Obama, the Nodes and the Hero’s Journey

Last updated on: April 1, 2008 at 10:47 am by Lynn Hayes

Obama, the Nodes and the Hero’s Journey 2008-04-01T10:47:00-04:00 Lynn Hayes

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Dharmaruci is back, and has a wonderful post about the Clinton/Obama mashup. He predicts that the Clinton candidacy will unwind when Pluto retrogrades this month, and connects the Obama candidacy to the Hero’s Journey in Jungian terms:

“Obama’s journey so far can be seen in Jungian archetypal terms, with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright being, in my opinion, Obama’s greatest benefactor during this period.

What we find in Jungian psychology is the journey from Young Hero to Wise Old Man, and necessary encounters with the Shadow and Anima, or Feminine, along the way. These encounters deepen the Young Hero, who begins with wonderful ideals, and a desire to complete some enormous task that will save the world (this is my way of putting it, not Jung’s.) But he is naïve, he sees the world in black and white terms, good guys versus bad guys. He, of course, is aligned with the Good. (I’m putting all this in male terms for now, but it translates quite easily into female terms).

It was during this naïve Young Hero phase that we encountered Obamania, when the saintly saviour archetype was projected strongly onto him by many people, and not just by young or uneducated people either. There was rightly a reaction in the opposite direction by many other people.

And then, as Pluto stationed in March, we heard the voice of the Underworld, of America’s Shadow in the form of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s long-time pastor. He vomited out great gobbets of unwelcome truth: “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye…and now we are indignant, because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought back into our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.” [This event also coincided with Obama’s reverse nodal return in which the transiting South Node conjoined the North Node in Obama’s chart.]

And again: “And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent, she failed. She put them on reservations… When it came to putting the citizens of African descent fairly, America failed… The government put them on slave quarters…Put them in inferior schools… Put them in the lower paying jobs. Put them outside the equal protection of the law. Kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education, and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three strike law and then wants us to sing God Bless America. Naw, naw, naw. Not God Bless America. God Damn America! That’s in the Bible. For killing innocent people. God Damn America for treating us citizens as less than human. God Damn America as long as she tries to act like she is God and she is Supreme.”

Pluto was not just stationing: he was opposite Obama’s natal Venus in Cancer. Venus is to do with both personal relationships and, in a politician, popular appeal, the relationship with the electorate. And Cancer concerns home and family and tribe. So it was a potent brew for Obama personally. He was being called upon to acknowledge his origins, his roots, his tribe, and the way they see their country.

“God damn America.”

It doesn’t get much more shadow than this. Yet how can you love your country if you don’t also detest its flaws? What does it mean to say you love your country if you paint out the bits you don’t like? Obama performed a pretty nifty dance in his response to the release of the Wright video. He gave a speech, “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.” He said some good, inspiring stuff in his usual, eloquent way, and it was good politics.”

read more here…

Warning: geeky astrological details follow. A reader commented on the transit of the South Node to Obama’s North Node, which led me on an expedition to determine whether the True Node (which is astronomically correct) is more accurate than the Mean Node (which averages the passage of the nodes through time so that it always travels retrograde).

Using the True Node, Obama’s North Node is at 27 degrees 18 minutes Leo, and the Mean Node is at 27 degrees 54 minutes Leo. The South Node is currently in Aquarius and recently transited Obama’s North Node (interpretation to follow) but the dates are different depending upon whether you use the True Node or the Mean Node. The True Node reverse return occurred on March 23, and the Mean Node reverse return occurred on February 16.

Although the story of Reverend Wright and his links to Louis Farrakhan had been simmering since last year, it didn’t erupt into the national consciousness until March 12 when Wright’s video surfaced on You Tube. It looks to me as though the True Node in this case was actually more accurate in defining this event, which arguably will change the course of Obama’s candidacy, than the Mean Node.

More on the reversed nodal return. The North Node in the chart represents our evolutionary direction; it’s a signpost that guides us forward in the direction of our evolutionary path. The transiting South Node brings us in contact with the past; if we think about evolutionary growth as a spiral, we travel in ever-expanding spirals that bring us time after time back to the same place where we revisit events and issues from our past that challenge and aid us in our transformation. The conjunction of the South Node (past) to the natal North Node (future) is called the “reverse nodal return,” and describes an important challenge that will either help or hinder our forward motion. As with every other transit, how we handle these challenges is up to us, and difficult cycles can be the greatest tools of our soul’s progress.

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