Dear Friend and Reader:
There are times when history turns on a pivot, and the truth is we don’t usually see them. Most times we think of as historical are not; they are an artifice. The real moments of history are usually the ones we don’t see, because nobody writes an article saying “this [inauguration, disaster or whatever] is so relevant.” Whenever someone says that, click on or turn to the business section and see what you’re really missing. Of course, business news today is front page news, and what is buried in the back — for example, oil company profits — is the real news; the real underbelly of what is happening. Note also our series this week on the Navy taking over the Pacific Coast. Is this meaningful? Well, it is, but it’s not on Keith Olbermann.
One kind of aspect that history pivots on is the Saturn-Uranus cycle. Saturn takes 29.6 years to orbit the Sun (10,832 days) and Uranus takes 84 years to orbit (30,799 days). Their combined cycle is about 42 years; that is, every 42 years, they will make a conjunction or an opposition — and they are at opposition now.
Today is the second of five exact face-to-face meetings of these two giant worlds, in the current era. Imagine the Earth hanging in the middle of them, taking the energy of both at full strength. The last time they were at opposition was the mid-1960s. The oppositions of Saturn and Uranus always come in a long series that usually lasts two or more years, but is really one event. The first of the five did indeed happen on Election Day 2008, which was a cosmic pointer either to the significance of that election; or it was a leverage device we used to climb over the wall of a contracting universe — one based on warfare, fear, suspicion and greed. Those things work for a while, but as we are seeing they don’t work forever. Didn’t you know there was going to be a serious economic decline the minute they went into Iraq?
Saturn and Uranus are usually considered to be opposite archetypes: one is about conservatism and the other about revolution. One is about the past, and one is about the future. That’s good for the comic book version of astrology, but true enough on one level: we are indeed seeingВ a split between the fundamentalists (i.e., Republicans who would sooner die than vote for anything Obama supports); and pluralists, that is, regular people demanding progress and a more open, inclusive viewpoint.