You Don’t Really Believe in Astrology, Do You?

Epigraph

“Philosophy is written in this grand book – the universe – which stands continuously open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it was written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures. Without these one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.”

Galileo Galilei, Opere II Saggiatore p.171

Dedication

To all my inspiring teachers and tutors of astrology through the years, and particularly Noel Tyl; you have given me so much

Acknowledgements

Many kind permissions have been given for references in this book; from Michael Harding, Nicholas Campion, Raymond Merriman, John Martineau, Dr Joe Dispenza, James Russell, The Mountain Astrologer Magazine, Astrolabe Inc, Roy Gillett, and The Random House Group.

Special thanks to my dear friend Nick, for his endless patience, support and help in the birthing of this book.

Introduction

“Life is too short to be little.”

Benjamin Disraeli

Welcome. Maybe you picked this book up because you know very little about astrology, or you have some knowledge but want to know more. Or maybe you are a student of astrology already. This book is for you all, and I believe it will enrich your understanding.

Astrology is still the one of the most misunderstood alternative subjects. It is hard for me to reconcile the deep awe I so often felt in the oak panelled lecture rooms at Jesus College Oxford each summer as we studied charts and as I became aware of the profundity and scale of astrology, with the glib dinner party remark, “You don’t really believe in astrology, do you?” This is a nonsensical question to me. It’s like saying, “You don’t really believe in French, do you?” Astrology is a language, it is not at all a psychic skill. It is a deep, rich, mathematical, precise, symbolic language that has to be mastered. I don’t hear voices or see visions when I am working on a chart; it would be really handy if I did but sadly I don’t. I can feel the same process happening in my brain whether I’m translating French or astrology. It is a language.

So there seems to be a Grand Canyon of misunderstanding about the subject. Some of the greatest minds in human history, as we shall see, were astrologers. Astrology held a prestigious position through history in academic and high ecclesiastical circles up until the 17th Century, but in our modern world its general perception has been reduced to simplistic Sun-sign astrology and “all Geminis will have a great day”. I hope this book goes some way to bridging that gap.

The beginning of my interest in astrology began almost four decades ago. After university I emigrated to Canada and happened to join a yoga class. One of the attendees there, I discovered, was an astrologer. I asked if he would do my birthchart for me and gave him my first name, date, time and place of birth. That’s all he knew. I went to have the consultation a week later and sat for several hours with him, stunned, as he explained the deeper meaning of my childhood experiences, my relationships with my parents, dates of important incidents (accurate to the month), my work life, my love life, my talents, my challenges – everything was there. How could he know all this about me more deeply than I knew it myself? He emphasised that astrology was a sacred language, not anything that required psychic ability, but I felt that this language allowed him to read my soul.

That afternoon, as I sat with him in his small flat in Toronto, I had been given a tiny chink of light into a vast universe of interconnectedness and possibility. That was the beginning of a journey that will never end.

I began my lifelong study of astrology that very week but sadly mislaid his recording of our session together during a house move. It was five years later that I found it, when I was leaving my flat to return to England, and played it while I was packing boxes. It said, “September 4, 1979, will be a major turning point, and by October 30 you will experience one of the major highs of your life”. Well, that day was September 4, 1979, and I was leaving Canada forever to return to England. However, I’d also planned a big trip to India and Nepal and, spookily enough, on October 30 1979 I was sitting at 19,000 feet in the Himalayas.

Please come with me on this journey to appreciate the depth and enormity of the language of astrology and how, if we understand it, we can see that it touches every aspect of our lives, and serves to reconnect us with the universe.

Notes to the Reader

I’ve written this book to help interested people like you to have a better understanding of a much-misunderstood subject and share the many practical benefits with you. It is absolutely not my intention to teach astrology in this book. There are many excellent books and organisations that do this and I’ve listed these at the back. The archetypal meanings of the planets are set out here, as are the meanings of the main astrological areas of the birthchart. There are others but I didn’t want to dazzle you. If you don’t want to read these now, that’s fine, you can come back to them as a reference if you need to. I hope to have given enough explanation to make the narrative comprehensible and have often given additional explanation in brackets for those readers with some astrological knowledge.

Don’t worry if you don’t understand the technicalities, it doesn’t matter as far as the benefit of this book is concerned. You’ll still understand the many things that astrology can offer.

Astrology is a demanding subject and takes many years to learn, so I’ve tried to keep all the examples very simple. The historical chapter is incredibly important as our foundation of understanding, but I’ve kept this concise as readers, I suspect, will be more interested in getting to the heart of what astrology can offer.

Throughout the book, consistent with all western astrology, I am using the tropical zodiac. Astrology refers to the Sun and the Moon as planets, although of course strictly they are luminaries. Astrology is geocentric, it operates from the Earth being the centre, so throughout the book we will be referring to the ‘Sun going around the Earth’, as this indicates the Sun’s apparent motion, just as we observe the Sun appearing to rise in the morning and set in the evening from the perspective of the Earth.

Also, although Pluto has officially been demoted from planet status, it makes no difference to how its archetype manifests.

One of the fundamental pillars of astrology is that the planets each have archetypal associations. So what are archetypes? They have been described as the deepest patterns of psychic functioning which make us who we are, and define how we see ourselves and the world.

‘Archetype’ is also a word used in psychology that describes the rich symbolic associations of something – in this case the planets. They form a key underpinning of Carl Gustav Jung’s psychology, and indeed of our lives. Jung has described them as patterns of emotional and mental behaviour but emphasised that they represent urges towards those behaviours. In astrology too, they represent drives or desires to express the planetary archetype.

As will become evident from the chart below, each planetary archetype is very different. They each have profound mythical connections and are a coherent collection of symbolic associations. The rich planetary archetypes have been built up over many hundreds, and in some cases, thousands of years. They are multi-faceted and multi-dimensional, like diamonds with many faces.

For instance, one level of meaning with planetary archetypes is always emotional. Saturn for example is associated with frustration, a sense of delay, fear, contraction, and feeling blocked by circumstances or authority figures. Eventually these feelings mellow into patience, maturity, responsibility, and a feeling of being ‘old before one’s time’. It has other associations, because of its archetypal meanings of structure and boundaries, with teeth, bones, fences and walls, lead, the father figure, ageing and time. Its meaning is to work hard and play by the rules and then we will reap our reward.

Conversely, Uranus emotionally is associated with an upsurge of energy, rebellion, restlessness, creativity, originality, wanting freedom and greater self-expression. It is the maverick who demands to be heard and won’t play by the rules. The urge is to assert one’s individuality and sense of truth. It has other associations of a superconscious perception and insight; it has technical, electrical, scientific and computer links, also telecommunications. As it is an erratic, volatile, eruptive energy, we see the manifestation of this archetype when we have volcanoes, earthquakes, electrical cut-outs or cyber-attacks.

The Saturnian and Uranian archetypes are thus very different. Below is a table outlining each of the planetary archetypes.

Planetary Archetypes

In addition to these, we also include Chiron. Chiron is not a planet but an asteroid that was discovered in 1977. Archetypally, it is known as the ‘wounded healer’, and describes where we feel wounded or vulnerable; so it can be connected to physical illness, but also a feeling of being out of the group, psychologically wounded, betrayed, or having a sense of injustice. In myth, Chiron sustained a wound that wouldn’t heal, but he was able to help others; hence he became a healer, a herbalist, an astrologer, and a mentor. Chiron represents the ‘mystic bridge’, the ability to move to a higher level of being, and transform our perspective. It’s about seeing the gift in the wound.

All of the above meanings are not exhaustive but sufficient for our purposes.

Planetary Aspects

Conjunction 0º (normally an ‘orb’ of 8º either way)

Square 90º

Opposition180º

Although there are others, these are the main ones we will refer to in the book.

Astrological houses are areas of life where planets in your birthchart may fall, and meanings here are not exhaustive but sufficient for understanding the content.

For those readers who may not have seen an astrological chart before, this is a typical example:

Astrological Houses

I would like to strongly emphasise that in no way do I wish to suggest that the planets ‘cause’ anything, or are doing anything ‘to us’ in a physical sense. I do not believe this at all. We are not victims of planetary cycles. Astrologers can sometimes abbreviate language that may suggest this, and if my language has slipped in the course of this book, that is not my intention. My views on how astrology may operate will unfold throughout this book. I sincerely hope that you enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it.

Birthchart

Astrological Calculations by Solar Fire software, Astrolabe Inc (www.alabe.com)

1

From the Dawn of Civilization

“Astrology has its beginning in a remote sense of some great cosmic unity.”

Goethe

Astrology is one of the oldest studies known to man. It began almost 6,000 years ago in our earliest known civilization, ancient Mesopotamia, which is now modern day Iraq. Man was living very open to the skies and was fascinated by the movements of the planets. We know this, as the first evidence of early cultures noting these can be seen as notches on animal bones, marking the lunar phases. It is easy to imagine these people observing the heavens, watching for signs to better understand their world; the earliest records of astrological knowledge come from the ancient Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians in the distant past.

There was a natural assumption of universal order, as evident in the repeating cycles of the Sun and Moon and the seasons. The world was seen as a living whole. These ancient peoples saw an understanding of the repeating cycles in the heavens as important not only for crop growing, but also for spiritual development. They believed that gods and goddesses resided in the planets whose movements were signs or instructions from these deities. Hence there was a god of horticulture, a god of irrigation, a god of war, and so on. The temple priests, known as ‘baru-priests’, were the academics investigating the study. The Chaldeans, who were the most ancient Babylonian astrologers, held the same status as the Egyptian priests.

Between 3,000 BC and 2,000 BC, astrology continued to be developed and indeed was the impetus for astronomy, mythology and arithmetic. It was important to measure and understand the planetary movements, as astrology was seen as the key to understanding the universe. It was here that the concept of ‘as above, so below’ was born: that planetary movements may have correlation with human events on Earth, and astrology was the way to find order amongst the apparent chaos of life’s events – something that has not changed through to today. Astrology was seen at this time as of benefit to the monarch and the state; the first birthchart for an individual did not appear until 409 BC in Babylonia.

So astrology in these early times was very much a spiritual study, under the domain of the priests, who advised their monarchs on the astrology of the day. In ancient Egypt, from around 2,000 BC, astrology was used as part of Egyptian funeral rites, as the Chaldeans had reputedly taught the subject to the priests of the Pharaohs; astrological knowledge was part of their religion. It was seen as having spiritual benefit, something echoed by the Ancient Greeks, particularly Plato, who felt that studying astrology could bring one closer to God by understanding Hisdivine Will.

Astrology appears everywhere in these early cultures, and what is remarkable is that many of the meanings which were attributed to the planets (or gods) thousands of years ago are identical to those which modern astrology still uses today, some of which have been verified by statistical research, as we shall see, but also by the practice of many millions of chart consultations since that time. We do not know how these meanings originated, but they were also completely entwined with mythology that passed down through the ages. Mars, for instance, was seen as aggressive, assertive, energetic, and the ‘god of war’; Jupiter was seen as ‘jovial’, Saturn as authoritative and disciplinarian, Venus was connected to love, while Mercury was connected to the intellect and deemed to be the messenger of the gods. We know from historical records that astrologers were aware of planets as distant as Saturn. Astrologers thought of the planets as ‘wanderers’, and they believed it was this wandering that brought changes of fate to the country. Uranus of course was only discovered many centuries later in 1781, followed by Neptune in 1846 and Pluto in 1930.

Around 2000 BC, on the other side of the world, the Mayan culture also became very sophisticated mathematically and astronomically. The Mayans often built observatories on top of their pyramids. They were obsessed by time, and accurately charted eclipses and Venus’ orbit. In England man went to Herculean efforts, with earthworks dated as early as 3,000 BC, to build Stonehenge that enabled people to better predict the 18-year eclipse cycle. It is astonishing how accurate their measurements were without the benefits of modern equipment. These ancient cultures clearly felt it was of great importance to be aware of these celestial events, and the ceremonies that accompanied them must have helped a sense of participation indivine reality.

Not only was astrology seen as a spiritual subject in these early times, but from over 5,000 years ago evidence has been found that the ancient Egyptians used plants and herbs which they believed corresponded to planets and signs. This was the beginning of astrology being integrated with medicine, which continued down through the ages. For instance, the Stoics who lived around 250 BC were not only scholars and philosophers, but they used astrology in their work as physicians. They were highly regarded as outstanding thinkers of their time. They emphasised the understanding of one’s destiny as a way of coming into harmony with the cosmos and divine will, and were very influential amongst the intellectual classes.

The Ancient Greeks in general from around 500 BC made a major contribution to astrology, and it was the philosophers such as Plato and Pythagoras who had great impact on the subject’s development. Astrology was viewed as a learned and scientific subject, and this period in history saw important advances in its philosophy and measurement. Ptolemy was a skilled astronomer and astrologer, and wrote one of the earliest astrology textbooks, ‘Almagest’. This remained the definitive astrological text, along with ‘Tetrabiblos’, its sister compendium, down to the time of Copernicus and Galileo. Ptolemy also identified the mathematical aspects between planets that were the most important, and remarkably these are those still used in astrology today.

Hipparchus was another outstanding astronomer and astrologer of his day. In the 2nd century BC he is credited with the discovery of the ‘precession of the equinoxes’, a slippage in the Earth’s orientation to a slightly different point in space each year, although this takes very detailed astronomical observations over many years1. He is said to have calculated this to within 4 seconds of arc of the correct position, which without calculators and computers is certainly impressive.

Archimedes, who was born in 287 BC, is believed to have designed the ‘Antikythera Mechanism’, a system of interlocking geared wheels that was a planetarium, and essentially the world’s first computer. This was discovered by chance by divers on a wrecked ship in Greek waters in October 1900, but it was only in the last few years that a team comprised of mathematicians, astronomers, engineers, physicists, historians, and Greek specialists eventually decoded how this worked. The Antikythera Mechanism perfectly represents the cosmos as theAncient Greeks knew it, including the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. It not only correctly measures all the orbits of those planets, but also the variable motion of the Moon, which they had accurately observed. The Ancient Greeks were obsessed by the movements of the Moon, and saw eclipses as bad omens; with this mechanism Archimedes had not only accurately measured the 18.6 year Saros eclipse cycle, but could precisely predict eclipses, both solar and lunar, not just to the day, but to the hour. This indicates how vital the measurements of planetary motions were to the Ancient Greeks, because of the importance of their meaning for the country and the King. This astronomical sophistication over 2,000 years ago is truly remarkable.

Greek astrology then started to spread across other countries with Alexander the Great’s invasion of Mesopotamia in 331 BC. He also conquered Asia up to the borders of northern India, so Greek methods in astrology began to infiltrate Syria, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Central Asia, Egypt and even the coasts of France and Spain. In the last century BC it also spread to Rome, where the concept of official court astrologers to the Roman Emperors became established. Early evidence of astrology has also been found in China, Japan, and North American Indian and Mexican cultures; it not only spread across these national borders, but also became integrated with many religions: Catholic, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Islam and Jewish.

The Greeks as we have seen had done much to improve astronomical measurement, and therefore astrological accuracy. Their knowledge spread via the Byzantine Empire to the Islamic world, and was developed further when a school of astronomy and astrology was set up in Baghdad in 777 AD. Muslim Spain, particularly around Toledo, Seville and Cordova, provided rich centres of learning, teaching astrology as part of medicine. It continued to be seen as a scholarly and scientific subject, partly because Arab medical texts had to be translated into Latin, and as we have seen medicine had strong astrological influences. There were astrological correspondences, originally invented by Hippocrates, with the organs in the body, and the four humours (phlegm, blood, yellow bile, and black bile). He also reportedly stated that: “A physician without a thorough knowledge of astrology has no right to call himself a physician.” Galileo (1564-1642) taught astrology for many years as part of the medical curriculum at the University of Padua, Italy.2 Indeed, in the Middle Ages, physicians would always practise medicine with a good understanding of astrology. It would have been unthinkable not to.

Nicholas Culpepper was a good example of this as late as the 17th century. He studied at Cambridge and understood Latin and Greek that enabled him to translate ancient medical texts. This knowledge was integrated into his work as a physician and herbalist. He treated people by understanding the astrological influence on their disease, and then countered their condition by using certain herbs that had the opposite astrological effect. He became very well known working in the poorer areas of London; ‘Culpepper’s herbs’ are still well known today. The top medical practitioners at the time saw astrologically-based cures as restoring the patient to a state of balance with the cosmos. Culpepper said: “Only astrologers are fit to study medicine, and a medical man without astrology is like a lamp without oil.”3 Even Robert Boyle in the late 17th century, who is considered one of the founders of modern chemistry, accepted and worked with astrological principles.

In this way, astrology was an integral part of everyday European thought, be it religious, scientific or medical. Throughout history it had been seen as a spiritual, learned, and scientific subject. If you were an educated person, you would commonly study as part of the curriculum philosophy, mathematics, theology and astrology, and there was a general assumption through these subjects that the universe was a single living organism.

Astrology from earliest times had been a fundamental part of religion. This had been a thread all the way from the Babylonian baru-priests. Certainly from the 8th century in Europe it was encouraged not only by monarchs but also by bishops and clerics, and astrological symbolism appears in many of our European Gothic cathedrals. In the 12th century Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, regarded astrology as the highest intellectual discipline and spiritually second only to divine worship.4 It was taught in monasteries and ecclesiastical colleges and universities across Europe, such as Oxford and the Sorbonne, up to as late as the 17th century.

During the Middle Ages, ‘astrologer-priests’ would advise the monarchs. For instance Johannes Campanus (died 1297) was a mathematician, and the chaplain and physician to Pope Urban IV. Court astrologers were employed across Europe as part of each monarch’s decision-making team, up until the 17th century. Outstanding astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler were examples of this, as they were astrologers to the Holy Roman Emperor, and Galileo had the patronage of the Medici family. Another example was Jean Baptise Morin (1583-1656), who was a doctor of medicine, student of philosophy, and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Paris; he was astrologer to the powerful Cardinal Richelieu.5 Astrologers held crucially high positions in the Great Courts of the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, and were even sent on foreign missions as diplomats and ambassadors. The Papal Court became an important astrological centre after the astrologer Luca Gaurico predicted in 1529 that Alessandro Farnese would become Pope – and Luca was rewarded with a bishopric.6

So through the Middle Ages, particularly from the 11th to the 16th centuries, astrology was a central part of spiritual, scientific, and intellectual life in Europe. It had been intertwined with myth and religion from the earliest times, and had continued to evolve as part of academic, theological, and medical learning, as well as having powerful political influence with the monarchs of the day. Elizabeth I of England was one of the last monarchs to benefit from this. She was heavily reliant on John Dee (1527-1608) as Royal Astrologer; a brilliant scholar, a Fellow of St John’s College Cambridge, a mathematician, astronomer, geographer, navigator and astrologer. He was a key part of her close counsel, and a trusted advisor.

It is strange that the common perception of astrology today is simply of newspaper column Sun-sign astrology, when some of the greatest minds in human history have been astrologers: Pythagoras, Plato, Hippocrates, Hipparchus, Ptolemy, Goethe, Emerson, Thomas Aquinas, Francis and Roger Bacon, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Brahe, Dante, Yeats, C G Jung, Krishnamurti, Gurdjieff and Ouspensky to name but a few.

Astrology as we have seen had been integrated with religion from the earliest times of the Chaldean baru-priests, and had been supported by the Catholic Church. The divide that occurred between the Church and astrology in the 16th and 17th centuries was rather a function of astronomy than astrology itself. The Earth, and therefore man, had always been thought of as the fixed centre of God’s universe, and Biblical passages were quoted to support that view. Copernicus’s heliocentric theories not only made the Sun the centre of the universe, but also meant that the Earth moved. This the Church could not tolerate, as it threatened their entire teaching of how the world worked by God’s design; the Earth according to heliocentric theory could not be the fixed centre of God’s creation. The Church banned any writings that described the Earth as moving. They felt that Copernicus was undermining the authority of God; Luther referred to him as “the upstart astrologer”, and this began a broad assault on the subject by the Church. Galileo, who shared Copernicus’s heliocentric views, was interrogated by the Inquisition and placed under house arrest.

This split from the Church was also followed by a major scientific challenge, as we shall see, and together these resulted in the demise of astrology in the 17th century.

Another very important historical thread as background to this is that up until the scientific revolution of the 17th century, man saw the universe as alive and flowing. Early man and native peoples tried to live in harmony with the living Earth, and saw everything in the world as linked to everything else. Even in western cultures through more structured religion the view was that there was a divine Creator, or God, who expressed His will and intelligence in the world. Everything had its proper place in the whole via the Great Chain of Being.7 There was a line of being from God, through Angels, to man, animals, plants and the Earth. It was a living organism.

This organic view came to an end with the arrival firstly of Descartes’ theories in the 17th century. Descartes was a French mathematician and philosopher who also loved clocks and mechanical toys. He believed in God, but saw mind and matter as entirely separate, and believed that the universe operated like a machine. He thought that everything in nature was inanimate and devoid of spirit or connection. He even wrote: “I consider the body as a machine.” There was nothing that the principles of mechanics could not explain. Mind and matter from that point were defined as separate; one had no relationship, effect or influence over the other. Descartes saw the human mind and its intelligence as king, but our connection with the universe had been destroyed with his philosophy.

Sir Isaac Newton, a brilliant mathematician and scientist, compounded this view. He too, with his development of the laws of motion and of gravity, saw the world as a clockwork, inanimate machine with fixed, predictable rules. Consciousness had no part in this worldview, as it could not be measured. His theories have enabled us to make enormous scientific advances and send a man to the Moon. However the philosophies of Descartes and Newton in their high rationality made any connection to the greater universe derisory unless it could be proven by mechanical law. Newton knew that the planets were too distant for gravity to have an effect, and therefore astrology was dismissed as ‘superstition’. Although through history astrology had been a galvanising force for astronomy and mathematics, ironically, the scientific revolution marked its fall from intellectual credibility. It could not be proved to work mechanically. Astrology was not disproved, it just fell into disrepute; and for the last 300 years or so, Newton’s view has been our view of the world: that we are separate, and live in an inanimate, clockwork universe.

However, we are now at a turning point. I believe we are about to come full circle in our understanding.

The towering thinkers mentioned above, who have helped to guide our understanding of the world through the ages, are some of the inspiration for this book. Just as flowers turn their heads to the Sun, these great minds observed the heavens and found meaning there. Using the language of astrology, now it’s our turn to do the same.

*

To summarise: since earliest times man has endeavoured to understand the meanings of planetary movements, as they were seen as the key to understanding the universe. Astrology was part of all ancient cultures, blending with mythology, and being the impetus for astronomy. It spread from ancient Mesopotamia across all of Europe, integrating with many religions. It was a scientific and spiritual subject, and was part of university, medical, and religious education down through history to the 17th century. Many of history’s great thinkers have been astrologers, and Royal Astrologers held powerful positions across Europe. The challenge from the Church in the 16th and 17th centuries came largely as a result of astronomical heliocentric theories, rather than astrology itself. There was a general assumption throughout history that the universe was a single living organism, up to the development of Newtonian mechanistic theory, when astrology fell into intellectual disrepute. The prevailing paradigm today is still a broadly Newtonian one.

2

The Birth Moment

“A child is born on and at that hour when the celestial rays are in mathematical harmony with his individual karma.”

Paramahansa Yogananda

Our birth moment defines our lifelong relationship with the universe. That’s an amazing thought. Your parental relationships, the relationship between your parents at your birth, your relationship with your siblings, your growing up, your talents, gifts and challenges and all of life’s events – births, deaths of close friends and family, promotion, redundancy, emigration – everything is there, with specific dates already encoded in the seed moment of your birth. All of your greatness and uniqueness is in your birthchart, waiting to be unfolded over time. It is not that we have to invent our uniqueness; it is already latent in the birthchart. We don’t have to go out and ‘create’ who we are, we simply have to allow it to ‘unfold’ from its archetypal pattern, which is different from anyone else’s. Just as a packet of flower seeds contain all the information they need to turn into pansies or poppies, in the same way, so do our birthcharts; just add freewill and our lives start to be lived out here on Earth.

It’s also amazing to think that the planetary pattern in your birthchart will never be repeated again, as the planets continue to move around at different speeds in their orbits. So your birthchart, and you, are completely unique. However before we get into the detail of the chart, let’s start with the ‘axes’ or ‘angles’ that give us the framework (these terms will be used interchangeably). These are determined by the birth time, and indeed move on very quickly – approximately 1° every 4 minutes on the clock.

Ascendant and Midheaven

As the Earth spins on its axis, a new degree of the ecliptic will rise roughly every 4 minutes. The horizontal axis is determined by the degree of the constellation on the horizon at the moment of birth, and will be expressed as a number of degrees of an astrological sign; for instance, 9 degrees of Capricorn. This is determined by time, not your Sun sign. The Ascendant or ‘Point of Incarnation’ on the left end of this axis acts like a filter over the entire chart. It is like a lens through which you see the world and the world sees you; it is how you project yourself to the world. So someone may have a planetary emphasis in Pisces, which can be yielding, dreamy, romantic and gentle, amongst many other things, but if this person has a Scorpio Ascendant they would also have, masking this sensitivity, a powerful focus, determination and willpower, they would drive themselves hard, and dislike weakness in themselves and others. Margaret Thatcher’s Ascendant, for instance, was in Scorpio. The Ascendant represents an important part of your personality, and is often more obvious in your personality than your Sun. It usually sets up a major life issue for you. For instance, if you have a Cancer Ascendant, as that sign is associated with mother, you are likely to have a powerful issue around your mother, and indeed motherhood, one way or the other.

The Midheaven is where the Sun would be at its highest point overhead at the moment of birth, and again is expressed as a degree of an astrological sign. It is linked to your career, and the values you aspire to. It is also the parental axis. These ‘angles’ are the most sensitive parts of the entire chart; major life changes happen when these axes are triggered by planets moving round in their orbits. Before beginning detailed work on any chart, I always go back through a client’s life and ask a list of questions about past events, such as: “Did a parent or grandparent die in March 1964? Was a sibling born in February 1965, who wasn’t well? Did you emigrate in July 1968? Did you get a big promotion in February 1971? Was your first big love in October 1979, and did you get married in March 1981? Did you have a child in August 1990? Did you divorce in January 2001?” The questions are around black and white issues of birth, death, emigration, etc. so they are impossible to ‘fudge’. They require yes and no answers and specific dates. Depending upon the age of the client I would normally ask 20 to 30 questions of this nature. If the birth time is inaccurate, those events will have occurred but not on those dates – they will all be earlier or later than the quoted dates. Then the birth time can be accurately determined and the individual’s life events will work like clockwork, timed precisely with planetary movements to those angles.

Please note, at this stage all I am looking at are planetary triggers to two lines on a piece of paper, the axes. I’m not considering the planets and all the finer detail within the chart – we look at that once we know the angles, or axes, are correct, as they act as the framework or clockface of the chart. Without accurate angles you can’t give accurate information. That’s why, however insignificant it seems, the birth time is so important.

One of the largest single pieces of statistical evidence to support astrology that we have comes from the work of Michel Gauquelin. He was a French statistician who was born in Paris in 1928, and studied Psychology and Statistics at the Sorbonne. His work highlights the importance of the angles.

Gauquelin was not a convinced astrologer and, indeed, had previously refuted various astrological claims. He was determined to prove whether there was anything truly ‘scientific’ in the subject and his methods were rigorous. He researched only accurate birth data from France, Belgium, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, where birth data is recorded. He then looked at various professions to see if any astrological pattern emerged and he only looked at those who were eminent in their work.

For instance, with sportsmen, he only researched those who were considered ‘champions’, those who excelled in their sport, some of whom had represented their countries. He only included outstanding scientists, including doctors and those who had had papers published in scientific journals. As a statistician, he necessarily used large samples, so his research findings would be robust. For instance, his sample size for sportsmen was 1,485 and for scientists 3,305. The larger the sample size the more definite the result.

What he found was fascinating in terms of the importance of the angles. He discovered with sportsmen that the planet Mars (in myth, god of war) appeared much more often than average at the Ascendant or the Midheaven in their birthchart. The diagram shows the distribution of Mars in their birthcharts, across the total sample; there is a clear clustering around the Ascendant and Midheaven. The chance of this occurring to such a degree is less than 1 in 5 million.8

Mars position for sports champions 9

The Ascendant is associated with how you project yourself to the world, and the Midheaven is related to your high point of achievement. Mars astrologically has associations of assertion, physicality, athleticism, competitiveness, needing to be the winner, stamina, ability to go it alone, high achieving, and so on; so these characteristics would be obvious in sports people.

For scientists, the planet that appeared to a disproportionate extent on these angles is Saturn.

Saturn position for scientists 10

So the emphases at the Ascendant and Midheaven in the diagram represent where Saturn appeared across the sample of scientists’ birthcharts. The chance of this emphasis occurring was less than 1 in 100,000.11Like Mars, the pattern is very pronounced. Astrologically, Saturn has associations of objectivity, logic, thoroughness, scientific method, mathematical ability, organisation, patience; qualities one would expect in a scientist. Gauquelin also found other correlations. For actors, the planet appearing disproportionately on these angles was Jupiter, with connections of joviality and expansion, and for writers it was the Moon.

Gauquelin’s data is highly statistically reliable. Many other scientific sceptics have tried to disprove his studies, which were published first in 1955 in “L’Influence des Astres” (The Influence of the Stars), and then in 1960 in “Les Hommes et les Astres” (Men and the Stars). He has received the full support of the eminent Professor Hans Eysenck of the University of London, who stated, “The Gauquelin work stands up to a careful degree of scrutiny.”

What is remarkable is the power that planets have when they appear on these angles. Remember, these angles are moving on at approximately 1º every four minutes; the clockface of the chart is continually turning. Therefore there is only a narrow window of time in each day when, for instance, Mars would appear on those angles – or rather the angles would move onto where Mars was in its orbit – before moving on. The athletic ability comes to the fore then. Gauquelin also researched individuals who did not have Mars on these angles and found them characteristically ‘non-assertive’. What’s amazing about that is they could well have been born on the same day and in the same geography, only an hour or two later, but then Mars has dropped back to a weaker position. The position of Mars in the birthchart has changed its meaning in the individual’s life. Should anyone consider it pedantic to have to know the exact birth time, I would point them to Michel Gauquelin’s lifetime of statistical analysis.

The diagram below shows the pattern of Mars for non-assertive people; we can see the pattern is very different from the first diagram for sportsmen, as the emphases actually avoid the Ascendant and Midheaven axes.

Mars position for non-assertive people 12

These axes are like crosswires that anchor us between planetary movement in the heavens and our life on Earth. That is why your chart very precisely defines your lifelong relationship with the universe, timed by your birth moment.

These axes also appear to link people and generations. I have noticed it is common in a long-term relationship to share at least one axis, sometimes both, with your partner. I have also observed that when women give birth naturally, it is extremely common for the child to share at least one of the axes with their mother. The child may also share, therefore, an axis with their father. That is to say they had the same astrological signs on the vertical or horizontal axis, almost as if they had ‘chosen the moment to be born’. A sign will pass over the horizon, or overhead, within about two hours. Therefore there is quite a small window of time within each day when these axes can link up. If you share an axis with your child you may well have a similar orientation or approach to the world, particularly if the horizontal axis and Ascendant is shared.

The diagram below may help to clarify this. It shows, for this individual, an Ascendant in the sign of Libra, with the opposite end in Aries. The Midheaven is in the sign of Cancer, with the other end in Capricorn. The partner and child can commonly link with these, but firstly it can be either the vertical or horizontal axis that they share, and secondly they may even have them the other way around; so the child may have an Aries Ascendant, with Libra at the opposite end. Still we see a link, as both have that Aries-Libra emphasis.

Birthchart Axes

Gauquelin found that if a parent had a particular planet, say Mars, on an angle, the child would be more likely to have it there too if the birth was natural. If the other parent also had Mars there, the chances of the child having it were doubled. This worked for the Moon, Venus, and Mars particularly well. The odds against the chance of this occurring are 1 million to 1. These are highly significant coincidences, and Gauquelin was employing the same planetary symbolism in his work as had been used consistently for about 3,000 years, all the way back to the Babylonians.

If there was surgical intervention in the birth, the parent-child link between these axes and planets appears to be much more random. This doesn’t mean that you will have no relationship with your child as there will be many planetary links, but it is interesting to note a high correlation in these axes if nature is left to her own devices.

Circumstances around the birth are also shown in the chart. For instance if the planet Neptune is close to, or aspecting (making a specific mathematical angle to) the Ascendant or ‘Point of Incarnation’, and Neptune has associations with altered states, then commonly gas or drugs would have been used during the birth. In life, this person may appear a little vague or spacey, and may have trouble with emotional boundaries, but is often highly intuitive and spiritually-minded. Pluto has associations of life and death, survival issues, and trauma, and if it is aspecting the Ascendant, it is likely that the birth would have been very difficult and hazardous for the baby. In life these people live with great emotional intensity, as if problems are a life and death struggle, and they often challenge themselves with constant pressure. If Uranus, planet of uncertainty and instability, is aspecting the Ascendant (for astrologers, particularly if it is in the 12th house) then the pregnancy may have been quite unstable. When the birth happens, it usually happens very quickly. Uranus has the association of always speeding things up.

Let’s stay with these angles a little longer before we get to the planetary information in the birthchart. Let’s go a little deeper behind what was prompting the questions to my client earlier, when I asked about past events in her life. The dates came from noting the month and year when slower orbiting planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto) came to aspect the Ascendant axis or Midheaven axis. These have a greater effect than faster moving planets such as Mars, as they trigger the axes less frequently. My question in each case will reflect the planetary symbolism, as well as the timing. Let’s take Uranus, for example, which has a restless, eruptive energy, wants new experiences in life and is very concerned about freedom of self-expression, and assertion of individuality. When Uranus in its orbit comes to aspect the Ascendant (which it only does rarely in a lifetime as it has an 84 year orbit), it is very common for the person to want to ‘redefine self in a new context’. Therefore ‘geographic relocation’ frequently occurs, by county, by country, or even by continent. I emigrated to Canada with precisely this aspect before I knew anything about astrology.

This horizontal axis is also the relationship axis, and the other manifestation of Uranus moving to this place is often for the same reasons – one or other in the partnership wants more newness, and freedom of self-expression. Therefore the relationship break-up and the geographic move often follow one after the other.

You may have Jupiter, in its 12-year orbit, coming to your Ascendant. Jupiter is the planet associated with expansion, self-improvement, and ‘higher-mind’ study and/or travel. So this is a time when commonly you start on some major study course that may be philosophical or spiritual in nature, or university-based, but often abroad. You travel to study and learn, not just to lie on a beach.

Jupiter’s Orbit

If Saturn, with its 29½-year orbit, comes to this point, because Saturn rules the structure of the body, particularly bones and teeth, there could be some problems with these. It will also symbolise the beginning of a major new 29½-year episode in your life, when you have the chance to redefine yourself physically, mentally and emotionally.

Saturn’s Orbit

Pluto with its 248-year orbit may come to aspect your vertical parental axis. Pluto is the planet of death and rebirth, endings and beginnings. It is common at this time to lose a grandparent or a parent. Pluto is connected to the myth of Persephone, who travelled down through Hades and crossed the Styx. After a period of darkness and fear she finally emerged into the light and was ‘reborn’. Equally, the early part of this Pluto movement over your vertical axis (which can take up to two years to complete) can be associated with a lot of stress and anxiety. This axis is also the career axis, so the Pluto transit may manifest as either the loss of a parent or grandparent and/or great stress/pressure at work, followed by ‘transformation’, where you see a major life milestone in your career.

We are still at this point considering very simple planetary transits to the two axes of the chart, just two lines on a piece of paper. However, we are already obtaining quite rich and detailed information and dates about important events in this person’s life. It’s important to say here that the accuracy of the birth time is vital here. If this is for example incorrect by eight minutes, it will make approximately a two degree difference to the Ascendant. We could then have up to a three-year error in anticipation of certain events, as Pluto can take that time to move two degrees in its orbit. The symbolism will manifest, but not at the expected time, unless the birth time is exact.

Pluto’s Orbit

Let’s think about this. How can a lump of rock, let’s say Uranus, have anything to do with someone moving house – or country? Or Pluto, spinning in the far distant galaxy, have anything to do with the death of my grandmother? It seems inconceivable and that is why sceptics sometimes begin their study of astrology in order to disprove it. Yet many, many millions of charts have been studied over the centuries. It is this sheer weight of cumulative data that makes astrology’s case so convincing. To have your own chart read is highly persuasive, as generally the astrologer has no prior knowledge of your life history and psychology, but the music of the birthchart has to play. The planetary archetypes will manifest in people’s lives with the predictable timing of their orbits. It’s like an orchestra; the violins, the brass, even the triangle will be played on time. The music may be played well or badly but there is no doubt that it will play.

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To summarise: our birth moment defines our lifelong relationship with the universe. The vertical and horizontal axes of the birthchart are extremely important in defining who we are, and their influence as ‘power zones’ is confirmed by Gauquelin’s work. Sports champions have a strong likelihood of having their natal Mars in this power position, and scientists tend to have their natal Saturn. There are strong correlations with the axes of the birthchart, and, as Gauquelin found, with the planets close to them, between spouses and their children. Planets aspecting the Ascendant at birth not only describe the quality of the birth experience for the baby but also have implications for their character. Planets in their orbits aspecting these axes are associated with important times in our lives.

3

Your Unique Sheet of Music

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

Oscar Wilde

Your birthchart is completely unique to you, determined by the time, date and place of your birth. It is your individual sheet of music; but we use our freewill in how we play that music. Do we play it with two tin spoons or the London Philharmonic? Do we choose to have a small life or a big life? It really is up to us.

The reason I feel this so strongly is that, over the years, I’ve studied charts that have similarities but one person has hung back, or reacted negatively to life experiences, while the other person has grasped opportunities and approached life very positively. Our freewill appears to operate in how we react to life’s events, and it is in those reactions to life’s events that we begin to weave our instinctive patterns and develop our character. Are we weak or over-reactive? Are we steady in a crisis with much inner strength? Are we an optimistic Pollyanna? Your chart will suggest your propensities but we appear to have latitude in the way we react.

In this way, astrologers agree that just by looking at a chart you can’t determine the level at which the individual is living it. By ‘level’ I mean how positively and fully they are living their potential. Recently I studied the birthcharts of two clients who both had musical gifts. The charts had many parallels, as the individuals had been born quite close to each other in time and geography. One of the men was working as a music teacher at a local comprehensive school but felt very dissatisfied that he hadn’t achieved more with his musical ability. The other man was working as a composer and lecturer at the Royal Academy in London, and played in a major well-known orchestra that performed internationally. One could argue that this latter gentleman was living out his potential more fully, and the reason for the dissatisfaction of the first client was because he was all too aware that he wasn’t.

Another example is that of a young teenager who had a challenging Mars-Uranus aspect in his chart (Mars square Uranus). Mars in myth is ‘god of war’, and archetypally it symbolises aggression, assertion, primal energy and the desire to be the winner and the leader. Uranus is a rebellious, eruptive energy archetypally, and this combination can be very angry and potentially violent; so he may be the local gang leader, smashing up local shops and terrorising his neighbourhood. If either Mars or Uranus is associated with the parental axis, then it is likely that the cause of this behaviour traces back to the ‘cutting off’ or ‘abandonment’ (Uranus) of a parent, and we could pinpoint the date when this was likely to have occurred. However, if we had a chance to sit down with this young man and talk to him about the real meaning of this symbolism being bravery, courage, quick reactions under pressure, and leadership skills, and then put him in charge of a crew of men crossing the Atlantic in a Force 9 gale, or in the Marines, he is likely to shine as a hero.

Sometimes the birthchart includes planets that have no ‘Ptolemic’ aspects to other planets: that is, geometric aspects of 0, 60, 90, 120 or 180 degrees as defined by Ptolemy, a Greek astronomer who was born in the second century AD. Essentially these planets are not connected via these traditional aspects to the rest of the birthchart, and are then known as ‘peregrine’ planets, which means ‘pilgrim’. The real sense of this is that these parts of the person’s character feel alien, or foreign in some way. As they aren’t attached to the rest of the birthchart, they tend to operate in much purer form, and tend to dominate the individual’s behaviour. They also pull into focus the area of the birthchart with which the peregrine planet is associated. If the peregrine planet is the Sun or the Moon, then the individual will always feel not fully part of the mainstream. They don’t quite understand the world and the world doesn’t understand them. They march to the sound of a different drummer.

My Sun, Mercury and Uranus are all peregrine; it is unusual to have so many. My Sun is associated with higher-mind subjects, metaphysics, philosophy, teaching, writing, and long-distance travel. My Mercury has the general association of communication, the need to learn and acquire knowledge, and it is linked to my career. I spent 35 years in the communications business. Uranus is associated with individual self-expression and the planet most linked to astrology. In my chart it is also connected to deep spiritual matters, writing and teaching. I taught corporate management for 20 years. I would say those three peregrine planets alone have had an enormous, dominating influence on my life. Isn’t it remarkable that Ptolemy recognised the importance of these aspects two millennia ago, and they are still completely relevant to our lives today?

However, particularly when you’re young, peregrine planets can be challenging. You can feel out-of-the-loop, not quite fitting in anywhere, and you can feel very isolated. It’s hard to know why you feel so different from others; but once we understand these and know how to use them well, they can give us a tremendous sense of purpose and drive in very individual ways. We can learn to celebrate them; they can become our mark of distinction to allow us to make a unique contribution to the world, rather than be confused by them.

A birthchart is pure potential. It determines what our sheet of music is, but does not dictate how we should play it. It is up to our own freewill to choose. In this sense, it is a choice enhancer, not a choice maker. To explain this another way, it is archetypally, symbolically predictive, not ‘executionally’ predictive. Unlike psychic readings, it does not give you the end of the story, or how you will live it out. With astrology, that is up to your own consciousness and the level at which you are living. The chart will be ‘on strategy’ symbolically, always.

What the birthchart shows are the underlying feelings and archetypal urges that need to be played out, the area of life in which they will occur (health, money, work, and so on), the kind of opportunities or issues you will be likely to face, the quality of the experience, and the specific timing of these. Astrology is very good at timing as planets stay reliably in their orbits. Then the liver of the life makes his choice. We become better co-creators because we understand our greatest potential at any given moment. We can constantly ask ourselves, “What is the best I can be right now?” One might think of our lives manifesting, at every moment, like the simple diagram below:

Co-creation

An important revelation in astrology is that we are not born neutral. We are not born as a blank sheet of paper. Philosophically, we might ask why that’s the case. Already, at the moment of our birth, the chart captures the relationship between your mother and father at that time. It also shows your relationship with each of them through your growing up, how they will influence you in those early years, and your relationship with your siblings when they arrive. Even though at birth these developments have not yet occurred, nevertheless it describes the important relationships and events that will unfold over your lifetime. Interestingly, different siblings often have different experiences of the same parents, and this is reflected in their birthcharts.

If the Sun and Moon in your birthchart sit close to each other (conjunction), then your parents were probably very happy together at your birth. If they are in tense aspect (e.g. 90º or 180º), they would probably have been not getting on so well. If there is anger around in the early home life (the position of Mars will indicate this), you may be super-aware of any hostility or attack in adult life, and may have already developed the skill, as a child, of the peacemaker. Astrology is a very useful tool to understand your developmental dynamics.

These early childhood experiences and our reaction to them sets up our “neural network” in our brain that can form our script into adulthood13 (see Dr Joe Dispenza’s ground-breaking work at www.drjoedispenza.com); but it is underpinned by your chart, from the birth moment.

If the childhood experience has been challenging, this may set up a repeating pattern of self-destructive behaviour, which is unconscious. Astrology is the study of repeating planetary archetypal cycles, and in any good consultation, the astrologer should track through how Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto cycles are manifesting in each client’s life, in order to help make these cycles more consciously and fully lived.

Below is a diagram to help those of you unfamiliar with astrology, to give a basic idea of what we are talking about with planetary orbits and cycles. As the planets move around in their orbits, all at different speeds, they will all at various times form different geometric angles with the planets and axes within the birthchart. These geometric angles have certain meanings. Also, planets moving in their orbits are referred to in astrology as ‘transits’, and this is the term we shall be using throughout.

Planetary Transits

Let’s take an example. A client had been abandoned at the age of four by her mother who left the family home. The potential for this was shown in the chart (Uranus square Moon, ruler of the parental 10th. This aspect became exact at the age of four). In the consultation, we tracked through all major Uranus transits that were making geometric aspects to her birthchart through her life. Uranus is the planet associated with rejection, abandonment, sudden cutting off. At every Uranus transit, friends, boyfriends and partners had abandoned her, with precise timing as the transits ‘struck’ the clockface of the birthchart, like the chimes of a grandfather clock. When Uranus aspected her career area twice, she was suddenly fired at those different points in her life. During our session, there was a dawning awareness by my client of how destructively she had lived out this negative expression of Uranus. The dates were all exact. Finally, we came to the most recent transit of Uranus in her birthchart, which had come to conjunct the ‘point of marriage’. That again suggested a savage rejection or abandonment by her husband, given how my client had lived out all previous Uranus transits. He had died – but not of anything she considered a natural cause. He had drunk himself to death, and my client considered that he had ‘chosen’ to do this. (For astrologers: transiting Neptune, associated with alcohol and addictions, was also aspecting the 7th house cusp.) So his death was the ultimate rejection, in her eyes.

I remember sitting in silence for some minutes in that consultation, and feeling the awareness crashing through my client’s consciousness of how destructively she had been living out those repeating Uranus transits, since the age of four. It was very clear. C.G. Jung said that what we are unconscious of meets us from the outside as fate. How different her life experience may have been if she had become aware much earlier of how negatively she was living out this cycle. Astrology makes us consciously aware of ‘patterning’, how repeating planetary cycles have correlated with archetypal repeating experiences. It is only through awareness of this that we can use our freewill to change our reactions, and change our lives. This client, in projecting abandonment and rejection, received those in increasingly dramatic ways with each Uranus transit.

With this new awareness, we understand that Uranus has a very positive expression; it is about freedom, individual self-expression, creativity, originality and breaking up old patterns to bring in the new. If we then know that we have a major Uranus transit coming up, we can consciously plan to use this very positively and opportunities will naturally present themselves.

So astrology gives us insight and helps us live more deeply from this understanding. It helps us live from the inside out, not the outside in, being buffeted by random events. In making conscious what is unconscious it shows that life originates from us, and that we can choose. That is very empowering. C.G. Jung said, “It’s not what happens to us in life, it’s how we react to what happens to us that determines character”, and, one might add, destiny.

You also enter life with gifts. Do you have musical, mathematical, or athletic ability? What should your career be? One of the wonderfully practical things about astrology is that it shows you the particular combination of skills that you have to bundle together to feel fully satisfied in your work, but also to make your best contribution to the world. For instance, one 18-year old client came to me asking where she should focus in her career. The chart suggested that she had excellent communication skills (Mercury in Gemini, square Midheaven), that she needed to dig deep in her work, maybe in a research capacity (Pluto aspecting Midheaven), that she had a strong social conscience (Aquarius Ascendant and Stellium in Aquarius), and that she needed to work in an environment of famous people (Pluto oriental). I asked if she had thought of becoming a researcher with the BBC, eventually specialising in documentaries that uncover corruption and inequality in society.

“That’s it, that’s it” she said, and almost danced out. Several years on now, that’s exactly what she is doing. I wish more people could get such completely tailored advice as this at a young age. Practically, I would love to see astrology offered in schools for career guidance. The birthchart will show not only what kind of work is the most fulfilling for you but also how you like to work and where. Self-employed or in a big corporation? At home? Dealing with the public or behind the scenes? Networking? Working for the government or in higher education? In fact, just looking at the position of your natal Moon alone, where it sits in your birthchart, will give much information about this. This is even without taking into consideration which sign it is in, or any other detail. The Moon represents your dominant reigning need in your personality. It must be satisfied for you to feel happy, and it has much influence on how you like to work, and even what kind of work you are drawn to.

For instance, if it is in the first house (the first slice of the pie moving down from the Ascendant), this is a do-it-your-own-way Moon. It doesn’t like interference, and often this alone can take you out of the mainstream; this Moon position demands recognition. Certain highly individualistic female celebrities have their Moon here. If the Moon is in your second house, it will be important for you to be in front of the public, and that your work can be seen as a personal contribution which is open to evaluation. If in the third house, you will tend to be a natural communicator, teacher, salesperson; if in the fourth you will feel very comfortable working from home. The fifth house gives creativity and flair, and often a wish to work with children. The sixth is considered a workaholic position; if in the seventh, you will feel comfortable working in a partnership or with your spouse. In the eighth, you may work as a consultant dealing with other people’s money, or in a very different sense, be involved in alternative healing. In the ninth, you may be very academic, with interests in philosophy. There is also a strong draw to live abroad. In the tenth, you need to be a leader, and be in charge at work. If in the eleventh, there is talent at networking. In the twelfth, you need to work behind the scenes; these people prefer to work out of the public gaze. There is much more that could be said about all of these, but we are simply obtaining these insights from the position of the Moon which changes rapidly as the clockface of the birthchart rotates through the day when you were born.

Your birthchart will also suggest the kind of growing up you had. Were you loved and nurtured? Did one parent die when you were young, or abandon you? These experiences may have many ramifications for your psychology and perhaps feelings of self-worth. The time that the death or abandonment by the parent occurred will be highlighted.

Everything that happens in your life is already in your birthchart. It shows us, if you like, the picture on the front of the seed packet, but described in an archetypal way. Are we meant to be a poppy, a rose or a chrysanthemum? All the information is there. What you are meant to become is already ‘enfolded’ into your birthchart, ready to ‘unfold’ or manifest in us over time. This is described by Aristotle as “entelechy”. This means that contained within an organism there is a plan of action, or blueprint already embedded. We see this in nature everywhere. It’s what turns acorns into oak trees and caterpillars into butterflies. It’s an organising force that arranges the blueprint to unfold to achieve its unique expression. Its urge is to manifest, to emerge, and it carries within it purposeful development.

It’s so much easier for us to effortlessly fulfil that higher vision of ourselves if we can see our true essence, rather than striving towards something we can’t, so knowing your birthchart can shortcut so much soul-searching of; “who am I?” There’s a wonderful story about an old parish priest called David, who was on his deathbed, speaking to his friend who was with him. “When I get to Heaven,” said the priest, “they will not ask: ‘why were you not Jesus?’ They will ask ‘why were you not David? Why did you not become what only you could become?’”

A client who comes to mind to illustrate this was three days old when we had the consultation, sitting on his father’s knee. This young baby had a powerful chart; there was a lot of outgoing, physical energy, ‘primal fire’ (Ascendant and stellium in Aries), bringing with it potential natural leadership, the pioneer, the adventurer, with entrepreneurial ability. He would be likely to have strong willpower (Mars in Scorpio), and have soaring idealism that may ultimately have an international focus. The chart suggested that he could well have much athletic ability (Jupiter in Sagittarius in 9th house), but this could also be expressed as academic ability, with interest in the law, philosophy, or religion. The potential for excellent communication skills in writing, speaking, debating and teaching was evident. He may well develop into a big, idealistic, philosophical thinker, and be able to influence the world, particularly in his concerns for the underdog in life.

There were many indications of extrovert, enthusiastic, sociable energy, someone who may be an adventurer and traveller, and is likely to love wild, instinctive places. I had a vision of this three day old baby as a young man, growing into his potential by scaling mountains and sailing seas to fundraise for the causes he passionately believes in, and being able to convince the world of their value. He is likely to develop a wide circle of friends, eventually an international network, which could become influential enough to change the world. All this was there as potential for this little boy, and more.

Yet hidden under all this powerful machismo energy was something even more special, something so delicate it would be easy to overlook. Firstly, along with his compassion for others, there was also a high level of creativity (six quintiles), and tucked away in the most hidden part of his birthchart (12th house) was something exquisitely sensitive, artistic, and spiritual (Moon conjunct Neptune and Chiron in Pisces in 12th house. Reinforced by midpoints Neptune=Asc/MC, Asc=Sun/Neptune and Jupiter=Neptune/Pluto, amongst many other indicators). All of this not only indicated great kindness, and a need to lead a special life and touch the divine in some way, but also suggested that this little boy as a child may live in his imagination. He may tell ‘tall stories’, and be tuned into intangibles, possibly even seeing and sensing things that others can’t, and intuitively sensing how other people are truly feeling beneath the words. All of this ‘tuning-in’ ability was likely to be developed from a close relationship with his mother, and being sensitive to her needs. He may need to withdraw at times, to listen to music, to daydream, and later in life perhaps to meditate. It would be so easy, in a sentence by an impatient teacher or parent, to crush this sensitive creativity that was as delicate as a rose petal, and completely at odds with the bullish, high achieving masculine potential that was always there. One reprimand of, “don’t tell tall stories, Peter”, could be the death-knell for a very special creativity that the world would then never see.

I don’t know any other way by which, other than being fabulously psychic, one could have shared this information with his parents at such a young age. I suggested that as they saw this side of his nature develop, they might consider a school that would cultivate those creative abilities, such as a Steiner School. I have already heard back from them that even at a few months old they are seeing evidence of this more ethereal, spiritual side in this otherwise rumbustious little boy. He was also, as it happened, completely different in character to his much earthier older sister.

In this way, our birthchart shows the unique archetypal pattern that will never be repeated in the same way again. That makes us special. It defines our greatness, our fulfilment, and what we can uniquely offer to the world. Who wouldn’t want to know that? There is a beautiful quote from Martha Graham that reflects this idea:

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it.”14

So if we don’t allow free expression of this energy, if we block it through lack of confidence, the world will then never benefit from that unique offering that we could have made.

An astrological consultation should have that sense of inspiration, painting a picture for the client as to ‘the best that he/she can be’. It helps us crystallise our sense of self, to know our patterning at the soul level. I believe this process helps people see themselves from a higher level of being, before executional choices are made. It’s as if we can suddenly glimpse behind the veil. Those moments are quite sacred.

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To summarise: our birthchart is our unique sheet of music, but we have freewill in how we play it. Astrology is therefore symbolically predictive, not executionally, as we are co-creators in our lives. We can choose to have a little life or a big one. Your birthchart is like the picture on the front of the seed packet in terms of who we are meant to become, and our blueprint is already built into it, so it is an unparalleled tool for self-understanding. It helps us live more deeply, and with greater meaning. None of us are born neutral; gifts and challenges are already evident in the potential of the birthchart, so astrology gives insight into our dynamics of development, and how repeating cycles have helped or hindered us. In doing this, it helps us see our lives from the inside out, not the outside in.

4

The Alchemy of Relationship

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”

C.G. Jung

The birthchart appears to encode our energy. It is not just a map of our consciousness, but also it describes our energy field; because it is patterned by mathematical aspects and meanings, I agree with astrologer Stephen Arroyo that it is our individual mathematical energy expression.

I discovered a definition of DNA in my old school notes a while ago, which states that it is a: “unique biological fate map for each individual, and contains all physiological and behavioural characteristics”. That’s exactly what your birthchart is. Maybe one day the scientific community will discover that they are one and the same, that unique you. It is the information code that contains the pattern for you to grow into you, from the moment of your birth.

There are four elements in astrology that form the basic building blocks of how we feel energy in ourselves and other people. These are Air (Gemini, Libra, Aquarius), Water (Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces), Earth (Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn) and Fire (Aries, Leo, Sagittarius). Air emphasis people are either very sociable, and/or live in the world of ideas and concepts. They are intellectual and communicative, rational and objective. Water emphasis people live in their emotions and feelings, which are of primary importance to them, and they are usually very sensitive and private. Earth emphasis individuals are generally practical, grounded, dependable and cautious, and like to deal with the tangibles of life; Fire emphasis individuals are generally quite physical, active, enthusiastic, and very sociable. They have a strong appetite for life, and can be passionate and excited about their plans; they often have a vision to aim for.

There is much more that could be said about these elements, but suffice to say that we each have an individual mix of these, often with a bias in one element. It is often this bias that we pick up in other people, as we feel these energies viscerally.

We are aware every day in life of how we feel when we are with people who uplift us and inspire us, fill us with confidence, whereas with others we can feel quite drained in their presence. Some people we may find annoying and irritating, whereas with others we simply have nothing in common. We may say that someone is all ‘hot air’, and in checking their chart we find a preponderance of Air element; or that someone else is a ‘bit wet’, or ‘heavy going’, or ‘fiery’, and we find an emphasis of planets in Water, Earth or Fire signs. We ‘sense’ people’s energy like this all the time. I believe we are experiencing, viscerally, the mix of energy fields with the other person. We seem to catch each other’s energy field as we catch a cold; we are caught up in that shared energy blend.

Depending on where we are coming from with our own elemental balance, we may find Air signs intellectually stimulating or ungrounded; Water sympathetic but overly-emotional; Earth practical but dull; and Fire energetic but exhausting. It all depends on our starting point.

Some major business schools are looking at this concept of how one person’s energy can affect another, and therefore the outcome of a meeting. In my previous work, training people how to make more persuasive business presentations, the positive energy level of the presenter was vital to infect the audience with his confidence and belief in his proposal. He was more likely to get a positive response, just by changing his energy.

We feel this in a generalised way in our day-to-day experience, but a comparison between birthcharts will show this in much, much more detail.

We can do a chart comparison and examine all the interaspects for any relationship, whether we are looking at flatmates, work colleagues or romantic partners. This aspect of astrology is known as ‘synastry’, where one can see how compatible two people are likely to be. What we are doing is placing one chart on top of the other, and then calculating all the aspects between person A and person B. In doing this chart comparison, we are essentially looking at how one person experiences and reacts to the energy field of the other. If this is potentially a romantic relationship, we always have to look first at our own birthchart in terms of our capacity for relationship, before we look at the comparison. It may well be, for instance, that if someone is very independent, they may not be truly open to any relationship.

Chart comparison can become quite complex, as we are taking into account all of person A’s patterns, and seeing how they link up with person B’s. There will often be a resonance, a sympathy, between dominant patterns appearing in both charts, and the couple feel drawn together largely because of that. We also look at direct comparisons of the aspects between the couple’s Suns, Moons, and so on, and indeed every possible combination of aspects of person A’s planets to person B’s. We also look at where person A’s planets tend to fall in the chart of person B. For instance, if they fall in the area connected with long-distance travel, which is also associated with ‘higher-mind study’ (ninth house), the couple are likely to focus their activities around these areas. If the planetary emphasis in the comparison is on career (tenth house), it is likely that they will encourage each other in this area and even work together. We are all aware that we focus on different areas in different relationships.

Comparison between the two charts will show where you are likely to ‘hit it off’, and other areas where you’re going to need some awareness and tolerance on both sides. It will describe mental, emotional and sexual compatibility, and whether the relationship is likely to be one of growth or control. It will show how you are likely to ‘rub along’ day-to-day. I’ve noticed that the Moon in each chart is very important in this; it is the dominant reigning need in your life, the way you can be instinctively happy and fulfilled, and it also describes your daily rhythm (amongst many other things). Do you feel naturally comfortable and nurtured in the other person’s company, day-to-day? If one person needs to go and climb a mountain to feel fulfilled (Moon in Aries) while the other is much more homey and wants a herb tea and a back rub (Moon in Cancer), the relationship may not work very well as a live-in situation. I’ve known many couples who were very much in love but just couldn’t make it work living together as their Moons were incompatible.

Broadly, the planetary archetypes are as follows if we are looking at romantic relationships, in addition to the main table at the front of the book:

Sun

Your energy, life force, the way you express your energy, and an indicator of soul purpose. Your need to be recognised.

Moon

Your daily rhythm, your dominant reigning need to feel comfortable and fulfilled at a deep instinctive level, your reactions to emotional events, your own sense of being nurtured and capacity to nurture. Your need to feel safe. How much support you need, and are able to give. In a man’s chart, partly describes the woman he’d be attracted to.

Mercury

Your mind, how your mind works, your thinking ability, how you communicate. Your mental flexibility. Your need for knowledge and intellectual stimulation and connection. Feeling understood.

Venus

Your capacity for loving, feeling contented, your own sense of self-worth. Need to feel comfort and harmony. What gives you pleasure in life, your sense of beauty. In a man’s chart, partly describes the woman he’d be attracted to.

Mars

Your energy level, how you use your energy, your enthusiasm, physicality, sexuality. Your need for physical and sexual excitement. How much self-starting energy you have, your focus and goal-orientation. Decisiveness. In a woman’s chart, it partly describes the man she’d be attracted to.

Jupiter

Your need for personal growth, reward, satisfaction and how you are likely to find that. Your need for knowledge, travel and ‘higher-mind’ activities. How you improve yourself in life, and how you get your rewards. Your need to connect to something greater.

Saturn

Your sense of responsibility, maturity, and partly your work ethic. Your need for stability, security, control and discipline, whether you had these in childhood, and how much you need a partner to fulfil them now. Any feelings of insecurity, inadequacy.

Uranus

Your sense of excitement and sparkle. Your need for variety and change. Your sense of rebellion, the unconventional. How independent you are, and how much space you need in a relationship.

Neptune

Your sense of idealism, and your need for the spiritual, creative, imaginative, and inspiring; your romantic needs. Your need to completely merge with another. Confusion, befuddlement, miscommunication, deceit, disappointment, disillusionment. Things not being as they seem. Lack of discrimination.

Pluto

Your sense of power, need for transformation, intensity, presence, magnetism. Your (unconscious) need for control, manipulation, possessiveness, or your experience of those. Your need for deep closeness and intensity with the other person.

These explanations are necessarily simplistic but we can see how when we compare the two charts we can get a great deal of insight into how their communication may work (Mercury), how emotionally comfortable they’ll feel with each other (Venus), and how the physical side of the relationship is likely to be (Mars). If Jupiter of person A falls on a sensitive point in the birthchart of person B, then they will tend to bring out the best in person B, who will feel encouragement and confidence with that person, and the relationship is likely to be one of mutual growth. Saturn in one person’s chart can be experienced by the other as stability and solidity; but it can also feel disciplinarian, authoritative, parental, restrictive, and controlling.

Uranus contacts can feel very exciting, and if aspecting the other person’s Venus or Mars can feel sexually very intense. The relationship can be unconventional, unpredictable, and unreliable, but it can open you up to new aspects of yourself which you’ve never experienced before. It can be a wild ride.

Neptune, conversely, can be romantic, creative, gentle and spiritual; but if the aspects are more challenging this can suggest deception in the relationship, and things not being as they seem, or not being clear. Neptune promotes a sense of idealism, and so often this can lead to a rose-coloured spectacles lack of discrimination.

Pluto interaspects are experienced as a sense of fate. There is something profound, inexplicable, and compulsive about these connections, which are often very sexual. In the case of Pluto aspects, these are relationships where you suspect it’s going to be a train crash but it’s so irresistible that you do it anyway. These contacts have the potential to bring transformation to both of you, but often with a lot of pain along the way.

The above will hopefully just start to give a flavour of matching up one chart with another. It is often the case that many aspects of the relationship work well, but there is just one area that is out of kilter. I’m thinking of a couple who have many wonderful compatibilities, physical, emotional, and growth-orientation, but their Mercuries were incompatible. Mercury is associated with how your mind works, your intellect, your mindset, and how important knowledge and learning are to you. The couple also worked together but had very different skills. The way this manifested was that he just didn’t hear her almost every time she spoke. She had perfect diction, and he had perfect hearing, but he spent much of their 20 years together saying, “Pardon?” Luckily, all other aspects of their relationship worked well, and they had the astrological knowledge to understand their incompatible Mercuries, otherwise she may have been sorely tested. Astrology teaches awareness and tolerance. Somehow seeing these challenges in your birthcharts on two pieces of paper makes you understand, very simply, that your communication is coming from different places.

There are two other very important components to consider in a relationship. The first is what I alluded to earlier, and that is the axes of the chart. I have noticed that it is extremely common in an important long-term relationship to have at least one of these axes the same as your partner: that is, with the same astrological signs at each end of the axis (e.g. Aries/Libra, Taurus/Scorpio, etc).

Just to explain this a little more, your Ascendant and Midheaven, the axes of your chart, are determined by the time and place of your birth. Your Sun sign is of no matter in this. The diagram below will help to visualise this. For instance, if your Ascendant sign is Aries, the opposite end of this inevitably is Libra. This is an Aries/Libra axis. Your Midheaven is approximately 90 degrees from this, so this will be Capricorn, with the opposite end of the axis in Cancer. This is a Capricorn/Cancer axis. It seems to be an indicator of an important and long-lasting relationship (if other indicators are positive) if one of your axes links with one of your partner’s, even if they are the opposite way around. My Midheaven is in Virgo, and the opposite end in Pisces; my husband’s Midheaven is in Pisces, and the opposite end in Virgo. This vertical axis as we know is linked to your career, and we met at work and then subsequently worked together. If you have the axes the same way around (i.e. both having Aries on the Ascendant), it can indicate a similar orientation to life.

Birthchart Axes

The second is a point in everyone’s chart that in Vedic (Indian) astrology is related to past lives. This is known as the Nodal axis of the Moon. At your birth, this is the point at which the Moon’s path was crossing the ecliptic. In important relationships, if your Nodal axis is linking up with sensitive points in the other person’s chart, there is a feeling of unfathomability, that you’ve known this person for all-time, however unlikely the outside packaging appears. These relationships seem powerful and compulsive, held together by the ancient glue of experience. Contacts to the Nodal axis seem to indicate major and long-term relationships; they are often hard to let go. In India before arranged marriages, the Nodal axis is one of the most important points that is considered for the prospective pair.

One of my clients told me that many years ago he was attending a large business meeting, and a new female employee joined the group. Although he had never met or spoken to this woman, he said to himself: “That’s the woman I’m going to marry”. He had a great sense of what he called ‘old knowing’ with this lady, who did indeed become his wife, and they are still together 20 years later. They have many planetary contacts to each other’s Nodal axis. The dance goes on.

What is always wonderful with couples is that once they move forwards in time together, their charts march in step. Marriage is indicated at the same time in both charts, as is the birth of children, the highs and lows of life. Only when they separate, and that will be highlighted too, do their individual charts begin to march independently.

There is one final thing which is very important to consider in each person’s chart, and that is known as the ‘Sun/Moon midpoint’. This is the midway point in distance, celestial longitude, between the Sun and the Moon at the time of that person’s birth. This is very sensitive to planetary transits, particularly concerning relationships.

As I write, in 2013, there is a powerful aspect (square) between Uranus and Pluto in the heavens, the two biggest indicators of planetary change we can have. Recently a high proportion of my clients have had this aspect directly triggering their Sun/Moon midpoint. This can be associated with restless, impulsive feelings, with either my clients or their partner having a deep desire for change in their relationship. As an example, a 46-year old man came to see me, who was very gentle and softly spoken in his demeanour. His name was David, and he was a healer, well known in his local area as someone who was committed to spiritual growth and helping others. As the session proceeded, I asked if all was well in his relationship. He had been married for 25 years, and had two children, but became quite tearful when he confessed that his behaviour of late was not something he was proud of. His emotions were “explosive and volcanic, hard to control” (these are archetypal expressions of Uranus and Pluto), but he knew something had to fundamentally change in his marriage. This kind of aspect certainly suggests that new dynamics have to come into the relationship to allow greater freedom and self-expression for both, or one or both of them may decide that they would be better to separate, but things in the relationship do not stay the same with this kind of challenge.

Even as an astrologer, I still find the reliability of these aspects impressive. How can it be that an aspect between Uranus and Pluto in their orbits today which triggers a halfway point in space between the Sun and Moon at the time of his birth 46 years ago describe his marriage crisis, for which the timing can be pinpointed so precisely? Remember also that the Sun and Moon move very quickly, the Moon by approximately 12 degrees in a day, so this midpoint would move quickly too. Even if this midpoint were to move by 3 degrees, just a few hours later in birthtime, his marriage crisis would then be occurring several years later.

Even after studying many thousands of charts, I never lose my sense of wonder at how the combination of archetypal symbolism and geometry produce expected meaning in people’s lives, precisely in the area of life expected, as the clock of life ticks on.

It’s fascinating as well that we can see the potential behaviour of the partner, person B, through the chart of person A. If person B is becoming restless, erratic, and demanding more freedom in the relationship, this is connected to the Uranian archetype, which will be evident in the transits to person A’s chart. If the partner is being deceptive in some way, that will be seen by Neptune transits in person A’s chart in the area connected with relationships. This is a reminder that we are essentially vessels for archetypal experiences. We will draw to us those individuals who will fulfil those patterns in our charts. It is often helpful to think about this principle when you are going through a tough time in your relationship, that it isn’t the particular partner who is to blame for things going wrong between you, it is more that you need at this time to draw that archetypal learning experience to you.

The chart comparison method we have been discussing essentially is looking at each person as an individual energy pattern, and seeing how this blend will work. However, there is also another method of looking at a relationship of any kind. This is to take the midpoints between the two charts, so you are taking the halfway point between a couple’s Ascendants, Suns, then Moons, then Mercuries, and so on, to produce what is known as a ‘composite chart’. This describes the energy pattern of the relationship itself, rather than looking at the two individuals interacting. In a sense it is taking the energy blend we have looked at and now we are looking at the result it produces. The composite chart can be very revealing. It shows where the couple will focus their energy, and also where the challenges lie. What is particularly fascinating about the composite chart is that it is also very sensitive to planets moving around in their orbits. These planetary transits, just as in an individual’s chart, indicate times of opportunity growth, financial gain and loss, children, change in geography, all areas of life, and sadly also it will suggest the ending of the relationship if there is one, in the composite chart. This is remarkable when you consider that we are not looking at a birthchart of a moment in time, but a mathematical blend of two birthcharts into one; but it still works with planetary transits just as the individual birthchart does.

Everything in your life and your relationships is in your chart.

*

To summarise: our birthchart shows our pattern of energy. We sense others’ energy all the time, but our birthcharts show this in great detail. We can compare one birthchart directly with another, to see how two individuals are likely to experience each other’s energy in the relationship, on all levels, from the importance of each of the planetary archetypes in this. We can ‘blend’ the two charts and produce a ‘composite’ chart of the relationship itself. There are particularly important elements of the birthchart to consider in a relationship: the axes, the Moon, the Nodal axis, and the Sun/Moon midpoint, all of which are very influential for the significance and longevity of the relationship.

5

Do You Live Strategically?

“There is nothing so unpardonable as to consent to a senseless, aimless and purposeless life.”

Helen Keller

When we are unaware of who we really are, we can easily repeat destructive patterns in our lives unconsciously. Life comes to us, apparently, from the outside, and we can feel besieged and overwhelmed, that life is doing something to us. It’s a constant struggle. It’s a useful analogy to think of a bicycle wheel and when we are unaware, we spin around on the outside, the rubber hitting the road. With understanding, however, we can move closer to the hub, where life is more still and centred, and observe the movement of our lives more clearly.

Even an elementary level of astrological knowledge is empowering. Because the archetypal patterns manifest in our lives with such predictability, as planets don’t move out of their orbits, we can see them coming. The music always plays. So we can continue to live our lives in a random fashion, with events happening by default, or we can so clearly and easily see the patterns of meaning behind our charts, and decide to use their full potential. One of the greatest gifts of astrology is that it gives us our own unique road map by which we can maximise our potential.

All of life’s experiences and events can be seen from your birthchart, however much they appear to come from the outside. The less conscious and aware we are, the more events appear to happen to us, something of which C.G. Jung was very cognisant in his work.

So wouldn’t it be so much better if we took charge of the patterns of meaning unfolding in our lives all the time and worked with them fully, instead of fighting against them? Our birthcharts will show the archetypal meaning that is emerging at any time to stimulate our development; our charts are energy potential, they offer us opportunities to be taken but it is up to our freewill to recognise them and use them wisely.

Let’s give some examples of how planetary energy potential can work. If we have Saturn transiting our career area, we are likely to experience its archetype of hard work, patience, playing by the rules, keeping our head down, and being conscientious, diligent, dutiful, and taking our responsibilities seriously, in that area of our life. When Saturn reaches ‘exactitude’ in its transit towards the Midheaven, if we have co-operated with the archetypal meaning, then we normally receive a promotion, or reach a high point in our career. But it is hard-won recognition, not lucky in any way.

However, if we have Uranus transiting this same area of career, the archetypal meaning is almost the opposite. Uranus is the maverick and the rebel. It breaks rules, wants to throw out old patterns, not obey authority figures, be original and creative and have its individual truth recognised. Therefore, these are times in our career when we can suddenly change direction, do something more creative, but also something that recognises our individuality more fully. These transits are very different indeed, and we feel them differently. Under Saturn transits, we feel more obedient, even though it is burdensome, whereas with Uranus we feel extremely restless and impulsive. These transits are visceral.

Freewill allows us the choice of playing our music badly or well. So let’s say during our Uranus transit we behave as if we’re having a Saturn transit; we work quietly away as we have always done, and even though we feel restless we refuse to make changes because we don’t feel confident enough. We can then miss many of the wonderful creative opportunities to break free of old patterns. We play it small. It also means that disruptive changes are likely to arrive from the outside and force us to change, as this energy of change has to be expressed somehow. This is much less comfortable, as we can feel that events are out of our control.

If we are going through a Saturn transit but refuse to knuckle down and obey the rules, leave work early and ignore bosses’ requests, much more as if we’re having a Uranus transit, we may get fired. I have seen several examples of this. When we resist the archetypal energy that is manifesting in our lives, life doesn’t go that well. That’s when clients come and see me, as they feel life makes no sense.

Astrology is like a cosmic weather forecast. If we know there’s a heavy rainstorm coming, we have the freewill to choose to go out without our hat, coat and brolly. But I’d suggest that you’d have a more comfortable experience if you take those with you.

I’m often asked if this isn’t a self-fulfilling prophecy, that when we go along with the archetypal energy it works well because we believe it will. If we believe in our success it is always more likely to happen, but the real short answer to the question is I can see what happens in my clients’ lives when they resist what they are supposed to be embracing. The music doesn’t stop playing but this part of the music plays very discordantly.

In this sense, we can start to live strategically, rather than by default. We can have much more power in our lives and clearly see where we can maximise our opportunities. Let’s take Jupiter, which has associations of expansion, abundance and wisdom. If it is coming in a year’s time to transit my area of career, I know that it is likely to bring success, reward, recognition, and perhaps more money from my work. It is a 12-year reward cycle, and usually effort in work produces rewards more easily. So I will deliberately plan to focus on my career, or even start up a new business then to maximise the opportunity that Jupiter brings. Every time this transit has occurred in my life, I received a promotion and pay rise, accurate to the month. The first transit in my life was when I was 11, and the month that Jupiter contacted this ‘career’ high point I was offered the position of Head Girl of the school. It works in similar ways for everyone, with reliability.

When Jupiter comes back to meet your Sun every 12 years this is usually a positive time for personal growth, abundance, feelings of wisdom, travel (particularly long-distance) may be involved, and/or education of some kind, often of a ‘higher-mind’ nature. Depending on where Jupiter is in your chart, money may come in, or often a feeling of ‘abundance’ in other emotional ways. As this only happens once every 12 years, it is important to maximise the opportunity it offers.

Last year Jupiter in my chart was returning to my Sun, and at the same time there was another powerful transit (Neptune conjunct my Moon in Pisces) that is associated with high sensitivity and intuition, often involving a spiritual experience of some kind. The dates for the conference I wanted to attend were announced – exactly on the weekend when this was occurring. This is not a surprise to astrologers, as there will always be an outer event to correlate with the symbolism that is being offered at the time. The conference was in Colorado (long-distance travel from England), involving a lot of meditation (Neptune conjunct my Moon and ‘wisdom’ potentially); the conference involved studying how the brain operates, particularly during meditation (higher-mind study), and was very positive learning. During this weekend I had some wonderful insights, including a powerful healing experience. If I hadn’t understood my astrology, I’m sure I would have lived this out in some way closer to home, but I suspect it would have been a smaller experience. We can go for our experiences and live a bigger, more opportunistic life if we understand our astrology. We trust life more. This is useful information as we start to use our own unfolding pattern to our advantage. We live more strategically.

This doesn’t mean to say that our lives are then without challenge. We need challenges in order to grow, but even in the tough times, it is clear to see the meaning of what we’re meant to be learning. Let’s say the planet Pluto is aspecting the area of relationships. If you are in a relationship, this can be a very intense time, with issues of control, manipulation, jealousy, and possessiveness coming up. However, the real meaning of Pluto transits is transformation and empowerment, and therefore if you decide to stay in the relationship the dynamics between you are likely to be transformed. After a period of stress you are likely to be stronger and wiser.

Or if we have Saturn transiting the area of our chart to do with our mind (3rd house), this can make us turn inward with our thinking, become anxious and even depressed. However, it is superb when used for study, as it makes our mind very focused and disciplined. I did a major part of the study for my astrology exams while this transit was happening, as I knew it would be an excellent use of this Saturn ‘mind’ energy. If we decide to be true to the archetypal energy but use it positively, it doesn’t have a chance to manifest negatively. We can live out all of our transits in this way.

Another important time in this Saturn cycle is when it is transiting the area of your chart to do with ‘higher-mind’ (9th house). This transit takes about two and a half years, and is about self-improvement. This may be physical, mental, or spiritual, but it is ultimately about constructing a framework of your philosophy, your beliefs, to guide you for the rest of your life. It is commonly about studying and working hard to incorporate something metaphysical into your life, and it is a period of bringing together all that you have learned, and building towards some goal that is based on these beliefs and values. It is usually quite a serious, ambitious time, and how well you prepare in this period will determine your degree of success in the next.

If you prepare well, when transiting Saturn reaches your Midheaven at the end of this period, this will represent a major culmination in your career, which has been hard won. If you were operating in the wrong work area, or have prepared badly, the consequences will become very clear at this point. Richard Nixon had precisely this transit when the Watergate scandal was uncovered15 One individual I know of was fired then; he had been submitting fraudulent expense claims, and it was discovered exactly as Saturn reached this high point. With Saturn, you always get exactly what you deserve; you reap the consequences of your previous actions.

However, if you want to do well, I believe that knowing the meaning of this Saturn transit will give you much greater clarity and confidence in working towards that goal two and a half years ahead. If you didn’t know the meaning, the feelings and urges towards self-improvement would still be there, but you probably wouldn’t throw yourself into life so fully. Knowing your chart gives you the permission, and the knowledge, to live every strategic opportunity fully.

Currently as I’m writing this book, I’m choosing to do it when transiting Saturn is moving into a part of my chart that is to do with withdrawal from the world (12th house). It is a time when you can feel quite cut off from worldly activities, as if you’re living behind a veil. This could be quite disorientating if you didn’t know what was happening. However, it’s a perfect time to write this book and I’m using the solitude extremely productively.

Astrology can also make sense of all the emotions we are going through.

For instance, if you have Saturn moving through the last part of your chart (12th house) in its 29½-year orbit, you can feel dislocated, spacey, and confused, as if the world is operating out there without you.

Saturn transiting your Birthchart

It can feel very lonely and cut off as if you’re going through all the motions of the old life without any of its previous meaning. It can seem like being a hamster in a wheel. It’s reassuring to be told that you are meant to be feeling that. The transit is about the dissolution of the old you, so life structures can fall away and we can feel very isolated. Sometimes things can feel quite stuck during this period, and it’s harder to move forwards, but that’s because it’s the end of the old cycle. Rather than approaching this extended period with frustration, accept that this is a wonderful opportunity to go within, to again become the chrysalis before the butterfly emerges.

In this way, the real meaning is that this is a rich time of preparation, approximately a two and a half year period where we can plan, dream, meditate about who we want the new ‘you’ to be, physically, mentally and emotionally. Once this period is over, and Saturn transits over our Ascendant or ‘Point of Incarnation’, we begin a whole new 29½-year episode of our life. This is a major cycle in our lives, and if we’ve understood the meaning and planned well, it can feel like a rebirth. If we didn’t have the knowledge and therefore couldn’t plan clearly, as we didn’t know what the process was all about, we may have felt depressed, alienated, and frittered away our time on antidepressants wondering why life wouldn’t move forwards. Also, we would miss the opportunity to plan our new episode in life to the fullest.

Another example is something I see a lot with clients. This is transiting Neptune. Neptune in its negative expression can make us feel low energy, droopy, weepy, lost, confused, as if we don’t know who we are or where we are going. The positive expression of Neptune is that it is spiritually and creatively inspiring. So you often feel a dissolution of gross physical energy but refinement of spiritual energy. So I always advise my clients with these transits to paint, listen to music, read poetry, meditate – whatever pursuit they enjoy as long as it is creative and/or spiritual. Then they will be using up the Neptune energy positively, rather than negatively. The music has to play, remember, but we choose how it will play. This determines our level of life experience. I have known several people in later life who have become artists during these major Neptune transits.

In this way, astrology is constantly empowering us in our lives. We choose with our astrological knowledge which areas of life to emphasise and what the archetypal energy is that we are meant to use to our fullest potential. This gives us better choices, more appropriate choices for what is emerging at any given time. We choose to play our music better, and we have more control over our destiny and the level at which we live. It’s helpful to know that you’re meant to be feeling a bit low in energy, or cut off at any point, or that it’s not a surprise at that time, but then understand the deeper meaning of why you need to experience this. As Victor Frankl, surviving Jewish inmate of the Nazi concentration camps, said: “Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost”.16

Who wouldn’t want to live strategically? We still choose with our freewill in our life experience, but we have individual guidance as to what is unfolding at each period in our life. The blueprint is already there and the oak tree naturally grows from an acorn, sprouts leaves in spring, and loses them in the autumn. The oak tree doesn’t resist this process. Our freewill, as humans, means that at times our choices go against what should be unfolding as an opportunity or a gift to develop. How inspiring though to fully understand our purpose, our ‘dharma’, what we are meant to become; this is what astrology is all about.

Understanding our birthchart is like a personal cosmic weather forecast. If we never see a weather forecast, we are going to be constantly caught out and off our guard when rainstorms, snow, floods, gales and heatwaves arrive. In this instance, it only affects our clothes and possibly our mood. Without knowledge of our birthchart, we are likely to be constantly caught out by events, and that affects our life.

There has been much exposure over recent years about the Law of Attraction. The implicit assumption of that is that we are a blank slate, and can invent any future we like by getting our thinking and feelings lined up correctly. But this misses one giant step in the process. Everything begins from your birthchart, that’s the music you are playing. The urges and desires of what you want come from that. It’s all about your individuality emerging, rather than needing to be invented.

So if you have transiting Uranus coming to your Ascendant, you will be likely to feel an urge to redefine your individuality in a new context. Understanding your birthchart means that you explore all the possible choices that you have with that transit, which may be coming from feelings of restlessness. You may make better choices then, by being aware of the process that is taking place, rather than living by default and feeling frustrated. So let’s say that you may be thinking of emigrating; you can use our visions, meditations and positive thinking to manifest this, but it begins with your birthchart. You can’t manifest anything in your life that is archetypally inconsistent with your chart at that time. If you have transiting Neptune coming to your Venus, you may have the urge to start painting, and be inspired by colours and beauty. If you have Jupiter transiting the area of your chart to do with ‘higher-mind study’, you may take a course in metaphysics or meditation, and because Jupiter has associations with travel, you may go abroad to do it.

I would just like to pause here for a moment, as through this book so far we have been talking about planets in their orbits transiting the birthchart. We have established that your birthchart is the archetypal foundation of you, containing all your potentiality and timings of events through your life. This is astrology. But what’s actually being triggered? We have already established that your birthchart will never be in the same pattern in the heavens again. That’s why you’re unique. The Ascendant has already moved on by a degree about four minutes after your birth, and the Moon is moving rapidly too. It has already changed within minutes of your birth. So how can your birthchart be so reliable, and sensitive to orbiting planets decades later? The only way I believe this could work is if the birthchart merely reflects your ‘energy imprint’ at the moment of your birth, when in some way your resonance is set, like a tuning fork, by the energy pattern prevailing at the time. This then echoes down through your life. It stamps the ‘information code’ into the seed that will grow into who you are. Your birthchart remains as a description of that unique energy imprint. That’s a truly extraordinary thought.

Based on this energy imprint, you have a plan that is yours alone, so throughout your life, you can continually ask yourself, “what is the greatest I can be, with what is potentially manifesting in my life right now? How can I use these archetypal energies most fully, in the areas of life that are highlighted?” You have a detailed individual road map to do it. I am an absolute believer in infinite possibilities through a lifetime, but at any one time in life the possibilities presenting themselves must be ‘on strategy’ with the archetypal energy being unfolded. We can play the music badly, but the archetypal energy is always clear to see, whether it is operating in a negative or positive expression.

I’ve considered this question deeply over the last twenty years or so. There seems to be an assumption in some modern modalities that the way you live your life is determined by your thinking, which produces electrical impulses in the brain, and your emotions, which register as magnetic waves. As an astrologer, I have to believe that your birthchart precedes that. It comes before your thinking and emotion, as it describes a very deep level – maybe the soul level – of the fundamental you. This fundamental you has predispositions to think and feel in certain patterns and indeed your birthchart will even suggest what you think about. It is our lifetime’s task to use our unique blueprints to think and feel as the greatest we can be, but the birthchart is the fundamental platform from which thinking and feeling emanate. Otherwise, how could we see the mental and emotional patterns and potentials so clearly at the moment of birth? Everything emerges from and can be seen in the birthchart. Each of us has a different toolkit to work with; we are not all starting from the same place. The birthchart gives us the underpinning of our mindset and our emotional profile, and suggests the way that the mental and emotional components of who we are are likely to develop through our early childhood experiences.

So it’s not just about getting your thinking and feeling lined up to manifest what you want. It’s in understanding your birthchart, which is the basis of you, and understanding your own personal timeline to maximise your opportunities. If a client wants to launch a new business, it’s helpful to co-ordinate this with the archetypal energies in the career area when success is likely to come more easily, than at times when delay or frustration are likely. We are co-creating consciously then, rather than by default. Our efforts reap far greater rewards when we live strategically rather than by guesswork.

When you understand your birthchart, you can see that opportunities are constantly presenting themselves in different areas of our lives to allow us to grow. We live a bigger life. That is not only an exciting way to live but also it’s only in understanding these that we can be full co-creators and play our music magnificently. In fact, we are the music.

*

To summarise: today, many people live by default, and feel that life is happening to them. By becoming aware of and understanding planetary cycles, we can start to live strategically, maximising opportunities so we can live them fully and meaningfully, rather than resisting or missing them. Your birthchart acts like a cosmic weather forecast; it doesn’t force us to do anything, but if we know it’s going to rain we’ll have a more comfortable experience if we take a brolly. Astrology gives us the confidence to live a bigger life. By understanding the meaning of planetary cycles in our lives, we inevitably live with a greater sense of meaning and purpose. We have more choices, and make better ones. Our birthchart is the foundation for us to become true co-creators in our lives.

6

Layers upon Layers of Meaning…

“Astrology is a language. If you understand this language, the sky speaks to you.”

Dane Rudhyar, Humanistic Psychologist and Astrologer

Astrology is a language of meaning. Every part of it contributes to great meaning for the individual. The problem with meaning is that it is qualitative. How do you measure meaning? It’s like trying to measure the beauty of a rose, or a Beethoven symphony. Meaning only has significance for the individual; what has meaning for you in your life may not mean much to me. However, from your birthchart astrology is able to translate what is likely to have meaning for you. It is seeing you from the inside out, if you like.

Even as the chart is coming out of the printer, the astrologer can quickly see where the emphasis in the chart lies. This is our first layer of meaning. Are most of the planets in the top half of the birthchart, as in the diagram below?

Hemisphere Emphasis

This can suggest that this person felt pushed around or carried along by the tide of events in early life. If the majority are in the bottom half of the birthchart, this is usually a theme of unfinished business from the early home life, when the person needs to build an identity ideally in a different geography that is not defined by the home base. If the majority are over to the right side of the birthchart, this can suggest someone who ‘gives themselves away to others’; someone who is often incredibly kind but can sometimes care for others to avoid dealing with their own issues. If on the left side of the birthchart, this person can be behaviourally quite defensive and we may ask why this is the case.

So the hemisphere emphasis in the chart is the very first brush stroke on the canvas that usually sets up an important theme that will be filled in with much more detail; indeed, it can often set up a major theme of life development.

The second layer of meaning is to look at how the planets are arranged in the signs. We consider the elements of Fire, Air, Earth and Water and see how many planets fall in each. These indicate the way that energy is expressed. If the majority fall in Fire (Aries, Leo, Sagittarius) we can expect this person to be quite energetic, enthusiastic, positive and outgoing and often quite physically active. If there is an emphasis in Air (Gemini, Libra, Aquarius) these people are generally more social and/or intellectual, and ideas and communication are important to them. If in Earth (Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn) practical matters come forth, and material comforts and success are usually important. If in Water (Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces) these people live very much in their feelings, and they are of prime importance.

Of course, these are general statements (for the sake of simplicity here) but it provides another brush stroke on our canvas as we start to build the picture.

Then we will look at how many planets fall within the different modalities of cardinal, fixed and mutable. Cardinal signs (Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn) emphasis suggests that the person is outgoing, self-starting, entrepreneurial, makes things happen, whereas an emphasis in fixed signs (Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, Aquarius) suggests someone who is very good at staying the course; they tend to be resistant to change, but they are steady, tenacious, determined, like to see things through to the end and also like a degree of control over life. An emphasis in mutable signs (Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius, Pisces) is usually someone who is more adaptable, co-operative, malleable to people and circumstances, and less rigid perhaps in their response.

We then have another layer of meaning when we look at exactly which signs the planets fall in, as each have their own set of associations. Then we consider how the archetypal meaning of each planet blends with the sign it is in. For instance, Mars (aggression, assertion, energy, physicality) in Aries (primal fire, I want to be Number One) has a very different expression to Mars in Pisces (dreamy, romantic, creative, spiritual). The area of the birthchart in which the planet is placed has meaning; is it in the area to do with career, or self-worth? What will that mean?

Other meanings then have to be considered. Once we have taken into account the archetypal meaning of each of the planets, their expression being modified by the sign they are in, and the area of life in which they are likely to be expressed, we then have to consider their relationship to each other. Their geometric relationship to each other is vital and gives the astrologer much information. This relationship very much reflects the Pythagorean theory that geometry and numbers, which each have a sacred meaning, form the underpinning of the universe. Only certain aspects count as meaningful. These are generally multiples of 45º, which are action-oriented, and all have different meanings. These 45º aspects are those of two planets being ‘at odds’ with each other, and they work like grit in an oyster: they prompt us to take action to resolve that dissonant situation. Aspects such as 60º and 120º also have different meanings, but are considered more passive in their life expression.

Many other aspects of the birthchart have meaning. For instance, the planet in its orbit just ahead of the Sun at the moment of your birth has much influence, as do particular groupings of planets. There are specific degree areas that have important meanings. Just as an experienced mathematician will see patterns in a jumble of numbers, astrologers are trained to see symbolic patterns of meaning. We are building up our picture on the canvas all the time.

An astrologer will also calculate all the ‘midpoints’ in a birthchart. These are the halfway points in distance around the circle (celestial longitude) between any pair of planets. There are approximately 100 midpoints in a birthchart, all offering different meanings and some being very important, as we have seen with the Sun/Moon midpoint in Chapter 4. For instance, the Saturn/Pluto midpoint in a prominent position will suggest a tendency to depression, but a Neptune/Pluto midpoint that is emphasised suggests someone who needs to live in the spiritual, and who is tuned into intangibles. The study of midpoints is rich and rewarding in our pursuit of meaning. It is possible to do a pretty accurate character analysis using these alone, as they contain even finer detail on the person’s development and character. Below we have a typical example of an individual’s midpoints:

Astrological Calculations by Solar Fire software by kind permission of Astrolabe Inc. (www.alabe.com) and Roy Gillett

Midpoint List

Then there is a whole branch of astrology called ‘harmonics’. This is a very ancient aspect of astrology, which is also at the heart of Hindu astrology. This again follows Pythagorean theory that each number has unique meaning. We can calculate the harmonic charts for an individual using a different point of focus each time. The most commonly used charts are those of the 5th, 7th, 8th and 9th harmonics. We are multiplying each of the planetary positions in the natal chart by for instance, 5, 7, 8 and 9 (then keep deducting 360º until we are back within the circle to get the new planetary position). What this produces is a series of charts that resonate to the above numbers; so only certain planets will be thrown into prominence with those charts. We are essentially looking at the ‘five-ness’ or ‘seven-ness’ of a person’s being, and the meanings will differ accordingly. David Hamblin, astrologer, says this is like “peeling away different layers of a person’s soul”.17

‘Five-ness’ has to do with freewill, the capacity for choice and conscious awareness of an individual, and also their capacity to create order out of chaos. It can be connected to creativity of intellect, and ideas, which can become the focus for someone’s life. Einstein, for instance, whose work was about trying to understand the laws of the universe, had a powerful fifth harmonic chart. ‘Seven-ness’ is connected with the spiritual, religious or mystical urge in an individual. This harmonic is particularly strong in the charts of clergymen.18 ‘Eighth-ness’ is connected to will, action and manifestation. Napoleon had a powerful eighth harmonic chart. ‘Ninth-ness’ is associated with the purpose towards which one is working but also one’s capacity for joy, peace and bliss. Rudolph Steiner, the spiritual leader and founder of Anthroposophy, had a strong ninth harmonic chart. He allegedly developed clairvoyant powers that enabled him to understand natural patterns in the cosmos. This ninth harmonic is particularly important in Hindu astrology in judging the marriage partner; partly to see, presumably, whether one would be blissfully happy with them!

Entire books have been written on this branch of astrology alone. It is a study in itself.

In this way, layers and layers of meaning accumulate, which are a combination of planetary archetypal meaning and geometry. We are taking finer and finer slices of an individual’s development, potential, character and inner being.

Then typically the astrologer would calculate the movements of the planets in the heavens, known as transits, and list the geometric aspects that are triggering the natal planetary positions. Again, this exercise produces a complex multi-layering of meaning. The astrologer must then weigh and synthesise all of this information to elicit the overall meaning of the period in question. That is part of the reason that astrology is such a demanding subject and takes many years to learn. Having used a computer for calculation, I believe only the astrologically trained human brain can achieve this synthesis of meaning.

Even within the birthchart itself, before we consider transits, there is incredible richness. Let’s look at a very simple challenging aspect between Venus and Saturn (an aspect of a 45º multiple).

Venus-Saturn Aspect

If we look at this for clues as to this female’s growing up, this symbolism suggests that she didn’t have enough time or enough love from her father. Psychologically this can result in low self-esteem and not valuing herself sufficiently as a woman. Emotionally it can make her quite well defended and ‘tight’, finding it difficult to open up spontaneously. Behaviourally, it produces a ‘business before pleasure’ attitude, and although commonly successful in business, it can wreak havoc with one’s emotional life. Relationships are often difficult or delayed. Physiologically this is commonly the signature for kidney and lower back problems, possibly an indication of insufficient support at the emotional level in childhood.

This is remarkable when all we are considering is, let’s say, a 180º ‘opposition’ between Venus and Saturn, before we even consider the position of each planet in the chart, or its sign.

Just looking at the two planetary symbols joined by a line, by changing the ‘lens of our brain’ we get richer information about this individual. We move through childhood dynamics, to emotional and psychological propensities, to the physical condition and potential areas of body weakness. This offers us another branch of astrology, another layer of meaning, which is medical astrology. In any birthchart there is tension. Like the grit in the oyster, it encourages us to do something positive, make something beautiful from it. However, if we allow these tensions to remain as stresses, they can ultimately bring about illness. They can become entrenched in us as negative energy. This is often the case where the individual’s birthchart shows a lack of self-worth and lovability, which was the case with ‘Fiona’.

Fiona had been the black sheep in the family, as she described herself. Her three sisters had been quiet, diligent and conscientious, and the family background was highly educated and academic. Fiona however didn’t do well in school (3rd house stressed). She played truant, and was endlessly in trouble both with teachers and parents. She became a ‘wild child’, and the more she was punished, the wilder she became (Uranus square Sun, conjunct Moon). The self-worth and lovability areas of her birthchart (2nd and 11th) were heavily stressed as well. She felt like an alien and a reject from her family, and eventually at 16 her father asked her to leave the family home. She constantly had the theme of ‘it’s not fair’ (Chiron conjunct the Sun), and this cry against the world continued through abandonments by boyfriends and firings by companies when she wouldn’t obey the rules.

Everyone has potential areas of body weakness in their birthchart, but these don’t have to manifest as serious illness. However, it seems that if emotional tensions have not been resolved, and become deeply embedded in our psyche, they can manifest as illness. There is a great deal of research now to indicate that our thinking creates our emotion that, if negative, can create energy blockages that result in illness. I have noticed this particularly with people who may feel like a victim in life; they haven’t found their real power. Unless resolved, these tensions accumulate, almost creating a block in the plumbing of pure, positive life expression.

When Fiona was 55 she had a series of very challenging transits (Pluto and Uranus both square to her Sun and Mercury, associated with her area of health and the nervous system; transiting Pluto was also conjunct her Ascendant, which is also known as the health axis; transiting Neptune and Chiron, suggesting illness, square to her Moon, and transiting Saturn conjunct Neptune in her 2nd house of self-worth). Fiona became debilitated and quite suddenly suffered paralysis from the waist down. A rare auto-immune condition was attacking her nervous system (Gemini on the cusp of the 6th house of health, ruled by Mercury and associated with the nervous system), rendering her a hospitalised invalid. Transiting Saturn conjunct Neptune spoke of extreme anxiety, weakness and in its worst expression potential paralysis, as well as depression and feeling like a victim (Neptune ruled her 2nd house of self-worth). Transiting Uranus square to Mercury jangles the nervous system, and appears to be the common signature for Multiple Sclerosis (Uranus is linked to erratic electrical impulses – in the case of MS in the nervous system). Transiting Pluto aspecting the Ascendant echoed the myth of Persephone, with fear, trauma, endings, and major life change, together with issues of powerlessness. Transiting Neptune and Chiron aspecting her Moon suggested weakness, illness, and also being out of society, together with a big loud theme of “it’s not fair, I’m a victim!”

When Fiona telephoned to explain what had happened, her first sentence was about life not treating her fairly; so I asked her when she had felt like that before in childhood. She explained in detail the unfairness of all that, how she had been constantly punished, rejected, and eventually thrown out of school and home, all of which of course had exacerbated the self-worth and lovability issues. Now, with this auto-immune condition, her body was repeating this theme of victimhood, unfairness and powerlessness very clearly. She was totally at the mercy of her carers for life’s basics. The anger had turned against her own body.

I have seen a number of auto-immune conditions in my clients. Within this limited sample, the consistent theme I have noticed is a sense of victimhood and unfairness; of course the auto-immune condition manifests these issues in an even more dramatic way. The body, as Deepak Chopra once commented, is a print-out of our consciousness. This usually means that these individuals are not clearly expressing their essential nature, who they are meant to be. I have three clients who all have several planets in the sign of Leo. This energy should be extrovert, creative, confident, with a strong sense of self and centre. The astrological joke for Leo is, “I’ve arrived, we can start now!” However, all three of these individuals are introverted, unsure of themselves and only demonstrating the fixed resistance of Leo (which is a fixed sign), rather than its exuberant energy. There is a block in the plumbing of what needs to flow, due to issues of poor self-worth. This undermines their natural flow of positive life energy, of allowing what they are meant to express, and has resulted in illness.

This whole area of medical astrology provides us with another incredibly rich layer of meaning. The idea of energy blocks causing illness is not new. Illness shows the power of our belief systems, but our birthchart can show the predispositions to those beliefs. Importantly, what astrology can offer is that it not only helps to identify the underlying psychological issues and the areas of potential body weakness, but by highlighting the timing of challenges to the health area, it can act preventatively.

We must always remember that astrology is symbolically, archetypally predictive, not executionally predictive. That is, the astrologer does not know how that symbolism will be lived out in the world; that depends on the level at which our client is living it.

As an example, I remember some years ago I had a consultation with a client who was a restaurateur. In his birthchart, he had the Moon in the (6th house) area of day-to-day work. His Moon was also in Cancer. The Moon and Cancer both have strong associations with nourishment, and it is very common if they are in the work area of the chart for the person to cook for a living – he literally has the urge to feed and nourish people.

His Moon at the time was being opposed by transiting Mars and Uranus in their orbit. This combination can be associated with sudden accidents, disruptive events and changes. But remember that the Moon represents the mother and the home, as well as your emotions. There was a range of possibilities for this symbolism to express itself. His mother may have had a sudden accident, which could have upset him emotionally and may have affected his work. He may have had a sudden and unexpected (Uranus) move of home, or a sudden accident at work. As the Moon ‘ruled’ his area of important relationships, another possibility is that he became very emotionally excited (Uranus) and passionate (Mars) about a new relationship or excited about a business partner.

What actually transpired is that there was an electrical (Uranus) fault in some of his cooking equipment (Moon in Cancer) that started a sudden (Uranus) fire (Mars). Not only was his restaurant destroyed but he lived in the flat above (Moon, home) which was also completely destroyed. He therefore had a sudden and unexpected change of home (Uranus, Moon), was very emotionally upset by it (Uranus, Moon) and had to return to live with his mother (Moon) for a while. It also disrupted his income, as Uranus in his birthchart was associated with money.

As an astrologer, I couldn’t have guessed at this outcome. Indeed, if I had, I certainly wouldn’t have foreseen all the specifics – leaving my client to think that astrology was a bit of a waste of time. But if I described his feelings from the inside, and described the symbolism rather than the story, I’m being faithful to the potentiality in his chart. Indeed, the real meaning here at a deeper level was that he felt the restaurant was too small and cramped and he wanted bigger premises to demonstrate his talents, which, as a result of the insurance payout, he was able to achieve, albeit after some inconvenience.

Therefore there are usually myriads of possibilities of executional expression; but it is the symbolism we must rely on to be accurate, we cannot guess at the story that will unfold. The important thing is not to describe the outer event accurately but highlight the deeper meaning of what development in the person is seeking to come forth.

Of course, these layers of meaning are apparent in everyone’s chart but a recent example sticks in my mind. My client, Susan (not her real name) had a challenging aspect in the area of health in her chart. Her Moon, symbolic of the mother, was in this area, and it was in the sign associated with digestion (Virgo). This is a difficult placement as it can suggest that her mother was very critical of her as a child (other things in the chart reinforced this), and this can create a script of perfectionism, self-criticism, and any anxiety tending to hit the digestive area. Uranus was together with (conjunct) the Moon, suggesting that she may have been cold-shouldered at times, or cut off by her mother. This can be quite raw and rejecting. Neptune aspected the Moon too, which has associations of dissolving boundaries, and the Moon is also strongly associated with nutrition and the amount of nurturing she had as a child from her mother.

Now remember, the astrologer does not know how Susan’s birthchart has been lived but the symbolic indicators were suggestive of a difficult rejecting relationship with her mother, and the subsequent self-criticism and anxiety that had been set up in childhood was likely to hit her digestion.

Susan explained that her mother was emotionally unavailable (Moon – Neptune aspects can mean absent mother or can’t ‘get hold of’ mother), and frequently cruel and punishing. To punish Susan, she would deny her food (Moon = nourishment, Uranus = cutting off). This had caused her great distress and feelings of rejection. As she grew up, she had increasing problems with digestion (Virgo), including leaky gut (Neptune dissolves boundaries), IBS and many food allergies (Uranus associated with erratic, intense reactions). These lasted many years and by the time she came to see me she was almost unable to eat as the list of allergies was so long and the allergic reactions so dramatic. So the ‘mind’ of childhood had become the body, personified.

The situation had become extremely serious, as she had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer, which had begun in the gut and spread. Her illness had begun when transiting Pluto had come to a challenging aspect to these three planets. Pluto has associations of death and rebirth, survival issues and extreme stress. Susan’s illness and treatment meant that she felt so unwell that she was physically unable to eat and losing weight dangerously. Uranus in this three-planet configuration was associated with ‘critical health’ in her chart, and Pluto triggering this suggested a major challenge in this area.

Sitting in our session together, I was aware of her Moon almost ‘shape-shifting’ before my eyes, falling through layers and layers of meaning across time and space; of mother, cutting off nurturance (physical and emotional), self-criticism by Susan which affected the digestion (Virgo), all the associated over-reactions to food as if it was a poison, and eventually coming full circle with her illness by denying herself food. The symbolism was so clear and so simple. I was looking at three planets being triggered at that time by Pluto in its orbit. That’s all. But the richness of the symbolism made us both go silent for some moments.

This is not to suggest that Susan’s illness was ‘fated’, that she had no choice in how this area of her life played out. If she had been aware of this very deep-rooted connection and its dangers earlier on, she could have changed her reactions. If she had seen more clearly that her panicky reaction to mother’s punishment became the panicky allergic reaction to food, and ultimately the panicky reaction to life itself, she could have changed how she expressed this symbolism.

It is by becoming aware of these childhood patterns that have become self-destructive in adulthood, that we can change them, and in changing them, we change our destiny.

Astrology, in a sense, is the study of coincidences. It is all about the symbolism manifesting internally in our psyches, and externally as an event. Jung was fascinated by these coincidences, these links between inner and outer events, which have significance for us. Jung observed these many times with his patients. It was often in a dream that his patients would have an experience and then that experience would be echoed in some way in the outside world to remind them of the dream. This Jung called ‘synchronicity’, the meaningful coincidence of the inner and the outer, via archetypal experience. As Jung used astrology to help to diagnose his patients, he essentially understood the planetary archetypes that we have described as the building blocks of the human psyche. These, as we have said, are very ancient and originally part of mythology. They appear to be embedded in our consciousness.

In the same way that Jung witnessed these synchronicities, his clients were usually able to resolve their issues as the symbolism of their unconscious became clear. He used to draw up his clients’ birthcharts, as he felt that these gave him so much insight into their psyches; it gave him a much faster way to understand what they were experiencing. This perception of the common symbolism linking one’s psychology to life events is one of the processes that we see in chart consultations. In this way astrology can increase our consciousness, by pointing out those inner and outer coincidences. The unconscious is then made conscious.

Also, parallel situations occur in adulthood that have their origin in childhood but we are often not consciously aware of them. Astrology can even identify not only how but also when these developments occurred. Childhood experiences, we now know, set up a ‘neural network’ in our brains (see the work of Dr Joe Dispenza) so the road systems, the pathways in our brains, were created and hardwired by these. They repeat into adulthood as our scripts and can be limiting or worse but as long as they remain unconscious, we cannot deal with them. Astrology helps us see these, often in the first chart consultation.

As an example, a client who comes to mind had Pluto in (10th house) the area of the birthchart connected with her work and also her mother. It was in challenging aspect to her Moon (mother) that was in the sign of Scorpio (in 12th house). This speaks of a complex, unspoken relationship with her mother, who is likely to be controlling, dominant, invasive, manipulative and may well have violated my client’s trust as a child, creating deep, intense, turbulent emotions. This was not a picture of a supportive mother. The symbolism was very clear but I didn’t know the childhood details. My client, let’s call her Carol, came to see me about some difficulties at work. Her boss was extremely bullying and controlling, she said. He was constantly checking up on her work and had betrayed her trust by telling others in the company that he didn’t feel she was doing a very good job. He seemed to constantly want to disempower (Pluto) her and she was extremely angry about it. Her emotional intensity (Pluto-Moon) was very clear in our session. She also had been given an enormous volume of work recently, which she felt unable to cope with and it was the last straw (at the time she had transiting Saturn, hard work and burdens, conjunct her natal Pluto).

I asked if her boss reminded her of anyone in childhood who had been controlling and manipulative. She thought for a few seconds, and then burst out, “of course, he’s my mother all over again!” Once this becomes conscious we can start to deal with it, as the script of disempowerment had begun in childhood but been repressed. Anything we do not consciously acknowledge, as Jung believed, will come to you from the outside. He said, “whatever is rejected from the self appears in the world as an event”. She may now choose to deal with these feelings of disempowerment and change the dynamics with her boss – one way or the other. Unless she does consciously change, that deep-seated childhood script is likely to replay whenever her Pluto configuration is triggered.

So we can see that there are many layers of meaning in the birthchart. Yet another is a branch of astrology known as ‘astrocartography’. In that, we are taking the time of your birth and seeing which, if any, of the planets at that moment are in the influential ‘Gauquelin’ position. That is, are they next to the Ascendant or the Midheaven, which we know are very powerful positions, and if so, seeing where they fall across the Earth (imagine the planet casting a shadow) at your birth moment.

This can be very revealing. For instance, Margaret Thatcher’s Mars (archetypally, god of war) at the time of her birth ran straight through the Falkland Islands and Buenos Aires. That means that at her birth moment Mars came to the Ascendant in that geography. The Falkland Islands were a surprisingly remote place with which to go to war but the potential was already there in her chart.

Reproduced with the kind permission of Michael Harding,from ‘Working with Astrology’.

Margaret Thatcher’s natal Mars and astrocartography19

Similarly, George W. Bush’s (senior) Mars line ran straight through Afghanistan and Pakistan. In this case Mars at the time of his birth became conjunct the Midheaven over those countries. Observing strong planetary transits to his natal Mars, astrologer Jim Shawvan, wrote in his article ‘The Red Planet and the White House: Mars in the Presidency of George W. Bush’, in ‘The Mountain Astrologer’ April/May 2001: “During Dubya’s term in office, he may judge it necessary to threaten or even use force in either Afghanistan or Pakistan or both, in response to anti-American violence. Given the transits of Saturn and Neptune to Dubya’s Mars, I would expect these countries to become a focus of his attention no later than the last week of June 2001, then again starting in mid-December, and on into the following year”.20Following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, George Bush launched the invasion of Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, and the war gradually spread into NW Pakistan by 2004.

For J F Kennedy, at the moment of his birth Pluto (planet of death and trauma) had come to the Midheaven precisely over Dallas, where he was assassinated.21

In my own case, Mercury was conjunct the Midheaven in Toronto at the moment of my birth. This is the place to which I emigrated after university, and began a career in the communications business that led to a very successful career in advertising. Mercury is the planet associated with communication. My natal Venus contacts the Ascendant in a remote area of SW France where I bought a small house, and I feel incredibly relaxed and contented there.

It’s not important if you don’t fully understand the technicalities of astrocartography; what is important is that we are ‘slicing’ the moment of birth a different way. As Michael Harding and Charles Harvey point out in their excellent book ‘Working with Astrology’, what we are looking at here is our relationship not only with the planets but also the Earth. We can get insight into different experiences we are likely to have in different parts of the globe.

I have a friend whose Mars-Uranus conjunction with the Ascendant runs through Sydney, Australia in her astrocartography. This is associated with sudden accidents and unexpected incidents and breakage. Her luggage was lost, and in the time she spent there she had two car crashes and broke several ribs, an arm and a leg.

If you are planning a chart consultation ask the astrologer to calculate your astrocartography then just reflect on the experiences you may have had there. You may find some interesting coincidences.

And so it is by the astrologer analysing all these different dimensions of internal meaning in the chart, that allows insightful correspondences for the past and the present and projections of meaning for the future. With all of this understanding, we can develop clarity and purpose moving forwards.

*

To summarise: we have looked at many different layers of meaning in the birthchart. The astrologer must consider the shape of the chart, the elemental balance of Fire, Air, Earth and Water; the modalities of cardinal, fixed and mutable; the astrological signs; planetary symbolism, which is modified by all of the above; planetary groupings; geometric aspects; midpoints; harmonics; medical astrology; and transits of planets in their orbits. Each piece of this has meaning. It’s more important to understand development than to describe character, because it sheds more light on how we’re behaving now, and how our lives have unfolded. We’ve emphasised how astrology is symbolically predictive, not executionally, as we have freewill in playing our music. However, the music can sometimes get stuck in childhood patterns that no longer serve us, and astrology can help us to identify those too. Finally, we have looked at astrocartography, your own personal relationship with the Earth as well as with the planets.

7

From the Ancient Greeks to Quantum Physics

“Behold, the kingdom of God is within you”.

Luke 17:21

The Ancient Greeks made a major contribution to the development of astrology, mainly due to the philosophies of Pythagoras and Plato.

Pythagoras was born in 569 BC and studied in Babylon. Babylonian astrology very much saw man as a fated being, but Pythagoras was the first to develop the concept of man as a free individual. Astrology became much more individually focused from that point, as up to then it had been largely monarch and country based in its prognostications.

Pythagoras combined science and religion in his concept of astrology. He believed that each individual’s soul was eternal, and each one of us holds the potential for full consciousness. He felt that it was through understanding planetary movements and their meaning that we could access the divine. But his major contribution to astrology and western thought was his philosophy that number, and numerical relationships, are the basis of the universe. He saw numbers as sacred, with each having its own symbolic meaning, beyond that of literal counting. These theories still form the foundation of our modern day astrology.

Pythagoras was thus a mystic and a mathematician. He believed that the organisation of the cosmos and the psyche of man both reflected the meaning of these numerical patterns. Geometry and numbers were sacred because they were the code, the building blocks, behind the hidden order of creation;a they not only provided the underpinning of forms in the material universe, but also their meaning.

Pythagoras also discovered that whole numbers governed musical harmonies, and that there was clear arithmetic behind musical intervals. He felt that if numbers can represent the harmonies of music, there was no reason that they could not represent the harmonies of the universe itself, as geometry governed the movement of the planets. He invented the term ‘the Harmony of the Spheres’, reflecting this idea. Mathematical patterns in nature, he believed, represented the language of divine intelligence; and forms derived from numbers, whether they were natural, musical, astronomical or architectural, were also sacred. Pythagoras had developed a very important idea here. It wasn’t simply that he observed the mathematical underpinning of the cosmos; it was that these patterns enabled you to penetrate to a deeper divine reality of meaning, beyond the physical world. Therefore he is often referred to as the ‘father of sacred geometry’.

Pythagoras’ theories are very important for astrology. Not only is astrology a highly mathematical and precise language but also each number does have meaning for the birthchart. One (conjunction) represents unity, two (opposition) duality, three (trine) harmony, four (square) action, conflict to be resolved, and so on. Essentially one is dividing the 360º circle by different numbers to determine these separate meanings.

Dividing the circle by five produces a 72º angle (quintile), which appears to be a measure of one’s creativity. If more than three of these aspects between any planets occur in a birthchart the individual is considered to be very creative. Dividing the circle by two produces 180º, an opposition, which can show how much objectivity a person is likely to show. If someone has no oppositions in their birthchart, they may lack objectivity and see things very much from their own point of view. Indeed, there is an entire branch of astrology known as ‘harmonics’, referred to in the previous chapter, where the celestial longitude of each planet in the birthchart is multiplied by different numbers to give deeper views of an individual’s spirituality or sense of purpose, or capacity to feel joy.

Harmonic charts offer finer and finer slices of an individual’s being, based on the meaning of the number being used. For instance, the 7th harmonic chart describes our spiritual or mystical dimension, the 8th our capacity for effort, willpower, and action to make things happen, the 9th our capacity for joy, bliss, happiness and the ‘ideal to be realised’. Harmonic theory is very much rooted in Hindu astrology; but its underlying principle is as Pythagoras stated: that numbers each have a distinct and symbolic meaning. That has remained a fundamental pillar of astrology ever since, from almost 2,500 years ago. For astrologers, please see John Addey’s excellent book ‘Harmonics in Astrology’.

Plato was born in 427 BC, following close behind Pythagoras, and was heavily influenced by him. Plato believed that the symbolism of numbers represented the highest level of knowledge. He thought that all things grew from numbers and, like Pythagoras, thought they were the basis of reality. He believed that simple 3-D geometry and repeating patterns produced material forms in nature and in the world. At the time his ideas were considered to be quite mystical. However, later discoveries of mathematical and geometric forms in nature, such as the structure of crystals, snowflakes, leaf growth, spiders’ webs, and even DNA itself, confirm his theories.

Plato believed that planetary orbits with their eternal regularity and predictability represented the “flowing image of eternity”. He saw the planets as measuring time, and believed that the divine could be awakened in each individual if they were in harmony with celestial patterns. Plato theorised that there was a ‘World of Being’, which was eternal, perfect and unchanging. Within this ‘World of Being’, Plato described the Perfect World of Ideas, or Forms, which were the archetypes from which the ‘World of Becoming’ became manifest as concrete reality, and as life in this world. Although he saw the ‘World of Becoming’ as one that decays, he felt that if you can get closer to the ‘World of Being’ you could slow down this decay. Planets were closer to this world and at a higher level than the ‘World of Becoming’, so if you could harmonise with these celestial patterns, Plato believed you could have greater control over your destiny.

Plato’s Worldview

Essentially, Plato like Pythagoras saw the world as highly ordered on mathematical principles, and this geometry was reflected in the human psyche as well as within the cosmos. Soul was also a key part of the cosmos and of us; it wasn’t simply about number. Plato believed that there was a pervasive, transcendent intelligence, which he referred to as the ‘mind of God’, that gives the ‘World of Being’ its archetypal design, and which guides it to unfold over time into the ‘World of Becoming’. So it is the Perfect Ideas, or Archetypes, which are the building blocks of the manifest universe, the life we see all around us in ourselves and others. The ‘World of Being’ contains the model and pattern of the cosmos in all its perfection.

The Ancient Greek philosophers including Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Plotinus and Ptolemy all had a similar vision of a divine organising intelligence operating behind everything, and from this flowed the Forms, Ideas and Archetypes, which encapsulated meaning. This was the source of our physical world. In this way, the Ancient Greeks saw a unified cosmos, which operated in a continuous flow of meaning and manifestation. Man was not separate from the cosmos, but an intrinsic part of the unified whole, which was a single living organism. The Archetypes manifested equally in the physical world as well as within the psyche of man.

This all-pervasive concept is powerful and supports the astrological model perfectly. In astrology, each planet, as we have seen, is associated with archetypal symbolism, which combined with the geometry of the aspects in our individual birthchart, gives us our unique pattern, or ‘information code’ from which our character and behaviour flow. Astrology is completely in line with this Ancient Greek model from almost 2,500 years ago, and in this sense Pythagoras and Plato were extremely influential in astrological thinking through history. We still use the archetypes, number and geometry described by them long ago.

We shall see in a later chapter how these archetypes manifest in the outer world, as well as in our personal lives. Whether inner or outer, the world appears to operate consistently with Plato’s vision of universal law.

The reason that these theories are even more relevant for us today is that over two millennia later, David Bohm, who was a theoretical physicist at the University of London and a colleague of Einstein, developed his own theories based on leading-edge science of how the universe operates, which bear striking parallels to the views of Plato and Pythagoras. Bohm was passionate about investigating the deeper nature of reality, and he had long conversations with his friend Krishnamurti, the Indian mystic, on the subject. Although this no doubt influenced his views, he remained a rigorous theoretical physicist.

Quantum field theory now teaches that at the quantum level, we are one unbroken field of energy, we are all connected. David Bohm describes this as a “universal order of undivided wholeness”. For Bohm, “what we call empty space contains an immense background of energy”.22 He believed that there was a deeper order of existence, a vast and more fundamental level of reality, from which our objects and physical reality in the world are formed. He called this the ‘implicate’ or ‘enfolded’ order, and the manifest or ‘explicate’ order flows from this higher reality. He felt that matter was merely a small ripple on this vast ocean of energy in the universe, and that there was something immensely greater behind our physical world of objects. He stated, “There is an implicate order and there is an infinite sea of energy, and this unfolds to form time, space and matter”.

In order to demonstrate this ‘hidden implicate order’, Bohm used this analogy: if you take a jar of glycerine and stir in a drop of ink (imagine a stirrer in a honey jar), gradually the ink would disappear and be invisible within the glycerine. But that doesn’t mean that the ink no longer exists; it’s simply that it’s no longer visible. If it were possible to ‘unwind’ the ink droplet, so it finally began to emerge from the glycerine, then that ‘hidden order’ would become apparent again. Equally, in the rough-and-tumble of life we don’t necessarily see this ‘hidden order of meaning’. We may see life as chaotic or just ‘out there’ and happening to us, rather than us happening to life.

Bohm also believed that, as mystics have been speaking of for thousands of years, as far back as the Vendanta Sanskrit texts, that “all is one”. He believed that everything in the universe was a continuum, and the apparent separateness of things at the explicate, physical level was really an illusion. Ultimately at the implicate level, everything was connected to everything else. “The implicate order could equally be called Idealism, Spirit, Consciousness. The separation of the two – matter and Spirit – is an abstraction. The ground is always one”.23

The diagram below helps to show the parallels between Bohm’s view and that of Plato:

Plato’s Worldview and David Bohm’s Worldview

An important part of Bohm’s thinking is that things that appear to be disordered at one level, from a higher level don’t appear to be disordered at all. If you are rushing along amongst bustling crowds in a busy New York street at rush hour, it may appear chaotic, but seen from above with speeded-up film the scene has a rhythmic pattern. Bohm believed that what appears to be random chaos contains a deeper meaning, that of the implicate order. “A hidden order may be present in what appears to be random”. His theories are highly consistent, in modern quantum-thinking form, with the ancient concepts of Pythagoras and Plato. These now appear to have heightened relevance with the latest quantum field understanding that ‘all is one undivided wholeness’, and that material reality manifests as a result of higher level meaning.

The reason these concepts are so important for us to understand is that this thinking fully supports the way astrology operates. The physicist William Keepin, PhD, has also spoken about the parallels between Bohm’s theories and astrology.

There is no doubt for me that astrology operates at the ‘implicate level’ of our being, and we then use our freewill to choose its explicate manifestation in our lives.

So whether we are thinking of Plato’s World of Being as a higher order of meaning, or whether we refer to it as Bohm’s implicate order, I profoundly believe that this is the level at which your birthchart can be understood. It is pure potentiality; it is not yet lived out. It has not yet unfolded into the World of Becoming, or the explicate order, where things take on a physical reality. It is only when you apply your freewill, use energy, and employ choices that your chart manifests in the world.

So our lives are a combination of our unique, fundamental pattern in our birthchart, and then the level at which we are expressing it becomes our energy, our vibration. It is this particular frequency of vibration, our level of consciousness, which then creates our lives. We are all aware that we have to tune our radio dial to a certain frequency to receive Classic FM, and on that frequency we can’t receive Radio 4 or the local rock station. It is the same with our lives; we have to be tuned into what we want to receive.

This is consistent with quantum theory. In the quantum world, electrons are not solid, nor do they have specific locations; they exist as waves of pure potentiality and have a spectrum of possibilities. This is directly analogous to our birthchart, which exists as potential archetypal energy but also with a spectrum of executional possibilities. They are like waves that have not yet become particles. Therefore once our attention and our level of consciousness are directed to these waves of pure potential in the universe, they collapse from waves into particles, and produce an event in our lives.

In this way, our birthcharts make it very clear that we are co-creators. One of the reasons I believe that clients find consultations inspiring or uplifting is that they are ‘lifted up’ in their understanding of their true meaning, up to their implicate pattern, their higher level of being. They see beyond the overwhelm of challenges in their lives, and perceive the development that is trying to emerge.

Dennis Elwell has written beautifully about this concept in his book ‘The Cosmic Loom’. Essentially, if we think of life as a tapestry, we only tend to see the ‘weft’, the fabric of life’s events that weaves horizontally around the ‘warp’, the hidden vertical strands of meaning. So we just see the horizontal hubbub, and may feel it is chaotic and random; we remain unaware of the deeper connections of meaning around which our lives operate.

Planetary archetypes form the ‘warp’, the pillars of meaning

This analogy of warp and weft echoes Plato’s World of Being and Becoming, and David Bohm’s implicate and explicate orders. We have freewill in how we weave the ‘weft’, but our lives are underpinned fundamentally by the hidden strands of meaning, the warp. These are the planetary archetypes. Bohm believed that ‘meaning’ might represent the underlying and all-pervasive organising principle of the universe, for it “penetrates the cosmos or even what is beyond the cosmos”.24He believed that meaning was the key factor of being, not only for human beings individually and socially, but perhaps for nature and the whole universe.

Bohm felt meaning was such a fundamental organising principle in our lives that he went beyond Einstein’s theories of reality, with his famous equation of E = mc2. In this, Einstein was describing the inter-relationship between matter and energy, but Bohm added a third element to this, which was meaning. Indeed, he felt that this was possibly the most important and stated that: “meaning enfolds both matter and energy”, almost like eggs being folded into a cake mix. He felt that any change in our sense of meaning could turn matter into energy, and energy into matter; these changes would be felt through the body, as a “new meaning is what organises a new state”.25

Imagine you are walking home late one night down a poorly-lit street, and you hear footsteps behind you. You speed up a little, and so does the person behind. Your heart may begin to beat a little faster, your adrenalin starts to pump, and you may feel some fear and panic. In this way the meaning you are giving to this experience is changing your matter (physiology) in every cell of your body, and your energy (fear, contraction). If however you suddenly discover it is your favourite neighbour trying to catch you up, the entire meaning, physiology, and energy of the experience changes, probably with much relieved laughter.

If you think about it, all through the minutes and hours of our days, events are occurring and we are allocating meaning to them. Jung said it’s not what happens to us, it’s how we react to what happens to us that determines character. So let’s say we fail to get a job we’ve applied for. Do we say to ourselves, “I’m a loser, a failure, I never get what I want in life”, or do we say, “I know a better one will come along”. The meanings of the stories we tell ourselves make up our lives. So meaning appears to be a combination, firstly of the meaning that comes from the archetypal pattern in our birthchart, together with the thoughts we are thinking, and the associated meaning and emotion that come from those thoughts, as illustrated above.

Bohm went even further with his understanding of meaning. He felt that it was the most essential feature of consciousness, and even said perhaps it was “better to focus on meaning rather than consciousness”.26 Consciousness, therefore, is nothing without meaning. As he believed that we are the “totality of our meanings”,27 he felt that “any transformation in consciousness must be a transformation of meaning”.28

The reason this is so important for astrology is that it is a language of meaning. Bohm saw the meaning realm as the invisible implicate order, and energy and matter as part of the explicate, manifest realm. However, consciousness (meaning) was constantly influencing matter; indeed, Bohm actually believed that it was a more subtle form of matter.

An instructive example of how powerfully changes in consciousness can affect matter comes from the work of Dr Joe Dispenza, a neuroscientist with whom I have been studying for several years. Recently Dr Joe has begun to collect data on how changes in consciousness during deep meditation show in brainwave patterns. He measured these changes during an advanced retreat in Arizona in February 2013. There were some dramatic changes in the brainwave patterns of meditators as measured on EEG equipment, but more importantly several participants who had been suffering from serious physical conditions experienced profound healing as a result of this shift in consciousness. Dr Joe explained this as the higher level of coherence achieved in meditation effecting a ‘downward causation’, and resulting in a reorganisation of matter, their physiology. This supports Bohm’s theory that a “new meaning (an upward shift in consciousness in this case) organises a new state.”

Bohm believed that every human consciousness had its source in the implicate (archetypal, planetary) realm. What is so insightful about astrology is that your birthchart, I believe, brings together your individual pattern of meaning in this implicate realm, and links it to your physical life on Earth.

The ‘crosswires’ or axes of your birthchart act like lightning rods, anchoring you between your unique planetary pattern in the heavens, and your life lived out in time-based reality on Earth. They are the crossing point of the invisible world of meaning with the concrete world of manifestation. This is the language of astrology.

Astrology does more, however. It doesn’t just describe your character, as is the common perception. It illuminates threads of meaning in your archetypal pattern that you will have lived out. The perception of these meanings (as with the client with a dominant mother and boss) allows connections to be made which can vitally change and raise our consciousness. In changing our consciousness (meaning) we change our physiology (matter) and our energy. It provides a process of transformation that can be very rapid.

We now have a wealth of evidence as to how the meaning of our lives determines the thinking, the emotion, the energy and even the physical matter of our bodies, all through our days.

We have mounting evidence for this principle from such leaders in the field as Candace Pert in ‘Molecules of Emotion’, and Bruce Lipton in ‘Biology of Belief’. Candace Pert wrote beautifully of the discovery of how a change in our emotions (our sense of meaning) creates a cascade of neuropeptide changes in every single cell in our bodies. Neuropeptides are the biochemical equivalent of our thoughts and emotions. Bruce Lipton’s ground-breaking work showed the vital importance of the meaning we perceive of events in our lives to change our biology in every moment, and result in improved or diminished health. It is well known that in the western world the incidence of heart attacks peak on a Monday morning, around 9am. This is a dramatic example of the meaning (perhaps dreading going to a stressful job you hate) affecting your physiology.

A sense of meaningless is an increasingly common condition today, but Bohm saw this not as a total lack, but as an inadequate or diminished sense of meaning. The solution is to have a greater sense of one’s own value, or meaning, which will instantly change our energy into a new way of thinking. Meaning is everything. Bohm felt it constituted consciousness, and it is at the heart of astrology. As Dane Rudhyar, humanistic psychologist and astrologer, said: “Showing man the meaningfulness of his life is the most important thing that astrology can do.”

*

To summarise: we have tracked through the theories of the Ancient Greeks, that numbers were sacred and were the building blocks behind our reality, and that mathematical patterns in nature were evidence of the divine organising intelligence of our manifest reality. We have seen how they believed there was a line of meaning running through the universe from the planets and archetypes, to our physical life on Earth, and our psyches, and how David Bohm’s theories as a theoretical physicist have distinct parallels to this. We have seen how Bohm and the Ancient Greeks both believed that our universe was one huge living organism, rather than anything operating on mechanical principles. It had soul and consciousness. We have seen how for the Greeks via the Archetypes, and for Bohm as an organising principle, meaning was everything. As he said, we are the totality of our meanings. Finally, that meaning is the most essential feature of consciousness, and enfolds matter and energy.

Our birthcharts act as the anchor point for our unique archetypal meaning and our life here on Earth. Astrology is the language by which we can decode the interpenetration of this invisible pattern of meaning and our day-to-day lives. Just as in the quantum world, our birthcharts exist as pure potential; as co-creators in our reality, we can choose from a spectrum of executional possibilities at any moment.

8

Deeper and Deeper We Go

“In some sense man is a microcosm of the universe; therefore what man is, is a clue to the universe.”

David Bohm

Both Einstein and Bohm were focused on how energy can transform itself into matter. Both were interested in the fact that we may think things in our everyday life are solid, like tables, chairs, walls, and ourselves, but they may not be. That may just be our perception. Einstein’s theories were all about the interchangeability of mass and energy; his famous equation E = mc2 contradicted Newton’s theories of matter being solid, and that the universe was clockwork and separate.

We know now, from the quantum understanding of the universe, that we human beings and all that we see is 99.99999% empty space. As Einstein said, “reality is merely an illusion, although a very persistent one”. If you took one of us and removed all of the space between the electrons and nuclei of the atoms in our body and then condensed them down, the mass in each human would be smaller than the point of a pin. We may not be used to thinking that way, but we are almost entirely vibrating energy, gravitationally organised patterns of light. We may think that people and things appear to be separate, but we know at a quantum level this is not the case; Bohm believed that matter was merely a ‘ripple’ on an ocean of energy, and that the universe was one indivisible whole, that everything was connected.

In 1963 Edward Lorenz, in developing ‘chaos theory’, had already hypothesised interconnectedness. This is commonly known as the ‘butterfly’s wings’ theory, as tiny, apparently insignificant changes can have an effect on the whole. In 1964, J.S. Bell, who was a particle physicist at CERN in Switzerland, theorised that once particles were ‘entangled’, and then separated by distances, they would continue to react at the same moment in time. “Reality” Bell said, “is non-local”; he had proved that this was mathematically possible via ‘Bell’s Theorem’.

However in 1982 some remarkable experiments were conducted at the University of Paris by Alain Aspect and his team. These ultimately confirmed the theories of Bohm, Lorenz and Bell, that everything was connected.

Aspect discovered that at the quantum level subatomic particles like electrons were apparently able to communicate with each other. More surprisingly, they did this instantly, with no time delay over distance, however great that distance was; it could have been 10 feet or 10 million miles, it didn’t matter at this level of reality. There appeared to be an awareness by each particle of the other particles, so there was a web of communication exchange which could not be explained by classical physics. In fact, this was the reason that Einstein had never been able to resolve what he called “spooky happenings at a distance”. He was aware that something else was going on which he had not taken account of to allow this instant communication, but as he believed that nothing could travel faster than light, he was never able to solve this puzzle which he struggled with for many years. That is why these experiments were so ground-breaking; they finally proved what other great thinkers such as Bohm, Lorenz and Bell had theorised. The laws of physics were starting to look very different in terms of how the world worked.

What was also remarkable about these experiments was that they suggested to Bohm that these subatomic particles could keep in contact with each other not by any mysterious signal or physical force, or by any physical exchange, as that would have resulted in a delay across time and space: rather, it was because we only perceive them as separate, but at the quantum level this was not the case; he believed that at a deeper level of reality, these particles were not separate entities, they were all part of one indivisible whole.

Sometimes it is hard for us to understand these concepts, as in our everyday world apparently time and space do exist; if I post a letter to New York, I know it may take a few days to get there, as New York is a long way away. The world for us is operating within our understanding of the classical laws of physics. But in this quantum world, time and space appear to be irrelevant; they don’t exist. Not only that, but the effect is not reduced across time or distance.

A very clear example of this is an experiment conducted by a colleague of Deepak Chopra, Cleve Baxter. He was studying the sperm of an individual, and had placed a sample three rooms away, being measured by EEG equipment. When the subject was asked to smell some amyl nitrate, the sperm forty feet away showed a spike in the readings. This was again evidence of interconnectedness; communication happened across distance with no time delay, even though the subject’s sperm in the test tube down the corridor was apparently separate from him.29

These findings of Alain Aspect and Bohm’s theory of universal interconnectedness can begin to give us an explanation as to how telepathy, ESP, distant healing and related activities may operate. We see it all the time in nature. In watching a flock of birds or a shoal of fish suddenly change direction, we are witnessing some kind of instant communication. Rupert Sheldrake, Professor at Cambridge, conducted experiments where researchers were told to simply observe when dogs became excited at the prospect of their owners returning home. The owners were returning at different times, and from different places, but the dogs became agitated and alert at exactly the moment when their owners left to come home. At some level, this is clearly showing a form of interconnectedness between the owner and the dog.30

A well-known example of this interconnectedness comes from the observation of Japanese monkeys in the 1950s, which lived on the island of Koshima. Researchers were delivering truckloads of sweet potatoes for them, but the monkeys didn’t like the covering of dirt and grit. One super-smart monkey discovered that if she washed the sweet potatoes in the sea it solved the problem, and rapidly the habit spread amongst the group. What was surprising, however, was that monkeys on neighbouring islands, without any direct contact with the Koshima monkeys, started to do the same. This was reported in Lyall Watson’s wonderful book ‘Lifetide’ (1979), and is an illustration of some kind of non-direct communication across distance, via the collective unconscious of monkeys.

All of this and the wealth of evidence from the natural world demonstrate interconnectedness. Physicist Paul Davies observed that if all particles are continually communicating, the “the non-local aspects of quantum systems are therefore a general property of nature”31 (my italics). More importantly for us, this principle is highly relevant to the astrological model.

Science knows that gravity is too weak for the planets to have any physical pull on humankind, which was part of the reason that astrology was discredited according to mechanistic Newtonian laws, in the 17th century. If something couldn’t be proved to operate as a mechanical force, it couldn’t be valid. Now, with our understanding of quantum field theory, that we are one unbroken wholeness, we can see that astrology is consistent with these models. We are all part of one universe. What happens with the planets is reflected in us.

In order to understand this further, we need to examine another principle in quantum theory. Larry Dossey MD, doctor and metaphysical author, talks of how in the quantum world non-local events are what he calls ‘acausally related’. What that means is that one event isn’t actually causing another by any physical or mechanical force (just as J.S. Bell had theorised in 1964 and Alain Aspect’s experiments confirmed), but the behaviour of one event “is immediately correlated and co-ordinated with the other.”

This of course is exactly what we witness in astrology. The movements of planets in their orbits do not physically cause any change in us. There is nothing mechanical happening, no push or pull. It is simply that we are acausally related to and interrelated with the planets, so their movements are totally correlated with our feelings, emotions, and experiences on Earth. The inner and the outer, the microcosm and the macrocosm, the human psyche and the planets, are all part of one living organism, as the Ancient Greeks hypothesised. There is no separation.

Following in the tradition of this Ancient Greek theory, that the universe was one living organism, David Bohm said: “Such quantum wholeness of activity is closer to the organised unity of the functioning of the parts of a living being than it is to the kind of unity that is obtained by putting together a machine”.32

Going one step further, Bohm believed that this one vast indivisible wholeness of the universe is one gigantic hologram. This also has direct relevance for astrology, as we shall see.

Holograms are becoming increasingly common to see in our everyday lives, as the refracting images on credit cards and passport photographs for instance. You may also be familiar with a hologram from the film ‘Star Wars’ with Princess Leila, when her ghostly image can be seen from all sides. So a hologram isn’t flat like a photograph, but is a 3-dimensional image, created by diffracting patterns of light. Imagine throwing a pebble in a pond, and watching the ripples that are produced; then throw another pebble in a different part of the pond, and the ripples emerging from that cross the first set and create ‘interference’. This is basically how holography works, but with light.

Holography is essentially lens-less photography and holograms are what you get when you record light scattered from an object, and then later reconstruct that light to give the appearance of a 3-dimensional object, even when that object is no longer there. You can theoretically walk through a hologram, as they are not solid.

If you have a photograph of a dog, you can cut it up into pieces, and you will end up with parts of the dog on each piece: paws, head, and so on. However if you have a hologram of a dog, then the image is cut in half, and illuminated by laser, you do not get half a dog, or bits of a dog. Each half will still contain the entire image of the dog. If you keep on cutting up the hologram, each piece will always be a smaller but intact version of the original image. So each part of the hologram contains all of the information possessed by the whole.

This “whole in part” nature of holograms – the whole is in the part and the part is in the whole – is an entirely new way of understanding organisation and order. It is completely different from the mechanical solid building-block worldview of the last 300 years, but it is, I believe, exactly in line with astrology.

The nature of holograms has been in my mind for many years whenever I work on a birthchart. It starts as a flat piece of paper coming out of the printer but quite quickly, as deductions are made, it becomes a shimmering sphere of meaning, which is multi-dimensional, multi-layered, full of rich symbology and criss-crossing geometry, that has profound meaning for the individual, stretching across time and space. Just like a hologram, it is not solid; it is your mathematical expression of energy. It is information. And, just like the ‘whole in part’ nature of the hologram, you can find the whole in its separate parts, the individual’s sacred meaning.

You can give an accurate character analysis just by looking at an individual’s midpoints (just the halfway point in space between any two planets at the moment of their birth); or just by looking at the mathematical angles between planets and their astrological signs; or just by considering their harmonic charts. With a hologram, a small piece of it has poorer resolution than that of the whole image. In the same way, only taking slices of information from the chart as above will give a less detailed, but still accurate picture of the whole person. There is undoubtedly a holographic quality to astrology.

In another way, this ‘whole in part’ nature of holograms manifests in another way in the birthchart, with the idea of the macrocosm and the microcosm. Planets are represented in the birthchart but obviously are not there in any physical sense; there is no physical cause involved. What we seem to be seeing here are identical developmental urges, the acausal relationship, whether in the outer world or the inner. For instance, one of the developmental processes that Uranus is associated with is breaking up old patterns, and we will be looking at that in depth for the world in the next chapter. So in our birthcharts we capture in this macrocosmic/microcosmic way the essence of the specific correlations that are associated with Saturn, Uranus, Pluto and so on.

We can go another step with this too, for Bohm felt that the universe was not just a gigantic hologram but that the deep structure of reality was holographic, being a realm of frequencies and potentialities. He felt that this was in constant flow and he described the emergence of life from this higher implicate order of being as “holomovement”. He said: “all entities are forms of holomovement”. Indeed, what we are looking at in a chart consultation is essentially holomovement; we are looking at the way the client is ‘playing their music’, and making their life emerge on planet Earth through the movement of time.

Holographic theory is gaining growing acceptance in scientific circles, but the term “holographic universe” was first used by David Bohm and Karl Pribham. Pribham was a Stanford University neurophysiologist, and had studied the brain extensively. He had also become convinced of the holographic nature of reality. They had worked on their theories separately but had come together when they realised that they had come to very similar conclusions about the holographic model.

Bohm developed the theory that the brain operates in a manner similar to a hologram, in accordance with quantum mathematical principles and the characteristics of wave patterns. Pribham for some years had been trying to determine where memory is stored in the brain, and his theories about brain function grew from these. There had been some important experiments conducted in the 1920s, when brain scientist Karl Lashley repeatedly operated to remove various parts of rats’ brains. However, no matter how much of the brains he removed, the rats astonishingly still remembered complex tasks that they had learned previously. It didn’t improve the co-ordination skills of these poor volunteer rats, but it didn’t affect their memory. Pribham therefore came to believe that memory is scattered throughout the brain, that there wasn’t a specific physical ‘memory location’. Somehow the workings of memory, and the brain, appeared to be much more holistic than that. Ultimately he came to believe that the brain itself is a hologram.

Other authorities on the brain (such as Keith Floyd, Professor of Psychology and author of ‘Of Time and the Mind’) have become very interested in holography as a way of understanding its function. If the brain operated by storing information via nerve impulses it is theorised it simply wouldn’t be possible to hold a lifetime’s memories. However, holograms have two special features in this regard. Firstly, they have a huge capacity for storing information; 1 cubic centimetre of film can contain as much as 10 billion bits of information. Secondly, the holographic model could account for the speed at which things can be recalled. We don’t have to sift through filing cabinets of information in our brains in any kind of linear way if we are trying to recall something; it happens much faster than that.

The quantum model gives support for Bohm and Pribham’s holographic theories; they may even be the way that consciousness operates. Bohm believed that a blizzard of frequencies emanate from the implicate order, a deeper level of reality, and that these are then decoded by the brain holographically to make sense of our objective world, as holograms excel at translating frequencies. Pribham shared this view. It is a little like a television set interpreting signals and frequencies to turn them into comprehensible words and pictures. The film ‘The Matrix’ is an example of reality as a hologram. All of this, as we have discussed, is entirely compatible with the astrological model. Interestingly, researchers have found that the brain may even be sensitive to cosmic frequencies.

As we have stated, holograms are not solid. You can wave your hand through them, there is nothing tangible there, but they still convey information. Science tells us that only an infinitesimal part of the universe is matter – only 0.00001% in us. So in this invisible world, which perhaps is not empty, but filled with frequencies and potentialities, could this not also contain our astrological DNA, our patterning, which does not operate by any physical exchange in the universe but by information and perhaps vibration? The holographic way that astrology seems to operate suggests that is so.

Increasingly, science is coming to believe that information and vibration (energy) are vital components, possibly the components, of our universe. Bruce Lipton, previously Professor of Anatomy, speaks of wave energy or vibration being one hundred times more powerful than drugs or chemistry. We are essentially electrical beings. Pribham became convinced that the cosmos was a kind of frequency domain, an entire spectrum of waveforms, like a symphony. This has strong echoes of Pythagoras’s description of the ‘Harmony of the Spheres’ from 2,500 years before.

All of this thinking is highly relevant to astrology. The entire study of Harmonics is based on waveforms; different aspects in the birthchart create different ‘vibrations’; some aspects (particularly multiples of 30 degrees) are relaxed and passive, others have tension and demand action (multiples of 45 degrees). The balance of whether someone is ‘fiery’ or ‘earthy’ creates a different energy and vibration in the individual. Vibration also is determined by the level at which the birthchart is lived out. For instance, emotions can be measured on EEG equipment. Depression has a very different frequency to joy; changing our emotion changes our frequency, our vibration. Today, there are a myriad of courses in the world to help you to do that.

So we are living in a very different world to the 17th century. Reality then was seen to be solid. It was made of building blocks that operated in an entirely predictable mechanical way. The universe was seen to be filled with inanimate, unconscious matter. In school, electrons used to be demonstrated as solid polystyrene balls; we now know that they are waves of probability, that don’t even have an exact location. Now reality is seen to be vibrational, full of potential and possibility that can be awakened by consciousness. When Newton developed his laws of motion and gravity, he believed that they explained everything in the universe, and astrology at that point was excommunicated from any intellectual respectability.

Newton’s laws do indeed work perfectly for the ‘big’ world, the world we can see, but unfortunately collapse completely when we study the tiny, the subatomic world. That operates to very different laws. We are at the shift-point from the mechanical worldview to one of consciousness and vibration.

Strangely then, as the Newtonian paradigm of living in a clockwork, solid, universe fades, theories from over 2,000 years ago are being resurrected with our modern understanding of a quantum universe. In this both ancient and quantum paradigm, astrology fits perfectly.

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To summarise: in this chapter we have seen proof of interconnectedness at the quantum level, and that instant communication can happen across time and irrespective of distance, as we’re not separate at that level. Aspect’s experiments suggest that there is no mechanical or physical causation happening between particles, or in our case planets and people. Another principle in quantum theory is that things are ‘acausally related’ or correlated, exactly as we see in astrology. As part of this interconnectedness, Bohm believed that the universe was one gigantic hologram. An essential feature of holograms is that the whole is in the part, as well as the part in the whole. This is absolutely fundamental to the way astrology operates, that the microcosm reflects the macrocosm. Finally, science is increasingly discovering that the solidity of our world is an illusion; we live in a web of frequency and potentiality, which are at the heart of astrological theory.

9

The Macrocosm and the Microcosm

“This world is inescapably linked to the motions of the worlds above.”

Aristotle

In this chapter we will move from our focus on the individual, to see how astrology may operate in a global context. As I write this in 2013 we are in the middle of one of the most important planetary cycles that there is: an aspect between Uranus and Pluto. Individually, and even more so together, they represent the greatest planetary archetypes of change that we have. They are the ‘big bruisers’ of the solar system in terms of change in our lives and in the world.

This particular aspect is a 90° aspect, a square, between Uranus and Pluto in their orbits, which began in June 2012 and will continue until March 2015. This is a rare aspect; we will not have an identical aspect for another 127 years.

Uranus, as we have discussed in previous chapters, is associated with sudden change, disruption, events happening out of the blue, restlessness, uncertainty, volatility, erratic energy where things feel speeded up and on/off; creative opportunities appearing and a feeling of liberation and freedom. Essentially, it is associated with breaking down old patterns to break through to the new.

Pluto is not so much sudden, fast-moving change but deep, fundamental change, like a snake shedding its skin, when things are never the same again after it has passed. It is associated with endings and beginnings, death and rebirth, and transformation. It is ultimately associated with restructuring, often after a period of stress.

As I write in 2013, Uranus and Pluto have been forming a ‘pincer movement’ in the early degrees of the ‘cardinal’ signs over the last year or so, affecting people born in early Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn (essentially those born during the last few days of March, June, September and December). Many of my clients have fallen into that category; they have suddenly lost jobs, or parents, or partners, or they have been the ones who have been breaking away. Either way, the effect is generally to bring about a sudden and usually unexpected freedom, and a new episode in life. People born a little later, up to about the 5th of April, July, October and January of any year, may experience similar things over the next couple of years up to 2015. Essentially, this Uranus-Pluto square is associated with significant life change, from which you may emerge stronger and wiser; but you will not fail to notice that it manifests in your life. This aspect will be seen by all of us in the world, as we can’t hold up a celestial umbrella, but it is likely to be felt personally and directly by those born with birthdates given above.

As we have discussed in previous chapters, from earliest times human beings had an understanding of “as above, so below”, not only in their individual lives, but also in the fate of their crops and their Kings. We have seen how the “macrocosm and the microcosm” was an integral part of Ancient Greek philosophical thinking and how it is consistent with modern quantum theory. This unity of human and cosmos is seen in many other philosophies too, such as those of Chinese Taoism and Ayurveda, and features prominently in Jung’s work on psychological archetypes (they were fundamentally planetary archetypes, as he was an astrologer) that operated both in the psyche and in the outer world. This was the basis of his well-known work on synchronicities; this is essentially the study of meaningful coincidence in the inner and outer world. There is an underlying symmetry. One could say that astrology is the study of coincidence, for we are looking at how the planets moving around in their orbits bring their archetypes into our lives, often in powerful ways.

So now we are going to look at how the Uranus-Pluto cycle manifests in the outer world. There are many other cycles we could study, such as Saturn-Neptune, or Neptune-Pluto, or Jupiter-Uranus; there are many combinations. Partly because the Uranus-Pluto cycle is quite dramatic in its manifestation and partly because we are in the middle of a three-year period where this cycle is at one of its important phases, it is a useful example to take.

This branch of astrology is called ‘mundane astrology’. ‘Mundane’ comes from the Latin ‘mundus’, meaning the world. The associations of Uranus and Pluto in a mundane sense are consistent with those above, with some additions for their social/global context. Uranus is strongly associated, because of its drive for freedom, with uprisings and revolutions. In fact, there is always a synchronicity between the discovery of a planet and the events going on in the world at the time. Uranus was discovered by William Herschel in 1781. This was at the peak of the Enlightenment, and the thinking that led to the American and French Revolutions a few years later.

The Uranian impulse is for freedom and equality, particularly amongst the common man and often the disenfranchised young or unemployed. Uranus in strong aspect is associated with things speeding up, an impatience, a desire for change now, and a tearing down of the old order. It is connected to sudden shocks and surprises, volatility, and situations can change from one moment to the next. It is common during these times of powerful Uranus-Pluto aspects that people rise up against their autocratic monarchies and their governments.

Uranus archetypically is also associated with new scientific discoveries, technology, industry, and the Internet. It is a process of breaking down old patterns to bring in the new, usually in dramatic ways. It is also linked to breakthroughs in our understanding, often connected with how we see the nature of our reality. Uranus appears to be connected to a superconscious intuition, a sudden shift in perception of how we see things that can contribute to these breakthroughs; consequently, it is known as the Great Awakener. It has an astrological meaning of a high mental vibration (considered the higher octave of Mercury), sometimes called ‘the mind of God’.

It is connected with electrical energy too; whether our own field of electromagnetic energy or, as it tends to be erratic and volatile, it can be associated with electrical blackouts, cyber-attacks and Internet failures. As it is an eruptive energy, it is linked with earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis and extreme weather generally. Historically, the extreme weather has often resulted in crop failure and consequent high food prices, austerity and hard times.

Pluto, in a mundane sense, is connected with taxes, debt, default, over-controlling governments, the power structure, the power of the masses, and the financial system. The urge is to change the power structure. It is about fundamental reform and transformation, achieved via destructuring and restructuring, a breaking down and a building back up in a new form.

So both Uranus and Pluto want change, a combination of rapid rising up and attempting to radically change (Uranus) the status quo, combined with such fundamental change (Pluto), so that things are never quite the same again; society has been transformed. As Pluto is transiting through the sign of Capricorn for the next few years, the areas of change are likely to be governments, power structures and the financial system. The issues driving these changes will be freedom, and social and economic equality (Uranus).

Before we discuss what is taking place currently in our world, let us take a journey through history, to see how Uranus and Pluto in relationship to each other in their orbits have manifested clear themes for us to follow, and to anticipate going into the future. Here we are only considering three aspects between them, considered powerful. These are when they are together in their orbits with reference to the tropical zodiac (conjunction 0°), when they are in square aspect (90°), and opposed to each other (180°).

The first period we will consider is between 1492 and 1499, when we had an identical aspect between Uranus and Pluto to that which we have today. It was a waxing square aspect.

Financially, one of the most powerful banks in the world was the Medici banking empire based in Italy. They were extremely successful and made huge profits for some years. They were even appointed as bankers for the Vatican, and developed much political influence. They started to overlend enormously, and even England owed large amounts to the bank. Between 1494 and 1499, the bank started to get into serious trouble, and eventually went bankrupt. People lost their money, and a mob of protesters stormed into Florence and burned down the bank.33 There was a massive outcry and huge protests at the inequality of this situation. Does this have any echoes of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement now?

In terms of new discoveries, particularly those concerned with how we see the nature of our reality, in 1492 Columbus discovered the land that was to become America. In doing so, he proved that the Earth wasn’t flat, it was round. He hadn’t fallen off the edge in his travels. This was a huge paradigm shift for people in the 1490s to be told that the Earth was a sphere. Other new lands such as China and India were discovered during these years, and people gradually became aware that the world was a bigger place than they had ever imagined. This changed the nature of their reality in a dramatic way.

The next important point in the Uranus-Pluto cycle was the opposition (180°) that occurred from 1535 to 1543. This was the period of the Reformation, as a result of major social and religious change. In terms of new discoveries, Copernicus published his heliocentric theories in ‘De Revolutionibus’ in 1543. Not only had the paradigm shifted with an understanding that the Earth wasn’t flat it was round, with Columbus’s discoveries at the previous Uranus-Pluto cycle, but now people had to accept that the Earth went round the Sun, not the other way around. This was again a dramatic shift in the nature of how reality was perceived. The average chap in the street must have really struggled with this concept in the 1540s. He could see from getting up in the morning until he went to bed at night that the Sun was moving round in the sky – how could that not be true? As with all paradigm shifts, it can take many years for these revolutionary jumps in our understanding to become widely accepted.

Also in 1543, Vesalius, Professor of Surgery and Anatomy at Padua, published ‘De Humani Corporis Fabrica’. This was a new perspective on biology, and Versalius is considered the father of modern anatomy. A new understanding of the human body was born.

Orbits of Venus and the Earth

Few major new scientific discoveries were made until the next Uranus-Pluto aspect, the conjunction (0°), from 1592 and 1600. Indeed, it was in 1592, following on from Copernicus’s heliocentric theories, that Galileo began his studies into the laws of motion. Hard on his heels, Kepler in 1595 while drawing on a blackboard suddenly realised that the universe was composed of a series of geometrical figures: the triangle, square and pentagon. He also realised that the aspects that planets make to each other repeat over time, but they have moved on in distance against the background of the tropical zodiac. This ‘slippage’, if we could trace their dance as we see a trail from a plane in the sky, would form a beautiful mandala, based on Pythagorean geometry. The one shown here is of Venus and the Earth, and appears with the kind permission of John Martineau, from his fascinating book, “A Little Book of Coincidence in the Solar System”, published by Wooden Books.

It was this insight that caused the development of Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion. He went on to work with Tycho Brahe and together they provided highly accurate astronomical evidence for heliocentric theory in 1600. This gave proof to Copernicus’ theory that was developed during the previous Uranus-Pluto aspect.

The opposition of Uranus-Pluto (180°) from 1643 to 1653 was a time of upheaval socially and politically in many countries. This was the time of the English Revolution and revolutions and rebellions erupted across Europe and Asia.

It was also a ‘communications revolution’ as literacy spread across the developed world. As Uranus is seen as the ‘higher octave’ of Mercury, the planet of communication, it appears to be linked historically to periods when communication jumped to another level. In England, letter writing became a huge social change that occurred across all classes. This had followed on from the printing revolution that allowed the written word to become more freely available. Wealthy people used their servants to deliver their letters, and in this capacity the servants were known as ‘little Mercuries’. Mercury is not only the planetary archetype of communication but also letter writing! Now even working class people began to write. This was the time of social ferment and political turmoil with the Roundheads versus the Cavaliers, the Republicans versus the King, in the English Civil War. Writing became an instrument of the revolution, allowing propaganda to be written, circulated, and understood. News could be spread quickly to facilitate the organising of mass protests, and the uprisings against the King happened at great speed (Uranus). Finally, in 1649, King Charles I England was beheaded. This was an extraordinary historical event, and for the only time in its history England had a ruling Republic. This rapid spreading of news was to be the forerunner of mass communication that enabled later Uranus-Pluto revolutions in 1848 and 2011, as we shall see.

In terms of science, Descartes was developing his mechanistic theories of how the world operated. This was the beginning of the overthrow of the ancient concept of the universe being an organic living whole and it set the stage for Newtonian theory to become the new paradigm.

The conjunction (0°) of Uranus and Pluto occurred between 1707 and 1715. The conjunction is always the seeding, the start point, of a cycle. This saw the earliest beginnings of the Industrial Revolution with the first commercially successful steam engine, invented by Thomas Newcomen in 1712. Through the following square and opposition aspects between Uranus and Pluto during the 1750s and 1790s respectively, industrialisation intensified, which included further mechanisation of the press. The printing press had been invented by Gutenberg in 1450, during the previous Uranus-Pluto conjunction of 1450 to 1457. This formed the foundation of mass communication, which was built upon during later Uranus-Pluto aspects.

The massive social change engendered by the Industrial Revolution also raised classic Uranian themes of freedom and equality. Oppressed factory workers were made to work at least a seventy-hour week in generally appalling conditions while the industrialists and entrepreneurs became very wealthy.

These issues of freedom and equality came to a head during the Uranus-Pluto opposition (180°) during 1789 to 1796. The Irish Rebellion erupted in 1789, and these years also witnessed social ferment in Britain. There were food riots in 1792, and radical protests to demand better rights for the ordinary working man. The uprisings were so widespread that the government was convinced that insurrection was imminent; they brought hundreds of troops into London in December 1792, and even fortified the Tower. Many organisations sprang up to represent the common man at this time, such as the London Revolutionary Society, with much of their communication spread by printed pamphlets.

This was also the time of the French Revolution. People rose up against their over-powerful fossilized monarchy, as they saw it. There were mass protests and riots in the streets of Paris, driven by the need for greater freedom and equality. The term ‘Revolution’ is synonymous with Uranus. As we have stated, Uranus is particularly associated with the common (disenfranchised) man no longer being willing to tolerate his condition in view of the disparity he sees before him.

Some historians believe that it was the success of the French Revolution that established the historical precedent that it was possible for the masses to overthrow their government. This would have given confidence to the ordinary people during the period 1846 to 1854. This encompasses 1848, known historically as the ‘Year of Revolution’. This was the next Uranus-Pluto conjunction. In Europe, the potato and grain harvests had failed due to extreme weather. Food prices spiked, and people were hungry. There was recession, and unemployment; 10,000 workers had been laid off in Vienna alone in 1847. The discontented rose up in mass protests against their governments. There was huge social unrest across Europe. In France, the monarchy fell in just three days; in Vienna, it took two days; and the uprisings spread across Rome, Milan, Sicily, Naples, Florence, Tuscany, Piedmont, Baden, Bavaria, Berlin, Bavaria, Saxony, Prussia, Budapest, Prague, Denmark, Holland, Sweden, Belgium, Ireland and London. With an interesting echo of language, the German Liberals talked about the ‘Springtime of Peoples’. Within a few short weeks the entire political landscape had changed across Europe. It would be astonishing today but the speed at which it happened in 1848 was unprecedented.

How had it happened so quickly? Partly it was the invention of the steam train in the Industrial Revolution during the previous Uranus-Pluto conjunction that allowed the news to spread quickly, together with the invention of the electric telegraph. The literacy rate had increased dramatically during the previous Uranus-Pluto aspect, and newspapers now filled the demand for information. News could therefore spread across Europe like a forest fire. Why had the uprisings occurred? Again, the driving issues were freedom and social and economic disparity. The people were no longer willing to tolerate autocracy.

There were also uprisings across Asia, and in India, Japan and China during these years, that were savagely resisted by the authorities. In China, an estimated 20 million people died in the Taiping Rebellion of 1850 to 1864.

In 1848, the same year as the European Revolutions, Marx and Engels wrote ‘The Communist Manifesto’ which became the bible for the workers of the Russian Revolution that was to follow at the next Uranus-Pluto opposition. This period also saw the beginning of the Women’s Rights movement with the efforts of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Again, the driving issues were freedom and equality.

The next aspect of Uranus-Pluto of 1874 to 1878 saw a major economic depression not only across Europe, but also the longest economic depression in US history. In America, this was principally due to the debt and overspend in the Civil War. This was a ‘waxing’ square (i.e. the first square after the conjunction), which is identical to that in the 1490s, and indeed 2012 to 2015. Following our theme of breakthroughs to new levels of communication, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876 when this Uranus-Pluto aspect was exact.

Following that was the Uranus-Pluto opposition from 1898 to 1906. This of course saw the Russian Revolution of 1905, ignited by Marx’s ‘The Communist Manifesto’.

In terms of new developments, the Wright Brothers achieved the first successful powered flight from North Carolina in 1903. This period also saw the development of car manufacture, radio and motion pictures. This was an extremely exciting time in how we perceive our reality, for this was the beginning of quantum physics. Einstein noticed that particles that had a relationship together, when separated over distance, still reacted at the same moment in time. He called these ‘spooky happenings at distance’ and we have referred to this in earlier chapters. He also published his ‘Theory of Relativity’ in 1905, linking matter and energy. However, just before this, in 1900, Max Plank, who was the founding father of quantum physics, theorised that energy is not a continuous, flowing entity, but is carried in minute discontinuous units called ‘quanta’. This revolutionised our understanding of the atomic and subatomic world. Quantum physics essentially was the beginning of our scientific understanding that we are all energy. It’s not, as Einstein believed, that mass (matter) is related to energy, it’s that it is energy.

The next Uranus-Pluto aspect lasted from 1928 to 1933. This was a major period in the development of quantum physics, progressing our understanding. It was at this time that Heisenberg published his Uncertainty Principle. This describes at a quantum level how the observer in an experiment will cause a wave to collapse into a particle. This further developed the concept of co-creation, as the observer is himself making a contribution to the outcome of the wave. New technological breakthroughs occurred with the first television transmissions in 1927, as this aspect was beginning.

It was also of course the period of the Great Depression, after the market crash of 1929. There were runs on the banks, and many failed. People lost their life savings. Through the early 1930s there was much civil unrest across the US and England, with frequent marches on parliament, such as the ‘Jarrow Hunger March’. The issues were again social and economic disparity, with the ordinary man suffering severely after the financial structure collapsed. This was classic Uranus-Pluto manifestation, with the consequent ‘hard times’ that characterised the early 1930s. Extreme weather added to the hardship, as the 1930s saw the devastation of the ‘Dust Bowl’ in the southern plains of America, when growing crops and feeding livestock became impossible.

Next was the ‘seeding point’ of the Uranus-Pluto cycle, the conjunction (0°) from 1963 to 1969. We may think of this as an incredibly rich time musically and culturally (this is related to other planetary cycles) but it was also a time of huge social unrest. There were mass movements and protests across the world. The women’s movement that had begun with Elizabeth Cady Stanton at a previous point in the Uranus-Pluto cycle, and the suffragettes of the 1900s, now became the Women’s Liberation movement. During the mid-1960s we also saw anti-nuclear demonstrations, the Civil Rights Movement, Gay Liberation protests and anti-Vietnam War rallies. There were marches about racial discrimination, the black power movement, and the Black Panthers became a radical force. Some of the Marxist revolutionary leaders such as Che Guevara and Fidel Castro inspired some of the uprisings. The issues were always around justice, freedom and equality.

1968 was a peak year during this conjunction. There were sit-ins and demonstrations across many major cities: New York, London, Paris and Rome. In Paris it was an interesting echo of the mass protests during the French Revolution during July 1789 and then again in the Year of Revolution of 1848. There was the first General Strike in France and the students joined in the protests of the Labour unions. The ‘Prague Spring’ erupted in 1968, when the people of Czechoslovakia rose up against their government. It was a long hot summer in America with race riots (demand for equality) and in that year Martin Luther King was assassinated.

However, there were changes as a result of all these demands. The contraceptive pill was launched during these years, allowing sexual freedom. The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 banning racial, sexual and religious discrimination. Also, governments across many countries began spending on welfare programmes for the less well off in society. In this way, Uranus and Pluto, with their associations of freedom, equality, and reform, were connected with some important social changes.

In terms of technological developments, the first Internet transmission occurred in 1964, with the launch of the worldwide web. One of the individuals involved in its development said: “authority was now horizontal”; it was about equality (Uranus), and universal access irrespective of social class. This was another revolution (Uranus), and again one of communication. This follows our theme from the development of the printing press by Gutenberg in 1450, the spread of literacy and letter writing from 1644 to 1653, and the rapid development of the press during the Industrial Revolution from 1707 to 1715; then in 1848 we had the invention of the electric telegraph, which helped to spread news of the revolutions across Europe. In 1876 the telephone was invented. All of these took place under Uranus-Pluto aspects.

Technologically, the 1960s were also a peak time for the Space Programme, with the high achievement of the Moon landing of Apollo 11 on July 20 1969; Neil Armstrong described it is as a “Giant Leap for Mankind”. Importantly, we had expanded the nature of our reality from the 1490s and Columbus discovering new lands and that the Earth wasn’t flat, under a previous Uranus-Pluto aspect, and now we were sending men to the Moon.

Below, for astrologers, is the chart set for that day at 22.56 Eastern Daylight Time at the White House, Washington, DC. This data comes from ‘The Book of World Horoscopes’ by Nicholas Campion, with his kind permission.34This was the moment when Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the Moon. It is set for the White House as the American focal point, as we were seeing this from the perspective of the Earth. I laughed out loud when I ran this chart through the computer and saw its symbolism. Here, we see Uranus-Pluto in conjunction with Jupiter, which together is about an awakening, an expansion of our understanding (and long-distance travel!) together with – the Moon!

Chart for First Man on the Moon

During the mid-60s it was an incredibly rich period of shifts in our understanding. The Big Bang Theory was developed then, detailing how our universe may have been born, together with Chaos Theory in 1963 by Edward Lorenz, which was the ‘butterfly’s wings’ theory of interconnectedness we have referred to earlier. Then in 1964 J.S. Bell published his theory of non-locality. We were beginning to have a clear scientific understanding of our interconnectedness. As Edwin Schrodinger had stated: “Entanglement is not a property of quantum; it is the property”. These scientific advances, plus the Moon landing, yet again shifted our paradigm of understanding.

As I write, we are twelve months into a three-year period of the next Uranus-Pluto point in the cycle, the square. What are the themes so far that echo what we have seen through history, and what will it offer us as yet another paradigm shift?

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To summarise: based on the theory of the microcosm reflects the macrocosm, planetary archetypes don’t just manifest in our lives, but also in the world, and we can track these themes very clearly through history. Here we’ve looked at the powerful Uranus-Pluto aspect, and how it is associated with austerity, revolution, and people rising up against their monarchies and governments, who they see as not responding to their needs and deprivations. It breaks down old patterns in order to break through to the new, and is associated with revolutions of various kinds, destructuring and restructuring governments and systems of power. Usually debt, default and taxes are part of the picture. Positively, this aspect has strong associations with new technical and scientific discoveries, jumps in our communication methods, and also bringing about a new understanding of our reality.

10

Where Are We Now?

“The psychology of the individual is reflected in the psychology of the nation.”

C. G. Jung

Before we focus on the Uranus-Pluto aspect in detail, we need to take a step back in time to incorporate another major configuration; that of Saturn opposing Uranus from 2008 to 2010. Symbolically, this can be seen as a challenge to capitalism. Together, these major aspects form what astrologers know as the ‘Cardinal Climax’, a major period in history financially, economically, politically and socially.

Astrologers were aware that the Saturn-Uranus opposition would be likely to bring about shocks to the system, a sudden tearing down of the old order, and volatility that would be extremely fast moving and shake our foundations. Saturn’s archetype is connected to the status quo, the way our lives are structured and set up. It has particular associations with governments and the banking and financial system. It symbolises traditional structures and institutions, and the way we have always done things.

Uranus’s archetype is the maverick and revolutionary that demands pure truth. It will not tolerate injustice, inequality and social disparity. Astrologers believed that this aspect was likely to bring about a major financial crisis, particularly around September 2008, when faster moving planets were ‘translating’ the forthcoming Saturn-Uranus opposition.

On September 15th 2008 the Dow Jones Industrial Index fell over 500 points. By November 1st, it had declined by almost 48%. Other stock markets around the world suffered similarly. This triggered a worldwide banking crisis. The issues of debt, overlending by the banks (as with the Medici bank in the 1490s) and the sub-prime mortgage scandal erupted, and the whole financial structure of the world looked very vulnerable. Transiting Pluto had entered the sign of Capricorn, so the symbolism was about the destructuring, restructuring and transformation of big business, governments and the financial system (Capricorn is ruled by Saturn, and therefore has the same associations). The trigger linked to this destructuring was the Saturn-Uranus opposition.

Several well-informed astrologers had been putting their expectations for this period into print. For the astrological world, it was not a surprise; it fulfilled the obvious symbolism. If the bankers didn’t expect it, astrologers did. It is very important to say that the astrological symbolism does not have to play out with such devastating consequences. In a mundane sense, freewill operates by the choices and decisions our leaders and therefore our countries take, although they can be influenced by us as individuals. If they make different choices, destructuring and transformation will still take place but will inflict less pain on the world.

This Saturn-Uranus opposition and the worldwide banking crisis formed the backdrop to the Uranus-Pluto square that was already being felt (planetary aspects have an ‘orb’ of influence, we start to feel their symbolism before they are exact) as early as early 2011. Like a train coming down the track, we start to see evidence of their symbolism in the world.

The current Uranus-Pluto waxing square became exact on June 24th 2012 and will last until March 17th 2015. We have highlighted in the previous chapter those who are likely to feel this influence very directly and personally in their lives, but in this chapter we will look at the very recent past in light of historical themes but also project forward in terms of likely developments over these years.

Before this Uranus-Pluto square became exact in June 2012, as always we had glimpses of how it may manifest this time around. This happens when faster moving planets move into an aspect with Uranus and Pluto, thus triggering and translating the aspect even though the two planets themselves have not come into ‘exactitude’. For instance, this happened in early 2011 when Mars came to trigger the slowly forming square of Uranus and Pluto in the heavens; it connected the two slower moving planets. It pulled the not-quite-formed square into focus, as the diagram below shows:

Planetary aspects for the Arab Spring

This is a highly eruptive, violent, aggressive combination and we should have expected to see this manifesting in the world. You may remember that this was the time of the ‘Arab Spring’, the uprisings that saw Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and the Yemen wrought with ferment and mass protests. There were other uprisings in Bahrain, Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Sudan and, now tragically, in Syria. Who was protesting? It was the common man, ordinary people, but in particular the young who saw themselves as disenfranchised (all Uranus manifestations) from a bankrupt system.

They were often educated but unemployed as they felt the system offered them no opportunities and their frustration boiled over. They saw their governments and leaders as autocratic, over-controlling and completely out of touch with ordinary people, and they weren’t prepared to tolerate these repressive regimes any longer. The issues, as always, were freedom and social and economic equality. There was a domino effect of revolutions and, just as in 1848, after holding onto power for many years, as in Egypt, governments were torn down in a matter of days. It is interesting that Wikipedia states that the term ‘Arab Spring’ is actually an allusion to the revolutions of 1848 and the ‘Prague Spring’ in 1968, previous Uranus-Pluto aspects.

How were these protests organised so quickly and effectively? We had gone beyond the electric telegraph of 1848 and, with the invention of the Internet at the Uranus-Pluto seed point in the 1960s, these young, angry people organised the protests entirely by the new social media; Facebook and Twitter. Remember, Uranus is strongly associated with the Internet and new technology. This method of communication, as in 1848 with the electric telegraph, allowed people to undercut the control of autocratic top-down governments.

Then in August 2011, again with the translation of the developing Uranus-Pluto aspect squared by Mars (god of war), we saw violent unrest across Europe, in Greece, Italy, Spain, France, Portugal and even London. There were protests that the police found difficult to contain and in the UK the riots spread from London to other major cities, with looting, fires and general devastation. There was shock at the level of aggression, but those protesting were driven by issues of injustice and inequality that they were not prepared to tolerate anymore. Many of the world’s economic problems had been driven by irresponsible lending by the banks and the resulting financial problems had caused loss and austerity for many people. There were ‘Flash Mobs’ in the US, looting and creating mayhem, and of course the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Also in August 2011 the US experienced its first credit downgrade in history, losing its AAA rating.

We have seen mass protests across much of the world at the austerity measures being imposed by governments, as the destructuring (Pluto) of the financial system takes place, before we can move forwards to reform and restructuring. It remains to be seen whether Greece, Cyprus and some other European countries suffering extreme austerity and rioting in the streets will remain in the Eurozone.

As I write, the Cyprus Government has closed all the country’s banks and are attempting to levy a tax of up to 37% on people’s savings in order to qualify for a European emergency bail-out to prevent the country becoming bankrupt. People in Cyprus were outraged that the banks could deduct a sum of their choosing from their accounts, before allowing the owners access to them. This was a major violation in people’s trust of the banking system, which had a ripple effect across the rest of Europe, and again raised questions about the safety of the banks.

Countries have charts too; their ‘birth’ occurring usually when their constitution was drawn up, which sets up the institutions that will regulate their political, economic and social life. It is when a country legally defines its nationhood in a new way. For instance, the chart for the US is set for the Declaration of Independence, in Philadelphia 5.10pm on July 4th 1776. I initially found it very hard to accept that countries have charts in the way that people do, but Jung observed that anything that is born in a moment in time takes on the qualities of that moment. We are back to the ‘energy imprint’ idea, whether it is a person or a country.

Astrologers over time will evaluate these charts rigorously to see if they are responding to transits in terms of events in those countries. For instance, the chart for the Constitutional Union of Scotland and England is set at 00.00 hours on May 12th 1707, at Westminster. Fascinatingly, the Ascendant of this chart is directly aspected by transiting Uranus on the date that has been set for the vote on Scottish independence from England on 18th September 2014 (the square from transiting Uranus to the Ascendant builds from June 2014). The symbolism is about the ‘assertion of individuality’ at that time, linked to their sense of Scottish identity. The other chart that operates powerfully for the UK was set at the Act of Union, January 1st 1801, 00.00 hours, Westminster. This chart in September 2014 has its Sun (leadership) and Midheaven axis (its standing in the world) directly aspected by transiting Pluto.

What is absolutely fascinating for astrology is by pure historical accident how many countries’ charts have their Sun, or other major planets or angles between 9° to 13° of the cardinal signs (Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn). Each of these signs is of equal importance when considering this Uranus-Pluto aspect.

In the chart below, I have been able to identify (from Nicholas Campion’s excellent reference, ‘The Book of World Horoscopes’, The Wessex Astrologer Ltd., 2004) 26 countries that have their Sun or Ascendant in that position. The Sun in a mundane sense represents the leadership of a country and in that way is one of its most important features, much more than in an individual’s chart. The Ascendant of a country is regarded as its sense of identity. In addition, the EEC and the Euro currency both have their Suns in this degree band. The United Nations has its Midheaven here, associated with its standing in the world. A further seven important countries have other planets in that zone.

These are the degrees that will be triggered over the next two years by the powerful Uranus-Pluto aspect. These countries have all been established at different times in history, depending on local events, but their charts have produced their Suns (or Ascendants) all coinciding between these five degrees, which represent just over 5% of the circle (5 degrees x 4 signs = 20 degrees divided by 360 degrees). This is significant clustering.

You may note that several countries have their charts set up on 1st January in a year, as it is often deliberately planned for the new legal entity to begin then. The dates and reasons for the setting up of these charts don’t matter for our purposes. All we are considering here is that these are the degrees Uranus and Pluto are going to be triggering in the next two years. Our interest here is in the future going forwards, not the past.

The lower part of the chart also lists countries that have important planets other than the Sun in this degree band. I will explain the significance of each of these within their respective charts.

There may well be other countries that are part of this picture, which have unknown charts, but this is certainly a significant list to consider. It is a measure of how important this time in history, and in our lifetimes, will be. This aspect is associated, as we have seen, with disruption, sudden shocks, earthquakes, extreme weather, uprisings, revolutions, tearing down of ‘power’ systems, be they governments or financial structures, and austerity. Many of these countries have already seen these events but there is more to come. What is particularly interesting is that the establishment of the Eurozone and the launch of the Euro currency are also strongly affected by the Uranus-Pluto square. Even before this, from 2009 to 2010, transiting Pluto was creating stress for the Ascendant of the Euro (its identity), calling for fundamental change followed through 2011 by transiting Uranus, associated with sudden and unexpected disruptions to its identity. The continued existence of the Euro was being tested even then.

Country

Date, Time and Place

Position of Planet/Ascendant 9º to 13º of Cardinal Sign

Australia

13.25hrs. 1/1/1901 Melbourne

Sun

10º 03’

Belgium

12.00hrs. 4/10/1830 Brussels

Sun

10º 44’

China

4.04hrs. 1/1/1912 Nanking

Sun

09º 24’

Czech Republic

00.00hrs. 1/1/1993 Prague

Sun

10º 33’

EEC

00.00hrs. 1/1/1958 Brussels

Sun

10º 02’

Estonia

22.10hrs. 20/8/1991 Tallinn

Ascendant

10º 55’

Euro currency

00.01hrs. 1/1/1999 Belgium

Sun

10º 04’

France

18.30hrs. 6/10/1958 Paris

Sun

12º 57’

Germany

00.00hrs. 3/10/1990 Berlin

Sun

09º 29’

Greece

04.00hrs. 24/7/1974 Athens

Ascendant

13º 08’

Haiti

12.00hrs. 1/1/1804 Gonaives

Sun

10º 09’

India

00.00hrs. 1/1/1877 Delhi

Sun

10º 32’

Iran

15.00hrs. 1/4/1979 Tehran

Sun

11º 06’

Iraq

10.30hrs. 3/10/1932 Baghdad

Sun

10º 00’

Italy

12.30hrs. 2/7/1871 Rome

Sun

10º 03’

Kiribati

00.00hrs. 12/7/1979 Tarawa

Ascendant

13º 05’

Lebanon

00.00hrs. 1/1/1944 Beirut

Sun

09º 22’

Mexico

18.00hrs. 28/9/1821 Mexico City

Ascendant

09º 34’

Mongolia

4.55hrs. 3/3/1921 Kyakhta

Sun

10º 23’

New Zealand

11.00hrs. 26/9/1906 Wellington

Ascendant

09º 47’

Pakistan

7.05hrs. 23/3/1956 Karachi

Ascendant

12º 01’

Philippines

9.15hrs. 4/7/1946 Manilla

Sun

11º 28’

Portugal

11.00hrs. 4/10/1910 Lisbon

Sun

10º 22’

Sudan

8.00hrs. 1/1/1956 Khartoum

Sun

09º 48’

Singapore

10.00hrs. 9/8/1965 Singapore

Ascendant

09º 25’

Syria

00.00hrs. 1/1/1944 Damascus

Sun

09º 22’

Ascendant

13º 20’

UK

00.00hrs. 1/1/1801 Westminster

Sun

10º 11’

USA

17.10hrs. 4/7/1776 Philadelphia

Sun

13º 19’

Cyprus

00.00hrs. 16/8/1960 Nicosia

Saturn

12º 38’

Japan

13.30hrs. 28/4/1952 Tokyo

Saturn

09º 39’

Uranus

10º 39’

Mercury

12º 13’

North Korea

12.00hrs. 10/9/1948 Pyongyang

Mercury

09º 35’

Neptune

11º 47’

South Korea

12.00hrs. 15/8/1948 Seoul

Neptune

10º 59’

Russia

07.30hrs. 5/9/1991 Moscow

Uranus

09º 55’

Spain

12.45hrs. 22/11/1975 Madrid

Moon

11º 34’

Turkey

20.30 29/10/1923 Ankara

Pluto

12º 20’

United Nations

16.45 24/10/1945 Washington

Midheaven

11º 10’

Specifically in the charts of these countries in the lower list: for Cyprus, Saturn represents its institutions, and fascinatingly foreign investment (literally, ‘other countries’ money’). For Japan, Saturn represents institutions and its identity; Uranus has the general association of upheaval, and connections to radioactivity, but here also represents wealth; Mercury represents public health and Japan’s standing in the world. For North Korea, Mercury is connected to international finance and the country’s government, and Neptune to the social base. For South Korea, Neptune is linked to social ideals. For Russia, Uranus is linked to communication systems and trade, and the social base. For Spain, the Moon is linked to issues of unemployment and the common people. In Turkey, Pluto represents the power of the masses, and June 2013 saw the inflamed protests of the people against their government.

Don’t worry about the detail and technicalities of the above chart. All you really need to understand is that the countries listed above are likely to manifest the themes of Uranus-Pluto that we have highlighted over the next two years, if they haven’t done so already. If you’re at all sceptical about a country having a chart, no problem, just wait and watch the news as the events in these regions unfold over the next two years.

As I write in July 2013, we have witnessed recent rioting in Brazil, Turkey, and a military coup in Egypt, amongst many other global protests. In terms of extreme weather, 2012 saw a severe drought in America, covering up to 80% of agricultural land with echoes of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s; there have been massive floods in India and a world temperature record of 54 degrees in Arizona, with ensuing fires. All of these echo the themes of Uranus-Pluto.

So the themes of debt, banking and financial crises, and civil unrest and uprisings of people against their governments as a result of austerity are likely to continue through until March 2015. April 2014 may be a particularly notable month in this regard. There could be tensions between nations, races and religions. Uranus-Pluto can have radical and violent tendencies, but it does not have to manifest in such a dramatic way. It will, eventually, bring about the reform and restructuring of the world’s financial system for the better.

As Uranus has erratic electrical associations, electrical blackouts and Internet cut-outs and cyber-attacks are characteristic of this Uranus-Pluto aspect too, and they are likely to continue up to March 2015. In July 2012, 600 million people in India were without power for several days, and on 20th March 2013, the BBC reported a cyber attack on South Korea, with major loss of Internet across the country. On May 10th 2013 the BBC reported a major cyber attack (Uranus) on banks across twenty countries, amounting to a theft of £29 million. Questions were raised again about the security of the banking system (Pluto).

Uranus-Pluto aspects are associated with powerful, violent, eruptive energy, whether that is social, political or in terms of natural events. Tragically as I write in April 2013, there have been four major earthquakes, two in Iran (one of the countries listed above), one in Papua New Guinea (no chart known), and one in China (also listed above). We have witnessed the tragedy of Fukushima on 11th March 2011, 3.36pm JST, at the beginning of this Uranus-Pluto aspect. Both Pluto and Uranus have links to nuclear radiation (Plutonium and Uranium, and the current aspect is triggering the ‘public health’ area of Japan’s chart).

Uranus is also associated with ‘pure truth’, however you see your own truth, and is therefore connected to terrorism and extremism. On the 15th April the Boston Marathon bombings occurred, with loss of life and terrible injuries. For astrologers, there were many other indicators involved on this day, suggesting violence (Mars-Pluto) and shock to the public. Very sadly, we may see more of this kind of incident before the Uranus-Pluto aspect wanes in March 2015. Astrology can provide a language to gain some insight into this apparently senseless world.

More positively, in terms of new discoveries and breakthroughs, just a few days after the Uranus-Pluto square became exact on 24th June 2012, CERN confirmed the discovery of the Higgs-Bosun particle, which one particle physicist described as the “biggest discovery since Columbus discovered the Earth wasn’t flat”. This was a perfect reference to the identical historical aspect between Uranus and Pluto in the 1490s. Essentially, the Higgs-Bosun particle enables us to understand how matter is formed. It is another step forward in a scientific understanding of how the world works, and this discovery was described by one theoretical physicist as “the doorway to deeper ideas about the nature of reality”. This is, at a profound level, one manifestation of the Uranus-Pluto aspect; it breaks us through to new understandings about our reality.

There will be more of these to come before March 2015. We should expect to see dazzling breakthroughs in science, technology and medicine. It is possible that we will develop a unified theory of physics that works for the whole universe. Currently, Newtonian laws work for the big world but don’t work at all for the subatomic world, whereas quantum theory works for the tiny, but not for the large. Part of the research work happening at CERN in Switzerland is to find a new theory that is workable across all life, a Theory of Everything. I believe we will have Columbus moments, and Copernicus moments.

As I write, on 21st March 2013, cosmologists have been able to confirm the validity of the Big Bang Theory (which originated at the Uranus-Pluto conjunction in the 1960s) via the Planck Satellite, and also to state that they knew the Big Bang occurred 13.82 billion years ago. They also said that this discovery might make it possible to go even further back in time in their understanding of the universe. With each new discovery, we seem to move science closer to how the mystics perceived the world, thousands of years ago.

Another theme that is likely to develop over the next few years is alternative energy. Just as Uranus-Pluto was associated with the Industrial Revolution in the early 1700s, this time around it may well be the Green Revolution.

There is an entirely different player in our dramas whose associations may well feed into this ‘Green Revolution’. Unlike the hard-to-miss energies of change and upheaval associated with Uranus and Pluto, this planetary archetype is almost the antithesis.

This is Neptune, the planet that (‘rules’) is associated with Pisces, moving into Pisces in the tropical zodiac. This is therefore a very comfortable place for Neptune to be, and it won’t leave Pisces until January 2026. Therefore the comments we are making here relate to that period. Neptune has a 165-year orbit, so the last time it moved into Pisces we saw the beginning of the Spiritualist movement, as Neptune is associated with altered states. It is the planetary archetype of spirituality, idealism, creativity, inner peace, meditation, transcendent love, withdrawal to nature, dreams, healing, telepathy, consciousness and miracles. It is associated with the intangible and perception of that world via high sensitivity.

So we may see dreams being more accepted in the mainstream as a method of inner guidance. Various forms of healing may be investigated and discussed, and it is likely that the nature of consciousness will be debated and written about as an integral and vital part of what makes up the universe, as we move away from our clockwork paradigm. All of these things are in the nature of Neptune. It has a feeling of the fairytale, the magical, gossamer, the illusion, and refined spiritual energy. It is associated with infinite possibilities.

Neptune in myth is Lord of the Sea, and therefore has strong associations with water. Over the next few years we are likely to see issues around water: too much water, not enough water, or water in the wrong place as a result of extreme weather, manifesting as floods, droughts and tsunamis. Water may well become an economic and political issue, not only because it is necessary for agriculture as well as human consumption but also because it is used to drive hydro-electric power stations in many countries. Water pollution and the greater recognition of the tiny percentage of the world that has access to clean water, will be likely to come to the forefront.

Neptune also has associations with photography and, in combination with Uranus, which is associated with electrical energy, we could see the greater use of Kirlian photography for diagnostic purposes. Kirlian photography takes an image of your aura, your electrical energy field. A handful of alternative practitioners are using this in the UK at the moment. To some extent, this could avoid the need for X-rays with their damaging radiation.

Another rapidly growing understanding, which I see as a manifestation of our current planetary line-up, is earthing. If you are unfamiliar with this, please see www.groundology.com. We have already discussed how there was a conjunction between Uranus and Pluto during the 1960s with the birth of the Internet. This represented the ‘seed point’, which is always tested when the planets in question reach a 90° aspect, a square, in their relationship. This is where we are now. We are aware of the many benefits which Internet communication has brought us and the all-pervasive wi-fi and mobile signals to allow us the convenience of instant communication, anywhere.

However, some are becoming aware of possible health issues, particularly those who are sensitive to electrical and EMF energy (electromagnetic frequency, the domain of Uranus). We are electrical beings before we are chemical beings. The earthing movement makes us aware of the enormous healing electrical energy of the Earth via its negatively charged electrons. It is becoming known as the ‘barefoot revolution’, encouraging people to walk barefoot on the Earth as often as they can. The pre- and post-blood test results can be seen on the groundology website, and are dramatic. The reason this is interesting from an astrological point of view is that the part of the body that Neptune is associated with is the feet (and is associated with blood), together with retreating to nature, which was also part of 1960s culture. So in the earthing movement, we have the testing point in the Uranus-Pluto cycle of what this new technology has brought us, plus healing (Neptune) ourselves via connecting with our electrical (Uranus) Earth via our feet (Neptune).

Many sensitive people are reporting a finer and faster energy in the world, a shift of consciousness. If we take the literal symbolism of Uranus, Pluto and Neptune, we are led to expect an energy shift. Part of what this current time is about, astrologically, is a “quickening (Uranus) of spiritual (Neptune) transformation (Pluto)”. Powerful Uranus-Pluto aspects are commonly associated with paradigm shifts and this one should be no different.

There is a strong sense of entering a new paradigm that recognises the power of thought to create emotion and change in our energy, that we live from the inside out not the outside in, and that we truly are co-creators in our world. We are potentially living in a time of shift, even in the mainstream, from the mechanistic to the spiritual, from mind to soul. Your birthchart gives you your individual road map to guide you.

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To summarise: this important period in history is known as the ‘Cardinal Climax’, and spans 2008 to 2015. It began with the worldwide financial crash, which was associated with the Saturn-Uranus aspect at the time. This formed a backdrop to the Uranus-Pluto aspect that we are now experiencing, with its associations of violent uprisings against governments, because of stringent austerity measures and general deprivation. We have seen this from the Arab Spring, to the London riots, to the Occupy Wall Street Movement and flash mobs in the US, to repeated violent protests in many European countries.

Fascinatingly, a surprisingly long list of countries have their Suns (leadership) and Ascendants (identity), in the narrow band of the zodiac which this Uranus-Pluto square will be moving through in the next two years. This includes the Eurozone and the chart for the Euro itself. We should watch these countries for Uranus-Pluto themes, where they have not already developed.

The other classic manifestations of Uranus-Pluto are becoming evident not only in earthquakes and electrical cut-outs but also in new scientific discoveries such as the Higgs-Boson particle. There will be many more new discoveries to come.

In contrast, the other important planetary transit at this time is Neptune moving into Pisces, with its associations of spirituality, healing and withdrawal to nature. These themes will become more prominent, as will issues connected with water. Alternative ‘green’ energy, Kirlian photography, and earthing could come to the fore as important subjects. The combination of Uranus, Pluto and Neptune in their currently strong positions describes the shift in consciousness that many are feeling: a quickening (Uranus) of spiritual (Neptune) transformation (Pluto).

11

Wheels within Wheels

“Nature, it appears, is made up as a nested hierarchy of non-locally connected, coherent systems.”35

Ervin Laszlo

All of life is based on cycles. We are aware of the rising and setting of the Sun each day, the phases of the Moon, and the rhythm of the seasons. Sailors have to be informed about the predictable pattern of the tides. Nature knows that new growth comes forth in spring and dies back in autumn. Birds build nests in spring and migrate in winter. Within our own bodies, we have clear rising and falling of blood pressure and uric acid levels at different points through the day, and many biochemical markers follow a daily cycle. Our circadian day-night rhythm, by definition, is linked to the movement of the Earth. We have hormonal and menstrual cycles through our life. All life goes through a process of birth, growth and decay, everything waxes and wanes.

Plant and animal life on Earth is interlocked with the greater cycles of the universe, and indeed Lyall Watson’s book ‘Supernature’ was all about this impressive interdependence. For instance horse-shoe crabs live in the deep ocean where no light penetrates; yet once a year, and always at the Full Moon, millions assemble on one beach to mate. Or take the example of the experiment conducted by Professor Frank Brown Jr, of Illinois University.36 He was aware that oysters open and close their valves in rhythm with the tides. To test whether these oysters were truly reading the local conditions and were interacting with the Moon’s cycles, he had some live oysters shipped from Long Island to Illinois, sealed from daylight. For a couple of weeks after arrival they opened their valves in rhythm to the Long Island tides but gradually became completely in-sync with the Illinois tides – had there been any. This proved it was the Moon’s cycles, not the non-existent tides in Illinois, which were correlated with their change in behaviour. Like tiny cogs clicking into bigger cogs, everything in nature is interlinked with natural cycles.

A fascinating part of this natural interdependence is that the Earth has a pulse, called the Schumann resonance. Ever since life began, it has been surrounded by this pulse. We have been aware for many years that the Earth is a massive electromagnetic body, and in the previous chapter we referred to the healing potential of the negatively charged electrons emitted continually from the Earth. However, in addition to this, it was Professor W.O. Schumann in 1954 that discovered that the Earth’s pulse was 7.83 Hz. His successor, Herbert Konig, demonstrated that this frequency is identical to those of alpha brain waves in a human being. The alpha wave state promotes creativity, wellbeing, boosts our immune system, and better enables us to deal with stress. Essentially this is the frequency at which, as Konig discovered, we are ‘tuned into’ the Earth. Indeed, when we are separated from this frequency for a period of time we reduce our ability to fight off disease and cope well emotionally.

In his film ‘Beings of Frequency’37 James Russell shares some powerful evidence for this. He describes how as an experiment, Professor R.Wever from the Max Planck Institute built an underground bunker that completely screened out the Earth’s natural resonance. Student volunteers lived there for four weeks. Professor Wever noticed that their health progressively deteriorated. Their circadian rhythm, the day-night cycle, became disrupted. They suffered sleep disruption, migraine headaches, and emotional distress. The deterioration was physical, mental and emotional. Without the volunteers being aware, Professor Wever introduced the Earth’s natural pulse of 7.83 Hz into their living accommodation, and the body measurements that were being constantly monitored rapidly improved. As astronauts experienced the same problems in the early days of space travel, a device emitting the Earth’s natural pulse, the Schumann resonance, is now built into spaceships.

Clearly then, contact with the Earth is vital for our physical and mental well-being. We are hardwired for the same frequency as the Earth. It isn’t just animals and plants that are interconnected with the Earth in a direct way; humans are all part of this organic ecosystem too.

We know from medicine and from the respected work of the HeartMath Institute that our brain and our heart communicate via electrical signals. We are principally electrical beings, and secondly chemical beings. We need to be in contact with the electromagnetic Earth for our bodies to work naturally well.

So there are two different ways in which natural contact with the Earth is being interfered with by modern living. One is the physical separation from the Earth as a result of wearing shoes and living in buildings, which insulates us from its healing effect, but also there is something else that disrupts our ‘tuning-in’ to the Earth’s natural pulse. This is EMFs – electromagnetic frequencies from mobile phones, wi-fi, and so on. We know now that these can bring changes in the body’s biorhythms, functions in the brain and the tissues, heart rate and immunity. They specifically reduce the production of a powerful antioxidant called melatonin, which is believed to be anti-carcinogenic. We now live in a sea of EMFs: they are everywhere.

James Russell in his film ‘Beings of Frequency’ details how EMFs might affect natural patterns. He explains an experiment carried out by Dr. Joseph Kuhn from Koblenz University, who placed mobile phones in eight beehives. What he recorded was a dramatic decline in the bees returning to those hives, and in one case, no bees returned at all. Of course, if bees are affected by mobile phone signals, one may presume that they will be affected by mobile phone masts. We know they navigate by magnetic signals, and in recent years there has been a massive increase in EMFs due to increased mobile phone ownership. Since 2006, Colony Collapse Disorder has caused the devastation of the bee population, which accounts for over 70% of food pollination. Bird populations have also significantly declined.

We can see therefore that our insulation from the Earth, and the interference with its natural pulse of 7.83 Hz potentially affects not only humans directly, but also the balance of nature. Everything is connected. Everything in the universe demonstrates interdependent natural cycles at many levels.

Sir Fred Hoyle of Cambridge University, founder of the Cambridge Institute of Theoretical Astronomy, believed that the universe is comprised of an interlocking series of intelligences. He theorised that these intelligences extend down from the universe, through nature, to humans on Earth: “there is a hierarchical and interpenetrating chain of intelligence”, he said, which links everything to everything else in the universe.

Planetary orbits

Our interest here is, obviously, with the planets, whose orbiting motion produces a hierarchy of interlocking cycles.

This diagram is, of course, much simplified, as planets move in an elliptical, slightly undulating fashion. As they continually move, they form geometric aspects to each other, which manifest as meaning in the world and in our lives. Charles Harvey, a world-class astrologer and inspiring tutor with whom I was lucky enough to enjoy workshops in Jesus College, Oxford, said: “The planetary cycles are thus the threads of eternity which weave the great tapestry of life in time”.

The cycles of the planets go from one day, in the case of the Earth making one rotation on its axis, to the orbit of Pluto, which is approximately 248 years.

We looked at the example of Uranus in meaningful relationship to Pluto in the previous chapter but any two planets coming together in certain geometric relationships will manifest in the world. Their meaning will become apparent globally, nationally, socially and individually. If we ‘slice’ their meaning another way, we will see their manifestation ecologically, economically, culturally, technically, scientifically and even spiritually. We have also seen how when two slow-moving planets are gradually forming an exact aspect, say 90°, but haven’t quite got there, faster moving planets such as the Sun and Mars can ‘translate’ this aspect so it manifests powerfully, as if it were exact. We saw this with the dramatic events of the Arab Spring. Smaller cycles are linked with larger ones.

We are also aware that within this vast planetary picture there are many billions of individual charts, each stamped with their own ‘energy imprint’ at the moment of birth that reflects the pattern in the heavens at the time, but also each has a life of its own. Each individual, as we have seen, has his own potentialities and distinct abilities seeded in his chart but each of us cannot be separated from the whole organic universe. Science tells us that we are even physically made up of the same material as the stars: stardust.

While I was very young, I remember being fascinated by Mandelbrot Sets, exquisite patterns that appear chaotic but when you ‘dive’ into the image order readily appears. Similar structures appear in nature; if you study the rugged coastlines of Western Scotland or Ireland with their tiny inlets, or look closely at ferns, there appear to be tiny versions of the larger image. However, if you magnify the ‘tiny’ and dive into them, virtually identical structures to the big fern will appear, firstly in miniature, then open up further to reveal even tinier replicas. It’s a little like Russian dolls, but on a much greater scale.

The static black and white image below does not do this justice. It’s well worth viewing these on the Internet, where it’s possible to plunge into them and have a feeling of ordered infinity.

Mandelbrot Set sourced from www.misterx.ca

It is possible to do this on the beautiful website from which this image was sourced, www.misterx.ca. These fascinating images are called Mandelbrots because a French mathematician called Benoit Mandelbrot defined these as fractal patterns that do not lose their detail or their proportions, whatever the scale. So even when magnified or shrunk to microscopic level, these patterns retain their proportions. He developed a mathematical way of producing these patterns, known as the ‘Mandelbrot Set’. They are a form of fractal geometry, and these fractals form an infinite number of interlocking, ‘self-nested’, similar structures. They are almost – but not quite – identical, but form a hierarchy of patterns, which are mathematical in structure, perfectly ordered but initially appearing chaotic, linking the micro to the macro.

When I began to study astrology, and was diving deeply into birthcharts, it reminded me of the fascination I had as a child for the profound intricacies of Mandelbrots. The Mandelbrot Set gives us a wonderful visual analogy of how we fit with the greater whole. We are not identical, we have our own distinctive pattern but we are all interlocked together as microcosms to form part of, and reflect, the macrocosm of the planetary cycles in the universe.

This idea of the microcosm and the macrocosm and smaller cycles linking into greater ones, is at the heart of astrology as a philosophy. It is precisely this idea that is used as one of the most powerful techniques in astrology.

To explain this, we need to understand that the Sun moves approximately a degree a day through the zodiac. In ancient times, the Babylonians originated the concept of ‘one degree of the circle for one day of life’ as a method of forecasting the future for an individual, but this became increasingly inaccurate as the person grew older. In efforts to correct the inaccuracy, Ptolemy further developed this idea, and it was refined through the ages to eventually become ‘one day equals one year’ in an individual’s life. This is because the Sun has a slight variation in its apparent speed through the year, so it is not always exactly one degree per day. If you are 40 years old, for instance, we need to take the position of your Sun, your life giver, count 40 days on from your birthdate, and then add that same distance travelled by the Sun from your birth to every other planet in your chart. These new positions may form new geometric aspects with the natal planets. This provides a powerful technique in astrology. These are called ‘Solar Arcs’, and as my Masters’ tutor Noel Tyl calls them, they are the ‘big bells’. This may sound like a mathematical abstraction, a sleight of hand, but we are still using the idea of ‘a day equals a year’, as travelled by the Sun from your birthdate. This concept is about the microcosm reflecting the macrocosm, the smaller daily cycles reflecting the annual ones in a person’s life.

It is important to understand that we are not just looking at the average (apparent) speed of the Sun, but its speed at your birth. It is an organic unfolding of your birthchart. This is entelechy, as Aristotle described it. The dates of life events wouldn’t work if you just took the average speed of the Sun. That’s the problem the ancients had, as they knew it was a powerful concept, but the dates were often a little inaccurate. They were almost-but-not-quite-right. It has taken until recent times to understand that it is only by considering the individualised speed of your Sun that these Solar Arcs work absolutely precisely in time. An astrological computer program will calculate these exactly. For instance, the distance between the Sun and the Earth is greatest during summer, so the apparent motion of the Sun is slower during March to September.

These Solar Arcs are correlated with the biggest developments in people’s lives, in my view. Firstly, they are very quick to see by eye in a chart. As stated, the Sun moves about a degree a year (almost but not quite, sometimes a little less, sometimes a little more, depending on the birthdate but one can make a quick mental adjustment for this) and applying this distance to all the planets will mean they form new relationships, new geometric angles, with the natal planets. This gives the astrologer a lot of symbolic information.

If I am in a situation where I’m doing short, spontaneous consultations for people in front of an audience after a talk, to demonstrate how astrology works, with no time at all for preparation, I will rely heavily on these Solar Arcs. Some quick ‘eyeball’ maths will enable me to look back in time and give ages and dates when certain types of events may have occurred, and equally one can project forward in time. It is using simple arithmetic based on the position of the planets and angles at birth.

I am constantly impressed, even after many years, with the reliability of these aspects. Many other techniques are used in chart analysis but, in my experience, these are the dominant ones. They give validity to the microcosm equals the macrocosm idea, as we are using a small cycle (a day) to equal a larger cycle (a year), with reliability. Solar Arcs are like an expression of the Mandelbrot Set in an individual’s life. They carry with them, however, insight and meaning.

We are looking at interlocking smaller and larger cycles of time here. What is fascinating is that we are looking at a mix of real time (planetary orbits) with symbolic time (a day for a year). This is proof positive for me that we are not dealing with any physical causation here, of the planets affecting us in any direct way. They can’t be, otherwise aspects of symbolic time wouldn’t work, as they do very powerfully. It is something much more holographic; the whole that is in the part guides our lives.

It reminds me of an ancient Buddhist sutra referred to as ‘Indra’s net’, which describes a cosmic web of multi-faceted gems in which each distinct part reflects all other gems, together with all of their reflections. A beautiful expression of the macrocosm and the microcosm.

Let me give some examples of how Solar Arcs can manifest in people’s lives. A client recently had Solar Arc Sun moving onto her natal Jupiter. This should, archetypally, have associations of success, abundance (particularly as Jupiter was connected to the money area of her chart), recognition, ‘higher-mind study’, and long-distance travel. She completed her degree in philosophy with flying colours, inherited a considerable amount of money from a relative and travelled to Australia for a well-earned yoga and meditation holiday. All of these events occurred as Solar Arc Sun was exactly on her natal Jupiter, to the month.

Another client was hesitating as to whether he should take a very large job offer that had been made to him. His chart showed Solar Arc Midheaven (remember, this is the point where the Sun is at its highest overhead at the moment of your birth, progressed and calculated exactly for the number of years he has lived, by counting the days, hours and minutes reflected in the smaller cycle) moving onto his Sun, which was also connected to his career. Not only did this Arc show the job offer but also suggested the success, recognition and public exposure he would have in his new role. He accepted the job and it was extremely successful for him. He told me some months later that without this astrological input he may well have pulled back and stayed in his previous job, where he would have done very well, but he would have missed the bigger opportunity.

Another client wanted to meet a partner. Two years from her consultation her chart showed that she had Solar Arc Sun moving onto her Mars, which is archetypally connected with sexuality and often the ‘man in your life’, and in her chart was also connected to romance. Three years after that, her Solar Arc Sun was moving onto her Venus, connected with love, and specifically in her chart with marriage and feeling loved and appreciated. Guess what happened – she met her husband-to-be two years after our session, and married him three years later.

Sadly, another client clearly had marriage difficulties; she had Solar Arc Uranus (breaking up old patterns, the need for more freedom coming from one partner or the other, and sometimes it seems to be connected to another person being involved) moving to aspect her ‘point of marriage’. So was Solar Arc Pluto, associated with endings, beginnings and stress. My client suspected her husband was having an affair and wanted to leave the marriage. This does not mean to say that the marriage was definitely over, for we have freewill in terms of how we react to life’s events, but at a minimum there will be changes in the dynamics of the relationship.

As I write in July 2013, just last night I was doing a series of short readings for people after a talk. In these situations, members of the audience give me their birthdata, and the computer will calculate their charts in seconds; I then instantly ‘translate’ some of the birthchart information for them. I entered the birthdata for one lady, and as her chart came up on screen I immediately asked her if she had been ill or wounded in some way at the age of two, as Solar Arc Chiron (the ‘wounded healer’) moved onto her Ascendant. Yes, she said, she had required a blood transfusion. Also her Solar Arc Midheaven (the parental axis) had moved onto her natal Uranus and Pluto at the age of six. This suggested something sudden, traumatic, stressful, and would be likely to involve a geographic relocation for her, and at least one of the parents. When I asked her what had happened at that time, she said her father had taken her away to Malta at that age, telling her that he wasn’t going to allow her to return home to her mother in the UK.

All of these simple but quite dramatic examples of life’s events are all based on this mysteriously reliable concept of one day equals one year in the life. It is calculated to be exact to the month when the corresponding events are most likely to occur, but these are such big archetypal energies that we can feel them over the course of the entire year of influence. It is remarkable that these powerful aspects that are symbolically time-based are correlated, as in some of the examples above, with major life change.

Equally, we are looking at cycles in a different context when we look at the ‘transits’ of planets. Here we are looking at the repeating cyclic patterns of planets moving around in their orbit in real time, and making aspects with the natal chart. Either way we are looking at interlocking cycles of symbolic time and real time. That’s what astrology is.

This combination of symbolic time and real time that experienced astrologers use in every consultation is fascinating. Astrologers, myself included, perhaps take these concepts for granted as we are working with them all the time, but they most definitely say to me that what we are working with is a fractal, holographic measurement of time. Time is not simply linear, it’s much deeper than that, as otherwise these symbolic time measurements wouldn’t work. ‘The microcosm reflects the macrocosm’ was originally a philosophic concept of the ancients, perhaps spiritually perceived, but here we have evidence of it in real astronomy and mathematics. That’s truly amazing to me, even after all my years of working with astrology.

It’s always important for the astrologer to think in terms of cycles in a client’s birthchart, rather than one-off events. Through a person’s life, we need to track through the threads of meaning over time. If we are considering Jupiter with its 12-year orbit, we know that it has associations of personal growth, abundance, expansion, teaching, learning, long-distance travel and ‘higher-mind’ subjects. We will have additional information depending on Jupiter’s position in the client’s birthchart. What the astrologer doesn’t know is how it will have been lived out in the client’s life, and what its precise manifestation was. There is always a spiralling upwards, an echo of the previous manifestation from 12 years before, but being lived at a higher level now, building on the previous transits.

An important time in Jupiter’s orbit is when it returns to meet your Sun. A client is a very good example. At Jupiter’s second meeting with his Sun at 22 he took a year off and travelled around the world, spending time perfecting his French and Italian, and teaching English. He also started to practise yoga (Jupiter associations of long-distance travel, expanding your horizons, teaching and ‘higher-mind’ activities). At 34, he was offered a job as a lecturer in languages in France, and he also started to teach yoga there. At 46 he emigrated to Australia, was made Head of the Department of Languages at a University there, and set up his own yoga studio where he taught at weekends. He also wrote a book (Jupiter has connections to writing and publishing). This was a very clear ‘spiralling upwards’, each Jupiter cycle building on the last.

Particularly with the more distant planets like Saturn, with its orbit of approximately 29 years, it is very important to consider what part of the cycle we are in. The conjunction is the seed point, the birth of an idea; the square (90°) around seven years later tests the validity of what was begun; then seven years after that (the opposition, 180°) this can be the culmination of what began, after much hard work and responsibility, or it becomes clear to the individual that changes in direction have to be made. The final square to the original conjunction at age 21 will reap the rewards, or otherwise, of this cycle.

These are major cycles in anyone’s life, and will have similar manifestations. The most important part of the cycle is known as the Saturn return when it returns to its natal place around age 29 and then again around 59, for everyone. For the year or so before these times, relationships, jobs or circumstances may fall away, and it can be associated with stress. It is sometimes referred to as “astrological adulthood” at the age of 29, but at both 29 and 59 (approximately, needs to be calculated exactly) there is a strong feeling of being at a crossroads. You have a sense of a bird’s eye view of your life. There is an evaluation of all aspects of life, personal, and professional. It’s like sorting the wheat from the chaff, the harvest. It becomes clear what has gone well in life and what has gone less well. You meet with hard reality.

Usually the degree of difficulty during these times is correlated with how fully you have been ‘true to who you really are’ in your life. If you have generally lived your life doing what others expected of you, this can be quite a painful period of readjustment. If you have lived life expressing who you really are, then this can be a period of consolidation. Either way, usually adjustments and restructuring need to take place. There is also a feeling of urgency, even at 29, that you have to get on and do whatever you haven’t yet achieved. There will be many other specific associations of this transit depending on Saturn’s position within the birthchart, but the generality described above will apply.

You are aware of decisions being more important than normal as you refocus your lens on your priorities for the future. Both of these times in life can be major evaluation periods and can often involve responsibility, maturity, hard work and realism. There is often a feeling of weightiness about these periods in life.

Saturn also has another cycle that operates through the birthchart. This is where we are still tracking the 29½-year orbit of Saturn but this time following how it moves through the different sections of your own chart. If we imagine your birthchart as a cake with twelve slices, each slice represents an area of life such as health, career, children, and so on, as shown on the diagram in Notes to the Reader where you can see the more detailed associations. For the purposes of this example, we’ll keep it very simple.

Transiting Saturn through the birthchart

We take the start point for transiting Saturn as it crosses your Ascendant and then spends approximately two and a half years in each area. This area of life will be highlighted during this period but the whole 29½ year cycle viewed this way looks at your internal development from a period of obscurity to rising to our greatest impact and influence in the world. It is fascinating to track this cycle alone when we are looking at the lives of politicians and famous people, and see their rise to power as they dutifully follow the progress of Saturn in their birthchart with immaculate timing. Transiting Saturn’s cycle viewed in this way is one of the most fundamental in our lives, but for each of us it follows an individualised timing as it begins at your Ascendant.

Another major cycle operational in everyone’s life is Uranus, which has an 84-year orbit. In your early twenties, roughly around the age of 21, although this must be calculated exactly, transiting Uranus comes to 90° to its natal position, a square. This can often be a phase of rebellion against someone or something in the particular area of life that Uranus is associated with in your individual chart. It is usually a desire for more freedom of self-expression, an assertion of individuality. In certain areas of life you will experience rapid and fast-moving change, disruption and a feeling of time being speeded up, an urgency to get on with what is most meaningful in your life.

This ‘adjustment’ period is very important. Although they are very different archetypes, Saturn and Uranus both urge you to find your essential nature, to discover who you are as an individual and pursue that as your focus. As with Saturn’s opposition to its natal place, Uranus tests how well we have made our decisions when it reaches its opposition around the age of 42. This can be part of the so-called ‘mid-life crisis’, when you are evaluating what you’ve accomplished so far. It feels quite different from Saturn’s transits in that Uranus’ expression is to make sudden radical changes, and be disruptive; you feel wired, it’s often hard to sleep. There is always an impatience, an intensity, a demanding quality to Uranus at these major transit times. One important element is to recognise what individuality is for you, and start to live it at a deeper level of purpose. It’s about matters of ultimate concern and how your life fits into that.

The next Uranus ‘square’ to its natal place happens in your early sixties and the issues and decisions made around the age of 42 will be tested. How deeply has your life reflected your individuality in all its facets, or have you tended to go along with what others expected of you?

Everyone has these cycles in their lives, amongst many other individually timed ones. But what we’re doing here is separating out the hidden threads of planetary meaning, so we can track through each individual’s life and see clearly how each archetype has manifested. We can unravel the complex web of your birthchart and see how you have evolved on the ‘spindle’ of Jupiter’s or Saturn’s archetypal meaning. For instance, if you have always avoided responsibility, the important transits of Saturn will make the consequences of that behaviour very clear. Clients find it very helpful to see the meaning of the apparent chaos of day-to-day life ‘laid bare’. There is no better tool for self-understanding and also to develop a sense of responsibility for our actions, in seeing how we have used our freewill to play the archetypal events.

One of the wonderfully practical things about astrology is that these archetypal patterns and meanings give you a set of individualised instructions for your life, which you can choose to use as future guidance or blunder on by yourself. Have you ever tried to do something in life without reading the instruction manual? How well did you do? Why wouldn’t you at least want to take a peek at those uniquely made-for-you instructions?

Astrology encourages you to think in cycles, ever spiralling upwards in their manifestation.

Cycles are fundamental in astrology just as they are in nature and we have seen in the previous chapter how some of these cycles have manifested in the world. Also, cycles are very important for what is known as financial astrology. Some wealthy investors use astrologers on a regular basis. Over the years at astrology conferences, I have met economists and people working for various financial and investment institutions and those who invest in the stock market. They use astrological cycles as a research tool to guide their decision-making.

The movements of the stock market are also a measure of confidence but financial astrology is much more detailed than that. One particularly skilled astrologer, Ray Merriman, who is familiar with financial markets, has spent many years studying correlations of planetary cycles to currencies, silver, gold, wheat, corn, soybeans and crude oil. Each of these responds to different planetary movements. Each has its own cycle length that breaks down into sub-cycles of peaks and troughs, which can be tracked with impressive accuracy. Ray frequently identifies these tops and bottoms of individual commodity cycles within a few minutes. He also identified the market meltdown, financial and banking crisis for fourteen years before September 2008, every year, in writing. That’s how powerful astrological cycle analysis can be.

In mid-April 2013, gold had fallen 170 points within a few days leading up to 15th April, falling 9% in one day. It even made the national news. Economists who were interviewed struggled to find a good reason for this sudden fall. Ray Merriman had already warned his subscribers that this was a time frame in which gold would drop sharply on the way to a low point in its sub-cycle that was then in effect. He was completely confident as a result of tracking this astrologically for many years. He did all of this using astrological cycles and correlating these with his knowledge of financial markets, and going against what many other economists and financial institutions were projecting.

Astrology in this way gives us a whole new paradigm, a different view entirely to what the conventional news and economists are telling us about our national economies.

Every year, in writing, Ray will plot the forthcoming year in terms of forecasts for the above commodities, currencies, major stock markets and important world events. If you were investing in the stock market wouldn’t these astrological insights at least be ‘an aid to judgement’? He has now set up an Academy to teach astrological cycles to those working in the financial world, and has an extremely impressive list of students, including senior management from prominent investment houses. He remains however a humble and highly spiritual man. He is less focused on financial gain, rather on greater understanding of universal archetypal cycles. I have followed Ray’s work for many years and have complete respect for his studies. He may provide the way that astrology can become legitimised in the modern world.

I wonder how different our world would be with a greater knowledge of the subject, if it were as widespread as it was up until the 17th century. How different would the prevailing paradigm be, how much greater would our self-knowledge be, and how different would the decisions of our leaders be? Astrology recognises that we live in a world of interlocking cycles within our bodies, within nature, and within the cosmos. We are inescapably part of the greater whole.

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To summarise: all of life operates according to natural cycles of the Sun, the Moon, and the seasons. Part of this interdependence is that living beings need to be exposed to the Earth’s pulse, the Schumann resonance. This frequency operates at 7.83 Hz, the identical frequency to our alpha brainwaves that are associated with relaxation and wellbeing. When we are separated from this our health deteriorates, as Professor Wever’s experiments with students insulated in a bunker showed. All of nature is connected.

We have also seen how our individual birthcharts lock into world events. The microcosm reflects the macrocosm. This principle is also seen in naturally occurring fractal geometry in nature, as seen in fern growth, and snowflakes. Diving into the detail of these structures will reveal identical repeating patterns.

The microcosm-macrocosm idea operates powerfully in astrology in the individual and the world, but also in the way time appears to operate. The idea of ‘a day for a year’ had its origins in ancient Babylonia and has been refined to a system of Solar Arcs. This only works when the calculation is based on the speed of the Sun’s movement at the time of the individual’s birth. The resulting Solar Arcs of each planet and angle give us one of the most powerful techniques in astrology, but they also prove that no physical causation by the planets is taking place, for here we are dealing with symbolic time. The astrologer is always looking at a mix of real planetary orbit time and symbolic time, interlocked together. This suggests that we are dealing with a fractal, holographic quality of time that is not simply linear.

Astrology deals with repeating cycles, and how they have manifested in the individual’s life. This allows the astrologer to separate out the individual planetary threads to see how the client has used the spindle of meaning of Jupiter, Saturn, and so on through their lives.

These repeating cycles are crucial also in financial astrology, and one master astrologer, Ray Merriman, has correlated planetary cycles to stock market, currency and commodity cycles, with impressive success. This has allowed him to accurately identify ahead of time troughs and crests in markets, as well as the financial meltdown of 2008. In this way, astrology provides a totally different paradigm for looking at the world economy.

However much modern man believes he is separate from nature, he cannot escape the fact that he is part of the eternal interlocking cycles of planetary movements in the cosmos.

12

Coming Full Circle

“There is one common flow, one common breathing, all things are in sympathy.”

Hippocrates in De Alimento, 5th Century BC

We have seen in our journey through this book that the Ancient Greeks such as Hippocrates as quoted above, and the scientists Plato and Pythagoras, believed that the patterns and cycles that were everywhere in nature and in the movements of the planets were all part of one living organism. This concept was generally accepted as the worldview until the 17th century when Newton’s mechanistic explanation of the world became dominant. Up to that point, mathematics and science were intertwined with philosophy and spirituality; they enabled insights into ‘divine will’. Astrology over the last three hundred years or so has fallen a long way from that elevated perspective. Now science, with its new discoveries in quantum law, gives astrology the opportunity to reclaim its historical position.

Astrology offers us the bridge between science and spirituality. Clearly, it is embedded in the laws of the universe, as it is based on planetary movements. That is its foundation. But it also gives us profound insights into who we are, and who we’re meant to become.

It is fascinating to study historical cycles as we have done with Uranus and Pluto and to see the same themes repeating time after time in history. There is a spiralling upwards in our development. But there is a consistency to these archetypal meanings, which is very clear. We could track through the theme of ‘revolution’ with this Uranus-Pluto aspect, associated with austerity and inequality. So whether we look at the burning down of the Medici Bank in Florence by the storm of protesters, the revolutions and rebellions of 1643 to 54, the French Revolution (and others) in the 1790s, the ‘Year of Revolution’ in 1848, the protest marches and demonstrations for equal rights for various groups in the 1960s, or the recent ‘Arab Spring’ and civil unrest across Europe, we can see the archetypal meanings of Uranus-Pluto playing out in the world.

Or we could take the thread of scientific and technical innovation: the invention of the printing press during 1450, and the Industrial Revolution that accelerated this; the development of the steam train and the electric telegraph that enabled the revolutions across Europe in 1848 to spread so quickly; the invention of the telephone in 1876; to the Internet development in the 1960s: and finally the widespread use of social media, Facebook and Twitter, in the organisation of the Arab Spring and the London riots.

Or we could take the thread of breaking through to a new understanding of our reality: Columbus discovering new lands, and that the Earth wasn’t flat, Copernicus discovering the Earth went round the Sun, to putting a man on the Moon in July 1969. All of these, as we have seen, were under Uranus-Pluto aspects.

What this suggests to me is that the archetypal meanings of the planets are eternal through time. Their expression in the world changes as mankind advances, so we communicate no longer by electric telegraph but by Facebook and Twitter. But the underlying themes remain the same. We could visualise it like this:

Meaning spiralling upwards in its expression

The planetary archetypes appear to be the building blocks of meaning in the world across time.

This links, of course, to the concept of these ‘pillars of meaning’ forming the warp in the tapestry, on which we have freewill to weave the ‘weft’ of life’s events. The aspects between the planets we know give us another layer of meaning. It is this perception of a hidden order around which our lives operate that can be so insightful. It encourages us to maximise our potential, and take opportunities when the time is right. It helps us to understand who we and our partners and children really are. It shows you where you’re special. It helps you understand where your challenges lie and that the greatest growth can come from this. It illuminates times when we do need to withdraw from the world and how we can use this time well. It gives us insight into very difficult times, perhaps when a marriage is ending, and it helps to give us the courage to make changes. It gives us confidence that we ‘have a following wind’ at key times. More than anything, it helps us to see the underlying meaning of experiences we are going through so we can make better sense of our circumstances. It also shows us other options so we can make better choices. Astrology does not dictate how well we live our lives, how beautifully we play our music. With awareness, we choose how it will be played. Our birthchart is a totally trusted ally in the hubbub of life; it is potentially the highest expression of ourselves on paper. It gives us practical access to who we are and who we are becoming. My life would undoubtedly have been less without it.

We have seen how the archetypes manifest both internally in our lives but also outwardly in the world. Particularly with the challenging transits, anything you don’t willingly express and acknowledge tends to come at you more dramatically from the outside. For instance, if you have transiting Uranus aspecting the marriage area of your chart, you will know from the astrology that this means it’s important for both of you to have greater freedom of self-expression. Without any changes being made consciously, this may manifest as your spouse announcing that they are leaving the marriage as they feel it has become stale and confining. You can then use this Uranus transit positively to bring new dimensions, more variety into your marriage, and thereby possibly save it. Wasn’t that worth knowing? It is the way we understand and play the music; we are not fated victims in our lives.

This doesn’t mean that astrologers all live perfect lives, but it does give an additional layer of profound insight that will always be for your benefit and personal growth.

Many of the clients coming to see me now are having important parts of their birthchart triggered by this Uranus-Pluto aspect. We have seen the outward expression of this in the world, but it is very easy to see how it impacts my clients’ lives and psyches. Therefore, what we are seeing is a consistent thread of meaning from the individual to the world, the inner to the outer. The same themes of upheaval, disruption, freedom of self-expression, fundamental and fast-moving change apply to the individual and the world equally. But, of course, there is another step in this process; that the archetypal meanings are originating from the planets in their orbits, from the cosmos. This concept is fundamental to astrology.

Our connection to the cosmos

In this sense then, astrology is the language that connects us to the cosmos, via meaning. But it doesn’t just connect us in a general sense; it connects us as unique individuals with the planets. We each have our own map. Meaning is everything in our lives; it is our ‘totality’ as Bohm said. We constantly allocate meaning to conversations, relationships, events and ultimately our lives. It gives us purpose and value. Astrology gives us access to that fundamental web of meaning that permeates the universe and our lives. It is everywhere. It is in past, present and future time. It is in our psyches and in the world. It has dimensions in every aspect of our lives: our work, our relationships, our children, our health, and our development. Meaning is determined partly by the archetypal pattern in our birthchart, then by whatever the planetary transits are offering to us at any moment, but also, importantly, by how we choose to react to life’s events.

But what is choosing? It is our freewill, in the form of consciousness, that chooses. Astrology sees the consciousness of the individual and that of the universe as one, in constant co-creation.

In the Newtonian age, and for the last 300 years or so, matter and mechanics were seen as the true reality. In quantum theory, consciousness and potentiality are the true reality.

I personally know two people who have both had profound spiritual awakenings via a Kundalini (enlightenment) experience. Both of them described how they now see, everywhere, what they describe as ‘squiggles’ of potentiality in the universe, all around us. They are waiting to manifest as matter and events in our lives. It is the implicate, waiting to become explicate. We then, either by default, or being fully conscious of our thoughts and emotions, create our lives. But we are always working from our fundamental script, our birthchart. How conscious we are determines the level at which our birthcharts will manifest. If we are largely unaware we live small lives bumping along the bottom; but with greater consciousness we can play our music magnificently, and be the best that we can be.

So astrology should not be seen in any sense as ‘fated’, that the planets are ‘doing something to you’ in some physical sense. Your birthchart is your pure potentiality but you then use this to co-create. As Deepak Chopra said, “In my stillness I am the eternal possibility; in my movement I am the cosmos.” Indeed, the best use of astrology is not in a predictive sense in terms of describing events. Firstly, it is not a psychic or clairvoyant process where the astrologer can ‘see’ the events unfolding. As we said earlier, it is symbolically predictive, not executionally predictive.

Secondly, it may actually be limiting to define the event; the universe is much smarter than we are, and may deliver something much better than we can imagine. Thirdly, and very importantly, it is not our life as astrologers to live; it is our client’s. So the best use of astrology is not only to illuminate the developmental process that has made our client who they are, but to then set out the upcoming archetypal opportunities. What astrology is very good at is describing the kind of archetypal energy (eg. Uranus-Pluto, Neptune, etc.) that is coming in, the specific timing of this, and the area of life in which it will be experienced – be it money, health, work etc. The outlining of these opportunities can be very detailed without dictating how our client should live them out. Then astrology becomes truly empowering.

I frequently see clients who are experiencing Neptune transits. In their positive expression these can be exceptionally inspiring, creative and often highly spiritual. They refine gross physical energy so we often have less ‘get up and go’, and may even think we have something wrong with us; but the process refines spiritual and creative energy, so it seems to become purer and lighter. However, if you don’t know you have a Neptune transit, in its negative expression it is confused, weepy, droopy, in a fog, you barely know who you are or where you are going, feeling disoriented and lost. It is easy to feel like a victim with these, and not know which direction to move in. It can feel like a powerful undertow that is totally appropriate for Neptune as Lord of the Sea. However, if you use up the Neptunian energy positively by doing something creative, artistic or spiritual, then the music plays, as it were, without affecting you negatively.

I’m personally experiencing powerful Neptune transits to both my Sun and my Moon right now (transiting Neptune conjunct my Moon, and Solar Arc Neptune square my Sun), which could be a guaranteed energy wipe-out. But I’m choosing to write this book, and I also do some simple healing for people. Over the period of these Neptune transits, I have not only started to regularly feel energy and see people’s auras, I also feel powerful energy during meditation and healing. I frequently feel, at these times, that my body isn’t solid, that it is just waves of vibrating energy (which is actually the quantum truth!). My physical energy is good but at these times of heightened perception, the feeling of ‘dissolution’ and energy shift is marked. ‘Dissolution’ is one of Neptune’s associations.

So in this way we can consciously change gear, if you like, with our transits. We can become inspired rather than depressed. We can live the positive rather than the negative. But if you didn’t know what you were going through, what would you do? See a doctor? Take antidepressants? Stay confused and low energy for a couple of years? That is generally how long Neptune transits last. Astrology is just so darned, practically useful.

When we experience transits, the information or process that that planetary archetype represents, somehow becomes part of us. As in Alain Aspect’s experiments, this seems to be happening as some kind of information sharing, rather than any physical causal effect. Both Aspect’s experiments and quantum theory teach us that we live in one seamless, indivisible universe of possibility.

The planets as we have seen connect us to this universe of possibility via the archetypal pillars of meaning. However, the planetary cycles provide another connection; they act as instruments of time for our world. The Sun and Moon in a very obvious way help us to measure time via days and months. The planetary orbits translate the pure potentiality of the implicate, timeless quantum world into our structured time-based reality. Plato said that: “Time is the flowing image of eternity.” He saw the planets, as seen in his worldview in Chapter 7, as bringing his Perfect Forms and Ideas which exist in the eternal and unchanging World of Being into the dimension of time, our everyday world. They become earthed. At the moment of our birth we are anchored in a freeze-frame moment between the universal potentiality of meaning and the dimension of time, as described by our planetary pattern.

The mechanical soulless universe of the last 300 years has made it easy for us to feel separate. Understanding astrology teaches us that we are not separate. We are each like a wave, which is part of the ocean. We do not live in a blind, random, meaningless universe. It is alive, humming with number, meaning and purpose. Like Mandelbrots we are complete individual microcosms that are indivisible from and fully reflective of the macrocosm.

Having worked with astrology for so many years, it is impossible not to believe there is a divine organising intelligence behind it. Its awesome complexity but precision, its profound sense of meaning, its interlocking cycles of symbolic time intertwined with real time, its infinite order, and its presence in every aspect of our lives, all speak of intelligence at a very high level, which is conscious. This divine intelligence operates everywhere in the world, but we probably scarcely acknowledge it. For instance, consider all your body functions. Medicine has calculated that there are at least 30 million things happening in our bodies every second when you measure all the biochemical activities. Are you checking in on those to make sure they’re running ok, or do you trust some higher intelligence is doing the job for you? Our hearts beat, we breathe, repair cells, digest food, think, move around, make babies, without us even considering the miracles that are our bodies.

There is purpose everywhere in nature; trees come into leaf, flowers bloom, birds are busy making nests in spring then they migrate in winter. Acorns turn into oak trees and caterpillars into butterflies. Salmon risk life and fin battling back upstream to spawn at their original birthplace. All of nature is filled with purpose, demonstrating intelligent order, and miracles abound. We tend to take all this for granted in our busy lives.

In ancient and medieval times, as well as in traditional cultures, there was a perception of the world as an intelligently and divinely ordered living organism, in which everyone had souls, and every part of nature and man had purpose. At the beginning of our journey, we set out how archetypes represent an urge or desire to manifest their symbolism; they have a will and intent to evolve, and they therefore feed our growth. We, and the world, have purpose as these archetypes are expressed. There is an evolution forwards and upwards in our development.

Indeed, it has only been in the last 300 years or so, in western culture, that our perspective was changed so dramatically to a mechanistic view. Man had no particular purpose within that, no particular place to which he should evolve. That is still largely the prevailing context, and that is why these ancient-but-quantum ideas seem so unfamiliar. Rationality ruled. The concept of an intelligent living universe in which we could have any connection with the planets was ridiculed, derided and scorned as ‘primitive thinking’ and ‘superstition’. Yet nature demonstrates this interconnectedness everywhere, in its natural rhythm with the seasons, night and day, the Moon’s cycles and in animals’ interdependence on each other in the intricacies of the food chain. If this is true for all other animal and plant life, why should man be the only species excluded from this connection in the universe? As Deepak Chopra said:

“The body is a movement of stars. Biological movements are a function of planetary movements – circadian, seasonal, etc. There is an underlying intelligence that organises the infinity of all things happening in the universe, and connects all things with each other.”

San Francisco Chronicle, January 11 1997 38

“Einstein, with his profound respect for natural law, said that the universe ‘reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection’.”

Einstein: The World as I See It, John Lane, London 1935

We are even made of the same material as the planets. After the Big Bang, the material that was left over solidified into stars, planets, and us. We are made of the same stuff as stardust. So when mystics speak of “the world is in us”, that is physically true.

I am truly blessed to have stumbled upon astrology almost four decades ago. I can’t imagine what my life would have been without it. Even when I was working with corporate management, it helped to make sense of the world. It has been a spiritual framework, a practical weather forecast, and a deeply trusted friend. It is a spiritual practice, teaching maturity and detachment on the wheel of time. It has taken me on deeper pathways, into a never-ending exploration of psychology, philosophy and physics. It has shown me a higher divine intelligent order at work in my life, and has given me perspective on whatever is playing out in the world. It teaches that the universe is profoundly meaningful and purposeful.

Instead of living life on the outside of the bicycle tyre, the rubber hitting the road, astrology has allowed me to move closer to the hub of the wheel, and gain some perspective. It has undoubtedly helped me to ‘play the music’ better and bigger, and encourage others to do the same. In challenging times for myself and others, the meaning was always clear, and as Victor Frankl said, “with meaning, anything is possible”.

It has given me confidence, courage and a clear sense of purpose through the various episodes of my life, which have been very different. I feel privileged to have been part of a long line of astrologers, great and small, stretching back to ancient times in Babylonia. This personal journey has been immense and inspiring. For the last 300 years astrology has been dismissed and intellectually discredited; all astrologers have an inkling, at some point, of how it feels to operate on the periphery of society. The general perception is that the totality of astrology is reflected in Sun-sign columns. If it were that simple it wouldn’t take years of demanding study to become competent. It is so, so much more than that, as I hope this book demonstrates.

But we are moving towards coming full circle. Science is beginning to rejoin the dots so astrology can regain the respect it so fully deserves. If this book, in the smallest sense, has added another dot along the way, I am truly grateful.

This way lies wisdom.

To every thing there is a season,

and a time to every purpose under the heaven;

a time to be born, and a time to die;

a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

a time to kill, and a time to heal;

a time to break down, and a time to build up;

a time to weep, and a time to dance;

a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;

a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

a time to get, and a time to lose;

a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

a time to rend, and a time to sew;

a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

a time to love, and a time of hate;

a time of war, and a time of peace.

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

Afterword: a Vision of a New World

Written June 2017

“The way we think about ourselves will give rise to the world we live in.”

Gregg Braden

We are living in extraordinary times of fast-moving change and shifting consciousness, and the next few years are likely to see even greater and faster change than we have ever experienced in our history. In this chapter we are going to consider what this New World is likely to be. How will you fit into a world that even by 2020 may feel very different from where we are now in 2017? The next few years will have some very clear themes that we can see emerging now. Firstly, social activism.

Social Activism

Since April 2011, we have been experiencing the Uranus in Aries square to Pluto in Capricorn, which I wrote about in Chapter 10. Historically it has always been about the people who may feel disenfranchised and marginalised, rising up against the powers that be. It is a revolutionary, eruptive energy, demanding greater equality, fairness, freedom and independence from controls, and for people to have their voice heard. This reflects the Uranus symbolism, and the Pluto symbolism represents any autocratic, controlling, top-down government, corporation or organisation that has become institutionalised and over-powerful. Corruption and underhandedness are often part of this picture, as well as ownership by a wealthy elite. It seems often that a small group of people controls the many. People then rebel.

In Chapter 10 I have written about many of the manifestations of this Uranus-Pluto square, which began in April 2011 with the Arab Spring. It is continuing through to 2017, and indeed being aspected and therefore ‘expanded’ by Jupiter, the planet connected to expansion. Jupiter will continue to oppose Uranus all through 2017. This aspect is strongly connected to social activism. We have seen this recently in the massive protest by indigenous Indian tribes, plus many other supporters at Standing Rock in North Dakota, in peaceful protest against the installation of the North Dakota Pipeline. The pipeline would be drilled through the sacred lands of the Indian tribes, but more importantly may endanger their clean water supply, and the water of all those Americans who are supplied by water from the Mississippi River. Leaks of oil and even gasoline are frequent, and this battle is symbolised astrologically by the Saturn (corporations and governments, in its rulership of Capricorn) square to Neptune in Pisces, which is associated with both oil and water, the key issues here. Saturn in Sagittarius also is connected to the law and its power or limited power to protect the water of these sacred lands.

In general at this time in 2017, Uranus astrologically is connected to ‘pure truth’, so in its aspect both to Pluto in Capricorn and Jupiter in Libra is shining the light of truth on organisations to reveal any dishonesty, cover-ups, or lack of ‘fair play’ and justice (Jupiter in Libra) with regard to the rest of society. A new word has even been invented, ‘corporatocracy’, reflecting the power of corporations over individuals. Astrologically, this is symbolised by Pluto, representing powerful people and companies. There is growing awareness of mainstream media being biased or deliberately not covering some of the social activism taking place in the world, so people are moving towards what they consider to be more honest sources of news on social media, where the platform is more ‘horizontal’ and open. In 2017 as I write, an increasing number of people are using alternative media as their main news source.

What adds even more to this social activism is that the dwarf planet Eris that represents the spiritual warrior is becoming more prominent in 2017 as it is conjunct Uranus. Eris represents the principle of disruption, but always operating to higher spiritual law in taking a strong and necessary stand against any form of oppression. Her symbolism particularly fights against oppression and injustice inflicted on the many by a small section of society. Any lack of integrity is likely to meet justice as we move towards 2020. In myth, Eris is considered the sister of Mars, God of War. Eris will continue to travel with Uranus in the heavens until early 2018, and is opposed by Jupiter, which in Libra also espouses fairness and justice. Eris and Uranus together can produce radical, sudden, chaotic events, protests and rebellions, but always with a purpose of vortexing upwards to a higher level of equality and evolution. Uranus is the planet of awakening, and has been square to Pluto, the planet of transformation since April 2011. Many people link this to the acceleration of ‘awakening’.

One of the major areas of social activism may concern women, and women’s rights. There are several pieces to this astrological picture. Firstly, Venus, the goddess of love and the planet of the female, has begun is beginning its new synodic cycle of 584 days on 25th March 2017 in Aries, at the same time as Mars is in Taurus, ruled by Venus. This is called ‘mutual reception’, with Mars being in Venus’ sign, and Venus is Mars’ sign. This emphasises the ‘spiritual warrior’ female side of society coming to the fore, echoed by Jupiter in Libra, which is ruled by Venus, and demands more equality and fairness. This potentially disruptive but divine feminine energy is strongly reinforced by Eris, goddess of discord, being conjunct Uranus, the planet of awakening, until early 2018, and both in Aries. Aries itself is the sign of the warrior, but Eris’ symbolism is that of the female warrior goddess who creates disruption to help us evolve to a higher state of being, always following spiritual law. We should expect the rise of the divine feminine in society, in reaction to any masculine assertive actions that may be happening in the world.

The divine feminine goes beyond gender, but rather wishes to cultivate those more female qualities of love, nurturing, mutual respect, and co-operation, whether you are man or woman. They are qualities that we need to reflect in society in a bigger way, and social activism around this issue will bring it much more to the fore, as an antidote to any aggressive patriarchy we witness in the world.

So we are in extraordinary times of social, political, and evolutionary change.

The social protests may take many forms: there will be outcries against inequality in society against governments, but also against those substances that are damaging our Earth and our health. 2017 is likely to see many protests across the globe with variations on this theme. However, the opposition between Jupiter and Uranus is not just about protesting; it is about envisioning and awakening to a new and better way to do things. This aspect can help us to suddenly see new possibilities, to create innovation, to find new ways to do old things, and to imagine a soaring vision of a new society that can live in harmony with the Earth, and in balance with nature. The Jupiter-Uranus opposition can manifest as a breaking away from mainstream social values, and striking out in another way to live a more natural and community-based lifestyle, in which society becomes more horizontal in its structure rather than vertical. This is one of the most positive aspects astrologically. If we can accept that there are multiple possibilities at any moment, the Jupiter-Uranus aspect can help us achieve the highest manifestation available, as Jupiter expands the superconscious perception of Uranus, giving us sudden insights from a higher level to shift our energy. It can feel energised and liberating that we suddenly can see things from a different, wider, and higher perspective. This aspect suggests a quantum, evolutionary leap, rather than gradual progress, where we may even begin to function differently as humans.

If Saturn with all its associations of density and tangibility represents the 3rd dimensional world, Uranus represents the 4th, where we move beyond time and space. It can give that piercing clarity that can come from superconscious insights, as Uranus is often referred to as the ‘Mind of God’, the higher octave of Mercury. It is this that can introduce apparent magic into our world, with rapid shifts in perception and possibility.

The Uranus-Pluto square itself is associated with personal breakthroughs and transformation, and many of us have experienced this over the last few years. For some of 2017 Jupiter will be expanding these possibilities. However, what is even more important between now and early 2018 is a very rare aspect between the dwarf planet Haumea in Libra, and Uranus and Eris (another breakdown to breakthrough planet) in Aries. This provides us with another dominant, powerful theme over the next few years, that of a new consciousness.

New Consciousness

Haumea is a planet with a very slow 285-year orbit, so when aspects are made with other planets they are very important. The name ‘Haumea’ is linked to a sacred birth, and in Hawaiian myth represents the divine feminine. She is a goddess associated with childbirth, fertility and creation, and indeed was able to give birth to children from various parts of her body, suggesting a deep understanding of the process of creation. The symbolism of all the planets originates in myth, and in myth Haumea understood the primordial forces supporting life. She had extensive knowledge of herb and plant medicine, all the ancient wisdom of the Earth and how to use it. She understood the sacredness of all life and the evolution of the soul, with a profound mysticism.

Haumea had the ability to not only understand but also regenerate nature, acting in harmony with the Earth. She has the ability to protect and nurture life in all its forms, and is a wild, free spirit. She even had a magic stick called Makalei, with which she could summon seafood, and produce wild food when mass agriculture had failed. There is a magical, Merlin-like, ethereal quality to Haumea. Her protection and nurturing of the Earth, and the ability to regenerate it after any damage or toxicity, is very relevant to our lives now, and certainly needed.

Although Haumea grew older as we all do, she had the ability to constantly renew and rejuvenate herself, evidenced by her ability to be young enough to become her children and grandchildren. This suggests that we will have processes by which we can rejuvenate our bodies too. Haumea saw the Earth as a holistic, organic, living and conscious body, and our interactions with it should be sacred. We should revere and respect the Earth. She has a link to modern-day quantum physics in that she believed that through our intentions and beliefs we can create new realities in our lives, exactly as the shift to the new paradigm is suggesting. So in her ancientness she is leading our thinking now of how we truly are co-creators of our lives; she demonstrated it in many ways in the myth. The ancient Hawaiians were astronomers, evidenced by the fact that they had many references to the stars and planets in their ancient sacred texts. They understood that the world was made up of vibrating energy, which through directed thought became matter, exactly as quantum physics understands it today.

Whenever a planet comes into strong aspects with others in the heavens, its symbolism that is always derived from myth becomes prominent in the world, and becomes part of our consciousness. This suggests that our concern for the Earth and its sustainability and repair will come increasingly to the fore, and we will have the ability to restore its fertility and health in some way. For those who wish to do so, they will live more in harmony with the Earth, her simple natural rhythms, and better understand her power. We have the possibility to live closer to the Earth as part of nature without interfering with it, and away from cities. The combination of the background of the Uranus-Pluto square, representing personal transformation and breakthrough, the Jupiter-Uranus opposition through 2017 of soaring new visions, horizons and possibilities, and maximising your potential at any moment, and the opposition of Haumea and Uranus and Eris in Aries (sign of new beginnings, and individuality), suggest the birth of a new consciousness via higher superconscious perceptions (Uranus). There will be a much wider understanding of how we can shift our vibration and frequency and co-create the future we want, with a quantum understanding of what we are doing. The whole process becomes conscious and empowering. This is one important way we can shift from some of the victim consciousness and dominance of old-paradigm structures that have been evident in recent history.

These aspects will affect us all, but there are certain groups of people who may resonate particularly strongly with Haumea in their birth chart. For instance, from 1953 to 1955, Haumea was conjunct Pluto in Leo. If you were born during those years, the combination of these planets could produce leadership for you, particularly in areas of new consciousness and new thinking. You are likely to have a high degree of personal integrity too, and these qualities in you may become more prominent in the years leading up to 2020, and indeed, beyond.

If you were born in 1962, you will have a Haumea-Uranus conjunction in your birth chart. You are likely to have a more rebellious, radical, alternative view of the world, which is being stirred right now into a major awakening.

Technological Innovation and Healing

Through 2017 there is another important aspect as well as the Jupiter-Uranus opposition, and this continues until spring 2020. This is a semi-square between Uranus and Neptune. Uranus represents radical change, alternative living, innovation and inspiration, together with the use of technology (the Internet was born in the mid-1960s with the conjunction of Uranus and Pluto), and Neptune represents music, rhythm, bliss, and altered states generally, as well as a sense of oneness. We had a similar Uranus-Neptune aspect during the 1960s, and this was a very rich time in terms of music and art, but also people living in communities in oneness, love and peace (Neptune). So over the next three years we have a repeat of this aspect, but always we vortex up in its manifestation. So this is likely to encourage many of us to live in ‘peaceful communities in nature’, following this symbolism. I believe that we will again see a time of inspired music and culture, but also technical (Uranus) devices to achieve altered states and bliss (Neptune). We will even have technology to allow us to access, virtually, the future or the past. Sound healing will become more widespread, and its ability to heal will be better understood. Neptune is connected to music, and Uranus is connected to vibration. It will be more widely understood that we are vibrational beings, and therefore when our frequency can be adjusted via processes such as sound healing, great improvements in our energy can take place.

Indeed, brain ‘surgery’ is already being conducted using sound waves, as reported by the BBC on December 9th 2016. The sound waves are targeted on a specific area of the brain that requires treatment, and without any incisions being necessary, the focused ultrasound corrects the problem. The patient remains awake throughout the procedure, and no recovery time is necessary. A patient who was suffering from severe Parkinson’s disease was recently cured using this non-invasive method. This medical revolution reflects the same astrological symbolism as above.

A very clear demonstration of how vibration can change energy is from the science of cymatics. The term ‘cyma’ comes from the Greek root ‘kyma’ meaning ‘wave’. Cymatics has been described as the science of wave phenomena, in the sense of vibrational wave forces. It particularly demonstrates how different sound vibrations can structure matter into any form, and therefore, how vibration stands behind the creation of the physical world itself. It is vibration made visible. If sand is scattered on a plate, it will form different patterns depending on the vibration that is applied to it, for instance from a violin string being played. Uranus is the planet most linked to vibration, and in May 2018 it will move into Taurus, one of the two signs (the other is Virgo) most linked to the human body. This suggests a much greater understanding and use of vibrational medicine.

One very clear and wonderful example of vibration in healing is that it has been discovered that cancer cells are vulnerable to a frequency of the 11th harmonic. The 11th harmonic is produced when there are two input frequencies and one is 11 times higher than the other. This shatters cancer cells (please see the amazing TED talk by Anthony Holland, Associate Music Professor at Skidmore College, on this research using a Resonant Frequency Device). Every disease or condition has a particular frequency, and through vibrational medicine, which is essentially the basis of homeopathy, we will be able to cure them without drugs. As well as homeopathy, I believe there will be new devices and technologies, which will be able to adjust frequencies and affect a cure very quickly. Light therapy is already being used on this basis.

So great changes are likely to happen in medicine over the next few years, particularly using new technology. New medical discoveries will be made as early as 2017, under the Jupiter-Uranus aspect. For instance, an artificial pancreas has been developed and apparently approved by the FDA for type 1 diabetes patients. This device can automatically monitor glucose levels within the body, and administer insulin exactly when required. Uranus symbolically is the planet most associated with new technology and innovation, and Taurus is associated with the human body. Another example of this is the current development of an electrode, a tiny, minimally invasive implant that can record electrical (Uranus) activity in the brain and then translate this into thoughts that in turn can be translated into movements, to help those suffering from paralysis and severe spinal cord injuries. So regenerative medicine is likely to flourish.

We already have machines that diagnose the body’s energy field and condition, called ‘bioresonance machines’, but with the move of Uranus into Taurus it is likely that in the next few years many of us will have a ‘chip’ or small device implanted in us that can supply constant feedback on our body’s condition. This would obviously revolutionise medicine, and the way the medical services of countries are organised. It may certainly ease the current load on doctors, as the diagnoses would be instant.

Artificial intelligence is likely to play a very big part in this. Google DeepMind software is being developed that can diagnose eye diseases such as macular degeneration very quickly, accurately, and at the very early stages. There is even a smartphone app that now does this.

So the line between natural biology and technology will start to blur as many of us either use internal or external devices to diagnose ourselves or reach a more optimum state.

Stem-cell medicine is likely to become prominent too, which has developed enormously during 2015 and 2016 while Jupiter and the North Node were in Virgo (the tiny, and linked to medicine). Research demonstrates that stem cells have the ability to grow into any kind of cell required in the body. One of the medical aims is that people suffering from brain damage due to Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease may be able to have foreign neuron stem cells implanted into the host’s brain that will allow the organ to repair itself.

There is a revolution happening in 3D printing too, and already new body parts are being simply ‘printed’.

Chiron, the asteroid of the ‘wounded healer’ symbolism, is moving into Aries in May 2019. Aries is the sign of the pioneer, and new beginnings. We are likely to see even greater innovation in healing from that time. However, while Chiron and Neptune (also linked with healing) are still in Pisces, we have seen the development, or more accurately the rediscovery, of some ancient symbols that can be used for healing. These symbols are often from ancient traditions such as Egyptian or Sanskrit, when they were almost certainly used for healing. Certain people across the world are gradually downloading these different symbols in their dreams, and then converting them into a tangible form such as a glass lens that the patient then holds for healing to occur. This new/ancient form of healing is known as BioGeometry.

Another development we are likely to see is the increase in people being able to channel and become telepathic. This is reflected by a combination of Neptune in Pisces, which gives us the ability to ‘tune into’ the intangible, spiritual side of life, and the semi-square between Uranus and Neptune that will continue until early 2020. Over the next three years I believe this ability will be awakened or accelerated in many people. Uranus links to the superconscious, the ‘Mind of God’, and is also linked to the ‘outsider’. Therefore this suggests that many people may be able to link to beings beyond the Earth via channelling. Many can do this already, but in the years up to 2020 this is likely to become more widespread. The ‘Uranus-Neptune generation’ who were born between January 1991 and December 1995 may be particularly adept at this, as they were born under the conjunction of these two planets. These abilities are also supported by Saturn in Sagittarius throughout 2017, and Sagittarius is connected to space travel, and understanding of wisdom that may come from beyond this Earth. Jupiter makes an exact opposition to Uranus in September 2017, and this is linked to breakthroughs in the understanding of life in newly discovered galaxies. We may well have more sightings of extra-terrestrial life.

Then from November 2018 through to December 2019 Jupiter is in Sagittarius, the sign it rules, and we may again achieve a much higher understanding of life beyond this Earth during that time. August 2019 is particularly highlighted as Jupiter becomes stationary direct at 14 degrees Sagittarius, aligning with an area in the cosmos known as The Great Attractor. This has a massive gravitational force and can even bend space-time and light, therefore suggesting that planets at this degree point may help us to ‘see around corners’ or develop precognition. This may further enable us to shift our consciousness and our reality as we develop a much bigger vision and context for who we are, and our understanding of our abilities as humans. We can become visionaries and trailblazers for a very different future at this time. We will have a strong desire to throw off any compromise or jobs that just ‘make a living’, to start living our own truth and being authentic in a clearer way. What will your legacy be, in this future world? What will be your footprint in the sand?

Another manifestation of this Uranus-Neptune semi-square aspect is increasing awareness of how electro-magnetic frequencies (Uranus) from technology (Uranus) such as cell phones, Wi-Fi, and smart meters, as well as radiation in general, disrupt our bliss (Neptune). Technologies have already been developed that can detect and measure these EMFs, and there is extensive research on the damage they do to us. However equally under this aspect, and also once Uranus enters Taurus in May 2018 for seven years, I believe that new technology will be developed to protect us from this damage. Uranus is the planet most associated symbolically with magnetism and Taurus represents the Earth (it is ‘fixed Earth’ in astrology). Therefore it is likely that we will start to understand much more about the power of magnetism to work as an antidote to these EMFs, and boost our healing ability. There may be other powers of the Earth, yet to be discovered, that will help us heal and regenerate. The fact that Haumea, linked to regeneration and healing, is opposing Uranus until early 2018 strongly suggests that.

Taurus represents our natural resources, and is linked to agriculture and food production. As Uranus will be spending seven years in Taurus from May 2018, I believe this will signal a revolution in food production and a much better understanding of how we can use the power of the Earth, including magnetism, to grow food more effectively. Equally, as Uranus enters Taurus, this can suggest disruptions with the food supply, in part caused by pollution from EMFs and chemicals and pesticides. This is suggested by the aspect between Uranus and Neptune, Uranus being associated with EMFs and energy disruptions for our systems, and Neptune linked to chemicals and toxins of all kinds. Uranus in Taurus suggests that they will manifest directly into our food supply, which in turn will accelerate the trend towards developing cleaner, more natural and organic ways of growing our food. The symbolism of Uranus in Taurus suggests a ‘revolution in agriculture and food production’.

Partly this will come via many people growing their own food. This trend is likely to accelerate through 2017 with the trine from Saturn to Uranus, suggesting self-sufficiency and self-organising communities. It will also come by farming happening in a different way; there are ‘vertical farms’ already being developed in big warehouses in cities, where pure organic food can be harvested via efficient vertical racking systems, which maximise the use of space, and make for easy watering and harvesting. These are likely to spread where land is polluted. It has been discovered that different vegetables require different light for optimum growth, very much a reflection of the Uranus-Neptune aspect, with Uranus linked to vibration and Neptune linked to light. Each colour on the light spectrum has a different vibration.

The other expression of the symbolism of Uranus in Taurus is ‘innovation in resources’, so this could happen in many areas where any resources come into short supply. For instance in Florida a team of workers on bicycles with trailers have a system by which they will dig up your front lawn and plant and tend organic vegetables for you. When they are ready to be harvested, the householder will receive a portion of them, with the rest going to a local green market. More innovative schemes such as this are likely to grow. There will be great changes (Uranus) in the area of natural resources (Taurus).

Off-grid eco-villages are now being developed that are entirely organic in their food production, and they can also produce all of their own clean water and energy. These already exist in the Netherlands and will be spreading across Europe.

Pure water is also a luxury on this Earth, as many people have either no direct clean water supply, or only water that is contaminated from chemicals and toxins and from such neurotoxins as fluoride. There is innovation in this area already, spurred by the semi-square aspect between Uranus and Neptune, and with Neptune in Pisces (water). Both Neptune and Chiron in Pisces suggest polluted water or ‘wounded water’. The recent development of graphene, which is made from a layer of carbon only one atom thick and is the strongest material in the world, may be able to help with this. Plans are being developed to use it for desalination, as the graphene filter can let water through but not the salt molecules. This may be helpful for polluted water too, and more innovation is likely to emerge in this area.

The new ideas around the development of resources and cleaning up the Earth are likely to happen from the grassroots up, rather than the innovation coming from big corporations. The reason for this is that we are gradually moving away from corporatocracy, the domination of large organisations, towards a more horizontal collective in which we all play an equal part in the co-creation of our reality. It will be grassroots generated, by individuals with brilliant ideas.

In spite of the major developments in innovation and technology with Uranus, part of the urge of Taurus is always to return to the simple life, to go back to the natural rhythms of the Earth. This simplicity will feed into the desire of many people to leave the cities, their sophisticated life in the EMF smog, and want to simplify life and live in nature. It may become a real yearning, with the aspect between Uranus and Neptune. There will be a strong trend towards living in communities in nature and closer to the Earth over the next few years and particularly as we move towards December 2020.

Social and Economic Trends

The other important potential manifestation of Uranus in Taurus that should be mentioned is that Taurus represents the banking system, so Uranus in this sign for seven years suggests revolutionary changes, and perhaps sudden disruptions. The changes are likely to come about as a result of increased use of technology (Uranus). It is likely at that time that we will increasingly move towards a cashless society, as Sweden has already done, and India and Australia are taking steps towards this too. This is where all money is digitised, so we will no longer handle cash. Already many people do their banking and financial transactions entirely on their smartphones. Although Uranus is in Taurus for seven years, the effect of a planet is usually felt most strongly at the beginning of that period, which is from May 2018. It may also suggest sudden financial and economic peaks and troughs (Uranian volatility) as we move towards 2020, which would encourage people to move away from corporate and financial structures (Uranus square to Pluto, but also Saturn entering Capricorn in December 2017) if any volatility makes them appear to be unreliable. It is highly likely that we will see an economic and banking revolution over the next three years.

Linked to this, the Jupiter-Saturn cycle is very connected to social organisation. Since 1842 the conjunction between them has always occurred in the Earth signs, so there has been a feeling of density, materialism and permanence. Home and car ownership has been strong over this period. In December 2020 the conjunction is in the Air sign of Aquarius, and the conjunctions will continue to be in Air signs until 2059. This indicates a major new social cycle of organisation that is much lighter, faster and more flexible. There is likely to be a shift from permanent ownership to a focus on experiences and information. There will be much less car ownership, and more of us will merely summon a car via our smartphones to take us to our destination. Electric cars will replace fuel-based ones, eliminating much air pollution, and by 2020 Uber has stated that it will test a flying car. This of course would revolutionise road traffic congestion. Aeronautics will see accelerated development to a much higher, faster level. We will be able to travel to distant parts of the world in a fraction of the time.

Flexible living is likely to replace permanent, so there is likely to be a move towards renting rather than long-term buying. People will be searching for varied experiences and shorter-term living arrangements that may be shared, rather than wanting lifetime home ownership. The feeling of density, solid brick and mortar homes for a lifetime, will be replaced by something lighter, enabling people to change location more easily as they wish, without the encumbrance of ownership. In fact the world’s largest 3D printer, Big Delta, is close to finishing its first 3D-printed house. One website is offering houses that will have water channels in the roof structure, so that you can grow vegetables and plants on your roof. This will provide warmth as well as food. So the density of permanent housing will shift, and the focus will be more on the collective. Group living, often in eco-villages, will be self-sufficient with everyone offering their individual skills practically, but also the benefit of these will be the psychological support of the community. You will be able to gravitate more easily to like-minded people. There will be more peer-to-peer sharing and exchange, without money necessarily changing hands. Ideas and information will be the preferred currencies. We will leave a lighter footprint on the Earth.

As the conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn happens in December 2020 right at the start of Aquarius, at 0°, it feels particularly powerful in emphasising Aquarian characteristics of idealism, equality and humanitarianism, and a powerful urge to improve the world with new ideas and technology, as Aquarius is ruled by Uranus. Uranus is the planet most associated with electricity, so electric cars will replace the current diesel and petrol driven vehicles. In fact it has already been ruled in law that by 2020, Paris, Madrid, Athens and Mexico City will have banned diesel cars. In general there will be a move away from fossil fuels, oil, heavy industry, capitalism and big corporations. There will be major developments in free energy from renewable power such as wind and solar, with many innovations in these areas. In fact, some countries such as Norway, Iceland and Paraguay are already virtually 100% renewable in their energy. For instance, a roof tile has already been developed that is a small solar panel. We will be able to access energy more directly from the Sun via devices such as smartflowers™, which can be anchored in the garden and open to the Sun, folding up in the rain and wind. Even the food we eat will be lighter, less dense, as we will use the energy from the Sun in plants as our fuel. People are likely to move away from dense foods like red meat, and may derive protein from new sources such as insects. This shift will be building from now, but these trends will accelerate from 2020.

2020 is a year of great intensity, with one powerful aspect coming after another. The year begins just after a total Solar Eclipse (big new beginning) on December 26th 2019, at 4° Capricorn, conjunct Jupiter. This suggests major change in the structures of society (Capricorn). This may suggest changes in governments, leaders, financial systems, and big corporations. Then we have a very important conjunction between Saturn, Pluto, the Sun, Mercury and Ceres (agriculture) at 22-23° Capricorn in January 2020, exact on the 12th. This conjunction is not repeated during the year, it only occurs once, and this again suggests its importance in January 2020. There is a feeling of things coming to a peak in 2020, a great polarisation between the traditional controls in society, and people more and more from the grassroots wanting to avoid these social controls. This will accelerate the breakdown of those traditional structures.

The Saturn-Pluto cycle is massive in terms of its impact on society, and in Capricorn it is suggesting a new beginning in the ‘way things have been’ in the world of governments, banking, financial systems, and large corporations. It historically has also resulted in a redistribution of power geopolitically; it occurred in 1914, the beginning of World War I when Europe was changed dramatically, then again in 1947 after World War II when the Cold War and very poor relations between East and West became more intense. There was a powerful opposition between Saturn and Pluto in 1931. It is important to note that if we consider those dates – 1914, 1931, and 1947 – anyone who knows their history is aware that these were ‘hard times’ economically, and that same symbolism is being repeated in 2020. We should expect not only a dramatic change in our social, economic, and political structures in 2020, but also a change in the power dynamics across the world. Interestingly, the sign of Capricorn is also linked to the principle of accountability, and banking. Any ‘corrupt elitists’ or anyone who has not behaved with integrity will be exposed and will be likely to face justice at this time. Even the idea of elitism will face a strong challenge.

Jupiter then forms a conjunction with Pluto at 24° Capricorn on 4th April and 30th June 2020, then on 13th November at 23° Capricorn. This suggests major new populist movements and experiments, socially, politically and economically. We have a lunar eclipse at 24° Capricorn on 16th July 2019 (the degrees of 22–24° Capricorn are highlighted all through 2020), and this will give us a glimpse of what we have in store coming up for us in 2020. It is likely to be a precursor for those events. The lunar eclipse is also a culmination, a closure, a completion of some kind, things coming to a head; in Capricorn it is again linked to social and financial structures. The conjunction between Jupiter and Pluto, followed by the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction on 21st December 2020 at 0° Aquarius, taken together, suggest the death and rebirth of religious, political and economic structures and systems. It will be a time of upheaval and experimentation. This is likely to result in a much more equal and less elitist financial system (Aquarius, the sign of community and the collective). Obviously, if you have planets or angles in your birth chart around 22–24° of the cardinal signs (Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn), you will be likely to be going through some significant changes then, depending on where these aspects fall in your chart.

There will be a solar eclipse at 0° Cancer on 21st June 2020. This degree is the World Axis, a degree point where important world events are likely to occur. There is a Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto conjunction at this time too, giving great focus to social change. There are likely to be major breakthroughs in recycling toxic (Pluto) waste and pollution of all kinds, including radioactive pollution (Pluto). New energy technologies will come to the fore. During June 2020, there is a very rare and beautiful six-pointed star between the planets, which feels very auspicious for the New World we are moving towards; a sign of hope in what will be challenging times of change.

In late March 2020 Mars comes to conjunct Saturn and Pluto in Capricorn, suggesting great force and power being asserted in the world. Then in June 2020, Mars moves into Aries, the sign of the warrior and the sign that Mars rules, and stays there until January 2021. It may well be that 2020 sees some clashes amongst world powers, but it is also likely that Mars will be activating the collapse of old power structures in society. The further we get into 2020, the more the New World order will emerge. Mars in Aries suggests new beginnings. From August to December 2020, Mars squares the conjunction of Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto. This aspect suggests militarism (Mars square Saturn) and the use of strong, assertive power (Mars square Pluto) between countries. Jupiter expands the symbolism of all of this, and any aspect between Jupiter and Pluto suggests that economics and wealth are part of this battle.

2020 stands out as a very important and pivotal year astrologically. For those alive now, it will certainly be one of the greatest years of change and paradigm shift, and this new paradigm will continue into 2021 and well beyond. We will think of how life was before 2020, and then how it is after.

One of the biggest changes will be in our greater understanding of quantum reality, and how we can change our reality simply by changing our thinking, which then changes our emotional frequency, and that then draws different experiences on that frequency towards us which are wanted rather than unwanted. This is currently understood and practised by a minority of the population, but it will become more widespread as Jupiter and Saturn form their repeated conjunctions in Air signs, representing the intangible, thoughts and ideas. This is a quantum leap in our evolution, not just a gradual progression.

We may get a greater sense of this from May 2017 until November 2018, when the Nodal Axis will be in Leo and Aquarius. Leo represents heart energy, our creativity, and Aquarius has the qualities of innovation, evolutionary leaps, and equality and humanitarianism that we have mentioned above. This can prepare us for the new paradigm that starts to emerge more fully from December 2020.

The more I work with astrology, the more it becomes very clear to me that there are specific multiple realities available to us at any moment, as defined by the astrological patterns combined in the birth chart and in the heavens at that time. This complex set of matrices describes the leaps we can make from one level of reality to another if we can maximise the potential shown by the prevailing astrological patterns. The shift of consciousness that is required very often happens in the astrological consultation, when clients realise that their challenging outer reality is not just random, but clearly delineated by a less than positive expression of their planetary pattern at that time. Once a more positive expression of that pattern can be described to them, so they can then see that their outer reality matches their inner and that the world is a mirror for their inner psyche, lasting change can result. In this way, astrology is a quantum tool that can be much more widely used.

With any upcoming astrological aspect, I will always visualise and anticipate with surety (just as a pregnant mother knows that her baby is on the way) the best that the pattern can produce, and never allow myself to dwell on any less positive possibilities. In this way, there is no space, energetically, for those less positive manifestations to occur. This is the best use of ‘quantum astrology’ for us all. Our understanding of quantum theory will be deepened, and this will finally be the death knell for the Newtonian model of the world. Astrology is thus a language of spiritual evolution, showing us clearly how we can develop our individual consciousness, and be the best that we can be at any moment.

As 3D life may feel quite dense and intense through the years leading up to 2020 until Jupiter and Saturn move into Air signs, it becomes more imperative to develop this quantum understanding using our birth charts, to shift our frequency and therefore create a different reality for us.

Countries in 2020

Moving from how the astrology of 2020 will affect us as people, let’s now consider how the astrological patterns at that time may affect certain countries. Each country has a ‘birth chart’, and this is ‘set’ when a new constitution or legal framework is initiated for that country, and astrologers will always test a chart rigorously to see if it resonates to planetary transits. All the charts I will be referring to here are well accepted and established, and all are taken from Nicholas Campion’s excellent reference book, The Book of World Horoscopes.

The countries that jump out, where their ‘birth’ chart is triggered by the transits of 2019 and 2020, are the US, Russia, China, and Greece, and to some extent, India.

On 26th December 2019 we have a solar eclipse at 4° Capricorn, and Jupiter is conjunct this. Eclipses act like powerful pivot points, usually bringing about fast-moving change in the area that is aspected. For India, this is tightly on its Midheaven, therefore suggesting that the status of that country in the world may change (chart set for 26th January 1950, 10.15am, Delhi). For Greece, this eclipse forms a tight T-square to the ‘natal’ Moon-Pluto conjunction in the 4th house of the homeland, national identity and ordinary people (as opposed to the government), and Venus, which always represents money and the economy of a country. Venus also rules the 11th house that has connections to foreign affairs, and long-term hopes and wishes (chart set for 24th July 1974 at 4am, Athens). This may well suggest that Greece breaks away from the EU, due to economic pressures, and the demands of the populace. The ‘natal’ Moon-Pluto conjunction that is highlighted here by the eclipse suggests intense feelings on behalf of the people, demanding change.

China’s chart (set for 1st October 1949, 15.15 Peking) will also be aspected by the solar eclipse on 26th December 2019. The eclipse will form a T-square to ‘natal’ Uranus which here rules the Ascendant and therefore the identity of the country in terms of how it projects itself to the world. It also aspects the Sun in the 9th house of foreign relations, and the Sun rules the 7th house of treaties and alliances. It can also suggest ‘open enemies’, that is, known enemies. The solar eclipse can suggest changes in all these areas for China.

The lunar eclipse on 10th January 2020 at 20° Cancer opposes Pluto. Both the lunar eclipse and Pluto will both aspect China’s Jupiter in the 12th house. We should anticipate some powerful changes to the economy, and overall with its relationships with other nations. Pluto represents power, and its use and abuse.

Russia (chart set for 25th December 1991 at 17.45, Moscow) has its Sun, representing the leadership of a country, at 3° Capricorn, tightly aspected by the lunar eclipse of December 2019 at 4° Capricorn. The Sun here rules the Ascendant, the identity of the country as projected to the world. This can represent pivotal changes in the identity of that country, and a lunar eclipse can be experienced as what has been earned, the fruits of its labour or a culmination. The current leader of Russia is experiencing some very positive aspects in the years running up to 2020.

For the US I’m using the chart set for 4th July 1776 at 17.10 in Philadelphia at the Declaration of Independence. Before we discuss 2020, even in 2017 there are several important aspects to this chart that will act as setting the stage for 2020.

From September 2017 to February 2018, transiting Uranus is forming a T-square to Mercury in the 8th house, and Pluto in the 2nd. Mercury rules the 9th and 11th houses of foreign relations and alliances, and in the 8th house refers to international finance and foreign investment. The transit from Uranus suggests significant and at times sudden change in these, echoed by Pluto’s position in the 2nd house, the country’s economy. Pluto also rules the 12th house of ‘secret enemies’, so there may be some less obvious opposition to the government that is nevertheless important, and this could come from countries or individuals. The Inauguration Chart for President Trump set at noon 20th January in Washington, DC has Uranus in the 12th house, suggesting that this opposition may even come from someone radical, an outsider.

All through July, August, and September 2017 transiting Saturn opposes Mars in the US chart, which can be a militaristic aspect. The US president has a powerful Mars conjunct his Ascendant in his birth chart, so his tendency is to be assertive. During early July 2017 and again in late November, Mars opposes and then squares Pluto in the heavens, a powerful aspect of aggressive power. Then in mid-July and early December 2017, Mars forms a T-square to the US Pluto and Mercury, suggesting angry words being spoken between countries. July is likely to be an intense month, as not only do we have transiting Saturn opposing the US Mars, as mentioned above, but also transiting Mars forms a cardinal Grand Cross in the heavens with Pluto in Capricorn, Uranus, Eris in Aries and Jupiter in Libra from the 2–18th July 2017.

On August 21st 2017 there is a total solar eclipse at 28°53 Leo. The path of this eclipse falls right across the US, which has not happened since February 26th 1979. Interestingly, it falls exactly across the Ascendant of the US president, and his natal Mars. This will represent some kind of pivot point/new beginning in how he is seen in the world (identity projection), and may link to assertive actions on his part (Mars). It may even involve a constitutional crisis, as Mars rules his 9th house of legalities.

The Winter Solstice of 2017 is particularly powerful. It happens on 21st December 2017, and the Sun and Saturn are conjunct at 0° degrees Capricorn that day and on the World Axis, suggesting something significant happening that will be thrown out onto the world stage, likely to be related to the economy and the banking sector. The Winter Solstice coinciding with the entry of Saturn into Capricorn (the sign it rules) at 0° has not happened since 21st December 1870. So this will be a powerful time, and there may even be changes happening to the Federal Reserve then. The Federal Reserve was established on 23rd December 1913 at 6.02pm, Washington, DC, since which time it has never been audited. Transiting Saturn will be aspecting eight out of the ten planets in the Federal Reserve chart from December 2017 onwards through 2018. Saturn in Capricorn is about accountability, particularly of those people involved in banking, finance and government, the areas that Capricorn is associated with. There may be issues around power and control of the organisation, with transiting Saturn (control) opposing ‘natal’ Pluto (power) in this chart. Transiting Saturn will also be opposing the US Venus through much of 2018. Venus is generally linked to money, and currencies, and in the US chart is also linked to the status of the US too (Libran Midheaven, which Venus rules). This again suggests big economic and financial changes.

Then looking further ahead, the US chart is significantly aspected by the major transits and Eclipses of 2019–2020. Firstly, the Lunar Eclipse of 26th December 2019 at 4° Capricorn is exactly opposing the US Venus, planet of the economy and finance, and tightly opposing the US Jupiter which rules the Ascendant, the country’s identity in the world. The ‘natal’ Jupiter-Venus conjunction is linked to the wealth of a country, so changes should definitely be expected in those areas, linked to trading, treaties and alliances with other countries, as this conjunction is in the 7th house.

Then the Solar Eclipse at 0° Cancer on June 21st 2020 is closely aspecting this US Venus and Jupiter yet again, reinforcing the economic and financial trends that begin in December 2019. In fact, I believe they will begin as early as autumn 2017, but will build to a peak as we get further into 2020. On January 12th 2020, the Saturn-Pluto conjunction at 22° Capricorn will oppose the US’s Mercury. Mercury in the US chart is in the 8th house of investments and international finance, and Mercury as a planet is connected to a country’s trade. In this chart it also rules the 7th and 9th houses, linked to foreign affairs and foreign relationships in general. These are likely to change significantly with this aspect, and there may be changes with the freedom of the press (Mercury represents news).

Then on 5th April 2020 Jupiter comes to conjunct Pluto at 24° Capricorn, and this will again aspect the US Mercury, but also its Pluto at 27° Capricorn in the 2nd house of the country’s finances. Natal Pluto here rules the 12th house of anything hidden, hidden or secret enemies, self-undoing, and anything that is subversive to the established order (Capricorn) of that country. It seems very clear that the US will move through some very big changes in its economy, trade, and alliances before the new paradigm becomes more fully birthed as we move into 2021.

It’s important to say that from August to December 2020, transiting Mars is squaring Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto, all in the late degrees of Capricorn, which will all aspect the natal Pluto of the US. That certainly suggests the assertion of power by the US, as well as the power of the US being challenged by other countries. We are likely to see a big change in geopolitics through this year.

These themes are reinforced by other observations. Pluto, planet of power and transformation, is actually making its 248-year return to its ‘natal’ position in the US chart of 1776, which is likely to be a time of enormous transformation that again is suggested in the economic and financial area for the country (Pluto is in the 2nd house of money and finance), and using this same US chart, Solar Arc Pluto will be exactly conjunct the Midheaven in 2021, suggesting a completely transformed sense of power, projection and status in the world. The next few years will be fascinating for the US, and a time of enormous flux. I strongly believe that we do not only bring our leaders to power consciously through democratic election, who are then inevitably in positions of power and influence, but they are also a reflection of the collective consciousness of that country. Therefore the more we can do to raise our own consciousness, that will ripple out and affect others. As more people do this, the higher level of collective consciousness will actually change collective reality too.

It remains to be seen what enormous changes this will occur in our financial world. The US has been very dominant as a world power, with the US dollar the default currency, but this may change as we move towards 2020. Astrology is a language of mathematical probability and therefore not specifically prescriptive in terms of the exact changes that will take place, but shows the direction of developmental travel for the world. By the time we get into 2021 and beyond, I have no doubt that the social and financial divisions that we have now will be very different. Value will come from ideas and information and individual skills (Jupiter conjunct Saturn in Aquarius), rather than birth, status, or how much you used to have in your bank account.

As we move towards 2020, my regular YouTube video updates and monthly newsletters will provide further insights into the unfolding global developments. However, remember that all of us are playing a part in creating this world; we are all co-creators through our unique birth charts. We are moving towards the Age of Aquarius with Jupiter and Saturn beginning a new social cycle in that sign in December 2020. Aquarius is the sign ruled by Uranus, the planet most associated with astrology. So it could well be that astrology becomes much more fully recognised as a tool to empower each of us through a better understanding of our unique birth charts. Not only that, but in understanding how to better maximise our potential, it helps us to come together (Aquarius = collective), and work towards a better world.

Remember that the astrological pattern is set, but not the level. Our consciousness determines that. It is incumbent on each of us to work towards a world of peace, mutual respect, tolerance for all, and love for the Earth. Each of us can start to make that contribution today, and to change how our world unfolds; we each have the power to influence that.

Via our unique astrological patterns and the frequency we broadcast to the world, energetically we are throwing pebbles into the universal pond of manifestation and unfoldment. Astrology is a language of spiritual evolution, so that we can start to become much more aware not only of our own uniqueness, but also what we can offer to the world with our conscious co-creation. We are creating with this energy all the time, but perhaps up to now unconsciously, by default. I hope this book has perhaps made you more aware of how you can use your powerful contribution to make for a better world.

Blessings to you all on this journey.

Bibliography and Recommended Reading

Astrology

Arroyo, Stephen, Astrology, Psychology and the Four Elements; Astrology Karma and Transformation; Person-to-Person Astrology; Relationships and Life Cycles

Baigent, Michael; Campion, Nicholas and Harvey, Charles, Mundane Astrology

Campion, Nicholas A History of Western Astrology, Volumes I and II; The Book of World Horoscopes

Evans, Jane A, Twelve Doors to the Soul

Elwell, Dennis, The Cosmic Loom

Gauquelin, Michel, Written in the Stars

Greene, Liz, Saturn: A New Look at an Old Devil

Hamblin, David, Harmonic Charts

Hand, Robert, Planets in Transit

Harding, Michael, Hymns to the Ancient Gods

Harding, Michael and Harvey, Charles, Working with Astrology

Harvey, Charles, Anima Mundi

Idemon, Richard, The Magic Thread

Merriman, Raymond, Forecast Books 2012 and 2013

Rudhyar, Dane, Astrology of Personality

Ruperti, Alexander, Cycles of Becoming

Sasportas, Howard, The Twelve Houses; The Gods of Change

Tompkins, Sue, Aspects in Astrology; The Contemporary Astrologer’s Handbook

Tyl, Noel, The Creative Astrology; Solar Arcs, Synthesis and Counselling;Vocations

Quantum Physics, Science and Philosophy

Arntz, William; Chasse, Betsy and Vicente, Mark, What the Bleep Do We Know!?

Bohm, David, The Essential David Bohm (edited by Lee Nichol), Unfolding Meaning; Wholeness and the Implicate Order

Bohm, David and Krishnamurti, J, The Ending of Time

Bohm, David and Hiley, B J, The Undivided Universe

Chopra, Deepak, SynchroDestiny

Clark, Ronald W, Einstein: The Life and Times

Davies, Paul, Superforce; The Cosmic Blueprint

Dispenza, Dr Joe, Evolve Your Brain; Break the Habit of Being Yourself

Friedman, Norman, Bridging Science and Spirit

Herbert, Nick, Quantum Reality

László, Ervin, Science and the Akashic Field

Lipton, Bruce H, Biology of Belief

Martineau, John, A Little Book of Coincidence in the Solar System

McTaggart, Lynne, The Intention Experiment

Ober, Clinton; Sinatra, Stephen T; Zucker, Martin, Earthing

Pert, Candace B, Molecules of Emotion

Sheldrake, Dr Rupert, A New Science of Life; The Rebirth of Nature

Talbot, Michael, Beyond the Quantum, Mysticism and the New Physics; The Holographic Universe

Wilber, Ken, Quantum Questions; The Holographic Paradigm

Organisations Teaching Astrology

American Federation of Astrologers – www.astrologers.com

Centre for Psychological Astrology, London, UK – www.cpalondon.com

Faculty of Astrological Studies, London, UK – www.astrology.org.uk

London School of Astrology – www.londonschoolofastrology.co.uk

Mayo School of Astrology, London, UK – www.mayoastrology.com

The Sophia Centre at Bath Spa University, UK – www.uwtsd.ac.uk/sophia

Noel Tyl, US – www.noeltyl.com

Federation of Australian Astrologers Inc. – www.faainc.org.au

Endnotes

Chapter 1

Mundane Astrology, p.32, M. Baigent, N. Campion, C. Harvey. The Aquarian Press 1984 [Return to text]

A History of Western Astrology Volume II, p.143, N. Campion, Continuum Books 2009 [Return to text]

The Modern Textbook of Astrology, p.294, M.E. Hone. The Camelot Press 1978 [Return to text]

Mundane Astrology, p.55, M. Baigent, N. Campion, C. Harvey. The Aquarian Press 1984 [Return to text]

The Modern Textbook of Astrology, p.293, M.E. Hone. The Camelot Press 1978 [Return to text]

Mundane Astrology, p.65, M. Baigent, N. Campion, C. Harvey. The Aquarian Press 1984 [Return to text]

Great Chain of Being, A.O. Lovejoy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1936 [Return to text]

Chapter 2

Written in the Stars, p.111, M. Gauquelin. The Aquarian Press 1984 [Return to text]

With the kind permission of Michael Harding, from Working with Astrology, p.171, M. Harding and C. Harvey, Arkana 1990 [Return to text]

Written in the Stars, p.107, by M. Gauquelin. The Aquarian Press 1984 [Return to text]

With the kind permission of Michael Harding, from Working with Astrology, p.172, M. Harding and C. Harvey, Arkana 1990 [Return to text]

Chapter 3

Evolve Your Brain, p.240-243, Dr J. Dispenza, Health Communications Inc, 2007 [Return to text]

The Life and Times of Martha Graham, by Agnes de Mille, 1991, published by Hutchinson. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited [Return to text]

Planets in Transit, p.36, R. Hand. Whitford Press 2001 [Return to text]

Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl. New York Washington Square Press 1984 [Return to text]

Harmonic Charts, p.17, D. Hamblin. The Aquarian Press, 1983 [Return to text]

Harmonics in Astrology, John Addey. The Camelot Press Ltd, 1976 [Return to text]

With the kind permission of Michael Harding, from Working with Astrology, p.326, Arkana 1990 [Return to text]

With the kind permission of The Mountain Astrologer magazine, April/May 2001, article by Jim Shawvan [Return to text]

With the kind permission of Michael Harding, from Working with Astrology, p.317. Arkana 1990 [Return to text]

Chapter 7

Implicate Order, p.242, D. Bohm. Routledge Classics 2002 [Return to text]

Nature and Creativity, ReVision (5 No.2, Fall 1982), p.40, D. Bohm and R.Weber [Return to text]

Unfolding Meaning, p.97, D. Bohm. Foundation House Publications 1985 [Return to text]

Unfolding Meaning, p.95, D. Bohm. Foundation House Publications 1985 [Return to text]

Unfolding Meaning, p.86, D. Bohm. Foundation House Publications 1985 [Return to text]

Unfolding Meaning, p.93, D. Bohm. Foundation House Publications 1985 [Return to text]

Unfolding Meaning, p.93, D. Bohm. Foundation House Publications 1985 [Return to text]

Chapter 8

SynchroDestiny, p.53, Deepak Chopra. Random House 2003 [Return to text]

Dogs that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home, R. Sheldrake Arrow Books 2011 [Return to text]

Superforce, p.48, Paul Davies. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984 [Return to text]

Hidden Variables and the Implicate Order, D. Bohm. Paper presented at Berkeley, California, April 1983 [Return to text]

Chapter 9

Forecast 2012, Raymond Merriman. Seek-It Publications 2011 [Return to text]

The Book of World Horoscopes, N. Campion. The Wessex Astrologer Limited, 2004 [Return to text]

What the Bleep Do we Know?, p.245, W. Arntz, B. Chasse, and M. Vicente. Health Communications Inc., 2002 [Return to text]

Cosmic Clocks, M. Gauquelin. London: Peter Owen 1969 [Return to text]

With the kind permission of James Russell, from Beings of Frequency, Frog Free Films [Return to text]

Chapter 12

Person-to-Person Astrology, p.12, S. Arroyo, Frog Ltd. 2007 [Return to text]

About the Author

Pam Gregory discovered astrology over 42 years ago when she emigrated to Canada after university. Her passion for the subject took her through many years of intensive study at the Faculty of Astrological Studies, and then on to achieve Highest Honours in her Master’s course. She now run a busy client practice in the New Forest, England. She has also published How to Co-Create Using the Secret Language of the Universe.

Her website is www.pamgregory.com.

Copyright Notice

Second Edition Published in 2017 by SilverWood Books

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Copyright © Pam Gregory 2017

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ISBN 978-1-78132-711-1 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-78132-712-8 (ebook)