Dear Friend and Reader:
Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales were indicted by a Texas grand jury on Tuesday. Cheney, who has up to $85 million invested in a company that owns private, for-profit prisons, is accused of profiteering off of federal contracts, and also of prisoner abuse at one of the facilities.
The grand jury accused Cheney of “engaging in an organized criminal activity” and “direct conflict of interest” because he had influence over the awards of federal bids to companies in which he had a financial stake. He’s also accused of assault of inmates by allowing other inmates in the facility to assault them.
Gonzales, the infamous former attorney general, was indicted for using his official power to cover up these and other crimes. I have not seen the legal paperwork, but Agence France-Presse (AFP) quotes the indictment: Gonzales “participated by further having used his position…to stop the investigations as to the wrongdoings which includes the assaults committed in the prison for profit in Willacy County, Texas.”
As of press time, this was being considered a minor story by the mainstream media. I had CNN on for hours Thursday and didn’t hear it mentioned once. [One of our editors said she heard it on CNN.] Thursday’s New York Times account of the charges verged on ridiculing them. One of my Washington sources called the indictment “ceremonial.” Others agreed that the charges were unlikely to stick. Cheney and Gonzales are scheduled to appear for arraignment today, Friday, though they may appear by attorney and are not required to show up in person.
The prosecutor in the case, Juan Angel Guerra, was missing as of Thursday night. He didn’t appear for a hearing Wednesday morning, and the presiding judge sent the Texas rangers (the state police) to his house to check on his wellbeing. It turned out that he was out of the country on a previously scheduled trip, as he did not expect the hearing to be scheduled so soon after filing the indictment.
Earlier this evening, I cast what is called a horary chart on the question of his apparent disappearance. The chart is timed for when I reached David Roell, one of my early astrology teachers, on the phone and we agreed that the question was appropriate for this method. Horary basically uses astrology as a divination tool based on a chart for the time of the question. Here is the basic version of the chart that I’m using.
Unlike natal astrology, which in our era is client-centered and practiced freeform, horary is all about astrology and adheres to fairly rigid guidelines. Our chart passes two tests that would bar judgment: Saturn is clear of the 7th house, and the horoscope gives a reasonable picture of what is happening. There are indicators that something strange is afoot, in the government and in general: Uranus at the top of the chart (in the 10th house, the government) and the Sun is void of course, about to change signs. That is to say, the Sun is in the last degree of Scorpio, the same degree it occupied when John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Cancer is rising; the ruler of the ascendant (the Moon) represents the person we’re inquiring about. Capricorn is on the 7th house or descendent, and its ruler (Saturn) represents the “other party,” i.e., Mr. Cheney. The Moon and Saturn are applying to a conjunction, in Virgo. The conjunction is exact Friday.
Looking at the minor planets (which are not used in traditional astrology) the Moon’s closest aspect is a precise square to a triple conjunction in Sagittarius: Atlantis, Bacchus and Photographica. The implication is that he is tangling with people who are drunk with power.
To me, this chart suggests that Mr. Guerra may not be safe at this time; he managed to survive the week, but he needs a security detail or a lot of television cameras around him.
At the least, the chart suggests that there is a clash between Guerra and Cheney and that the vice president considers this prosecution an actual threat. Saturn in the 4th house is ominous, representing a death threat to Guerra (Saturn also rules the 8th house, the cause of death); and it stands for a world of secrets that could come unraveled as Saturn continues its opposition to Uranus. Finally, that Saturn stands for the enormous power base, still extant, of someone considered alternately the most powerful vice president in United States history and the most evil person on the planet.
Mr. Cheney has yet to leave office, and though he is often hiding in one bunker or another, we need to keep our eyes on him till he is removed from Washington, DC on his last ride aboard Marine 2.
Saturn opposite Uranus: Part One of Five
It seems like years ago that Barack Obama was elected to serve as the 44th president, through January 2013. Election night was really just under three weeks ago; celestial speedup is doing its thing, creating a sense of both time fleeting with increasing speed and with the past seeming more distant than it really is. There is the sense that time is out of control; that it’s somehow unraveling.
You may recall that on Election Day, Saturn and Uranus opposed one another for the first time since January 1967. This is the planet of structure and tradition (Saturn) meeting the planet of energy and sudden impulses face to face. Saturn is usually held to be the planet that governs the passage of linear time. Uranus tends to jump levels, quantum style, shaking up the known order of reality. A long time can go by when nothing much seems to be happening and then Uranus enters the scene and suddenly there is a burst of progress.
To many people, that seemed to be the case on Election Day. Something different happened, something very different, after an excruciating delay. A majority of people voted on the basis of something positive rather than merely responding to fear. Fear does have a purpose, but if someone is scared all the time, obviously that makes it difficult to apply that function. If your speedometer always says you’re going 70 miles per hour, how would you know if you’re speeding?
So it is with fear. Fear has a relationship to time: it tends to keep us trapped in the past, fearing progress and emphasizing what we think of as familiar. If we are under aspects that will tend to undo stuck aspects of the past, that could stir up a good bit of psychic unrest in those who are wedged on a denser level of awareness.
Let’s consider this setup. The opposition will be exact five times between now and the summer of 2010. Four of the oppositions will occur with both planets being in the relatively slow-moving signs Virgo and Pisces. This indicates the gradual working out of a new social order; a kind of dialog, which will have its own complicated story.
Much like the Sixties, it’s not going to be an easy time for people who are threatened by progress or change. There are plenty of them. Anyone who takes part in a group process, be it the marketing committee or a personal growth workshop, encounters those folks who have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the present moment. This is born of many seemingly different emotions, from resentment to insecurity.
There are also people who fear that time has rushed ahead of them, leaving them in the ditch. They have that sense they will never be cool enough to be with it, right now, which is a self-affirming thought form because it will dominate perception and prove itself “right.”
Almost all the time, fear is connected with such responses, typically fear of the unknown. Fear of change and fear of the unknown are empathically associated with our feelings about death. So, too, is sex. The terrifying thing about sex is that it compels us to change; the new feelings we have threaten the old structure of relationships and the impulse is often to hold them down or stuff them in. The fear of sex and the fear of death are twins who masquerade as one another, and the two are always associated with regressive movements or the desire to stop progress.
In the current political scheme, nowhere is this more evident than in the anti-queer movement summed up in the term Proposition 8. That was the California referendum that makes it unconstitutional (in that state) for gay people to have the same marriage rights as heterosexuals.
As it turned out, social conservatism was (and is) about sex. Consider that for social conservatives, marriage is a license to have sex. This has always been true, but Miley Cyrus wears a purity ring, a commitment to her father to remain a virgin until heterosexual marriage.
Therefore, Proposition 8 is not only a movement to prevent basic equal protection rights, such as visiting your partner in the hospital; it is an attempt to ban gay sex, because under this mentality you need that church/state permit to be sexual at all.
Now, there is something special about anyone who would deny others the right to the most basic psychic and physical freedom among consenting adults. This is a complicated issue perhaps more appropriate for a thorough airing out on the pages of Book of Blue on the emotional psychology of homophobia. But there is another issue that tends to stir up a lot of control drama, and that is jealousy.
One manifestation of jealousy is the feeling that nobody can have more fun than you are having. Since those who harbor this mentality tend to not have very much fun to begin with, jealousy would seem to dictate that the world shut down; which is basically true. In exciting times of change, we need to be mindful that there are those who will resist change simply because other people are having more fun than they are. And in times when we know that we need to make progress, we need to understand that some people are going to resist seemingly for its own sake.
And some of these may be people we love. We go through this too often: one member of a couple refuses to update his or her files, to see a different viewpoint or to admit what they are feeling. Certain members of a family resist change or honest conversation. There comes that moment when we have to say, well, if that’s how you feel . . .
Saturn-Uranus-Pluto and the Aries Point
WHILE SATURN-URANUS is working itself out, it will move through late Virgo-Pisces and end up on the Aries-Libra axis. Those first degrees of Aries and Libra, and the other cardinal signs Cancer and Capricorn, bring in what is called the Aries Point. That is the first degree of Aries, which is highly sensitive and tends to create big events with far-reaching personal implications.
The first four Saturn-Uranus oppositions lead up to something, and what they lead up to we find out in July 2010. But much else happens before that.
Pluto is about to arrive in Capricorn, in just under a week: Pluto shows up to stay on Nov. 26, where it will square the Aries Point. This is no ordinary Pluto ingress; none of them are, but this one gets bonus points. As I mentioned in a previous article (probably worth re-reading), the Aries Point is extremely active in the days immediately following Christmas.
Then next autumn, Saturn arrives in Libra, squaring Pluto. Saturn-Pluto aspects tend to come with a wave of oppression, repression and regression (the last one started in the summer of 2001 and ushered in the War on Terror and the War on Freedom). Saturn with Pluto generally stirs up all kinds of moralistic sentiments among the psychic scavengers, petty tyrants and leach despots among us. With Saturn opposing Uranus and squaring Pluto, we are talking about a serious culture war.
On one level, the election of Barack Obama was a step forward, but many people perceive it as a line in the sand. The regressive forces, such as they are, are getting ready to fight back. But the next major aspect will make that extremely difficult, and that is Uranus square Pluto. This is the big crescendo of 2012 astrology, from the planetary standpoint — and it lasts a long time.
What are called “hard aspects” between Uranus and Pluto happen about every 40 years, and they stir up the revolutionary impulse in everything from science to art to politics. These are the quadrature alignments — the conjunction (which happened between 1965 and 1966) is a good example. There was a massive upheaval and surge forward in society (which was nearly stopped by a simultaneous Saturn opposition to Pluto). Oppositions and squares arrive with much the same feeling as the conjunction.
Notice that this square is exact seven times between 2012 and 2015, a highly unusual sequence of events. This suggests that what we think of as “2012” has a long warm-up and then a long follow-through. We are currently well within range of the Uranus-Pluto square’s early expressions; and the late ones will take us through around 2018.
As the Grateful Dead used to say, you know it’s gonna get stranger, so let’s get on with the show.
Yours & truly,
Weekly Horoscope for Friday, November 21, 2008, #741 – By ERIC FRANCIS
Aries (March 20-April 19)
By all rights, you should be feeling a world of possibilities opening up now, and a calling to not just do bigger and better things, but more meaningful ones. Yet your most basic responsibilities and a sense of isolation may be weighing you down. This is the normal status of life on Earth. We’re not usually presented a budget, a decade and an empty building to work with; we have to juggle the past, the present and the future in one seemingly impossible juggling routine. The next few weeks represent a transition from a phase of your existence where ideas count for more than actions, to one where pragmatic decisions and maneuvers will dominate. Yet at the moment, you are being gifted with some powerful new visions of what might be. Remember them.
Taurus (April 19-May 20)
You seem to be paying a price for your desire to expand your world. People have high expectations of you, and you expect yourself to meet them. I suggest you be mindful of the extent to which you allow others to define your goals. As a Taurus, you fancy yourself independent, a fact attested by your infamous stubbornness. I would offer the clue that resistance may be a sign that you lack independence; it’s a crude substitute, and it’s based on the level of ego rather than spirit. The place to maintain ‘control’, if I may use such a crude word, is on the level of your intentions and your creative vision. And for that to work, much that you thought of as cast in concrete needs to feel a little more like paint and wet clay. That would be you.
Gemini (May 20-June 21)
Anger, passion, faith, ecstasy: we call these different things, but often they have a common root emotion. I suggest that you consider the qualities they share, especially in the context of a relationship that seems to be blessed, at the moment, with colors and shades of them all. Feel for what is going on right beneath these different expressions, and tune into how it filters or transposes into something else. What exactly is making the changes, and why? You can do this by examining the psychology of someone whose life is profoundly influencing yours at the moment; or you can explore how feeling and sensation transform within you. While you’re doing this, be aware of the aspect of yourself that does not change, that is the steady self-observer.
Cancer (June 21-July 22)
For years, the primary focus of your life has been work. The emphasis is rapidly shifting to relationships, and this is a word of caution as much as it is of welcome. As for the caution part, your energy field is opening up to allow others in, and to allow them to have a greater influence on your experience. This will require you to be focused and to maintain a high level of awareness on each individual being who inhabits your world. As for the welcome part, you have tended to get stuck in the ways of the past, when trying to love in the present moment. I suggest that how you love is as important now as who you love, and as who loves you. Be open to people with different ideas about relationship, in particular ones that remember that content is more important than form.
Leo (July 22-Aug. 23)
You need to be cautious about any tendencies you have to act in mechanical ways. We all get into these modes, even the most elegant cashmere charcoal sketch artist working on a spring afternoon at Montmartre. Practice letting your energy flow with the moment. Practice allowing your commitments to find you, rather than having to go after them. Focus on your wellbeing — as The Color Purple novelist Alice Walker suggested to your Leo brother Barack Obama in a letter this month, you cannot let your leadership role suck you dry. You need time with your family and your friends. You need to take care of yourself, because you are clearly being expected to take care of everyone else.
Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22)
You seem to be waiting for the confidence to set yourself free. What you think of as spiritually free is not enough, as I trust you have discovered from many experiments. Freedom of spirit means little without a working end of the equation, without the ability to act. In other words, freedom is not just an idea; God is not merely a concept; and most important, your creativity is not solely based on a routine. You are on a profound inner edge right now. You may want to cling to the past, but the whole message of the past has been about going forward and you know that moment is soon at hand. I know that part of you wishes you could hesitate. But the moment you commit and take the step you know is necessary, the cosmos will take a bigger step as a gesture of welcome.
Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23)
You’re not someone who needs the deeper shades of life explained to you; you’re in touch with yourself on a core level that, as you’ve noticed, eludes most of your friends. Indeed, they reach toward you for validation of their inner journey, and for this unusual gift that you have of turning darkness into light. The way you do this is precisely by remaining aware of your fears, your passions and your desires. You seem to understand intuitively that the fountain of joy springs from a deep well of sorrow. This knowledge, I think, has always provided an aura of safety for you, and contact with life’s deeper meaning. I think that at this point in your story, you’ve come to a place where you are truly ready to feel safe; a place where you can claim your understanding of yourself, and the wisdom that you will always be secure within yourself. Remember that whenever you feel shaken.
Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22)
Your mind and your soul are an odd couple. Your soul is optimistic and seeks experience and easy expression; your mind is constantly engaging the world on the level of necessity. That, basically, is how you can tell them apart. You are, at the moment, working to forge a relationship between them; indeed, you are gradually giving birth to the awareness that they are one and the same entity. It’s not easy, because your mind is convinced that only material reality matters, and we have to work hard to keep things in line; while your soul has this notion that God or the Universe has everything under control. It may seem like there is no point of union between these two viewpoints. There is, and sooner rather than later you will catch a glimpse of how beautiful the sense of inner contact truly is.
Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 22)
Love is brave. It is the definition and the essence and the very example of bravery. We pack so many expectations and so much baggage around love, though, that it rarely gets a moment to be itself. For most people the immediate response is fear; attachment; wanting to control the situation. Somewhere deep in there is what I think of as the devotional ray. It is the aspect of human feelings that is consistent, strong and strives to make itself known in subtle ways; sometimes through words, more often, when it’s in harmony, with actions. This is the aspect of yourself that you are now free to express. You may notice that it challenges all your old beliefs about how you’re “supposed to act” or who you are “supposed to be” in your relationships, and guides you to the vivid space of expressing who you are, without question or hesitation.
Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20)
Isolation of a certain odd kind has become so normal that you don’t know much of anything else. It’s taught you a few things about yourself; if nothing else you have become a truly interior person. Without knowing it, you’ve gone deeper than most anyone you know. And you’ve come to live a somewhat cocooned existence in there; in a mental room of your own. You’re now at a breakthrough point. If I were you, I would be wanting to feel my presence in the world; I would be craving human contact of a truly alive and energetic kind. That is one thing; the sense of liberation from your own headspace will, I promise, be pleasantly invigorating. I would propose that no matter what you have accomplished in your life, you’re just hitting your stride.
Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19)
It looks like you’ve suddenly been seized by a craving for new environments: bigger environments, and strange ones, and perhaps distant ones. Start locally, with a radical change in your social patterns. Go places you’ve never been, and indulge yourself in things that are far from your cultural background. There is plenty; it looks like it’s just appearing around you as if it was always there. It may have been; you would be shocked if you noticed all the things you overlook right in your immediate environment. What you are really looking for is people: different people, whose language is different than your own, whose religion you don’t understand, and who confront you with a different notion of humanity. In any event, now is the time to get outside of your house, especially at night.
Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20)
You have put so much emphasis on your professional life the past number of years, you seem to have forgotten that you are, at heart, a kind of hedonist. You’ve also grown accustomed to life’s rewards coming in smaller payments rather than larger ones; and to viewing your peers as authority figures rather than as playmates. Get ready for a push; prepare yourself for a blast of irreverence, and to embark on an unusual quest for social freedom. This is not, by the way, going to come at the expense of your work or your creative aspirations. In an environment where you are doing so much as seeking wider personal expression, your energy will bubble to the surface, then come up with the force of a geyser. From the look of your charts, you haven’t seen anything like this in a long time. So breathe and let it happen.