CHAPTER SEVEN:
America at the Crossroads - 8

America, as the "New World" that the motto on the Great Seal encourages us to dream of, is not to be identified with the Puritan dogmatism and ethics. Nor is it to be identified with a violent repudiation of all that Puritanism stood for. The God of the Freemasons who helped to build the new nation was not a Puritan God, nor were these men atheists and materialists. But the official churches that dominated the lives of the American Pilgrims were always in league with the privileged class, and when the effective ruler of a nation becomes closely identified with a religious movement, giving it an almost official sanction through his personal example, then we come close to the state of Czarist Russia or old England where the principles of authority in both the civil and the religious spheres were focused on one person, emperor or king.
      The President of the United States has the right as an individual person to surround himself with the friends and advisers he chooses; but is he really an individual person in the White House? Does he not become, while operating there, a symbol rather than a person? To say that the White House is wherever the President resides is, I believe, a complete misunderstanding of the correct relationship between the man as an individual person and the office. But alas many concepts in American life are vitiated by misunderstandings of this type, because we do not grasp the crucial importance of keeping individual and collective values each where they belong, and because we have been trained since childhood to consider everything in personality terms rather than according to basic principles. We naively tend to believe that the person of a President, in an individual way, is the absolutely determining factor in any situation. In fact, the White House and its ghosts control an incoming President far more than he controls them. He becomes the focal point for the Establishment and he is largely the prisoner of "the system," which in turn reflects the level of consciousness and motivation of the nation as a collective person. If the President succeeds in taking what might be considered to be revolutionary steps in answer to an obviously critical situation — as Franklin D. Roosevelt did — it is because his mind is open and sufficiently attuned to the forces of transformation at work within not only the nation but the whole planet, to act as a catalyst for a reordering of sociopolitical processes in terms of the need of this new situation.
      Such a reordering cannot mean a return to the good old days and the old religion. If it seems to be that, it is because this publicized "return" is in fact mainly a screen to hide what the actual rulers do not want to publicly proclaim. It would be unwise and ineffectual for a President to state that the new socioeconomic and political situation created by our electronic technology now invading all fields of human existence, private as well as public, requires a frankly technocratic system of government — that is, impersonal rule by a more or less dehumanized elite of technicians and ruthless managers of new material and psychological powers. Yet this is what a certain aspect of the world situation seems to encourage, if not to demand for survival. At least this is evidently the Pentagon view, and the Nixonian outlook. Will, it prevail in spite of Watergate?
      The most interesting thing is that in an incredibly stupid way something went wrong at Watergate — a tiny little thing, seemingly of no importance. Yet because of what, later on, two or three unspectacular persons said and did, this little thing has kindled a raging fire, which has perhaps done as much harm to the White House as the War of 1812. The whole Watergate crisis might turn out to be as inconclusive as the War of 1812 with England; yet that war apparently was an important factor in giving a firmer national consciousness to the American people, and it started an era of good feelings. It may be that the youth struggling for freedom and sanity during the sixties and through the technocratic nonsense of the Vietnam war will now be able to make a deeper impression upon the sociocultural and educational Establishment. But before this can occur the winter and spring of 1974 are certainly filled with the possibility of drastic encounters with destiny. The combination of Saturn and Pluto transits are most likely to stir up the Sun-Pluto progression which was so effective during the last election campaign and as the second Nixon administration started on its fateful drive for power, which appears to be ending in at least near catastrophe.
      Many people here and in Western Europe are deeply concerned with what the great Kohoutek comet may add to an already explosive planetary situation. There is no doubt that in the past the appearance of a spectacular comet coming from beyond Saturn's orbit (and in this case, from galactic regions beyond Pluto) has always been associated with a period of confusion and often of wars, social cataclysms or epidemics. But we must keep in mind that there is more to the appearance of a comet than a few weeks of close proximity to the Sun and the Earth. Such comets should be considered "signatures" of cosmic changes. They do not cause anything to happen; rather they reveal that the time has come for changes to take place. Everything points to the necessity for basic changes, and it appears that the spring of 1974 will have little to offer in the way of peace and comfort to either the nation or the White House. Nevertheless, these months promise dynamic action, and the character of this dynamism depends largely on how human beings, individually and collectively, will respond to the message that, symbolically speaking, Pluto is hammering into our stubbornly self-complacent minds closed to the regenerative and transforming visions of superphysical and parapsychological reality.
      As soon as the transits of Pluto and Saturn have done their work upon the United States Mid Heaven and the group of planets in Cancer and in the seventh House of the chart, Neptune will reach the natal Ascendant at Sagittarius 14°. This will be in January 1976, and a new Presidential campaign will be in the offing. America as a collective person will be two hundred years old and perhaps wiser for all she has weathered. Still, as Neptune leaves this 14th degree of Sagittarius, Pluto will have reached the natal Saturn of the U.S. chart. The two most remote planets, Neptune and Pluto, and whatever they signify to the mind aware of their movements, are therefore at this time throwing their spotlights upon very sensitive points in the sky-charted destiny of America. They certainly cannot be made to refer to the forces that seek even to maintain the status quo. In the next chapter we shall see that they already have told us in no uncertain terms that the time for basic changes has come.
      America is only one of the participants in the evolution of mankind on this planet Earth. It is only one factor in the development of Western civilization and, I repeat, it is this entire civilization which in this twentieth century is being challenged to show whether or not it can cure itself of all its present ills, which are legion, and at the same time transform at least some of the fundamental ideas it has taken for granted and which made it both the most dynamic and perhaps the most tragic of all civilizations.