Jupiter in Aquarius: Innovations By, For, and About The People

1.8.09


One thing we'll have no shortage of this year is innovative ideas.

Jupiter will dwell in Aquarius, a land of visionary genius (or is it just 'outlandish eccentricity'?) through Jan 2010—and deliver big concepts unlike any we've heard before. Some will sound brilliant, and some certifiably nuts.

The common link? Taking a sincere stab at sharing more of everything—both the responsibility and the fruits of that effort—among a larger proportion of the populace. Aquarius, after all, is the quintessential sign of decentralization. Aquarians naturally gravitate toward collective solutions to problems, with the understanding that each of us, as a totally unique and irreplaceable component of the whole, thrives best by doing that which maximizes usage of his/her special talents to collaborative ends.

That is to say: People who need people really are the luckiest people in the world.

Jupiter in Aquarius places a premium on scientific knowledge, hi-tech advancement and intellectual experimentation… which is a damn good thing since, right about now, we're in need of a few technological quantum-leaps to help us repair the broken engine of our global economy without risking our species' survival in the process. Whereas, in recent years, we witnessed a neo-luddite resistance to radical forward-thinking creativity ('dare we threaten the sanctity of our precious traditions?'), the tide has undoubtedly turned. Science and technology will cease to be heard as dirty words. (Funny how it takes a worsening crisis to make 'tradition' suddenly seem like a dead-end death knell.)

I would be shocked if, during the course of '09, we didn't greet the widespread introduction of at least one major new tech development which will ultimately prove to revolutionize our lives. (Not such a brave prediction to make, by the way.) It will be a big one… though we might not recognize its all-pervasive impact while it's still rippling outward. I sure as hell didn't conceive of how entirely my life would later become centered around the Internet, back when I sent my first email (for a school assignment) in 1994 or so, in the midst of the epic Uranus-Neptune conjunction. This is a similar astro-influence, if not somewhat less 'epic'.

Aquarius doesn't limit its cerebral explorations to science, however. This is also a sign of philosophic humanitarianism, ready to further any notions that broaden personal freedoms and/or bespeak of the critical need to dismantle oppressive status-quo institutions. With Jupiter tramping through Aquarius, the concerns of 'The People' will come through louder and clearer than they have in a while. Cooperative models and coalitions will sound more appealing than top-down leadership by royal edict. Ideas that address real people's real-life situations will, at last, really be heard.

Now, of course, 'heard' doesn't necessarily mean 'acted upon'… and here's where I step in to rain on what otherwise appears to be quite a lively, mind-opening parade. As I reported in my last posting, Jupiter's transit through Aquarius is capped off by a conjunction to Neptune and Chiron. As such, there's a very high potential for us to ride a tsunami of unreserved optimism through '09—a badly-needed injection of hope that washes over the whole culture, at the same time these 'big ideas' and 'promising advances' distract us from nitty-gritty, here-and-now realities that cannot wait through endless brainstorming sessions before being pragmatically addressed.

Regardless of what our ingenuity can come up with next, we still have karmic residue from our prior excesses and short-sighted decisions hanging over into our immediate future. It demands us to finish what we started… which, as I see it, amounts to nothing less than a thorough clean-up of those issues and entities we essentially loaded down with garbage in past years. Saturn, still in Virgo on and off through mid-2010, is the ideal agent for such detail-oriented, earthly-plane 'housecleaning'.

Jupiter in Aquarius, alas, forms an awkward inconjunct (150-degree angle) to Saturn in Virgo. They are at subtle cross-purposes. The last thing Jupiter wants, upon proudly espousing its buoyant liberty-for-all pronouncements and describing its latest newfangled utopian-era inventions, is to listen to Saturn posing a bunch of nitpicky little questions about how the hell it's all going to actually work.

Yet, isn't this exactly what Jupiter needs—to make real on his notions? Otherwise, he's just a lot of hot air.