Dear Friend and Reader:

As we continue to move through the current ‘wait and see’ astrology related to planets aspecting Neptune, the news offered at least a couple of stories this week worth touching on. One is Hurricane Dorian; the other is a new development in the summer-long protests in Hong Kong (Brexit-related news will have to wait for another essay).

Sun shining over Hurricane Dorian in a photo taken by Garrett Black, a first lieutenant and aerial reconnaissance weather officer in the USAF.

I’m not going to try to figure out if the astrology could have predicted Hurricane Dorian. From what I understand, the astrology of natural disasters is complicated, though it often appears easy to make correlations after the fact.

Yet, related to the ‘time will tell’ theme of this week, it remains to be seen just how difficult the recovery and rebuilding phase will be for the hardest-hit communities. Hurricane Dorian hovered over the Bahamas for about three days — a terrifying length of time to endure such high winds and rain — resulting in thousands of homes destroyed and at least 23 deaths recorded so far there.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

Decades into my project of studying the planets, I’ve figured out that the story never resolves. The cycles describe many potential points of resolution, but it rarely seems to happen. When it does, those few truly determined people are the ones who make it happen.

Fractal image by Pixabay.

Studying the planets means studying people and what they do; the issue is coming from the human realm, not the astrological or the symbolic.

One of my approaches to the horoscope column and my recorded readings is to find the point of resolution. I look at the planets, and I identify the pattern and the potential courses of action. Then I describe the way through, and forward. This is always based on action that you must take — not something that will happen to you.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

Friday morning, the Sun joins Venus and Mars in Virgo. Juno will be close behind, entering Virgo Friday evening.

Orange, the color and the fruit.

We’re continuing with an unusual situation in which four planets will suddenly be in a sign where there has been very little action for a while. This has just happened with Leo, and now it’s about to happen with Virgo.

For quite some time, the astrology has been focused on Aries and Capricorn. Currently, many slow movers are making their way across these two signs — Chiron, Saturn, Pluto and Eris, and minor planets Salacia, Pholus and Quaoar. Uranus recently spent seven years in Aries.

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Today, Aug. 15, 2019, is the 50th anniversary of the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival. I had been planning an article on the topic, but I could not get it up to my standards in time. I have offered one commentary in last week’s Planet Waves FM [listen to segment here] and I will have more to say on Sunday. The world has been looking at the same (admittedly brilliant) photos of the festival for many years. Not so many cameras got in, or not so many photos got out. But some, by Richard Bellak, were recently discovered. Among others, he took a series of nighttime images of the Woodstock festival, which were especially difficult to capture using film cameras from the time (where “fast” film was considered ASA/ISO 400). We’ve illustrated tonight’s article on the Aquarius Moon with pictures from the festival by several different photographers. Tonight’s article is a revision of a piece in my “Moon” series originally published in 2003. NOTE: If you want to listen to Woodstock “as it happened,” tune into WXPN out of Philly. They are playing the concert in realtime all weekend.

I am a lonely visitor.
I came too late to cause a stir,
Though I campaigned all my life towards that goal.
I hardly slept the night you wept
Our secret’s safe and still well kept
Where even Richard Nixon has got soul.
Even Richard Nixon has got soul.
— Neil Young

Dear Stargazer:

The Aquarius Moon often presents a puzzle to astrologers. The Moon is a cyclical creature, constantly changing. Aquarius is a fixed sign and tends to crystallize patterns. The Moon is inherently emotional and Aquarius is usually described as being rational and intellectual.

The Moon is maternal and we hardly think of Aquarius as being particularly cozy this way. Aquarius is ruled by Saturn (in the modern age, also by Uranus). The Moon rules the sign Cancer, which is about as different from Aquarius as you can get.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

We can count everything happening now as the Pluto return of the United States. Though it technically starts in 2022 and extends a few years, we are presently in the vortex of this once per 248 years event. Current circumstances are, due to the rarity of this aspect, much more meaningful and influential than they may seem, especially in an era where everything is considered irrelevant.

Detail of the chart for the Saturn-Pluto conjunction on Jan. 12, 2020. All the Capricorn stuff is right on top: the event takes place at 33 seconds to noon Eastern time. Notice that Jupiter is also in the picture, in early Capricorn. The Jupiter-Saturn conjunction takes place after the election, on the winter solstice of 2020.

There are three main elements to the U.S. Pluto return. One is the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of Jan. 12, 2020. I described this cycle in a few paragraphs in the most recent Monday Morning edition (third section).

In order to understand what is happening now — assuming you want to — this is essential reading. I have a couple of other pieces on the Pluto return that I will add in the P.S., below my signature.

The first element is the alignment on Jan. 12: Saturn and Pluto are joined by Mercury, the Sun and Ceres, all within about two degrees. That is how 2020 starts off. The second element is that this whole pattern forms a square to Eris in Aries.

Eris is not always as simple as discord (her Roman name was Discordia, patron saint of sci-fi author Robert Anton Wilson).
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Mercury stationed direct overnight Wednesday to Thursday, aligned with the Leo New Moon. To my eye and ear, this represents a turning point in the year, and in particular, the end of a phase associated with the Mars transits of spring and early summer. This was an especially tumultuous phase for many people; I noticed a lot of “breakdown” energy, particularly in those who were overloaded and not dealing with that fact.

Ink drawing by Lanvi Nguyen.

No matter how you look at the astrology, Mars has been a big player for the past 18 months. Mars means desire, motivation and anger — all of which come up as points of frustration for a great many people in our time.

Regarding the recent (actually, current) Mercury direct, I suggest you not rush into getting to all the things you may have put off. Take your time getting started; use the waxing side of the lunar cycle to gradually find a new routine, and during that time, attend to important matters on your task list. Do this slowly and thoughtfully, and I suggest you give yourself until Monday or so to start tackling the bigger projects.

Mercury is doing something unusual now, which is holding a nearly stationary square to Eris. I’ve never seen this before (Eris is a new factor), though if you’re in some kind of crazy mental chaos, here’s where to look for ideas how to sort this out. Take your time; this aspect lasts a week or so.

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“Only the small child and the artist have that immediacy of approach that permits perception of the environmental. The artist provides us with anti-environments that enable us to see the environment.”

— Marshall McLuhan, 1965

Dear Friend and Reader:

My (so far) four-year swan dive into advanced media studies began with a single comment I made one night on Planet Waves FM: The environment is invisible.

Students at the Rijksmuseum study Rembrandt’s “Night Watchman” on their phones. These devices are now so pervasive, they are part of the background environment. We hardly even notice them — but we need to, and to observe them, and ourselves. Photo by Gijsbert van der Wal.

I learned this from my father, Joe Coppolino, who was doing his Ph.D. in communications in the late 1960s and early 1970s when I was a kid. This was at New York University, where the same program was also called “media ecology” — the study of the media environment.

He learned it from reading Marshall McLuhan as part of his course work, which percolated to the dinner table or drives around New York City in his Ford Maverick (in case you’re wondering how I turned out this way).

Today, based on my studies, I would state it slightly differently: the environments that surround us tend to be imperceptible. We don’t tend to notice them, unless someone points something out to us, or there is a problem. Yet the environment is what drives everything we experience as reality, and conditions how we feel and perceive existence.

For example, the electrical environment that surrounds us is more noticeable when there is a blackout. Normally you don’t think of the electrons flowing into your freezer, until you’re sitting in the dark in 90-degree heat concerned that all your food will melt. Remember that metaphor. It applies to many things, including (and especially) what I do with astrology.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

For the past couple of years, I’ve occasionally posted to my Facebook page the question, “What if the Moon landing really happened?” I can’t take credit for that line — the phrasing originates with Andrew McLuhan, grandson and student of Marshall, who also had a knack for turning things sideways so you could see them better. We’ve been bouncing around the topic for a while.

Pres. John F. Kennedy tells Congress we are going to the Moon, 1961.

My question was intended mostly as a thought experiment. I was interested in two things: one, the basis of people’s belief that the Moon landing occurred or did not occur, and two, philosophical ideas about the implications of humans visiting another world for the first time in known history. What if?

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