I am swamped today, so I give you Dharmaruci’s excellent take on the future of the Bush’s presidency (and not just because he quotes me!!)

But what happens when reality runs so counter to the worldview of an unusually rigid character like Bush? He cannot adapt, and he knows it’s coming, and soon. With his Prog Mars conjoining natal Jupiter ever more tightly, he KNOWS he is right about Iraq and the direction he is taking the US, and this to him might justify some sort of coup in order to maintain his policies.

From a comment by Kenna on Dharma’s blog Astrotabletalk:

I think the events of this autumn are likely to be even darker than you’re predicting. Just as Pluto in Sagittarius showed us the dark, damaging side of the US Justice System– beginning with the truth about racist cops coming out in the OJ Simpson trial– I think Pluto in Capricorn is going to show us the dark, damaging side of the US powers-that-be. Benito Mussolini said something like, “Fascism should be called corporatism, because it is the merging of state and corporate interests.” We’re there already, no doubt. Now, it’s just a matter of Pluto digging it out for all to see.”

John Roberts suffered a seizure yesterday and fell at his Maine vacation home on Monday, July 30. This was the second time he had blacked out after experiencing what they are calling a “benign idiopathic seizure,” meaning the medical experts don’t know what caused it. That always sends me running to the chart, because undiagnosable medical maladies are often energy imbalances in the physical structure.

Roberts has an Aquarius Sun [click chart to enlarge]. Aquarians often have an interesting medical history because as a rule their inventive, rational mind typically takes control of their emotions. Roberts has the Moon in Pisces, which does add water to his chart and shows a deeply sensitive nature, and his Moon is part of a Grand Trine in Water which includes a conjunction of Jupiter and Uranus in Cancer as well as Saturn in Scorpio. This suggests a comfort with the emotional realm overall (Pisces Moon) with a need to care for others (Jupiter in Cancer) although that must be done in a way that retains his autonomy and freedom (Uranus conjunct Jupiter).

Saturn in Scorpio reveals a strongly fixed nature and works well in the trine; however, that same Saturn in Scorpio also squares his Aquarius Mercury and Pluto. Mercury and Pluto are in opposition which lends an intensity (Pluto) to the mental realms (Mercury) and can indicate a tendency towards obsessive thinking. This is not easy for the Aquarian Mercury, which prefers to live in the more subjective realms where life makes sense and there are no underlying psychic demons such as the ones that Scorpio embraces. In this T-square the Saturn in Scorpio suggests a fear and discomfort (Saturn) with the Scorpio realm of the emotional underworld.

It is this T-square that was hit on Monday when Roberts experienced the seizure that sent him briefly to the hospital. The square of transiting Saturn to Mars exactly squared the Pluto/Mercury opposition in Roberts chart, and transiting Saturn was in exact conjunction to his Pluto.

This in itself does not signify a medical event, so I looked back to the earlier seizure episode that Roberts experienced in January of 1993. At that time transiting Chiron in Leo had just made a square to Saturn in Roberts’ chart and was preparing to conjunct his Pluto and oppose his Mercury; meanwhile, transiting Pluto was exactly square to the Mercury/Pluto opposition. He was in his “Pluto Square” at the time – this is the time when transiting Pluto makes a square (90 degree angle) to Pluto in our birthcharts and being the God of the Underworld, begins drudging up any hidden psychic debris from which we have been hiding.

I was unable to find the exact date for that seizure in January 0f 1993, but transiting Mercury would have been opposite Roberts’ Jupiter/Uranus square. Because Uranus rules electricity in general and electromagnetic energy in particular, the combination of Uranus and Mercury is often a volatile one that can bring about anxiety and other mental disorders.

From an astrological perspective, the timing of these seizure events indicates a reluctance on the part of John Roberts to delve into the deep emotional underworld where life is messy and complicated and full of darkness. Jealousy, rage, desire, loathing – all of these ugly things reside in that world, and the Aquarian nature prefers to remain in the world of the mind where all things make sense and emotions can be managed by reason. The darkness of the emotions get pushed to the basement, where they remain until a planetary transit activates them and the carefully constructed defense may begin to show cracks.

John Roberts has created an incredibly perfect persona in which no cracks have yet appeared: perfect good looks, the perfect wife, perfect children. Perfect Harvard education with a magna cum laude degree, Latin student, National Merit scholar, perfect Washington suburban home with the perfect Maine summer home. Still, according to Wikipedia “Dr. Max Lee of the Milwaukee Neurological Institute, who is not involved in the case said, “Having two seizures so many years apart without any known culprit is going to be very difficult to figure out.”^[12]

Perhaps the culprit is still hiding in the emotional basement.

The square of Mars to Saturn is exact today, and not a minute too soon. Is it my imagination or has there been many more explosions, car wrecks, dramatic and fiery events lately? Both are still in aspect to Neptune, making this a T-square which demands confrontation and resolution, and the trine of Mars to Pluto adds energy and fire to break up the Mars/Saturn stalemate.

Fortunately Mars is a fast mover so be careful out there for the next day or two while this energy begins to unwind!

My husband Rich is a very laid-back guy, nothing bothers him very much. He is in the middle of a transit of Pluto square to his Sun, a transit that can be very difficult as we are forced to face the dark side of our psyche as we enter the Underworld of consciousness that is Pluto’s domain. Pluto transits to the Sun can strip our lives down to the bare essentials. Jobs are often lost under these transits, relationships can end as we are forced to realize that those relationships do not feed the deepest hunger for soul connections.

Because Pluto retrogrades every year, Pluto transits nearly always occur in a cycle of three or five hits making them intense and long-lasting. Pluto transits can be like a tornado strike: The first phase is sometimes called the “breakdown phase” in which anything that doesn’t serve our ultimate soul evolution is broken down and stripped away. During the second phase we survey the damage to see what is gone and what remains. The third phase brings reconstruction and often a sense of relief as we recognize the freedom that results from liberating ourselves from experiences in which we have become stuck and stagnant.

This transit of Pluto square his Sun has been an amazing process for Rich and he gave me permission to share his experiences here. A few years ago Pluto squared Rich’s Moon (emotions and safety) and he went through quite a bit of emotional upheaval. He experienced a surge of emotions and memories surrounding his fear of his own power, something which had limited him throughout his life. Old memories of rage during infancy, ancient past-life memories of abuse of power – these erupted with clarity and focus as he relived his past. It was really a shamanic experience that shifted his perceptions and clarified his focus and understanding.

Rich never thinks about death. For me, with Pluto conjunct my nadir and Moon, death is always lurking, but not Rich. For him, death is something that happens to other people. When Pluto first approached a square to his Sun, Rich’s uncle died a year after a stroke paralyzed him completely. This week, as Pluto hit the second square to his Sun, a co-worker died. Pluto often exposes us to the raw experience of death, the raw material that teaches us about life.

Pluto also is concerned with issues of power. Often when Pluto squares our Sun, we find ourselves in power conflicts with authority, or seeking more power for ourselves. If we have unresolved issues that keep us from becoming fully empowered we will find ourselves thwarted and challenged at every turn. Once we have resolved those issues, however, Pluto opens the doors to the depth of the power that lies within us. This is what has happened to Rich under this transit, demonstrating that so-called “bad” transits can act powerfully for the good.

It’s really time to put aside our concepts of what is bad and what is good when it comes to planetary transits, and let the gods bring to us what they have come to teach!

The Moon will be full in Aquarius on July 29, with the Moon in opposition to the Leo Sun. Full Moons are oppositions, calling on us to balance two opposing viewpoints. The Leo/Aquarius polarity creates tension between the need to express our own individual ego in a healthy way that celebrates life in a body (Leo) with the urge to express ourselves through a more collective experience (Aquarius). In Leo our experience is extremely personal – like the Sun we are the center of our own Universe. In Aquarius, our experience becomes transpersonal, transcending the individual Ego to align with a larger collective mind and soul. Every sign has a polarity, and no sign is better than another, despite our individual prejudices.

In a Full Moon, the sign that the Moon is in becomes illuminated with the opposite sign playing the shadow. In this Full Moon we are focused on Aquarius and its need to transcend the original ego in order to gain greater wisdom from a more transpersonal source. Mars is approaching a square to Saturn at the time of the Full Moon that could create a certain amount of fear and hesitation and a sense of being blocked from fulfilling the ego’s desires. Saturn is associated with Aquarius as its ancient ruler, and brings with it a strong sense of responsibility to the collective that is meant to overpower the needs of the ego. Yet the modern ruler of Aquarius, Uranus, encourages us to break free of restrictions. This is a sensitive combination of influences that requires a certain amount of detachment to operate successfully. This Full Moon is a time for mindfulness and compassion, as in the words of this Buddhist prayer:

May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness.
May all beings not have suffering and the causes of suffering.
May all beings never be without the supreme bliss, free from all suffering.
May all beings live in the great equanimity, free from all attachment and aversion.

Kathryn notes that the Venus cycle from 2001 to 2007 makes the shape of a pentagram with this interesting analysis:

It’s interesting to note that Venus is associated with love, harmony and proportion when the pentagram that its 5 retrograde cycles describes in the heavens contains a ratio that conforms to the Golden Mean. The Golden Mean is also known as phi- 1.618, or Divine Proportion. Since the ‘discovery’ of phi by the Greeks it became obvious that ‘God Geometrises’ and that the world is essentially founded upon the arrangement of number.

The pentagram has all sorts of occult connotations but it is actually one of the oldest symbols known to man next to the circle. We know this as it has been found etched into cave walls dating back to prehistoric times, showing that Man was obviously tracking the cycles in the skies above him. Next to the Sun and Moon, Venus is the third brightest object in the sky and it periodic disappearance from view at phases in its cycle would have been of tremendous symbolic importance to ancient tribes, whose world stretched only as far as the visible horizon.

The pentagram divides the ecliptic up into 5 equal sections of 72 degrees, which is the quintile aspect in astrology. The quintile refers to creativity, inspiration and the forging of links. Albert Einstein possessed quintiles which brought his Moon, Jupiter and Neptune together in the 5H chart. Here was a Man whose inspiration came in the form of his ‘geometrisation’ of physics.

The cycles of Venus were of particular relevance to ancient civilisations in particular the Mayans. They saw time, not as linear but as a series of interlocking cycles and it is mainly from their observations of the Sun, Moon and Venus phases that they have predicted the end of one vast cycle of Man for the date of 2012. It is now perhaps easier to cast out any ‘conspiracy theory’ that the classic era Mayans were part of a super advanced intergalactic race. This theory had been postulated based on the fact that the Mesoamericans (and the Egyptians) appeared to know about Phi long before it had been ‘discovered’ however it’s abundantly clear that the tracking of the heavenly cycles allowed these ancient races to discern the divine geometry inherent in nature and they used this knowledge as the basis of their architectural designs. Their pyramids, towers and other monuments were all observatories from which they tracked the heavenly movements and/or offered sacrifices up to the Celestial Gods and many were based on the Divine Proportion.

It was also the cycle of the planet Venus which the Mayans used to time the start of their wars*. Although Venus, and the quintile in modern astrology, is associated with harmony rather than discord, the opposite planet to Venus is Mars, the known planet of aggression. The Venus ruled signs of Libra and Taurus are both opposed by Mars i.e Taurus/Scorpio Libra/Aries. So it may be that due to their natural understanding of the law of polarity (in which the meaning of opposite signs is inextricable) the Mayans saw both Mars and Venus as significant of conflict and diplomacy and vice versa. Venus is never far away from the Sun, and was even thought to be its twin by the Mayans, but for certain periods in its cycle Venus disappears from view This gave rise to the mythology that it had a periodic sojourn in the Underworld, or was devoured before being resurrected. This may be one reason why the Mayans timed their wars to begin with the heliacal rising of Venus and why to this day it has correlations of aligning with the loss of reputation of old leaders and the rise of powerful new ones.

I like what Melody has to say on Venus retrograding in Virgo:

Because I have a Virgo Moon, a friend of mine who gave me my first real astrology reading told me the story of how Native Americans would weave a beautiful white blanket but intentionally leave a yellow bead towards the middle as a reminder that nothing is perfect. The journey that Venus in Virgo puts us on is the same. In learning to understand humankind’s imperfections, there is a softening and acceptance of each person’s unfolding path and its inherent cosmic perfection, including our own and our ability to accept that less pure with the pure. And so the highest energies of Venus in Virgo include gentleness, kindness, service, caring, altruism, and a love for ourselves and for all humanity, as we are all one in the end.

This theme parallels Virgo retrograde, those rare periods of introspection where we are inwardly adjusting and focused on our relationship with others and ourselves. Resources and values are an extension of this in the sense that we value what we think we need in terms of others and resources (such as money) to survive and feel secure.

There are many questions that may come up during the next week. Perhaps we need to rebel against societal expectations so that we can feel good about staying true to our own values. Perhaps we are being challenged to examine how we are being critical of our failures, or adjust our thinking towards looking at the changes that would bring harmony and self-love back into our lives. Perhaps we need to look at areas where there is guilt looming heavily in the background and adjust our perspective so that we can let the guilt go. Guilt is a very toxic emotion and sometimes is warranted to herd one back to a higher path, but often is acquired through impersonal expectations and conditionings of others and society. To buy into the guilt is to be controlled. Perhaps this is a time to see how one’s judgments and self-acceptance or lack of are affecting the areas of one’s life that are being influenced by this transit.

This is a time to learn and grow. I would suggest that whatever your last year has brought, this point on your chart is the place of healing, self-love, and a purer more perfect sense of yourself.

The lovely Venus, having just entered Virgo a few short days ago, has slowed down for her retrograde turn tomorrow. While traveling backward she will re-enter the more outgoing sign of Leo where she enjoys a good party, at least until she reconnects with Saturn in the days leading up to the exact conjunction on August 13.

The conjunction of Venus with Saturn reminds us of our responsibilities to others and can put a damper on social intercourse. Venus conjunctions to Saturn typically occur every year or so, but the retrogradation of Venus makes this a three-part conjunction series and therefore of more importance. Where Venus in Leo is outgoing and affectionate, with a generosity of spirit that is unmatched in the zodiac, the conjunction to Saturn shows that the expression of affection is tempered by the stern discipline and structure of Saturn.

Still, with Saturn and Pluto moving into a trine formation that is exact August 8th, the Saturn/Venus influence will be softened as Venus joins Saturn in the trine to Pluto’s power for regeneration and transformation. There is a great deal of potential here for materializing our goals as Saturn’s discipline and structured approach to life harmonizes with the push from Pluto towards empowerment and self-actualization.

The first conjunction of Venus to Saturn took place on July 1 at 22 degrees Leo. The second conjunction in the cycle occurs August 13th at 27 degrees Leo with a trine to Pluto (and the Galactic Center!) and the cycle will conclude when Venus travels again through Leo and conjuncts Saturn at 4 degrees Virgo on October 13th of this year.

Transits of Venus tend to be subtle in nature, although if the Venus/Saturn conjunctions occur near sensitive points in your chart you may find yourself making changes in your relationships and more easily able to effect change in your surrounding world as well. Venus/Saturn often denotes endings of personal connections, and if this occurs in this second phase of the cycle which also aspects Pluto the endings will be more easily recognized as essential in nature.