Ring of Fire

There was an earthquake last night here in San Francisco. It felt like the Earth was shuddering from the violence occurring on the other side of the globe.

It was the eve of the Blood Moon. Full Moons like this are said to bring to light to that which has been lying dormant. The light could arrive as a flash of understanding, or as a burst of blazing and blinding.

It has arrived this month in an orgy of suffering.

Symbols

Decoding planetary patterns can help us understand a lot. But they are, after all, just symbols. They spell out the cosmic lessons in play. It is not their job to tell us what to do. When sucker-punched by horrors like the ones happening now in the Middle East, it is up to us humans to either respond or react.

Alas, when blood is flowing and hearts are breaking, most don’t take the time to respond. They react.

Carnage shock

The transits of October laid out their themes with jarring explicitness. Uranus, the planet of explosions, has been on top of the Sun in the chart of Israel (at right) for a while now. When Mars (weaponry) moved into position, it made for a geopolitical Molotov cocktail.

Mars dominated the sky on October 7th at 6:31 am, when the crisis began. The war planet was dawning over Israel’s Ascendant, and it was powered by Pluto — at peak strength as it geared up for a station — in an aspect known for kill-or-be-killed dynamics. When imbalanced, a Pluto-fueled Mars can only end in destruction.

The way it’s used is the problem, not the planet. At its highest level of expression, Mars expresses as raw courage. And Pluto, at its highest, breaks down outworn forms in order to break us through stagnant situations. The two of them can wrench us out of an untenable impasse by lethal ultimatum.

From the transpersonal point of view, this is the intention of brutal moments in human history.

But down here on the Earth plane, cosmic intention is painfully hard to see, let alone to enact. Rare indeed is the person who can follow the transpersonal path when it’s shrouded in the fog of war. It’s especially hard for us to see it en masse. Once we’re in the throes of the collective mind, if we’re hit in the gut we come back from the gut.

In a configuration like that of Oct 7th, at left, Mars (testosterone) pumps Pluto (life-and-death) full of adrenaline. Whatever is already happening gets cranked up to operatic extremes. In the absence of consciousness, aggression becomes homicide. Over the long term, homicide becomes genocide.(1)

Homeland insecurity

Across from Pluto in the 10/7 chart, Mars is skewered by the Moon (homeland) in Cancer, where it is at its most defensive and tribal. A few days later, on Oct 11th, Mars moved into Scorpio, whose unintegrated expression is revenge.

Low-level Mars in Scorpio can infect the hive mind like an audience baying for blood at a Liam Neesom movie.

With the backing of its U.S. and European allies Israel is preparing to launch not only a scorched earth campaign in Gaza but the worst ethnic cleansing since the wars in the former Yugoslavia.– Chris Hedges 10/22

Unconscious Mars is being personified right now by partisans everywhere who are rooting to widen the bloodbath. Their goal is not to avoid conflict but to avoid resolution. Washington’s initial reaction to the crisis, typical of unalloyed Mars, was short on nuance:

Calls for a ceasefire, the White House press secretary declared, are “repugnant.” State Department employees have even been instructed to avoid mentioning the terms “de-escalation/ceasefire,” “end to violence/bloodshed” and “restoring calm.” — Peace and Planet News 

Rubble into rubble

Netanyahu and his supporters have every reason to hope that, in many quarters, grief and blind rage in the wake of the Hamas massacres will push his own corruptions out of the news cycle. His strategy is to answer one atrocity with another. Indeed, with many, many others.

Who are these many, many others? As of 10/29, 8,000+ Gazans have been killed (but the figure goes up hourly; the Israeli army is just getting started), thousands of them children. Civilians did not perpetrate the terrible deeds of October 7th but they are the target, because outrage must have a target.

The American public should be familiar with this maneuver. After 9/11 we allowed Bush to rush off to invade a country that had nothing to do with the attack on the twin towers. Too crazed with revenge to trouble ourselves with the guilt or innocence of our targets, we sent our war machine into Afghanistan – one of the most desperately impoverished places in the world, as Gaza is — and bombed away.

(Although he had voted for the invasion at the time, Biden admitted the other day that, oops, that had been sort of a mistake).

Evil

Remember Dubya’s war cry back then, cribbed from WWII? “The Axis of Evil”, with its dramatic Biblical undertones, was a phrase dark and juicy enough to undercut all those pesky rational arguments against invading Iraq.

Uncle Joe has been pushing the same fire-and-brimstone button as he beats the drum for Israel. Now, it’s the Palestinians who are “pure evil.”

It’s a word that proudly touts its own ignorance, glossed with moral grandeur. Since time immemorial, kings and churchmen have invoked the Devil to manipulate public opinion. Modern-day politicians just delete the “D.”

Calling an enemy evil is a consciousness deadener. It frightens the credulous among us and infantilizes everybody. We become ethically dumbed-down, disabused of any need to cultivate our natal Jupiters – that is, our inborn responsibility for developing an independent moral stance. If our religion or government has already informed us — in quick & digestible terms, as with a stick-figure sketch  — who is evil and who isn’t, why bother to develop a conscience?

[The battle with Hamas is] a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle. — Netanyahu, , in a tweet  that was later removed

The other day ol’ Joe came up with a more secular pitch. It was, if anything, even more stupid-making. He referred to the belligerents in the Middle East as “teams.” During his bear-hug meet with Netanyahu, a perpetrator of the longest ethnic cleansing operation in modern history, he opined that “the other team” must have caused that contested hospital explosion in Gaza on 10/17.

It’s hard to know which is more repugnant: the good-vs.-evil trope or the opposing-sides-at-a-spectator-sport metaphor. 

Propaganda

Israel is a nation-state. It is doing what a lot of nation-states have done throughout the history of nation-states. It is wiping out, or otherwise removing, the indigenous population of the territory it has conquered. It has been doing this for 75 years. The indigenous population, i.e., the Palestinians, have been trying not to get completely wiped out, or otherwise removed from their indigenous territory, and lashing out at Israel in a variety of ways (i.e., from throwing stones to committing mass murder). That is what is happening. The rest is PR. Public relations. Propaganda. — – C. J. Hopkins 

If you are acquainted with the modern history of the Middle East, you will not be surprised by the one-sidedness of the mass media right now. The superpowers who are climbing all over each other pledging undying allegiance to Israel are the modern incarnations of those who created it back in WWI.

In the USA, every public figure who wants to keep their career is jumping on the bandwagon. This includes Biden & his posse, and Trump & his posse. It includes RFK Jr. It includes the woke and the anti-woke. Goddess help us, it even includes Playboy Magazine, that great bastion of human dignity, who denounced a former bunny for declaring support for Palestine). (2)

In the most toxic twist of this strange-bedfellows scenario, we find radical Zionists joining forces with far-right American anti-Semites. The ultimate unholy alliance.(3) 

As is usual in a war climate, free speech is hanging on by a thread. The corporate media has the knives out for anybody who dares to speak up for Palestine from any angle. The Onion sums it up with bitter humor:

Q: How many people have died? A: That depends on whether you count Palestinian deaths as well.

Q: Am I allowed to be sad for all of the victims? A: Absolutely not. You have to pick a side..

Q: Where can I learn more? A: This is a logistically and morally complex situation involving decades of recent history and thousands of years of context, so try your cousin’s Instagram stories. – The Onion 

Ignorance holes

But despite the stupefyingly reductionistic way the disaster is being presented on the news, many of us are crawling out of our ignorance holes. We are learning things about the politics of the region that we never knew.

Such as how Netanyahu has been quietly propping up Hamas for some time, in order to prevent any other Palestinian government from succeeding in establishing a Palestinian state.

We might be learning about Uncle Sam’s involvement, not just about the billions of armaments we pump into Israel but about the failed CIA coup in Palestine in 2008 that was part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs.

We might be digging even deeper into the history of these ancient lands. And the further back in time we go, the less black-and-white things look. As Gabor Mate and others have been reminding us, back when the Romans invaded, many Jews stayed put, becoming “Palestinians.” It is well known that genetically and historically, the two “teams” are cousins. 

Libra

What are we to make of the extraordinary showing of Libra in the chart October 7th 2023? How can a vicious war be inaugurated by the sign of peace?

This seeming paradox derives from a misunderstanding of how signs work. Libra doesn’t create peace any more than Capricorn creates career success or Cancer creates security. It is we humans who are responsible for where along the spectrum a given archetype expresses itself. Transits manifest at whatever level the mass mind is capable of manifesting them.

Libra, doubly emphasized in the “Ring of Fire” eclipse on 10/14, is as likely to use disequilibrium as equilibrium as a teaching device. This is the sign of the balance-imbalance polarity, and right now, with Mars as its masthead, its klieg light is trained upon the asymmetrical warfare in Gaza.

A country with a state-of-the-art war machine is pitted against a destitute occupied population with no mechanized units, air force, navy, missiles or heavy artillery. Or water or food or internet.

The law

The law is one way humanity has tried to answer the great Libran questions. International law, in particular, is a worthy attempt to inject sanity into the madness of war. Most of the UN’s legalisms, such as the outlawing of war crimes, strike us as intuitive. They reflect simple human decency, and are all but universally agreed upon.

But they are models only. Libra, an air sign, traffics in concepts and ideals. Interpretating them is up to us.

Take the definition of national self-defense. Does Israel’s right to defend itself, usually intended in the case of an external aggressor, legally apply when it’s against an imprisoned internal population? Does an occupied population have a legal right to defend itself against its military occupiers (according to the UN, it does)?

What about the laws that many countries adopt to criminalize Holocaust denial. Are there similar laws against Naqba denial? Remarkably, in Israel, there’s an opposite law. Mentioning the Naqba there is a crime.

Perhaps the most heinous expression of distorted Libra is collective punishment, listed by the UN as a war crime. The general public wholeheartedly agrees, at least when we see it fictionalized. We are justifiably outraged when, for example, we watch Nazis in a war movie avenging the killing of a single German soldier by executing twenty French villagers.

The use of collective punishment by Washington and its allies seems to elicit far less revulsion.

The Libra ladder

The astrological point of a transit is to squeeze mass consciousness into an elevated state, into a subtler version of the sign in question. How might we advance a rung upwards on the Libra ladder?

This is the sign of quid-pro-quos. The very lowest rung of this archetype is seeing everything in terms of one side vs. the other, permanently opposed. Every problem met by taking-an-eye-for-an-eye.

But we all know that that just makes the whole world blind. If our goal is to arrest the cycle of suffering, we have to climb further up the ladder. Our impulse to punish must be considered with great care.

Original nightmare

The world’s reaction to Hamas’s atrocities has several layers.  One is the immediate sense of horror and outrage with which decent people everywhere react to violence against innocents in general. And the belief that perpetrators must take responsibility for such acts.

A deeper layer has to do with the collective trauma that abides within the Israeli national identity specifically. The horrible events of October 7th have ruptured a wound of monumental, paradigmatic victimization, which, though it goes back centuries, was epitomized in WWII by the nightmare of the Shoah.

This trauma has yet to be healed in the world soul. Unhealed, it remains in the form of travesties like the implacable animus between the state of Israel and the indigenous inhabitants of that region, an animus so entrenched as to be institutionalized in state apartheid.

         We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”– Yoav Gallant, Israel’s minister of defense

Attempts to resolve this baked-in antipathy with pragmatic approaches or geopolitical logic have not worked, because they do not address its collective unconscious dimension.

The Holocaust is the elephant in the room.

Mythic narrative

The Nazi program is the most widely deplored atrocity in modern history, and it lives on as a mythic narrative. (Not “mythic” in the sense of false; just the opposite. Myths are the glue of the group soul, enshrined because they hold truths too important to forget.) Nazism lives on in various twisted iterations, such as in the minds of white nationalists and in the fantasies of S&M cos-players.

Most particularly, it lives on in the collective unconscious of Israel, whose policies have been motivated by it ever since.

Perhaps in some distorted version of the myth, the Nakba is seen as compensating for the horrors of WWII. The unconscious logic, which of course isn’t logic at all, seems to be that because German war criminals themselves can’t be punished, being already dead, someone else must stand in for commensurate retribution. Heated debates with apologists of Israel’s current policies invariably end up referencing the Nazis, as a tacit justification for their country’s own monstrosities.

In an expression of Jungian enantiodromia, the Gaza Strip has been made into an open-air concentration camp.

Antisemitism

Israel’s inhumanities towards its neighbors have not, of course, done a thing to eradicate antisemitism, a hardy and widespread poison. It is alive and thriving, including among supporters of Palestine. But the struggle against it is hindered, not helped, by hurling accusations reactively and indiscriminately.

In the current feverish moment, even dedicated humanitarians among the peace and social justice workers in Israel are being condemned as anti-Semites, for daring to protest their government’s policies. This is not just an ethical but a tactical mistake. The irresponsible use of such a serious charge weakens and delegitimizes its just use.

Peace

What would it look like to climb a little higher up the Libra ladder?

Libra has rulership over peace initiatives, but not all peace initiatives deserve the term. For decades we have seen diplomatic proposals, most recently the Abraham Accords, that are only nominally about bringing an end to the conflict in the Middle East. Most of them have been cynical measures instigated by the same old vested interests, intent on maintaining the status quo.

The UN, despite its tragic imperfections, is a more sincere approximation of the Libran ideal: a world court that aspires to rise above geopolitical bias. Looking even higher up the Libran ladder, we might nominate the South African Truth and Reconciliation system. Such grassroots councils take the radical step of having each group of antagonists listen to and empathize with the other.

Palestinian rights and the struggle against antisemitism should be part of the same struggle.  – Slavo Zizek

Libra, an air sign (concept) with a glyph made up of two parts, is about the paradox of duality being a version of unity. Libra is always looking for ways to make two separate entities work together as a single unit. Its revelations arise when both sides of a polarity recognize that they are reflections of each other.

Try this in your personal life, with your alter egos.

Envision

The Libran vision is the primary theme encoded by these October skies. But a vision is not the same thing as a manifest reality. A sign is not a set of circumstances.

Air signs, especially, do not traffic in material reality. They are about mental constructs, such as the Libran concept of perfect balance. In order to show up in real life, that vision must be channeled through us flawed human beings. It has to navigate our personal and collective pains and prejudices.

You don’t have to follow astrology to feel the cosmic gauntlet being thrown down right now. The world moment is crying out to be heard by each of us. We can try to shut it out, and close our hearts to it, but psychically it will reach us anyway.

Let us allow ourselves to feel what is going on, to feel it in our body, mind and heart. Accepting the reality of what’s happening is the first step in the process of knowing how to respond. This response may be one of acts, ideas, resources or emotions, depending on our individual make-up. Whatever form it takes, if it’s dictated from our psychic center, it will be a creative response.

This is the way each of us contributes to the world.

………..

Notes

1)  It is noteworthy that under these same skies, two films appeared addressing another example of ethnic cleansing that Americans may find hitting closer to home: Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” and Ken Burns’ series on the buffalo.

2) The mainstream media has attracted a lot of skepticism lately. Americans all along the political spectrum have a beef with its bias, but few seem to notice its selectivity: that is, not just how things are reported but what is considered newsworthy enough to get reported in the first place. This second problem is the more telling, because it is invisible: how can we know what is left unmentioned? Who decides what global tragedies deserve global attention, and thus our sympathy?

We don’t hear much about the carnage in South Sudan, for example, and it certainly isn’t because there are fewer casualties there or because the people there are suffering less. “Some places, like Nagorno-Karabakh, in the far corners of the South Caucasus, are tragically easy for the world to forget, until they explode. Others, like Israel and Palestine, are always on the world’s mind, and they also explode.”– Dahlia Scheindlin 

3) One of the loudest factions “standing by Israel” are the Christian groups gearing up for spiritual war. They seem to see this as another Crusade that will lead to their occupation of Jerusalem.