When I went on the air to do my weekly Planet Waves FM webcast on Tuesday, August 19, I was prepared with the chart of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, which had happened 10 days earlier.
This latest shooting by police of an unarmed black youth set off weeks of riots in a city about the size of Kingston, located in St. Louis County. Local and state police, as well as the National Guard, were called in, though as the days progressed, the situation escalated and many times went out of control.
Brown's death is being seen as part of a pattern of unarmed men of color, mostly teenagers, killed by police. Among the deaths we've actually heard of are Eric Garner, age 43, Staten Island, 2014 (the guy who sold loose cigarettes, killed in a chokehold); Kimani Gray, age 16, Brooklyn, 2013; Kendrec Mcdade, age 19, Pasadena, 2012; Ervin Jefferson, age 18, Atlanta, 2012 (shot by a security guard); Ramarley Graham, age 18, Bronx, 2012; and Victor Steen, age 17, Pensacola, 2009. This doesn't count Trayvon Martin, who was killed by wannabe cop George Zimmerman.
The well of rage that Brown's death taps into is related to this pattern, though the shootings are just the most visible attribute. It also includes the stop and frisk policy of the NYPD that went on throughout the Bloomberg administration, the noted phenomenon of being pulled over for driving while black, and many other circumstances.
In an article published the third week of August, Rob Urie of Counterpunch laid the scenario out in stark terms. "Had the murder been an isolated incident it would be tragic. But the death of Mike Brown was a political assassination. The systematic nature in which youth of color are harassed, intimidated, incarcerated and assassinated perpetuates the historic repression of American blacks and browns from the barbaric founding of the US in slavery and genocide to supposed resolution with the Civil Rights movement. This is to state that any of these murders might be considered individually but the aggregation paints a clear picture of systematic racial repression."
It takes some awareness of history, and some sensitivity, to know that what we're seeing in Ferguson is part of a very old pattern. Dred Scott, the former slave whose name is attached to one of the most infamous Supreme Court decisions in history, is buried just a few miles away from Ferguson.
In that 1857 decision, Chief Justice Roger Taney declared African Americans "beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."
Astrologically, the scenario in Ferguson is set before the backdrop of the Uranus-Pluto square. This is the astrology that defines our time in history, in a way similar to how the Saturn-Pluto opposition of 2001 and 2002 defined the 9/11 era. Pluto is a small planet that works on a large scale.
In his 2006 book Cosmos and Psyche, historian Richard Tarnas (author of The Passion of the Western Mind) documents the Uranus-Pluto cycle as a time of revolt and revolution, with stops at many infamous eras in history. The last big stop was the conjunction of 1965-1966. What we think of as The Sixties was a reflection of, or a product of, the Uranus-Pluto conjunction in Virgo, an aspect that had a ripple effect back to the 1950s and well into the 1970s; that's how these aspects work.
Now nearly 50 years later we're at the square, the equivalent of the first quarter phase, which is exact between 2012 and 2015. We saw the first manifestations of this with Arab Spring, the Wisconsin labor protests and the Occupy movement, all of which took place in 2011. The Occupy movement was snuffed out, Wisconsin was crushed and Arab Spring did not turn out so well.
Since then it's been pretty quiet, though people have had plenty to protest. In fact, I would describe the past few years as having an eerie calm, given the astrology. The longer it's gone on, the weirder it's seemed to me. By silence I don't mean the world—the world seems to be spinning off its axis right now.
It's the human response to all this mayhem and injustice that I've been listening for. Each time an incident would increase the pressure on individuals and on society, I kept waiting for the echo, the response or the point of release, and again and again, there was nothing. Then Ferguson happened.
When I cast the chart for Michael Brown's death, I thought I would see the Uranus-Pluto square come up front and center—mainly due to the aftermath. Instead, the aspect is in the background of the chart, hidden away, as if lurking behind the scenes. I took that to be an illustration of the tension behind the protests and riots.
This showed up as Uranus in Aries in the 12th house, illustrating restlessness, a sense of revolt and revolution behind the veil of perception (the 12th represents that veil into the unseen). Close to Uranus is Eris, a goddess the Romans called Discordia. There is a kind of militancy with this pattern, and coming from the 12th, a lot of pressure.
All that pressure seemed to vent into the 4th house—the home base. I read that as Sun and Mercury closely trine Uranus. A trine opens up an energy flow, and all that energy seemed to be pouring into 4th house. The chart seemed to illustrate a vast, far-reaching problem so large as to be invisible.
Then one day there was an effect; a manifestation, a flashpoint, in one location most people had never heard of; that location could be anywhere.
The chart described many other themes behind the scenes. There are several houses in the chart that show the background of the question, and all of them had activity in this chart. For example, Pluto in the 9th house describes a titanic spiritual crisis, and a struggle to evolve. The Capricorn Moon in the 9th describes the looming presence of authority, both in reality and as an emotional construct. The Moon was about to change signs and make an opposition to the Sun; Brown was killed right before the Full Moon.
There was one other noteworthy placement—Pholus in the 8th house. The 8th in a death chart is important because it describes how the person died, and the circumstances surrounding the death. Pholus is a centaur planet, similar in some ways to Chiron. But rather than the slow burn of Chiron, Phlous describes the runaway reaction. We see the illustration of a cop shooting an unarmed person six times as part of what has gone out of control, followed by out of control riots.
Then a reader pointed out that I had reversed AM and PM on the incident chart. Brown was actually killed a few minutes past noon on August 9, not a few minutes past midnight. AM/PM errors are common in astrology, and they happen to every astrologer at least once in their career, usually a good few times.
When I pondered how I could possibly make such an error, it occurred to me that one would never expect a cop to gun down an unarmed person at high noon. That seems like more the thing that happens at night.
I remember copying the time from my data source, and I am a pretty good transcriber—I never want to commit publicly to the interpretation of the wrong chart. In this case, we were talking about the same basic aspect patterns. What was rearranged by the error was what houses the planets and aspects appeared in.
As errors go, this one was interesting and potentially useful for a few reasons. One is that it describes the 12 hours leading up to the incident. It was not a random time; if astrology is useful for prediction, one should be able to see the event coming 12 hours in advance, in that exact locale.
Another is that reversing the meridian, that is, switching AM and PM, can reveal the shadow chart. It's a technique in natal astrology for getting underneath a confounding chart (it's also used sometimes for reading for identical twins, but I don't like this method).
The midnight chart certainly has the feeling of a psychological study of what has been driving the protests. The noon chart is a lot simpler. It describes the police state in stark terms. In some ways it's more the chart you would expect to see; for example, the Leo group shows up not on the bottom of the chart in the 4th house (home, security) but on top of the chart in the 10th house—the house of government. The chart describes a raw display of power and bravado.
At noon, Pisces is on the 6th house cusp. The 6th is the house that rules the military. The traditional ruler of Pisces is Jupiter, which we find as the most elevated planet in the chart (in the 10th), boldly asserting its authority in Leo. The Sun is up there, as is Mercury. We are being shown, and told, who the boss is.
It's noteworthy that in addition to a discussion of the police shooting men of color, we are having one of the only national discussions that I recall about how since the 9/11 incident the police have been transformed into a paramilitary force. Ferguson is a town of 22,000, a small place. Even much smaller towns have tank-like vehicles and SWAT teams with armored soldiers equipped with automatic weapons and chemical weapons.
Isn't it interesting that 9/11 was supposed to be about a foreign enemy of freedom, yet American citizens were expected to give back much of their freedom as a result of that incident? We extolled cops as heroes, and now we're dealing with what would under other circumstances be viewed as a serial murder.
James Madison was already onto this one in 1787. At the Constitutional Convention, he said: "A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home."
I think that the standing military force in our towns is a serious problem, though I think a bigger problem is the presumption that a police officer's shield is a license to kill. It is not.
We pay to train police officers, and one of the things we train them in is the proper use of force. Generally, that means exerting minimal necessary force in order to bring a suspect in with the least possible fuss or injury. In the words of the Department of Justice guidelines, "Police officers should use only the amount of force necessary to control an incident, effect an arrest, or protect themselves or others from harm or death."
We seem to be adopting the principle that if a police officer feels threatened, then it's OK to shoot first and deal with the aftermath later. We know that those feelings are not always accurate, since so many unarmed people are killed. If we are to believe the NRA, the only solution to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. So then why exactly are so many people without guns getting killed? Maybe there are too many guns, including in the hands of the police.
We live in angry, frustrated times. People feel powerless, and I think that perception is correct. There is a lot brewing behind the scenes of Ferguson. There is a lot being revealed. The midnight chart and the noon chart of Michael Brown's death tell different sides of the same story.