Planet Waves

Listeners to Planet Waves FM — here is this week’s edition, covering Mars in Libra, yesterday’s Full Moon and the USA chart. I also read the Declaration of Independence. To Americans and Amerophiles — happy 4th. –efc

In 1817, John Trumbull painted the famous portrait of the presentation of the Declaration if Independence to Congress. Note, this is not the signing of the document. — In 1817, John Trumbull painted the famous portrait of the presentation of the Declaration if Independence to Congress. Note, it does not depict the signing of the document.

Note: Eric first published this article in our premium subscriber issue on July 2, 2010. It may be two years old, but it contains a wealth of insight regarding the astrology of the USA. Some of our frequent commenters refer to the Sibly chart regularly; you may want to bookmark this post so you can refer to the charts in the future. The image above is a sample; here is the full painting. And here is the full text of the Declaration itself — a document that is truly relevant to our situation today.- amanda

The United States is having its 234th birthday this weekend [236th, in 2012] — a good time to check with something called the Sibly Chart. This is the best-accepted chart for the United States, dated July 4, 1776 and with a time of 5:10 pm local time, Philadelphia. The time of the chart has been debated; if you’re curious about the backstory you may check out the page in Astrodatabank that discusses the issue. I was a bit skeptical of this chart until the Sept. 11, 2001, incident, which basically proved the time is accurate — that ascendant degree of 12+ Sagittarius turned out to be pretty sensitive, confirming that this is a working chart to within a few minutes of accuracy.

The Sibly Chart is the Sagittarius rising chart for July 4, 1776. The time the Declaration was signed is in debate (it took a while), but the 12+ Sagittarius ascendant of this chart (next to the horizontal line on the left side) has been confirmed by historical events. Click image for larger version.

To sum up the transits the U.S. chart is now taking: every aspect of American life is in the process of profound and sweeping changes that we can barely imagine. It’s hard to counsel a whole nation, but if this were a client, I would prepare them to go through a series of transformations, inner and outer, that create an entirely different life in just a few years. The chart aligns exactly with the cardinal T-square that we’ve been discussing. Were the United States a person, the angles of American life that would be most affected over the next two years are sense of identity and perception in the world (ascendant), personal resources (2nd house) home and security (4th house), marriage and partnership contracts (8th house), and reputation, career and goals (10th house).

The Sibly Chart has Sagittarius rising, which describes our sanctimonious, religion-obsessed, expansion-obsessed nation. We love to spread out, and for the first couple of hundred years of our existence we did quite a bit of it. We still think that’s what we do, even though at the moment we’re shrinking both in influence and in economic strength. Our military is mired in two wars that have no goal and no limit to their expense; that is not growth, unless you supply guns and hamburgers to the troops.

Our treasury borrows every day, taxing the distant future, to wage these wars, and there are no protests against them. This week Republicans in the Senate blocked renewal of unemployment benefits to more than a million Americans while it will spend billions to kill people in Iraq and Afghanistan under a false pretense of being at war with Al Qaeda.