I walked into Dominick’s Cafe in Uptown Kingston to buy some newspapers on Saturday, April 20, and owner Dominick Vanacore asked me: “What the heck just happened in Boston?”
That’s the question, isn’t it. And it’s a good one.
The fairytale version goes like this: Terrifying, mysterious bombers attacked the crowd at a great athletic event. The nation spared no expense, used its best technology and figured out who might have done the terrible deed, then sent its bravest fighters in to catch them. Everyone helped with this effort. One suspect was killed; the other took flight, was hunted down, and caught.
Then all the people of the kingdom came out in the streets and cheered the brave warriors who had saved the day, joyful that they were now safe again.
Alternate versions go like this: It was a vast overreaction by public officials; or it was a planned event designed to insure the budgets of federal agencies against sequestration; or it was an event designed to destabilize society in some way, complete with a martial law drill/mass psychology experiment conducted in the virgin target of Boston.
I heard about the bombing of the Boston Marathon shortly after it happened on a flight from Portland, Oregon to Chicago. Fortunately, it was a flight with WiFi. However, the first thing I did before reading any of the news reports was to cast the chart. In doing forensic astrology, I prefer to see the chart before I know the facts, then make some observations and perhaps come up with a theory. Then I study the facts to either dismiss or support my hunches.
What I noticed first about the chart was that Neptune is looming on the western horizon. Also called the 7th house or descendant (opposite the ascendant, which is to the east), that angle of a chart gives a picture of the environment and describes one’s relationship to one’s environment. Neptune’s themes cover illusions, delusions, denial and deception. Neptune also includes inspiration, a talent for fantasy, music and photography and in a natal chart, it can point to one’s taste for drink and drugs.
Neptune in the 7th is a warning to be especially discerning. My sense was that everything we were about to be told would be wrong or made up. Moments after seeing the chart, I posted to Planet Waves: “Nothing says ‘don’t trust the story’ like Neptune on the 7th. It’s like looking into a fog, and you need special vision to see through it.”
So began a week of misreported facts, conflicting versions of the story, photos circulating around the Internet featuring scenes that could have come out movie studios, plus all the usual stories of selfless heroism, love of country and determination to go on. The bombing happened not just at the Boston Marathon but also on a day venerated in Boston—Patriot’s Day, commemorating the start of the American Revolution in 1775.
It was a perfectly strange week in every other way. Just 48 hours after the 200 people were hurt in a domestic bombing incident, the Senate voted down a series of measures designed to keep assault rifles out of the hands of known felons and terrorists.
Letters laced with the poison ricin were allegedly sent to the president and a senator, and a suspect was arrested. There was a massive explosion in a fertilizer plant in West, Texas, close to the anniversary of another fertilizer explosion in 1947 that killed nearly 600 people. There were many, many other horrid anniversaries in American history the week of the bombing.
Then on Thursday, April 18, the FBI released photos of its proposed suspects, beginning one of the strangest days in modern American history—the 7-Eleven robbery that may or may not have been part of the scenario, the security guard shot for no special reason, the carjacking and the midnight firefight that allegedly killed Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26. These developments are what we’re told turned Watertown, MA into war zone.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, after casually going to school the day after the bombing, allegedly went on the run. Boston metro area was put under martial law; Harvard, Brandeis, Boston University, MIT, and other campuses were shut down. We witnessed the most impressive show of force aimed at a civilian population on domestic soil ever, as the new Homeland Security militarized police apparatus was rolled out before our eyes, with its robots and X-ray vision. A terrifying door-to-door search ensued. I have a friend in Watertown who was horrified as eight “heavily armed men” searched her condo without a warrant or any actual reason, as she and her kids watched.
The suspect was then discovered outside the police perimeter thanks to a neighbor who noticed blood on the white tarp covering their boat, looked inside and thought he saw a dead body. The reason that didn’t happen sooner? Everyone had been ordered indoors.
That person, we’re told, was Dzhokhar, who was bleeding so badly he was barely alive. He had, by some miracle, allegedly engaged hundreds of military police in a prolonged firefight—and there’s no reference to his even having been found with a gun or enough ammo to fight an army.
Through the week, many rumors surfaced. Working with my collaborators, I debunked various conspiracy theories and attempted to assemble valid facts. The FEMA event in town that day turned out to be a previously scheduled class at Harvard. The athletic coach running in the marathon who heard an announcement that “this is a drill” was the only person who described that; a second witness would have made his account more plausible. The Boston Globe tweet allegedly predicting the incident was published an hour after the fact, not in advance, and referred to something else.
Yet as we went through the reported details, no part of the story came out intact. It was like adding a list of numbers from the bottom and the top getting different results every time.
All of these major crime scenes have an element of chaos, and there are always unresolved issues, but it’s not usually like this.
Then we learned that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older brother, was the subject of an international terrorism inquiry in 2011. The Russian government asked the FBI to look into him, investigated and interviewed him, and said it had no reason to suspect him of anything. This is at best bad police work and at worst a cover story.
What is true and what is not? Neptune indeed.
The chart for the Boston Marathon bombing has several plot lines that unfold simultaneously. Charts often have that attribute, and it’s necessary to sort out the significators as carefully as possible—that is, to have a clear sense what planet represents whom, or what.
This chart has Virgo rising, and right in the exact degree rising was a newly discovered planet called Orcus. Essentially the twin of Pluto, located in the same region of space, Orcus was named for an early European prototype from the Hades/Pluto cycle of myths. He’s an underworld god, and he has a famous namesake in modern literature—J. R. R. Tolkien named his monstrous, smelly orcs after Orcus.
Orcus in the ascendant is an image of the troll under the bridge; the lurking factor of which we must be very afraid. Virgo rising suggests something meticulously planned by intelligent people. The bombs went off less than 15 seconds apart, and they performed as designed.
When Virgo is rising, the next place to look is the planet that rules Virgo—Mercury, and that turned out to be an influential planet as the event unfolded. Mercury in a world chart like this can represent a person, and it can represent an idea or a message—whatever message comes out of the incident, whatever is taken by the public.
Mercury was newly in Aries, after months in Pisces. In the bombing chart it was on the Aries Point, indicating the intersection of something deeply personal with something widely collective. And it was about to make a conjunction to Uranus in Aries—and pass through the Uranus-Pluto square that defines what I call the 2012 era—approximately 2011-2016, with a few years on either side as a warm-up and cool-down.
Early on, I also saw Mercury as representing a young person. My take is that Mercury represents Dzhokhar, the younger brother, in the capacity of one who seems to have been haplessly drawn into this plot. As of press time, he was being kept alive—and we’re being told he may never speak.
Mercury, as ruler of the Virgo ascendant, also represents the issue itself, and the inquiry into it. Planets can get two or three meanings.
In a terrorism plot, there’s also the matter of a secret enemy—the behind-the-scenes perpetrator. We find information that in the sign and planet that rule the 12th house. Leo is on the 12th house cusp—and that says to look at the Sun (the ruler of Leo). This character in the story is dramatic and important-seeming. The Aries Sun is about to make a conjunction to Mars, which has the image of dying violently.
I believe this represents Tamerlan, the older brother. We don’t know his actual involvement in this, and the chart portrays him more as a victim, that is, as a scapegoat, than as a perpetrator. Now he’s dead in the style of Lee Harvey Oswald, and we won’t ever hear from him.
There’s one last plot line to cover. The 7th house, where Neptune is looming, is also the house of open enemies (as contrasted with secret ones). We know that Neptune is sitting there in Pisces, warning us that nothing in the official version of events may be true. Pisces also has a traditional ruler—Jupiter.
Where is it, and what story does it tell? Jupiter is in Gemini, and also the 10th house of government. It’s in a strange condition—called intercepted, which means that Gemini has no house cusp running through it (this doesn’t happen in every chart, and it can happen anywhere when it does). Intercepted Gemini is like a house hidden within the 10th house, which you can think of as the inner sanctum of government, the intelligence establishment or black operations of some kind.
I will leave that angle alone for now. In closing I will say this. If you’re thinking that two bombs justified the house arrest of more than a million people, please think more slowly. These ideas would best be phrased as questions rather than as statements. Was that governmental response justified? What was the emotional cost, and the price we paid in our freedom?
Many people who lived through having their homes searched are emotionally traumatized. They may never think of the concept of “home” the same way again. Our social contract in the US is clear. “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.” Was the response we witnessed reasonable, in the moral and legal sense of the word? We need to have a long conversation with our neighbors about this.
We also need a national conversation. What we witnessed in Boston, from the improvised explosive devices to the firefights in urban areas to the door-to-door searches, are what the American government has been experiencing, or doing, in Afghanistan and Iraq for more than 10 years. The war literally came home to Boston and its suburbs. We don’t like bombs going off in our public places and I hope we don’t like armored vehicles, SWAT teams in our homes and high-powered rifles going off in the streets.
It’s time to ask when we’re going to stop doing this to other countries. It’s also time for “nonpolitical” people to raise questions about the conduct of our leaders, both at home and abroad. It’s time to learn how to not feel like an asshole for actually caring—and for being willing to speak up, including when it’s considered socially inappropriate. Which is usually.
This article appears in May 2013.
