Category Archives: Current

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

May 2, 2014

Posted under

Current

Comments

2 Comments

The 2008 Election

Below are four views of election day 2008 in the United States, but they all have a single message. That election will be remembered for all time as the one in which a black man (but interestingly one related to slaves only through his white mother) was elected President of a country whose founders were slave owners. But the campaign and election will also be remembered for other things, as discussed below, which may well set the standard for upcoming elections in the United States.

Image

Obama on Election Day

 

Image

Neptune on Obama’s Ascendant

 

The first chart is that of the winner of the election, Barak Obama, on election day. The most noticeable feature of this chart is Neptune prominently in the first house and near the Ascenant. Neptune was conjunct the Ascendant since Mr. Obama speech to the 2004 Democratic convention that first gave him prominence on the national stage. Neptune can be handled successfully but with difficulty by an individual, but collectively it usually turns out negatively. Neptune represents illusions, delusions, not seeing things clearly. Neptune on the Ascendant is great for actors since it allows them to easily pretend to be someone they are not, the hallmark of a good actor. With someone in the public eye, it allow the person to appear to be something that he is not. Obama himself described this in one of his campaign autobiographies, saying that people see in him whatever that think he is. Neptune in this position means exactly that. And in fact Mr. Obama got an award from Advertising Age as the best marketing campaign for 2008, beating out Apple that usually won. Neptune on the Ascendant definitely helped him win this award.

The second  chart, a graphical ephemeris of Mr. Obama from June of 2004 to June of 2009 (mistakenly labelled as 6 years) shows clearly that transiting Neptune was dancing around his Ascendant — near the bottom of the graph — during this   entire period.  By noticing how slowly Neptune move  — it appears to   move only 15º in five years — one can judge that it is near his Ascendant for all of his first term.  See also Definition section for Graphical Ephemeris for more details.

Image

Comparison of USA & Obama

The third chart is a comparison of Mr. Obama’s chart (on the inside) and the chart of the United States (on the outside). Several things stand out. First we notice that the Obama Venus is conjunct the US Venus. Love at first sight! If this were two people they definitely should get together. Then Obama’s Uranus is opposite the Moon of the US. The people in the US see this person as being unconventional, maybe even revolutionary. Obama’s Mars is conjunct the US Neptune and square the US Mars. Remember that the tightest hard aspect in Obama’s chart is the Mars semisquare Neptune that now we see fits into the US Mars square Neptune. As mentioned before, Mars-Neptune hard aspects are difficult to maninifest positively. They tend to indicate poorly planned action, deception about violence. Obama fits right into the violence of the US. Obama’s Midheaven is sesquiquadrate the US Sun and his Ascendant is sesquiquadrate the US Venus. Here again are two more indicators that these two were meant to be together. A further indication, his Jupiter is trine the Midheaven of the US, his Sun is trine the Ascendant of the US, and is Venus is square the Midheaven of the US – Obama and the United States: a Match Made in Heaven!! Of course, as in all relationships, hate is the other side of love, and so there can be deep animosity in this relationship between Mr. Obama and the United States as well as love. And one more: his Satun is conjunct the Pluto of the US. We’ve talked about Saturn Pluto aspects before, and will talk some more later, but this does not bode well.

 

Image

United States on Election Day

Image

Neptune and the Moon of the United
States

 

The fourth chart is that of the United States on Election Day. Neptune is loosely conjunct with the Moon of the United States, and it will be drawing closer and going over the Moon over the next four years. In fact, for the 2012 elections Neptune was about the same distance from the Moon but on the other side of it, leaving orb. Here again we see Neptune, as was described above, effecting the people (the Moon represents the people of a country) of the United States. As I mentioned before, Neptune is very difficult to handle in a positive manner for individuals (spiritual adepts are an exception) but for a collective group of people – that is the citizens of the United – it is almost impossible to manifest positively. In its negative manifestation Neptune represents illusion, delusion, deception. The old Roman proverb qui vult decipi, dicipiatur is most appropriate: those who wish to be deceived, let them be deceived. The people of the United Stats were going through a period where they could not see things clearly, there was much denial. We could also see this in the increasing denial that humanity is causing climate change.

 

The fifth chart is another graphical ephemeris for the period September 2008 to September 2013, showing that Neptune flirted with  the Moon of the United States over all of this period.       We also   note that Uranus crossed the Aries point — the heavy black  horizontal line —  during this period.

Image

Neptune on the Sun/Midheaven Midpoint

One final chart. This shows that on election day, and for a while thereafter, Neptune was at the midpoint of the US Sun and Midheaven. The Sun-Midheaven midpoint, written as Sun/MC (MC stands for Medium Coeli, Latin for middle of the sky) can be seen as the way the US is seen by the rest of the world. With Neptune there, the rest of the world can be deceived (witness the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Mr. Obama shortly after he took office) and many believed that the US was now something other than it once was under the previous administration.

Another issue was pointed out to me by Canadian astrologer Audra Stenger (yellowlotusarts.com). She points out that Obama accepted his nomination under a void-of-course moon. (The void of course moon concept, popularized by New York astrologer Al Morrison and used now by Oregon astrologer Jim Maynard in his calendars, is that period of time after the Moon makes its last ptolemic aspect and before it enters the next sign. It is suggested that events occurring in this period do not come to fruition. See write-up in any of Jim Maynard’s calendars for further details.) She writes of this:

Nothing has come of it. That is what a VOC moon means. I am being a bit existential, so I will elaborate: he has gone back on every single campaign promise and we might as well have kept George W. in office or elected a Republican (as Chomsky says- there is no real difference between the two parties. We really have a one party system here in the US).

 

Obama promised to end extraordinary rendition, close overseas blackop sites, gitmo, end the war in Iraq (never did say he would end the war in Afganistan- hum), end torture, he promised initially to give us Medicare for All, to end domestic spying. what we have instead is illegal drone wars in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia, troops just sent to Nicaragua, and troops in Australia. Additionally, he declared WikiLeaks an enemy of the state just as if Assange were Osama bin Laden.

 

So, I for one, existentially speaking, do not see really where the US is in a different place had a Republican like Sarah Palin been sworn in. At least we all knew she was a dumb as a box of hammers. Obama is a lawyer- he’s smart. To me, Obama is a perfect example of a VOC president. Nothing has come of his presidency that is any different than before, and every political analyst worth their salt agrees.

 

Change you can believe in was his slogan. Well, the more things change, the more things stay the same should be his second campaign slogan.

 

Blogs at the time of this election also reflected  this Neptunian theme: The terms used were “hopium”, Obama Derangement Syndrome (ODS)  and “drinking the Kool-Aid”. The latter was a reference to the massacre at Jonestown where the followers of Jim Jones drank Kool-Aid and Flavor Aid containing poison and died.

 

 

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

March 28, 2014

Posted under

Current

Comments

1 Comment

The Nodal Problems

 

Technically the nodes of the Moon are the positions on the ecliptic – the sun’s path through the heavens – where the path of the Moon crosses. There are two: the North Node of the Moon where the Moon crosses going north, and the South Node where the Moon crosses going south. These nodes travel backwards through the zodiac at about 3′ per day.

But I want to discuss the symbolic meaning of the North and South nodes of the Moon. The North Node, also called caput draconis or the head of the dragon, is where we get nutrition, sustenance, energy. The South Node, also called cauda draconis or tail of the dragon, is where waste products are expelled. These can be seen as input and output. Or, to use terms from physics, source and sink. And they must be in balance. Too much input without corresponding output can lead to bloating and expansion – excess. Too much output can lead to emaciation, wasting away – limitation. And we can have a Jupiter problem or a Saturn problem at both ends. It is like the alimentary canal, where input takes place at the top and output at the bottom. In the Unix/Linux world the term /dev/null (pronounced dev null) is considered a source and sink for any process.

In terms of the world system, the meanings of the nodes should be obvious. The North Node is where we take in food, water, energy, minerals, whatever we need to keep running the world. The South Node is where we get rid of the wastes, which can be the exhaust of your car, the plastic bag you throw away, or the spent fuel of a nuclear reactor.

For a long time we’ve had a Jupiter problem at both ends of the nodal axis. We were using our resources, water, oil, et cetera, et cetera, like there is no tomorrow. We’ve also thrown away trash assuming that it would somehow disappear, that there was no consequences for producing all that garbage. We have assumed that both the source and sink were infinite – we’ve thought we have a real /dev/null on the physical earth.

We are now moving to a Saturn problem with both ends of the nodal axis. The Saturn problems with the North Node are often prefixed with the term “Peak”. People often assume that peak means that you have run out of some resource, as in the term Peak Oil. But of course it doesn’t. If you are climbing a mountain and reach the peak your journey is not over, but rather half finished. If we have reached the peak (of oil or whatever) it does not mean we have exhausted that resource, but rather that we have used half of the supply, the low hanging fruit as it were, and after that we have to work harder to get the second half, as can be seen with the non-conventional oil we are hearing so much about now, as in tar sands and shale oil. So we have a peak of fossil fuels, water, edible fish, minerals, land, and so forth.

The Saturn problem with the South Node is a little different. We’ve produced so much waste – the Jupiter problem – that now there is a limit to how much more waste can be disposed of easily. We have an excess of waste with no place to put it. The most obvious example is t-he CO2 that has been produced by the burning of fossil fuels for the last several hundred years. This has left much waste in the atmosphere which has lead to the greenhouse effect. But there have been many other problems. Think of all the plastic waste which has now created islands of plastic scrap in the seas. Or radiation in the ocean, which are often the repository of our junk. Or all the toxic chemicals that are now found in every human being. Or all the fertilizers that have run off the land and caused dead zones at the months of major rivers. The list can be extended.

This was all predicted before. Think of the book Limits of Growth – the title sums up our situation – which appeared in the early Seventies. At first it was praised but later the backlash came on, and now it is widely assumed to have been nonsense. But the trends predicted by the book mirror closely what is happening in the world now. But still very few want to hear the message.

Parties do basically two things: consume stuff and produce waste, just like a human being but on a larger scale. After a party one needs to clean up and replenish supplies. This is relatively simple when you have a vacuum cleaner and a corner store. The longest party I have been involved in was four days long over a Thanksgiving Weekend. At the end our large propane tank was empty – we ended up cooking the turkey in the fireplace – and the septic system had to be replaced because it had been so overloaded. But a 500 year party is different, so much larger and longer. It started out slow, with not many at the party. The first thing was to expand the room for the party, and then allow more for the party-goers to consume. Then more and more people came to the party. As time went on the party got bigger and bigger. There are three big themes of the party which we will later explore in detail: Capitalism, Industrialism, Rationalism.

These nodal problems have been the result of the 500 Year Party. In the next 500 years we will be dealing with these nodal problems so we can find a way to to continue to live on this Earth, since it should be obvious to most intelligent observers that the methods of the last 500 years are not sustainable. We are now in a position like Wile E. Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons who has just been chased of a cliff. As long as he doesn’t look down he believes that nothing has changed. But eventually….

 

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

March 21, 2014

Posted under

Current

Comments

4 Comments

500 Years — Part I

The title of this blog contains the words “500 Years” so we need to show why 500 years is an important period of time, what I call a basic cycle. It is long enough to be a period where many changes happen, and short enough that we have had several during recorded history.

First let’s consider the periods of revolution of the outer planets. This is similar to the Moon rotating about the earth, though in this case these planets are rotating about the Sun. The Moon takes about 27 1/3 days to go around the Earth, as measured from, say, 0 Aries to 0 Aries.

Planet

Period

Number of Periods

Total Years

Jupiter

11.86

42

498.12

Saturn

29.42

17

500.14

Uranus

83.75

6

502.50

Neptune

163.74

3

491.22

Pluto

245.33

2

490.66

The average of the five cycles is 496.53 years. This is not to say that all these planets return to the same position in about 500 years, but only that their relative positions return. Also note that the inner planets not mentions have such small cycles that they of course fit into this scheme. The longest cycle of those not mentioned is Mars, which is only two years.

Next let us consider the synodic period of two planets. This is the period between one conjunction of the two planets and the next conjunction. After the first conjunction the two planets move and so the next conjunction takes place after, and perhaps long after, the faster moving planet returns to the spot where the first conjunction took place. This is similar to the period from one New Moon to the next New Moon. As the Moon moves during 27 1/3 days the Sun moves almost one-twelfth of its total rotation (as seen from the Earth) and so the Moon needs to move a little more after it returns to the spot of the first conjunction – New Moon. That is why consecutive New Moons advance through the zodiac. The synodic period for the Moon-Sun is about 29 ½ days.

Synodic Planets

Period

Number of Periods

Total Years

Jupiter-Saturn

19.86

25

496.50

Jupiter-Uranus

13.81

36

497.16

Jupiter-Neptune

12.78

39

498.42

Jupiter-Pluto

12.46

40

498.40

Saturn-Uranus

45.36

11

498.96

Saturn-Neptune

35.87

14

502.18

Saturn-Pluto

33.42

15

501.30

Uranus-Neptune

171.00

3

513.00

Uranus-Pluto

126.94

4

507.16

Neptune-Pluto

492.33

1

492.33

The average is 500.60 years. This is a relative return of all these cycles.

To sum up, there is a basic cycle of 500 years in which all the planets of the solar system return to their same relative position. This 500 year cycle is the basis of the title of this blog, The 500 Year Party. The next question of course is when does the 500 years start. This is similar to the question of when the 20 year Jupiter-Saturn cycle starts. The Jupiter-Saturn cycle has long been used in astrology; I have seen it in a book of ancient Persian astrology, where it was said to rule the rise and fall of kings. In present times, the cycle starts near the beginning of an even decade, so I call this period the bi-decade and it consists of an outgoing half – from conjunction to opposition – like the lunar cycle from New to Full Moon, the waxing cycle. Then the odd decade – from opposition to next conjunction – like the phase from Full to New Moon, is the waning period. So waxing decades are the Sixties, the Eighties, and the Oughts, whereas the waning decades are the Seventies, the Nineties, and this current decade. I’ll leave it to the reader to find the differences between the waxing and waning decades.

There is another large astrological cycle called the Great Year, based on the Precession of the Equinoxes whereas the first point of Aries – the Vernal Equinox – moves backward through the zodiac at a rate of approximately one degree every 72 years. This causes the Pole Star to change through the ages, and results in the charmingly named Age of Aquarius, which is due any time now. The Great Year is about 26, 000 years. The actual year consists of 12 months, but 52 weeks or 13 4-week periods. This difference between 12 and 13 is the result of attempting to merge the lunar – moon-based – and solar – sun-based calendars. But the ratio of a week to a year is about the same as the ratio of 500 years to the Great Year, so I call this 500 year cycle the Great Week.

From: Astrology: Worlds Visible and Invisible Everett Blackman AFA 1974