The transits around the Equinox suggested stark raving madness. One by one, quickly moving triggers have been setting off the Cardinal Cross, starting with Mercury’s ingress into Libra, which sent the horror in Syria galloping out in front of the world’s awareness (see September’s blog).

Jupiter’s conjunction to the US Cancer planets told us Uncle Sam was going to dive headfirst into the spotlight without a helmet. Just before the Equinox, Pluto was exactly at the midpoint of the US Sun-Jupiter by opposition when it stationed at the Full Moon. This didn’t mean that the country was being forced by the gods to take leave of its senses. It just meant that if fatal dysfunction already existed, it would explode like an unlanced boil.

Add to that triggered Cross: a grand trine in water signs, all three of them rattled and ready to overflow. This is when Colorado suffered its devastating flash (Uranus) floods (Neptune).

Deluge

More than just a weather event, what happened in those mountains expressed the myth of the Great Flood: a tale that has resided in the collective unconscious since time immemorial. The story is about a human race so polluted (Pluto) that only a mass purge can heal it. As with Hurricane Katrina — which also took place at a Pluto station — the deluge in Colorado revealed a deadly toxicity. The state is infested with fracking wells.

As environmental horrors go, fracking takes the prize. It requires exorbitant amounts of water, drought or no; and it deploys nightmarishly toxic chemicals (Pluto + Neptune). These were released by the rain into Colorado’s waterways.

The American mass media, which tends towards footage of intrepid local firemen rescuing soggy dogs, has not explored this aspect of the disaster. But you can bet your galoshes that this is the one that’ll cause the enduring suffering. The fracking industry, steeped as it is in financial and political corruption, remains well under the radar of mass awareness (Pluto) as a public safety issue. Its ecological implications are building like underground gases waiting to explode (Uranus).

Fire at Sea

Just after the Equinox the waters off the Italian peninsula were the scene of an oceanic catastrophe. An overfull vessel of hundreds of refugees, mostly Eritreans, sank near Lampedusa. The fatality numbers are unprecedented, but the tragic phenomenon is becoming a pattern. One survivor reported seeing another boat approach the doomed vessel, stop for a moment as if considering a rescue, and then decide against it, disappearing over the horizon.

This chilling example of indifferent inhumanity can be read as a microcosmic parable. As most of the seven billion of Earth’s children struggle to survive in a world of war, globalization and dwindling resources, others — insulated from immediate danger and deprivation — manage to ignore, for a while longer, the fact that this planet is one interconnected body, and that a crisis in one corner of the world organism is a crisis of the whole.

Shots Rang Out

Mercury was exactly square Pluto (death) and opposed to Uranus (shock) on Sept 16^th, when a disturbed naval employee in Washington DC racked up America’s latest multiple homicide. Each time the country hosts an eruption like this of out-of-control Mars, the airwaves buzz with talk about how easy it is for Americans – even those who, like Aaron Alexis, were on record as having shot at their downstairs neighbors through the floorboards — to cop and keep a gun.

Less frequently do we hear about how much of this violence is committed by psychically brutalized soldiers and others in military culture  (Virginia Tech, Fort Hood et al). Connecting those dots seems to pose too great a threat to the nation’s stories about itself.

Three days after the carnage, with the Full Moon culminating in the sky, House Republicans voted to decimate by $39 billion government assistance to, among others, veterans broken in body and spirit. The longer Americans refuse to acknowledge the damage done to the mostly young, impoverished men who are employed, traumatized and abandoned by the “armed services,” the longer society will reap the karma of its cycle of violence.

The ancients paid particular attention to the location of a lightning strike. No less meaningful are the locations of these electrifying acts of violence that shake up the modern psyche. When hearing that the scene of the Alexis shootings was the historic Old Navy Yard, most Americans’ first association with the words was probably the clothing retailer owned by the Gap. This dark cosmic pun was the second bit of mayhem to point to the Gap this year; the first was the sweatshop collapse in Bangladesh.

Blackmail

Especially telling was the fact that the shootings took place in that particular city. Two weeks later, the nation’s capitol was again identified as the center of destructive irrationality when a small group of extortionists in Congress staged a sociopathic version of the terrible twos. By this time it was the Sun’s turn to trigger the Cross, beginning its square to Pluto on Sept. 30, the day the federal shutdown began.

It was the latest and most despicable in a long series of GOP ploys to derail the health care bill, a piece of legislation that has already passed through the gauntlet of Constitutional procedures — a process these grandstanding patriots claim to revere and are elected to uphold. In undermining the rules by which the nation is governanable, the Tea-Party faction (Willie Brown calls them teajadists) are personifying the dark side of Pluto in Capricorn: they are chipping away at the infrastructural mortar that gives a society cohesion.

The shutdown puts not only the federal government in danger of default but risks destabilizing markets around the world. We can infer Jupiter’s opposition to Pluto in the fact that the Congressmen are upping the ante on the damage (Pluto) they will cause, in a way that’s all out of proportion (Jupiter) to their presumed goals. These include not just the killing of Obamacare but the green lighting of the unconscionable Keystone XL pipeline.

The transits make it clear that hidden, powerful forces (Pluto) operate in the background of this shameful exercise. The infamous Koch brothers are bankrolling it, as usual, as is Peter Thiel, co-founder of the ubiquitous PayPal.

On Thursday 10/3, with the New Moon about to dawn, there arose another flash of violence at the same location. A recently fired dental hygienist, armed only with her automobile — and accompanied, astonishingly, by a baby (unharmed) — was shot to death near the Capitol Building.

Official agencies are giving out that she was motivated by delusions about the president. But parsing meaning on this level seems less fruitful than observing these incidents symbolically, as if they were a living tarot montage. Like a human arrow, the dead woman’s trajectory pointed straight to the scene of chaotic madness taking place in the halls of Congress.

The next day, somebody doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire on the National Mall. Also that day, a guy pleaded guilty to rigging his Jeep to crash near a Secret Service guard booth; he had planned to spray-paint a “don’t tread of me” snake on the White House.

The snake in this montage calls to mind the location of Saturn right now: in Scorpio, squaring Obama’s Sun.

Armed and in Uniform

Another bizarre spectacle was playing out in Washington under that New Moon, serving as a backdrop to these acts of violence like a black theatre curtain behind spot-lit performers. A massive consortium of cops, soldiers and goons of every type and tier was winding up their interagency training exercise. I’m picturing a sea of uniformed gun-swaddled enforcers, whose presence in the streets of the capitol — that week, of all weeks — must have given the city the look and feel of a police state.

One of Pluto in Capricorn’s dark potentials is totalitarianism. Since the transit began, a new meme has entered the American visual vocabulary: that of heavily armed “security” forces swarming into some patriotic hot spot. Whether in a movie (“White House Down”) or on the news (the official reaction to the Boston Marathon bombing), this aspect of Cardinal Cross symbolism is increasingly visible in the USA.

The lunar cycle, having begun in destruction (Pluto) and shock (Uranus), is waxing as I write. Its culmination will be the on October 18^th: a lunar eclipse, the first of a series. Washington watchers will recognize that the debt ceiling deadline is the day before, October 17^th.

All Saints

We know about Full Moons that they have the power to illuminate like a klieg light; this power is enhanced at eclipses. October 18th and the solar eclipse that follows it on Nov 3^rd have the astrological clout to clarify the meaning of these recent shocks to the collective system.

As 2013 begins to wind down, transit trackers are focusing on the fourth exactitude of the Uranus-Pluto square that takes place in the wee small hours (PDT) as Halloween segues into All Saints’ Day (my lecture on the meaning of Old Samhain, as the Celts called it, can be found here). In the blogs we will continue to track what pops up as this season of breakdown unfolds. In the Skywatches we will discuss their personal implications.