1981: The Astro-Political Workings of Ronald Reagan

It has been said that Reagan was a believer in Astrology and even had a professional astrologer for political consultation. The 1980s were to mark a drastic political shift for the 20th Cenutry, and it's entirely possible that Reagan was hip to the fact that his election co-incided with the Grand Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in Libra, the place of Saturn's Exaltation.

If you take any combination of planets occupying the same part of the sky, this adds up to a "Conjunction", however a "Grand Conjunction" is a unique variety of conjunction because it refers specifically to the Saturn and Jupiter together as signifiers of changes and shifts at the level of Kingdoms, Governments, and State-craft. With this in mind it's entirely possible that what happened with the Reagan & Thatcher Era beginning in the 1980s was actually an elaborate Magical Working, to Harness this Grand Conjunction in Libra as a crucial turning point.

(pictured above: Ronald Reagan's Inauguration Chart, with the Grand Conjunction of Saturn & Jupiter at 09° 10° Libra. Pluto is also present in Libra, although separate from the conjunction at 24° Libra)

To understand the Grand Conjunction, we can think of it as a Astrological Cycle similar to that of the Sun and Moon. On a Monthly Basis we experience the Lunar Cycle that features "New Moons" as Conjunctions between the Sun and Moon, with Full Moons as Oppositions between the Full Moon. However at the level of the Moon, this is happening at a monthly basis similar to a woman's menstral cycle. If the Moon rules over Home, Children, Motherhood, Childbirth, Care for the Body etc, we can understand that by applying this principle to Jupiter & Saturn, we move away from the Monthly Cycle into a much longer cycle that has more to do with the rise and fall of whole political dynasties.

If we examine the Opposition between Jupiter-Saturn as the equivalent to the coming-to-potential of the "Full Moon" we can see this peaK with the Opposition of Jupiter-Saturn in 1990, shortly after the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Saturn is in it's own sign of Capricorn, together with a conjunction between Uranus-Neptune, in an opposition to an Exalted Jupiter in Cancer. Does it makes sense that the Fall of the Soviet Union and this momentary soap-bubble of 1990s Globalist Utopian Optimism is characteristic of the "coming to fruition" of the Reagan-Thatcher political plan? Or was the fall of the Soviet Union a kind of unexpected "Co-incidence"? This gives you a sense anyway of the Rhythm and Pulse of a Grand Conjunction.

Earth Sign Grand Conjunctions: 2000 & 1961

The next conjunction of Jupiter & Saturn would happen in 2000, this time in an Earth Sign, Taurus. This times up with election of GW Bush, although the actual inaugration would not happen until January 2001, at this point the Grand Conjunction of Jupiter&Saturn has gone "out of sign", with Jupiter in Retrograde at 01° Gemini, and Saturn at 24° Taurus.

Regardless of what your opinion is of Reagan's politics, his inauguration was much more astrologically ausicious given the Exalted Saturn in a tight conjunction with Jupiter, at a tight 1° orb.

It is also interesting to note that when it comes to the approximate 300 year Air Cycle of Grand Conjunctions, there isn't a "clean transition" from one element to another.

What makes Reagan's Election so interesting is that not only does it have a much tighter and better dignified Grand Conjunction present in the chart, it happens to be the first Grand Conjunction in an Air Sign, prior to this all the Grand Conjunctions were happening in Earth Signs. In 1961 the Grand Conjunction happened in Capricorn, Perfecting at 24° Capricorn around Valentines Day '61.

You may beginning to see a pattern in the Rhythm of this cycle: 1961, 1981, 2000... critical cultural turning points at 20 year intervals. The Progressive Surge of the 1960s, and then the Neo-Conservative Reaction of the 1980s. Again with Y2K and the Shock of the 911 Attacks ushering a new era dominated by fears around Safety, Security and National Defense.

2021: A Return to the Age of Air

A Wobbly Transition

To Review, We can see the ebbs and flows of history and politics as told by Jupiter and Saturn, and the puslating rhythms of their conjuctions:

1722: Grand Conjunction in Sagittarius (Fire Sign)
1741: Grand Conjunction in Leo (Fire Sign)
1762: Grand Conjunction in Aries (Fire Sign)
1782: Grand Conjunction in Capricorn (Earth Sign)
1802: Grand Conjunction in Virgo (Earth Sign)
1822: Grand Conjunction in Taurus* (Earth Sign) *note: 10 degree orb in Taurus, much tighter conjunction in 3rd Decan of Aries
1842: Grand Conjunction in Capricorn (Earth Sign)
1861: Grand Conjunction in Virgo (Earth Sign)
1881: Grand Conjunction in Taurus (Earth Sign)
1901: Grand Conjunction in Capricorn (Earth Sign)
1921: Grand Conjunction in Virgo (Earth Sign)
1941: Grand Conjunction in Taurus (Earth Sign)
1961: Grand Conjunction in Capricorn (Earth Sign)
1981: Grand Conjunction in Libra (Air Sign)
2000: Grand Conjunction in Taurus (Earth Sign)
2021: Grand Conjunction in Aquarius (Air Sign)
2040: Grand Conjunction in Libra (Air Sign)
2060: Grand Conjunction in Gemini (Air Sign)

If we extend back the range to 1722, we can see Grand Conjunctions in Fire Signs, and if we use the Grand Conjunction in Capricorn in 1782 as the First Grand Conjunction in an Age of Earth, 300 years later would mark the end of the cycle at approximately 2080. In some sense it is maybe more accurate to say this is a 200 year Age of Earth, lasting from 1782 until 1981, with Y2K marking the "Wobble Point". Similarly in 1822 the Grand Conjunction in Taurus looks pretty weak with a 10° orb, compared to the much tighter conjunction in the sign of Aries... what if this is a similar "Wobble Point", wobbling out of Earth and back into Fire, before iniating into this long period of Grand Conjunctions in Earth Signs?

With this in mind, I am writing this from the perspective of a Millennial, who was born during the Reagan-Thatcher Era of the 1980s, and my whole experience of adolescence into adulthood has been coloured by this strange wobbling back and forth, the from utopian globalist visions of a liberal egalitarian society that transcends borders and cultural distinctions, to a hyper-vigilant security culture where wars are fought to control key resources in the form of oil, gas and now Rare Earth Minerals. As Millennials we experienced a certain kind of "Whiplash" effect from this, as children we were fed a somewhat naive and idealistic vision of a future globalist society through childhood TV Shows and Videogames such as "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?". Maybe it's just my personal experience of being raised in a multicultural montessori school, where we celebrated "United Nations Day", this innocent dream was ultimately challenged by the shocking terrorist attack of September 11th, however as a Canadian citizen personally I did not feel as directly effected by the wave of Patriotism and Nationalistic Hyper-Vigilance that seemed to wash over America as an all pervasive tide that coloured the background atmosphere of the early 2000s.

Y2K was this cultural Whiplash Point, a shocking regression form the utopian high experienced on the heels of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It signalled that the 21st Century was to begin as a distinct Rupture Point from the previous Era. Naomi Klein has described a certain phenomenon around this time, an attitude that somehow the game had changed, and that you had to adapt to these new circumstances, because you couldn't get stuck in "Pre-911 Thinking".

It's entirely possible that Reagans Astrologers knew what they where in for back in 1981 and seized this opportunity to essentially cast a political spell that would go on to colour the political landscape for the rest of the 20th Century.

As I am writing this in December 2025, the words of Ronald Reagan were recently invoked in a Political Ad paid for by none other than Ontario Premier and Canadian Political Strong-man Doug Ford, to be aired during a weekend of Major League Baseball Finals Apparently (sorry I am not much of a sports guy). This created a huge uproar in the tense political situation between USA and Canada, with Donald Trump "Terminating" the Trade Negotiations with Canada. Why was this advertisement so controversial? It's a recording of Reagan from 1987, making an argument against the use of Tariffs in the name of Free Trade. In the Reagan Thatcher Era, a certain political doctrine became popular which is generally known as "Reaganomics". This style of Politics marked a drastic shift from the previous era and marked a new style of economic policy that favoured deregulation, and promotion of Globalist Free Trade. Reagan style Neo-Conservatism was essentially promoting the idea that Progressive Governments were inherently too bloated, wasting too much money on expensive social services, and that a Government should be small and have minimal interference with the free market. Instead of Governments running the world, the world should be run by Businesses and Business Men. Basically the idea was that the less interference the Government had in Business and Private Industry, the better. By choosing to use this recording of Ronald Reagan arguing against Tariffs against Donald Trump and MAGA, Doug Ford is only pointing out the obvious: that the Trump's Tariff Strategy is by definition "anti-free-trade", and an obvious shift away from the Free Trade Policy of the Reagan-Thatcher Era. In the 1990s this style of politics had become so popular, that Francis Fukuyama announced "The End of History", the Soviets were defeated, and Free Market Capitalism had won.

Now as we head into 2026, this is obviously not the case. If the largest economic force in America right now is Nvidia, a computer chipset designer (it's important to remember most of the manufacturing for these chips is still done in Taiwan, and this has become a critical tension point in the global economy). If Trump is trying to control or restrict Nvidia's business with China, by putting a Tax on all chips that are sold to China, or all business done with Chinese Chip Manufactures that use the Nvidia design license, this is basically the antithesis of Reagan's Free Trade principle, the biggest industries in America are now rife with Government Meddling, in an effort to pull manufacturing out of Taiwan and bring it back to American Soil.

Let's take it back to Reagan & Thatcher in the 80s for a moment. During this time it wasn't at all obvious that the Soviet Union was about to fall, and in this context it was crucially important that Free Market Capitalism was to be seen as the rational choice, positioning itself in a dichotomy to the Authoritarian Control of the Communist Regime. In this simplified way, the Free Market came to be associated with the American Principles of Freedom itself, "Free Enterprise" being specifically what set America apart from the Planned Economy of the Communist State.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, America was no longer defining itself in terms of the Soviet Communists as being some kind of fundamental enemy. After 911, it was now clear that American Freedom & Liberty were to be challenged not by the Communists but rather by Islamic Terrorists. This ended up setting the tone of what was to follow in the 21st Century, with the Soviets defeated, it was Islam who posed a threat to "Western Civilization". If Capitalism had defeated Communism at the level of Political-Economic Ideology, the new lines of political conflict were to be drawn over Religious lines, probably to obscure the underlying Geo-Political or Resource-based motivations for these conflicts. It has been suggested that whatever the pretenses are about spreading "Freedom and Democracy" abroad, all wars are really faught over resources.

It may seem quaint now to imagine that back when the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions were still in their infancy, there was a mixed sense of dread and optimism of what was to come from these new found technologies. What if we really did have the opportunity to transform society? With a new scientific understanding allowing us to harness the resources available from the natural environment as never before, where we seizing the opportunity to create a new world not bound up in the old limitations of survival and scarcity? If all wars are basically fought over resources, if we gaurentee that everyone has basic access to Food, Shelter, Clothing, Education, Healthcare... do we essentially take aware the motivation that leads one people to go to war with another? This was the promise of the New Age of Free Market Global Capitalism, that since Free Market Capitalism had emerged as the clear winner, the only real conflicts that were left were the old leftovers of religious sectarian violence? Not so fast, said History!

The problem with 911 and the GW Bush Era, is that the motivation to invade Iraq as a reaction to 911 obviously did not make very much sense to the casual observer. There is even a famous line from Donald Rumsfeld about how there were "Known Unknowns" and "Unknown Unknowns", Things you know you don't know, and things you don't know you don't know. In this bizarre feat of logic, you could justify going to war with a country, not because you had any positive information about why this is necessary, but rather that you could invade any country that you wanted to, because there could very well be valid reasons to go to war that would only make sense in hindsight once you had all of the information. In Hindsight it appeared more to be an obvious cash grab by "Tricky Dick" Cheney, whom Hollywood has made a popular movie with Christian Bale in the lead role as Vice President Dick Cheney himself. This movie, Vice, was made by the same guys who did "The Big Short", with the real life character that inspired the movie recently appearing in the news again attempting to short the AI Bubble. (leading back to this whole problem of a bubble economy where huge megacorporations sell things back and forth to each other, while investors speculate on how to keep making money off all this after the first wave of hype and novelty begins to wear off...)

Regardless of any Conspiracy Theories claiming that 911 was an "inside job" orchestrated by the Bush/Cheney Administration, they certainly did seize the opportunity to capitalize on the crisis, the way Naomi Klein illustrates in "The Shock Doctrine". What if this opportunity was not just about using shock induced by the 911 attacks to justify launching into a series of wars that made little to no rational sense, but also taking the opportunity to seize upon a critical historical moment for America. In the 20th Century, America dominated as a Super-power, largely due to the vast surplus it had in the Post-WW2 Era. In the Cold War Era this military surplus continued to build up, and the fact that the Soviet Union would suddenly collapse under it's own internal pressures and vulnerabilities came as a surprise to the Americans. It turns out they had spent decades prepairing for a potential conflict that would never happen. In Russia after the fall of the USSR, the power obviously fell to the Oligarchs, who would inheret the Soviet's Military Power. But during Reagan's time, the politics were about more than a power conflict between who had the biggest, most powerful army, navy and airforce. There was an ideological conflict, where Soviet Style Communism had been defined as inherently "Unamerican", and any Marxist or Socialist sentiment had been harshly clamped down on during the McCarthy Era. The Korean War and the War in Vietnam were faught to keep this Communist Menace at bay, and the 1960s Anti-War Movement was not just about "Peace & Love" on their own, there was an inhernetly pro-communist undertones where young students questioned why the Koreans and the Vietnamese were denied the right to self-determine their own Governments, free of foreign intervention. Keep in mind, this was still a time when Communism and Marxism held a promise for some people as something to believe in. In the 21st Century we inhabit a curious time where obviously North Korea is so terribly distopian in it's authoritarian control, that no one would consider it to be a Communist Utopia, and even though China is still technically Communist, the way it has adapted to Free Market Capitalism has undone the old conception that Communism itself is something that inherently separate from or opposed to the "Free Market". Now the supposedly "communist" china would love to sell North America its new Electronic Vehicles, its the American and Canadian Trade Barriers that are keeping these EVs separate from the North American Marketplace.

At one point in time, we believed that the "Free Market" would solve the problem of global scarcity by providing everyone with what they needed at the basic material level. In some sense I would argue that at some level we have already accomplished this basic goal of a "Post-Scarcity" society. However, we seem to be experiencing some kind of "Turning Point" around the "Crux" of Material Security, in that even if it's easy enough to provide a habitable living in terms of access to the basic essentials of food, housing etc. the system still needs to use scarcity as a means for controlling and enforcing behaviour. To this extent we tend to over-produce, and sit on a huge surplus, but create artificial "Choke Points", by which you can leverage money out of people, typically this is done through access to housing. Housing Scarcity makes Housing a Commodity, something you need to work towards, as a kind of lofty goal, unless you are already an insider to the higher stratas of real estate land barons. I would argue that we are smart enough to plan housing projects to the extent that no-one needs to worry about being homeless, but "housing scarcity" is intentionally manufactured and manipulated to maintain the leveraging point that separates a class of Landlords from a class of Tenants. It is a common experience amongst renters to find out that the landlord is not really the landlord, and actually the way Real Estate works is that there is a strange hidden hierarchy of Landlords, each passing rent upwards up the hierarchy until it reaches some mysterious source at the top. The Era of Trump has become synomymous with the Rule of Oligarchs and Wealthy Land Barons. Rule by the Land Owning Class of Nobles, through a system of renting, now we are all familiar with "Cloud Rent" and Yanis V's Techno-Feudalism. This means that Artificial Land Scarcity is becoming concretely reinforced by Land use for Data Centers, where the Virtual is now beginning to eat up concrete real estate, for the sake of producing a new virtual territory, through an interconnected network of people renting out and leasing things to each other, rather than owning. This is all done for the sake of keeping power in the hands of an Elite Class of Land Barons and DATA Cloud Barons.

In the book "The People's Republic of Walmart" the argument is made that Walmart itself is functioning as a Planned Economy larger than that of the Soviet Union. Apparently, after the fall of the Soviet Union, some of it's Navy was purchased by American corporations such as Pepsi. In the 21st Century, the Corporation has become stronger and more powerful than the Nations, and the whole pretense of Reagan's policies to minimize government spending in favour of Privatization, as essentially resulted in the creation of these monolithic mega-corporations such as Amazon or Walmart that have become whole economies unto themselves. If you consider the Techno-Economy as a kind of Mecha-Godzilla Dragon, Amazon and Walmart are like huge Kaiju monsters that go around devouring small businesses because they offer prices that no-one can compete with. However what makes these Economic Monsters so powerful is that Walmart runs not only the storefront but also the supply chain... and because the whole point of Amazon is that it's a web-only ordering platform, it focuses more on efficient supply chain management rather than any public facing storefront, for the sake of maximizing efficiency. Apparently no one wants to go shop in the store anymore when they can stay at home in their pajamas and recieve their parcel with a knock at the door.

What if we took the "accellerationist pill" here and let this play out, you only need so many amazon warehouses, what to do with all these empty strip malls that have been put out of business by this new way of doing things? Why not redevlop them into high density housing complexes? Now you have just solved the Housing Crisis, and you have a huge workforce to act as consumers, and fuel further economic growth. Instead of allowing this to happen, most of the land is being held by the kinds of people who prefer to milk it for all it's worth with Online Services such as Air B'n'B. At least here in Canada we have begun to crack down on these Air B'n'B rentals choking out the housing market, but when this was done the Air B'n'B Landlord Class responded with accusations of Communist Authoritarian Control Regime interfering with their right to freedom of enterprise in maximizing as much profit as possible from their little Air B'n'B Vacation Rentals. This is basically the landscape of the 2021 Grand Conjunction in Aquarius, a landscape defined by a privileged Land-owning class, clutching their pearls in NIMBY panic against the encroaching tide of Urban Densification. This has been resisted through media campaigns promoting the wholesomeness of the "Cottage Core" lifestyle, to avoid the decadent sins of urbanization by establishing roots in the wholesome traditions of the countryside.

So What Does This All Mean?