Last night I found myself trying to navigate a driver who also did not know the route, in the pitch dark, with no lighting and signposts. It’s a Scorpionic sort of week coming up, and so that may be a metaphor: negotiating the darkness. We are truly on an unknown path, both with the economic situation, and the US Presidential Election which astrologically has become synonymous with the upcoming Saturn-Uranus opposition. I have been trying to get a handle on the Barack Obama enigma, so far with no success, despite having read both his books a while ago. I have seen him in the media this week referred to as both the returning Christ and his opposite. But the most promising lead came on Thursday night at a fundraiser when he finally revealed his true origins: “I was not born in a manger. I was actually born on Krypton and sent here by my father, Jor-el, to save the Planet Earth”. So I am now on a mission to find an ephemeris for the planet Krypton…Anyway, all this stumbling in the dark is the lead-up to Wednesday’s sextile between the Sun and Pluto. If you’ve done your homework, looked into the Krypton ephemeris, remembered to take your torch and compass, looked at whereabouts in your life births, deaths, rebirths and transformations are being played out, Wednesday (22nd) could bring out the very best that this cycle of manifestation has to offer: acknowledging how far you have grown, and a real insight into what needs to go, and what needs to be built or re-built. Pluto works very much on a depth-psychological level, so ask fundamental questions. Imagine you could meet Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, R.D. Laing and Rufus May at a dinner party – what would you ask them about psychology in general? Not of course about your own psychology which is unique and your own speciality. This aspect is about bringing into wholeness the dark and the light, talking of which the Observer this morning headlines Boris Johnson as “No more Mr. Nice Guy”. Well I would also like to know what happened to Raymond Blanc’s nice guy image. On the last series of The Restaurant I thought “There goes a real gentil homme – a real contrast from all the other TV kitchen dictators”. Now in the current series, he is really cutting with his contestants. Though he, like Richard Branson of last week’s blog, is going through his second Saturn return, he shouldn’t be taking it out on them. That’s not the purpose of a Saturn return. It must be the added strain of Uranus being opposite his Saturn and transiting Saturn, but that’s still no excuse. I will be watching my own behaviour carefully when I have my second Saturn return on the US Election/Saturn opposite Uranus day. On Thursday (23rd) the Sun enters Scorpio, reinforcing the Plutonic theme of the previous day. We leave behind the lightness of Libra, and it seems like soul-searching all the way now – at least until November 4th! Saturday (25th) is significant for Chiron-watchers (failing information about Krypton) for Chiron is stationary prior to turning direct. Chiron has a similar energy to Pluto up to a point. While Pluto is into depth-psychology and letting go of outworn forms, Chiron is about depth-psychology too but with a healing twist. So when you are undergoing a Chiron transit it can feel very much like a Plutonian event and equally transformative at a cellular level, but you reach a point when you can suddenly see the purpose of the event much more easily and turn a crisis into a miracle. The timing of Chiron is also different from that of Pluto. A Pluto problem can take a long time to steal into your life and to resolve. Chiron events are often shorter in duration, often come to notice in a sudden crisis, and be instant in resolution. Chiron turning direct will enable us much more to take advantage of its positive process and healing potential. So to sum up: identify the planet responsible for your current crisis (assuming you have one), and never travel without your inner light.