What if three years ago I had predicted that a swath of Asia would be wiped out by an earthquake and tsunami, with more than 229,866 lost or missing and countless lives disrupted? What if I predicted that a paltry $7 billion in humanitarian aid would be donated? Then this would be followed eight months later by two hurricanes that would flood much of the American Southeast, including New Orleans, damage from which would still not be repaired two years later.
Included in that prediction could have been that the occupation of Iraq would go into an endless downward spiral of death and violence, with no sign of the occupied nation stabilizing. In response to this, Bush’s approval rating would sink to the 30-percent range and the American public would finally dump the Republican House of Representatives and Senate. Yet the new Democrat-controlled Congress would soon after write a blank military spending check to the Administration, proving that they are Republicrats after all.
I did not predict these things (the closest I came was to say that we would probably have a lot of serious dam breaks starting in the summer of 2005). But they would have been reasonable forecasts, given the astrology. This includes the once-per-35-year opposition of Saturn and Neptune, which made its third and final pass on June 25. Personally, I try to avoid predictions of catastrophe, preferring to give the human family the time and space to make up its mind about what it wants to do with its brief moment on the planet. I view all astrology as an opportunity for change, and I am open to being pleasantly surprised by the possibilities for difficult aspects that are not necessarily considered by predictive astrologers, who typically display little ingenuity.
Saturn opposite Neptune is one of the more difficult aspects that comes along, and there were many predictions of disaster. It involves Neptune, whose energy is dreamy, watery, foggy, delusional, creative, and idealistic, being opposed by Saturn, whose energy is typically experienced as structured, solid, heavy, and often as a limit or a boundary. Basically, it is a solid, realistic thing and a big pool of water and imagination meeting face to face, with our world in between. If you want to visualize this, imagine it like the Full Moon, with the Sun to one side and the Moon to the other (an opposition), only replace the Sun and Moon with two vastly larger planets. In an earlier Planet Waves article, I described this as “the unbearable tension of water.”
An opposition is the peak of a cycle, or maximum polarity between two planets. It is a culmination, though this is not often logically expressed by history in a way that relates to the beginning of the cycle, the conjunction. The most recent conjunction of Saturn and Neptune occurred in 1989. It was actually an extremely rare triple conjunction between Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune (since at the time there was a rare conjunction between the latter two planets, which were then joined by Saturn).
Saturn and Neptune together in a conjunction (or any other aspect related to 90 degrees, such as a square) can come with a feeling of structures dissolving and there being no solid ground to stand on. Uranus is a planet whose energy is most often described as revolutionary, electricity in the form of lightening, and forward-thinking in the style of Prometheus. So we had a kind of splash-bang-shock-crumble era in history back then. In the immediate aftershocks of that conjunction, the world witnessed, with all due astonishment, the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall. But it also marked the rise of capitalism in Eastern Europe and China, the kind of freedom that is not about free people but really about so-called “free markets” and, moreover, gloriously free multinational companies.
This revolution has now come to full maturity. As I am writing this, an e-mail just came from a reader, describing how China has taken over nearly all vitamin production in the US market as well as that of many other drugs. This is merely an example of our moment in history, and related to the pet-food contamination of several months ago, because the same thing can happen with vitamins. The article begins:
“SHIJIAZHUANG, China—If you pop a vitamin C tablet in your mouth, it’s a good bet it came from China. Indeed, many of the world’s vitamins are now made in China. In less than a decade, China has captured 90 percent of the US market for vitamin C, driving almost everyone else out of business.”
