Daily Archives: April 10, 2018

Astrology and the USA — Saturn Opposition to Venus and Jupiter (April 10, 2018)

The Mean­ing of Amer­i­ca, Venus and Jupiter in the USA Chart and the Oppo­si­tion by Saturn

I thought it would be use­ful for lis­ten­ers of my radio show, and for the read­ers of this blog, to have this (more or less) ver­ba­tim tran­script of my last radio show on the USA, which aired on Sat­ur­day April 7th (which you can lis­ten to here).  

As I not­ed in my 2018 fore­cast with regards to the USA, Sat­urn will be oppos­ing the USA Venus and Jupiter dur­ing this year as Sat­urn begins its 2.5‑year pas­sage through Capri­corn. More­over, it will move into the mid­dle degrees of Capri­corn in 2019 and align with the USA Sun and Sat­urn. In the past 3 such pas­sages of Sat­urn through Capri­corn, 1988–91, 1959–62 and 1929–32, the USA expe­ri­enced eco­nom­ic chal­lenges, and these led to upsets or rever­sals of polit­i­cal pow­er. Now, a pat­tern does not pre­dict the future, but we should con­sid­er why this pas­sage of Sat­urn through Capri­corn might bring these effects, and more impor­tant­ly under­stand what the mean­ing and mes­sage is behind this experience.

Astrol­o­gy can pro­vide insight upon almost any con­sid­er­a­tion or ques­tion, whether indi­vid­u­als, groups or larg­er enti­ties. Whether one is exam­in­ing cor­po­rate, nation­al or world­ly mat­ters astrologers call this branch of astrol­o­gy Mun­dane or World­ly Astrol­o­gy. The Astro­log­i­cal Signs, Plan­ets and Hous­es of a chart retain much of their essen­tial indi­ca­tions and mean­ings, but they must also be adjust­ed with respect to what the object of study is.

For exam­ple, the Sun in an individual’s chart indi­cates that person’s essen­tial char­ac­ter, their pure poten­tial, where­as in a chart of a nation the Sun gov­erns or rules the essen­tial char­ac­ter of the state, and may also indi­cate the supreme author­i­ty or ruler, and the myths or images that the state holds for itself and how oth­ers may view it. The Moon in a person’s chart indi­cates their emo­tion­al tem­pera­ment and needs, of how they react with­out think­ing, where­as in a nation’s chart it rules the mass­es, “the peo­ple” and indi­cates pop­u­lar moods, opin­ions and ideologies.

Today we are will look at the mean­ing and mes­sages of Venus and Jupiter in the chart of the USA.

Venus and Jupiter:

The USA has its Venus and Jupiter, (and its Sun), in the 7th house, the house of rela­tion­ship, and all three are in the Sign of Can­cer. What this indi­cates for the USA is that our per­son­al val­ues and self-worth (Venus), and our prin­ci­ples, gen­eros­i­ty and good for­tune (Jupiter) and our very being and pur­pose (Sun), is revealed, real­ized and ful­filled in the nature and qual­i­ty of our car­ing (Can­cer) rela­tion­ships to one anoth­er (the 7th House) as cit­i­zens of this coun­try, and then also exter­nal­ly with regards to the nature of our rela­tion­ship with the world at large.

What this real­ly means is this: The USA’s True Source of Strength and Val­ue, Amer­i­ca’s great­est strength, (with the two “benefics” of Astrol­o­gy, Venus and Jupiter, our Val­ues and Prin­ci­ples, in the 7th house of rela­tion­ship), is to be found in our abun­dant gen­eros­i­ty of spir­it towards one anoth­er and the towards the rest of the world. Our strength, our real wealth, lies in our con­tin­u­ing con­tri­bu­tion to one another’s self-ful­fill­ment, to the pur­suit of true Happiness.

I spoke and wrote about this under­stand­ing of Hap­pi­ness in my show/blog post­ing about the August 2017 Eclipse. Here is part of what I stat­ed then:

The True Mean­ing of “Hap­pi­ness”

But the most curi­ous phrase, the one peo­ple should con­sid­er care­ful­ly as to what does it mean, is this “Pur­suit of Hap­pi­ness”. Well the true mean­ing or deriva­tion of hap­pi­ness comes from the Ancient Teach­ings or Wis­dom, affirmed and restat­ed in Greek Phi­los­o­phy by Aris­to­tle, and Locke and Jef­fer­son refer back to this ancient under­stand­ing or mean­ing or def­i­n­i­tion of hap­pi­ness. The word in Greek that defines this notion of hap­pi­ness is Eudai­mo­nia.

That word trans­lates lit­er­al­ly as “Union with Good Spir­it”, or what we might call “Human Flour­ish­ing”, or most tru­ly we would say “Human Self-Ful­fill­ment”. What Jef­fer­son was say­ing is not that peo­ple should be allowed to be hap­py, to just be hap­py or cheer­ful or some­thing like this. He was say­ing this a spir­i­tu­al mat­ter, and what he was writ­ing about and what we are doing here comes from the sto­ry of Human­i­ty, grow­ing and devel­op­ing and becom­ing ever more self-aware and self-deter­mined. What we are try­ing to do here, what the true pur­pose and goal of human life is to achieve the Union with one’s High­er Self, to expe­ri­ence the truth with­in by join­ing with what I call the “Beloved”, or the Divine Spark with­in us.

Hap­pi­ness and Self-Fulfillment

What this means for Amer­i­ca, is that the foun­da­tion­al val­ue of our Nation is that we are try­ing to allow and empow­er each per­son to be able to pur­sue their Full Human Poten­tial. In oth­er words, this core prin­ci­ple of our found­ing doc­u­ment, and we broke from the King because he was deny­ing our right to gov­ern our­selves, we could not ful­fill our­selves while being under the rule of a monar­chy, and so we jus­ti­fied our break­ing free so that we could pur­sue our right to Self-Ful­fill­ment. We estab­lished this as our under­stand­ing of the pur­pose of our Ven­ture, that the true pur­pose of rela­tion­ship is that it must serve human Self-Fulfillment.

We have formed our sacred com­pact with one anoth­er, based upon this pledge, that we will ful­fill our poten­tials for and with and through one anoth­er, as we steadi­ly move towards and align our­selves with our true and Divine Nature.

This is what Jef­fer­son meant by the Pur­suit of Hap­pi­ness, Jef­fer­son meant Self-Ful­fill­ment through Spir­i­tu­al Awak­en­ing. Which means every choice we make as indi­vid­u­als or as a soci­ety, must be ground­ed in this sim­ple ques­tion: Will this Action or Activ­i­ty bring us clos­er to uni­ver­sal human self-ful­fill­ment or move us fur­ther away from it. We make good and bad deci­sions every day, all of us do. But to sup­port our own or oth­ers greater self-ful­fill­ment is the true goal and way to Happiness.

Our found­ing as a Nation, was a vol­un­tary agree­ment or com­pact with one anoth­er. It was seen by our founders and those who fol­lowed, as the next step in the evo­lu­tion of Spir­it. Accord­ing to the Ancient Wis­dom, this jour­ney of Spir­it can be seen as ever bend­ing towards the eter­nal truth embod­ied in the mys­tery and pow­er of spir­i­tu­al self-ful­fill­ment. For humans in gen­er­al, and for the USA in par­tic­u­lar, this state of hap­pi­ness is sup­port­ed and ful­filled by our freely formed rela­tion­ships with one another.

The USA rep­re­sents in the very nature of how it was estab­lished, by its found­ing and foun­da­tion­al doc­u­ments, (Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence and Con­sti­tu­tion), that the essen­tial char­ac­ter of the USA would be a state found­ed not upon blood and soil, not by ref­er­ence or alle­giance to myths of empires and king­doms, and cer­tain­ly not be estab­lished as a gov­ern­ment held and shaped by hier­ar­chies of inher­it­ed pow­er. Instead, here indi­vid­u­als would freely choose to join in a com­pact and gov­ern them­selves. This “Rev­o­lu­tion in Gov­er­nance” is beau­ti­ful­ly affirmed by the idea inscribed upon the Great Seal of the USA, and this idea express­es our nation­al mot­to, when the USA declared itself to be a “Novus Ordo Seclo­rum”, which means “A New Order for the Centuries”.

The founders of this nation under­stood that what they were cre­at­ing was some­thing new, some­thing hereto­fore unfa­mil­iar because it rep­re­sent­ed a rad­i­cal break with the past, it was a rev­o­lu­tion. Here, in this nation, we would come togeth­er and freely deter­mine our rela­tion­ships with one anoth­er. We would sur­ren­der all title and priv­i­leges and stand as equals to one anoth­er; we would be sub­ject to no King, or Prince, or Clan or Class. Instead we agreed to come togeth­er as equals and to form a vol­un­tary asso­ci­a­tion, and we estab­lished our com­pact with one anoth­er. This sacred com­pact is sealed and pro­tect­ed by the one and only true ruler in Amer­i­ca, the Rule of Law and our Con­sti­tu­tion, (which is why the US has Sat­urn (order), in Libra (the scales of jus­tice) in our 10th house (the rul­ing author­i­ty). In the Unit­ed States, the law is King, and no one is above the law.

Embod­ied in our “Law” are the val­ues (Venus) that we have so far evolved, that form and guide our con­duct with one anoth­er per­son­al­ly. Those val­ues are made into rules (laws) which we have agreed upon, and these are held by the plan­et Jupiter (the ruler of Law), so that we know how we are expect­ed to con­duct our­selves with regards to one anoth­er. In oth­er words, we have estab­lished these laws as the crys­tal­lized form of val­ues with and between one anoth­er. The essen­tial heart of those val­ues, with Venus in Can­cer, is that we would care for one another…and behind that is the spir­i­tu­al truth that we intu­itive­ly and lov­ing­ly under­stand that our own hap­pi­ness depends upon, in fact springs from, the well-being and hap­pi­ness of our fel­low broth­ers and sisters.

But unlike some, who believe that those orig­i­nal laws, our first rules, the Con­sti­tu­tion, to be a fin­ished piece and not to be altered, most of us find that the sto­ry of human ful­fill­ment is an unfold­ing one that is far from over. And, so, we must keep improv­ing upon and adding to our val­ues and improv­ing our rules or laws.

The Found­ing Fathers cer­tain­ly knew this work was not fin­ished or done with them. They sought to go beyond what had been, yet they could not reach or agree beyond a cer­tain under­stand­ing. They strug­gled over issues and did not over­come some of their own chal­lenges, and so they left it to oth­er gen­er­a­tions to face the glar­ing injus­tices embod­ied in our first set of “rules”. How could it be otherwise?

In many ways, as the var­i­ous plan­ets align over the years with these sig­nif­i­cant indi­ca­tors of our jour­ney, we can see the rise and fall of our path as we find and make our way to forge a bet­ter union with one anoth­er, and cre­ate the con­di­tions for our “life, lib­er­ty and the pur­suit of happiness”.

In the chart of the USA, it is this con­junc­tion of Venus and Jupiter in Can­cer in our 7th house, and the sig­nif­i­cant tran­sits to these two bod­ies (and then to the Sun and Sat­urn), that will mark sig­nif­i­cant peri­ods in this on-going sto­ry of our progress to bring into real­i­ty a more spir­i­tu­al real­iza­tion of our oth­er mot­to, e pluribus unum, “Out of Many, One”.

Sat­urn over Venus/Jupiter:

Every 7 to 8 years, Sat­urn will make a “hard” con­tact to the USA Venus, Jupiter (and then Sun and Sat­urn), and each time it is reminder that our work of form­ing a more per­fect union is far from over. But it is this par­tic­u­lar pas­sage, of Sat­urn in Capri­corn and oppo­site to the USA’s Venus, Jupiter and then Sun which hap­pens every 28–29 years or so, it is this peri­od that elic­its a rather dra­mat­ic expe­ri­ence of this ongo­ing strug­gle to make real the ide­al that is the USA.

The Sat­urn (Real­i­ty Prin­ci­ple) chal­lenge to Venus forces a reassess­ment of the val­ues that do (or do not), hold us togeth­er, just as these same val­ues will hold or not hold a fam­i­ly togeth­er in shared sen­si­bil­i­ties and love for one anoth­er, (with Venus in Can­cer, the sign of fam­i­ly). Then Sat­urn to Jupiter will equal­ly chal­lenge the larg­er sys­tems of belief that form our com­mon under­stand­ings and agree­ments as to what con­sti­tutes Real­i­ty. Jupiter rules our expe­ri­ence of Truth, (Philo­soph­ic, Sci­en­tif­ic and Reli­gious). This Sat­urn pas­sage reveals the strength or weak­ness of the inter­nal and exter­nal bonds that hold us to one anoth­er, of our shared val­ues and beliefs that guide our jour­ney to self-ful­fill­ment with and through one another.

Real­ly, every 7 to 8 years, and cer­tain­ly and more dra­mat­i­cal­ly every 29 years or so like now, we are faced with the need to con­front the gap between the ide­al and the real­i­ty in our val­ues and prin­ci­ples that form and inform our com­pact with one another.

But Venus and Jupiter hold addi­tion­al mean­ings too, and these con­tribute to oth­er effects that we also expe­ri­ence with this pas­sage of Sat­urn through Capri­corn. Venus, con­nect­ed with Tau­rus and Libra, also rules the resources of a nation, so finan­cial insti­tu­tions, bankers and farm­ers. Jupiter also rules the Nation­al Wealth, and it rules banks, the rich and the gen­er­al finan­cial life of the nation.

The USA is blessed with Venus and Jupiter con­junct one anoth­er, and these are known in Astrol­o­gy as the “less­er and greater benefics”. The USA is tru­ly blessed by “good for­tune”. But just as in a per­son­al chart, good luck is not some­thing one has, it is some­thing one makes. Venus and Jupiter brought togeth­er cre­ate good for­tune pre­cise­ly because they indi­cate a gen­er­ous, boun­ti­ful nature. It is because togeth­er they cre­ate a char­ac­ter of good will and an abun­dant spir­it of gen­eros­i­ty. The USA has always been a very gen­er­ous nation, and as long as con­tin­ues to do so, it will be reward­ed by the return of good for­tune too.

But this pas­sage of Sat­urn over this bless­ing in the chart for the USA is often marked by eco­nom­ic down­turns, reces­sions or worse. In a way, just as in an individual’s chart, the pas­sage of Sat­urn like this over Venus can make one feel less valu­able, less loved and lead to loss of val­ue inter­nal­ly, and to the break­ing of rela­tion­ships exter­nal­ly. Well, here too that will be the larg­er real­i­ty of what hap­pens to the USA.

Like­wise, the oppo­si­tion to Jupiter will also cur­tail the gen­eros­i­ty and good­will for one anoth­er and towards oth­er nations, and our rule of law will be test­ed and chal­lenged. When­ev­er Sat­urn oppos­es Jupiter for an indi­vid­ual and in a nation, they will encounter eco­nom­ic dif­fi­cul­ties, down­turns and upsets.

And, if his­to­ry is any guide, with Jupiter also indi­cat­ing the con­di­tions for the ruler of a nation, the last three pas­sages of Sat­urn in Capri­corn have been accom­pa­nied by a change of polit­i­cal for­tunes in any upcom­ing elec­tion. In all three pre­vi­ous pas­sages, the par­ty in pow­er is turned out. The Winds of Spir­it are blow­ing stronger now, and eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal change is coming.

We are remind­ed, once again by “Sat­urn the Teacher”, that our very own hap­pi­ness can only be tru­ly expe­ri­enced by affirm­ing and abid­ing in our pledge to one anoth­er as embod­ied in our found­ing doc­u­ments and prin­ci­ples. Our pledge to one anoth­er is:

That we will con­tin­u­ous­ly strive to pre­serve and improve our union with one anoth­er, and
That we lov­ing­ly ded­i­cate our lives and for­tunes to the well-being of one and all.

In no small mea­sure, we are being asked to remem­ber in this year, (and in the next), that our true good for­tune and self-ful­fill­ment rests on, depends upon each of us. “We, the peo­ple”, are the truest and great­est trea­sure in this land. The USA is great­ly enriched by our diver­si­ty of peo­ples, for it is from our com­plex webs of rela­tion­ships to one anoth­er that we forge our wealth and good fortune.

We have tak­en a sacred oath in our found­ing, “…we mutu­al­ly pledge to each oth­er our Lives, our For­tunes, and our sacred Honor.”

This heart­felt pledge is root­ed in a fun­da­men­tal val­ue of Spir­i­tu­al Truth, and this is the shin­ing bedrock of our New Order for the Centuries:

True hap­pi­ness for any of one of us can only be ful­ly real­ized through our con­tin­u­al­ly striv­ing for the self-ful­fill­ment of one and for all.

Yes, we are on the path where Out of many, we are One.

We, the peo­ple are here to love and care for one another,

For we are many, and we are One.