On the 11th of March, a week after the New Moon in Pisces, a devastating tsunami, induced by a powerful earthquake off the coast of Sendai, Honshu led to the destruction of several coastal cities in north-eastern Japan, as well as a major meltdown crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plant. At the time, the waxing Moon was making a square to Neptune, ruler of the oceans – a fitting omen. Some astrologers suggested that the quake may have been stirred up by the stronger-than-usual gravitational pull of the Super Moon as it waxed towards Full on the 19th whilst others pinpointed Uranus, planet of sudden disruption and chaos (and ruler of Uranium) as the main astrological significator for this event as, positing that it may have given off a final burst of energy as it reached the last degrees of Pisces – a sign associated with large bodies of water as well as leaks and floods, given that its ruler, Neptune, tends to dissolve boundaries.
I don’t think one needs to isolate the significance of the event down to one particular astrological phenomenon – this is a hangover from the scientific paradigm that is so pervasive in the thinking of Western culture. However, its ‘cause and effect’ model definitely has its limitations and only really seems to apply to the world of physics and matter (I say ‘seems’, because we are all too aware of the strange events that take place within the world of quantum physics…)
It is my opinion that astrology is a largely symbolic art, rooted in the world of poetry, consciousness and spirit – the higher dimension or foundations of matter, depending on your worldview – which transcends logic, and that it doesn’t really matter HOW one tunes into the underlying meaning of an event, so long as one does manage to find a ‘way in.’ As the Chinese saying goes: ‘There are many paths to the top of the mountain.’
However, as people like Jung and Joseph Campbell noticed, the strange thing is that once you peel away the individual conceptions and cultural overlays of many rituals, symbolic objects or events, the core meaning or intuitive message situated at the heart of it tends to quite similar for different people, possibly because of our shared humanity.
Astro-Insights Blog 