Current Transits for September 2012 Current Transits for September 2012Here's some of the important astrological news this month ...
Chiron Sextile Pluto, 9-6
New Moon at 23Vi37, 9-15
Juno enters Sagittarius, 9-16
Pluto Direct Station at 6Cp57, 9-18
Uranus Square Pluto, 9-19
Ceres enters Cancer, 9-26
Full Moon at 7Ar22, 9-29
Election Notes
An online ephemeris for the month is available.
September is a bit of a muddled mess. There are no big storms or major planetary patterns that break through the fog, which should have mixed results. On the one hand, we won't be totally overwhelmed by powerful patterns that kick us all over the place as we've seen earlier in the summer. However, without any focus and power to back us up, it's hard to get anything accomplished due to a constant stream of interruptions and side issues cropping up. If you had to pick one dominant theme this month, it would have to be Pluto. The Dark Lord is standing still on the night of the 17th/18th. But since Pluto doesn't move very quickly when he's near a station, the direct station is active essentially all month. Pretty much all of September is a matter of troublesome issues that have been festering all summer coming to a breaking point. If certain areas of your life are impossible to hold together and make work, perhaps it's time to simply let them go and move on. Both of the "big aspects" involve Pluto in combination with Chiron and Uranus. Whenever the month shows some signs of life, it seems to involve this trio of planets. Once more, the theme is one of change and transformation at a deep level that can feel very disruptive if you're not adept at handling such refined energies. In short, this may not be a month that "feels good" in any normal sense, but the change in direction it produces will be useful in the long run. Hang in there!
The big news this month all centers around Pluto. He has his direct station on the 17th/18th and two "big aspects". The other items consist of a pair of asteroids changing signs.
Chiron is sextile Pluto on the 6th, the second of 5 such contacts. They first met on May 12 and will have 3 more contacts on 2013-4-4, 2013-10-28 and 2014-2-25. Both these planets are important catalysts for approaching the unconscious, opening up a deeper level of your nature for review. Pluto reveals deep truths about yourself, although these are often uncomfortable parts of your behavior and motivations that the conscious ego would rather ignore. Even though such "shadow material" can make you squirm, it's vital to reclaim these behaviors and somehow incorporate them into everyday life, because they have a revitalizing effect on you when life seems flat or uninspiring. Chiron also deals with bringing these hidden parts of yourself into the open, giving you the courage to face these unacceptable and rejected parts and see their value again. It's intriguing that this series of sextiles happens at the same time as the Uranus-Pluto squares. It's as if Chiron is softening the impact of these harsh squares, making them more acceptable and less painful as they remake our personal lives and the larger social scene. It allows us to see revolutionary change as a form of healing and liberation from past restrictions that prevented us from reaching our full potential. However, it also points out the spiritual truth that genuine change starts on the inside and can't be imposed from the outside. If people want the world to evolve in a more positive direction, they need to start by embodying those changes within themselves first. You need to become the change you want to see. Resistance to your own growth and higher potential is the greatest obstacle to a better world. Start within and face down your own demons. Fortunately, we've got some time for this project. Get busy however and don't put off the work -- life is too precious to waste.
The new moon chart is a mess. There's no central pattern that ties everything together, no dominant theme that explains what these energies feel like. The Uranus-Chiron-Pluto (soon standing still) group is rather quiet now, with Venus moving past its triggering contacts and Mercury yet to move into place. Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune have some weak connections. The Sun and Moon are mostly off by themselves. Where to even start?
The new moon falls in the sign of Virgo, an indication that the coming month is a time of increasing awareness and discipline when practical information and useful skills need to be pursued. At least that's what is going on at the surface level. The second level concerns practical action that is geared towards the larger social venue. Jupiter and Saturn rule over the benefits and the responsibilities that come our way due to our everyday connections with the people in our lives. The role of Neptune in this group adds a note of rarified idealism to this social realm, but it also tends to distort our perceptions. Belief can overwhelm a sense of reality, rose colored glasses can keep you from seeing the shortcomings of how you treat others. And below even that is the Uranus-Pluto group, always in the background this month. This level challenges those same beliefs and perspectives, making us question all those things we hold as God given truths. It's harder to avoid the shortcomings of your ways down here, as the powerful Pluto vibe is busy tearing down the weak areas of your life. This shaky foundation should provide the Virgo new moon with plenty of material to mull over and attempt to integrate. Don't be too concerned if your situation looks "as clear as mud" right now -- clarity is not really in the cards these days while the rules are changing. Be patient and ever watchful...
Juno enters Sagittarius on the 16th. She will remain in this sign until Dec 18, a few days before the winter solstice, when she moves into Capricorn. Actually, this is the second time Juno has hung out in Sag this year, having been in this sign from Jan 29 to May 17 before her recent retrograde cycle brought her back into Scorpio. Juno is the Queen of Relationships. She rules over close relationships based on mutual trust and support. As long as she feels she's being treated honestly and as an equal, her love is deep and unconditional. But if she feels she's being taken advantage of somehow or taken for granted, her love turns to rage and resentment in a heartbeat. It was easy for her to see the worst in her partners while in Scorpio, a sign that specializes in steamy and suspicious emotions, making the course of true love rather bumpy, particularly since retrograde cycles bring latent issues to the surface after being hidden for too long. Juno in Sagittarius sets an entirely different mood. The tendency now is to grant your partners a great deal of freedom, as long as they return the favor. It's a time to lighten up on each other, lower your emotional expectations and give the relation some breathing room. If you're the jealous type, try seeing the best in your partner rather than always expecting the worst. Above all, this is a placement that emphasizes having fun with your loved ones, free from the dark emotional clouds that drain the life out of your close contacts. Emotional freedom is very nurturing to the human spirit. Let your heart be fully open for a change...
Pluto reaches his direct station of 6Cp57 early on the 18th (late on the 17th on the west coast). This ends a 5 month long retrograde cycle that began back on Apr 10 at 9Cp33. Pluto retrograde cycles are an incredible phenomenon in astrology, although they are more interesting if you're watching from the bleachers instead of down on the playing field. At a deep spiritual level, we all come into this world with tasks and purposes to perform. The trouble is, we keep getting distracted by the goodies, perks and creature comforts of this world, preventing us from staying on our paths. It's Pluto's role in life to remind us who we truly are and make sure we return to the business at hand. You can sometimes tell ahead of time what wake up call Pluto will be delivering, based on which house he's moving through in your natal chart and which birth planets he's aspecting at any given time. This drama of letting go and getting back to basics is played out with uncanny timing during his retrograde periods. Early in the cycle, around the time of the retrograde station, his hints are almost imperceptible. You may notice that some area of your life that you're quite comfortable with that's been running along smoothly for many years is starting to require more effort and attention than normal. As you start to be aware of these troubles, the first response is to try harder to hold this problem area together and make it work once more. This response is a dead end, however, since Pluto keeps pushing harder and harder, requiring more and more effort to hold off this collapse. Eventually, by the time of the direct station (now!), this simply requires more effort than you have time for. Favorite belongings fall apart, relationships become distant, work situations turn dissatisfying, etc., depending upon the particular lesson Pluto is teaching you that year. There are two main coping styles that people resort to during these cycles. The typical style is to resist the call to change and letting go, to attempt to hold things together despite the irresistible pressure to move on. As Pluto becomes more insistent, this path leads to a lot of pain and frustration when you finally have to face the obvious. The other coping style is to attempt to cooperate with Pluto, to figure out what is falling apart and why, and to voluntarily relinquish this comfortable area of life and move on. You still go through the pain of separation and all the grieving that goes with it, but overall, this path generates much less frustration. What's happening below the surface is that your comfortable life has made you soft, spiritually speaking. You've settled for less than you can be, indeed must be in order to pursue your spiritual goals in this life. By releasing these crutches that your false self relies upon, you become "leaner and meaner" at a deep soul level. You can always tell a person that's been going through hard Pluto times. In so many ways, they look like they've had the fat in their lives burned off. They're all lean muscle (both physically and metaphorically) with a wizened, knowing look about them. They've dropped out of normal living and returned to their original path. Through your losses in the outer world, you regain your inner self. Needless to say, few people value Pluto as a good friend and most consider him a malefic (difficult and challenging) planet. The irony of resisting his call to transformation is that you are only rebelling against your higher self, not some external force. All the hurt, anger and resentment is directed towards yourself, an unhealthy attitude that itself needs to be transcended. Learn to live in harmony with your inner nature instead of fighting it. That's one of the highest spiritual lessons of all...
Uranus is square Pluto on the 19th. This is the second of 7 such contacts. The first contact was back on Jun 24. The next one will be on 2013-5-20 and they stretch all the way to 2015-3-16. As if the Pluto direct station wasn't trouble enough, this powerful square happens barely 24 hours later. Even though the square aspect between these planets lasts 3 very long years, it's important to put it in the context of the full 138 year Uranus-Pluto cycle that began with their conjunction back in 1965-6, the birth of the Sixties. That was a time when America and the world were waking up to new ideas and forces that shattered the bland complacency of the 1950's mainstream. Uranus is revolutionary overhaul, while Pluto is evolutionary change and these two planets unleashed a wave of transformation of our culture that is still reverberating through our lives. However, conjunctions are just the initiation point of such cycles, the time when the changes are set in motion and not their culmination. It takes the entire cycle -- over a century -- to work through the full process. The square aspect (where we are now) is a major turning point in this long process, a time when previous gains are tested and challenged. In particular, the political climate now is vastly different from the tumultuous changes of the Sixties. Curiously, there's a potent backlash from the Right that is fighting back and trying to reverse all the evolution of the last 50 years, trying to reinstate the "traditional values" of a simpler and more constricted mindset -- hopefully without giving up our cell phones and Internet connections. There's a fetish of returning to the "original intent" of the Founding Fathers, without understanding that they were the political radicals of their time, not the bastions of conservatism that we imagine today. The end result of this backlash is that the country is divided in a way we haven't seen in decades, with competing factions so polarized that they can hardly talk to each other. It's ironic that the gravest insult you can give to Tea Party protesters is to compare them to the protesters of the Occupy Movement, even though their goals (returning power to "the people") are similar. In effect, resistance and dissent is present on both Left and Right, with both sides fighting to reclaim the mainstream. Granted, the world needs fixing and saving, but I doubt the answer is via a conservative revival. Frankly, the limitations and shortcomings of both ideologies are pretty obvious, at least to the other side, and a new third way is in order. This new way, more in harmony with our human nature, the state of the world at large, the needs of the Earth we are ravaging and our spiritual nature that is largely lost in a phony materialism, is hardly on the radar screen yet. Polarization and anger are the first steps of evolutionary change, not the final result. Until we learn to talk together and articulate common goals, constructive change is impossible -- that's why this square is such a perilous time.
Keep in mind that as Pluto progresses through Capricorn, we are approaching a Pluto return in the US chart. Like a Pluto retrograde cycle on steroids, this return is inexorably pushing the country to redefine itself and get back to the powerful spiritual principles (not synonymous with Christian fundamentalism, mind you) that defined our creation as a nation on the world stage. It's a struggle for the soul of the nation and what we stand for. How curious that this most pivotal election season, fueled by an obscene amount of special interest money on both sides, falls in the midst of this most challenging of aspects. Too bad we're fighting with mud and lies instead of light and intelligent truth-telling, yelling with rage instead of discussing rationally. The divisions in the national psyche are too raw and deep for a saner outcome. Unfortunately, if we fail to heal these divisions, letting the pendulum swing from left to right, we're only setting ourselves up for more conflict and mutual demonizing during the remainder of this long cycle, that is, the rest of the 21st century. These divisions and the harsh emotions they engender are a symptom of the underlying problems, not the solution, a manifestation of the lower qualities of Uranus and Pluto, not their higher ones. We need to have an adult conversation for a change and move beyond the wild adolescence that characterizes the American psyche to a large extent. We need to forge a new spirit and paradigm that is a viable foundation for future growth -- returning to the past is not an option. And we need a lot of good luck -- the next few years will not be easy...
Ceres moves from Gemini into Cancer on the 26th. She'll be in this sign until Dec 4, when she backs into Gemini again after going retrograde on Oct 31. Once she goes direct again, she'll make one more pass through Cancer between 2013-4-4 and 2013-6-22. Nothing says "Mother!" like Ceres in Cancer. Ceres was the Great Mother Goddess of ancient times, a symbol of how we are all interconnected in a great Web of Life. And of course, Cancer is the sign of mothering, nurturing and caring, of all those relationships forged in tender emotions and blood. This is a placement that makes the connections between living beings an almost palpable experience. It brings the bonds of care-giving and care-receiving into view, letting us know we need to extend our care and support to those beings under our wings, as well as open up to how we can receive help from friends and family. We're all in this together. But "family" is greater than just our human relationships. We also have a bond with all living creatures on the planet and indeed, the Earth herself. We're all too often so concerned with taking care of people, especially our material needs, that we do so at the expense of the Earth and all her children. The "environment" is not some place outside of the city limits that we can ignore and exploit at our pleasure, it's our home and our life support system. We lose sight of that truth on a regular basis. Ecology is not a dirty word, but a realization of how connected we are with nature, even when we choose to ignore it. This brief passage of Ceres through Cancer, even though it's an extended period during to her retrograde motion, is not going to save the planet and make all our families healthy all by itself. But maybe it will inspire us to start looking at the issues in a different light. We're all family...
There's a little more life in the full moon than new moon chart. The big pattern in this chart is a powerful T-square: Sun opposite Moon and Uranus, square Pluto. Wow! Then there's the rest of the chart. Saturn is approaching a trine to Neptune and a trioctile to Jupiter, both "big aspects" in October. Venus and Mars are still square, but leaving Uranus-Pluto behind.
If you haven't had your obligatory Pluto meltdown by now, this full moon may be it. Uranus and Pluto promote a "breakdown and recreate" influence in our lives, but it can be very hard to surf these high tension waves. If you can't handle it, the influence feels more like crash and burn. You have to be very flexible in your beliefs and your behavior, ready to let go and change on a moment's notice. Stay calm and a little detached from your emotional reactions -- the Moon and Uranus in Aries is high strung enough already. Try to work through the relationship issues, in both casual, everyday contacts and with your close loved ones. Life may feel like it will never be the same after this moon -- and that's the way it's supposed to be. Hang in there...
I haven't taken much time yet to look at the astrology for the upcoming elections, but I did recently pull up the charts for the presidential candidates. I was struck immediately by the large number of Sun, Mars and Pluto contacts between Obama's and Romney's charts, a pattern Obama has with John McCain as well, his 2008 opponent. The campaign will be intense, personal, sometimes dirty. There are many other contacts between their charts as well, so theirs is a complex relation. You wonder how many lifetimes they've played these roles with each other.
In 2008, as Pluto set up shop in Capricorn and the economy collapsed, it seemed Pluto showed up in election related charts in many ways. Obama, in particular, had an uncanny timing that linked him to Pluto constantly. That's probably one reason he won, as well as why he generates such intense emotions in people, good and bad. I looked for strong Pluto connections when Romney accepted the nomination (2012-8-30, 22:36:41 EDT, Tampa, FL) and was disappointed by his timing. The Moon-Neptune conjunction in Pisces describes his speech, full of gauzy life stories and very short (less than 10 minutes at the end) on policy proposals and where he wants to guide the country. Maybe Romney dances to some other planet than Pluto, but that would put him out of sync with the times. Obama's turn is coming up in Charlotte, NC. However, I just noticed that Obama's Pluto (6Vi58) is in almost a near perfect trine to the Pluto direct station (6Cp57) on the 18th. This is obviously the election of his life, marked by a major, life-defining transit in his chart. September may be rough for Obama -- it'll be interesting to see how he responds to the pressure. The Dark Lord can cut both ways...