Into 2012: "A Going On"......

Year's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us. (Hal Borland).

Last New Year's Eve I posted some predictions for 2011 from around the net and via my tarot deck. (Relevant post is HERE). First 3 featured were, very predictably, winners.

They were part of a list drawn up by John Derbyshire, who is a contributor editor of National Review:

Numerology: People will make a great fuss about 11/11/11. Didn't they!

Vocabulary: The word “austerity” will be heard a lot. We heard it!

The culture: Obsessive texting on tiny communication gadgets will become so widespread that at some moment in some daylight hour of 2011, nobody in the U.S.A. will be speaking to anyone else. Yep!

See the rest, including my rather wishy-washy tarot offering, at the link above.

With hindsight, regarding the tarot cards drawn, I might possibly relate two of them to the Occupy movement - 8 Cups -a turning away from the status quo by many of the (Page Wands) younger generation (+ others); the third card (6 Cups) - nostalgia or the return of someone from the past....still a mystery.

I usually find that without a card from the tarot's Major Arcana turning up in the draw, it's barely possible to read stuff that could cover a whole year for the whole world. So.... as a Major card didn't turn up this time either, I'll give tarot a miss in this post. It could be a good sign, by the way: certainly no end-of-world scenario coming up! But we knew that.....didn't we?

It's good that, nowadays, it's custom to limit predictions to the year ahead -ish. Some really, really bad predictions from the past show us how mindset of any given era cannot possibly embrace thought of change on a vast scale over long periods. We have been, and still are, necessarily limited in how much future change our brains are able to process. Perhaps we have improved some, from ongoing experience, and yet, because science and technology have progressed at an ever-incresing pace, can we hope, ever, to keep up?

The ordinary "horseless carriage" is at present a luxury for the wealthy; and although its price will probably fall in the future, it will never, of course, come into as common use as the bicycle.Literary Digest, 1899.

Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.
Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre, 1904.

There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), maker of big business mainframe computers, arguing against the PC in 1977.

It's a great invention but who would want to use it anyway?Rutherford B. Hayes, U.S. President, after a demonstration of Alexander Bell's telephone, 1876

X-rays will prove to be a hoax.Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, 1883.

More bad predictions HERE

Astrologers give us their best shot at foretelling the future with each New Year. They can match coming planetary transits to potential (underline potential) outcomes. The best we can hope for is a picture painted with very, very broad brush. In 2012, for instance, the three outer planets (the ones to watch in relation to predicting the future) will all three be in, or about to enter the early degrees of a new sign. During 2012:
Uranus 0 to 4 of Aries
Neptune 28 Aquarius to 1 Pisces, having reached 3 then backtracked.
Pluto 7 to 9 Capricorn.

That could be interpreted as indicating an overall change of atmosphere - everywhere.

Pluto moved from Sagittarius to Capricorn at the end of 2008, so has been at the avant garde, the initiator of a changed atmosphere poised to develop further in coming months.

The election of Barack Obama as President of the USA in 2008 can be seen as evidence of this change. First African American president of the US = a change all by itself. Unfortunately enticing promises of change in Washington which accompanied this new phenomenon have not manifested.

As Uranus creeps ever so slowly, (with a bit of back-and-forthing too) into Fiery Aries we wonder exactly how this new transit will manifest, bearing in mind that around the Fall of 2012 Uranus and Pluto will "square up", that is form a challenging square (90*) aspect. Most astrologers agree that this is the key time to watch for unexpected (Uranus' signature) events in 2012.

The broadest possible astro-brushwork indicates change, but of what type, how deep, at what rate, and where it will manifest most clearly, cannot be made clear by the planets.

I'm sticking to an earlier thought of mine - that the Occupy movement could have been a very, very early sign of change-to-come, but we shouldn't expect to see spectacular, long-lasting change for some years - until Pluto transits Aquarius in fact: 2025 onwards.