Parallels in 1968–1977 and 2018–2027

Astrology doesn’t replace history by a long shot, but it can help symbolically track the themes within it. Chiron, the wounded healer, moves slowly enough to symbolize generational shifts in society. When it travels through Aries, the sign of identity and self, it confronts misalignments and how a group understands itself.

The United States was born with Chiron in Aries (the sign of self) and in the 4th house (the house of home, roots, and origin). Chiron in Aries transits correlate with friction around national identity. These transits mark periods of conflict, identity deconstruction, and truth seeking. The stories America tells about itself become unsteady.

The current transit (2018–2027) mirrors the previous one (1968–1977) with some uncanny similarities. Each transit has common political tensions, spiritual and religious shifts, economic crises, protest movements, tech advances, and battles over truth and narrative control. But now it’s amplified by the U.S. Pluto return, and of course modern visibility.

These past and present cycles can make the American identity wound clearer, and possibly shed some light on what might come during the next Chiron in Taurus transit.

Chiron in Aries: The Identity Wound

Aries Themes:

Selfhood, individuality, confrontation, courage, identity, authenticity.

Chiron Themes:

The wound that reveals the truth. This is the wound where healing is needed. If the healing path is chosen, this pain point also holds massive potential for growth.

Combined:

Chiron in Aries requires a nation to face the truth of who it really is. Not who it believes it is, or wishes it were. For the U.S., this is especially important. Chiron in Aries lives in the natal 4th house which symbolizes roots, ancestors, home, and the national origin story mythos.

Chiron returns in the U.S. bring attention back to the contradictions between the American ideal and American reality. They also highlight an underlying truth: American identity is inherently plural.

1968–1977: The Earlier Aries Transit

The earlier Chiron in Aries transit brought “identity politics.” By “identity politics,” I don’t mean it in the way that phrase is currently weaponized. The 70s was more about identity as truth. It was identity as reclamation, equality, courage, and collective uprising.

Social and Political Identity Movements

Civil rights
Women’s rights
Early LGBTQ+ activism
Disability rights beginnings
American Indian Movement
Anti–Vietnam War protests
Youth rebellion
Widespread government distrust

Each movement called for inclusion in the national identity, or for national identity itself to evolve for the people.

Cultural Shifts & Subcultural Emergence

Punk and hip hop music had their births and the initial beginnings of their subcultures.
Folk music charted with songs on collective moral storytelling, social commentary, and the fight against corruption.
Disco was short-lived but gave people an outlet of acceptance, joy, and relief with community.

Authenticity, self-expression, and cultural individuation were strong themes of the Aries transit.

Religion, Spirituality, & New Age Beginnings

Spirituality wasn’t restricted to institutions.

People explored and experimented.

Eastern traditions, psychedelics, and metaphysics intertwined with activism.

For many, spirituality was personal, boundary-breaking, and multicultural.

Importantly, organized religion and churches were not blatantly politicized, but more focused on the heart of their religious teachings.

War, Media, and Outrage

Vietnam became the first televised war.

For the first time, Americans saw the consequences of U.S. policy.

Kent State showed the people that state violence could kill their own children domestically.

This visibility resulted in justified moral outrage.

Public Health, Environment, and Safety

EPA founded (1970)
OSHA created (1971)
Massive vaccination progress
National awareness of pollution and environmental harm, movements for regulation
The first Earth Day (1970)

Economy and Worker Identity

stagflation
1970 postal workers strike (succeeded)
corporate distrust
lack of faith in government credibility

Technology & Systems Development

Boeing 747 made its first flight
the first personal computers were created
the foundations for future corporate tech empires were seeded

All of these reflected a nation questioning its identity, values, and story.

Chiron’s Discovery:

As we move on to the next transit, the timing coincides with the discovery of Chiron itself. Chiron was discovered in 1977, which aligns with its shift from Aries to Taurus.

Even before this asteroid’s discovery, the symbolic themes of its transit were playing out in real time.

1977–1988: The Taurus Shift, Comfort Over Identity

As Chiron moved into Taurus, America’s wound shifted from identity to security.

Taurus places importance on comfort, stability, values, and material safety. This psychological shift was utilized by politicians to reshape the country.

Rise of the Christian Right

This was textbook Taurus timing:

emphasis on “family”
hunger for moral order
desire for comfort and safety
the need for simplicity after the turbulence of the Aries transit

Conservative Christianity fused with political identity through:

the Moral Majority
prosperity gospel
“values voters” rhetoric
the suburban lifestyle ideal
the home as a symbol of morality

Taurus craves grounding. The Christian Right offered it.

Reagan as Archetypal Taurus Father

To many Americans, Reagan embodied a Taurus archetype of strength and safety. He was America’s reassuring dad, promising stability and even contributing to the end of the Cold War. This was something that was seen as a victory of American resolve. Symbolically, this comforted and eased the previous Aries transit’s turbulence.

Yet it came at a cost. Trickle down economics deepened inequality. Policies and rhetoric widened divides rather than healing the underlying wound.

His administration delivered:

union destruction (PATCO firing)
trickle-down economics
welfare demonization (“welfare queen”)
deregulation
shift into materialism
merging of religion and nationalism
years of ignoring uncomfortable issues like the AIDS crisis until public activism forced action

Though some of the earlier identity movements of the 70s persisted, many were stifled, co-opted, or rolled back. Comfort replaced confrontation. Values replaced truth seeking. The national myth was smoothed over, but identity wasn’t fully healed.

2018–2027: The Current Identity Fracture

The current Aries cycle is even more volatile than the last because it coincides with the U.S.’s first Pluto return, meaning both identity and power structures are impacted.

Yet parallels creepily align across both.

Rights and Identity Under Attack

Roe v. Wade (1973) overturned
DEI eliminated
anti-LGBTQ pushes increasing
Indigenous land violated
Medicare/Medicaid threatened
vaccination rates declining, previously eradicated diseases returning
the right to due process violated
mass detention

Where the 70s expanded rights, the 2020s attempt to revoke them.

Identity Movements Rising

BLM
Trans rights activism
union resurgence
decentralized online activism
nationwide pro-Palestine and anti-genocide protests
multiracial, interfaith groups demanding accountability

In the 70s, identity politics symbolized reclamation and inclusion. But today, critics on the right often weaponize the term to dismiss movements (like BLM for example) as divisive.

This tension itself reflects the Aries wound: a battle over whose truths define the plural American story. Historical patterns show that suppression often backfires, fueling further outrage.

Authenticity and courage (core Aries traits) define the collective again.

War, Visibility, and Public Moral Outrage

Just as Vietnam was the first televised war, Gaza is the first realtime livestreamed war.

First-person suffering circulates online uncensored.

Americans confront state-funded violence instantaneously.

Campus protests mirror the 1970s, and are intensified by:

militarized police
ICE detentions
surveillance
mass arrests

Visibility fuels moral crisis. Just as it did in the 70s.

Federal Workers and Government Breakdown

The first Aries cycle saw federal worker power (postal strike).

The second sees:

government shutdowns
federal workers unpaid for over a month
mass agency gutting
scientific institutions purged
regulatory collapse (Boeing crises as a notable example)
stacking of safety agencies (like the EPA) with former anti-regulation lobbyists as staff

Chiron (and Pluto) exposes dysfunction to the very foundations.

Economy and Elite Extraction

Trump mirrors Reagan’s corporate favoritism, but he enacted it at the wrong part of the cycle.

Taurus-style wealth consolidation during Aries creates public rage, not stability.

Common people feel this wound directly:

“Not only can I not thrive, I can barely survive.”

Technology, Surveillance, and Oligarchy

The 70s gave us the start of the personal computer.

The 2020s give us:

AI
surveillance capitalism
tech oligarchs extorting political power
rampant corporate-government fusion
Boeing aircraft failures echoing earlier aircraft symbolism
mass data manipulation

Technology again catalyzes a collective identity crisis.

Religion, Politics & the American Story

Where the 1970s kept a line between religion and politics, the 1980s saw the right fuse them.

In the current Aries cycle, this fusion continues, but the conflict gets even more existential.

The national identity wound has now become a battle over the American story itself.

The narrative itself becomes a wound. Who tells the truth?

During every Aries cycle, hidden or uncomfortable truths resurface.

The plurality of American identity comes to the forefront, as well as the real imbalances underlying them.

Power responds by trying to suppress them.

In the 2020s this shows up as:

attacks on museums for being “woke”
attempts to censor exhibits on slavery, racism, or Indigenous genocide
the framing of historical facts as “unpatriotic”
textbook censorship (similar to local textbook arguments in the 70s but censorship is far more systemic today)
laws restricting how history can be taught
suppression of protest movements as “un-American”
the President describing millions of Americans at No Kings protests as “not representative of the American people”

This is one of the fights of Chiron in Aries:

the wound in the national myth is resurfacing, and the establishment is scrambling to preserve a sanitized story.

Why This Happens in Aries

Aries represents the question:

“Who are we, truly?”

So Aries cycles become a confrontation with:

national origin myths
historical truth and facts
the right to define American identity
the right to belong in the story at all

The fight over narrative is the fight over nationhood.

Recurring Factors

Based on the current and last cycle, there seems to be a set of events that may repeat during Aries cycles:

identity revolutions
rollback or expansion of individual rights
fights for the collective good
generational moral awakening
moral outrage at war
federal worker crises
public health turning points
environmental crisis or reform
union conflict (the people vs the power structure)
aggressive attempts to rewrite history
tech advances
collapse of trust in institutions
conflict between truth and comfort
charismatic leaders weaponizing identity wounds to divide the public
widespread protest movements
violent suppression of those movements

Many of these can also find overlap in the original birth of the U.S.

This is the national identity wound resurfacing in full.

The Coming Taurus Shift (2027–2036)

The next phase will center on:

values
security
stability
comfort
material reality
economic grounding

But also:

authoritarian “father figure” politics
religious nationalism
economic systems
nostalgia for false stability
battles over resources and survival

The question isn’t whether Taurus will bring a need for stability, it will.

The question is whose stability and at what cost.

Taurus can manifest as:

authoritarian comfort

grounded communal care.

The Aries cycle rebuilds the raw identity baseline. The Taurus cycle determines what’s built from it.

Identity First, Comfort Second

Each Aries transit returns America to the same identity wound:

the disharmony between myth and truth, story and reality.

1968–1977 opened that wound for today.

2018–2027 widens it under the pressure of Pluto’s return.

As history repeats, the choice becomes more urgent:

Who are we?
What story do we tell?
What do we value?
And what kind of comfort (or justice) are we willing to accept?

There’s still time to decide what we value and protect. And importantly, what we refuse to become.

hellsbeth.com

Chiron in Aries and the American Identity Cycle