Eclipses and Sanity

Eclipse season began with the New Moon of June first.

This month’s Skywatch discusses the series of squares taking place from Neptune in Pisces, the Great Dissembler. I thought of this ingress last weekend when I heard about the yogi Swami Ramdev, whose protest against corruption in government (Pluto in Capricorn) took a Neptunian turn. Accosted by the police during his hunger strike, the yogi fled into the crowd disguised as an old woman, covering his black beard with a white shawl.

My June column in DayKeeper Journal, titled “Weakening the Bones,”

is about Saturn, which stations on June 12th at 10 1/2 Libra.

The biggest news this month surrounds the Solstice, which trines Neptune in Pisces — the first time in our lifetimes that we have experienced this winsome water trine. And, as it has for the past three years, the first week of summer sets off the explosive Cardinal Cross. Global dramas financial, political and revolutionary cluster around the Aries Point.

This year, two Eclipses flank the Solstice. First, there’s the total Lunar Eclipse on June 15th, hitting the mind-boggling Galactic Center. Then there’s the Solar Eclipse on July first. I go into detail about both of them in my new lecture, “Somethin’s Happenin’ Here” (a reference to the Buffalo Springfield song, “For What It’s Worth”).

Astrologers, especially us vintage types, are forever talking about the parallels between the planets’  placements now and what they were in the mid-1960s. The parallels are about to get even more striking. And when they do, I recommend we make use of the notion of sanity. Transits this potent are a signal that we need sanity more than we need anything else.

More than ingenious technology, more than lots of money, more than cool friends or charismatic leaders,  we’re going to need sanity over the years ahead. Especially considering that we are living in a world where attention seems to magnetize around ideas and people who express the opposite of sanity. Case in point: Donald Trump and Sarah Palin sitting down together for a photo op at a franchise pizza outlet: media magnets without the encumbrance of meaning.

Around the same time as the Palin-Trump powwow, scientists from the International Energy Agency convened to release their estimate of greenhouse gases, though few were paying attention to their meeting. They declared that worldwide emissions had increased by a record amount last year.

So despite all the cant we’ve been hearing from every quarter about the world going green, the truth is that if this year’s emissions rise by as much as they did in 2010, according to the IEA it will be all but impossible to hold global warming to a manageable degree. The incalculable suffering that humanity faces unless we change course is, according to Lord Stern of the London School of Economics, “a risk any sane person would seek to drastically reduce.”

Are we sane enough to seek to reduce it? This is the question that lies behind the issue of human choice in our era. Will we seek to reduce this risk, each of us, in whatever way we can? “In whatever way we can” means in whatever ways might be appropriate to our own unique situation. It won’t do any good if we try to address the situation by mimicking somebody else’s approach.

More so than the idea of right and wrong, the idea of sanity has legs. I think it will prove far more useful during the years of the Cardinal Cross than the promotion of any particular ideology or behavior. After all, everywhere we turn we see the pointlessness of trying to foist any one idea or course of action upon people. As astrologers, we know such attempts are doomed. Think about it: how could a singular approach be right for every person, given that everyone’s chart is by definition unique?

The notion of sanity, on the other hand, is one-size-fits-all.