Introduction
Greetings loyal readers!
What a month it has been! Mercury, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were all retrograde until July 18, when Mercury went direct. Because Mercury was retrograde in Cancer, not only were people very emotional, but the Cancerian energy trails gave this particular Mercury retrograde a very wide orb. That is, the effects of this past Mercury retrograde continue to be felt for weeks after Mercury has gone direct.
Uranus, Neptune and Pluto Retrograde
Now we only have to worry about the three outermost planets being retrograde for most of August, and then we’ll be down to two. Here in New York City the effects of four planetary bodies in retrograde manifested in some rather dramatic ways. We had not one but three buildings collapse. First, two houses in Brooklyn exploded into rubble. Neighbors claimed they smelled gas, but the authorities said there was no evidence of an explosion. (But we ALWAYS believe the authorities, don’t we – NOT!) Then a few days later a building collapsed in Manhattan. This building housed a business called Irreplaceable Artifacts that sells antiques and provides period pieces for movie sets. Apparently there was some work being done on the building, and there were some extremely heavy objects stored upstairs. The floor gave way, as well as a side wall. The energy of all this put a very strange pall over the entire city.
Meanwhile some interesting revelations came to light about our illustrious mayor, the widely hated and despised Rudolph Guiliani. (Even people who admire some of his mayoral accomplishments cannot stand him as a person.) A new book about Guiliani reveals that his father was a criminal and gangster who spent two years in jail for robbing a milkman at gunpoint and later broke people’s legs with a baseball bat to collect payments for his brother’s loan-sharking business. The court papers described the elder Guiliani as a complete sociopath – a person completely incapable of perceiving or caring about the feelings of others. When he was diagnosed with prostate cancer a few months ago, a tearful Mayor Guiliani explained to the television cameras that his late father had died of prostate cancer, and that he loved and admired his father and misses him every day. Now we know why he had so much love and admiration for dear old dad – Rudy has tried all his life to emulate the evil his father manifested so completely.
So what does it mean to have Uranus, Neptune and Pluto in retrograde? Uranus is the great awakener, the planet of eccentric genius and flashes of insight. Neptune is the planet of mysticism and illusion, and Pluto is the planet or reorganization, transformation and renewal. When planets go retrograde, the external manifestations of that planet’s energies are blocked, along with the energies of the element of the sign the planet is retrograde in. During planetary retrogrades, it is time to go deeply internal regarding the areas of life the retrograde planet governs. Retrograde Uranus slows us down, keeps us from moving too quickly or making sudden movements and radical directional shifts. Retrograde Neptune brings us deeply inside our own imaginations, and retrograde Pluto helps us transform internally as external transformations are put on hold. Just as retrograde Mercury can lead to traffic accidents and miscommunications, Pluto retrograde can lead to construction accidents (such as the collapse of the Irreplaceable Artifacts building), construction delays and total confusion and bad planning in organizational restructuring.
Both Uranus and Neptune have been retrograde in Aquarius. Aquarius is the fixed air sign. Not only that, but Uranus rules Aquarius, so Uranus is retrograde in its own sign – the sign where it feels most comfortable. Uranus retrograde in Aquarius means mental energy is stuck, inspiration is frozen, and thinking is fuzzy and confused. Neptune retrograde in Aquarius means not only are people living deeply inside their own delusions, but those delusions involve Aquarian themes, such as social harmony and societal well-being. Under this influence people are deluded into believing that the actions they are taking are for the greater good, when in fact the opposite is true.
An Illustrative Example
Without getting into too much inside information, let me share the fact that I am currently employed by a company that is going through a major restructuring. A deal was closed in early June whereby a large chunk of my employer’s stock was acquired by a huge multi-national company, making my employer a subsidiary of the larger entity. Near the end of June, the new owners held a board meeting and announced a major management shakeup and a move for most employees several hundred miles away to another state. Since the big multi-national company has a culture of moving people around, it never occurred to them that the vast majority of employees in the company they acquired would not be interested in moving at all, much less in moving to the deep south. The acquiring company never realized that the company they were acquiring had never moved anyone. There were people who had spent their entire lives at my company, who had given their heart and soul to it, but who are not interested in uprooting their families and raising their children in a racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, anti-gay environment. (My apologies to my readers in southern states, but the foregoing is an unfortunate but true description of too many communities in our nation’s south climes.)
This sort of thing is classic outer planet retrograde behavior. Announcing major corporate restructuring of this sort on a Mercury retrograde is a bad enough idea – especially with Mercury in highly emotional Cancer -- but doing so when Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are also retrograde was a major disaster. Furthermore, the company had announced a timetable for moving various departments at the June meeting that it now realizes is impossible to meet. So here these new managers came in, alienated virtually all of the employees, and now are losing credibility because they have to keep revising their schedule. This has the net effect of making the employees completely distrustful of the new management.
In addition, the new owners are now faced with the possibility of having to replace highly experienced staff members with a great deal of institutional knowledge and company history – and they must find the talent they are looking for in the city they are relocating to. My entire department (the legal department) has decided not to move. The old general counsel was replaced as part of management restructuring. The new general counsel is new to the company. Currently this person is living out of a suitcase five days a week at the company’s present location. Then in a few months this person will have to move down south and adjust to a new home in a new place, and also adjust to a new company without any experienced staff in his department to help in navigating the organization.
This unfortunate situation is a dramatic illustration of the power of retrograde planets to destroy human plans. There is a wonderful old Jewish proverb that says: “Man makes plans – God laughs.” What is even more unfortunate is the fact that all of these problems could have been prevented through better due diligence (i.e., the acquiring company talking to the employees before the acquisition, instead of just talking to people in management) and through the advice of a good astrologer. From an astrological standpoint, the planning and execution of this entire deal could not have been worse if they planned it. (But huge multinational corporations have their culture and their way of doing things, so the world’s most brilliant astrologers could probably not talk any sense into them if they tried.) It’s really a shame, because a great deal of disruption to many people’s lives (including the management of the acquiring corporation) could have been avoided through the understanding of and respect for basic astrological principles.
Copyright 2000 Marcy J. Gordon. All rights reserved. The author wants you to know you are free to copy and distribute this article for noncommercial purposes, provided you reproduce it in its entirety and credit the author. For quotation permission, please contact the author at mgordon@pipeline.com.