Now begins a calendar year that’s been well worked over before it was born. Variously interpreted eschatological imagery and dubious pop culture prophecies have been pouring forth for years now, exploiting poor 2012 like an MGM child star. Now that it’s here, let’s separate the hype from the essential meanings that underlie it.

The Longest Arm of the Cross

The star of the transit show is a first partile 90º angle, a First Quarter square, between Uranus in Aries and Pluto in Capricorn. It will be exact to the minute of arc seven times between this Spring and March of 2015. During 2012 the transit comes into its glory, with its first two exactitudes in June and September.

If you follow Western astrology you’ve been hearing a lot about this square, the longest arm of the Cardinal Cross. The sky has been leading up to this transit for at least four years. To understand what will take shape in 2012 let’s look at the themes presented during the transit’s approach.

The Cardinal Cross era can be said to have begun when Pluto entered Capricorn and initiated the Wall Street scandal in 2007-9. This financial cataclysm seemed to have to happened overnight, but of course it was really years in the making: the deregulation of the financial industry and the government-abetted corruption of the banks took place under successive US presidential administrations, right under the noses of the public.

But upon deeper consideration we see that the economic crises upon the world now have their origin in failed policies that have held sway since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Uranus (massive disruption) and Pluto (decay) represent cosmic forces that are breaking down models of social organization so deeply ingrained in the mass mind that most people can’t imagine that the world could work any other way.

As it had a long on-ramp, this transit will have a long off-ramp. Humanity will be integrating its effects until at least 2023.

Transits

In addition to its June and September exactitudes, the Uranus-Pluto square will be activated when it is hit by trigger planet transits, on which I will release lectures throughout the year. Astrologers expect extreme events each time a quickly-moving planet moves through the early degrees of Cardinal signs; such as Venus in February, Mercury in March and Mars in July.

A noteworthy singular event this year is the occultation of Venus (money) in early June. While retrograde, Venus will pass over the disc of the Sun. As Julija Imas has noted, the Wall Street meltdown took place at the midpoint between the last Venus occultation, in 2004, and this coming one.

Then there is the extra-long passage of Mars in Virgo, 8 months long due to its retrograde-direct dance, which will agitate mutable signs (Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces) wherever they reside. One of the peak times for this transit is January 23rd, when Mars will station at 23º (hitting natal Mars and Neptune in the US chart).

Resistance

In taking the pulse of the year to come, we should use what we already know about life on Earth. We need to factor in human nature, which isn’t going to change overnight. It’s not realistic to nurture fantasies of a sudden, magic awakening, where all beings on Earth see the light and drop their fear trips. Such expectations are no more helpful than those of a spontaneous ascension into heaven of the faithful, or of a UFO swooping down to fetch the cognoscenti.

It doesn’t happen like that. Evolution is slow and incremental, even when in the throes of a steep learning curve.

We know that change – especially change as immense as the world needs now — provokes resistance. The deeper the changes required, the deeper the status quo is going to dig in its heels. Every spasm forward is likely to be met by denial, at best, and by violent reaction, at worst, from the forces of stasis.

Our focus should be to zone in on the burgeoning wave of creative, health-affirming energy all around us, at the same time that we avoid being naïve about the negativity that human entities tend to express when under threat. We need to keep both of these realities in mind. One without the other won’t work.

We want to maintain a perspective that will protect us upcoming from overwhelm, confusion and fear. Knowing how to observe, with detachment, humanity’s resistance to change is no less important than knowing how to support humanity’s fundamental desire to be free and made new.

Backlash and Vision

Resistance to change can take either active or passive forms. An example of the latter is induced escapism: large numbers of people diving into self-loss, with a little help from manipulative agencies. When Neptune reenters Pisces in February it meets up with Chiron; their conjunction will be exacerbated by retrograde Mars. We can expect the media-consuming public to indulge in a surge of fantasies. These may include a paranoia about “terrorists” fed by psychological propaganda, and reactive consumerism fed by a no-holds-barred advertising industry (e.g. ceiling-to-floor, wall-to-wall ads in heretofore public spaces, such as transport terminals, and city buses shrink-wrapped in advertising).

At the same time, we will doubtless see the anti-consumerist movement grow increasingly imaginative and committed. Prescient pioneers in this area include Adbusters Magazine¹ and the brilliant Bill Talen², of the Church of Stop Shopping.

Almost everywhere in the world, I expect the backlash expression of the Uranus-Pluto square to take the form of coordinated efforts of government, military and police agencies to crack down, no-more-mister-nice-guy-style, on protests and cultural critics, as began to happen with the Occupy movement (see Naomi Wolf’s analysis ) when Uranus was at the Aries Point under the solar Eclipse, in late November 2011.

In American politics and perhaps elsewhere, we may probably see an increase in Throw-the-bums-out syndrome: the undiscriminating reaction, on the part of most members of the public against any and all incumbent leaders. Whoever had the job last will be blamed for society’s increasing hardships, regardless of their ideas, character or actual responsibility. As we are seeing already, this public attitude opens the field to extreme and unhinged ideologues, making for a highly unstable, unserious candidate pool.

Uranian Voices

We need to be more and more selective about whom we give our energy. As the action ramps up throughout the year, it will prove a waste of time to give too much energy to the elements of society that are fighting change tooth and nail, though their resistances will make big claims on our attention as they wax ever more absurd, idiotic and heavy-handed. We need to be remember that, realistically, it is never more than a small minority of the population at any given time who grasp the world-altering changes required by the whole.

These are the visionaries, the Uranian voices of the future. We will recognize by their life-affirming messages. Our focus and support should go to them, and to the parts of ourselves that we see mirrored in them.

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Note:

1 The glossy quarterly magazine whose editors conceived of Occupy Wall Street.

2 Talen, a master parodist, has been known to collect soil from mountains that have been strip-mined, stroll with his cohorts into bank lobbies with an air of having been invited by an art curator, and proceed to sculpt dirt peaks while singing; thus exorcizing the demons out of the ATMs.