Yesterday, April 15, 2013, two explosions at the Boston Marathon killed three and wounded over 100. The tragedy took place in the midst of some intense Aries energy as the Sun approached its conjunction to Mars (named after the god of war) and amid an atmosphere of militancy and violence: at least 55 were killed in a string of coordinated bombings across Iraq on Monday; the NRA is baiting gun fanatics who ‘refuse to be a victim’; Kim Jong-Un is threatening nuclear war from the other side of the globe. All of it carries the insidious psychic/spiritual message that ‘you are not safe’.
It’s a dangerous message to buy into. Once you do, it’s a slippery slope to being controlled by that fear.
In the hours after the Boston Marathon bombing, I saw numerous friends on Facebook asserting their refusal to give in to this idea that ‘we cannot be safe’.
One who works in that part of Boston has run that famous race twice expressed his desire to do so again, with his family able to watch it at the sidelines, “without reservation and without fear.” Another intentionally walked downtown in an act of spiritual rebellion and was glad to see there were people out having dinner. And so on.
I was heartened to know that many are getting that living in a state of panic won’t help things; that being afraid to live doesn’t make living in this world any easier; that in the wake of something like this — an event designed to shock us into paralysis and emotional numbness — jumping to assumptions and scapegoats and spreading misinformation just because it popped up in your social media feed is, at best, an example of poor cyber-citizenship.
Worse, it can help fuel more fear and violence. And even worse than that: it can blind us to being able to see what’s really going on when the fog clears.
That fog, in this case, is represented by Neptune right on the 7th house cusp of the chart for the explosions in Boston. This event occurred with a Sun-Mars conjunction in Aries (exact Wednesday at 8:20 pm EDT), with Mercury conjunct Uranus in that same sign, and Eris not too far from Mars. All that Aries energy turns Neptune into ‘the fog of war’. It’s the fog of the Shock Doctrine, distracting and confusing us with chaos and pain, so that we won’t notice what comes next.