Wise souls--innocence worth nurturing.. |
“The wise have no mind of their
own, finding it in the minds
Of ordinary people.
They’re good to good people and they're good to bad people.
Power is goodness.
They trust people of good faith and they trust people of bad faith.
Power is trust.
They mingle their life with the
world, they mix their mind up
with the
world.
Ordinary people look after
them.
Wise souls are children.”
—Ursula K. LeGuin, Lao Tzu Tao Te Ching
The halls of power in this nation
seem so bereft of wise souls these days, but I refuse to despair because great
reserves of wisdom and true power are everywhere to see in “ordinary people”—in
peaceful protesters animated by childlike confidence that the righteous, loving
change they envision is do-able; in voters who wait for hours in the heat and
rain to cast their precious ballots, and in those who celebrate, instead of rage,
at the successes of others unlike themselves.
I’ve often wondered why major
dimensions of human life and society like race
and class—so much in the news
right now and so much about these “ordinary people”—always seemed difficult to
discern in an astrological chart. Meaning that there is no one planet that seems to directly speak to these issues, despite
their clear importance to humanity. It’s occurred to me over time that
astrology’s roots in ancient civilizations must have something to do with this.
Think about what life was like for
the masses of people in those foundational times: in most places, there were
“demigod”-like (Sun) rulers who basically controlled their societies’ resources
(like gold, silver, copper-Sun, Moon, Venus) sent their armies
(Mars)
abroad to conquer new territories and peoples (enslaving the vanquished as they
did), and shared a portion of the spoils with their courtiers (Mercury),
artists and functionaries (Venus, Saturn) and “wise men” (Jupiter - the educated
priestly class, including astrologers) to keep them loyal and dependent. They
weren’t even aware of the most distant collective planets (Uranus, Neptune, Pluto),
so the larger-than-life forces that accounted for so many of the perils and
mysteries of life at that time were simply explained away by the Ruler’s
special relationship with “the Divine,” or were expressed in their mythologies.
Feudalism & slavery were equivalent systems in Europe. |
And then, there was everyone else (Moon)—the peasant class
who didn’t own land or other tangible property, a lack which consigned them to
the common state of feudal poverty and absolute disempowerment: if they didn’t
become fodder for wars that served their rulers’ interests, then they labored
in the land-owners’ fields, in deadly mines or worse. Slaves served in ruling
class homes and fields and built infrastructures, including the rulers’
all-important tombs and monuments. Always prone to the whims of the “gods,” their
ruling class spokespeople and the limitations of wrenching poverty, life for
these masses was, as Thomas Hobbes
famously said, “nasty, brutish and short.”
This description surely
oversimplifies human history, but common themes regarding the distribution of
power and resources run throughout history and across all cultures. It’s no
mystery that the great civilizations—Mesopotamia/Babylonia, Greece, Rome,
Egypt—were all built on the backs of the masses, often with a religious
pretext—if not to serve the pre-Christian gods and their unquenchable demands
for sacrifice, then to serve the “glory of God” as conceived by whatever Church
ruled the day. Liberating and nurturing human potential was never a ruling class priority; this humanist
concern wasn’t even on the radar screen of governments until the Enlightenment
period in Europe, which spawned the great 18th century democratic
revolutions in France and the U.S..
Still, the “peculiar institution” of
slavery persisted because of its economic utility, so only some humans benefited from that period. For the sake of augmenting
the congressional representation of rural southern states, slaves were counted
as three-fifths of a person; for the
sake of their own interests and
dreams, slaves were listed as property
and treated as such.
Over time many Christian churches
preached the “curse of
Ham” as a biblical pretext for condoning black slavery, which when examined
closely doesn’t make any sense and was probably altered over time to mean what
such slavery boosters wanted it to mean.
So it’s not difficult to see why equality
has been so elusive in America and why this primal blind spot in humanity (Chiron)
as been so difficult to heal. Over time, an engrained cultural disdain for
blacks and an ancestral sense of white superiority evolved into a dogma that reinforced
this bias, teaching that blacks were put
on this Earth to serve those “better” than themselves. Transmitted and kept
alive via family and culture as almost a matter of “genetic heritage,” (Saturn-Pluto)
such ideas then spread “virally” (Mercury-Neptune-Jupiter) via
information channels, rumor, religious doctrine and through the norms and
practices codified into local laws (Saturn-i.e., the Jim Crow laws).
In
times of tremendous tension, these deep-rooted sentiments have exploded into view, often through
hysterical fear-mongering, which this nation's sordid history with lynch mobs certainly reflects (Neptune-Pluto).
Societies have, through these fears
and self-serving instinctual biases, created
ghetto-like conditions of systemic poverty for black communities, and since to
live with no ability to fulfill one’s potential is a sure recipe for disaster
(to individuals and to communities), those
conditions never fail to produce crime, which is answered by further outcries
from fearful white communities, and even more disastrously, by corporate and
government disinvestment (Saturn-Pluto), which only
exacerbates the blight, structural decline and intense hardship.
Those who
point to the “social contract” as the reason why today’s demands and actions by
protesters are unreasonable need to consider that this “contract” (Jupiter-Saturn)
has been based on the unwritten, but heavily enforced assumption that black
communities should accept their precarious, unequal, second-class citizenship
without question or complaint, or suffer the consequences for not doing so. All through our history,
any behavior that vigilantes or the police could interpret as a black person
“Getting above himself” has been an excuse for brutality, for “putting him in
his place.” Does that sound like a contract anyone
would sign on to?
Needless to say, delusion and
deception (Neptune) often play a role in perpetuating the deep biases that
people feel compelled to cloak in some kind of socially acceptable institution—
religion, as we’ve seen, but even more disturbingly, law enforcement.
Long decades of policy focus on “law and order” (often
a “dog whistle” for police abuse) have only deepened the vicious cycle of
injustice and the ravaging
of black communities, by incarcerating (Saturn, Neptune) far too
many mothers and fathers not just unjustly (often with extreme sentences that
signal a double standard for whites and blacks), but unproductively for society in general. We are only choking off the
vitality of our overall “body politic” by choking off such an important “organ”
within that body.
Pluto and Chiron are guiding us as we heal our ancestral wounds. |
White and black Americans need
each other in more ways than we can probably imagine—there’s no going back,
and with Pluto hovering so near its return position in the Sibly
chart, the stakes are enormous for healing this ancestral Wound. Pluto is now transiting square Sibly Chiron in Aries—it’s time to get this right.
So, while one planet alone is not
designated to rule racism, the dynamics of
the phenomenon are definitely covered by the same planets that govern human
hearts and minds and the mechanisms with which we design and run our societies.
Perhaps in trying to understand current
events through this astrological frame, we will be able to tease out more than
the usual information from the relevant charts. The more dramatic the events,
the more starkly clear and discernible the dynamics are in a chart. It’s also
key that we’re considering racial justice-related charts within the context of American society—we have founding
documents, constitutional amendments and Supreme Court cases that speak to all
of these issues and can be factored into the discussion over time. Before we
get started with actual charts, however, let’s frame the discussion with some
important context:
- -
The roles racial and ethnic minorities have
historically played in American society
-
-The seemingly unbridgeable disparities that
exist between those roles and the constitutionally-guaranteed civil rights of
all Americans
-
-The systemic obstacles that stand in the way of
healing those disparities, who supports
the unjust status quo and why.
The first point is fairly easy to
expand upon—because of historical racial disparities in access to education and
better employment opportunities, our minority populations have historically worked
in the lowest paying and most physically demanding jobs. This is certainly not
true for all, and there has been some
progress towards seeing more black professionals, but they are unfortunately
still the exception.
China's minority Uighur population is being forced into an army for cheap labor. |
It’s troubling, but not unusual for
societies to develop labor systems that include a permanent low-wage mass of
laborers—the New York Times reports that China
is creating a forced labor force within their ethnic Muslims as we
speak:
“KASHGAR, China — The order from Chinese officials was
blunt and urgent. Villagers from Muslim minorities should be pushed into jobs,
willing or not. Quotas would be set and families penalized if they refused to
go along.
“Make people who are hard to employ renounce their selfish
ideas,” the labor bureau of Qapqal, a county in the western region of Xinjiang,
said in the directive last year.
Such orders are part of an aggressive campaign to
remold Xinjiang’s Muslim minorities — mostly Uighurs and Kazakhs — into an army
of workers for factories and other big employers.”
The systemic nature of this policy
decision is reflected by Saturn in a mundane chart, but the
fact that somehow there’s an almost unwritten understanding in some societies
(like the U.S.) that minority populations will fill the ranks of a low-wage labor
force—that better jobs are for someone
else—speaks to the Neptune-Pluto dimension of society,
our collective unconscious, where the often unspoken phenomenon of racial bias
ultimately resides.
For instance, only recently has the
news carried stories about an atrocious race-based riot that was perpetrated by
a white mob of thousands over May 31-June 1, 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the
post-WWI period during which the Ku Klux Klan was experiencing a revival (there
have been three distinct eras of influence for the KKK thus far,
apparently). In 1921, the story was squelched and remained unspoken for
generations—similar to what has happened with so many stories that cry out for
attention. We can’t heal a problem if
we won’t bring it into the light of consciousness and awareness,, so it’s a
good sign that it’s coming to light in the wake of today’s protests.
Black lives, homes and businesses were destroyed by a white mob in Tulsa in 1921. |
History.com reports the events in Tulsa, which happened in a relatively
prosperous black community within that community at that time. The hysteria
that ensued was precipitated by Sarah Page, a white girl, who claimed to have
been assaulted by a black teenager, Dick Rowland (the same claim that has ended
in many black deaths over the years). As they always are, the violent racial
convulsions in the Tulsa instance were less about black behavior, and more
about imposing power over the black
community:
“As dawn broke on June 1, thousands of white citizens poured into the
Greenwood District, looting and burning homes and businesses over an area of 35
city blocks. Firefighters who arrived to help put out fires later testified
that rioters had threatened them with guns and forced them to leave.
According to a later Red
Cross estimate, some 1,256 houses were burned; 215 others were looted but
not torched. Two newspapers, a school, a library, a hospital, churches, hotels,
stores and many other black-owned businesses were among the buildings destroyed
or damaged by fire.
By the time the National Guard arrived and declared martial
law shortly before noon, the riot had effectively ended. Though guardsmen
helped put out fires, they also imprisoned many black Tulsans, and by June 2
some 6,000 people were under armed guard at the local fairgrounds.
In the hours after the Tulsa Race Massacre, all charges
against Dick Rowland were dropped. The police concluded that Rowland had most
likely stumbled into Page, or stepped on her foot. Kept safely under guard in
the jail during the riot, he left Tulsa the next morning and reportedly never
returned.”
Chart
#1: Tulsa Race Massacre, June 1, 1921, 6:00 a.m.ST (approx. dawn
timing), Tulsa, OK, Tropical Equal
Houses, True Node. Author cast on Kepler 8.0, with thanks to Cosmic Patterns Software.
Neptune trined Chiron (Leo-Aries), conjuring up fears, hysteria and reinforcing that some age-old karmic wounds lay dormant in the collective unconscious of Tulsa residents. In fact, fire was the main weapon of choice for the attackers. The roots of Neptune-Pluto-style peer pressure (which certainly figures into whipping up an already agitated Mars-influenced Aries mob) can go back generations and feel quite primal. The history of mankind is imprinted in our collective unconscious, and it’s a hideous picture at times.
No excuses here, of course—just trying to understand where such hysterical outbreaks come from. Had Tulsa’s settler-ancestors lived through traumatic times with local Native American tribes? Or perhaps the residual wounds left by the Civil War were still festering? It’s not hard to imagine that such mobs might tend to “wake up” once the Neptunian fog has cleared and might have a hard time even processing their actions, much less admitting to what they had done. Rather than confronting the reality and processing it as an entire community in 1921, the town residents apparently chose to repress it and leave it out of their history books, despite its clear importance to a good number of residents.
Psychologists since Sigmund Freud have helped individuals process the repressed contents of their unconscious minds, to embrace and make conscious their “shadow” sides so those repressed energies can be channeled in more constructive and creative ways. What we sometimes forget is that societies also need this type of therapy if they are to ever be healthy and whole.
It's easy for capitalism to rationalize racism. |
Capitalism
& racism
Loyalty to country and party (as
defined in the story about China above) isn’t the pretext that strictly capitalist
nations would use to engineer a working underclass, but the end result is
similar—a sort of wage slavery that allows non-minorities
to fill the higher-paid jobs those societies have to offer. Capitalist
systems (especially less regulated ones) keep minority populations in thrall by
simply making rising above the
permanent underclass an almost insurmountable challenge—one that demands the
convergence of several extraordinary “breaks,” as well as effort that puts “John Henry’s” contest
with the legendary steam-powered locomotive to shame. These conditions block
far too many candidates from reaching the next level.
At our darkest moment as a
nation, American capitalists thrived on the backs of enslaved Africans, and
many were hard-pressed to give up that lucrative access to a naturally-replicating
source of cheap labor—in their technocratic minds, owning slaves was a more
secure source of income than owning stocks would ever be, so why not?
All this
evokes Pluto, which also explains the practice of many slave-owners raping their female slaves (the ultimate
power trip) and forcing their family names
on the humans they “owned,” as if they were branding cattle. During George
Floyd’s final memorial service this Tuesday, Rev. Al Sharpton alluded to this
practice when he said (I’m paraphrasing here), “every time I write my name, I
am writing American history; I am writing the name of the man who owned my
great-grandfather.” The Nazis literally tattooed the arms of Jews with
concentration camp numbers—many rightly fail to see the difference.
Pluto is the “usual
suspect” when we talk about corporations, in fact, especially when the outsized
power they wield in our society is
the topic. In fact—as systemic players in
our economy—corporations often collude with government officials and
policies to make sure that minorities will continue to fill the lowest labor
ranks. Whether any of this is done consciously
or if it’s simply guided by the corporate compulsion to feed bottom lines is
hard to know, but either way, it’s destructive to upward mobility and it
reinforces systemic obstacles.
Enough said! |
One major way in which corporations
block upward mobility is by first, extracting more wealth and vitality from working-class
populations than they deliver in jobs or
services: this would apply to corporations that charge triple the normal car
insurance rates for living inside an urban zip code, and then have the gall to lobby
against expanding public transportation (i.e., Detroit), for instance. It also
applies to those that promote the school-to-corporate
prison pipeline by supporting officials who actively choke off public
school budgets and then channel an enormous share of public funding into
policing. Is the intention to make sure the prisons have plenty of customers?
Always hard to say, but a policy should be judged by its consequences—a topic
that’s much in the news these days.
This dynamic also applies to
pharmaceutical companies that profited in the billions for decades from the
opioid epidemic, counting on a complicit FDA to look the other way and then employing
finance loopholes in the law to
avoid true accountability; it applies to companies that contaminate the
soil that communities are built on with their fracking,
and to those who profited from the debacle of lead contamination in Flint,
Michigan’s public water system because state leadership decided Flint’s
mostly black community could do without safe water for the sake of budget cuts.
Apparently the potential for damaging the brains of Flint’s children was deemed
an “acceptable” risk.
Unfortunately, the annals of
Supreme Court cases are filled with corporations that have been sued for unlawfully
placing profits over human well-being—not to mention the environment, but rarely
do we hear about just how government officials and corporations work together
to collude in this quest.
Keeping people trapped in the
system of low-wage labor is a starkly Neptune-Pluto power dynamic, and it’s
hard at work when companies and governments team up to fight any effort for
minimum wage employees to advance within
their workplaces through unionization, a living wage that increases regularly
with the cost of living, and through continuing education and health care
benefits that don’t cost more than they’re worth. One person in a household
suffering from addiction or chronic health needs is enough to devastate a
minimum-wage laborer, and guess what causes
chronic conditions and mental health issues in many cases? Poverty!
Neptune and Pluto—often
with input from Saturn—are adept at creating pervasive “damned if you do,
damned if you don’t” environments like this, which seem to disproportionately
undermine the efforts of poor and minority individuals. Specifically, the harder they
work, the more they appear to be achieving, the more the goal posts for
progress slide away from them. Having taught in an urban, largely-minority
populated university, I’ve witnessed how students have struggled to turn their
hard-won degrees into tangible economic and professional progress: between
bureaucratic obfuscation and bias against “state” institutions (Jupiter-Saturn-Neptune)
and outright biased resume screening processes (Saturn-Uranus-Pluto--African-American
names are often easily discerned by resume bots), every step of their way is
met with systemic obstacles.
Sen. Corey Booker (D, NJ) advocates for the decriminalization of poverty. |
Sen. Corey Booker (D, NJ) often talks
about the way that mental illness and poverty have been “criminalized” in our
society—even unpaid traffic tickets are enough to put poor people in jail for
long terms because they can’t afford bail or decent representation, and public
defenders often counsel them to enter guilty pleas, just to move their cases
along. No surprise, these individuals are often disproportionately black and
brown. Such injustices—which devastate
families and communities—are an insult to our constitutional ideals of “Equal
protection under the Law,” and are probably the reason the Black Lives Matter
movement has caught on so powerfully. If police forces truly behaved as if
black citizens’ lives mattered as much as everyone else’s (and their own)—the streets wouldn’t need to be
full of protesters. Is it any wonder that demands have been mounting to redefine
public safety and policing in this nation?
Rivers of protesters swelled in the streets of American cities. |
The
astrology
Here’s where I believe we can start
to tease out the complex astrological factors embedded within the mass
outpouring of protesters we’ve seen across the nation—and the globe, for that
matter. One challenge we have here, however, is in pinning down a precise
moment that’s meaningful in the course of this very Neptunian phenomenon of
people flooding the streets en masse.
In fact, it’s all
meaningful and historical, and taken as a whole, could constitute an
important collective turning point, however let’s try to narrow our focus to
one key moment that clearly resonated—the militarized police in D.C. using tear
gas and force to clear peaceful protesters from Lafayette Park (across from the
White House) on the evening of June 1, 2020, to clear the way for Trump and his
entourage to pose for a photo op in front of St. John’s Episcopal. I’ve
expressed my feelings about this move by Trump and company in previous posts,
but we haven’t looked at the chart for the event.
Once we’ve analyzed that chart (Chart #2 below), we’ll examine a chart for the June 5th
Strawberry Moon lunar eclipse, set for Washington, D.C. This
chart should give us some helpful insight into what we can look for in the
coming months, not to mention some further thoughts about the dual crises we
are living through, between the protests and the pandemic.
Chart
#2: Police clear Lafayette Park, June 1, 2020, 6:35 p.m. DST, Washington,
D.C. Tropical Equal Houses, True Node.Author cast on Kepler 8.0, with thanks to Cosmic Patterns Software.
Moon (Libra) squares Pluto-Jupiter
(Capricorn), trines Sun-Venus (Gemini), quincunxes Neptune (Pisces) and opposes
Eris (Aries). These aspects speak loudly to the people (Moon)-driven
nature of the protests, but they also speak to the multiple ways in which the
institutional power of government was arrayed against them. The arrogance of larger-than-life
government power (Jupiter-Pluto) gave the order to disperse protesters from the
park (Saturn disposes these Capricorn points from a harsh Aquarius)
so our Executive (Sun) could stage a photo op that would—to his mind—turn the
protest to his advantage (Venus).
Even so, this moment that aimed to
suppress the First Amendment rights of protesters with quasi-military force so
the president could pose in front of St. John’s church with a bible offended
American sensibilities overall—polls regarding the president’s handling of this
event showed broad disapproval, so while the message of the mass outpouring
calling for justice was distorted by
Trump’s PR stunt momentarily (Neptune quincunx Moon), it wasn’t
irretrievably lost and protesters actually benefited (Moon trine Venus) by the
police turning them into martyrs (Mars-Neptune) of sorts in the end.
This is why peaceful protest can be
such a powerful tool—something even Trump seemed to grasp this after the “Black
Lives Matter” sign in big yellow letters was painted on the newly-named “Black
Lives Matter Plaza” pavement a couple days later—he
ordered the withdrawal of National Guard troops that he was previously more
than ready to use against American citizens.
He tried to frame the withdrawal as a victory lap—because the situation
was in
“complete control,”—however, it seems more likely that he realized the
situation had become a no-win for him that
looked bad in the media—Pisces Mars-Neptune (widely conjunct) square
Sun-Venus (Gemini). He trotted out his Attorney-General William Barr to
deny that the National Guard had tear-gassed
the protesters, with Barr trying to obfuscate (Mars-Neptune) the
chemical nature of pepper-spray that he or Trump ordered used in Lafayette
Park. Trump’s attempts
to spin the media (Gemini) had simply back-fired on him, and the blowback
hijacked his message and the benefits he was hoping for.
The Strawberry--or "Honey" Moon may be related to marriage traditions. |
June's Strawberry Moon lunar eclipse
Eclipses give us a window into the near
future, with special attention paid to solar-lunar dynamics, which speaks
beautifully to situations in which the highest authority in the land (Sun)
interacts significantly with the masses of People (Moon). In fact, eclipse
expert Celeste Teal reminds us that ancient rulers often used their inside
information about the celestial phenomenon of eclipses (they had court
astrologers and astronomers who let them in on these mysteries) to awe their
subjects and thus reinforce their power over them. Anything to hype their
“demi-god” status in the people’s eyes—after all, their authority to rule often
had less to do with their competence and dedication to the People than it did
to their ability to mystify and dazzle. Some things never change, right?
We see that here in Chart #3 for the June 5, 2020 penumbral
lunar eclipse—not visible in the United States, but it certainly constitutes a
potent transiting moment that may have a lasting impact. Interestingly, it was visible in many regions of the
world that have been rallying behind the Black Lives Matter protests right
along with the U.S. It was visible across most of Europe, Asia, Africa and
Australia, and a big vertical slice along the eastern edge of South America. Perhaps
these regions will find themselves embroiled in more issues concerning the
right use of power and authority for some time to come. Let’s examine the chart
for more specifics.
Chart
#3: Lunar Eclipse 6/5/2020, June 5, 2020, 3:14 p.m. DST, Washington, D.C. Tropical Equal Houses, True Node. Author cast on Kepler 8.0, with thanks to Cosmic Patterns Software.
T-Square:
Eclipse point (15+Sag-Gem) squares
Mars-Neptune (Pisces). Notice that this is a “dragon’s tail” eclipse,
meaning the So. Node falls near the Eclipse point (in the case of a lunar
eclipse, the Moon), rather than the No. Node (the “dragon’s head”). The
dragon’s tail eclipse is thought to denote a point where it’s necessary to
“give back,” and “balance the ledger.” Teal points to this type of eclipse as
being “exactly what is needed to complete a project that has previously
consumed much time and effort. This eclipse has to do with giving back, serving
selflessly, and practicing compassion.”[1] With
a Sagittarius
Moon, this dragon’s tail eclipse might help to bring passion,
intelligence and powerful wisdom to bear on the challenge of systemic racism
everywhere it’s found.
As for the t-square to the Mars-Neptune conjunction here,
we see the authority issues at stake in the full Moon being subject to
possible manipulation, distortion and even corruption, not to mention the
possible misuse of the Military (Mars), which is caught in the
“crossfire” if you will, between the Executive (Sun) and the People (Moon).
Because mutable Gemini is involved and because we have a Gemini Sun president (Eclipse
Sun
falls very near Trump’s natal Uranus-Node-Sun)[2],
we can expect ongoing attempts to manipulate the Media to his advantage, and to
dis-advantage the People (Moon).
To that end, the use of more passive aggressive techniques such as were seen
today in Georgia’s
chaotic primary vote are also likely. Investigations are already beginning
into whether the voting machines weren’t working across the state, or if the problems were only seen in the majority
black precincts. If it’s the latter,
this is yet another pernicious example of systemic racism that was supposed to be addressed by the 1965 Voting
Rights Act (Aug. 6, 1965), the chart for which featured strong mutable
oppositions as well.
In fact, the Supreme Court basically struck
down the heart of the Voting Rights Act in June, 2013, when it decided that
states with histories of disenfranchising black voters (i.e, via Jim Crow laws)
would now be free to change their voting laws without federal supervision.
Needless to say, there have been problems ever since. Perhaps it’s time for an
updated, renewed VRA for the way
forward?
Jupiter rules Sagittarius Eclipse point;
Jupiter conjoins Pluto in Capricorn. We have two “Lords” of the eclipse
in this chart—Jupiter, as noted here, and Venus, because it falls
within three degrees of the Sun,
opposite the Eclipse point. It doesn’t happen often that two benefics
corule an eclipse, but here we have it. Before we leap to the conclusion that
this chart portends nothing but positive impacts, however, we’ve already seen
some potential challenges with the t-square we discussed and nothing about
these two rulers tells me we should simply dismiss all that and expect warm
fuzzies and champagne instead. Venus (Gemini) also falls square
Mars and very widely square Neptune (Pisces), so we might
expect the Market to remain volatile and for financial issues to dominate our
leadership in disruptive ways. There will likely be some high-profile women in
the news, perhaps women who find themselves battling deceptive, and/or corrupt
men (Mars-Neptune
in Pisces).
For its part, Jupiter feels constrained and uncomfortable in Saturn’s home sign of Capricorn,
but its conjunction with Pluto in the 4th house
here suggests that “grass roots” Power will hold its own against an
out-of-touch Executive (Sun). This Jupiter-Pluto duo conjoins
Pallas, in turn, suggesting that the focus on Justice and what Demetra
George and Douglas Bloch call “a feminine-defined quality of heroism, bravery,
courage and sensible toughness.”[3]
George and Bloch associate Pallas in Capricorn with “structural perception,”
which makes perfect sense, given our society’s need to tease apart and deal
with the systemic (structural) ways in which racial bias informs so much that
goes on in our institutions and government. They also say that “There is a
strong power drive for authority over others in political and social
institutions. The wisdom of Pallas in Capricorn is the wisdom of order—putting
things in their proper sequence.”[4]
Pallas Athena |
It’s rather chilling to see the concept of political
“order” floated here—we know what that means in Trump’s lexicon and in the
police systems so many have been abused by, but in Pallas Athene’s capable
feminine hands, we will hopefully be looking at a renewed approach to true
social order, as opposed to “police state”-order. It seems significant
that Pallas
is sandwiched in between Jupiter and Saturn, with the latter
hovering in the first degree of Aquarius, waiting for its Great
Mutation conjunction with Jupiter this coming December. The
new cycle they begin there will ideally herald the beginnings of a total
structural re-envisioning of so many of our social systems. In that sense, what
we’re going through right now with the outpouring of people on our streets
calling for the defunding or dismantling of police departments doesn’t seem as
outrageous as it might.
Finally, it’s important to examine this chart for
signifiers about the public health crisis we are still embroiled in, despite
seeing so many people risking their health to protest George Floyd’s death by
having the breath crushed out of him under a police officer’s knee. The Mars-Neptune
t-square to the Eclipse axis suggests that public health issues are
also caught up in the clash between Executive and People power, and it’s quite
possible this situation will continue to play out over the life of this
eclipse. The over-representation of minority populations in COVID infections
and fatalities is well-documented—could there be a political context for understanding why? A distinguished professor
of bioethics at the University of California, Berkeley, Osagie Obasogie seems
to think there is—in fact, he points to parallels between our dual crises,
calling them the “twin pandemics” of the coronavirus and police violence
against black people. From the Washington Post:
“Pandemics are often thought to be unforeseeable acts
of God that emerge suddenly to wreak havoc on unsuspecting populations. But
that’s not how public health practitioners think about them. More often than
not, pandemics have a political economy behind them, in which substandard
living and working conditions connected to social inequalities produce opportunities
for disease to spread unchecked. That was true for the 1918 flu pandemic that
started on farms in Haskell County, Kan., and it also appears to account for
the emergence of the novel coronavirus. ..
Floyd’s autopsy revealed that he had tested
positive for the coronavirus, though he had no symptoms and it wasn’t a
factor in his death. Perhaps the most tragic similarity between these twin
pandemics is that the tepid response from the federal government can
be largely attributed to the fact that the same populations — poor,
dispossessed minorities — disproportionately make up the dead and suffering.
The government’s reaction would be dramatically different if these plagues
mostly affected white middle-class populations. Black lives seem not to matter,
which reveals an underlying
eugenic ideology in the United States of letting disease and violence
thin the herds of undesirable groups.”
As another writer put it some time
ago, Trump stopped caring about containing the virus when he found out who was dying. This may be overstating
the case, but it’s hard to excuse his indifference in regards to those
suffering from both these crises and
his current focus on trying to distort and leverage people’s outrage and pain
into political advantage is enormously troubling. One media outlet is
predicting there will be an October “surprise” of a COVID vaccine—if it has
anything to do with this mutable t-square in the eclipse chart (which it might),
its trustworthiness will be shaky, at best.
And, as we saw in Georgia this week,
we will also need to demand more from our state election systems and to
absolutely refuse to be deceived into mistrusting our democratic processes
because such cynicism serves a political purpose.
Final
thoughts
I’ve never felt the weight of my own
surname—Robertson—more than I have
during these days. I taught for two decades-plus at Detroit’s Wayne State
University, where I had numerous black students over the years whose last names (Robertson,
Robinson, and other variations) were clearly derived from the Scottish
Robertson clan that my own heritage harks back to. It didn’t take much to
deduce that there must have been slave owners somewhere in American history who
carried that name and imposed it upon their slaves, so my students were the
descendants of that karmic heritage in which some obscure ancestor of mine (whom I'll never know about, most likely) may
have played a role. Clearly, our clan motto, "Virtutis, Gloria, Merces" fell far short during this history, but there was nothing I could do about that for my students, except to try being a committed instructor who demanded
a lot of them, but promoted and celebrated their success to the best of my
ability.
It seems to me that the best our nation overall can do for the
African-American descendants of that painful passage is to re-envision the expectations—that
“social contract”—we live by as a nation. “Liberty and equality,” not to
mention “equal protection under the law” aren’t just pretty, outdated words on
a page—they are essential to healing
our karmic Plutonian wounds at long last, and to engineering a kinder,
more enlightened and equal society in
the coming Aquarius Jupiter-Saturn cycle that launches this December.
Let’s
not be naïve, however—the police can only ever
be as good as the system they work within. Reforming police departments sounds good, but it's basically
tinkering around the edges, when the problem runs deep as the ocean and
involves all of us, either directly or indirectly. Someone rightly observed that, “we
can’t legislate good will,” but we can build
a better system that rewards good will and doesn’t
reward hatred and bias.
IMHO, it’s long past time to flourish together in this nation, and to not allow fear--or fear-mongerers- to
drive us apart.
[1]Celeste
Teal, Eclipses: Predicting World Events
& Personal Transformation, Llewellyn Publications, Woodbury, MN, 1st
ed. 2006, p. 11.
[2]
Donald J. Trump birth data: June 14, 1946, 10:54 a.m.DST, Jamaica, NY.
[3]
Demetra George and Douglas Bloch, Asteroid
Goddesses: the Mythology, Psychology and Astrology of the Re-emerging Feminine,
2nd ed., Ibis Press, Lake Worth, FL, p. 91.,
[4]Ibid,
George and Bloch, p. 105.