America’s Search for Security
Saturn will be conjoining our country’s Sun and our president’s Sun over the next several months and will spend two years in the sign of its detriment. Now is the time to sweep away the cobwebs around Saturn’s lore and dispense with some superstitions.
To work properly, Saturn’s function should express the principles of consistency, practicality and preservation. But the core meanings of a symbol can become lost in the translation from archetype to societal expression. There has been a lot of bad press and confused thinking about Saturn’s modern face, and looking at it through the lens of the old planetary laws raises some interesting questions.
Soldiers of Misfortune: Contrivance vs. Reality in the U.S. Military
The USA has never excepted itself from the timeworn tradition whereby a nation uses its poor people to fight its wars. When country calls, the underemployed and underpaid flood into the front lines, while young folks with connections to power and money tend to be busy doing other things. In dictatorships as well as in putative democracies, the fact that foot-soldiers are disproportionately drawn from the working and indigent classes is almost universally accepted as an uncondoned reality. Hardly anybody talks about it except socialists and sociologists. The media discusses the make-up of the military almost not at all, pandering instead to a vague, unexamined consensual presumption that we who share the same landmass are more or less equally likely to die in its name.
Halloween and the Veil Between the Worlds
Halloween arrives with the brisk autumn wind, when our sensibilities are undergoingthe same subtle but profound changes as Nature herself. The energy in theair is ambivalent, prickling with unease but alive with the promise ofconnecting us to life in a new way, a deeper way. Halloween reminds usof the existence of powers we cannot see, and yet still somehow understand.
Thekeen sense of nostalgia many of us feel at this time of year may be dueto cellular memory, which keeps us in touch with Halloween’s long, richhistory. Archaic collective imagery of a very special kind
Children of the Moon
The recent black-out in New York City got me thinking about how rarely we get to experience a pure, velvety black night sky, studded with Moon and stars, shimmering with information. These days we city dwellers may even forget the Moon is there, unless we catch a glimpse of her as she rises between buildings, her magical luminosity not quite drowned out by the city’s electric lights.
Though the Moon is a universal icon, ubiquitous in our romantic language, in our psychology, literature and popular song, millions of us never actually see her. But there was a time when the Moon was humanity’s primary religious and temporal reference point, as comforting as a child’s nightlight, mysterious as a sovereign goddess.
Saturn on America’s Sun: We Meet the World Outside our Borders
The planet Saturn is potent this year. It is orbiting in perihelion — as close to the Sun as it gets– with a peak period in July 2003. In this state of maximized strength, Saturn will ingress into Cancer in early June, which means that for the next couple of years, all charts with Cancer planets have an appointment with their karma.
Saturn, governor of karma, completes its turn around the zodiac every 28 years, necessitating the native to reap that which he or she (or it) has sown. There is nothing mysterious about the operation of this law. It is one of the least opaque principles in metaphysics.
The Cowboy Hat vs. the Black Beret
“There may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.”
The New York Times, WASHINGTON, Feb.16, 2003
Saddam and Bush: one would think it was a showdown at the OK Corral, two guys, two guns, and a dusty street lined with spectators. The media is presenting the proposed war as if it were all about these two guys; as if all we needed was to see their picture often enough and know what they had for breakfast, and we’d understand what was happening.
Clock Time vs. Cosmic Time: What good is telling time, if it is an illusion?
As astrologers, we are the appointed timekeepers of metaphysics. Throughout history we have been the jealous guardians of the astrolabe, the hourglass, the ephemeris and the computer tables, clocks and calendars which use the sky to tell what time it is. Sky calendars are our lingua franca. Yet we must grapple with a basic conundrum: clock time and calendar time do not exist in cosmic reality. This is one of those things that is obvious once you think about it. But we don’t usually think about it.
Ever since humans have been on earth, they have been looking up, gazing at the sky, tracking time. The Julian Calendar used so widely today is a very recent invention. So are all linear calendars.
America’s Crisis of Maturity
Ours is a notoriously immature culture. One could even go so far as to say we pride ourselves on our adolescent ethos. Youth is king; juvenility is cool. Our president was not offended when he was portrayed as a comic-book super-hero on the cover of the satirical German magazine Der Spiegel. He was flattered.
Our mass obsession with physical youthfulness has been widely noted; the very word “mature” has become a euphemism for “no longer young and beautiful”. But far more insidious is the damage our cult of immaturity has inflicted upon the non-physical aspects of our beings. As a group, we lack a maturity of mind and soul.
America’s Crisis of Maturity: The Saturn/Pluto Factor
Poor old Saturn, the planet of responsibility, is usually quite narrowly considered. We tend to think of its lessons as material tasks and calls to filial duty: I must go to work on Monday morning; I must call Grandma on Tuesday; I must settle down and become a parent before I’m thirty.
But Saturn has to do with being grown-up in all arenas of life. Its recent duet with Pluto has intensified the question of what it means to mature in all of our human roles, not just the immediate ones.
Limiting the Dark, Deepening the Light: The Saturn-Pluto Opposition
The Flaming Arrow
Astrologers have been talking for years about the likelihood of holy wars during Pluto’s tenure in Sagittarius, the sign of religion. On September 11, the fiery arrow that is this sign’s symbol took the form of a speeding airplane (Sagittarius again) crashing into New York’s proud mercantile towers.