January 12, 2004
Jim Lewis and Ken Irving: NASO Lecture, Tucson 1978
Ken Irving: Among the scores of possible USA charts, most of which center around July 4th and the Declaration of Independence, there is one which is based on an event that happened on July 6, 1775. Some years ago, back in the early '60s in the magazine Spica, which came out of Great Britain and was edited by Brigadier Roy Firebrace, articles began appearing on what was very modestly called the true horoscope of the United States. The fact that it was for July 6, 1775 did not seem to make much sense to me at first, until I learned that on that date there was a declaration of war by the Colonies against the Crown.
Before explaining some of the historical circumstances of the chart, let me give you some examples of just how amazing the chart itself really is. One good illustration of this can be seen in the story of how this partnership came about. I had been writing a column on mundane astrology in American Astrology, and in that column had been using the chart on a testing basis for a couple of years. I wanted to see what a map of it would look like, so I sent Jim the data—July 6, 1775, 11 a.m. local mean time, Philadelphia—and didn't even tell him what it was, as a matter of fact. Someone there must have told him what it was, however, as it came back labeled USA, but it also arrived with a letter from Jim saying simply, “I'm absolutely converted. This is the most amazing thing I've ever seen…”
Jim Lewis: What is it, I wanted to know. At some point I will be passing out copies of the Astro*Carto*Graphy map and you'll see what I was so impressed about.
Ken: That's just to let you know that it's that impressive, folks. Now as I said, most USA charts are centered around the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. There are lots of debates about this date because for one thing the actual Declaration of Independence was approved on July 2nd and the final draft of the document itself was approved on July 4th. What they were voting on was the piece of paper and the words which explained the action they had taken approving a declaration on July 2nd. After it was drafted and approved, some people signed it immediately and others didn't, though by August 2nd they had all the signatures on it. Because of that, there are lots of people dissatisfied not only with what time of day the Declaration was voted on, and who signed it when, but also about the fact that there's a range of about a month when the Declaration was being discussed and signed.
That was part of the reason Helen Boyd started out on her search to see if there was anything before 1776, especially since the Revolutionary War was actually going on for quite a while before that. The Battle of Lexington happened in April of 1775, for example. [April 19, 1775, circa 5:00 A.M. LMT, at 71W14, 42N26 - KI, 2004] Through her digging, by going through the journals of the First and Second Continental Congresses she found out that on July 6, 1775 in the course of the Second Continental Congress, they voted on a declaration of war. It really was a declaration of war—it said we don't like the King, we don't like what he's doing to us and we're taking up arms to defend ourselves and our property and our homes against him. This was duly sent off to London, as if the King didn't already know they were at war. One passage in the document reads, “In our own native land in defense of the freedom that is our birth right and which we ever enjoyed until the late violation of it for the protection of our property acquired solely by the honest industry of our forefathers and ourselves against actual violence we have taken up arms.”
In Helen Boyd's opinion, despite the fact that the declaration of war itself makes no mention of the dissolution of all ties between Crown and Colonies as the Declaration of Independence did, it seems apparent that those who drafted this document were already thinking and acting in those terms. They had, after all, already taken up arms and said in effect, this it, we're certain of it and we're going to stick with it until this conflict is resolved in some way. This is the basic rationale underlying the chart.
In my part of this talk I will concentrate on simple configurations involving the Sun and the Moon. The Sun and the Moon in a national chart are indicative of two very basic principles about a country, and thus deal directly with what happens to it and why it does the things it does. Traditionally in mundane astrology, the Sun indicates the head of state, the government and more generally than that it indicates the rule of law and courts. When the Sun in a national chart or a mundane chart of any sort is stimulated by progression or transit, it brings events or historical periods which center around the people and the institutions that control and define the nation, its purpose and its goals. The most obvious of these are the President, the legislature and the courts, as well as the interaction among those various branches of government.
The Moon is traditionally identified as simply “the people,” and thus represents something less tangible, less obvious, than the Sun. Fundamentally, it indicates the actions and reactions to events of the nation as a whole, in a subjective way. There is somewhat of a conflict between what the Sun represents and what the Moon represents, so you'll often find that while periods of history indicated by solar transits and progressions deal with government changes, periods indicated by lunar configurations are concerned with changes that come from the ground up—for example when there are riots, efforts to impeach people, and so forth.
Where the Sun is concerned, I'll be dealing with progressions. In The True Horoscope of the United States, in which Helen Boyd outlined the reasons she and Firebrace were impressed with this chart, she uses sidereal lunar returns and so on, but I will be dealing with other indicators and events than those she discusses. I was very impressed with the examples in her book, but I thought that the chart ought to work with other techniques and events if it had real validity. For example, one obvious facet of U.S. history is the fact that we have had four Presidential assassinations and nine Presidential deaths in office. Since, as I just explained, the Sun is supposed to indicate the head of state, you would think that the natal or progressed Sun in this chart would be active around the time of these assassinations.
If you look at this period of time, from the middle of the Civil War to about 1870, you'll see first of all that the country was divided, fighting amongst itself; and then the head of state was assassinated, and after that is a period during Reconstruction when the Congress was essentially trying to take over the government. They made a power play, subduing the courts in a way that made them ineffective, and then they maneuvered the man who succeeded Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, into compromising himself before the law in order to get rid of him since he was not going along with their program. So to summarize: The country is polarized, the president is assassinated, one branch of government tries to force the others out of the picture.
If you compare the two times surrounding these two events, you will see there are many similarities. For example, first the civil rights era and the McCarthy era stirred up and polarized people and then the President was assassinated. After that, during a period which people later called the Imperial Presidency, one branch of government essentially tried to subdue the others. Lyndon Johnson worked the Congress so far into a hole on Vietnam, that in effect Congress was stripped of its power to declare war. To me, indicators such as these for times such as these are very basic. If you don't find this kind of simple indicator linked to major events, then the chart probably is not radical.
Now to consider some progressions. As I mentioned, when Kennedy was assassinated, the progressed Saturn was sitting right on top of the U.S. natal Moon. That's a very basic, impressive influence—textbook, classic. Allowing an orb of about a degree, Saturn began to come up on this aspect in the late '40s, it was exact in about 1960, and it's still there. That was the period when the Cold War began, which was followed by the McCarthy Era, and then the civil rights movement, so it's as if we haven't had any time to rest for the last thirty years. We've been constantly changing and rearranging things, and destroying older institutions. For instance, consider the role the CIA and the FBI used to have and then look where they are now. They've essentially been gutted, which is a Moon-Saturn thing.
Consider another instance of this kind of shake-up which is given in Helen Boyd's book. On the date of what was called the Saturday Night Massacre, when Nixon was trying to save his hide by firing everyone in the Justice Department, transiting Uranus was in a dead conjunction with the U.S. natal Moon, which again had that progressed Saturn already on top of it. [Official announcement of the “massacre” was made by the White House October 21, 1973, 8:45 P.M. EDT - KI, 2004] So again you had Uranus-Saturn-Moon which is the kind of aspect that I think of as a furniture-buster, a house cleaner, something that comes into play when you're really depressed by some situation and bent on solving it.
As I remember that night, I was having dinner with some people and the TV was on and a bulletin came on detailing what Nixon had done in the White House, we were ready to march to Washington right then to tell Nixon he didn't have any right to be there. No matter what anyone's politics were, a lot of people were really upset about what he did. And the kinds of actions they were willing to take is shown by the fact that whole impeachment process. The good news in respect to this Saturn to Moon aspect, by the way, is that progressed Saturn on the natal Moon continues until at least 2021, which is as far as my ephemeris goes.
Up to this time I have specifically avoided talking about the chart itself. One thing really notable about it, depending on what your political views are is that I think there's a case to be made—if you note the rising Saturn and Mars—that as good a country as the U.S. is, and as many times as we've passed up the chance to build an empire or to crush somebody under our boot heel, we are still really basically a violent country. We have a national hobby of assassinating a political leader every few years, talking about gun control for a while forgetting about that, assassinating another leader, and so on.
Aside from this, we seem to have a very macho image of
ourselves—look at what's on television. It's called “action entertainment,” meaning that you see how many shootings and beatings and car wrecks you can cram into an hour and a half. I mean we really are a violent country. Something which brought that home to me is a passage from Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, which I found excerpted under the title “My Anchorage” in Henry Miller on Writing. This quotation struck me almost as defining that Mars and Saturn. Miller says, “No greater humiliation it seems to me was meted out to any man than to Montezuma. No race was ever so ruthlessly wiped out than the American Indian. No land was ever raped in the bloody way that California was raped by the gold diggers. I blush to think of our origins. Our hands are steeped in blood and crime, and there is no letup to the slaughter and the pillage as I discovered traveling through the length and breadth of the land. Down to the closest friend, every many is a potential murderer.”
With that jolly thought, I will turn things over to Jim and let him explain his way out of that one.
Jim: That's a hard act to follow.
I noticed a few things on the map, too, which I'd like to point out to you. I'm going to approach this in a slightly different way than Ken has, and then after a while I'll pass out the ACG maps and show you what that's all about and explain it. I should explain to those of you who don't know that an ACG map is a map of the world done for the moment and entity or person is born, and the lines across the map indicate the places where the various planets were rising or setting or at the Midheaven or the IC—in this case at the moment the USA was born. For example you will see that there's a line labeled VE ASC, which of course means Venus Ascendant, going through California. This means that at the moment this declaration of war was made in 1775 the planet Venus was bodily on the horizon in California. When I say something like Mars Midheaven is “over” a certain part of the world, I mean that when the Declaration of War was approved by the Continental Congress that Mars was directly overhead in that part of the world, as shown on this map by a line labeled MA MH.
Also, I have noticed a few progressions, and Ken has noticed a couple of others, that apply particularly to this map. I hope it will be clear what I'm speaking of when I refer to a progressed planet not drawn on this map by telling you where they were. Looking at the map, and considering what Ken said about violence, I would add sex, drugs and violence as indicated by Mars, Saturn, Neptune—and you only have to read our newspapers to see that we have sort of an identification hang-up with sex, drugs and violence. Notice that also, both tropically and sidereally, many of these planets are in Virgo. Virgo is a factor as it indicates to me the Puritan ethic as it tries to deal with the reality of sex, drugs and violence. As a consequence, this becomes a national identity crisis. This of course is shown by the fact that these three planets are clustering around the Ascendant.
The Sun in the Midheaven is, I think, fairly obvious for a nation that has indeed become imperial and has established itself as a world force. The Jupiter-Uranus in the 9th house in Gemini is, I think, our incredible ingenuity, and also the cleverness with which we build machines and travel around. Of course the greatest accomplishment of American civilization to date is the freeway system and the whole car thing. It's absolutely incredible to think that a nation such as ours has brought into being a freeway system of the sort that we have, covering thousands of miles, and has furnished cars to all of its population in order to make use of it. And I think that's perhaps our Jupiter-Uranus in Gemini in the 9th house. I'm speaking tropically, of course.
The obvious factors of this map are those, but you can take your own look at this map and see how it fits. Also I think the Moon in Libra is good.
Looking through the country to see where these lines are, we have a Jupiter Midheaven over Texas and the Midwest and I think that's the whole Rotarian Midwestern complacency that those of us who have lived in the Midwest and Texas are aware of. It is perhaps the dominating character there. It also bisects the heart of the Bible Belt. More interesting is the fact that over on the East coast we have Mars on the Ascendant over Richmond, Virginia and throughout the area in which the Civil War was fought. You'll see that that Mars Ascendant line goes through Washington and Richmond, Virginia.
It might be of interest for you to note that at the time of the Civil War, the progressed Midheaven of the 1775 chart was in conjunction with that natal Mars, bringing two factors into play. First Mars is on the Ascendant directly over Richmond and Washington at the time the signed that Declaration of War. Then a hundred years later, during our Civil War, the progressed Midheaven of the natal chart—that is the 0 Cancer thing—at the rate of about a degree a year had progressed until it was in conjunction with that Mars thus activating that potential. That to me seems to me a definite confirmation that there must be some validity to this chart.
Moreover, of course, you would see that some years later, the Progressed Midheaven conjoins the natal Saturn, which is only six degrees further, and 1868 was the year of the impeachment of Andrew Johnson that Ken referred to before, the time at which there was a heavy activation of the national Saturn. I also called your attention to the fact that the Mars Ascendant line goes through Cuba, which does not bode well for our relationship with our bearded brother in Havana.
And then looking at the Mars Descendant line, it goes through Vietnam and of course it is very near the Saturn Descendant line, which also goes through that area. I don't think it would be easy to think of anything more fitting of our entanglement in Vietnam than Mars Descendant and Saturn Descendant. That is the area of the world in which our particular aggressive, dominating instincts just did not work as we thought they would.
So that shows the way in which the ACG map justifies this horoscope. That is to say, the ACG map is good for the entire duration of the existence of this nation as an integrated whole and these lines do seem to indicate places at which we have had certain crucial national experiences at certain times and they seem to indicate extremely well the areas where we had our most intense wars. They also designate the areas in our own country where certain geographical and spiritual realities exist.
The last line I would like to call to your attention is to me the most dramatic: The Pluto Midheaven line goes right through Hiroshima. Hiroshima is at a longitude of 132 E 27 and the national Pluto is at 133 E 31. That is less than a degree of orb. Thus at the time they signed that Declaration of War, the planet of force majeure was on the Midheaven at a place where it would become activated 169 years later. Pluto is a singleton in the Marc Edmund Jones technique, meaning it is standing all by itself in one hemisphere of the chart, opposite and quite distinct from everything else.
Of course it was only discovered in 1930, which to my way of thinking means that the consciousness of the things that Pluto stands for only came to public attention around that time. And I date the change of this country from what it was to what it has become now as having begun in about 1930, and the basic symbol of that change was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. From that point on, we can never ever again say we're innocent. Before that we could say that we'd always been in the right, or that we'd always been on the right side. There may be justifications that can be offered for the bombing, but there's certainly going to be a question in everyone's mind forever about whether or not there was really any reason to have incinerated all those people.
To me, the coming into being of consciousness by Pluto shown by this chart, by Harry Truman's chart and by the chart for the first atomic bomb test is symbolized by the fact that we matured as a nation when we found out that we could indeed do harm. It is interesting also to note that in 1968 the progressed Sun of the natal U.S. horoscope—the Sun that begins up here in the 10th house—by 1968, it had progressed to a conjunction of natal Pluto. This was the period that Ken was speaking about as showing great evidence of national disillusion, the riots and things like that.
You can see that some of the reason for the violent change was a reaction to the Pluto factor. I think that the atomic bomb is a far more significant factor…I grew up in the '50s, when everyday they'd blow a whistle and we'd all jump under our desks and why? Well, because they might be atomic bombing us tomorrow. So I tend to have a fixation on the topic. On the other hand, it is a rather formidable reality in our present world and to me it seems to be a very basic reality in our national consciousness and our national chart, as it is in that of Japan.
In 1968, this reality that came into existence in 1945 changed the definition the United States had for itself, as with the progression of the Sun to natal Pluto, we suddenly began to feel the need for a new morality, and to think that we had to change our entire attitude toward the world. For that reason, there was a radical change in the national consciousness, which I think continues. Finally, a few more things to add some more flesh to Ken's ideas about the various progressions during the Cold War and other periods. If you take the ACG map and progress the Mars Midheaven line, which was over Berlin, it will move eastward across the map at a rate of approximately 3/4 of a degree a year. In a certain number of years, it would reach various other places. As it turns out, accurately calculated, in 1945, at the bombing of Hiroshima the progressed Mars was right over Hiroshima and was therefore within orb of conjunction of national Pluto. In fact, the actual figures are that Mars had progressed to a longitude of 132 E 31, keeping in mind that Hiroshima is 132 E 27. Four seconds of arc difference. And the national Pluto is 133 E 31, less than a degree away from both of those. Certainly there is a significance there for those who will see.
Moreover, consider the conjunction of Saturn and Neptune, transiting Saturn and Neptune that Ken referred to before, on our national Moon during the McCarthy era. Look where our national Moon is on the Midheaven in the ACG map—it goes right through Moscow, so that the entire freaked out paranoia of the early '50s, with the Saturn and Neptune transit, was directed against the Russians. It's also interesting that our national Moon goes through Israel, but we'll get to that in a little while. But to me an incredible justification for this map lies in the fact that during the period of the most intense national paranoia we've ever had, the fear was directed at the country whose capital lies directly under the Moon of this national chart. The Moon of course represents the way you are sensitized to things that are coming in, your feelings, your uncertainties, your unconscious mind. And indeed it's almost as if the Communist government of Russia became sort of a shadow image or our own, a bogeyman that was almost unbelievable and incomprehensible outside of ourselves, just as a negative lunar image often becomes under the stress of transits.
Moving on to the future, about the only thing that I can see here is that it is significant that in the near future, transiting Pluto is going to conjoin that same natal Moon in a couple of years, 1979 and 1980. The Moon of course is in 20° Libra tropically and Pluto will be there in a couple of years. And that should see a radical change, an upheaval either in the Israeli thing or the Russian thing, or most likely the two of them. At the same time, the progressed Saturn is still sitting there, which should complexify the matter even further.
Finally, as a cheerful note, I though that after all this rather depressing stuff there is one little thing. Notice where Venus is in the natal chart, at 26 degrees tropically, and that of course goes through California, which stands for our national awareness of beauty and pleasant things of that sort. It also, I believe, stands for our money although certain people disagree with me on that. But I believe that Venus basically can be seen as a symbol for money and of course during the time that Saturn in transit has been going back and forth in the last degrees of Leo, the dollar has hit all sorts of new lows and everyone is saying it's not worth anything anymore. Also, the movie industry has been having all its terrible problems and I would like to think that as Saturn moves into Virgo and leaves our Venus alone, this country will be able to enjoy itself and our money will be welcome in foreign capitals again.
Posted by Ken Irving at January 12, 2004 12:31 AM. © 2004