Today is the Venus-Uranus conjunction in Pisces. This happens about once a year; Venus follows the path of the Sun, more or less. Notably, this is the last Venus-Uranus conjunction in Pisces for about 75 years. When next the two planets meet, on April 22, 2011, Uranus will be solidly into Aries. So today’s conjunction marks the transition into another era of the astrological terrain: that being the cardinal t-square that we think of as 2012.
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Misconceptions about 2012 are still running wild. A local newspaper editor buttonholed me in the neighborhood deli yesterday to tell me about the great alignment of planets (all in a row, that is, a big stellium) that supposedly marks the transition of the Mayan calendar at the winter solstice.
No such thing exists. The 2012 alignment — which would have been unknown to the Mayans, who were not following Uranus or Pluto — involves a T-square from the cardinal signs Aries, Libra and Capricorn — not a stelllium. The aspect pattern is more reminiscent of the 1960s than any time in recent history.
Once again 2012 is a dramatization of the United States’ love affair with the ‘End Times’. I learned at NCGR that the US obsession with the End Times goes back to the earliest days of religious-types giving up their well-established lives in Europe and flocking to the New World, assuming it was the New Jerusalem.
In modern terms, the End Times are a psychological cop out. Our culture gets itself into all kinds of trouble, most of it from activities related to warfare (an issue with many sources and results, such as the inability to take care of our basic needs as a nation) and then we ‘solve’ the problem by pretending the world is going to end.