The Cardinal Cross is alive and well.

Our old friend the Uranus-Pluto square is now past exactitude⁽¹⁾ but still feisty. Every time a third planet passes through its zone of degrees, sudden storms arise.⁽²⁾ 

Transit trackers will have noticed the way the seasonal portals ignite the Cross. Since 2010, every equinox and solstice has functioned as a trigger.

The same thing has happened, often even more explosively, when any of the other planets has moved into a cardinal sign. This month it’s Mars and Mercury. Mars in Libra sets off the Cross between Dec. 6^th and 11^th. Mercury will do the same, from Capricorn, Dec. 19^th -21^st.

With each hit, a chord will be struck, in you and everybody you know. Every sentient being will revisit the storms and upsets for which the Cross is notorious. It’s a déjà vu — but not an exact repetition, because each time we’ve learned more.

Getting hip

Every trigger transit is a personal invitation to get clearer. No matter how well we think we already get what the Cross wants us to get, we’re nudged to go deeper.

The many iterations of the Cardinal Cross since 2008 are reflections of the fact that we’ve created an unsustainable world. ⁽³⁾ Everybody knows this. On some level of awareness, we all know we can’t go on this way. The Cross has been a crash course in mass consciousness.

The same thing goes for each of us, as individuals. We wouldn’t have incarnated when we did unless we’d wanted to wise up.⁽⁴⁾ The gap between what our souls know and the way we act is way too wide. Our higher selves were fed up with being asleep.

Every time there’s a trigger, like those of this month, it’s the cosmos trying to get us to bring our everyday selves a little closer to the ideal selves symbolized by our birth chart.

Mars kicks the Cross

To get a sense of what to watch for, think about what kind of events have been churned up over the past three years. Ask yourself what changes have rocked your world. These may have been actual happenings, psychological insights or spiritual breakthroughs.

Isolate the themes. Try to identify them with words. Having them in mind will help when they rear their heads again this month.

Of the various fleeting transits that can trigger the Cross, Mars’s are usually the most obvious. These come the first half of December. It can seem  like somebody kicked a live grenade.

We can expect big dramas peaking on the 6^th – 7^th when Mars exactly squares Pluto, and on the 10^th – 11^th when Mars exactly opposes Uranus. These will probably arise as a single event or circumstance, but let’s look at them one by one.

For the first peak, a power struggle may arise. This is a test of our ability to put our ego (Mars) at the service of some kind of makeover (Pluto) that needs to happen. The second peak pits against each other the two most selfish planets in the sky (Mars and Uranus), which, for many people, provokes a defiant outburst. But don’t waste the transit by playing the hotshot teenager. Use it for getting into the open whatever has been festering, and for breaking free from an oppressive situation.

Keep the door open

Right now Uranus and Pluto are only two degrees apart: 16 Aries and 14 Capricorn. Locate these in your natal chart and get ready for the themes to come calling. They may just tap at the door of your awareness, seeking recognition. If they’ve been ignored in the past, they may start pounding.

If you’ve been trying to shut down to them  — a really bad idea — they may break through the door with a battering ram, vindicating all the scary things you’ve read about them online.

But that wouldn’t be their first choice. All they really want is to wake you up.

Notes:

1 Exactitude in this case means the period during which the angle between these planets was exactly 90 degrees, with zero orb. This happened seven times between June 2012 and March 16 of this year.

2 In general we can consider the Cardinal Cross years as extending from 2008 – 2023. But your own chart may skew the timing earlier or later, because a natal planet’s relationship to the transit is a far more precise indicator of when it feels most intense. In general, the first four years gave us a series of intense Grand Crosses that splashed the main themes of the era in our faces addressed in my lecture series). Now we’re in the assimilation phase, individually and collectively: trying to digest the Cross’s key lessons.

3 A recent article by Bill Herbst puts the Uranus-Pluto square in historical context (Mountain Astrologer Magazine, Dec ‘15-Jan ’16 issue.)

4 In what particular areas? The houses and aspects of your natal placements will tell you. Check your chart, or have an astrologer do it.

Sea storm by J. W. Turner

Dancer photo by Tarun Vishwa

Nocturnal seascape by Joseph Rebell

Mural thanks to Seth of Montreal

If anyone knows who painted the marvelous black-paint-daub crowd (last image), please contact us so we may credit the artist.