Please note: In 2015, long after I wrote this article, my understandings of the quindecile, a 24° aspect, were born out of the new–mathematically accurate–name for the 165° aspect, now called undecaquartisextile. Please read about the Undecaquartisextile as its related aspect patterns which can be found in the Pluto – Full On series. You’ll find the Pluto – Full On series under the subcategory of Undecaquartisextile, located in the Feature Articles tab. Thanks for your patience with the modification of the name.

Around the same time each year, newspapers in India and Pakistan focus on sudden border clashes near the region known as Jammu and Kashmir. It’s not that the tensions themselves suddenly erupt, rather that the conflict never truly goes away. This area of South Asia reminds me of other hotspots in the world that often flare up and make peacemakers apply another BandAid® to tourniquet-sized wounds in what seems to be an effort to quell the “fever” rather than dealing with the “disease.”

Perhaps the headline still draws the eye when one reads, “They Fired Every 5 Minutes.” Surely that wording may attract more than what has almost numbed the reader in seeing the word, “Terrorist” or “Terrorism” in the daily news. It’s daily, therefore it’s more mundane and commonplace. It can also serve as a frighteningly numbing sensation, blinding us to the obvious.

‘They Fired Every 5 Minutes’: Policeman Injured in Punjab Terror Attack

An even East-West hemispheric split with a first and second quadrant below-the-horizon dominance points to this being a terrorist attack. But one could have looked at the newspaper headlines to have figured that out. At the time of the attack, the Sun was making a 16-minute partile conjunction to the Ascendant. I suspect this incident may have actually occurred a minute or two before the reported 5:45 AM time–one of several attacks and incidents taking place near Pathankot, in Dinanagar,  and in Gurdaspur. On the other hand, Mars in Moon-ruled Cancer fits well in the 12th house, pointing to an overlooked “enemy.” I don’t mean that as overstating the obvious.

The 12th house can point to a hidden enemy through a Mars transit and becomes even more relevant when we note Saturn in the 4th house and Neptune in the 8th. One must pay especially close attention to the 4th house interception in Pluto-ruled Scorpio. For me, Pluto’s touch here is simply icing on the cake.

But Pluto’s significance here isn’t only because of its Scorpio rulership. Some may say Pluto is too far in opposition to Mars. I disagree: Mars serves as the bridge in this case, opposing Pluto and obviously squaring Uranus at the apex of the chart. And at the time of the incident, while the Moon had made ingress to Sagittarius, it was still clearly within orb of the conjunction to Saturn.

I’ve been following events in the region as they started rising again about two weeks ago. As a result, on Saturday night, I had created a chart to see what was potentially going to be showing in India with the Venus Retrograde (Rx) in the hours before Uranus also shifted to Rx and while Uranus and Mars had formed a 38-minute partile square at the same time the Moon and Saturn had been conjunct. I had done the same focus for the United States and the United Kingdom, but my initial view of what was coming at that time in India may have been too fleeting. I had seen so much in the US chart, I now question whether I’d glossed over the view of India too quickly to have given it more serious consideration.

It’s true: I couldn’t have done–or have stopped–a thing. But the thought still gnaws at me: Did I look enough to have been fair in that quick assessment?

The Scorpio Ascendant with the Moon-Pluto 20-minute partile conjunction in the first tells me my assessment may have been premature. We can always overlook the obvious especially when the obvious is an in-your-face view. Certainly Jupiter’s conjunction to the MC in the chart roughly 16 hours prior to the Gurdaspur attacks implies expansion. Expansion, especially with the conjunction to Venus, can be positive or negative. Remember as well Venus not only had shifted to Rx motion, the conjunction to Jupiter served as the bridge Venus needed to conjunct the MC as well. Jupiter is also forming an undecaquartisextile to 4th house Mars in this chart, and the writing was on the wall if only I had spotted this sooner too! One could say both sides were pursuing desires even at the cost of martyrdom.

Somewhere along the line in my studies way back when, I remembered reading about the Venus-MC conjunction as if it was a time of rejoicing and celebration of love. Mentally, one might associate this conjunction to the Ten of Cups in the Tarot. That mental image alone–and certainly with Venus now in Mercury-ruled Virgo even with the Leo MC–would have been enough to bring such an image to mind.

But I’m not writing this in some kind of self-castigating effort, rather to understand the dynamics of one missing the obvious. Although the actual chart for the attacks in Jammu clearly pointed to this kind of event taking place, the “Venus Rx-pending Uranus Rx” chart didn’t reveal the obvious looming tragedy. The midpoint of that Jupiter-Venus conjunction in the transiting chart just hours before fell at 28 Leo 40–a 22-minute partile square to Saturn where it still was by the time of the attacks. The obvious was there; I had overlooked the midpoint.

That fourth house interception in the Gurdaspur chart led me to look at Saturn as the most prominent point to note. There was certainly an undertone of the Venus-Jupiter conjunction at the MC in the transits chart at the time Venus had shifted to Rx, but Saturn’s first house presence in its partile conjunction to the Moon just seems so much more like a dominant player in this Venus shift to Rx transiting chart. For me, then, Saturn represents the prominent factor that pulls together the 8th house Mars and 4th house Neptune, triggering that 4/8/12 complex. Of course, I had no way of anticipating these as the defining factors in the house complex by the time of the attacks.

I considered these points as I focused on Saturn versus the Venus-Jupiter midpoint and saw each at their respective Sabian Symbols of 29°. While the Venus-Jupiter midpoint at Leo 29 might have merit to someone else–A MERMAID HAS CLIMBED TO THE ROCKY SHORE OF A BLEAK COAST; SHE AWAITS THE PRINCE WHO WILL BRING HER IMMORTALITY–for me, it seems more focused on the personal than the mundane. Lynda Hill‘s 360 Degrees of Wisdom: A Sabian Oracle (©Lynda Hill 2004) writes in part:

“Keywords: Coming into conscious form. New ways of being. Transformation. New forms emerging out of the past. Needing, and probably expecting, recognition. Feeling different from the crowd. Learning to stand on your own two feet. Problems with feet and legs. Longing to make an impression.

“The Caution: Focusing on social or rational aspects before being ready. Naivety. Being thrown in the deep end. Relying on relationships too much. Looking to the other for validation of one’s existence. Co-dependent behavior.”

The dynamic ringing true for me lies not in this vulnerable side of the mermaid awaiting the prince as much as it does the sense Lynda conveys as looking forward to the future, to new beginnings but especially to transformation. When we move forward, we are invariably transforming–and that, to me, points to Scorpio 29 still being very much ruled by Pluto.

Now consider Scorpio 29, the degree where we see Saturn and my belief that this is the stronger point: AN INDIAN WOMAN PLEADING TO THE CHIEF FOR THE LIVES OF HER CHILDREN. Lynda quotes Gandhi in the sidebar, “All humanity is one undivided and indivisible family, and each one of us is responsible for the misdeeds of all the others. I cannot detach myself from the wickedest soul,” and that’s true.

Here, at Scorpio 29, Lynda notes, is where one might be looking to  stand up for and protect others. But this point of Scorpio with Saturn on this degree is especially interesting because it begs the question in this particular incident of who is actually being protected and whether they are willing “children” in this case. The question of dominance arises in the Keywords and the Caution. But again, the question ultimately lies in whether those being protected actually want to be–and who the protectors actually are.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, in another sidebar quote, may be answering this pair of questions when he says, “Pretty much all the honest truth telling there is in the world is done by children.”

If anything, such questions may be answered in Identity Politics in Jammu and Kashmir (Rekha Chowdhary, editor) [©Vitasta Publishing 2010], where the issue of identity is addressed. The book offers the opportunity to examine the pluralistic identity of the region itself. The door stays open to the reader’s understanding that the question of peace may be best answered by addressing the region’s plurality and in recognizing that perceptions are still at the heart of these conflicts. Yoginder Sikand in “Hindu-Muslim Relations in Jammu” makes a powerful statement in his observation, “Rather than being Islamically legitimate, they argued that such actions were fitna–strife, chaos or illegitimate rebellion–the very opposite of true jihad. A declaration of jihad can, they pointed out, be made only if Muslims are denied the freedom to practice their faith. Since there is no restriction on the practice of Islam in the state, they said, the conflict cannot be said to be a jihad.”

At the very end of a critical chapter in the same book, “The Conundrum of Identity,” Badri Raina, the chapter’s author, writes, “Democracy can be trumpeted, but only when friendly governments are slated to win elections, not if a Hamas comes to legitimate power. Dictators can be derided unless, like the one across the border, or those that used to exist in Latin America and East Asia, willing to play second-fiddle to the ones who claim the divine right to lay down definitions and constitute identities, until the ‘general will’ yet again reverses all that and transforms the landscape of identities in unconscionable ways and dimensions.” [“See my ‘Grand Narrative of Terrorism‘, Economic and Political Weekly, 27 December 2003-2 January 2004, Vol. XXXVIII, nos. 51-52, pp 5,327-29.”]

To be sure, this was a terrorist attack. That really doesn’t need to be spelled out. But for those who question what role these transits played in bringing this particular one to light, perhaps the continuing interplay of the Cardinal T-square–8th/9th house Mars in opposition to 2nd house Pluto with Uranus in the 5th–doesn’t show as strongly in the Venus Rx any more than the 4/8/12 complex can be made out. And yet, within the next 16 hours, the entire picture showed so clearly as Mars fell in the 12th, Pluto in the 6th in square to Uranus at the apex while the 4/8/12 house complex was no longer in question.

The sixth house rises in the July Lunar Return (LR) for India, with Scorpio again on the Ascendant and Saturn in the 1st. Here too, Neptune falls in the 4th, and natal and transiting Mars fall in the 8th as well as natal Uranus. But Mars and Mercury in the LR form an 18-minute partile conjunction in yet another respective 30- and 48-minute partile opposition to LR Pluto! Although the 12th house is empty save for natal Chiron, take note of LR Uranus making an 18-minute partile conjunction to the 6th house and completing that obvious T-square to Mars in the eighth.

Even that lovely Venus-Jupiter conjunction to the MC from inside the tenth house of the LR for July wasn’t enough to prevent the series of attacks that struck in Jammu earlier today (Monday, July 27). It’s going to be a hot summer made a lot hotter.

Namaste, I love you.

©2015 Michelle Young