Mercury Conjuncts the North Node at 20 Capricorn and Leaves its Retrograde Shadow

Well, it's officially over as of tonight when Mercury clears its shadow, but that was certainly a hideous beast of a Mercury retrograde period in Capricorn. Pluto-infused throughout. Massive doses of collective terror running through our neurological systems as well as long-embedded traumas to the feminine held in the emotional body collective rising to the surface for release - the results of structural corruption, inequality, abuse and control. For me, it was overwhelming.

Mercury conjuncted Pluto at 2 degrees Capricorn on December 7, 2009 (the day I realized I had been poisoned by the antibiotic Cipro). By December 9, Mercury had entered its retrograde shadow, carrying Plutonic energy all the way. Mercury was on SOME mission. It stripped us bare.

For three solid weeks (and off and on for the next two), the toxic psychosis related to the drug reaction had convinced me I was going to die. Consumed by Plutonic confrontations with death.

Mercury travelled through Capricorn and conjuncted the North Node at 21 degrees where it turned around and went retrograde December 26.

The Sabian Symbol for this degree of Capricorn is: "A General Accepting Defeat Gracefully." Pretty fitting for the level of surrender this Merc retro required. Pluto often deals us situations where we just have to throw our hands up and go along for the ride, no matter how terrifying.

As the side effects left me almost completely physically debilitated, with the mental and emotional terror sitting on me, the image of my English Grandmother in her early 20s on a ship travelling across the ocean during World War II came to my mind's eye. She was at sea for twelve days and was bedridden with horrible seasickness almost the entire time. In her typical humour, she said she felt so wretched she was praying she would die and was terrified she wouldn't! The ship she was on was criss-crossing the ocean, trying to avoid being torpedoed by the Germans, on the way to the East coast of Canada where her soldier husband was waiting for her. She made it safely, but on the way back, the ship was hit and sunk. Her husband, a pilot, was shot down over the ocean and killed within a few years of her being in Canada, and my Pluto/South Node in Cancer/Capricorn North Node Grandmother was was left in a foreign country with a baby boy and no family or resources of her own. Her own home country, England, suffered horrendous destruction, and she was advised to stay in Canada and make a life here as opposed to going back (Pluto/South Node Cancer).

I also had images coming to me of the people from Africa who had been stolen from their lives and chained on slave ships, forced to lie in vomit, urine and excrement for weeks, packed in alongside others who had died on the journey. They didn't have a life fit for human beings waiting for them when (and if) they reached their destinations. A brutal life of constant and back-breaking labour that would generally kill them by the age of 40 was all they had to look to.

This misery is what created the wealth of the "owners" and the warmongers and their generations of offspring - those we are supposed to look at as the big success stories of human culture. Variations of this same corruption, enforced misery, inhumanity and injustice support all the pyramid-scheme hierarchies, all the top-down structural set-ups, in our societies to this day. It artificially props up most every wealthy, grinning "success story" we have. Follow the roots, and it's undeniable.

Haiti's poverty today is a direct result of European trade bans and then the forced payment of reparations to slave owners (to the tune of $35 billion) after the Haitian people overthrew their slavery between 1791 and 1804. From a London Progressive article by Ben Selwyn: Haiti's Tragedy and White Man's Burden Redux

"The victory of the former Haitian slaves against the French and then British came at a high cost. European countries refused to trade with Haiti, with France agreeing to resume trade on the condition that the Haitian state pay former slave owners compensation of 150 million francs (equivalent to around $35 billion today). When, in the early 20th century, the Haitian state found it impossible to continue repaying the loan, it turned to US banks for help. The United States occupied the country – from 1915 to 1934 – to ensure the repayment of these loans and to continue the expansion of US business interests in the Caribbean and wider Latin American region. The US then supported the murderous ‘Papa Doc’ and ‘Baby Doc’ dictatorships between 1957 and 1986. But ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier was overthrown by mass uprisings in 1986 and Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected in 1990 on a pro-poor platform. But no sooner had he entered office than a US-backed military coup overthrew him in 1991. The US then backtracked, supporting Aristide on the condition that he implement neo-liberal reforms, and restored him to office in 1994. In 2004 the US switched sides again, backing a coup against Aristide. Since then the country has been (in)effectively ruled by UN troops."

Just as my misery and the misery of hundreds of thousands of others who have had these hideous adverse drug reactions is considered nothing more than collateral damage in the quest for profit for corporations like Bayer and the makers of other dangerous drugs doled out these days with no care about the consequences.

Incidentally, Bayer is a German company that was part of the Nazi's IG Farben - their chemical and pharmaceuticals conglomerate. This conglomerate used concentration camp slave labour to produce its wares, bought and used human guinea pig slaves to test their drugs, and manufactured the pesticide Zyklon B, which was used to kill people in the gas chambers. Illustrious past this Bayer has. As horrifying as this is, it now makes so much more sense how their drugs could be being pushed by doctors around the world and making people so sick. There is a total whitewash of adverse reactions related to fluoroquinolone antibiotics as well as multitudes of other drugs being prescribed to people every day. Adverse drug reactions are now the fourth leading cause of death in the United States.

This was just some of the unresolved, often denied, collective terror and psychic/emotional trauma passing through our cells during the Mercury-Pluto conjunction, the following retrograde and the Cancer-Capricorn eclipses.

And for those of us who follow in these lineages, the emotional and psychic fallout of what has come before (and continues now) is almost crushing at times. With so many people living lives in almost complete denial of underlying realities, the battle on the psychic/emotional/energetic fronts falls to the few who cannot possibly deny it. The disturbances on these levels can be overwhelming, debilitating, paralyzing - wading through and trying to work with realities and dynamics most deny exist.

(Isn't it funny how much of the astrological establishment refuses to look at or acknowledge the influence of Pluto? Not funny ha-ha. More funny severely frustrating. Let's not forget that that establishment is a rigid, masculine-heavy hierarchical structure just like all others in dire need of the Pluto treatment...)

To cap off a very bumpy and difficult year, we experienced the Cancer Full Moon lunar eclipse on New Year's Eve. And just as Mercury was slowing again to station direct, the horrific earthquake in Haiti occurred (January 12), between the two eclipses.

Mercury's direct station at 5 degrees Capricorn coincided with the Capricorn New Moon solar eclipse January 15.

So it has been a wicked and terrifying Mercury retrograde period for many people.

Mercury has been passing back and forth between Pluto and the North Node in Capricorn, and we have been informed in no uncertain terms just how corrupt, dangerous and deadly the corpo-governmental structures remain at this point in human history. Collectively, we have become more deeply aware than ever of the influence of inhumane corporate agendas (Pluto in Capricorn) in our day-to-day lives (Mercury) and of how little value or meaning human life has to the people enforcing and reinforcing those agendas.

As Mercury re-wired us on these themes, we had our awareness heightened of the icy cold grip of corporate control and its attempts to reach ever-further into our daily lives, and we were challenged to take charge, to sever ties wherever we could to those corrupt infrastructures. This Plutonic severance is and will continue to be a very complex, multi-layered process of kicking top-down tyranny out of our lives by, together, reinforcing soul-sovereignty and the sovereignty of our communities...and committing to living that way.

We've been informed. We know how deep and how all-encompassing it is. We know now, moving forward, what we have to do, step-by-step, to take the control back in our own lives, communities, businesses, relationships, countries. How we have to alter our decision-making processes...

Mercury direct just conjuncted the North Node in Capricorn for the second time, post-retrograde, and we are more committed than ever moving forward. Mercury has gathered the information and passed on the messages we need at this point to help us understand the next layer of context of Pluto's transit through Capricorn (15 more years to go on that front) and what it means to us personally and collectively. Things have been laid bare for us, brutally in a lot of respects.

But we've gotten crystal clear on who can be trusted, on where our allegiances lie and on what we intend to further from this point on.

The progress has been difficult and frustrating, tied as it is to the massive Plutonic restructuring process. These are huge dynamics we're shifting, and progress is happening in fits and starts. Saturn and Mars are retrograde, and, of course, Mercury is just heading into new degrees of the zodiac. The frustration comes when we are held in place and seemingly can't move forward. If we struggle against it or attempt to go too fast, things can get frightening and overwhelming. Patience is required as we wait for the next small step to become apparent and for the ability to take it in a sure manner. But it gets very heavy, almost intolerable, as we wait for the next step. Very uncomfortable. There have been many times in the past two months (and even before) when I felt certain I would break under the pressure.

Collectively, we're breaking deeply ingrained old patterns now with every step we take, opening vast new possibilities. The importance of what we're doing - and the necessity to do it right every step of the way - is the weightiness we feel. As we take each step forward, the dust and detritus have to clear before we can take another.

Mercury coming together with the North Node today (our soul path and point of successful navigation through the current energies) brings the understanding that we are are being delivered into new vehicles and new relationship structures (Saturn in Libra square Pluto in Capricorn) to achieve the concrete progress to which we've committed.

We now take charge personally of the process of transforming collective concepts of success, worthwhile achievement, and prestige in career and public image. We commit to disengaging fully from the remnants of conditioned corporate, patriarchal versions of those things and sidestep those versions altogether. We recognize the energy of what is real and what is not, and it becomes simple to choose integrity every time. Here is the final "drawing in" to the core, disconnecting from any corrupt structures, people or concepts we were unknowingly furthering. Spinning off the influence of that which is inauthentic to us.

We are the balance (Saturn in Libra) to the boxed-in corporate lifestyles we're supposed to pick out of a catalog. "Order A, B or C." We choose D. None of the above. We choose our own lives, based on the guidance of our own hearts and souls. And we choose to do it together.

The Sabian Symbol for 20 Capricorn (where Mercury re-joins the North Node) is: "A Relay Race." So you see the crucial importance here (with Saturn in Libra as dispositor) of coming together, working together and sharing the responsibilities and effort as we go forward. No one can go it alone at this point. No single person can bear the weight of humanity's collective fears as we move forward, especially those that are hidden and denied in the collective subconscious. The powers that be are very aware of the manipulative, coercive power of playing on collective fears, especially when they can make people feel isolated and desperate, as if they are the only ones who have those fears.

Saturn in Libra represents the coming together of people, of equals, and the formation of relationships designed to be vehicles for achieving the collective goals we could not achieve alone. Achieving not only the balance, but tipping the scales - to justice, freedom, love and dignity for all good people.

This is why we have to act as a team now going forward. That's how we're strong. Understanding the energetic connection among all good people, past, present and future, and drawing on the spiritual wellspring of wisdom we always have access to in times of need and great struggle. (Jupiter in Pisces)

We've fused soul agendas. This process has helped us to strip off distortions, concepts of time and space, that kept us feeling separate from those in our soul groups who came before. We've now merged fully with those who have shared our soul imperatives throughout history and who have taken part in the same struggles all good people have shared.

The next steps are to come together with those of like-mind and like-soul in the present, for the future. I've been expecting this to happen for quite some time, so I'm having a hard time believing it's actually going to go down. Unity, unity, unity, we've heard it all before. At the same time, I know I've gone as far as I can go alone - I feel as if I've gone too far, actually - and I'm sure many are feeling the same way.

Mercury enters Aquarius February 10, and I don't think I have ever been more grateful for a Mercury transit to come to completion.

My recovery is going to take longer than expected, and I'm not sure what's going to happen with me or the blog. I found this post quite taxing, so I probably won't do another for a while. I wish you all strength and faith to get you through these dark times we're going through. All the best.

Willow