ASTROLOGY, POLITICS, AND HISTORY BLOGETTE  – TIM LYONS – AUGUST 18, 2017

DONALDTRUMP_AUGUST2017ECLIPSE_DC

HOW DONALD TRUMP HAS PROVIDED US ALL WITH AN OBJECT LESSON ON HOW NOT TO DEAL WITH AN ECLIPSE

                Various dignitaries have asked me various questions about the “effect” of the August 2017 eclipse on our noble leader, the sometimes iconoclastic and often idiotic Mr. Donny Trump. I will attempt, in this blogette – a short blog-entry, if you please! – to respond to these people, for they seem sincere in their inquiries and noble in their hearts. Like a good businessman, I will use bullet-points:

• Solar eclipses take place on New Moons, with the Sun and Moon at the same zodiac degree and with the Moon on the ecliptic. The Moon comes between the earth and the Sun. (Why do we not have a solar eclipse every new moon? Because the Moon wanders from the ecliptic. Track its monthly journey and you’ll see.)
• The Moon symbolizes, among other things, habit patterns taken from childhood. (Thus, I think, Mr. Gurdjieff’s statement – which I think I got from Ouspensky – that the Moon ‘is eating you’: habit patterns can devour creativity. The Sun symbolizes the light of conscious awareness and creative possibility.
• When the Moon interposes itself directly between earth and sun, habit patterns can largely blot out the light of creative possibility. The greatest danger, here, has to do with acting blindly, for habit patterns can blind us, putting us on behavioral and psychological autopilot.
• The eclipse falls directly on Trump’s Mars-Ascendant conjunction in Leo.
• That Mars-Ascendant aspect points to what we get almost daily from Mr. DT: a kind of bombastic aggression in which Mr. Trump, blinded, in this case, by the blazing light of ego, with Mars symbolizing the tendency to get narrowly identified with his own pride. He reminds us, every day, IMHO, that we can get blinded by enormous ego-ism as readily as by habit patterns (though, of course, habit patterns too often arise as part of the ego-complex, a matter we will not discuss here and now). Mars in Leo in the ascendant, unless governed by self-awareness, will often appear arrogant, bombastic, and self-absorbed. (Note that I have given the neurotic side of Leo and Mars. Do not take my remarks as indicating that Leo or Mars always do any more damage than other signs and planets. All astrological symbols have what we might call their neurotic side and their more enlightened side. Unfortunately, Mr. Trump seems consistently to manifest the former. Even more unfortunately, we could say something similar of many people who get captured by their own ambition.)
• The eclipse on Trump’s Mars-Ascendant strongly suggests that our Twitter-obsessed leader, sitting alone in his upstairs room and perhaps talking too much to himself, will act out old habit patterns related to arrogance, stubbornness, and aggression; the Moon, in this case, seems to have blinded the Sun rather completely.
• Leo, as a fixed sign, often acts stubbornly. Of course, one person’s stubbornness may also appear as another person’s steadfastness, and Leo has a deserved reputation for loyalty. In this case, though, we seem to have DT’s loyalty to his own blindness. Alas.
• Thus Trump’s insistence on sticking to his guns – or, I suppose, his statements – regarding Charlottesville. A person manifesting Leo’s oft-observed magnanimity might act with confident generosity; however, a person manifesting Leo’s also-oft-observed self-absorption would act as we see Trump acting: inflexibly and myopically.
• If we want to know about the positive potential of eclipse-energy, we can go back to the astronomical situation. We see the Moon blocking the Sun, and thus we see, if we have the right instruments – with “instruments,” here, referring to psychological tools or approaches: means one might use to access the one’s inherent potential for insight – we can see the outline of the Moon. This suggests that eclipses can bring us (so to speak) precise understanding and clarity about the role that habit patterns and other lunar matters play in our lives; lunar matters (e.g. habit patterns, sensitivity of emotional response) can arise as a kind of lens through which to focus creative energy. Thus eclipses can bring sharpened insight and understanding about the role of habit patterns in our lives. But to accomplish that, we must look steadily and surely, and we must do so without getting blinded – with, as noted, the proper tools, which with the physical eclipse means the proper kind of lens and with the “psychological eclipse” means the discipline and courage to look at ourselves honestly.
• I don’t know Mr. Trump personally, but I see no evidence that he looks at himself honestly, or that he has developed the discipline or courage to do so. I don’t know for certain, of course, what goes on in his mind, and I admit that human beings often surprise me. So far, though, Mr. Trump has not done so.
• So: blindness, acting out of and through blinding habitual tendencies, with an emphasis on pride, what seems like intellectual laziness, and aggression, striking out, we might say, in the darkness.
• Bonus bullet-point: we can often get further insight into astrological occurrences by looking at the Sabian Symbol(s) for the degree at which the occurrence occurs. This solar eclipse takes place in the 29^th degree of Leo. The Sabian Symbol for this degree, as recorded decades ago by Marc Edmund Jones, reads like this (from The Sabian Symbols in Astrology): A mermaid. This is a symbol of humanity’s insatiable appetite for experience on the side of psychological self-assurance, and of the nascent eagerness of the soul for a private and personal participation in every possible facet of self-fulfillment…When positive, the degree is a completeness of quickening to inner instincts of the being and a real willingness to trust them, and when negative, a lack of discrimination and an awkward insensitivity.
• This symbol and interpretation applies to all of us, not just to the guy sending Tweets from an upstairs room in D.C.
• Questions?