Author Archives: Eric Francis

The Most Important Year of Your Life

Dear Friend and Reader:

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I would be doing some occasional rearranging of the publishing schedule to accommodate work on the 2012 annual edition of Planet Waves — Revolution. Revelation. Reality Check. We’ve arrived at the first such week; expect a few others. Regular editions of Planet Waves will resume next week.

Photo by Elizabeth Joyce.

There has never been a year in your life, nor will there ever be, like the one we’re approaching. Twenty-twelve will arrive with many life-changing events, and the astrology deserves all the attention we both can give it. I’ve been preparing for this moment for many years — and you can trust that I’m going to do my homework for this annual edition.

As I’m sure you’re overwhelmingly aware, we are deep into a phase of heightened and accelerated change. The much-fabled 2012 transition is now here. It doesn’t matter whether 2012 has a Mayan calendar root, whether it involves Uranus square Pluto or the extremely rare Venus event in June: the magnitude of this astrology and how it will influence us cannot be overstated. My annual edition breaks it down into three basic experiences for each of the 12 signs and rising signs:

Revelation. That means discovery. Material and information we were not expecting will come to the surface, at times rapidly. We will make discoveries about ourselves, our relationships and our society. Key decision points await you, but at this time so early in the process, it may be difficult to see what those decisions will be about. Here is where astrology can help provide a glance around the corner.

Revolution. We all talk about change. So many of us have been committed to inner growth and healing and outer social progress — going back years or even decades. You may have discovered that major changes are rarely possible. Yet the times, the causes and the conditions are all coming together this year. This is a time of revolutions — they’re not only possible but inevitable. The question is, what does this mean for you?

Reality Check. There will be more reality coming at us than most people have the stomach for. Yet when there is so much power in the air, one needs to check and balance oneself to keep on track. You’ll need to stay grounded, and have clear agreements with yourself about what matters the most. You will need to penetrate the layers of illusion that have delayed you or taken you off track. Things are moving so fast we need to do this on a constant basis.

In the 2012 annual edition, I provide you with the tools to work with all three factors.

Consider that we live in an era that will be studied by people far in the future. They will want to know not only what was happening, but what it was like to be here, what we perceived and what our options were. We have the incredible privilege of being present in this time. If you think life is intense, here is why: we are occupying and experiencing the moment of transition.

Every single person alive is going to be influenced by this astrology. If you’re in a body and on the planet, it’s not possible that you won’t be personally affected. There are many years when the astrology just sort of goes by. But this is astrology you will feel, experience and live through. The question is where and how; and how do you make the most of it?

Even if all you knew is that there’s a tremendous surge of transformation sweeping through the human environment, you would want to ask yourself: How do I catch this wave?

I ask for two reasons. One is to make the very most of it. Second is to have it manifest as something other than fear or chaos.

Astrology is more than a guidance tool. It’s a method you can use to influence the course of your life rather than merely being subject to what’s happening around you. Many people struggle to put themselves on track, or to attune to their own intentions — much less the world around them. The way I use astrology will give you tools to do both.

I’ve created this link for current subscribers and customers to pre-order the 2012 annual at a significant discount.

Meanwhile, I suggest you check your November monthly horoscope again — there is stuff in there you may not have noticed. Regular editions will resume next week. Please watch the Planet Waves daily blog, which Amanda and the writing team will be handling as we go through the Taurus Full Moon this week.

Lovingly,

Neptune to Chiron: from Denial to Awareness

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Dear Friend and Reader:

I’m wondering what kind of week you had. What did you experience and what did you learn the past five days? It’s been an unusually interesting sky, as Mercury and Venus (personal planets associated with emotions and senses) first made aspects to Neptune (denial, delusion) then to Chiron (painful revelation or healing impulse) and Uranus (sudden awareness, ideas, invention). The story arc of these transits is like the psyche passing through a fog of denial, then getting caught in the spotlight of instant karma, then experiencing a wave of awareness that might lead you to make a decision and act on it. This has manifested in large and personal and collective ways, but let’s start with you. (You may email me if you want to share your experiences.)

Photo by Eric Francis, Book of Blue – Paris series.

These aspects describe not only the need to wake up and grow up, but the inevitability of doing so. There is a prevailing theme of noticing what’s going on, then connecting actions with consequences — something that we humans are not especially good at. We are very good at pretending there is no connection, and then wondering whom to blame when the catastrophic results suddenly become obvious.

In what we think of as public life (while we have the luxury of thinking there’s a difference between that and anything else), we’ve just lived through a truly incredible week of the personal as political. It was so revealing of the astrology — and what I can only call our moral crisis of leadership — that I’ve prepared a little news roundup for you.

As the United States gets ready to decide who will lead us deeper into the 21st century, two more Republican presidential campaigns burst into flames. Herman Cain, the gospel-singing pizza guy, found himself all over the news as several past cases of sexual harassment were revealed by the news website Politico. First Cain made a series of bumbling denials that anything happened or that any settlement was made, and finally admitted that something had indeed happened.

When confronted on video Wednesday, he lost his cool, telling reporters to bugger off and mind their own business — churning up even more interest in the situation. We will likely be hearing from some of the women involved, all of whom were given cash settlements and signed confidentiality agreements, and for that reason could not come forward. It looks like his campaign is road pizza.

Next, Rick Perry, the sitting governor of Texas, found himself in the news when he regressed into a kind of giggling, giddy man-child speaking to a bunch of New Hampshire conservatives, apparently under the influence of some substance or a manic episode. This was not the Rick Perry of, “No, sir, I’m not worried that I executed any innocent people” fame. (More executions have happened under his administration than under any governor in American history.)

Photo by Eric Francis, Book of Blue – Paris series.

Rather, it was a Rick Perry brimming with sentimental enthusiasm about the Live Free or Die slogan on New Hampshire’s license plates, then clutching a little bottle of maple syrup wearing a sappy, Texas-sized grin. When you see the whole speech, it’s not as twisted as it seems when you excerpt it. He seems more like the religious huckster that he is, who goes over the top a few times and then ends seeming like he’s mentally unstable.

Next, here’s one you may have heard about by now as the story goes viral — the most personal of all. In Dallas, Hillary Adams, the daughter of a family court judge, posted a seven-minute video of her father viciously flogging her with a belt when she was 16 years old, while her mother looks on. Apparently she had been caught downloading potentially-pirated video games and music (her father didn’t think she should have one of those computer thingies).

Hillary, who has cerebral palsy, says she was beaten regularly and finally posted the video this week when he would not stop harassing her. Her father, Judge William Adams, now faces a police investigation and a judicial probe, and has been suspended from his duties.

“In my mind I have not done anything wrong other than discipline my child when she was caught stealing. I did lose my temper, I’ve apologized. It looks worse than it is,” Adams told Texas television station KZTV.

Hillary Adams, now 23, told television station KRIS on Wednesday her father was “making light of the situation,” adding, “I just can’t believe he would say something like he doesn’t think it’s a big deal.” The story is replete with twisted details: for example, Hillary doesn’t blame her mom for the situation because she was emotionally abused by Adams too, and has since left the marriage.

It’s like our political process itself has ended up on the set of The Jerry Springer Show. It reveals what is going on beneath the surface of so much that we see.

Isle of Tinos,
Greece. Photo by Anthony Ayiomamitis.

And there is a distraction effect. Efforts to solve Greece’s rapidly escalating financial crisis fell apart this week, and the country may not be able to avoid defaulting on its loans. The government itself seems on the brink of collapse. What you may not have heard is that earlier this week, the government replaced the heads of the Navy, Army and Air Force due to the fact the armed forces were allegedly planning a coup similar to the junta which ruled Greece between 1967 and 1974.

If Greece defaults, there could be an economic ripple effect that spreads across Europe and possibly to the United States — so everyone is watching this carefully. Here, the political could become intimately personal. As one of our colleagues in Greece wrote to me Thursday, “It really is a very pathetic situation and something I would not wish on anyone.”

Meanwhile, Pres. Obama is in France at the moment, at a meeting of the G20 group of nations that has this issue on its agenda. Democracy Now! noted that Monday, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou angered many European leaders by announcing his support for a popular referendum — allowing the Greek people to decide if they want to accept the conditions of the $179 billion European Union bailout. Papandreou is now facing calls from within his party to resign after days of increasing criticism from European leaders.

The Greek debt scandal has also pitted U.S. banking interests against France, Germany and other European powers. “The Americans are putting immense pressure on Europe, saying, ‘We will wreck your economy, if you don’t wreck Greece’s economy,'” says economic analyst Michael Hudson. President Obama is “basically telling Europe, ‘Don’t go the democratic route. Support Wall Street’.” Clearly the irony of Obama’s position while the Occupy protests are still taking place in cities around the United States is not lost on many.

The Common Thread

The common thread of these events is power-based relationships, and personal responsibility (or the total lack thereof). There is something here about where the public trust intersects with deeply personal values. Presidential candidates are included in the ‘power relationship’ category by default, as they want to be the presumed ruler of the nation. And we are seeing this for the power trip that it is. What we’re witnessing are not individual cases of abdicated responsibility but rather the death of a model of leadership that is disconnected from any ethics at all.

Graffitti mural in Battery Steele, Peaks Island, ME. Photo by Amanda.

Herman Cain, like many people, managed to turn sex (or rather the idea of sex) into a power trip. By the time it comes down to four (and counting) accusations and at least three different women receiving cash settlements to settle sexual harassment charges, obviously this is a way of life. This person wants to be president, with access to nuclear weapons? That’s also a power relationship, to the whole world. Why, exactly, does he want to be president?

Rick Perry, the executioner, also wants access to those nuclear bombs. He’s a Dominionist, which means he feels it’s his duty to accelerate the end of the world, on behalf of God. But he’s delusional and he can’t hold his shit together, even at a public event with the television cameras on. It’s all about the power and glory. What I see in these presidential campaigns is people trying on the ‘I am the president’ trip with no sense of what that might mean to the people they’re supposed to serve. It’s like something has become hollowed out and feels like it’s going to collapse on itself. But I don’t think this is going on exclusively ‘up top’. We see many examples of how it manifests in more humble places, and to some extent we all enable the dysfunction in other people who live from power trip to power trip — until we don’t any more.

As for Judge Adams: all judges spend their days rearranging the private lives of others, more or less arbitrarily. They hold themselves above the law, and few mechanisms exist to keep them in control. If not for YouTube, we likely never would have found out about this situation. Everyone is shocked that a family court judge would beat the daylights out of his daughter. But that’s merely an extension of the same power he holds over everyone who comes through his courtroom. I’ve met very few people who have the guts to call out a judge on their illegal or immoral conduct.

Economically, we are facing a similar betrayal on a vast, even incomprehensible scale. We may not have seen the worst of it yet. It is no longer the paranoid who are predicting another collapse of the banks and a massive tsunami of defaults. It’s the people who know the most about economics. Part of the betrayal is on the part of the people with the most power, and part is on account of those with the very least. By that I mean that our economic woes are in part due to predatory lending, and the rest is due to people who could not resist their own greed and signed up for loans they could not afford. Meanwhile, countries and massive corporations have been busy doing the same thing. In this economic crisis, the conduct of governments, corporations and many private individuals has been nearly identical — and I rarely ever hear about that.

Everywhere we look around us, we see the aggressive use of power. The question is, how is this playing out in our own lives? Most individuals are more in the position to squander their power and creativity than abuse it, but opportunities to do both abound. The question is, what part of the problem are you willing to take responsibility for, and what are you going to do about it?

The Next Alignment

I ask because the same story is continuing in a different form. Mercury and Venus are now making an unusually long, exact conjunction that is moving through Sagittarius. Looked at one way, this aspect is brimming with idealism and potential. It’s a kind of astrology about having the best intentions.

Mercury and Venus (toward the right) in a long, near-exact conjunction. The two planets are moving at about the same speed for a while, but they don’t ever align precisely for this cycle. (Mercury, usually the faster planet, goes retrograde before catching up with Venus.) They form a conjunction in June 2012, which takes place in Gemini. Points above left are Pholus and the North Node.

Yet Mars in Leo is making a long opposition to Neptune, and soon it will make an opposition to Chiron. Like Mercury and Venus have just done with their squares to Neptune and Chiron, Mars is going make an opposition to Neptune first and then, when it changes signs, to Chiron. So we get the same sequence of denial/delusion with a subsequent feeling of radical awakening.

Treading this path with Mars is a little more dangerous because unlike Mercury and Venus, Mars is a sharp, hot and potentially flammable object. Opposite Neptune, we have a warning about going out of bounds, taking too much for granted or pushing an issue or a lie of some kind. There is a caution about emotional violence, psychic attack and severely compromised judgment. Because Aquarius is involved, this could involve some form of group denial or delusion (that would be nothing new, but as the astrology develops we can see a distinct event approaching — just in time for many local elections in the United States).

With Mars-Neptune aspects, the theme of motives needs to be investigated carefully, especially where any form of violence, force or power-over is involved. Deception needs to be considered an example of all three.

You might think of it this way. When power itself becomes the goal, that is dangerous territory. If you keep asking yourself about your motives, that is the time to call a timeout. Fortunately, there is a built-in boundary in the current planetary setup: as Mars opposes Neptune, the Sun makes a square to Vesta.

Vesta defines space, and will help focus the terms of the discussion. If you take action from the place of true and sincere devotion, you’re on solid ground.

Lovingly,

PS: In case you missed our special offer sent to subscribers for Revolution. Revelation. Reality Check, the 2012 annual edition of Planet Waves, here is that link again. Also, check your email Sunday evening for a special announcement.

Note that in the United States and Canada, daylight savings time ends and standard time begins this weekend. Mercury’s shadow/echo phase begins Saturday, heralding a retrograde that runs from Nov. 24 through Dec. 13. Mercury will be retrograde entirely in Sagittarius this time around. Speaking of planetary stations, Neptune stations direct on Nov. 9, just before the Taurus Full Moon. Mars forms an exact opposition to Neptune on Nov. 7, just before Neptune stations, so the two events are related. The opposition from Mars emphasizes the presence of Neptune at a sensitive moment in its cycle. Notably this will be the last Neptune station in Aquarius; it’s headed straight for Pisces, where it will remain until March 25, 2025.

The Moon entered Pisces early Friday morning, in a conjunction to Chiron. The Pisces Moon is already sensitive enough, especially after just having passed through the Mars-Neptune opposition. As with many other points this week that have aspected first Neptune and then Chiron, the message seems to be about gaining clarity, in this case emotional clarity. If after any potential disruption you consciously focus on healing, you’re likely to make actual progress. Then the Moon ingresses Aries at 2:02 pm EST on Sunday. That’s an aspect full of interesting surprises, as the Moon makes a conjunction to Uranus shortly after arriving in Aries, and squares Pluto that evening (overnight Sunday to Monday in the UK and Europe). This is a good day to avoid drama and keep your focus. Such conflict might come in the form of the sensation of ‘not fitting into the group’, being ‘too much of an individual’ or the notion of being too much in general.

Mercury and Venus remain in a long conjunction, which suggests making your desires verbal, or looked at the other way, feeling the words that you speak. In Sagittarius there may be a sense of adventure. At the same time, the Mars-Neptune opposition is providing some fuel for the imagination, the desire for something a little dangerous and the craving to push some boundaries with the help of a consciousness-altering substance. The thing to be aware of when doing that is that one does indeed negotiate one’s boundaries differently when consciousness is altered, and it’s good to keep a pulse on just how that works for you. No matter what you’re doing, be mindful of limits and boundaries. On that theme, perhaps the most interesting aspect with erotic overtones this weekend is Sun square Vesta. This aspect is developing all weekend and is exact Monday. Vesta can work like an organizing principle, such as within a physical space. There is the message here that if you set a safe container, you can do some bold experimentation within that container.

After repeated attacks from the police, with the enabling behavior of the mayor, Occupy Oakland became a general strike on Wednesday. Thousands of protesters shut down many stores and the commercial ports (Oakland is the nation’s fifth-largest port, where many of our imports from China come in), and nearly 20 percent of the city’s teachers did not report to work. The strike — the first general strike in Oakland since 1946 — was largely peaceful, though tension escalated overnight. Police arrested at least three dozen people and repeatedly fired tear gas and other projectiles to break up late night protests.

Elsewhere in #Occupy protests across the country, pepper spray has been used repeatedly by police. Police in Seattle used pepper spray to clear a side entrance to a hotel where JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was invited to speak Wednesday, so patrons could leave. Police in Tulsa, Oklahoma, pepper-sprayed Occupy protesters when they refused to vacate a local park. Police have made arrests in Seattle, Tulsa and Philadelphia, where demonstrators denounced Comcast for failing to pay taxes in a city with severe poverty issues.

Denial and Awareness

This week’s edition of Planet Waves FM develops the story of Mercury and Venus making aspects to Neptune and Chiron, a theme we’ve been exploring all week on our daily blog and covered in today’s edition. This is a fast-moving 30-minute presentation.

Here you’ll find the full archives and a downloadable zip file. They’re also available on iTunes.

Friday, Nov. 4, 2011. Weekly Horoscope #881. | Eric’s Zodiac Sign Descriptions

Aries (March 20-April 19) — Resist the temptation to be dishonest, which also means stand up to anyone who is less than forthright. Most people resist straight talk because they expect to be punished for it. As for why we don’t call people out on their deception: there are two big reasons for that. One is the fear of being seen as a liar. Second is to keep the peace, or rather, what passes for peace. There are other mucky, cloudy excuses for denial, ranging from social lubrication to the camouflage that a little deception offers. But this is not the time for that. Now is the time to look at the fog, admitting that it exists. It’s time to apply every available form of perception to your situation. Be sure you cross-check and don’t rely on any one source of information. Mostly, it’s time to be true to yourself. You may have to face a relationship issue that you’ve wanted to address for a long time. Get used to that idea — the time is nigh.

Aries, your birth sign or rising sign, is getting some of the most potent transits of them all right now. I’ve recorded an hour of astrology and a tarot card reading for you. Learn more by visiting this page.

Taurus (April 19-May 20) — You’ve finally gone past a point of a deep personal crisis — and now the real work begins. Just as when there’s a fire, a flood or an earthquake, the first response process is different from the long-term repair, the same is true for personal matters. You have discovered the places where your integrity is compromised. You have learned the ways in which you need to be more honest with yourself. You have probably figured out that it’s not only ‘okay’ but necessary to use what you know. And now you can apply these discoveries to your daily experience of life. There is no special time for growth and healing. If these words have any meaning at all, they are things we do all the time, even in our sleep — just like breathing. Many have noted that we’re a culture of shallow breathers, which describes our spiritual condition. Therefore, when in doubt, take a few deep breaths.

I’ve recorded an hour of astrology and done a tarot reading especially for you. It’s information that will help with your relationships, your professional life and your personal growth. Visit this page to find out more.

Gemini (May 20-June 21) — Your relationships don’t exist outside of you. There is no ‘third party’ known as the ‘relationship itself’, though at the moment it may seem that way. The risk in perceiving the relationship as a kind of corporate entity is dissociating yourself from a direct experience. It also dissociates you from the direct experience within someone close to you. I suggest you ask what’s happening on their end of the universe and listen carefully. This goes for anyone who would fit the definition of partner or close friend. You might even check in with those you consider your adversary or enemy. Those, too, are ‘special relationships’ that offer us plenty, and can sometimes be even more fruitful than the things we describe as relationships based on love. The question to keep in mind throughout your inquiry process is, ‘what does this say about me?’ I don’t mean this in the sense of a judgment, but rather a reflection.

Gemini is one of the most misunderstood signs — and as someone born under this sign, part of your role is to hold a mirror to the world. I’ve recorded an hour of audio for you, plus a 20-minute tarot reading. You can get access to these by visiting this page.

Cancer (June 21-July 22) — Scorpio is your house of playful sex, and the Sun is still there — but since last week, two other planets have ventured from Scorpio into Sagittarius. This puts the emphasis onto two themes: one is on what some call spirituality. Another is what some call healing. Typically, sex is considered as ‘unspiritual’ as you can get, and what we think of as healing usually exempts sex from the conversation. You may be figuring out that not only are these areas of life related, but for you they are the same thing. You might want to investigate the mental constructions that would tell you otherwise. Or, you can experiment with the idea that they are one and the same. This would involve coming out of denial, though it seems that you’ve recently had an experience that helped you do just that. Let’s start the process with desire. For the next week, try being scrupulously honest about what you want. Forget about why you might want an experience. Consider judgment and guilt forms of dishonesty, and keep going.

Leo (July 22-Aug. 23) — Hugh Prather once wrote that it takes ego to see ego. I would add, it takes ego to miss the point entirely. Your human journey needs a container, and for most people that container is this thing we refer to as ‘I’ or ‘me’. But it doesn’t stop there; we then take that ‘I’ or ‘me’ and seek affirmation of our existence in our experiences of other people. At the moment, some of those may feel a little strange: such as, the more you assert yourself, the less of a response you get. Or you act one way and you get a response that makes no sense at all. Here is the thing astrology reveals that you may not have a pulse on yet — there is a whole level of response that you cannot see but soon will. In part this involves the filter you’re looking through, and in part it involves the way someone is cloaking who they really are. Changing either one would go a long way toward clearing up the scene.

The 2011 Leo birthday report is 70 minutes of in-depth astrology plus a 20-minute tarot reading for you, exploring relationships, personal growth and your professional life. Visit this page for additional information.

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22) — The heart of the matter is emotional, but that means something different to you than it means to nearly anyone else. To be valid, something has to make sense to you — and there’s a good chance that you’re finally getting some clarity that is starting to feel like ‘making sense’. I would propose that this particular issue is going to make sense in a slightly different way every day for the next week or so. Give yourself the space to come to a different revelation that’s related to the prior one but still contains a unique idea. The key is to feel the idea and its implications. Try it on with your physical body and your emotions. Translate your discovery into words and decide how you like them. Consider what action you would take if that day’s possibility were actually true. Then, move onto the next one — with no special concern about where you’re going to end up.

The 2011 Virgo birthday report is ready! I’ve recorded 70 minutes of astrology plus a tarot reading for you, exploring how you’re working through family material, your use of spirituality, some new energy in your relationships and your professional goals. Visit this page for additional information.

Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23) — You recently came to terms with something, and this has had a liberating effect on you. You’re more of a free spirit than your astrology has enabled you to be the past couple of years, and you seem to have turned a corner that has come with the feeling of desiring freedom. At the same time you have greater clarity what it is — and from the way the planets are lining up, that has something to do with your ability to express yourself in words. For a while you may have felt beyond any hope of a cohesive idea, much less being able to express it tangibly. Why that has changed may be something of a mystery — perhaps something that stabilized your tendency to go from one emotional rush to the next. You may have noticed the pain you caused someone, or that some experience caused you — and the result is liberation that comes with acknowledging that simple truth.

Your Libra birthday audio for 2011 is finished. I’ve prepared a comprehensive reading for you, covering the astrology for your sign in about 70 minutes (in two segments) and offering a tarot reading of just under half an hour. Visit this link for additional information.

Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22) — It’s your birthday season, and I have a few messages for you. One is that this is going to be a good year for money, if you prioritize integrity above all else. That means being true to yourself, and to the people in your life. You will have opportunities to do anything and everything but be honest, and which only emphasize the point. In the old days when I used to train professional tarot card readers, I heard several of them say, ‘But I can’t charge money to help people’. And I would say, ‘Well what do you want to do, charge money to hurt them?’ This defines the first half of the integrity issue. The other half is not kidding yourself about the concepts ‘hurt’ and ‘help’. If you sell your soul, you cannot buy it back. You have to get it back some other way — but it’s far better to keep it in the first place.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Scorpio, please go to this link.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 22) — Two planets have just entered your sign — Venus and Mercury. The real-life version of that story may be an encounter or event that jolted you into a new level of discovery of who you are. It may have come through your dreams the past week or so, and in that dreamy way you may have forgotten what it was. Yet it’s had an influence on you. It feels like you unexpectedly resolved some old emotional pain. One clue about that pain is that it’s connected not only to your father but to some pattern involving his whole side of the family. You don’t necessarily need to analyze this, but it might help if you understood the connection. Your father had injuries and was subjected to influences that he did not understand. For a while that was the story of your life — and now a new story is finally beginning.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Sagittarius, please go to this link.

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20) — Leadership is about having your act together. Using that as a standard, just about everyone in political authority today, and mostly everyone in corporate authority today, would need to be described using a different term than ‘leader’. One story that your charts are telling is that you’re making the connection between emotional integration and your success in the world. By emotional integration, I mean getting the different parts of yourself to have the same conversation, and recognizing that they are aspects of the same whole entity — you. It’s not possible to divide your character (for example, trying to be honest with some people and dishonest with others). It’s useless to be constantly at odds with yourself. Insecurity of any kind simply must become a thing of the past. As you take action on these ideas, you will take yourself more seriously, and so will the people around you.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Capricorn, please go to this link.

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19) — You’re involved in an extended process of cleaning up some relationship issues, which may involve an actual encounter, several different experiences or your long-term patterns with others. This has less to do with those others and more directly with you. You are collecting the parts of yourself that you’ve scattered or invested in others, and which you are now claiming as your own. Think of this as a form of soul retrieval, or as a spiritual growth experience — it’s both. In either case, there is a special focus on the hidden psychological legacy of your mother. Repeat those words to yourself a few times. Note that such a thing even exists and that it influences you profoundly. Most of the unprocessed material of parents is passed directly to children — and we all know there is plenty. You’ve been in possession of the tools you need for a while; you’re now getting a handle on how to use them.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Aquarius, please go to this link.

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) — The time has come to be known for what you are best at, for what you want to be known for and most of all, for who you are. To some extent, your actions speak for you; your reputation precedes you. But you’re the one who has to provide the point of crystallization for an idea, and take the steps to assert yourself. While this takes energy, knowledge and the desire to succeed, most of what you need now is trust. That means trust in yourself, in what you’re offering and that the right people will respond in the ways that are in harmony with your process. Trust also means acting without hesitation or delay. Assert yourself, assert your message, and push beyond the containers that have held you in the past. Then be prepared to do this for a while, until you get either the results you want, or something better that you were not expecting — and could not have expected.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Pisces, please go to this link.

Planet Waves Inner Space Horoscope — November 2011

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Maria in a Venetian mask. Photo by Danielle Voirin

Dear Friend and Reader:

November is the month when the Sun moves from Scorpio to Sagittarius. As autumn develops, the theme evolves from the deepest emotional and sexual consciousness (flavored by Days of the Dead in early November) to the most etheric, global and cosmic. Yet the concepts of these two signs contain one another. Scorpio and Sagittarius present us with an essential diagram of the human experience, representing the two seeming polarities of what we long for. Scorpio endorses desire, which we find within ourselves and ultimately fulfill within ourselves. Sagittarius reminds us that the most cosmic experiences are often the most grounded ones. We can find the truth of God contemplating the Galactic Core or gazing at a flower. What all of this has in common is how we experience our awareness. Whether we experience something as emotional, erotic, mysterious or natural is all about how we experience ourselves — and this can change from moment to moment.

Lovingly,

Eric’s Zodiac Sign Descriptions

Aries (March 20-April 19) — After a phase of experimenting with your expressive passions, you reach an inner fork in the road: you can direct your creativity into a focused project or vocation, or you can get lost in your doubts and self-criticism. While I’m not a big fan of dichotomies, this one seems to contain some truth, at least this far: you cannot be too self-critical and still be free to express your passions. Self-reflective is one thing. Self-aware is closely related. It’s necessary to be able to critique your work without criticizing yourself. You seem determined to make some practical use of your passions, and to keep yourself busy with what actually matters to you. You can do that, though it’s going to take a mix of effort and flow, thought and intuition, motivation and attention to detail.

Aries, your birth sign or rising sign, is getting some of the most potent transits of them all right now. I’ve recorded an hour of astrology and a tarot card reading for you. Learn more by visiting this page.

Taurus (April 19-May 20) — You may feel like you’re right near potential that you cannot quite access. This might be in the form of having limited options or feeling like you’re boxed into the circumstances in your life. Yet there is something obvious you may be missing, which is that in any given moment, no matter what you’re doing, you have the privilege and the ability to express your quest. You may not think you do; you may have the idea that you’re not free till you make your great escape. That itself is a kind of trap. Your freedom of existence and creativity is contained in your daily activity. Yet to get there you have to make a decision to think of two things that usually seem separate or unrelated as the same thing, then explore how that feels.

I’ve recorded an hour of astrology and done a tarot reading especially for you. It’s information that will help with your relationships, your professional life and your personal growth. Visit this page to find out more.

Gemini (May 20-June 21) — You are in an unusual position to experience the world as the people who are close to you do. This is not the usual mirror effect of relationships but rather the sensation of a world opening. Remember to define the word ‘relationship’ as broadly as you can, remembering that human encounters are as diverse as the people we have them with. Connecting with people is not about getting married or hooking up or doing business — it’s vital to be open to any possibility, and greet the many people you encounter with a sense of potential and openness to adventure. That means keeping an open mind, and using your freedom to adapt to the people and circumstances that surround you. You don’t need an agenda, though your authentic curiosity will come in handy every day.

Cancer (June 21-July 22) — You need a lot of freedom around your work, and this is the time to take it. You know you’re not the type to sit in an office, so if you find yourself in one, do your best to get out as much as you can, on whatever excuse or project you can think of. If you’re self-employed, experiment with the most creative aspects of what you do, and then as the month progresses, work out of the house as much as possible. Your mind will be happier and your ideas will flow better. This is the time of year when you can connect to your infinite source of creativity. Many have wondered where you get your energy, and whatever the answer to that question may be, these are the months when you connect to your source, refill your well and guide the abundant activity of the month toward your highest vision.

Leo (July 22-Aug. 23) — Expression is the opposite of depression. Keep telling yourself that. You may not be depressed, but approximately two-thirds of the world seems to be — and it has a way of being contagious. At the moment you’re especially empathic and absorbent. You can feel just about anything anyone else is feeling, which is good for them. But when the Sun enters your fellow fire sign Sagittarius in a few weeks, you’re going to feel like a galaxy of ideas you want to share with the world. I suggest you start sooner rather than later. Clear a table, make space in your mind, and make space in your life as best you can in this busy world, because a wave of visionary creative passion is on its way. This is yours to explore and enjoy, however you can.

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22) — You need to learn the art of evaluation. All kinds of spiritual and psychological paths decry the toxin of judgment, but we don’t get much information about what to do after that. Virgo is famous for its self-critical nature, and you’re now beginning an extended phase of your life when you may be tempted to go there even more than usual. So I suggest that you create alternatives that give you a constructive use of that drive, giving you something useful to do with the energy. Along with this, I suggest you truly explore the concept of being open-minded. Like many things, it’s easier said than done, but more valuable than you may realize. One cannot really think, unless one is open-minded. Since you’ll be thinking a lot about yourself, it will help to do that in the gentlest, most self-supportive way.

Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23) — This has been a rather interesting few weeks in your experience of (and study of) your relationships. I trust that you’ve left one concept behind — grafting yourself permanently to another person for the rest of your life. Obviously you’re someone to whom commitment is deeply important. You believe in fidelity and you thrive on trust. But that is different from the idea of absolute permanence. You have, at least, begun to ask yourself real questions about what it means to be an autonomous, independent person. I would suggest that only such a person is in a good position to relate to someone else in an authentic way. Now and for the foreseeable future, you could say that the theme of your relationships is ‘love is freedom’.

Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22) — You’re at your most magnetic right now. The Scorpiophobia of the world is melting away and most days it will be more obvious that you’re the sensitive, passionate person you know yourself to be. That said, I suggest you remain picky about who your friends are. Fortunately, there will be a self-selection process working for you: the more authentic you are, the more you’ll attract the right people and repel the ones you don’t want. But don’t be too harsh on others; they may not seem to have your sharp wits or your notorious insight into psychology, but there will be certain days when you are feeling especially judgmental of the people around you. Everyone has their positive attributes, and one of yours is being able to notice that.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Scorpio, please go to this link.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 22) — This is the time of year when you feel the calling to the astonishing adventures for which you came to this Earth. As the Sun moves through your sign, you feel many of your deepest longings and your sense of cosmic connection. If you cannot go on a worldly adventure now, make plans to do so. You’re being called places; orient on them, collect information, make friends with people who live there. Make time in your schedule at the next possible moment. Set aside some money. Meanwhile, the deeper adventure involves the possibilities for your incarnation on our planet at this time. You came here with a purpose, whether it was to accomplish certain things, to learn, to have fun, or to serve. Connect with that mission now. Give yourself permission to let it be real.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Sagittarius, please go to this link.

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20) — You will get a lot further if you give up caring what other people think about you, but that’s another way of saying that self-acceptance is the key to success and happiness. You tend to be a private person, but you must also live with a sense of transparency that can be unnerving. In truth all you can really do is be comfortable within your own skin, though that’s a learned skill. Here is a clue: there are a number of people who factor prominently in your life right now, and you don’t feel the same way about any of them. If you practice objectivity, which basically means accepting them for who they are without judgment, you’re really offering yourself a space of belonging in the world at the same time. Said another way, the more freedom you give people to be themselves, the more you will feel to be yourself.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Capricorn, please go to this link.

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19) — You may be on an odd emotional edge where what you desire as your greatest success also feels the most dangerous. As you approach an accomplishment or take on new responsibilities, you may have this lurking sense that disaster is looming. You won’t be able to tell if it’s your intuition or a bit of paranoia, but I would suggest that the closer you get to that feeling, the more effective you’re being at working toward a deeply cherished goal. While this sensation is especially poignant for you now, many people experience this sensation — and in running from it, avoid actually accomplishing what they set out to do. Progress demands a measure of uncertainty, and if you can dance with that, you can do anything.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Aquarius, please go to this link.

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) — I’m not sure if you have an erotic vision — that is, a dream of how your sexuality would be ideally — but if you do, this is the month to take a step toward making it real. It would help if you state your ideas outright. This may feel radical; you may have the sense that nobody else will understand. What matters most is that you understand what you want. Why you want it is not so important; I suggest you connect your desire to direct ideas and visualizations. Then, see who and what comes your way, and the influence this has on the relationship experiences you have. What’s never said often enough about Pisces is that sex is your true religion, that is, where you seek your God-source. This idea is cosmologically and biologically accurate. It’s only judgment that gets in the way.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Pisces, please go to this link.

Tales from the Other Side of Astrology

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Several 19th century graves on the Grandmother Land, summer 2011. Photo by Eric Francis.

Dear Friend and Reader:

Being an astrologer is sometimes like being a metaphysical minister. People assume we have a connection to the other side, and many of us do. Practicing astrology helps people enhance their subtle senses. There is a need to reach a little beyond the obvious, into the unseen, and this gradually helps us open doors. More significantly, astrologers are presumed to be open-minded about things that other people won’t believe in, or won’t go near. We hear about a vast diversity of human experiences, including plenty that people would never tell their therapist.

In truth, it’s only a short hop from studying these mysterious charts, and the lives of both the living and the dead, to direct encounters with the spirit world. I understood this was the reason why a young mother approached me one evening in a bar on Vashon Island in Washington State, and asked me if I had any experience dealing with haunting or possession.

The infamous (and now gone) Jesus barn on Vashon Island, Washington, formerly on the property in question. Historic photo.

I asked if there was a child involved. The answer was yes — her young daughter. The mother believed some kind of spirit occupying their home had been coming through and tormenting her daughter, but the child had other problems. She said the spirit contact didn’t happen all the time, only periodically. I suggested that if things got worse, they get the child out of the house immediately, since children, especially those with any kind of psychic or emotional disturbance, make an easy foothold for certain kinds of entities.

She asked me to visit the house, and I agreed. This turned out to be located on the property where the old Jesus barn was — a barn that had the word Jesus painted on the front exterior. Everyone knew this place, and when the barn collapsed and was torn down, it lived on in memory. Things don’t change fast on Vashon. One of the odd mannerisms of islanders was to give directions suggesting that people “turn right where the Jesus barn used to be.” The grounds had a strange feature: a sinkhole into the Earth. I mean a hole so deep and wide that people would dispose of old washing machines and refrigerators by throwing them into the hole.

Historically, there was one other oddity: decades earlier, there was a boxing ring on the property. There was a tradition that when two neighbors had an issue, they would settle it with a bare-fisted fight in the ring, as everyone watched. Learning this bit of history gave me a clue what was under the laidback, extremely mellow passive aggression that can manifest on the island.

The next day I met her and her partner there. The house was enormous — ridiculously large for a family of three. But it also felt cramped at the same time. It was cold and dark. The family would huddle in the kitchen, which was kept warm by a wood stove. In the 1960s it was occupied by a cult. She showed me a kind of attic off of the second floor that had been decorated with satanic graffiti on the walls. In 40 years, nobody had bothered to paint it over. It was vile stuff, laden with hatred and negativity.

The child’s room, on the second floor, felt cramped and strange. I repeated my warning: if anything else happens to the kid, get her out of here fast. I was concerned because the descriptions of what was happening were evidence of a classical poltergeist situation: moving objects, slamming doors — and an emotionally stressed, weakened child. The relationship can eventually break the integrity of the child and result in a situation of actual possession.

One traditional use of frankincense is to attract protective angelic entities. There is a reason the magi, who were trained in the esoteric arts, brought it to Jesus. That said, it’s also necessary to consciously invoke your protection and assistance in any situation where you might need to do such a thing, and in my own work it serves partly as a reminder to do so. As for blue light, which draws on the high end of the spectrum — not sure how that works but I’ve found it to be effective. Photo by Eric Francis.

Within the space of the home, the haunting manifested the sensation of fake cobwebs on Halloween, only energetically, clinging to everything. And there was the weird feeling of the house being very large and very small at the same time. The place was rundown and untidy — which is an invitation for dark spirits to take up residence.

A few weeks later I got a phone call. The child had come under severe attack. The couple wanted to move out. The kid was with her father, in a safe space. Having taken these precautions, what should they do next?

I gave them an escape plan: put a blue light bulb in every fixture in the house, flood the house with frankincense smoke, pack and get out. I said use resin incense (it’s much more pure than regular incense) burn it on charcoal pads, and keep it going. These are not solutions — but they will buy you some time. They had taken the frankincense part seriously — they had a little furnace going in a cast iron pot.

I came over that night. The house was glowing blue. The sweet-smelling smoke was practically seeping from the doors and windows. They were packing their belongings into boxes and suitcases and had moved out by the next day. I never heard from them again.

I am not an expert on the subject of haunting or possession, so I cannot say I know what actually happened. Were this to have persisted as a discussion point between us, or had this seemed any weirder than it was, I would have likely referred them to someone better equipped to handle the situation, on a psychological or spiritual level (best with someone who understands the overlap). I was aware there were other circumstances involved, including the mental state of the adult caregivers. At least they had the sense to inquire what they should do. I designed my suggestions to be harmless even if I was wrong. If a physical space is a source of stress, it’s usually a good idea to leave, if one wants to stay healthy. We’re so accustomed to stress that we tend not to notice it. Noticing is the first step and choosing is the second.

I would add one other take-away. Society only sanctions this kind of possibility in movies. Just about everyone knows it’s real. And there’s a denial factor. So this is a source of tension, especially since contact with the nonphysical happens frequently and may be getting more commonplace due to something called ‘the quickening’. I propose we create a safe space to have the conversation.

A Vast World of Ghosts

Early in my astrological career, I was thrown a number of difficult cases involving the deaths of people close to my clients. Most of the deaths involved girls or young women, in two cases mothers who had recently lost children. One day my phone rang and it was a young man whose girlfriend had just killed herself. They were both in their 20s. I took the basic data, including her chart data, and made room in my schedule for him to come over that day.

View from the summit, above the Chironian in Rosendale, NY, where we said goodbye to my client’s girlfriend. Photo by Eric Francis.

He was the one who walked in on the scene three days after she shot herself. Part of the trauma was discovering the gruesome vision of her bloated corpse. He was sad and grieving, but he was also grounded and realistic about what had happened. Suicide always comes with the ‘what if’ factor, but he didn’t seem to be blaming himself. We read the astrology and talked about some of the emotional issues involved.

My instincts told me that the most important thing we could do was create the space for a clear goodbye; for a completion. So we walked from my first office, located in a little corner of Rosendale, NY, up a hill with a view to the west. This is the hill that’s over the healing cave I call the Chironian. We sat on the edge of a cliff above a sheer drop into some very deep cement mines, looking west toward the Catskill Mountains.

It was a warm spring evening. We sat up there and watched the Sun set, talking about her life and hanging out with the memory of who she was. The long, slow conversation came with a strange, otherworldly feeling as we watched the horizon sitting on the edge of a cliff. I was hanging out with this young guy who had just gone through this loss, and been confronted with the stark reality of death. It was a pure human-to-human encounter, set on some outpost of time and space where just he and I existed.

I was no longer an astrologer, but his companion on a journey through the unknown — and this taught me a lot about how to think of my clients.

We parted ways that evening. Later that night I was back in my apartment, where I lived with my two cats, Ling Ling and William Pen. I had a neighbor across the hall, who was out of town. I was cat sitting for her, so I had her door open and the cats could all roam freely around. I had also been doing some work up in the attic, and a door into the ceiling was open, with the ladder dropped down. It was about 2 am and I was alone in the house.

House on Binnewater Lane in Rosendale, NY, that was thrust into the
world of spirits. This is also the place where I wrote my first horoscope column, in April of 1995. My apartment was on the second
floor on the left side. Photo by Eric Francis.

Suddenly I felt a presence, as if the space had changed. It was suddenly much larger. Imagine you’re sitting in an ordinary living room, then you recognize that it’s on the floor of a stadium. That’s how it felt. Everything had opened up, as if the whole building had been thrust into a different dimension. It felt like there were many, many presences, as if hundreds of people were scurrying around in both apartments and up in the attic. I was not even vaguely frightened or creeped out. It was just a really interesting feeling, and I embraced their presence with an open heart.

I checked in with my cats — they were acting nonchalantly. So were my neighbor’s. I knew that if the cats did not sense danger, I was not in danger. Animal senses are usually sharper than those of people, and they extend further out to both ends of the spectrum. They have a keen sense of whether they are safe. This is one reason why certain practitioners of the psychic arts have what are called ‘familiars’ — specially designated animals who they keep nearby. (My cats and I had an understanding that this was part of their role.) They provide a sense of grounding as you move through the dimensions, including grounding in one’s identity and present space-time.

Then I felt the presence of his girlfriend. I was not scared — I was moved, almost to tears. I cleared off my couch for her, the one where I would usually sit when doing readings. I sat where my clients would usually sit, on a folded futon couch near the window. The first thing I did was welcome her. I made it vividly clear that she was welcome. I lit a candle and treated her just like I would treat any client, being present for her. We did not exchange words, only the sense of one another’s presence. I sat there with her and lovingly acknowledged her existence and her life.

Gradually the sensation faded. Her presence slowly departed and the dimensional opening seemed to seal back up. I was now back in my normal apartment, having had a rather unusual experience. Nothing quite like that ever happened again, though a lot of interesting things happened on that land.

Do They Know They’re Dead?

I have a tradition of doing a nude photo shoot every year in a cemetery, often around Days of the Dead. It’s difficult to make these original. The nude-woman-in-the-cemetery is one of the most played-out clichés of photography students. It’s easy to do badly.

Book of Blue model Heather Fae Speaker slips into the world between the worlds, on the grave of Sarah Ann Christiana at the Old Tongore Cemetery, Days of the Dead, 2009. Photo by Eric Francis.

For a while I was signed on as a photographer for Find-a-Grave, the Facebook of dead people. It’s one of the basic websites that bigger sites like Wikipedia link into, so that in the case of a notable dead person, there is a photo and location of the grave. But many other graves are listed.

One day I got a request to locate and photograph a certain grave in the Old Tongore Cemetery, located out near the Ashokan Reservoir. The Old Tongore Cemetery is very old, and not very large. I was looking for the grave of a woman named Sarah Ann Christiana who had died early in the 20th century. It took three separate visits to the cemetery to find the grave — including two searches with the neighbor of the cemetery. Finally I found the old guy who had the grave records, a farmer who lived in the small hamlet of Tongore. He looked up that particular name and told us where to find it. The weird part is that we had walked past that spot many times and not seen the grave.

My fourth visit to the cemetery was to take photos early one Sunday morning in November. It was a beautiful sunny day — the last warm day of the year. Old Tongore seemed to be the perfect place to go for the project. I was starting to become old friends with the place. I had recruited one of my most trusted models, Heather Fae Speaker. We were working very early for two reasons: the first was to get long light, with the Sun close to the horizon. The second was for security. If you’re going to photograph nude in a cemetery, it’s a good idea to do it when others are not likely to be around.

Everett Cook, president of Tongore Cemetery Assn., locates the grave of Sarah Ann Christiana in his record files. Photo by Eric.

We went to Sarah Ann’s grave, which was under a beautiful tree in the last row, on the east end of the cemetery. I set up my cameras. Heather Fae undressed.

The moment she sat down on the ground her comportment changed: her body language, her facial expression and the feeling of her presence. I looked at her and I knew what was going on.

“Can you feel them?”

She nodded.

“Do they know they’re dead?”

She shook her head no. I knew to ask because this is a common phenomenon: people often die and they don’t know it. They can be caught in a hologram between the worlds, a kind of mental pattern they cannot let go of. They think they’re alive. Maybe they get up and get dressed every day in an endless cycle of repetition. They live what feels like a life, but nothing ever changes.

That’s the problem with this world: often, the dead don’t know they’re dead, and the living don’t know they’re alive.

Lovingly,

Note to Readers: I’ve added some new sections the past couple of weeks. I don’t mean to overwhelm you with stuff to read, only to provide some organization for those who want specific information fast. The sections are practical astrology organized by topic. We also post the Planet Waves FM podcast. Your Friday edition is now designed as one-stop shopping at Planet Waves.

The Moon begins Friday in Scorpio, ingressing Sagittarius at 10:45 am EDT. It makes squares to Mars in Leo and Neptune in Aquarius, and trines Uranus in Aries today. The Moon stays in that fire sign most of the weekend, entering Capricorn Sunday Oct. 30, at 12:38 pm EDT.
Also today, Mercury in Scorpio squares Mars in Leo just before 11:08 am EDT and Jupiter trines Pluto in Capricorn a little before 12:30 pm EDT.
Saturday the Scorpio Sun opposes retrograde Jupiter in Taurus just before 9:42 pm EDT, then makes a sextile to Pluto in Capricorn just before 11:11 pm EDT.
Monday — Halloween — Venus in Scorpio makes a square to Neptune in Aquarius just after 5:19 pm EDT.

There are still some tense aspects in the air. Mercury is about to make a square to Mars, which has been brewing all week. That is a caution against being angry at yourself, and in particular, about letting that anger get snagged on an emotional level. If you have to, use analysis to figure out what’s going on with you. Venus square Neptune is calling out for emotional honesty. The square says be honest with yourself — don’t try to convince yourself of anything, especially that you’re a ‘bad’ or a ‘good’ person.

Mercury square Mars says: work out your mental blocks. Most people’s self-denial of the sex they want is a head trip. It’s possible to get caught in maintaining the illusion of self-image, or some idea that prevents you from even expressing what you want. Sometimes there is an apparent conflict between two desires. Note the level on which this is all a mind game. Work it out. Be honest with yourself first. Remember that ‘what people think’ usually verges on meaningless (or is a figment of your imagination), and what you think is the most meaningful thing to you. Venus square Neptune cautions against thinking you have to be ‘in love’ to have sex with someone — or that sharing sex means you’re in love. Kindness and consideration are enough.

A Decade of Saturn Opposing the Outer Planets: Summary

Yesterday was the exact opposition of Saturn opposite Eris. I discussed this in the October monthly horoscope. This is a slow-moving aspect. Because Eris is not well known or well understood, we won’t necessarily notice the many events that have been happening under the influence of this aspect. But it makes sense to study the sky, ourselves and the world because Saturn opposing outer planets tends to be momentous. Here is the background. Saturn has been making a lot of oppositions to outer planets the past 10 years. By outer planets I mean in the classical sense — Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, which are all fairly close together in the sky, having made a series of conjunctions in the 1960s and 1990s.

Unprecedented view of a dramatic and startling meteorological phenomenon on Saturn. Credit: NASA, from Cassini Space Probe, 2011.

So Saturn opposed them one at a time between 2001 and 2010. Note that these aspects have a much wider time orb than the dates I am stating, and because they are concentrated in just 10 years, this can be seen as one extended event.

First was Saturn opposite Pluto, from 2001-2002. This included a stolen election, the false flag attacks, anthrax, national security state consolidated, point of no return on corporate merger with government, start of Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Solution to everything: duct tape and plastic wrap. (Three exact oppositions.)

Then was Saturn opposite Neptune — 2004-2008 — Hurricanes Katrina + Rita, second stolen election, economic slide, precursor to the bank crash. (Three exact oppositions with a very wide orb since it’s Neptune.)

Then was Saturn opposite Uranus — 2008-present — The economic crash, Obama election, pluralists v reactionaries, rise of the Tea Party, European banking crisis (Greece, Ireland, Spain, etc).

Now we have Saturn opposite Eris. I include Eris among the many, many objects existing in the region of space beyond Pluto because Eris qualifies as one of the ‘great’ outer planets, not a minor planet, in that it summed up all prior minor planet discoveries, defined an era of astronomy, and an era of history. This makes one exact opposition, which occurred yesterday — though Saturn and Eris are still in the same degree today. The influence seems to be distinctly personal as opposed to ‘historical’. But there is also a distinct era in history: withdrawal of GI troops from Iraq, murder of bin Laden and of Qadaffi, the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement, awareness of the need for personal responsibility.

While we are definitely still getting some effects of Saturn opposite Uranus, and the early effects of Uranus square Pluto (exact 2012-2015), this intense, even insane year (Tucson shootings, Fukushima, etc.) will teach us a lot about Eris because of the exact opposition from Saturn.

The theme we’ve been developing the past two months about autonomy in relationships, personality chaos that cannot be answered by marriage or a partner, and many other themes, relate back to this aspect. It’s time we recognize how fragmented we feel because of the world changing so much faster than we can keep up with. It’s about an era in personal history that is defined by the idea of personal responsibility and standing up for what is right.

In #Occupy news, Occupy Oakland was raided twice by police on Tuesday, the second raid resulting in the critical injuring of 24-year-old Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen. Police there were tossing flash-bang grenades, shooting ‘bean bag’ rounds and firing tear gas into the group of marchers who were attempting to peacefully retake their encampment in front of Oakland’s City Hall. Coverage, including interviews with those who assisted Olsen, can be seen on the Democracy Now! website and on Countdown with Keith Olbermann on Current TV. Olbermann, in particular, called for the resignation of Oakland’s mayor in his special comment Wednesday night. Marches have been held in New York, Oakland and other cities to protest the violent crackdown.

In related news: one of the 1%, former Goldman Sachs board member Rajat Gupta, has been released on $10 million bail after pleading not guilty to six charges of insider trading. And Reuters is reporting that Democratic lawmakers on the ‘supercommittee’ are proposing to make cuts to Medicare and Medicaid for the 99%, as part of a plan to slash the budget deficit. European leaders this week firmed up a deal designed to end Greece’s budget crisis and hopefully stabilize the European economy, but many were skeptical that it would work.

Scorpio New Moon, and CT Butler Interview

This week’s Scorpio New Moon edition of Planet Waves is ready. My guest is CT Butler, one of the world’s leading minds on the theme of conflict resolution and consensus, who is talking about Occupy Wall Street’s leadership challenges and how he is working to inform the movement of a formal consensus process as opposed to a casual one. That’s in the second half of the program. In the first half of the program, I talk about the New Moon chart, and the many aspects that are happening right now, most of which involves Scorpio and its ruling planets; or Pisces and its ruling planets.

In today’s edition, Eric Francis speaks with CT Butler, the Papa Smurf of consensus, about the leadership situation in the Occupy movement.

Then I talk about the chart for the Occupy Wall Street movement. Monday, The Mountain Astrologer posted a guest column by me about that chart, set for Sept. 17 in New York City. This is a chart that’s all about a message — to the chagrin of those who would accuse the protest movement of having none. It’s so obvious that you cannot miss it unless you are determined to.

Our musical guest is Seth Davis, with a song called “LA Burning” from his CD Prettier than Blue. Seth is a friend from New Paltz, the co-creator of Karma Road, a vegan café. I just love this song — notice the horn solo about two minutes in. Can you tell what instrument that is? It almost sounds like a trombone.

Then the interview with CT — much of the conversation involves consensus process and how this relates to the usual American way of thinking. CT has a lot of perspective on activism; it’s been his career since a young age. At the end of the interview, CT describes his plan to do a kind of Consensus Tour 2012. He’s looking for sponsors and participants. If you would like to reach him, you can find him easily via his website, consensus.net, which lists his contact information.

Here is your podcast in the old player, which also includes an archive of all of my past programs — more than 75 of them. They’re also available on iTunes.

Friday, Oct. 28, 2011. Horoscope #880. | Eric’s Zodiac Sign Descriptions

Aries (March 20-April 19) — Do you remember that old novelty sign, ‘A clean desk is a sign of a sick mind’? Like most jokes about human nature, there is a grain of truth to this. In order to invoke your creativity, it’s necessary to dance with chaos. Sometimes a lot of chaos, sometimes just a little, but it’s necessary to let go of existing reality sufficiently to allow in something new. This is what you seem to be up to now, and by up to I mean ready for. It looks like you’ve been trying to contain the many pressures that are acting on your psyche, knowing that this would not be able to last. You can let go a little and see what happens. This will have the element of risk, but it’s not an especially big one. Embracing the unknown is something we do all the time. And just because your desk is neat doesn’t mean you can find what you’re looking for.

Taurus (April 19-May 20) — You seem to be holding onto something, and that is the source of your tension. You could just as easily stretch, expand, release or share — you would feel a lot better. To do that, however, you would need to change something that feels like a fundamental belief about yourself. While your current plight seems to be emotional, it really goes to the deeper level of faith in yourself. That, in turn, translates to having confidence in your connection to existence; if you felt that, you would know there’s nothing to hold onto, only to share. There is a paradox here, which many have noted. It’s through offering yourself that you discover how much you have to give. If you withhold, you will feel like you’re lacking. If you offer, you will feel your abundance. This may be a mental trick, but if it is, it’s one that points to reality.

Gemini (May 20-June 21) — Your mind appears to be tied up in knots, but it looks like you’ve reached the level where you have an idea of what’s going on, rather than just the sensation of being caught or snagged. I feel confident saying that as a Gemini you’re familiar with the distinctly dualistic aspect of your nature. The two sides that are currently vying for supremacy are your masculine and feminine aspects. I can give you a clue that may help you go deeper: try to move beyond the ideas of what these sides of you are about and get to the level of direct experience. If you’re experiencing conflict, start by taking one side, then the other. Keep switching sides until you start to discern what they both have in common. Then you can get an actual dialog going. Remember — relationships are built on common ground, rather than on differences, and this includes your inner relationship.

Cancer (June 21-July 22) — You have plenty of emotional leverage right now; a little self-control is all it will take to harness some excellent creative and/or sexual energy. Certain situations in your life that you thought were stuck are starting to come loose, giving you freedom to move, stretch and make some choices. I have one clue for how to maximize your mobility: forget what other people think. Stop seeking approval, or taxing your mind with the thought of what might happen if you have or don’t have that approval. The ‘others’ who might give you a thumbs up or down exist exclusively in your mind. Therefore, you can go a long way by approving of yourself. Or as a young David Hoffman, the first of many brilliant legal minds I had the pleasure of working with once said, “Do whatever you want until someone tells you that you can’t” — if they ever bother.

Leo (July 22-Aug. 23) — The obstacles you face are so small, they are actually more like footholds. If you experience any conflict, treat it like an opportunity. Someone resisting you is actually giving you their energy; agree mutually to make creative use of that offer. Apply this to any situation where there is tension; there have been many lately, though fortunately the new ones will be somewhat gentler and have a bit less of a dramatic flair. They have taught you one thing, anyway, which is that you can focus your will and intentions no matter what anyone else might think. Your strength at the moment is coming from below — from underneath you, from your emotional grounding, from your sense of what your own past has given you. There is no place you cannot go, if you have your feet on the ground. There is nothing you cannot accomplish, if you know what you want.

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22) — Recently, an odd point called Transpluto entered your sign. It’s not a planet, asteroid or star — it’s classified as a hypothetical point, existing only in mathematics and the minds of astrologers. Here is the strange part: it takes nearly seven centuries to go around the Sun. It was in Leo from the mid-1930s till last week. For the next four years it will be dancing back and forth between Leo and Virgo. One effect this will have is to put you under an inner microscope. You’ll be able to see yourself more accurately, and you’ll be able to see your tendency for self-criticism in a more realistic light. Here is what I suggest: accept only the kinds of critique that give you a choice in the matter of who you are. You can assume as categorically false any thought that backs you into a corner.

Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23) — I’m not a big believer in how the universe ‘tests’ us. I know, some people are. But some things do feel like tests. You’ve been through one lately, which has if anything strengthened your emotional resolve, particularly around an important financial issue. In a few days Venus, the planet associated with your sign, is going to make a square to Neptune. If this is a test, it’s about being true to yourself — especially in the face of some deception or fog that gives the illusion of truth. This may come in the form of group pressure, or the option to give yourself over to an opinion that you don’t actually agree with. For most people this would be a test of ethics on a scale that might cause a full meltdown. The threat of not being accepted by others is more than most mortals can stand. Good thing you’re feeling immortal these days.

Planet Waves

Zoom H4n recorder, ready for work, Tuesday afternoon on the Grandmother Land.

Libra Birthdays: Recorded Live on the Grandmother Land

Your Libra Birthday Reading is ready for Libra and Libra rising people. This is literally a fireside chat about your astrology for 2011, recorded in the hours before the Aries Full Moon. It covers the unusual events in your relationship, family and creative angles. Going well over the usual hour or so, this presentation was recorded outside on the land, after crossing the stream and scaling the side of the waterfall with my gear, collecting firewood and getting the fire going, ending shortly after dark. The Libra Report includes three sections of astrology plus a reading from the Voyager Tarot. The chart and a photo of the reading are included, along with access to special discounts on other projects. Here is your link to purchase.

Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22) — Your life may feel like an unplanned trip to the Advanced Leadership Training Program. While this has been arriving with all kinds of challenges and opportunities to overcome the emotional chaos of the world (and of certain people close to you), you may be figuring out what a rare and precious thing actual leadership is. The message seems to be, the more you get your ego out of the way, the more authority you have. The more you define authority as the ability to guide things in a mutually positive direction, the happier everyone will be. Just note one thing: not everyone believes in this crazy notion of mutually positive. Most people’s game theory is so crude, there must be a winner and a loser in every transaction. If that were true, there would not be a living creature on the planet. Life sustains life.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Scorpio, please go to this link.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 22) — You may not feel like a certain idea or project is ready for presentation to the world around you, but I suggest you take the chance and roll it out a little sooner than you were planning. Thankfully, you’re not a perfectionist. Yes, you’re more driven by attention to details than any description of your sign that you’ve ever read. This is especially true when a meaningful professional question is on the line, or when your reputation is at stake. So make sure that the few most meaningful details are right, but time is of the essence. This is a rare moment. What you’re sharing is the concept, and what you’re looking for is information that will advance that concept. Be aware that not everyone will understand; you may hear some dumb critiques. Yet if you take away one good idea, or one conversation that evolves your thinking, you’ve accomplished your goal.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Sagittarius, please go to this link.

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20) — Have you noticed the prevailing state of emotional chaos in the world? You could hang a big sky in the upper atmosphere: Welcome to Planet Earth, where hardly anyone knows what to think or what to feel. This has its positive side; it can insinuate openness to new information or experience that would help us make up our mind. But if the question “who am I?” is asked insincerely, then the response is likely to do little other than deepen the confusion. I assure you that it’s safe for you to be confident in who you are right now. You’ve been through many developments that have reassured you that you’re not only on the right track, you’re on the right train, and it’s running on schedule. So stop begging the question. You have a mission. Yes, it’s different than everyone else’s mission — and this fact gives you a dependable point of clarity.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Capricorn, please go to this link.

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19) — It’s time to revise your strategy. For a while, you’ve been working with the idea of what you need to give up in order to have what you want. That will work better if you’re figuring out that it’s better to give up what you don’t want and don’t need as a way of making room for what will enhance your life. As for that change in strategy: it involves knowing when to be honest and when to apply camouflage. As you’ve learned recently, it’s not always a good idea to engage people in conflict, even if you’re right and even if you think you can win. There are times when it’s helpful to put on your cloaking device and slip unnoticed from the room. Other times, someone is going to put a microphone and TV camera in your face and you’ll know it’s time to tell it like it is. The coming days and weeks will offer a variety of both.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Aquarius, please go to this link.

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) — You may feel like your life is a mixed bag at the moment, but if you pay attention you’ll notice that you’ve been winning every round, and are on the way to advancing to the next league. Maintain your policy of putting up with nothing, stopping at nothing and being open to everything. Be sure to apply actual, conscious discernment whenever you come to a point where it’s time to make a choice — and there will be many the next few weeks. Most people don’t recognize those crucial junctures. You have the ability to, and at the moment you have the awareness to identify the people in your life with unusual precision. Once you ‘get’ who someone is and what their agenda is, all you need to do is treat them appropriately. When someone is generous with you, return the favor in kind — but don’t give anyone the benefit of the doubt when there is none.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Pisces, please go to this link.

Scorpio New Moon and the November Monthly Horoscope

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Dear Friend and Reader:

Wednesday is the Scorpio New Moon — and as you might expect this is a deep chart. There are many points aligned in Scorpio, and both rulers of that sign (Mars, the traditional ruler and Pluto, the modern ruler) are taking aspects from other planets. I would describe this as a moment of reevaluation, in a time when the door is open to asking real questions.

Photo by Eric Francis. View image in larger format.

Cutting to the chase, it’s fair to sum up the chart as saying basically: What is the role of jealousy and control in our relationships? And to what extent do these things get in the way of (or substitute for) a real exchange? Do we want that exchange, and how do we feel when it actually happens?

We take for granted that our emotional bonds with others are going to include control and jealousy (especially where sex is concerned). More than viewing this as something appropriate or useful, we tend to simply expect or even stoke these emotions, which so far as I can tell are responsible for more human misery than the next 10 factors combined. Of course, if we worked through this stuff, that would eliminate the themes of most movies, songs, artwork and poetry. Whatever would humanity do with its precious few drops of time on the planet? What would we do with our newfound freedom? That is the question that emotional drama prevents us from asking.

In some ways this is changing, but when it comes down to the level of an emotional reflex, jealousy for most people seems intractable. Once they are sexually bonded with someone, not only does jealousy often feel impossible to resolve, most would think there is no possible way to do so, and a good few would not want to — after all, it’s a sign of love, right? This could only be true in a society where relationship is seen (and often treated legally) as a property right.

We might ask where the opening would be. It’s not about relationships — it’s about self concept. The emotions I am describing are the result of near-total investment of ‘self’ into a relationship — or the idea of self into the idea of a relationship. When the relationship changes, or even when we have the notion that it might change, that can feel like a death threat to that ‘self’ that is so heavily invested. This sense of being on the inevitable, compelling, not-entirely-voluntary emotional brink is the essence of Scorpio from a psychological perspective.

This is the energy that we can either fight or work with. Working with begins with being aware and being with — rather than catapulting oneself into denial. The New Moon trine Chiron in Pisces is an opening to awareness. A little Chiron and Pisces will go a long way to helping us process Scorpio — help we can use. Alice A. Bailey describes Scorpio as “a sign which is of paramount importance in the life of evolving [humanity].” She also describes it as “the great constellation which influences the turning point both in the life of humanity and the life of the individual human being.” If you have strong Scorpio factors in your chart, you may be familiar with this. If you respond to Scorpios in a strong way, this may be what you’re responding to. Unfortunately, it’s not always expressed creatively, though it can be.

I would say that the crux of the matter of this turning point is understanding sex, death and where the two meet — or at least being open to the conversation. That intersection can involve the sensation of loss of control, or the fear that this might happen. Even admitting the least attraction to someone can come with a surge of phobia that we might lose control. The same can be said of any true creative process, to which we must give ourselves if we are to embark on it at all. This would include creating children, who are often the direct result of sex.

Sample of the Scorpio New Moon chart set for Wednesday afternoon, which shows Moon and Sun (with the same degree value), plus Venus, Mercury and Juno in Scorpio. Venus and Mercury are square Mars, which is one of the rulers of Scorpio, heightening the tension. The squares to Mars focus that tension internally.

Imagine for a moment what life would be like were we really okay with our sexual natures, and those of the people around us. Venus square Mars in the New Moon chart is describing working out internal sexual tension. Gender identity may be all over the news (for example, marriage rights for same-sex couples, and the political debate about whether being homosexual can be cured) but rarely do we take the conversation inward. Some may be dimly aware of having inner male and female polarities, but imagine if we understood how deeply these influenced our sense of identity. Think of it this way. We project the whole matter outward, as the relationship game. But if it’s really about working through internal tension, and we filter this fact out, we can get ourselves into some real quandaries. For example, that could influence us to make enormous decisions we don’t understand.

Implied in Scorpio is the concept of ‘death and transformation’. This idea comes with a bit of twisted humor in that many people would rather die than change. And that point of resistance becomes a place where others can get a lot of leverage over us. The resulting war within makes us susceptible to manipulation, especially by the deeply taboo ideas of sex and death. There is a reason they work so well in advertising.

Here is a question, which has been asked before. What if death held no appeal, no allure as a power trip, as a news item, as a political game? This allure — so often glamorized — influences us more ways than we think. If we noticed, we might be able to do something about it. Consider all the subtle ways that death stalks sexual relationships: all the ‘what ifs’, the conditions we place on people, the unspoken influences. These range from AIDS-phobia to the notion of ‘lifelong’ commitments to any consideration that includes something like one’s partner’s potential inheritance. These things are more damaging to love and the expression of life than we might imagine; it’s why A Course in Miracles suggests that you “accept no compromise in which death plays a part.” Any time you identify such a compromise, study it carefully — it’s usually a raw deal of some kind, ruled by fear, and which you can dismiss outright.

Later in the month, we experience the Taurus Full Moon. This is square Nessus in Aquarius, and to me that’s a question: To what extent do we allow our relationships to be defined by popular opinion, group dynamics or some form of bullying? Any time a relationship value becomes politicized, whether it’s in a circle of friends or the national political scene, this is what’s going on. And there is all kinds of underlying subject matter — described above — when this happens.

Right after the Full Moon, Mars moves into Virgo, where it will be for the next nine months. This is due to Mars retrograde in that sign (Jan. 23 to April 13). While the actual retrograde lasts just over three months, Mars spends a lot of time slowing down and speeding back up, all of it in Virgo. This begs the question of self-acceptance. Virgo is famous for its relentless self-critique; add Mars, and Mars seeming to reverse directions, and we have a real inquiry — with the reminder to take it easy. You can’t fix everything about yourself at once. Healing is a process, and it’s best explored gently, with determination.

I would give Mars retrograde in Virgo a two-word key phrase: healing desire. I’ll have more to say about this as that particular transit unfolds.

See you Friday with our Halloween edition.

Lovingly,

Planet Waves Monthly Horoscope — November 2011

Aries (March 20-April 19) — This month, your ruling planet Mars enters Virgo, where it will be for about nine months. This involves Mars retrograde, which is a long process — but this is especially long for Mars to stay in one sign. This is an extended opportunity to rethink three things: one is your idea of work. Next is your idea of your health. Last is your idea of wellbeing. You may be filled with the inspiration to start fixing your life, and embarking on every conceivable self-improvement plan. I suggest you start with evaluating how you evaluate things. Your mind tends to be impetuous and you have a way of snapping to judgments, then sorting out whether you were right or wrong the next day or the next week. Even then, you’re trying to apply some logic, and the time has arrived to figure out just what that logic is. By that I mean, what is your concept of ‘better’? What is your idea of ‘fair’? How do you discern whether you’re coming from your mind or your emotions when you make a decision? Mars retrograde is going to put you in a position to review many, many facts of your life, and many past decisions you’ve made — and how they impact you. I suggest you begin this process well in advance. But while you’re doing that, notice how you size up those decisions. This is a process of becoming conscious even as you observe how conscious you were when you decided certain things.

Taurus (April 19-May 20) — You have a right to be picky about who and what you want, but if that is true, you may as well be specific. You have a tendency to tell yourself what you don’t want rather than to affirm what you actually want. The two sides of this equation — negating things and affirming things — are not equivalent values. Yes and no are both important, but yes implies making a choice, which is a commitment, and then following through on it. This, in turn, calls for a deeper level of self-awareness, and also knowing that you will live with your decision. One more point: if you say no to something, that implies that you’re keeping your other options open. If you say yes, you are in theory passing by those other options (which is not usually true but many people believe it is). Much of your hesitancy comes from this one notion. In any event, I suggest you consider all of your options, and choose consciously from among them, affirming what you want. Know good fortune when you have it, and know good times when you’re in them. It may be little comfort to say things can always be worse, but it takes an open heart to know that you’re taking care of yourself, and that others have your best interests at heart. Sooner or later we all must learn that life is not about survival, even contrary to what plenty of people with a wine cellar would tell you.

Gemini (May 20-June 21) — What do you have in common with your father? Said another way, the question your astrology is asking now and for the foreseeable future is, do you feel safe? Do you have any sense of the protection that your father and the space he provided was somewhere you could be yourself? Or is that space tainted by some sense of narrowness, threat or judgment? I suggest you consider this for a while, because the answer to your question will tell you about your relationship to all men, and give you a clue as to your ideas of relationships between women and men. I believe that trust is the fundamental value in any relationship, and this relates directly to whether there is the sense of a safe container. What you may discover is that any threat to your safety lurks within your own consciousness. But these thought forms don’t just end up in our minds and emotions by accident; they are put there by others, sometimes intentionally, and sometimes just because that’s how things are done around the parts where you grew up. Now is the time to review your tendency to be self-critical, and to count the cost of any such habit. You may notice a little surge in narrow or judgmental thought patterns, and I suggest you stalk them till you understand from whence they come. It’s actually not your material; it’s ancestral residue, and once you’re aware of that fact, you’re free to cast it off.

Cancer (June 21-July 22) — Though your sign has a reputation for being emotionally driven, you have a knack for deep and original thought. However, I suggest you not push that too far at the moment, or get too carried away. Beware of mental obsessions and thoughts that think themselves. Rather, when working out problems or developing ideas, check in with your intuition and emotional process regularly. An unusual development in your solar chart suggests that you might have a tendency to overthink, when the solution or central concept to any circumstance you might face is likely to be intuitive or even obvious. There are two likely sources of distraction. One is conformity. It’s harder than most people think to do what you actually want rather than what everyone else thinks you should do. If someone is giving you heavy-handed ‘advice’, check their motives. Second, watch your tendency to be defensive, including knowing more about what you don’t want than what you do want. You often cast this as pragmatism, when in fact the more pragmatic approach is to keep your fields of desire wide open. Now is the time to stretch into what you want, and to give yourself the freedom to dream. Doing this, you might have the feeling of remembering old dreams, which will have more life in them than you might imagine. A broad-minded approach to life is your path to making those dreams real, which is why staying open is the way to get where you are going. And you’re definitely going somewhere.

Leo (July 22-Aug. 23) — You are laying the groundwork for some major advances in your professional life, and your financial life. At the moment, developments may not seem to be going as fast or according to the plan you thought you were working with. No need to worry about that; you are in ‘the build tracks’ phase of making the railroad, rather than the ‘make the trains run on time’ phase. That translates to cultivating your vision of what you want to do. What is your idea of the pinnacle of success? It might not be the one you saw in a movie or a TV commercial. It’s likely to be original, and you’re at a peak of that originality right now. I would phase the question like this: what would you do if you had no fear at all of being seen as different? What would you do if you had full authority over your life? These are two different issues, but they’re related. If we had any concept of how many good ideas go nowhere because the person with the idea is afraid of being seen as weird. Even if they have faith in their concept, it’s still possible to get caught in this trap. As for money. Monetizing anything — a talent, a project, a company — is usually best accomplished using a business plan. I suggest that your business plan has three characteristics: that it be fairly meticulous, subject to adjustment and designed for the long-run.

The 2011 Leo birthday report is 70 minutes of in-depth astrology plus a 20-minute tarot reading for you, exploring relationships, personal growth and your professional life. Visit this page for additional information.

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22) — This month brings the beginning of a significant transitional phase in your life. This is something akin to when one of the slow-moving planets arrives in your sign, indicating a major transition in your experience of yourself. I would place the time-frame at approximately nine months. I would describe the point of orientation as assertiveness. This is the ability to be clear and project your intentions and desires into the world, which begins with being able to recognize them and exist with them being actual factors you honor in your life. I recognize that you’ve been in a process of doing this for a while; you may trace it back years, with a big change over the past year or so. But most of these developments have been spurred by others: partners, healers, people setting an example for you, and the occasional pain in the ass who would try to make your life difficult but who actually ends up making you stronger. One thing you will learn during this time in your life is to be specific. Goals and ideas you explicitly state have several properties, one of which is that you can evaluate them directly. Another is you can begin to focus your energy on making them happen. I recognize there is something to be said for ‘going with the flow’, and at the moment this is what the flow is suggesting. Don’t worry about being perfect or getting it right. Focus your mind and get started.

Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23) — I would love to see statistics on what people fear in the privacy of their minds versus how rarely those things actually happen. We live in an age when many people are stalked by anxiety, and most of it is useless. You may be one of them, at least at times, and you may know many such people. The answer does not involve meds — it must involve cultivating awareness and deep healing. Letting go of fear is about reaching an understanding with oneself about existence, especially in this volatile time of history. This is a dependable theme as Saturn moves through its last year in your birth sign. This is the final stretch of your journey of ‘coming to terms with yourself’ that Saturn’s presence indicates, what may feel like a last major step into adult maturity. There will be others — but what you’re going through now is like a platform that you will build on for the rest of your life. I suggest you be blatantly honest with yourself about fear and its effects. I mean fear in any form, from the subtlest anxiety to seemingly grand concerns about not being worthy enough for something or someone. I am talking about gaining an understanding of fear on an existential level, and working it through fully — so that you emerge as a more confident, self-directed person. It is possible to live in a way that is affirmative rather than defensive. It’s possible to feel safe, even on this planet, but that requires a commitment.

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Zoom H4n recorder, ready for work, Tuesday afternoon on the Grandmother Land.

Libra Birthdays: Recorded Live on the Grandmother Land

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Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22) — There comes a time in everyone’s life when they must reconsider the notion of ‘friend’. This is a word used casually, lately reduced to a button and a statistic. I was going to say that a person is fortunate to have just a few friends in life; it’s worth remembering that there are many people who feel they have no friends, nobody they truly trust or can confide in. This is not an excuse for considering those who are in any way unsupportive, lacking in trust or who do not treat you with equanimity as friends. You will be in a pruning process over the next few seasons, when it will be natural and necessary to cull the people in your life and determine who is who. This will have a tendency to set you free to be who you are, since often, it is the expectations and past perceptions that others have of us that prevent us from expressing our true identity. If you ever find yourself in a position where being authentic means you’re unpopular, be grateful of that. Consider it a moment of clarity. The more truly you resonate with your inner being, the more likely you are to see and feel the presence of people you truly resonate with. There is a difference between antagonizing and not being afraid to be unpopular. It’s a fine line — but it’s definitely one you can see and feel. You have nothing to prove, only the right to exist as you are.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Scorpio, please go to this link.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 22) — Can you make a decision based on doubt? Doubt is excellent for raising questions, reducing the number of possibilities and negating weak concepts. But ultimately one must use some other conceptual tool to make an affirmative choice. You seem to run into a self-judgment issue when you assert your authority. It’s as if you judge yourself for doing the one thing you need to do in order to move forward. While events of the next three weeks do more to raise questions than provide ready answers, you have some time to work out the puzzle of what it means to be in charge of your life. Part of what you’re working out is your tendency to want to control certain details at the same time you’re such a big-picture thinker. In truth, a skilled artist must learn to paint with a wide brush as well as a fine one. A skilled thinker must learn to think in principle and concept, as well as to attend to the smaller points that any real discussion will bring up. The key to making progress is keeping the two orders of reality in the context of one another. Seeing accurately is a matter of perspective, and this is what you are learning right now. In solving any problem or making any plan, I suggest you proceed from the general to the specific. Start with a broad goal, then refine it into something workable. Look at the general trend of your life, then focus on the specific areas you want to develop.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Sagittarius, please go to this link.

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20) — Now is the time to create your long-term financial strategy. Remember that any strategy is an approach, and it will change over time. I’m talking about developing a game plan, and then revising it continuously. This month and indeed the rest of the year present you with opportunities and the frame of mind to initiate this in a new way. I’m aware the world around you may be populated with negative or even dreadful people, wondering all about ‘what if’. There’s ongoing talk of recession, economic collapse and all the usual paranoia. Your job is to either ignore this or see the opportunity in the midst of it. The world’s most precious resource — people — needs to be something you focus on consciously and select with the mastery of a gem cutter who can see what’s inside a stone before cutting it open. Steer clear of people who are scared or obsessive about negative outcomes. Make friends with people who think in clear terms and see your potential, and their potential, for what it is. Most of all, know what you’re envisioning. Be clear what you want to create, and how you would improve the world if you had the opportunity to do so. You may face an ongoing temptation to create something in response to the prevailing negativity of the culture. Sure, plenty can go wrong. That’s always been true. Your most significant challenge is to design your vision from a wholly positive stream of thought and feeling.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Capricorn, please go to this link.

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19) — It’s difficult for most people to connect their most precious personal talents to the money they earn. In truth this represents one of the deepest splits in our psyches — and if we follow it down, I believe that ultimately it points directly to the question: Do you have a right to exist? True, it would help many smalltime enterprises if people were more willing to spend their money on things they believe in. It would help if we believed that what ‘does good’ must come to them as a charity. But more to the point, those who dare to do what they believe in must get over their insecurities and see the connection between any potential lack of self-esteem and their financial struggle. This elusive thing known as ‘doing what you want to do’ in life involves actual self-mastery. That’s another way of saying being in harmony with yourself, and utilizing your psychic and intellectual resources toward your own ends — and, notably, not against them. You have a number of seemingly different goals at the moment. I suggest you determine what they have in common and work closely with that especially precious piece of information. Try to notice what motivates each of your seemingly different objectives and draw strength from that deeper ground. Look inside of everything, for its content on every level. You are in the last stage of preparation before embarking on what I would describe as a period of achievement. So prepare yourself well.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Aquarius, please go to this link.

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) — Have you ever had that experience of thinking, Everything is going well, except for this one thing. It might be something you’re worried about, it might be a potential problem, it might be an actual problem. But for many people, there is always something. I believe that the art of life involves being able to coexist with those fears or with negative situations and not have that mess up the rest of what you’re doing, or affect what you want to do. You are in a moment of incredible potential right now, and yet there seems to be something on your mind, something that is potentially troubling your faith. I assure you that your faith is stronger than whatever this thing is — than any anxiety or concern. ‘This thing’ by the way is more likely to involve a collective matter than an individual one. You may be picking up on the fears or paralysis of others. You may be noticing the ways that others work against their own cause or live by the sword of controversy and contention. In a sense you are breaking consensus by believing in yourself. Distinguish yourself by openly coexisting peacefully with others, and by being willing to see the potential of your own talent. I suggest, therefore, that you cast aside any distraction, leave people to their petty dramas, and boldly proceed with your ideas. Don’t wait for any external ‘opportunity’ to do so. Life itself is that opportunity, and today it is all yours.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Pisces, please go to this link.

A Vast Left Wing Conspiracy

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Dear Friend and Reader:

This week I’ve been enjoying the stream of paranoid emails and Facebook messages that have started to reach me, wherein people are freaked out about how there is actually a populist uprising going on the United States. I concede that we have good reason to believe that the power brokers will be nervous that someone is actually noticing that the average Goldman Sachs employee makes $292,000 per year. This is the same company that placed bets that an oil rig would blow up in the Gulf of Mexico. Remember that? Fabulous Fabio and his infamous, “Suck it up, fishies and birdies”?

Occupy Wall Street poster created for the original Sept. 17 action, by Adbusters in Vancouver, BC.

The big boys have had the luxury of thirty years to take advantage of a public that has, until now, yet to call them to task. Most recent polls I’ve heard of give the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators the support of at least 57% of the American public, with many more who don’t agree with them saying they have the right to protest. Some neighbors of Zuccotti Park are, understandably, annoyed at the drumming and 24-hour activity in a neighborhood that after 6 pm previously resembled a cemetery. I heard this week that the drummers were asked to go elsewhere, in order to address this problem.

Meanwhile, most other New Yorkers are into the protests, which have sprung up literally from coast to coast and many places beyond. This sounds like the United States of my wildest fantasies. More to the point, it sounds like the Uranus-Pluto cycle heating up, so reliably you could set your atomic clock to it. Though neither the protesters nor the protestees are likely to know this, this movement is going to have traction because it’s synced with an astrological cycle that is specifically about revolution and social progress on real issues.

One concern I’ve heard is how the CIA, the FBI and the NYPD are trying to infiltrate the movement. (This is an old story — cops have tried to infiltrate activist movements since they both existed.) The main fear going around is that they will try to provoke the activists into coming off like the scruffy mob that Fox News is making them out to be. One person writing to me is worried that Anonymous, the hacker collective, is really a CIA front operation. We have a commenter on the Planet Waves blog who is tweaked by the Guy Fawkes masks that people wear to the protests. She thinks those are the actual members of the Anonymous collective, who you cannot trust because they’re wearing masks. (If you get on their bad side, a mask is the last thing you’ll have to worry about.)

One astrologer in New York City tried to send me an encrypted file that had all the goods, but after a few tries the encrypted email would not go through. I encouraged her to just email it the old-fashioned way. After several tries, the PDF arrived last night via the ultra-secret, immune-from-domestic-surveillance Hushmail. I clicked on it with the eager anticipation of a document junkie.

Poster for “Buy Nothing Day,” the second-most famous event created by Adbusters, the Vancouver-based anti-corporate magazine that got the #Occupy ball rolling.

Scanning over its chaotic pages, I read about the links between the Wall Street sit-in to the Sandinistas, Barack Obama, MoveOn!, the Independent Media Institute, Adbusters magazine, ACORN, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the League of Women Voters, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the National Organization for Women, Planned Parenthood, Public Citizen, the Rainforest Action Network, Refuse & Resist!, the Ruckus Society, the Service Employees International Union, San Francisco Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Sierra Club and the Soros Foundation Community Fellows.

Wait — the Sandinistas? Really? Those cool people down in Nicaragua who were into building farm cooperatives, community hospitals and schools? Who supported mass literacy and gender equality? The ones Ronald Reagan hated so much he nearly lost his presidency trying to destroy them? They still exist? Where can I send a check?

And the Ruckus Society? No wonder this is all causing such a ruckus.

And what about George Soros? Isn’t he one of them? Why would he be going against them when he’s really one of them? There has to be something weird going on. He must be a double agent, or maybe a triple agent. He’s going to infiltrate the movement by having one of his front organizations send a shipment of air mattresses and a case of chai.

The involvement of Adbusters I learned about after someone posted a comment to the website of the Daily Freeman here in Kingston, really nervous and concerned, after there was a little protest march in front of the courthouse, with the participants’ average age looking like about 60. The commenter said that Occupy Wall Street was started by a “Canadian ad agency,” insinuating foreign infiltration.

Occupying The Other Wall Street — protesters in Kingston, New York gathered outside the county courthouse on our Wall Street last week, staging their own demonstration. Nobody slept over, and nobody got arrested. Photo by Tania Barricklo for the Daily Freeman.

I asked around and put this comment together with the splashy, snarky anti-consumerist magazine that your local Barnes & Noble gets all of five copies of each month — Adbusters. The magazine critiques the ‘mental environment’. Count on them for articles about how it’s wrong to be forced to watch 10 advertisements sitting in a movie theater. They’re the ones who invented Buy Nothing Day (commemorated each year the Friday after Thanksgiving).

Adbusters’ editor Kalle Lasn, a refugee from the advertising industry, was the one who first put out the concept of occupying Wall Street in a July email to his reader list. With a little help from the deputy inspector of the NYPD who pepper sprayed some women just because he felt like it, #Occupy is the coolest thing in the world. Or rather it is unless you’re freaked out that if anyone questions the legitimacy of the corporate-government-national security state, or dares to blaspheme the religion of the Free Market, or questions that some dude sitting in a cubicle ripping off the economy should make $292,000 a year — then clearly whole system we love and benefit from and pay handsomely for the privilege of using debit cards is going to come crashing down on our heads.

Today, someone posted an undated picture of a riot to my Facebook page and said in that frantic tone that can only be conveyed in sentence fragments, “look at this ‘peaceful resistance’!…somebody will say it’s nothing to do with wall street occupation…let me tell you — they (on the street) declare opposite!..it’s just ..not everybody is ready and has right consciousness for a change..and there is someone leading them in a trap.” Um, not everyone has the right consciousness? Therefore call the whole thing off and go back to yoga class?

Guy Fawkes mask, a reference to the film V for Vendetta. The mask image is sometimes used by the hacker collective Anonymous, which has been supporting #Occupy various ways. Photo by Eric.

The posh New York City astrologer who smuggled me the top-secret file, for her part, is absolutely certain that this is all a setup for martial law. I asked her about her spiritual training on the issue of ‘fear’ and she replied, “While spirituality is very important, unfortunately there are some not-so-nice people on this planet with us.”

No, really?

I replied, “To say that something is a setup for martial law is, at best, presumptuous. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but to me there are many other possibilities.” Since she’s an astrologer, which at least implies some metaphysical learnings, I added: “The plane of reality to which you’re attached or typically reside will influence your perception of the flow of events and the validity of information. Indicators [of your mindset] are things like the polarization level of your experience, your love/fear quotient, and what you perceive as real.”

People who are paranoid about Occupy Wall Street might have one of a few things going on, psychologically speaking. First, they may have authority issues, which result in a blowback of guilt when they or anyone they see challenges authority. (This connects to unresolved relationships with their parents, which by the way usually involve money issues.) Or, they are getting off on the self-importance of warning people about a big threat that nobody else is informed enough to see. Trying to send the file by encrypted mail comes with the message, “I’m so important, they’re spying on me.” And many people feel too cool to support the protest, like economic justice was a good thing until it became trendy. So naturally, all of a sudden it’s a CIA plot. Personally, I take the suggestion of David Byrne, from the old Taking Heads song: Don’t worry about the government.

I would say that the real problem the Occupy Wall Street movement has is great expectations. We are a country so starved for leadership and moral guidance that many people actually expect this uprising to solve the nation’s problems. One question going around is, “How are they going to influence Washington?” As if to say — finally we have something that actually might do so.

The Chart for Occupy Wall Street

And the funny thing is, not only might it work, it’s likely to be having an actual influence even in this nascent stage. Earlier in the week, a friend documented the birth data for the Occupy Wall Street movement. According to a poster that was circulated announcing the event, the first protest was called for noon on Sept. 17 in New York City. That’s good enough to cast a chart. Here it is.

Note Mercury at the top of the chart, the planet of messages and messengers in the house of corporations and governments. Many planets not shown in this rendering are aligned with Mercury — see the table below. Click for larger version.

The first thing that leaps off of the page is that green planet at the very top of the chart, next to the dark line. Can you see that one? The one with the little horns? That is Mercury, the messenger. Mercury is strong in this chart: placed in Virgo, one of the signs it rules, and also it’s the most elevated planet in the chart. It’s located in the 10th house — the one about the government, the corporate system, and in general, influence, reputation and fame.

Mercury so powerful in the 10th house translates to “speak truth to power.” So far as I can see, whatever constitutes power is going to be getting the message. What they do about it remains to be seen, but Occupy Wall Street is coming across in their boardrooms loud and clear. Mercury in Virgo this prominent is also about thoughtful, intellectual leadership in an era when you usually have to be an idiot to get on TV.

Contrary to this being a confused movement that is looking for a message, it is the embodiment of a message. The movement has, in one month, re-framed the discussion about the economy. At the time this little gathering happened, the national discussion was about why we could not pay to rebuild bridges in Vermont after Hurricane Irene. But how come we have trillions for bank bailouts and wars and executive bonuses? Now suddenly we’re talking about economic equity, jobs creation and puttying the Glass-Stegall act back into place.

The reason so many people are sympathetic is that they already understand the issue, or rather, they understand how all of the issues being raised by the protesters (which means, the public) are related. Yet there’s another factor, which is that Mercury is hooked into a lot of energy coming from a group of minor planets in mid-Sagittarius.

A few days before the first Occupy event, I wrote an article about the Pisces Full Moon, called The Chaos Generator. This was a rather strong Full Moon, and it too aligned with the cluster of minor planets in Sagittarius, but not as closely as that Mercury, which nails it to a fraction of a degree, right at the moment of the first gathering. When you align a fast-moving planet with a group of slow-moving ones, you ramp up the power of the fast planet, giving it extra purpose and influence.

Here is a thought from that article: “The Pisces Full Moon also makes a square to the solar eclipse in Gemini earlier in the year (both are mutable signs … this will add public resonance — eclipses have that sensation … it’s a potential turning point, which includes all of the themes associated with the planets in Sagittarius.”

Minor planets in the Occupy Wall Street chart, focused on 14+ degrees of the mutable signs (Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces) which function as one influence. Many planets are aligned with Mercury, the most powerful planet in the chart. Included in the alignment are Sappho, which brings people together, and Panacea, which is about far-reaching solutions. Ephemeris calculation from Serennu.com.

I also pointed out the presence of the Great Attractor, located at 14+ Sagittarius, which was part of the aspect structure. “What aspects the Great Attractor takes on part of the energy — especially a conjunction. People who have natal planets in aspect to the Great Attractor can have an odd kind of charisma, where they seem untouchable. It’s as if they have an invisible boundary around them, that makes you keep your distance but want to get closer at the same time. The word attractor is used because everything is rushing toward it, but nothing can ever keep up.”

Continuing: “It can also have a magnifying effect on whatever is there, like a cosmic repeating station that might take the relatively subtle theme of a planet or asteroid and broadcast it outward. Remember, the Great Attractor is the mass of many thousands of galaxies; it’s positively enormous. Then things come along and line up with it, and that’s exactly what we have going on now.”

I concluded the article, “The simplest way to say this is that unless we take our political problems to a higher level, what you might call a spiritual level, we’re going to be caught in the same game endlessly. The issue is evolutionary. We might ask ourselves not about when we’re going to come up with a solution to our political problems, but rather to the problem of politics.”

One thing that’s interesting about Occupy Wall Street is that it’s being run as a collective. There are mass meetings called general assemblies held a couple of times a day. It’s further organized into working groups that take on specific tasks. But there is no name or face associated with Occupy Wall Street. It does not have an ego identity and nobody is ‘claiming credit’ for it. This is actually a reasonable first step in solving the problem of politics. Obviously the absurd rules of the U.S. Senate have outlived their use; it’s dumb to have one drunk politician be allowed to hold up progress for the whole country.

As for how it all unfolds, we influence that with our choices. I mean this actively, each of us. Leadership is now in plasma mode. This is a new mental environment for some, perfectly natural to others — but it’s the environment we are in. We are in a different universe from the ‘freaking out is mandatory’ environment of the post-9/11 decade. How we think and how we feel contribute to the greater body of thought movement. This is not merely a sit-in or series of protest marches; it’s an evolution of thought in a highly quickened psychic environment. I suggest you learn to navigate the energy. It’s lighter and requires more agility. And if you stay flexible, you can have a lot more fun.

Lovingly,

Friday, Oct, 21, the Sun is conjunct Juno and trine Neptune. We’ve covered this aspect here. The Sun ingresses Scorpio at 2:30 pm EDT Sunday. We’ve covered the Scorpio ingress here. In other news, the hypothetical planet Transpluto has ingressed Virgo, changing signs for the first time in 70 years (to the best of our research, it has a 686-year orbit). Ignored by most astrologers, Transpluto (associated with narrowness, focus and self-criticism) will crawl back and forth over the Leo-Virgo line for the next couple of years, though the first ingress is one to watch carefully. This will get extra emphasis as Mars makes a conjunction to Transpluto when it ingresses Virgo on Nov. 11. This conjunction will be exactly opposite Chiron in Pisces, bringing it into the discussion. For those who are Chiron trivia buffs, you may have noticed that Jupiter is currently sitting in the Chiron discovery degree, 3+ Taurus.

The Moon is past last quarter and is in waning phase, about to approach the waning crescent. The Leo Moon is conjunct Mars Friday, suggesting some combination of anger, passion or creativity. Be aware of being angry at women, or your mom. The Moon moves into Virgo Saturday morning, first making a conjunction to self-critical Transpluto (which is in Virgo for the first time in 600 years — this is a new kind of event, and the point was undiscovered the last time it was in Virgo). The Moon ingresses Libra Tuesday just before noon EDT. While the Sun is early in Scorpio there will be a New Moon, which happens at 3:55 pm EDT on Wednesday. This is an interesting event — the New Moon is conjunct Atlantis, which we covered in the article Here at the Edge of the World. This is a clue to watch the fear index carefully. Note that most people who are scared are actually horny but don’t know what to do about it.

Questions of attachment and what to do about it, and with it, dominate this week’s astrology. Mercury and Venus are in Scorpio — anything in Scorpio stokes passionate sex. But then there’s the relationship question. Friday’s conjunction of the Sun and Juno is suggesting that we need to separate our identity from our identity as a relationship partner. This is a bigger issue for some people than for others, but it seems to be underappreciated as a mental trap. In any event there is an opportunity to dissolve some of that energy and unfold one’s sense of personal identity within a relationship or beyond it. More significantly, there’s an opportunity to recognize the degree to which we tend to consider ourselves whole people as a benefit of being in a relationship.

Astrology of Marriage; My Theory of Healing

In this week’s edition of Planet Waves FM, I look at the current astrology, which involves a Sun-Juno conjunction in Libra — an aspect that is asking some questions about our concept of marriage. I include a discussion of Juno as an astrological factor, as well as some approaches to what it tells us about ourselves. In the second half of the podcast (starting at 30 minutes in) I explore the concept of healing — one of the most misunderstood ideas there is.

This is a follow-up on last week’s discussion with Elisa Novick and I offer some of my thoughts about healing process, what a healer is, and how to work with one. I suggest we go beyond seeing a healer as someone with magic powers, or the ability to fix us with their technology, and look at them a someone who holds space and facilitates our process.

Toward the middle of the program, I mention a CD, called My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. This is a masterpiece of found art, an experimental collaboration based on random sounds and assembled with composition by two of my favorite Tauruses, Brian Eno and David Byrne. If you haven’t tuned into the solo work of either of these two composers, you’re in for a treat. This is their first collaboration (as composers — Eno had produced Talking Heads for years). They recently came out with a second one, called Everything that Happens Will Happen Today. These guys are not really musicians — they are artists who happen to express themselves through music (both are excellent painters as well).

Here is your program — and the complete archives — in the old player.

Friday, Oct. 21, 2011. Horoscope #879. | Eric’s Zodiac Sign Descriptions

Aries (March 20-April 19) — What are you up against? Do you have the sensation that you have some kind of an invisible obstacle or adversary? Does everyone seem to be treating you with the same attitude? It can be difficult to see how your internal psychological dynamics manifest as events, situations and trends in your relationships — but now would be a good time. There is something here about the ways you were treated as a child that is showing up in your life now. Most people have little idea what their early environment did to inform them about the seeming ‘bottom lines’ in the world. If you find yourself having strange or inexplicable encounters, or getting drawn into peoples’ dramas, I suggest you try making the lines directly back to your early history. With these added points of reference, you’ll be able to change your mind about things that have troubled you for a long time.

Taurus (April 19-May 20) — You seem to be experiencing considerable sexual tension. This appears to be less about how you relate to others than about how the male and female polarities within you relate to one another. There is something in psychology known as projection. In sexual relationships, projection often comes in the form of seeing the attributes of your inner male in the men around you (usually, this happens to women), and of your inner female in the women around you (usually, this happens to men). In the current setup, this may be reversed, and you may be looking to same-sex examples for who you want to be, or what you can confidently express. If you perceive certain people as ‘more sexual’ than you, make contact with the aspect of yourself who is just as intense and passionate. Note your same-sex attractions and fascinations. Sex and gender are a puppet show — remember who is the master.

Gemini (May 20-June 21) — As the next few days unfold, make sure you know what’s bothering you. Keep your energy moving rather than bottled up. A steady burn-off will prevent larger explosions. Be aware that you could pick up on someone else’s rage, or be extra sensitive to the injustices that others around you are facing. If you’ve got jealousy on your mind or weighing on your feelings, I suggest you ask yourself what good that particular emotion ever did anyone. I think people avoid understanding jealousy for two reasons: one is that it can veil something we really think is hotter than hot, but are afraid to admit; and it can veil the fear of death, disguised as the fear of losing a relationship. I suggest you investigate. The deeper you take your inquiry, the deeper emotional healing you will access — and that is the point.

Cancer (June 21-July 22) — For the moment, I suggest you keep financial matters and sex as far apart as you can. They often get intermingled, whether it’s the dinner date that leads to sex, the trip to Vegas or the intricately woven erotic-economic threads of marriage, do your best to separate these two topics. People can have this weird tendency to vindicate sex because there was a cash exchange of some kind. I suggest you give your pleasure away for free, and see how that feels. For free would translate to without expectation of some other return. If someone you love or desire has another erotic interest, I suggest you surrender to that experience and explore how you feel doing so. Right now your charts are all about tapping into unusual sources of passion, exploring taboo emotions and leaving yourself free to feel exactly what you are feeling. Start with allowing sex to be sex for its own sake, with no other value.

Leo (July 22-Aug. 23) — Pay attention to what someone close to you has gone through, and how it still may be influencing them today. You may think that it was clearly more intense than something you went through — and it may have been, but there will be parallels in your own life. Indeed, what happens over the next few days could shed light on your experience of relationships going back many years. This involves how people respond to you when you desire them. It also involves how you perceive the desire of others, directed toward you. Have you noticed what conflict this can cause? I’m inclined to say that it’s needless conflict, but there is a cause, and it involves the relationship of desire to power. An astonishing number of people have been subjected to some form of sexual abuse, and this always involves the conflation of desire and power. We would all relax a little, if we could see this for what it is.

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22) — Virgo is famous for its self-critical tendencies. However, they are really a problem when your judgments are lurking below the level of awareness. Once you become aware of them, they are easier to address; they are easier to see as being distortions. You are entering an extended phase of your life when the theme is learning how to relax these strict expectations, rules and standards that you have set for yourself. Before you get there, you’re going to see them in a whole new light, and you’ll become aware of the cost to you in energy, pleasure and freedom. As you do this, you’re likely to notice something else: you can bring out specific talents and intentions and focus on them with unusual power. That, by the way, would be a result of using the energy you gain from relaxing your false or negative expectations on yourself. Your gifts are much more beautiful seen in the light.

Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23) — We usually think of relationships as involving two people, but they are always part of a larger human constellation. We’re taught to wear these little blinders: If it’s not a marriage/official partnership, it’s not an official relationship, and every pair-bond is an island. There is this subtle paranoia that if we let go of that notion even a little, the result will be anything from an instant orgy to the decline of Western civilization. Well, cheers to orgies and the decline of civilization, but that’s not what usually happens. Many relationships need to be let out of their jar. They need a walk in the park. Many people in relationships need to go to a party on their own, flirt with everyone, and maybe meet someone for coffee the next day. Many people not in relationships would benefit from noticing the many, many possibilities for how two or more people can relate to one another.

Planet Waves

Zoom H4n recorder, ready for work, Tuesday afternoon on the Grandmother Land.

Libra Birthdays: Recorded Live on the Grandmother Land

Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22) — The Sun is about to ingress your sign this weekend — that’s excellent news. Even better news is that the first thing the Sun does is make a trine to Chiron, which will help open up the flow of passion and emotional energy. You will have many choices where to direct that energy, and an invitation to participate in an experiment. But I suggest you be conscious of one thing, which is that passion, erotic energy and love can have a tendency to flush out many of what we call negative emotions. Many of those emotions show up as projections — things we see in others, and which are calling for some resolution within ourselves. For you, a place to shine the light is where erotic energy meets control. You’re in an unusual position to see this emotional dynamic for what it is, and to take a step toward setting yourself free.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Scorpio, please go to this link.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 22) — All kinds of deep and dark emotions seem to be brewing at the bottom of your psyche, and as the Sun moves into your neighboring sign Scorpio this weekend, you’re likely to get some insight into what’s going on for you. It looks like there’s a lot you’re not expressing, but at the same time you don’t have the words to do so. I think that’s the first step — gradually identifying what you’re feeling, at least clearly enough to make a short sentence. As you do so, you may discover that these emotions go a lot deeper than you think, and each new discovery may be wrapped in a layer of frustration. Don’t let that deter you. Keep your gumption. You’re the one thing in the world that you need the most information about. Nobody is going to tell you; you’re going to discover it yourself, and that will take some gumption. Be patient and dauntless and you will learn a lot.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Sagittarius, please go to this link.

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20) — You have the solution to a joint financial issue right in your hands. It’s so obvious and so close to you that you might look right past it without seeing it. Said another way, the solution to the puzzle is exactly the thing that your intuition is telling you it is. One clue I can give you is, you have recently gained some insight into the larger forces that are operating around you. You’re aware that there are people with agendas, some of which affect you directly and some of which don’t affect you at all. Make sure you can tell the difference. You may have this idea that if you want something, someone else will automatically not want it, or prevent you from getting it. If you have this notion, I would say it’s time to test the theory. Take a step outside the established rules (or unspoken rules) of your situation. Notice what happens when you decide you’re not going to let fear or resentment run your life.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Capricorn, please go to this link.

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19) — You have a theory of relationship, and a corresponding reality that does not always match. No matter how idealistic you are, it always comes down to who or what pushes your buttons, or treads on your most sensitive spots in an insensitive way. It would help if you bear in mind what those spots are, and rather than defending them or guarding them, gently guide the discussion in another direction. This may be challenging, as you’re likely to have at least one situation in the coming few days when you feel like someone is treading directly on one of your deepest injuries. Whatever this may represent, bear in mind that the person involved may not be aware of what is going on with you — nor may they be in a position to help you talk it out. You may decide it’s worth daring an actual conversation — but that will work better if you don’t blame anyone for what is yours to work through.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Aquarius, please go to this link.

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) — Patric Walker, the master of the horoscope column (1931-1995) once wrote that if you scratch a Pisces you will find a Virgo under their skin. I would say if you put your fingers on the wrist of a Pisces, you will feel a Scorpio pulse running through their veins. This will be especially true now, as the Sun enters Scorpio this weekend, lighting up Chiron in your own sign as it does so. This translates to an easy flow of passion and desire — as long as you get out of your own way and allow the energy to flow through first. Said another way, take care of yourself. Don’t let the emotional or mental blocks of others frustrate you. There may be nothing you can do to help them — and there are others who are in a better position to exchange energy with you. Then look around for others who are curious, adventurous and creative — you will find them, and you will have plenty to share.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Pisces, please go to this link.

Notes from #Occupy: Looking for Common Ground

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Breaking story — ABC News ticker informs protesters at Times Square in New York City on Saturday, Oct. 15 that the #Occupy movement has gone global. Photo by Eric Francis. More Times Square images here.

Dear Friend and Reader:

On Saturday, I went to a big rally in Times Square that was part of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Around the world in an estimated 1,500 other cities, similar protests were happening. This was one day after Mayor Michael Bloomberg wisely chose to not clear out the movement’s base camp in Zuccotti Park, in New York’s financial district. I arrived a little early, wondering what would happen. By 5 pm, the stated time of the protest, Broadway was packed from 42nd Street north up to 47th Street. A small ocean of friendly, sincere people had come out to make their presence known to the world — not to celebrate New Year’s Eve but rather to state their objection to greed.

For many years, we have all watched the injustices mount against the American people. I’ve long wondered when we were going to hear an objection, and this event was something of a miracle. A decade of war, years of economic decline, jobs being shipped overseas, people with enormous college debt unable to find work — the silence was deafening and disturbing. Suddenly I was standing in Times Square, surrounded by people aware of the problem and choosing to join together as one voice. As the crowd gathered, the news ticker above ABC studios delivered the message, “Occupy Wall Street Movement Goes Worldwide.”

Notably, this was the first coordinated day of global action since the F-15 protests against the Iraq war on Feb. 15, 2003 — just over eight-and-a-half years ago. I’m not sure what is more amazing — that the F-15 protests happened at all, or that they didn’t continue. But they put on the record, before the fact, the public’s objection to an invasion that went horribly on every account. The current movement is happening in a different era of history, presumably for a different reason. In 2003, the economy was still riding from bubble to bubble, and objecting to a war was seen as a political statement; a statement of principle or of moral objection to what in fact became a moral outrage.

In 2011, we have another situation on our hands, one requiring neither prescience or an especially sensitive moral compass. There are millions of people for whom the economic system is not working. The real unemployment rate is closer to 20%, poverty rates are increasing, and one in five Americans is having trouble feeding their family. At the same time, people are seeing headlines over and over again about huge banks that took bailouts reaping profits, giving bonuses to top executives and laying off workers. You don’t need to be an economist to understand this is a problem.

Every day, we are told again that tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans will lead to more jobs, and after a decade of those tax cuts the economy is where it is today. The people who create these problems, making huge profits, are nervous. They know that everyone else is starting to figure out what happened, and understanding has a way of rippling out, once it gets rolling. And it is now rolling: awareness and a movement of people who are at least willing to get off the couch and step out from behind their computer and get together and discover that they are not alone.

Stop the Drones: By linking the economic crisis to the war, protesters are risking being perceived as being a ‘left wing’ movement — but this has not hurt the movement’s popularity with the public (including city residents). The #Occupy demonstrations have spread to many countries around the world and are overwhelmingly supported by the American people. Photo by Eric Francis.

Mainstream news outlets may keep portraying Occupy Wall Street as a movement of unwashed people who have never accomplished anything and who are confused about their goals, but for the moment, at least, we can tell the story ourselves. There is now an alternative media that is so far-reaching it would have been incomprehensible 20 years ago when I was writing for In These Times and Sierra. When two dozen people get arrested at a Citibank branch for trying to close their accounts, the video goes viral within hours. That both informs many more people than would have heard the story otherwise, and puts significant pressure on the bigger news outlets to at least acknowledge what happened.

This is a very special moment we are in. When I say that we must use it wisely, I mean that we all have something precious and useful in our hands, something that many, many people recognize, however dimly, belongs to all of us.

Set Your Watch: It’s Time for Uranus Square Pluto

A few times at the protest I was asked what I do, and I said that I’m the editor of an astrology website. In answer to, “Is this in the astrology?” I said yes — it’s the Uranus-Pluto cycle. It’s the same cycle that was going off in the 1960s. I know I’ve explained this a few times. It’s not easy for everyone to understand. We are now entering an extended peak of this cycle, and at the moment we have many options for how we use this energy.

The Earth Day flag made an appearance at Times Square on Saturday night, a reminder that we live on one world. Photo by Eric Francis.

Uranus (the faster of the two planets, orbiting the Sun once in just over 84 years) has the themes of sudden upheaval, surprises, invention and forward-thinking. When Uranus gets into the picture, events proceed quickly. The best advice any astrologer can give is to expect the unexpected, and work with it rather than against it. Pluto (the slower of the two planets, taking 251 years to go around the Sun) takes anything it touches deeper. In the psyche it’s related to the drive to make contact with one’s soul, as well as profound transformations. In society, Pluto can represent control dramas as well as profound restructuring of cultural institutions: for example, the government, banks, corporations and the empire itself.

Put these two planets together and amazing things happen. Uranus and Pluto will make a big aspect every 40 to 50 years or so, which is like a shakeup of the accumulated material, outdated ideas, stuck institutions and stuck people. It’s almost always a revolutionary era.

It’s astonishing how dependable this particular cycle really is. When I say that the current movement is just getting going, and is going to last for years, I am speaking with authentic confidence that is grounded in history. Perhaps the most famous time frame associated with Uranus-Pluto is that of the French Revolution. Uranus and Pluto were opposite one another (literally, on opposite sides of the Sun) from 1787 through 1798, closely overlapping the revolutionary era of 1789 through the late 1790s. This revolution was not all fun and games. The accumulated outrage both at centuries of repression by the monarchy and the church came busting out violently. It did not end well; in many ways the opportunity was squandered. After a brief period of a constitutional republic, by late 1804 France had an emperor, in the person of Napoleon I.

Another famous period was the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of 1848-1849. This was the peak of a wide-reaching wave of change that culminated with revolutions spreading across Europe faster than the mail could travel, including Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, Dresden, Baden, Prague, Rome and Milan. Astrologer-historian Richard Tarnas describes this as “the sudden eruption of a collective revolutionary impulse affecting an entire continent with mass insurrections, the emergence of radical political and social movements, revolts for nationalist independence, and the abrupt overthrow of governments.”

The heart of the matter: sign saying that the richest 1% of Americans control 40% of the wealth. Photo by Eric Francis.

Then there was the conjunction of the 1960s, which had a similar revolutionary spirit. This was expressed in student uprisings, stunning advances in art, music and technology, the anti-war movement, the environmental movement, the Moon landing and Woodstock — to name a few events we think of that happened during a concentrated time in history. John F. Kennedy was assassinated, which was a kind of revolution, and Richard Nixon both came to power and was finally thrown out of office as the conjunction waned. That also had the feeling of a revolution, perhaps more poignantly than the JFK assassination. After a brief period of collectivism, we then embarked on a 30-year phase where politics and nearly every other facet of public life swung toward corporate power and military domination of the world.

It’s fair to say that Uranus-Pluto aspects are amazing while they last, and then the end result is a gamble. It’s easy to throw out the stodgy old jerks who were oppressing you; it’s hard to build a new world. What world we are going to build is exactly what we need to be thinking about right now. What we would do if we had the power to make changes is not just something we need to be pondering but putting into action right now.

Beyond Left and Right

One of the first things I think is essential is going beyond the usual left/right, liberal/conservative storyline. We all have human needs, and yet many people are stuck to their old tales of why things are wrong. If so-called liberals and conservatives would listen to one another, they would discover plenty of common ground — especially on economic issues, which are the core theme of these protests. This is going to be as challenging for many people as a lifelong Catholic going to Jewish services every Saturday. And certain facts (such as about the actual current distribution of wealth) are going to need to enter the picture.

Photo by Eric Francis.

As Matt Taibbi, one of my favorite journalists, wrote Monday [Oct. 17] in his blog at Rolling Stone, “What nobody is comfortable with is a movement in which virtually the entire spectrum of middle class and poor Americans is on the same page, railing against incestuous political and financial corruption on Wall Street and in Washington. The reality is that Occupy Wall Street and the millions of middle Americans who make up the Tea Party are natural allies and should be on the same page about most of the key issues, and that’s a story our media won’t want to or know how to handle.”

Yet it’s essential that we who care unify toward some common goals. This is not easy for people who are programmed to be divisive and divided. For this to happen, I think two things are necessary. One is that the person or group with the greater understanding has to work to reach for the common ideas that underlie the problems we all agree are real. This is evolutionary work. You could say that it’s the Pluto side of the equation. Pluto represents the need for all of us to go deep and therefore reach a place where there is more likely to be mutual understanding. If we own our shadow material — our fear, guilt, anger and related emotions — we will be less likely to project those feelings onto others, and therefore less likely to blame them. There’s also something here about taking personal responsibility for that aspect of the problem that was caused by individual greed — such as the many people who used their home as an ATM, or who got their mortgage by lying about their income.

Taking this on the level of personal responsibility in order to actually do something new: to not only let go of the patterns of the past, but to create new patterns that are fundamentally different. You could say that instead of working this out as a cultural game of left versus right, we each need to get the left and right hemispheres of our brains talking to one another.

Our tendencies to divide against ourselves and hence against one another can seem intractable. They involve cultural and family patterns, emotional patterns and ideas about relationships, and I believe all these things are rooted in our DNA and what some call karma. That is to say that in addition to any revolutionary activity, for the revolution to stick, we need to do some deep healing work and understand how we got to where we needed a revolution in the first place. Fortunately there are a lot of people who have been doing that deep healing work for many years. You may be one of them. And as the revolution spills out into the streets, we will need to guide it into the hearts and souls of those who would be free.

Lovingly,

Stay tuned for pre-ordering information for Reality Check: The 2012 annual edition of Planet Waves.

The Foiled Plot to End All Protests

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Dear Friend and Reader:

Last week, I cautioned that some kind of false-flag event might be used to disrupt the Occupy Wall Street protests that have now spread to 1,100 cities in the United States. As of press time, the protesters had too strong a presence in Zuccotti Park for New York City to move ahead with its proposed ‘cleaning’ of the park first thing Friday morning. Protesters spent the night mopping and scrubbing the plaza in the financial district. That is a real movement, and it’s going to grow as the Uranus-Pluto square — the 2012 aspect — comes into focus. Unlike protesting a war, which might be seen as ideological and unpatriotic, there’s nothing un-American about wanting to feed your children. Wednesday night Keith Olbermann reported that according to a new survey, one in five Americans said they had trouble feeding their families the past year.

Her sign reads, “I inherited money at 21. I have had health and dental insurance all my life. I want to live in a world where we all have enough. I have more than enough. Tax me! Rich kid for redistribution! I am the 1% and I stand with the 99%.” Photographer unknown; city unknown; source: Electrical Audio website.

Directly or indirectly, it seems that the world economic crisis is affecting everyone, and even if it’s not affecting you, you may still be outraged by the ways in which the ‘bailouts’ of Wall Street firms and U.S. banks seem to have gone directly into bonuses for top executives. Bank of America, which got nearly a quarter-trillion dollars in bailouts, is about to lay off 30,000 workers.

This kind of greed is what the Occupy Wall Street protests are about — and they are catching on. Saturday is the planned worldwide 15 October event, which officially takes the #Occupy movement global. Though this protest movement started a month ago with the big story being how it was being ignored by the media, I would say it’s doing very well right now. Sure, much of the coverage has been pretty stupid, which The Onion summed up this week as, “Nation Waiting For Protesters to Clearly Articulate Demands Before Ignoring Them.”

Though Fox News portrays those protesting as a bunch of anarchists who have never worked for anything in their lives, in truth this is a broad-based movement of educated people who know that our society is being ripped off and our economy is being destroyed. To my ear, those so-called conservative elements calling for dismantling the government (what they call deregulation) so that it’s easier for them to do business have as much credibility as the mafia calling for the dismantling of the organized crime unit.

As author and war correspondent Chris Hedges put it last week, “Those who are protesting the rise of the corporate state are in fact on the political spectrum the true conservatives because they’re calling for the restoration of the rule of law. The radicals have seized power and they have trashed all regulations and legal impediments to a corporate reconfiguration of American society into a form of neo-feudalism. And that’s what we’re really asking for — is the restoration of the rule of law.”

That is an interesting image of Pluto in Capricorn — and this is going to be an interesting revolution. The hippies are now the conservatives (who would preserve the power of the state) and the self-acclaimed conservatives are now the anarchists (who are doing a good job taking it apart).

Speaking of the rule of law, on Tuesday, the federal government’s top cops held a press conference and announced that a big terrorism plot had been foiled. Let’s see if I can get this right. The Iranian government was going to hire a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States, while he was in New York. This was supposed to happen in a restaurant and in theory lots of innocent people would have been killed. The plot was disrupted and it never got anywhere near actually happening.

Protest at Chase bank in San Francisco on Sept. 29, 2011. The signs say, ‘Make Banks Pay’. Photo from open-source Flickr stream.

“Though it reads like the pages of a Hollywood script, the impact would have been very real, and many lives would have been lost,” said Robert Mueller, head of the FBI, claiming victory on behalf of the nation.

Funny, this was the same scenario for an action-thriller I suggested to my literary agent last month, though in my version, the plot was foiled by an astrologer who was asked by Iran to cast the perfect chart for the event. The astrologer had a friend who was an FBI agent, he passed the tip along and saved the day. Okay, just kidding about that part.

My favorite critique of this ‘terror plot’ came from Glen Greenwald’s blog on Salon.com. He wrote, “The most difficult challenge in writing about the Iranian Terror Plot unveiled yesterday is to take it seriously enough to analyze it. Iranian Muslims in the Quds Force sending marauding bands of Mexican drug cartel assassins onto sacred American soil to commit Terrorism — against Saudi Arabia and possibly Israel — is what Bill Kristol and John Bolton would feverishly dream up while dropping acid and madly cackling at the possibility that they could get someone to believe it.”

In case you don’t know those names, Bill Kristol was Dan Quayle’s chief of staff when he was vice president, he’s associated with several prominent neoconservative think tanks, and is the godfather of the Neocon movement. John Bolton is the big guy with the walrus moustache who wanted to blow the top 10 floors off of the United Nations (to which he was a delegate under Bush). Now imagine them taking LSD together, and dreaming up something really weird. That’s what this plot sounds like.

Queens Galley soup kitchen in Kingston, NY, which feeds anyone who walks in three meals a day and provides emergency housing for 50. According to a new survey, one in five Americans has struggled to feed themselves or their family this year. Photo by Eric.

Thursday, The New York Times informed us that Mansour J. Arbabsiar, the suspect allegedly at the center of the alleged terrorist plot, was someone who was so disorganized he literally could not manage to wear matching socks. “He was perennially disheveled, friends and acquaintances said, and hopelessly disorganized,” the newspaper wrote. They quoted an old friend: “He was always losing his keys and his cellphone. He was not capable of carrying out this plan.” Hmm, he’s got something in common with many of the alleged 9/11 hijackers.

The Times noted, “American officials, who say the plot was endorsed by top Iranian authorities, were exploring why the sophisticated Quds Force might have chosen to rely on so amateurish an agent as Mr. Arbabsiar.”

Maybe astrology will give us a clue. Let’s take a look at the chart for the big announcement that the terror plot had been foiled. When I first looked at this chart, the story seemed plausible. But as I studied the placements more carefully, the whole thing seemed, well, the word is tidy. Tidier than a chaotic lead conspirator who could not keep track of his cellphone. Tidier than an international conspiracy to commit mass murder. How was that Mexican gang going to get into the United States? I guess they were going to sneak past right where the fence along the border is supposed to go.

The chart is basically that of the Aries Full Moon. Federal officials made their announcement Tuesday just a few hours before the Moon reached its exact opposition to the Sun. It’s true that the Full Moon can have a precipitating effect, like the wind blowing through a tree full of ripe apples. [That was the case in August 2006, when another such plot was uncovered on the Full Moon, this one in the UK. That was the famous one that led to not being able to bring more than a few ounces of liquid onto an airplane. It turned out to be a domestic plot, based right in England.]

This chart has Capricorn rising, and we find Saturn (the ruler of Capricorn) standing at attention up on top of the chart — about to be conjoined by the Sun. So we have a Sun-Saturn conjunction straight up at the top. This could be the image of the servants of justice and government doing their job — which is precisely what it seems like: an image. In Libra, this image has come out of Central Casting and been attended to by $400 an hour stylists. It’s so realistic, it makes me want to stand up, put my hand over my heart and wipe a little tear from my eye.

Chart for Eric Holder announcing that the U.S. government had foiled a terrorism plot by Iran. Click for larger image.

The Aries Moon for its part is down in the 3rd house (of media) and it’s precisely — to the exact degree — square the ascendant. Very neat and tidy.

Here is something interesting as well. The Moon in this chart is also exactly on the horizon of the chart for the Sept. 11 incident — the relationship angle, one of the most sensitive lines in the whole chart. If George Bush had made this announcement, he would have come out with a hunk of still-smoldering debris from the World Trade Center. The Obama administration is somewhat subtler in its sales approach, evoking the sensation of Sept. 11 rather than the gory details. But the theme is ‘terrorism’ and the effect is a distraction. I don’t think the guys in the Obama administration want to rain havoc and death on anyone, but they do have their agenda.

No matter how long I’ve looked at this chart, I could not see the chart of a foiled terror plot. But I do see a chart about government, money and banking. The houses in this chart that have the most activity are that 9th/10th blend (the government going about its business, looking very handsome as it does so) with the Sun and Saturn blowing in the breeze. The money and finance houses have a lot going on, and the theme is that it’s 1) extremely narrow and 2) deceptive and 3) aggressive. We see this among many other places as Mars in the 8th house of banking, combined with a variety of other planets (some not shown in this chart) that speak of a focused, closed-minded conspiracy to do something very specific — involving money.

In any chart of a conspiracy, there is a way to check and see who the main conspirator is. That will be by studying the 12th house. If we check that house, which tells us about the ‘secret enemy’, we find Sagittarius on the cusp. Follow that to the ruler of Sagittarius, which is Jupiter, who is wealthy, fat and happy, retrograde in Taurus lurking right at the bottom of the chart. The secret enemy in this chart of a foiled terror plot is a banker, at home, sipping Romanée Conti from a good year.

Still standing — the occupation of Zuccotti Park was alive and well Friday morning, apparently too large for Mayor Bloomberg to evict for cleaning of the privately owned plaza. Cellphone photo by Beth Bagner, who will have lots more photos on our website later Friday.

So, the plot to end all protests didn’t work. Thursday’s lead story on CNN.com was about Republicans being friendlier to the protesters. Heck, Mitt Romney said he’s worried about the 99%, and “I understand how those people feel” despite his being one of the 1%.

Even Eric Cantor, whose chart could work as drain cleaner and who was just last week referring to ‘mobs’, on Wednesday said, “People are upset, and they’re justifiably frustrated. They’re out of work. The economy is not moving. Their sense of security for the future is not clear at all. People are afraid, and I get it. When we have elected leaders stirring the pot, if you will, that’s not good.”

Speaking of stirring the pot, we’re aware that as of press time Friday morning, the presence of protesters at Zuccotti Park was too strong for the city to move in on them. The last time Mayor Bloomberg took action against the protesters was on Oct. 1, which helped send #Occupy international. A new phase of this is planned for this Saturday with the 15 October day of action. Perhaps Bloomberg has figured out that this movement is bigger than he and his billions — something the protesters apparently figured out long ago. Good thing, too.

Lovingly,

Saturn and Libra Sun are currently opposite Eris in Aries. Eris, a relatively new discovery, is a longterm visitor to Aries, taking more than a century to cross this one sign — and redefining it as it goes. Sun and Saturn opposing Eris present an image of the rigid human ego gazing into the chaotic mirror of human nature as it plays out in the world. It’s also a comment about how we seek and use relationships for stability of our own personality. Venus opposes Jupiter at 7:53 pm EDT Friday. The Moon ingresses Gemini at 10:15 am EDT on Saturday. Venus squares Vesta at 9:07 am EDT Sunday. Mercury opposes Jupiter Monday at 2:55 pm EDT, though both of these personal planets opposing Jupiter will be in effect all weekend. Beware of an emotional exaggeration effect as that happens; things are unlikely to be as big as your emotional filters make them seem, so be careful not to overreact. The Moon enters Cancer Monday evening, doing its weekly thing of ringing the bell of the 2012 aspect, Uranus in Aries square Pluto in Capricorn. If events, discussions or emotions seem tense, Monday is a possible release point, as the Moon makes a trine from Cancer to Chiron in Pisces, and also trines Mercury and Venus in Scorpio. One last: though Mercury and Venus appear close together, they don’t actually form a conjunction until June 2012, the same month that everything else happens all at once.

This weekend’s emotional tides are being driven by Venus and Mercury in Scorpio opposing Jupiter. Yes, that’s a bit more emotional than it is erotic, but anything with Scorpio so prominent is going to have a sexual flavor. But first we need to sort out the power struggle or negotiation indicated by the opposition aspects. Venus in Scorpio wants what she wants, and Jupiter retrograde in Taurus may not be in the mood to give it up. So if an opposition carries tension, this one especially does, with extra emphasis considering that Venus (in Scorpio) rules Taurus — the sign that Jupiter now occupies. Venus is opposite a planet in her own sign, and feels kicked out. There is an intervening or mediating factor in this push and pull experience: Both planets are square Vesta. With Vesta in the picture, nothing can ever be a quest for self-interest, no matter how interested anyone is in pushing that agenda. In Aquarius, her role will be to raise the discussion to the level of ‘the greatest good for all concerned’. This may call for what seems like a sacrifice of some kind, but that’s a loaded word; you can think of it more as making a contribution to the common good. Mercury has entered Scorpio as of Thursday, and this may represent the interests of another party — such as a child or young person — as part of the picture. The Moon will be in Gemini most of the weekend, at least providing an intuitive pull toward putting feelings into words.

Translating this aspect directly into sex, it looks like two available people rejected by a third person get together and have some fun. Or, it could represent a threesome, though this is becoming a lost art. Or one last potential – a situation wherein someone is apparently withholding. I would suggest that in any form of sex, the space be honored — that’s a Vesta thing, creating the appropriate setting. This is more important than most people recognize, especially if the sex isn’t the ‘taken for granted’ kind that can occur in a ‘committed’ partnership but rather something happening under other circumstances. Many object to the notion that sex can be planned; it’s supposed to be spontaneous and therefore romantic. Sex can definitely be planned, and is often better for being so. Yet this starts with making the space available, guiding social situations gently, and then seeing if the energy catches on. What may develop is more like a safe, steamy, very unusual conversation (a factor of both Vesta and the Gemini Moon). All this Vesta suggests that the sex that may happen is the ‘non sex’ kind, which might be erotic writing, hot talk, masturbation or sharing masturbation with a friend or lover. Once the definition of sex is expanded, the possibilities are endless.

Note, this was written Thursday night, prior to Mayor Bloomberg making the decision not to raid the occupation at Zuccotti Park. I’m leaving the original text: As mentioned, Mayor Bloomberg was planning to clear out Zuccotti Park Monday morning at 7 am. This is a loaded chart. Sunrise happens at a few minutes past 7, so both the Sun and Saturn are exactly in the ascendant of this chart. Venus, the ascendant ruler, is opposite Jupiter. On the 7th house cusp we have Eris, who can be a chaotic influence. The upshot of this chart is, everyone better keep their cool or it will be a bad scene for both sides. It will help that there are going to be a thousand or so video cameras trained on the situation, and city officials know that the non-Fox News-watching public supports this protest movement. It appears that the protesters are the ones who are practicing discipline and restraint while the city has a harder time keeping its forces in line. Check the Planet Waves blog later today for photos and updates. And check the 15 October website for information about demonstrations in your city.

A Conversation with Elisa Novick

Greetings. We’re ready with a new edition of Planet Waves FM, this week featuring an interview with Elisa Novick. I would describe Elisa as a master healer — words I don’t use very often or speak lightly. The longer I know Elisa, and the more I work with her and learn from her, the better I understand what that means.

Elisa Novick, photo by Eric.

I spent an evening with her Monday at her home in Great Barrington, MA, speaking with her about what she does and how she does it. You will hear things in this discussion that are definitely out of the ordinary, but — as I prefer to keep all matters of a spiritual nature — eminently practical. She is someone who works on a planetary level but also serves groups and individuals.

Anyone who aspires to this kind of work would benefit from hearing from her. I’m curious to hear your responses to both the material she presents and how you feel listening to her speak.

I give a brief overview of the week’s astrology at the top of the program, then I quickly move on to the conversation. The whole program is about one hour and 15 minutes, without a music break. If you would like to contact Elisa, you can reach her through her website, ThrivingPlanet.org. She mentions a Tree Play workshop, which will be held near Rhinebeck, NY (right near the Omega Institute) on Saturday, Oct. 29, and this is open to anyone who is interested. Check her website for more information.

Here is your recording in the old player, as well as the zip file, with the complete archive of all of my podcasts. The old player will open in a new window.

Friday, Oct. 14, 2011. Horoscope #878. | Eric’s Zodiac Sign Descriptions

Aries (March 20-April 19) — Beware of subtle tensions that could be brewing under the surface of your professional or social contacts. Things you barely notice have the potential to trigger disproportionately large reactions from you or from others. The first person to monitor is yourself; in particular, any sense of pressure that has the feeling, ‘if I don’t deal with this, I might explode’. The real subject matter may be masked by more obvious dramas or conflicts that are in truth meaningless. Carefully look past any drama for the actual subject matter, which will relate to circumstances that you have not been able to change no matter how hard you try, or qualities in yourself that seem intractable. Don’t wait for any kind of straw to break the camel’s back, or the fire to start that runs out of control. There’s a long-established pattern pointing back to what you are trying to work through here. Be patient and connect the dots.

Taurus (April 19-May 20) — How often, or rather how dependably, do you see the world from the viewpoint of others? Now it would seem that you have little choice, though to do so means indulging in some complexity and sorting out what may be a mixed message or some exaggerated point of view. The real information you’re seeking will come more in the form of a whisper. When you really notice something about another person, your confirmation will be that it tells you something about yourself. The sensation will be one of closeness rather than alienation; of common ground rather than a polarity, and your own desire to grow and evolve. It’s true, there is plenty you can point to that is different about someone, and the helpless sensation of a deadlock is always available. Go below the surface and tap into something more creative, a feeling or observation that draws you toward contact and empathy.

Gemini (May 20-June 21) — Most people choose to remain ignorant because they think that exposure to new information will not only threaten their viewpoint — it will threaten their identity. I suggest you let go of any such irrational fear. I suggest you be most willing to embrace anything that contradicts or challenges your point of view. Make a conscious effort to see all of the sides of any situation without being judgmental or dismissive. Pay special attention to your environment, and notice the agendas of anyone involved. Someone seems determined to create a conflict where there otherwise would be none, but they are leaving clues along the way and you may have had a run-in with them recently. Listen carefully and keep your sixth sense on. You have the ability not only to defuse this situation, but to make sure that it’s turned into a positive gain for everyone.

Cancer (June 21-July 22) — The feelings of others may be especially compelling right now, but don’t lose your center. You could easily have your emotions drowned in an issue that someone is claiming is extremely important but is really just an over-reaction. The key will be to listen without getting caught up in the current. Over the next few days you may have a tendency to forget yourself, or at least to forget what’s important to you. Meanwhile, if you keep your focus and maintain a sense of perspective, there is an opportunity brewing that is likely to appear quickly and disappear just as fast if you don’t take notice. The opportunity relates to a financial situation that you recently determined was top priority. It’s not just about money; you have a lavish creative opportunity that’s on the verge of opening up. Remember your potential and how many times you have promised yourself to do something about it.

Leo (July 22-Aug. 23) — I suggest you directly confront something that you don’t understand, no matter how confounding it seems. You will benefit from doing so, even if you have to encounter some confusion along the way. You may think you have to sort everything out, but what you’re really trying to do is get yourself out of a corner you’ve somehow gotten yourself into. Your sense of being overwhelmed has more to do with your viewpoint than it does with your environment. The more flexible you become, the clearer you’ll feel about what’s going on in your environment. You may have to feel really, truly stuck before that happens, but it won’t last long; and as you get to the breakthrough point, you’re likely to recognize that you can make many similar adjustments to your thought patterns. Looked at another way, you’re seeing the beautiful difference between thinking clearly and not thinking at all.

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sep. 22) — Something has been bothering you — potentially for years — and you are about to discover what it is. I may have used this analogy before: imagine you got a shard of metal embedded in your skin as a child, then forgot that it happened. Over the years, your body has gradually pushed the shard up toward the surface. Then one day it breaks the skin, and you can grab it with a tweezers and pull it out. The little injury that you get from the skin breaking is nothing compared to the sense of relief of the thing coming out. An odd tension you barely noticed will release itself, giving you new flexibility. What is this thing? It’s something old, and it’s directly related to the ‘self-critical’ thing that so many astrologers — and Virgo natives — have noticed about your sign. Working out the unfinished business of the distant past has been a theme of recent years of your life, and this is one tangible result.

Libra (Sep. 22-Oct. 23) — You are different from the people around you. We all are, I know — but you’re in the midst of a major discovery right now. Certain individuals in your life can stand a lot more chaos, uncertainty and instability than you can. Yet the more you hunker down and cling to stability, the more you notice how much instability annoys you. Let’s see if we can figure out what’s really going on. One way to look at the situation is that everyone is just being who they are. Another way is that you and the people around you are influencing one another, as living things coexisting in one environment will always do. There are specific things you can learn about how to integrate change into your life. For you, this is more about working with variables than it is about embracing chaos. There are patterns that make perfect sense, and which point to viable options — as long as you look at the world with an open mind.

Planet Waves Zoom H4n recorder, ready for work, Tuesday afternoon on the Grandmother Land.

Libra Birthdays: Recorded Live on the Grandmother Land

Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 22) — You seem to be considering something you never would contemplate otherwise. I get the feeling that you like the sensation of doing this, and you seem poised to make a spontaneous decision that might leave everyone wondering what got into you. From the look of your solar chart, this involves your career — you finally figured out that you could not be boxed into an old idea or goal, and the desire to grow took on a life of its own. Even if you make a significant change now, you will be able to find the roots of that thought process going back years; you’re reaching the critical mass point now. Carrying through on a decision is sometimes more challenging than making the decision in the first place, so make sure you take one step at a time and keep going till you get where you want to be. Let your passion guide you. That will be a lot easier now that you know in which direction to head.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Scorpio, please go to this link.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 22) — You can indulge your fantasies — no matter how lurid, ‘inappropriate’ or hormone-drenched. If I had to guess these won’t feel like your usual erotic daydreams but rather like some form of actual, living contact, though on a slightly different plane of existence. I’ve noticed that the more vivid and easy a fantasy feels, the more likely it is to happen. It’s like you think a thought and then it thinks you back just as fast. The contact between you and the focus of your desire is so palpable, it’s vivid and alive. I would ask you a simple, potentially controversial question — how does it feel to be so turned on? Do you feel drawn in, a little panicky, or both? I would say that a touch of fear would be normal given the placement of the planets, but it’s something you can brush aside to claim the pleasure that’s directly on the other side.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Sagittarius, please go to this link.

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 20) — Someone may be getting on your nerves. Since you’re the kind of person who can handle really, really annoying people, this is saying a lot. Translated into Goat Speak, someone who has been irritating you for a while is on the verge of becoming such a significant pain in the ass you might have to whack them with your head once or twice. However, the planets suggest one fact pretty clearly — this person is more of a hazard to themselves than they are to you. So I suggest you keep your distance and let the situation unfold. I think you’ll get one of those ‘lessons of leadership’, which amounts to: sometimes you don’t need to do anything. Therefore, keep your agenda moving forward; focus on what you want to create rather than fixing anything that’s bothering you. Many other forces are working in your favor; your friends love you and want to help you.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Capricorn, please go to this link.

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 19) — Belief is a strange thing. Consider how if you believe something that is utterly and absolutely wrong, it can have the full force and effect of being true. You may have just discovered something like that in your life. This is why it’s really healthy to challenge your beliefs before they get around to challenging you. This one had something to do with whether you feel confident enough to assert your authority. That in turn may have involved the confidence of whether you will be liked or loved. This is the thing you sometimes have to chance when you assert yourself. It could be that you’ll be liked more for being authentic, but in any event, the real issue is integrity. And this you have demonstrated, and you’ve learned something in the process of doing so: as in, don’t always believe your beliefs. Take them out for a spin and see if they actually roll.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Aquarius, please go to this link.

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) — When sexy planets show up in Scorpio, I like to remind you that sex is your religion. By this I mean that your notion of what is spiritual is what most people think of as erotic, or at least it starts there. You can leave it to others to proclaim that ‘God is love’ or ‘God is everything’, and then you get to experiment with living as if that’s actually true. The erotic dimension is one your most meaningful points of contact with what others call ‘spiritual’. Keep that in mind over the next few days, especially the part about this all being an experiment. That would include having faith in passion and exploring the ways in which beauty is nourishing. I would offer you one last idea: when most religious leaders use the word ‘sin’ they mean sexual sin. What if this were absolutely not true? What if there were no such thing? There may not be one answer to that question, but rather a doorway to a world of possibilities.

To order Light Bridge, your full-length 2011 reading including written and audio segments for Pisces, please go to this link.