angstoic.com Astrologer, Ang Stoic
The Moon completes her final quarter through Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces this week before finally heading into Aries-land for the weekend. This is the sector of skies where all the planetary activity lies, so with Mercury, Chiron and Venus flanking the Aries Sun, let’s be prepared for an interesting week in the lead-up to next Monday’s New Moon.
As we are observing at this tense, last-quarter phase, the headstrong and self-willed Aries has had nearly enough of Capricorn’s ‘doing the right thing’ hypocrisies, which is a concern for all those who resonate with the stern, Cardinal Earth sign. Seems like things are about to swing, if not swiftly and decisively, then possibly violently. Planets in Aries stand for nothing but themselves and will ram anyone who crosses them, again and again until they get their way, taking no prisoners. Aided by the progressive, reforming energies of Jupiter/Saturn in Aquarius, this spearheads us into yet another level of awareness that humankind’s divergence into two distinct levels of consciousness is finally here. It is evident with every encounter that we are either in one camp or another, and the difference between the two is nearly palpable.
Of course, whichever team you think you’re in, it’s always the right one – it’s the others who are in the wrong. This is why we cannot have world peace right now, because according to someone – anyone you ask, it’s always others who aren’t lifting their game.
Here’s a list of the key transits this week…
Venus, now moving toward the evening skies makes some pleasant contacts with both Mars and Jupiter, and in a very selfish, careless way inspires us to go ahead and do things that make us feel good, without considering the ramifications of our actions. Mars is in square to Neptune, creating a considerable degree of fuzziness in the way we’re asserting our big egos out there. You may find that many of your impulses originate from the unconscious mind, and so it can be difficult to perceive them correctly or to understand their nature. Caution is necessary before charging into anything, especially when driving (Mars is in Gemini) or getting into situations where you feel impelled to act in certain ways, or argue certain points whilst in a state of confusion. Hidden, powerful motivations are directing your choices.
Squares suggest some degree of frustration, and both the energies of Mars and Neptune will seem mutually inhibiting this week, creating distortions in both their favoured modes of expression. The Martial energy operates on an intermittently argumentative course through Gemini, ranging from an obsessive urge to lash out verbally, to almost recanting at times, leaving us with a minimum of motivation and vitality to even finish what we started. The Neptunian ebb and flow messes with our sense of assertiveness, distorting our thoughts and ideas via disconcerting emotional impulses, generating strange imaginations and obsessions, or negative types of habit-patterned or sentimental behaviour, which can be essentially self-destructive especially if we are vulnerable to the Neptunian predilections for booze, drugs and compulsive sexual obsessions.
Speaking of squares, there are some grindingly tense developments in the astrology of June/July which are perhaps worth foreshadowing throughout April/May. As mentioned, this is mostly a result of worlds colliding, both in the spiritual (metaphysical) and secular (physical) levels of our perceptive experience. Yes, we must keep a foot in both camps if we are to maintain some degree of mastery of this transition to the new world. Slow-moving transitory squares between Saturn/Uranus and Pluto/Eris indicate an anxious base frequency endemic in all cumulative energies throughout 2021. Where these contact the Nodal Axis, there is every indication that these powerfully alchemising transits are affecting the survival and evolutionary progress of all sentient beings on this planet.
Pluto’s partile sesquisquare to the North Node becomes partile this week on the day of the Aries New Moon. The Pluto/Node contact suggests an oppressive heaviness, an overwhelming pressure for deeply transformative change – a “gun to the head”-type force which leaves us no option but to succumb to extreme demand or face elimination. With Pluto in Capricorn, this massive force (wherever one feels it) motions us more towards the patriarchal (fatherly rule) gestures of social responsibility, where we are ‘nudged’ towards “doing the right thing”. This is all well and good when the benefits of civic compliance are all out in the open, but as we know, with Pluto, much is hidden beneath the surface. Pluto’s sinister intent is always with an agenda to commandeer our soul into some permanently binding contractual agreement, where most of the energetic implications of the arrangement remain buried in secrecy, immuned to questioning or inquiry, entirely obscured from view and largely designed to keep you enslaved to something “until death do you part”. Whether you’re conscious of the obligatory pull or not, there seems to be a force there, holding you to your role.
Ruled by Saturn, Pluto brings out the more unpropitious elements of Capricorn (Cardinal/Earth) – those shadow traits that relate to the mythological Kronos, the mythical symbol of the cynical father – a weak and infirm old man – the dying king. Here, in the last degrees of Pluto’s transit through Capricorn (2008-2024) we start to see a distinct shadow figure of the rigid-old-man, the disapproving father as it were, whose calcification of consciousness has evolved out of nothing but a morbid dread of his ageing weaknesses, his physical frailties and notions of his imminent mortality. The old man desperately clings to what was his, becoming plagued with maintaining a steadfast grip over his dominion by grimly dictating his own fears over all who fall under its jurisdiction.
This cruel, unbending archetype became arguably cemented into our collective consciousness in the January of 2020, when Saturn was conjunct Pluto at 22°♑46′, slowly sending our world into a crippling state of collective disease and derangement as if proclaiming a subtle shift towards ultimate authoritarianism. Widespread panic and hysteria about catching a lethal virus then descended over the planet, like a black heavy cloud as state-imposed lockdowns, tight thought-control censorship, severe restrictions on social contact, travel, trade as well as stringent physical and artistic expressions were put into place, and kept there ever since until they are now somewhat part of our daily ‘normality’. These, of course, are hallmarks of authoritarianism’s adumbration over humankind throughout history. Apparently, this is what happens when Pluto transits the Capricorn every 250 years or so – empires fall. Those who care to look at the larger cycle will observe that this is the same deconstructive part of Pluto’s cycle which manifests as a final, mad dash for power and control over a crumbling and decaying dominion, which in fact did nothing but bring about the ultimate demise of Egypt, Babylon, Athens, Rome, Tenochtitlan; and, most recently, the decline of feudal Europe and the indigenous Americas in the mid-1700’s, and is now perhaps looking likely to destroy the entire earth.
But don’t you worry…
This model of malignant patriarchy has more to do with dominating and using force (might makes right) over others rather than engaging in a reciprocal, consultative kind of relationship. It is as if the dying old man has sensed that he has outlived his usefulness, and so in clutching to his fading legacy of supremacy; craving for that which he no longer holds, seeks to impose obstacles upon the growth and development for others. As Saturn moved into Aquarius this year, the archetype of the wicked father became typically dissociated from and lost touch with all feeling, with personable relatedness, with creativity and eros, with the heart and compassion, and love itself.
“Unlimited power in the hands of a few always leads to cruelty.”
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn
This cold, seemingly cruel archetype which now (currently indicated by Saturn and Pluto) threatens us with the most negative and malignant shades of patriarchy, suppresses the feminine, as well as kills the spontaneity of life itself. Its proponents, seen throughout governments, institutions and ‘father-figures’ exalt aggressive and exploitative attitudes, discriminating and judging as immature or “regressive” all those who don’t forcibly succumb to the old man’s “succeed and conquer” paradigm. The dark triad of Machiavellianism, psychopathy and narcissism are rampant, thereby subtly and subliminally trying to gaslight and brainwash our youth into the hardened ways of status and money-obsessed methods of a fast-fading world of consumerist capitalism.
Of course, hidden within this archetype is our own intrinsic power. As we start to see the cracks forming in the matrix of the old patriarchy, the transiting Aries Sun, recently conjunct Chiron and flanked by a soon-Hesperus (evening star) Venus, challenges us to find and speak our true intrinsic voice. Aries imbues each of us with a storming sense of urgency, the urge to access and step into our individual centre of empowerment and true authority. In so doing, we seek to ignite our individual will with the intrinsic spark of the authentic Self. Hence, the Aries New Moon becomes a moment of profound awareness of our ego-centre, that essence of self which is undeniably the source of all personal inspiration and self-identification.
I spoke extensively on this in our last cosmic bus.
Squares from this Aries lunation to the Capricorn dynamic will symbolically challenge the mythic negative patriarchy and Saturn’s (Kronos) obsession with chrono-logical or spatial/linear (3D) perception of time. There’s nothing innately wrong with linear time, of course – it’s simply a construct of the human mind that can serve as a convenient tool for navigating our life. But taken to extremes, Saturn can use the instrument of limitation and space to become a tyrannical master. Chiron’s sextile serves to mediate this, just as a disruptive Uranean square attempts to symbolically dismantle the negative patriarchy, forcing it to step outside its ‘time-bound’ structures and initiating Kronos into a more synchronous, or ‘present moment’ consciousness – one where time is experienced as a radial matrix whose center is here and now.
Neptune’s semisquare from Pisces to both Saturn and Uranus holds governance over these now, reminding us that Dreamtime is neither linear nor single-pointed but circular, not fixed but fluid, not mechanistic or merely innovative but natural, not historical but ahistorical. Disrupting and dissolving the essential figure of Father Time, no longer living in a limited, clock-defined world where “time is money,” will subtly initiate humanity to the “syn-chronic” new world order – a boundless realm of infinite interconnectedness and inter-resonance between everything and everything else.
Of course, these are only dimensions of consciousness in which the synchronic realm the microcosm and macrocosm are mirrored reflections of each other, different iterations of the same underlying, harmonic fractal. Being an astrologer, I am frequently asked by individuals “when is all of this going to end”, which to me immediately betrays the contradictory struggle happening within every living soul – the need to see change, possibly for the better, but not be at all inclined to take one’s dutiful part in making the change happen.
What can you do? I will be back later this week to host another exciting episode of Cosmic Bus (sign up here), as well as posting each of your signs with a special New Moon horoscope message and intention.
Blessings, and have an amazing week xx
