Category Archives: Update

Big Things — Jupiter Opposite Galactic Core

Jupiter opposes the core of our galaxy for the first time since June 2001, shortly before 1 am EDT Thursday. At the same time, the largest planet will complete a mutable cross without historical precedent. The Jupiter-Galactic Core axis of the grand cross indicates big things are imminent.

Unlike 2001, the immense immanence implied is more eminent than infamous — thanks to the other half of the cross configuration. That comprises an opposition from Pisces to Virgo between Salacia and Makemake, which indicates what we may yet grow to become — and where that growth must take place.

The last time Jupiter was closing its Gemini tour with an opposition to Sagittarius’s Galactic Core, infamy was at at hand. Just over two months later, the world was purloined into the impoverishment of perpetual war.

Now, as Jupiter returns to reflect the center of our celestial neighborhood, it’s an auspicious time for you to reflect as well. As Jupiter’s year in mutable air reaches its last fortnight before ingress to Cancer on June 26, to whom will the remaining years of your precious life belong? Beyond that, how will you emulate Jupiter by growing into what you must be?

In astrology, square aspects provide the opportunity for growth. A mutable cross consists of four square aspects, connecting all four of the signs that share the same quality: either cardinal, fixed or mutable. The mutable cross that Jupiter is completing now implies growing out of old patterns and into new ones.

In reality, growth is never easy. The proverbial term “growing pains” is well informed and reflects how the square aspect of astrology expresses in your life. On Earth however, the alternative is incompatible with continued existence. Even mountains, when they cease to grow, ultimately cease to exist. Implicitly, the struggle of growth is your imperative to sustain. How to attain the necessary sustenance is implied by the mutable opposition that will be precisely (to the degree) perpendicular to the axis from Jupiter to the Galactic Center.

In the Pisces corner, wearing the wet trunks, will be distant Salacia. Currently, Salacia is literally distant, half again as far away from the Sun as Pluto, which was the outer limit of the solar system for decades. Through its nominal connection with Neptune’s spouse, however, Salacia’s role in Thursday’s grand cross is to provoke you to grow so as to close the distance between your life on land and its connection with (and probable origin in) the seas, both literally and figuratively.

In the literal sense, the seas of our planet provide a good deal of the oxygen you need to live, while also absorbing a significant amount of the carbon your living produces. In a figurative sense, the oceans represent the vast and mostly unappreciated legacy of the emotions that have motivated us, the intuitions that have guided us, and the psychic potentials that represent the probable direction in which our kind will most productively grow to evolve.

Already opposing Salacia from Virgo is an even more distant object, Makemake. Named after a dominant deity from the farthest removed vestige of human culture (variously known as Easter Island, Rapa Nui and Isla de Pascua) Makemake’s symbolic place on the mutable cross is to promote a growing appreciation of neglected hemispheres, both on Earth and in your skull.

The Southern Hemisphere of our planet (where Easter Island is located) is often not given its due in the world, partially because that is where the seas are most dominant over the land. More specific to the symbolism employed by astrology, however, is how Makemake’s association with a neglected hemisphere on our planet corresponds to a neglected hemisphere of your brain.

The currently dominant paradigm of human consciousness, intrinsic to cultures of the Northern Hemisphere, favors the left hemisphere of the brain. The left brain is the seat of linear thinking and the virtues conferred upon cold, mathematical logic. Your brain’s right hemisphere, home to alternative sorts of sense-making has, in recent centuries, been as deprecated as the Southern Hemisphere of Earth. Yet both places are where there is not only room to grow, but necessity.

So that’s how Jupiter’s last days through Gemini are taking form. In the Jovian opposition to the Galactic Center is the necessity for you, and all of us together, to become as big as events, rather than shrinking from or being swallowed up by them.

In the grand mutable crossing provided by the opposition of Salacia and Makemake is nothing less than the potential you should sustain, and the direction that you should apply yourself toward. You will know you have done it if you can grow to confidently count yourself among those who are in their right minds.

Offered In Service

Len is available for astrology readings. You can contact him at lenwallick [at] gmail [dot] com.

The Weekend Tarot Reading — Sunday, June 9, 2013

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By Sarah Taylor

What do you feel when you see these cards? Tell me. What do you feel? Once you’ve identified your feelings, how about this: what was the thought on which your feelings were predicated? And how were you feeling before you had the thought? Was there a significant shift in how you were feeling before you saw the reading, and how you felt afterwards?

If so, then perhaps you have come away with a greater sense of the power that your thoughts about what you see have in affecting your perception of reality.

The Tower, Three of Swords, Eight of Swords -- RWS Tarot deck.

The Tower, Three of Swords, Eight of Swords from the Rider-Waite Smith Tarot deck, created by A E Waite and illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith. Click on the image for a larger version.

Thoughts create beliefs — a belief being a thought that has been repeated to the point where it isn’t as immediately open to enquiry. It can become entrenched like the grooves of a record, which is only capable of playing the same song, over and over again.

If that song is a song of fear, one that drowns out your connection to what lies at the very heart of you and separates you from your Self, then you have a choice. You can stick with the song you know — predictable, familiar, conjuring equally predictable and familiar feelings. Or you can see the song for what it is and the effect it has on you each time you get it out and play it. When you can do that, your options expand and you open yourself to freedom.

Take a look at the cards again. It may be that all is not what it at first seems.

On the left there is The Tower, in the centre the Three of Swords, and on the right the Eight of Swords: one major arcana card, which points to an archetypal experience, followed by two cards that describe the thoughts about that experience.

The Tower lies at the foundation of the reading — it has already happened in one form or another. When The Tower has been activated in our lives, we live through an upheaval over which we have little or no control. It occurs when a structure we have built — whether literal or metaphorical — has moved so far out of integrity with our essential selves that it can no longer exist in its current form.

The soul seeks freedom and creativity, and it cannot live fully in the confines of an inflexible and constricting ivory tower. In a misguided attempt to create a place of safety, where we crown ourselves kings over our lives, we find out sooner or later that the ivory becomes grey and lifeless, the skies surrounding it rendered black and without a source of light.

Thus we are overthrown by a higher authority that sees beyond the walls we’ve constructed around us: the divine breaks into consciousness with full impact. When the lightning strikes, it is the lightning of the transpersonal. What falls releases an element of the psyche that has been trapped or isolated by our actions, however well-intentioned, and the energy to the card will very often be felt collectively as well as personally.

In the second card, the foundation of The Tower is given its context — that of relationship. The Three of Swords is typically a love triangle of one form or another, whether personal, familial, professional, or the divided allegiances of communities, governments and cultures. Remember that Swords are thoughts, though — not emotions and not material reality. In the Three of Swords, we witness the belief that we can lay claim to love in the face of perceived competition. By asserting ownership over something that cannot be controlled, we strike to the heart of the love itself. We are not the victims as much as love is. Our limiting thoughts have wounded the very thing we wanted to have; the skies weep with us.

And so to the Eight of Swords. Looking at the swords around the bound and blindfolded figure, there are three swords at the left of the picture, a reflection of the Three of Swords. The figure is turned towards them, aware of their presence, but she cannot see the reality of her circumstances. This demonstrates an inability to see fully, or to recognise that, although the swords — her thoughts — feel familiar, what she is encountering is in fact different.

The Three of Swords is resonating. It has started to play its song, one that she has known before. Yet the song is in her mind; it is not an emotional or physical reality. If she were to exercise her right to freedom, she could remove her blindfold and see the threat for what it is: static blades, unmanned by others, points embedded in the ground. Weapons of her imagination.

Astrologically, we are entering the energy of the grand water trine now, which stretches over the next season and beyond. Water in tarot is the domain of the Cups suit, and it represents both the emotions and the unconscious.

When we move into the deeper waters of our psyche, our conscious mind can interpret this sense of fluidity as a threat, and it throws up all of the thought patterns that have become entrenched as a way of defending against it. Thus we meet the Cups energy with Swords. We try to think ourselves out of a sensation that asks for no-thought. We do this by running tried and tested thought patterns, because that is what our mind defaults to. We bring out our old records and we play them.

But our feeling natures work differently. They move with the beat of our hearts; they are attuned to a wisdom that transcends thought. The old patterns no longer apply. All the old patterns do is to keep us in the landscape of the Eight of Swords: blind to our power, trapped in the shallows while the sea is waiting a little further beyond to welcome us.

Freedom is right in front of you, if you are able to see your prison for what it is. It is the prison of your thoughts and your beliefs, and what you tell yourself based on them. What has happened in the past only continues to happen in the ideas you have about it. Look at the thoughts that hold you hostage, bring them out into the open and talk about them, and disarm them.

Be prepared to see another way, and another way is open to you.

Astrology/Elemental correspondences: The Tower (Mars), Three of Swords (Saturn in Libra), Eight of Swords (Jupiter in Gemini)

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.

Out Of Sight — Gemini New Moon

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The Gemini New Moon just before Noon EDT Saturday, like all New Moons, will be out of sight. It will not be the only such event in the astrology this weekend. If there is anything to the proverb “As above, so below,” the next several days will not be about appearances. Rather, you will be entering an auspicious time to observe and cultivate nascent developments to your inner life.

An inner life is a valuable resource. Like all resources, you need to be aware of it, and take care of it. That’s especially so now, on an implied threshold of cycles, shifts and crossings taking place out of sight above and below.

Above you, some new cycles are about to set in. Foremost among them is the start of a lunation — the period of time from one New Moon to the next.

Every lunation begins with the Moon moving between Earth and the Sun, out of sight in the solar glare. That phenomenon explains how New Moons are an appropriate time to begin new cycles of your own by simply being aware of the resources your inner life offers. Among them are contemplation, meditation and imagination. Simple awareness can in turn lead to appreciation. That’s a major inner shift, and it corresponds to a shift about to take place above you.

Out of sight above you, an important hypothetical point is on the threshold of a rare and major shift from one sign to another. The mean lunar apogee (otherwise known as mean Black Moon Lilith) enters Cancer about 6 am EDT Sunday.

In simple terms, mean Black Moon Lilith (abbreviated as mean BML) is the part of the lunar orbit farthest removed from Earth, whether or not the Moon is actually there. The “mean” part is not a nasty disposition, but an indication that the point is an averaged mathematical value. While an empty, abstract, averaged point may seem little more than imaginary, astrologers have learned to appreciate it as a resource.

Witness the “Swiss Ephemeris,” one of the most respected astrological resources in the world. With only 14 columns to work with, one of those columns (the one headed by a black lunar crescent on a cross) is devoted to listing the daily position of mean BML. That position changes slowly. So slowly, the last time mean BML changed signs (into Gemini) was on the historically meaningful date of September 11, 2012.

Mean BML last ingressed Cancer on August 3, 2004. For the mean lunar apogee now to cross over into Cancer, the sign ruled by the Moon, for the first time in nearly a decade is thus worthy of meaningful contemplation. What’s more, the timing is something to meditate upon as two positions on the zodiac closely associated with the Moon (mean BML and Cancer) come together less than 24 hours after the actual Sun and Moon have come together to initiate a lunation.

You would be justified in imagining two very different lunar cycles beginning at once, both enhanced and distinguished by their close concurrence. All the more so when you consider that the imagined event will be nearly concurrent with another point being crossed that is deeply appreciated as a milestone of astrology, even though it is also out of sight.

Just before 9 pm EDT Sunday, Mercury will cross the degree of Cancer to which it will return when its retrograde period (from June 26 to July 20) finally ends with a resumption of direct motion. In other words, Mercury will be entering its ‘echo’ (or ‘shadow’) phase just after mean BML enters Cancer and just before the Moon returns from being out of sight in the glare of a conjunction with the Sun. The close association in time implies a close symbolic correlation between all three events.

The echo/shadow phase is a period of about two weeks. During that period, as Mercury’s apparent motion decelerates before reversal, your own experience often corresponds to an ‘echo’ from the future. It is a time which frequently foreshadows what the approximately three weeks of retrograde motion will bring.

To have the foreshadowing that accompanies Mercury’s final fortnight of direct motion commence as two lunar cycles begin, and to have all of those beginnings take place out of sight, implies where your attention would be best directed over the next several days. Instead of the usual protocol of prioritizing what you see, you may want to initiate a new cycle of your own.

This weekend, you may want to initiate a new cycle of awareness. You may want to begin that cycle by shifting your focus from what you see on the outside to what you feel, and what you think, on the inside. You may want to cross over from prioritizing external resources and start appreciating internal resources. You may want to cultivate those internal resources, and develop them into what could ultimately be how you anticipate, and create, an outer life that is out of sight for you now.

If, as is the case with many people, your outer life leaves something to be desired, what have you got to lose? Instead of taking the weekend to simply indulge the usual distractions that take you out of your mind, try taking a cue from the astrology and explore what may have been, until now, out of sight.

Offered In Service

Len is available for astrology readings. You can contact him at lenwallick [at] gmail [dot] com.

The Weekend Tarot Reading — Sunday, June 2, 2013

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By Sarah Taylor

“Once you free your mind about the concept of … being ‘correct’, you can do whatever you want. So, nobody told me what to do, and there was no preconception of what to do.”

— Giovanni Giorgio, songwriter and producer

The reading today is unambiguous: the events from the eclipse period and their effects are still at work in the psyche. You are being encouraged not to turn away from what was revealed to you, and to follow the call of what is yet to emerge into full consciousness, even as the land of The Moon seems alien to your thinking, logical mind. Your thoughts — and here, specifically, thoughts that are enmeshed with fear — are not the focus. The Moon, by its presence at centre, is asking you to acknowledge your fears, and to shift your attention to meet with what feels right in the depths of you. It is painting its desire on the canvas of your heart.

Ten of Swords, The Moon, Nine of Swords -- RWS Tarot deck.

Ten of Swords, The Moon, Nine of Swords from the Rider-Waite Smith Tarot deck, created by A E Waite and illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith. Click on the image for a larger version.

How to bring what The Moon is asking to be manifested to light? The card itself points this out in the form of a pathway, which runs between the two towers in the background, which I see as being associated with the Ten of Swords — where you have just come from — and the Nine of Swords — what might potentially re-emerge as a result of that experience.

The Ten of Swords suggests a time of hitting rock-bottom. It is the card of inevitable surrender to a circumstance, whereupon you discover in your prone position that the sky in the distance is clearing. What has happened is done, and the sacrifice you endured was what you needed to go through in order to emerge on the other side with a new perspective.

Now, as you move into uncharted territory, there might be some fear about the re-emergence of something in the Ten of Swords that you know only too well. The Nine of Swords is the card of thought as a mode of self-injury. It represents a deeply engrained belief that has the power to hold you to ransom and thus to isolate you.

Know this, however. The power of the Nine of Swords lies in the power you give to it. When you understand this, you are able to see that your beliefs are a matter of choice. And in that understanding we can all make the courageous choice of taking another path — the pathway that strikes out in a new direction.

The Sun radiates. It is action-orientated. It represents the conscious, which is more readily accessible to the intellect. The Moon works in a different way. Its light is reflected and therefore it is passive. It asks for receptivity rather than activity. It asks that you still the chatter. It asks that you embrace your creature-self, which is more adept at walking through the shadows (think how much better a dog or a jackal can see in the darkness).

Often, we are tempted to avoid The Moon because it isn’t fully understandable. What can happen when we enter the wilds is that we can try to explain it by falling back on prior experience — the Hindu notion of sanskara. There’s your Nine and Ten of Swords. The Moon is bringing you face to face with thought patterns and asking for some deep work around the releasing of those that no longer work for you or serve your highest purpose.

Choose differently. Ask for the help you need to see what you cannot see, and to look at what is so close to you that you hadn’t considered it wasn’t a part of you. Choose the unknown, choose your intuition, your feeling body, a path that is hazy and indistinct, but which calls to you wildishly. Be patient. Above all, be gentle and loving with yourself. This wildish connection is feminine, of the earth, feeling- and body-based, tuned to the world of Spirit; it moves in its own rhythms. It exhorts you in a strange tongue. Learn this language and you learn a new way of relating to your thoughts, to yourself, to others, and to your life.

Astrology/Elemental correspondences: Ten of Swords (Sun in Gemini), The Moon (Pisces), Nine of Swords (Mars in Gemini)

The Weekend Tarot Reading — Sunday, May 26, 2013

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By Sarah Taylor

Whoa there, tiger! Before you go rushing off, sword drawn, ready to make your conquest, why not let these questions compassionately penetrate the membrane of your consciousness:

“Am I headed in the right direction? And what am I running from?”

Knight of Swords, Five of Cups, The Moon -- RWS Tarot deck.

Knight of Swords, Five of Cups, The Moon from the Rider-Waite Smith Tarot deck, created by A E Waite and illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith. Click on the image for a larger version.

There is no coincidence that this is the second appearance of The Moon in the triple eclipse period that has taken place over the last four weeks.

The first eclipse was a lunar eclipse on April 25/26; the second a solar eclipse on May 9/10; the third a lunar eclipse that took place May 24/25 — in other words this weekend.

The first time The Moon card appeared during this period, on May 5, I wrote:

If we can let go of our fear … and accept a period where not everything is clear, where it is best to travel light and remain flexible, where details are obscured, and where there is an ‘edge’ to our experience that is jagged and chaotic, then what these three creatures [jackal, dog and crustacean] bring to us is contact with something that has a particular kind of wisdom.

Yes, it isn’t rational, and it is impervious to our need to analyse, categorise and understand. It is nevertheless an integral part of us and one that we often disown or ignore because it plays by different rules. …

Thus the Moon becomes a gift — the potential for something to become manifest.

The time is ripe for you to stop racing ahead — to stop your thoughts racing too — and move within to discover and embody fully this gift while the power of the three eclipses is only just beginning to take shape. The suggestion here is not to be side-tracked by a need to embark on a crusade that would have you rushing from pillar to post, in attack mode. “If I just get in here fast enough, then everything will fall into place.” “If I get out into the world, show them who I am, then I’ll get places.”

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