Rollan's Censored Issues Blog

TWO DIFFERENT PRISONERS

For whoever and whatever 2011 will be important - and the year promises to be eventful - it looks guaranteed to be memorable for two persons: Gilad Shalit, the Israeli army corporal, a prisoner (but effectively prize hostage) in Gaza since June 2006, and Bradley Manning, the army private held in a Virginia army base since July 2010. Both these prisoners are more or less stuck in solitary confinement. Both are also quite young, (one born 1986, the other in ’87) almost too young to be where they are and to know what they were doing when they managed with such consequence for themselves and everyone to arrive there.

It’s high time and beyond it that Gaza’s number one hostage since ’06, Shalit, was freed, but there are good chances he will be. And it is to be hoped that whatever happens Manning will at least be able avoid the rest of his life in jail and/or under the kind of physical abuse of which US prisons are too full since if and when Manning gets out of solitary it could be an “out of the frying pan into the fire” situation for him.

Although the lights of the Colisseum in Rome were dimmed for Shalit on his last birthday (Aug 28th) and protests within Israel have been widespread and passionate, the fact is there has been a scandalous lack of protest internationally seeing that international law and rights have been insufficiently observed in this case. The superficiality or cryptic anti-Semitism of leading nations and their leaders is so strong that it is not being sufficiently protested that Shalit has not, so far as we know, been given the medical attention he should receive – though at his capture wounded in hand and shoulder by shrapnel he has never even received the Red Cross visits that are his right under international law. It is not convenient to his captors to let the international community know where he is, so law is simply waived in this case.

Apparently Shalit has been kept in solitary confinement and from light of day for years; a note released in '08 reports frequent depression. People should have the common sense to realize it is just this lack of will to play by the rules and the deficiency of humanitarian feeling wherever it suits Muslim radicals (Hamas in this case) that is at the back of Israeli distrust of almost anything and everything their neighbours propose and claim. Full of sympathy for “poor” Palestinians, the world indulges or turns a blind eye to just how dangerously implacable with the hatreds it will carry for generations if need be the relevant cultures and societies may be – it takes cases of injustice to women as in Iran for the liberal West even to be able to see it.

GILAD AS THE ARCHETYPAL JOSEPH

The fate of Gilad Shalit is not just tragic but haunting for the archetypal issues of which it is redolent. Quite simply this soldier is a sort of Joseph in Egypt, the youth handsome and talented brought low, at the same time as he is the Jew as eternal victim and at that not without having a touch of Christ association with it (his sun, moon and Jupiter are in the same signs, his Jupiter to within minutes of a degree of Christ’s Jupiter at birth according to the data for that birth I treat of in my Testament of the Magi).

Everyone seems agreed that Gilad, even if not quite the Balm of Gilead itself, is eye candy - even Australia’s Foreign Minister, Kevin Rudd, recently assured his parents their son was handsome. But he’s handsome in a certain Venus in Libra way assisted perhaps by an education in France, of which he is a dual citizen, that has left him the style and appearance more of a male model or artist than a soldier. Except that everyone in Israel must do their military time, looking at some photos of Gilad it is almost surprising to think he was ever in the army or at any rate forced himself to take part in the combat mission from which his low medical reading could have excused him. It seems he just wanted to be with his brother. Even so, what vague guilt or sense of obligation, what near masochism kept him to this to his ultimate misfortune? I suspect for starters the Virgo sun which is always ready to be its own best critic and feel obligations that others more extravert wouldn’t have. There is a sense one must always serve. Being in the army is itself called “being in service” and it’s a more Virgoan kind of self-sacrificing occupation than many realize.

The role of martyr, the depression and experience of serious testing is mapped in Gilad’s natus (28th August 1986 in Nahariyya, Israel) by especially the aspect of Sun to Neptune and then the serious and close square to confining and depressing Saturn. Mars (the soldier and war) is more or less unaspected unless you count a very wide trine, too wide to be really helpful for either good fortune or action, so that it probably does little but add to the sun’s exaggerated sense of obligation to act where it is not strictly necessary. Gilad’s is a seriously afflicted and unusual birth pattern with even the moon opposite Uranus which is probably involved with the tough, unhomely conditions of Gaza jail and while the Uranus aspects add to the odd and unusual destiny and perhaps character.

HOPE FOR GILAD SHALIT IN 2011?

It is my speculation the birth time might have been around 3 pm so that late Sagittarius rises. If that’s the case, the heavy hand of Pluto would have been on the ascendant (the body) when the bodily seizure of the capture took place in June ’06. Sagittarius rising would make “lucky” Jupiter rule the pattern which hardly looks to be the case for Gilad, but given Jupiter’s afflictions in this chart this Jupiter factor is not working in normal ways unless to create the kind of optimism and over-confidence that encouraged military involvement in the first place. It’s the same kind of feature which is likely to influence in the case of Manning, the Jupiter ruled Sagittarian who evidently hoped for a bit too much and pushed his luck to the extreme.

Will Gilad finally make it out of jail in 2011? This time it won’t be the butler will be the instrument of divine providence, but it might be the army, which has just said it is doing its own thing for him. So the army might achieve what the politicians can’t or won’t. At any rate on Jan 4th a solar eclipse falls nearly to the minute of a degree on Gilad’s Mars – he’s called a soldier and the army want to help him so Mars is these kind of associations. The eclipse certainly suggests more will to activity on his behalf - God forbid it doesn’t mean only danger - but while something could happen in January itself, real developments are more likely to occur some time over the year from then. Liberating Jupiter in Taurus, which enters that sign only in June, is more helpful in its indications for Gilad’s chart than Jupiter through Aries during the first part of the year. The hoped for liberation if it occurs this year could well hang fire till the second half of the year. Late August’s lunation falls right on Gilad’s birth sun and then the full moon of September is right on his messianically placed Jupiter in Pisces. That combination really ought to register and one can only hope that it does. If he’s already out by then that is the time the books and media are coming his way.

THE MORE COMPLEX CASE OF BRADLEY MANNING

By contrast, Bradley Manning (born Oklahoma 17.12.'87) can’t quite be spoken of as any Joseph in Egypt and unlike Gilad he doesn’t believe in God. He has been put on suicide watch in jail and his hardly inspiring reading requests have included atheist Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Sagittarians love philosophy, but Kant is no easy read even for philosophy students, so one can only imagine the former bright child who was cracking codes when other kids were playing normal computer games, wants, if not to improve the golden hours, to make them pass cracking the Kant code! Obviously the gay identity, which his largely absent father disapproved, affects the attitude to religion and faith (God as Father is the automatic enemy!) though obviously not all gays are unspiritual or even Lady Gaga fans like Manning. One wonders how Manning ever arrived in the army rather than the natural Sagittarian home of the university. One can only suspect it could be involved with the inadequate family as well as peer support which it has been suggested is a clue to his whole character, the need to draw attention to himself and also to be somewhat avenged.

When I wrote the last article I didn’t know Bradley Manning’s birth date but remarked if his data were known it would be striking. In effect it is. Uranus the planet variously of anything gay and anything intellectually brilliant, and which for Manning is strongly emphasized just as imagined, is locked into close conjunction with the sun and Saturn. Manning’s total identity (the sun) is tied to his brilliance and gayness at the same time as everything in the realms of tradition, authority, duty and the father (who doesn’t ever seem to have been helpful) repress this and stand in its way.

Because “lucky” Jupiter in Aries trines Manning’s sun there is a high dose of optimism that things can work out and risks be taken, but the feeling around, or from, people is cold and the world not kind. Venus is debased in cold, Saturnian Capricorn and even the moon (the mother and everyday emotions) is in Scorpio, a bit hidden and murky – it was with his mother that Manning went to live in Wales. Whatever this moon might reflect for the mother-son relation, it is certainly a connection to Julian Assange who shows the same feature. Both Manning and Assange could be said to want to prize out people’s secrets that are the business of especially Scorpio. I suspect Assange appears to Manning like “family” or some kind of parental figure. If so, the imprisoned private likely stands to be disappointed by the roving civilian. There could be a fair dose of the narcissist in Assange, a psychological type known to use and abandon people. There is utter confusion (or is it Scorpionic secrecy?) over whether funds have been or will be given towards the legal costs of Manning’s defence by Wikileaks). I take it as quite possible, even likely, that Manning’s birth time was before dawn with Scorpio rising (he was short as a child and is blue eyed and somewhat fair) and with this difficult Scorpio moon locked in the imprisoning twelfth house, so that he could be on a see-saw between a Scorpio moon that hides and is alone, and a rising Sagittarius sun that is all for being out there showing and telling it like it is. Out and proud too because then gay Uranus would rise. However this is speculation.

Undisputed is that Jupiter is natally in Aries. This surely has to be the reason Manning’s optimism and ambition went so improbably out towards things military and/or militant (and also towards Dawkins, Dawkins being an Arien who might even be perceived as another substitute father guide in preference to more Saturnian figures offering their various credos). In the absence of a birth time it is interesting to note that the late Jeane Dixon, who would class Manning, born on December 17th, as a Sagittarian 8, regards this date as relatively unfortunate for those concerned in contrast to the more outgoing, fortunate, life path of other Sagittarians. This is the frustrated, restricted Sagittarian who needs to tread carefully and who can only hope for slower and later personal fulfillment in life. Jupiter in aspect to Manning’s Saturn and in retrograde is limited of the Jupiterian expansion for him.

Even a right wing British paper unsympathetic to Manning recently observed that American justice can be “relentlessly vengeful” to those it decides to dislike, so that at worst one fears Manning could actually finish the rest of his life in jail, much of it in solitary (Sun conjunct lonely Saturn). Even if Manning has done wrong and was risking lives as the person who reported on him believed – Manning himself felt, it seems with some justification, that he was exposing corruption and torture in the army in Iraq – he does not deserve the worst of verdicts. And something should be taken into account as regards his background and youthful inexperience (which possibly Assange exploited). What’s certain is that with the total lunar eclipse of June right on Manning’s Sun/Uranus/Saturn combination much is likely to be heard or decided concerning him from then on while Jupiter through Aries and across Manning’s Jupiter during the first part of the year, if it doesn’t give false hopes would probably raise his spirits and encourage reasonably positive thoughts towards him in others in a way helpful to his case. Obviously to know the time of birth would supply a clearer, more detailed picture. All one can presently say is that it is not wholly negative one.

OTHER FORECASTS FOR 2011

I have been too busy to give thoughts to prospects for 2011, but not irrelevant to the comments on Gilad Shalit and in light of recent media declarations that it is not a case of whether Israel will be at war again but when, then I should say February, following the lunation on the 3rd, is more likely than during January as the first of the possible whens. There looks like some distinct aggravation to Israel’s chart in February.

There’s also some aggravation to my own chart, though I am not expecting to go to war unless more metaphysically. The latest regarding my book, Temple Mysteries and Spiritual Efficiency is that its PR will be issued on January 19th. Since the book is substantial in ideas and length as well as provocative I guess it is unlikely any response to the launch would be till into February and I think my pattern is maybe showing that.