Let’s face it: We’ve turned the clocks back and we’ve wiped out 50 years of Civil Rights. We’ve gone mad, just as we did in the 1960s, when riots consumed the streets from New York to LA, when a president named Kennedy lived in the White House during what had begun as the Camelot Era suddenly died in Dallas with a bullet through his head.

I had thought we finally got it right. I did! I had hoped that somewhere in these years people remembered as those black days of mourning descended upon us during the 1960s when a 3-yo boy named John John saluted his father’s horse-drawn caisson as the funeral procession passed by. I had hoped that when Martin Luther King, Jr. had died so tragically in Mississippi four-and-a-half years later on April 4, 1968 and then Bobby Kennedy, the president’s brother, was shot in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968 and died at 1:44 am the following morning, the United States of America would have learned from history.

I was naive.

Fast forward now to May 1, 2015. My first awareness of the news that six of Baltimore’s finest (?!?!) were facing criminal charges including second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter for the wrongful death–homocide–of 25- year-old Freddie Gray arrived in my email with a New York Times breaking news alert. But as I started to work with the time that arrived (10:51 am), I discovered a better time posted by the NPR for 8:30 ET, which actually is 9:30 am EDT.

I don’t think anyone would be especially surprised to learn the likelihood of police coverups in this particular situation. Even the timelines vary slightly from Gant Daily to the Baltimore Sun to the NY Daily News. Which one to believe? I’m counting on the Baltimore Sun because they offered one bit of timed evidence the other two sites seemed to have missed, and this bit of missing evidence is like expecting nobody to notice when you have a huge wart on your nose.

So I focused on the time: 8:46 am on the 12th of April when everything suddenly went very wrong, very deadly, and hazy in the telling.

An Eastern 4th quadrant above-the-horizon dominance begins to unravel this deadly mess in which it would seem the police on duty at the time of Freddie’s eventually fatal (April 19) injuries really didn’t care much who saw what happened. After all, they were the men in blue (or black, whichever may be the dominant color of police uniforms in Baltimore), and they carried the guns and the billy clubs. They, as many seem to do, apparently figured they held the power. But US citizens these days have a different perception of power, thanks to cell phones, ipads and other high tech equipment that can offer split second shots of wrongdoings by officers regardless of where they might be.

When I first started looking at these charts, I had assumed I’d see a Cardinal sign rising. But there are two dynamics going on in the world around us these days, and with Saturn and Neptune–the two buddies who form the Peeling of Life’s Onion–around, it’s probably time to start giving this Mutable duo more of a nod. On the other hand, that doesn’t mean we’re done yet with the Cardinal aspects.

There’s a curious but complex dynamic in the heartbeat of the chart from what begins as the interaction between 12th house Mercury, Mars and Venus and ends with a whole lot of confusion, thanks to 10th house Neptune in its own sign, Pisces.  Saturn rules the 10th house in the natural chart. But in this chart, it’s conjunct the 7th house cusp in square to Neptune. This Saturn-Neptune square points to more than the simple peeling of the onion. It points to the possibility of collusion in the air that morning. Pay special attention to the mutable T-square between Saturn and its opposition to Venus in square to Neptune.

Saturn has another role to play with its out-of-sign square to the 9th house Moon which simultaneously acts as a bridge to creating a T-square with the Sun-Mercury portion of a stellium (3 or more planets conjunct at a reasonable orb of 0°) between Uranus, the Sun and Mercury. It’s complex, I know. After all, Uranus is also still squaring Pluto and is just barely out of the separating partile square aspect. But please don’t think that’s all. By the time I show you what I discovered today, you may be as fascinated as I was. At least I hope so:

We talk about eclipses in astrology and how they play roles in our lives. I’ve spoken about every single point in the eclipses being relevant to a natal chart and its increased importance when the eclipse makes a natal contact. But that natal contact may not be from the Sun or the Moon, rather from one of the other planets to a natal planet, and transits to the eclipse points when contacting the natal chart at one or more planets will impact the native each and every time that degree is touched on transit. We don’t always see these dynamics coming together, but perhaps they do and we just don’t always understand them that easily. If eclipses truly have such an impact against the natal chart, surely the same kind of impact might be present as well in a mundane chart.

No eclipse will point to every position the natal planets will have, nor should we expect every position in the mundane chart would be matched point for point with an eclipse. But I can’t help noticing that the Solar Eclipse of April 29, 2014 was making a 50-minute partile opposition to Mars the day Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri, and that the placement of Jupiter in the chart representing the day he was killed makes a 9-minute partile conjunction to the 7th house cusp. The Solar Eclipse also showed Mars in opposition to transiting Uranus, with Uranus in a partile square to transiting Pluto while Mars in the eclipse chart also created a 23-minute partile square to Pluto in the chart showing when Brown was killed.

Carrying this further, take note that the Sun on the day Michael Brown was shot was making a partile conjunction to the 7th house in the Lunar Eclipse chart set for Washington, DC. Since I’m examining the eclipses based on the national perspective to see whether the United States of America is in another eclipse cycle related to these events, the eclipse itself would not have to be placed in Ferguson, rather in Washington, DC as the home for the nation. Venus in the killing chart tightly squares the Lunar Eclipse Full Moon without being partile, but the placement of Venus also makes a 1-minute partile square to the killing chart’s Ascendant and conjuncts the Moon in the Lunar Eclipse chart. Mars in the Lunar Eclipse chart opposes a Mercury-Uranus partile conjunction in another partile square to transiting Pluto; but Mars is also making a 6-minute partile opposition to the killing chart’s Uranus.

I used the eclipse charts prior to Michael Brown’s death because they were the last ones before his death a little over 3 months before. But now let’s have another look of a different kind–the kind that brings in the history I mentioned in the first two paragraphs of this post: Let’s go back to see how the dynamics of the Sixties relate to events of the past year:

Pay close attention to the Nodes in these charts. We see the correlations of eclipses, but the Nodal changes appear to be quite relevant as well. In this case, the South Node would have been moving into place where the North Node had been years before. The 1968 chart for the Solar Eclipse of March 28 indicated the last eclipse before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. I felt this was especially important since this eclipse directly correlated to events that followed. Robert F. Kennedy was also assassinated during this period.

Now this isn’t to say that events related to Civil Rights weren’t important prior to this period, rather that the assassinations of both Reverend King and Bobby Kennedy launched a cycle of riots throughout the nation and the need to step up the pace in efforts for racial equality in the United States.

The 60s overall had been a time of turmoil throughout the States with both antiwar and Civil Rights activists marching on Washington and other major cities. Passions lit fires at these times, launching violence in the streets and whether people were fighting to bring the boys home from Vietnam or for balance of the races, both issues evolved into a feeling of war at home.

Riots had started in Little Rock, Arkansas with the integration of Little Rock High School in 1957; but by 1962, these riots were still taking place even at the University of Mississippi where James Meredith became the first black student at that school. James Baldwin, author of The Fire Next Time, warned of the violence that was sure to follow, and it did. By 1963, 200000 demonstrators in Washington were demanding equal civil rights. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas three months later.

Racial issues continued to compound, and by 1965 Malcolm X had been assassinated at a rally in Harlem (New York City) followed by riots in Watts (Los Angeles) that summer and more riots spreading like wildfire. The efforts to continue to integrate met with more hostilities, and it was as if the United States had regressed 100 years back to the days of the Civil War, the War between the North and the South.

I’m mentioning this history as a foundation of my decision to use 1968 as a focal point of this analysis since the racial tensions had continued to build and then appeared to quiet down again. It would seem, however, when we look at the Nodal contacts in these three charts, the embers were left smoldering, and the fires have again begun to crop up.

Now, with Pluto in Capricorn, the police across the nation will need to do some serious housecleaning if they hope to get in step with the rest of the nation. Police forces can be good or bad: When they look at the color of the skin to determine whether a crime has been committed, it just may be too late. Too much force and effort to control what needs to be transformed spells trouble. As I wrote in my first book, Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow: Meeting the Challenge of Our Multicultural America & Beyond (©1996 Christiansen and Young, Caddo Gap Press), “Unification has become outmoded, just as the whalebone bodices and even the girdles of the 20th century did. Why? Because we can only force conformation of bodies into whalebone bodices, 20th century girdles, or pre-determined concepts of excellence for just so long. Eventually something will pop out–at one end or another.

“Undoubtedly, the ladies of the 19th century rebelled against squeezing their 24-inch–more or less–waists into 13-inch tourniquet-like contraptions. After all, how many of those wasp waists stayed that wasp-like after they’d been through the rigors of childbirth? Certainly many women abandoned 20th century girdles for similar reasons!

“Similarly, unification could be compared to why a marriage won’t work when a spouse attempts to remake a partner–or why leopards will never become tigers. You simply can’t fake it for long. Sooner or later, something has to give, and it usually will.”

As all of this relates to Civil Rights, of course. It boils down to the need to reexamine what’s going on with the issue because everyone still hasn’t fallen in step with the rest of the country. If one wants to live in a segregated world, that’s fine; but imposing one’s power via violence and weapons or restraints on another didn’t work back then, and it won’t work now. Better that those who can’t “get with the program” should move to a place where life has no diversity and Nature is then the only thing needing control. Maybe such people will find it on Mars, but I’m not sure it will be found on this planet any time too soon.

I suppose I shouldn’t be that surprised with what I’m seeing here. After all, the Solar Eclipse of March 20, 2015 echoes the eclipse of March 28, 1968 too. Take note of the placement of Chiron in 1968 at 29 Pisces 48: It was a mere 21 minutes off the 29 Pisces 27 point where the Solar Eclipse was in March of this year. Chilling, isn’t it?

So is the violence police across the nation have been wielding in their efforts to show their power. But then they can’t wonder why people have become so angry. Note the oppositions between Mars when Michael Brown was killed and when Freddie Gray was.

May they and the other victims of this violence rest in peace–and may peace begin to reign in the land again.

Namaste, I love you.

©2015 Michelle Young