Midlife Transits

Today I want to refer you to an excellent post by Donna Cunningham on Mars/Neptune and the recent deaths of 2 people (and the illnesses of many more) who participated in a “Spiritual Warrior” program run by James Arthur Ray, a man perhaps best known for his association with “The Secret.” The people died as a result of being in what was labeled a sweat lodge but what was apparently a concoction of Ray himself, one utilizing extreme heat in ways not generally used by those who organize a more traditional sweat lodge ceremony.

Cunningham talks specifically about Mars and Neptune in her post, and I have to admit ‘Neptune aspects’ was my first thought when I thought about what Ray’s birth chart might look like. It turns out that Ray’s chart (accurate birth time not known) also contains a Mars/Uranus square.

In my own personal experience, if you want to be associated with sudden, surprising and bad accidents, the Uranus/Mars square is one you want to seek out. It turns out that Ray’s previous ‘sweat lodge’ events have been associated with bad events in the past, although not on this scale.

The chart for the event itself also contains a wide Uranus/Pluto square (out of sign), and it is these wide squares that I see most commonly in events that affect many people.

But it would be foolish to say that any time these squares show up bad things will happen. Billions of people got through that day without any untoward events. While such squares may show up in after the fact analysis, they are not predictive.

The presence of Neptune aspects isn’t predictive either, although I’ll take a few words to weigh in on the planet of delusion at this point. The thing about Neptune is that he is the planet of transcending limits. In this respect, he is otherworldly, because real life (something Neptune is not fond of, real life) is full of limits.

Overly Neptunian people have a devil of a time reconciling themselves to this. They just do not want to believe it. It seems incomprehensible and illogical to them. If the mind can do many things, they reason, why can’t it do everything? Why acknowledge the existence of anything else?

These people want to live in a world of imagination, in which many of the normal limits do not apply. Sometimes they twist reality around so violently that they turn very real limits (e.g., the amount of time a body can go without being properly rehydrated) into irrelevancies in their own minds.

And then innocent people pay the price.

You could say it is the insanity of Neptune that makes Saturn so necessary. Saturn gets a bad rap because he insists on facing limits, getting grounded in reality, and understanding that suffering is a legitimate and appropriate response to many of the conditions of the real world.

The problem with Neptune is that it does not want to accept the legitimacy of ordinary human suffering. It attempts to escape it, transcend it, ignore it, deny it, and spin it into something entirely different.

Hence, we get Ray purportedly saying to his followers that the people who died attracted their deaths to themselves. No need to grieve, mourn, suffer, contemplate, acknowledge responsibility or limits. It’s a happy thing and we can all escape the legitimate sorrow that should accompany such an event by pretending that the deaths were the fault of the people who died. No one dies unless they want to. There are no tragedies, no accidents, and no evil in the Neptunian world. Just magical thoughts and magical outcomes that have no use for the reality that everyone else has to live in.

I could get real cynical at this point and say that the people who died did indeed attract their own deaths by signing up for a g*dd*mn scam by a semi-cult leader preaching bullsh*t. Their Saturns didn’t tell them to get the hell out of the tent and scram before something went horribly wrong. Or I could say that pushing responsibility for the deaths on the people who died is a strangely insidious and Neptunian form of evil. Perhaps I will get real cynical as my own personal buttons get pushed by this story.

But that would be mean, so perhaps I’ll just run a PSA from Saturn:

Hi folks, Saturn here. Remember that reality is a beautiful thing no matter how much you may not like it at any given moment. You don’t need to run around trying to think magical thoughts in order to get around its existence. You just have to respect it.

You don’t need to be attracting wealth all the time, turning your critical thinking faculties over to a guru, or believing that there’s some secret that will make life wonderful all the time if you just think the right things. Because it isn’t wonderful all the time. That’s what makes the times when it is wonderful so incredibly precious. Seriously.

So, as the official planetary sponsor of reality, I just want to remind you to be grateful for me occasionally. I may not talk as pretty as Neptune, but I am your friend. Really.

After Michael Jackson’s death, some people immediately and understandably asked me about the astrology aspect. Some people asked about MJ specifically, others about the weirdness of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson dying on the same day (soon after Ed McMahon). Of course, I thought about the astrology too.

But truth to tell I was too bummed by Jackson’s death to have much heart for the astrology of it. I wasn’t much of Michael Jackson fan, other than the fact that Billie Jean is one of my favorite songs of all time. And, like almost everyone else, I liked many of the songs from his heyday and would defend them when they weren’t cool in my circle. I also liked his quote about studying Fred Astaire and saying that one thing he learned from Astaire was that all the great dancers were angry dancers.

Michael Jackson was one of the best angry dancers of all time in my opinion.

But I also felt bad for him and disturbed by him as his times in the spotlight got progressively weirder. The past several years seemed to be just one battle after another for him. I sure did wish he hadn’t all those plastic surgeries. I cringed at pictures of him as a youngster in the Jackson Five, thinking about how unhappy he was during those times, and how drastically he altered any physical trace of that young person from his being.

I remember that he used to eat at a Sufi restaurant on Third Street that I liked and that he was about a block away from me when the infamous Pepsi commercial accident happened. One of my acquaintances was involved in the television movie about his early life.

But these things don’t amount to being a rabid fan–they’re just instances of being touched by his presence as a towering show business talent like so many people were. But you don’t have to be a rabid fan, it turns out, to be shocked and bummed out by the death of an icon.  It almost seemed disrespectful to go running for astro charts, as though they can make the death any more comprehensible or less sad.

So I’ll be a little more general. I’ve not made much of a study of sudden death in astrological charts. Death of any sort is not my astrological specialty; that’s for sure. But still, one encounters death in astrology as one does anywhere else. My limited experience with sudden death points to the following factors in most cases I’ve run across.

8th house involvement. Uranus involvement or sometimes Mars instead. A higher than expected number of occurrences during eclipse seasons. In birth charts, there will often be markers like Uranus in the 8th house or 12th houses, Mars in the 4th or 12th houses, or some sort of repeating theme in the chart that indicates violence, accidents, or something similar.

Another thing I’ve noticed is not exactly astrological. It’s that the person seems to have almost ‘used up’ their life energy as shown in the astrological chart. They’ve accomplished so much of what the chart seemed to indicate by the time of death, that it’s almost as if they’d done it all, done what they came for. Another thing I’ve noticed is that the death often shows up very strongly in the charts of people around them, sometimes more strongly than in the person’s own chart.

But none of this is predictive. I’ve seen plenty of people with the same factors, and they live very long lives. I’ve seen people get through the most dangerous astrological times of their lives and come out on the other side into astrological sunshine.

At any rate, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of a reliable birth time for Michael Jackson, so  I don’t really have a trusthworthy chart to analyze anyway. I suspect he had Uranus in the 8th or 12th house, by transit and natally. I suspect that the triple conjunction of Neptune, Jupiter, and Chiron hit one of the angles in his birth chart, given the circumstances of his death, and that Uranus being at the 26 degree mark as well placed his chart under additional stress.

But I could easily be wrong. And in the end, it may not really matter nearly as much as the wishes of people all around the world that he’s now in peace and that his contributions to our lives be remembered and celebrated.