Signs of the Times, 2004

SIGNS OF THE TIMES

ARIELLE’S OUTLOOK ON THE ASTROLOGY OF 2004

Note: This is edited down from a talk given in Santa Fe, New Mexico at the beginning of the year. A few more observations have since been added. Below is the chart for the new year, January 1, 2004 cast for Washington D.C., the nation’s capitol, using the Geodetic angles for Washington.

The Year Begins with a Bang!

The year started off with a real bang, a real push, a confrontational attitude of “things in your face” that you weren’t ready for (shown astrologically by a cardinal T-square between the Sun in Capricorn, Mars in Aries and Saturn in Cancer).  I have a feeling that the corporate structure of America and maybe even your own little corporate structure in the world that you live in, is undergoing some major employer/employee tugs of war right now.

Saturn in Cancer – Food, Farms, Workers

A few things that I’ve noticed since Saturn has been in Cancer (June 2003) is Cancer rules food and Saturn deals with limits. Cancer is the sign of home and it’s the sign of the United States' Sun as well as George Bush’s Sun, so it’s visiting us in our country, in our presidency, right in our backyards right now. Cancer has to do with the home and family and food and all that. Look at the food supply right now. The headlines of the year began with scares of Mad Cow disease hitting U.S. soil. Farm-raised salmon is poisonous to our systems, not to mention to the earth itself. Most of the soybeans being grown right now are GMO. So, we can’t eat beef, we can’t eat salmon, and tofu is highly suspect (in fact all three are highly suspect unless you know where your food is grown and how it is grown and processed).

Supporting your local growers and community farming is more important now than it’s ever been. We have a Farmers Market and we have a lot of great organic food stores here in our town. Take care of the local economy before you shop the big chains next time, because that’s really an important thing to keep ourselves growing.

Jupiter in Virgo

Much of this year is about the work force or the service industry. Jupiter is in Virgo this year as well as Saturn in Cancer, so we’re talking about food, talking about agriculture, talking about what it takes for people to do their service in a correct way. It’s also the year when you’re all going to want to find the highest service, what gives you the most joy. Jupiter in Virgo – this is your best chance to get a job that you really like or do the job that you really love to do.

The Sabian Symbol for 2004

I look at Sabian symbols of prominent degrees in the charts I study. In the Sabian symbols each degree has a little picture attached to it, a little image. The one for this year is 24 Libra and it pictures a butterfly with a third wing on its left side. What that actually implies is imperfections and distortions of the DNA, or of the blood of a species, having to constantly adapt to changing situations and circumstances in the world. The strong ones will make it through because the evolutionary demands on them, in terms of the survival of the fittest, means they will survive and make it through to the next crisis. This past year in Santa Fe approximately 80 to 90% of our pinon crop became infested with the bark beetle and were killed. Those trees are gone and will not be coming back. So the environment itself has to adapt to these changing conditions or else the tree has to grow a third wing on its left side in order to survive this drought and in a climate like we have. Some will perish during this time but others will get stronger and adapt and do what they need to do to get through.

I want to say to everybody that what I hear from people on the telephone and through emails is that there’s a lot of people who are really depressed about the state of the world and the state of affairs right now. We can’t afford to get depressed and just slump into this state of acceptance. We have to stay strong and at least keep our own energies strong, even if you don’t feel like this Mars-Saturn out there requires you to take action on something. If you can keep positive and keep your own immune system strong and light for others, that helps a great deal. I had to chuckle when I saw the third wing on its left side because I’m always reminded that this country is portrayed by an eagle which has a left wing and a right wing and that’s basically where we’re divided all the time. And so the third wing on the left side gives the people on the left side a little more ammunition as well. (Audience: It is the feminine too.) Yes! It is the feminine (getting stronger now as an evolutionary crisis forces this demand). 

So that’s the other issue the chart for 2004 brings up.  There’s a battle between the male and the female dynamic right now.  It’s the unspoken war, or the unannounced war.  It’s the male dynamic and the female dynamic (not necessarily men and women) but what is going on in the cosmos in terms of equality right now. The politics of the day strongly favor a masculine dynamic of war and aggression; there is little support for the other side.

Pluto Enters the 3^rd Decanate of Sagittarius

Now that Pluto is entering the 3^rd decanate of Sagittarius, we will see a new side of Pluto.  Pluto is a very slow-moving planet and it’s entire sojourn through Sagittarius lasts for 14 years.  It has just completed the first 2/3 of the sign and now entering it’s third 3^rd.   When it was at the halfway point we witnessed September 11^th and its aftermath.  Sagittarius, of course, is the sign we think of for foreign travel.  How many people thought we’d be having armed marshals on all of our flights now?  How many people thought we’d be practically strip searched in airports now and have all these wands waved around us?  And, an atmosphere of terror lurking in the shadows?  You can’t go to any public building right now, to any bank, any public gathering place without seeing extra security people lurking in the shadows.  Even if they don’t look like security because they are not dressed like security, they are there.  So there’s Pluto manifesting  everywhere right now.

Uranus Enters Pisces (2004 – 2011)

The people that don’t like living in the real world in the next seven years will find themselves living in a virtual world.  I’m going to jump ahead here, beyond 2004.  The planet Uranus has just, at the new year, entered into the sign Pisces where it will stay for 7 years.  So we’re going to have virtual everything, with Uranus in Pisces.  Now let me backtrack a little to give you a little bit of history of where Uranus has been before.  Uranus stays in a sign 7 years.  I’ve always seen it as setting the social trends of the world, for the community: what’s hip, what’s in, what’s happening.  And Uranian things, what’s hip, what’s in – most of the time you have to look to your children or teenagers to figure it out because the rest of us are pretty much out of it, ok?  For the 7 years that just passed, Uranus was in Aquarius, and it produced the internet, the internet and the internet.

During the first half of Uranus in Aquarius, we had people convincing us that the internet was a good thing because they called it the Information Superhighway.  Does anybody remember that term?  The Information Superhighway was what invited us all to join the bandwagon and jump into the internet, and we all did.  About half way through, that idea has pretty much gotten buried under e-commerce with huge internet companies making big bucks with day trading on the internet and eBay and Amazon.com and companies like that pretty much taking over and becoming mega-marketing giants in cyberspace.  (The little independent guys haven’t done so bad either).   High tech rallies, up and down like a roller coaster, dot-com companies exploding like fireworks and dying out with a fizzle,  (from pagers and an occasional mobile phone user at the beginning of the period to everyone having a cell phone by the end of the period).   That was Uranus in Aquarius. 

Now, for seven years, we’re going to have Uranus in Pisces.  Pisces is a little gentler than Aquarius, it’s a water rather than an air sign, and it deals with the symbology of the two fish, the actual Christian idea of the fish in the story that has become the biggest of all time in the Age of Pisces, that of the life of Jesus.  We were considered to be living in the Age of Pisces for the last 2,000 years.  So with Uranus going into Pisces now (it entered Pisces from March through September during 2003) – my favorite metaphor for this, is:

The Time of The Broken Fish…(or “The DaVinci Code”) Explodes onto the Landscape

Last year, when Uranus went into Pisces for about 6 months in the spring and summer of the year, a little book was published.   Called The DaVinci Code, this was not your typical murder-mystery thriller.  For the period that Uranus was in Pisces, this book was an unprecedented best-seller (and still is).  The week it premiered, it not only made the New York Times best seller list, but it premiered at Number One.  That’s pretty unheard of for a book, to come into being and then make number one right away.  The information that comes out of the DaVinci Code for a lot of esoteric people, symbologists, metaphysicists may not seem like anything new (especially for fans of Holy Blood, Holy Grail and the numerous other works that are similar).  Though we must surely credit author Dan Brown with an amazingly creative way of putting it all together.  What is new about this is how it hit the mainstream in a huge, huge way.  It has to do with another version of the Christ story of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.  So right now, the Catholic church and some fundamental Christian clergy are reeling, from the information that was contained in this book.  Articles are appearing throughout the country’s major newspapers and magazines (it made the cover of both Time and Newsweek) about how the church is dealing with that information.  And we’ve just barely crawled through the first little bit of Pisces now with Uranus.  Of course Uranus is the planet of upset, of revolutionary information, of ideas whose time has come, and it will shine its beam of lightning bolt power on subjects that have been in the dark for so long.  It’s information we need to know. Whether the information is true or false isn’t the issue.  The issue is that a dialogue is opened and change begins to happen as a result of information that was previously hidden or kept controlled.  This is part of what’s happening as we go into Uranus in Pisces. 

Uranus in Pisces/Neptune in Aquarius

Just a couple of more things about Uranus in Pisces.  There’s a good likelihood that the internet is going to start drowning very shortly, what with Neptune in Aquarius at the last half of the sign and Uranus in Pisces, forming what is known as a mutual reception.  We’ll probably see some very nasty viruses and cyberscams on the internet.  The worst thing about it and probably the thing we have to fear most about it is that Uranus is free public information.  In the 7 years that Uranus was in Aquarius, we were allowed to make news across the world instantly.  You couldn’t keep any secrets, you couldn’t block out vital information.  But with Uranus getting deeper into Pisces over the next few years, there’s going to be a very strong trend toward keeping information secret, locking us out, making us pay very dearly for the use of the internet, or making it a crime to say certain things on the internet.  Government control of the internet and free information is what we now have to be careful of.  We haven’t even started hearing the stories yet because we’re just barely there.  This is what we can watch for over the next several years. 

Venus and the 5 Pointed Star

Every other year, Venus turns retrograde for 40 days and creates the most beautiful pattern in the sky, as befitting for a planet with Venus’ reputation.  Every 8 years it completes a perfect 5-pointed star in the heavens in its retrograde pattern.  The division of the circle by 5, which is 72 degrees, is called a quintile, and this aspect of 72 degrees in astrology is very strongly scented Venusian in flavor. This year the Venus retrograde period is from May 18^th to June 30^th when Venus will form one of its 5 points of the star.  That’s going to be a very potent time of the year, as it is the time (every 2 years) when Venus turns Rx for 40 days that it is at its most potent.  It will be turning retrograde in Gemini and it is quite likely that the economy in general or the stock market specifically or the world markets in general might tip the scales in exactly a different direction than they have been going until that point and some important things are going to come out of that time period as well.  Venus is an evening star right now.  What happens when Venus turns retrograde is that shortly before the time that it goes retrograde, sometime in late April, early May when it then disappears as its light gets blocked by the Sun, it spends what mythologists call 40 days in the underworld.  It’s a very important cycle for women, and for the feminine principle, in general.  In fact it is a time of the enactment of feminine mysteries; in goddess cults of old as in modern times as well, celebrations and ceremonies around Venus and what happens to Venus when she goes into the underworld take place.  So it’s a very important time for women and for relationships and for all things to do with the male/female kind of relationships.  Look for love in places you wouldn’t normally look and you’ll find it – there in the shadows.  Creative impulses take on new forms.  The fruits of the last creative impulse will announce themselves during the stationary direct of this Venus cycle (from late June to early August). 

Eclipses for 2004

I wanted to mention the eclipses for this year -- where they fall and where the story is for the year, because some of the biggest stories of the year take place around where the eclipses are experienced.  For instance from late 2002 through late 2003, California (from top to bottom) was victim to the placement of the eclipse pattern, both lunar and solar.  During the first round their governor was thrown out of office and during the second round, fires galore were burning up the landscape throughout southern California, and we probably haven’t seen the final fallout from that because they are still getting mud slides and rain.  They may be dealing with that for quite a while. 

In looking at this year and of course the eclipses hit other places in the world too -- this year we have an eclipse at 29 degrees Aries, it’s exactly on New York City’s geodetic Ascendant.  The moon of the new year’s chart is at 29 degrees Aries, exactly on the same degree as New York city’s angle, which in turn is stirred up by several transits this year, including Mars passing over that point in early February.  So my feeling is that New York is going to be in the spotlight once again.  The eclipse also spotlights eastern Europe and the Turkey, Egypt area of the middle east.  The eclipse in the fall -- October 13^th at 21 Libra, that’s the one that hits the descendant, the 7^th house cusp of the US chart and every time that cusp is hit by a transit or an eclipse there is a perceived danger to the country, real or imaginary, kind of an attack, something coming from outside.  At least that’s in the historical context in which those planets have crossed that angle.  That’s going to be in October, right before the elections.  So New York and geographic surroundings are vulnerable in the spring, while Washington DC and surroundings are vulnerable in the fall. 

The Good News? Or The Bad News?

Catch me later this year on the indepth review of the Presidential race when I’ve finished reviewing all the likely candidates, their strategies, their potentials and the worrisome state of the union.  Kerry looks strong and I’m quite optimistic, especially since Bush’s chart looks so difficult this year.  But Neptune and Saturn are in terribly difficult aspects to each other and to the U.S. chart most of the year and it’s the election process itself, the whole democratic or so-called democratic process itself that has me questioning whether or not we can trust the results of our votes.  And yet, the astrological aspects on Election Day, November 2, 2004 – look so smooth – in sharp contrast to the terribly difficult retrograde pattern that was in place on Election Day 2000 -- one might wonder – what was all the fuss about in the first place?