The Taal Volcano

Many have connected the recent conjunction of Saturn and Pluto to the beginning of a cycle that will produce profound shifts in the global financial system. That may well prove to be the case but in terms of a connection to immediate events, the Taal volcanic eruption in the Philippines is what caught my eye. This volcano is situated 14°00'N and 120°59'E and in the Philippines, the conjunction was exact at 12:12am on Monday 13th January 2020. The volcano began erupting on the Sunday. Figure 1 shows a chart drawn up for that time at the location of the volcano:

Figure 1

The conjunction falls within one degree of the chart's IC. Saturn can be associated with the Earth's crust, marking as it does the "skin" of the planet, and Pluto of course is the seething magma beneath this crust that sometimes breaks through it, as it's attempting to do via the Taal volcano. Note that Mars in the second house throws a sharp semi-square to the conjunction that involves Mercury, Ceres and the Sun as well as Saturn and Pluto. 

A youth living at the foot of Taal volcano rides an outrigger canoe
while the volcano spews ash as seen from Tanauan town in
Batangas province, south of Manila, on January 13, 2020.
Credit: Ted Aljibe Getty Images

Here's an excerpt from a recent article describing the volcano:

For the more than 500,000 residents of the exclusion zone around the Philippines’ Taal volcano, which began erupting on Sunday, the coming days will be a tense wait to see if the eruption will intensify—threatening lives and property—or sputter out. If activity ramps up, Taal is capable of producing all three of the deadliest volcanic hazards: tsunamis, mudflows, and superheated flows of gas and debris. Volcanoes are notoriously unpredictable, but there are seismic signs and others that geologists will be watching for indications of what this one will do. Taal is the second most active volcano in the Philippines Islands, which are situated at the confluence of several tectonic plates. Taal’s peak sits at the southern end of the main island of Luzon, about 40 miles south of the nation’s capital, Manila. The entire volcanic complex presents something of a geologic Droste effect (a term used to describe recursive pictures within pictures): a lake fills the main crater, which itself is an island in a larger lake that fills the old caldera that formed after catastrophic eruptions about 500,000 and 100,000 years ago. The volcano has erupted 33 times since 1572—most recently in 1977. Since then, it has seen numerous periods of what volcanologists call unrest—seismic rumblings and up-and-down ground movements indicating that magma and other fluids are shifting below the surface. The quandary for those trying to predict Taal’s next moves is that “sometimes that unrest leads to eruption, and sometimes it doesn’t,” says Michael Manga, a volcanologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

It will be interesting to see how things play out.