This week I’m taking the rare opportunity to opt out of a horoscope and essay. For next week I have to write a weekly horoscope for the newspapers, so you’ll see one of those. I have an Inner Space for you Tuesday, though it’s based on the short annual (expertly excerpted by our copy editor, who has edited my horoscopes for five years); I’ll see if we can pull together excerpts of Cosmic Confidential instead.
If you are reading this, you survived some of the must tumultuous, shocking astrology in nearly a decade. Yet the truth is, what we lived through in December and January was like the weekend-long training ride that American Youth Hostels required for everyone taking the summer-long, coast-to-coast bicycle trip. I suggest that you put the events of the past two months to a thorough review and make an inventory of everything you learned, or wish you learned.
Last week’s solar eclipse in Capricorn conjunct Venus is showing some ramifications in the corporate/government realm covered by that sign. Thursday the Supreme Court issued a decision in the case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The 150-page decision, we’re being told, grants the rights of individuals to corporations, originating in the matter of whether companies can pour money, unfettered, into propaganda designed to sway an election.
First, a historical note. Did you know that when Christopher Columbus “discovered America,” the thing he discovered was Haiti? So the island that was shaken and the country that was shaken to rubble this week has a hallowed place in the dark history of the New World, as the place where European feet first touched the ground. There, they met the native Tainos, one of the Arawak people; and made a settlement, called La Navidad, on the north coast of present-day Haiti.
I have noticed the squeeze of this approaching simultaneous Mercury stationing direct and annular (not annual, rather annular) solar eclipse. I bet you have, too. Using a fairly basic set of planets, there are 11 of them concentrated in Capricorn and Aquarius, including Mercury and the eclipse; plus Jupiter, Chiron, Neptune and Pluto. This whole setup is stretched across the two Saturn-ruled signs, Capricorn and Aquarius. One addresses psychical structures and the other, psychic structures.
Weeks ago I described our current phase of astrology as the winter whirl. Two inner planets are retrograde (Mercury and Mars) and we’re building toward a solar eclipse — the perfect recipe for confusion and originality. Dare I say paranoia, but do we really believe it? Is it really credible? Why do we take fear so much more seriously than, say, creativity? Eclipses apply mental pressure, which can spill over to other levels.