Sunday musings: Can we, should we, move past Charleston?

Normally a tragedy such as the one which just occurred in Charleston, in which 21-year old Dylann Roof, in the throes of the double transit of Saturn and Uranus I wrote of just this week, killed nine people worshipping in a church, would send me to the astrological chart to attempt to find a personality disorder that would explain how a person could commit such a heinous act.

The real tragedy is that these events are becoming so commonplace that there is barely time to profile so many criminals and murderers, and at this point it becomes evident that the illness is not just in the individual, but also in the society that feeds the illness of the individual and causes it to erupt into the collective conscious experience.  The racist spewings of Dylann Roof are not that different from what you will hear on Fox News nearly every day.  “Taking our country back” is a catchphrase that was often used during the 2012 election when conservative voters talked about taking the country back from the African American living in the White House.

There has been a drastic spike in mass shootings since 2000, and especially since 2007 (just before Pluto entered Capricorn and sent financial markets into a contraction that still reverberates today).   Between 2000 and 2006 there were 6.4 mass shootings a year.  Between 2007 and 2013 that number jumped to 16.4 mass shootings a year.  Mother Jones magazine has posted a comprehensive list of mass shootings in the US and you can see that in the 1980s there were one or two mass killings a year.  Shootings began to increase in the 1990s to two to three a year, and then we see a drastic increase to five in 1999, the year of the Columbine shootings.  During this time transiting Pluto was crossing the ascendant of the astrological chart for the United States and doing its job of bringing out the darkness of the collective unconscious.

Planetary transits, even of Saturn and Pluto, the two dark forces of the astrological pantheon, do not in themselves create murder and horrific events.  Their role is to enforce the need for Universal balance, and when the life of an individual OR of a nation is out of balance, events will occur in the outer world to draw our attention to the need for change.  When our children began murdering members of our society, we must cease our denial and explanations and realize that there is something very fundamentally wrong with our culture that needs immediate repair.  With Sagittarius rising in the US chart there is a tendency to want to believe only the best about the country – the myth of “American Exceptionalism” is at this point only a fantasy, and yet it appears to be the driving force for many political forces and only serves to keep us trapped in a web of delusion.

There is a lot of talk right now about forgiveness.  And there’s no doubt that carrying rage and resentment in one’s heart for a lifetime creates nothing but illness and misery.  But forgiveness will not correct the underlying karma of a nation trapped by its own mythology.  These murders in Charleston were committed by one very disturbed young person – that is absolutely true.  But it was an action that resonated in the hearts and minds of a large portion of mainstream America as we have witnessed nearly ever night over the past year as we watch the news.

Until the truth is allowed to emerge and real discourse and accountability can take place, the darkness will continue to rule this country.