Friday Bite: 4 October 2024

Remember, Remember, the Fifth of November

Israel – Iran – United States – Election – Trump – Harris

“Israel will not go gentle into that good night, we will never need to rage against the dying of the light, because the torch of Israel will forever shine bright,” Netanyahu, United Nations Headquarters, New York, 27 September.

“Israel seeks peace. Israel yearns for peace. Israel has made peace and will make peace again,” Netanyahu, United Nations Headquarters New York, 27 September.

“Iran has made a big mistake tonight, and will pay for it.” Netanyahu, 2 October

“Iran is at war.”  Ali Akbar Ahmadian, Chair of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, 2 October

WHEN I POSTED the Friday Bite last week, Hurricane Helene, with winds of 140 mph and a storm surge of twenty feet, had made landfall in Florida. Despite being downgraded to a tropical storm, it went on to cause extensive flooding and landslides throughout Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee and Alabama. Two hundred and fifteen people are known to have died and hundreds remain unaccounted for.

At the same time that Helene was devastating America’s south east, Israel launched a series of air attacks on Lebanon’s capital. We later learned that Israel had specifically targeted Hezbollah’s headquarters in the centre of Beirut where Hassan Nasrallah and senior commanders were gathered in a bunker deep below. Confirmation of the death of the Hezbollah leader came on Monday.

Roughly an hour before Friday’s attack on Beirut, which he had just authorized, Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a half-empty hall at the United Nations headquarters in New York. The Israeli prime minister made no mention of the cease-fire deals for Gaza and Lebanon that had been championed by the United States and agreed to by Hassan Nasrallah.

Thus far, one million people in Lebanon have been displaced, 1,600 are dead and 6,000 injured.

On Tuesday night, Iran fired 180 ballistic missiles into Israel, targeting air bases. Almost all the missiles were intercepted by Israel’s defence system.

Also on Tuesday, in a land far, far away, Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, was signed in. She is Mexico’s first female president, a former mayor of Mexico City and a climate scientist.

Hours after the new Mexican president was inaugurated, vice-presidents elect, Tim Walz and JD Vance, were on a CBS News stage in New York for their first and only television debate. I didn’t watch the event but, by all accounts, it was civilized and both candidates emerged relatively unscathed. Just for the record, Mr Vance refused to be drawn on whether he believed the 2020 election to have been “stolen” preferring instead to point out that Kamela Harris was the threat to democracy, not Donald Trump.

And while we’re on the subject of Mr Trump, on Wednesday, a new165-page document regarding Donald Trump’s alleged criminal attempts to overturn the 2020 election were filed by the federal prosecutor, Jack Smith. Mr Trump is not bothered. He fully expects to be president elect by the time the deadline for a response is reached. The seventh of November.

Not only is the weather forming a fitting background to the growing international turmoil, but on Wednesday, a massive solar flare “a colossal X-class eruption” occurred triggering short-wave radio blackouts in Africa and Europe, the sunlit parts of the world at the time. And then there is comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas, aka A 3, which is within range of planet Earth and from next week will be visible in the sky to the west, just after sunset.

A 3 has not made an appearance in our skies for 80,000 years and like all comets is believed to herald great things to come. As indeed do eclipses. And on Wednesday, a spectacular ring-of-fire solar eclipse took place.

Clearly, if you’re reading this, you have an interest in astrology, but for millions of people across the world astrology is a nonsense – an entertainment at best, a scourge on civilization at worst. However, there is a very strong case to be made for the validity of astrology given events of the current time and the prevailing alignments, including the eclipses, that have presided over them.

Wednesday’s solar eclipse at 10 degrees of Libra was conjunct the fixed star, Vindemiatrix, and the dwarf planet, Makemake, and opposed to the fixed star, Algenib. All three celestial bodies come with a health warning: these two fixed stars are considered unfortunate and Makemake, in keeping with the other dwarf planets, including Pluto, is a creator-destroyer. The solar eclipse was also conjoined to Israel’s Neptune and opposed to Iran’s Sun and Hezbollah’s Mars. (You can read more about this eclipse in last week’s Bite, which follows on from this.)

In last week’s Bite, I suggested, “That the solar eclipse is conjunct Israel’s Neptune is a concern. While Neptune represents the spiritual and ideological battle that Israel is fighting, there is more than an element of sacrifice and loss in the mix, enough to imply that Israel may be hoisted by its own petard. That the solar eclipse is conjunct Hezbollah’s Mars and Iran’s Sun is self-explanatory. Like it or not, want it or not, the time has come for a reckoning.”

Events in the Middle East don’t just stay in the Middle East. Already, Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and Iran’s response to them have almost certainly affected the trajectory of the United States’ election. And while much of the Middle East and the west would prefer to see the regime in Tehran wiped off the face of the Earth, backing Israel’s intent to do something about it is a bridge too far for most of them.

In the opinion of many, Donald Trump is seen as someone who can “fix” the problem while Biden’s policies, which Harris has inherited, are seen as hypocritical and appealing neither to the pro-Israel camp nor the pro-Palestinian. These policies, however, were also the policies of the Trump administration.

While Democrats have been encouraged by the pace at which Kamala is eroding Trump’s lead in many states, this trend may well be about to stall. Even if Ms Harris succeeds in winning the popular vote in the election, the electoral vote is a rather different matter.

I have stated several times that Donald Trump would not return to the White House, however, with the events of the past seven days, this prediction is beginning to look unsafe. I find it interesting that many Vedic astrologers believe the former president will win the election. I’m not a Vedic astrologer so I have no idea how they have reached their conclusions, but, as a western, geocentric-based astrologer there are more signs of a loss than a win.

In the charts above, the natal horoscopes of Trump and Harris occupy the inner ring and the outer rings display the planetary positions on 5 November. The election chart is set for Washington at the time voting stations open. The Moon is void-of-course suggesting from the outset that “nothing will come of the matter”, which infers that either the voting process will be interrupted/never happen or that the result will be contested.

This is where the filing of the new165-page document regarding Donald Trump’s alleged criminal attempts to overturn the 2020 is timely. And if there’s one thing you can say about eclipses it is that they are timely. They reveal what needs to be revealed at the appropriate time. There are five key points made in the document and while all of them refer to actions which failed in 2020, they have a much better chance of succeeding this time round.

1)     Trump planned to claim victory, no matter what, even before all the ballots were counted.
2)     Part of the plan to claim victory was to cite voter fraud.
3)     Despite countless attempts by the vice president, Mike Pence, to convince Trump to accept the result of the election, the outgoing president continued to spread false claims and mount spurious legal challenges.
4)     Campaign staff created such chaos in battleground states that it risked turning violent.
5)     Trump and his allies allegedly sought to exploit the chaos at the Capital on 6 January in order to delay the election certification.

In Trump’s favour, transiting Jupiter is conjunct his north node and the Sun, and opposing his natal Moon while Venus is conjunct his Moon and opposing his Sun. A victory is likely. On the downside, Uranus is conjunct his Midheaven indicating an unexpected upset and a “removal” from power. The Midheaven of the election chart (25 degrees Leo 55 minutes) is conjunct Trump’s natal Mars suggesting he has a fight on his hands, and since Mars is opposing Pluto, it’s not going to be a pretty one.

In Kamala Harris’s favour, the transiting Venus-Jupiter opposition is flanking her Ascendant-Descendant axis while Uranus is conjoined to her Jupiter. That Jupiter rules her seventh house certainly suggests she has the American people behind her and is therefore likely to win the popular vote, possibly by a large margin. On the minus side, transiting Neptune is inconjunct her Libran Sun while Saturn is opposing her natal Uranus, so there is a loss in there somewhere.

Right now, there are thirty-one days to go before the US election. And a lot can happen in thirty-one days. Ahead of us lies a huge astrological minefield centring on the full moon in Aries on 17 October. Already, Jupiter is in stationary mode (exact on 9 October), so that the good is going to be fabulous and the bad is going to be off the scale. Pluto turns direct on the 12th squaring Mercury (who was it who said Iran has made a big mistake and will pay for it…) and the full moon itself forms a grand cross with the Mars-Pluto opposition at the same time as Venus opposes Uranus, which is conjunct the fixed star Algol! As for that full moon it is within three degrees of Harris’s natal Sun-Moon opposition.

It’s time to batten down the hatches. However things look now, they’re going to look rather different by the fifth of November.

Friday Bite: 27 September 2024

Darkness Before the Dawn

Solar Eclipse

“Aggression against Russia by any non-nuclear state, but with the participation or support of a nuclear state, [will] be considered as their joint attack on the Russian Federation” Vladimir Putin, Meeting of Russia’s Security Council, 25 September

“Russia no longer has any instruments to intimidate the world apart from nuclear blackmail…these instruments will not work.” Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s Chief of Staff.

“He was ‘hail and hearty and well-met’, but he wasn’t a smart person.” Donald Trump on William Shakespeare, Pennsylvania, 23 September

“One of the wettest we’ve ever seen from the standpoint of water.” Donald Trump on Hurricane Helene

IN THE PAST seven days, the possibility of a wider conflict in the Middle East has become ever more a reality. It appears the sabotage of Hezbollah pagers was the opening salvo in a large-scale assault on Lebanon and the militant group. Since the lunar eclipse (18 September), more than six hundred people in Lebanon have been killed, thousands injured and another 90,000 displaced. Despite hopes of a twenty-one-day ceasefire proposed by France and the United States, Netanyahu has urged the Israeli military to keep “fighting with full force”. As I suggested in last week’s Friday Bite, based on Venus’s position in the Libra Ingress chart and regarding the pager attacks, Israel’s audacious strike was “tantamount to a declaration of war or at least a power play of epic proportions”.

With much of the world’s attention on the Middle East, the war in Ukraine has taken something of a back seat, which is why it is so important to point out Putin’s recent actions. First, the announcement of a third mobilization of Russian forces and now the threat to use nuclear weapons against any nuclear power that facilitates Ukraine’s firing of long-range missiles into Russia. Ukraine’s resolve is fierce but its progress to victory, faltering.

Since the forthcoming solar eclipse is three days before Putin’s birthday – which will also be the first anniversary of the war in Gaza – we can rule nothing out in the Russian president’s arsenal to win the war and remain in power.

The fall-out from the BBC’s investigation, Al-Fayed: Predator at Harrods continues. The programme, which aired on 19 September, featured allegations by twenty women that they had been sexually assaulted by Mohammed Fayed, the late owner of Harrods, five of them claiming they had been raped and that the company had covered it up.

As you may remember, accountability has been something of a constant in these pages, and here we are again, only this time the perpetrator is dead and buried. Although his chart is still alive and well! I found it interesting that Uranus, the planet of awakenings, is currently on his natal north node and Pluto squaring his Jupiter.

Not for the first time has the weather been a huge story. During the past week, in some parts of England, a month’s rain fell in twenty-four hours, causing rivers to burst their banks, motorways to be closed off and millions of pounds of damage to lives and livelihoods. Meanwhile in Florida, Hurricane Helene with winds of 140 mph rolled in. States of emergency were declared in Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia and Alabama. The increasing strength of typhoons and hurricanes across the globe is the result of the warming oceans, a trend that can only get worse unless and until we can get a measure on greenhouse gas emissions.

Astrology has nothing to do with the climate, but it has a lot to do with synchronicities. And it is hard not to see a connection between the extreme weather that is devastating much of the world, the wars which threaten our existence and the astrology of the times.

In my video on the forthcoming solar eclipse, (watch the video) I talk about the dwarf planet Makemake. Makemake is the fertility deity of the Rapa Nui people of Easter Island. I was drawn to look into the mythology of this celestial body because not only is Easter Island the best place to view the solar eclipse but it turns out Makemake, currently 10 degrees of Libra, is conjunct the solar eclipse.

As many of you know, I’m a bit of a purist when it comes to using asteroids in my astrological work: there are thousands of them and they lie outside our solar system. Too much information sort of thing. However, some years ago I had a Damascus moment regarding Chiron and I am now prepared to at least look at Makemake and the other dwarf planets (Haumea, Eris and Ceres) since Pluto was demoted to their ranks.

The Rapa Nui people settled Easter Island between 300 and 1200 CE. It was they who carved the giant heads – all 887 of them – out of rock. These heads or Moai represented the ancestors of the Rapa Nui people who believed the dead influenced the health and wellbeing of the living. Makemake emerged later out of the decades of famine that decimated the island. What unites the Moai, Makemake and the cult of the birdman (Tangata manu) is the enduring mystery and veneration of life and death. Makemake, like all fertility deities, is a creator-destroyer, which in astrology, aligns him with Pluto, lord of the underworld, Haumea (the Hawaiian fertility goddess) and Eris (Greek goddess of strife and discord).

Stefano Stracuzzi’s research into Makemake’s effects [The Astrological Journal, September 2023] found evidence of its being linked to “large-scale events of a destructive nature”, specifically 9-11 when it was conjunct the Sun. Of course, the Sun and the personal planets will conjoin Makemake every twelve to eighteen months and there isn’t a mass disaster every time. However, I think we might want to take a solar eclipse conjunct Makemake rather seriously, and certainly as a portent of life-defining events to come.

The solar eclipse of 2 October is annular, with the Moon blocking out only part of the Sun, however, it is an extremely long eclipse – some 7 minutes 25 seconds – which may suggest that the events upon which it places its signature will be several months in the making. Like all solar eclipses it bodes dark days but also the prospect of light at the end of the tunnel.

In the above chart of the solar eclipse, you may notice that have added the fixed stars, Algenib and Vindemiatrix as well as pointing out Israel’s natal Neptune, Hezbollah’s Mars and Iran’s Sun, which all closely connect with the eclipse.

Both fixed stars have an unfortunate character: Algenib (the nature of Mars and Mercury) is associated with bad ideas, and Vindemiatrix, “the widow maker” (the nature of Mercury and Saturn) is connected to falsity, disgrace, witch hunts and assassinations and dramatic, newsworthy deaths.

That the solar eclipse is conjunct Israel’s Neptune is a concern. While Neptune represents the spiritual and ideological battle that Israel is fighting, there is more than an element of sacrifice and loss in the mix, enough to imply that Israel may be hoisted by its own petard. That the solar eclipse is conjunct Hezbollah’s Mars and Iran’s Sun is self-explanatory. Like it or not, want it or not, the time has come for a reckoning.

I called this Friday Bite the darkness before the dawn for a reason. All wars end in peace treaties. And the war in Ukraine and the war in the Middle East are no different. Peace will come. That’s a certainty.