From today’s edition

In a murder chart, one of the first things to look for is the motive. Because the 8th is the house of the cause of death, that’s where we look for the motive. The Moon is in the 1st house, so count eight houses, anticlockwise, to arrive at the 8th. The sign Libra and the planet Saturn are involved.

The 8th is about surrender, the power of ‘the other’ and it contains illustrations of and ideas about orgasm. Saturn represents a blockage. Saturn in Libra suggests the blockage comes as part of a relational issue, not merely a sexual one. This is a sexually frustrated chart. To me this represents the world-famous sexual frustrations of the American people, a country which terrorizes its children with abstinence indoctrination, telling them that if they have sex they will be like a chewed up and spit out piece of candy. In public school programs across the nation, sex is equated with immorality, disease and lack of desirability.

Dr. Wilhelm Reich, one of the most brilliant psychological and political theorists of the 20th century, suggested that mass sexual repression in a society is harvested by the political system. The bottled-up passion and frustration (generally, contained by implanted moral impulses) are converted into the feeling of mystical longing. (This is why so many desperately horny people spend so much time voraciously reading books about spirituality).

Libra is associated with Venus. Venus appears in Sagittarius — that’s a nice illustration of sexuality (Venus) converted into a mystical longing (Sagittarius). This is in the 9th house of spirituality (top of the chart, right side). But Sagittarius is also the 10th sign from the ascendant — so it counts again as the 10th house — the government. Sexual repression has become mystical longing, which has in turn converted again to an uncontainable burst of rage at the government (Pholus).

Truly, I think we need to come to terms with Dr. Reich’s idea that sexual repression is converted by the psyche into mystical longing, which is then acted out politically — usually, as he puts it, in the obsession with a charismatic leader. We tend to be proud of our sexual repression in the United States; we worship virgins and prosecute the king for having a tryst. We need to understand that our obsession with sexual purity has many consequences, both personal and political.

I recognize that Jared Loughner is mentally ill. Dr. Reich associated most psychosis with frustrated sexual energy running wild in the psyche. But if I may, here is an obvious question. Do you think he would have been more or less likely to have done this, had he been in a fulfilling sexual relationship? When you’re 22, you have a lot of sexual energy to vent. It has to go somewhere.