Jul 2011
Spill it? Clean it up
It always struck me as so quintessentially American, that Pottery Barn metaphor that Colin Powell and Thomas Friedman used to refer to Iraq: “You break it, you own it”. (You wonder whether a public speaker elsewhere in the world would have chosen a less explicitly commercial metaphor; such as, say, a mother saying to her child, “If you spill that milk, you’re cleaning it up”.) Buzz-phrases that catch on as solidly as this one did clearly resonate with something deep within the collective imagination. “You break it, you own it” has wormed its way into the American vernacular. It even has its own Wikipedia page.
The phrase makes a great exercise for students of the Sibly chart of the USA (drawn up for July 4th,1776 at 5:10 pm in Philadelphia, Pa, discussed in my book about the nation’s karma). Via the imagery of home furnishings, the Pottery Barn metaphor supplies Cancer symbolism; the US chart has Venus, Jupiter and the Sun in Cancer.
But it is Pluto’s placement that gives “You break it, you own it” its power. America’s Pluto (annihilation) falls in its second house (possessions). Deep within the national unconscious, the ideas of destruction and ownership are inextricably fused.
Three Eclipses
The third of July’s three Eclipses is a New Moon on July 30th. In between the Eclipses on July 1st and July 14th, Uranus makes a retrograde station. On the ninth of July, the god of revolution stops square to Pluto, barely a degree away from exactitude. This makes the Longest Arm of the Cross the strongest it has yet been.
When the Solstice Eclipses moved into position last month, the Uranus-Pluto square was kicked into a new level of fervor. As the world rolled its eyes in disgust and dismay, Pluto’s two most salacious expressions, sex and corruption, found tawdry expression in the failure of Anthony Wiener and Dominique Strauss-Kahn to keep their appetites in their pants. But it is the square’s impact on the world’s governments that is making history. Rebellions (Uranus) against entrenched corruption (Pluto) are now threatening an astounding number of the world’s heads of state (giving the lie to those that are democracies in name only, such as India and Indonesia).
It is hard to think of a single spot on the globe where individuals (Uranus in Aries) are not up in arms against centralized institutions (Pluto in Capricorn).
Waves of Meaning
The Japanese earthquake-tsunami will go down in astrological history as one of the most stunning instances of the power of ingresses (a planet changing signs), in general, and of ingresses to the Aries point, in particular. The catastrophe took place on the very day Uranus moved into Aries for the second time this cycle, March 11th, 2011.
Like the angry ocean that destroyed northeastern Japan, the wider meaning of this catastrophe has come at us in a series of waves. The first shock wave was local, as we would expect. Its focus was the immediate human tragedy of the earthquake. Its effect was to magnetize the world’s sympathy for the victims, with attention funneled to the islands themselves.
The next wave of meaning extended beyond the local. The earthquake and threat of nuclear reactor meltdown that ensued expanded the sense of threat into a significance that was, for many observers, universal and dystopic. Environmental implications started to dawn on people worldwide. Baby boomers old enough to remember the clumsy civil-defense newsreels they’d seen as schoolchildren wondered whether their worst Cold War-era nightmares were coming true. As the aftermath from the quake in Japan was televised all over the world, people everywhere watched hundreds of thousands of gallons of irradiated water being pumped into the sea, making its way towards their own shores, poisoning everything in its wake.
Now that the solar dial has shifted a full quarter turn, the meaning of what happened just before the Equinox is in its third wave. This one is far more demanding than the first two, which were merely about shock and horror. Now we are left to confront the sobering realities, the realities of what we humans have done. Starting with the fact that we built dozens of nuclear reactors in the world’s most quake-prone series of islands. Isn’t it difficult, at this point, to imagine that we thought that was a good idea?
When we factor in the global frequency in recent years of climate change-induced tsunamis, and of freak storms that can no longer accurately be called “freak”, surely what happened on March 11th comes to look not shocking at all but downright inevitable. The question is not “How could we possibly have seen that coming,” but rather, “What kind of denial have we been in that we could have not foreseen it?”
Unasked Questions
If you think of human existence as one long evolution of consciousness, you place no small significance on the things certain segments of humanity learn from hideous blunders like the Japanese quake. You pay attention to the fact that in the months since March 11th, Germany’s government has taken the vanguard position and moved to ban nuclear plants altogether; and that elsewhere in the world the anti-nuke movement has been revived after a relatively complacent hiatus. If you believe that the Uranus-Pluto years are about consciousness raising, which is signaled by questions being asked, then the Cardinal Cross is doing its job with daunting precision and right on time.
More and more people are asking whether it is possible to have nuclear power without the dangers of unimaginably toxic contaminants. But a tougher question hides behind this one: What will we do when the oil runs out? Global peak oil production, speculated by some energy analysts to be reached any time between 2012 and 2020, has long been associated by some astrologers with the transits of the Cardinal Cross.
Uranus hits the Aries point again in November. It will stay there without budging until January, stationing right there upon it on December 9th.
Culture Clash
In the 1960s, Uranus & Pluto (counter-) were opposed to Saturn (culture) and created the counter-culture (see my latest lecture, “Something’s Happening Here,” ). Right now the same three planets are creating a new set of stringent societal polarizations. One of them surrounds nuclear energy.
Worldwide, most environmentalists are incredulous that there could still be any doubt about the folly of nuclear energy. But, predictably enough, as soon as the initial shock from the quake and tsunami died down, the nuclear power industry, in the USA and elsewhere – even, goddess have mercy, in Japan – started qualifying their contrite moratoriums, and quietly making plans to return to business as usual.
Among political and social progressives there is, at the moment, no clear consensus.
Just Doing Their Jobs
But among readers of astrological archetypes, a clear theme starts to arise. Humanity is being asked to integrate Uranus (technology) and Pluto (power) with Saturn (responsibility).
The specter of explosive (Uranus) mass death and toxicity (Pluto) that arose in March in the seas of Japan was a textbook example of Pluto and Uranus run amok, unleashed from all restraint (Saturn). Both Uranus and Pluto are associated with the breakdown of the atom. Inventing a power source for which there is no disposal plan is an example of heeding Uranus and Pluto without Saturn. Saturn’s placement at the Solstice Eclipse, stationary and positioned right between the other two (this summer is the last hurrah of that three-year T-square), was telling us loud and clear that Saturn, and only Saturn, can contain the wild energy of the Cross.
Wild and crazy Uranus and Pluto certainly are; but we would be wrong to think of them as malevolent forces, though this is a mistake many beginning astrologers make. In truth the planets do not have motive or agency; they are value-neutral symbols, representing cosmic laws. Uranus governs technology and Pluto is about power. They are just doing their jobs, in this case manifesting as the nuclear power industry, cooking up ways to meet the world’s energy needs.
Saturn, meanwhile, exists to rein in Uranus and Pluto; because wherever there is enormous power, there is the potential for it to backfire enormously badly. Saturn represents the impulse towards caution which, when integrated with the other two planets, allows all three to function well.
Why do we need Saturn? It governs the legal regulations that are set up to rein in big business; cautions which would, in theory, prevent us from the kind of desecration that Big Oil inflicted upon the environment in the Gulf in April 2010. It governs the kind of safeguards that could have prevented the financial catastrophe that Wall Street inflicted upon the world economy. During these fiascos the absence of Saturnine accountability was the object lesson.
Examples abound of modern societies that have thoroughly mastered Uranus (exemplified by all those shiny new gadgets rolling off Chinese assembly lines) and Pluto (exemplified by the unstinting production of weapons of war) — but that have not mastered Saturn.
Saturn is now moving ahead through Libra, and will find new ways to teach us that everything we do has a consequence. Under skies like these, the society that does not find a balance between all three is doomed. It’s toast.
Fouling the Nest
Uranus is a very fancy planet, a taker of high-concept risks. If you have Uranus prominent in your natal chart, you know what I mean. It specializes in that spark of mind-power that makes humans different from the “lower animals”. Saturn, by contrast, is the most soberly practical of the planets. Its caution is based on some simple rules of survival. Such as the instinctive rules that prevents birds from fouling their own nests. If modern humanity were as hip to the Saturn principle as birds are, we wouldn’t have created an industry whose wastes we haven’t learned how to take responsibility for.
On the weekend before the Full Moon Eclipse of June 15th, the streets in parts of Tokyo were jammed with protesters demonstrating against nuclear power. These were messengers of high-level Saturn: thousands of ordinary citizens making the case that we cannot continue to foul our own nest. Three months after the Uranus ingress sent that scorching message to humanity about how dangerously easy it is to spill poison, these folks were doing their part to clean up the mess.