By Jessica Murray
To understand the roiling energies that manifested in the assassination of Benazir Bhutto we must take a few steps back, and look at the astrological stage from a distance. Mundane astrologers -- those who match up unusual planetary alignments with telluric and geopolitical events -- have for months been talking about the several sign changes during the days around the Winter Solstice, a pivotal annual crossroads for humanity. And they have been talking about Pluto's conjunction with the Galactic Core, that mysterious locus identifying the astronomical center of our celestial home, a point associated with the potential for quantum leaps of understanding.
The Jupiter-Pluto conjunction that we have mentioned before -- see Neptune and Oil Spills -- provided the most obvious piece of the backdrop of Thursday's tragedy. Its job was to take the darkest (Pluto) of the many troubling realities now simmering just under the surface of mass consciousness, and expand them (Jupiter) into global awareness.
How many Americans knew, for example, that their taxes have been pumped into the black hole of Pakistan's flailing dictatorship at a rate of 150 million dollars a month for the past six years? Such data will doubtless move now from the back pages of the nation's newspapers to the front pages, a symbol of Jupiter making Plutonian truths seize hold of the public mind in a new way. There are many questions about the background of the killing, and Pluto (intrigue, secrets, clandestine plots) suggests that they will not be easy to fathom. But with Pluto one thing is certain: before there is rebirth there must be an acknowledgement of breakdown. Every death (Pluto) is a entryway into a new level of consciousness. There is no resurrection without a corpse.
In the moment of her killing, Benazir Bhutto moved from being a Muslim woman/politician/individual to being a mythic figure. And if we back up even further from our immediate emotional reaction in order to decode the symbols in their abstract purity, we see Thursday's apparent suicide-murder as a symbol of the decade-long theme of fiery ideological (Jupiter) statements being proclaimed through death (Pluto); not only for Bhutto but for the individual whose fatal commitment to his beliefs took her life, and those of dozens of bystanders, along with his. This event was the swan song for the last thirteen years of Pluto's tenure in Sagittarius, the sign of crusades.
Over the coming months Mars will continue dodging back and forth within a few degrees of the Pluto-Jupiter zone. For those who see astrology as chance to plumb esoteric teachings, this time period will mean digging deeper into the notion of opposition (the planets' geometrical angle spells out its psychological meaning); and the fact that Mars is now retrograde gives this theme particular clout.
The significance for the American public in particular is clear: Mars' station in mid-November conjoined the Sun in the chart of the USA initiating the current retro-cycle with a set of martial issues directly associated with America. It was around the time of this station that Washington's recycled arguments for a military strike against Iran jumped above-the-fold in the headlines again.
Wherever it appears, the Mars-Pluto opposition is associated with brutal power-mongering. This Iran-as-Axis-of-Evil story has a four-year history of peaking when Mars is transiting the US chart. The fact that we are still hearing it despite the overwhelming displeasure the US populace is now expressing with the war in Iraq gives the propaganda an eerily surreal quality: the function of retrogradation is to repeat a theme in order to force us to see meaning in it that we did not see before.
In keeping with the symbolism of Pluto being the tiny little planet that packs the biggest punch in the solar system, we are to witness how tenacity and raw power work, as in the case of a short little guy in a bar whose iron-clad desire to dominate allows him to prevail over all comers. This is, of course, only the crudest and least conscious use of Mars-Pluto; the use of it that the collective mind has defaulted to out of lack of understanding. And what is the more conscious form the transit could take? What would it look like at its most sublime?
The image of the nations of the world reconsidering aggression is a hope so cherished by every feeling person alive today that the very notion of it cannot help but strike the heart with profound poignancy. To dare to feel that poignancy and apply it to intention under a transit like this is to work transformative magic. Those who use transits like this in a ritualistic way would start by identifying that little jab-in-the-heart; then watch it change and deepen into a commitment to use our own Mars (behavior; ego impulses) differently.
This is energy work. Whether one does it in meditation and calls it visualization, or in a Wiccan ceremony and calls it spell-casting, or in a temple or church and calls it prayer, it amounts to the same thing. One might burn a red candle while doing this exercise. One might invoke the words of a great teacher. The line that comes to my mind when I think of ennobled Mars is the one Shakespeare gave the great warrior Othello, who, when surrounded by a rowdy mob, bid them "Put up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them."
When the heart and mind are combined in setting an intention – in this case, to experience a world where Mars is used creatively rather than destructively -- a kind of power is invoked that doesn't go by the laws of statistics and logic. It goes by the laws of Pluto: the tiny little planet of death and regeneration.
1. I refer here to the Sibly chart et al which posit July 4th 1776 as the birthday of the collective entity that is the USA. See my book Soul-Sick Nation: An Astrologer's View of America.