Astrology, Prediction and Comment

By and large, Western leaders make sensible comments.  We might not agree with what they say, but there is an underlying logic.  However, when you are dealing with Donald Trump, there’s a problem.  He sometimes says things that are nonsense.  For example, he recently discussed the possibility that light, heat and disinfectant might be cures for coronavirus.  He even suggested that it might be appropriate to inject the body with disinfectant.

You can kind of understand the logic.  If coronavirus is on a surface, for example a kitchen countertop, it can be destroyed very quickly with bleach, or maybe a UV lamp.  You can therefore apply this to the body… get the bleach or the heat or the light into the body, and you’ve got a cure.  Yes, if I have coronavirus, and I spend a few milliseconds on the Sun’s surface, I’ll be cured.

This makes me wonder how Donald Trump’s brain works.  I assume that unlike Ronald Reagan, he is not suffering from early-stage dementia.  But be seems to be unable to grasp basic scientific principles.  It is as if he hasn’t thought the matter through, or done any intelligent Googling.  And furthermore, when communicating, he doesn’t seem to realize how stupid he sounds.

Now it may be that it is a deliberate and very clever act.  He might know that many of his supporters are as thick as two short planks, and they don’t want to be patronized by smart ass intellectuals.  We saw this in the 1980 presidential debates, when Jimmy Carter was up against Ronald Reagan.  The two candidates were discussing healthcare, and Carter described the idea of a national health insurance, as a way of dealing with the inequalities in the American health system.  Reagan was smirking throughout Carter’s earnest and intelligent speech, and then responded with four words, which won him the debate and possibly the Presidency: “There you go again”.

I don’t think we can credit Donald Trump with such deliberation and guile, even if his cluelessness helps shore up his base.  Instead we can probably see it in terms of scrambled signals.  He is suffering from information overload, and from a cognitive perspective, there may be problems with the way he represents information.  Compare a neatly ordered library with a huge pile of random books.  Donald knew that disinfectant and light could destroy the virus, but he got the context confused.

In terms of astrology, how do we see this?  In  the West the planet Mercury is connected with communications and the intellect.  In Vedic astrology the Moon is also linked with mental functioning.  To keep it simple I’ll focus on Mercury.  Here is Trump’s horoscope:

The Western astrologer would want to see evidence that Trump’s Mercury is weak.  From the perspective of traditional astrology, it is weak.  It is in the ninth degree of Cancer, and therefore has no essential dignity.  Furthermore, it is in later degrees than the Sun, meaning that it is an evening rather than a morning star.  The evening star Mercury functions best in night-time charts, and in day-time charts it is  happiest below the horizon.  Trump’s Mercury is above the horizon.

Looking at aspects, Mercury is at 8 degrees 52 minutes Cancer, Neptune at 5 degrees 41 Libra.  So Trump has a square between Mercury and Neptune.  Mercury and Neptune do not make major aspects to any other planet in his chart.

Mercury and Neptune squares can be associated with confused thinking, or getting the wrong idea about something.  They can also be about muddled communication.  On the plus side, Neptune may allow Trump to have a fleeting understanding of popular trends, in a glitzy kind of way.

But what makes the Mercury-Neptune square really bad is the fact that by aspect it is unconnected to the rest of the chart.  It is an autonomous subsystem.  Mercury speaks without knowing what it is doing.  Also, Mercury’s position in Cancer may suggest that Trump’s thought processes are overly subjective, and given everything else, can’t be treated as being discerning or analytical.

One might then ask how a man with such a large intellectual deficit has become President.  We shouldn’t get too attached to people as individuals.  Trump is simply a reflection of America, a country where one person’s ignorance is just as valid as another person’s knowledge.  Besides, the rest of Trump’s horoscope is incredibly dynamic, easily enough to have propelled him into the White House.

On Thursday April 23, at 3.26 am London time there is a New Moon.  It is a New Moon that is obvious, in the sense that its underlying message is no different from what we can see with our own eyes.  Right now, everyone is sick of the lock-down, and protests are forming. The images that we see on the news channels, particularly in state capitals across the US, are well described by the New Moon. The chart below is the New Moon set for London:

I have included Alfred Witte’s hypothetical planets in the chart, because I think they may provide some useful information.

The New Moon is at 3 degrees 24 minutes Taurus, and it is conjunct Uranus at 6 degrees 24 minutes Taurus and square Saturn at 1 degrees 42 minutes Aquarius.  This means that the New Moon makes a 45 degree aspect to the Saturn-Uranus midpoint, which is at 19 degrees and 3 minutes Pisces.

The New Moon is triggering the Saturn-Uranus square, which becomes exact in February of next year.  The principle of the Saturn-Uranus square is tension – you have two energies that don’t like to share the same space.  Uranus wants to be free, Saturn wants to restrict.  In mythology Uranus was the father of Saturn, and it was Saturn who castrated him.  This perhaps gives meaning to the Saturn-Uranus square: Saturn wants to disempower the rebellious spirit of Uranus.  Yet it’s a battle, and the New Moon on April 23 is right in the middle of it.  People want their freedom, and the government is trying to hold things together.

We can conceptualize the New Moon as a situation where no-one is prepared to compromise – especially as both Saturn and Uranus are in fixed signs.  I am reminded of Langston Hughes’ famous 1950s poem “Harlem“, which speculates on what happens if a dream gets deferred.  “Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?” or “stink like rotten meat?”…. or “Or does it explode?”  Of course Langston Hughes’ poem is normally associated with the civil rights movement, not the temporary inconvenience of an essential lock down.  Nonetheless, we have the image of a pressure cooker, and with the New Moon making a close semi-square to the Saturn-Uranus midpoint we might indeed get an explosion.

From a midpoint perspective, this is the New Moon’s 45 degree midpoint structure:

AP = SU/AP = MO/AP = MA/ZE = SU = SU/MO = MO = ME/MA = UR/VU

I have thrown some hypothetical planets into the equation – Apollon, Zeus and Vulcanus.  The New Moon is exactly opposite Apollon, and this does create the possibility of creative excellence.  It is a great time for music and the arts, and if you try to be creative while the world bubbles over you’ll be amazed at what you can achieve.  Yet the fact that the New Moon aspects the Mars/Zeus and Uranus/Vulcanus midpoints is worrying.  The Mars-Zeus combination is often associated with firearms, and Uranus/Vulcanus is about the exercise of massive power.  I am therefore thinking that the New Moon is going to cause civil disturbance, with violence.

If I had to choose the countries and regions that are going to be most effected by the New Moon, I would go for Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iraq, Kurdistan, Eastern Turkey, Eastern Ukraine and Russia.  These are the regions where the New Moon take place at around sunrise on April 23.  But arguably astrology is just confirming what we already know.  Saudi Arabia, for example, is seeing its economy hammered by a collapsing oil price.  It might also be relevant that Ramadan probably starts on the evening of April 23.  However,  the astrology adds poignancy and violence to the situation.  The pressure cooker is going critical.

The Sun is now in Taurus.  Ten years ago, I wrong an article titled “Is Taurus the nastiest sign of the Zodiac”?  Over the years, it has been the article that has got the most hits.  The article was written tongue in cheek, but I think there is evidence that some Taureans display a peculiar kind of nastiness.  They don’t forget, and they can be dedicated to homicidal  causes.  Adolf Hiter, born on April 20 1889, was notorious for his vengefulness.  In the last months of the Second World War, as the Third Reich was collapsing in on itself, he made sure sure that many of his imprisoned political enemies were executed.  I am not going to survive this, and neither are you.

At the beginning of the week, as the Sun moves through the first degrees of Taurus, we can expect some frustration.  This is because the Sun is making a stressful, 90-degree aspect to Saturn.  It will be difficult to make our presence felt, and at the same time other people are going to be incredibly stubborn.  They will be sticking to their principles, regardless of the cost.  And don’t forget, just because someone has principles doesn’t mean they’re a nice person.  Ask Adolf.

Also this week, Venus in Gemini is desperatly trying to make a favourable, 120 aspect to Mars in Aquarius.  This aspect never happens, because Venus is slowing down, in preparation for the retrograde portion of its cycle, which starts on May 13.  This aspect has sexual and romantic connotations, and is suggestive of two people trying to engage with each other.  Because the aspect never completes, there is great disappointment.  So if you’ve got romantic plans, be realistic – you can get very close to the achievement of your desires, but be blocked at the last moment.  If you want to play Sun sign astrology, the signs most at risk of this scenario are Aries, Taurus, Libra and Scorpio.

Though probably the biggest event of the week is a New Moon, on Thurday April 23.  This New Moon is a pressure cooker, and could result in explosive events.  I’ll discuss this lunation in my next post.

On December 21 2020 there is a conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn, in the first degree of Aquarius.  This means that we’re about to enter a period of time, lasting 20 years, when the sign Aquarius is going to reign supreme.  We already have a feel of this conjunction, as Jupiter and Saturn move closer together, as Saturn flits between late Capricorn and early Aquarius.  But it won’t be until the end of the year that we get the full blast.

The author and futurologist H.G. Wells made a connection between archaeology and predicting the future.  One thinks of archaeology as being the understanding of long-dead civilizations through unearthing their relics.  But maybe it works both ways.  We can see the relics of the future in the present day.  If we understand these relics, and put them together into a wider picture, we can look ahead, years, decades, even centuries.

But for now I am only looking ahead twenty years.  And I don’t think you need any special astrological or mystical skills to think about what is going to happen next.  Look at what is happening right now, as the world languishes in lock down:

1. The internet is achieving its full potential.  People are running their lives online.  Socializing, shopping and learning, with personal contacts kept to a minimum.
2. The decline of the celebrity.  In the age of COVID-19 the heroes are the people working in essential services, not sports stars and the Kardashians.
3. Government is rampant, even in the United States.  People are looking to their governments for salvation.

All this is happening before the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction.  The conjunction itself will actualize the trends.  If we want to understand the  conjunction, we need to think of the sign it takes place in.  Aquarius, the sign that is opposite Leo.  It is anti-Leo.

What’s the sign Leo about?  Me, the centre of the universe.  Look at me, look at how wonderful I am.  Aquarius is everything that Leo is not.

Let’s now look back at the last Jupiter-Saturn cycle, that started in May 2000, with a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in late Taurus.  I remember the Summer of 2000.  In the UK, it was launch of Big Brother, when Reality TV became mainstream.  People had cell phones, but they were for making telephone calls and sending text messages.  We could therefore see the seeds of a trend.

Jump ten years to 2010, and we are halfway through the Jupiter-Saturn cycle.  This is the Full Moon stage of the cycle, where we start to see the full picture.  Phones are becoming smart.  Social media is taking off.  Reality TV is everywhere.  We all have the potential of being a star.   As we move beyond 2010, the image of the new decade becomes a prostitute preening in front of her cell phone and success is measured by Instagram likes and Youtube followers.

But we are now transitioning into a twenty year period where the individual is going to be less important.  Twenty years of Aquarius, twenty years of anti-Leo.  Celebrity for celebrity’s sake will be hard to achieve, and the collective will become more important than the individual.

This was of course already happening, but in a way that most of us could probably ignore.  A bit like the internet in the late 1990s. From 2010 one of the big trends in technology was big data, with its concept that you can predict individual behavior from collective datasets.  From the end of 2020 onwards we need to accept that most of us are going to be statistics, that our individuality doesn’t matter any more.

Aquarius has a clear association with technology.  This makes sense.  It is anti-Leo.  The individual against the machine.  Over the next twenty years articifical intelligence will start reaching its full potential, and we’ll see AI control our world in the same way that the internet controls it now.  This absolutely requires governments to manage every aspect of the economy, because otherwise AI will lead to mass unemployment.

Talking about the economy, let’s think back to 1990.  This was the halfway stage of the 1980 to 2000 Jupiter-Saturn cycle.  This was the time when the internet started to make its presence felt.  Jump forward to the the current cycle, and the halfway year was 2010.  One thing that started in this year was Bitcoin.  No-one knows where Bitcoin and the cryptocurrencies are going, especially as the bottom has fallen out of the crypto market.  Like it fell out of the NASDAQ, with the dot com collapse in 2000.  Yet many internet companies roared back, and many cryptocurrencies will do the same.

Crytpocurrencies aren’t done.  In fact, they haven’t even started.  One of the hallmarks of the Jupiter-Saturn cycle that starts at the end of 2020 will be an explosion in the adoption of cryptocurrencies.  They are something that is high-tech and very Aquarian, and in the first few years of the new decade we are likely to see cryptos hitting new highs.  That doesn’t mean that Bitcoin will remain the top dog.  It could be something else… Ethereum, Litecoin, NANO, Ripple, IOTA, or something that is still being developed.  This means that one of the main features of the next twenty years will be a desperate attempt by all-embracing governments to control the monetary system.  It is a battle they probably can’t win.