“’My country, right or wrong’ is a thing that no true patriot would think of saying… It is like saying ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’” -- G. K. Chesterton This month the Saturn-Uranus opposition officially goes into orb. After the Equinox (9/22 8:46 am PDT) the transit’s impact on humanity will become stronger and stronger, and its worldly parallels more and more obvious. So will its impact on the metabolic, mental and emotional bodies of individuals. This is the most important mundane transit of the rest of the calendar year, and our goal should be to mine it for understanding.

To conscientious Americans it is nothing short of unbelievable; to international observers it is beyond insanity. The group of militarists who brought us the War in Iraq are actually getting ready to attack Iran. Apparently willing and eager to follow up the most notorious military blunder since Viet Nam with another whose outcome promises to be downright dystopic, Washington has put the bulwark in place in the Eastern bloc to launch the assault.1 It is a scenario right out of Stanley

Saturn Direct This month Saturn is direct again, climbing up through the early degrees of Virgo. Readers whose natal charts contain a planet in this degree range will feel a pinch they may remember quite well -- from last October, and then again in February -- when Saturn was in this same place.  But you aren’t in the same place, are you?

If you woke up suddenly out of stage-four sleep, with no idea in the world what time it was, which hand of the clock would you look at first?  If you are like most of the denizens of Earth who have learned how to tell time the old-fashioned way,1 your eyes would naturally seek out the short little hour hand. In astrology, the transits that correspond to the hour hand of a clock are those of the mysterious outer planets.

Last winter, the astrologer Ted Denmark hit the nail on the head: “2007 will be the last normal year.  We are now in the whirlwind of the big economic storm like going down a slide--there's no turning back.” Though Pluto will be tending to the last flickers of the Sagittarian flame until late 2008, the portents of its entry into Capricorn have been astonishingly obvious since it made the big crossing on January 25th.1 And we would expect no less.

Well, it happened like clockwork. Cosmic clockwork. Just as Pluto entered Capricorn, the sign of financial infrastructures, the economy hit the skids. Pluto's job is to expose the rot in the areas governed by the sign it’s in. The last time this planet changed signs, its impact was similarly immediate: in the mid-nineties, as soon as it went into Sagittarius (religion), the pedophile priest scandal broke. The time before that, within days of its ingress into Scorpio (sex and death) in the mid-eighties, AIDS hit the headlines.

The Mars- Pluto opposition reaches exactitude again on March 6th- 7th. What might we expect from the second go-round of this notorious transit? Before we venture into the guessing game of “What’s going to happen?,” let us consider once again the nature of cosmic laws, which are never boring; given that they are utterly consistent and, at the same time, completely inscrutable.

On January 25th, Pluto entered Capricorn. When the Tiny Little Planet of Great Big Power crossed that line into the first degree of Capricorn, humanity was introduced, once again, to a new chapter in its evolution.  Pluto’s tenure through this no-nonsense earth sign will restructure humanity’s vision for about 15 years.