By John Townley, November 2016

Ten years ago at the very beginning of AstroCocktail, we wrote a seminal set of observations about a unique historical cycle  that had pretty much gone unnoticed. It touched on a repeating set of circumstances (Saturn inside the "nest" of grouped outer planets) that tended to coincide with desperate world circumstances when things had gotten so out of hand due to inflexible cultural and government establishment policies that the world was forced to finally pull together to avoid self-induced annihilation. The most striking recent example was the period of World War II, but there are examples going back to the Napoleonic Wars (another big one) and several others between and since, operative when the outer planets were close enough together to make a nest, as they are now. This is a follow-up on that article, so best to read it first to fully understand what’s coming next, below.

In our pre-election editorial (for November 2016, still current at this writing) we noted that regardless of who won the coming U.S. election, we were already in the downward spiral into another such fateful crisis period, our only choice being which path we chose to stumble down. The principle: in general, when Saturn (the establishment, non-progressive, bogged-down restrictiveness by the powers that be) has too-long been outside the larger, historic bowl of greater social developments which the outer planets represent, it means that the folks who are running things are out of tune with history and greater social cohesion and thus encouraging destructiveness, often in the name of keeping things safe, stable, or the way they used to be. And the final slide toward the "nest" until Saturn finally gets into tune with the bigger historic picture is later seen in hindsight as a period of disastrous myopia in the face of what should have been clear and present danger. But, it always happens, anyway, and the price is often hugely high.

We are in just such a period right now, the final roll downhill when ill-conceived policies, fears, and missteps lead to spiraling catastrophe. Some of the symptoms have been evident for some time, some are just now appearing. Many are more than just astrologically parallel with events in the 1930s. In that manifestation, with Saturn as a lingering bucket handle, first came the Great Depression --  this time it was the Great Recession. Both were followed by a temporary recovery under Jupiter bucket handle skies , which were notable in that the usually-benefic tidal waves of Jupiter changing signs yearly were significantly out of control, being more successfully ridden by the forces of destruction (fascism then, rampant terrorism and nationalist separatism now) than by peaceful, unifying movements, which were on the whole feckless and/or under-organized and under-supported.

The peak of disaster back then came as the watershed Jupiter-Saturn conjunction (itself always a 20-year power-shifter) of 1940 (still outside the outer-planet nest) heralded general war in Europe, while America continued to sit idly by, requiring a direct attack on its home ground to wake up to what was happening. Only then did Saturn finally enter the outer planet nest, to remain there until a whole new world order had been forged with the blood of over 40 million lives lost in just the official war alone.

 
2020 opens as Saturn conjoins Pluto, entering the outer-planet "nest" (red) from Pluto to Uranus, and Jupiter joins in April.

Our current sky developments place us in a spot similar to early 1938, when as now Jupiter was also squaring Uranus (and passing through a T-square with Pluto) at the end of a four-year Jupiter bucket-handle period marking out-of-control political shifts and only partial economic recovery. That put Pearl Harbor not quite four years ahead, but the start of general war and the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction (outside the nest) less than two. We are now looking at four years until Saturn and Jupiter meet (unusually, just inside the nest, this time, which could be significant), but we can only surmise the events that will populate the coming countdown on the clock as it runs. Once nested in 2020, Saturn will remain there for twelve long years of readjustment, similar to last time.

Paddling into the whirlpool: Brexit, Trump, and Me (first)

For a glance at the players, and the possibilities, we needn’t look much further than than the usual set of world powers and their self-conceived attempts and lack of either ability or inclination to control the situation in their favor. Where the Axis (Germany, Japan, Italy) once stood across West and East vs. the Allies (Britain, France, America), now we have  an evermore-loosely attached America, Britain and Europe vs. an even more loosely but increasingly-attached Russia, China, and India, in which both sets are competing for political and trade dominance over Africa and the Middle East and, ultimately, each other. That’s oversimplified, since as before South America and Australia are involved in the dance, but ultimately it’s not the specific players that matter as much as their basic attitudes and willingness to generally cooperate (or not) with each other. The cycles of Saturn (and Jupiter) are about the national players themselves, the middle planets moving at the speed of political events, while the outer planets are more about how the total amalgam evolves and gets along, or doesn’t, moving at the slower and more ineluctable pace of greater social evolution and awareness across the centuries.

Like all cycles and human experience in general they are characterized by beginning, middle, and end: the lessons of the previous cycle are first fresh in the mind, then dilute into something broader, finally unwisely forgotten and thus shortly to be lived over again. In the case of great world crises, once we get through their horrors, we then say “never again” and set up systems that will ensure that, then we start to chafe under our wisely-imposed community concern and self-regulation, and finally we forgetfully abandon what we learned and not only pursue but glorify the separatism and inconsiderate self-interest that ultimately brings widespread conflict, destruction, and the beginning of a new cycle for those that survive.

 
Jupiter and Saturn join at end of 2020, add to crisis power shift, Saturn stays in the outer-planet "nest" (red) until exit in 2032.

In interplay of the outer planets vs. Saturn and Jupiter, we are currently sinking into that final stage. You would think that the uniquely-human possession of social memory (beginning with language and writing, the ability to store and recall events) would damp the extremes of these variations, but unfortunately history is largely written and glorified by the winners, while  the dead and destroyed don’t get to testify, skewing the picture. Thus, even to those who recall the past the next coming crisis looks almost inviting, a welcome challenge rather than the universal nightmare it almost always is, as the dead would gladly remind us if they could.

This final stage is individually and nationally marked by the belief that helping yourself short-term is preferable to getting together and helping each other to avoid disaster – to the extent that individual  and cultural group self-interest overrides national welfare, and internationally a country’s policy reflectively ignores international peace and cooperation in favor of immediate power and position. This time around, the seeds of this cycle-end approach were sown in the 1980s by the “greed is good” likes of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and are now reaching their full bloom – not all that dissimilar to the cycle before where isolationism and the illusion of safety through hands-off  “peace in our time” paved the downslope to destruction. This has reblossomed most recently in the UK’s self-defeating Brexit vote, followed by Trump in America (“what have you got to lose?”), both of which accurately reflect the current forgetfully-myopic end-cycle descent into disaster. 

And that’s only two of the many nations that are being drawn into this temporal attractor, this vortex looming ahead that we are all being sucked into, victims of our own predictable lack of attention to history, or in many countries complete lack of knowledge of it. A similar "nesting" readjustment occurred in the 1980s, but without the magnifying boom-and-bust Saturn and Jupiter afflictions leading into it, a much mellower entry -- but the effect then was still the total realignment of Eastern Europe and the fall of the U.S.S.R., a major society vs. establishment reset but without a world war, unlike the previous occurrance.

The approaching "nesting" of Saturn pulls us, circling in, like a black hole, or the ship in Poe's "A Descent into the Maelstrom".

That’s the big picture, something to consider as the larger ship we’re all sailing on heads steadily for Scilla, Charybdis, or both. Despite the severity of this version of the repeating voyage, steady hands on the helm all around might get us through with minimal damage on this side of the Pond. But America’s smaller, and highly influential boat has its own special set of problems, locked into a dynamic but afflicted natal horoscope, which help explain the particular political path we’ve just now chosen to take -- or perhaps more realistically put, just inadvertently fell into -- for reasons we don’t sufficiently understand but consistently demonstrate, now and throughout our history. There, too, 20-20 hindsight about what just happened this month will point directly to 2020 and beyond. That will be the subject of our next article...