Is it Covid, or is it me? Or you? I am finding, these days, that Time seems to drag interminably on the one hand, and whizz by at warp speed on the other. Coming round slowly as usual over my morning cuppa (not a morning person, me…) I was jolted awake by realising that it’s almost Midsummer. How did that happen? It seemed like it was the Spring Equinox about five minutes ago. Much has happened/not happened since then…depends on what level of lockdown you’ve been enduring where you are, I guess!
So, I thought I’d revisit the post I wrote for the UK’s Astrological Journal at the time of the Spring Equinox 2021: taking stock, as it were, of where we were then, and where we are now, as Midsummer approaches. Your thoughts, as ever, are most welcome!
Normally, I don’t have too much bother coming up with a column topic. The idea usually lands in my mind either days or weeks before the deadline. If it refuses to go away and bother someone else, I know it’s mine to tackle. Either that, or final deadline looming has a miraculously stimulating effect on my inert capacity for creative cogitation.
Not this time.
I have been in what can best be described as ‘zombie slug’ mode, as the latest covid lockdown has deprived all of us of most activity involving direct social contact with our fellow human beings. I share the apprehension of many worldwide who have been shocked at the full frontal assault on democracy provoked by Trump in the dying embers of his less than successful presidency. Tomorrow, 20th January 2021, is Inauguration Day in the USA.
What shape is 2021 going to take? The astrology of the new Air Era which began on 2020’s Winter Solstice has produced much commentary from me and fellow astrologers across the globe. I feel dispirited at the thought of coming up with anything relevant to say in my current mood.
However, dragging myself out into the dank, cold, grubby murk of a city morning for the usual walk, I found the cheery defiance of new season’s snowdrops sprouting merrily in the local park more inspiring than ever before. Their simple yet powerful reminder that Life goes on despite the antics of humans, cheered me up.
‘I know!” I thought. “I’m going to have a look at the 2021 Spring Equinox horoscope – and not allow myself to be intimidated by knowing that knowledgeable and erudite commentaries from experienced mundane astrologers are even now being penned the length and breadth of lands various…’. ( yes, I know no-one pens anything very much any more…it’s just a figure of speech)
Later…
After three days’ procrastination, a much cheerier mood prevails as I begin perusing this year’s Spring Equinox chart. The USA now has a presidential President in Joe Biden; despite the pall of covid hanging over us all, he set the tone for an inspiring Inauguration.
And the women – wow!
First off, we now have the first black/South Asian female Vice Ppresident: two firsts rolled into the formidable Kamala Harris. Next up, the accomplished Dr Jill Biden as FLOTUS. Then Lady Gaga’s knockout rendition of the USA’s national anthem. And the magnificent poem performed superbly by 22 year old Amanda Gorman.
Also: in the roll-call of Biden appointments, this from CNN on Inauguration day:
“At least six major news networks have assigned women to lead White House coverage of the Biden administration, raising the profile of female journalists in an institution long dominated by men”(i)
But more on the women shortly…
This Spring Equinox horoscope certainly holds some cheer for us: Jupiter is closely conjunct the Aquarian MC, trine Gemini rising, as he moves away from Saturn. Both Saturn from the 9th house and Jupiter from the 10th are trine a 12th house Moon/North Node/Mars combination in Gemini. This suggests some cautious optimism and focused energy arising behind the scenes in our world-wide community, with plenty new ideas coming slowly to the fore – hopefully as the covid infection and death rates slowly fall with the gradual rise and impact of mass vaccination programmes.
That Jupiter on an Aquarian MC does suggest that rich male benefactors with a social conscience might divert some of their squillions toward the common good – eg helping to get the world vaccinated. Come on, Besos and Musk. Step up!! ( ps 8.6.21: They haven’t as yet…what a surprise.)
Meanwhile, we are in for a whole year of Saturn square Uranus, which first kicked off from March to July 2020. This year, their squares are exact at the following points: February17th (7 deg Aquarius/Taurus) + June 14th (13 deg Aquarius/Taurus) + Dec 24th (11deg Aquarius/Taurus). Much has already been said, and will be repeated as 2021 unfolds, concerning the intractable and potentially violent taking up of intransigent, polarised positions politically and culturally from which we have suffered so much in the year just gone.
However, as I reflected on the many variations on the battle between the old and new order arising already from this alarming square, my eye fell on the Venus/Neptune conjunction, sitting right next to the equinoctal Aries Sun.
I realised that its 24 deg Pisces midpoint fell on the Saturn/Uranus midpoint. Suddenly – honestly, I’m not making this up! – a vivid image came to me: Gustave Moreau’s 1866 painting of ‘Venus Rising from the Sea’. I’ve always preferred this version of the mythical birth of Venus (from the severed genitals of mythical sky god Uranus castrated by his mythical offspring Saturn and cast into the briny, supposedly off the coast of Cyprus …) to Sandro Botticelli’s much more demure Venus, painted sometime in the 1480s, arriving onshore draped prettily within a seashell. Moreau’s Venus, as can be seen from the accompanying image, is much more authoritative, tougher- looking in her beauty – pretty formidable, in fact.
(No – I could not resist checking my battered copy of Michelson’s wonderful Tables of Planetary Phenomena to see what was going on in 1866. Yes – in July and August that year, there were significant Saturn/Uranus aspects: with Saturn at 6 deg Scorpio waxing trine Uranus at 6 deg Cancer + Saturn at 7 deg Scorpio waxing trine Uranus at 7 deg Cancer. Some co-incidence, eh?!)
Now – back to the formidable, authoritative women who are very much part of our current world picture.
In 2019, we had Greta Thunberg coming to the fore with the South Node conjunct Saturn/Pluto in the Spring, taking ineffectual male politicians to task in the face of a building world-wide climate crisis, and winding up as Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. She succeeded in turning vague anxieties about the planet into a worldwide movement calling for global change.
My Jan/Feb 2021 NTAC column concerned the provocative ‘silver blob’ commemorative statue to Mary Wollestonecraft, arguably the world’s first publicly influential feminist via her famous 1792 tract ‘Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ and mother of the prescient Mary Shelley. Shelley warned us – via ‘Frankenstein’ published in 1818 – of the consequences of science being allowed to run unchecked by either compassion or ethics.
That statue, unveiled on 10th November 2020, succeeded in raising the ire of women across a wide spectrum – in the same week that Kamala Harrismade history by becoming Joe Biden’s Vice President. The horoscope of the statue’s launch – which includes the four key female asteroids Ceres, Juno, Pallas, and Vesta – shows strong, combative female energy being very much to the fore, reflecting in microcosm what is currently going on across the world. Female leaders from Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon to New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern and Germany’s Angela Merkelare generally making a better job of leading their countries through the covid crisis than their male counterparts.
I was powerfully struck by the arrival of Moreau’s formidable Venus in my mind’s eye as I contemplated the Spring Equinox’s Venus/Neptune in Pisces in relation to that intractable-looking Saturn/Uranus square. It strongly suggested this to me: if the angry and dangerous stances of opposing camps are to be slowly dissolved and gradually transformed into more constructive, co-operative positions as this (yet another!) crisis year for the world unfolds, it is likely to be the energies of formidable, authoritative, powerful, compassionate women which play a significant part in enabling such a transformation…
(This post is an edited version of my 34th Not the Astrology Column featured in the March/April 2021 Issue of the UK’s Astrological Journal, edited by Victor Olliver.)
I grew up on a small, windswept island off the West Coast of Scotland, where environmental pollution was negligible; the night skies were wonderfully, deeply dark. Dazzlingly dark – especially on cold, clear winter nights. Becoming utterly fascinated by the heavens above me, I was gradually able to discern some of the patterns made by the stars, learning to spot even Saturn at certain times of the year.
However, what I especially loved was the comfortingly predictable rhythm of the Moon’s monthly traverse across the night sky. I waited eagerly to see – intermittently because of our frequently stormy and cloudy weather! – the fragile silvery sliver of the waning crescent. Then darkness. And a couple of days later – again, if I was lucky and the skies were clear – the welcome appearance of the fresh, new waxing crescent Moon.
That was outdoors. Indoors, things were uncomfortably unpredictable to say the least as I slowly emerged from childhood, gradually gaining agency culminating in an early departure from home in my late teens. The one steady source of comfort as I moved towards that goal was a picture: the picture you see here. I knew nothing whatever about it apart from its title:‘Reaching for the Moon’. No-one in the house seemed to know where it had come from…only many years later thanks to google did I find out its author and provenance (ii)
That stylised Art Deco image inspired me to reach in my teens toward the waxing crescent of my slowly forming future life…only many years later on receiving a hand-drawn horoscope from the Faculty of Astrological Studies’ cartographer as part of their Certificate course in the early 1980s did I discover my birth had occurred on a Sun/Moon conjunction in Leo in the twelfth house – just a few hours before the New Moon. No wonder the soli/lunar cycle had fascinated me in my childhood; cycles have increasingly continued to do so ever since.
Whether the cycle is huge, like the five hundred year Neptune/ Pluto one, or small, like that of the monthly Sun/Moon, the same basic stages apply: seeding, germinating, sprouting, flowering, ripening, harvesting, dying back in preparation for the new. Those stages describe developmental processes from gnats to galaxies; we can thus apply the basic template of what we see enacted above us in the heavens every month to the ebb and flow everything, including cultural phases and the rise and fall of whole civilisations…
In mid-life, during one single decade I had to negotiate a passage through the endings of not one, or two, or three but four major cycles amplified by a long Uranus then Neptune transit opposing my twelfth house planets. This necessitated a lengthy period of contemplative retreat and slow re-emergence, which was both personally purging and a wonderfully close-up qualitative research opportunity (you have to look on the bright side!). Although aspects of this ten-year period were pretty devastating, I emerged with both deepened insight into – and fascination with – the waning and waxing crescent phases of cycles great and small, personal and collective.
The times we are currently living through are devastatingly disruptive and at the moment we have no real idea how – or who – we are going to be when we eventually emerge. It struck me recently that the very last 20 year Jupiter/Saturn cycle in the Earth element could roughly be mapped onto the waning crescent of that 200 year period; and the cycle’s first twenty-year journey through the subsequent Air era could be thought of as the waxing crescent of a very different time unfolding.
Three major cycles’ endings…
At times symbolism seems to step down a level, manifesting in a very literal way in the world we ordinary mortals inhabit. I experienced such a moment of symbol becoming strikingly ‘real’ in the week following Saturn’s first entry into airy Aquarius on Sunday 22nd March 2020, Mother’s Day in the UK. This was also the day the UK government declared that we were in lockdown owing to the threat posed by the covid 19 airborne pandemic, thereby joining much of the rest of Europe and parts of North America, much of Asia having got there weeks before us.
A few days later, it seemed as though the human community had literally taken to Air en masse – via Zoom, Skype, WhatsApp, FaceTime, Facebook etc – a powerful, immediate, adaptive response to the locked-down world.
Along with many of my astrological colleagues, especially those of us who have been ‘tuning in’ to the larger planetary cycles which span aeons of time, I have been observing the turmoil and difficulty of the very ending of the 1982-2020 Saturn/Pluto cycle and its manifestations in the reality of life on Earth with grim fascination.
I’ve also been very aware that the long sojourn of the 20-years long Jupiter/Saturn cycles through the Earth element, which began in 1802, will terminate with a dramatic symbolic flourish following its full entry into Air, meeting Jupiter at 0 Aquarius on 21st December 2020 – the Winter Solstice, no less…
Thus we are not only at the end of the Jupiter/Saturn cycle begun in Taurus in the year 2000, but the end of a whole era of that cycle’s moving through the Earth element. This shift,‘…the transition of the conjunction from one element to another – the ‘Mutation Conjunction’ – has always been considered to be of particular importance marking a major shift in emphasis and orientation in the world…’ (iii)
This ‘triple whammy’ of Moondark in 2019 and 2020, involving the very ending of no less than three major cycles of 200, 33-38 and 20 years respectively, therefore points to those years as being especially symbolically significant.
We have increasingly been handing over the conduct of our ‘civilisation’, for good and ill (the usual inextricable twins) to the airy Internet in recent times, gaining pace from the Jupiter/Saturn conjunction’s first brief, 20-years appearance in the Air element, in Libra, in 1980/81: creating an increasingly interconnected cyber-world. However, the last week of March 2020 powerfully brought home to me the literal reality of the symbolism I’d been observing: at the end of the waning crescent phase of the Jupiter/Saturn cycles travelling through Earth, the Air era truly is almost upon us.
We are seeing the seeds of the next 200 years beginning to push through the darkness of the future. As the Earth era loses power and agency in its waning crescent, a new world order is gradually emerging…
Deaths – and Entrances
It feels as though we humans – tiny chips of the huge prevailing energies of turbulence and change – are living
“On almost the incendiary eve
Of deaths and entrances” (iv)
as Dylan Thomas so powerfully put it. It is a very ancient human tendency, when knowing that a stage of life has come to an inexorable end, to look back to wherever the beginning might have been in trying to come to terms – and in starting to contemplate the largely unknown future.
That has very much been my recent experience. My husband Ian was felled by a stroke on the 12th January 2020, three hours after the opening crescent phase of the new Saturn/Pluto cycle in Capricorn: a brutal opening for me to a new way of life. One of my ways of dealing with his loss has been to go back, back to just before the opening 1982 Saturn/Pluto cycle in Libra, when we were married nearly forty years ago, to reflect on what that precious time may have meant both in my life and his – and where I go from here.
However, having been born with (far too many!) Leo planets in the twelfth house, it has always been my way to seek creative perspective on whatever happens to me, mine and the wider world by setting personal dramas if possible in the context of a bigger picture.
Thus, as we all sit in 2020 – penned in and fearful as a deadly airborne virus takes down not only individuals, over half a million as I write in July 2020, but also much of the economic and social structures upon which the Earth era rests – I have been very strongly drawn to reflecting on another ending and beginning on the very large scale: the closing crescent phase of the Jupiter/Saturn cycles through the element of Fire in 1603 which ended with the conjunction’s first meeting in Earth in 1802.
What a turbulent ending and beginning that was! The waning crescent of the Fire era hosted not one, but two major Western revolutions: the American Revolution between 1775 and 1783, and the French Revolution from 1789 to 1799. These occurred against the backdrop of the combined forces of the accelerating Industrial Revolution and the Scientific Revolution, which really got under weigh from the Jupiter/Saturn cycle’s shift into Earth in 1802 and the rise of the materialist era thereafter – rooted firmly in exploitation of the resources of Planet Earth.
It needs only a sketchy knowledge of the historical timeline, looking back, to realise that those revolutionary upheavals at the waning crescent of the old Fire era were largely responsible for the rise and pan-global impact of Western civilisation as the new Earth era took shape.
One of the fascinating seeds of the coming Air era emerging in the waning crescent phase of our current Earth era, has been the undoubted rise and expanding influence of the East, spearheaded by the expansionist, exponential rise in worldly power and influence of China whose dominance and global influence via sophisticated technologies has given us at least some idea of what shape the Air era will take. A manifestation of the negative dimensions of this Airy shift has been the rise of cyber-warfare in recent years…
Powerful new Earth-based technologies, eg Big Oil, arising in the materialist era have provided lifestyles and opportunities undreamed of by our ancestors – in the wealthier parts of the world. But, uncoupled from any agreed collective sense of responsibility towards our mother planet, they have also as the Earth era draws to a close, placed her very survival under threat. Clearly, as the opening crescent of the new Air era takes form, we will need urgently to develop technologies which no longer depend upon sawing off the branch on which we are all sitting…
From the collective to the personal – Mary Shelley, prophet…and Greta Thunberg, climate activist
Mary Shelley
Some individuals have a more powerful impact than others on the way history and culture take shape. As Greta Thunberg herself neatly put it in her first book’s title: ‘No One is Too Small to Make a Difference’(v). As my reflections on the waning crescent phases of both the 1603-1802 Fire era and the 1802-2020 Earth era continued, the impact of two very young women – Mary Shelley and Greta Thunberg – struck me forcefully as individuals whose lives and work bracket the beginning and ending of the Earth era, as well as setting the tone for our entry into Air.
Mary Godwin Shelley was born on 30th August 1797. Daughter of the famous philosopher and writer William Godwin and the early feminist writer Mary Wollestonecraft who died 10 days after her birth, she made her entrance in the turbulent final years of the dying Fire era, its waning crescent.
Little did her parents know that their child, at the time of her first Nodal Return whilst only nineteen years old, in the waxing crescent phase and the first twenty-year Jupiter/Saturn cycle of the new materialist Earth era, would write an enduringly famous book which has created a modern myth. “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus” (published 1.1.1818), issued a prescient warning of the grim results which might well follow from scientific endeavour being pursued without compassion or due regard for ethics or morality. As Emily Sunstein, in her wonderful biography of Mary Shelley, put it:
“Mary Shelley … will be best remembered for her perception in ‘Frankenstein’ … that the Promethean drive is at the heart of human progress and yet a bringer of new
ills if not focused on ethical means and ends …”(v)
Here comes Greta
Greta Thunberg
At the end of the waning crescent of the Earth era, and the outset of the final Jupiter/Saturn cycle in Earth, enter another globally significant young woman, her birth taking place at an earlier stage of an era’s end than Mary Shelley’s: her preoccupation being the dangerously damaged state of the Earth, our mother.
I find it fascinating, if chilling, that the warning issued by Mary Shelley via ‘Frankenstein’ can be seen clearly now to have been so prophetic. That materialist era’s wanton disregard for the health and wellbeing of our world and all its creatures, largely in the name of profit, is reaping its consequences in terms of planetary and climate upheaval which now threatens our very survival.
None of us had heard of a young Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, born on 3rd January 2003, until she began her solo protest against climate change in August 2018 at the age of fifteen. By the end of 2019, she had been declared Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year”. Here are the bare bones of her story, in the words of their 23/30 December 2019 issue:
“…Thunberg began a global movement by skipping school: starting in August 2018, she spent her days camped out in front of the Swedish Parliament, holding a sign painted in black letters on a white background that read Skolstrejk för klimatet: “School Strike for Climate.” In the 16 months since, she has addressed heads of state at the U.N., met with the Pope, sparred with the President of the United States and inspired 4 million people to join the global climate strike on September 20, 2019, in what was the largest climate demonstration in human history. Her image has been celebrated in murals and Halloween costumes, and her name has been attached to everything from bike shares to beetles. Margaret Atwood compared her to Joan of Arc…”(vi)
We do not know as yet what Thunberg will do as we all step over a powerful threshold into the opening crescent of the new Air era on 21st December 2020. She has already published two books: one of her speeches, the other a memoir featuring her family. What we do know is that her challenges, issued at the closing crescent of the 1802-2020 Earth era, have birthed the Extinction Rebellion movement, thereby setting the agenda for one of the defining themes of the opening Air era – and of the Jupiter/Saturn cycle at 0 Aquarius with which it begins – ie we can no longer ignore the grim reality that our planet is under threat to its very survival.
It would seem likely, therefore, that the waxing crescent of the Air era will involve the development of new, community-based politics which are a radical departure from the old, broken, top-down model. It will also need to evolve technologies which facilitate the conserving of our planet and its abundant but limited natural resources, and find a way of doing this relatively quickly. Youthful leaders are already arising from the Millennial generation. I imagine that Greta Thunberg will be one of them.
Mary’s and Greta’s horoscopes
Mary, Greta, Neptune Direct
Surely, I thought, there must be significant connections between their birth charts? Indeed there are. There is much upon which to reflect with those horoscopes, both individually and in conjunction. I’m confining myself, however, to commenting on the three sets of links which struck me as most significant. I’m sure readers will find more…we do not as yet have a birth time for Greta. But the Sunrise chart I have used is still very descriptive.
Mary’s painful first house Saturn rising in Cancer, signifying her maternal loss and the alienated Monster in ‘Frankenstein’, abandoned by his Creator, friendless, and alone, opposes Greta’s powerful Sun/Chiron conjunction. This signifies her very extreme, wounded response to the pain of our planet which set her off on her protest, and may also point to her autism and other personal wounds; the classic ‘wounded healer’ significator. One can see in this linking the powerful sensitivity to woundedness in them both which fuelled Mary’s writing and Greta’s campaigning.
Greta has an exact first house conjunction at 26 Aquarius between rebellious, political, potentially fanatical Uranus and Pallas, the asteroid signifying warfare, wisdom, skill, strategy and commitment to fairness and justice. This falls closely conjunct Mary’s 27 Aquarius MC, conjunct Pluto at 1 Pisces. I was stunned to find that Mary’s progressed Moon is crossing this combination, at 26.5 Aquarius, at the Winter Solstice 2020. This link between Mary and Greta as rebels, innovators and visionaries hardly needs explanation.
I’ve saved the most significant connections till last. Mary Shelley’s North Node at 19 Gemini in the mediumistic twelfth house, opposite the South Node at 19 Sagittarius in the sixth, squares her Sun/Venus, Sun/Mercury, and Uranus/Mercury midpoints in Virgo, making a powerful T’Square. This potent combination speaks of a visionary writer whose task, set by the North Node’s position, was to send out a futuristic, ground-breaking challenge and warning which was to echo down the ages…
Her first Nodal Return with its attendant eclipses triggering off this pattern, co-incided with the birthing and publication of ‘Frankenstein’.
Greta’s Nodes are in the same pair of signs, at 8 degrees Gemini/Sagittarius. Her Pluto at 18 Sagittarius sits exactly on Mary’s South Node. What a fated connection! And here’s the knock-out Nodal link which took my breath away when I saw it. Not only is the North Node in airy Gemini, midwifing the shift from the Earth to the Air era on the winter solstice 2020: the Nodal Axis then is at 19 degrees Gemini/Sagittarius: exactly conjunct Mary Shelley’s Nodal T’Square – and Greta Thunberg’s Pluto. Co-incidence – or Fate?
At the Winter Solstice of 2020, as we make our dramatic transition into the new Air era, transiting Neptune having turned direct at the end of November 2020, will be at 18 degrees Pisces, squaring the transiting Nodes at Gemini/Sagittarius, Mary Shelley’s Nodes and Greta Thunberg’s Pluto.
From all those stunning overlaps, it certainly looks as though Greta Thunberg one way or another, is set to continue where Mary Shelley left off as we step into our Airy future.
Voices of the Great Mother…
There was a stand-out moment for me last spring 2019, when the South Node met Saturn/Pluto in Capricorn; at that time the very Capricornian Greta Thunberg strode onto the world stage, forcefully confronting us all – and our political leaders in particular – with the dangerous state of our mother planet and challenging us to do something about it.
Listening to this slight sixteen year old girl speaking so passionately, articulately and forcefully, I had one of those moments where one gets a shiver down the back and becomes tearful – accompanied by an eerie sense of listening to the voice of the Great Mother calling to us through the voice of a woman barely out of childhood.
Thinking about this, and Greta’s evocation for me of the voice of the Great Mother, brought to mind an article I had written featuring Mary Shelley published in TMA way back in 2001 at the opening crescent of the final Jupiter/Saturn cycle through Earth, called ‘Mary, Dolly, and Andi: O Brave New World?’
In this article, I wrote about the exact links between Mary Shelley’s Placidus ninth house cusp at 5 43 Aquarius; the February 1997 Jupiter/Uranus conjunction at 5-6 Aquarius and the public announcement of Dolly the Sheep at that time; followed in January 2001 by the birth of rhesus macaque monkey Andi, the world’s first genetically modified primate, just when Neptune at 5-6 Aquarius went over Mary’s ninth house cusp. I wrote the following:
‘This is a stunning piece of synchronicity. How do we interpret it? The long traverse of Neptune through Mary’s Aquarian ninth house which has now begun, could be seen as a metaphor for the slow,inexorable consequences of what she foresaw seeping into every facet of human life, radically altering it forever.
An image arises of Mary Shelley, standing alone on the shoreline of her imagination and her dreams, calling out a message to the far future like the Oracle in ancient times…’
As the human community prepares to step into the challenge, terror and exhilaration of a largely unknown future, we have already been provided with significant clues regarding the shape of what lies ahead for its waxing Air crescent – and what we must do if we are to survive for the next two hundred years.
Has the Great Mother indeed spoken to us? And are we listening?
****
Data:
Mary Shelley, August 30, 1797, London, 11:20 p.m. L.T.
Source: father William Godwin’s journal – he was present at
her birth.
Greta Thunberg, January 3 2003, Stockholm, Sweden
Sunrise 8:51 am CET – no known birth time
Source: astrotheme.com
Endnotes:
from… ‘Fragments on Nature and Life’… p 340… by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
(iii) Baigent, Campion and Harvey in “Mundane Astrology” (publ. 1984, 1992,1995), p185, who also describe the conjunction as ‘…the ground base of human development which marks the interaction between perception of ideas, potentialities (Jupiter) and their manifestation in the concrete world.’( Saturn) (p184)
(iv) from v3, Dylan Thomas’ poetry collectionDeaths and Entrances(1946)
(v) Emily Sunstein, Mary Shelley, p. 403, quoted in Dreaming Frankenstein – The Creation of a Modern Myth by Anne Whitaker, published in TMA April – May 2016
Saturn entered Aquarius on Sunday, 22nd March, 2020 at 3:58 uk time. On Mothering Sunday (i). That symbolic ‘co-incidence’ really struck home. The planet is our Mother, and we humans have been abusing her for a very long time.
To me, the symbolism (and the corona virus with its attendant worldwide consequences) is saying clearly to our human community (Aquarius) that it is time to take responsibility, accept widespread restrictions (Saturn), for the sake of our communities – and our planet.
higherselfportal.com
The very next day, the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnston told the nation in no uncertain terms that we are now in lockdown ( another vivid manifestation ofSaturn’s entry into Aquarius), following the actions of other countries from China onwards in attempting to limit the spread of the corona virus.
Saturn in Capricorn
Saturn entered Capricorn on 20th December 2017, beginning his long march towards a grim summit with Pluto, coming within close orb of their conjunction during the spring and early summer, then the winter of 2019.Since that entry, intensified hugely by the conjunction, all our organisational systems from nationhood, to politics, to health, to education, to formal religious institutions, to finance and business, have been tested to their very limits, and been found seriously wanting one way or another.
At the conjunction’s closest point in April 2019, their symbolic danse macabre with the South Node in Capricorn gave rise to Greta Thunberg – the youthful feminine voice of the Great Mother? – and the Extinction Rebellion movement. To an astrologer’s symbolic eye, the North Node in Cancer was now forcing us to pay attention to the crisis point which our planet has reached and pointing us in the direction we needed to go in actually dealing with it instead of our politicians world wide indulging largely in ineffectual posturing or downright denial. “Crisis – what crisis?”.
That much-feared Saturn/Pluto conjunction took place exactly on 12 January 2020; we are now at the outset of a drastic but hopefully positive, if painful cycle of restructuring culminating in the next Saturn/Pluto conjunction at 13/14 Pisces in 2053/4. I am not alone in thinking that a major instrument of that reconstruction arrived in the shape of the corona virus, now shaping up as a world-wide pandemic.
As a consequence, all our complacent ways of living are now being upended. Everyone is feeling the pain, one way or another. Anyone could die of this virus, even Trump or Bolsonaro…( hmmmm…)
We have found out in recent days that Boris Johnson and several members of his team spearheading management of the pandemic in the UK are now self-isolating, having tested positive for the virus. Prince Charles, UK head of state in waiting, has also contracted it – more manifestations of Saturn in Aquarius, as male leaders fall prey to an affliction crashing like a malevolent wave through the world-wide human community.
Capricorn and Aquarius
Both Capricorn and Aquarius are ruled by Saturn, Saturn being Aquarius’ ‘old’ ruler. I take some comfort from this as I watch events unfold, stunned and awed as usual by the symbolic accuracy of the planets’ unfolding patterns. Saturn is at its potentially most constructive as it moves through those collective signs.
The transit through Capricorn has been saying, in essence‘I have checked out all your systems. They are not what our Mother planet or its creatures need – although much of it may be what some humans want: eg no minority on the face of this Earth needs to accumulate billions whilst many of the majority go hungry – so I have given these systems, and the illusions and denials that go with them, a good kicking. I have joined forces with Pluto and the Nodes – since a good kicking is apparently not enough – and sent you the highly unpleasant gift of corona virus. Great for the planet, but awful for humanity. Let’s see if that’s enough to make you pay attention to what needs to change…’
Saturn in Aquarius
And now we have Saturn in Aquarius: he dips in for a while, then returns to Capricorn from July until the end of 2020. Saturn has just told us that the old order represented by Capricorn is no longer viable – it’s long past its sell-by date, so to speak. Aquarius is a forward-looking collective sign, more concerned with the hidden potentials hovering in the future than with the past. Uranus, its ‘new’ ruler, amplifies that with its brilliance in developing new technologies in service of the human project. So – we can look forward to new, as yet undreamed-of solutions to the problems threatening us all with possible extinction in the present time.
A much bigger context, though, is this: there is a vast epochal process of turbulence and change happening which reaches a major developmental stage when Jupiter meets Saturn at 0 degrees of Aquarius on the winter solstice of 2020. What does this portend?Baigent, Campion and Harvey in “Mundane Astrology” describe this powerful twenty-year recurring cycle as‘…the ground base of human development which marks the interaction between perception of ideas, potentialities (Jupiter) and their manifestation in the concrete world ( Saturn).’(ii)
There is more. The symbolically world-shaping duo of Jupiter and Saturn take over 800 years to go through the four elements, reflecting changing epochs as they go. I’ve written about this in some detail in ‘Some notes on cycles in a time of crisis’, published last year on Astrodienst if you’d like to take a look.
The Materialist Era
For now, let’s just look back to 1802. That was the year of the Jupiter/Saturn conjunction’s early entry into the Earth element, where it was to remain for over 200 years, its last meeting in Earth taking place at 23 Taurus in May 2000, its final departure in December 2020. That 1802 date co-incided with the Industrial Revolution’s gathering pace and impact at the beginning of the nineteenth century, as the materialist age of exploitation of our Earth’s natural resources for material gain began.
Let’s not get too ‘holier than thou’, here, though. Political philosopher Thomas Hobbes in the mid seventeenth century posited that in the state of nature people’s lives are“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short …”(iii)and there is no doubt that the lives of a massive number of humans – especially in developed Westerncountries – have gained hugely improved health, longevity, quality of life and opportunities for personal fulfilment as a result ofour astonishing progress in harnessing the forces and resources of Nature.
However the point would appear to be that, at the very end of Jupiter/Saturn’s sojourn in the Earth element, we have been brutally made aware especially in the last couple of years that the costs of ‘the march of progress’ now heavily outweigh the benefits, to the extent that the very survival of our lives on planet Earth is under threat…
The Airy Future…
I find it fascinating that the years since 2000, if you like the 12th house phase of the long Jupiter/Saturn traverse through the Earth element, have offered us more than a glimpse of what the impending shift of the conjunction into the Air element may look like. The appearance of the first iPhone in June 2007 and its spread – like a virus! – until smartphones became ubiquitous technology across the globe in less than ten years, has revolutionised the way we live. The generation born from the Millennium on are the first in human history never to have known what a life without airy inter-connection was like.
Astrologers have known for a long time that the year 2020 was to be one like no other: it is the first year for over 200 years of‘…the transition of the (Jupiter/Saturn) conjunction from one element to another – the ‘Mutation Conjunction’ – has always been considered to be of particular importance marking a major shift in emphasis and orientation in the world…’(iv)
Thus far, as we live through stormy turbulence at the beginning of 2020, we can see the ‘emphasis and orientation’ of the approaching Air era becoming clear. One major consequence of the corona virus pandemic sweeping through our world as Saturn shifts into Aquarius inviting us to live differently and more responsibly as humans, is already very obvious. In the last couple of weeks, there has been an explosion of collective Zooming, Skyping, WhatsApping, etc as we set about working from home and transferring our individual and group lives to the airwaves.
Still to come after the Mutation Conjunction into 0 Aquarius on the Winter Solstice of 2020 ( how’s that for a Fated-sounding date?!) – Pluto’s shift into Aquarius in 2024.
Fasten those seatbelts, folks. We’ve been selected to be present at the dawn of a new epoch…
Endnotes
(i)Mothering Sunday is celebrated by Christians in the United Kingdom, Ireland and some other English-speaking countries… It is increasingly being called Mother’s Day, although that name also belongs to the American and Canadian secular holiday which is quite distinct from the original Mothering Sunday. (c/f Wikipedia)
(ii) Baigent, Campion and Harvey in “Mundane Astrology”(publ. 1984, 1992,1995), p184
(iii)…from…”Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil”, commonly referred to as “Leviathan”, is a book written by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and published in 1651.
(iv) Baigent, Campion and Harvey in “Mundane Astrology” (publ. 1984, 1992,1995), p185
……a quotation from “Simple Abundance” by Sarah Ban Breathnach states……
“ Gloom we have always with us, a rank and sturdy weed, but joy requires tending.”
Barbara Holland
Winter Solstice 2018 by Anne Whitaker
This has never seemed truer as we approach the end of what has been a very difficult year, our human community across the world riven with even more – and more angrily polarised – conflicts than usual.
It is becoming much harder, since young Greta Thunberg’s resolute pounding on the door of our resistance to facing the truth of our planetary crisis, to avoid facing certain harsh realities. It’s been a year for being confronted with those, both individually and collectively. Many of us are feeling pretty dispirited, exhausted, lacking in optimism for the future.
So, what to do?
Having an astrological perspective is a great help, at least in being able to stand back and realise that we very clever 21st century folk are not immune to the turbulence which has followed the unfolding of the human story throughout history. The planetary cycles are telling us quite clearly, as I outlined in my recent article on Astrodienst, that we are at a time of extraordinary, epochal change.
For the old order to die, and the new one to emerge, we need to go through a form of collective death and rebirth.
How can we help this along, and in our own small way contribute to a more positive world in the future?
Personally, I find it helpful always to return toJung‘s view: if there’s something wrong with the world, with society, with nation or with family, then there’s something also wrong with ME; so, taking responsibility for who I am and where I’m at, is the first step in changing the world for the better.
In other words, start where you are, and do what you can, to bring some light into the dark both at this solstice time of year, and during the year which is fast approaching. As the wise quote says, we need to keep ourselves from becoming too gloomy, and cultivate joy wherever we can.
Today, I had a lovely experience of doing just that. I met up with a young friend who has just completed her first term at university. After many very difficult years, she has gradually found a firm place on which to stand in her life: in a mutually supportive relationship, she knows what her future vocation is now, and her studies are focused on some very clear goals. She is fizzing with enthusiasm and excitement, and has done extremely well in her first term’s exams.
It made me feel joyful to share her enthusiasm and her optimism for the future. As an older person, being able to support young folk like her is a simple and positive way to keep the rank weed of gloom at bay, and cultivate a positive approach to whatever our future proves to be.
So – what’s your recipe for cultivating joy as 2020 approaches? Do share!
