Let’s get serious
The Winter Solstice on December 21st, as the Sun enters Capricorn, leads the way into the New Moon in Capricorn on the 23rd and then into the Christmas festivities. The most notable theme of both the Solstice and the New Moon is the sheer line-up of planets in the sign of Capricorn. By the time of the New Moon we have five planets there – that’s half of all the planets.
Capricorn represents hierarchical top-down structures such as governments, corporate institutions, organisations, banking structures etc., etc. And actually what we see today is an emphasis on the partnership between corporates and governments (and banking systems for that matter), aka ‘corporatism’, masquerading as one big friendly saviour of the planet and our health, and all feeding into huge one top down structure! Corporatism developed during the 1850’s as Marxism grew and became one of the main tenets of fascism alongside Mussolini’s advocating of the integration of large interest groups under the state.
This is the second of five new moons at either 0 or 1 degree of their signs. New Moons are all about new beginnings and new intentions, and when they fall right at the beginning of their respective signs there is a double message that we need to be doing something new and different. So, as we approach the joyous Christmas break, I would like this blog to reflect this intention.
What Capricornian type intentions can we make? For starters new intentions don’t happen by themselves. They require some kind of effort or work put into them - Capricorn is ruled by Saturn who demands effort, responsibility, morality, hard work. Saturn takes life seriously; he wants us to take ownership of our lives and it is this ownership that ultimately gives us our freedom because it is in this way that we become sovereign beings. I was listening recently to a speech by Maggie Thatcher who, love her or loathe her, championed the idea of the individual creating their own destiny. In this speech she was saying that when an individual becomes dependent on the state for their livelihood, they lose their sense of freedom and purpose. I would add to this the notion that the people also lose this sense of freedom and purpose when their lives and their movements are controlled by the state in the name of ‘for your own good or safety’.
As our government appears to feel the need to send out more and more nannying type messages in the name of keeping us safe, we also see ideas to limit our freedom, such as the proposed division of certain cities, for example Oxford, into 15-minute areas. If you haven’t seen this already then take a dive. Saturn is the planet who teaches us how to overcome our obstacles. In essence he shows us how to strive, how to become our own master rather than another master’s slave. Our astrological horoscope shows the potential of becoming the best possible “I” – how we self-develop or how we navigate the ‘potholes’ of life. A life spent just following rules is not a life spent creating a destiny, but rather one fulfilling someone else’s’ idea of destiny.
This New Moon chart echoes January 2020 when we also had five planets in Capricorn. This was the time of the Saturn/Pluto conjunction – the harsh and cruel introduction to the last three years or so. Or as a nearby shopkeeper said to me recently – “the day the world ended. The past”. As Richard Tarnas puts it, Saturn/Pluto has an ‘end of an era’ theme and that is I think where we are, the end of one era and the beginning of a new. This Saturn/Pluto conjunction is symbolic of harsh and cruel control systems, similar to those seen in the time of the Nazis. Indeed the Nazis considered that they knew best who should inhabit their world. And those Nazi elements and goals never really disappeared; in the archetypal Pluto element of the Saturn/Pluto conjunction they just went underground, only to emerge sanitised and rebirthed so that they could take their places back in the corporate sector with their old dreams intact.
When times are good we become complacent and we perhaps don’t appreciate what we have, always seeking in Oliver Twist style, ‘just that little bit more’. In a Capricornian capitalistic type, top-down society the goal becomes more and more money, as our value systems and our status become rated by the amount of money, the number and scale of holidays and the size of house we have. In this top-down type of civilisation what we find is that most people never truly feel satisfied. Whilst on the one hand this fuels ambition, what happens if you finally have enough money to buy anything you want? There is still that elusive thing called ‘happiness’ which, within a monetary value system rated according to the purchase of your latest ‘dream’, ultimately leads to that latest purchase not actually making you feel happy so another is sought. But money buys influence and influence buys power and so the goal for some changes to one of power and control, and in our globalised world the goal then for the psychopathic few becomes control of the world, just because they consider they know best how the world should be run.
At this New Moon we should perhaps consider how we truly define success, achievement and happiness. You can have the best house you could wish for or a bank account containing more money than you could ever manage to spend in your lifetime, but real joy comes through interactions with the important people in your life, having true friends; or perhaps feeling that you have attained success through fulfilment of rewarding goals. In one word it comes from love. Happiness is a product of the heart.
This Capricorn line up sits in the 12th house of the chart set for London, and the 12th house is symbolic of self-undoing. It is Mercury who at the New Moon sits as a reflection of the Saturn/Pluto conjunction of 2020. This was the time that our lives changed. Mercury represents our mind, our thoughts, our beliefs, our voice. We could have everything material in our lives taken from us, but our thoughts and our beliefs remain ours. If we want to change our life directions or our behaviour, we must first look within at our belief systems and consider whether in the light of everything happening around us we are satisfied with the belief systems that we follow. Are they valid? Do they stand up to scrutiny? It’s important that we do this now. Next month we are in a new year when all planets will be in forward motion – there will be an impetus to take our lives towards our new intentions. At this New Moon Jupiter has left Neptune behind in Pisces, and sits on the Aries world point, a further impetus for forward action. The overload of strong Piscean energy we have had has brought with it so much propaganda, so much bending of truths, so much guilt tripping. The veil is lifting – we should begin to see glimpses, begin to see more clearly through the fog without quite so much emphasis on propagandising.
We live in times of changing civilisation. Historical and astrological cycles reveal that civilisations never stay the same. We can go back through time as far as the age of the start of the first monotheistic religions, which was a huge shift in culture. We can then continue through the epochs, viewing the evolutionary changes as reflected by the astrological cycles, where the planets from Jupiter out to Pluto act as major shapeshifting energies. Carl Jung wrote “the form of the world into which a person is born is already inborn in him as a virtual image”. In other words, the cycles of the future inform the present time, because our current world has to aim its behaviour towards that world of the future, and those who have chosen to come into the world at this time have their role to play in creating the future of a humanity – a humanity currently under threat. Astrological cycles contain the archetypal energy of the planets most involved within each particular cycle, and working through these archetypal meanings gives us many clues as to what we face in terms of our evolution.
If we aren’t in tune with our beliefs our minds become dulled, and it becomes easier to allow others to take over our lives, particularly in a time when others appear to promote some very warped ideologies of how we should live. In the same way if we don’t take responsibility for the health of our bodies, our bodies can ‘forget’ that we were designed to have an innate immune system which allows us to heal. We were born with the ability to heal, to be intuitive, to be able to imagine, to believe that magic exists and to know that the world is one of both loving intelligence and evil – light and dark. And this New Moon time is governed by Saturn, once worshipped as the God of Agriculture. In my lifetime I have not known too many real food shortages. However, there are signs that such shortages may be upon us before long.
At this festive period we should honour Saturn and go back to our basic needs. We should honour the systems of agriculture which nourish us, but which are currently under threat. Our ancestors never took the harvest for granted – they gave thanks for their food and conducted rituals to influence and ensure they would have sufficient. It is time to reconsider what is really and truly important within our lives; to examine our belief systems and to put Saturnian serious effort into making clear intentions accordingly. Saturn urges us to develop a sense of responsibility for ourselves as opposed to blaming others.
Finally, I thank all those who have read and continue to read my blogs. Merry Christmas, enjoy the festive break and take time (another Saturn thing as Father Time) to recharge your batteries. See you next year.