Category Archives: Welcome

Monday Diary: Astrology for the Bold at Heart

Not everyone is having an easy time with the Uranus-Pluto square. Both Uranus in Aries and Pluto in Capricorn are leaving us with very little we can take for granted.

Photo by Eric Francis.

With Uranus, the concept of ‘self’ is under near-constant assault or at least ongoing rapid revision.

You might say that revision process is daily or perhaps as leisurely as the pace at which Firefox comes out with new updates.

Uranus in Aries is a caution that we are indeed being defined by our technology — until we become conscious of that fact and choose to define ourselves.

With Pluto in Capricorn, there is nothing to cling to. No structure, no institution, no tradition, is steady or stable. What we do have is the guarantee of change. The concept of ground has become shifting ground. In the style of Pluto, that is necessitating making contact with something deeper than the material world — contact with your soul.

When put together, these transits can be explosive. They describe a scenario under which everything is changing, and there is a particularly busy intersection where ‘self’ meets ‘society’. The world we knew as children no longer exists, it will not come back, and the changes will continue.

Monday at 12:14 am EST (05:14 UTC), the sixth of seven exact Uranus-Pluto squares happens. The aspect goes back to 2012, though the social and inner processes go back at least to 2008. So we are at a major turning point in this journey. The last exact square is in March, then the two planets begin to separate.

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Do Humans Belong on Earth? The Unasked Question

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Dear Friend and Reader:

I had a stunning moment reading email recently. Earlier in the year, I sent out a request for proposals for articles on the theme of “you belong here,” for use in the forthcoming annual edition of Planet Waves, Cosmophilia.

One of the first proposals that came back began: “Humans do not belong on Earth. We are a parasite and mutation which invaded the plant and animal kingdoms.”

I was actually shocked by this statement. I thought about this for weeks — actually, for months. At first I was offended; it seemed like one of the most self-defeating ideas I’d ever heard.

Then gradually, it occurred to me that many people feel this way.

Not only do many people feel like they don’t belong where they are; there is a kind of spiritual movement devoted to the idea that humanity is somehow wrong; that we don’t belong on our planet. There are lots of theories floating around — various shades of “mutation” (by aliens) or “invasive species” that you can hear about on late-night AM radio.

Religious sects have long pushed the idea that “you don’t belong in a body” or that the body is merely bait for the devil. Philosophies have emerged over the ages that put humans in a wide variety of no-win and paradoxical situations — the “don’t think about chocolate cake” kind of thing. (Of course the moment you’re told not to think about chocolate cake, you do.) These are all used as some form of proof that humanity, or its state of mind, or its desires — is inherently wrong.

Can any of this possibly be true?

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Landing 2014 Safely

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With the Gemini Full Moon behind us, we’re really down to one major (and distinctive, as in new) event remaining in 2014 — the ingress of Saturn into Sagittarius. This is a change of pace from recent years around the time of the year-end/Yule type of holidays lately, when we’ve had all kinds of stormy weather, eclipses and inner planetary retrogrades in the vicinity (Mercury, Venus, Mars).

Spiral galaxy, looking a bit like our own home, the Milky Way,
might appear if we could see it.

I propose that this is the right moment for arranging your plans and your activities to wrap up your year-end business and to make some choices for a sane holiday season.

This seems to be an unavoidable cultural ritual for much of the Western world. Though it’s been watered down some in recent decades, there are still the associated rituals of travel, of spending a lot of money, and of obligation. Those are purely the social level. Were you willing to think through these rituals and make up your mind what you really want, I think you would find that you have more freedom than you think.

The whole topic of family obligations around the time of the holidays deserves a good airing out and I propose we have it here on the pages of Planet Waves.

On what you might think of as the psychic or environmental level, the days are very short this time of year where many population centers are focused in the U.S. — the entire Northeast up to metro-Montreal and Toronto; across to Chicago and the San Francisco Bay area. I know you may be watering your plants in Australia these days, though for many people there is an intense veil of darkness that surrounds us — sometime seeming to cocoon, sometimes to subsume and swallow.

These short days are compressed, and there is potentially the biological sensation of panic about where the heck the Sun went. As the Earth approaches solstice, there is a sensation of compression, and of something having spun out to an extreme — one that we haven’t quite reached yet but will soon.

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Bad Advice for the Guru Full Moon

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By Madame Zolonga

From Madame Zolonga’s Guide to Failing with Astrology

Welcome! And hey, here we are with the annual Super Duper Guru Full Moon. This may be a new term to you, so I’ll explain.

Humans have a tradition of naming Full Moons things like the Wolf Moon, or the Beaver Moon. This names made great sense when we still needed a Full Moon to see what the critters were up to on electricity-free night.

However, modern humans have failed to translate this tradition to our contemporary lifestyle. Except for every August when everybody’s Facebook feed flips out with journalists discovering Richard Nolle’s Supermoon, we have no modern equivalents.

This needs to change.

Changeability is Gemini’s grace note, and because this Full Moon’s in Gemini, let’s change something. Let’s name this henceforth the Super Duper Guru Full Moon. They may call it a Gemini Moon, but that’s not the whole story. This baby is always about Sagittarius, and Sagittarius is always Super-Duper. Let me explain.

Sagittarius is a sign of Big Things. It’s always SUPER. You can’t make mini-size Sag. Sagittarius is also the sign most associated with gurus. Sag represents that place in all of us that has something to tell others, something to teach.

Except we don’t use the word “teacher” because teachers never make any money. We say we’re “gurus” because guru sounds exotic. Gurus aren’t from around here; they might know something we don’t. We give them money and they might tell us.

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Top 5 Events of 2015 (and your December horoscope)

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Note, this extended monthly horoscope is available to all readers, registered or not. The extended monthly is usually part of a Core Community Membership to this website. –efc

Dear Friend and Reader:

If you made it through this much of 2014, you experienced some of the most wrenching astrology in recent memory. The cardinal grand cross of January and April, combined with Mars retrograde and some strategically placed eclipses, earned most of the current year the rating of whiplash machine.

Photos in this article are all of the Coxing, a stream in Ulster County, the only stream I’m really interested in photographing. Photos are all along the Grandmother Land in High Falls, NY.

I’ll start with a little refresher of that. In the background of all astrology in our phase of history is an era-defining aspect called the Uranus-Pluto square. This started warming up in 2008 when Obama got elected and the banking and mortgage collapse happened.

It really got cooking in 2011 with Fukushima, Arab Spring, the Occupy movement and countless other too-intense news events that year. And it had (or will have) a total of seven exact contacts between early 2012 and early 2015. This aspect is an extension of Sixties astrology, in that it’s part of the same cycle, the Uranus-Pluto cycle, that instigated that most interesting era of the mid-20th century.

The evolutionary force of Pluto combined with the revolutionary impulse of Uranus, and the blend illustrated an outpouring of energy of nearly every shade, color and temperature.

Nearly 50 years later, those two planets are at first-quarter phase, an extended drama that begins to resolve in 2015. What we experienced in 2014 on two separate occasions was other planets getting into the action — Mars and Jupiter, which basically brought the sensation of that aspect to the front of awareness. That was the grand cross of January and April 2014.

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Planet Waves Daily Oracle for Tuesday, Dec. 2, 2014

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Today’s Oracle takes us to the Gemini weekly for April 4, 2003

Beneath the many things you are experiencing and seeking information about, there is one truth. It’s your personal truth, and its main characteristic is that every separate event, incident, feeling and symptom leads straight down to it — as if they are all pages in one great volume, each of which leads to the binding that holds them all together. Where you’ve gone wrong in the recent past has been attempting to apprehend and solve each problem separately. Now, it’s true enough that our minds are carefully trained to divide and conquer, so you can’t count on conventional thought to get you to where you need to be. And what else is there? There is the careful study of patterns, and the miracle of pattern recognition. Look at every issue, in writing, preferably, and ask what they all have in common. When in doubt, start with any two. Keep going. In a little while, you’ll stumble upon something you’ll value for the rest of your life.

The Daily Oracle offers a horoscope selected randomly by our Intelligent Archive Oracle program, unique to Planet Waves. It’s also a database of my horoscopes going back to the late 1990s. You can use the Intelligent Archive Oracle to answer questions and give you ideas for how to handle problems and situations you cannot see through. This feature is available to our All Access and Core Community members. See this link for more information.

Taking a Ride on the Grand Fire Trine

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The Sun is in Sagittarius, along with Mercury, Ceres, Venus, Pholus, Vesta and a whole bunch of other minor planets. Jupiter is in Leo. And the Moon is about to enter Aries (at about 8:30 pm EST Sunday (01:14 UTC Monday), where it will join Uranus, Eris and the Moon’s South Node. Monday we will have a werry werry fiery day — the Moon will emphasize the grand fire trine.

Very cool stock image purchased for a nickel from Dreamstime.com.

Very cool stock image initially found in Google, then purchased for a nickel from Dreamstime.com.

You can expect people to be reactive. You don’t have to be. You can expect them to be more passionate than usual. You can do so on your own terms.

There will be plenty of enthusiasm to focus — and it will indeed benefit from focus, which you may be the one to provide. Note, it may not be easy, as your mind may want to run in every direction at once. But you can do it.

Take a breath and set a goal, then go there.

This story could use a little background. Right now Mercury in Sagittarius is exactly square Neptune in Pisces. That is exact at about 11:26 pm EST (04:26 UTC), then it will begin to separate. This has been an interesting aspect, all about sorting out truth from lies, sorting through layers of image, and investigating self-deception.

Those themes don’t end after the aspect begins separating; the really interesting thoughts and ideas may come out in the wash of Neptune.

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Weekend Tarot Reading — Sunday, Nov. 30, 2014

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By Sarah Taylor

What’s on the mind of the Prince of Cups as he closes his eyes and faces into the cosmos of possibility? Not that it’s hard to take a guess — but perhaps the other cards speak to something more complex than first appearances.

“Desire,” “Wishes,” “Longing,” “The possibilities of transformation.”

prince_cups_queen_disks_three_cups_rohrig_sm

Prince of Cups, Queen of Disks, Three of Cups from the Röhrig Tarot deck, created by Carl-W. Röhrig. Click on the image for a larger version.

It is this last phrase on the card that hints at that complexity. Yes, the Prince has sex on his mind — a melding of bodies, breasts, genitals, and long, feathered hair. However, that long, feathered hair becomes almost butterfly-wing-like over his brows as he contemplates his erotic potential. He is, after all, a Prince; not a Princess, who is just starting out, but a contender for the throne of the Knight.

How does he make that leap from contender to ruler? How does he own who he is, assume full responsibility for his role as an agent of transformation, and step into being someone who doesn’t just dream about desire, but whose life is offered in service to desire and to living that out as wholly, autonomously, and purposefully as possible?

The key lies in the central card, the Queen of Disks. Earth to the Prince’s water, feminine to his masculine, fully-fledged (the butterfly wings are formed, whole), the Queen of Disks also cuts a sensual figure, but in this case she is bound to nature while he is suspended in space. She is the grounding, feminine principle that, through her presence — looking straight at us as she does — sees what he cannot see, knows what he does not yet know.

One of the first things I noticed was that the Prince is turning away from the Queen. What can this mean? It signifies that they are not so much in direct (eye-to-eye) relationship as they are in psychic relationship. The breast that touches the Queen’s left cheek is also present next to the Prince. There is a bond here that is suggestive of, even if it isn’t only limited to, an inner relationship — a coniunctio, or marriage between two aspects of oneself.

But is it the Prince who is growing into the world of the Queen? Or is the Queen now realising her inner Prince? And does it really matter? I think not. Because what is important is not who comes first, but what happens when they come together (in a manner of speaking).

Abundance. The Three of Cups:

“Overflowing interchange of love,” “exceptional valuable feelings, which can be –”

Which can be what? The writing flows beyond the edge of the card. Don’t you love a good mystery?

What is clear from the final card is that there is a third element that that forms part of this marriage based on an “overflowing interchange of love”: a cup that stands at the head of the waterfall, unpatterned, a little different, and yet part of a cohesive whole. What does that mean? Perhaps this is part of the mystery: that third presence, or ingredient, that is necessary for the complete fruition of what this reading holds.

The Three of Cups is very much a feminine card, the cascade over two rocky outcrops reminiscent of a woman’s thighs parting to reveal her watery depths. Two come together and a third is formed. This is alchemy; this is conception; it is community. Or, it is the potential for alchemy and conception (whether creative, physical or both) and community. Right now, what forms from this vessel is that mystery alluded to in the phrase that currently sits unfinished.

Bringing these two aspects together, what are you feeling? And where are you being guided — by your heart, by your desire, by your groundedness which connects you to life? What is emerging from their union? What can be brought forth? I look at this reading, and I want to start fanning myself, quite frankly. Not so much because it’s hot-hot-hot, but because it is full, present, and charged with longing and knowing.

Why not slip into those waters, grounded in the certainty that you are held — and that it is you doing the holding?

See — or better, feel — where they take you.

Astrology/Elemental correspondences: Prince of Cups (the airy aspect of water), Queen of Disks (the watery aspect of earth), Three of Cups (Mercury in Cancer)

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.