Everything, All at Once (or, Welcome to 2012)

Note to Readers: There’s not a regular edition of Astrology News today — so I’m posting this archive edition from earlier this year. It’s the Jan. 15, 2010 lead article from the subscriber series of Friday essays, following up on the earthquake in Haiti earlier that same week. –efc

Dear Friend and Reader:

First, a historical note. Did you know that when Christopher Columbus “discovered America,” the thing he discovered was Haiti? So the island that was shaken and the country that was shaken to rubble this week has a hallowed place in the dark history of the New World, as the place where European feet first touched the ground. There, they met the native Tainos, one of the Arawak people; and made a settlement, called La Navidad, on the north coast of present-day Haiti.

Thus began a holocaust. In 2007, US News and World Report said that from an estimated initial population of 250,000 in 1492, the Arawaks had dropped to 14,000 by 1517. How did that happen? There’s the famous entry from Columbus’ log, reporting his first encounter with them; that pretty much explains it.

“They brought us barrels of cotton thread and parrots and other little things which it would be tedious to list, and exchanged everything for whatever we offered them…I kept my eyes open and tried to find out if there was any gold, and I saw that some of them had a little piece hanging from a hole in their nose. I gathered from their signs that if one goes south, or around the south side of the island, there is a king with great jars full of it, enormous amounts. I tried to persuade them to go there, but I saw that the idea was not to their liking…They would make fine servants…With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

So much for Pat Robertson’s theory that this week’s quake happened because the Haitians had made a pact with the devil at Bois-Caiman near Cap-Haitien on Aug. 14, 1791. Yes, those in the slave revolt used Santeria at the commencement of the rebellion; that is historically documented. But even in the unlikely event that has some kind of karmic influence, it doesn’t explain what had happened on Hispaniola for the prior 300 years: brutal slavery at the hands of the Spaniards and the sugar-addicted French. Bad things have been happening in Haiti since Columbus laid eyes on the place.

When we look at the astrology of Tuesday’s earthquake and notice that it was triggered by the Aries Point — that potent first degree of the horoscope that puts collective and personal events into the context of one another — we can safely propose that this is about something much bigger. Are we getting a message that this is so big, it’s a comment on the story of the entire New World?

Yes, earthquakes happen, and they can happen anywhere. For example, there is an active geological fault line running down the Hudson River. The Indian Point nuclear power plant sits atop a newly identified intersection of two active seismic zones. We in New York who don’t even experience tremors could wake up to the Earth shaking one day next week or in 5,000 years.

The Aries Point and the Earthquake

The Haiti earthquake occurred in the days before a solar eclipse overnight Thursday to Friday, right near an 11-planet alignment in Capricorn and Aquarius. Yet in the midst of that alignment was a specific astrological marker, involving something called the Aries Point. That’s the location of the Sun on the first day of Northern Hemisphere spring. Or, the location of the Sun the day the Sun’s rays square the equator as the Sun enters Aries; same thing. The Aries Point, literally the first degree of the sign Aries, is extended by astrologers to include all four cardinal signs: the early degrees of Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn, all of which are sensitive to Aries Point effects.

I often characterize the Aries Point as “the personal is political,” in that the news that occurs around the time of an Aries Point event always affects a lot of people and also has a property of merging the personal and the collective realms. The world crashes into our living rooms. Everything happens at once. On the same day, relief efforts are underway from one of the deadliest earthquakes in recent history, and possibly in a very long time; congressional hearings on the banking crisis that nearly toppled the economy are proceeding. Citigroup was leveraged 68:1, debt to assets. There are no new regulations in place to prevent it from happening again. Remember I said that. I’m not the only one.

Suddenly there’s a new terrorist alert coming out of Yemen. Most people hadn’t heard of Yemen till a month ago. One near-miss incident on one flight is causing some to respond as if Sept. 11 had happened again.

A trial is underway in San Francisco to determine the constitutionality of banning same-sex marriage; talk about the personal being political. This trial is uniting one of the nation’s top conservative attorneys, Ted Olson — the U.S. government’s lawyer under George Bush — with one of the stalwart ‘liberal’ movements. Finally, a defection.

Then, in the approximate flavor of Mercury retrograde in Capricorn (on the Aries Point, with Pluto two degrees away), Google is considering pulling out of China. The company, which is part of our daily lives if anything is, cited what the Washington Post reported as “a concerted political and corporate espionage effort that exploited security flaws in e-mail attachments to sneak into the networks of major financial, defense and technology companies and research institutions.” China has imposed strict censorship requirements on Google which even fans of the company are disgusted that the search engine follows.

Oh, and our nation’s health departments are blitzing us with that ad for flu vaccinations, which you can see practically on any channel at any time: they suddenly have an overstock. I haven’t got around to doing an article on this, but hand sanitizers are pure BS. They don’t work; they make matters worse, creating a sticky, sugar-based film on the hand into which bacteria embeds and where it flourishes, allowing it to be spread further.

That Was Just the Warmup

This is a snapshot of the culmination of Mercury retrograde, two eclipses and a massive alignment within about 60 degrees of sky: a lot of pressure, a lot of Aries Point. Mars (the ruler of Aries) is retrograde, too: that lasts all winter, and you could look at it as Mars being a bit reserved and feeling cramped in his style: or Mars calling us all to look inward and search out our true sense of self. That the retrograde takes place in Leo puts Mars opposite Aquarius, the sign of conformity to groups. We are just coming out of one of the most impressive phases of mass-hypnosis that a talented, astrologically literate fantasy writer could ever make up. That would be based on a decade of Neptune in Aquarius, the drug of the masses being denial, Facebook and Fox News.

Chiron is now conjunct Neptune, a rare event that is about clearing up all that fog and seeing through the denial, delusion, deception and false idealism of Neptune in Aquarius.

But here’s what I’m here to tell you: we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. I can say this with some confidence after studying Aries Point effects for about 10 years, and knowing a little about the astrology of 2010. All the fuss about 2012 is the Aries Point, but we are fully into the aspect pattern right now, as planets begin to gather in the early degrees of the cardinal signs.

Of course the Flying Saucer People (who may be right) don’t know that; the Mayan astrologers seem to have had a clue: their long count comes to its transition on Dec. 21, 2012 with the Sun in the first degree of Capricorn, that is, aspecting the Aries Point precisely. The issue is not the Sun, itself; what the Mayans were looking at was where the Sun would be located: precisely on one of the cardinal points, and where they would be aligned at this time in the precessional cycle.

Before that happens, we have the spring of 2010. And here’s a bit of what we get. The big event involves a conjunction in the first degree of Aries: the conjunction of Jupiter and Uranus, two very influential planets. Jupiter leaves Aquarius and moves into Pisces on Sunday, but it does something unusual: it cuts clear across Pisces and stops in the first degree of Aries, where it stations retrograde.

Uranus, meanwhile, has been in Pisces for nearly seven years. If you’re a Pisces you’ve been on a wild ride, no doubt; but we’ve all been feeling this one as the morph of the technical world with the dream world, as a sense of bizarre instability and emotional restlessness. Uranus moves into Aries in June, right when Jupiter does: and we have the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction on the Aries Point. The last time these two planets teamed up with Aries Point involvement, it was in Libra the summer of 1969. That was the summer we had the Manson murders, the Moon landing and Woodstock, among many, many other news events that get eclipsed by these big three. (For example, the Beatles broke up that year.)

What is this conjunction about? From a political angle, we see many signs of a mass movement or uprising of some kind. It could be aggressive, or even militant; it could just be highly energized. I recognize that there are occasionally protests in our time of history, but we still don’t identify with this as being a time of rebellion or uprising against the many injustices that are being perpetrated. Given all the years and years of abuses taken by the American public, and by extension, the public of many other countries that have been affected by everything from the Iraq war to the banking crisis. Most people will still tell you they don’t know what to do about these things. Jupiter-Uranus to me looks like an invention; and in part, an invention of identity.

What we don’t want is too many people becoming too over-identified with a brilliant cause that they ‘take matters into their own hands’, and I don’t mean that in the style of Betty Dodson. The influence of Aries could have certain individuals becoming extremely gung-ho about their ‘ideals’ and Uranus could have them convinced they represent a ‘group’. Jupiter can lead people to think they know more than they do. The theme of the hour is precisely the opposite: figuring out how little we know; and getting some perspective on all this group identification that has been dominating the political landscape of our era.

When Jupiter and Uranus meet on the Aries Point, they will be in alignment with Saturn and Pluto, which have already been stirring up plenty of change. Pluto in Capricorn all by itself is the astrological semaphore for the banking collapse; the near-total dysfunction of Congress; and many other aspects of corporate and government decay. Astrologers have seen this coming for years; in articles years ago I was describing a banking crisis when I had no clue what that really meant. Notably, when Chiron crossed Capricorn beginning in late 2001, we had the aftermath of the Sept. 11 event, the Enron scandal, and Worldcom going down, and Arthur Andersen; and a variety of government scandals involving the FBI and US intelligence ignoring the warning signs about the imminent attacks.

What I said at the time was that Chiron in Capricorn was a kind of readiness exercise for Pluto’s arrival; if we learned the lessons then, we would not have to go through them again. Now, it seems the entire economy has turned into one giant Enron.

An Awakening of Consciousness

Jupiter and Uranus in Aries add a LOT of energy to this equation. But they add something else, something we really need: self-awakening. The thing about Aries is that it is deeply connected to themes like self-awareness. Aries is the original sign of I Am; it turns the key to existence, to action and to desire. Uranus is a revolutionary force, forward thinking and provocative. It could have been named Prometheus just as well. The ‘fire of the gods’ is the core of self-awareness, which of course all religions seem to have an issue with. Better to leave it all to God, than to be entrusted with the responsibility of making decisions.

Then comes Jupiter. Jupiter magnifies things and is an excellent compliment to Uranus because it brings in a wisdom aspect, a cultural attribute and something worldly. And this sounds like it has the potential to be a sudden, spontaneous awakening of awareness, in particular, of self-awareness. Aries is about desire, and after Mars has spent six months lingering in Leo, most of it retrograde, desire is going to be running high this spring.

Opposite Jupiter/Uranus is Saturn in Libra, which is about taking relationships seriously. The Sixties were great and all, but one of the missing pieces was a reverence for relationship. That was a problem. What happened in the Sixties was not really a sexual revolution; it was the unleashing of long pent-up desire. There is plenty of sex going around these days, but most of it is not what you would call conscious or honest.

At the same time, in the same era, many of the people who aspire to do the work on themselves are afraid of sex or sexual contact; a good few — you must know some of these folks — are chipper and spiritual and associate sex with the ‘baser instincts’. Many people are trapped in relationship paradigms that force them to suppress who they, or is it who we, are; and it looks like that issue may finally catch fire. We sure could use the heat.

Yours & truly,