A Deeper View — Pluto and the USA Mercury (January 18, 2020) — Transcript of Radio Show

Transcript of Radio Show: A Deeper View — Pluto and the USA Mercury

What I would like to do today is pick up on things I have been talking about for some time. As I did last week, I will talk about these periods and moments in history or in the world’s unfolding of events, and that there are planetary cycles within cycles. We look principally at the main drivers of large and long range cycles, and they are held by the three outer planets: Pluto going through Capricorn from 2008 to 2024; and Neptune going through Pisces from 2011 to 2026; and Uranus going through Taurus from 2018 to 2026.

All these are quite potent, powerful forces and have interesting intersections with other historical periods that I mentioned last time and with what’s happening now, and you can always listen to that show if you want to hear that or read the transcript, or find more on the blog about this stuff as well.

I thought today, though I will always keep in mind these universal energies that are affecting the planet, we are also affected in individual ways. You can also look at a chart of any entity whether it be a company or a leader of a country or a country itself, you can look at their birth chart and get some indication as to what that country or entity may be going through.

Mundane Astrology
This kind of astrology is called Mundane Astrology or worldly astrology, not looking at humans or humans and their pets and other kinds of things, but looking at looking at these larger entities formed and often lasting for many more years than a human. We look at these same energies moving through their charts to see what it might indicate.

Pluto & Mercury in USA Chart
What I mentioned in the last year or two, building up in the USA chart, is a particularly important aspect that is occurring this year. These long-wave aspects build in like a Bell curve, coming as a waxing of energies that reach their climax at the most exact moments. This year in the USA, we are experiencing this triple pass of Pluto going back and forth over the USA Mercury. The exact time, not that it matters for our purposes, is the end of February the middle of July and the beginning of 2021.

We would expect this energy to hold steadily, since Pluto hardly moves at all during the year. What is striking about this alignment is that this same aspect exists in the USA chart. The United States was born with the planet Pluto rising in its Second House of resources and value, (and the value of anything is shown by the 2nd house). Whereas in the 8th house, Mercury is located and is opposite to Pluto, (and the 8 thhouse rules how we join our values together and combine our assets and resources, to do what we cannot do alone). In a National chart or a mundane chart, the 8 thwould include things like international affairs and international trade and international finance and activities that we are doing not by ourselves but in combination with others. For a nation that means with other entities or nations for the most part and how we combine with them, and so this very much deals with our understanding of our own value and wealth and our trade and wealth with other nations and things of that nature.

But more especially, on another level, Pluto deals with, as I’ve been talking about, the will and willpower. The central concern of Pluto is to help us as individuals, or any entity, to form and create its own sacred space that it exists and abides within; and, to turn that energy back on itself in order to achieve greater self-mastery and self-determination. But often these energies are misapplied and misused by those who live in fear or with a more negative viewpoint, and then they will try to use this energy-form to control or violate the spaces of others, which is why we often have “hell on earth”.

Pluto/Mercury Aspect in USA chart
So, in this regard, this is what is happening within the USA chart and its relationship to the planet Mercury, which is the planet that rules communications, the mind, and thought forms. So, this shows a very intense energy form at the outset of the USA’s constitution and structure to do with communications, and the passionate belief we would have in our thought-forms, ideas, and beliefs.

It is somewhat quite well known in many circles that Americans can be a little off putting because we think we are right, all the time. We think our way is the best way and the only way; and that is where we make a mistake. We do have great ideals and great aspirations, to be this great experiment where all peoples come together and blend together. But then we ourselves can fall into dogmatism and rigidity in our own thinking when we press the case for being all knowing or having the only answer, which is not true.

Yet, because Pluto rules transformation, rebirth and renewal and Mercury brings the mind to bear, this power that the USA does possess is one that is very directly tied to our power in terms of delving deeper than other peoples might do to undercover underlying truth. That is why this country has always excelled in terms of research and transformational knowledge. I would say that with Pluto rising and Mercury opposite in our 8th house, and the fact that Pluto rules the 8th sign of Scorpio, I would say the USA is a very “Alchemical Country”.

Alchemy
What does that mean? Alchemy, like our modern term of chemistry, is how everything is made and created through combining with other things. Nothing exists by itself; everything is a combination with something else to make something greater. And, in that process we elicit growth and change and the unfoldment of the entire cosmos, (as in atoms developing into larger atoms, and molecules developing into larger molecules, and lifeforms developing and multiplying, all through combinations and elicitations of growth and change). So, this is the very power that drives life itself. It is quite fundamental, and one could say that in our country we are discovering the secrets of life (and other countries are as well), which is very amazing (and scary).

But still, what does it mean for us now as a nation to be dealing with this Pluto transit over Mercury, what might it tell us? Well it is making us reexamine, (as Pluto marches through our second house and lines up with Mercury), and deal with this question of our sacred space and each person’s consciousness; and it reminds us that we may misuse that power if we are not careful, when we try to force ideas upon one another, or one group to another, so that people become obsessed with their thinking and narrowed in their understanding. Then, rather than holding truth and delving to a greater truth through humility and openness to a greater understanding, we end up trying to beat each other up with our points of view and “truth”, which is certainly happening out there in all different forms and mediums in our world right now.

What happens is that nobody is listening, and everybody is shouting at one another, and we do not find the truth because it gets drowned out in all this noise. So, there is a need for all of us to step back as individuals and take control of our own minds; we need to see how our thoughts and ideas are being swayed and pushed by forces bending them beyond our understanding. And this holds true not just for thoughts but also for our values, because this is the House of the USA values. Of course we all know and have heard about how our tastes and longings, our fears and our hopes, are being shaped by others who are gathering all this data on us, and they are learning how to shape our own thoughts and aspirations and desires and buying habits, they are shaping our values through algorithms and all this big data.

Value of a Nation
And again, that is what I would want us to consider, that if the 2nd house is the House of Value: what is the value of a nation? I’ve talked about this many times, and many people would consider in a traditional house chart of a nation, that it is that country’s stocks and bonds, and oil and coal and gas, and all the natural resources, and that is the wealth and prosperity of that nation. And though I would grant, that on a physical level there are physical facts that can make one nation have more of these so-called “natural resources” than another. But what I would prefer to focus upon, given that we’re dealing with humans, and looking at things spiritually, is that the real source of value of course in anything is Spirit.

And therefore, the values of a nation would then come from its people, in terms of dealing with the human condition. Therefore we would look at this type of hierarchy of values in terms of our experience of one another as human, and how we work towards bringing out the value and self-worth and leading to the self-fulfillment of every person in this nation (of course even in this world) in order to reach the highest level of a culture and an experience for one and all.

So, these natural resources can have value, certainly. And what is of value to any culture can change. Obviously, if you are in a certain kind of agrarian culture certain things are useful to you. But if you are in a very industrial kind of culture other things that look like they were useless now take on great value, like minerals and such. So, it varies our experience of the values of this world around us, but our fundamental value, the source of value, is the value we have for and between one another.

And so, this is what is going through a transformation right now as we address this question of how we work this notion of value in our life. We realize that indeed, though we saw humans having value by the sweat of their labor, and combining with various resources they were able to produce added value through that effort, (and some were then able to accumulate that value to build larger organizations and institutions of value).

Commodification of Humans
What is our value, what is your value, in this American economy? We have come to realize this: We are the product now! There is a whole industry devoted to examining us, to collecting our “data”, in order to figure out our wants and desires, our fears and longings, through all these algorithms, so that they can “sell us”. We are what they are selling to others.

So, we have to say: “wait a minute, what is my value and why are you using it in this fashion to drive our experiences and make us go in this direction versus that direction?” This is a calling for all of us to think about how we hold sacred our value and wish to protect our privacy to whatever extent we wish, and open in other ways to every extent we wish, because these questions have not been addressed but need to be addressed at this time. Because others may be abusing us as a value, and that they seemingly can own us, and slice up and dice up this information and share with others for monetary gain.

Those are some things that are sort of swirling in my mind about this question of value for our country.

History of Pluto/Mercury Transits in USA Chart
But again, what is also interesting historically is to look at other points in history in which Pluto made this alignment to Mercury. And, as I have mentioned before, there were two such times. The previous two alignments of Pluto to Mercury was 1933 to 1937, and 1981 to 1983.

1930s
And so, I said to myself well let us compare those periods and see what happened at each of those moments. Well, obviously in the early 1930s, it was the beginning of the Great Depression, the world came almost to a complete stop, and America was teetering at that moment between going one way and another. Some other solutions throughout the world at that time was a fusion of capitalism and the state in terms of Fascism; and some went other way towards a fusion of the state and the economy with Socialism and Communism.

America sort of found a way through, not doing one or the other but trying to hold together you might say the labor movement and the capitalists and forge an agreement of how we would share the benefits and protect people but also allow for reasonable growth. And there was a model set in place then in the 1930s into the late 1930s that held until the late 1970s. And if we look at the economic modeling of that, and how the wealth was shared in our economy from the late 1940s, let’s say from late 40s after the war on up to 1980, the lines of different income segments in both the bottom percentiles that the top percentiles went in step with each other, steadily climbing so that productivity and the gains and the wealth was being distributed more or less fairly among the different sectors. One could argue how fair, but fairly equitable.

1980s
But when we get to 1980 the lines completely diverge. And I said to myself, “isn’t that striking, that we were having this increasingly growing but fair economy that broke down, what changed?” What changed in 1980 was the so-called Reagan Revolution, where we cut the marginal rates of taxes dramatically; we were promised by cutting taxes we would have extraordinary growth. George Bush the senior at that time, running against Reagan for presidential office, said it is “voodoo economics”. He was right, because the promises of great growth paying for the tax cuts and everybody would be made whole, everybody would benefit from this, did not pan out and for the next 40 years, from 1980 to now 2020, these lines have been diverging. And the majority of people have had their incomes flattening out, and their wealth decrease. And many of them were wiped out in 2008 when economy was crashed again by the financial “titans” who supposedly run these things; they broke the economic machine and it was never fixed or made whole.

From 1980 to 2020, we have been experiencing a growing unfair sharing of our wealth that we all produce. In fact in terms of the share of total US income held by the top 1%, it reached its highest proportion right before the great crash in 1929, it got to its lowest level and fairest distribution of US income was reached in the late 70s, and ever since then it’s been climbing.

Inequality in America
So this is part of what’s driving our divisions now, (there are many other changes that took place in terms of economic laws being changed, not just marginal tax rates, in terms of how investment banks operated, how different things were happening in the economy) that led to a skewing of outcomes. But one fundamental fact is, that unlike other advanced industrial countries, we changed our tax structure in a dramatic way that disallowed the general sharing of wealth in this country and skewed it to the top 1%, to the top .1%, even the top 5%, and so the rest of us were left to struggle more and more to make ends meet.

And so, what is happening here in 2020 is we are going to have this conversation again about what is right. We should be looking at what happened in the 1930s and compare it to what happened the 1980s and see where we are now in the 2020s and say, “can we do better than this, how can we do better than this”?

This is part of the conversation that is certainly happening in the Democratic side; it should be happening on the Republican side too, because if these increasing divides continue this country cannot be held together and we will divide up and fight one another or it will be imposed upon us, and we should agree to agree as to what is fair.

That is certainly an especially important conversation, that will be the conversation here, as the 2020s begin. Just like we had this same reset economically in the 1930s and again in the 1980s, count on there being a major reset of US understanding and relationship to how we handle our wealth and value, how therefore we treat our people in this upcoming period.

Saturn and Pluto
What is also striking about this to my mind, is that at the same time that Pluto is going over our Mercury, Saturn now every 29 years comes around the solar system, that’s how long it takes to make a complete circuit of the solar system, and this is the year that it’s once again lining up with the USA Pluto. The very planet we have been talking about. Saturn lining up a Pluto is dealing with questions posed by Saturn which is about questions of authority, and how we structure things in terms of, in this case, state organizations or business organizations or whatever organization we are talking about.

Saturn is in a sense the ruler and the leader, and the institution itself, the structure of authority; and Pluto is the issue of the will. So how does that authority wield the will that is put at its disposal. Again, I always say the will is this energy that we have created by holding ourselves within a container and then direct that energy outward to serve that entity, and as long as whether you’re the head of a family, or the head of a community, or the head of a company or country, as long as you serve the ends of that entity then you are safe and can wield that power correctly.

But when you seize it for your own use or misuse that authority, that is when you are brought down. What is happening here with Saturn going over the USA Pluto is that we are dealing with this issue of how authorities are wielding their will appropriately, neither over or under doing that, or are they in need of being restructured because they have abused that authority, because the structure or authorities have let us down, which is certainly a big complaint of late.

History of Saturn Conjunct Pluto
So, in looking at the times that this happened before it will be about every 29 years, the years that come out are striking. It is 1932, that was when Roosevelt comes into office to try to heal the country and move it on a path of good growth again, which took quite some time. 1961, when Kennedy came in and brought about certain reforms and changes that that were foreshortened by his assassination. 1991, we go from the years of Reagan and Bush to the years of Bill Clinton. And now, it is happening again in 2020.

Each one seems to be a pivotal moment in the relationship between power and the authority, between the state and how it wields its power. So, there is a great struggle over who will wield power and how power should be exercised in our country from the local level to the state level to the national level. In each period, we had to address these questions of how we wield authority and power: Are the authorities wielding it correctly, have they done right by their office? These were the questions in the early 1930s and the early 1960s and the early 1990s. In 2020, these very same questions regarding the will and the authority confront our country once again.

Originally published at https://astrologerbillattride.typepad.com.