the weather inside me

saturn squares pluto: the boogie-man returneth

NOTE: Because the Saturn-Pluto square is THE big aspect for many months now, I'm holding this blog entry at the top during this coming week as the aspect forms it's exact degree alignment. For new blog entries, scroll down down down...

On November 14th, Saturn will once again square Pluto. This is a major aspect, usually associated with big geo-political events. For example, the last time Saturn squared Pluto we experienced the Twin Towers and Pentagon attacks. On that occasion, the aspect was > 1 degree from exact. Previous Saturn/Pluto aspect cycles (the square/opposition or conjunction) have coincided with the outbreak of both World War 1 and 2, the Stock Market crash of 1929, Gandhi's assassination, three Israeli wars, and the first Trade Tower bombing. It doesn't paint a pretty picture, this aspect cycle.

And yet there's an upside, too. The positive expression of this cycle seems to be a dogged determination to overcome the violence and ugliness of the times. The Marshall Plan was enacted under this aspect, and Winston Churchill was able to rally a ragged and stunned nation in the dark early days of WWII during the nightly German Luftwaffe bombing raids. It was also during a Saturn-Pluto cycle that Arthur Miller produced the highly successful counter-argument to senator Joseph Mc Carthy's theater of paranoia (the House Un-American Activities Committee), and his communist blacklists. That counter argument was Miller's play, The Crucible, a work that did more to expose the insanity of McCarthyism than any politician or private individual who dared to oppose the senator.

 My favorite counter argument to the post 9/11 Saturn-Pluto cycle was the smart sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica.

In the 2003-2009 remake (first aired during the last Saturn-Pluto alignment), the early plot line, which was originally created back in 1978, easily fit the events of 9/11 and captured the zeitgeist of a nation (a planet in this story) turned upside-down by a nuclear (terrorist) attack. The little band of survivors are the last of humanity. Of course, there's a nasty enemy (Cyclons/terrorists) with an agenda to annihilate these survivors. Of course we root for the hardy humans (soldiers/firefighters/policemen) who battle against extreme odds to save their species (American way of life).

But the twist in the story is the secret to every Saturn-Pluto cycle, and the twist is this: the enemy is us. Yes, the enemy in Battlestar Galactica was not the easily identifiable chrome-plated Cylon of yore. No, the enemy, they discover, looks a lot like a...human. Cylons now can look, breathe, eat, make love, and fight like humans. Horrors! You're sleeping with the enemy.

Of course, this revelation ignites paranoia which is followed by harsh legalism, accusations of moral relativism, comforting the enemy --all the usual bag of Saturn-Pluto psychological tricks meant to wear an enemy down and assert the "good guy's" superiority. Here, it's the assertion that just being human makes one inherently superior. The "bad guy" Cylons are, of course, given demeaning nicknames like "toasters". So easy to define the players with rhetoric like this.

However, as the story evolves we find the good guy humans slowly turning into the sort of monsters they accuse the Cyclons of being and the Cylons become more empathetic toward the humans. Not that they initially recognize this shift. In their drive to survive and their absolute assurance of the moral superiority of their cause, each faction degenerates into an shape-shifting, boundary-less ethical fog of self-doubt and internal division before they can accept the complexity of their feelings toward the "other". Who exactly is the bad guy now when Cylons behave like humans and humans like monsters?

The Inauguration Train: Obama and Pluto Pull Into History

from Planet Waves

Dear Friend and Reader:

Jan. 17, 2009 at 7:10 PM EST, the Inauguration Train and President-elect Barack Obama rolled into Union Station in Washington, DC hauling 250 years of history and a whole lot of Pluto in Capricorn along with him.

Two weeks after Americans elected Barack Obama as the their next president, the dwarf planet Pluto returned for a 15-year stay in the sign of Capricorn. This is significant because Pluto has not been in the sign of Capricorn for 247 years. Since the time of America’s Revolutionary War, in fact.

A supporter listens to President-elect Obama at a rally in Wilmington, during his whistle-stop tour Saturday. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Bloomberg News.

In Philadelphia, where Obama began the Inauguration ride, the president-elect reminded his audience of their 18th century origins: “It was here, in this city, that our American journey began…It was here that a group of farmers and lawyers, merchants and soldiers, gathered to declare their independence and lay claim to a destiny that they were being denied.”

Obama continued to invoke the 18th century spirit at each train stop: ” ‘We should never forget that we are the heirs of those early patriots, ordinary men and women who refused to give up when it all seemed so improbable - and who somehow believed that they had the power to make the world anew,’ he told a crowd estimated at 35,000. ‘That is the spirit that we must reclaim today.’ ”

In Next World Stories, we offer a deeper look at the themes and events of Pluto’s last pass through Capricorn 247 years ago. It was an era that birthed the American Experiment — truly worth studying because the return of Pluto to Capricorn will likely force Americans to recreate the government they created 250 years ago.