will show no mercy. Its function is to reveal whether something is, in the words of Bob Dylan, busy being born or busy dying. Unmoved by ideological criteria, Pluto makes this assessment by coldly considering the facts.
In this context, so many facts have been bandied about lately that I propose we confine ourselves here to just two. 1.) The amount spent on health care per annum per person in the USA is $7000; more than twice that spent in, say, Japan, where life expectancy is longer. 2.) Those Americans “lucky” enough to have health insurance (many of whom seem to have remarkably little empathy for those who don’t) are, counter-intuitively, more likely than the uninsured to go bankrupt from medical costs.
In this exercise we’re trying to figure out whether the American system has enough viability to be left on life support, or whether it’s afflicted with too much corruption to thrive (Pluto governs “corruption” in all senses of the word: legal, moral, organic). Here we’d have to factor in the existence of insurance-company-sponsored smear campaigns fronted by politicians whose votes are sold to the highest bidder.
If we followed this line of inquiry, more fundamental questions would arise. Such as, What kind of society allows the profit motive to dictate whether sick people get care?
Pluto’s role in the ongoing Cardinal Cross tells us that after we’ve identified what is ready to die, we’d best let it die. By Plutonian logic, when a decrepit system bites the dust, its energy reassembles organically and turns into something else. This new something is born out of the needs of the moment, and is thus, by definition, more suitable than the old thing was. Whether you accept this as a law of physics or a law of Pluto, it amounts to the same thing: energy is never created nor destroyed; it just changes form. To understand the implications of this law is to embrace the destruction wrought by Pluto in Capricorn (governmental and societal structures) as not cruel, but creative.
For transits this dramatic to be of any use, we have to apply their logic not selectively but systematically, the way the ancient seers did.
This is not easy to do when the issue is as anxiety-driven as the health care debate is for Americans. Clarity is muddled even further by the way the debate is being framed, in compulsively combative terms, by a mass media with less vision than a blinkered horse. But we’ll get nowhere quarreling about the details of health care reform without taking into account the deep-structure corruption of which the current mess is an inevitable outgrowth.
Otherwise we’re like a group of mad doctors arguing about how to operate on the arm of a corpse, while the rest of the body lies rotting under a sheet.
