Hurricane Irene

You know how accidents can happen to people who don’t want to change? Particularly when there is a major transit coming up, and they can no longer get away with staying as they are. Sometimes it’s easier to change. The amount of effort people sometimes put in to staying limited and miserable, because it is familiar, can be far more than the effort required to change and become happier.

I can’t help looking in this way at the storm that is starting to hit the East Coast of the US. I know it’s going to create a lot of damage and a lot of people will suffer, and I don’t want to make it sound like it’s some sort of divine punishment. But as an astrologer I get used to making symbolic connections. It is an art, because you can make everything symbolic if you want, every event meaningful, and I think that’s a sort of madness.

In the case of the US, however, I’m aware from the Uranus-Pluto square just how intense are the forces for change right now, and how intensely the US as a whole is trying to hang on to things the way they have been. The paralysis we saw in Congress over the debt ceiling is suggestive of this conflict. And the category 1 storm that is about to hit the US, a ‘historic’ storm according to the POTUS, is exactly the sort of event that can occur when there is this level of resistance to change.

Click to Enlarge

Pluto and Uranus have been hard aspecting the US MC at 1 Libra since 2008 and the beginning of the Great Recession. They are now moving on to the US Sun-Jupiter at 5-13 Cancer, and intensifying as Uranus and Pluto themselves move towards an exact square. This square will be exact in 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015. The storm symbolises the level of change that is coming, and which has so far been resisted.

This Uranus-Pluto will probably be the most intense force for change that the US has ever experienced, and the reason for that is that Uranus and Pluto will be exactly squaring each other for such a long period and increasingly closely to the US Sun – in 2014 and 2015, they will be on top of it.

So this is a ‘historic’ storm presaging historic change. Europe is subject to similar historic change, but it will on average be taking place a year or two earlier than in the US. This is because the Suns of, for example, the UK and Germany are at about 10 degrees of the Cardinal signs. France is at 13 Libra, so it could lag a bit behind. Why, I don’t know. But you can see in the case of the Euro that something has to give soon, because Germany and France cannot continue to be subject to the debts of Spain and Italy. The US can probably hang on a bit longer before something is forced to give.

Click to Enlarge

On the other hand… the US Solar Return for this year has Pluto closely conjunct the IC and square to Uranus very closely opposite the Asc. So a very intense year for the US. The UK, remarkably, also has this configuration in its current Solar Return, but a bit wider.