The WikiLeaks story hit the headlines under one of the most powerful Full Moons of the year, July 25th (see second lecture in the 2012 series box, at right). Mars, the planet of war, was conjunct Saturn, a combination associated with the army. Saturn was within hours of making its last exact opposition to Uranus — a contest that had been going on for two years.
I guess we found out who won that round.
Uranus is made of stronger stuff than Saturn, which governs the establishment and its various self-protective agencies. Saturn maintains stasis by tightening up and shutting down; whereas, Uranus, like a military ambush, depends on the element of surprise. Explosive and defiant, Uranus uses out-of-left-field tactics to compel change. The tug-of-war between Saturn and Uranus forms the spine of the Cardinal Climax and is bisected by Pluto (secrets). When Mars (ignition) moved into position, it was inevitable that something would burst into the open — something that the powers-that-be had been trying to conceal.
What have we learned from those 90,000 released files? Many observers of what’s been going on in Afghanistan have known since the beginning that the occupation was doomed. What the leaks showed us was the extent to which the generals knew it, too. They not only knew they were losing, but that they had no chance of winning. Yet with hideous cynicism they were willing to keep on destroying lives, decimating resources, and reducing to smaller and smaller bits of rubble what was left of the second poorest country in the world.
The presence of Pluto (cover-ups) in the transit picture suggests that however reasonable the official war arguments (Saturn in Libra) were imagined to be, the reality was and is riddled with ugly secrets. A few chilling examples: from the WikiLeaks we hear about the existence of Task Force 373, which is — not to put too fine a point on it – a death squad; created to murder not only suspected insurgents (whatever that means) but, apparently, the occasional unarmed motorcyclist. We hear about an incident where French troops used machine guns to strafe a bus full of children. We hear about Polish troops massacring a village wedding party out of revenge for an earlier insurgent assault.
What came to light on the Full Moon last month was a pattern of official lies (with Neptune and Chiron approaching the US Moon for one more round in November, we should keep our eyes peeled for more) that, to Pentagon-watchers of a certain age, sounded strikingly familiar. It echoed the spin concocted for that other war – the one from the last time Uranus and Pluto were in hard aspect, in the mid-60s: the one in Viet Nam. The strategy then was to lie about the strength of the native resistance, to deliberately misclassify civilian deaths as combat deaths, and to send in ever more men and guns.
As the Moon began to wane in late July, the spin machine began to hum as Pentagon and Capitol Hill flacks tried to neutralize the threat to their control posed by a newly engaged public. They seem to have been so taken off guard that their clumsy attempts at damage control contradicted each other: out of one corner of their mouths, they opined that the WikiLeaks data were no great shakes: It’s old news, they sneered; Nothing to see here, folks, just move along. Out of the other corner of their mouths they described the intel as so dangerously sensitive that Julian Assange had put “the lives of U.S. and partner service members at risk” by releasing it.
One was sorry to hear Obama echoing this despicable nonsense, but not surprised. As astrologers know, a predictable karmic arc is finishing up here. The first iteration of the Uranus-Saturn opposition was Nov 4th 2008, the same day the new president came into office vowing to throw his weight behind the occupation. Two years later, his project has started to come undone: Uranus (rupture) has ripped the mask off the war’s public face (Saturn).
Our hidden faces must be disclosed if we are to transform ourselves. As a group, the realities behind our official stories must be confronted, sordid though they may be. Those who take to heart the principle known in Chinese medicine as Law of Cure – whereby toxins must be pushed to the surface before an organism can heal – may find themselves not only unafraid of, but yearning for, the next phase of this process of breakdown. We might find ourselves welcoming a new set of revelations that shows this abominable war for what it is.
The next transit in this trajectory takes place on the 21st of August. At that point, for the last time this cycle, Saturn will exactly square Pluto, governor of the mystery of decay, precursor to new life.
