The shooting yesterday of Gabrielle Giffords yesterday along with seventeen others, which left six people dead including a child who, in curious synchronicity, was born on September 11th, has had a profound effect on Americans everywhere. Unlike the other mass killings that we have seen in the past few years, this one was motivated by political rage and for that reason it epitomizes the fury in the American political system that has become a cancer in American life.
Progressed Mars in the (Sibley) chart for the United States turned retrograde in the summer of 2006, and as we look back we can see that it was at that point, with the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, that the country as a whole recognized that the war in Iraq was a massive fiasco. I believe that this was the turning point in American military power, and that as long as the US progressed Mars is retrograde (which will be for quite a long time to come) American military force will need to revamp its strategy in the face of the new global realities.
The chart for the United States has a challenging square of Saturn to the Sun. This aspect, in any chart, requires mastery in order to achieve greatness. Sagittarius is rising in the US chart, bestowing the innate optimism and sense of entitlement of the Jupiter rulership. But Saturn is always there, necessitating that the hard work be done before the luck of Jupiter can be manifested. The solar eclipse on January 4th at 13 Capricorn opposed the US Sun which is 13 Cancer, and it also squared the US Saturn at 14-15 Libra.
The other significant national astrological event is that the US is in its Saturn return right now. The last US Saturn Return was in 1981 and 1982 which was marked by the beginnings of the Iran Contra scandal.
The shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, was born in September 1988 according to the police report but I haven’t found any other details about his birthdate. Without a date it’s difficult to tell much about him except that he would have had a conjunction of Saturn to Uranus in his chart – the fusion of form and structure (Saturn) with the revolutionary instinct (Uranus), and transiting Uranus was in a nearly exact square to Uranus in his chart for the final time now. This age of 21-22 is difficult for anyone, because the Saturn and Uranus cycles converge with transiting Saturn in a square to natal Saturn and transiting Uranus in a square to natal Uranus. This would have been particularly problematic for Loughner this summer, when Saturn and Uranus in the sky were in an exact formation to this dynamic in his chart.
For me, though, the biggest significance of this event is in its exposure of this cancerous political rage that is tearing the US apart. I’ll have more to say later as more details are known, and as more astrologers weigh in on this event. Meanwhile, I’ve posted this on my Facebook page and I think it bears repeating:
Read Previous Post
