ARTICLES FROM CURRENT ASTROLOGERS

[Bianca]

The election extravaganza



A timely example of distorted Saturn can be seen in the current showcasing by the American telecommunications industry of the biggest money-making scam in media history: the presidential campaign season. This massive election-prep period, with its preternaturally early whistle stops, its up-for-grabs scheduling of primaries and its rule manipulating run amok (2), is proving itself as elastic as Mike Huckabee’s old trousers.

Even if we set aside the content of the speechifying and its attendant punditry, the sheer girth of this media phenom—its extravaganza-like presence across the media landscape—tends to seduce even the most skeptical American into believing that there is nothing more newsworthy in the whole wide world than that day’s tiny poll shift or the tear that appeared in Hillary’s eye or the number of times Rudy said “9/11” in a speech. Low-level Saturn logic concludes that if the official voices of a society—in this case, the talking heads on TV—are giving this subject so much attention, it cannot be nonsense. It must be reality.

We have seen that Saturn gets its heft from the notion that this is what everybody thinks. The scale of the stagecraft involved in America’s election-year machinery is cultivated to convey the idea that everybody thinks these goings-on are über-important. Although, as we have seen, Saturn resists defining who this “everybody” is,media consumers are cajoled into assuming that what they are watching represents something of overweening concern to some vast, universal majority.

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Saturn decides what the majority is thinking, even when it isn’t



But the more closely we look at it, the idea of The Majority starts to shift and fluctuate, much like the idea of reality. Like other Saturn-governed concepts, it is less sacrosanct than we are led to believe.

For example, pollsters tell us that only a dinky little third of the American electorate is behind the Bush-Cheney cabal at this point, but one would never know it given the great honking sound and fury emanating from the candidates vying for the GOP torch. This contingent is given a huge amount of airtime, because, of course, the game is rigged; they represent agencies with oodles of money and connections to the seat of power. (3)

What does this scenario have to do with the workings of Saturn?

Skewed media positioning provides its beneficiaries with a patina of gravitas, Saturn’s ultimate prize. The lack of a level playing field of visibility has fed into a fictive construct that not only do most people find these individuals and their scripted sound bites eminently significant, but that most people see these views as normal. The intention is to make the most foolish, off-the-wall public figures achieve an aura of being the voice of majority opinion without it being literally true. (This phenomenon has a counterpart in the financial world. Stock analysts call it the “salience bias:” investors give high-profile information—even when it is obviously flawed—more weight than they give sound, lower-profile information.)

In our last column we described the tendency of individuals in the grip of a Saturn picture to disdain subjecting their story to statistical analysis (for example, the idea that “most marriages last until-death-do-us-part”). The irony here is that the presumption of factuality is exactly what makes their view feel so solid.

But even when such stories are backed up by empirical data, Saturn persuades us to believe that its truisms are not just true; they are more than true. They are common knowledge. There is a sense of psychological weight surrounding Saturnine institutions and viewpoints that would not exist if they were thought to be the beliefs of the minority.

[Bianca]

Saturn decides who The Fringe is



Most Americans—whether right- or left-leaning—know that endorsing torture is not a value that the US citizenry as a whole identifies with. If we’re talking about actual majority opinion, it is very improbable that Mitt Romney’s call to double the size of Guantanamo represents mainstream thinking. Moreover, it seems likely that most Americans in their heart of hearts detected the whiff of the nutcase about Sen. McCain changing the lyrics of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann” to “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran;” as well as about Mr. Huckabee’s announcement that if all the nation’s aborted fetuses had gone to term, the US wouldn’t need low-cost immigrant labor.

Nonetheless there exists a stubborn collective resistance to seeing these stances for what they are: the unwholesome, bizarre opinions of a fringe wing of an unpopular party. The stagecraft shoring up these gentlemen—the fact that they are given the imprimatur of the headlines day after day, and that big-name reporters analyze, with grave solemnity and dead seriousness, their every word and gesture—is designed to prevent them from being seen as fringe thinkers.

Even were an idea to pop out of one of these speakers’ mouths that was fringe-like in a positive sense—i.e. refreshingly unique—Saturn would have none of it. Saturn does not acquire authority by being original or idiosyncratic. It gets its avoirdupois from the idea that certain things are generally known and accepted. These candidates do not aspire to be seen as brilliant or innovative. They want to be thought of as predictable exponents of What Most People Think. They are running on the Saturn platform.

With perverse irony, the faux-majority thinking trope works its magic all along the political spectrum. Many leftwing Americans buy into this fallacy every bit as much as the cheerleaders of the candidates we are describing. Consider that American progressives—the type of voter who might see Dennis Kucinich as a harbinger of integrity and common sense, for example—even this kind of American, if she watched enough TV, would tend to get snookered by Saturn’s Reality Show. The rules of this show declare that if Kucinich is denied a place in the big debate, he must not be a real candidate. Thus if a voter identifies with him and believes in his authenticity, she must be the fringe thinker.

By this skewed logic, the anti-war contingent, despite being identified by pollsters as the overwhelming majority of the US populace, tend to see themselves as the odd-men-out, as voices in the wilderness, as the weirdos.

[Bianca]

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).

[Bianca]

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.

[Bianca]

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.

[Bianca]

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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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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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 new book, Soul-Sick Nation: An Astrologer's View of America, has recently been published by AuthorHouse. 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.


http://www.daykeeperjournal.com/murraylist.shtml

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I think I have explained this before but let me try to do it again for you. I will excerpt from some of the Magi texts since hey have already explained these techniques perfectly. Declinations were also used in Ptolemaic astrology and by the medievals, but fell out of use. Recently more work has gone into their re-integration. It absolutely makes sense.

“Believe it or not, everyone has TWO birth charts. A normal chart is an attempt to give you the positions of the planets. But the positions such charts give you are only one set of coordinates of the planets and such charts are MISSING THE OTHER COORDINATES that you need.

The most fundamental theory in astrology is that the positions of the planets in the sky have an influence on us. When the positions of the planets change, the influences also change. For this reason, astrological charts were designed to be a map of the sky that should tell us the positions of the planets when someone was born and also should tell us about the changes in the positions of the planets from one time to the next. However, even though a birth chart is a map of the sky, the normal astrological birth chart only has one coordinate. But every other kind of map that you have ever used has two coordinates: the horizontal (East-West) coordinate and the vertical (North-South) coordinate.

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Since an astrological chart is supposed to be a map of the sky, it must have two coordinates. You cannot know the position of a planet in the sky unless you have both the vertical and the horizontal coordinates.

When someone says that she/he is a Virgo, the person really is referring to only the horizontal coordinate of the Sun when the person was born. The normal birth chart has only one coordinate and only tells you the horizontal position of the planets. When you look for a planet in the nighttime sky, you cannot find it unless you know both the horizontal and vertical coordinates. When the planets move across our skies, the planets move a little bit horizontally and a little bit vertically at the same time. Since astrologers believe that the positions and movements of the planets have an influence on us, it makes sense that BOTH the horizontal coordinates and the vertical coordinates of the planets are equally important.

Astrology has a name for both the vertical and the horizontal coordinates. The vertical coordinates are called the DECLINATIONS. The horizontal coordinates are called the LONGITUDES and these positions of the planets are always drawn along the circumference of the circle. Both the declinations and the longitudes are equally important in astrology.

[Bianca]

Each of the planets move both horizontally and vertically in the sky, in other words the planets move both side to side in the sky, and they also each move up and down in the sky. But most astrologers have been taking into account only the side to side (horizontal) movement of the planets and have ignored the up and down (vertical) movement of each planet. When astrologers talk about what sign the Sun is in, they are talking about only the HORIZONTAL POSITION of the Sun. Astrologers have always believed that the horizontal positions and movement of the planets have an influence on life on Earth. They are correct on this point. But the VERTICAL movement and positions of the planets must also have an influence and should also be taken into consideration in any astrological analysis. A map always has two coordinates, the horizontal and the vertical coordinates. An astrological chart is just like a map. An astrological chart is a map of the sky. Everyday, each planet moves a little bit horizontally, and each planet also moves a little bit vertically. Therefore, all astrological charts should show us both the horizontal and vertical positions of the planets. However, the astrological charts used by the Babylonians and by traditional astrology all use only the horizontal coordinates of the planets. These charts are missing the vertical positions, and it is these positions that create your second birth chart. If we were going to use a standard street map to try to reach a destination, we would not get where we want to go by using only the horizontal coordinates of the map.

[Bianca]

In the same way, an astrologer will also get lost if he or she only uses the horizontal coordinates of a planet. When astrologers say that they are a Leo or a Scorpio, what they really mean is that the horizontal coordinate of their Sun was in Leo or in Scorpio on the day they were born. When astrologers say that their Mars is in Gemini and they have a Virgo Moon, they are really referring only to the horizontal coordinate of these planets. It is these horizontal coordinates in the sky that all astrologers since the Babylonians have marked down in the circle of an astrological chart, but the vertical coordinates are equally important.

Astronomers refer to the horizontal locations of the planets as the LONGITUDES, and the vertical positions of the planets as the DECLINATIONS. Astrology has adapted the same terminology. In traditional astrology, the longitudes are used to create the circle of the birth charts. These charts include all horoscope charts and Babylonian-style alignment charts. It is the horizontal positions of the planets (the longitudes) that are drawn around the circumference of the circle.

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A meaningful alignment of planets can occur in the Declinations Chart as well as the Babylonian Alignment Chart (longitudes). Planetary aspects occur in the declinations whenever two planets are both in the same degree and also on the same side of the Equinox Line. Astrologers call such a planetary aspect a PARALLEL. The two planets are referred to as being parallel to each other. When two planets are in the same degree but on opposite sides of the Equinox Line, we say that the two planets are CONTRAPARALLEL to each other. This alignment also creates a planetary aspect in the declinations, and the aspect is called a contra-parallel. Both the parallel and the contraparallel are the equivalent of the conjunction in the Babylonian Alignment Chart (although the contra-parallel is not as strong as the parallel). This means that the parallel and contra-parallel are not only planetary aspects, but they are also enhancement aspects. Since astrology is consistent, this also means that such declinational planetary aspects are interpreted the same way as the enhancements are in the Babylonian Alignment Charts; you simply combine and integrate the symbolisms of the planets that comprise the aspect.”



By Robert C.

www.starlight news.com

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                                        THE FOURTH AMENDMENT SIGNED AWAY






Today July 10, 2008 at 1:22pm in Washington, DC


the President of the United States, with the complicit support of most of the House and Senate, signed away the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Although our government has acknowledged that they have been spying on us for quite some time, today they made it official with no recourse to sue from the Judiciary. This government has been in legal violation of the Constitution and today they made that violation OK.

What a day, what a time to sign this bill into law. It will be challenged in courts throughout this country, that is a given.

Pluto in Sagittarius in the 3rd House of mundane communication opposing Mercury in Gemini in the 9th House of higher courts. The respective houses are in Mutual Reception, putting Pluto in the 9th and Mercury in the 3rd. According to Robert Hand "a Mercury Pluto opposition is (amoung other things) a naked power grab, with either you (the US) or Pluto (the government) trying to convince that a thought or action that is wrong is actually right, don't be fooled." Pluto is now retrograde at 29 degrees Sagittarius and will come back over that 29 degrees in September/October/November. In mid August (before the convention) Mars and the transiting Moon will square the Sagittarius/Gemini axis, and that's when the people will begin making known their real anger over this. In the late spring of 2010 Uranus makes its first square from Pisces to that axis with Jupiter joining later in the month of June as Uranus goes retrograde on 29 Pisces in square to the Pluto/Mercury.

All the "power planets" are in play in today's event signing. Asc. is in Libra and Mid-heaven in Cancer and Moon and Venus are in a square.Moon trine Neptune (most people don't see the meaning of this right now today but they will) Mercury oppose Pluto (see above paragraph)

Sun oppose Jupiter ((lots of ego and hubris over this, plus Nancy Pelosi in trying to move the dialogue away from what's just happened is saying "well Dennis Kuchinch can take his impeachment resolution to the judiciary committe and they can discuss it, how's that for a bone to the people) Mars and Saturn are in an exact conjunction today and tomorrow (can get lots of work done, but also seething frustration ready to explode when Mars passes Saturn, and that's when it falls on Obama's Pluto and McCain's Sun, it's gonna be real hot on that campaign trail over this.)

But it's the trine from the Sun to Uranus and the sextile from Jupiter that needs to be paid attention to; Uranus is just sitting down there retrograding, in the 6th house (another Mercury house) taking notes. The star Betelgeuse sits on Mercury (successful operation) and so it was successful, but the star Acumen sits on top of Pluto (enduring attacks which weaken) When Uranus gets around to 29 Pisces in 2010 the potential of successfully overturning this is great, or it will blow up the Constitution all together. Uranus will separate the wheat from the chaff or more to the point the BS from the truth, with a lot of help from Jupiter the planet of truth and remember Mercury is in the 9th house, the house of truth. The point isn't that truth is always told, the point is there is a penalty to be paid when it isn't.

The Constitution became law on March 4, 1789 in Philadelphia, PA - Pluto was at 18 Aquarius as was the 1st Setting of Congress, also in 1789, as was the election of George Washington. Today's North Node is at 18 Aquarius signaling a new start. In the progressed chart of the Constitution Chiron lands at 29 degrees Gemini giving the message of a wounding to the Constitution, Congress and the Presidency. I believe a big mistake has been made today.

The Moon is a chart represents the feminine and the Sun the masculine, so in a universal chart such as an event or country the Moon represents the people as a whole and the Sun the leadership as a whole. Sun opposes Jupiter can give you an idea of the amount of hubris rolling around the Sun over this FISA Bill by those protecting their butts, but the Moon is rising in the 1st house of "us."

I don't remember who said this but it was one of the founding fathers I think



                      "People who behave like sheep open the door to a government of wolves."



And haven't we just done that all along.



www.astroworl.us.com