Confessions of an Astrologer: July 2014

Chapter One : People Empowered

“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer.”

-D.H. Lawrence

It’s a very controversial suggestion as far as the astrological community is concerned. Not only does a July 2^nd Independence Day mean that they’ve been working with the wrong chart all along, it suggests that some of their most fundamental presumptions about America’s basic character have been grossly mistaken.

No one likes being wrong, but it goes deeper than that. They just don’t like the Moon-Pluto conjunction that occurred on July 2^nd . It just looks too offensive to them. It suggests dark and disturbing things about our homeland, indecent things that their more genteel and civilized July 4^th chart wouldn’t dream of mentioning. Their Fourth of July charts all have Moon in Aquarius, which would indicate that Americans are an idealistic, civilized, humanitarian people filled with brotherly love. Sounds pretty nice, right? Moon in Aquarius gives high intelligence with a stable, calm, emotionally detached nature. Still sound like America?

I don’t think so. The America I know has always had a little outlaw blood in its veins, a little more Jesse James than Albert Einstein. Moon in Aquarius doesn’t have much in common with the nation I know, the nation that spent its first hundred years massacring Indians from one end of the continent to the other. Nor does it sound like the nation that almost ripped itself apart over slavery. Nor does it sound much like the nation that stood nose to nose against monsters like Hitler, Stalin, Hirohito, Mao, Saddam Hussein, and Bin Laden, and never flinched once.

America, to be blunt, has balls. Moon in Aquarius doesn’t.

The July 2^nd chart, on the other hand, has huge balls. But they come at a terrible cost. Moon conjunct Pluto would mean that part of the destiny of the America people is to confront evil in the world head-on, standing up to it both domestically and abroad, both our own evil and that of others. It would mean that we might not always be the nicest guys on the block, but we’re no one’s whipping boy either. We would spend our entire existence, according to this chart, staring directly into the heart of darkness, and we would either overcome it or be destroyed by it.

It is very much in the nature of Pluto to define the world in terms of all or nothing, black or white. A people born under Moon conjunct Pluto would see the whole world this way, and that is America’s entire history in a nutshell. When we were fighting the “barbaric, savage” Indians, we believed at the time that we were fighting evil incarnate, cleansing the continent to ready it for the absolute goods of Christianity and democracy. When the North fought against the South in the Civil war, it again viewed the fight as being one against the “absolute evil” of slavery. When America fought against Hitler, then communism, and now Islamic terrorism, each time we have seen ourselves fighting against “ultimate evil”.

A lot of astrologers find themselves unnerved by this Moon-Pluto conjunction. They associate Pluto so strongly with concepts like “danger” and “evil” that they feel this conjunction could only mean that America itself was evil. However, it’s not that simple. While no astrological aspect can make people immoral in and of itself , Moon conjunct Pluto does make people compelled to outwardly express and display whatever darkness they do have within themselves, so they confront it and become consciously aware of it. And eventually, if they survive that self-confrontation, this same conjunction would ultimately compel them to fight that darkness and purge it from themselves. Part of the reason America has been as successful as we have been in confronting evil in the rest of the world is because we practiced that skill on ourselves first, in our Civil War. We got to know our own dark side very well, and got a good feel for just what we are capable of. In fact, we started learning that lesson early on.

Born in Matricide

When Britain’s King George III rejected the American colonies’ Olive Branch Petition in 1775, the colonists were finally forced to admit to themselves that there were only two choices left, and both were terrible : to either unconditionally submit to brutal domination by Britain, or to risk everything they had to fight for their independence and freedom. On the afternoon of July 2, 1776, the American people finally determined which of these two paths they would take when the Continental Congress voted for independence by passing the Lee Resolution. The colonists’ decision to sever all ties with their British motherland is perfectly reflected in the Moon-Pluto conjunction in the skies that afternoon. Moon conjunct Pluto can either point to a mother who symbolically or literally “kills” her children, or to a child who “kills” its parent, but the underlying theme is the same – the total destruction of the child’s tie to home and mother. Psychologically, this act is very powerful. If a human being killed his mother, that act would obviously have repercussions that haunted him for the rest of his life. One likely effect, however, would be the empowering conclusion “If I can do this terrible thing, I can probably do anything else as well. Nothing is beyond me now.” And just like people, nations also have their own psychology, and in 1776, this decision to break free of Britain’s bonds must have been a tremendously frightening and awesome move that made a permanent impression on the nation’s psyche, one which still shapes our behavior and attitudes today. What was that impression? “I am powerful and dangerous! Do not mess with me! I would even kill my own mother if necessary!” The nation’s first flags carried the same message - “Don’t Tread On Me” - along with a very Plutonian symbol – a coiled rattlesnake. Later, we would switch our national symbol to yet another Plutonian character – the eagle (Pluto rules the sign Scorpio, and the three classical symbols for Scorpio are a scorpion, an eagle, and a serpent).

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles.

- “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus,

engraved on the Statue of Liberty

Psychologically, Moon conjunct Pluto indicates both the death and the rebirth of the mother figure. America’s first mother experience came to an end when we parted ways with Britain in our Revolutionary War, but then was reborn anew when America reinvented herself by taking on the role of mother for the entire world. With this aspect in its chart, America was destined to be a universal mother and homemaker, gathering and protecting all who need her under a powerful motherly embrace, and that’s exactly what happened. Pluto intensifies and magnifies all the natural expressions of the Moon, making our nation so tremendously maternal and nurturing that it opened its arms wide, inviting in all the world’s “tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free” for 236 straight years. America has taken it upon itself to provide a safe refuge for the world’s needy, providing a new home and new melting-pot family to the “wretched refuse” of foreign lands.

Moon-Pluto’s strong motherly instincts also explain why America stood up to provide an umbrella of safety to the West as leader of the Free World during the Cold War. But the same concerns that inspire America to provide a secure homeland also tempts it to become controlling, manipulative, and possessive, as Moon-Pluto is the epitome of the overprotective mother who is always willing to ask others to give up a little more freedom for increased security.

Rebirth of a Nation

Pluto is all about death and rebirth, and the Moon represents the people, the masses. Thus it makes sense that our nation quickly became known as a “melting pot”, where immigrants shed their old national identities to be transformed into something new. But with this conjunction in our nation’s chart, this process of death and rebirth, of self-purges and self- recreations, will be something that keeps happening to us as long as America exists. It is our inescapable fate, according to the Liberty Chart. The circumstances of history will force us again and again to publically expose and confront our nation’s internal faults, shortcomings, and self-contradictions. This is a miserable, bitterly painful process, but a certain and direct path to becoming a better, stronger, more unified and more powerful people. Although “Whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger” is a modern saying, it has been one of the guiding principles of our nation since its founding. Once our faults are exposed, we wrestle with ourselves over them for awhile, and eventually we purge them from our nation, becoming a new and healthier people as a result. We have done this again and again in our history, and we will continue to do so in the years to come. We are our own greatest accomplishment. We have suffered through this painful process with slavery, and voting rights, and prohibition, and labor rights, and civil rights, and gay rights, and nonsmokers’ rights, and we will keep on going, forever reshaping and refining ourselves into something better.

Our first flag carried the image of a snake, which has proven prophetic in ways our founders did not anticipate. Like a snake, our nation has shed its skin and reinvented itself again and again over the years. We can do this great thing for one reason alone – we are not afraid of the pain. With Moon conjunct Pluto, we ARE the pain. The pain of ongoing self-destruction and self-recreation is a huge part of what the American people are all about.

The Gift of Moon-Pluto

The primary focal point of the Liberty Chart is this Moon-Pluto conjunction, which is in Capricorn, in the Second House. This conjunction is all alone on one side of the chart, with all the other planets grouped up against it on the opposite side of the chart. This makes the already potent Moon-Pluto conjunction even stronger, turning it into the most powerful and sensitive point in the whole chart. And it fits. In a nation’s horoscope, the Moon represents the people, the public, the masses, and Pluto represents ultimate, absolute power, so this chart is perfectly placed in the chart of the world’s first modern democracy “of the people, by the people, and for the people”. This chart’s Moon-Pluto conjunction indicates a great empowerment of the masses, which as we know was the primary purpose of this new republic. But this same conjunction also represents extreme, ruthless, absolute control of the people, as well as an entire people’s terrible self-destruction and rebirth, and those too are consistent with America’s history. Moon conjunct Pluto is reflective of both the inhuman slavery of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and also the horrific war we put ourselves through to break free of that institution. Moon conjunct Pluto suggests that our nation possesses bitter and sensitive emotional wounds, but also that our people can be expected to continually evolve and self-transform as a result of that pain. Moon conjunct Pluto indicates a traumatized people who live in almost perpetual fear, but also a people who feel an urgent need to acquire ever greater control of the world around it in response to that fear. A people with Moon conjunct Pluto will carry tremendous pain, anxiety, and grief within themselves, but it will also be a nation of indomitable will, a people that throws themselves fully and utterly into any project or mission they set for themselves. A nation with this aspect will be obsessive in many ways; it will have tremendous focus, drive, and determination, but it will also be highly prone to paranoia, and it will wrestle with some very serious hangups and psychological issues, especially when it comes to the subjects of sex and death. It will be a nation of dark secrets, a nation capable of going to any extreme or violating any principle or treaty to achieve its goals, a nation not merely capable of mass murder, but one that sometimes seems to breed mass murderers by the truckload. It will be a people who fiercely love their guns, a nation that stockpiles the most dangerous weapons imaginable and then goes looking for more. It will be a populace that not only knows that disturbing things happen in secret behind closed doors, but who accept such things as normal and teach their children to play it safe, turn away and not ask too many questions. But at the same time, it will also be a nation capable of the noblest self-sacrifice and steadiest resolve, a nation capable of plunging directly into an inferno if that is what it takes to achieve its goals. A people with Moon conjunct Pluto can stare unflinchingly into the heart of darkness without being intimidated or swayed from their chosen path.

The Curse of Moon-Pluto

Any nation born under a Moon-Pluto conjunction would be condemned to suffer almost perpetual fear, tragedy, trauma, and grief, and this is so true of America that, right alongside our national anthem, our national bird, and our national pastime, we also have our very own national natural disaster – the tornado, earth’s most violent storm. While floods, droughts, hurricanes, forest fires, earthquakes, and tsunamis occur in relatively equal measure all over the globe, America has far more tornadoes than anywhere else, averaging about 1,200 annually. While tornadoes do occasionally occur in other parts of the world, the vast majority of them take place in the United States because of its unique geography. For up to six months out of each year, Americans living in Tornado Alley go to bed at night uncertain if their houses will still be standing come morning, and every year brings more reports of homes, neighborhoods, and even entire towns being blown away by these monsters. It’s like a perverse national lottery that happens every Spring; everyone knows that some town somewhere in America is probably going to be ripped to splinters before the season is over, and everyone just hopes and prays it won’t be theirs. Witnesses describing tornadoes’ aftermath often say things like “Our neighborhood looks like the middle of a war zone”, and for the millions living in Tornado Alley, it does seem that every Spring brings a new round of violent ambushes from Mother Nature. These attacks are so swift and overpowering that there’s no real defense against them, leaving everyone in Tornado Alley feeling vulnerable and afraid. The National Weather Service issues hundreds of Tornado Watches and Warnings each year, advising millions of Americans to quite literally drop everything and run for their lives. No one feels safe when it’s spring in Tornado Alley.

If America was truly born under Moon conjunct Pluto, its population would have been doomed to an almost uninterrupted diet of fear, pain, trauma, and grief. This is a problem for most astrologers today, who prefer to think the correct chart has Moon in Aquarius, which would instead make us a calm, stable, dispassionate, enlightened, and idealistic people, not at all like the troubled nation we would be under Moon-Pluto. So the question is, how troubled are we? Have the American people been force-fed a steady diet of fear, pain, and grief since the nation was born, or not? Younger Americans recalling the relative peace and prosperity of the 1980s and 1990's might assume the answer is no, but let’s take a closer look at our nation’s history.

To start off, for over a hundred long years, from 1776 all the way through 1890, America was tangled up in the Indian Wars, trying to “make the frontier safe for civilization”. Frontier warfare was almost incomprehensibly brutal, and even when noncombatants on both sides weren’t actively being massacred, their food supplies were being systematically targeted and destroyed. For over a century, there was a steady stream of murders, tortures, rapes, scalpings, mutilations, massacres, and other atrocities being committed by both sides of the war. Both sides regularly tortured innocent women, children, and other noncombatants to death, leaving gruesomely mutilated corpses. During this same period, of course, slaves in the South were treated every bit as inhumanly as the Indians were. Our Black and Asian slaves were routinely beaten, raped, tortured, crippled, and even killed when it was thought necessary. The only reason the Indians were singled out for wholesale slaughter was because they made lousy slaves. Blacks in the North were treated somewhat better, but there too they frequently found themselves the victims of barbaric violence. It is estimated that as many as 10 million souls died during America’s Indian wars, including 90% of the native Indian population.

But America’s frenzy of mass murder didn’t stop in 1890. Even after the Indian Wars were over, gruesome homicidal mania continued to play a bitterly familiar part of America’s daily life. Hundreds upon hundreds of mass murder cases have been documented in America’s 236 years as a nation; in just the last few years alone, over 43 incidents have been reported in our papers. We have suffered through the 2008 Northern Illinois University shootings, the 2007 Christmas Eve massacre in Carnation Washington, the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, the 2007 Church shootings in Colorado Springs, the 2007 Louisiana State University murders, the 2007 Westroads Mall massacre, the 2007 Trolley Square Mall shooting in Salt Lake City, the 2007 Tyler Peterson shootings in Wisconsin, the 2007 SuccessTech High School shooting in Cleveland, the 2007 Delaware State University shooting, the 2007 Atlanta abortion clinic bombing, the 2006 Amish school shootings, the 2006 Capitol Hill massacre, the 2006 Baseline Killer murders in Phoenix, the 2006 Serial Shooter murders in Phoenix, the 2006 Hamilton Avenue murders in Indianapolis, the 2006 Platte Canyon High School shooting in Colorado, the 2006 Pine Middle School shooting in Reno, the 2005 Tacoma Mall shooting in Washington, the 2005 Red Lake High School massacre in Minnesota, the 2005 Tyler Courthouse shooting in Texas, the 2003 Ohio highway sniper attacks, the 2003 Beltway sniper attacks, the 2003 Lockheed Martin shooting, the 2003 Rocori High School shooting in Minnesota, the 2003 Red Lion Area Junior High School shootings in Pennsylvania, the 2002 Angel of Death murders, the 2002 Appalachian School of Law shooting, the 2002 shootings at LAX, the 2001 September 11th attacks, the 2001 Anthrax attacks, the 2000's BTK Kill

er murders, the 2000 al-Qaeda bombing of the USS Cole, the 2000 Buell Elementary School shooting in Michigan, the 2000 Wakefield Massacre in Massachusetts, the 2000 Brooklyn Strangler Murders, the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, the 1999 Wedgewood Baptist Church shootings in Texas, the 1999 Xerox murders in Honolulu, the 1998 Thurston High School shooting, the 1998 Jonesboro massacre, the 1998 Birmingham abortion clinic bombing, and the 1998 Connecticut Lottery Headquarters shootings.

Astrologers who insist that our nation must have its Moon in the peaceful and civilized sign of Aquarius have a hard time reconciling that view with these chilling statistics.

From 1776 - 1781, of course, we were also up to our necks in trouble with the Revolutionary War, which cost us 25,000 fatalities. Almost immediately after the war was over, we went through our first economic depression from 1784-1787. A few decades later we very nearly lost our second war with Britain, which cost us another 20,000 fatalities, and almost immediately after that war was over, the nation was thrown up in arms over slavery by the Missouri Compromise. When the Panic of 1819 caused a six year-long economic depression, we started having urban race riots all over, and they’ve been with us on and off ever since. The race riots weren’t confined to the South alone; the bloodiest one in American history occurred in New York City in 1863, when mobs swept through the streets murdering Blacks, hanging their corpses on lamp posts, and torching Black homes, businesses, and orphanages. In the decades leading up to the Civil War, virtually the entire the South lived in anxious dread of slave uprisings, revolts, and conspiracies. Many did spring up, in places like Missouri, Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, and Louisiana; when the Army was called in to suppress slave revolts near New Orleans in 1811, sixty-six slaves were executed, with sixteen of their heads left impaled on spikes alongside the road as a warning to others.

Meanwhile, horrible cholera epidemics occurred around the nation in 1832, 1834, 1849-52, and 1854. The first cholera epidemic started in New York City and killed half its victims, while half of the entire Pawnee population and two thirds of the southern Cherokees died in the epidemic of 1849-1852. The Panic of 1837 brought an even more terrible five-year depression, leaving one-third of America’s workers unemployed. From 1838 to 1862, a lot of brave Americans risked life and limb to run the Underground Railroad, but many of them got lynched by the Ku Klux Klan after the war was over. Around the same time the Underground Railroad was helping people escape to the North, other Americans were trying to escape to the West via wagon train, but a lot of them, such as the cannibalizing Donner Party of 1846, never made it. But even though these journeys to the West were so dangerous and uncertain, massive numbers of Americans decided the risk was worth it, which says a lot about how awful life was in the East during these years.

The Civil War was a blood bath, costing us 623,000 fatalities, more than all the other war fatalities in our entire history. And after it was over, racial violence and rioting continued to convulse the nation for the next hundred years. The Ku Klux Klan and similar domestic terrorist organizations spread riots, terror, and mass murder into nearly every southern state, mutilating, raping, shooting, and massacring Blacks, schoolteachers, Republicans, and members of the Underground Railroad.

The American Old West remained lawless and violent until 1890, because there was hardly any local law enforcement there, and those few justice systems that did exist were generally corrupt. Buffalo hunters, railroad workers, cowboys and soldiers had regular shoot-outs in public, and violent range wars were frequent. Around the same time on the East Coast, the mid-1800's witnessed a cruel upsurge in child labor, when American children as young as four found themselves being pressed into the workforce, toiling in unspeakable conditions for up to ten hours a day. In 1873, three simultaneous pandemics ravaged the South: yellow fever, cholera, and smallpox.

In the mid-1800's we started seeing a new phenomenon in America – strikes, riots and massacres from labor unrest, beginning what eventually proved to be the bloodiest history of labor of any industrialized nation on Earth. After the Civil War, America’s population began shifting into the cities just as vast numbers of new immigrants arrived, creating horrific and violent slums. In 1890, eleven out of twelve million American families were below the poverty line. Due to overcrowding and unsanitary conditions, infant mortality in New York in 1870 was 65% higher than it had been in 1810. The Panic of 1873 started the Long Depression (1873–1896), which was regarded as the Great Depression until the more severe Great Depression arrived in the 1930s. The last two decades of the 19^th century witnessed the worst race problems in our nation’s history, with segregation, lynchings, riots, and Jim Crow laws all over the country. During this time, the constant threat of terror was used to keep blacks “in their place”. In 1893, yet another financial panic erupted, causing hundreds of railroad companies, steel mills and other businesses to fail.

In World War I, 116,000 Americans lost their lives overseas, while the US mainland became so terrified of Germans, Bolsheviks, and Blacks that a massive domestic intelligence system was put in place which included 300,000 volunteer spies, the largest corps of homeland spies ever assembled. After the war, the Klan came back and starting lynching people again, even going so far as to murder Black soldiers returning from overseas. The Spanish Flu pandemic terrorized America from 1818- 1820, killing over half a million of our citizens, and in 1919 there were race riots in 26 different American cities, and labor unrest was a daily occurrence. From 1920 to 1933, Prohibition brought a large organized crime presence to America, when Al Capone-style mobs ruled our cities. In 1923, the entire town of Rosewood Florida was burned to the ground and many of its inhabitants massacred in one of the worst cases of racial violence in America’s history. Then of course, from 1929-1945 we suffered through the Great Depression and World War II, which cost us another 400,000 fatalities.

Immediately afterwards, Russia got the bomb, sending America into about twenty more years of hysterics worrying about McCarthyism, the Red Scare, Mutual Assured Destruction, and backyard bomb shelters. The Asian Flu arrived in 1957–1958, killing some 69,000 Americans, which was immediately followed by the fear, violence, and civil unrest of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960's, and then still more fear, violence and civil unrest from the Vietnam War protests in the 1960's and 1970's. The Hong Kong Flu pandemic of 1968–1969 infected 50 million Americans, killed 33,000 of us, and terrified the rest of us. The Vietnam War cost us 58,000 fatalities, and almost as soon as it was over, the drug pandemic arrived. Crack cocaine showed up in the 1980's and then crystal meth in the 1990's, fueling a huge explosion in crime and street gangs all over the nation. From 1960 to 1990, violent crime in America rose 630%, murder rose 257%, rape rose 596%, and robbery rose 592%. And, of course, we shouldn’t forget about terrorism, which stuck America in 1993 and 2001, leaving us looking uneasily over our shoulders ever since.

Whew! After going through all that, how do we Americans even get out of bed in the morning? It seems that just as one would predict for a nation born under Moon conjunct Pluto, our nation has indeed been in a more or less constant state of fear, pain, trauma, and grief since its very birth. Despite what the glossy advertisements say, living in America has never been easy or safe. On the contrary, life here has always been a terrifying struggle for survival for a sizable portion of the population. Between the tornadoes, the Indian Wars, the lawless Old West, the Civil War, race riots, the KKK, World War I, the Red Scare, the Spanish Flu, organized crime, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, World War II, Russian Nukes, the Cold War, McCarthyism, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the drug wars, terrorist attacks, and a steady steam of race riots and crazed homicidal maniacs attacking our schools, malls, churches, streets, and workplaces, we have never really had much of a chance to feel safe. Instead, we’ve been forced to teach each new generation of our children how to bend over and kiss their asses goodbye for the last 236 years.

So how do Americans summon the courage to get out of bed each morning after living through all that trauma? By embracing our past and drawing strength from having survived it. Our nation identifies deeply and passionately with this history of fear, pain, trauma, and grief, and has woven its inner sense of self around such issues. Who are we? We are a people forever dealing with our own fear and pain. We do not let go, we do not move on, we do not forget. Remember the Boston Tea Party! Remember the Maine! Remember the Alamo! Remember Pearl Harbor! Remember 9/11! The outward source of our fear may seem to change, but the trauma itself never really seems to dissipate. We process our fear and pain, and reprocess it, and then reprocess it some more. We rehash battles from wars fought over a hundred years ago (Civil War enactments., etc.). Other nations might consider this sort of thing to be sick or obsessive, but to us, it’s just how we are. It’s WHO we are. However, a nation that grows up living in fear is a nation that ends up being feared by others. And so we are. Who are we? To many other peoples and nations of the world, we are death itself, the “Great Satan”. Which is also consistent with a nation whose Moon is conjunct Pluto.

Moon-Pluto Is Our Blind Spot

Thanks to that conjunction, America can always be counted on to have a huge kneejerk emotional reaction to all things related to power and death (which on a psychological level are really the same subject – if we had enough power, we could theoretically avoid death). Power issues are something we relate very strongly to in America, something we respond to instinctively and automatically. Whatever the stimulus is, if it makes Americans feel more powerful, we find ourselves attracted to it and want to embrace it and identify with it; but if the stimulus instead makes us feel weak, vulnerable, or powerless, we then instinctively reject it, deny it, and either try to ignore it, or, better still, destroy it. With Moon conjunct Pluto, America is always going to have more than its fair share of psychological complexes, phobias and blind spots. We harbor very touchy sensitivities about feeling vulnerable or endangered, and whenever these sort of psychological buttons are pushed, we automatically compensate with a powerful, over the top reaction. As Japan learned in 1945.

We especially don’t like being reminded of our mortality, and go to great lengths as a people to avoid, deny, and reject such reminders. Unlike most of the other nations of the world, we prefer to hide our sick, weak, and elderly loved ones away behind closed institutional doors, perhaps because they remind us that even with all our power and wealth, we still do not have control over our own final destiny. But even if we cannot hold off death forever, our Moon-Pluto conjunction makes us determined as a society to do all we can to avoid being reminded of that unpleasant fact, plastering over any nagging reminders of the inevitability of sickness and death with a constant media barrage that instead celebrates the eternal vibrancy, beauty, and sexiness of youth. It’s not that we are obsessed with youth itself per se, but just that we are desperately trying to avoid its opposite, which is why it has become possible in 2012 to flip through dozens of TV channels without running across anyone older than thirty-five. And why we are deluged daily with an endless flood of ads for products designed to help us seem young and healthy. And why we keep a far larger percentage of our population hidden away behind institutional doors than any other country on earth.

Moon-Pluto Is Our Passion

America has always had an insatiable craving for intense danger and death-defying heroics, from the epic gunfights of the Old West to Evel Knievel jumping across the Snake Canyon to Houdini escaping from certain death to the seemingly impossible aerobatic feats of the Blue Angels. Instead of turning away in fear, we find ourselves drawn in, fascinated by the raw danger and unrestrained force of bare-knuckle fistfights, ultimate fighting tournaments, boxing matches, football games, NASCAR, and even hockey. Make no mistake about it, however, we're not there for the blood. We’re there to witness the one phenomenon that fascinates Americans more than anything else in this world – exhibitions of sheer will and unrelenting determination in the face of intense danger. The rest of the world thinks that soccer and cricket are the best sports in the world, but to Americans they are as unappealing as week-old bread. Why? Not enough danger. Not enough at stake to make it interesting. We want to see people putting everything they have on the line, just like we did in 1776. If they do that, they’ll be reminding us of what we like best about ourselves, and we’ll love them for it and keep coming back for more.

Moon conjunct Pluto indicates a national obsession with sex, danger, and death, which is clearly evidenced in the American Motion Picture Industry. The movies being made by the rest of the world's nations do not have anywhere near the same focus or emphasis on sex, death, and horror that American cinema does. Why sex? Because Moon conjunct Pluto is all about experiencing irresistible desire and powerful, sexy force. We Americans never feel more alive than when we are riding a swell of raw power, when matters of life and death are in our hands. Moon conjunct Pluto makes us addicted to things that have a “kick”, things that make us feel acutely alive and in the moment. We like our sports to be dangerous, our movies to be intense, and our music to rock us right down to our toes.

The Harley Davidson motorcycle has enjoyed so much success precisely because it does such a great job of fulfilling this visceral national need, helping the average American feel what it’s like to wield massive amounts of raw energy. Elvis was such a phenomenon in America for the exact same reason – he infused music with a dark, sexy power the public didn’t even know they wanted, but once they saw it, they couldn’t get enough of it. In any horoscope, the Moon describes the emotional needs, telling us what we are really looking for whether we realize it or not, what we need in order to feel complete, satisfied, and fulfilled. This conjunction says that America has a deep emotional need to feel raw power, to push limits, and to stand at the edge of life’s precipices and see how far we dare lean over.

Moon-Pluto Is Our Dark Side

For any nation with Moon conjunct Pluto, wrestling with its inner demons will be a major domestic issue. This is certainly true in America, which holds a far larger percentage of its population in prison than most other nations, and has a far higher homicide rate than other industrialized nations, and far more serial murderers, mass murderers, school shootings, gun violence, and race riots than other countries, and is one of the very few “civilized” nations left on earth that still practices capital punishment. As of 2012, thirty thousand people die each year in America from gun violence, which is more deaths per year than all our Revolutionary War fatalities put together. No other “civilized” country in the world has a record even remotely like this, and that dark truth is simply not reflected in any of the milquetoast July 4^th charts that have been proposed for our nation.

However, our inner darkness is not just found in our citizenry, but also in our government. In the last few years, the world’s news has surprised many by running stories accusing America of engaging in torture in our War Against Terrorism. Many were also surprised by President Bush’s blunt threat to pre-emptively nuke Iran or other nations if necessary. However, no astrologer would be surprised by a nation with Moon conjunct Pluto using such measures to achieve its ends. This conjunction makes people manipulative if necessary, controlling if necessary, coercive if necessary, and yes, even murderous if necessary. Basically, it gives people such tremendously strong willpower and determination that they will do whatever it takes to achieve their aims. Pluto is very comfortable viewing the world in absolutes, and a nation living out its destiny under a Moon-Pluto conjunction would be predisposed to view its issues, goals, and desires as more important than the idealistic rules, abstract principles, and technical laws of normal civilized behavior. This attitude should surprise no one, because it’s the same one we adopted while exterminating the Indians and enslaving the blacks.

Fortunately, this disregard for morality or principle is directly at odds with the strongly moral Jupiter and Sagittarius influences also present in America’s chart (in the Sagittarius Ascendant and the Sun-Jupiter conjunction), which means that our nation will always be fighting a battle within itself over the appropriateness or inappropriateness of such extreme methods. With the strong Pluto influence, it is an astrological certainty that there will be times when our nation does embrace methods like torture, coercion, and mass murder, but with the Jupiter influence, it is equally certain that there will also be times when we just as enthusiastically reject and prosecute such crimes.

Any nation with Moon conjunct Pluto will spend a lot of its time, energy, and resources struggling with self-destructive behavior, and that has also certainly been true of America. And while some of our self-destruction had a purpose, like the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, a great deal of it does not. Today, the vast majority of deaths in America are the result of avoidable self-destructive behaviors, such as getting lung cancer from smoking, or heart disease from eating too much crap and not getting enough exercise, or AIDS from unprotected sex, or having traffic accidents from driving too fast or not paying attention. And then of course there’s our alcohol and drugs, which not only kill us when we take them, but also kill us by financing gang warfare. As of 2012, America ranked last among all industrialized nations in preventable deaths. But do we stop doing any of this stuff, even when we know its probably going to kill us sooner or later? No. Why? Perhaps simply because it’s in our nation’s chart to be this way. With Moon conjunct Pluto, after all, people will be more than a little attracted to “the dark side”. We like our cars to be too fast, our heroes to know how to fight dirty, and our women to have exaggerated sexual characteristics.

There’s no way around it – any nation with Moon conjunct Pluto is going to have some very self-destructive tendencies. Given that certainty, our government’s move in the last decades to push our national debt into the stratosphere might be seen as deeply troubling, especially when one considers that this ominous conjunction is in the 2^nd house of finances. As we all know, America defeated the Soviet Union by bankrupting them. This makes sense, because Moon-Pluto in the second house tells us that our nation’s greatest strength and power is financially-based. But this Moon-Pluto conjunction not only describes our greatest power (Pluto), but also our greatest vulnerability (Moon), which leaves open the possibility that we could end up going to our destruction the same way the USSR did.

Speaking of “being attracted to the dark side”, Moon conjunct Pluto is also an indicator that the nation will have some substantial connection with the occult, and this too would seem to be in evidence in our nation’s history. The Founding Fathers’ connection with Freemasonry is well-documented, but most people today write that off as a strange but meaningless curiosity. However, the connections that our nation’s more recent leaders have with the dark and ominous Skull and Bones group are perhaps more unsettling. Once known as “The Brotherhood of Death”, The Order of Skull and Bones is one of the oldest secret societies in the United States, continuing its Masonic-inspired rituals since it was founded almost two hundred years ago. The 27th, 41st, and 43rd Presidents of the United States were all “bonesmen”, and their brethren have had seemingly inordinate influence over the nation’s course. It was bonesman Benjamin Sillman Jr., for example, who first invented gasoline, bonesman Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite who first gave corporations legal “personhood”, and bonesman Robert A. Lovett who created the CIA. Bonesman founded the Carnegie Institution, the American Economic Association, the American Historical Association, and the American Psychological Association.

But maybe we’re just being paranoid about that whole Skull and Bones thing. Any nation born under Moon- conjunct Pluto will have real issues with paranoia, and that has certainly been true of America. In 1964, Richard Hofstadter of Columbia University wrote the seminal article “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, detailing America’s long history of political paranoia, detailing such events as an eighteenth century panic over an alleged “Illuminati” conspiracy, a 1820 panic over an alleged Masonic conspiracy, a 1855 Texas newspaper warning of a Catholic European conspiracy, a 1895 Populist party manifesto warning of a conspiracy of international bankers, and McCarthy’s 1951 warnings of an impending communist takeover. Again and again, the American public has found itself caught in the grip of desperate certainty that “time is running out” before some shadowy group rose up and took over.

Of course, this paranoia is not only reserved to the political arena. Over the last 50 years, a great many Americans have gotten themselves all worked up over alleged conspiracies about space aliens, conspiracies to conceal cures for cancer, cars that get 200 miles to the gallon, and Beatle Paul McCartney’s alleged death, conspiracies to put mind control drugs in our water supplies, conspiracies to use AIDS and drugs to suppress the black population, conspiracies to combine Mexico, America, and Canada into a North American Union, conspiracies to kill JFK and MLK, conspiracies to steal elections with electronic voting boxes, conspiracies to invade the Middle East and steal their oil, and on and on. Not only are we a nation of conspiracy theorists today , but we seem to have always been that way.

On the other hand, a nation born under Moon conjunct Pluto would be exactly the sort of place where secret conspiracies and invisible power structures really would exist.

Moon-Pluto Is Our Need for Power and Control

From the instant our colonies voted for independence on July 2^nd, 1776, the American people were astrologically destined to become a powerful nation. Having that Moon-Pluto conjunction in the 2^nd was like getting a promise from the universe that the American people would eventually possess incredible amounts of power, and this has come true beyond the wildest dreams of anyone alive at the time. The American people were the first nation on earth to harness the atom, and today our nuclear arsenal is the strongest on earth, making us the most powerful and dangerous nation in all of human history. The American people possess literally unimaginable power, both military and economic, a state of affairs which perfectly fulfills the promise of Moon-Pluto in the nation’s chart. Thanks to the recent collapse of our only rival, the Soviet Empire, America’s will is now almost completely dominant in the world. We not only possess a vast network of military bases and spy satellites all over the globe, but we directly or indirectly control the economies of a great deal of the world. We have come to a point in history where our will is essentially law, and we can accomplish all that we set out to achieve. But the key to our power, this chart declares, is our own resolve and unity. One of the meanings of Pluto is an intense focus of energy (or attention or will) into a single point, which is yet another symbol of America - “E Pluribus Unum”. The only thing that can stop America from accomplishing its goals, its chart declares, is America itself; as long as the nation is unified in purpose and resolve, it has the power to meet any challenge.

But Moon conjunct Pluto gives our nation an unsatiable and unquenchable thirst for power, and even with our recent victory in the Cold War, that thirst has not been sated. More importantly, according to America’s chart, it never really will. With this conjunction in its chart, America will always hunger for more wealth, more power, and more control, and just like the robot in the Terminator movies, it will never, ever stop. We will always lust after more power, and because our nation’s concept and experience of power will always be tied to the Second House, America will continue to seek that increased influence through financial means, through the power of money, property, and possessions. Given this, one might find it disturbing that we have recently erected permanent military bases in the oil-rich Middle East. In 1943, the US State Department declared that Middle-East oil was “the greatest single prize in all history”, and with this conjunction in the 2^nd House of America’s chart, it may simply not be possible for our nation to resist going after that prize. We Americans love owning things, acquiring things, putting things in our pocket. Our first major act as a nation, after all, was to annex the rest of the continent and evict its former owners. Moon conjunct Pluto in the 2^nd House describes a people (Moon) with an unquenchable and obsessive compulsion (Pluto) to shop (2^nd House); America’s extravagant consumerism was preordained from the beginning, and oh how true that prediction has proven to be. We always want more things, bigger things, shinier things, and we want them now. We want bigger houses, more nukes, bigger Christmas light displays, more TV channels, bigger restaurant portions, more gadgets, bigger SUVs ... we probably won’t rest until we get our hands on that oil.

Not only are we driven to spend money, but with this conjunction in the 2^nd, the American people are equally driven to make money, thus accounting for America’s magnificent financial empire. The United States is the ultimate machine when it comes to making money, single-minded and unstoppable (which of course are Plutonian characteristics). One of the most important building blocks of our financial empire was the historic decision to give corporations legal personhood. Thanks to our Supreme Court, a corporation is considered a legal entity onto itself, a “juristic person” with a legal identity separate from its members. A corporation can be sued, but it of course cannot be sent to prison, nor can a corporation’s members be held liable for any crimes it may commit even though they benefit when the corporation profits. Thus, a corporation’s members are able to enjoy all its benefits without having to suffer all its failures. Corporate personhood is the single most important cornerstone in America’s entire financial system, and as such, one would certainly expect it to be reflected in America’s chart. It is. The Moon-Pluto conjunction in Capricorn in the 2^nd house is a perfect symbolic representation of America’s corporate entities : powerful (Pluto) financial (2^nd house) businesses (Capricorn) have been given (conjunct) the legal status (Capricorn) of persons (Moon).

Moon-Pluto typically brings intense possessiveness. Individuals with this in their charts typically have at least one intensely possessive relationship in their lives where they are blinded with desire for the other person and wish to own and control them completely. America went through something like this as well. It was called slavery.

Moon-Pluto Is Our Achilles’ Heel

Because this conjunction is all alone on one side of the chart with all the other planets on the opposite side of the chart, it becomes the focus point or fulcrum for the entire chart; it essentially becomes as powerful and influential as all the rest of the chart put together. This pattern makes the American nation acutely sensitive to any and all contacts from transiting or progressed planets that stimulate the Moon-Pluto conjunction. This was borne out most recently, when America’s progressed Ascendant conjoined this natal Moon-Pluto conjunction between late 2000 and late 2001, at the same time that transiting Pluto was conjoining the natal Ascendant. This was a supremely rare coincidence, because Pluto takes about 250 years to make one orbit around the sun. Pluto only conjoins the Ascendant once every 250 years, but it just happened to be doing so right when the 9/11 attacks happened, and also right when the progressed Ascendant was conjoining the natal Moon -Pluto conjunction. That’s right, there was a double Ascendant-Pluto conjunction occurring in the July 2^nd Liberty Chart during the 9/11 attacks! When the first stage of this assault hit (progresed Ascendant conjunct Pluto), the whole nation felt raped (a Plutonian act) when the Supreme Court stopped Florida’s vote count in the November 2000 elections and handed over the Presidency to George W. Bush. Transiting Pluto continued to conjoin the Ascendant for the next year, which kept the nation nursing that election wound instead of letting the matter drop. But then when the second shoe dropped and the progressed Ascendant moved on to conjoin the Moon in 2001 (with transiting Pluto still conjunct the Ascendant), the full force of the Liberty Chart’s Moon-Pluto conjunction was finally released, and America suffered the worst terrorist attack in its history. ¹

Incredibly, despite all the pain, grief, and trauma that this Moon-Pluto conjunction has brought America, we don’t think of ourselves as a suffering people. Instead of feeling cursed, we feel very blessed, which is in large part due to our Sun-Jupiter conjunction, which keeps us optimistic and forward-thinking, and prevents us from dwelling too heavily on the traumas of our past. While our Moon-Pluto conjunction gives us our ferocious will and determination, our Sun-Jupiter conjunction gives us great vision, hope, and no small measure of luck. Together, they are an unbeatable recipe for excellence and supremacy.

¹That this attack occurred under the progressed conjunction to the Moon instead of Pluto a degree earlier makes sense for three reasons : (1) it was the final part of the progressed Ascendant conjunction to Pluto-Moon, finally allowing the full force of our natal Moon-Pluto conjunction to be released, and (2) the Moon represents a nation’s humanity, weakness, and vulnerability, i.e., the place where it can be hurt and victimized the most, and (3) the Ascendant-Moon conjunction reflects how the rest of the world’s nations subsequently sympathized with America during the days and months that followed, comforting us and feeling our pain.

Confessions of an Astrologer

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

March 2015

Friday, July 11, 2014

Liberty's Heartbeat: The Astrology of the USA