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Saturn’s rings of fear strike terror into astro besotted lankan hearts
On the second of November, after thirty years of voyaging the twelve constellations, the most-feared planet in the astrological sphere, Saturn, moved into the house of Scorpio, home of the zodiac’s war lord Mars.
Lying more than 1,200,000,000 kilometres away from Earth, the transit of Saturn from the constellation Libra into Scorpio may only amount to another notch in the astronomical calendar for astronomers to jot for the record. But to the millions of Lankans who gaze at the heavens to discern some twinkling sign as to their future fate, the movement is one that has them gripped in a tangled web of dread and terror spun by astrologers to whom Saturn is but bread and butter.
Every two and a half years, Saturn transits the twelve constellations of the zodiac in a cycle that takes thirty years to complete. Every transit to and every sojourn in each house is another welcome reason for the astrologers to roll out their ola leaves and awaken the familiar fears of forebodings amongst the faithful in order to gather the manna that falls from celestial skies.
To make matters worse, Saturn’s Aquarius is Sri Lanka’s birth sign in mundane astrology. And Saturn, being the lord of Aquarius, is the ruling planet of this nation. It is also the planet which stays the longest in any single house. As a result it is considered to be the one planet, whose influence is not transient, whose power is not fleeting; but whose transit in a particular sign is more felt and feared and leaves a more lasting mark than any other planet. Malefic Saturn is also the planet most regarded as a protagonist of change, for better or for worse. Saturn is the bogey man in the zodiac.
But before you rush to pooh pooh and condemn astrology as bunkum, consider the bizarre catalogue of events that have occurred since Saturn moved to Scorpio on November 2nd. Before you trash astrology wholesale, think whether the highly developed minds of the old rishis of India may have had a magical insight into the unknown forces at work in the universe when they predicted with uncanny accuracy the volatile nature of Saturn and how its transit from house to house in each era inflicts dramatic change.
On October 29, four days before Saturn entered Scorpio, the first faint tremors of the changes Saturn could bring were felt in the highlands of Uva when the tragic landslide in Koslanda occurred. And astrologers rushed to place the blame on the malefic effects Saturn’s transit brings in its wake as it leaves the two and a half year tenancy of its old abode and comes to occupy new lodgings. Coincidence? Maybe.
But the rumblings have not been limited to the Uva land mass but have ominously extended to reach the throne itself, the shock waves felt in the highlands of power. Three weeks after Saturn’s arrival in Scorpio, the earth began to shift in the political landscape. On November 19, though he had two more years left in his tenure of office and could have easily glided, on auto pilot if need be, during the remainder of his six year term, President Rajapaksa deemed it prudent to call for an early presidential election and thus issued the proclamation in the supreme confidence that the opposition couldn’t produce a David to take on the invincible Goliath. The wheels of change were set in motion.
Dreaded Saturn’s feared transit: The zodiac's God of change
But the challenger to the presidency was not the man or woman the president expected him or her to be. To his undisguised surprise, it was not the leader of the UNP stale Ranil, neither was it the irrepressible Chandrika. With Ranil it would have been a cakewalk, with Chandrika it would have been a sprint on a hot tin roof. To his bewilderment, the opposition had wised upto the challenge and cut the sod under his feet by presenting as the contender a man from his own party, an SLFP member of parliament for 25 years, a senior government minister, whose ambition, it had appeared, stopped at the prime minister’s office, the record breaking general secretary of the SLFP no less, Maithripala Sirisena. A rustic son of the soil from a rural farming family sent to lay claim to the Sinhala Buddhist crown. The surprise element demanded a change of plans. But the best kept secret of this century was revealed only when the presidential proclamation had been signed irrevocably, announcing the election and it was too late to defer it. Coincidence?
If Saturn displaced the best laid plans of the President then it also caused a revolution in the life of the challenger from Polonnaruwa. Until then, an unflappable first mate of the ship, Maithripala had plodded on as the man in charge of the nation’s health, a grey figure lit only by his anti-tobacco crusades as he tried desperately to tar each packet of cigarettes with horror photographs in Technicolor to scare the masses from the evils of smoke. A sort of quaint Don Quixote figure, fighting the windmills of giant tobacco companies but carrying on the good fight without treading on any big toes. On November 21, the placid, comfortable political life he had led was to change beyond recognition; and perhaps, for the first time since becoming minister, he discovered the rough and tumble of ugly life on the other side of the mean street.
Even as he made his dramatic announcement proclaiming his grandiose intention to contest the presidency and declared himself to be the inspired opposition’s chosen seed to covenant with the masses, he was stripped of his security and all the paraphernalia that goes with being a pampered holder of a senior ministerial post in the UPFA cabinet. Whatever transpires on January 8, life would not be the same again. But as recompense for the temporary loss, Saturn placed him on centre stage, as the mortal pivot of earthly change. Coincidence?
Then what of Ranil to whom defeat had been but a spur to dare the unreachable, whose adrenaline had flowed to the quick in the midst of disaster and emboldened him, against all odds, to brave new challenges to seek the Holy Grail of his naked ambition? What of Ranil, who not only two months before had twice declared himself as the UNP’s presidential candidate, whose candidature had been proposed and seconded by the UNP executive committee, to now renounce, in the name of country and party, his great desire to step into the presidential shoes his uncle JR had cobbled 36 years ago?
If his machinations prove successful, here he is now, content to take a back seat and play second fiddle as prime minister under a Maithripala presidency, even as he did for a short spell under Chandrika? Change of circumstances had brought a change of ambition even as it has done for former President Chandrika. Touted as a possible presidential candidate in the January elections, Chandrika had wisely abided her time, watching which way the cookie would crumble before making a late grand entry into the field of runners. But having lost her father and her husband to political violence and her eye and nearly her life to LTTE suicide bombers, she was forced, in her own moving words, to eschew adorning the bewitching medallion dangled before her due to the admonitions of her concerned and caring son. But from semi-retirement she still emerged to canvass the cause of Maithri, to become the woman behind Maithripala’s possible success, even making the President refer to her as the ‘real candidate’. For both Ranil and Chandrika, the year ends on an unforeseen note of dramatic change to their individual ambitions.
Coincidences?
And what of the famous five who mutinied in the galley with Maithri and now dare to walk the plank if their audacious efforts come a cropper. For them too Saturn’s movement has been an albatross on the ship’s mast. Gone, the cosy comfort of being pampered ministers of the UPFA on the government’s luxury liner, enjoying the smooth sunshine cruise which had been so generously afforded them with no expense spared. Exotic ports of call, liberal shore leave and no questions asked. But, though every move made had been meticulously logged on the ship’s cards and carefully filed for possible future use, something had made them jump ship and climb aboard a rickety raft manned by a motley crew of marooned sea dogs desperately in search of a skipper, united only by that singular aim of sighting and hailing land ahoy. Did Saturn throw them overboard? Or was it pure coincidence?
The same goes for those who still haven’t stirred from their cosy cabins and instead hope the lashing storm would soon pass. But as the days turn to nights and nights turn to days, the tempest blows ceaseless; and the frightening prospect looms before their ever narrowing portholes that the endless summer joyride they had so far enjoyed aboard paradise ship may soon hit the rocks. Life indeed is dramatically changing for them and the question arises: Is it coincidence? Or is Saturn rocking the boat?
If that is the case for individuals and the sudden turns of fate Saturn’s transit has whirled in their paths, how must it be for the collective groupings, the blistering barnacles that had stuck firmly to the ship’s rusty hull?
Exactly one month after Saturn crossed over to Scorpio, The Jathika Hela Urumaya broke ranks with UPFA and crossed over to Maithripala’s side on December 2. But then more change was to follow. Two weeks later its Deputy Secretary crossed back into the Mahinda camp in the skillful manner of a conscientious tree frog. In his resignation speech on the 17th of this month, he spoke of his conscience and how it grieved his heart to break away from the party he loved and vowed it was not his intention to either take away other JHU members with him or do anything to wreck the JHU. Four days later on December 22, he had done both. He announced the formation of his new party to represent Sinhala Buddhists and revealed that 17 JHU members had joined him. Contrary to his promise, he has not only usurped the Hela Urumaya name tag from the Jathika Hela Urumaya but also plagiarised the word Pivithuru from JHU MP Ven Athuraliye Rathana Thera’s recent Pivithuru Hetak campaign to coin his new party’s name Pivithuru Hela Urumaya.
The All Ceylon Makkal Congress, a constituent of UPFA, also left the Government when its leader, Industries and Trade Minister Rishard Bathiudeen, joined the Maithri camp on Tuesday. This caused a split in the party with some opting to stay in the Mahinda fold. As for the Ceylon Workers Congress, the all-powerful fair weather party, its leader Thondaman remains with the Government while its deputy leader has joined Maithripala’s group causing a split in the CWC. As for the Bedouins of the eastern desert, the SLMC, the signs are it will also seek shade in Maithripala’s oasis though it may cause a split too. Thus all these parties on the fringe have changed their political colours since the advent of Saturn to Scorpio. Worse, they have suffered internal damage. Coincidence?
And this Tuesday, the Government lost its vital two-thirds majority in parliament which it had enjoyed for the last seven years to exercise absolute legislative power. Saturn had put the spanner in the works and turned the whole edifice, once thought invincible, topsy-turvy. Change is visible. Change is audible. Change is in the seasonal air. It’s in the rustle of the wind. It’s in the murmur of the breeze. And while a growing section clamours for it, another secure grouping fears it. Just pure coincidence, you say? Or is Saturn’s influence, the alien conspiracy Wimal Weerawansa is talking of?
But Saturn is also the beggar of the zodiac and is identified with the masses. Unlike the astrological planet Sun which denotes kings, Saturn rules the mass. It is the planet of the people, the ultimate kingmaker. And for the people too it has brought real change and presented to them with a credible alternative they never dreamt they would ever have two months ago.
Now, flashback to thirty years ago. On December 18, 1984, Saturn enters Scorpio. A year earlier the prelude had been set. On July 23, 1983, thirteen soldiers had been killed in an LTTE ambush in Jaffna. Racial riots had broken out in Colombo. Hundreds of Tamils had been killed, their homes and businesses gutted. Then as Saturn makes its inexorable journey towards the house of Scorpio, the terrible flames of hate burning in the aftermath of Black July’s inferno continue to rage and turn Tamil ire to molten lava. Tamil opprobrium is raised to fever pitch; the Sinhala people are condemned as racists; the Tamil exodus begins in earnest. What had been till then, an amateurish affair waged by Tamil insurgents transforms into a military battle. And as Saturn enters Scorpio, the house of the war lord Mars on December 18, 1984, Lanka discovers she has a full blown terrorist war on her hands.
The dramatic change, Saturn’s is reputed to inflict, happens. And its consequences, even though the war is over, are still being felt today. Another coincidence? Or Saturn’s work?
Then flash your mind back to thirty years before 1984 when once again Saturn moved into Scorpio on November 12, 1955. The prelude for change had been set four years earlier when the senior Minister of the UNP Government, S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, had left the sole reigning United National Party and formed his own nationalistic party, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party. On April 12, 1956, exactly five months after Saturn had crossed over to Scorpio and whilst remaining in Scorpio, Bandaranaike is elected as the Prime Minister of Ceylon. The mould of a one party state is broken. Change is wrought. Democracy is revitalised as a result. And even today sixty years after, the country remains a two party political state. Saturn in Scorpio had brought change, this time for the better.
Even the weather has freaked. The Disaster Management Centre said on Friday that the present weather was the worst since 1957. In 1957 Saturn was in the house of Scorpio, just as it is now.
Still think it all boils down to coincidence, do you now?
Before you follow the shallow fashion of the unenlightened west to view with derision the supposed primitive beliefs of the East, beware. Is it possible that the planets reflect what’s in store for us? The East has devised a system based on mathematics and the movement of the stars to predict the future. Has the West come up with anything?
There may well be a Da Vinci Code writ large in the celestial skies with its meaning known only to the initiated in the diagnostic art of astrology based on the science of astronomy. What may appear to Galilee to be the mere movement of Saturn to the constellation of Scorpio or Virgo may, to Nostradamus, portend the advent of a catastrophic event on earth hundreds of years later.
“The fault,’ as Shakespeare’s Cassius tells Brutus, “may not be in our stars but in our selves”, but the stars may reflect our faults, foretell our fates. As the old bard puts it in Hamlet where the Prince of Denmark tells his friend Horatio, ‘there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” The heavens may indeed contain the signs for the wise on earth to glean and for the uninitiated to scoff.