A recent discussion at a.a.m drew my attention to Godwin's Law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_Law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_Hitlerum
Being curious since some years to find out more about the birth
date of Usenet - all I know from public sources is that it has
been in autumn or early winter 1979 - I looked at the birth chart
of the originator of the "Law", Mike Goodwin:
October 26, 1956
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Godwin
In his birth chart there is a sun/Neptune conjunction in early
Scorpio - i.e. opposite Hitler's natal sun.
Something like this came to my mind:
"His self (sun) has the illusion (Neptune) that all persons
that one is conversing with in Usenet (opposition aspect, the
number 2, thus also related to the element Air, communication)
is likely to reveal themselves as Hitler (sun in opposition)."
Probably overly simplified in this form, but let me simply think
on... Would that thus just be an illusion of Mike Godwin, with no
particular relation to Usenet ? No. Because out of many things
that many people said about usenet, this made it into a popular
"Law", so it must have resonated with many people's feelings and
experiences in Usenet.
So, maybe Usenet itself also has a sun/Neptune conjunction ?
Since the first Usenet message had been sent with a set of shell
scripts that had been stitched together, it had always appeared
most likely to me that Usenet was born with planets in Sagittarius,
and most likely including the sun. Now, in autumn and winter 1979,
Neptune was in Sagittarius. The exact conjunction with the sun was
12 December at 20:21 UTC:
Sun: 20 Sag 13
Moon: 03 Lib 53
Mercury: 00 Sag 21
Venus 17 Cap 42
Mars: 09 Vir 04
Jupiter: 09 Vir 56
Saturn: 26 Vir 27
Uranus: 23 Ura 02
Neptune: 20 Sag 13
Pluto: 21 Lib 14
N.Node: 02 Vir 20
Chiron: 09 Tau 48
Lilith: 17 Vir 18
The Jupiter/Mars conjunction near the s.node reminds me immediately
of the following popular quote about Usenet:
Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea‹massive,
difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of
mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.
-- Eugene Spafford
http://www.smfr.org/mtnw/docs/Usenet.html
The elephants stand for Jupiter (c.f. Republican Party in the USA),
sudden unexpected happenings as well, like Zeus who usually observes
and lets people do whatever they fancy, only sometimes throwing in
a bolt of lightning that then often comes quite unexpected to the
folks living on the ground. Mars in conjunction seems to fit well,
and the "excrements" fit well with the s.node if you consider the
celestial dragon/s**** with n.node head and s.node tail to be also
associvated with the "s****" of the digestive system in human beings,
i.e. mouth (n.node) - esophagus - stomach - guts - anus (s.node).
Sun/Neptune opposite Gemini, which makes me think of the two discouri
in Greek mythology, which would fit with the tendency of conversations
in Usenet to evolve often into "fights almost to the death", and a bolt
of lightning killing one of them, maybe, but also this quote:
You need two things on Usenet‹a civil tongue and a thick skin.
-- Steve Dorner
http://www.smfr.org/mtnw/docs/Usenet.html
Obviously, I do not expect that the above chart is the exact birth
chart of Usenet, but it might be close, the idea of a sun/Neptune
conjunction seems at least compelling to me :)
Something else, or maybe not:
Charles Harvey, in the following article
http://www.skyscript.co.uk/sun_nep.html
makes the interesting distinction between "incoming" and "outgoing"
aspects, at the example of sun/Neptune.
* In simple terms, the Sun-Neptune cycle can be seen as the cycle of the
relation****p
* between the focused Individual Unity (Sun) in relation to the all
embracing Collective
* Unity (Neptune). The Sun represents the conscious individual, the
focused leader, the
* purposeful Hero Soul ****ning with his own unique inner light; in
contrast to Neptune,
* the boundless Collective Unconscious and the ocean of unitive reality.
We can relate
* the Sun to the differentiated individual Seed whose potential is to
become a unique,
* conscious carrier of a creative idea. By contrast, Neptune is the great
vessel of
* archetypes which substands all our lives and dreams.
Here is an excerpt about the conjunction:
* Mohammad, the founder of Islam, is said to have been born on 5th May
570. If so, he was
* born at this conjunction which would be entirely appropriate for a man
who preached so
* forcefully complete submission of the individual (Sun) to the will of
God (Neptune),
* and the equality of all men of every race. This faith was to give birth
to a tremendous
* rich flowering of arts and science and philosophy during our own Dark
Ages.
C. G. Jung had a close outgoing square:
* The outgoing square demands that the individual meet the material world
and grapple with
* the issues involved in making the root principles of the cycle manifest.
This is often
* both the most problematic phase of any cycle and yet at the same time
one of the most
* fruitful and productive. As the Sun arrives at the outgoing square to
Neptune, the ego
* (Sun) is challenged to separate from the collective in some way, to
differentiate from
* the archetypal and yet at the same time to carry forward the collective
vision into the
* world.
Charles Harvey, Petrarca and me (although with relatively wide orbs)
have an incoming square instead:
* At the incoming square it would seem that the individual is concerned
* with returning the fruits of individuality to the greater good of the
* Collective.
which is already apparent by this quote being briefer than the ones
above. You cannot bring back and fit the whole richness of collective
possibilities into the individual selves of everybody, nor into any
person by him-/herself. You can only bring back seeds that allow to
grow beautiful/helpful/useful things relatively quickly, when needed
or desired.
So let me bring back a few now. In Jung's Aion, I started reading a bit
somewhere in the middle. In my edition this is on page 84/85, where he
links Saturn to donkeys, which I did not know, but makes sense, of course
in terms of the animals used by the two big parties in the USA. Jung also
mentions that in medieval tradition, the following religions are said to
have originated with the following conjunctions:
Jupiter/Saturn: Jewish
Jupiter/Venus: Muslim
Jupiter/Mercury: Christian
Jupiter/Moon: Antichrist
Now, Hitler had a Jupiter/moon conjunction in Capricorn, while Bush 43
has also one, namely the moon at 16*42 Libra and Jupiter at 18*09. Even
Al Gore has one, although with an orb of about 5 degrees. (Barack Obama
has a Jupiter/Saturn conjunction with the same orb, John McCain is free
of Jupiter conjunctions.)
How much free will is there ?
Would anyone but a Nazi consider Hitler an evil genius ? Wasn't he just
of average intelligence, maybe slighly more, but of course an a**ç&*%"
and very much unable to turn the themes in his birth chart into something
positive ? In that sense, comparing someone to Hitler is likely
permissible
because there are arguably quite a few more people who fit that profile.
But when it comes to the actual actions of Hitler and the Nazis, WWII and
the industrialized killing of millions of people, there is very little
that
can be compared to that, of course. In some sense, not even Stalin
(Jupiter
conjunct n.node) does fit the industrial indifference of the Nazis, even
though Stalin killed nominally more people.
George W. Bush is also certainly not the most intelligent president that
the USA has ever had, nor does he seem to be able to handle his fate well.
But I also do not see him as more evil and cunning than most other people
in politics in the USA. In that sense, it was maybe really mainly the
positions of planets in his birth chart (paired with his inability to
handle them fruitfully) that has lead to lots of pain in recent years.
More loosely speaking, despite intentions that were maybe no worse than
the ones of previous presidents, limited abilities might have turned some
situations simply into "bad luck" for people in the USA and the world.
Take 9/11, with the AC and Mercury at 14 Libra, and the recent crash of
the stock market with Venus/Mercury at 18 Libra. Then again, who can tell
for sure what would have happened if someone else had been president ? Al
Gore also has a Jupiter/moon conjunction, albeit a more loose one, and in
my judgment he was also not much free of the forces influencing him at
the time he was running for president.
Not much choice there was in 2000 after the primaries, with two candidates
with a Jupiter/moon conjunction to choose from.
I recently saw the movie Hellboy II, The Golden Army, and was pleasantly
surprised that it was a return to a safe world in cinema. Despite fighting
all kinds of dangerous underwold creatures and despite the character
Hellboy
being the son of "the fallen one", they team up and there is no doubt at
all
at any time that they might not make it and it is certain that good and
individual freedom will prevail. Hellboy protects the weak and does the
right things. Felt very American / American Dream to me, although the
movie
had been turned with a Mexican director in London and Hungary.
Its not what you have, but what you make of it :)
)o+
--
http://www.exactphilosophy.net/
Something different...
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