Dear Friend and Reader:
It’s New Year’s Eve and we have an eclipse of the Moon in Cancer — the sign ruled by the Moon. Eclipses represent dependable transitions; this is fitting astrology for the end of a year, and even a decade. Yet by our calendar, this is not technically the end of the decade; that’s a year from now. When we get wind of the astrology of 2010, we’ll see that the coming year is the peak of something that has been building since before Dick and Junior went to Washington and committed treason. However, it’s been 10 years today since Y2K; 10 years since another foiled terrorist attack — the guy who was going to bomb Los Angeles airport (LAX) who was busted by a worker on the Washington State Ferries. Vigilance is indeed the price of liberty.
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Eclipses come back to any pair of signs every nine years, and the signs where eclipses happen have a way of coloring the world. One of the themes of eclipses across Cancer and Capricorn is emotional dependency and its counterpart, the need to submit to authority. Back when people other than advertising writers thought about psychology, a few of us understood that giving away our power was an emotionally-driven process, fueled by fear and the refusal to take authority for our own lives. Erich Fromm called it the Escape from Freedom.
Here’s a theory for you: humans rarely seem to grow out of the tendencies we develop in our early childhood relationships with authority figures — such as our almighty parents; ministers who claim to personally wield the power of God; and teachers who can inflict torture and humiliation on us. Once instilled, these patterns dominate our emotional landscape; and take up residence in our relationships, our homes, our jobs, our creative experiences — everywhere. Under such emotional conditions, the only acceptable way of life is to be stupid, fat and bored: nobody is threatened. We would in fact express ourselves, if not for the fear of threatening others; which is a ruse for refusing to grow up.