We’re about to experience a spring season like no other. In the Northern Hemisphere, spring begins when the Sun’s rays square the equator, just past noon in the Eastern US zone on March 20. This is also the time when the Sun enters the sign Aries and the new astronomical year begins. Aries is a cardinal sign, which means it begins a season and arrives with strength, determination, and initiative.
Think of all the energy rising out of the ground: seeds bursting into bloom, trees creating tens of thousands of new leaves to harvest the newly available rays of the Sun, animals birthing, and even people taking a moment to feel alive. Yet in addition to the usual fire surge of spring, this particular season contains a planetary event that takes this energy to a cosmic scale. On June 8 there is a second equinox, where two of the largest and also most influential planets align exactly in the first degree of Aries. Think of that degree as a kind of amplifier that makes an astrological event impossible to miss, called the Aries Point.
The planets involved are Jupiter (wisdom, expansion, culture, pleasure, exotic) and Uranus (spontaneous, disruptive, revolution, ingenious, forward-thinking). They meet up every 14 years, in a different sign (the last time was Aquarius, in February 1997).
Though any moment of astrology is unique in the world, it’s possible to make some comparisons to past events. If you’re old enough to remember 1969, you’ve felt something like this. The conjunction happened that year, in very early Libra—precisely opposite of where it happens in the spring of 2010.
While 250,000 people marched on Washington to protest the Vietnam War, another 100,000 demonstrated simultaneously in San Francisco. We witnessed the Moon landing in July—the first time that humans touched the surface of another planet. By some miracle, this was followed weeks later by the Woodstock festival in August, which was like life on Earth turning into life on another planet.
The year was not all jubilance. Nixon became president. The Manson murders happened that summer. The Beatles broke up. Yet every event had a quality of being personally significant, affecting many people. These were not abstract news items; they were palpable experiences that we cared about, and that came crashing into our living rooms. They have all left many visual impressions in our minds. It was a mythic time in history, larger than life, yet also in the flow of life.
There are odd little details from 1969. The Boeing 747 and Concorde made their first flights. A lot of nasty information came out about Vietnam, including the fact of an illegal war in Laos (Cambodia was the next year). Sen. Ted Kennedy drove his car off of Dyke Bridge, killing a former campaign worker. All of this happened in a few short seasons; most of it focused on the summer.
To understand a confluence of events that significant, it helps to look to astrology. There’s unlikely to be an explanation in conventional history or sociology, or not one that’s spiritually satisfying. Astrology is a matter of what time it is, and both the planets and world events help us see that. By 1969, it was time for people to get together; it was time for awareness of global issues to amount to something.
In Libra style, there were three massive peace gatherings—the two antiwar protests and the historic pro-peace protest we think of as Woodstock. I have always considered Woodstock one of the most moving, poignant statements by the public against Vietnam; it’s always seemed like the best protest ever. I thought I would ask Michael Lang, the creator of the festival, if he agreed.
“The war was definitely at the center,” Lang said in a March 11 e-mail. “Everyone’s thinking was focused on stopping the war.”
What’s different about the astrology of ’10 as compared to ’69 is that the setup is a mirror image. Where a conjunction occurs tells you something about how it’s going to feel, and how many people it will affect. In 1969, the conjunction took place in Libra, a sign that’s mellow on the exterior but with a lot of mojo coming out from deep inside. The themes of Libra include art, balance, beauty, and relationship.
In 2010, the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction takes place in the more impetuous sign Aries, a fire sign and the first sign of the zodiac. Aries tends to be self-centered and lacks the balance of Libra. It comes with a raw, unrefined, and fiery quality. The two conjunctions have one thing in common, which is that they appear in the very early degrees of what are called cardinal signs—the signs that start the seasons.
That puts them in aspect to something called the Aries Point. When you think of the Aries Point, the summer of 1969 is a great example of the energy. Even though two enormous planets were opposite the Aries Point that summer, it worked just fine to stir up the full effect of that degree: What I describe as the personal is political.
The conjunction of 2010, which takes place in early June, will have a different flavor, a different feeling tone. Aries not only lacks any sense of balance; it’s the opposite of balance: Aries is a surge of energy. By definition it is self-centered rather than other-centered. The energy is emotional (fiery, Aries) rather than mental (airy, Libra).
By 1969, the peak of sixties astrology had already passed—the extremely rare Uranus-Pluto conjunction of 1965-66. Currently we are approaching the next peak of that cycle, which is the essence of 2012—the Uranus-Pluto square. The energy of this square is now building; it hasn’t happened yet, but we are starting to feel the vibes. We have quite a few surprises in store, and they begin right about now.
In some ways this spring looks like an antisixties moment rather than any kind of replay of the sixties. The outspoken activists of our day are conservatives. There is kind of a contra-hippie movement known as the Teabaggers. Their name pertains to antitax protests (the original Boston Tea Party of yore), but (in perfect antisixties spirit) also refers to a sexual act that few of them seem to have heard of.
Though they claim to be in favor of individual rights most of them are against a woman’s rights, and sex education, and the rights of gay people. So it’s an “individual rights for us, not for you” movement. Most Teabaggers are against government spending but in favor of war; that leaves the relatively small portion of the budget spent on actual social programs to cut.
There is lots of subtle, festering anger, yet little in the way of expression and no corresponding spirit of celebration. In fact, though it’s taken me about 15 years to figure it out, there seems to be a perpetual retreat among many who have something to offer or share. It seems dangerous or foolish to care too much. There’s lots of talk about coming out and doing something together—then it seems like a big deal to have a drum circle.
Injustice after injustice happens, and not only is there not a pushback, you barely hear a peep. In Utah, Gov. Gary Herbert on March 8 signed a law that makes it a crime for a woman or a girl to have a miscarriage. The law reads: “A woman is not guilty of criminal homicide of her own unborn child if the death of her unborn child...is not caused by an intentional or knowing act of the woman.” Sorting out that convoluted language, if a pregnant woman falls down the stairs and loses her child, she can be put on trial for criminal homicide. The way the law is written sounds like she’s guilty until whatever happened is determined to have happened unintentionally.
I’m just wondering why the only place I’ve heard about this is from my news-scouring editorial assistant. This issue is not registering in public awareness. In another era, women would have been in the streets protesting. Now it’s high fashion to say, “That’s too bad, but what can I do about it?”—that is, if you’ve even heard about it.
Many people who identify as liberal have set up so many strict rules for themselves that it would he comical to describe them as liberated. Many seem terrified to so much as talk about sex. Spirituality imposes as many dictates as the pope, as does the mandate of having the perfect image. These conceptual structures, which to me feel like keeping oneself in a cage, are going to come under a lot of stress when this conjunction happens. It absolutely bursts with human potential—with the “I am” energy of Aries.
Human potential and self-awareness are something we could do with a lot more of. I keep hearing people ask when everyone is going to wake up; this aspect looks a lot like an awakening. I would be more optimistic if I heard people ask about when they are going to wake up.
I have a few concerns about this conjunction. Aries is a militant sign, and we live in an era when militants get most of the attention. It’s ruled by Mars, the ancient god of war. In the sixties, activists would put flowers into guns. Here in the antisixties, “activists” carry guns. The modern equivalent of the back to the land movement is: Start a militia.
This conjunction has a lot of Mars to it, and we’ve just come through a long, challenging Mars retrograde that covered the entire winter through March 10. This came with plenty of frustrated will and desire, still working itself out. However, over the next two months, as we approach the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, the energy shifts in the direction of expression, of self-awareness, and of some new kind of liberation, particularly for our era.
Here is the issue I’m having, if it’s not clear yet. It seems like the people who feel the most comfortable speaking up and claiming their space are the ones who would hold others down. My concern is that this conjunction is going to embolden them more than it’s going to speak to the people who wish they could stand up, express themselves, and be free for its own sake. I understand that it can feel dangerous to do this, but I’m wondering how far into the basement, the closet, or the corner we’re willing to be pushed into before we push back.
True, push doesn’t need to come to shove. It’s possible to simply be free, but I think that the fear of a confrontation, and the fear of being seen as different, is precisely what keeps many, many people locked in their house, typing on the Internet under a fake handle that can’t be traced back to them.
Here’s the silver lining. Clearly, we need more group consciousness in our culture; we’ve done just about everything we can do alone, from going bowling to imaginary sex to a DVD exercise program. Anything significant that we need to do as a society will take the combined efforts of many. Most of the really fun things we want to do, we do with others.
Yet groups are groups of individuals. A collection of people who are not individuals is a mass and not a group. A mass has completely different dynamics, such as the sum total of everyone who drinks Diet Pepsi, or the mentality of a mob.
A conjunction this strong in the first degree of Aries has individuality written all over it. The thing about this kind of individuality is that it calls on us to really be who we are, to say what we believe, and express the energy and potential we contain. That, in turn, is an invitation to grow and change in obvious, expressive ways—in ways we might be seen and noticed. As of today, that is supposedly as scary as it gets.
Let’s see about tomorrow.
