A fun spin on serious cosmic stuff! Wendell C. Perry has 40 years experience studying astrology and how it impacts personalities & relationships. He's written two books & published articles in astrology magazines. He's happy to share this website so that you, too, can have fun with astrology to help you in everyday life!
I have to admit I was a little nervous when Joe Biden set out of his trip to Europe, with stopovers for the G-7, tea with the Queen and a summit with Vladimir Putin. I was nervous because right now both transiting Saturn and Uranus, which square one another in the sky, are both making hard aspects to President Biden’s natal Mars. A transit by either of these planets can be challenging. Getting both at the same time typically signals a very difficult period.
With that in mind, I was actually pleased with the somewhat lackluster outcome of this trip. No, the G-7 meeting didn’t bring us a major breakthrough on climate change and, yes, the summit with Putin was more about each leader taking stock of the other than anything substantial but, considering the damaging potential of these two transits in Biden’s chart, I’ll take it.
Of course, when we consider what’s waiting for Joe Biden once he gets back to Washington, this European tour might seem like a vacation. The situation on our border with Mexico remains a crisis, the deadly duo of Manchin and McConnell seem posed to slap down any progressive legislation that enters the Senate and we’re averaging a mass shooting every 24 hours. Reestablishing America’s place in the international community might be the easiest part of Joe Biden’s job.
Joe Biden wasn’t the only Joe to get a big promotion in the 2020 election. The same vote that put Biden in the White House made Joe Manchin the most powerful person in the U.S. Senate. Some might say he’s the most powerful man in the country since, with the Senate evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, his vote has become the deciding factor in many of the initiatives put forth by the Biden administration.
Manchin in a rare creature in today’s politics. He’s a conservative Democrat. He’s also a politician who is more attuned to the needs and opinions of his constituents than the dogma of his party. Back in the day, congress was full of conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans and they made deals in which party principles got bent but stuff got done. In the intensely partisan atmosphere of today’s political world, however, that kind of deal-making is rare.
Astrologically speaking, Joe Manchin is also an outlier. Born in 1947, he part of the Baby Boom Generation born with Pluto in Leo and Neptune in Libra. This is the generation that invented extreme partisanship. It is a generation full of people consumed with the idea that they had to save the world but sharply divided in their opinion of what they were saving it from. It is also a generation for which adhering to one’s principles and ideals matters much more than getting stuff done.
I had hoped that the prominence of Jupiter in the May 26 Full Moon and eclipse chart would help renew our optimism. (Click here to see the article and the chart.) Certainly, as it becomes more and more apparent that we are exiting the darkest days of the pandemic, that has been the case. However, I also warned that the way that Mars was intertwined with the Sun and Moon indicated that there would be no relief from the gun violence that has plagued us for so long. Unfortunately, that also turned out to be true.
The other thing that concerned me about the Full Moon chart was the placement of Neptune in the Tenth Housesquare Mercury and Venus. Neptune muddies the waters and gives us false hopes. We’ve seen evidence of this in the way that the initiatives of the Biden administration have been stymied by opposition in the Senate and the conviction of some Republicans that if you count the same votes enough times the results of the 2020 election will be different.
We’ve had some fun rectifying the horoscopes of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, but what’s the use of having such charts (speculative though they are) if we don’t also consider the event that is most associated with both of these men. That is the duel they fought on July 11, 1804 in Weehawken, New Jersey. (Click on Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr to see the speculative horoscopes.)
In terms of American history, this meeting of two of our founding fathers was not all that significant. Both Hamilton and Burr were both more or less spent as political factors by this time in their careers. Still, the mixture of fame and violence has fixed this duel in the public memory in a way that the more historic events of that period never will.
First, let’s compare the horoscopes of the two combatants. (Click here to see a double chart with Aaron Burr’s speculative horoscope in the middle and Hamilton speculative horoscope in the outside ring.) The most noticeable thing about this double chart seems to confirm my rectification of Burr’s horoscope. Hamilton’s Pluto is directly on the Midheaven of Burr’s chart. Pluto represents a blockage and Aaron Burr had every reason to see Alexander Hamilton as blocking his career. When Burr and Thomas Jefferson were tied in the 1800 presidential election, Hamilton was instrumental in giving the edge to Jefferson. Then, in the 1803 race for governor of New York, Hamilton did all he could to see that Burr was defeated.
