Must I write about the president's chart? Well, whatever it takes to raise the vibration of the planet, I guess. Doing the horoscope of the national leader is one of those perfunctory things that an astrologer is duty-bound to get on with every now and then. I mean, what good are we if we can't peer into the mysteries of His Majesty? For one thing it's an awesome exercise in objectivity. As I glance over Mr. Bush's chart, one of thousands to issue forth from my Lexmark printer, one of the many souls who lands on my desk and upon whom I make notes and reflect on what they did to him, and moreover, the less-frequently pondered what he is doing to us, it would be too easy to lapse into the thinking that a fine couple of planets are gonna come along and...
Two features resound in the president's natal chart. The first is a shocking alignment of Chiron, Luna, Juno and Jupiter in Libra (balance, relationships, sense of aesthetics) in his third house (his mind, his childhood, his siblings, his community). This alignment is square the Sun. By itself, Chiron-Moon conjunction is rarely a pretty thing. It lights people up, but it comes at a cost so great it may never get paid, and if it does, the person will be an extraordinary healer. Chiron's presence in the third house can give the feeling of a savant -- an inner sense of a broken mind, but something runs in through the cracks. The Moon is conjunct this situation. Not just the mind is broken; the feelings, the sense of safety, the sense of inner balance have all been hurt. Add the Sun to the configuration and we have a picture of alienation from both parents and from his inner male and inner female awareness.
Alienation from our parents usually makes us want them more.
It's not that Chiron's presence is always 'bad' -- usually it's amazingly helpful, but there was a crisis along the way. But in the end, what becomes of your Chiron placement has a lot to do with who you are and what you want out of life. There are other factors about his chart that just leap out: Leo rising, with Mercury and Pluto in the ascendant? Um, the term merchant of death comes to mind. But it's not that he needs the cash or anything. He has another thing going.
We see a person who seeks safety in danger. And the more the better.
This is not healthy. The president has a kind of split personality. He takes after his father, an uber-Gemini. With Gemini, the question is never whether the personality expresses in two fabulously different polarities; the question is, which. Will it be motorcycle dude by day and drag queen by night? Will it be prim and proper bitch by day and raging whore by night? Is it the nutrition consultant who drinks a case of Diet Pepsi in a weekend? Sometimes we never see the other side -- or rarely. The president struggles to conceal his caustic, mean, vindictive side and put forth his fatherly, caring, protective side. He is like an oscillating morph between Nixon and Reagan. I don't mean to scare you.
In his own bizarre, reeking way, this man is royalty, and he drips with a kind of charisma that I'd rather not get on my clothes. He is charismatic in the way a bleeding child is unbearably charming to hammerhead sharks.
The natal square configuration, involving both the lights -- Sol and Luna -- plus Chiron, Jupiter and Juno, is not angular, meaning it's not directly aspected by either the ascendant or the midheaven, or located in the first, fourth, seventh or tenth houses. As a result, it's largely an unconscious phenomenon. Often these setups work below awareness until a Chiron transit comes along and makes them very, very conscious.
With his Sun, his dynamic or active sense of identity, located in the 12th house, we have a person who may not be self-aware enough to function as a normal person (is president the only job he can handle?), but is able to feel his presence as some kind of vast and boundless cosmic power, like the Postal Service or General Motors. He always knew great things would come of him, even if he had no clue. He always knew being 1% owner of the Texas Rangers and the laid-back governor of that state were merely preparation for a far greater destiny. Sun 12th also means his dad was missing; perhaps he was aboard the Barbara, the spy ship he named for his wife. The placement can say missing so effectively that they're not on the planet at all. Daddy Bush was alive, but clearly he was doing his thing.
All these planets fall in the middle of the cardinal signs. And as it turns out that degree range is one of the hottest zones of the sky for the next 12 months. Why? Saturn is coming -- right to his Sun, and square all those Libra planets. Chiron is coming, right opposite his Sun and square all those Libra planets. Varuna, the first planet beyond Pluto to bear a name (a creator god, usually depicted carrying a noose) is also exactly conjunct the president's Sun as of this writing and remains within one degree for the next 12 months.
I am inclined to wonder: What would he do without his daddy?
Or rather -- what would we do?
We have lived through the first two years of the Bush presidency under the collective delusion that he's the president. Inwardly, we know he's not. But who is? I assure you that there is a commitment on the part of the press to divert any and all attention from the tangible reality that his father, who turns 79 in June, is the president. We 'know this' but we 'don't know it'. It's like you're having a dream that you're driving your car, but it's not your car, but it is, but it's not, and the contradiction is all summed up in a cheeseburger you're taking big bites of with your teeth, which you can chew but can't swallow but it still feels like you're eating. Everything is normal. Dubya is president.
In our constitutional system, we have many safeguards to protect against a vacuum of power. So seriously is this taken that the line of presidential succession, in the event that both the president and the vice president are incapacitated, extends 17 links down through the administration, from the Speaker of the House, even unto the Secretary of Transportation, the Secretary of Energy, the Secretary of Education, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, the Secretary of Homeland Security. (Congress came up with this law in 1947, after the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan.)
But what would we do without Big Daddy Bush, how would George Jr. respond, and who and what would enter the vacuum of power? The elder Bush, for his part, has enough planets in the mid-cardinal signs (including the Moon, Venus and Pluto) and others in the late cardinal signs (Saturn and Chiron), that those with political inclinations might want to ponder this. Could young George step up to the challenge? Could he stand up to Dicus Bigus (in the words of Kenny Lay, 'President Cheney')? And what if he could not?
There is some significant -- the only word is karma, I hate to use it twice in one year -- between Dubya and his daddy. Their moons, in mid-Libra, are off by just one degree; their inner experiences are so similar it's as if they feel like the same person. One can imagine they have side-by-side toilets. But then there is the link between Dubya's north node and Uranus, and Senior's natal Sun. I would be inclined to say this is not the first time they have been in a situation such as we're seeing. Politicians often give me the past-life willies. They ooze with Rome and conquering hoards, and their death-dealing speeches just sound like the same crap I've heard a thousand times before. I am much more intrigued that people actually still believe it. But these two dudes? They go back.
To me, it is clear that the younger Bush genuinely trusts his father, and by extension, the people his father has placed around him. What is disturbing about Dubya's chart at the moment is the presence of Neptune moving across his 7th house, which was well within range on 9-Eleven. The issue here is that Dubya would believe the people he trusts (and seeks the approval of) even if they were telling him some of the biggest lies in history, even if he caught them doing it six or seven times -- and they probably are, and he probably has. But suddenly Bush the younger is going to be looking at a Saturn-Chiron opposition on his Sun and square his Moon.
It's worth mentioning the recent eclipse of Dec. 4 made a major intersection with the younger Bush's solar arc direction chart: it was a total eclipse exactly on his solar arc directed Moon, Chiron, Jupiter and Juno conjunction. No matter what his public face, he is in a lot of pain and he's not having an especially safe experience here on the planet. But he's used to it. Part of his child abuse pattern is that he was never safe as a kid. Now he's acting it out on us. Who else could speak of small pox except in the most solemn terms?
My experience as an astrologer leads me to conclude just one thing: the presence of many factors, including this eclipse, plus the action of Chiron, Saturn and Varuna this year in the charts of both the president and the President, will ensure that major elements on the national scene are significantly different on the last day of 2003 than they were on the first. To some extent, we will all live out the president's transit experiences. As ever, the more meaningful issue is how we respond.
The flag of piracy flew from my mast my sails were set wing to wing
I had a jukebox graduate for first mate she couldn't sail but she sure could sing
I pushed B-52 and bombed `em with the blues with my gear set stubborn on standing
I broke all the rules strafed my old high school never once gave thought to landing
I hid in the clouded wrath of the crowd but when they said `Come down' I threw up
Ooh-ooh growin' up
- Bruce
Scorpionic America
Time only permits a few observations on what I consider the national horoscope, Scorpionic America, a chart discovered and written about extensively by historian David Solte. The data is Nov. 15, 1777 at 5:53:56 p.m. GMT in York, PA. The event is the banding together of the 13 colonies under the Articles of Confederation. The chart gives us a late Scorpio sun, Gemini moon and Aquarius rising. It's a perfect hologram of the United States culture -- shallow in a really deep kind of way. Mars is on the south node. Just like Daddy Bush (who has this placement, too), we are obsessed by the power of violence and need to let it go. In the US chart, it's conjunct Juno -- marriage and attachment -- so we're married to warfare and not so quick to get divorced.
The United States was not born on July 4, 1776. That was the day that war was declared on England by the 13 independent colonies. They became one nation over God more than a year later, when our first national constitution, the Articles, was signed.
Scorpionic America is now under several major transits. Most noteworthy is that currently Neptune squares its natal Scorpio Saturn/Mercury conjunction. This invokes the picture of hung-over senators voting on laws which contain dark provisions they have no idea exist. Has any one person actually read the Homeland Security Act? Well there must be someone. I think his name is Edmund.
Interesting transit number two is that the lunar nodes in the Scorpionic America chart are being aspected directly by Chiron (south node, Juno and Mars in Capricorn) and by Saturn (north node in Cancer). The lunar nodes are the chart's friendly way of saying This Is Your Karma -- so deal with it. Knowing how dependable Chiron transits are, I am interested in observing what Chiron's presence does here in terms of raising awareness of our national tendencies.
Meanwhile I am greatly appreciating the existence of an admittedly low-key but very much genuine anti-war effort. The bumper stickers, the fundraiers, the letters from movie stars to newspapers, the Not In My Name campaign, while all largely below the radar of the mainstream press, are all contributing to the awareness that there are two sides to this issue. (If someone blew up something and said 'We've done this for peace', THAT would get the attention of the press. But please spare us, it won't help the cause -- let's stick to bumper stickers.)
One last, Chaos conjunct the Moon. Discovered in 2001, Chaos was named for the god of the mighty firmament. Chaos was "the rude and shapeless mass whose appearance could not be described, for there was no light by which it could be seen." Chaos is one of the oldest gods and one of the deities of the infernal region. Here's the great news -- Chaos is making a long, slow and quite exact conjunction to the US Gemini moon as we speak and through 2003.
Do we know quite what it is that we're feeling?
