Hudson Valley Astrologer

“Every setback is an opportunity for a comeback.”

~ Charles Atlas

In the 1930s an iconic ad began to appear in the back of magazines. It was called The Insult that Made a Hero out of “Mac” and was the brain child of muscle man Charles Atlas who was selling his Dynamic Tension Course which was aimed at anyone who felt emasculated by the rough and tumble reality of the world. The ad was a comic strip that depicted a thin frail man (“Mac”) having sand kicked in his face by a muscular bully who threatened “Mac” and forced him to “shut up and put up.”

The fact that this ad ran for many decades and suggests that the message hit a nerve. “Mac” was desperate for a solution and sent away for the mail order course. He transformed himself and in the concluding frame gets his just revenge by punching the bully in the face, much to the admiration of the other beachgoers. The message? Might makes Right!

This period in history coincided with Uranus square Pluto, and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. While historians generally agree that the start of WWII was Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, some historians also point to Japan’s expansionist policies and militarization as a significant precursor to the broader global conflict that followed. We may have witnessed a diachronic analog of Japanese aggression when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 signaling a much broader global conflict beginning. The full scale invasion of Ukraine occurred in 2022, and as in the 1930s, world tensions may only worsen from this point until released through World War. The coincident astrological alignment in 2014 ironically enough also happened during the Uranus square Pluto transit.

The 2022 invasion of Ukraine came on the heels of the Covid-19 pandemic, but any adaptations I have been forced to make, I think it is fair to say, have been modest compared to others around the world, some under the threat of authoritarian regimes.

In 2020, Saturn was conjunct Pluto. Jupiter then moved into take Saturn’s place in a series of conjunctions through the rest of the year until finally catching up with Saturn in December. This conjunction marked The Grand Mutation, the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn which recurs on a 20 year cycle, but the ingress into Air signs at 00 Aquarius, was the first Air Sign conjunction since 1980. The time before that was 575 years earlier in 1405. Interestingly, those series of conjunctions between Jupiter and Saturn that began in Air coincided with the Black Death, the Crusades, and The Hundred Year’s War. Notably, the Renaissance also happened.

What brought this analysis to mind is that we are now witnessing state sanctioned bullying that is not much different than “Max” getting sand kicked in his face on the beach. Human nature does seem too often to revert to bullying, to people taking advantage just because they have power over others.

The peak of the tension suggested by the Uranus Pluto square, carried over into 2020, mixing with both dire (Saturn conjunct Pluto), conspiratorial (Jupiter conjunct Pluto), and and purpose driven (Jupiter conjunct Saturn); all of these aspect aimed at reshaping and reorganizing culture and society somehow.

We are two years removed from the pandemic, but people are apparently still struggling with the fallout, and the supposed origin story of Covid-19 is a good example. Just last week Bill Maher amplified the theory that Dr. Anthony Fauci knowingly misled the public and that he knew for a fact the virus originated in a lab in Wuhan. This theory however remains highly contested and lacks definitive evidence. Most scientific studies favor a natural zoonotic origin which are easy enough to find with a simple search. But while a lab leak is plausible it is far from proven, and yet people are very quick to jump on the theory as fact. What is mind boggling to me is that some of these same people, while believing a coverup or conspiracy like it is gospel, as far as Covid-19 is concerned, will not give one shred of plausibility to astrology, despite the correspondences delineated above. Yet they’ll believe the next conspiracy theory if it serves their narrative.

The orb of the epic square between Uranus and Pluto is reaching its outer limit in terms of the amount of time we can consider to be under its influence. So, I suspect that the metaphorical “Mac” will find his footing here and stand up for himself, pushing back on this inane authoritarian movement.

HVA

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