Black gold, Blue Gold and many things in between

With the recent ingress of Saturn into Aries on Feb. 14, followed by the Sun, and the belated Mars on April 9 - not only in a fire sign but also on the cardinal axis -no one can be seriously surprised by the rapidity of unfolding events and what appears to be the term of the year: precluded exit.

Basically, this is a situation in which someone has backed themselves into a corner and now decides to use the ram’s horns at full power.

The ram is not about intellectual reasoning. It’s all about impulses and action. No strategy. Or rather, the strategy (Saturn) IS action. But be careful: Saturn in Aries is in his fall, he does not bother with lawfulness, ethics or righteousness but rather thinks in terms of “bring it on, no matter what”. He is harsh and severe, lashes out but since he is in fall, he has no self-control. While he can be over controlling when it comes to others, he hardly looks in the mirror. Saturn’s nature is obstacles, blocking, delaying. He throws stones into the water, but how can it be his fault if the water piles up and overflows everything?! He leaks systems, slows engines. This is how things are set in motion, with unexpected consequences. But sometimes, the stone is a boomerang. Especially when Mars comes into the picture.

Mars in Aries keeps the adrenaline pumping and the heart at a dangerous speed. On April 19, 2026 at the Sun’s last degree in his exaltation, Mars, Saturn and Mercury make a conjunction. This makes four planets in Aries. It is hard to see any deescalation prior to this date. We know that psychological warfare is an important component in this war but the question is how can any deescalation be possible if there is no trust and every uttered word either IS or is feared to be fake? Besides, the conjunction takes place in the tail of Cetus, the sea monster. Mars says keep pushing, escalate. Saturn says break the brakes. The Sun in Aries burns hotter than usual, indeed, in Jyotish, the Sun is a malefic planet, which then makes three in Aries. In my article about the Saturn ingress, I already pointed to the association of petroleum and Saturn, but in fire, we can expect massive blows that will be hard to extinguish. Jupiter’s exalted square might help somewhat but it still is a square. I will come back to the water question shortly.

There is one sentence that I avoid saying: It can’t get worse than this. Let’s just say that this is my “black cat”. Every morning while sipping my coffee, I read the news, just as probably most people do and then I am reminded, once again, of my black cat. It seems to get worse by the day. But what can I do?!

I am a born optimist. Not on the short term, more like on the long run. I think in large time scales, like in Lego-Duplo-Megaliths. I go for the latter.

When I think of those hundreds of tankers in the strait of Hormuz, lining up, I can only imagine how trapped the sailors must feel and how afraid their families are. But besides the immense human disaster in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran and the rather large hurricane clouds that are building up over the world’s economy, I also wonder what will happen if those tankers get bombed, as it already happened to some. The ecological disaster would be incredible, not only for the water creatures, the fishing- industry and related businesses, but in particular because all the Gulf nations depend on desalinated water and this water comes from the Persian Gulf. So either way, if the desalinization plants get damaged or the water polluted so that it cannot be desalinated anymore, it does not look good.

On my trips in Saudi Arabia I have seen these huge water silos in many places in the desert, and one thing is certain: the gulf nations are thirsty.

There is the agenda Green Riyadh 2030. The crown prince has the vision to transform the capital from the desert’s dust into a green city. And, believe it or not, my first impression of the city was, “Wow, how much greenery they have!” But in order to realize this very ambitious agenda, they don’t need the black gold. They need the blue one.

So now, this Jupiter /Mars/Saturn square in cardinal signs makes me worry about the quantity and the quality of the water. Desalinization plants have already been bombed. But this might just have been a taste.

And after how much water pollution can water no longer be purified anymore, I wonder? Besides more silly questions of how to transport water when even plastic becomes an issue. There are better ways than plastic, no doubt, but they will require time. And Saudi lives on water bottles. No way anyone can drink tap water. Don’t even think about it. But hey, maybe we will finally realize how much damage we create with all that plastic-dependency.

The blue gold is a funny thing, because the Saudi desert has amazing landscapes. Red dunes and mountains shaped over millennia by huge quantities of - yes!!- water which now is just a very far and rather dusty memory. In places such as the Edge of the World, one can nearly see the huge water masses that once creayed this place. Valleys and mountains shaped by gigantic waves. This is even recognizable from airplanes. But these powerfully shaped landscapes are not everywhere.

Saudi Arabia hosts, of course, also the world’s biggest oil fields. I had a chance to travel along those fields, on my trip from Riyadh towards Bahrain. What I saw in this part of the country was plain desert, no hills, no dunes, just grayish brown stony ground. 46° outside in June but with the reasonable prospect to further increase over the next two months, somebody told me it would be up to 53°. No shadow as far as the eye can see. But beneath my feet, black gold. This is the substance that rules (or at least ruled!) the world’s entire economy. Just a few hundreds meters further down, below the sand, there is plenty of that substance without which our economy is basically dead. But think about it.Petroleum is what remains of primordial forests. This vast desert was once an Arabian Amazon. More importantly, the irony is that the money expected to bear fruit for the international investment community comes from a completely infertile place that was once shaped by water. And thus, it comes full circle.

We are reading and seeing with our own eyes, much of our lives depend on petroleum. Our entire industry. Are we about to learn the lesson that we cannot drink the black gold?

These days I am constantly reminded of two things. The first is

Only after the last tree has been cut down / Only after the last river has been poisoned / Only after the last fish has been caught / Then will you find that money cannot be eaten.

Maybe it is time to get rid of this incredibly stupid petroleum dependency. Not only because it is expensive and environmentally-fatal, but it will not last forever. Then what? Of course, many will think, who cares.

Is this war throwing into our faces the result of the past 60 or so years of greed?

Is it time to get less plastic- elastic and more sustainable?

I told you I am an optimist. In the long run.

Of course I am aware of the Egyptian concept of the Zep Tepi, the first time. It basically says that humanity has destroyed itself several times in the past. We are now the -what? 4th or 5th attempt? Who counts. But we will get there, eventually.

And the other is a sentence from the Bible, but - no worries -I am sure other religions have similar phrases. It says

The last shall be the first.

I had always thought this referred to poor and rich people and the difference between the opportunities they were offered in life.

But now I am starting to think that this sentence has a very practical meaning. If everything goes south with our society, and the kindergarten bullies keep fighting over whose is bigger, after the boom and doom, who will step forward and found a new society?

First, those who have lived long enough in the wilderness to make a fire. A simple, damn fire. With nothing else than wet branches. As a kid, I still learned how to recognize those stones to make a fire. I was a city girl, but that I knew! Well, not anymore. I haven’t seen them in how many years? Let’s not get into counting. A long time anyway. I know a lot about crystals though, if this might help?

Let’s not finish this newsletter with foolishness, but with cosmology, history and art. Here is a paper I have just published on a beautiful artifact and its astronomy. Enjoy.

See you in the next newsletter. Don’t talk peace. Make peace.

(c) Tania Daniels 2026