Hidalgo is named for the father of the Mexican Revolution, Padre Miguel Hidalgo.

I was not surprised to find the asteroid Hidalgo conjunct Cho's natal South Node and the Great Attractor. This is one of the most complex asteroids going, and I will try to do it justice in a few paragraphs. It may provide, on the level of personality, a clue about the contradictions he had to contend with.

This asteroid deals with themes of rebelling against hypocrisy, which point Cho made a few times in his manifesto. Of course this was a misguided revolt, reminiscent of Mark David Chapman, the assassin of John Lennon, being a fan of Holden Caulfield, the hero of The Catcher in the Rye. Caulfield was another supposed rebel against hypocrisy.

Hidalgo is named for the father of the Mexican Revolution, Padre Miguel Hidalgo. This was a Roman Catholic priest who managed to raise an insurgency of 200,000 and fight the Spaniards, till he was finally captured and killed -- but the revolution went on.

Hidalgo works on a large scale and has a Sagittarian flavor; it is often associated with Latin culture in any form. But I have seen that it mostly involves personal revolts against certain kinds of social hypocrisies, such as we have witnessed in the case of Cho's objections to wealth and privilege.

Hidalgo also speaks to the perplexing hypocrisies presented to us by culture, the ones we have to swallow every day and are often humiliated in so doing. I'll give you an example. In many Latin cultures, homosexuality is considered an "affront to masculinity," or its denial. A man is not really a man if he is gay. But then you are not really gay if you are the "top" in the male couple -- that is, if you fuck other men. Then, you are still a man, and only the "bottom" partner in the relationship is actually gay. So only one half of a gay couple is actually gay. Now, this per se is not Hidalgo: rather, I associate this asteroid with the fact that so many people let this obvious absurdity just slip by, pretending it doesn't exist. And people who have a strong Hidalgo placement are likely to raise the issue they see, rather than let it sleep.

There are many examples like this: for example, men are often confronted by women who take two hours to prepare to get out of the house and walk down the street looking like a high-fashion model, then are resentful when men actually notice. Hidalgo is the experience of how it feels to be resented in this way, to be slammed by this kind of subtle denial of your existence. To me, Hidalgo is about our response to absurd social hypocrisies, whether or not we revolt against them, and how we do it. We can be sure that with Hidalgo on the Great Attractor and the South Node, Cho felt that rebellion on a vast scale, and that his response was enormously exaggerated (particularly due to the Great Attractor, which has thrust his message into all of society).

The South Node speaks to the tendencies that you come in with; the karma you bring along with you into a given lifetime and, with any grace, the process you embark on of gradually releasing or changing into something more applicable to the moment. Working with the South Node is a learned skill, and in a sense to do so, you must take full responsibility for all of who you are, for all of what you have brought into this lifetime, and for the choices you make that help you deal with it.

As we have seen again and again, the problem with railing on hypocrisy is that it's difficult, indeed, impossible to do so without becoming a hypocrite oneself. At least half the challenge of hypocrisy is owning at least a piece of it. So to start with, one needs to do something besides rail, or take one's rage out on everyone with one's guns. We may well ask what we would do, if we could do something. Obviously there is plenty, and it ranges from being present in the world and authentically friendly and helpful to others -- to addressing all of the above, that is, admitting our part of the content of what Cho Seung-Hui could not say and why he could not say it.



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