Anti-War Protesters in St. Petersburg, February 24th (Anton Vaganov/Reuters)
I wish I had better reasons to write to you today. Planet-wide entrenched power continues its death and destruction rampage, dragging all of us closer and closer to extinction. The events happening in the Ukraine are horrific, and will probably result in destabilization of the region for some time.
Astrologically speaking, what is happening is highly Saturn-Pluto in nature, in both the apparent themes of the actual events (and their causes), but also indicated via transit. While the most recent Saturn-Pluto conjunction happened over two years ago now — January of 2020 — just two days ago, on the 24th, the day the bombing and invasion of the Ukraine began, Mars, the God of War, was transiting the exact degree: 22° Capricorn. This shows, not only how potent a trigger Mars can be, but also how long a degree can remain sensitized.
Key alignments of outer planets, such as Saturn-Pluto, are not fleeting moments in time that fade quickly, but mark the beginning of long cycles. The 2020 conjunction was the genesis point of a new era, which will unfold for decades to come. It has, so far, shown itself supremely challenging; and not a surprise in the least for any astrologer, for the conjunction was extremely complex and powerful. Several planetary cycles converged with this turning-point conjunction that swept in on the tide of a turbulent lunar eclipse, with not only the Sun and Moon, as every eclipse involves, but Mercury, Ceres, Saturn, and Pluto — all in a tight huddle, all less than three degrees apart.
Saturn and Pluto conjoin only once every 30-40 years, but every conjunction has coincided with one abuse-of-power horror after another: war, both covert and overt aggression, media manipulation and propaganda, financial and market manipulations, including trade agreements, and with that, the consolidation of power and money into the hands of fewer and fewer. The Cold War, currently making a sinister comeback right now, tracks exactly along Saturn-Pluto lines. It began back in 1947 when Saturn and Pluto were conjunct in Leo, the same year the National Security Act established the United States Air Force, National Security Council, and the Central Intelligence Agency.
This is what Mars has stirred up for us, obvious looking at the result if we understand the archetypal workings of all three. But Mars is also not alone right now, Venus has been flying right alongside, they just formed a conjunction in Capricorn, and are moving towards a triple conjunction next week with Pluto. Moreover, as I write, the Moon is in Capricorn and nearing conjunction with Venus, Mars and Pluto as well. And the Moon is also a formidable trigger. No wonder there is so much tension right now.
When I wrote about the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, at the time Covid-19 wasn't even on the radar yet. I remember looking at the chart back then, working on the article and realizing just how much was happening all at once: intensity and stress piled on top of intensity and stress. In sibylline style, lines from a Leonard Cohen song (The Future) kept playing in my head: "Give me back the Berlin wall / Give me Stalin and St. Paul / I've seen the future, baby / It is murder." Too dark for even a Scorpio like me to include in the article (the rest of the song continues on in even more explicitly dark imagery), it has unfortunately proven over time to have been on the mark. The force of darkness, the march of death and destruction flowing over this planet like orcs pouring out of Mordor must be countered by the people, like the Russian people protesting Putin's actions in the photo above, a source of inspiration and hope for us all.
And in saying that, I want to be clear I do not see Russia as the sole perpetrator here, far from it. NATO expansion, and with that, the expansion of US Arms Dealers/Defense contractors pouring into eastern Europe, for example, Raytheon (speaking of orcs), and their 2018 multi-billion dollar "defense" contract with Poland. As Chris Hedges noted in his article, Chronicle of a War Foretold, posted last Thursday, providing important context, the more complete truth: the role NATO expansion has had in creating the current conflict. He writes:
I was in Eastern Europe in 1989, reporting on the revolutions that overthrew the ossified communist dictatorships that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was a time of hope. NATO, with the breakup of the Soviet empire, became obsolete. President Mikhail Gorbachev reached out to Washington and Europe to build a new security pact that would include Russia. Secretary of State James Baker in the Reagan administration, along with the West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, assured the Soviet leader that if Germany was unified NATO would not be extended beyond the new borders. The commitment not to expand NATO, also made by Great Britain and France, appeared to herald a new global order. We saw the peace dividend dangled before us, the promise that the massive expenditures on weapons that characterized the Cold War would be converted into expenditures on social programs and infrastructures that had long been neglected to feed the insatiable appetite of the military.
There was a near universal understanding among diplomats and political leaders at the time that any attempt to expand NATO was foolish, an unwarranted provocation against Russia that would obliterate the ties and bonds that happily emerged at the end of the Cold War.
How naive we were. The war industry did not intend to shrink its power or its profits. It set out almost immediately to recruit the former Communist Bloc countries into the European Union and NATO. Countries that joined NATO, which now include Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia were forced to reconfigure their militaries, often through hefty loans, to become compatible with NATO military hardware.
There would be no peace dividend. The expansion of NATO swiftly became a multi-billion-dollar bonanza for the corporations that had profited from the Cold War. (Poland, for example, just agreed to spend $ 6 billion on M1 Abrams tanks and other U.S. military equipment.) If Russia would not acquiesce to again being the enemy, then Russia would be pressured into becoming the enemy. And here we are. On the brink of another Cold War, one from which only the war industry will profit while, as W. H. Auden wrote, the little children die in the streets.
The consequences of pushing NATO up to the borders with Russia — there is now a NATO missile base in Poland 100 miles from the Russian border — were well known to policy makers. Yet they did it anyway. It made no geopolitical sense. But it made commercial sense. War, after all, is a business, a very lucrative one. It is why we spent two decades in Afghanistan although there was near universal consensus after a few years of fruitless fighting that we had waded into a quagmire we could never win.
Here is the link to read Hedges' full article at Scheer Post.
February 27th Update
Glenn Greenwald just posted an excellent article on the dangerous undermining of any kind of questioning or dissent regarding the Ukraine conflict. Greenwald also discusses the function of propaganda, especially war propaganda. In the aftermath of 9/11, we saw this same alarming tribalism, nationalism and complete intolerance to any difference of opinion; anyone questioning the war were routinely branded traitors. Greenwald gets right at the root of it:
When critical faculties are deliberately turned off based on a belief that absolute moral certainty has been attained, the parts of our brain armed with the capacity of reason are disabled. That is why the leading anti-Russia hawks such as former Obama Ambassador Michael McFaul and others are demanding that no "Putin propagandists" (meaning anyone who diverges from his views of the conflict) even be permitted a platform, and why many are angry that Facebook has not gone far enough by banning many Russian media outlets from advertising or being monetized. Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), using the now-standard tactic of government officials dictating to social media companies which content they should and should not allow, announced on Saturday: "I'm concerned about Russian disinformation spreading online, so today I wrote to the CEOs of major tech companies to ask them to restrict the spread of Russian propaganda." Suppressing any divergent views or at least conditioning the population to ignore them as treasonous is how propagandistic systems remain strong.
Here's the link to read Greenwald's full article on Substack.
Relatedly, Steven Starr, former board member of Physicians for Social Responsibility, wrote an excellent article on the troubling attacks on free speech and dissent. He writes:
There is a real danger to the nation when a free press is replaced with corporate media that stifles and censors dissent. Rather than a free press, we now have a Ministry of Propaganda that acts as an echo chamber for the latest diktats from the White House. The systematic creation of false narratives by corporate media, designed to serve the purposes of the federal government, have so misinformed the American public about world events that we find the nation ready to go to war with Russia.
Here's the link to read Starr's full article at Consortium News.
March 1st Update
Matt Taibbi just posted an excellent article on the now conveniently forgotten history of how the West, especially the US, was responsible for Putin's rise to power, and subsequent amnesia about the events following the end of the Cold War. "The revolution of 1991, he writes, "was really a greed-fueled intelligence mutiny, in which a collection of senior communists and KGB officers worked with Western partners to dismantle the Soviet Union." As a young reporter, Taibbi spent the last part of the 80s and much of the 90s in Moscow. He writes:
Condoleezza Rice was on Fox Sunday, where host Harris Faulkner asked her to comment on Putin's invasion of Ukraine, saying, "When you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime." Rice answered with a straight face: "It is certainly against every principle of international law and international order." This dovetailed with Mitt Romney saying Putin's invasion is "the first time in 80 years a great power has moved to conquer a sovereign nation," and EC chief Ursula von der Leyen claiming Putin has "brought war back to Europe," as if a whole range of events from Iraq to Afghanistan to Kosovo never took place.
If you're wondering why the levels of media insanity in response to Putin's attack have been cranked up to levels never before seen on the Internet — "as if there had been Twitter on 9/11" is how one reporter friend put it — it's not just because Putin's act in isolation is horrible, and barbaric, and a tragedy for Ukraine and the region. It's also because the event creates a massive propaganda imperative. Even though the pre-emptive war pretext Putin invoked was identical to the one Rice, her boss George Bush, and current media hero David Frum deployed to attack Iraq, there will be an effort now to hammer home with younger audiences especially that Putin's war is the first violent break of the international order since the Sudetenland. For people like Rice and Frum, Ukraine is a ticket to absolution.
We're watching a clash of civilizations, in which the international order needs to see its most infamous apostate, and the nationalism he represents, crushed both as an idea and as a military power. The situation is particularly dangerous because Putin has always operated on the understanding that the only political error that is not survivable is a show of weakness. Which means, to me, that if he has to turn Kyiv into a vacuum-bombed moonscape like Grozny, he will. It's horrific to contemplate. But to those demanding another denunciation of the man, I checked that box a long time ago, during the Frankensteinian portion of this story, when America had its best shot at fixing its Putin problem and chose not to try. We're past all that now. All that's left to do is hold on, and pray all of this madness cools somehow, before someone dusts off the button.
Here's the link to Taibbi's Substack page.
* * *
Tolkien often comes to mind for me in times of darkness and despair. Written in stages from 1937 to 1949, in the years leading up to, throughout, and immediately following the Second World War, including during the 1947 Saturn-Pluto alignment, LOTR is indeed a tale for our times, and a Saturn-Pluto tale it is.
I know. It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.
What are we holding onto, Sam?
That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo… and it's worth fighting for.
Blue Moon Astrology is free of ads and free to all. If you enjoy reading this blog, please donate if you can — always much appreciated! Thank you!
If you'd like notification when I post new articles: subscribe to my mailing list.
Book a Reading with Elaine!
Lake Mt. Fuji by Tsuchiya Koitsu
I currently offer two session options: 60-minute and 90-minute over the phone at US $175 and $225. For every reading, I draw up and analyze several charts: natal, natal aspects, transits, secondary progressions, solar arc directions, and the current solar return chart — the necessary foundation for a meaningful reading of the highest quality.
What Clients Have Said
"I just wanted to take a minute to tell you how often I go back to the reading you did for me. I listened to it twice, taking notes the second time, and now when I am feeling a little lost...or pissed off (:-) or just like I can't make sense of anything, I go back and re-read or listen to sections of it and it helps IMMENSELY! Thank you for all your talented and thoughtful work!" — T.F.
* * *
"Elaine, your reading has enabled me to see the big picture as I've never seen it before. I've been aware of much of what you've spoken, but not had the clarity to deal with it. I really have had such an awakening with your reading, for which I will be forever thankful." — M.O
Find out more
© Elaine Kalantarian, all rights reserved