“Music,” it’s said, “soothes the savage beast.” And if some 20000 who attended the nearly packed Manchester Arena last night in the United Kingdom had been able to tell you after the show was over, perhaps all but one of them might have believed that old, misquoted adage. As I write, the toll is at 22 dead, some 59 injured, and the number of deaths are expected to rise.
But as much a contradiction as the last paragraph is since that one soul obviously wasn’t soothed at all, the quote itself is also not right–at least not from what William Congreve had intended when his 451-page play was published in 1797. The passage begins:
“Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast,
To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.
I’ve read, that things inanimate have mov’d,
And, as with living Souls, have been inform’d,
By Magick Numbers and persuasive Sound.”
Last night, in Manchester, it appears neither breast nor beast were soothed as the hour closed in on those horrific events and stole the lives of unsuspecting men, women and children who, as young as 8 years old, sat in the audience. In an instant, the cheers of Ariana Grande’s fans melded into screams of terror and throngs bolting for the exits. Nearly two dozen have lost their lives, close to five dozen more lay in various stages of injury in eight area hospitals. Saffie Roussos didn’t make it. She was 8, a beautiful child with straight brown hair and a sweet, shy look of innocence still on her face.
Manchester-local astrologer, Leah Whitehorse, posted her early reactions today in “The Astrology of the Manchester Terrorist Attack May 2017,” and I cannot and will not write what I had begun last night without acknowledging and honoring her wisdom as well as her pain. She is a dear friend whom I love and respect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdJ8TXpFLdw
Still, I’d like to lend my own perspectives especially since I’d begun to gather my resource material for this article last night. I was simply too spent on the research and emotion overtaking me to write then. While I live on what is fondly called by many Brits, and I’ve adopted the phrase, “across the pond” from where this took place last night in what is apparently one of Europe’s largest and most well-established arenas, I can relate to the shock and complete devastation experienced in Manchester. Of course, this doesn’t diminish events that have taken place before–in New York City, Paris, Nice, Brussels, Madrid, Mumbai, Peshawar and in so many other places we’ve seen in the midst of the nightmares associated with terrorism in the last nearly 20 years now. I know, it doesn’t seem possible, does it? In September, we mark 16 years since the attack on the World Trade Center. It remains vividly in so many minds.
The chart is downright remarkable! In all these years, I’ve never seen a Western below-the-horizon dominated chart with a first quadrant emphasis before! Or at least I can’t seem to recall where I have. Normally, we see a tendency to have the Eastern hemisphere with the first or fourth quadrants, the Western with the 2nd or 3rd; but here we’re looking at a chart where this appeared to be selfishly driven. Not a single planet or luminary falls in the 4th quadrant at all! I also usually fall shy of calling an Eastern dominated chart “selfish” but this one points so obviously to that first quadrant. The focus is on the “look at me, and see me as I destroy the lives of all of you!” This wasn’t “merely” an attack on those inside the arena. This was an attack on all of Manchester, and on all of the United Kingdom. I have to wonder if this was motivated as much by a wish on his part to tell people he felt different in his having been born and raised in Manchester, or if he had indeed been self-radicalized. One might presume 22-year-old Salman Abedi actually had known many of the people who were injured last night or someone in their families.
The first house focuses on Self and one’s relationship to oneself and the world around him/her. While my thoughts are laced with compassion in what I’m about to say, that doesn’t mean I understand or condone the actions the attacker used, of course. But if Abedi was one of few from his ethnic and cultural background, it’s possible he felt so different, he was actually trying to make a stand. However, the biggest challenge in that last sentence lies in his being in a highly diverse community in which people from all walks of life, all races, all religions come together and live in harmony, respecting and supporting each other. That was obvious on CBS TV Evening News with Scott Pelley tonight. Pelley was in Manchester with some CBS correspondents, one of whom interviewed a local man appearing to be of Middle Eastern descent. As they sat in his van, the man pointed to some young girls on their way home. “That one could have been my daughter,” he said.
So while I can ask who is to say whether that stand was in anger and frustration, or in his hopes of aligning himself with those who shared his roots, I stop short of speculating on my having learned about Manchester and its marvelously diverse community.
Salman Abedi used what have been described as nail bombs. Consider the symbolism then of Martian rage when placed on the 7th house cusp. In Gemini, it can be verbal–and it was in the sense of the venue he chose to destroy. But in opposition to Saturn on the Ascendant, this particular aspect offers a greater likelihood of his decision to use nail bombs. Mars in hard aspect to Saturn is often described as cruelty. We think of these two planetary bodies combined as cold, hard, cutting. In the right houses, it can be an ideal combination for a surgeon who needs to perform precise operations to save lives. In the wrong ones, like this obviously was, they become the tools of destruction.”
As I said, “look at me, and see me…!” For me, the thought can be laced with compassion for the person because I understand being markedly “different” in some way to the world in which one has been brought up. That isn’t enough. Not enough feeling of separateness, not enough alienation. There isn’t enough reason or even rationale I could hear to convince me of his thoughts in harming one or so many individuals much less in wreaking havoc, terror, injury and death.on thousands who probably hadn’t even known anyone like this.
The 2nd house intercepted South Node, now forming a 23-minute partile semisextile to 3rd house Chiron in the explosions chart forms a Resonant Blooming Undecaquartisextile (undecaquartisextile = 165°) in the 8th house at 13 Virgo 24 in a 42-minute partile opposition to Neptune. There’s also a Blooming Undecaquartisextile forming in the Chiron semisextile to 4th house Uranus, resolving at 12 Libra 23 in a mere 1°18′ of orb to conjunct the chart ruler Jupiter Rx in the 9th house! Jupiter as well opposes 3rd house Venus in Aries, forming a tight trine to the Jupiter-ruled Ascendant. The scene is clearly established: The crowd, thrilled with the performance, was relaxed and thoroughly enamored with the night. They were like lambs being led to the slaughter.
Triwheel – UK 1801 chart inside, attack middle, UK 1922 outside
