Tuesday Letter: A Moment of Psyche

Dear Friend and Reader:

We're not done editing the Moonshine horoscope yet, so it's going to wait a week. Working with a young writer who is learning to write horoscopes is giving me a new appreciation for how challenging it is to translate astrology into a few succinct sentences, and have it be helpful, accurate and not confuse matters any more than they already are. Thanks for your patience.

Lower Manhattan skyline as it appeared prior to Sept. 11, 2001, offering us a dreamlike image of a cityscape that once was. This is a viral image; I have not been able to identify the photographer.

This creates an opportunity to comment on Sept. 11, on Sept. 11. Once again I've been spending hours and hours with the charts for that incident, and as usual, learning a lot. I will be describing some of that in tonight's edition of Planet Waves FM and Friday's edition for subscribers. Today on the 11th anniversary, though, we get an aspect that begs for attention: Psyche square Pluto.

When you calculate the exact solar return (birthday chart) for the airplane crash into the North Tower (which was exact just past midnight N.Y. time), the asteroid Psyche meets Pluto at 90-degrees -- a square -- to a tiny fraction of a degree. A square is an aspect of tension. It's provocative, which is to say, it's a kind of trigger point. In this situation, two points associated with psychological distress are in aspect to one another. Outside the context of today's anniversary, please remember that this aspect is happening, and that you may be feeling it.

In an issue earlier in the year, I quoted minor planet specialist Martha Lang-Wescott describing the psychological scarring associated with Pluto in Capricorn. The United States has been through some profoundly difficult times since that airplane hit the North Tower at 8:46 on a clear, cool Tuesday morning. Capricorn is a sign associated with government, with corporations, with family and with tradition -- and Pluto is having its sometimes-painful influences in all of these places. In the style of Capricorn, these influences often refer to the past (Capricorn territory), and how we orient our lives today based on what happened before.

We have a lot of that with Sept. 11. The horror of what we witnessed; the loss of so many people on one morning; then war after war, the buildup of the 'national security' state; all of our cell calls and texts and social networking being archived, for future use, with 9/11 used as an excuse. That makes every one of us a suspected terrorist, you and me, and thanks to the various laws passed in the wake of 9/11, we can be treated that way. Now the words 'activist' and 'terrorist' are interchangeable.

A feat of architecture, and a childhood memory: the World Trade center under construction in 1971. The towers were built to withstand hurricanes and multiple strikes by jet liners. Photo by Pat Bianculli / Wikimedia Commons.

That's enough to freak out anyone -- anyone paying attention, and to haunt the nightmares of just about anyone else. Psyche addresses psychological wounding that can cut to the soul level, and its exact square today to Pluto in Capricorn is a clear image of that: the fear, the pain, the lingering memories and the nagging questions.

It's as if our whole society is going through this on a daily basis, and these scars are stirred up by a diversity of sources: politicians using both threats and the promise of security as weapons against us; the media selling newspapers and cars on cable TV, using all this pain to get our attention; the agony of considering what the people of Afghanistan and Iraq have gone through, paying for what someone else did; feeling the hurt and grief of the tens of thousands of killed and wounded American service members, and their families.

Then there are the lost opportunities: for example, the trillions of dollars' worth of resources spent on wars and SWAT teams for little towns (and big cities) and airport X-ray machines that could have been invested in infrastructure, protecting the environment, education, health.

And then there's one last not-so-small matter: what if those people who think that the official story is simply not true are correct? What if you have questions about how three skyscrapers collapsed on their footprint the same day, one of which was not even hit by an airplane? Why is it so difficult to accept that something else happened, even when presented with direct evidence of that fact?

That's the question that I'll be taking up this week, in tonight's edition of Planet Waves FM and Friday's edition. I am focusing on the mass psychology of Sept. 11, and how people respond when presented with evidence that contradicts their worldview. (That will be posted on the main PW blog later tonight, and be re-issued in Friday's edition).

Till then, take good care.

Lovingly,