It’s like finding a piece of rotting meat in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator. We put it there ourselves, and then forgot about it.

Transits like this one trigger events that are often very unpleasant. Uranus and Pluto are exactly square in the sky, as I write. It’s the 6^th out of seven times this historic transit (2012-15) has been exact to the degree. The last time will be in March 2015.⁽¹⁾

When a transit this potent makes a precise hit, the several weeks on either side are buzzed up with a sense of destiny. Wrenching shifts (Uranus) tend to occur, both in our own personal lives and in society at large. The square alerts us to something that’s in decay (Pluto) and needs to be gotten rid of.⁽²⁾

Hear ye, hear ye

The release on December 8^th of the CIA torture report was one of these cosmic alerts. It forced into the public conversation something we were pretending not to know, something unsavory in the body politic. Dianne Feinstein, whose Cancer Sun cluster overlaps that of the USA, almost single-handedly dragged it through layers of official secrecy into the light.

In this context she is personifying Prometheus, whom astrologer Rick Tarnas has proposed as a Uranus figure. Feinstein has Uranus conjunct her Ascendant right now, and her gesture was a perfect fit for the symbolism. Prometheus, the mythic fire-stealer, dared to break rank with the Olympian establishment. He gave up his exalted place among the gods in order to give us — humanity — a gift without which we wouldn’t have evolved.

Feinstein too defied the establishment, and for the same ends. She persevered despite all the resistance and harassment the CIA and the White House could throw at her. I have never been a fan of the Senator, but I’m not evaluating her here as a politician. I’m congratulating her for channeling an archetype.

The connections between her natal chart and the USA’s, and between it and the current transits, are astonishing. From a transpersonal point of view, she did what she did because she had no other choice.⁽³⁾

The report went public the day Jupiter (truth, publication) made a station.⁽⁴⁾

Stain on the fabric

Senator Feinstein called the interrogation practices outlined in the report a “stain” on the country’s values. This is a Plutonian concept: when something taints or defiles the organism of which it’s a part. Pluto’s job is to target whatever is at risk of fatally polluting the greater whole.

The USA has a couple more years to be thus targeted, and then several more to assimilate it. Rising to the challenge will be no small feat, given Washington’s appalling lack of political imagination. Using its Jupiterian emphasis⁽⁵⁾in the least inspired way possible, Uncle Sam usually defaults to unconditional righteousness. Government spokes-flacks can be counted on to cloak even the most heinous of crimes with a spin that boils down to “My country, right or wrong.”

But it’s a posture that comes from an earlier era, and in this complicated world it cannot work. To hear the idiotic sputterings of Fox News pundits as they tried to defend the CIA (“[Feinstein] is just trying to tear down our awesome country”) was to bear witness to the moral vacancy, in the 20-teens, of reflexive, brain-dead patriotism.

The transits above are changing the game. Next year will bring more anomalous flashes of Uranus in the body politic, for the US and other countries of the world, as Uranus in Aries (popular dissent) dukes it out with Pluto in Capricorn (governments).

Right now, let us raise a solstice toast to Senator Feinstein, whose courage in this instance modeled that of high-level Aries, the sign on her Ascendant.

Notes

1 As transit trackers know, the period we’re in right now got its start in the mid-1960s. That was when Uranus and Pluto conjoined in the sky, inaugurating the cycle. That conjunction was analogous to a New Moon; the square now is its First Quarter.

2 The USA is getting pummeled by the Uranus-Pluto square this year and next. I’ll be talking about this at the San Francisco Astrological Society on Dec.28^th.

3 The exact degree of the Moon in the torture report chart is contingent on the exact time of its release, which I don’t know, but it was somewhere in Cancer, hitting one of the USA’s four Cancer planet.

4 I discuss the trials and blessings of those who channel Uranus in my webinar, “Understanding Uranus.”

5 Jupiter conjunct the Sun, and Sagittarius rising (discussed in detail in Soul-Sick Nation.)