[Note:  This article appeared on The Pisces Chronicles on June 9, 2006, and received 110 comments!]

A shift has taken place. Can you feel it?

It all seems to have started with the New Moon in Gemini on May 27 (May 26 here on the West Coast). Suddenly, there’s a new energy among us. We’re teeming with ideas, questioning old beliefs, and seeing the world in a new way.

Things certainly are different here on my blog. You can go back through the past few posts and see it how it happened literally overnight. A reader suggested that we are being “beamed,” possibly with energy from the Galactic Center.

It made me think about the Sumerians. No one knows exactly where they came from. They apparently just showed up suddenly in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq, a coincidence?) and superimposed themselves on the existing society. Within a short time, we had writing, law, accounting, a means of accurate measurement, and, eventually, astrology. I’ve always wondered whether a shift in consciousness might have been responsible for this development, whether they got “beamed,” and why them? Were they more receptive than others?

Is there a possibility it could happen again? Might we be witnesses to such an extraordinary event? Is what’s happening here on the Pisces Chronicles a little whiff of what it might be like when it happens? I sure hope so.

These are my thoughts as we approach Sunday’s Sagittarius Full Moon.

The Full Moon falls at 21 degrees Sagittarius, six degrees from the Galactic Center and five degrees from retrograde Pluto. While six degrees isn’t an exact hit, it’s still close enough to let in the light, or beams, or whatever’s coming from that giant funnel at our core (from the Latin word for “heart”). Master astrologer Maya del Mar describes it like this:

The Galactic Center emits massive amounts of infrared radiation, which Philip Sedgwick, pioneer of galactic astrology, describes as both ‘arousing the subconscious portion of the brain’ and providing ‘intense stimulation for the root chakra.’ Alex Miller-Mignone tells us that this activation of the subconscious promotes the retrieval of information from the past, the past of this life and other lives, which may interact with the self-preservation instincts of the root chakra, creating some uneasiness. Attention now to unconscious impulses could be very helpful.

We’re particularly feeling this energy right now with the lunation cycle in Gemini-Sagittarius. That the subject is even on our radar screen is an indication that something is happening. And it’s significant that the next Pluto conjunction to the Galactic Center, exact on December 29, will be the first in our conscious awareness. When the previous one occurred in 1759, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto hadn’t been discovered yet, although Uranus had been sighted at least six times. (William Hershel, who is credited with its discovery in 1781, moved from his native Germany to England in 1757. He went on to discover infrared in 1800).

Some astrologers predict that there will be rapid technological advancements in the years following the Pluto-GC conjunction. There no doubt will be, but if we ascribed them to any particular astrological event, I’d say it’s the early influence of the coming Age of Aquarius. Given Pluto’s transformational energies and the characteristics traditionally assigned to Sagittarius, it’s more likely that we’ll see changing political boundaries, experience a shift in our belief systems and religious doctrine, and arrive at a new understanding of the mysteries of the Universe. These discoveries could lead to advances in technology, so maybe I’m splitting hairs, but the distinction seems important. With that in mind, I decided to take a look at past Pluto-GC conjunctions to see what was going in the world and whether it could be attributed to this cosmic alignment.

Before I could do that, I had to calculate the degree of the Galactic Center for tropical astrology. If we could see it, we would find it at the boundary between the constellations Sagittarius, Scorpius, and Ophiuchus, the 13th or “forgotten sign” of the Zodiac. That alone is symbolic, given the regenerative properties assigned to Scorpio, the mythological connection between Ophiuchus and healing, and the reputation of Sagittarius as the truth-seeker. Some astrologers note that the Archer’s arrow of truth points directly at the Galactic Center.

However, because of precession, the Galactic Center is now located at 26’57” Sagittarius in the tropical Zodiac. Precession occurs at 1 degree every 72 years. Calculating backwards, the previous two Pluto-GC conjunctions occurred at 23’31” Sagittarius in 1759 and 20’04” Sagittarius in 1511. According to my calculations, conjunctions also would have occurred in 1263 and 1015.

To find out what was going on in the world back then, I consulted Bartleby’s Encyclopedia of World History, which describes the period between 1000 and 1500 as being marked by “[c]hanges in the Islamic world, the rise of new empires spreading from central Asia, new patterns of international contact (involving new policies in China and in Europe), and solidification of the major religions . . . The regional civilizations of the Eastern Hemisphere were transformed in this period. The Eastern Hemisphere ecumene continued to expand through trade, the spread of religions, migrations of peoples, and conquests. In the Western Hemisphere, Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations emerged in a context of complex, nonurbanized societies.”

Expansion, trade, migration, conquest . . . these are all watchwords for Sagittarius. Throw in transformation, and you’ve got Pluto in Sagittarius. Of course, Pluto was in every other sign during this period, too, so why all the Sagittarius imagery?

Might it have anything to do with the Galactic Center and Pluto’s conjunction with it every 248 years?

Things get even more interesting in 1511, the year Ponce de Leon became the first European to set foot on the American continent. Again, quoting from Bartleby’s:

During the early modern period, the context of human affairs was changing dramatically. Within the globalization of life, three major changes were of special significance. 1. The development of new-style empires and large state systems that came to dominate global political and military affairs. 2. The internal transformation of the major societies, but especially the transformation of society in western Europe. 3. The emergence of networks of interaction that were global in their scope. These developments reoriented the global balance of societal power. In 1500 there were four predominant traditions of civilization in the Eastern Hemisphere in a position of relative parity, but by 1800, one of these societies, the West, was in a position to assume political and military control over the whole world.

For 1759, I did something a little different. I just googled the date to see what turned up, and was astonished to find a book by that title, subtitled, The Year Britain Became Master of the World. That pretty much says it all, although here’s an interesting excerpt from the book review by Publishers Weekly:

The entire history of the world would have been different but for the events of 1759,” McLynn (Wagons West; Napoleon; etc.) argues in his stylish account of a year crowded with scheming, battles and British conquest. That year was the fourth in the Seven Years War, a struggle between France and England for global dominance that was fought worldwide. McLynn focuses on the deadly conflict, contrasting the two nations’ differing wartime policies and showing how the combination of Britain’s maritime prowess and sheer good luck helped it emerge triumphant, albeit by a narrow margin.

Good luck? Maybe they had something else going for them? Anyone want to do the chart?