What do these events have in common?

Answer: they all coincided with oppositions formed by Saturn and Pluto.

Saturn-Pluto oppositions happen in a cycle averaging 33.8 years, or about three times a century. Invariably this pattern coincides with clashes between a status quo and a new or radical movement. What radical new and what status quo, and how intense the clash, depends on how the opposition impacts sensitive points in a given natal chart.

Another way to describe the mood of a Saturn-Pluto opposition is this: All the we’s are right and all their they’s are evil. An especially adverse angle formed by this opposition to a nativity’s chart can raise a lot of partisan passion. The 1960s Saturn-Pluto opposition involved Uranus, and created a T-square with the US Mars, which is square the US Neptune.

Shortly after 9/11/01 when the Bush administration and corporate-owned media were beating the war drums, Bush used the word “crusade” to characterize this war he then envisioned, and which is now very much with us. It’s now clear that his intention was to morph al Qaeda attackers of 9/11 into Saddam Hussein. This propaganda spin succeeded. An estimated 70 percent of the American population came to believe that Saddam and Iraq were somehow connected to the attack of 9/11 when in fact they were not.

If you care to read the bloody history of the Crusade launched by the Roman Catholic Pope about a thousand years previous to Bush, you’ll find that a similar propaganda campaign roused the European public then. Another odd coincidence: Crusaders used the severed heads of Arabs as cannon balls lobbed over the walls of Arab cities back then; Iraq insurgents now sever the heads of Americans and throw lob them as video images.

Many Americans are irked that the Iraq War is being compared to the Vietnam War. For all the differences, there are striking similarities. However, during any Saturn-Pluto opposition, it’s not always immediately clear what radical new is threatening what status quo. The Saturn-Pluto opposition of 1931 saw the German Third Reich’s genocide of Jews; in the US, the Roosevelt Administration pushed socially beneficial legislation to uplift the working class. Both radically changed previous status quo, one for worse, the other for better.

Construction on the World Trade Towers was begun about the same time the Vietnam War kicked into high gear, April of 1966. Many saw the towers as an assault on the New York skyline. At that time Saturn was in Pisces opposite Pluto in Virgo, and Pluto was conjunct Uranus, with both conjunct the US natal Neptune, which squares the warrior energy of the US natal Mars in Gemini.

Coincidentally enough, on 9/11/2001, Saturn was in Gemini, square where it had been in 1966, and Pluto was opposite in Sagittarius, square where it had been in 1966. (See Chart 2)

My guess is that you’d have to search astronomical calculations back many millennia to find a previous time when a Uranus-Pluto conjunction in Virgo was opposite Saturn in Pisces.

The joke is that if you lived the Sixties you can’t remember what happened because you were either zapped on drugs or clashing with police over Jim Crow or the Vietnam War, or other injustices, and in any case, things were happening so fast and furiously that no one had any idea how it would all shake out. The unprecedented became the norm, it seemed, and you didn’t know today what to expect tomorrow. That was Uranus’ influence at play.

Some good things emerged from the 1960s: civil rights for African Americans, an end to the draft, a new sense of women’s rights, gay rights and other movements to overturn long established injustices and prejudices. Inevitably, conservatives fought back, this time with more subtle means. And slowly but surely gains made by the working class following the Saturn-Pluto opposition of the 1930s and the 1960s are being undermined.

From an astrological perspective it’s the surprising geometry of the latest Saturn-Pluto opposition, combined with the 1960s pattern that seems to be reprising memories of those years. Then as now we were caught up in a foreign war which, unlike World War II, not all Americans believed was justified, and some believed defrauded the American people.

Americans were also split over the Spanish-American War coinciding with the Saturn-Pluto opposition of 1898, and during the Reconstruction years coinciding with the opposition of 1866 following the Civil War when the first Civil Rights Bill was passed; Southern Whites smoldered in resentment and imposed local Jim Crow laws to hold Blacks in sharecropper poverty.

An Abundance of Coincidences

Rational scientific types scoff at astrology as being nonsensical soothsaying or outright superstition. Few to none of the scoffers ever studied astrology. Conversely, some astrologers would like to show that astrology is as scientific as many accepted sciences. But astrology does not lend itself to the binary, cause/effect thinking that goes into the contemporary scientific method.

For millennia, humans have been trying to figure out why certain planetary angles coincide with certain types of events in the human realm, but so far no one has come up with a theory that is fully accepted by modern science. Personally, I think this is a good thing. Astrology is far more ancient and enduring than modern science and chances are that it will outlast the belief system which now constitutes the scientific method.

One reason astrology won’t fit into a scientific paradigm is this: although planetary cycles repeat with rhythmic regularity, they do so within a context of ever-changing patterns formed by the other planets, against a backdrop of the cosmos surrounding our Solar system which is always changing. The Solar System “clock” is a lot more complex than our earthly clock.

Yet these repeating planetary patterns continue to present us with an abundance of coincidences, as they have for millennia. How many coincides does it take to make a scientific correlation?

Or to come at it from a different angle, what can we predict from the pattern formed by Saturn, Uranus and Pluto during the mid-1960s (building of the Twin Towers and Vietnam War) concerning our present time, following the Saturn-Pluto opposition of 2001 and conflating the Iraq War and so-called “war on terror.” (As if the mightiest army in the world can defeat an emotion: Neptune’s impact.)

Now as then (the 1960s), there is a growing clash building between the masses and the authorities. This is happening inside the US, where Congress is passing laws that enable big corporations to plunder the American public, outsourcing to cheap labor and importing more cheap labor from south of the border. This clash between workers and corporatized governments is happening around the planet, in just about every nation state and region. But it’s likely to manifest most dramatically here, in the USA, because both Saturn-Pluto oppositions-—the 1960s and the 2001-—hit sensitive spots in the USA’s natal birth chart: the Mars-Neptune square.

Astrology can’t tell us exactly how this latest radical new versus status quo will manifest in our human reality, but it can give us indications of when. One key to when is the transit of Uranus, because it was part of the Saturn-Pluto opposition of the 1960s. Another key is the US natal Mars-Neptune square, which was impacted during the 1960s and again in 2001. So, when can we look for a climax to the rush of new-against-established Saturn-Pluto-opposition events that commenced with the attack of 9/11/2001?

My guesstimate is around 2008 because that is when transiting Uranus will arrive at 22 Pisces, forming a 180-degree opposition with the US Neptune, and square the US Mars. The upcoming Uranus affliction to the US Mars-Neptune square will make three exact hits: June 2 and July 21, 2008 and March 9, 2009.

I’ve chosen to show the third exact hit in Chart 3 because at that time, Saturn in Virgo and Uranus in Pisces will be opposite where they were in the mid-1960s. Pluto will have moved into Capricorn by this time, coming opposite the US cluster of planets in Cancer.