Images and Mirages

Sarah Palin has cast a glamour and sparked the election game with Aquarian (Sun, Mars, Mercury) electricity. If she wins, she'd be paradoxically busting the glass ceiling (Uranus), while on the surface representing the willful defense of the status quo (Saturn), a.k.a. the non-negotiable American way of life. In his article in the Huffington Post, Deepak Chopra says she's the shadow unmasked in the national psyche. He writes, She is the reverse of Barack Obama, in essence his shadow, deriding his idealism and exhorting people to obey their worst impulses. In psychological terms the shadow is that part of the psyche that hides out of sight, countering our aspirations, virtue, and vision with qualities we are ashamed to face: anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion of "the other." Chopra lays it down as a simple choice between progress and inertia.

But as Chopra points out, everyone has a shadow, and many have written about Obama's natal Sun-Neptune square, clouding our perception of who he is. Robert Phoenix has an enthralling ongoing series on the Obama (Leo) and Palin (Aquarius) drama. In his latest entry, he rectifies Obama's chart to a Scorpio rising, with Neptune conjunct, which mirrors the lingering questions about his early life and identity. Writes Phoenix, ...seen through the lens of Scorpio rising, with Neptune on the ascendant, this haze, fog and confusion over Obama’s birth place and time are spot on. Neptune on the ascendant obfuscates identity, has the ability of making the person become whatever they wish while having others project whatever they want onto them. Neptune on the ascendant is lock and groove with Obama’s messiah program as Neptune would color the personality with an aura of religiosity and mysticism.

We're hypnotized by the stagecraft of both candidates, and like it's a popularity contest, deciding which one we like or don't like (check here). Phoenix muses on whether this is distracting eyecandy to the main event going on beyond the media gaze. In Part 10: Winds of War, The Shadow Election, he writes, While we are frothing and mesmerized by the high stakes theater of the upcoming election, Pluto is stirring, pieces on the geo-political chess board are moving...We all might just be sleeping while something far more pressing and important is taking place behind that screen over there. And then there's the documentary called Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West, being sent only to swing stages, just in case anyone forgot about "the Other." Here at the end of Pluto in Sagittarius, the intent to shape belief, has been exposed. The powers-that-be know full well, that it's our perception of global events, or who a candidate is, that will determine our choices as voters.