An Inaugural Eclipse

1.19.09


What astrologer wouldn't crack a smile at this? Obama's inauguration (tomorrow, on Jan 20) will be held within a week of a Jupiter-enhanced eclipse in Aquarius, the sign of the people.

Well, of course it is. Eclipses are our cosmic announcement that one chapter of life is wrapping itself up, while another gets underway.

Every six months or so, we welcome an eclipse period (at least one solar and one lunar eclipse within a few-weeks' span)… to rapidly flip pages in our life-stories with climactic developments and events that move the action along in a dramatic fashion. For those couple weeks on either side of an eclipse, it's as if we're becoming 'unstuck' by larger currents pushing us emphatically into the future.

The solar eclipse that occurs in the wee-early-morning hours of next Mon Jan 26 (or very late the night of Sun Jan 25 out west) is an especially fortuitous one, occurring in conjunction with good-guy Jupiter in Aquarius. This casts our next months ahead in the optimistic light of collectively-minded thought and innovation, as promoted by Jupiter-in-Aquarius's visionary creativity (which I described at length here).

Jupiter's influence on an eclipse is a benevolent one overall, promising that, even with the inevitable drama usually accompanying eclipse periods, the end result is oriented toward growth and expansion and transcendence of prior boundaries… as opposed to, say, limitation or acceptance or confrontation. This theme is reiterated by the fact that this eclipse is conjunct the Moon's north node (rather than the south), further indicating we must aim toward the unfamiliar and the fresh, as a way of reimagining what's possible, instead of repeating the same maneuvers and hoping for different results.

Resting, as we are now, on the inside edge of increasingly tumultuous astro-times, I'm struck by the powerful image of the US inaugurating its first Black president… a man who seeks to bring people together rather than split us apart… someone who inspires widespread hope (and its shadow: fear) by putting a fresh unfamiliar face to our conception of political authority. This is probably a more hopeful scenario than most of the 2012 doomsday-type prophets and skywatchers had conjured up for this 'final approach' phase of the Mayan calendar (and history itself?). I presume a majority of those 2012 folks swing left politically, and were perhaps expecting an evil heartless corporate overlord or some direct descendent of Satan to become leader of the free world during the lead-up to 2012—not this calm-mannered, well-spoken, loving husband-and-father and sort-of-seems-like-a-decent guy named Barack, someone who still shoots a few hoops in his spare time. (Perhaps Satan's ambassadors have gotten 21st-century makeovers.)

Full disclosure: I am feeling extremely optimistic these days. I have four planets in Aquarius, my birthday is this week, and both Jupiter and the Jan 25/6 eclipse are lookin' pretty damn good from my end of the neighborhood. I haven't felt this personally upbeat in a couple years, though I'm under no delusion that all the work is already done. (Hardly.) I find this to be an incredibly exciting time in which to be alive, when our human ingenuity is under intense pressure to outdo its former self so we might save ourselves from the fallout of our last round of human ingenuity. We'll get to find out firsthand if the world will indeed end in 2012. (I'm betting against it.) Politically, I lean toward deep suspicion of anyone who'd make it very far in politics, considering all the sweetheart deals and backscratching cronyism needed to secure the social and financial capital. I excuse my readiness to write off much of politics (being so clever, of course, I can see right into the hollowness of 'The System') with the commitment to vote in every election, and to speak out when I feel a certain way about a certain issue. And though I've yet to be overcome with Obama fever myself, there's no doubt the enthusiasm his election has engendered among so many of my compatriots is obviously contagious. I suppose I've caught a mild case of it.

I also still think Obama may ultimately prove to be the biggest surprise to those folks who have pinned all their hopes and dreams on him, this single human being who can only accomplish as much as one single human being can… though, with Jupiter and Neptune conjunct in Aquarius throughout 2009, his limitations might not become so obvious until '10 and beyond. (Read more about what I mean here.) While I personally believe him to be a man of good intention, he will surely make decisions I disagree with, in addition to those I support. At times, he's sure to appear in striking dissimilarity to what the hopers and dreamers imagined they'd see. He is, after all, a human being: inconsistent, imperfect, still learning on the job.

Ultimately, I believe, the key to Obama's wider success or failure rests somewhere beyond the grasp of his own hands… in part because we still have the (forgive the vocabulary) residual karma to burn off from the past many years of unchecked global greed (and no, it's not all due to the dastardly deeds of supposed evil-overlord George Bush), as well as plenty more turbulent astrology to endure throughout the entire of his term, and into the next.

We'd do our next president a great service to continually remind ourselves he is just one man… and to continually adjust our expectations accordingly.

In honor of the Jan 25/6 eclipse, let's all accept our individual roles in the collective well-being of our society, rather than leave a few daring souls out on the tightrope by themselves—easy targets to villanize, should the tides of history overpower their efforts, though we'd gladly help ourselves to the fruits should they instead emerge triumphant. However it goes, we are all responsible.