Friday Bite: 26 April 2024
Metamorphosis
Mike Johnson – SCOTUS – Humza Yousaf – the Great Awakening
Where do we begin? So many epoch-making developments in seven days, almost all of them resonating with the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, it is hard to choose which to prioritize. However, I am going to open with an event that can truly be said to be epoch-making.
For the first time in at least a billion years, two life forms have merged into one organism. View Article Here The last time primary endosymbiosis happened, Earth got plants! A giant leap for mankind, no less.
You may recall Neil Armstrong uttered these words when he became the first man to walk on the Moon. And when did he do that? On 21 July 1969, the day Jupiter and Uranus met on the same degree of Libra.
Jupiter and Uranus are a fairly combustible double act, historically presiding over revolutions and bloody conflicts – freedom, liberation and independence being something of a theme. 1968-69 (Jupiter-Uranus in Virgo/Libra) saw mass student demonstrations across Europe over the Vietnam War and currently huge protests are taking place on US college campuses regarding the government’s support of Israel and the suppression of free speech.
By and large, Jupiter-Uranus conjunctions usher in new eras of the most positive kind. They inspire and fortify man’s quest for progress and enlightenment, hence the groundbreaking scientific developments that occur on or around the time of these conjunctions. The first artificial life form was created in May 2010 when Jupiter and Uranus were conjoined in Pisces. And in 1941 (Jupiter conjunct Uranus in Taurus) Konrad Zuse (now, there’s a synchronicity) completed development of the first computer. And on it goes.
Incidentally, the merging of two life-forms was not the only scientific breakthrough of the past week: a potential cure for certain cancers was also announced.
I’ll return to Zeus and Ouranos at the end of this Friday Bite but first some other sources of shock and awe.
ON TUESDAY, THE US Senate voted overwhelmingly to approve $95 billion of aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. The breakthrough in the six-month-long deadlock came on Saturday after speaker Mike Johnson put his career on the line and negotiated a bi-partisan deal. He made the choice for “the greater good”. Rather than appease the extreme arm of the Republican party, he decided that going down in history as the speaker who led America’s retreat from the global stage and left Ukraine to fend for itself against the Russian aggressor, was not for him. “I want to be on the right side of history.”
Almost immediately, Ukraine started to deploy the Atacms long-range missiles sent to them on Biden’s behest. This may turn out to be the breakthrough so badly needed in Ukraine’s fight for its sovereignty.
I COVERED Mr Smith’s unexpected rise to power in my Friday Bite of October 27. He was elected speaker on 25 October last year, three days before a lunar eclipse in Scorpio. People who come to prominence on and around an eclipse face an uncertain future. The decision he reached over the aid package could have gone either way but he chose to go with his conscience and thus retained his job and acquired gravitas in the process.
Mr Johnson’s chart serves to show us the role eclipses play in our destiny. We do not have a time of birth for the speaker, but even without one we can see he was born on a lunar eclipse (Sun Aquarius-Moon Leo) and people born on eclipses are not only destined for an important role but they are more responsive to eclipses throughout their lives, (Mr Trump is a case in point, also being born on a lunar eclipse, Princess Catherine and Prince William are two more.) The recent total solar eclipse fell on Johnson’s natal Mars in Aries. As for the future, Uranus is still some distance from his natal Saturn, but it will be a little close for comfort during the late summer, so his tenure as speaker is by no means a long-term prospect.
ON THURSDAY, as Mercury turned direct, a fleet of noteworthy developments took place. In Washington DC, the supreme court heard arguments regarding Mr Trump’s argument that presidents should have blanket immunity from prosecution. I listened to it all. And what I came away with is the belief that there will be no final decision over presidential immunity in the immediate future because the court will send it back to the lower courts for refining.
In so doing, the nine supreme court justices have handed Mr Trump a life-line. The federal case brought by Jack Smith against the former president for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election (originally set for 4 March this year) may well be delayed until after the November election.
This delay raises the prospect that the trial will never take place at all because, if Mr Trump wins the election, he will order the justice department to dismiss the case. However, such a scenario is a moot point. If we trust the astrology, the former president, for one reason or another, is unlikely to return to the White House and may never even participate in the election.
THURSDAY WAS THUS a momentous day in American history. Specifically in regard to the supreme court’s actions (or non-actions), we are not only witnessing constitutional change in motion but beginning to understand that unless America honours its promises as laid out in the Declaration of Independence, it is on the way to no longer being the country we admired, respected, emulated and relied upon to be the bastion of democracy.
The above chart, set for the full moon in Scorpio from the perspective of Washington DC, says it all. The full moon flanks the Ascendant-Descendant axis and squares the US nodal axis, and conclusions are being drawn. On the one hand, the end of the Congressional deadlock and on the other the possible end of a fair and unbiased SCOTUS. The United States is also experiencing its Chiron return and thus reopening wounds that have never fully healed.
Whether or not the overturning of Harvey Weinstein’s conviction by a New York appeals court falls into the category of justice being delivered depends on your viewpoint, but if a trial is not deemed fair, even on a legal technicality, the conviction should not stand.
Just saying.
By contrast and also on Thursday, in Arizona, a grand jury indicted eighteen individuals, including Rudi Giuliani, Mark Meadows (former White House Chief of Staff) and Kelli Ward (former Arizona state senator) on charges of fraud, conspiracy and forgery. It also implicated Donald Trump as an “unindicted co-conspirator”.
THEMES OF JUSTICE are playing long and loud the world over. Here in the UK, the inquiry over the Post Office debacle continues to reveal the extraordinary level of corruption at the top of the organization. Executives in the hot seat struggle to deny complicity in the miscarriages of justice that have seen hundreds of sub-post-masters imprisoned.
In Ireland, the sight of former leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson and his wife, Lady Eleanor arriving at court on charges related to historical sexual allegations was beyond shocking.
I have talked about Saturn in Pisces* having much to do with atonement on both a collective and individual level, and we are seeing this process accelerated by the powerful cocktail of eclipses, Pluto in Aquarius* and the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction*.
NOT SO MUCH a case of Saturnian atonement as eclipse hubris, Scotland’s first minister Humza Yousaf shocked his fellow parliamentarians by suddenly sacking his Green party partners and ripping up the agreement that had been in place since 2021, which had been hailed as “a new era in consensus politics”
With this unexpected – some might say uncalled for – action, Mr Yousaf appears to have shot himself in the foot, which Arians are prone to doing, but we can clearly lay the blame for this self-serving and self-immolating action at the feet of Jupiter-Uranus and the total solar eclipse.
Mr Yousaf was born with 21 degrees of Scorpio rising and the Moon at 23 degrees of Scorpio opposing Mars in Taurus. The Jupiter-Uranus conjunction took place at 21 degrees of Taurus, thus triggering this fiery configuration. Add to this, the solar eclipse at 19 degrees Aries (conjunct his natal Sun), and in terms of a fateful, if not fatal, set of developments was set in motion.
I think it’s going to be difficult for the first minister to remain in place. The cosmic lords have spoken!
WHICH BRINGS ME back to the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction and the belief that it has consciousness-changing properties. The late Charles Harvey considered this conjunction to be a motivating force in “the purposeful extension and awakening of human consciousness”.
However, this does not mean it is behind some kind of wave of new consciousness sweeping the planet.
Jupiter-Uranus conjunctions occur roughly every fourteen years, which is not a large slice of time, and while they evidently preside over great leaps in knowledge, which in turn promote the advance of civilization, a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction is not in and of itself indicative of a mass change of consciousness – the “great awakening” or “ascension” so many people are talking about. At best, Jupiter-Uranus conjunctions represent times of accelerated development.
In the same way that Uranus could only be discovered when we had the wherewithal to spot it – when we had achieved a level of knowledge and awareness to be open to its properties and develop the necessary tools – the huge advances in technology which have allowed us to travel to outer space and create the internet are similarly expanding our awareness and leading us to change our perception of ourselves and our world.
In simple terms, we could say that thought gives rise to reality.
The ideas of philosopher Peter Russell have a lot to tell us about this “great awakening”, this “ascension”.
“The interlinking of humanity that began with the emergence of language has now progressed to the point where information can be transmitted to anyone, anywhere, at the speed of light. Billions of messages continually shuttle back and forth, in an ever-growing web of communication, linking the billions of minds of humanity together into a single system… As a species, we’re advancing to the point where it will be possible for our minds to link together to create a collective human consciousness.”
While it is compelling to think humanity is indeed receiving divine energy and being prepared to enter a new age of enlightenment, history would tell us differently. Consider the Renaissance, for instance, an era that took mankind out of the Dark Ages, it did not take place over a matter of months or years but three centuries. And in the same way that it took more than a billion years for two life-forms to merge into a single organism, a new and enlightened species of homo sapiens is going to take a while.
Since the nineteen-sixties there have been several alignments predicted to inspire a mass expansion of consciousness and provide a gateway to a new world. There was the Dawn of the Age of Aquarius (5 February, 1962), the Harmonic Convergence (15 August, 1987), the end of the Mayan final world cycle (21 December 2012) and the annual Lion’s Gate Portals among them. None of which appear to have done very much to help humanity act in a more enlightened fashion. It’s going to take more than sixty years and a lot of work on our chakras!
In the same way that all the above were based on extraordinary alignments, the current line-up of planets in a tight little bundle could be among that number. What this alignment is most certainly doing is intensifying events, inspiring extreme reactions and presiding over some of the most transformational events in our history.
Believe me, I want to believe in a new world, but I think we have to go through a lot of turbulence and purging before we get there. Metamorphosis is a big job…
*See my video Saturn in Pisces See my video Pluto in Aquarius. See my video Jupiter/Uranus conjunction
Friday Bite: 19 April 2024
Gazing into the Abyss
Iran – Israel – Donald Trump
WHERE TO BEGIN? Unprecedented is a word used with increasing frequency in these troubled times, but entirely justified in light of events of the past seven days. On Saturday morning I awoke to news footage of a knife-bearing assassin moving with deadly purpose around Sydney’s Westfield Mall (he left six dead and twelve injured before he was shot by a police officer). Later, we watched missiles and drones arcing over Jerusalem like shooting stars. It was Iran’s first-ever direct assault on Israel. On Monday, in Manhattan, the trial of a former president began. And, as if in sympathy with these life-changing events, Indonesia’s Ruang volcano erupted while storms across Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia caused chaos and disruption. Eighteen months’ rainfall fell on Dubai in thirty-six hours.
So, fellow sky-watchers, are we beginning to understand what two eclipses, a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, a Sun-Pluto square and a Mars-Saturn conjunction can do to turn our worlds upside-down.
ACCORDING TO REUTERS, the opening salvo of a five-hour assault on Israel by Iran began at 23:00 local time. One hundred and seventy drones were followed by 120 ballistic missiles and 30 cruise missiles; not one person was killed, nor any major structural damage sustained, but a little girl was severely wounded. By all accounts it was an epic fail on Iran’s part.
The majority of the missiles were intercepted outside Israel’s borders, with help from the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Jordan. Israel’s Iron Dome air defence system neutralized most of the rest. For Israel and its allies, it was deemed a huge success, and proved the strength and the effectiveness of the alliance.
Some analysts, however, have suggested that the Iranian operation was designed to fail and had been carefully choreographed to avoid triggering an all-out war in the region. The Islamic Republic gave ample warning to Israel of the forthcoming attack and it has continued to advise Israel not to respond. Joe Biden is among many heads of state urging Israel to show restraint. “Take the win”, he advised Netanyahu.
So, will the Israeli government indeed “show restraint”? While past evidence would suggest it will exact a fearsome price, Netanyahu might choose otherwise. As Yaakov Amidror, retired general and former head of the research department of Israeli military intelligence, told Politico: “Bibi’s been given two good options – and that seldom happens… He can either go for the head of the octopus, which is Tehran, arguing we have the legitimacy to do so now. Or he can say to the Americans: We understand that you don’t want us to escalate with Iran [sic] and we are ready to compromise, but what we want in return is that America will give Israel all the help needed to destroy the military capability of Hamas in Gaza, including in Rafah.”
In last week’s Friday Bite, I suggested Iran could strike back at Israel on 14/15 April since the Moon in Cancer would be squaring the recent total solar eclipse and Iran’s natal Pluto. And, indeed, that astrological promise was fulfilled. However, I also mentioned 21/22 April, which is an even stronger candidate, given the Sun will be square Pluto, Jupiter conjunct Uranus and the Moon in Libra opposing the degree of the solar eclipse and conjoined to Iran’s Pluto.
As we now know, on Thursday, Israel notified the United States of its intention to attack Iran, and in the early hours of Friday morning Israeli missiles struck strategic targets not only in Iran but also Syria – Isfahan, which houses both a military base and a nuclear facility, among them. Iran has played down the attack, some in the media describing it as “weak”.
With its “relaxed” approach to Israel’s attack, Iran is signalling that a major escalation is not necessary. However, Israel is sending a clear message that it can “dial it up” should it so choose. The danger of miscalculation is clear and present.
While there may be no will to escalate the war in Gaza, sometimes a random act can precipitate a chain of events that lead to a wider conflict. No one could have imagined the consequences of the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in 1914. No country wanted a world war.
We are not yet out of the woods as far as these volatile alignments are concerned, and I believe it would be foolish to think that Friday’s Israeli strikes on Iran have defused the threat of a wider war in the region. The 21/22 April is one hurdle to get past, the full moon and its opposition to Jupiter and Uranus (24/25) another.
The above chart serves not only to give us a picture of the moment Iranian drones were seen in the skies above Israel but also the prevailing influences that are affecting us all, wherever we are in the world. This tight bundle of planets appears to be reflecting the entrenched nature of so many collective and personal situations. There seems to be no give. When it rains, it pours.
AND SO TO the historical events playing out in a Manhattan courtroom.
On Monday, 15 April, at 9:30 in the morning, former president Donald Trump entered the Courthouse in Lower Manhattan for the start of his criminal trial. Should he be convicted of falsifying the financial transaction behind the $130,000 hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels, he could face a prison sentence. Unlikely, but not impossible.
However, time behind prison bars may be precisely what Mr Trump is seeking, albeit it not as a result of his trial, but by violating a court order.
On Monday, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office filed a motion to hold the former president in contempt of court for violating a gag order. Judge Merchan, who is presiding over the case and issued the gag order, will hold a hearing on the matter next Tuesday.
Each violation incurs a penalty of $1000 and the prospect of incarceration. By Friday (19 April) there were seven violations. However, Judge Merchan could be said to be in between a rock and a hard place, given that he can either allow Mr Trump to continue to bully and castigate witnesses and those associated with the trial or he can allow him to play the martyr by giving him jail time. I wouldn’t be surprised if he put him behind bars.
Each day of the trial thus far has been spent in jury selection, a process expected to take weeks. By Thursday afternoon, twelve jurors had been selected. Opening statements are expected on Monday.
In the words of former president, George W. Bush, let us not “mis-underestimate” the toll this trial is already taking on Mr Trump. Is it any surprise he was caught on camera snatching forty winks from time to time. One of the most painful aspects of the hearings for the former president, if not the most painful, is that he has been forced to sit silently by while members of the public deliver their undiluted opinions of him. He has heard himself described as “racist”, “sexist” and “a narcissist”.
Isn’t this fascinating. As the trial opened, 25 degrees of Gemini was rising, some three degrees away from Donald Trump’s natal Sun-Moon opposition. (He was, you may remember, born on a lunar eclipse.) The Moon at 23 degrees of Cancer fell precisely on his natal Saturn while the MC-IC axis is conjunct his natal Ascendant-Descendant axis. It’s definitely personal.
To be honest, it is difficult to judge whether or not Mr Trump will be convicted of the crimes he is alleged to have committed – the trial requires a unanimous verdict – but, reading the chart as a horary – and you know I’m not an expert in this technique – that the Moon forms applying aspects to the Sun and Neptune informs us that “the matter will be concluded”. Since the Moon falls on Mr Trump’s natal Saturn and Saturn is conjunct Mars in the angular tenth house, whether or not he is sentenced, he will be judged and pay a hefty penalty in reputational and psychological terms.
Next Tuesday, when Judge Merchan considers the contempt of court charge, the Moon will be in either Libra or Scorpio and squaring Pluto, while the south node will be conjunct Trump’s natal Chiron. Unbelievable as it may seem, the Judge could take the nuclear option and remove the former president from the courtroom, albeit to a side room and just for a day.
We live in interesting times.
