Note: For the past several weeks I have been standing in for Eric on the Monday Astrology Diary so he can make efficient, relaxed headway on your soon-to-be-incredible Vision Quest annual readings for 2016. Read more about Vision Quest and pre-order these year-ahead readings (written and audio components) here. — Amanda

Earlier today I was reading a section of astrologer Robert Hand’s book Planets in Transit to get some extra insight on the Sun-Jupiter square that is exact today (Monday) at 10:02 am EST, with the Sun in Sagittarius and Jupiter in Virgo. At its best, this aspect can signal tremendous growth and expanded opportunities; particularly spiritual growth or opportunities to serve humanity, given the signs involved.

Like COP21, its bark is worse than its bite… Photo by Amanda Painter.

Yet a particular passage by Hand stood out for me:

“Basically this transit is a test of your discipline and self-restraint. If you are not a restrained person, you will react to this influence by going overboard in some way, overextending yourself or living in a fool’s paradise where you think nothing can go wrong. Or you might squander a valuable resource, only to find on another day that you do not have enough of what you need.”

Does that passage remind you of anything? For example, the agreement reached at the COP21 climate summit in Paris that, unfortunately, does not really accomplish anything meaningful toward slowing global warming?

I realize that many are celebrating that an agreement was reached at all. But take four minutes to watch this interview with Paul Oquist, lead envoy from Nicaragua to COP21, who describes why the mechanisms agreed to at the summit are a path to failure: “We don’t want to be an accomplice to taking the world to 3 to 4 degrees and the death and destruction that represents.”

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By Sarah Taylor

Something is rounding off to an end. But this is a particular kind of ‘end’, because it implies the beginning of something else that’s connected to it.

The Judgment, Four of Wands, Eight of Wands from The Röhrig Tarot deck, created by Carl-W. Röhrig. Click on the image for a larger version.

The Four of Wands, you see, comes relatively early on in the Wands suit — just before half-way. So this “Completion” is more about finishing off one stage of a larger creative project. And, nearly always with Wands, I invite you to view the word “creative” in as broad terms as you can define it. It does not have to be work-related, nor artistic in the conventional sense. This is any kind of project to which you have devoted your erotic energy — that is, your procreative powers. It’s ‘juice’, life-force.

If you were reading this column several weeks back, you would have been introduced to the Three of Wands — which appeared more than once over a short period. In this card, a figure is walking down a road, over a hill and into the distance, heading towards some hills. You, like him, had struck out on a quest that asked for faith — particularly because it was guiding you away from what was familiar. It may even have asked you to walk alone, with little support for your particular (ad)venture.

But you were full of that juicy life-force that I write of above. Something was calling you, and something felt right. Others around you may have scratched their heads in confusion, may have ridiculed you, or may simply have been focussed elsewhere. You were connected to a growing sense of beauty that kept one foot in front of the other.

So now, today, you find yourself at the first waypoint. Here, in your life, there is a marker that confirms that you are where you are because you listened.

What immediately preceded this waypoint is the first card in today’s reading — The Judgment. As the foundation card, The Judgment will have made itself apparent in your life very recently, somewhere between your departure on this journey and now; somewhere in the past month or so. Maybe even in the past week or two.

The Judgment is a spiritual wake-up call. It is a revealing or understanding that is so powerful it brings something back to life, or allows something new to come through you that had previously been lying dormant, or defeated.

The Judgment has been the call you were waiting for to confirm that, yes, the path you’re on is your path. No mistakes. Your faith has been acknowledged.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that the path is comfortable or you’ll feel like you’re tripping the light fantastic. That’s not what The Judgment is about. It may be challenging; it may be chaotic; the pace may feel like some kind of mayhem at times. It may be hard to discern any underlying patterns when things get shaken up into consciousness in the way they have been. What it does do is liberate something in you — and very likely something around you, too — so that there is more energy available to you.

If your circumstances haven’t changed much, look within and ask yourself whether it’s rather you who’s changed. Whether you are now more able and adept at weathering the storms that have been hitting you. More than that: could it be that you are learning to navigate the storms so that they work for you, rather than against you? Have you somehow become a surfer of the unpredictable — a harnesser of the unpredictable? Maybe it’s that unpredictability no longer matters in the way it used to. If that’s the case, that’s some transformation, traveller!

And there’s more to come.

Your “completion,” whatever it looks like, has unleashed the kind of energy that you’re going to be able to feel in the form of the Eight of Wands. It’s coming up on the horizon. A channel will open; think of it like your surfboard getting an outboard motor. There will be meetings, connections — some external, and others an alignment with a part of you that brings with it emerging possibilities. A missing puzzle piece is revealed. It may have been staring you in the face all along. Now you’ll have the eyes to see it.

Astrology/Elemental correspondences: The Judgment (Pluto), Four of Wands (Venus in Aries), Eight of Wands (Mercury in Sagittarius)

If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread.

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

“Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.”–John Lennon

If you’re desperately trying to make sense out of all you see around you, dear reader, you’re not alone. We’re witnessing a world population struggling with decisions about what is necessary, ethical and forward-thinking as opposed to a knee-jerk legitimizing of bias, hatred, repression and alarm. Some have said this current chaos ushers in the twilight of humanity’s dominance on the earth: our species’ final nihilistic period, the waning of culture and the dying gasp of the consciousness that set all this mayhem in motion.

Well, maybe that last one. Perhaps the consciousness that has provoked all this — presently embodied on these shores in the personage of one Donald J. Trump, egoist and brandmeister — has finally condensed itself into an energy that we can recognize as both vitriolic and suicidal. Yet, even though we recognized the sadly familiar spirit of churlishness and fear-mongering coming on like a slow-moving train, we couldn’t stop the national pandemonium inspired by the murders in San Bernadino.

We’re wading through a re-do of paranoia and Chicken Little projection of dire threat from the ‘enemy’ that’s familiar to all of us, now that we’ve begun to label our security in a faintly Germanic-sounding “homeland” package. No, nobody is asking why you aren’t wearing your flag pin, but don’t be surprised if you’re asked for your green card or quizzed on your religious preferences.

No doubt about it, we’re experiencing 9/11, version 2.0. We’re suffering through a re-do of, as FDR named it, “fear of fear itself,” although, to our credit, some of us have the presence of mind to wonder just who the enemy actually is. To those of us who have clung to rationality like a life-raft, things that come out of the current political frontrunner’s mouth seem so extreme and dangerous as to make even the most peaceful citizen want to punch his nose.

If fascism is, indeed, the confluence of political and corporate power, then the Donald is our homegrown Il Duce, appealing to our darkest emotions and pandering to our most deeply held apprehensions. Who can argue the point when even Uncle Dick Cheney tells us Trump’s proposals are unAmerican? (Particularly poignant, since I often refer to Dick as “he who cannot be named,” and now JK Rowling has determined that the Donald is WORSE than Voldemort.)

Although I sometimes think of Donald as an unloved child, a black hole of bratty dysfunctionality unable to be sated by vast amounts of validation and attention, he is also that cynical elitist who will use any device against his competition in order to win. Trust Donald when he says he’s a winner. That defines how he sees himself and his purpose, and he will let nothing get in his way, let alone the good of everyone else on the planet.

It’s all so extreme, isn’t it? A virtual workshop in noticing and responding to extremism. We are faced with extreme weather, extreme politics, extreme violence, extreme inequality. Worse, we’ve accepted that as the ‘new normal,’ just one more condition to have to stuff down into the garbage chute of worrisome prospects. At the base of all this there IS an enemy, humankind’s oldest and most ruthless enemy of all: fear.

Fear is like a wall of darkness that rises within our reptilian brain to block out all reasonable and reassuring human emotion, like compassion, pity and empathy. It raises specters of ancient wounds and amplifies emotions long buried. Fear nags at us, even when we know it isn’t rational, holding us prisoner to all that is unhealed within us.

There’s a reason they’re called “night terrors,” sneaking out to goad us when our conscious mind is no longer guarding the door. And there, where the little man behind the curtain can project the most worrisome images on our imagination, we must learn to combat them with the words of Lao Tsu: “There is no illusion greater than fear.” That concept must become so real to us that we can bring its power to our lucid dreaming experience, banishing the shadows and healing our souls. We can only accomplish that with practice at facing our fears, and the universe — in concert with this shifting planetary era — has given us the opportunity to do so.

Here’s a very bright spot on our horizon: many of us have done our homework, it seems. Here in the real world, as Elaine Goodman’s excellent piece earlier this week points out, we are seeing formidable backlash against Trump and the fear-inspired energy he represents, what I think of as “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” As proof, mid-week, friend and reader Geoff Marsh sent a link to news of the British outpouring of disfavor in petitioning that Trump be denied a visa to visit Britain. By Wednesday they had collected over 370,000 signatures, which means that the petition must be considered for debate by Parliament.

Scotland’s First Minister has stripped Trump of his status as a business ambassador for Scotland, and Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon University has revoked his honorary degree in recognition of his achievements as an entrepreneur and businessman. Kudos to our cousins across the pond for smacking Trump on the snout with a rolled up copy of the Guardian!

They’re not the only ones, now that Donald has tarnished his brand. A billboard with the likeness of Donald and his daughter was removed from the construction site of a Dubai golf course, and Lifestyle, one of the Middle East’s largest retail chains, has removed his products from their shelves.

Trump’s one-size-fits-all understanding of the Muslim religion is finally being confronted by that population, which until now was quiet on the subject (so as not to incite riots, I suppose). Polls tell us that Muslims are the LEAST violent religion in this country, and certainly the least loud in their own defense, but that’s changing. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote a scathing op-ed for the Times saying, in part, that Trump’s “cruel and dim-witted” line of thinking “is not the stuff presidents are made of.”

Muhammad Ali called on politicians to educate their constituents on Islam, adding, “I am a Muslim and there is nothing Islamic about killing innocent people in Paris, San Bernardino, or anywhere else in the world. True Muslims know that the ruthless violence of so-called Islamic Jihadists goes against the very tenets of our religion.”

Fareed Zakaria came out as a Muslim in a fiery opinion piece, saying that he felt compelled to do so as an American because he was appalled by Trump’s bigotry. In an interview on CNN, he said that he’d seen this kind of rhetorical attack on a people in the Balkans and Iraq, turning neighbor against neighbor and creating ghettos of exclusion that invariably become hotbeds of defensive radicalism. The American model of inclusion for Muslims has been the gold standard in peaceful cultural assimilation, he continued, something Europe has been unable to replicate. This current wave of xenophobia, combined with election politics, threatens that successful model and gives America a black eye.

This is, gratefully, a robust response to Trump’s low-level proposals, and so today we can pull that curtain back just a bit and remember that there are fewer Pubs than Dems, and those Dems — accused of being politically lethargic in all but election years — very often belong to a DNA mix the Donald would not approve. If our citizens need motivation to get out the vote, the Donald is a first-class motivator!

Although the religous/Bagger base will pick among the most extreme of the candidates — yes, perhaps our self-serving reality show host — only about 10 percent of the party supports him, and that’s fading fast. All of us are getting our reflection in the mirror, it appears, and I’m going to give Lindsey Graham — a man who knows a bit about fear-mongering himself — virtual head pats for saying, “I’d rather lose this election without him than win it with him. There’s no shame in losing an election. The shame comes when you lose your honor.”

Jon Stewart’s replacement, Trevor Noah, put the mirror up tall and wide by doing a brilliant piece on Donald as “the white ISIS.” Like it or not, the mirror is everywhere we look now.

“The enemy is fear,” said Gandhi. “We think it is hate, but it is fear.” So here we are, subject to the fear-inspired hatefulness around us, our own fear-consciousness nibbling at our conscience and asking for an action plan. Of course, the only plan to defeat the worst of humankind’s oldest enemy is the one we speak of so often here, the choice of love over fear, inspiration over defeatism, life over death.

Our Len Wallick writes, of yesterday’s New Moon, “While we do not in fact know whether or not today’s New Moon in Sagittarius will at long last herald an awakening to a new order worthy of its name, we have reason to be skeptical. Yet, because we can see it in the sky (and more importantly, in ourselves) we also have reason to believe it possible.”

We see it in ourselves. That is where we should have been looking all along, fearlessly examining what we have brought into manifestation. It is always what we collectively bring to the table that counts, and it appears that more of us are taking responsibility for ourselves now, and for a more compassionate way forward, than we are being lead to believe.

Here is the act that pulls back the curtain to expose the little man pulling the levers on our fears: each fear we face gives us an opportunity to strengthen our character, swing wide the bars of our prison of doubt and self-sabotage, and choose love as an antidote to all that ails us. We have forgotten that fear is a choice. We’ve forgotten that we can choose again.

Do you want to become an activist this season, but don’t know how? Choose love. Pass along a smile, pay it forward, lend a hand. Get involved, offer kindness, model a belief that you can make a difference. Stay open to the highest and most life-affirming possibilities, and share your hopes for tomorrow with those who will listen. So my dears, in a season made holy by humankind’s most heart-felt affirmations for the birth of unconditional love, let your Light shine as a beacon to fearless belief in a brighter tomorrow.

While there is no certainty as to its origin, the idea of a new order appears to go back at least as far as the roots of western civilization. Those roots are largely a hybrid of two traditions. In spite of their differences, both imply that humanity is empowered to improve its lot.

One cultural tradition is associated with the folklore and culture of ancient Greece, which was later adopted by ancient Rome (with some names changed, perhaps to protect the innocent).

The other system of belief can broadly but fairly be characterized as Sumerian in its origin. That paradigm now finds some of its more extreme adherents contending with one another to bring on an apocalypse. This, in spite of the fact that they all trace their lineage back to a paternal figure known as Abraham.

It appears that the inspirations for both the Greek and Sumerian traditions were in some way supernatural yet possessed of many human traits. Among those characteristics one can demonstrably include abject jealousy, profoundly destructive rage, and a proprietary sense of entitlement normally observed only in human beings who are about two years of age.

Yet both traditions professed to represent an improvement (especially for human beings) over those who had come before. Since most records of the supplanted spiritual and cultural models have been thoroughly eradicated, we cannot be sure.

We do, however, have cause to be suspicious because both Abraham’s tradition and the Hellenistic tradition are known as much for what, who and how they (often violently) exclude others as they are known for anything else. It is for that same reason we must also be suspicious of any new order proffered by human beings. For as long as unconditional inclusion is not an intrinsic part of the ostensibly new archetype being professed, you can pretty much anticipate more of the same mess that has propelled our planet and our kind in a direction that cannot be sustained.

Yet renewal continues. With every dawn, the rotation of the Earth brings a new day. Similarly the tilt of Earth’s axis, in combination with its orbit around the Sun, regularly brings new seasons. That’s how cycles form the basis for our reality, and as long as that’s true an authentically new order remains possible.

Perhaps the most visually perceptible cycle of Earthly existence has to do with the phases of the Moon. That cycle starts over every month or so with a New Moon — when the Sun and Moon move through the sky together for a day, as represented by their brief conjunction in the same degree of the same sign of the zodiac.

Because the side of the Moon facing toward Earth is not illuminated during its conjunction with the Sun, we don’t see a New Moon. Hence the symbolism of not being able to see, at first, what a new lunar cycle holds in store. The planetary aspects during a New Moon, however, can give a clue.

One of those aspects during the New Moon in Sagittarius earlier today — Venus in Scorpio trine Neptune in Pisces — offers some intriguing hints about what a viable new order might possibly include.

The geometrical relationship called a trine equates to 120 degrees of separation on the zodiac circle. So, a trine aspect is reminiscent of an equilateral triangle, a figure fundamental to the sacred facet of geometry, and reminiscent of strength and sustainability derived from equality and balance. Because Scorpio and Pisces have the same sacred element (water) in common, there is an implication of nourishment, perpetuation, connection, cycles and intuition included with the aspect.

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Finally, because Neptune represents what astrologers call the higher octave (same tone, different pitch) of Venus, there is a reinforcing sense of harmony, receptivity and life-affirming values indicated by the New Moon taking place while the water trine from Venus to Neptune is exact to the degree.

This is not to say that an authentic and viable new order is finally coming to pass with today’s Sagittarius New Moon. Yet, one cannot help but see what a long-awaited order of justice, peace, love and equality on Earth might consist of.

That order would first and foremost be inclusive. There would be no slaves (such as there were in the Hellenistic cultural model). Neither would be a paradigm of “us” as distinguished from “them,” which, among other things, characterizes the Sumerian tradition.

There would be equality of status and power in the distribution of shared resources for any new order emblematic of today’s water trine from Venus to Neptune. Finally, there would be continual and unlimited strength that requires no coercion or violence to sustain harmony indefinitely.

While we do not in fact know whether or not today’s New Moon in Sagittarius will at long last herald an awakening to a new order worthy of its name, we have reason to be skeptical. Yet, because we can see it in the sky (and more importantly, in ourselves) we also have reason to believe it possible. May you contribute in your own way to make today the first day of that possibility becoming real.

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