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America In Transition

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Bianca
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« Reply #45 on: July 28, 2008, 10:15:09 am »










The majority…except for the rest of the world

While it might have been true right after 9/11 that the hawkish viewpoint constituted a numerical majority in the USA, a couple of years later the opposition to a preëmptive strike against Iraq rose to the millions in the USA and to the hundreds of millions throughout the rest of the world. In every major city across the globe, masses of humanity arose to protest Washington’s plan. The war promoters were so hugely outnumbered that the New York Times declared there to be “two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion" (Feb. 16, 2003).

This scenario brings to light yet another layer of un-integrated Saturn. To what extent do international viewpoints factor into America’s Reality Show?

We have seen that rigorous accuracy is not the driving force behind America’s sense of majority opinion, even its own national majority opinion. Much has been written about the tendency of the US government to minimize the numbers of domestic dissidents (by refusing them access to media; by contesting their reports or resorting to character assassination [e.g. global warming scientists, Joseph Wilson]; by undercounting mass demonstrations), thus manipulating the country’s sense of what constitutes received wisdom in the USA. But the faux-majority gambit becomes qualitatively more outrageous when we consider how it allows Americans to summarily dismiss the perspectives of the other countries of the world. (4)

A distorted Saturn is nothing if not provincial. Following the lead of their government, Americans by and large give global opinion very little attention. They accept quite readily their leaders’ cataloguing of other nations into two groups: “allies” or potential objects of conquest (or, as it is demurely being framed, the lucky recipients of new, improved regimes).



True majority opinion

The truth is that aside from the apparently infinite credulity of certain groups within the American public, basically no one across the whole face of the globe sees things the way Washington does. To see the Iraq war as having to do with "democracy," for instance, may be either the normal or the faux-normal position here in the USA, depending on your point of view; but it is considered flat-out preposterous just about everywhere else in the world.

If we applied Saturn’s own presumed standard—that of preponderant viewpoints—we would find that at most a few million Americans take seriously the “We bombed Iraq to free them” and the “Attacking Iran would make the world safer” rationales. By contrast with the billions of other Earth denizens this is not a very impressive number.
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« Reply #46 on: July 28, 2008, 10:16:25 am »










Saturn mutates with perspective

At this point in our study of Saturn, we may conclude that the longer a view one takes, the more Saturn’s reality-pictures change. We have seen that were we to keep Saturn’s frame of reference limited to the impression conveyed by the American media, we’d get a certain very emphatic, if unfounded, sense of What Everybody Thinks. And were we to expand this frame of reference to the whole American populace—one that included those who did not watch television—we’d get a very different one.

Finally, were we to expand to the world at large America’s notion of what constitutes consensus thinking, we would see its Saturnine sureties not only melt away but reverse themselves.



The chart of the USA

How did America’s premier Saturn agency, its government, come to misuse the authority of this noble archetype? What factors account for a planet-gone-bad?

In next month’s column we will discuss the placement of Saturn in the US chart, using the natal map of the entity born July 4th 1776 in Philadelphia as our primary source. From the aspects formed by this planet much can be derived about how it became so susceptible to distortion, as well as about the ways we might coax it back into working order.

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« Reply #47 on: July 28, 2008, 10:17:28 am »










Notes:



1 Similarly, the assumption that the USA actually has this form of government right now—that is, the form identified with the Founding Fathers of 1776—was almost never questioned until the current administration’s conduct started provoking questions about it from some quarters (and questioning it still brushes up against cultural taboo). Until very recently it was just another assumption, upon which the ours-is-the-best-government assumption depended.

2 An example of blatant gerrymandering that made surprisingly few waves was the attempt in mid-January by Hillary Clinton’s people to exclude the Las Vegas Strip from voting. They knew the Culinary Union was big there, and that the Latino and black workers who dominate its membership would likely go for Obama.

3 The FCC’s recent approval of even more media consolidation flies in the face of almost unanimous public opposition. The tightening of the control the White House exerts over the telecommunications industry over the past few years has assured that Washington-favored interests get the choicest coverage, feeding into their perceived status as more real than those whom Washington makes sure the public rarely gets a chance to see or hear.

4 This point will be driven home during the Pluto-in-Capricorn years upcoming, when the whole idea of national boundaries will come up for redefinition.
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« Reply #48 on: July 28, 2008, 10:19:11 am »










In our last couple of columns we discussed the association of the planet Saturn with the concept of What Everybody Thinks, or, more precisely, What We Think Everybody Thinks. We talked about the way this fictive construct is fed by the human yearning to be “normal.” We talked about how this yearning is manipulated by the mass media, which functions, as it has in every age to a greater or lesser extent, as an arm of the government.



Governments in general are associated with Saturn. These will be under the spotlight the world over during the coming years, as Pluto moves through Saturn’s affiliated sign, Capricorn (1). There is a great deal of interest stirring in the mass consciousness right now about the nature of government on every level. The primary election we just had in California turned voters out in record-breaking numbers.

Now is the time to bring out the natal chart of the USA, and see what it tells us about America’s relationship with its own leadership infrastructure.



Father Knows Best

As a group entity, America has a strained rapport with its elected officials and the machinery that brings them to power. The astrological signature of this ambivalence is a 90º angle between Saturn and the Sun in the USA chart (2). This aspect, called a square, has led many astrologers to ascribe to the USA a walloping Father Complex: a love-hate relationship with persons and agencies of authority.

The interesting thing about this ambivalence is how much it clashes with the national self-image. (3) For a populace that crows about its freedom as much as this country’s does, it is truly remarkable how cowed Americans are by patriarchal agencies. Scared out of its wits by the intimidations of a bad-dad president and his fear-fomenting consiglieri, the citizenry of this Home-of-the-Brave-and-Land-of-the-Free has, over the past seven years, handed over its most cherished rights to FBI men with phone-tapping headsets faster than you could say “Islamic terr’ist.”

Because it conflicts so starkly with the country’s swaggering persona, this odd national tendency to spook in the face of officialdom gets very little attention from citizens and international observers. But astrology is well-suited to make sense of the pattern, which aligns quite predictably with what we know of natives who disown their Saturn.

In human individuals, a wide-eyed respect for the rules is a feature we expect, or at least hope for, in actual children. When we are very young, following a because-I-say-so figure is developmentally appropriate. (4) But in the case of adults who have not integrated their natal Saturn, childlikeness is distorted into childishness and is often projected upon a series of father figures. Examples of a misused Saturn-Sun square include the insecure college student looking to date her professor, not out of attraction but out of powerlessness; or the employee who rails against his boss at the water cooler but is quiet as a mouse in the big man’s office.
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« Reply #49 on: July 28, 2008, 10:20:56 am »










The Cowboy vs. the Boss

With group entities the same rules apply. When Saturn is estranged in a country’s chart, the citizenry tends to grumble and grouse but, in the end, scoots over and leaves the driving to Daddy.

American legend is full of mavericks and outlaws: Jesse James outsmarting the sheriff; Rocky Balboa prevailing against impossible odds through sheer pluck (and, as might be inferred from recent statements made by his creator, perhaps a little help from the syringe). The classic Sagittarius rising sees itself as a feisty rebel.

Meanwhile, the Sun-Saturn square in the US chart helps us understand why, despite their penchant for bad-boy underdogs in the movies, actual Americans tend to slump into obeisance in the presence of uniformed agents. When the voice of bureaucracy speaks over the P.A. system, or if a security guard in crisp polyester pleats tells them to stay behind the yellow line, by and large Americans will do as they are told. If the medical man in the white jacket tells them an operation is necessary, most will meekly prepare for the scalpel. The plucky outlaw is nowhere to be found.

The Jupiterian bombast of the US chart also has its negatives, to be sure; the heedless swashbuckler is an inherently adolescent figure. The natal standoff between America’s Jupiter and its ambivalently held Saturn is an example of uneasy equipoise, with both sides prone to distortion. We are focusing here on the Saturn side of things because only by coming to grips with the defects in this arena can we hope to rein in the perilous excesses in the Jupiter arena—among them, America’s Yee-Haw foreign policy.



Responsibility and unresponsiveness

In the etymology of the word responsibility we find the essence of the meaning of Saturn: the ability to respond. Astrologically defined, a mature individual is one who can come up with a genuine, inner-derived response—not a reaction—to the moment. A populace that has not pressed its Saturn into service is going to be inherently unresponsive. They will wait to be told what to do, what to believe, what to buy and whom to vote for.

Americans are not unresponsive in the sense of torpid or devoid of opinions (a Sagittarius-rising entity could hardly be devoid of opinions); but the true responsiveness that is Saturn’s highest potential is not expressed by mere restlessness (5) and strong convictions. The unresponsiveness of the US populace shows up in more insidious ways, which, as we discussed in our last column, are all the more worrisome for being considered normal.

In a communal waiting area, it might take the form of zoning out in front of one of the ubiquitous television sets that started to appear some years ago in doctors’ waiting rooms and now are popping up everywhere from fancy restaurants to bank lobbies. It may take the form of succumbing to the hypnotic Muzak piped into a department store to forestall critical thinking.

For a populace to disown its Saturn is especially pernicious in an era of cynical officialdom. An unresponsive public serves the powers-that-be in consumer and bureaucratic settings in the same way that the dispensing of evening meds at a hospital promises to give the late-shift nurses an easier night.

As is so often the case when a planet is square the Sun, the USA is starving for its estranged Saturn. A citizenry knows in its collective soul when something is missing. What’s missing is responsibility; but when exercised without awareness this yearning expresses as blame. What does it tell us, for example, that American citizens have embraced litigation like a gambler at a slot machine, with lawsuits skyrocketing yearly? It tells us that Saturn’s wholesome impulse for redress, for recompense, for responsibility to be taken, has vacated its original offices in the halls of justice and is running amok through the corridors.
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« Reply #50 on: July 28, 2008, 10:22:15 am »










Sheep without shoes

No institution points up this phenomenon more blatantly than the post-millennial American airport. In this context the public’s Saturn, planet of practical intelligence and self-respect, seems to get confiscated at the security gate along with the hair gel. That American citizens continue to allow themselves to be corralled like farm animals while their shoes roll by on a conveyor belt has got to be one of the most devilish jokes the Cosmos has played yet on this cocky young nation; pointing up what happens when common sense (also associated with positive Saturn) and simple human dignity are surrendered. Where is the cowboy now? Timidly struggling to tie his shoes without losing his balance in a crowded queue, while scrambling to collect his carry-on bag from a little plastic tray.

Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle told a funny story recently about waiting to board a flight at SFO. The take-off time was postponed again and again for reasons that were never explained by any of the several disengaged airline Customer Service Representatives milling around, who instead offered up to the increasingly frustrated crowd ever-more-transparently bogus excuses for the delay.

“Because this was a flight to Paris,” Carroll writes, “there were a lot of French people in the waiting room… who began to kick up a fuss. It is said that Americans are big whiners with an inflated sense of entitlement (6), and it’s true that there’s no complainer like an American complainer. But en masse, we tend to be passive… The French have no such problem … They do not care whether strangers like them. …It [was] strangely comforting that the scary, sarcastic French were on [our] side… the French mob made hotel vouchers appear within minutes. International cooperation is a beautiful thing.”



Saturn mislabeled and misapplied

When it is not given away wholesale to The Man, how does Saturn express itself in America?

As often happens when a planet functions without awareness, the USA’s afflicted Saturn exhibits an odd all-or-nothing quality. This piece of the national chart has become at once inflated and wildly misidentified.

In the criminal misuse of America’s Saturn, Exhibit A is the word/concept “conservative.” Cautious, conventional Saturn governs the impulse to conserve: to safeguard that which retains value from the past. But in the context of the American cultural vernacular, “conservative” connotes meanings that have nothing to do with conserving.

When properly manifested, Saturn inspires us to treat with reverence social standards whose effectiveness has been tested by time. But America’s “conservative” icons’ most telling characteristic is their flagrant lack of this quality. Many are downright precedent-shattering. “Conservative” policymakers like the Bush crowd are notorious for flouting international institutions such as the Geneva Conventions, which are conventional in the classic Saturnine sense. Those American politicians who are blithely termed “conservative”—by themselves, the public and the media—commonly disdain and repudiate such agreements as the Kyoto accord and nuclear anti-proliferation treaties that constitute, collectively, the very epitome of the global impulse to conserve. And from the radio personalities deemed “conservative” we hear outrageous utterances that have nothing to do with the values of staid, taciturn Saturn; but rather, seem to be scripted to ensure that pundit’s presence on the evening news (e.g. Ann Coulter’s assertion last October that Jews need to be “perfected.”)

This is outlandish stuff. In content, form and intention these examples betray the very opposite of what conservatism might logically be thought to mean. Indeed, in a gambit that psychologists would find perversely predictable, pundits of this sort often accuse their perceived adversaries of über-conservatism; that is, of fascism (e.g. feminazis, enviro-fascists (7)). Fascism is the form Saturn takes when it is distorted to its furthest extreme. These name-callers are projecting a grotesquely exaggerated form of the Saturn archetype onto their ideological opponents, while misidentifying themselves as its true exponents.
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« Reply #51 on: July 28, 2008, 10:23:13 am »











Code words
This self-touting in America of the word/concept “conservatism” while exhibiting its opposite is a symptom of a planet in deep distress. The media exaggeration that often surrounds the term (consider the coinage “ultra-conservative”) exudes something of a hysterical quality. It is as if by ratcheting up the misnomer, America could make up for its desperate lack of true conservatism.

Another aspect of Saturn’s meaning that the USA has twisted into a pretzel is the notion of practicality. Saturn is the most utilitarian of the planets; last month we discussed its governance of the notion of realism. Ideally, this means honoring the empirical dictates of the material world and prioritizing efficiency. A properly functioning Saturn cares, first and foremost, about what works.

But although most right-wing thinkers present their policies in pragmatic terms—for example, when Big Agra disdains moral arguments (Cool for raising farm workers’ working conditions to something other than quasi-slave labor (9), they mention “the bottom line” a lot—the utter disingenuousness of their arguments is clear when we consider that none of this belt-tightening is ever construed to apply to their CEOs.

The word “unrealistic” is often invoked by corporate spokespersons to describe, for example, employee health benefits; yet it is one of the more universally agreed-upon truisms of modern society that labor-force healthcare is a supremely realistic idea; considering the enormous loss of work-hours and resources that communities must otherwise shell out by waiting until people get so sick they have no recourse but the hospital emergency room. (10)

Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical industry, one of the top three most profitable industries in the USA, to whose lobbyists the most “conservative” politicians are sworn heart and soul, now spends more on marketing than research. One cannot help but feel that this kind of “realism” has a highly specialized meaning: that of rendering more and more real the cushy retirements of the companies’ biggest shareholders.

Other deliberately misleading Saturn terms that have been cropping up lately in the election speechifying include prudent—which in this context, as Jon Carroll reminds us, really means “no new taxes”—and affordable, which tends to mean corporate-subsidized. And most bloodcurdling of all, “safe; “ which has come to mean, “Torture is fine with me.”

A choice to make
In the USA chart Saturn holds an elevated position. It is highly placed in the tenth house, the part of the wheel that bespeaks high worldwide visibility. This placement suggests that the country has been given an important leadership role to play. The sign it is in, Libra, tells us that America presumes itself to be, and has the capability to be, a bastion of fairness and peace-promotion. These values, cited if not adhered to by patriots for 300 years, actually exist in potential form in the group soul that is the USA.

To access the sublime potential of a chart we must reclaim its planets in their purity. In this spirit, the identification of cultural blind spots is an excellent learning device. That troublesome square in the national chart is there for a reason; a reason karmically tailored to every self-actualizing citizen.

If we do not find in the culture around us the higher features of the planet of responsibility, we have a choice to make. We can cave into the collective tendency to go numb, and delay or avoid entirely (at least, in this lifetime) Saturn’s lessons of responsibility. This would entail going along with the current national penchant for reacting instead of responding, casting blame instead of looking to change one’s own terns of participation, or, if one can afford it, hiring lawyers to duke it out.

Or we can aspire to Saturn’s deeper capacities and get on with our soul work.

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« Reply #52 on: July 28, 2008, 10:24:20 am »










Notes:



1 For a brief essay on this 15-year transit, see February’s Skywatch on MotherSky.com.

2 I refer here to the collective entity born July 4th 1776, for which I use the Sibly chart (see Soul-Sick Nation: An Astrologer’s View of America).

3 America’s Marlboro Man self-image is indicated by the USA’s Sagittarius Ascendant, as well as by the fact that Jupiter conjuncts its Sun. The face in the national mirror is that of a rollicking cowboy, asserting himself in his own territory however he wants, galloping unhindered wherever in the world he wants. Full of bravado about his own presumed freedom, this figure openly boasts about the contrast he perceives between his own sky’s-the-limit possibilities and the limitations that make all other nation-states losers in his eyes.

4 Juveniles require, by definition, the outside environment to provide boundaries. This is not just a psychological truism but an astrological one as well: no one younger than 28 can have experienced the three-decades-long circuit of Saturn through the zodiac back to its placement at birth. By astrological law this means that he cannot yet have assimilated Saturn’s meaning, that of knowing how to boundary the self. Once the planet does come back to its natal placement, the person has his Saturn Return. Chronologically, at least, the threshold of adulthood has been crossed. He is theoretically now able to understand the demands and rewards of maturity.

5 The frenetic perambulation of the US population is indicated by the mutable square between the US chart’s agitation-prone Mars in Gemini and its fluctuating Neptune in Virgo.

6 A classic symptom of the Jupiter-Sun conjunction in its unconscious state.

7 Here the name-calling extends into the furthest reaches of irony; for today’s environmentalists are the priests and priestesses of Saturn at its highest: the true conservatives.

8 Proponents of humanitarian legislation are often dismissed by faux-conservatives with the odd phrase “bleeding heart liberal,” a coinage bizarrely suggestive of medieval imagery from the Church of Rome. Has anybody looked into this etymology?

9 A recent study found that raising the American farm worker’s income to a bare minimum wage would add up to a mere fifty dollars per year for the households who consume the fruits and vegetables that would rot in the fields without their labor. This proposal would seem to meet the criteria of bottom-line integrity quite well, if the goal here were a just society.

10 But the insurance industry, in its current American form, is hardly the Saturn savior in this scenario. Medical costs are now the leading cause of personal bankruptcy even for those in the USA who buy insurance.
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« Reply #53 on: July 28, 2008, 10:25:53 am »









It’s time to talk about Mars.

The red planet has been exceptionally active lately. It was opposing Pluto when the latter crossed into Capricorn (1) in late January, ratcheting up the drama to a fever pitch by stationing five days later. And all this time it was hitting its own position in the chart of the USA (2). Thus did the part played by Mars in the historic Pluto ingress set the tone for the next 15 years, pinpointing America’s starring role. We may wish to leave the God of War well enough alone, but he clearly has no intention of leaving us alone.



But Mars’ unquestioned identification with anger and war invites a closer look, and never more so than now.

In this column we have been going through the planets, one by one, to see what they can teach us about what’s going on in the world. The daunting crises that beset humanity at the moment seem to be multiplying like rabbits in the springtime. In order to keep our heads on straight, we need a way of seeing that can do more than simply equating Mars with violence and war and leaving it at that. We need a deeper astrology, no less than we need visionary leaders and a more intelligent mass media.

Of the three, let us start with the one we have direct control over: our understanding of astrological symbols.



Ground level and sky level

For astrology to lead to wisdom, we must allow its transpersonal viewpoint to guide us, all the while staying awake to the geopolitical dramas that inform this epoch.

There is a mistaken notion among some spiritual seekers that worldly affairs hold no interest to the sufficiently enlightened. But this view ignores the astrological importance of time—and place—as key components of our life purpose. Astrology contends that where we find ourselves (in a certain family, in a certain country) is no accident, anymore than when we incarnated. From the point of view of psychic health, we ignore the current state of the world at our peril.

While it is human to find ourselves wishing we could deny—as a coping mechanism—either our spiritual yearnings or our society’s dysfunctions, these two perspectives represent parallel levels of reality. Each requires acknowledgement. It is axiomatic in astrology that the soul knew what it was doing when it chose this particular era. The world beyond our picket fence, in all its complexity and foreignness and painful paroxysms, is part and parcel of our personal life play.

For Americans of conscience, the horrors we hear about on the news—or, worse, the ones the mainstream news does not mention—often feel downright unbearable to look at. The fact that so many of these horrors are paid for with our hard-earned taxes, to boot, strikes many a sensitive citizen as too excruciatingly ironic to think about. But we know in our hearts that denial rebounds back upon us in the end. (3)

As pathologies go, denial seems like a fairly innocuous offence. But in America denial has become epidemic, all the while achieving the imprimatur of normalcy; like a chronic disease that blots out all memory of health. It is not a good sign when a populace is unable to come up with responsible leaders, accepting instead a cabal driven by over-the-top greed and moral cretinism. As many commentators have urged, it bodes ill for the republic that so many American citizens remain ignorant of the fact that their country’s vast resources have, with increasing boldness lately, been spent not for the benefit of the public but for the benefit of a handful of mega-corporations and an exclusive club of oil-rich dictator-kings who rule in deserts far away. It causes a sickness in the soul for Americans to look the other way while companies like Halliburton, Lockheed, Blackwater and Bechtel—Bob Dylan’s masters of war—get fat and rich off the unspeakable suffering of millions of ordinary human beings. (4)

The cure for this soul-sickness begins with the refusal to deny. But astrologers who eschew denial must juggle a couple of seemingly very different perspectives. At the same time that we acknowledge all these unsavory worldly realities, we fix our focus upon their larger significance. Being politically aware does not contraindicate seeing life as a vast set of abstract symbols legible in the sky. Astrology can decode the meaning of our culture’s deadliest foibles, allowing us to get someplace more useful than merely railing against them or wringing our hands in despair.

It is not a contradiction, but a paradox: to be free of our national sicknesses we must take responsibility for the fact that here we are—right here, right now—living amidst a specific set of toxic worldly circumstances… at the same time that we must distance ourselves from them. We distance ourselves not to disengage, but to better understand. To disengage is not an option for the truth-seeker. Those of us alive today were born into an epoch that will harshly punish sleepwalking.
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« Reply #54 on: July 28, 2008, 10:27:13 am »










Mars: “malefic” or misused?

Of all the planets astrology uses, Mars is closest to the biological level of existence. It governs the urge to survive, a motivation humans share equally with plants and non-human animals. In its primal, healthy expression, Mars is the feisty “fight” in all vital beings: the seedling’s will to pierce through a crack in the sidewalk in order to reach the sunlight; the athlete’s adrenaline that keeps her going against daunting odds. It is when the Martial impulse is distorted by the ego-mind of human beings that things start to get complicated.

A seedling covered up by a pebble may resort to twisting itself around to survive the blockage; a tied-up dog may chew its leash in two. A human individual or group entity whose will is thwarted may either respond or react, depending on its level of consciousness; giving rise to the potential for the many faces of shadow Mars that have given the planet such a bad name over the centuries. (5) When frustrated, human willpower can strike out in anger, or—more pathological still, according to some psychologists—can turn anger back upon the self (depression).

Assertion is Mars in its natural form; aggression is what happens when blockage of some kind has led it awry. The further Mars strays from the innocent urge to express vitality, the more problematic things get. There is nothing “malefic” about the drive to stand out from the crowd through action. But when this drive is estranged from its natural state by human sophistry it becomes destructive.

The essence of Mars is the archetypal warrior, a noble figure that is mostly visible these days only in the imagery of ancient history (e.g. the samurai) or in the animal kingdom (e.g. the dignity of the tiger, whose new status as an endangered species is an apt symbol for the Mars-Pluto [extinction] warning above us in the sky). One notch lower on the consciousness scale and the warrior turns into a mere soldier, a distinction we will consider more fully in next month’s column. When the group mind is stuck equating Mars with soldiering, the result is shadow Mars at its most hideous (Darfur, Haditha, Tibet, the Congo).

Thanks to the Mars-Pluto opposition, Americans are learning, ever so reluctantly, an esoteric truth about misusing Mars this way: that the soldier’s ultimate victim is himself. With the transit overhead, newspaper stories started appearing about G.I. suicides (three to seven times the rate of the general population). (6) The most dystopic form of this trajectory of Mars—away from biology into man-made artifice—must surely be the current use by the Pentagon of robot fighters, or as the generals demurely call them, “unmanned vehicles”. (7)

Mars shows up as war when humanity knows no better. To use Martial energy for deliberate violence is to use the archetype blind: out of touch with its place in the Whole. Granted, this interpretation of the planet’s symbolism is less dramatic than the conventional reading of Mars as a definitive war god—an image which gets a lot of mileage in astrology for the same reason that allegories get used in literature: they are emotionally vivid and immediate, like pictures in a comic strip. But cosmic forces are not cartoons. To see Mars in such simplistic terms is as silly as reducing the concept of “God” to a bearded old white man in the clouds.

Humanistic astrology views the planets as numinous forces, every one of them value-neutral. They are, after all, just symbols —symbols that function as mirrors. Mirrors take on a different look depending upon who is using them, and when.

Here is where that old saw, we create our own reality, comes in. On an individual level, whether one uses Mars in bold, creative action or in anger and solipsism depends on the face looking in the mirror. On the sociopolitical level, how Mars is expressed by a given group reveals the consciousness of that group.

When Americans look into the mirror of Mars, what face looks back at us? And if we don’t like what we see, what can be done to change it?
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« Reply #55 on: July 28, 2008, 10:28:43 am »










Notes:



1 Retrogradation will move Pluto back and forth over this threshold for the rest of 2008. The Mars-Pluto opposition was an unusually long one for the same reason: Mars’ own retrogradation kept the heat on that transit for five full months, with exactitudes occurring Sept. 21, January 2 and March 6-7.

2 I refer here to the group entity that rose into being on July 4, 1776; which receives transits and progressions just as a person’s chart does. Though historical controversy surrounds the exact birth moment of the USA, I use the widely-favored Sibly chart (see my book, Soul-Sick Nation: An Astrologer’s View of America, Jessica Murray, MotherSky Press 2008).

3 By astrological logic, this is so because denial, like sins of omission, is a form of distorted Saturn, the planet of karma. The remedy here, as for all such distortions, is perhaps not intuitively obvious: it is self-compassion. We start climbing out of denial by accessing self-forgiveness. This is easy to do when we remember that what motivates Saturn’s defense mechanisms is the simple desire to be safe. We deny out of a misguided need to protect ourselves. In this sense Saturn functions similarly to the Moon.

4 The current presidential campaign is bringing these long-running themes to the surface. While the followers of John (“Bomb-Bomb Iran”) McCain were under no such illusions, many peace-loving Americans who had hoped that the Democratic Party would redeem the barbarity of their country’s foreign policy over the past seven years were sickened in late April to hear Hillary Clinton promise to “totally obliterate” Iran (which has no nukes), were it to threaten Israel (which is armed to the teeth with them). Sen. Clinton’s statement epitomizes the win-at-any-cost mentality of distorted Mars, which in her natal chart is susceptible to being unmoored by the power of Pluto. Barack Obama’s warmongering is more muted. But his choice of reactionary consigliere Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the architects of the war in Afghanistan, and his militant projections for Pakistan and Palestine et al, cannot help but remind even his most progressive supporters of the unavoidable reality that no candidate can prevail in the current political system without paying blood money to America’s Mars.

5 In 1521, Cardinal Wolsey urged Henry VIII to desist from war in order to prevent “the effusion of …blood, the consuming of treasure, subversion of realms, depopulation and desolation of countries and other infinite inconveniences.”

6 The figure is an estimate, for the notoriously closed-mouthed Veterans’ Administration refuses to make such statistics public. Similarly verboten is any mention of the number of non-fatal casualties (maimings), which are widely believed to be overwhelming. Leaked reports indicate that in the supposed jewel of the V.A. system, Walter Reed Hospital, the wounded are overflowing onto cots in the corridors.

7 The US Congress has set a goal of having robot vehicles constitute one-third of its ground force by 2015. Four thousand of these artificial warriors, such as the MQ-1 Predator, are “serving” in Iraq right now; capable of striking from the air, under the sea and on land. When one of these robot fighters self-navigated above a car full of Al Qaeda suspects in 2002, the decision to vaporize the victims with Hellfire missiles was made by pilots 7,000 miles away.

 


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« Reply #56 on: July 28, 2008, 10:30:56 am »









We create our own reality.

Do these words make you roll your eyes just a little bit? Even though you believe them? Over the past couple of decades, this truism has been bandied about so much that it has lost most of its stinging magic. But if we were to truly consider its implications, it would change our lives in revolutionary ways. In the case of the planet Mars, it would inspire us to reconsider violence, blaming and anger.




In our last America in Transition we suggested that although Mars has long been considered the bad boy of the birth chart, anger is not the be-all-and-end-all of what Mars means, nor are accidents, sickness and aggression. We proposed that the energy symbolized by this planet is essentially healthy: in its undistorted form, Mars is no more or less than individuated life force rearing its head, champing at the bit. Mars says, This is who I am and this is what I want.

If persons and groups create their own reality, it follows that the planets are reflections of our consciousness. If a transit shows up in a destructive way, it is so because we are using it that way. We ended our discussion last month with the question, When Americans look into the mirror of Mars, what do they see?

Right now, they see the war in Iraq.



Mars and war

Almost as much ink has been spilled writing about this abominable war as blood has been spilled in the waging of it, so a few relevant points will suffice here.

Americans were at first told that the war would pay for itself. (1) Now the economist Joseph Stiglitz tells us that the war will cost taxpayers three trillion dollars; although to come up with any final figure would seem misleadingly optimistic, since it is clear that the powers-that-be in Washington—no matter who wins the election—have no intention of leaving the occupied region once they secure their foothold. They don’t call those sixteen permanent US bases “permanent” for nothing. (2)

Even if the ordinary American taxpayer were able to fathom the amount of money three trillion dollars is (this writer gave up trying after hearing that if you taped that many dollar bills end to end they’d reach to the Moon and back), it is doubtful that he could fully absorb the fact that this money, which could be used to fund social security for the next 50 years, is instead being used to fund death and ruination. It’s not only that it’s too tragic; it’s also that it’s too absurd. The US taxpayer risks cognitive dissonance hearing that he is bankrolling the infliction by his government of terrible suffering (3) on a mass scale; at the very same time that social programs for the needy in his community are being deemed too expensive and must be eliminated—including, with crushing irony, those programs set up to help the veterans who come home broken in body, mind and soul after following their government’s orders. (4)

America’s upside-down priorities have entered the realm of surrealism. To see this scenario as the New Normal, as our government would have us do, is crazy-making.

It is Mars gone mad.
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« Reply #57 on: July 28, 2008, 10:33:32 am »










Mars transits to the US chart

The Spring Equinox was on a Full Moon this year, and it formed a T-square with Pluto. This augured that the three months that followed would feature explosive breakdown. By the time of the vernal threshold, Mars was back in Cancer (real estate) and was opposing Pluto for a second round, in Capricorn (monetary systems).

It was then that the sub-prime mortgage debacle moved into its next phase: the bailout of bloated bankers by the Fed. Citizen outrage started to broaden and deepen as Americans bore witness to the egregious degree of self-interest (Mars run amok) at the heart of the country’s agencies of material power (Pluto in the US 2nd house). Stumbling bloviations ensued from Washington about why punch-drunk fund managers should be able to walk away scot-free—and with giant severance packages, to boot—from the fiscal mess they themselves had created; while elsewhere in the socioeconomic strata homeowners were being evicted, teachers were getting pink slips and homeless shelters were shutting their doors. Weren’t these sort of exactly the types of scenarios that caused the French Revolution?

Mars continued its way through the seventh house of the USA chart and into the eighth house of banking (5),where it will stay until late June. These transits confirm with astounding precision the factors involved in the current American financial crisis, including the outrage (Mars) that the American public feels percolating within its collective breast. From the point of view of group psychology, one senses the country is nearing a tipping point of anger. One wonders what this great nation of spenders will refuse, at long last, to pay for.

With war coverage having dropped to less than a fifth of what it was even a year ago, the typical American may find the prospect of a scorched, ruined Iraq—a third of its citizens killed or exiled with her hard-earned taxes—less infuriating than the idea of bailing out the gaggle of white collar thieves whose folly has given the country another shove towards the economic precipice.



Soldiers vs. warriors

There is something to be said for righteous anger in the face of extravagant wrongdoing such as this. As a sign of socio-political vitality and alertness, outrage would be the first response we would expect from a fully awake citizenry. But when we back up from the worldly level and consider the situation transpersonally, we remember that anger, however justified, is only a transitional expression of Mars. While not denying the reality of appropriate rage, the spiritual seeker does not want to stay there.

To use Mars to advance our consciousness, engaged Americans must acknowledge the strong feelings—energizing but uncomfortable—that arise in response to the inhumanities happening on our watch; recognize our aliveness in the feeling of such feelings; and then consider how this force might manifest were it used with heightened awareness. At this level of subtlety we find the warrior.

Astrology has long associated Mars with soldiers. This category includes what we might call the bad soldiers, the so-called “bad apples” who, at Mai Lai and Haditha et al, committed what received wisdom selectively deems atrocities; and the “good soldiers,” whose actions remain safely within the confines of the status quo’s notion of patriotic service. Both categories undermine the sublime potential of Mars.

To raise this planetary function to the level of which it is capable we must dispense with the soldier and bring in the warrior. Each of us has a warrior within us; and each group entity has the capacity to use its soldiers as warriors instead. The warrior is a figure of courage; not a factotum with a gun.

We must demand more of this part of our psyche. For too long Mars has been seen, at best, as a bundle of clumsy, dangerous volatility; and at worst as the cause of terrible harm. Our goal is to liberate the red planet from its stereotype. In our next America in Transition we will consider how the warrior can be coaxed forth from the natal chart, for the times we live in require his presence. Seeing Mars in his true form will give us access to the inborn bravery that allows each of us to do what must be done.

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« Reply #58 on: July 28, 2008, 10:35:13 am »









Notes:



1 Not too long ago (though apparently too long ago to have meaning for many Americans ) the early estimate of fifty billion dollars was scoffed at by the White House. Larry Lindsey, Assistant to the President on Economic Policy, was forced to resign in 2002 after putting the number at an unheard-of 200 billion. Six years later, we hear the war is costing ten billion dollars a month.

2 The embassy in Iraq is the largest in the world. Despite the sound bites one hears from the candidates about troop withdrawal, neither political party is saying a word about the 50,000 to 100,000 Americans who will not go home with the soldiers. These personnel are to be embedded into the infamous Iraqi Interior Ministry. Though their official designation may shift—from “military” to “paramilitary”, or even to the risibly euphemistic label “diplomatic advisers””—Mars by any other name is still Mars.

3 Nothing calls to mind the iconic American battle cry, “No taxation without representation” more than the fact that, despite being repulsed en masse by the idea of torture, American taxpayers are paying for Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Camp Bondesteel in Kosovo and other torture camps around the world whose names and locations remain classified. Though we are compelled by law to pay our taxes, financing these atrocities takes a toll our soul-health. S.T. Bindoff, the British historian, wrote in 1950 that “the extortion of evidence by the infliction of intolerable pain is a barbarism whose recrudescence in our own day has not rendered it less revolting to humane minds, and all who touch it are defiled.”

4 Under the USA’s extended Mars return, stop-loss deployment entered the American lexicon, raising the consciousness of millions of American civilians about the brutal reality of a soldier’s experience. The stop-loss phenomenon expresses the symbolism of the transit like an arrow to the bulls-eye: back-and-forth (Gemini) military action (Mars). Suddenly pushed into the forefront of national discourse was a theme that began with last year’s revelation of the scandalous conditions wounded vets suffer at Walter Reed Hospital (slated for reconstruction by none other than —wait for it—Halliburton). We are now seeing a sudden flurry of studies coming out about the treatment of veterans: one reports that GIs who committed suicide, or tried to, jumped six-fold from 2002 to 2007; another that one in 5 soldiers returning with symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome is never referred by government physicians for further help. (As for Iraqi soldiers wounded in the service of their country, studies are in short supply. These men can’t turn to Iraqi military hospitals: there aren’t any.)

5 It would be shortsighted to lay the current burgeoning fiscal crisis exclusively at the feet of the Bush crowd. Under Bill Clinton, Greenspan and then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin got rid of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which was designed to prevent the kind of rampant speculation that led to Great Depression. Deregulation was all the rage in the ‘90s and became accepted in more and more industries.

(Ed. note: read more on Glass-Steagall here.)


http://www.daykeeperjournal.com/aarch08/0806jun/murray.shtml
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« Reply #59 on: July 28, 2008, 10:38:13 am »










Jessica Murray trained as a fine artist before graduating in 1973 from Brown University, where she studied psychology and linguistics. After a stint in political theatre in the heady early '70s, Jessica moved to San Francisco and began studying metaphysics, where she has had a full-time private practice in astrology for more than 30 years.


Her book, Soul-Sick Nation: An Astrologer's View of America, is available through her website,

mothersky.com.

In addition to her column in Daykeeper Journal and the monthly Skywatch on her website,

MotherSky.com,

Jessica's essays appear in The Mountain Astrologer, P.S. Magazine, Considerations and other publications. Jessica can be reached at



415.626.7795

or jessica@mothersky.com.
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