Dear Friend and Reader:

Wednesday evening (Thursday in European and Australian time zones) the Aquarius New Moon lights up the planet waves. This is a vibrant event, concentrating seven planets and points in Aquarius, happening right as the Sun passes over the midpoint of that sign. This lunation is taking place right in the midst of the Egyptian situation, which we are studying carefully. The situation is likely to move fast right around the New Moon and we will have additional coverage on our main blog and in Friday’s edition.

Chart for the Aquarius New Moon, set for Kingston, NY. Notice the concentration of planets in Aquarius, at the center of which is Mars. Ceres is the purple question mark-like thing, and represents agriculture. This chart will be similar just about anywhere on the East Coast; note the concentration of planets below the horizon — in this chart, all but Eris in red on the right, and Juno in blue on the left. Also above the horizon are three calculated points — Transpluto in pink, the South Node in orange and the vertex.

It’s always a bit unsettling when the most volatile region in the world verges on going totally out of control. We’ve seen a revolution in Tunisia, we’re about to see one in Egypt, and the natives are restless in Jordan. Regardless of whose theory you accept as to how this all started, that says little about how the cookie will crumble.

This is an unusually strong New Moon for a number of reasons — beginning with that concentration of planets in Aquarius. At the center of the cluster is Mars, closely conjoined by Ceres, the Moon and the Sun. Aquarius is about ideas and Mars is about passion and energy — this puts the two together. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself feeling rather strongly about an idea you have. Aquarius-styled, that’s going to be an idea about standing out as an individual, something that most of us could do with a little more of. Conformity is boring, and we know that at the end of the discussion one must be who one really is — there is no point in faking it.

The other attribute of this New Moon worth paying attention to is that it’s close to the cross-quarter day Imbolc. I mention the Aries Point a lot; that term, pertaining to the first degree of the tropical zodiac, also translates to eight different points along the zodiac: the quarter days (equinoxes and solstices) and cross-quarter days when the Sun is at the midpoint of a season, right in the middle of a fixed sign. Events close to these cross-quarter points can be every bit as influential as eclipses, reverberating with that ‘personal is political’ energy of seemingly larger events.

Chiron, now slow and powerful, is on the brink of changing signs into Pisces, bringing in one of the basic energies of the 2012 era. This is the last New Moon before Chiron ingresses Pisces on Feb. 8 (where it will remain continually until it first dips into Aries on April 17, 2018). For now, Chiron is lingering in the very end of Aquarius, one of the most interesting degrees of the zodiac. Though a little long to quote here, the degree (randomly channeled by a psychic nearly a century ago) is about individual initiation into group consciousness — a key theme of Aquarius.

One theme of Aquarius is the tension between individuals and groups. Because few people actually express their individuality, they cannot rightly be part of a group; Alice Bailey distinguishes mass consciousness to describe what happens when not so individuated people think like bees buzzing in a hive rather than mature individuals who come together for a conscious purpose.

More to the picture. This chart lists the planets that are close to the Sun and Moon along the fixed cross — in the signs Taurus, Leo, Scorpio and Aquarius. It’s called a 90-degree sort, and it’s a way of filtering out planets in any given chart. We see that in the midst of the New Moon arrangement is a centaur called Asbolus, associated with carbon and what all life has in common. Across the dial is Photographica in Leo, taking pictures of the whole scene. The asteroid Sphinx pertains to old mysteries, and it’s in Scorpio, square Damocles (as in sword of), opposite Arachne (stories and conspiracies) and aspecting a diversity of other points.

For its part, Mars in Aquarius is about asserting individuality from cliques and social scenes; it’s about not being afraid to be unpopular. Part of the current madness of the world is our obsession with being approved of, and the simultaneous obsession with seeming like you’re not as different as you really are. This lunation is an invitation to try something different, and depending on where it reaches your chart, your circumstances will provide just such an opportunity.

The combination of Ceres, Mars and Aquarius had me a little nervous about food when I presented this chart initially (check audio of Jan. 26 for details), and I called the theme of genetic modification of crops. It turns out that we’re at a crucial turning point, where the biggest players in the organic food industry (including Whole Foods and Stonyfield Farm) are ready to sell out to the USDA and Monsanto, which want to cover the world with its Roundup-ready genetically engineered alfalfa.

What is at stake is whether engineered pollen contaminates nearby organic farms — in essence, the integrity of the organic food industry. Alfalfa is a crop that can often be grown without any herbicides at all — so why do we need a Roundup-ready version? To sell more Roundup? Now that Monsanto is officially a person (thanks to Citizens United v. FEC), perhaps it should be ‘personally’ criminally indicted for murder each time someone dies of cancer from its pesticides.

Most of us treat GMO foods like they were something normal, without realizing what an enormous threshold this is in the history of the world. It’s going to look a lot bigger than it does now with a little hindsight, particularly when we figure out where this is all heading. Again and again, we fall for the reassurances of government and industry, or act like there’s nothing we could possibly do to influence the flow of events.

To those who may believe this: have you ever hoped you were wrong?

It would be easier if we didn’t give away our power so easily or so willingly. There is a revolution going on in Egypt where an entrenched military dictator is currently being thrown out by a populist movement; he may be gone by the time that Aquarius New Moon passes overhead. Egypt has responded by cutting off Internet and cellular phone service to the entire country, another first in the history of the Internet. If I were going to choose a sign to represent the ‘Net it would be Aquarius, in part because of its morph of populism and elitism, and of individual vs. collective reality; and in part because it is a nice picture of an information infrastructure. The New Moon in that sign presents an interesting picture of that situation, and so does Chiron there right on the edge of Aquarius as if on the brink of a new moment.

There may have been an excuse for ignorance 10 years ago, but now with most families essentially having a global library coming into their homes or into their pockets, today there is no excuse for ignorance about genetically modified foods or any other issue.

Yet the one thing you cannot find on the Internet is the willingness to learn. That’s the ingredient you have to supply on your own. In our times, curiosity is an act of defiance, akin to marching at a civil rights rally in the 1950s.

Yours & truly

———

Eric Francis, the founder and editor of Planet Waves, is an astrologer and investigative journalist. He was working in his first job as a municipal newspaper reporter when he discovered that his editor also owned an astrology bookstore. This began a long relationship between astrology and journalism, which has taken Eric through the pages of many newspapers as a horoscope writer, including the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror plus numerous other venues. Today, Eric covers global turning point events through the lens of astrology. He is a specialist in newly-discovered planets.