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Thursday,
November 17, 2005
Pluto in Leo
and Art
A new exhibit at the L.A. County
Art Museum
was reviewed in the Los Angeles
Times. A retrospective of the work of post-World War
II artist Lee Mullican received a glowing tribute. Pluto was in
Leo from 1939 until about 1958. Many of today's Pluto in Leo Baby
Boomers, such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, form a cohort
of creative individuals. However, Pluto also imprints the cultural
era as well as the generation. Leo is the sign of the creative artist,
the individual seeking self-expression. When Pluto was in Leo, then,
we would expect to see this, but usually there is talk of how Pluto
in Leo gave us Hitler and Stalin and World War II--the power side
of Leo.
Here's what L.A. Times art
critic Christopher Knight wrote:
"Faced with the unprecedented potential for nuclear annihilation,
and soon given the emerging truth about the Holocaust in Europe,
matters of life's sanctity were pressing in the years following
the war. Creativity itself held profound intrinsic value —
and in a measure unmatched in American culture before. History had
brought the world to the brink. Artists, many of them returned from
the battlefields, reasonably surmised that a reconsideration of
prehistory might provide a platform from which to start over." (Read
the entire review here)
Art can often be viewed through the lens of astrology, and this
quote is a succinct demonstration of the artistic power of Pluto
in Leo.
In
my astrology article titled “Robots Come Home,” just
published in Llewellyn’s Starview
Almanac 2006, I predicted
a surge in personal robots during the coming year. This prediction
is based on the position of Uranus and its influence on the horoscope
of the United States. As reported in a PC
Magazine article titled, “iRobot Graduates to IPO, Infiltrates
Society,” personal “robot power”
is already being realized with the initial public stock offering
of iRobot the company which makes the popular Roomba robot vacuum
cleaner and now the Scooba floor washing robot. iRobot also makes
robots for the military. The stock of iRobot surged to $26.70 a
share on its opening day, reflecting investor optimism for the future
of this market sector. In addition, one of iRobot’s PackBot
robots rang the opening bell for the New York Stock Exchange on
Wednesday, Nov. 9.
President
Bush's Closest Aspect
The
closest aspect in President Bush’s horoscope is a sesqui-square
(135 degrees) angle between a 2nd house Mars and his Midheaven.
The second house has to do with self-image and the Midheaven with
our profession.
The closest aspect is important in any horoscope. Because Bush sets
the foreign policy for the United States, this aspect intrudes into
his handling of foreign affairs. It is made all the more forceful
through the Mars-Midheaven connection (see
Bush's horoscope).
The sesqui-square is described by Bil Tierney in Dynamics
of Aspect Analysis. As you read the following
quotes from this book, you will notice how they perfectly describe
a certain and fundamental part of Bush’s nature:
“With this aspect, we are apt to react to minor conflicts
in an overly forceful manner, which tends to throw situations off-balance
or blow them out of proportion. Here we are…often at odds
with an unprecedented turn-about of events out of our control. Situations
under this aspect tend to break down or fall apart at the last minute…Our
reactions are usually out-of-place or inappropriate for the occasion
represented. The tendency to over-dramatize issues here leads towards
misjudgment.”
Tierney goes on to correlate the sesqui-square with individuals
who try to force their subjective values on others, “remolding
people thru subtle power-plays.” These attempts to remake
others are met in turn with resistance which is “interpreted
as harassment and domination.” These individuals, Tierney
suggests, need to learn tolerance and acceptance.
Halloween
and the Pluto in Scorpio Generation
The
Pluto in Scorpio generation (born 1984-1996) certainly has embraced
the quintessential Scorpionic celebration of Halloween—with
a vengeance. Pluto is Scorpio’s ruling planet. Both planet
and sign have an affinity for the dark side. Just look at the
profusion of black, black, black clothing that predominates on
most high school campuses today. In addition:
The Mexican Day of the Dead has begun to take hold of culture
in a major way. The marketing website Event
Solutions notes
the growing importance of Dia de los Muertos: “In the U.S.,
the African-American, Latino and Asian communities are growing
at a very fast pace. This dramatic growth has led to an increase
in multicultural events surrounding specific cultural holidays
such as new year's festivities, heritage festivals, variations
on mainstream holidays and culturally specific celebrations such
as El Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebrated by Hispanic
Americans around the time of Halloween…”
The biggest movie of the 2005 Halloween weekend (a marketing stroke
of genius) was the horror flick Saw II. As noted in a
Los
Angeles Times story, Saw II takes
blood and gore to a whole new level. The marketing of the movie,
through a gruesome poster with the tag line, “Oh yes, there
will be blood,” would have been unthinkable in years past.
Saw II is very popular with the older kids belonging to the Pluto
in Scorpio generation.
Young people’s costume choices—when they are at least
teenagers and thus old enough to have some choice in their costumes—reflect
a more ghoulish element than we have seen before. There is a very
strong gothic element in the costumes, a trend also being propelled
by clothing stores like Hot
Topic.
Perhaps Halloween reveals each generation’s Pluto. When
Pluto in Leo Baby Boomers were kids, they dressed for Halloween
as leonine super heroes and lioness royal princesses.
Add to this the ongoing Neptune-Pluto sextile. Neptune may be
adding a marketing and consumer element to all the generational
Pluto markers.
Thursday, October 27, 2005
Harriet
Miers: Yes, she IS a Leo
Harriet
Miers has withdrawn her name from consideration as U.S. Supreme
Court Justice. An article in the New
York Times noted that “Ms.
Miers has been described by friends and associates as intelligent,
principled and discreet to the point of shyness.” Harriet
Miers is a Leo, but what sets her personality apart from many
other sunnier, more flamboyant political Leos (think Bill Clinton,
Arnold Schwarzenegger) is her Virgo Moon. A Virgo Moon makes one
meticulous and detail-oriented. It also imparts usefulness and
even a sense of mission in serving others—as Miers appears
to have done with President Bush.
A number of post-mortem news reports have commented on her withdrawal
by noting that she was so closely aligned with President Bush
that she really lacked an identity that was strikingly independent
of his. This lack of independent identity, while an admirable
trait in her job as White House Counsel, was a detriment in her
nomination to be a U.S. Supreme Court Justice. In commentary posted elsewhere
on my
website, I noted the bundled
trines of both Bush and Miers and the close synastric conjunction
of these bundled planets. You can see the horoscopes of Bush and
Miers in a bi-wheel by clicking
here and then scrolling
down the page. This pattern symbolizes, in immediate visual terms,
the astrology behind much of what has been said and written about
this nomination and its subsequent difficulties.
The
Uranus-Neptune Conjunction
The
Uranus-Neptune conjunction is a major planetary conjunction that
only occurs every 170 years. We just had a Uranus-Neptune conjunction
in 1993 and its effects are slowly beginning to permeate cultures
and societies throughout the world. One effect of this conjunction
is the age of “full-immersion virtual reality” (to
quote from Ray Kurzweil’s new book, The
Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology).
Christopher Caldwell discusses this modern trend in a New
York Times commentary titled
“Beyond Human.” He feels we are moving away from an
essential humanistic culture to a detached virtual one. He cites,
as negative effects of this detachment, the growing number of
couples who have pets instead of children and the abandonment
of the elderly in the deadly 2003 French heat wave. Uranus gives
a certain detachment and Neptune provides idealization. Detached
ideals begin to surface following a Uranus-Neptune conjunction,
although these effects may not be felt for decades. Caldwell writes,
"Abandoning your own world for a made-up one is an ever-larger
part of adult life...Thanks to innovations in genetics, nanotechnology
and robotics, you’ll be able to design your own mental habitat…We’ll
learn how brains operate and devise computers that function like
them. Then the barrier between our minds and our computers will
disappear."
We are entering a Uranus-Neptune world where science and technology
are idealized, detaching us from ourselves.
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Karl
Rove and Chiron: Spinning a Loophole
Pluto
is approaching a conjunction with Karl Rove’s Chiron (see
Rove’s horoscope). Chiron
is a major astrological influence, orbiting the Sun between the
conservative Saturn and the revolutionary Uranus. Zane Stein (see
his website), who originally
laid out the framework for our astrological understanding of Chiron,
wrote that Chiron strongly symbolizes the maverick, the free operator.
Chiron may also symbolize a loophole—a legal escape—and
a transit of Pluto to Chiron may indicate a situation where a loophole
is exposed. Since this is Karl Rove’s Chiron we’re talking
about, it is possible that when Pluto hits his Chiron the loophole
he used will be exposed: i.e., he says he was just talking to a
reporter and it was a reporter who divulged to him the name of a
CIA operative's wife. It is starting to look, based on comments
by Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and others, as though Rove will be spinning a loophole.
Hutchison said that if there is an indictment, it should not be
"some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on the crime."
Rove has also been very much a maverick, operating in the space
between the conservative Republican political base and the political
center.
Tolstoy's
War and Peace
I
am re-reading War and Peace. Although Anna Karenina
is more popular today (during a recent visit to Barnes and Noble,
I saw about ten copies of Anna Karenina and only one
War and Peace), I’ll take War and Peace any
day. War and Peace does lack the dramatic assertion of
an independent female protagonist. Natasha and Marya, two of the
main female characters in War and Peace, seem a bit too
much “angel in the house.” I first read this novel
when I was a monk in a yoga ashram. We had semi-annual retreats
in the desert and I took War and Peace (which I found
in the monks' library) along with me on one such retreat. I was
24 years old and the book changed my life. The main character
(a misnomer, really, since there are so many in this sweeping
panorama of a book) is Pierre and I identified strongly with his
search for himself, for an identity, for who he was. Leo Tolstoy
was a Virgo, and the main tone of the book is a Virgoan probing
behind the facades of characters and events. Like Virgo, the book
is also very organic. The vast scope, a perspective which can
jump easily from the minute to the cosmic, gives it a Sagittarian
feel.
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Jupiter
and Bird Flu
Bird
flu originated in Southeast Asia and has now spread as far as
Eastern Europe. It has killed about sixty people, but at this
point the disease is only spread from bird to human, not human
to human. The concern is that at some point the disease may mutate
and become a pandemic in which humans infect each other. So far,
that has not happened. Medieval Islamic astrologer
al-Biruni
ascribed rulership of grain-eating birds to Jupiter. Well,
here we are in the last two or three years of Pluto in Jupiter-ruled
Sagittarius. When Pluto enters Capricorn in 2008, we will see
a highly contagious global disease, a pandemic. Capricorn has
to do with masks, the face we put on when we meet the world (different,
however, from the Ascendant mask, which is part of our core nature).
When Pluto enters Capricorn, people will wear masks—surgical
masks to protect themselves from air-borne pathogens. This is
already beginning to happen (read
the ABC news story), but the trend will
accelerate in response to a bird flu mutation—or another
as-yet unanticipated disease—in a couple of years.
The
Planets, new book by Dava Sobel
There
is a wonderful new book called The
Planets,
by Dava Sobel, the author who previously wrote Longitude
and Galileo's Daughter. It is not an
astrology book, but in the chapter on Jupiter, she writes extensively
and knowledgably about astrology in a positive way. Sobel notes
important points about Galileo’s horoscope and about Jupiter
as the natural ruler of the 9th house. She writes of its exaltation
in Cancer. She treats astrology with respect. In the Introduction
to the book, Sobel writes about her love for the planets and how
in grade school she created a mock-up of the solar system. I enjoyed
reading this part because it mirrored my own early fascination
with the solar system. The planets have always sparked my imagination.
Sobel writes beautifully of the planets as “an assortment
of magic beans or precious gems in a little private cabinet of
wonder—portable, evocative, and swirled in beauty." The
book is arranged by planets, each chapter bearing the title of
a planet. She includes the Sun and Moon. It is mainly the chapter
on Jupiter that focuses on astrology; other chapters explore additional
features of the planets, including mythology.
Harold
Pinter and the astrology of silence
Harold
Pinter, one of the world’s great playwrights, has won this
year’s Nobel Prize for literature. I was entranced with
his plays when I was a teenager in the 1960’s. In plays
like The Birthday Party and The Caretaker, he
made silent pauses speak volumes and his spare language carried
undertones of existential menace. He was a Libra, born October
10, 1930, in Hackney, England. His Mercury is at 29° Virgo, which
Dane Rudhyar in his book on Sabian symbols interprets as “Totally
intent upon completing a task, a man is deaf to any allurement.”
It is the last degree of the summer cycle before the autumnal
equinox. How appropriate for a writer whose characters were always
in a state of completion, totally intent to the exclusion of language
itself, and deaf to the allurement of noise. Pinter’s Pluto
squares his Sun, allowing him to explore dramatic themes of—in
the words of a New
York Times description of his work—“powerlessness,
domination and the faceless tyranny of the state.” This
same Sun-Pluto square gave him a social voice noted for challenging
political power. It is his sounds of silence, though, which linger.
Wednesday,
October 12, 2005
A
History of Violence and the U.S. 12th house
The
12th house of the United States horoscope (using the Sibly chart)
has Scorpio on the cusp. The 12th house represents hidden, repressed,
or unconscious elements of the collective. I thought of this when
I saw the movie A History of Violence. Although it sounds
like a documentary, it is a powerful film directed by David Cronenberg
and starring Viggo Mortenson (who shot to fame in the Lord of the
Rings movie trilogy). In the movie, a family man who owns a small-town
diner shoots and kills two men who try to rob him. Like the movie
Traffic—which showed how drugs had seeped into every
facet of society and culture—A History of Violence
tries to link different expressions of violence in American culture,
tracing their origin back to something like Original Sin. A parental
slap of a snotty teenager is somehow linked to larger patterns of
domestic violence and from there to the hidden, unconscious violence
which lurks beneath the surface of modern culture. The movie tries
to show how a part of the American psyche which is preternaturally
violent. It is the U.S. 12th house.
Star
Gazing
London
underground bombings and attempted bombings…Egyptian resort
explosions… a suspected suicide bomber shot dead by London police
at point blank range…an unending series of Iraq car bombs…random
package searches on the New York transit system.
The world has changed. Something major has shifted.
It’s been hot where I live. One evening, the electricity went
out. In our backyard, my wife and I lay on our backs under the stars.
We looked at the sky. I tried to imagine what it must have been like
to be an ancient Egyptian or Babylonian staring at a similar starry
sky. For the ancients, it was a cosmic connection. How could one not
get a clearer perspective on our earthly lives by gazing into the
night sky and seeing patterns, recording slow progressions on papyrus,
observing (in the words of Thornton Wilder) “the stars—doing
their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky”? I recalled how
World War I soldiers suffering from shell shock—what today we
would call post traumatic stress disorder—were prescribed a
therapy of star gazing to calm their hearts and minds. Perhaps the
shell-shocked world needs, for just one short evening, to turn off
all electricity and collectively gaze at the stars.
I tried to imagine myself living in an ancient civilization in which
the stars mattered.
Then, suddenly, the electricity came back on. The stars, which had
been so bright and glittering, faded quickly with the return of our
electric nightscape of streetlamps, brightly lit supermarkets, and
fluorescent parking lots. The darkness paled. There wasn’t much
to see in the sky anymore. My wife and I returned indoors and flicked
on the late television news.
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