There is an awareness growing among Americans that the times we are living through now are similar to the 1760s, the years leading up to the American Revolution. The astrological marker for this growing awareness is Pluto’s position at 25-26 Sagittarius. That’s where Pluto is now in 2006, and where it was 246 years ago. Pluto’s orbit around the Sun averages 248 of our years. This puts it conjunct the Galactic Center of the Milky Way, in a separating opposition to the US Mars and an applying opposition to the US Venus.
”In 1760, the conservatives in North America were those who were loyal to the hereditary aristocracy of the British Crown. By the 1780s, as the Constitution was being written, the royalists had left the country for Canada or the UK and the remaining conservatives had shifted their advocacy of aristocracy from one based on genetics to one based on wealth.” (“Challenging Abramoff’s ‘Artificial Aristocracy’” by Thom Hartman, CommonDreams.org.)
Thom Hartman points out that Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Tom Paine and other liberal Founders opposed aristocracy based on birth or wealth. They believed “that if the largest portion of the people were given the largest portion of the power of governance, then they would correct errors they themselves made, and correct them quickly because of the impact they’d have on themselves...(to support their contention) they quoted Locke, Rousseau, and the experience of the Iroquois Confederacy.”
Conservative Founders like Adams argued for an aristocracy based on wealth. They believed that the vast majority, being poor, were thus also stupid and composed an uncouth mob that, if given the reins of governance, would cause national catastrophe.
Since the Revolutionary War, this democratic-autocratic argument has seesawed back and forth. The Adams conservatives prevailed at first, decreeing that governance would be protected from “the rabble” by an electoral college empowered to choose the president; the Senate would be appointed by state politicians; only the House of Representatives would be directly elected. Excluded from voting were all women, all African Americans, all Indians, and all white men without property. Jefferson’s phrase, “We, the People,” was interpreted by Adams to mean his own wealthy kind only.
Eventually, white men without property got to vote but it wasn’t till the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913 that senators were directly elected, and it wasn’t till 1920 that white women were allowed to vote. Blacks and Indians weren’t accorded full legal civil rights till the 1960s.
But by 2000, rich conservatives had again tipped the seesaw and the likes of Jack Abramoff were acting as middlemen, brokering deals between the wealthy few and the people’s elected representatives. Political office had again become for the rich only, those who could afford to hire public relations experts to manipulate public opinion through TV commercials. Many people had grown to distrust the election process because of gerrymandering, record-less voting machines, corporate-owned news media, and a variety of other methods used to prevent true democracy.
And so by 2006, the USA is morphing from a democracy into a third world country of extremes: the rich few and the struggling or impoverished many. It is the society spawned by Adams, Hamilton and other conservative Founders, who replaced aristocracy by inheritance with aristocracy by wealth – most of which is obtained by inheritance.
Now, the feeling among many is that something has gone terribly wrong. Congress, the Administration and even the judiciary are corrupt, and cannot or will not rid themselves of corruption. Although what the US now has is called democracy, it clearly is not government of, for and by the people. Polling indicates the public wants more attention to public schools, health care, infrastructure and economic fairness; the “people’s representatives” persist in spending billions on wars, cronyism, “pork projects” and outsourcing capital and/or dumping bundles of $100 bills onto the streets of Baghdad.
Meanwhile, ironically, the ideals of the USA’s liberal Founders have caught on around the world like the all-time hottest hit song ever. And the most recent election in Ecuador was cleaner, according to international observers, than the most recent in the USA.
But you won’t learn the facts about these other democracies from the US news media. It has been taken over by the same believers in an aristocracy of the rich that now controls government. And the propaganda put out by the media has Bush and company bringing “democracy and prosperity” by bombs and invasion. Their public relations campaign is so crafty, even dirt-poor farmers in Kansas vote for the people who grind them deeper into poverty.
And so we have come full circle back to the social atmosphere of the 1760s, the years leading up to the Revolutionary War that created this nation. Pluto has completed one circling of the Sun during these 246 years, arriving back at 25 Sagittarius, opposite a point between the US Mars and Venus. The rich are again plundering the American people, this time by taking wealth created by American workers and investing it overseas to obtain cheap labor, and by importing cheap labor from south of the border to replace American-born workers.
It is the outermost planets that are most indicative of major social, economic and governmental changes. In the 1700s, the French and Indian Was of the 1750s occurred during a Uranus-Pluto square from Pisces to Sagittarius, which resembles the Uranus-Pluto square due to begin to take effect in 2008 and last till 2018. The F&W War was prelude to the American Revolution 20 years later.
During the revolutionary years, Saturn was square Pluto, conjunct Neptune and opposite Uranus, in a series of aspects that occurred between the 1770 and 1780s. Upcoming, Saturn opposes Neptune 2006-2007, Saturn opposes Uranus 2008-2010, and then Saturn forms a T square opposition Uranus and square Pluto 2009-2010. These aspects will be climaxed by an extraordinarily long Uranus-Pluto square from 2008 to 2018.
In the 1700s, the virulence of the F&W War led into the Revolutionary War, which was more a militia terrorist movement capped off by help from the French military. What many people are feeling today, I think, is an approaching series of events much like the 1700s but in reverse sequence: the Uranus-Pluto square will climax rather than instigate whatever major social, economic and governmental changes manifest during the coming 15 or so years.
Comparing the upcoming aspects of the outermost planes to the 1920s and 1930s, and then the 1960s into the early 1970s is indicative too.
In 1920 a stock market crash occurred during a Saturn-Uranus opposition. Then a stock market bubble grew during the rest of the 1920s under a Saturn-Uranus square, which was extant when the markets crashed in 1929 as a Saturn-Pluto opposition also took hold. The worst years of this great depression occurred under a T-square formed by Saturn, Uranus and Pluto. When combined with the US natal chart, this created a grand cross pattern with the US natal Sun-Saturn square.
One can read these transits of the outermost planets alone in a series of world charts, or one can read them as a transit-to-natal series, noting where they hit the USA’s natal planets in a chart for July 4, 1776. I find the latter method works best. For instance, during the 1920s, Europe was suffering the after-effects of World War I while the US economy was booming. This contrast can be read by using transit-to-natal charts for European countries and the US. This reading reveals that the great depression of the 1930s did not hit the US till the outermost planets formed adverse aspects to two key points in the US nativity: the Sun-Saturn square and the Mars-Neptune square.
Now it is the US economy which is said to be the “engine of the world economy,” so transit-to-natal readings will, I think, give us a better read concerning what is likely to manifest during the coming decade and a half. Of course astrology does not enable us to predict particular events. But reviewing the past history of, for instance, the Uranus-Pluto square – when it has “afflicted” the US Sun-Saturn square or Mars-Neptune square – enables us to guesstimate what is likely going forward.
This transit-to-natal approach brings us to The Sixties, when last Saturn, Uranus and Pluto hit the natal Mars-Neptune square. The Sixties was dominated by a conjunction of Uranus and Pluto in Virgo, conjunct the US Neptune, and for the most dynamic of this decade, those planets opposite Saturn in Pisces.
My read, in brief, is that financial markets will be crashed or crashing by November 2008 when Saturn conjuncts the US Neptune and Uranus opposes, with both square the US Mars in Gemini, simultaneously being opposed by Pluto in late Sagittarius, forming a grand cross to the US Mars-Neptune square. Then, by 2015 when a grand cross to the US Sun-Saturn is formed by Uranus in Aries square Pluto in Capricorn, the US economy will be into its fifth great depression since 1776. On the way to the bottom of this coming great depression, in 2012 Saturn square Neptune will form a T-square with the US Uranus.
One of the lessons of astrological-economic history is that no single hard aspect formed by the outermost planets, alone, will bring down the economy. Rather, it’s when combinations of hard aspects are formed by Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto to those key points in the US nativity that hard economic times have manifested.
During The Sixties, Saturn, Uranus, Pluto and the US Mars-Neptune square were involved.
During the 1930s great depression, Saturn, Uranus, Pluto and the US Sun-Saturn square were involved.
Based on the sequencing of the hard aspects to be formed by the outermost planets in the coming years, first hitting the US Mars-Neptune and then the US Sun-Saturn, what appears likely is this:
A deterioration of financial markets by 2008, followed by a great depression and possibly another revolution during the 2000-teens.
This prediction omits the expected buildup of natural catastrophes and is based not on world chart readings alone, but rather on combining world charts with the natal chart of the USA, and then reviewing history to find what similar planetary and economic cyclical patterns brought in the past.
The history of Saturn-Uranus oppositions and Uranus-Pluto squares, without combining these with any national natal chart, show that major turning points in the evolution of human affairs are reached during these periods. It’s when these cycles are combined with a nation’s natal chart that historic specifics emerge.
Thus, the feeling among many Americans today that we are going through a period much like the years leading up to the American Revolution of the 1770s is one manifestation of this buildup of hard aspects. President Bush is being accused of behaving now like King George then. Now, as then, large corporations backed by government are creating social distress and economic imbalance. Now, as then, the official news is upbeat and rosy while an underground media (broadsides then, the Internet now) tell a very different story.
One major difference is this: now, unlike then, there is an abundant harvest of books about how to prosper in the coming hard times. This message is directed to affluent individuals, and does not take into consideration the overall economic context within which such individuals will be thriving…or floundering. History suggests the affluent do not thrive in a sea of social turmoil.
One factor is different today: the expected buildup of natural catastrophes. And that may save us from our more mendacious talents. Next to making war on each other, what we humans do second best is come to each other’s rescue in times of natural catastrophe. How ironic is that! Should we pray, or do mass creative visualization, for the next Katrina to devastate downtown Washington, DC?