Uranus in Aries

Mania and depression in the financial markets

Earlier in December I wrote about the stock market roller coaster of the past year, and since then it’s gotten even crazier, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average careening from 23,693 on December 19th to a low of 21,721 on December 26th, and zooming up over 1000 points yesterday, the biggest single increase in history.

I lay the blame for this erratic volatility partly on the last gasp of Uranus, planet of disruption, traveling through the fiery sign of Aries for the last time through the end of February.

Meanwhile Jupiter (the planet most closely associated with the stock market) and Mercury (thoughts and ideas) are both in the highly optimistic sign of Sagittarius, so even when the markets drop investors are seeing this as an opportunity to “buy the dip” rather than a depression.  But with Saturn and Pluto both in the highly realistic sign of Capricorn, this optimism is not likely to be permanent.  With Uranus colliding with fast moving Mars in mid-February we are likely to have continued volatility for the next couple of months.  Then when Uranus moves back into the security-minded sign of Taurus in early March and Venus enters dour Capricorn along with Saturn and Pluto, I believe that we will see a pretty serious pullback of financial markets.

I am not a financial advisor, but I do believe that caution is the name of the game here.  With such a predominance of earthy energy in 2019, and Jupiter’s entry into Capricorn along with Venus’s return in December, solid investments rather than media darlings are going to be the survivors if financial markets begin to collapse.

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By |2018-12-27T09:16:26-05:00December 27th, 2018|Money and markets|6 Comments
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Uranus square the lunar nodes: Change is inevitable, progress is optional

Over the past week, and throughout November, the planet Uranus and the lunar nodes will be locked in a square (90 degree) formation.  The nodes of the Moon are points where the journey of the Moon through the sky crosses the path of the Sun, and these points are associated with the soul’s journey from past to future.

I view the outer planets as transformational forces which inspire us, activating something in the personality in order to create change where change is necessary.  Uranus is the planet of change itself – under the influence of Uranus we tend to become restless with anything in our lives that feels stuck, and sometimes we find ourselves faced with shocking events that serve to knock us from our comfort zone.

Our lives are built on patterns of expectation.  We expect that we will wake up in the morning, and that we will follow our normal routines during the day.  Uranus tends to break apart those expectations, at best helping us to see our lives through new eyes.  At its most difficult, Uranus can bring about a drastic change that forces a change in perspective.

Planetary cycles occur on several planes at once.  The alignment of the planets in the sky (which I write about in my Planetary Illuminations newsletter) affect everyone on the planet on a macro level.  When these alignments interact with the planets in our own natal chart, they stimulate change or evolution on a much more personal level.  There are other layers of planetary influence as well: to our relationships, to our communities and countries, to our evolving selves.

The current square between Uranus and the lunar nodes could bring about surprising events in our lives that shake us […]

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By |2018-11-05T08:02:27-05:00November 4th, 2018|Planetary cycles|7 Comments
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In praise of hierarchy: A tale of the Uranus/Pluto square

In case you missed it, ever since Pluto entered Capricorn in 2008, followed by Uranus entering Aries in 2010, these two planets were locked in a challenging aspect that inspired and motivated the change that we have seen between 2010 and 2017.  (You can catch up here if this is all new to you.)

I always find it interesting when the zeitgeist (defined: the defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time) reflects for the mainstream thinker the planetary cycles that astrologers have been talking about and explaining in the context of planetary cycles.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal by economist Niall Ferguson (may be behind a paywall) tells a part of the story of this planetary cycle:

Established, traditional order [Capricorn]  is under assault [Pluto] from freewheeling [Aries], networked disrupters [Uranus] as never before. But society craves centralized leadership ([Capricorn], too. …

Networks rule not only in the realm of business. In politics, too, party establishments and their machines have been displaced by crowdfunded campaigns and viral messaging. Money, once a monopoly of the state, is being challenged by Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which require no central banks to manage them, only consensus algorithms.

But is all this wise? In all the excitement of the age of hyper-connection, have we perhaps forgotten why hierarchies came into existence in the first place? Do we perhaps overestimate what can be achieved by ungoverned networks—and underestimate the perils of a world without any legitimate hierarchical structure?

The answer is, of course going from one extreme (rigid hierarchical societal structures) to another (chaos and anarchy) is not a great idea.  Nature and human nature both tend to swing from one […]

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By |2018-01-07T18:45:55-05:00January 7th, 2018|Future Shock, Life|2 Comments
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Sunday inspiration: Longing to Belong

Art by Monica Stewart Art by Monica Stewart

Venus is in Cancer right now, enhancing our longing to belong to a tribe, a family of souls that connect us to the earth.  This longing for connection conflicts over the next day or two with Uranus in Aries – the individualist, the loner.  This conflict between our need for individual space and our need to belong is central to the human condition and creator of much of our personal and political conflicts. 

To inspire healing on this day where our desire to belong is conflicting with our need to separate, I offer this beautiful writing from the late John O’Donohoe. 

 

Our world desperately needs to come in from the lost islands of desiccated individualism and learn to stand again on the fecund earth where vibrant and vital interaction can happen between people.

Our world is facing so many crises ecologically, economically, and spiritually. These cannot be overcome by isolated individuals. We need to come together. There is incredible power in a community of people who are together because they care, and who are motivated by the ideals of compassion and creativity.

When such a community develops and maintains its own vision, it will not fall into the trap of being prisoners of reaction and beginning to resemble more and more the opposition. It will not deconstruct in the introverted power games, but maintain its care and critical focus.

When such a prophetic community is nourished by prayer and animated by Divine Longing, the harvest of creativity and belonging which it can bring is unlimited.

Excerpt from Eternal Echoes. 

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By |2016-07-15T15:36:58-04:00July 10th, 2016|Inspiration|2 Comments
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Pluto opposes the US Sun and a mass shooting every day

Cartoon from PiedType

One of the things I have used this blog for is to profile the psychology of criminals from an astrological viewpoint.  In the past there were one or two mass shootings in a year that warranted an attempt to try to understand what goes on in the human  mind to inspire such horrific behavior.  In 2015, with more mass shootings than days, this task has become impossible.

Back in June when a screwed up teenager shot up a church in Charleston I wrote “The real tragedy is that these events are becoming so commonplace that there is barely time to profile so many criminals and murderers, and at this point it becomes evident that the illness is not just in the individual, but also in the society that feeds the illness of the individual and causes it to erupt into the collective conscious experience.”

Also from that article,

Between 2000 and 2006 there were 6.4 mass shootings a year.  Between 2007 and 2013 that number jumped to 16.4 mass shootings a year.  Mother Jones magazine has posted a comprehensive list of mass shootings in the US and you can see that in the 1980s there were one or two mass killings a year.  Shootings began to increase in the 1990s to two to three a year, and then we see a drastic increase to five in 1999, the year of the Columbine shootings.  During this time transiting Pluto was crossing the ascendant of the astrological chart for the United States and doing its job of bringing out the darkness of the collective unconscious.

read more here…

Back in March 2014 transiting Pluto, the planet of destruction and regeneration,  began to form […]

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By |2022-06-21T07