The Astrological Resonance of the Armistice

I’m writing on 10th November 2018, and have been looking into the astrological resonances of the World War One Armistice, which was signed at 5am in the Forest of Compiègne, north of Paris, on 11^th November 1918 and became effective later that day, at 11am.

The chart of the signing of the Armistice, Forest of Compiegne, 11th Nov. 1918, 5am

The sabian symbol for the ascending degree when the Armistice was signed (26° Libra) is startling:

An eagle and a white dove change swiftly into each other.

Six hours later, when the Armistice became effective, the ascending degree was 6° Capricorn with Pluto (death, fate, necessity) exactly on the descendant, signalling that the destructive forces of Pluto were disowned and projected on to the ‘Other’ side, and loading the moment with depth and intensity. The Sun (national identities) is conjunct Venus (the peacemaker) ascending towards the midheaven, shining down over the whole chart.

The Moon (the people) is just hours away from a conjunction with Uranus (liberation) – an exuberant time of release and freedom. Of course, the Moon had been conjuncting Uranus once a month for the entirety of the war, but that it is stamped into this historic moment is worthy of remark. This mood of popular liberation is echoed in the 1801 UK chart which has a quintile from the Moon to Uranus: the UK populace carries the Uranus theme of eccentricity, innovation and of upsetting expectations (even to the point of perversity).

Mars (the warrior), at the signing of the Armistice, is at 29° Sagittarius in an exact square with retrograde Chiron (the wounded healer) at 29° Pisces. Chiron today, 100 years later, stands at 28° Pisces, also retrograde, lending a fraught and painful resonance to the centenary. By 11am, when the Armistice became effective, Mars had moved to 0° Capricorn, the lowest point in the zodiac and the degree of the midwinter solstice, trining Saturn: aggression is in lockdown, stilled and held by authority. Hostility is positively contained.

In the UK chart Mars trines the Sun – self-assertion/aggression (Mars) flows very naturally as a part of the national identity (the Sun). Both the Sun and Mars are in earth signs and belligerence might be seen as a national attribute. Mars squares harmonious Venus (Stiff upper lip, don’t be a softie, lad!) and opposes Neptune. Now this is interesting. Neptune signifies idealism, sacrifice and delusion, suggesting a British tendency towards idealising conflict, having an inflated sense of our own force and an appetite for martyrishness. The Brits tend towards autonomy, but the tendency is not readily seen or owned (Mars and Uranus are both hidden in watery houses, the 8^th and the 12^th respectively). So often it has happened in our dealings with Europe that we suppose we are being slighted and taken for a ride and feel bullish in response. It is our own perverse tendency to doing it and having it our own way that makes us poor collaborators across national boundaries.

The 1801 chart of the UK

The Sun-Venus conjunction in the Armistice chart opposes the UK’s Mars and conjuncts the UK’s Neptune, bringing a conscious awareness of the mood of surrender and release that is the resonance of Neptune. As we mark the Armistice each year the Sun is passing through the degree held by the national Neptune – we fall under the trance-like spell of that planet and tend to idealise our losses and focus on sacrifice and the grandiosity of heroism in a sadly sentimental way. It would be good to mark this centenary without falling into nationalistic emotion, to recognise that the wiping out of a great part of a generation of young men across the continent of Europe is a blight, a shame and a trauma from which we are still recovering.

Our UK Mars-Neptune opposition means that feelings of loss, self-sacrifice and idealism are hopelessly muddled with conflict and aggression. People in this country still talk jauntily of “the Blitz spirit”, and get sentimentally teary about our war dead. Without demeaning them in any way, those that died in WW1 were not heroes any more than you or I. They had no choice, but to be shot for desertion or abused and imprisoned as ‘conchies’ (conscientious objectors, for the younger reader). Our war dead were sacrificed by the State. The victims of war are calling out for our help still, arriving in Kent in refrigerated lorries, drowning in the Med (near coastlines where we like to holiday) and living in degrading conditions in refugee camps. These people are our people, let us not feel separate from them. If an eagle can swiftly turn into a white dove, a white dove can as swiftly turn back into an eagle. At the going down of the Sun, we shall remember them. And so we should. It might pay also to remember the atrocities that citizens are obliged to participate in on the orders of the State. This is not a time for emotionalism.

My local town hall is currently festooned with Union Jack bunting (it’s like doing pilates on the set of Dads’ Army) and the hallway is lined with letters addressed to the Unknown Soldier by our local school children, thanking him for his service and sacrifice. I’ve seen grown men and women dressed up in WW1 uniforms on the street. It’s an uncomfortable mixture of homage, nostalgia and costume party that feels to me inappropriate and confused.

Transiting Saturn is now squaring the UK ascendant/descendant axis and approaching a conjunction with the Sun. Our identity as a nation is feeling gridlocked and restricted, and in authoritarian mood. At the same time Pluto is, and will be, over the coming months, moving away from its long transit by opposition of our introspective Cancer Moon. The UK people’s sense of belonging, our crustacean-like need for firm borders and security has been radically overhauled by this Pluto transit. This has allowed us to witness a smash and grab of power-mongering in the body politic, and much that is poisonous and abhorrent in the national psyche and in national institutions has been brought into the light of consciousness. This is no bad thing, but it is surely time to cultivate the mind of compassion. This requires some emotional maturity which will become available in the new year when transiting Pluto will have moved off the Moon and transiting Saturn will have taken its place; Saturn will bring maturity, gravity and realism into the reckoning of Brexit. As ever, under the influence of Saturn, it will be time to bend or break.

We are at an historic moment: commemorating the centenary of the end of WW1 hostilities and engaged in fundamentally altering our historically fraught relationship with continental Europe. The post-war European project may be far from ideal but it has also been far better than the perpetual scrapping and warring that preceded it. It would be helpful now for us to divorce our honouring of the dead from nationalistic sentiment. To combine these two makes us highly vulnerable to political manipulation. Best to try and see and think clearly at this moment. Certainly we should honour our dead, all our dead, whatever their country of origin. And let us honour not just the dead, but those living with the effects of war: the wounded, the traumatised and the exiled.

Kate Hubert

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Sighting the Fisher King

AUTUMN EQUINOX  23rd September 2018, 01:55 gmt

(image: http://www.bowlofwheaties.blogspot.com)

The autumn equinox, marked by the Sun’s entry into the sign of Libra teaches us about the experience of balance. It is a time of poise and pause before we tilt towards the dark part of the

year. Balance, as the wheel of the year shows us, comes and goes; it is not a place you can pitch your tent. We move in and out of it and we can’t hang on to it, but simply have to taste it when it’s present. The equinoxes, joints in time where the forces of day and night are, for the whole globe in balance, are governed by Aries and Libra: the forces of self-actualisation and the call to relationship.

A New Indigeneity: going off grid

There are many resources our access to which is governed by adherence to the idea of a Grid. There are grids for energy, for lighting your home and cooking your food and powering your transport; there is a grid of water providing clean water for you to drink and bathe in; care grids exist for your sick and elderly and an education grid for your young. Grids provide all manner of foodstuffs and there are even transportation, information and communication grids. You could even say there are grids of thought and attention.  Grids take natural resources and monopolise them, turn them into commodities and then sell them to consumers. Grids also take human energy and resources, monopolise them, turn them into commodities and sell them back to humans. This is very easy and very convenient. We find we are fed, clothed, housed, educated, nursed and entertained in exchange for money. Money, however, we need.

We get money through giving our labour. We exchange the hours and days of our lives for money so that we can exchange that money for all the things we need that we are unable to provide for ourselves. This can work quite well, so long as the labour of your days pays you enough for all the things you need. Some folks like the idea of living off grid, wild and free. Like skiers going off piste, those who venture off grid have to be inventive and resilient, finding ways to supply their own needs; they’ll need to use the financial grid to buy perhaps some solar panels and woodburners. They’ll run up against planning laws, for sure, and soon discover that the culture is hostile to the spirit of independence.

Grid culture is powered by dependency and passivity. It needs us to need: to be in need. It needs us to want and want and want. It takes hold best in a de-skilled and unimaginative population. For example one where human energy is so engaged in making enough money to pay the bills – and a bit freaked out about the future – to question the basic assumptions of why it should be the way it is. Why should it be that very few people own enough land to grow food for their families? Why do we not generate household energy in little local schemes rather than rely on ‘the big six’? Why don’t we even try? Dependency has been taken to such extremes in our culture that we are now in a condition so parlous we no longer know how to feed or clothe ourselves. We can eat (oh can we eat!) and we can get dressed. But we cannot hunt, gather and grow our own food or create clothing. Nor do most of us have the resources to do so should we wish to try, because they are enclosed and monopolised by corporations. This situation, absurdly, has had the western world defecating in its own water supply in the name of hygiene for the last 150 years. Funny old world.  Still it all makes work for the working man to do.

In her book, Wild, Jay Griffiths quotes an amazonian tribal person commenting on contact with missionaries:

We learned things, though: we learned money and Spanish and work. We learned that we had to work for money for needs that we didn’t have before: matches, salt and sugar. Why were we civilised? For what were we civilised? To be taught that we needed sugar and oil and money and clothes from the markets, more and more.

We, in Britain today, want a lot more than sugar and oil, do we not? Griffiths comments that when populations do that thing that is so difficult for the civilised and live ‘for free’, off grid, as all indigenous populations do and always have done, they perceive themselves as having other fundamental freedoms too. But ‘once they are made dependent on money, their other, more conceptual, freedoms can be taken away: freedom of will, freedom of time and freedom of thought.’ 

Here is an interesting thought experiment.  Do we retain and exercise freedoms such as these? Is your will free – are you self-determining and self-authorising, responsible for and to yourself? Do you know what you want to do; do you know your will? Do we even know what it might mean to have freedom of time? What would that look like? And what is freedom of thought, and what could be its preconditions?

From this perspective it seems we are giving a whole lot more than money for our basic needs, even given that money represents the labour of our bodies and minds and increasing amounts of the time of our lives. It seems to me we are in a state of collective hallucination and addiction: a kind of cultural psychosis. Our own indigenous ancestry is long distant. I don’t even have a notion of first-nation britons. But undoubtedly they were here on this island, speaking a lost (?) language (one I increasingly long to hear) that related to this landscape, feeding and clothing themselves, relating strongly, of necessity, to the genius loci; autonomous, resourceful and responsive to their own here and now. Our indigeneity is distant in time, but the elements, I feel sure, are long memoried – and they do live in us after all; we weave our lives out of them all the time, mundanely and beautifully.   Here and now belong to us and are always essentially wild and free.

It feels like time for us to come out of our demented collective amnesia and recall that we are natural beings that depend utterly upon our land, this earth and its resources. ‘Freedom,’ Griffiths says, ‘is the absolute demand of the human spirit.’ It is necessary that we see the grids that monetise and commoditise resources and services for what they are: instruments of domination. In essence we are still wild and free, a feature of the natural world: the green fuse of the wild fizzes through us. Whatever our schemes and contingency plans, whatever the claims of our civilised materialistic culture, nature remains wild and free, and all of life participates in that wild freedom and all of culture is subject to it. Our bodies and the earth beneath our feet are speaking all the time of the crazy and fantastical meeting of nature and culture. If we seek meaning for our lives and times, we don’t need to pick greedily over the remnants of the more recently devastated first-nation cultures of elsewhere to heed the call of the wild within and without. We need to connect and relate to the spirits of this place and this time: to find autonomous, resourceful, authentic responses to our own here and now; to find a new and urgent indigeneity. Show up, listen up and, as they say, join the conversation.

Kate Hubert

Awen Astrology

kate@spiral7.co.uk

Re-imagining Physical Realities

“The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.” 

I’m persuaded of the truthfulness of this statement. So, I’m offering a day of exploration and recalibration in Ashburton, South Devon on Sunday 16th September, 11am – 4.30pm:

“Creating Good Soil: Re-imagining Physical Realities”
(or Uranus in Taurus and all it may bring!)

The springboard for the day will be the transit of Uranus through Taurus – but the workshop is not about acquiring information or astrological technique. It is about enquiring into the nature of this time and the possibilities that are opening up for recalibrating our own energy fields and seeing physical reality through new eyes (as Uranus liberates radically new perceptions in us).

Rediscovering indigeneity
Tuning in to the wisdom of the body and the Earth
New perceptions and new possibilities
Inspired mind, inspired voice

Using imagination and intuitional intelligence, our tools will be sound/song, meditation, discussion and elements of ritual. We’ll explore our perceptions of embodiment and connection to land/Earth/Gaia with the purpose of creating good ‘soil’ within ourselves for the seeds of the future to begin to transform and ripen towards their highest expression.

If this calls to you, please book a place (spaces are limited) and come and do the work.
Cost £20 (or more if you wish, less if you need).

Beloved

Between Star and Stone

Summer Solstice, 21^st June 2018, 10:08

Rabindranath Tagore

Source: http://www.cycledessaisons.wordpress.com

(Verse: Rabindranath Tagore.  Image: http://www.cycledessaisons.wordpress.com)

The beloved Sun, source of all life, source of all consciousness, stands at the peak of its power, its northernmost point, bathing us in its vitalising rays. We are livingly aware of the dance between Earth and Sun of which we are a crucial part. We channel the Sun’s etheric force into the body of the Earth and the Earth’s etheric force out into the cosmos. Human beings are a significant means of interchange in this cosmic dance of star and stone, of Sun and planet. This interchange is necessary, not optional. We are capable of conscious participation in this process – we can assist and co-operate in it. Our assistance is richly rewarded with increased vitality and deep understanding, arising both inwardly and outwardly. Power and purpose pour from the Sun into our human lives. Go outside and breathe it in!

Stand barefoot on the Earth, under the Sun. Breathe deeply in the golden cosmic light of our star, all the way through your body. Your hands can help you direct this flow of energy. Then gently exhale the vibrant light of the Earth out towards the Sun. Feel the interchange of Sun and Earth in your body.

Through the light and warmth of the life-giving Sun we are changing and we are changed. The Sun makes available power beyond our imagining. It is wild and free and exceeds all the petty oppressions of the mean shadow of power that forms the basis of the ‘systems’ that seek to govern us. The Sun offers us life and power in abundance, it gives to us unfailingly – all we need to do is stand upright on the Earth.

Perhaps we can make a meaningful distinction between the Earth and the World, where the Earth is Gaia, a being made up of physical and refined substance, and the world is all that human culture lays over Gaia, good and bad. Our World stands in sore need of real, meaningful connection to the source of all vitality, the Sun. At the time of solstice we are under the eye of the Sun, and it is a time of reckoning. When the light is strong so are the shadows.

The solstice Sun shows the reckoning to be painful (Sun square Chiron) – we see that the force that is used to get things done in the world can be cruel. How can the human heart tolerate the abuses we are witnessing? How can the human heart deal out such abuses? Through the expedience of needing to manage situations, achieve outcomes, comply with procedure, safeguard profits, keep my job, feed my children… We harden our hearts and close our eyes. The world’s not perfect after all. And we can’t be open to all the suffering we are part of twenty-four hours a day; can we? How to be with this?

The Sun’s principle is consciousness. The power and purpose it bestows come through its primary gift of consciousness. Can we say we want to live lives of power and purpose while remaining unconscious of the manner of our participation in the world? The Sun wants us to wake up; Gaia absolutely requires it. But the world encourages a weary, anaesthetised, broken-hearted kind of somnambulism that allows our vitality, power, energy and attention to be syphoned off for private profit. We yield readily. We are such obedient servants.

Pluto through Capricorn is revealing the dark underside of the culture we call the world or public life. The revelations of corruption and toxicity have been oozing out thickly since Pluto entered Capricorn in 2008. The latest scandal is the final coming to light after many years of patients being killed in their hundreds in an NHS hospital: managed to death. There is more of this to come, have no doubt. This is what happens when the expedience of status and bureaucracy are interposed between human beings and considered a higher value. When an algorithmic bureaucratic system governs the place where human relating should live and breathe there is already an abuse of power. Be aware: these spaces are broadening and becoming ubiquitous in our lives. Learn to spot them. Where we confront such abuses – and we all do – we have to call them out. We have to come into relationship with each other, to talk and share, to gather our forces to resist the bureaucratic paradigm. We cannot at this point, racing towards the meeting of Saturn and Pluto in 2020, afford to stand down. Bureaucracy and technology in combination have totalitarian instincts to which human energy is simply fodder (income).

Certain organisational grids overlay earthly resources. Its a feature of modernity: management, distribution and, of course, commodification and monetisation of resources is effected through creating grids. And we are all authoritatively pressured to be dependent on these grids. Think of water, sanitation, gas, electricity – we are dependent on grids of service and supply, and profits are made out of our dependency. There are other resource grids too that it is hard to opt out of: transportation, health and education services, internet, money and financial services, media. These grids govern flows of power back and forth between individuals and the public culture. They are modelled on the fundamental grid of energy which runs through all things (which we might call prana or qi, lifeforce, tao or the way it is) and represent attempts to tap into, warp and profit out of this ineluctably wild and free fundamental grid, to which we all are connected all the time, totally free of charge. The fundamental grid is created from the interchange of Sun and Gaia. We need to be aligned with the fundamental grid for its power to flow optimally into our beings. We Our standing between heaven and earth is what energises this grid: we complete the relationship between star and stone (Sun and Earth). The birth chart describes the unique alignments for which we are designed.

Uranus in Taurus sextiles the solstice Sun; Taurus rules resources and thus refers to this matter of grids. Uranus here is bringing a radically new perception to the matter of physical resources and their modes of organisation. Your ultimate resource is your body. It is the vehicle of your thought, feeling, consciousness, soul and spirit. It is plugged into Gaia’s fundamental grid, and fed by the light of the Sun. Corporations are seeking to plug it into grids of their own making. The energy and attention we give to the fundamental grid increases our vitality and power. There is no alternative source of vitality for earthly beings. The time between now and the equinox offers a particular opportunity to work with Uranus in Taurus – to enter into exploration of a new indigeneity, a natural belonging to the Earth, one that truly belongs to you and the land you walk.

Don’t let your path be perplexed by the idle dust of days!

Kate Hubert

Awen Astrology

kate@spiral7.co.uk

To Heed & to Thrive: Uranus in Taurus

Taurus deals with the manifest reality of our physical bodies and the physical environment, the defining basis for life on Planet Earth, whose principle is manifestation.  Attuning us to sensation and wellbeing, Taurus seeks the resources and conditions that assure thriving life.[i]  What is it to thrive?  Thriving requires stability, the organised consolidation of resources to optimise growth and a sense of connection to the protective forces (seen and unseen) that cluster around living things (and all things have life).  This is a falling into line with the energetic patterns of physical reality that instinct tends to serve.  There is a natural relationship between physical life and the sign of the Bull.  At an individual level this pertains to our bodily experience, and the possessions, resources and material conditions that we have at our disposal.  At a general level we can extend these concerns to include our relationship to the ‘land’, agricultural processes, use of planetary resources and environmental concerns.

As Uranus, disruptor of certainties, moves into Taurus on 15^th May 2018, we can expect material conditions and physical resources to be thrown into radical review.  This presents an unsurpassed opportunity to become familiar with what thriving life might really mean for us and require of us.  Uranus brings awakening – forcibly, when we didn’t even know we were sleeping.  It illuminates us with bolts of lightning to allow us to glimpse that things are not as we were led to believe.  Uranus is cerebral and radical and will bring brilliant insights into taurean matters: physical conditions, bodily reality, land and resources.

 

The issue of plastics is finally becoming subject to policy in Britain due to the Chinese refusal to continue receiving our exports of rubbish. The vision of fields full of plastic waste tarped down across this green and pleasant land focuses the mind wonderfully well.  This is the very beginning of a journey that will entirely reframe our very understanding of the words ‘resource’ and ‘waste’ as Uranus moves through Taurus over the next eight years.  Uranus is associated with technology and we can hope that the next few years will promote the pioneering engagement of engineers and scientists with the challenges of assuring thriving life for all beings.  Our resources need to be honoured and protected – this is a requirement of all of us, but it is not a feature of capitalistic obsession with profit.  We will have to see our relationship to resources and our coercion into behaviours of consumption as being deeply pathological and damaging.  Waking up to this is hard already.  After all, what can we do?

Virtual reality and cybernetics will be used in ways both pioneering and pathological to re-order and extend human sensual and sexual capacity. The harvest of this is likely to be awesome: both brilliant and stomach-churningly appalling (I don’t need to spell it out).  At the outset I referred to the principle of Earth being physical manifestation; I believe this to be true.  It does not incorporate the mimicry, however technologically accomplished, of physicality.  VR, to the extent that it takes us away from the conditions of thriving, is not essentially supported in this place.

Which raises the following question: if human energy and attention are increasingly consumed by non-physical, fictive realities what happens to Planet Earth for whom they are essential to thriving? Our energy and attention have to remain rooted in physicality or else we begin to die.  At the moment human energy and attention are being harvested on a massive scale in an entirely unprecedented way by big business for profit (and we don’t yet know what else).  Obviously this will intensify and it is strange new territory.  We need insight into the underlying nature of this dilemma.  In her wise Guide to the I Ching, Carol K. Anthony suggests that the inner truth of a situation is itself the vehicle for change.  This is an oblique and very fertile way forward.  Our energy and attention are being harvested for someone else’s capital.  These are our fundamental resources and we are divesting ourselves of them, in return for what?  Netflix?  Instagram?  God knows.  It puts the Opium Wars into deep shade.

Our more or less global online addiction comes at a great cost not only to personal liberty and quality of energy and attention, but increasingly to the environment: data processing long ago exceeded aviation in energy consumption. Five years ago it was estimated that we used 50 per cent more energy to move digital information than was used to move aircraft in global aviation.[ii]  You can opt out of air travel, but there is no meaningful way to opt-out of the digital economy.  So what happens?  The inherent limitations of physical reality become apparent, that’s what happens.  Anthony remarks, ‘Limitation has to do with accepting that it is our Fate to learn how to respond correctly to challenges and adversities.’[iii]  And humans will respond by pioneering and innovating, by raging, grabbing and warring, and by realising, in some cases, what a profound responsibility it is to interact with fire, earth, air and water.

Kate Hubert

Awen Astrology

kate@spiral7.co.uk

 

[i] I am borrowing this term, ‘thriving life’, from Pat McCabe (www.thrivinglife.weebly.com).

[ii] Mark Mills, ‘The cloud begins with coal: big data, big networks, big infrastructure, big power’, Aug. 2013, www.tech-pundit.com.  Accessed May 2018.

[iii] Hexagram 60 in Carol K. Anthony’s Guide to the I Ching, 3^rd edn, 1988.

Fixing the Spirit

‘Don’t turn away your head. Keep looking at the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters you.’¹

There is a curious medical condition that manifests as the loss of sensation in the skin: the nerves of the skin are unreceptive to stimuli. Interestingly, this results in a condition that we tend, in our mental, emotional and bodily lives, to strive towards: painlessness. We often consider comfort and painlessness to be the markers of wellbeing. They could well be the markers of closure, stagnation and imminent danger. The child suffering from loss of sensation in the skin is in danger of serious physical damage; the warnings, experienced as pain, are not registered, so the child can get into threatening situations very readily. Pain is not the problem in our lives; suffering is not the problem. The problem is the disconnection between sensations and awareness that results in unconsciousness.