Welcome to the January 2021 edition of our Cosmic Weather Forecast from your editors Curtis Lang and Jane Sherry. Thursday January 28th we celebrate the Full Moon in Leo and the Aquarius Solar Festival.
Johannes Hevelius's chart of Aquarius and surrounding constellations,
from his Firmamentum Sobiescianum sive Uranographia.
The Aquarian personality exhibits fearless individualism along with strong desires to participate in collective action toward common goals. The Uranus-ruled Aquarian mind is often characterized as rational and highly intellectual with a predisposition toward the scientific method, but Aquarius also tends to conform to the collective consciousness of any group with which they strongly identify, and this can lead to slavish conformity to ideas which are out of touch with reality, to one degree or another.
When a collective is composed of individuals who are attuned to their intuitive guidance, and aligned with Higher Self, Higher Mind and Higher Purpose, collective Aquarian consciousness manifests as the will to good, grounded in group activities designed to optimize social structures of all kinds.
When an Aquarian collective is composed of individuals whose energies are concentrated in the lower chakras, and who are subject to the promptings of the egocentric personality, collective Aquarian consciousness manifests as authoritarian communitarianism, of one kind or another, often designed to advance the interests of a particular group at the expense of other groups.
We will experience an epic Aquarian impulse this week and for weeks to come. Sun, Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn all reside in Aquarius as of January 22nd and Venus enters Aquarius February 1, 2021. All these planets, including Mercury Retrograde, will remain in the sign of the Water Bearer for most of February.
In any event, for the next few weeks, however it manifests in individual and group consciousness, the impulses of the Aquarian Stellium will be at odds with strong counter-forces epitomized by the square to Mars in Taurus.
On January 28, the Full Moon occurs at 2:18 pm at 9.06 degrees of Leo exactly opposing the Sun and Jupiter at approximately 9 degrees Aquarius. Mars and Uranus in early degrees of Taurus will form a stressful Fixed Sign T-square with the Sun-Moon axis.
Johannes Hevelius's chart of Taurus and surrounding constellations,
from Firmamentum Sobiescianum sive Uranographia.
Mars in Taurus is said to be in its detriment, in large part because our actions at the time of this aspect tend to create so much inner and outer conflict that we cannot successfully manifest our intentions at all.
The 1980 movie Raging Bull comes to mind as an example of this type of energy. Robert de Niro's character, a boxer named Jake LaMotta, has tremendous ambitions and a lot of talent, but his jealous, violent nature is uncontrollable. Jake eventually hurts and alienates everyone he loves in his life.
On a societal level, Mars in Taurus square the Aquarian stellium indicates a powerful energy attempting to force revolutionary changes within a calcified social structure. The revolutionary impulses are met with implacable force as the existing power structures resist those changes at any cost. This Mars aspect is intense now but will wane in the spring.
At the same time, we are feeling the effects of a much more powerful and long-lasting aspect, Uranus in Taurus square Saturn in Aquarius, which is the signature aspect for the entire year of 2021.
Uranus, the rebel planet, appears to rotate on its side, traveling in the opposite direction from all the other planets in the solar system except for Venus. Volatile, stressful Uranus aspects are associated with electrifying, sudden change.
Uranus square Saturn definitely adds to the tension and potential for all out conflict in every area of life throughout 2021. Uranus in Taurus in particular is symbolic of dramatic reversals of Fortune.
The Wheel of Fortune, Trump X, Thoth Tarot Deck
The current Uranus-Saturn square runs from 2020-2023. This year, these planets make three exact squares, on February 17, June 15, and Christmas Eve.
In Cosmos and Psyche, renowned astrologer Richard Tarnas explains the history of Uranus-Saturn alignments. Tarnas says these aspects coincide with:
“the exacerbation of tensions between authority and rebellion, order and freedom, structure and change. Often the two archetypal principles combined and interpenetrated in contradictory ways: repressive revolution, erratically unpredictable authority, and so forth, as evident during the Terror in revolutionary France and the Cultural Revolution in communist China.”
During the American civil war:
“the slaveholding Confederate states…sought and proclaimed freedom (Uranus) from the Union to maintain their systemically oppressive (Saturn) mode of life.”
The Uranus-Saturn aspects indicate a mass awakening to the reality that existing Saturnian cultural, political and economic systems have become completely unacceptable, followed by an irresistible mass Uranian uprising intended to sweep away all remnants of the old order.
Financial market crashes are also associated with the Uranus-Saturn square aspect. In 1839-40 the United States experienced one of the steepest market declines in world history, at the time of a Uranus-Saturn square aspect.
Two 45 year long Uranus-Saturn cycles later, in 1930-31, the United States again experienced a stock market crash and an economic collapse. This triggered the decade long Great Depression.
It is now 90 years, or two Uranus-Saturn cycles since the onset of the Great Depression. So far, since Uranus entered Taurus in 2019, the United States experienced the greatest financial markets crash since 1929, which occurred in the spring of 2020, during the first phase of the global Covid pandemic.
In 2020 and 2021, in response to the onset of the subsequent Covid Recession, central banks around the world have kept interest rates extremely low while flooding the financial system with trillions of dollars of liquidity. This has kept yields on bonds either negative or extremely low in all major markets, forcing investors into stocks, which have skyrocketed in value. U.S. stocks are now about the most expensive they have ever been in history, relative to earnings.
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Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster, with Earth in background.
"Spaceman" mannequin wearing SpaceX Spacesuit in driving seat. "Last image" transmitted.
Camera mounted on external boom.
Falcon Heavy Demo Mission, 2-6-2018, courtesy SpaceX
This file was donated to the public domain by SpaceX
For example. Tesla shares have reached values that exceed the wildest overvaluations seen during the dot com bubble of 1999-2000. Shares keep rising while projected earnings fall.
"In the past two years Tesla shares have risen over 800%," according to analysts at investment bank JP Morgan Chase. "Analysts have raised their price targets by about 450%, and also simultaneously lowered their earnings estimates for the company for the years 2020 through 2024."
Investors have recently been using unprecedented amounts of borrowed money to buy overvalued stocks, highly volatile Bitcoin, and other speculative investments, another indicator of a vast bubble in financial markets. This is called buying on margin. This risky, speculative type of investing was a prime causative factor helping precipitate the 1929 Black Tuesday stock market crash.
In 2020 another sign of dangerous financial market speculation appeared. A bubble developed in the vast market for stock options, derivative contracts that allow investors to purchase the right to buy or sell a specific security in the future for a specified price. The options market has traditionally been the domain of day traders whose extremely short term time horizon is the mark of purely speculative investing.
"Speculation [in options] has reached a frenzied level not seen since the tail end of the dot-com boom two decades ago," according to a January 26,2021 article in The New York Times. "Much of this money has come from small-time traders hoping to make fast gains by buying “calls” — bets on rising markets — set to expire quickly."
Spiking options activity is creating additional upward momentum in already overvalued sky high stock prices.
“The fundamentals aren’t the driver. That’s not what matters anymore,” said Charlie McElligott, a market analyst with Nomura Securities in New York. “It’s the scale and the growth of the options market as this lottery ticket vehicle, which is especially magnified right now because of the retail frenzy.”
It all appears totally irrational because the stock market appears completely divorced from tremendous ongoing difficulties in the American economy, which would, in the past, have caused a stock market collapse.
In the real economy, tens of millions are applying for unemployment insurance. But only those who are earning nothing each week and who are actively searching for a job count as unemployed. Official unemployment figures don't show people who earn only a tiny amount of money each week, or who are discouraged and have stopped looking for work.
"Only 46.1% of white Americans over the age of 16 — and a mere 40.8% of Black Americans — now have a full-time job paying more than $20,000 per year," according to the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, founded by Gene Ludwig, a former U.S. Comptroller of the Currency.
Nearly one of every two workers in America are not earning enough to support themselves and their families!
Small businesses are being decimated by Covid. Commercial and residential real estate values are plummeting in New York city, Los Angeles and other key urban areas.
Failing businesses, flatlining tourism, and depreciating real estate values reduce tax revenues, with the result that even our most urbanized and wealthy states and cities now totter on the brink of insolvency.
President Biden warns that Congress must pass another $2 trillion Covid bailout bill immediately just to prevent imminent economic collapse and widespread suffering. The stock market has already priced that $2 trillion Covid relief bill into today's stock prices.
US President Joe Biden
This file is a work of an employee of the Executive Office of the President of the United States,
taken or made as part of that person's official duties.
As a work of the U.S. federal government, it is in the public domain.
But it remains to be seen if the new Biden administration, with its razor thin Congressional majority, can actually pass the bill as currently written. Already Democrats who promised to send $2000 checks to most American voters have backpedaled and now say they will be satisfied with sending $1600 checks.
The Biden administration has also promised vast infrastructure investment, additional Covid relief bills, huge new investments in green energy technologies, and other large scale programs.
President Biden knows that without substantial ongoing fiscal stimulus, in the form of additional government spending, bailouts of cities and states, additional checks to pandemic unemployed, and debt forbearance for students, renters, and small business owners, the economy will most likely re-enter an on again off again pandemic recession that began in spring 2020.
Unfortunately, political observers are virtually unanimous in their opinion that the Democratic administration will be unable to pass these types of big spending programs in Congress. In addition, an ultra-right wing Supreme Court will do everything it can to stop Democratic legislation and regulations from being enacted.
So the possibility of a second Covid Wall Street collapse looks increasingly likely.
Yet stocks continue their vertical levitation. Investors are betting that the Federal Reserve will once again lower interest rates and pour trillions of dollars into financial markets, to prop up prices of stocks and bonds.
This is not to predict a stock market crash. As I learned while working at Ameritrade in the late Nineties, the stock market can stay irrational longer than you as an investor can remain solvent.
The stars impel, they do not compel. However, Uranus is the joker in the cosmic deck. And this year, unlike 1930 or 1839, Saturn is conjunct Pluto and occasionally Jupiter, while squaring Uranus, which should in all probability increase the potency of this long lasting astrological earthquake.
Photo of Uranus courtesy NASA
So in 2021, examining the history of the Uranus-Saturn square, expect the unexpected in every area of life. Prepare for unprecedented turmoil and volatility in financial markets.
Expect unstable authority figures to invite, through their weakness, dramatic political power plays designed to initiate dramatic restructuring of the entire political system.
Expect political polarization to intensify. Confrontations that have been building up for years will begin to boil over on social media, on TV, and in real life.
Polarized political groupings may crystallize highly authoritarian group consciousness on both sides of the political spectrum. Repressive revolutions of all political flavors often emerge during this type of cosmic weather pattern.
Historical examples of inflammatory Uranus-Saturn aspects include the creation of the Confederacy, the French Revolution and Mao's Cultural Revolution.
Cheers as Marie-Antoinette's head is displayed after her execution
in Place de la Concorde on October 16, 1793
It is up to each of us to practice discernment and to stand aside from any such authoritarian Aquarian groupings and resist irrational social pressures.
On an individual level, now is the time for each of us to be willing to take a clear, hard look at all those Saturnian structures in our lives that have been coming under increasing stress the last few years.
Whether those structures underpin our career path, our home, our close relationships, or our health, we need to examine any places where we sense that sweeping changes may be required.
The big question for each of us during this year of the Uranus-Saturn square is what kind of change will we be experiencing? Change is coming. Structures will be tested, and in many cases will fail the test, requiring total transformation of one or more areas of life.
The Great Wave of Kanagawa, Katsushika Hokusai, 1829-1833
It is up to each of us to oversee these transformations of the crucial structures in our lives with clarity, discernment, wisdom and love. It is up to each of us to navigate through the coming tsunami of transformation while maintaining a dynamic psychic equilibrium that will enable us to reach our spiritual and material goals.
Be willing to take an unflinching look at the stressors in your life before the structures in your life buckle under the unprecedented strain of social transformation occurring on an individual, national and global scale.
Embrace the change wave and resolve to inject the Saturnian disciplines of prudence, patience and perseverance into the areas where you have resolved to initiate your own much needed personal transformations.
Large Gautama Buddha statue in Buddha Park of Ravangla, Sikkim Subhrajyoti,
CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Don't be the Raging Bull! Be the insightful, discerning, patient, persevering Buddha! Don't forget the Buddha too was a Taurus! Buddha initiated some of the most powerful transformations in consciousness in human history!
Let us all strive to channel the powerful energy of the Uranus-Pluto square and the Aquarian stellium of 2021 into self-transformation. May our expanded consciousness enable us to seed an elevation of group consciousness, in true Aquarian fashion.
Collective Vision, by Alex Grey
May those groups seeking to elevate human consciousness foster an increase in goodwill and compassion throughout society. Let us all strive to take the lead in implementation of Aquarian inspired group activities that will improve social structures over the next few years, for the best and highest good of all concerned.
We are entering a global crisis that will impact each of us and transform human civilization. Nothing less will do.
Meditation Moment: Collective Living
"Knowing how to live collectively is the way ahead for true human
evolution. Yes, you do not evolve by remaining alone in your
corner, reading, learning and developing. When you isolate
yourself in this way, you merely give free rein to your
egotistical tendencies.
You should love community, the sensation
of being immersed in a sea of souls, all vibrating together.
Of course, some seek out community to fulfil their need to assert
themselves over others, to make slaves of them and exploit them.
The fact that you are looking for community does not of itself
mean that you know how to live in it; it's often quite the
opposite!
So, living in community implies a great deal of work, necessary
work. Sooner or later everyone must conquer their self-centered
tendencies: their egotism, ambition, greed or authoritarian
nature, which cause them to come into continual conflict with
others. Eventually they must be able to say, I am a collective
being." - Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov