Dear Friend and Reader:

There is an idea going around that the economic crisis is the result of the misconduct of markets, banks and financial institutions, and that the solution will come from the government providing relief or taking action.

Obama signs the stimulus package on Tuesday, Feb. 17.

Like all lies, there is an element of truth here. Banks have been reckless. Enormous, unnecessary risks were taken with investor assets, and millions of people who could barely afford to rent were sold homes. Fraud on an incomprehensible scale was and still is being perpetuated, enough to make the Enron scandal seem quaint. The government does need to intervene in a variety of ways, and a lot of people need help; many who need that help most will not get it.

It’s also true that our system as we think of it is a dinosaur, which serves little purpose other than to feed itself. We are watching it begin to stumble over.

The rest of the story, and I believe it’s the bigger piece, the one not being talked about, has to do with us. It is about our inner process, and the way we relate to one another through a conducting medium we call the economy. Economy is a 500-year-old English word going back to Greek and Latin that means household management. It also relates to the concept of a dwelling or a village. It’s a much more personal and local concept than we think of it as being, such as when we watch the stock ticker go by or see Alan Greenspan give one of his poetic speeches.

The chart for the stimulus bill, the first major legislation that President Obama signed into law, offers a holographic image of the condition of our society, a culture where money is referred to in religious terms as the Almighty Dollar. The chart data is Feb. 17, 2009 at 1:23 pm in Denver, Obama signing the legislation broadcast with the time on live television.

Don’t worry if you think you can’t read a chart; check out this one. Even my pet vole was looking at it with bug eyes. See all those planets up there in Aquarius? They are in the 8th house, what you might call the house of sex, death and taxes.

The Crowded House

Of the 12 houses, the 8th in my view is the most complex, the easiest to get trapped in, and the one where in fact most of us are snagged at the moment. It’s the house where we encounter just about every taboo subject we supposedly cannot discuss at dinner, and thus there is a veil of secrecy thrown over it. We typically have profound hang-ups with the subjects described by this house, which also includes matters of debt, credit and investment. You’re never supposed to tell anyone who you had sex with, or how much money you have, and these themes are the essence of the 8th.

Section of the chart for the signing of the stimulus package, showing the packed 8th house of sex, death and other peoples’ money. Click for full chart.

The common thread is other people’s resources. It therefore includes and often is focused on loans and contracts, and the extension of credit. So if you look at this chart and consider what it’s for — an attempt to bail out the whole economy, using borrowed money — it starts to look like the chart of someone signing the biggest credit card slip in history; which is precisely what it is.

This so-called stimulus package adds to the approximately $14 trillion national debt, most of which accrued during the Cheney/Bush administration in the form of tax cuts to the rich and military spending on Iraq and Afghanistan.

My old astro-tripping buddy Maria in Germany used to call the 8th the “crowded house,” because so much is going on there. One day, relatively new to her astrology studies, she remarked: “The 8th always involves somebody else,” which is true; it covers shared values and resources. Here, we have a chart with an extremely crowded 8th house, and interestingly, the sign involved is Aquarius — the sign of “all of us here.”

We are all involved; the 8th also covers reproduction, so our progeny are involved as well (our great grandkids are still going to be paying for this stimulus package); and it’s the picture of massive, incomprehensible debt, most of it owed to foreign governments, and we all hold a piece of this debt. Like it or not, we are all in this together. In my estimation, the way we got here was by thinking we have separate interests. That is one of the taboos of the 8th: particularly when Aquarius is involved, it represents one vast ground of common interest, but we treat it like private interest. We forget that economy is about something that we share, or it would not even exist.

What we currently share is not the wealth of the richest nation on Earth, but rather its debt. Part of that debt is the national debt, and a massive amount of it is private debt. Citizen economist Michael Hodges estimates that total household debt for the United States at $53 trillion. This figure dwarfs the $14 trillion in debt owed mostly to foreign nations by the United States government, which is considered astronomical.

At some point, through a long series of changes, the United States and much of the world switched from a gold-backed, cash-based economy, to a debt- and credit-based economy. And that is what we are looking at when we gaze into that 8th house of this chart.

Many other houses cover the subject of what we create. The 8th house is about what we consume, and just the portion of consumer debt as of 2007 stood at $2.7 trillion; this is unsecured debt, and does not include mortgages, which are supposedly backed by real estate and car loans, which are backed by the value of one’s car.

Instead of being paid in money, it’s as if we are paid in credit points, which we redeem for merchandise and then pay back at three times their worth. (Then, miraculously, the banks that hold this debt go bankrupt because they turned around and did the same thing on an astonishing scale.) Consumer spending is about buying stuff, and not necessarily stuff that we need. The American economy is in many ways driven by consumer spending, such as the purchase of new products like cell phones and iPods; and much of this is based on planned obsolescence.

Click for The Onion video about Sony’s hot new absolutely useless product.

It’s not that easy to keep or use anything for very long; we are inflicted with the sense that we have to keep up with the next great thing, and marketers know this. Now it’s not enough to call one another anywhere in the world; we need the technology to send naked pictures, songs and movies of our visit to the Mona Lisa. In most economies, particularly those based on technology, in order to stay in business, it’s necessary for the manufacturers to keep coming out with new things that drive the market forward. Then you need the marketing campaigns (which as a guy in business personally drive me nuts because they consume so much time and energy, but nothing happens without them.) The Onion recently parodied this in a video about the next new worthless garbage by Sony that everyone has to rush out and get, for no good reason, except that everyone else is doing it.

This is really starting to look like the 8th house of the stimulus package chart. The notion of a social trend — a very Aquarian thing, particularly where consumer technology is concerned — imposed over the 8th house of debt and death — sounds like a whole culture based on “whoever has the most toys when he dies wins.”

Yet what is really driving all this consumer debt? Is it the need to conform? Are we covering some deep insecurity? Are we consuming because we have issues about our ability to create? A consumer-based economy is clearly the result of the feeling that we’re not creative people. Compared to vacations in the Bahamas, art supplies and musical instruments are cheap. Most of what we consume either has nothing to do with creating; or it could, if we applied the imagination to make it so. But that takes, well, imagination, and the boldness to use it. Learning to play the guitar takes practice.

Yet as most creative people will tell you, it’s difficult to make a living based on what you make. Most of us don’t actually purchase the work of craftspeople, artisans or artists; we purchase manufactured items — and all artists know it because most of us have to do something else to put food on the table. And often when art is purchased, it is done as an investment by the purchaser rather than for its own sake. The value goes up when the artist dies. I jokingly tell talented young artists not to accept payment in heroin. I learned this from an art dealer.

The House of Sex and Jealousy

In the 20th century, the delineation of the 8th house took on an additional meaning involving sex, bestowed (to the best of my research) by an astrologer named Alan Leo (1860-1917). It was intuitive enough; Scorpio, the 8th sign, corresponds to the genitals and sex is the ultimate use or experience of “someone else’s resources.” Also, as the house of marriage contracts, the 8th would represent what I call the sex license. Through the sex license, we have the legal means of possessing another person, or, at least in theory, legally enforcing their exclusivity. (Banning gay people from marrying is a futile and thinly veiled attempt to prevent them from having sex.)

Dream of Jealousy. Photo by Oskar Havos. Read more at Jealousy and the Abyss.

One thing that I can tell you from being an astrological counselor is that many of these 8th house relationships are dissatisfying to the people in them; many people experience them as stifling, and say that the sex is not happening like we’re told it will in the advertisement. Countless emotional and spiritual hang-ups create this situation, particularly the fear of being alone, and using others as a means of filling in a supposedly missing internal piece.

Numerous other people spend their lives avoiding others, with the devotion of yoga, as if it were some kind of spiritual activity. It may feel that way, but on this planet there is no way to avoid relationships; you can only avoid yourself, and that is not spiritual.

What is funny about the stimulus package chart is that the house of monogamy is loaded with Aquarius planets — it’s about as monogamous as a big orgy. I could interpret this for a while, but for now I will leave it at this. We are a lot less monogamous than we think, or than we claim; it is jealousy that largely keeps us clinging to this model as the be-all and end-all of existence. One big not-so-secret is that many supposedly monogamous people are serial monogamists, which is really serial polyamory; and are the kings and queens of the one-night stand (such as when dating, between relationships, or during relationships). Meanwhile, our sexual habits in both Eastern and Western society are drifting toward obsessions with ever more intense media-based sex (known as porno), and sex and even desire are turned into products that you purchase.

Most people you ask would admit this is filling an inner gap of some kind. Consumer spending fills much the same role. Alan Greenspan, the former longtime chairman of the Federal Reserve, described the stimulus package this way: “Remember, the real test of fiscal stimulus is not whether it temporarily expands GDP, but whether it primes the pump for private demand.”

This language sounds awfully sexual. Even the words stimulus and package evoke images of, well, you know what. It sounds like a Viagra ad. And we do buy an awful lot of Viagra in our country, mainly because we’re so stressed out as a society, and we generally don’t have the inclination to be creative in the way that good sex calls for; we don’t think of sex as a creative experience but rather as one of consumption. Years ago, Planet Waves reported that even very young men are becoming Viagra junkies.

The words stimulus, expands and increase bring to my mind the image of America on Viagra with Greenspan the High Priest. So maybe this is telling us that America feels impotent; our exchange process seems to be stalling out, and there is a profound fear of sex in our society.

Besides showing up as sex-phobia, our emotional problems are congealing around money and specifically debt. Americans consume mindlessly, and it long ago turned into a full-blown habit. Admittedly, we are pushed to consume on a nonstop basis by the most expensive educational campaign in history — advertising.

Addiction is an inappropriate response to an emotional issue, and it is often hidden from view (veiled, like the 8th house). We have accessed debt at unimaginable amounts to finance this addiction. As a culture, we utilize our brainpower to rationalize our behavior rather than use it to recognize and define the problems underlying our addiction; or to turn our energy toward creation. The act of thinking has been co-opted in the service of our addictions. We feed our imagination titillation and fantasy to the point of total distraction. We shun the use of our creativity for problem solving, for pleasure, for beauty.

Why do we do this? Here are some questions we might ponder, provided this week by my friend Kelly after she looked at the chart:

— What are the emotional issues that are underlying our addiction? What are we avoiding? Why is any loss so difficult to deal with?

— What price are we willing to pay before we recognize that emotional processing should be part of our daily rituals, just like brushing our teeth, or eating? It is part of the maintenance of living.

— Why are we holding onto our paradigm of reality even when it is clear to any rational being that it is self-destructing? Doesn’t anybody notice that our knuckles are turning blue?

The Death of Capitalism; the Rebirth of Something

Capitalism, the theme of the bailout, is parked in the 8th house. Capitalism itself is an 8th house theme; and we’re all stuffed in there. We have been gradually witnessing the demise of Adam Smith’s theories, peaking with the federal buyout of the banks, a major insurance company and the auto industry starting late last year. The federal government has taken over business, and that is not any kind of “free market.” It is more like a lot of free cash for CEOs.

Fortunately, the 8th is the house of transformation as well, since in esoteric language, death specifically refers to a change in form. That 8th house says that we are going through a massive transformation, and that we are all involved. Transformation is not easy, it takes constant work and focus, and group transformation is often far more challenging; we have to deal with our own stuff, and that of one another. People do indeed cling to old forms until their knuckles are blue. Many people among us would rather die than change, and often that is what they get.

An open farmers’ market like this one in Kingston, NY, is not capitalism; it is a form of grassroots trade, practiced for as long as human civilization has existed. Markets like this in many places offer products from around the world, and still would not qualify as capitalism — most of the time, they are the most accessible option to partaking in the corporate system. Photo by Eric Francis.

We have acknowledged many times that Pluto in Capricorn is about a major overhaul of the system, which will seek to restructure things from the foundations up; and that the ongoing Saturn opposing Uranus is about a shock or confrontation with reality. Remember, capitalism was never designed to be sustainable. It was designed to consume the planet and make capitalists rich.

The best news in this chart is the approaching Chiron-Neptune conjunction in Aquarius. This conjunction makes its first peak in the spring, and it develops over the next year. It represents the clearing of the fog on some of these issues we are seeing. It represents the willingness to heal addictions, to look at our delusions and to recognize that we are not in this alone. It is within the context of a spiritually (Neptune-ruled) consciousness that we find the solution, and since Aquarius is involved, there is a humanitarian theme. With Saturn ruling that 8th, the Spiritual perspective reveals the practical, concrete steps we must take, individually and collectively to move forward.

Letting go of our past expectations and fears, and presenting worries and insecurities is our salvation. So, too, is letting go of the idea that infinite expansion is the only way that we can keep the economy going.

Until we find our way to other planets, or are able to colonize other planes of reality, we need to make do with the finite resources we have here. Sharing what we have will help a lot — many of us have far more than we need, and many others have far less. Being disciplined will help a lot more; we do tend to lose control of our time and resources.

Barack Obama is often accused (albeit by Republicans, who hand out money to corporations by the truckload) of trying to be a socialist. Actually, the chart has this implication — of a more community based form of economy; structured by the Saturn association with Aquarius, and something inventive, energized by the Uranus association with Aquarius. We need a form of socialism badly; but the kind that is actually social in nature.

There is one strange part about this chart, and that is the position of the Moon. The Moon has special importance because it rules the ascendant. In this kind of chart, the ascendant ruler is about the issue itself, and the Moon is about the public; it really is about all of us. The Sagittarius Moon points to the inherently spiritual nature of the issue. But if you look you see it’s conjunct a centaur planet called Hylonome. My keywords for this point are “self-inflicted.” We have done this whole thing ourselves, and we need to get out of it ourselves, not by deus ex machina.

For this centaur, minor planet pioneer Juan Revilla down in Costa Rica offers the idea “the cry of the poor.” History is indeed the story of the struggle between the haves and the have-nots. It’s time we figure out who we are in that equation — and time we start listening.

Yours & truly,

— with David Arner & Tracy Delaney

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

I WROTE A letter not long ago; a real one, with paper and ink. It was agony. My fingers, accustomed to jotting short notes and lists, protested the long haul of paragraph after paragraph with persistent cramping. My handwriting, which I once took pride in as an artistic extension of my persona, appeared unpracticed and unsatisfactory. My brain raced ahead of my ability to put my thoughts on the page. I came away with a sense of frustration shadowed by an uneasy feeling of loss; after that came sheer relief in getting back to my keyboard. So much, I decided, for the niceties of life.

Vancouver at night. Photo by Jeremy Asher.

We live in a time of instant communication, amazing technology that has brought us enormous benefit and the ability to participate both globally and personally with immediacy. We’re plugged in, we’re informed, we’re available, and we’ve paid a larger price for that than we realize. We’ve gone a little manic; lost some of our ability to distance from those things that drive us forward. We’ve forgotten some of the skills that, experientially, gave us creative insight and the chance to ponder our challenges. We’ve entered a slipstream of information, a speed-up of necessary response and strengthened one of our worst human traits — our need for instant gratification.

Some things need patience, growing revelation and full understanding; some of the things we’ve traded in for our ability to swim the slipstream we have need of, to make sense of our shifting world and our desire for orderly change. A major difference between a supersized Big Mac, handed through a window in a bag, and Chicken Cordon Bleu as an entree after a first course or two, is essentially the time it takes to create it. That is the experience of dining as opposed to gobbling a quick bite; to exist on junk food, physically as well as mentally, emotionally and spiritually, is to become overweight and undernourished.

Coming Up in Daily Astrology and Adventure

As Chiron, the Awakener, continues its journey through Aquarius (a sign associated with invention and innovation), we should expect to see more revelations of the consequences and limitations of our technologically dependent culture. Below are two events that illustrate one aspect of these limitations we’re now discovering: From near-orbit space to the depths of the sea, from satellites to submarines, we appear to be running out of optimal space to operate our machines.

First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Jonathon Band at a news conference in London, Feb. 16. Photo courtesy of BBC.com

In each incident technology failed to prevent what could have been two disasterous collisions. Chiron alerts us to problems that require our attention. Clearly, these events prove that over-crowding in our skies and seas is a reality that can no longer be ignored.

At a press conference Monday, Feb. 16, the British Navy admitted that the night of Feb. 4 two nuclear submarines — one British, one French — collided underwater.

While the British Ministry of Defence is downplaying the accident, calling it an “infinitesimal” coincidence that they’d been the same place at the same time, the BBC isn’t buying the story: “[The claim] is undermined because NATO allies routinely share information at a top-secret level about the deployment of submarines to ensure they do not occupy the same area of ocean, an arrangement in which the French, whose nuclear deterrent remains independent, are understood to participate.”

The collision occurred, however, in a well-trafficked depth of the North Atlantic preferred by British, French, American, and even Russian nuclear submarines.

Satellites Collide: An Update

Following up on last week’s satellite smash-up — Russia’s Mission Control Chief, Vladimir Solovyov, thinks debris from the two destroyed satellites could hang around for 10,000 years. This is a problem because the debris in a well-trafficked zone for satellites: “800 kilometers is a very popular orbit which is used by Earth-tracking and communications satellites. The clouds of debris pose a serious danger to them.”

According to an AP story, Solovyov asserted that even tiny fragments could pose a serious threat to spacecraft. Both are made of light alloys and travel at high speed; even small bits have the potential to damage spacecraft and satellites they encounter.

While the US military can track objects as small as a baseball, it lacks the resources to track every bit of space junk, says a spokesperson from US Strategic Command.

This concerns both government and private developers: “With the amount of spacecraft and debris in orbit, the probability of collisions is going up more rapidly,” said John Higginbotham, in the AP story. Higginbotham is chief executive of Integral Systems Inc., a Lanham, Maryland-based company that runs ground support systems for satellites.

On Mardi Gras, and a few hours before the New Moon on Feb. 24, NASA will launch its Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) into space. The launch at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California is scheduled for 1:51:30 am PST.

OCO is the first spacecraft dedicated to studying atmospheric carbon dioxide, the most significant human-produced greenhouse gas and the principal human-produced driver of climate change. File the results under “too much information.” Image courtesy of NASA.

The Carbon Observatory is a satellite, and it’s NASA’s first that is dedicated solely to measuring the carbon dioxide levels in Earth’s atmosphere. It will monitor increases and decreases, and will try to determine where carbon dioxide in the atmosphere originated.

In the chart for the scheduled launch — it could change depending on technical factors and the weather — the Great Attractor in Sagittarius is rising. As scheduled now, this mission will have far-reaching effects, beyond what we can comprehend now. Pholus is also close to the ascendant; this is the planet that lets the Pepsi out of the shaken-up bottle on a hot day (as we’ve often described it here). This might come back to us not as corn syrup in the face, but as too much information.

The ascendant ruler (Jupiter) and the descendent ruler (Mercury) are conjunct exact to eight arc minutes — a symbol of innovation, and a suggestion that the mission will work very well; but we are not going to like the news. It’s too bad we didn’t have this kind of technology before we dumped all that carbon into the atmosphere. Mars is conjunct Nessus, which is likely to represent how badly we have screwed ourselves over.

And a packed 2nd house always tells you that a lot of money is at stake. We need to bear in mind the extent to which environmental policy is determined by the supposed right of corporations to make as much money as they want.

The reason for the mission, according to Eric Lansen, the Program Executive of the OCO, is to gather more information about global warming. It’s already known how much carbon dioxide is due to human behavior, but “we can only account for about half of the carbon dioxide that doesn’t remain in the atmosphere.”

In the backdrop of the mission is Chiron conjunct Neptune. This is the symbol of The Great Awakening. Whoever stands to lose something may not want the truth to get out, but it would appear that we will find out, no matter what anyone who stands to lose wants to happen.

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, February 20, 2009, #754 – By ERIC FRANCIS

Aries (March 20-April 19)
It’s as if you can see in the dark. I recommend that you keep your eyes open anyway, because at the moment you need both kinds of vision. Being aware of your surroundings is the essence of leadership, and right now there are many people in your world who are looking to you not just as an example but as a kind of focalizing agent. Leadership, in the new sense of the word, involves following your inner guidance, and at the moment this is coming in strong. To make the best use of this, you will need to cultivate a different kind of trust than you are normally accustomed to. This involves both sides of your brain; not just the rational side. Learning to trust intuition may be the single most important growth point in human development; the ability to listen to yourself, and trust what you hear.

Read your 2008 annual for Aries. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Aries and Aries rising here.

Taurus (April 19- May 20)
I don’t know what you do for your work, and whether you find it satisfying. Regardless, this is the time to implement your highest vision. I don’t care what they’re saying on CNN about the economy, astronomy or the price of pastrami. You are in the moment of connecting with your calling. It’s likely to be the thing you’ve doubted the most for a long time. If that is true, you are in a moment of needing to confront your deepest fears and insecurities about your worth, your role in the world, and your ability to rise to the occasion of your life. You do not need an astrologer to tell you that the core of Taurean “stubbornness” has quite a bit to do with insecurity. I am not suggesting you give that up, but rather that you use it to stoke your engines.

Read your 2008 annual for Taurus. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Taurus and Taurus rising here.

Gemini (May 20- June 21)
You are about to enter new territory — really new. Believe it or not, for all the energy pouring through your life at the moment, most of it has been invested in the past. Nearly everyone talks about getting out of history and into the future, without acknowledging one little hang-up; the future is not only unfamiliar, it is unwritten, and thus presents one of the most daunting creative challenges a mortal can embrace. We may ask why the world is so set in its ways, and I will tell you. Most of us are chicken shits who would not recognize originality if it fell through the ceiling and started tap dancing wearing a big sign that said ALIVE. I am guessing this is not your problem, right?

Read your 2008 annual for Gemini. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Gemini and Gemini rising here.

Cancer (June 21- July 22)
Keep negotiating, with everyone and everything. If you get a parking ticket, haggle with City Hall. If someone offers you a job, ask for more money. If you have an idea, revise the plan at least three times till you know you have it right. You have a few things coming to you, and one of the most meaningful things you can do is learn to choose. There are about to be a diversity of new options presented to you, so I suggest you bide your time for a week or two, and consider your life an experiment in the possibilities. Just remember, they are more and better than you were imagining, so it would be truly helpful to get your imagination into the act.

Read your 2008 annual for Cancer. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Cancer and Cancer rising here.

Leo (July 22- Aug. 23)
Are you seeing things as they are, or are you seeing them as you are? At this point in my journey I assume that the cosmos is a co-creative process; that everything is responding to everything else. We bring some of the energy; the people and events around us bring some of the energy. The key part of the dynamic, the meeting point, is awareness. That is where the alchemy of creation and change enter the equation. Your whole perspective on a complex situation suddenly seems to have changed, and this has shifted the situation itself. In other words, your awareness is not merely passive, but rather an activating agent in the world around you. Work with that.

Read your 2008 annual for Leo. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Leo and Leo rising here.

Virgo (Aug. 23- Sep. 22)
It would be difficult to fit more activity into your planner, and you may have already started stapling in extra pages. Over the next three weeks, you can expect the scene of your life to change rapidly from day to day. Fortunately you’re born under a mutable sign, and are a master at adaptation. The territory you’re entering is both challenging and satisfying, and I suggest you let it inform you of one not-so-small fact: you have not given up. You have persisted and against some significant odds have arrived in a place where you actually have a purpose: in truth, many new purposes that share something vital, and that are about to reveal themselves one at a time. Don’t be fooled by the seeming differences. Stick to what they share.

Read your 2008 annual for Virgo. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Virgo and Virgo rising here.

Libra (Sep. 22 – Oct. 23)
Creative is what creative does; and more to the point, how it gets the job done. No matter what you are doing, make it a work of art. I know the world believes that cleaning the bathroom is different than taking sculpting class; that addressing an envelope is different than calligraphy. For your purposes, let there be no difference. I don’t mean to Zen out, but rather to treat everything you touch as turning to art, to beauty, to something better than it was when you first became aware of its presence. Complete everything you start, particularly small things. The result will be an incredible tour of your own potential, with some spectacular and unexpected options revealed to you.

Read your 2008 annual for Libra. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Libra and libra rising here.

Scorpio (Oct. 23- Nov. 22)
If you don’t want the next few weeks to be an emotional roller coaster, get some support from the people around you, and remember that you have an option at every moment. We’re taught to think that we’re confronted by facts; but each fact we meet is a juncture. There is an immediate choice involved for how to respond; for what to do; for what to say. This is no small matter. It is the only means by which we direct the course of our lives. If not for this, we would all be prisoners. As for that support: you have plenty to offer as well. You can, in one gesture, shift the dynamic of your life from being boxed into a corner, to an exciting exchange of experience and potential.

Read your 2008 annual for Scorpio. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Scorpio and Scorpio rising here.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 – Dec. 22)
The Sun’s entry into Pisces this week will give you some emotional grounding; these have been an incredibly mental few weeks. What you are likely to discover is how you feel about so many recent events. Though your mind was racing along, you hardly had time to note what you thought about them, and you may discover that the emotional dimension has a few surprises in store for you. One of them is likely to be the desire to go further into your experiences than you’ve been willing to go lately. You’ve been doing more wind surfing than scuba diving. You are not a dilettante; you are a high achiever. But at the moment, high translates to real, to focused and moreover, to deep.

Read your 2008 annual for Sagittarius. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Sagittarius and Sagittarius rising here.

Capricorn (Dec. 22- Jan. 20)
I suggest you go through every aspect of your financial affairs in the next couple of weeks. Get help if you need it, which would mean any patient person with a knack for figures and paperwork. You need to know exactly where you stand; how much you have in the way of money, debt and credit. The weather is uniquely fair for this exercise, which amounts on one level to an assessment of how much power you have. Be aware if you’re reluctant to do this exercise. The fact is that the truth will be better than you imagine, and you will discover that you have a diversity of unexpected options for how to handle your affairs.

Read your 2008 annual for Capricorn. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Capricorn and Capricorn rising here.

Aquarius (Jan. 20- Feb. 19)
You are continuing to discover yourself; but it’s more like you’re getting pulled into the vortex of your own awareness. You may, however, be seeking a relationship as a means of stabilizing this incredible personal progress you are making, or wondering why you’re not in the cozy couple of your dreams. The answer is that what the world calls a relationship is precisely antithetical to the process you’re now in, which quite directly requires you to be a different person every day. If, however, you find yourself in the company of someone who can fully grasp this a reality, and the utmost necessity for your autonomy of mind and body, that would be a friend to stay in contact with.

Read your 2008 annual for Aquarius. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Aquarius and Aquarius rising here.

Pisces (Feb. 19- March 20)
At long last, the Sun has returned to your sign. I can say, with a gleam in my eye, that you have no idea what is in store for you. Your imagination, your mind and very likely your hands have been working overtime, but you don’t exactly know toward what end. One thing you can count on is that the cosmic intelligence that holds the atoms together, the same one that invented DNA and tarot cards, has been working overtime right along with you. Keep yourself organized, well rested and well fed. Pace yourself carefully. In a very short time you will not recognize your life — and as we both know you’ve been long overdue for progress.

Read your 2008 annual for Pisces. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Pisces and Pisces rising here.

Dear Friend and Reader,

Today is the last day the Sun is in Aquarius: tomorrow, at 7:46 am EST, it will move into Pisces. We usually send you monthly horoscopes on Tuesdays, but we got one extra Tuesday in Aquarius this year, so see below for a bonus edition from Planet Waves — a note from our archives.On Friday, Eric wrote that the Sun was making its last conjunctions to Nessus, Chiron and Neptune before moving into Pisces. What he didn’t mention in that article is that Chiron is, and has been, residing in Aquarius since Feb. 21, 2005. It’ll be there until 2011.

Yours & Truly,
Rachel Asher

By Eric Francis

Imagine you’re sitting in a restaurant with a group of your friends, and a discussion about a potentially sensitive subject comes up. A few of your friends express their views, and you decide to take a turn, something you don’t usually do. You speak your mind and the room goes chilly. There are stares in your direction. Your stomach turns; you’ve crossed the line of social appropriateness.

Image: “Automat-Ic” by Via Keller, Studio Psycherotica.

It’s like a nightmare: you’ve revealed yourself and been rejected for it. In a single moment you realize that in order to maintain your social relationships from this point onward, you would have to ignore the difference in values and suppress your views and, in reality, yourself. If you were to be open about them, you would basically be unacceptable. Suddenly you feel very alone in the world. Could it be that these people were not your friends at all? What is a friend? And could it be that you really need to invest more energy into actually expressing who you are, rather than in conforming to what other people think for their convenience?

If you look closely at our world, it’s easy to see a thousand ways in which we put up with such compromises every day. Generally, in our era of history, we deal with just about everything by suppressing it. Either that, or distracting ourselves with all our fabulous means of entertainment. Most entertainment is passive and antisocial; in the U.S. most bars play the music so loud you cannot hear your own voice, much less someone else’s; people walking down the street wearing an MP3 player are not going to be available to meet new people, say hello or even make eye contact. The examples go on.

Suppression is really depression and a lot of people are depressed. Many are resorting to coping through antidepressants; it seems like the best most people can hope to do in life is cope and it seems that we are in a “whatever it takes” phase of history. These drugs are showing up in the water supply, and they are also making an impact on our social relations, though it’s extremely difficult to point to what it is — it exists as a kind of psychic climate change.

There are so many factors influencing us to bury our real personalities and the real issues we have on our heart and mind that they are too numerous to count. At the same time there has been another trend, which is toward the spiritual or opening-up practices that are available to exist as private experiences; things we do alone rather than together, or where social relationships are discouraged in the name of integrity.

Dear Friend and Reader:

When I get into a habit of staying in my photo studio, I’m isolated from television (and surrounded by art), and somehow my life is different. Besides not being blasted with advertising, I am relieved of the burden of a non-stop barrage of that which is supposed to scare me, for example, how many jobs were lost this week. I still hear about it; but I only read about it five times instead of being blasted with it the usual 275 times via television.

An Aquarian Gorilla. Image by Rachel Asher.

I wonder what good this kind of “news” does for those who don’t think they have something meaningful and productive to occupy their mind and their hands, besides terrorize them. The thing about our particular economy is that so much of it is based on confidence. This includes banks lending to one another, and my tab at Dominick’s Cafe across the street.

What we get hurled at us so often seems to be fear for its own sake; a kind of substance that absorbs any remaining traces of creative energy, confidence and awareness, making sure we get as plastered into unreality as is possible. In our time, one question of Aquarius is, how stuck do you want to be? And do you recognize fear as the agent of that stuckness? Do we recognize that fear eats creativity, it distracts us from love and it derails erotic energy — the source of all abundance?

Besides all the companies that are dumping employees so the corporation itself can survive the recession, the zeitgeist piece we all love to hate is the one about the Suleman octuplets; that is, the lady in California who had eight more kids after already having six, no job, and not a dad but a sperm donor. The latest eight were born during Aquarius, the sign of groups, which is kind of like when twins are born during Gemini.

Except for the Aquarius part, I agree that the story is outrageous, but it’s just one example in a world of madness, extreme energy drinks, extreme sports and extremely large SUVs. In our particular world, it’s reasonable to wonder if she did it for the publicity (she is on food stamps, but has a spokesperson), if she was obsessed with her reproductive power (clearly) or if she’s the reincarnation of the old woman who lived in a shoe. This is a folk tale that has been around for a while, and as you can read in Wikipedia, it has several historical interpretations.

Front page of Nadya Suleman’s website.

At least this was a planned pregnancy; perhaps a bit too planned, but not an accident. We have to give Nadya Suleman that much. It’s the millions of people whose pregnancies are not even vaguely thought through, the ones that “just happen” to people who don’t use any birth control and are surprised that they got pregnant, or those who have a second or third kid when they can’t afford the first one or two, who really get me going.

My friend Karen Pardini, a midwife, yesterday was demonstrating how a woman gets pregnant while “watching a parade.” I don’t know if this is an old joke, but it was an extremely funny one-woman skit.

Nadya is reflecting something back to us, maybe something about population. It’s just as ridiculous to have 14 children in one house as it is to have a planet with seven billion people on it. What exactly are we doing about that? We can critique Nadya Suleman for having her enormous family that she cannot afford, then becoming Joe the Plumber of child-rearing, but when was the last time you saw a public service advertisement on TV encouraging responsible sex or population control? Unplugging your cell phone charger when you’re not using it is not enough.

The Age of Aquarius?

Speaking of octuplets, the sky is still mobbed with Aquarius planets. If you’re wondering what it is you experienced this past week, we had a lunar eclipse across Aquarius/Leo (that was Monday, just five days ago) mingled with the Sun making conjunctions to Nessus, Chiron and Neptune. Neptune was the last conjunction of the series

What we just bounced through — this patch of rattling celestial movement where so much happened to so many people — was the Earth and Sun aligning with each of these planets in turn. There was plenty more going on at the same time, notably Uranus and Saturn still in a tight opposition, which is like bouncing reality on an Aquarian trampoline.

Now Mars is moving through Aquarius at about three-quarters of a degree per day, a bit slower than the Sun. It, too, will make conjunctions to Jupiter, Juno, the North Node, Nessus, Chiron and Neptune before entering Pisces on March 14. While that’s going on, Mercury (done with its recent retrograde) will move back into Aquarius, making an even faster series of conjunctions to the same planets.

Charles Émile Auguste Durband, Hêbê, oil on canvas, 1874, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lille.

One highlight happens over the next few days, and is in full force is this weekend — Mars is making a conjunction to Juno and Jupiter. This is a cosmic parody on Valentine’s Day. Juno and Jupiter are the divine consorts. Add Mars and you have a threesome. Personally I like to take a counter-romantic view of this ridiculous “holiday,” and how the sky is doing it for me. If you’re in a couple and want to try something a little kinky, maybe post your fantasy to Craig’s List and see who shows up in your inbox.

Last night, a journalist contacted me, asking if I thought this meant the Age of Aquarius was beginning. He quoted the song by James Rado, Gerome Ragni and Galt MacDermot, and performed by the Fifth Dimension. It’s the one which begins, “When the Mooooon is in the 7th house…” (which it is for about two hours every day) and Jupiter aligns with Mars (which it does once every four months, for about a week). By that reckoning, the Age of Aquarius has begun several hundred times since 2000. No wonder we never seem to get there.

The people who wrote this song did not know anything about astrology, that I can tell. But they were experts in groovy. The Age of Aquarius is not reckoned by planets, and certainly not by fast-movers like Jupiter and Mars. It’s generally counted by the movement of the sidereal vernal point through the constellations, in an approximately 26,000-year cycle. This is called the precession of the equinox. By this calculation, the Age of Aquarius would not begin for another 300 to 400 years.

I do believe we are at the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, but not because of Jupiter and Mars, and not because of precessional movement. The proliferation of technology is one way you can tell that we are living in Aquarian times, and we have still not figured out how to boycott media which do nothing but pump out fear.

The other product of our Aquarian media is conformity, which is a growing medium where fear proliferates generously. For most people, this manifests as an obsessive drive to conform to what others are doing, with the presumed punishment of being banned from the tribe if you do not.

Aquarius crystallizes patterns, and one of the reasons we are having a variety of breakdowns at this point in history seems to be designed to break down some of the more dangerous patterns that have come to grip our society. If we’re going to experience brotherly love, we need to recognize one another as individuals and not as parts in a machine or a crowd to conform to. We need to claim our freedom as individuals before we claim our freedom as a society.

The Sun enters Pisces the morning of Feb. 18 (afternoon in the UK), but the Aquarius adventure continues all through the spring.

Here are the upcoming highlights. Note, this is a very incomplete list, covering the big stuff; note all the other planets currently in Aquarius, listed at right, positions accurate as of Thursday night. Note that everyone born in the mid-1960s has extra natal points in Aquarius, such as Pholus, Chariklo and 1992 QB1. So you are getting extra transits to whatever planets you may know about in Aquarius.

One things stands out of this long list: Tantalus is conjunct Chiron. This is the sense of vulnerability associated with not getting who or what we want the very most. The Buddhists are right, desire itself is a big part of the problem, especially in a society that is driven by desire. But check out the extent to which we hold out on one another, or take someone wanting something that we have as an opportunity to have power over that person. We’re so hungry for power that yes, we usually take all we can get.

Feb. 14 – Mercury re-enters Aquarius. It went retrograde there Jan. 12. The Moon enters Scorpio about an hour ahead of Mercury making its move, so this happens during a Moon-Mercury square.

Courtesy of Serennu.com

Feb. 17 – Mars conjunct Jupiter (and Juno). If you’re married or in a monogamous relationship, raise your hand if your sex life could be hotter. This aspect will help, I think; it’s the image of heating up your erotic reality with some “intellectual stimulation.” The added factor is Mars, that is, yang or male energy. Juno is famous for how allegedly faithful she is and Jupiter for how allegedly philandering. Now we have some kind of really exciting threesome unthinkably consisting of two guys and a chick. On this day, Venus (slow and powerful, about to station retrograde) in Aries sextiles Jupiter.

Feb. 18 – Sun enters Pisces. Venus sextiles Mars, while Mars is still within one degree of Jupiter.

Feb. 21 – Mercury shadow phase ends. Now you can buy one of these and it will work perfectly (this takes you to The Onion. Profanity warning, if you are at work).

Feb 24 – Pisces New Moon, at 7 degrees of that sign. Mercury is conjunct Jupiter, the same accenting the Pisces theme, and also the theme of how we experience our relationships in the context of the larger groups that surround them. Most couples solve the problem of ‘the rest of the world’ by isolating themselves from anyone but other people involved in couples.

Feb. 26 – Mercury sextiles Venus, as well as makes parallels to both Jupiter and Pluto. A parallel is like a conjunction, only different; but the emphasis here is on dialing in the difficult to communicate about. With Jupiter and Pluto involved, it sounds like a dangerous liaison in a library.

March 1 – Mercury conjunct Mars. This sounds like a bright idea, just make sure you think about it for longer than a Google search takes before you decide.

March 5 – Mars conjunct Chiron. This happens every two years, and it’s an aspect that favors the underdog. The two planets most endowed with warrior energy get together, with Mars energizing Chiron and Chiron adding a spiritual dimension to Mars. We also learn something about the struggle of men in our culture, particularly their sexual struggle, which is usually presumed not to exist.

March 6 – Venus stations retrograde in Aries. Retrograde least of all the planets, Venus is retrograde for about six weeks every 18 months. The station direct is in the last degree of Pisces on April 17. This is a study in the self-obsession with which our society is so secretly enamored, thinking it’s lost in obsessing about someone else.

March 8 – Mars conjunct Neptune. This is great for poets, musicians, artists and social visionaries, and bad for drug addicts, liars, control freaks and people possessed by entities. Some great ideas will come out of this conjunction, and so will a few Kamikaze missions, overdoses and spectacular lies to the public. This may be kept in check a little by the Sun’s opposition to Saturn. Or it may provide the feeling of needing to escape by one or more of the above methods. Mercury also enters Pisces, beginning a whole new story.

March 12 – Sun conjunct Uranus. This, after a recent opposition to Saturn, will provide a feeling of freedom and creative expression. Sun-Uranus is the conjunction we’ve all been waiting for. Well, except for when Jupiter, Chiron and Neptune align this spring.

Yours & truly,

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

“THE MORE things change, the more they stay the same” — that’s the old saying that has only made sense to me as I’ve gotten decades of experience under my belt. I think it comes down to the people who are producing the change; as much as folks want change, they only want it to be good, and that, of course, isn’t how the dynamic works. Change is not subjective; it’s neutral, even though it doesn’t feel that way. Windows most often fly open only when doors shut hard in our face.

Mt. Tabor. Photo by Laura A. Miller.

Change will always involve losing something to make room for something else, and we howl like banshees if we lose anything at all; as we try to slow up the flow of change to make sure nothing we want to keep is lost, our personal psychology steps up to impose our ancient patterns of belief system, insecurity and tribal allegiance. Now, reflecting the personal changes that are challenging us, we once again find ourselves politically at odds – party-to-party, neighbor-to-neighbor — in a battle of consciousness. That never stops change from arriving on our doorstep, of course; but it makes the explosion bigger when it finally comes. I think that’s what this situation of ours is all about — building pressure for a blast the size of Tunguska.

I’d suppose that’s not what you want to hear; reality of this proportion is tough stuff. But the disastrous wobble in systems we’re seeing today did not come out of the blue; it’s an energy that’s been growing and collecting strength by small increments since the founding of this nation. Futurists that had a capacity to understand that things change established that perfect embryo of a Republic that came forth, but some things shouldn’t: like free speech and liberties and common interests.

Feb. 13, 2009 Dear Friend and Reader: I thought I would share with you are few of the reader comments about Next World Stories, the 2009 annual edition of Planet Waves. “I am really liking the whole Next World Stories – what a terrific job Eric and his team did putting that together. It is wonderful to be on the receiving end of their insightful creativity. Thank them all for me.” “I want to thank you so much for the amazing work on Next World Stories. I have so far read only my sun and rising signs, but for the first time ever I cried (CRIED!!!) over a horoscope – this is the level of insight and perspective you offer. Having our mostly silent, but titantic, struggles articulated and soothed by another – who stands outside the frame – is an incredibly healing thing. You are an international treasure. Thank you for your brilliance and perseverance; the hard work shines.” “The annual horoscopes are great. It is too much to absorb at one time, so I’ll be reading it over the next year several times. This is just to say, thank you and I appreciate the work that goes into this.” If you’re an NWS subscriber, please send your comments — they are encouraging for others to subscribe. Thanks! Order Next World Stories Here

Coming Up in Daily Astrology and Adventure

On Tuesday, Feb. 10, and for the first time, two intact satellites collided in orbit. The wreck created a “massive” debris field 491 miles over Siberia and 270 miles over the NASA international space station.

An Iridium commercial communications satellite, launched in 1997 and weighing 1,235 pounds, collided with a one-ton 1993 Russian Kosmos 2251 military satellite which appeared to be out of control.

NASA believes it will take several weeks before they have a full assessment of the damage.

“We knew this was going to happen eventually,” said Mark Matney, an orbital debris scientist at Johnson Space Center in Houston, in an interview with the Associate Press.

Litter in orbit is now a greater hazard to space shuttle flights than lift-off or re-entry. However, The Washington Post reports a NASA memo stating the risk to a planned Feb. 22 shuttle launch as “elevated” but “very small and within acceptable limits.”

According to Nicholas Johnson, we should probably worry more about the Hubble Telescope. Johnson, an orbital debris expert at the Houston space center, said the risk of damage from Tuesday’s collision is greater for the Hubble Space Telescope and Earth-observing satellites, which are in higher orbit and nearer the debris field.

NASA estimates that of the 6,000 satellites launched since 1957, approximately half remain in operation. In addition, about 18,000 pieces of man-made objects orbit the earth as space litter. Most are the result of old satellites breaking up, long after they ceased to function.

And who is counting these floating bits? The military, says The Washington Post:

The military can track space debris as small as a baseball. The U.S. Strategic Command monitors 18,000 distinct pieces of debris, according to Reggie Winchester, spokeswoman for the command. That number will jump by at least 600, the preliminary estimate for the number of pieces from Tuesday’s collision.

Even a very small object packs tremendous kinetic energy at orbital velocities, which are on the order of 17,500 mph. Humphries said the space station has “bumpers” designed to shatter an object into tiny pieces before it can penetrate the pressurized interior.

Said Humphries: “It gets down to probabilities. Space being very big, these pieces of debris being very small, the odds are very high that they’re not going to collide.”

A bursting display of x-rays and gamma-rays have been spotted by NASA’s Swift satellite and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Loredana Vetere, who oversees the Swift observations in Penn State, explains: “At times, this remarkable object has erupted with more than 100 flares in as little as 20 minutes.”

Gamma-ray flares from SGR J1550-5418 may arise when the magnetar’s surface suddenly cracks, releasing energy stored in its powerful magnetic field. Image courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab.

The object is called a gamma ray repeater, which is a type of magnetar — a neutron star with the most powerful magnetic field in the universe. They are fairly uncommon; thus far, only six have been discovered.

According to galactic astrology specialist Philip Sedgwick, this particular SGR object is located at 8+ Sagittarius, and it’s clustered with several other similar points in Sagittarius and Capricorn.

The soft-gamma-ray repeater, given the catchy name “SGR J1550-5418,” is about 30,000 light-years from Earth. It appears to originate from the constellation Norma, which lies in the path of the Milky Way. The first bursts from SGR J1550-5418 were noted on Oct. 3, 2008. After a quiet patch, the soft-gamma-ray repeater sprung back into action on Jan. 22.

Just over four years ago, on Dec. 27, 2004, the most powerful burst from a soft-gamma-repeater was recorded, which was 50,000 light years away and emitted a burst strong enough to ionize Earth’s upper atmosphere. “Previously, SGR emanations have disrupted satellite and cell phone service,” Sedgwick said.

How and why gamma-ray-repeaters occur is still in the theory stages. What is known is that the observed curved and twisted flares occur due to levels of high magnetic fields. On the Sun, for example, events like solar flares and coronal loops — when the flare forms an arch instead of shooting directly outwards — occur around strong magnetic fields. The gamma-ray and x-ray flares around SGR J1550-5418 behave similarly due to the magnetic activity.

“Dead On Arrival” ought to be the title of Andrew Thomas’s Law & Order styled 10-minute homemade film which premiered at the NASA leadership retreat last month. Thomas, a NASA astronaut who participated in several Mir Space Station flights through the late 1990s, wanted to show his co-workers at the agency that, despite policy changes after the 2003 Columbia disaster, barriers to innovation and inclusion still dominate the culture at NASA.

Still from the NASA innovation video.

A hybrid of The Office and a live-action Dilbert cartoon, the film features a young engineer’s demoralizing experience as she tangles with an impersonal bureaucracy intent on following administrative protocols. We follow her along as her ideas and enthusiasm for her work are killed off in a slow death of defeating encounters with managers and directors obsessed with process and conformity.

“The point about the video is it’s not fiction,” Thomas told SPACE.com. “I think it is something that does need to be addressed because we don’t want to have another accident,” said Thomas, whose last spaceflight was NASA’s first shuttle flight following the Columbia tragedy. “And in our business, that’s what happens when you have that kind of culture.”

NASA’s response to the video was surprisingly broadminded. “I found it extraordinarily funny and not at all funny,” NASA’s former shuttle program manager Wayne Hale wrote in a NASA blog entry last week. Hale posted the video to his YouTube account where it’s caught the attention of viewers well outside the NASA culture.

The video, which was first posted on Jan. 27 (the day after the extraordinary Aquarian annular solar eclipse) has been seen over 30,000 times.

“It has really been resonating with people,” Thomas said. “I’m enormously surprised.”

GLBT Americans with foreign partners may find some relief from legal struggle this year. The Uniting American Families Act, which will expand immigration law to include same-sex partners, was introduced to the House of Representatives and the Senate on Thursday, Feb. 12. The bill has now been introduced to the House six times in the House and four times in the Senate since 2000, and a combination of increased conservatism and Homeland Security have made immigration to the US nearly impossible for gay and lesbian “love migrants.” Over 40,000 binational same-sex couples reside in the US, relying on tourist, student and temporary work visas to keep their families together, while thousands more have chosen to emigrate. A 218-vote majority is needed to pass the bill in the House, the first step towards becoming law: so far, there are 75 co-sponsors.

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, February 13, 2009, #753 – By ERIC FRANCIS

Aries (March 20-April 19)
By now you may have decided that you need to be more careful who you call a friend. Lately they seem to be arriving in every flavor, and only occasionally what could be properly called friendly. As for this other thing called love, I doubt you’ve been left with the feeling that your luck is running high right now. The paradox of your astrology is about you possessing a distinct magnetism at the same time you’re feeling like you may need to retreat into yourself for a while — which would be a good idea, though not especially easy. You need, at the least, some nights alone and time to consider the many things you feel but which you cannot say. If you’re struggling with anyone, decide whether you want them to be part of your fantasy or part of your reality — or neither.

Read your 2008 annual for Aries. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Aries and Aries rising here.

Taurus (April 19- May 20)
If you live with the feeling that you’re always looking for yourself but can never quite find yourself, you’re now in a rare moment when you can get a new sense of your inner territory. This will be a long story, lasting well through spring; the astrology theme is Venus retrograde in Aries. This may highlight a struggle that smothers you from time to time, which is the difficulty you have connecting with your sense of drive. I would propose that the infamous Taurean stubbornness is more a story about not being able to connect with your motivation, literally, your psychic motor. It’s as if the engine is hot and running, but too often not connected to the wheels. Now is the time to look for the missing link. You will find it if you do.

Read your 2008 annual for Taurus. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Taurus and Taurus rising here.

Gemini (May 20- June 21)
You need to think bigger over the next few days. Most horoscopes are written like the author is talking into a mouse hole. I am writing this one broadcasting from a satellite. Don’t take the “next step” — jump one order of magnitude at least. Take your 10-year plan and turn it into a one-year plan. Let your mind leap to the distant future and see what is happening then, what is necessary and what the culture is going to be doing — and see where you fit in. You have this kind of foresight. The future — and your future — are arriving faster than you might imagine. You have recently been through a spell of seeing what it’s like to be stuck in agreements that no longer serve you. Now you can get the feeling for what you can do when you’re free.

Read your 2008 annual for Gemini. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Gemini and Gemini rising here.

Cancer (June 21- July 22)
We are taught to turn sex into a power trip. The fact that our society blends economic sustenance, security, relationships and sexuality into one mix entrenches the problem to the point where it seems impossible to even recognize. If we want sexual freedom, our supposed economic security is threatened. If we want financial freedom, issues of sex and gender are among the first to arise. If we want emotional freedom, we can threaten every structure of our lives, unless we keep unusually enlightened company. This whole complex of issues is about to explode in your awareness. You’re about to see the light of day, particularly on the one issue: where the demand for social conformity plays into the situation. You are about to see what you would do, if you were free to have your own opinion.

Read your 2008 annual for Cancer. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Cancer and Cancer rising here.

Leo (July 22- Aug. 23)
If you are feeling a powerful pull into a relationship or a significant new opportunity, I suggest you go with it. Any associated discomfort you may feel is about letting go of an old idea of yourself that does not connect with the potentials that you see in the world. The astrological image is one of outgrowing your ego structure, and stretching into something much larger: an entirely new world of circumstances. This is one of those moments when what you perceive externally or in another person far outpaces what you might be feeling as a potential within yourself. That sounds like an opportunity for action; an opportunity to engage with the world and to see not only what you learn, but who you become as a result.

Read your 2008 annual for Leo. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Leo and Leo rising here.

Virgo (Aug. 23- Sep. 22)
You’ve been pacing around one particular bit of psychic territory, wondering why you’re still there. Suddenly, it seems you’re not there anymore, and with that, you’re facing the challenges of a new purpose that may feel so overwhelming that you don’t know where to begin. All you can really do is dive in, which is another way of saying: there is a lot of the past that you need to let go of, and that’s convenient given that the world around you has so much to offer. Get used to the feeling that you will never live up to your potential in the way you used to think of it. What you are embracing is an entirely different concept of potential, and how it relates to something much deeper, your relationship to yourself. Think of it this way. Potential is not about the future. It’s about right now.

Read your 2008 annual for Virgo. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Virgo and Virgo rising here.

Libra (Sep. 22 – Oct. 23)
You have energy; it is a question of where you apply it. It’s clear that you are almost entirely focused on a romantic partnership issue, and that you are holding it out as a kind of ideal. I would caution you against investing in that as your single most important priority. That situation has a life of its own; it is what it is, and it’s pretty good. There is what you could call karmic magnetism that will draw the whole situation forward. It is more challenging on this planet to invest your energy into your own sense of aliveness, passion and creative purpose. Part of why it’s more difficult is because the world is so heavily geared to guide us into doing everything else. You now have the power to break free from a certain mentality that has only held you down. Make sure that your relationship or relationships support this purpose.

Read your 2008 annual for Libra. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Libra and libra rising here.

Scorpio (Oct. 23- Nov. 22)
You seem emotionally overrun, like a room full of computers midsummer without any air conditioning. However, it looks like you’ve calculated your way through one delusion that was blocking you from getting the emotional data that you need. It’s true that one particular decision you are making seems to be taking forever. The stars point to an obsession with balancing different factors that you know will never actually come into equilibrium. There is a factor that you are not seeing, however, and you need to press gently on the situation, and your attitude toward it, and do that gradually until you have the revelation that shifts your whole point of view. Let’s put it this way. You will solve this in a way different than your parents would.

Read your 2008 annual for Scorpio. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Scorpio and Scorpio rising here.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 – Dec. 22)
I suggest you slow down and let your intuition do the work. You are trying to pump a lot of information through and out of your mind, but I think you’re doing it the hard way. The problem is that the answer you’re coming up with intuitively is unlikely to be the one that the people around you agree with, so therefore you’re likely to want to cook the books, revise the report or edit the data; that is, in some way violate what you know to be true. The real question is why you would do that. And there is an answer, but you may not like it; indeed, it would violate your freewheeling, independent self-image. You would not be the first Sagittarian to believe what your PR department is saying about you, but that’s not going to help you live your truth. In fact, you might want to get a new publicist.

Read your 2008 annual for Sagittarius. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Sagittarius and Sagittarius rising here.

Capricorn (Dec. 22- Jan. 20)
There is a complex dance going on between your personality-level growth process and your awareness on some other level of reality: a level you may just be discovering for the first time. You are waking up to yourself, and this is a lot like waking up in the morning: you’re not always willing, but you do it anyway. Here’s how it looks on my Google Maps version of your psyche, known as astrology. You are beginning to experience emotions as receptive, rather than as expressive. In a sense, you are beginning to learn how you feel about how you feel. This is no small development: because what we’re talking about is the emergence of the Inner Witness. Once you learn to observe yourself, anything is possible, in particular, making decisions for yourself that you actually agree with.

Read your 2008 annual for Capricorn. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Capricorn and Capricorn rising here.

Aquarius (Jan. 20- Feb. 19)
Chiron and Neptune have worked together this week to accelerate a healing process, wherein you have come to an understanding of the importance of self-acceptance. That would be self-acceptance no matter what anyone else thinks. Or, for that matter, what you think they think. Human beings drag around tons of fear, but the most toxic of all is the fear of oneself; because it is very directly the fear of existence itself. And, at the beginning of the day, at lunch and at the end of the day, all we have is our existence. I trust that you’ve seen you relieve a lot of tension when you’re honest with yourself, and when you then are honest — down to the last word — with every person around you who you say matters. If you find that you’re not, start asking questions; you’ve passed the point in your personal growth where any discrepancy is safe.

Read your 2008 annual for Aquarius. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Aquarius and Aquarius rising here.

Pisces (Feb. 19- March 20)
With the Sun about to enter Pisces, you’re reaching the end of your solar year, and quite an end it has been. Indeed, quite a year it has been. I am sure you’re left with the feeling that there is a huge story that is still lurking behind the scenes of your awareness. This is true, but you of all the signs are skilled at going back there and bringing the unmanifest into the manifest world. In physics, this is called the implicit order and the explicit order; that which is veiled and exists in potential, and that which is expressed and becomes tangible. Finding the relationship between the two is your learning goal for the next 12 months. Lesson one is mastering fear. The psychic/energetic realm I am talking about is, for most people, entirely dominated by anxiety. That is why most people run in circles their whole lives, and why you are set to run the marathon.

Read your 2008 annual for Pisces. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Pisces and Pisces rising here.

Dear Friend and Reader:

In the late Sixties, shortly after the last series of Saturn-Uranus oppositions, a song called “The Weight” was included on the first album by The Band. Though it got plenty of airplay in its first years, it was never top-40 a hit for the original artists in the United States. But the song has endured for decades, presumably due to being used in films and television programs. I think the song has stayed around so long because its seemingly mysterious story is such a haunting mirror of our time in history.

Segment from The Garden of Earthly Delights. Painting by Hieronymus Bosch.

You’ll remember the song when you hear it — it’s the one that goes, “Take a load off, Fannie, take a load for free / Take a load off, Fannie, and you put the load right on me.”

The song is as simple and complex as a folk tale, though the chorus interspersed between the episodes is what makes it feel so cryptic. (While Robbie Robertson gets the writing credit for this song, the whole band was originally credited, and much of the imagery comes from Dennis Danko, the brother of Rick Danko.)

It’s the story of a tired traveler who one night arrives in a town called Nazareth (Pennsylvania, but they don’t say that). We don’t know how or why he got there, which pretty much sums up our lives. Then a series of strange encounters follows his arrival. The first person he meets won’t tell him where to get a room to sleep, but gives him a big grin and a handshake.

Then he meets Carmen and the Devil. Carmen doesn’t have time to go downtown, but she happily leaves him in the company of the Devil, who has plenty of time on his hands. What an interesting place this turning out to be — he goes to Nazareth and he runs into the Devil.

Next he meets a guy named Luke, who is waiting for the apocalypse. The traveler reminds him about his young bride. Luke asks the traveler to look after her while he hangs out anticipating the end of the world, like so many people are doing right now. For some The End might be the rapture, or the collapse of the economy, or their own personal demise; any excuse to not actually live life.

At the end of the song, the traveler says he has to leave and get back to Miss Fannie. We find out that actually, he was sent as a her messenger to give her regards to everyone he’s just met. They all thought they were pulling fast ones on him, pawning off the people or situations they didn’t want; as it turns out, he was on a karmic journey, doing Fannie’s bidding all along.

Of course, she has passed her stuff along to him — but he at least is conscious of that fact, though perhaps he got himself into a little more than he was expecting: once again, the story of our lives. Play the song a couple of times and you can’t escape the feeling that there is something more going on: something that is left out of the story, and that until we take action to change it, the tale goes round and round.

Personal and Collective Karma

This is a song about the thin membrane between personal and collective karma. To me, this is the theme of Aquarius, the sign of groups, and the sign of the quest for individuating. You could write a lot of astrology about how and why Aquarius got these associations, but let’s keep “The Weight” in mind as an illustration of the way things are, however they got there.

Watch. Painting by Susan Madsen.

Then there’s Monday’s eclipse of the Moon in Leo, which illustrates the same theme. The eclipse is notable, first, for being in an exact opposition to Chiron in Aquarius. That is to say, the Leo Moon is eclipsed by the Earth’s shadow, just as the Aquarius Sun is in an exact conjunction to Chiron. Plenty else is going on in Aquarius: Neptune is there, and Nessus and Jupiter exactly conjunct the North Node. Mars has just arrived, and Mercury is on its way back. This week and through the next month, we are experiencing more than a dozen conjunctions in Aquarius.

The highlight of this eclipse is how Chiron exactly aspects both the Sun and the Moon; we are going to learn something about this potent little planet. Exact in this case means the contact is so close you have to split a degree of the zodiac by a small fraction to measure its precision (the conjunction is exact to seven arc minutes, less than a tenth of a degree). To me this eclipse of the Moon seems to really be about the Sun conjunct Chiron in Aquarius. The Moon, which itself blurs the line between personal and collective, is eclipsed in Leo, the sign of personal identity. This is a penumbral eclipse, so it’s barely visible. It’s like an invisible shadow is being cast over our sense of personal pride.

The Sun is Leo’s ruler. It is the symbol of our personal identity, our sense of glory and our need to shine in the world; and notably, it’s in Aquarius. This is not easy. The Sun and Aquarius have fundamentally different energies. Here, the Sun must carefully investigate its connections to everyone and everything else, and move through the perilous world of interpersonal and group politics — the complex and confusing world of ego. This is tricky enough on its own. In many ways our lives are one long quest to connect with people, to be seen, to be accepted or alternately, to avoid connections and remain invisible.

As members of our society, we are all represented by the Sun in Aquarius, seeking to find a role, to be approved of and at the same time to guard our precious individuality.

Despite all our best efforts, it seems the only real encounters we have are those that are karmically appointed — like mysteriously running into Luke, who is waiting for Judgment Day but who thinks nothing of sacrificing love at the altar of death.

Both the Sun and the Moon are joined by the Chiron connection, and by the Leo connection as well; remember that the Moon is being eclipsed in the sign ruled by the Sun. So there is a sense of one’s need (the Moon) for personal recognition (Leo) being diminished or interrupted in some way, or at least questioned (the eclipse). And this happens to the Sun as well — owing to both the recent solar eclipse, and the presence of Chiron.

Ashamed. Image by Beverly Naidus.

This points to a deep personal vulnerability. Chiron in any form emphasizes the need to be different, or the deep sense that one is different and handicapped because of it. You could say that Chiron is our most vulnerable point, representing what we feel is our deepest flaw, but the other side of that is that with awareness, it becomes our greatest strength. My latest phrase to describe Chiron is The Golden Flaw.

To me Chiron opposite the eclipsed Leo Moon is about how our individual pride is always compromised in relationships, or rather, how necessary it is to let that pride go when we’re in relationship to others, because it really gets in the way. But in this situation, the relationships involved turn out to bring in many people (Sun in Aquarius), who may indeed be connected to one another and have no idea of that fact — like everyone the traveler meets during his short visit to Nazareth.

We have a moment of the conscious light of the Sun being shined on the most vulnerable part of who we are. Note that this vulnerability involves how we relate to others — our friends, our family, our tribe, the public and technology — anything represented by Aquarius. To the extent that you try to not face your deepest wounds, they come to light and we may fear this happens in the most public way. This feels like the fear of being found out or exposed.

To the extent that you do face these injuries or sense of personal vulnerability, you can actually get somewhere. Eclipses are always moments when progress is possible, but this one reaches so close to the heart of who we are that we can truly use it as a lever for self-awareness and a sense of where we fit into the larger scheme of life. That life exists both outside the shell we usually walk around on; and inside, deeper than we typically go or reveal to others.

The Quest for Collective Mass Individuality

We live in a society that is obsessed by one-to-one relationships — by the “special relationship.” But I am beginning to figure out that this is a ruse. I think the real issue is our relationship to the collective, that is, to everyone and everything. In our times, this shows up as an urge to be famous even though you’ve done nothing particularly worthy of fame. There are a lot of Joe the Plumbers running around out there, and many people are obsessed with having as many “friends” on SpaceBook and MyFace as possible.

Abraham Maslow was the psychologist who gave us the hierarchy of needs. Remember that thing? Maslow’s hierarchy puts self-actualization at the top; but before we get there, he argued, our needs for belonging must be fulfilled. Along the way, belonging somehow became conformity. Rather than being a stepping-stone to actualization of our potential or capacities, it is more like a boulder prohibiting further movement.

Alice Bailey, the theosophical author/channel, put it a different way. In her discussion of Aquarius, she notes the difference between mass consciousness and group consciousness. A group, she says, can only be composed of individuals. A mass of people are the ones who have not individuated and who cannot therefore be a group. Conformity is mass consciousness. Therefore the alignment between the individual and a group, Aquarius style, is that a group is a group of individuals. And therefore individuating is a prerequisite for being part of that group. She has things in a different order than Maslow, but her theory seems just as valid.

Many psychological studies illustrate the perverse extent we will go to have the feeling of conforming to others, or to have the perception of conforming. With a lot of help from advertising, we are conditioned nearly around the clock to express our individuality by imitating what everyone else does, which not surprisingly involves buying something that everyone else buys, and which everyone else can see.

We can then wonder where we went; why we feel like we don’t exist, are not special, are not even different. Note that the traditional ruler of Aquarius is Saturn, which is associated with the enforcement of boundaries, rules and laws. The Saturn principle, Aquarius-styled, is about staying in line. But in a “free society” nobody would buy that. So we have to be told we’re actually unique. And try as we may to reduce ourselves to incontrovertible data, we cannot control how others perceive us.

Because Aquarius tends to rapidly crystallize patterns, it can be one of the most lock-step energies of the zodiac, involved with things like fashion, trends and the mandatory proliferation of technology. You could call it the sign of friendly fascism, usually involving the voluntary form of mandatory. First there are all the social rules, too numerous to contain in a database. Everyone loves their iPod, which is the modern equivalent of the Little Red Book. Everybody loves their blue jeans and considers them a deeply personal expression of their identity, which coincidentally looks like everyone else’s deeply personal, individual expression.

Shadows and Light. Photo by Vikki Bouett.

One interesting thing to notice is that our stunning Aquarius moment also happens when the two rulers of Aquarius — traditional and modern, Saturn and Uranus — are face to face. It’s like we are trying to shatter all of these models at the same time, even as Aquarius tries to convert the entire world into data.

Not only is everything being reduced to data, we are personally being reduced to data. Social networking sites or personal ad services are like exercises in public relations; someone once remarked that when we meet these days, we don’t meet one another, we meet our publicists. Social networking sites ask us to tick all the boxes that apply, and then expect that somehow this is going to tell others what they have in common with us. Hello, I’m a Goth Burner Indy Rocker Straight Edge Slacker. What are you? Oh, excuse me — who are you?

Before you answer, tell me this. Observe yourself. Are you going to answer based on what is actually true for you, or based on what I want to hear? How scared are you that I’m going to judge you, or that your lover is, or your business partner, or your friends or your boss?

Do you live in some degree of secrecy or deception as a result? Are you going to try to decide in advance what makes you acceptable, or are you going to answer from your heart? And what fears attend either possibility? The fear, on the one hand, of giving up who you are in order to be accepted; and on the other, the fear of being rejected, that is, thrown out of the tribe, when you actually reveal your true self, and deserve to be embraced for that.

This is the crisis we face; in our moment, this is “The Weight” of society that we are carrying, and if you ask me, the apocalypse we fear: the moment of being real or nothing.

Yours & truly.

Additional research: David Arner, Tracy Delaney, Christine Farber

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

THERE’S A new word in town, one I hear repeated over and over: purity. It seems to be the one assigned to Barack Obama’s vision of governance, although I don’t remember him using it in any of his speeches. In fact, I’m pretty sure that a man so thoroughly pragmatic would never use that word, especially in regard to reforming a government that is in shambles after decades of infighting and institutionalized corruption.

A Girl’s Garden. Painting by Kathleen McGuiness.

The Neptunian qualities of our new President — he’s a blank page for our hopes and dreams to be written on — and the adoring response from those who have internalized his message of hope and reform, have set the bar for success improbably high; and given the Right an easy target. Barack Obama is not going to walk on water, save us all from ourselves and do it without breaking a sweat, but he does have the potential to bring an end to our moral and ethical hemorrhage, slow up the international decline of American power and bring the nation together to collectively face a global financial emergency — if we let him.

As Obama fleshes out his administration, he’s just endured a series of jostles on his high-wire; American opinion, still woven through with an archaic and immature thread of Puritanism, has cried foul over the less-than-perfect track record of his nominees. The Right is gleeful and the Left is furious; I’m perplexed. Where are the grownups?

Nobody appears to be doing a check and balance of Obama’s errors against those of his predecessor; Barack’s election was a boomerang to the sleazy, corrupt and arrogant Bushies, yet the difference between his recent appointment stumbles and, say, Bush’s wide, and often covert, embrace of oil executives and corporate powerbrokers in the Oval Office is a mile wide. You wouldn’t think so, from the response, both Right and Left, over the appointment glitches of Timothy Geithner, Nancy Killefer and Tom Daschle.

Dear Subscriber: Thank you for making Newt World Stories the most successful project so far in Planet Waves history. Your letters about the astrological readings have been touching, and made me feel like the incredible amount of work we put into the project was truly worth the effort and expense. The project — the 11th annual edition, and one of our traditions at Planet Waves — is beginning to collect reviews. One prominent Canadian website, Suite 101, wrote recently, “Published by PlanetWaves — the innovative, outspoken site for astrology, spirituality, sexuality, culture and politics — the annual horoscope project Next World Stories is a massive piece of collaborative work that talks about what it means to be human in these chaotic, challenging, changing times.” The review continues by describing Next World Stories as “a powerful, multi-disciplinary resource that ‘uses astrology as a visioning tool to help you create your reality’. The horoscopes, of course, are the linchpin of the whole thing, written by journalist-astrologer Eric Francis with his trademark wit, sensitivity and visionary insight.” Truly an honor — and we are pleased to say that individual signs cost less than half of what you will pay on most other websites, part of our commitment to making our work accessible. To my readers — we could not have done this without you. Order Next World Stories Here

Coming Up in Daily Astrology and Adventure:

This February the omens say you may meet with a green-tailed beauty. Comet Lulin is her name. From Feb. 6 until February 24 (when she passes closest to Earth) Comet Lulin will be visible to us on clear nights, without the aid of binoculars or telescopes.

Comet Lulin on Feb. 1. Photo courtesy of amateur astronomer Jack Newton, Arizona.

Comet Lulin was first discovered in 2007. Quanzhi Ye, the Taiwanese astronomer who found the comet when he was just 19 years old, explains that Lulin is rare not only for its green, glowing tail, but also for the method of its discovery. “This is a ‘comet of collaboration’ between Taiwanese and Chinese astronomers,” said Lulin in a NASA interview. “The discovery could not have been made without a contribution from both sides of the Strait that separates our countries. Chi Sheng Lin and other members of the Lulin Observatory staff enabled me to get the images I wanted, while I analyzed the data and found the comet.”

On Feb. 6, we’ll get the first opportunity to see the comet with unaided eyes: Lulin will pass through the fulcrum of the scales in the constellation Libra, the sign of partnership — or collaboration. On Feb. 16 it will pass the star, Spica, in the constellation Virgo — the sign of service. Spica is a star of first magnitude, which means that even city-dwellers can catch its light in the sky. Finally, on Feb. 24, Comet Lulin will arrive at its closest point (38 million miles from Earth) and come within a few degrees of Saturn, in the constellation Leo.

Chinese astrology traditionally interprets comets as important omens of history-making events. Comets are neither good or ill-omened by themselves, but interpreted in the context of other phenomenon. Passing through the constellations of Libra, Virgo and Leo, we might consider this message from Lulin: through partnership we serve to rebuild our image of leadership. It’s about as good an omen as you can get from a green-tailed beauty.

Google Earth, the computer program that can provide visuals of anywhere in the world, released its latest version this week. Previously, the program offered satellite imagery, aerial photography and GIS 3D only for areas above sea level: bodies of water, particularly the oceans, were either blank or looked like cheap blue filler.

But now, Google Earth 5.0 explores the ocean to its deepest depth: the Marianas Trench, and includes famous underwater footage like Jacques Cousteau’s torch divers. New features also include historic imagery, where you can view up to 60 years of photographs from a single location to track changes over time, and tour recording, allowing the user to document points of interest and send the map to other users.

The biggest advance in the Google Earth project was announced on Wednesday, Feb. 2: Google Mars. It currently includes three types of data from the Red Planet: Elevation, Visible and Infrared. Google is currently working with NASA to advance Google Mars so it can be used similarly to Google Earth. There is a 3-D mock-up, made by Arizona State University, to show what it will look like. You can view it here.

An Austrian insurance company made the headlines this week for discriminating in the hiring process — based on zodiac signs. The Salzburg insurance company, after reviewing a statistical study conducted in Austria, concluded that the best employees in the country had only five signs.

First appearing over the weekend, Salzburg’s ad read: “We are looking for people over 20 for part-time jobs in sales and management with the following star signs: Capricorn, Taurus, Aquarius, Aries and Leo.”

The public, along with many equality groups, were enraged, and anti-discrimination authorities conducted an investigation. In the end, though, it was determined that in Austria discrimination only counts when it’s based on race, age and gender: not the sign you were born under.

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, February 6, 2009, #752 – By ERIC FRANCIS

Planetarium

Monday’s Leo Full Moon is a penumbral lunar eclipse in Leo, remarkable because the Moon is opposite Chiron and the Sun is conjunct Chiron exact to a small fraction of a degree (seven arc minutes). This focuses this eclipse on the qualities of the first centaur planet. Aspecting the Sun and the Moon, Chiron is relating to both the male and female principles of the human psyche.

Aries (March 20-April 19)
It’s true that your charm is peak level, but you may sense that people don’t exactly trust you. Is it them, or is it you who have your identity mixed up with someone who brings chaos rather than order to the situations in your life? You seem to be operating with the perception that you have two agendas. I don’t think that’s true. But if you don’t know what your agenda is, then you may be hobbled by the belief that you really cannot trust yourself. This is the thing that kills confidence before it takes its first step. In particular, you need to ask whether your male friends and colleagues hold you as trustworthy and vice versa. Claim back your projections. Claim back your false perceptions. Step into your right to be honest.

Read your 2008 annual for Aries. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Aries and Aries rising here.

Taurus (April 19- May 20)
Your chart is a setup for funneling your current sense of some great mystery of who you are into your professional goals. I suggest you be aware that you’re working with a kind of deficit that will lead you to want to compensate in some other way, such as conquering the world. This is how it’s usually done, but you simply cannot afford to let your attention lapse where your personal growth or self-awareness are concerned. What you don’t notice about yourself you’re likely to see as flaws in other people. Any sense of emotional emptiness you feel, you’re likely to discern is the result of others being unwilling to maintain self-awareness. What you observe may be true, but until you’re in contact with your feelings, your senses and the odd dreams you seem to be having lately, your observations will matter little.

Read your 2008 annual for Taurus. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Taurus and Taurus rising here.

Gemini (May 20- June 21)
Where are you looking for inspiration? Recent developments in a close relationship, despite having worked out well enough for everyone’s mutual benefit, appear to have you wanting to head for the Himalayas. I think you fear there’s something, despite all the working out, that didn’t quite get worked out. I would guess that you feel you’re invested in the situation to a degree that you cannot support or sustain right now, and you may be feeling you don’t belong there. I don’t suggest you run too far. Stay in contact with the litany of thoughts, doubts and sense that you’re not good enough. The astrology is moving in your favor. Developments in the coming days and weeks will gradually take the pressure off and increase your sense of freedom, but until then, be aware that you may be feeling cagey.

Read your 2008 annual for Gemini. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Gemini and Gemini rising here.

Cancer (June 21- July 22)
You need to make some important financial decisions, and you need to do this with a sense of focus and adventure. The more you narrow your goals and your financial commitments, the more opportunity will open up for you. The two are related, and the connection point involves the conservation of energy, which includes both money and mental resources. And it involves focusing your eyes, so that you can see. More than you may imagine is available to you. Let go of the standard of perfection — you may not even be aware you drag this around. There is such a thing as good enough, and you are quite close to that point right now. Someone you are associating with on some pretty important matters needs to cross about two more mental hurdles to have your full trust. Give them a chance.

Read your 2008 annual for Cancer. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Cancer and Cancer rising here.

Leo (July 22- Aug. 23)
Rarely do we see the extent of projection in our relationships. A little self-awareness is all it would take. The problem is that the self-awareness that would lead to witnessing this projection would dismantle all of our ideas about relationships, the ones we think we hold so dear. Most of our rules of right and wrong would fall apart; most of our accusations placed on others would be meaningless, because in large measure, we want the same things out of life. Yet here is the question: do we proceed guided by the aspect of our awareness who is strong and healthy, or do we proceed under the authority of the aspect of awareness who feels injured? In this matter, we do have a choice, but for a while it has to be made about once every minute. Now is an excellent time to practice.

Read your 2008 annual for Leo. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Leo and Leo rising here.

Virgo (Aug. 23- Sep. 22)
Your desires are still running ahead of your ability to process them, but you do seem to be moving in a healthy direction. One thought at a time, you’re beginning to see that you have the ability to make choices that acknowledge what you feel, what you think, and what you want. I know that this often feels like trying to thread two needles blindfolded. It helps if you turn on the lights and open your eyes. The issue of the week is likely to surface as some situation requiring you to work out an issue of devotion with someone in your life. You’re in a delicate spot of examining where your ideals conflict with your true needs; and where your expectations of others are clouded by your own idea that you cannot measure up to what they want from you. Honest conversations are a good place to start. All expectations are potentially dangerous, but the unstated ones are poison.

Read your 2008 annual for Virgo. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Virgo and Virgo rising here.

Libra (Sep. 22 – Oct. 23)
Most original works of art are created from the feeling of an inner flaw or the need to heal. I think this is an altogether better state than creation from presumed mastery, mostly because a state of growth gives us something to reach for, whereas the idea of previously attained mastery does not. Therefore, if you feel like you’re creating or loving from an imperfect space, that’s the space to occupy, because it’s where you’re going to draw on the best of your strength and your potential. You may need to get over the feeling that your own inner sense of not being fully aligned is resulting in work or expression that is not fully aligned, or making your point adequately. Remember what the Grateful Dead say in their magnificent suite of songs, Terrapin Station: that the storyteller’s job is to shed light and not to master.

Read your 2008 annual for Libra. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Libra and libra rising here.

Scorpio (Oct. 23- Nov. 22)
A dialog is underway between your ideas and your feelings. In your life the two have a remarkable similarity, this, despite the general consensus that Scorpio is an emotionally driven animal. Your particular form of evolution is about integrating both sides of your brain, so that you are capable of complete thought and complete feeling. Then there is a second kind of integration, which (at least in the astrological sense) is vertical in nature. It involves what you experience internally coupled with what you accomplish. You might ask why you manage to pull off such great things when you’re feeling the most insecure. The next question is: do you like the feeling, or can you have the great achievements and enjoy the feeling of quiet confidence?

Read your 2008 annual for Scorpio. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Scorpio and Scorpio rising here.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 – Dec. 22)
Keep your focus and take notes. You want to document every step of whatever process you’re going through: it looks like something about allowing yourself a new set of dreams or visions for your life. What you’re really doing is working with some new ideas, which are evolving rapidly at the moment. I suggest you stick to simple, clear plans for what you want to do now, which are followed up by fast action. At the same time, recognize that a limit has been removed on what you can do in the long run. The sky is indeed the limit, though you need to be practical how you get there. Remember that it was bicycle repairmen who invented the first airplane, not the purveyors of the automobile.

Read your 2008 annual for Sagittarius. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Sagittarius and Sagittarius rising here.

Capricorn (Dec. 22- Jan. 20)
A good financial plan today is better than a perfect one tomorrow. If partners are not coming through with their end of the deal, you may feel like you’re going it alone. The thing about alone for you is really a lot more: you’re always thinking in terms of what benefits everyone, and the people who your thinking is designed to serve are the ones who must put up the most in the way of support and resources. If someone is bowing out of the game, trust that you don’t need them. Then you will have room for new influences and partnership opportunities. Make sure whoever you get involved with is the “let’s help everyone” type rather than the “let’s help me” type.

Read your 2008 annual for Capricorn. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Capricorn and Capricorn rising here.

Aquarius (Jan. 20- Feb. 19)
Monday’s eclipse in your opposite sign Leo may leave you feeling like your fatal flaw has been exposed once and for all. Really, it’s your Golden Flaw: the one that holds the key to success, freedom or recreating yourself. The Golden Flaw always has its source in something we perceive as being the thing that can wreck everything, such as a personality trait. And for a moment, you’re going to get a glimpse of how what you think of as your biggest problem becomes the thing that can move you the furthest ahead. The catch is you might forget what it was the next day. Make a point to remember; this will be worth remembering.

Read your 2008 annual for Aquarius. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Aquarius and Aquarius rising here.

Pisces (Feb. 19- March 20)
You have a state of mind available wherein you can consider any possibility for who you are, for who you might be, for who you want to be and who it might terrify you to be. I would guess that you feel like you know things you’re not supposed to know, or have access to perceptive abilities that might scare you. Remember, you’re not really seeing the future; you are seeing potentials or what the Seth books call “probable selves.” Why might one self be more probable than another? Well, because you want it to be (a conscious desire), because you need it to be (an unconscious desire) or because you lapse in your attention and make a choice that you were not actually planning to make. Therefore, pay attention.

Read your 2008 annual for Pisces. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Pisces and Pisces rising here.

Dear Friend and Reader:

Within a day or so of the Aquarius eclipse overnight Sunday to Monday, a woman gave birth to octuplets, one of the few births of eight live children on record. Nearly 100,000 jobs were reported lost by American industry. A recently unemployed man shot his family of five, then killed himself.

Venus unfurled. Photo by Eric Francis/Book of Blue.

Barack Obama was on Capitol Hill working to win the support of reluctant Republican legislators, whose political language (and notion of economic relief) seems to include only two words, tax cuts. Not a single Republican member of the House of Representatives voted for his economic proposal, reminding us they still exist. Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich refused to show up for his impeachment trial before the State Senate, and chose the talk show circuit to declare his innocence instead, only to appear at his trial at the last moment to testify. He has since been removed from office.

If you’re feeling your way though life right now, it might seem like we’re at the chaos point. The amount of data flying at us seems to be increasing exponentially: it probably is (we need evermore data processing devices to keep up with it, or is it the other way around?). Very little of that data is personally or culturally relevant. However, one interesting bit of information did percolate through, and was sent to me separately by at least five different people this week. Sunday before the eclipse, The New York Times Magazine published an article looking at the work of a new generation of female sex researchers who are studying the mysteries of female desire, or trying to. When I posted it to the Planet Waves web log, it got nearly 50 reader comments.

The lead study covered by the Times was conducted by Dr. Meredith Chivers, a Canadian psychologist and professor at Queen’s University in Ontario. She studied the sexual responses of men and women to a diversity of visual and auditory stimuli: men and women having sex, men together, women together, men and women masturbating (separately), bonobos having sex, a man walking on a beach and a woman exercising.

The data were collected by one objective method (a probe in or on the genitals to sense minute changes in physical arousal from second to second), and reporting by keypad to describe whether the subject thought he or she was aroused by a particular scene. Then the two sets of data — the body’s responses, and the mind’s responses — were compared.

Alyssa from Book of Blue. Photo by Eric Francis.

Admitting that sex is better suited for exploration in poetry and art, and that there are problems inherent in this kind of research, I’m going to assume that Chivers’ experiment is valid, and focus on the interpretation of her findings. I think that the excitement generated by the article is an indication of a deep craving we have for some real information about sex, rather than the abstinence/hypersex messages that we get all the time.

Chivers demonstrated that men tend to have a narrow focus of what they think turns them on, and those are the things that their bodies respond to in the form of their penis growing more erect. If you’re a straight man, you get aroused by heterosexual sex or women together or a woman masturbating, and you know it. If you’re a gay man, you get aroused by images of men having sex or masturbating, and you know it. The copulating bonobos (despite being our closest primate cousins, who are known to have sex for pleasure and not just reproduction) did nothing for the men, consistent with what they reported. For men, Chivers determined that conscious arousal corresponded with physical response.

Women also have a narrow focus of what they think turns them on. Straight women said they were turned on by images of a heterosexual couple making love; lesbian women by images of a lesbian couple. But when the responses of their bodies were measured by blood flow and vaginal lubrication, they responded to nearly everything sexual, including the bonobos. The scene that got the least response was a buff man walking on the beach. Everything else, including the exercising woman, increased their blood flow and vaginal secretions significantly.

What does this data tell us? Well, Chivers and the Times expressed the findings as indicating that women are out of contact with what turns them on. They think very little does; in reality, nearly everything does. Men were described as having equally narrow interests, but as being more connected and aligned with their desires. I think that most men, including myself, would take this as vindicating.

Making Love to Chaos. Photo by Eric Francis/Book of Blue.

Men who want to coexist with women sexually have nearly all encountered the maze of yes meaning no, no meaning yes, maybe meaning yes, yes meaning maybe, no meaning maybe and maybe meaning anything or nothing at all. The subtext: don’t believe anything women say. Forget about the Antioch College rules of sexual engagement (nearly universally adopted by campuses around the United States); there is no negotiating where yes and no have null values, or where nobody honors their meaning. Keep assuming; you’re more aware than they are. Women aren’t going to say what they want or what they feel because they don’t know, or they’re confused by the diversity of things they feel, or they don’t want to commit in words to something they might regret having said later. Now we have a scientific study, apparently one of many, that seems to establish this feminine property.

Chivers says she teaches her students that “arousal does not equal consent.” But in a world where we are trained to not speak honestly about sex, just to do it or avoid it, we might well ask what does. Usually, a woman signals with her body and not her words, and often this signaling is “unconscious,” such as open body language meaning she is open to approach. In practical reality, arousal does equal consent, and we all know it — until you start talking. Then the cognitive mind does indeed get in the way, unless the goal is awareness (which it usually is not, but which it surely can be).

One thing we can surmise from this study is that women are turned on by life itself. Let’s give this a name: biophilia. Anyone who has been erotically close to a woman might have noticed that her entire body and emotional field can become a sex organ under the right conditions; a puff of breeze blowing or the sound of a voice can be experienced as erotic. If you’re a man and you have this kind of response, you’re probably a poet.

If one lets go into that kind of general state of being turned on by the world, that’s a lot like total vulnerability. Whatever the cultural condition, mental censorship would be one possible adaptation to that amount of sensory input. Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception described the mind as a reducing valve; in this respect, women’s conscious minds were demonstrated by this study to be functioning precisely as such, filtering out their much wider physical and psychic perspective. That women might deny their response, or not be aware of it, may also be a product of conditioning, such as the feeling that their opinions or desires do not matter, or that they will be punished for them.

Mirror for Kimberly the night of the annular eclipse. Photo by Eric Francis from Book of Blue.

There are evolutionary reasons women need to be so sensitive. One human female function is taking care of the young, and that requires high awareness, including empathy (being attuned to the feelings of others). It also calls for setting your own feelings aside with a kind of mental override; or being consumed by the emotional environment of the bond with the child or children. There’s not a lot of room for self-actualizing in that space, that is, having a conscious relationship with specific desires. Neither do traditional models of relationship leave women a lot of room for self-actualizing. I’ve heard nearly as many stories of men becoming jealous of their partner going back to school as I have heard about their friendship with or interest in another man.

What I think is more interesting is that the focus of men’s desires and responses were identified as being so narrow. I don’t hold it as a virtue that men succeed at knowing what turns them on, within a very narrow range; it could be that both their minds and their bodies are shut down to the rest of reality that they don’t think interests them, but which might, were they more open. Evolutionary roles differ as well: when you hunt an animal, you must be aware of the environment to the extent that you listen to the birds and don’t fall off a cliff, but that’s all designed to help you focus on one goal. This includes the goal of pursuing a woman, often described by both men and women as a kind of hunt.

Men tend to be socialized into roles that require meeting a goal. Women tend to be socialized into roles that require them to be generally responsive to their environment; multitasking is an example of this responsiveness. At least the physical bodies of women are still connected to the full spectrum of experience, even if their minds have a different opinion; that is, even if their minds are becoming more like the bioenergetic systems of men: attempting to focus on one goal or one acceptable stimulus.

If you know something about astrology, you know we’re talking about Venus and Mars here. Both men and women have Venus and Mars in their charts (they never leave the solar system). It is socializing that drives the sexes to express one gender energy at the expense of another, or to fail to integrate the other energy.

The Birth of Venus (1912) by Odilon Redon.

Venus is a full-spectrum planet associated with females, femaleness, and desire on the level of receptivity. Castaneda proposed that the universe itself is female. To me it is the principle of emotional intelligence. It’s also considered an indicator of what we value; that is, what is truly important to us in a deep and abiding way.

Most people would associate Venus more with love than with sex, though it depends on your definition of sex. It rules Taurus, which has extremely strong preserver energy; and Libra, which is inherently relational, and seeks beauty and balance. The glyph of Venus is a circle with a cross below it; grounding is suggested, and a connection between the “celestial” and the “mundane.” The image is reminiscent of women’s genitals beneath a pregnant belly.

Mars is a circle with an arrow reminiscent of the Sagittarius glyph. That arrow is about attaining a one-pointed goal. As Dale O’Brien once suggested to me, Mars is a sharp object. It’s designed to penetrate. Penetration requires identifying, seeking and hitting the mark. There is an element of precision required, and danger suggested. That arrow, the working end of Mars, is grounded in the circle; perhaps the world. It’s focused upwardly, on an idea or goal (incidentally, at the angle of an erect penis meeting a pair of balls). Mars rules Aries, which is about self and initiative; and Scorpio, the sign associated with the genitals.

Women’s physical sexual responses are more closely aligned with what we think of as Venus, which is a biophilic kind of energy. The desire of warrior Mars is equally intent on killing or conquering as it is on impregnating. We all have both planets in our charts, though men tend to be more like Mars and women more like Venus. This is primarily due to socializing, though biology — itself shaped by the socializing processes in the environment — is directly involved.

What astrology does not generally admit is how profoundly corrupted both of these energies are right now. A few examples will suffice. If Venus is about emotional intelligence, beauty and what we value, think of how these are stamped on (or out) by advertising, which manipulates and dictates to us what we’re supposed to think and feel. There are thousands of drugs on the market designed to override our feelings. The entire environment is awash in chemicals that mimic female hormones (called xenoestrogenic compounds), disrupting both male and female hormonal processes, psychology and I believe our sexual signaling.

Mars is focused by social conditioning on the goal of acquisition, conquering or getting off. In our era, its warrior energy is generally not allocated toward social processes like environmentalism or the peace movement, but rather programmed to connect with the desire to kill by countless media images of combat and death; or to fuck as many women as possible, generally in imaginary form (pornography). As many have noted, it’s perfectly appropriate to show blown-up body parts and dead children on primetime television, but a breast sets off the alarms, the spam traps and the wrath of the FCC.

A contemplative bonobo at the Cincinnati Zoo. Bonobos, our closest primate cousins, are the only primates so far observed doing sex for pleasure and not just reproduction. They have same-sex experiences and masturbate together. Photo by Kabir Bakie.

Women, more closely associated with Venus, are in a double bind. On the one hand, they are told that to have any value, they must go out and work and be like men. Raising children has been devalued (including by economics) to the point where few people do it full time, which is a recipe for society falling apart. Their biology is still in tune with the physical necessities of children and partnerships, while their minds are being trained to deny these things and participate in the world, if only out of economic necessity. Even the role of Venus as caregiver is being pathologized out of existence; “caregiving” is a psychological buzzword for a woman denying her own needs, and is considered something to remedy.

Many men are gradually growing out of their conquering warrior roles, and becoming more attuned to the full spectrum of experience, which includes intuitive responsiveness to relationship partners and to the needs of children. Yet they too are in a double bind; this is extremely difficult in a world that does not value this psychic posture. We still live in a world of women who often don’t know how to handle male sensitivity or emotional availability; who assume, perhaps out of ignorance, conditioning or convenience, that men are impervious to pain — and this itself is a profound double bind, and one that has not been identified in any gender studies discussion that I’ve ever encountered.

As relates to men, I have another question: how do we handle women opening up to the full spectrum of their sexuality? By its inherent many-valent nature, there are episodes from the lives of sexually awake women that would explicitly exclude men. Others might involve other men. They probably would, once the dictum of monogamy were lifted. Ultimately the freedom to express the prerogatives of what amounts to infinite erotic potential must be hers exclusively, if it is to be anything at all, and this will be the tipping point in female equality to men.

We can see that the world is in chaos right now; we see this wherever we look. James Hillman, one of the preeminent Jungians of the 20th century, talks about how Venus would call to Chaos every night and they would made love. Because they made love, she would seduce him into not completely destroying the world. The role of Venus is to stop this beautiful world from being swallowed up by insanity, which apparently existed long before television.

Tom’s cupped hand. Photo by Eric Francis / Book of Blue.

But Venus right now is in a difficult situation. For one thing, there is an overwhelming amount of chaos to embrace, including hormonal chaos that scrambles the body’s signals; the chaos of a world at war; and a world in economic transition/transformation based on a previous collapse of values. For another, there is the constant influence that she must be more like Mars: one-pointed. She is pressured constantly to close her mind to the profound beauty of life, and cease to be biophilic. And we know that she’s being conditioned or pressured to shut down to the pain of war — otherwise we would be hearing more from her. (We will learn more about this cycle of myths during the upcoming Venus retrograde in Aries, which touches on the precious subject of narcissism.)

Shutting down will not work, is not working. We need more sensitivity, not less. We need to focus on goals, but not at the expense of reality. And we need to consciously embrace the chaos that is gradually enveloping us. How do we call to the chaos with love, and not try to delete it, filter it out or stick it in a folder? How do we engage the chaos — perhaps as a creative source?

Venus wants to say: I can take on chaos. I can make you feel wonderful, and take the edge off of your desire to destroy. I can embrace anything (and this does need to include emotionally sensitive men). For us who are alive today, this is a political task, an environmental necessity, a relational task and a sexual one as well: it has a name, Kaleo. This is the most divine gesture of loving the universe, the core cosmic dharma of Venus.

Yours and truly,

with help from Rachel Asher, Christine Farber and Maria Katzenbach.

From the comic Dykes to Watch Out For, by Alison Bechdel. The male character, Stu, is an example of a more sensitive male that’s begun to emerge in our culture.

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

IN NORMAL TIMES, the year-end holidays signal that quiet, introspective period we call winter. This year, we had a paradigm-shaking event to take us through January; as cold as the world seemed in this last month, our hearts warmed us. Now we await Valentine’s Day to give us another break from our daily routines, and then Saint Patrick’s Day will cheer us on until Easter and the coming of spring.

The mouse hole. Photo by Rachel Asher.

Here in the Pea Patch, winter grinds slowly and with little romance. We are planted in that middle ground between stunningly dramatic snows to the North and milder, less volatile weather to the South. Color has drained away and my world is dressed in shades of black, brown and grey; the occasional flash of cardinal wings offers a welcome bright red counterpoint to an almost surrealistic drabness. The wind blows bitter and the bare, tangled trees shiver in constant motion, as if they’re dancing a bit to keep warm. The shimmer of reflection off the lake has become a still glint as ice creeps farther and farther across its broad face.

You know it’s winter here when you jot down the phone number to the neighbor that has a 4-wheel drive. It’s winter when you overhear conversations at the local greasy spoon about having to break the ice at the watering hole with a backhoe so the cattle can drink. It’s winter when the fourth blanket you put on your bed just about does it, but — as you discover around 3 in the morning — not quite. And it’s winter when the constant din of mind chatter begins to doze off occasionally, leaving you to quieter, more essential thoughts.

Ruth Stout, guru to gardeners in the last century, put it this way: “There is a privacy about it which no other season gives you. In spring, summer and fall people sort of have an open season on each other; only in the winter, in the country, can you have longer, quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself.”

Eric, I want you to know that i am stunned by the accuracy of your 2008 annual for Libra. It is unimaginably profound, like a mirror where i see my inner face. i want to express my deep gratitude for such an inspiring work. —————- Eric, I’m reading what you’ve written & it’s like my higher self wrote it to me as a clue! And it’s written to Taurus, not ME. I think you get my drift. Your antennae are definitely working & then some. Keep up the good work, ether man! Order Next World Stories Here

Coming Up in Daily Astrology and Adventure:

For the first time in the history of astronomy, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope is delivering us a weather report from outside our solar system. The weather observed — volatile with a chance of eccentric — is on planet HD 80606b, which is 190 light years away, meaning we’re receiving the report from 190 years ago. The planet, discovered by Dominique Naef of the Geneva Observatory, Switzerland in 2001, is gaseous, similar to Jupiter. HD 80606b is one half of a binary star system, though the stars are more than arm-length from each other — the twins are separated by a distance close to that between our Sun and Saturn, times 125.

Computer-generated images charting the development of sever weather patterns on HD 80606b. NASA image.

In fact, distance isn’t the only thing that’s bigger outside of our solar system: HD 80606b is about four times larger than Jupiter (our largest planet by a long-shot) and its weather is much crazier. To understand the parallels, consider that Jupiter’s biggest storm is ongoing, known as The Great Red Spot, an anticyclonic storm that began at least two centuries ago, and makes a full counter-clockwise rotation in about six days. The weather conditions on HD 80606b change every six hours.

Here’s how it happens: HD 80606b takes about 111 days to make a complete elliptical orbit, so its year is 2/3 shorter than an Earth year, while its days are 34 hours long. If you’re confused, you’re not alone: according to NASA, it has the most unusual orbit ever recorded. As it nears its sun-like star, the orbit speeds up, and its proximity to the star changes from 2.8 to 78 million miles away. This quick shift results in temperature changes from 980 to 2,240 degrees Fahrenheit, all in a six-hour period.

The Spitzer Telescope, responsible for gathering this data, is named after Lyman Strong Spitzer, Jr., the man behind the Hubble Space Telescope and the race to the Moon.

When Ralph Kramden threatened to pop his Alice “to the Moon!” it’s unlikely he would have dropped $10,000 dollars to do it. Star Trek fans, however, will be relieved that their favorite husband and wife team, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and his producer/actress wife, Majel, will spare no expense to make it to the Moon — or rather, deep space — together.

Gene and Majel Roddenberry, married on Earth, in Japan, August 6th, 1969.

Jan. 26, the Celestis Memorial Flight Service announced plans to send the dynamic space duo on the maiden voyage of the USS Voya– er, the Voyager Memorial Spaceflight Service. It’s mission: to seek out and find a suitable eternal resting place. Launch date, 2012.

The flight will carry a payload of several ounces of the Roddenberry’s cremated ashes, as well digitized tributes to the couple from Star Trek fans.

We recommend a launch date of May 10, 2012. On this date the asteroid Roddenberry will form an exact conjunction at 7+ degrees Aries with the hyper-spacey, futuristic planet Uranus. Asteroid Roddenberry will also form a trine that day with two points in Saggitarius, the sign of long-distance travel. The two points are the North Node and the asteroid Juno. The North Node gives us a symbol of our future; Juno is the symbol of the wife or the spouse. Clearly the future for Majel Roddenberry could be a very long-distance trip. Getting shot into space would certainly qualify.

We wish them both a peaceful voyage.

Weekly Horoscope for Friday, January 30, 2009, #751 – By ERIC FRANCIS

Aries (March 20-April 19)
Now that Mercury is about to station direct, you can resolve a professional issue by the one method you have not tried yet — stating clearly what you need. Be aware of an emotional block to doing precisely that: which may be the feeling that you will come uncorked, or reveal some deep contradiction in yourself the moment you attempt some clarity. This may help explain why you’ve been so pushy on the one hand, but reluctant to reveal your inner thoughts on the other. In any event, Mercury does not change directions until Monday, and I suggest you not take action or declare your intentions till then. When Mercury stations direct or retrograde, it always comes with a revelation of information or a new layer of truth, and this is exactly what you need.

Read your 2008 annual for Aries. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Aries and Aries rising here.

Taurus (April 19- May 20)
Venus is now getting into position for one of her rare retrogrades, which spans from March 6 through April 17. For you, this process begins when Venus enters Aries next week, which is likely to have a double effect on you psychologically. One thing you may experience is the sense of being detached from yourself, unable to make contact with your usual motives. Another thing you may experience is a sense of having access to some version of your secret self. The sequence of astrological events, however, suggests that you are coming to terms with some sense of loss, ego death or enforced growth. If you go through that process consciously, despite the temptation to go to sleep, you will discover that this is a truly meaningful awakening.

Read your 2008 annual for Taurus. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Taurus and Taurus rising here.

Gemini (May 20- June 21)
Capricorn for you is the sign of agreements, and that’s where your ruling planet Mercury is coming to a stop, turning around and returning to forward motion. You may feel like some understanding or arrangement is demanding more alterations than a tailor sees in a month. Accusations or the sense that everyone is a flake may be circulating. Don’t take this too seriously, and try to be polite as everyone works out the details. This is not the time to get attached to any one plan. Rather, it’s the time to assess the available information and make your decisions based on that. Given that this most important thing is the one you’re most likely to forget when you need it most, I would sum it up thus: pay attention and use what you know.

Read your 2008 annual for Gemini. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Gemini and Gemini rising here.

Cancer (June 21- July 22)
If you’re getting along with anyone at all, count yourself lucky. You probably are getting along with some people, and developing a sense of detachment from the ones who are proving to be about as much fun as chicken pox. And you might want to remember that you are not responsible for the aggression or mentally odd actions of anyone close to you. I think you’ll feel a lot better when you do this. Meanwhile, there are several people for whom you are flavor of the month. They may have strange ways of showing this, and at least one of them who likes you the best has not breathed a word about it. Listen carefully for when they do.

Read your 2008 annual for Cancer. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Cancer and Cancer rising here.

Leo (July 22- Aug. 23)
The Sun in your opposite sign Aquarius is making aspects to a bunch of other things in Aquarius, namely two very intense centaur planets and Neptune. This, along with an eclipse there earlier in the week, suggest strongly that you need to be cautious in your relationships, take nothing for granted, and not assume you know the truth until you have exhausted every other possibility. If you act like you distrust people, you’re likely to actually lose their trust. Yet you have to be careful what you let go of and leave in their hands unconsciously. The key to navigating astrology like this is not expecting any two days to be the same, which you’re pretty good at, and remembering that both you and anyone close to you have many facets — of which you are seeing and combining many possibilities lately.

Read your 2008 annual for Leo. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Leo and Leo rising here.

Virgo (Aug. 23- Sep. 22)
You have been working overtime trying to unravel the many knots, kinks and inhibitions that have suddenly made themselves known to you. It might be easier if you were not burning up with desire at the same time as you’re trying to set yourself free, but then what motivation would you have? What I suggest you work on is the extent to which the freedom you’re seeking is about unraveling a mental block. You seem to have it mixed up with a moral issue; with being right about something. This is the problem. Once you recognize that allowing yourself to want what you want is legitimate, it will be a lot easier, but then you will have to stop using morality as an excuse.

Read your 2008 annual for Virgo. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Virgo and Virgo rising here.

Libra (Sep. 22 – Oct. 23)
To those with few proclivities to creativity, the notion of making something out of nothing must seem strange. Rght now this notion may seem not only strange to you, but a little dangerous. To access creativity, as you’re likely to be discovering, you need to reach into those shadow places where old material, pain, conflict and fear may be hidden. The reason most people don’t allow themselves to be creative is not about their talent; it’s about the way humans tend to manage their relationship to their pain, and to the past — which is typically by denial. Art is affirmation. Love is affirmation. Sex is affirmation. And they all bring up everything unlike themselves; which become the elements and chemicals of which they are formed.

Read your 2008 annual for Libra. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Libra and libra rising here.

Scorpio (Oct. 23- Nov. 22)
Get ready to change your mind about something you thought was really, really important yesterday. You need practice doing this: unless you’re in a pretty deep coma, it should take less than a decade to make a decision. Actually, it only takes a moment, no matter how long you think it takes. The things that get in the way are all the trappings, expectations and attachments to the past that you think are so important, and invariably come around to deciding are not so important. I suggest that while you’re working out this decision, you notice your attachment to attachment. Is this a game? Is it something you use to hide from your own potential? Or are you concerned that once you hang loose for five minutes, you’re going to turn into an anarchist? It could be some mix of the above.

Read your 2008 annual for Scorpio. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Scorpio and Scorpio rising here.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 – Dec. 22)
You can torture yourself all you want with various defensive reactions which are really a cover-up for not knowing what you want. I don’t think it’s a sin to be defensive, but it’s better to be honest about this, and to explore your options. You seem to know what you want, on one level, but have this notion that someone else is plugging up the works and preventing you from getting there. More likely, it’s what you think someone else thinks that’s preventing you from making contact with your authentic intentions. Why exactly do you care so much? As a Sagittarian it’s unlikely that you would admit to being driven or rather paralyzed by your own insecurity. You may be rather nervous about imagining what would happen if you actually stepped into your confidence, and owned fully that only you can influence this.

Read your 2008 annual for Sagittarius. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Sagittarius and Sagittarius rising here.

Capricorn (Dec. 22- Jan. 20)
You are obsessed with a work issue. Let me give you a clue. There is a diplomatic solution. If you’re a lawyer, you can settle the case. If you’re a boss, there is an ally who can help you work out the right arrangement. What you need to know is that someone who seems to have one opinion actually has a very different opinion, if anyone would bother to talk to them and find out about it. If things have not gone well by the end of the week, pretend it doesn’t matter and try again Monday. Even if someone hung up on you, slammed a door or was acting like they didn’t recognize you, try again Monday.

Read your 2008 annual for Capricorn. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Capricorn and Capricorn rising here.

Aquarius (Jan. 20- Feb. 19)
You may have the feeling that you don’t know yourself, and some days, that you really don’t like yourself. I don’t mean to sound like someone impersonating a Buddhist monk, but don’t take this seriously. You can feel like a healer one day, a mean ornery person the next day, a saint the next day and a liar that evening. Yes, it’s sure interesting being human, isn’t it? All of this is designed to point you to a deeper layer of what we think of as “identity.” It’s not the fleeting, flying thing that you’re experiencing so blatantly right now. What you are getting a sense of are the facets of your ego structure, rather than who you actually are. As each of those facets goes by, reach deeper. And pay attention to what is consistent from day to day, even if your own opinion is not on that list.

Read your 2008 annual for Aquarius. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Aquarius and Aquarius rising here.

Pisces (Feb. 19- March 20)
If certain friends or loved ones have made a point of being unavailable, give them a second chance, and make sure you have time for them when they’re ready to come around. God gave everyone eyes, but not everyone can see the light of day. The Goddess gave everyone feelings, but not everyone pays attention to them. I can tell you that the reprieve you’ve had from getting too much social attention has provided you with an opportunity to observe something about yourself, and about people in general; something that’s going to be useful when you resume conversations that stopped weeks or months ago. This year is about making contact with yourself. That contact is likely to be deeper than the dialog you perceive others as having with themselves, which may or may not be true.

Read your 2008 annual for Pisces. Order your Next World Stories 2009 annual for
Pisces and Pisces rising here.