NewsScope for January 3, 2000

Yeltsin Resigns, Putin Assumes Presidency

Boris Yeltsin resigned only hours before the new millennium dawned over Asia, and appointed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as acting President until presidential elections can be held on March 26, 2000. Putin immediately signed a decree offering Yeltsin a lifetime pension and freedom from criminal prosecution.

Russia’s national horoscope (November 8, 1917, 2:12 am, Petrograd) reflects the sudden turn of events, with the ongoing square between transiting Saturn  and Uranus being the lead indicator. These two outer planets have been hitting Russia’s Sun for most of 1999, bringing the leadership much turmoil and radically shifting policies.

Yeltsin has hired and fired several prime ministers under this influence. On the last day of the twentieth century Uranus was exactly squaring the Russian Sun, and he made his final surprising move and a masterful exit. Saturn and Uranus continue to harass the Russian government right through the next election, with the nation’s first Uranus Return scheduled for March 26, 2000, the day of the presidential election. Coincidentally, Saturn at that time will be exactly opposite the Russian Sun.

Vladimir Putin (born October 7, 1952) is well placed to win Russia’s election. His Libran diplomatic skills were in full force last week when he assured the world that “Freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of mass media, property rights—all those basic elements of a civilized society will be safely protected by the state.”

(NewsScope’s Russian correspondent Boris Izraitel reports Putin’s birth time as 1:00 am in Petrograd, as forwarded from Moscow astrologer Sergey Klimov. This gives him a 14 degree Leo Ascendant, the exact place of December 31, 1999’s Pallas-Uranus opposition. In addition, Jupiter turning direct  in his Tenth House reflects an assumption of power. The birth time should be considered speculative.)

The Global Village Safely Enters the New Millennium

Time zone by time zone the global village entered the third millennium with no major computer glitches to bring the entire system down. A virtual, collective sigh of relief was heard throughout cyberspace, and in retrospect observers everywhere mused whimsically on the hype about an event no more dangerous than an odometer rollover.

The astrological messages were mixed, making accurate forecasts difficult. Transiting Uranus, the planet governing technology, was precisely, to-the-minute trine the U.S. Saturn. This showed that the institutional framework (Saturn) would successfully make the Y2K transition. Then, transiting Jupiter was at its most powerful by being stationary and sextile the U.S. Moon, ushering in a spectacular wave of prosperity and consumer confidence. (Editor's note: WolfStar uses the Scorpio rising U.S. chart.)

The wild card, the planetary cycle that no one really was sure about, was the conjunction between Chiron and Pluto. After all, the last time these two were conjunct was at the height of World War II, so the precedent was unsettling. Chiron’s association with vulnerability and psychological, even physical, pain seemed amplified by Pluto’s affinity with power plays, terrorism and catastrophe.

However, if we see Chiron’s motivation as bridging the personal with the collective, and Pluto as the influence of an individual or powerful faction on the collective, then these two have done their job well. On January 1, 2000 all the individuals and peoples of Spaceship Earth fully realized their interconnectivity and interdependence. We are all vulnerable, and we are all one.

Albert Einstein, Person of the Century

Who else but a Pisces would show us that time is much stranger than it seems? Albert Einstein, selected as Time Magazine’s “Person of the Century,” was the twentieth century’s leading intellectual, humanitarian, and, according to some laid-back fans, the first hippy.

Einstein was born on March 14, 1879 (at 11:30 am, Ulm, Germany) with his imaginative Pisces Sun empowered by favorable aspects to both Mars and Pluto. A Mercury-Saturn conjunction in pioneering Aries gives his active mind discipline and order, allowing him to take his insight of how God would make the universe and translate it into mathematical codes.

The most prominent placement in Einstein’s horoscope is not a planet, but an asteroid. Vesta right on the Ascendant describes the physicist’s nearly religious devotion to his work to the exclusion of everything else. Vesta is further emphasized because she has the two closest aspects in the chart (a semi-square or 45 degree aspect to Pluto, plus a square to Pallas Athena). The links to Pluto and Pallas confer penetrating perceptions and perhaps an obsessive drive to understanding the universe.

Einstein’s theories were first demonstrated during the solar eclipse on May 29, 1919 when the light from a nearly occulted star was seen to bend at twice the expected rate due to the Sun’s gravity. This solar eclipse took place at the same zodiacal location as the 1892 Neptune-Pluto conjunction (aligned with the U.S. Uranus) which political astrologers see as initiating the modern age of technology. The same eclipse featured Uranus exactly opposite Einstein’s Uranus, and brought him overnight celebrity status.