In the United States, today is Thanksgiving – a day to give thanks – as well a day to remember the pilgrims who arrived there in 1620. This small band of men and women endured many hardships in order that they might practice their own religion without persecution and for that, we continue to applaud them.
Whilst you’re digesting your turkey and stuffing and pumpkin pie, might you be interested in delving deeper?
Sure, why not – let’s give it a try.
I think it no accident that the pilgrims in question set out from England with the start of a new Jupiter/Pluto cycle:
- Pluto = fanaticism, obsession, compulsion, and power.
- Jupiter = relaxed liberalism, tolerance and good will.
Jupiter most certainly can be taken to suggest the strongly-held religious beliefs of the Pilgrims with Pluto representing the Church of England, which after many gyrations (Catholic/Protestant and back again), they found to be impossibly corrupt.
Little wonder.
With the death of Elizabeth I (who had restored the country to Protestantism after the death of her Catholic half-sister, Mary I), James I of England (James VI of Scotland) took the throne. He had been baptized Roman Catholic but was a practicing Protestant and so the Catholic/Protestant conflict raged on.
Initially, Elizabeth I had taken the position of Moderate Protestantism, a comprise that took the middle ground and allowed the Catholics to practice their religion, as long as they kept their heads down. This was too much for some but not enough for others and so eventually after 1580, the noose around the necks of the Catholics was tightened by the government, whether Elizabeth liked it or not.
Willingly or otherwise, James took the same approach, reinforcing ever more strict penalties against the Catholics whilst at the same time seeking a Spanish wife for his son, Charles, which understandably fueled fears that Catholicism would be the state religion again. By 1620, the situation had become impossible. If the Catholics were too bold and brash and mystical for some tastes, Luther and Calvin and the religions they’d spawned were too mean and harsh for others. The government was expected to intervene (again), and it did effectively becoming, at least in regards to religion, a police state.
This is the essence of the Jupiter/Pluto cycle, political power struggles, intense beliefs, and fundamentalism, as a response to fear and uncertainty.
The last Jupiter/Pluto cycle that commenced in 2007 is drawing now to a close. Consider any and all similarities between that time and that experienced by those pilgrims when in 1620, they’d finally had enough.
Next consider that the next Jupiter/Pluto cycle commences in March 2020 in addition to a heavy-hitter conjunction between Pluto/Saturn (the need for endings) in Capricorn in January 2020. The pilgrims did not have to deal with Pluto/Saturn but we will. To give you a taste of what that might entail, consider that a Pluto/Saturn cycle in Capricorn has not occurred since January 1518, just two months after Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg. Thus began the Protestant Revolution that not only radically changed the face of world politics but also fueled those pilgrims to leave home.
Can we expect to see another wave of pilgrims, setting off from regimes they find too intolerant for their taste? Your guess is as good as mine but I’m willing to bet that we’re already seeing the beginning of it with immigrants fleeing…ah, but then you don’t necessarily want to reflect on that on a day of thanks giving do you or, then again, maybe you do?!
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