Against the Grain
The New Moon at the end of February kicked off a whole series of events; events that were unsurprising considering the line-up of planets in Pisces , that were reflecting so much confusion and lies. But Aries season is about to begin and will eventually up-end this Piscean energy; Neptune enters Aries at the end of March and Saturn follows in May. Aries energy has very little in common with Pisces type energy, so be warned that, with its potentially direct and hard-hitting action, it may well feel brutal in comparison.
The Full Moon in Virgo on March 14th takes us into eclipse season with a total lunar eclipse. During a total lunar eclipse, the entire Moon falls within the darkest part of Earth's shadow, called the umbra. When the Moon is within the umbra, it appears red/orange. This is why lunar eclipses are sometimes called “Blood Moons”. Lunar eclipses tend to provoke more on an emotional level, and we still have a big focus on Pisces energy, with a line-up of Saturn, Sun, North Node and Neptune all conjunct and all still in Pisces. For sure we haven’t been lacking in vented emotions. But, alongside emotions, a Virgo Moon is telling us that we need facts and, in particular, facts that contain useful, researched information that is based on the truth. If you mix Aries energy with high emotions and lack of truth you will likely see hysteria. To my mind that’s exactly what we are seeing, and, in fact, that is more or less how and why my blogs began. Five years ago we were awash with emotions and hysteria at almost the same time of year – born out of emotional propaganda and mind-influencing techniques aplenty, alongside chosen facts to support a specific agenda.
I never started these blogs to lecture or to convince people that my opinions are right. Indeed they began more to put across a different viewpoint, backed up by research. My intention has always been to provoke thought so that the reader comes to their own conclusions that were perhaps different to how they thought before. You perhaps have noticed that I ask a lot of questions in my blogs – I ask them so that others might consider a different way of thinking. I spoke in the last blog about how we form our perceptions and the role the Ascendant has in how we do this. As I said then, the operation of the Ascendant is an unconscious process formed from the moment of birth, first culturally through where we live and through our parents and family and their beliefs, and then later through others and through our learned experiences. Because it is an unconscious process, we don’t necessarily stop to think about how we arrived at our views, and we could very well be in older age and yet still functioning through belief systems that are outdated and formed in early life.
The individual ability to rationalise how and what we think will depend very much on how our Ascendants work for us, how our minds work, whether our natures are very fixed or adaptable to change – many different ways. I know that I am generally a very changeable and curious type of person – others may take longer to consider thinking that they might need to change, and there is nothing wrong with that. But maybe also I am just naturally someone who goes against the grain; I dislike being controlled by others and have always been very unsusceptible to being hypnotised and, therefore, to being mind-influenced. Some may find what I say in this particular blog challenging perhaps. And that’s good because I don’t wish to be functioning within an echo chamber anyway. I just ask that you allow yourself to be provoked but then you research the facts in a detached, dispassionate manner before drawing your conclusions, rather than coming from an already formed bias.
This Full Moon on March 14th is the prelude to the Sun’s entry into Aries, which is the start of the astrological new year, and to the partial solar eclipse in Aries of March 29th, occurring just the day before Neptune’s entry into Aries. Right now we are in a highly emotional period where emotions have indeed been running high since the beginning of the month and have been played out very publicly. The world as a whole feels as though it is on a knife edge (and of course Mars and Aries represent knives). It is a Moon that makes a harmonious aspect to Uranus, the planet that delivers shocks and disruptive events.
The Full Moon is in Virgo, ruled by Mercury. Virgo speaks of health and it speaks of data and information, but information that has been sifted to utilise only the useful data. Of course, the question is – what data is useful for you? Mercury is in Aries; he is stationary at the degree where the solar eclipse will be at the end of the month. Is this significant? Yes, I think it is. All the events right now are linked in some way. Mercury, in a chart set for the UK, is positioned right on the Ascendant, and the Ascendant, as I said earlier, signifies our unconscious perceptions of the world around us. Because the Ascendant is unconscious, unless we purposefully consider our beliefs, we are not necessarily aware that they have been pre-conditioned by our experiences, the beliefs of others and influenced by the media. But Mercury is about to turn retrograde on March 15th until April 7th when he will turn direct from almost 27 Pisces, the degree of the North Node at this Full Moon. So we will be afforded a very specific opportunity. Rather than thinking negatively about a Mercury retrograde, consider that we have time to re-consider our opinions, our decisions, our communications, all of which influence the world’s destiny and fate. It is indeed April 26th before Mercury gets back to the degree he is at this Full Moon – so we have time to think, time to arm ourselves with knowledge gleaned from various sources rather than just what mainstream media tells us; time to challenge the belief systems formed by our Ascendants and question if they are indeed valid,
Mercury’s position on the Ascendant, but back into the 12th house, at this Full Moon in Aries is important. Mercury is stationing now before going retrograde. He is strong because of that and because he is on the angle of the Ascendant. People likely have very strong, emotionally led opinions. In Aries, however, perhaps the mouth and the emotions are speaking, but the brain is not exactly fully engaged. At the beginning of March, just after the New Moon with its huge line up in Pisces, I felt as though I had been transported into a parallel universe, where emotions ruled over facts, just as they did back in early 2020 - the point where our lives changed unimaginably. It was also a point where we were heavily ‘encouraged’ to think in a particular way and to capture others into this way of thinking via a form of virtue signalling. The 12th house is the natural home of Pisces; it is where hidden messages seep into our porous minds. It is the home of the unconscious and behaviours that have been learned without us truly realising.
The ruler of Aries, Mars (the god of war) is in Cancer at this lunar eclipse, where he is triggered into action by his emotions, or indeed can be highly emotionally manipulative of others. In Cancer he is motivated to defend his home and his family. And what is he being told? That he must prepare to do just that, because if he doesn’t the Russians will not stop until they have his home in their possession. Has this been threatened? Not to my knowledge. But this is a ‘sneaky’ Mars. A Mars that ‘grooms’ and manipulates. He is also what astrologers call ‘out of bounds’, which means that he will be likely to act erratically and probably in a more extreme way than expected.
Much of the hysteria we have seen since the last New Moon has been directed at the President of the United States, Donald Trump’s attitude and manner. And I totally get that. He does not portray himself in a manner that even comes close to asking others to love him. He appears not to care one way or the other, which is very alienating in itself. And, now in his second term as President, he has not really been accorded the respect normally given to a President, particularly the President of the number one superpower in the world. In fact, in many ways he is treated as a ‘joke’ figure, and this has led him to be a figure of ‘social conditioning’ that has led to a very divided view of him and of his abilities. Dan Astin-Gregory wrote a piece recently that made me stop and think, and I will just precis that piece here. He asked the reader to imagine a dilemma where Trump said something that you actually agreed with – a situation that you found very unusual. Dan asked ‘how do you handle that dilemma’? You have always been on the side of peace so seeing the war drums banging you are very much pained by this. Now Trump comes along speaking about peace and an end to bloodshed, all the things you believe in. But you can’t stand Trump and just want to be anti-anything and everything he says, because at the very least that makes you fit in. So what do you do? If you support him you would be going against the grain as far as everyone else around you is concerned (which would be wrong) and you would find yourself agreeing with him, which would indeed be even more wrong. ‘You can’t even explain why you can’t support his peace efforts, you just know you’re not supposed to’. And that my readers, as Dan Astin Gregory says is ‘the power of social conditioning – where following the crowd overrides everything’!
And, in this case it is even easier, because we have been socially conditioned to dislike Russia, to fear Russia and to believe anything negative about Russia. The Russians are harsh, uncompromising people who think nothing of using Novichok on innocents, so we are told. And yes culturally they are a harsh nation; they have probably had to be in the context of their everyday lives. Do we forget though that at the end of the Cold War we, alongside Germany and Europe, promised that we would not advance NATO one inch further towards the Russian border? And what did we do? Think how America reacted to similar circumstances in the Cuban crisis.
The history of Russia and Ukraine is long and complex; it is nowhere near as simple as saying that Russia invaded first in 2022. We need to understand the events that built up to that point from many years earlier that now so many have died for, needlessly we might say. Before you lash out at me, the messenger, I would just ask that you ensure your opinions are valid and come from a knowledge of historical facts rather than the propaganda of a narrative via social media and accepted trends. War is in the interest of many in order to direct events and to make a lot of money and I think we have no idea how powerful that military industrial complex, alongside the bankers and the lengths they will go to ensure their mission succeeds, really is. We can be extremely naïve when it comes to where governments really and truly want to take us and the methods they will use.
The last time we had a Labour Government we were taken down the route to war on the basis of lies and untruths. Do we really want any future loss of life based on that? Can we really be sure that our own government is being straight with us? Whatever country we are in we seem to be surrounded by a culture of corruption and lies. A Sun conjunct Saturn in Pisces in the 12th house, as we have at this eclipse in the UK, looks very much like leaders who do not hold the moral and ethical high ground to me. Have we forgotten the Minsk Agreement and Merkel’s statement just a few years later that, even though she signed it, she admitted they never had any intention of keeping to it – rather it was to buy time for them to re-arm? So another war built on lies. Do we know that many many ethnic Russians died at Ukraine hands because they were so hated, the reason why a treaty was needed in the first place?
We are pledging billions and billions of Dollars, Pounds and Euros – do we know where this is actually going? We know now that it is being taken from our pension funds, from our elderly, our poor, our sick, our disabled and their PIP payments. We are told that it will bolster Ukrainian military capability, but it is not doing the same for our own military, on which we will have to spend more millions if we want to be in any way a capable force. Military forces on the ground in opposition to Russia have been shown by history to rarely do well anyway, particularly if not backed by American dollars. Venus, signifying money in general and the ruler of the second house of assets, is retrograde in Aries in the 12th house, the house of hidden enemies. Where indeed is our money?
Pluto is interesting also in this lunar eclipse chart. Symbolic of what I tend to call ‘the robber billionaires’, who are generally referred to as ‘the elites’, I would read Pluto here as the plutocratic technocrats who have received a surge of wealth in the last five years or so that shows no sign of easing off. They are the ones who hold the cards. They have more money than nations these days which allows them to be big influencers in political decision making. Pluto makes no ‘in sign’ aspects. The only aspect he makes is an ‘out of sign’ one to the South Node sitting next to the Moon (the people). The South Node very often signifies letting go of something. What indeed are the people going to have to lose? The plutocrats are letting nothing go; they are the highest planet in the chart and, with no real planetary aspects, they have free rein. They do indeed hold the cards. Is Blackrock and its ilk really a cause worthy of dying for?
To sum up, if I set the chart for the UK the Full Moon straddles the 12th house/6th house axis. So we have this huge 12th house line-up in Pisces, in the natural house of Pisces with Neptune standing at the anaretic and dangerous 29th degree. The Sun (leaders) sits with the North Node (the country’s direction) on one side and Saturn the other. Obviously this is down to interpretation and subjectivity, but I read this as a potentially unethical leadership taking us down a harsh road where we may really have to learn our lessons. Venus (our wealth) is already retrograde. and Mercury is about to turn retrograde, both in the 12th just back from the Ascendant. What truths are we not being told? What is being covered up and hidden? Who really are our hidden enemies? It’s very easy to be a good astrologer with the benefit of hindsight, but the signs are there and nothing is jumping out of the woodwork that shows me any different.
At the Aries ingress on March 20th Gemini rises for the UK, with Jupiter on the Ascendant. Jupiter is not strong in Gemini - but his position on the Ascendant makes him important. Is this a foolhardy, overconfident Jupiter? This is a Jupiter that smacks of hubris to me. Pluto sits up on the Midheaven, so our robber barons are still holding the cards. And the Sun sits with a retrograde Mercury and retrograde Venus both combust and unable to function. Where indeed are our minds and our money?
Since when did we fear holding a different opinion to the crowd to the extent that we would lose reason? When did we fear holding an opinion that went against the grain? Do we really want to put our lives, our futures, our children’s futures on the line to the extent we risk dying for Black Rock and those who ruthlessly seek wealth and power? Why are we even considering more loss of life – why are we not as a world working to seek peace above everything? Why are the European leaders so intent on war? Why was Trump not praised and supported for being one of the few to seek peace? For the record I am neither a Trump nor a Russia supporter. I am just seeking a peaceful world where we are not at the mercy of the greedy wealth and power seekers. How has our world spiralled down to such a low level? Social conditioning and manipulation have clearly – yet sadly – been incredibly successful. As many will sink into misery, others will run gleefully to the bank. The Cold War, that once was, has now become a Hot War and so many are blindly cheering it all on.
And just as I went to press the ‘publish’ button it seems that a deal has been made and Ukraine is ready to accept a 30 day truce with Russia alongside a return of US support and aid. Next chess move – over to Mr. Putin. This has been a particularly ‘low energy’ blog but I felt it had to be written. The next Solar Eclipse one will hopefully be taken back up into ‘high energy’ (and I already feel better!!)