On 16 April, 2008, American mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz died from cancer at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, at the age of 90. The name Lorenz may not be a familiar one to you but the title of his paper presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1972 will be:

Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in
 Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?

His paper captured the imagination not only of the world of science but also that of the world at large and gave rise to the ubiquitous phrase, the ‘butterfly effect’. Lorenz was attempting to predict the weather using computers. Instead he found that that a small disturbance like the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can bring about enormous consequences, and thus emerged chaos theory.

Edward Lorenz  (taken late 90s)
as part of the Faculty of the
Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.

A strange attractor - Lorenz's 'Butterfly effect'' heralding the birth of chaos theory.

Such a discovery, said the committee that awarded him the 1991 Kyoto Prize for basic sciences, ‘brought about one of the most dramatic changes in mankind’s view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton’. [1]

My thanks to Elly Vriezen-Wieman from the Netherlands who pointed out to us that Lorenz, was born on 23 May 1917 in West Hartford, Connecticut, and had his Mars at13⁰ 57’ Taurus, Jupiter at 21⁰37 Taurus and Mercury at 21⁰46’ Taurus, all within the Stare of Cetus. (see sky map below)

I noted last month how planets/luminaries travelling through the zodiacal constellation of the ram of Aries had Cetus the Sea Monster sitting hidden beneath it below the ecliptic (see April 2008 edition of the V.A.N.)

It is as if planets in this area of the sky that hold the energy of independence or self-focus (the ram of Aries, who shares his glory with no-one) also contain the great intense stare of the unknown beast from the depths (Cetus the Sea Monster) who watches each planet, ready to drag it into the void if there are any imbalanced actions or over-bearing attitudes.
 

Thus it was for Lorenz. Whilst his practical thinking (Mercury in Taurus) drove him to expand and seek greater knowledge (Mercury-Mars-Jupiter) about weather-predicting, the Stare of Cetus turned all of this on its head. Perception emerged from the ensuing chaos but proclaimed chaos a gift.

If we segue briefly to medieval astrology, Mars in Taurus in detriment brings in that which is alternative or different, in this case one who is on the edge of their thinking. Lorenz allowed himself to look into the face of what was emerging in the collective via his computer screen and to interpret meaning from the chaos. This is a positive expression of The Stare of Cetus.

Edward Lorenz's Mars, Jupiter and Mercury
in the Stare of Cetus - 23 May 1917

Pim Fortuijn was a controversial and charismatic Dutch politician, born 19 February, 1948, in Driehuis (according to the Wikipedia) in The Netherlands at 00:10 am.

Openly gay, he formed his own party, Lijst Pim Fortuyn (List Pim Fortuyn or LPF) and was at the centre of several political controversies for his views on immigration and Islam. He campaigned on an anti-immigration ticket during the 2002 Dutch national election campaign, gaining public support, but was attacked by militant animal rights activist Volkert van der Graaf as he left a radio studio in the central Dutch city of Hilversum on 6 May 2002. He was shot six times and suffered multiple wounds in the head, chest and neck, and died shortly afterwards.

The situation began to change in early February 2008 to her advantage.

Visually Cetus is lying along the line of the horizon staring directly into the Descendant.  In this case my client found that she had to become Cetus, to become the voice of the collective indigenous women seeking to be heard, and stare back at her opponents and be patient. Thus she could use the Stare of Cetus to her advantage, maintaining her position and allowing disorder, confusion and eruption to reign around her as these biases were fleshed out.

Cetus staring at a client's Descendant.

My father has Mars at 4⁰ Taurus. He was born in a little town and his grandparents were farmers. They were very religious Protestants, and when my grandmother got pregnant, it was a scandal. She refused to say who the father was of her unborn child. I don’t know what happened with my grandmother, because it wasn’t discussable in my family. What I know is that a few years later she married someone else, and my father got his surname. The things I know were told by my grandmother of mother’s side.

My father had a difficult childhood; his father beat him and didn’t accept him as his son. My father had six brothers and sisters. When my father became 16 years old he signed up in the marine, he began as an ordinary sailor. They sent him in to the war. After WW II he was sent out to Indonesia to fight. At the end of the war in Indonesia he got wounded and they sent him home and he stayed for six months in hospital. In that time his parents didn’t visit him. When he was dismissed from the hospital he didn’t go to his parents, he stayed in Amsterdam where he met my mother and they got married.

My parents didn’t have a good marriage, in part caused by the things he saw in the war and in part because he missed the travelling and freedom he had felt when he was at sea. My father died a few days before he became 80 years.

I have my Descendant at 7⁰ Taurus. The ruler Venus is in the 8th house in Gemini. Before I was born my mother gave birth to two sons, one stillborn and one who died a few hours after birth. Then there was me, a healthy daughter with black curly hair. Then my mother gave birth to a baby girl, however a few hours later she died. Then there was my sister a beautiful baby with blonde hair.

I can’t remember much of the time before the birth of my sister. But from the moment my sister was born things changed, and I became a sort of out-cast. My sister was everything for my father. I grew up in a house that didn’t feel safe and warm, and I became a rebellious child. Of all the things, I most remember the loneliness that I felt. My fortune was my grandmother who lived next door, she always told me that I didn’t do anything wrong, that it was my father who was wrong, and that it had to do with his birth-father and the way I looked, so different from the rest who were all blond with a light skin. But for a child that is difficult to understand.

When I think about my childhood and all the things that happened ….. what was the price I had to pay. I wasn’t an unhappy child; I had my own world, my books and fantasies. Maybe a bit strange, as a young child I felt a desire some type of homesickness and I never knew for what. It was difficult to understand and when I grew older it disappeared. It was some kind of feeling that came up and sometimes stayed for hours or days. Writing about it I can still feel it deep inside of me, that longing, that desire. I know that I have paid a price; one of it is my marriage. I never learnt to commit myself to someone. I learnt that from my children.

The relationship with my father stayed the same till the day he died, because of that there isn’t even contact with my sister and my mother died before my father.  

So my father tried to eat me, but I survived. I’m not angry with my father, I did forgive him but also myself. It was as it was. 

Here is a family pattern of upheaval and change. The ruler of our student’s Descendant, Venus, is in the 8th house in Gemini conjunct Jupiter. The Descendant is a covert angle but its ruler, in this case Venus, is not only in a house of irrevocable change but visually it sits on the horns of the Great Bull, so it is confronting and challenging in relationship and marriage issues.In this case the student's father represented the Stare of Cetus, for our student was the physical reminder of the affair of her mother, and of her paternal grandmother.

Staring into abandonment

Does predictive work via progressions apply to the Stare of Cetus? Here are some thoughts from a student from Austria who wrote this:

I've got Saturn at 4.41 Taurus in the 10th house currently touched by progressed Venus. Independence and supremacy combined with solitude, envy and feelings of inferiority in the public eye are issues that I’ve known very much in my life (so has my mother and her mother). Times of success and marching on get overthrown by times of utter chaos. Sometimes it feels like I am the victim of a cruel play. A lot of things are given to me but a lot of things are also taken away from me again. It definitely feels as if I have to battle more than other people and that it makes me a "lonely wolf". (Issues of abandonment from earliest childhood on are also big, like one comment in the blog. I was, though, associating this more to other aspects in my chart.)

It also made me wonder if progressed planets do go through the same journey? I've noticed that my progressed Mars just touched 20 Taurus. I asked myself when I thought that the progressed Mars could have been at 5 Taurus and I've thought back to a very strong memory in 1983 and  actually I was right. Progressed Mars was conjunct Saturn back then.

Right now my life is into shatters once again. On Sunday when Venus was at 5 Taurus I rescued my daughter from a fall which resulted in me falling down and rupturing a ligament on my foot. I was all alone in the garden and had to wait a long time until somebody came to help.

Staring in mundane cycles  - Pluto’s journey through Cetus

Bernadette noted in the February 2008 Visual Astrology Newsletter how, with Pluto's orbital path tilted at an angle of over 17⁰ to the ecliptic, Pluto travels through areas of the sky that no other planet can reach. Thus a planet's pathway through the stars will be a unique feature of that planet's sky narrative. Pluto's journey through Cetus begins by entering its tail. It runs through its heart and emerges through the mouth. This last occurred in the years 1857-1873.

In 1857, the USA experienced what was one of the most severe economic crises in U.S. history, known as 'The Panic of 1857'. This was instigated by the failure of the New York branch of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company on 24 August, 1857. Reports of embezzlement caused New York bankers to put severe restrictions on even the most routine transactions. This was interpreted as a sign of impending financial collapse and people reacted with panic. [2]
 

The contraction of the economy which followed was profound and had parallels in Europe, South America, South Africa, and the Far East. It has come to be understood as being the first worldwide economic crisis No recovery was evident in the United States for a year and a half, and the full impact did not dissipate until the American Civil War.   Then in 1873 as Pluto moved out through the jaws of Cetus, over-speculation in the US triggered 'The Panic of 1873'. Two days after Jay Cooke & Co., one of the nation's most reputable brokerage firms, declared bankruptcy, the New York Stock Exchange decided to close down for ten days to wait out the worst of the crisis. The secretary of the Treasury responded to these events by pumping $26 million of new currency into the economy, swelling the amount of paper money in circulation to $382 million. This Panic lasted eighteen months but reverberated until 1877, a time known as the Long Depression, with unemployment reaching 14% in 1876. [3]

Run on the Fourth National Bank, No. 20 Nassau Street (New York City, 1873).

Staring in mundane cycles  - Sedna’s journey through Cetus

As a final insight, Sedna at its present position of 20⁰ Taurus is currently in the jaws of Cetus. Sedna’s discovery was made public in March 2004. Her mythology of the Inuit goddess brings issues of the environment to the fore, so ecological themes are being chewed up, spat out and made visible. In the last week both the Sun and Venus have joined Sedna and thus have also been in the Stare of Cetus and we have had the terrible news of the Cyclone Nargis which struck Burma on the 8th May, killing an estimated 100,000 people. In the newsletter of October 2007 we talked of the approaching difficulties for Burma in this year, looking at this via their charts, predictive work and the visual astrology components. If you wish to revisit the newsletter on Burma, follow the link to the October newsletter.

In summary…

So it seems that there are several options for behavioural responses when a person has a planet or luminary in the Stare of Cetus:

* They can be jammed by it, as with Harry Patch (VAN April 2008).
* They can embrace it and be it, taking it on as part of contractual challenge in partnerships, as with my client working with indigenous women in central Australia (VAN, February 2008).
* They can be ‘eaten’ by it, as with Pim Fortuijn.
* They can feel abandoned by it, as with our student from Austria,
* Or they can work with it, as with Edward Lorenz and our Dutch student.

So watch for it in your clients’ charts and see how telling them about the Stare of Cetus affects their understanding. Their stories will' further inform you as to how the Stare of Cetus is working in natal charts.

Not only that, the longer cycles of the outer planets passing into this area of the sky will also reverberate through the collective and explode hidden matters into our awareness. Just because a constellation is hidden does not mean it is inactive. It simply means it catches us unawares.

Thanks to all who contributed to this edition of the Visual Astrology Newsletter.

 1.   ‘Edward N. Lorenz, a Meteorologist and a Father of Chaos Theory, Dies at 90’ by Kenneth Change, April 17, 2008, New York Times online, at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/us/17lorenz.html?_r=2&ref=us&oref=slogin&oref=slogin – accessed  5th May 2008.

       2.       http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/today/aug24.html - accessed 5th May 2008.

       3.        http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history.do?action=Article&id=6108 - – accessed  5th May 2008.