The sixth month of the year commences this week. It is the time, when, due to our inclined planetary position, the rays of the Sun fall directly upon the northernmost area, making days longer and shortening the nights in the northern hemisphere. The growing Moon, showing half of her face, will be observable on the very first day of the month.
Saturn will be a major character in the month now beginning. On the central day of the period, having reached half its annual retrograde motion cycle of 140 days, while in the final stretch of his stay by Sagittarius, it will align perfectly with the Earth and the Sun. On that day, the ringed planet will be at its point closest to the Earth, making it easier for its symbolic qualities to be perceived with greater intensity.
For several millennia, and until Uranus was discovered 236 years ago, Saturn was considered to be the last of the planets, the farthest away from Earth and the Sun, the one that established the limits of our Universe. Attributed to Saturn are the characteristics that Roman mythology attributes to its homonymous divinity, as well as those attributed by the Greeks to Kronos, the titan who became the god of time, which castrated its father and ate its own children.
It is the celestial body representing the struggle for – and the exercise of – Power. It symbolizes control, status, authoritarian attitude, rigor, discipline, repression, despotism. Its seniority and command experience push it towards putting down any attempt of subversion, because its allies are Law and Order. It is identified with the performance of government functions and with the imposition of authority.
Because of Saturn’s prevailing conditions, everything connected with it tends to manifest itself more prominently. In the following months, when the Sun heads south, and until it reaches its southernmost point (December 21), we will witness significant alterations in the political life of the peoples and nations of the world. That moment —the December solstice— marks the passing of the ringed planet into its own sign, Capricorn, and it will do so in precise conjunction with the Sun.
The sign-change of a distant planet, as is the case this time with Saturn, has significant repercussions; but when it reaches the environment propitious to it (Capricorn) accompanied by the very Sun, its sequels will be more impacting. A saturnine winter-solstice like the one of next December had not happened in more than two centuries.
The opposition, next June 15, of Sun and Saturn on the Gemini-Sagittarius axis, determines the quality of the whole second half of this year, as regards the exercise of power. At the global level, a substantive change in different governments and states of the world, in the face of the new cycle of political foundations that should begin later this year, should come about.
May comes to an end, along with the opposition between Mars and Saturn, as an anteroom of what the alignment of the latter with the Earth and the Sun will be, an indicator of the climate of political confrontation of the second half. Strong controversies have already shown up in the political arena of the American continent. In Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and Venezuela, law enforcement has had to contain this week the fury unleashed by the ones opposing their policies and governmental efforts.
In the days to come, in the midst of this Mars-Saturn confrontation, and in times of great internal conflict within some of the states that lead that alliance, the chancellors of the American republics will attempt to agree on cornering the Venezuelan government. This leads one into thinking that the alleged intervention action will not cause immediately the effects sought after.
Mars represents the violence of the insurgent forces; and Saturn, those of the established order. That is the cosmic conflict raised these days. But legal and political action by a multilateral body such as the OAS, which represents governments, is not only contradictory, but would involve a self-subversive action with unforeseeable consequences, unrelated to the sidereal climate of this week.
June arrives in order to put the inhabitants of the planet in tune with the adaptation, necessary, to new schemes for looking at —and exercising— saturnity; i.e., to prepare ourselves for the times ahead: tottering governments, and the emergence of new ways and styles of imposing authority.
Translated by Jorge Pardo Febres-Cordero, Certified Public Translator (Spanish-English-Spanish) – [email protected]
Photo Credits: NASA’s Earth Observatory