Editor’s note: this is the full PW members’ edition, featuring a special Jupiter in Sagittarius horoscope by Amy Elliott, Create; and Eric’s Planet Waves FM program.

Dear Friend and Reader:

Today and tomorrow are busy days astrologically. The combination of events involved suggests that tracking your inner emotional and mental landscape (or monologue) is equally important as keeping tabs on what is going on around you personally and culturally — perhaps even more so; though the moments when external and internal intersect could also be key. Here are the main events:

No. 2 from Group IV of “the ten biggest ones”; tempera on paper over canvas by Hilma af Klint (1862-1944). Her “Paintings for the Temple” relate to inner processes as conveyed in meditation via spiritual entities.

Mars has just left Aquarius after a long sojourn in that sign — about six months, thanks to its retrograde, not counting a few weeks in Capricorn this summer. It finally dove into Pisces at 5:21 pm EST (22:20:42 UTC) today. About eight hours before Mars made its move, we got the first quarter Moon (Aquarius Moon to Scorpio Sun, late in their signs).

Tomorrow, Venus stations direct in Libra after its own month-and-a-half or so of retrograde motion, most of which was in Scorpio. Venus makes its apparent pivot at 5:51 am EST (10:50:58 UTC). About 15 hours later, Mercury stations retrograde in Sagittarius at 8:33 pm EST (1:33:06 UTC Saturday).

That’s a lot to have happening all at once with the so-called personal planets: the bodies that represent such attributes as our motivation, physical activity and sex drive (Mars); our emotions, receptivity and intimate relationships (Venus); and our thought processes, communication and communication technology (Mercury). And although the monthly cycles of the Moon (emotions and subconscious) are perhaps less striking, the sense of moving into gear that can accompany the first quarter is certainly coloring the background.

As a result of all this, it would seem that the first order of business for the next few days is simply to stay tuned in — to your experiences, to your responses to others, to any little insights or pieces of information that come your way, to any urges or tugs of intuition, to the sensation that you’re finally answering a question you’ve been grappling with a while, and to the arrival of new questions. Standard protocol for Mercury stationing is to notice when your attention to the task at hand has lapsed so you can refocus; but with all that’s going on, it could be just as enlightening to note what other thought your mind was occupied with at that moment.

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Editor’s note: this is the full PW members’ edition, featuring your November monthly horoscope by Eric, Create; and Eric’s Planet Waves FM program.

Dear Friend and Reader:

As the dust settles on Tuesday’s midterm elections in the U.S., I wish I could say the political landscape looked even more different — but I am grateful for the movement that was achieved. Voters came out in increased numbers on both sides, and women were voted into office to an unprecedented degree. There is no longer a one-party lock on all three branches of government.

A blue wave? Jupiter’s south pole, as seen by NASA’s Juno spacecraft from an altitude of 32,000 miles (52,000 kilometres). Photo by NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Betsy Asher Hall/Gervasio Robles.

This opens the way for House Democrats to put things in motion, specifically subpoenas to investigate Trump’s taxes and his involvement with Russia in 2016. Of course, Trump is already saying he’ll be happy to work with House Dems — as long as they don’t go after those subpoenas; in which case he’ll “fight fire with fire.”

Even so, we now have the first two Native American women in the U.S. House (for context, more than 10,000 people have served in the House since the first Congress met in 1789). The first two Muslim women have been voted into the House.

A Latina woman is the youngest representative ever elected to the House, and there are new African American women elected to this branch of government, with USA Today putting the total number of all women in the House at 118 as of midday Wednesday — breaking the previous record.

Colorado elected its first openly gay governor — the first in the nation. And although Democrat Beto O’Rourke lost his Senate bid in historically red Texas to incumbent Ted Cruz, he did strikingly well in counties that border Mexico and have higher Latinx populations (as well in as the more diverse urban centers in the state).

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Editor’s note: this is the full PW members’ edition, featuring your weekly horoscope by Amy Elliott, Create; and Eric’s Planet Waves FM program.

Dear Friend and Reader:

We’re in the midst of the Days of the Dead (a Catholic celebration of departed souls that has pagan roots, and echoes in many ancient indigenous cultures), and I have a question: How does one honor one’s ancestors when so much of what they helped to build is being dismantled, perverted, mocked and cut down?

View of October leaves from below; photo by Amanda Painter.

I’m not referring to past institutions that we’ve come to realize are systematically racist, sexist or in some other way oppressive; the process to recognize and dismantle those strikes me as being one of the reasons we’re all here at this time.

I’m talking about cultural advances that were made to lift up and empower as many people as possible, and which now appear threatened. I’m referring to past cultural lessons about things like fascism, which many people seem to have forgotten or somehow never learned in the first place.

If you are someone who chooses this time of year to honor your deceased ancestors, how do you bring your meditation and ritual intention into action? How might you choose to connect the past and your place in your familial lineage with serving the highest good for all concerned?

I have a couple thoughts on that, especially this week, in view of the pointedly anti-Semitic murder of 11 worshippers in a Pittsburgh, PA, synagogue (including one survivor of the Holocaust), and Pres. Trump’s declaration that he intends to issue an executive order ending birthright citizenship (which is protected by the Constitution). Trump’s refusal to denounce outright the violent actions of ‘white nationalist’ extremists, and his repeated, toxic, inflammatory language whipping up that demographic, is having visible — and measurable — effects.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

If you’re having difficulty assembling the pieces of the “pipe bomb” story in a way that resembles a recognizable object, you’re not alone. It does not make any sense to me. The biggest clue is that none of the seeming bombs exploded. The second biggest clue is that they are all being intercepted.

Part of the Secret Service announcement of what seemed to be bombs in the mail, with the Moon at 29 Aries 32 — not making any new aspects before it enters Taurus. See full chart here.

In brief, just in case you dropped your phone down an elevator shaft and have not heard about any of this, yesterday the Secret Service announced that a number of things resembling pipe bombs had been intercepted in the mail, and that one or two had arrived by hand delivery (but were also intercepted). They were equipped with made-for-movies countdown clocks.

The first one I heard about was hand delivered to George Soros, the one-man-band left-wingnut all-in-one conspiracy of the wildest right-wingnut dreams. If “liberals” do something, he allegedly personally wrote the check.

Then packages containing what looked like bombs were mailed to Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack and Michelle Obama, and then CNN. Try to make sense of this: we’re being told that somehow, a package addressed to John Brennan, the former CIA director (and a Republican) was found in the CNN offices in Manhattan.

This resulted in the “extraordinary spectacle of the network’s correspondents reporting live from the street outside,” according to New York Times coverage. Yes, TV is once again the subject of TV.

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Editor’s note: this is the full PW members’ edition, featuring your weekly horoscope by Amy Elliott, Create; and Eric’s Planet Waves FM program.

Dear Friend and Reader:

Although the Sun is still in Libra, some of this week’s news events appear to have a distinct Scorpio scent. This would seem to relate to astrology involving Mercury in Scorpio that is bookending the current workweek, layered over the continuing Venus retrograde in Scorpio.

True to the intrigue emblematic of Mercury in Scorpio, it seems that a possible scapegoat for Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance was also the point of contact for Saudi Arabia’s offers of help to the Trump campaign in 2016. Rachel Maddow teased out the threads Wednesday.

We began the week with news coverage intensifying about the disappearance of Washington Post journalist and Saudi national Jamal Khashoggi.

Turkish officials allegedly have audio and video evidence of Khashoggi being tortured and dismembered within the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, which he had visited to obtain legal documents pertaining to his upcoming marriage.

We might interpret this as representing a dark shadow side to Mercury conjunct Venus in Scorpio, which was exact on Monday and which was also sextile Vesta in Capricorn. Usually astrologers describe Mercury-Venus conjunctions as stimulating an appreciation for beauty or declarations of love. Yet Mercury-Venus can also help one to see the underlying patterns in a relationship. The alleged events surrounding Khashoggi’s disappearance and apparent murder do appear to be laying bare certain unsavory facets in the relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.

Here we have the communication role of Mercury in a few ways. For one, Khashoggi was a journalist. Second, I’m considering this event from the perspective of when new reports spiked in popular awareness, rather than looking at an event chart for the alleged murder. Third, the evolving reporting has elicited shifting responses from the Saudi government, as well as Pres. Trump’s vocal desire to protect arms deals with the Saudis.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

Last night as Hurricane Michael was roaring through the Florida panhandle, making landfall as a Category 4 storm with 150 mph winds, Donald Trump was holding a pep rally in Erie, PA. At that rally, as the stock market lost 800 points in a tech selloff, Trump was leading the crowd in a chant of, “Lock her up!”

Mr. Friendly — Trump campaigns in Erie, PA, on Wednesday night as Hurricane Michael pounded Florida. Photo by Evan Vucci.

Then he revved the crowd by calling Democrats “an angry, left-wing mob” who he said is unfit to govern. He is, of course, campaigning for the midterm elections less than one month away. Don’t be surprised if there is no blue wave, and if one of these days this year or next, Robert Mueller, the special counsel, passes a confidential report to a Republican Congress.

Is it obvious what’s happening? People are angry — or many people, anyway. Strange, given that we’re told that the unemployment rate is the lowest since 1969. Oh wait, that’s irrelevant. Real wages are stagnant, and the cost of living is higher than ever.

The economy is going beautifully for the 1%. There is real economic frustration coming from the background in that most people cannot call the United States the land of opportunity.

But there’s something deeper going on. Trump is harvesting frustration rooted on an existential level, and he’s using it to whip up authoritarian impulses in people. Frustration and pain are commodities, for those who know how to harvest them. He would not succeed at doing this if people felt better, if they had satisfying relationships and reasons to feel good to be alive. We live in cranky times of virtual sex and virtual food and virtual friends and virtual assistants and virtual trips to Italy or wherever.

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Roy Scheider and Jessica Lange in All That Jazz.

Venus stations retrograde in Scorpio on Friday afternoon. Scorpio is where Venus is what you might call uncomfortable, in the sign opposite one that she rules (Taurus); in a sign ruled by Mars; yet also in a feminine sign associated with surrender, transformation, death and sexuality.

Scorpio is the home of all things unmentionable at the Thanksgiving dinner table. What Venus represents in this place of the zodiac is a discussion not found in most places in the world except for where high tantric teaching is welcome, and there are not many. However, it sometimes finds its way into popular culture as death showing up as a woman, and an unnamed phobia of women that is found in many cultures, including our own.

One version of the Sri Yantra, a tantric mandala. The symbolism is all life and all of existence, including time and space, emerging from the feminine. One of the objectives of tantric practice is to turn awareness toward the source of existence, rather than our usual position of having our backs to it.

Within the tantric frame of reference, woman is the giver of life and therefore the one who takes it away. What we think of as the sacred feminine is the pool from which life emerges, and therefore into which it yields itself. Yet consider the daunting responsibility that would come with accepting this. And consider the potential for the abuse of power if it is denied, not kept in full awareness, or expressed in an unloving or toxic form.

Such is the root of our social and political woes. Imagine if every discussion of the role, power, and place of women began with the statement, “All life emerges from the female body. All of our mothers gave up something in order for us to live.”

Yet this is unacknowledged; it’s the biggest open secret in the world. And as something that is not admitted, not recognized, not ritualized, and surely not celebrated, it is part of the repressed world of what Jung called shadow material.

Into the Realm of Shadows

With any retrograde planet, we find our way to the shadow realm: what is forgotten, lurking in the recesses of the past (personal, ancestral and collective); what is not openly spoken of; what is expressed in a way that is ‘unacceptable’ or inappropriate; what is misunderstood; and what is consciously repressed.

In a natal chart, retrograde planets can represent a form of mastery that must be recovered, though it might seem problematic or a dubious gift until it’s claimed fully and reabsorbed into the psyche.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

In any sane version of the world, what we witnessed today before the Senate Judiciary Committee would not have happened. The hearing would not have taken place because what Christine Blasey Ford says she experienced should not have happened.

Christine Blasey Ford was sworn in to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Photo by Erin Schaff for The New York Times.

And in any sane version of politics, the hearing would never have occurred, either. When a political appointee becomes this embattled, they are usually withdrawn. That is, with one notable exception in living memory: Clarence Thomas, Monsanto’s representative on the Supreme Court.

We can thank Pres. Trump for the fact that today’s confrontation between Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, Brett Kavanaugh and the Senate Judiciary Committee was broadcast to the public. The president could have ended this, but he chose not to.

What takes place so deliberately within a political environment is political by design, and that is an important context in which to view this. I will get to this in a moment.

The whole matter could have been referred to the FBI as a seemingly impartial, third-party finder of fact. It was not. It could have been handled privately, behind the scenes; it was not. It could have come out a long time ago; it did not. It has exploded into consciousness.

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