Saturn enters Sagittarius Heads will roll, empires will fall
Any or all of these world leaders could be deposed during Saturn's transit of Sagittarius. Clockwise from left, Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe England's Theresa May; Grace Mugabe; US' Donald Trump; Germany's Angela Merkel.
Saturn enters Sagittarius on Nov. 19, 2017
Guess what happened on the eve of Saturn changing Zodiacal position from Ophiuchus to Sagittarius?
1) Robert Mugabe, senile dictator of Zimbabwe was forced out of office after 37 years. In this time span, the country went from being one of the most prosperous of Africa's newer nations, to the poorest. The people rejoiced in the street, as the army somewhat reluctantly takes over the reigns of power. The new leaders, however, can hardly be expected to solve any of the overwhelming problems that the country faces, which stem from the massive corruption and mismanagement of the economy.
Zimbabwe Parliament erupts in joy at the news of Mugabe's resignation.
2) German Chancellor Angela Merkel's center-right government collapses, forcing a snap election. The right wing is sharpening its knives for a anti-immigrant government, and it looks like the end of the European Union--which has been called, "a currency looking for a state".*
The rise of the economic realities of falling prices and exports, and the collapse of the social contract between government and the workers can drive German political divisions into a complete schism. Fascist parties are on the march. Germany would be a forerunner for other Western industrial societies splitting apart along class and culture.
The takeaway from Saturn's new position in Sagittarius is that dynasties will fall, governments will crumble, empires will face their doom. High hopes will come crashing down. It will rain on everyone's parade. It's happened before. Will history repeat itself, same story, different empire?
The Last time Saturn was in Sag. (1988)
Saturn in astrology always represents the State, the central authority of an organized society. Immobilized with civic responsibility, imbued with unlimited power, stratified by hollow traditions, Saturn may not make the rules, but enforces them as like the glue that holds a political structure together. Freedom and decentralization is anathema to Saturn, since either would cause the unraveling of state power and the rise of individualism. To see how this works in real time, one only has to look at the "deep state" in the US, which, while pontificating on the sanctity of personal privacy can meanwhile set up an electronic spy bureaucracy that can invade every aspect of our lives. Ophiuchus, by contrast is secretive and guarded. Ophiuchus has ancestral memories of the state and church burning her fore-bearers at the stake, murdering them as heretics and witches by the thousands, for thousands of years.
Ophiuchus is the pariah of the state, since she wants her own coven of belief and action in which she is the head of state, the sole leader, the benevolent dictator.
When Ophiuchus stands her ground against the state, overcoming the fear of persecution, it is war to the end. The hopes and dreams of the generation are resting on Ophiuchus victories. As some women fight against the unspeakable evils of our time, others will cooperate, and be held accountable. Even the crisis is serene because it is part of nature.
What happens in Sagittarius is that the high, some might say inflated, hopes of success and good luck get crushed under Saturn's hob-nail boots. The deflating feeling of failure; the lost youth, love betrayed and highest aspirations dashed.
There are enough metaphors to describe the problem; the rise and fall of an idea, the archer overshooting his mark, the return to the animal, the savage, the beast.
With Saturn's heavy hand, there's always an element of having to surrender the lofty goals, not scale the mountain, not measure up, not make that payment. Yet once this new path of retreat and recoil has been mapped, Sagittarius will take the hit, accept the challange to bring about change, even if it means sacrificing everything.
"Not with a Bang but a Whimper" --T.S. Eliot "The Hollow Men"
*Today we have two weakening empires that could fall apart under the sway of the newest 2017-2020 Saturn transit of Sagittarius: the faltering European Union, which is skating on the thin ice of bankrupt member states, and over-extended central bank debt. Brexit may just be the first of several fissures in the Union, with Italy, Spain and Greece in danger of default. Of course, the biggest cheese, the United States, could be headed for a military defeat in the middle East, and a subsequent massive loss of wealth at home, with probable gridlock and fragmentation of the Federal government preventing any solutions.
However, the EU seems to be closer to disintegration, since it has always been a marriage of convenience, rather than a truly integrated union. Recent events in Spain illustrate how tenuous a grip some EU governments have on their own sovereignty, much less that of the Eurozone. Germany has always been the dominant member, and has shielded the other countries from accountability, in exchange for opening up their markets to German goods. However, the divisions between European nations is, and always has been, so deep, that a even free trade, common markets and a shared currency is not enough to paper over the national hatred they have for each other. The EU marriage of convenience, more like cluster-fuck, ultimately benefits the larger, richer members at the expense of the poorer ones. Germany is the economic wolf, hiding among the sheep-nations. With the economic suicide of Great Britain's Brexit; a divided Spain, the gutted economies of Greece, Portugal, Italy hanging on by a thread, and now a German political crisis--it appears that the EU is coming apart at the seams.
A toppled statue of Vladimir Lenin in Lithuania, Sept. 1, 1991, symbolizes the end of the Soviet Union during Saturn's last transit of Sagittarius.
The last time Saturn entered Sagittarius, in 1988, the Soviet Union began a 3-year process of demoralization, dissipation, and disintegration that ended in its complete collapse and subsequent plundering by its foreign and domestic enemies.
The USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) was itself born in Sagittarius, on Dec 22, 1922, and died there as well, on Dec. 25, 1991. The end of the Soviet Union wasn't predictable. At the beginning of the 1980s, the Soviet empire looked impregnable, and militarily invincible, coming off its invasion of Afghanistan, its network of client states, and its highly-touted hosting of the Olympics.
However, by the time Saturn started to engage the Centaur constellation in 1988, fissures began to show, and the facade of the Soviet "worker's paradise" was stripped away by internal strife and even outright rebellion. By December of 1991, 69 years after the Soviet Union was established, its dissolution was official.
The Soviet Union also invested all its moral authority in the protection of the state against its enemies, using a vast secret police network to weed out troublemakers. Although no capitalist ruling class was allowed to take control, the civil service, the army and the local authorities became a quagmire through which Soviet citizens had to constantly navigate. Corruption and bribery were the rule, and the people became more and more cynical and weary of the reality behind the heroic propaganda of the revolution.
Women, workers, and soldiers held the power in the worker's state. Or was it all just a cruel hoax?
The beginning of the end for the Soviet Union was its invasion of Afghanistan on Dec. 24, 1979. The pretense for the invasion was to support the liberal but unpopular government that the Soviets themselves had installed there. The Russians wanted to secure Afghanistan as a strategic buffer zone and captive market, treating it much the same as it did its other satellite republics. The cold war between the USSR and the US was a series of proxy wars, where the two main nuclear powers would battle for dominance in small, brutal wars fought in smaller, otherwise neutral countries that were transformed into battlegrounds.
In the late 1960s, the US had blundered into a 10-year struggle to colonize Vietnam and failed spectacularly, having to withdraw unilaterally after the deaths of 58,000 American soldiers. The Soviet Union and China both helped the Vietnamese resist the American invasion, but in the process, over a million Vietnamese soldiers and over two million civilians were killed during the slaughter, before the fighting ended in 1975, as Neptune entered Ophiuchus and Saturn entered Cancer. The war in Vietnam was a shattering experience for the American military and changed our view of war forever. A shattered and disenfranchised baby-boomer generation wilted like a tree hit by lightning, losing all its bearings in the pall of cynicism and defeat of its lofty goals. Vietnam destroyed a generation of Americans by dividing it into warring factions; those who supported American imperialism, and those who resisted it.
Accordingly, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was "Russia's Vietnam" and hit the Soviet empire with a sledge hammer. As Saturn entered its transit of Sagittarius in 1988, The Soviet empire was crumbling under the weight of its foreign ambitions and its domestic miasma. As one Soviet republic after another peeled away from the core, and the Russians suffered shortages of consumer goods from soap to vodka, the weakness of the state and its leadership ended the reign of the largest and most powerful socialist country, reducing it to roadkill for the capitalist vultures circling around it.
