A 10-mile line of 8,000 illuminated balloons called Lichtgrenze (translation: “border of light”) will stretch along part of the same path where the 96-mile Berlin Wall once stood. Light artist Christopher Bauder and his filmmaker brother, Marc, came up with the idea before the 20th anniversary of the wall’s fall, but needed more time to complete it. Visualization by Christopher Bauder.

Beginning today, Nov. 7, until Nov. 9 — the 25th anniversary of the fall of the wall that once divided East and West Berlin — Christopher and Marc Bauder’s Lichtgrenze will stand. On the evening of Nov. 9, 8,000 Berliners will line up with each of the balloons, and using a key, will release each one in succession into the sky, carrying a personal message.

For these three days in between, residents of Berlin will be able to walk through the line of balloons — but vehicles will be blocked. Along the route, video screens will play archival footage of the days before and after the fall — contextualizing how much has changed in the last 25 years.

“This will trigger understanding of what it meant to have a wall in front of your door,” says Marc Bauder. “There were people coming out of their homes, and they couldn’t even cross the street because a wall was there.”

You can read more about the Lichtgrenze and see other visualizations of the commemorative piece at Wired.com.

Below is a discussion of the astrological chart for the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall by Eric, taken from the Feb. 3, 2012, Planet Waves subscriber issue titled Sea Changes: Neptune Enters Pisces.

Tear Down the Wall: Capricorn Alignment of 1989

By Eric Francis

Before I get into some ideas about Neptune in Pisces, let’s check in with an outer planet event focused on 1989: a series of conjunctions in Capricorn. These involved Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, which were basically all conjunct one another in a long series of events from ’89 through around ’94. In a sense, all the changes we are seeing in the world — including the manifestations of Neptune in Aquarius that we’ve been reviewing this week, as well as Uranus in Aries, come back to one particular epicenter in 1989: the chart for the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Chart for news about the Berlin Wall opening up, which led to the Berlin Wall actually opening up. Notice the planets with a 10 next to them — the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, precisely opposed by Jupiter. Saturn, Uranus and Neptune were hanging around in a conjunction for a long time, and came with many changes in geopolitics. Conjunctions represent the beginnings of cycles, which are still active today. Then in a perfectly hilarious commentary, the chart says “broadcast with impact!” with the Sun, Mercury and Pluto in Scorpio rising. This astonishing story is worth reading — here is the Wikipedia page. Then look at the chart to see the similarities.

This is an important chart because of the conjunctions that it contains. Conjunctions start cycles, and this chart includes a triple conjunction of Saturn, Uranus and Neptune that is at the root of the world we currently inhabit (and often take for granted). This publication is produced with the help of our buddy Anatoly in the Ukraine. Before 1989, we were taught in school that he was ‘the enemy’. In 2012, he’s one of our best friends. Go figure.

Younger readers may not remember or even know about the manic terror of communism that was driven into the American soul between the late 1940s and the mid-1980s, which came down with a press release and the sound of a champagne bottle popping overnight between Nov. 9 and Nov. 10, 1989. Before then, you were either worried about Commies hanging out in garbage cans, or infiltrating Hollywood, or shooting missiles across the ocean at our cities. Many of our parents endured relentless duck and cover drills, hiding under their school desks, freaking out in honor of seemingly imminent nuclear war.

The chart is for the West German newscast the night of Nov. 9 that announced that East German refugees could exit directly through crossing points to West Germany, and that private travel between the two would be allowed. It’s one of the most amazing charts of the 20th century and I want to make contact with it for a moment, so we have some grounding. The events that were sparked off this day had a cascading effect that we are still living with today — as do the Neptune cycles that are described in the chart.

Let’s consider the aspects — then their implications. The simplified chart you’re looking at includes a four-planet conjunction in Capricorn, with Saturn and Neptune in a precise alignment. That aspect precipitated or symbolized (as you prefer) the dissolving of the boundary between East Berlin and West Berlin; hence, East Germany and West Germany; and hence, the whole “iron curtain” that divided Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe from capitalist Western Europe. The boundary is represented by Saturn and Capricorn; the dissolving by Neptune. The other two players are fast-moving Venus (for love) and slow-moving Uranus (for the sustained power of revolution).

To add a dash of humor to the chart, we have Jupiter exactly opposite Saturn and Neptune. To measure the alignments, look at the numbers next to the planets. The closer the numbers, the closer the alignments. These are really close. Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune are aligned with the Earth to the degree on that very day.

I’ve also left in a witty conjunction that was rising exactly, as in exactly rising, exactly at the time of the event — a Sun-Pluto-Mercury conjunction in Scorpio. Remember that this is the chart for a news broadcast — talk about a TV show with impact. Remember how fast the ascendant moves — a degree every four minutes. You would think the announcement was timed by an astrologer. Actually, it was timed by the universe.

Once the announcement was made on German television, life imitated the media and chunks of the Berlin Wall became hot souvenirs as the wall was torn down. Photo by Dmitry Vrubel.

Remember that this was the same year China came up on the radar — Tiananmen Square happened, having much the same effect as the fall of the Berlin Wall — the merging of the East and the West, the most significant global boundary at the time. In 1989, Walmart existed in much smaller form but more to the point, 90% of the products were not made in China. That all happens after the Tiananmen Square incident, which was supposedly about liberty and ended up being about capitalism.

Included in this alignment is a truly rare event — the Uranus-Neptune conjunction, which happens less than once per century. It hadn’t quite happened yet as of this chart, but it’s still very close, close enough to be in full effect during this chart and historical event. Lining up Uranus and Neptune in Capricorn blew up nearly every boundary you can think of, particularly in geopolitics. The Eastern Bloc fell apart and dozens of ‘new’ countries showed up on the map.

Within 10 years, the border crossings had disappeared from across Europe, the Euro was imminent, and the big boys were reorganizing the world into new trade zones, encoded in GATT, NAFTA and other treaties. One day in 2006, I was driving from France to Belgium and came across one of these abandoned border crossing checkpoints. Seeing the abandoned booths and parking lots with grass growing out of them made the whole notion of borders seem as ridiculous as it is.

So in our current era of boundaries falling and everything becoming more permeable, and information from your wallet sitting on numerous computer servers around the world, remember that there was a brick-and-mortar parallel that happened long before what we are now experiencing — and it starts with the alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — the four largest planets, with three of the four being in Capricorn, the sign of boundaries and containers.

The moral of the story is that when these planets get busy, actual stuff happens. And this particular chart is becoming active again because Pluto is in Capricorn going over all those planets there, and Uranus is in Aries, about to square them all. Maybe that will help us get rid of the absurd new border crossings that have been installed — that is, the ones currently run by the ever-charming TSA, which can’t seem to stop groping people, stealing from them and accusing them of being terrorists on the basis of a bottle of Poland Spring water.