Dear Friend and Reader:
WHEN ASTRONOMERS (and old-fashioned astrologers) measure the year, one way they do it is to divide the year into 24 “hours.” Midnight is when the Sun arrives in the fist degree of Aries. So measuring the year using this method, it’s now about fifteen minutes to midnight — meaning that we’re quite close to the vernal equinox. And fans of the Doomsday Clock will recognize the metaphor. I am hearing a lot of my [even] sensible friends talking about various shades of dread and doom.
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Speaking of doom, today is the 5th anniversary of the bombing of Iraq. The war, if you can really call it that — it’s really a stuck occupation — has now lasted considerably longer than World War II and half the length of the Vietnam War, if you count from the Tonkin Gulf Incident to the fall of Saigon. Here is today’s edition for all readers, which reprints my original article on the invasion from March 21, 2003.
Thankfully, despite humanity’s persistently violent qualities, nature keeps on moving through her cycles. Equinox means equal night and day, which actually lasts for about a week; night and day are not equal for just one night, as is usually thought. It’s a little phase, and it develops gradually, so actually we’re in it now; but the official moment of “The Equinox” is when the Sun reaches the beginning of Aries, exact Thursday, March 20 at 1:48 am EDT.The Aries ingress, though a “time of balancing,” is always a hot spot. This year, we have added factors pushing up the temperature. For example, we’ve all heard once or twice that Pluto is in Capricorn. Capricorn is 90 degrees away from Aries, which is called a square. Pluto happens to be in the second degree of Cap, that is, very early Cap — so when the Sun enters Aries, one of the first things will do is make a square to Pluto.
That would be more than enough, really — but then mix in a Full Moon just after the Aries ingress. So now, it’s equinox + Sun square Pluto + Full Moon.
But we are still not done. There are other planets hanging out in the neighborhood, that is, on this thing we’re talking about called the cardinal cross — the type of sign that both Aries and Capricorn are. For example, Mars is in early Cancer. An asteroid called Pallas Athene is in early Aries, a few degrees ahead of the Sun. There’s other stuff in the vicinity as well, such as a Centaur planet called Bienor. All of this space debris is in the very early cardinal signs; all of it is in a strong aspect to the first degree of Aries (called the Aries Point, which we’ll cover in greater detail Wednesday).
To make a long story somewhat short, the Aries Point is a degree where public and private spheres of existence intersect, and the charts have been glowing with this point for a while — Pluto is the most potent thing setting off the Aries Point at the moment. We’ve had a fine example of “the personal is political” quality of this degree with the whole Eliot Spitzer scenario, wherein the emperor of the Empire State had sex at the Emperor’s Club and is now unemployed.
This is a textbook case of the news hotting up (as they say in England) when the Aries Point gets into the act; and with Pluto (that shadowy antiplanet which used to be considered the edge of reality) in Capricorn (the sign of government and big corporations) we have a fine setup for the emperor being disrobed or defrocked. In other words, it’s government scandal season, though it would be nice if one of those scandals would involve a corporation (Halliburton would do) making billions on another fine Plutonian topic, death.
I have a new theory, though — death is too hard to talk about, so we take Pluto Lite and talk about sex, disparagingly, because of a cultural mandate that such discussions must be embarrassing. I think that we are currently in the midst of one vast lesson in what I will sum up as “how not to talk about sex.”
However, if we’re going to do better, we have to do better. Have you had an interesting, deep (that is to say, honest) conversation about sex with someone lately? This is my get out the vote drive…now would be a great time, because the astrology is like a wind in your sails, and if you have just the right conversation with just the right person, I assure you that it will not end there.
However, let’s consider one last Pluto/Scorpio type issue: the world financial markets. With all this astrology piled up on the Aries Point and the markets shaking from the credit crisis, we do have a real question on our hands. Can they stand the impact of the astrology? It is indeed impact. I know plenty of people who are sitting around waiting for a meltdown of the economic system. It would be the ultimate case of “the personal is the political.” I’li be developing this story for Friday’s edition of Planet Waves Astrology News, and keep a close eye on what emerges this week.
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