iVillage

Astrologers tend to spend a lot time making gloomy predictions. It's almost a joke around our house: the astrological "apocalypse du jour." That nasty-looking August eclipse a while back was one of them. The current opposition of Saturn and Pluto has also generated a lot of fearful press. And of course we've got to give the fear-mongers a few points this time.

Probably we are all going to see the event chart for the Trade Tower destruction (9/11/01, Manhattan, "a few minutes before 9 AM") analyzed until we know it better than our own birthcharts. Like most disaster charts, it doesn't look all that sinister at first glance, although I'm sure we'll get plenty of Monday-morning quarterbacking on it.

The current Saturn/Pluto opposition is definitely serious: We're facing the hard, manifest reality (Saturn) of some deep, dark Plutonian wounds. We can expect those unresolved wounds (Pluto) to crystallize concretely (Saturn); to be "in our faces." But that planetary aspect is in effect over a long period of time. More unique to this particular timeframe, Mars is conjunct the Moon's South Node. That does imply war-karma coming home to roost, and effectively pinpoints this present period. (It also calls our attention forward to April-July '02, when the Nodes cross transiting Saturn and Pluto)

Going further, Saturn's rulership of the South Node leaps to mind, powerfully linking the dominant Saturn/Pluto structure to the underlying pattern of violent karma. Topping it off, the Moon was Void in late Gemini, but within the orbs of opposing Mars. Thus it acted as a trigger.

The strange fact of the Moon being Void usually suggests "nothing will come of this." At first, that seems implausible, but it does support the possibility that investigations prove ultimately inconclusive, and no "satisfying" target of revenge emerges. Another angle, for which I thank Jodie's sharp eyes, is that actions undertaken under a Void Moon tend to go nowhere -- and it was of course the terrorists themselves who undertook the action. This suggests that, while they succeeded at what they set out to do, in the end the Void Moon prevents them from accomplishing their larger goals. Their deeper aims will come to nothing here.