Welcome to the Full Moon in Taurus, Scorpio Solar Festival November 2016 edition of the Satya Center Cosmic Weather Forecast.
This Taurus Super Moon will come closer to Earth than any full moon since 1948, so it will be 15% larger and 30% brighter than any full moon in my lifetime! Go outside Sunday and Monday nights and experience the magical moonglow!
Generally speaking, human beings prefer not to change. Those of us who have a developed spiritual practice are well aware that the challenges and setbacks in life are the opportunities we need to transform our worst personality-based life patterns into more positive behavior. These are Scorpio lessons that help us transcend our karmic limitations and toxic life-scripts and grow spiritually.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
The Full Super Moon on Monday, November 14, 2016 occurs at 23°09′ Taurus, opposed by the Sun at 23°09′ Scorpio.
This has been a history-making week in America, and this newsletter will try to put the events of the week in perspective. We hope you will benefit from a big picture view.
Donald Trump is now President of the United States following a historic victory over Hillary Clinton that was fueled by an eruption of volcanic anger directed against the political establishment, Wall Street and political correctness in general.
Despite winning the majority of votes nationwide, Hillary lost the election in the Electoral College. Shades of George W. Bush vs. Al Gore.
Trump’s ascent will further polarize the already deeply divided American populace, but the last eight years of political gridlock in America are set to come to an end.
Republicans now control both houses of Congress, along with the vast majority of state legislatures, and the vast majority of all state Governors are Republican.
Trump will have every opportunity to pack the currently deadlocked Supreme Court with Constitutional fundamentalists who favor ending abortion rights, curtailing voting rights, and returning the country to a mythical Golden Age that supposedly existed prior to the Nineteen Sixties.
President Trump has promised to achieve total victory over ISIS and Muslim warriors everywhere in the world, wage a trade war with China, reduce America’s commitment to the post-World War II global strategic order that saw America emerge as the “policeman” of the world, eviscerate the Environmental Protection Agency, withdraw from the Paris Climate Change Accords, accelerate the pace of fracking throughout the country, repeal Obamacare, expel millions of “illegal” immigrants and build a wall along the length of the Mexican border.
Prior to the election, this wish list was considered nothing but hot air. Now that hot air has turned into a volcanic eruption.
The Sabian symbol for this Full Moon in Taurus is “An Indian warrior riding fiercely, human scalps hanging from his belt.”
Here we have a picture of the tribal consciousness of humanity, which divides humanity into two camps – and assumes that survival of the tribe depends upon the success of war waged upon outsiders. This reptilian brain zero-sum survivalist mentality has now become the default setting for the new American government.
For the last year and a half, President Trump has been waging verbal warfare against Muslims, African Americans, Latinos, women, Democrats, educated elites, environmentalists, Wall Street, the news media, and even the former Republican party establishment.
There is every reason to believe that Trump and the newly radicalized Republican Party will wage a “scorched earth” campaign against the 50% of Americans who voted for Hillary.
Protests against Trump have broken out in New York, Chicago, Oakland, and San Diego, and it is likely that there will be substantial resistance to the Trump agenda from young people, African Americans, Latinos, women, intellectuals and others who see themselves, quite rightly, as targets of the new regime.
Throughout the long campaign, Americans have been shocked and appalled by the personal vitriol leveled at the candidates by both sides, by the constant lies, the fog of propaganda and delusion that has blanketed the land.
How did we reach this low point as a nation?
One thing is clear. Seventy million Americans, a landslide majority of voters, supported either Trump or Bernie Sanders because they believe that the current political and economic systems are “rigged” against average Americans.
The Democratic Party chose to ignore the signs of erupting anger among the voters, and nominated Hillary Clinton, a candidate who personifies the status quo.
The notion was that identity politics would deliver a victory for Hillary, and that demographically, in a contest between white middle class America-first conservatives and the rainbow coalition of the Democrats, Hillary would win, just as Obama had won the last two elections.
The Democrats severely underestimated the anger of the 99% of Americans who have seen their dreams crushed by the globalized, financialized super-competitive economic system that was brought to us by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
Even now, in the aftermath of the most historic defeat of the Democratic Party since McGovern’s landslide loss to Richard Nixon in 1968, Democratic party pundits and cable news talking heads continue to announce that Trump’s appeal was based entirely on ethnic nationalism. In their view 50% of Americans are driven by hate and a desire for a white supremacist political program.
However the facts do not support this view. A post-election article in Jacobin magazine provides the data that clarifies the picture for us.
“This election, in the words of New York Times analyst Nate Cohn, was decided by people who voted for Barack Obama in 2012. Not all of them can be bigots.”
“Clinton won only 65 percent of Latino voters, compared to Obama’s 71 percent four years ago. She performed this poorly against a candidate who ran on a program of building a wall along America’s southern border, a candidate who kicked off his campaign by calling Mexicans rapists.”
“Clinton won 34 percent of white women without college degrees. And she won just 54 percent of women overall, compared to Obama’s 55 percent in 2012. Clinton, of course, was running against a candidate who has gloated on film about grabbing women ‘by the pussy.’”
“This was Clinton’s election to lose. And she lost. A lot of the blame will fall on Clinton the candidate, but she only embodied the consensus of this generation of Democratic Party leaders. Under President Obama, Democrats have lost almost a thousand state-legislature seats, a dozen gubernatorial races, sixty-nine House seats and thirteen in the Senate. Last night didn’t come out of nowhere.”
“The problem with Clinton wasn’t her peculiarity but her typicality. It was characteristic of this Democratic Party that the power players in Washington decided on the nominee — with overwhelming endorsements — many months before a single ballot was cast.”
“They made a fateful choice for all of us by stacking the deck, decisively, against the kind of politics that could win: a working-class politics.”
“Seventy-two percent of Americans who voted last night believed that ‘the economy is rigged to the advantage of the rich and powerful.’ Sixty-eight percent agreed that ‘traditional parties and politicians don’t care about people like me.’”
“Almost alone among Democratic politicians, Bernie Sanders spoke to this simmering sense of alienation and class anger. Sanders had a basic message for the American people: you deserve more and you are right to believe you do. Health care, college education, a living wage. It’s a message that has made him by far the most popular politician in the country.”
“Hillary Clinton’s formal platform approached some of Sanders’s concrete ideas, but repudiated its core message. For those in charge of the Democratic Party, it made no sense to rail against America. For them, America never stopped being great. And things have only been getting better.”
“Party leaders asked voters to hand politics over to them. They thought they had it under control. They were wrong. Now we all have to deal with the consequences. And we will.”
This election has radicalized the Republican Party, turning it into a vehicle for the authoritarian right-wing strongman, Donald Trump, who ran a campaign more typical of Eastern European or Central American elections.
It remains to be seen whether the Democratic Party will also undergo a kind of radicalization, since there is no charismatic outsider like Donald Trump to lead a revolution in party politics.
For decades the Democratic Party has reviled and ostracized progressive economic populists. I still remember living in upstate New York, in the heart of Trump country, and having political conversations with my Republican neighbors. They said they were shocked to find a Democrat who wanted to punish the banksters responsible for the Global Financial Meltdown, and who opposed the neo-liberal economic-political consensus. We haven’t seen a Democrat who was on the side of working people in decades, they said.
Perhaps the Democratic Party can reorganize itself to unite Bernie Sanders style economic populism with vigorous defense of the hard-won civil rights of women, African Americans, Latinos, and the rest of us. That remains to be seen.
There is certainly no appetite among party leaders to transform their party into a reincarnation of Sixties radicalism, which did unify a socialist economic program with unflinching determination to expand human rights for all Americans.
But make no mistake, the New American Cold Civil War has begun.
Since 2008, the Cosmic Weather Forecast has predicted that this decade would see the end of the current global status quo.
In a series of posts about The Grand Cardinal Cross, we have explained that the end of the Age of Cheap Fossil Fuels coincides with the onset of the Long Environmental Emergency represented by climate change, and promises to upend existing financial, political and social systems.
Again and again, we have pointed out that this is a vast global transition from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius, and will take decades to play out on the world stage.
We have often pointed out that the Age of Pisces is the age of charismatic religious, political and social leaders, and that the Age of Aquarius promises to be a time when power resides in the collective consciousness of humanity.
We have repeatedly encouraged our readers to accept that responsibility and to lead the way to a new sustainable global civilization characterized by financial democracy, social justice and civil rights for all.
That’s not hippie day-dreaming, it’s essential for the survival of civilization around the world.
We have predicted that although the numerous Uranus-Pluto squares that marked this decade and helped set up the Grand Cardinal Cross have mainly dissipated, the results of this world historical Cosmic Weather System would shape human life for the remainder of this decade and well into the next.
These Uranus-Pluto squares have pitted elites against the rest of us, and social systems dominated by these elites against the aspirations of the vast majority of human beings for a life with dignity, purpose, and justice for all.
However, the conflicts in America surfacing today indicate that the process of creative destruction in our society has accelerated much faster than we expected. We now have identified many of the sources of our social problems.
However an epic battle is brewing because there are deeply opposed groups with very different views of how to deal with these problems.
On one side we have those who would like to return to the days prior to the onset of the Grand Cardinal Cross years, re-live the days prior to the Nineteen Sixties, perhaps regress all the way to the era of the robber barons of the Nineteenth Century, or even the era when kings ruled the world.
On the other side we have those who uphold the gains of the last several centuries of human civilization, the gains made during the Twentieth Century in civil rights and human rights, environmental protection and social responsibility for the well-being of all citizens.
Right now, in America, the first, reactionary group has seized control of the Republican party and the US government, from the White House to Capitol Hill to the vast majority of statehouses around the country.
The second group is opposed by the leaders of the Democratic Party, who want only to perpetuate the failing status quo.
So here in America we are left with a painful awareness of the urgent need for systemic transformation, and are confronted with an array of powerful financial and political forces controlling both political parties and the financial system.
This recent Presidential election did not change that. It only brought the urgency and the difficulty of our task into sharp relief.
This is totally appropriate for the Taurus Full Moon and Scorpio Solar Festival of 2016, because this month we see the reappearance of the Grand Mutable Cross and a thorny T-square in Cardinal signs, which reactivates the energy of the Grand Cardinal Cross.
On November 15, the day after the full moon, Neptune sits in Pisces, Mercury in Sagittarius, Moon is in Gemini, and the North Node is in Virgo, re-creating the Grand Mutable Cross that propelled us onto a whirlwind merry-go-round of bad news and a flurry of competing responsibilities earlier this year.
On November 24, the Cardinal T-Square emerges once again in the skies, as Venus passes through Capricorn, and squares Uranus in Aries and Jupiter in Libra. That pattern persists through the end of the month.
I am reminded here of a conversation I had a while ago with Master Astrologer Bill Herbst, who has written hundreds of articles about the Grand Cardinal Cross and was an editor at the Mountain Astrologer magazine for many years. Bill told me that he had looked at the charts of both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and analyzed what would happen with them during the year after this election. Bill felt that whoever won the election would be sorry they did within a year of ascending to power.
Here is an excerpt from an article Bill posted Friday November 11, in the wake of the election.
“Tens of millions of people are excited and pleased about the outcome, and tens of millions of others are appalled and terrified,” Bill explains.
“In my perception, two emotions underpinned the campaign and the election. One was anger. The other was mistrust. Both of those emotions are characteristic of the Uranus-Pluto transit that constitutes the symbolic backbone of this decade.”
“. . .The only certainty in this upheaval is that things are going to change. While it seems likely that the country will move from a partially progressive to a largely reactionary stance, at least in government and public policy, no one can be sure what a Trump Presidency will mean. The Republicans may encounter almost as much trouble with Mr. Trump as the Democrats do. Trump is not an ideologue. He is a showman, a TV star. He wants to be a Big, Can-Do, Do-Everything President, along the lines of Theodore Roosevelt. Trump doesn’t concern himself with how something gets done, and he will push, shove, seduce, and cajole to get what he wants.”
“But there’s a fly in the ointment. Trump’s chart runs smack into major difficulties starting in late December as Saturn reaches his Sagittarian full Moon and arrives in January opposite his Gemini Sun-Uranus.”
“. . .In short, Trump is in for serious frustration in 2017. The American President is often called the most powerful person on the planet, but that power is not unlimited. Trump is about to run head-on into the hard lesson that our government has built-in checks and balances. We shall see how well he handles that,” Bill writes.
We are an adaptable, smart, resilient and resourceful species. That is how we managed to evolve from tool using apes to space-faring astronauts. That is how we created the technologies that have enabled billions of human beings to populate the planet.
However we are also still attached to the reptilian hind brain that houses tribal instincts and the certainty that life is a war of all against all.
Generally speaking, human beings prefer not to change. Those of us who have a developed spiritual practice are well aware that the challenges and setbacks in life are the opportunities we need to transform our worst personality-based life patterns into more positive behavior.
Now we are confronted with the need to overcome the forces that would pretend we can set the clock back and live in a fantasy world of cars with big fins, women who wore white gloves to lunch, and men who acted like John Wayne.
We need to overcome the still entrenched elites who believe that the present system is the best of all possible worlds – and maybe it is, for them.
We need to learn to work together with those who want to create positive change that will bring all of us into a brighter future.
Make no mistake. There will be conflict, and there will be change, on a scale the world has never seen.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
May you all receive the grace and guidance you need to renew your energy, restore peace of mind, ground your emotions and visualize a way forward on the path of Spirit that will bring change that for the best and highest good of all of us.
Sending Love and Light to you all.
Curtis and Jane
Picture Credits from top to bottom: Photo of Full Moon Starting to set in Boca by Curtis Lang & Jane Sherry, Copyright free photo of American Eagle, Devi watching the lizard photo by Jane Sherry, Jane Sherry painting on paper "Banks Redlining the Neighborhood", Jane Sherry orchid photo