Friday Bite June 24th 2022

The Cancer Ingress – three perspectives

At 1:30 in the morning, 28 miles south-west of Khost, Afghanistan, a 5.9 magnitude earthquake struck. One thousand people were killed and 1600 injured. It was yet another catastrophe for a country that has experienced appalling suffering on all levels since the Taliban regained power in August last year. As the week went on, earthquakes of a different variety were felt in other corners of the globe.

On Sunday, President Macron lost control of the French National Assembly. He now faces a titanic struggle to prevent opposition parties from imposing their protectionist agenda on the country. (He may have won the general election two months ago, despite serious afflictions to his chart, but those Uranus and Pluto transits may still prove his undoing – Pluto conjunct his Ascendant and Uranus conjunct his Moon and opposing natal Uranus.

In Thursday’s fifth Select Committee hearing on the storming of the Capitol yet more testimony from Republicans was given endorsing the panel’s case that Donald Trump was the force behind the failed coup. Despite a huge body of support for the former president, according to many political commentators, he is losing ground. “I see people no longer drinking the Kool-Aid. I see people moving away from Trump for the first time.” (Frank Luntz, political consultant and pollster.)

On Friday, in the UK, the government awoke to the news that it had lost two bi-elections in spectacular fashion. Before it could blink, co-party chairman, Oliver Dowden had resigned. An embattled Boris, currently attending the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Rwanda, assured the party faithful that this was par for the course, and business would continue as usual… (Sadly, I think that’s almost certainly why the Tories lost the bi-elections.)

On Tuesday, the Sun entered the sign of Cancer, marking the Cancer Ingress. There are four points in the year at which the Sun enters a cardinal sign and charts erected for that moment provide a bird’s-eye view of the following quarter. This is the Cancer Ingress from the perspective of Khost in Afghanistan.

With Pluto exactly on the IC, it is clear there is to be trouble at home. Could a resistance movement launch an attack on the government? Could there be new laws that adversely affect the people and the homeland? (Sun in the ninth house of the judiciary inconjunct Pluto in the fourth house.) Or could Pluto’s principles of transformation involve an eruption of the geological kind? Saturn is squaring Venus, the ruler of the chart and placed in the eighth house, suggesting financial loss/hardship/downgrading of the currency and/or grave loss of life and livelihoods.

Here’s a picture of what happened the very next day.

At the moment the earthquake struck, Pluto was high overhead (reversing its position at the Ingress) and Uranus rising to the Ascendant. Now, let us be clear, these planetary positions and angular relations did not cause the earth to erupt; they just provided a narrative of the event. Yes, we might expect Uranus or Pluto to be on an angle or in close (hard) aspect to a personal planet, but an earthquake does not happen every time such configurations come to pass. Nor did an earthquake of the actual kind occur in France, the USA or the UK in the wake of the Cancer Ingress. For President Macron, the rug was pulled out from under him, and the French Assembly plunged into chaos.

Pluto does not appear on the angle in the Ingress chart for France, although Uranus is widely conjunct the Midheaven. Venus stands proud on the Midheaven and is both square to Saturn and trine Pluto. What is relevant in this chart is the Midheaven degree (24 Taurus) and the proximity of the nodal axis to the MC-IC axis: eclipses occur on or near the nodes, and this is a reference to the total lunar eclipse of May 16th at 25 degrees Scorpio/Taurus. The fixed star, Algol is located at 25 degrees of Taurus, and is considered to be most unfortunate having much to do with violence and decapitation! That Saturn at 25 degrees of Aquarius is precisely squaring the MC-IC axis and Algol, suggests the government, as represented by the tenth house, is in danger of losing its head. Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but the aforementioned configuration certainly indicates the battle facing President Macron to stay in power as he endeavours to establish unity in a deadlocked assembly.

A similar message is being transmitted by the Ingress chart for the UK. Here we find Uranus and Saturn closer to the angles but with the same Saturn/nodal axis/Algol configuration. A decapitation therefore is even more likely. It may be that Boris will not survive as Prime Minister beyond this quarter.

At the start of the year, I suggested Mr Johnson would be gone by the end of 2022, but thus far, he has survived all manner of threats to his leadership. There is something immensely likeable about Boris even though it is clear he has breached the ministerial code, and should therefore resign. More seriously, he is at his best dealing with such dangerous global situations as the Ukraine war, and his loss at Britain’s helm would be a loss for the wider world.

The Sun in this ingress chart is placed in the eleventh house of enterprise and society and squaring the Moon, Jupiter and Neptune in the eighth house. While we cannot rule out events that will involve a large loss of life or livelihoods in this next quarter, we can certainly see the way the economy is heading – increasing inflation and interest hikes. The Neptune-Moon-Jupiter combo is at once growth (good) and inflation (bad).

Mercury is the ruler of the chart and in harmony with the Moon-Jupiter conjunction, which supplies a small ray of hope that discussions to avert the summer of strikes will prove successful. Nonetheless, with Saturn conjunct the Descendant squaring Venus, victories will be hard to come by.

Friday Bite June 17th 2022

LIVING IN A VIRTUAL WORLD

It’s been quite a week.

With days to go before the first flight carrying asylum seekers from the United Kingdom to Rwanda, over twenty Bishops and Archbishops signed a letter to The Times voicing their opposition to the government’s policy calling it “immoral” and “opposite the nature of God”. Prince Charles joined the chorus of disapproval describing the policy as “appalling”. After a string of legal battles aimed at preventing Tuesday’s flight to Rwanda from taking off, the European Court of Human Rights intervened and at the eleventh hour it was cancelled. It was not the only blow for Boris and a beleaguered Tory party: on Thursday, Lord Geidt, the prime minister’s ethical advisor, resigned. In his resignation letter Lord Geidt cited as a reason his refusal to advise on proposals that posed a “deliberate and purposeful breach of the ministerial code”. In the second Select Committee hearing over the January 6 insurrection, yet more evidence and testimony emerged of former president Donald Trump’s refusal to accept he’d lost the 2020 election. And then there was Bitcoin, which lost 25% of its value in the span of four days.

We can point the finger at Tuesday’s full moon squaring Neptune for presiding over all the chaos and confusion – a full moon which fell on Mr Trump’s natal Sun-Moon opposition, Boris’s Sun-Venus-Mercury midpoint and squared Bitcoin’s Saturn-Uranus opposition.

The cryptocurrency world is in a bit of a pickle. Crypto and global equity markets have been selling off since early 2022, in large part due to the wider global economic climate – interest rate increases, galloping inflation and cost of living rises – in turn inspired by the war in Ukraine and the meteoric hike in gas prices. In mid-May, the near collapse of the Stablecoin Terra followed by another, Tether, sent panic waves across cryptocurrency markets and since then the currency has been unstable to say the least.

I had made a brief mention of the cryptocurrency market in my May 13th Friday Bite, but I thought it worthy of a closer look now.

Bitcoin was the first of the cryptocurrencies and it remains the “bellwether” for the crypto market, thus its precipitous tumble in the past few days is concerning. Indeed, it may turn out to be the “bellwether” for the global economy.

Bitcoin came out of the turmoil of the 2007 global economic meltdown. The trust in banks had gone and a way of making financial transactions without the necessity of an intermediary was clearly an idea whose time had come. Bitcoin was launched on January 3rd 2009 but the first transaction took place on May 22nd 2010 when a Florida man negotiated the delivery of two Papa John’s pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins – the value of the Bitcoin being 4 coins to a penny. In January of 2022 the value of that transaction would have been $400 million.

Bitcoin has had a vertiginous journey, reaching peaks and troughs many times during the course of its thirteen-year history. So, there is a case to be made for its recovery from this recent nosedive. Indeed, many experts believe just that. Some maintaining that the value of the Bitcoin will reach $100 million by 2030 and $1 billion by 2038. Warren Buffet, however, can’t see the point of it.

“If you said … for a 1% interest in all the farmland in the United States, pay our group $25 billion, I’ll write you a check this afternoon,” Buffett said. ”[For] $25 billion I now own 1% of the farmland. [If] you offer me 1% of all the apartment houses in the country and you want another $25 billion, I’ll write you a check, it’s very simple. Now if you told me you own all of the bitcoin in the world and you offered it to me for $25 I wouldn’t take it because what would I do with it? I’d have to sell it back to you one way or another. It isn’t going to do anything. The apartments are going to produce rent and the farms are going to produce food.”

The above chart represents the launch of the Bitcoin blockchain — the first block being called the genesis block. Since Bitcoin was born in cyberspace at 18:15 GMT on January 3rd 2009, the use of London as a birthplace is arbitrary. (The creator of the Bitcoin is widely considered to be a group of developers collectively calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto.) I have to say, I would have expected to see a prominent Uranus or Neptune – planets whose joint signatures are on virtual reality – although Saturn and Uranus are in opposition, and Uranus occupies the Neptune-ruled sign of Pisces. The Sun, the ruler of the chart, is in Capricorn, widely conjunct Mars which in turn is conjunct Pluto — factors which provide some essential grounding for this virtual currency. That Pluto was at the beginning of its journey through Capricorn is significant. Why? Because cryptocurrency emerged like a phoenix out of the ashes of the 2007 economic meltdown, and since Pluto is about to enter Aquarius, cryptocurrency will either reinvent itself, becoming bigger and better, or it will go the way of all bubbles. Puff!

Jessica Adams has a similar view but for different reasons: “Bitcoin will only change the world economy until April 26th, 2026. From that point it either vanishes, or people no longer care as they once did. April 26th 2026 is the end of the Uranus in Taurus cycle. The cash revolution is over.”

Certainly, Uranus in Taurus is the quintessence of a ground-breaking currency – Taurus having much to do with the economy and Uranus being the revolutionary of the planets – but given that crypto currency manifested in 2009 and Uranus entered Taurus in May, 2018, I’m not sure you can place Uranus’s signature on the entire lifespan of Bitcoin, and the rest of the cryptocurrencies.

Jessica reveals that 0-1 degree and 18-20 degrees of any sign of the zodiac are crucial to key developments in and the highs and lows of Bitcoin’s lifecycle, citing several examples, most recently, May 9, when Bitcoin fell to less than half its all-time-high (November 2021). (Sun 19 degrees Taurus and Mars 18 degrees Pisces.) On Tuesday, 14 June, Bitcoin’s value slipped below $21,000. (Venus 20 degrees Taurus and Mercury 1 degree Gemini.)

Seattle Astrologer, Robert Weinstein, who has followed Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency market for over a decade maintains Jupiter in Pisces is “extremely bad” for crypto markets. Jupiter, of course transited Pisces between late December 2021 and May 10 this year, and will return in late October through late December.

I haven’t done an enormous amount of research on Bitcoin, but it strikes me that with a Saturn-Uranus opposition at birth, the relationship between these two planets and their individual transits could be important to the life of the currency. That it should reach its all-time-high in November last year when Saturn and Uranus were in close square is interesting, although it takes more than a single swallow to make a summer. 

As I mentioned earlier, the crashes in the cryptocurrency markets may not just be a response to the global economic challenges but the sign of things to come in the global economy. We should be looking at late July through mid-August for some tremors in the cryptocurrency world and the economy generally, and again in late October through mid-November. And I’m inclined to go along with the Bank of England, which has recently warned that we are not just in stagflation but on the way to another full-blown recession.

In regard to the future of cryptocurrencies, even if they form a bubble, which will inevitably burst, given the way the world is going – in ever-expanding digital circles – the blockchain system is here to stay. It will provide the structure for new and better financial models. And this would be entirely in keeping with Pluto’s entry into Aquarius: what began in Capricorn is reborn in this progressive air sign, reconfigured and reimagined in Aquarius. Cryptocurrencies per se may not reinvent themselves but the way we deal with money, which may involve a rethinking of stock markets and currency exchange rates, will change. And we might not have to wait until 2026…