Astrology and the Newtown Massacre
I’ve never been one of those astrologers who believes that human beings are fated to move in lock step with the changes in the sky. My mantra has always been that the aspects matter less than what we decide to do with the energy they bring us. So the fact that the mass murder in Newtown, CN occurred on a day that seemed relatively benign in astrological terms, didn’t totally surprise me.
Not that there weren’t some significant aspects on Dec. 14. Jupiter was almost within a degree of being in a quincunx aspect with Pluto. Pluto is certainly the planet we would associate with mass murder. It rules all the dark, obsessive cavities of the human soul as well as powers that rip control of our individual lives out of our hands. Meanwhile, Jupiter is the planet of release and expansion. But the quincunx is a minor aspect that many astrologers don’t even consider, so I doubt if anyone would have predicted such a dire occurrence as the Newtown massacre from this one aspect.
The other close aspect was a sextile between Saturn and Pluto. Traditionally, the sextile is an aspect of minor good fortune but when it involves two of astrology’s most notorious “bad guys” (Saturn and Pluto) that good fortune is bound to come with a lot of stress and conflict. I associate this aspect with “fiscal cliff” negotiations. It describes conditions that bubble ominously in the background and not a dramatic turn off events like what we saw in Newtown.
Of course, we still have the ongoing square between Uranus and Pluto. This aspect was within one degree when the shooting at the Sikh temple occurred on Aug. 5, 2012. It was also within a degree on July 20, 2012 when James Holmes opened fire in a crowded theater in Colorado and on July 22, 2011 with Behring Breivik carried out his murderous attacks in Norway. On Dec. 14, however, there were over four degrees of separation in this aspect between Uranus and Pluto so we would expect its intensity to be at low ebb. (The fact is that Uranus and Pluto won’t be more than five degrees away from 90 degrees of separation at any time until 2016.)
I would expect that one of the aspects I’ve described interacted significantly with some factor in horoscope of the perpetrator of the Newtown attack but that leaves open the question of what was happening with the 27 victims of the shooting. Did each one of them have a similar contact with one of these aspects and their individual horoscopes or was some other factor at work? Or is it just that with modern killing machines it is just as easy to kill 20 people as it is one? This is a question to which astrology offers no easy answer except to say that, when an individual decides to turn the energy of the cosmos toward creating mayhem, there is no predicting how much damage will be done.
